N. T. Wright on the Authority of Scripture

The apostolic writings, like the "word" which they now wrote down, were not simply about the coming of God's Kingdom into all the world; they were, and were designed to be, part of the means whereby that happened.¹

The New Testament understands itself as the new covenant charter, the book that forms the basis for the new telling of the story through which Christians are formed, reformed and transformed so as to be God's people for God's world. That is the challenge the early Christians bequeath to us as we reconsider what "the authority of scripture" might mean in practice today.²

What does it mean to appeal to "the authority of scripture"? This phrase is sometimes used as a way of saying, "A plague on all your scholarship; we just believe the Bible." This is simply unsustainable. Without scholars to provide Greek lexicons and translations based on them, few today could read the New Testament. Without scholarship to explain the world of the first century, few today could begin to understand it (as often becomes painfully evident when people without such explanations try to read it aloud, let alone expound it). Scholarship of some sort is always assumed; what the protest often means, unfortunately, is that the speakers prefer the scholarship implicit in their early training, which is now simply taken for granted as common knowledge, to the bother of having to wake up mentally and think fresh thoughts. Again and again, such older scholarship, and such older traditions of reading, turn out to be flawed or in need of supplementing. Today's and tomorrow's will be just the same, of course, but this does not absolve us from constantly trying to do better, from the never-ending attempt to understand scripture more fully. It is my own experience that such attempts regularly result in real advances (measured not least in terms of the deep and many-sided sense that is made of the text), and that even making the effort almost always results in fresh pastoral and homiletic insights. To affirm "the authority of scripture" is precisely not to say, "We know what scripture means and don't need to raise any more questions." It is always a way of saying that the church in each generation must make fresh and rejuvenated efforts to understand scripture more fully and live by it more thoroughly, even if that means cutting off cherished traditions.³

There is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is "true" after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes. Which is the bottom line: "proving the Bible to be true" (often with the effect of saying, "So we can go on thinking what we've always thought"), or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we'd never heard before and didn't particularly want to hear?⁴

(1) N. T. Wright, The Last Word, (HarperCollins, 2005), 51
(2) Ibid., 59
(3) Ibid., 90-91
(4) Ibid., 95

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