Biblical Authority
A Master's paper I wrote for a class on Biblical Scriptural Authority
Thesis
Biblical authority is a topic of much nuance and controversy that expands the history of Christianity. Popes have called for war using biblical authority, churches have supported politicians using biblical authority, and women and other marginalized folks have used biblical authority to protest against corrupt politics. Biblical authority, while perhaps not meaning much to a non-Christian, has influenced so much of our Western world that I claim it is an authority whether I ascribe my personal theology to the Bible or Christianity or otherwise.
Biblical authority is the power and influence of biblical text to which an individual or group ascribes their lifestyle and perspective – ultimately, their theology and behavioral motivations.
It is agreed that there are 4 sources of authority to which people ascribe their theology: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason.
Experience and reason are what keep me alive in the day to day, and scripture and tradition are what give the rest of it meaning and connection. I believe that God is love, and the message of the Bible is to work towards social/communal love, therefore, we should constructively evaluate the context of the text/scripture so it is in line with how I believe God loves all. Justice is ongoing work that takes time to unfold. There are laws or ideas we accepted yesterday, and through learning and listening, we discern no longer can be justified in our contemporary context. The message of God is eternal, but I do not agree that the entirety of the Bible is eternally applicable.
For my exploration of my embedded theology and the political implications of scripture authority, I will use various sources to explain how these texts' stories, ideas, etc., influence my personal theology, if particular texts are more authoritative than other parts of the Christian canon (e.g., the Prophets, the Gospels, etc.) and why, and what role scripture plays in the embedded theology that I brought to seminary.
Etymology
I will use both class texts and lectures to inform my definition of authority and describe the potential sources of Christian authority.
Engaging Biblical Authority defines authority as:
‘1. power and a right to command, act, enforce obedience, or make final decisions; jurisdiction... authorization... the power derived from opinion, respect or esteem; the influence of character or office.2. Power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior... freedom granted... convincing force... grounds, warrant.’
Essential to the definition is the notion of both power and creation:
"Authority" comes from the Latin autoritas, meaning "origination," from which also the word "author" derives. The word is also related to the verb auctorare, "to bind."
Some Christians ascribe the Bible, scripture, as the final authority for their theology. The Bible, as said in 2 Pet. 1:20-21: ‘knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit . Many of these Christians take a literal approach to the Bible and claim the source of their theology is the ‘Word of God’. A literal approach to interpreting the Bible allows the reader to use it as a specific how-to manual, giving the reader clear-cut guidance, rooted in biblical texts, on how to conduct their lives. There becomes a ‘canon-within-a -canon’, where the powers that be use particular texts to state their claims and theology. They feel the values and ideals of the biblical stories are eternal and applicable.
So, what is biblical authority? Is its ‘influence,’ brought on by its ‘creators’ (pastors, denominations, etc.) ‘binding forever’ to the reader/listener? The answer is that it depends on the reader:
‘Simply put, biblical authority is reader responsive: through our genuine engagement of Scripture, God "authors" us. Scripture's authority is dynamic and life-shaping.’
Therefore, biblical authority is up to the personal interpreter’s response to ascribe the bible’s text authority to how they navigate their surrounding world, which includes their politics and personal economics and relationships. There are 4 sources of authority to which Christians ascribe their theology: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason.
While John Wesleyan claims these four can be visualized like a square that rotates like a diamond when one ‘point’ is leading the interpretation, Dr. Davison revisits this visual to argue this shape is not so much a rigid, edged square but an all-flowing circle. To break these four aspects up seems strange when we consider:
‘All of them involve interpretation
None are self-explanatory
All involve experience
Cannot have any without a human experience’
The four sources of theology flow and interconnect for the user.
Personal Testimony
In response to folks who identify with a canon-within-a-canon methodology to , I agree with Ellen Davis: ‘The canon offers us a model for how established religious convictions, even those established by authoritative texts, may be challenged and debated within the community of faith. Every biblical writer who departs from the tradition does so by highlighting other neglected elements of the tradition; every innovation is established on an older foundation. From this precedent, I take the principle that if we disagree with a certain text on a given point, then it must be in obedience to what we, in community with other Christians, discern to be the larger or more fundamental message of the Scriptures.’
What Ms. Davis argues is that disagreement is good, it is an indicator of spiritual maturity to disagree with scripture in a constructive way. ‘Critical interpretation of the Bible is an essential way that Christians practice the virtues of humility, charity, and patience in a distinctly intellectual mode.’
I argue that when we settle for canon, we tend to pick favorites and inadvertently create blind spots and therefore risk limiting our capacity to gleam truth.
The Bible, authored by many different authors and politicked across time by many councils and interested parties, is a sacred compilation of wisdom, parables, direct commands, conflicting commands, history, sociology, and inspiration. While I believe scripture is what secures us to the larger story, and helps us to understand our own personal story, perpetuating archaic social paradigms on the grounds that the texts are divinely inspired is harmful and legalistic, directly negating Jesus.
Additionally, relying too much on the past will isolate folks from contemporary society – their exclusion from modern society excludes them from having real credibility with folks who are striving to hold the creative tension of the gospel’s use in our shared contemporary world. In short, when you start calling Taylor Swift a Satanist, you’ve lost me and countless others. You become an opposing threat to how perfectly God-loved people are trying to enjoy pop culture, and you create a space where Jesus and Taylor Swift can’t be in the same conversation. To me, that’s limiting Jesus.
Alternative sources for theology include experience and reasoning. These are God-given gifts. We love logic! Logic keeps us and those around us safe. When the rules don’t make sense to us, we want to change them. And we should be able to do so. If we accept the Bible at wholesale, we are asking for conflict. If we accept the Bible in canon-within-a-canon, we endanger impressing and evangelizing a singular worldview.
Conversely, I know myself. My disdain and distrust for institutions and aged documents have left me feeling spiritually homeless. As if I have fought all the big bad institutions, intellectualizing and pointing out their failings, now I’m left with nothing but a human soul in need of safety, community, and guidance – needs that can be met with organized religion, of which I’m skeptical.
It feels as if conservatives avoid going deeper into the texts, that cognitive dissonance or new information threatens to annihilate their paradigm. Conversely, the intellectual distrust of progressives towards scripture and tradition is riddled with ‘against’ language that, at times, leads to me wondering what we’re even doing. Are we just fighting against bad people, or are we building something? Where is the sense of a larger community and story of the intellectual progressive left when they keep ridiculing rituals and throwing out Scripture with the bathwater?
We have both dug our feet into the ground and now stand at a face-off, yelling for totalitarian acceptance of one another’s worldview. We are in terrible fear that the confused, misdirected spiritual guidance of the other will wreak mass harm and disarray to continuity. Ultimately – we are afraid of one another’s power over the other. And so we siphon ourselves off to our communities and fight like tooth and nail against people who… are in the carpool line with us?
I’m tired of fighting. I want to build. And I can only build when using the wholeness of the four sources. I can only grow and transform when I sit with all sides and find compassion. This is the humility Ms. Davis speaks on – my worldview exists for a personal reason, but so does yours. Through God, we are to find a compromise of egos and interests with the hope of ultimately leading to peace.
One of my favorite theologians, Richard Rohr, says ‘Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control’. We cannot move towards a loving and more just world if we chronically and systematically exclude people on the basis of scripture and tradition, and we cannot untether the individual into loneliness with pious intellect only to impress a warlike social justice theology to the point of unstructured oppression. Too much questioning leads us to become rooted in nothing, as every attempt at organizing people will necessitate standardization and regulation, which will inherently define the organization’s culture and authority and therefore set a boundary of which to rebel.
Perhaps this is why the Bible tells us about a New Heaven and a New Earth, one that is beyond the abilities of humans to form here on Earth. Perhaps God designed us to be capable of both camps so that we can continuously move the middle forward, rooted in realness.
Summary
Biblical authority - what is it, who has it, which books take priority or preference over others - has been questioned since the book’s inception. But without the bible as an authority, the Christian story was chaotic and made it difficult for others to all share in the same single theology. Christianity’s authority was called into question prior to establishing a text authority, as there needed to be a unified text to draw from as a source of truth. Progress tends to look back on itself and cringe, which is no different. Christianity was lacking in uniformity, which robbed its power, and they needed a Bible to legitimize their story and source of truth.
Through Scripture and tradition, we are able to share in the great news of Jesus Christ and the message he brings in a seemingly unified way. Through experience and reasoning, we can expand our worldview to discern how to best move toward an inclusive world beyond what was known or understood by our ancestors. We must be willing to be humble, to see Scripture as a large room with a door so low we have to stoop to enter it. We must have the wisdom and consistency of the old world to give us context and meaning, but also move towards the expanded consciousness that God has gifted us continues to evolve. We must wrestle with the creative tension of understanding the values of each side without dehumanizing the other.
This is not easy work. There is no simple solution. There is only compromise and suffering, but that is what the Cross teaches us. The transformation is in the vulnerable. It’s in the conservatives allowing for new information and ideas, it’s in the progressives approaching organizations and boundaries with more compassion and understanding of why those things are in place and have meaning. After all, the boundaries keep folks safe.
Bibliography
Brown, William P. Engaging Biblical Authority. Page xii. Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
Davis, Ellen F. Engaging Biblical Authority: The Soil That is Scripture. Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
Davison, Dr. Lisa. Theological Consistency. Lecture. Phillips Theological Seminary. April 4, 2024.
Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. 2 Pet. 1:20-21. Biblica, 2011.
Lapsley, Jacqueline. Am I Able to Say Just Anything? Learning Faithful Exegesis from Balaam. Princeton Theological Seminary.
Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward, Revised and Updated. John Wiley & Sons, 2023.
Sanders, Fred. Canon Within the Canon - The Scriptorium Daily. The Scriptorium Daily. https://www.facebook.com/scriptoriumdaily?ref=hl. September 19, 2011. https://scriptoriumdaily.com/canon-within-the-canon/. 2011.
Stone, Howard W., and James O. Duke. How to Think Theologically. Fortress Press, 2023.
