Two Evangelical Protestant Scholars Sounding Very "Mormon" on the Spirit and Knowledge of the Canon

In a work responding to Peter Enns and others on the nature of “scripture,” Evangelical Protestants Daniel Castelo and Robert W. Wall appeal to the working of the Holy Spirit for the believing community to “know” the books that compose the biblical canon:

 . . . God-fearing saints made certain judgments within a Spirit-drenched context, one in which the Spirit was involved at the beginning, during the process, and toward the end of a complex series of developments called “canonization.”

The church’s “canon-consciousness,” then, is the graced (God-given) capacity to discern what substantively agrees with the apostolic testimony of Jesus from what does not. The church’s act of discernment is not a magical performance. The recognition of a text’s canonicity, if properly led by the Spirit, is necessarily honed in worship by prayer and in faithful use when teaching and training God’s people. Canonization is a process of and for the church in which God’s Spirit is present, performing the role for which the Spirit was sent (see John 14-16). There is no need for a biblical canon if there is no church, and without a biblical canon the church would be spiritually impoverished. (Daniel Castelo and Robert W. Wall, The Marks of Scripture: Rethinking the Nature of the Bible [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2019], 5-6, emphasis added)

Elsewhere, they note:

This notion of the Spirit’s use of Scripture was informed by what the church deemed as helpful to the task of inspiring believers and keeping them faithful to Jesus and the teachings and preachings of the apostles. Often, when people speak of the canonical process, criteria are appealed to that are of a historical (authorial origins, context, and so on) as well as theological (how well a book coheres to other established books and so forth) nature. From these gleanings, people stamp the process as a recognition of a text’s “inspiration,” with the appeal sometimes made to 2 Tim. 3:16 (“All scripture is inspired by God”). Missing from this allusion, however, is the second half of the verse (“and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness”), which might in turn function as a gloss on what the term “inspiration” may involve and how a test comes to be recognized as “inspired” in the first place. In this sense, “Scripture” is a dynamic process, a dynamism shaped during the canonical process by historical and theological actors and by a formational impress as well. (Ibid., 8-9 n. 8, emphasis added)

Finally, the authors make the following comments about John 17:20-23 about the “unity” between believers with Christ and Christ’s unity with the Father, they end up sounding very “Mormon”:

If the Spirit appointed the Gospel as an auxiliary for disclosing the sanctifying word of truth to teach and guide Jesus’s disciples for their mission during this interim period, then we might further ask how this community, which has received this teaching Spirit at Pentecost (John 20:21-23; see Acts 2:1-4), comes to recognize and canonize the fourfold Gospel the Spirit will use to teach them about Jesus in his absence. Stipulating the criteria of canonization has been a topic of much discussion and debate since the magisterial Reformation. For the purpose of this typology, however, we will continue to follow the lead of the Lord’s intercessory prayer in John 17. According to verses 20-23, John’s Jesus targets a future when the church’s successful mission adds new converts by its ministry of the sanctified word of truth (that is, the canonical Gospel) now in its possession. The Gospel of the Spirit’s own choosing may be recognized by its usefulness in producing a certain kind of witness in a post-ascension world that no longer benefits from the historical Jesus’s personal presence as God’s incarnate Son.

In two particular ways, this passage serves to clarify the church’s vocation: (1) Three successive hina (ινα, “so that,” 17:21) clauses focus our attention on the compelling witness of a unified community whose life together underwrites the risen Son’s messianic missions to purify the world of its sin (cf. John 1:29).

(2) The second effect of the community’s Spirit-breathed ministry of this sanctified Gospel is its reception of God’s “glory” or presence given to them (17:22). The full range of the community’s experience of God’s indwelling presence may be inferred from the repetition of “glory” in the Gospel. God’s glory is disclosed in the works of Jesus (v. 4) as “full of grace and truth” (1:4). The Spirit of truth participates in the glorification of Jesus by continuing to communicate the life of “the Holy One of God” (6:69) to his followers (16:12-16). We take this to be a profoundly trinitarian sensibility in which the glorious presence of the Father, which is self-evidently “full of grace and truth,” is instantiated in the works of God’s Son, whose apostolic witness is preserved in the canonical Gospel—a sanctified word of truth—for use by the Spirit to sanctify the church for its ministry in the world.

These conclusions shape how we understand canonization as a process of divine providence: the canonical process was a hallowing process by which the church came to recognize those texts appointed and made holy by the Spirit for use in teaching the church that Jesus is the way, truth, and life. The Spirit’s current ministry is cued by Jesus’s departure and his temporary absence from his followers, who continue to ask Thomas’s question: “How can we know the way?” These writings were collected and ordered into a scriptural witness for the church’s work in the mission Dei. It is by this sacred witness that we know “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12 AT). (Ibid., 81-82, italics in original, emphasis in bold added)

I have discussed how many Protestants, both historical and modern, are very “Mormon” when it comes to appealing to the internal (and in this case, ecclesiastical) witness of the Spirit to “know” the canon of God-inspired books, such as:

Not by Scripture Alone: A Latter-day Saint Refutation of Sola Scriptura

Protestant Fideism: A Primer

Protestant Fideism Part 2: The "Testimonies" of Evangelical Anti-Mormons: Nothing but Subjective Feelings

Robert P. Booth on βαπτιζω Denoting Bodily Immersion

And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner. (Luke 11:38)

Commenting on the use of the verb βαπτιζω in this passage, Robert P. Booth wrote the following, showing how it is the accepted conclusion of most of scholarship that βαπτιζω, in both profane and sacred usages denotes immersion:

 . . .in Luke, the Pharisee is surprised that before the meal Jesus οὐ πρῶτον ἐβαπτίσθη. He aorist passive ἐβαπτίσθη literally means ‘was dipped (or immersed)’, which implies the whole body.

We think Luke means immersion of the whole body since he uses the verb βαπτιζω in describing John’s baptizing in his ch. 3, and John had adapted the Jewish ritual tebilah in which the body was immersed. The verb is an intensive or iterative form of the verb βαπτω both of which mean to dip or immerse (Bauer, s.v.). Thus at 2 Kings 5.14 (LXX) Naman ἐβαπτίσατο ἐν τῷ Ιορδάνῃ. A Luke 11:38 the verb implies the body and not the hands, since in the NT the verb νιπω is used for the washing of the hands (e.g. Mark 7.3; Mt. 15.2) and the face (Mt. 6.17), but not the body. (Robert P. Booth, Jesus and the Laws of Purity: Tradition History and Legal History in Mark 7 [Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 13; Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1986], 24)

The other instances of ἐβαπτίσθη as used elsewhere in the New Testament are used with respect to the ordinance of baptism:

And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized (ἐβαπτίσθη) of John in Jordan. (Mark 1:9)

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it has been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized (ἐβαπτίσθη). (Acts 9:18)

And when she was baptized (ἐβαπτίσθη), and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us. (Acts 16:15)

And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed (λουω) their stripes; and was baptized (ἐβαπτίσθη), he and all his, straightway. (Acts 16:33)

24th Anniversary of The Family: A Proclamation to the World

On this day 24 years ago, Gordon B. Hinckley, then-president of the Church, issued The Family: A Proclamation to the World (and for 24 years, regressive leftist members of the Church have been triggered by such):

Here is a representation of the great moral Reformer, Gordon B. Hinckley, nailing The Proclamation on the doors of the ProgMo Cathedral. Much autistic screeching from leftist members of the Church has ensued since:

Ether 3:1 and Ancient Knowledge of Glass

The Book of Mormon teaches that knowledge of glass was known to the Jaredites (well before the exilic period):

And it came to pass that the brother of Jared, (now the number of the vessels which had been prepared was eight) went forth unto the mount, which they called the mount Shelem, because of its exceeding height, and did molten out of a rock sixteen small stones; and they were white and clear, even as transparent glass; and he did carry them in his hands upon the top of the mount, and cried again unto the Lord, saying: (Ether 3:1)

While some may believe that this is an anachronism, knowledge of glass and glassworking was known at this time period. In their book on the history of glass, Dan Klein and Ward Lloyd noted:

Since the Bronze Age, about 3000 BC, glass has been used for making various kinds of objects. It was first made from a mixture of silica (from sand), lime and an alkali such as soda or potash, and these remained the basic ingredients of glass unto the development of lead glass in the seventeen century. When heated, the mixture becomes soft and malleable, and can be formed by various techniques into a vast array of shapes and sizes. The homogenous mass thus formed by melting then cools to create glass, but in contrast to most materials formed in this way (metals, for instance), glass lacks the crystalline structure normally associated with solids, and instead retains the random molecular structure of a liquid. In effect, as glass cools, it progressively stiffens until rigid, but does so without setting up a network of interlocking crystals customarily associated with that process. This is why glass shatters so easily when dealt a sudden blow, why glass deteriorates over time (a process call devitrification), especially when exposed to moisture, and why glassware must be slowly annealed (reheated and uniformly cooled) after manufacture to release internal stresses by uneven cooling. (Dan Klein and Ward Lloyd, The History of Glass [Tiger Books, 1997], 9)

Elsewhere we read:

The Late Bronze Age

Although the place and time of the discovery of glass is uncertain, the earliest known industry Bronze Age by the middle of the third millennium BC. This industry, first founded in western Asia, probably in the Mitannian or Hurrian region of Mesopotamia, was the natural outgrowth of experimentation with vitreous glazes, used to embellish pottery, tiles and other objects, or with faience. The earliest archaeologically datable objects are beads, seals, inlays and plaques. Vessels appeared later, probably by the close of the sixteenth century BC. Shortly afterwards, knowledge of the manufacture of glass spread quickly to northern Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, and the late Aegean, where the palace-dominated civilizations of the Late Bronze Age used glass as a semi-precious material. (Ibid., 14)

On the Jaredite stones themselves, see the following from Book of Mormon Central:

Where did the Brother of Jared Get the Idea of Shining Stones?

Moses' Intercession in Exodus 32: Evidence of Contingent Foreknowledge and the Efficacy of Prayer

In Exo 32:7-14, we read the following:

And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves: They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people: Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation. And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever. And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.

In the above pericope, as well as the aftermath, as recorded in Exo 32-33, evidences God’s contingent foreknowledge and the efficacy of prayer. Note what happens:

1. God determines to destroy all of Israel for worshipping the golden calf.

2. Moses pleads with God to relent, reiterating the promise to Abraham and the potential mockery from Egypt.

3. God rescinds His threat to destroy all of Israel, yet punishes the leading perpetrators.

4. Moses spends 40 days prostrate and fasting to appease God for Israel’s sin.

5. Although temporarily appeased, God refuses to go with the Israelites through the desert, because they are so “stiff-necked” he “might destroy them on the way.”

6. Moses pleads again with God to change His mind.

7. God changes His mind and decides to go with them.

8. God then remarks on the intimate relationship He has with Moses as the basis of His decision to change His mind.

9. God confirms this intimate relationship by showing Moses part of His actual appearance.

Commenting on this passage, Blake Ostler wrote:

Yahweh told Moses that he intended to destroy Israel for having made the golden calf. Moses objected and actually argued that such a course would be unworthy of God. As Childs observed, the key to understanding the encounter is God’s response to Moses: “Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against [Israel]” (v. 10) (Brevard S Childs, The Book of Exodus [Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1974], 56-7). God had actually formed an intention to execute wrath: it was something that “he thought to do” (v. 14). This passage shows that while God had decided to destroy Israel, “the decision had not yet reached an irretrievable point; Moses could conceivable contribute something to the divine deliberation that might occasion a future for Israel other than wrath” (Terence Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective [Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984, 50). Remarkably, Moses persuaded God to recent what he had to decided to do: “And the Lord repented of the evil he thought to do unto his people” (v. 14). The most faithful way to understand this passage, it seems to me, is to view Yahweh as having formed an intention to do one thing—and thus at one time believing that he would do it—and at a later time changing his mind and coming to believe something different. Yet if God did not know at the time of his conversation with Moses whether Israel would be destroyed, then certainly there were a good many things about the future he did not know.

Some Mormons may point out that when Joseph Smith revised the Bible, he changed all of the passages suggesting that Go repented, implying that such changes were made because the Prophet Joseph Smith believed that repentance could not be appropriate to a being that cannot possibly be mistaken about any belief or sin in any way. Nevertheless, the Joseph Smith translation of this passage makes God’s intention to do one thing and then another even more explicit, an thus recognizes that God changed his mind: “The Lord said unto Moses, If they will repent of the evil which they have done, I will spare them . . . Therefore, see thou do this which I have commanded thee, or I will execute all which I thought to do unto my people” (JST Ex. 32:13-14). (Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought, Volume 1: The Attributes of God [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001], 306-7)

One should also compare the above discussion with the following from Lorenzo Snow in a sermon from 6 May 1882. Commenting on Moses' propitiating God's wrath against the Israelites, Snow noted:

Moses, for instance, had such power with the Almighty as to change his purposes on a certain occasion. It will be remembered that the Lord became angry with the Israelites, and declared to Moses that he would destroy them, and he would take Moses and make of him a great people, and would bestow upon him and his posterity what he had promised to Israel. But this great leader and lawgiver, faithful to his trust, stood in the gap and there plead with the Lord on behalf of his people; by the power that he could exercise and did exercise, he was the means of saving the people from threatened destruction. How noble and glorious Moses must have appeared in the eyes of the Lord, and what a source of satisfaction it must have been to him to know that his chosen people, in their obstinate and ignorant condition, had such a man at their head. (JOD 23:191)

This incident in the Old Testament provides an exegetically strong case for an “open” view of the future and the nature and function of prayer.

John Hilton et al. Gentiles in the Book of Mormon

The Interpreter Foundation just posted a new article:

John Hilton III, Ryan Sharp, Brad Wilcox, and Jaron Hansen, Gentiles in the Book of Mormon (PDF)

Something which struck me was the high level of intertextuality in the Book of Mormon, evidencing a strong level of internal consistency, something one should not expect if Nephite source material did not exist for Mormon et al to use, and instead, Joseph Smith was just making it up and trying to remember things he dictated previously from memory. For instance, table 3 (p. 284)

Table 3. Intertextuality between Christ and Nephi
(emphasis added).

1 Nephi 15:13, 17

3 Nephi 21:5-6

“[I]n the latter days, when our seed shall have dwindled in unbelief, yea, for the space of many years, and many generations after the Messiah shall be manifested in body unto the children of men, then shall the fulness of the gospel of the Messiah come unto the Gentiles, and from the Gentiles unto the remnant of our seed … it [the fulness of the gospel] shall come by way of the Gentiles, that the Lord may show his power unto the Gentiles …”

“[W]hen these works and the works which shall be wrought among you hereafter shall come forth from the Gentiles, unto your seed which shall dwindle in unbelief because of iniquity; For thus it behooveth the Father that it [the Book of Mormon] should come forth from the Gentiles, that he may show forth his power unto the Gentiles …”

A Note on Galatians 5:12

Gal 5:12 in the KJV reads:

I would they [the Judaizers] were even cut off which trouble you.

The KJV seems to be downplaying the euphemism in the Greek, although it has been captured rather well (and graphically . . .) by modern translations. For instance, the NRSV reads:

I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!

The NASB reads:

I wish that those who are troubling you would even mutilate themselves.

The Greek translated "cut off" is ἀναστατοῦντες, the present active nominative masculine plural of αναστατοω ("to stir up/disturb/upset"). Paul is using a hyperbole of circumcision. Since the Judaizers were insistent that one had to be circumcised first before becoming a member of the New Covenant, Paul wishes for the knife to slip and that they would cut off their entire member entirely, becoming "eunuchs for the [false] kingdom" they wished to establish in Galatia.

As the NET notes:

Or "make eunuchs of themselves"; Grk "cut themselves off." This statement is rhetorical hyperbole on Paul's part. It does strongly suggest, however, that Paul's adversaries in this case ("those agitators") were men. Some interpreters (notably Erasmus and the Reformers) have attempted to soften the meaning to a figurative "separate themselves" (meaning the opponents would withdraw from fellowship) but such an understanding dramatically weakens the rhetorical force of Paul's argument. Although it has been argued that such an act of emasculation would be unthinkable for Paul, it must be noted that Paul's statement is one of biting sarcasm, obviously not meant to be taken literally.

As F.F. Bruce noted:

Ὄφελον with the future indicative expresses an attainable wish: ‘Would that they would …!’ As for the middle of ἀποκόπτω, there is little doubt that Paul means ‘they had better go the whole way and make eunuchs of themselves!’ (NEB)—or rather ‘have themselves made eunuchs’. A eunuch is called ἀποκεκομμένος in Dt. 23:1 (LXX), where he is debarred from the ἐκκλησία κυρίου. Several commentators since R Bentley, Critica Sacra, ed. A. A. Ellis (Cambridge, 1862), 48, have noted the verbal parallel in Dio Cassius, Hist. 80 (79).11, where ἀποκόπτειν completes the process which begins with περιτέμνειν. Greek commentators regularly understood Paul’s language thus; the Latins operated with a more ambiguous form of words, like Vg. utinam et abscindantur qui vos conturbant (cf. AV ‘I would they were even cut off which trouble you’). Some more recent commentators (e.g. H. N. Ridderbos, Galatians, 194f.) have noted that Pessinus, in North Galatia, was the centre of the cult of Cybele, who was served by galli, emasculated priests; but there is no need to posit such an allusion here. Elsewhere Paul demotes literal circumcision to the status of mere mutilation, κατατομή (Phil. 3:2), reserving the sacral term περιτομή for those who ‘worship by the Spirit of God’ (Phil. 3:3). (F.F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text [New International Greek Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982], 238)

This is not the only instance of euphemistic language in the Bible and other ancient literature. In an email sent to the University of Chicago ANE digest email list from 17 February 1998, John Tvedtnes wrote:

 . . . we should note that the names of other body parts are sometimes used euphemistically for the sexual organs. Thus, Gordon noted that the word for hand, yd, is used for "phallus" in Ugaritic (Ugaritic Texts 408-409), as also in Mandaic and in the Hebrew of Isaiah 57:8  see Cyrus H. Gordon, review of E. S. Drower, The Book of the Zodiac, in Orientalia 20 (1951):507).  The same is perhaps true of the Manual of Discipline (1QS VII.15-16) from Qumran.  There are other examples from Semitic languages of various body parts being used to designate the sexual organs.  E.g., Leslau lists Akkadian išdu, "leg with posterior" (see CAD 7:235a, Muss-Arnoldt 113b, UT 394, BDB 78a) and notes that it is related to South Arabic šît.  The latter, while generally also meaning "posterior" (e.g., in Šh.auri) is "penis" in Mehri while in the Yemenite form ist, it means "pudenda" (Wolf Leslau, "The Parts of the Body in the Modern South Arabic Languages," Language 21 [1945]: 237), which we can compare to Arabic 'išt, "podex or anus, or signifying the former, and sometimes used as meaning the latter" (Lane 56b).  In the same article (page 242), Leslau lists Šh.auri gibb, "pudenda," saying that "the  Šh.auri gibb might perhaps be compared with H.ad.r[amaut] ga'ba, ‘buttock.'" In another article ("South East Semitic [Ethiopic and South Arabic]," JAOS 63 [1943]: 12), he lists Soqot.ri berberoh, Gurage bärrä, "thigh," and adds, "on the relation between this root and the Omani and Datina barbur, ‘penis', see Leslau, Lex. Soq. 94."  In the same article, he lists the following lexical items (page 13), noting that the root also exists in Cushitic: Soqot.ri qenther, "vulva," Tigrina qent.ar, "clitoris," Tigre qänt.irat, Amharic qint.är, Hariri kintir, Gurage qent.er.  Unfortunately, Leslau did not indicate whether he believed there may be a connection between qnt.r and qn, "horn."  Cf. Galla kontoro, "penis" (Foot, p. 37a), and Somali kintir, "clitoris" (Abraham 151b).  We might also note that the non-Semitic Hittite word hurnius may mean "arms" or "penis," according to E. H. Sturtevant, Hittite Glossary (Baltimore: Waverly Press; supplement to Language, Language Monographs No. IX, June 1931), 25.  In my paper, "New Light on Job 16:15," presented at last year's regional SBL meeting, I gave evidence that the word qeren (qarni) in that passage refers to the penis.

For more, see, for e.g., the entry "Bible, Euphemism, and Dysphemism in the" by Marvin Pope in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, volume 1, pp. 720-25