The God Who Doesn't Lose Books

The God Who Doesn’t Lose Books

There’s a strange irony in the conspiracy theories about the biblical canon, whether it’s the idea that bishops in smoky back rooms “suppressed” certain books, or that Constantine personally curated the New Testament like a man picking chocolates from a sampler. These stories sound bold and edgy, but they actually give human beings a level of power Scripture never grants them. It turns frail, quarrelsome, frequently confused people into near-omnipotent gatekeepers, capable of thwarting the purposes of the God who spoke galaxies into existence. As if Athanasius or Jerome could outmaneuver the Almighty with a clever edit.

What gets lost in the drama is the simple truth that God is not passive in His own self-revelation. If He breathed out His Word—really breathed it out, not in some poetic or metaphorical sense—then He also superintended its preservation. The same God who raises kingdoms and topples empires is not suddenly helpless when a council gathers in AD 397. The caricature makes Him look like a nervous playwright watching corrupt actors rip pages from the script, wringing His hands and whispering, “I hope they don’t ruin this.” That’s not the God of Isaiah 40. That’s not the God who promised His Word would not return void.

The conspiracies also flatten the messy, public, sometimes tediously ordinary history of the canon into a kind of ecclesiastical thriller. But the real story is far less cinematic and far more encouraging: scattered Christian communities, across languages and regions, independently recognizing the same books as apostolic, authoritative, and God-breathed. No single bishop or emperor had the reach to orchestrate that coherence. The sheer geographic breadth of early Christian agreement is itself a quiet rebuttal to the idea that the canon could be manipulated by a handful of power-players.

And beneath it all lies a subtle but telling assumption: that humans are clever enough to reshape divine revelation, while God is too polite—or too inept—to intervene. In truth, it gives far too much credit to human cunning and far too little to divine sovereignty. Scripture never presents God as an anxious spectator to history. He governs it. He ordains means and ends. And the formation of the canon belongs to that same providential sweep.

The irony is that the conspiracies, for all their bravado, shrink God down to the size of a worried librarian guarding a fragile archive. The biblical view, by contrast, lifts our eyes to a God who speaks, preserves, gathers, and guards His Word with the same power that called light out of nothing. The canon didn’t survive because people were brilliant. It survived because God is faithful.