Lead Article

It is one thing to acknowledge that the Bible is the revealed Word of God, which He gave for our salvation and guidance in life. It is another matter, however, to ascertain how God’s authority through His Word actually encounters our lives. To put it another way, how can we know the authoritative will of God? How a person responds to this question determines whether he or she has made the Scriptures his or her ultimate authority.

Through the centuries people have answered this question in one of three ways: God’s will is determined either by human spiritual experience or by the authoritative teaching of the church or by the Scriptures themselves as taught by the Holy Spirit. Some people may accept more than one of these as the voice of God; but inevitably only one can be considered supreme and therefore final.

Human Spiritual Experience

In this approach God’s authoritative will is found in the subjective opinions of the individual. The Scriptures as well as the testimony of God’s people may be useful in the process, but one’s own personal experiences finally determine God’s will.

In this view the Scriptures are authoritative to the extent that they are in harmony with reason. This may mean surrendering scriptural teaching and data to the latest conclusions of the historical-critical approach to the Bible. Or it may mean accommodating the Scriptures to the dominant ideas of modern culture.

This option in relation to the Bible’s authority is often held by those who reject the full inspiration of the Scriptures and its inerrancy. They feel that some authority outside the Scriptures must tell them where the Bible speaks God’s truth and where it is only the voice of a fallible human. Human knowledge and reason serve as the final court of appeal.

This view is held even by some who profess to believe in the highest view of divine inspiration. For example, some teach that homosexuality, when practiced in committed relationships, is in accord with Scripture. Also in the case of some who say that the roles of men and women are fully interchangeable in the home and in the church, human experience carries a strong if not determinative authoritative role. The following was written by a professed evangelical (at the time) to the editor of a popular Christian magazine for collegians. “At the historical moment when secular society is just beginning to wake up concerning centuries of injustice to women, it is unwise and unjust for evangelical publications to stress biblical passages concerning ancient inequalities between the sexes. By continuing on such a course, evangelicals will only add fuel to the widespread secular concept that the Christian church is an outmoded institution dedicated to the maintenance of the status quo, no matter how unjust and inhuman that status quo may be.”¹

More recently an elder of an evangelical church acknowledged to a colleague of mine that he would be ashamed to read Paul’s teaching concerning husbands and wives in Ephesians 5:21-33 to those whom he invited to church.

For some people rational thought becomes the ultimate religious authority even over the Scriptures. For others that authority is religious feelings or mystical experiences. The prominence of this kind of thinking is evident in the work Fire from Heaven (1995), written by theologian Harvey Cox. Viewing the religious clash of the past three centuries between scientific modernity and traditional religion, Cox says the next struggle will be between fundamentalism, by which he means those who put a premium on cognitive truth, and experientialism, a sort of cafeteria-style spirituality wherein only those truths are accepted that “click” with everyday experience.²

But on what basis can we conclude that a certain human experience (rational or emotional) is an authoritative expression of God’s voice? And whose experience is to be taken as normative? Rather than judging the Scriptures, our human experience is to be judged and transformed by them. The Bible must be received as the objective Word of God, standing above us so that all human experience is submitted to it.

The Teaching Authority of the Church

A second approach to the authority of the Scriptures says that the Bible’s authority is conveyed to us through the authority of the church. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), initiated by Pope John Paul II and produced under his direction, states that the divine revelation of the gospel is transmitted in two forms: sacred Scripture and tradition.³ While these have traditionally been viewed as two separate sources of revelation, there is a tendency in recent Roman Catholic thought to view them as a unit. Citing a document from the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, the Catechism states, “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God.”⁴ Everything in church tradition is allegedly found in the Scriptures either explicitly or implicitly.⁵