We do not possess a large amount of information about the worship of Christians in the early days of the church and most of what we do comes from First Corinthians. In it Paul answers various questions raised by the Corinthians, among them one about spiritual gifts. We ought probably to envisage a small group meeting in a house (cf. 1 Cor. 16.19; there would have been a number of such ‘house-churches’ in Corinth). In these meetings the Christians present made various contributions to the worship according to their abilities, or, more correctly, their spiritual gifts, charismata.

My title, which is stolen from a collection of learned German essays edited by Ernst Käsemann (Das Neue Testament als Kanon, 1970), may sound remote from the concerns of the practical ministry. But the academic question here raised has profound implications for all our understanding, proclamation and practice of the gospel. My exposition will fall into three parts. First I shall make clear what, historically, were the theological motives governing the establishment of a fixed canon of New Testament scripture, and I shall discuss the question of how far the aims of the early Church in this matter may be considered, in the light of modern critical scholarship, to have been achieved. Next I shall show that today also we are faced by problems similar to those which the principle of a New Testament canon was designed to meet, and I shall try to indicate what part the canonical New Testament may still play in helping us to meet them. Thirdly, I shall draw some consequences for worship, preaching, evangelism, ecumenism, and ethics from the principle of a New Testament canon and from the actual content of the canonical New Testament. In conclusion, I shall briefly consider the place of the canonical New Testament in the problem posed by the particularity of Christianity's historical origins and the universality of its claims. Space will obviously forbid anything more than the giving of hints on all these questions.

The thinkers of old Israel, whether Psalmists, historians or teachers of Wisdom, were supremely serene and confident men. Their world was established, and could not be moved (1 Sam. 2.8; Ps. 93.1); God's favour and victory were with his people (Deut. 33.26f); his covenant was benign and Israel's king reigned in Zion (Ps. 72.17f; 133); and everyone but the fool knew his proper place and was content, and life's rewards seemed fair and consistent (1 Kings 4.25; Prov. 10.14–15; 12.9; 13.14–16; 14.1, 30 etc.). Evil and tragedy were present, but they were not allowed to pose any ultimate problem, since they were known to be firmly under God's control and part and parcel of the divine economy (Gen. 45.5; 2 Sam. 17.14; Ps. 30.6 (Engl. 5); 73.16–17). Under the double impact of Assyrian imperial advance and of internal social disintegration in the eighth and seventh centuries, this optimistic Weltanschauung was rudely shattered. The prophetic movement, hitherto nonconformist and not highly regarded by those who mattered, came into its own, sounding ever more loudly sour and pessimistic notes that had rarely been heard in Israel before (Amos 5.18f; Mic. 6.1–2; Isa. 5.18f; Zeph. 2.15; Jer. 6.16f; 8.8f etc.). It deeply affected the historians who were responsible for the Deuteronomistic writings,2 but of more direct concern to us, it had a pervasive influence on the Wisdom tradition as well.3 This can be traced in an increasing emphasis upon the need for humble submission to God's will in the face of life's enigmas.

Traditionally Romans 8.26 has been a text to which at least some Pentecostals have appealed as scriptural support for the practice of speaking in tongues. However, this interpretation has by no means found favour with all commentators: Adolf Schlatter explicitly denies it, arguing that (a) the powerlessness that is described here is not an affliction peculiar to a few individuals but is the mark of all Christian prayer, whereas speaking with tongues is considered by Paul to be a gift given to certain individuals only, (b) it is a gift of thanksgiving and of singing of God's secrets, not of groaning, and (c) it is not ‘unspeakable’, for some interpreted it.2 Rather, he argues, the groaning here is wordless, but yet intercessory. Many commentators share Schlatter's view that Paul's language here does not fit the phenomenon of glossolalia: so Dodd refers to an ‘inarticulate aspiration’ that expresses itself in ‘sighs that are beyond words’, and Barrett explicitly prefers to see here a reference to an immediate communion between the ‘Spirit (-filled worshipper) and God’ which needs no spoken word.