Oscar Cullmann on the relationship between oral tradition and the canon of the New Testament, part 2

Continuing from my previous post.

Slight clarification here. In the citation from Cullmann that follows, he is using the words "apostolic tradition" to describe "the sum of what the Apostles taught, both orally and in written form." He makes a distinction between "apostolic tradition," which was the definitive, eyewitness testimony of the Apostles, and what later became "ecclesiastical tradition," that is, the traditions of the church.

Cullmann is in the process of making the case that the canon of the New Testament became fixed, as a necessity, because of the damage that was being inflicted by various gnostic heresies: "oral" tradition was no longer reliable because it was becoming an admixture of too many things. The only reliable "apostolic tradition" was that which had been written down by the apostles and their associates during the lifetimes of the apostles.

By establishing the principle of a canon the Church recognized that from that time the tradition was no longer a criterion of truth. It drew a line under the apostolic tradition. It declared implicitly that from that time every subsequent tradition must be submitted to the control of the aposotlic tradition. That is, it declared: here is the tradition which constituted the Church, which forced itself upon it. Certainly the Church did not intend to thereby put an end to the continued evolution of the tradition. But by what we might all an act of humility it submitted all subsequent tradition to be elaborated by itself to the superior criterion of the apostolic tradition, codified in the Holy Scriptures.

To establish a canon is equivalent to saying this: henceforth our ecclesiastical tradition needs to be controlled; with the help of the Holy Spirit it will be controlled by the apostolic tradition fixed in writing; for we are getting to the point where we are too distant from the apostolic age to be able to guard the purity of the tradition without a superior written norm, and too distant to prevent slight legendary and other deformations creeping in, and thus being transmitted and amplified(90).

Well, while the early church understood the danger of "legendary and other deformations creeping in, thus being transmitted and amplified," it would seem that this has become the creed of the Roman Catholic Church: "We know that legendary and other deformations have crept into our dogmas, where they are transmitted and amplified. And we embrace these legendary and other deformations, and we press them on the consciences of loyal Roman Catholics."

But I digress. After some further justification of the process above: the need to fix a norm by fixing the Canon of the New Testament, Cullman notes something about the character of the Apostolic Fathers that I had noticed and have even commented on, but have not until this time been able to put it all together:

For a long time it has been noted that, apart from the letters of Ignatius, the writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers, who do not really belong to the Apostolic age but to the beginning of the second century—[1 Clement, Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas]—despite their theological interest, are to a considerable distance from New Testament thought, and to a considerable extent relapse into a moralism which ignores the notion of grace, and of the redemptive death of Christ, so central to apostolic theology. [See Torrance’s “The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers,” 1948].

It has also been noted that the Church Fathers who wrote after 150—Irenaeus and Tertullian—although chronologically more remote from the New Testament than the authors of the first half of the century, understood infinitely better the essence of the gospel. This seems paradoxical, but is explained perfectly by that most important act, the codification of the apostolic tradition in a canon, henceforward the superior norm of all tradition.

The Fathers of the first half of the century wrote at a period when the writings of the New Testament already existed, but without being vested with canonical authority, and so set apart. Therefore they did not have any norm at their disposal, and, on the other hand, and on the other hand, they were already too far distant from the apostolic age to be able to draw directly on the testimony of eye-witnesses. The encounters of Polycarp and Papias with apostolic persons could no longer guarantee a pure transmission of authentic traditions, as is proved by the extant fragments of their writings.

But after 150 contact with the apostolic age was re-established through the construction of the canon, which discarded all impure and deformed sources of information. Thus it is confirmed that, by subordinating all subsequent tradition to the canon, the Church once and for all saved its apostolic basis. It enabled its members to hear, thanks to this canon, continually afresh and throughout all the centuries to come the authentic word of the apostles, a privilege which no oral tradition, passing through Polycarp or Papias, could have assured them (96).

The written fixation of the witness of the apostles is one of the essential facts of the incarnation. The church of 150 AD consciously set about to formulate a canon, to put an end to the numerous apocryphal works that had been appearing in the first part of the second century, fueling the expansion of the different heresies.

Andreas Kostenberger and Michael Kruger largely concur with this process, adding that first, the Apostles would have been more than familiar with the concept of covenant, the need for covenant documents. The books of Moses provided this very set of documentation. In their own era, there were, of course, the Apostles saw to o that the Gospels, and the various letters that they knew had been written. Kostenberger and Kruger then note:

Although the term “closed canon” is most commonly used to refer to fourth-century ecclesiastical decisions, there is a real sense in which the canon, in principle, was “closed” long before that time. In the Muratorian Fragment (c. 170), the very popular Shepherd of Hermas is mentioned as a book that can be read by the church but is rejected as canonical. The grounds for this rejection are due to the fact that it was written “very recently, in our own times.” In other words, the author of the fragment reflects the conviction that early Christians were not willing to accept books written in the second century or later, but had restricted themselves to books from the apostolic time period. They seemed to have understood that the apostolic phase of redemptive history was uniquely the time when canonical books were produced. [Jason Engwer has commented on this section, noting that they could have expanded this so much more than they did. See here.]

Thus, from this perspective, the canon was “closed” by the beginning of the second century. After this time (and long before Athanasius), the church was not “open” to more books, but instead was engaged in discussions about which books God had already given. In other words, due to the theological conviction of the early Christians about the foundational role of the apostles, there was a built-in sense that the canon was “closed” after the apostolic time period had ended.

Note that the books themselves carried the marks of “canonicity.” Kostenberger and Kruger cite Herman Ridderbos:

When understood in terms of the history of redemption, the canon cannot be open; in principle it must be closed. That follows directly from the unique and exclusive nature of the power of the apostles received from Christ and from the commission he gave to them to be witnesses to what they had seen and heard of the salvation he had brought. The result of this power and commission os the foundation of the church and the creation of the canon, and therefore these are naturally unrepeatable and exclusive in character.

Meanwhile, it was not the authority of “the Church” which determined the canon. In reality, as Cullmann notes, it was the decision of the church (in fixing the canon) determined that “oral tradition” was becoming too corrupted to be useful.

By establishing the principle of a canon the Church recognized that from that time the tradition was no longer a criterion of truth.