Authority of Scripture

Have you even heard the term “authority of scripture”? It seems to get thrown around a lot, but what do we mean by it?

When you really start to think about it I think some very interesting questions come up. For instance, how can any book be authoritative, much less a book written by Jews and a handful of early Christians who lived some 2000+ years ago…and wrote primarily in narrative (story) form! Do you see the problem we have already? I mean typically when we talk about authority we may picture something like a soldier who stands before his commanding officer and awaits his orders. The commanding officer, no doubt, will say, "clean the mess hall," or "take 2 men and scout that hill" or something like that. But what if, as N. T. Wright once put it, instead of a list of commands the commander begins, “Once upon a time…”

What do you do with that?

Whether or not they would have phrased it like this, this problem has plagued Christians for a very long time. Our rational culture loves to have a list, a system, a matrix, an outline. And so we’ve effectively decided that the Bible was written all wrong, and proceeded to fix it much as a scientist might “fix” a petri dish full of organic material. We must break it down into smaller parts - each book into chapters and each chapter into sections and each section into verses, so that we might scrutinize its fiddley bits. Then we pick apart those small parts and create “systematic theologies” (long boring books) or condense the pieces into the “Four Spiritual Laws” or the “Romans Road” or sum it all up in a “statement of faith” which we can post on our church website.

Speaking of statements of faith, I think Jesus' statment of faith was summed up in a little pamphlet we call the "Old Testament." I'd like to see on a church website's statement of faith page a link to BibleGateway.com - but now having said that, to be more honest, we might have to add links to the writings of the early church father, and maybe for some of us the writings of Calvin or Wesley or Tim LaHaye.

Anyway, have you ever wondered why God gave us this narrative instead of just a list of do’s, don’ts, and how-to’s? I mean surely God could do that, and wouldn’t that solve so many problems? Shouldn’t Paul have just written a 12 step program on how to be saved, or how to do church, or whatever?

But He gave us the Bible, and sorting through the whole thing can get quite messy at times. Ever wonder why He did that? I have.

And how about this – what’s the Bible say about authority. There are some scant references to what we may call “authority of scripture,” but throughout the Bible the scriptures consistently attribute all authority to God. In the beginning God creates all things (now if that isn’t authority…), later we’re told that Jesus is given all authority on heaven and earth, and later we see a transfer of authority to the apostles and then to all Christians via the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And so perhaps we should be aware that “authority of scripture” is really just short for saying that God has invested His authority into scripture – but then perhaps we must ask if there are other things that He’s invested his authority into (us, for example, via the indwelling of the Holy Spirit) and what that might mean.

Here is an analogy given by N.T. Wright on how we might begin to think about scripture in light of this authority business.

Imagine we find a brilliant Shakespearean play. Everything is amazing: the plot, character development, writing, irony, and so on. The only problem being that we have only found the first 4 acts of what seems to be a 5 act play. What might we do?

Well, likely we'd gather some brilliant actors and perhaps playwrites and such and have them work out a 5th act to finish the play. They’d first need to become extremely well acquanted with the first 4 acts. They’d act it out a number of times, get to “know” their characters, begin discussing subtle meanings and plot lines, etc. Then, in time they could begin to develop a 5th act.

There wouldn't necessarily be just one way to end the play but we'd have the first 4 acts to serve as a type of "authority." We wouldn't want to take a character who had been evil for 4 acts and suddenly make him good for no reason, for example. We’d need to strictly adhear to the guideline the first 4 acts had provided, but then we must, necessarily, take it further in the 5th act. It would do us no good at all simply to try and repeat what happened in act 4 or to repeat lines from act 3 and call it finished.

And another thing, no one could perform Act 5 and say that this is the Act 5. Perhaps the most beautiful part of the play would be seeing how each group of actors finish it. It would be slightly different each time you saw it.

This is, perhaps, one way we could view scripture. Wright divides the first four acts up as 1) Creation 2) Fall 3) Israel 4) Jesus, and we are living out, in our daily lives, 5th act. I love the analogy and the idea that we are actually in the play, for we are the actors. For most of my short Christian life I’ve felt more like a commentator or critic of the play, an outsider. But what if you and I are in the play? Doesn’t that change how we view the Bible? How we view our lives?

Wright goes on to suggest that our predicament is actually somewhat better than the analogy because the New Testament is actually a part of the beginning of the 5th act and some parts of it actually give us hints as to how the 5th act will ultimately end. So we need only to figure out the middle section.

So the point then is that we're a part of God's story. We use the Bible as a guideline of sorts to help us figure out our character and how to develop him further and essentially how we can be the best "character" we can be in God's story. Some may see this as a low view of scripture, I personally think that it is quite a high view of both scripture and of God.



There’s a particular article by Bishop N. T. Wright that got me thinking on this and a lot of what I’ve been talking about is based directly on the article. How Can the Bible be Authoritative