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CANON

“Canon” comes from Greek kanon and Hebrew qaneh: “stalk” or “reed.” Since this plant was uncommonly straight, the term acquired a derived meaning of “standard/rule” (cf. Ezek. 40:5). In early Christian times, canon denoted the church’s “rule of faith” or accepted doctrinal teaching. By the fourth century, canon referred to writings the church viewed as congruent with its rule of faith. Eventually, canon meant that corpus the church recognized as sacred Scripture. Although it is a specialized concept in systematic and biblical theology, canon also signifies any requisite body of written materials, even in a secular setting.

Canon is closely associated with Christian tradition, but in reality Judaism was fundamentally responsible for developing the idea that a body of authoritative texts is central to the faith and life of a religious community. Expressed negatively, “external books” (separim hisonim) were noncanonical; expressed positively, documents that “rendered the hands unclean” (mettame’t ha-yadayim) were holy and canonical. The refinement of this idea over time eventuated in Judaism’s seeing itself as “people of the book.”

Early Christianity shared Judaism’s understanding of canon (more implied than articulated). However, Christians believed that the teaching and apostolic interpretation of Jesus were key to appropriating these Scriptures that were held in common. Though as adamant as their Jewish counterparts about biblical authority, the early Christians read the Jewish Scriptures to justify their claims about Jesus. Finally, Christianity accommodated its view of Judaism’s Bible to the documents that were to become the New Testament (thus, “Old Testament” is distinctly Christian terminology).

Few would disagree that Judaism and Christianity are biblical religions in the sense that certain writings played a crucial role in their development. Still, it was centuries before the two communities viewed canon as a more or less hermetically sealed group of inspired texts. Before this, canon was conceived in more fluid and dynamic terms. This is why subsets of Judaism and Christianity saw no difficulty in treating as authoritative to some degree an array of religious writings. Even today, strictly speaking, Christianity has yet to agree completely on what materials are canonical. For example, the books in the Protestant canon differ from those in the Roman Catholic canon.

Nonetheless, one may legitimately regard canon as a property of Judaism and Christianity as long as the term is properly defined and the canonical process carefully described. Elements in a consensus on the topic of canon are roughly as follows: (1) “canon” and “Scripture” should probably be distinguished; the former refers to a fixed corpus of authoritative books, the latter to any text of which a community made religious use; (2) “canon” in the strict sense was a relatively late development in both Judaism and Christianity; (3) no understanding of canon in either Judaism or Christianity precluded the parallel growth of influential interpretive traditions (e.g., the Talmud for Judaism; ecumenical creeds for Christianity); (4) while various elite groups undoubtedly played disproportionate roles in the canonization process, the willing acceptance of the common folk in the community was almost surely requisite; (5) the criteria for canonization were certainly varied and complex—antiquity, authorship, perceived inspiration, socio-political factors, and others—but in the final analysis the writings that the community perceived as most expressive of its deepest religious and theological convictions were deemed canonical; (6) neither Judaism nor Christianity should be seen exclusively as a function of their respective canons; both were and remain complex social communities that cannot be completely defined by any single factor.

As rich as the idea of canon and processes of canonization can be from one perspective, from another scholars have viewed them as unfortunate. To the extent that canonization obscures the theological and religious pluralism that existed in ancient Judaism and Christianity (not to mention Israel), scholars have discounted its value. To be sure, the process of canonization is an important datum for understanding these religious communities, in both their ancient and modern expressions. But as the key to social, historical, and theological understanding, canon as such should be given no priority. To the contrary, canon must never be allowed to undercut rigorous historical analysis in which noncanonical sources count as much as canonical ones.

Without necessarily denying this, other scholars have argued that recovering the idea of canon in contemporary theological debate has been salutary. Thus, in the early 1970s James Sanders advocated “canonical criticism,” which was geared to ascertaining how religious communities read and later re-signified in other settings the traditions they saw as quintessential for their faith and praxis. This approach combines the full range of standard historical-critical tools and a theological sensitivity that takes seriously the Bible as Scripture.

The question is whether Sanders’s understanding of canon accords with the more usual meaning of canon as an authoritative body of texts. The canonical texts are no more theologically valid than other texts (or ideas). This means that for Sanders the value of the canon does not lie in its being an exclusive or even primary religious authority. Rather, the canon gives us countless examples for how texts functioned in Judaism and Christianity. In short, canon provides a hermeneutical guide for theological reflection and discourse. Contemporary theological reflection is, therefore, analogous to rather than derivative of canon. Sanders’s “canonical criticism” is, it appears, actually a theologically oriented version of the “history of traditions” (Traditionsgeschichte). The theological value, whether negative or positive, of such traditions is to be determined by criteria outside of the canon. That may, indeed, constitute a justifiable approach, but whether it should be construed under the rubric of “canon” is arguable.

Brevard Childs has attempted to foster an approach to canon along more traditional lines. He criticizes modern scholarship for failing to take seriously either the importance of canonical processes in the founding communities of Judaism and Christianity or the production of the final, canonical form of the text as the proper context for theological reflection. Childs maintains that standard critical tools should be retained, but self-consciously placed in the service of a canonical interpretation; in fact, the critical approaches may serve to highlight the canonical emphases. He rejects what he thinks has been modern scholarship’s primary goal: locating pre-canonical traditions in their original historical settings and assigning a privileged ideational or theological position to that setting. Equally, Childs rejects the anti-critical stance of conservative scholarship for construing inspiration too narrowly and for espousing a historically naïve view of the canon’s development.

For Childs, the canon is more than a coincidental “frozen moment” in the faith community’s history. Nor did the canon result from the arbitrary selections of history’s “winners,” who proceeded to impose their theological will on everyone else. Rather, from the beginning the community selected, shaped, and edited the traditions that it believed mediated divine revelation. Regardless of the date of its actual completion, canon is the result of thousands of theologically constitutive decisions that the community made in countless life situations. The growth of revered and influential interpretive traditions alongside the canon does not obviate the fact that neither Judaism nor Christianity ever accorded these traditions equivalent status, at least not officially. Even though scholarship sometimes insists on bypassing the canon to ascertain on solid historical grounds the community’s claims, Childs contends that canonical formation, rightly conceived, affords the best opportunity for uncovering precisely what those claims were.

James Barr has criticized Childs for imprecise or changing definitions of canon, on the one hand, and, on the other, for failing to follow through with a truly canonical approach in the execution of the exegetical and theological task. In spite of Barr’s appreciation for the way Sanders and Childs have promoted renewed interest in and a thorough discussion of canon in modern scholarly discourse, in the end he believes that major issues regarding canon, biblical authority, the relationship of Old Testament and New Testament, systematic as opposed to biblical theology, and similar issues are not resolved by the variety of canonical methods. If canonical approaches have been helpful in some areas of biblical interpretation, they have just as certainly complicated others. For Barr, canon may be a valuable heuristic device for dealing with some biblical matters, but little more than that.

In historical terms, it seems impossible to deny that even biblical religions have worked out their faith and life by appealing not only to Scripture or canon, but also to tradition, experience, and reason. For the Christian church, the exact relationship among these various sources of authority has yet to be spelled out satisfactorily. One recent effort to describe the relationship between canon and church more adequately has been that of William Abraham, who has tried to show that historically the canon played a sacramental and salvific role in the church’s life. The canon was a “means of grace.” Only later did the canon come to be seen as having primarily epistemic value, something that Abraham believes was deleterious. It is noteworthy, however, that a systematic theologian has made a major contribution on the topic of canon, which previously had been almost exclusively the provenance of biblical scholars.

For a generation now the topic of canon has been a lively one, in spite of great disagreement and many unresolved issues. Once considered a necessary but dull chapter in biblical introductions, the idea of canon has become the focus of vigorous debate among scholars in a number of religious disciplines. As long as biblical authority in particular and religious or ecclesial authority in general are worthy of serious discussion—perhaps in spite of and even because an alleged postmodern era has now arrived—then the continuing debate over the nature and function of canon will have most positive results.

FRANK ANTHONY SPINA

Bibliography

William J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology.

James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective.

Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments.

John Goldingay, Models for Scripture.

James A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism.

Cross-Reference: Authority, Biblical Criticism, Biblical Theology, Inspiration, Tradition.