376 - The Authority of Scripture: Normative or Incidental?

The Authority of Scripture: Normative or Incidental?
By J. Christiaan Beker

"When we reflect on the road we have traveled since the Reformation, it becomes abundantly evident how unclear, uncertain, and ambiguous we have become about the authority of Scripture, the written Word of God, which we confess to be the normative source of Christian life and doctrine.... Can we in our time simply regress to the tradition of the sixteenth century in our view of Scripture? "

When we speak about the authority of Scripture in our time, we engage, it seems, in an anachronistic exercise. What meaning does the term "biblical authority" have other than being an inherited, routinized concept that comes to us from the tradition as some holy entity? Indeed, in what sense is it anything but a piece of tradition which is nothing but a relic from the past, which has ceased to have any existential meaning for us?

When we reflect for a moment on this issue, we realize that if we desire to speak at all about the authority of Scripture, we are able to speak only about its incidental rather than its normative authority. In what sense, though, is it meaningful to posit an incidental authority? That seems to be an outright logical contradiction; the notion of authority is necessarily linked with its normative and abiding character. As soon as authority is qualified as incidental, it ceases to be authority in any intelligible sense. For an incidental authority is an ad hoc subjective estimate of what may be only fitting in a very particular and contingent situation.

I

Of course, this observation should not come as a surprise to us. Our time is characterized by a nearly total eclipse of authoritative structures. This eclipse is all the more apparent when we notice the desperate attempt of fundamentalistic and evangelical theologians and preachers to reestablish biblical authority by hardening their views of

J. C. Beker is the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of the acclaimed Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (1980), a major study of Pauline theology. Among his many other books are Suffering and Hope: The Biblical Vision and the Human Predicament (1987) and Heirs of Paul Paul's Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today (1991).

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the inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration of Scripture. Sometimes it seems as if we have regressed not just to the times of Hodge and Warfield but to those of Origen, for whom the inerrancy of Scripture was the sole anchor for the Christian soul amidst the chaotic flux of the times.

The collapse of authoritative structures in our time is well described and explored by Langdon Gilkey in Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God Language, a book which, though not recent (it was published in 1969), still is impressive in delineating our basic Zeitgeist, Gilkey characterizes the Zeitgeist as fundamentally secular, as the maturation of the secular spirit. He does not use the word "secular" as a description of the "nonreligious" elements of our culture. Rather he means a "referent to that fundamental attitude toward existence characteristic of our age," which, "as a basic spirit we all share, tends to be subversive of any sort of faith and discourse that might be called authentically Biblical."¹

In the course of his discussion, Gilkey mentions four general characteristics of the secular spirit, which are highly relevant to our topic because they place the problem of biblical authority in a larger cultural context and, thus, make the problem all the more acute for us. The principal elements of the modern ethos are, according to Gilkey, contingency, relativism, temporality, and autonomy.

Contingency refers to the sense that the world around us and we ourselves are "the result of causes that are neither necessary, rational nor purposive. The essence of this modern sense of contingency is that the given is ultimately arbitrary, and, consequently, beyond the given there lies nothing, no ground, no ultimate order, no explanation, no reason" and, we might add, no authoritative structures.

The second and third elements of our modern ethos are closely intertwined with the sense of the contingent structures of reality. Relativism and temporality, the sense of transience, corroborate the notion of contingency by suggesting that "all is pinioned within the flux of passage or of history" and that "all is in time and time being in all things each has its appointed terminus."² "Modern man," Gilkey writes, "thus has tended to find the meaning of his history in patterns of development leading toward a future goal rather than through his reiterated participation in an eternal order established at the beginning of things-as the modern myths of progress and of the Marxist dialect so well illustrate."³

In contrast to these three elements of our culture that emphasize the sense of disorder, chaos, and flux, the fourth element, autonomy, constitutes the human attempt to discover its identity and value in the

¹ Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 33.
² Ibid., p. 53.
³ Ibid., p. 55.

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midst of flux and in the absence of authoritative structures. In Gilkey's words:

Little, if any confidence or courage come to modern man from his wider, cosmic environment, where all is blind, relative and transient. In this sense, he is truly 'on his own,' an alien set within a context that is indifferent and so irrelevant to his own deepest purposes, and whatever hope and meaning he may have come to him from himself"; "the modern spirit holds that a man must ... live his life in autonomy if that life is to be creative and human.... Thus, the modern spirit is dedicated to the proposition that any external social authority will in the end only crush man's humanity if his own personal being does not participate fully and voluntarily ... in whatever creative turns his life may take.⁴

And so Gilkey concludes:

The assertion of autonomous freedom and self-direction as the key to human self-fulfillment is subversive of many of the historic forms of religion with their traditional authorities of various sorts stemming from the distant past-and their insistence that man is fulfilled when he patterns himself according to the divine image.

Whatever our culture's pious or traditional protestations, man clearly no longer feels himself to be set within any basic order or context in terms of which he understands himself, that is, from which he draws not only his being but also the meanings, standards, and values of his life.⁵

It is not difficult for Christians to understand Gilkey's descriptions of the modern Zeitgeist because all of us participate in it, not only in the world but also as members of the church. Here, if anywhere, the windows of the church are not simply open to the world, but the world has blown the windows of the church wide open and has made the church uncertain about its mandate and mission and especially about the meaning of biblical authority.

II

When we reflect on the road we have traveled since the Reformation, it becomes abundantly evident how unclear, uncertain, and ambiguous we have become about the authority of Scripture, the written Word of God, which we confess to be the normative source of Christian life and doctrine. See, for instance, the 1967 Confession of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which claims, "Scripture is The Word of God written." This formulation (actually more akin to post-Reformation orthodoxy than to either Luther or even Calvin, with its insistence on the written character of the canon of Scripture) posits a severe challenge to us: Can we in out time simply regress to the tradition of the sixteenth century in our view of Scripture?

In this context, we must remember that Luther, in opposition to the medieval Catholic practice of harmonizing dogmatic tradition with Scripture, posited Scripture not only as "the norm, but also as the

⁴ Ibid., pp. 57,59.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 60, 70.

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critical voice for ecclesiastical doctrine."⁶ He not only insisted on the claritas Scripturae and the hermeneutical conviction of scripture sui ipsius interpres, but he elaborated as well his understanding of Scripture by two basic convictions: the historicity of the gospel and the harmonious unity of the gospel as witnessed in Scripture. The first conviction about the historicity of the gospel meant for Luther the historical character of the gospel in the sense that God's act in Jesus Christ is not only an event of the past but also a present salvific occurrence.

Luther's second conviction actually corroborates his insight into the clarity of Scripture. The diversity of the scriptural witness, or, as we would say, the diversity of its Sprachgestalt (linguistic expression) is at one with its essential witness, at one with its Sachinhalt (basic content). Indeed, Luther argues that, since the texts of Scripture interpret themselves in relation to each other, even obscure passages of Scripture must be understood in relation to clearer expressions of the subject matter in other texts.

It is important to recognize that post-Reformation orthodoxy absolutized Luther's second conviction to the neglect of his first one, so that Scripture became an a historical doctrinal compendium, a book of eternal verities. Indeed, Scripture became subjected to dogmatic loci that had to provide proof texts (dicta probantia) to these loci, which were in turn imposed on the faithful as unquestionable authority.

I will not review the multiple causes which, since the Enlightenment, have led to the decline and even the eclipse of the Reformation's insistence on the normative and critical function of Scripture. Let me just say that the Enlightenment produced a new sense of human autonomy and of historical consciousness. New criteria of historical explanation were posited, climaxing in Troeltsch's widely accepted theory that critical historical inquiry rests on three interrelated principles: (1) the principle of criticism, which focuses on the critical distance of the observer from the historical text and on the fact that judgments of the past can only attain a greater or lesser degree of probability and are always open to revision; (2) the principle of analogy, or internal relations; and (3) the principle of correlation, which stresses the historical nexus between phenomena.⁷ Thus, since the Enlightenment the principle of the authority of Scripture broke down in terms of both of Luther's essential points. Luther's insistence on the historical nature of the gospel and on the unity of Scripture could no longer be maintained under this historicist attack. The discovery of the historical origins of the various books of the canon turned Luther's emphasis on the historical nature of the gospel into a historicist scenario of various

⁶ J. Roloff, "Die Geschichtlichkeit der Schrift und die Bezeugung des einen Evangeliums" in Exegetische Verantwortung in der Kirche, (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1990), p. 11.
⁷ See Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 14-15.

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time-bound, culturally-specific documents, subject to the canons of historical inquiry. Moreover, this new historical inquiry likewise dismantled Luther's view of the unity of Scripture, since every gospel account now had to stand on its own feet and in its own context and could no longer be harmonized with the other parts of the canon of Scripture.

We realize that the havoc the Enlightenment caused for the Christian commitment to the authority of Scripture is still with us today and no convincing solution has as yet been offered. Moreover, intellectual honesty, the moral integrity inherent in the scholar's quest for truth, forbids us to retreat into some safe ghetto or to engage in some half-baked compromises. A visit to any recent conference of the guild of biblical scholars will demonstrate the extent to which we have cast aside the issue of biblical authority. Instead, we have substituted the idea of the Bible as an archaeological deposit for the Bible as an authority, a viva vox for the community of faith. And even when the question of the authority of Scripture for the church today arises, more often than not both its obsolete ethical directives and its oppressive attitudes toward women, homosexuals, and minority groups are necessarily highlighted. In other words, the question arises, How can the witness of Scripture be normative and liberating, if it oppresses the dignity of basic human realities? It seems that Scripture is no longer normative but is at best incidental, becoming authoritative when and if it conforms in some of its expressions to what we consider to be helpful guidelines for our present situation.

III

As we have seen, the church accords canonical and authoritative status to the written Word of God in Scripture, which we confess to be the normative source (the norma normans) of Christian life and doctrine. In other words, the writings of Scripture do not comprise an archaeological deposit, but we confess them to convey the power of the gospel ever anew to different times and circumstances. However, if Scripture is to have this normative authority, we must face a serious question, one which we find difficult to answer: How can the normative authority of Scripture be posited in the face of its historically dated and culturally specific features?

In my work on the Apostle Paul, I encountered the same problem, albeit within a much more limited compass. First of all, the problem concerns the question of what can constitute the unity of Paul's gospel within the various perspectives and situations of his letters. Second, it raises the even more urgent question of how-once the unity of Paul's gospel is secured-it can be transferred to our time with the same authority it carried in New Testament times.

I suggest that the solution to these questions which I proposed for a small section of Scripture, the letters of Paul, may be applicable as well to the greater canvas of Scripture as a whole. In short, I want to propose a two-fold model that may assist us in clarifying the problem of the authority of Scripture and reassert it for our time.

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The first part of the model posits that Scripture is constituted by two components: coherence and contingency. Moreover, these two components are interrelated in a complex manner. I define coherence as the abiding, constant, and normative elements of the gospel, which focus on the apocalyptic-eschatological interpretation of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Contingency, on the other hand, concerns those elements of Scripture that comprise the time-bound, culturally specific situations into and for which the gospel is addressed. Furthermore, we must recognize that the interaction between coherence and contingency constitutes the heart of the gospel; it makes the abiding Word of God a word on target for the people to whom the gospel is addressed. This is so, because it is the very essence of the gospel that it inserts itself into the particularities of every human situation.

Indeed, once we divorce the coherence of the gospel from its contingency, we are no longer dealing with the gospel but, rather, with some eternal verity, a pronouncement that resembles more an universally valid philosophical proposition than it does the particularity of the gospel. In this case, the Word of the gospel disintegrates into a monotonous monologue, similar to the description by Vincens of Lerins in the fifth century about true doctrine in the Catholic church: "that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all" (ubique ... semper ... ab omnibus). However, if we divorce the contingency of the gospel from its necessary interaction with its coherent core, the gospel disintegrates into an incidental and opportunistic structure. It now accommodates itself to whatever the fashions of the time demand and into what the marketplace is willing to buy, or worse still, it becomes prey for whatever ideological position happens to rule our time.

Thus, when we posit that the authority of Scripture is to be located in the dynamic interrelation between coherence and contingency, the question of the authority of Scripture is directly connected to the interpretation of Scripture. And so it follows that Scripture is only authoritative when we obey its command to engage in the same risks of interpreting the gospel that it is itself engaged in all its parts.

Therefore, we can say that the authority of Scripture is identical with its effectiveness in the human situation, an effectiveness that pertains both to its critical judgmental function-its over-againstness-and to its transforming, liberating function.

In other words, the essence of the authority of Scripture lies in its two-fold dimension: its incarnational dimension (its concrete insertion into the particularity of human situations) and its transcendent dimension (its critical over-againstness with respect to human pride, idolatry, and the autonomy of the ego).

The second part of the two-fold model, concerns the issue of the transfer of the gospel to our time. However, we must be aware that the interpretive task of conjoining coherence and contingency is directly related to this issue. Indeed, the Word of Scripture can only be a lively word, a word on target, when we realize that its central message must

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speak to us within the particularity of our diverse situations. Therefore, I suggest that the authority of Scripture has a catalytic function for our time. A catalytic reading of Scripture denotes a generative hermeneutic. It means that even though the biblical text must undergo a necessary change in its transferral to our time, it is nonetheless not altered in its "substance." A catalytic hermeneutic intends to remain faithful to the abiding and normative coherence of the gospel, but in such a way that it resists a literalistic and anachronistic transfer of the text because it is aware that the contingencies of biblical times are not identical to those of our time. The culturally-conditioned scriptural voices about submission of slaves and women to the rule of masters and men and Scripture's prevalent androcentrism simply cannot claim to be authoritative for us. In short, a catalytic view of a text's authority must follow the model of the authors of Scripture in so interpreting the gospel that its claim on our time is neither anachronistic (as in a literalist hermeneutic) nor modernistic (as when the text simply becomes a means for confirming our own ideologies).

How can this solution apply to the Bible as a whole, since we have thus far only dealt with the issue of biblical authority as applied to the New Testament? I can only give some suggestions as to how the catalytic model and the coherence-contingency model can help us in reestablishing the authority of the whole of Scripture for our time.

The coherent framework of Scripture, that is, its normative pattern for Christians, must be located in and derived from the gospel of God's saving purpose for the world. Thus, the norm and center of Scripture is to be stated in terms of Luther's criterion of "Was Christum treibet": "All the genuine sacred books agree in this, that all of them preach and inculcate Christ. And this is the true text by which to judge all books, when we see whether or not they inculcate Christ." In other words, the amazing variety and diversity of scriptural voices, which mark both testaments, testify also to the rich contingency of both.

When we ask how the coherence or coherent pattern that holds together the two aspects of Scripture can be ascertained, I want to argue that, although the validity of Luther's claim about Scripture must be upheld, it must be modified in a theocentric direction. Indeed, Christians must not only interpret the Old Testament in terms of its hope and expectations, but must also recognize that this hope is not fulfilled, but rather rekindled, in the New Testament proclamation of Christ. In other words, I suggest that both testaments are patterned on a theology of hope, by an apocalyptic thrust, which will only find its fulfillment when the triumph of God will make an end to all evil, suffering, and injustice and bring about the joy of a world at peace.

Thus, the authority of Scripture for our time can only become a normative authority, rather than an incidental authority, if interpreters of Scripture discern the coherent pattern that pervades Scripture in order to make it, with the help of the Holy Spirit, a living voice for our time.