Double Standard?

Often, Rome charges that the Scriptures are ambiguous and unclear, needing Tradition and the Magisterium to properly interpret them. On the contrary, we believe that the Scriptures teach that they are perspicuous. That is, they are plain and clear enough in the necessary places to know of what we must believe concerning salvation and do in response to so great a salvation.

Yet, isn’t it interesting to observe Rome’s double speak? For, on the one hand, she says that the Scriptures are unclear, yet when arguing for blasphemous doctrines such as the sinlessness of Mary, her assumption, Apostolic succession, etc., the Papists begin arguing for the clarity of Scripture as it stands on its own.

William Whitaker once wrote,

Indeed all the papists in their books, when they seek to prove any thing, boast everywhere that they can bring arguments against us from the most luminous, plain, clear and manifest testimonies of Scripture . . . For in every dispute their common phrases are,””This is clear,””This is plain,””This is manifest in the scriptures, and such like. Surely when they speak thus, they ignorantly and unawares confess the perspicuity of the scriptures even in the greatest questions and controversies (A Disputation on Holy Scripture Against the Papists, Especially Bellarmine and Stapleton, trans. and ed. William Fitzgerald (Cambridge: The University Press, reprinted 1849), 401).