On the Problem(s) of Scriptural Authority

ROBERT W. J ENS ON
Professor of Systematic Theology
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg
Attempts to explain the authority of Scripture by
theories of inspiration and inerrancy are futile.
The authority of Scripture resides in its several
actual functions, indispensable to Christian
worship, thought, and life.
T
HERE IS NO ONE PROBLEM of Scripture's authority; there are at least
four, which are routinely confused. Once sorted out, one of the four can be
seen as a mere blunder, and one a pseudoproblem. These two analyzed, the third
and fourth become visible as authentic theological problems. With respect to these
authentic problems, we are currently rather better off than with respect to most
theological problems. The agenda of this essay is the debunking of laments about
"lost" scriptural authority.
SCOPE
People ask worriedly, "But why should we take Scripture as authoritative?"
Usually, there is no more to the worry than an equivocation on "we." If "we"
includes those who do not believe the gospel, there are no arguments at all why
such persons should bow to Scripture; nor should this lack bother anyone. But
the "we" who worry are in fact believers; and there are arguments why, if we
believe the gospel, we should bow to Scripture.
A. The position just taken does not mean that there are no arguments why we,
any "we," should believe the gospel. It may indeed be that if there are no argu-
ments why we should believe, it is irrational to do so; that is not here my subject.
But what draws the demand for reasons directly to Scripture is the fundamentalist
notion that the reason to believe the gospel is that it is in the Bible, which is
antecedently known to contain nothing but truth. This is a serious category
mistake.
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The authority of the Scripture, or its lack, is quite irrelevant to belief itself. It
is relevant rather to the believer's attempt in turn to speak the gospel; Scripture
is the norm of proclamation. The preacher's appeal, "You may believe it be-
cause it is in the Bible," works only in a situation where Christianity and its book
are established as the religion of the culture, while actual faith in the gospel re-
mains an option; even then, the appeal may obscure the possibility of faith. It is
the preacher's work the night before the proclaiming of the gospel that needs
authoritative Scripture.
B. The gospel is proclamation of the resurrection of the crucified Jesusif some
use "the gospel" for other things, there is no way to stop them; but whatever
they are up to has nothing to do with that for which the church needs authoritative
Scripture. It happened that certain persons, disciples or enemies of Jesus of
Nazareth, believed that he had met them after his death, so situated in reality as
to preclude his dying again. Thus they found themselves with news of universal
import; for if Jesus has death behind him, then his intention for his fellows,
defined by his particular life and death, must utterly triumph, there being no
longer anything to stop him. The possessers of such news were under sheer
moral obligation to spread it; and they set out to do so.
At least some of them called their message "the gospel," since, Jesus being who
he is, it is a saving message that he will triumph. The epithet stuck as a label,
which we still use. The persons themselves we call "the apostles," whoever and
however many they were. "The gospel" is thus a simple label for whatever the
apostles said in telling of Jesus' resurrection.
The carrying of the resurrection-news has continued, has reached us. If we
believe what we hear, for whatever reason, we find ourselves under the same obli-
gation as the apostles : We must turn from hearing the gospelwhich the apostles
themselves did notto speaking it. The enterprise of gospel-speaking, since it is
a continuing enterprise in history, can go wrong. Therefore we need ways to
check whether what we say and propose to say is indeed the gospel.
In every continuing historical tradition, when the question of authenticity thus
arises, we turn back to the deposited tradition. In the present case, when we
wonder whether what we propose to say is really the gospel, we look back to those
from whom we heard it, selectively : to a respected teacher, or to Luther or Calvin,
or to some anonymous pamphleteer. We seek tried procedures and samples of
gospel-speaking. But, of course, any such authority can always be challenged by
some otheruntil we come to the apostles. Fortautologously-if they did not
speak the gospel, no one did. The apostles' authority is as simple, and its basis
as trivial, as that. We cannot get behind the apostles to the gospel, since they only
spoke and did not hear it. Therefore they are our last resort.
The question about the authenticity of our gospel-speaking is therefore a ques-
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tion about whether we say the same as the apostles. The content of "the same"
in the last sentence is a genuine theological problem, to which I will come. The
apostles being dead, the checking of our gospel by theirs now depends on docu-
ments. As it happens, we have two sorts: their texts and some samples of their
work. The "Old Testament" is the first; the epistles are the second; the Gospels
are both.
The apostles' gospel-speaking, essentially, used texts. What they had to say,
for reasons I will come to, could be said only as exegesis of the deposited tradition
of Israel. Their gospel was intrinsically interpretation of Israel's book by what had
happened with Jesus. The apostles' texts are also available to us. In our effort
to say what the apostles said, one thing we can do is submit ourselves to the same
texts they did. If our talk of God does not seem to fit Moses' JHWH, if the
Exodus means nothing to the hope we hold out, if the psalms make uncomfortable
prayers, if Isaiah does not elucidate the difference between our Christ and the idols,
we are off the track.
The authority of the New Testament is different. The New Testament com-
prises the extant literary relics of apostolic gospel-speaking; these are norms as
samples of what we are to do. The New Testament is not entirely by apostles;
given the scarcity of such relics, we throw the net wider. The canonical list is a
commendation by the church to the church : Here are documents from which to
see how the church went about gospel-speaking during the years before its aposto-
licity became a problem rather than a given. I will describe our use of these
samples in the next section.
The extent of the canon is a problembut not for the Bible's authority. The
Old Testament is to comprise the authentic deposited tradition of Israel ; and the
New Testament is the useful relics of the apostolic church. If something is left
out that should be in, this is a loss; but it does not compromise the authority of
what is in. If something is in that should be out, we should put it out when we
decide this; but acknowledgment of this possibility cannot compromise authority
in advance. Nor can the circumstance that we must, over time, make these
decisions compromise the authority over us of what is in fact decided to be in. The
canon-list is a dogma: a declaration by the community to its members con-
cerning the boundaries of the community. The canon-dogma says that authorita-
tive use of these documents is a line between church and non-church. But the
Bible itself is not a dogma or collection of dogmas; its authority-function is very
different and is unaffected by the necessary uncertainties of the canon-list.
This account no doubt seems simplistic. I can only plead that the matter may
in fact be simple. It is at least possible that this fundamental argument for
Scripture's authority is only customarily obscured by complexities dragged in from,
and best resolved, elsewhere. I turn now to some of these.
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OPERATION
We are after the authoritative function of Scripture for believers' speaking.
Here a second confusion threatens, of greater subtlety. The very form of the
phrase tempts us to suppose that the authority of Scripture is some one relation
between what is said in Scripture and what we say now. There is no such relation;
the supposition that there is, is the second factor that regularly deranges discussion
and has done so through the history of the church. There are a variety of ways
in which the Scriptures function authoritatively in the church's life, and do so
even when all lament their failure to find the authority of Scripture.
A. The underlying confusion is of a type elsewhere and long ago exorcised by
Ludwig Wittgenstein. It appears most blatantly in the plaint that Scripture can-
not be authoritative for our proclamation, in general or on a particular point,
because Scripture, or the New Testament, contains so many different definitions
of the gospel. As a preliminary step, let me imitate Wittgenstein's exorcism with
a parable modeled on one of his.
Suppose that in a room containing several persons, I ask one of them to go
stand in the corner. Whatever that person does, the rest of us will usually be able
to decide whether or not he obeyed me. But now, suppose I draw an arc on the
floor in the corner and ask the group whether someone who stood inside the arc
would obey my request and they all answer yes. Next I draw a slightly larger con-
centric arc and repeat the question, and so on. At some point the group will
begin to disagree about whether someone who stood in the latest arc but outside
the one just previous would have obeyed my request. Then we may be tempted
to wonder where "the corner" is and to suppose something ambiguous in my
original instructionwhen in fact there was nothing at all ambiguous about it.
The instruction, "Go preach the gospel," can be perfectly clear and may be de-
cided on even if the several instructors give no agreed, uniform definition of what
the gospel "is."
B. How in fact, and in the complexity of all fact, does Scripture exercise author-
ity in the church's life? It is operations we have to consider.
The gospel is any act of human communication in which two specific givens
meet and interpret each other. One of these is the claim that Jesus is risen) so
that this individual person, defined by his particular life and death, has death
behind him and must triumph. The other is the antecedent structure of hopes and
fears of those who at a time and place come to speak of this claim; history is but
the changing succession of such structures. In each mutual interpretation of these
two, there arise at once an eschatological promise and a founded ethic.
Thus, for example, to Americans still obscurely animated by the dream of
happiness pursued, but driven to despair and mania by the capitalist-individualist
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version of the dream, gospel-speakers may tell of the happiness that waits in com-
mitment to the community rather than in self-made independence from itin that
Jesus will finally bind all lives into perfected community by his unconditional com-
mitment to all. In such discourse, the proclamation of Jesus' triumph is interpreted
as a political promise; an eschatological vision of the Kingdom is delineated by
the colors of Jeffersonian "public happiness." And the antecedent longing for
happiness is just so fixed as a specific and pursuable ethical value. The gospel is
the actual proclamatory act of any such interpretation.
The problem posed by the one pole of the gospel, the changing given of com-
mon hopes and fears, are the matter of the next sections. In this section, I try to
clear the way to see these problems by attention to the other pole, the claim that
Jesus is risen. For the actual functions of Scripture in the church can be laid out
by the parts of this claim.
1 ) In the sentence, "Jesus is risen," "Jesus," like every proper name at such a
grammatical location, functions to identify the one of whom a predicate, here
"risen," is to be taken. Upon this identification depends the gospel-character of
the gospel. It is the fact that this person lives to triumph that is a message of
salvation; "Stalin is risen" would be no such message. The problem in gospel-
speaking is often with the identification ; we may find we do not know what to say
because the work done by the word "Jesus" goes badly.
The problem is then of a sort regular with proper names: "Jones is getting
married." "But who is Jones?" Recourse in all such cases is necessarily to iden-
tifying descriptions. We must be able to say things like "Jones is the one who
graduated first in his class last year, and who fell down the chapel steps at bac-
calaureate, and who . . . ," continuing until people say, "Oh. That one." The
Bible provides the possibility of such identifying descriptions for the risen Lord
Jesus.
This very process in the apostolic church created the new genre of Gospels. To
begin, the various streams of tradition about Jesus served various purposes of dis-
cipline, exhortation, and so on. But as the identity of the Lord, with increasing his-
torical distance, ceased to be obvious, all the different sorts of reminiscence came
together for the one purpose. A Gospel is simply a long "The one who . . . , and
who . . . , " with an abruptly stated "is risen" at the end.
Not only the Gospels provide for the identification of the Lord. The temporal
scope of the "the one who . . ." clauses, by which any individual may be iden-
tified, stretches indefinitely back from his death to encompass in principle all
previous history that is within his tradition-lineage. What is chosen from this
indefinite repertoire for any particular act of identification depends on the oc-
casion. What enables identification of Jesus includes the whole tradition of Israel,
as it is in fact mediated by the Hebrew Bible.
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Only from Scripture can we know who is risen. This is the first of the functions
properly denoted by "scriptural authority."
This function lives in the church as scholarship. The question, "Which indi-
vidual does 'Jesus' name?" can be dealt with only by study of the texts. Such
research has always been done in the church and has been central to the actual
pressure of Scripture on the church's lifewhatever theories about its place may
have come and gone. With the advent of modern historical consciousness, the
enterprise changed profoundly, in ways that will concern us shortly; but this
change did not initiate the enterprise itself or alter its necessity and role. From the
gcspel-writers on, the Scriptures have provided the sole material of study to
ascertain which person is risen; just so, they are authority.
2) "Risen," like all morally potent predicates, works only within a certain
semantic and syntactic structure, only within its home language. When "Paul"
tried to speak of resurrection with Greeks on Mars Hill, they took him to be
promoting a new minor deity; for that was the only semantic slot they had for
something like Anastasis. When we try to speak of resurrection with the
bowdlerized technocrats who inhabit America, they suppose we are speculating
about resuscitation and adduce cryogenics or the later Kubler-Ross. To say " . . .
is risen," we have to speak Old-Testamentese ; "risen" is a predicate only within
the language-tradition of Israel.
This is not a plea for Hebrew as against, for example, Greek thought or for
our conceptual metamorphosis into ancient Hebrews. We are Greeks, among
other things; and if we have to become pure Hebrews to believe, we cannot believe.
But language-traditions live and maintain their identity precisely by the endlessly
syncretic process in which they meet foreign tradition and in the meeting create
new language. Thus the language-tradition of Israel long since enveloped language
born of Greek religion and reflection and just so became our language. Missionary
proclamation is not an attempted sheer transfer of the proposition "Jesus is risen;"
it must be an initial experience of the communal tradition of such speech. Indeed,
a small event in the continuing syncretic growth of the tradition.
Thus a second necessary function of Scripture is to maintain the liveliness
and authenticity of the language in which "Jesus is risen" can be said, to con-
tinually reestablish the church as a community whose common bond is the
language-tradition of Israel. This sort of biblical authority occurs liturgically. In
that Scripture is solemnly read, in that it provides the texts for preaching and
sacrament, in that its image and stories pervade prayer and praise and personal
meditation, in that its very words are regularly prayed, in that children are trained
in piety by its admonitions and stories, Scripture is authority. We read and hear
Scripture in order to learn to talk rightly.
In much of the church there has been a disastrous collapse of the liturgical life
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of Scripture. Seminary seniors have to ask the point of references to "the veil of
Moses" or "Jacob's ladder." In communities whose actual life and expression are
not fundamentally and continuously shaped by the stories and sayings and argu-
ments of Scripture, Scripture just does lack essential authorityand this cannot
be remedied by an act of will or by a theory. When Sunday school had a purpose,
it was to teach Bible storiesnot their relevance.
3) Between "Jesus" and "risen" sits "is." Elucidation of this copula is the task
of theology in the more specific sense. Over against the changing hopes and fears
of history we ask again and again, "What is to be said because it is Jesus that is
risen? And what is to be said because he is risen and not dead or deathless?"
"What sort of being is being risen?" There are at least two ways in which Scrip-
ture functions authoritatively in theological work.
First, theology is thinking about what to say to be saying the gospel. Since the
gospel is whatever the apostles said, the thinking of the apostlesinsofar as they
needed to do anywas acceptable, by trivial definition. Thus samples of apostolic
theologizing are guaranteed samples of authentic theologizing, though not neces-
sarily the best theologizing. They have the authority of paradigms. The most
notable samples are the epistles. But we have also the theology revealed by
tendancy- and redaction-criticism of the Gospels.
We are neither to reproduce nor merely deductively amplify the matter of
apostolic theology. If we tried, our reflection would not lead to saying the gospel,
for their antecedent hopes are not ours. What we may and must learn from them
is method. Since theology is a directed activity, the only way to learn it is to watch
others doing it and to gradually mix in. The repertoire of importunate mentors
is in this case enormous, encompassing two millennia of genius; the apostles are
those who, although they may not be the smartest or most powerful, are for certain
actually doing what we want to do.
Since the authority of apostolic theology is methodological, the theological
pluralism modernly discovered in the New Testament is no difficulty. If we were
supposed to imitate the material theology of the New Testament, the discovery
that there is no one such thing could be an embarrassment ; since we are rather to
be initiated into an activity by the New Testament, the discovery is a relief. The
theology of the church has always been plural and presumably always will be.
If the theology of the apostolic church were not also plural, it could not be
paradigmatic for us. Only the discovery that the New Testament writers were up
to different enterprises, that some were not trying to interpret human concern by
Jesus' resurrection, would be a problembut a canonical problem.
I may judge that Paul is a better theological drill-master than John; and you
may judge the reverse. If both of us are faithful, I will then judge my theology
better than yours, and you the reverse. If I cannot recognize your theology at
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all, as in fact terminating in the lively proclamation of Jesus' resurrection, one of
us is a heretic. If in my preference for Paul, I can recognize neither you nor
John, I am the heretic, or John must leave the canon. That last must be a com-
munity decision. Only so does New Testament theology set material boundaries
for ours.
Second, insofar as theology bears fruits, these will be propositions of the general
form, "To be saying the gospel, let us say \ . .' (rather than '. . . ' ) . " Such pro-
positions must be tested against Scripture, for reasons stated under Bl and B2. But
we must be very clear how this testing works. It does not occur by our asking
globally, "Is this what Scripture says?" Indeed, it does not occur in any special
comparing that "theologians" would do. It is not in principle internal to theology
at all. It occurs rather in the actual course of preaching, teaching, praying.
Always in such work we are confronted with texts, from sentences to whole
writingsor we are if the church is rightly under Scripture's liturgical authority.
The test of my theology is whether it helps me to deal with actual texts without
pressing them. I deliberately use the vague "deal with" because the uses of texts
are as various as the contents of Scripture and the life of the church; the matter
of "pressing" is the matter of the next section. Given, for example, a parable of
the Lord, does my interpretation of Godor of eternal life or whateverhelp or
hinder my attempt to bring the parable to life as gospel in the church? "Theology"
that leaves daily exegesis unaffected is no theology; it is ideology. Theology that
regularly fights texts is in process of refutation. Right theology constantly liberates
us to exclaim that "Of course! That' s why Isaiah could say . . . ."
Moreover, most theological enterprises create some global slogan in which an
eschatological vision and an ethic coincide: "Jesus liberates," or "Christ justifies
the ungodly," or "God is feminine," or whatever. The test of such a theology is
the practicality of its slogan as a hermeneutical principle for the whole of Scripture.
A proper theological enterprise has a sort of double-funnel structure, with the
whole of Scripture in one half, the most various speculations and interpretations
in the other, and a slogan in between.
C. In the actual life of Scripture in the church, there occurs no general act of
comparing our teaching with Scripture to judge the former. Rather, the Bible is
essential to the church's life of proclamation and prayer in several very different
ways which together are its authority. In all that follows, the internal differentia-
tion of Scripture's authority must be in mind. It is in the ensemble of scholarly
and liturgical and theological necessary use of Scripture for gospel-speaking that
Scripture actually controls gospel-speaking.
Here is the place to dismiss all theories of "inspiration," "inerrancy" and the
like, however attenuated. Such theories attempt to explain "the" authority of
Scripture; since there is no such one thing, they are all empty. If we look to the
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several actual functions of Scripture, we quickly see the emptiness: in each, we
will act just the same whether or not we believe Scripture is "inspired" or "iner-
rant." The one possible exception is the scholarly use: if we allow a theory to
persuade us that Scripture is historically or scientifically inerrant, this use comes
altogether to a halt under the conditions of our time. We need neither "high"
nor "low" theories of Scripture; we need a clear grasp of what it actually does
in the church.
HERMENEUTICS
Since communal hopes and fears change through time, there are no unchang-
ing formulas of the gospel, and theological reflection can never come to rest.
Explicit awareness of this fact is itself the product of just such an historic change,
which like others poses theological problems: the problem that concerns us here
is that modern historical consciousness makes it doubtful that any ancient docu-
ment can make serious claims on us. This is a true theological problem often
hidden under the puzzles justI trustdispelled.
A. If Scripture is to be read as authority, we must so read as to guard the texts'
distance from us, their independence of us. Of whatever ways a text is to be
authoritative for me, it is a necessary presupposition that the text may have some-
thing to say different from what I already think. "What I hear the text saying"
is indeed all I have to work with; but recognition of the text's authority is
recognition that the text may be saying something other than I hear and that it
is my job to keep listening.
In all modes of reading discussed above, Scripture's fundamental distance from
us is temporal: the Scripture just is a very old book. Scripture identifies Jesus
by large chunks of ancient history; the language-tradition it attempts to maintain
is of hoary antiquity; its samples of apostolic theology are pieces of first-century
theosophy and myth. If, therefore, the texts themselves in their independence of
us are to say what they have to say, they must be so read as to preserve and bring
to influence in our understanding the temporal distance between them and us.
That is, they must be read in the way we now label "historical-critical." This
has always been so; the birth of consciousness that it is so is the historic event
referred to in the first paragraph of this section. Scripture can now be authority
only if deliberately read historically-critically.
But this very requirement creates a profound problem for Scripture's authority,
so soon as it is an explicit methodological requirement, that is, so soon as modern
historical consciousness is present. Any reader of pre-Enlightenment writings is
struck by the way in which the stretch of time is experienced as continuity:
sixteenth-century princes are exhorted to imitate Marcus Aurelius with no thought
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that his solutions might be irrelevant to later problems; Aristotle is quoted on
"being" with no worry about conceptual slippage. In the eighteenth century,
the intellectual policy of "critique" broke this continuity and transformed experi-
ence of the stretch of time into experience of separation. The space of time ceased
to be the space in which we may live together and became distance, despite which
we struggle toward each other.
"Critique" named one whole aspect of the seventeenth century's new sciences,
that they are methodologically from Missouri: "I know that's what it looks like
is happening; but is it really?" "I know it looks like the sun revolves around the
earth; but does it really?" The century's passion was the "critique of appear-
ances;" and the passion bore great fruit in history's single greatest explosion of
knowledge. Through the eighteenth century, the policy of critique was inevitably
extended to our knowledge of ourselves. This took several forms, among them
that critique of social and political appearances which led to revolution. In that
the humanity given us to know is past humanity, the critique of human appear-
ances is critique of the tradition in which the past presents itself to us: "I know
that's what Caesar's text says happened in Belgium; but did it really?"
As the tradition is cut, Caesar's time and ours separate. The point of his-
torical study is now to grasp Caesar in his own timeand indeed to grasp the
various events that brought us the tradition about him in the same way. But
these times are by definition not our time. To switch the example, as we discover
what Jesus probably really said, from which the canonical parable of the rebellious
vineyard tenants developed, and that he addressed it to the Judean leadership
as a warning against unrepentance, the parable speaks less and less to us, who are
neither Judean leaders nor responsible for such. Historical study does not let the
tradition lay claims or promises on us here now.
The very first object of historical critique was the Bible; and the motive was
precisely thus to silence the Bible and let more recent wisdom be heard. Then
believing critics set out to silence just the apostles and let the historical Jesus
speak. But of course, eventually also Jesus-or Locke and Hobbesmust be
silenced by the same process once it is underway. Indeed, in that all apprehension
of human claims on us involves memory, and in that all historical memory occurs
by tradition, historical critique, once out of the way, must finally isolate each
human individual in utter ethical and religious deafnessor so it has seemed.
"Historical relativism" was experienced in its full weight already by the end of
the last century.
If Scriptureor any body of traditionis to be authoritative, we must read it
historically-critically. If we do, methodically rather than by undeliberated neces-
sity, it falls existentially silent. There is the problem.
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B. A notable line from Dilthey to Gadamer have striven with this "hermeneutical
problem," and not without result. Indeed, there is considerable consensus.
The heart of the consensus is that historical relativism cannot be escaped but
can be salvifically radicalized; by recognition that I, the historical critic, also be-
long to the stream of time and do not observe the past and its tradition from a
timeless vantage point. Even as I can explain, for example, Jesus' parables by
the circumstances of his time and place, so can my thought and word, including
my explanations of Jesus' parables, be explained by the circumstances of my time
and place: I too am "historically conditioned." Conditioned by what? By that
very past of which Jesus is one item. Or alternatively, by that very tradition of
which the parable-text before me is one item.
In fact, therefore, no item of the tradition can fail to speak to me; for all my
apprehension and discourse is determined by the past and its tradition. But this
insight does not restore the old naive continuity; for now we see that the locus
of continuity with the past is precisely my prejudices, the patterns of thought and
language which are in me prior to any particular encounter with tradition, de-
posited in me by the whole tradition to date. Every particular attempt to under-
stand some part of the tradition is but an event in an antecedent and continuing
shaping by the tradition, which shaping is the intellectual and moral given sub-
stance of the one who seeks to understand.
This is the famous "hermeneutical circle." As we approach an item of tradi-
tion, we are led by some tradition-determined preunderstanding of its matter to
which it cannot but make some difference. The parable of the rebellious tenants,
spoken by a Jew to Jewish leaders, was apparently preserved and edited by the
Gentile church because of anguish over its own all too exclusively Gentile character
-it is Jewish stubbornness, the church cried out, that separates them from us.
All history since guarantees that their cryalaswill echo in us.
Therefore, the necessary historical distance between the text and us, rightly
understood, is preserved by labor to bring our prejudices into play as prejudices :
to let them be questioned by the text, indeed, to bring them as questions seeking
reply in the text. Historical-critical work on our example-parable can and must
lead us to ask, "Is it really obvious and natural that Jews and Christians are two
different sorts of people, as we late Christians suppose?" Then we will hear
surprising answers that question us.
Finally, we ask by what prejudices/questions we are to be open to the tradi-
tion. Here too there is a general consensus. The question by which, despite his-
torical consciousness, we are connected to the past isnecessarilythat posed by
historical consciousness itself: "Are there any human claims on us?" "Is life
for anything?" "Is there meaning?" We are open to the past by "existential"
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questioning. What any text says to us if it comes to speech is, in some way, "Life
is for something." The tradition, when it speaks, "opens the future."
C. The consensus is, I judge, sound, if hard to practice. But just at the last
point we must go beyond it. Especially Christian hermeneuts have been not only
existential but existentialist. Although historical relativism and historical skepti-
cism by no means go together, many hermeneuts have been both. And in the
existentialism that taught them about existential questions, they have thought
to find balm also for their skepticism.
For existentialism, authentic life is "open to the future" in a way to which
what is in fact coming is irrelevant; indeed, the very mark of authenticity is that
I open to whatever is going to happen, abandoning all assurances of what that
will be. But if this is so, the function of tradition is simply to pose a future, never
mind which; then no assertions of fact are necessarily involved in the tradition's
address to us. And then the truth or falsity of the assertions tradition does hap-
pen to make are irrelevant to its existential truth. It was a comfort to a whole
generation, shocked by the self-defeat of the attempt to make biographies of Jesus,
that the tradition about Jesus could be a word of claim and promise independently
of its historical value.
But the ploy will not do. It ignores the most primitive structure of any com-
munication-event. True existentialism would end as a sort of worldless self-
transcendence. In communication, persons come together in a world which is,
precisely to let this happen, not any of their private arenas, and which they identify
as such to each other. All addresses from me to you are simultaneously words
about the world that is neither I nor you, or they do not make it to you.
The world is the totality of facts. Existential address may not seek to lift
itself above refutation by factual untruth, lest it undo itself as communication.
Even direct first-person "I love you," must meet objections of the sort, "But how
then do you explain what happened this morning?" The gospel, which is a
declaration of love in the name of a third person Jesus, who is either an historic
person or nothing at all, simply is, in this respect, factual narrative.
The question that joins us to any piece of tradition is, we saw, "How does this
text open the future?" But we may not so interpret this question as to prescind
from assertion about the world. The form of utterance that is both assertion and
future-evocation is promise; the interpretive question's more precise statement is,
therefore, "what does this text promise?" With the large part of tradition that
is itself narrative, the narrative will determine the description of what is promised
to happen. Over against the Bible, the global interpretive question is, therefore,
"What is promised by the fact that Jesus, the one who . . ., lives?" About our
parable-example, the interpretive question is, "What is promised to Jews and
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On the Problem(s) of Scriptural Authority
Interpretation
Gentiles about each other because Jesus, the one who spoke the first version of this
parable, lives?"
In thus insisting that tradition opens specific, narratable future, I do not
reject the true existentialist insight that authentic openness to the future means
abandonment of all attempts to secure ourselves against it. But abstract futurity is
not the great challenge. Whether the promise of a specific future abets or over-
throws our self-securing depends on what is promised. What the gospel promises,
the love of the Crucified, is the one absolutely uncontrollable future.
METAPHYSICS
I have at various points said that one instance of putative gospel-speaking says
or should say "the same" as some other instance. When we set out to speak the
gospel, we want to bring the same message as the one we heard, that is, as one
now deposited somewhere in traditionif that is not what we want, the question
of authority does not, of course, arise. And the norm of both our attempt and
those to which we respond is that they are to bring the same message as did the
apostles. A second real problem is, what is the content of this "the same?" What
is the gospel's self-identity through time?
The methodology discussed under "OPERATI ON" was in fact an operational
description of the identity, so that all I have now to do is state the metaphysics of
the matter. The self-identity of the gospel through time is not any sort of lin-
guistically stipulable identity: There are no formulas which must always appear
or deductive continuities which must always be preserved. The self-identity of
the gospel is the risen Jesus' personal self-identity through time. The gospel is
always about and in the name of the same person, which is all the self-identity
it needs.
The intention of a person's life is defined at and by his death; only then has
his definition been written to completion. Jesus livesnot deathlessly butwith
death behind him. Who and what he is has therefore been settled for all eternity,
just as with any dead man.
Insofar as the gospel is about Jesus, therefore, its self-identity is its historical
memory of Jesus' life and death. The gospel provokes us to study, and just so
remains one with itself.
That Jesuswith death behindlives, means that he can and does now surprise
all our plans and calculations about him, all our Christian religion, that in our
discourse about him, "the gospel," there is an initiative that is not ours. Theology
can never come to rest; the gospel both drives and pursues the changing visions
that make history be history, unpredictably speaking hope to each new constella-
tion of dilemmas. If Jesus lives, he is the agitator of this chase.
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Insofar as the gospel is Jesus' own word, therefore, its self-identity is that it
does to its hearers what Jesus does. My putative gospel is "the same" as Augustine's
if our words do the same in the lives of hearers. Of course, every attempt to say
what that is, is a particular theology, with its slogan: For example, "Jesus
liberates;" which slogan is then an attempted definition of the anthropological
continuity of the gospel. This is not circular; each such slogan can be tested
by Scripture.
Finally, the possibility of the gospel's self-identity through time is the unity of
these two criteria : Part of what we remember is that Jesus is risen, to be the free
agitator of our lives. That we can thus remember the Eschaton, is, of course, the
Christian mystery.
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