The Living Word
What is considered “canon?”
This question is debated all the time in virtually every nook and cranny of fandom. Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, even Disney! What is official and what is not? There’s always a controversy somewhere. Star Wars reset their entire continuity after Disney took over and fans were so upset! Some of their favorite characters were wiped out of official continuity at the drop of a hat.[1] When Star Trek rebooted the movies and introduced Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, again fans were livid. Less because they introduced new actors and more because they changed Trek history. They even named this block of movies as “The Kelvin Timeline” to differentiate it from the “real” timeline.[2] And don’t get me started on comic books. The number of times a character’s origin story has been told and retold is ridiculous. One website chronicles the number of Superman origin stories at 835 (and counting with the new movie coming out in July).[3] Fans will spend hours arguing about which origin story is real, or which version best represents the heart and soul of their favorite character. Believe it or not, the same thing happened with the Bible.
To us, the Bible is the most authoritative book we have.
We are called the People of Five Books because of how important each one is defining who we are. The Book of Worship provides guidance on how to lead worship. The Book of Discipline outlines the basics for running a church. The Book of Resolutions collects our position on many social issues. And our hymnal shares our most important songs and prayers cataloged for easy research. But the Bible is the most important. It is held in higher esteem than any other book in our faith. Even non-churchgoing people often hold it in reverence or at least respect as a holy book. But when it was first created, there was a lot of debate about which books should be included and which should not. Which books would become canon? It would take hundreds of years to decisively determine which books would make the final list. Even today we still differ about which books are considered authoritative. Although Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants have the same New Testament, they have different numbers of books included in the Old Testament. Thirty-nine of the books in the OT are the same, but the Catholic Bible includes a section we refer to as the Apocrypha – additional books not considered to be as authoritative as the others, but still important enough to be included. The Orthodox Church has even more of those “not quite as authoritative” books included – hence the differences in our Bibles.
So what is the Bible to us?
One way of looking at it comes directly from the Bible itself. As Methodists, our official stance on the Bible is that it is the inspired Word of God. We believe the Bible is inspired, but not inerrant. That means the early writers were guided by the Holy Spirit when composing the different books of the Bible, but they wrote them in their own style, their own experience, and their own encounter with God. Everything they wrote was through their own life experience. We also believe the Bible is sufficient for matters of faith. All that means is we believe by knowing God’s character and reading the Bible in context we can figure out for ourselves what God would say to us today. But the Bible is not inerrant in the way we understand inerrancy today.[4] Plain and simple there are errors in the Bible. But those errors are not errors that change the fundamentals of our faith. Like when you read all four Gospels, you’ll find they don’t always put events in the same order or they will have slightly different details. Does that mean they didn’t happen? No. It just means each writer remembers the events a little differently. But they do not take away from the essence or meaning of the Bible. Maybe because we are so far away from the time of Christ we have put more and more weight on the Bible itself, but something Adam Hamilton wrote in his book Making Sense of the Bible stuck with me. He wrote, “One concern I have for those who hold to inerrancy is that they seem to indicate that their entire faith would collapse if the Bible were found to have one real error…this seems a very weak foundation for one’s faith. The early Christians did not see an inerrant Bible as the foundation for their faith. For them, it was Jesus Christ, God’s Word enfleshed, that was the foundation of their faith.”
14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. – 2 Timothy 3: 14-17
When we read this passage, we think Paul is talking about the Bible.
But he wasn’t talking about the Bible at all. At least not as we know it today. The Scriptures Paul was talking about were what we call the Old Testament. At most it may have included some of the early church writings, but the Bible as it is constructed today hadn’t yet been determined. Having said that, we still believe this statement is as true today as it was back then. What we consider to be our sacred texts, the Scriptures as we know it, are God-breathed to us – meaning we believe them to have been inspired by God and because they were, they are useful in “teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training us in righteousness.” If this is true, we should constantly refer to them for direction and inspiration. We should know them. We should study them so we too can be “thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
But there are some things the Bible is not.
The Bible is not an Owner’s Manual. It isn’t meant to be the single definitive answer to every problem we encounter. It IS meant to help us understand the nature of God and his will for our lives, but unlike an Owner’s Manual, it doesn’t deconstruct our lives one bolt at a time or tell us in minute detail everything we should do every minute of every day. Some people refer to the Bible using an acronym – Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.[5] Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth and while cute, the Bible is much more than that. The danger we have when we treat it as an owner’s manual is we are left rudderless when something doesn’t turn out as expected. Take for instance the book of James. In James 5:14-15, the Bible states, “14 Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well…” What happens then when that person dies? Does that mean we were not faithful enough? Hamilton told a story about a woman who had became angry with God because she believed in this promise, but when her son became ill he died anyways. He said, “The Bible now seemed to her a book of broken promises.”[6] We need to look at the Bible as a living document. It isn’t meant to address every problem in every age with exactitude. Instead the Bible is meant to help us understand the God we serve. It’s intended to give us a better perspective on how God intends for us to live and how we are to treat one another. It’s meant to give us a clearer picture of the people God meant for us to be. But it wasn’t meant to be an instruction manual given once for all time. If you were to read an instruction manual for the telephone back in the 1930’s it would read very differently than one today. That’s because an instruction manual is meant to be used only for a very specific time and place. To think the Bible was written like that would be very much the same thing – very limiting. Instead, the Bible is written more like our Constitution with different people interpreting it in different ways. Some take a more literal view of it, some take a more interpretative view of it, and together we struggle to hear the intent of our founding fathers in applying its principals today. For us as Christians we would say we struggle to hear the intent of our Founding Father in Heaven.
The Bible is a gift.
It’s a gift from God to help us grow closer to him and understand him. But like I said before, it’s not an owner’s manual. God gave you a brain and free will for a reason, in the hopes that you will make decisions that honor him. And how can you do that if you don’t know him? Read your Bible. Study it. Become a student of God if you aren’t already. And I hope that by studying the Bible, and discovering new truths about it, it will strengthen your faith and make you more confident in the God who inspired these writings. As it says in the last chapter of John, “30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”
[1] More and more of the old characters are being “re-canonized” as fan favorites are leaking into the new rebooted universe. My favorite being Grand Admiral Thrawn, but another favorite, Luke Skywalker’s wife and former Red Guard Mara Jade remains outside of the official story. https://screenrant.com/star-wars-disney-canon-reset-problems-explained/ for more on Star Wars canon.
[2] I did find it interesting that even Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, never had a consistent view on what was “canon.” However, the debate about the Kelvin timeline was solved, even if some fans didn’t accept it.
[3] My personal favorite version of Superman is the one with Krypto the Superdog! I mean who wouldn’t love a super dog? This article from Comic Book Resources shares some of those 835 origins.
[4] http://www.crivoice.org/inerrant.html (This article about inerrancy gives a lot of clarification to the entire debate and how our view of modern inerrancy is different from what it was intended to be).
[5] Adam Hamilton, op.cit., p.8.
[6] Ibid, p.9.
Craig's Corner 