Calvin's appeal to the inner witness of the Holy Spirit
as the ground for his canonical decision fares no better than Luther's
proposal. Recall that the prime consideration for Calvin in designating
Scripture as the Word of God, and therefore as canonical, was not the
properties of scripture but the fact that the inner witness of the Holy Spirit
in the minds of Christian believers proved Scripture to be the Word of God. The
difficulties with this claim are as follows.
1. This is not a doctrine which is itself taught in the
Scriptures. There is, of course, a doctrine that the Father will bear witness
to Christ; but this is a far cry from a doctrine that proposes that the Father
will tell us that Scripture alone is the Word of God in written form. Equally,
there is a very important doctrine of the inner witness in Paul, but this
doctrine concerns how the Holy Spirit bears witness in the hearts of believers
that they are children of God. It has nothing to say about a doctrine of
Scripture or about the boundaries of the biblical canon. Calvin and his
followers have in all probability extrapolated from these materials to develop
and extended inner witness of the Spirit to support their doctrine of
Scripture; but they have no warrant in their own norm of theological reflection
for such a move.
2. It is untrue to say that the experience of Christian
believers actually confirms Calvin's claim that they accept the canon because
the Spirit bears witness to them inwardly in the way required. Calvin claims to
speak of 'nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself'.
However, there is no consensus on that to which Christians bear witness at this
point. Thus Reuss, in exploring what it was that led Christians to distinguish
canonical from non-canonical texts, asks pointedly:
Was it really in virtue of the sovereign principle of the
inward testimony of the Holy Spirit? Would it be quite true to say that the
first Protestant theologians, while unmoved by the enthusiastic eloquence of
the author of Wisdom, so much extolled by the Alexandrians, felt the breath of
God in the genealogies of Chronicles, or the topographical catalogues of the
book of Joshua? Did they actually find so great a difference between the
miracles of the Chaldean Daniel and those of the Greek Daniel, that they felt
bound to remove the first two chapters from the volume which bears Daniel's
name? I have some difficulty in believing that they arrived at the distinction
they drew by any test of that kind. (Reuss, History of the Canon, 312)
If we were to follow that the experience of believers
tells us, then it is not very likely that we would arrive at the canon
identified by Calvin. Moreoever, it is not at all clear that the experience of
believers actually underwrites Calvin's very specific claim about the canon:
namely, that in the Bible and in the Bible alone we hear the Word of God. The
religious experience of believers rarely addresses such a question.
3. The really deep problem with the appeal to the inner
witness in Calvin is that either it is circular, or it shifts the foundations
of Christian belief from Scripture to religious experience. Everything hinges
here on which reading of Calvin we deploy.
On one reading, the appeal to the inner witness is an
appeal to an inner revelation to the individual, wherein God tells that
individual that his Word is located in Scripture. If this is correct, then
Calvin has really proposed that the test of genuine revelation is another
revelation. However, if one is following the logic of Calvin's position, this
leads only to the obvious question: How do we know that the Spirit has truly
spoken to us in our hearts? Once we ask this, we are off again in search of a further
criterion of genuine divine revelation. On another reading, we might take
Calvin as asserting that the divine Word in Scripture is grounded in the
experience of Christian believers. They experience Scripture, it might be said,
as being a Divine Word. If this is correct, we now have another foundation for
theology outside that of Scripture, namely, religious experience.
Scripture no longer operates as the foundation for all
theological proposals. So, depending on the option taken, we either beg the
question by positing another revelation, or we introduce a whole new foundation
for Christian theology, which is explicitly repudiated by Calvin. (William J.
Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to
Feminism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 153-55)
(in case a pop-level RC apologist who never reads LDS scholarship or apologetics claims this is a problem for LDS too, that is not the case; the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit for LDS is the basis of one's personal existential knowledge of the truth of the Book of Mormon, the LDS Church, etc., but the normative authority for LDS, which is the LDS Church itself, does not base its decisions on canon merely by the internal witness of the Holy Spirit, etc)