Principle 1: The clearer governs the less clear, the analogy of faith

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

The principle. When two passages appear to conflict, the plain, didactic, repeated statement interprets the obscure, figurative, or solitary one, never the reverse. "No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation" (2 Peter 1:20); truth comes "precept upon precept; line upon line" (Isaiah 28:10), "comparing spiritual things with spiritual" (1 Corinthians 2:13).

Why it should be preferred. Because the alternative destroys the possibility of doctrine altogether. If a difficult verse may overturn a plain one, then much of the history of heresy becomes exegetically defensible, since heresies have characteristically been built by planting a flag in an obscure text and forcing the clear ones to march to it. Many historical doctrinal errors have leaned disproportionately on disputed texts: the Arian party on "firstborn of every creature," the Judaizing party on the circumcision passages. The pattern is old and instructive. God "is not the author of confusion" (1 Corinthians 14:33); if Scripture is one Author's book, its hard sayings must harmonize with its plain ones, and the only non-arbitrary direction of harmony is from the repeatedly plain to the singly obscure. Concretely: John 10:28 ("they shall never perish") is a plain universal promise in a didactic discourse; Hebrews 6:4-6 is a notoriously contested warning whose own paragraph adds a disclaimer (6:9). Sound method reads the warning in the light of the promise. The attainment system's method reads the promise in the light of the warning, and must then quietly rewrite "never perish" as "probably won't perish if they maintain standing," which is not interpretation but amendment.

The test the reader can apply. Ask of any teacher: which of your doctrines rests on a verse whose meaning is disputed, and which on statements repeated plainly across multiple books? A system whose distinctives (Zion tiers, tongues-as-evidence, celibate 144,000) live exclusively in contested symbolic territory, while the plain statements must all be bent to accommodate them, fares poorly under this test.