The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity
Casey J Chalk
Emmaus Road, $24.95, 320 pages
In his concise new book, The Obscurity of Scripture, Casey J Chalk speaks from the experience of his own journey from the Reformed tradition to the Catholic Church to pick apart Protestant doctrines of perspicuity which complement sola scriptura. When a Christian leader, be he Protestant or Catholic, says “Scripture is clear”, our eyebrows should always rise. After all, what on earth, Chalk asks, is ever self-evident? How can any of us, he wonders, accept the weight of interpreting what is necessary for our own salvation? What good is a Bible in our hands without a living authority to guarantee its meaning?
The Obscurity of Scripture begins with various explanations of what perspicuity is (Catholics with little exposure to intra-Protestant debates may be grateful) and proceeds to a series of astute answers to questions about the Bible and Tradition from both Protestant and Catholic perspectives. Chalk is steeped in the Catholic wisdom of Bellarmine and Newman, but he is also an expert in the many, often opposing, Protestant doctrines of Scripture from the 16th century onward. Chalk’s Reformed background makes him a critical connoisseur of recent Calvinist literature, which shoulders a large intellectual load compared to that of many other non-Catholic groups. At least they, to the difference of so many Protestants today, know they require a theory for how the Bible in the possession of an individual believer is supposed to work its salutary magic.
But every explanation of perspicuity ultimately falls into one fallacious trap or another. Chalk picks them all apart, beginning with Luther’s five “tenets”, which provide the basic framework for most successive defences of perspicuity across various Protestant traditions. Scripture is clear, Luther teaches, where faith is present in the reader, inspired by the Holy Spirit. That is, if Scripture is not clear, the problem is our lack of faith, not the text’s opacity. The Presbyterian tradition, on the other hand, has tended to emphasise the big picture of God’s saving plan for the sinner. The essentials, they say, are overwhelmingly clear to anyone, and further details may be edifying for the masses when trained interpreters can connect it all together with the main message.
But among Protestants the essentials vary not only from tradition to tradition, but from building to building, or even person to person. Hence the old joke in the American south about two strangers who immediately strike up a friendship rooted in a long list of common Christian beliefs, but they are finally saddened to have to declare each other heretics after discovering they belong to neighbouring, rival Baptist groups. But more seriously, what if we cannot easily find the Trinity in the Bible?
Perspicuity emanates from the quagmire of private judgment, whereas, Chalk says, “the Catholic relinquishes his autonomy”, thereby appreciating the Bible more, not less. Chalk sums up the problem and the solution with a quote from St Thomas More: “Scripture itself does not make us believe Scripture, but the Church makes us know Scripture.” Chalk expands on More’s insight, making a compelling argument in favour of the Catholic understanding of revelation as received and propagated by the Roman Magisterium and artfully described in recent times by Dei verbum.
Chalk carefully disposes of various Protestant misperceptions about Catholics and the Bible – that papists have only been reading Bibles in the vernacular in recent times, the Church discourages us from reading the Bible at all, and that nefarious clergymen twist plain biblical meanings to create an unbiblical cult. He also follows Newman in exploding the notion that perspicuity was a patristics-era doctrine, and that the rest of the Fathers’ dogmatic programme had much of anything in common with today’s Protestant traditions.
My favourite part of the book is Chalk’s charitable dismantling of Protestant proof-texts. How, Chalk asks, can we presume clarity even in a verse like Romans 3:23 (“all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”)? How do we define “sin”, or “God”, for that matter? He counters with a tidy collection of exegesis in favour of what Catholics believe; but he warns Catholics against falling down in the long wake of nominalism, implicitly accepting the terms of perspicuity by trying to beat Protestants at their own interpretive game. Chalk even offers a small but significant dig at mainstream Catholic apologists, who are not infrequently “former Protestants who may, perhaps inchoately and unintentionally, still adhere to the perspicuity thesis”. Instead, Catholic evangelists must champion a fuller understanding of God’s revelation to the Church and our recourse to the magisterium.
Chalk’s book is informative and easy to read, and is a welcome contribution to the ongoing efforts to reach separated brethren with Catholic truth. The Obscurity of Scripture belongs on the shelf of anyone seeking to understand and appreciate the Bible’s role in the life of the Church today.
Andrew Petiprin is a writer and former Anglican clergyman living in Texas.
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