Doug at Metacatholic has a post in which he references my brief discussion of canon. I liked his final paragraph/sentence in which he talks about the canon as that which makes the Bible the source for our conversation as a community. It is one of those setences that I wish I had written myself, so I thought I would quote it in full here.
The importance of canon, perhaps, is not in that it provides a final form of the text, or a uniform synchronic text collected out of a multiform diachronic variety of texts, but that it points to the texts as located in a reading community that turns to them in both diversity and uniformity, as those texts which the community authorises to author its conversation and its life.
The one thing I might change is to add a qualifier, so that the beginning reads “The importance of canon . . . is not only that it provides a final form . . .”. That aside, I think the idea of text as author is a particularly rich metaphor.