Robert Webber grounds authority in the apostolic teaching, and most Christians would of course agree. The apostles were given authority by Christ, and all other authority derives from that. Here Webber veers ever so slightly into the “tradition is equal to written scripture” view.
"Authority in the early medieval era, like in the ancient church, was rooted in the apostolic tradition and succession….while the apostles were the original authority in the church, a writing of Augustine or another Father of the church, or a creed or council that extended or expounded an idea in keeping with apostolic teaching enjoyed a kind of apostolic authority." P177
I do not mean to read too much into that. His view is likely not equivalent to what Catholicism is often accused of by Protestants. One has to nuance one’s objections in this regard. The problem with tradition is not that it exists, but centers around the question of when it begins to bend the scripture, when it begins to add to or take away from what the apostles clearly wrote. And Augustine was one who indicated quite strongly his own writingw were not as authoritative as scripture.
Webber makes much of tradition though, and finds the horrible culprit to be convicted in recent evangelical thought to be reason.
"The modern era of authority reflects the rationalism and individualism of the period. The rise of rationalism in the hands of modern liberals relocated authority from scripture to reason. …The liberals dismissed the creeds and confessions as pious expressions of a believer’s experience with God and argued they have no correspondence with realtiy (what Lindbeck calls the ‘experiential-expressive’ model. On the other hand, the conservatives argued that creeds and confessions were to be understood literally as corresponding exactly with the reality they represent, (what Lindbeck calls ‘propositionalism’) By the end of the modern era liberals and conservatives were locked into a hopeless debate with no way out because of their commitment to the rationalist method…”
I have long bristled at the way so many fail to define the terms “rational” and “rationalistic”. They are not equivalent. And Webber seems to have fallen into that trap. One must, in order to avoid the rationalism of the enlightenment, have a skeptical eye toward all things that claim to be “rational”. If there are conservatives who are committed to “the rationalist method”, I’ve never known of them or read them. Yet Webber claims:
"The primary problem inherited from the enlightenment for both liberals and conservatives and evangelicals is the authority given to reason. Rationalism shows up in two areas: the authority of reason over Scripture; and the authority of reason over the creeds." P178
Then Webber makes a very bold claim:
"In the postmodern world the impasse between liberals and evangelicals will be broken as both abandon rationalism for a canonical reading of scripture. This postcritical approach to scripture will allow it to be read as a narrative rooted in God’s inspiration and recognized by the communal authority of the church.” P178
Notice that such a statement makes no value distinction between evangelicals and liberals. Both are committed to rationalism. Both are equally in error. The separation between them is an “impasse” that will be broken not by one side winning or losing but by both embracing a new epistemology. It is as if those who deny the deity of Christ, the virgin birth and the resurrection are only as misguided as those who do not. And both sides will somehow find perfect harmony if they would just abandon rationalism and embrace the interpretation of the community. I find this hard to fathom that Webber would make such an obvious false statement of equivalence.
But he truly does mean to separate faith from reason.
"Throughout the history of the church, Scripture has always been regarded as the inspired and revealed Word of God. Therefore, its trustworthiness has been an assumed rather than debated aspect of faith. However the enlightenment, with its emphasis on truth as known through reason rather than faith introduced a watershed event in the attitude toward scripture." P179
Truth then must be known through faith and not through reason. There is a wall between faith and reason? I don't think that is what Webber meant, but it is what he seems to have written. And what was the watershed moment? Apparently the point at which certain individuals sought to reasonably conclude that the scripture dealt accurately with historical events. This somehow betrayed a better, more mystical way of approaching scripture.
“The bible, removed from a subjective experience of the Spirit, became instead an objective book to be studied quite apart from subjective experience.” P179
Most everyone in the objectivist camp would agree that without some connection to the subjective “illumination” of the Spirit, scripture would remain a “dead letter”. But at no time in history that I, as a layman, am aware of, did the church’s conception of scripture posit subjective experience as the cornerstone of faith or dismiss as irrelevant a reasonable connection to history and the observable universe.
I said at the outset that I liked much of what Bob Webber wrote in “The Younger Evangelicals” and in “Worship Old and New”. In fact, I like some of what he says in “Ancient Future Faith.” I don’t doubt his faith, his orthodoxy, his sincerity, his love for the church and his God. But while I believe Webber was orthodox himself, the system of thought he seems to espouse above makes it very difficult to sustain orthodoxy for more than a generation. He has virtually severed the faith from any sort of rational foundation. It is not that he calls into question any Orthodox doctrines; it is that he calls into question the very notion of reality. It is not that he proposes a new, novel view of Christianity, it is that he has accepted a completely different universe, one in which objective reality cannot correspond to language, one in which reason and faith are seen to be at odds, and as an inevitable result, faith must be seen as non-rational, mysticism must take precedence over reason.
I speak not merely of Webber, but of a seemingly massive, growing cloud of thought that pervades Western thinking and is infecting Western theology - and I use the following crude analogy. Imagine you are boarding a plane. The pilot announces the usual instructions, “Welcome to Pan-Universe Airlines. Today we will be flying at 22,000 feet, weather is good, we should be on schedule and arrive at our destination on time…” Up to this point, you would be calm and disinterested – the usual preflight talk. Everything seems normal. But then if you were to hear from the pilot, “Oh, by the way, I don’t believe the law of gravity or aerodynamics are universal truths, because those are constructs of the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, but don’t worry, we’ll be fine”, I assume most of us would be more than a little concerned. Not that we doubt the law of gravity. That belief in gravity is the very reason we would be concerned.
That is how I feel every time I hear or read of another evangelical, mainline or emergent leader quoting Lindbeck as the key to making Christianity palatable to postmodern culture. Most don’t outright deny the essential truths of the faith, they only posit a completely different reality from the one I’ve lived in for 48 years. That’s all. No denial of doctrine, just an alternate universe. And that is troublesome. Do words like “faith”, “God”, “Christ” and “Salvation” mean the same thing in their universe as they do in mine? That's the question. But because truth is a cultural construct, there is no way to even intelligently discuss what the answer might be. Like those around the Tower of Babel, we can no longer communicate and must go our separate ways. Christian unity becomes more of an impossibility than ever before.
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