notion and use of the canon to be caught up in these kinds of dynamics. But the cost is high. Nearly always, such appeals make little use of language about the freedom of God, and tend to take their energy from the fatally attractive mythology of a closed social and intellectual order. But, more than that, they turn the canon into an inviolable possession, even a weapon. The ‘canon syndrome’87 all too quickly lifts the church’s life out of temporality and becomes a means of giving material form to