Three reigning misconceptions, based upon faulty scriptural and church historical premises, with incalculable fallout
1. There is no scripture until the church creates such
* the flaw here is not the usual one entailing a Reformation debate over sola scriptura or disputes over the relationship between church/tradition and scripture (these are important topics in their own right)
* rather, what is in error here is imprecision or an improper understanding of the character of the Scriptures as inherently a dual witness of prophets (OT) and apostles (NT)
* the OT canon is sufficiently stable that it is an antecedent witness, not only to the Church but to Jesus Christ; so there is no church without scripture in the sense of the scriptures of Israel existing both prior to NT and a two-testament Canon of Christian Scripture
* when the creed says that Jesus Christ died and rose again ‘in accordance with the scriptures’ the antecedent character of the scriptures of Israel is stipulated
* to state it more ambitiously, one might want to speak about a proper dialectical or reciprocal understanding of the relationship between Church and NT scriptures, or between Church and an emerging collection of apostolic writings
* but this discussion ought not confuse the fact that the OT scriptures preceded the church; that this precedence required careful examination was due to the authority of the Church’s Risen Lord, and the need to correlate Easter faith and the memory of Jesus’ own bearing toward the scriptural witness from the bosom of Israel, with the maintained conviction, especially strong among Gentiles outside that household, that the God of Israel, the LORD, and the Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ, were one (see Philippians 2);
2. Creedal confessions follow in a straight-forward, sequential way, from the Canonical Scriptures
* we have already touched on this above
* here it is important to observe that creeds emerge in the life of the Church as the formation of the NT canon is still a developing matter
* A false kind of sequentiality assumes that creeds are the third in a line of canonical developments, from OT to NT to Church confession, when in reality, creeds exist in the lived life of the Church, and stipulate not just matters of belief, based upon or independent of, a scriptural witness (depending on one’s view of this), but how the scriptures—first OT and then NT and then both together—are to be heard and received, from faith to faith;
* That is, creeds stipulate the ontological identity of the LORD with Christ (‘my Lord and my God’)
* It is for this reason that recourse is made in apostolic writings to what is termed a ‘rule of faith’
* The rule of faith—whatever else it is—is a guide to reading the scriptures of Israel, in the light of apostolic teaching, as the Church’s received authority
* The rule of faith is a doxological, threshold, affirmation that the LORD of the Old Testament and Jesus Christ are one, and that the Holy Spirit ‘spake by the prophets’
3. The post-apostolic Church is to be understood as self-evidently more connected to the NT than the OT, and so Christian Scripture leans from Old to New
* on this understanding, the post-apostolic church sees the relationship between OT and NT as one chiefly of religious development
* on this understanding, the concern for establishing ontological identity, in the time of the formation of the NT, between the LORD of heaven and earth and Jesus his eternal Word, becomes secondary to an understanding of religious development;
* and so the OT ceases to be heard as a witness to the Father of Jesus Christ; or to Christ as central to its claims about God; or to the Holy Spirit in a dispensation before the NT
* The Church finds its theological and its ecclesial rootage in a second testament which carries over and adapts what went before in the first;
* The Church has a relationship to the NT which improves upon an earlier witness
* This developmental understanding of Church and the two testaments of Scripture is what lies underneath the crisis of and widespread confusion over use of the Church’s Scriptures in our present neuralgic times
Chris Seitz The Anglican Crisis in Interpretation and the Two Testament Voice of Christian Scripture
