#STRask - Do You Believe in the Clarity of Scripture?

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Question about whether Stand to Reason accepts the doctrine of biblical perspicuity (the idea that the Bible is clear in what it teaches about essential doctrines). Does Stand to Reason accept the doctrine of biblical perspicuity, and if so, how would it be verified or falsified?

You're listening to Greg Kokel and Amy Hall on Stand to Reason's hashtag SDRS podcast. Okay, nice trying. And I'm trying to come up with a new way to say it and I'm stumbling all over my words here. It is us. It is us. It is we. We are them. Here we are. All right.

Let's get into this. Off we go. All right. This first question is from Sam Hall. No relation to me, as far as I know. And he asks, know. And he asks, I listened to your answer concerning post-enlightenment authorial intent and wondering if you have read Casey Chalk's book, The Obscurity of Scripture. Does STR accept the doctrine of biblical perspicuity? If so, how would perspicuity, the clarity of Scripture,

be verified or falsified? Thank you. Well, I have never been asked that question quite the way it's been asked. The perspicuity of Scripture is a doctrine or a policy or approach, hermeneutical approach, that says the plain things, the main things, are the clear things, okay? All the things that are really important are stated in a fairly perspicuous manner with clarity. Now, I think that needs to be qualified because, first of all, for us, we're reading in English what came from either a Hebrew or a Greek text. So, there's a translation involved that then, because of the nature of translations,

creates more ambiguity, let's put it that way, in some circumstances. So it's possible to misunderstand some things, and it might be necessary to do a little bit more study to get what otherwise would be a perspicuous point. Otherwise, I'm meaning by the original readers. And the other factor that relates to original readers is time and culture. Okay? So these things are written in a language that the people who were meant to receive them understood. And in a cultural context that they were completely aware of.

So, there are going to be a number of things that are said that aren't going to be as clear to us, or maybe we would draw the wrong conclusions from, like Jesus being the Son of God. Oh, he's not God, he's the Son of God. Well, we draw the wrong conclusion there. He's the Son, not God, because we are not understanding the language the way the people at that time would have heard it. When we see the response of the people at that time, you being a man, make yourself out to be God because you're calling God your Father, making yourself equal with God. Oh, if we saw it then, making yourself equal with God, oh, if we saw it then, then we would get what for them was perspicuous, clear, obvious, and not confusing. So, the perspicuity of Scripture needs to be understood in the sense that, or at least with the qualification that, some of that clarity is going to be lost because

we're dealing with a translation, we're dealing with a culture, we're dealing with a time gap that separates us a little bit from the clear understanding of the audience at the time. So we have to do a little bit more work. But notice that the Matthew—I'm just thinking of the New Testament here—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, and all the epistles were written to ordinary folk. They were written to people who the writers expected to understand what they were writing about. were writing about. And Luke famously starts by saying, I put this thing down in an orderly fashion so you'd know exactly, O Theophilus, the truth about these things. They had an intention of communicating clear truth to their audiences. Now, I don't know, that isn't a circular way of defending perspicuity. The appeal that I'm making is to the nature of communication and to the kinds of communications we're talking about. Now, if you're talking about a poem, say an epic poem, for example, or any poetry, for that matter,

or any poetry, for that matter, you have a form of communication that is going to be less perspicuous because of the nature of the form, of the genre of writing. But part of the difficulty is people take these religious texts in highly spiritualized fashion. They're looking for hidden meanings. This is like a Gnostic approach. What is the inside, hidden, secret meaning of all this? Where these writers were solving problems. It's clear when you read the text, they are solving problems. Here, Peter's writing to Christians that are scattered abroad that are being persecuted. So, I'm going to encourage you, okay? Well, I think it's fair to take that opening kind of salvo as an indicator that we're supposed to take his words in a straightforward fashion.

Again, I don't think this is non-circular. Of course, to some degree, you're going to have to interpret certain words in a straightforward, clear fashion in order to see that the rest of the words are meant to be understood in that way. So maybe someone might claim there's a circularity there, but I am actually drawing from a broader notion that communication between two people is meant to be accomplished in a particular way, with clear speech. And especially when really critically important matters are being discussed, like salvation and Christian growth, etc., the person of Jesus and why he was here and what he meant to do.

That's the natural way of reading anything. And if you don't take that as a natural approach to reading standard things and standard communiques, especially historical communiques or letters, those are the nature of those genres of the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles, if you don't apply those rules, you have no means of understanding the point that's being made. People write things for reasons. The reason they write them is to communicate something to someone else. You can only communicate something to someone else effectively if you speak as clearly as you're capable.

I mean, we know this just as writers, Amy. We are working with our text all the time. And I do the best I can to clean up my stuff. I send it to you and you find all these ambiguities. And you say, well, this isn't going to work. They're going to misunderstand that. You got to fix this. I said, dad, blast it.

Okay, I'm going back to the drawing table. And Amy just sent me back. And then I end up with a piece that's much more perspicuous. It is more effective at accomplishing the goal of the writer, which is to communicate a message to the reader. Now, that way of approaching it is not the least bit circular. It is based on an understanding about how communication works to accomplish a goal. And we are simply having that sensitivity when we go back to the text. Now, there are traditions, obviously, you know, that say, well, only the religious leaders in our tradition can understand that.

Okay? And this was the view of the Roman Catholic Church for a long time. When I was a kid, as a Roman Catholic, that was the view. We've got to explain it to you. We know what it means because we're the ones who have the ability to do that. But the fact is, when the Corinthians got a letter from Paul, they didn't say, man, what are we going to do with this? Is there a priest around that can tell us what this means? means? No. Those letters were written in Koine Greek, not Attic Greek, not the High Greek,

but the Greek of the people, of the common people, because it was written to common people to be understood by common people. And so I think all of these particular points, non-circular points, defend the notion of the perspicuity of Scripture, and the times that some things are not so clear, often it's because of the difficulty, the distance in translation, the distance in culture, and the distance in time. Those things that are not as clear to us were much more clear to the rank and file who were reading them. And incidentally, just to make this point even more clear, there are, in the Gospels, things that were not clear to the people who heard them, and they were not clear on purpose. Jesus told parables to keep the information. It was veiled, the information he wanted to communicate,

but to keep it from some people and to have others understand it. And what's interesting is, is those he wanted to understand it were his disciples. And so when he tells the parable of the sower, he gives the whole parable. And then when he's in private with his disciples, he explains what the parable meant. Point being, even in these like, what's that all about kind of circumstances, Jesus is seeking to be perspicuous with the information when speaking to the people he wants to understand it. people he wants to understand it. In other words, we might need to work at understanding, but we don't need a special gift. There's not, like you said, some sort of mystical thing that we have to uncover or be given so that we can interpret it. Or a divine authority that's vested in us to interpret it, like Roman Catholic. Yeah. So it's written in a way that we can understand,

even if that means we have to work at it. Now, why do you, well, why is it then that people have different interpretations? And I can give a few different reasons why that happens. And one that you've mentioned already is bad hermeneutics. They don't know anything about the time or the place or how to interpret anything. So you need to have good hermeneutics. And there's a book called How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, and that can help you with that. And you've also touched on, Greg, and that is some people have an authority other than the Bible that's above the Bible, that they're submitting the Bible to. And this could be somebody like, say, a prophet in Mormonism or the watchtower in Jehovah's Witnesses, or it could be the magisterium in the Catholic Church, whatever it is. Which, by the way, just so people don't misunderstand, these are very different groups theologically, but the point you're making does apply to each one. Right. So the point is, if you have any sort of authority, and it doesn't even have to be an official authority. Maybe you've read a book by somebody you like, and you've taken his view, and you're holding it above the Bible. Maybe you have your own desires for things, and you put that

above the Bible, your own understanding of love, and then you interpret the Bible according to your understanding of love, if you have any sort of authority by which you are interpreting the Bible or that you're submitting the Bible to, you're going to end up with different answers to questions or different understandings of the text. So that's the second thing. The third thing I think happens is that when we sin in certain ways, it's much harder to see what the Bible is saying because we don't want it to be true. I mean, just look at Romans 1. When God handed people over, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and God hands them over to their depraved minds. Well, this is what happened.

This is terrifying, actually. You need to pray, especially if you're an apologist, pray for sanctification. Pray that you're not blinded by your sin, that you can actually see the truth. So in those three ways, you have another authority, you have bad hermeneutics, or you have sin in some way. I think all of those things will cause people to come to different interpretations. And there may be more things I haven't even thought of. You know, this application of the phrase from Romans 1 there, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie. Now, we know the motivation because they're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness.

It's right there in the text. But I actually never thought of it in that sense. So this is a new insight for me, Amy, which I thank you for, that when you are suppressing the truth with unrighteous motives, you end up exchanging the truth for a lie. Now, we see this a lot in the gay-affirming movement in the church, okay, that there are, that God speaks very clearly, even in the Romans 1 passage, unequivocally, you cannot mistake this if you look carefully at the words, you know. Nevertheless, with regards to homosexuality, the section there in 25 and 26 of the first chapter, but of course, there are a whole bunch of people that say, oh, no, that doesn't mean that. They got the cultural distance approach. It's not that kind of homosexuality. We're practicing a different type of homosexuality that God's fine with.

Well, there, what they're doing is suppressing the truth of God. And then they exchange that truth for a lie because of the immorality that's in their life. And this is what Jesus condemns. I think it's in Matthew 5. And he says, you shall know them by their fruit. To depart from me, I will say, you who promote lawlessness. You know, these are people who look like sheep, but they're really wolves. And what their doctrine is, is promoting lawlessness, you know? These are people who look like sheep, but they're really wolves, and what their doctrine is is promoting lawlessness. They have, just like you said,

quoting Romans 1, exchanged the truth of God for a lie because they have suppressed the truth with unrighteous motives. And we see in 2 Peter, at the end of 2 Peter, Peter's talking about Paul's writings, and he says, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures. So that covers both the sin angle and the bad hermeneutics angle. Yes, right, the untaught. So that can happen. But if you look at the denominations, obviously there are a lot of different denominations.

But if you look at the ones that place the Bible as the highest authority, there is broad agreement among almost everything. And I'm not including in this maybe a progressive church where they have more cultural ideas in charge than the Bible. You'll start to see things divide. But you have to get down to more specific doctrines to where maybe the Bible isn't as clear about exactly, you know, what the position is and people can have arguments about it. But you'll notice when they do argue about it, they don't just say, well, we can never understand it. They'll actually go to the text and say, here, I'm going to make an argument from the text. Here it says this.

This follows next. This follows next. Here's the argument being made. See, this supports what I'm saying. There's an assumption there that we can understand what the text is saying. That's right. Maybe there's not enough information in the text to come to a conclusion about something that's not revealed, and maybe you have to do some speculation about that. But when it's in the text, we assume that we can understand it, and that's why we argue from the

text. If you have a high view of Scripture, unlike the progressives you just made reference to, but that's a good point. I was going to make it. You did it really well, so let me just sum it up. How do you resolve these difficulties? You have to go back to the text and look closely at the reasons. Now, go back to the text is really critical. I'm writing a piece right now for Solid Ground on blood atonement. Okay, it's called Why the Blood? Because blood atonement is under attack. And there's all these other various ideas of atonement, you know, ransom to Satan, moral influence theory, etc., etc., etc. But I noticed that these things are all speculative and don't take the text seriously. Because they don't like what they come up with these other ideas. But you have to come up with the idea about the atonement that the text actually

teaches. And so you start with the text first. And when you get a clear idea of what the text teaches, then you can figure out, you know, answer the questions or dissatisfactions you have. But you can't just start with your dissatisfactions, oh, I think it means this, that, and the other thing, without letting the text instruct you. And by the way, when it way, one of the things I'm learning, when it comes to the substitutionary atonement, penal substitution atonement, Jesus died for our sins. This is perspicuous.

It's all through the text, and it's not hard to see it if you aren't inclined to just be dismissive of it because you don't like the idea of a so-called bloodthirsty God who's executing cosmic child abuse on an innocent person, in this case, his son. You start with the text, and when you stay with the text and work with the text, a whole bunch of problems get solved. They may not be solved to your satisfaction. That does not matter. What matters is what God says through the text, and that many times can be solved with a closer look.

So look at the reasons why people are arguing for the position. In that case, they would give reasons like, well, God can't be this way because that would be mean, or whatever it is, but it's actually not from the text. The text is clear. There are people who just out of hand reject what the text says. Well, Paul was wrong or, you know, the Bible's wrong about that. Start listening for that and you'll start to see how these divides happen. And there are, like I said, because Sam asked if this could be verified or falsified, I think that all these, like, you can see where these disagreements are coming from. And the places where maybe people will diverge, sometimes there isn't enough information. But that doesn't mean that the information that is there is not clear. It just means we don't have all the information we would like to solve that

particular problem. It only takes us so far. Right. And by the way, sometimes that's what we end up doing, trying to solve a more theologically difficult issue textually. We can use the text to say, well, it doesn't mean this, and it doesn't mean this because the text disqualifies those options. It moves us closer. I think of the spokes on a wheel moving towards the hub, the answers in the hub, but that might be a little clouded. But we can move along the spokes using the text to get closer to the answer, more closely approximate the textual answer, even if sometimes some of these things are clouded in mystery. So if you want to be able to be a good interpreter of the Bible and to come together with other people who also want to be good interpreters of the Bible. If you want to combat these three problems, pray for sanctification, pray for submission to God, come to the Bible with the willingness to sacrifice the theological

ideas that you have already gotten from other people, from other sources. You have to be willing to give up your ideas to conform them to the Bible. And then use all the hermeneutical tools, skills that you can get. You need to look into that. You need to learn how to do that better, especially these days. And people in our culture, we have not learned good comprehension skills when it comes to reading. So this idea of having to submit ourselves to something outside of ourselves is very foreign to this culture, and it might be difficult if you're not used to doing it. But this is what we have to do as Christians so that we do not distort the scriptures as the untaught, unstable people do with false writings, as Peter said. All right, Greg, anything to add before I

close this out? Just to remind people of the book you mentioned, which is one of the handiest books. It's popularly written. It does a great job in the basics of hermeneutics. And that is the book titled How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. The authors are... Is Moo one of the authors? Who? Moo? No. It's usually on the tip of my tongue. That's all right. You'll find it. It's the only one with that title. There are some others that... One other I have that's much more of a textbook that if you want

to go into depth, you can, but I think it's the Principles of Biblical Interpretation, and Craig Blomberg is one of the authors there. There's actually three authors. But that's a little bit more heavy duty. But start with Fee and Stewart. Oh, yes. Thank you. Yes. Fee and Stewart, the reading the Bible for all it's worth, how to read the Bible for all it's worth. Well, thank you, Sam. You gave us a question that lasted the entire episode.

There you go. We appreciate hearing from you. If you'd like to send us your question, send it on X with the hashtag STRask or go to our website at str.org. All you have to do is look for our hashtag STRask podcast page and you'll find a link there. And then you just send us your question. Just all we ask is that you keep it short, two sentences at most. I know some people go a little over, but we try to keep it within those couple of sentences. So we look forward to hearing from

you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.