I’ve begun reading The Canon of Scripture by F. F. Bruce. The logical place for a book with that title to start is with a definition* of the word canon, and so it does. First, it’s not a really big gun. That would be a cannon. Scripture is, of course, a really big gun—the big gun—of religion and theology; but that’s besides the point.
The word ‘canon’ has come into our language (through Latin) from the Greek word kanōn. In Greek it meant a rod, especially a straight rod used as a rule; from this usage comes the other meaning which the word commonly bears in English—‘rule’ or ‘standard’. We speak, for example, of the ‘canons’ or rules of the Church of England. But a straight rod used as a rule might be marked in units of length (like a modern ruler marked in inches or centimeters); from this practice the Greek word kanōn came to be used of the series of such marks, and hence to be used in the general sense of ‘series’ or ‘list’. it is this last usage that underlines the term ‘the canon of scripture’.
Before the word ‘canon’ came to be used in the sense of ‘list’, it was used in another sense by the church—in the phrase ‘the rule of faith’ or ‘the rule of truth’. In the earlier Christian centuries this was a summary of Christian teaching, believed to reproduce what the apostles themselves taught, by which any system of doctrine offered for Christian acceptance, or any interpretation of biblical writings, was to be assessed. But when once the limits of holy scripture came to be generally agreed upon, holy scripture itself came to be regarded as the rule of faith. For example, Thomas Aquinas (c 1225–1274), says that ‘canonical scripture alone is the rule of faith’. From another theological perspective the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), after listing the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, adds: ‘All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.’ These words affirm the status of holy scripture as the ‘canon’ or ‘standard’ by which Christian teaching and action must be regulated. While the ‘canon’ of scripture means the list of books accepted as holy scripture, the other sense of ‘canon’—rule or standard—has rubbed off on this one, so that the ‘canon’ of scripture is understood to be the listof books which are acknowledged to be, in a unique sense, the rule of belief and practice.
—F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 1988), 17–18.
That is what the canon is. If Scripture is to be our “rule of faith and life,” it behooves us to know how it is that we came to recognize our Bible, in its present form, as the Word of God. And that is what this book is about.
*Another good definition is here.
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