Where now is the authority?
The one foundation
Phyllis Tickle noticed that every rummage sale drags the same question up out of the basement and sets it on the lawn: where now is the authority? When the old answer cracks — the tradition you inherited, the certainty you were raised on, the leader or the institution or the way of reading the Bible that settled every argument — the church, and the soul, has to discover all over again what it actually stands on. It is a terrifying question while you are inside it. It is also a clarifying one.
Paul had already named the floor beneath every floor. You can lose a hundred lesser authorities — and an upheaval will strip them away one by one — but no one can lay any other foundation than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. Jesus said the same thing with a picture: the wise build on rock, and when the floods come and beat against the house, it stands, because of what is underneath it. Upheaval is the flood that finally shows you what your house was built on.
“For no one can lay any other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
— Paul, to the Corinthians — 1 Corinthians 3:11 (WEB)
“Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man, who built his house on a rock... it didn't fall, for it was founded on the rock.”
An upheaval is a flood, and a flood is honest. It does not care what you said your house was built on; it only reveals what it was actually built on. The authorities that wash away in the water were never the foundation, however much weight you had quietly rested on them — a charismatic leader, an unquestioned tradition, a borrowed certainty, your own competence.
This is why the authority question, terrifying as it is, is a gift. It forces you to stop standing on the floors and find the rock. The church that survives its rummage sale is not the one that clings hardest to the old furniture; it is the one that gets driven back down to the one foundation that cannot be relaid or removed. So when the waters rise and your certainties go floating past, ask the clarifying question: under all of it, what am I actually standing on — and is it the rock?