Sorry to be so slow in posting these... Here are the quotes I handed out that morning.
N.T. Wright,
How Can The Bible Be Authoritative?“When people in the church talk about authority they are very often talking about controlling people or situations. They want to make sure that everything is regulated properly, that the church does not go off the rails doctrinally or ethically, that correct ideas and practices are upheld and transmitted to the next generation. ‘Authority’ is the place where we go to find out the correct answers to key questions such as these. This notion, however, runs into all kinds of problems when we apply it to the Bible. Is that really what the Bible is for? Is it there to control the church? Is it there simply to look up the correct answers to questions that we, for some reason, already know?
Somehow, the authority which God has invested in this book is an authority that is wielded and exercised through the people of God telling and retelling their story as the story of the world, telling the covenant story as the true story of creation. Somehow, this authority is also wielded through his people singing psalms. Somehow, it is wielded in particular through God’s people telling the story of Jesus.
The Bible, then, is designed to function through human beings, through the church, through people who, living still by the Spirit, have their life molded by this Spirit-inspired book. What for? Well, as Jesus said in John 20, ‘As the Father sent me, even so I send you’. He sends the church into the world, in other words, to be and do for the world what he was and did for Israel. There, I suggest, is the key hermeneutical bridge. By this means we are enabled to move from the bare story-line that speaks of Jesus as the man who lived and died and did these things in Palestine 2,000 years ago, into an agenda for the church.
Leonard Sweet,
Aqua Church
“The Scriptures point us to Christ. They enable us to locate the North Star. They are not Christ. They are not what we worship. But the compass points to our life work – following Christ.” p.55
“The witness of the Bible is not to get people to believe the Bible to believe God. It does not say ‘Believe in the Bible, and you will be saved…’” (58)
Douglass John Hall,
Thinking the Faith
Describing the Reformers’ mantra, “Faith which intends to be Christian must be prepared to listen to and submit itself to the authority of the Scriptures. …(The Reformers intended) to establish methodologically their main theological point.” (258-259)
“Theology lives with and from the Bible, not as a pupil of primary school mathematics lives with a set of ‘correct answers’ but as a storyteller lives with what seems the original and most authentic version of the story he or she is trying to tell, now, under different circumstances. For the disciple community, in other words, the Bible exists as its fundamental source of information and courage.
It is also of course the fount of information… But the informational function of the Scriptures, important as it may be, is secondary and subservient to its inspirational function. …The Bible apparently wants to give, and is able to give more than information – and faith certainly needs more.” (262-263)
Stan Grenz,
How Do We Know What to Believe? Revelation and Authrority“In keeping with the Reformation concern to bind Word and Spirit together, this statement suggests that the authority of the Bible lies in its role as that in which the Spirit has chosen to speak.” (23)
“The ongoing task of the community of Christ is to ask continually, ‘What is the Spirit saying to the church? Or, stated in terms of speech-act theory, What illocutionary act is the Spirit performing in our midst on the basis of the reading of Scripture?” (23)
“A paradigmatic event is a historical occurrence that captures the imagination of a community in such a manner that it shapes the community’s way of conceiving the totality of reality as well as the community’s understanding of its ongoing experience of reality. A paradigmatic narrative is a set of events that connects the community and its participants wit the past and the future. …It fuses past and future with the present in a manner that calls forth a new world in the here and now, so that the community that inhabits this world takes its identity from, and becomes the contemporary embodiment of, the paradigmatic narrative itself.” (25)
“A central aspect of the Spirit’s appropriating of the biblical narrative is to connect us with the primal events that originally constituted the Christian community, especially the life, passion and resurrection of Jesus…” (25)
Stan Grenz,
Theology for the Community of God
“The Bible functions as ‘the constitution of an ongoing community.’ These writings provide the foundation for the life we share as believers, that is, for our identity as the Christian community.
Yet we ask, What about the Bible gives it this lofty role? Simply stated, the biblical writings are constitutional in that they are the product of the foundational stage in the history of the faith community… Because they set forth what constituted our identity as the people of God at the beginning, they hold primary status at all stages in the life of the community of believers.” (389)
“In declaring the trustworthiness of the Bible, therefore, we must keep in mind that it is ultimately not the book itself which we are affirming. Rather, we are confessing our faith in the Spirit who speaks his revelatory message to us through the pages of Scripture.” (403)
Daniel Migliore,
Faith Seeking Understanding
“The real question that is raised for theology by the modern critical mentality is whether the authority of Scripture is properly understood as oppressive. Is its authority an arbitrary datum simply to be accepted by a sacrifice of the intellect, or is it inseparable from the scriptural proclamation of the liberating grace of God in Jesus Christ? Put differently, the question is whether the church has forgotten that its own scriptural tradition contains a powerful critique of arbitrary authority and a distinctive message of freedom.” (42)
“Through the biblical witness, and especially through its narratives of God’s gracious, liberating activity in Jesus Christ, God is newly identified for us and we are led into a new way of life in communion with God and with others.” (48)
This is something I didn't hand out, but found interesting at least... James Packer
Biblical authority, as historically (and, in my judgment, rightly) understood by evangelicals, a a complex dogmatic construction made up of seven elements as follows.
The first is a view of inspiration as an activity whereby God, who in His providence overrules all human utterance, caused certain particular men to speak and write in such a way that their utterance was, and remains, His utterance through them, establishing norms of faith and practice.
The second element in the historic evangelical account of biblical authority is a view of the principle of canonicity, as being objectively the fact, and subjectively the recognition, of inspiration.
The third element in the evangelical position is a belief that the Scriptures authenticate themselves to Christian believers through the convincing work of the Holy Spirit, who enables us to recognise, and bow before, divine realities.
Fourthly, evangelicals maintain that the Scriptures are sufficient for the Christian and the Church as a lamp for our feet and a light for our path - a guide, that is, as to what steps we should take at any time in the realms of belief and behaviour.
Fifthly, evangelicals affirm that the Scriptures are clear, and interpret themselves from within; and consequently, in their character as 'God's word written', are able to stand above both the Church and the Christian in corrective judgment and health-giving instruction.
Sixthly, evangelicals stress that Scripture is a mystery in a sense parallel to that in which the Incarnation is a mystery - that is, that the identifying of the human and the divine words in the one case, like the taking of manhood into God in the other, was a unique creative divine act of which we cannot fully grasp either the nature or the mode or the dynamic implications. Scripture is as genuinely and fully human as it is divine.
Seventhly, evangelicals hold that the obedience of both the Christian individually, and the Church corporately, consists precisely in conscious submission, both intellectual and ethical, to the teaching of Holy Scripture.
