Why Adventist Church Leaders Say the Bible Is "Historically Constituted"

20 May 2026

• A New Model of Revelation and Inspiration
• The “Historical Constitution” of God
• The “Historical Constitution” of the Prophet
• Bracketing Out the Apologetical Problem
• Sola Scriptura and the Systematic Approach
• History as an A Priori Category of Cognition
• Can We Distinguish Religious Tradition from Culture?
• Do Our Beliefs Determine Our Life Experiences?
• Is God Timeless?
• Conclusion

A New Model of Revelation and Inspiration

In the mid-1990s, Fernando Canale, an Adventist professor of philosophy and theology, published a series in Andrews University Seminary Studies that proposed a new epistemology (theory of knowledge) for understanding the relationship between revelation and inspiration. Subsequently, this epistemology, which Canale calls the “historical-cognitive model,” has become foundational to the church’s response to contemporary debates over biblical hermeneutics and evolutionary theory.¹ In recent years, whenever General Conference leaders have argued that the Bible is “historically constituted” rather than “historically conditioned,” as historical-critical hermeneutical methods presume, they are echoing a distinction introduced by Canale.² Canale’s historical-cognitive model is also the theoretical framework underlying Norman Gulley’s Systematic Theology, the only systematic theology published by the Adventist Church.

However, although Canale’s epistemology has become foundational to the church’s apologetics, progressive Adventists have hardly noticed its influence. The historical-cognitive model introduces a radical conception of God that effectively denies his transcendence. By rejecting the notion that God is “timeless,” which Canale considers an innovation of Greek philosophy, he denies that God transcends historical time. Gulley incorporates this same assumption into his Systematic Theology as the basis of his foundational claim that “theology must be totally independent of all philosophies because they operate from opposite assumptions.” In the views of Canale and Gulley, the main distinction between philosophy and theology is that the former conceives God as timeless, whereas the latter treats God strictly as a historical phenomenon.³

As I will show in this essay, although Canale promises that his temporal conception of God enables him to defend traditional Adventist teachings on creation, anthropology, eschatology, and the prophetic gift, he is not successful in his aims. All that results from Canale’s epistemology is a diminished conception of God, history, and human reason. God’s transcendence is diminished because he is no longer conceived as atemporal; he regards history as coterminous with scriptural tradition, to the exclusion of other traditions and elements of human culture; and human reason is deprived of its indispensable role in understanding God and the world we inhabit. Far from resolving the difficulties of prior models of revelation and inspiration, the historical-cognitive model absolves the church from engaging in its apologetical responsibility of rationally persuading others of its teachings, especially when they conflict with science and history.

The “Historical Constitution” of God

In the first part of his series, Canale introduces his historical-cognitive epistemology by proposing grounds for a new approach to revelation and inspiration. He begins by affirming that according to the Bible, both revelation, defined as the process by which ideas are generated in a prophet’s mind, and inspiration, defined as the “process through which the prophets wrote down the revealed ideas and produced the Bible,” are acts of God. Nonetheless, both revelation and inspiration also involve human agents. Thus, he argues that proper conceptions of both God’s activity and human cognition are essential to understanding revelation and inspiration.⁴

Canale thinks a new theological model for understanding revelation and inspiration is necessary because, in his view, “one basic commonality to most, if not all, of these [previous models] is that God’s being and activity are characterized less on the basis of biblical concepts than on concepts produced by human philosophy—more specifically, Greek philosophy.” Consequently, because the Hebrew understanding of God has not always aligned with the philosophical view, prior models of revelation and inspiration “have tended either to openly reject or covertly belittle the ideological content of the [Old Testament].” Early Christian theologians borrowed Greek philosophical concepts to elucidate “the meaning of God’s being, his transcendence, and his actions in history.” However, over time, these ideas began “to displace [Old Testament] thought from its proper role in Christian theology.”⁵

According to Canale, the most crucial distinction between the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of God “is that the former interprets ultimate reality to be timeless, whereas the Bible considers reality to be temporal and historical.” He defines timelessness as “the conception that reality in general and God in particular are essentially and necessarily voided of, and incompatible with, time and space.” Canale argues that by treating God and reality as timeless, traditional theology “eliminates from the realm of genuine reality anything that may be considered as historical, or analogical to what we call history.” It denies that history “properly belong[s] to reality.” Because God is timeless, his “actions cannot be conceived as his personal, historical involvement and operation within history, but rather as historical manifestations of one eternal act outside of history.” This one eternal act is the act whereby God brought the world into existence and continues to sustain it in predetermined ways.⁶

Canale wants to reject the timeless conception of God because, in his view, if God is timeless, his acts in history cannot be interpreted as belonging essentially to his nature. Rather, what constitutes a historical act of God is merely a human judgment conditioned by our historical circumstances. We therefore cannot reliably confirm that God is the agent behind these acts. Canale states that in the Old Testament, by contrast, God’s historical acts are presented as “divine acts in which God himself, experiencing the created temporal sequence (i.e., past, present, and future), but not limited to it, is a historical agent within the continuous flux of history.” In other words, a “timeless” God, in his view, cannot personally experience the passage of time. God therefore “cannot be thought of as achieving the work of atonement through a historical act involving contingency and real risk.”⁷ That is, if God transcends time, he cannot have genuinely risked his own life when Jesus died on the cross. In Canale’s view, unless it were possible for Jesus to sin, he could not have demonstrated that we can obey God despite our sinful condition. He maintains that if God’s law is just and universally applicable, God himself must have faced the threat of eternal death if he disobeyed his law.

Canale states, “Biblical thinking about reality in general and about God in particular posits that reality is essentially temporal and historical.” He cites the theologian Oscar Cullmann to support this view: “eternity, which is possible only as an attribute of God, is time, or, to put it better, what we call ‘time’ is nothing but a part, defined and delimited by God, of this same unending duration of God’s time.”⁸ In other words, God, whose nature is eternal (and therefore characterized by temporality), only expresses his nature to us within time.

This claim is sufficient for Canale’s purpose of defending the idea that God reveals himself to us in history. Nevertheless, he goes further, suggesting that God not only reveals himself to us in history but that he is essentially a historical person. Canale states, “real things, including God’s being and activities, exist and occur in space and time.”⁹ He goes beyond merely stating that space and time are means by which God reveals his nature to us or that they are essential to his nature (in other words, that one cannot conceive God without recognizing space and time as belonging to his essence). Instead, he argues that God is a being in space and time.

Because prior models of revelation and inspiration have accepted God’s timelessness, Canale argues they have effectively rejected the biblical view of God. Instead, these prior models rely on “human philosophy” to interpret the Bible. This has produced a variety of conflicting interpretations of revelation, each associated with a different philosophical school. Canale claims that the reason for competing theological schools is the church’s abandonment of the sola Scriptura principle, which he describes as the principle that only the biblical text itself, and not the external resources of philosophy or historical criticism, should be consulted in interpreting the Bible.

Canale states, “If the timelessness of God is incorporated into theological methodology as a presupposition which determines the nature of God’s actions, the sola Scriptura principle cannot be applied, even though it might be theoretically affirmed.”¹⁰ He explains that if God is timeless, then divine revelation must “pertain to the timeless realm.” Since the Bible contains historical content, this content must “belong, not to its divine cause, but rather to the human condition necessary for the expression of its divinely (timelessly) originated content. Thus, the Scriptures are said to be ‘historically conditioned.’” By contrast, he argues, if we are to maintain that the whole Bible is divinely originated, we must affirm “that God is capable of acting genuinely in history,” and that the Bible is therefore “‘historically constituted.’”¹¹ When the General Conference promotes this terminological distinction to defend its rejection of historical-critical hermeneutics, it denies that God transcends time. In other words, God himself is “historically constituted.”

The “Historical Constitution” of the Prophet

As noted above, Canale maintains that God and the human prophet are involved in revelation and inspiration. He explains, “besides God the other agent involved in the revelation-inspiration process is the human writer. The action of God is addressed to, and localized in, this writer. Both revelation and inspiration as acts of God occur within the human nature of the writer.”¹² In stating that they belong to the “human nature” of the prophet, Canale is asserting that these inspired acts are essential to the prophet’s nature. As we will see, his historical-cognitive model is based on the claim that a prophet’s historical context is an a priori cognitive “category” that determines their reception of divine revelations. Thus, when Canale states that revelatory acts “occur within the human nature of the writer,” he means that the historical context that conditions the prophet’s reception of a divine revelation—specifically, their religious tradition—is essential to the prophet’s nature. This means that a prophet could not reject the previous claims of their religious tradition without contradicting their nature.

Canale argues that while God supplies the content of a revelation, its form is supplied by the prophet. His understanding of the human agent corresponds to his temporal conception of God. In Canale’s view, if a divine revelation is timeless, a human being could not understand it unless their soul is timeless. Consequently, previous epistemological models have “usually adopted a timeless interpretation of being and knowledge of the human entity as an immortal soul or as ‘having’ an immortal soul.”¹³

Canale therefore maintains that if Adventists are to reject the immortality of the soul, they must reject God’s timelessness since a timeless God cannot communicate a timeless revelation to finite humans. Instead, he proposes that in “the biblical historical-relational understanding,” a person’s nature “is seen as the actual historical concrete reality of the individual, who wholistically opens to the ‘other’ and the world.” Canale maintains that whereas the classical model “presents human reason as reaching general (universal) timeless concepts by elimination of the historical and material aspects of reality,” his model “understands the cognitive mode as obtaining knowledge historically by way of the conscious gathering and integration of all the data provided by concrete, historical events.” In other words, the mind of the prophet who receives a revelation from God is “historically constituted” by their religious tradition. Without their religious tradition, through which God has previously revealed himself, a prophet could not confirm that their revelation came from God.¹⁴

As will become clearer below, Canale’s historical-cognitive model presents a circumscribed view of history and human cognition. History, for Canale, is nothing other than the religious tradition in which one was raised. He would not regard ideas from other religions as valid revelations from God, no matter how influential these ideas may have been on an individual. Additionally, because one’s cognition is constituted primarily by one’s historical tradition, if a person were to reject their traditional religious teachings, they would undermine their personhood and identity. Canale’s historical-cognitive model thus has the consequence of delegitimizing critics of the religious tradition and precluding ecumenical dialogue.

Bracketing Out the Apologetical Problem

In the second part of his series, Canale asks, “How should Christian theology proceed to define a theological position about the origin of Scripture which is able to integrate all the pertinent data provided by Scripture itself?” Although the most straightforward answer to this question is that Christians ought to adopt an “exegetical-biblical methodology” consisting of “a technical interpretation of the origin of Scripture … obtained by going to the Bible itself,” Canale considers this methodology inadequate because “the Bible does not provide a technical explanation of its epistemological origin.” That is, because the Bible itself does not explain how revelation and inspiration occurred, it is difficult to authenticate the Bible as a divine revelation based on its claims. Canale therefore considers it necessary to supplement biblical exegesis with an epistemology that explains the nature of revelation and inspiration. He insists that his epistemology does not furnish an additional source of theological data besides the content of divine revelation. Rather, he claims that his “systematic approach” only imposes a particular form on the biblical data relevant to the topic of revelation and inspiration, whereas the data itself comes from the Bible, rather than from philosophy.¹⁵

Canale does not question the Bible’s authenticity. He argues that since the Enlightenment, “the supernatural role of God became almost obliterated from the epistemological explanation of the origin of Scripture.” Consequently, conservative Christian theologians have found it necessary “to defend their traditional theological conceptions” by “reaffirm[ing] the classical understanding of the origin of Scripture, turning it into an apologetical approach.” Canale affirms, “God is the author of Scripture, and consequently no error is to be found in it. Scripture is infallible and true because of its supernatural, divine origin. Not only is the Bible without error, but its truth is grounded a priori by reason of its origin. It logically follows that no a posteriori verification of its contents is necessary.”¹⁶

In other words, conservative Christian apologetics works by presuming that God is the author of scripture and concluding that it therefore must be true. Canale does not address the underlying problem with conservative Christian apologetics, namely, that the Bible needs not only “a posteriori verification,” but authentication—confirmation that we ought to regard it as an authentic and authoritative revelation from God. He agrees with conservative apologists that the Bible is “infallible and true because of its supernatural, divine origin,” and he does not try to persuade those who do not believe in supernatural phenomena. In Canale’s view, conservative theology has only stagnated because it has not examined the epistemological foundations of the doctrine of revelation and inspiration, for fear of raising apologetical difficulties. Conservatives face the challenge that if the process of revelation and inspiration cannot be understood apart from a supplementary conceptual framework, the details of which are not present within the Bible itself, then it is impossible to recognize the Bible as true because of its origin. Without this framework, a posteriori verification of the Bible’s revelatory status becomes necessary. But this places them at a disadvantage since they do not believe the Bible needs such verification.

Canale proposes that to resolve this problem, we must set aside the apologetical issue of demonstrating that God revealed the Bible’s contents. He argues, “The bracketing out of the apologetical approach from the area in which the doctrine of revelation and inspiration is to be discussed becomes … a necessary methodological step to uncover the subject matter to be interpreted, namely, the epistemological origin of the Bible.” He states that “apologetical issues should not be entertained” in considering the nature of revelation.¹⁷ In other words, Canale maintains that to develop a supplementary framework for understanding revelation and inspiration, we must ignore the issue of demonstrating that the Bible is the supernaturally revealed word of God. The supernatural origins of the Bible must be assumed without question if one is to maintain that the Bible is God’s word. No epistemologist ought to find it necessary to defend this assumption. The epistemological model cannot ground the a priori presupposition that the Bible is the word of God, since in the conservative viewpoint, only this presupposition itself can serve as the valid basis of Christian theology.

The problems with Canale’s “bracketing out of the apologetical approach” are obvious. The purpose of his epistemology is to ground our understanding of the Bible’s claim to be the authentic word of God, based on the presupposition that the Bible correctly testifies to its status as a divine revelation. However, if a person sees no problem with this presupposition (such as its circular reasoning), there is no need for an epistemological framework. Why would we need to understand how revelation takes place if we are satisfied with the assumption that it has occurred by supernatural means (which are, by definition, inexplicable)? It seems that conservative theologians argue that the Bible “needs” no a posteriori verification because they realize that they are ill-equipped to provide any such verification.

Not only does Canale’s unwillingness to confront the apologetical challenge of authenticating the Bible’s divine origin betray a recognition of the unpersuasiveness of his presuppositions, but his epistemology does not serve its stated function. His discussion of revelation and inspiration seems to be an opportunity to introduce his temporal conception of God rather than a solution to the problem of authenticating Scripture. His temporal conception of God enables him to claim that the “historical” contents of the Bible are doctrinally significant. He insists that we ought to believe the Old Testament conception of God rather than acknowledge the rationality of the “Greek philosophical” standpoint because he wants to maintain that we can only believe and obey God by keeping the commandments he revealed in the Old Testament. Canale’s doctrine is intended to ground the Adventist doctrines of the historicity of the biblical myths, such as the seven-day creation; the necessity of obeying the Levitical law; the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and the idea that through Jesus, God risked his eternal life to demonstrate the absolute necessity of obeying his immutable law.

This last implication of Canale’s epistemology exposes what is probably the most theologically problematic aspect of his views on God. Those who affirm God’s timelessness believe that God exists necessarily—that it is impossible for God not to exist. This is what it means to describe God as eternal or as transcending time. It is this aspect of God that the ontological argument for his existence has sought to capture: the principle that God is the necessity by which the world exists. If it were possible for God to render himself nonexistent by choosing not to obey his law, this would mean that God’s existence is not necessary but contingent on his obedience. Since God’s existence would be contingent, we could therefore not affirm that God is the infinite being from which all contingent things have necessarily come into existence. Instead, there must be something more necessary than God himself, which must be his law. Thus Canale’s epistemology implies that only the Ten Commandments are eternal and non-contingent and that God, an anthropomorphic being in time, is not eternal because of his infinite and perfect nature, but merely because of his free choice to obey the Ten Commandments.

This doctrine is far removed from any recognizable form of Christianity, which teaches that through faith in Christ’s resurrection, we are delivered from the inevitable consequence of disobeying the law, namely death. If obeying the law was so necessary that even God himself could not violate it without thereby annihilating himself, it would be impossible for him to supervene the effects of the law by offering us salvation from its consequences. However, this is precisely what faith in Christ promises. Those who accept Canale’s epistemology cannot consistently believe in righteousness through faith in Christ’s power to overcome the law.

Sola Scriptura and the Systematic Approach

Canale believes the sola Scriptura principle prohibits using external resources, including philosophical reasoning, for interpreting the Bible. This is a corollary of his view that philosophy aims at identifying “timeless” truths by eliminating all historical contingency. Rather than viewing philosophy as the definitive activity of the human mind, he considers it an imposter of valid reasoning, which consists of adherence to religious tradition. The effect of Canale’s argument that human reasoning is antithetical to the sola Scriptura principle is that readers must defer to traditional authorities since they cannot validly apply critical reason to interpreting the Bible’s contents. He therefore undermines the original purpose of the sola Scriptura principle, which was to contend that biblical interpretation should not be mediated through established religious authorities. Using one’s autonomous reason in interpreting the Bible is not antithetical to the sola Scriptura principle but is precisely what this principle was intended to defend.

Canale suggests that abandoning the sola Scriptura principle in favor of philosophical interpretations of the Bible is responsible for the proliferation of competing theological schools and denominations. However, in my view, far from enforcing a singular interpretation of the Bible, the sola Scriptura principle is directly responsible for this historical phenomenon, since it denies that a single religious institution—for example, the Catholic Church—is responsible for enforcing an authorized interpretation. Because many biblical texts contradict each other and have obscure meanings, the Bible inevitably yields conflicting interpretations. Without external historical resources to illuminate the original meanings of these texts, they are often unintelligible. Even the Adventist church, I would suggest, does not abide by the sola Scriptura principle, as construed in the narrow sense by Canale, since it relies on extra-biblical history to understand the meaning of its prophecies.

Canale is anxious to show that his epistemological model does not succumb to the philosophizing tendencies of prior models. He explains, “Human philosophy provides solutions to the issues”—e.g. the nature of God, human existence, reality, or reason—“on the basis of natural information and the use of human reason and imagination.” By contrast, he argues, “theology should develop an understanding of these issues on the basis of—and in full harmony with—the interpretation they receive in Scripture.”¹⁸

For Canale, what distinguishes philosophy and theology is not that they deal with separate issues but that they adopt different approaches to solving them. In a footnote, Canale states that he “agree[s] with Paul Tillich when he states that ‘philosophy and theology ask the question of being’ … thus implying that both share the same subject matter.” He “disagree[s] with Tillich, however, when he goes on to say that ‘philosophy deals with the structure of being in itself; theology deals with the meaning of being for us’ … thus implying that philosophy and theology do not share the same subject matter after all, but rather have very different, though mutually complementary, objects of study.”¹⁹ Canale’s distinction between these two disciplines does not guarantee that each has its proper domain. He does not maintain that philosophy is concerned with a knowledge of the natural world, while theology is concerned with teaching faith and obedience to God. Rather, because they have the same subject matter, of which there can be only one valid interpretation, Canale believes theology entirely precludes philosophical and scientific reasoning. The Bible is the only valid source of knowledge about the world.

Canale argues, “Scientific faithfulness to the sola Scriptura principle should replace any humanly originated interpretation of philosophical issues by one of biblical origin.”²⁰ He explains, “From a scientific viewpoint, the data best qualified to shed light on the exploration of the origin of Scripture come from Scripture itself,” adding that “such a fact agrees with the sola Scriptura principle that provided the ground for a new approach to the doctrine of revelation and inspiration.”²¹ Canale regards science as the demonstration of conclusions about a particular subject matter from premises proper to that subject matter.

The problem with his understanding of the “scientific viewpoint” of theology is that by proposing to demonstrate the Bible’s divine origins from the Bible itself, he makes it impossible to falsify its claims about its origins. A book like the Bible may affirm or deny that it has a supernatural origin, but this is no guarantee that it is telling the truth. The Greek poet Homer might have claimed to possess a prophetic gift whereby he revealed the nature of the gods in his epics, but this would not be a good reason to believe him. Even the internal logical coherence of a system deduced from biblical premises is not adequate to prove its claims. Only by its practical usefulness or agreement with our experiences can we regard any scientific system, including theology, as true. However, Canale forbids this criterion of truth by insisting that we must believe the Bible based on our presupposition of its supernatural origins rather than empirical confirmation, and by suggesting that the alternative to this presupposition, namely philosophy, is an imposter of valid cognition, which is historically constituted.

Canale proposes to obtain his theological premises from the Bible. He contends that those who consistently apply the sola Scriptura principle will inevitably arrive at “the biblical conception about God and human nature as temporal-historical realities capable of direct interrelation.” In his view, this contradicts the “classical” and “liberal” models of revelation and inspiration, which cannot conceive God and humans as capable of historical interaction due to their “timeless” conception of God.²²

According to Canale, in the classical model of revelation and inspiration, represented by Thomas Aquinas, God is timeless. Since the contents of revelation, including the means of salvation, must also be timeless, salvation is only possible if God elevates people’s minds above the limits of their historical circumstances. This requires belief in a supernatural soul capable of transcending the body. Additionally, in the classical model, the human agents involved in acts of inspiration are merely the passive recipients of revelations. God is the one who, through direct dictation or providential guidance, causes the prophet to write the Bible in the way he intends. Canale concludes that in the classical model, the historical process by which the Bible was written, which accounts for its various genres, is ultimately irrelevant. Canale objects to both implications of the classical model. He cannot see how a historically constituted mind can recognize transcendent truths. In his view, the notion of timeless truths necessarily invalidates the historically contingent parts of the Bible. Thus, he insists on the sola Scriptura principle, which demands that we believe all parts of the Bible are necessary for salvation.²³

In Canale’s assessment, the liberal model fares no better. Taking Friedrich Schleiermacher as a representative of this model, he notes that Schleiermacher also accepts the idea that God is timeless. However, influenced by Immanuel Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and the way they appear to us in space and time, Schleiermacher denied that our minds have access to a complete knowledge of God, who transcends space and time. In Canale’s view, the liberal model therefore reproduces the error of the classical model by stating that God does not reveal himself through the historical processes of prophetic inspiration. Moreover, in the liberal—or, more accurately, Kantian—model, a transcendent God cannot reveal himself to our rational cognitive faculties, which are limited by space and time. Instead, according to Canale, Schleiermacher maintained that God only reveals himself to our emotional faculties, by engendering pious feelings. He therefore cannot convey propositional truths to us. The act of inspiration is reduced to merely putting our feelings of absolute dependence on God into words. Canale objects to the liberal model because he does not believe that the feeling of absolute dependence on God is adequate for salvation. Rather, in his view, we can only be saved by believing the Bible’s propositions, which have historical content.²⁴

History as an A Priori Category of Cognition

In the final part of his series, Canale states that the purpose of his historical-cognitive model is to determine “whether Scripture’s claim to be the concepts and words of God is possible.” He insists that this possibility “need[s] to be ascertained from the contents of Scripture” itself.²⁵ A good epistemological model must reject any conception of God not explicitly promoted in the Bible. In his view, this includes the notion that God is timeless. Only by regarding the Bible as the historical act of a temporal God can we affirm that the entire Bible is his word.

In addition to denying God’s timelessness, Canale rejects the idea that the Bible was “produced by the same kind of divine activity,” such as, for instance, a single act of predestination by which he determined the prophets to know what he intended to reveal. Rather, Canale states that his model “conceive[s] of God as acting and communicating directly throughout human history in a variety of ways, at different times.” This allows him to account for the variety of ways in which the Bible was written while nonetheless ascribing it to God: “The identification of the main patterns utilized by God in the generation of Scripture cannot be rationally deduced from his nature but rather described from the phenomena of Scripture.” In these phenomena, he states, “we discover God presenting himself” in several different ways, which, in “order of decreasing cognitive specificity,” may be listed as follows: “in history to human beings (theophanies), writing, speaking, giving visual representations, historically acting in history, and acting in relation to the life experience of an individual.” Canale calls these means of God’s self-revelation “meaning-full forms,” arguing that what makes them meaningful is not simply the objective reality of their occurrence within history, but their subjective reception “by the human nature of the biblical writer, notably involving his cognitive capabilities.”²⁶

The prophet can receive divine revelations in these “meaning-full forms” because they occur within history, which constitutes the prophet’s cognitive capabilities. In other words, what a prophet can think is entirely determined by their historical context. Canale explains the historical constitution of human nature by reinterpreting the Aristotelian and Kantian notions of the a priori cognitive “categories.” He states, “Without a priori categories the human mind cannot receive and process any meaning-full form.”²⁷

In different ways, Aristotle and Kant regarded the a priori categories as determining what we can affirm about the objects we perceive. For Aristotle, the categories refer to various ways we describe existing things. He derived his understanding of the categories from analyzing the language we use to describe the world. By contrast, Kant maintained that the categories of cognition are not necessarily properties of the world outside ourselves but merely properties of our reasoning that condition how we perceive the world. For Kant, the categories are a priori because they condition, and are therefore conceptually prior to, our experiences of the outside world.

Canale ostensibly rejects the Aristotelian and Kantian views of the categories, suggesting that Aristotle and Kant regarded them as “timeless possessions of the nature of reason” that “are not originated in history.” (This characterization is more true for Kant than for Aristotle, who regarded the categories as properties of language, which originated in history.) Instead, Canale proposes that “the a priori categories are not grounded in timeless being or reason, but rather in the historical experience of the prophet with God’s previous revelations in the Lebenswelt” (life experience of the individual). In his view, “These previous revelations may include what other biblical prophets have said and written and even personal revelations given by God to the prophet in his or her past experience.” In other words, he argues that these a priori categories are grounded in the historical experience of the prophet as shaped by their religious tradition, which is, in turn, shaped by the experiences of previous prophets. The evidence for the authenticity of a prophet’s revelation is its consistency with prior revelations.²⁸

Although Canale regards a prophet’s life experience as the grounds of their a priori cognitive categories, he denies that these categories determine either the content or the form of prophetic revelations. In his view, the content of revelation is contained in the “meaning-full forms” noted above, while the form in which revelation is presented is freely chosen by the prophet. Canale lists five factors that “play a decisive role in the cognitive process” by which revelations are received. In order of their importance, these are “presuppositional structure, doctrinal conceptions, sociocultural idiosyncrasies, personal life experiences, and individual personal traits.” This ordering guarantees that even if prophets have different personal experiences and traits, these will not affect their prophecies as much as their religious tradition. Canale argues, “even when no two prophets interpret the divinely originated meaning-full forms with the same a priori categories (life experience), no theological pluralism follows because the variety in the content of their a priori experiences is not systematic or doctrinal, but rather cultural and personal.”²⁹ Unless a prophet’s presuppositions and doctrines were more decisive than cultural or personal influences, it would be impossible to maintain that two prophets differ only in aesthetic preferences rather than doctrinally.

Can We Distinguish Religious Tradition from Culture?

Canale does not justify his prioritization of the factors that influence a prophet’s inspiration except by insisting that it must be correct if the Bible’s historical content is theologically significant. But how can we be so sure that a prophetic revelation was more influenced by doctrinal, rather than cultural or personal, factors? How can we confirm that, as Canale states, “the historical origination and content of the a priori categories, which the prophet brings to the cognitive event of revelation, are not to be identified with changing human culture, as is done in the liberal model”?³⁰ How can a distinction between culture and religious tradition be sustained?

Canale asserts that God occasionally intervenes in the process of inspiration to ensure that it aligns with what he wants to reveal. He states, “God’s specific historical interventions in the process of proclaiming divine revelation in an oral or written form are designed to ensure three things: (1) that the prophet remains God’s representative, not replacing God’s contents with his or her own interpretations or ideas; (2) that the prophet is assisted in finding the most fitting way to communicate revealed truth; and (3) that, on the basis of the simultaneity of writing and thinking, new ideas are originated during the actual process of writing.” However, he adds that these interventions “should not be conceived as ways by which God overrode the essential characteristics of the human modes of cognition and language so as to eliminate their limitedness, indeterminacy, ambiguity, impreciseness, or inaccuracy.”³¹ These interventions are how God ensures a distinction between culture, which is created by humans, and religious tradition, which has a divine origin.

However, Canale’s answer does not sufficiently explain how we know a prophet’s cognitive experience has a divine origin. He states that the criterion for authenticating a prophetic revelation is whether it agrees with prior revelations in the religious tradition. But this only defers the problem of authentication to an earlier prophet in the tradition. How can we confirm that the first prophet within a religious tradition, such as Moses, the legendary author of the Pentateuch, is authoritative if there was no prophet before him against which his claims can be validated? Canale’s epistemology could be employed by any religious tradition to argue that as an a priori category of cognition, its historical experiences are how subsequent prophecies can be validated. Far from demonstrating that the Bible alone is the word of God, the historical-cognitive model could be used to argue that any book, such as the Quran or the Upanishads, is the word of God. By “bracketing out” the apologetical issue, Canale has admitted no other criteria for validating this claim.

Canale’s conception of God’s revelatory activity as taking place within the prophet’s historically constituted cognition makes it impossible to distinguish between God and tradition. How can we distinguish divine interventions from natural or historical processes without regarding these interventions as originating in some realm apart from nature and history—from some realm of “timelessness”? The only other realm that Canale allows is human freedom, as distinguished from natural and historical necessity. Is God then simply the product of our free will? Canale is willing to deny God’s timelessness so he can affirm that prophets have an active role in prophesying. However, in doing so, he practically eliminates God from the picture. By denying God’s transcendence over time, Canale effectively reduces God to a cultural phenomenon, despite his insistence on a meaningful distinction between culture and religious tradition.

Do Our Beliefs Determine Our Life Experiences?

Another problem with Canale’s epistemology is his notion of an a priori category. He uses the term “a priori” to mean “objectively prior to the experience of a particular individual.” However, neither Aristotle nor Kant conceived categories as a priori in this way. Aristotle arrived at his understanding of the categories by analyzing our use of language in describing things. For Aristotle, religious tradition cannot be described as a category because no grammatical structure is uniquely employed in describing tradition. We describe religious traditions using the same nouns, verbs, and adjectives with which we describe everything else. Religious traditions may be prior to our individual experiences, but our understanding of these traditions is mediated through our use of language, as is our understanding of everything else.

Kant located the categorical structures in the mind or transcendental ego. For him, we cannot know whether things have an independent reality apart from how they appear to us. Nevertheless, religious tradition cannot be described as a cognitive category for Kant and Aristotle because we only know history through experience, not as a condition of experience. History may be prior to our individual experiences, but it is not a precondition of cognitive experience itself. It does not belong to cognition itself, for obtaining knowledge of history by experience would not be necessary if it was. Rather, we would possess an innate knowledge of history.

Canale tries to mediate the positions of Aristotle and Kant. Like Aristotle, he affirms that we can know an objective reality outside ourselves, namely history, through which God reveals himself. But like Kant, he insists that the prophet has a free volition whereby they can put the contents of their revelations into their own words. Thus, he maintains that our historical experiences determine the cognitive structures through which the objects of our perceptions are mediated to the mind. The mind has the power to freely affirm or deny these mediated ideas, but it cannot escape its historical constitution. The problem with Canale’s epistemology is not its proposal that our ideas are shaped by our previous experiences, but its suggestion that there is a distinction between the a priori “historical” ideas that constitute the mind and the other ideas that the mind can freely choose to deny. The contents of all ideas in our minds are ultimately derived from our sensory experiences. The mind only rejects ideas by weighing the relative merits between two competing ideas (or between the idea and one’s feelings) and determining which one is the most persuasive. Its freedom is augmented only by its wide knowledge of ideas by which it can determine the merits of new insights. Thus, the mind’s freedom is entirely constrained by the ideas it has previously encountered. There is no distinction between the historical ideas that constitute the mind and the ideas that the mind affirms or denies.

Since traditional religious teachings and social norms must be learned through experience, Canale’s ordering of the five factors involved in cognition, in which one’s “presuppositional structure” and “doctrinal conceptions” are more important than their social and personal experiences, is wrong. The characteristics of a person’s social and cultural environment condition their personal life experiences, and their character or personality traits are the results of these experiences. An individual’s “presuppositions,” and any doctrines derived from them, are simply the set of beliefs about the world that they have developed during their lives and that they use to interpret subsequent experiences. There can be little doubt that our beliefs subsequently influence how we live our lives or interact with our social settings. Nevertheless, unless we believe in Socratic recollection, according to which we innately know everything that will ever happen to us, we cannot affirm that these beliefs are more important than the other factors.

Moreover, because our “presuppositions” are conditioned by our social setting and personal experiences, they are not arbitrary or interchangeable. We cannot artificially substitute the presupposition that the Bible is God’s word in place of judgments based on our practical experiences. Perhaps a priori cognitive categories shape our judgments, at least to the extent that we can put our perceptions into words. However, history itself is not one of these categories. We can experience things without being able to fit them into a coherent historical narrative. The effect of insisting that religious tradition is an a priori “category” is simply to circumscribe what properly belongs to history, by eliminating those events that do not fit into the church’s doctrinal narratives.

In Adventist theology, this tendency can be seen in the church’s dismissive treatment of momentous historical events, such as World War II, which do not fit neatly into its eschatological narrative. It can also be seen in the church’s routine dismissal of the individual experiences of those whose lifestyles do not align with the church’s moral norms. Ultimately, Canale’s epistemology is intended to reinforce the Adventist church’s exclusivist conception of religious knowledge. Unfortunately, it does so at the expense of any meaningful notion of God as a transcendent being.

Is God Timeless?

Canale portrays his temporal conception of God as the biblical alternative to the “timeless” conception of God, which he attributes to the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. He argues that according to Aristotelian epistemology, reason works by “reaching general (universal) timeless concepts” through the “elimination of the historical and material aspects of reality.” However, this is a travesty of both Aristotle’s method and the biblical evidence for God’s timelessness.

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle sought to identify the premises common to all sciences. However, he did not believe these premises can yield a detailed understanding of the actual world. As John H. Randall, Jr., explains, in contrast to the Platonist view of science as a “single body of knowledge,” “Aristotle formulates the notion of a whole series of separate and distinct ‘sciences,’ all of which possess certain methods and certain distinctions in common, but each of which has also its own distinctive … ‘principles,’ and its own determinate subject matter.” By deducing conclusions from the distinctive principles of a given science, Aristotle sought “a knowledge of the whys, … the ‘reasons for’ true statements.” He sought to show “the reasons why … things are as they are observed to be, and why they must be so.”

Aristotle argued that every science involved three elements. First, it involves “that ‘about which’ it establishes some theorem or conclusion,” that is, a particular subject matter or “certain ‘kind’ of thing” proper to the science. Second, every science involves “‘what’ it establishes as conclusions,” namely, “the causes and properties of that particular kind of thing.” Finally, it involves “that ‘from which’ it demonstrates its conclusions … namely, its first things, or … its principles.”³²

In other words, for Aristotle, scientific investigation is not only about discovering empirical facts about a particular kind of thing. Factual discoveries are only one element of science, namely that about which it establishes its conclusions. Science does not end with the discovery of facts. Although scientific conclusions must align with observable facts, scientific demonstrations are more valuable than the observed facts by themselves, since they enable us to predict the outcomes of future scenarios in which similar causes of a particular phenomenon are present. The purpose of scientific reasoning is to determine the causes, reasons, or explanations for things. To the extent that the reasons for things apply across multiple instances of a particular kind of phenomenon and across multiple moments in time, they may be said to transcend time—to be atemporal, eternal, or “timeless.”

Nevertheless, in Aristotle’s view, the particular instances of any given kind of thing, and not the abstract kinds of thing themselves, are ontologically primary. For Aristotle, for a thing to exist or to be is for it to be a determinate individual. “Aristotle states his general principle: ‘To be separate … and individual … belongs above all to any ousia [being or substance].’”³³ Canale is wrong to state that Aristotle’s philosophy involves the “elimination of the historical and material aspects of reality,” as though it were possible to understand the nature of a thing while eliminating the thing itself.

Aristotelian metaphysics has contributed to the Western Christian understanding of God by providing us with a means of clarifying what it means for God to be eternal or “timeless.” As Aristotle taught, reasoning is concerned with explaining why things are as they are. If we can determine that a particular kind of thing has a common cause, then given a similar set of observable circumstances, we can infer that a similar effect will likely be produced. But what guarantees that we can reliably reason about things in this way, as though they are in some sense “necessary”?

The notion of God emerges from a consideration of this problem. God is the necessary order that is active in the universe. In other words, “God” is the name by which we designate that which guarantees activity and order in the universe and that necessitates the world’s existence. These three properties of reality—activity, order, and necessary existence—are inextricably interrelated: one thing cannot act on another or produce a necessary effect unless both the mover and the thing moved, or both cause and effect, belong to the same order of things, and we cannot affirm that something exists unless we can perceive through our senses, which exist within the same natural order.

God is not simply one agent or mover among many. He should not be reduced to a first efficient cause, a “first mover,” existing in time. Rather, God is the absolute first cause of things, by which I mean that he is activity, order, and necessary existence itself. Nothing can exist without God, because for a thing to exist is for it to be the product of natural processes, through which God acts. God should not be conceived as a being in time, because the passage of time is itself only measurable by the changes in the qualities or attributes of things from one moment to the next. Activity, change, or motion can only be conceived as occurring in time, so time itself must be an attribute of God, through which he expresses himself.

God is not “timeless,” if this means that time is not an element of the universal order in which God acts. Time is constitutive of the universal order. However, to deny that God is timeless in this sense is not the same as denying that God is transcendent and atemporal. We cannot perceive what does not occur within time—and it is precisely for this reason that we cannot distinguish between what is natural or “supernatural,” or between that which is “historically conditioned” and that which appears unconditionally (without explanation) in history. Nevertheless, insofar as we can identify reasons for things that apply across time, these reasons can be called atemporal, since their occurrence does not depend on a specific moment, but only on a certain set of other conditions. If God is, by definition, the form or essence of the natural order in which these conditions appear, then he must be atemporal, just as these causal laws are (although they are only instantiated in particular moments in time).

This philosophical conception of God differs from Canale’s views in that it identifies God not as a particular being in time, but as the formal cause or essence of time itself. Since Canale maintains that God is an anthropomorphic being who interacts personally with human beings through historical acts of revelation, he reduces God to a temporal agent—one who is effectively indistinguishable from the prophet who received a revelation. This anthropomorphic conception of God cannot be defended without relying on arguments from design, which make the unjustified assumption that complex natural phenomena must have been designed with the same intentionality as human artifacts. This assumption fails to recognize that natural phenomena are distinguishable from artificial ones because the latter are intended for human use, whereas the usefulness of natural objects to humans is merely coincidental.

I would like to note another important consequence of the “timeless” conception of God that I am proposing, namely that the material substance of nature inheres within God’s essential nature. Individual things in the universe can only be conceived as existing if they are the products of natural processes, of which God is the absolute first cause and active agent. Moreover, time is only measured by changes in the qualities of things from one moment to the next. Thus, the passage of time depends on the existence of things by which it can be measured. If we are to affirm that God has existed for all eternity, then these distinct things or events by which time is measured must also belong to the essence of God, of whom time is an essential attribute. When God has traditionally been described as that whose essence involves existence, or as that which necessarily exists, this can only mean that God’s essence, as the ground and structure of space and time, involves the eternal creation of existing things through the natural processes of generation and disintegration—processes that require material components. The material substance of reality therefore belongs to the essence of God.

It is important to note that differences or changes in the qualities of things do not depend on the perception of these differences by a human intellect. These qualitative changes exist and are conceived in the infinite intellect of God—although this term “intellect” can only be intended in a metaphorical sense, since God is not an anthropomorphic being who passively observes temporal affairs, as human beings are, but is the active agent in temporal processes.

Since both the form and the material substance of reality are essential attributes of God, he is the immanent cause of the universe. The affirmation of God’s immanence should not be taken as a rejection of his transcendence: as I have already argued, God is transcendent since he is the formal cause of the natural order, the laws of which transcend particular moments in time. Nonetheless, the ultimate substance of material things is part of God’s essence, meaning that material substances do not conserve themselves. God did not set the universe into motion and leave it to run its course by mechanical necessity. God is the necessity by which the universe runs its course.

Canale’s argument that God cannot be timeless only makes sense if we deny God’s immanence, since then we would be justified in suggesting that there is no way of knowing whether God acts outside of time, inasmuch as we can only experience what happens in time. But Canale fails to acknowledge that if God cannot be conceived as transcending time, there is no way of identifying him as a transitive cause of the universe, that is, as a being distinct from the historical order itself. If we deny that God exists outside the temporal order, then we must affirm that he is immanent in it. However, Canale refuses to draw this conclusion because of its panentheism. He criticizes the alleged panentheism of the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, arguing that Buber’s emphasis on God’s absolute transcendence brings him full circle to an affirmation of God’s absolute immanence.³⁴

For Canale, God is neither “timeless” nor immanent. Rather, he is an anthropomorphic being subject to the laws of space and time. He is not concerned with resolving the tension between his claim that God is an anthropomorphic, spatiotemporal being and his claim that God is the cause of the natural order to which all other beings are subject. Rather, he presumes that this must be the case because the Bible says so, and then bases his epistemology on this presupposition.

However, Canale’s claim that the Bible denies God’s timelessness and immanence is not sound. God calls himself “I Am Who I Am” (Exodus 3:14), indicating that he exists by eternal necessity. This means that God cannot render himself non-existent, such as by choosing to disobey his law. He is not a contingent being, as all other temporal beings are. Concerning God’s timelessness, Psalm 90:2 states, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” God’s existence is not limited to the natural history of the planet inhabited by humans. He does not merely exist for human beings and his power is not constrained by our moral interests. He has existed and acted for all eternity. Isaiah 46:9–10 says, “I am God, and there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My purpose shall stand, and I will fulfill my intention.’” Finally, the Bible confirms God’s immanence. At the creation of the world, God’s spirit moved through the nebulous void from which the earth was formed (Genesis 1:2). Moreover, as Paul affirms in Acts 17:28, “In [God] we live and move and have our being.” All things are in God, meaning they exist and act only by the necessity of his infinite and eternal nature.

Conclusion

Canale thus ignores the biblical evidence of God’s timelessness to construct an interpretation of the Bible that yields the Adventist Church’s characteristic teachings about the necessity of obedience to God’s law. His historical-cognitive epistemology fails to explain the acts of revelation and inspiration in such a way as to distinguish between the divine and human agents involved in them. Rather, in his model, God’s activity is indistinguishable from the historical and cognitive constitution of the prophet to whom the revelation was revealed. Moreover, because Canale denigrates philosophy and does not consider whether there can be any basis in natural reason for belief in the Bible, he precludes the possibility of apologetical theology, the purpose of which is to rationally persuade others of the church’s teachings. To make matters worse, in the course of developing his epistemology, he undermines one of the most central, and rationally defensible, claims of Christian theology, namely that God transcends time. The result of his epistemological model is that a person can be persuaded that God exists only by deferring to the Bible, as interpreted by established authorities, rather than by using one’s innate faculties of reasoning.

Church members have yet to fully recognize the implications of Canale’s epistemology. His rejection of historical-critical hermeneutics as being based on the view that the Bible is “historically conditioned,” and his proposal that the Bible is instead “historically constituted,” has been promoted by church leaders who have sought to devise a hermeneutical method conducive to traditional Adventist doctrines, but church members have not realized the significance of the word “constituted” in this phrase. What church leaders mean when they state that divine revelations are historically constituted is that God, far from transcending particular instances in time, is only present on the occasions in which he reveals himself to a prophet. Ultimately, the effect of Canale’s epistemology is to reinforce traditional Adventist teachings by depriving church members of the ability to use the resources of their innate reasoning to critically evaluate them.