In my experience with evangelical churches, the popular opinion is that the Word equates the Bible. In all fairness, the stress of this equation is not on the importance of the printed book but rather on the evocative power (or message) contained in the pages of this normative text. The compelling nature of the message also elevates preaching in all practical matters to the status of “Word of God”.

This understanding share some commonalities with Lutheran theology, which has a highly developed theology of the Word, in that the emphasis is on the activity of the Spirit mediated by some physical, or at least intelligible means. During baptisms at Good Shepherd, I hear in the liturgy something along the lines “in baptisms we celebrate the day the Word and water touched our spirit”. In all honesty, this wider understanding of the Word still strikes me as a little foreign because I did not grow up with a sacramental understanding of baptism. But I can perceive how the stress is not on the water alone, but on the act of grace mediated with water.

I guess what I want to say is that the audience on the receiving end of the Word, have innate sensitivities to discern what comes from God and what does not. I say this, not to fall on relativism, but to highlight the universality of the human spirit to connect with God.

Myron obviously got a kick out of my using the feminine to describe the Church choosing the canon. “I think it would be good if you would at some point review just how the canon came to be.” She” at the time was represented by a bunch of guys who often had their own personal and political interests in mind, and were naturally influenced by the world they lived in, their time and place. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Bible didn’t just fall from the sky fully formed as some seem to believe. Some very human judgments were brought to bear”

Actually the formation of the canon was a pretty natural process, not as manipulative as Myron imagines. Both testaments began as oral stories that were placed into fluid texts. The Christians accepted as their Old Testament the Jewish canon that was pretty stable by the end of the first century A.D. due to the challenges from Hellenism and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple.

The source of the New Testament was the anecdotes and oral stories used to remember Jesus in the early church’s worship. They also read letters sent by respected leaders such as Paul. The church seemed to compile collections of these stories before they began to write gospels around 70 AD. New texts, such as the Gnostics gospels, confronted these in the middle of the second century. We have letters showing how the congregations began to pass around the books they were using as well as their evaluations of them. Their emphasis was always on usefulness in building up the community rather than individual spirituality. Gradually through this folk approach just about every one was using just about the same books. So when the council of Carthage in 397 defined the canon, they simply endorsed what already was the practice.

That is not to say things were as rigid as we often think. Texts kept changing, often in the interest of integrity. Monks would place in the margins of their texts, “Keep the difference” acknowledging that they were keeping the contradictions, because they were not sure of what they were copying. Also not all Christians use the same canon. The Ethiopian Orthodox have 81 books compared to our 66. And of course, the Roman Catholics include the Old Testament Apocrypha.