One of the key arguments made by defenders of the Roman Church against those who take the Bible as their unique authority for revealing God’s truth regards the formation of the New Testament canon, i.e., the list of books that comprise the New Testament. They claim that the Church (by which they mean the Roman Church) had to officially decide and declare what was and was not a part of the New Testament canon, which it did in several church councils around 400 A.D. And if that is indeed the case, then surely it is the Church, they say, that has the ultimate authority to decide what that canon teaches.

One such writer boldly puts it this way:

The Bible does not and cannot answer questions about its own inspiration or about the canon….The early Christians, many of whom disagreed on the issue, needed the Church in council to give an authoritative decree to settle the question. Those are the historical facts.

It is true that we know Scripture to be inspired and canonical only because the Church has told us so. That is historical fact….

If we did not have Scripture, we would still have the Church. But without the Church, there would be no New Testament Scripture. It was members of this kingdom, the Church, who wrote Scripture, preserved its many texts, and eventually canonized it. Scripture alone could not do any of this.

— Tim Staples, “Why the ‘Bible Alone’ Is an Unworkable Rule of Faith,” 2007.

Yet even such a writer, as bold as he is, has to admit an obvious fact in his last statement: it was not the Church itself as an organization, but its “members,” as he says, who wrote and preserved the Scriptures.

And when he says it was also the members of the church that canonized the Scripture, we would certainly agree—though not, as he means, in the church councils, but by the common assent of all the many believers in so many different localities and over several centuries.

Peter himself, the one whom Catholics claim is the first pope, gives us one of the best examples of this. He does so when he recognizes, in his second letter, that the writings of the apostle Paul are a part of the Scripture:

And count the long-suffering of our Lord to be salvation, even as our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which some things are hard to understand, which the unlearned and unstable twist, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own ruin.
— 2 Peter 3:15-16

Contrary the the assertion of the writer above, Peter certainly did not need “the Church in council” to tell him what was and was not the Scripture! Here he makes no official papal decree, and invokes no authority of “the Church.” He just recognizes, and states very directly, a simple fact: Paul’s writings are a part of the canon of Scripture.

This brief statement by “the first pope” demolishes any assertion of the Roman Church that it was the Church which determined the canon of Scripture. Rather, we see here that it was in reality the Holy Spirit who did so, working in various ways through the individual members of the Body of Christ, as He does here with Peter. It had to be this way, because, after all, there simply was no governing organization in the first few centuries to oversee the writing of the Scripture, or the creation of the canon.

And Peter also tells us that

…No prophecy was ever borne by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were borne by the Holy Spirit.
— 2 Peter 1:21

While he is speaking here specifically regarding the Old Testament prophets, this same principle no doubt applies to all of Scripture. And, we would say, it certainly applies to the formation of the canon as well. That is, no earthy will, including that of the Roman church, produced the Scriptures, nor did any oversee the canonization of the Scriptures; rather, the unique One to oversee this glorious work was the Holy Spirit Himself.

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—  21 June 2025 —