This post contains thoughts and insights contained in the original post (linked below) by Shaun Wheeler. The base subject is, in my words, what authority does the bible have if it is not seen as fully dictated by God and applicable for eternity. Here is the link to the very enlightening thread.
What remains of scriptural authority after infallibility and univocality collapse begun by Schaun Wheeler on Dec 30, 2025
Extracts from the thread are below.
Wheeler’s Opening Paragraph and some that follow:
I grew up in and still belong to a religious tradition that largely treats the Bible (plus some other books of scripture) as authoritative. My own experience plus my understanding of critical scholarship doesn’t so much allow me to maintain that particular strain of my faith tradition in my own thinking today, but I do devote a lot of thought to the question of whether and to what extent any text can, in any sense, be considered to have normative weight. Although I’ve largely abandoned the dogma that scripture is some direct download of God’s will onto paper, the intuition and inclination is still in me to see the Bible as having a divine origin, in some sense of that term.
I’m skeptical of any approach that assumes that deity has abdicated any amount of its authority to a collection of words on a page. I’m not a fan of sola scriptura. So I seem to be looking for a view of scripture where the text can be in some sense authoritative, without positing that the text is the seat of that authority.
Wheeler quotes Benjamin Sommer’s book Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition
The divine presence in the biblical text consists not of its words but in the qol [the non-linguistic ‘voice’ or sound that precedes semantic speech] that is not yet a word, in the aleph [the silent letter, without propositional content] of God’s presence that hovers beneath the biblical text and invites it into being. The words in that text are signposts pointing toward a transcendence that cannot be apprehended, but they are not synonymous with or written by that transcendence.
He’s not, it seems to me, trying to rescue the Bible from critical scholarship; he is trying to explain how normativity can survive once revelation is no longer equated with dictation. The key move is to stop identifying revelation with textual content at all. Revelation is encounter. Using his later metaphor: it’s a nonverbal command that precedes and generates interpretation without being exhausted by it.
If revelation were identical with the words, then rejecting parts of the text would be rejecting revelation itself. But if revelation is prior to the words, then engagement with the text is always already and necessarily interpretive, and selective. I don’t actually avoid the risk of using scripture as a mirror by pretending the text is fixed, and the interpretation therefore anchored to some sort of original intended meaning. I avoid it by treating interpretation as a disciplined response to something that resists me. The text embodies prior attempts to respond faithfully to an encounter that neither I nor the text nor anyone else controls. I’m not submitting to the authority of ancient sentences; I’m entering into a chain of responses to a reality that exceeds any one response, including my own. Correction comes not from obeying propositions but from submitting my moral imagination to a tradition of interpretation that neither I nor anyone else can fully domesticate. The text confronts me precisely because it does not speak with one voice, and cannot be reduced to a single moral stance.
If the divine presence resides not in the words but in the pre-verbal summons that generates them, then authority is real but indirect. The text has normative weight not because it settles questions, but because it reliably reopens them. It presses me toward something you cannot fully articulate, by pressing me towards other people’s imperfect attempts at their own articulation. Authority resides neither in the text nor in private judgement, but in the ongoing encounter with the divine that is forced by my repeated interactions with historically-situated human responses to encounters with the divine. Scripture matters because it is a privileged archive of some, but of course not all, of those responses, not because it provides One Response To Rule Them All.
It does not tell me what to think; it insists that I think in conversation with voices, failures, and insights that are not my own, all of which (including my own contributions) are themselves responses to a reality that none of us can fully grasp. Normativity can survive the collapse of textual infallibility by relocating revelation in encounter rather than inscription. It’s authority without the idolatry of words.
———–End Extracts of Wheeler’s Opening post.———–
Extracts from responses by Charles Bledsoe.
In my view, the Bible’s “normative force” is an emergent property. The Bible, to argue a truism of historical-critical scholarship, is not an entity that came with full-blown normative force pre-installed, so to speak. Its various constituent texts acquired normative force because of how communities engaged with them; and then, subsequently, communities began to engage with them as texts possessing normative force, the standing to correct and constrain, i.e., to enjoin and enforce a mode of life. And those modes of life have yielded social and existential well-being, i.e., have sustained communities and communal flourishing; and enabled human beings to organize their lives around what Tillich would term ultimate concern and meaning.
That is, rather than being a static document that was morally authoritative from the start, the Bible is a relational process of human beings jointly creating a morally enriching existence, geared to “existential ultimacy of purpose” (to steal a line from scholar Brook Ziporyn). “Scripture” then, on this view, is this collaborative process, or living and evolving tradition, from which authority and normativity emerges. Scripture and its prescriptive standing is something that’s socially grown, not given; dialogically constructed over time, not innate.
I’ll also refer back to my previous reply in this thread and posit that God is also a factor in this process, although not a unilateral, controlling factor. From my theological perspective the cliché “Man proposes, God disposes” should be reversed. God proposes, tries to guide us toward readings and uses of scripture that are eudaimonistic (favorable to human well-being) and emancipatory (conducive to human dignity), but human reading communities have the final say on the Bible’s exegesis and application.
[This is what I believe.]
In my panentheistic process-theological version of concursive inspiration, human beings have an internal felt relation to God, they feel divine “lures”, urgings to realize ideal possibilities. But, being instances of self-creative freedom, we often form and follow our own subjective aims rather than the initiatives supplied by God. In the case of the authors of the Bible, some of what they wrote is a result of theological and ethical insight that they owed to their internal relation to God, and receptiveness to divine urgings. But, rather than being in control of it, God essentially acted as a muse for their creativity. When they weren’t listening to their divine muse sometimes they still turned out brilliant stuff, but sometimes what they produced was flawed, context-bound, and theologically dreadful. And of course, the divinely inspired content, the brilliant human contributions, and the harmful and toxic human contributions are all interwoven, making it necessary to read the Bible critically. In short, through this mechanism of internal influence God had a hand in the production of the Bible, but this influence wasn’t always operative or regnant. The Bible is predominantly human in origin.
At any rate, this is how I understand how the Bible can be a mixed bag of rubbish and revelation, of material that should be rejected and material that should be normative. This is how I “see the Bible as having a divine origin”, and at the same time being “human, all too human” (to steal a line from Nietzsche). And this is how I understand revelation being prior to, not identical to the words of the Bible; and “the divine presence” residing “not in the words but in the pre-verbal summons that generates them”, and the Bible’s resulting “indirect” but “real” “authority”.
The same process-theological theology of inspiration that constructs God’s role in the production of the Bible as a muse-like influence on human agency can also supply legitimacy to your pickings and choosings among biblical teachings and texts that have a ring of truth to you, by constructing that ring of truth as sometimes divinely inspired, a result of a felt appropriation of a divine urging, rather than always merely a matter of your fallible subjectivity and bias.
Follow-up by Wheeler
…one would need to have some sort of encounter with that divine reality in order to recognize appropriate authority. However, as mentioned, we can argue that the text operates not only as a record but also as a sort of method for facilitating that encounter.
I tend to think better via stories than propositions, and I think the Old Testament especially illustrates authority via encounter in many useful ways. In 1 Kings 19:11–13, [see quote below] for example, Elijah is told to stand on the mountain as God passes by, and a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire tear through the landscape. Each of these is associated elsewhere with divine presence, but God is said not to be “in” any of them. After these overwhelming displays comes – I love this wording from the NRSVue – “a sound of sheer silence”. And only then does Elijah cover his face, recognizing that God is present. The text goes out of its way to put God in the absence of any manifestation that can be described with words. Maybe my favorite is Job 38–42, where Job (very reasonably) asks for an explanation for his suffering – he doesn’t ask for alleviation or compensation, just for a reason. God basically tells Job to mind his own business. God throws out a series of overwhelming questions about creation, order, and power, effectively refusing to reply to Job’s question. And Job accepts it. The only thing that changed for Job between the time before God replies and the time after God replies is that Job encountered God directly.
For me, the point is that divine encounter defies language – it’s the “sound of sheer silence”. I’m reminded of a quote by George Saunders: “The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.” I see scripture as bulge in the fence of language created by various people’s encounters with the divine. It’s their attempt to put words to something that defies words, and a model for how we can throw ourselves at the fence, too.
1 Kings 19:11-12
11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake, 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.
