Church, scripture, canon

I'm going to quote some excerpts from a book by a noted evangelical OT scholar. The quotes are clearly germane to a Catholic apologetic trope against the Protestant canon. Provan supplies detailed supporting material to document his claims. I won't be quoting the copious documentation, but just his summary conclusions. 

Does Scripture precede the Church, and provide the "rule" against which the teaching of the Church is to be measured, or does the Church precede Scripture, and provide the only context in which Scripture may rightly be understood?

[Craig] Allert is critical of the way in which most evangelical Protestants (his target audience) "have…a 'dropped out of the sky' understanding of the Bible…"

At the heart of Alert's argument, first of all, lies an important confusion with respect to notions of "Scripture" and "canon." No biblical canon, he informs us, in the sense of "a delimited list of authoritative writings"–neither in an OT nor a NT canon–existed in the early Christian centuries. Therefore, "One cannot properly speak of a Bible in the first several centuries of the church's existence." The Bible, he claims, comes into being as a result of the teaching and practice of the Church, as expressed in the rule of faith and later creeds; therefore, there is a problem with Christians appealing to it over agains the teaching and the practice of the Church. The Bible itself cannot be regarded as the rule of faith, Allert proposes, because early Christians like Tertullian "did not know of a closed canon."

All of this begs the question, however, as to whether it is possible to have a recognized Scripture that is functioning canonically (that is, authoritatively in respect to religious practice and/or doctrine), without yet possessing a finally "delimited list of authoritative writings" in a closed canon.

The question is not whether everyone agreed in earlier times about exactly which text were canonical Scripture and which were not. The question is whether the idea of Scripture itself implies the idea of a limitation–of canon–even if people do not yet conceive that the limits have been reached…"the margins of the emerging canon are less significant than the character and function of the canon  (or 'core canon') itself."

In reality, however, one doesn't need to have a closed canon in order to have an authoritatively functioning Scripture that is a "measuring stick" (the meaning of the Greek word kanon), against which belief and practice may be assessed. One only needs to have a "mere" canon: a collection of texts, albeit not yet necessarily regarded as complete, that serves a normative function within the community–"a sort of core of central and agreed tradition, a body of writings already recognized and revered, which…functioned…in the same general way in which the canon of scripture functioned for later generations. 

It is clear from everything described thus far, then, that the "Rule of Faith against which everything was measured in the 2C," and also in succeeding centuries, was God-breathed (God-inspired) Scripture, even if the ultimate and precise boundaries of this Scripture (at least with respect to the NT writings) had yet to be defined. 

"The Christian church was born with a Bible in its hands," as Stephen Dempster put it, and it always had one thereafter, looking for its guidance on faith and life to the prophets, and then to the apostles, on whose foundational teaching the Church had been built. 

We have established in chapter 2 that, even if the OT canon was not yet already closed in the earliest period of the life of the emerging Christian Church, the Church certainly possessed from the beginning an authoritatively functioning set of canonical Scriptures, shared with Judaism, that formed the "measure" of its belief and practice. But was the OT canon, after all, closed? 

Who decided which books were canonical, and on what grounds? In the first instance, with respect to the OT, no Christian "decided". The point was to receive the OT scriptures, as from God in Christ…The point was not to "decide." The point was to receive new Scripture from the apostles who had been appointed by Christ, and to represent a new and authoritative prophetic "stream" in history, in continuity with the OT prophets. Iain Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017).