I am very grateful for the invitation to give
this particular lecture, I should perhaps say that my reflections here arise
not so much from reading lots of books about the authority of the Bible—though
I have read some of the recent ones—but from the multiple experience I find
myself having, of studying and teaching the New Testament at an academic level,
of regular liturgical worship in which the Bible plays a central part, and of
evangelistic and pastoral work in which, again, though not always so obviously,
the Bible is at or at least near the heart of what one is doing. What I want to offer to you has therefore
something of the mood, for me, of reflection on reality. I am trying to understand what it is that I
am doing, not least so that I can do it (I hope) less badly, in a less muddled
fashion. But I hope that this will not
give you the impression that the issues are private to myself. I believe that they are highly important if
we are to be the people that we are supposed to be, as Christians in whatever
sphere of life.
The question before
us, then, is: how can the Bible be authoritative? This way of putting it carries deliberately, two different though
related meanings, and I shall look at them in turn. First, how can there be such a thing as an authoritative
book? What sort of a claim are we
making about a book when we say that it is ‘authoritative’? Second, by what means can the Bible actually
exercise its authority? How is it to be
used so that its authority becomes effective?
The first question subdivides further, and I want to argue two things as
we took at it. (1) I shall argue that usual views of the Bible—including usual
evangelical views of the Bible—are actually too low, and do not give it the
sufficient weight that it ought to have. (2) I shall then suggest a different
way of envisaging authority from that which I think most Christians normally
take. Under the second, I shall address
various issues that arise when we consider how the Bible can actually do
the job that, as Christians, we claim God has given it to do. This will involve looking at biblical
authority in relation, particularly, to the church’s task and to the
church’s own life.
AN AUTHORITATIVE BOOK?
Authority?
Our generation has a problem about
authority. In church and in state we
use the word ‘authority’ in different ways, some positive and some negative. We use it in secular senses. We say of a great footballer that he stamped
his authority on the game. Or we say of
a great musician that he or she gave an authoritative performance of a
particular concerto. Within more
structured social gatherings the question ‘Who’s in charge?’ has particular
function. For instance, if someone came
into a lecture-room and asked ‘Who’s in charge?’, the answer would presumably
be either the lecturer or the chairman, if any. If, however, a group of people went out to dinner at a restaurant
and somebody suddenly came in and said, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ the question
might not actually make any sense. We
might be a bit puzzled as to what authority might mean in that structure. Within a more definite structure, however, such
as a law court or a college or a business, the question ‘Who’s in charge?’ or
‘What does authority mean here?’ would have a very definite meaning, and could
expect a fairly clear answer. The
meaning of ‘authority’, then, varies considerably according to the context
within which the discourse is taking place. It is important to realize this
from the start, not least because one of my central contentions is going to be
that we have tended to let the word ‘authority’ be the fixed point and have
adjusted ‘scripture’ to meet it, instead of the other way round.
Authority in the Church
Authority in the Church
Within the church, the question of what we mean
by authority has had particular focal points.
It has had practical questions attached to it. How are things to be organized within church life? What are the boundaries of allowable
behavior and doctrine? In particular,
to use the sixteenth-century formulation, what are those things ‘necessary to be
believed upon pain of damnation’? But
it has also had theoretical sides to it.
What are we looking for when we are looking for authority in the
church? Where would we find it? How would we know when we had found it? What would we do with authoritative
documents, people or whatever, if we had them?
It is within that context that the familiar debates have taken place,
advocating the relative weight to be given to scripture, tradition and reason,
or (if you like, and again in sixteenth-century terms) to Bible, Pope and
Scholar. Within the last century or so
we have seen a fourth, to rival those three, namely emotion or feeling. Various attempts are still being made to
draw up satisfactory formulations of how these things fit together in some sort
of a hierarchy: ARCIC is here one of several such attempts.
Evangelical Views
Evangelical Views
Most heirs of the Reformation, not least
evangelicals, take if for granted that we are to give scripture the primary
place and that everything else has to be lined up in relation to
scripture. There is, indeed, an evangelical
assumption, common in some circles, that evangelicals do not have any
tradition. We simply open the
scripture, read what it says, and take it as applying to ourselves: there the
matter ends, and we do not have any ‘tradition’. This is rather like the frequent Anglican assumption (being an
Anglican myself I rather cherish this) that Anglicans have no doctrine peculiar
to themselves: it is merely that if something is true the Church of England
believes it. This, though not itself a
refutation of the claim not to have any ‘tradition’, is for the moment
sufficient indication of the inherent unlikeliness of the claim’s truth, and I
am confident that most people, facing the question explicitly, will not wish
that the claim be pressed. But I still
find two things to be the case, both of which give me some cause for
concern. First, there is an implied,
and quite unwarranted, positivism: we imagine that we are ‘reading the text,
straight’, and that if somebody disagrees with us it must be because they,
unlike we ourselves, are secretly using ‘presuppositions’ of this or that
sort. This is simply naïve,
and actually astonishingly arrogant and dangerous. It fuels the second point, which is that evangelicals often use
the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ when they mean the authority of
evangelical, or Protestant, theology, since the assumption is made that we
(evangelicals, or Protestants) are the ones who know and believe what the Bible
is saying. And, though there is more
than a grain of truth in such claims, they are by no means the whole truth, and
to imagine that they are is to move from theology to ideology. If we are not careful, the phrase ‘authority
of scripture’ can, by such routes, come to mean simply ‘the authority of
evangelical tradition, as opposed to Catholic or rationalist ones.’
Biblical Authority: the Problem
Biblical Authority: the Problem
When people in the church talk about authority
they are very often talking about controlling people or situations. They want to make sure that everything is regulated
properly, that the church does not go off the rails doctrinally or ethically,
that correct ideas and practices are upheld and transmitted to the next
generation. ‘Authority’ is the place
where we go to find out the correct answers to key questions such as
these. This notion, however, runs into
all kinds of problems when we apply it to the Bible. Is that really what the Bible is for? Is it there to control the
church? Is it there simply to look up
the correct answers to questions that we, for some reason, already know?
As we read the Bible
we discover that the answer to these questions seems in fact to be ‘no’. Most of the Bible does not consist of rules
and regulations—lists of commands to be obeyed. Nor does it consist of creeds—lists of things to be
believed. And often, when there ARE
lists of rules or of creedal statements, they seem to be somewhat incidental to
the purpose of the writing in question.
One might even say, in one (admittedly limited) sense, that there is no
biblical doctrine of the authority of the Bible. For the most part the Bible itself is much more concerned with
doing a whole range of other things rather than talking about itself. There are, of course, key passages,
especially at transition moments like 2 Timothy or 2 Peter, where the writers
are concerned that the church of the next generation should be properly founded
and based. At precisely such points we
find statements emerging about the place of scripture within the life of the
church. But such a doctrine usually has
to be inferred. It may well be possible
to infer it, but it is not (for instance) what Isaiah or Paul are talking
about. Nor is it, for the most part,
what Jesus is talking about in the gospels.
He isn’t constantly saying, ‘What about scripture? What about
scripture?’ It is there sometimes, but
it is not the central thing that we have sometimes made it. And the attempt by many evangelicals to
argue a general doctrine of scripture out of the use made of the Old Testament
in the New is doomed to failure, despite its many strong points, precisely
because the relation between the Old and New Testaments is not the same as the
relation between the New Testament and ourselves.[1]
If we look in scripture to find
out where in practice authority is held to lie, the answer on page after page
does not address our regular antitheses at all. As we shall see, in the Bible all authority lies with God
himself.
The question of
biblical authority, of how there can be such a thing as an authoritative Bible,
is not, then, as simple as it might look.
In order to raise it at all, we have to appreciate that it is a
sub-question of some much more general questions. (1) How can any text function as authoritative? Once one gets away from the idea of a rule
book such as might function as authoritative in, say, a golf club, this
question gets progressively harder. (2)
How can any ancient text function as authoritative? If you were a Jew, wanting to obey the Torah (or, perhaps, obey
the Talmud) you would find that there were all sorts of difficult questions
about how a text, written so many years ago, can function as authoritative
today. Actually, it is easier with the
Talmud than with the Bible because the Talmud is designed very specifically to
be a rule book for human beings engaged in life in a particular sort of
community. But much of what we call the
Bible—the Old and New Testaments—is not a rule book; it is narrative. That raises a further question: (3) How can an ancient narrative text be
authoritative? How, for instance, can
the book of Judges, or the book of Acts, be authoritative? It is one thing to go to your commanding
officer first thing in the morning and have a string of commands barked at you. But what would you do if, instead, he began
‘Once upon a time . . .’?
These questions press
so acutely that the church has, down the centuries, tried out all sorts of ways
of getting round them, and of thereby turning the apparently somewhat
recalcitrant material in the Bible itself into material that can more readily
be used as ‘authoritative’ in the senses demanded by this or that period of
church history. I want to look at three
such methods and suggest that each in its own way actually belittles the Bible, thereby betraying a low doctrine of
inspiration in practice, whatever may be held in theory.
Timeless Truth?
Timeless Truth?
A regular response to these problems is to say
that the Bible is a repository of timeless truth. There are some senses in which that is true. But the sense in which it is normally meant
is certainly not true. The whole Bible
from Genesis to Revelation is culturally conditioned. It is all written in the language of particular times, and evokes
the cultures in which it came to birth.
It seems, when we get close up to it, as though, if we grant for a
moment that in some sense or other God has indeed inspired this book, he has
not wanted to give us an abstract set of truths unrelated to space and
time. He has wanted to give us
something rather different, which is not (in our post-enlightenment world)
nearly so easy to handle as such a set of truths might seem to be. The problem of the gospels is one particular
instance of this question. And at this
point in the argument evangelicals often lurch towards Romans as a sort of safe
place where they can find a basic systematic theology in the light of which one
can read everything else. I have often
been assured by evangelical colleagues in theological disciplines other than my
own that my perception is indeed true: namely, that the Protestant and evangelical
tradition has not been half so good on the gospels as it has been on the
epistles. We don’t quite know what to
do with them. Because, I think, we have
come to them as we have come to the whole Bible, looking for particular answers
to particular questions. And we have
thereby made the Bible into something which it basically is not. I remember a well-known Preacher saying that
he thought a lot of Christians used the Bible as an unsorted edition of Daily
Light. It really ought to be
arranged into neat little devotional chunks, but it happens to have got all
muddled up. The same phenomenon occurs,
at a rather different level, when People treat it as an unsorted edition of
Calvin’s Institutes, the Westminster Confession, the UCCF Basis of Faith, or
the so-called ‘Four Spiritual Laws’.
But to treat the Bible like that is, in fact, simply to take your place
in a very long tradition of Christians who have tried to make the Bible into a
set of abstract truths and rules—abstract devotional doctrinal, or evangelistic
snippets here and there.
This problem goes back
ultimately, I think, to a failure on the part of the Reformers to work out
fully their proper insistence on the literal sense of scripture as the real
locus of God’s revelation, the place where God was really speaking in
scripture. The literal sense seems fine
when it comes to saying, and working with, what (for instance) Paul actually
meant in Romans. (This itself can
actually be misleading too, but we let it pass for the moment.) It’s fine when you’re attacking mediaeval
allegorizing of one sort or another.
But the Reformers, I think, never worked out a satisfactory answer to
the question, how can the literal sense of stories—which purport to
describe events in (say) first century Palestine—how can that be
authoritative? If we are not careful,
the appeal to ‘timeless truths’ not only distorts the Bible itself, making it
into the sort of book it manifestly is not, but also creeps back, behind the
Reformers’ polemic against allegory, into a neo-allegorization which is all the
more dangerous for being unrecognised.[2]
Witness to Primary Events?
So, more recently, we have seen attempts on the
part of many scholars to make this very difficult text authoritative by
suggesting that it is authoritative insofar as it witnesses to primary
events. This emphasis, associated not
least with the post-war biblical theology movement, at least has the merit of
taking seriously the historical setting, the literal sense of the text. The problem about that, however, can be seen
quite easily. Supposing we actually dug
up Pilate’s court records, and supposing we were able to agree that they gave a
fair transcript of Jesus’ trial. Would
they be authoritative in any of the normal senses in which Christians have claimed
that the Bible is authoritative? I
think not. A variation on this theme
occurs when people say that the Bible (or the New Testament) is authoritative
because it witnesses to early Christian experience. There is a whole range of modern scholarship that has assumed
that the aim of New Testament study is to find the early Christians at work or
at prayer or at evangelism or at teaching.
The Bible then becomes authoritative because it lets us in on what it
was like being an early Christian—and it is the early Christian experience that
is then treated as the real authority, the real norm. In both of these variations, then, authority has shifted from the
Bible itself to the historically reconstructed event or experience. We are not really talking about the
authority of the Bible, at all.
Timeless Function?
Timeless Function?
Another (related) way in which the Bible has
been used, with the frequent implication that it is in such use that its
authority consists, is in the timeless functions which it is deemed to
perform. For Bultmann, the New
Testament functioned (among other things) as issuing the timeless call to
decision. For Ignatius and those who
have taught Jesuit spirituality, it can be used in a timeless sense within
pastoral practice. Now this is not a
million miles from certain things which I shall be suggesting later on in this
lecture as appropriate uses of scripture.
But at the level of theory it is vital that we say, once more, that such
uses in and of themselves are not what is primarily meant when we say that the
Bible is authoritative: or, if they are, that they thereby belittle the Bible,
and fail to do justice to the book as we actually have it. All three methods I have outlined involve a
certain procedure which ultimately seems to be illegitimate: that one attempts,
as it were, to boil off certain timeless truths, models, or challenges into a
sort of ethereal realm which is not anything immediately to do with space-time
reality in order then to carry them across from the first century to any other
given century and re-liquefy them (I hope I’m getting my physics right at this
point), making them relevant to a new situation. Once again, it is not really the Bible that is being
regarded as the ‘real’ authority. It is
something else.
Evangelicals and Biblical Authority
Evangelicals and Biblical Authority
It seems to be that evangelicalism has flirted
with, and frequently held long-running love affairs with all of these different
methods of using the Bible, all of these attempts to put into practice what
turns out to be quite an inarticulate sense that it is somehow the real locus
of authority. And that has produced
what one can now see in many so-called scriptural churches around the world—not
least in North America. It seems to be
the case that the more that you insist that you are based on the Bible, the
more fissiparous you become; the church splits up into more and more little
groups, each thinking that they have got biblical truth right. And in my experience of teaching theological
students I find that very often those from a conservative evangelical
background opt for one such view as the safe one, the one with which they will
privately stick, from which they will criticize the others. Failing that, they lapse into the
regrettable (though sometimes comprehensible) attitude of temporary
book-learning followed by regained positivism: we will learn for a while the
sort of things that the scholars write about, then we shall get back to using
the Bible straight. There may be places
and times where that approach is the only possible one, but I am quite sure
that the Christian world of 1989 is not among them. There is a time to grow up in reading the Bible as in everything
else. There is a time to take the doctrine
of inspiration seriously. And my
contention here is that evangelicalism has usually done no better than those it
sometimes attacks in taking inspiration seriously. Methodologically, evangelical handling of scripture has fallen
into the same traps as most other movements, even if we have found ways of
appearing to extricate ourselves.
The Belittling of the Bible
The problem with all such solutions as to how to
use the Bible is that they belittle the Bible and exalt something else. Basically they imply—and this is what I mean
when I say that they offer too low a view of scripture—that God has, after all,
given us the wrong sort of book and it is our job to turn it into the right
sort of book by engaging in these hermeneutical moves, translation procedures
or whatever. They imply that the real
place where God has revealed himself—the real locus of authority and
revelation—is, in fact, somewhere else; somewhere else in the past in an event
that once took place, or somewhere else in a timeless sphere which is not
really hooked into our world at all out touches it tangentially, or somewhere
in the present in ‘my own experience’, or somewhere in the future in some great
act which is yet to come. And such
views, I suggest, rely very heavily on either tradition (including evangelical
tradition) or reason, often playing off one against the other, and lurching
away from scripture into something else.
I have a suspicion that most of you are as familiar with this whole
process as I am. If you are not, you
would be within a very short time of beginning to study theology at any serious
level.
My conclusion, then,
is this: that the regular views of scripture and its authority which we find
not only outside but also inside evangelicalism fail to do justice to what the
Bible actually is—a book, an ancient book, an ancient narrative book. They function by tuning that book into
something else, and by implying thereby that God has, after all, given us the
wrong sort of book. This is a low
doctrine of inspiration, whatever heights are claimed for it and whatever words
beginning with ‘in-’ are used to label it.
I propose that what we need to do is to re-examine the concept of
authority itself and see if we cannot do a bit better.
The Bible and Biblical Authority
All Authority is God’s Authority
The Bible and Biblical Authority
All Authority is God’s Authority
So, secondly within the first half of this
lecture, I want to suggest that scripture’s own view of authority focuses on
the authority of God himself. (I recall
a well-known lecturer once insisting that ‘there can be no authority other than
scripture’, and thumping the tub so completely that I wanted to ask ‘but what
about God?’) If we think for a moment
what we are actually saying when we use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’, we
must surely acknowledge that this is a shorthand way of saying that, though
authority belongs to God, God has somehow invested this authority in
scripture. And that is a complex
claim. It is not straightforward. When people use the phrase ‘authority of
scripture’ they very often do not realize this. Worse, they often treat the word ‘authority’ as the absolute, the
fixed point, and make the word ‘scripture’ the thing which is moving around
trying to find a home against it. In
other words, they think they know what authority is and then they say that
scripture is that thing.
I want to suggest that
we should try it the other way around.
Supposing we said that we know what scripture is (we have it here, after
all), and that we should try and discover what authority might be in the light
of that. Granted that this is the book
that we actually have, and that we want to find out what its ‘authority’ might
mean, we need perhaps to forswear our too-ready ideas about ‘authority’ and let
them be remolded in the light of scripture itself—not just in the light of the
biblical statements about authority but in the light of the whole Bible,
or the whole New Testament, itself.
What are we saying about the concept of ‘authority’ itself if we assert
that this book—not the book we are so good at turning this book into—is
‘authoritative’?
Beginning, though,
with explicit scriptural evidence about authority itself, we find soon
enough—this is obvious but is often ignored—that all authority does indeed
belong to God. ‘In the beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth’. God
says this, God says that, and it is done.
Now if that is not authoritative, I don’t know what is. God calls Abraham; he speaks
authoritatively. God exercises
authority in great dynamic events (in Exodus, the Exile and Return). In the New Testament, we discover that
authority is ultimately invested in Christ: ‘all authority has been given to me
in heaven and on earth’. Then, perhaps
to our surprise, authority is invested in the apostles: Paul wrote whole
letters in order to make this point crystal clear (in a manner of speaking). This authority, we discover, has to do with
the Holy Spirit. And the whole church
is then, and thereby, given authority to work within God’s world as his
accredited agent(s). From an
exceedingly quick survey, we are forced to say: authority, according to the
Bible itself, is vested in God himself, Father, Son and Spirit.
The Purpose and Character of God’s Authority
The Purpose and Character of God’s Authority
But what is God doing with his authority? We discover, as we look at the Bible itself,
that God’s model of authority is not like that of the managing director over
the business, not like that of the governing body over the college, not like
that of the police or the law courts who have authority over society. There is a more subtle thing going on. God is not simply organizing the world in a
certain way such as we would recognize from any of those human models. He is organizing it—if that’s the right word
at all—through Jesus and in the power of the Spirit. And the notion of God’s authority, which we have to understand
before we understand what we mean by the authority of scripture, is based on
the fact that this God is the loving, wise, creator, redeemer God. And his authority is his sovereign exercise
of those powers; his love and wise creations and redemption. What is he doing? He is not simply organizing the world. He is, as we see and know in Christ and by the Spirit, judging
and remaking his world. What he does
authoritatively he dots with this intent.
God is not a celestial information service to whom you can apply for
answers on difficult questions. Nor is
he a heavenly ticket agency to whom you can go for moral or doctrinal permits
or passports to salvation. He does not
stand outside the human process and merely comment on it or merely issue you
with certain tickets that you might need.
Those views would imply either a deist’s God or a legalist’s God, not
the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ and the Spirit. And it must be said that a great many views
of biblical authority imply one or other of those sub-Christian alternatives.
But, once we say that
God’s authority is like that, we find that there is a challenge issued to the
world’s view of authority and to the church’s view of authority. Authority is not the power to control
people, and crush them, and keep them in little boxes. The church often tries to do that—to tidy
people up. Nor is the Bible as the
vehicle of God’s authority meant to be information for the legalist. We have to apply some central reformation
insights to the concept of authority itself.
It seems to me that the Reformation, once more, did not go quite far
enough in this respect, and was always in danger of picking up the mediaeval
view of authority and simply continuing it with, as was often said, a paper
pope instead of a human one. Rather, God’s
authority vested in scripture is designed, as all God’s authority is designed,
to liberate human beings, to judge and condemn evil and sin in the world in
order to set people free to be fully human.
That’s what God is in the business of doing. That is what his authority is there for. And when we use a
shorthand phrase like ‘authority of scripture’ that is what we ought to be
meaning. It is an authority with this
shape and character, this purpose and goal.
How in the Bible does God exercise his authority?
How in the Bible does God exercise his authority?
Then, we have to ask, if we are to get to the
authority of scripture. How does God
exercise that authority? Again and
again, in the biblical story itself we see that he does so through human
agents anointed and equipped by the Holy Spirit. And this is itself an expression of his love, because he does not
will, simply to come into the world in a blinding flash of light and obliterate
all opposition. He wants to reveal
himself meaningfully within the space/time universe not just passing it by tangentially;
to reveal himself in judgement and in mercy in a way which will save
people. So, we get the prophets. We get obedient writers in the Old
Testament, not only prophets but those who wrote the psalms and so on. As the climax of the story we get Jesus
himself as the great prophet, but how much more than a prophet. And, we then get Jesus’ people as the
anointed ones. And within that sequence
there is a very significant passage, namely 1 Kings 22. Micaiah, the son of Imlah (one of the great
prophets who didn’t leave any writing behind him but who certainly knew what
his business was) stands up against the wicked king, Ahab. The false prophets of Israel at the time
were saying to Ahab, ‘Go up against Ramoth-gilead and fight and you will
triumph. Yahweh will give it into your
hand’. This is especially interesting,
because the false prophets appear to have everything going for them. They are quoting Deuteronomy 33—one of them
makes horns and puts them on his head and says, ‘with these you will crush the
enemy until they are overthrown’. They
had scripture on their side, so it seemed.
They had tradition on their side; after all, Yahweh was the God of
Battles and he would fight for Israel.
They had reason on their side; Israel and Judah together can beat these
northern enemies quite easily. But they
didn’t have God on their side. Micaiah
had stood in the council of the Lord and in that private, strange, secret
meeting he had learned that even the apparent scriptural authority which these
prophets had, and the apparent tradition and reason, wasn’t good enough; God
wanted to judge Ahab and so save Israel.
And so God delegated his authority to the prophet Micaiah who, inspired
by the Spirit, stood humbly in the council of God and then stood boldly in the
councils of men. He put his life and
liberty on the line, like Daniel and so many others. That is how God brought his authority to bear on Israel: not by
revealing to them a set of timeless truths, but by delegating his authority to
obedient men through whose words he brought judgement and salvation to Israel
and the world.
And how much more must
we say of Jesus. Jesus the great
prophet; Jesus who rules from the cross in judgement and love; Jesus who says:
all authority is given to me, so you go and get on with the
job. I hope the irony of that has not
escaped you. So too in Acts 1, we find:
God has all authority . . . so that you will receive power. Again, the irony. How can we resolve that irony?
By holding firmly to what the New Testament gives us, which is the
strong theology of the authoritative Holy Spirit. Jesus’ people are to be the anointed ones through whom God still
works authoritatively. And then, in
order that the church may be the church—may be the people of God for the
world—God, by that same Holy Spirit, equips men in the first generation to
write the new covenant documentation.
This is to be the new covenant documentation which gives the foundation
charter and the characteristic direction and identity to the people of God, who
are to be the people of God for the world.
It is common to say in some scholarly circles that the evangelists, for
instance, didn’t know they were writing scripture. One of the gains of modern scholarship is that we now see that to
be a mistake. Redaction criticism has
shown that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were writing what they were writing in
order that it might be the foundation documentation for the church of their day
and might bear God’s authority in doing so.
And a book which carries God’s authority to be the foundation of the
church for the world is what I mean by scripture. I think they knew what they were doing.[3]
Thus it is that
through the spoken and written authority of anointed human beings God brings
his authority to bear on his people and his world. Thus far, we have looked at what the Bible says about how God
exercises his judging and saving authority.
And it includes (the point with which in fact we began) the delegation
of his authority, in some sense, to certain writings. But this leads us to more questions.
How does God exercise his authority through the Bible?
How does God exercise his authority through the Bible?
When we turn the question round, however, and
ask it the other way about, we discover just what a rich concept of authority
we are going to need if we are to do justice to this book. The writings written by these people, thus
led by the Spirit, are not for the most part, as we saw, the sort of things we
would think of as ‘authoritative’. They
are mostly narrative; and we have already run up against the problem how
can a story, a narrative, be authoritative?[4] Somehow, the authority which God has invested in this book is an
authority that is wielded and exercised through the people of God
telling and retelling their story as the story of the world, telling the
covenant story as the true story of creation.
Somehow, this authority is also wielded through his people singing
psalms. Somehow, it is wielded (it
seems) in particular through God’s people telling the story of Jesus. We must look, then, at the question of
stories. What sort of authority might
they possess?
The Authority of a Story
The Authority of a Story
There are various ways in which stories might be
thought to possess authority. Sometimes
a story is told so that the actions of its characters may be imitated. It was because they had that impression that
some early Fathers, embarrassed by the possibilities inherent in reading the
Old Testament that way, insisted upon allegorical exegesis. More subtly, a story can be told with a view
to creating a generalized ethos which may then be perpetuated this way or
that. The problem with such models,
popular in fact though they are within Christian reading of scripture, is that
they are far too vague: they constitute a hermeneutical grab-bag or lucky
dip. Rather, I suggest that stories in
general, and certainly the biblical story, has a shape and a goal that must be
observed and to which appropriate response must be made.
But what might this
appropriate response look like? Let me
offer you a possible model, which is not in fact simply an illustration but
actually corresponds, as I shall argue, to some important features of the
biblical story, which (as I have been suggesting) is that which God has given
to his people as the means of his exercising his authority. Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play
whose fifth act had been lost. The
first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization,
such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed
that the play ought to be staged.
Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act
once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit
Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact
his own. Better, it might be felt, to
give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian
actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the
language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told
to work out a fifth act for themselves.[5]
Consider the
result. The first four acts, existing
as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand. That is, anyone could properly object to the
new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving
inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had
not reached its proper resolution. This
‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command
that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over
again. It would consist in the fact of
an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward
movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which
required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in
order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn
together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting
with both innovation and consistency.
This model could and
perhaps should be adapted further; it offers in fact quite a range of possibilities. Among the detailed moves available within
this model, which I shall explore and pursue elsewhere, is the possibility of
seeing the five acts as follows: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus. The New Testament would then form the first
scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Car 15; parts of the
Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end. The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant
story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual
performance of the final act. Appeal
could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a
major theme or characterization in the earlier material. Such an appeal—and such an offering!—would
of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story
and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat
verbatim passages from earlier sections.
Such sensitivity (cashing out the model in terms of church life) is
precisely what one would have expected to be required; did we ever imagine that
the application of biblical authority ought to be something that could be done
by a well-programmed computer?
Old Testament, New Testament
Old Testament, New Testament
The model already enables us to add a footnote,
albeit an important one. The Old
Testament, we begin to see more clearly, is not the book of the covenant people
of God in Christ in the same sense that the New Testament is. The New Testament is written to be the
charter for the people of the creator God in the time between the first and
second comings of Jesus; the Old Testament forms the story of the earlier acts,
which are (to be sure) vital for understanding why Act 4, and hence Act 5, are
what they are, but not at all appropriate to be picked up and hurled forward
into Act 5 without more ado. The Old
Testament has the authority that an earlier act of the play would have, no
more, no less. This is, of course, a
demand for a more carefully worked out view of the senses in which the Old
Testament is, and/or is not, ‘authoritative’ for the life of the church; I do
not think that my model has settled the question once and for all, though I
believe it offers a creative way forward in understanding at least the shape of
the problem. At the same time, the suggestion
forms a counter-proposal to the suggestion of J D G Dunn in chapter 3 of his
book, The Living Word. There he
implies, and sometimes states specifically, that since Jesus and Paul treated
the Old Testament with a mixture of respect and cavalier freedom, we should do
the same—with the New Testament![6] But this would only hold if we knew in
advance that there had been, between the New Testament and ourselves, a break
in (for want of a better word) dispensation comparable to the evident break in
dispensation between Acts 3 and 4, between Old Testament and Jesus. And we know no such thing,
Thus, there is a hard
thing which has to be said here, and it is this: that there is a sense in which
the Old Testament is not the book of the church in the same way that the New
Testament is the book of the church.
Please do not misunderstand me.
The Old Testament is in all sorts of important senses reaffirmed by Paul
and Jesus and so on-it is the book of the people of God, God’s book, God’s word
etc. But, the Old Testament proclaims
itself to be the beginning of that story which has now reached its climax in
Jesus; and, as the letter to the Hebrews says, ‘that which is old and wearing
out is ready to vanish away’, referring to the temple. But it is referring also to all those bits
of the Old Testament which were good (they weren’t bad, I’m not advocating a
Marcionite position, cutting off the Old Testament) but, were there for a time
as Paul argues very cogently, as in Galatians 3. The New Testament, building on what God did in the Old, is now
the covenant charter for the people of God.
We do not have a temple, we do not have sacrifices—at least, not in the
old Jewish sense of either of those.
Both are translated into new meanings in the New Testament. We do not have kosher laws. We do not require that our male children be
circumcised if they are to be part of the people of God. We do not keep the
seventh day of the week as the Sabbath.
Those were the boundary markers which the Old Testament laid down for
the time when the people of God was one nation, one geographical entity, with
one racial and cultural identity. Now
that the gospel has gone worldwide we thank God that he prepared the way like
that; but it is the New Testament now which is the charter for the church.
The effect of this authority
The effect of this authority
But this means that the New Testament is not
merely a true commentary on Christianity.
It has been pointed out in relation to B B Warfield’s theological
position that Warfield was always in danger of saying that Christianity would
be totally true and would totally work even if there weren’t a Bible to tell us
all about it (but that it so happens that we have set an authoritative book
which does precisely that, from as it were the sidelines).[7]
But, according to Paul in Romans
15 and elsewhere, the Bible is itself a key part of God’s plan. It is not merely a divinely given commentary
on the way salvation works (or whatever); the Bible is part of the means by
which he puts his purposes of judgement and salvation to work. The Bible is made up, all through, of
writings of those who, like Micaiah ben Imlah stood humbly in the councils of
God and then stood boldly, in their writing, in the councils of men.
The Bible, then, is
designed to function through human beings, through the church, through people
who, living still by the Spirit, have their life molded by this Spirit-inspired
book. What for? Well, as Jesus said in John 20, ‘As the
Father sent me, even so I send you’. He
sends the church into the world, in other words, to be and do for the world
what he was and did for Israel. There,
I suggest, is the key hermeneutical bridge.
By this means we are enabled to move from the bare story-line that
speaks of Jesus as the man who lived and died and did these things in Palestine
2,000 years ago, into an agenda for the church. And that agenda is the same confrontation with the world that
Jesus had with Israel a confrontation involving judgement and mercy. It is a paradoxical confrontation because it
is done with God’s authority. It is not
done with the authority that we reach for so easily, an authority which will
manipulate, or crush, or control, or merely give information about the
world. But, rather, it is to be done
with an authority with which the church can authentically speak God’s words of
judgement and mercy to the world. We
are not, then, entering into the world’s power games. That, after all, is what Peter tried to do in the garden with his
sword, trying to bring in the kingdom of God in the same way that the world
would like to do it. The world is
always trying to lure the church into playing the game by its (the world’s)
rules. And the church is all too often
eager to do this, not least by using the idea of the authority of scripture as
a means to control people, to force them into little boxes. Those little boxes often owe far more, in my
experience, to cultural conditioning of this or that sort, than to scripture
itself as the revelation of the loving, creator and redeemer God.
Authority in the
church, then, means the church’s authority, with scripture in its hand and
heart, to speak and act for God in his world.
It is not simply that we may say, in the church, ‘Are we allowed to do
this or that?’ ‘Where are the lines drawn for our behavior?’ Or, ‘Must we believe the following 17
doctrines if we are to be really sound?’
God wants the church to lift up its eyes and see the field ripe for
harvest, and to go out, armed with the authority of scripture; not just to get
its own life right within a Christian ghetto, but to use the authority of
scripture to declare to the world authoritatively that Jesus is Lord. And, since the New Testament is the covenant
charter of the people of God, the Holy Spirit, I believe, desires and longs to
do this task in each generation by reawakening people to the freshness of that
covenant, and hence summoning them to fresh covenant tasks. The phrase ‘authority of scripture’, therefore,
is a sort of shorthand for the fact that the creator and covenant God uses this
book as his means of equipping and calling the church for these tasks. And this is, I believe, the true biblical
context of the biblical doctrine of authority, which is meant to enable us in
turn to be Micaiahs, in church and how much more in society: so that, in other
words, we may be able to stand humbly in the councils of God, in order then to
stand boldly in the councils of men.
How may we do that? By soaking
ourselves in scripture, in the power and strength and leading of the Spirit, in
order that we may then speak freshly and with authority to the world of this
same creator God.
Why is authority like
this? Why does it have to be like
that? Because God (as in Acts 1 and
Matthew 28, which we looked at earlier) wants to catch human beings up in the
work that he is doing. He doesn’t want
to do it by-passing us; he wants us to be involved in his work. And as we are involved, so we ourselves are
being remade. He doesn’t give us the
Holy Spirit in order to make us infallible—blind and dumb servants who merely
sit there and let the stuff flow through us.
So, he doesn’t simply give us a rule book so that we could just thumb
through and look it up. He doesn’t
create a church where you become automatically sinless on entry. Because, as the goal and end of his work is
redemption, so the means is redemptive also: judgement and mercy, nature and
grace. God does not, then, want to put
people into little boxes and keep them safe and sound. It is, after all, possible to be so sound
that you’re sound asleep. I am not in
favor of unsoundness; but soundness means health, and health means growth, and
growth means life and vigor and new directions. The little boxes in which you put people and keep them under
control are called coffins. We read
scripture not in order to avoid life and growth. God forgive us that we have done that in some of our traditions. Nor do we read scripture in order to avoid
thought and action, or to be crushed, or squeezed, or confined into a
de-humanizing shape, but in order to die and rise again in our minds. Because, again and again, we find that, as
we submit to scripture, as we wrestle with the bits that don’t make sense, and
as we hand through to a new sense that we haven’t thought of or seen before,
God breathes into our nostrils his own breath—the breath of life. And we become living beings—a church
recreated in his image, more fully human, thinking, alive beings.
That, in fact, is (I
believe) one of the reasons why God has given us so much story, so much
narrative in scripture. Story
authority, as Jesus knew only too well, is the authority that really
works. Throw a rule book at people’s
head, or offer them a list of doctrines, and they can duck or avoid it, or
simply disagree and go away. Tell them
a story, though, and you invite them to come into a different world; you invite
them to share a world-view or better still a ‘God-view’. That, actually, is what the parables are all
about. They offer, as all genuine
Christian story-telling the does, a world-view which, as someone comes into it
and finds how compelling it is, quietly shatters the world-view that they were
in already. Stories determine how
people see themselves and how they see the world. Stories determine how they experience God, and the world, and
themselves, and others. Great
revolutionary movements have told stories about the past and present and
future. They have invited people to see
themselves in that light, and people’s lives have been changed. If that happens at a merely human level, how
much more when it is God himself, the creator, breathing through his word.
Conclusion
Conclusion
There, then, is perhaps a more complex model of
biblical authority than some Christian traditions are used to. I have argued that the phrase ‘the authority
of scripture’ must be understood within the context of God’s authority, of
which it is both a witness and, perhaps more importantly, a vehicle. This is, I submit, a more dynamic model of
authority than some others on offer. I
believe it is a view which is substantially compatible with the Bible’s own
view (if one dare sum up something so complex in such an
over-simplification). In addition, for
what it may be worth, I believe that it is also in the deepest sense a very
Protestant view, however much it diverges from normal Protestant opinion today;
after all, it stresses the unique and unrepeatable events of Jesus’ life, death
and resurrection, and it insists that the Bible, not the books that we become
so skilled at turning the Bible into, is the real locus of authority. In addition, actually, it is also in some
senses a far more Catholic view than some others, stressing the need for the
community of Jesus’ people to understand itself and its tasks within thoroughly
historical parameters. It is also, now
that we have started on this game, a more orthodox, charismatic, and even
liberal view than those which sometimes go by those labels; but to spell all
this out would be some-what tedious and anyway, for our present purposes,
unnecessary.
HOW CAN THE BIBLE FUNCTION AS AUTHORITATIVE?
But how, then, can scripture be properly
used? How can it exercise this
authority? If God has delegated his
authority somehow to this book, what does he want us to do with it?
The Basis: Fundamentals and Overtones
History and Hermeneutics
History and Hermeneutics
How can we handle this extraordinary treasure,
responsibly? First, we have to let the
Bible be the Bible in all its historical oddness and otherness. We have again and again, not done that. We have, again and again, allowed ourselves
to say—I’ve heard myself say it, over and over again—‘What Paul is really
getting at here is . . . What Jesus was really meaning in this passage . .
.’—and then, what has happened is a translation of something which is
beautiful, and fragile, and unique, into something which is commonplace and
boring, and every other Christian in the pew has heard it several sermons
before. I am reminded of that amazing
line in Schaffer’s play Amadeus where Salieri sees on stage Mozart’s
Figaro, and he says, ‘He has taken ordinary people—chambermaids and servants
and barbers—and he has made them gods and heroes.’ And then Salieri remembers his own operas and he says, ‘I have
taken gods and heroes—and I have made them ordinary.’ God forgive us that we have taken the Bible and have made it
ordinary—that we have cut it down to our size.
We have reduced it, so that whatever text we preach on it will say
basically the same things. This is
particularly a problem for second and third-generation movements of which the
rather tired and puzzled evangelicalism in many British churches today is a
good example. What we are seeing in
such preaching is not the authority of scripture at work, but the authority of
a tradition, or even a mere convention masquerading as the authority of
scripture-which is much worse, because it has thereby lost the possibility of a
critique or inbuilt self-correction coming to it from scripture itself.
In Romans 15, by
contrast, Paul says, ‘That by patience and encouragement of the scriptures you
might have hope’; because scripture brings God’s order to God’s world. And that order will forever be breaking in
as a new word, recognizably in continuity with words heard from God before, but
often in discontinuity even with the very traditions by which those older fresh
words were preserved and transmitted.
Scripture is the book that assures us that we are the people of God
when, again and again, we are tempted to doubt. Scripture is the covenant book, not just in order that we can
look up our pedigree in it and see where we came from (Abraham and so on), but
the book through which the Spirit assures a that we are his people and through
which he sends us out into the world to tell the Jesus story, that is, the
Israel story which has become the Jesus story which together is God’s story for
the world. And as we do that in the
power of the Spirit, the miracle is that it rings true and people out there in
the world know, in this or that fashion, that this strange story which we are
telling does in fact run deeper than the world’s stories. It does in fact tell them truths which they
half-knew and had rather hoped to forget.
It is the story which confirms the fact that God had redeemed the world
in Jesus Christ. It is the story which
breaks open all other world-views and, by so doing, invites men and women,
young and old, to see this story as their story. In other words,
as we let the Bible be the Bible, God works through us-and it-to do what he
intends to do in and for the church and the world.
A model which suggests
itself at this point—and this is more of a mere illustration than the last one
was—is that of the piano. Sit at a
piano, hold down the loud pedal, strike a low note loudly, and listen. You will hear all kinds of higher notes,
harmonics, shimmering above the note originally struck. In the same way, the retelling of the story
that the Bible actually contains is to function as the striking of the low
note, the basic fundamental note of God’s story with his world. As we retell this story there will be
harmonics audible, for those, at least, with ears to hear. The problem, of course, is that historical
criticism of the Bible has insisted on striking the fundamental notes with the soft
pedal on, as though by thus screening out the harmonics it might ensure that
the fundamental really made its own point-and then Christians have grumbled
that such criticism makes the Bible irrelevant. The equal and opposite danger is that pious Christians have only been
interested in the harmonics themselves, and then by actually striking them
instead of the fundamentals have produced a narrower range of tone, making up
in shrillness what it lacks in historical depth and basic substance.
Story and Hermeneutic: Living in the Fifth Act
Story and Hermeneutic: Living in the Fifth Act
In the church and in the world, then, we have to
tell the story. It is not enough to
translate scripture into timeless truths.
How easy it has been for theologians and preachers to translate the gospels
(for instance) into something more like epistles! We must, if anything, assimilate the epistles to the gospels
rather than vice versa. I would not
actually recommend that, but if you were going to make a mistake that would be
the direction to do it in. And as we
tell the story—the story of Israel, the story of Jesus, the story of the early
church—that itself is an act of worship.
That is why, within my tradition, the reading of scripture is not merely
ancillary to worship—something to prepare for the sermon—but it is actually,
itself, part of the rhythm of worship itself.
The church in reading publicly the story of God is praising God for his
mighty acts, and is celebrating them, and is celebrating the fact that she is
part of that continuous story. And,
that story as we use it in worship reforms our God-view our world-view—reconstitutes
us as the church. The story has to be
told as the new covenant story. This is
where my five-act model comes to our help again. The earlier parts of the story are to be told precisely as the
earlier parts of the story. We do not
read Genesis 1 and 2 as though the world were still like that; we do not read
Genesis 3 as though ignorant of Genesis 12, of Exodus, or indeed of the
gospels. Nor do we read the gospels us
though we were ignorant of the fact that they are written precisely in order to
make the transition from Act 4 to Act 5, the Act in which we are now living and
in which we are to make our own unique, unscripted and yet obedient,
improvisation. This is how we are to be
the church, for the world. As we do so,
we are calling into question the world’s models of authority, as well as the
content and direction of that authority.
So, we have to tell
the story within the world and the church; because the church is always in
danger of getting too like the world. I
have already said that this happens in relation to authority; we use the
world’s authority models instead of the God-given authority models. And scripture demands, in fact, to be read
in the context of traditions within the church, precisely in order that it may
judge and redeem the traditions of the church.
Not that it may blunder them: the traditions are second-order stories,
the stories that you and I tell about who we are as Christians, which go back
through Wesley and Whitefield or through Luther or Aquinas or whoever. These are the stones that form the grid
through which we read scripture; we can’t do without them, but they need
regular checking. And part of my whole
argument here is that evangelical traditions needs checking just as well as
anybody else’s, checking according to scripture itself. We then have to allow the story to challenge
our traditions, not to get rid of traditions but in order to see where we’ve
come from, and who we are as the people of God in the 20th century, and to
reshape on, traditions honestly and properly.
But, also, we must allow scripture to stretch our reason back into
shape. We must allow scripture to teach
us how to think straight, because by ourselves we don’t; we think bent, we
think crooked. Gerard Manley Hopkins
said, ‘The Holy Spirit over the bent world broods with warm breast and with Ah!
bright wings.’ And the Spirit broods
over us as we read this book, to straighten out our bent thinking; the
world-views that have got twisted so that they are like the world’s
world-views. God wants us to be people,
not puppets; to love him with our mind as well as our soul and our
strength. And it is scripture that
enables us to do that, not by crushing us into an alien mould but by giving us
the fully authoritative four acts, and the start of the fifth, which set us
free to become the church afresh in each generation.
Biblical Authority and the Church’s Task
Biblical Authority and the Church’s Task
The Challenge to the world’s authority structures and concepts
The church is not made so that there can be a
safe ghetto into which people can run and escape from the world, but so that
God can shine out his light into the world, exposing (among other things) the
ways in which the world has structured itself into darkness. And this is relevant to the concepts of
authority themselves. The Bible is a
living witness to the fact that there is a different sort of authority, a
different sort of power, to that which is recognized in the world of politics,
business, government, or even the academy.
Do you know that moment in Jesus Christ Superstar where the crowds are
coming into Jerusalem and the disciples are all singing, ‘Haysannah,
Hosannah’. And one of the zealots says
to Jesus, ‘Come on, you ride in ahead of us and you’ll get the power and the glory
for ever and ever and ever.’ And Jesus
turns round and says, ‘Neither you, Simon, nor the 50,000, nor the Romans, nor
the Jews, nor Judas, nor the twelve, nor the priests, nor the scribes, nor
doomed Jerusalem herself, understand what power is, understand what
glory is.’ And then he proceeds to weep
over Jerusalem and prophesy its destruction; and then he goes, steadily through
the following week, to his enthronement on Calvary, which with hindsight the
church realizes to be the place where all power, all real power, is
congregated.
The world needs to see
that there is a different model of authority.
Because the world needs to know that there is a different God. When the world says, ‘God’ it doesn’t mean
what you and I mean by God. It doesn’t
mean the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It means either a pantheist god: the god of all-being, a sort of nature
god. Or, it means a deist-god way up in
the sky who started off by being a landlord, then became an absentee landlord,
and now is just an absentee. We have to
tell the world again, that the God who is in authority over the world, the God
who speaks through scripture, is the Father of Jesus, the God who sends the
Spirit. And, therefore, we have to
announce to the world the story of scripture.
This is how the
gospels are to become authoritative.
They are to become authoritative because, as they tell the story of who
Jesus was for Israel in judging and redeeming Israel, so we continue that
story—this is the great message of Luke, is it not—in being for the
world what Jesus was for Israel. That
is how the translation works. And that
is why we need narrative, not timeless truth.
I’m not a timeless person; I’ve got a story. The world’s not a timeless world; it’s got a story. And I’ve got a responsibility, armed with
scripture, to tell the world God’s story, through song and in speech, in drama
and in art. We must do this by telling
whatever parables are appropriate. That
may well not be by standing on street corners reading chunks of scripture. It might be much more appropriate to go off
and write a novel (and not a ‘Christian’ novel where half the characters are
Christians and all the other half become Christians on the last page) but a
novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with
Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so
that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story
can be my story. After all, the story
of the Bible, and the power that it possesses, is a better story than any of
the power games that we play in our world.
We must tell this story, and let it exercise its power in the world.
And that is the task
of the whole church. Need I say, not
merely of the professional caste within it—although those who are privileged,
whether by being given gifts of study by God, or by being set apart with
particular time (as I have been) to study scripture, do have a special
responsibility to make sure that they are constantly living in the story for
themselves, constantly being the scripture people themselves, in order to
encourage the church to be that sort of people, again not for its own sake but
for the sake of the world.
The Challenge to the World’s World-View
The Challenge to the World’s World-View
When we tell the whole story of the Bible, and
tell it (of course) not just by repeating it parrot-fashion but by articulating
it in a thousand different ways, improvising our own faithful versions, we are
inevitably challenging more than just one aspect of the world’s way of looking
at things (i.e. its view of authority and power). We are undermining its entire view of what the world is, and is
for, and are offering, in the best way possible, a new world-view, which turns
out (of course) to be a new God-view.
We are articulating a viewpoint according to which there is one God, the
creator of all that is, who not only made the world but is living and active
within it (in opposition to the dualism and/or deism which clings so closely,
even to much evangelical tradition), who is also transcendent over it and
deeply grieved by its fall away from goodness into sin (in opposition to the
pantheism which always lurks in the wings, and which has made a major new entry
in the so-called New Age movement—and which often traps Christians who are in a
mode of reaction against dualism or deism).
This story about the World and its creator will function as an
invitation to participate in the story oneself, to make it one’s own, and to do
so by turning away from the idols which prevent the story becoming one’s own,
and by worshipping instead the God revealed as the true God. Evangelism and the summons injustice and
mercy in society are thus one and the same, and both are effected by the
telling of the story, the authoritative story, which works by its own power
irrespective of the technique of the storyteller. Once again, we see that the church’s task is to be the people
who, like Micaiah, stand humbly before God in order then to stand boldly before
men.
Biblical Authority and the Church’s Life
Biblical Authority and the Church’s Life
I shall be briefer about this aspect, though it
could be spelt out in considerable detail—and probably needs to be if the
church is to be really healthy, and not go through a barren ritual of reading
the Bible but getting nothing out of it that cannot be reduced to terms of what
she already knows. The purpose of the
church’s life is to be the people of God for the world: a city set on a hill
cannot be hidden. But the church can
only be this if in her own life she is constantly being recalled to the story
and message of scripture, without which she will herself lapse into the world’s
ways of thinking (as is done in the evangelical dualism, for example, that
perpetuates the split between religion and politics
invented by the fairly godless eighteenth century).
invented by the fairly godless eighteenth century).
How is this to be
done? The church in her public worship
uses lectionaries—at least, if she does not, she runs the grave risk of
revolving, as C S Lewis pointed out, round the little treadmill of favorite
passages, of ‘desert island texts’, and muzzling the terrible and wonderful
things that scripture really has to say.
But even in the lectionaries there are problems; because at least those
that are common Bible today do their own fair share of muzzling, missing out
crucial passages in order to keep the readings short, omitting verses that
might shock modern Western sensibilities.
The Bible is to be in the bloodstream of the church’s worship, but at
the moment the bloodstream is looking fairly watery. We must reform the lectionaries, and give to the church creative
and positive ways of reading scripture, and hearing it read, which will enable
this book to be once again the fully authoritative covenant charter.
In private reading,
and in informal group meetings, we need again to experiment with new ways of
reading scripture. Anyone who has heard
an entire biblical book read, or even acted (think of Alec McCown on Mark, or
Paul Alexander on John; I have heard the same done with Galatians, and very
impressive it was, too) will realize that such things as chapter-divisions, or
almost any divisions at all, can be simply unhelpful. We need to recapture a sense of scripture as a whole, telling and
retelling stories as wholes. Only when
you read Exodus as a whole (for example) do you realize the awful irony whereby
the making of the golden calf is a parody of what God wanted the people
to do with their gold and jewels . . . and only by reading Mark as a whole
might you realize that, when the disciples ask to sit at Jesus’ right and left
hand, they are indeed asking for something they do not understand.
It is perhaps the
half-hearted and sometimes quite miserable traditions of reading the Bible—even
among whose who claim to take it seriously—that account for the very low level
of biblical knowledge and awareness even among some church leaders and those
with delegated responsibility. And this
is the more lamentable in that the Bible ought to be functioning as
authoritative within church debates.
What happens all too often is that the debate is conducted without
reference to the Bible (until a rabid fundamentalist stands up and waves it
around, confirming the tacit agreement of everyone else to give it a wide
berth). Rather, serious engagement is
required, at every level from the personal through to the group Bible-study, to
the proper liturgical use, to the giving of time in synods and councils to
Bible exposition and study. Only so
will the church avoid the trap of trying to address the world and having
nothing to say but the faint echo of what the world itself has been saying for
some while.
If we really engage
with the Bible in this serious way we will find, I believe, that we will be set
free from (among other things) some of the small-scale evangelical paranoia
which goes on about scripture. We won’t
be forced into awkward corners, answering impossible questions of the ‘Have you
stopped beating your wife?’ variety about whether scripture is exactly this or
exactly that. Of course the Bible is
inspired, and if you’re using it like this there won’t be any question in your
mind that the Bible is inspired. But,
you will be set free to explore ways of articulating that belief which do not
fall into the old rationalist traps of 18th or 19th or 20th century. Actually using the Bible in this way
is a far sounder thing than mouthing lots of words beginning with ‘in—’ but still
imprisoning the Bible within evangelical tradition (which is what some of those
‘in—’ words seem almost designed to do).
Of course you will discover that the Bible will not let you down. You will be paying attention to it; you
won’t be sitting in judgement over it.
But you won’t come with a preconceived notion of what this or that
passage has to mean if it is to be true.
You will discover that God is speaking new truth through it. I take it as a method in my biblical studies
that if I turn a corner and find myself saying, ‘Well, in that case, that verse
is wrong’ that I must have turned a wrong corner somewhere. But that does not mean that I impose what I
think is right on to that bit of the Bible.
It means, instead, that I am forced to live with that text
uncomfortably, sometimes literally for years (this is sober autobiography),
until suddenly I come round a different corner and that verse makes a lot of
sense; sense that I wouldn’t have got if I had insisted on imposing my initial
view on it from day one.
The Bible, clearly, is
also to be used in a thousand different ways within the pastoral work of the
church, the caring and building up of all its members. Again, there is much that I could say here,
but little space. Suffice it to note
that the individual world-views and God-views of Christians, as much as anybody
else, need to be constantly adjusted and straightened out in the light of the
story which is told in scripture. But
this is not to say that there is one, or even that there are twenty-one,
‘right’ ways of this being done. To be
sure, the regular use of scripture in private and public worship is a regular
medicine for many of the ills that beset us.
But there are many methods of meditation, of imaginative reading, ways
of soaking oneself in a book or a text, ways of allowing the story to become
one’s own story in all sorts of intimate ways, that can with profit be
recommended by a pastor, or engaged in within the context of pastoral ministry
itself. Here, too, we discover the
authority of the Bible at work: God’s own authority, exercised not to give true
information about wholeness but to give wholeness itself, by judging and
remaking the thoughts and intentions, the imaginations and rememberings, of
men, women and children. There are
worlds to be discovered here of which a good deal of the church remains sadly
ignorant. The Bible is the book of
personal renewal, the book of tears and laughter, the book through which God
resonates with our pain and joy, and enables us to resonate with his pain and
joy. This is the really powerful
authority of the Bible, to be distinguished from the merely manipulative or the
crassly confrontational ‘use’ of scripture.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that the notion of the ‘authority of
scripture’ is a shorthand expression for God’s authority, exercised somehow
through scripture; that scripture must be allowed to be itself in exercising
its authority, and not be turned into something else which might fit better
into what the church, or the world, might have thought its ‘authority’ should
look like; that it is therefore the meaning of ‘authority’ itself, not that of
scripture, that is the unknown in the equation, and that when this unknown is
discovered it challenges head on the various notions and practices of authority
endemic in the world and, alas, in the church also. I have suggested, less systematically, some ways in which this
might be put into practice. All of this
has been designed as a plea to the church to let the Bible be the Bible, and so
to let God be God—and so to enable the people of God to be the people of God,
his special people, living under his authority, bringing his light to his
world. The Bible is not an end in
itself. It is there so that, by its
proper use, the creator may be glorified and the creation may be healed. It is our task to be the people through whom
this extraordinary vision comes to pass.
We are thus entrusted with a privilege too great for casual handling,
too vital to remain a mere matter of debate.
So what am I saying? I am saying that we mustn’t belittle
scripture by bringing the world’s models of authority into it. We must let scripture be itself, and that is
a hard task. Scripture contains many
things that I don’t know, and that you don’t know; many things we are waiting
to discover; passages which are lying dormant waiting for us to dig them
out. Awaken them. We must then make sure that the church,
armed in this way, is challenging the world’s view of authority. So that, we must determine—corporately as
well as individually—to become in a true sense, people of the book. Not people of the book in the Islamic sense,
where this book just drops down and crushes people and you say it’s the will of
Allah, and I don’t understand it, and I can’t do anything about it. But, people of the book in the Christian
sense; people who are being remade, judged and remolded by the Spirit through
scripture. It seems to me that evangelical
tradition has often become in bondage to a sort of lip-service scripture
principle even while debating in fact how many angels can dance on the head of
a pin. (Not literally, but there are
equivalents in our tradition.)
But Noah found grace in the eyes of the
LORD. ( Genesis 6:8 )
My Dear in Him,
Please follow me to study this words of hope from
the beginning to the end of the messages so you can found grace in the eyes of
The Almighty Father in obedience to The Divine direction to His prophet.
The word “grace” appears for the first time in the Bible in this verse. Noah
lived in the midst of the most heinously evil society the world had known, but
because he had found grace, God favored him with personal instruction about the
coming catastrophic judgment and the details for a new beginning on earth.The language of Genesis 6:8 gives us insight into Noah’s character. “Found” is a simple active perfect verb, not a passive one. Thus, Noah found favor—grace—in God’s eyes because he was actively looking for it. Likewise, Adam found no helpmate from among the animals that was suitable for him (Genesis 2:20), and Noah’s dove did not find rest for the sole of her foot (Genesis 8:9). Laban did not find his household images that Rachel had stolen and hidden (Genesis 31:35), and Hilkiah the priest found a book of the law of the Lord given by Moses
(2 Chronicles 34:14-15). God could have used a passive verb in reference to Noah, but He did not.
What can we learn from the life of this great man?
Evidently, God intended for us to know this key factor: Noah’s life was righteous—in spite of the horrible condition of the world of his day. He was looking for God’s direction and for the answers to his heart’s cry. Noah wasn’t merely hanging around waiting for the inevitable destruction that he sensed must come as a result of the awful rebellion that surrounded him. Noah was anticipating a response from God—and when God finally did give him instruction, Noah “found” the favor that he sought!
Captain of Industry
Many centuries later, God warned Ezekiel of future judgment that would happen to the land of Israel because of its wickedness. God identified three men—Noah, Daniel, and Job—as examples of the best “righteous” men in history (Ezekiel 14:14, 20). If that comparison has any meaning, Noah was much more than a mere chance recipient of God’s grace.
Job was “the greatest of all the men of the east” (Job 1:3). His livestock resources (mainly those for caravan duty) were enormous. That certainly meant that he was a successful trade broker and possibly a source for prized stock. He had multiple houses and land—so much so that “bands” from nearby nations were necessary to destroy his wealth.
God had labeled Job “my servant...there is none like him in the earth, a perfect [blameless] and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth [shuns] evil” (Job 1:8). Job was much more than a “nice guy.” He was probably the wealthiest man of his day, and yet he was of such godly character that God used him to teach Satan a lesson!
Daniel was one of the king’s descendants and nobles from Judah taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 1:3). The account of Daniel and his three godly friends is well known among Christians, but the young adult experiences of Daniel often overshadow the long life that he led as the leader of the “scientists” (learned men) of that day. He was commissioned as a “great man” by Nebuchadnezzar and “sat in the gate of the king” (Daniel 2:48-49). Daniel served in some form of senior political and advisory position for six kings over some 70 years. Not bad for a captive!
God identified Daniel as a “man greatly beloved” (Daniel 10:11). He was privileged to have unusual spiritual insight, which he could have used to his personal advantage. But he always made it clear that he was gifted by God’s grace—to whom he always gave credit. Furthermore, God used Daniel to record several of the most remarkable prophecies in all of Scripture. Scholars are still discussing the book of Daniel. He was a significant person indeed!
If the comparisons of the righteous men listed in Ezekiel 14 are to be genuine comparisons, Noah must have been a person of significance in his region—if not well known throughout the world of his day. He clearly possessed or had access to the resources and skills needed to accomplish the monumental task that was assigned to him. Since God’s instructions to build the Ark are somewhat general, it is not beyond reason to assume that Noah ran an architectural and contracting business of some kind.
The pre-Flood civilization would certainly have been advanced enough for such an enterprise. The evolutionary cloud has mesmerized most of the world into relegating the “ancient” world into some sort of pre-human existence—living in caves and grass huts with animal skins for clothing. The Bible paints a much different picture! There were cities during Noah’s day, as well as developed technology that included metallurgy and the skills to build and market musical instruments (Genesis 4:17-22). Somebody had to construct the habitations for the growing population, and someone had to coordinate the distribution and development of those manufacturing places that produced the products needed by that society.
The world of Noah was very wicked, but it functioned with much the same needs as our current world. When the Lord Jesus wanted to emphasize the suddenness of the destruction in the coming end-times judgment, He did it by drawing a comparison with the “ordinary” life of the populations around Noah.
And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be
also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married
wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the
ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all. (Luke 17:26-27)
Noah was an important man in his day. Whether he was a general contractor,
an architect, or a business baron is pretty much an educated guess. But the
fact that he found grace is important. Noah was fully dedicated to the
work of God during his life.Walked with God
The Bible says that Noah was one of only two men in all of history who “walked with God” (Genesis 6:9). The other is Enoch, who may be more well known since he was taken up into God’s presence without dying (Genesis 5:24). Efforts by some to portray Noah as a bumbling, drunken hypocrite are simply not true. God’s commentary is that Noah was “just” and “perfect” (upright, without blemish). The Creator entrusted him with a monumental task that is unique in all of history.
Noah was “just.” That simply means that he was known for his equitable dealings with others. Even in the wicked world that disgusted the Creator, Noah was “justified” in his dealings. He charged reasonable prices for his work. He gave a good product (whatever it was) to those who employed his services. His honest dealings gave rise to his influence in the community. He was proven to be a man of integrity (Genesis 7:1).
Noah was “perfect.” That precious reputation, at least from God’s perspective, means that he was a man without condemnation. His “just” dealings resulted in a “blameless” record. Whatever the wicked people of his day may have said behind his back, they knew that Noah was above reproach. Just as folks today often resort to rumor-mongering and distortion of facts to cover their own guilt, those around Noah no doubt employed some of the same practices to discredit righteous Noah. He may well have had that kind of treatment, but God saw that he was “perfect.”
Preacher of Righteousness
Peter called Noah a “preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5). Think of what that means in the context of Genesis 6! The whole earth was “filled with violence” and “every heart” only thought of evil. The social milieu must have been a real mess. Yet Noah had the guts to stand up publically for the righteous behavior that just about everyone else openly and loudly rejected.
Perhaps his extended family members, and even some or most of his employees, were under his influence. But by the time the judgment of God fell, only Noah, his wife, and three of their sons and their wives were willing to follow his leadership into the Ark. Many would consider a ministry with such results a failure today, and yet God insisted that Noah’s faith not only “saved” his family but the future world from extinction (Hebrews 11:7)!
We are not told in Scripture what Noah preached about. Enoch (the other man who walked with God) preached about the return of the Lord in judgment (Jude 1:14-15). Noah may well have preached about the coming judgment of the Flood and the desperate need of the world’s people to turn back to their Creator for salvation. Whatever he may have preached and however he implemented his heart’s desire, Noah was labeled a “preacher of righteousness” by the only Judge that ultimately counts.
God’s grace is always available. It is not hidden from anyone. But it must be “found” by God’s servants as we “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).
My Most Beloved,
If you look for God with your whole heart you will find Him and He
will remove that affliction out of your life, family, marriage and business.
God is great and also the wisest personage in the
universe. Your decision to look for Him today as the solution to the problems
that have weighed you down in this life is the only key to the problem.
You might be among those who are searching for God but
not with your whole heart. You might also be searching for God and at the same
time going to the places you know from your heart that is not pleasing to God
Almighty.
God is everywhere you go though not accessible from all
places you have fixed your heart for the solution to your needs.
So many people have looked for this God through many
gods of various religions and yet they are still confused of life and why they
even came into existence.
Others have believed that joining different kinds of
Self Realization organizations is the key to actualize and realize what they
are looking for.
I have seen others who are tired of other gods of other
people but now they have decided to create their own gods to worship. Can a man
create God?
Yet many men have created gods and deceived you to
worship them.
Many are calling upon the names of other gods they do
not know about simply because they want to try a certain kind of worship and see
how it can be with them. Some others are
busy looking for a place to discover another strange god which is not yet
discovered by any other man. If we move
a little into the Bible book we will discover the exact message of God
concerning searching and developing gods in any other scientific method which
the Bible rightly stipulated, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any
likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath,
or that is in the water under the earth:
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve
them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that
hate me;
And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me,
and keep my commandments.” – EXODUS 20: 3-6.
God is warning you from this portion of the scripture
to stop developing any form of worship that will
entice you to worship other gods.
God is also warning you in particular to remove and
throw away those gods you kept in secret places which men do not know you are
worshipping.
Stars and other things in the skies are not made to be
worshipped by The Almighty Father and the Creator of universe. God commanded
you also never to worship gods of woods, silvers, gold and iron.
God
spoke to us through Moses and said. “And
the LORD commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that ye
might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it.
Take
ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on
the day that the LORD spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire:
Lest
ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any
figure, the likeness of male or female,
The
likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl
that flieth in the air,
The
likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish
that is in the waters beneath the earth:
And lest
thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon,
and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship
them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God hath divided unto all nations
under the whole heaven. - Deuteronomy 4:14-19
God is angry with you as you are bowing down to them
and this is the source of those problems that refuses to go out of your life.
The Almighty Father does not want you to worship the gods of your land.
Some people do carry the gods of their lands in wooden
form to another country for worshipping purposes but The Almighty Father cannot
be carried in a wooden form because He is accessible from any place and any
condition you can call Him in truth and in Spirit wholeheartedly.
There is no good gods in seas and oceans. There is no
marine good gods that is capable to do what Almighty God cannot do for you.
He warned you never to bow down to any of them. Your
destiny is purely in the hand of The Almighty Father. None of your blessings
comes as a result of worshipping idols.
God is jealous and will not be happy if you are giving
the glories that are due to His Most Holy Name, Jehovah to other gods of
nations and other gods who have ears but cannot hear.
If you believe me today, and decide to drop those gods
you are serving and to come to The Almighty Jehovah through His Son, Jesus
Christ.
The
Bible warned, “As
many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold,
I stand at the door, and knock:
if any man hear my voice, and open the door,
I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
To
him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also
overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the
Spirit saith unto the churches. The Revelation of Saint John 3:19-22.
Why not decide right now as you are reading this
message and give your entire life to your Creator so it shall be well with you,
your family and all your businesses?
Will you continue to serve the gods that demands for
the blood of your children for ritual purposes and sacrifices so as to bless
and protect you?
Will you serve the gods that takes away your fertility
in other to give you unrealistic financial blessings and fame?
Reason well before you go.
God is telling me that some group of people is trying
to initiate you into a cult, an occult group, a satanic system of worship.
Please beware and run away for your dear life so you
will not regret the final outcome of it.
There is nothing absolutely good in Satan. He is a liar
and father of all liars.
If you believe this message is for you in particular
and you wants to be saved before it is too late. Why not call my attention for
my direction to establish your faith in Jesus Christ?
Accept and Confess the name of Jesus Christ so He shall
come into your life and be your God as you have totally dropped all form of
other gods with sincere heart.
Jesus
saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the
Father, but by me.If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.- JOHN 14:6-7
Am available to assist you to develop your faith in God
and also to pray with you for instant divine solution to those problems that
has taken you far and wide without hope for solution.
“And thou, Solomon my son, know thou the God of thy
father, and serve him with a perfect heart and with a willing mind: for the
LORD searcheth all hearts, and understandeth all the imaginations of the
thoughts: if thou seek him, he will be found of thee; but if thou forsake him,
he will cast thee off for ever. - I CHRONICLES 28:9.
God bless you for giving a listening ear to this
message of God that is specially made for you today for your upliftment.
If you are moved by the Spirit of God to
support this work. Please don’t hesitate to tell us of how you are led by God
to assist. Or you can send us your Check to our office below for our mission to
Africa and building of schools for Orphans and Orphanage .
We need an offering and a monetary donation
motivated by the Spirit of God for the poor and less privileged because God
loves a cheerful giver.
Please
kindly send us Check of the amount placed in your heart by the Spirit of Most High
GOD JEHOVAH to- Bishop Uchenna Celestine Okonkwor
472 Amherst St
Suite 732225
Nashua, NH 03063
U.S.A.
Tel:
781-569-0201.
Alternatively, I will also suggest that you
forward your donation to us for the poor through Our Payoneer Bank Account
details below to make the deposit…
Bank Account Holder: Uchenna
Celestine Okonkwor
Bank Name: Bank Of America
Account #: 00003503352939167
ABA (Bank Routing) #: 061000052
Account Type: CHECKING.
Bank Name: Bank Of America
Account #: 00003503352939167
ABA (Bank Routing) #: 061000052
Account Type: CHECKING.
You may as well send your financial
donation in support of this missionary work through our paypal account at
zionagency@yahoo.com.
You can visit our outreach and ministerial sites below
for perusal to enable you understand our mission practically well. We need up to $2,ooo,000 to facilitate the
schools building project for the poor and less privileged. This will have
primary, secondary and University educational system. We are pleading that you
give us your financial contribution and support as you are capable and also led
by The Spirit of The Almighty God.
God bless you.
Bishop Uchenna C. Okonkwor
472 Amherst St
Suite 732225
Nashua, NH 03063
Suite 732225
Nashua, NH 03063
781-569-0201.
U.S.A.
JESUS CHRIST IS THE LORD.
No comments :
Post a Comment