Prophets versus Experts - Isaiah 29:10-14; JS-H 1:64-65

 

"PHD." Abbreviations.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2025. Web. 19 Jan. 2025.<https://www.abbreviations.com/term/387815>.

"For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes: the prophets and your rulers, the seers hath he covered. And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed: And the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned. Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men: Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid." (Isaiah 29:10-14)

 1. Outside of Restored Christianity, the above Isaiah quote generates generic commentary about the choice of attitude each of us have in listening to God. In parallel with Jesus's mockery of Pharisees as "whited walls" who profess a great understanding of the law, but who comprehend its fundamentals so little that they can't even recognize the Messiah right in front of their eyes, Protestant thought teaches that book learning doesn't guarantee spiritual wisdom--that you can have credentials and amass readings, and still miss the point. Both the unlearned illiterate and the learned readers get no benefit from the contents of a sealed book. While that's a fair reading of the passage's general content, two things are true: a. few "experts" feel personally implicated by passages like this even though we all should; b. new information initiates interpreters to new hermeneutic possibilities.

Self-satisfied that they would never be guilty of the errors of the Pharisees, many well-meaning Bible believers and Doctors of Divinity fail to note that their careful sola scriptura strictures put them afoul of the very root of Christ's critique--the Pharisees also claimed that only prior scripture should be trusted as the source of God's voice. Their approach to truth was as sophic as the bulk of Protestantism today--Catholicism too, with the exception of the Pope, one could argue. And in all three cases, as extensive compilation of commentary gradually substitutes for scripture itself over time, the mantic spirit Christ Himself embodied and inspired across the centuries of His manifestations to prophets is lost to erroneous argumentation. Please understand: I mean no insult to honest seekers of truth whose consistent philosophies limit their understanding. I only point out that it's possible to be internally consistent and well-meaning, and God-fearing, and honest, and still wrong.

This passage from Isaiah has a more concrete reference to a sealed book and a learned man being unable to read it--not out of over-education, but out of self-interest in not being able to control the profits from it. And the man without proper letters, the very concrete Joseph Smith, may not have had the formal training, but did have the gift and power given by God to read the book that was sealed to others. Isaiah didn't explicitly tie the unlearned man as the agent of producing the marvelous work, but he didn't forbid it either, and his move to describe the kind of work that would be wondrous and bring hearts back into alignment with the Lord in contrast with the lips that merely profess, but don't honor as one that only the unlearned could do (the wisdom of the wise men being insufficient to this task).

The Martin Harris account, published in this canonized history after he had left the church, but which he continued to attest despite incentives to recant, tells of a hand-copied page of "Reformed Egyptian" symbols which a reputable professor at Columbia verbally certified, but who likely had no clue he was uttering nearly to the letter Isaiah's 2600 year-old words when he ripped up his draft of a written certification upon learning that the book was sealed: "I cannot read a sealed book" (JS-H 1:65).

He also could not have predicted, as self-interested as he was in either glorifying himself in its translation, or in discrediting it altogether, how the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and the consequently Restored Church and its advancement would resemble the marvelous work and wonder Isaiah clearly prophesied. And only those open to the mantic mode of truth-seeking will come to know of its truth, further hiding the wisdom of the world's Christian, but misguided prudent men and other scholars.

2. As part of my own project of study to bring scripture as much to life as I can, I did a little digging into the scholarly atmosphere of the day. Maybe a detail or two here will help someone else get more out of their study as well. Contextual elements like this also deepen my sense of how God prepares the conditions for His actions.

First off, Anthon wasn't an Egyptologist, and while he had a background in other ancient cultures and languages, some of his knowledge of Egypt could only have been in the infancy of the West's earliest modern understanding of Egyptian scripts. Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt brought to France and England a number of artifacts whose procurement was of dubious ethics, but whose importance to history, archeology, and linguistics has proven immense. One such was the famous Rosetta Stone which sat undeciphered in a British museum for decades before a young student in the fledgling discipline of "Egyptology" made a few key assumptions about the hieroglyphs on the stele that appeared to match the meaning of the Greek script it also contained. This Jean-François Champollion had to battle a scholarly misconception about hieroglyphs themselves. It was well known that ideographs, glyphs that convey an entire idea rather than transcribe the phonetic form of the idea, can serve as vehicles for multiple languages. It was also well established that across the millenia that Egypt used writing, there were three identifiable scripts that the spoken language, which also evolved over such lengthy periods, made use of. Because the kinds of monarchs and priests who commanded the construction of monuments were also the kind to want themselves memorialized in the most indelible ways, the surviving exemplars of one of these scripts--hieroglyphics--was almost exclusively found in temples and funerary edifices. This led to the false conclusion that hieroglyphics was only used for religious purposes and therefore didn't represent the spoken language of the normal people. Champollion contested this idea, showing how there might be a progression of the more purely ideographic hieroglyphics to the more frequent phonetic markings used on more corruptible papyrii in the hieratic script could finally lead to the more alphabetic demotic script which itself was likely connected as an ancestor to the modern-day Coptic tongue still spoken in parts of Egypt (it's one of the world's oldest continuously spoken languages still extant). This logical leap allowed him to parse out some names on the Rosetta Stone that were attested elsewhere, and then abstract out a few phonetic symbols which then gave him a key to more and more, until the full stone had its translation worked out.

His work on the Rosetta Stone was published posthumously not long after completed, as Champollion died relatively young (age 41) of a stroke that many attributed to the after-effects of an arduous journey to Egypt and back to France. That publication was less than 6 years old, and not likely available in translated form for the contemporary New York professor Charles Anthon to have digested (although I have no idea whether he spoke French) to have very deep insight as to the nature or meaning of any Egyptian script let alone one written in a derived form of Demotic used to transcribe Hebrew rather than the ancestor tongue of the Copts, and then modified over the thousand years of Nephite linguistic evolution.

The state of Egyptology in the US in 1828, when Martin Harris made the trip to New York to obtain second opinions as to the wisdom of his investment in the Book of Mormon translation and publication projects he was heavily leveraged on, simply didn't have a whole lot to it just yet.

But even if it did, the way to test it is in its pages, not through scholarly examination of the archeological materials. The way to know if Joseph Smith was a prophet is to pray, as he did, with real intent and having faith in Christ to know if the Book of Mormon is true. And this manner of proving the prophets isn't contained only in its pages, but is also among the Savior's own prescriptions as recorded in Matthew: "by their fruits ye shall know them". The fruits and gifts of the Spirit seem to scientism too subjective, but they bring precisely the testimony of truth the world needs. The marvelous work and a wonder is afoot.

Context is King - Joseph Smith-History 1:41

 

"He quoted many other passages of scripture, and offered many explanations which cannot be mentioned here."

Untangling context is sometimes a necessary chore. All valid interpretation depends on it, and yet we, as readers, may have varying attentiveness to or knowledge of its elements, and varying judgments as to the elements' salience.

Take the question of how to understand Moroni's first visit to Joseph Smith. You and I, who have read the Book of Mormon and know that this Moroni was its last prophet can't avoid an imposing image when we see the very name. This was a giant of a man--I make no claim on his height, although it's hard not to imagine him as a strong warrior, because we know he was a general in the last of the Nephite armies--whose faith kept him alive and kept sacred records secure for 20+ years after his civilization fell in a great and last battle, and its enemies relentlessly hunted him. We know him as a stalwart Christian who transcribed the record of the Jaredites onto the limited space of the gold plates that he would eventually be inspired to hide up in the hill where Joseph Smith was led to find them. This Jaredite civilization also fell, and its fall was caused by such similar forces to his own, that this Moroni--who knew neither his own people nor his enemies would receive this record, but a Gentile people far into the future--felt the lessons so deeply and powerfully that he felt too weak to communicate them in the ideographic script available to him. In one of the most memorable passages in his recordings, the Lord speaks to him to assure him that only fools would mock at his weakness, but that if men like him came to Christ with their weakness, the Lord would make weak things strong. And how strong is he now! He has come as an angel of glory, able to shine forth, speak messages of world-turning importance with authority, and act as the agent of the fulfillment of ancient prophecy. To us who know him already, this angel is a sign of God's grace, an inspiration, an encouragement to be faithful as he was, to push through despair, challenge, and ill-disposed conditions he had no control over to trust Christ would make something better of himself and his efforts than he could. He is a glorified being as we all can be.

But Joseph Smith at the time didn't know him or his writings or backstory. All 17-year old Joseph Smith saw was a nameless messenger from God of fearfully bright appearance who came as a faithful response to the young man's sincere repentance, who shared news of a calling from God that Joseph needed to rise to, who gave news of a hidden book and tools of its translation, and then who spent the bulk of his visitation time citing and explaining scripture. Smith received basically a heavenly sermon, with text and commentary all pointing toward a Restoration of scriptures, of authorities, of structures, and of a mantic approach to revelation. To the youth in the room, this wasn't a personal example of how strong the Lord could make a weak person, Moroni was instead a dedicated servant delivering messages word for word from God, revealing purpose, giving directions (like those not to show the plates to anyone), and using most of his time and words to contextualize this purpose inside a trajectory of previously revealed prophecies. Moroni was an object of awe, a snap-to-it moment for the young Smith, an abstract position more than a person, and while the bearer of an important and intense message, he was not meaningful in and of himself.

And now take a step away from the agents in the narrative and consider the narrator and his context. This 17-year old experiencing Moroni for the first time is no longer 17, but rather 33. He's a mature leader of a Restored church of over 17,000 members, has completed both the translation of the Book of Mormon and of the Bible, has received over a hundred revelations, and has felt the burden of laying foundations of community amid sometimes mortally hostile conditions. To this more mature narrator looking back on his younger self and selecting the details of his experience most propitious both for responding to growing numbers of critics and for affirming the faith of the believers, Moroni was neither the faceless messenger nor the strengthened and glorified mortal. He was, instead, a seed--the starting point for a trajectory of mighty growth, the miraculous flashpoint from which a growing fire of faith would envelop the earth. Moroni wasn't merely the purveyor of prophecy, but was himself the fulfillment of prophecy, and he signaled the fulfillment of many more. Smith spent much of the year of this history's dictation falsely accused in prison and awaiting trial. Mobs had threatened his people and thought they cut the head off of the snake when they imprisoned Joseph. Joseph's reminder of Moroni as a beginning reminded all who had the faith to see it, that this wasn't Joseph's work--Smith was not the head of the proverbial snake, and no earthly power could stop the growth of the Church because it was the work of the Lord.

Do you see how the same figure of Moroni can have three separate valences according to the contextual details we choose as salient to our interpretive position? Do you see how all three can be true simultaneously? Do you see how the more initiation you have into context, the more you can draw out of the same passage?

Now read the cited verse at the top of this post again.

Smith notes that Moroni relayed verses from Malachi with slightly different wording than in the King James Version he was familiar with. Moroni had no earthly memory of that wording. We have his record, and we know that while Malachi's writings were accomplished a continent away, Christ Himself cited Malachi's words for the Nephites. And those mirrored the KJV exactly.

Between the two versions, and the new context for their delivery, Smith's mind and heart were beginning to open to paradigm-shifting realities.

Moroni also cited Joel and Acts, both scriptures with which he could have had no record (his people's connection with ancient Israel was broken by the year 600, just a decade and less than a half away from the Babylonian exile, and therefore their records couldn't have included Joel or Luke, 1st century author of the Acts of the Apostles), therefore which he could only have learned by some non-terrestrial form of learning. And the context and the guidance given pointed Smith to more new understanding of the imminence of these prophecies' fulfilment.

And apparently there are many others Moroni cited, expounded, and impressed upon the young mind of a Smith hungry for personal forgiveness, and for a purpose to pursue in life, but not necessarily one of such scriptural import. The context and Moroni's way of authoritatively guiding him through all the way from message to interpretation, must have blown Smith's mind.

What ways have new contexts provided you with new applications for familiar scriptures? Do new callings in the Church, or new seasons of life (adolescence, career changes, parenthood, parenthood of adolescents, retirement, serious illness, etc.) give you new perspective on the Lord's Word? Have you allowed Him to blow your mind recently? I promise you, the more you learn about the original context, the more accurately you'll see new applications of truths to your own situation.

Zero Tolerance - D&C 1:31

 

"I the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance"

 Schools and workplaces sometimes have explicit "zero tolerance" policies for certain kinds of misbehavior they find most egregious. In the academic setting, this most often refers to drugs or violence. The idea is that infractions in these areas aren't matters for explaining yourself to authorities who have discretion as to whether or not and to what degree to apply a penalty. Instead, they are a "you do the crime, you do the time" concept where the penalty is applied automatically no matter how light or "first time" your drug use was, or how justified or defensive your violence was. More broadly, the policies are designed to remove all doubt from all members of the affected community that there is no acceptable reason for the infraction. And they are also popular because the administrators don't need to engage in the messy business of moral judgment--they can just be blind to anyone's reasons, the context of the event, and the prevailing moral baseline of the community, and still come off as supporting high standards of behavior. It's using neutrality as cover for moral relativity.

As the moral law-giver Himself, the Lord doesn't fall into the category of moral relativist in the slightest. This verse casts Him as the embodiment of the opposite: moral absolutism.

But be careful to judge only as He does with respect to two implications: 1. Tolerance and allowance are different concepts; 2. Sins are not the same things as mistakes.

1. I know of now other Christian denomination that declares such bold doctrines as to suggest that God is capable of certain behaviors that would result in His immediate cessation of being God. That there are principles superordinate to the Supreme Being. In order for God to be God, He must be a God of justice, and perfectly so. If He is merely an arbitrary Being whose commands are rooted in whim, not reason, then obedience to Him is purposeless. But because He has a purpose, and it has been revealed, all of His laws have a design serving that purpose: our happiness. Purpose, design, and justice are all inherent principles of our creation.

And so is judgment day.

The principle of accountability for our choices in this mortal life is as immutable as God's just character. No matter how small, no matter how justified we think we are, no matter our weakness or the other guy's bad character, we will all have no excuse one day. No excuse, but perhaps a covering. If we repent, the Savior will take upon Himself our guilt no matter how excuse-free our guilt is. His merciful grace is our Good News.

Until then, however, mortality definitely still is a space where sin is tolerated--only temporarily, of course, but this fallen world with sin and sin's consequences in it is part of what makes the space a worthy test.

God doesn't allow sin, we do. And His promise and design is that this temporary allowance teach us in the here and now what is and what is not tolerable. Until it stops, and we are left either covered or convicted.

2. God has a will, and the more we surrender ours to His, the better we grow and benefit. He directs individuals sometimes in very detailed ways. But when it comes to public pronouncements of His will, He chooses authorized voices--prophets--and gives them commandments. Being under commandment and failing to obey is sin. Knowing the commandment and choosing to disobey it is sin. Is one more condemnable for its active and rebellious nature and another less for its passive nature, and for the weak nature of those who fail to obey it? Maybe, but none of it will be excused, which is to say that all of it will prevent our celestial happiness.

But there are tons of choices we can make that don't fall under the obedience versus disobedience to God rubric, and yet can have serious consequences for us. These are mistakes. These aren't what God is judging, so we shouldn't either. God looks upon weakness differently than He looks upon rebellion. And He looks upon mistakes differently than sins.

The Manner of our Understanding - D&C 1:24

 "Behold, I am God and have spoken it; these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding"

 With the section opening so strongly on the concept of the voice of the Lord, this connected point about the language of the Lord gains more meaning and deserves more reflection.

First, as a reminder, "hearkening" as we are told to do, not just listen or hear, means that there's an active opening of heart, mind, and will to the message. The implication is that while messages must come from authorized sources, our task as receivers is to convert the symbols into an actionable contribution to our understanding, feeling, and motivation.

As Saussure's lectures on general linguistics establishes, communication presupposes at least two interlocutors (a sender and a receiver), a message, and a shared code, and as Grice adds, there must be a cooperative principle orienting interpretation or else the message received will not be the one intended. This verse insists on all of the above. The message sender is God, who can use proxies and various forms as vehicles for His Word. The receiver is us, and whether through human intermediaries or mediated by the various forms verbal communication can take (audible, textual), we must incline our faculties of interpretation with humble attitudes in order to accept the divine messages. The code we share is the language used.

I find it heartening to know that God adapts his message through codes as part of His design to increase understanding and obtain the goal of everyone "speaking" for the Lord. He spoke to Adam in Adamic, Moses in Egyptian, Isaiah in Hebrew, and to Peter in Aramaic. And while I don't think this principle means He is equally pleased with both King James early modern English and the latest Gen Z slang "translation," it does mean that His messages are not arcane, not meant to be inaccessible, not so far beyond the common tongue that there are educational barriers to understanding.

But that also does not mean that the messages are shallow or lack complexity.

Notice the structure of this section, punctuated and broken down into verse for us after the fact, contains very few independent propositions, but rather includes multiple embedded clauses and other kinds of complex sentence structure. It takes effort to unpack. And I think that's the model for all scripture--it's given to us in understandable form, but the meaning we wring from it is a function of both our effort and our initiation. In fact, it's also a function of our faith: our lived experience heeding and hearkening to what light we have received.

The above image is a common depiction of the Annunciation. Many medieval and renaissance era artists depicted the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove aiming at the ear, not the womb of Mary as the angel Gabriel revealed to her that she would bear the Son of God. The unbelieving poke fun at the idea of a virgin birth, and literalists poke fun at the concept of conception through the tympanic membrane rather than in the usual manner. But these depictions, like all words, are symbolic--sometimes symbolic on multiple levels at once. Just as the Holy Ghost enters only metaphorically through the ear, so the language of the Lord is aimed at our emotion, our reason, and our will, and enters only through our embodied faculties of reception.

Yes, the Being of perfection, or omniscience and omnipotence doesn't compel understanding, even though He could, and even though the behaviors thus motivated would accord with His will more certainly and universally. Instead, this Father adapts to maximize our growth toward Him, which is less about crossing an information gap between us and Him as it is about choosing to take growth steps and beginning what part of the crossing we can begin.

Hearkening has to include effort, but He also makes efforts to be understandable. And since all symbolic communication improves with initiation, the invitation is to learn more about the symbols. Don't just assume that since you are a reader of English your study of the Doctrine and Covenants will transparently grant you the fathoming of all of the Lord's depths.

The dove aimed at Mary's ear to "conceive" of the Savior has another layer--a contrast--that enhances understanding. Eve listened to the serpent and sin was brought into the world. Contrasting Eve and Mary, the serpent and Christ, holiness and sin, the choice to accept temptation versus the choice to accept blessing, all in a single image element draws out multiple facets of the Savior's character and roles. It allows us to identify with new aspects of the avatars for all of us. It allows us new gratitude for the magnitude of Christ's atoning sacrifice.

I hope, in the same way, that as we open our minds and hearts to learning new symbolic entry-points into scripture, our hearkening and gratitude will be continuously drawn toward improvement, toward matching, as best our imperfect selves are able, His model.

What is Scripture?

Although many scholars believe the definitive compilation wasn't made until the time of the Babylonian exile (around 600 BC), Jewish tradition has kept a more or less standard list of "books" as canonical from as early as we have record of a Hebrew alphabet, and have added to it what histories, poetry, prophecies and divine directives have been deemed authoritative and noteworthy ever since. There are a few books which remain debatable for their inclusion (the Protestant King James Bible, for example, discards 7 books from the Catholic canon), and there is some evidence that some books have been lost to time for various reasons, but the agreed upon grouping has been stable for centuries. Christians broadly agree, even with Jews, and largely with Muslims on the sacredness and divine provenance of at least 39 Old Testament books, all written in Hebrew.

The New Testament, on the other hand, was written at a time and in a geographic area where Greek was the predominant lingua franca. Its books, which are entirely comprised of letters meant for public consumption, are more standardized across Catholic and Protestant compilations, but there are still a few "apocryphal" books that are excluded sometimes for questions of authenticity, sometimes for doctrinal content. What they share, aside from Greek, is 1st century authors with a maximum single degree of separation from personally witnessing the Savior's mortal ministry.

In both cases, some process of vetting extant copies (which contained variations) and weighting (personal letters for private edification versus letters worthy of parallel inclusion with writings of world-wide importance) had to be made and carried out by accepted authorities, whether subject experts or civil or spiritual authorities. And in both cases, Christians of the LDS variety accept the King James canonical 66 books of the Bible as the word of God as far as they are translated correctly.

The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, was transmitted basically from prophet to prophet (with minor departures from that pattern still remaining in-family), and kept under guard and/or secret during the entire span of its compilation. Because its transmission was centralized and secure, the only errors come from the human flaws of its sources, and from its translation (either from inspired ideas to linguistic forms, or between linguistic forms). Since the Christians who are LDS believe that the Book of Mormon was translated by divine gift, the translation pathway for error introduction is also eliminated and we often assert that it is therefore the most correct book--not the most important, or the most influential, just the most correct.

Finally, translations of certain discovered papyrii, inspired additions to biblical books, and a few testimony accounts and a credo comprise the fourth and least consulted tome of LDS scripture.

But to Christians who believe that the canon is open and that all words inspired by the Spirit are "scripture" even if not officially canonized, the term scripture itself has a broadness problem. Prophets and apostles speak truth to the public regularly, and General Conference compilations are published every six months to log the most official and broadest audience versions of these. But in order to avoid drowning in inspired text, the LDS often distinguish between "the scriptures" (the 4 canonized "standard works") and other inspired writings like conference talks, official declarations, and proclamations. All of them are revealed and useful for instruction--all of them lead powerfully to Christ as all scripture must--and some of them have the force of official doctrine immediately upon publication (the Proclamations, for example), but most are merely useful reflections on, commentary about, and illustrations of doctrine and scripture, not new scripture per se.

Not everything a prophet or apostle says is scripture just because they said it, or even just because it's true. We generally expect that men upheld as revelators will carefully distinguish between their own thoughts or thinking about revealed truths and thoughts they were commanded to transmit to the public as revelations. Only this latter category would be proposed as canonical by its leaders to the church collectively.

I hope that provides a little clarity on what scripture is and is not, and how and why some writings get canonized as we begin a study of the only LDS book of canonized scripture with an open end: the Doctrine and Covenants. We will assume no errors of translation or transmission (although refinement of a minor editorial nature has occurred), divine provenance, and all of it directly into English (although mostly an 1830s American version of it). And we will approach it as we do all scripture: God is its author, men are merely the conduits, and we have to change for the truth--work to discover and apply its truth for ourselves--because the truth isn't affected by our denial of it or disinterest in it.