How is the authority of divine truth, which abides in and derives from God himself, transmitted or conveyed or shared with human beings? Conversely, what is the proper ranking of those channels for transmitting divine truth, including the Bible, which are available to Christians? Before we can adequately set forth the contemporary question, we need some historical perspective.
I. THE HISTORY OF THE PRINCIPLES OR PATTERNS OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY IN CHRISTIANITY#
The New Testament contains various statements about the existence of a body of Christian beliefs or truths and their transmission. Reference is made to:
“The faith,” probably in the sense of a body of teaching (Gal. 1:23; Col. 2:7; 1 Tim. 6:20c; Tit. l:13;Jude 3)
“One faith” (Eph. 4:5)
“Sound teaching” (2 Tim. 4:3; Tit. 1 :9)
“The good teaching” (1 Tim. 4:6)
“The sure word according to the teaching” (Tit. 1 :9)
By way of contrast, to “another gospel of a different kind” (Gal. 1:8)
Likewise the gospel (or a virtual synonym) is said to have been “passed down” or “transmitted” (Luke 1:2; 1 Cor. 11:2, 23; 15:3; Rom. 6:17;Jude 3), that which has been passed down or transmitted can be called “the traditions” (2 Thess. 2: 15; 1 Cor. 11 :2), and both the content and the fact of transmission together were called “what has been entrusted” ( 1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1: 14, RSV).
The word “tradition” could also have a negative connotation vis-a-vis incipient Gnosticism (Col. 2:8).
A. THE PATRISTIC AGE#
What standards or channels of religious truth were recognized or utilized by the Christians of the middle or latter first century A.D.?
Undoubtedly for a time the sayings of Jesus (Logia), together with accounts of his miracles and passion, circulated in oral form but how long this was true after the writing of the canonical Gospels is not clear.
The proclaimed central message (kerygma) of early Christianity, centering in the death-resurrection of Jesus, also seems to have been regarded as having authority (1 Cor. 15:3-4).
First-century Christians had the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), especially in the form of the Septuagint, which they interpreted in relation to Jesus as the Messiah and which they deemed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:20-21). Certain Christian prophets claiming the guidance of the Holy Spirit were operative and very likely heeded.
Some ethical teaching (didache), as distinct from the kerygma and as given in the latter parts of most of Paul’s epistles, may have been circulating and recognized among first-century Christians.
The books that would eventually comprise the New Testament were in existence before the end of the century, but to what extent they may have been considered distinctive channels of religious authority is not clear.
By the end of the second century a threefold pattern of religious authority began to be expressed in the writings of Christian authors such as lrenaeus and Tertullian. This pattern presupposed that the Old Testament books were Christian Scriptures, most likely in the extended canon
The Christian Scriptures of the new covenant, which by the latter second century clearly included the four Gospels and the Pauline epistles
The “Rule of Faith,” a triadic confession in a Trinitarian form with an expanded Christo logical section, the language of which was becoming more fixed
The concept that those bishops or presbyters who served in direct succession to those apostles who had founded their particular churches had indeed received and transmitted apostolic truth in contrast to the falsehoods of the heretics.
In the face of heresy the church would find that the rule of faith and the apostolic teaching would serve as the key to interpretation of the Scriptures, and these would be coordinate channels of religious authority.
By the fourth century creeds and church councils had become a part of the pattern of authority.
Creeds, probably developed from baptismal and catechetical questions and certainly finalized amid theological controversy, came to be used as standards for true Christian beliefs and teaching,
Episcopal councils, both ecumenical and regional, became during the post-Constantinian era the normal means for resolving theological disputes
By the time of the episcopate of Leo of Rome (440-61) more ecclesiastical authority was attributed to the bishop of Rome, even as Leo was setting forth the doctrine of Pettine primacy, but this did not mean that he could dominate the ecumenical councils being held in the East.
Appeal was also being made to the teaching common among the earlier Fathers:
Vincent of Lerins in the middle of the fifth century affirmed the sufficiency of the Scriptures and laid down a threefold criterion of church tradition
Gregory the Great (590-604) was appealing to the authority of the teaching of the early Fathers and of the first four ecumenical councils
B. EASTERN ORTHODOXY#
The appeal to the Scriptures and to apostolic tradition through the Fathers and the councils was made normative in the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches of the East, which espoused continuity, not change. In later centuries the Orthodox Church reckoned as seven - from Nicea I (325) through Nicea II (787) - the number of recognized and hence authoritative ecumenical councils.
Orthodoxy accepted the shorter canon of the Old Testament, and the Nestorian Church never received Jude or Revelation into its canon of the New Testament. Orthodoxy and the non-Chalcedonian churches rejected the Western elevation of the authority of the bishop of Rome.
C. THE MEDIEVAL WEST#
Medieval Western Christianity had a concept of authority quite similar to the later patristic view. The Scriptures and church tradition, not in unwritten form but as patristic writings, were both authoritative.
No description of the medieval conception of authority can refuse to ask to what extent the church as institution with its hierarchical structure participated in the actual shaping of religious authority, and this would include both the papal office and those councils held in the West and recognized as erumenical by the West, though not by the East.
Georges Henri Tavard (1922) has contended that not until the fourteenth cenrury was there the breakdown of the doctrine of the coinherence of the Scriptures and church tradition and the result of that breakdown, the idea that tradition was oral and pluriform. But Protestant and other authors have disagreed, tracing the idea of numerous extrabiblical traditions back as far as Tertullian.
During the fifteenth cenrury writers as diverse as Peter d’Ailly (1350-1420), a Conciliarist, Thomas Netter (c.1377-1430), an opponent of Wycliffe and Hus, and John of Turrecremata (1388-1468), an opponent of Conciliarism, espoused the transmission of authoritative oral or nonwritten traditions.
D. THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION#
The Protestant Reformation was characterized by a shift from the authority of the Church to the authority of the Scriptures, without the Old Testament Apocrypha. Likewise, the supreme authority of the Scriptures has been called “the formal principle” of the Reformation. But not every Protestant leader or movement in the sixteenth century took the same stance on authority.
Among the magisterial Reformers the level of unity on authority was fairly high. Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Martin Bucer (1491-1551), and Calvin affirmed the Scriptures as the Word of God and placed them above popes, councils, and creeds. These Reformers, when explicating the Trinity or Christology, drew heavily upon the first four ecumenical councils.
The radical Reformers stood with the magisterial Reformers in the rejection of “the medieval synthesis of Scripture, tradition, and papal authority.”
Anabaptists elevated the New Testament, which they interpreted literally as a kind of “new law,” above the Old Testament, including the Old Testament Apocrypha, which they interpreted typologically and allegorically.
For the Spiritualists authority centered in the relationship of the Son of God or the Holy Spirit to the inner Word and/or to the inner spirit of man.
Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) taught that the Bible “may contain things above reason” but “does not contain anything contrary to reason” and hence the “Bible reader must be at pains to ascertain the rational sense of Scripture.”
The New Testament stands above the Old Testament because it announces immortality and has a higher ethic.
The Council of Trent adopted a doctrinal decree on the written Scriptures and the unwritten traditions which constituted the Roman Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation’s challenge respecting authority. The Tridentine bishops declared that the gospel, which had been “first promulgated” by Jesus “with His own mouth” and which Jesus had commanded the apostles to preach “to every creature,” is the “fountain” of all “saving truth and moral discipline.”
For four centuries this decree was strictly interpreted as teaching two distinct sources of authority, written Scriptures and unwritten traditions.
E. THE POST-REFORMATION ERA#
During the seventeenth century Lutheran and Reformed theologians gave expression to a form of theological orthodoxy, sometimes called Protestant Scholasticism, in which the Bible was held to be the Word of God, “for God speaks to us in Scripture” and God speaks to Christians today only through the Scriptures, divinely inspired by the Triune God as revelation put to writing.
The autographs of the inspired Scriptures only were inerrant in all areas (not just doctrine and ethics), and there is harmony between the two testaments and among the books of the Bible. The Scriptures, moreover, are intrinsically authoritative, having both internal and external evidences of such authority and indeed also the internal witness of the Holy Spirit, so that, contra Rome, the Scriptures do not have to be validated by the church. The text of the Scriptures is authentic even to the extent of the Hebrew vowel points. Hence the Scriptures are the only “source” of “supernatural theology” and are “the only norm of Christian doctrine.”
Very different indeed were the concepts of authority common to English Deism and the Continental Enlightenment. Here in progressive steps or stages, revealed or biblical truth was held to be supplementary and superior to the truths obtained through reason, not to be contrary to the judgment of reason, and finally to be subject to and hence overruled by the demands of reason.
Other movements such as Puritanism, Pietism, and Wesleyanism maintained the supreme authority of the Bible for Christian doctrine but interpreted biblical authority so that it evoked and undergirded Christian piety or experience.
Richard Sibbes (1577-1635) used the figurative language of the Scriptures in his plain, spiritual preaching
Richard Baxter (1615-91) majored on biblical promises about the heavenly rest in his providing of guidelines for Protestant meditation
Gerrard Winstanley (1609-after 1660), taking the Bible as a ‘report’ of the revelations by the Spirit to prophets and apostles, saw it as authorizing his call for the common people to plant the common land
John Milton championed the clarity, plainness, power, and veracity of the Scriptures in contrast to tradition and hierarchical and ceremonial religion and coupled with these marks the renovating work of the Spirit
John Bunyan skillfully employed the metaphors and events of the Bible so “as to give shape and meaning to the spiritual life” of his readers from justification by faith all the way to the New Jerusalem.
John Wesley (1703-91) recognized the supreme authority of the Bible but attributed to reason a secondary role as “the handmaid of faith, the setvant of revelation.”
F. THE MODERN ERA#
Beginning with Schleiermacher, Liberal Protestantism shifted the locus of authority from the objective Scriptures to the religious consciousness or religious experience. The Ritschlian school emphasized value-judgments in Christianity, and the French Protestant, Louis August Sabatier (1839-1901), rejecting the religions of authority - whether of the church or of the Bible, espoused a religion of the Spirit.
Vatican Council I (1869-70), reaffirming the primacy of Peter and of the Church at Rome and the finality of his judgments and restating the two-level view of natural theology derived from reason and supernatural theology obtained through faith, declared that the teaching authority (magisterium) of the Catholic Church reaches its climax in the exercise by the pope of infallibility.
Reacting against Liberal Protestantism and that thoroughgoing form of it which both Roman Catholics and Protestants at the beginning of the twentieth century were calling Modernism, Protestant Fundamentalism, especially in the United States, rejected the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible and reasserted the plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible, the inerrancy of the autographs of biblical books, and the supreme authority of the Bible for Christian doctrine and life together with certain doctrines related to Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
The Continental Neoorthodox theologians, rejecting much of the theology of Liberal Protestantism, affirmed the authority of the Word of God - not in the sense that the Bible itself can be fully and rightly called the Word of God but in the sense that the Bible may become the Word of God when God speaks by encounter to modern man through it. They had no place for plenary verbal inspiration or for biblical inerrancy.
Vatican Council II (1962-65), while reaffirming the decrees of Trent and Vatican I, put less emphasis on a twofold approach to the Scriptures and unwritten traditions, preferring to speak of “Tradition” (singular), and declared that both “make up a single sacred deposit of the word of God, which is entrusted to the Church.”
Likewise, without undercutting papal infallibility, the council affirmed that the bishops, gathered in an ecumenical council, can also exercise infallible teaching authority when they concur among themselves and when the pope agrees.
II. THE MAJOR OPTIONS CONCERNING RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY#
According to the Christian revelation of God, ultimate truth and the authority of that truth rest in God himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Jesus as the Son of God is the supreme earthly and historical embodiment of divine truth (John 14:6)
Jesus both attributed truth to God the Father (John 3:34-35; 5:36b-37a) and promised that it would be made available through “the Spirit of truth” (John 16: 13)
For Christians, the controverted theological issue is not whether truth does indeed rest in and derive from God, but instead how and where this divine truth is faithfully and responsibly transmitted or communicated to humans, and especially to Christians.
A. CHURCH AND TRADITION: CATHOLIC CHRISTIANITY#
Catholic Christianity, whether Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Old Catholic or Monophysite, has placed high on the list of channels of religious authority the historic or institutional church in perpetuity and what may be called ecclesiastical tradition and authority.
This is not to say that Catholic Christianity has officially and unambiguously placed church and tradition above the Scriptures in the order of channels of religious authority. Rather the authority of the Bible is normally qualified by the authority of church and tradition in Catholic Christianity.
Eastern Orthodoxy, while affirming the authority of the Old and the New Testaments, holds to the special and unique authority of seven early ecumenical councils: Nicaea I (325), Constantinople I (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople II (553), Constantinople III (680-681), and Nicaea II (787).
Roman Catholicism, while recognizing the authority of twenty-one ecumenical councils - Vatican II being the twenty-first - stresses the present-day magisterium (teaching authority) of the church as that reaches its climax in the office of the pope, to whom is ascribed infallibility when functioning as the supreme pastor and teacher. Both the canonical Scriptures and unwritten traditions are held to be authoritative, along with the magisterium.
B. THE SCRIPTURES OF THE OLD AND THE NEW TESTAMENTS: CLASSICAL PROTESTANT CHRISTIANITY#
Protestant Christianity in its more classical forms has placed at the top of the list of channels of religious authority the Bible, or the canonical Scriptures.
Protestants sometimes have acknowledged the work of the Church Fathers in formulating such doctrines as the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ.
Protestants have framed and utilized confessions of faith, but these same confessions have repeatedly affirmed the supreme or final authority of the Bible, always above any creeds or confessions of faith or church councils or private religious experiences or opinions.
C. THE DIVINE-HUMAN ENCOUNTER: VARIOUS MOVEMENTS#
A third channel of religious authority in Christianity may be identified by the all-embracing term, “the divine-human encounter.” Its advocates include Catholic mystics, Quakers, Llberal Protestants, existentialists, and others. When elevated to the first position among the channels of religious authority, the divine-human encounter judges both the Scriptures and churchly tradition.
Medieval Western Catholic mystics stressed the mystical and sometimes non-historical path to God; notable among these were Hugh of St. Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Meister Eckhardt (c.1260-c.1327).
Quakers, or Friends, have described the encounter as “the Inner Llght.”
Robert Barclay (1648-90), the early Quaker theologian, taught the continued existence of “divine inward revelations” - “by the Spirit” - which do not “contradict” the Scriptures and do not need to be “subjected” to the Scriptures or to “natural reason,” for they “serve as their own evidence.”
Liberal Protestants, especially during the nineteenth century, stressed either the religious consciousness (“the feeling of absolute dependence upon God,” according to F.D.E. Schleiermacher), the human value:judgments in religion (according to Albrecht Ritschl), or the unfettered religion of the Spirit (according to August Sabatier).
Existentialist theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann and Gerhard Ebeling have emphasized the leap of faith and the transformation of historical - even if it still can be called that revelation into personal experience.
If and when present-day practition- ers of the spiritual gifts of speaking in tongues and prophecy should allow the exercise of their gifts to be a more authoritative source of religious truth than the written Scriptures, they would need to be reckoned under the divine-human encounter.
In summary, the advocates of the authority of the Bible normally rank the Bible first among the channels ofreligious authority, and the advocates of the authority of the divine-human encounter tend to rank that encounter first among the channels, but the advocates of the church and tradition do not formally assert that church and tradition should rank first among the channels but instead allow it to modify the authority of the Scriptures or to become de facto the primal channel.
III. THE QUEST FOR A VIABLE PATTERN OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY#
The issue as to religious authority among Christians today is not so much the question, “Which channel of religious authority is valid and to be recognized?” as it is the question, “What ranking is proper to the different channels of authority?”
James I. Packer has restated the case for the absolute necessity for sola Scriptura, but in a context in which he was explaining and defending the Reformers’ entire doctrine of Scripture. Some of Packer’s reasons for insisting on sola Scriptura can be met as well by suprema Scriptura, or the Bible as the supreme or highest channel of religious authority.
Rejection of the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church
Nondependence on popes and church councils for the interpretation of the Bible
Vivid awareness of the Bible as the Word of God
Rightful judging of what the church in each age has taught
Only the having of a single source for revealed truth would seem to necessitate sola Scriptura.
In Robert Charles Sproul’s (1939-) defense of sola Scriptura, in which he has made Luther’s doctrine of sola Scriptura to be a corollary of his doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible, Sproul has interpreted the Reformers’ sola Scriptura to mean that the Bible is not “the only authority in the church,” to be “the supreme norm of ecclesiastical authority,” and to allow for general revelation. Sproul indeed has defined sola Scriptura so as to mean suprema Scriptura.
In fact, Luther’s treatise, On the Councils and the Churches (1539), is marked evidence that Luther agreed with and recognized the validity of the doctrinal decisions of the early ecumenical councils. Furthermore, Lutheranism’s formulation and use of confessions of faith and catechisms are compatible with suprema Scriptura.
All the channels are designed to convey the authoritative truth of God in Jesus Christ. If and when, however, these nonbiblical channels should contradict the Scriptures, they must be rejected or corrected by the Scriptures. Yet at the same time we must be prepared to acknowledge that our very interpretation of texts of the Bible may have been influenced by one or more of the other channels of authority - church and tradition, the divine-human encounter, or a specific human culture or civilization.
In the ranking of the nonbiblical channels the more churchly forms of Christianity normally put the church and tradition in second place, and the more individualistic forms of Christianity normally put the divine-human encounter in second place.
IV. THE NATURE OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY#
If indeed the Bible is to be reckoned as the supreme standard or highest ranking channel of religious authority for Christians, how ought the authority of the Bible to be understood?
A. The Bible is authoritative primarily as a book of religion or of divine revelation. It is not a textbook on the natural sciences or a record of all ancient history. The Bible is the record of a historically mediated revelation of God centered in the mighty words and acts of God, and it derives its authority from the self-revealing and self-authenticating God.
B. The authority of the message of the Bible transcends the societal, geographical, and chronological matrix of the biblical books, and, contrary to the recent school of cultural relativism that alleges that the message of the Bible cannot be communicated to another nonbiblical culture, the message of the Bible can and does show itself to be communicatable to and applicable in numerous present-day cultures.
C. The authority of the Bible is that of the sovereign God, who commands and persuades but does not coerce human beings and who redeems or liberates but does not enslave human beings. When the nature and the authority of the Bible are rightly understood, there is no valid basis for the accusation that Christians engage in and are guilty of “Bibliolatry.”
D. The Bible is authoritative as it is accurately and faithfully interpreted in its historical context and by the criterion of Jesus Christ, who as the promise and the fulfillment is the central personage and theme of the Bible.
E. The Bible is authoritative as the Holy Spirit bestows illumination as to the significance and application of specific texts within and specific books of the Old and the New Testaments.