I’d have to read Allert’s book to see what consequences, exactly, he is arguing for as a result of looking at canonization. But the arguments I’ve seen raised before tend to run thus: if one holds to a view of Scripture as inerrant (or possibly other high views), then one must believe that the canon itself was decided infallibly, else how does one know what inerrant Scripture is? And if the canon was decided infallibly, that argues for a high ecclesiology. The Church is dominant over Scripture, rather than the other way around.

It’s the first “if-then” that is wrong, in my view. We can believe that the canon was decided correctly, even without believing that decision was made through divine inspiration. For one thing, we can examine the provenance of the various books, the history of when and where they came about, and their language, style, and so on. These things help us evaluate their authenticity. And many of these qualities were themselves debated by the early church fathers and during canonization. Scholarship can play a big role in this.

If we believe they got it right on the basis of scholarly evidence and tracing the books’ histories, and someone else believes they got it right because ecumenical councils are supposedly infallible, then what does it matter? Both are coming to the same conclusion as to the authenticity of Scripture.

Maybe it’s just the approach to Scripture that I have, but I don’t see why the original method of canonization should be the ultimate issue. Even within the universally-accepted canon (say, the Gospels), you’ve got the long ending of Mark that was not original. And Christian scholars still debate the accuracy of specific lines of text, and so on. So why would I care if the canon was decided from on high by a “church council” in year X, or whether it gradually came to be recognized by the Christian world beforehand? The question of the truth (and Truth) of Scripture is an objective reality that exists independently of our understanding of it. It doesn’t depend on who pronounced it. If it was gotten wrong earlier, we can still critique it today.

By the way, I am amused to find some Catholics fighting the good fight against The Da Vinci Code by telling Dan Brown that the canon emerged early on from its widespread acceptance, and the later church councils simply ratified the near-universal understanding of the canon. While other Catholics tell Protestants that the Bible didn’t exist until late, when the Church itself created it from on high.

There are some good comments about our views of the bible at a blog I recently discovered:

http://reclaimingthefword.typepad.com/reclaiming_the_f_word/2007/05/3_things_people.html

“3 Things People Need To Know About The Bible.”

(btw, f stands for faith)

We evangelicals are currently faced with a similar dilemma. The church needs reformation. The answer is not going back to the church from which it was expelled, but going back to The Christ as revealed in His Word, Who we believe to be it’s Author. I would gladly ask the Catholics and Orthodox to join us in this journey.

The formation of the canon was due to a growing grass-roots consensus rather than a decision that was handed down by ecclesiastical authorities. The canon was not imposed by church leaders or by councils. They stand at the end of the process rather than at the beginning.

No action of a council or a synod was early enough to have had a decisive influence on the course of events.
The council decrees have the form: “This council declares that these are the books which have always been held to be canonical”.

It would therefore be more accurate to say that the canon selected itself, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, than that any Church selected it.

As regarding the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, all ecumenical Councils before 900 AD were held in the Greek East and all were convoked by the Emperor from Constantinople. At these Councils, where the ‘Nature of God’ was defined and determined for all generations, Latin bishops were numerically insignificant and made an insignificant contribution. For example, out of a total attendance of 318 at the Council of Nicea, the Latins could boast of only 7 representatives.

There is a very cogent reason for this lack of Latin participation: the first Latin version scripture of which we have knowledge circulated in North Africa about 200 AD. Faulty Latin versions multiplied until Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to make a new rendering from the original languages. The resultant translation – the Latin Vulgate was completed about 404 AD.

The order of church development was conditioned by the availability of scriptures in the common tongue. The Bible passed from Hebrew to Greek and thence into Latin, and the churches developed in similar order. The Latin churches, in the centuries when they were without the authoritative word, relied a great deal upon unauthoritative and wholly unreliable tradition.

And what about the role of the Spirit? Many talks about this subject ignore Him altogether. It is like all the church renewals and councils occurred without His intervention/leading.

I also went through a course on early Christian art. The early portraits of Jesus pictured him as a shepherd in a toga. He was one of them and took care of them. The pictures of Jesus changed over the centuries toward a more removed and emperor-like persona. I remember seeing a fifth century painting that portrayed a Jewish Jesus with a mean, judgemental look on his face holding the book of Jesus. Afterward, Christian artists started painting warm, mother-like pictures of Mary instead. As the centuries went by, she was given more divinity and portrayed as an intercessor to Christ. My teacher said that as Jesus became more like a judge and more removed, Mary replaced him as the intercessor/way to God. Surely we must always be looking at the way we perceive Christ. As we delve into the scriptures we will always be challenged by our perceptions of Him and He will challenge our perceptions of the Father and the role/person of the Holy Spirit. This is true reformation. If you study any good book on Church history, you will find that renewal and expansion comes when Christians rediscover the person of God through the Scriptures that have been handed down to us (read Paul,the Spirit, and the People of God; Gordon D. Fee). Another good reading is the introduction in Walls New Internation Biblical Commentary on the Revelation. There are good reasons to read the Church Fathers and recite the ancient creeds but none to go back to false perceptions of the One who died for us.