Reviewed by: Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism Everett Ferguson William J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. 508. $110.00. The author’s thesis is that the canon of the Church was not a formal epistemic norm but a means of grace. The book is not a study of the history of the canon of scripture but a study of the move from regarding canonical materials as what nourish faith to regarding them as a normative epistemology and the problems this move entails. The main concern is how in the Western Church the “canonical heritage” (which includes a canon of scripture, creeds, ecclesial regulations, episcopacy, liturgical practices, an approved list of fathers, and iconography) was narrowed and became a norm for knowledge. Between the introductory and closing chapters, fifteen chapters take up the patristic age, the split between East and West, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, René Descartes, the Anglican via media (Richard Hooker), John Locke, Friederich Scheiermacher, the Princeton school (Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge), B. B. Warfield, John Henry Newman, Karl Barth, Schubert Ogden, and feminism (Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, and Mary McClintock Fulkerson). Aquinas gets major blame for beginning the shift to canonizing a particular (Aristotelian) epistemology. One might raise the question, Did not some of the fathers do the same with Platonism? The Roman church shifted the meaning of canon to the epistemic view and set up the magisterium as a norm of truth, and the Reformation accepted this shift in definition but changed the content to sola scriptura. Developments since the [End Page 618] Reformation have been efforts to support a particular criterion (used in the philosophical sense of a standard by which to judge claims of knowledge) or to overcome the epistemological crisis produced by the confusion of canon with criterion. Only a small part of the book deals with the patristic age, but Abraham has a positive appreciation of the patristic heritage of the Church in contrast to later ages, perhaps unduly so. At first sight the distinction between canon and epistemology is patently obvious; only by theological shorthand is confusion possible. But Abraham has not sufficiently clarified his alternative. His use of norm in a narrow technical sense equivalent to a philosopher’s criterion can be read as denying norms as understood by the fathers. Abraham recognizes canonical material as authoritative (e.g., “binding on the whole community,” 29), but his point is that to construe canon as a formal epistemic norm of truth makes it an item of epistemology (118, n. 9). The fathers certainly spent an inordinate amount of time arguing doctrine from scripture for them to have thought that scripture, albeit primarily a means to salvation, was not a norm and did not communicate information. The creeds that Abraham includes in the canonical heritage of the Church were arrived at, not independently, but as the result of arguments over the meaning of scripture. Abraham often speaks of the canonical materials as a “means of grace,” nurturing spirituality and the moral life (e.g., 156). They were, but where are the texts that say this was the intention of the Church in making decisions about the canon of scripture? The word canon was used for various things: “canon of truth,” canons of the councils, and later the canon of the Mass. Its first use in reference to scripture was for a list of books, but all the uses have in common the notion of norm or rule. The canonical heritage of the Church was broader than scripture, but that does not change, only illustrates, the fact that scripture in its own sphere as witness to revelation was considered normative for the meaning of the revelation. Does the recurring appeal in history to epistemic concerns indicate they were present from early on? Although the fathers did not have a rigorous theory of knowledge, Abraham acknowledges that there are epistemic hints in the fathers (such as deriving doctrine from scripture). In denying that there was a “canonical account of inspiration” (e.g., 328) Abraham seems to think that unless something was approved...