‍Why Protestants Can’t Agree on the Clear Teachings of Scripture

‍The 500-year experiment on the clarity of Scripture

  Gary Hoge  ·  November 4, 2026

‍One of the foundational doctrines of Protestantism is sola Scriptura, the belief that Scripture alone is our rule of faith and practice. We don’t need the Church to tell us what we’re supposed to believe.

‍Obviously, if Scripture alone is the final authority for determining Christian doctrine, Scripture alone must present its teachings with sufficient clarity to perform that function.

‍And Protestants assert that it does. They call this the perspicuity of Scripture.

‍The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) puts it this way:

‍All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.¹

‍Reformed theologian W. Robert Godfrey makes much the same claim:

‍The Protestant position, and my position, is that all things necessary for salvation and concerning faith and life are taught in the Bible with enough clarity that the ordinary believer can find them there and understand.²

‍Now, I agree up to a point. There are many teachings in the Bible that are clearly presented. You can tell which ones those are because Christians across the spectrum—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—tend to agree on them. For example, the Crucifixion, the Virgin Birth, and the bodily Resurrection are clearly taught in Scripture, and therefore clearly understood across Christianity.

‍But are all the essential teachings of Christianity sufficiently clear that ordinary Christians can determine what they’re supposed to believe without relying on the Church?

‍A five-hundred-year experiment

‍In a sense, Protestantism has been conducting a five-hundred-year experiment to find out.

‍They’ve studied Scripture in its original languages, examined its historical context, written countless commentaries, established seminaries, debated one another, and produced elaborate confessions of faith.

‍And what have they discovered?

‍That they can’t agree about what Scripture teaches concerning baptism, justification, perseverance, predestination, the Eucharist, and a host of other doctrines that Christians considered important long before the Reformation.

‍Some, like Lutherans, believe that baptism actually washes away sins and brings about regeneration. Others, like Southern Baptists, insist that it doesn’t accomplish either of those things.³

‍Some, like Presbyterians, believe that infants should be baptized. Others, like Pentecostals, insist that only those old enough to profess faith may receive baptism.⁴

‍Some, like Methodists, believe that a Christian can lose his salvation. Others, like the Plymouth Brethren, insist that once someone is genuinely saved, he can never be lost.⁵

‍Some, like Anglicans, believe that Christ’s body and blood are truly present in the Eucharist. Others, like the Churches of Christ, regard the bread and wine as symbols.⁶

‍After five hundred years of sustained disagreement among people who have devoted their lives to understanding Scripture, maybe we should reconsider whether Scripture alone is as clear as it needs to be for sola Scriptura to be a viable rule of faith.

‍How low must we set the bar?

‍There’s a possible response to this objection. The doctrine of perspicuity doesn’t claim that Scripture is equally clear about everything. It claims that Scripture is clear about what’s necessary for salvation.

‍Fair enough. If Scripture is clear about everything necessary for salvation, we should expect substantial agreement among Protestants about those things. But when we look at what Protestants actually agree on, the list is pretty short.

‍And missing from that list are things the Bible itself presents as important.

‍Protestants don’t agree about baptism, so we’d have to exclude that. But Jesus said, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16). Peter wrote, “Baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21).

‍Protestants don’t agree about the Eucharist, so we’d have to exclude that. But Jesus warned, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). And Paul asked, “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16).

‍Protestants don’t agree about the necessity of obedience, so we’d have to exclude that. But John 3:36  said, “He who does not obey the Son shall not see life.” And Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21).

‍Protestants don’t agree about the role of good works, so we’d have to exclude that. But Paul said, “To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7). And Jesus himself said, “Those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned” (John 5:28–29).

‍Those certainly sound like matters related to salvation. Yet Protestants disagree about what these passages mean, whether the things they describe are conditions of salvation or consequences of it, and what God actually requires of us to be saved.

‍So what do we do? Do we just keep lowering the bar until the perspicuity doctrine can clear it, rendering the assertion that Scripture is clear virtually meaningless?

‍Or do we admit that just as widespread agreement among Christians is evidence that a doctrine is clearly taught in Scripture, widespread disagreement is evidence that it isn’t?

‍Of course, a Protestant can insist that Scripture is clear and that everyone who disagrees with his interpretation has simply misunderstood it. But every Protestant can make that same claim.

‍And if Scripture is clear regardless of how many people disagree about what it teaches, or how long those disagreements persist, how would it be any different if Scripture were not clear?

‍Why was it necessary to claim that Scripture was perspicuous?

‍The Reformers rejected the Catholic Church’s claim to possess the authority to interpret Scripture definitively. But that raised an obvious question: If Christians no longer had an authoritative interpreter—and referee—how were they supposed to know what Scripture meant or settle their disagreements about it?

‍The doctrine of perspicuity supplied an answer. Scripture was sufficiently clear that even ordinary Christians could understand everything necessary for salvation. They didn’t need the Church to tell them what to believe.

‍The Church might help them understand it, of course. But its interpretation could be overruled by every blacksmith and wheelwright who thought the Church got it wrong.

‍In that sense, the doctrine of perspicuity does more than affirm the clarity of Scripture. It helps justify the rejection of the Church’s authority to interpret it.

‍Why the experiment failed

‍For five hundred years, Protestants have been attempting to determine Christian doctrine from Scripture alone. If Scripture were sufficiently clear for ordinary Christians to understand the essential teachings of their faith, we should expect substantial agreement about those teachings. Instead, we’ve seen centuries of disagreement over baptism, justification, the Eucharist, perseverance, and other important doctrines, with no end in sight.

‍By any reasonable measure, the experiment has failed.

‍And I think the reason is that sola Scriptura asks the Bible to do something it wasn’t written to do. The New Testament was written to Christians who already possessed a body of teaching that had been communicated to them personally. Its authors knew that and took it into account. They didn’t need to explain everything their readers already knew so that Christians two thousand years later would know it, too. And there’s no reason to assume they did.

‍That’s why Paul’s letters weren’t introductory textbooks explaining Christianity from the ground up. They were written to communities that had already been evangelized, instructed, baptized, and incorporated into the Church. So sometimes Paul just reminded people of his teachings; he didn’t explain them all over again.

‍For instance, he told the Thessalonians:

‍So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter. (2 Thessalonians 2:15)

‍And when he instructed Timothy to preserve and transmit the faith, he wrote:

‍And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Timothy 2:2)

‍Paul directed that the apostolic faith be handed down from one generation to the next, person to person, not simply preserved in documents but taught within a living Christian community.

‍That was the context in which the New Testament was written. And it was the context in which its authors expected their writings to be understood. So to the original audience, much of the New Testament probably was pretty clear. And if we could read it with the same background knowledge they possessed, much of it would probably be clearer to us, too.

‍The Good Book Misused

‍Sola Scriptura fails, in part, because it treats the Bible as if it were a self-contained “Manual of Christianity” from which we can reconstruct the faith from scratch. But the New Testament’s authors clearly never intended it to serve that purpose. They took their readers’ prior knowledge into account when they wrote, and they didn’t explain things their audience already knew but that we might not. 

‍The problem isn’t necessarily that the teachings are missing from Scripture. It’s that without the knowledge its original readers possessed, we may not be able to tell which interpretation of those teachings is correct.

‍That’s the problem we face when we try to reconstruct the faith from Scripture alone. Consider infant baptism.

‍The New Testament tells us that entire households were baptized (Acts 16:15, 16:33; 1 Corinthians 1:16). But it never tells us whether those households included infants.

‍And when Peter preached at Pentecost, he told his listeners to repent and be baptized, adding, “The promise is for you and your children” (Acts 2:38–39).

‍A Presbyterian can reasonably appeal to household baptisms, covenant continuity, and Peter’s promise to his listeners and their children. A Baptist can reasonably point out that the New Testament never explicitly says infants were baptized and that Peter’s promise could refer to future generations. 

‍Both sides appeal to the same Bible. Both interpretations are plausible on the available textual evidence, even though they can’t both correctly describe apostolic practice.

‍But suppose we know from the apostolic teaching handed down within the Church that the apostles baptized infants. Suddenly, these passages become much easier to understand. The household baptisms and Peter’s promise to his listeners and their children fit naturally into a practice that the Church had already received.

‍I believe the New Testament does teach infant baptism. But I recognize that it can plausibly be interpreted otherwise. It’s the teaching preserved within the Church that tells me which interpretation reflects what the apostles actually taught.

‍The biblical text hasn’t changed. We’ve simply restored the context in which those passages were meant to be understood. Combine that with the fact that the Church has been baptizing infants continuously for centuries—as far back as our records explicitly address the question⁷—and we have even more reason to believe we understand what the biblical writers meant, even though they never spelled it out.

‍And why didn’t they spell it out? Well, do modern Presbyterian parents need a letter from their pastor explaining whether their church baptizes infants? Of course not. They already know. Even those of us who aren’t Presbyterians know. And if their pastor wrote them a letter about something else, he wouldn’t necessarily explain that Presbyterians baptize infants, because, again, his readers already know that.

‍The same was true of the Christians to whom the apostles wrote. They knew whether their churches baptized infants. The New Testament authors didn’t need to mention it, so they didn’t.

‍If only God could communicate as well as the Westminster Assembly

‍Just think how easily the centuries-long controversy over infant baptism could have been avoided. The Westminster Assembly wrote:

‍Not only those that do actually profess faith in and obedience unto Christ, but also the infants of one, or both, believing parents, are to be baptized.⁸

‍That’s perfectly clear. Nobody has to spend years studying Greek or Hebrew to determine whether Westminster teaches infant baptism. It says so explicitly.

‍A Baptist might reject that teaching, but he can’t reasonably deny that Westminster teaches it. Clarity doesn’t eliminate disagreement about whether a teaching is true. It eliminates reasonable disagreement about what the teaching is.

‍Imagine if that single sentence had appeared anywhere in the New Testament.

‍There would be no Baptist–Presbyterian controversy over infant baptism. There might not even be any Baptists!

‍So why didn’t God make the matter equally clear in Scripture? Surely he’s at least as good a communicator as the authors of the Westminster Confession. Yet they managed to accomplish in one sentence something the whole New Testament didn’t.

‍Maybe God didn’t mean for that particular teaching to be preserved explicitly in Scripture but handed down in the life and practice of the Church. And the Church’s inherited practice would, in turn, supply the context that makes Scripture clear on that subject after all.

‍The churches that have preserved the practice of infant baptism don’t have to reconstruct it from ambiguous biblical passages. They already know whether infants should be baptized, just as the Christians to whom the apostles wrote knew.

‍The problem isn’t that the New Testament authors failed to communicate clearly. They were writing to people who already possessed knowledge that we don’t necessarily possess today. Something can be perfectly clear to its intended audience without being equally clear to people who lack the background knowledge that audience had.

‍That’s not a defect in Scripture. It’s simply how written communication works.

‍And that’s the problem with sola Scriptura. It asks the Bible to communicate the Christian faith without the context that made it clear in the first place. In doing so, it removes something necessary for the clarity it insists Scripture possesses.

‍Why Catholics and Orthodox agree on so much

‍Here’s something worth considering.

‍The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches have been separated for nearly a thousand years. That’s about twice as long as Protestantism has even existed. They have serious disagreements about papal authority and certain other theological questions.

‍But consider how much they agree about.

‍Both believe that the Eucharist truly becomes the body and blood of Christ.

‍Both baptize infants and understand baptism as a sacrament through which God grants new life.

‍Both recognize the sacramental character of the priesthood and the importance of apostolic succession.

‍Both practice confession to a priest, honor Mary and the saints, pray for the dead, and believe that the apostolic faith has been preserved and handed down within the visible, historical Church.

‍And both reject sola Scriptura.

‍Why is there so much agreement between two Churches that have been separated for centuries, while Protestant communities that share a commitment to Scripture alone continue to disagree about so many of these same doctrines?

‍I would suggest it’s because they don’t approach the New Testament as though Christianity must be reconstructed from its pages. They read it within a faith that they believe was received from the apostles and preserved within the Church.

‍The breadth of their shared beliefs is striking, especially when contrasted with the doctrinal diversity that developed within Protestantism.

‍And it suggests that something important has been preserved in the apostolic inheritance they share.

‍Conclusion

‍For five hundred years, Protestants have been trying to determine the essential teachings of Christianity from Scripture alone. And after five hundred years of studying, debating, and dividing over what Scripture teaches, they still can’t agree about many of those teachings.

‍I don’t blame Protestants for that. If Catholics approached Scripture the same way, we wouldn’t do any better. The problem isn’t the people. It’s the method.

‍Sola Scriptura requires Scripture to be sufficiently clear that ordinary Christians can determine what they’re supposed to believe without relying on the Church.

‍But the New Testament was written to Christians who already knew much of what they were supposed to believe. Its authors didn’t need to repeat everything their readers already knew, and they didn’t.

‍When we separate Scripture from that inherited knowledge, we lose part of the context that makes its meaning clear. And when we reject the Church’s authority to settle the disagreements that result, those disagreements persist indefinitely.

‍That’s the great irony of sola Scriptura. It removes something necessary for the clarity on which the whole system depends.

‍But if you don’t remove that context, maybe Scripture is clear after all. Maybe you just have to read it the way God intended it to be read.

‍__________

^‍1 Westminster Confession of Faith, (1646), 1.7, “Of the Holy Scripture.” Westminster Confession of Faith.

^‍2 W. Robert Godfrey, “What Do We Mean by Sola Scriptura?”, in Sola Scriptura: The Protestant Position on the Bible, p. 2. Ligonier Ministries.

^‍3 The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod teaches that baptism is a means of grace through which God grants regeneration and forgiveness of sins. The Southern Baptist Convention describes baptism as an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith. See LCMS, “Frequently Asked Questions: Doctrine” and The Baptist Faith and Message (2000), Article VII.

^‍4 Westminster Confession of Faith 28.4 affirms the baptism of infants of believing parents. The Assemblies of God’s Statement of Fundamental Truths, Article 6, describes baptism as an ordinance for those who repent and believe in Christ. See Westminster Confession of Faith and Assemblies of God, “Statement of Fundamental Truths”.

^‍5 The United Methodist Church teaches that Christians may turn away from God’s saving grace and ultimately be lost. Plymouth Brethren writer Franklin Ferguson defends the eternal security of the believer. See United Methodist Church, “Do United Methodists Believe Once Saved, Always Saved?” and Franklin Ferguson, “Eternal Security,” Plymouth Brethren & Other Ministries.

^‍6 The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, Article XXVIII, teaches that Christ’s body is received in the Lord’s Supper in a heavenly and spiritual manner. Churches of Christ commonly describe the bread and fruit of the vine as emblems symbolizing Christ’s body and blood. See Church of England, “Articles of Religion” and Churches of Christ, “About Us”.

^‍7 Tertullian, On Baptism 18 (c. AD 200), recommends delaying the baptism of young children, demonstrating that the practice was already known. Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 8.3 (third century), discusses infant baptism as an existing Church practice; his Commentary on Romans 5.9 attributes it to apostolic tradition, although the surviving text comes through Rufinus’s later Latin translation. Cyprian, Letter to Fidus 64.2 (c. AD 253; numbered Epistle 58 in some editions), records a council of 66 bishops agreeing that newborn infants need not wait until the eighth day to be baptized. These are among our earliest explicit discussions of infant baptism, and they show that the practice was already established when the surviving historical record begins addressing it. See Tertullian, On Baptism; Early Christian testimony concerning infant baptism; and Cyprian, Letter to Fidus.

^‍8 Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 28.4, “Of Baptism.” Westminster Confession of Faith.