Humanity has always been a people who resist external authority. Adam and Eve in the Garden are the first but certainly not the last to challenge God’s right to authority over us. In the contemporary theological scene the biggest issue surrounding the Doctrine of Revelation is the issue of authority. It is found even behind some of the other criticisms of Revelational theology that we will look at. In this opening discussion, however, it would be good to begin with an analysis of authority itself, as it relates to Biblical revelation.
There are a number of ways that philosophers agree we gain knowledge: intuition, experience, reason, and (I would add) revelation. At various stages in history one of these was elevated to the place of supreme authority in access to knowledge. For Christians it had always been that Scripture was the supreme rule for all matters of life and faith, but that didn’t stay. In the Medieval era a theologian by the name of Thomas Aquinas began to elevate human reason to the place of supreme authority. It was not his intent to displace the Scriptures, but he inadvertently opened that door. Rene Descartes would kick it open further with deep skepticism. Descartes wanted to get to the most fundamental belief, the most basic assertion that one could be certain of. What he found was that he could only be certain of his own existence and nothing more. He thought therefore he was. On the flip side a man by the name of Soren Kierkegaard, in response to the dead orthodoxy of his day, began to elevate human experience to the place of ultimate authority;the existential theologians followed him and expanded on the role of experience.
The displacement t of the authoritative Word of God was never the original intent of these theologians and philosophers, yet the results of their shifts was not ultimately positive for theology. The elevation of reason and experience have led theologians to either fall into empiricism and to abandon revelation as impossible, like the Christian Atheists, or to fall into existentialism and abandon revelation as unnecessary. In many cases rationalists became atheists and existentialists became pantheists (though someone like Spinoza found a way to be both a rationalist and a pantheist at the same time).
This is of course a reductionist look at the history of philosophy, not even a very good one I am sure (especially since these events never really happen in linear fashion). But the point should be stressed that to displace the revealed Word of God as authority in all matters of faith and life is to find yourself losing the God who wrote that Word. As Carl F. Henry writes:
The modern interpretation of human ideation other than on the basis of the Scriptural doctrine of creation involves more than the loss of a theistic grounding of human thought and conception: the force of the idea of God in human experience is blunted, the ontic reference of all ideas shrouded in doubt, and the reality of God lost in man and then in nature.
It is important that we all note that this is not simply an issue of academia, it is an issue at the very heart of the Christian life. If you deny the authority of the Word you deny the God who wrote it. Think carefully, then, friends, about who or what has authority in your life. It’s not that Christian deny the importance and influence of reason and experience (in fact I believe these are essential for knowledge and we’ll look at that in my next post), but we must not always remember the supremacy of God’s Word. His Word is Authoritative!
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 