The clarity of Scripture

Light for the simple

God spoke in order to be understood. Moses told Israel that his commandment "is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach" (Deuteronomy 30:11): "the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart" (Deuteronomy 30:14). The psalmist prays:

The unfolding of Your words gives light; it informs the simple.

Psalm 119:130

Matthew Henry comments that the Scriptures "give to the simple, in a few days, understanding of those matters, which philosophers for ages sought in vain" Matthew Henry. Timothy had known the Scriptures "from infancy", and they made him wise for salvation (2 Timothy 3:15). This is what theologians call the clarity, or perspicuity, of Scripture.

It does not mean that every page is equally plain. Peter admits that Paul's letters contain "some parts" that are "hard to understand" (2 Peter 3:16). The Ethiopian official asked, "How can I … unless someone guides me?" (Acts 8:31), and God sent Philip to explain Isaiah to him. Clarity does not make teachers and preachers unnecessary. And when we fail to understand, the trouble often lies less in the text than in the heart, which the Spirit must open (Luke 24:45; see illumination).

The church's confession

Augustine taught that the Holy Spirit arranged Scripture wisely, satisfying our hunger with its plainer passages and whetting our appetite with its obscure ones, and that obscure places are to be explained by clearer ones Augustine, On Christian Teaching. In 1525, in his debate with Erasmus over free will, Luther insisted that the subject matter of Scripture is clear, that obscurity usually lies in our ignorance of words and grammar, and he distinguished the outward clarity of the word proclaimed from the inward clarity the Spirit gives the heart Luther, The Bondage of the Will. The Westminster Confession (1646) puts it carefully:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.

Westminster Confession 1.7

This conviction is why the Reformation churches translated the Bible into the languages of ordinary people and put it in their hands.

Where Christians differ

The Catholic Church urges that easy access to Scripture be given to all the faithful, but teaches that the task of authentically interpreting the word of God has been entrusted to the church's living teaching office, the Magisterium Dei Verbum. The Orthodox stress reading Scripture within the mind of the church, as it lives on in the Fathers, the councils and the liturgy. For Protestants too, clarity is not a licence for private interpretation cut off from the church; they read Scripture together, with their confessions and teachers.

Some ask whether Scripture can be so clear when Protestants are divided into many denominations. Protestant theologians usually answer that the questions dividing them, such as baptism or church government, are ones Scripture speaks to less plainly, while on the gospel necessary for salvation there is broad agreement. For practical help, see How should we read the Bible?, and for the history of interpretation, the lesson Interpreting Scripture. The study of how to read Scripture rightly is hermeneutics.