Year: 2013 (Page 4 of 14)

Are Conversions to Orthodoxy Tragic? A Response to Leithart

October 11, 2013 / Robert Arakaki / 7 Comments

Folks, Today’s posting contains Gabe Martini’s excellent response to Peter Leithart. I will be uploading my response to Rev. Leithart shortly. Robert

Are conversions to Orthodoxy tragic?

This is a continuing notion from Leithart and other, similar Protestants, who have adopted certain aspects of the Catholic tradition while refusing to adopt the fullness of the Body of Christ. This it not to say (at all) that Dr. Leithart is not a Christian, but that his approach to Christianity remains bodiless—an adoption of ideas and theories, but not the living and Spirit-filled community that has embodied such ideas and theories.

Are Conversions to Orthodoxy Tragic?

In his latest post at First Things, Leithart laments about “cross-Christian conversions,” naming them “tragic.”

Leithart does not deem these tragic necessarily because they are to the detriment of the convert themselves, but because the “logic behind some conversions” is flawed. According to Leithart, the quest for “the true church” is such flawed logic, and the “assumptions” behind such a movement are nothing short of “un-Christian.”

These are bold claims, especially from those who repackage Patristic theology for an audience under-exposed to both Patristics and the Catholic tradition. But, I digress. The real point of responding to this assertion of “tragedy” is that it misses the mark in a number of important ways.

First, Leithart claims that seeking out the true church is un-Christian. He explains:

Apart from all the detailed historical arguments, this quest makes an assumption about the nature of time, an assumption that I have labeled “tragic.” It’s the assumption that the old is always purer and better, and that if we want to regain life and health we need to go back to the beginning.

While many apologetics of Orthodoxy (and Rome) are centered around returning to the “original Church,” this is not a linear movement. Holy Tradition is not “older is better,” and our Tradition is not a lifeless stack of books, but the continuing life and work of both Christ and the Holy Spirit in Christ’s one, holy Body.

In fact, there is nothing more Deistic or backwards-facing than classical Protestantism, with sola scriptura and the perspicuity and self-sufficiency of the (Protestant canon of the) Bible. Sola scriptura claims that God—through his prophets and apostles—has left us a set of books by which one is to both understand and determine everything regarding faith and life. But the way to interpret this set of books was not included, and no interpretation is without subjectivity, nor is it the result of osmosis.

As a result, hundreds of denominations or new, individual church movements are started every year. Despite the claims to perspicuity, no two people within Protestantism agree on the right interpretation of any given sets of verses, and this even within their own, segregated, confessional communions. Leithart understands this very well, himself having been put under scrutiny by his own presbytery on a number of occasions, with each side talking past the other regarding the proper interpretation of both the Bible and the Westminster Standards.

On the other hand, the Orthodox faith teaches that we are not abandoned by God with either a single set of books (the Bible) or an old, static thing called tradition. We are not always looking back, but are instead transformed through the Body and Blood of Christ to a communion that transcends both time and place.

In the Eucharistic fellowship of the Church, we are ever-united with all the Saints of history, both past and present. Our orientation is eschatological, and eschatology is not merely “the future,” in a strictly linear sense. This is nowhere more pronounced than in our celebration of the Eucharist, which is an event that points the faithful towards the east—not merely towards Eden or the beginnings of a nostalgic faith, but towards the great wedding feast of the Lamb. This is played out not only in our written tradition and services, but also in our iconography of the Mystical Supper, which shows both Jesus and the apostles not in a dingy upper room of first-century Palestine but at the table of the wedding feast in eternity.

We certainly believe that the apostolic Church is the source of life and health for the faithful Christian, but this is not a return to “the beginning,” but rather an adoption into a timeless family. A family that is oriented towards the east (a redundancy, I know); towards the second coming and the culmination of all things in Christ (which paradoxically restores us to a unity with God found heretofore only in Eden).

Our tradition is holy, since it is the tradition of the Holy Spirit. This means that it is grounded not in a place of the past, but in the dynamic life of the Life-giving Trinity. This is an essential aspect of the doctrine of the Communion of the Saints, as well: “Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come … shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).

Leithart continues:

Truth is not just the Father; the Son – the supplement, the second, the one begotten – identifies Himself as Truth, and then comes a third, the Spirit, also Truth, the Spirit of Truth. Truth is not just in the Father; the fullness of Truth is not at the origin, but in the fullness of the divine life, which includes a double supplement to the origin.

Despite the appearance of Sabellianism, and a denial of orthodox triadology, I think I understand what Leithart is getting at here.

The tradition of the Church has borne a perspective that is more nuanced than Leithart appears to allow. The earthly bulwarks of our faith (throughout the centuries, and not just in the “early Church”) have pointed to a Trinity that ismonarchical, with the Father as “origin.” For example, the Father begets the Son, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father (in eternity). Still, Leithart rightly notes that truth is not only of the Father, but is also an essential aspect of both the Spirit and the Son. What’s important to emphasize here is that our Tradition originates and rests in the life of God himself; in the life of the Holy Trinity. Not just the Father, but the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Their roles in both revealing and preserving this Faith through synergy with the Church varies according to the divine person, but we must be careful not to conflate the persons for the sake of flawed arguments.

Leithart concludes:

History is patterned in the same way. Eden is not the golden time to which we return; it is the infancy from which we begin and grow up. The golden age is ahead, in the Edenic Jerusalem.

And the church’s history is patterned in the same way too. It’s disorienting to think that we have to press ahead rather than try to discover or recover the safety of an achieved ecclesia, disorienting because we can’t know or predict the future. But it’s the only assumption Trinitarians can consistently make: The ecclesial peace we seek is not behind us, but in front. We get there by following the pillar of fire that leads us to a land we do not know.

Orthodox Christians do not believe in a mythical “golden age” of the Church. Our hagiography makes this more than plain, as we recount one exile of a Saint or one new heresy after another. What we do believe in, however, is the continuing presence of the life and light of God in the Body of Christ. Because of this fact, we know that the Church is the true community and family of God. It is not a future reality to be anticipated, but neither is it a nostalgic idea of the past. It is a continuing, apostolic mission of God’s people, transformed and recreated into the image of Christ through the passage of time. When we face the east in worship (per St. Basil the Great in On the Holy Spirit), we are facing both Eden and the glorious and second coming. Leithart bifurcates along linear projections, when it is both inappropriate and even impossible to do so.

He is right in saying that we follow the “pillar of fire” as the Church, but this pillar is within each of us. It is not a distant figure that has left us only a book and a few thousand years in order to figure everything out. It is a personal witness and indwelling in the Body of Christ that warms and guides our souls towards the kingdom; a kingdom that can, in fact, be within each one of us in Christ (Luke 17:21).

So while Leithart brings up a few important concepts in this short argument against conversions to Orthodox-Catholic Christianity, he misses the mark when it comes to not only understanding Holy Tradition and the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, but also limits this experience of the Church to a single direction, where no such limitation is warranted.

Conversion to the one, true Church is not tragic; it is a journey home. And this home is not found in any single point in time, but transcends all such limitations, being the very Body of the Eternal One.

Gabe Martini has a BA in Philosophy from Indiana University and serves as a subdeacon at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Church in Bellingham, WA. He is the editor-in-chief of On Behalf of All and is a Product Marketing Lead for Logos Bible Software.

Geneva Bible and the City on a Hill

October 5, 2013 / Robert Arakaki / 16 Comments

Governor John Winthrop and his followers

Part 2 of 4.

Parts 1, 3, and 4.

One striking feature about the recent promotions of the Geneva Bible is the reworking of church history. They depict a tyrannical King James who oppressed freedom loving Puritans and how the Geneva Bible played a pivotal role in the emergence of democracy in America, but history is more complicated than that.

The website for Studylight.org claims:

The notes also infuriated King James, since they allowed disobedience to tyrannical kings. King James went so far as to make ownership of the Geneva Bible a felony. He then proceeded to make his own version of the Bible, but without the marginal notes that had so disturbed him. Consequently, during King James’s reign, and into the reign of Charles I, the Geneva Bible was gradually replaced by the King James Bible. (Emphasis added; Source)

In a similar vein we find Kirk Cameron claiming:

The English church had become little more than an arm of the State, and the English Reformation was losing steam. Just then The Geneva Bible was providentially unleashed on a dark, discouraged, downtrodden people, and it was the spark for a Christian Reformation of life and culture the likes of which the world had never seen. (Emphasis added; Source)

It would not be accurate to describe the Puritans as a freedom loving people. There is a theocratic streak in the Puritan Project. For example, in Scotland a law was passed mandating that everyone over a certain income purchase a copy of the Geneva Bible! It seems to this writer that what the neo-Reformed are attempting to do is reimagine the past to advance their theological agenda.

Stoolball equipment from modern day reenactment event.

Because of their strict biblicism the Pilgrims had a restrictive understanding of culture. This can be seen in their views on Christmas which they saw as a Romish invention lacking biblical support and therefore contrary to the Christian way of life.

Nathaniel Philbrick in Mayflower (2006) described the first Christmas in the New World:

For the Pilgrims, Christmas was a day just like any other; for most of the Strangers from the Fortune, on the other hand, it was a religious holiday, and they informed Bradford that it was “against their consciences” to work on Christmas. Bradford begrudgingly gave them the day off and led the rest of the men out for the usual day’s work. But when they returned at noon, they found the once placid streets of Plymouth in a state of joyous bedlam. The Strangers were playing games, including stool ball, a cricketlike game popular in the west of England. This was typical of how most Englishmen spent Christmas, but this was not the way the members of a pious Puritan community were to conduct themselves. Bradford proceeded to confiscate the gamesters’ balls and bats. It was not fair, he insisted, that some played while others worked. If they wanted to spend Christmas praying quietly at home, that was fine by him; “but there should be no gaming or reveling in the streets.” (p. 128)

This highly disciplined lifestyle was not a fluke but a consequence of the Pilgrims’ attempt to literally follow Paul’s admonition “come out among them, and be separate.” The Pilgrims (aka Separatists) were Puritans who believed that the Church of England was not a true church of Christ. In light of this they believed they needed to form their own church of visible saints. This quest for a pure church required not only a disciplined lifestyle based on the Bible but also the excommunication of those who strayed from the path of righteousness. (See Philbrick p. 12)

The Geneva Bible and the City on a Hill

The Cambridge Geneva Bible of 1591 was the edition carried by the Pilgrims when they fled to America. As such, it directly provided much of the genius and inspiration which carried those courageous and faithful souls through their trials, and provided the spiritual, intellectual and legal basis for establishment and flourishing of the colonies. Thus, it became the foundation for establishment of the American Nation. (Emphasis added; Source: Studylight.org)

When the Puritans’ attempt to reform English society was stymied, a renewed attempt was made in the New World. Puritan New England was not so much a retreat as it was a utopian quest. The Puritans believed themselves to be God’s elect like Old Testament Israel. Governor John Winthrop’s seminal sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity” and the imagery of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill” that would be a shining example to all the world reflected the confluence of federal theology’s emphasis on the church as covenanted society and post-millennialist eschatology which anticipated the revealing of God’s glory on earth through his elect nation. Later it would be transformed into the founding myth of the United States of America. (See Robert Bellah’s Broken Covenant, Chapter 1 “America’s Myth of Origin.”)

Recent publicity materials claim the Geneva Bible was the foundational text for Puritan New England. But that was not the case. There were two English bibles used in New England: the Geneva Bible and the King James Version (aka the Authorized Version). It was a common practice for ministers to use the King James Version in their printed sermons in addition to their free rendering of the Greek and Hebrew texts (Note 4, Stout 1982:35).

The presence of the two English translations was consequential for that tiny community. The dilemma of the New England way lay in the attempt to fuse corporate solidarity based on Old Testament theocracy with the Protestant insistence on the salvation of the individual soul by free grace. The Geneva Bible’s commentary notes encouraged a spiritualized reading of Old Testament Israel, while the King James Version’s lack of commentary opened up exegetical space for theocratic readings. The King James Version was more popular in the Bay Colony while the Geneva Bible was more popular among the Pilgrims down in Plymouth Plantation. The Pilgrims’ emphasis on free grace provided them with no cultural glue leading to withdrawal and stagnation (Stout 1982:29; Ahlstrom 1975:186-187). Due to their inability to flourish, the Plymouth colony was made part of the Massachusetts colony in 1691.

Anne Hutchinson on trial

The Geneva Bible played a role in the Antinomian controversy that rocked the New England colony from 1636 to 1638. Anne Hutchinson favored the Geneva Bible which allowed for a more spiritualized reading. During the court proceedings she was able to recite verbatim extensive excerpts from the Geneva Bible (Stout 1982:31). Her ally, George Wheelwright, used the Genevan translation of Matthew 9:15 for his controversial Fast Day sermon to trumpet the covenant of grace over the covenant of works (the underpinning of the New England polity).

It has been noted that the Geneva Bible had undergone multiple reprint editions from 1576 to 1644. This raises the question about the cessation of publication after 1644. I suggest that 1644 correlated with the waning enthusiasm for the Puritan Project. The Puritan Project was based on the notion of the church as a covenant community made up of believers able to testify to converting grace. However, a new generation emerged of church attendees unable to testify to a definite conversion experience. The Half Way Covenant was adopted in 1657 as way of accommodating the decline in spiritual fervor of its members and as a way enabling the church to retain influence in society (Ahlstrom 1975:108-110). As religious fervor in New England waned so did the demand for the Geneva Bible. By 1700, enthusiasm for the Puritan project had given way to the more moderate Congregationalism.

Scene_at_the_Signing_of_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States.jpg

Signing of the US Constitution

By the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, we find a very different America from the one the Puritans knew. While Puritan New England figures quite prominently in the founding myth of the United States, it is important to keep in mind that the source of American democracy is quite complex. It includes the religious tolerance of Roger Williams’ Rhode Island and William Penn’s Pennsylvania, John Locke’s liberal philosophy, Thomas Jefferson’s rationalism, and the more radical views of men like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. It is important that we approach history critically even as we affirm God’s sovereignty over human affairs.

The Rise and Fall of the Geneva Bible

The Geneva Bible was at one time the most influential Bible for English speaking Protestants. This was the Bible used by William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, John Donne, and John Bunyan. Thus, its influence on English culture was considerable. So why then did it become the forgotten Bible of Protestantism?

The decline can be traced to three factors. One was the lack of official support. The Geneva Bible was produced in the Genevan republic, not in England where the crown was the supreme authority. This republican bias is evident in its commentary that decried tyranny and encouraged revolution against tyranny. For example, the commentary to Exodus 1, especially verse 19, noted the lawfulness of the midwives’ disobedience to Pharaoh. Comments like these were likely to displease King James and his royalist supporters. But there is no evidence of King James ever banning the Geneva Bible. Those who make this assertion seem to have their history mixed up.

Another contributing factor was the growing radicalism of English Puritanism. When it first came out, the Geneva Bible gave very little attention to the concept of covenant and the covenant as the basis for national unity. It was the product of two exiled Englishmen concerned with promoting personal faith in Christ in the face of the Roman Catholic emphasis on salvation through the Church. By the early 1600s England’s break from Rome was more or less an accomplished fact. Attention then shifted to the more ambitious goal of “building an entire social order according to scriptural blueprint” (Stout 19982:25). The growing interest among Puritans in covenant theology (federal theology) from late 1500s to the 1600s began to feed into their desire to reform all of English society in accordance with Scripture. The Geneva Bible’s spiritualizing interpretation of Old Testament passages did not support their emphasis on national covenant. This led, not to its repudiation, as to a quiet neglect by the Puritans.

A third factor was the growing popularity of the King James Version. As a result of the growing tensions between the Puritans and the more mainstream Anglicans, the Hampton Court conference was convened. As a result of this meeting King James authorized a new translation that would be known as the King James Version. Unlike the Geneva Bible, the King James Version of 1611 was very much a corporate venture. It was produced under the sponsorship of the monarch and involved the finest Anglican and Puritan scholars of the time. It contained no marginal commentary and only the barest summary of the chapter contents. As part of the ‘Establishment’ at the time, the Puritans had no difficulty accepting the King James Version. Stout notes:

It is not coincidental that the Puritan leaders’ preference for the Authorized Version grew in direct proportion to their growth in numbers and influence (p. 26).

The King James Version surpassed the Geneva Bible in popularity among the Puritan clergymen (Stout 1982:25). This is no surprise given the fact that many Puritans were involved in the making of the King James Version and its outstanding literary style.

Conclusion

The Puritan Project represents an aspect of English Protestantism. But it is important that we do not exaggerate its importance. It flourished from 1570 to 1640 then went into decline. It was replaced by Congregationalism, Unitarianism, revivalism, not to mention the Baptists and Arminians. So while the Geneva Bible played an important role in English Protestantism, its influence would later be eclipsed by the King James Version. Where Geneva Bible was particular to Puritanism, English speaking Protestantism would be more closely identified with the King James Version.

The King James Version became the most popular Protestant version in America until the twentieth century when newer versions like the Revised Standard Version and the New International Version began to challenge its primacy among Protestants.

There is not a little irony in the fact that Christians in the free church tradition like the Baptists are among the fiercest defenders of the King James Version overlooking the fact that their preferred version was sponsored by a monarch who persecuted the Nonconformists! Given modern Evangelicals’ resemblance to Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams one would expect them to prefer the Geneva Bible. There is also irony in the fact that some neo-Reformed who favor dominion theology also favor the Geneva Bible. If anything, they should be favoring the King James Version like their seventeenth century Puritan predecessors did.

Therefore, church history is not as simple as the promoters of the Geneva Bible make it out to be. It is full of surprising twists and turns, not to mention ironic reverses!

Robert Arakaki

Next: The Geneva Bible compared against the Orthodox Study Bible

References

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. 1975. A Religious History of the American People. Image Books.

Bellah, Robert N. 1975. Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. The University of Chicago Press.

Philbrick, Nathaniel. 2006. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Penguin Books.

Stout, Harry S. 1982. “Word and Order in Colonial New England,” in The Bible in America (pp. 19-37), Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds. Oxford University Press.

Geneva Bible and Sola Scriptura

October 4, 2013 / Robert Arakaki / 36 Comments

See online version here.

The recent Reformed resurgence has given rise to a renewed interest in the Geneva Bible. Many people associate Protestantism with the King James Version (KJV), but the neo-Reformed enthusiasts look down on the KJV which was produced under the sponsorship of King James and the Church of England. They prefer instead the Geneva Bible that the Puritans and Pilgrims brought to the New World. For them the Geneva Bible represents the truer Reformed understanding of the Bible.

As I read their enthusiastic promotion of the Geneva Bible I was struck by two claims: (1) the Geneva Bible being faithful to sola Scriptura and (2) the Geneva Bible as the spiritual foundation for American democracy.

Knox and Calvin, as well as the other Reformers, wanted the Bible to speak for itself. The Geneva Bible fulfilled that need. It nurtured liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. A generation of men and women raised on this Bible would not tolerate tyranny in church or state. [Emphasis added; Source: Kirk Cameron]

The Pilgrims and Puritans preferred the Geneva Bible over the King James Bible, not trusting the king’s purported good faith. The Geneva Bible was brought over on the Mayflower, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the Geneva translation and footnotes were the biblical foundation for the American Republic. [Emphasis added; Source: Kirk Cameron]

This posting is the first of a four part review of the Geneva Bible. For my research I relied on Harry S. Stout’s “Word and Order in Colonial New England,” which appeared in The Bible in America (1982), edited by Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll.

Scripture IN Tradition

There is a certain irony in the claim: “Knox and Calvin, as well as the other Reformers, wanted the Bible to speak for itself,” when the Geneva Bible is famous for its extensive commentary of more than 300,000 words. This made it a veritable a mini theology library accessible to the common readers of the time. What we see here is an English translation of Scripture encased in the Reformed theological tradition. This is no stand alone Bible but a Bible embedded in a specific Protestant tradition. This is much like how Orthodoxy understands the Bible. For Orthodoxy the Bible must not be read independently but understood in light of Apostolic Tradition.

As a study bible the Geneva Bible was not all that unusual for its time. Luther’s German translation included theological commentary as did Olivetanus’ French translation. Prof. Harry Stout noted that what would have been unusual at the time was a popular translation without commentary. This practice of inserting marginal notes refutes the contemporary imaginings of popular Evangelicalism of sola Scriptura: the Bible all by itself. Keith Mathison labeled this distorted understanding: “solo Scriptura.” As originally understood by the Reformers, sola Scriptura meant Scripture understood in light of the best exegetical tools and theological research available and unfettered by subservience to papal authority. But this massive set of commentary notes raises the issue: Which particular theological tradition is being affixed to the Scripture text?

The Geneva Bible marked the beginning of the Protestant practice (tradition) of making study bibles. Some of the more popular modern versions are the Scofield Study Bible and the Ryrie Study Bible, both are based on JN Darby’s dispensational school of theology. More recently, there have appeared specialty bibles like the Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Bible and the John F. MacArthur Study Bible. All these bibles set an interpretive commentary alongside the very text of Scripture. This commentary is without question a tradition—a set of teachings and practices that guide and define a particular faith community. The Protestant Reformers were not averse to the notion of tradition. But one has to wonder about the proliferation of Protestant study bibles when they offer conflicting interpretations of the Bible.

In 2008, the Orthodox Study Bible was published by Thomas Nelson. Like the Geneva Bible, the Orthodox Study Bible has extensive commentary notes. Where it differs is that the commentary notes draw on the early Church Fathers. This is significant. The early Christians were admonished to hold fast to Apostolic Tradition both in written and oral forms (2 Thessalonians 2:15), and to ensure its transmission to future generations (2 Timothy 1:13, 2:2). This is the biblical basis for capital “T” Tradition. Because of the early Church Fathers’ proximity to the Apostles and their commitment to the traditioning process, we can be confident that the patristic exegesis of Scripture is faithful to the Apostle’s understanding of what Scripture meant. In contrast to this, the Geneva Bible draws on an exegetical tradition that date back to the 1500s, i.e., the Protestant Reformation. In other words, the commentary texts of the Geneva Bible ground the reader in a theological tradition that much more recent than that of the Church Fathers. It then becomes a question why one would prefer a four hundred year old tradition over another that is almost two thousand years old.

Sola Scriptura and Vernacular Bibles

The Protestant principle sola Scriptura gave rise to the need for vernacular translations. The original Reformers were able to read Scripture in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, but they wanted to make the Bible accessible to the common people. This quest for the vernacular arose in part to Rome’s ecclesiastical tyranny and the widespread biblical illiteracy among the laity. Stout wrote:

At that time vernacular Bibles were still in their infancy, and ordinary people had no ready access to the Word of God in an intelligible and affordable edition. Until that need was met, the Reformation ideal of sola Scriptura would remain just that: an ideal with no realistic prospect of implementation in a living society. The exiles’ proposed translation, then, represented the necessary precondition for a biblical-based culture organized solely on God’s ordinances (1982:20).

This need for vernacular translations is characteristic of Western Christianity. In the West the Bible was in a dead language, Latin, and was thus inaccessible to the vast majority of society. In the Byzantine East significant parts of the population were still conversant in Greek. Furthermore, Orthodoxy has a tradition of translating into the vernacular dating to the ninth century when Kyril and Methodios sought to evangelize the Slavs.

The anomaly of an English translation being named after a city situated outside England reflects the circumstances in which it originated. The Geneva Bible was the work of Anthony Gilby and William Whittingham who fled the persecution of the pro-Catholic Queen Mary to Geneva. There they produced an English translation, working in concert with other leading Reformed scholars of the day like Calvin and Beza. It is important to keep in mind that at the same time other vernacular translations were being undertaken in French, Spanish, Italian, as well as English.

The first printing of the entire Geneva Bible, Old and New Testaments took place in 1576. It became widely popular and went through some 150 editions from 1576 to 1644. Its popularity was due not only to the clarity and vigor of style but also its extensive commentary notes. The Geneva Bible was also notable for its technical innovations. The numbering of verses, cross referencing of verses, detailed introductions to each book, in addition to maps, woodcut illustrations, and indexes all made for a very influential and popular study bible.

Altering the Biblical Canon

Another innovation introduced through the Geneva Bible was the exclusion of the Apocrypha (the deuterocanonical books). This change took place with the 1599 version; earlier versions of the Geneva Bible contained the Apocrypha. From a historical vantage point, the English Puritans were pioneers in this unprecedented tampering of the biblical canon. For the first 1500 years the Christian Bible contained the Apocrypha. Even among Protestant translations the exclusion of the Apocrypha was an anomaly. Luther’s German Bible and Olivetan’s French Bible both contained the Apocrypha. All English Bibles printed in the sixteenth century contained a section or appendix for the Apocrypha: Matthew’s Bible (1537), Myles Coverdale Bible (1538), and the 1560 Geneva Bible. The King James Bible which was first printed in 1611 likewise contained the Apocrypha. What probably accounts for this change was the growing radicalism of English Puritanism which sought the purify not only church and society, but also the biblical canon.

The Puritans’ exclusion of the Apocrypha has had a tremendous impact on the Protestant understanding of the Bible. The Protestant Old Testament ends with Malachi which dates to the fifth century BC resulting in a sizable gap between the Old and New Testaments. However, the Apocrypha contains later works like Sirach which has been dated to 180 BC and 1 Maccabees which has been dated to 104 BC. Thus, if we include the Apocrypha in the Old Testament then we find a significant reduction in the gap between the Old and New Testament periods. If the gap between the Jewish Bible and the Christian New Testament is miniscule then one’s understanding of salvation history changes from one based on discontinuity to one based on continuity. One becomes more open to viewing the New Testament as the extension and culmination of Old Testament salvation history. I would conjecture that the Puritans’ exclusion of the Apocrypha may have inadvertently laid the groundwork for dispensationalism’s dichotomy between the Age of Law (Israel) and the Age of Grace (the Christian Church).

Conclusion

The Geneva Bible is instructive for our understanding of the Protestantism’s sola Scriptura. Contrary to what many Evangelicals think, the original Protestant Reformers’ understanding of sola scriptura was more along the lines of prima Scriptura than solo Scriptura. Thus, the early Protestants had no problem with providing extensive commentary notes to the biblical text. They assumed that their interpretation of the Bible was identical to that of the Apostles. However, historical and theological scholarship have found that the Protestant Reformation to mark a break from the historic Christian Faith of the first millennium. Protestantism’s novelty can be seen in its understanding of sola Scriptura, the Eucharist, and in the case of the Puritans, their rejection of the episcopacy and the Apocrypha; all of which puts them at odds with the early Church. Thus, the Geneva Bible marked not a return to the early Church but the start of a new religious tradition, Protestant Christianity. Furthermore, the Geneva Bible opened the way for the proliferation of study bibles mirroring Protestantism’s denominational confusion. Thus, the Geneva Bible exemplifies the consequences of Protestantism’s sola Scriptura.

Robert Arakaki

Next: The Geneva Bible and the City on a Hill

Year: 2013 (Page 4 of 14)

Are Conversions to Orthodoxy Tragic? A Response to Leithart

Geneva Bible and the City on a Hill

Geneva Bible and Sola Scriptura

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Categories

Archives