Authority of the Bible

It is one of the central topics of historical protestantism. It was in the name of their faithfulness to Scripture as opposed to "papal apostasy" that almost all reformers carried the course of reformation forward in its early stages. But also, perhaps disturbingly, almost every new protestant denomination since then has begun its own life with a new "turn to the Bible", or at least professing it.

The "Sola Scriptura" formula will never loose its appeal in protestantism, as surely as "ad fontes" or "back to the source" calls always have their force in any religion. I think that it is quite clear that Christianity would cease to be Christianity if one would simply disregard the Bible as a source of faith and doctrine.

The role of Scripture in responsible Christian theology today is still a hot topic and rightly so. It is quite appropriate for a Christian theology to repeatedly return to the question of Biblical interpretation and of the understanding of its spiritual authority, as our circumstances in which we come to the Biblical text change, as well as our knowledge of many areas of life and the world including the socio-historical and linguistic worlds of the Bible, and sociological and psychological perspectives of human religious behaviour.

Nevertheless, one needs to be careful not to lift the Bible to the pedestal on which it can not stand after a longer, honest look. By doing so, textually conservative theologies of today (like evangelical, adventist, but even some interpretations of neo-orthodoxy and post-liberalism) can do the Bible and Christianity a great disservice. For example, inspiration of the Bible does not guarantee its historical reliability (although it might at places "make it" more reliable than other sources from that time). Rather, it means - among other things - that God can and does speak to individuals and to communities today and in all times through the biblical text in a very special and deeply felt ways. This is crucial and it is this what makes the Bible a spiritually unique book in Christianity. Gospels, for ex. are the closest to the earliest, most potent narratives about Christ and his meaning for humanity. The Bible enables us to get in touch, however remotely yet genuinely, with the faith of people who have been devoted and open to the same Ultimate Reality which is at work in people's lives today, two and more thousands years ago.

But because of its very nature, the Bible can not be the only source of Christian faith and doctrine, nor is it absolutely above and superior to the other sources suggested in history (tradition, reason, religious experience). I will give reasons for this claim in the next post.