Church Authority

It is very easy to get upset by a church that declares it has authority to know theological matters or to be the judge of this or that. It just doesn't sit well with the modern, western mind, and often for good reason.

What right does a church have to claim authority in anything, especially since theological understandings of God are quite obviously mystery to everyone?

Avery Dulles makes some good points about this in his book Models of Church (I draw heavily on his ideas in his first chapter in this post). The very fact that theological and spiritual matters are mystery is actually key, in his view. Mysteries are a form of knowledge that cannot be empirically determined. You can't reproduce an experiment to yield a conclusive answer. Neither is a single person going to sit in their private bunker and "figure it all out". However, somehow the collective understandings of a body of people in a church are able to come to a somewhat reliable (but flexible) understanding.

"Family"

The way I see it, it is like trying to come up with a definition of the word "family." You can do it, but no definition is ever really going to cover all the bases. "Family" is something that has to be experienced, and in a way, no outsider can truly be the best judge. How can you walk into my life and say that my friendships with this person or that meet the criteria for family or not? You 'have to be there' to hope to make a reliable judgment.

We all have an inner understanding of what family is. For some, it may be as simple as a blood line. That's it. cut and dried, black and white. For others, "family" has more to do with the spirit of the brotherhood. From this perspective, bloodline or not, you have to act, feel and behave like family in order to merit the title. Thus, if a certain spirit is there, we can say that "family" is there.

But where do you draw the line? When do you say that one group of people is a family, but another group isn't? You can't write up a formula about it that measures every possible condition. But if you have a large enough group of people, they can probably come to an understanding that is somewhat reliable for making a pronouncement on a given situation.

In a sense, this is what church authority is--the collective understanding about things that are not easily defined, but sort of instinctively known. The individual is not always the best judge acting by themselves, but an individual can and must weigh in. It is not a collective decision if individuals are not participating. But an individual should not think that they are going to run the show, either. The combined wisdom of countless people through countless generations forms a picture that has a certain amount of authority to it.

Conflicts Between the Individual and the Church

So then what does an individual do when their views clash with the established group understanding?

Obviously theologies change over time, even in large churches with long histories (perhaps especially so). A church cannot change unless someone comes out and proposes something that is in conflict with current ideas. Reform is thus a natural and healthy part of the process. So the contributions of individuals can and do affect this change.

The process whereby change happens is a delicate one. You cannot expect a church to bend to your will. But it would be wrong for a church body to be completely inflexible to individual contributions and overall developments and evolutions. The proposed reforms have got to resonate with the people in order to be valid. They've got to peculate deep into the community, and then brew back out. It can be a long and frustrating process.

It is hard to know what to do when as a private person you have insights that differ from the church you belong to. What do you do with that? You can submit to church authority. You can rebel and leave the church. You can ignore the items you disagree with. You can play along.

You can act "as if" this church knows best, even if you are not yet able to understand why. This is sometimes an important thing to do (key word: "sometimes"). It is easy in our modern world to assume that past theological insights of the church are ridiculous given the non-scientific nature of people in Biblical times or early Christianity. But spiritual insight is not linear, so it differs considerably from scientific knowledge. You can't simply say that people from the past were not advanced enough to know best. The fact that we can continually draw from the wisdom of the ancients through the Bible and other texts is a pure "testament" to this fact. Some things needed to evolve, but the capacity for wisdom back then is unquestioned, even in light of many social considerations that we would simply not have room for today (slavery, genocide, etc).

So therefore it is always important to defer at least to some degree to the collective wisdom that has come down the pipe. It is shows a spiritual immaturity to think that a 33 year old living in Columbus, OH, with my varied but hopelessly limited experience just somehow "gets it" more than the millions of people who came before me in countless cultures and generations of history. I have often felt that many parts of the church were stupid only to be deeply impressed when I actually did a sophisticated study. But yet, there have been reforms, breakaway movements, some of it unfairly suppressed, so its not like the orthodox church authority is always a clean and clear, open decision. But yet, to think that all these people didn't have a clue but _I_ do is just silly.

But what do you do when the collective wisdom declares itself to have absolute authority? Does that have merit? What do you do when the collective wisdom believes it is important to suppress other ideas? Is that truth talking or fear talking?

Book of Job

I think the Book of Job can lend some insight to this. Like Job, we need to have the integrity to respect our own thoughts. Job sat with his sickness telling him one thing and his religious tradition telling him another. His life experience told him that he was a righteous man, but in the theology of his day, it was believed that he must have been sinful to warrant his physical suffering. And he sat there in tension between these conflicting thoughts.

He did not throw either of them out, entirely. He could not reconcile his experience with what his faith tradition was telling him, and he passionately spoke out. The people around him like his wife and his "friends" were picking sides. Job did not. He hung in there. He did not blindly defer to his church tradition, nor did he completely toss it out in favor of his personal theology. There is a model for faithfulness there, as Job was the one who "spoke rightly" about God and he was the one who was ultimately rewarded with a transformative experience of God.