I wonder, to be honest, where the debate about the canon of scripture is leading. Whatever reservations we may have about the process, I don’t see any prospect of the canon being revised. It is simply part of our religious heritage that the church at a certain point chose to validate a particular list of books as normative or authoritative on the grounds of apostolicity, catholicity and orthodoxy (I cribbed this from an MA paper I am currently marking). So I make the following comments on the assumption that there will always be a canon of scripture and that it will probably be the canon that we have now. This is simply my protest from the margins.
1. A clearly defined canon, as Daniel points out, will not lead to consensus. Arguably, the fact of canonicity makes it harder to reach practical and intelligent conclusions - especially regarding moral and social issues that are not directly addressed, or which are addressed under very different conditions, in scripture. We frequently misread scripture in our concern to make it say something about contemporary issues.
2. The idea of a canon of scripture creates an illusion of completeness and adequacy. It is supposed to function as a ‘rule’ by which we are to evaluate all matters relating to faith. I think we would benefit from having a better sense of the incompleteness and inadequacy of our hold on the truth.
3. The whole notion of a canon, whatever its theological merits, is counter-historical. Insofar as we are seeking to understand in historical terms who Jesus was and how the early church defined itself, canon is more or less a useless construct. We wouldn’t dream of establishing an official list of authorized documents by which people would know the truth about, say, the First World War. We would simply make critical use of all the material available to us. Admittedly we do not make use of scripture purely for historical purposes, but we are increasingly aware of how faith is the product of a (historical) narrative and I would suggest that to some extent the canonicity of scripture is an obstacle to this.
4. The need for an authorized list originally arose because texts were in competition with each other. I wonder whether that is still really the case. I suppose you could argue that there is a need to stop some of the New Testament pseudepigrapha and gnostic texts from seeping into the minds of ordinary believers, but why not just rely on the ongoing debate to keep order here? What would actually happen if the official list was abandoned? Why shouldn’t we just have sensible open discussion over whether the pastorals were actually written by Paul, without having been put in the awkward position of a prior religious commitment to their canonicity.
5. The fact of canonicity also produces text-level or hermeneutical distortions - on the one hand, by isolating texts from their historical-literary environment (Jesus, for example, becomes the mouthpiece of a universal piety, not Israel’s prophet); and on the other, by creating an artificial sense of coherence and homogeneity such that great ingenuity must be deployed in resolving discrepancies and contradictions. I think we need to learn to read biblical texts for what, at one level at least, they are - diverse ancient texts among other ancient texts.
6. It is not a neutral or harmless or ‘innocent’ state of affairs that ‘Christianity’ as a religion is defined, or is perceived to be defined, by a normative or prescriptive canon of texts - a sacred book, the word of God. We rather take it for granted that Christians have their Bible just as Muslims have their Qur’an and Hindus have the Bhagavad Gita, and so on. But the Bible inevitably has this status at the expense of something else. A sacred text becomes central to discipleship, worship, apologetics, mission. A sacred text as word of God is likely to usurp the place of the living Word of God. A sacred text, I suspect, undermines our sense of historical continuity with the biblical community of the people of God. A sacred text encourages a mentality of pedantry and legalism. A sacred, ecclesially authorized text requires elite handlers, experts, scribes, lawyers, theologians; it generates hierarchy and exclusion; it gives priority to the cognitive over other aspects of human behaviour and character.
7. Canonicity is a later judgment on scripture, from a standpoint somewhat removed from the circumstances that actually produced the writings. What I think should have priority in our understanding of what scripture is and how it acquires authority is not canonicity but narrative. Certain moments in that story are definitive for shaping the people that claims the story as its own: the calling of Abraham, the institution of religious systems under Moses, the Babylonian exile, the restucturing and renewal of that people around Jesus, the inclusion of non-Jews, and the confrontation with Roman imperialism. Certain moments in that story (it’s debatable, of course, how closely ‘real’ history corresponded to the biblical narrative) also generated documents that recorded events, informed behaviour, and expressed hopes and expectations for the future. But the story is not wholly contained within the pages of the canonical set of texts. The story precedes the texts, it provides the background and context for the texts; it is larger and more complex than the texts.
8. More importantly, the story is expressed through the experiences of a concrete, historical community. The outlook of this community is bound to be shaped by the memory of its origins, by the written record of certain formative periods and experiences; but this memory needs to be activated as a living tradition of wisdom. This, in my view, is where the real challenge for the emerging church is to be found. Evangelicalism has given us a massive commitment to understand and respect scripture. But that that knowledge and understanding needs to be transmuted into the wisdom of a concrete historical community as it makes sense of its vocation in the midst of the peoples of the earth. We are a long way from doing this well.
Indigestion
Dear Andrew
Thank you for your post which is full of good food for thought. I haven’t had time to digest it yet but here are a couple of quick responses.
You said: The idea of a canon of scripture creates an illusion of completeness and adequacy… I think we would benefit from having a better sense of the incompleteness and inadequacy of our hold on the truth. I am contrasting this idea with Paul’s advice to Timothy that Scripture can enable him to become equipped for every good work. To me that suggests that Paul regarded Scripture (whatever books that term signified for him) as having an element of completeness. Scripture was sufficient to make Timothy competent for spiritual work. So however interesting or informative it might have been for Timothy to go to his local library and study the writings of Enoch or Psalm 151 or the book of Tobit, wouldn’t Paul rather have advised Timothy to concentrate on Scripture, since those books alone contained all he needed to equip him? Likewise, if Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon and Hebrews are not God-breathed Scripture, wouldn’t it behove me to concentrate my time studying Romans and John and Isaiah instead of getting side-tracked?
You said: We wouldn’t dream of establishing an official list of authorized documents by which people would know the truth about, say, the First World War. True, but we read the Bible for more reasons than just to learn the truth. There is also the aim of increasing our faith. Since faith comes from hearing the Word of God, and since I think we hear God speak today in a unique way through his written Word instead of through religious writings that are not God-breathed (however much truth they may contain), then wouldn’t it be helpful for Jesus’s followers to know which writings to concentrate on when they are on their knees in their prayer closet (even if they consult a wider selection of books when sitting at their desk in their study)?
Thanks for this opportunity to explore these issues. Phil
With regard to your first
With regard to your first point, I was only really arguing for a measure of intellectual humility as we attempt to address some of the larger moral and social challenges that we face. Having said that, it’s also worth noticing the context of Paul’s statement in 2 Tim. 3:16-17. He has in mind specifically the pressures that the churches would face during a period of eschatological crisis (3:1). I certainly do not wish to deny the usefulness of scripture for teaching, etc., but I do think we need to keep in mind the fact that our post-Christendom, postmodern context today poses a different type of challenge.
Similarly, meditation of scripture in the prayer closet is a very different activity to the sort of radical rethinking of what it means to be an authentic people of God that the emerging church is engaged in. I would question, though, whether ‘all scripture is God-breathed’ (2 Tim. 3:16) means that only scripture is God-breathed. Does canonicity mean that only these texts are an expression of the mind and purpose of God? Or that it is by reference to this standard, this special body of texts, that we measure the truthfulness and inspiration of whatever else we might say or write?
Speculations on the canon
If we removed the canon, I wonder whether it wouldn’t just reinvent itself, as texts vied with each other for authoritativeness. I’m sure there would be some sort of evaluative process as people compared texts with each other. (On a personal level, we all do this all the time). Imagine the debates in academic circles. Also, would the OT canon be handled differently from the NT canon - given its relatively more stable and historic origins?
On determing moral issues - I think there is value in having texts which the faith community holds to be authoritative: not because they directly address the kinds of issues which we now face, which were not anticipated in the times the texts were written, but because they provide a foundation for value systems. If we dismantle the canon, there might, for instance, be a big debate about the authority of the early chapters of Genesis, and I suspect that a new canon would arise as people saw the need to preserve statements about God’s creating activity and purpose, and the emergence of a ‘plan’ to put to right the effects of ‘the fall’. But the debates about how this was being accomplished might shed greater light on the subject as closer questions were being asked.
I suspect that an issue in this discussion is not so much canon itself, as the lenses which we bring to interpret texts. There is the modernist leaning to move from the historical and narrative base of the texts to abstract systems of thought and doctrinal formulae - in which process we miss vital aspects of the message which the texts are committing to us.
Maybe it’s because I’m ploughing through ‘The New Testament and the People of God’ at the moment that my eyes are being opened to the light shed on biblical texts by approaching them as a series of historical narratives in search of a conclusion, which Israel after the exile and in the 1st century was feverishly seeking to provide. This approach virtually demands a keener awareness of the particularities of historical context, which is not necessarily clearly visible in the texts of the canon.
There is a particular benefit in this approach to the canon: awareness of historic context as suggested by Wright can be very effective in helping to deconstruct the biases we import to the texts through our unseen contemporary cultural assumptions. The text that emerges is then in a better position to address contemporary life and culture, such as:
- The gospel as proclamation of Jesus as king of the whole earth - summoning people everywhere to allegiance to himself, in which the benefits are things we have tended to promote in themselves as the primary to the proclamation
- The gospel as the gathering around Jesus of a people, and salvation being described in terms of relationship to that people, rather than purely individually appropriated
- A motivation for mission in terms of election for that task or proclamation, with the entire scriptural history forming a motivational mainspring.
Given that the narrative of the history of Israel has been recorded in the way it has, with all kinds of related texts and stories, I think there will inevitably be some sort of canon - whether officially prescribed or informally held.
Speculations on the canon (2)
It was only after sending the previous comment that something like the obvious dawned - that critical approaches to the bible over the last 250 years (and continuing - and this is a non-value laden statement) have interpreted the bible precisely as if there is no canon, in the sense of selected texts having some kind of divinely sanctioned privileged status. It may be that biblical criticism has revolved around texts that are within the canon, but not in the sense that these texts have any particular privileged status. So all that I was hypothesising about the removal of the canon has, in one sense, already been happening. Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Or simply barking? Maybe I just need to get out more.
Biblical fish in a historical sea
I’m sure you’re right that the canon would reinvent itself if we attempted to remove it, though probably in a much more flexible, diversified form: we would have designer canons to suit different theological and ecclesiological orientations. But my concern is less to remove the principle of a list of authorized and authoritative texts than to relocate those texts in their proper literary environment - that is, as historical texts among other historical texts. Unfortunately the whole way that scripture is packaged, promoted and used in the church works in the opposite direction, reinforcing the impression of uniqueness and cultural and intellectual isolation.
The biblical texts are like fish that the church has taken from the sea of history and placed in the carefully controlled environment of an aquarium - for ease of observation and study. I want to be able to throw those texts back into the sea and watch them swim around in their natural environment, see how they survive, how they behave in the wild, how they interact with other species. I suppose you could regard the historical critical method as an early, rather badly managed attempt to rehabilitate the biblical texts - unfortunately they didn’t really survive. But I think we are slowly learning to do it better.
Fishy goings on in the canon
We have some goldfish in a pond in our back garden; there are really too many of them and they have grown too big for the pond - and need to be relocated into a more spacious environment. This doesn’t mean much except that I enjoyed the fish metaphor and wanted to continue it.
Historical criticism shot its own goose in its claims to be the only sure way of discovering the ‘true’ meaning of a biblical text: ie that questions of origin, author and historical context alone were the keys to a text’s meaning. Historical criticism serves its purpose when its pretensions are removed and it is rehabilitated alongside other ways of ascertaining meaning.
There is a ‘meaning’ which emerges from the finished texts of which, broadly, the biblical canon(s) consists, and it’s not too difficult to find: namely, that God’s purposes were to address a problem, located in the earliest chapters of Genesis, through calling individuals and a nation, and finally a representative member of that nation, to undo the problem, and set creation back on track to its original purpose. In this sense, the ‘canon’ performs its task, as a calling to where we are heading, as much as an analysis of origins. The canon brings a challenge to respond in faith to its message, and to become part of a people who will take its message forward in a multitude of applications lived out in the present.
Of course, this is not to oversimplify or minimise the work that needs to be done in understanding contexts of all kinds in the texts of the canon. And to my mind, contemporary scholarship is opening up a rich treasure of understanding of what it means to be the people of God, which confidently points a way forward through the challenges of a changing culture.
I suppose what I am seeing is not that the message which the canon brings has changed, but the way the message has been interpreted (through such things as cultural lenses, church practice and the gospel we have proclaimed), and that this core message can be enhanced and find a better home in the light of some contemporary biblical scholarship.
There is a danger of oversimplification, but I would identify two areas which have the potential to revolutionise our appropriation, proclamation and practice of the bible’s core message:
1. the gospel as a message of the victory and kingship of God - having application across the whole of life, not being confined (as we have tended to do) to an interior spiritual compartment; this brings a challenge and critique to both modernism and postmodernism - in their attitudes to spirituality
2. the gospel as a narrative whose decisive events have occurred in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but a narrative which still yearns towards a conclusion. By entering the story we find ourselves part of that motivating dynamic, which asks of us how we must play our part, given the kind of role and contribution our particular part makes to the drama, to help bring the drama to its conclusion in its closing act.
I enjoyed the fish
Is that how you continue a fish metaphor? What else have you got in that pond of yours?
You identify two areas ‘which have the potential to revolutionise our appropriation, proclamation and practice of the bible’s core message’. Both have to do with the gospel. I would agree with the way you have framed these emphases, but I’m not sure I agree with the assumption that the gospel constitutes the core message of the Bible. I am inclined to say that the core message has to do with the existence of a people, called to be distinct, among the diverse peoples of the world, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a dwelling place for the living God.
This people was chosen, not saved, but its story gave rise to the need for an announcement of good news, of forgiveness for national failing, and the transformation that went with that - including the incorporation of Gentiles into that people, descendants of Abraham on the grounds of promise. I would suggest, therefore, that the gospel is secondary: it presupposes the calling of a people and the complex history of that people; it also establishes the conditions for the continuing (post-eschatological) existence and activity of that people, which I don’t think we see very clearly in the New Testament. Without the historical gospel there would be no people, and YHWH would not be remembered in the world; but if we give priority to the gospel, we can easily fail to ask the fundamental question about the existence and purpose of the church.
Fish, geese, marriage and simultaneous equations
Yes - the abrupt change of metaphor occurred to me as well, and I couldn’t think of any way of justifying it, so I left it.
When you start talking of what is primary or secondary in the biblical narrative/history, there is the possibility of ‘rending asunder what God has joined’ (to adopt something like another metaphor). The use of the word ‘gospel’ is a case in point: is the bible talking about a people, or a message? Not ‘either or’, or ‘primarily/secondarily’, but both. Or maybe a circle, whose centre is Christ, whose area is the world (and therefore ‘all nations’), and whose circumference is all creation.
The biblical narrative is characterised by people and promise/covenant. The purpose of the covenant, as I see it, in all its forms throughout Old Testament history, was to demonstrate God’s faithfulness to his people, yet his determination to deal with their sin. So if there is a message here, which culminated in the gospel, it cannot operate without a people to whom it applies. Which is primary and which is secondary? A people in whom God should find his dwelling place, or the person by whose actions (the gospel) that possibility became a reality? If there has to be primary and secondary, then, shifting the terms, Christ, and what he has done, are the primary focus of that people; it’s impossible to think of one without the other, and the one not being the focus of honour and worship of the other.
So what is the gospel? If its centre is Christ, its core is what he did, its consequences were the people who were transformed and formed by it; but in a technical sense, it is a message which is proclaimed. What is the message? Modernism has tended to mould a presentation almost in terms of an equation which has a mainly individualistic application; a more literary and historically contextualised approach might see the gospel as a summons to all people to obedience on the basis of what God has done through Jesus - in particular, through the complex of his death/resurrection, ascension/outpoured Spirit; it leads to the ‘obedience that comes from faith’ of Romans 1:5, (and by the way, the contrast of 1:3 between the ‘human nature’ of Jesus and 1:4 the ‘Son of God’ declared with power through the Holy Spirit is another one for Theocrat to get his head around - to me, another of those inferences suggesting humanity and divinity.
I get the feeling you might be rather coy about the ‘message’ aspect of the gospel,which forms the people who are the object of its proclamation.