More on Using non-Canonical Books in Church
My friend Josh Linton wrote a response for a grad class he’s in about biblical canon. After he sent it to me I thought it had some interesting overlap with my last post about the Acts of Paul so I asked him if I could put up some of it up here for continued reflection. Enjoy.
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In The Biblical Canon, Lee Martin McDonald makes a case that the ancient faith communities accepted a variety of writings and oral traditions as sacred or Scripture. This broader embrace of sacred texts is different from the idea of a closed canon that developed later in the history of Christianity. The word canon was first understood as a general standard, a measurement, and as the Church felt the need to recognize a standard of sacred writings the word later developed into “a closed collection of sacred Scriptures that Jews and Christians believe had their origins in God and are divinely inspired.”
McDonald spends time fleshing out these distinctions to make his case that the final list of inspired books didn’t happen within a short time or without human influence. The gathering and collecting of a fixed set of sacred documents for the ancient religious communities unfolded rather porously and slowly. It seems clear that what is now understood as canon, the final collection of Scripture, may not have been the primary intention of the earliest communities when they gathered sacred writings.
McDonald copiously substantiates his contention that some of the texts considered by the early Christians as sacred didn’t find their way into the canon and that the writings used as Scripture were more diverse than is reflected in the closed canon today. He points to a controversial passage in Jude, where the writer quotes from 1 Enoch. He concludes, “The issue is not whether Jude cited 1 Enoch, of course, but how he cited it. And from the early church fathers, it appears that he cited is as Scripture.”
This begs the question of why 1 Enoch is not in the canon, leading to McDonald’s argument for a deeper understanding of this period in history.
If faith communities today view the canon as what has been accepted from the inception of Christianity then they blind themselves to the variety of factors that shaped the final product. What he writes about some scholars can be similarly true of people today that focus on this issue. He writes: “They assume that the notion of canon that developed later (in the second to fourth centuries C.E.) in the Jewish and Christian communities was present in the first century, and they transpose such notions to that earlier period.”
McDonald’s research and evidence gives those baffled by the canon story permission to critique the final product and makes room to ask if there were other voices excluded from the conversation.
Confronting these implications can be disconcerting. A modern Christian community could feel overwhelmed by a growing distrust in the Bible if they were to misunderstand McDonald’s reconstruction of the canonical process. He stayed vague on how communities today should specifically cope with the explosive knowledge gained from retelling the historical canonization. It may not have been within his purpose but a bit more could have been explained, in my opinion, about how a community can reconcile a faith shaped by the canon but also remain open to the other voices that emerged during the infant years of Christianity. How does a Christian community embrace the Bible without throwing out its contextual history and shutting out other conversation partners? How does it cope with a list of Scripture that’s now closed and may need to be reopened but won’t be? To be fair these are not questions that McDonald necessarily sought to address but certainly ones that he left on the table. But I believe his work provides a solid foundation on which to begin constructing answers to those specific questions.
It’s hard to argue with his reconstruction of the canonical process. He provides insights and historical data that leave one with a sense that in some ways many were robbed of other invaluable resources on which to base their faith. I found most compelling the 1 Enoch citation. The letter of Jude utilizes 1 Enoch as Scripture to bolster his directives toward Christian character. This example cast a great deal of doubt on the completeness of the canon. In the residue left by these examples in his reconstruction I discovered a fresh perspective on inspiration.
For me, the necessary reevaluation of inspiration is the story within the story of canonization. If shaken by a fuller historical account of the canon story some might react by affirming a biblical concept like God’s word doesn’t change. Yes, but what McDonald’s reconstruction begs them to consider is whether or not they have heard all of God’s word. And is what they’ve heard told them is God’s word really so? For some, if these texts are inspired they come directly from the mouth of God and to question the canon could be construed as questioning God. But is this the case? No, historical chronology suggests inspiration didn’t produce canonization. As McDonald argues, “Inspiration was not a criterion by which a NT book was given the status of Scripture and later placed into a fixed biblical canon, but rather a corollary to its recognized status.”
This historical formula for inspiration requires that I critique my comprehension of inspiration and pushes me to consider God’s voice in other media that may have suffered silencing during this process.
All that said, I don’t think McDonald has discredited the canon or trashed the idea of the witness of texts inspired by God. I believe he has enriched and expanded the conversation and gives impetus to hear with new ears those things spoken by God that may not have been previously heard as Divine voice. Moving forward through these complex questions demands a realistic approach of seeing the story of the biblical canon for what it is, a multi-layered and storied process that produced an incredible gift and probably left some others buried. So McDonald leads readers back through that adventure, guiding them through the experiences of the process to canon and in doing so provides them with the confidence to accept the other gifts unearthed along the way.
