MHA Features on Authority
Understanding the crisis of authority
In an essay titled “Authority versus Power” (in The Crisis of Modernity, 2014), Augusto Del Noce, wrote that “The eclipse of the idea of authority is one of the essential characteristics of today’s world; in fact, it is the most immediately observable characteristic.”
His comments echoed concerns expressed decades earlier by Hannah Arendt. The third chapter in her 1961 book Between Past and Future was titled “What Is Authority?” But in the first paragraph she suggested that she probably should have titled it “What Was Authority?” since “authority has vanished from the modern world.”
A number of interviews and lectures on the meaning and significance of authority have released by Mars Hill Audio in our Friday Features series. Streaming audio of some of those Features are presented below. (You can hear new Friday Features on a variety of topics (almost) every week via our mobile app, available for Apple and Android devices.
Features you may hear below:
D. C. Schindler: The authority of the symbol
D. C. Schindler: The symbol of authority
David Koyzis: Authority, office, and the image of God
Jean Bethke Elshtain: “Democratic Authority at Century’s End”
Victor Lee Austin: Authority and human flourishing
D. C. Schindler: The authority of the symbol
In this lecture given in July 2023 at the CiRCE Institute national conference, D. C. Schindler explores the remarkable way in which symbols have power to connect us to one another and to the order in Creation. (The companion lecture by Schindler is available below. Thanks to the Institute’s staff for giving us permission to share this lecture with our listeners.)⇧ back to features list
D. C. Schindler: The symbol of authority
In 1958 — before, that is, the decade that was supposed to have inaugurated wide-spread rebellion — Hannah Arendt observed that “a constant, ever-widening and deepening crisis of authority has accompanied the development of the modern world in our century.” This Friday Feature presents the second of two lectures by D. C. Schindler in which he explores the nature of authority with reference to the transcendental dance of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. (The first lecture is above.) Both lectures were given at the annual conference of the CiRCE Institute.⇧ back to features list
David Koyzis: Authority, office, and the image of God
In his book We Answer to Another: Authority, Office and the Image of God (Pickwick Publications, 2014), David Koyzis situates authority in the context of the idea of office. “An office is a calling, a commission, a task given us in fulfilling our duties before God,” he explains. “What the book argues is that each of us has been given, by God, an office, and inherent in each of our respective offices is some measure of authority. The authority that we experience in the different areas of our life is, therefore, something that we are called to respect when it is properly exercised.” Ken Myers introduces his 2014 conversation with Koyzis with some passages from the work of Lesslie Newbigin and Stanley Hauerwas.⇧ back to features list
Jean Bethke Elshtain: “Democratic Authority at Century’s End”
“The alternative to authority is not some free-form utopia but coercion, domination, violence, and unaccountable methods and systems of manipulating persons.” So argued Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941–2013) in a 1999 article titled “Democratic Authority at Century’s End.” In the article — published in The Hedgehog Review (Summer 2000) — Elshtain summarized concerns expressed by Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) about the viability of democratic governance in the wake of widespread suspicion toward the very idea of authority. Elshtain observes that authority is finally unintelligible without recognition of transcendent order (and an Orderer) with which our wills and actions should be aligned. In this Feature, Ken Myers reads the entire text of Elshtain’s article.
Excerpts from Elshtain’s Augustine and the Limits of Politics may be read here. Excerpts from the book based on her 2005 Gifford Lectures — Sovereignty: God, State, and Self — may be read here.
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Victor Lee Austin: The necessity of authority for human flourishing
This Feature presents a 2011 interview with theologian Victor Lee Austin, discussing his book Up with Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings (T & T Clark, 2010). Rather than assuming that authority is the enemy of freedom, Austin argues that many acts of free persons can only be effected while under authority. Also included is a short reading on authority from Harry Blamires’s classic book The Christian Mind.
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