Why do we need authority? Because authority contributes irreplaceably to the larger task of cultural development, says David T. Koyzis in his review of Victor Lee Austin’s Up with Authority:
Austin believes there is a paradoxical quality to any discussion of ecclesial authority, because the church is not just another “mini-society” or voluntary association among other such associations. Yet neither is it an “umbrella” society presiding over everything else. It defies any attempt to categorize it: “The church is not a political society and will never be one, but its mission is to point to one peculiar and ultimate political society: a kingdom of citizens who freely obey and follow their King, who live in a city of which their Lord is the light.”
Throughout the book, Austin emphasizes that authority is always personal authority. It resides in persons and not in things. Despite a seemingly vigorous corporate ecclesiology, he nevertheless affirms that “authority resides in the individual believer.” The church cannot exist without its individual members and their confession of faith in Jesus Christ. The church quite properly has its offices, creeds, traditions, and, above all, the Scriptures. Yet authority in the full sense is to be found in none of these by itself: “Authority resides in the individual believer who, inspired by the Holy Spirit, proclaims faithfully her allegiance to the suffering Jesus, and thus to her Lord, and thus to the Triune Reality that is the source of all authority in heaven and earth.” Yet the individual’s confession of faith is dependent on the larger community which authorizes her to make this confession.
September 12th, 2011 | 10:50 am
Authority as described here, it seems to me, is Chaos by another name.
The authority of each individual believer leads inevitably to the thousands of denominations, each claiming authority in some way. An affront to our Founder, who prayed to the Father “ut unum sint” (that they may be one.) For further study, please see John Paul II’s encyclical letter by that same name.
September 12th, 2011 | 11:48 am
Joe, I think that’s the larger point they are trying to make with the last sentence. Most of the review discussion doesn’t seem to focus on the concept of individual authority at all as opposed to social and political. It’s personal in that it’s applied to persons rather than ideas or things. But its very much about recognizing other forms of authority in the lines of your idea.
The book sounds interesting, but I don’t really buy that creativity flourishes under authority. I’d need to read his arguments, because I don’t recall anything like that happening in practice. Authority tends to lead to copying authority over your own individual voice.
September 12th, 2011 | 11:56 am
Dave “Dblade” Dutcher I’d need to read his arguments, because I don’t recall anything like that happening in practice. Authority tends to lead to copying authority over your own individual voice.
I think one good example is the U.S. military, a group that tends to foster more creativity than your average art school.
September 12th, 2011 | 12:13 pm
Joe Carter:
I’d like to hear your reasons why you think that.
September 12th, 2011 | 12:18 pm
“I think one good example is the U.S. military, a group that tends to foster more creativity than your average art school.”
Whatever one may think of art schools, well, words fail me.
September 12th, 2011 | 12:30 pm
Joe Carter: That’s because the authority of the US military typically values results rather than ideology, something that can’t be said for art school, or most other contemporary academic settings (of course, the military has its own bureaucratic forces as does any large institution, and during peacetime there are usually stronger barriers against innovation). The military as a war fighting institution is quite unusual in have quantifiable and specific goals that must be achieved, where most authority, whether government/corporate/academic/whatever, is more concerned with self-perpetuation–for instance, the government seems to view itself as a success if and only if its budget keeps increasing.
September 12th, 2011 | 3:13 pm
“I think one good example is the U.S. military, a group that tends to foster more creativity than your average art school.”
Whatever one may think of art schools, well, words fail me.
IMO it is comparing apples and oranges, since the military allows no creativity in terms of determining what the problem is, but allows greater creativity in terms of approaching how to solve the problem.
Whereas art schools allow very little creativity in either case, at the start – because they must teach technique, and that means everyone must submit to the technique being taught. This often means an entire classroom full of kids copying the same Grand Master painting – because this is the quickest, most efficient way to teach a particular technique.
In the end, the military man will become hopefully become a highly efficient problem-solver – a machine to be operated by someone else, but able to use creativity to be a better machine. This isn’t bad – this isn’t a criticism – it’s just a different type of role.
The art student will be free to use whatever tools he or she likes after school – and must also choose not only how to use them, but what to use them for. That’s a huge amount of freedom. Paradoxically, that is why freedom must be taken away from the art student – because a first year student will use that “freedom” to perfect what he already knows how to do (which usually involves copying whatever current artists are doing)…this is why a loss of freedom must be involved as the student must be exposed to a variety of styles and techniques, and it’s not very pleasant: a kid who has learned to earn admiration for how well he copies anime “manga” style cartooning is not going to enjoy copying an Impressionist painting.
All that said, I do agree that right now art schools – like every other type of school, it seems – do seem to be overly ideological, stamping out cookie-cutter students, at least as measured by the number of schools where the student portfolios all seem to look pretty much the same. (By the final year, individual styles ought to be emerging).
September 12th, 2011 | 4:31 pm
Thanks, Joe Carter, for bringing to our attention David Koyzis’ thought provoking review of Victor Lee Austin’s Up With Authority.
From the review:
As for Christendom being a misguided by-product of Constantinianism, the Church already was essentially what it was meant to be before Constantine and it continued to be just that after Constantine. The writings of St. Cyprian in particular make very clear that what is now claimed to be Constantinian influence on the Church was there before Constantine. It was never right for the Church, to the extent that it ever did so, to claim for itself the temporal authority that God had bestowed upon the state. For a description of the genuine, God-given authority of the state see Leo XIII’s encyclical On the Origins of Civil Power.
Genuine Christendom, it seems to me, would consist of those states where the Church restricted itself to properly exercising its spiritual authority and the state restricted itself to properly exercising its temporal authority. As it is clearly wrong for the state to force religious beliefs on people, a state that mandated Christianity be practiced by its citizens could never be a member of those states that constituted true Christendom.
Our nation was wisely founded upon not Christianity, but on natural law – the laws of nature and nature’s God that are written upon the human heart. That law being already written on the human heart is why people acknowledged that murder and theft were wrong long before Christianity affirmed natural law, explaining in much more depth just how wrong those things were and why they were wrong, but teaching nothing really new in proclaiming that they were wrong.
The statement that
reveals a misunderstanding of both the First Amendment and the Christian message. The First Amendment means just what it says on the matter: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” Christian political authorities may believe wholeheartedly in the “rule of Christ” in spiritual matters. To do so is not to establish a state religion or to deny that we are a nation with a government that was originally founded upon natural law. Again, the Christian message is that the state has its own legitimate authority bestowed upon it by God, and so does the Church, but its authority is not in the temporal realm.
The problem today is that the atheistic, secular state has usurped God’s authority over innocent human life and, in the case of the U.S., rejected natural law as its original theory of jurisprudence. The rhetoric used to defend this usurpation often cites “the separation of church and state,” which does not appear in the Constitution at all, as though it did. It also reveals a complete rejection of the intentions of the founders and the facts of history. The state simply has no authority to sanction the killing of innocent human beings. Murder violates the law written on our hearts. That murder is wrong is not a uniquely Christian belief. That such murder is legitimate can only be suggested by an atheistic state that has rejected natural law and made atheism the de facto state religion. This is why we have witnessed the “legalization” of the killing of the child in the womb, but curiously, have not yet seen clearly that this is a fundamental rejection of the principles our nation was founded upon.
As for authority in the Church, it is clear from the Scriptures that God puts someone in charge and stands behind them. It is also clear that everyone having authority is exactly the same as no one having authority. No one having authority plainly contradicts what the Scripture teaches about spiritual authority. It seems to me that Protestantism rejected the papacy as an evil institution contrary to the intentions of Christ – and then made everyone a pope.
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