Culpability and authority

It was suggested to me today by a colleague that the Church is hardly a reliable authority upon which to base our faith in the Bible or Christianity, because of the many atrocities committed throughout the history of the Church (Inquisition, Crusades, and the like). It is quite impossible to argue that the Church has been lily white in its history–indeed it has been marred repeatedly by corruption and scandal, from popes to parish priests (Just read up on Pope Alexander VI as a starting point). No sort of defense of the Church can stand that starts with the assumption that its authority depends on its blamelessness. The only defense that comes, and it is the only one needed, is that the Church has never pretended to be blameless; in fact, her mantra, the very essence of her message, has always been the acknowledgement of her (and everyone else’s) blame. The Church claims more blood on her hands than her opponents could ever catch her with.

The remarkable claim of the church is that she is authoritative not on the basis of her own merit but on the basis of Jesus’ anointing. She claims that Jesus promised that she would never fundamentally stray or err in doctrine; in other words, that she would preserve the true faith. It is no more necessary for her to be blameless in order to do this than it is necessary to be bald in order to be a barber, or to be a billionaire in order to be a banker. In fact I am the most suspicious of barbers who are bald, and of bankers who are billionaires, and of priests who are perfect.

The real question in examining the Church’s authority is whether Jesus really gave her this charge and whether she has ever fundamentally shifted in her teaching. We will find that, emerging from first century Palestine like an unflinching stallion, the Church has always defended the same message, God’s grace through the blood of Jesus, prevailing over sin and granting those who believe in his name the right to be called the sons and daughters of God, imbued with all the divine authority befitting such a bloodline.

ex opere operato Christi

Must the Church be an organization?

In my last post, I concluded that the authority to interpret Christian doctrine rests on the One True Church; however, I have not defined this One True Church. Before we may venture further, we must establish what we mean by this word “Church” (including its capitalized and lower-case forms).

When we refer to a “church” [uncapitalized], we usually refer to a particular congregation of Christians and/or the building they gather in. When we refer to “The Church” [capitalized] we may mean one of two things:

(1) An organization of these churches sharing common doctrinal beliefs affirmed by a central and terminal authority, such as a council, convention, or pontiff (for example, “The Roman Catholic Church” or “The Southern Baptist Church”), in other words, a denomination

(2) The entire global body of Christians, the Body of Christ

When we give the power over interpretation of doctrine to the True Church, we certainly mean the Church in this second, global sense. The question that emerges, though, is whether we must also mean a particular organizational Church (sense 1).

I think we must. My reasons for thinking so are connected to my reason for arguing for the True Church as the defender of orthodoxy in the first place; or put another way, I think this institutional concept of the church is entailed by the role that I have suggested it has.

If we define the True Church as simply the global body of Christ, the question must be asked, do we mean that all Church denominations are included in this? We would then be in the position of affirming the Fire Baptized Church of God of Holiness of the Americas, the Central Yearly Meeting of Friends, the Branch Davidians, the Indian Shakers, not to mention both the Catholics and the Protestants, as all authoritative for interpreting Christian doctrine and practice. Certainly this is not tenable! It is more likely that we mean that the Church transcends the denominations, not fitting perfectly into any one of them. Some people from any denomination might be part of the True Church, and some people from any denomination may not be part of it. In other words, the Church is a spiritual entity known to God and not fully to man.

However, thus abstracting the True Church away from any earthly form leaves us in danger of being unable to recognize it. It cannot be that we are left without any means of ascertaining the Church, because we must be a part of it! Christ wills for us to participate in his Church. Accepting an agnostic position in which we are not concerned about the authenticity of our own church and denomination leaves us powerless to affirm truth or reject falsehood. We may be part of a false or deficient church, and thus develop falsities and deficiencies in our soul, and those around us. We might imbibe false prophecy and erroneous teaching without even knowing it. This is certainly not a possibility that the Good Shepherd leaves open to his precious flock. There must be some way of knowing for sure whether our church or denomination is part of the True Church.

Is there any way that we can affirm the truth of our church or our denomination without equating it to The Church? There is a way, the way taken by congregationalists and quakers and those who see their churches as democratic gatherings of autonomous believers. It is an appeal to a power outside the church or denomination itself: to Reason. The congregationalist believes in his church because he believes that his pastor or his elders or he himself has enough reason and insight, and that their Reason has the authority to interpret Christian doctrine and practice, using the Bible as a basis.

However, I have argued previously that the authority to interpret Christian truth cannot be trusted to the reason of men, for we are flawed and sinful and incapable of reliably interpreting the divine mysteries. The True Church, for whose preservation Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, could never surrender her members to such a treacherous guide, but would protect them from error by her own authority. Since The Church is herself the true authority (as I said in my last post), she would never abdicate to an impostor.

If we affirm more than one denomination, we fall to contradiction, and if we affirm none of them, we fall to an agnosticism that renders us powerless against error, which itself can only be remedied by giving Reason the scepter of interpretation, which The Church would never do. We must therefore regard a single Church, a denomination, as The Church.

We have now come to the point when we can and must ask, “Which Church (sense 1) is the Church (sense 2)?” or put another way, “Which denomination is the True Church?” I will consider this immense and crucial question later, but the significance of the point we have just come to cannot be overstated, namely, that the question can be framed in those terms at all.

The authority to interpret scripture

In the previous essay I concluded that the Bible is reliable on the basis of the authority of the institutional Church to establish Christian practice and doctrine. But, although Protestants accept from the hand of Tradition both the Bible and its companions, the Creeds, they reject the authority of the Tradition of the Church today (as the battle cry “sola scriptura” proclaims). Such authority must have been removed from the Church sometime (perhaps gradually) between the 4^th Century and the 16^th Century, at which point the Reformation occurred. I have heard it explained in roughly these words: “God gave the institutional Church authority through the apostolic age and through the age of the councils, so that the Bible would be reliably formed, but since the closure of the Canon, the authority to interpret doctrine no longer resides with the leaders of the Church, but with all believers, since the meaning of the Bible is evident and apparent within its completed pages and stands on its own.” Authority to interpret has been removed from the Church, and given to all who can read the Bible for themselves. It is a good thing to read the Bible for oneself, but to place the power to interpret the Bible into the hands of everyone is to destroy all certainty of truth.

The Zionist First Church of God of Holiness

We become aware of this if we consider the hundreds of different protestant denominations, many of which we can agree are dubiously orthodox. Take, for example, Reverend Michael at the Zionist First Church of God of Holiness down the street, who claims to be an apostle, slays people with the spirit, and drives a Rolls Royce because the Holy Spirit told him to tell his congregation to contribute to the work of the Lord. We can’t accept his authority, can we? But on what basis do we reject it? We will answer, “His teaching and lifestyle doesn’t line up with the Bible.” But Apostle Michael quotes heavily from the Bible all the time. So, on what basis do we claim that his teachings don’t line up? “He misinterprets scripture.” And how do we know that he is misinterpreting scripture? Because we know how to correctly interpret the meaning of scripture. On what grounds are we certain of our interpretations?

The first and most common line of reasoning that comes to the Protestant mind is, I believe, based on an incorrect assumption.

Intrinsic meaning?

The Protestant will probably answer that we can be certain of our interpretations because, by careful study of Greek, Hebrew, and biblical history, we can know the original intention of the author to his audience, situated in the historical, linguistic, and textual context, and discovering this intention is to know the meaning of the text. This is based on a key assumption about the nature of meaning shared by most evangelicals and expressed by John Piper:

“The grammatical-historical method…aims to get at something intrinsic to the text, namely its meaning.”

Piper defines the meaning of a text as the author’s intention (as discernible from the historical, linguistic, cultural context, etc.) and claims authority to know it based on the fact that the intention is intrinsic to the words of the text. However, it is decidedly not the case that an author’s intention is intrinsic to his words.

Permit me to get technical for a moment. All meaning is conveyed between interlocutors using a process of coding, transferring, and decoding messages. Words, whether “well formulated in writing” or in spoken utterance, are the signs of meaning, the material used in transfer. In a precise semiology, words are not identical to the author’s intention. The intention or meaning is conveyed by the words in conjunction with the encoding and decoding apparatuses of both interlocutors. My ability to understand someone’s intention is dependent on how well they interpret the message into a form I can understand and how well I interpret the form of their message back into an intention. Therefore, the author’s intention is not simply intrinsic to his words, but passes between him and the reader by the instrument of his words within a communicative act that includes interpretation on both their parts.

Such a denial of the role of interpretation in meaning causes us to (unintentionally) neglect God’s role in interpreting scripture to us, and overemphasize our role. This brings us to the real grounds on which Protestants are sure of their interpretations of scripture.

Faith in Reason

What asserting the intrinsic meaning of the texts of scripture is really doing is placing the full power and responsibility to interpret scripture in the hands of Reason, the faculty of the human mind.

At first, we depend on reason only under the guise of scholarship–“Enough rigorous study and education eventually grant the authority to interpret scripture reliably.” However, the subjection of the scriptures to rational scholarship has, in the past four centuries, produced an enormous amount of scholarship doubting nearly everything that can be believed about the Bible, not to mention thousands of fractures of communion based on contradictions of interpretation. Must we accept the positions of any liberal pastor, any linguist, any historical-critical professor of theology who puts forward a new interpretation of scripture based on scholarly study? If we do, then all we will have left of our Christianity will be an emasculated, ham-strung collection of historical happy thoughts. If we say no, then we must again answer, “On what basis?” It is tempting to pretend that there is a consensus among scholars that we might give authority to, by presenting a list of opinions that excludes scholars we deem to be unorthodox, but as with the Canon we will find ourselves begging the question again.

In the end, the only thing we have left to put forward as the sure authority for the interpretation of scripture is our own reason and intellect. But here we have come to something as indefensible as Reverend Michael’s sermon at the Zionist First Church of God of Holiness, for no man who says that the Holy Spirit spoke to him can be proved wrong, and neither can a man who gives ultimate authority to his own reason. But no reasonable person absolutely relies upon his reason. The sane person never absolutely trusts his sanity. As G.K. Chesterton says, “The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.” In contrast, it is a mark of the insane man that he fixates on his own reasonings. “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational man must admit that he is not exempt from the weaknesses of the mind that cause other men to err with the utmost sincerity, and he will look for something greater than himself in which to anchor his understanding of the divine mysteries.

The Church, the interpreter

What shall we say, then? Here lies the Bible before us, but how can we interpret its meaning into our lives with confidence? Surely God has provided a reliable interpreter. We need an interpreter whose authority is neither merely human (as the scholar’s reason) nor merely divine (as the charismatic’s spirit), but has a foot in both, possessing the same dual nature as our Lord Jesus Himself, who is fully God and fully Man. Where can we find such an interpreter? She stands before us in the One True Church, whose Body is on earth and whose Head is in heaven. It was she that gave us the scriptures by the power vested in her, and it is she who continues to give them to this very day. If she does not interpret for us, there can be no sure interpretation.

The authority to interpret the Bible lies today in the same hands as it did in the 4^th century, those of the Church. We need to repent of our trust in our own minds, which does not bring glory to God, and instead gladly submit to the safety of the authority of the Living Body of Christ which preserves truth. We must accept the holy and catholic Church as the agency through which God has promised to guide our interpretations of scripture and proclaim its truth in power throughout the earth.

Authority issues (Freedom is not independence)

In church this week, Jeff Noble compared King Solomon to King Jesus. When Solomon became king he had to consolidate his empire by eliminating several people who posed threats to his power. For example, his brother Adonaijah, who had already tried to take the throne, without David’s consent. Jesus, in the same way, will consolidate his kingdom. In the apocalypse he will come as a warrior with a flaming sword, surrounded by his angel army. On that day “every knee shall bow,” and those who in life rejected his kingship will then be rejected from his kingdom. As Jeff said, “He will tolerate no challenge to his authority.” There’s no doubt about it: You don’t have to look very far in the Bible to perceive that God asserts unequivocal, unflinching, absolute authority over creation.

Jeff also said that we in the modern West have authority issues. Ever since the Boston Tea Party, Americans have been throwing off yokes with a cry of, “Freedom!” You can see it in our political parties, our approaches to sex, sexual orientation, medical decisions, guns, property (“get offa my land!”), money, lifestyle, music, fashion, you name it. Take it from Miley Cyrus in her hit We Can’t Stop:

It’s our party we can do what we want to
It’s our house we can love who we want to
It’s our song we can sing we if we want to
It’s my mouth I can say what I want to

Independence and equality is deeply rooted into the American value system. And for good reason, I’ll say. It has developed out of oppression and inequality. The Boston Tea Party, from King George III. The French Revolution, from the strangling of the poor. Civil rights, from racism and slavery. We are right to champion freedom and equality and resist undue assertions of authority.

However, this same skepticism of authority has gradually doubled back on God. When we postmodernists bump up against this absolutely authoritative King God, some of us recoil in revulsion (“How dare this God demand to be worshiped? How selfish!”)(cf. Oprah). Some of us just don’t connect with that part of God. We obey him out of obligation and fear and performance-based acceptance. But whether we are the prodigal or the older brother in the story of the prodigal son, whether we run away from God’s authority or try lock-step conformity, something is missing. The Bible calls us to embrace and love God’s authority (cf. Basically all of Psalm 119).

How do we do that? How do we love and embrace God’s authority?

I believe the answer is in part that God’s grace enlightens our hearts to depend on God’s strong hand like a son does his father, and find it more freeing than independence.

Freedom and independence aren’t always the same. Independence means not needing other things. Take marriage for example. If my wife and I are living in a dysfunctional cycle where I come home and do my own thing, don’t talk to her, don’t pay attention to her, and she does the same thing, keeping to her room, ignoring and avoiding me, are we independent? In a sense our relationship is more independent than it should be. We don’t rely on each other to do anything. However, is that relationship free? I don’t think so. Pins and needles. Awkwardness. Unaddressed hurt. That relationship is a ball and chain, and the more independent you become, the heavier the weight secretly gets. That’s because freedom isn’t just being in charge of yourself, cut loose, independent: Freedom is being properly dependent. For the slave, it means getting out of there, but for marriage, it means coming together and learning how to communicate needs and meet each others needs in love.

As marital freedom comes through right dependence in marriage, so ultimate freedom comes through right dependence on God. God made us for relationship with him, so freedom means learning our roles in relationship to him. For example, my money is not my domain, it is God’s gift, and I am a steward. When I learn that role, I can loosen my death grip on the wad of cash and be generous. And as I do it, trusting in God to provide what I need instead of myself, I learn that he is much better suited to the task, and I can breath easy, and finally be free. While assertion of authority by a man against another man is often oppression, when God asserts his authority, it is like the strong hands of a father as he reaches over his frustrated child, trying to unscrew a cap, and says, “Here, let me.”

We are left to decide whether we will yank our bottle away from the Father and say, “No, it’s mine!” or yield willingly to his strong hands and learn how much love resides within his power. The issue of how we handle God’s assertion of authority is in the end a question of whether we know and believe that he loves us. In any sphere in which we know the love of God, by faith, by his precious and very great promises, we will not WANT to do it on our own. We will embrace his authority as a child does that of a good father whom he knows loves him back. We will find freedom in dependence.

Authority and the origin of names

I wrote a paper a while back in my Theories of Language class that I dug up today. The topic still gives me a sense of awe at the power of language. Language is perhaps the greatest privilege of being human, and the most remarkable way that we are made in the image of God. There’s something mysteriously glorious and significant about our ability to communicate through language. If you’re feeling nerdy, here’s my paper. You can also see it in PDF form here.

The Locus of Name Origination as Ultimate Authority

Language is a crucial part of us. It helps us put handles on our perceptions, enables communication with others, and builds communities and cultures. As language is such an integral part of our reality, what we believe about language is a part of our explanatory framework—the way we make sense of things—our worldview.

This holds true for the ancients. Their worldviews, which have helped shape the modern world, are informed by their views on the origin of language. The Authors of the Bible, Plato, and Jean Jacques Rousseau all ascribe an origin to language, or in its most rudimentary form, simply “names.” We will find that in their writings, the things the authors identify as the origin of names strongly resemble the things they believe to hold ultimate authority. In fact, I will suggest that there is a synonymy between name-making and power.

The Bible

Let us first consider the Bible, comparing naming ability and authority according to its perspective. As God creates the world in Genesis 1, he names his creation. “God called the light day, and the darkness he called night” (Genesis 1:5). He also defines the names for heaven (1:8), and earth and sea (1:10). There is no mention of God specifically naming living creatures. Then God delegates naming to man. He brings the animals (and subsequently Eve) to Adam, and he names them.

Compare this with the biblical extent of human authority. God bids man to “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (1:28). These things over which God has given Adam power, he allows him to name shortly thereafter. However, God retains authority over the things He named, i.e. the heavens and earth themselves. “To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it” (Deuteronomy 10:14). The Bible says that naming began with God and was partially apportioned to man. This is in clear parallel to the division of authority we see evidenced here (which is concordant with normal Christian theology), that God rules over creation, but has also entrusted rule of the earth to man as a steward.

Plato

In Cratylus, Plato concludes that there is a truth to names (Cratylus, p. 429, line 391). He says that he who gives names is the “legislator, who of all skilled artisans in the world is the rarest” (p. 427, line 389). This legislator is he who is able to discern the true form of something and express it in letters and syllables (p. 429, line 389). When his discourse turns to Cratylus, Plato reiterates his position saying that naming is an art, of which legislators are the artisans, whose skill is judged by their giving names that reflect reality. The wise man who is able to discern the natural form and essence of something and describe it is he who has the right to give names.

In Plato’s Republic, he ranks the “philosopher king” as the ideal leader of society. Power ought to rest in the hands of the discerning and wise, who can be trusted. This corresponds well to Plato’s concept of the wise and discerning linguistic legislator. Again, here is a parallel between the prescribed roles of the authority-holder and the name-giver—Plato gives the right to name to the philosopher, who is also his favored trustee of authority.

Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau claims that names had their nascence in natural man. Names evolved slowly from animal utterances before they grew by common consent. They began in the bosom of nature, as the savage man freely responded to its impulses. “The first language of mankind…was the simple cry of nature” (A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 60). Furthermore, names were the convention of man, not reflective of a higher truth, “owing their original institution to merely human means” (p. 63). Therefore, original man and his mother nature were the origins of names.

Consider Rousseau’s views on where authority lies (or ought to). He is a staunch humanist. Man in his natural state is good. Man in modern society is corrupt, artificial, enervated of strength and courage, and degenerate (p. 52). The savage man is free from wants, carries his robust body “whole and entire,” and is innocent and at peace (p. 48-9). Thus, he upon whom Rousseau bestows authority to rule man, is man himself, in the state of nature. Social conventions are in rebellion against this proper order. The parallel continues—by Rousseau “man in the state of nature” is both the true guide of society and the originator of names.

Conclusion

The worldviews of these ancient writers clearly appear in their treatment of the origin of names. The Bible says that names started with God, who has ultimate authority, and were passed down to man. Plato says that the philosopher-legislator makes names as he discerns true forms, by virtue of the authority afforded to him by his intelligence. Rousseau says that names evolved from original man, who is himself the ultimate authority. The golden thread is this: whomever you see as the source of names, the one who first called things what they are, that is the person you also see as the continuing authority that has the right to determine reality. Gold is well and good, but in truth, he who has the names makes the rules.

Respecting vicarious authority

What should our thinking be toward government? We should remember that we are always citizens of the Kingdom of God before we are citizens of any nation (and it if comes to it, we must disobey in order to keep the faith). However, given that, we ought to submit to government, not resisting, protesting, and causing dissension. Paul writes to the Romans:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. (Romans 13:1-2)

Some authorities, including government, are instituted by God, and carry his own authority vicariously. We are told to respect authorities, because by doing so, since they are the extension of God’s authority, we are in fact respecting God Himself. There is a parallel between the thinking here and that written in Matthew 25. People are commended on the final judgment for helping Jesus when he was sick, naked, and hungry. They ask, “Lord, we when did we do this? We don’t remember it. We’ve never actually met you…” The King’s reply:

‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

Because those poor people represented the recipients through which those people could demonstrate mercy, God counted them as merciful and tender-hearted even to Himself. In the same way, when we obey government, we are obeying God, who has established them as the stewards of his authority. Of course, there are limits to this, because governments can be abusive. The Bible also says, “There is a time for war,” and that includes war against an oppressive government, but that does not justify the cynical government-bashing, boss-bashing, and father-bashing that are so rampant in our culture. The Christian’s default mode should be one of reverence and respect for those whom God has appointed. We should remember that our political leaders, our fathers, our husbands, and whoever else is over us, have God to answer to, and us to answer for; it is not our job to hold them accountable. God has appointed them, and he still rules them, and will exercise his purposes through them. He is the King of Kings. By honoring Kings, we show our faith in their King.