Internal Clarity

Yet there is another aspect of Scripture’s clarity: ‘internal clarity’. There is a sense in which, to use his words, ‘no man perceives one iota of what is in the Scriptures unless he has the Spirit of God’. It is possible to know how to quote Scripture, to recite everything in it in a way that makes perfect sense and to ‘apprehend and truly understand nothing of it’. Understanding, in the true Christian sense, is more than making sense of the words on the page. The clarity of Scripture, Luther argued, needs to be understood at both of these levels, external and internal, and we must remember that God involves himself in both. The clarity of Scripture is no mere once and for all accomplishment, ‘a static property of the text’, to use the popular caricature. Scripture remains God’s word by which he addresses the human heart. God’s clear word is made clear to believers by God.

 

Mark Thompson, A Clear and Present Word (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 149