Continuing Revelation

Volume Four—Chapter Eight CONTINUING REVELATION AND MODERN SCRIPTURE

#The Book of Mormon

Evangelical view. Blomberg writes of the Book of Mormon: “The more I read, the more I feel it to be the product of nineteenth-century religious fervor, however well intentioned” (HWD, 183). Evangelicals have observed that the Book of Mormon uses “Christian terms and concepts.”

Blomberg also raises a few additional questions about the Book of Mormon: 1. He questions whether or not there “truly was such a language as ‘Reformed Egyptian’” (HWD, 53).

2. He seems perplexed by Joseph Smith’s “mistake” in naming the land of Jerusalem (rather than Bethlehem) as the birthplace of Jesus Christ. He said, “I have no idea why he allowed this discrepancy to stand” (Ibid., 46). Blomberg’s reference is to Alma 7:10: “And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God.”

3. He also regards the Book of Mormon as being anachronistic. “The whole range of issues that the uniquely LDS Scriptures seek to answer fits perfectly the spirit of the early nineteenth century.” As examples, he lists infant baptism, predestination, and original sin, claiming that they “all fit the religious climate of nineteenth-century North America very readily” (Ibid., 52).

LDS view. Robinson responds:

Latter-day Saints believe that the fulness of the gospel was revealed to Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and many others of the ancient prophets whose blessed assurance came on the strength of the Lord’s promises of future events. It was also revealed to Moses, but the children of Israel proved unready for the revelation and, when they sinned, they were given a lesser law to be their schoolmaster until the fulness would be revealed to them again in the future.

In my view the absence of specifically Christian language in the Old Testament from Sinai on is not primarily due to “editing out,” as Prof. Blomberg assumes. Rather it is due to the Old Testament’s being part of the “lesser” law of Moses. The language of the gospel was never in most of the Old Testament, since the Old Testament postdates Moses and is adapted to the understanding of those who were under the law of Moses. It is a text for those under the Old Covenant, not those under the New.

However, the fulness of the Christian gospel was revealed to the Book of Mormon peoples in the New World before the birth of Christ just as it had been revealed to Adam, Noah, and Abraham. In describing their Christian beliefs in the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith did not hesitate to use the KJV idiom wherever he could. This was not “plagiarism” but a conscious decision to use the sacred language he knew to render similar ideas from the ancient record. It may “seem” anachronistic to some, but regardless of what may have been on the plates, why should Joseph be required to invent new terminology when both he and his audience already knew intimately the KJV idiom? It seems to me that this boils down to whether Latter-day Saints (or Evangelicals) are wrong about pre-Christian prophets possibly knowing the Christian gospel (HWD, 66-67).

Blomberg seems unaware of the irresistibly compelling multidisciplinary body of evidences that have been accumulated, largely in the last twenty-five years, by competent Latter-day Saint scholars. These corroborate and support the Book of Mormon as an authentic ancient document. Blomberg is also apparently unaware of

recent scholarly research on the Reformed Egyptian question.

Scholarship suggests that far from constituting a mistake, Alma 7:10 reflects authentically ancient Near Eastern usage.2 Of course Joseph Smith knew that Jesus was born in the town of Bethlehem. In writing this particular sentence, did Joseph Smith make an error? This passage is not an error. Here Jerusalem is referred to as a land and not a city. It was the custom of the day to refer to the area surrounding a large city, such as Jerusalem as the land of Jerusalem. Any small town or village located near the major city was referred to as being in that city’s land. Thus Bethlehem was located in the land of Jerusalem. Joseph Smith could not have known, from his study of the Bible, about this concept of lands and cities since it is not clearly elucidated in the Bible. Modern sources, however, have confirmed the fact that anciently the town of Bethlehem was considered to be located in the “land of Jerusalem” (see John Bright, A History of Israel, 221-22 and Dan Barag, “A New Source Concerning the Ultimate Borders of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 29, 197-217). A recently released text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, a text claiming to have originated in the days of Jeremiah (and, therefore, in Lehi’s time), says that the Jews of that period were “taken captive from the land of Jerusalem” (Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, 57-58). Texts discovered earlier in the twentieth century seem to include Bethlehem within that “land.”

Hamblin and Peterson respond to the doctrinal examples Blomberg mentions as seeming to him anachronistic:

They also fit many other periods of biblical and Christian history. Original sin and predestination, for instance, were major sources of contention between Augustine and Pelagius in the early fifth century, and in the years leading up to the Second Council of Orange in AD 529, Tertullian and the Anabaptists rejected infant baptism in, respectively, early third-century North Africa and sixteenth century Germanic Europe, which would seem to indicate that controversy on the subject is not limited to “nineteenth century North America” (FRB, 203).

Mormon and Moroni wrote in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. It is interesting to note that the same apostate practices and beliefs had crept into the Christian church in the New World.

#Does God Continue to Speak to Prophets?

Evangelical view. Blomberg attempts to downplay the possibility of—and the importance of—modern revelation. His line of reasoning is a bit unexpected. He differentiates between Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles and suggests that the kind of prophecy that comprises written, canonizable texts was on its way out in New Testament times: “It is perhaps not so surprising . . . that no New Testament author ever claims that his writing is the result of prophecy, except for John in the book of Revelation (Revelation 22:18-19). The writers believed they were guided or inspired by the Spirit (as in 1 Corinthians 7:40), but that does not constitute a claim that they were writing as New Testament “prophets” (HWD, 43).

Blomberg seems to feel that scripture written by prophets in Old Testament times was fundamentally different from scripture in New Testament times. Old Testament prophets received revelation and wrote scripture containing “prophecy.” Their writings were accepted as binding without any questions asked. He writes, “In the days of Isaiah and Jeremiah, for example, no divinely accredited prophets were ever to be evaluated [judged critically by the people]; their messages were simply to be believed and obeyed” (HWD, 42). “In Paul’s day, however, such evaluation becomes mandatory (e.g. 1 Corinthians 14:29 [“Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge”])” (Ibid.).

LDS view. Hamblin and Peterson disagree with Blomberg, pointing out that revelation and scripture writing were no different in New Testament times than in Old Testament times. They first address Blomberg’s contention that the messages of Old Testament prophets were to be simply obeyed and not evaluated critically. They write:

This [contention of Blomberg’s] seems . . . to be untrue. Deuteronomy 18:20-22 [“But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him”], for instance, which claims to have been written well before the time of Isaiah and which came forth publicly . . . precisely during the time of Jeremiah, outlines a test by which claims to prophecy were to be evaluated. So Blomberg’s distinction does not hold.

“What is more,” Blomberg avers, “[In New Testament times] genuine revelations from God could be misinterpreted by those who received them in ways that made the actual prophecy and its (mis-) interpretation difficult to distinguish. . . . What these [New Testament] Christians put forward as a word from the Lord was a combination of genuine revelation and faulty human interpretation. So even if God does still grant prophecies today, we must never treat them as if they were on a par with inerrant Scripture, because they may not get to us in an inerrant form” (HWD, 43). But why would this ever have been different, even in Old Testament times? And why is a text that has been transmitted and changed over 2,000 years more inerrant than the words of a living prophet? “The record of revelation,” Robinson cogently points out, “cannot logically be more authoritative than the experience of revelation” (HWD, 58). Weren’t the original biblical texts revealed to or written down by humans? Aren’t they still subject to human misinterpretation?

“In the era beginning with the apostles,” says Blomberg, “prophets almost never added to Scripture. So even if we could demonstrate that Joseph Smith were a prophet, we should not have any high degree of expectation that he would ever write Scripture” (HWD, 43). Perhaps not. And, in fact, many of the modern prophets (e.g., Howard W. Hunter, Ezra Taft Benson, David O. McKay, Lorenzo Snow, and others) have never formally produced scripture. But the fact that many prophets have not added to scripture is a very weak basis on which to suggest that another specific prophet will not, or even that he may not. Furthermore, Blomberg appears to be committing a semantic equivocation between the term prophet in a narrow academic sense, and prophet in the sense used by Latter-day Saints, according to which the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy (Revelation 19:10). For Mormons, all the early apostles and authors of the New Testament were prophets, and the authors of the New Testament all clearly, by definition, added texts or revelations to the canon. It is true that many of the prophets and apostles of the New Testament (e.g., Thaddeus, Agabus, and Nathanael) did not produce scriptural texts, but, for that matter, neither did many of the prophets of the earlier testament (e.g. Nathan, Micaiah, Elijah, and Elisha) (FRB, 204-06).

#Is Revelation the Same as Scripture?

Evangelical view. For Evangelicals, the issues of continuing revelation and closed or open canon are identical. They identify revelation as scripture (canon).

It is also apparent that Evangelicals highly favor scriptural texts and are uncomfortable with the nontextual nature of direct revelation. They accept the scripture and the dead prophets, but the idea of a living apostle or prophet is repugnant to them.

LDS view. From our point of view, the questions of open or closed canon and continuing revelation are two quite different questions. We consider revelation to be any communication from God to mankind. Scripture is a written record of revelation that has been accepted as binding, and hence as canon, by the common consent of the members of the Church. Not all revelation is recorded in scripture. It is theoretically possible to believe in continuing revelation without believing in an open canon. From our standpoint, of course, it is because of continuing revelation that God can, and does, expand the canon.

The tendency for men to accept the dead prophets but reject the living has apparently always existed. Hugh Nibley observed:

It is a plain fact that the true church upon the earth must and will always have at its head a living prophet. But that is unwelcome news to the world. It has always been poison. It is the one teaching that has made the restored gospel unacceptable to the wisdom of men. A dead prophet the world dearly desires and warmly cherishes; he is a priceless tradition, a spiritual heritage, a beautiful memory. But woe to a living prophet! He shall be greeted with stones and catcalls even by pious people. The men who put the apostles to death thought they were doing God a favor, and the Lord tells us with what reverence and devotion men adorn the tombs of the prophets whom they would kill if they were alive (Luke 11:47-48).

Men can read the words of a dead prophet and apply his heavy charges to that dead generation to which the prophet spoke, piously shaking their heads the while and repeating, “If we had been present in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.” By that very statement, the Lord tells those devout lovers of dead prophets, “Ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets” (Matthew 23:30-31). Christ predicted that he, too, like the other prophets, would be eagerly sought after once he had left the earth—but then it would be too late.

Here we have something in the nature of a general principle. The rejection of living prophets and the veneration of dead ones is not a folly limited to one nation or to one generation. It meets us throughout the long history of Israel as a sort of standard procedure. Nor did it cease with the coming of Christ, who promised his disciples that they would be treated as badly and rejected as completely as he.

The wise men of his time had a ready answer to Jesus: “Abraham is our father” (John 8:39), they protest. “We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God” (John 8:41). “We are Moses’s disciples. We know that God spake unto Moses: as for this fellow, we know not from whence he is” (John 9:28-29).

God had visited the earth in remote times; he had spoken to Abraham and to Moses. Venerable traditions burdened with a magnificent weight of art, poetry, scholarship, and ritual attested the sincere devotion of the race to the memory of God’s visits to men in times past. But to ask men to believe that that same God had spoken in their own day, and to a plain man who walked their streets—that was simply too much to take! That was the test that Christ’s generation could not pass.

It was a test that few have ever passed: the humiliating test of recognizing a true prophet and taking instruction from the weak and humble things of the earth. Was the wondrous modern age of applied science that began in the nineteenth century to be excused from taking the same test of integrity? Remember that the prophets of old came to generations that were very modern in their thinking, smart and sophisticated, advanced, liberated, and intellectual. The Hellenistic world, if anything, surpassed our own in those qualities of social advancement. But to come to our own age, do you think the God of heaven is going to come unannounced by prophets? God’s declared policy of testing the world by the sending of prophets from time to time was not abrogated two thousand years ago. Men have not so changed, and God has not so changed but that this sure touchstone of past ages can be employed with full effect in our own day. It is precisely those ages which think themselves beyond such things that are most eligible for the warning voice of the prophets. Our message is that God has called prophets again in these days and that the world might well heed their words (Hugh Nibley, The World and the Prophets, 7).

The Lord has always taught us that for prophets, he chooses the simple and uneducated men of the earth (D&C 1:24; 1 Corinthians 1:27). It is difficult to see the orthodox Christian world today accepting such a man as a prophet. They much prefer the educated religionist, the scholar. Brother Nibley further observed:

The prophetic gift . . . cannot be acquired in any school. In a word, the prophet is not a scholar. As surely as the words of a prophet are written down in books, they become the object of specialist study. Once the true prophet has been duly rejected and passed to his reward, swarms of experts descend upon his words to begin the learned business of exegesis [critical interpretation of scriptures]. The words of the dead prophets become the peculiar possession of armies of specially trained and carefully conditioned scholars. In a very old text, Peter is reported as saying in a letter to James regarding the use of his own writings in the church: “They think they are able to interpret my own words better than I can, telling their hearers that they are conveying my very thoughts to them, while the fact is that such things never entered my mind. If they take such outrageous liberties while I am alive, what will they do after I am gone?!” (Clementine, Epistle of Peter to Jacob 2, in PG 2:28.) . . . You see the point: The scholar and learned divine must necessarily get their knowledge from the written word . . . The prophet, on the other hand, who may well be illiterate, gets his knowledge by direct intercourse with heaven. The orientation of the two is entirely different.

This is well illustrated in the case of the Lord himself. We will recall that he was accused by the learned of blasphemy for claiming tangible contact with the Father in heaven who, he insisted, was not just his symbolic but his real Father. Now the men who opposed Jesus were learned in the scripture: He said, “The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain” (Luke 9:22), specifically singling out as his opponents the most learned segment of the society. These men could cite scripture for everything they did or said, and in all things the scripture was their authority. Of Christ, on the other hand, we read: “They were astonished at his doctrine, for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22). What he spoke was scripture. And the same holds for every true prophet. That fact is admitted by the whole Christian world, which is willing to accept as holy writ any syllable that can be shown to be the genuine utterance of an apostle, no matter how trivial the matter discussed (Hugh Nibley, The World and the Prophets, 28).

The apostles in the Lord’s primitive Church were not lesser prophets as Blomberg has suggested. The saints of the Church held them in high esteem. This is well-expressed in a remarkable passage from Clement, one of the oldest fragments of genuine early Christian literature in existence, as it has been preserved for us by Eusebius. This text is instructive since it makes clear that the apostles, though it was known they were unsophisticated in a worldly sense, were regarded as inspired prophets. It is also clear that the revelation they received was valued even more than what little they wrote down:

Those inspired and, one might truly say, divine men, by which I mean the apostles of Christ, having purified their lives to the highest degree and adorned their minds with every virtue, spoke only the common tongue; but they were emboldened by the possession of a supernatural power, which had been bestowed upon them as a gift by the Savior himself. They neither knew nor made any effort to know anything about the art of persuasion or skill with words as taught in the schools. The only power they ever made use of was the assurance of the Holy Ghost and the miraculous power of Christ operating through them, by which they preached the kingdom of God throughout the world. They gave little thought to writing anything down. What they did they did with the aid of a power beyond that of men. Paul, for example, the most skillful speaker and the best educated man of them all, left nothing in writing but a few extremely short letters; yet he was in a position to utter marvelous things without number, as one having actually been in contact with visions of the third heaven, caught up even to God’s paradise, where he was deemed worthy to hear unutterable things (Clement of Alexandria, Clementine Recognitions in Patrologiae Cursus Completus 8:704).

Commenting on Clement’s passage, Brother Hugh Nibley wrote:

From this passage it is perfectly clear that the early church depended wholly on the inspired teaching of living prophets and would have nothing to do with that formal instruction in rhetoric and dialectic which, by the fourth century, had become a “must” for any candidate for the office of bishop.

Of course, God can choose a learned man for a prophet if he wants to, but we are told in no uncertain terms that such is not the type of man he prefers. To the pagan Celsus, who made merry over the poor education and bad grammar of the apostles, Origen replied that the obviously defective education of the prophets was a most powerful argument in their favor, for if they had acquired the learning of the schools, then their great gifts of leadership and persuasion might possibly be attributed not to direct instruction from above, but to their years of training (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History III, 24, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus 20:263-67).

The prophet recognizes the merit of study; there is a spirit in man, Paul tells us, and we know that the spirit of Jesus Christ enlightens every man that comes into the world. The prophet recognizes the scholar for what he is, but the scholar does not return the compliment. He cannot conceive how anyone could possibly acquire knowledge by any method other than his. He cannot believe that any man has experienced anything which he has not experienced. The great Dutch scholar Quispel is at present engaged in showing how this narrow prejudice of the experts has rendered them incapable of comprehending the true nature of the Primitive Church. “I have never seen a vision,” says the scholar, “therefore Joseph Smith never had one” (The World and the Prophets, 29).

The existence of a prophet, and a continual succession of prophets, is more important than the scripture they write. Scripture would not exist if God had not revealed his word to a living, breathing prophet. Scripture is important primarily because it is a record of what God said to prophets. The prophet is a key element in the communication between God and man. The real value of scripture lies in the fact that it records what “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:20-21). The recording of revelations is important because it preserves the inspired communication and makes it accessible to more people in the Church. But the process of recording scripture is secondary to the process of revelation itself. It is illogical to suppose that scripture itself is more important, more pure, and truer than the communication experience the prophet had with God.

Today in the Church, we attribute our doctrinal correctness primarily to the living apostles and prophets, and only secondarily to the preservation of the written scripture itself. The role of the living prophet in scripture interpretation is critical, as the scripture contains errors and omissions. Interpretation by an authorized and inspired prophet is badly needed. Also, the prophet is necessary to constantly re-interpret the scriptures in light of new situations and new contexts. Those things God said in times past to apostles and prophets are secondary to what God is saying directly to them now.

An apostle or prophet is necessary to receive revelation. Just so, an apostle or prophet is needed to authoritatively interpret it. This is the real intent of 2 Peter 1:19-21: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” Peter points out here that interpretation of scripture is not a private or individual matter. Scripture is best interpreted by “holy men of God,” apostles and prophets, moved by the Holy Ghost. The gospel does not change. God is constant. The needs of the people, however, do change. As long as “holy men of God” (apostles and prophets) remain in the Church to interpret and apply the written revelations to changing times and new situations, we will experience doctrinal continuity.

Hamblin and Peterson add:

To considerable though varying degrees, Protestant and other forms of mainstream Christianity draw their doctrine and their authority from a deposit of faith laid down in documents from the past, and a precise understanding of those documents is essential to enable them to remain faithful to that ancient deposit. Latter-day Saints, while treasuring such ancient scripture as the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and . . . the Pearl of Great Price, see the guarantee of their fidelity to the will of God very much in the presence of living apostles and prophets in the church. Doctrinal authenticity and proper practice are ensured far less by careful scholarly scrutiny of ancient documents than by what Latter-day Saints accept as continuous revelation (FRB, 207).

Also, if inspired prophets are around to interpret the revelation authoritatively, God might reveal, from time to time, some new concept or give added insight to subjects already recorded in scripture. Living oracles may well “add to” the canon. The thoughtful gospel student cannot escape the conclusion that the concept of a closed canon would prevent God from choosing to reveal or restore something to the world. If God had something more to say, there would be no way for him to speak to mortals.

One concern over the idea of continuing revelation was expressed by Owen and Mosser in the form of a citation by W. D. Davies:

Progressive and continuous revelation is certainly an attractive notion, but equally certainly it is not without the grave danger of so altering or enlarging upon the original revelation as to distort, annul, and even falsify it (“Reflections on the Mormon ‘Canon,’” Harvard Theological Review 79, 64) (cited by Owen and Mosser, FRB, 12).

We do not worry that any existing scripture will be contradicted or altered by modern prophets’ adding to the canon. The same God who gave the original revelations is the source of the ongoing ones. We are comfortable there is no “danger.” Daniel Peterson also pointed out that Davies’s is the same argument used against Christ by the ancient Sadducees: “Wouldn’t most Jews regard Christianity as a distortion, annulment, or falsification of the revelation their ancestors received in the ancient past?” (FRB, 304).

1 See William J. Hamblin, “Reformed Egyptian” (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1995); John Gee, “Two Notes on Egyptian Script,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies volume 5, number 1 (1996): 162-76; John A. Tvedtnes and Stephen D. Ricks, “Jewish and Other Semitic Texts Written in Egyptian Characters,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies volume 5, number 2 (1996): 156-63.

2 See Daniel C. Peterson, Matthew Roper, and William J. Hamblin, “On Alma 7:10 and the Birthplace of Jesus Christ” (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1995).