Casey Chalk's recent publication of The Obscurity of Scripture, a heartfelt account of wrestling with the doctrine of sola Scriptura before a reluctant admission that it made no sense, has triggered a wildly disproportionate reaction among Protestant apologists. The underlying philosophical explanation has been previously published for years at the Called to Communion website, but it produced nothing like the angry backlash that Chalk's latest work has, including such slanders as "doesn't he think texts have meaning?," "I guess Roman Catholics are postmodernists now," and "I can't understand what Chalk is saying because I don't have an infallible interpreter."
Then I realized that I'd seen a similar level of discontent and anger before in response to philosophical arguments concerning biological sex, a fact of which I was reminded by this article. The response to Chalk seems to stem from the same sort of existential dread that drives the response to otherwise-innocuous inquiries into the philosophical basis of biological sex. In the context of the transgender debate, the underlying psychological condition is known as gender dysphoria, referring to a profound and existential sense that one does not belong in the biological sex of one's birth. Transgender allies see this condition reflecting the individual's "truth," and thus view attempts to give an account of gender rooted in biological sex as attacks, while those providing a philosophical account of biological sex are generally motivated by a desire to know the truth of things in the same way that they would know any other truth.
By analogy, I would call Scripture dysphoria an existential discontent with the essential elements of what is necessary for Scripture to count as divine revelation, that is, to affirm that it is inspired and has divine normative authority. These are requirements for God to have spoken clearly to us; Chalk explicitly ties the "obscurity" he means to the inherent obscurity of the divine nature, a fact that appears to have been largely overlooked. The work at Called to Communion and my own previous article on normative authority are both directed to this issue of the philosophy of divine revelation, and this is essentially what Chalk's book addresses head-on. There have been other works that have addressed the fundamental issue of Scriptural authority more delicately, such as Matthew Levering's Was the Reformation a Mistake?, but the inquiry is the same. There are real philosophical requirements for Scripture to count as divine revelation, just as there are real biological parameters for one to count as a member of a biological sex.
Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with the the ability to interpret texts reliably, only with the specifically unique properties that qualify Scripture as divine revelation, especially the existence of a divinely authorized Magisterium ratifying Scripture's authority. In that respect, the response "you're challenging the authority of Scripture" is in the same class as "you're challenging my gender." It is not engaging at all with the philosophical claim that there are requirements for a text to count as divine revelation. Perspicuity of Scripture is similar in that regard to gender as personal expression; the denial is equated with an attack on the person's identity, not merely an ordinary philosophical discussion.
When dealing with these sorts of intensely personal beliefs, it is difficult to have a reasonable discussion, and it requires great empathy. (Levering is a model of that sort of charitable interaction.) Rather than engaging with these sorts of emotional responses as arguments, we probably need to recognize that the person making such arguments is dealing with issues that can trigger an existential crisis and that this might not be the right time to push the issue. That being said, as with the transgender debate, one may still need to be firm about maintaining the truth and not to capitulate to intimidation. In that respect, I do think that this discussion needs to be had that what Protestants mean by "authority," much like what transgender allies mean by "gender," is simply not the same concept Christianity has historically held.
