During Lunch Today

I ate lunch at work with two good friends of mine, who belong to different Protestant Communities (one is Evangelical and closest to Baptist, the other is somewhere between Plymouth Brethren and general non-denominational cessationist (i.e. the charismatic gifts like tongues ceased after the Apostolic age)).

We were discussing several different matters, and my friend M. who is Plymouth Brethren responded to a challenge I had made to him about the canon of Scripture in our last discussion. It turned out that his rebuttal didn’t work because we looked up the books that were in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament and discovered that it included the 7 deuterocanonical books which Catholics have in their Bibles but Protestants do not but that it also included many other books which neither of us accept as canonical.

Anyway, I challenged both of them with a variation on why they accept their 66-book Protestant canon, and my other friend L., with whom I have had less discussions, thought for a while aloud and put together the argument I was making–it clicked for him–and over my friend M.’s objections he started explaining, “No, don’t you see that Devin is making the point that XYZ is inconsistent in our Protestant beliefs.” To which M. replied in an exasperated (but good-natured way) “Of course I see it–that’s the same point Devin makes every time we talk about this stuff!”

I started laughing because it was true. I make the same arguments everytime. Essentially my friend M. has realized that the arguments and questions I present on the canon of Scripture have painted him into the corner of having to say “I accept on faith that the Bible consists the 66-books of the Protestant canon.” No historical evidence nor witness provides a principled reason for having certainty in the Protestant canon.

That position is acceptable but unsatisfying for many reasons. For example, Mormons can say the same thing about their Bible and the Book of Mormon: They accept on faith that God revealed the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith and confirmed as true the (66-book Protestant) Bible. You cannot make an argument against such a fideistic position because the response is always “I believe it to be true.”

So is the Catholic Faith completely rational and deductible apart from faith? No, absolutely not. Faith is definitely required to believe in Christianity in any form (or to believe in Islam for example). The question is instead one of epistemology and consistency. CalledToCommunion.com is going to post an article on this subject in the next weeks or months which I look forward to linking to and discussing–those guys will explain the distinctions made between Catholic and Protestant epistemologies more clearly than I could.