Defending Perspicuity: A Response to The Obscurity of Scripture by Casey Chalk

Note: the following is a modified transcript of an adult Sunday school lecture that I taught at Riveroaks Reformed Presbyterian Church (PCA) in October 2023, as part of a series defending the Protestant doctrine of Scripture. In this lecture, I address some common Roman Catholic objections to the perspicuity of Scripture. I do this primarily by engaging with the arguments presented in the book The Obscurity of Scripture by PCA-to-Catholic convert Casey Chalk. I recently learned that Chalk offered a friendly response to my lecture on the Catholic apologetics website Called to Communion. I will post a rejoinder to his response on this blog soon.

Welcome back to our Sunday school class on the doctrine of Scripture. In this series we’re describing and defending the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura, and today we are continuing our discussion on the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture—that is, the clarity of Scripture. My focus is going to be on answering objections against the doctrine of perspicuity, and in order to prepare for this lesson, I read a book which was just published this year. It’s called The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity, by Casey Chalk. He is formerly PCA—I believe he was a student at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson—and he is a convert to Roman Catholicism. And he’s written a good amount in defense of Roman Catholicism; I believe he’s one of the contributors for a Catholic magazine called Crisis.

Some positives

Most of what I’m going to say today is going to be critical of his main arguments, but I want to begin with some of the positives. This is a very well done book. He put a lot of effort into writing this book and it shows. He did a lot of research as well. He actually does make an effort to present the doctrine of perspicuity at its best. He tries—although I don’t think he always succeeds. But he does look at some of the leading sources of Protestant defenders of perspicuity, and many of those sources I’ve been using in this class: Charles Hodge, Francis Turretin, Keith Mathison. He’s read these sources, and so he has done his homework. And I think he does a good job of presenting the standard objections to the doctrine of perspicuity. I’ll also add I think he does so very charitably. He’s not combative; he’s not trying to use a sledgehammer on you if you’re a Protestant. So I really do appreciate his gracious tone and I’m going to try to return the favor. So today my attempt is to engage in perhaps what we could call “irenic polemics”—irenic means aimed at peace, but polemic means we’re still going to be doing some critique. My goal is to defend the doctrine of perspicuity against his main objections.

I want to start by stating what his purpose is in writing this book. His goal is pretty modest. He is not saying that everything in Scripture is hopelessly obscure—that we can’t understand anything in Scripture apart from the magisterial authority of the Roman Catholic Church. He’s not arguing that there’s no benefit to individuals privately studying Scripture. What he is critiquing is the Protestant idea that Scripture is sufficiently clear in its essentials, such that any individual, Spirit-guided Christian can come to a saving understanding of the essential doctrines of Christianity. He does not think that Scripture is sufficiently clear in that respect.

Chalk’s definition of perspicuity

He breaks down his definition of perspicuity into three points:

…This book seeks to attack several key presuppositions regarding the classical nature of perspicuity as taught by the leaders of the Reformation and their theological descendants. These include the following claims: (1) Scripture is sufficiently clear that any Spirit-guided, faith-possessing Christian will be able to determine what is necessary for salvation; (2) Scripture is sufficient in and of itself to resolve interpretive disagreements without recourse to an extra-biblical authority; and (3) Scripture is sufficient to unify Christians.

Chalk, 15

I would agree with his point #1, but I think that the way he’s described perspicuity in point #2 is a little bit confusing. I’ve previously made the distinction between the material sufficiency of Scripture and the formal sufficiency. I am making the argument that Scripture is materially sufficient: it contains all of the doctrines that are necessary for salvation, either explicitly or implicitly (that is, derived by good and necessary consequence). But that does not mean that we have no need for an interpretive authority. I would affirm that there is a formal necessity to the church and tradition in helping us to interpret Scripture. What I don’t say is that that authority is infallible. That’s where I would disagree with Chalk’s understanding of interpretive authority. I believe that the church is necessary to interpret Scripture, but I don’t think it does so infallibly. It can make mistakes, and it does sometimes need correction. So I would not argue that Scripture is formally sufficient to resolve interpretive disagreements. Now there have been some Protestants who have described the sufficiency of Scripture in formal terms, but I don’t think that’s the right way to put it. If you look at the classical Protestant sources—like Francis Turretin, who I’ve used in this class—they teach that we should affirm the material sufficiency of Scripture and the formal necessity of tradition and the church.

Then point #3: whether Scripture is sufficient to unify Christians. Now with upwards of 30,000 Protestant denominations in existence, it’s true that Protestants haven’t succeeded in achieving unity by using Scripture alone. Now maybe to some extent, in the future, we can hope that some of those differences will be overcome. That kind of depends on what your eschatology is. Keith Mathison, for example, is a postmillennialist, and he thinks that the interpretive disagreements among Protestants will be overcome before Jesus comes back. He thinks there will be a unified institutional church before the return of Christ. I am not personally a postmillennialist; I am more on the historic premillennial side. So I think that some of these interpretive disagreements might just be with us until Jesus comes back. Now although it’s not a good thing that we have these institutional divides in the church, I still think we can be a true church in spite of these differences. Even if Baptists and Presbyterians never join denominations, we can still affirm that we’re brothers and sisters in Christ. So I can still affirm the catholicity of the church without restricting it to one institutional body. I understand the sanctification of the church just like the sanctification of an individual: it’s an ongoing process and it’s not going to be completed until Jesus comes back. I do hope that some of the differences between church denominations can be resolved, but they might not all be resolved before Jesus returns. But we can still say that we are a true church in spite of those disagreements, because generally speaking, where Protestants do disagree—at least among those who affirm the five Solas—our disagreements are on secondary matters. They’re not over the essentials of Christian doctrine, so we still have a spiritual and organic unity, even if we don’t have an institutional or organizational unity.

I want to say all of this on the front end, because I think some of Chalk’s critiques are going to miss the mark, because he’s not defining perspicuity in the strongest terms.

Five objections against perspicuity

Now I am going to highlight five of the objections that Chalk raises in his book—objections that I found to be prominent not only in this book, but also among other Roman Catholics. There’s plenty more that he has to say in the book, but I can’t do an exhaustive analysis of the entire book in just a single Sunday school lesson. So I’m going to limit myself to these five objections:

1. Perspicuity makes the individual the ultimate authority.
2. Perspicuity cannot resolve interpretive disagreements.
3. Protestants disagree with each other over what the essentials of Scripture are.
4. Appealing to Scripture to defend perspicuity is circular reasoning.
5. Perspicuity is rooted in faulty nominalist philosophy.

I want to address each of these objections one by one.

1. “Perspicuity makes the individual the ultimate authority.”

This is arguably the most common Roman Catholic objection to the Protestant doctrine of perspicuity. That is, perspicuity turns us into autonomous individuals, who are not under any authority. The argument is that when Protestants say that Scripture is their ultimate authority, what they mean is, “My interpretation of Scripture is the ultimate authority.” And that’s functionally equivalent to making the individual the ultimate authority. Chalk makes this point repeatedly in the book:

• “[The] individual is… the one who possesses final authority to define [the Bible’s] contents and interpret them…. In the Protestant paradigm, while the individual Christian declares his or her total submission to the Bible, he or she retains ultimate authority over its interpretation.” (52–53)
• “…In the Protestant paradigm, the ultimate interpretive authority is not the church and tradition, but the individual Christian.” (209)
• “The question, then, is who is one the [sic] doing the authoritative interpreting? In the Protestant paradigm, the answer is the individual Christian… In Protestantism, the interpretive ‘custodian’ is the individual Christian.” (258)

Here is the point that I want to highlight in response, because this objection gets raised so often, yet I think it rests on a misunderstanding of how authority works: Protestants affirm not the individual’s ultimate authority, but rather his/her ultimate accountability to God. Protestants acknowledge that we will have to answer for our beliefs and our conduct on the Last Day, before the judgment seat of Christ. The way we interpret Scripture is not autonomous; we will ultimately have to answer to God for how we’ve handled Scripture. And if we separate from a church on the basis of our interpretation of Scripture, we’re going to have to answer to God for that decision as well. Whether we were right in doing so or wrong in doing so, God will hold us accountable for that. I think this point gets missed in the conversation. I want to share with you a quote from the 19th-century Princeton theologian Samuel Miller in in his work “On the Importance and Utility of Creeds and Confessions”:

It will not, surely, be denied by anyone, that a body of Christians have a right, in every free country, to associate and walk together upon such principles as they may choose to agree upon, not inconsistent with public order. They have a right to agree and declare how they understand the scriptures; what articles found in scripture they concur in considering as fundamental; and in what manner they will have their public preaching and polity conducted, for the edification of themselves and their children. They have no right, indeed, to decide or to judge for others, nor can they compel any man to join them. But it is surely their privilege to judge for themselves, to agree upon the plan of their own association, to determine upon what principles they will receive other members into their brotherhood, and to form a set of rules which will exclude from their body those with whom they cannot walk in harmony. The question is not whether they make, in all cases, a wise and scriptural use of this right to follow the dictates of conscience, but whether they possess the right at all? They are, indeed, accountable for the use which they make of it, and solemnly accountable to their Master in heaven; but to man they surely cannot, and ought not, to be compelled to give any account. It is their own concern. Their fellow men have nothing to do with it, as long as they commit no offense against the public peace. To decide otherwise would indeed be an outrage on the right of private judgment. If the principles of civil and religious liberty generally prevalent in our happy country are correct, demonstration itself cannot be more incontrovertible than these positions.

Miller (1839)

Miller is affirming the right of Christians to assemble according to liberty of conscience, but he also recognizes that that right is not separated from our ultimate accountability to God. So if we make a wrong use of that right, we will have to answer to God for that. I think this pretty reasonably answers the objection that Protestantism turns the individual into the ultimate authority. We’re not the ultimate authority; God is. And for every choice we make here in this life, we will have to answer to God for that choice.

Here’s an analogy that can help you think about what I mean here: The individual citizen’s right to exercise civil disobedience against unjust laws does not mean he/she has ultimate authority over the civil government. And yet the government’s authority is a limited authority, because ultimately we will answer to a higher authority: God himself. That is why citizens have that right. Now if they use that right wrongly, God will judge them for it, just like if we use the right of interpretation wrongly, God will judge us for that as well. But because we are ultimately accountable to God and God alone, the church cannot bind our conscience. We are only bound to the Word of God.

On a practical level, let’s talk about what this would mean in situations where the individual and the church disagree. Here is how Francis Turretin describes the situation:

If [church members] think they observe anything in [the church’s doctrines] worthy of correction, they ought to undertake nothing rashly or disorderly and unseasonably, so as to violently rend the body, but to refer the difficulties they feel to their church and either to prefer her public opinion to their own private judgment or to secede from her communion, if their conscience cannot acquiesce to her judgment. Thus they cannot bind in the inner court of conscience except inasmuch as they are found to agree with the word of God which alone has the power to bind the conscience.

Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology III.284

This is a distinctive Protestant teaching: only the Word of God can bind your conscience. The church cannot bind your conscience. So we have a good model here for what to do when you are in disagreement with your church. First, consider how serious the disagreement is. Is it something that you could live with? Is it a minor issue? If so, then for the sake of the peace of the church, you should keep it to yourself. If you think it’s a big enough concern, you can bring it to the church leadership, and they can discuss it with you. If that doesn’t lead to a resolution, and if your conscience still won’t allow you to submit to the church’s teaching on this point, then as a last resort you can withdraw from the communion and seek another church. And it is your right to do so. Now if you are judging wrongly, you will answer to God for that, and you will be held liable for schism. But that’s still between you and God. So that’s how a Protestant would address that point.

Contrast that with what Roman Catholics would have to say when there are disagreements between the individual and the church. I’m taking a quote here from an authoritative Roman Catholic document from 1990 called Donum Veritatis, which comes from a papal commission called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which included Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI. So this was written by that group—primarily Cardinal Ratzinger, I believe. This is how they describe what to do when disagreements arise between individual theologians and the magisterium:

If, despite a loyal effort on the theologian’s part, the difficulties persist, the theologian has the duty to make known to the Magisterial authorities the problems raised by the teaching in itself, in the arguments proposed to justify it, or even in the manner in which it is presented…. It can also happen that at the conclusion of a serious study, undertaken with the desire to heed the Magisterium’s teaching without hesitation, the theologian’s difficulty remains because the arguments to the contrary seem more persuasive to him. Faced with a proposition to which he feels he cannot give his intellectual assent, the theologian nevertheless has the duty to remain open to a deeper examination of the question. For a loyal spirit, animated by love for the Church, such a situation can certainly prove a difficult trial. It can be a call to suffer for the truth, in silence and prayer, but with the certainty, that if the truth really is at stake, it will ultimately prevail.

Donum Veritatis (1990)

So how does this differ from Turretin’s advice? This document is essentially saying that if you disagree with the the teaching of the Roman Catholic magisterium—no matter how serious the disagreement—you cannot leave. You are called to suffer in silence if you cannot resolve that disagreement. And that’s a fundamental point of difference that Protestants would have. We would say no; if you believe that the church has erred on a fundamental point of doctrine, you have no obligation to remain within that communion, because that communion no longer has the right to the title of church. They have compromised that by denying some fundamental aspect of the apostolic teaching, and in such a case, it is actually your duty to withdraw from that communion. So that is a very significant point of difference between Catholics and Protestants. 

2. “Perspicuity cannot resolve interpretive disagreements.”

I would say these first two objections are the most common objections I hear to the Protestant understanding of perspicuity. Chalk has this to say:

Salvation, the sacraments, ecclesiology, Christology, slavery—Protestants have debated these and manifold others, drawing inherently incompatible interpretations from the Bible. One solution to this dilemma was to claim a person had an exclusive access to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Yet that proved just as subjective and impossible to evaluate as the competing criteria and interpretations employed by well meaning Protestants. It’s true that various Protestant denominations held synods and drafted confessional documents that mimicked the councils and documents of the Catholic Church, but these were only binding on members of their own communities—and only as long as individual members of those communities, making recourse to perspicuity, assessed those confessions to be in accordance with Scripture. If a Christian came to assess otherwise, he or she could simply switch camps or form a new ecclesial organization that finally, its creators naively believed, would be faithful to scriptural teaching.

Chalk, 119-120

In response, I think we actually do have an objective, empirical guardrail for the proper interpretation of Scripture. And that is the Rule of Faith—the authoritative yet subordinate summary of the essential teachings of Christianity, which have been handed down through the generations in an unbroken historical continuity throughout the church age. Keith Mathison, in a follow-up to a critical review of his book The Shape of Sola Scriptura, spelled out exactly how the Rule of Faith developed, and he lists eight chronological stages, which I’m paraphrasing here:

This is how we got the Rule of Faith: it began with the Apostles’ oral teaching of the gospel—so they preached orally before they wrote down Scripture, but they were still inspired by the Holy Spirit when they did so. Protestants call this the Verbum agraphon. Both the unwritten Word and the written Word are the inspired Word of God; they’re just communicated in different modes, orally versus written. But it’s the same content. We’re not talking about two different contents of revealed teaching.

So it began at that first stage, and then from that developed uninspired summaries of this teaching, which was used for baptismal instruction. This is called catechesis, and in the early church, even while the apostles were still alive, this was the process that was used for new converts to Christianity. They would get instruction in the basics of the Christian faith, and they would assent to that in preparation for their baptism. We actually see the roots of these primitive creeds in the New Testament itself. So you can actually look in the letters of Paul—for example, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, we get what was probably a rudimentary creed. That’s probably something that Paul himself didn’t compose originally, but he did use it in his presentation of the gospel. Same with Philippians 2:5-11, which talks about the humility of Christ—you know, being in the form of God, he did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped but made himself nothing, emptied himself, and took the form of a servant. And so that very well could be a primitive Creed that was used by the early church in baptismal instruction. So we see that developing in the early church from the very beginning. Then shortly thereafter, the apostles started writing down this apostolic teaching, and this was a process that was inspired by the Holy Spirit, so we treat that writing as the Word of God, and that was then later recognized as the canon of the New Testament.

Then as we move into the post-apostolic period in the second century, we see that there comes to be a fixed formula of questions and answers which were used for baptismal instruction. So it takes a more fixed form at this point, and we hear about this from early church fathers like Justin Martyr. Then shortly thereafter, that formula is developed into semi-formal declaratory creeds. And this happens at some point in the second or third centuries and we get descriptions of this process by later church fathers like Irenaeus and Tertullian—those are the church fathers who start referring to these statements as a “rule of faith.” And that Rule of Faith then gets developed into a more formal form as the early creeds, such as what’s now known as the Old Roman Creed, which was the precursor to the Apostles’ Creed. The final stage in this whole process is when we finally get these more advanced formal creeds, such as the Nicene Creed in the 4th century.

Now the thing to notice about the Rule of Faith is, it’s not adding anything to the essential doctrines of Scripture; it’s clarifying what those essential doctrines are. And so when we speak of the Rule of Faith, this is the rule that we use for the proper interpretation of Scripture.

There are some important points to derive from this notion of the Rule of Faith. First of all, I’m arguing the Rule of Faith is the historically verifiable guardrail for the Protestant interpretation of Scripture. Any interpretation of Scripture that contradicts this Rule of Faith does not have a right to be called a Christian interpretation of Scripture. No true church can deny this essential message of Christianity. Similarly, the Rule of Faith is the proof of Christ’s promise that the true church will be preserved throughout all the ages. Why is that? Because the true church is defined by its commitment to the core Christian message. If you don’t adhere to the core Christian message, you’re not a true church. Therefore, logically we should expect that the true church, if it’s going to be preserved throughout all the ages, will always adhere to the core Christian message. How is that message defined? By the Rule of Faith.

Further, we can say that the Rule of Faith allows for doctrinal development, but not reversal or innovation. So for example, we don’t find an articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in the first or second or even third century; that comes into full expression only in the fourth century. So we do see doctrinal development there, but this is just a way of clarifying what has always been affirmed. We were grasping for the right words to use to affirm all the truths of Scripture regarding God: one God, three persons, each person equal yet distinct. And so all of that ultimately led to this articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. So there is development, but it’s in continuity with—and a logically necessary consequence of—the doctrines that had already previously been affirmed.

Another point—and this is another Protestant distinctive in our understanding of the Rule of Faith—we would say the Rule of Faith is not limited to one institutional body or denomination. Many different denominations can affirm the Rule of Faith and still be true churches, despite those institutional differences and divides. Now I’m not saying those divides are a good thing, but we can still be true churches in spite of those divides.

And then also we would say the Rule of Faith allows for interpretive diversity in the non-essentials, but not in the essentials of Christian doctrine. So a Protestant approach to a biblical interpretation will admittedly lead to more interpretive diversity. We don’t have some final arbiter to decide the difference between, say, paedo-baptism versus believer’s baptism, but we can still acknowledge that both sides in that debate are true believers. In the end, you will have to make a judgment about which side you think is making the more biblical argument, and you’ll have to act accordingly, and God will hold you accountable for how you choose and how you interpret. But we can still affirm this is a secondary issue; we’re still brothers and sisters in Christ, because these are not part of that Rule of Faith. I also think this will help us to answer the third objection.

3. “Protestants disagree with each other over what the essentials of Scripture are.”

I’m actually a bit surprised that, as thoroughly as Chalk researched for this book, he doesn’t really talk about the Rule of Faith, which I think is so central to a proper Protestant interpretation of Scripture. He does point to plenty of disagreements that Protestants have had over how to determine what the essentials of Scripture are, but he never gives a direct treatment of this notion of the Rule of Faith as that objective, historically verifiable criterion for determining what counts as the essentials. Here’s what he has to say:

There is undoubtedly a significant difference of opinion within Protestantism and even the Reformed faith over the meaning and content of the doctrine of perspicuity. Some understand clarity to apply to a broad spectrum of doctrines: the Trinity, justification, even child rearing. Others define clarity as applying to a narrower set of doctrines: perhaps a “core message” about God’s salvific work for humanity, or what is “necessary for salvation.” Yet even here we must already admit that there is disagreement over the exact content of this “core message,” or what is “necessary for salvation.”

Chalk, 41

Again, I think that if we look to this historic Rule of Faith, we have an answer to this question. We have a clear description of what the church has always considered to be essential. That essential core has been affirmed throughout church history, especially in the years leading up to the formal creeds of the early church, like the Nicene Creed. There’s a book that came out recently, called Reformed Catholicity by Michael Allen and Scott Swain, where they actually make an argument for a “ruled reading” of Scripture. That is, they they argue for Protestants making use of this Rule of Faith as that interpretive guardrail for understanding the meaning of Scripture. And here’s how they define the essentials according to the Rule of Faith:

“Two elements” that “remain constant” in these early summaries of the faith are (1) the triune name of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”; and (2) the gospel narrative of “the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Such summaries have since come to fulfill various functions within the church, including their function as subordinate standards to which the church’s office-bearers subscribe and in accordance with which they pledge to teach in fulfillment of their calling.

Allen and Swain, Reformed Catholicity, 109 (quoting Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:117)

So those are the two points that I would say are are the essentials which are laid out in the Rule of Faith: the doctrine of the Trinity, whether implicitly earlier in the church or in explicit form by the time we get to the Council of Nicaea, and then the gospel narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—that’s what we’ve seen the Apostles’ Creed and even before that in the Old Roman Creed, and in those baptismal formulas that were used in the first and second centuries. That’s the core, and we actually have objective, historical verification for what that core is, so as Protestants we’re not just making up these essentials after the fact. We have objective criteria for determining what counts as essential, if we look to this historic Rule of Faith.

Now there is some disagreement among Protestants, especially over how the Rule of Faith actually develops. For example, does the doctrine of justification by faith alone count as part of that Rule of Faith? Historically, we do see some church fathers affirm something like the doctrine of justification by faith; you see that idea in Augustine, John Chrysostom, and before that in Clement of Rome. So it’s present in the early church fathers. You also find opposing views as well. That was never codified in the Rule of Faith in a formal way. But again, everyone acknowledges that the Rule of Faith does allow for doctrinal development. That’s exactly what happened with the doctrine the Trinity. So this is a point of disagreement among Protestants. Some Protestants, like Francis Turretin for example, would say that justification by faith alone belongs to that Rule of Faith as a valid development of it, and therefore it is fundamental to the profession of Christian faith. Other Protestants would say that although the doctrine of justification by faith alone is true, it doesn’t belong to that Rule of Faith; it’s not at the same level as, say, the doctrine of the Trinity. Protestants taking that view would include Keith Mathison, Charles Hodge, and Richard Hooker. But here’s the point that I want to make: I’m not trying to make a case whether or not Sola Fide belongs to that Rule of Faith as a valid development. I’m just saying even if Protestants have disagreement over some aspects of it, there’s still a universally accepted core. Every Protestant would agree that the Trinity belongs in the Rule of Faith, and if you deny that, you don’t have a right to call yourself a Christian. So we can acknowledge there’s some disagreement on later developments of it, but there’s still a objectively recognizable core to that Rule of Faith that we can all agree should govern our interpretation of Scripture. I really do think that Chalk should have addressed this point, because I think it is the strongest case that Protestants can make for objective criteria for the interpretation of Scripture.

4. “Appealing to Scripture to defend perspicuity is circular reasoning.”

Passages like Deuteronomy 30:11-14, Psalm 119:15, and 2 Peter 1:19 were commonly used by Protestants in defense of the perspicuity of Scripture. But is that presupposing that those texts are clear when they speak of the clarity of Scripture? Isn’t that a type of circular reasoning? Chalk writes:

Another common Protestant argument for perspicuity also depends upon question-begging presuppositions. According to this argument, the Bible is clear because it says it is clear…. The unstated premise built into this line of Protestant argumentation is that Scripture is clear… Yet, just as arguing for clarity by reference to God’s intention in creating Scripture is a form of question-begging, so is this. This is so because such Protestant apologists presume the doctrine of clarity already when they read certain Bible verses and interpret those verses’ supposedly plain meaning in a specific manner that is not held by all readers or Christian communities. In other words, to argue that Scripture is clear by citing and interpreting various phrases or verses from Scripture is circular reasoning.

Chalk, 78-79

In response, one could argue that, at the broadest level, all reasoning is necessarily circular. In his book God’s Word Alone, Matthew Barrett anticipated the objection of circularity:

Any appeal to an ultimate authority is necessarily circular. After all, there is no higher authority to appeal to. If there were a higher authority outside of Scripture to appeal to, then Scripture would no longer be the highest authority (and sola Scriptura would be compromised)… Is it really fair for critics to tell evangelicals that they cannot look to Scripture to explain what Scripture is and does? D. A. Carson argues, “Surely part of the effort to find out what Scripture is requires that we read Scripture and see what it says of itself.”

Barrett, God’s Word Alone, 148-149 n169

Wouldn’t it be odd if we had to make an argument for perspicuity without being allowed to look at what Scripture itself says? That almost seems like we’re being required to fight with one hand tied behind our back. Given what Scripture is—given that it is our ultimate authority—we should expect its clarity to be self-evident. If it’s not self-evident, then we would have to appeal to some higher authority, which by definition we cannot do, if it is our highest authority. So disallowing an appeal to Scripture’s testimony concerning its own perspicuity actually begs the question against perspicuity.

Here’s another way we could think about it: take the mathematical statement that three corners of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. If you have the proper training in mathematics, that truth is self-evident. It doesn’t need further proof, once you understand the math involved. We would say the same thing about approaching Scripture. Through a due use of ordinary means—proper training in interpretation, the ministry of the church, training in language and all the basic requirements of literacy, and guidance by the Spirit—when you look at what Scripture says, its clarity is self-evident. I think that is how Protestants could respond to the objection of circularity. We can acknowledge that there is a type of circularity involved, but it’s the sort of circularity that would be true for any ultimate authority—including the authority of the magisterium!

5. “Perspicuity is rooted in faulty nominalist philosophy.”

This wasn’t exactly a central objection to the book, but I did want to address it, because I personally thought this was the weakest part of the book. Many of Chalk’s objections, I thought, required some careful reflection. But this one just struck me as a particularly weak argument, because it just seemed historically misinformed. He writes:

Often underlying these question-begging assumptions are presumptions that follow from a philosophical school that has had a long and profound influence on Protestant biblical interpretation, beginning with Martin Luther himself. This is the philosophy of William of Occam (also spelled Ockham), often called “nominalism”…

Chalk, 81

So his argument is that Protestantism is in some way rooted in this medieval philosophy known as nominalism, and we see that expressed in the writings of Martin Luther himself. Now there is a huge technical debate over nominalism, and I’m not going to be able to give an exhaustive description of what nominalism is within only five minutes. But for our purposes here, let me just summarize it in this way:

Nominalism was also known as the via moderna during the Middle Ages. This was one of the chief debates within the Scholastic movement in the Middle Ages. One of its chief defenders was William of Ockham. The opposing view was generally known as the via antiqua, represented by Thomas Aquinas. What characterized nominalism was a denial of universals. For example, it denied that there is no such a thing as “humanity;” there’s only humans. It denied that there are objective essences or natures to things, which transcend physical reality. Nominalists accepted a univocal rather than analogical concept of being: God and humans could be considered different species of the same genus of being. There’s different ways of putting that—God and creatures exist on the same ontological plane, they’re in the same order of being, and so forth. Relatedly, nominalism affirms voluntarism, which is the idea of the primacy of will over intellect. That is, the will is radically free, even arbitrary. Hypothetically, God could command sin if he wanted to. Then the idea of competitive metaphysics. Think of God’s will and man’s will existing in a zero-sum game: where God’s will is active man’s will must be passive, and where man’s will is active God’s will must be passive. That’s a very brief characterization of nominalism.

Chalk makes the further argument that Martin Luther embraced nominalism. Now I’ve looked at Luther, and I think an argument can be made that he did side with nominalism sometimes. However, Luther was not always the most careful thinker, especially when it came to philosophy. Sometimes he did speak favorably of nominalism. But here’s something that Chalk doesn’t mention at all: as far as I’m aware, no other Protestant sided with nominalism. If you look at how Protestantism developed after the time of Martin Luther, they unanimously rejected nominalism. They would have sided with Thomas Aquinas in his via antiqua. Many sources have pointed this out. Even just a superficial investigation of the topic show Protestants were overwhelmingly against nominalism. Here’s a quote um from a source by John Patrick Donnelly (I have to give credit to PCA pastor Derrick Brite, who posted this on Twitter/X):

“The theology of Vermigli and Zanchi, together with parallel developments within Lutheranism, shows that when Protestants came to recast their theology into a scholastic form, they rather consistently avoided nominalism as a base. Insofar as the roots of Protestant scholasticism go back to the Middle Ages, they tend to go back to the via antiqua and Thomism. Protestant fruit grows quite well on the Thomist tree, even better than on the bad nominalist tree.”

John Patrick Donnelly, “Calvinist Thomism,” Viator 7 (1976), p. 454

So I agree with Chalk’s critiques of nominalism. I don’t agree with nominalism myself, but pretty much no other Protestant did either, with the possible exception of Martin Luther. So I’m not entirely sure what Chalk was trying to do with this objection. I don’t think he was necessarily trying to say that perspicuity depends upon nominalist philosophy, or that it’s essential for perspicuity. If he’d made that kind of argument, then I would understand at least what he’s trying to do. At best, perhaps he’s just trying to make an analogy, saying that doctrinal positions often have implicit philosophical assumptions, and if those assumptions are false that’s going to lead us into bad doctrine. Now that’s a fair point, but it really has no relevance to the truth of perspicuity, unless he’s arguing that perspicuity necessarily depends upon nominalism itself.

Another source here, from an online journal called Ad Fontes, makes the same point in a five-part series critiquing this myth of Protestant nominalism. The author, an Anglican priest named Seth Snyder says:

“The most glaring problem with the Protestant-nominalist generalization… is that it is simply false.”

Fr. Seth Snyder, “The Myth of Protestant Nominalism,” AdFontesJournal.com (September 2022)

In the course of this article series, Snyder looks at some of the primary sources from the different branches of the Protestant tradition: he looks at Lutheran sources, Continental Reformed sources, Anglican sources, and he shows that these sources explicitly rejected each of these aspects of nominalist philosophy. They rejected the univocal concept of being, they rejected voluntarism, they rejected competitive metaphysics—and so personally that’s why I thought this was the weakest part of the book. Chalk hasn’t established that there’s a necessary connection between perspicuity and nominalism. And if that’s the case, then the whole point is just not relevant to his argument. If he ever does make a revision of this book, I would personally advise him to take that section out and give more time to the Rule of Faith. I think that would make for a more robust critique. I still think Protestants can answer that critique, but it would at least improve upon his book.

So to summarize all my answers to the chief objections in the book:

1. As Protestants, we affirm individual accountability, but not autonomy.
2. We believe that biblical interpretation should be governed governed by the Rule of Faith.
3. The essential teachings of Scripture are also defined by the Rule of Faith.
4. Any appeal to an ultimate authority will necessarily be circular.
5. The claim of Protestant nominalism is simply a myth.

There are other objections that Chalk raises in the book, which we don’t have much time for. I’ll just briefly mention some of them: he would say the criteria for discerning a proper disposition towards Scripture—such as the Spirit’s illumination, humility, obedience, and so forth—are subjective and unverifiable. I think we could argue though that the Rule of Faith is objective though, so we’re not hopelessly subjective.

Chalk also argues that perspicuity demands that we assume the worst in others, as if misinterpretation is always based on sin. Now I can acknowledge that I have sin in my heart too, and that might affect my own interpretation too, so I can’t just assume that my interpretation is always right. I have to examine my heart as well.

Chalk also says the early church fathers rejected perspicuity. I disagree with that; I think he’s misinterpreting some of the primary sources. They do clearly affirm the clarity of Scripture, but they also affirm the necessity of an interpretive authority, which I do as well. I think Chalk needs to be more careful about distinguishing between an interpretive authority in the church versus an infallible interpretive authority. I think he bears a higher burden of proof to show that the church fathers believed in an infallible interpretive authority in the church, which I don’t think they did. And I would say uh the same thing applies to his reading of some of the biblical passages about interpretive authority. I do think Scripture does on occasion affirm the need for an interpretive authority—just not an infallible, post-apostolic interpretive authority.

So that would be my summary of some of the other objections. There’s plenty more that could be said about this book—like I said it’s a well done book, I just fundamentally disagree with his argument, and I hope I’ve responded to him in a charitable way. So maybe he’ll check out my YouTube video and he can give feedback of his own, and we can continue the conversation.