Straight teaching on authority

“…….how should the church hold authority?”

“How did it ever? This will lead us into Church history, and the fact that Christ gave the Church His authority, after He had ascended to the Father. It held this authority exclusively until the rebellion in the 1500’s. Then it became (and still is today), every man for himself….however he interprates scripture, that what it says..that’s what it means, with no one (on earth) to approve or disapprove.”

The words quoted above are from a comment left on the same blog as my previous post, by yet another brother. It sparked me to respond with the following thoughts, which I'd also like to share here…

This is a rather simplistic look at what the freedom of a Christian means, and it seems to me, a little scornful.

How should the Church hold authority?
I’ll tell you how.
In all meekness and humility, insisting on the truth of the gospel, adding nothing, taking nothing away, being answerable in all things to the Lord who is also the Word of God, to the same Jesus whom we meet in the four gospels, in the book of Revelation, and in the apostolic kerygma of the epistles. When the Church holds authority in any other way, it is bending the truth to fit its requirements, or worse.
My former pastor taught, on the basis of the church fathers, this truth, when asked ‘What does the Orthodox Church teach about…?’

“The Church has no teachings, it only hands over (the meaning of παραδωσις) what it has received from Christ and the apostles.”

This is straight teaching.

Christ gave the Church authority to do what?
To forgive sins, to reconcile enemies, to baptise all nations into His Body, to preach the good news, that He is risen from the dead, by death trampling down death, and to those in the tombs granting life.

It didn’t hold this authority exclusively until the 1500’s, unless by that you mean that that the Papal church of the West (Roman Catholicism) was in full “control” of the whole Church—which it was not, and never had been.

The excesses of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation did nothing to harm the purity of the truth contained in the Holy Scriptures.
For everyone who seeks to be a disciple, there isn’t any cause for schism or heresy, because the Word of God, contrary to former and current opinion, is not difficult to understand, nor is the way of the gospel life impossible to live.

When the churchly institutions dogmatize apart from the Word, fantasy creeps in and takes hold, producing in the rebellious opposite fantasies, and the devil rejoices.

Everyone who knows Jesus’ voice knows when He is speaking, in or out of “church.”

Every disciple in church knows when true authority is being wielded, and when it is false that is being foisted on us. It’s always still our choice, it’s always up to us, to witness for Jesus, for the Truth, wherever we are.