Testament and Authority: A Brief Illustration

No prooftexting or quotemining; an illustration for those who know texts and quotes

Consider that there are three entities in the discussion of “authority” with respect to God, the church, and scripture. Namely, those three.

These three exist in a complex association with respect to authority. All Christians believe that God alone bears “original” authority, but the nature of the “derived” authority of God between scripture and the church remains inscrutable for many. I think a simple illustration can help to illuminate what seems obvious in principle but is difficult to understand pragmatically. 1

In capsule form, many people (myself included) hold that “scripture” bears a derived authority more proximate to God’s own original authority than “the church”, so that it uniquely becomes the primary means by which God’s original authority is manifest or known. Its authority is derived from God, but is uniquely so, in that scripture represents God’s special communication to the world. This is the “self-attesting” view of scripture’s authority held by the most ancient Christians—the uniquely inspired authors of holy scripture—and upheld according to inclusion/recognition criteria by later Christians who concretized the “limits” of the canon. So its foundation is circular to a degree, but not wholly (since both scripture and the church attest scripture’s unique authority over against other “derived” authorities).

If this is true, then the church derives its authority both from God and from scripture. This would hold true even as the church itself plays a role in ratifying or recognizing the prior (in time and hierarchy) authority of the canon of scripture, the “testament(s)” in my title.

Consider an illustration that reflects this view.

This image represents three heavenly bodies: the sun, the earth, and our moon. In this analogy, the sun stands for God, the earth stands for the church, and the moon stands for scripture.

The bright crescent of the moon is directly illuminated by the sun, but the rest of the moon is also illuminated, but by “earthshine” which is the sun’s light, as reflected by the moon onto the earth, and back on to the moon. So two things are true: (1) without the earth the full boundary of the moon could not be seen, but (2) that border already exists by nature and is itself illuminated by its own “derived” source of light, lent to the earth.

[This analogy supposes a moon that never sets, a sort of eternal night, so don’t take it too far and wonder about daytime, eclipses, etc. Quips about “lunatics” have already crossed my mind. I suppose, however, that more astronomically-informed minds than mine could come up with all sorts of interesting analogies.]

By contrast, other traditions hold that scripture and the church both uniquely derive authority from God, but often in practice let the buck stop with the “earth”—the church—between the earth and moon in this illustration. Perhaps like when you see both the sun and moon in the sky together in the morning, which cuts a sort of “geocentric” figure that befits those traditions.

The entailments of the view are and have been significant in the life of the church and the history of the world, but I won’t wax rhetorical with my Protestant forebears here. Things can go wrong too when a crisis of authority begets a crisis of identity. And then there are the concerns about treating such an already-authoritative text as a human text and as history, involving notions like “bias,” “presuppositions,” “criticism,” and so on.

Another time, perhaps.

For now, this illustration might be helpful to some.

On “original” and “derived” authority: “One can draw a distinction between the “original” and “derivative” possession of a quality. A thing possesses a quality “originally” if it possesses it simply in virtue of what it is. A thing possesses a quality “derivatively” if it possesses it only through the assistance of something else.” Steven Nemes, Theological Authority, xiv. Nemes uses the moon as an illustration of “derivative” light, which inspired my fuller illustration.