Biblical Authority
I found this Mark Driscoll quote on my friend Sam Haist’s blog. Driscoll is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA. His theology is sold and he is very biblical so I tend to agree with most of what he has to say.
Karen’s chapter raises the important question of what exactly is the level of authority that Scripture holds in the church. Karen’s chapter uses only three Scripture references, an old worship song, an indie rock band, a postmodern philosopher, a church blog, a movie, an obscure theologian, and Hindu Ghandi as her authorities. And while quoting various cultural references is not inherently bad, since Paul was also known to quote law codes and mainstream poets, it is concerning when the final authority of Scripture is questioned. She quotes the poet Rilke, saying, ‘God speaks to us [...] out of our own lives, no less so than God speaks to us in the canon of Holy Scripture.’ at the risk of stating the obvious, before we drop the authority of Scripture, we need a better reason than a poem from a non-Christian whose mother wanted a girl so badly that she called him Sophia and made him wear girls’ clothes until the age of five.
That speaks volumes for me. I find that this Karen he talks about is similar to most of the pastor’s down at the University of Illinois and increasingly around the United States from what I can tell. A pastor of one of the churches I went to down at school seemed to just hold the Bible for effect or “because that’s what he was supposed to do.” When he started his message he put it down and did not pick it back up again. That disturbed me. The Bible is the inspired Word of God yet even given that, we fail to recognize its authority on a consistent basis. While I understand that some of the churches down at school are attempting to water down the message in order to bring in unchurched college students, I am not sure that that is what they need to do.
While there may be some validity to making a message more accessible to college students, removing the Bible from it is about the worst thing that pastors could do. If we don’t use the Bible to bring along new Christians, their theology will be thrown off and it will give them an excuse to continue in their sin. They may not continue in it on purpose; it might just be that they do not know which choices are right and wrong. There just is no way to remove Scripture’s authority from the church and still be immitator’s of Christ.
June 18 2007 01:12 pm | Bible