5. Authority: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience
5 AUTHORITY: SCRIPTURE, TRADITION, REASON, EXPERIENCE
On the whole we regard authority as a bad thing. Our culture developed in revolt against external authority. One of the great themes of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason, from which our modern world was largely born, was that of freedom from external authority and the affirmation that true authority must be internal. Individual freedom of thought, freedom of conscience and self-responsibility in finding out the truth – these were the ideas that prevailed.
But freedom of thought cannot be the last word. This is because there is a real world out there and we have to find out about it and discover whether we are right or wrong in what we think. So these freedoms – freedom of conscience and freedom of thought – though they are the absolutely sacred icons of our culture, cannot have, or be, the last word unless we are to substitute virtual reality for the real thing. And we cannot live unceasingly in virtual reality.
We know this in the most practical of ways. We know that a teacher explaining perhaps a theory in geometry, or a poem, will exercise a certain authority in saying to the children, ‘Look, this is true and I want you to understand this.’ And the children might, to begin with, simply accept what is taught on the authority of the teacher. But, of course, the teacher will not be satisfied if the only answer they can give for the truth of a theory is that their teacher said so. The competent teacher will not be satisfied until the child has seen for himself or herself that what has been taught is true. So in this way, authority is both external and internal.
The woman at the well of Samaria told the people of her village about her experience of Jesus and they took her word. But it was only when they went and saw for themselves that they declared, ‘Now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Saviour of the world’ (John 4:42). Again, we see the internal and external sides of authority.
Let us begin by discussing the external side of authority. Take the question: ‘What are the external authorities for what we believe as Christians?’ I suppose a typical Protestant answer might be: ‘The Bible.’ A typical Roman Catholic answer would be: ‘The Bible and tradition.’ And there is a long tradition in Anglican theology which says: ‘Bible, tradition, reason.’
Let us look first at the Catholic answer, for there is much to be said for it. In a certain sense one can say that the Bible, or at least the New Testament, is subsequent to the church.
When St Paul was writing the letters which form a great part of our New Testament, there was no Bible, at least no New Testament. There was the Bible as those people knew it (what we call the Old Testament), but the apostles themselves were reporting a tradition.
Paul was very careful to say over and again, ‘I am handing on to you what I received.’ The Latin words are the words which in English become ‘tradition’: the handing over of what is received.
In the first sermon of Peter, on the day of Pentecost, there is an outline of the story. In 1 Corinthians 15:1 St Paul writes, ‘I delivered to you,’ and the word he uses is ‘tradition’. What he had received he transmitted to them in the form of ‘tradition’ – that Christ died, according to the Scriptures, and was buried and rose from the dead and was then seen by so many people. So it was the apostles who created what we call the New Testament. In that sense the tradition is prior to the book. The apostles were not simply original thinkers, putting out their own ideas about theology. They were, on the contrary, passing on something given to them, given in the first instance, by word of mouth.
Paul, with the older apostles, Peter, James, John and Barnabas and so forth, was hearing that tradition. What we call the four Gospels have been formed by bringing together traditions that were treasured in the different churches of the early first century by those who had actually heard the words of Jesus and seen his deeds.
St Luke said in the introduction to his Gospel that he had made it his business to find out what the earliest witnesses had to say about Jesus: the relationship between the book and the community was two-way. In one sense it was the community which created the book, but in another sense it was the story they told which created the community and those two have always been reciprocally related to each other.
Those first apostles were always careful to affirm that what they were saying was the true interpretation of the Scriptures, namely the Old Testament. So that the coming of Jesus and the events of the gospel had made it possible, for the first time, to understand the real meaning of those prophecies and laws. Their true meaning had become manifest in the things concerning Jesus so that the heart of the tradition, which they received and carried forward, was that, according to the Scriptures, those things actually happened.
The final fixing of the canon of the New Testament, the decision about which books should or should not be included, was a church decision. Some books were the subject of long debate and doubt. It was only with great hesitation that the second book of Peter, for instance, was included in the canon. On the other hand, the gospel of Thomas, which claims to have been written by an apostle, was rejected. It was judged not to be a faithful representation of the tradition, and if we read the gospel of Thomas today we can see why that was deemed to be so.
In one sense the fixing of the text of our New Testament was a work of the church. But on the other hand, the very fact that the church in that way fixed the canon meant that the church recognised that it was not free to think whatever it wanted. Its thinking must forever be controlled by those writings which represent, with the greatest faithfulness, the authentic tradition concerning the original message relating to Jesus.
What then does it mean to speak of the Bible as the word of God? Let us begin by recognising that the phrase ‘the word of God’ is used in three respects in the New Testament. It is used first of Jesus himself, then of the preaching of the apostles and thirdly of the written Scriptures. The fundamental use of the phrase is with reference to Jesus himself: God, who in sundry times and various ways had spoken through the prophets, had now spoken through his Son. He was, as St John said, the ‘Word made flesh’, the Word present as a human life. And we cannot stress and emphasise that point enough.
In the we looked at the effect upon all our thinking of the past three centuries, of the vision of truth propounded and advocated by Descartes. He saw the human mind as though it was a kind of disembodied eye. He took as the model of truth what was called an objective view where no subject was involved. The mind was outside of and apart from the observed. Descartes taught us to take as the ideal of truth a so-called objective truth, in which the subject was not involved.
In complete contrast to that, we have an actual man of history, living in a particular time and place, identified and personified as the Truth. So the truth is known in exact contradiction to Descartes. It is known in the first sense in the actual bodily reality of this man Jesus. He is the Word of God. So the Word of God is not a detached or merely an intellectual or mental entity, but ultimately Jesus himself.
But then naturally, and secondly, the preaching of Jesus as Lord is described as ‘preaching the Word’. The preaching of the apostles is the Word of God. And here again, it is not a detached or objective truth where no subject is involved. It is precisely the Word in action, the Word being engaged in the actual life of the world. So that is the second sense in which the phrase ‘Word of God’ is used.
The third sense occurs in the written testimony to God’s word as given to us in the Scriptures. The recorded writings of the apostles, the prophets and the books of the Old Testament are now understood as being testimony to this Word made manifest, made incarnate in Jesus Christ. So that all the writings we have in the Bible have been Scripture from the very beginning.
It is not the case, to put it bluntly, that there were certain writings which were canonised and came to be regarded as Scripture. It is rather that all of these writings – which are the record of actual involvement in the name of God with the life of the world – are from the very beginning part of the action of God in the world. There is no pre-scriptural phase, so to speak, of these writings.
So there are these three senses, of which the first is fundamental: Jesus Christ, the Word of God; secondly, the preaching of Christ as Lord is the preaching of the Word; and thirdly, the realisation that the record of the testimony of the prophets and apostles in relation to Jesus is in fact the word of God.
For the first 1,400 years of the life of the church the Bible was essentially a book that was not read but heard. There was no printed Scripture. The Bible was known through the liturgy of the church and was read and expounded in church. It was part of the testimony of the church to Jesus Christ. But when printing was invented it created something new and different. It meant the Bible could now be read outside the church by an individual not involved in the actual worship of the church. It was still, of course, within the world of Christendom. It was still being read in the context of Christian faith, because that was the public faith of Europe. But it was liberated from the direct control of the church. It was a control which in many ways came eventually to obscure some of the essential teachings of the Scriptures. So it was read outside the church, but still within Christendom, and read as Scripture, as Holy Scripture.
Then we come to that great intellectual conversion of Europe, called by those who passed through it the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, when the Bible began to be read, not as Scripture, but simply as a book – one of the many that were filling up the world. It was read, however, not within the tradition which controlled its creation, but within another tradition.
Perhaps the fundamental change that took place during that eighteenth-century intellectual conversion, which created our modern understanding of the world, was the return to the ancient classical view that eternal truths transcended history. These truths were beyond history and were, so to speak, beyond time. These eternal or universal truths were such that history could only provide illustrations but could never form the basis or be the ground itself. One of the most quoted sayings of the Enlightenment came from the German philosopher, G. E. Lessing (1729–81). He asserted: ‘Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.’
Sir Isaac Newton’s life spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth century and his cosmology, envisioning the universe as a huge clock mechanism, which operates indefinitely, was perhaps one of the eternal truths of reason: it was timeless, not based upon any historical happening and – if you come to see it that way – just how things were. But, as the Bible is a story of happenings in history, one might find within it illustrations of eternal truths, but they cannot be the source of our knowledge of truth because – remember Descartes – truth is something known only as an objective reality. In other words, the mind contemplates the world from outside.
How was the church to respond to that position? Broadly speaking, there were two possibilities which we have come to call ‘liberal’ and ‘fundamentalist’. I do not like these labels because they are so often used as an excuse for not listening to the other person – but they are helpful.
The liberal response was fundamentally an evangelical missionary reaction: how can we get the people of this modern world to listen to the Bible? How can we make the Bible intelligible to this modern age? This was what the liberal tried to answer. And the father of the whole liberal movement was the great German theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). He said that deeper than all the findings of science and metaphysics there was something fundamental in human nature which urged that we were all ultimately dependent upon God. We are not our own sovereigns.
Whatever our beliefs, we know at heart that we are dependent creatures. There is a sense of absolute dependence upon a greater reality. Schleiermacher sought to find a standing ground from which he could convince the rationalists of his time that the Bible had something to say.
Into our Christian thinking this blessed word ‘experience’ was launched, where religion became a matter of experience and of internal feelings. Until the nineteenth century, the English word ‘experience’ was used in the sense in which we now say ‘experiment’. Its use in our modern sense came from Germany in the nineteenth century and has now become widely accepted. You do not ask: experience of what? It is just experience that came to be valued as the heart of religion and, of course, Christianity. But not uniquely of Christianity because all religions are full of religious experience. And so, the Bible came to be valued as a marvellous treasury of religious experience.
But then if you begin to ask about the truth of the Bible from the point of view of the enlightened modern world, then you begin to ask all those questions raised by what is called the ‘historical-critical’ method. This method has dominated theological colleges and seminaries for the past hundred years or so. On examination it is found that the historical-critical method is based upon a whole set of assumptions about what is possible. And on the basis of those assumptions – drawn from another source, not from the Bible – you decide how to understand the Bible and how much of it can be accepted.
The positive fruit of this movement is that there arose a serious and determined effort to disentangle the sources which have been brought together in the Bible, as we have it now, and to examine the various oral and written traditions that have been brought together in this book we call the Bible. But, as I have said, the essential heart of this whole response was how the message of the Bible could be made intelligible to the modern world. And it was in that sense a missionary intention.
It is only now that we can see it was the wrong reaction. The question to the world should have been put the other way round: ‘How can the world make any sense at all without the gospel?’ But perhaps it would have been too difficult, in the wake of the triumphant Age of Reason, to see that this was the real question.
The other response is the one labelled ‘fundamentalist’, also shaped by the Enlightenment. Indeed, it is impossible to live in this modern world without being moulded and influenced to a great extent by the Enlightenment. The fundamentalist response takes the form that if the Bible is the word of God, then it must have that kind of certitude which Descartes had taught us to regard as the benchmark of truth. And so it must be affirmed that the Bible is verbally inerrant in every statement and that it possesses that kind of objective certainty which Descartes regarded as the only real knowledge. This means we are imposing upon the Scriptures a concept of truth foreign to them.
To use a simple illustration. When St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘I thank God that I baptised none of you – oh yes, I baptised Crispus and Gaius, and the household of Stephanus, but I don’t remember who else’ (1 Corinthians 1:14–16 paraphrased), he was obviously not writing a kind of inerrant text to satisfy Descartes. It was a different kind of language. And to impose upon it a concept of certitude that has arisen from a particular philosophical tradition is to do injustice and even violence to the Scriptures.
If we want to know what the word of God is, we must not begin by first deciding what it is or what it must be, and then imposing that view upon the Scriptures. We have to find out from the Scriptures themselves what the word of God is, how God speaks to us. And the fundamental mistake is to forget the great insight of the Reformation – that our knowledge of God is by grace through faith.
Our knowledge of God is not the kind of thing that Descartes was advocating. It is a knowledge that comes through atonement, reconciliation and forgiveness. It comes through the gracious action of God addressed to us as human beings who need to repent and be converted. It is a different kind of understanding of truth, and that is the fundamental point to which we must cling.
Look at the Anglican triad: Scripture, tradition, reason. One can understand the inclusion of reason because we have to use our reason in reading the Bible as in anything else. But the point is that reason is not an independent source of information about what is the case. Reason is the faculty by which we make sense of the material and data that is given.
All rational discourse has two characteristics. First of all, something has to be taken for granted. There has to be some data, something given. Secondly, rational discourse always operates within a tradition, which in turn implies language. Reason cannot operate without a language and languages are different. Language cannot operate effectively without a variety of symbols, concepts and models. No reasoning can take place without information, a tradition, and language. In this context language goes beyond mere communication, or the signalling of wants or desires – the type of communication available to animals – and enters the realm of categorising and symbolising reality, which in turn enables reasoning to take place.
The Christian use of reason is that exercise which takes as the data, as the given, the fact of the gospel. The gospel takes the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as what is given. We should not try to go behind it, for it is the starting point. It operates within the tradition of Christian belief which has developed from that beginning.
But if reason is invoked in the sense in which I am afraid it has often been, it is really reason based upon the tradition that stems from the Enlightenment. This takes as the fundamental data simply the facts available for empirical observation by the methods of modern science in the modern world. So that one tradition is brought into play as the critique of another. It is not the independent exercise of reason.
One of the most famous philosophical works of the Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. For Kant it was reason, as he understood it, which provided the basic tradition, and religion must be acceptable only as it fits into that tradition. Nicholas Wolterstorff, a modern philosopher, has written an excellent little book called Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and the writer points out that all reasoning takes place within a tradition of reasoning and that for most of human history it has been religion that has provided the tradition within which reason works.
In the world of Islam the Koran is understood to be the actual verbatim dictation by God in the Arabic language and to be accepted, whether you understand it or not, simply as God’s revelation of the truth. And because all translation means interpretation – since you cannot translate something without at least trying to understand it – and since human understanding is always fallible, it is therefore an article of faith in Islam that the Koran cannot be translated.
If you pick up an English version of the Koran you will notice that it is called ‘an interpretation of the Koran’ never ‘a translation’. In order to actually hear God’s word you must learn Arabic but even then you are not expected to understand. You may try, but it is not expected. It is a purely external authority and the ideal of Islam is that one should be able to recite the entire Koran in Arabic.
By contrast, we look at Jesus because the parallel is not Koran and Bible, but Koran and Jesus. It is Jesus who is the Word of God in the primary and fundamental sense and Jesus, as we know, did not write a book. The only knowledge we have of his writing is when he wrote in the dust when a woman was charged with adultery. Jesus could have written a book but he did not. He gathered a company of disciples and he called them ‘friends’. He told them: ‘I do not call you servants because a servant does not understand what his master is doing. I have called you friends, for everything that I have heard from my father, I have made known to you’ (John 15:15).
What we find in the Gospels is exactly what I have been trying to describe: an apprenticeship to a tradition. Jesus took his disciples as apprentices and, as we know, apprenticeship means much more than reading a book. One cannot become a doctor simply by reading medical textbooks. There is no alternative to actually becoming an apprentice to a skilled doctor, watching the expert at work and following by example.
And so it was with Jesus. He did not issue a manual of instructions. He entrusted the revelation of God to this company of friends who were not simply slaves, but real friends, who were to understand what he was saying. And that is why we have different accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus in the four Gospels. We do not have any parable or miracle about which we can say we know exactly what Jesus said or did.
From Descartes’ point of view we have no reliable certainty. This is the charge the Muslims make against Christians. If you have been in discussion with Muslims you will know that the fact that we have four Gospels, and not one, is used by them as an argument to prove that we have lost the original Gospel, the Injil, and that what we have is a series of botched attempts to recover it. But this is not something to regret; it is fundamental to our faith as this is the way God has made known his revelation to us.
There was an attempt in the early Syriac church to overcome this difficulty by combining the four Gospels into a single narrative, the Diatessaron, which comes from Greek and means ‘through four’, but the church rejected the idea. These four distinct Gospels were kept as they are, in true obedience to the intention of Jesus. This helps us to see what it means for God to reveal himself to us. It is precisely through this presence of the living man Jesus Christ, apprenticing a group of friends to learn and to follow, that God has chosen to reveal himself.
Now we come to the great thing which is absolutely central – the work of the Holy Spirit. It is only if we understand the Christian teaching about the Holy Spirit that we have the clue to overcoming this dichotomy between objective and subjective which has almost paralysed the thinking of our modern world.
First, according to the teaching of the apostles, we have the work of the Spirit in communicating the word of God through the mouths of the prophets. It is by the work of the Spirit that they were enabled to communicate the word of God to their times. Then we have the great event of Pentecost which enabled the apostles to communicate the Word of God incarnate in Jesus to their contemporaries. It is by the power of the Spirit that they were enabled truly to interpret Jesus to the world around them.
Next we have the great passage in St John where Jesus, on the eve of his passion, said to his disciples, ‘There are many things I have to tell you but you cannot bear them now’ (John 16:12). There was a vast amount which that little company of Palestinian Jews in the first century could not know; they could not have a universal knowledge. There was much that they had to learn, but he told them, ‘You cannot bear them now, but the Spirit of truth when he comes, he will guide you into the truth as a whole … for he will take what is mine and show it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and show it to you’ (John 16:12–15).
In one sense there has been a full revelation: ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father,’ said Jesus (John 14:9b). So, in one sense, it was a full revelation and yet there was a vast amount to be learnt. And in the New Testament itself we see the disciples beginning to learn and, led by the Spirit, to start going beyond what Jesus had said, for example, in the matter of circumcision.
The work of the Spirit cannot be separated from the name of Jesus. As St Paul and St John said, the test that it was truly the Holy Spirit was that it led to the confession of Jesus as Lord. So the Spirit is not something, as it were, that goes beyond Jesus, but the Spirit illuminates the world in the light of the revelation in Jesus Christ.
It often is said that this makes us sectarian. And if people say, ‘But the Spirit’s work is much wider than this talk about Jesus,’ the answer is, ‘All that the Father has is mine’ – so the name of Jesus is not a sectarian name. Everything that exists belongs to Jesus. And it is the work of the Spirit through the church down the ages – as the church moves into new continents, new generations and new cultures – to illuminate the world in the light of Jesus Christ so that the truth, the truth in all its fullness, is seen to be present in Jesus Christ.
So in this way this objective-subjective divide is healed. There is the objective given reality of Jesus Christ: this man of Nazareth who belonged both to a particular time in history and to a specific human culture. He was not part of Chinese or African culture and nor was he part of the twentieth century. His life was an objective fact and we may study him as we listen to the Scriptures, and seek to understand them. There is at the same time this working of the Holy Spirit in our hearts which enables Jesus to illuminate the whole of our experience as we move onwards through the history of the world and across all nations and cultures.
I find the Eastern Orthodox way of putting this most helpful, because they say that the Word and the Spirit are the two hands of the Father. The Word (Jesus in the flesh) and the Spirit (universal, everywhere, present in all ages and times) are the two hands of the one Father. They are not two different things. And this is one more place where the doctrine of the Trinity is not a puzzle, but the solution to a puzzle, because there is no other ultimate solution to this dichotomy between subjective and objective.
How in practice do we read the Bible? I think we can waste a lot of time talking about our doctrine of Scripture when what is important is the practice of how we actually treat the Scriptures. We first need to recognise that as we read the Scriptures we are apprentices to a tradition and have much to learn.
It is not that we should simply take it as a Muslim takes the Koran, whether we understand it or not. We should open our hearts and minds to what is given and seek in our total daily life to grasp more fully what it means. The external authority is there but our task is to internalise it and understand it and not to pretend that we understand all of it – or even that we can accept it all. Our business is to allow it to shape our thinking and practice so that we see ourselves as apprentices in this great tradition, of which the Bible is the central clue.
All of this must be tackled in the context of actual discipleship because there can be no apprenticeship which involves the mere reading of a book. It must be worked at against a background of worship, obedience and discipleship. One result of the Enlightenment is that the Bible has been taken out of the church and perhaps lodged too much in the universities and schools for academic study. Of course, it is perfectly legitimate to study the Bible in academic institutions. The universities may help us with all kinds of insights, and thank God for that. But the real understanding of the Bible can only be in church, in the context of worship and obedience and in connection with the tradition of all the saints who sought to be faithful, in their own day, to the teaching of the Bible.
We have to use our reason in reading the Bible. But it is a reason which is based not upon some other tradition but on the tradition of the Bible itself. Obviously, when we read the Bible there are great tensions. Put the book of Joshua alongside the Sermon on the Mount and you have a mind-blowing contradiction. In many other places, there are further tensions. Take, for example, the passages on justification by faith written by St Paul and those written by St James. Consider the nature of the state in Revelation 13 and in Romans 13: in Romans, the Roman Empire is the power ordained by God while in Revelation it is the beast out of the Abyss.
How do we cope with them? How do we deal with these tensions? The ultimate clue is in Jesus himself. We must recognise that in the Bible God is leading a people to a deeper understanding of his nature and that we therefore have to read the Bible in this light. When Jesus begins a statement with the words, ‘You have been told in old times, but I say unto you’, this is not an absolute discontinuity. Jesus is instead bringing an old commandment to its full strength and deeper understanding in his own teaching.
We have to recognise that in the Bible we have the story of God leading a people into an ever deepening understanding. That means that we have to read every text in the context of the gospel itself, for it is the clue to our understanding of Scripture.
It means that we read every text in its cultural context. Let me give another simple illustration. It is said that St Paul accepted slavery and therefore we cannot trust him. But slavery was an integral part of his culture and you cannot simply jump out of your society or your time. The Bible forbids usury – the taking of interest on loans. In modern usage usury means the charging of iniquitous rates of interest, but the charging of reasonable rates is nevertheless integral to our own present economic system. We know that the Bible forbids it yet we all practise it. We cannot leap out of our society. Paul could not suddenly propel himself out of the first-century society in which he lived, but he was able to plant the seeds of change. When Paul considered the case of the runaway slave Onesimus he did not tell him to go underground and become a fugitive. Instead, he sent him back to his master, but with a new status. This was the status of a representative of the apostles in the house of Philemon.
Paul thus introduced into that existing institution of slavery something which would eventually transform it. This simple illustration is true in many other cases. We must always read any text in the context of the culture of its time. So in reading the Scriptures we should try to understand their direction, and the meaning to which the texts point, in relation to their place and time.
But the ultimate tension in the Bible, which causes us discomfort, is that straining between the holy wrath of God and the holy love of God – a tension which lies at the very heart of the being of God. And that is a tension which within this life we will never fully overcome. We have to take with the greatest seriousness both those passages of Scripture which speak of the holy wrath of God, his rejection of sin in every form, and those passages which speak of the all-inclusive and utterly forgiving love of God for the sinner. In our human strength we cannot hold that tension but it is in the atoning work of Jesus Christ, in that cross which is both the judgment and the salvation of the world, that the clue lies by which we can grasp these tremendous tensions within the Scriptures.
We must allow the Scriptures to shape our minds and teach us how God speaks to us, what it means to speak of the Word of God. We must allow the Scriptures to play such a vast part in our lives that we think in terms of the horizon that Scripture gives us. It is in the light of the Scriptures as a whole that we eventually come to understand our own lives. We come to understand who we really are, rather than avoiding who we are. We realise where we have come from and where we are going, and what choices are available to us on the way. It is only when we discover how to live in this manner that we learn what it really means to speak of Scripture as being the word of God.