28 Bulletin for Biblical Research 5
canon. The Bible must be recognized as a canon in more than
an accidental, historical sense. If one holds that the limits of the canon
were established by accidental historical processes in the early centu-
ries of the church, such that there was nothing intrinsic to the books
themselves that brought about these decisions, then the canon must
be judged arbitrary. One may, I suppose, assign it to some general
providence and, in a leap of faith, decide to accept this providential
arrangement and work within the confines of these biblia. But one
must, in that case, concede that another list could have been feasible
and that there is nothing intrinsic to the books in the present canon to
warrant the supposition that they really can be linked in a coherent
biblical theology (second definition). In that case we are forced to
adopt a definition of biblical theology that is third or lower on my
list. To adopt the second definition, which alone warrants “eine ge-
samtbiblische Theologies,” presupposes that the books that constitute
the canon are of such a nature that the endeavor is possible.
51
In short,
biblical theology, so understood, presupposes a coherent and agreed
51. When this paper was first read (at the 1993 annual meeting of IBR), some
discussion turned on whether the view of canon implicitly adopted here is a "defini-
tional presupposition" (i.e., no more than a working hypothesis) or a "metaphysical
hypothesis" (i.e., an assumption not open to inquiry). Quite apart from whether
"definitional" and "metaphysical" are the best terms to designate the two kinds of as-
sumption, I doubt that the sharp antithesis is helpful. My interlocutor insisted that if
the assumption is "definitional," then we must handle the texts in such a way that the
canon remains provisionally open: every generation must wrestle afresh with the ques-
tion of canon. But the sharpness of the antithesis is demanding extreme conclusions.
Even a "metaphysical" assumption can be changed: people can and do change their
world views, rejecting one metaphysic for another. Conversely, a "working hypothe-
sis" is not necessarily something that one must constantly be tempted to place in
abeyance! To take an example from another area of Christian thought: Confessional
believers hold to the deity of Jesus the Messiah, regardless of how sophisticated the
form of the expression may be. Most come to hold this as a "given," a functional non-
negotiable: i.e., in theory they acknowledge that this confession is open to doubt;
moreover they know some people who have changed their minds on precisely this
issue; nevertheless, for most believers this credal point is so stable that it functions as
a non-negotiable in most of their work, and thus (rightly) ensures that their work
on some points will be cast in a certain way. It would be presumptuous to demand
that such believers, because they acknowledge (in theory at least) that this belief could
change, must constantly treat the matter as provisionally open. (It is a different mat-
ter, of course, if a believer chooses to treat this belief as open for the sake of an
argument.) True, every generation must wrestle with such matters afresh, precisely
because every generation must, ideally, find at least some persons who study the
primary evidence for themselves to ensure that the belief is not merely secondhand
tradition. Even so, it remains a great comfort to recognize that a belief drawn from the
primary documents is in line with the central tradition of the church. In exactly the
same way, I would argue that the approach to the canon assumed in this paper can be
defended in considerable detail, and that it should function as a non-negotiable in
most related discussion undertaken by a confessional believer.