In this post, I will continue discussing scripture by describing my concept of biblical authority. I began part one of this four-part series with Paul’s words to his prodigy, Timothy,

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:14-17)

I covered inspiration in the last part, but now I want to turn to the idea the Bible is authoritative. I want to suggest that the Bible is authoritative in two different ways.

God’s revelation to us

The Bible is God’s primary revelation to us. No other book tells us about him and his story of salvation for his people and the redemption of the cosmos. It tells us about the Fathers of faith: Israel, God’s promised people. The Bible tells us of their unfaithfulness and God’s unrelenting love for them.

The Bible tells us that God became human for us, lived in our world, lived in our skin, and took on our experiences. It is the only book that tells us that Jesus died the death we deserve so that we might be saved from death. Then it tells us that he is risen so that we can be saved to live the life God always intended for us, eternally with him in the New Creation.

The Bible tells us the story of the Church and of the theology thrashed out in the to-and-fro of working out how to be a new people of God in a diverse community, including Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.

But there is a paradox in how I think about the authority of scripture. On the one hand, it cannot be changed. We cannot add to it or take away from it. In the best possible way, it is what it is, because the Bible is God’s story and is the story of how he came to live among us, die for us and rise again to give us hope in the person of Jesus.

On the other hand, it reveals that God, in his love, changes how he works with his people. The classic example of this is how, in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, God commanded the Israelites to keep his law. Moreover, the law functioned as a set of boundary markers to keep them holy: set apart from the other nations. Then, in the New Testament, we see an ethic that is consistent with the 10 Commandments in many ways, but all the Laws that acted as boundary markers to separate Jew and Gentile are torn down. Here, we have the same God dealing differently with his people because Jesus changed everything.

For me, this paradox means there is both consistency and dynamism in the authority of scripture. The Bible is always the authority in the respect that it is the source of God’s story and about who he reveals himself to us to be in Jesus Christ. That authority is also dynamic because it helps us to think about how to live well in our life today, even though our situation is very different to the world in which scripture was written.

Guide for Life

But there is another sense that I believe the Bible is the authority; as the word of God, it should be able to tell us how to live. If we read this story well; if we read the wisdom literature and listen to its ethical directions, we will hear God’s directions to us of how to live. Not just survive this life but begin to thrive as he intended us to live. But don’t hear me wrong; I am not saying some old stale legalism, where people use scripture’s words to force straight-jackets on to others. If I read Jesus right, nothing made him angrier. Think about when he tore strips off the hypocritical Pharisees and teachers of the law. He began by saying: 

They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. (Mat 23:4)

No, what I mean is simply this: am I open to allowing the Spirit to use the Bible to convict me of how I need to live?

To finish with another example. As I read Galatians, I am struck by how difficult the early church found it to work out how to move from being a largely Jewish community to one that embraced Jews and Gentiles together. Yet Paul was emphatic that Christ united people, no matter how the people in Galatia differed. Yes, living in unity is hard, but we cannot compromise on unity to feel more comfortable in our cliques.  My church is on a Bicultural journey of becoming increasingly a place where Pākeha and Māori people can worship God together in our different ways and customs.^1* The question for me is, how much am I taking seriously the authority of scripture for my life, and thus acknowledging the implicit racism of my past and instead actively pursuing that vision of unity across racial divisions today? 

1. Pākeha is the Māori word for a person of European descent. But I also recognise it as a
   terms of self-identity that extends beyond European ethnicity: even though I am Dutch, I can live in Aotearoa/New Zealand because Māori agreed to make a treaty with the British (Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi), which made it possible for those of us who are not the indigenous people of the land to live here freely. ↩︎