© 2024 The Interpreter Foundation. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
All content by The Interpreter Foundation, unless otherwise specified, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
Interpreter Foundation is not owned, controlled by or affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All research and opinions provided on this site are the sole responsibility of their respective authors, and should not be interpreted as the opinions of the Board, nor as official statements of LDS doctrine, belief or practice.
Dr. Peterson,
My brother and I had an interesting email exchange where we mused over the possibility of the prophet Mohammad and his interactions with the angel Gabriel. Doctrinally speaking, our church at least leaves room for the possibility of Muhammad’s experience as he states it. Given your expertise in the field of Islam, do you personally believe that an angel conversed with Muhammad?
Back when I served my mission in about the year 2000, I had, on a couple of occasions, run into Evangelical Christians who countered our claim to prophets and apostles (and therefore divine revelation) by saying, “of course there are prophets and apostles living today, just none of them are Mormons.” This logic must be followed by considering why is it that the cannon of scripture is closed roughly 1900 years ago?
Besides maybe the basic idea in the divinity of the Jesus, IMHO, nothing unifies Christianity-at-large more than the idea that the bible is complete, and sealed with all religious truth. This unfortunately creates a catch 22. Where in the Bible can we derive the basic idea about the bible itself being complete? Anyone who has served an LDS mission (and many more who haven’t) will tell you that the mainstream Christian retort tends to come from the last few verses of Revelation, which anybody can tell is a really bad interpretation of scripture.
Joseph may have had a hard time trying to convey this idea, but to this end if God exists, the Latter-day Saints stand on the philosophically superior ground.
Great article Dr. Peterson. I think that if one accepts the possibility of revelation in the past, it seems inconsistent to hold that there can never again be revelation.
However, I do believe that the default position when encountering a person who claims revelation should be disbelief. Knowing the ‘true ratio’ of real revelations to false revelations is unknowable, in biblical times and ever since. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that the ratio is quite small, say 1/10000. Given this assumption, when anyone claims revelation, the ‘statistical’ response should be a rejection. The error of Dickens and Costain is to infer that because most people claiming revelation are obviously fakes, then all people claiming revelation are fakes. Jay Gould’s best statement is along the lines, ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’; what could be more extraordinary that claiming that the Supreme Being interacted with you? In Joseph Smith, we find extraordinary evidence for his incredible claim, namely, the Book of Mormon.
I agree.
Many years ago I had dinner with Wes Walters, the very anti-Mormon Presbyterian minister from Marissa,Illinois. During the course of the evening I asked him why he opposed Mormonism. He deflected the question by asking me why I thought he did what he did. I resorted to quoting Joseph Smith: “But we ask, does it remain for a people who never had faith enough to call down one scrap of revelation from heaven, and for all they have now are indebted to the faith of another people who lived hundreds and thousands of years before them, does it remain for them to say how much God has spoken and how much He has not spoken?” (TPJS, 61) That, of course, brought that discussion to and end and we went on to other things.
Great quotation. Somehow that one had passed me by.
Excellent article! It seems that the source of all truth, Jesus Christ, offends many. For His words and ways truly exemplifies a two-edged sword, which, on the one side, it liberates the captive, and on the other, it cuts the proud to the very core. The Book of Mormon and modern-day revelation continue to be stumbling blocks to the whole world.
Thanks, Heath.