Abstract
The age of authority is not over-not in theology, anyway, and probably not in any other area of life. Claims to the contrary, nevertheless, bear a measure of truth. In important respects we have become secularized. In some ways the dominance of the past over the present has been diminished. The acceptance of authoritative persons and institutions today is not as automatic as it might once have been. Freedom has become a major, perhaps the major, intellectual preoccupation of our time. Hence, the varied claims that we in the West now stand in a somewhat unique independence of traditional authorities may well be true. But even if true, these claims are also misleading, especially, as I shall argue here, in the case of theology. There is a sense in which even a secular theology -a theology responsible solely to canons of meaning and truth defensible in the community of modern knowledge2-both does and can stand under the authority of some past. And that authority may well be the Bible. If, for example, we take Christian theology, as we shall in this essay, the problem of authority, I believe, is not that the Bible has ceased to be, or has ceased to be able to be, authoritative for theology. The problem is that the nature of theological authority
Published Version
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