Jesus taught with authority, but...
Illustration
Jesus taught with authority, but authority is a tough issue for many. We live in an age when many people do not want authority themselves and prefer instead to act under the authority of others. This was forcefully demonstrated a few years ago by an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University a few years ago. Milgram asked several randomly chosen adults to participate in an experiment in which they were to administer electric shocks to other adults. In reality, the experiment was a setup. The electric devices were bogus and the "victims" were not actually shocked; they were just acting the part. The shock-givers, however, did not know any of this and believed that they were really inflicting pain on the victims. Following the instructions given by the experiment director, the shock-givers turned a dial that was marked from "mild" to "extremely dangerous." To Milgram's surprise, even when the shock-givers could see the victims writhing in pain and could hear them screaming, eighty percent still went to "intense" on the dial and a full 65 percent went all the way up. Most of those giving the shocks, although they clearly became uncomfortable about what they were doing, continued to accept the directions of the experiment director to keep administering the electric jolts. They pushed their own reservations aside and acted under the authority of the director. (Reported in Thomas J. Peter and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., In Search of Excellence [New York: Harper and Row, 1982], pp. 78-79.)
