Authoritah

In response to Jon’s questions about authority, I will offer a few comments.

I’m not a terrible fan of notions of authority, and least of all authority in interpretation. I think that ‘authority’ is more often than not a claim for power, which I have deep problems with (if anyone is interested, I rather like Michel Foucault). The possession of ‘truth’ or ‘authority’, then, is something I am rather suspicious of. Instead of this, I feel that good leaders, good interpretation and good truth speak for themselves, and do not require such buttressing with labels of ‘safety’.

A simple matter of fact is that Christianity possesses a rich legacy of interpretation and theology that has contributed enormously to its development. As a result, to use the resources of Christian tradition in the formulation of interpretation is a helpful and legitimate practice.

--

In terms of Genesis I reject any suggestion that until the dawn of Darwin all Christians were good bible-believing literalists. This is a simple factual error. Most of the Church’s great thinkers adopt a far broader understanding of truth than many Christians today, one that includes knowledge not derived from ‘Christian’ reflection on the nature of reality. Theologians, scientists, and all of us do the practice of natural Theology, of working things out about the nature of God from the way things are in the world, all the time. Augustine (from a simple Wikipedia search, in which he is quoted) was not a literalist on Genesis, and talked of Christians ‘speaking so idiotically on these matters’ as a result of ‘[affirming] rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.’ No opposition of conflict is envisaged between different ways of knowing things, and where one understanding (such as a literal reading of Gen 1-3) is rendered null because of advances in another discipline (such as science), one ought not to oppose knowledge derived from outside one’s own tradition, but embrace it as part of the broader task of understanding the world as it is.

Concepts of authority, then, can serve to stifle this. Where some place authority on the Bible (with concepts of inerrancy etc), this prevents the engagement with and affirmation of truth from other sources. Further to this, concepts like scriptural literalism substantially misread the texts they attempt to ‘defend’ – as I have noted countless times before, a great number of texts in the Bible were not written as accounts of history in the modern sense. Placing authority on the Bible can obscure a thoroughgoing engagement with the texts’ own concerns, as well as negating legitimate and valuable truth from other sources.

Theology and science are different ways of engaging with the world, with different remits, different languages, different methods, different intentions etc. They form part of the rich tapestry of human experience that seeks to make sense of the world, and need not compete with each other in this end. Giving ‘authority’ to one over the other (or any other) risks negating the legitimate placing of others within this broad framework.

--

So how is it that theology is done in this context? I think that Anglicans have it about right: a starting point of Scripture that has been handed down through generations; interpreted in the light of tradition (theology, experience etc); and also through reason. This is a deeply Catholic method, seeking to embrace a variety of things in the service of truth. I conclude this section with a quote from Luke T. Johnson, a RC biblical scholar, from an essay entitled ‘What’s Catholic about Catholic Biblical Scholarship?’:

‘The truth of Christianity does not require the denial of truth and beauty everywhere else. Catholics celebrate God’s capacity for self-disclosure to both Jews and pagans. Such traces of God’s revelation are the surest pledge that God is also capable of revealing Godself to Christians.’

--

In summary, bullet-points will do:

• Inerrancy and literalism are not present (at least significantly) in Church tradition before modern fundamentalism
• Augustine in the 4th century (among countless others) saw no conflict between science and religion. Both play an important part in understanding the world, and they need not compete over the same territory
• Notions of scriptural authority can obscure good interpretation – reading Genesis historically refuses to take its authors on their own terms, and misses the subtlety of their means of communication
• An Anglican understanding of Theology is a helpful means of proceeding: the continual dialogue of Scripture, tradition and reason

--

As an afterthought, and in response to Jon’s instigation of these questions, it would be great to talk about these issues. If doing Theology is a decentralized, deauthoritized process then through dialogue we can continue the tradition of interpretation, and resource both others and ourselves. It would be wonderful to talk about the nature of Theology, concepts of authority, the ways in which people do it, the relationship between religion and science etc. One thing I am deeply unwilling to debate is the notion of inerrancy – for me, it is no more defensible than flat-earth cosmology and obscures genuinely interesting things from coming to the fore.