It is the initial step which must be questioned, the initial acceptance of the authority, in this case the text of Scripture, as untouchable, as beyond question. What if any is the rational ground for taking this decisive step in the first place? Or is it irrational? At what point does one refuse to give reasons for one’s belief ?
5 THE EFFECTS OF THE BIBLE
It is as the Bible is effective within the church that the church is in a position to acknowledge its authority. It is when God has made his presence known within the church that the church is in a position to confess his present reality. As God’s presence becomes known through the instrumentality of the Bible, the church confesses the authority of the Bible. This means that the ‘question’ of the Bible’s ‘authority’ is a question about an answer which has already been found.
It is when the individual acknowledges the Bible as the means of God’s word, the avenue through which he ‘speaks’ to the individual and to the church as a community, as something which
has become real to one in one’s experience, that one can recognize the authority of the Bible. It is then a real and living thing. If the question of its authority comes up one then knows what the appropriate answer is. The Bible has exerted influence, has produced certain effects. You acknowledge that it has done so and agree that it has authority. This authority cannot be imposed upon you. You assent to it, agree that it is this way. In your acknowledgment you recognize something which comes to you. You do not constitute the Bible authoritative because and when you recognize it to have authority.
The authority of the Bible is ‘acceptable in the sense that, while independent of the person upon whom it imposes itself, it secures the assent of that person.’36 The person does not assent because some authority insists that the Bible must be believed. The believer should not be irrational. The believer acknowledges the Bible because it has become the instrument through which God has made himself known, whatever other instruments or agents may have been involved in the process. The Bible is a constant factor in the complex process which results in the Christian confession of faith. The term ‘assent’ therefore is rather misleading.
6 ACCEPTANCE, RECOGNITION
The believer responds, makes a judgment. He is aware of and responsible for what he hears and experiences of the word of God. In saying this we avoid one-sidedness. The Bible is not an external authority imposed on the believer by another external authority. If it can be and sometimes is, the believer himself being a willing accessory in the process, that is to misunderstand. It is to avoid this, while not reducing the word of God, or the testimony of the Spirit, to the believer’s or the church’s experience, we must hold firmly to two complementary assertions when we speak of the authority of the Bible:
1 Its authority is not constituted authoritative by our acceptance and recognition of it.
2 Our recognition of it is essential to its having authority. The recognition or acknowledgment of this authority takes place when the Bible has had and continues to have the effect upon the believer, of evoking and nurturing Christian faith. In the words of C. H Dodd,
a book is as external as a church, or rather it is much more so. The act of faith which accepts the authority of the Bible is as purely individual a judgment as that which accepts the authority of the church. What is the ground of it? . . . . Really — may we not say? — he believes the Bible to be authoritative because of the effect it produces upon his own mind and spirit. In this as for all his beliefs he must accept personal responsibility.37
The acceptance of the authority of the Bible, associated with and dependent as it is upon confession of faith in God, is a reasonable and responsible act.
7 TESTIMONY NOT PROOF
Authority resides in the truth alone, in the mind and will of God. The Bible possesses authority in religion as it mediates the truth, as the ‘Word of God.’ The truth is not given in an external, self-subsistent form. In dealing with the question of biblical authority we must consider the response of the subject. ‘Granted that religious authority somehow resides in the Bible, how does it become authoritative for me?’38 The answer to this question is not to be found in thinking of the Bible as a repository of doctrine, waiting to be excavated. ‘The most important thing we find in the Bible is not “doctrine” but something that helps us in a new attitude to God and to life.’39 If we treat the Bible as a source of information, whether doctrinal information or historical information, we are missing the point. The traditional theory valued the Bible ‘as giving authoritative information, in the form of dogma, upon matters known only by special revelation.’40 The critical method treated it as a source of historical information. In both cases there is a failure to understand the real character of the Bible. The authority of the Bible is not in its being a source of doctrine, but rather and ‘primarily in inducing in us a religious attitude and outlook,’41 not in providing static and unchanging dogma, but in including us within ‘a tradition of life and experience.’42 That means that we are caught up in a progressing movement, in which (as the New Testament says) the Spirit of God is leading us into a developing and forward-looking experience. It is in performing this activity that the authority of Scripture consists. The Christian believer’s claim is that the religious authority of the Bible is known when God makes himself known. Such authority is known in the experience of the believer. The Bible is the instrument through which believers receive the word of God. ‘The Scriptures are holy because they are the vehicle through which the Gospel is communicated to us . . . . Hence there is no outside standard by which we can measure the adequacy of the biblical communication.’43 This unique authority can be witnessed to but it cannot be proved. It is a matter of testimony and not of proof.
8 RELIGIOUS AND FACTUAL AUTHORITY
The religious value and authority of the Bible does not depend on its reliability as a different kind of authority, namely its historical and factual trustworthiness. It is not my purpose at all to re-engage in the battles fought and fought again in the nineteenth century over this issue. I shall survey and draw lessons from some of that debate later.44 If we learn a lesson from history it will be that we must fight our own battles and not simply replay old ones, even if in some contexts it seems we are very much doing the latter, or observing others doing the latter.
Statements in the Bible frequently have reference to historical, geographical and other factual states of affair. Such statements may be confirmed where there is appropriate evidence. We can check such biblical statements by examining the relevant evidence. The cosmological assumptions of the Bible are a quite different matter from its factual claims. By ‘cosmological assumptions’ we mean what they took for granted about how the universe is structured, how it operates, how the bodies that make it up and the events which take place within it are related to one another, about whether there is something more than the natural world to be accounted for and, if there is, how the supernatural world is related to the natural. The Bible is an ancient book and its writers operated with pre-scientific assumptions. It is pre-Einsteinian, pre- Newtonian, pre-Copernican. This means that they had a different kind of understanding, a different mode of thinking from ours. We understand Newton and know he is a watershed in the history of human development. We may not well understand Einstein, but we well know that we live in a quite different world from the ancients when it comes to our understanding the universe. The words ‘nature,’ ‘universe,’ as we use them were unknown to the ancients. There is a great divide between us. It is the advent and long success of scientific method that has brought about this change.
What they have to say about God and the world and his relation to the world and history they say in their idiom. They were well able to say what they had to say in the form and within the thought- patterns within which they operated. It did not stand in the way of their communicating what they had to communicate, which were their convictions about what God was doing