The Authority of the Bible

A few Sundays ago I was preaching on Divorce and remarriage, and was confronted by the words of Jesus that said in effect that divorce was never right, and yet in most western Christian communities it has almost disappeared as an issue.  

Now if any of you are a bit like me, and have moved from being quite legalistic about divorce and remarriage into a position of understanding and permitting it, I wonder if you, too, have struggled with a wondering if you have done a bad thing to the Bible by disregarding something that Jesus seems to have said very specifically.

This strikes at our sense of the authority of the Bible and raises a question for us — "How can we

do what seems to be the opposite and not undermine the authority of the Bible?"

I have struggled with this question, mainly because l have never clearly thought through a framework for understanding what authority the Bible has.  For most of us there are two central planks in the

authority of the Bible - God wrote it, and it is infallibly correct. Anyone who disregards the text or its plain meaning is undermining its authority.

My seminary training taught me a different view of the text, but it didn't give me an alternative

understanding of the authority of the text; and just recently someone wrote something that makes so much sense about it that I want to share it with you before l unpick this issue of divorce and remarriage.

Clearly, the text of the Bible was written by men (there is some suspicion that Priscilla may have

written Hebrews, l think), but as an easy example, when Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians he

was not writing Holy Scripture.  He was writing a letter to some friends to help them as a

community of Christians.  For him The Psalms and the Prophets were the Scriptures. 

Similarly, when King David and others wrote the Psalms, they were not writing Scripture. For

them, only the first five books of the bible were Scripture.

The process by which these texts were elevated to sacred texts was progressive and took a long

time.  In the case of what we call the Old Testament, at first there was just the Torah -— Genesis to

Deuteronomy — then they added the Psalms and some of the Prophets and finally some of the

later prophets and the writings like Job and Esther.  This took about 600 years and even then

some people want to leave bits out that others wanted in.

In the case of the New Testament the decision to include post-Jesus writings to the Old Testament

didn't happen for several hundred years, and it all took three or four goes at deciding on the in-group of texts, and then Luther and others wanted to get rid of James and we still have a difference of opinion in the church about the Apocryphal books.

So, what is it that gives these texts their authority?

I was recently reminded that the authority comes from the determination by our forefathers in the faith that these texts should be regarded as sacred texts.  They were not saying they were written by God, as some religions do with their texts - the Quran and The Book of Mormon, for example - but they were saying these texts give us a great basis for discovering what God wants of us.

The task we have, as have God’s people have had throughout all time, is to discern from these texts how we should then live, and because the texts are constantly being considered in different times and places to when they were written, we have a complex task of interpretation.