…before the Enlightenment, authority resided not in books, but in divinely ordained people. Authority figures taught with a kind of divine right parallel to the divine right by which kings were thought to rule. My hunch is that as we dispensed with the divine right of kings, we moved toward the divine right of individuals, enshrined in a statement like “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” We articulated and defended those human rights through constitutions. I think we did something similar in the ecclesial realm: Protestants, at least, dispensed with the divine right of popes and cardinals, and we shifted our authority to constitutions — doctrinal statements and systematic theologies — which we claimed were derived from and legitimized by the Bible. Brian McLaren ☀
Friday 19 February 2010
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