Greg and Amy reframe the question of whether God limits himself with just 66 books of the Bible, reminding us that God has defined himself in the Bible and given us everything we need to know, albeit not everything there is to know about him.
Transcript
Question: How do you respond to someone who says that putting God in the “box of the 66 books of Scripture” is limiting himself somehow, and we have no way to know all he has done or said because we are human and can only know so much about God?
Greg: Here’s a question. What if God limited himself to 66 books of revelation? I mean, that’s the claim that we’re making. It isn’t the claim that we are limiting him—that somehow, out of nowhere, we just thought, “Ah. 66. That’s plenty. Here it is—this big giant thing. We got enough already. We’re not going to add any more to it.” That isn’t the way it worked. The way it worked was, more or less, a recognition by God’s people of the texts that we received—or they received—as the authoritative words of God himself. Now, of course, they could be mistaken about that. There are challenges to that, which we can address, but that’s not what’s going on here. The claim here is, just because we’re saying there are these 66 books—as if we were the ones who are saying it, making the decision—then we are putting God in a box. But, on our view at least, it isn’t us making the decision. No one group is making the decision.
I heard Dan Wallace put it this way in the documentary The God Who Speaks. He said, with regards to the canon, it’s either an authoritative list of books, or it’s a list of authoritative books. Now, that’s not wordplay. The point is, if it’s an authoritative list of books, that means someone is taking upon themselves the role of being the authority to declare the books as God’s books. That would be the Roman Catholic Church’s view of the canon. But if it is a list of books that are authoritative—in other words, the authority is vested in the works themselves—the authority is not in the person who declares them to be such. In fact, when you look at the history of the canon, that’s the way it happened.
It is not the case that we did not have this list of authoritative books until the third or fourth century. Early on, you have an acknowledgement of most of the works that we consider canon as being the rule because they came from the rule makers, as it were, those disciples trained by Christ—not just disciples, but apostles—that were authorized by Christ himself to produce authoritative doctrine for the church. And in their teaching, they were authoritative, and it was the writings that reflected their teaching that survived their death. And so, these writings were then collected and acknowledged to be so, and you could see the early church fathers affirming that. It was later that they finally came up with the New Testament list that we use as authoritative now.
The apocryphal books—the in-between books—they were not canonized until 1,500 years after Christ at the Council of Trent by the Roman Catholic Church. Now, I’m not saying they weren’t considered valuable, and some considered them canon, but not everybody, and there wasn’t a unified understanding of that.
The point I’m making here is, what we have in the 66 books is a list of authoritative books. This goes back to my opening comment. Well, what if God himself limited himself to these 66 books? What if God limited himself? I get bugged with this “putting God in a box” kind of reference. It’s just nutty. What exactly are we doing when we’re putting God in a box? And, almost always, when I hear that phrase, it’s when someone tries to make a biblical argument that is contrary to an individual’s personal view. So, they find fault with the view by saying, “Well, you’re putting God in a box.”
I like Frank Beckwith’s comment—he’s a philosopher from Baylor. I wrote a book with him a number of years ago. Good friend. He can turn a phrase. Here’s what his observation, in this case, is. When somebody else cannot beat you with an argument on a theological matter, they try to trump you with their own spirituality. “Well, I can’t refute your view, but I’m holier than you are. I’m more spiritual than you are.” And that’s really what’s at the heart of this claim. We’ve got theological reasons—rational arguments regarding the 66 books being the authorized canon. This is where God has spoken, and somebody says, “Well, your God is smaller than mine. My God is not in a box. My God is free and can do whatever he wants, and he gives revelation wherever he wants.” Well, of course, we agree with that in principle. God is free to do whatever he wants. The question isn’t what he’s free to do. The question is what he has done. And this is why this kind of response is just childish. It’s just infantile. It misses the point entirely.
What we’re trying to figure out is, where has God spoken, and what are our reasons to believe that’s the case? And the early church fathers understood the 66 books of this particular testament to be that because their source was authoritative—in the case of the New Testament, the apostolic witness (that’s the principal concept) and the recognition of all other churches and Christians that these books carried with them authority. They recognize the authority inherent in them. So, to the person who thinks we’re putting God in the box, well then, where are the other texts, the other places where God has spoken authoritatively and inherently, that you’d like to offer as an option? Even the Roman Church, who offers additional sources of authoritative information, at least seek to make the case that they’re not just saying, “Oh, you’re putting God in a box.” That’s silly. That just tells me the person who makes this comment has no other good reasons to claim other revelation is authoritative.
Amy: I think the key thing to know here—when this person says we have no way of knowing all he has done or said because we are human and we can only know so much about God—the key difference to note here is that there’s a difference between knowing fully, which we can’t do, and knowing truly, which we can do, and we can do it because we’re made in the image of God and we are persons like God is a person, and he’s made us so that we can communicate with him and apprehend certain things about him that he tells us about. Now, we’ll never know everything there is to know about God, but we can truly know the things that he has told us. The truth that he’s given us is, by nature, limiting, and the reason why it’s limiting is because God is himself and he’s not not himself. So, when God says, “This is who I am,” all things that are opposite of that are not God. So, he is limited, if you want to call it that. He’s limited himself to this truth about himself.
When God gives us 66 books of the Bible, those are the things that he thinks we need to know. It’s not everything there is to know about God, but it’s everything we need to know about God to know him truly—to know who he is and who he is not. And so, I suspect, if someone says we’re limiting ourselves to the 66 books, perhaps there’s some sort of mystical thing they want to let into here—like visions or meditations or some sort of mystical experience of God that they want to allow in—but God has given us everything we need to know him truly. And yes, there’s only so much we can know, but we can know this, and this is what he’s given us. It’s not limiting; it’s defining—truthfully defining, which, of course, is limiting, just as every definition is limiting, but in a legitimate way, not in an illegitimate way.