By what Authority were the Books of the Bible selected?

Let us look at Chapter One of the Westminster Confession of 1646. The meat is in Article 2, where the books are enumerated, Article 3 which declares the Apocrypha illigitimate, and Article 4 which says:

IV. The authority of the holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, 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.

The trouble with Article 4 is that it misses the point. By what authority does the Westminster Confession declare what the books of the Bible are? It doesn't say. We have only their word, the word of an uncredentialed authority. There isn't even the mention of a credentialed authority. If there is a credentialed authority, the Westminster Confession has certainly detracted from it in their very first Chapter.

Who would have credentials. The Jews had their own Cannonization Process for their Torah, our Old Testament, which is generally accepted by Christianity. Thus, restricting the question to the New Testament, all New Testament credentials and authority would derive from Christ. Since almost all of the New Testament books were not written until after the death of Christ, his authority must have flowed somewhere to make the New Testament valid. The Apostles are generally considered the recipients of this authority. Yet none of the Apostles, not even John, were alive when the collection of scripture which became the New Testament was finally agreed upon. The Apostles had successors, who inherited their authority and held the Office of Bishop, hence a Doctrine of Apostolic Succession is needed in order to maintain the Bible. Recapitulating, the Authority flowed from Christ to the Apostles, and from the Apostles to the Apostolic Successors to authenticate the Bible.

Historically, the Council of Carthage of 397 AD set the de facto standard for what qualified a book to be in the Bible. The one thing about a de facto standard is that even though it is not necessarily legally in force, it recieves acceptance because of necessity, and because no one else is able to come up with anything better. The Council of Carthage had plenty of necessity justification for what they did, as their purpose was to discard the Gnostic Gospels from the Cannon which were about to polute and overwhelm the Cannon, a situation which Bishop Irenaeus warned against in Against Heresies. One does not pick a Holy Book out of the gutter, from whence the Gnostic Gospels came. At issue was what a what books to keep, what books to discard, and by what authority. The solution, roughly described as the Smell Test of St. Irenaeus, was to requre that each accepted book have a demonstrable connection to an Apostle, a property of the Most Frequently Used Books by the Oldest Churches with the Closest Connection to an Apostle. Additionally, the Scriptures had to be consistent with each other. We note in passing that the Apocrypha contains valuable history which assists with the Cannonization Process, contrary to Chapter 1, Article 3.

The problem with deemphasizing the Council of Carthage of 397 as an unimportant council is that it delegitimizes their purpose of discarding the Gnostic Gospels from the Scriptures, thus opening the door for reinstating the Gospels of Judas, Thomas, and Philip, the Apocalypse of St. Peter, and various and sundry other Gnostic Gospels. There is no contemporary alternate authority from which to draw legitimacy.

Coming full circle, the Westminster Confession mindfully and arbitrarily skips the authentication of the Bible. It does not give any reason to discard any Gnostic Gospel, other than the fact that they were not mentioned. Hence, since the Gnostic Gospels were not explicitly excluded, the Westminster provides implicit grounds to include them in Scripture. This problem is in addition to the Westminster Confession's inability to qualify their own authority. Further, since the Westminster Confession some 1250 years after Carthage, the connection to the Apostles is at least three times as dilute, should the Apostolic Succession argument be attempted. As we continue our examination of the Westminster Confession, we will find that a foundation was laid to delegitimize any and all findings of Church Councils in Chapter XXXI, which in turn legally permits the eventual overruling of the Council of Carthage and the Reselection of the Books of the Bible.

Doctrinal Paradoxes

We owe it to Mathematician Kurt Gödel that paradoxes derive from self-referentiality. This causes problems with the belief that the Bible being "self-authenticating". By construct, there are other holy books which must, of necessity, be self-authenticating. Even Mathematical Texts are self-authenticating. Such a weak claim of self-authentication detracts, rather than enhances, the Truth of the Bible. If I am to maintain my Christianity, I can have no use for "self-authentication".

Let us recognize that there have been several attempts to control the message of the Bible, either by the insertion of false books into the Bible as was tried by the Gnostics in the first three centuries of Christianity tried to do, or by the editing of Biblical content to maintain pet doctrines, such as the editing of the Bible to de-emphasize scripture, say Revelation 22:19 to protect a pet doctrine.

The main focus, however, is to investigate the underpinnings of if the Bible were true in relation to Doctrine. Case in point are the doctrines of Monergism and Total Depravity. If Mongerism and/or Total Depravity were true, than Man can in no way further the cause of his own salvation, or for that matter, the salvation of another. The translating, publishing, and commentary on the Bible are activities which, if competently done, furthers the salvation of Man. Therefore, the Bible cannot be competently translated, published, or commented upon. Since this is a conclusion that I cannot accept without the abandonment of the Bible or Christianity, I must discard Mongerism and Total Depravity.

The sieve I use to separate Wheat from Chaff is the Reduction to an Absurdity technique of Mathematicians. This blog's premise is that anything that undermines the Bible, its authority, and the Canonization process, from which the Bible was determined, is void. In consequence, I must oppose various forms of NeoGnosticism or premises that legitimatize NeoGnosticism as certain confessions of faith would do. Said compromises with NeoGnosticism opens the way for the inclusion of previously discarded books from the Bible, in particular, the gospels of Judas, Thomas, and Phillip, and the Apocalypse of St. Peter. Since Cannonization was a MetaScriptural Process, this blog must also be MetaScriptural. When Scripture is actually quoted, it will be generally be used to demonstrate that a particular version of the Bible is Edited, Not Translated in this blog.

Theological Responsibility requires that if a doctrine gets refuted, it must either be replaced by by a plausibe doctrine, or that it wasn't needed to begin with. To be Theologically Responsible, my refutation of Monergism has made me Synsegistic by default. Since there is Sin in this World, I have to account for it in consequence to debunking Total Depravity. I find both the Doctrine of Original Sin and the Doctrine of the Corruption of the Nature of Man both acceptable doctrines at this point.

I must make one last observation. There is an obscure "Doctrine of Illumination", apparently propounded by St. Augustine, that God can cause a person to be illumined. Illumination does not confer Holiness. It follows that an Illumined Sinner is still a Totally Depraved Sinner, and the incompetance to translate, copy, print, interpret, or comment upon the Bible still remains. Chapter XXXI of the Westminster Confession, to be discussed later, actually concedes the point by stating that ALL Church Councils are invalid because they are Sinful without imputing ANY Illumination to ANY Church Council.