Without necessarily denying this, other scholars have argued that recovering the idea of canon in contemporary theological debate has been salutary. Thus, in the early 1970s James Sanders advocated “canonical criticism,” which was geared to ascertaining how religious communities read and later re-signified in other settings the traditions they saw as quintessential for their faith and praxis. This approach combines the full range of standard historical-critical tools and a theological sensitivity that takes seriously the Bible as Scripture.
The question is whether Sanders’s understanding of canon accords with the more usual meaning of canon as an authoritative body of texts. The canonical texts are no more theologically valid than other texts (or ideas). This means that for Sanders the value of the canon does not lie in its being an exclusive or even primary religious authority. Rather, the canon gives us countless examples for how texts functioned in Judaism and Christianity. In short, canon provides a hermeneutical guide for theological reflection and discourse. Contemporary theological reflection is, therefore, analogous to rather than derivative of canon. Sanders’s “canonical criticism” is, it appears, actually a theologically oriented version of the “history of traditions” (Traditionsgeschichte). The theological value, whether negative or positive, of such traditions is to be determined by criteria outside of the canon. That may, indeed, constitute a justifiable approach, but whether it should be construed under the rubric of “canon” is arguable.
Brevard Childs has attempted to foster an approach to canon along more traditional lines. He criticizes modern scholarship for failing to take seriously either the importance of canonical processes in the founding communities of Judaism and Christianity or the production of the final, canonical form of the text as the proper context for theological reflection. Childs maintains that standard critical tools should be retained, but self-consciously placed in the service of a canonical interpretation; in fact, the critical approaches may serve to highlight the canonical emphases. He rejects what he thinks has been modern scholarship’s primary goal: locating pre-canonical traditions in their original historical settings and assigning a privileged ideational or theological position to that setting. Equally, Childs rejects the anti-critical stance of conservative scholarship for construing inspiration too narrowly and for espousing a historically naïve view of the canon’s development.
For Childs, the canon is more than a coincidental “frozen moment” in the faith community’s history. Nor did the canon result from the arbitrary selections of history’s “winners,” who proceeded to impose their theological will on everyone else. Rather, from the beginning the community selected, shaped, and edited the traditions that it believed mediated divine revelation. Regardless of the date of its actual completion, canon is the result of thousands of theologically constitutive decisions that the community made in countless life situations. The growth of revered and influential interpretive traditions alongside the canon does not obviate the fact that neither Judaism nor Christianity ever accorded these traditions equivalent status, at least not officially. Even though scholarship sometimes insists on bypassing the canon to ascertain on solid historical grounds the community’s claims, Childs contends that canonical formation, rightly conceived, affords the best opportunity for uncovering precisely what those claims were.
James Barr has criticized Childs for imprecise or changing definitions of canon, on the one hand, and, on the other, for failing to follow through with a truly canonical approach in the execution of the exegetical and theological task. In spite of Barr’s appreciation for the way Sanders and Childs have promoted renewed interest in and a thorough discussion of canon in modern scholarly discourse, in the end he believes that major issues regarding canon, biblical authority, the relationship of Old Testament and New Testament, systematic as opposed to biblical theology, and similar issues are not resolved by the variety of canonical methods. If canonical approaches have been helpful in some areas of biblical interpretation, they have just as certainly complicated others. For Barr, canon may be a valuable heuristic device for dealing with some biblical matters, but little more than that.
In historical terms, it seems impossible to deny that even biblical religions have worked out their faith and life by appealing not only to Scripture or canon, but also to tradition, experience, and reason. For the Christian church, the exact relationship among these various sources of authority has yet to be spelled out satisfactorily. One recent effort to describe the relationship between canon and church more adequately has been that of William Abraham, who has tried to show that historically the canon played a sacramental and salvific role in the church’s life. The canon was a “means of grace.” Only later did the canon come to be seen as having primarily epistemic value, something that Abraham believes was deleterious. It is noteworthy, however, that a systematic theologian has made a major contribution on the topic of canon, which previously had been almost exclusively the provenance of biblical scholars.
For a generation now the topic of canon has been a lively one, in spite of great disagreement and many unresolved issues. Once considered a necessary but dull chapter in biblical introductions, the idea of canon has become the focus of vigorous debate among scholars in a number of religious disciplines. As long as biblical authority in particular and religious or ecclesial authority in general are worthy of serious discussion—perhaps in spite of and even because an alleged postmodern era has now arrived—then the continuing debate over the nature and function of canon will have most positive results.
FRANK ANTHONY SPINA
Bibliography
William J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology.
James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective.
Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments.
John Goldingay, Models for Scripture.
James A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism.
Cross-Reference: Authority, Biblical Criticism, Biblical Theology, Inspiration, Tradition.
CELAM II
In 1968 the second general ConferencE of Latin AMerican Bishops (CELAM II) met in Medellín, Colombia; the first conference had been held in Rio de Janeiro in 1955. Although the title of the conference, “The Church in the Present-Day Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council,” implied that the bishops were applying Vatican II to the particular circumstances of their continent, “Medellin,” as the meeting and its final document were generally called, became an important reference point for pastoral work and theology during the next two decades, and it was arguably the moment when Latin American Catholicism moved from being an extension of a European church and took on its own identity.
Methodologically, Medellin reversed the traditional doctrine-to-application model of Roman Catholic theology by first focusing on the reality of the social, economic, and political situation of Latin American society before proceeding to theological reflection and pastoral commitment. This new approach is evident in each of the sixteen final documents and in the presentation of the conclusions as a whole. First, the documents deal with the current situation, focusing on peace, justice, education, and family; a second set of documents takes up various aspects of pastoral work, such as catechetics and liturgy; and the last set deals with the structures of the church (e.g., priests, religious life, and laity), operating on the assumption that these should function to serve the church’s mission within the current situation. In their pastoral reflection and planning, church workers were quick to invoke the “Medellin method,” following a similar procedure in order to set their pastoral activity within an overall