Sources of Religious Authority in Liberal Protestantism

Abstract

Against the background of the classical Protestant understanding of the sources of religious authority, the essay first indicates the changes called for in this classical understanding by the typical approach and method of liberal Protestantism and then outlines the understanding of the sources of authority required of an adequate Christian theology today. Sustaining this historico-systematic argument is the conviction that there is an essential continuity between the theological position required today and that typically developed by liberal Protestantism. This liberal position is represented as significantly different from the classical position of the Reformers, as well as from Protestant orthodoxy, for two basic reasons: (1) its thoroughgoing historical approach relativizes the classical Protestant claim for the unique authority of Scripture (sola scriptura); and (2) its characteristic method as a systematic theology entails the insistence, directly counter to classical Protestantism, on two ultimate sources of religious authority not only specifically Christian experience of God as decisively revealed in Jesus Christ but also universally human experience of ultimate reality as originally revealed in our existence as such. The issues thus raised by liberal Protestantism can be settled today only by maintaining: (1) that it is not Scripture as such but the earliest stratum of Christian witness the so-called Jesuskerygma of the Synoptic tradition that is the real canon of the Christian community; and (2) that the only sufficient warrant for the truth, as distinct from the Christianness, of theological claims is our universal experience and reason simply as human beings. SCHUBERT M. OGDEN is Professor of Theology in Perkins School of Theology and Director of the Graduate Program in Religion at Southern Methodist University. The present essay was commissioned for the centennial discussions of Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinatti, Ohio, October 1975. Copyright ? 1976 American Academy of Religion This content downloaded from 207.46.13.166 on Thu, 07 Jul 2016 04:14:04 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 404 SCHUBERT M. OGDEN