Crisis over authority! No single subject gets more talk these days than this. The crisis extends beyond the many forms of anarchism that threaten established governments and reaches those who are concerned about the Church. Many people today who are willing to accept the authority of God are deeply dubious about the authority of human officials. For these people, the office-bearers of the Church have lost their power to speak for God.
The question is very real: are the various forms of churchly authority still credible, in their speaking or their silence, their actions or their inaction? That a crisis in authority can arise is closely related to the fact that the New Testament lets us know how God’s authority is exercised. It is exercised in and through an authority invested in men. Stranger and more striking still is the fact that there appears to be an identity between God’s authority and that exercised by men. “He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me …” (Luke 10:16). Again, “He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man but God” (1 Thess. 4:8). Even in the Old Testament we meet the apparent equation of God’s with man’s word: “they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me,” says the Lord to Samuel (1 Sam. 8:7).
Human authority! The vox humana rings into human ears, but it comes with the overtones of God. The most striking instance in this union of human and divine voices comes to view in connection with the forgiveness of sins. When Jesus forgave sins he was branded a blasphemer; for who can forgive sins but God (Mark 2:7; Matt. 9:3; Luke 5:21)? Can we really speak of a man’s voice functioning for God when it comes to forgiving sins?
In reaction to the Roman Catholic view of authority in connection with the power of absolution, Protestantism has denied the legitimacy of the vox humana in the sphere of forgiveness. Can a man ever be secure in his pardon if it comes from a mere man? Is not the forgiving of sins a transcendent event, a divine privilege?
We must keep in mind that the Gospel never lets us have reason to fear a competition of man’s voice with God’s own. When it comes to authority, we may well remember Jesus’ words: “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” (John 20:23). These words were spoken right after the Holy Spirit was given to the disciples. And in Matthew 16:19 we discover again the close marriage between what happens on earth and what happens in heaven.
The keys of the kingdom are put in wrinkled human hands. All the temptations and dangers that surround this fact may not permit us to minimize its reality. The entire New Testament is replete with instances of apostolic use of authority. Apostles are not much in themselves, to be sure (1 Cor. 3:7); but they are collaborators with God (3:9), and stewards of the mysteries of God (1 Cor. 4:1). The ministry of reconciliation was entrusted to them, as ambassadors of Christ, “as though God did beseech you by us” (2 Cor. 5:21). This “as though” is not a sort of fiction. It is a pointer to a reality, the reality of the vox Dei in and through the vox humana.
Taking all this into account, we surely have no grounds for denying the reality of human authority. Certainly the failures and weaknesses of our fellow men give us no grounds. There is a profound mystery in the way that salvation comes within our horizon through human functionality. Time and again, people have been discontent with this mystery, and have wanted to hear another kind of voice, something with more certainty, and productive of more stable guaranties. The human voice is so commonplace, so unlike God’s. We want something more sure, more reassuring. We want the pure Word of God. When we fail to get such a Word, we are tempted to be discouraged, discomforted. At least, some of us go this route.
But the route God takes is another. It is a way on which men can misuse the authority God gives them. They sometimes think they can “channel” the salvation of God into an establishment pipeline, can use the keys to open and shut the doors to the kingdom arbitrarily. God’s way is also a way on which people can fail to hear his Word because it all sounds so very ordinary, so very human. Paul is aware of this danger when he proclaims the Word. He does not take it for granted that the Church will listen to him. No, he thanks God without let-up because “when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of man but, as it is in truth, the word of God” (1 Thess. 2:13).
There is a dimension of depth in that human word of authority. Here we have a perspective of the mystery of faith; the fellowship and discipleship of Christ develops dynamically when this Word works its own dynamic. When the bearers of office come into the limelight of controversy and crisis, it is not a mere matter of theory or theology that is involved. It touches the strange ways of God in his approach to men, and it has to do with human certainty on the way into the future.
We are all tempted to lose sight of this unique dimension of God’s way with us. All of Christian life, all of churchly life, is involved whenever we close our ears to the Word of God that comes to us in the servant-form of the human word. Only the Holy Spirit can keep us from falling into this denial of God’s manner of speaking to us.
It is easy to lapse into a sense of insecurity when we hear the welter of human voices beating their way to our attention. The young boy, Samuel, was in the same boat, but finally he did hear the right voice. According to the story in First Samuel 3, the voice of God came to him without a human medium (it was not Eli’s voice). His answer was, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (3:10). We, in the time of fulfillment, have to listen to human voices, speaking, out of the fullness of Christ’s own authority.
It is the marvel and the gift of God’s ways with us that, as we accept the mystery and let him lead us into the unknown ahead, he overcomes our fears and buttresses us in our weaknesses. We need not be uncertain about God’s Word as it comes in human form; we can simply let it lead and speak to us. There is reason to give God constant thanks that he sends us new men, over and over again, to speak his Word, and leads people, over and over again, to discern in their vox humana the voice of the Good Shepherd. These are his sheep, the ones who hear his voice. And he “goes before them, and the sheep follow him.” Where? On unknown ways into an unknown future. But they are his ways. We are summoned to walk on them by the unique authority that has been entrusted to the mere voice of mere men.
