MetaCatholic

Debates about canon and canonicity continue and turn into one on the place of Scripture. John Hobbins lists his series in the left (bottom) sidebar of Ancient Hebrew Poetry. Many of my responses to John can be found (in reverse order) through this link. Both of us refer to other blogs and resources, though John’s series is far more exhaustive. Now Kevin Edgecomb has provoked a new response from John, and some of the conversation is continuing in the comments on John’s post.

Kevin’s point that there is a difference in emphasis between referring to canonical books and a canon of books is well-taken. The term canon does shift from the “rule of faith” to the collection of books, but exactly when is hard to tell. Kevin claims that McDonald locates it in 1768 with David Ruhnken, but this is not quite accurate. What McDonald actually says is:

In an annual Easter letter of 367 C.E. … Athanasius made use of the verbal form kanonizomenōn (”canonized”) in reference to a collection of sacred literature that he wanted to distinguish from a collection of apocryphal writings commonly read in the churches of Egypt and elsewhere. This is the earliest use of kanōn for a collection or listing of the church’s Scriptures.
    The word canon was not regularly used in reference to a closed collection of writings until David Ruhnken used it this way in 1768.¹

The point is that while there were rare precedents for the later regular use, the emphasis was on the books the church read as both exercising a salvific function (in the view of Athanasius)  and being in accord with Christian life, faith and practice. The regular emergence of applying the term “canon” to a set collection is in my view less important for how scripture was and is treated than first the binding of this set collection between fixed covers, and then the making of that set collection easily available, so that “the Scriptures” (the holy writings) irrespective of whether the word “canon” is used, comes to both be replaced by and to mean “the Bible” (the holy book). It is the existence of scripture as a book, a particular sort of artefact, that not only allows false oppositions to be made between scripture and tradition, but leads some to believe that there is no holy tradition, because there is (in their mistaken view) immediate access to what lies behind it.

At the heart of John’s response lies this affirmation:

the Church is a creation of the Word proclaimed in its midst, and the Word proclaimed in its midst is identical to the scripture read when the Church assembles and after which, in many traditions, the words “This is the word of the Lord” are pronounced. (his emphasis)

Now there are ways of construing that emphasized word “identical” that I can agree with, and ways in which I couldn’t, in the same way that there are ways I can both agree and disagree with a statement like “the bread of the Eucharist is identical to the Body of Christ.” Before I say more about this sacramental parallel, however, I want to note Kevin’s most recent response:

So, while the biblical books have now become the primary literary expression within the Canon of Faith, they are only a part of that wider entity, and not exclusively its defining element. That lies with God among the people and in the whole, organic, holistic, inexplicable, inexhausible Canon of Faith, often referred to among my Orthodox folk as Tradition. It is God who gives faith, which is strengthened by all the parts of that Tradition, the Canon of Faith, of which the Bible is one glorious luminary.

There are two problems with that, I think. One is the way in which, as John points out, Scripture functions also in Orthodox churches in the Divine Liturgy. Its presence in the liturgy shows the church revering it and attending to it in ways no other writings are attended to. The second problem, which I think myself (as a Western Rite Christian influenced by the Reformation) is a problem for Orthodoxy. The conflation of the “rule of faith” with Holy Tradition, and the locating of Scripture as simply one (significant) part of Holy Tradition, when taken together lead to difficulties in hearing the Word of God as the word that can address the church ab extra, summoning, judging transforming and reforming.

But enough of being negative. I am tentatively beginning to explore whether some of these apparent opposites might be reconciled in considering scripture as sacrament. Most of this is not exactly thought through, but more like  ideas to which I would like to return and explore more fully.

I find helpful the idea (which I think is Schillebeeckx’s – though I may use it differently) that Christ is the primordial sacrament. It is in Christ that the divine is fully present to us in the human, and the human is transformed into the divine. The church celebrates sacraments, and understands herself sacramentally, because of Christ in his incarnation and resurrection. From this bare summary I would suggest the following brief theses about scripture.

1. The nature of scripture as human words is essential to their ability to convey divine words. It is understanding their full humanity as best we can that we will most fully be able to hear the divine Word.
2. Scripture is primarily heard, not read, because the sacrament conveyed is hearing the Word of the Lord addressing humanity, ourselves as object, and not ourselves as subject discovering the Word of the Lord in a book.
3. As Christ was full of the Spirit, and we pray the gift of the Spirit on the elements of bread, wine and water that they may be to us the Body and Blood of the Lord, and the washing away of sins, so it is the work of the Spirit to vivify the words of Scripture that they may become God’s Word for us.
4. Scripture is primarily ecclesial: it belongs to the celebration of Christ’s risen life in the Church for the world. The hearing of the Word of the Lord belongs primarily with those who gather (better, are gathered) together in prayer, in the Spirit, and in encounter with God through Christ. Private reading of Scripture derives from this, and flows into this, but the word of the Lord creates a new people, not simply new persons. Private reading is, if you like, analogous to communion from the reserved sacrament.
5. Scripture, as the sacrament of the Word, may properly have attributed to it the various attributes of God’s Word, communicatio idiomatum, and thus is to be heard as blessing, rebuking, calling, transforming and so on, and may itself be referred to as the Word of God.
6. The Word is properly Christ, and so the Scriptures are fundamentally a vehicle for Christ. The liturgy reflects this in the particular honour it gives to the Gospel as that part of scripture which mediates the incarnate Christ most directly in narratives of his earthly life. The liturgy further testifies to it in the way in which it is completed in the personal encounter with the Lord through his Body in the Holy Communion, the sacrament of his complete self-gift, and in communion with his Body, the Church, the sacrament of his gift of peace, restoration and reconciliation. God does not simply stand over against us in addressing us, but enters our lives.
7. The Word who is Christ, who is met and encountered in the words of scripture, is God’s Word to create and redeem, summoning both creation and new creation into being. So Scripture must be read and listened to for  the Word that can make, unmake and remake the Church. The authority of Christ is truly conveyed through its words as the Church listens to them, and it is Christ’s authority which stands over all Church practice and theology, calls them to account, confirms their truthfulness and corrects their errors.

All this is,as I say, an early reflection, and still fairly inchoate, if not incoherent, in my own mind. I may be barking completely up the wrong tree, but it seemed a good time to chase a squirrel.

1. Lee Martin McDonald The Biblical Canon Hendrikson 2007 p51 – his italics, my bold emphasis [↩]

Last Thursday Mike Bird revealed the remarkable and difficult question he set his students: “Are Christians theologically obligated to support the present state of Israel?” He’s a brave man, and asking for trouble. It seems to me that it is almost impossible to say anything about either the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, or just about anything at all about the State of Israel, without offending somebody. By contrast, it seems almost impossibly easy for people to say crass, naive and both theologically and politically illiterate things. Mike also referenced a popular (Christianity Today) and an academic (Bruce Longenecker in April’s JTS) article, both of which have things to say on aspects of the question.

Any such discussion has to start, it seems to me, from an acknowledgement of history, that Christian attitudes to Jews and Judaism have more often than not been quite sinful, and regularly been the cause of behaviour that can ultimately only be described as blasphemous as well as evil. It also has to start from the open recognition that today’s community of Judaism has grown up as essentially a twin-track of development with Christianity from the shared ancestor of Second Temple Judaism. Identifying either with their common parent is probably unhelpful to fully appreciating the integrity of both as they have developed historically. Christians entering into dialogue with Jews today do not themselves have the same theology and practice as those first Christians and are not engaging Jews who have the same practices and theology of those engaged by Paul (himself one of them) and others.

Even while I believe we need to recognise and engage with one another in large part on the basis of the scriptural books we share in common, we need to be very patient in attending to the different ways our developing traditions have engaged with those books, often to the point of their seeming to be books with very different messages. That said, I think there are specific Christian perspectives that can’t simply be denied or set aside when it comes to the political realities of today’s State of Israel, or the theological realities of Judaism. Dialogue is not well served by concealing, denying or simply rejecting one’s own heritage.

In the JTS article mentioned above, Longenecker demonstrates, I think successfully, the weakness (as readings of Paul) of both two-track views (that Christianity represents a way in which salvation is made available to the Gentiles, and Judaism for the Jews) and replacement views (that the Church has simply superceded Israel in every respect). But it seems to me, both as a reading of Paul, and as the more developed view of incarnational theology that sees in Jesus the decisive engagement of God with humanity, that Christianity, to be true to itself, must and does insist that God’s salvation of humanity, Jew and Gentile alike, has something essentially to do with the particular history and eschatological destiny of the Jew Jesus.

How that works out (in history or eternity) may indeed surprise us, and may (indeed, I suspect will have to) look quite different from any mass conversions. Christians today (and in ways somewhat different from the intra-Jewish polemical disputes of much of the New Testament) must also insist on recognising the grace-full ways in which the God of the Word and the Covenants is still and always making his presence known among those who live in the light of Torah. It is possible to see rather more clearly than Paul did, what Paul himself said, that God’s promises are irrevocable, and how that divine faithfulness is being worked out.

One of the features of the early Christian developments in their Jewish matrix was a relocating of the promise of the land to a greater fulfilment in a new creation, marked by and tasted in the immanent presence of the Spirit. That view, which surfaces in various ways, draws strongly on readings of the prophets, a shared apocalyptic symbolism, and the experience of Jesus’ resurrection. The language of God’s promised renewal had become so extravagant, that it is hard to see how any simple earthly kingdom could actually be seen to fulfil it. I also wonder whether some of the ways in which belonging to the people of the land, while being dispersed amongst the “whole inhabited world” were in fact making this sort of re-interpretation of the prophecies more widely acceptable for both those who saw Jesus as Messiah and those who did not.

In the light of this expansion of the prophetic vision to a renewed humanity as heirs to a promised new creation rather than a promised land, I simply can’t see how any Christians can still invest the fulfilment of those promises in a single human state of Israel, or, indeed any other. To do so goes against a central thrust of the New Testament. I also wonder if this wider vision of the promises is a topic that Christians, engaged in dialogue about our common scriptures, can tentatively and humbly explore with Jews as a way of theologically reframing the political issues. Theological thinking about the State of Israel begins then for Christians at least in terms of its witness to a wider reality of new creation as a social and visible entity, not as a spiritual and invisible substitute for it. Israel’s existence bears witness against the Church’s Platonizing tendency. Furthermore, if the new creation is about the provision of a peaceable home for all humanity, then creating a peaceable home for those to whom the hope and the promise were first given is an integral part of that witness.

That has implications for political relations with Israel, that other countries, and especially those where Christians are influential in politics, should be committed to the peaceable existence of a Jewish homeland in Israel. It implies also that the internal policies of the State of Israel should not only be aimed at creating a state in which Jews can live at peace, but that the peace of Israel is always intended to be shared with all humanity, and therefore can’t ultimately be built on the misery of others. The prophets themselves repeatedly said as much. Exactly what political solutions can be imagined, devised or implemented to make that work is sadly beyond my scope.