“Authority is rightful say-so, the power to commend belief and command obedience. Authority is linked to authorship, for who has more right to say-so over something than the one who conceived and originated it? [He then references Rom. 13:1, Rom. 4:17, Gen. 6:18, 15:18, Exod. 19:5 and Deut. 7:6] All three persons of the Trinity are involved in everything that God does, creating and covenanting alike: omnia opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (all the external works of the Trinity are indivisible). This includes exercising authority.”
I would say that “authority” has been one of the top theological buzzwords of 2016. Much has been written about authority and submission in male/female relationships, authority and subordination between the Father and the Son, and on the authority of Scripture. I’ve written a good deal on the topic myself this year. Often I have seen authority claimed that is unauthorized. Other times I have agreed on authorization, but not in the meaning of how the word is being used. For a word that is being used so much, we better know what we mean when we are saying it.
One place where I have found a good definition and description of authority is in Kevin Vanhoozer’s Biblical Authority After Babel. Before addressing interpretive authority for the Scriptures, Vanhoozer knows he needs to define authority and discuss how it relates to rationality. To do this, he begins with the principal of authority: the Triune God:
Authority is rightful say-so, the power to commend belief and command obedience. Authority is linked to authorship, for who has more right to say-so over something than the one who conceived and originated it? [He then references Rom. 13:1, Rom. 4:17, Gen. 6:18, 15:18, Exod. 19:5 and Deut. 7:6] All three persons of the Trinity are involved in everything that God does, creating and covenanting alike: omnia opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (all the external works of the Trinity are indivisible). This includes exercising authority. (85)
The all-knowing God is the creator of all things, therefore having rightful power to communicate authoritatively to his creatures. He knows what we are created for, and he knows how to get us there. Vanhoozer uses the illustration of a chess game, in that without the rules, the game is no fun and there is no real freedom to play chess. “It follows, then, that authority—rightful say-so—is not a coercive force but an enabling condition of free play…. Far from constraining human freedom, authority is a necessary condition for human flourishing” (85-86). Vanhoozer bids us to think of a conductor for an orchestra, who is “unifying common action through rules binding for all” (87). He moves from teaching on the covenantal relationship of divine authority and human answerability to introduce the concept that “biblical authority orients freedom to the new reality that is Jesus Christ” (86).
Moving on to human relationships, Vanhoozer emphasizes that “’authorization’ is the key term. ‘To be an authority is to be authorized by something or someone beyond oneself’…(Rom. 13:1)…. What authority authorizes is an office: ‘To have authority is to exercise an office and to do so because someone authorized it.’” (86). The author is concerned here to progress to his main point of who are authorized biblical interpreters. But he first wants to show how authority has been a theme early in the drama of Scripture. Adam and Eve were vice-regents, “ruled rulers,” under God’s command to “Fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). And so Vanhoozer says, “’The most basic office we hold is that of divine image,’” noting that this “authority over the earth has nothing to do with imposing one’s will to power on creatures or creation. On the contrary, God authorized the first couple ‘to accomplish a particular task, to act in a particular capacity, to seek a particular end’” (87).
Adam and Eve failed to make that end, disordering authority when “they decided to do something for which they were not authorized.
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