The clarity of Scripture is found in Christ alone

Listening to: Regina Specktor: Far

Erasmus argued against Luther that some doctrines in the Bible are unclear, and you cannot make confident statements about them. He believed that the freedom of the will was one of these.

Luther, was having none of it:

This indeed I confess, that there are many places in the Scriptures obscure and abstruse; not from the majesty of the thing, but from our ignorance of certain terms and grammatical particulars; but which do not prevent a knowledge of all the things in the Scriptures. For what thing of more importance can remain hidden in the Scriptures, now that the seals are broken, the stone rolled from the door of the sepulchre, and that greatest of all mysteries brought to light, Christ made man: that God is Trinity and Unity: that Christ suffered for us, and will reign to all eternity? Are not these things known and proclaimed even in our streets? Take Christ out of the Scriptures, and what will you find remaining in them? (source)

He goes on to make a incredible statement:

If many things still remain abstruse to many, this does not arise from obscurity in the Scriptures, but from their own blindness or want of understanding, who do not go the way to see the all-perfect clearness of the truth.

That is a radical statement. But its born out of a faith which sees Christ as all of Christianity. Do we think the same way? Luther argues that the test is whether we find things in the Scriptures unlcear.

Luther and Erasmus on the gospel and salvation history

Where Erasmus viewed the Scripture in terms of salvation history and placed Jesus' sayings and the Gospels at the center (ad fontes! [= "to the sources"]), Melanchthon found the scopus [goal] of the Scripture in Romans and justification by faith alone. Where Luther and Melanchthon both distinguished between law and gospel in the Scripture, Erasmus consistently constructed a grand unity between the two, culminating in the philosophia Christi, an overarching moral construal of the gospel in which Christ provided the Christian with an ideal example. Thus Erasmus centered his description of the gospel in the creation of a Christian people, not in the forgiveness of sins. His appeal for harmony and concord reflected the very center of Christ's gospel for him.

(Review of Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness: Philip Melanchthon's Exegetical Dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam by Timothy Wengert, Trinity Journal, Spring 1999 by Scheck, Tom)

Sound familiar?

Of course the big danger in reading about church history is that you start off deciding who is orthodox before you even find out what was being taught. Before you know it instead of being concerned to be looking through biblical eyes, you start looking through Martin Luther's, Philipp Melanchton's, or whoever your Christian hero is.

So I have to be careful. By stating that X thought something does not mean that we should pre-judge anything. As Erasmus and the Reformers said, ad fontes!