Gospel and Scripture: rethinking canonical unity -- By: Francis Watson

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 52:2 (NA 2001)
Article: Gospel and Scripture: rethinking canonical unity
Author: Francis Watson


Gospel and Scripture: rethinking canonical unity1

Francis Watson

Summary

It is widely believed that the Christian Bible is merely an anthology of the religious literature of ancient Israel and the early church, and that to speak of its ‘unity’ or ‘coherence’ is no longer possible. But biblical unity is still an issue where one seeks to understand the texts in their relation to God, and there are two main ways in which this issue is typically presented: biblical unity may be grounded in the process of divine inspiration which is believed to have generated these writings, or it may be grounded in a theory of providential ordering. The problem with both approaches is that they fail to reflect on the relation between scripture and the gospel, the proclamation of what God has done in and through Jesus and his Spirit which, for Christians, lies at the centre of the testimony of both Old and New Testaments. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul struggles to articulate an evangelical hermeneutic for scriptural interpretation, over against opponents who hold no less ‘high’ a doctrine of scripture than he does. This evangelical hermeneutic is not simply imposed on the texts from the outside, but identifies fundamental elements in the dynamics of these texts, notably the promise/law polarity. In broad outline, Paul’s argument can serve as a model for our own attempts to rethink scriptural unity.

I. Introduction

Integral to the concept of the scriptural canon is the idea of its ‘unity’ or ‘coherence’. A canon is not an anthology, although, like an anthology, its contents may well have been selected out of a mass of available material. An anthology cannot be held accountable for the unity or coherence of its contents. If the poets appear to disagree with one another, then that simply illustrates the rich diversity of the human

experience in which a particular poetic tradition is rooted. But to explain the varied content of Christian scripture in this way would be to abandon the concepts of canon and scripture. A richly diverse human experience certainly underlies the writings of Christian scripture; and yet these writings are supposed to speak, from beginning to end, of the one God who is trustworthy and true, and to do so in a way that is itself trustworthy and true. Anthologies and canons are both diverse, but canons also lay claim to some degree of structured coherence, a unifying logic inherent to the writings themselves. Canons are supposed to express something other than the preferences and prejudices of anthologisers.

It is, of course, possible for interpreters of the Bible to understand it as an ...

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