IB World Religions 3.4.5. Authority: God, Foundational Figures and Church Hierarchy Notes

3.4.5. Authority: God, Foundational Figures and Church Hierarchy

God, Christ and Spirit

1. Christians hold that all authority in the church is derived. God is its source, and every human office is described as holding authority on trust rather than by right.
2. Jesus is presented as carrying that authority directly. Mark 1 has crowds astonished that he taught with authority and not like the scribes, and Matthew 28 closes with him claiming all authority in heaven and on earth.
3. The Holy Spirit supplies the third strand. Christians hold that the Spirit leads the church into truth, which is why councils and synods claim to be discerning something given rather than inventing something new.
4. Revelation ties the three together. Christians distinguish general revelation, what they hold can be known of God through creation and conscience, from special revelation, God's disclosure in Israel, in Christ and in scripture.
5. The Bible is treated as the written deposit of that disclosure. Denominations divide over whether it stands alone or alongside tradition, and that single difference shapes everything below.
6. Ordinary practice keeps the derivation visible. Ministers are ordained with prayer for the Spirit, and preachers conventionally present a sermon as expounding scripture rather than as personal opinion.

Prophets, apostles and saints

1. The prophets of the Old Testament are read as authoritative voices. Christians take Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos to be speaking God's word into their own century and pointing beyond it to Christ.
2. The apostles hold a unique place as witnesses of the resurrection. Peter and Paul dominate Acts and the letters, and apostolic authorship became the test for admitting a book to the New Testament.
3. The Church Fathers shaped doctrine in the centuries that followed. Athanasius, Augustine and John Chrysostom are quoted across all the branches, and Orthodoxy treats the agreement of the Fathers as a controlling authority.
4. Martyrs carried a different kind of weight. Dying rather than recanting was treated as testimony that argument could not match, and the graves of martyrs became the first Christian shrines.
5. Catholic and Orthodox Christians venerate saints and ask their prayers. Theologians separate dulia, the honour given to saints, from latria, the worship owed to God alone, and Mary receives hyperdulia, honour above other saints.
6. Most Protestant churches took the opposite path. They use the word saint for all believers, as Paul does when writing to the saints at Philippi, and hold that Christ alone mediates between God and humanity.

Catholic and Orthodox order

1. The Roman Catholic Church is governed through an ordered hierarchy. Authority runs from the pope through bishops to priests and deacons, with the laity sharing the church's mission without holding ordained office.
2. The pope's claim rests on Petrine primacy. Catholic teaching reads Matthew 16, where Jesus calls Peter the rock on which the church will be built, as founding an office continued by the bishops of Rome.
3. Catholic teaching authority is called the magisterium. The First Vatican Council in 1870 defined that the pope teaches infallibly when he speaks ex cathedra on faith or morals, a power which has been invoked very rarely.
4. Apostolic succession holds the structure together. Bishops are said to stand in an unbroken line of ordination reaching back to the apostles, and Orthodox and most Anglican churches claim the same for their bishops.
5. Orthodoxy distributes authority quite differently. It is a communion of autocephalous churches, each with its own patriarch, and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople holds a primacy of honour rather than jurisdiction.
6. Orthodox decisions rest on conciliarity. Truth is discerned by councils and then received by the whole body of the faithful, and this refusal of a single supreme office is among the reasons the split of 1054 has never healed.

Protestant polities

1. The Reformation moved final authority to scripture. Sola scriptura holds that the Bible judges doctrine above popes, councils and inherited custom.
2. It was paired with the priesthood of all believers. Luther argued from 1 Peter 2 that every Christian has direct access to God, which removed any separate class of mediators.
3. Protestant churches then organised themselves in three main patterns. Episcopal polity keeps bishops, presbyterian polity governs through elders sitting in courts, and congregational polity places authority in the local gathered church.
4. Each pattern has its churches. Anglicans and Scandinavian Lutherans keep bishops, the Church of Scotland uses presbyteries, and Baptists hold that the local congregation decides.
5. Methodism developed a fourth arrangement. Connexionalism binds local societies into one connected body under Conference, and ministers are sent to circuits rather than called by individual congregations.
6. Pentecostal and non-denominational churches often concentrate authority in a founding pastor. Their own leaders as well as outsiders have raised questions about accountability, and many have since added boards or network affiliation.

Councils and confessions

1. Christians have settled disputed teaching through councils. The first, at Nicaea in 325, was called to deal with an argument about the person of Christ, and its ruling was treated as binding on the whole church.
2. Seven councils are accepted as ecumenical by Catholic and Orthodox Christians alike. They run from Nicaea in 325 to the second Council of Nicaea in 787, which settled the veneration of icons.
3. After that the counting diverges. Rome recognises later assemblies including Trent, the First Vatican Council of 1870 and the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, none of which Orthodoxy accepts as ecumenical.
4. The Oriental Orthodox churches stop even earlier. Their rejection of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 separated the Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian and Syriac churches from the rest of Christianity.
5. Protestants largely replaced councils with confessions. The Augsburg Confession of 1530, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession of 1647 still define teaching for Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed churches.
6. Reception matters as much as decision. Orthodox theology holds that a council proves to be authoritative when the whole body of the faithful receives it, which is why some large assemblies were later set aside.

Personal authority

1. Alongside offices and texts, Christians recognise authority in the individual believer. Denominations differ chiefly over how much weight it carries when it conflicts with the other kinds.
2. Catholic teaching gives conscience a high place. Cardinal John Henry Newman said he would drink to conscience first and the pope afterwards, and the Second Vatican Council called it the most secret core of a person.
3. Reformation churches added private judgment. A believer reading scripture is held to be able to test what teachers say, which is one reason vernacular Bibles mattered so much to the reformers.
4. Quakers take this furthest. The inner light is held to guide each meeting, and Quaker meetings have no ordained ministry and reach decisions by waiting in silence for a sense of the meeting.
5. Pentecostal and charismatic Christians locate authority in spiritual gifts. Prophecy, tongues and healing are held to be given to ordinary members, and most such churches teach that these must be tested against scripture.
6. Every tradition therefore manages a tension. Personal conviction can renew a church or split it, and much of the machinery of bishops, councils and confessions exists to arbitrate exactly that.