The pre-canonical church in the first four centuries was not at all a precursor to the Christian church. It was not at all a silent period of mediation. It was the real deal; the New Covenant people of God! And this New Covenant Church sought the spoken word  through the bishops of the church. They were the arbitrators of this new type of theology (New Covenant) while the canon was being formed. The church was growing into its canonical form in a very organic manner – no temporary building blocks or intermit positions were formed for “the coming of the canon.”

The very succession of apostolic authority to the later patriarchs was a permanent and therefore ecclesiastical part of the Church. For it was out of this group of bishops that the canon of the New Testament was formed. Therefore, to believe in the canon is to believe in the very authority of these bishops. Did God bring forth His Law through an invalid office or through just some man that happened to be available at the time? Likewise, did God choose the writings of the Holy Scriptures to be written by whomever the people of God currently had, or did he appoint the man Saul to a specific and anointed office of Apostle? Why then would God appoint the very gathering and confirming of his Holy Scriptures to an office and calling that does not spiritually or physically exist? How could this even happen except that one presuppose some sort of Balaam’s Ass theology? But we know that the Bishops of the early church were not equivalent to such a grotesque concept.

In the beginning of the second century Bishop Ignatius (A.D. 35-A.D. 117) referred to the written Word of God and later in the second century we find Irenaeus bringing forth the idea of two separate Testaments. Around this same time, the heretic Marcion, compiled his own canon, forcing the Church to adopt an official canon. F.F. Bruce describes this act in the following:

“Augustine’s [canonical] ruling supplied a powerful precedent for the western church from his own day to the Reformation and beyond.

In 393 a church council held in [Bishop] Augustine’s see of Hippo laid down the limits of the canonical books along the lines approval by Augustine himself. The proceedings of this council have been lost but they were summarized in the proceedings of the Third Council of Carthage (397), a provincial council. These appear to be the first church councils to make a formal pronouncement on the canon.”

The bishops gathered and confirmed the canon. It is clear that the office of the Bishop was a part of the very unification of the Church. The very Word of God was entrusted to them by God and His people for its consecration.