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12 Jul 09
James BaisingerHow Can The Bible Be Authoritative?
(The Laing Lecture 1989, and the Griffith Thomas Lecture 1989. Originally published in Vox Evangelica, 1991, 21, 7–32. Reproduced by permission of the author.)
N.T. Wright
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 -
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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. -
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. - 16 more annotations...
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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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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). -
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).
Rath
> -
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. -
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. -
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.) Instead,
I suggest that our task is to seize this privilege with both hands, and use it
to the glory of God and the redemption of the world.
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12 Jul 06
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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.) Instead, I suggest that our task is to seize this privilege with both hands, and use it to the glory of God and the redemption of the world.
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05 Jul 06
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24 May 05
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