Sunday, 27 September 2015

On Artillery

The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
LORD we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
While there aren't really any cannons in the Anglican Church, there are multiple canons. Canon is an honorary title awarded to both clergy and laity for recognition of service to the church. Canons may also refer to rules of the Church. In the Anglican Church of Canada, there is currently a great deal of debate over proposed amendments to Canon XXI of the Church which governs the rules for the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Canons of this type exist dating back to the earliest days of the Church. When the Ecumenical Councils gathered, the decisions they reached were released in the form of Canons, lists of numbered rules that had been agreed upon.

There is a third form of canon, however, which is the Canon of Scripture. The Canon of Scripture refers to the list of accepted books of the Bible in both the old and new testaments. To be canonical is to be accepted as authoritative, while being non-canonical indicates that the book is not authoritative as Scripture, though it does not necessarily mean that the rejected text contains false teachings.

The Canon of Scripture speaks to a seemingly simple question: where does the Bible come from, and how do we know it is the authoritative word of God?

We have two testaments, so the answer to these questions becomes two-fold.

In the time of Christ, references are made to the Scriptures, but of course these would have been to what we now consider the Old Testament. The Scriptures given to the Jews over the centuries. While the early heresy of Marcionism sought to reject the Old Testament, suggesting it described another god, separate from God the Father revealed by Jesus Christ, all Christians accepted the authority of the Old Testament books of the Bible, in continuity and interpreted through the lens of revelation in Jesus Christ.

While in general the Old Testament was universally accepted by orthodox Christians, there are a few points of division. The most substantive change comes from the two histories of the texts, the Septuagint Greek Old Testament and the Masoretic Hebrew Old Testament. By the time of Christ, the majority of Jews were Jews of Diaspora living outside of ancient Israel and most often speaking the lingua franca of the ancient world, Greek. Because they spoke and read Greek, the Scriptures were written down in Greek and read in Greek. It would not have been unusual for many Jewish communities to not contain a single person capable of reading the Hebrew texts.

For the first few decades after the Resurrection, Christianity was viewed by many as being simply a subset of Judaism. Over time, however, and especially after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, they became viewed as separate. Partly because of the fact that Christians were using the Septuagint text and that they wanted to distinguish themselves as “proper” Jews, the Jewish authorities developed the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Hebrew Scriptures. In doing this, they adjusted their canon of Scripture, removing a few books which had previously been considered canonical and authoritative. The organization of some books was also adjusted.

This initially had a limited impact on Christianity and the Canon of the Old Testament until the time of Continental Reformation in the 16th century.  Between that time, Christian translations of the Bible would sometimes use both the Masoretic and Septuagint sources, with the canon remaining fixed by the Septuagint tradition. By the time of the Reformation, however, a number of reformers suggested that because the Jews had removed some of the books of the Old Testament from their canon, we ought to as well. Today, most Protestant Bibles continue to exclude those books.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, which has tended to stick to the Septuagint only as the source of its Old Testament books maintains the original numbering and order.

In the West, the Roman Catholic Church determined that the books removed from the Hebrew text would be deemed deuterocanonical, which means secondary canon. They still hold some form of authority, but they tend to be organized into a separate section either at the end of the Bible or between the Old and New Testaments, and held to a lower level of authority (in contrast to the East where no distinction is made between them and other accepted books of the Old Testament).

In Anglicanism, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion follow the Roman practice of organizing these books into a secondary canon called either the deuterocanon or Apocrypha, saying, “And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.” The term deuterocanonical is often preferred to avoid misunderstandings with apocryphal books of the New Testament which contain false teachings. The deuterocanonical books are variously viewed as being the lowest level of Scripture, or by some as being the highest and most authoritative non-Scriptural books of the Bible.

The Canon of the New Testament is a bit more of an interesting story, though obviously parallels earlier developments in the canon of the Old Testament as it was assembled over the centuries by the Jews. The books of the New Testament were written roughly twenty to sixty years after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Over the course of the next few hundred years, the exact Canon of Scripture was not fixed and in different places you might have a smaller Canon of Scripture, set by the local bishop, which rejected some books which are now canonical, while other bishops might have a more expansive Canon, which might include books such as I Clement, which was extremely popular in the early Church.

St Athanasius the Great writing in the mid fourth century has the honour of writing the first canon of Scripture which articulates the Canon as we hold it today, more than three hundred years after the time of Christ. The reality is that until the legalization of Christianity in the 4th century, many of these matters were not resolved because they simply weren’t of sufficiently pressing concern.

When they were resolved, the general test for whether or not a book would be accepted in the Canon was whether or not it was Apostolic, meaning written either by an Apostle or in their name. This rule would account for the rejection of I Clement from the Canon, despite the fact that it remains to this day well-regarded and expounds no theological error and was written in the Apostolic Age (c. 95AD), but Clement was writing in his own name and was not an Apostle, but only a Bishop or Priest.

By the end of the fourth century in the West and the fifth century in the East (there remained there controversy over the book of Revelation, not because its authority was in question but because of concerns that it might be misinterpreted by future Christians), the Canon of the New Testament was universally accepted by councils of the Church, and fixed for all time as it remains to this day.

While there may not be cannons in Anglicanism, surely the authority and teachings of Holy Scripture represent an invaluable armoury to the Christian against the snares of the devil.

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