Who Do We Trust?: The Authority of Scripture

The other day I introduced a new series about the nature of authority in Christianity, specifically in matters of theology or belief. Today I’m going to start with the source of authority officially shared by all Christians: Sacred Scripture, what we call the Bible. This book, or better, this library of books, has inspired Christians for two thousand years now, informing every aspect of life, including our beliefs, our prayer and worship, our ethics, and even our language. On the surface, to say that we believe in the Bible seems simple. But as the past five hundred years since the Protestant Reformation and its cries of “by Scripture alone!” (Sola Scriptura) have shown, it’s not simple at all. Accepting the authority of the Bible requires us to answer a lot of questions — hopefully explicitly, but far too often tacitly — about which Christians have never fully agreed: What is the Bible? What does it include? What does it exclude, and on what grounds? What does it mean to say that the Bible is “inspired”? What kind of authority does it have? Are all of its parts authoritative in the same way? How do we interpret it, and on what grounds? Today I’d like to take some time to explore these questions in a general way, and show where different Christian groups have landed on them over the centuries.

The most basic question we have to answer is ‘What is the Bible?’ To say that it is Christianity’s Sacred Scripture only punts the matter to the question of what it means for something to be Sacred Scripture. From a cross-religious, value-neutral perspective, Scriptures are those texts which carry the highest degree of authority within a given community. But what that ‘authority’ means differs from religion to religion, and, crucially for our purposes, even within religions, and within a community’s own canonical Scriptures. And, different traditions within a particular religion may disagree about what their Scriptures include and exclude (i.e., their canon).

For Christians, at the most basic level, the Bible is comprised of two parts, the ‘Old Testament’, which is similar in content to the Jewish Tanakh and contains material relating to our tradition’s pre-Christian history, and the ‘New Testament’, which tells the story of Jesus and the earliest days of Christian faith. But things aren’t quite that simple, on a few fronts. The canon of Scripture itself has a long and complicated history. (For a limited discussion of the Old Testament canon, see my post on how the New Testament interprets the Old; and for a brief discussion about the New Testament canon, see my post on biblical interpretation in the second century.) The long and the short of it is that different groups of Christians have different Old Testaments. Some insist on using the Hebrew textual tradition, while some give precedent to the Greek translation that the New Testament itself uses. Some have a strictly defined canon, while others have a looser canon including books that were popular during Second Temple Judaism but were excluded from the Hebrew Bible when the early Jewish rabbis discerned their canon. The New Testament canon is more straightforward, but even here it was left an open discussion for a few centuries, and some books that were questioned (such as Hebrews and Revelation) ended up being included and others (such as 1 Clement, Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas) not.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about all this from a post-Reformation perspective, is that the canon was never all that big of a deal. It took over three hundred years before things were formalized (and far far longer for the Old Testament), and even then, differences remained here and there, without any real fuss. Think about it: A Church that was willing to schism over minute differences in belief about the relationship between Jesus’ humanity and divinity barely shrugged a shoulder at the canon of its Scriptures. To help understand why this is, it’s time to turn to the question of how we understand the nature of Scripture’s authority.

All Christians believe that the Bible is “inspired” by God. But, what Christians have meant by that has never been quite clear. The word inspired is taken from 2 Timothy 3, which says:

… from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3.15-17)

For most of Christian history, this was a good enough answer: Christians believed that these books are not simply human texts, but that God had a role in shaping them for the purpose of instruction and correction. But this did not mean the Scriptures were all taken as authoritative in the same way. Even within the Old Testament there are places where the Scriptures do not agree, or in which the perspective about something changes over time. Considering the books of the Old Testament underwent significant editing and curation before they took their canonical form, it seems that this diversity of voices within Scripture was not only not seen as a problem, but was intentionally left in. This allowance for Scripture to speak against itself and change over time is even more pronounced in how the New Testament approaches the Old. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus insists that he accepts the authority of the Law (Matthew 5.17), but is also happy to contradict it (He repeats “You have heard it said … but I say to you …” five times between Matthew 5.21-43). Paul took a similar approach, professing love for the Law while also calling it a ‘babysitter’ that was no longer necessary. So for Christians, believing the Bible was authoritative did not mean everything in it was without question, or authoritative in the same way. The Law especially became marginalized, and eventually replaced as the ‘core’ Scripture by the Gospels. The question becomes on what grounds do we decide which path to follow in the Scriptures when its message diverges. This leads us to the question of interpretation, known academically as hermeneutics.

To start this discussion, we need to ask ourselves what Scriptures are for. The best we can say about this is that the first Christians took the first part of that passage from 2 Timothy very seriously: The role of Scripture is specifically to teach about Jesus. This is not just true about the New Testament (which of course was not around when that text was written), but the Old Testament too. As I’ve previously written about this:

If there is one single hermeneutical principle shared by the New Testament writers it’s that the Scriptures are to be read Christocentrically, that is, through ‘Christ-coloured glasses.’ So profound and world-altering was the experience of Jesus that he became the single lens through which all of history — and especially God’s activity within it — was to be understood. This point cannot be over-emphasized.

This Christocentrism was taken up into ‘the Rule of Faith’ that formed the dominant interpretive principle in the rest of antiquity: Scripture was authoritative inasmuch as it told the story of Jesus. Any detail in the Old Testament — the appearance of water or a piece of wood — was to be interpreted as a foreshadowing of Jesus. To use a negative, but not untrue, analogy, the community’s faith in Jesus acted like a Procrustean Bed, to which the Scriptures were required to conform. In order to make this work, Christians developed a very rich, nuanced, and sophisticated approach to the Bible, using many different tools (including some that resemble modern linguistic analyses), and allowing Scripture to speak on different levels of meaning. Eventually, these approaches themselves became ‘tradition’. And thus emerge what’s known as the ‘Medieval Synthesis’, in which it was understood that Scripture, when interpreted correctly, and Holy Tradition were in complete and natural accord.

It was of course this Synthesis that the Protestant Reformers attacked with their belief in ‘Scripture alone’ and that Scripture has a singular, clear, and simple meaning. Because of this unprecedented shift in belief about the Bible, the question of the composition of the canon took on a far greater importance. The reason why it had never been all that big of a deal was that with the Rule of Faith predetermining how the Bible was going to be read, it didn’t really matter all that much what was ‘in’ and what was ‘out’. But, with this guard-rail of Tradition removed, suddenly the matter of the canon mattered very much indeed. This also in part explains the Protestant preference for the Hebrew text of the Old Testament over the Greek: After all, if a text is going to be the sole authority for discerning truth, you must be sure you know what its original author said as much as possible. But the Reformation path about the singular importance of the Bible ended up  leading Protestants down diverging roads, with some insisting that the Bible must be understood through the lens of critical methodologies, and with others doubling down on the text as we have it as a clear message from God. The latter of these two paths ended up flattening the Scriptures, so that every part of the Bible ends up being authoritative in exactly the same way. This means that the events of Genesis are no longer authoritative inasmuch as they point to God’s ultimate revelation in Christ, but, in the words of the 1982 Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, are “all factual, that is, they are about space-time events which actually happened as reported in the book of Genesis.”

So where does this leave us? When it comes to the question of biblical authority, different Christian groups, across time and today, have different beliefs. Here are some of the most influential:

• “a verbal icon of Christ” (Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional); one twentieth century catechism fleshes this out as “the true and genuine expressions of [God’s] Truth and His Will for His People and for the whole world” (Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith)
• “we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1.1.2.3.2); and Scripture “makes present and fruitful in the Church the mystery of Christ” (1.1.2.2.2).
• “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” (Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (i.e., Anglican), Article VI)
• “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men.” (Westminster Confession (Calvinist), 1.6)
• “Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.” (1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (Evangelical Theological Society))

We see here something of a continuum of beliefs, where the main difference is one of scope. On the one extreme there are the two most traditional definitions, which, in full agreement with the earliest Church’s Christocentrism, focus on Scripture’s role in revealing Jesus, or ‘the mystery of Christ.’ The Roman Catholic and Anglican statements add an explicit reference to salvation here: it’s not just a knowledge of Jesus that the Scriptures intend, but a saving knowledge. The traditional Calvinist statement adds “life” to the stated scope, which I think the others would agree with tacitly: Knowledge of Christ should change how we live. But against these, the Chicago Statement stands out quite dramatically. Here, far from being a text that is true insofar as it truly teaches about God’s saving acts for humanity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and our response to them, we have a text that must be true “no less” about cosmology and history than about salvation. This is the interesting thing about our contemporary discourse about the Bible: It’s generally assumed, both by Christians and non-Christians, that in order to believe in the Bible, one has to believe it in a Fundamentalist way. But, as this little exercise has demonstrated, the Fundamentalist approach to the Bible, in which the Scriptures must be wholly inerrant and infallible in every single way, is very recent, and goes well beyond what even the Reformers, those great champions of the Bible, proposed. And with good reason: As I’ve shown previously, as a collection of texts written in human language, the Bible is simply not built to withstand the kind of weight Fundamentalism places on it. This isn’t a bad thing or a problem — no less than a chair crumbling under the weight of a house is not a problem, because that’s not what it’s for. The funny thing is that when it comes the Bible, being “more traditional” allows us a lot more freedom and air.

The point of this series is not to come down on any one opinion as ‘the right’ one. It’s mostly just to bring these questions about authority — which everyone answers in their own ways, whether they know it or not — into the open where we can see them. But, I will leave you with some of the principles that have become important to me over the years when finding my own answers.

When it comes to the authority of the Bible:

• The Scriptures are a verbal icon of Christ, who is the Word of God. They are human documents, through which God has revealed all that God has done for us and for our salvation in and through Jesus of Nazareth.
• While inspired by God, the Scriptures are written by human hands, human minds, human hearts, and using human language and human literary forms. As such, they are by nature ambiguous and must be interpreted.
• The Bible itself has an internal history and includes differences of theological opinion. Later points in God’s revelation should have primacy over earlier points, so that Prophecy legitimately critiques the Law, and the Old Testament is always applied through the lens of the Gospels.
• Where two interpretations are possible, or where two passages disagree, we should choose the line of thought that best represents the big, bold, and beautiful story of the Gospel.
• While ‘Sola Scriptura’ is not actually practical (more on this as the series goes on), it remains a helpful value as it constantly reminds us of the separation between the text and its interpretation.