The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The Rt. Rev. John Bauerschmidt: “How do we know what we know?: Sources of Authority in the Church,” Province IV Bishops’ Meeting

“How do we know what we know?: Sources of Authority in the Church”: that’s our topic this afternoon, the subject of authority through the lens of epistemology, of the way we know something. Notice right away that there is ambiguity in our topic. Implicit in it is some linkage between human knowing and authority, but the precise relationship between them is not defined. Are we implying that only what we know is authoritative for us as a Christian community or as individuals? Or are we saying that authority of some sort (what someone else knows) has a role to play in establishing what we know as members of the Church? Remember Augustine’s dictum that he would not have believed unless the Church had taught him: not, we should note, an argument for ecclesiastical fascism, but his acknowledgment that the Gospel was proclaimed and received by persons in a community over time.

Hilaire Belloc, the early 20th century Roman Catholic writer and satirist, is supposed to have said that it would be marvelous to receive a fresh papal encyclical each day with the morning post, with detailed instructions for the doing of whatever matter was at hand, but of course this isn’t how human beings “know” anything. (He was a satirist, but I’m not sure his work extended to self-satire.) Nor is human life really lived this way, not with any integrity. I would assert that there is a difference between those things about which we must have confidence in our knowledge as Christians, even things that we can confidently assert, and the sort of “dead certainty” that I take Belloc’s remark to exemplify. The difference is hard to quantify but it is real.

The cultural tendency is to invest the individual with epistemological and other forms of authority (each of us defines our own individual truth, each of us is our own primary authority, the American “Don’t tread on me” attitude, etc), sometimes to the point where the individual is the only authority the individual owns and society is effectively dissolved by the assertion of individual autonomy; while others would point to the fact that the acceptance of knowledge on the basis of authority is the only way that individuals are able to transcend their own limitations of knowledge (I’m indebted to Victor Austin’s recent book, Up With Authority, for this formulation). The medieval writer Bernard of Chartes observed that we stand on the shoulders of giants, a way of acknowledging that we are able to see farther than those who came before us but only because they were before us and because they were of such stature. Michael Sandel, the modern Harvard political philosopher has written somewhere that “We can know a good in common that we cannot know alone”, which provides an additional perspective of what I would call “lateral authority” between sources that are not necessarily hierarchical.

Acceptance of authority is a more general principle, according to Austin, a necessary means of human flourishing, but of course it is territory staked out particularly by Christians, who acknowledge in some fashion a historically mediated faith as well as a community dimension to that faith. Both these features of Christianity create space for authority or authorities of some sort. Remember, obedience is a word rooted in the Latin for “listening to each other”, which is what the community of faith does over time. This suggests that authority is not only about a “chain of command” (interesting metaphor, “chain”), “top down”, as it were, but characterized by an interplay of diverse persons and spheres of authority (“lateral authority”) that must come together in a coherent way.

Again, should we assume that the “knowledge” referred to in our topic is “saving knowledge” or “belief”, rather than knowledge of the distance between the earth and the moon? If so, is such saving knowledge possible? I’m not referring to Gnostic mysteries here, but rather to the sort of knowledge that Ephesians 1:17-18 speaks of. “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints…”. Or again, Colossians, “you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator…” (Col. 3:9-10). There might be knowledge that is not “factual” or “scientific” but no less real or true in spite of this.

Though not factual, this knowledge is engaged through the mind. J.H. Newman, in a sermon preached while Vicar of St Mary’s, the University Church, talks about the connection between faith and knowledge. Faith is “the substance and evidence of what is invisible. It is faith, but not faith such as a heathen might have, but Gospel faith; for only in the Gospel has God so revealed Himself, as to allow of that kind of faith which may be called, in a special sense, knowledge… But the Gospel is a manifestation, and therefore addressed to the eyes of our mind” (“Saving Knowledge”). I think Newman talks more about this and about faith in general in The Grammar of Assent.

I note in passing the philosophical question of the objectivity and subjectivity of knowledge in general, already alluded to in the comment about the privileging of individual authority. I don’t know what I can say about this except to point out that there many ways into the kingdom, philosophically speaking. What might turn out to be problematic is a radical questioning of the possibility of knowledge itself. The Gospel of John suggests that there is truth and that it can be known; you know the text: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jo. 8:32). Truth claims, I think, call for a becoming modesty on the part of Christians, but a radical disavowal of the possibility of any human knowing is fraught with its own difficulties.

So what about sources of authority? Richard Hooker is famous for the appeal to Scripture, reason, and tradition. In addressing the order of things to be kept in the Church, the laws of ecclesiastical polity, Hooker writes, “Be it in matter of the one kind or the other” (matters of doctrine or matters of order) “what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; and after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgments whatsoever” (V.8.2). Note that reason as used by Hooker is a ordering principal that brings cohesion, not a critical tool that discerns difference: what Paul Hazzard calls “a mediating power, imposing an order based on accommodations, compromises, give-and-take” rather than “a critical force whose main duty was to inquire, to examine, to question”(The European Mind 1680-1715).

Note as well that Scripture has a primacy of order in Hooker: consulted first, with a priority in determination, rather than one of three equally weighted parts. This is in keeping with well-established parts of our tradition that stretch back beyond the Reformation to the Middle Ages. Scripture “containeth all things necessary to salvation” (Article VI), a formulation that goes back to medieval authors of unimpeachable orthodoxy rather than being a Reformation idea, though it certainly was taken by some Reformers in a new direction. The Church is “a witness and keeper of Holy Writ”, but “ought not to decree anything against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation” (Article XX). So Hooker is reflecting these themes in his ordering of Scripture, reason, and tradition.

Yet reason also has a role in understanding the Scriptures. Again, Hooker: “Unto the word of God, being in respect of that end for which God ordained it perfect, exact, and absolute in itself, we do not add reason as a supplement of any maim or defect therein, but as a necessary instrument, without which we could not reap by the Scripture’s perfection that fruit and benefit which it yieldeth. ‘The word of God is a two-edged sword’ (Heb, 4:12), but in the hands of reasonable men; a reason as the weapon that slew Goliath, if they be as David was that use it” (III.8). Hooker cautions against the misuse of the Scriptures, a different kind of “adding” to the law of God. Hooker points out how claims about the “word of God” or “the law of God” made by his Puritan opponents turn out to be speeches from the historical books of Scripture which are not meant to establish a law. “When that which the word of God doth but deliver historically, we construe without any warrant as if it were legally meant, and so urge it further than we can prove that it was intended; do we not add to the laws of God, and make them more in number than they are? It standeth us upon to be careful in this case” (III.5).

Finally, Hooker again: “The question then being by what means we are taught this (saving truth); some answer that to learn it we have no other way than tradition; as namely that so we believe because both we from our predecessors and they from theirs have so received. But is this enough? That which all men’s experience teacheth them may not in any wise be denied. And by experience we all know that the first outward motive leading men so to esteem of the Scripture is the authority of God’s Church. For when we know the whole Church of God hath that opinion of the Scripture, we judge it even at the first an imprudent thing for any man bred and brought up in the Church to be of a contrary mind without cause. Afterwards the more we bestow our labor in reading or hearing the mysteries thereof, the more we find that the thing itself doth answer our received opinion concerning it. So that the former inducement prevailing somewhat with us before, doth now much more prevail, when the very thing hath ministered farther reason. If infidels or atheists chance at any time to call it in question, this giveth us occasion to sift what reason there is, whereby the testimony of the Church concerning Scripture, and our own possession which Scripture itself confirmed, may be proved a truth infallible” (III.8). Here we see the subtle interplay of Scripture, reason, and tradition.

Finally, a further iteration of how authority functions, bringing us even further from epistemology along the road into polity. Here we take a global stage with the 1948 Lambeth Conference which addressed one of its reports to the subject of the Anglican Communion itself. The Report cited the 1930 Conference, which had contrasted two types of ecclesiastical organization, “that of centralized government and that of regional autonomy”. The 1948 Conference Report repudiated centralized government, congratulating previous Conferences on their decisions not to establish either a formal primacy for Canterbury, or an Appellate Tribunal, or to give the Conference itself legislative powers.

But then the report continues, “the positive nature of the authority which binds the Anglican Communion together is therefore seen to be moral and spiritual, resting on the truth of the Gospel, and on a charity which is patient and willing to defer to the common mind”. “The common mind”: agreement of authorities together.

Authority, as it has come down to the Anglican Communion from the undivided Church of the first centuries, is single in that it comes from one Divine source, but is “distributed among Scripture, Tradition, Creeds, the Ministry of the Word and Sacraments, the witness of saints, and the consensus fidelium, which is the continuing experience of the Holy Spirit through His faithful people in the Church”. Lambeth incautiously speaks of different kinds of authority together in the same breath, but the principle of diversity is the same. Multiple elements need to agree together for authorities to cohere and speak as one in order for truth to command assent.

“It is thus a dispersed rather than a centralized authority having many elements which combine, interact with, and check each other; these elements together contributing by a process of mutual support, mutual checking, and redressing of errors and exaggerations to the many sided fullness of the authority which Christ has committed to His Church. When this authority of Christ is to be found mediated not in one mode but in several we recognize in this multiplicity God’s loving provision against the temptations to tyranny and the dangers of unchecked power”.

When Lambeth 1948 sought the place where this dispersed authority distributed in diverse places finds its focus, it pointed to the episcopate, “by virtue of… divine commission, and in synodical association with… clergy and laity”, and to the Book of Common Prayer. It’s instructive to us, as bishops, to note the role that this order of ministry is identified as possessing in the bringing together of dispersed authority and focusing it today. This doesn’t mean that bishops (even associated in synod with clergy and laity) are the authorities, but rather that diverse authorities come together in the oversight by bishops of the Church. We should also note the role that worship has in bringing together the same multiple authorities.

So again, we come back to agreement together: something different from centralized authority or universal jurisdiction, yet still substantial, and morally and spiritually authoritative.

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