Dear Family and Friends of St. John's,

In our age we have removed absolutes and so the opinion poll has become the arbiter of moral values. However, having removed God from the system, modern man has discovered that the concepts of ‘truth' and ‘authority' have departed with him. Like Pilate we now ask ‘What is truth?' Consequently right can only be determined from consequences. Democracy has trumped faith and above all individual freedom has trumped authority. We are conflicted by the very idea of authority, from the authority of parents to the authority of government in the face of individual rights.

Christians are inevitably affected. Most of the issues facing evangelicals today resolve into a debate about authority, and in particular the authority of the Bible. Authority is inevitably linked to the issue of truth. In each area of controversy the issue is, ‘Where do we go for the answer on this question? What is the truth by which we must live?' If Christians believe in the authority of the Bible - why do we disagree?

Most Christians uphold the authority of the Scriptures. However, in realty there are other authorities which compete with the Bible for supremacy, other sources of truth about God and our world. Most commonly, there are four claimants to religious authority: Bible... Tradition (Institution)...  Reason... and Experience.  

Put simply, these four competing authorities represent four Christianities. They all imply their own view of God.

Bible: God speaks and reveals himself in the spoken and written word alone.

Tradition (Institution): God is a God of order and unity who calls one people.

Reason: God is reasonable, rational and true.

Experience: God moves and acts and is available in our experience today.

We could perhaps give assent to all of these as true in some measure (although you may be able to identify each of these views with a particular sort of church where they are particularly emphasized). Moreover, it is not possible to read and interpret the Bible without a measure of tradition. (We are all children of our history and we have inherited 2000 years of interpretation of Christian faith.) We cannot read the Bible without employing reason and the assumption that God is reasonable. And we inevitably read the Bible through the grid of our experience.

So what is the problem? The problem arises when Tradition, Reason or Experience overrule the Bible as the revelation of God's truth. Instead of being an aid to interpretation they can become the rule of interpretation. Some extreme examples might help us to understand.

When someone says that no one can share the Lord's Supper unless a priest is present to ‘consecrate' the bread and wine they are ranking their tradition above the Bible which says nothing about it. (Indeed the use of the word ‘priest' is an example of putting church tradition over the Bible which ended the priesthood with the Old Covenant)

When someone says that they can't believe in predestination because it can't be reconciled to free will they are ranking their own reason above God's revelation which tells us that we are predestined according to the plan of God.

When someone says that they are sure that God would want them to marry a non-Christian because of their great love for one another and anyway, one of their parents is an unbeliever and that worked out all right, they are ranking their own experience before the Bible which says that we are not to be yoked with unbelievers.

Once people go down the pathway of an authority above the Bible they will often find ways to justify it by devaluing the truth of the Bible in some way. The devaluation of the Apostle Paul relative to the gospels is perhaps the most common of these and is often used in debates about male and female roles or homosexuality. The claim that we are now a more enlightened society than when the Bible was written is another way of devaluing the Bible as our source of truth and authority. (How anyone could look at our society and claim that it is enlightened is quite bewildering!) There are a million variations on this theme.

So what is the bottom line in all this? Very simply it is this: The Bible is not simply authoritative. The Bible alone is authoritative.

Have a look at the diagram below. The quadrilateral represents the different positions that a Christian might take in regard to their source of authority. Every Christian will be living somewhere in this quadrilateral. We all make some use of Bible, tradition, reason and experience but we will also have a default authority, a starting position, a point we return to and live in. What's yours?

Bruce Morrison