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And now, from the Most Reverend Raphael J. Adams,

The Last Word

I am about to drag you through a semantic exercise. Please forgive me. But I do believe that words have meanings, and that the only way we can avoid fuzzy thinking, vague conclusions, hazy strategies and tenuous plans is to clarify the meaning of the words we use. When our definitions are equivocal and our perceptions muddled and confused, we cannot reason together (or alone, for that matter). I contend that, to some extent, the Church is experiencing a crisis of authority because of a great equivocation: we have all forgotten what authority is!

Decades ago, someone defined authority for me in terms that I had not previously associated with it: creativity, generativeness, and action. In retrospect, although his explanation was simple and obvious, I somehow missed it. It was contrary to the rigid, cadaverous, Ignatian idea of the nature of obedience in relation to "lawful" authority and the nature of "legitimacy" as an assumed characteristic of all persons in positions of authority. According to Cassell's, the words which parented "authority"æauctoritas, auctor, augeo -- have to do with the capacity to enlarge or increaseæin a sense, to improve, to make bigger and better. In primitive usage, there is no such thing as "an authority". Instead, one is an "author", someone who initiates, creates, originates, causes to happen. One undertakes. One begins. One leads. One does not merely appear to lead. One comes up with something new in response to new challenges and opportunities. Something substantive.

To obey, on the other hand, is literally to listen, to attend to what is happening, to be open, to have a responsive attitude. The relationship between authority and obedience is not one of giving orders and having them carried out. Rather, the relationship between authority and obedience is one of creating, inspiring, and then evoking a positive response in the listener. Since obedience is as much a matter of responsiveness as compliance, is it possible that in many cases an apparent crisis of obedience is in reality a crisis of true authority? Further, is it also possible that crises of authority may not result from a failure to command or even to lead, but from a failure to be creative, proactive, original, initiatory, and productive? A failure to begin something new, something which engages, moves, and inspires those who are eager to participate in making it all bigger and better?

I am compelled to obsess about an obvious point: making things bigger and better while keeping them just the way they are is inherently contradictory. The fact remains that, while stagnation, fixation, or any other type of "stuckness" are not exemplifiers of true authority, neither are frenzied action and directionless, ill-planned change. Having said that and in the interest of bringing reality to bear on this discussion, when dealing with ecclesiastical authority, I have rarely observed any danger of the latter occurring. "Not rocking the boatism," on the other hand . . .

Ultimately, in all matters that concern us as Christians (I am reclaiming the word), we must defer to the One who has the last word, the One who is the Last Word by virtue of His authority. The people whom Jesus taught responded to Him because He spoke "as one who had authority, and not as their scribes." (Matt. 7:29 RSV.) Supremely aware of the difference between authority and authoritarianism, Jesus warned his apostles against confusing the two. In that Word which still has the power to save and transform us, Jesus gathers us around Him now, in this present day "crisis of authority," and says to us, without equivocation, what He said to His first apostles:

You know that in the world, rulers lord it over their subjects, and their great men feel the weight of authority; but it shall not be so with you. Among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever would be first must be the willing slave of all, like the Son of Man; he did not come to be served, but to serve, and to surrender his life as a ransom for many. (Matt. 20: 25-28 NEB) 

And that is the last word. !