How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? by N.T. Wright

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 remolded 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 glory of God and the redemption of the world.

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My conclusion, then, is this: that the regular views of scripture and its authority which we find not only outside but also inside evangelicalism fail to do justice to what the Bible actually is—a book, an ancient book, an ancient narrative book.  They function by tuning that book into something else, and by implying thereby that God has, after all, given us the wrong sort of book.  This is a low doctrine of inspiration, whatever heights are claimed for it and whatever words beginning with ‘in-’ are used to label it.  I propose that what we need to do is to re-examine the concept of authority itself and see if we cannot do a bit better.

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Supposing we said that we know what scripture is (we have it here, after all), and that we should try and discover what authority might be in the light of that.  Granted that this is the book that we actually have, and that we want to find out what its ‘authority’ might mean, we need perhaps to forswear our too-ready ideas about ‘authority’ and let them be remolded in the light of scripture itself—not just in the light of the biblical statements about authority but in the light of the whole Bible, or the whole New Testament, itself.  What are we saying about the concept of ‘authority’ itself if we assert that this book—not the book we are so good at turning this book into—is ‘authoritative’?

Beginning, though, with explicit scriptural evidence about authority itself, we find soon enough—this is obvious but is often ignored—that all authority does indeed belong to God.  ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’.  God says this, God says that, and it is done.  Now if that is not authoritative, I don’t know what is.  God calls Abraham; he speaks authoritatively.  God exercises authority in great dynamic events (in Exodus, the Exile and Return).  In the New Testament, we discover that authority is ultimately invested in Christ: ‘all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth’.  Then, perhaps to our surprise, authority is invested in the apostles: Paul wrote whole letters in order to make this point crystal clear (in a manner of speaking).  This authority, we discover, has to do with the Holy Spirit.  And the whole church is then, and thereby, given authority to work within God’s world as his accredited agent(s).  From an exceedingly quick survey, we are forced to say: authority, according to the Bible itself, is vested in God himself, Father, Son and Spirit.

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God is not a celestial information service to whom you can apply for answers on difficult questions.  Nor is he a heavenly ticket agency to whom you can go for moral or doctrinal permits or passports to salvation.  He does not stand outside the human process and merely comment on it or merely issue you with certain tickets that you might need.  Those views would imply either a deist’s God or a legalist’s God, not the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ and the Spirit.  And it must be said that a great many views of biblical authority imply one or other of those sub-Christian alternatives.

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But, once we say that God’s authority is like that, we find that there is a challenge issued to the world’s view of authority and to the church’s view of authority.  Authority is not the power to control people, and crush them, and keep them in little boxes.  The church often tries to do that—to tidy people up.  Nor is the Bible as the vehicle of God’s authority meant to be information for the legalist.  We have to apply some central reformation insights to the concept of authority itself.  It seems to me that the Reformation, once more, did not go quite far enough in this respect, and was always in danger of picking up the mediaeval view of authority and simply continuing it with, as was often said, a paper pope instead of a human one.  Rather, God’s authority vested in scripture is designed, as all God’s authority is designed, to liberate human beings, to judge and condemn evil and sin in the world in order to set people free to be fully human.  That’s what God is in the business of doing.  That is what his authority is there for. And when we use a shorthand phrase like ‘authority of scripture’ that is what we ought to be meaning.  It is an authority with this shape and character, this purpose and goal.

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They had scripture on their side, so it seemed.  They had tradition on their side; after all, Yahweh was the God of Battles and he would fight for Israel.  They had reason on their side; Israel and Judah together can beat these northern enemies quite easily.  But they didn’t have God on their side.

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Micaiah had stood in the council of the Lord and in that private, strange, secret meeting he had learned that even the apparent scriptural authority which these prophets had, and the apparent tradition and reason, wasn’t good enough; God wanted to judge Ahab and so save Israel.  And so God delegated his authority to the prophet Micaiah who, inspired by the Spirit, stood humbly in the council of God and then stood boldly in the councils of men.  He put his life and liberty on the line, like Daniel and so many others.  That is how God brought his authority to bear on Israel: not by revealing to them a set of timeless truths, but by delegating his authority to obedient men through whose words he brought judgement and salvation to Israel and the world.

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The New Testament is written to be the charter for the people of the creator God in the time between the first and second comings of Jesus; the Old Testament forms the story of the earlier acts, which are (to be sure) vital for understanding why Act 4, and hence Act 5, are what they are, but not at all appropriate to be picked up and hurled forward into Act 5 without more ado.  The Old Testament has the authority that an earlier act of the play would have, no more, no less.  This is, of course, a demand for a more carefully worked out view of the senses in which the Old Testament is, and/or is not, ‘authoritative’ for the life of the church; I do not think that my model has settled the question once and for all, though I believe it offers a creative way forward in understanding at least the shape of the problem.  At the same time, the suggestion forms a counter-proposal to the suggestion of J D G Dunn in chapter 3 of his book, The Living Word.  There he implies, and sometimes states specifically, that since Jesus and Paul treated the Old Testament with a mixture of respect and cavalier freedom, we should do the same—with the New Testament![6]  But this would only hold if we knew in advance that there had been, between the New Testament and ourselves, a break in (for want of a better word) dispensation comparable to the evident break in dispensation between Acts 3 and 4, between Old Testament and Jesus.  And we know no such thing,

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Thus, there is a hard thing which has to be said here, and it is this: that there is a sense in which the Old Testament is not the book of the church in the same way that the New Testament is the book of the church.  Please do not misunderstand me.  The Old Testament is in all sorts of important senses reaffirmed by Paul and Jesus and so on-it is the book of the people of God, God’s book, God’s word etc.  But, the Old Testament proclaims itself to be the beginning of that story which has now reached its climax in Jesus; and, as the letter to the Hebrews says, ‘that which is old and wearing out is ready to vanish away’, referring to the temple.  But it is referring also to all those bits of the Old Testament which were good (they weren’t bad, I’m not advocating a Marcionite position, cutting off the Old Testament) but, were there for a time as Paul argues very cogently, as in Galatians 3.  The New Testament, building on what God did in the Old, is now the covenant charter for the people of God.  We do not have a temple, we do not have sacrifices—at least, not in the old Jewish sense of either of those.  Both are translated into new meanings in the New Testament.  We do not have kosher laws.  We do not require that our male children be circumcised if they are to be part of the people of God. We do not keep the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath.  Those were the boundary markers which the Old Testament laid down for the time when the people of God was one nation, one geographical entity, with one racial and cultural identity.  Now that the gospel has gone worldwide we thank God that he prepared the way like that; but it is the New Testament now which is the charter for the church.

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Why is authority like this?  Why does it have to be like that?  Because God (as in Acts 1 and Matthew 28, which we looked at earlier) wants to catch human beings up in the work that he is doing.  He doesn’t want to do it by-passing us; he wants us to be involved in his work.  And as we are involved, so we ourselves are being remade.  He doesn’t give us the Holy Spirit in order to make us infallible—blind and dumb servants who merely sit there and let the stuff flow through us.  So, he doesn’t simply give us a rule book so that we could just thumb through and look it up.  He doesn’t create a church where you become automatically sinless on entry.  Because, as the goal and end of his work is redemption, so the means is redemptive also: judgement and mercy, nature and grace.  God does not, then, want to put people into little boxes and keep them safe and sound.  It is, after all, possible to be so sound that you’re sound asleep.  I am not in favor of unsoundness; but soundness means health, and health means growth, and growth means life and vigor and new directions.  The little boxes in which you put people and keep them under control are called coffins.  We read scripture not in order to avoid life and growth.  God forgive us that we have done that in some of our traditions.  Nor do we read scripture in order to avoid thought and action, or to be crushed, or squeezed, or confined into a de-humanizing shape, but in order to die and rise again in our minds.  Because, again and again, we find that, as we submit to scripture, as we wrestle with the bits that don’t make sense, and as we hand through to a new sense that we haven’t thought of or seen before, God breathes into our nostrils his own breath—the breath of life.  And we become living beings—a church recreated in his image, more fully human, thinking, alive beings.

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That, in fact, is (I believe) one of the reasons why God has given us so much story, so much narrative in scripture.  Story authority, as Jesus knew only too well, is the authority that really works.  Throw a rule book at people’s head, or offer them a list of doctrines, and they can duck or avoid it, or simply disagree and go away.  Tell them a story, though, and you invite them to come into a different world; you invite them to share a world-view or better still a ‘God-view’.  That, actually, is what the parables are all about.  They offer, as all genuine Christian story-telling the does, a world-view which, as someone comes into it and finds how compelling it is, quietly shatters the world-view that they were in already.  Stories determine how people see themselves and how they see the world.  Stories determine how they experience God, and the world, and themselves, and others.  Great revolutionary movements have told stories about the past and present and future.  They have invited people to see themselves in that light, and people’s lives have been changed.  If that happens at a merely human level, how much more when it is God himself, the creator, breathing through his word.

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God forgive us that we have taken the Bible and have made it ordinary—that we have cut it down to our size.  We have reduced it, so that whatever text we preach on it will say basically the same things.  This is particularly a problem for second and third-generation movements of which the rather tired and puzzled evangelicalism in many British churches today is a good example.  What we are seeing in such preaching is not the authority of scripture at work, but the authority of a tradition, or even a mere convention masquerading as the authority of scripture-which is much worse, because it has thereby lost the possibility of a critique or inbuilt self-correction coming to it from scripture itself.

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Scripture is the book that assures us that we are the people of God when, again and again, we are tempted to doubt.  Scripture is the covenant book, not just in order that we can look up our pedigree in it and see where we came from (Abraham and so on), but the book through which the Spirit assures a that we are his people and through which he sends us out into the world to tell the Jesus story, that is, the Israel story which has become the Jesus story which together is God’s story for the world.  And as we do that in the power of the Spirit, the miracle is that it rings true and people out there in the world know, in this or that fashion, that this strange story which we are telling does in fact run deeper than the world’s stories.  It does in fact tell them truths which they half-knew and had rather hoped to forget.  It is the story which confirms the fact that God had redeemed the world in Jesus Christ.  It is the story which breaks open all other world-views and, by so doing, invites men and women, young and old, to see this story as their story. In other words, as we let the Bible be the Bible, God works through us-and it-to do what he intends to do in and for the church and the world.

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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 (i.e. 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.

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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).

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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).  Rath >

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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.

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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.

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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 remolded 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 glory of God and the redemption of the world.

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