Does the Bible “Speak Plainly”?

This has been a reoccurring conversation I’ve had with many people over the years.

The problem with this idea, when used wrongly, is that it conflates the text itself with our reading of the text, and then treats any challenge as a challenge to Scripture itself. When used this way, the phrase essentially becomes a power move that evades accountability for interpretation by locating all authority in the reading of the text rather than taking responsibility for the means of interpretation.

The abuse of this idea has become so bad that I know quite a few people who have abandoned the whole idea that Scripture can be clearly known by individuals. So, when we conflate our reading of Scripture with the authority of Scripture itself, we do real harm, to both individuals and the Church.

However, the over-correction of this error is arguably more dangerous because its failure is less visible: treating all textual meaning as indeterminate is simply a different kind of evasion.

When we act as if the meaning of the text is not accessible to us on any level, we inevitably produce one of two errors: on the one hand, we might say “the text could mean many things, so I’ll take what seems reasonable to me in my circumstances”, which produces a kind of “system of convenient beliefs”, or, on the other hand, we conclude that “I can’t know the text, so I’ll trust this ecclesial authority that has a claim to authoritative interpretation,” which merely eschews personal responsibility for interpretation and shifts it to one’s chosen ecclesial community. In both cases, our own judgment is still the final arbiter. The interpretive authority still hasn’t been properly located, but has merely been transferred to some other locus in the former case, or obfuscated in the latter.

The solution to false certainty is not epistemic paralysis. It’s interpretation that is accountable, disciplined, and humble.

Meaning is not arbitrary just because interpretation is required. All communication involves interpretation, yet meaning can still be established. But neither is interpretation unconstrained. It’s governed by several keys: 1) authorial intent and genre; 2) the semantic range of words; 3) canonical coherence; 4) the community of interpreters across time; and 5) the direction of the canonical narrative. Clarity of meaning, then, exists across these lines of interpretation.

So we should recognize that the meaning of Scripture exists within a spectrum of clarity. Some ideas are pervasive and convergent, appearing across genre, testament, author, and cultural context, being confirmed by the shape of the whole canonical narrative, and having been recognized across the broad scope of Christian community and history. Other ideas are genre-dependent and context-sensitive, requiring knowledge of literary form, historical context, or canonical placement to interpret responsibly. Still others are genuinely contested, with serious, faithful, historically-grounded interpreters, who all share hermeneutical commitments, reaching different conclusions.

Scripture’s spectrum of clarity, then, is differentiated by converging lines of evidence, not any single criteria. The abuse of “the Bible plainly says” comes when one line of evidence is treated as conclusive and no other lines are permitted. But, the more lines point in the same direction, and the more independent those lines are from each other, the stronger the case there is for the higher-certainty categories.

My argument — as is the argument of Protestantism — is that Scripture actually does “speak plainly” together. This doesn’t mean that our understanding is always perfect or infallible, and we should be cautious about any locus of interpretation that claims infallibility, for such hubris lends itself to abuse, but we can be certain that Scripture does speak. I believe that Scripture is written by God through the human mind, which means that in Scripture, both God’s mind and the human mind converge. And I believe that God has given us his Spirit, both individually and communally, so that we can “know the mind of Christ.” Therefore, although the meaning of some Scriptures are less certain than others, God’s message is accessible to us and is sufficient to establish both our faith and our convictions in the truth.