Authority Structures

"Question authority" became a slogan in the '60's and a principle ever since. What is authority? Authority is defined as "the right to control," essentially. That's plain enough, but who is in authority?

I'm sure you can see quite clearly that we are surrounded by authority. There is the authority of the policeman who derives his authority from the legal system which derives its authority from, in our case, the Constitution which derives ... well, you get the idea. There are hierarchies of authority. There are also spheres of authority. A parent has authority over their kids that others don't have, even while the parents are under authority as well. Scripture talks about wives submitting to their husbands, putting the husband in a sphere of authority that no other man has. Your boss has authority in your life, but that sphere only extends as far as your work goes. Everybody has authority in something and everyone is under authority.

These authority structures, of course, can cause problems. When Authority A tells you to do X and Authority B tells you to do Y, which will you do? When God tells you to preach the gospel and human authorities tell you not to, which will you choose? These structures have spheres of influence and levels of hierarchy that need to be defined and observed. We Christians understand God to be the ultimate authority -- the one exception to the "everyone is under authority" rule, but humans as a group typically regard themselves as the ultimate authority and it never fails that the commands from God will certainly clash with the commands from self.

We are all under authority -- multiple authorities. To determine which to follow, we need to determine if they hold authority in the sphere they are exercising. For instance, a boss has no authority in your home; a president has no authority in your church. We need to determine the hierarchy in that authority. Does this command violate a higher one? And at the bottom, we need to realize that our standard hierarchy begins with "me" as ultimate authority, and that's upside down. We can question authority. We can and should certainly question our own. We can question authorities like teachers or police officers or mayors or governors. But I hope you felt, as I listed those, an ascending caution where, as they fell higher in the hierarchy of authority, they demanded more respect, both in terms of the threat doing so might bring as well as the weight of their office. At the top, then, it becomes rather unwise to question God's authority. Like we do almost every day.