Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Two Evangelical Protestant Scholars Sounding Very "Mormon" on the Spirit and Knowledge of the Canon


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: