What was Biblical Authority?

Name:

Tutor:

Course:

Date:

What was Biblical Authority?

Biblical authority is the supremacy and final authority in the written word of God. It operates as the standard through which the custom, motive and familiarity of the church must serve. The authority is established in the believer through the same Holy Spirit that was in the authors as they wrote the Holy Book and who now cleanses those who stay true to the scripture. The authority is manifested in its purpose to bring us the word of god through Jesus Christ who bears God’s grace and through.

Authorship of the bible is a concept that no human can comprehend since the authors were divinely revealed to by God on what they were to write but they were still in their human forms. When the biblical stories are told, there is need to recognize that indeed there is authority in the Bible. It is clear of the existence of only one God who is the creator of all living things in the world and He is living and proactive in it. His authority is seen in scriptures such as in Genesis when he is making the world, He says let there be and there was.

In other scriptures, he appeared to the people and spoke to then authoritatively like in the instance of Abraham and the burning bush. The scientific theory by Darwin seemed to challenge the biblical authority and the creation of man by God. The biblical authority question back then was how religions could rely so much on a book from which they based their faith on and even preached from it. The biblical studies were viewed as any other postwar intellectual atmosphere.

The studies, mainly from Germany and British, utilized the techniques from what they referred as scientific history to show that the Bible was just combination of poetry and religious prediction that had been put together in a thousand years. This interest by the scholars came around at the time when the New Testament had just been revised. Twenty thousand copies of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Times that printed the New Testament were sold in less than a week. In the 19^th Century, the Roman Catholics and the Protestants both believed in the Bible as the motivated word of God. The Roman Catholics however diverged and enhanced the teaching of the bible with those of tradition.

The Protestants however stuck to the original power of the word of God. As things changing, women were believed to be resolute churchgoers than men. They actively participated in worship meetings and devotions. Men were believed to be busy in their daily deeds and could not afford the time to attend prayer meetings. Women who never got married became nuns under the Roman Catholic and later headed local school. They were referred as ‘Mother Superiors’ and it was up to them to demonstrate faithfulness as compared to the other church married women who had families to run. As the times passed people began thinking of go as a woman. These thoughts made women become more attached to the biblical contexts.

Men also rose and started attending services. They began working as church officials, got involved in missionary work and even on calls to transform the non-religious to Christianity. By the end of the 19^th century, five point five million men were actively involved Para-religion organizations such as the Freemasonry, which encouraged them to bond emotionally. A huge percentage of these men did not attach themselves to any church.  Conclusively, the questioning of the authority of the bible cannot be justified. Christians who even date back as the 19^th century still believed in his divine existence and power.