Which Came First the Gospel or the Law?

The knee-jerk response of many to the question posed in the title of this essay will be to say that the Law came first. It, after all, is the “Old” Covenant whereas the Gospel is the “New” Covenant. The proof-texting types will then back up this answer with John 1:17 “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.”

Since the Exodus took place approximately half-way through the second millennium BC this might seem conclusive. Back up, however, sixteen verses to the words with which the Gospel of John opens: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The beginning alluded to is the same beginning references in the first verse of Genesis which precedes Exodus. The Word, as the fourteenth verse clearly states, is Jesus Christ.

Now let us jump ahead seven chapters to where this same Jesus, Who brought the grace and truth of the Gospel, tells the Pharisees “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.” Abraham was the first of the Hebrew Patriarchs, the grandfather of Jacob in whose days the Israelites went down to Egypt, from bondage in which God delivered them in the days of Moses, four centuries later. When Jesus was then asked “Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?” He responded with “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.”

While Moses lived a millennium and a half prior to the Incarnation, the verses that I have been pointing you to, which testify to the deity of Jesus Christ demonstrate that He, Who in Himself IS the Gospel, is prior to Moses. Elsewhere, St. John testifies to seeing an angel flying in the midst of heaven “having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth” (Rev. 14:6). The word translated “everlasting” here is αἰώνιος. It is the Greek word for “eternal” which means having neither beginning nor end.

Lest it be thought that I am finding clever arguments for a moot point turn to the third chapter of epistle to the Galatians and note how St. Paul hangs his entire argument that grace finishes what grace begins upon the priority of the Gospel over the Law. In the eighth verse he writes “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.” Later in the seventeenth verse he writes “And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.” The Gospel, the Covenant of grace and promise, St. Paul is clearly arguing, is older than the Law, which he proceeds to argue was temporarily added, “because of transgressions” (v. 19) as a “schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ” (v. 24).

This third chapter of Galatians demonstrates several doctrines that are popular in various circles within contemporary Christianity to be utterly in error. Let us look at two of these.

The first is the “Church Age as parenthesis” doctrine that has been taught by many dispensationalists in support of their eschatology. This doctrine teaches that we are living in an Age that began with Pentecost and which will conclude with the Rapture and which, having been completely unknown to the prophets of the Old Testament, is a parenthesis – a gap – in the timeline of Old Testament prophecy and in God’s dealings with national Israel under the Mosaic Covenant (the Law). John F. Walvoord, who was president of Dallas Theological Seminary, the flagship school of dispensationalism, from the 1950s to the 1980s, articulated and defended this doctrine in both The Rapture Question (1979) and The Millennial Kingdom (1983). Earlier, Harry A. Ironside, popular Bible teacher and pastor of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago had written an entire book entitled The Great Parenthesis: The Mystery in Daniel’s Prophecy (1943). Both men derived this doctrine from the earlier teachings of men like John N. Darby and C. I. Scofield. Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder of Dallas Theological Seminary, in his Major Bible Themes (1926), which was later revised and expanded by Walvoord (1974), took the parenthesis theory to its logical conclusion, given the premises of dispensationalist eschatology, and argued that in the Great Tribulation after the Rapture, the Age of Law would resume. Of the Age or Dispensation of Law Chafer wrote “Its course was interrupted by the death of Christ and the thrusting in of the hitherto unannounced age of the church. Thus the church age, while complete in itself, is parenthetical within the age of the law.” That this is the exact opposite of what St. Paul taught in Galatians ought to be obvious to anyone who reads that epistle. It is the Law, not the Gospel, that is the parenthesis.

The second doctrine is found in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which was drawn up in 1646 by the Puritans, those seditious, regicidal, maniacs, who murdered and martyred King Charles I, the legitimate king who was the true defender of his people’s liberty and freedom against those who wished to use Parliament as a means to subjecting the kingdom to their own arbitrary rule, because he stood in the way of their plans to abolish all that is ancient and aesthetically pleasing in the Church, to impose such a rigid, legalistic Sabbath keeping upon everyone that had the Pharisees of old survived to see it they would have cried “whoa, chill out, man”, to accuse everybody they didn’t like of “popish” leanings or witchcraft, to persecute those so accused, and to require that everyone subscribe to the darkest, gloomiest, version of the dark and gloomy doctrine known as Calvinism. The Puritans were the first liberals and leftists – their party within Parliament developed into the Whigs who later became the Liberals, their rebellion again the King and Church of England became the model for the Jacobin and Bolshevik Revolutions in France and Russia, and their Cromwellian Protectorate was the template for all subsequent totalitarian terror states from the French Reign of Terror to the Soviet Union to the Third Reich. Here is what their Confession has to say about man’s original condition:

The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience. (Westminster Confession of Faith, VII, ii)

The verses the Westminster divines pointed to in support of this idea of a “covenant of works” are verses which speak of the principle of the Law, including, ironically, a verse from Galatians 3. Ironies abound with regards to this teaching of the Westminster Confession. By making the original condition of man in the Garden a “covenant of works” that is the equivalent of the Law, they have fallen into the same mistake usually found in Gospel tracts written by Arminian – or outright Pelagian – evangelicals of saying that God’s original plan was messed up by man so He had to fall back on Plan B which was the Cross. St. John speaks of Christ as the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) in language that echoes that used by St. Peter in the eighteenth to twentieth verses of the first chapter of his first Catholic Epistle. Note St. Peter’s use of the word “foreordained” in verse twenty. The Cross was never “Plan B”, and one would think that people who emphasized the doctrines of election, foreordination, and predestination to the extent that the Puritans, who took these doctrines to such an extreme that they turned them into a gross, impious, and blasphemous heresy that denies the universal love of God and the universal offer of salvation in the Gospel, ought to know that better than anyone else. (1)

Man in the Garden of Eden was not under the Law. The Scriptures are very clear about this. Here again are the words of St. Paul from the first part of the nineteenth verse of the third chapter of Galatians: “Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions.” The Fall of Man was the first such transgression. Consider also the following which St. Paul wrote to Timothy:

But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust. (I Timothy 1:8-11)

If the Law was added because of transgressions, of which the Fall, which resulted in the expulsion from Eden was the first, and the law was not made for a righteous man, which Adam was prior to his transgression, but for the lawless and disobedient, i.e., men after the Fall, then man’s condition prior to the Fall in the Garden was not the “covenant of works” of the Westminster Confession.

Indeed, it is quite evident from the Genesis account alone that man’s original state was one of grace. It is an impoverished understanding of grace that thinks of it exclusively or even primarily as a merciful response to man’s sin. Grace, which we get from the Latin word gratia, the equivalent of the Greek Χάρις. These words had a similar range of meanings, from being the proper name of a class of pagan goddesses, usually three in number, to being the standard word used in giving thanks, which is why we speak of a prayer of thanksgiving prior to a meal as “saying grace.” All of its meanings, however, point back to its primary meaning of “favour”. When used of outward beauty, as we still use it when we speak of someone speaking or moving “gracefully” this had connotations both of beauty as a gift bestowed by divine favour, and that which is pleasing to the eye and so wins the favour of the beholder. The Graces were so-called because they were the goddesses of beauty and other related concepts. Thanksgiving, of course, is the proper and polite response to favour bestowed. When the Bible speaks of the grace of God it speaks of God’s favour, freely bestowed upon mankind, and it is a comprehensive term covering everything from the divine benevolence which motivates the bestowal of favour, the act of freely bestowing it, the favour itself, and everything which is freely given to show that favour, including both the Saviour of mankind, all that He did to accomplish our salvation, that salvation itself and the Holy Spirit Who was sent to indwell His Church and to perform the work of sanctification. Grace did not begin with man’s Fall. Man’s entire original state was one of grace. God poured His grace upon man by creating Him in the first place, for God did not owe us existence, by blessing him upon Creation and giving him dominion over the rest of creation (Gen. 1:28), and preparing the Garden of Eden for him and placing him in it (Gen. 2:8-15).

Note that the Genesis account mentions the Tree of Life as having been placed in the Garden of Eden before it mentions the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Gen. 2:9). No conditions are placed on eating of the Tree of Life, which man is only barred from – and only temporarily at that (Rev. 22:1-2) – after his fall into sin (Gen. 3:22-24). A single commandment is given – the prohibition from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:17) Commandments are not contrary to grace. Jesus, on the eve of His Crucifixion and the dawn of the New Covenant, in conversation at the same Passover seder in which He instituted the New Covenant Sacrament of the Eucharist, left His disciples a “new commandment.” The new commandment was similar to the two commandments that He had said summarized the Law, but with a difference. The new commandment was “That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” “As I have loved you” has a double meaning. It means both “in the same manner as”, i.e., self-sacrificially, and “because.” Christ’s self-sacrificial love for us is both the example we are to follow and the motivation given for following it. Under the Gospel of grace, our motivation for obeying God is not that of the Law – do this and live (Gal. 3:12) – but gratitude (a word derived from grace). Being under grace rather than Law does not mean being under no authority and having no obligation to obey God. It means that our being in God’s favour is in no way dependent upon our performance of these obligations but that that favour is freely bestowed. (2) Which is exactly the condition of man in the Garden prior to the Fall. Nowhere in Genesis 1-3 is life “promised to Adam…upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.” On the contrary, life was freely given to Adam, as was access to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. The prohibition on the other Tree came with a warning of death, but there is a huge difference between saying “you have A on condition that you do B” and “don’t do X or you will get Y.” The Puritans never understood this difference. This is why they preached the regulative rather than the normative principle of worship, i.e., that it should include only what is specifically commanded in Scripture rather than that it can include all that it is not specifically prohibited in Scripture. This is why they rebelled against their legitimate king in the name of “liberty” and proceeded to establish the grandparent of all totalitarian despotisms. This is why they saw Law rather than grace in the Garden of Eden and included this, ironically Pelagian, heresy in their famous Confession of Faith.

Should someone want to quibble that the Gospel properly refers to the Good News about divine favour restored by He who redeemed us from sin rather than the grace enjoyed by man in his innocence, look to Genesis 3:15. The promise of the Redeemer was given in the midst of the curse, even before the expulsion from Eden, long before God saw fit to hand down the Law to Moses at Mt. Sinai.

(1) The dispensationalists also ought to have known better. In many other respects they have the strongest grasp of the distinction between Law and Gospel/Grace of any group in Christendom except the Lutherans. Whatever else can be said, for or against, the teachings of C. I. Scofield, the distinctions in his “Law and Grace”, originally the sixth chapter of his booklet Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, (1896) later modified and included by R. A. Torrey and A. C. Dixon in The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, (1910-1915) are superbly worded. “Law shuts every mouth before God; grace opens every mouth to praise Him… Law never had a missionary; grace is to be preached to every creature. Law utterly condemns the best man; grace freely justifies the worst.”

(2) It also means that the commandments are light rather than burdensome. In the Garden of Eden there was only one commandment – it prohibited eating of one tree, all other trees in the Garden were allowed. While the Law, containing over 600 commandments, could be essentially reduced to the famous Ten, and these summed up in two, the commandment of the Gospel is, like that in the Garden of Eden, single. “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28-30)

The Heresies of the Westminster Confession of Faith

The Westminster Confession of Faith is the principle confession of faith for English Presbyterianism. It is also highly regarded by traditional English Baptists, whose own London Confession of Faith is merely a modified version of the Westminster Confession. (1) In this essay, I shall demonstrate that it deviates from orthodoxy in three significant ways – the canon of Scripture, the application of Scripture, and the very Gospel itself. The last of these is the most important deviation and the one on which I shall focus most attention. I have dealt with the first at greater length elsewhere. (2)

Before proceeding, I ought to lay all my cards on the table and acknowledge my own bias. The men who produced the Westminster Confession in 1646 were men of whom I have an extremely low opinion for historical and political reasons. The Westminster Assembly, from which the Confession takes its name, consisted of 121 Puritans who at the time were engaged in unlawful rebellion and sedition against their king, whom they eventually captured and murdered, justifying their wicked actions with their theology. Puritanism in power, was totalitarian and despotic, and fully earned its much-deserved reputation for legalistic Pharisaism, beauty-hating Philistinism, and general life-sucking, joy-killing, spiritual oppressiveness. Historically, Puritanism was the earliest form of English liberalism. (3) From a bad tree like Puritanism, bad fruit is exactly what I expect to find.

One last preliminary step before examining the Confession itself is to define the standard that I shall be applying to evaluate its errors. When I say that the Confession deviates from orthodoxy, I mean Protestant orthodoxy. Protestant orthodoxy includes small-c catholic orthodoxy. Small-c catholic orthodoxy consists of the basic Scriptural doctrines summed up by the early church in the Apostles’, Nicene-Constantinopolitan, and Athanasian Creeds. This form of orthodoxy is held by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and orthodox Protestant (Anglican, Lutheran, and continental Reformed) Churches, excluding, of course, the portions of these churches that have succumbed to theological liberalism. (4) Protestant orthodoxy also includes the basic truths of the Reformation – that orthodox doctrine is established by the authority of the Scriptures alone (5) and that salvation is a free gift given to mankind on the basis of grace alone, accomplished by Christ alone, and received by faith alone, for which God alone deserves the glory. The orthodox Protestant confessions include the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530), Smacald Articles (1537), and Formula of Concord (1577), and the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) and Belgic Confession (1561) of the continental Reformed Church. On two of the three points under consideration, the Westminster Confession departs from the consensus of these older, orthodox, confessions. On the remaining point it departs from a consensus between the Anglican and Lutheran confessions.

Heresy I: The Canon of Scriptures

The third paragraph of the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith reads:

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.


This was not the viewpoint of the Protestant Reformers, and it is not the position taken in the orthodox Anglican, Lutheran, and continental Reformed confessions. The books that are incorrectly dubbed the Apocrypha here, (6) are the books (7) and additional chapters to books (8) which appear the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that was supposed to have been produced for Ptolemy II in the 3rd Century BC, but not the Hebrew Masoretic Text. The Masoretic Text is what Rabbinic Judaism has, since some point subsequent to the destruction of the Second Temple, regarded as the canonical text of its Tanakh. The Septuagint is what is quoted as authoritative Scripture in the New Testament, what is quoted as the Old Testament in the earliest extra-Biblical writings of orthodox Christianity, and what was received by the Christian church as its Old Testament. The Protestant Reformers adopted what had been a minority viewpoint in the early church, (9) that the LXX books not found in the Masoretic Text should be regarded as “ecclesiastical books” appointed to be read in churches for instruction and edification but not “canonical books.” N.B. that the “canon” in “canonical books” as used in this context, does not refer to the list of books that belong in the Bible – which includes both the canonical and ecclesiastical books – but the use of the books as a “canon”, i.e., rule or standard, by which orthodox doctrine is established. The Reformers’ position was that the “ecclesiastical books” which were part of what the Christian church had received as its Old Testament Scriptures from the beginning, but whose equality with the “canonical books” was not incontrovertible, were not to be removed from the Scriptures, but were to be treated as a distinct category of books, that would be read liturgically, but could only be used to support doctrines established from the canonical books, never to establish doctrine. (10) Hence, orthodox Protestant Bibles like Lutheran’s German Bible and the Authorized Bible of 1611, include these books, but place them in a separate location between the Old and the New Testament. The Reformers’ position, while it was very much a minority position in the first 1500 years of church history, is still within the bounds of small-c catholic orthodoxy, since it does not remove books from the received Scriptures, and everything in the ecumenical Creeds can be firmly established from the canonical books without recourse to the ecclesiastical. The Westminster Confession’s position is not orthodox, and places those who penned it under the curse of Revelation 22:19.

Heresy II: The Application of Scripture and Christian Liberty

The first paragraph of the twenty-first chapter of the Westminster Confession reads:

The light of nature shows that there is a God, who has lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and does good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture.

This is what is known as the “regulative principle of worship” – that true worship of God should include nothing beyond what we are specifically commanded to do in the Scriptures. It is easy to overlook the heresy in this principle. The way it is formulated it sounds good and true – until we compare it to the opposite principle, the “normative principle of worship”, which states that Christian churches are permitted to worship in any way that is not specifically prohibited in the Scriptures. As Richard Hooker put it “Whatsoever Christ hath commanded for ever to be kept in his Church, the same we take not upon us to abrogate; and whatsoever our laws have thereunto added besides, of such quality we hope it is, as no lawe of Christ doth any where condemn.” (11) When this comparison is made it becomes abundantly clear what is lacking in the regulative principle – Christian liberty as taught by St. Paul in Romans 14, I Corinthians 10, the book of Galatians, and, indeed, practically every epistle he wrote. The doctrine of Christian liberty is the basis of the normative principle, which is also the consensus of the Anglican and Lutheran confessions. (12) The continental Reformed confessions are widely believed to dissent from this consensus. Article 32 of the Belgic Confession, for example, is generally regarded as a statement of the regulative principle. The principle is much more explicit in the Westminster Confession, however. When the Belgic Confession declares that churches “ought always to guard against deviating from what Christ, our only Master,has ordained for us” and goes on to say “Therefore we reject all human innovations and all laws imposed on us, in our worship of God, which bind and force our consciences in any way. So we accept only what is proper to maintain harmony and unity and to keep all in obedience to God” this is not as out of harmony with the Anglican and Lutheran position as the Westminister Confession’s “He may not be worshipped…any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture.”


Heresy III: The Gospel


The eighteenth chapter of the Westminster Confession is entitled “Of Assurance of Grace and Salvation.” It consists of four paragraphs. The first of these observes that while unregenerate hypocrites may have “false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favour of God, and estate of salvation”, nevertheless true believers “may, in this life, be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace, and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed.” That this is true is clearly stated in the Scriptures (1 John 5:13). It is a Scriptural truth that had long been buried under legalistic late Medieval theology and the recovery of this truth lay at the heart of the much needed Reformation of the sixteenth century. However, in the second and third paragraphs the Westminster Confession retreats from the Scriptural truths of the Reformation and indeed from the Gospel itself: The second paragraph reads:

This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope; but an infallible assurance of faith founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God, which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.

The third paragraph begins by saying:

This infallible assurance does not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties, before he be partaker of it: yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto.

If the second paragraph had ended with the words “the divine truth of the promises of salvation” it would have been perfectly sound. It did not end there, however, and by making the “inward evidence” part of the foundation of assurance in addition to the truth of God’s promises, hopelessly confuses the objective basis of assurance with its subjective experience. Consequently, the Confession proceeds to separate assurance from faith, in direct contradiction to Scripture (Hebrews 11:1), the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther, John Calvin, the sixteenth century English Reformers, as well as all of the Lutheran Confessions, the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. (13)

The Reformers knew that a true and infallible assurance of salvation could only be built upon ground that is firm, solid and unmovable and must therefore be founded upon the Gospel promises of salvation alone. The believer is not to look inward at his own faith, feelings, works, life, and experience, all of which vary, for evidence of his salvation, but to look outward through his faith to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to find his assurance there. His subjective experience of this assurance is his faith in the promises of the Gospel, that is to say his taking those promises to himself as being true on the grounds of the infallible reliability of the God Who made them. It is not a feeling, an emotional experience, or a conclusion to be arrived at through self-examination and reasoning. It is taking God at His Word, i.e., faith. This is what the Reformers meant when they said that assurance is the essence of saving faith. It did not mean that the believer’s experience of assurance could never be clouded by doubt, but that the only sound way to dispel those clouds is by looking outward at Jesus Christ, as He is presented to us in the Gospel, and never inwardly at ourselves. The inner witness of the Holy Spirit is not a ministry of providing additional, internal evidence of our salvation but of establishing, strengthening, and supporting our faith in Jesus Christ through the means of the Gospel.

By retreating from this doctrine, the Westminster Confession retreated from the Gospel itself. The New Testament Gospel, properly understood, is exactly what its name in both English and Greek suggests. (14) It is not a set of instructions or commandments that we follow in order to save ourselves. It is God’s good news or glad tidings to a world of men and women lost in their sins and trespasses about how He has given them a Saviour Who has done everything necessary to save them. It is all about Jesus, (15) Who He is - the Christ, the Son of the Living God (John 20:31), and what He has done - died for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day (1 Corinthians 15:1-8). In the Gospel, justification (being proclaimed righteous in the court of divine justice) and everlasting life are proclaimed to be gifts, given in Christ freely to everyone who believes in Him (Jn.3:14-18 4:7-26, 5:24, 6:27, 29, 35-40; Rom 3:24-26, 4:3-5, 6:23; Eph. 2:8-9). The Gospel presents a triumphant Saviour, Who has accomplished a finished salvation, that is sure and certain, to the sinners whom it invites to trust that Saviour. It is a perversion of that Gospel to tell people that they must look partly to Christ, and partly to something in themselves, in order to find peace and hope. (16)

Conclusion

In the first two of the heresies we have looked at, Puritanism’s Westminster Confession took the teachings of the sixteenth century Reformers, that the ecclesiastical books from the LXX should not be appealed to in order to establish doctrine and that doctrine was to be established on the authority of Scripture alone, to extremes that were much further than the sixteenth century Magisterial Reformers were willing to go, by removing the ecclesiastical books from the Bible altogether, and compromising Christian liberty by insisting that everything be removed from Christian worship as popish, man-made inventions, that was not specifically authorized by Scripture even if it was not forbidden in Scripture either. In the third of the heresies, the Puritan Confession stepped backward from the Reformation into the darkness of legalistic uncertainty against which Luther and Calvin had protested.

(1) The Second London Confession of 1689, that is, that replaced the London Confession of 1644 which predated the Westminster Confession by two years. The Congregationalists had modified the Westminster Confession to incorporate their views of church government in the Savoy Declaration (1658), the Second London Confession modified it further to incorporate the Baptist view of baptism. In North America, the Philadelphia Confession of Faith of 1742 was a reissue of the Second London Confession, with two new articles, and thus also a slightly revised version of the Westminster Confession.

(2) In the essay “What Books Make Up the Bible?”: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2018/03/what-books-make-up-bible.html

(3) After the English Civil War, the murder of King Charles I, the interregnum and the despotic dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, and the Restoration of the monarchy and Church of England, the Puritan side in these conflicts developed into the Whig party in Parliament, the first liberal party, whereas the Royalists became the Tories.

(4) For the last thousand years, of course, the Eastern churches have disagreed that the Western churches hold to this kind of orthodoxy, and vice-versa, each regarding the other as being in excommunicable heresy. The disagreement is over a difference between the Greek and Latin texts of the second Creed. It does not pertain to any of the matters we will be looking at here however.

(5) This is the true meaning of sola Scriptura – “by Scripture alone.” The idea that Scriptures can and should be interpreted privately without regard to the Creeds, the ecumenical Councils, and the teachings of the Fathers and Doctors of the church, is more properly called “solo Scriptura”. The former is the doctrine of orthodox Protestants, the latter of radical Protestant extremists.

(6) The term Apocrypha dates back to the early church, and the Westminster Confession’s statement would be correct if it were referring to the same books the Church Fathers were talking about. The Church Fathers, however, used the term to refer to a completely different class of writings.

(7) Tobit, Judith, I and II Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and the books that are called III and IV Esdras in Bibles in which Ezra and Nehemiah are titled I and II Esdras, and I and II Esdras in the Bibles that use the titles Ezra and Nehemiah.

(8) The Song of the Three Children, the story of Susannah and the Elders and the story of Bel and the Dragon, from the Book of Daniel, additional chapters to the Book of Esther, the Prayer of Manasseh which is appended sometimes to II Chronicles and sometimes to the Psalms in ancient manuscripts, Baruch which was considered part of the Book of Jeremiah in the first few centuries of the Church but was later treated as a separate book, and the Epistle of Jeremiah.

(9) As discussed in my previous essay, referenced above in footnote 2, this was originally a regional viewpoint in Alexandria, Egypt, of which St. Athanasius was the most orthodox voice, but which later found limited support outside Alexandria in St. Jerome, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, and Rufinus of Aquileia.

(10) Note the very different tone of Article 6 of the Belgic Confession. “The church may certainly read these books and learn from them as far as they agree with the canonical books” is not of the same spirit as “therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.”

(11) Richard Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Book III, xi, 13.

(12) Article XX of the Thirty-Nine Articles and Article XV of the Augsburg Confession.

(13) Article IV of Luther’s Augsburg Confession reads “Also they [the “our churches” mentioned in Article I - GTN] teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ's sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ's sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight.” Philip Melanchthon, commenting on this Article in his Defense of the Augsburg Confession, wrote: “But that faith which justifies is not merely a knowledge of history, [not merely this, that I know the stories of Christ's birth, suffering, etc. (that even the devils know,)] but it is to assent to the promise of God, in which, for Christ's sake, the remission of sins and justification are freely offered. [It is the certainty or the certain trust in the heart, when, with my whole heart, I regard the promises of God as certain and true, through which there are offered me, without my merit, the forgiveness of sins, grace, and all salvation, through Christ the Mediator.]” (brackets and parentheses are part of the translation) Similarly, in the Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord we read: “This faith is a gift of God, by which we truly learn to know Christ, our Redeemer, in the Word of the Gospel, and trust in Him, that for the sake of His obedience alone we have the forgiveness of sins by grace, are regarded as godly and righteous by God the father, and are eternally saved.” (III.x) The Lutheran tradition never departed Luther’s teachings on this in the way that Puritanism and the Westminster Confession departed from Calvin’s. Therefore we find the same equation of faith and assurance in C. F. W. Walther’s The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1928), Francis Pieper’s 4 volume Christliche Dogmatik, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1917-1924), John Theodore Mueller’s 1 volume Christian Dogmatics, an epitome of Pieper’s work published in English by the same publisher in 1934, and Robert D. Preuss’s Getting into the Theology of Concord (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1977). That John Calvin agreed with the Lutheran position is attested in numerous places in his own writings. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, he famously wrote “In one word, he only is a true believer who, firmly persuaded that God is reconciled, and is a kind Father to him, hopes everything from his kindness, who, trusting to the promises of the divine favor, with undoubting confidence anticipates salvation” (III.ii.16) Similarly, in his Commentary on 2 Corinthians, he writes “In the second place, it serves to prove the assurance of faith, as to which the Sorbonnic sophists have made us stagger, nay more, have altogether rooted out from the minds of men. They charge with rashness all that are persuaded that they are the members of Christ, and have Him remaining in them, for they bid us be satisfied with a “moral conjecture,” as they call it — that is, with a mere opinion so that our consciences remain constantly in suspense, and in a state of perplexity. But what does Paul say here? He declares, that all are reprobates, who doubt whether they profess Christ and are a part of His body. Let us, therefore, reckon that alone to be right faith, which leads us to repose in safety in the favor of God, with no wavering opinion, but with a firm and steadfast assurance.” Amusingly, it is in his remarks on 2 Corinthians 13:5 that this is found. This verse was and is a favorite proof-text of the Westminster Puritans and the vast majority of theologians who would identify as “Calvinist” for the idea that believers need to be constantly examining themselves for evidence of their salvation. Calvin himself, understood correctly, that in this verse St. Paul was calling on his readers, not to look for evidence of their salvation in themselves, but to look to their own saving faith as evidence of the work of God in his, that is to say, St. Paul’s, ministry. The idea that we must look to ourselves for evidence of our own salvation was condemned by Calvin, who, in arguing against “semi-Papists” who taught that we must ever alternate between hope and fear, as we alternately look at Christ and ourselves, insisted that “If you look to yourself damnation is certain” and that we ought only to consider ourselves in our union with Christ. (Institutes, III.ii.24) In another famous passage from his Institutes he declared “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election.” (III.xxiv.5) The Heidelberg Catechism is in full agreement with Luther and Calvin. Its answer to Question 21, “What is true faith?” is: “True faith is not only a sure knowledge by which I hold as true all that God has revealed to us in Scripture; it is also a wholehearted trust, which the Holy Spirit creates in me by the gospel, that God has freely granted, not only to others but to me also, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation. These are gifts of sheer grace, granted solely by Christ’s merit.” Nor is there any departure from this doctrine in the Belgic Confession. The Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-19) however, depart from the consensus of Lutheran and early Calvinist orthodoxy in the same way the Westminster Confession does. For an excellent discussion of how this deviation from Reformational orthodoxy took place see R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). For a presentation and defense of the original Reformation doctrine against the Puritan heresy written from a Calvinist viewpoint see Prof. David J. Engelsma, The Gift of Assurance, (South Holland, Illinois: Evangelism Committee of the Protestant Reformed Church, 2009). Engelsma aptly condemns the Puritan heresy in the following words: “The Puritan doctrine of assurance is a form of salvation by works. A doctrine of works is necessarily also a doctrine of doubt.” (p. 12)

(14) Gospel is a contraction of the Old English “godspel”, formed from adding good (originally spelled with one long o) to spel, which meant story, message, or tidings. The Greek εὐαγγέλιον is formed the same way and with the same meaning.

(15) When John the Baptist and Jesus Himself preached a message they called a Gospel the content of that message was “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”. This version of the Gospel was addressed to national Israel and meant that the Kingdom of God promised in the Old Testament prophets had finally arrived. This too, was all about Jesus because it was in the Person of Jesus, as Christ the King, that the Kingdom of Heaven was present.

(16) In Westminster Puritanism the “decisionism” that pervades contemporary evangelicalism has its genesis. While the immediate ancestor of evangelical decisionism is the nineteenth century American evangelist Charles Finney, whose teachings the Puritans would have – rightly – regarded as hopelessly tainted with Pelagianism, Puritanism itself took the first step in transforming saving faith from the receptive response to the Gospel of simple belief or trust into an act of the will. Hence their departure from the Reformers on the matter of assurance. In Puritan doctrine, saving faith was not distinguished from other faith merely by its object, Jesus Christ as presented in the Gospel. It also differed from ordinary belief, according to the Puritans, by including the element of repentance, which they defined as the sinner’s decision to abandon his sinful ways and to obey God’s commandments. This was a compound error. It confused both repentance and faith with their results, and reverses the Reformers’ teaching about repentance and faith, namely that it was the presence of faith that made the difference between saving and non-saving repentance rather than the other way around. In Luther’s theology, repentance could refer either to contrition, which was not necessarily saving, or the entirety of conversion which included both contrition and faith in Jesus Christ. Apart from faith in the Gospel, contrition could not save. Furthermore, contrition was not an act of the will. It was the realization that one’s sins had earned for one’s self the just condemnation of God and was itself a product of believing God, in this case believing what He says in the Law. The Law, properly used, was an instrument of grace, preparing men for the reception of the Gospel, by destroying their confidence in their own goodness and revealing to them their hopeless lost estate of sinfulness and therefore their need for the salvation proclaimed in the Gospel. Contrition, by itself, was a repentance that could not save, because salvation is proclaimed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and received by faith in that Gospel, not by faith in the Law. It was the addition of faith in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Gospel, that turned contrition into saving repentance, i.e., conversion. The hymn writer, John Newton, described the way God’s grace works through the Law and Gospel to produce conversion in the famous words “’twas grace that taught my heart to fear [contrition produced by the Law], and grace my fear relieved [faith produced by the Gospel].” Conversion, with its two elements of contrition and faith, was not a term limited to the initial reception of salvation, as it usually is in contemporary evangelicalism, but referred to the ongoing ministry of the Law and Gospel in the hearts of believers throughout their lives, and the moving of the will to abandon sin and obey God’s commandments was not part of conversion, but its outcome. If the Gospel promises do not speak to the impenitent, as the Reformers taught, this was not because the decision to change one’s ways was either a co-condition with belief of receiving salvation or a part of saving faith, but because impenitence, the stubborn refusal to consider changing ones ways, comes from self-satisfaction, the considering of self to be good enough and not needing change, which attitude contradicts the message of both the Law and the Gospel. Such self-satisfaction and confidence in one’s own goodness had to be broken down in the heart before faith in the Gospel could form there. The Reformers warned, however, against the danger of placing faith in our own contrition that ought to be placed in Christ alone. See Dr. Martin Luther, Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, (1520), in particular the section on the Sacrament of Penance. Note especially “Beware, then, of putting your trust, in your own contrition and of ascribing the forgiveness of sins to your own sorrow. God does not have respect to you because of that, but because of the faith by which you have believed His threatenings and promises, and which wrought such sorrow within you. Thus we owe whatever of good there may be in our penance, not to our scrupulous enumeration of sins, but to the truth of God and to our faith. All other things are the works and fruits of this, which follow of their own accord, and do not make a man good, but are done by a man already made good through faith in the truth of God” (4:9) See also Preuss’s excellent summary of this subject in Chapter XII, “The Work of The Law and Gospel: Repentance”, pages 62-63 of Getting Into the Formula of Concord.

What Books Make Up the Bible?

The twenty-second chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew records events that took place in the final week of Jesus’ earthly ministry, after He had openly presented Himself to Israel as their Messiah on the first Palm Sunday, as recorded in chapter twenty-one, and before the Last Supper, in which He partook of the Passover Seder of the Old Covenant with His disciples for the last time and instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist of the New Covenant on the evening of His betrayal, arrest, and trial, as recorded in chapter twenty-six. During that last week, Jesus taught in the Temple and His enemies came to Him posing trick questions in vain attempts to trip Him up. Three such occurrences are recorded in the chapter we are considering, the first and third by the Pharisees and the second by the Sadducees. After the final question – the one about which commandment is the greatest – Jesus turned the tables on His interrogators and asked them a question which they could not answer after which, the Apostle records “neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions.”

The question from the Sadducees and Jesus’ response is particularly interesting. The Sadducees, whom the Apostle reminds us did not believe in the resurrection from the dead, asked Him:

Master, Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother. Now there were with us seven brethren: and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother: Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh. And last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her. (vv. 24-28)

Jesus answer is to say:

Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. (vv. 29-32)

There are two parts to His answer, the first part which addresses the question posed to Him, and the second which addresses the Sadducee’s heretical doctrine. The first part of the answer raises the question of what exactly Jesus meant when He said that they did not know the Scriptures. It cannot be referring to their rejection of the resurrection as it precedes the περὶ δὲ (“but concerning”) at the beginning of verse 31 with which Jesus turns to this matter. It seems at first glance, therefore, like Jesus is saying that what He goes on to explain about the nature of the resurrection state is explicitly found in the Old Testament Scriptures. If, however, this is what He meant, where are those Old Testament Scriptures that say that in the resurrection “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven”?

The answer, of course, is that nowhere in the Old Testament does it say any such thing about the state of the resurrected. Jesus own words are the first revelation we have on this subject. What then was He talking about when He said that they did not know the Scriptures?

Sadly, few evangelicals will know the answer. This is because most of them have never read the book to which the Sadducees were alluding when they posed their question to Jesus. No, they did not just make it up to suit their purposes. The story of the woman who had seven husbands comes from the Book of Tobit, which is set in Ninevah, after the Assyrians had conquered the Northern Kingdom in 720 BC. The book concludes with the destruction of Ninevah in 612 BC, as prophesied in the book of Nahum, but this takes place long after the main narrative has concluded. The title character is a faithful Israelite of the tribe of Naphtali who, like Antigone in Sophocles’ play, gets in trouble with the civil authorities for performing burials that they have forbidden. Blinded by birds after sleeping in the street one night, he sends his son Tobias to a man in Media to collect money the latter owes him. Raphael, “one of the seven holy Angels, which present the prayers of the Saints, and which go in and out before the glory of the Holy one” (11:15) accompanies Tobias and helps him both to accomplish his task, to heal his father’s blindness, and to marry Sara, daughter of their kinsman Raguel. Sara has previously been given in marriage to seven men, but each had been killed on the wedding night by Asmodeus, demon of lust, before the marriage could be consummated. Raphael shows Tobias how to drive the demon away, and so to safely marry Sara.

The Sadducees, in alluding to this story, add the detail that the seven husbands were brothers acting in accordance to the Levirate instructions in Deuteronomy 25, which, although it can be reasonably inferred is not present in Tobit, and, more importantly leave out the more important detail that she was given in marriage an eight time, and this time the marriage was completed. Of these, only the eighth, Tobias, was ever truly her husband in the fullest sense of the term. Thus, “not knowing the scriptures”, they presented a mangled and distorted version of the story. Note that the reason the Sadducees did not know this book very well is the same reason that they did not believe in either the resurrection or angels. They accepted only the Torah (the Pentateuch, the first five books) as canon.

Many Calvinists today deny that this passage in the Gospel of Matthew – which is also found in Luke and Mark – alludes to the Book of Tobit, but in support of this denial, they can only point to the differences between the Tobit account of the woman with seven husbands and the Sadducees version when, as we have seen, these differences are precisely what Jesus was calling attention to in rebuking them for not knowing the Scriptures. The real problem Calvinists have with seeing the allusion to Tobit here is that they, like the Sadducees, do not regard the book of Tobit as Scripture. In this they disagree with the vast majority of Christians throughout history and, if the text does indeed allude to Tobit, with the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

The book of Tobit belongs to those books which in Martin Luther’s German Bible of 1534 and in the Authorized English Version of 1611 were printed in a separate section between the Old and New Testament and dubbed, “The Apocrypha”. This is a misnomer, as the books which can be found in these sections are not the Gnostic, heretical, and pseudepigraphal writings to which the early church first applied this term. In the Bibles of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches as well as the ancient Churches of the Near East these are found within the Old Testament itself. They are not printed at all in most bibles that evangelicals use, such as the popular New International Version. It is a widespread notion among evangelicals that the Bible consists of sixty-six books and that the books contained in the so-called “Apocryhpa” were added by the Roman Catholics at the Council of Trent. This is a distortion of history, and it does not represent the viewpoint of the Protestant Reformers.

When Martin Luther moved these books, in his translation of the Bible, from the Old Testament into the “Apocrypha”, he defined “Apocrypha” as meaning “books which are not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.” This does not mean that he considered them as being down on the level of his own writings, or even those of the Church Fathers. It meant that he considered them unequal to the books which he left in the Old and New Testaments, but still worthy of being set higher than all other Christian literature by being printed in the Bible itself. This was the same position taken by the Church of England in the Sixth of its Thirty-Nine Articles, which is why the Book of Common Prayer includes readings from them in its lectionary (the readings for the weeks of the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, the Twenty-Third through Twenty-Sixth Sundays after Trinity, and the Last Sunday before Advent) and why it was included in King James’ Authorized Bible in the same position as in Luther’s Bible. Although the evangelical/fundamentalist idea that these books don’t belong in the Bible at all and perhaps should be avoided as being “popish” came, as we shall see, out of the Calvinist tradition, it does not represent John Calvin’s own views. Calvin, on this as on many other matters, was much closer to Martin Luther and the English Reformers than he was to those who would call themselves “Calvinists.”

Those who argue for the “Calvinist” position on the canon – that I and II Esdras (III and IV Esdras in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles which count Ezra and Nehemiah as I and II Esdras), Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, the Prayer of Manasseh, I and II Maccabees, and the LXX versions of Esther, Jeremiah (including Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah), Daniel (including the Song of the Three Children, Susanna and the Elders, and Bel and the Dragon) – are no part of the Bible and should be regarded with suspicion as popish additions will often maintain that neither Jesus nor His Apostles cited these books in the New Testament and that the earliest non-canonical Christian writings did not do so either. Neither of these claim is true.

The allusion to Sara and her seven husbands in Matthew 24 is not the only reference to Tobit in the New Testament. The Book of Revelation reads like a written tapestry in which threads of imagery are plucked from throughout the Old Testament and woven together. In the eights chapter St. John writes that “I saw the seven Angels which stand before God, and to them were given seven trumpets. And another Angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer, and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all Saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne.” (vv. 2-3). The seven angels who stand before God and offer up the prayers of the saints comes from the fifteenth verse of the eleventh chapter of Tobit (quoted above). John Calvin saw a reference to the fourth chapter of Baruch in the tenth chapter of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians where both speak of sacrifices to idols as being made to devils. Later in the same epistle, his reasoning in the verse which speaks of those “who are baptized for the dead” is identical to that used in II Maccabees 12:43-45 to explain Judas Maccabeus’ actions in sending two thousand drachmas of silver to Jerusalem to offer a sin offering on behalf of his slain comrades. Indeed, there are multiple references to the Maccabees throughout the New Testament. In the Olivet Discourse Jesus references the book of Daniel when He speaks about the “Abomination of Desolation” but it would be difficult, if not impossible, for “whoso readeth” to “understand” what Daniel was talking about without the illumination provided by the books of Maccabees. In the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel Jesus goes to Jerusalem to participate in a festival established, not in the Torah, but in the Maccabees. The author of Hebrews includes a reference to II Maccabees chapter seven in his list of heroes of faith in chapter 11 (verse 35).

Calvinist theologian Wayne Grudem, citing F. F. Bruce and Roger Beckwith as authorities, states that “In fact, the earliest Christian evidence is decidedly against viewing the Apocrypha as Scripture, but the use of the Apocrypha gradually increased in some parts of the church until the time of the Reformation.” (1) John Piper makes similar statements. This is utterly fantastical nonsense, however. Apart from the New Testament itself, of which vide supra, you do not find earlier “Christian evidence” that St. Clement of Rome’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, The Epistle of Barnabas, (2) the Didache, and St. Polycarp of Smyrna’s Epistle to the Philippians. In these Wisdom, Sirach, and Tobit are all cited authoritatively like any other Scripture.

The fact of the matter is that the books that in Luther’s Bible and the KJV are called “The Apocrypha” were part of the Septuagint or LXX. This was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that was said to have had been made by seventy-two Jewish scholars for the Macedonian King of Egypt, Ptolemy II, who wanted copies of all the world’s books of wisdom for the library in Alexandria. (3) According to legend each was required to translate the whole of the Hebrew sacred writings independently of the others and miraculously they all agreed. Whatever truth there may or may not be to that story, it was the LXX and not the Hebrew Masoretic Text that became the Old Testament of the early Church. The books that were in the LXX, but not the Masoretic Text, were accepted as Scriptures – not without dissent, but by a broad consensus – by the Christian Church, from its earliest days, and long before the Council of Trent. N.B. they are included in the canons of the Eastern Churches that broke with Rome in 1056 AD, a good five hundred years before the Council of Trent, and by the Near Eastern Churches that broke with the Greek and Latin Churches almost five hundred years before that.

The dissenting voices to the broad consensus wherewith the LXX, including the books not found in the Masoretic Text, was accepted as Old Testament Scriptures represent a minority, regional, tradition. It was primarily followers of Origen of Alexandria, such as Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea, who argued against the LXX. This was a school of thought that, while highly regarded for its scholarship was not known for its orthodoxy. Origen, notoriously, fell into a sort of proto-Arianism of which Eusebius was also later accused. On the other hand, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, the champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy and Eusebius’ chief opponent, also took Origen’s position on the Old Testament canon, arguing that the canon should be limited to the books of the Masoretic Text, minus the book of Esther, but that a second category of “ecclesiastical books” needed to be recognized, consisting of writings approved by the Fathers for edification and instruction. In this category he placed Esther, the LXX books, and certain early non-canonical Christian writings like the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas. (4) St. Jerome was of the same opinion, although he included the LXX books in his Latin translation of the Old Testament. Apart from St. Athanasius and St. Jerome, there were very few others among the unquestionably orthodox Fathers who did not fully accept the canonicity of the LXX.

In arguing against the canonicity of the books found in the LXX but not the Masoretic Text these men used the lack of Hebrew originals and the fact that the Jews did not accept the books in their own canon as reasons for excluding them from the Christian canon. The first of these reasons is partially out-of-date as Hebrew copies of some of these books have since been discovered – portions of Sirach and Tobit in Hebrew, for example, were discovered among the scrolls in the caves of Qumran in the twentieth century. The second reason is not a valid reason for excluding these books from the Christian canon. No matter how it is parsed, what it is ultimately reduces to is the idea that a religion that rejects Jesus Christ as the Messiah is a more trustworthy authority as to what books belong in the Bible than the broad consensus of the Christian Church from the earliest days. (5)

Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the English Reformers, while they accepted the arguments of Sts. Athanasius and Jerome, did not remove the “ecclesiastical books” from the Bible altogether, but rather set them apart, between the Testaments, in a section that they unfortunately and inaccurately dubbed “The Apocrypha.” The position of these Reformers was that of the Church of England in its Thirty-Nine Articles declared of these books “And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.” (6) Note that this is identical to the distinction Martin Luther drew between the literal interpretation of the Scriptures and the other three interpretations of the traditional quadriga (allegorical, moral, and anagogical). The latter interpretations are only to be considered valid if established elsewhere in the Scriptures literally, and doctrines can be supported from the deuterocanonical books if established in the protocanonical books. Luther frequently quoted the deuterocanonical books in this way and while Calvin was less liberal in his use of the deuterocanonical writings, he did often appeal to Baruch and the Wisdom of Solomon.

So why do evangelicals dissent, not only from the vast majority of Christian Churches (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and ancient Near Eastern Churches all accepting the full canonicity of the “ecclesiastical” or “deuterocanonical” books) but the Protestant Reformers (who kept the books in the Bible, as in Luther’s translation and the KJV, but in a subordinate position, appealed to for instruction, edification, and support, but not establishment of doctrine), and take the unhistorical position that these are “popish” books, added by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent?

Today’s evangelicals are basically liberal fundamentalists, that is to say individuals who have a mostly fundamentalist theology with considerably less rigidness and strictness – often on things that they ought to be rigid and strict about. Fundamentalism was a late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century movement, based primarily in North America, and descended theologically from the Puritanism of the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, in England and her North American colonies. Puritanism was the radicalized form of Calvinism, brought back to England from Switzerland after the reign of Bloody Mary. In addition to being the ancestor of fundamentalism and through fundamentalism modern evangelicalism it was also the ancestor of political liberalism (of which the “conservative” republicanism of the country to our south is a variety).

The Puritans were religious and political extremists. By contrast with Luther and the English Reformers, who reformed Church practices in accordance with the Normative Principle (established church customs that are not forbidden in the Scriptures are allowed to be retained) they followed Calvin’s Regulative Principle (whatever is not authorized by the Scriptures is forbidden) and took this much further than Calvin himself. This principle is enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter XXI, paragraph 1) (7), which is the first Confession to go further than the Reformers on the deuterocanonical writings and take the hard position that “The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings” (Chapter I, paragraph 3). The men who wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith were rebels, revolutionaries, seditionists, and terrorists, waging war against their king and the established Church, who three years after writing their Confession, illegally put their king to death, and established the tyrannical junta that would be the prototype of subsequent, secular, totalitarian states such as the first French Republic, and those of the Communists and Nazis. In placing the LXX books outside the Bible altogether, as the earlier Reformers were careful not to do, not wanting to be guilty of subtracting from the Scriptures, they chose to believe that the religion that rejects Jesus Christ as Messiah is right about the Old Testament canon and that the broad consensus among those who have confessed Jesus Christ is wrong, and were guilty of countless other counts of Judaizing as well. (8)

Today’s evangelicals would do well to reject this heritage, and return to that of the earlier, saner, evangelicalism of Luther and the English Reformers.


(1) Wayne A. Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994)
(2) Not to be confused with the heretical Gospel of Barnabas.
(3) The title of the translation refers to the number of translators, rounded down to the nearest ten.
(4) St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Epistle for 367 AD.
(5) This argument against the exclusion of these books from the Christian canon is all the stronger if, as has long been believed, Judaism did not come to a decisive decision as to its own canon until after the destruction of the Second Temple. The theory, based upon a passage in the Mishnah portion of the Talmud, that this took place at a Council held in Yahvneh or Jamnia in the late first century AD, has gone out of vogue among scholars, but the evidence does suggest that until the destruction of the Second Temple (70 AD) necessitated the translation of Jewish identity out of the terms of the nation Israel and into those of the religion Judaism, there was no consensus among the sects of the first century Jews as to the canon of their Scriptures. As noted in the text of this essay, the sect of the Sadducees had an extremely limited canon, and while the sect of the Pharisees may very well have accepted a canon closer to that of present day Judaism, the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus speaks of twenty-two books that were divinely inspired and authoritative (the canon of the Tanakh currently recognized by Judaism contains twenty-four books, Ezra and Nehemiah being considered one book, as are the twelve minor prophets), other Jewish groups, such as the one in Alexandria to which the philosopher Philo belonged, used the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide evidence that Hebrew originals of the LXX books not found in the Masoretic Text were used by the Essenes, and, ironically, all branches of Judaism continue to celebrate as a major festival each year, Hanukkah, which was established in the Maccabean books.
(6) For a fuller look at the original Protestant position on the canon see D. H. Graham’s article “The Protestant Bible: A Touchstone of Orthodoxy,” which can be found in Anglican Tradition, Volume I, (2012-2015), pp.25-52.
(7) Ironically the chapter previous to this is the one on “Christian Liberty, and Liberty of Conscience.”
(8) See Eliane Glazer, Judaism Without Jews: Philosemitism and Christian Polemic in Early Modern England, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 30-63 and Norman Podhoretz, Why are the Jews Liberal?, (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp, 73-80.