We Should See Other Blogs

There’s one question that I think we don’t ask or answer in scripturally-based churches often enough. I would think it obvious that Biblical authority is necessary for a church to grow and reach out and be successful in its mission. If scripture holds no authority, the church – which is, like it or not – based on the Word becomes nothing but another cultural collection of opinions, and not even a collection of opinions from this culture, but one from a culture long ago. And in a modern and post-modern world, the opinions of another culture are largely irrelevant, not to mention that there are already enough opinions to go around.

But even if a church doesn’t cast aside its admittedly strange positions on issues like – to pick one old horse to beat on – feminism, it still has to answer the question of where scripture itself derives its authority. Because face it, if the Bible is yet another collection of ancient spiritual advice, it’s once again just opinion, just like every other strange book written by strange men in strange cultures a long time ago.

I think it’s a crucial division to say that one can be a Bible worshipper without being a Biblical one. Or to put it another way, worshipping the words instead of the God who wrote them. Yes, the words are important, but apart from Christ – the centrepiece of the whole schebang – they mean nothing at all.

More to the point, the words of scripture derive their authority from the person and the work of Jesus, and any attempt to divorce them from that, be it by the uberhumanisation of Jesus or the deification of the book itself, robs scripture of its authority. The scriptures say this: the Word became flesh and lived among us. And it’s easy to forget that without Jesus, even that statement is bereft of meaning.