Imposing Unity?

I read a couple of articles recently. The first one was Gerald Sheppard's "Canonization: Hearing the Voice of the Same God through Historically Dissimilar Traditions," which was in the January 1, 1982 issue of Interpretation. The second was John Piper's "Authority and Meaning of the Christian Canon: A Response to Gerald Sheppard on Canon Criticism," which appeared in the September 2, 1976 Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. (This was back when he was a meek Bible professor.)

1. To be honest, I'm not sure what Sheppard's main argument was, but his article contained material that (in my opinion) was quite rich. I appreciated the opening line of his article, which was that "Investigations of the early order of the canonical material in the name of unity show that the unity displayed lies more in the hermeneutical principles used than in the material itself." Many people believe that there is an over-arching message of the Bible. Several Christians sum up the Bible as a story of humanity's separation from God, and God bridging that gap by sending Jesus Christ to atone for people's sins and to reconcile them with God. Some think that the main message of the Bible is social justice. Some think it's Torah.

But does the Bible have an over-arching theme? Sheppard's point in his articles is that people put together the diverse books of the Bible to make certain points. Post-exilic Judaism, for example, subordinated everything to the Torah, which it defined as the Pentateuch. (Well, the Jews who produced Jubilees probably didn't see the Pentateuch as the Torah, for they had their own alternative Torah. But there were Jews who had a high regard for the Pentateuch.) The Pentateuch was put first in the Bible, and the other books followed it. The impression that leaves with us is that the other books of the Bible comment on the Pentateuch. When Proverbs refers to "Torah" or to "wisdom," much of post-exilic Judaism assumed that to mean the laws of the Pentateuch. The same goes for the times that Psalms and prophetic books talk about the "law." When these books refer to the "Torah," however, they may not have had in mind the Pentateuch---which they may not have even known about, at least in any form that is recognizable to us. Jeremiah 7:22 denies that God commanded the Israelites to sacrifice after he brought them out of Egypt, which contradicts the Book of Leviticus and Numbers. But post-exilic Jews imposed an order, or a unity, upon the biblical books---which were books that were quite diverse from each other.

The same goes for Christianity, Sheppard contends. Paul offered a version of Christianity that was rather negative about the law, and those who ordered the books of the Bible chose not to start out the New Testament with Paul's writings. Rather, they started out with the Gospel of Matthew, which was quite pro-Torah. The epistle of James comes after the letters of Paul, and, within the New Testament, it serves to balance out Paul's pro-grace, anti-law position. We have diverse books---from Jewish Christianity, and from Paul, who got a revelation in the wilderness. But Christian communities imposed a unity upon them by putting them in a certain order.

My impression is that Sheppard does not consider this canonical process to be a bad thing. He believes that the diverse parts of the Bible should be in dialogue with one another---in the sense that we consider the different voices and balance them out with each other (or something like that). That brings me to the Piper article.

2. Piper critiques the canon criticism of Brevard Childs and Gerald Sheppard. According to Piper, the position of Sheppard is that God is behind the process of canonization. But Piper feels that Sheppard roots the canon's authority in the religious community rather than the text itself, and that Sheppard fails to highlight the grammatical-historical meaning of the biblical texts. Instead, for Piper, Sheppard relies on religious subjectivism: God revealing stuff to believers through the Bible, rather than believers trying to determine the text's meaning by looking at grammar, history, and context. And Piper distinguishes the grammatical-historical approach from historical-criticism, which he believes tries to get behind the text, rather than drawing from the text itself.

I agree with Piper's criticism of locating authority in religious communities. I've often wondered why communities are so great, that we should regard them as authorities. They have flaws, just like anything else that's human. Moreover, I wonder how Sheppard would address the different ways that religious communities canonize the texts. As he noted in his own article, Palestinian Judaism ordered the books of the Hebrew Bible according to an ideology that was different from that of Christians: it focused on Torah, whereas Christianity was concerned with Christ. The way that Christians order the Old Testament actually sets the stage for Christ: Malachi ends by talking about Elijah coming, and, at the beginning of the New Testament, in strolls John the Baptist, the Elijah who is to come! Palestinian Judaism, however, ends the Hebrew Bible with the Jews' restoration from exile in II Chronicles---the message being that God will restore his exiled people. (I'm not sure how Hellenistic Judaism ended the Hebrew Bible---with Malachi, or with Chronicles.) Which canon does God support?

I thought that Piper was a little hard on the historical-critical method. I acknowledge that there are aspects of historical-criticism that are flamboyantly speculative. But recognizing that the Bible has diverse voices is, well, letting the Bible speak for itself. What does Piper prefer? Using mental gymnastics to harmonize biblical contradictions, imposing a unity that is not there?

I'll stop here.