Or, why anarchy of the Spirit is not disorder
Firstly, let me credit Shulamite with reviving my interest in writing here.
Go here Link.
This is as much, if not more, a response to my own first response to Shulamite's article, as it is a response to that article itself.
I freely admit to having a problem with authority. My problem is that it is frequently not authoritarian enough, and that, usually, when it attempts to exert itself it does so in fundamentally inept and counter-productive ways.
I also freely admit that I am too lazy to go do the hunt for the biblical references that provide the intellectual and 'spiritual' authority for what I'm about to say. Take my word for it or not, as you please.
Christ is the head of the universal Church that accepts his Name. It has no other, being the Body that depends from that Head. There are three Authorities in the world that we know: the Powers Temporal, the Power Spiritual, and God.
The christian Church considers itself the Power Spiritual. The Powers Temporal are all those institutions which comprise political power; and then there is God, who is more than His Church on Earth.
It is the essence of the doctrine of St. Paul, as set forth in Hebrews and Romans, that authority on Earth is instituted by God in order to safeguard the believer's liberty to discover God for himself. It is equally essential to his doctrine in those letters that there is one priest before God for the Christian believer, that Priest being Jesus himself, who is a priest forever in the Order of Melchizedek, rather than merely a temporal substitute in the Order of the Temple Worship promulgated by Moses.
That Order passes away and is fulfilled by the coming and Resurrection of Christ, and it in is in Him, not in any temporal structure, that all power and authority is vested. If the Church was founded upon Peter, and to him were given the Keys of Heaven and Hell, means no more than that in his human fallibility he exemplifies what it is in each of us, our strength and our weakness, that opens those two doors.
It does not mean that his supposed successors are thereby granted some authority to dictate to the consciences of others how or in what way their faith is best expressed.
Men are fallible. God is not. If men in the Church were faithful, if they were truly filled with the Spirit, then God would rule all to peace through that Spirit, and not even the possibility of legalism would exist. If the christian Church is plagued by legalism it is because it is not full of the Spirit, but possessed by the Spirit of this world (to speak in terms a christian will comprehend).
Anarchism, the anarchism which ensues when men truly expose themselves to God, is not disorder. But it is non-hierarchical, non-generational, not determined by gender or color or any other material consideration.
Authority, in a Spirit-determined order is opportunistic, speaking through those best capable of clearly hearing its requirements. It has no fixed location. It undertakes no project which will be to its profit, but only those which enhance its honour. It is non-transferable, temporary, and impermanent.
But because it is of God, if the Apostle Paul is to be believed, it is purposeful, coherent, and intelligible.
This Spiritual authority is anti-thetical to everything we understand by the term: irrational, non-centered, non-'authoritarian'. Which perhaps explains why it's never been implemented as an organizational principle, within or without the Church.
Any attempt to implement it would require an abandonment to charity that appears singularly unlikely when contemporary christianity is largely dominated by intransigent fundamentalism, a fundamentalism which is bound to grow and increase as christianity once more faces its ancient enemy - militant islam.