The Authority of Scripture
This lecture was given as one of four faculty presentations at a brief Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary symposium on April 24, 1984. It has been transcribed from a tape recording.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, "David Beats Goliath" (1509)
How does the Word of God establish its authority over us? The Word of God establishes its authority over us by virtue of its power to do what it claims for us and to us: to end the old and begin the new; to create faith, to set us free; to liberate from law, sin, and death. Authority is what does that. Authority, in this case, is that beyond which there is no further appeal; the place where the buck stops. So that when dealing with the Word of God in all of its forms—that is, as the incarnate Word, the preached Word, and the written Word—we rightly fear, of course, placing some human authority over the Word. We seek to be under the Word. We are naturally suspicious of human attempts to deal critically with the Word of God—to sit in judgment over it. But I suppose that if we were consistent we should also be suspicious of attempts to stand above the Word in order to bolster it up; to shore it up and obscure its authority by human contrivances in order to give it an authority which it does not want nor claim. That will result in invariably lessening the authority of the Word of God because it substitutes human forms of authority for divine authority. That is to say that all attempts to substitute human authority for divine authority will not liberate but they will enslave. So, that is why the question is rightly put: how does the Word of God establish its authority over us?
In the Lutheran Church, perhaps in the protestant church generally, one must begin by recognizing that there are two modes of authority now that God has come among us. There is the authority of the Old—what we might call legal authority. And the authority of the New: the authority of the Gospel.
Legal authority is what we are mostly used to. It is most common in the everyday world. It works by its ability to impose conditions, grant rewards for success, or punishment for failure. Just about everything we do in this age—in this world—stands under such authority. And mostly we think that’s about the only kind of authority there is. And if it is suddenly taken away we think that we have “lost all authority” over our lives.
But the ultimate authority of the Word of God is not the authority of the Law but of the Gospel promise. The Gospel works by its power to end the old existence under the law and begin the new in the spirit. Gospel authority is that which has the power to set us free; to liberate. The Word of God establishes its authority over us by virtue of its power to do just that: to bring the old to an end—to kill. And to make alive and, thus, to set free. That is a peculiar kind of authority. We are not used to thinking about that kind of authority or dealing with it.
And we can be rightly suspicious of a lot of loose talk about “liberation” where the matter is simply reduced to “choosing one’s lifestyle” or something like that. That kind of liberation is usually just a new form of bondage to [what Paul calls] the “elemental spirits of the age.” We might also be suspicious of what has been called “gospel reductionism”—reducing everything to a simple word of favor. If the Word of God were reduced to some nice words of comfort, possibility thinking, sweet security or whatever might be appealing to us as Old Beings, that would indeed be gospel reductionism.
We must be quite clear when we talk about the authority of the Word of God that we are speaking about the death of the Old and the resurrection of the New; not affirmation for coddling of the Old in its fancies. Of course, the Old being can coddled in more ways than one. It may also have a penchant for legalism; for seeking security in law and using the Word of God as a means to dominate. Under the guise of putting oneself under the Word of God, one puts oneself in the position of using it to control and dominate. This calls to mind some of those passages in Martin Luther’s treatise “On the Freedom of the Christian” where he speaks of pastors who like to use the Word of God as rods with which to beat people. That must go.
The Word of God establishes its authority over us only when it puts to death the Old and raises up the New in Christ; the new who is free to hear God. The peculiar nature of this authority is that there can be no appeal to anything higher. Only the Word of God—by itself, alone—can acquire such authority over us by its being communicated to us. Either this happens in the communication or it does not. The authority is the happening; the liberating deed itself. To refuse it is simply to refuse the Gospel, to refuse to be free, to submit once again to a yolk of bondage. There is no way that we could appeal to anything higher, to a higher mode of authority. There is no set of standards to which we could claim or appeal to say that the Word of God ought to have such authority— [claims of] inerrancy or whatever—since that would be to fall back on legal authority once again. The Word is not of the sort that it ought to have this kind of authority. Nor can we give it that kind of authority.
It can only establish its own authority. That is what it means, ultimately, to say that the Holy Spirit witnesses to the truth and the power of the Word. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.
Either the Word of God sets you free or you haven’t heard it at all.
So the Word of God allows no appeal beyond itself. It establishes its authority by putting an end to all other authorities bringing us to our end under the law and opening up the future to new life in the Spirit. The authority of the Word of God is the authority to set us free.
Now, in this world, we must take account of the fact that the Word of God does possess a kind of legal authority. It takes on legal form. It carries legal authority in the community which is placed under the Word—especially in the form of the written Word. Christ was born under the law. The Word of Christ takes shape under the law. The story is carried in the written word, the tradition, the confessions, the doctrine of the church. But this written word functions as a charter of freedom; like a letter declaring the slave to be free. It has legal character and status in the community. One guards it, keeps it, protects it from distortion and alternation. But one does that because it does actually liberate—not because of its legal character per se. The ultimate authority it has is in its power to liberate. It is important to see this lest the Gospel itself be lost. The question of the ultimate authority of the Word of God does not and cannot come to rest through our discussions of the presence or absence of errors in the legal form. Inerrancy and such things are no guarantee of the Word of God. Similar claims are made for religious documents in other communities but we do not find them authoritative on that account. Why? Because they do not liberate; they do not claim us by their intrinsic power. The Word of God establishes its own power over us by its own power to set us free and there can be no higher authority than that.
