No, The Bible Is Not Your Highest Authority

(Credit: Flickr Creative Commons)

Crown prince of performative evangelicalism, Franklin Graham, posted something on Twitter today that caught my attention.

On the surface it was a fairly innocuous and rather generic evangelic sentiment, but dig a little deeper and that sentiment is, like Facebook, the source of all sorts of evil.

Here’s the tweet in question…

Like I said, superficially innocuous.

Christians of all sorts and stripes and creeds profess the Bible as their highest authority.

But there’s the thing: it’s not really true and pretending otherwise has served as justification for all sorts of evil in the name of Jesus and “biblical principles.”

Don’t get me wrong. Holding up the Bible as your highest authority sounds great. It sounds like you’re being faithful to the way of Jesus, humble even in that you are, in theory, trusting in someone else - God - to lead you. The reality, however, is that as reverent as it might sound to claim the Bible is your highest authority, the reality is, more often than not that sort of professions simply serves as a way to deflect responsibility away from yourself and onto the Bible.

Don’t think women should be allowed to talk in church?

I’m just doing what the Bible tells me to do.

Don’t think LGBT folks should be allowed to get married?

I’m just doing what the Bible tells me to do.

Or maybe you simply believe you’ve been called to damn everyone to hell who doesn’t agree with you.

It’s ok. I’m just doing what the Bible tells me to do.

Now you may be thinking this post is about proof-texting or picking and choosing what verses you want to emphasize and follow while ignoring those you don’t, but the issue is deeper, more fundamental than that.

It’s about what it means for the Bible to have any authority in our lives at all and the inescapable reality that even in according the Bible authority in our lives we remain the ultimate authority in deciding what is or is not authoritative or why it’s authoritative in the first place simply by virtue of that decision process. By making the decision to position the Bible as an authority in our lives we must already be in the position of authority as the ultimate decision maker of what is authoritative in our lives.

In other words, we can profess whatever we like about the Bible being God’s word and that’s why we follow it and it has authority no matter what other people believe or say about it, but that profession is a choice we make and the ability to make that choice inherently and inescapably makes us the final arbiter or “highest authority” of whether or not the Bible has any authority at all in our lives. It’s why Christians hold the Bible in such high esteem while most atheists don’t. Both parties made a decision about its authority.

That’s not to say the Bible isn’t worth following, nor is this a post about finding a way to avoid the reality of our role in deciding whether or how the Bible has authority in our lives. That reality is unavoidable.

This post is about embracing that reality in order to better understand both our own biases as well as the message of the Bible itself because it’s not until we can begin to see and acknowledge our role in interpreting scripture and move away from the myth that the Bible is somehow an autonomous authority we can simply quote from and follow without any personal interaction or interpretation that we can begin to read and use the Bible the way it was intended: as a source of life and freedom rather than oppression and death.

It’s a process much like what we learned about in my historical methods and sources class in grad school. There is no such thing as pure, unbiased history. Unconscious biases, opinions, and the choices of what to emphasize and what isn’t as important are all part of the process of historical research and they are all unavoidable. The task of the historian is not to pretend those personal biases and choices don’t exist, but rather to acknowledge their unavoidable presence in order to be able to better work around them and know when to seek out other opinions and perspectives in hopes of seeing things you simply aren’t able to see yourself in order to get to the best understanding of the historical record as possible.

Reading and following the Bible functions in much the same way.

There is no such thing as a “plain reading of the Bible” nor are you “just repeating what the Bible says.” In a literal sense that might be true, but the simple decision to quote this verse and not that one alone is an exercise in personal judgment, opinion, bias, and, yes, authority. That is the case with everything in religion. Every act of interpretation or profession is an assertion of personal authority. Even saying “I do this because God told me to and here’s a verse to prove it” requires you to first decide that God has authority and is worth following.

In other words, you may appeal to God as your authority but that appeal still requires you to have the ultimate personal authority to do so.

So, even if you follow the gross path of Calvinism and claim that God controls every molecule in the universe since the dawn of creation and therefore ordains and enacts every single thing that ever has or ever will happen, that belief or “submission to God’s will” is still ultimately a choice you make which means you are still in the position of authority as the one making the decision about who or what should make the decisions in your life.

Some folks out there will be quick to accuse me of idolatry, of positioning creatures in the place of the Creator. But that is not at all what I’m doing. Acknowledging personal responsibility and the role we place in making decisions in our lives does not equate to making ourselves gods of our lives. It’s simply the inescapable reality of free will.

I know this may all sound a bit like theological gymnastics for Bible nerds, but there’s an important point in the question of where authority comes from in our lives.

To be faithful readers and “doers” of scripture, we first have to be honest about the inescapable role we play in deciding how the Bible should be read and interpreted and why it should have any authority in our lives to begin with. Pretending otherwise is nothing more than a dishonest deflection of personal responsibility that only ever serves to sanctify of oppression, marginalization, and violence in the name of biblical authority.

We may profess and even strive to submit to “biblical authority” but we must never pretend as if we ourselves don’t play a central role in determining what that authority looks like in real life.

Using the Bible as a source of personal inspiration and a guide for living life in the footsteps of Jesus is not at all a bad thing and obviously something that is very central to the Christian life so long as how we go about reading and interpreting the Bible leads us to love God and our neighbor as Jesus instructed when he declared that everything in scripture hangs on those two commandments.

But the moment we invoke “biblical authority” to oppress, marginalize, or inflict violence on others as if we are helpless robots simply doing what the Bible tells us to do, we become like Facebook, the never-taking-personal-responsibility source of all kinds of evil.

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