Wright how can the bible be authoritative

If possible, try to wipe your mind of every detail, idea, fact, or thought about Jesus which has its origin in Scripture. Sure, you might have some oral legends and myths that have been passed down through time for years, but how reliable and authoritative do you think these would be? Without the Bible, we would have nothing authoritative to say about Jesus, and therefore, no firm foundation on which to base our Christian teachings and ideas.

For the Christian faith to be authoritative, we need eyewitness accounts of what Jesus said and how Jesus lived, and this is what we have in Scripture, primarily in the four Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But since Jesus is my authority, I agree with Jesus that the Scriptures are authoritative only as long as they point us to Jesus.

He said to the religious leaders of His day that they search the Scriptures daily because they think that in them they have life, but these Scriptures actually point to Jesus John We cannot follow the authority of Jesus without the authority of Scripture, for Scripture teaches us and informs about Jesus.

So when it comes to the Christian authority, I have no qualms in saying that our authority is the Word of God. Of course, it is important to also consider how the Bible is authoritative. We cannot have one without the other. Chester McCalley, a pastor in Kansas City, Missouri was asked one Sunday by some visitors if they could see the church constitution. Our church is governed by the Word of God. This pastor was correct, and yet a careful distinction must be made. Jesus Christ is the Word, and the Bible can help us understand Jesus as the Word only so long as we remember that the Bible points to and teaches about Jesus.

Jesus Himself chided the Bible experts of His day for diligently studying the Scriptures while not seeing that they pointed to Him John If we learn, study, and teach Scripture just so we can learn more about Scripture, we have lost our way, and are not actually studying the Word of God. If you are studying the Bible and it is not pointing you to Jesus, then you are not truly studying the Word of God. And the great thing about both Jesus and Scripture being authoritative is that these two authorities do not contradict or disagree with each other when both are properly understood.

So since I strive to be a faithful and committed follower of Jesus, I search the Scriptures daily, so that in them and through the authority of Scripture, I might be pointed to Jesus, my sole and ultimate authority. If you want to see how I work some of this out, try one of books or start listening to my podcast. This post is part of the June Synchroblog on the topic of authority. Here are the other contributors for this month:.

Get FREE articles and audio teachings every week in my discipleship emails! 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. 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.

And that is a complex claim. It is not straightforward. 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.

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. God says this, God says that, and it is done. God calls Abraham; he speaks authoritatively.

God exercises authority in great dynamic events in Exodus, the Exile and Return. 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. 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.

But what is God doing with his authority? 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. 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. And it must be said that a great many views of biblical authority imply one or other of those sub-Christian alternatives. 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.

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. That is what his authority is there for. It is an authority with this shape and character, this purpose and goal.

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. 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 within that sequence there is a very significant passage, namely 1 Kings This is especially interesting, because the false prophets appear to have everything going for them. 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. 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. 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. 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. One of the gains of modern scholarship is that we now see that to be a mistake. I think they knew what they were doing. 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. 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.

They are mostly narrative ; and we have already run up against the problem how can a story, a narrative, be authoritative? Somehow, this authority is also wielded through his people singing psalms.

We must look, then, at the question of stories. What sort of authority might they possess? 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.

Consider the result. 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.

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. 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! 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? 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. 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!

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 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. But this means that the New Testament is not merely a true commentary on Christianity.

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? 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, 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 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. 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.

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.

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.

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? We must then make sure that the church, armed in this way, to become in a true sense, people of the book in the Christian sense; people who are being remade, judged and remolded by the Spirit through scripture.

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Wright bmkrein , Authority in the Church What are the boundaries of allowable behavior and doctrine? Evangelical Views There is, indeed, an evangelical assumption, common in some circles, that evangelicals do not have any tradition. Sub-questions How can any text function as authoritative? How can any ancient text function as authoritative? How can an ancient narrative text be authoritative? Three ways Church has unswered to theese guestions: Timeless Truth? Witness to Primary Events?

Timeless Function? Evangelicals and Biblical Authority The more that you insist that you are based on the Bible, the more fissiparous you become. 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. How in the Bible does God exercise his authority? How does God exercise his authority through the Bible? The Authority of a Story 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.

Old Testament, New Testament 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. The effect of this authority The Bible is part of the means by which he puts his purposes of judgement and salvation to work. Story and Hermeneutic: Living in the Fifth Act The story of the early church—that itself is an act of worship.

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