In a lecture delivered in 1989, N.T. Wright offered a number of provocative thoughts on what it means to say that the Bible is authoritative. While I want to offer some criticisms of some of his points and/or applications, I should say at the outset that some of his points were superb, and were exactly the kind of thing that some of his shriller critics need to hear. N.T. Wright is like the girl in the poem who had a curl in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid. The lecture was entitled “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative,” and the page numbers are from my version obtained off the web.
The superb parts of the lecture had to do with the need to develop an approach to narratival authority, finding the authority resident in story. The awful parts had to do with how he went about applying (or not applying) this principle.
“As we read the Bible we discover that the answer to these questions seems in fact to be ‘no’. Most of the Bible does not consist of rules and regulations–lists of commands to be obeyed. Nor does it consist of creeds–lists of things to be believed” (p. 3).
Right out of the blocks, Wright violates his own principle. I could illustrate this with some of Christ’s parables, but don’t want to get distracted with some of the larger issues involved with the parables, issues that Wright himself deals with so well. So let’s take one of Aesop’s fables, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. To paraphrase Wright’s comment, what is most of the fable about? Well, this is a quantitative question, and when we are dealing with the authority of a story, we find that it is not a quantitative matter. Aesop has a little tag line at the end of the fable that tells us what the point was. But he could have left that off, and the point of the fable would have remained the same, even though the propositional summary of the fable had gone from around eleven percent down to zero. When Wright tells us that most of the Bible does not consist of rules or creeds, this is quite right. It is also completely beside the point. Authority is not determined by the pound, or by the yard.
Another problem concerned what I think was Wright’s mis-identification of one of his characters in the story. In the article, Wright has high praise for Micaiah the prophet, as well he should. But later, when he refers to a rabid fundamentalist, waving a Bible around, I began to wonder. If Micaiah himself visited the Church of England today, what kind of comments would Wright hear being made about him after his departure? Ten dollars says that fundamentalist would be one of the terms used.