Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology From the Fathers to Feminism

Standard accounts of canon reduce it to scripture and treat scripture as a criterion of truth. Scripture is then related in positive or negative ways to tradition, reason, and experience. Such projects mistakenly locate the canonical heritage of the church within epistemology, and Abraham charts the fatal consequences of this move, from the Fathers to modern feminist theology.

Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology provides an original and important narrative on the significance of canon in the Christian tradition. Standard accounts of canon reduce canon to scripture and treat scripture as a criterion of truth. Scripture is then related in positive or negative ways to tradition, reason, and experience. Such projects involve a misreading of the meaning and content of canon --- they locate the canonical heritage of the church within epistemology --- and Abraham charts the fatal consequences of this move, from the Fathers to modern feminist theology. In the process he shows that the central epistemological concerns of the Enlightenment have Christian origins and echoes. He also shows that the crucial developments of theology from the Reformation onwards involve extraordinary efforts to fix the foundations of faith. This trajectory is now exhausted theologically and spiritually. Hence, the door is opened for a recovery of the full canonical heritage of the early church and for fresh work on the epistemology of theology.

1 - Orientation:Authority, Canon, and Criterion
2 - The Emergence of the Canonical Heritage of the Church
3 - Canonical Division between East and West
4 - Canon and Scientia
5 - Theological Foundationalism
6 - the Epistemic Fortunes of Sola Scriptura
7 - Initiation into the Rule of Truth
8 - Canonical Synthesis: The Anglican Via Media
9 - The Rule of Reason
10 - Theology within the Limits of Experience Alone
11 - The Canons of Common Sense
12 - The Rough Intellectualist Road of a Sound Epistemology
13 - More Light Amid the Encircling Gloom
14 - Ending the Great Misery of Protestantism
15 - Digging Still Deeper for Firm Ground
16 - Feminism and the Transgressing of Canonical Boundaries
17 - The Canonical Heritage and the Epistemology of Theology

William J. Abraham teaches philosophy and theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, where he is Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies