Who Do We Trust?: Final Thoughts on Authority in Christian Thought and Life

This series on the nature of authority in Christianity has been wide-ranging, and perhaps even a little chaotic. If there’s one thing that I hope it’s demonstrated it’s that authority is complex and never as simple as many of us would like to believe. The goal of today’s post is to bring the discussion together in some sort of unified way.

With all of the different kinds of authority that vie for our attention, it’s possible to see it as messy or even hopeless. But, I prefer to think of it as a helpful system of checks and balances and supports. They aren’t sworn enemies, but are differing, often helpful, perspectives that work together to create the best and most faithful theology and lifestyle possible for us in our circumstances. And to my mind, that’s a very good thing. We need the creative tension between what’s worked in the past and the demands and concerns of the present in order for religion and spirituality to have any meaning for us. Without the past, we’re adrift and not part of anything outside our present, partial, and parochial experiences. Without the present, we’re not really present at all, just vainly attempting to repeat or restore a past that isn’t coming back. We need both. We need to be traditioned by things like Scripture, creeds and canons, and important voices from our tradition’s past, but we need to harness all of these things for the sake of what’s happening now — and acknowledge that the here-and-now is going to shape the way we receive that tradition whether we want it to or not.

Thinking of these sources of authority as perspectives brings to mind the multi-perspectival approach advocated within Integral thought. As a reminder, this approach maintains that in order to fully understand anything, we need to understand it in terms of the individual and collective, and the interior (what we might call subjective) and exterior (’objective’). This is often depicted as four quadrants. If we plot out the eight ‘authorities’ discussed in this series over these quadrants, we see that they actually cover the map pretty well: Personal experience falls obviously into the first, top left quadrant; culture, liturgy, and the influence of the Church Fathers and theological heroes fall into the second, bottom left quadrant; reason, logic, and the outputs of science and study fall into the third, top right quadrant; and Church Hierarchy, creeds and canons fall into the fourth, bottom right quadrant, along with things like social structures and economic systems. If you notice, not only are all four quadrants active when we engage all of these different types of authority, but we could also easily add a third dimension to the grid, for explicitly ‘religious’ authorities and more ‘secular’ influences. We can see this in the diagram below, where this third dimension has been indicated by a circle within each quadrant:

So, to my mind, far from being chaotic, understanding the influence of all of the types of authority discussed in this series allows for a balanced, informed, and engaged life of faith. We can think of them as part of our Inner Wisdom Circle, each with their own ideas and perspectives, but with the common goal of guiding us down the right path. It would be great if they all agreed, but most of the time, there will be some dissent and we’ll need careful discernment and deliberation to sort things out. Again, this isn’t a bad thing. Each perspective has its voice for a reason and deserves to be heard, whether we end up following it or not. And the same process works in community too, as challenging as that is, since communities are made up of individuals with different experiences, who inhabit different places on the socio-economic ladder, and whose thinking may lead them down very different roads. It’s why community is hard; it’s also why community can be magic when it’s working well.

What’s important is to bring all of these voices to the table intentionally, and give each room to speak. If we don’t do this, they’ll still be in the hallways outside whispering where we can’t see them. And that’s a problem. That’s the kind of thing that can make us mistake our very culturally-defined beliefs for universal truths and the clear teaching of Scripture. And, as people of faith, that’s the last thing we should want.

This brings this series on authority to a close. I hope you’ve found it interesting and helpful.