those who, like Micaiah ben Imlah stood humbly in the councils of God and
then stood boldly, in their writing, in the councils of men.
The Bible, then, is designed to function through human beings,
through the church, through people who, living still by the Spirit, have their
life moulded 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. And that
agenda is the same confrontation with the world that Jesus had with
Israel a confrontation involving judgement and mercy. It is a paradoxical
confrontation because it is done with God's authority. It is not done
with the authority that we reach for so easily, an authority which will
manipulate, or crush, or control, or merely give information about the
world. But, rather, it is to be done with an authority with which the
church can authentically speak God's words of judgement and mercy to the
world. We are not, then, entering into the world's power games. That,
after all, is what Peter tried to do in the garden with his sword, trying
to bring in the kingdom of God in the same way that the world would like
to do it. The world is always trying to lure the church into playing the
game by its (the world's) rules. And the church is all too often eager to
do this, not least by using the idea of the authority of scripture as a
means to control people, to force them into little boxes. Those little
boxes often owe far more, in my experience, to cultural conditioning of
this or that sort, than to scripture itself as the revelation of the loving,
creator and redeemer God.
Authority in the church, then, means the church's authority, with
scripture in its hand and heart, to speak and act for God in his world. It is
not simply that we may say, in the church, 'Are we allowed to do this or that?'
'Where are the lines drawn for our behaviour?' Or, 'Must we believe the
following 17 doctrines if we are to be really sound?' God wants the church to
lift up its eyes and see the field ripe for harvest, and to go out, armed with
the authority of scripture; not just to get its own life right within a Christian
ghetto, but to use the authority of scripture to declare to the world
authoritatively that Jesus is Lord. And, since the New Testament is the
covenant charter of the people of God, the Holy Spirit, I believe, desires and
longs to do this task in each generation by reawakening people to the
freshness of that covenant, and hence summoning them to fresh covenant
tasks. The phrase 'authority of scripture', therefore, is a sort of shorthand for
the fact that the creator and covenant God uses this book as his means of