What Is Spiritual Authority? Neither Authoritarianism nor Anti-Institutionalism

Several years ago, a pastor friend became convinced that, when leading the Lord’s Supper, he should “fence the Table.” If you don’t know that phrase, it refers to the practice of saying who should and should not receive the Lord’s Supper—putting a fence around the Supper, as it were, leaving some people inside the fence and other people outside of it. He wanted to lead the Supper by saying something like,

If you are a member of this church or a baptized member of some other church that preaches the same gospel you heard here this morning, you are welcome to take the Supper with us. If, however, you are not a follower of Jesus Christ in committed fellowship with his church, we’re very grateful you’re here. You are most welcome. Thank you for coming. We’d encourage you to let the elements pass by and use this time to pray and to reflect on what you heard in the sermon.

To put my own cards on the table, I think this is good language. My fellow elders and I offer some version of it every Sunday when we lead the Lord’s Supper. Yet my friend’s fellow elders were uncomfortable with that language. It felt too restrictive to them. If I had to guess, many Christians today would feel uncomfortable with such a verbal fence, too.

I offer the vignette to raise the question of spiritual authority, which, no doubt, is a contentious issue—and the topic of this essay. To fence the Lord’s Table is to assert one very concrete type of spiritual authority, which is church authority. That particular assertion of spiritual authority creates the possibility of excluding a sincere Christian from the Lord’s Table because he is not a church member somewhere. It risks pitting an individual’s personal conviction against a church. Jesus might say about the Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me.” But fencing the Table is a way of saying, “Some of you should not do this in remembrance of him.” And, I assume, that might sound shocking to some Christians today.

Yet suppose I switch around the story. Instead of pitting the individual against the church, I pit the church against the state. In a debate over whether elected officials should be required to take religious assessment tests, James Madison argued that governors and legislatures should not make these kinds of theological judgments. Such authority belongs to religious bodies. His speech notes read, “What edition, Hebrew, Septuagint, or Vulgate? What copy—what translation … What books canonical, what apochryphal? The papists holding to be the former what Protestants the latter, the Lutherans the latter what other Protestant and papists the former.”¹ Madison’s point was that politicians are not competent to answer sensitive theological questions. Leave such judgments to the churches.

In other words, when the conversation pits spiritual authority against the civil, many if not most Christians will quickly side with Madison and advocate for some form of spiritual or even church authority. Something like spiritual authority or church authority must exist. We don’t want the state storming all over the church’s domain.

So what exactly is spiritual authority?

What is authority?

Before answering that question, it will serve our purpose to ask what authority is generally.

Authorization to exercise power

Authority is not power. Power pertains to capacity or ability. To say someone has the power to solve an algebra problem or renovate a kitchen is to say that person has the ability to do those things. Authority, on the other hand, is an authorization. It is a moral license to exercise power. A person might have the power to renovate a kitchen, but he doesn’t have the authority to do so until a county inspection’s office licenses him to do so. The topic of authority, in other words, ushers conversations about power into a moral register, moving from what someone can do to what someone may, should, or must do, depending on one’s position.

All authority possesses both a basis and scope. An authority’s basis is the source of that moral license. Who is the authorizer? Who makes an authority figure’s rule morally right, such that he or she has the right to say, “You must,” and anyone under that command is morally bound to obey the must? An authority’s scope is the area of its work, including its purpose, prerogatives, responsibilities, and limits or jurisdiction. For instance, legal authority clearly possesses a different scope than medical authority.

God’s intrinsic authority

Authority first shows up in the Bible in Genesis 1 and 2 with God. Uniquely, God is the basis for his own authority. He possesses an intrinsic right to rule. The divine creator is the divine ruler. As with a playwright and his plays, so with God and all creation. The author, by definition, possesses all author-ity. To hate authority is to hate God, because essential to God’s being is the intrinsic right to create and to rule.

God alone, therefore, possesses absolute authority. There is no voter recall or judicial review for God. Said King Nebuchadnezzar, “No one can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Dan 4:35).²

Uniquely also, God’s authority is comprehensive in scope. It covers all of life and all the universe since he created all of it. No plant or star, no word or deed, no hope or desire, neither the future nor the past, is outside of his jurisdiction. He gives purpose and significance to everything and imbues them with their moral value. He declares what’s right and wrong universally and eternally, and he does whatever he pleases (Ps 115:3).

Humanity’s delegated authority

Yet not only is God’s authority absolute and comprehensive, it is generous. He uses his rule to authorize rule in us. He delegates. He created humanity in his image and told us to multiply and fill, to subdue and exercise dominion (Gen 1:28).

I’ve heard Christians say that authority is a “necessary evil.” Apparently, they forgot these opening chapters of Scripture, as well as Psalm 8, which looks back on these chapters and marvels that God crowned every human being with glory and honor and put all things under his feet. God created human beings to rule.

Ruling—exercising authority—plays a central role in imaging or representing him. We image the divine ruler by ruling. This applies to every person ever born: from a father to a sister to a congressman to the homeless man one steps over on the way to work. Every one of them God created to rule and exercise dominion over some plot of earth.

These facts should cause us to praise. God could have ruled the universe far more effectively all alone. Yet, like a father asking his son to build a rocking chair with him, so the Lord of glory created humanity and said, “I want you to share my rule with me as well as all the glory that goes with it.” So the psalmist exclaims, “What is man that you are mindful of him!” (Ps 8:4).

Ruling by submitting

Yet the Lord’s authorization of Adam and Eve came with a crucial qualification: As you rule, you must obey me. Human authority is neither absolute nor comprehensive. It’s always relative to the assignments God gives and the boundaries or jurisdictions he establishes. He’s like a father teaching his daughter to drive, as I’ve now done three times: “I’ll teach you to drive, but you must listen to me. Do exactly what I say.”

Humanity learns to rule by submitting. For a human being, authority and submission are two sides of the same coin. Human authority is never intrinsic to us, as it is with God. It is never something a human being simply is. It is something that must be given by an authorizing agent.³ It is always a gift, an office we can only step into.

Plus, that office—whether pastor, policeman, parent, parliamentarian, pilot, or toll booth operator—must always remain in submission to some other authority; namely, whoever authorized it. This was true of Israel’s king (Deut 17). More profoundly, it proved true of the incarnate Son. Jesus only did what the divine Father told him to do (John 5:19, 30; 12:49) and so proved himself worthy of all authority in heaven and earth (Matt 28:18).

Good & bad authority

Keeping all these lessons about what authority is in mind, we can distinguish between good and bad forms of authority.

• Good authority creates life, while bad authority harms and steals it.
• Good authority stays in its lanes, while bad authority does not.
• Good authority seeks wisdom, while bad authority trusts only itself.
• Good authority makes itself vulnerable and absorbs whatever costs it can, while bad authority only imposes costs on others.
• Good authority submits to a higher authority, while bad authority rejects whatever rules, purposes, or boundaries the authorizing agent imposes.

Bad authority, in that regard, is self-generated, self-focused, and narcissistic. Never place a person in a position of authority, in other words, if he or she doesn’t know how to submit.⁴

Spiritual authority & institutionalism

If authority is an authorization—a moral license to exercise power—what is spiritual authority?

Authority as institutionally conferred

Before answering that, consider as a comparison what people mean when they refer to “medical” authority or “legal” authority. In both cases, the adjective speaks to the scope and the basis of that authority. To say a doctor possesses medical authority means he is authorized to address medical matters—that is the scope of his authority. And it means that his authority depends upon a medically recognized and agreed-upon basis, such as licensure by the American Medical Association, as well as the legal framework created by a host of public health laws. Likewise, to say lawyers and judges possess legal authority mean they are authorized to take legal actions (that’s the scope) by virtue of their licensure by a state bar, as well as by the larger framework of constitutions, statues, administrative agency regulations, and the precedents established by various court decisions (that’s the basis).

Furthermore, notice that in both examples the basis and scope of authority depends upon a publicly recognized institutional framework. Why is that important? Remember what authority is: a moral license or right to exercise power. A moral license cannot be self-manufactured. We cannot confer moral prerogatives upon ourselves. Only delusional dictators, postmodern philosophers, and rambunctious toddlers believe otherwise, all of whom happily confer moral authority upon themselves whenever they please. Such is the way of atomistic individualism. Rather, every legitimate authority—whether the adjective out front is medical, legal, civil, workplace, parental, academic, or spiritual—must possesses a moral basis, and that moral basis must be conferred.

Typically, this conferral—or authorization—occurs through a publicly recognizable and recognized rule structure, which is what an institution is: a rule structure. Such institutions or rule structures establish the terms, responsibilities, rights, and limits of any given authority—its scope. Returning to the example of medical authority, federal statutes create a national medical association, which in turn grants licensure to hospitals and doctors. So with state bar associations and lawyers.

To speak of any authority outside of an institutional framework, in other words, turns that authority into something unbound, unrestricted, unchecked, uncontrollable. It treats that authority as narcissistically self-generated, making it profoundly—here’s one more “un” word—unsafe.

Today’s anti-institutionalism

Turning to the topic of spiritual authority, then, the first matter worthy of our attention is our Western context and society’s widespread anti-institutional impulses.

We call ourselves “spiritual, not religious”; meaning, we want to appeal to spiritual realities, but we’re reluctant to institutionalize them by subjecting them to a so-called religious authority. Ask the average Western citizen about any spiritual authorities in his or her life, and chances are you will hear the name of a favorite wellness author, a yoga instructor, or a talk show host like Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey herself speaks for many when she remarks, “I have church with myself: I have church walking down the street. I believe in the God force that lives inside all of us, and once you tap into that, you can do anything.”⁵ Notice that the institution of the “church” is entirely subjectivized and individualized in her rendering.

The Christian version of the anti-institutional “spiritual, not religious” mantra is something like, “I love Jesus, but not the church.”⁶ We, too, like spiritual-sounding language, such as talk of a personal relationship with Jesus. But clunky institutional topics like church membership, church discipline, or fencing the Table can feel unspiritual and legalistic to us.

In my experience of teaching church leaders for two decades, even the average church leader has difficulty explaining church authority or pastoral authority. Ask about either and they’ll sheepishly offer, “The authority to teach?” Follow up the first question with a second: “So what’s the difference between a Christian friend teaching you the Bible on a weeknight and the pastor teaching it on Sunday? Don’t both moments depend on the authority of the Bible itself?” They’ll respond with a blank face. Biblical authority, in other words, Christians understand. But pastoral authority and church authority? Are they something different?

Contemporary definitions of spiritual authority

When we turn to formal Christian definitions of “spiritual authority,” these same anti-institutional, individualistic instincts show up. No mention will be made of church structures.

One Christian author defines spiritual authority as “the God-given right to receive and use God’s power that flows from the indwelling Holy Spirit.”⁷ His definition sounds similar to Winfrey’s: “I believe in the God force that lives inside all of us, and once you tap into that, you can do anything.” The only difference is the Christian author names the Holy Spirit. His definition rightly points to the divine basis for this so-called spiritual authority, but he leaves it to every individual to define for him- or herself what the scope of that authority might be, based on a subjective sense of God’s power within. Authority is not an office with rights, responsibilities, and limits that are imposed upon a leader, but a kind of charismatic power. The risk, of course, is that that charismatic power and its claims become self-defining. Spiritual authority starts to look like a baptized version of what Alisdair MacIntyre labels emotivism or Carl Trueman calls individual expressivism.

Here’s another example from another Christian author on this topic. Notice how he explicitly denies the institutional dynamic:

Spiritual authority, unlike secular authority, is not rooted in position. An officer in the army or the president of a corporation has authority by virtue of his or her office. Spiritual authority, however (even though it may be associated with an office in the church, or one’s position as a parent), is actually rooted in one’s gift. Paul relied on “the authority the Lord gave me” (13:10) in his dealings with the Corinthians.⁸

First, this author creates a false antithesis between gift and office, even though an office is a gift. Second, he ignores the fact that Paul occupied a distinct, non-repeatable, non-universal office—the office of apostle, which, ironically, Paul calls a gift (Eph 4:8, 11). Third, by locating authority in one’s internal gift and not in a churchly office, this author effectively subjectivizes authority. He turns it into a passion and a demand which one soul unilaterally imposes upon the world, like the obstreperous young men I knew in seminary who declared themselves “called” into ministry by the Holy Spirit and were unwilling to be gainsaid by their elders.

Historical views of spiritual authority

Meanwhile, tackling the topic of spiritual authority in the history of the Christian church yields a different picture.

Spiritual authority in the ancient & medieval church

The exact phrase “spiritual authority” is not common,⁹ but the concept is—with two differences. First, the historical discussions tie spiritual authority to an institutional framing, as with phrases like “ecclesiastical authority” or “priestly authority.” Second and relatedly, the historical conversation concerns the relationship between the government and the church, not the relationship between the church and the individual, as in the discussion concerning anti-institutionalism above.

For instance, Pope Gelasius I offered his two-swords doctrine in the late fifth century, which distinguished the civil and ecclesial authorities—royal authority versus the priesthood. He argued that each should remain in its own domain. The emperor should be over “laws,” “public discipline,” and “trivialities.” The priest, he said, was responsible for “God’s work,” “the causes of salvation,” “the reception and due administration of the sacraments,” “religious matters,” and “venerable mysteries.”¹⁰

To be sure, the boundaries and prerogatives of the spiritual authority of the church and its officers were continually contested. This contest between prince and pope provided one of the principal dramas of the middle ages. In 1302, for example, Pope Boniface VIII reformulated the two-swords doctrine in his Unam Sanctum by giving both swords to the church, explaining that kings and soldiers might brandish the temporal sword “at the will and by the permission of the priest.” It pronounced “temporal authority subject to spiritual,” meaning that when “the earthly power err, it shall be judged by the spiritual power” and not the other way around.¹¹

On the other hand, King Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy of 1534 did just the opposite. It named the king the supreme head of the Church of England, making him the final civil and spiritual authority. That title continues to this day. King Charles is the head of the church.

Yet, however those boundaries were drawn at any given moment, Christians from the time of Christ tied spiritual authority in some form or fashion to the church and its officers.

The rise of the supremacy of the individual

Yet somewhere in between the late middle ages and today, Christians began to detach their view of spiritual authority from the church and began to locate it the individual. As such, a second conversation joins the first. Not only are various authorities pitted against one another, such as the spiritual against the political. All authorities began to be pitted against the individual and the individual conscience.

In many respects, this was a consequence of the Enlightenment. Epistemologically, Rene Descartes began the journey by intentionally doubting all external sources of knowledge. Never mind what the Bible, the priest, my teacher, my father, or anyone else says is true: What can I figure out on my own? Politically, names like John Locke began the work of dismantling the divine right of kings and resting political authority on the consent of the governed. Economically, Adam Smith and others began the capitalist project of shifting authority to the individual consumer.

One by one, all of the traditional forms of authority were toppled: church, king, the village elders, parents, tradition, the bourgeoisie, or factory owners, and eventually science, philosophy, words, the media, and even our gender. Only the individual conscience was left standing. Skepticism toward any and every authority besides “me” became the reigning worldview in Western culture.

Protestantism’s impact on authority

Beyond the impact of the Enlightenment, Roman Catholic critics sometimes point to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on the supreme authority of Scripture, the priesthood of believers, religious liberty, and the individual conscience as responsible for the deconstruction of all authority and the moral chaos engendered by an anti-institutional atomistic individualism.¹²

Church authority, said Martin Luther, didn’t belong principally to popes or bishops, but to the new covenant priesthood, that is, to every member of the church. Any believer, therefore, could baptize in a pinch: “In cases of necessity any one [sic] can baptize and give absolution, which would be impossible unless we were all priests.”¹³ Or interpret Scripture: “An ordinary man may have true understanding; why then should we not follow him” against any errors of popes or bishops?¹⁴ Or reprove the pope or any erring Christian: “But if I am to accuse him before the Church, I must bring the Church together.”¹⁵

Meanwhile, Luther exalted the personal conscience over and against every institutional authority outside of Scripture. He famously remarked in his Diet of Worms speech, “I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the council” wherever “they have fallen into error … if I am not convinced by proof from Holy Scripture.” After all, “it cannot be either safe or honest for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.”¹⁶

From a Roman Catholic perspective, such remarks by Luther break the connection between faith and church authority. According to the Reformation-era (Tridentine) Roman Catholic Church, there is no salvation outside the institutional church. Salvation depends upon submission to the institutional church through the person of a priest or bishop. To deny the institutional church’s authority, therefore, is to damn oneself.

By exalting the individual conscience over and against the institutional church, says the Roman Catholic critic, Protestants effectively did away with church authority altogether. Protestants left themselves, therefore, with the vague anti-institutional, expressivist versions of spiritual authority that sound as much like Oprah as anything from a theology book.

That said, the Roman Catholic critique is misguided. Protestant theology has consistently offered a robust doctrine of church authority. Perhaps a corrupted, nominalized Protestantism dismisses a role for the church over and against the individual. Yet one could choose from a thousand examples to demonstrate the robust role Protestantism gives to the institutional church, such as the Westminster Assembly’s debates on the topic.¹⁷ Furthermore, the Roman Catholic critique presumes that the only legitimate use of church authority is to tie salvation to submission to the church. But there are other ways to construe church authority, as I’ll explain in a moment.

Spiritual authority in our present day

Today, conversations about authority have to toggle back and forth between the spiritual vs. political conversation and the church vs. the individual-conscience conversation.

Our predicament: dismissal of authority

Not only that, we should recognize the strong bias that our cultural intuitions bear toward trusting the individual over and against any form of external authority, spiritual or otherwise.

Protestant Christians several centuries ago would not have batted an eye when the preacher fenced the Table. Today, the idea feels outlandish to some: “How dare a church tell a sincere Christian whether or not he can take the Supper?!” Further, any attempt to carefully patrol the boundaries of the church in the name of “meaningful membership” or “covenant membership” feels heavy-handed. And instruction on church discipline sounds beyond the pale.

As such, Christians today feel reluctant to give quarter to assertions of “church authority” or “pastoral authority” beyond judgments or decisions we already agree with, which is to say, we effectively dismiss the substance of church authority altogether. Instead, we turn spiritual authority into every individual’s internal sense of God’s work within, as in the contemporary definitions above.

Our cultural intuitions bias us toward recognizing the dangers of authoritarianism. We fail to spot the ditch on the other side of the road; namely, the ditch of moral chaos and rampant individualism. Individualism overlooks the doctrine of original sin, which is to say, the corruption of every individual human being.

We need community and are built for community, and the formation of community always requires authority.

The solution: good authority

What Christians of every tradition should be able to agree upon is that, while authoritarianism is one problem, so is the unconstrained, narcissistic individual who defines true spirituality according to his own lights. No church and no Christian community can be formed when every individual only does “what is right in his own eyes” (Judg 21:25).

Furthermore, the solution to bad authority is not no authority, but good authority. Good authority, I said a moment ago, creates life, seeks wisdom, stays in its lane, absorbs the cost—even the cost of others’ sins—and always submits to a higher authority. Not only that, but rescue from a bad authority also comes from good authorities. Just ask the abused child, the assaulted woman, the abused church member, or the oppressed minority. Even the king of kings used his rule to rescue a people from humanity’s greatest enemies, sin and death (Mark 10:45).

If they hope to be faithful to the Bible, Christians must always keep both eyes open, one eye fixed on good authority and one on bad. By this token, a right view of good spiritual authority makes room for both the individual and for the church, because both can be right and both can be wrong.

The purpose of the church’s spiritual authority

How then should we understand a rightly ordered spiritual and ecclesial authority?

The ecclesial shape of salvation

Step one in understanding the spiritual authority that a church should play in the Christian’s life is to recognize the corporate nature of Christian conversion. Notice how the Apostle Peter places the individual and the corporate aspects of conversion into a parallel position:

Once you were not a people, but now you are a people;
Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Pet 2:10)

When Christians today tell their conversion testimonies, too often their stories only emphasize the second line. They recount how they were sinning, but then God showed them mercy. They moved from “not mercy” to “mercy.” Yet Peter’s version should draw Christians to also include the first line, and how their salvation also involved moving from “not a people” to a “people.”

Paul offers the same story in Ephesians 2. The first half of that chapter recounts the individual’s vertical reconciliation with God: God “raised us up and seated us in the heavenlies” (v. 6). The second half then highlights the horizontal reconciliation that follows: “you who were far off have been brought near” (v. 13).

The metaphor of adoption captures the idea: To be adopted by parents means gaining new brothers and sisters, to boot. In the Scriptures, conversion signs the sinful individual up for a family photograph, converting the “me” into an “us.”

God always designates a people for himself

The entire storyline of Scriptures also places a stark line in between God’s people and not-God’s people.

• The boundaries of Eden, and the fact that God eventually “excommunicated” Adam and Eve from it, delineated those who possess his presence.
• With Noah’s ark, God drew a line of judgment between “his people” and “not his people.”
• He did the same with his people in Egypt by placing them in Goshen and sparing them from the later plagues.
• In the wilderness, God marked off those inside from those outside the camp.
• So, too, being inside the land of Israel indicated blessing while being exiled (reminiscent of Adam and Eve) meant being excluded from his presence.

God always maintained an inside and an outside, and he placed his name on the people inside: “you are my people, I am your God.”

God’s Old Testament people, then, were always identified physically and geographically—in Eden, in the Ark, in Goshen, in the camp, in the land. Yet he also identified them through signs of the covenant. Through his covenant with Abraham, he marked them off with circumcision. Through his covenant with Moses, he marked them off with Sabbath-keeping, sacrifice, and obedience to the law.

Identifying & instructing kingdom-citizens

But the old covenant did not keep the people from sacrificing to other gods. They disobeyed his law. They were not holy unto the Lord.

God therefore promised a new covenant “for the sake of his name” (Ezek 36:22–27). No longer would the people of the new covenant be identified by either the signs of the old covenant or by their dwelling in a land. Instead, these people would be born again by God’s Word and God’s Spirit (see Ezek 37:1–12), and they would travel into all nations (Matt 28:18).

The question then becomes: How does the world identify a people who are born again by God’s invisible Spirit? Am I a citizen of Christ’s kingdom? Are you? How do we know who “we” are? How do you exercise border patrol or ask for identity papers for a kingdom of people with no borders?

Answer: through gathering those people together, baptizing them, and granting them the Lord’s Supper. That gathered, baptized, and Supper-receiving church makes the invisible, universal church locally visible, so that it can be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears.

What then is the purpose of church authority? God has granted gathered churches the authority not to save people ex opere operato, like the historic Roman Catholic Church teaches, but to identify those who are saved and to teach them everything Christ commands (Matt 28:18–20). Church authority doesn’t serve the purposes of salvation (at least not directly), but of identification and instruction.

What is spiritual authority?

With all that in mind, let’s start this conversation over. How should we define spiritual authority?

The nature of spiritual authority

We can define it broadly and narrowly.

Following the pattern set with medical and legal authority, we could broadly say that spiritual authority is the authority to address spiritual or religious matters based on some type of spiritual, divine, or transcendent word, a word ordinarily ensconced in a tradition or institutional structure. That institutional structure might be as simple as the village shaman’s rituals for anointing his successor. It might be as elaborate as the Church of Rome with its magisterium and college of cardinals.

Defined broadly like this, we could say that parents exercise a form of spiritual authority over their children when they address their children on behalf of God by tying their words to his words. It’s one thing for parents to say to their three-year-old, “It’s time for bed.” It’s a slightly different thing to say, “It’s time for bed, and God has instructed you to honor me.” The latter statement adds an explicitly spiritual element to the parent’s authority.

In this broad sense, then, we can say that spiritual authority is exercised any time an authority figure explicitly identifies his or her will with God’s will.

Narrowly, however, spiritual authority centers on the authority of Scripture, the church, and the elders or pastors. Scripture’s authority is supreme and legislative. It is God’s Word and tells us what God’s law is. It explains everything we need for salvation and for the life that pleases God (1 Tim 3:14–17). It explains the principles by which God will judge the world. Spiritual authority then is the combined work of Scripture, the church, and pastors, particularly as pastors and churches mediate and apply the authority of Scripture.

The church’s judicial & ambassadorial authority

But how then do we relate the perfect and supreme authority of Scripture with the church’s imperfect authority, a derivative authority that must always remain under and subservient to Scripture?

Theologians in the past have described the church’s authority as “declarative and ministerial.” For example, James Bannerman writes,

When Church power is employed ministerially to declare the truth of God in a question of faith, or ministerially to judge in a question of government or discipline, the declaration of doctrine and the decision of law are to be received and submitted to on two grounds: first, and chiefly, because they are agreeable to the Word of God; but second, and in a subordinate sense, because they are emitted by the Church, as an ordinance of God instituted for that very purpose.¹⁸

I affirm entirely what theologians like Bannerman are affirming with the language of “ministerial” and “declarative,” but I don’t use it. The word “ministerial” is lost on people today, and the word “declarative” feels underspecified. After all, there are many kinds of declarations: romantic, legal, a promise between friends.

What kind of declarations do churches make? If Scripture’s authority is supreme and legislative, like the words of an absolute monarch, a church’s declarations, and therefore the church’s authority, are judicial and ambassadorial, like the words of a judge and an ambassador who work for the king.

A king declares the law. But then that law needs to be applied in an endless variety of circumstances. A judge does the interpretive work of considering those circumstances, studying the law, and rending a judgment that seeks to faithfully apply the law to those circumstances. His words don’t legislate; they apply.

Furthermore, his judicial declaration does not merely transmit information, like a law professor’s lecture transmits information. More than that, a judge’s gavel-pounding declaration actually binds people: “guilty” or “not guilty.” This is what Jesus intended for both the apostles and local churches to do when he told them to pick up the keys of the kingdom and “bind on earth what will be bound in heaven and loose on earth what will be loosed in heaven” (Matt 16:19; 18:18). He was telling them to wield a judicial authority on behalf of the kingdom of heaven.

Insofar as a church’s judgments speak for the kingdom of heaven, they also possess an ambassadorial nature. The church’s judicial declarations have no bearing in the law courts of your nation or mine. Rather, like the words of an ambassador who represents a king, so a church’s declarations represent the judgments of another kingdom, the kingdom of heaven. They speak for the Father and Son seated in heaven. This is what Jesus means when he explains the power of the keys by concluding, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matt 18:20). He doesn’t mean he hovers in the room like a mystical fog. He means the church flies his flag and speaks for him. (Notice also that the language of “two or three” is Old Testament judicial language; see Deut 19:15.)

When a church then baptizes people “into the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit” (Matt 28:19), they are effectively declaring to the nations of the earth, “Hear ye, hear ye, on behalf of the king of kings, we declare to you that this individual belongs to Christ and is a citizen of his heavenly kingdom.” Again, they represent that kingdom like an ambassador.

Insofar as Protestant Christians dismiss the authority of the church and individualize their Christianity, they give legs to the Roman Catholic critique. Yet tying salvation to submission to the church as Roman Catholicism does is not the only way to construe church authority. The Roman way effectively treats biblical and church authority as equally supreme and legislative. A better and more biblical way is to treat only the Bible as supreme and legislative, and church authority as judicial and ambassadorial.

Here’s a practical illustration of church authority being exercised. Imagine that on a Tuesday evening, you share the gospel with a non-Christian neighbor, saying, “Jesus, the eternal Son of God, died and rose again for the forgiveness of sin.” These words—spoken in that informal setting—carry the full authority of Scripture. That is to say, God will hold your neighbor accountable on the day of judgment based on his or her response to this proclamation. Now suppose you repeat those exact words from the pulpit during your church’s Sunday gathering. The congregation affirms them with a nod. In this context, your declaration once again bears the authority of Scripture, but it also assumes an additional dimension: the authority of the church.

Within the gathered body of believers, such words take on a judicial function, publicly affirming and uniting the congregation around the gospel. You are not merely stating that the message is true; all of you together are affirming that belief in this gospel is constitutive of the church’s identity. It’s the message that binds you together as a church.

Moreover, this judicial act bears an ambassadorial function: It publicly proclaims to all—both believers and non-believers—that this is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Church authority through agreement

Luther was entirely correct. We cannot submit our faith either to a pastor or to any church wherever they have fallen into error. Scripture alone is supreme. As such, it is neither safe nor honest for a Christian to speak against his or her conscience, where not convinced by proof from Holy Scripture.

Still, how will churches form unless someone draws a line in between the inside and the outside of belief and obedience? Individuals err, too! Arius might have stood by his conscience in arguing that Jesus is not fully God, but Arius was damnably wrong. He should have been excluded.

Likewise, what if your answer to the questions “Who is Jesus?” or “What is the gospel?” or “What does it mean to obey?” are different than mine? Am I forced to allow you to join my church, even if I disagree with you? No. The freedom of the conscience works in two directions at once. It means a Christian can ultimately reject the authority of a church, but it also means a church can reject the individual when they don’t agree with that individual. If you claim, for instance, that Jesus is the greatest of all God’s creations, then you and I do not agree on the gospel. If you claim that baptism is not required for membership in the church, then you and I do not agree on the obedience that Christ requires. In both cases, therefore, my church would not admit you to membership.

The white-hot center of church authority, it turns out, is the agreement of believers—agreement on both the meaning of Scripture as well as on who is a believer: “If two of you agree on anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven” (Matt 18:19). Church authority does not depend upon the generation-by-generation succession of bishops. It does not depend upon pastoral ordination. Rather, it depends upon two or three Christians—or two or three hundred—gathering as a church and agreeing on who Jesus is and what he requires: “For where two or three gather in my name …” That gathering presumes agreement upon who he is.

The pastor’s authority as instructive & directive

How do we then relate the authority of Scripture and a church to the authority of pastors or elders?

In many Christian traditions, the elders exercise the church’s authority on the church’s behalf. The whole church possesses authority, says many a book of church order, but the elders exercise it. In such traditions, the elders’ authority is “ministerial and declarative,” as many put it, or judicial and ambassadorial, as I put it.

Yet as an elder-led congregationalist, I believe the elders’ job is to instruct and direct the church in its own use of authority. So if the Bible’s authority is supreme and legislative, and the church’s authority is judicial and ambassadorial, so the elders’ authority is instructive and directive. Elders teach and give oversight by directing the church in how they should conduct their affairs.

For instance, Paul plays the part of a good elder or pastor when he tells the Corinthian congregation to remove the adulterous man from their midst. He tells the church he has already passed “judgment” on the man (1 Cor 5:3). But Paul’s judgment did not effectively remove the man. The church still needed to act. Therefore, he called the church to exercise the same judgment he had exercised (v. 12). Paul’s work was to instruct and direct. The church’s work was to act in judgment.

Summary & application

What is spiritual authority?

Broadly speaking, people exercise spiritual authority any time an authority figure explicitly identifies his or her authoritative will with God’s will.

Narrowly speaking, spiritual authority belongs to the Bible, churches, and pastors. It’s the authority that Scripture asserts over every person’s life, particularly as Scripture is mediated and applied in the lives of believers by churches and pastors.

This spiritual work distinguishes what the church does from what the state does. While the officers of government should likewise seek to represent God in some sense in their work, they don’t do so as his designated, ambassadorial spokesmen. Governmental officers do not possess the keys of the kingdom to judicially declare the what and the who of the gospel—what counts as a right gospel confession and who should be treated as a true gospel confessor. A government’s job is to keep the civil peace, not declare the way to a heavenly peace.

To be sure, Christians do not depend directly on church authority for their salvation. For that reason, they should remain ever vigilant and be willing to defy a church when it departs from the Word of God. That said, Christians should ordinarily submit to the authority of their churches and pastors for the sake of obedience, sanctification, and recognition as fellow saints in the kingdom of heaven.

Practically, therefore, churches should practice meaningful membership. They should insist on baptism before membership and make sure everyone joining the church understands the gospel. They should practice church discipline when members pursue sin unrepentantly. They should also fence the Table. Paul teaches that churches, like Adam in the garden, Noah in the Ark, and Israel in the land, should draw a bright line in between themselves and the world (2 Cor 6:14–7:1).

And we should do all of this for the sake of love—love for the members, for our non-Christian neighbors, and for Christ. After all, the church shows the love of Christ not by mimicking the world, but by living distinctly from it. What good is salt if it loses its saltiness? And what use is a light hidden under a basket (Matt 5:13–16)?

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