Every tradition that takes sacred texts seriously faces the same question: which writings speak with governing authority, and which illuminate, interpret, or apply without ruling? The Old Templar Church has answered this question clearly and deliberately, through a document called the Canon of the Living Temple.

The Canon is not a rejection of the wider Christian tradition. It is an act of discernment: a naming of which texts form the authoritative center of this Church's scriptural imagination, and how other texts relate to that center. The lamp is fixed. The stained glass can still blaze.

The principle that governs everything on this page is simple: canonical does not mean exclusive. Governing does not mean solitary.

The Old Templar Church stands in the Chevillonian tradition, which understands the Christian mystery through the lens of Reintegration: the soul's return to its divine origin through the sacramental life, the contemplative path, and the symbolic discipline of the three streams. This understanding is Johannine at its heart. It is concerned above all with the descent of the Logos into the finite, with illumination breaking through darkness, with the gathered and scattered self becoming a Living Temple of divine presence.

The governing question this tradition asks of Scripture is not "How does the guilty sinner receive legal acquittal?" It is: How does the scattered soul become a Living Temple of the Logos? How does the false self yield to the true person? How does the Light descend into a prepared vessel?

A Johannine, Magdalene, Jacobean, and apostolic canon answers that question far more directly than a Pauline-centered one. This is not anti-Pauline; it is a recognition that different theological grammars serve different spiritual visions, and that the Chevillonian vision is served best by the scriptural witnesses named here.

The Canon of the Living Temple organizes its texts into five tiers, each with its own function and authority.

These are the governing texts: the foundation for ordinary doctrine, public worship, preaching, catechesis, and formation. They include the four canonical Gospels (with John holding the position of Principal Logos Gospel), Acts of the Apostles, James, the Johannine letters, First Peter, Jude, the Revelation of John, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Didache, and the Odes of Solomon.

Every Sunday liturgy, every ordinary homily, every catechetical session draws first from these texts. They are the sacred library's governing shelves.

These texts carry genuine authority within their appropriate contexts. They are approved for formation, special liturgies, mystagogy, clergy preparation, and selected public readings, but they do not govern ordinary doctrine in the way the Canon Proper does. They include First Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, Second Peter, the Acts of John and Acts of Thomas, the Hymn of the Pearl, Thunder Perfect Mind, the Exegesis of the Soul, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Dialogue of the Savior, the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Secret Book of James, and the Treatise on the Resurrection.

Think of these texts as the deeper shelves of the library: not for every visitor on every occasion, but essential for those who have gone further into the tradition's interior.

These texts are reserved for advanced formation within the Order of Christian Mysteries and the Congregatio Sanctarum Mysteriorum, and for specialized clerical preparation. They include selected portions of Pistis Sophia, the Apocalypses of James, the Prayer of Thanksgiving, the Treatise on the Eighth and Ninth, and the Valentinian Exposition. They are not used in ordinary public worship and are not assigned without the theological formation required to receive them. 

Here, the tradition keeps texts that matter historically and theologically without exercising governing authority over OTC doctrine or discipline. The Letter to the Hebrews rests here as an anonymous early Christian meditation on priestly themes, not as a Pauline text. The Pauline corpus (Romans through Philemon) rests here as well. Paul is not condemned or dismissed; his letters are studied with care and profit in historical and comparative contexts. They simply do not govern this tradition's doctrine, liturgy, gender theology, or sacramental practice. That governing function belongs elsewhere.

These are readings from the wider tradition that may illuminate, interpret, or apply the day's mystery without displacing canonical authority. A passage from Chevillon's own writings at his commemoration. A text from the Desert Fathers during Lent. A Cathar or Templar passage at an appropriate feast. A reading from the Hermetic tradition in an initiatic context. Supplemental witnesses are always clearly named as supplemental, and they are always appointed in harmony with the Canon's governing rule: no text is received in a way that denies the Incarnation, despises creation, abolishes charity, breaks sacramental continuity, or makes secret knowledge superior to holiness. 

Every text in the Canon of the Living Temple, at whatever tier, is read through six principles. No text is received in a way that denies the Incarnation of the Logos. No text is received in a way that despises creation or the body through which the sacraments operate. No text is received in a way that abolishes charity as the governing form of Christian life. No text is received in a way that breaks sacramental continuity with the apostolic Church. No text is received in a way that makes secret knowledge superior to holiness. No text is received in a way that subordinates Christ to mythic speculation or cosmological scheme.

These six principles are the key. They ensure that the Church's expanded scriptural imagination remains anchored in the apostolic faith and ordered toward Reintegration. A canon of this kind, without such a rule, would become what one of our conversations called "a fog machine": all perfume and no skeleton. The rule gives the canon its bones.

The Liturgy of the Word in the Liturgy of the Living Temple follows a fourfold structure. The First Lesson draws from Hebrew Scripture, Wisdom literature, or the Odes of Solomon. The Responsorial Psalm or Ode follows in contemplation. The Apostolic Reading draws from the apostolic witness of the Canon Proper: James, the Johannine letters, Peter, Jude, the Didache, the Odes, Clement, or Hermas. The Holy Gospel is always and only one of the four canonical Gospels, proclaimed with full liturgical honors.

In solemn and mystagogical celebrations, a Mystical Reading may accompany these: a passage from Thomas, Mary, Philip, or the Gospel of Truth, appointed as a contemplative companion to the Holy Gospel rather than a replacement of it.

The word "Epistle," which carries Pauline connotations embedded deeply in Western Christian liturgical memory, is retired from all OTC liturgical usage. In its place: Apostolic Reading. The shift is not merely terminological. It names a genuine reorientation of the tradition's scriptural imagination.

The Old Templar Church ordinarily uses the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue) for canonical biblical texts in public reading and formation. The World English Bible (WEB) serves as a public-domain alternative for compilable, printable, or distributable editions. Deuterocanonical and initiatic texts are read from the best available scholarly translations, as identified in the Canon reference page. 

The Canon of the Living Temple is not merely a collection of ancient writings. It is a rule of illumination: a sacred library ordered toward the Reintegration of the soul, the formation of the Living Temple, and the descent of the Infinite into the prepared vessel of human life.

The central question beneath every reading in every liturgy of this tradition is the one Chevillon's entire life addressed: how does the scattered soul become a Living Temple of the Logos? The Canon exists to answer that question, again and again, in every season, through every year of Lux, Veritas, and Caritas, until the answer is not merely understood but inhabited.