means that most Christians, most of the time, simply endorse the tradition. They simply accept what has been handed down to them from the past. Even those who most enthusiastically affirm the principle of ‘the Bible and the Bible only’ depend upon the tradition about the canon so that they can identify what the limits of the Bible are. This is usually done without much concern or criticism. As a result we have a strange paradox: to affirm both ‘The Bible and the Bible only,’ and to affirm as well the traditional identification of the Bible, limiting it to those books which the tradition has affirmed. It is particularly ironical that most Protestants assert that the Bible stands alone, while relying upon tradition to identify which are the books which constitute the Bible, tradition which existed long before the divide between Protestant and Catholic took place.
So when the church acknowledges Scripture is this anything other than a formal recognition of sixty-six books?
The fact is that the effective canon is not identical with the sixty- six books which the church formally defines as its official canon. The church does not use all portions of the canon consistently. ‘The church’ refers to the congregation, the churchman, the preacher, the theologian, the individual believer. Each of these is a particular entity. By ‘use’ we refer to doctrinal definition, proclamation, devotional reading, liturgical practice and have in mind the distinctions we made at the very beginning of this book. It is essential that we now make a clear distinction. It is that between books formally and traditionally defined as canonical and books or portions of books actually, repeatedly and consistently used in the various activities of the church. The effective canon of the church consists of those books and parts of books the church actually uses. These are a limited selection and are drawn from the whole which the church formally calls its canon. The official canon is the list of accepted books. Some will be used frequently, some seldom, some not at all. The ‘canon’ sets the outer limit. Within that limit there is selection. This means that there are inner limits. In the performance of its varied activities the church appeals to certain portions of the writings whose outer limits are defined by the official canon. The books whose limits are formally defined and the books actually used repeatedly and consistently are not identical.
We might use technical language to make this important distinction.25 The community might say, We are not bound to an historical decision, a contingent decision about the canon, for the manner in which we use these books. The church identifies herselfby specifying which books she uses. That means that the definition of the canon is made by, and at the same time is an identification of, the church itself. The church identifies itself by specifying as canonical those writings it uses in its varied activities.
A further observation is important. We have in what precedes been speaking of the canonical books as formally defined, in contrast to books or portions of books actually used regularly and seriously. But, of course, books outside of the formally defined canon can, and often do, exercise as much or even greater influence on Christian understanding, worship and practice than writings from the canon of Scripture. What writing is effectively authoritative within the church will be assessed in proportion to the influence it exercises and the acknowledgment it receives. The writings of a teacher, a charismatic figure, a churchman, a theologian may, in a given community, have more effective influence than whole sections of the formal canon. That is an important fact of church life which the Protestant must take into account in understanding what the principle of sola scriptura can mean. The activity of the Holy Spirit, so the church claims, manifests itself in many ways in the church. Some of them may not be directly related to the actual words of formally canonical Scripture.
It looks as though the Protestant principle of sola scriptura might be compromised on two levels:
1 because of an acceptance of a definition of the limits of Scripture handed down by tradition, i.e. of an endorsement of the traditional pronouncements about the canon; and
2 because a non-Scriptural office or person or tradition may, in any given community, wield more effective influence and be referred to more consistently than the writings of the canonical Scripture, whole portions of which may be quietly left aside.
So a doctrine of Scripture cannot be isolated from the life and practice of the community which uses Scripture. Otherwise the doctrine becomes formal and the church’s claim concerning Scripture does not then correspond to its actual practice.
8 THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE CONSIDERATIONS
We conclude this chapter with a brief suggestion about the theological significance of these considerations.
1 That the books of Scripture have a history means that human elements play an essential part from the very beginning and throughout the whole process of the book’s production. It is necessary to say this only because (at times) there has been a misleading emphasis in the opposite direction, to play down, even to suppress, any reference to the human. We may then have to insist that the books are human productions because so much emphasis has often been laid on the divine.
2 It is then a matter of saying how to speak well of God’s revelation in and through the books whose history we can trace. Christians affirm that these are the books through which God reveals himself, as they recount how God revealed himself in the past. This book is the written Word of God because of its intrinsic relationship with God’s revelation to the church.
3 Authority means influence. These books have influence of a particular kind. Christians accept them for having had and for continuing to have such influence. We must then, in giving a theological account of Scripture in relation to the life of the church, carefully state what this influence is. This will require clear, unprejudiced thinking.
4 The context for discussion of the Bible is where the Bible is spoken of as Holy Scripture, where it is received as having a special status, where, if it happens, God reveals himself. The authority of the Bible is not a property which inheres in it and which can be demonstrated, for example by showing that it is inspired, but rather connotes a relation in which divine and human elements both play an important role. Hence our insistence that we observe what actually happens with regard to the Bible in the practice of the church.
We cannot do justice to the status of the Bible without dealing with the community, the church, in which the Bible is used, and in which judgments about the Bible are made and passed on, sometimes formally and sometimes informally. Only by speaking in relational terms shall we be able to do justice to the problem of the authority of the Bible.
10 Donald E. Gowan, Bridge Between the Testaments, p. 334.
11 Ibid. p. 331.
12 The Reformers decided that the so-called apocryphal books were to be read but not to be held as having authority. ‘The Roman Catholic church at the Council of Trent (AD 1545 - 1563) decided that the apocryphal books were to be included, since they had been long used in worship. So a difference arose among Christians.
13 B. W. Anderson comments: ‘These principles may strike us as being rather arbitrary. It would certainly not have detracted from Jewish Scripture, if for instance some reason had been found to substitute the Wisdom of Ben Sire or some of the psalms from the Qumran community for the Song of Songs or Esther. We must remember, however, that the question of the authority of most of the writings now found in the Hebrew Bible had been answered before the Academy of Jamnia, especially in the worship practice of the community. Those writings were preserved and used devotionally which spoke authoritatively to the community of faith.’ B. W. Anderson, op. cit., pp. 536-537.
