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th ro u g h
adoption and grace, and by the Son, Jesus Christ, to whom all
authority in heaven and earth has been given, and by the Holy Spirit, who
speaks both to the churches and to all of the individuals who make them up.
. . . All Christians know that it must be God ’s authoritative Word that
teaches and leads them, however many disagreements and controversies
they may have among themselves as to what this authoritative Word is.
(ii)
Authority is a
cham e leon
term, changing its quality, nuance and
tone—its color, one might say—according to the frame of reference in which
it appears. The basic distinction here is that sometimes it corresponds to the
I ,atin
ills,
which means coercive and executive authority that must be recog
nized because it is legally held, and sometimes to the Latin
auctoritas
, which
means persuasive and pedagogic authority that ought to be recognized for
moral reasons, that is, reasons of tru th and holiness. Authority is a word that
oscillates in use between these moral and legal poles, with more being made
of the moral basis of claims when they are not backed by power of enforce
ment than is ordinarily the case when they are. Thus, when authority
appears in contexts coloured by legal considerations and sanctions, its claim
may well appear to be merely extrinsic, since the only thought being high
lighted is that what is directed had better be done since it is backed by a big
stick. It is in situations of this type that civil laws that have a moral base are
sometimes displaced by laws that have none, and might is sometimes guilty
of masquerading as right; and thus legal and moral authority get out of step
with each other. But the authority of moral claims is intrinsic, and when
authority is spoken of in a moral context, what is meant is that particular
lines of belief and action ought to be followed simply because they are the
dictates of tru th and right, or fittingness, and as such are our duty, whatever
the law may say or do. Thus, for instance, it could be maintained that any
legal authority that authorizes abortion on demand lacks moral authority,
while the obligation to protect personal life prior to birth as well as after it,
an obligation whose moral authority is surely unquestionable, is not under
those circumstances being backed by legal authority. The point being illus
trated is that moral authority is principled, and can always be justified by
appeal to what is true and fitting; legal authority, however, is pragmatic, and
can be manipulated in non-moral ways by those who hold the power. It is
important to see this distinction clearly, for in actual use the word “author
ity” rolls around between its two poles of reference in a most confusing way,
and the temptation to take the line of least resistance by assimilating moral
to legal authority and thus settling for moral relativism is often very strong.
But we should now note that in the authority that biblical Christianity
ascribes to God, the two aspects of which we have spoken, the legal and the
moral, the authority of right and the authority of power, do in fact coincide
in the way that is theoretically proper, for here the authority of executive
power backs up the authority of moral perfection. Both by right of owner