From: george murphy <gmurphy@raex.com>
> I'm the first to admit that there are difficult questions involved
> with the idea of the inspiration of scripture. But the idea that the Bible
> is a "thoroughly human testimony" means, first, that there is no way to
> distinguish between the canon of scripture and other writings so, so that
> not only the Gospel of Thomas (as with the Jesus Seminar) but a whole
> variety of apocryphal texts, gnostic documents &c have as much claim to be
> "thoroughly human testimony to the authentic human experience of the
> presence of the Sacred" as anything in the NT - & from there anything goes.
As George correctly notes below, I'm not advocating an "anything goes"
strategy. I am, however, advocating that religious communities develop the
candor and courage to say, "We take full responsibility for selecting the
contributions to our community-defining canon in the manner of our own
choosing, a manner that we find to be consistent with our experience of the
Sacred and with mature our communal judgment in regard to who we are and
what heritage we represent.
> N.B. I am NOT saying that for Howard "anything goes" but there is
> nothing here to keep one from going off in any direction one's experience
> seems to take one. One purpose of a doctrine of inspiration & a canon of
> scripture is to provide some boundaries.
If I were a bit more cynical I might suggest that another function of a
doctrine of inspiration is to fend off all criticism of the canon once it
has been put in place (by various historic councils and ecclesiastical
decisions). The result, however, is a tendency for a religious community to
stagnate in its conceptual vocabulary and theological constructs. Those
members of a community who dare to challenge some portion of the canon, or
even some doctrinal proposition crafted to protect the canon from criticism,
are subject to all manner of, shall we say, "sometimes less than polite"
criticism or rejection by a community. Tickets for guilt trips are freely
dispensed to the critics.
Howard Van Till
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