The Word Among Us

The Biblical Canon and the Theology of God

The theology of God is inseparably linked to the ancient documents that became the norm for faith, self-identity, and the practice of faith within the faith community. This basic assumption applies to both the Hebrew Bible and the Bible of the Church. What is said and believed about the Biblical canon in both religions was synonymous with what was said and believed about the God who was revealed in these texts. The sacredness of certain writings, as they were accepted to be, was an essential aspect of certain texts over that of many other writings that never achieved the same level of respect and authority within the faith community.
The reference to the Palestinian canon of the Hebrew Bible, synonymous with the Masoretic Text, as the orthodox canon in Judaism, reflected the effort of the Palestinian Jews to establish a collection of writings that could serve as an authoritative measure of history, faith, and practice. Likewise, the New Testament evolved in the early centuries of the Church to provide an authoritative measure or guide in the establishment of Christianity. To ward off the many subjective developments in early Christianity, the New Testament became the orthodox canon, carrying with its status all the power and authority for the establishment of the norms of faith and practice in the Church.
Once the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament became the written collection of sacred documents, both religions of Judaism and Christianity became “People of the Book.” Sacred Scripture represents the record and revelation of Israel’s and the Church’s encounter and experience with the divine. As revelation, any theology of God could not be complete without the Biblical canon that is used to support assertions about the divine.

Christian Old Testament and a Theology of God

“All Christian use of the Old Testament seems to depend on the belief that the One God who is the God of Israel is also the God and Father of Jesus Christ.” Among the many differences between Judaic and Christian teachings, the one solid theme that continues to remind us of their close relationship is this profound statement. We accept the basic premise that the God of both religions is the same God. Now, how this fundamental belief is expressed through revelation and the actual practice of the faiths certainly pursues different paths. In brief, the Christian vision of God is not supported by the New Testament alone but at the juncture of the Old Testament and the New Testament. The great value of the Hebrew Bible is its ability to provide various dimensions of faith that are necessary for understanding the teachings of the New Testament. One obvious example is the vision of the divine.
The reader must be reminded of two important truths as they concern knowledge and understanding of the Hebrew Bible. First, the Jewish community is not the only people who read and accept the Hebrew scriptures as sacred. In this respect, the theology of the God of the Biblical story was received and embraced by both the Synagogue and the Church. The second insight is the fact that the early Church was predominately Jewish, and by being Jewish the New Testament shall always be Jewish in its acceptance of the basic world view of Judaism and the Sacred Scriptures of the Jewish faith. In this second regard, we do not expect to see a dramatic departure of understandings of God simply because the early orthodox writings of the Church focused on the central role of Jesus the Christ.
The idea of revelation serves as the basis of the New Testament story of God who was believed to have been revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. In its most basic meaning, Biblical revelation states that God is revealed to the human community through divine initiative and not through human endeavor. “The presupposition of all valid speech or teaching of the Church about God is the self-revelation of God.” The same is said of the teachings of Judaism. Suggested in this profound statement is the fact that knowledge of God in the New Testament since we are dealing with self-revelation, is dependent upon a knowledge of God revealed in the Hebrew Bible. Unlike the presentation of God in the Hebrew Bible, the Creator God is introduced alongside the Hebrew ancestors in a new revelation of the divine in history, the New Testament does not represent an introduction of God from a completely neutral stance. The New Testament presentation of God is dependent upon the Old Testament. One example would be the fact that the name for God as “Father” in the New Testament is not non-Jewish and the followers of Jesus would have been quite at home with references to God as Father. Further, the God revealed through Jesus was the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God who delivered the Israelites from Egypt and gave them the divine laws at Sinai and so on. However, the central issue of divine self-revelation, according to the early Church, is that God was revealed in and through Jesus of Nazareth who became Jesus Christ in the Christian faith.
The role of the Holy Spirit in New Testament teachings provides a link between the revelation of Jesus which was carried forward through his disciples and that which was recorded in certain writings. In addition to this, the Holy Spirit was believed to be the inspiration behind the New Testament writings thereby giving them their sacred and authoritative status (2 Timothy 3:16). From the perspectives of the Church, the New Testament gained supreme authority because the writings gave witness and testimony to Jesus of Nazareth as the true Christ of the Christian faith. And yet the entirety of the Church’s Biblical canon included sacred writings that pre-dated the arrival of Jesus by centuries. In the early Church, a diligent search was made to search out and to link the ancient texts of Judaism to the new revelations of God through Jesus Christ. The revelation of God through Jesus Christ and his disciples achieved the authoritative equivalent to that of the voices of the prophets in ancient Israel. The doctrine of inspiration elevated the New Testament writings, as well as the Old Testament, to supernatural standing which established their authority beyond question. From this acceptance and respect for the relationship of divine revelation and the documents collected to form the New Testament, the doctrine of God in Christianity securely linked traditional understanding of God and the revelation of the divine through Jesus of Nazareth.