A carpenter has many tools. One of them is a ruler. Before anything is cut, it is measured. A good carpenter “measures twice and cuts once.” While a carpenter uses a ruler to measure, and when they are finished building whatever it is they are making, they do not go around proudly showing off their ruler at the expense of what has been created. Here is the problem of ‘Bible believing Christians’: they spend all their time talking about their ruler, their ‘canon.’ They do not seem to understand that the concept of the Bible as a canon is that it is not the thing in itself but is a measuring tool. However, it is not the measuring tool of Christianity. The church had a canon before it had the biblical canon. It was this canon that determined which books should be finally included in the biblical canon. This canon was the emerging doctrine of the Trinity, the character of God revealed as Abba, Son and Spirit. This ‘authentic’ canon had three intersecting loci: The Baptismal Creed The Divine Liturgy The Catechism In the early church, ethics, liturgy and theology/spirituality were all of one piece. Modern Protestantism has virtually tossed the canon of the early church out of the house and replaced it with the fiction of the ‘biblical’ canon. It has furthermore adopted an extremely tenuous view that God alone gives the interpretation of the Bible to the individual believer. The Bible was the church’s book and always has been the church’s book, never the book of the individual. It is a book about a people meant to be interpreted in the light of the journey of a people by a people. The Bible is a communal book. So people can say that the ‘Bible says this’ or the ‘Bible says that’ but if what they say is incongruent with the prayers of the ancient liturgy or the catechetical practice of the early church or if it does not reflect a healthy perception and understanding of the relationship between the Abba, the Son Jesus and the Spirit, I will not listen. At that point they have decided that their own personal story trumps the story of the way God has always worked and that is with a people, a community. Why? Because we are not autonomous individuals, such a thing does not exist. We are our relationships; we are interdividual (to use Rene Girard’s term). Bible study is a communal thing, it involves the present community and it involves all the saints who have gone before us. Show me a carpenter who only talks about his/her tools and I’ll show you a fool.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 18:24:28 +0000
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