What Is Meant By "The Authority of Scripture"?

Jesus and Salvation Series (Part 9)

Welcome to the Summer 2006 study for the Koinonia Class of Calvary Baptist Church, Denver, Colorado. We’re looking at the issue of Jesus and Salvation, using the book “Is Jesus The Only Savior” [James R. Edwards, Is Jesus The Only Savior? (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: 2005)]. We encourage each person to buy a copy and follow along.

I just finished reading “The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture” by N. T. Wright (Harper San Francisco, 2005). It wasn’t quite what I expected or wanted, but it led me in a new direction that I believe will take me to a refreshing destination.

Wright spends a good bit of time on the meaning of “the authority of Scripture”, which he says “is a shorthand for ‘God’s authority exercised through Scripture’”. That is, the Bible is not the authority itself, God is; and God exercises His authority through the reading and preaching of the scriptures, through the telling of the Story (more about that later), and through the Church carrying the gospel into the world in work and witness. For more about this see his article, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” on his web site: http://www.ntwrightpage.com/ .

In the story, of course, it is necessary to see how Israel and God’s Kingdom-people play out their parts, how Jesus was the climax of the story, and how over the years the Church has fared in taking the play on the road into various cultures. In other words, Wright goes into a lot of Church history as it involves God’s use of the scriptures to bring about His will and the Church’s interpretations (“improvisations” as Wright calls them) of the scriptures to meet its challenges.

A central focus of Church history concerning the Scripture is the Enlightenment, the 18th century explosion of Rationalism and reason, and how it continues to affect study of the Bible. In chapter 7, “Misreadings of Scripture”, Wright points out how both the “right wing” and the “left wing” of Christianity have taken positions based on misreadings of Scripture. It’s a helpful exercise to read both lists and see how many of one’s own positions are based on faulty readings of Scripture.

It is tempting to jump to Chapter 8, “How To Get Back On Track”, and get to the heart of his argument. It really got tempting for me as I read through the foundation-laying sections in the previous chapters. But in the end I could see the necessity for not skipping the foundation-laying parts.

Wright presents the storyline of the Scripture as a 5-Act play (recapitulating some of his writing in his book, “The New Testament and the People of God” (Fortress Press, 1992).
The five Acts are: Creation, the Fall, Israel, Jesus, and the Church. Living in and acting out Act Five, we are bound to be true to Scene One in Act Five (and that’s where the Church remembered, retold, and wrote down what occurred in Act Four with Jesus).

The heart of his argument is on page 127 under “Strategies for Honoring the Authority of Scripture”. Here I can only summarize his strategies by quoting him on page 127, “How can we be sure that our understandings and ‘improvisations’ of scripture facilitate the Spirit’s working in and through us, as individuals, congregations, and the larger church? We do so by a reading of scripture that is (a) totally contextual, (b) liturgically grounded, (c) privately studied, (d) refreshed by appropriate scholarship, and (e) taught by the church’s accredited leaders.”

Wright, himself a bishop in the Anglican Communion (Bishop of Durham, England) insists that for the church to get back on track its teachers and pastors (and bishops) must be able to teach scripture so as to ably lead the church in its mission to the world. He points to the “various crises in the Western church of our day—decline in numbers and resources, moral dilemmas, internal division, failure to present the gospel coherently to a new generation…” as the impetus for us to “open the Bible in the power of the Spirit…for God’s word to do its work in the world…”.

The destination to which this book led me was not to Athens but to Jerusalem. On page 77 Wright quoted Tertullian (a second century theologian), “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” and goes on to explain “in other words, what has unaided philosophical reason to do with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ? This book led me not to more scholarship for scholarship’s sake, but to a re-reading of the Bible with his 5-Act Play in mind, being reminded of his five strategies for honoring the authority of scripture, and allowing God through the Spirit to work out His authority in me and through my teaching of His Word.