The Locus of Authority in the Church

The dispute over the role of Scripture, tradition, and reason as sources of authority for Christian teaching did not begin with the Reformation. It was already a major concern of Irenaeus of Lyons (late second century) in his polemic against the Gnostics.

In the last few years, the terrain occupied by the contending parties has shifted drastically. As recently as 1950 Roman Catholicism was still claiming the authority to pronounce new articles of faith necessary for salvation even if there were no biblical evidence for them: the dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven was announced that year. Today, by contrast, we see the debacle of tradition in the Roman church, from the traditional garb of the religious orders to traditional teaching in the moral sphere. At the same time, different kinds of traditionalism rise and fall within the various branches of Protestantism, sometimes virtually dominating theology, even when they conflict with clear teachings of the Bible. The academic tradition known as the (modified) documentary hypothesis of the origin of the first five books of the Bible continues to reign in general Protestant (and now even Roman Catholic) biblical studies. Despite the devastating objections brought by such substantial scholars as Umberto Cassuto, M. H. Segal, Oswald T. Allis, Edward J. Young, and more recently Cyrus H. Gordon and Kenneth Kitchen, in many circles no serious criticism of this hallowed tradition is tolerated.

Because of the shifting of the ground on which the contenders stand in the centuries-old Scripture-tradition issue, it is worthwhile to take a fresh look at it. Can we outline some fundamental themes to help us identify common ground that Christians can defend against skepticism and unbelief?

I. Universality And Particularity Of The Gospel

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is addressed to all nations. In St. Paul’s words, in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female (Gal. 3:28). That God is universal not only in his dominion but also in his appeal is exemplified by many biblical texts; for example, “One God and one mediator between God and man” (1 Tim. 2:5), and “God so loved the world” (John 3:16). But the universality of God’s appeal must always be seen in the context of the particularity of his dealing with mankind. He chooses for himself one people to be his peculiar and holy nation: he leads it out of Egypt, the ancient kingdom with an apparently timeless past—perhaps 1,500 years of nationhood and royal rule before Moses—into a land of promise (from which—perhaps not incidentally—the Jews had to oust the occupants). In short, the universal God is also a God of choice, an electing God. We may praise this choice as gracious, and indeed we do, but we cannot overlook the momentous fact that in the election of Israel and all that follows, right down to each Christian’s salvation and eternal bliss, there is manifested that most paradoxical of events: the unlimited, eternal, unconditioned God has condescended to have fellowship with finite, mortal, contingent man.

The surge of Israel into the Promised Land coincides with its entry onto the stage of ordinary history. The house of Abraham had a long way to go from Ur to Jerusalem, and Abraham’s spiritual children a still longer one to the Heavenly City.

a. The Gospel as God’s way. The word “way” suggests the particularity of God’s dealing. He calls Israel to be not a people of pyramids, those solid, mute witnesses to millennia of forgotten history, but a people of the caravan route through the desert. There no monuments are raised, but a people’s character is formed. In his earthly ministry the Son of God does not establish a school or a place of worship; rather, he writes upon the fleshly tables of the heart. His disciples were literally his companions of the way. In contrast to the great pagan philosophers and teachers, how many of the early Christians spent their lives “on the road”: not only St. Paul was a traveler, but according to tradition, most of the other apostles as well. There were scaffolds in Justin Martyr’s native Palestine, but he was faithful unto death in Rome; there was Gnostic speculation in Asia Minor, but Irenaeus fought it in Gaul.

The image of the believer in Christ as a “stranger and pilgrim” evoked in Hebrews 11:13 is often understood to mean his citizenship in the heavenly commonwealth as distinguished from the earthly city. Yet it equally well suggests the Christian life as companionship in the way. In contrast to the localized, temple- or sanctuary-bound cults of antiquity, entering on Delphi, Olympus, or even Jerusalem, the Gospel is a traveling faith: the conversion of whole nations can be attributed to the constrained voyage of one Christian captive or the arranged voyage of a Christian princess. The Christian as wayfarer, as “stranger,” carries his characteristics with him. If missionaries during sixteen centuries have been slow to adapt themselves to the mores of the people to whom they go, let us not forget that in a real sense they were badly adapted strangers among their own countrymen first.

b. The Gospel translated. If the Gospel calls one to a journey, it also journeys itself, i.e., it is translated. Although it was first preached in Aramaic, its canonical fixation is in Greek. It must be addressed to each nation in its own language, formulated and phrased according to that nation’s cultural traditions. There is always the danger that this reformulation may distort the Gospel, but without a specific, distinctive formulation adapted to the understanding of those addressed, the message cannot be communicated at all. Therefore it is up to us to say not merely where authority can be found but also how individuals can recognize it as such. We give our attention not only to the universal theoretical aspect of the divine authority that we seek to identify and to acknowledge but also to the particular, practical way in which this divine authority presents itself to us. That presentation must take place on the road we were already traveling. In our own case, as speakers of English, it presents itself to us as to heirs of a threefold cultural tradition: Semitic, Graeco-Roman, and Germanic.

Ii. Authority In Itself, And Understood

a. Authority in itself. Absolute and original authority (authority not dependent upon or derived from someone or something else) belongs to God alone (Rom. 13:1). The authority of God includes his might, i.e., his ability to accomplish his purposes: it also includes his power in a second sense, his ability to inspire consent among those he governs. It is not limited to this voluntary consent, however, because it also includes the concept of legitimacy, of just as opposed to capricious law (Ps. 119:160).

God’s authority can be perceived as such by man only if it is at least in a measure understandable and communicable: otherwise it appears as a source of dread and wonder but not of confidence and trust. Confidence, trust, and the assurance that flow from them are distinctively evangelical attitudes. They contrast favorably with the feelings of fear, guilt, and anxiety induced by much non-evangelical religion, but they can also lead to an attitude of chumminess with God that belies his holiness and majesty—a frequent criticism of Protestant worship. Because God’s authority can and does express itself in understandable communication, it can inspire confidence and trust. When its communication is recognized by man’s intellect as truthful and by man’s will as just, it is believed and obeyed. (This recognition cannot be achieved until man’s sinful heart has been converted through God’s grace; therefore failure to recognize God’s authority involves more than merely an insufficiency of knowledge or intelligence.)

b. Authority understood. The subjective result of belief and of obedience is trust: out of trust comes assurance. Trust exists only between persons, and it depends not only on past promises fulfilled but also on the promise of the future, a promise that is usually if not always expressed in words. Trust is not a substitute for knowledge: that is, we do not trust another person (or God) because we do not know him well enough; on the contrary, it is necessary to trust him in order to increase our personal knowledge of him. Trust depends on the adequacy of the authority: it may be wise to trust a mountaineer to guide you over the high passes but not in New York traffic. God’s authority as such is not limited, but man’s perception of it is conditioned both by God’s willingness to reveal it and by the situation of the man who receives it. A very important aspect of this situation is the moral one, involving the way sin hampers our perception of God’s authority, but here we are interested chiefly in the intellectual aspect.

The source of authority is God himself, who possesses and produces might, power (in the sense of the ability to inspire consent), and legitimacy. The understandable, communicable, and morally admirable aspects of this authority express themselves in the Word of God. The creative Word of God (Gen. 1:3, John 1:3, Heb. 1:2) is also the communicating Word of God: the Law given through Moses, grace and truth through Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son, who has also declared the Father (John 1:17 f.). As the ground of trust, confidence, and assurance, authority must have an understandable aspect. That is, God does not merely create and perform wondrous works, inspiring our awe; he also explains to us his purpose in so doing, arousing our confidence.

The Word of God, enunciated in former times to the fathers in the prophets in Hebrew, in a context neither Greek nor Roman, was spoken anew by the Son, again in a Semitic idiom, Aramaic, but immediately rendered into Greek, and preserved for us in that language and in translations from it.

The understandability of the Gospel depends on its communication, and communication is a function not only of the language but also of the total culture. We compare Scripture with Scripture, for Scripture has its own language. Yet the language of Scripture arose not in a vacuum but in a living environment; it could amend and vary what it found, and so the New Testament meaning of a word may differ from the classical, but it did not arise ex nihilo. Although a language, like an individual, has a new and special way to travel after it has been touched by God, it always has a portion of its way behind it before it is touched.

We would not make classical Graeco-Roman civilization normative for the reception of a Gospel that is to be proclaimed “to every creature,” especially since the majority of the world’s population does not have a Graeco-Roman heritage. We should be even more reticent to condition the Gospel on the Germanic or English component of our heritage, for this is an even more peculiar and limited segment of the cultural experience of mankind.

Yet, in the providence of God, the fullness of time came in a corner of the Mediterranean world that had been subjected to Roman law and administration and illuminated (as well as deluded) by Hellenistic philosophy and speculation. The total authority that the Risen Lord announced had been given to him is designated pasa exousia and tota auctoritas in the two languages used by the Caesars and Augusti, the later autocrats of Rome and Constantinople. Its declaration and interpretation have come to us speakers of English through the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, and other Germanic peoples. We have a history of Caesars and consuls, of generals and kings, of Roman emperors holy and otherwise, of parliaments and kaisers, and even a Lord Protector and a Führer, and all this helps or hinders our understanding of God’s authority.

Iii. The Personal Nature Of Authority

Divine authority centers not only in the nature of God but also in the person of God as he communicates his will to us in an understandable way. Here we note that (a) authority inheres in the Person of the Father, as in that of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and (b) that authority does not cease to be God’s authority when it is delegated.

a. The exousia given to Jesus Christ derives from the absolute possibility of action that belongs to God and that includes both the ability to act and the highest law of justice, the law that Richard Hooker called the first law eternal, “that order which God before all ages hath set down with himself, to do all things by” (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I, ii, 6). Exousia in this sense differs from the Roman potestas, which attaches to the office rather than to the person and corresponds more to auctoritas. During the Roman republic, auctoritas belonged to the senators collectively, because of their supposed personal dignity (worth); it later came to reside in the person of the Augustus (emperor).

This exousia given to Jesus Christ is not a restricted commission. This New Testament teaching is simply being restated in more philosophical language in the Nicene affirmation that the Son is of one substance with the Father. Because this authority is absolute, not limited to the realm of information, learning, or gnosis (the secret knowledge claimed by certain sects), the personal exousia of Jesus Christ inevitably clashed with Augustan auctoritas. The eighty-year-old Polycarp died because he refused to forsake his Lord by giving the title of kyrios (Lord) to Caesar.

b. Auctoritas, when it is delegated, does not cease to pertain to the original person from whom it is derived. When it is legitimately exercised in his name, he is acting. Thus the terrible impact of the judgment passages of Matthew 25:31–46, in which those who have fed and clothed “the least of these my brethren”—or have refused to do so—have done it in effect to Christ himself. The exarch of the Roman Emperor of the East ruled at Ravenna not in his own right but as the plenipotentiary of the basileus at Constantinople. Paul speaks of entreating his hearers as an ambassador, “as though God did beseech you” (2 Cor. 5:20). Such an ambassador does not merely have a commission; he has stewardship of “the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1). “He who receives you, receives me, and he who receives me, receives him that sent me” (Matt. 10:40). Authority in the Church, then, must preserve its personal nature and may not degenerate into a merely formal potestas—power exercised by virtue of an office.

The recognition of authority depends upon recognition of the person; Augustus Caesar exceeded the other magistrates of Rome not in power but in authority. “Sovereignty works by command and constraint, depending on eternal force and unconditioned compliance. Authority, by contrast, must be affirmed by the one who accepts it, by virtue of a free insight into the worth of the authority and by virtue of moral trust” (“Potestas” in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie). When an authority loses this respectful acceptance among those submitted to it, it no longer represents authority to them: if they continue to obey it, they do so as under compulsion, not authority. States take measures when the authority of a ruler or government is no longer recognized as such, measures of force or violence. Those who do not have God as their authority do not escape his law, but they lack or lose the insight into its motivation in his love, and experience it only as constraint, violence, destruction.

c. Authority takes its origin in the person of the one who possesses it, and is only acknowledged, not established, by the subject or follower; it is not created by a democratic consensus. The Semitic and the Hellenistic world have their characteristic ways of misrepresenting or misunderstanding God’s authority. In the Semitic misrepresentation, it appears capricious and arbitrary; in the Hellenistic, static and stultifying.

With the conversion of the Germanic peoples, a new motif was added to our understanding of authority and a new possibility of misunderstanding it. Authority continues to inhere in a person, but it depends, at least in part, on the loyalty of his followers. The ninth-century Old High German gospel harmony Der Heiland represents the Messiah as the young hero of the human race, the victor over Satan, and the Christians as his valiant and loyal blades. But to the Germanic mind, the status of the leader is not unconditioned: it rests on the faithfulness of his followers, which the leader must purchase by his generosity, even to the point of excess. (We may hear echoes of this kind of loyalty in the personal testimonies of certain modern tycoons, who seem to look on their own success as the expression of God’s gratitude for their faithfulness.) Unlike a Latin skeptic, the slighted follower of the Germanic god Odin not only abandons his leader or his god but turns against him and strives to dethrone him. “Christianized” descendants of Odin-worshipers may lash out in the same way when they feel that the God of the Bible has ignored them.

In the conception that God’s authority derives in part from our willingness to accept it lies the seed of Christian atheism: the Christian who has subconsciously thought of his faith as a work, as an accomplishment on God’s behalf, as a guarantee against misfortune, takes God to court when trouble strikes. We begin to tell God what we expect of him and even what he may ask of us. Thus we see articles called “What God Means to Me” and the like, in which the emphasis is definitely on the “to me” rather than on God. How many learned articles say, in effect, “We cannot conceive of a God who …”? This is a particularly Germanic aberration in our approach to God’s authority.

Iv. Authority Transmitted

Authority pertains to God as God and is only recognized, not established, by the acceptance and faithfulness of Christians. A principal characteristic of this authority is that it must be understandable and communicable. Both these aspects imply particularity, i.e., that God, infinite himself, ties himself to particular communications, although they are finite. The divine Logos is the mediator between the infinite and the particular not only by his role in the work of creation but also in that he can speak personally to the finite mind of an individual. To have the Logos as partner in a dialogue means that one has been recognized—taken notice of—by God: this is the basis for the Christian conviction of the reality of the individual as a person.

The Word of God expresses the providential will of God. While this will is particular, it is not arbitrary in the negative sense of the word, i.e., capricious. The will of God is the ground of being of all that exists, i.e., is real; the Word of God is the underlying intellectual ground of all that is true. That is, God’s will creates the condition in which reality exists; God’s Word creates the condition in which truth exists.

Even larger than the scandal of the Cross, namely that he who is divine should suffer and die, is the scandal of the Word, i.e., that absolute truth should in any way tie itself to expressions also used and abused for fallible human communication. Even if the jots and tittles do not preoccupy us, there is a terribly arbitrary-seeming particularity about a communication that is supposed to be the highest wisdom of the universe and yet comes to us in words and letters, and even (in the present editions) with punctuation marks.

Yet there is also something very appropriate about this. Each human being owes his existence to a single actual event among an immense number of possible ones, the fertilization of a single ovum by one among millions of sperm. An individual traces his way upon earth not among symbolic, mythical, or universal events but among concrete, space-and-time-bound ones.

The philosophical and psychological stumbling-block inherent in the idea of God’s limiting himself becomes intolerable for many people when it is suggested that he has circumscribed even part of ultimate truth within a now written text and has confined his message to reproducible words. The limitation we encounter here is of precisely the same nature as the limitation inherent in the idea that God in any way elects or chooses, be it a people or an individual, and thus discriminates in his working. It is, broadly speaking, the paradox of the personal nature of the boundless God, a concept that is very hard for us to grasp but is nonetheless fundamental for revealed and personal religion. As Rachel King points out, even the bare suggestion by God of any idea to Moses not already inherent in Moses’ mind involves an influence by a non-physical factor (God) to alter something in the physical universe (Moses’ brain), and thus is inherently as objectionable to the naturalistic world-view as is the miracle of the Resurrection or the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes (The Creation of Death and Life, pp. 279 ff.).

a. Leaving aside the technical questions of the formation of the canon, in the New Testament Church we see authority exercised, after the Lord himself, first of all by those who had known and followed him during his ministry and had been eyewitnesses of his resurrection. Paul, the apostle born out of season, feels he has to proclaim the identity of his Gospel with the Gospel. The motif of a personal transmission of the message from witness to witness is exemplified in Irenaeus’s account of having learned from Polycarp, who had sat at the feet of the Apostle John. Polycarp bore witness in a twofold sense, for he also died for his testimony. The “tradition of the Church” is equivalent to the “handing over by the Church,” and is entrusted, in Irenaeus’s words, to “the most ancient churches, with which the Apostles held constant intercourse.”

When the Gnostics attempted to expand the simple scriptural message by appealing to an elaborate secret tradition that Christ allegedly taught to his disciples in the forty days after his resurrection, Irenaeus tried to combat this by emphasizing the continuing validity of the Old Testament and the real and historic Incarnation “according to the prophets.” The continuity of tradition in the churches of apostolic foundation guarantees, he thought, the handing down of the truth without distortion. Yet even Irenaeus himself, when he trusted a church tradition without any scriptural support, came up with the remarkable view that Jesus had reached the age of fifty when he was crucified. He thus presents us with an example of the very danger he warns against, that an unsupported tradition may plunge into fancy and lack all foundation in truth.

b. If transmission can be flawed when it becomes more than the handing over of the Scriptures and scriptural doctrines and begins to expand their content, it can also be warped by the plausible application to Scripture of categories and conventions gleaned from pagan learning. Under the leadership of Irenaeus, the Church successfully repelled the challenge of Gnostic tradition and speculation.

Even before Irenaeus, however, it was already being subjected to the influence of a less fanciful but still insidious tradition. The influences of Platonic and neo-Platonic thought that makes itself felt in the first Christian philosopher, Justin Martyr (who died around 165), proved harder to shake off. The rhetor Tertullian objected a few decades later, and denied any connection between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (revelation). The Christian should build his faith “not on a foreign tradition, but on his own,” said Tertullian. The substitution of a foreign philosophical foundation is said by Hippolytus (died around 237) to be the origin of all the ancient heresies; today, Jewish scholar Hans Jonas finds it necessary to warn his nominally Christian colleagues not to make the same mistake with the existentialism of Martin Heidegger.

c. Transmission can also be clouded by interpretation. Although the great Alexandrian scholar Origen believed in verbal inspiration, he lacked a sense of historical development. In consequence, he found he had to engage in allegorical interpretation, so much that he is acknowledged as the ancestor of all the worst features of the allegorizing method.

Over against this method (and much modern interpretation is a new kind of allegorizing), the return to the sensus litteralis, the literal meaning, was the keynote of Reformation Bible scholarship. In his Table Talk Luther says, “When I was a monk, I was an expert in allegories.” Catholic scholar George Tavard charges that the return to a more clearly literal interpretation of Scripture was itself plagued by a subjectivism that ignored all continuity within the historic community of faith. He gives a clue to the antidote when he criticized “Luther’s separation of the Gospel as doctrine—his doctrine—and the written New Testament.” In a recently published book, Clark H. Pinnock states, “The high view of Scripture makes us more, not less, careful to ascertain the actual meaning of a text in context” (Biblical Revelation, p. 211).

d. The transmission of authority can be marred by interposition. If Tertullian justly castigates the introduction of a false philosophical foundation into doctrine, and if in Origen we see the danger of a false hermeneutical method, in the Western Catholic tradition we encounter the interposition of a hierarchical teaching institution as an authority between the Word and the believer. Here the key word is “authority.” Nikos A. Nissiotis speaks of a “sacral character of the hierarchy and the institution in an ontological sense … a neglect of pneumatology” (Die Theologie der Ostkirche im ökumenischen Dialog, p. 65). The personal immediacy of God, who spoke once in the Word and who authenticates that Word today in the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, is ruptured when another authority enters.

We have only touched the surface of the great issues arising out of the startling claim that the infinite God has spoken to finite, fallible, and sinning man in language that man can understand and reproduce. We can hope, however, to have suggested some useful concepts for dealing with that claim, which is the foundation of all revealed religion. To stress the personal nature of authority draws our attention to the fact that it must take particular, intelligible, and communicable forms. With this in mind, we can look upon the seemingly arbitrary and even trivial aspect of the verbal nature and scriptural fixation of God’s message to us as the understandable and appropriate reflection of the fact that he, the supreme giver of both law and being, seeks not merely to be obeyed but also to be acknowledged, to be known, and to be loved.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

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