Where is the Authority

One of my favorite movies is Bull Durham. I love the raw humor of the baseball scenes and there are some good bits outside of those as well. There is a scene where Crash and Annie argue about how to treat Nuke and at some point Annie says some quote which she attributes to William Blake. Crash asks her, "William Blake?" and she responds with authority, "William Blake!"

I used to really wrestle with this scene. Annie's implication is that there are some authors who have authority to settle arguments if you can think of a witty and pertinent quote. A lot of people use Mark Twain that way, for example. The thing is that I don't think any author should be able to settle an argument. Scripture should settle arguments, but authors are just people like us.

To be sure, we can use authors to illustrate points. We can use them as the basis of a story to expound something. However, I think we get on a very slippery slope when we let people settle philosophical debates. Obviously, statements of fact will be settled by some authorities. I trust an historian like Jules Tygiel over Ken Burns when it comes to baseball, for example. The point is that we need to make sure that we know Scripture well enough to use it as the basis for our opinions.