4 Modes of Scriptural Authority

"Many different strategies have been developed in the attempt to retain an authentic place for the Bible in the post-Enlightenment world. One was to continue to assert as a matter of faith that the Bible is a factually accurate account of creation and history and that where the account is contradicted by modern science, modern science is wrong. 1) [This strategy] is difficult to maintain without a kind of split personality if one is going to live an active life in the modern world. As Langdon Gilkey has remarked, even the most devout fundamentalist in Texas, when prospecting for oil, consults geologists and not biblical scholars. 2) Those who hold this position are themselves part of the modern world; consequently, when they say that the Bible is factually accurate, they are working with a whole context of meaning, within a concept of factuality that is foreign to the Bible. Fundamentalism in this form is a post-Enlightenment product."

"Much more common than this has been the strategy that seeks to conserve the religious meaning of the Bible without any attempt to defend its factual accuracy in matters of natural science or history. ... But this can lead to a situation in which the scholar simply subjects the biblical text to the same kind of critical analysis that he would use in the case of any other text of similar antiquity. The scholar is the active subject; the Bible is the passive object. ... The scholar examines the text but is not, in any profound sense, examined by the text. If he is a believer, he will draw from the text illumination for his own faith. But his faith does not rest on the authority of the text."

"Another way of seeking to relate the Bible to the post-Enlightenment world has been to distill from it concepts of principles that could be applied to modern life. ... It is not clear what their provenance in the Bible gives them or why it should give them any authority other than the authority that their intrinsic rightness may give them to the reason and conscience of modern men and women."

"Another strategy has been to concentrate on the character of the Bible as history - the history of the acts of God. God's revelation of himself, in this view, is not in the text itself but in the events reported and interpreted in the text. ... It is for the modern believer to understand the story of these acts, the salvation history, in contemporary terms. ... But it is not always clear whether the series of divine acts that constitute the salvation history is to be understood as forming the central thread of universal history ... or whether it is understood as the clue to the specifically religous experience that is available as a personal option within public history."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 45-48