Authority of Bible in Christianity

Given the conversation thus far, it appears that a student investigating the nature of God, anthropomorphic and transcendental aspects, or core principles throughout the Bible might risk misrepresenting Christian perspectives. This is because many Christians do not consider the entire Bible as authoritative, with a significant number focusing primarily on the New Testament. Therefore, to accurately reflect Christian beliefs on these essential topics, the student must delve into the New Testament, which most Christians regard as their main source of doctrinal authority. The question then arises: will these individuals view the New Testament's text as definitive?

Scripture, Tradition and Pope

Catholic Church maintains that the Scripture does not only contain the Word of God but is the Word of God and hence final authority. It also maintains that the Church’s ongoing tradition, the rule of faith, is also authoritative alongside the Scripture. The Scripture and the Tradition are accepted with equal piety and reverence. “Tradition” in the past was nothing but the Church or the decisions of the Vatican, and no one was allowed to oppose or reject these. It was stated in the Council of Trent in 1546 that, “No one... shall presume to interpret Sacred Scripture contrary to the sense which the Holy Mother Church – to whom it belongs to judge the true sense and interpretation of Holy Scripture – both held and continues to hold...” This belief found its climax in the dogma of “Papal Infallibility”, when the Pope speaks ex-cathedra, defined at the Vatican Council of 1870 as “when the Pope speaks ex cathedra; that is, when in his character of ‘pastor and doctor of all Christians,’ he ‘defines a doctrine regarding faith and morals,’ he is possessed of infallibility.”

This doctrine was applied in 1950 to the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary (the taking up of the Virgin Mary into Heaven at the end of her life). “When the dogma of Mary’s assumption was declared in 1950”, observes G. C. Berkouwer, “the absence of any reference to it in Scripture was acknowledged. But, it was added, ‘The Catholic Church teaches that there are two sources of revelation from which we can derive divine truth, the written Word of God and unwritten tradition. We know Mary’s ascension into heaven through tradition.’”

In modern Catholic theory, the Scripture, the “Tradition” or the Church in the figure of the Pope, are all considered authorities. Still, practically this means the Pope or the Church, as Loofs a responsible theologian of the Vatican states, “Neither the Holy Scripture nor the Divine tradition, but the teaching Church, which infallibly expounds both sources of truth ... is for us the first rule of faith.”

Second Vatican Council of 1959

In recent times, especially after the Second Vatican Council of 1959, this view has been slightly modified to give a strong accent to the scriptures. As an outcome of this unexpected Council, which has created unprecedented tensions within the Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth century, the two sources of authority previously held independently were closely interconnected. The Council declared that both the Scripture and sacred traditions are “like a mirror in which the pilgrim Church on earth looks at God...until she is brought to see Him as He is, face to face.” To fully understand the Scripture: Christian scholars must be ever mindful of the findings that the Spirit-guided Church has already achieved, above all, those which the magisterium has guaranteed. This perfect accord with the insights of the Church’s living tradition is the best guide that anyone can have in studying God’s word.

In short, the final guarantee of correctness and truth lies with the Church. The gist of this new theological standpoint is that though the Scripture is all authority its true interpretation can only be achieved by the tradition and with the help of the Holy Spirit. And Rome is quite sure it has both of them.

Some observers have rightly pointed out that though the recent shift is significant it “does not make much difference because a tradition that interprets can very subtly become a tradition that creates truth.” It will easily be apparent that although the Scriptures are acknowledged as the final authority in matters of doctrine, in practice this seems mere lip service to them. The authority of the Scriptures is closely linked with the ‘tradition’ of which the church is the sole repository. Therefore, the end product remains the same, the Church’s certain authority over the Scriptures (or at least in effect it seems to be), and this authority is manifested through the Church’s sole right to declare an interpretation of the Scriptures as traditional. The Church’s official stamp guarantees the validity of the interpretation and finally assumes binding and authoritative status.

Protestant Approach 

One dominant trend in Protestantism, as exemplified for instance in classical Lutheranism, neither gives the Church nor Tradition equal authority with the Scripture. These Protestants do not accept the Church as infallible but following Luther, subordinate the Church to Scripture in matters of faith. The Church argued Luther, “cannot create articles of faith; she can only recognize and confess them as a slave does the seal of his lord.”

Calvin, debating the Romanists, argued: “For if the Christian Church has been from the beginning founded on the writings of the prophets and the preaching of the apostles, wherever the doctrine is found, the approbation of it has preceded the formation of Church, since without it the Church itself had never existed.”  Therefore, “Those persons betray great folly who wish it to be demonstrated to infidels that the Scripture is the Word of God, which cannot be known without faith.” He concluded: Let it be considered, then, as an undeniable truth, that they who have been inwardly taught by the Spirit feel an entire acquiescence in the Scripture, and that it is self-authenticated, carrying with it its own evidence, and ought not to be made the subject of demonstration and arguments from reason; but it obtains the credit which it deserves with us by the testimony of the Spirit.

To many Protestants today, the Word of God alone in its “Grammatical, historical meaning” or the “meaning of the tongue or of language” in which it is understood by everyone, and not the doctrine of the Church, has the ultimate authority. Although this is overtly claimed, the reality, as has already been seen, is that final authority ends up in the individual interpreting that Scripture. Luther himself, despite his principle of Verbal Inspiration, made distinctions between different passages of the Scripture. He accepted some of them as binding and others as non-binding. For instance, he rejected the Apocryphal books of the Old Testament and described James as a “right straw Epistle.” To him “it is not the Bible that counts but Christ therein contained.” And, Christ is found in the text by the interpreters often with some external, arbitrary, and at times fanciful method.

Other Reformers like Calvin, on the other hand, seemed to maintain the traditional and authoritative view of the Scripture. Scholars like C. A. Briggs state that “the theory of a literal inspiration and inerrancy was not held by the Reformers.” On the other hand, Warfield, Brunner, Harris, and many others argue otherwise, maintaining that the Reformers did hold a literal view concerning the inerrancy of the Scriptures. Harris remarks: “Most students of the Reformation will be astonished at the suggestion that Calvin believed anything else.” Brunner notes that “Calvin is already moving away from Luther toward the doctrine of verbal inspiration. His doctrine of the Bible is entirely the traditional, formally authoritative, view. From the end of the sixteenth century onwards, there was no other “principle of Scripture” than this formal authoritarian one. Whatever development took place after this culminated in the most strict and most carefully formulated doctrine of Verbal Inspiration...”  

Today, the situation, especially in academic circles, is quite different. “Historical and Literary Criticism” in biblical studies or “Lower”, and “Higher” biblical criticism has brought about substantial changes in a great many biblical scholars’ attitude towards the Scriptures. Lower criticism refers to attempts to determine what a text originally said before it was altered, and is concerned with the transmission and preservation of the biblical text, whilst higher criticism refers to attempts to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text.

Starting with Jean Astruc’s (1753) discovery of the variation of the divine names in Genesis, the hypothesis or the documentary theory was developed (generally stating that the Pentateuch was derived from different narratives) and modified by German scholars like Eichhorn (d. 1827) and Hupfeld (1853). Higher criticism was given its classical form by Karl H. Graf (1866) and Julius Wellhausen (1876 and 1878).

Anglican Approach

In England this approach found expression through the edited work of Benjamin Jowett's “Essays and Reviews” published in February of 1860. In his long essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture” Jowett set his own principles of scriptural interpretation. They were taken as outrageous at the time but are still viable and serve as a charter for modern critical biblical scholarship. Jowett’s guiding principle was to “Interpret the Scripture like any other book.” The real meanings of the Scripture were the meanings intended by the author and by the text itself. Jowett argued: “The book itself remains as at the first unchanged amid the changing interpretations of it. The office of the interpreter is not to add another, but to recover the original one: the meaning, that is, of the words as they struck on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those who first heard and read them. He has to transfer himself to another age to imagine that he is a disciple of Christ or Paul; to disengage himself from all that follows. The history of Christendom is nothing to him.... All the after thoughts of theology are nothing to him.... The greater part of his learning is knowledge of the text itself; he has no delight in voluminous literature which has overgrown it.”

He further observed that “we have no reason to attribute to the Prophet or Evangelist any second or hidden sense different from that which appears on the surface.” He denied infallibility to biblical writers and believed in “progressive revelation.” This, to him, was the solution to rectify biblical immoralities. “For what is progressive is necessarily imperfect in its earlier stages, and even erring to those who come after....Scripture itself points the way to answer the moral objections to Scripture.”

Since then this approach has been the dominant trend in almost all the universities of the Western world though not without resistance. In the nineteenth century William Robertson Smith, editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, advocated the principles of the historical criticism of the Bible, publishing articles by Wellhausen within it. He was put on trial and expelled from his chair. In the same century, John Colenso, a South African Anglican bishop, was condemned as “the wicked bishop” and his works drew three hundred responses within twenty years.

Dominent Contemporray Approach

In the twenty-first century, however, we witness a quite different situation. Even the Catholic Church, the age-long opponent of such investigation into biblical data, has joined the majority of biblical scholarship. In 1943 Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical letter, Divino Afflante Spiritu, which promoted biblical studies opening, the door for such investigation in Catholic circles. It has been called “a Magna Carta for biblical progress.” The Pope concluded by writing: “Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed.” Since then the approach has been adopted universally in most academic institutions. This approach, as we have seen, presupposes that in all books of the Bible, there is only one meaning that matters and that is the meaning intended by the original human author. One needs to explore to the best of his/her ability the original historical and cultural setting of the individual author of each book or passage and study his thoughts to discern what it was that he believed and wanted to say. Theologians such as Kahler, Schlatter, v. Oettingen, Ritschl, Harnack, Bultmann, Joseph Stevens Buckminister, Moses Stuart, Andrews Norton, and Morton Smith are just a few examples of this approach.