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Perspicuity & Denominationalism (vs. Javier Perdomo)

Perspicuity & Denominationalism (vs. Javier Perdomo)

Last updated on: June 23, 2026 at 1:43 pm by Dave Armstrong

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Perspicuity & Denominationalism (vs. Javier Perdomo) 2026-06-23T13:43:54-04:00 Dave Armstrong

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Javier Perdomo is a Lutheran apologist and YouTuber. He wrote a very in-depth tract on his Substack, entitled, “Does Disagreement Prove Scripture is Unclear?: How a Common Roman Catholic Objection to Sola Scriptura Refutes Itself” (6-20-26). I replied there; so far he has made one short counter-reply. I’ll add any more replies from him as they are made.

*****

An extremely ambitious essay indeed! I sincerely commend you for that (I always appreciate serious and detailed thought). It’s so densely argued it seems that it would take about a month to properly refute! But at this point, I’d like to (as one of the Catholic apologists mentioned) make a response to just one of your points. You write:

The argument advanced . . . turns on a single underlying principle. I am going to give it a name so we can handle it precisely. I will call it the Ecclesialist Perspicuity Objection—the EPO.

EPO: Any body of data that generates widespread and persistent disagreement among competent, good-faith interpreters about which of its competing interpretations is correct thereby fails to rationally compel assent to any one of those interpretations over the others.

I don’t believe that in my own critique of perspicuity and the denominationalism that derives in part from it (I’d say it derives from the larger notion of sola Scriptura and the ultimately unbounded and unchecked exercise of private judgment), I ever put it in this particular way.

The following is the point that I habitually make (and in fact made again in my most recent YouTube video at the Catholic Bible Highlights channel: dated 6-19-26). I’ll re-use some of your words for the first part. But my essentially different formulation is more aptly entitled the “Logical / Falsehood Perspicuity Objection” (LFPO for short):

“Any body of data that generates widespread and persistent disagreement among competent, good-faith interpreters about which of its competing interpretations is correct thereby necessarily creates — by the intrinsic laws of logic and contradiction — a large number of institutionally sanctioned theological falsehoods. These are present beyond any doubt whatever in at least one instance (and possibly also in both cases), where denominations have honest disagreements that are logically contradictory.”

Further Troublesome Implications of LFPO:

Falsehood (I think all can agree) is not a good thing. Protestantism, by its very nature and rule of faith (sola Scriptura, including, prominently, the notion of perspicuity) literally promotes (or at best “winks” at or reluctantly tolerates) the ever-increasing prevalence of such erroneous beliefs within its purview. We may not know with absolute certainty which view is wrong where contradictions are present, but we know with absolute certainty that at the very least one of the two is wrong, if true contradiction is present.

And that is not the biblical outlook. Denominations clearly aren’t, in and of themselves, but beyond that, the alarming, scandalous level of falsehood necessarily and institutionally present in Protestant circles is equally hostile to the biblical worldview. In the New Testament (In RSV) the phrase “the truth” appears 70 times, “the faith” 34 times, and there are several other synonyms (gospel, tradition, the message, etc.).

Bottom line: it’s everywhere assumed — especially in St. Paul — that there is one unified body of truth, and that it’s readily known among Christians; so much so that Paul repeatedly urges his followers to separate themselves from anyone who doesn’t abide by the known “tradition.” This in turn presupposes, it seems to me, a Catholic / Orthodox / Anglican idea of apostolic succession.

Secondly, we know where falsehood ultimately comes from:

John 8:44 (RSV). . . the devil . . . has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies

Revelation 12:9 . . . Satan, the deceiver of the whole world . . .

Now, of course I’m not saying that every Protestant is consciously following the devil or beliefs that he or she knows to be false (and when anyone in my hearing says such a thing they are rebuked, and/or their comment is removed from my venues). Of course not.

My point is much more subtle: falsehoods that are necessarily present in the endless and unresolvable Protestant disagreements are a bad thing, and ultimately from the devil. And that can’t possibly be good. Protestantism ends up unwittingly (but at this late date, irresponsibly, and with less and less excuse) promoting and bringing about that which the devil rejoices in, and which expressly contradicts the scriptural notion of “the [theological / spiritual / moral] truth.”

The Bible even states twice that those who “practice falsehood” will be prohibited from entering heaven (Rev 21:27; 22:15). Note that this isn’t the same as being a deliberate liar (which category of persons is also barred from heaven: Rev 21:8).

In light of all this, my questions are very simple, and two in number:

Why would any Christian system want to promote a rule of faith whereby great amounts of error and falsehood will necessarily be present as a result: up to and including possibly helping to cause who knows how many souls to be lost forever?

How does a Protestant resolve these internecine disputes when they occur, so as to present a unified teaching of truth, rather than truth (?) + necessarily present various errors that are curiously tolerated as necessary consequences of a fatally flawed rule of faith?

When I have asked Protestants these provocative questions over my 35 years as a Catholic apologist (especially the second), I’ve never received — to my recollection — a proper relevant answer. I have received, however, many times, some version of the “your dad’s uglier than mine” non sequitur, whereby I learn that the person I challenged can’t possibly be — could never ever become — a Catholic “because of a, b, c, d, e . . .”

But that’s perfectly irrelevant to the question, which asks how Protestants resolve these problems within their own system and framework. That’s a completely different issue from a consideration of whether Protestantism or Catholicism is true, or whether one of the two has significantly more truth than the other, leading one to profess allegiance to it. It’s a critique of an internal incoherence and inconsistency and a conflict between Protestantism and the teaching of the Bible.

I think an honest question to an informed Protestant deserves an honest answer, and not just the tiresome “BUT the big bad boogeyman Catholicism . . . !!!” evasion. One’s own problems are never solved merely by pointing out that someone else has, or reputedly has, bigger problems. We all gotta address the beam in our own eye and not the speck in the other guy’s eye, as someone famously said.

***

You claimed near the beginning, “five different apologists, one argument.” I was one of the five named apologists, yet something else you assert that is uniformly true of all five arguments we made (which you claim amount to “one argument”) was the following:

The objection, to be valid, must show not merely that some readers disagree about some passages, but that the saving content of Scripture is not accessible to competent, good-faith, Spirit-directed readers without an external infallible interpretive authority. That is the target.

In other words, if we can’t show that, then the argument fails, being invalid. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I have never MADE this argument (nor, I highly suspect, have they). I’ve always agreed that one can be saved with the Bible alone, and even largely understand it in relative isolation. Hence, I wrote in an article nine years ago:

It’s not that Scripture is so unclear and esoteric that it is an utter mystery and an undecipherable “code” that only Holy Mother Church can break, and that no individual can possibly understand.

You cited my words from my book, 100 Biblical Arguments Against Sola Scriptura. I devote 14 sections to perspicuity there, taking up about 16 pages (so you only cited one of 14 of my arguments). At the beginning of that chapter, I wrote the following:

If a man was stranded on a desert island with nothing but a Bible, I believe he could be saved. . . . It wouldn’t be absolutely necessary to have a Church or Tradition. For that matter, he could be saved without a Bible, or without ever having heard a word of it, as long as he sought truth; for God said his existence is evident from the things he made (see Romans 1).(p. 45 of the 2nd 2025 edition; p. 59 in the first Catholic Answers edition of 2012)

I wrote in another article from 2002:

I think the Bible is pretty clearly understood even if read on one’s own, provided that the person is truly open to what the Holy Spirit is trying to say to them and teach them . . . I don’t believe that Scripture itself is all that obscure or difficult to understand, at least not in its main outlines. I have never found that to be the case in any serious Bible study I have undertaken on my own . . .

So obviously, what you claim is a goal of Catholic argumentation against perspicuity — or, more specifically, what needs to be shown to succeed in our argument, lest it defeat itself, has never been my goal, because my arguments were of a different nature. I explained the broad outline of how it works in my initial longer comment.

Near the end, you state:

Furthermore, the inference from denominational disagreement to the falsification of perspicuity presupposes that all such disagreements are produced by the text’s failure to communicate, rather than by the reader’s failure to attend, by the noetic effects of sin on theological reasoning, by the distorting influence of prior philosophical commitments, or by inadequate catechetical formation. The apologist has given no argument for this presupposition. Without it, the empirical observation is consistent with the perspicuity doctrine: a text can be clear enough to communicate its saving content and still be misread by readers who bring distorting factors to the act of reading.

Once again, this has no power against my own formulations because I basically agree with it, as already observed in my prior comments and citations from my past writings. In my book that you quote, I write on pp. 47-48 (2nd edition):

Catholics don’t think it [the Bible] is so much obscure or mysterious as it is prone to distorted interpretations. . . . the difficulty is compounded by readers’ false theological presuppositions, selective prooftexting, neglect of context, . . . disregard for exegetical and doctrinal precedent, and so on . . .

Holy Scripture is inherently what it is: God’s inspired, inerrant, written revelation. But human error, sin, and inability to achieve unity of belief on the basis of individualism made the teaching of the Church absolutely necessary.

Hence, my premise is not that Scripture is inherently unclear. I argue that it’s largely clear (much in the sense that you do), including clear about how one is saved, but that human beings — for the various reasons you and I both detail — wrongly interpret it; making an authoritative framework or “final say” necessary. We believe that is the Church, which is protected by the Holy Spirit and granted infallibility in order to preserve true doctrine and to provide certainty for the believer. We don’t think there are any insuperable problems in the biblical text itself.

***

[Javier]: Hello, Dave. Thank you for taking the time to interact. Do you agree that the dogmas of faith, the knowledge of which is necessary to all for their salvation, have been set forth clearly in Scripture? And to that end, would you agree that the more obscure passages can be understood in light of the plainer passages—such that the meaning of Scripture regarding these doctrines can be discerned from the text? Because if you do, then I’m unsure why you claim to deny the doctrine of perspicuity.

Additionally, if you grant that the issue behind misinterpretation lies in the reader (and not the Scriptures themselves), then I fail to see how the magisterium solves that; after all, a reader of the magisterium can, in principle, make all the same sort of errors when interpreting magisterial documents.

Greetings. Thanks for letting me freely comment here. Double yes (material sufficiency). I’m not so much opposed to the clarity of Scripture (as explained), as I am to sola Scriptura as a whole, and how it utilizes private judgment: up to and including internal revolt and division, as in Luther’s own revolt, that inspired the whole thing.

It leads to theological relativism and ecclesiological chaos, as we have seen in Protestantism from almost the very beginning, with Carlstadt, Zwingli, and the Anabaptists. They simply applied Luther’s “Here I Stand” to him, just as he had against the Catholic Church. If he could do it, why not them also? And so it has been ever since. It’ll never stop, because it can’t, with these flawed first principles. They’re simply applied over and over, with each new denomination being yet another mini version of the “Wittenberg door.” “We know better than you. We’re the ‘real’ Bible people! We get it right!”

The fundamental error is the denial of infallibility to the Church and tradition, as had been believed previously. It’s not a matter of replacing the Bible with the Church (as you implied). We don’t believe in sola ecclesia. We believe in the “three-legged-stool” of Scripture-Church-Tradition: always in harmony with each other, by God’s grace and power. Nor does the Catholic Church dogmatically interpret every Bible passage. This is a huge myth. There are in fact only eight or nine that must be interpreted in one way only. Jimmy Akin wrote about that. The Church constitutes the orthodox framework within which good and proper exegesis can take place.

I think one of the big problems in Protestantism is that it holds that inspired Scripture could be written even by sinful men, but Protestants don’t have enough faith to believe that a merely infallible Church (a lesser gift and protection) could be run by sinful men and still be under God’s protection. If God can do one thing, He can do the other, and we believe He did, because Scripture teaches us that He did.

I don’t get why that’s so hard to believe, in light of the fact that God chose to make an eternal covenant with a guy who basically caused a man’s death so that he could steal his wife (he was also the biggest prototype of the Messiah), and chose as the premier evangelist and writer of most of the New Testament a man who murdered Christians for who knows how long.

So, an infallible Church? No problem. It was taught in the Jerusalem Council, where the Holy Spirit confirmed the decision (Acts 15:28), and it’s taught in 1 Timothy 3:15 : “. . . the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.” Something lesser than pure truth can’t be the pillar of truth itself. Therefore, the Church is infallible. Sola Scriptura collapses in a heap, just from those two passages. But there are many more. I recently collected 350.

So, I’m looking at the whole picture: why Protestantism is the way it is and how and why it can never achieve unity, and so must forever be fragmented into a thousand pieces, with rampant falsehood and theological relativism necessarily present by the laws of logic. I have called this the “Protestant Non-Quest for Certainty.” Certainty and assurance can’t occur under the false premise of sola Scriptura.

And that’s why Protestant denominations always go liberal over time, while the Catholic Church has the same theology and morals that it has always had. Apparently it’s now creeping into even the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (which has lost about half of its members in the last 20 years), according to conservative Lutherans. Francis Schaeffer wrote The Great Evangelical Disaster in 1984, back when I was a Protestant apologist, writing about the Trinity and refuting Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s only gotten much worse since then.

But I have great respect for individual Protestants who attempt to hold onto Protestant theological and moral tradition. It’s commendable, but I think it’s doomed to failure. I think if you ponder the situation more deeply, and realize that it can never be resolved, you’ll consider Catholicism a more biblical and consistent alternative.

*****

Photo credit: Image by “Jsaneke88” [Pixabay / CC0 public domain]

Summary: I examine a Lutheran argument favoring perspicuity (clearness) of Scripture, that replied to five Catholic critiques, including my own. But my view was not accurately understood.

Baptism and Sacramentalism

Bible and Tradition

Calvinism & General Protestantism

Literary Resume

clarity of Scripture

Clearness of Scripture

Javier Perdomo

perspicuity of Scripture

Sola Scriptura

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