I don't under 'Perspicuity of Scripture'. This means The perspicuity of scripture is 'the idea that the Bible is clear and understandable, and that it canbe interpreted literally'
Who is or is not interpreting the bible literally, the Protestants or Catholics. What is the problem with the bible being clear and interpreted literally in some places. Or needs further interpretation in others.
If I understand you correctly, you are pointing out correctly that the idea of perspicuity of scripture implies a false dichotomy between esoteric and exoteric interpretation, and also that some texts are difficult to interpret, and if that is your point, I would agree, but at the same time, there remains an implicit erroneous Protestant vs. Catholic false dichotomy, which is one of the great historical errors that confuses Western scholars of Christian divinity, particularly those from a non-liturgical or Restorationist background.
This is an error not only firstly it completely neglects the unique perspectives of the three great Eastern churches*, which is incredibly problematic since these churches include nearly all native Christian speakers of the Greek and Aramaic languages, the former being what the New Testament was written in, and a dialect of the latter being the language actually spoken by Jesus Christ and the Jews, indeed, for several centuries prior to His Incarnation (the Book of Daniel, for example, is primarily Aramaic, and there are Aramaic words scattered throughout the Hebrew books of the Old Testament, even in Genesis). Two of these three communities, the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox, are among the largest in the world, being the second largest and approximately sixth or seventh largest respectively as a unified communion (Roman Catholicism being the largest, Anglicanism the third largest, Lutheranism the fourth largest, various Calvinist and Reformed churches which are in communion, the fifth largest, and certain Pentecostal and Baptist groups in the same size range as the Oriental Orthodox, with 290 million Eastern Orthodox and about 70 million Oriental Orthodox (perhaps more, since OO demographics are believed to be under-reported in some Islamic countries such as Egypt and Syria).
The Church of the East, the third Eastern community, used to be the largest in the world, at least in terms of geography, and perhaps in population as well, until a mass-murdering Muslim warlord called Timur the Lame, more commonly known as Tamerlane, initiated a generations-long genocide in which all of its members outside of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East and the Malabar Coast of India, a region stretching from Socotra in Yemen in the southwest to Azerbaijan in the northwest, and from there to Mongolia in the Northeast, then down across China to Tibet in the Southeast. Thus these churches account for a significant minority of Christians alive today, and when we consider the Islamist genocides, the Roman genocides against Coptic Christians under Diocletian, and the Turkish genocide against Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks, and more recent genocides and “ethnic cleansing” (forced displacement of populations) across Asia in the past 120 years, and the Communist persecutions which began under Lenin and intensified to an extreme under Stalin, and which led to the death of yet more Armenians and many Ethiopians including the martyred Emperor Haile Selassie under the Derg regime, not to mention countless Russians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Georgians, Bulgarians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and other Eastern Europeans before and after World War II, account for a very high percentage of Christian martyrs, at least a plurality.
These churches were not unknown to the Protestants or the Catholics; Martin Luther was inspired to move against Rome by the mere existence of the Ethiopian church, which had never been under Roman control (nor had most Eastern churches; this would change politically but not religiously when Mussolini conquered Ethiopia and briefly occupied in one of the first acts of aggression leading to the Second World War), John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was heavily influenced by Eastern Orthodox theology and was probably secretly consecrated a bishop by a Greek Orthodox bishop visiting England in 1763, Erasmus of Arcadia. Starting in the 17th century, non-Juring Scottish Episcopalians explored entering into communion with the Russian Orthodox Church, and this came close to happening between the Episcopalians and Russian Orthodox in North America, but was derailed by three factors: the rise of Communism causing the fragmentation of the Eastern Orthodox community in North America, the objections of “low church” Anglicans, and the rise of the “liberal Catholic” movement which integrated with the “broad church” movement to dominate Episcopalianism until the present.
Now, while I don’t agree with all of what Rev. Billy Graham taught, he did the Russian Orthodox church a great service during the Communist persecution, by obtaining a blessing from the Patriarch to preach in Russia, and thus do what the Soviet authorities would not allow the church to do, which was to engage in basic catechtical instruction, especially to youth - during the Soviet union, this happened in the privacy of homes, and those who maintained Orthodox faith faced persecution up to and including death, and were excluded from the Communist Party, membership of which was required in order to hold any number of important jobs. This was also the case with all other Christian churches operating in the USSR, and in the other Warsaw Pact countries to varying extents (some sought to maintain a pretense of religious freedom, whereas others, particularly Albania and North Korea, violently suppressed all religious activity aside from the cult of personality around their leader).
Finally, the Protestant vs. Catholic dichotomy is also a distortion even within Western Christianity, since there exist churches which do not fit into the dichotomy either according to the principles of their faith, such as the Moravians or Old Catholics or Anglicans of a High Church or Anglo-Catholic persuasion, or Orthodox Lutherans of an Evangelical Catholic persuasion, or which break the mold despite believing in the dichotomy, for example, Adventists and other Restorationists which have doctrines that are highly divergent from the most common shared beliefs of Protestants. It also ignores internal divisions within the Roman Catholic communion, such as the Sui Juris Eastern Catholic Churches, and even the other Western rites, such as the Ambrosian Rite Catholics of Milan, as well as the distinct practices and theological orientation of the various religious orders, which have on occasion come into conflict, for example, the Chinese Rites Controversy between the Jesuits, who believed that ancestor worship could be tolerated, and the Franciscans and Domincans, who took the view that it was intolerable (which I also share; this view however led to the Khangxi Emperor ordering all Christians in China to be killed.**
Thus, whenever we reduce a subject to a dichotomy, we are usually in error, and this is especially so when we try to reduce Christian theology to Protestantism vs. Catholicism, which is a point of view so narrow that I would argue it excludes most of it, since the few polemical bits that are popular in Protestant vs. Catholic debates are often misunderstood theological cliches that most serious theologians of either church, both conservative and liberal, traditional and modern, do not regard with much weight. And we ignore the mass martyrdoms that continue of Asian and African Christians of Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Identity, as well as those of Protestant and Catholic identity, and also the phenomenon of large scale conversions to the Orthodox church in the West, which also has included some converts to the Assyrian churches.
*These are, for those wondering, the Eastern Orthodox Communion (Greeks, Cypriots, Romanians, Antiochians, other non-Catholic Arabs of
Rum (meaning Roman, from the Greek
Romiioi) ethnicity such as the Jordanian Orthodox and the Orthodox Bedouins, Serbians, Montenegrins, Albanians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Russians, Finns, Poles, Native Alaskans, and various other Slavic Orthodox populations including many Carpatho-Rusyn or Ruthenian, Lemko and Czech and Slovak people, in addition to more recent conversions in the West), the Oriental Orthodox Communion, which consists of the Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Suroye (Syriac Orthodox Christians in the Levant, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and the Holy Land), Nasrani (Syriac Orthodox in India), and finally the Church of the East (currently divided by a schism on non-ethnic lines between the Ancient Church of the East and the much larger Assyrian Church of the East, the latter of which has more than 700,000 native speakers of Aramaic, the largest Aramaic speaking population in the world, but of course, the Ancient Church of the East also consists primarily of Aramaic speakers, and Syriac Aramaic is not only the liturgical language of the Syriac Orthodox Church, but spoken by a minority of its Suroye members, in two main surviving dialects, Turoyo, spoken by many from Turkey, and another version spoken in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and finally there is an Aramaic speaking population in the Antiochian Orthodox Church, which is Eastern Orthodox, most notably in the village of Maaloula, Syria, which was held hostage by Al Qaeda about a decade ago and which like all Syrian Christians is once again endangered due to the rise of the new Islamist regime.
** Most of my Episcopalian friends are perplexed and bemused by the fact that the very odd church of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, which appears to have Universalist tendencies but was apparently unaware of the fact that St. Gregory is one of only a few Early Church Fathers who expressly condemned in his writings all forms of homosexual conduct, there exists a Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) style icon of the Kangxi Emperor along with various other Christian and non-Christian figures, such as Ghandi, on the ceiling of that parish. But that parish, for all of its eclectic worship (incorporating Shaker dances, Shinto shrines, Byzantine chant, and an Anaphora, or Eucharistic Prayer, dedicated to Cain, the proto-murderer, is still less of an anomaly than herchurch, an ELCA parish in San Francisco which is in no respects identifiably Lutheran, nor do I think it would count as Christian on CF.com, since it engages in “Mother Goddess worship” and distributes prayer beads called “Mother Goddess Rosaries” that feature a Pagan idol, and engages in Pagan rites such as Croning (a coming of age ceremony for women who are no longer of child-bearing age).
