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political. Indeed, the overtly political assertion that scripture has authority is
seldom analyzed. Rather it is accepted as a statement of Iact, when it is by no
means clear what it means to say that scripture or anything else has authority.
Therefore it is necessary to provide an account of authority that may illumine
how scripture is or should be used in the life of church.
Although my analysis of authority will be distinct from an explicit
discussion of scripture, the very meaning of scripture entails authoritative
judgment. As David Kelsey has reminded us, to say “ these texts are Christian
scripture” is but a way of saying “these texts are authoritative for the life of
the Christian church. ” So claims about the authority of scripture are analytic,
since the scriptural texts ’ ‘‘authority for theology is logically grounded in and
dependent on their authority for the life of the church generally. But since,
concretely speaking, the life of church taken as some sort of organic whole
is
‘tradition’, that means that the texts’ authority for theology is dependent on
their being authority for ‘tradition. ’ ”25Therefore, to call certain texts “ scrip
ture” means in part that the church relies upon them in a normatively decisive
manner.
This situation is not peculiar to the Christian community, for the very
meaning of authority is community dependent. Though authority is often
confused with power or coercion, it draws its life from community in a quite
different manner. Like power, authority is directive; unlike power, however,
it takes its rationale not from the deficiencies of community but from the
intrinsic demands of a common life.26 The meaning of authority must be
grounded in a community’s self-understanding, which is embodied in its
habits, customs, laws, and traditions; for this embodiment constitutes the
community’s pledge to provide the means for an individual more nearly to
approach the truth.
The language of community is open to a great deal of misunderstanding,
given its association with small, tightly knit groups. Yet the fact that a com
munity requires authority indicates that it is a mistake to think of community
in personal rather than institutional terms. A community is a group of persons
who share a history and whose common set of interpretations about that
history provide the basis for common actions. These interpretations may be
quite diverse and controversial even within the community, but are sufficient
to provide the individual members with the sense that they are more alike than
unlike.
The diversity of accounts and interpretations of a community’s experi
ences is exactly the basis of authority. For authority is that power of a com
munity that allows for reasoned interpretations of the community’s past and
future goals. Authority, therefore, is not contrary to reason but essential to it.
Authority is the means by which the wisdom of the past is critically appro
priated by being tested by current realities as well as by challenging the too