Our Problem with Canon
I have not yet read Rachel Held Evan’s latest book but I think I get at least one of her points in it. She is saying to the church and the Christian community “your use of canon is self-referentially inconsistent according to what you say canon is.”
By canon her I mean Scripture of course, but then why not just say “Scripture” or “The Bible”. By using the word canon I highly the aspect of the Bible that is it as rule, as the authoritative document for the Christian community’s life together. If you’re unfamiliar with the terms you can explore it on Wikipedia’s entry.
Rachel’s line of argument is a common one employed by many who are arguing within canon community “your reading of canon doesn’t work, it doesn’t have integrity, it doesn’t accomplish what you expect it to accomplish”.
Christian Smith does a similar thing with his book “The Bible Made Impossible” but without the performance art approach.
None of this is of course necessarily a bad thing. This tactic was used by Jesus numerous times in debating the religious leaders of his community. It is a way of using canon within a community by holding up “the measuring rule” to a practice and asking “does this hit the mark?”
Why Cosmopolitan Relativism Chafes At Canon
There is a narrative deep within the embrace of cosmopolitan relativism that assumes the process of progressive disclosure. In past centuries for all sorts of reasons people’s access to information was severely limited. In the last hundred years access to information has exploded both in terms of the volume of information available and the commonality of access to that information. As recently as the 19th century books were highly valuable and relatively rare as compared to today. Today the electronic screen is replacing the book and via the Internet information is cheaper than it ever was.
What the economizing and democratizing of information has afforded is our ability to judge different texts on a scale hardly imaginable throughout human history.
Not only are texts available but people of diverse cultural backgrounds are available to me because of globalization so now I can have regular contact with peoples of different cultures and religions both in a face to face manner as well as having access to their cultural treasures.
What access to all of this wealth and diversity of cultures and text has done is relativized the lot of it. How can I prioritize one text, or one culture above the throng? We are Jacks of all Cultures but mastered by none.
The temptation from this heady, lofty position is to assume that I don’t have a culture, or biases, or even perspective. It is to imagine myself godlike in this power and seat of judgment. Failure to recognize this, of course, is to succumb to the cultural imperialism that multi-culturalism was supposed to banish. I think this cosmopolitan relativism is deeply dependent upon specific cultural footings of egalitarianism and individualism, just to name a couple.
As cosmopolitan pluralism relativizes all cultures and texts (by prioritizing itself) the notion of canonicity erodes. Cosmopolitan pluralism then takes the ironic and arrogant step of dismissing canon embracers and canon embracing as evolutionary dead-enders, important for the evolution of cosmopolitan relativists but now sadly obsolete. Canon embracers stand as Lucy (Australopithecus) or Neanderthal compared to the newly and recently evolved humanity. The judgment of such a position is of course breathtaking.
Jesus, Deep In Slave Culture
The Apostle Paul often gets called out for crimes against women and slaves, but Jesus clearly gets too quickly a pass. Jesus of course lived in a context with polygamy, repression of women and pervasive slave holding. Jesus doesn’t get quoted as saying “slaves obey your masters” like Paul did but Jesus’ parables are full of unchallenged references to slaves and slavery. Check out Luke 17:7-10
Luke 17:7-10
Lexham English Bible (LEB)
7 “And which of you who has a slave plowing or shepherding sheep[a] who comes in from the field will say to him, ‘Come here at once and[b] recline at the table’? 8 Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare something that I may eat, and dress yourself to serve me while I eat and drink, and after these things you will eat and drink.’ 9 He will not be grateful[c] to the slave because he did what was ordered,will he?[d] 10 Thus you also, when you have done all the things you were ordered to do,[e] say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have done what we were obligated to do.’”
It seems we have to make a decision of what to do with this Jesus. We can insert him into the narrative of cosmopolitan relativism and rescue him by saying “Poor Jesus didn’t have all the information necessary to be a truly enlightened man. We will take from his words what may be salvaged, add it to the far larger body of information we have accumulated and extract from it what may be useful for us.”
This is heady wine for us to drink because it of course puts us at the top of the evolutionary tree. Not too much thinking will reveal, however, that the sweet, heady wine will produce a nasty hangover when the next generation does it to us as they have yet more access to more information and express more judgment upon the cultural artifacts that we leave for them, and on we go. That is of course until we evolve ourselves into extinction. The dirty little secret about evolution is that it never arrives and it leaves in its wake loss and waste as it consumes its parents.
What Canon Offers
The other option that seeing Jesus deep in slave country offers is believing that incarnation can happen in a broken world. According to Christian doctrine divinity can tabernacle with us even before we imagine ourselves not fully evolved. The two natures can only co-habitate in him if the unlimited takes upon itself limitation and embraces that limitation as good. Canon is only accessible to limited creatures if canon itself has limit.
I listened to a talk given by Andy Crouch about the creative power. It was a sensational talk that opened up all kinds of new ideas and understandings for me. It was one of those talks that after I listened to it I thought to myself “how could I have dared to speak and write without hearing this talk?” It was that revelatory for me, but that talk isn’t my topic for this posting. A good talk will often lunch numerous side tracks and this one did that too. He opened up for me the story of the rebellion in a way I had never seen it before. He did not tell me another story, he showed me what was within the story I knew but had not known.
Without canon the only canon we are left with is our own judgment and we become prisoners to ourselves. We simply need to be right and we need to be right all the time and all of our being right is always subject to new information, new discoveries, new technologies that disrupt and unsettle and new competitors who have better tools, better access, and more power.
Canon Offers Self Critique
The specificity of canon offers self critique in a way that our heady world of progressive informational evolution does not. A good canon frees us from slavery to ourselves and stands against us for our own good.
I have known myself long enough now after 49 years to know I am a tyrant if given the opportunity. I need a canon, a textual context and a community created by that canon in which to live and from which to see and make sense of a world too large for me.
Leadingchurch.com 
I read many of your posts here, Paul, but rarely comment. I enjoyed this article immensely and appreciate that God has given you the gift to put your thoughts in writing this way. The tension between culture and canon will help us to understand canon much better. What I think you are saying is that without canon, culture might run amok. Thanks for shedding some light on the subject.
kp