Arthur A. Tiger on the Debates Among Protestants Concerning Soteriology

  

The doctrine of salvation stands at the heart of Protestant theology, yet no area generated more passionate disagreement among orthodox believers than the precise nature of how God saves sinners. These soteriological debates, involving questions about divine sovereignty and human responsibility, the nature of faith, the security of salvation and possibility of apostasy, represent not merely academic theological disputes but fundamental differences in understanding God’s character, human nature, and the very essence of the gospel. With hundreds of millions of Protestants aligned with different soteriological systems—Reformed, Arminian, Lutheran, Baptist, Wesleyan—these debates shape preaching, evangelism, discipleship, and Christian experience across denominational lines. (Arthur A. Tiger, The Encyclopedic Handbook of Protestant Denominations: Systematic Analysis of History, Theology, and Contemporary Challenges [His Story for Us Publishing, 2025], 437, emphasis in original)

 

 

These debates matter profoundly because they affect every aspect of Christian life and ministry. The Calvinist preaching God’s sovereign grace to totally depraved sinners, the Arminian calling for decisive faith response to prevenient grace, the Lutheran proclaiming objective justification through Word and Sacrament, and the Wesleyan pursuing entire sanctification through grace-empowered holiness each reflect different soteriological convictions with practical consequences. The contemporary resurgence of Reformed theology among young evangelicals, the growth of “Traditionalist” Southern Baptists opposing Calvinism, and the popularity of “Free Grace” theology demonstrate these ancient debates’ ongoing vitality and divisive potential. (Arthur A. Tiger, The Encyclopedic Handbook of Protestant Denominations: Systematic Analysis of History, Theology, and Contemporary Challenges [His Story for Us Publishing, 2025], 438)

 

Robert Alter on Psalm 45:13 (Hebrew: v. 14)

  

All the princess’s treasure is pearls. The Masoretic Text reads literally “all the princess’s treasure is inward,” which Jewish tradition has taken as a slogan for the virtuous wife’s conjugal modesty. But the immediately following word has a superfluous mem at the beginning. If one moves it back to the end of the previous word and inserts a second nun for the mem in the middle of the word, instead of penimah, “inward,” the consonantal text would read peninim, “pearls,” which makes more sense and a much better parallelism. There is also a syntactic problem here, because “princess” would have to be a vocative (“All the treasure, princess”), but because the royal bride is spoken of in the third person in the last half of the verse, the translation does not represent the vocative. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:120)

 

Robert Alter on Psalm 38:19 (Hebrew: v. 20)

  

my wanton enemies. The Masoretic Text reads ʾoyvay ḥayim, literally, “my enemies of life,” which some construe as “my mortal enemies,” though it is not a biblical idiom as it is worded here. A scroll of Psalms found at Qumran reads ʾoyvay ḥinam, “my wanton enemies” (that is, “enemies for no good reason”), which is nicely idiomatic and makes the parallelism in the two versets here exactly that of 35:19 (where sheqer, “unprovoked,” appears in the first verset and ḥinam in the second, rather than the other way around as here). (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:105)

 

The BHS of this verse reads:

 

‎  וְאֹיְבַי חַיִּים עָצֵמוּ וְרַבּוּ שֹׂנְאַי שָׁקֶר

 

The verse in 4Q83 Psalms a (fragment 9, column ii, line 3), the text from Qumran Alter references, reads:

 

וֿאיב̇י ח֯נ̇ם

 

Arthur Weister on Psalm 38 and לְהַזְכִּיר (cf. εἰς ἀνάμνησιν [LXX: Psalm 37])

  

A Psalm. Of David. For the purpose of making a confession(?) (Arthur Weiser, The Psalms: A Commentary [The Old Testament Library; Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1998], 323)

 

 

Cf. the title of Ps. 70. Luther translates: for a memorial (l hāzkīr). Others relate the term to the’ azkārā, the offering of incense, which was part of the ‘meal offering’ (minḥā) and in the course of which the worship of late Judaism is said to have used the psalm as a prayer. (Ibid., n. 1)

 

Robert Alter on Psalm 38 and לְהַזְכִּיר (cf. εἰς ἀνάμνησιν [LXX: Psalm 37])

  

to call to mind. The Hebrew infinitive lehazkir is anomalous in the superscription of a psalm, appearing here and at the beginning of Psalm 70. It may simply refer to the speaker’s intention to bring to mind his suffering in his supplication to God. It might also have a connotation of confession: compare the words of Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer in Genesis 41:9, “My offenses I recall [mazkir] today,” and those of the widow from Zarephath to Elijah in 1 Kings 17:18, “You have come to me to recall [lehazkir] my crime.” (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:104)

 

Nathan B. Oman on Extended "Families" or "Kingdoms" and Early Latter-day Saint Plural Marraige Among Brigham Young and Others

  

During the 19th century, what can be called kingdom theology dominated sealing practices. Kingdom theology can be seen most clearly in the law of adoption, where sealings between non-biologically related adults were designed to bind individuals in eternal, dynastic structures with patriarchal heads. Joseph Smith’s sealing practice was confined to marriage, but shortly after his death. Brigham Young and his associates instituted adoptive sealings. Initially these took the form of sealing nonbiological relationships in which adults were sealed to high church leaders as members of their extended adoptive “families” or “kingdoms.” These massive “families” proved important organizational structures during the Mormon exodus to the Great Basin. Thereafter the so-called law of adoption was suspended until the first Utah temple was dedicated in 1877 at St. George. At that point, there was an effort to reinstitute the practice. Within this theological frame, marriage sealings were another mechanism for creating priestly connections, at times in disregard of temporal family relationships. Where modern Latter-day Saints think of such sealings in terms of “eternal families” using ideas of companionate marriage and nuclear families, their 19th-century forebearers thought in terms of kingdom and sacral networks. (Nathan B. Oman, Living Oracles: Law and the Latter-day Saint Tradition [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026], 168-69)

 

 

This explains, for example, the bewildering variety of Brigham Young’s plural marriages. Fifty-five women were sealed to Young. Only sixteen of these women bore his children. Twenty-three of the women belonged to Young’s households, although some of these wives likely did not have a sexual relationship with Young. The other women were sealed into Young’s eternal kingdom without becoming part of his earthly family. Some of these women were much older when they were sealed to Young, including one woman sealed on her deathbed. Some of them held themselves out as “wife of President Young” without being part of his household. Some of the women were sealed to Young while continuing to be married to other men, presumably to be included in Young’s postmortal dynasty. See generally Jeffrey Ogden Johnson, “Determining and Defining ‘Wife’: The Brigham Young Households,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20, no. 3 (1987): 57-70. (Ibid., 274 n. 43)

 

Scriptural Mormonism Podcast Episode 110: Stanford Carmack on Early Modern English and the Book of Mormon

 

Episode 110: Stanford Carmack on Early Modern English and the Book of Mormon