Read Part 1.
The doctrine of perspicuity or clarity of Scripture can be stated this way: All things being accounted for, the Scriptures are understandable. The question is, however, what should be accounted for?
Luther grappled with the idea and admitted in The Bondage of the Will that the Scriptures were both clear and unclear. He, like many other reformers, attempted to balance the statements in the Scriptures themselves that tended to support the understandability of the Scriptures on the one hand and their difficulty on the other. Most significant among the passages that state the difficulty of the Scriptures is Peter’s declaration that in Paul’s epistles there “are some things hard to be understood” (2 Peter 3:16). The experience of reading and studying the Scriptures also proves that not all things in the Scriptures are readily understandable.
Seizing upon that statement and upon similar rationales, the religious establishment at the time of Luther declared that the Scriptures were inherently unclear and, hence, withheld them from the laity for fear that the lay people would misunderstand them. Granted, there “are some things hard to be understood” in the Scriptures, and they should be accounted for. They are, in essence, the type of difficulties Bible translators encounter. By virtue of the nature of the translation process, they are, for the most part, passed on to the readers of the translations.read more
Reprinted with permission from