|
Review Summary: Evangelicals Rediscovering Church Authority and Tradition |
Date: 2008-09-06 |
|
| |
Details: Most of us evangelicals spend much or all of our lives believing in the Bible and in it's self-authentication or spirit-authentication. We fail to ask ourselves where we got our Bible. This review gives away a lot of the content. But if you want to know ahead of time, keep reading.
Craig Allert began his study of the canon knowing the typical evangelical views of the formation of the canon. To sum up, the canon (it is supposed) formed relatively quickly after death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As each book was written, goes the typical lore, it was included in the already existing open canon until it was felt that no more could be included and it was dutifully closed.
Through his study Allert realized that early church history isn't quite so simple nor were the voices of church fathers so unanimous as to give us anything like a fixed canon until beginning in the fourth century A.D. In fact, he shows that even much later in the eighth and ninth centuries, there was still some ambiguity.
Allert's study shows that inspiration and scripture in the early church were not only applied to texts other than those that made it into the canon. His conclusion is that if the content of the canon wasn't fixed early on, then the Christians must have had a different set of criteria for determining the content of the gospel message than most evangelicals do. They had a message, a rule of faith, which defined the content, meaning, and scope of the gospel and this led to some of the criteria the church used for including or exluding books in the Bible.
Whatever one's initial reaction to the idea that evangelicals are reliant upon tradition, Allert forcefully argues that even in evangelicalism it is impossible to accept the Bible without accepting tradition, because the Bible IS a tradition. It is the product of a tradition that formed its idea of the gospel before it had any new testament to refer to.
However, Allert is clear that some of the books were accepted very early on without dispute; for instance: the thirteen letters of Paul, Acts, and the four gospels. Nevertheless, anyone who accepts the rest of the new testament is relying on church unanimity which only fully solidified long after the fourth century A.D. (In fact, even today the Ethiopic church doesn't recognize the same New Testament as the rest of the church.)
Allert does not argue that "inspiration" had nothing to do with it. What he argues instead is that "inspiration" in a subjective sense wasn't a criterion used by the church to recognize these books, however much it had to agree with the "rule of faith". Neither was apostolicity (in the sense of the author of a book being by an apostle or one of his direct followers) a clinching criterion. It was only as the church lived its life for many more centuries that the fullness of the NT canon as we have it today solidified into a "canon".
His conclusion, then, is that if his study of canon is correct, evangelicals must rethink their ecclesiology and give the church's role in the redemptive scheme of God much more thought.
For great online primary sources dealing with these topics (including canon lists) see: http://www.bible-researcher.com/canon.html.
Also, for a more approachable, friendly, and humorous approach to the problems of tradition for evangelicals, see By What Authority?: An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition. Mark Shea, the author, is truly kind and appreciative of his evangelical heritage, while trying to demonstrate the superiority of Catholic Tradition. |
| |
|
Review Summary: The problem of a cloudy interpretative lens |
Date: 2008-05-08 |
|
|
| |
Details: Dr. Allert adds argument to the growing number of evangelicals challenging their fellow evangelicals to correct their interpretative lens. Through the use of multiple examples from the early church Dr. Allert challenges evangelical assumptions about the canon, definitions of inspiration, and definitions of scripture. He points out how the early church fathers, who's authority determined the canon on which we rely, often pointed to other writings as scripture or inspired. If we were to take recognition by the early church as our guide to what must be included in the canon, we would have a much larger canon than we now have (Dr. Allert's included with regard to the deuterocanon - see Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger: The Untold Story of the Lost Books of the Protestant Bible for more on that topic).
Dr. Allert does well to challenge these assumptions and making it clear that, in the end, it is not canon or inerrancy that is key to understanding scripture's role as a guide. It is, in the end, interpretation that is key. And interpretation cannot be done in a vacuum (see also, 2 Peter 1:20) but must be done in the context of the church that formed the canon. Dr. Allert avoids the begging question of "what church would that be?" Instead, he ignores that important question and leaves us wondering at his answer. He makes a bold confession denying sola scriptura when he concludes, "For roughly the first four hundred years of its existence, the church had no closed canon, so the *Bible* could not have functioned as the sole criterion." Unfortunately, though he points out the importance of the church in interpreting scripture, he fails to identify how that church can be found in the evangelical paradigm of an invisible church. The same history that gives us the importance of the church also identifies that church but Dr. Allert seems hesitant to share his findings. Perhaps he is not yet ready to face his own assumptions about that question.
Many of us have gone this same road of discovery and we are all on different parts of the road. Dr. Allert is to be commended for his honest and thorough scholarship in challenging his fellow evangelicals to think more deeply on these questions. This is a worthy addition to this refreshing series of works. Dr. Allert has given us a solid historical study with much food for thought while leaving some important questions still open for us to ponder. One of his closing remarks says it all, "[I]f we are to do justice to and cherish God's word to us, we must be aware of the means God used to deliver it to us, and in that, the church has been central. Failure to account for this does not appreciate the importance of the Bible in the life of the church and its members, no matter how high people claim their doctrine of Scripture to be."
The point is very well stated and very highly recommended for deeper consideration. Also a good companion to Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church's Future) or Tradition, Scripture, and Interpretation: A Sourcebook of the Ancient Church (Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church's Future) in any library. |
| |
|
Review Summary: How should an evangelical view the formation of Scripture? |
Date: 2007-10-13 |
|
|
| |
Details: Allert found it curious that evangelicals--and he calls himself one--rarely studied the historical process which formed the canon of the New Testament. For himself, he felt that "a high view of Scripture demands an understanding..of the Bible's very formation" (p 13).
About 1900, Zahn had argued that the canon was formed by the end of the 1st century. Harnack saw the canon as settled during the 2nd century, which became the standard approach for many evangelical biblical scholars.
As Allert dug deeper, he realized this was incorrect. In 1 Clement and the letter of Ignatius there are references to a common set of dogmas or tradition. "This tradition is guarded by the church leadership" (p 62).
Harnack may have argued that the canon was settled by the 2nd century, but the facts do not fully support this thesis. The church fathers cited many noncanonical literature as Scripture. Their view of what formed the books of Scripture was clearly broader than ours today.
In fact, "the Bible grew in and was mediated through the church...Scripture and church function together--they coincide" (p 84-5). He notes that Irenaeus stresses the process of succession from the apostles to the bishops. Against the heresies of the Gnostics, Irenaeus points to the body of doctrine proclaimed by the church as consistent everywhere.
A well thought out and well argued approach. Much recommended. |
| |
|
Review Summary: A good introduction to some issues |
Date: 2007-08-08 |
|
| |
Details: This book is part of a series of works aiming to bring patristic scholarship to bear on problems in interpretation and proclamation for evangelicals. The author makes simple observations - that the canon of scripture was not solidified and closed by the second century (as Harnack claimed) and that there was indeed a church before there was a canon. The first of his two observations is more controversial than the second, but has better support from patristic sources. Allert challenges the dominant evangelical understanding of "theopneustos" in 2 Tim. 3:16 by recourse to the patristic sources that use the same apellative to describe phenomena unrelated to scripture.
This is not a book that offers easy answers to the difficult questions surrounding what we mean when we say that scripture is inspired. Also, I would have appreciated a bit more interaction with the source material like the review of recent scholarship on the effect that Marcion, Montanism and Gnosticism had on the development of the canon. But as an introduction is it quite sufficient and I expect to use the footnotes to guide further study of this area of interpretation. |
| |
|
out of 4 Reviews
