A few posts over the past month have had me thinking on the issue of canon. Yes, I know I’ve written on canon before. But this time I wasn’t wondering about canon formation. I’ve been thinking about canon closure. Why was the canon closed? What does it mean that the canon is closed? What is inspiration? These are the kind of questions I’ve been thinking about.

Firstly, a disclaimer: These are not finished thoughts. This is why everything is framed in questions. These aren’t my stated beliefs, I’m simply exploring, and I’d like all those who read it to comment so we all can explore it further.

In a comment on Jeff’s site, I’ve been speaking about how I read scripture as an ‘ongoing revelation’ to Israel:

The best analogy to me is to compare the revelation of scripture to a journey as a Christian. When you first meet God, most of us have a very simple and (to be honest) ignorant view of who God is. But, as you grow as a Christian, you discover more aspects of God, and this continues as your life as a Christian continues. If you’d always blogged, you could probably trace the ongoing process of discover, and you might go back to things you’d written years before, and disagree with them. But all of it is revelation. All of it is the product of your relationship with God. Scripture is a record of this process in the nation of Israel. If you look further back, the revelation is only partial. They’re a little ignorant. They project a lot of their understand of gods onto God. But they learn, and they get to know God better.

Jeff also asked me about how I know which parts to ‘trust’ and which parts not to. My response was that, as Christ is our most complete revelation of God, we, like the nation of Israel before us interpreting Torah through the prophets, interpret the Old Testament through Christ. However, as I thought more on the subject, I wondered: Was Christ our most recent revelation in the New Testament? Or were the apostles our most recent revelation of God?

This reminded me of something Bryan Cross wrote, on Ecclesial Deism (an interesting article if you’re interested in Catholicism):

Deism refers to a belief that God made the world, and then left it to run on its own. It is sometimes compared to “a clockmaker” winding up a clock and then “letting it run.” Deism is distinct from theism in that theism affirms not only that God created the world, but also that God continually sustains and governs all of creation. Ecclesial deism is the notion that Christ founded His Church, but then withdrew, not protecting His Church’s Magisterium (i.e., the Apostles and/or their successors) from falling into heresy or apostasy. Ecclesial deism is not the belief that individual members of the Magisterium could fall into heresy or apostasy. It is the belief that the Magisterium of the Church could lose or corrupt some essential of the deposit of faith, or add something to the deposit of faith.

Now, whilst I’m not Catholic, and hence not an ecclesial theist in Bryan’s sense, I wouldn’t say that I am an ecclesial deist either. I certainly believe that God continually sustains and governs his church in some sense, which is why I tend to be very Catholic in many respects (and hence why I attend a very Catholic Anglican cathedral). Thinking of concepts such as canon in this light (although I know this is not the application Bryan intended) yields some realizations that our stance on the canon has theological implications.  If God continually sustains and governs his church, why did His revelation stop at St John’s Revelation? Mike Bird quoted Martin Hengel, who asked a similar question about the Old Testament canon:

Does the church still need a clearly demarcated, strictly closed Old Testament canon, since the New Testament is, after all, the ‘conclusion’, the goal and the fulfilment of the Old? Indeed, does not one face an essential contradiction if one, in an unhistorical biblicism, clings to a limited ‘Hebrew’, or better pharisaical, ‘canon’ from Jabneh? Must not the Old Testament remain a degree open to the New? [...]

The origin of Christianity as well as of rabbinic Judaism after 70 CE becomes at all historically interesting and comprehensible only through this literature, which includes in a wider dimension also Josephus, Philo and the Pseudepigrapha. One portion of this literature was preserved, sometimes unwillingly, by Christian tradition; the other comes to light now in the Qumran texts.

The great interest that this rich ‘post-biblical’ Jewish tradition finds among Jews and Christians could perhaps be assessed as a sign of the relative openness of the ‘canon’ in both directions, given the fact that Jews and Christians parted conclusively only after the destruction of Jerusalem toward the end of the first century CE.

Now, for exactly the reasons Hengel spoke of, I believe it’s incredibly important to remain abreast of both Old and New Testament apocryphal material. I’ve believed this (although practiced it imperfectly) for a while now. But I’ve never before thought about these in regards to the openness of the canon. After all, at the time they were written, none of the books currently in the bible were considered scripture; and there were plenty of books considered scripture by the writers of the bible, that are no longer in the canon. Surely this poses some problems for the canon as we know it? It suggests, after all, that the canon is a human invention – the canon references scripture outside of it, and does not speak of itself as scripture.

If God in fact continually sustains and governs his church, at least in the sense of its scripture, how do we account for the the texts that were once canonical and now are not? And how do we account for the gap in writings – have we had no new revelation of God in the past two thousand years? Now, the first question – how do we account for the the texts that were once canonical and now are not – might be answered by appealing to scripture’s nature as ongoing revelation. In a similar way to our learning that aspects of the Old Testament – slavery, sacrifice, genocide – are not what God desires through the New Testament, our ancestors learnt that Enoch did not describe God in the manner revealed to him. Boom! It was removed from the Canon (in many traditions, anyway). However, it does not explain why this didn’t happen to other texts that similarly had their revelations refined by the prophets and apostles that followed.

The second question – why have we had no new revelation of God in the past two thousand years – is the one I’m more curious about. In the rabbinic tradition, whilst the canon closed, it nevertheless has been ever-expanding. The Mishnah, and the Talmud were interpretations, and they in turn were interpreted, and that was recorded, and each generations wisdom and reading of scripture was recorded and commented upon by the next, each being regarded as a seed of revelation from God, to this very day. However, in Christian tradition, none of this writing has ever been considered as sacred or inspired in any way. In fact, it is almost as if the concept of ‘inspiration’ is one distant from any canonizing groups – the New Testament canon according to evidence that they were  written by Apostles, rather than because it was considered ‘inspired’ by God.

I wonder, if we consider our scripture to be that which was inspired by God, then our scripture cannot end after the writings of the New Testament, and should not have a gap where the Apocrypha are. If Christ is the climax so far of God’s ongoing revelation of himself, perhaps – considering Christianity is an eschatological religion – this revelation will only be complete in the second coming. In which case, the same argument Hengel applied to the Apocrypha applies to everything written between then and the New Testament. The apostolic, church and desert fathers, the prayer books and Magisterium, sermons, scrolls, artworks and books, are all inspired by God, and are all scripture.

If this is the case, then how do we separate the wheat from the chaff? Good question. My suggestion is this: Whilst we may be awaiting a completed revelation of God, the benchmark of our own revelation is still Christ. If we read everything – Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament, and everything after it – through the lens of Christ (not called the Word of God for nothing), then that will separate truth from mistake and falsehood. This is something that is true even in the limited canon that we have – as is shown by the discussions that have been had recently about the Caananite genocide. If we are applying these judgments to our closed canon (and I hope we are, to avoid statements such as ‘the babies in the land of Canaan deserved to die’, or ‘God can kill whoever he wants, because he has ownership over everything’), then what is stopping us from reading other church texts in a similar way to how Rabbinic Judaism always has: Critically, but with a view to discovering God, and in our case, with Christ as our benchmark.