My dad had a giant church history timeline hanging in his office wall when I was a kid. And if you are a pastor’s kid, you learn a lot watching how your parents handle the church member who shows up to run an inquisition. Somebody would come in and say, “You said X, but the biblical answer is not X,” and Dad would point up at that timeline and start naming people. What about this guy? What about her? Eventually he would land on the line: “Look, I don’t feel like cutting verses out of the Bible or saints out of our history.” That is basically this whole conversation. Craig Allert teaches religious studies at Trinity Western University in Canada, he is a friend of Myron Penner (which is its own recommendation), and he has written two books that do the same work from different angles — one on the actual formation of the New Testament canon, and one on how the early church fathers read Genesis 1. The through-line is what D.H. Williams and Robert Louis Wilken call historical amnesia: we do not know who we are because we do not know where we came from, and the version we were handed is not the whole story. The real history turns out to be thicker, stranger, and considerably more invigorating for faith than the drop-out-of-the-sky version. Also, at some point I explain how modern scientific naturalism is a covert theology that kept the cathedral of creation and evicted God from it. Craig, generously, did not stop me.
Highlights from the conversation
- Scripture and canon are not the same word. The distinction comes from Albert C. Sundberg Jr. in the 1960s and 70s, and it reorganizes everything. Scripture means religiously authoritative writing, and it implies openness. Canonmeans a closed collection — nothing added, nothing removed. The first three centuries of Christianity are full of references to scripture. References to a canon do not begin until the latter half of the fourth century. Craig noticed the problem the way you would expect a historical theologian to notice it: Irenaeus, late second century, cites the Shepherd of Hermas as scripture. So do others with 1 Clement, 2 Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas. They cannot possibly be referring to a closed collection, because there was not one yet.
- When Irenaeus says “canon,” he means something else entirely. He is famous for the word — and he never once uses it for a collection of writings. Irenaeus is the best example in Christian history of the canon or rule of faith: a standard of orthodoxy that lives in the church. Which means that when he fights the Gnostics, he does not appeal to a closed canon of scripture, because he does not have one. He appeals to the rule of faith. Origen does the same thing in the preface to On First Principles — here is what the apostles handed down, here is what we are sure about, and here is the enormous space left over that he then proceeded to fill with the most creative speculation in the early church.
- The canon was not forged as a weapon against heretics. The standard story says Marcion produced a canon, so the church had to counter with one of its own. Craig’s response: there is no evidence of a counter-canon, and more importantly, that is not how Irenaeus actually argued. He conceded the documents held in common and fought on interpretation. Which is where the mosaic analogy lives — the Gnostics take scripture the way someone might take a mosaic portrait of a king, rearrange the tiles into a fox or a dog, and announce that this was the picture all along. The Gospel of John was a Gnostic favorite. The issue was never which books. It was whether you were reading them inside the home where the rule of faith lives.
- Athanasius, 367, and the books that are still good. The first person to use canon for the same twenty-seven-book New Testament we use. But notice what the closing does and does not do: Athanasius distinguishes between canonical books and books that are genuinely worth reading but cannot ground doctrine. The Shepherd, the Clements, Barnabas — they do not stop being useful. Meanwhile Eusebius has reservations about James, 2 Peter, and 2–3 John; Gregory of Nazianzus is not on board with Revelation. If you have imported a radical sola scriptura and read it backward into the fourth century, this is alarming. If you understand that the canon of scripture always functioned inside other ecclesial canons, it is just the church doing discernment, slowly, with other things on its plate.
- Basil reads Genesis 1 and nobody in the creation wars notices. Augustine wrote A Literal Commentary on Genesis and opens by explaining that you cannot read the creation accounts literally — there is light before the sun. Our word literal is welded to historical in a way theirs was not; Aquinas could say that to read the Bible literally is to read it as God intends it be heard. And Basil — one of the primary architects of the doctrine of the Trinity that evangelicals hold as non-negotiable — argues creation is instantaneous and timeless, and reads let them rule over the fish as ruling over the inner passions in order to be prepared to contemplate God. He calls the creation accounts a training ground for righteousness. The silkworm’s metamorphosis, the bird and the egg. Tripp’s frame: what you are reading is not a stopwatch but the conceptual architecture of creation in the mind of God, and how does it end? Good, good, good, very good.
- The Princetonian fence, and what a high view actually costs. The title of Craig’s book has a question mark in it for a reason. Verbal plenary inspiration and a particular construction of inerrancy came from the Hodges and Warfield, built in genuine panic — the Bible really was being attacked in ways it never had been, and the fear was that losing the Bible meant losing the culture. Craig owns his own history here: the first systematic theology he ever bought was Charles Hodge’s three volumes from Powell’s in Portland, and he read all of it, and that was theology to him. The question the book asks is whether that is really a high view of scripture in light of the vast majority of Christian history that did not hold it — and whether proof-texting one sentence from a church father about inspiration and calling it verbal plenary is honest reading. His alternative is not lower. It is humility, breadth, and the recognition that the Bible is the church’s book, which means its history matters to it. Because propositionalism, as he puts it, gets anchored in an arrogance: I have the list, it is biblical, and if you do not believe it you are out and I am in. That is not just flattening the Bible. That is flattening faith.
About our guest
Dr. Craig D. Allert is Professor of Religious Studies and Coordinator of the Christianity and Culture Program at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. He is a historical theologian specializing in early Christianity, patristics, and the formation of the New Testament canon.
His books include A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon ; Early Christian Readings of Genesis One: Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation; and Revelation, Truth, Canon, and Interpretation: Studies in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho.
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