Who Do We Trust?: The Question of Authority in Christian Faith and Life

In the relatively short period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Western culture experienced a series of shocking revolutions in thought: The Renaissance with its clarion call ‘Ad fontes!’ — ‘Back to the sources!” — wanted to re-found European society on ancient Greco-Roman principles and philosophy. The Reformation applied this spirit of returning to the sources specifically to Christian religion, rejecting the ‘Medieval Synthesis’ of Scripture and Tradition, and the supremacy of Rome in Church affairs with it. Then, in the bloody wake of the Reformation and Catholic Reformation and the wars they prompted, figures such as Rene Descartes began to question whether, in fact, both sides’ commitments were off base and we were better off using reason to determine what’s best. Descartes’ Rationalism in turn spurred other philosophical questions, which led to movements we call the Enlightenment, which challenged longstanding social and political structures, and the Scientific Revolution. This is an oversimplified narrative, but the point is that in a relatively short period of time (historically speaking), the West underwent not just a revolution in thinking, but a series of revolutions that questioned everything. And every one of them revolved around the question of authority: Who or what is it, exactly, that we trust? And why?

There can really be no more important question in any area of study. And we are now well into a period where the tentative answers to them we call Modernity, or the Modern Era, are themselves being questioned, leading to yet another time of cultural, social, and theological upheaval. While all of these aspects of our current cultural moment are important and worth study, for the purposes of this blog, it’s the last of these that is the most relevant. Now, just as in past centuries, differences in Christian belief and practice owe more to differences in questions of authority than they do to differences of interpretation.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring the question of authority in Christianity by looking at the different options suggested throughout history, their proponents and opponents, their strengths and their weaknesses. My goal is to look at not just those authorities Christians have explicitly committed to following, but also the tacit ones, those lurking in the background or shadow.

I hope that it will not only be an interesting project, but also a fruitful one. Because, for the most part, this is not stuff many of us think about on a day-to-day basis, and, with this as with anything, our greatest weaknesses lie in what we cannot see.