Further excerpts from Victor Lee Austin's Up With Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings (London: T & T Clark, 2010), chapter 5:
Authority in the church, then, appears as a sort of mysterious percolation. It requires hat there be an assembly, and therefore it requires that there be the communal identity and structure that makes the assembly possible. To be specific, and to take a catholic ecclesiology as normative, authority requires that there be a given structure of ordained ministry, received creeds, and continually-renewed tradition. Above all, authority in the church requires the Scriptures, [100] faithfully handed down and recited in the presence of all the faithful. But the odd thing we see in the church is that authority in the radical sense resides in none of those things: not in ordination, not in creed and tradition, not even in Scripture. Authority resides in the individual believer who, inspired by the Holy Spirit, proclaims faithfully her allegiance to the suffering Jesus, and thus to her Lord, and thus to the Triune Reality that is the source of all authority in heaven and earth. (pages 99-100)
Authority is actualized in the church when Christ is confessed; the Christ who is confessed is the one who has all authority. He bestows the Holy Spirit to bring human beings into communion with God and each other. (page 100)
So we cannot have an individual confession of Christ that does not arise out of a eucharistic community. And we cannot have eucharistic community without the oversight of a bishop. And we cannot have a bishop who is not in communion with other bishops, nor a eucharistic community that is not in communion with other eucharistic communities. And we cannot have communities and bishops without some means of making authoritative determinations about the [102] boundaries of Christian confession. But all these things--authoritative doctrinal determinations, authoritative conciliar structures, authoritative persons with oversight of particular communities--all exist to make possible the one truly authoritative act, which is the confession of Christ, which like all authority is ineluctably personal. (pages 101-102)
Authority in the church, in other words, highlights for us an essential dynamic in the working out of authority. The community is prior to the individual. No person could have faith or come to any knowledge of truth without submitting to the authority of others. And yet the community exists only in the individual to which it gives rise. The individual, as it were, contains the community, even as she enacts, authoritatively, the faithful response of the community, which must be in an individual, to the faithfulness of the one who is the source of all the church's authority, namely the Son to whom all authority has been given. (page 103)
[Drawing on Herbert McCabe, The Good Life [London: Continuum, 2005] and citing from pages 26-27} The error of contractarian thinking in political philosophy--that already existing individuals enter into contracts together to make societies--lies in the fact that before you could be an individual you must "be already in possession of what only society could provide--institutions such as language, contract, agreement, and so on." Humans are rational beings, which means preeminently that we can talk with each other and articulate alternatives to the way things are. "Rationality," McCabe says, "is a special way of being in a group." (page 103)
