The Word Given

A son asks his father how he knows. He is not asking whether the Bible is true. He was raised on it and has not yet thought to doubt it. He asks something narrower and harder. Why these books? Who said Matthew is in and Thomas is out? A friend’s father, a Catholic, says the church gave us the Bible. A video says Constantine did. A man on the internet says there are four hundred thousand errors in it. The boy is not hostile. He wants to know what his father knows.

I will answer for myself first. I defended this Book for years by inheritance. I said “Scripture alone” without knowing what stood behind it. I laughed at “the church gave you the Bible” without being able to say who did give it, or when, or on what grounds, and I had not read the Book through when I first laughed. The sword goes into my own defense before it goes anywhere else. A father who cannot answer his son’s question has left the boy to the internet, and the internet has an answer ready.

The answer God gives is older than the question. It is in the psalm Asaph wrote for fathers.

“For He established a testimony in Jacob And set a law in Israel, Which He commanded our fathers That they should teach them to their children, That the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, That they may arise and recount them to their children, That they should set their confidence in God And not forget the deeds of God, But observe His commandments” (Psalm 78:5-7 LSB).

God establishes a testimony. God sets a law. God commands fathers to teach it. The end of the whole arrangement is that sons “set their confidence in God.” The psalm treats the testimony as a thing God established and handed to fathers as a trust, and it makes proof no condition of teaching. A father does not first prove the Word to his son and then hand it over. He hands it over, and then he learns what he was handed, so that he can hand it on with his eyes open. That learning is this essay. It runs from the book beside the ark to the letters read aloud in the first churches, and it ends where the psalm ends.

God gives what He speaks

God creates by His word. He binds His people to Himself by speech, and when He binds them, He writes. The written word is the covenant’s own witness, and God places it where the covenant is kept. Look at what Moses does with the finished book.

“And it happened, when Moses finished writing the words of this law in a book until they were complete, that Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of Yahweh, saying, ‘Take this book of the law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of Yahweh your God, that it may be there as a witness against you’” (Deuteronomy 31:24-26 LSB).

Three things happen in that sentence. The words are written “until they were complete.” The book is deposited beside the ark, at the center of Israel’s worship, in the custody of the priests. And the book is a witness, which means it judges the people who hold it. The whole doctrine of the canon is in that sentence in seed. A covenant document is authoritative by nature, because it carries the King’s words. It is bounded by nature, because the King has said what He has said. Moses says as much in the same book: “You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of Yahweh your God which I am commanding you” (Deuteronomy 4:2 LSB). Canon is built into covenant. A covenant document is a rule, and it has edges, and both belong to it from the day it is written.¹

The pattern repeats through Israel’s history and never changes shape. The king is to write his own copy of the law “in the presence of the Levitical priests” and read it “all the days of his life” (Deuteronomy 17:18-19 LSB). Joshua adds words to “the book of the law of God” (Joshua 24:26 LSB) and Samuel writes the ordinances of the kingdom “in the book” and lays it “before Yahweh” (1 Samuel 10:25 LSB). When the book is lost and found again under Josiah, the king reads “all the words of the book of the covenant” in the hearing of “all the people, both small and great,” and the people enter the covenant on the terms of what is written (2 Kings 23:2-3 LSB). Isaiah binds up the testimony and seals the law among his disciples, and then makes the sealed word the test of every voice that comes after: “To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn” (Isaiah 8:20 LSB). Daniel, in exile, reads a fellow prophet’s scroll and treats it as God’s own count of the years: “I, Daniel, discerned in the books the number of the years concerning which the word of Yahweh came to Jeremiah the prophet” (Daniel 9:2 LSB). Jeremiah had been dead for less than a lifetime. His book was already “the books.”²

That detail carries weight. The collection grew as God spoke, and each new word was received by the people who already held the older words, on the same terms, into the same custody. No council sat for Daniel to read Jeremiah. No list existed for Josiah to check. The Word came with its authority on it, and the people who feared God knew what they were holding. That is the first thing a father tells his son. Before there was ever a list, there was a book beside the ark, and God put it there.

The church’s best readers have read these texts the same way, and their work stands behind this essay.³ The father does not need it to see what Deuteronomy says. He needs it only to know that he is reading Deuteronomy as they read it.

The Word Jesus held

The father’s Old Testament is Jesus’s Old Testament. Most of the Old Testament question hangs on that sentence, so it has to be shown.

Jesus names the shape of His Bible. On the road and in the upper room He speaks of “all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44 LSB). To the leaders who studied it He says, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that bear witness about Me” (John 5:39 LSB). In His parable, Abraham tells the rich man, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them” (Luke 16:29 LSB). He says that “the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35 LSB), and that not “the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:18 LSB).⁴

He corrects the teachers of Israel on almost everything else. He tears down their Sabbath rules, their Corban, their washings: “Leaving the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8 LSB), and again, “invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down” (Mark 7:13 LSB). A Lord who overturned their traditions that freely and left their Scriptures standing left them standing because they were right. He never once tells the scribes they have too few books or too many. The boundary He inherited, He kept.

Look at what Paul says Israel had.

“Great in every respect. First of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2 LSB).

The oracles were entrusted to Israel. That entrusting is the hinge of the whole Old Testament question, and everything that follows hangs on it. The church received its Old Testament from Israel’s hand, as Jesus did, and the question of which books belong to it is the question of what Israel was entrusted with.

The answer is on the record, before Christ and in His generation. A grandson translating his grandfather’s book into Greek about a hundred and thirty years before Christ speaks three times of the Law, the Prophets, and, in his words, “the other ancestral books” as the inherited Scriptures of his people.⁵ Josephus, a priest born a few years after the crucifixion, says the Jews have “only twenty two books: which contain the records of all the past times: which are justly believed to be divine,” that “no one has been so bold, as either to add any thing to them; to take any thing from them; or to make any change in them,” and that later writings lack the same standing “because there hath not been an exact succession of Prophets since that time.”⁶ Twenty-two is the Hebrew way of counting the same books the father’s Old Testament contains, with Ruth counted with Judges and Lamentations with Jeremiah; the later rabbis counted twenty-four, dividing those two, and named every book.⁷ Philo, the Greek-speaking Jew of Alexandria, describes his people’s sacred study in the same three-part terms.⁸ The rabbis after the temple fell argued about the edges, about Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, and the fact that they argued about the edges shows that the body was not in question. No council at Jamnia closed the canon. The council is a modern hypothesis, and no ancient source describes it.⁹

This is the Old Testament Jesus held, and the New Testament writers treat it exactly as He did. They cite it as Scripture again and again, with “it is written” and “the Scripture says,” and every one of those citations comes from the books Israel was entrusted with. Not one comes from Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, or the Maccabees.¹⁰

The other side of the record is also there, and the father had better see it here before a Catholic friend shows it to him.

The apostles wrote in Greek and quoted a Greek Bible. The great Greek Bibles of the fourth and fifth centuries, the codices called Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus, contain the additional books, and each contains a different set of them.¹¹ Augustine received the additional books and said so, and the African councils at Hippo and Carthage in the 390s listed them among the canonical Scriptures, in a summary confirmed at Carthage in 397 and recited again in the African code of 419.¹² Innocent I, bishop of Rome, sent the same broad list to a bishop in Gaul in 405.¹³ The Council of Florence listed the books in 1442.¹⁴ The Council of Trent, in April 1546, over a minority that wanted Jerome’s distinction kept, declared them “sacred and canonical” and attached an anathema to any man who knowingly refused them.¹⁵ A Catholic apologist will say all of that, and every piece of it is true.

The men of the early church who could read Hebrew, or who took the trouble to ask, drew the line where the synagogue drew it. Melito of Sardis, about the year 170, went to the East, “reached the place where these things were preached and done,” and there, in his own words, “learned accurately the books of the Old Testament.” The list he sent home matches the Hebrew canon in every book but Esther, which he omits, and contains none of the additional books.¹⁶ Origen, the most learned Christian of the third century, said the Hebrew books were twenty-two and listed them.¹⁷ Athanasius, in the Easter letter of 367 that also gives the first surviving exact list of our twenty-seven New Testament books, set the Old Testament in three classes: the books “included in the Canon,” the books “not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us,” and the apocrypha, and put Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit in the second class.¹⁸ Cyril of Jerusalem and Gregory of Nazianzus counted twenty-two and warned their hearers away from anything outside the list.¹⁹ Rufinus called the additional books “ecclesiastical,” read in church, and denied them any power to confirm doctrine.²⁰ Jerome, who learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers and gave the Latin church its Bible, counted the Hebrew books and ruled: “whatever is outside these must be placed among the apocrypha.”²¹ That judgment stood inside the Roman church for eleven centuries. Cardinal Cajetan, the man Rome sent to examine Luther, followed Jerome in 1532 and set the additional books outside the books that confirm the faith, two years before Luther’s German Bible printed them under the heading “Apocrypha: these are books which are not held equal to Holy Scripture, and yet are useful and good to read.”²² Luther removed nothing. He printed what Jerome had sorted, under Jerome’s rule, and Trent’s anathema came twelve years after he did it.

The Orthodox witness says the same thing, from inside Orthodoxy. The Longer Catechism of the Russian Church, written by Metropolitan Philaret and approved by the Holy Synod in 1839, counts the Old Testament at twenty-two books, “agreeing therein with the Jews, who so reckon them in the original Hebrew tongue,” grounds that count in Romans 3:2, “unto them were committed the oracles of God,” answers the question why Sirach and the others go unnumbered with four words, “Because they do not exist in the Hebrew,” and assigns them to the reading category Athanasius named.²³ The Reformed argument for the Old Testament canon is, at its hinge, an Orthodox catechism’s argument.

The honest statement is narrow, and it is enough. The church received the Hebrew canon from Israel along with a Greek library. It took several centuries to say which was which, and some of its greatest men said it wrong. Its most learned men, East and West, kept the synagogue’s line. The first binding definition that crossed that line came at Trent, with the Reformation already twenty-nine years old. A father can say all of that to his son without hiding a single fact, because the argument rested on Romans 3:2 from the start, and the fourth century’s tidiness was never its ground.

Two objections remain, and they answer each other. Jude quotes the book of Enoch, and Paul quotes pagan poets: Aratus on the Areopagus, Menander to the Corinthians, Epimenides to Titus.²⁴ Quotation and canon are different things. If quotation made a book Scripture, Aratus would be Scripture. Jude quotes a true sentence from Enoch as Paul quotes a true sentence from Aratus, and the church that received Jude did not receive Enoch. Tertullian, who argued for Enoch, admitted that it was rejected because it had no place in the Jewish canon, and the one church that does receive it, the Ethiopian, receives eighty-one books.²⁵ The same principle runs the other way. Hebrews honors the Maccabean martyrs who were tortured “not accepting their release” (Hebrews 11:35 LSB), Paul’s indictment of the nations in Romans 1 follows the same argument as the Wisdom of Solomon, and none of it makes those books Scripture, any more than Paul’s use of Aratus made Aratus a prophet.²⁶ The apostles read widely. They cited one body of books as the oracles of God.

What, then, should a father do with the additional books, the ones his Catholic friend calls deuterocanonical and the Reformers called Apocrypha? The Belgic Confession says it in three sentences: the church “may certainly read these books and learn from them as far as they agree with the canonical books,” they have no “power and virtue that one could confirm from their testimony any point of faith,” and they cannot “detract from the authority of the other holy books.”²⁷ That is the posture a father takes toward Josephus or a good commentary. He may read First Maccabees and learn what the Lord’s people suffered between Malachi and Matthew. He will not build a doctrine on it, and neither did the men who first taught him to read it.

The Word the apostles gave

The New Testament half of the question has a different shape. Israel received a written deposit. The church received witnesses, and a promise about what the Spirit would do in them. Jesus Himself wrote nothing.

“But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (John 14:26 LSB).

“I still have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak from Himself, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come” (John 16:12-13 LSB).

Remembrance presupposes eyewitness. The promise is spoken to the men in the room, who had heard what was to be brought to their remembrance, and it is fulfilled in what those men delivered. When the eleven replace Judas, the qualification for the office is stated: a man who had accompanied them from John’s baptism to the ascension, to “become a witness with us of His resurrection” (Acts 1:22 LSB). The office is unrepeatable by its own terms. No one alive after that generation could meet it. And Jesus set the authority of those witnesses at the level of His own: “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me. And he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me” (Luke 10:16 LSB).

The apostles knew what they were writing. Paul tells the Corinthians, in the chapter where he silences the disorder of their assembly, “If anyone thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, let him recognize that the things which I write to you are the Lord’s commandment” (1 Corinthians 14:37 LSB). He tells the Thessalonians, “I implore you by the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers” (1 Thessalonians 5:27 LSB), and in the second letter, “if anyone does not obey our word in this letter, take special note of that person” (2 Thessalonians 3:14 LSB), with his own handwriting set at the end as the mark of a genuine letter. He orders the Colossians to exchange letters with Laodicea so that each church reads what the other received (Colossians 4:16). These are the words of men who knew they were delivering the Lord’s commandment in writing, ordering it read in the assemblies, and binding the churches to obey it.²⁸

Look at what Peter does with Paul’s letters.

“and consider the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:15-16 LSB).

Peter calls Paul’s letters Scripture, sets them beside “the rest of the Scriptures,” and warns that distorting them destroys a man. This is the apostle who had once been rebuked to his face by the man whose letters he now ranks with Moses, and he ranks them there in the first generation.²⁹

The churches read them that way from the start. Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth about the year 96, tells the Corinthians to take up the letter Paul wrote them.³⁰ Justin Martyr, about the year 155, describes the Sunday assembly in Rome: “the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits,” and “when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.”³¹ The apostles’ writings were read in worship beside the prophets a century before any council met, because the churches received them as what they were. Irenaeus, about 180, could already write that “it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are,” and reach for the four winds and the four corners of the earth to say why.³² By about the year 200 a Christian in Egypt could hold a single codex with Paul’s letters in it, and within a generation or two another with the four Gospels and Acts, and a list, probably Roman and probably from about the same time, names the fourfold Gospel, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, and the Apocalypse of John, while rejecting forged letters under Paul’s name because they were forged.³³

The New Testament record has its own hard edge.

The edges took time. Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation were questioned in some churches for two centuries and more. Origen, in the third century, recorded which books were acknowledged everywhere and which were disputed. Eusebius, in the fourth, sorted the whole body into the acknowledged, the disputed, and the rejected, and could not decide where to put Revelation.³⁴ Cyril of Jerusalem and Gregory of Nazianzus listed twenty-six books and left Revelation out. Athanasius and the African councils listed twenty-seven.³⁵ The Syriac-speaking churches’ standard New Testament lacked 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation, and later versions had to supply them.³⁶ Luther, in 1522, printed all twenty-seven, and set Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation at the end without numbers, and said in his prefaces that he could not put James “among the chief books.”³⁷ Every one of those facts is true, and every one of them will be handed to the boy by someone.

The core never moved. The four Gospels, Acts, the thirteen letters of Paul, 1 Peter, and 1 John were received everywhere our earliest witnesses can see, without a recorded dissent from any church that received the apostles at all.³⁸ The books that were questioned were questioned on stated grounds: whether the author was who the book said, whether the book had been known in the churches from the beginning, whether its teaching matched what the apostles had delivered. Those are the questions a witness asks about a document, and the church asked them in the open for two hundred years and settled them by evidence. The Gospel of Thomas was rejected because, as Eusebius wrote, no church writer in the succession had ever used it, its style was not the apostles’ style, and its teaching was not theirs.³⁹ A canon that had been manufactured would have been announced, in one place, on one day, with the edges as firm as the center. A canon that was received looks exactly like what the record shows: a center held from the first generation, edges tested in the open, and a settlement reached by the churches comparing what they had.

And the settlement was reached before Constantine. Not one of the twenty canons of Nicaea says a word about the books of Scripture. The council dealt with Arius, with the date of Easter, and with church order. The act of Constantine that touched the Bible was a letter asking Eusebius for fifty copies of “the sacred Scriptures” for the churches of his new capital, a copying order that names no books, because the books were already known.⁴⁰ Irenaeus had written that the Gospels could be neither more nor fewer than four a century and a half before the emperor was born.

The foundation was laid once, and Paul names what it is made of.

“So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone” (Ephesians 2:19-20 LSB).

A foundation is not laid twice. The apostles and prophets are the foundation, Christ is the cornerstone, and the house is built on what they delivered. Jude says the same thing: the saints are to contend “for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 3 LSB). The deposit is finished because the witnesses Christ appointed to His resurrection have delivered their witness, and there are no more of them. Whatever the Spirit does in the church after them, He does under the Word they left, and the Word tests it.

Who decided

The son’s first question was “who decided?” The question assumes that a canon is decided. A canon is delivered.

A covenant document is delivered to its recipients, and it binds them from the day of delivery whether or not they have yet said so in a list. Israel was bound by the book beside the ark before any council existed. The Thessalonians were bound by Paul’s letter the day it was read to them. The church has never possessed a moment at which the Word waited on its vote. What the church does is recognize. Christ said it of His own: “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me” (John 10:27 LSB). The church hears its Shepherd’s voice in the writings the prophets and apostles delivered, and it says so: first by reading them in worship, then by listing them when disputes arose, and last by confessing them. Recognition is a real act. It is ministerial, which means it serves what it recognizes. It is fallible, in the way every human act is fallible. And it is testable, because the thing recognized stays open for every generation to examine.

The Roman church says the church’s recognition is infallible, and it says this by the mouth of its greatest controversialist. Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit who answered the Reformers, wrote that “the church has no power to make a noncanonical book canonical, or the reverse; it only declares which book is to be held canonical.”⁴¹ Rome’s own champion concedes that the canon is recognized and not made, that the books are what they are before any declaration, and that the declaration follows evidence: the testimony of antiquity, the likeness of a disputed book to the undisputed ones, the common sense of the Christian people. Then he attaches infallibility to the declaration. That is the whole difference between Rome and the Reformation on this question, and it is narrower than either side’s popular apologists let on. Both say the church recognizes. Rome says the recognizer cannot err. The Reformed say the recognition is a witness’s testimony, answerable to the thing witnessed, and that the certainty lies in the thing and in the God who gave it.

The Westminster Confession says the authority of Scripture “dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.” And: “our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.”⁴² The Belgic Confession, a century earlier, said why the church receives “all these books and these only”: “not so much because the church receives and approves them as such but above all because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God, and also because they prove themselves to be from God.”⁴³ Calvin, whom both confessions follow, wrote that “the highest proof of Scripture is uniformly taken from the character of him whose Word it is,” and “as God alone can properly bear witness to his own words, so these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of men, until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.”⁴⁴

One Protestant shortcut has to be refused here, and it is a beloved one. It has been said that the Protestant canon is “a fallible collection of infallible books.”⁴⁵ The phrase answers Rome’s question on Rome’s frame. It grants that the canon is a collection the church made and then apologizes for the church’s fallibility, and a Catholic hears it as the concession it is. The better statement is the confessions’ own. The canon is God’s act. The church’s list is the church’s confession of that act. A confession can be tested against what it confesses, and this confession has been tested against the books themselves for two thousand years, by friend and by enemy, and it stands. The father is asked to hear the Word, as the church heard it, and to see that the church’s confession of what it heard has borne every examination the world has brought to it. No one asks him to trust a fallible church about an infallible Word.

Two histories confirm this from the outside. The first is that no council with a claim to bind the whole church defined the Old Testament canon before Trent in 1546, and Trent defined it against the line the church’s most learned men had kept for eleven centuries. The second is that when the Eastern church did act conciliarly, at the Council in Trullo in 692, it ratified in a single canon the lists of Laodicea and of Carthage, of Athanasius and of Gregory, which contradict one another on Revelation and on the additional books, and left the contradiction standing.⁴⁶ If the canon rested on conciliar authority, those two facts would be fatal. They are not fatal, because it never did. They are what the record of a received canon looks like when councils try to describe it.

Three texts are brought against all this, and two of them I have used myself in print, so they get their full weight here.

Paul calls the church “the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15 LSB). Rome reads the pillar as warrant for a teaching office that cannot err.⁴⁷ But a pillar holds up what is set on it. The foundation has already been named, “the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone.” The church upholds and displays the truth before the world. The truth is prior to the church and is what the church is for. The verse’s own setting settles the order. Paul writes the letter, he says, “so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God.” The letter governs the household. The household does not govern the letter.

Paul commands the Thessalonians: “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us” (2 Thessalonians 2:15 LSB). Rome reads two streams of apostolic teaching, one written and one unwritten, both binding.⁴⁸ But the verse names one teaching in two deliveries: what Paul said when he was with them (“Do you not remember that while I was still with you, I was telling you these things?” 2 Thessalonians 2:5 LSB) and what he wrote. The apostle is the same, the church is the same, and the generation is the same. Nothing in the verse creates a second body of content, and nothing in it provides for carrying unwritten content past the people who heard it. Whoever claims that a binding oral apostolic teaching survives outside the writings must produce it. Rome, in its own constitution on revelation, describes tradition’s growth at length and never names one.⁴⁹ And when Paul praises the Corinthians for the same thing, “you remember me in everything and hold firmly to the traditions, just as I delivered them to you” (1 Corinthians 11:2 LSB), he writes the tradition in question down in the next fourteen verses. The tradition he told the church to hold is the one he inscripturated in the same breath. That is the tradition I told the church to uphold when I wrote on that chapter, and it is the only kind the New Testament knows.

Christ promised the Spirit would guide “into all the truth” (John 16:13 LSB). Rome reads the promise as running to the church’s teaching office in every age. But the promise is spoken in the upper room to the eleven, and John 14:26 gives its shape: the Spirit will bring to their remembrance what Jesus said to them. A man cannot be reminded of what he never heard. The promise is fulfilled in the apostolic witness, written and kept, and there is no transfer clause in it.

The last question is put to me by name: which church? I am not, at this writing, on the roll of a congregation, and men who know it have asked how I can speak of “the church” receiving anything. The church that received the canon is the people of God across the ages: the Levites who carried the book beside the ark, the exiles who heard Ezra read the law from morning till midday, the Thessalonians who heard Paul’s letter the week it arrived, the Roman congregation Justin describes with the memoirs of the apostles open on a Sunday, the bishops who compared their lists and settled the edges, the Reformers who confessed the sixty-six. That body received the Word before any living man joined a roll, and it will hold the Word after every living man has left one. A man’s standing in a congregation is a question for the elders of the congregation he joins, and I have said in public what I intend to do about mine. The canon does not wait on it. It did not wait on Trent, and it will not wait on me.

The witness and the fact

A witness does not create the fact he attests. A court’s judgment does not create the law it applies. The church is the witness. The councils are the court. The Word is the law. Everything the son was told about who decided is true as a description of the court and false as an account of the law. The law was given at Sinai and beside the ark, through Isaiah and Daniel and the rest of the prophets, through the men Christ appointed and the Spirit taught, once for all. The court recognized it, slowly at the edges and instantly at the center, and its records of that recognition are on the table for the boy to read.

So the father tells his son what Asaph told the fathers of Israel. God established a testimony. God commanded fathers to teach it. The reason a father can put this Book in his son’s hands and say what it is rests on the faithfulness of the God who gave the testimony, who entrusted it to Israel, who spoke in these last days in His Son, who sent witnesses and taught them, and who has never once left His people without His Word. The tidiness of the fourth century and the vote of any council carry none of that weight. The church’s testimony serves that confidence the way a witness serves a fact. The confidence itself rests where the psalm puts it. “That they should set their confidence in God.”