bobjots : redux

• Until the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent defined an authoritative canon of Scripture, all surviving manuscripts of the whole Christian Bible include at least some of the Apocrypha as well as disputed books.
• There is no 1 set of Apocrypha. While the Protestants and Roman Catholics generally agree on which books form the Apocrypha (Deutrocanonical for the latter - for them the Apocrypha means something totally different), significant differences occur with the Greek Orthodox, Slavonic Bible and Ethiopian & Coptic Orthodoxy's version of the canon.
• The Reformers never rejected or proscribed the Apocrypha. They just delegated it as being non Scriptural.
• Since I am a Protestant from the Western tradition, when I say Apocrypha, I generally mean the Protestant Apocrypha.

Apocrypha, that is, books which are not held equal to the sacred scriptures, and nevertheless are useful and good to read.
- Martin Luther's Subtitle To the Apocrypha

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.
- 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith

And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine ..
- 39 Articles of the Anglican Church

And yet we do not conceal the fact that certain books of the Old Testament were by the ancient authors called Apocryphal, and by others Ecclesiastical; inasmuch as some would have them read in the churches, but not advanced as an authority from which the faith is to be established.
- 1566 Second Helvetic Confession

So, here's how I see it. I know there are some who would reject the Apocrypha outright as forgeries and heretical and even dangerous for a Christian to read. It looks to me like there was some level of consensus from the Church Reformers that there was value in the Apocrypha, even if it wasn't Scripture. To throw out the Apocrypha for being non-canonical, one might as well throw out the writings of the Church Fathers as well and not use Josephus' The Antiquities of the Jews as our favourite secular proof document of the existence of Christ.

To contemporarise it a bit, do we not get good value and teachings from devotionals like Daily Bread or Every Day With Jesus. Or Spurgeon's Morning and Evening Devotions from the Bible? How about books like Knowing God by JI Packer, or Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. What about John Piper's Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth? They're useful, aren't they? Good expositions of the mysteries of the Christian faith? Does this make them Scripture? Of course not! Do we then get nervous or flappy when they're quoted from the pulpit? Then why can't we approach the Apocrypha the same way?

I'll probably expound more on my main blog but I must say my position on this has shifted quite tremendously somewhat.