Practicing the Authority of Scripture

by David R. Bauer

Clearly the authority of the Scriptures stands at the center of evangelical identity. And, insofar as the Free Methodist Church lies within the evangelical tradition, Free Methodists universally ascribe to the authority of the Bible. But this concern for the authority of the Scriptures is not only a part of our broad evangelical legacy, but also more specifically of our Wesleyan heritage. Anyone who reads through Wesley’s Works will repeatedly come upon passages like this one: “I want to know one thing — the way to heaven … God himself has condescended to teach the way. … He has written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it: Here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri [a man of one book]” (Preface to “Sermons on Several Occasions”).

And the early Free Methodists strongly reaffirmed this Wesleyan emphasis on the authority of the Scriptures. Thus, Elias Bowen, in his “History of the Origin of the Free Methodist Church,” writing within approximately a decade of the founding of the denomination, insisted that even with regard to the way in which the Free Methodist Church chose to organize itself, “Nothing indeed has been taken for granted; nothing upon the ground of church authority; everything has been ‘weighed in the balance of the sanctuary,’ and made to conform to the word and will of God.” Moreover, this embrace of the supreme authority of the Scriptures is as strong today as it was at the church’s founding. Accordingly, all persons entering membership in the Free Methodist Church are expected to answer in the affirmative the question that is posed to them: “Do you believe the Bible is God’s written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit and do you accept its authority for what you must believe and how you must live?”

But it is possible to accept the notion of the authority of the Bible as a creedal affirmation, and yet not consider what difference such an embrace of biblical authority makes in the specific ways in which we think about and act toward the Bible in our daily lives? For this reason, I have titled this article “Practicing the Authority of Scripture,” thereby suggesting that the authority of the Bible is not something to be merely affirmed in the sense of reciting it as an article of faith, but rather something to be done. Submitting to the Bible’s authority implies certain ways of relating to the Bible.

Let us be clear. When we talk of submitting to the authority of the Bible, we really mean yielding ourselves, both in thought and practice, to the God who reveals Himself in the Bible and speaks to us uniquely in the pages of Scripture. Thus, embracing the authority of the Bible means submitting to the message of the Bible, which itself carries the corollary of committing ourselves to understand what God is communicating to us through the words of Scripture and considering what that divine communication means for us in the daily decisions of our lives. After all, it makes no sense for us to claim that we submit to the message of the Bible without taking care to understand as accurately, clearly and deeply as possible what that message is. In other words, an active belief in the Bible’s authority obligates us to the happy task of discerning the message of the Scriptures, which is interpretation, and applying that message to our own lives and our own situations (and the lives of those around us), which is appropriation.

But what, exactly, does this practicing the authority of the Bible involve?

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“Our world offers many distractions. For that reason, we must be intentional in devoting quality time to reading the Scriptures, so that we know exactly what is there.”

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It involves, first, acquainting ourselves with what the Bible itself says. The healthy Christian hungers to know the Scriptures. In fact, the Christian should know the Bible intimately, better than any other book or anything else in all the world. As a college student, I sat next to the retired Free Methodist missionary to China and Taiwan, James Hudson Taylor II, during a performance of Handel’s “Messiah.” I was impressed that he was able from memory to note on his program the chapter and verse of the biblical passage represented by each line of that oratorio. But, really, shouldn’t all mature Christians who have spent years in the faith be able to do that? The problem of biblical illiteracy in the contemporary church is well-documented, and the outlandish answers that even many Christians give to questions of basic Bible content would be comical if the situation were not so serious. Our world offers many distractions. For that reason, we must be intentional in devoting quality time to reading the Scriptures, so that we know exactly what is there.

But it is not enough simply to know what the Bible says. We must know what it means, and that involves assuming an attitude of utter and complete openness to its message. We all come to the Bible with our experiences, our memories of the voices of trusted pastors or writers who have told us what they think this verse means or what this concept is all about. Now these personal accessories that we bring to the Bible are not in themselves harmful; they may enable us to understand the text better under certain circumstances. But they also may be wrong, or at least obscure what a given passage is actually saying. It is therefore helpful to approach each passage of Scripture, as much as possible, as though we are reading it for the first time, with an openness to allowing the plain meaning of the passage to have its full resonance, and being willing to accept its meaning, even if that meaning is new, inconvenient, uncomfortable, or runs counter to our personal or cultural assumptions. Moreover, we live in an ideologically fraught culture where certain notions or perspectives are granted unquestioned normativeness. It takes intellectual and moral courage, made possible by the Spirit of God, to acknowledge the possibility of a quite different truth from the pages of God’s Word.

We come to know what the Bible means also by studying the Bible according to its own nature. If we believe that God has chosen to reveal Himself through the medium of the Bible, then it is an act of submission to God’s own methods to study the Bible according to the character of the Bible itself. But what exactly is the nature of the Bible, and how might a recognition of its characteristics shape a responsible study of God’s Word?

For one thing, the Bible is a collection of originally independent books. G. Campbell Morgan, the renowned British expositor, insisted that the Bible is not so much a book as it is a library of books. If that is the case, it means that we must gain the sense of any passage from a consideration of its role within the entire biblical book in which it is found.

Everyone recognizes that a responsible reading of anything must attend to its context. Indeed, someone has said that context does not merely inform the meaning of a statement but essentially establishes its meaning. We know that the very same sentence can mean one thing in one context, and something entirely different in another. Now we often think of context as the verses that immediately precede and follow our passage, and it is essential always to consider this immediate context. But the principle that the Bible is composed of different books implies that the whole book forms the primary context of any passage, and its role within the book primarily determines its meaning. This is the Context Principle.

But the observation that the Bible is made up of originally separate books means also that we must allow each book to present its own message and not simply read the meaning of one biblical book into another. This principle is illustrated well by our four Gospels. Each evangelist tells his own story of Jesus with its distinctive emphases and peculiar features, and the church needs to hear each of these distinctive perspectives of Jesus in order finally to experience the fulness of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, the principle that the Bible is a collection of books, which we call the canon of Scripture, means that while avoiding the practice of carelessly dumping the meaning of other books into our book, we must attend to the way in which the rest of the Bible may illuminate the passage or book that we are studying and consider too how our passage may contribute to the presentation of the theme or issue in the Bible as a whole. This is the Canon Principle.

Now these various biblical books were produced at certain points in the past and were directed in the first instance not to us but to their original audiences. In other words, they have a history. The biblical writers naturally assumed that their readers were aware of the historical realities that surround the events they record or the statements they present. Therefore, in order to make ourselves fully competent readers, we must become aware of these historical settings. The go-to places for this kind of information are Bible dictionaries or reliable commentaries. This is the Background Principle.

Yet even though these biblical books were not originally written to us, they do speak to us and address us in our own situations. In fact, the recognition that they are canonical Scripture means that we understand that God speaks to us uniquely and with full reliability through the Bible. While we want to avoid reading our contemporary concerns into the Bible in such a way as to be unable to hear well the message that the inspired biblical writers wished to convey, it is incumbent upon us to consider exactly how the message of a biblical passage or theme intersects with our lives and informs in specific ways how we should think about and live into the challenges that face us. In this regard, we have a responsibility to do all we can to understand accurately and thoroughly the contemporary issue or situation. Otherwise, we might misapply Scripture and frustrate God’s project of forming us into the kind of people and community that He desires. This is the Appropriation Principle.

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“God intends that His church should be a community of critical conversation, devoted to the Lord and to the truth that He is constantly revealing through the study of His Word.”

Of course, the Bible addresses us both as individuals and as the community (of faith). Therefore, the study of the Bible is not merely an individual endeavor, but is also a corporate enterprise. One of the functions of the gathered church is to study the Scriptures together. God intends that His church should be a community of critical conversation, devoted to the Lord and to the truth that He is constantly revealing through the study of His Word, with leaders who are trained and can thus give direction, but with all contributing their insights. Everyone experienced in ministry recognizes that those who may lack formal training have great capacity for understanding and sharing the profound truths of God’s Word. This is the Community Principle.

Naturally, none of us comes to the study of the Scriptures in a vacuum, but we all bring certain perspectives to bear. As human beings, we bring our experiences (including our Christian experience). As members of the Christian community, we are heirs of the theological tradition of the Christian church. As thinking persons, we exercise our capacity to reason. Wesley rightly considered how each of these — experience, tradition, reason — along with Scripture has a role to play in our Christian formation. Some church historians have thus talked about these four things as the “Wesleyan quadrilateral,” sometimes giving the impression that Wesley judged that each of them have equal significance. But actually Wesley affirmed the supreme authority of Scripture. He did not see these other three elements as having an independent significance or as functioning in such a way as to dictate the meaning of Scripture. Rather, he considered that they can help us to see more clearly and understand more deeply those truths that Scripture itself, interpreted properly according to the principles described above, reveals. This is the Perspective Principle.

The authority of the Bible means taking its study and its translation into life with all seriousness. This requires persistent, dedicated attention to the task. But does the Bible deserve any less from us? +