“Biblical authority” and peace: Is there a problem? [Peace and the Bible #5]

Ted Grimsrud—November 27, 2023

When I became a Christian in 1971, one of the first beliefs that was emphasized to me was an affirmation of the strong authority of the Bible. From that point, for many years, I assumed that if I wanted to make a case for some theological or ethical position, I needed to ground it in the Bible.

A belief that the Bible mattered

I somehow had the idea that if I could make the case biblically, I would be able to persuade people of the truth of my position. And so, I went to work. Well, it took a few years after my initial conversion, but from, say, 1976 on, one of my main points of focus has been to argue based on the Bible for, among other convictions, pacifism, the inclusion of women as leaders in the churches, the peaceableness of the Old Testament and of the book of Revelation, full welcome toward gay people, economic and racial equality, rejection of the death penalty, resistance to Empire, and so on.

Now, I have produced a pretty lengthy collection of writings as a result. I have authored, co-authored, and edited 17 books. I have filled up two websites with writings on these themes. I taught dozens of college classes that drew on this work. Written out over 400 sermons. Conversations beyond counting. I don’t regret this work, except that it hasn’t made more of an impact. And that gets to my point. I have done my best. I think I’ve done a decent job. I have persuaded a few people along the way. And I love the Bible more than ever—and am more convinced than ever about the message of the Bible. I still think my interpretations are largely correct.

However, my initial premise has been proved to be untrue. Making a persuasive case for something based on the Bible is not going to change much. Most Christian convictions are not actually based all that much on the Bible. In practice, most Christians don’t actually decide what their core convictions are going to be based on careful study of the Bible. Biblical authority is not, operationally, the basis for convictions in practice. For whatever reasons and in whatever ways, Christians do not actually base their convictions on the Bible in a way that would lead them to change those convictions in face of biblical evidence.

I don’t think I wasted my time by studying and teaching and writing about the Bible. But to the extent that I did so in order to persuade other people to change their thinking and agree with the perspective I presented, I did more or less waste my time. So, I have had to rethink “biblical authority.” It doesn’t work the way I was taught that it should—where to grant the authority of the Bible means that we will actually base our convictions on what the Bible says.

How “biblical authority” actually does not work

I have developed strong arguments from the Bible in favor of women in church leadership, in favor of pacifism, in favor of welcome to gays—and have had them dismissed out of hand by Bible believers who simply would not engage my arguments. I recognize that it is altogether possible that my interpretations are not the best, maybe even actually incorrect. Certainly, I have been invested in my positions, so it is altogether possible that when others don’t agree with me, I am liable to mistake their rejection of my arguments for rejection of the Bible’s teaching. I grant that possibility. However, if I am mistaking “disagreeing the Ted” with “disagreeing with the Bible,” my point still stands, I think.

What I have noticed hasn’t just been that people disagree with what I say about the Bible. More so, I have noticed the lack of engagement with the arguments and with the biblical evidence on the part of Christians who say they affirm biblical authority—in some cases as their most important theological affirmation. So, I would not say, any more, that the Bible gives us proof about the truthfulness of, say, pacifism. I still think the Bible points in that direction, and I still orient a lot of my thinking about pacifism around the Bible. However, now I also notice that the arguments against pacifism usually are not actually biblical (they are more about what is “practical” or “realistic” or “necessary”). And, to the extend such arguments occasionally do claim to be biblical, they are in reality based on tendentious readings of the Bible (such as putting way too much weight on the cryptic teaching of Romans 13 or making Old Testament violence normative for Christians or arguing that Jesus’s driving out the money-changers means he supports justifiable wars).

I think back now to a moment in graduate school. I was defending my comprehensive exams, and one of the profs (a person I always respected tremendously) told me that he agreed with me that the Bible’s message is pacifist and that the early Christians were pacifist. But that doesn’t really matter; once the Christians became political leaders in the Roman Empire at the time of Constantine, they had to base their political ethics on expedience and not the Bible. Now, this person did not necessarily claim to give the Bible the highest authority (at least not in an evangelical way), but since then I have realized that most Bible-believers make the same kinds of moves. Because they do not base their rejection of pacifism on the Bible, they will not be persuaded by arguments about what the Bible actually teaches—even though they claim to be Bible-centered.

What “biblical authority” actually is about

It turns out, I perceive, that the confession of the centrality of “biblical authority” is usually not a commitment to seek the best interpretations of the Bible’s teachings and make those central. It’s a commitment to what we could call a “house of authority.” By that I mean an intellectual structure and process in Christian communities that protects the “truthfulness” of revelation from God. In practice, this “house” is a framework for human authority that is oriented toward power in support of the status quo. The Bible as a witness to a countercultural sensibility has no presence within this “house.”

The house of authority seems to follow from a longing for certainty and control over religious beliefs and practices. The starting point for the house of authority is belief in an authoritarian God who requires a written text to convey God’s will for humanity. Because human beings are fragile and tend to corrupt whatever revelation might come from God, it is necessary to have a perfect text, an inspired and inerrant Bible. Even then, though, the Bible can be misinterpreted. So, along with the authoritative scripture, formal doctrines (official interpretations of the Bible and other theological truths) and church structures are required to assure that the true message from God is properly understood and enforced. This, then, is the “house of authority”: a structure of human authority that provides controls for how the Bible is approached.

As a consequence of the need for a house of authority centered on the Bible, Christians (especially Protestants) have tended to make doctrine about the Bible more important than the content of the Bible. In practice, beliefs such as sola scriptura have tended to underwrite emphases on the authority of the Bible (and the other elements of the house of authority) rather than provide impetus for discerning and embodying the message of the Bible. A major consequence of this approach to the Bible has been ignorance or avoidance of the Bible’s peace witness—including the Bible’s critical perspective on hierarchical human authority structures.

So, what do we do?

As I wrote above, I believe more than ever that the Bible’s content is strongly oriented toward peace and provides profound guidance for our hopes to be peacemakers. What this means, though, is that the very peaceable content of the Bible prevents those who affirm it from entering into power struggles with people who approach the Bible in authoritarian ways. The message of peace may only be authentically spread when it is conveyed in ways that are themselves peaceable. That is, intellectually coercive arguments in favor of pacifism that, in effect, force those who don’t accept them to defer to them contradict their very message.

The most consistent approach for peaceable perspectives on the Bible is simply to seek for clarity and elegance. A peacemaker’s main hope is to share those perspectives in ways that will be winsome and persuasive—and then let the consequences work themselves out. With this approach, then, to insist on the Bible’s “authority” as if it must simply be deferred to is not a helpful approach. Rather, perhaps the focus should be on demonstrating the Bible’s meaningfulness as an invitation, period.

I do love the Bible. I still do focus most of my work on the Bible. But with a different intention than when I started. The life-giving power of the Bible is utterly noncoercive. It is a betrayal of the Bible’s main teachings to use it as part of a house of authority. As literary critic Gabriel Josipovici wrote in his excellent book on the Bible, The Book of God, the Bible is most impressive in its winsomeness, its lack of an authoritarian tone.

That is, the Bible’s most important message is about love. To be love, something has to be noncoercive, non-authoritarian, vulnerable, “weak.” Love does not force others to change their views—even when those views seem hurtful and destructive (as are pro-violence readings of the Bible). There is a vulnerability to love that demands patience, letting others make their own choices, and seeking to let all areas of life be conformed to the ways of peace.

Blog posts in the “Peace and the Bible” series