The Bible and the Latter-day Saint Tradition

The Bible and the Latter-day Saint Tradition represents a valuable contribution to, and a continuation of, a more than century-long conversation about the reception of the Bible and biblical scholarship in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Since B. H. Roberts's late nineteenth-century efforts to engage the newly emergent historical-critical study of the Bible, the LDS Church has had three responses: ignorance favoring pre-modern readings, tentative concessions (if faith-promoting), or caustic rejection. This volume's various contributors give insightful background to this in its thirty-one essays, ranging across a host of biblical subjects, organized into five categories.None of the essays is unnecessarily lengthy or technical, striking a balance of being both academically instructive and accessible to non-specialists. The essays collectively are dispassionate and non-apologetic. Neither are they overly critical, focusing on facts and candid observations. Each essay is an excellent starting point from which to conduct further study. This volume should be on the bookshelf of anyone engaging with Latter-day Saint theology or history and the Bible.Part I, “The Ancient World of the Bible as Understood by the Latter-day Saints: From Joseph Smith to Contemporary Scholarship,” consists of a somewhat eclectic assortment of essays covering the ancient Near East context of the Bible and issues particular to the LDS Church. Topics include the Dead Sea scrolls, the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, and the ancient temple versus the LDS temple.In Part II, “Conceptions of Canon and Not Canon: The Bible(s) and Restoration Scripture,” Daniel Becerra's essay on “The Biblical Canon” and Grant Hardy's “How the Book of Mormon Responds to the Bible” stand out. For untrained readers, Becerra's article may be the best starting essay to understanding the Bible and its basic reception among Latter-day Saints.Part III, “A Variety of Critical Biblical Approaches and Their Relevance to Mormon Studies,” discusses how various historical-critical methods might be profitably applied in LDS contexts. Joseph Spencer's advocacy for applying principles of biblical theology for LDS readers seeking to benefit from, but not surrender to, an unhindered historical-critical method while upholding biblical and Restoration scripture in devotional practice and spiritual formation was particularly intriguing.Part IV, “Inheritance and Divergence: Latter-day Saints Read Others Reading the Bible,” places Latter-day Saint reading of the Bible in the context of other non-LDS biblical readers and exegetes. Jared Ludlow's discussion weaves a delicate balance of acknowledging the potentially subjective and tendentious nature of New Testament, early Christian, and (by implication) LDS interpretive strategies of the Old Testament's messianic and typological passages and places these within and in continuity with Jewish hermeneutical approaches. Importantly, this highlights how early Christians may have been selective about how they chose to read the Old Testament messianically and typologically, but they were not necessarily innovative.Part V, “Latter-day Saint Approaches to the Bible's Major Genres and Divisions,” recognizes that the Bible features multiple literary genres edited and compiled over time. Consequently, one cannot speak of a unified biblical perspective. Rather, one does biblical theology with the various genres and books of the Bible and reflects on their changes, emphases, and authorial reshaping over time. For example, this view is not shared with early Christians who read the Bible as a “unicity” (see Griffen and Heal in Part IV). Although this may be a splitting of hairs as one could argue for some form of overall unity with nuance (unicity would be in the eye of the beholder).The challenge of a work such as this is that it identifies explicitly and implicitly numerous avenues for further work and expansion in thinking about how the LDS Church handles complex issues of scripture and theology in an increasingly skeptical culture—speaking of the Global North in general. Is it even viable to assume or maintain biblically fundamentalist views of scripture akin to the mid-twentieth-century LDS Church, or is it time for the LDS Church to embrace a nuanced scriptural theology that accepts the human aspects of scripture along with the divine? How exactly does the LDS Church manage a cohesive but less rigid doctrine of faith, maintain an optimal unity of membership, navigate legitimate claims from the academy, and still move its adherents toward lives of faith and devotion today? These questions strike at the core of what the “Restoration” means, what truth claims the Church can make, and who the Latter-day Saints are as an identity. It seems unlikely that the scriptural propositions of the mid-twentieth-century LDS Church will be adequate for the twenty-first-century Church. A failure to adequately address these questions will have significant consequences for future generations of Latter-day Saints.