THE NATURE OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY
AND THE RESTORATION MOVEMENT

In 1837 when Alexander Campbell debated Bishop Purcell on Roman Catholicism, he spoke in his opening speech of defending “the great redeeming, regenerating, and enabling principles of Protestantism.” Though there was no proposition in the debate dealing with the place of scriptures per se, except for the thesis defended by Mr. Campbell that mankind has the Bible quite independently of the Roman church, he does make explicit his view of the scriptures as authoritative. Sketching what he calls “the Protestant rule,” as opposed to the Roman, he names seven attributes of the Bible. It is inspired, authoritative, intelligible, moral, perpetual, catholic, perfect. In attributing authority to scripture, he quotes John 12:48: “The word that I speak to you shall judge you in the last day.”

While some heirs of the Restoration Movement have been critical of Campbell for defending Protestantism in that debate, there can be no question that he stood in the mainstream of classical Protestant thought in his view of scripture. Though he had his quarrel with the Westminster divines of 1647 in their creation of The Confession of Faith, it was not when they said: “The authority of the holy scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God, (who is truth itself), the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the word of God.” And while Luther would not ascribe the Word of God to all the scriptures, Campbell would certainly agree with him that “both Popes and general councils of the Church can err and only the Scriptures are authoritative.” And Calvin did not even go too far for Campbell when he wrote: “The scriptures receive full authority among the faithful by no other right than that they decided that the Scriptures have flowed down from heaven, as if the very words of God were there heard.” To be sure, if the Bible was authoritative to Protestantism, it certainly was to Alexander Campbell.

Before I say more about the views of our founding fathers, I owe it to my audience, I presume, to set forth my own position on the nature of biblical authority, I am, after all, like most of you, a product of the Restoration Movement. Any conclusions that we might reach in this study are to be drawn not only from the best thinking of our own past, but from our own application of mind, in reference to the most reliable biblical scholarship of our own day.

I take the position that the authoritative basis of our religion is centered, not in a book per se, but in a Person, the Founder of our faith and the Captain of our salvation, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible describes him as the Word of God (Rev. 19:13), and that Word was an authoritative reality long before there were any New Covenant scriptures. And even the Old Covenant scriptures, which was the only Bible that the earliest Christians had, was (and is) accepted as authoritative in that Jesus set the seal of his own authority upon them.

“God spoke to our fathers in various ways and in different installments through the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us through his son,” Heb. 1:1-2 assures us. The prophets were and are authoritative in that they spoke with a “thus saith the Lord,” ex cathedra, as much as any ambassador with plenipotentiary authority would speak for the government he represents. This was true whether they wrote or not. Elijah and Elisha were the great non-writing prophets, but their words were as authoritative as those of Isaiah or Amos. It was the “thus saith the Lord” that counted, whether it was ever written or not. Thus the word of God given to Moses was heaven’s authoritative Word while it existed in oral tradition as much as when it finally became literature, and I accept it today as part of “God has spoken,” mainly because it was accepted as such by Jesus and his apostles.

Said the Lord: “Everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds that they might understand the scriptures” (Lk. 24:44-45). “You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me” (John 5:39).

Since he is indeed the son of God, I believe Jesus when he says: “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth” (Mt. 28:18). Authority lies only in truth. Since God is ultimate truth, only He has absolute authority. This authority He has given to his son. It is to the extent that we discern this truth in Jesus in the scriptures that the Bible is authoritative to us. The scriptures of both Old and New Covenants are thus authoritative in that they reflect him and bear witness to his mission in this world.

This is to say that Jesus “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature,” and that it is only in the scriptures that this great truth comes to me and gives me life and light. He is thus my example and pattern, the norm by which I conform my life to God, which is what authority is all about. This is the case not only of his life and teaching and all that the Old Covenant scriptures say in anticipation of him, but also of the experience of the primitive church, the Acts and the epistles thus reflecting the experience of the community of believers growing in Christ-likeness. All these are authoritative in that they speak to me of Jesus.

This implies a distinction between relative and absolute biblical authority. Those portions of scripture that reflect the Christ with greater glory and reveal his will to me more explicitly are more authoritative. The Lord’s prayer is thus more authoritative than the prayer of Nehemiah, and the gospel of John or the letter to the Ephesians is more authoritative than the Song of Solomon or the Book of Leviticus. The parables of Jesus and the letters of Paul speak to me with absolute authority, while the genealogies of Chronicles mean almost nothing in comparison. If authority is rooted in truth, we must remember that the scriptures give us truth ranging all the way from nil to crucial to life and light. No thinking Christian would contend, except perhaps in some indefensible theory of inspiration, that the dietary rules in Leviticus or the apocalyptic views of Zechariah are of the same authority as the Sermon on the Mount or Paul’s love hymn of 1 Cor.13, even though all these fall under the general heading of the holy scriptures. All scripture may be truth, but obviously all scripture is not of the same importance, and consequently not of the same authority.

Interestingly enough, the Bible nowhere calls itself the Word of God. It rather says that “the Word of God came” to the great prophets of Israel and that it was finally “made flesh.” The Word of God had already happened when the Bible came along, and yet we believe that somehow, as much as paper and ink can, it mirrors the mind of God and is thus scripture inspired of God (2 Tim. 3:16). William Robertson Smith, that great Aberdeen scholar, said it well in such an unlikely place as his own heresy trial: “If I am asked why I receive scripture as the Word of God, I answer with all the Fathers of the Reformed Church: Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to man in Christ Jesus and declaring to us, in him, his will for our salvation, and this record I know to be true by the witness of his Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God himself is able to speak such words to my soul.” (A. M. Hunter, Bible and Gospel, p. 3).

I am saying that the nature of biblical authority is that the scriptures grew out of God’s authoritative dealings with man. The Bible is a record of man’s experience in responding to God’s overtures. I believe that God directed all this in such a way that we now have the scriptures He wants us to have and that they say to us what He wants them to say. This we can believe in spite of all the problems of canonicity. Even if the early church accepted some books that we now reject and rejected some that we now accept, we can believe that God’s superintending hand has preserved for the continuing church the literature that is best for it.

But this cannot mean that all scripture, even that of the New Covenant, is equally important and authoritative. There is a reason why the early church questioned the place of Hebrews, James, 2 and 3 John, Jude, 2 Peter, and Revelation; and it was a long time before they gained and undisputed place in the canon. But Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Acts, and 13 epistles of Paul were never in dispute, for it is here that we have the heart of the Christian scriptures. We lose nothing in admitting that a book like Jude or 3 John is of relative authority, while Luke and Acts are of absolute authority. The difference lies in what they have to say to us in reference to the will of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Just as there is no comparison between what the Gospel of John and the Revelation of John does for one in bringing Jesus into focus. In the Gospel I read of the Lord’s teaching about his own nature and his mission in this world, his meeting with people like the Samaritan woman, his prayer to the Father, and his eventual passion and resurrection. Whereas in the Revelation I am projected into a catastrophic world of fantastic and terrifying imagery that probably nobody really understands in our time. The nature of biblical authority has to be such that literature like the Gospel of John is of greater authority than the Revelation. The Gospel of John speaks to me in terms of what God wants me to do and to be; the Revelation, outside its first three chapters, says very little to me in this respect. And it is in doing and being that authority is all about.

Neither do I see it necessary to hold to a theory of absolute inerrancy of scripture in order to accept is as authoritative. The Bible is hardly a volume that has come to us through some kind of divine dictation and thus free of any kind of error. It is difficult for a thoughtful Christian to believe this. If it were true, it would make God responsible for every little mistake in scripture, such as in Mk. 2:26 where Abiathar is wrongly written for Abimelech, or in Mt. 27:9 where Jeremiah is given credit for something said by Zechariah.

We unnecessarily burden ourselves with the task of explaining all such discrepancies, as if the nature of biblical authority demanded this. Even though the scriptures make no such claim for themselves, we belabor the point and make a big deal out of explaining, with all sorts of gymnastics, “the alleged contradictions and discrepancies of the Bible.” We even subject ourselves to the ordeal of working out “a harmony of the gospels.” as if it were all one testimony. It does not seem to have occurred to us that if God had wanted us to have had but one gospel record, he would have provided us with just that rather than the fourfold view that He has given us. It is as if we missed the point of divine revelation, which has been given to us through earthen vessels and consequently has the mark of human imperfections.

A more moderate view than rigid inerrancy allows us to see the peculiarities and even the prejudices of the different writers. Even though “the beloved physician” almost certainly had Mark’s account of the woman with a hemorrhage before him, he conveniently omitted that part that reflected on physicians. Dr. Luke no doubt felt that he could tell the story just as well without saying, “After long and painful treatment under various doctors, she had spent all she had without being any the better for it” (Mk. 5:26). Luke tells us only that “no one was able to cure her.” But the doctor does tell the story, and with Jesus shining through as beautiful as ever.

I agree with the likes of T. H. Horne and Wescott & Hort that the inerrancy of scripture means that there is no substantial error in the Bible. There is no imperfection that materially affects its message or its great teachings. Witnesses to any event do not have to agree in every particular for their testimony to be valid. Indeed, it is the variations that indicate that there has been no collusion. It is not the medium that is the message, Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding, but in the case of the gospel story, whether it be in the Old Covenant scriptures where the story is potentialized or in the New Covenant where it is actualized, the message is the wonderful Person of the Bible. No error, no discrepancy, no contradiction even begins to blur the glorious story of who he is and what he means to us. If this is not inerrancy, it is what C. H. Dodd calls “cogent persuasiveness.” This means that in the Bible there is a faithful record of the Master’s voice. Like any recording device, there may be noises in the machine and needle scratches on the disk, but it is still the Master speaking and his voice is cogent and persuasive. Praise God that He has revealed His son to us, however frail and fallible the instruments through which He has done so!

There is another thing about the nature of authority, whether biblical or otherwise, and that is the more subtle it is the more deeply it cuts into our lives. Like some great painting or musical composition, it imposes itself upon us through its own internal character rather than by any arbitrary demands. This subjective aspect of authority cannot be overlooked. This is why some biblical passages that are associated with our own valleys of despair or peaks of joy, verses rooted deeply in our own dramatic vicissitudes, speak to us with such resounding authority. And this is why those same passages will not mean nearly so much to someone else. I remember whispering the assuring words of Philip. 4:13 to my very sick Mother as she was being wheeled into surgery. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” She was still repeating that great passage as she underwent the anesthetic. That verse now has to me a subjective ring to its authority.

The authority of a writer like Alexander Solzhenitsyn has this subtle element. He does not have to tell people that he is an authority on the life and times of the Russian revolution. And what one gets in reading Cancer Ward or Gulag Archipelago, or in hearing the novelist recount his experiences in a TV interview, is more than information. There is a person that comes through. There is a spirit that pervades it all, a subjective element, that gives it an authentic ring. It is an authority gained through suffering and involvement rather than one externally imposed. It is the kind of thing we all understand in such a judgment as, “The pianist’s performance lacked authority,” And such a judgment is sometimes made when all the objective and external features have been faithfully performed.

The authority of our Lord is like that. He never imposes himself or presses his claims upon anyone. He points more to the Father than to himself: “The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise” (Jo. 5:19). The entire Bible is this way. It is not so much inspired information that it gives us. It is literature that stirs the deeper levels of personality by involving us in the drama of suffering and compassion, so that we find ourselves awed by its relevance to the human predicament. When we read of the greatest life ever lived, the struggles of a community growing in Christlikeness, the agony of the great apostle who had pressing upon him “the care of all the churches”—the fight that he fought, the race that he finished, the faith he kept,—there is something about it all that convinces us that it is God’s Word from the Beyond. It has that special something about it that calls for no apologetic, and we find ourselves saying that’s for me! And that is the true nature of biblical authority.

Finally, I must say that the Bible never really becomes authoritative except to him who hungers for God. Despite all his efforts, Jesus was never accepted as authoritative to those Pharisees who both resented and rejected him. One of the most remarkable of Jesus’ saying is along this line: “If any man wills to do God’s will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority” (Jn. 7:17). If anyone wills he will know. It follows that so long as one is not willing, and is insincere before God, he will not know. There is no need to show light to a blind man, but once he is caused to see he can rejoice in the light. One blind man who was caused to see said, quite knowingly, “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (Jn. 9:33). Jesus pointed him to God, and this is the essence of our Lord’s authority: his power to enable men to see God.

The source of biblical authority is therefore in God and in His son, Jesus. By their appointment of prophets and apostles this authority is expressed through the scriptures. God thus speaks to us through the Bible. Since the deity has no vocal cords and does not “speak” except in terms of human language, with whatever limitations that may impose, we must necessarily interpret the Bible as we would other ancient literature. This has to mean that each man’s conscience is the final court of appeal as to what God is saying to him in the scriptures, unless indeed we are willing to allow others to serve as the final arbiter as to what the Bible means. In that sense, then, each one of us is his own authority, for each one is responsible under God to make that response to the scriptures that is consistent to his own mind and heart.

Returning now to the founders of our Movement, it is appropriate to ask to what extent these views of biblical authority are consistent with theirs, even though we all agree that consistency is not necessary for our own personal quest of truth. Limiting myself only to Alexander Campbell, I see my thinking as consistent with his in the following respects.

1. Influenced as he was by Francis Bacon and John Locke, Campbell insisted that the student must approach the scriptures inductively rather than deductively. He believed in the kind of free inquiry that was void of all presuppositions in approaching the biblical text. The “textuary divines,” as he called them in his more ungracious moments, have their premises already in hand, and so they proceed to find those texts that will justify their conclusions. He laid down a standard for biblical study that hardly anyone could be expected to follow perfectly, including himself: “I have endeavored to read the scriptures as though no one had read them before me; and I am as much on my guard against reading them today, through the medium of my own views yesterday, or a week ago, as I am against being influenced by any foreign name, authority, or system, whatever” (Chris. Bap. 1826, p. 201).

2. Even though he lived before the dawn of modern scientific biblical criticism, his own grammatio-historical approach to the scriptures was well in advance of his time. His passion for giving the public a new translation of the living oracles is an instance of this. He had no fear of an honest, vigorous examination of the Bible in its historical and cultural setting. He laid down principles of interpretation that alarmed the clergy, such as: “the same philological principles, deduced from the nature of language of other books, are to be applied to the language of the Bible” (Christian System, p.4).

3. He did not confuse some theory of verbal inspiration with biblical authority. In fact, he rejected verbal inspiration for plenary inspiration. While the scriptures are completely (plenary) inspired, there is no evidence that every word is given of the Holy Spirit. He said: “We must regard these writers as using their own modes of speech, and as selecting their own words, both in speaking and writing; yet so plenary was their inspiration that they could not select an improper term or a word not in accordance with the mind of the Spirit. That they did select different words to express the same ideas cannot be disputed.” (Mill Harb, 1834, p. 200). Rejecting the dictation theory commonly held, he believed the Spirit directed the writers in the selection of the sources, but left them free to write out of their own individual uniqueness.

Nor was Campbell alarmed by a possible error here and there in the scriptures. Asked in the Campbell-Owen debate about the reference to Jeremiah in Mt. 27:9 instead of Zechariah, he explained that a writer could easily make such a mistake since the Old Testament was divided in a different way then; but even if it be an error it in no wise affects the credibility of Matthew’s testimony concerning Jesus, he insisted.

4. He makes a place for what I have called the subjective aspect of authority. After a long list of erudite rules for interpretation, he lays down what he calls the one “indispensable” rule, which is that the reader of the scriptures must come within “the understanding distance.” There is a hearing distance and a speaking distance in ordinary affairs that we all understand, he observes, but in reference to God and the Bible there is an understanding distance, beyond which one never understands, however learned he may be. One must enter the circle of the understanding distance, of which God is the center and humility is the circumference, he says. Just as the sun reaches out to give us light and we must open our eyes to benefit from it, so the light of the scriptures are for us only if we open our hearts and minds to its influence. If one’s only intent is to know the will of God, then he has “a sound eye” and a knowledge of God will be easy for him. (Christian System, p. 5).

5. He believed the Bible to be the complete, authoritative Word of God, and that it would be just as foolish to expect God to give another sun to illuminate the heavens as to give another Bible. “In the Christian religion there are no new discoveries, no new improvement to be made. It is already revealed, and long since developed in the apostolic writing,” he told the readers of the Christian Baptist in 1826 (p. 168). And he put his finger on the main point of biblical authority when he wrote: “As God kindly revealed himself, his will, and our salvation in human language, the words of human language, which he used for this purpose, must have been used by his Spirit in the commonly received sense amongst mankind generally; else it could not have been a revelation, for a revelation in words not understood in the common sense is no revelation at all” (Chris. Bap., 1823, page 121).

As divided as our Movement now is, we have a common heritage of accepting the scriptures as the authoritative Word of God. It is amiss for any one of our groups to account for our differences on the ground of “a difference in attitude toward the Bible,” as if only our own wing were the only ones who believe in the authority of the scriptures. All of us in the Restoration Movement believe in the authority of the Bible! Our divisions may come from making too much of our varying interpretations, especially our interpretation of the silence of the scriptures, or from a lack of that love that unites, but they are not because some of us accept the Bible as our rule of faith and practice and others of us do not. We are all justified in pointing each other, and the whole of the Christian world, to the scriptures as the church’s only norm in religion, bu t we do not have the right to impose our opinions and our own personal interpretations either upon each other or upon others, thus making them tests of fellowship. We are all part of a tradition that has appealed to a “thus saith the Lord” and our forebears have pointed to those things in the Bible that are “clearly and distinctly” set forth as the basis of communion. I would urge that we preserve that legacy.—the Editor

(This paper was presented at the Theological Forum, North American Christian Convention, July 24,1974.)