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From: lisa@phs.UUCP (Jeffrey William Gillette)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Hunting Phantasma in the Christian Tradition
Message-ID: <1058@phs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Oct-85 21:41:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: phs.1058
Posted: Thu Oct  3 21:41:29 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Oct-85 03:15:47 EDT
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As usual, Gary Buchholz has contributed a very thoughtful and informed
article to the discussion of doctrine and Christianity.  Regarding the
importance of the canon as authoritative for Christianity, Gary calls
attention to the writings of Helmut Koester and J.M. Robinson, who argue
(following the lead of Walter Bauer, who wrote at mid-century) that the
New Testament canon is simply the end product of theological
controversy of the 2nd Century.  Put bluntly, Bauer, Koester and
Robinson claim that our Bible represents the authority of the "winners".

While there is much truth, and even more significance in the Koester &
Robinson approach (e.g. their argument for the continuity of development
from Jewish wisdom tradition to Jesus saying to Gnostic revelation), we
must avoid drawing excessively simplistic assumptions about how the
canon came about.  In fact, the first church authority who published a
list of books which corresponds exactly to our New Testament was
Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria Egypt, in his Easter letter of 359.  Al
Sundberg has argued forcefully for years that the formative period in
the development of the canon of the New Testament as we understand it
was not the 2nd Century but the 4th Century.  

It is interesting to note in support of Sundberg the reaction of 2nd
Century writers to the phenomenon of Christian Scripture.  Papias,
writing in the early decades of the 2nd Century, rejects the written
Gospels, preferring the "living and abiding voice" from the apostles.
Tertullian, writing around 200 in Carthage, North Africa, bemoans the
fact that every heretic quotes Scripture.  Irenaeus thinks it necessary
to defend his use of Christian Scripture by first defending the
orthodoxy of the apostles who wrote it!  In my readings of the 2nd
Century it seems evident that the normative force in Christianity is the
"regula fidei", the creed (loosely speaking) by which one interprets the
writings.  The idea that Christianity was a religion of the "book", and
the debate over which books are included belongs much more to the
constructive and academic debates of the late 3rd / early 4th Century,
rather than the "political hegemony" of 2nd Century theological debates.

Regarding the continuing relevance of Scripture, Gary brings up the
views of Best and Dunn, roughly that in the New Testament we have
"freezings" ("snapshot" might be as good a term) of how specific
individuals in specific situations and specific cultures understood
Christianity.  The upshot of this for Best is to call into question
whether these "freezings" ought to be more authoritative than, e.g. the
non-canonical Gospel of Thomas or Shepherd of Hermas (the first of these
books may well come from the 1st Century, the second came very close to
"making it" into the New Testament).  For Best, the presence of multiple
layers of tradition in the text causes him to attempt to formulate an
"irreducible minimum" of Christian belief (which core Best characterizes
condescendingly as the "individualistic emphasis of Evangelical
Protestantism").  

Recently Brevard Childs of Yale has registered two very powerful (to my
mind at least) criticisms of the Dunn / Best view of Scripture.  First,
Childs argues that Best wants to anchor the meaning of the text too
firmly in a "historicist reading" - that the meaning of a parable is
what Jesus meant when he told it, or what the Evangelist meant when he
wrote it down.  In fact, the many levels of material in the text (e.g.
what Jesus said, what the early Church passed on, what the Evangelist
wrote down, what latter editors may have reworked) shows the church
involved in the exact opposite of the "freezing" process.  The process
of the canon is a process by which the believing community attempted to
"loosen the text from any one given historical setting, and to transcend
the original addressee", while still remaining faithful to the fact that
the Word of God came in time and history.

Second, Childs criticizes Best and Dunn for not realizing that the
significance of the canon was not to tie the gospel to the past, but to
the future.  The process of canonization was a dialectic in which the
church shaped the text, and in return were shaped by the same
Scriptures.  Rather than presenting a series of outdated and irrelevant
snapshots of Christianity (a position, by the way, which neither Dunn
nor Best would hold), we see in the canon the church of several
generations wrestling with the basic questions of what it means to be
and to live as a Christian.  Inasmuch as the basic questions of human
existence, justice and theology have remained the same throughout the
past two millennia, the canon serves to give us a living paradigm of how
the contemporary community must wrestle with the truth of the gospel of
Jesus Christ.

This brings up Gary's final point.  Given the point that the canon of
Scripture represents a positive and relevant definition (or definitions)
of what Christianity is about, can we call it authoritative (i.e. Truth
or Reality)?  I take it that this is where the 20th Century academy has
not (nor, dare I say it, ever will) overcome the "scandal of the Cross."
Bultmann thought that if one properly "demythologized" the New Testament
he could come up with some enduring insight into Reality.  I would argue
that his approach differs from modern Fundamentalists in degree, not in
kind.  In fact no denomination takes Scripture "literally" (when was the
last time someone in your church sold all his belongings and gave them
to the poor).  On the other hand, every believing Christian makes the
conscious decision to accept on faith that in Jesus Christ God decisively 
encountered humankind, and in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures (canon) 
we have the authoritative record of that encounter, which, when properly 
interpreted (whatever this may mean) will yield valid and relevant 
insight into the person of God, God's relationship with man, and man's 
ethical responsibility in the world.  Has the Christian "defined" reality 
or "described" it (to use Gary's terms)?  I suppose that depends on 
whether one chooses to "believe" or not.  Thus I see no way around the
dilemma: what appears to one as the "shifting images of phantasmagoria" 
appear to another as "true doctrine."  

	Jeffrey William Gillette		uucp: duke!phys!lisa
	The Divinity School			bitnet: DYBBUK @ TUCCVM
	Duke University