Taking God Seriously E-Book

J. I. Packer

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 254

Beschreibung

Explaining the essentials of the faith, renowned theologian and author Dr. J. I. Packer outlines the core commitments that are common to those of us who profess belief in Jesus. Here is a call to discipleship in mere Christianity—the business of taking God seriously.

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TAKING GOD SERIOUSLY

OTHER CROSSWAY BOOKS BY J. I. PACKER

A Grief Sanctified: Through Sorrow to Eternal Hope

Growing in Christ

Praying the Lord’s Prayer

Keeping the Ten Commandments

In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement (with Mark Dever)

Affirming the Apostles’ Creed

A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life

Faithfulness and Holiness: The Witness of J. C. Ryle

Taking God Seriously: Vital Things We Need to Know

Copyright © 2013 by J. I. Packer

Published by Crossway                     1300 Crescent Street                    Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Faceout Studio, www.faceoutstudio.com

First printing 2013

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3327-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3330-3 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3328-0 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3329-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Packer, J. I. (James Innell)

Taking God seriously : vital things we need to know /

J. I. Packer.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-3327-3

1. Christianity—Essence, genius, nature. 2. Theology,

Doctrinal. I. Title.

BT60.P25      2013

230—dc23            2012027059

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

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CONTENTS

Preface

1 Taking Faith Seriously

2 Taking Doctrine Seriously

3 Taking Christian Unity Seriously

4 Taking Repentance Seriously

5 Taking the Church Seriously

6 Taking the Holy Spirit Seriously

7 Taking Baptism Seriously

8 Taking the Lord’s Supper Seriously

PREFACE

We in the West are a very food-conscious lot, and no wonder. Commercials on TV, ads in the newspapers and magazines, roadside billboards, flyers flowing from food stores, sections of magazines, and indeed entire magazines wholly devoted to diet and cuisine keep the allure and joy of eating vividly before our minds. Restaurants parade their styles and specialties all around us, fast-food outlets and coffee shops abound, and supermarkets stocking abundance of shining edibles vie for our custom. No surprise, then, that we overstock and end up throwing away food that is uneaten or gone bad. No surprise, either, that we overeat and that obesity brought on by imprudent snacking has become a major present-day problem. Food supply is not among our difficulties.

But it is not like that everywhere.

Something approaching a third of the world’s population, two billion plus, are undernourished and go chronically hungry since where they live food is regularly in short supply. So do these hungry people always feel hungry? Actually, no; not only does absorption in other things keep hunger at bay for hours, as we all know by experience, but it is unhappily possible to get used to never having enough so that the body settles for always being below par. Then energy evaporates, appetites wither, and lethargy sets in. Famine, which we have all seen on TV, if not in the flesh, produces dull eyes, set features, slow motion, and slow speech. Vitality is absent. People go on living, but their famine-fed apathy shows what they are losing for lack of food. They need adequate regular meals, and need them urgently, which is why the civilized world gives high priority to famine relief.

Nor is famine the only cause of dehumanizing undernourishment. Extended periods of unbalanced diet—lacking protein, for instance, and short in its calorie count—can yield the same effects. And anorexia becomes self-starvation. Thus, living in the midst of plenty, one still can waste away. Tragic? Yes, but true, as many among us know.

UNDERNOURISHED BELIEVERS

These thoughts illustrate the perspective from which I write this book. As the years go by, I am increasingly burdened by the sense that the more conservative church people in the West, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike, are, if not starving, at least grievously undernourished for lack of a particular pastoral ministry that was a staple item in the church life of the first Christian centuries and also of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era in Western Europe, but has largely fallen out of use in recent days. That ministry is called catechesis. It consists of intentional, orderly instruction in the truths that Christians are called to live by, linked with equally intentional and orderly instruction on how they are to do this.

A VITAL DISCIPLINE FOR ALL CHURCH PEOPLE

There are different levels of catechizing, according to the age groups involved: catechizing is, or should be, a vital ongoing discipline for church people from nine to ninety, so angles, styles, and emphases will naturally vary. There are different ways of catechizing— question and answer, one-on-one; set presentation, orally or on paper, leading to monitored group discussion; offering formulae for memorization and affirmations for amplification; or the time-honored school system of chalk, walk, and talk in didactic dialogue with a class of learners—but essentially the same thing is being done each time. The Bible calls it, quite simply, teaching; on that basis we may further label it, discipling.

Though Bible-based, catechesis is not exactly Bible study, and though it spurs devotion to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is in itself a discipline of thought in God’s presence rather than of direct address to the Holy Three, or to any one of them. Its intended end product is Christians who know their faith, can explain it to enquirers and sustain it against skeptics, and can put it to work in evangelism, church fellowship, and the many forms of service to God and man for which circumstances call. As a nurturing discipline, catechesis may be said to correspond to the innermost ring of the dartboard, or rifle or archery target. Bible study meetings and prayer gatherings will reach the outer rings, but it is catechesis—this ongoing procedure of teaching and discipling—that hits the bull’s-eye. The fact that all-age catechesis has fallen out of the curriculum of most churches today is thus a major loss, which, as was indicated above, has left many Christians undernourished and hence spiritually sluggish.

CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND APPLICATION

The essence of catechetical material is that it links the formulation of Christian truth (i.e., orthodoxy) with its application in Christian living (i.e., obedience, or orthopraxy, as nowadays it is often called). Several of the New Testament pastoral letters are classic examples. Glance with me at two of them, Paul’s epistle to Christians at Rome and the anonymous epistle to Hebrews, that is, to members of Jewish Christian congregations. Both these documents are (1) kerygmatic, that is, proclaiming salvation through Jesus Christ, and (2) didactic, logically arranged to offer a single flow of foundational thinking. Thus they are (3) catechetical, that is, showing how right belief requires right living through an active faith that responds to Christ crucified, risen, and enthroned, and that likewise responds to all that is and will be ours in and through him, and to the plans of God the Father that undergird this salvation and this hope. (Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter have the same catechetical character, but we cannot look at them here.) The catechetical agenda of Romans and Hebrews becomes clear as soon as we note what doctrinal substance they contain and what impact on the readers addressed is intended.

Though the readerships of Romans and Hebrews were different (Romans was written mainly to non-Jewish converts; Hebrews, mainly to Jewish believers), and though the styles of the two writers are different and the situations of the two reading audiences differed, still we find that the following essential, basic teachings are set forth in both Romans and Hebrews in complementary ways.

TWO POSITIVE POINTS

1. THE REVELATION OF GOD IN AND THROUGH JESUS CHRIST, THE BRINGER OF SALVATION, OF WHOM BOTH WRITERS ARE SPEAKING WITH AUTHORITY

Jesus Christ is the Son of God, a distinct divine person within the divine unity, to be worshipped as the Father is worshipped (Rom. 1:4; 9:5; Heb. 1:1–14).

Jesus Christ is the Son of God incarnate, a fully divine person in his humanity, whom the Father in love has sent into this world for sinners’ salvation (Rom. 1:3–7; 16:25–27; Heb. 2:5–18).

Jesus Christ gave his life at the Father’s will as an atoning sacrifice for sins. He was raised from the dead by the power of God and lives, rules, and will one day return for the final judgment and the completing of our salvation from all sin and evil. Through Jesus Christ as Mediator sinful humans are reconciled to God, justified and forgiven by him, and given permanent access to him. Through Christ’s outreach to them they are adopted into God’s family, made his heirs with Christ, and assured of his eternal love for them (Rom. 2:5–16; 3:21–5:21; 8:15–23, 31–39; Heb. 2:10–18; 8:1–10:23; 12:5–11, 22–24).

Jesus Christ is the enthroned Lord whom Christians are to worship, call on, trust for help, and serve throughout their lives (Rom. 10:8–13; 13:14; 14:17–18; Heb. 4:14–16; 12:1–3; 13:7–15).

Jesus Christ imparts his own resurrection life to believers through their faith-union with him. This ongoing transformation of them toward full Christlikeness of perception and practice is effected by the Holy Spirit and is expressed in baptism (Rom. 6:1–7:6; Heb. 8:10–12; 10:16–17).

2. THE RESPONSE REQUIRED FROM SINNERS WHO BECOME RECIPIENTS OF SALVATION, TO WHOM BOTH WRITERS ARE ADDRESSING PASTORAL GUIDANCE

Faith is required. Faith is a New Testament technical term. It means wholehearted acceptance of, trust in, and obedience to God, branched out into a threefold object: the Word of God, that is, the teaching of the Old Testament and the apostolic writers as such; the promises of God categorically; and the Son of God personally. Faith is credence plus commitment, assurance plus allegiance, and devotion plus discipleship. Faith flows from understanding the gospel, which is the effect of learning it, which is the outcome of being taught it (Rom. 1:16–17; 4:1–5:11; 10:5–17; 14:1–4, 20–23; Heb. 2:1–4; 3:1–6; 4:14–16; 5:11–6:12; 10:19–12:2).

Repentance is required. Repentance, a function of faith, is a remorseful reversing of one’s previous self-centered, sin-serving habits and actions and turning to Christ to become his faithful and obedient follower, practicing repentance and pursuing holiness as a lifelong project (Rom. 2:4; 6:12–23; 13:12–14; Heb. 6:1–6; 12:1–4, 14–17).

Hope, motivating endurance, is required. Both are functions of faith in action. Hope is the divinely guaranteed certainty of good things to come; endurance is holding fast to one’s God-given hope in the face of temptations and urgings to abandon it (Rom. 5:1–5; 8:23–25; 15:4–13; Heb. 3:6; 6:11–20; 10:23; 11:13–16).

Love is required. God, fellow-believers, and one’s neighbors generally, are love’s objects. Love to God means gratitude for his grace and a devoted doing of his will so as to please him. Love to fellow-believers means welcoming them into, and maintaining their welcome within, the circle of Christian fellowship, there serving their needs, spiritual and physical, encouraging them in their discipleship, and taking care not to thoughtlessly put roadblocks in their path. Love to neighbors as such, whoever they are, means kindness, helpfulness, doing good to them, sharing resources with them, and forgoing all forms of revenge and tit for tat all along the line (Rom. 8:28; 12:6–13; 13:8–10; 14:13–22; Heb. 10:24–25; 13:1–5, 15–16).

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF GOD’S CHURCH

These positive points are the catechetical basics that these two epistles yield for discipling individual believers, the human building blocks of God’s church. Catechetical instruction on the church and church life, Bible-based like the basics listed above, would be the next stage in the discipling process (for which, it may be suggested, Paul’s letters to the Ephesians, to Timothy, and to Titus would be the primary New Testament resources).

It should be noted that in Romans and Hebrews the positive points that I have highlighted as, so to speak, the marrow of the discipling message were mostly laid out in what were implicitly, if not explicitly, corrective contexts—where error, inadequacy, and misconception were being exposed in order to be excluded. Clearing the ground mentally, in terms of “not that but this,” is in fact part of the catechetical process itself. Educators know that as white looks whiter on a blackboard and black looks blacker on a whiteboard, so meaning is more clearly and sharply seen when contrasted with what is not meant. So, too, competent catechesis (teaching and discipling), like the teaching of the Bible itself, needs to specify negative as well as positive corollaries to achieve fullest clarity in both comprehension and application.

SPIRITUAL NOURISHMENT FOR ALL CHRISTIAN BELIEVERS

The job of a preface, as I understand it, is to give readers a preliminary word about the book itself by indicating its aim and scope, and, if I may put it so, its wavelength. I hope the preceding pages have done this for the present volume. The chapters included in the book are ventures in adult catechesis, furnishing the mind and forming the judgment regarding key truths that are often challenged today. Since they were first produced separately, and at four-month intervals, some repetition was unavoidable; I ask that it be forgiven, now that they are all together.

As an Anglican, I write with a sense of urgency in response to recent trends in my own church context. But readers who are not Anglicans will recognize many of the same trends in their own denominational circles, and may find that this book speaks pointedly to their situations, challenges, and concerns. So while I write in hope of helping fellow-Anglicans into a mature faith, there is nothing exclusive about this need or aim. I offer examples from my Anglican experience, but before I am an Anglican I am an evangelical, and I have tried to write in such a way that all evangelicals—and would-be and should-be evangelicals—will benefit. The questions after each chapter have an Anglican slant, but I do not think that Christians anywhere who take their Christian commitment seriously will find these questions unfruitful for meditation and discussion in their own neck of the denominational woods.

Thus my prayer is that God may use this material (1) to ground thoughtful Christians more firmly and clearheadedly in their faith, (2) to stir them out of the sluggishness into which theological and spiritual undernourishment has brought so many of us, and (3) to help us all take to heart the marching orders given us by our Lord and his apostles—who charge us first to be and then to make disciples everywhere, starting from where we are. This is the Christian’s serious business; God make us serious in attending to it.

1

TAKING FAITH SERIOUSLY

When a person falls into convulsions, short-term remedies may for the moment calm him down, but the long-term need is to diagnose the root cause of his trouble and treat that. So it is today with churches round the world, including the worldwide Anglican Communion, a body that is over seventy million strong and growing by leaps and bounds in both Asia and Africa. A much-publicized Episcopal decision in Canada to bless same-sex unions as if they were marriages, as well as the consecrating in the United States of a diocesan bishop who unashamedly lives in such a union, has convulsed global Anglicanism in the way that pebbles thrown into a pond send ripples over the entire surface of the water. Pressure groups and leadership blocs have emerged in Anglicanism’s “Old West” (Britain, North America, Australasia) resolved to fight this issue till approval of gay pairings is fully established. Tensions over the question between and within provinces, dioceses, and congregations have become acute, and there is no end in sight.

What, we ask, is the root cause of these convulsions? What would be needed to get us beyond them? The fact we must face is that the clash of views on how, pastorally, to view and help male and female homosexuals grows out of a more basic cleavage about faith. To map this and suggest what to do about it is our present task.

WHAT IS FAITH? A WORD THAT SLIPS AND SLIDES

Getting the hang of current disagreements about faith is not easy, for the word faith itself is used elusively and does in truth mean different things to different people, though this fact often goes unrecognized. The way of the “Old West” churches, in prayers, sermons, books, and discussions that seek to be unitive, is constantly to refer to the faith as a common property held by all who worship, but without defining or analyzing its substance, so that worshippers can go for years without any clear notion of what their church stands for. Theologians rise up to affirm that, in idea at least, faith goes beyond mere orthodoxy (belief of truth) to orthopraxy (living out that truth in worship and service, love to God and man)—and in saying this they are right so far. But when some think orthodoxy sanctions behavior that others see orthodoxy as ruling out, it is clear that agreement about the truth we live by is lacking, and that is what we have to look at now.

Complicating our task is the fact that all varieties of the dimension of life we call religion (Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Baha’i, Voodoo, Sikh, New Age, Scientology, and the rest) are regularly lumped together with all the versions of Christianity (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, conservative Protestant, liberal Protestant) as so many faiths. This usage makes it seem that all religions should be seen as essentially similar—which is probably how most post-Christian Westerners do in fact see them, though in the church this is very much a minority idea. Then, too, we use the word faith for whatever hopes about the future individuals cherish and live by (e.g., that science will save the planet from ruin; that there will not be another economic crash like 1929; that this or that missing person will be found alive; that this or that cancer can be beaten; that every cloud will have a silver lining; and so on). These broader uses of the word grew up as its former Christian precision dissolved away, so that in modern Western speech faith has become a vague term, a warm fuzzy slipping and sliding from one area of meaning to another all the time. In the New Testament, however, faith is a Christian technical term, specific in meaning as our secular technical terms (computer, dividend, airplane, spanner, appendectomy, syllabus, for example) are specific in meaning, and its New Testament meaning remained specific for Christians till about a century ago. It is something we need to get back to.

What did the apostolic writers have in mind when they spoke of faith? Nothing less than what they took to be the distinctive essence of Christianity: namely, a belief-and-behavior commitment to Jesus Christ, the divine-human Lord, who came to earth, died for sins, rose from death, returned to heaven, reigns now over the cosmos as his Father’s nominated vice-regent, and will reappear to judge everyone and to take his own people into glory, where they will be with him in unimaginable joy forever. This was “the faith” that was taught and defended against Gnostic syncretists from the start (we see Paul in Colossians and John in his letters actually doing that); soon it was enshrined in creeds, which began as syllabi for catechetical instruction of enquirers; and, with its Trinitarian implications made explicit, it has since then been at the heart of mainstream Christianity everywhere. (The Reformers debated with Roman Catholics as to whether faith brings present justification directly, but no one in the debate doubted that real faith includes all that we have described.)

So faith, that is, believing, is in the New Testament a “two-tone” reality, a response to God’s self-revelation in Christ that is both intellectual and relational. Mere credence—assent, that is, to “the faith”—is not faith, nor is commitment to a God or a Christ who is merely a product of human imagination. Christian faith is shaped, and its nature is determined, entirely by its object, just as the impression on a seal is shaped entirely by a die-stamp that is pressed down on the hot wax. The object of Christian faith, as the apostolic writers, the creeds, and the basic Anglican formularies (Articles, Prayer Book, and Homilies) present it, is threefold: first, God the Three-in-One, the Creator-become-Redeemer, who throughout history has been, and still is, transforming sinners into a new humanity in Christ; second, Jesus Christ himself, God incarnate and Savior, now absent from us in the flesh but personally and powerfully present with us through the Holy Spirit; and third, the many invitations, promises, commands, and assurances that the Father and the Son extend to all who will receive Jesus as their Savior and Lord and become his disciples, living henceforth by his teaching in his fellowship under his authority.

All of this is laid before us in the Bible, the revelatory book that God has given us for the forming of our faith. In the Bible, faith is a matter of knowing the facts of the gospel (the person, place, and work of Jesus Christ), welcoming the terms of the gospel (salvation from sin and a new life with God), and receiving the Christ of the gospel (setting oneself to live as his follower by self-denial, cross-bearing, and sacrificial service). Believing the biblically revealed facts and truths about God and trusting the living Lord to whom these facts and truths lead us are the two “tones,” the intellectual and relational aspects of real faith, blending like two-part harmony in music. This is the understanding of faith that needs to be reestablished.

We noted above that in our time the word faith has become a warm fuzzy, slipping and sliding in use in and out of its Christian meaning to refer to other modes of believing and behaving that, whatever else they are, differ in significant ways from what we have described. This fuzzification of faith has developed in parallel to increasing ignorance of biblical teaching and growing skepticism as to whether that teaching as it stands may properly be called the Word of God. Is there a connection? Yes. When the church ceases to treat the Bible as a final standard of spiritual truth and wisdom, it is going to wobble between maintaining its tradition in a changing world and adapting to that world, and as the wobbles go on, uncertainty as to what is the real substance of faith and the proper way of embracing it and living it out will inevitably increase.

But the Bible is currently interpreted in many different ways, and scholars’ arguments about its meaning are regularly over ordinary people’s heads. So even when Scripture is acknowledged as the standard, are confusion and uncertainty likely to be any less? This is a fair question, and to answer it we need to take a longer, harder look at the Bible than perhaps we have ever done before.

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? FAITH AND THE TALKING BOOK

Most people in churches nowadays have never read through the Bible even once; the older Christian habit of reading it from start to finish as a devotional discipline has virtually vanished. So in describing the Bible we start from scratch, assuming no prior knowledge.

The Bible consists of sixty-six separate pieces of writing, composed over something like a millennium and a half. The last twenty-seven of them were written in a single generation: they comprise four narratives about Jesus called Gospels, an account of Christianity’s earliest days called the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one pastoral letters from teachers with authority, and a final admonition to churches from the Lord Jesus himself, given partly by dictation and partly by vision. All these books speak of human life being supernaturally renovated through, in, with, under, from, and for the once crucified, now glorified Son of God, who fills each writer’s horizon, receives his worship, and determines his mind-set at every point.

Through the books of the Bible runs the claim that this Jesus fulfills promises, patterns, and premonitions of blessings to come that are embodied in the thirty-nine pre-Christian books. These are of four main types: history books, telling how God called and sought to educate the Jewish people—Abraham’s family—to worship, serve, and enjoy him, and to be ready to welcome Jesus Christ when he appeared; prophetic books, recording oracular sermons from God conveyed by human messengers expressing threats, hopes, and calls to faithfulness; poetry books, containing songs to and about God (Psalms) and celebrating love between a man and a woman (Song of Solomon); and wisdom books, which in response to God’s revelation show how to praise, pray, live, love, and cope with whatever may happen.

Christians name these two collections the Old and New Testaments respectively. Testament means covenant commitment, and the Christian idea, learned from Paul, from the writer to the Hebrews, and from Jesus himself, is that God’s covenant commitment to his own people has had two editions. The first edition extended from Abraham to Christ; it was marked throughout by temporary features and many limitations, not unlike a nonpermanent shanty built of wood on massive concrete foundations. The second edition extends from Christ’s first coming to his return and is the grand full-scale edifice for which the foundations were originally laid. The writer to the Hebrews, following Jeremiah’s prophecy, calls this second superstructure the new covenant and explains that through Christ, who is truly its heart, it provides a better priesthood, sacrifice, place of worship, range of promises, and hope for the future than were known under its predecessor. Christians see Christ as the true center of reference in both Testaments, the Old always looking and pointing forward to him and the New proclaiming his past coming, his present life and ministry in and from heaven, and his future destiny at his return; and they hold that this is the key to true biblical interpretation. Christians have maintained this since Christianity began.

Christians call the Bible the Word of God—“God’s Word written,” as Anglican Article 20 puts it—for two reasons. The first is its divine origin. Jesus and his apostles always treat Scripture as the utterance of God through the Holy Spirit, transmitted by the agency of men whose minds God moved in such a way that in all their composing they wrote just what he wanted as their contribution to the text and texture of the full Bible that he planned. The Bible’s quality of being thus completely shaped by God, so that it may and must always be read as God testifying to himself through the testimony to him of the human writers, is its inspiration. The second reason for calling the Bible God’s Word is its divine ministry of revealing God’s mind to us as the Holy Spirit gives understanding of what its text says, and thus makes us “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (see 2 Tim. 3:14–17). This quality of thus communicating knowledge of God, of his grace, and of his Son, is the Bible’s instrumentality. Your word is formally the utterance that proceeds from your mouth and substantially the expression and communication of your mind, and so it is with Scripture as the Word of God: formally, more than a million words strung together; substantially, God’s inexhaustible, Christ-centered, salvation-oriented, self-revelation to us. The Bible is both God-given and God-giving, and as such it stands as the standard of Christian faith.

Christianity expresses the thought of Scripture as the standard by calling it the canon. This is a Greek word, meaning a measuring rod, and thus a rule. Some have wondered whether the sixty-six-book Protestant canon includes all it should, or contains items that should not be there, but uncertainty about this is unwarranted. There is no good reason for doubting (1) that our Old Testament canon was established in Palestine before Jesus was born, and (2) that the first churches were right to see documents authored and/or approved by apostles as carrying God’s authority and complementing the Old Testament, and (3) that they were also right to claim the Old Testament as Christian Scripture and to interpret it as foreshadowing Jesus Christ the Messiah, and the kingdom of God and the new life that came with him.

Nor is there any good reason to fear that the church made mistakes when in the second and third centuries, confronted with spurious gospels, epistles, and acts bearing apostolic names, it identified the genuine apostolic writings and dismissed the rest. Nor do there exist outside the canon any documents that for any reason seem to merit inclusion. At the Counter-Reformational Council of Trent the Roman Catholic Church defined into the canon the twelve-book pre-Christian Apocrypha that Jerome had found in the Greek version of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) and included in his Latin rendering (the Vulgate) in the fifth century; but since these books never belonged to the Hebrew Palestinian canon that Jesus knew, the council’s decision must be judged a mistake. It is precisely the books listed in Anglican Article 6 and found in every printed Bible, neither more nor less, that together form the canonical Word of God.