Spiritual Authority
Sophie Cartwright looks at various institutions’ claims to have it
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Photo: Freestockphoto.com
We are Christians. We believe in One God, Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth… in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord … we believe in the Holy Spirit … in one holy, catholic and apostolic church. We are Christians. We believe that Jesus Christ is saviour of the world. What does this mean? Ask someone else and see if they agree with you. People who fall under the umbrella term of Christian often disagree. How large a disagreement upon an important theological issue negates a person’s claims to Christianity? What about people who believe the right thing but accept as Christians others who believe the wrong thing? Throughout the ages, our faith has been torn apart by the need to define what we believe doctrinally and how we should act morally. We are desperate to define what we believe.
Christianity has met this desire for definition with attempts to find a clear, indisputable source of doctrine. It’s impossible to do theological justice to these attempts without writing several pages so I stress that the examples I give are illustrative rather than descriptively exhaustive. In the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, the church has generally been considered authoritative. Protestantism generally denies the institution of the church, or the body of believers, any intrinsic spiritual authority, recognising its fallibility and declaring the Bible to be the sole indisputable spiritual authority. Evangelical fundamentalists and those who believe church teaching to be infallible both appear to make simple claims and yet there is a wealth of disagreement upon what both of these concepts might mean. For instance, does Biblical inerrancy necessarily imply Biblical literalism? Does contextualisation indicate respect for or lack of faith in the text? Is the pope’s authority sacrosanct if the majority of the Roman Catholic Communion opposes its conclusions? Where, then, is the source of church authority to be found and on what basis? We want a tangible measure of divine authority, but our failure to find one, even within narrowly defined denominational groups and religious traditions, is almost comedic.
We need to find some common ground. That common ground, I hope, is God.
There are very few Christians who would deny that God wielded supreme spiritual authority and judgement. No worries then; we just need to listen to God. Unfortunately, I tend to have trouble hearing God and I don’t think I’m alone in this. Hence we need to find a way of verifying that it is God we’re hearing and not merely our own twisted consciences, echoing back at us. If we are able to measure our obedience, we can feel more certain that it’s real. Therefore, we claim that God speaks through some tangible earthly force and that to have faith in God we must have faith in this. This is what both Biblical literalists and Church Authoritarians are trying to do.
Evangelicals are now often accused of intellectual intransigence. It is ironic that the Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura was originally a liberating concept which allowed each believer to examine the spiritual canon for themselves, forming a spiritual relationship in which they, theoretically, were not obliged to defer to any living human. This is still true. My church at home is a fairly conservative evangelical Anglican church and I remember my youth leader telling us at a confirmation class “Don’t take anything I say, don’t take anything the church says, don’t take anything your parents say; look in the Bible.” It was liberating. I felt I could look at the Bible and know what God was saying to me. There was an absolute measure of God’s will, which had been ignored by the church. That was why the church had gone wrong. There was an explanation. It was very comforting. Unfortunately, such an attitude is intellectually unsupportable; it was through heated discussion in Early Church councils that the Bible was compiled. Nor is it possible to argue that the correct works shone out obviously as the Word of God. Some of the votes were very close; the Gospel of Thomas, apparently, was nearly made canon. Further, looking at the Bible now, I struggle with it. It is not obvious to me that it is the word of God, or even inspired by God. Indeed, I’ve heard several conversations where the integrity of the Bible is defended on the basis that it has self-evident worth against someone who attacked Biblical teaching as morally abhorrent. Accepting Biblical authority is an act of faith, which requires humility about personal moral judgements. The logical implication of this is at least a degree of faith in church authority.
There is something very comforting about a tangible source of doctrine on which people can agree, and from which we can agree on a wider range of spiritual issues. It is telling that most evangelicals would be very uncomfortable if you suggested, for example, that the theory of Penitentiary Substitution was unbiblical. This attitude reveals a desire, not only for a definite authority, but an authority that is easily decipherable. If well-meaning, intelligent, mature Christians can have major disagreements on what the Bible is saying whilst agreeing on the nature and extent of its authority, then Biblical authority somehow fails to work. When a discussion reveals a discrepancy in someone’s theological perspective, it is often assumed that this is due to mutual lack of Biblical knowledge. Frequently, this is the case; nonetheless, it shows a belief that if both parties had a comprehensive Biblical knowledge to hand, the disagreement would be impossible. Apparently, life is an exam to which God has given us the answer booklet. Emphasis on church authority is a response to the same very human desire for easy answers. It is acknowledged that the teachings of the Church change. How else can the Roman Catholic Church apologise for the Crusades? Again, where there is wide theological disagreement, the criteria for doctrinal authority is conveniently not met. A Catholic recently explained to me that there had been wide consensus on doctrine in the Roman Catholic Church from the time of St. Peter to the present day. “Of course, there were schismatics, but they were outside the body of the church.” This is a somewhat circular argument.
The claims of various Christian traditions to have accessed a tangible form of divine authority are not logically negated by the convenience of these claims. However, it is an uncomfortable observation that most woolly liberals who champion the claims of conscience do not ultimately receive a reasoned explanation of why verifiable forms of spiritual authority are more likely to be true. They receive a frustrated demand: “How do you know what you believe?”
There is no merit in believing for the sake of believing; believe only for the sake of truth. Examine your motives for adhering to a particular source of authority. Remember that God is the ultimate source. Why are we afraid to listen to him? Do we not believe he can speak? Of course conscience is fallible; good, intelligent people in full possession of the facts will continue to disagree on matters of conscience. Nonetheless, having struggled and informed your moral judgement as much as possible, each individual needs to act as they believe is right. Don’t negate your moral agency or your relationship with God by insisting that both are subjugated to a particular form of canon. Listen to God. Do what you believe is right and he will bless you even as you stumble. You can do no other.