EXPLORING THE FUNCTION, ROLE, AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF AUTHORITY

Until now, we have seen how the Scripture and the tradition have constituted a "house of authority" in Christian theology.  In other words, Scripture and tradition (along with experience) have constituted the norms and standards of belief and practice.  The notion of "the Scripture being our only rule of faith and practice," or the transmitted tradition being the "guiding norm" for theology as it was in the early Church, come under question and scrutiny now.

Some might consider it "heretical" to even think of questioning the historical authority.  After all, they might say, this authority was handed down by God and who are to even begin to tamper with it?  I respectfully submit that our collective and individual insecurities lead us to need or want a secure and stable structure that we can rely on, instead of allowing our theology to go awry or disparate.  We don't want to have a "scatter brain" theology, which consists of "think as you please," or "it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere." We long for a secure structure that tells us what to believe without questioning.  In the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions, adherents are expected to subscribe to the tradition simply "because it's been that way all along."  In Protestantism, there is the notion of "the Bible says so, end of story."  In either case, there has been no room for "razzle, dazzle." 

Now we come to a point when this structure of authority is questioned and challenged.  The question is "Do we have to be enslaved to a structure of authority that was handed down a long time ago "just because?" Is there any room for modifying or revamping that structure, so that in the end, we still have something to rely on rather than have a theology "at random" or "at whim?  Here we shall examine some levels of criticism and how they brought about the collapse of a structure that was already tottering from within.  

The first and still the most important is historical criticism in its various forms.  The beginnings of historical consciousness may traced back to the Renaissance, but they came to fruition in the Enlightenment and its aftermath.  Historical consciousness assumes that every entity occurs in a specific but ever changing context and is itself always fluid.  No exceptions to the principle of historicity can be allowed.  While this insight was fully grasped by Johann Gottfried Herder and others in the eighteenth century, its impact was experienced only gradually.  Criticism seemed to arrive in successive waves until finally all aspects of Scripture and doctrinal tradition were engulfed.  Because it was easier to assume a critical stance toward the Old Testament, methodological breakthroughs generally occurred first in Old Testament research and were only later applied to the Christian Scriptures (Edward Farley and Peter C. Hodgson in Scripture and Tradition, p. 73).

The first and most basic historical-critical level at which investigation was carried out was text criticism, developed already by such Renaissance scholars as Nicholas of Cusa.  It tested the authenticity of received texts and established the first principles of critical editions.  It was followed by literary and source criticism, which showed that the authors to which many of the books of the Old and New Testaments were traditionally attributed were not the actual authors, and that in most cases, a complex process of oral and written tradition underlay the writings in their present form.  The Documentary Hypothesis regarding the Pentateuch and recognition of the central role played by oral tradition in the formation of Israel's Scriptures led to similar discoveries in the area of the New Testament.  Concurrently, various forms of content criticism emerged.  The rationalists attacked the miraculous elements in the sacred history and attempted to replace them with a "purely natural" explanation.Then the so-called "mythical interpretation" came along to argue that these elements are ingredient to the structure of biblical mythology and cannot be removed without its meaning.  David Strauss in particular, advanced the thesis that much of the biblical material is actually not historical but mythical or legendary in character, reflecting the religious interests of the author or community that produced it.  With this went a challenge to the truth claims mediated by such material.  The effect of such criticism on the gospel history of Jesus was especially devastating (Ibid., p. 74). 

These three forms of criticism tended to predominate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In our modern era (twentieth and twenty-first centuries), tradition criticism has played a major role, beginning with the form criticism of Rudolf Bultmann, who showed a developmental trajectory of the units comprising the synoptic tradition can be established, permitting a reconstruction of the earliest forms of the tradition.  Bultmann's successors, the so-called "redaction critics," stressed the importance of understanding that  the function of the text in the literary and theological framework established by the editor or author.  Within current biblical studies, two new methods have come to be increasingly influential; structuralism, concerned with a depth dimension of grammatical and linguistic relations, and a second level of literary criticism, concerned with literary genres.  By attending to the function of symbol, myth, legend, narrative, poetry, parable, epistle, and other literary forms, critics have come to the realization that Scripture does not contain "doctrine" or "deposits" or revealed truth at all.  Biblical language portrays new ways of being in a world transformed by grace; its meaning is a function of symbolic and metaphorical uses of language that cannot be directly translated into conceptual terms (Ibid.).

Obviously, these various layers of historical and literary criticism seriously complicate the traditional way in which Scripture was understood to contain the content of revelation-as divinely inspired, infallibly expressed, equally distributed to all its parts, available for translation into theological concepts, immutably valid for all generations.  Similar types of criticism were applied to the history of doctrine.  The historical myths underlaying doctrinal legitimation of dogma and papacy were exposed, and the whole process by which an authoritative tradition originated and developed was grasped in a thoroughly historical manner.  Here the great master was Adolf Harnack, but he had many eminent predecessors, notably Johann Salomo Semler, and Ferdinand Christian Baur (Ibid.).

A second level of criticism is neither historical nor literary but social-phenomenological. It argues that the "Scripture principle" does not offer a vehicle of duration corresponding adequately to ecclesial existence.  This sort of criticism has rarely been advanced explicitly, but it is implicit in the ecclesiology and theological method of certain theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher. A community whose actual social duration is based on testimony to the Gospel, the experience of salvation mediated by the presence of the risen Christ, and the inauguration of God's promised eschatological rule cannot have literature construed as an atomistic collection of authoritative texts containing a deposit of revelation confined to a specific time in the past.  The ecclesial community, moreover, is non ethnic, universal, and culturally pluralistic, so that purely ethnic, provincial, and culturally relative elements of Scripture cannot be authoritative.  On this view it is altogether possible that features logically attending the form of social and religious existence represented by Christian faith have never been fully actualized or even perceived, and in their place, forms have been adopted that contradict Christianity's immanent ideal. The question of Scripture and tradition is therefore closely intertwined with that of ecclesiology (Ibid. pp. 74-75). 

The third level of criticism is theological.  It addresses the themes or presuppositions that underlie the Scripture principle, namely salvation history and the principle of identity.  While this theological critique has been widespread during these past  centuries, it has rarely been been perceived as undercutting the Scripture principle.  Yet clearly it does.  The patriarchalism, monarchialism, and triumphalism of the classical salvation-history scheme, for instance, have been widely discredited. Triumphalism in particular founders on the rock of theodicy, for it has proven very difficult to sustain the logic of sovereignty in the face of massive evil experienced during the past century.  If theology shifts from the model of causality to that of influence, and acknowledges the contingencies of world process-as in various forms of existentialism, process thought, and political theologies-then salvation history and the logic of triumph dissolve.  This is also the case with the principle of identity. Since the Adamic myth rules out an ontological identity between Creator and creation, this identity has usually been construed on the model of causal efficacy as an identity between what God wills to happen or make known and what in fact happens or is known in history.  Apart from the discrediting of the logic of triumph, the chief difficulty with the principle of identity is that of a literalized myth. In folk religion everywhere, God is represented mythically as thinking, willing, reflecting, and accomplishing in the mode of an in-the-world-being who intervenes selectively in world process.  There are enormous problems with this sort of mythology.  It mundanizes the divine and sacrilizes the non-divine. It violates finite human freedom and the contingency of the natural world.  And it is hard pressed to avoid attributing specific evils as well as goods to the divine will.  With the end of mythological thinking about God, the theological foundations of the Scripture principle evaporate (Ibid., pp 75-76).

The house of authority has collapsed, despite the fact that many people still try to live in it.  Some retain title to it without actually living there; others are antiquarians or renovators, attempting in one way or another to salvage it; others have abandoned it for new quarters or no quarters at all.  During this past century and a half, a spectrum of possible theological responses to this "shaking of the foundation" may be sketched as follows.  Clearly at one extreme are those who abandon the biblical writings as in any sense scripture, regarding them as obscurantist, provincial, no longer authoritative for life in the world. This was seen as an option in the Enlightenment, and was taken up explicitly by certain forms of historicism, modernism, and relativism.  At the other extreme are those who continue to defend the Scripture principle more or less uncompromisingly : Protestant scholasticism, Catholic orthodoxy, the Princeton theology, and modern evangelicalism (Ibid., p. 76).

In the middle ground, two groups may be distinguished. One seeks to modify the principle by displacing the locus of revelation from the canon of Scripture as such to specific events, figures, concepts, or subsets of texts-something like a canon within a canon.  An identity is no longer maintained between the written document and revelation, but the authority of Scripture continues to derive from its revelatory substratum, which might or might not be presumed to be beyond the reach of historical criticism.  The other group, without always acknowledging it, uses Scripture in relation to constructive theological proposals in such a way as to negate the presuppositions and axioms of the Scripture principle, and thus construe scriptural authority in a functionalist rather than revelational terms. This group may continue to espouse a rather traditional doctrine of scripture, yet clearly they are doing something quite different (Ibid., pp 76-77).

En fin, we are left with various options. Do we continue to subscribe, uncritically, to the notion of "biblical authority?"  Is our notion of "authority" one of the Scriptures themselves, or is it one of the one who inspired and speaks to the Scriptures, therefore making it a derivative authority?  Does the authority, as we asked before, extend to the divergent manuscripts, translations, and versions of Scripture, or does it only reside in the original autographs?  Do we equate biblical "authority" with the authority of our hermeneutics (interpretations), thereby creating "a canon within a canon?"  As we continue to engage in constructive theology, we will also continue to pose these questions as a challenge to how we do theology.  

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology 

Tainan Theological College/Seminary