‘THE CAPSTONE OF AUTHORITY’
Dear Friends,
Four short words. That’s all that the earliest Christian creed required to communicate the great, foundational truths of the gospel. Four words in the original Greek, a mere three words in English.
Jesus is Lord.
It’s the most foundational statement of the gospel: and it’s basic, indeed, to the way that life itself works.
Everything you need to know is packaged in the phrase. The person. His continuing work. His abiding significance.
Hearing the phrase, a Jew picked up on the person, and the blasphemous claim being made about the person. The Lord. The name of God Himself.
How dare it be said that a Johnny-come-lately, and thoroughly upstart, rabbi, from an out-in-the-sticks sort of place in the north – that He was actually no less than their glorious, covenant God! I mean, get real! A man who’d never undertaken any course of rabbinic instruction. A man who’d come out with some pretty outrageous things. A man who’d defied all their time-honoured take on the Sabbath of God. A man who’d been nailed to a criminal’s cross. A man who according to all that their Scriptures declared was plainly and wholly accursed.
‘Jesus is Lord’ to the ear of the Jew was abhorrent, heretical, sin – the ultimate blasphemous claim of any mere man to take to himself the name of the one true God.
And to the Gentile ear, accustomed to the widespread rule of Rome, the phrase was the next best thing to a treasonable offence. Why? Because as everyone knew, or as everyone everywhere knew they were bound to confess, Caesar is Lord. He and he alone ruled the roost. It wasn’t so much any claim about the person of Jesus which made the ears of the Gentile world prick up, it was His claimed significance. It was the claim to ultimate authority.
Jesus is Lord. If you valued your life, you didn’t dare come out with a phrase like that. You risked a swift imprisonment, if not a speedy death. Like not to be ‘rooting for Putin’ in the Russia of today. It was the sin of a dreadful disloyalty, a stance which would see you condemned without trial as a self-styled enemy of the state. It had to do with authority, and where that ultimate, final authority lies.
With Caesar? The state? The system? If so, you’ll confess that Caesar is lord.
Unless you’ve concluded that Jesus is Lord: not merely an interesting figure from times now long past, but God Himself, come down into a broken, bankrupt world, to put things all to right – and now risen, rampant, reigning.
Jesus is Lord. It’s a question of authority.
Even the ancient Gentile world could recognize the place of such authority. They understood the underlying logic and dynamics of authority: even a battle-hardened veteran of the great imperial war machine, even he could grasp how the whole thing worked. You have authority because you’re under authority.
The issue in the ancient world was not authority itself. The issue was where it lay. Authority itself was recognized, embraced, acknowledged: an undisputed building block of life. You might not like the way the thing was exercised. You might have wished that it could somehow lie elsewhere. You might well not agree with where that ultimate authority was found: Is Caesar lord? Is Jesus Lord?
But the thing itself, authority, was integral to how all life was lived. An authority above and beyond yourself, which laid out clear parameters within which life was lived.
Nor was that restricted to the ancient world. Across the globe, and down the years, the notion of authority was understood and recognized, right across the strata of a people’s life. In the home. In every small community. In a people’s national life. Parents, teachers, elders, leaders, right on up through lords and ladies, kings and queens and governments, until, as well you traced the source of all of the authority these others sought to exercise to something, someone, somewhere quite transcendent. The ‘gods’ was how so many in the ancient world had gropingly concluded it must be. The Lord Himself – the great, eternal, all-creating God – for those to whom that truth had been revealed.
The exercise of any real authority requires in the end a final, ultimate, top-of-the-chain authority. You only ever have authority when you yourself are under authority. That’s how the whole thing works. In much the same way as an archway simply collapses when you remove from its place the capstone, so the whole over-arching framework of authority in any nation’s life comes crumbling down when her people refuse to acknowledge and own a final and absolute authority.
And that’s where the real and deepest crisis of these days across the western world is found to have its root. It’s no longer the case that the problems we have derive from the fact that we bow at the throne of false and inadequate gods: it’s no longer the case that we’ve simply misplaced where that ultimate authority lies.
The problem now is that we’ve binned the very notion of authority. It’s that, quite strikingly, it’s that perhaps above all other things, which first has met the eye of those who’ve come here fresh from Africa. The dreadful lack of respect. The lack of respect for any in authority. In the home, in our schools, on our streets. A total culture shock.
Carl Trueman (who studied here – did his doctorate here, I think – and taught for a while in Aberdeen) published back in 2020 a hugely important book along these lines: in the book (a good 400 pages and more) he both carefully charts the way in which this ‘capstone’ of authority in the archway of our western world has been subtly and deliberately removed, and describes in frightening detail the rubble to which the fabric of our moral and spiritual life has in consequence been reduced.
Called simply ‘The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self’, it explains how an inevitable post-enlightenment drift into the philosophy of what gets termed ‘post-modernism’ has resulted in the rise of the tyranny of ‘self’. The self-indulgent ‘Samson’ of our modern western world has ripped away the shackles of authority, denying any absolutes, decrying all the mores of society, and demanding now the freedoms of the liberated self.
You can track that path to a ‘post-modern’ outlook on life and can see for yourself where it leads. All truth is only ever relative. Your truth is only as valid as that of anyone else. There are no ultimate absolutes. There are no eternal verities. There is no final authority. You must only be true to your ‘self’. The rise and triumph of the modern self.
Remove the capstone of the archway, however, and the overarching framework of society begins to fall apart. You have authority only because you’re under authority. But if there is no final authority, then no one really has a real authority – except, accordingly, yourself.
Look at the way the whole thing plays out. Start in the home, because even little children understand the basic logic of this underlying ‘post-modern’ way of living life. Take the case of a mother I’ve met in the course of my pastoral work: an intelligent, able, and kind-hearted woman, but a child of her times, her views and perspective informed by the tenets of this ‘post-modern’ outlook on life.
She’s bemused and distraught, and quite at a loss as to how she’s to handle her 5-year-old boy who refuses to do what he’s told: she doesn’t know quite how to answer her son when he argues his case. For he’s seen how she lives and observes that, ‘You do what you like, Mummy. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? No one tells you what to do: so why should I be any different, why should I do what you tell me?’
A genuine conversation. Even a 5-year-old child can understand the fundamental logic of authority. And how is she to answer him, when she sees the force of his argument. If she herself as a parent isn’t under any authority .. where does she get authority?
She can argue, of course, that she’s older, wiser, bigger, stronger: and that these considerations means that she’s in charge. But she’s wise enough to discern where that leads: she can see that she is in effect resorting to the law of the jungle. Might is right. It’s no longer about authority, it’s all about mere ‘muscle’ power. And she doesn’t want to go there, for she sees that if she majors on that argument, she’ll teach her child to think and act the same. She’ll be raising a child who lives by the law of the jungle, who will use his superior age and strength to batter his younger siblings into doing what he says, and who’ll learn that that’s how life gets lived: you simply throw your ‘weight’ around (whatever the ‘weight’ may be – financial resources, military strength, political clout, or whatever other ‘weight’ you choose).
The rise and triumph of the modern self might seem to some like a great and desirable end result, but it comes at the cost of the capstone in the archway being removed. The arch itself collapses.
One of two things happen (sometimes both) when that capstone of authority is removed in the life of a society.
Anarchy is one clear path down which the overarching fabric of society will collapse. Remember the sobering statement from the final, sombre chapters of the tragic book of Judges – Israel had no king: everyone did as they saw fit. Remove the capstone – no king: and everyone does their own thing. The archway of authority is razed to the ground and ends on as the rubble of autonomy.
Isn’t that what we’re seeing in society today? You do your own thing. You make your own rules. You choose your own gender. The rise and triumph of the modern ‘self’. Precepts and parameters are gone. There are no rules in the jungle of a vain ‘post-modern’ world: for ‘rules’ are an infringement of my rights, an unwarranted intrusion on my liberty. People must be free to be themselves, free to be the person whom they choose to be. The self is the only sovereign.
It’s this which you see on the streets of our land in the havoc occasioned by riots, in the widespread disruption occasioned by all sorts of protests. The sovereignty of self, where you are always the victim, and where you must be free to make your point and to make it however you like: and any attempt to constrain how you act is perceived as a sign of abuse. The very idea of ‘authority’ now has so steadily, subtly been freshly defined – and equates now to ‘oppression’.
Anarchy is the first pile of rubble into which, when the capstone is gone, the overarching framework of society will invariably fall. Read the book of Judges if you doubt that stark reality: or read the daily papers and you’ll see the same.
But it isn’t just by anarchy that the absence of authority is replaced. The other way this archway of authority will fall is into an authoritarian state. Which is subtly but significantly different. It’s the subtle distinction between authority, on the one hand, and power, on the other: it’s the subtle contrast between the law of the Lord and the law of the jungle, between that which is intrinsically right and that which is basically nothing more than mere might.
A society where you cancel rather than counsel. A society where equality means uniformity, and where the demand for a redefined tolerance becomes itself intolerant.
Anarchy and tyranny. Those are the piles of the rubble that’s left when the capstone of authority is taken away and the archway of society comes crumbling down. Such are the ruins to which our western civilisation has now been reduced.
And such is the challenge we face now today. Rebuilding from the rubble, with that same unchanging message. Jesus is Lord. There is a final authority. There is a King. His name is Jesus, He’s God almighty, and He reigns forever supreme.
The stone which the builders of our post-modern world were so keen to reject is found to be the capstone.
Yours in Christ Jesus our Lord
Jeremy Middleton