When you try your best but you don’t succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep
Stuck in reverse

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Fix You
Coldplay
X&Y

Yesterday, I wrote about changing our traditional views on the “authority of scripture.” Scripture isn’t a reference book, it isn’t a rule book, it isn’t even an informational manifesto for the church. These things limit the Bible and make it something that scripture is not. These things seek to control and regulate. By viewing the Bible in this fashion we have simply made another god.

I come from a tradition that has done just that. We have confined ourselves to using the Bible as a tool to keep ourselves, or rather, those we disagree with, in check. We claim freedom in Christ as we shackle ourselves to this belief that ensnares our souls. We proclaim “nothing but the Bible.” Sadly, we often mean just that. No God, no Jesus, no Spirit, no history, no context. Nothing but the Bible.

Please do not misunderstand me. I love my heritage. I am so thankful for the men and women who raised me in this tradition. I just want more. I’m not ready to stick my flag in the ground and proclaim ownership. I look at this institution, belief system and paper god and sing at the top of my lungs, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Philippians 3:12-14

So, how then should the church react to the authority of scripture? If we should not look to it as merely a reference book, an outline of beliefs, or a step-by-step blueprint for the church how then should we view it?

The Bible is primarily written as an epic.

The bulk of the Old and New Testaments consist of story. God’s story. Christ’s story. Our story. There are sections of instructions… told in stories. There are lists of tenets of faith… told in stories. These lists are incidental to the narrative.

There is nothing epic about lists. There is nothing life-changing about a blueprint (even a Frank Gehry blueprint is just a blueprint).

Wright has a great theory on how we, as the church, should approach scripture. How can this story have authority?

Let me offer you a possible model, which is not in fact simply an illustration but actually corresponds, as I shall argue, to some important features of the biblical story, which (as I have been suggesting) is that which God has given to his people as the means of his exercising his authority.  Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost.  The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged.  Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own.  Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

Consider the result.  The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand.  That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution.  This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again.  It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.

Wright believes we find that four acts have been written in scripture: Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus. The fifth act, the church, was begun and we have an idea about the ending (Revelation). What if the fifth act is up to us?

Again, what if WE are to enter into this epic story and, using God’s authority, act out the fifth act?

Whoa!

The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act.  Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material.  Such an appeal—and such an offering!—would of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections.  Such sensitivity (cashing out the model in terms of church life) is precisely what one would have expected to be required; did we ever imagine that the application of biblical authority ought to be something that could be done by a well-programmed computer?

In Matthew, we find Jesus using the phase “binding and loosing.”

Matthew 16:19 finds Jesus telling Peter that he has the keys to the kingdom and whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heave, Whatever Peter looses on earth will be loosed in heaven. “Ok, that’s all well and good,” you say. “That’s Peter.” But look at Matthew 18:18. Jesus is addressing the believers. He says, “I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

We find believers binding and loosing with Christ’s authority throughout history. It is the playing out of the fifth act.

We see it in the Jerusalem council. We see it in the choosing of elders. We see it in the growth of the church. You can even argue that the selection of the cannon is binding and loosing using this authority. (We treat that extra-biblical fact as authoritative!) These acts are consistent with the first four acts. They liberate and bring freedom and innovation to the church. These acts stifle sin and error yet bring openess to to the table.

The funny thing about this is that the Pharisees were also known to exercise this authority of binding and loosing. According to Josephus, “The power of binding and loosing was always claimed by the Pharisees. (They) became the administrators of all public affairs so as to be empowered to banish and readmit whom they pleased, as well as to loose and to bind.”

The Pharisees, no doubt, used this authority to close and kill freedom. They were known for making people slaves to the law (Matthew 23:15). They perverted the scriptures making them something they were not.

When it comes to binding and loosing, how do you come to scripture? As a pharisee or as a humble actor in the greatest performance of your life?

For Further Reading:
NT Wright
Velvet Elvis

Yes, but not how we might think.

“When people in the church talk about authority they are very often talking about controlling people or situations. They want to make sure that everything is regulated properly, that the church does not go off the rails doctrinally or ethically, that correct ides and practices are upheld and transmitted to the next generation. ‘Authority’ is the place where we go to find out the correct answers to key questions such as these. This notion, however, runs into all kinds of problems when we apply it to the Bible. Is that really what the Bible is there for? Is it there to control the church? Is it there simply to look up correct answers to questions that we, for some reason, already know?”

This is a very brief excerpt from the transcript of “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?”, an incredible lecture, by theologian N.T. Wright. Wright goes on to say that when we treat scripture like an answer book or an owner’s manual we actually belittle the Bible. We make it into something it is not. To say that the scripture has authority, we should, in essence, mean that God’s authority is “invested” in scripture.

But what exactly is God’s authority and how does it relate to our use of scripture as authoritative?

“And (God’s) authority is his sovereign exercise of those powers; his love and wise creations and redemption. What is he doing? He is not simply organizing the world. He is, as we see and know in Christ and by the Spirit, judging and remaking his world. What he does authoritatively he dots with this intent. God is not a celestial information service to whom you can apply for answers on difficult questions. Nor is he a heavenly ticket agency to whom you can go for moral or doctrinal permits or passports to salvation. He does not stand outside the human process and merely comment on it or merely issue you with certain tickets that you might need. Those views would imply either a deist’s God or a legalist’s God, not the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ and the Spirit. And it must be said that a great many views of biblical authority imply one or other of those sub-Christian alternatives.

But, once we say that God’s authority is like that, we find that there is a challenge issued to the world’s view of authority and to the church’s view of authority. Authority is not the power to control people, and crush them, and keep them in little boxes. The church often tries to do that—to tidy people up. Nor is the Bible as the vehicle of God’s authority meant to be information for the legalist. We have to apply some central reformation insights to the concept of authority itself. It seems to me that the Reformation, once more, did not go quite far enough in this respect, and was always in danger of picking up the mediaeval view of authority and simply continuing it with, as was often said, a paper pope instead of a human one. Rather, God’s authority vested in scripture is designed, as all God’s authority is designed, to liberate human beings, to judge and condemn evil and sin in the world in order to set people free to be fully human. That’s what God is in the business of doing. That is what his authority is there for. And when we use a shorthand phrase like ‘authority of scripture’ that is what we ought to be meaning. It is an authority with this shape and character, this purpose and goal.”

What would happen if we began to treat scripture in this way?

I’ll let you know what I find out.

Link
N.T. Wright Page