There are a lot of possible ways to answer the question ‘why’.
I think the most informative explanation is simply that the earliest protestants were themselves devout Christians steeped in the Bible and committed to Christianity. They saw themselves as recovering a pure and primitive Christianity ridding it of various abuses and heresies that had be introduced to it over the centuries. In other words, they started from a position of faith and proceeded to pare back whatever elements they identified as later corruptions; what they were doing was not Cartesian skepticism applied the Christianity, in which you start by questioning everything and then try to build it back up from the foundation.
Look at the trajectory of Luther’s thought: He starts off rejecting a fairly narrow parts of Catholicism–principally the doctrines and practices surrounding purgatory and indulgences–but over time he comes to abandon more and more of Catholicism.
Keep in mind: Textual criticism was in its embryonic stages–Erasmus published his Greek NT in 1516, just one year before the 95 theses. Moreover, we didn’t know many of the apocryphal works–we knew some, but orthodox Christians dismissed those as late and clearly spurious, in no way–to their minds–comparable to the canonical works.
So in that context, it isn’t too surprising that early Protestants latched onto the canon as sound–it was written and widely dispersed (not easily falsified or corrupted by power-hungry and worldly pontiffs) and everyone agreed not only that it was written early but that it had been received by Christians as inspired Scripture early.
Put yourself in Luther’s shoes: He’s a Catholic priest with a doctorate in theology, he really believes; he’s in deep. But he sees Tetzel trotting around Germany, with papal authorization, scaring people into buying tickets into heaven to finance the new St. Peter’s, and Luther says to himself something has gone wrong: This practice and theology must be wrong because it doesn’t fit with other parts of his Christian–really Catholic–faith. So he uses parts of the Catholicism he knew and loved–like the Bible, which he takes to be surer–and uses them to argue against parts of Catholicism he takes to be later and corrupt. Of course, once you throw off authority in one part of Catholic theology, it is just a matter of time till you start questioning other aspects of that edifice.
BTW, Luther did famously try to excise the letter of James (calling it a letter of straw), but that didn’t catch on.
Anyway, if you mean to ask how Protestants justify using the Canon to themselves, I suspect they would say something like, the formation of the canon was a spontaneous movement among Christians spread throughout the world, guided by the Spirit over time. It wasn’t decided by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church as such. There is something to that view–the formation of the canon was gradual, and though we can look to bishops and synods finally approving the canon, (a) they were often just stating the already common practice and (b) those decisions were only local; though those local decisions may have set precedent that was imitated elsewhere, there was no universally binding decree on the matter until after the Reformation (namely, from Trent, though again, Trent was just reiterating what was already standard).
By the way, Catholics like to throw the formation of the canon at Protestants as an knock-down apologetic argument, but its actually a pretty big problem for Catholics too.
It is a matter of fact that the canon wasn’t settle for several centuries. It wasn’t until sometime near the end of the fourth century that anyone gives the list of 27 books we now use, and that isn’t for lack of records; there were lots of attempts to study and formulate a canon leading up to that. So we first get the presently accepted list of which books are inspired in the 4th cent, and that those 27 books and they alone are inspired isn’t infallibly taught until the 16th century.
But the Church’s magisterium (per Catholic theology) can’t teach anything infallibly unless it was already somehow revealed (directly or indirectly). So if the teaching that those 27 books were inspired can be infallibly taught by the magisterium at Trent, a Catholic has to say that the teaching was already revealed.
Well, per Catholic theology there are two sources of (public) revelation: Scripture and apostolic-Tradition.
Obviously it isn’t revealed in those books themselves–the bible didn’t come with a table of contents. So if it was revealed it must be in the apostolic tradition.
But it obviously wasn’t in apostolic tradition because no one had the current canon until the end of the 4th cent, despite there being a lot of discussion on the point. Even if you think all the books date to within the lifetimes of the apostles, it still is perfectly clear that this list wasn’t being handed down in a continuous tradition from the apostles.
The canon is a big problem for everybody, not just Protestants.
Thank you Porphyry for all of the great information, but I was actually more curious as to why some present day non-Catholics (with access to more texts and the tools of textual criticism) have not expressed an interest in starting from the ground up. Esp Evangelicals with their tradition of searching for the absolute truth. It’s hard to imagine none of them thinking: “We know more now and maybe they got it wrong.”. LOL
I was just curious. Maybe someday someone will, in fact, do this.
I really think it comes down to this:
They are committed Christians who are antecedently convinced that Jesus is the Lord. If they reject the NT canon, then they are rejecting the oldest source of orthodox Christianity, the one shared source that all historically viable forms of Christianity have shared, and in rejecting the one source that all viable forms of Christianity have shared then they would be essentially rejecting all of Christianity, because they would be then rejecting even its most universally accepted source; the implication, then, would be that God let true Christianity die out or become universally confused about even it’s most foundational source. If you allow yourself the freedom to reject Scripture, you quickly run out of any basis for maintaining a robustly orthodox Christianity (e.g., a Christianity that affirms the divinity and virgin birth of Christ).
If you start off committed to the belief that Jesus is the savior of the world, a divine person, born of a virgin to die for the sins of the world, who rose on the third day, you pretty much have to accept scripture (if you care at all about historicity) because without the testimony of scripture you have zero basis for holding those beliefs. What basis are you left with for holding the core teachings of orthodox Christianity, if you believe the whole Christian world was deluded in accepting the NT, from which they got those beliefs?
If that seems like putting the cart before the horse, I think it is. I don’t want to speak for Protestants, since I’m not one, and never have been one, but that looks to me like what is going on.
In their own minds, I think it comes down to disputing that it was really the Catholic Church, as such, that formulated the canon. I think they (well the best of them) would say it was the orthodox Christian community as a whole, guided by the HS, that came to a universal consensus on which books were scripture. That, at the time, essentially the whole Christian community existed in the historical society that would, in time, become, by degrees, the medieval Catholic Church was an irrelevant accident of history.
If you are talking about Orthodox (capital O), non-Catholic Churches–it is even less of a problem, because they (quite plausibly in some cases) identify as the same eastern Christian communities that assisted in coming to the consensus in the first place. So they would deny that they were part of the Roman Catholic Church at the time; they would insist that the Church of Rome broke communion with them.
Yes, your point, in essence, about the “Catholic Church” writ-large or as a large organization in need of reform – is obviously not yet what the “Church” WAS in the first few centuries when decisions on the canon were made, not yet corrupted by humans per se, etc. And that makes it easier for some to believe that the earlier Church and it’s decisions were more pure, guided by the HS, etc. That makes a lot of sense.
And, as Bart said in one of his books – despite Evangelical Christianity’s commitment to the pursuit of “truth”, when that “truth” appears to lead away from fundamental Christian beliefs, the appetite for true “truth” wanes.
My experience in Roman Catholicism and the study of comparative religion is that these pursuits morph into efforts to manufacture “proofs” or “truths” that result in heavily metaphoricallly-based, rationalized, contrived, convoluted, and abstruse theological arguments & concepts far removed from the texts that were purportedly their foundation.
I am reminded of the criticism of Joseph Campbell’s work in which it is claimed that he sort of chose what he wanted to believe and then cherry-picked historical evidence to support it.
I see this tendency in all religions and, frankly, in all areas of study. We humans become attached to beliefs that have formed the foundation for how we understand the world and rail against challenges to those foundations. And, to an extent, I believe these staunch defenses are a very rational and logical first reaction – if something has “worked”, so to speak, then efforts to change it understandably require a higher degree of scrutiny. Perhaps like in the initial reactions to Einstein’s challenge to Newtonian mechanics.
Unfortunately, it seems there will never be a shortage of humans who call for the proofs and question the answers.
Thank you for this exchange 🙂
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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