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The issue of authority is central for Christian theology. Most broadly, authority deals with the sources of legitimation for theological assertions. Given the plurality of theological positions within the Christian orb today and the many theological methods and styles on the contemporary scene, it is apparent that sources of authority are quite varied. Most basically, Christian theology deals with the living God who is the source of all. This includes the recognition that it is God who “authorizes” theological claims. Yet recognizing this point raises the further issue of how humans can discern and understand the means God uses to disclose God’s truth. How are theological truth claims authorized?

Avenues of Authority. Current approaches to the issue of authority have their roots in the history of Christian theology. An appreciation of today’s discussions can be enhanced by looking at the sources from which these approaches emerge.

Since the earliest days of the church, theologians have wrestled with the question of how God’s “authority” is to be understood and the avenues by which it comes to us. Since this is such a basic question, other theological issues and doctrines have taken their trajectories from the various viewpoints established. Several such channels of authority have functioned in normative ways for Christian theology.

1. Church. After the death of the apostles of Jesus, the emerging Christian community faced the question of how God’s authority would be maintained. Through Jesus and his immediate disciples, the community experienced what it considered to be God’s authoritative word and presence. As the early centuries went on, however, three important new sources of authority emerged in the church: the canon of Scripture (Old and New Testaments); the creeds of the church and church councils; and the advancing authority ascribed to church leaders, such as bishops, elders, and deacons. The Middle Ages saw the growth of the papacy and the structured authority of the Roman Catholic Church as the major expression of Christianity in the Western world. Within the Roman church, the sources of Scripture and tradition vied for a place as the ultimate authority for the church’s life. Persons who appealed to the tradition of the church as having its roots in the church’s oral traditions and ultimately with the apostles themselves argued that these ecclesiastical traditions are the arbiters of validity. The Scriptures gain the authority conferred to them by the church, and the Christian community is the adjudicator of Christian doctrine.

2. Scripture. The Protestant Reformers challenged this conception of the church’s authority by rejecting the primacy of the papacy and the magisterium as the foremost interpreters of Christian doctrine. Martin Luther contended that Scripture interprets itself through the work of the Holy Spirit. John Calvin, agreeing with this stance, went on to argue that the church is built on the Word of God, “the teaching of apostles and prophets” (Eph. 2:20), now found for the church in the writings of Holy Scripture (Institutes of the Christian Religion 4.2.4). For Calvin, Scripture is the “Word of God” (Institutes 1.7.1), superior to all human wisdom since it originates with God. God used human writers, accommodating the divine wisdom to human capacities for understanding and thus communicating God’s divine message through human thought forms. Scripture authenticates itself as the Word of God by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, which is “more excellent than all reason” (Institutes 1.7.4) and which seals the conviction that Scripture is God’s Word in the experience of believers. This concentration on Scripture as the primary authority for Christian theology and for the church led to the Reformation slogan, ”sola scriptura” (Scripture alone).

3. Spirit. Within Protestantism, the Anabaptist movement was marked by a rejection of Lutheran and Reformed teachings on several doctrines (most notably, baptism) and by a differing emphasis on the source of authority. Among these believers, “God’s Spirit, which the Anabaptists believed themselves to possess, is the ultimate authority which first gives authority to the written word of the Bible” (Reventlow, 53). Anabaptists stressed the “outer word” (Scripture) and the “inner word” (the legitimation by the Holy Spirit). A biblical text without the penetration and testing of the Spirit was a “dead letter.” Spiritual authority—of whatever kind—was grounded in the promptings of the Holy Spirit in an individual’s heart. The “authority” of church and Scripture must yield to this “inner light” (Quakerism) of immediate revelation as the ultimate and final authority for Christian theology and the Christian life as well.

Another factor has been active in these three avenues of authority. The place of human reason must also be considered. Although opinions differ on the extent to which “reason” is a “theological” as opposed to a “natural” factor, reason is a means by which theological systems are judged and theological claims assessed (the historic controversies on the relation between reason and revelation point to the necessity to consider reason as an important factor). Appropriation of the church’s tradition, the interpretation of Scripture, and the discernment of individual revelation are all filtered (as Immanuel Kant showed) through the eye of “reason.” Today, theorists recognize that in the interpretations of texts, the interpreter as well as the text itself must be interpreted: One’s own cultural milieu and setting in life actively influence interpretation. In the broadest sense of “reason” as the agent by which we understand and articulate what we perceive as church tradition, Scripture, or the Spirit, this dimension of human involvement and the human community is always present.

In the post-Reformation period, the principal avenues of authority were broadened further by various theological movements. The authority of the church and its traditions was fortified through the Council of Trent (1545-63), in which the Roman Catholic Church asserted that church teachings could be drawn “from Sacred Scripture, the apostolic traditions, the holy and approved councils, the constitutions and authorities of the supreme pontiffs and holy fathers, and the consensus of the Catholic Church.” The authority of the Pope as the interpreter of the Roman Catholic tradition was confirmed by the First Vatican Council, which gave official status to the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870. This gave the Pope’s pronouncements binding authority in the church when he spoke in an official capacity (ex cathedra) under prescribed conditions. The Pope was said to be “the true vicar of Christ, the head of the whole Church, the father and teacher of all Christians.”

Against Counter-Reformation attempts at Trent to establish the authority of the church, Protestant theology in both its Lutheran and Reformed expressions sought to prove the authority of the Bible as the inspired Word of God that must be obeyed and that would take precedence over even the authority of the church. In the elaborate theological systems constructed by Protestant “scholastic” or “orthodox” theologians, Scripture functioned as the formal principle on which a scientific theology could be constructed. Crucial to this treatment of the Bible was detailed attention to the inspiration of Scripture and in some writings, to what became known as Scripture’s “inerrancy.” The Helvetic Consensus Formula (1675), a Reformed confession, pronounced that the Bible was inspired “not only in its matter, but in its words.” This inspiration was found “not only in its consonants, but in its vowels—either the vowel points themselves, or at least the power of the points.” This view accompanied the corollary of Scripture’s inerrancy—that, because Scripture was inspired by God, it could exhibit no “errors” of any kind, including all statements of fact in areas such as geography, science, and history.

In reaction to the interconfessional disputes among continental orthodox churches, the Pietist movement arose in the eighteenth century. It sought a revival of religious fervor and emphasized the religious renewal of individuals through the “new Birth.” The work of the Holy Spirit was a primary source of authority for Pietism and the proof of the Spirit’s work was in the works of “piety” performed. This emphasis stood in contrast to what the Pietists regarded as the formalism of orthodoxy, which was thought to be so heavily influenced by technical theology and the established church structures that lively spiritual experience was virtually lost. In a European culture where the prospects of maintaining a “Christian civilization” were being questioned, the Spirit’s work in individuals became Pietism’s focus.

Attacks on Authority. The period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century saw massive attacks on these traditional sources of Christian authority. Rapid changes in the European intellectual and social climate spurred by new currents in the studies of the natural sciences, philosophy, and literature put authority on all planes on the defensive. The formulations of Isaac Newton for mathematical physics presented nature as a rational, unified order where there were no “hidden purposes” (of God) to discover. As a result of Newton’s work, “God” was no longer needed as the hypothesis to authorize the world; “God” became a projection of nature. The scientific method of Francis Bacon, who emphasized the inductive approach to knowledge, allowed science to pursue truth on its own terms, thus freeing it from having to seek theological warrants as authority. This shift led to a heightened stress on reason as a primary authority for interpreting all human experience. It meant as well that traditions (as promoted by the church) or supernatural appeals to the “Spirit” were suspect. The Cartesian method that led to the “I think” (cogito)—the human being’s existence as a thinking being as the primary datum for reflection—became the starting point for authority. The emphasis of John Locke on reason as a “natural revelation” made reason alone the arbiter of the correctness of any claims to revelation. For English Deism, reason was the supreme reality. Authority was rooted in human perception in “the Age of Reason.”

Similar movements in literary fields brought about the beginnings of biblical criticism. The rise of historical consciousness, in which it was realized that people in the ancient biblical cultures perceived reality and asked questions in ways different from those of Europeans of the nineteenth century, was an important factor. So too were developments from archaeological explorations that enabled history to be reconstructed apart from the biblical data. Biblical texts themselves were being examined in ways that questioned or negated previous orthodox assumptions. Thus attacks on the Bible as “infallible” or “inerrant” became commonplace.

Traditional authority was also questioned by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume attacked causality, and with it the validity of making any empirically demonstrable statement about God. In Kant’s analysis of reason and the possibility of metaphysics, he concluded that “the only theology of reason which is possible is that which is based upon moral laws or seeks guidance from them.” Thus in the Enlightenment period, the metaphysical structure of reality, on which traditional models of authority (and Christian revelation) were based, was apparently destroyed.

Alternatives. Christian theologians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries responded to the Enlightenment attacks by shifting the grounds on which authority is based. Friedrich Schleiermacher turned to the realm of religious experience as the foundation for faith. The feeling of “absolute dependence” and the Christian experience of redemption provided the framework by which he believed theology could be possible. Albrecht Ritschl focused on the historical Jesus as the object of faith and revelation of God’s will. Ritschl saw Jesus as the intersection of the religious and ethical foci of theology and as the model for the value judgments that religion makes, particularly as Jesus symbolized the moral ideal of the kingdom of God. Thus Ritschl sought to emphasize the ethical implications of Christian faith.

The challenge of the Enlightenment was met differently by Karl Barth. Instead of seeking an authority grounded in religious experience or history as his liberal teachers had done, Barth turned to God’s self-revelation and disclosure in Jesus Christ as the foundation for all authority. Jesus Christ is the Word of God, God’s address to the world, and the ground and basis for all knowledge of God and language about God. God’s incarnate Word is mediated to humanity through the Bible as the written Word and through preaching as the Word proclaimed. Scripture has authority as God uses it to witness to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. The Bible must be approached in faith (given by the Holy Spirit)—not by “external proofs”—for its authority to be recognized. Barth’s christological approach sought to give authority a divine basis not dependent on the specifics of human experience or rational or historical standards used to judge Scripture.

Paul Tillich’s approach to authority is characterized by his emphasis on the “method of correlation”—correlating culture’s existential questions with the religious symbols of Christianity. The primary symbol is Jesus as the Christ who is the “New Being.” In the living encounter with this symbol (facilitated by the Scriptures), humans receive God’s revelation and their salvation. Thus Tillich found the emergence of authority in the mediation of power and the new awareness of the self enabled by one’s encounter with the divine (the “ground of being”). Tillich’s whole theological approach was concerned to unite “sacred” and “secular” since all being is grounded in the divine reality of God.

A number of other views of authority have emerged from current theological movements and theologians. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) led Roman Catholicism to ecclesiastical reforms and to a view that church tradition helps ensure the correct interpretation of Scripture. The Council also taught that tradition does not contain any truth not also revealed in Scripture.

In the later 1970s some conservative Protestants formed the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI), which tried to reestablish and interpret the inerrancy of Scripture as the prime authority for today. Other conservative Protestants have preferred the term “infallibility” to designate Scripture’s authority for salvation and the life of faith.

Liberation theology emphasizes the priority of praxis, the practical situation, or beginning “where the pain is,” for engaging in theology. This means that human experience—whether that of the poor, Blacks, women, or others oppressed—has a decisive role as authority for theology. Experience is also central in process theology, where one is involved in the evolution of God and the world into future possibilities.

Authority Today. Today’s scene presents a wide array of sources appealed to as authorities for theology. The traditional bases—church and tradition, Scripture, Holy Spirit and experience, and reason—reemerge in varying ways as norms and criteria for theological discourse. Use of these sources is not drawn along specific ecclesiastical lines. In the pluralistic world of theology now, all appear with differing accents and emphases, thus pointing to the importance of the concept of authority for the full range of theological work. A sampling of voices on the current scene includes the following:

1. Process Theology. Process theology finds a compatibility between the analysis of reality provided by Alfred North Whitehead and basic Christian faith. Conscious beliefs are expressed through religious “doctrine.” These beliefs dramatically affect human existence. Christian doctrine makes human consciousness aware of elements of the universal experience of the divine, such as divine grace. In this way doctrines can shape attitudes, commitments, and human purposes, thereby altering the structures of human existence themselves. Thus, doctrine can carry “authority.” Scripture may be a source for “doctrine.” But Scripture’s authority emerges from the recognition of its concurrence with one’s own, self-evident experience. Christian doctrine and the Christian Scriptures can be sources through which one apprehends God’s unfolding action in the world. Scripture’s authority emerges through the insight and inspiration it provides as well as the new possibilities for experience it presents. In this way, Scripture and experience together can be sources of authority.

2. Narrative Theology. Theologians who stress the power of narratives to shape human life find the “narrative” of Scripture as well as the narratives within Scripture as sources of authority. Basic to this view is the emphasis on the shaping power of language to define human beings, to establish their boundaries, and give them the journeys of meaning they follow through life. The metaphors of narrative provide possibilities for new interpretations of reality to emerge through a personal set of images and a larger vision of the course and direction of one’s journey. These narratives invite response and participation, thus drawing one into the power they convey. Authority for narrative theologians comes through the Christian Scriptures that provide the central set of metaphors by which one’s life and vision can be shaped. The Christian gospel, as conveyed in the biblical stories, provides a “way of being in the world.” The gospel emerges as part of the larger story of Israel. The Christian community is the corporate body of those who “remember” the stories and seek to live truthfully in light of their commitments to the Christian message. In this way, the Scriptures provide stories that shape Christians to be faithful people.

3. Liberation Theologies. The various forms of Liberation theology today—Latin American, Black, Asian, Feminist, Womanist, and others—share a central conviction that experience and social location are key ingredients for doing theology and that theological statements reflect these elements even as they attempt as well to interpret the Scriptures.

For Latin American Liberation theologians, Scripture functions as the foundation for freedom. The Bible provides the paradigms, goals, and means through which human liberation can occur. The Scriptures also introduce the ultimate liberator, Jesus Christ. In the midst of oppression, injustice, and the ravages of economic devastation, Scripture provides an “authority” for human life in the praxis of the human community by presenting a God who has a “preferential option” for the poor and who is at work in the world to bring about human liberation. As the biblical model of liberation takes shape in communities, the Scriptures provide the life-giving word of freedom.

For Black theology, authority is also accorded to the Bible as it is interpreted in local church communities among those who are oppressed as black people and seek liberation from white domination in American society. The Scriptures are the conduit for understanding God’s being and acts. They are the church’s book and hold the primary place of authority within black churches. The Scriptures provide a liberating word since the biblical accounts portray a God who brings “salvation” through the process of “liberation.” A main paradigm is the exodus experience of the people of Israel who were liberated from the oppression of the Egyptians. As the Scriptures are read, interpreted, and proclaimed in the black community, the liberating word—focused in Jesus Christ himself—becomes an authoritative reality for those who are oppressed.

Asian theology also seeks liberation for oppressed people in Asia. It incorporates a blending of Christian stories with traditional Asian folktales and parables to provide a common witness for discerning God’s presence and actions in the world. Dialogue and conversations between Christians and those of other religious and cultural traditions are important ingredients in providing stories for freedom that can motivate and shape Asian peoples’ struggle for self-identity and human dignity. Authority emerges through those narratives that can be “re-imagined” and “contextualized” to provide a liberating word for people in need of freedom and hope.

Feminist and Womanist theologians find authority residing in their experience as women, particularly as women of color (womanist). In their experience of oppression, they turn to Scripture as the mother of models to provide the paradigms, visions, and hope needed to combat sexism, racism, and classism, and to further the liberation of women. These theologians seek to reclaim texts, interpret Scripture in light of liberation themes, and reconstruct biblical history in ways that will be liberating for women. In the critique of patriarchy and the yearning for the transformation of patriarchal and racist church structures, feminist and womanist theologians with their feminist critical consciousness appropriate the Bible’s prophetic tradition to work for the transformation of oppressed and marginalized persons and communities. Authority emerges as those with feminist and womanist consciousness appropriate liberating elements in Scripture and in their own experience.

4. Postmodern Theologies. Various theologies called “postmodern” share a view that there is no longer a single, universal worldview that affords a unified, all-encompassing, and universally valid explanation for all things. “Postmodernism” as an intellectual mood and cultural expression emphasizes “difference,” the local and particular instead of the universal. Postmodern thinkers also reject “metanarratives”—the legitimizing of myths as narratives that give a group its ability to sustain social relationships and form the basis for their legitimacy. In the postmodern period, all things are “delegitimized.” There is no universality.

These views have tremendous implications for inherited and traditional views of God, Christ, and humanity within the world. The “de-centering” of these concepts calls into question the viability of all issues of “authority connected” religion as well as religion in general. The postmodern context is one that features open-endedness, pluralism, pragmatism, and tentativeness. Contemporary theologians are challenged to represent God, Christ, and the church as realities and sources of authority in ways that are intelligible to the current age and also faithful to the inherited theological vision of Christianity. While the issue of authority has been central in every age, it takes on even more dramatic seriousness today since common foundations—assumed in times past—can no longer be called upon in the service of Christian apologetics or theological construction.

DONALD K. McKIM