In March 2016, I wrote a lengthy response to Mike Thomas of Reachout Trust:
Near the end, I responded to another Evangelical critic who raised a common objection against Latter-day Saint claims to authority, one that is focused on the lack of authoritative, infallible interpretations of the Bible and the production of a “perfect” Bible, among other things. I thought it would be beneficial to readers to reproduce it here for ease of access:
The critic, Eric Laranjo, wrote:
It seems to me that the Mormon Church, with its living prophets and apostles, and Joseph Smith's seer stone and priesthood authority, that they would have come out with their own translation of the Bible by now. They have had nearly 200 years.
Simple—such is not necessary. The reason why the leadership of the LDS Church has not sought to (and probably never will) produce a critical edition of the Old and New Testaments, answering authoritatively every single textual variation and any other objection, is that, as we have seen, the Latter-day Saint hermeneutic is informed, not just by the biblical revelations, but also the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit within the LDS Church, the latter authority being an active authority that can, as with the upper echelons of the Church in Acts 15 and elsewhere, answer authoritatively issues relating to theology and morals if and when a dispute arises.
Take, for instance, the phrase found in all four of the institutional narratives of the Eucharist, “this is my body” (Greek: τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου [Matt 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19]; alt. τοῦτό μού ἐστιν τὸ σῶμα [1 Cor 11:24]). The theological meaning of Christ’s words in this phrase has long been disputed, and not just between Roman Catholics and Protestants, the former who accept the authority of Fourth Lateran (1215) that dogmatised transubstantiation wherein the phrase is understood that Christ transformed all but the outward appearances of the bread into His body, but within Protestantism itself, both historically and modern. For instance, amongst the magisterial Reformers, while all disagreed with the Catholic view of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice (intimately tied into Transubstantiation), Luther held to consubstantiation, wherein Christ was truly and substantially present with and in the consecrated bread (and wine), but there was no change in the substance thereof and was not a propitiatory sacrifice offered up to God; Calvin, while wishing to hold to a variety of Real Presence but also wishing to reject such crassly literal readings of the Catholics and Luther et al., held that Christ was present in a “spiritual” sense during the celebration of the Eucharist, while Zwingli and the Swiss Sacramentarians held to a purely symbolic view of the Eucharist, jettisoning any concept of “Real Presence.” Luther also battled the likes of Andreas Karlstadt et al. on the nature of the Eucharist and its relationship to salvation (see his 1525 work, “Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments.” One can find an on-line edition here or consult pp. 153-301 of The Selected Works of Martin Luther, Volume 3: 1523-1526, ed. Theodore G. Tappert).
When one examines the disputes between the Protestant Reformers and their followers on this issue, they divided with one another over this issue, viewing it of being salvific, not a “minor, tertiary at best” issue, and one Luther wanted to go to war over!. Indeed, writing years after the Marburg Colloquy held in October 1529, Calvin wrote a booklet wherein he stated that a correct understanding of the Lord’s Supper (and baptism) were necessary for salvation (see his A Treatise on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper; for a discussion of the Marburg Colloquy and the disparate theologies of the Eucharist amongst the early Reformers and their followers, see Hermann Sasse, This is My Body: Luther's Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar and George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation).
While the LDS Church has never produced an “official” exegesis of this contentious phrase and its relationship to a theology of the Eucharist, the entirety of Latter-day Saint scripture and the guidance of the Church has explicated that the elements of the Lord’s Supper are not transformed in any substantial manner, and that allows one to know which interpretations are acceptable and which are not, and one has the backing of both modern revelation and the Church as guides (although careful exegesis of the phrase, “this is my body” supports the LDS view of rejecting the Lutheran and Catholic/Eastern Orthodox views of “Real Presence”; see my exegesis of the phrase here), and this represents one truly important theological issue that can be resolved, not by providing an authoritative perfect translation of the Bible, but in light of the entirety of God’s revelation, something Protestants of all stripes are cut off from.
The same applies for many other issues of theological importance that are debated today, as well as the “proof-texts” the disparate positions cite.
