Catholics also recognise that the Scripture has a primary function for the church. They formulate statements about that primary function differently from Protestants, setting it beside what they consider to be other primary functions for the church, in addition to that of the Bible. For the Catholic the Bible is one primary authority. The living tradition of the church is another.
We can now put our point in historical terms. When Christians testify to their present experience, they claim that the Bible has mediated to them the revelation of God and as such an instrument is an irreplaceable means of that revelation. By means of this book they have come to know his love, his demand, his forgiveness, his call, his succour. The claim about these writings from the very beginning is the claim that they are a part of the total event of God’s revelation through Jesus Christ, that they are instruments creative of Christian faith and of the Christian community. There was a point in history when Christian faith had its beginning. It is because of this event and of the connection of the Christian writings with this event that these books have an irreplaceable position in the church.
Historically, these books are those which came out of the total event in which God revealed himself in Jesus Christ and established the Christian community upon the grounds of faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is these particular books and not others, these books we now call the New Testament, which have this particular historical status.
The New Testament books have a certain historical primacy. They are the historical deposit of the movement of the first century of our era, which included the life and death of Jesus and the coming into being of the Christian church. These documents are unique in that they have survived from this crucial and formative period. Thus they cannot be replaced by later documents, important and even primary as such other documents may be. The historical primacy these documents, our New Testament, have, ensure their irreplaceability as mediating to us our knowledge of that Christian movement whose faith in Jesus Christ we have come to share. They bear witness to that faith. We, in our turn, bear witness to what they bore witness to. Something literary remains of their witness. These are our primary documents reporting it, recording it.
The Old Testament writings participated in this formative event, the Christ-event. They provided the ideas, the means for interpreting what happened. They make it possible for Christians to regard Jesus Christ as the fulfilment of human and Hebrew history. They provide the background for the events which had recently taken place when the New Testament began to be written. The New Testament writings are historically irreplaceable. They are the bridge from Jesus to the church. In this sense we may speak of their apostolicity. The apostles were those who first publicly proclaimed their faith in Jesus Christ, and interpreted his life and death from the viewpoint of their faith in him. They were the first leaders in the church and assumed the task of public witnessing. The term ‘apostolicity’ connotes their distinctive features, their priority as preachers of the Christian gospel. They provide the link with the earliest Christian faith and with the historical Jesus. So the term has sometimes been applied to the books of the New Testament.
Apostolicity does not mean that because a book is written by an apostle its special status is guaranteed. Conversely, it does not mean that we must demonstrate that a book is written by an apostle before we accept its authority. The specific identity of the author is relatively unimportant. The books are the instruments of God’s saving revelation in Jesus Christ without the author being specifically identified. To identify an author is an historical task, and the continuing faith of the church does not depend upon our success or failure at establishing such historical facts. Whoever wrote it, the book does what it does. That is the important thing. It does now and it did from the beginning mediate the reality of God. This is recognized in church doctrine by attributing the effectiveness of the proclamation of Scripture to the activity of the Holy Spirit. The Bible has authority if and when God mediates himself through it. Should one then wish to speak of the apostolicity of the New Testament books one can certainly do so. The term ‘apostle’ is reserved for those who were the first to announce the good news about Jesus. The books share with the men who were apostles that they are the primary historical witnesses to the resurrection, to faith in Jesus Christ. In the one case such primary historical witnesses were human beings. In the other case they are writings. In both cases they have an irreplaceable historical position. They are the first, and in that sense the primary, witnesses of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and its meaning. These books continue to be the means, as they were from the time of their writing, for understanding and for experiencing the Christian faith. As in the case of the human apostle, the book is what it is because of what it does and because of what it has done. It is its effectiveness and its historical position that constitutes its apostolicity.
3 INTERPRETATION AND TRADITION
It is clear that we need an appropriate concept of authority when we speak of the ‘authority of the Bible.’ We shall discuss the meaning of the word to some purpose as we discover how it is used by those who acknowledge that authority. The community of faith recognizes the Bible. We must give due consideration to the implications of that recognition. The Bible has always held a unique position in the church. So also has the interpreter, the teacher, the charismatic leader. The Bible ‘speaks’ only as someone interprets it, and, in turn, only as someone understands it.
The Bible is a text. That means that it has fixed foci: so many books, so many chapters. It is a set of writings arranged in an order. The words are there, once written by hand, now printed. Whether in some translation or another, or in the original languages, the Bible is a text. As a text it is fixed and static. There are the scrolls, the original pages. There is the book bound between two covers, now sitting on the shelf, now open on the desk, now closed on the table. In what sense can we speak, then, of the authority of the Bible? How can we say that the Bible is the living and challenging word of God, when the Bible is a book of silent words, ink-marks on paper? The Bible has no authority simply by being there, whoever ‘wrote’ it and whatever the circumstances of its ‘writing.’ Does the Bible have authority only when someone in the community interprets and expounds it? In that case does not the teacher, the interpreter, wield the authority by virtue of his ability to interpret the text, which text would otherwise be a dead letter? Is not the authority then within the church which engages in the activity, and exercises control over the process of interpreting the Bible? Does not the church draw limits, give guidance and impose sanctions concerning what the Bible means and how it is to be interpreted? Indeed, is it not the case that the church produced the Bible, that the church decided which books it would accept as Scripture and which books it would reject? Is the authority then not rather of the church than of the Bible? If so we decide the question about authority discerning the church’s attitude to the Bible.
Moreover, interpretations of what the Bible means, when endorsed and agreed upon, are passed on from one generation to the next so that an accepted meaning becomes widely recognized within a particular community. That meaning then has become a tradition. The tradition then provides guidance in indicating what
Scripture means, what is the right and proper interpretation of Scripture. The particular tradition guides the reader by providing him with the questions and the concepts with which to read and interpret the Bible. This church, that church, any church says: ‘This is how we read the Bible,’ and then refers you to its teachings, which it claims are the teachings of the Bible or are related to the Bible. When we come to inquire about the meaning of Scripture we are offered a particular tradition of understanding. So the authority lies in the tradition. It does not matter whether the tradition has its source in a council, in a creed, in the words of a reformer, or in the deliverances of a charismatic. If tradition is the means by which we understand Scripture, then the tradition has the real and primary authority. A particular church accepts a distinctive method of interpretation and produces a doctrinal system. Its reading of the Bible will reflect that doctrinal tradition. The authority then lies in the doctrinal system.
Appeal to the authority of Scripture may not, under analysis, turn out to be what it appears to be.
4 THE CONCEPT OF AUTHORITY
The term ‘authority’ refers to a relationship. It is a relational term. The