As means of grace, the Word (particularly the gospel) preached creates the church; as normative canon (constitution), the Word as Scripture stands over the community. Through this Word, Christ not only creates a redeemed communion but governs it as Prophet, Priest, and King. The church is the recipient of God’s saving revelation, never a source.

The crucial difference between Roman Catholic and confessional Protestant interpretations at this point is easily summarized. While the former treats the p 190 church’s authority as magisterial, the latter treats it as ministerial. Neither possessing absolute authority nor devoid of any authority, the church’s role is that of a court rather than of a constitution.

Judicial decisions and the history of case precedent cannot be equated with the constitution itself. The new covenant had been inaugurated and now, by Christ’s appointment, was receiving its constitution. While all apostolic pronouncements concerning faith and practice were to be received as God’s Word (“either by our spoken word or by our letter”), the Spirit saw fit to commit the most necessary oral and written teaching to the New Testament Scriptures. Analogous to postprophetic traditions, then, postapostolic traditions have ministerial but not magisterial authority. The court is not the author of its own constitution.

This sovereignty of Scripture over the church may be defended not only from the New Testament but secondarily from the actual process by which the postapostolic church arrived at the canon. Our twenty-seven books in the New Testament canon were first codified in an official list at the councils of Carthage (393) and Hippo (397). However, two important facts need to be considered.

First, most of these texts were already widely recognized and employed regularly in public worship as divinely inspired.

Second, from these ancient Christian writers we can identify four main categories in which texts were to be placed: canonical, widely accepted, spurious, and p 195 heretical.