Scripture: Canon and Sole Authority for Evangelicals We begin with the Evangelical understanding of Scripture. Three questions come to mind: (1) What is the role and purpose of Scripture for Evangelicals? (2) What are the Scriptures that constitute the authoritative canon? (3) How are the Scriptures to be interpreted and why is only Scripture and Scripture alone viewed as authoritative for Evangelicals?
Scripture Scripture is God’s written revelation of himself.17 It is a divine Trinitarian pattern of revelation from God the Father centered in Jesus Christ through the agency of the Holy Spirit which ensures that everything God has revealed in Scripture is without error and profitable to our salvation.18 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” John tells us. That word, “became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:1, 14) in the person of Jesus Christ, the God-man.19 Jesus Christ is properly the Word of God and all Scripture speaks to and about him. God the Father and his will for us would be unknown to us and the world unless he had revealed himself through his Son, Jesus Christ. No one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals him (Mt 11:27). This revelation occurs through the promised Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who proceeds from the Father through the Son to testify about Jesus (Jn 15:26). This Trinitarian pattern of revelation was provided to Jesus’s disciples who would also testify about him, Jesus said, since they had been with him from the beginning (Jn 15:27). Thus, revelation did not stop with the death of Jesus; it continued under the apostles through the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit as they proclaimed Jesus and his saving gospel and recorded this proclamation, writing it down for our benefit, even as the prophets of old did in the Old Testament. The apostles and prophets did not write down everything they preached or witnessed, but what they did write was “written so that [we] may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing [we] may have life in his name” (Jn 20:31). Thus, Scripture is God’s revelation of himself, centered in Christ, provided for us through the agency of the Holy Spirit in order that we might believe and have life in and through Christ Jesus. While John refers to many other things that Jesus did that were not recorded (Jn 20:30), and Paul refers to tradition himself when speaking of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:23) or the resurrection (1 Cor 15:3), it is precisely the fact that both he and John then recorded what they had received from the Lord that provides us with a written record of the Lord’s words that are also recorded in writing by the other apostles in the Gospels. In 1 Corinthian 15:3–4, in fact, Paul appeals to the written Scriptures as the authority for what he had received when he writes, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” [emphasis added]. This phrase in accordance with the Scripture was included later verbatim in the Nicene Creed as a testimony to the written record of Christ’s resurrection that had been prophesied in the Old Testament in order to guarantee the facConcordia Journal/Winter 2016
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