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Why the Bible IS clear to read

1:00am Thursday, 12th August 2010

God doesn’t leave us alone to read his word—and he
helps us understand it, too. Michael Jensen explains.

You might remember the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, from Acts 8:26–40. It’s a story about how to read the Bible.
Philip wanders off down a wilderness road away from Jerusalem. There he meets an Ethiopian eunuch, an important public official under Queen Candace. Here is obviously a man of no small authority and intelligence. What is more, he is devout, having come up to Jerusalem to worship such as he could given his physical condition. He is a man with the ability and the hunger to know God. Seated in his chariot, we find him catching up on his reading of the prophet Isaiah.
What is not in question is the significance and authority of the Scriptures: the eunuch knows already that Bible study is indispensible. The problem is he can’t understand it.
Philip, overhearing him reading from this book, asked him a great question:
“Do you understand what you are reading?”
The reply comes: “How can I, unless someone guides me?”
That is, without someone who has the key I can’t unlock the words of this book such that it makes sense. Even though I am keen, seeking after God, and literate, it just doesn’t seem to make much sense here. Who is to guide me so that I don’t fall into terrible error? What stops us just saying that the text means this for me, and something else for you?
I am sure we can all identify with the eunuch. This book, which we call God’s Word, and on which so much hangs, can seem a really dark and mysterious place. To read it can seem like you are wandering in a verbal forest without any kind of map to guide you— you soon get lost. And what’s more, people seem to be able to get almost any teaching they like out of scripture. Christians of good faith and character can disagree passionately about what scripture actually says onr quite important issues.
Is Scripture, then, irreducibly and finally obscure: more impenetrable jungle than forest?
This is not a new problem. The Gnostics viewed scripture as completely obscure and dark to ordinary people. What was needed in order to understand the Scriptures was an initiation into secret knowledge that would give the enlightened few special knowledge of the spiritual realities indicated by the texts. The texts evidently could not mean what they appeared to mean—that was a fleshly way to read. Rather, they indicated something more spiritual—if only you knew how to read them rightly. But, of course, what the Gnostics produced was the most wild and speculative interpretations you could imagine. What was to stop them doing this? Isn’t scripture at the mercy of all kinds of special interests?
And perhaps worst of all: if there is no certainty of the meaning of the text, no way of protecting the text from misuse, then how can there be any certainty of faith?
It was an ancient problem, but it is a modern—or should I say postmodern—one too. It has two particular features for us. First: we just don’t trust texts anymore, do we? It is now said that texts mean whatever their readers take them to mean, after all.
Second: we live in an expertise culture, and this has affected the way we study the Bible too. So, we tend to outsource everything to the professionals: from childcare to window-cleaning. Expertise works by telling you that you aren’t doing something properly, of course—or can barely do it at all, without help. And so it is with Bible reading. Ordinary Christians should not feel that they can read their Bibles without expert help.
How do we get out of these problems?
The Roman Catholic solution is to say that you have an authorised interpreter. That church still, in effect teaches that Scripture has no clarity of its own, but rather is subject to the authorised interpretation of the teachers of the Church.
However, the more biblical answer is that, by the power of the Spirit, the gospel of Christ Jesus provides the lens that clarifies the Scriptures. Do you recall what happened to the eunuch? He was converted and baptised! This clarity is not a matter of quibbling over a text: this encounter actually results in the spiritual transformation of the reader. It is worth pointing out, too, that Ethiopian understood something of the Old Testament text: he could recognise its verbal structures and its meaning—in fact his question reveals that he has indeed understood the prophetic outline of the text and is taking it seriously. Hearing the gospel makes it clear for him.
This was of course the teaching of the Reformation: that Scripture is clear, or perspicuous. The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck said: “The teaching of the perspicuity of Scripture is one of the strongest bulwarks of the Reformation”. The great Bible translator and martyr William Tyndale was one of the first to teach it. He allegedly said to a church official: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”
The Bible is a book whose authors expected to have readers who understood what they were talking about. The law in Israel was to be a light to the paths of the people (see also Ps 19:8). They were expected to read it and obey it, and were held accountable for it! Scripture is breathed-out by God for the purpose of training the man of God (2 Tim 3:16). Scripture does not cast itself as a book of secrets, a book of codes and mysteries. “These things are written”, says John, “that you might believe ... and believing have life!” (20:31)
But this idea of the clarity of Scripture is an evangelical idea. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that both unites Scripture and renders it clear—not that the Old Testament was without clarity. Jesus is the “Yes” who both explains and fulfils the promises of God. The Ethiopian eunuch appeared baffled by his reading of Isaiah until he met Philip who explained it to him. We shouldn’t be distracted by the presence of an interpreter in the story. The point is not: “you need an authorised interpreter”, but rather “Jesus makes sense of it”. In fact this pattern is repeated throughout the book of Acts (and indeed the New Testament). It is the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen that is the great shining light in the middle of the Bible, making the rest of its sometimes disparate parts cohere. The coming of the gospel is a great moment of revelation, a moment when the secret and mysterious ways of God come to light in a spectacular way. The “clarity” of scripture, then, is primarily a teaching about the effectiveness of scripture to do its job, which is to present us Christ Jesus.
This evangelical clarity is a work of the Holy Spirit. In Acts, it is the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit that guides Philip and illuminates the eunuch. The Ethiopian is able to read the Scripture and probably understand what the words mean but the significance is totally lost on him. For that, cue the Holy Spirit! A friend of mine puts it this way: “In the Spirit, Philip perfects the eunuch’s knowledge as saving knowledge. He now understands the significance of what it is that he is reading. The Spirit makes a difference to the act of reading.”
That means then, that the doctrine of the clarity of the Scriptures has little to do with how simple or how hard the scriptures are to understand. Indeed, in 2 Peter 3:16, Peter complains that Paul’s letters have things in them that are very difficult!
The idea of the clarity of Scripture does not mean that the matters and the subjects with which the scriptures deal are not mysteries that far exceed our human intellects. It certainly does not mean that in every place, Scripture is clear to everyone in every time. It certainly does not mean that there are not texts within Scripture that are in some way unclear.
The Reformers held that the fundamental ideas of Scripture clarify the parts, and that the obscure texts are explained by the plain ones. This was not to say that we should pretend we have no presuppositions when we approach the Bible – that would be sheer arrogance. But it does ensure that those presuppositions submit to the things we find in the pages of the Bible and are not held as an authoritative grid over it.
The clarity of Scripture, because it is an evangelical clarity, has more to do with the submission of the reader to the rule of Jesus than it does to some linguistic technique of skill. The disciples of Jesus know and recognise their master’s voice. Scripture is better characterised as a book that reads us, rather than the other way round. If you are converted, you are teachable: you are receptive to what the Spirit has to say to you in the Word of God.
So, in fact, we need to develop a “spirituality” of reading. Reading the bible is a spiritual activity, to be attended by the virtue of humility and the business of prayer, as an antidote to our own pride and self-derived wisdom.
Dr Michael Jensen teaches at Moore College.