The Crisis in Religious Authority

Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern

“I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!” - William Tyndale’s retort to a priest who said “we had better be without God’s laws than the Pope’s”

My last post gave a general discussion of the most-beloved fallacy of our day, the appeal to authority.  

I suggested it had many different forms.  In common they attempt to gain the authority of truth while at the same time placing those in positions of authority above it.  The fact that the appeal to authority is historically recognized as a logical fallacy shows that our forebears at least recognized that the truth possesses authority. 

The fact that most of us don’t recognize logical fallacies and accept them without disagreement shows how fallen our culture has become.

Today I want to discuss appeals to authority in the field of religion.

Appeals to authority are not a new phenomenon there.  The Reformation, one of the seminal events of the late-Medieval era, certainly involved such a contest over authority. 

The Appeal of Sola Scriptura

What was at stake in the Reformation was the claim, on both sides, that the other was committing a logical fallacy.  They were making illegitimate appeals to authority.

The Magisterium of Rome claimed that Matthew 16:13-20 authorized Peter as the first Pope and head of the church, an office that had been handed down through apostolic succession.  William Tyndale and other Protestants retorted that this appeal to the authority of Scripture was correct in principle but wrong in the ‘authorized’ interpretation.   It was an instance of motivated proof-texting. 

A more careful attention to Scripture revealed that rather than authorizing Peter as Jesus’ successor, the broader thrust of Scripture made it clear that it was the truth of the gospel imparted to Peter and the other apostles that was the keys to the kingdom.  Jesus never delegated his authority to earthly representatives.  He remained Lord of the church.  He sits and reigns at the Father’s right hand.  His voice is unambiguously to be discerned sola scriptura.

The Magisterium responded that this view of Scripture would make everyone into a Pope. They strangled and burnt Tyndale at the stake for translating the Scriptures into English.

I am on the side of the Reformers, not only because I believe the gospel and the authority of Christ over His church, but because (like the Greek philosophers of old and my Christian forebears) I hold to the authority of truth more generally – to which earthly authorities (including religious ones) are subject.  This idea of equality under the law, rationally discerned, is the basis of common law, natural law, and the idea of inalienable human rights. 

Vishal Mangalwadi, in his 2012 book The Book that Made Your World, gives a fascinating account of the astonishing legacy of the Bible on culture with this basic principle in mind.

The Critics of Sola Scriptura

My convictions are not universally shared among those who call themselves Christians.  I mentioned the late-medieval conflict we call the Reformation. I am going to mention very briefly two examples.

1)      The first is very modern.

There are still those who would solve the alleged problems of the doctrine of sola scriptura with the doctrine of sola ecclesia.  Yet rather than engage in the theological arguments of the late-medieval period, they employ variations of the poisoned well fallacy, very much following the style of the Enlightenment philosophes.

For example, Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory in his 2012 book The Unintended Reformation attributes all the pathologies of modernity to the Reformers, charging them with splintering the intellectual-theological consensus and ushering in the multiplicity of truth-claims inherent to modernity and postmodernity.  It is an astonishing bit of revisionist history to identify the fruits of Enlightenment atheism with the Reformation.  It is the sort of screed the French Enlightenment philosophes used against the Catholic church. 

Not only does he ignore, as this helpful review suggests, the consensus was already broken thanks to the great schism of Eastern and Western Christendom, and yet unity still existed thanks to the historic distinction between the visible and the invisible church, he ignores the divisions within the Roman Catholic Church itself that have all the same marks of what he rightly identifies as the pathology of modernity.  He also ignores the clear benefits of the Reformation that Mangalwadi catalogues in numerous books.

2)      The second is very postmodern.

A recent challenge, more in keeping with the pathologies of postmodernity, was presented by Bruxy Cavey, the teaching pastor of Canada’s largest megachurch, The Meeting House.  Unlike the previous discussions within Western Christianity over authority in the church, Cavey fused the premises of postmodernity with the church growth movement to present a more marketable brand of Christianity.

Postmodernism has a wide range of characteristics as this entry makes clear.  A helpful summary is that it presents a lawless metanarrative against all metanarratives.

Bruxy’s Meeting House branded itself accordingly.  It was ‘a church for people who aren’t into church’.

And it is in the premises of postmodernity that we see a radical new form of an appeal to authority.

For whereas the Roman Catholic position appealed, based on Matthew 16:18-19, to the authority of Peter’s successors on earth, and the Reformers insisted on the authority of Christ even now on the basis of a broader Scriptural reading, Cavey claims to exalt the authority of Christ by excluding both the authority of the church and the authority of Scripture.

What replaced the metanarratives of the authority of the church and the authority of Scripture? 

According to Bruxy, it was the authority of Jesus.

This was a consistent metanarrative thread in Cavey’s teaching.  He repeatedly and explicitly denied that the Scriptures had authority.  He called the doctrine of sola scriptura a ‘paper Pope’.  And he said that the Scriptures didn’t actually support the idea of Scriptural authority. 

If true, this would not only contradict the entire history of Christianity, it would mean that the Bible’s red-print presentation of Jesus own words (even their appeal to the Scriptures) would lack authority!

Where did this appeal to Jesus’ authority outside the authority of Scripture end? 

According to an article in a recent edition of The Walrus, which is worth a careful read, it resulted in a rampant cultural of pastoral sexual abuse.

To date, according to Karmyn Bokma, the Meeting House’s interim senior pastor, Bissell has received approximately fifty-eight referrals. The church noted in an online statement that these are “not unique sets of sexual misconduct allegations” but are “allegations, disclosures, and concerns relating primarily to clergy sexual misconduct, harassment, and abuse by a number of former pastors and church leaders.” Some allegations are repeated. Some of the referrals, the statement continued, were “from people who have felt that the church did not, in the past, respond properly when they came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct.”

This abuse included the teaching pastor himself:

“The first woman who came forward later told the Toronto Star that Cavey pressured her to keep their sexual relationship private and that he would compare their relationship to his stance on gay marriage: it wasn’t technically allowed by God, but such a relationship would be redeemed if it were one of commitment. According to the article, Cavey told her that she was a gift given to him by God.”

The language the woman gave seems telling. The consistent denial of the authority of Scripture allowed Bruxy to appeal to Jesus’ authority without any fear of contradiction.  God would allow them to get off with this ‘technicality’. 

The defence itself is a technicality. The truth is that Bruxy’s position on Scripture already dismisses all abuse the Scriptures might cite on ‘technical’ grounds, because while the Bible directly speaks against abuse, it has no authority.

The appeal to Jesus authority thus easily became a fallacy promoting the authority of a virtual pope.