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Which leads us to one of Luther’s most distinctive contributions, his delineation of two kinds of clarity in Scripture. There is, he insisted, an ‘external clarity’, which concerns the public accessibility of Scripture. God has graciously chosen to express himself in the ordinary conventions of human language, with the result that ‘everything there is in the Scriptures has been brought out by the Word into the most definite light, and published to all the world’. This is the aspect of clarity that makes the public ministry of the word possible as well as the appeal to Scripture in all matters of doctrine and Christian living.