In his book The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology David Kelsey has rightly observed that the authority which Scripture has for the common life of the Christian community resides in Scripture's being deployed in certain regulative and normative ways; ways which contribute to the creation, sustaining and re-formation of the community's self-identity and the personal identities of those who are gathered within it. The congregatio fidelium is what it is precisely because it gains its orientation from Scripture. Christianity, in this sense, is truly to be reckoned ‘a religion of the book’, a book which ‘renders’ or ‘depicts’ a linguistic world that is of decisive significance for Christian reflection and practice. To profess to be a Christian is thus to stand in an undeniable, though as yet unspecified, relation to this all-encompassing biblical linguistic world. Any properly theological discussion of Christian ‘discipleship’ must therefore involve some consideration of the relation that obtains between specifications of the identity of the Christian community (and the particular identities of its members) and the scriptural linguistic world.

Throughout the centuries countless proposals have of course been advanced for a recognizably Christian, and a properly theological, understanding of the normative relation which obtains between the biblical linguistic world and the identity of the community of believers.