I have a piece at the Christward Collective looking at the doctrine of perspicuity, the clarity of Scripture. This is the first of what will be a three-part series.
Does God speak to us, and if he does, can we understand him?
This two-part question, much more than the question of the existence of God, is particularly relevant today. Most polls of religious views show that somewhere between seventy and ninety percent of Americans believe in God (74% in this Harris poll, 86% in this Gallup one, 89% of this Pew one), an indication that, beyond the celebrity atheists, the question of the existence of God is largely settled for the current population.
The question that continues to nag, however, is whether we can really know God. Is he intelligible to the likes of us, or is he forever shrouded behind the veil, a thing to be gestured at clumsily but hardly known, rarely encountered, and surely not loved. (Or, to paraphrase Woody Allen, I wouldn’t want to know a God who would allow a person like me to know him.)
This is not a new question, either. This is an issue that, I would contend, lay at the center of the Reformation program.
Read the rest here.