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For Scripture is so holy and perfect, abundantly containing whatsoever is necessary for salvation, that nothing can be added to it, and it is also so perfectly and prudently composed that nothing can be taken away from it.

Girolamo Zanchi, Confession of the Christian Religion, §I.ix

Now Zanchi continues with his description of the character of Scripture. In §I.i-viii, he’s told us what we as members of the church confess about the clarity, authority and preservation (or integrity) of God’s written word. Now, in a tightly packed sentence, he emphasizes a few more of Scripture’s “properties” (as they’re called): its holiness, necessity, and perfection.

Most of these properties were not hotly debated in the late sixteenth century, so they didn’t require much more than a simple statement. But because of the debate with Rome, the property of authority called for a much more detailed articulation (§I.v-x). Similarly, perspecuity will also receive some elaboration (§I.xiii).

Peter van Mastricht, writing downstream of Zanchi by a century, offers a slightly longer but still concise description of the properties of Scripture in the prolegomena to his Theoretical-Practical Theology (§1.1.2; pp. 126-30).

Mastricht organizes the properties into slightly different categories (authority, truth, integrity, sanctity, perspecuity, perfection, necessity, and efficacy) and describes them in greater detail. But I don’t see dramatic differences between what he and Zanchi are trying to communicate about the word of God.

The basic points that Zanchi wants to draw out here is 1) Scripture gives us everything that we need to know for our salvation and 2) Scripture works as an integrated whole. It’s all of a piece and perfectly wrought, so we don’t need anything more and anything less wouldn’t do.

Thus, we submit to the teaching of the holy Scriptures, just as all the devout ought, holding to what the Apostle said: “All Scripture inspired of God is useful for teaching” and so forth (2 Tim. 3:16).

Girolamo Zanchi, Confession of the Christian Religion, §I.x

Given what has been confessed about the nature and character of Scripture, the obvious next thesis is, of course, that “we must submit” to what it says. This can’t be a controversial conclusion for anyone who has acknowledged what preceded. But, to reorient our minds in the light of Scripture itself, Zanchi rightly turns us toward 2 Timothy 3:16 where we are reminded that every word of God-inspired Scripture is “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

If the Scriptures are holy and God-breathed, then we must soften our hearts and bend our knees. That doesn’t meant that submission is easy or that we always know exactly what submission looks like. But, as noted in a previous post, the posture of God’s people before him (and, so, before his word) should default to humility. The fear of the Lord—not slavish, cringing fear, but awe-ful reverence before the one who stands in authority over us—is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10).

Zanchi has already confessed that the canon of Scripture is the normative authority which alone can be used to prove the “tenets of the faith” (§I.v). But now he’s going to circle back around because he wants make sure that we state the proper relationship between the authority of Scripture and the authority of the church in a very clear fashion.

That relationship was one of the major presenting issues that sparked the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Which came first, the church or the Bible? Rome argued (and still does) that the church decided which books accorded with apostolic teaching and which did not. It conferred authority upon the Bible and, therefore, the Bible’s authority stands under the authority of the church, especially via unwritten apostolic traditions handed down to bishops. The pope, as earthly head of the church, exercises interpretive authority.

The Reformers said, as Zanchi puts it, that “the canonical books do not receive their authority from the church” (§I.vi). From generation to generation, as the church listened to the Holy Spirit and to the prophets and apostles who set down the Word of God, she has accepted, received, acknowledged, and declared which books are canonical and which not. But all of those actions testify to the church’s submissive posture before the Bible. Why? Because Scripture’s authority comes from the fact that it is God’s word.

[T]hese writings neither receive nor have their authority from [the church], but only from God, their proper author. Therefore, of themselves, because they are the word of God, they have authority [ius] over everyone and are worthy to be believed and obeyed by everyone simply.

Jerome Zanchi, Confession of the Christian Religion, §I.vi

Nevertheless, the church bears witness to the Scripture as the word of God. We testify that we hear in them God’s voice in the hope that, as we do, others will be moved by the authority of the church to “hear and read the holy Scriptures as the word of God” (§I.vii).

In offering this testimony to the living word of God, the church doesn’t “add something or take something away” from it (§I.viii). Nor does the church have the power to bring life to a stony heart. That’s the work of the Spirit who gives faith through the proclamation of the law and the gospel. But, like the Samaritan woman who invited her neighbors to “come, see a man who told me all that I ever did” (Jn. 4:29), the church uses whatever relational capital it can muster to turn people toward the source of living water (v. 10).

In a passage cited by Zanchi on this point, Augustine famously declared that he “would not have believe the gospel, had not the authority of the Church” moved him to it. Which gets us to the question that I hope we will all wrestle with: Do the local congregations of Christ’s church in which we participate have that sort of authority? Would someone coming in for the first time at the invitation of a coworker or family member be drawn to respond to the bold proclamation of the gospel on the basis of the church’s testimony? Or has the church become a stumbling block to belief. If the latter, what can we do as individuals and communities to change that?

Zanchi’s mentor Peter Martyr Vermgli (1499-1562) left behind a powerful collection of prayers drawn from the psalms. I’ve been convicted by how often he connects repentance and godliness within the church to her faithful and fruitful witness among the nations. Let’s pray for reformation within the house of God so that we can be credible witnesses to our Lord when we say to our neighbors, “Come and see.”

There’s a second half to CCR §I.iii that takes up the distinction between canonical and apocryphal books. The former are those that have been accepted everywhere, always, and by all the church as theopneustos (God-breathed) because, as Barclay put it, “no one could stop them.” But what about those that were “less evident[ly]… from the Holy Spirit”? Here’s Zanchi’s answer:

The other books, although they are contained within a volume of the holy books [in volumine sacrorum bibliorum], she nevertheless calls Apocryphal, because it is less evident that they are from the Holy Spirit than the other ones.

Girolamo Zanchi, Confession of the Christian Religion, §I.iii

This is a bit of a surprise to me. Zanchi’s rationale for calling books like Judith, Tobit, and Ecclesiasticus [sic] apocryphal is not that they are heretical or confusing or came later than the canonical OT books. Instead, he highlights that it is “less evident” to the church that they are theopneustos. Well, the Western Roman and Eastern Orthodox Churches would disagree, I suppose. But Zanchi has the rabbis on his side as well as Jesus and the apostles, who never quote from or paraphrase apocryphal books.

It turns out that it was not unusual for Reformation and post-Reformation Protestants to have a high opinion of the Apocrypha even as they distinguished it from the biblical canon. In taking this approach, they followed the Church Father Jerome (c. 342-420), who drew a line between OT canonical books and ecclesiastical books, the latter being apocryphal. (This article by David Briones is useful here.)

So, in one sense, Zanchi isn’t doing anything unusual. He likes the Apocrypha but knows that it’s not canon. Although he gives the apocryphal books “the first place after the canonical books,” he confesses that we should “use only the canonical books for proving the tenets of the faith” (§I.iv-v). Even Zanchi’s assertion that, after a point of faith has been proven from Scripture, apocryphal texts “have no little authority” as subordinate and confirming authorities (§I.v) can fit within this approach.

Yet Zanchi sure seems to go beyond saying that apocryphal books are beneficial, holding out the possibility that they are, in fact, theopneustos. It’s just that their Spirit-breathed character was “less evident” to the church, which therefore did not recognize them as Scripture. In other words, as Barclay might have put it, these books could be stopped.

So can revelation be the very word of God but not be canonical Scripture? Well, yes, depending on how we use “canonical.” Francis Turretin gives a bit more clarity when he explains an Augustinian distinction:

For [Augustine] makes two orders of canonicals: the first of those which are received by all the churches [“the canon of faith”] and were never called in question; the second of those which are admitted only by some [“the canon of ecclesiastical reading”] and were usually read from the pulpit. He holds that the latter are not to be valued as rightly as the former and have far less authority.

Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, I:104 (2T, Q9.VII)

Can revelation be God-breathed but not canonical in the narrower sense? Well, maybe. This is probably the case with Paul’s letter to the Laodiceans (Col. 4:16) or the Book of the Wars of the Lord (Num. 21:14), both of which are lost, which clearly indicates to us that the Lord determined that whatever those books contained was not necessary information for the salvation and flourishing of the entire church. The “canon of faith” was complete without them.

But here Zanchi (and Turretin) is speaking of books that we still possess. His point is that the very fact that God’s people have not always and everywhere discerned them as God’s word demonstrates that they are not canonical in Turretin’s narrower sense, even if they may be theopneustos and canonical in Turretin’s wider sense..

There are some things about this approach that are helpful. For example, it makes sense of why some early congregations accepted The Shepherd of Hermas or the Didache as special revelation even though the whole church never received them as canonical. But this is a difficult road to walk—Danger on all sides!—because the church has not always been content with the 66-book canon that we receive. How do we know that we aren’t missing the canonical boat by labeling Bel and the Dragon merely as apocryphal?

“How do we know?” So many of our questions come back to that issue of certainty. It’s the curse of the Enlightenment and its post-modern grandchild at work. Zanchi wasn’t unaware of the need to address this question but he also wasn’t obsessed with it in the way that we tend to be. How did he know that Bel and the Dragon was “out”? God’s OT church hadn’t recognized it. Jesus and the Apostles did recognize it. The post-apostolic church had doubts about it. It didn’t sound like Scripture. It didn’t claim to be the word of God. All this didn’t make the Apocrypha bad or useless. It just made it non-canonical.

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Having confessed that the God who reveals has revealed himself to the prophets and apostles as well as to us through their Spirit-inspired writings (which are the “very word of God” [§I.ii]), Zanchi now has to say something about which writings are”canonical” and which aren’t.

God did not simply drop the Bible down from heaven. Instead, he chose to reveal himself through prophetic and apostolic authors. Zanchi doesn’t have much to say here about how God did this, since it wasn’t a matter of serious contention until later in church history.

What he does want to focus on is the the fundamental criterion for canonicity, which is that the books in question are theopneustos or God-breathed. If such God-breathed writings exist and if the church can recognize them as such, then they are the measuring stick (which is all that “canon” means) for “all Christian piety” and “religious controversy.” Not surprisingly, his next move in CCR will be to list all the books that the “whole church… acknowledges and embraces, without any doubt,… as most certainly the word of God” (§I.iv).

But where, you ask, does the church fit in? After all, Dan Brown convinced millions that church leaders gathered at the Council of Nicea chose which books got to be in the Bible. Fortunately, Zanchi never got around to reading The Da Vinci Code.

To be sure, CCR affirms that the church calls specific books canonical and other not, but it makes this distinction not because it claims a magisterial authority that binds (or looses) books to (or from) the canon. Rather, the church’s authority is ministerial. The church is accustomed to call Spirit-inspired books written by prophets and apostles canonical because (“for that reason”) they are theopneustos, which is to say “the very word of God” (as Zanchi put it §I.ii).

Needless to say—at least, I wish it were needless to say (but, things being as they are…)—this is not the same thing as saying that the church decides which books are the very words of God or that it confers an inspired status upon the Bible.

Books don’t gain or lose canonical status on account of the church’s recognition (even if the testimony of the church on their behalf may be important in convincing individuals to believe (as was famously the case for Augustine); they are canonical, so the church recognizes them.

Bruce Metzger comments:

Neither individuals nor councils created the canon; instead, they came to recognize and acknowledge the self-authenticating quality of these writings, which imposed themselves as canonical upon the church.

The New Testament, Its Background, Growth and Content, p. 318

William Barclay put it succinctly: “The New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so” (Making of the Bible, 78).

With that important clarification in mind, let’s take a moment to wonder at the fact that God gave the church the work of gathering together into a single volume the inspired writings that he chose to be included in the canon of Scripture. Like sheep that know the voice of their Shepherd, the Spirit-guided church recognized the voice of her God and responded. Because she hears that voice in books of the Bible, she recognizes them the canon, the ruler that measures theology, piety, and practice.