Authority Chapter 1, What is it?

02/03/2024The Angry Preacher

---

This one concept is so important and so confused in our lives, it is the root of spiritual warfare. It bothers me when people try to address spiritual warfare with this armor of God thing in Ephesians 6, and then proceed to just repeat the same begging of the question that tells us nothing. This one concept of Authority is the root of so many lies that I sometimes think it is the central, foundational, most critical component of all the spiritual warfare focused on the moralists among us. Those people who have more faith in their works following the law and the blessings they receive than they do in God. What is this concept of authority all about?

The books of the bible are all about authority. Paul, in particular, opens nearly every work he pens with Paul someone picked by Jesus to go to you with His Word as ordained by God. It’s not just an opening to a letter, it’s establishing his authority to be believed, that he is speaking the truth. In Corinthians, he includes that he is also picked and sent with this message by Sosthenes; who was the leader of the church at Corinth and highly respected, who had been beaten for his belief in Paul. In Galatians, he continues in subsequent verses saying that other apostles who actually lived and walked with Jesus agree with the message he’s about to impart.

Kinda like someone asking for a source or citation today.

When you get a school assignment that requires three citations in such and such format, you are being trained to think this way. To accept the ways of authority. 

In the days of the Old Testament, someone who is declared wise or a scribe or leader or other words, was attached to a bloodline going back to Moses. That meant we should listen to this person because what he had to say was the closest thing we could get to the best among us when it comes to these subjects. In that part of the world, there has always been this idea that this kind of wisdom could come from being related or descended. It was this thinking that got the so-called ‘brother’ of the Lord, James, put in charge of the Jerusalem church after the death of Jesus, and also this kind of thinking was what caused the split between the Sunni and Shiite in Islam. After their Prophet’s death the group that became the Sunni wanted a close friend of the prophet, Abu Bakr, to lead; and another group that became Shiite wanted the Prophet’s cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib, to lead. Both Christianity and Islam argue about this to this day, though one a little more violently than the other.

We still see fighting among Christian denominations and the Catholics arguing the point, though the seeds of it may have been largely lost to time in favor of just an argument on the principles. 

It’s kinda like when we argue over the original Star Trek or the New Generation. Or basically just any remake or reboot. 

lol. I know that’s incredibly reductive.

In the time of the Pharisees and continuing through about the 5th century a Rabbi would be ordained by 2 or 3 established Rabbi and you can actually see them writing about it just like Paul did, in their opening argument, establishing who ordained or trained them. This establishes their authority on the subject they are speaking. Tracing their bloodline became tracing their training line, so to speak.

The Pharisees constantly challenged Jesus’ authority in this way, asking him where he got his approval to be a Rabbi. I’ve heard some explain that He got it when He was baptized by John the Baptist and then by God Himself when He said, ‘This is My Son and I’m well pleased by Him.’ [Matthew 3:17, 17:5] Which should have been a pretty damn good authority, and probably started the cycle of hubris that caused the Pharisees to destroy themselves.

We do see this kind of authority today as well, when people name drop or put in the CV notes about who they trained under or letters of commendation they might have gotten from famous people, or medals in the military that were given by respected commanders.

So, you can see that this concept of authority runs throughout the bible. In fact, I’m inclined to believe that this seeking to establish the authority of information in communication is something that is built into us as human beings. We tend to ask for it any time we hear something we don’t readily agree with; we tend to use it as one of the first counterarguments when we disagree with someone presenting some fact, and; we tend to bring it up any time we are trying to convince others – liars sometimes will throw it out there without even being asked.

I’m inclined to believe that the psychology of mankind has authority built into it, much like you don’t have a choice to faith or not, only the object of that faith. You don’t have a choice to decide on the authority of all your knowledge, you only have a choice what that authority is going to be.

Authority is why you believe the truth that you hear, the truth that you read, the truth that you see, the truth that you are taught, and the truth that you do.

Every time someone explains something is true because it’s what they experienced, that’s an expression of authority. Experience is a kind of authority, called witness testimony. Many skeptics will go on and on that it is the weakest kind of evidence, yet there are countless people spending years in prison right now that were convicted on witness testimony. it’s good enough for a court of law, but not good enough for skeptics.

So you can see that authority is closely related to trust. Who are you going to trust? You use authority to decide even if you aren’t conscious of it being called that. 

In science, we use the scientific method, which makes the evidence the authority. I’m not sure what is taught today but when I was in school it was said that a theory cannot be proven true, but can be proven false. If all evidence confirms the theory it will be accepted as true, but it is always open to new evidence, and it only takes one contradicting evidence to prove it false. After years or decades or more of no contradicting evidence, it’s still not proven true but it is more accepted and people stop looking for contradicting evidence. Peer review is a process where either the methodology is reviewed or the evidence is reproduced, depending on the context, and it is more accepted, but still not proven true.

There’s a difference between evidence and proof. 

In a court of law again there is no proof. The evidence is presented and argued in front of a jury of impartial people, people who have no skin in the game, who are questioned regarding bias, and the judge will observe the entire proceeding to make sure both sides are argued correctly and fairly. The jury then decides if the evidence will meet the criteria, either the preponderance of the evidence in a civil case or beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal case which is a higher standard. But notice it says reasonable, reason not emotion. The judge who is convinced that the proceeds were argued fairly to that standard and that the jury came to an honest conclusion will sign his name on the verdict. The judge is the authority in this case and the truth of the verdict is imputed by the authority of the judge. But it’s still not proof. This is important. Beyond a reasonable doubt is not the same thing as proof of truth. Every single person ever convicted in America was not proven to be guilty, they were judged to be guilty.  

It’s the only way to be intellectually and morally honest with truth because truth requires authority.

Now, many out there say their emotions are authority. They believe things because of how they feel about them. These are the people who say ‘my truth’ and try to convince people that they have their truth and you have yours and both are valid. This is a gross misrepresentation of what truth means. Truth cannot be separated from objectivity. Subjective truth is merely perception or opinion. It’s not the same thing as intuition or gestalt. When someone says ‘my truth’ they are elevating their opinion to the same level as Moses, who spoke with God and was given the truth of God written in stone by God’s own finger. Emotion, like eyewitness testimony, has a place but it is a dubious authority.

Now to this point, you might think that authority is synonymous with truth or even evidence or proof. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be going to this length to describe all these different types of authority. My contention is that authority may be related but there is a subtle distinction. While we may consider the fact that this or that piece of information is true because it is presented by someone who is the third generation direct bloodline of Moses, it’s not to say that this authority of the bloodline is necessarily evidence that this fact is true. It’s not, it’s hearsay in the strictest terms. The difference has some to do with our internal psychology and some to do with the nature of objectivity.  

The best description of what objectivity is that I ever heard was when a priest told me the objective is true even if there are no people to perceive it. The subjective can only exist when it is perceived. 

Clearly, then all the evidence in the world can only define what is perceived. Authority is greater than evidence in that it is given to us by the objective.

God himself wrote on a stone and spoke to Moses, An objective truth that would still exist as true even if Moses wasn’t there. As an attempt to preserve this rarity, we tried to maintain the truth of it by following his bloodline, as that was lost to time we tried to preserve it by only accepting someone as having the truth if they were approved or ordained by two or three others who had prior been ordained by two or three others, etc.

Eventually, we got to the point where it had degraded to the Pharisees. Today we have dozens of denominations. It happens.

I like to read a lot of Jewish commentary and literature as it provides insight, to me at least. Along this route to subjectivity you can plainly see the degradation is basically rationalization and self-justification done by very learned people. A kind of bias. All humans have bias, can’t have someone without it. We can learn to be aware of it, and take steps to minimize it, things like double-blind studies with controls or mathematical statistics. But sooner or later any objective truth revealed by God will necessarily be degraded by subjectivity. This is not an indictment, the very act of perception creates subjectivity.

 The objective is true even if there are no people to perceive it. The subjective can only exist when it is perceived.

The second half of that is the important part.

And that’s where authority is important to Christianity and where it differs from mere evidence.

I’m not saying every Christian thinks this way, just ask them. It’s fairly rare in my experience to find one who can articulate anything like this to explain why they are a Christian. 

What makes Christianity unique and special is that Jesus is the authority for Jesus.

Every other thing that claims to be a ‘truth’ is less than this. In science, honest scientists will admit that most of what we ‘know’ to be science is based on theory. This is a good thing. The idea that theories can’t be proven true is honest. We have achieved great things by building on theories. In the legal system, as many others have pointed out a great deal of what we use today is based on that early Judeo-Christian thought. You can trace our legal system to English Common law which can be traced to the Laws of Moses. A president that stands up and mocks the bible saying they couldn’t put the bible’s laws into Department of Defense policy is engaging in a very subtle form of deception. Much of it already is. 

In the legal or justice sense, one learned person is imbued with the power to be a judge and represent the law, which is still based on what was handed down from God, just like a judge in biblical times. It may have changed in some ways down the years due to time and due to different cultural biases, but the principles are the same.

Jesus was from the line of David, so there is a bloodline authority. He was ordained by John the Baptist and the voice of God Himself so he met the criteria of ordination. He was challenged constantly to show a ‘sign’ which is a form of authority by evidence, and He kept telling them ‘only one’. He put everything into whether or not He came back from death, the resurrection. A singular event that could never be duplicated. If you think it’s complicated or contradicted by Lazarus’ return from death, that actually is an argument for Jesus’ authority. The same objective truth raised them both. (Romans 8:11-13)

Matthew and Luke begin with the bloodline or genealogy. The baptism and ordination of Jesus are recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They knew about authority. Jesus consistently put His authority on God. 

Before the resurrection.

Everything is built on this one fact. Without it, there would have been no Christian church, and based on the pervasiveness of Christianity concepts and principles throughout history and unto today we would be in a vastly different world today without it, for the believer and nonbeliever alike.

The entire book of Hebrews talks about this. The author lays down an argument about Authority trying to explain that the old priesthood had been changed to the new. There’s a new authority.

And you can see this authority sprinkled throughout the scriptures, it’s filled with things here and there that confirm that Authority.

Reality, even today is filled with things that affirm that Authority. We have to go to convoluted sophistry or blind nonbelief to be an atheist or agnostic. 

In psychology, we talk about subjective worldview. There’s a belief that most people’s problems, in talk therapy anyway, are at its root an ‘impoverished’ subjective worldview. Since we all live in a subjective world, that’s only incidentally related to the true objective world we actually live in, a subjective world that is created by our perception and experiences and traumas and ego and just everything… life, we don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why we need to talk to someone. to help us identify where we’re missing something. Our worldview is impoverished. We don’t know we may have any alternative or option that might be more sane or healthy in response to some situation of life. A good therapist, or friend for that matter, will patiently talk with us till they can identify what that missing piece is and then even more patiently hold our hand as we try the unknown. It’s always a matter of fighting through that barrier of our own ego that tells us we already know everything we need to know and we can point to our entire life as proof we aren’t wrong. We’re deeply invested in our way of life and nobody likes a threat to our investments.

When I started looking at this concept in the other Christians I was counseling I noticed this interesting phenomenon. They would come to me with a problem with a fellow church member who wouldn’t let them be in charge of this event or that. I would assume at first this was the old ego raising its head, the chief enemy of pride. But as we started talking about their subjective impoverished view of the world, it took a sharp change in direction from what I would normally associate with ego or pride. No matter how much they’d insist that it was that other person, that their motivations were pure and that’s why they’ve been suffering in silence and praying earnestly on it, there was something incongruent about it. 

I accidentally stumbled onto the key the first time and started using it ever since. I was trying to draw a contrast between their ego and God’s will, and I asked, “If Jesus appeared right there next to you and said this is not what I want for you, this is that other person’s path. What would you do?” You might think their ego would come up and they’d start making rationalizations and try to justify why that would never happen. Things that I’d always associated with being a slave to one’s ego just like was very common with every other non-Christian or recovering alcoholic or anybody else. But this small group of them had a completely surprising reaction. They’d say ‘Oh’ and that was it. You’re absolutely right, thank you. and walk out and it never bothered them again. 

It wasn’t ego, they had gotten confused on this one small issue with authority. Their desire to help and maybe graduate to more of a leadership role didn’t really change, they still wanted to do it. They just forgot to let Jesus lead. There was no miracle, they didn’t magically get to lead the following week or any of the miraculous stories we like to tell people about. It was more subtle than that. If I wasn’t who I was I might never have noticed it. They never went through any of the signs or changes I’d associate with fighting their pride and ego, the issue I usually find in counseling.  

It was someone finding the peace and sanctuary of letting God be in charge.

Grace and Peace. The message of the gospel. 

Personally, I think this is a much greater glory to the authority of Jesus.

Then I started noticing it more often. There’s a subtle difference between this and more regular problems of pride. Just like there are subtle differences between authority and what I’ve been talking about with evidence or proof. 

I want to talk some more about this idea of authority, there’s a lot more to it. I could have taken the more common route and given you a list of different kinds of authority, something like

1. Divine authority and talked about the Ten Commandments and any of the many times God’s authority over creation as an example, then;
2. Leadership authority and the authority of church leaders and what Paul said about it, followed by;
3. Moral authority, etc.

but honestly, that is what I’m talking about, and then it’s not really. It’s boilerplate from teachers to fill an hour’s worth of a sermon.

Exactly the kind of things we have to look forward to in a world where our Shepherds get their sermons written by ChatGPT.

What I’m talking about actually is all of these things, but it’s more. It’s more the root of this concept and more general. All those things are true, but I don’t think they actually speak to a personal relationship.

I’m going to talk more about this topic, but for now, I think we can see all the different topics that were brought into this concept. I mentioned evidence and truth, subjectivity and faith, deception and time, and especially how authority is like faith. We don’t really get a choice to live without it. Like faithing we only get a choice of what the object of our authority is going to be. 

But I started this thing by saying that this is one of the most subtle and foundational spiritual attacks we face daily. My experience with the churchgoer who confused authority was an example. And how sudden and dramatic the internal change was when it was fixed. Its effects are so subtle, and its strength is so overlooked in our day-to-day lives that we can be blind to it for years, even forever. And as Paul explains in Romans there are two laws, or authorities fighting constantly in us. Simply knowing what to do doesn’t guarantee we’re going to do it. We are going to be under the wrong authority even if we don’t even know it exists.