Last week we began to work our way through the Westminster Confession of Faith. The first section is entitled Of Holy Scripture, and today we continue our journey through this section.
1. Of Holy Scripture
II. Under the name of Holy Scripture, or the Word of God written, are now contained all the books of the Old and New Testament, which are these:
Of the Old Testament:
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Joshua
Judges
Ruth
I. Samuel
II. Samuel
I. Kings
II. Kings
I. Chronicles
II. Chronicles
Ezra
Nehemiah
Esther
Job
Psalms
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
The Song of Songs
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Lamentations
Ezekiel
Daniel
Hosea
Joel
Amos
Obadiah
Jonah
Micah
Nahum
Habakkuk
Zephaniah
Haggai
Zechariah
Malachi
Of the New Testament:
The Gospels according to
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
The Acts of the Apostles
Paul’s Epistles
To the Romans
Corinthians I.
Corinthians II.
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
Thessalonians I.
Thessalonians II.
To Timothy I.
To Timothy II.
To Titus
To Philemon
The Epistle to the Hebrews
The Epistle of James
The first and second Epistles of Peter
The first, second, and third Epistles of John
The Epistle of Jude
The Revelation of John
All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.
III. 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.
Comments
The Reformers held the Word of God to be the rule of faith and life. It thus becomes very important to know what books are the Word of God. They accepted the books listed above as the inspired Word of God and the full canon. They disagreed with the Roman Catholic Church which in the Council of Trent (1545-1563) included many books of the apocryphal as canonical. Why? According to T.L. Wilkinson in The Westminster Confession now, the books referred to as apocrypha here were writings between the Old Testament and New Testament that were a kind of addendum to the canonical Old Testament. These writings were not accepted by Jews as inspired Scripture and Christ did not quote them.
Some have wondered whether there are other books like the Gospel of Thomas that were excluded because of bias from the New Testament canon. As Wilkinson points out, the books in the canon ‘were books already received by the churches because they were acknowledged as having Apostolic authorship or Apostolic authority. The adoption of the canon by the church was simply official recognition of the authority these books already possessed.” There are sound reasons the Church has rejected books like the Gospel of Thomas and Peter. One of the issues for these ‘gospels’ is the late date of composition.