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10.02.2016 Feature Article

AUTHORITY AND THE BIBLE

AUTHORITY AND THE BIBLE
10.02.2016 LISTEN

Authority is a word that makes most people think of law and order, direction and restraint, command and control, dominance and submission, respect and obedience. How, I wonder, do you react to such ideas? Have they any place in your vision of the life that is good and sweet? If so, you are unusual. One tragedy of our time is that, having these associations, authority has become almost a dirty word in the Western world, while opposition to authority in schools, families, and society generally is cheerfully accepted as something that is at least harmless and perhaps rather fine.

How is it that so many today will tolerate expressions of defiance and disorder in society that a century ago would have been thought intolerable? Whence came the passionate permissiveness that has made a shambles of so many homes, schools, and individual lives? What is going on here? What is happening to us (J. I. Packer, Truth & Power: The Place of Scripture in the Christian Life), 11.

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