Long but worthwhile read extracted below in part

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Bible_Authoritative.htm

The Bible and Biblical Authority

All Authority is God’s Authority        

So, secondly within the first half of this lecture, I want to suggest that scripture’s own view of authority focuses on the authority of God himself.  (I recall a well-known lecturer once insisting that ‘there can be no authority other than scripture’, and thumping the tub so completely that I wanted to ask ‘but what about God?’)  If we think for a moment what we are actually saying when we use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’, we must surely acknowledge that this is a shorthand way of saying that, though authority belongs to God, God has somehow invested this authority in scripture.  And that is a complex claim.  It is not straightforward.  When people use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ they very often do not realize this.  Worse, they often treat the word ‘authority’ as the absolute, the fixed point, and make the word ‘scripture’ the thing which is moving around trying to find a home against it.  In other words, they think they know what authority is and then they say that scripture is that thing.

I want to suggest that we should try it the other way around.  Supposing we said that we know what scripture is (we have it here, after all), and that we should try and discover what authority might be in the light of that.  Granted that this is the book that we actually have, and that we want to find out what its ‘authority’ might mean, we need perhaps to forswear our too-ready ideas about ‘authority’ and let them be remolded in the light of scripture itself—not just in the light of the biblical statements about authority but in the light of the whole Bible, or the whole New Testament, itself.  What are we saying about the concept of ‘authority’ itself if we assert that this book—not the book we are so good at turning this book into—is ‘authoritative’?

Beginning, though, with explicit scriptural evidence about authority itself, we find soon enough—this is obvious but is often ignored—that all authority does indeed belong to God.  ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’.  God says this, God says that, and it is done.  Now if that is not authoritative, I don’t know what is.  God calls Abraham; he speaks authoritatively.  God exercises authority in great dynamic events (in Exodus, the Exile and Return).  In the New Testament, we discover that authority is ultimately invested in Christ: ‘all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth’.  Then, perhaps to our surprise, authority is invested in the apostles: Paul wrote whole letters in order to make this point crystal clear (in a manner of speaking).  This authority, we discover, has to do with the Holy Spirit.  And the whole church is then, and thereby, given authority to work within God’s world as his accredited agent(s).  From an exceedingly quick survey, we are forced to say: authority, according to the Bible itself, is vested in God himself, Father, Son and Spirit.

The Purpose and Character of God’s Authority

But what is God doing with his authority?  We discover, as we look at the Bible itself, that God’s model of authority is not like that of the managing director over the business, not like that of the governing body over the college, not like that of the police or the law courts who have authority over society.  There is a more subtle thing going on.  God is not simply organizing the world in a certain way such as we would recognize from any of those human models.  He is organizing it—if that’s the right word at all—through Jesus and in the power of the Spirit.  And the notion of God’s authority, which we have to understand before we understand what we mean by the authority of scripture, is based on the fact that this God is the loving, wise, creator, redeemer God.  And his authority is his sovereign exercise of those powers; his love and wise creations and redemption.  What is he doing?  He is not simply organizing the world.  He is, as we see and know in Christ and by the Spirit, judging and remaking his world.  What he does authoritatively he dots with this intent.  God is not a celestial information service to whom you can apply for answers on difficult questions.  Nor is he a heavenly ticket agency to whom you can go for moral or doctrinal permits or passports to salvation.  He does not stand outside the human process and merely comment on it or merely issue you with certain tickets that you might need.  Those views would imply either a deist’s God or a legalist’s God, not the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ and the Spirit.  And it must be said that a great many views of biblical authority imply one or other of those sub-Christian alternatives.

But, once we say that God’s authority is like that, we find that there is a challenge issued to the world’s view of authority and to the church’s view of authority.  Authority is not the power to control people, and crush them, and keep them in little boxes.  The church often tries to do that—to tidy people up.  Nor is the Bible as the vehicle of God’s authority meant to be information for the legalist.  We have to apply some central reformation insights to the concept of authority itself.  It seems to me that the Reformation, once more, did not go quite far enough in this respect, and was always in danger of picking up the mediaeval view of authority and simply continuing it with, as was often said, a paper pope instead of a human one.  Rather, God’s authority vested in scripture is designed, as all God’s authority is designed, to liberate human beings, to judge and condemn evil and sin in the world in order to set people free to be fully human.  That’s what God is in the business of doing.  That is what his authority is there for. And when we use a shorthand phrase like ‘authority of scripture’ that is what we ought to be meaning.  It is an authority with this shape and character, this purpose and goal.

How in the Bible does God exercise his authority?

Then, we have to ask, if we are to get to the authority of scripture.  How does God exercise that authority?  Again and again, in the biblical story itself we see that he does so through human agents anointed and equipped by the Holy Spirit.  And this is itself an expression of his love, because he does not will, simply to come into the world in a blinding flash of light and obliterate all opposition.  He wants to reveal himself meaningfully within the space/time universe not just passing it by tangentially; to reveal himself in judgement and in mercy in a way which will save people.  So, we get the prophets.  We get obedient writers in the Old Testament, not only prophets but those who wrote the psalms and so on.  As the climax of the story we get Jesus himself as the great prophet, but how much more than a prophet.  And, we then get Jesus’ people as the anointed ones.  And within that sequence there is a very significant passage, namely 1 Kings 22.  Micaiah, the son of Imlah (one of the great prophets who didn’t leave any writing behind him but who certainly knew what his business was) stands up against the wicked king, Ahab.  The false prophets of Israel at the time were saying to Ahab, ‘Go up against Ramoth-gilead and fight and you will triumph.  Yahweh will give it into your hand’.  This is especially interesting, because the false prophets appear to have everything going for them.  They are quoting Deuteronomy 33—one of them makes horns and puts them on his head and says, ‘with these you will crush the enemy until they are overthrown’.  They had scripture on their side, so it seemed.  They had tradition on their side; after all, Yahweh was the God of Battles and he would fight for Israel.  They had reason on their side; Israel and Judah together can beat these northern enemies quite easily.  But they didn’t have God on their side.  Micaiah had stood in the council of the Lord and in that private, strange, secret meeting he had learned that even the apparent scriptural authority which these prophets had, and the apparent tradition and reason, wasn’t good enough; God wanted to judge Ahab and so save Israel.  And so God delegated his authority to the prophet Micaiah who, inspired by the Spirit, stood humbly in the council of God and then stood boldly in the councils of men.  He put his life and liberty on the line, like Daniel and so many others.  That is how God brought his authority to bear on Israel: not by revealing to them a set of timeless truths, but by delegating his authority to obedient men through whose words he brought judgement and salvation to Israel and the world.

And how much more must we say of Jesus.  Jesus the great prophet; Jesus who rules from the cross in judgement and love; Jesus who says: all authority is given to me, so you go and get on with the job.  I hope the irony of that has not escaped you.  So too in Acts 1, we find: God has all authority . . . so that you will receive power.  Again, the irony.  How can we resolve that irony?  By holding firmly to what the New Testament gives us, which is the strong theology of the authoritative Holy Spirit.  Jesus’ people are to be the anointed ones through whom God still works authoritatively.  And then, in order that the church may be the church—may be the people of God for the world—God, by that same Holy Spirit, equips men in the first generation to write the new covenant documentation.  This is to be the new covenant documentation which gives the foundation charter and the characteristic direction and identity to the people of God, who are to be the people of God for the world.  It is common to say in some scholarly circles that the evangelists, for instance, didn’t know they were writing scripture.  One of the gains of modern scholarship is that we now see that to be a mistake.  Redaction criticism has shown that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were writing what they were writing in order that it might be the foundation documentation for the church of their day and might bear God’s authority in doing so.  And a book which carries God’s authority to be the foundation of the church for the world is what I mean by scripture.  I think they knew what they were doing.[3]

Thus it is that through the spoken and written authority of anointed human beings God brings his authority to bear on his people and his world.  Thus far, we have looked at what the Bible says about how God exercises his judging and saving authority.  And it includes (the point with which in fact we began) the delegation of his authority, in some sense, to certain writings.  But this leads us to more questions.

How does God exercise his authority through the Bible?

When we turn the question round, however, and ask it the other way about, we discover just what a rich concept of authority we are going to need if we are to do justice to this book.  The writings written by these people, thus led by the Spirit, are not for the most part, as we saw, the sort of things we would think of as ‘authoritative’.  They are mostly narrative; and we have already run up against the problem how can a story, a narrative, be authoritative?[4]  Somehow, the authority which God has invested in this book is an authority that is wielded and exercised through the people of God telling and retelling their story as the story of the world, telling the covenant story as the true story of creation.  Somehow, this authority is also wielded through his people singing psalms.  Somehow, it is wielded (it seems) in particular through God’s people telling the story of Jesus.  We must look, then, at the question of stories.  What sort of authority might they possess?

The Authority of a Story

There are various ways in which stories might be thought to possess authority.  Sometimes a story is told so that the actions of its characters may be imitated.  It was because they had that impression that some early Fathers, embarrassed by the possibilities inherent in reading the Old Testament that way, insisted upon allegorical exegesis.  More subtly, a story can be told with a view to creating a generalized ethos which may then be perpetuated this way or that.  The problem with such models, popular in fact though they are within Christian reading of scripture, is that they are far too vague: they constitute a hermeneutical grab-bag or lucky dip.  Rather, I suggest that stories in general, and certainly the biblical story, has a shape and a goal that must be observed and to which appropriate response must be made.

But what might this appropriate response look like?  Let me offer you a possible model, which is not in fact simply an illustration but actually corresponds, as I shall argue, to some important features of the biblical story, which (as I have been suggesting) is that which God has given to his people as the means of his exercising his authority.  Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost.  The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged.  Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own.  Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.[5]

Consider the result.  The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand.  That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution.  This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again.  It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.

This model could and perhaps should be adapted further; it offers in fact quite a range of possibilities.  Among the detailed moves available within this model, which I shall explore and pursue elsewhere, is the possibility of seeing the five acts as follows: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus.  The New Testament would then form the first scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Car 15; parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end.  The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act.  Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material.  Such an appeal—and such an offering!—would of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections.  Such sensitivity (cashing out the model in terms of church life) is precisely what one would have expected to be required; did we ever imagine that the application of biblical authority ought to be something that could be done by a well-programmed computer?

Old Testament, New Testament

The model already enables us to add a footnote, albeit an important one.  The Old Testament, we begin to see more clearly, is not the book of the covenant people of God in Christ in the same sense that the New Testament is.  The New Testament is written to be the charter for the people of the creator God in the time between the first and second comings of Jesus; the Old Testament forms the story of the earlier acts, which are (to be sure) vital for understanding why Act 4, and hence Act 5, are what they are, but not at all appropriate to be picked up and hurled forward into Act 5 without more ado.  The Old Testament has the authority that an earlier act of the play would have, no more, no less.  This is, of course, a demand for a more carefully worked out view of the senses in which the Old Testament is, and/or is not, ‘authoritative’ for the life of the church; I do not think that my model has settled the question once and for all, though I believe it offers a creative way forward in understanding at least the shape of the problem.  At the same time, the suggestion forms a counter-proposal to the suggestion of J D G Dunn in chapter 3 of his book, The Living Word.  There he implies, and sometimes states specifically, that since Jesus and Paul treated the Old Testament with a mixture of respect and cavalier freedom, we should do the same—with the New Testament![6]  But this would only hold if we knew in advance that there had been, between the New Testament and ourselves, a break in (for want of a better word) dispensation comparable to the evident break in dispensation between Acts 3 and 4, between Old Testament and Jesus.  And we know no such thing,

Thus, there is a hard thing which has to be said here, and it is this: that there is a sense in which the Old Testament is not the book of the church in the same way that the New Testament is the book of the church.  Please do not misunderstand me.  The Old Testament is in all sorts of important senses reaffirmed by Paul and Jesus and so on-it is the book of the people of God, God’s book, God’s word etc.  But, the Old Testament proclaims itself to be the beginning of that story which has now reached its climax in Jesus; and, as the letter to the Hebrews says, ‘that which is old and wearing out is ready to vanish away’, referring to the temple.  But it is referring also to all those bits of the Old Testament which were good (they weren’t bad, I’m not advocating a Marcionite position, cutting off the Old Testament) but, were there for a time as Paul argues very cogently, as in Galatians 3.  The New Testament, building on what God did in the Old, is now the covenant charter for the people of God.  We do not have a temple, we do not have sacrifices—at least, not in the old Jewish sense of either of those.  Both are translated into new meanings in the New Testament.  We do not have kosher laws.  We do not require that our male children be circumcised if they are to be part of the people of God. We do not keep the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath.  Those were the boundary markers which the Old Testament laid down for the time when the people of God was one nation, one geographical entity, with one racial and cultural identity.  Now that the gospel has gone worldwide we thank God that he prepared the way like that; but it is the New Testament now which is the charter for the church.

The effect of this authority

But this means that the New Testament is not merely a true commentary on Christianity.  It has been pointed out in relation to B B Warfield’s theological position that Warfield was always in danger of saying that Christianity would be totally true and would totally work even if there weren’t a Bible to tell us all about it (but that it so happens that we have set an authoritative book which does precisely that, from as it were the sidelines).[7]  But, according to Paul in Romans 15 and elsewhere, the Bible is itself a key part of God’s plan.  It is not merely a divinely given commentary on the way salvation works (or whatever); the Bible is part of the means by which he puts his purposes of judgement and salvation to work.  The Bible is made up, all through, of writings of those who, like Micaiah ben Imlah stood humbly in the councils of God and then stood boldly, in their writing, in the councils of men.

The Bible, then, is designed to function through human beings, through the church, through people who, living still by the Spirit, have their life molded by this Spirit-inspired book.  What for?  Well, as Jesus said in John 20, ‘As the Father sent me, even so I send you’.  He sends the church into the world, in other words, to be and do for the world what he was and did for Israel.  There, I suggest, is the key hermeneutical bridge.  By this means we are enabled to move from the bare story-line that speaks of Jesus as the man who lived and died and did these things in Palestine 2,000 years ago, into an agenda for the church.  And that agenda is the same confrontation with the world that Jesus had with Israel a confrontation involving judgement and mercy.  It is a paradoxical confrontation because it is done with God’s authority.  It is not done with the authority that we reach for so easily, an authority which will manipulate, or crush, or control, or merely give information about the world.  But, rather, it is to be done with an authority with which the church can authentically speak God’s words of judgement and mercy to the world.  We are not, then, entering into the world’s power games.  That, after all, is what Peter tried to do in the garden with his sword, trying to bring in the kingdom of God in the same way that the world would like to do it.  The world is always trying to lure the church into playing the game by its (the world’s) rules.  And the church is all too often eager to do this, not least by using the idea of the authority of scripture as a means to control people, to force them into little boxes.  Those little boxes often owe far more, in my experience, to cultural conditioning of this or that sort, than to scripture itself as the revelation of the loving, creator and redeemer God.

Authority in the church, then, means the church’s authority, with scripture in its hand and heart, to speak and act for God in his world.  It is not simply that we may say, in the church, ‘Are we allowed to do this or that?’ ‘Where are the lines drawn for our behavior?’  Or, ‘Must we believe the following 17 doctrines if we are to be really sound?’  God wants the church to lift up its eyes and see the field ripe for harvest, and to go out, armed with the authority of scripture; not just to get its own life right within a Christian ghetto, but to use the authority of scripture to declare to the world authoritatively that Jesus is Lord.  And, since the New Testament is the covenant charter of the people of God, the Holy Spirit, I believe, desires and longs to do this task in each generation by reawakening people to the freshness of that covenant, and hence summoning them to fresh covenant tasks.  The phrase ‘authority of scripture’, therefore, is a sort of shorthand for the fact that the creator and covenant God uses this book as his means of equipping and calling the church for these tasks.  And this is, I believe, the true biblical context of the biblical doctrine of authority, which is meant to enable us in turn to be Micaiahs, in church and how much more in society: so that, in other words, we may be able to stand humbly in the councils of God, in order then to stand boldly in the councils of men.  How may we do that?  By soaking ourselves in scripture, in the power and strength and leading of the Spirit, in order that we may then speak freshly and with authority to the world of this same creator God.

Why is authority like this?  Why does it have to be like that?  Because God (as in Acts 1 and Matthew 28, which we looked at earlier) wants to catch human beings up in the work that he is doing.  He doesn’t want to do it by-passing us; he wants us to be involved in his work.  And as we are involved, so we ourselves are being remade.  He doesn’t give us the Holy Spirit in order to make us infallible—blind and dumb servants who merely sit there and let the stuff flow through us.  So, he doesn’t simply give us a rule book so that we could just thumb through and look it up.  He doesn’t create a church where you become automatically sinless on entry.  Because, as the goal and end of his work is redemption, so the means is redemptive also: judgement and mercy, nature and grace.  God does not, then, want to put people into little boxes and keep them safe and sound.  It is, after all, possible to be so sound that you’re sound asleep.  I am not in favor of unsoundness; but soundness means health, and health means growth, and growth means life and vigor and new directions.  The little boxes in which you put people and keep them under control are called coffins.  We read scripture not in order to avoid life and growth.  God forgive us that we have done that in some of our traditions.  Nor do we read scripture in order to avoid thought and action, or to be crushed, or squeezed, or confined into a de-humanizing shape, but in order to die and rise again in our minds.  Because, again and again, we find that, as we submit to scripture, as we wrestle with the bits that don’t make sense, and as we hand through to a new sense that we haven’t thought of or seen before, God breathes into our nostrils his own breath—the breath of life.  And we become living beings—a church recreated in his image, more fully human, thinking, alive beings.

That, in fact, is (I believe) one of the reasons why God has given us so much story, so much narrative in scripture.  Story authority, as Jesus knew only too well, is the authority that really works.  Throw a rule book at people’s head, or offer them a list of doctrines, and they can duck or avoid it, or simply disagree and go away.  Tell them a story, though, and you invite them to come into a different world; you invite them to share a world-view or better still a ‘God-view’.  That, actually, is what the parables are all about.  They offer, as all genuine Christian story-telling the does, a world-view which, as someone comes into it and finds how compelling it is, quietly shatters the world-view that they were in already.  Stories determine how people see themselves and how they see the world.  Stories determine how they experience God, and the world, and themselves, and others.  Great revolutionary movements have told stories about the past and present and future.  They have invited people to see themselves in that light, and people’s lives have been changed.  If that happens at a merely human level, how much more when it is God himself, the creator, breathing through his word.

Posting the Conclusion separately for an easy summary of above

Conclusion

There, then, is perhaps a more complex model of biblical authority than some Christian traditions are used to. I have argued that the phrase ‘the authority of scripture’ must be understood within the context of God’s authority, of which it is both a witness and, perhaps more importantly, a vehicle. This is, I submit, a more dynamic model of authority than some others on offer. I believe it is a view which is substantially compatible with the Bible’s own view (if one dare sum up something so complex in such an over-simplification). In addition, for what it may be worth, I believe that it is also in the deepest sense a very Protestant view, however much it diverges from normal Protestant opinion today; after all, it stresses the unique and unrepeatable events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and it insists that the Bible, not the books that we become so skilled at turning the Bible into, is the real locus of authority. In addition, actually, it is also in some senses a far more Catholic view than some others, stressing the need for the community of Jesus’ people to understand itself and its tasks within thoroughly historical parameters. It is also, now that we have started on this game, a more orthodox, charismatic, and even liberal view than those which sometimes go by those labels; but to spell all this out would be some-what tedious and anyway, for our present purposes, unnecessary.

So, quo vadis?

Biblical Authority and the Church’s Task

The Challenge to the world’s authority structures and concepts

The church is not made so that there can be a safe ghetto into which people can run and escape from the world, but so that God can shine out his light into the world, exposing (among other things) the ways in which the world has structured itself into darkness. And this is relevant to the concepts of authority themselves. T[b]he Bible is a living witness to the fact that there is a different sort of authority, a different sort of power, to that which is recognized in the world of politics, business, government, or even the academy.[/b] Do you know that moment in Jesus Christ Superstar where the crowds are coming into Jerusalem and the disciples are all singing, ‘Haysannah, Hosannah’. And one of the zealots says to Jesus, ‘Come on, you ride in ahead of us and you’ll get the power and the glory for ever and ever and ever.’ And Jesus turns round and says, ‘Neither you, Simon, nor the 50,000, nor the Romans, nor the Jews, nor Judas, nor the twelve, nor the priests, nor the scribes, nor doomed Jerusalem herself, understand what power is, understand what glory is.’ And then he proceeds to weep over Jerusalem and prophesy its destruction; and then he goes, steadily through the following week, to his enthronement on Calvary, which with hindsight the church realizes to be the place where all power, all real power, is congregated.

The world needs to see that there is a different model of authority. Because the world needs to know that there is a different God. When the world says, ‘God’ it doesn’t mean what you and I mean by God. It doesn’t mean the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. It means either a pantheist god: the god of all-being, a sort of nature god. Or, it means a deist-god way up in the sky who started off by being a landlord, then became an absentee landlord, and now is just an absentee. We have to tell the world again, that the God who is in authority over the world, the God who speaks through scripture, is the Father of Jesus, the God who sends the Spirit. And, therefore, we have to announce to the world the story of scripture.

This is how the gospels are to become authoritative. They are to become authoritative because, as they tell the story of who Jesus was for Israel in judging and redeeming Israel, so we continue that story—this is the great message of Luke, is it not—in being for the world what Jesus was for Israel. That is how the translation works. And that is why we need narrative, not timeless truth. I’m not a timeless person; I’ve got a story. The world’s not a timeless world; it’s got a story. And I’ve got a responsibility, armed with scripture, to tell the world God’s story, through song and in speech, in drama and in art. We must do this by telling whatever parables are appropriate. That may well not be by standing on street corners reading chunks of scripture. It might be much more appropriate to go off and write a novel (and not a ‘Christian’ novel where half the characters are Christians and all the other half become Christians on the last page) but a novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story can be my story. After all, the story of the Bible, and the power that it possesses, is a better story than any of the power games that we play in our world. We must tell this story, and let it exercise its power in the world.

And that is the task of the whole church. Need I say, not merely of the professional caste within it—although those who are privileged, whether by being given gifts of study by God, or by being set apart with particular time (as I have been) to study scripture, do have a special responsibility to make sure that they are constantly living in the story for themselves, constantly being the scripture people themselves, in order to encourage the church to be that sort of people, again not for its own sake but for the sake of the world.

The Challenge to the World’s World-View

When we tell the whole story of the Bible, and tell it (of course) not just by repeating it parrot-fashion but by articulating it in a thousand different ways, improvising our own faithful versions, we are inevitably challenging more than just one aspect of the world’s way of looking at things (i.e. its view of authority and power). We are undermining its entire view of what the world is, and is for, and are offering, in the best way possible, a new world-view, which turns out (of course) to be a new God-view. We are articulating a viewpoint according to which there is one God, the creator of all that is, who not only made the world but is living and active within it (in opposition to the dualism and/or deism which clings so closely, even to much evangelical tradition), who is also transcendent over it and deeply grieved by its fall away from goodness into sin (in opposition to the pantheism which always lurks in the wings, and which has made a major new entry in the so-called New Age movement—and which often traps Christians who are in a mode of reaction against dualism or deism). This story about the World and its creator will function as an invitation to participate in the story oneself, to make it one’s own, and to do so by turning away from the idols which prevent the story becoming one’s own, and by worshipping instead the God revealed as the true God. Evangelism and the summons injustice and mercy in society are thus one and the same, and both are effected by the telling of the story, the authoritative story, which works by its own power irrespective of the technique of the storyteller. Once again, we see that the church’s task is to be the people who, like Micaiah, stand humbly before God in order then to stand boldly before men.

And note

It is perhaps the half-hearted and sometimes quite miserable traditions of reading the Bible—even among whose who claim to take it seriously—that account for the very low level of biblical knowledge and awareness even among some church leaders and those with delegated responsibility.  And this is the more lamentable in that the Bible ought to be functioning as authoritative within church debates.  What happens all too often is that the debate is conducted without reference to the Bible (until a rabid fundamentalist stands up and waves it around, confirming the tacit agreement of everyone else to give it a wide berth).  Rather, serious engagement is required, at every level from the personal through to the group Bible-study, to the proper liturgical use, to the giving of time in synods and councils to Bible exposition and study.  Only so will the church avoid the trap of trying to address the world and having nothing to say but the faint echo of what the world itself has been saying for some while.

If we really engage with the Bible in this serious way we will find, I believe, that we will be set free from (among other things) some of the small-scale evangelical paranoia which goes on about scripture.  We won’t be forced into awkward corners, answering impossible questions of the ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ variety about whether scripture is exactly this or exactly that.  Of course the Bible is inspired, and if you’re using it like this there won’t be any question in your mind that the Bible is inspired.  But, you will be set free to explore ways of articulating that belief which do not fall into the old rationalist traps of 18th or 19th or 20th century.  Actually using the Bible in this way is a far sounder thing than mouthing lots of words beginning with ‘in—’ but still imprisoning the Bible within evangelical tradition (which is what some of those ‘in—’ words seem almost designed to do).  Of course you will discover that the Bible will not let you down.  You will be paying attention to it; you won’t be sitting in judgement over it.  But you won’t come with a preconceived notion of what this or that passage has to mean if it is to be true.  You will discover that God is speaking new truth through it.  I take it as a method in my biblical studies that if I turn a corner and find myself saying, ‘Well, in that case, that verse is wrong’ that I must have turned a wrong corner somewhere.  But that does not mean that I impose what I think is right on to that bit of the Bible.  It means, instead, that I am forced to live with that text uncomfortably, sometimes literally for years (this is sober autobiography), until suddenly I come round a different corner and that verse makes a lot of sense; sense that I wouldn’t have got if I had insisted on imposing my initial view on it from day one.

Final full stop

CONCLUSION

I have argued that the notion of the ‘authority of scripture’ is a shorthand expression for God’s authority, exercised somehow through scripture; that scripture must be allowed to be itself in exercising its authority, and not be turned into something else which might fit better into what the church, or the world, might have thought its ‘authority’ should look like; that it is therefore the meaning of ‘authority’ itself, not that of scripture, that is the unknown in the equation, and that when this unknown is discovered it challenges head on the various notions and practices of authority endemic in the world and, alas, in the church also. I have suggested, less systematically, some ways in which this might be put into practice. All of this has been designed as a plea to the church to let the Bible be the Bible, and so to let God be God—and so to enable the people of God to be the people of God, his special people, living under his authority, bringing his light to his world. The Bible is not an end in itself. It is there so that, by its proper use, the creator may be glorified and the creation may be healed. It is our task to be the people through whom this extraordinary vision comes to pass. We are thus entrusted with a privilege too great for casual handling, too vital to remain a mere matter of debate.

So what am I saying? I am saying that we mustn’t belittle scripture by bringing the world’s models of authority into it. We must let scripture be itself, and that is a hard task. Scripture contains many things that I don’t know, and that you don’t know; many things we are waiting to discover; passages which are lying dormant waiting for us to dig them out. Awaken them. We must then make sure that the church, armed in this way, is challenging the world’s view of authority. So that, we must determine—corporately as well as individually—to become in a true sense, people of the book. Not people of the book in the Islamic sense, where this book just drops down and crushes people and you say it’s the will of Allah, and I don’t understand it, and I can’t do anything about it. But, people of the book in the Christian sense; people who are being remade, judged and remolded by the Spirit through scripture. It seems to me that evangelical tradition has often become in bondage to a sort of lip-service scripture principle even while debating in fact how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (Not literally, but there are equivalents in our tradition.) Instead, I suggest that our task is to seize this privilege with both hands, and use it to the glory of God and the redemption of the world.

Summarise please

Challenging stuff Enigma. A laborious but enriching read.

I am saying that we mustn’t belittle scripture by bringing the world’s models of authority into it.  We must let scripture be itself, and that is a hard task.  Scripture contains many things that I don’t know, and that you don’t know; many things we are waiting to discover; passages which are lying dormant waiting for us to dig them out.  Awaken them.  We must then make sure that the church, armed in this way, is challenging the world’s view of authority.  So that, we must determine—corporately as well as individually—to become in a true sense, people of the book.

And a task it is! Interpretations, understanding and applications of scripture are as diverse as there are christians - and often we (churches - depending on which institutions are truly 'churches') are unwilling to relinquish our positions on these issues. Me sef is guilty. This is a hard, and seemingly impossible task. Honestly, his charge is a noble one, but an acheivement of this on a massive, corporate level . . . *shaking my head* . . .  I dunno 'bout that. How can we let scripture be scripture when it is flawed, biased humans that are handling this scripture? May God help us through His Holy Spirit.

Question. Is there room for extra-biblical (not contra-biblical) material/understanding/revelation in all this? We all know scripture does not (and I don't think was intended) to address minute details of entire sphere of the human existence - but rather gives us principles and standards by which we live by. Can we sort of put ourselves in a box by prescribing only scripture? while also keeping in mind the kinds of abuse that occur when this door is opened.

Hiya Sis

The one of whom I'm jealous is shouting his hellos in the background here.

Of course the task is a hard one and I dare say we all face the difficulty of 'holding on' to what we have understood as you highlighted. Sometimes you wonder why God chose to allow things to be this way with the scriptures and even with the Church but then you check yourself that do you fully know the designs and ways of God?

{{{Aside: I think it was Billy Graham who said the first question he would ask God when he gets to heaven is why did He allow the devil to be so powerful?}}}

With regard to extra-biblical stuff, I certainly believe that there are various materials that may inform our understanding but, ultimately, I concur with Wright that once we properly understand the place/meaning of its "authority", our authority lies in the scriptures as understood in the truest sense possible of what God is communicating.

my head still aches. will file and summarize someday

Enigma:

Hiya Sis

The one of whom I'm jealous is shouting his hellos in the background here.

Ah! my small husband, abeg give him one big kiss for me

Of course the task is a hard one and I dare say we all face the difficulty of 'holding on' to what we have understood as you highlighted. Sometimes you wonder why God chose to allow things to be this way with the scriptures and even with the Church but then you check yourself that do you fully know the designs and ways of God?

True. We have to trust that His infinite wisdom is working all to the glorification of His name and the redemption of mankind. But ehn sometimes, its hard . . .

With regard to extra-biblical stuff, I certainly believe that there are various materials that may inform our understanding but, ultimately, I concur with Wright that once we properly understand the place/meaning of its "authority", our authority lies in the scriptures as understood in the truest sense possible of what God is communicating.

Got it, thanks.

Another question. When the author refers to 'scripture' he is refering to the 66 books we have today. When 2 Tim says "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" . . . what 'scripture' is it refering to? Just the OT? he had foresight of what would become 'scripture' today?

JeSoul:
. . .
Another question. When the author refers to 'scripture' he is refering to the 66 books we have today. When 2 Tim says "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" . . . what 'scripture' is it refering to? Just the OT? he had foresight of what would become 'scripture' today?

Good question! First I am going to stick to the view that Paul wrote the chapter (a lot of the claims that this or that person did not write that book or the other are really not substantiated, I think).

OK: first the current 66 (or 73) books? Not likely! Why? The likelihood is that 2 Timothy was written close to the time that other books of the New Testament were being written; thus, Paul probably did not have in view/mind, on a purely physical level, all the books that came to make up the New Testament. We could speculate that he anticipated that some "scriptures" were still to be written or that he saw himself as writing "scriptures" but did he have some foresight or spiritual premonition of the New Testament as it was finalised?

So what did he likely mean by scriptures? First, in the New Testament, there are several references to "scripture" or "scriptures" not in the mere sense of "writing" but also in the sense of a sort of "sacred" writing or book. Jesus Himself did it all the time: "today this scripture is fulfilled", "[some people] have no knowledge of scriptures or the power of God" etc etc

So what book or books were they referring to as "scripture" or "scriptures". In some instances, we know precisely: sometimes we only need to look at the footnotes to the Bible we are reading: examples would include Jesus reading Isaiah, quoting Psalm 82 etc. In most instances, the quotations are traceable to the Old Testament as we know it (minus the Apocrypha for now). I think there are maybe about three or four [Edit: more, actually] such OT books not quoted in the NT. Thus we know that Jesus and the early church considered much if not indeed all our OT to be "scriptures".

Here I want to interject a point: in the piece by NT Wright you will see that he said that Jesus and Paul treated the OT with "a mixture of respect and cavalier freedom"! Thus although something is "scripture" doesn't mean we follow blindly --- e.g. Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath; Paul explaining the place of the OT in light of Christ's death and resurrection (or in light of "NT"; author of Hebrews saying "useless law" is disanulled etc etc etc

The situation concerning the Apocrypha is more difficult: there are references to some books of the apocrypha in the "regular" Bible. But it is not always clear and still debatable that such references treat them as part of "the" "scriptures". All I would say is that they were, like many other books not themselves in the Apocrypha, available in the era of Jesus and His apostles/disciples including the authors of the gospels, epistles and The Apocalypse. I would also say - that references were made to some books did not automatically mean they were considered "scriptures" in the sense of sacred books. I would also say that what are considered references to a/some particular book may actually be disputed: e.g. conventional view is that Jude quoted the book of Enoch but there are legitimate questions that "did He really or was he quoting that saying of an Enoch from another source"?

One thing that could help is some amount of study of the debate concerning an/the Old Testament Canon and in particular whether by the time of Jesus and the apostles, the Jews themselves had finalised what books were in and what books were out {of "the canon" and thus what books constituted Old Testament "scriptures" in the sense of sacred text}.

Well, it is a debate and for many still ongoing: the article in the following link helps to put that debate in some perspective. NB the article does not have all the answers and, specifically, section 2.2 of the article should have had a clear and heavy qualification that the Council of Jamnia is disputed by some who say that it is only a hypothesis that such a Council, even if it took place, established an Old Testament canon.   http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/sbrandt/canon.htm

There is of course a simplistic way of looking at all of this, which is not wholly devoid of merit, that the Bible as we have it is what God intended us to have and thus the reference to "scriptures" in 2 Timothy is indeed to the Bible as we have it. 

Everyone to his own poison, innit?

The Bible and Biblical Authority

All Authority is God’s Authority

So, secondly within the first half of this lecture, I want to suggest that scripture’s own view of authority focuses on the authority of God himself. (I recall a well-known lecturer once insisting that ‘there can be no authority other than scripture’, and thumping the tub so completely that I wanted to ask ‘but what about God?’) If we think for a moment what we are actually saying when we use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’, we must surely acknowledge that this is a shorthand way of saying that, though authority belongs to God, God has somehow invested this authority in scripture. And that is a complex claim. It is not straightforward. When people use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ they very often do not realize this. Worse, they often treat the word ‘authority’ as the absolute, the fixed point, and make the word ‘scripture’ the thing which is moving around trying to find a home against it. In other words, they think they know what authority is and then they say that scripture is that thing.

I want to suggest that we should try it the other way around. Supposing we said that we know what scripture is (we have it here, after all), and that we should try and discover what authority might be in the light of that. Granted that this is the book that we actually have, and that we want to find out what its ‘authority’ might mean, we need perhaps to forswear our too-ready ideas about ‘authority’ and let them be remolded in the light of scripture itself—not just in the light of the biblical statements about authority but in the light of the whole Bible, or the whole New Testament, itself. What are we saying about the concept of ‘authority’ itself if we assert that this book—not the book we are so good at turning this book into—is ‘authoritative’?

Beginning, though, with explicit scriptural evidence about authority itself, we find soon enough—this is obvious but is often ignored—that all authority does indeed belong to God. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’. God says this, God says that, and it is done. Now if that is not authoritative, I don’t know what is. God calls Abraham; he speaks authoritatively. God exercises authority in great dynamic events (in Exodus, the Exile and Return). In the New Testament, we discover that authority is ultimately invested in Christ: ‘all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth’. Then, perhaps to our surprise, authority is invested in the apostles: Paul wrote whole letters in order to make this point crystal clear (in a manner of speaking). This authority, we discover, has to do with the Holy Spirit. And the whole church is then, and thereby, given authority to work within God’s world as his accredited agent(s). From an exceedingly quick survey, we are forced to say: authority, according to the Bible itself, is vested in God himself, Father, Son and Spirit.

Hi peeps. Okay, I haven't read through the entire quote. I found it quite dense and I was also a bit at a loss about what the writer was trying to say. I wasn't sure if he was contradicting himself or if I was merely not getting it. So I'm going to respond only to the very first paragraph.

I don't know what the writer/lecturer actually means by the word 'Authority'. I understand Authority to be something that cannot be questioned. It's will is done and it's opinion is accepted in all matters over which it exercises Authority. I understand Authority to be related to Authorship. That is creator/inventor and in old english father.

If all authority is God's authority (and I agree with this claim) then the Third Reich of Hitler's germany was authorised by God. The Corrupt governments of Nigeria are authorised by God. Your wicked landlord is authorised by God. Gaddafi is authorised by God. If the people rise up against Gaddafi, are they rising up against God's authority? What then if they win and defeat Gaddafi and set up another government? That would mean that God is constantly changing the structure of how he delegates his authority.


I think that the lecturer is perhaps a little hazy on the history of the bible, and also on the work of the likes of St. Augustine of Hippo. The Authority of the bible was not invested in it by God himself directly. At least not as far as I'm aware. It got it's authority from the Catholic Church that compiled it and gave it it's place in the christian's life. The Authority was first vested in the Church and the church passed on some of it's authority into the bible. However even from reading the bible itself it cannot be denied that the greater authority is the Church itself. Matt 28:18 is quoted by the writer but it will serve us better to read that passage in it's full context:

18And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. 19[b]Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: 20Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you:[/b] and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

All authority been given to Jesus, we, the church, are commanded to teach, baptise, and spread the teachings of Jesus. All this was before the compilation of the bible. The church's activities are based on the authority given to Jesus.

Supposing we said that we know what scripture is (we have it here, after all), and that we should try and discover what authority might be in the light of that. Granted that this is the book that we actually have, and that we want to find out what its ‘authority’ might mean, we need perhaps to forswear our too-ready ideas about ‘authority’ and let them be remolded in the light of scripture itself—not just in the light of the biblical statements about authority but in the light of the whole Bible, or the whole New Testament, itself. What are we saying about the concept of ‘authority’ itself if we assert that this book—not the book we are so good at turning this book into—is ‘authoritative’?

I don't know how valid anything that he says above is. 'knowing what scripture is' is not as easy as he seems to think. He says 'we have it here, after all'. Someone in the audience should have asked him, 'what translation?'. Not to mention the numerous interpretations that can be extracted from it.

I wonder just how he separates 'this book', the bible, from 'the book we are so good at turning this book into'.

I'm also confused about how he defines authority, based on the bible.

we need perhaps to forswear our too-ready ideas about ‘authority’ and let them be remolded in the light of scripture itself

Yet all he does is point to passages where God is exercising his authority and saying

God says this, God says that, and it is done. Now if that is not authoritative, I don’t know what is.

Is he dribbling himself or what? The bible didn't say 'God says this and that, and it is done; and that is what we call authority'.
No, the writer still took his preconceived, 'too-ready ideas about authority', which incidentally is the same as that of every english speaker and merely found an example of it in the bible. The bible didn't define it as 'authority' explicitly. He identified it with the understanding of authority that pretty much everybody else has.
I'm forced to wonder whether much of that article is a load of hot air. I dunno.

Perhaps if someone (Enigma?) could write a short summary of it, distilling the key points that the writer is making then I'll be more convinced. As it stands there might not be any key points at all, but I wouldn't know cos it's covered with a load of verbosity.

When I read something and all sense of it seems to elude me it can only be one of two things. The writing is a load of convoluted bollocks, or it is way above my intellect.

Enigma:

Good question! First I am going to stick to the view that Paul wrote the chapter (a lot of the claims that this or that person did not write that book or the other are really not substantiated, I think).

OK: first the current 66 (or 73) books? Not likely! Why? The likelihood is that 2 Timothy was written close to the time that other books of the New Testament were being written; thus, Paul probably did not have in view/mind, on a purely physical level, all the books that came to make up the New Testament. We could speculate that he anticipated that some "scriptures" were still to be written or that he saw himself as writing "scriptures" but did he have some foresight or spiritual premonition of the New Testament as it was finalised?

So what did he likely mean by scriptures? First, in the New Testament, there are several references to "scripture" or "scriptures" not in the mere sense of "writing" but also in the sense of a sort of "sacred" writing or book. Jesus Himself did it all the time: "today this scripture is fulfilled", "[some people] have no knowledge of scriptures or the power of God" etc etc

So what book or books were they referring to as "scripture" or "scriptures". In some instances, we know precisely: sometimes we only need to look at the footnotes to the Bible we are reading: examples would include Jesus reading Isaiah, quoting Psalm 82 etc. In most instances, the quotations are traceable to the Old Testament as we know it (minus the Apocrypha for now). I think there are maybe about three or four such OT books not quoted in the NT. Thus we know that Jesus and the early church considered much if not indeed all our OT to be "scriptures".

*nodding along* . . .  

Here I want to interject a point: in the piece by NT Wright you will see that he said that Jesus and Paul treated the OT with "a mixture of respect and cavalier freedom"! Thus although something is "scripture" doesn't mean we follow blindly --- e.g. Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath; Paul explaining the place of the OT in light of Christ's death and resurrection (or in light of "NT"; author of Hebrews saying "useless law" is disanulled etc etc etc

The situation concerning the Apocrypha is more difficult: there are references to some books of the apocrypha in the "regular" Bible. [b]But it is not always clear and still debatable that such references treat them as part of "the" "scriptures". All I would say is that they were, like many other books not themselves in the Apocrypha, available in the era of Jesus and His apostles/disciples including the authors of the gospels, epistles and The Apocalypse. I would also say - that references were made to some books did not automatically mean they were considered "scriptures" in the sense of sacred books. [/b]I would also say that what are considered references to a/some particular book may actually be disputed: e.g. conventional view is that Jude quoted the book of Enoch but there are legitimate questions that "did He really or was he quoting that saying of an Enoch from another source"?

Bang bang bang!!! thanks for this! and here is the heart of the matter I think. We cannot exactly pin down what qualifies as 'scripture', as 'authority', as God's 'revelation' to man . . .  even Paul spoke once about how an instruction was not from God but his own personal opinion. Its made me wonder many times just how many more times were his 'personal opinion' - but he didn't explicitly say so.

One thing that could help is some amount of study of the debate concerning an/the Old Testament Canon and in particular whether by the time of Jesus and the apostles, the Jews themselves had finalised what books were in and what books were out {of "the canon" and thus what books constituted Old Testament "scriptures" in the sense of sacred text}.

Well, it is a debate and for many still ongoing: the article in the following link helps to put that debate in some perspective. NB the article does not have all the answers and, specifically, section 2.2 of the article should have had a clear and heavy qualification that the Council of Jamnia is disputed by some who say that it is only a hypothesis that such a Council, even if it took place, established an Old Testament canon.   http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/sbrandt/canon.htm

Thanks, I will check out that link.
 

There is of course a simplistic way of looking at all of this, which is not wholly devoid of merit, that the Bible as we have it is what God intended us to have and thus the reference to "scriptures" in 2 Timothy is indeed to the Bible as we have it. 

Everyone to his own poison, innit?

  Indeed! lol.

Glad you likeee

Pastor AIO:

Hi peeps. Okay, I haven't read through the entire quote. I found it quite dense and I was also a bit at a loss about what the writer was trying to say. I wasn't sure if he was contradicting himself or if I was merely not getting it. So I'm going to respond only to the very first paragraph.

 Lol. Its not just you Pastor, the author is verbose and like Lager and I commented, it is a laborious read.

I don't know what the writer/lecturer actually means by the word 'Authority'. I understand Authority to be something that cannot be questioned. It's will is done and it's opinion is accepted in all matters over which it exercises Authority. I understand Authority to be related to Authorship. That is creator/inventor and in old english father.

If all authority is God's authority (and I agree with this claim) then the Third Reich of Hitler's germany was authorised by God. The Corrupt governments of Nigeria are authorised by God. Your wicked landlord is authorised by God. Gaddafi is authorised by God. If the people rise up against Gaddafi, are they rising up against God's authority? What then if they win and defeat Gaddafi and set up another government? That would mean that God is constantly changing the structure of how he delegates his authority.

Enigma please correct me if I'm wrong.

Going by Wright's position, I would say not that God 'authorized' it - but that in His grand, all-encompassing authority - permits it? as He permitted many wrongs as we see in the bible? and that in the exercising of His authority - by either intervention or restraint - God is working all things to ¹ glorify His name ² redeem mankind

I think that the lecturer is perhaps a little hazy on the history of the bible, and also on the work of the likes of St. Augustine of Hippo. The Authority of the bible was not invested in it by God himself directly. At least not as far as I'm aware. It got it's authority from the Catholic Church that compiled it and gave it it's place in the christian's life. The Authority was first vested in the Church and the church passed on some of it's authority into the bible. However even from reading the bible itself it cannot be denied that the greater authority is the Church itself. Matt 28:18 is quoted by the writer but it will serve us better to read that passage in it's full context:

 I think this is exactly the nerve he's trying to strike . . . that the authority of the bible - is itself and by 'itself' - meaning God, because it comes from God (it may help to keep in mind he's probably writing to christian audience - hence an already existing belief system). Wright appears to ignore or dismiss as irrelevant how the bible 'got here' but that the words, stories, narratives themselves burst with power - and this is 'where/how' it has its authority. That the bible is not subject to secular standards of judgement or 'verification' - but that it is different in how it is to be ¹ Approached ² Apprehended ³ Analyzed (and verified to be legitimate) ^{and 4} Applied in our lives.

^^and I am well aware how this can come off - lol - the bible is 'special' and all of it must be accepted and followed whether or not you understand it

I hope any bit of all that made a little bit of sense?

Pastor AIO:
I don't know how valid anything that he says above is. 'knowing what scripture is' is not as easy as he seems to think. He says 'we have it here, after all'. Someone in the audience should have asked him, 'what translation?'. Not to mention the numerous interpretations that can be extracted from it.

I wonder just how he separates 'this book', the bible, from 'the book we are so good at turning this book into'.

Gbam. And that's why I asked Enigma about what exactly qualifies as 'scripture' - because if we (author and readers and all of christendom) cannot have an accord on this, the rest almost all goes out the window.

Perhaps if someone (Enigma?) could write a short summary of it, distilling the key points that the writer is making then I'll be more convinced. As it stands there might not be any key points at all, but I wouldn't know cos it's covered with a load of verbosity.

Brother Enigma, abeg hellep Pastor hia. My brain was barely able to get the gist of the story yday, a macro-headache resulting from only 4hrs of sleep is not helping either.

When I read something and all sense of it seems to elude me it can only be one of two things. The writing is a load of convoluted bollocks, or it is way above my intellect.

Lol . . . I'm willing to bet you haven't met a subject that is above your intellect, abi na lie?

@Jesoul

I think I'll just let the article speak for itself for now.