The eyes of faith: the sense of the faithful and the church's reception of revelation

5. Authority and the Canon of Scripture

116 ChAPter 5 authority and the Canon of scripture in addressing, in the previous chapter, the oral and literary formation of the Jesus tradition, the issue of communal authority was raised in terms of “approbative reception.” We now continue our exploration of authority by examining in greater detail the issue of approbative reception within the lives of the communities of the new Testament writings. We will then go on to see how this same concern for approbative reception gives rise to the selection and delimitation of certain writings, and not others, as constituting an accepted norm for the Christian faith. significantly, we will see that the final canon of new Testament writings is not primarily the result of a formal decision-making process by authority figures in the churches, but is the result of a much more inclusive and somewhat diffuse communal process, even though such authority figures play a significant role. SAfeguArDIN g t h e t reAS ure in one of the later writings of the new Testament, the Paul of the Pastoral Letters writes to Timothy: “Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.”1 The matter of teaching 1. 2 Tm 1:14. author i t y and th e canon 117 authority in the early church, its exercise and criteria, is a complex scholarly issue.2 however, one thing is clear: concern for fidelity to what the church had been given, the Gospel, is a pervasive concern throughout the new Testament. in this section, i do not wish to examine in detail the development of teaching authority in the early church. rather, i want to highlight that, while the emergence of authority figures and “institutional structures” does not replace the abiding sense that the whole community is authorized as the bearer of revelation, conflicting interpretation of revelation , nevertheless, becomes problematic in the first generations of Christianity . The early church’s response to that problem through a communal exercise of authority includes the specific role of certain authority figures. The implicit notion of “apostolic tradition” crystallizes the early church’s concern for a norm for testing further traditioning of the Gospel. our enquiry begins with an examination of the words “apostolic” and “apostle.” The word “apostolic” first of all refers to a foundational time in the church. at this stage it will be helpful to clarify terminology regarding the timeline we will be discussing. regarding the foundational period of the early church, there are varying designations. i will follow the schematization of raymond Brown. Presupposing, from the new Testament evidence, that the apostles who witnessed the pre-easter Jesus had died by around the year a.d. 67 and that, apart from the seven authentic Pauline letters, “most of the [new Testament] was written after the death of the last known apostle,”3 “the term ‘apostolic age’ should be confined to that second one-third of the first century, and that the last one-third of the century should be designated as the ‘sub-apostolic Period.’”4 in this latter period, attributing authorship to the historical apostles was intended as “a claim to apostolic adherence,”5 and so the period warrants designation at least as “sub-apostolic.” Brown includes in the “Postapostolic Period” writings of the next century, such as 1 Clement and the letters of ignatius of antioch; “this written work of a ‘third generation’ was moving away from claiming the direct mantle of the apostles.”6 2. for an overview, see Joseph a. fitzmyer, “The office of Teaching in the Christian Church according to the new Testament,” in Teaching Authority and Infallibility in the Church: Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue VI, ed. Paul C. empie et al. (minneapolis: augsburg Publishing house, 1980), 186–212. 3. raymond e. Brown, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (new york: Paulist Press, 1984), 14. 4. ibid., 15. 5. ibid., 16. 6. ibid. as a caveat to his terminology, Brown notes: “The language of ‘three generations’ 118 T H E nor m Two points need affirming before any discussion of the issue of apostolic authority within the early church. firstly, although there is a deep concern for oversight of the passing on of the Gospel, there is no sense in the new Testament that special knowledge has been given to one particular group in the church (such as the original apostles) which had not been revealed to all...