ken wilson online

I wonder if we’ve had the emphasis on the wrong syllable on the pressing issue of authority.  Speaking big picture, long time frame here.  The church at it’s inception had one creed: Jesus is Lord.  Simple.  All authority in heaven and on earth given to him, Jesus. What rolls off our tongue like a tired chorus, was, on their lips, incendiary. Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not, and Apollos is not and Astarte is not and the moon and the sun and the stars are not….and the powers and principalities that hold sway in this world are not.  Every knee shall bow before the One not the many, not the several, not the few.

In time the creed became a respectable religion, useful for ordering a failing empire. A prop for an order different than the kingdom of God.  And empires and orders are sustained by authority.  And divisions beset the Jesus movement as they always had. These divisions were settled, it was thought, by a clear answer to the authority question. Where doth ultimate authority reside?  The church, it was said.  The magisterium of the church.  The church and her councils and her bishops and cardinals and ultimately, her Pope, seated in the chair of Peter.  The answer held for centuries….

It held for centuries because it worked. The gathered community does bear a kind of authority.  There is binding and loosing granted by the founder to the followers.  Better this than the anarchy of every man, every crackpot prophet, every charismatic leader, holding sway.

enter sola scriptura

But it didn’t hold, ultimately. So the church regrouped, and many of her sons and daughters began to see themselves instead as brothers and sisters.  The church may be our mother, but we have a father and he has a Son and we are all his brothers and sisters, together a royal priesthood, thank you. Not wanting any other mediator between God and man save the God-Man Jesus.   But they too wrestled together over this question of ultimate authority, perhaps because they had a society to hold together, one ruled by Christian rulers, and it wasn’t an option for them to have a mystical answer to the authority question; they needed to hold a fracturing empire together, and so they said, The Bible.  The Bible only is the final arbiter.

They said this, remember, at a time when there was not a Bible in every home.  There were leaders who were expert in the Bible and more copies circulating than ever, but still, the Bible was, shall we say, better contained than it now is.

And a great movement of reform was ushered in.  A great reordering and re-prioritizing, with much fruit, and it must be admitted, much mess.  A kind of chaos and anarchy that understandably horrified our brothers and sister who settled on the older answer to the authority question–the church as the final arbiter in matters of faith and practice, is the final word.

The Bible.  The Church. The Church. The Bible.

Two great necessities, two great goods.  Two products of inspiration of the highest order.  A church born on Pentecost, breathed into existence by the Spirit, against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. And a text, a collection of writings, originating in the first-hand experience of the Spirit, God-breathed, inspired and discovered through experience to be a window into the mind and heart and presence of God.

what happened to jesus only?

Something about this great debate never set well with me, as though it presented us with the only two choices.  To choose one is to be a Roman Catholic, to choose the other, a Protestant, both of which seem lesser identities than the one I signed up for: to be a disciple of Jesus.

I wasn’t satisfied because one of my earliest teachers in the Jesus movement was a Jewish believer in Jesus, Haskell Stone, who didn’t relate to European Gentile Christianity as those who came to faith through the Gentile grafting.  Haskell was a man who didn’t necessarily trust the answers settled in the Gentile church wars.  Wars in which there was no Jewish messianic voice.

I’ve spent most of my believing life in close connection with Roman Catholics and Reformation Protestants.  But always with an awareness that this fight took place 500 years ago, without the voice of the Jewish believers in Jesus.  So I don’t trust the outcome arrived at 500 years ago.  I don’t trust Martin Luther or John Calvin or the Radical Reformers as having settled the thing once and for all.  But the answer of the Roman Catholic Church–that she in her institutional expression is the final arbiter, the final authority–well, no, as wonderful a thing as it would be to have such a tidy answer, I’m not persuaded.

The other day though, several weeks back, in prayer the following words presented themselves to me: “The father loves the son and has entrusted him with complete authority. Whoever puts his faith in the Son has eternal life. Whoever disobeys the Son will not see life; God’s wrath rests on him.” (Jn 3: 35-36)

I was moved to kneel, then an there, before the Son entrusted with complete authority.   And as I knelt it became clear that in kneeling before him, I was to kneel before no other.  The prospect of kneeling before the Church was clearly forbidden as was the prospect of kneeling before the Bible, even if before me lay the original manuscripts themselves.

A frightening thing, to kneel before the One entrusted by the Father with complete authority.  And like fear itself, at times, strangely clarifying.

The church only, scripture only, where can these phrases be found as the answer to the question of authority?  God alone is King, and he has entrusted his complete authority to the Son, knowing that authority has to be mediated through some means.  But the Son, and only the Son, is the means.

We humans though, concerned for unity, and having a practical bent, recoil at the thought.  People can claim anything, and societies require ordering, and Jesus is simply not–what?–available enough?  We need a group of fully authorized others–the magisterium of the church.  Or we need a text and an agreed upon set of rules by which the text is interpreted, to settle matters of dispute, to be the final authority.

And I hasten to add, we do need a church and we do need a Bible, and thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, we have both.  But is it possible that we’ve misunderstood each by failing come to grips with the fact that the father has entrusted complete authority to Jesus?  Jesus only.

Why are we afraid to rest our souls there?

If the Son were dead and buried but not risen, not living, we might understandably cast ourselves before the complete authority of the church or of the Bible as the final arbiters.  These are surely the best second choices.

Why didn’t the Son, before his parting, tell his frightened disciples that he would provide them with a text and a proper set of instructions regarding the right interpretation of the text as the final arbiter in matters of faith and practice?

Because he understood that the Father was entrusting him with complete authority?  He would be the final arbiter and he would be available, having been raised to the power of an indestructible life?

Why has this not been our answer to the authority question since it is his answer?

Perhaps because we consider it to be an insufficient answer.  But the question is, does he?

What if we believed that everything the Bible asserts about it’s own nature is true, but that our 500 year long understanding and articulation of the Bible’s nature may not be adequate?  Because, when it comes to the authority question, we’ve had the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble.

For 500 years we’ve been locked in a bitter battle.  It was a battle that began with blood letting, let us not forget.  People died in this battle at the hands of brothers and sisters.  The Protestants freed themselves from the tyranny of a church magisterium that claimed to be infallible yet seemed to them be patently fallible. They did this by asserting that the Bible only is the final arbiter, the final authority. In time, of course more than that was needed and so it was added, the bible properly interpreted according to rules that are–what?–generally agreed upon by the church or inferred from within the text itself, and then later, a text which is only definitively without error in the original manuscripts which are in the possession of no one to anyone’s knowledge. And so this battle continues. But did it settle the question?

Have we failed to emphasize the only answer we have been given in the text entrusted to the church: that the Father has entrusted COMPLETE AUTHORITY to the Son?

Have we forgotten the lesson of Mount Tabor? That when Moses and Elijah,the representatives of the Law & the Prophets–representative authors of the only Bible known to Jesus–stood before him conversing, and Peter said, “Stay here, you three and I’ll make us a shelter!” and a dark cloud overshadowed as if to convey the displeasure of God over such a foolish suggestion and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son!  Listen to HIM!” and when the cloud had passed there was Jesus only.  Sola Jesus: listen to him as he is in charge.  Receive the church that he left behind. Receive the book that was his book because it was his book.  But understand that he has been given complete authority.

These have been my musings of late.  Musings.  Hence, a blog post.  Not an assertion, a flag planted in the ground.  But a serious kind of wondering.  Have we missed something over the last 500 years of wrangling?

The test I think would be to kneel, literally, all who can, before the Son as the one entrusted by the Father with complete authority.  Perhaps for a long while, and frequently.

The test, furthermore, I think, would be to see if this kneeling before the Son would reshape our understanding of the Church and of the Bible, such that they were even more important than they now are.  (For all our rancorous asserting that either the Church or the Bible is the final arbiter of truth, each has become less prominent in the lives of her members and its readers.  Is that telling us something?)

When the Son is properly elevated he elevates everyone and everything around him.

Would the Bible be experienced as MORE powerful by virtue of our acknowledging that the Father has entrusted complete authority to the Son, and to no other?  Would the Bible be experienced as MORE powerful if we understood that Jesus himself–a living and active word–is the Word, the Final Word, in person?

Would the Bible be for us, less a painting, to which we would turn  to settle the question of what God looks like, and more a window into the heart of Jesus, who is the Word, living and active?

Would we argue less about the Bible?  I doubt it.

Would we argue better?  I would hope so.

Tags: bible, church, final authority, protestant, roman catholic, transfiguration

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under jesus brand spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.