Faith, Reason, and the Bible

Devin has a post about the problems of making the canon depend on things like apostolic authorship which we can never know for sure and must depend on scholars for any certainty we have. But the problem is deeper than that. Scripture scholarship often runs into the problem of doing a natural analysis of the supernatural and getting strange conclusions. For example, if you look at the gospel of John you can analyze it naturally and say it is a great piece of Greek literature.It is not hard at all to see why that leads many to conclude that a fisherman from Galilee could not have written this. To me that is valuable information. Now for me to conclude the apostle John didn't write the 4th gospel but rather to conclude that he had supernatural help. Most scholars are not that humble. They come out with statements like "we know this gospel was not written by John". What they are doing is assuming no supernatural event took place.

So it becomes quite impossible to have scholars analyze the 27 books of the New Testament and any other candidates for canonization you might have and expect them to produce reliable results. The word of God is something you would expect to have scholars in disbelief. It should not fit into ordinary human categories of literature.

So how do we analyze these books? We need to use faith and reason. We can't use pure faith. That has led many to conclude the Book of Mormon is the word of God. We must use reason. Taking scholarship into account but also looking at the testimony of early Christians. We can see there are very good reasons the church made the choices it made about what to include in the New Testament.

But more is required. Good reasons are not enough of a foundation to base the New Testament on. We need to be sure. We need the question to be closed. If someone says John does not belong in the New Testament there has to be a sense in which that opinion is out of bounds. The bible is something to which we all need to give ascent of faith. So we need a process that can put it in such a category. Catholics have such a process. Protestants do not.

So protestants turning to secular scholarship to support the truth of the bible is a bit of desperation. It is also a good example of the limits of science. Science cannot study peculiar acts of God. They can only study things that follow patterns that are reproducible. Many things are that way. But to say all things are that way is to rule out God intervening in human history.