Canon and on

In recent discussions I have had here in Oxford the issue of the development of the canon has loomed large. Post-liberalism tends to agree with Roman Catholicism that the canon is the creation of the church, or is even a practice of the church. Quotes aren't arguments, but, here are three that caught my eye:

The idea that the Bible should rule the church is not poplar today, when leading scholars in the fields are immersed in their own mythology of cultural relativity, but it is a concept which would have seemed perfectly in order to all the Fathers of the church. Gerald Bray, Creeds, Councils and Chirst, p.52

The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the Church. K.Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1, p.104

…the theological issues related to the historical development of the canon may appear rather perplexing to biblical scholars and theologians who would not want to conclude that the biblical canon is a creation of the church. E. Schnabel, "History, theology and the biblical canon: an introduction to basic issues" in Themelios 20:2, 1995, 16.

Vale Bruce Metzger

Bruce Metzger, the doyen of textual critics in the modern era, died very recently.

I was interested to read him this morning saying this in his book The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance:

Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia. (p. 76)

Of course, it is our postmodern tendency to emphasis the diversity and forget the coherence and unity... or to imagine that such unanimity must only have been achieved by the exercise of a centralised power and the engines of ecclesial bureaucracy.

Necessary Heresy 1: Marcion, or how big is the Bible?

This week at St Ebbe's I am starting a series of three lectures entitled Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us.

We start on Wednesday with Marcion. Marcion - the wealthy son of a bishop (how did THAT happen?) - gained a great deal of influence in the 2nd century church and beyond for his teaching that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was in fact a different deity to that of the New. He rejected the OT as scripture, and also everything but the letters of Paul - and edited those as well! The Christian gospel was as he saw it a repudiation of everything that the OT stood for. Creation was the product of a malicious and wrathful demiurge, from whose clutches we were to be saved by the Son.

What is interesting here is the interplay between the scriptural/textual issue and the theological one. Marcion would have no truck with allegorising the distasteful bits of the OT away to make them palatable. He just wouldn't see them reconciled with the loving deity of the New - and so he rejected them on the basis of this theological criterion.

It is significant that Adolf von Harnack, the great German liberal-Protestant church historian, thought Marcion was the most significant theologian between Paul and Luther. Partly, this is because Marcion did get something right: he did understand the radical newness of the gospel - its breaking out of boundaries and its dissolving of religious strictures and superstitions. He did understand the import of Paul's radical critique of the torah. He did understand the heart of the gospel is not bare law but divine love.

But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! It was of course the mission of 19th century liberal Protestantism to follow Marcion in his excision from the canon of the Bible parts that did not apparently square with gospel as they had determined it. The church of yore determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.

Is this heresy alive and well today?