A Clear and Present Word

The Clarity of Scripture

Mark D. Thompson, D. A. Carson, D. A. Carson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830889686
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

By almost any measure, a bold and confident use of the Bible is a hallmark of Christianity. Underlying such use are a number of assumptions about the origin, nature and form of the biblical literature, concerning its authority, diversity and message.However, a lack of confidence in the clarity or perspicuity of Scripture is apparent in Western Christianity. Despite recent, sophisticated analyses, the doctrine is ignored or derided by many. While there is a contemporary feel to these responses, the debate itself is not new.In this New Studies in Biblical Theology volume, Mark Thompson surveys past and present objections to the clarity of Scripture; expounds the living God as the Guarantor of his accessible, written Word; engages with the hermeneutical challenges and restates the doctrine for today.Addressing key issues in biblical theology, the works comprising New Studies in Biblical Theology are creative attempts to help Christians better understand their Bibles. The NSBT series is edited by D. A. Carson, aiming to simultaneously instruct and to edify, to interact with current scholarship and to point the way ahead.

Chapter One

Oh sweet obscurity: The absurdity of claiming clarity today

‘Did God really say. . .?’

By almost any measure a bold and confident use of the Bible is a hallmark of evangelical Christianity. Whether it be the sophisticated sociohistorical analysis of David Bebbington, who ranks ‘biblicism’ as the third of his four characteristics of evangelical religion,1 or the simple and direct statement of evangelical leader John Stott, ‘It is the contention of evangelicals that they are plain Bible Christians,’2 explorations of evangelical identity routinely acknowledge the decisive role of the Bible in shaping thought and practice. Billy Graham’s insistent appeal to ‘the Bible says’ is emblematic for many. Convinced that what the Bible says, God says, classic evangelicalism appeals to the Scriptures for an understanding of God and his purposes as well as for the shape of an appropriate response to the words he has spoken.

Underlying such an appeal are a number of assumptions about the origin, nature and form of that collection of ancient narrative, poetry, proverb, law, vision and epistle that is the Christian Bible. What authority (if ‘authority’ is the right word) can such an anthology legitimately exercise over the thinking and behaviour of men and women two millennia after its completion? What gives these texts a priority over the plethora of other religious texts in the world, even just the ancient world? How does their undoubted variety in genre and historical perspective serve the interests of their message, if, indeed, we can be permitted to speak about ‘message’ in the singular at all? These are all legitimate questions that have occupied many, especially in the last fifty years or so.3 Yet even if there are very good grounds (and there are) for accepting the Christian Scriptures as the authoritative word of the living God, complete with a coherent story or meganarrative that appropriates rather than sublimates the genuine diversity to be found in these texts,4 there is still another question that nags away at many: Can we really be certain about what it says or what it means?

In many ways this would appear to be the question of the hour. A lack of confidence that we do or even that we can know for sure what the Bible says is apparent in Western Christianity. Theologians, it seems, are more comfortable asking questions than giving answers or seeking to justify them. Ancient apophatic traditions with their appeal to mystery, to God’s incomprehensible nature and his inscrutable will, are gaining a new prominence in mainstream denominations.5 Silence is proposed as a more appropriate response to the reality of God’s presence than bold proclamation.6 Those who persist in an appeal to the clear teaching of Scripture face charges of hermeneutical naivety, entrapment in modernist assumptions, a lack of epistemic humility, or, worst of all, an act of ‘communicative violence’.7 You can’t be sure that’s what it means; and if you say you are, it is merely a ploy to coerce me to accept your point of view.

Despite a number of sophisticated explorations of the clarity or perspicuity of Scripture in recent decades,8 this doctrine is either ignored or derided by many. It seems scarcely credible and even absurd given two thousand years of Christian biblical interpretation, let alone contemporary literary theory. What is more, it just doesn’t seem to resonate with the experience of many Christians who struggle to make sense of what is being said at point after point. Should this doctrine and the rhetoric associated with it (‘the plain meaning of the text’) be quietly retired from Christian use? Is it not simply an uncomfortable reminder of those long-gone days when we took words at their face value, oblivious to the leaps of logic we made whenever we read the biblical texts? Berkouwer’s forty-year-old observation appears vindicated in the current climate: ‘No confession concerning Scripture is more disturbing to the church than the confession of its perspicuity.’9

There is undoubtedly a contemporary flavour to these objections to the doctrine of Scripture’s clarity. The phenomenon known mostly as ‘postmodernism’ has reshaped old questions and generated new ones. Nevertheless, the debate itself is not new. Considerable ink has been spilt over the centuries in attempts to challenge or defend the idea that Scripture, both in form and in substance, is clear. It is one of the many examples of our arrogance mixed with ignorance that we at the beginning of the third millennium consider responsible hermeneutics a relatively recent acquisition. Christian teachers have been exegeting the Scriptures since the Day of Pentecost, if not before, and questions of interpretation, indeed of the relative clarity or obscurity of the ancient texts and their own, were recognized and addressed from the earliest days.10 So before we explore a little more fully the particular shape objections to this doctrine have taken in more recent years, it is worth identifying the reasons why some in earlier times found it difficult to accept that Scripture is clear.

Traditional objections to the doctrine of the clarity of Scripture

Objections to any suggestion that Scripture is clear and that, as a consequence, a direct appeal to the words of Scripture is enough to settle controversy, came from various directions. Nevertheless, it may be helpful to identify five basic protests and deal with more specific issues under those headings. As those who sought to defend this doctrine in the past made plain, none of these objections is unanswerable. However, no attempt will be made to rehearse those answers or to construct our own at this point. The objections themselves need to be taken seriously and the weight of the arguments borne in full. As the history of Christian theology more generally makes plain, far too much theologizing has in fact been a response to a caricature rather than engagement with an issue.

1. The doctrine fails to take account of the transcendent mystery that is the subject of Scripture. This was one of the chief objections raised against the idea of Scripture’s clarity by the great early-modern humanist, Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536). In his exchange with Martin Luther over the status of the human will, Erasmus objected that Luther’s confident appeal to the Scriptures ran the risk of blasphemy, or at least of lacking the restraint necessary when speaking about God and his purposes on this side of the Lord’s return. While not every passage of Scripture is opaque, it ought not to surprise us if many are, since God and his purposes are greater than the human mind. Does not Scripture itself say so? Erasmus’ appeal at this point was to Romans 11:33 and Isaiah 40:13:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

(Rom. 11:33)

Who has measured the Spirit of the LORD, or what man shows him his counsel?

(Isa. 40:13)11

Paul and Isaiah, Erasmus suggested, tread a ‘wiser and more reverent course’ than the one to which Luther had committed himself. In fact, Luther’s confidence was actually presumption. He had dared to reduce God to a series of doctrinal assertions without realizing that at significant points God’s person and will go far beyond our linguistic capacity. Erasmus was protesting that all human language, including the language of Scripture, is stretched to breaking point when it comes to expressing the reality of God and his purposes.12 From this perspective, insistence upon the clarity of Scripture represents a failure at an elementary level: recasting God in the dimensions of his creatures. As Karl Barth would put it, ‘The revelation attested in the Bible is the revelation of the God who by nature cannot be unveiled to men.’13

2. The doctrine fails to acknowledge the God-given role of the church as the interpreter of Scripture. This objection lay close to the heart of the dispute about Scripture’s clarity at the time of the Reformation. Luther and those who stood with him reacted to what they saw as a radical inflation of the role of the church as guardian and interpreter of the Scriptures. Indeed, Luther considered that the papal claim to be the authoritative interpreter of Scripture was the second of three walls built to preserve the power of Rome and to stymie all attempts at reformation.14 However, the idea that the church had an important role in guarding the integrity of the Scriptures and attesting genuine interpretations had a much more benign origin. Irenaeus, the second-century bishop of Lyons, sought to counter the appeal to Scripture by the heretics of his day by insisting that the church, led by bishops as successors of the apostles, is the guarantor of true interpretation:

True knowledge is the teaching of the Apostles, the ancient constitution of the Church for the whole world, and the mark of Christ’s body according to the successions of bishops, to whom they committed that Church, which is in every single place. [The Church] carefully and continuously comes to us without pretence, [providing] a very full handling of the Scriptures, and a legitimate exposition according to the Scriptures, careful, accepting neither addition nor subtraction, reading without falsification, without danger, and without blasphemy.15

It should be evident that Irenaeus considered the Scriptures to be inviolate and that the authority of the church does not extend to adding or subtracting from the biblical text. Yet the reality of heterodox appeals to the Old Testament or the writings of the apostles led him to insist upon an interpretative responsibility peculiar to the orthodox churches.16 Only by heeding the interpretative guidance of the true church could the danger of blasphemy be avoided.

This concern is even more obvious in one of the most famous statements about the church’s role as guardian and interpreter of the Scriptures, from the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lérins written around AD 434:

Here someone may possibly ask: Since the canon of the Scriptures is complete, and is abundantly sufficient for every purpose, what need is there to add to it the authority of the church’s interpretation? The reason is, of course, that by its very depth the Holy Scripture is not received by all in one and the same sense, but its declarations are subject to interpretation, now in one way, now in another, so that, it would appear, we can find almost as many interpretations as there are men. Novatian expounds it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another, Photinus, Apollinaris, Priscillian, all another, Iovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, still another, and finally, Nestorius another. For this reason it is very necessary that, on account of so great intricacies of such varied error, the line used in the exposition of the prophets and apostles be made straight in accordance with the standard of ecclesiastical and catholic interpretation. Likewise in the catholic church itself especial care must be taken that we hold to that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by everyone.17

The last line points us in the direction of the famous ‘Vincentian Canon’, three cardinal virtues that enable an interpreter to identify the church’s authorized interpretation: ecumenicity (everywhere), antiquity (always) and consensus (by everyone).18 But once again the concern is to preserve the meaning of Scripture rather than to constitute it. The church’s role is to be a responsible guardian of this treasure entrusted to her, contending against diverse and idiosyncratic interpretations.

However, in the centuries that followed, a shift took place that gave the church’s interpretative function greater significance. In the wake of the Reformation, the Council of Trent declared in 1546 that the function of ‘Holy Mother Church’ is to ‘pass judgment on the true meaning and interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures’.19 The teaching of this council has been repeatedly affirmed in the centuries since. In its dogmatic constitution on divine revelation, Dei verbum, promulgated in 1965, Vatican II drew attention to God’s continuing presence and activity in the church: ‘God, who spoke of old, uninterruptedly converses with the bride of His beloved Son.’20 It then continued:

But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed.

It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titles in this series
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series preface
• Author's preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Oh sweet obscurity: The absurdity of claiming clarity today
• 2 The effective communicator: God as the guarantor of scriptural clarity
• 3 It is not beyond you: The accessible word of the living God
• 4 Engaging the hermeneutical challenge
• 5 The sharp double-edged sword: Restating the clarity of Scripture today
• Bibliography
• Index of authors
• Index of Scripture references
• Notes
• Praise for A clear and present word
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright