By What Authority?
By What Authority?
This paper was a first attempt to grapple with problems discussed more fully in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (London: SPCK, 1989) and now the basis of his forthcoming book Proper Confidence.
he program "The Gospel and Our Culture"1 is concerned to bring the insights developed in the history of Christian missions to bear upon the culture of the societies from which Christian missionaries have gone out to other parts of the world during the past two hundred years. The foreign missionary brings with him a book - the Bible - and a tradition of thought and practice regarded as being authorized by the Bible and by the teaching of the Church that has been the bearer of this tradition. But can the Bible and the Christian tradition speak in the same way to this culture, which has been so largely influenced in its history by precisely this book and this tradition? A recent reviewer of my book Foolishness to the Greeks2 said that this attempt to criticize our culture from the point of view of "the Bible" (his quotation marks) was like pretending to move a bus when you are sitting in it. It is a serious point. The Bible and the Christian tradition of thought and action are part of our culture and are subject to the same kind of analysis and criticism as is any other part. What grounds can be shown for according to them the privilege of speaking a word to our culture?
This question of authority has been a crucial one from the beginning of the Christian mission. The first apostles were asked by what authority they acted, and replied, "In Jesus's name."3 Jesus himself was asked for this authority; he replied by asking his interlocutors whether the baptism of John was from heaven or from men, and when they were unable to answer his question he refused to answer theirs. They had shown themselves incapable of recognizing authority when it was present. On the other hand, it is reported of "the crowds" that they recognized Jesus as one who taught having authority, unlike their scribes (Acts 4:5-10; Matt. 21:23-27; 7:281).
These references may serve to make the fundamental and obvious point that ultimate authority can only be the authority of God, and that if this authority is not recognized, there is no way of demonstrating it by reference to something else. We shall have to return to this fundamental point at the end. But it is impossible to avoid the question, "How is the authority of God mediated to us?" In attempting to answer this question, Christians have used four words: Scripture, tradition, reason, and - more recently - experience. It will be helpful to look at these four words in turn.
Scripture
It is notorious that Christians are deeply divided on the question of the authority of Scripture. For many centuries the Bible (the book) held a place apart from all other literature. Its authority was universally unquestioned. It provided the framework for the study of the laws of the natural world, as well as for the understanding of the human mind. In the course of the last three centuries it has been subjected to critical analysis with the tools of the modern scientific method. The result is the split with which we are familiar between those who wish to affirm biblical authority by defending the factual accuracy of everything it contains, and those who see the biblical material as symbolic of human religious experience, there being -of course-many other varieties of religious experience. In this situation it has become difficult or impossible to speak with intellectual coherence about the authority of Scripture vis-a-vis any particular aspect of our culture.
What is not often noticed is that this split is only one manifestation of a much deeper fissure in our culture as a whole. It might be described briefly as a breakdown of the unity between the subjective and the objective poles of human knowing. It is customary to trace this breakdown back to Descartes, with his search for indubitable knowledge set forth in forms of expression that have the clarity and exactitude of mathematics. For the centuries since then we have been dominated by the ideal of a kind of knowledge that is objective in the sense that it involves no personal commitment on the part of the knower. It is "factual," disinfected of anything that personal interest might introduce. What is claimed to be knowledge but cannot be expressed in such "objective" terms is a matter of personal opinion. It is belief rather than knowledge, and - as Locke has taught us - belief is what we fall back upon when knowledge is not available.4 "Values," in this view, are a matter of personal choice; "facts" are not. No logical ties can bind the two together. "Values" cannot be derived from "facts." The split is visible to all in the separation between science and "the humanities" in the curriculum of the universities.
Given this situation, it is natural that the Bible has to be understood as belonging to one or the other of these two halves of our culture. On the one hand are those who can only affirm the authority of Scripture by regarding it as a collection of factually true statements. On the other are those who see in it material that expresses in symbolic and poetic form certain values, including various kinds of religious experience. If the first choice is made, one is on a collision course with the findings of science, in spite of the efforts of the "creationists." If the second choice is made, the Bible simply has to take its place among the many varieties of moral and religious experience. It is part of the history of religions. George Lindbeck in The Nature of Christian Doctrines proposes, as an alternative to these two views, what he calls a "cultural-linguistic model" for the understanding of Scripture. I find this helpful only if it is related explicitly to the basic epistemological split of which the fundamentalist-liberal split is only a surface manifestation.
In his exposition of the "cultural-linguistic" model for understanding doctrine, Lindbeck uses such phrases as "myths or narratives ... which structure human experience and understanding of self and world," "an idiom that makes possible the description of realities," "something like a Kantian a priori."6 Doctrine, in other words, is not so much something we look at as something we look through in order to understand the world. Here we are raising the epistemological question. All knowing involves a knowing subject, and knowing is only possible for a subject who has been inducted into a tradition of knowing embodied in language, symbol, story. Most of what we know is - normally - not the subject of our attention. It is the framework we use to order our experience and make sense of it. It is, in Michael Polanyi's phrase, the tacit component in all knowing.? When Lindbeck uses the term cultural-linguistic to describe his model for doctrine, he is rightly drawing attention to the fact that knowledge requires the ability to use a language and an accepted framework of understanding about "how things are and how things behave" that enables us to make sense of experience. When we use language to communicate information or to share a vision, we do not attend to the words we are using; we attend through the words to the matter in hand. Only when the words fail to establish communication do we attend to the words in order to find better ones. And words are part of a culture, of a whole way of understanding and coping with the world that has been developed in a specific community. But this necessary subjective component in all knowing does not mean that it is robbed of its objective reference. It is saved from a false subjectivity by being published, made the object of public scrutiny and discussion, tested against new situations. Yet this scrutiny can only be undertaken by knowing subjects who are themselves depending on a culturally shaped tradition. Is "objective truth" unobtainable?
We seem to be nearing the end of a period in which it was believed that modern science could provide a body of universal truth that would be the possession of all human beings, whatever their cultural differences. The enormous impact of Newton's physics has lasted until the present day, with its vision of a self-contained cosmos of particles of matter moving according to a precisely determined mathematical world in which the human mind had no place. Paradoxically, this dehumanized model had enormous human appeal. It gave birth to the idea of a universal reason equally applicable in all human cultures and of the universal rights of man simply as man and apart from the accidents of a particular society. It created for Lessing the "wide ugly ditch" between the universal truths of reason and the accidental happenings of history. It provoked (most notably in Germany) the reaction in favor of the Volksgeist as the true bearer of truth. In spite of all that has happened in the recent developments of physics to call the Newtonian vision into question, we are still left with the "two cultures":8 a culture of science, which is supposed to be universally valid for all peoples, and a multiculturalism, which brands as imperialistic any claim to discriminate between less and more valuable elements in culture - including the area of religious belief.
It is simply impossible to remain content with this bisection of human experience into two halves that have no rational connection with each other, and that means that it is also impossible to accept the terms of the fundamentalist-liberal debate about the authority of Scripture. To borrow Lindbeck's words, Scripture functions as "the cultural-linguistic framework within which the Christian life is lived and Christian doctrine developed." The Bible is (Lindbeck again) "a narrative which structures human experience and understanding." It is, however varied its texture, essentially a story that claims to be the story, the true story both of the cosmos and of human life within the cosmos. After one has done all the work that can be done and has to be done to analyze its structures and trace the origins of its different parts, it is in its total canonical structure a story that provides the clue to the meaning of cosmic and human story in the story of a particular people and of a particular man among that people. Like every telling of the human story, it is a selection of a minute fraction of the available records and memories on the basis of a particular belief about the meaning of the story. World history as it is normally taught in schools is the history of the development of civilization. We are, naturally, the civilized people, and we are the point of the story. The Bible tells the story from a different view of what is significant, from the belief that the point of the entire story has been made in the doings and sufferings and triumphs of the man Jesus. Plainly, the farther one travels from this center the less precise are the details, until we reach the periphery of the story, the beginning and the end of the cosmos, where everything has necessarily to be in symbol.
The question "Which is the real story?" must determine everything else in our understanding of what it is to be human and what it is to handle rightly the natural world within which human life is set. The Bible, I suggest, functions properly in the life of the Church when it functions in the way Lindbeck's language suggests. It functions as the true story of which our story is a part, and therefore we do not so much look at it as through it in order to understand and deal with the real world. If I may revert to Polanyi's language,9 I would want to say that the Bible ought to function primarily as the tacit component in our endeavor to understand and deal with the world. We have to indwell the story, as we indwell the language we use and the culture of which we are a part. But since we also live within this other culture, there is necessarily an internal dialogue within us. By all our cultural formation from infancy onward, we are made part of the story of our nation and our civilization. There is something to be learned here from the experience of a foreign missionary. As one learns to enter deeply into the mental world of another people, into their story, as one is drawn by the coherence and rationality of that other story, dialogue is set up between this and the Christian story. That internal dialogue is the precondition for true external dialogue. But clearly the story functions effectively in providing the "structure of understanding" only insofar as one really lives the story. The Bible cannot function with any authority except through the lives of those whose story it is, those who "indwell" the story. We cannot speak of biblical authority without speaking of tradition.
Tradition
It is of crucial importance in any discussion of authority to consider the significance of the fact that Jesus did not write a book. The only example recorded of Jesus' writing is when he wrote in the dust.10 He did not bequeath a book to his followers. He devoted his ministry (as far as we know) to the formation of a community that would represent him to those who would come after. He taught them in ways that would be remembered and passed on to others, but he did not provide a written text. It is, surely, very important that almost all the words of Jesus have come to us in versions that are not identical. To wish that it were otherwise would evidently be to go against the intention of Jesus. The fact that we have four Gospels and not one is cited by Muslims as evidence that the real Gospel (Injil) has been lost. But the Church refused to substitute one harmonized version for the four disparate ones. On the one hand the New Testament writers insist that what they teach is (unless otherwise stated - e.g., 1 Cor. 7) a faithful rendering of the intention of Jesus. They are not originators but messengers. But on the other hand the teachings of Jesus and the stories of his ministry are told in the words of the writers, shaped to meet different situations.
The story the Bible tells is tied to particular times, places, languages, and cultures. If it were not, it would be no part of human history. It is told as the clue to the entire story -human and cosmic, from creation to the end of time. It cannot function as the clue to the whole story if it is simply repeated in the same words. It has to be translated, and translation is (fallible) interpretation. The manylayered material of the Old Testament is witness to the repeated retelling of the fundamental story in new terms of new occasions. And Jesus expressly tells the disciples (in the Johannine interpretation) that although they have received a true and full revelation of the Father, they have yet much to learn that they cannot learn until later. They are promised that the Holy Spirit will guide them "into all the truth." In view of the perennial temptation to identify the Holy Spirit with the Zeitgeist, it is important to note that the promise is that the Spirit will glorify Jesus, for the Spirit will show the Church how all things in the cosmos belong to him. Raymond Brown paraphrases the promise as "interpreting in relation to each coming generation the contemporary significance of what Jesus has said and done."11 The Church is not tied to a text in such a way that nothing will ever be done for the first time. In new situations those who "indwell" the story of which Jesus is the center will have to make new and risky decisions about what faithfulness to the Author of the story requires. There can be no drawing of a straight line from a text of Scripture to a contemporary ethical decision; there will always be the requirement of a fresh decision in responsibility to the One whose story it is.
There can, therefore, be no appeal to Scripture that ignores the continuing tradition of Christian discipleship. That would be to detach Scripture from the story to which it is the clue. But it is a delicate matter to state exactly what the relation between Scripture and tradition is. The tendency of Protestants to isolate the Scriptures from the tradition is, of course, mistaken, since no one has access to a Bible unless someone hands it over (tradition); but it is understandable in view of the long experience of the Roman Catholic tendency to treat Scripture and tradition as though they were separate and parallel sources of authority. The first draft of the Vatican II document on revelation was entitled "The Two Sources of Revelation." This was rejected, and the final text, simply entitled "Divine Revelation," begins with two chapters called "Revelation Itself" and "The Transmission of Divine Revelation." The first, beginning from God's word incarnate in Jesus Christ, affirms that God "can be known with certainty from created reality and by the light of human reason" and that he has spoken through the prophets and, last of all, in his Son. The second chapter speaks of Christ's commission to the apostles to preach the gospel to all, and of bishops as the successors of the apostles to whom this responsibility was entrusted. This tradition "develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit" so that "the Church constantly moves forward towards the fullness of divine truth." It follows that "both sacred tradition and sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence."
How is one to define the relation of tradition to Scripture? On the one hand the New Testament is itself part of the tradition. It is obviously based on oral testimony given at different times under different circumstances. But it claims to be the authentic representation of what it describes. "I delivered to you ... what I first received," says the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:3). On the other hand, the closing of the canon of Scripture implies that what is included in the canon has a higher authority than what is excluded. What is included has a normative role in relation to all further tradition. In this respect the language of Vatican II is surely too triumphalist. Not all of what has been handed on is to be accepted. The accusation that Jesus leveled against religious teachers of his time, that they had made void the Word of God by their traditions, has to be leveled against some forms of the Christian tradition.12 Development in Christian teaching is not a process that has its norm immanent in itself. The promise of Jesus to his disciples that the Holy Spirit would lead them into the fullness of the truth is linked to the promise that in doing so, the Spirit will glorify Jesus. What the Spirit will show the Church is what belongs to Jesus, and every alleged teaching of the Spirit has to be tested by that criterion (John 16:14f.). On the other hand, the authority of Scripture lies in the fact that it renders in narrative form the character of the One who is the Author of history and is therefore the clue to all history. Consequently we cannot follow this clue without taking account of the way that it has been followed in the past. The centuries after the incarnation of the Word have filled out with further content the universal and cosmic implications of the incarnation, but what has followed has to be judged by the criteria furnished by the events of the incarnation. The relation between Scripture and tradition is thus reciprocal, but Scripture is normative in relation to tradition. It is true that it often happens that someone who knows nothing of Jesus or of Christianity reads a Gospel for the first time and is so captured by the sheer power of what he reads that he turns to Christ in full submission. But it is also true that such a reader will not learn what submission to Christ means except in the fellowship of the Church. The book is the book of the community, and the community is the community of the story that the book tells. Neither can be understood without the other.
Tradition, therefore, is not a source of authority separate from Scripture. Rather it is only by "indwelling" the Scripture that one remains faithful to the tradition. By this "indwelling" ("abiding") we take our place and play our part in the story that is the true story of the whole human race and of the cosmos. Reading the Scriptures as our own story in a shared discipleship with all those-past and present -who acknowledge with us that this is the true story, we trust the promise that the Holy Spirit will lead us into the fullness of the truth. Neither Scripture nor tradition furnishes us with an authority that releases us from the risky business of making our own decision in every new situation. But we have the confidence that though we may make mistaken decisions, the community that lives by the true story will not be finally lost (Matt. 16:18).
Reason
There is a long tradition that speaks of Scripture, tradition, and reason as the threefold source of authority in regard to Christian doctrine. I have argued that it is a mistake to put tradition alongside of Scripture as though it were a separate and parallel source of authority. The fact that this is a mistake is now widely accepted. It would be equally mistaken to think of reason as a separate and parallel source of authority. No one grasps or makes sense of anything in Scripture or in the tradition of scriptural interpretation except by use of reason. And reason can only operate within a continuous tradition of speech, the speech of a community whose language embodies a shared way of understanding. Reason is a faculty we use to try to grasp the different elements in our experience in an orderly way, so that-as we say"they make sense." It is not a separate source of information about reality. It can only function within a continuous linguistic and cultural tradition. We learn to reason as we learn, in childhood, to use words and concepts, those words and concepts that embody the way our society makes sense of the world. All rationality is socially and culturally embodied.
When we look back on the "age of reason," and especially at the arguments used in the eighteenth century to defend the "reasonableness" of Christianity, it is obvious that the word reason was used to denote conformity with a set of assumptions derived from the science and philosophy of the time. The sociologists of knowledge have taught us to use the term plausibility structure to denote the structure of beliefs and practices that, in any given society, determine what beliefs are plausible within that society. When "reason" is adduced as a third source of authority alongside Scripture and tradition, it is obvious that what is being appealed to is simply the contemporary plausibility structure. This becomes especially obvious when we look at the "selfevident truths" of which the eighteenth-century thinkers spoke. It is obvious to us now that these truths are not self-evident. They are the product of a specific tradition of rationality. There is a parallel here with mathematics. The mathematician John Puddefoot has written, "An Axiom is not the foundation of a system, but the product of generations of mathematical enquiry as it has eventually been formalised or axiomatised."13 Reason operates within a specific tradition of rational discourse, a tradition that is carried by a specific human community. There is no supracultural "reason" that can stand in judgment over all particular human traditions of rationality. All reason operates within a total worldview that is embodied in the language, the concepts, and the models by which those who share them can reason together. Christian doctrine is a form of rational discourse, and it has been developed in communities that find the clue to the rationality of the cosmos in the events of the biblical narrative and in the subsequent experience of those who have done the same. The fact that it is rooted in one strand of the whole human story in no way invalidates its claim to universal relevance. Every other form of rationality is rooted thus as well.
Does this lead to a total relativism? No, because all human reasoning is subject to the test of adequacy. There are more and less adequate ways of making sense of human experience and of coping with the world in the light of what sense one can make of it. All forms of rationality are subject to this test. They are therefore (in vigorous societies) always being modified to take account of new experience. Sometimes the modifications are minor; sometimes they are cataclysmic. There is a parallel here with Thomas Kuhn's distinction between "normal" science and the experience of "paradigm shifts." A way of seeing things is proposed that "makes sense" in a more adequate way than the one previously accepted. As Kuhn shows, there is no over-arching logical system that can justify the switch from one vision to the other; it is a kind of conversion to a different way of seeing things that always needs new language. The only test is adequacy to the reality that has to be understood and coped with. The new paradigm cannot demonstrate its "reasonableness" on the terms of the old. But the success of the new paradigm will depend on the vigor and competence of those who have committed themselves to work with it.14 In every culture the Christian vision of how things are calls for a conversion and for the use of new language - none of which can be shown to be deducible from the reigning plausibility structure. How much the Christian paradigm convinces people of its superior rationality depends on the intellectual vigor and practical courage that those who inhabit the new plausibility structure use to demonstrate its adequacy and exacting use of reason. Paradoxically, one of the main functions of the twenty-first-century Church may be to defend the power of rational thought against the onslaught of antirational movements such as the New Age people.
There is a more specific way in which "reason" has been invoked as a source of authority, namely in contradistinction to "revelation." Granted that the reigning traditions of rationality in our culture are rooted in the specific history of Europe, these traditions rest upon the discoveries of the great scientists and philosophers and historians - discoveries that can be appropriated by any student who is willing to make the necessary effort. On the other hand, the Christian tradition of rationality rests upon alleged revelations that cannot be experimentally checked but have to be accepted in faith. It is asked, therefore, whether the idea of revelation is compatible with the requirements of reason.
The answer must be found, I think, by looking at two kinds of normal human experience that Martin Buber made familiar in his distinction between "I and you" and "I and it." In the latter situations the autonomous reason is in full control. I analyze, classify, dissect. I decide what questions to ask, and force the material to answer my questions. Reason is in the service of my sovereign will. But in the other situations, the situations of interpersonal relationships, matters are different. I am not in full control. I cannot force the other person to answer the questions I ask. Of course it is possible to treat the other person as an object in the "it" world, and to use the tools of science, including eventually the tools of the neurosurgeon, to find out how the brain of the person functions. But none of this gives knowledge of the other person as person. For that I must surrender control. I must listen and expose myself to question. And it is obvious that in thus surrendering sovereignty and moving to the position of one who is questioned, I have not abandoned the use of reason. I am still a rational person making rational judgments and drawing rational conclusions from data. The difference is in the role that reason is called to play. Reason has become the servant of a listening and trusting openness instead of being the servant of masterful autonomy.
The question, therefore, is not whether reason is employed. It is whether the total reality we as human beings have to deal with is to be understood exclusively as lifeless matter, to be investigated by the autonomous human subject, or whether this reality is such that a proper knowing of it is more the fruit of mature personal relationships. The debate is not between "reason" and "revelation"; it is a question about what kind of reality we are dealing with. If that reality is amenable to being understood along the lines we follow in a personal relationship, then it is reasonable to believe that a tradition of rational discourse could develop from the particular experiences of those to whom the Author of the universe has spoken and who have been alert and humble enough to listen. To "indwell" such a tradition, to live with this paradigm, to endeavor to show in every new generation its adequacy to human experience, its power to "make sense" of new situations, will be a fully rational enterprise. The proposal to set "reason" against "revelation" only arises if one is indwelling another tradition of rationality, one that sees the whole of reality only as an object for investigation. Within this latter tradition, of course, "religion" is one of the matters for investigation. There are "religious experiences." In this tradition one says, not "God spoke to Moses," but "Moses had a religious experience." The latter formulation leaves the investigator in charge; the former does not. But the long tradition of rational discourse that has followed from accepting the former as valid is not less rational than the one developed from the latter. Reason operating within the Christian (or Judaic or Muslim) tradition is still reason.
Experience
The fourth word often used in discussion about the authority of the Christian message is experience. It is a newcomer to theology. Until at least the beginning of the nineteenth century the word had the meaning that we now convey by the word experiment. Apparently it has become popular in English theology as a translation of the German Erlebnis.. One has to ask why it has become so popular. Earlier theologians did not appear to need it. Scientists, at least in the natural sciences, do not seem to need it. Neither a scientist nor anyone else knows anything except by-in some sense-having an experience -seeing it, reading it, or hearing it. When a new star appears in the telescope of an astronomer, he does not describe it as a new astronomical experience; he talks about the star. Why is it otherwise in theology? Why say "Moses had a religious experience," rather than "God spoke to Moses"? Obviously because the existence of God cannot be "objectively" demonstrated, whereas there is plenty of evidence to show conclusively that people have religious experiences, and these can be the object of scientific exploration. But it seems certain that only a minority of people who have had definite "religious experiences" can be the subject of this kind of investigation. I suppose that the most important factor in bringing this word into the theological debate is the impact of Schleiermacher's monumental effort to find a place for Christian belief among its "cultured despisers" by finding the evidence for God in the "feeling of absolute dependence" that, he held, is common to all. If Christian faith must leave the exploration of nature and history to those who operate on other presuppositions, it must find a habitation in the world of inward feeling. Leaving aside such paranormal religious experiences as are investigated by scientists, a great deal of Christian writing (and singing) is about inward experiences of peace and joy and penitence, rather than about realities outside the self.
In what sense can "experience" function as a source of authority? For those who have had the kind of definable "religious experience" that can be dated and described, such experience will seem an adequate basis for belief, even though it is also true that similar experiences are produced by the use of drugs. But such experiences, it would seem, always have some continuity with what has gone before. They are not totally unrelated to the rest of the person's experience of life. And they can only continue to provide authority for believing insofar as they enable the person to "make sense" of the rest of experience. The great majority of Christians, it would seem, hold the faith on grounds other than "religious experience" in this narrower sense. They will, for example, continue faithfully to pray in private and worship in public along with others, even though there are long periods in which these exercises produce no vivid experiences like those associated with the conversion of St. Paul or St. Augustine. They believe because they have been brought, perhaps from childhood, into the life of the community that believes the gospel, orders its life by it, and finds in so doing that its truth is confirmed in experience.
All experience is within a framework of interpretation. Even the primary experiences of sight and sound make sense only as the infant learns to relate the lights and noises that impinge on it to a real world that is there to be explored. The Christian gospel provides a framework within which all experience is interpreted in terms of the wise and loving purpose of God. Something that, in another framework, is experienced as disaster may, within the framework of Christian faith, be interpreted as part of God's loving provision. The crucifixion of Jesus is "folly" in one framework, "the wisdom of God" in another (1 Cor. 1:18).
It would therefore be misleading to treat "experience" as a distinct source of authority for Christian believing, because the character of our experience is shaped by the faith we hold. There is a long tradition of teaching in the Church that advises us not to depend too much on special religious experiences (precious and needful as they may be from time to time) but to accept the call to walk by faith, trusting that this is the path that leads to the vision of God, of which all religious experience can only be a faint glimpse.
By What Authority?
How well do these reflections enable me to answer the charge that to invoke the authority of "the Bible" over against our culture is like pretending to move a bus when you are sitting in it? I have affirmed that the way we experience the world depends on a framework of understanding that we receive as part of a living cultural tradition. This tradition always has a specific history in which there are events that have a special significance in shaping the framework. As a product of western European culture I am part of this tradition. But as a Christian I am also part of another tradition that celebrates other events as decisive for shaping a true understanding of the world. Here the analogy of the bus becomes inadequate. One cannot be in two buses at the same time, but one can share in two traditions. That is my situation. I have referred to the internal dialogue. The power of the reigning tradition is very strong. All the language of public debate and most of the language of personal conversation is shaped by the tradition of modern west European culture. But as a member of the Christian Church I am constantly invited to find my mental and spiritual dwelling place within another tradition that celebrates other events as decisive for the understanding of the world and of the human situation within it. There are many points at which these two ways of understanding are in radical contradiction. What authority can this other tradition have? If I say, "In the name of Jesus," what authority can that name have in a multicultural and religiously plural world?
Jesus "spoke with authority." He quoted from the Torah, and then added, "But I say to you...." But he renounced any kind of coercive authority, as the story of the threefold temptation in the wilderness testifies. According to the Johannine version he said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44). In the end even those who had come to him left him. But the company of those to whom he had entrusted the secret of his mission was promised the gift of the Advocate, the active presence of God's Spirit, who would be his witness and who would convict the world in respect of its most fundamental "self-evident truths." The authority of Jesus is the authority of the Father who sent him, and it can only be known and acknowledged by those to whom the Spirit speaks. There is no way that God's authority can be captured and institutionalized. But the presence of the Spirit is promised to those who "abide" in Jesus. Here is where we have to speak of tradition. Tradition is a living reality insofar as those who are committed to Jesus meet together to remember and retell the mighty acts of God, to relive the biblical story and the words and deeds of Jesus, and to offer their praise and prayer to the Father through him. It is in the Church's liturgy that the biblical story becomes a living tradition, remembered again and again, and - in the preaching of the Word - reinterpreted and applied to contemporary situations so that the written word of Scripture becomes the living word of God for today. Out of such liturgy there arises action in the life of the world that faithfully embodies the understanding of God's purpose for the world, which is revealed in the biblical narrative. And through the words and deeds of the members of the believing community there come occasions when the Holy Spirit bears witness in the heart and conscience of a man or woman that the secret of life is to be found in the company of Jesus. No other kind of authority is involved. It is always a mysterious matter, but it is the way in which the authority of Jesus is exercised, and the way men and women-whether in Indian cities and villages or in an English city-come to live by a story different from the one that operates in society. There can be no ultimate authority except the authority of the Spirit of God speaking in the heart and conscience of a man or woman. But the presence of that Holy Spirit is promised to the community that "indwells" the story of which the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the central key.