When we speak about Scripture and tradition, certain issues emerge.  One of them has to do with the canon.  When we speak of the canon, we are talking about that collection of books which the Church (both Jewish and Christian) considers to be authoritative and normative for faith, governance, and practice.  The notion of "authoritative and normative" is related to the doctrine of divine inspiration, i.e. that it was God who gave the Scriptures to the Church.

"Canon," by traditional definition signifies an officially sanctioned collection of writings containing divine revelation-supernaturally inspired and inerrant, the ultimate rule of faith doctrine, and life.  With the collapse of the house of authority, this way of understanding "canon" must be given up.  The question is whether there are other senses in which the concept of canon may continue to be valid or helpful.  It may represent a way of ascribing some kind of "wholeness" or inner unity to a set of writings. While the quest for wholeness is unavoidable, a variety of kinds of wholeness may in fact be ascribed to the texts, leading to several competing versions of the canon. Theologians may having a "working canon," or a "canon within the canon," to which they appeal in construing the wholeness or essence of Christian faith, but none of these may be endowed with divinely sanctioned authority.  In this context, continued use of the concept of canon, however modified, is not helpful and should be abandoned.  We acknowledge, however, that there remains a question as to how those writings that are constitutive of the faith of Israel and early Christianity can best be identified (Edward C. Farley and Peter C. Hodgson, in Scripture and Tradition, p. 81).

Another specific question concerns the relation of Scripture and tradition to each other and to other ecclesial authorities. We have tended to view the issue of Scripture versus tradition as a false one, since in the classic criteriology most of the qualities attributed to Scripture were extended to the doctrinal tradition as well.  Obviously both Scripture and doctrinal tradition are part of an ongoing "traditioning" process which is to be understood in historical-critical terms, not in terms of successive stages of salvation history.  But at the same time, we acknowledge that differences exist between writings that attest to  the origin of a religious faith and those that help to perpetuate it-differences both in the character of these writings and the uses to which they are put by church and theology. A further question concerns the relation of both Scripture and tradition to other elements of theological criteriology such as the role of experience, the function of norms in relation to sources and authorities, the kind of reality-reference implicit in religious faith, and finally the adjudication of truth claims or the making of theological judgments (Ibid., pp. 81-82).

A third persistent issue concerns the use of biblical exegesis in church and theology.  Implicit in this discussion is the contention that the exegesis of biblical texts must be critical, whether employed in preaching, instruction, or the doing of theology.  The alternative to critical exegesis is proof-texting, which brings with it all the paraphernalia of the old Scripture principle. However, we acknowledge that preachers, theologians, and lay people cannot be expected to to be biblical scholars, and we recognize that biblical scholarship itself has tended to complicate the theological use of biblical texts by showing how dependent their meaning is on determinate historical, literary, and linguistic contexts. Theologians, and preachers work with their own set of criteria, employing biblical texts in quite different frames of reference while at the same time seeking not to do violence to them.  They must start with the principles of critical exegesis and historical consciousness, yet they need to move beyond them in ways that are fitting.  While the results of biblical scholarship are clearly relevant to doing theology, they are not ultimately decisive, since every theological proposal and every sermon is shaped by a prior imaginative construal of what Christian faith is all about, a construal that determines how biblical texts and other sources will be selected and interpreted, while at the same time being controlled by close attention to the patterns, nuances, and details of the texts (Ibid. p. 82). 

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary