In a work
responding to Peter Enns and others on the nature of “scripture,” Evangelical
Protestants Daniel Castelo and Robert W. Wall appeal to the working of the
Holy Spirit for the believing community to “know” the books that compose the
biblical canon:
. . .
God-fearing saints made certain judgments within a Spirit-drenched context, one
in which the Spirit was involved at the beginning, during the process, and
toward the end of a complex series of developments called “canonization.”
The church’s “canon-consciousness,” then, is
the graced (God-given) capacity to discern what substantively agrees with the
apostolic testimony of Jesus from what does not. The church’s act of discernment
is not a magical performance. The recognition of a text’s canonicity, if properly led by the Spirit, is
necessarily honed in worship by prayer and in faithful use when teaching and
training God’s people. Canonization is a
process of and for the church in which God’s Spirit is present, performing the
role for which the Spirit was sent (see John 14-16). There is no need for a
biblical canon if there is no church, and without a biblical canon the church
would be spiritually impoverished. (Daniel Castelo and Robert W. Wall, The Marks of Scripture: Rethinking the
Nature of the Bible [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2019], 5-6,
emphasis added)
Elsewhere, they
note:
This notion of the Spirit’s use of Scripture
was informed by what the church deemed as helpful to the task of inspiring
believers and keeping them faithful to Jesus and the teachings and preachings
of the apostles. Often, when people speak of the canonical process, criteria
are appealed to that are of a historical (authorial origins, context, and so
on) as well as theological (how well a book coheres to other established books
and so forth) nature. From these gleanings, people stamp the process as a
recognition of a text’s “inspiration,” with the appeal sometimes made to 2 Tim.
3:16 (“All scripture is inspired by God”). Missing from this allusion, however,
is the second half of the verse (“and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for
correction, and for training in righteousness”), which might in turn function
as a gloss on what the term “inspiration” may involve and how a test comes to
be recognized as “inspired” in the first place. In this sense, “Scripture” is a dynamic process, a dynamism shaped
during the canonical process by historical and theological actors and by a
formational impress as well. (Ibid., 8-9 n. 8, emphasis added)
Finally, the
authors make the following comments about John 17:20-23 about the “unity” between
believers with Christ and Christ’s unity with the Father, they end up sounding
very “Mormon”:
If the Spirit appointed the Gospel as an
auxiliary for disclosing the sanctifying word of truth to teach and guide Jesus’s
disciples for their mission during this interim period, then we might further ask how this community,
which has received this teaching Spirit at Pentecost (John 20:21-23; see Acts
2:1-4), comes to recognize and canonize the fourfold Gospel the Spirit will use
to teach them about Jesus in his absence. Stipulating the criteria of
canonization has been a topic of much discussion and debate since the
magisterial Reformation. For the purpose of this typology, however, we will
continue to follow the lead of the Lord’s intercessory prayer in John 17.
According to verses 20-23, John’s Jesus targets a future when the church’s
successful mission adds new converts by its ministry of the sanctified word of
truth (that is, the canonical Gospel) now in its possession. The Gospel of the
Spirit’s own choosing may be recognized by its usefulness in producing a
certain kind of witness in a post-ascension world that no longer benefits from
the historical Jesus’s personal presence as God’s incarnate Son.
In two particular ways, this passage serves
to clarify the church’s vocation: (1) Three successive hina (ινα, “so that,” 17:21) clauses focus our attention on the compelling
witness of a unified community whose
life together underwrites the risen Son’s messianic missions to purify the
world of its sin (cf. John 1:29).
(2) The second effect of the community’s Spirit-breathed ministry of this
sanctified Gospel is its reception of God’s “glory” or presence given to them
(17:22). The full range of the community’s experience of God’s indwelling
presence may be inferred from the repetition of “glory” in the Gospel. God’s
glory is disclosed in the works of Jesus (v. 4) as “full of grace and truth”
(1:4). The Spirit of truth participates in the glorification of Jesus by
continuing to communicate the life of “the Holy One of God” (6:69) to his
followers (16:12-16). We take this to be a profoundly trinitarian sensibility
in which the glorious presence of the Father, which is self-evidently “full of
grace and truth,” is instantiated in the works of God’s Son, whose apostolic
witness is preserved in the canonical Gospel—a sanctified word of truth—for use
by the Spirit to sanctify the church for its ministry in the world.
These conclusions shape how we understand canonization as a process of divine
providence: the canonical process was a hallowing process by which the church
came to recognize those texts appointed and made holy by the Spirit for use in
teaching the church that Jesus is the way, truth, and life. The Spirit’s
current ministry is cued by Jesus’s departure and his temporary absence from
his followers, who continue to ask Thomas’s question: “How can we know the way?”
These writings were collected and ordered into a scriptural witness for the
church’s work in the mission Dei. It
is by this sacred witness that we know “there is salvation in no one else, for
there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved”
(Acts 4:12 AT). (Ibid., 81-82, italics in original, emphasis in bold added)
I have
discussed how many Protestants, both historical and modern, are very “Mormon”
when it comes to appealing to the internal (and in this case, ecclesiastical)
witness of the Spirit to “know” the canon of God-inspired books, such as:
