Biblical Authority and the Church's Task The church is not made so that there can be a safe ghetto into which people can run and escape from the world, but so that God can shine out his light into the world, exposing (among other things) the ways in which the world has structured itself into darkness. And this is relevant to the concepts of authority themselves, The Bible is a living witness to the fact that there is a different sort of authority, a different sort of power, to that which is recognized in the world of politics, business, government, or even the academy. Do you know that moment in Jesus Christ Superstar where the crowds are coming into Jerusalem and the disciples are all singing, 'Haysannah, Hosannah'. And one of the zealots says to Jesus, Come on, you ride in ahead of us and you'll get the power and the glory for ever and ever and ever.' And Jesus turns round and says, 'Neither you, Simon, nor the 50,000, nor the Romans, nor the Jews, nor Judas, nor the twelve, nor the priests, nor the scribes, nor doomed Jerusalem herself, understand what power is, understand what power is.' And then he proceeds to weep over Jerusalem and prophesy its destruction; and then he goes, steadily through the following week, to his enthronement on Calvary, which with hindsight the church realises to be the place where all power, all real power, is congregated. The world needs to see that there is a different model of authority. Because the world needs to know that there is a different God. When the world says, 'God' it doesn't mean what you and I mean by God. It doesn't mean the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. It means either a pantheist god: the god of all-being, a sort of nature god. Or, it means a deist-god way up in the sky who started off by being a landlord, then became an absentee landlord, and now is just an absentee. We have to tell the world again, that the God who is in authority over in- world, the God who speaks through scripture, is the Father of Jesus, the God who sends the Spirit. And, therefore, we have to announce to the world the story of scripture. This is how the gospels are to become authoritative. They are to become authoritative because, as they tell the story of who Jesus was for Israel in judging and redeeming Israel, so we continue that story--this is the great message of Luke, is it not-in being for the world what Jesus was for Israel. That is how the translation works. And that is why we need narrative, not timeless truth. I'm not a timeless person; I've got a story. The world's not a timeless world; it's got a story. And I've got a responsibility, armed with scripture, to tell in- world God's story, through song and in speech, in drama and in art. We must do this by telling whatever parables are appropriate. That may well not be by standing on street corners reading chunks of scripture. It might be much more appropriate to go off and write a novel (and not a 'Christian' novel where half the characters are Christians and all the other half become Christians on the last page) but a novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story can be my story. After all, the story of the Bible, and the power that it possesses, is a better story than any of the power games that we play in our world. We must tell this story, and let it exercise its power in the world. And that is the task of the whole church. Need I say, not merely of the professional caste within it-although those who are privileged, whether by being given gifts of study by God, or by being set apart with particular time (as I have been) to study scripture, do have a special responsibility to make sure that they are constantly living in the story for themselves, constantly being the scripture people themselves, in order to encourage the church to be that sort of people, again not for its own sake but for the sake of the world. The Challenge to the World's World-View When we tell the whole story of the Bible, and tell it (of course) not just by repeating it parrot-fashion but by articulating it in a thousand different ways, improvising our own faithful versions, we are inevitably challenging more than just one aspect of the world's way of looking at things (ie its view of authority and power). We are undermining its entire view of what the world is, and is for, and are offering, in the best way possible, a new world-view, which turns out (of course) to be a new God-view. We are articulating a viewpoint according to which there is one God, the creator of all that is, who not only made the world but is living and active within it (in opposition to the dualism and/or deism which clings so closely, even to much evangelical tradition), who is also transcendent over it and deeply grieved by its fall away from goodness into sin (in opposition to the pantheism which always lurks in the wings, and which has made a major new entry in the so-called New Age movement-and which often traps Christians who are in a mode of reaction against dualism or deism). This story about the World and its creator will function as an invitation to participate in the story oneself, to make it one's own, and to do so by turning away from the idols which prevent the story becoming one's own, and by worshipping instead the God revealed as the true God. Evangelism and the summons injustice and mercy in society are thus one and the same, and both are effected by the telling of the story, the authoritative story, which works by its own power irrespective of the technique of the storyteller. Once again, we see that the church's task is to be the people who, like Micaiah, stand humbly before God in order then to stand boldly before men. Biblical Authority and the Church's Life I shall be briefer about this aspect, though it could be spelt out in considerable detail-and probably needs to be if the church is to be really healthy, and not go through a barren ritual of reading the Bible but getting nothing out of it that cannot be reduced to terms of what she already knows. The purpose of the church's life is to be the people of God for the world: a city set on a hill cannot be hidden. But the church can only be this if in her own life she is constantly being recalled to the story and message of scripture, without which she will herself lapse into the world's ways of thinking (as is done in the evangelical dualism, for example, that perpetuates the split between religion and politics invented by the fairly godless eighteenth century). How is this to be done? The church in her public worship uses lectionaries-at least, if she does not, she runs the grave risk of revolving, as C S Lewis pointed out, round the little treadmill of favourite passages, of 'desert island texts', and muzzling the terrible and wonderful things that scripture really has to say. But even in the lectionaries there are problems; because at least those that are common Bible today do their own fair share of muzzling, missing out crucial passages in order to keep the readings short, omitting verses that might shock modern Western sensibilities, The Bible is to be in the bloodstream of the church's worship, but at the moment the bloodstream is looking fairly watery, We must reform the lectionaries, and give to the church creative and positive ways of reading scripture, and hearing it read, which will enable this book to be once again the fully authoritative covenant charter. In private reading, and in informal group meetings, we need again to experiment with new ways of reading scripture. Anyone who has heard an entire biblical book read, or even acted (think of Alec McCown on Mark, or Paul Alexander on John; I have heard the same done with Galatians, and very impressive it was, too) will realize that such things as chapter-divisions, or almost any divisions at all, can be simply unhelpful. We need to recapture a sense of scripture as a whole, telling and retelling stories as wholes. Only when you read Exodus as a whole (for example) do you realize the awful irony whereby the making of the golden calf is a parody of what God wanted the people to do with their gold and jewels . . . and only by reading Mark as a whole might you realize that, when the disciples ask to sit at Jesus' right and left hand, they are indeed asking for something they do not understand. It is perhaps the half-hearted and sometimes quite miserable traditions of reading the Bible-even among whose who claim to take it seriously-that account for the very low level of biblical knowledge and awareness even among some church leaders and those with delegated responsibility. And this is the more lamentable in that the Bible ought to be functioning as authoritative within church debates, What happens all too often is that the debate is conducted without reference to the Bible (until a rabid fundamentalist stands up and waves it around, confirming the tacit agreement of everyone else to give it a wide berth). Rather, serious engagement is required, at every level from the personal through to the group Bible-study, to the proper liturgical use, to the giving of time in synods and councils to Bible exposition and study. Only so will the church avoid the trap of trying to address the world and having nothing to say but the faint echo of what the world itself has been saying for some while. If we really engage with the Bible in this serious way we will find, I believe, that we will be set free from (among other things) some of the small-scale evangelical paranoia which goes on about scripture. We won't be forced into awkward corners, answering impossible questions of the 'Have you stopped beating your wife?' variety about whether scripture is exactly this or exactly that. Of course the Bible is inspired, and if you're using it like this there won't be any question in your mind that the Bible is inspired. But, you will be set free to explore ways of articulating that belief which do not fall into the old rationalist traps of 18th or 19th or 20th century. Actually using the Bible in this way is a far sounder thing than mouthing lots of words beginning with 'in-' but still imprisoning the Bible within evangelical tradition (which is what some of those 'in-' words seem almost designed to do). Of course you will discover that the Bible will not let you down. You will be paying attention to it; you won't be sitting in judgement over it. But you won't come with a preconceived notion of what this or that passage has to mean if it is to be true. You will discover that God is speaking new truth through it. I take it as a method in my biblical studies that if I turn a corner and find myself saying, 'Well, in that case, that verse is wrong' that I must have turned a wrong corner somewhere. But that does not mean that I impose what I think is right on to that bit of the Bible. It means, instead, that I am forced to live with that text uncomfortably, sometimes literally for years (this is sober autobiography), until suddenly I come round a different corner and that verse makes a lot of sense; sense that I wouldn't have got if I had insisted on imposing my initial view on it from day one. The Bible, clearly, is also to be used in a thousand different ways within the pastoral work of the church, the caring and building up of all its members. Again, there is much that I could say here, but little space. Suffice it to note that the individual world-views and God-views of Christians, as much as anybody else, need to be constantly adjusted and straightened out in the light of the story which is told in scripture. But this is not to say that there is one, or even that there are twenty-one, 'right' ways of this being done. To be sure, the regular use of scripture in private and public worship is a regular medicine for many of the ills that beset us, But there are many methods of meditation, of imaginative reading, ways of soaking oneself in a book or a text, ways of allowing the story to become one's own story in all sorts of intimate ways, that can with profit be recommended by a pastor, or engaged in within the context of pastoral ministry itself. Here, too, we discover the authority of the Bible at work: God's own authority, exercised not to give true information about wholeness but to give wholeness itself, by judging and remaking the thoughts and intentions, the imaginations and rememberings, of men, women and children, There are worlds to be discovered here of which a good deal of the church remains sadly ignorant. The Bible is the book of personal renewal, the book of tears and laughter, the book through which God resonates with our pain and joy, and enables us to resonate with his pain and joy. This is the really powerful authority of the Bible, to be distinguished from the merely manipulative or the crassly confrontational 'use' of scripture. CONCLUSION I have argued that the notion of the 'authority of scripture' is a shorthand expression for God's authority, exercised somehow through scripture; that scripture must be allowed to be itself in exercising its authority, and not be turned into something else which might fit better into what the church, or the world, might have thought its 'authority' should look like; that it is therefore the meaning of 'authority' itself, not that of scripture, that is the unknown in the equation, and that when this unknown is discovered it challenges head on the various notions and practices of authority endemic in the world and, alas, in the church also. I have suggested, less systematically, some ways in which this might be put into practice. All of this has been designed as a plea to the church to let the Bible be the Bible, and so to let God be God-and so to enable the people of God to be the people of God, his special people, living under his authority, bringing his light to his world. The Bible is not an end in itself. It is there so that, by its proper use, the creator may be glorified and the creation may be healed. It is our task to be the people through whom this extraordinary vision comes to pass. We are thus entrusted with a privilege too great for casual handling, too vital to remain a mere matter of debate. So what am I saying? I am saying that we mustn't belittle scripture by bringing the world's models of authority into it. We must let scripture be itself, and that is a hard task. Scripture contains many things that I don't know, and that you don't know; many things we are waiting to discover; passages which are lying dormant waiting for us to dig them out. Awaken them. We must then make sure that the church, armed in this way, is challenging the world's view of authority. So that, we must determine--corporately as well as individually-to become in a true sense, people of the book. Not people of the book in the Islamic sense, where this book just drops down and crushes people and you say it's the will of Allah, and I don't understand it, and I can't do anything about it. But, people of the book in the Christian sense; people who are being remade, judged and remoulded by the Spirit through scripture. It seems to me that evangelical tradition has often become in bondage to a sort of lip-service scripture principle even while debating in fact how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (Not literally, but there are equivalents in our tradition.) Instead, I suggest that our task is to seize this privilege with both hands, and use it to the gory of God and the redemption of the world.
The Challenge to the world's authority structures and concepts
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