Many Evangelicals critique the Latter-day Saint appeal to an internal witness of the Holy Spirit of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon (Moroni 10:3-5). However, they show themselves to be operating under a blatant double-standard, as various Protestant confessions, theological, and apologetic works appeal to an internal witness of the Holy Spirit to confirm the Bible and other topics. See the section entitled “A Self-Attesting, Self-Authenticating, Formally Sufficient Scripture?” here. I have discussed the hypocrisy of anti-Mormons, such as Mike and Ann Thomas, on this score, too:
(I based the title of this blog post on the title of their chapter in Mormonism: A Gold-Plated Religion [1997, 2008] discussing [in a very distorted manner] the LDS testimony)
Today I read a volume, Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit? An Investigation of the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today, eds. Daniel B. Wallace and M. James Sawyer (Dallas: Biblical Studies Press, 2005). In many of the essays contained therein, a privileging of emotions similar to the caricature of anti-Mormon portrayals of LDS epistemology.
Please read the following and ask yourself, “If a Latter-day Saint wrote/said the following, how would an anti-Mormon/Evangelical Protestant respond?” “Feelings, nothing more than feelings!”; “that is anti-intellectual—you are chucking your brain at the door!” and “that is dangerous, cultic thinking!” would be used, right?
After discussing his family’s battle with a son’s serious illness, Wallace wrote the following in an essay entitled, “The Uneasy Conscience of a Non-Charismatic Evangelical”:
Through this experience I found that the Bible was not adequate. I needed God in a personal way—not as an object of my study, but as friend, guide, comforter. I needed an existential experience of the Holy One. Quite frankly, I found that the Bible was not the answer. I found the scriptures to be helpful—even authoritatively helpful—as a guide. But without feeling God, the Bible gave me little solace. In the midst of this “summer from hell,” I began to examine what had become of my faith. I found a longing to get closer to God, but found myself unable to do so through my normal means: exegesis, scripture reading, more exegesis. I believe that I had depersonalized God so much that when I really needed him I didn’t know how to relate. I longed for him, but found many community-wide restrictions in my cessationist environment. I looked for God, but all I found was a suffocation of the Spirit in my evangelical tradition as well as in my own heart. (p. 7)
Elsewhere, in an essay entitled, “The Witness of the Spirit in Romans 8:16,” Wallace wrote:
3. How does the Spirit bear witness to our spirits? Certainly, he works on our hearts to convince us of the truth of scripture. But there is more. His inner witness is both immediate and intuitive. It involves a non-discursive presence that is recognized in the soul. This at least is the position of Calvin and the Reformers . . . Thus, the inner witness of the Spirit is supra-logical, not sub-logical—like the peace from God that surpasses all understanding. There are elements of the Christian faith that are not verifiable on an empirical plane. This makes them no less true.
4. For conflict in the academic realm: If the witness of the Spirit that I am a child of God is intuitive, then it is outside the realm of what is objectively verifiable. This does not make it any less true. We are too much sons of the Enlightenment when we deny intuition and internal apprehensions any value. When you fell in love, what scientific means did you use to verify the state of your heart? None. As every mother tells her child, “You just know.” It’s an apt analogy because it is one of the last vestiges of the pre-Enlightenment era that we still affirm. No one challenges it because there are no scientific means to determine whether a person is in love. Yet, we send bright young students armed with an M.Div. or Th.M. from an evangelical seminary into battle at secular schools, telling them only, “Trust your exegesis.” Too many have become spiritual casualties because they suppressed the inner witness of the Spirit . . . (p. 50)
In his essay, “The Witness of the Spirit in the Protestant Tradition,” M. James Sawyer discusses the various confessions (e.g., Westminster [1647]) that appealed to the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, as well as various theologians in the Protestant traditions. Commenting on Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), Sawyer wrote:
[H]e had a keen interest and fervent awareness of the necessity and reality of the witness of the Spirit in the life of the believer as an immediate experiential presence. He at various times makes mention of the work of the Spirit. A couple of examples will suffice to show his essential agreements with Wesley as to the nature of the witness, and his continuity with the Reformers in linking the witness of the Spirit to confirming the truth of the word of God. Edward notes:
And it seems to be necessary to suppose that there is an immediate influence of the Spirit of God, oftentimes, in bringing texts of Scripture to the mind. Not that I suppose it is done in a way of immediate revelation, without any use of the memory; but yet there seem plainly to be an immediate and extraordinary influence, in leading their thoughts to such and such passages of Scripture, and exciting them in the memory. Indeed, in some, God seems to bring texts of Scripture to their minds no otherwise than by leading them into such frames and meditations as harmonize with those Scriptures; but in many persons there seems to be something more like this . . . (Jonathan Edwards, “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God,” The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2.1084-85)
In speaking of one of his parishioner’s experiences of the Spirit, Edwards testifies again to the immediate nature of the witness of the Spirit in confirming the truth and divinity of scripture.
She had sometimes the powerful breathings of the Spirit of God on her soul, while reading the Scripture; and would express her sense of the certain truth and divinity thereof. She sometimes would appear with a pleasant smile on her countenance; and once, when her sister took notice of it, and asked why she smiled, she replied, I am rim-full of a sweet feeling within. (ibid., 1100-1101)
Thus, with both Edwards and Wesley there is an insistence on the immediate nature of the witness of the Spirit. Neither one follows the Puritan lead of insisting on the practical syllogism in gaining assurance of salvation. For both, the evidence of the Spirit is an immediate supra-rational experience in the soul, not unrelated to the word, and not to be conceived as mysticism. (pp. 84-85)
David Eckman, in “The Holy Spirit and Our Emotions,” wrote the following in a section entitled, “The Spirit and Our Emotions”:
Since the presence of the Spirit is internal, the work of the Spirit of God is emotional. One example will illustrate the point. As the believer is involved in the exercise of faith, the Spirit of God, for example, will supply joy and peace. In the details of a particular text, Rom 15:13, the Spirit is not the only member of the Trinity relating to the Christian. Paul related the believer’s emotional life to two members of the Trinity, the Father and the Spirit. The God of hope is supposed to fill (the same word as used in Eph 5:18) the believer with every variety of joy and peace in the process of believing. All of this is to be done by the inherent power of the Holy Spirit. The process of generating these emotions is completely dependent upon the Holy Spirit’s work. (p. 212)
With respect to Gal 5:22-23 (“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” [NASB]), Sawyer writes that:
Spirituality is a life normally dominated by primary emotions—primary in the sense that these are what Christian existence is founded upon. Note how each term of the fruit of the Spirit carries an emotional connotation. (p. 213)
In a section on how to minister to our emotions, Sawyer offered the following tips to the reader which is reminiscent of how LDS missionaries teach people how to tell the difference between superficial emotions and the experience of the Holy Spirit:
What we have to do to gain and maintain spiritual health is as follows:
We have to recognize or differentiated what is going on within our emotional life and in the management of our appetites (Gal 5:16-24). This gives us information as to where we are starting from, either with spirituality or carnality . . . We have to set our minds on our relationships above; we control our thinking (Rom 8:1-6; Col 3:1-3). The terms used in both Rom 8 and Col 3 refer to perspective. By reckoning we relate to God personally instead of to our appetites (Rom 6:11-12). The focus of a person’s inner life can either be the God on the outside of the appetites on the inside. Sadly our appetites many times have far more impact on many of us than God does. The focus on our inner person has to be on God the Father, and our identity before him as found in Christ, and not in our appetites. So no matter the level of pressure from our inward desires, we must freely approach and share ourselves with God. (p. 214)
Finally, in his essay, “The Holy Spirit in Missions,” Donald K. Smith wrote the following under the heading of “Rationalism Largely Excludes the Holy Spirit,” which, if it came from a Latter-day Saint, would be branded by Evangelicals as “cultic” due to its “anti-intellectual” nature:
Why, then, does it appear that the Holy Spirit is more active in Asia, Africa, or Latin America than in Europe and North America? . . . I suggest that the real point is not a difference in the working of the Holy Spirit, but in a difference in the working of our human perceptions. Just as our unaided ear cannot detect radio signals nor can our eyes pick up television signals, the untransformed heart is unable and/or unwilling to perceive the Holy Spirit except in ways consistent with our existing understanding. Our ability to perceive anything rests not only on our physical senses but on our previous experience and on our heart belief—our world view.
In Western cultures, reason is considered supreme. The cultural mainstream says that feelings are not to be trusted, and emotion should always be controlled. The Enlightenment paradigm infuses nearly every part of Western life, even our systematic theologies. It leads us to believe that Truth must be found and proved by careful logic, and that logic rests on empirical observations. If “it” cannot be weighed, counted, or measures in some way, “it” does not exist . . . This core/heart belief in Western cultures has made it nearly impossible to perceive the genuine working of the Holy Spirit.
Thus, the fundamental reason the ministry of the Holy Spirit seems more visible outside the North Atlantic nations is a matter of perception. We experience what we are conditioned to perceive. Since the dominant paradigm in North Atlantic nations is rationalistic, humanistic, and materialistic, we do not expect to see reality outside the boundaries established by our minds. (pp. 243, 244)
