Martin Luther and The Perspicuity of Scripture Student Number: 0003919 Standing where Luther (and Calvin) Stood BIBL 605 Dr. Iain Provan Regent College, Vancouver, BC May 2017 Word count: 2525
The meaning of scripture is, in and of itself, so certain, accessible, and clear that Scripture interprets itself and tests, judges and illuminates everything else. 1 The perspicuity of Scripture is a term derived from Latin to indicate that Scripture is clear and readily understandable for anyone who chooses to read the Bible. The statement by Luther cited above captures the essence of perspicuity and was for Luther an essential perspective that he came to in his battle with the papal authority of the Catholic church. Perspicuity is intimately associated with Sola Scriptura, a position Luther articulated in his famous speech at the Diet of Worms (1521) when he said, Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason, I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. 2 Given that Luther challenged the authority of Rome on the basis of his view of Scripture, his position necessitated that what is taught in Scripture is clear. What follows is to explore the relationship between Scripture and church tradition, to outline what Luther understood to be essential aspects of the perspicuity of Scripture, to point out some of the problems critics have raised with perspicuity, and finally to summarize some aspects of what is required if we are to claim that Scripture is clear about its purpose when it comes to interpretation. It was only in Luther s conflict with Rome that the relationship between Scripture and church tradition came to be seen as a problem. As Lohse points out, until Luther, the authority of Scripture as a totality was absolutely taken for granted in the church and the relationship 1 Martin Luther, Assertio omnium articularum M. Lutheri per bullam Leonis X. novissimam damnatorum (1520), WA 7:97, 23-24, cited in Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 157. 2 Martin Luther, Luther at the Diet of Worms, Luther s Works, Vol. 32, Edited George W. Forell (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1957), 112. "2
between Scripture and tradition had not yet been identified as a problem. 3 Lohse even goes on to argue that the primary reason Rome characterized Luther s publication of the Ninety-five Theses as a challenge to papal authority was precisely because the theologians of the day had not thought through the relationship between Scripture and tradition. The representatives of the church could not deny the watchword of the Reformation, Scripture alone, because they also accepted the authority of Scripture. 4 In fact, the whole premise upon which the early church councils operated is that they were making clear the nature of church doctrine on the basis of the authority of Scripture. However, even the challenge to the teachings of the church from John Wyclif, John Huss and Erasmus did not lead to any closer consideration of the problem of the relationship between Scripture and tradition. 5 Eventually, as the relationship between Scripture and church tradition was examined further by the Reformers, the question was raised about the relationship between theological training and Scripture. As the Reformation took hold, Luther and his Wittenberg colleagues, such as Philipp Melanchthon, rejected the prevailing curriculum based on Aristotelian philosophy and introduced the study of Scripture in the original languages of Greek and Hebrew. As for Rome, the relationship between Scripture and tradition was not settled until the Council of Trent (1545-63) when the decree on the Scriptures said that saving truth is contained both in the written books and the unwritten traditions. 6 What then did Luther understand by the perspicuity of Scripture? Gerrish has summarized Luther s view under five major concepts, the first being that the literal meaning is 3 Bernhard Lohse, 153, 154. 4 Ibid., 154. 5 Idid. 154. 6 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority After Babel (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016). 3301 Kindle. "3
to be preferred to the allegorical when we are seeking to establish points of doctrine. 7 By emphasizing the literal meaning of Scripture, Luther is rejecting what had developed in medieval reading of Scripture, largely with Origen, a preference for the spiritual meaning over the literal reading. In this regard, Luther is blunt: Some people out of ignorance, therefore, attributed a fourfold meaning to Scripture: the literal, the allegorical, the anagogical, and the tropological. But there is no basis for it. 8 In this document, Luther is responding to Emser who cites the use of II Corinthians 3:6, where Paul says, The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life, as a justification for preferring the spiritual interpretation of Scripture, the term used to summarize the three approaches to interpretation other than the literal meaning. Luther goes on to say that the literal meaning is not a good term and grammatical, historical meaning is better, but even more appropriate would to be to call it the meaning of the tongue or of language. 9 Luther s understanding of the literal meaning includes all of the literary devices normally associated with a literal understanding of language. Metaphorical and figurative language is part of the communicative intent of the writer. As Luther explains, if he said, Emser is a crude ass, he is not meaning that he is an animal, but that he had a crude and unreasonable mind. 10 Second, Luther s understanding of perspicuity is that the understanding of Scripture is fundamentally simple. 11 Luther makes this point in a variety of ways and places as when he argues that The Holy Spirit is the simplest writer and as a consequence his words could have 7 B. A. Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 57. 8 Martin Luther, Answer to the Hyperchristian Book, Luther s Works, Vol. 39, Edited Eric W. Gritsch (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1957), 180, 181. 9 Ibid., 181. 10 Ibid., 180. 11 Gerrish, 57. "4
no more than the one simplest meaning which we call the written one, or the literal meaning of the tongue. 12 Moreover, in Luther s defence at Worms, the record of the event summarizes that the Word of God was so clear to him that he was unable to yield unless taught better by the Word of God. 13 The clarity and simplicity of Scripture, however, did not preclude scholarship as is made plain in the work of the translation team at Wittenberg as they strove to express the clearest meaning of Scripture into the most accessible German possible: Whoever would speak German must not use Hebrew style. Rather once he understands the Hebrew author, [and] once he has the German words to serve the purpose, let him drop the Hebrew words and express the meaning freely in the best German he knows. 14 On the other hand, Luther would acknowledge that where the Hebrew conveys a better sense of the meaning of Scripture than what can be conveyed by the German, then the German must give way to the Hebrew. 15 Third, Luther believes that many difficulties can be cleared up and many errors evaded by interpreting each passage in the light of the biblical message as a whole. Scripture is its own interpreter. 16 Luther states this principle most clearly in his refutation of Erasmus discourse on the question of free will when he says that if the words are obscure in one place, yet they are clear in another. 17 Just previous to this point on the clarity of Scripture, Luther admits that many passages in Scriptures are obscure and abstruse, but he explains that it is 12 13 Luther, LW, Vol. 39, 178. Luther, LW, Vol. 32, 118. 14 Martin Luther, Defense of the Translation of the Psalms, Luther s Works, Vol. 35, Edited E. Theodore Bachmann (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1957), 213, 214. 15 16 Ibid., 216. Gerrish, 57. 17 Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, Erasmus-Luther: Discourse on Free Will, trans. and ed. Ernst F. Winter (New York: Continuum, 2002), 104. "5
simply because of our ignorance of certain terms and grammatical particulars, and not to the majesty of the subject. 18 Again we can see that Luther, while maintaining the clarity of Scripture, is still demonstrating the need for scholarship. The fourth point on the perspicuity of Scripture is that the Scriptures must always be understood in faith. We must feel the words of Scripture in the heart. Experience is necessary for understanding the Word, which must be lived and felt. 19 For Luther, we can understand how profound his experience was when he could echo Colossians 1:6 and understand God s grace in all its truth. Gerrish s fifth point, which he admits may be simply expressing the same thing differently, is related to the fourth in that we must listen to the voice of the same Spirit who wrote the Scriptures. 20 Timothy George makes a helpful distinction on Luther s understanding of the inner and outer clarity of Scripture whereby the inner clarity describes the reality of the Spirit s internal work of verifying the truth of Scripture in the heart of the believer. 21 In this way Luther could speak of a feeling, tasting, sweetening or experiencing that resulted from the work of the Holy Spirit within. 22 George goes on to quote Luther from his commentary on the Magnificat where he says that no one can correctly understand God or his Word unless he has received such understanding immediately from the Holy Spirit without experiencing, proving, and feeling it. In such experience, the Holy Spirit instructs us in his own school. 23 18 19 20 Ibid., 103. Gerrish, 57. Ibid., 57. 21 Timothy George, Reading Scripture with the Reformers (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 129. 22 23 Ibid., 129. Ibid., 129. "6
As to the outer clarity of Scripture, George explains that this objective aspect related to the public ministry of the Word and was thus a major concern for preachers and teachers of Scripture. As a result, the churches of the Reformation emphasized the necessity of a wellordered ministry and a program of rigorous theological education for its pastors and teachers. 24 Theological education reflects the earlier point made about the revision of the curriculum at the University of Wittenberg to reflect a study of Scripture rather than a study of medieval philosophy. In dealing with the inner clarity of Scripture and the Spirit s work of verifying the truth of scripture, Luther and the reformers were fighting a battle on two fronts: that against the church of Rome in its elevation of the church above the Bible and the radical distancing of Word from Spirit. 25 Those who separated Word from Spirit were the radical reformers like Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer, the latter of whom met a rather untimely death in the Peasants Revolt. For Luther, however, Word and Spirit belong together, and he is brutal in his ridicule of those who wished for new inspiration from the Spirit: when you ask how one comes by this lofty Spirit, they don t point to the outward gospel, but go up into cloud cuckoo land and say, Ah, you must have the experience of waiting and suddenly, just like that, God will be talking with you. 26 For Luther, this insistence on direct access to the Spirit is a denial of how the Spirit comes to us in the preached Word of God. 27 24 25 26 27 Ibid., 131. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 117. "7
While Luther and eventually the whole Protestant movement have insisted on the perspicuity of Scripture following the principle of Sola Scriptura, others have pointed out that if Scripture is so clear, why is it that we find the landscape of Protestant Christianity so fragmented and fractured with one estimate in 2010 listing four million congregations worldwide and thirtyeight thousand denominations. 28 In contrast, the Roman Catholic church which defers to the Magisterium for interpretive authority is quite unlike what some consider the Achilles heel of Protestantism: the lack of centralized interpretive authority. 29 The criticism of the fragmentation that resulted from the Reformation is even argued to be the source of modern secularism. 30 However, Vanhoozer takes all these criticisms and argues that the five solas of the Protestant Reformation properly understood: grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone, Christ alone and for the glory of God alone, help to address the contemporary problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism, and that retrieving the priesthood of all believers (ecclesiology) helps to address the problem of the authority of interpretive communities. 31 While it is beyond the scope of this paper to summarize all of Vanhoozer s argument, he does a convincing job of answering Belt s objection among many others. Belt argues that Sola Scriptura and in particular the three-fold confession of Scripture alone, grace alone and faith alone cannot be seen as an adequate summary of [the] whole process of spiritual and theological renewal of the church in the sixteenth century because Luther or the Reformers never used those terms together. 32 28 Vanhoozer, 149 Kindle. 29 30 Ibid., 428 Kindle. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 31 Vanhoozer, 603 Kindle. 32 Henk van den Belt, Sola Scriptura: An Inadequate Slogan for the Authority of Scripture, Calvin Theological Journal, 51 (2016), 204. "8
Vanhoozer counters and admits that while the terms may not have been used together until the twentieth century, yet the terms can be found in the Reformer s writings and the absence of the actual phrase does not imply the lack of the concept. 33 If we accept the principle of the clarity of Scripture as implied in Sola Scriptura, what is it that Scripture is clear about? At this point, the concept of Scripture s sufficiency is a helpful perspective to counter those who naively believe that Scripture provides a knowledge of everything in our world. We should say, with Isaiah, that Scripture is sufficient for everything for which it was divinely given: [My word] shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I propose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it (Isa. 55:11). 34 Vanhoozer goes on to quote Paul who tells Timothy that Scripture is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16). This means that Scripture is clear and communicates everything we need to know in order to learn Christ and live the Christian life. 35 While it is beyond the scope of this brief paper to detail the principles of Biblical interpretation, one thing we can claim along with Luther is that Scripture is clear in what it teaches. However, this does not preclude the necessity of a willingness to study the Scriptures and to make use of the very best of Biblical scholarship presented in commentaries and guides. Nor does the clarity of Scripture preclude the necessity of an educated clergy. Having grown up in the Plymouth Brethren movement whose roots embraced a radical anti-clerical stance, I have witnessed how the movement has languished as a result of a rejection of dedicated ordained 33 Vanhoozer, 1050 Kindle. 34 35 Ibid., 3216 Kindle. Ibid. "9
ministry. The Brethren were very active in establishing Biblical training, including Regent College, and its emphasis on the priesthood of all believers certainly fostered an active belief among many, yet the distancing from an apostolic understanding of the history of the church has led to an impoverishment in the movement. We can agree with Luther that only with both an educated clergy and laity with a knowledge of the original languages will we have the means to ensure that the clarity of Scripture is communicated both to the world and the worldwide Christian church. And the clarity and perspicuity of Scripture must also be understood to include all the communicative resources of language to render clearly all things necessary for salvation. "10
Bibliography Belt, Henk van den. Sola Scriptura: An Inadequate Slogan for the Authority of Scripture. Calvin Theological Journal. Vol. 51. (2016): 204-226. George, Timothy. Reading Scripture with the Reformers. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2011. Gerrish, B.A. The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Lohse, Bernhard. Martin Luther: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986. Luther, Martin. Answer to the Hyperchristian Book. Luther s Works. Vol. 39. Edited Eric W. Gritsch. Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1957.. Assertio omnium articularum M. Lutheri per bullam Leonis X. novissimam damnatorum (1520). WA 7:97: 23-24. Cited in Bernhard Lohse. Martin Luther: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.. The Bondage of the Will. Erasmus-Luther: Discourse on Free Will. Trans. and edited. Ernst F. Winter. New York: Continuum, 2002.. Defense of the Translation of the Psalms. Luther s Works. Vol. 35. Edited E. Theodore Bachmann. Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1957.. Luther at the Diet of Worms. Luther s Works. Vol. 32. Edited George W. Forell. Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1957. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016. "11