Our testimony.
Our testimony.
§ 430. Bellarmine takes his fourth and last class of arguments from our testimony. He says: “If Scripture is so clear, why do the Lutherans write so many commentaries? Why do they publish so many diverse versions of Scripture? Why do they explain Scripture in such different ways? Why do they say that the gift of interpretation is a special gift of the Holy Spirit? Why do they deny that the Scriptures can be understood without the Spirit and an interpreter?”
We respond. (1) We are not writing commentaries for the purpose of bringing light from another source into clear passages of Scripture in which dogmas of faith are presented, but in order to bring to light the genuine meaning from the Scriptures themselves, to defend the simplicity of faith against the corruptions of heretics, and to strengthen it further by a comparison with other passages of Scripture.
(2) The fact that dissent arises in the interpretation of certain passages of Scripture proves not Scripture’s obscurity, but human wickedness—as in the case of heretics who twist what has been said clearly in the articles of faith into another meaning—or the weakness of our mind, which cannot immediately find the true meaning in the more obscure passages of Scripture.
(3) When we assert that Scripture is perspicuous, we wish to exclude neither the internal illumination of the Holy Spirit nor the external work of the ecclesiastical ministry in interpreting Scripture. Our intent is merely this: The dogmas that everyone must know for salvation are presented in the Scriptures so clearly and perspicuously that one need not abandon the Scriptures and run for help to traditions, to the judgment of the Roman Church, to the statements of the fathers, to the decrees of the councils, etc. Instead, one can and should claim something certain about those dogmas from Scripture alone, and the laity, too, can and should be allowed to read them.