Quotes

The Authority of the Bible

Published on September 28th, 2009.

All this experience makes it plain that the authority of the word of God cannot be only the authority of a book, because no book is capable of exercising authority on the interpretation men put on it when there is no living authority to govern its readers. More exactly, since the word of God is really sovereign only insofar as he himself continues to utter it, with all the creative power that belongs to his word only when pronounced by him, this word can keep its sovereignty only where the divine presence continues to be; in other words, where the Church is not merely an abstraction drawn from the ideas contained in scriptural texts but a reality created and kept in being by the “apostolate” of the Son of God, of the living Word made flesh, prolonging himself in all times and places, in human form, by the “apostolate” of those the Son sent in his turn, as he had been sent by the Father.

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Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, trans. A. V. Littledale (Princeton: Scepter Publishers, 2001), 260-1.

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