Submission

Authority is an interesting thing to think about. We all have at least one, whether we like to admit it or not. Having been reading a bit of the Uniting Church's Basis of Union and some commentaries upon it has raised the issue of the authority of scripture. As Davis McCaughey notes, the Uniting Church recognises the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments have been recieved by the church and are an authority over the Church, but the Basis is intentional in not getting bogged down in what kind of authority the scriptures are.

Along the lines of authority I can't help but reflect back on a discussion during a class in which one of the teachers, reflecting on the rape of Dinah, pointed out the treatment of Dinah as property by both the Canaanites and her own family and how she was abused on virtually every front as a human being. As she became more emotional and vehmenent, she closed her discourse by saying that this (and other similarly violent passages in the Old Testament like it), for her, was not the word of God.

This raised one immediate concern on my part, which was that I had been too flipant in my reading of these passages (it was one of my favourites when I was 18 and just starting to read the Bible because of the successful against the odds revenge by Dinah's brothers) and of the abuse that women are especially vulnerable to, and more so in a society like the Ancient Near East.

It also raised another concern which I thought about more as time passed: how was my teacher able to distinguish what parts of the Bible were and were not the word of God, relevant to the teaching and building up of the church? What if she had a passage which she considered to be the word of God but I did not consider to be the word of God? Who then would be the arbiter of what was authoritative in such a dispute? It seemed then, as it does now, that my teacher was displacing the Bible and the God who inspired it from the rightful place of authority over the church. Such 'nasty' passages are in the Bible, I believe, not because God condones despicable behaviour (either by those who are his covenant people or those who are not) but because the Bible is a real book for the real world, and in the real world despicable things happen. Thankfully, God recognises the problem and himself ultimately provides the solution.