Is Abinadi trinitarian? Joseph Spencer is one of the leading experts on the Book of Mormon. He’ll tackle that question. He’s also the incoming president of Book of Mormon Studies Association, and he’s written a new book, “A Word in Season,” which discusses the Book of Mormon’s treatment of Isaiah. As LDS, we are told to study the words of Isaiah, so we’ll dive in and talk about how Abinadi, Christ, and Nephi approach Isaiah. It’s not the same! We’ll also discuss trinity in the Book of Mormon. Check out our conversation…
Don’t miss our other conversations with Joseph: https://gospeltangents.com/people/joseph-spencer/
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BOMSA Leader
Interview
GT 00:40 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have the incoming president for the Book of Mormon Studies Association. I bet you don’t get that introduction very often.
Joseph 00:50 No, I don’t.
GT 00:53 So tell us who you are.
Joseph 00:56 Yeah. I’m Joe Spencer. I am an associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, author of a bunch of books. We’re going to talk about one of those today, apparently.
GT 01:05 Definitely.
Joseph 01:06 My training is in philosophy, but I work, especially, at the conjunction of theology and scripture.
GT 01:10 Yeah. Two things: since I mentioned Book of Mormon Studies, Chris Thomas is a good friend of both of ours.
Joseph 01:17 Definitely.
GT 01:19 I think he put it in a good word for you. Is becoming president of these different associations, you haven’t been MHA (Mormon History Association) President or anything?
Joseph 01:29 No, heavens no.
GT 01:29 I think it’s one of those things where it’s like, anybody willing to do it? Yep. That’s just like church.
Joseph 01:36 There’s a lot of that. That’s exactly right. We look around and go, yeah, who’s a sucker here? {both laughing}
GT 01:44 So it’s going to be a three-year term.
Joseph 01:46 Yep.
GT 01:47 Why don’t you, for those listeners [who don’t know,] I got involved because of Chris. Then he told me he was the president. It’s in Logan every year, which is nice.
Joseph 01:55 Yes.
GT 01:56 But you’re serving a three-year term, not a one-year term.
Joseph 01:59 Yeah. That’s how we wrote our bylaws. It’s a three-year term for anyone who’s president. Book of Mormon Studies Association has been around. When did we formally do this? Was it 2017?
GT 02:09 I think Chris said he did it for four years.
Joseph 02:11 2018?
GT 02:11 He extended one year.
Joseph 02:12 He did. Yeah, we had him extend a bit. We launched this thing a few years ago, and we meet every year in Logan, in October, and people give papers about the Book of Mormon. It’s a lovely, lovely community.
GT 02:24 Yeah, It’s a lot of fun. Chris Thomas, I should just point out, it’s been a few years since he was on my podcast. He’s not Mormon!
Joseph 02:34 Yeah, he is Pentecostal. {Rick chuckling}
GT 02:37 And he wrote a great book called “A Pentecostal Reads the Book of Mormon.” If you really want to dive in, I didn’t realize when I interviewed him. But he is like a big deal.
Joseph 02:46 He is a very big deal.
GT 02:48 Especially with Pentecostal circles.
Joseph 02:49 Yeah. In Pentecostal theology and scriptural studies. Yeah, I think he’s THE man. Yeah.
GT 02:56 Yeah. So I’m excited to have Chris, and I guess he’s coming again to Logan? Do you know?
Joseph 03:03 Yeah, he’s going to be a keynote speaker this year.
GT 03:05 Oh, good.
Joseph 03:05 Yeah.
GT 03:07 I’ll see you and Chris.
Intro to Book/Ideal Reader
Interview
GT 03:10 You are Book of Mormon Man. We’ve got our new book here. Why don’t you go ahead and show it to the camera.
Joseph 03:18 Yeah. A Word In Season: Isaiah’s Reception of The Book of Mormon, which came out last year from the University of Illinois Press.
GT 03:31 Has it been a year?
Joseph 03:32 Well, it came out in November. So, it hasn’t been a year, but it came out last year.
GT 03:34 Okay. {Rick chuckling} I know this is a big year with the Book of Mormon, because we’re studying it at church. This is our Book of Mormon study year. And so it’s great to get there. I have to tell you, I know that Nephi says that we need to study the words of Isaiah, but I hate to study Isaiah.
Joseph 03:55 You’re not alone. There are a lot of people that feel this way. {both laughing}
GT 03:59 One of the things that struck me as I read your book, was you kept talking about the ideal reader…
Joseph 04:09 Yes.
GT 04:09 …of the Book of Mormon in the 19th century, And I thought, are they any different than us? Did they hate Isaiah as much as we do?
Joseph 04:17 Well, you see a couple of things in the early history of the Church. You get, people are interested in the Isaiah stuff. That’s actually more common then, than it is today. But they’re interested in it because they’re interested in fiery, Second Coming, Millennium kinds of things and so they get invested in the Isaiah materials in the Book of Mormon.
GT 04:36 That’s why we’re the Church of the last days.
Joseph 04:38 Exactly, exactly. You do actually see quite a bit of interest in the Isaiah stuff among the members of the church. But no early members of the church have a deep sense of the history of how people have interpreted Isaiah, which my ideal reader does.
GT 04:53 And so your ideal reader isn’t a common reader.
Joseph 04:55 Literally, I think there was no one that fit this category. {both laughing} Yeah, the idea here was, we have these angles we tend to have coming up the Book of Mormon. And when we want to read something like Isaiah, we’ve got questions in our minds and things that we want to solve. But what I wanted to create was someone who didn’t have any of those agendas. So, I created a totally invented ideal reader, who’s very familiar with the history of Isaiah’s interpretation, how Jews and Christians of various sorts have interpreted Isaiah over 2500 years. And then on the other hand, someone who’s very sympathetic to what’s happening in the translation of the Book of Mormon. Well, that’s a very narrow crossover. We had people who were really invested in the Book of Mormon right from the beginning, but they didn’t know a lot about the history of Isaiah. Then you had people who were, of course, very familiar with what people said about Isaiah, but they couldn’t have been less interested in the Book of Mormon. So, if I find little points of connection there, and then make that person read the book, what happens?
GT 05:57 Okay.
Joseph 05:58 Yeah.
GT 05:59 Okay. So it was interesting to me, I remember one of your real dives into there, and this is deep dive. And by the way, I guess we should talk a little bit more about your background.
Joseph 06:12 Sure.
GT 06:13 Here at Gospel Tangents, we’re the best source of Mormon history, science and theology, but philosophy is not part of that. And you’re a big philosophy guy.
Joseph 06:25 I am.
GT 06:25 Talk a little bit about your educational background.
Joseph 06:28 Sure, I went to BYU as an undergrad. I was planning to study music.
GT 06:33 Oh.
Joseph 06:34 It turns out talent is part of that package, and I didn’t have that. So, I found my way to philosophy after a semester or two and studied philosophy as an undergrad. I was not planning on being an academic.
GT 06:48 You were going to be a musician.
Joseph 06:49 No, not that either, because I realized that was a dead end for me. My wife and I opened an independent bookstore after we finished school. We did that for a couple of years. Then I did a master’s in library science, thinking I’d work in the book world. About the time that was ending, I was finishing up that masters. A friend of mine in the philosophy department here at UVU, where we happen to be recording this, asked if I was available to teach adjunct philosophy courses for the year and I said, “Sure!”
GT 07:16 Oh.
Joseph 07:17 And I got into the classroom and thought, my heavens, this is what I want to do.
GT 07:21 Oh, really?
Joseph 07:21 I went to graduate school and studied philosophy all the way through.
GT 07:24 Loyd Ericson?
Joseph 07:25 It was Brian Birch, who reached out to me, but yeah, I know Lloyd well.
GT 07:28 Loyd, doesn’t he teach he teach philosophy, too?
Joseph 07:30 He does, yeah.
GT 07:31 That’s what I thought.
GT 07:33 Greg Kofford Books, by the way.
Joseph 07:35 Yes. Seriously, they’re amazing. So, that’s how I found my way into philosophy all the way through to PhD and then went on the job market. But by then I was also writing a lot about Latter-day Saint scripture and thought. And so I ended up in religious education at BYU, where I do, I write about philosophy but my teaching in the classroom is Book of Mormon.
GT 07:53 Well, you’re dressed in green here. You’re fitting right in on campus.
Joseph 07:56 I should say I was thinking about that, but I didn’t. {both laughing}
GT 08:02 Now, where did you get your Ph.D. in philosophy?
Joseph 08:05 University of New Mexico.
GT 08:07 Oh, you’re a Lobo.
Joseph 08:08 I am a Lobo. Yep. {both chuckling}
GT 08:11 Well, very good. And so then you just made your way back to BYU?
Joseph 08:15 I did. Yeah, back where I started, which is totally not what I expected. It has been a very interesting path.
GT 08:23 Well, and the other interesting thing is as we were walking in, you found out that I teach here at UVU.
Joseph 08:29 Yeah.
GT 08:30 In the math department, and you said, “Well, tell us about your dissertation. ”
Joseph 08:34 Yeah.
GT 08:35 I won’t give it away.
Joseph 08:37 I wrote my dissertation in part about set theory for its theoretical mathematics. I was super interested in the fact that you have philosophers from very different contexts, who have used set theory, very specifically, to try to develop a rigorous concept of truth, and rival concepts of truth, which are very different concepts of truth. But they keep turning to set theory. And that struck me as very odd and interesting. So, that’s what I ended up writing my dissertation about.
GT 09:04 It strikes me as odd and interesting, too. I will say, I love lots of different math, but set theory is not one of them.
Joseph 09:10 Not your thing? {Rick laughing}
GT 09:13 I always struggle with philosophy, too. So, we’re going to dive deep into one of my weak areas.
Joseph 09:21 Let’s do it.
Is Abinadi Trinitarian?
Interview
GT 09:23 All right. So one of the things that really caught my attention was, you were talking about Abinadi. I was thinking, is he on the cover? But he’s not.
Joseph 09:31 No, this is Mary on the cover.
GT 09:33 Oh, Mary’s on the cover.
Joseph 09:34 Yeah.
GT 09:34 You were talking about Abinadi and how he both gave–I think you used the word quaint, kind of a quaint interpretation on Isaiah that was also, like, from the 19th century reader an old fashioned way to interpret scripture, but, you defended it. Talk more about that.
Joseph 09:58 Yeah. So, in the book, I read the Book of Mormon in the order of dictation. So, I start with Mosiah.
Joseph 10:04 I work to Moroni. Then I look at the small plates, 1st Nephi, 2nd Nephi, etc. So, I open with Abinadi. There are a lot of reasons I do that. We could talk about that, if you’d like. But, looking at Abinadi, his interpretations of Isaiah, he’s, of course, looking at Isaiah 53, especially, the famous song of the suffering servant. As he interprets that, he interprets this passage, especially, it’s Isaiah 53:8 that says, “Who shall declare his generation?” I think the best interpretation of what Abinadi is doing there, is he understands that to be a provocation, or provocative question about how do you explain what it means for God to have come down in the flesh? That seems to be how he’s reading it. That’s a very traditional way of reading it. But by the 19th century, [that] looks a little quaint, looks a little too traditional. So, basically, that’s a dominant interpretation of that passage in Isaiah among Catholic readers, right down to the beginning of the modern period. But with the dawn of modernity, not only does Protestantism give a totally different reading of that passage, most of the time, Luther and Calvin, right at the beginning, but also Catholics begin to abandon that traditional reading. So, that for 200-300 years leading up to the time of the Book of Mormon’s publication, that’s an old-fashioned, not a very modern reading. But Abinadi seems to sound like that earlier tradition.
GT 10:20 See the thing that pops into my head, two things. Number one, with “God coming down,” sounds very Trinitarian. I tried to pin Chris down, “Is the Book of Mormon Trinitarian?” He was like, “Not really.” My Baptist friend, why am I blanking on his name? Gosh dang, why can I remember his name? He’s a Baptist pastor. And he said it was not modalistic. I think Chris said it was Trinitarian with some modalistic fuzziness. Kyle Beshears, that’s the name I couldn’t remember.
Joseph 12:13 Kyle Beshears, yeah.
GT 12:14 He said it wasn’t really Modalism. I’m trying to remember what he said. It was kind of like a dualism or something.[1]
Joseph 12:24 Yeah.
GT 12:24 I’ll have to go back and listen. Then number three, Paul Toscano and Janice Allred and Margaret Toscano to some degree have looked at these Abinadi passages and come up with their own kind of Mormon heretical.
Joseph 12:24 Yes, they really have.
GT 12:41 It’s not really Godhead, but God did come down. I know Paul comes from a Catholic background. So, I think that’s really why he would dive into there, especially since you said that’s how Catholics were pre-19th century.
Joseph 13:07 Yeah, pre-16th century really? Yeah.
GT 13:13 So is the Book of Mormon Trinitarian? Let’s get your take.
Joseph 13:16 I think the simplest way to put this is the Book of Mormon is under determined. Right?
GT 13:20 Under determined.
Joseph 13:20 That is to say, it uses various kinds of language that one can nudge in a direction that’s Trinitarian, or nudge in a direction that’s non-Trinitarian. You could nudge it in a modalist direction in certain ways. You could nudge it. But I think in the end, it’s not embracing any particular position. These are theological readings that we develop out of the text. Obviously, everyday Latter-day Saints, of course, read it in light of the doctrine that Joseph Smith teaches in Nauvoo, that God, the Father, Jesus Christ, the Son, the Holy Ghost are three distinct, ontologically, distinct beings. And so most Latter-day Saints tend to read it that way, and then scratch their heads at why it’s worded weirdly, or whatever. But I think, really, in the end, the text does not actually require any particular of those readings. It can be massaged into one of those readings, but it’s doing its own thing, I think.
GT 14:15 Okay.
Joseph 14:15 Abinadi, in particular, he’s not saying anything at all about the Spirit. He’s not giving a Trinitarian picture. He’s trying to think about the dual nature of Christ. That feels like a different kind of question than Trinitarian theology, per se.
GT 14:30 Okay. Because I think it is Abinadi where most Protestants, if they don’t reject the book out right, right off the bat, but they’re going to say, well, that looks like a lot of Trinitarian. But you’re just saying you can mold it any way you want.
Joseph 14:49 Yeah. And so, that’s why I like the word under-determined. It’s not hard to push it a little bit and it’s Trinitarian. But it’s also not hard to push it in another way and it’s not. So, I think it is, itself, ambiguous. Then we can do different things with it. It’s worth saying for the first 10 or so years of the history of the Church, it was read as Trinitarian. You can document that in early articles in Church newspapers and things like that, or responses to critics of the Church. People read the Book of Mormon as Trinitarian at the beginning. It’s only after Nauvoo, I should say, that then people are like, “Well, no, it’s not Trinitarian because that’s the doctrine of the Church.” So, it certainly can be read that way.
GT 15:34 Community of Christ still reads it that way.
Joseph 15:35 They do, yeah. So I think we are free to speculate, we could say, with the text there about what it’s supposed to be saying. But I don’t think it actually nails itself down.
Abinadi Contradicts Nephi?
GT 15:46 Well, it seems like you also said that Abinadi contradicts Nephi.
Joseph 15:54 Yes.
GT 15:55 Talk more about that.
Joseph 15:56 I think over the course of the whole of the Book of Mormon here, you have very different models of reading Isaiah. Obviously, you’ve got Abinadi versus the priests. That’s a debate, a kind of contest. But what you’ve got with Nephi, is a model of reading Isaiah that has focused intensely on the question of Israel’s gathering, the fulfillment of an Abrahamic covenant and this kind of thing. Abinadi just, I mean, seems to be completely unconcerned with that question, and is looking instead intensely, for Jesus Christ, prophecies of Jesus Christ. I don’t think Nephi is averse to that. Nor do I think Abinadi is averse to looking for Abrahamic Covenant kinds of things. But neither of them emphasizes the same thing. And in certain passages of Isaiah, Isaiah 52, especially here, they read very different things into the very same verses. That’s suggestive that Abinadi is finding prophecies of apostles going forth into the world kind of a thing, and these messengers, these prophets, who are going to announce Christ to everyone. Nephi sees in it the coming of the Holy One of Israel, to redeem people in the last day, to redeem Israel in the last day. [These are] very different pictures.
Not Missing Mosiah Chapters?
GT 17:05 Well, that’s interesting, because you touched a little bit. You decided to approach the Book of Mormon from how it was translated. So, as we know, we lost 116 pages.
Joseph 17:21 Right.
GT 17:21 And so Joseph just continued on with our Mosiah 1, which was really Mosiah 3.
Joseph 17:28 Maybe. There’s a debate about that, but yes.
GT 17:31 That’s what Don Bradley says.
Joseph 17:32 Yes. Don, and I had that argument that —
GT 17:34 Oh really? No, we need to talk. Let’s talk about that.
Joseph 17:38 Yeah, I’m convinced we’re not missing any of Mosiah. It would take some work to show why I think that’s the case. But I think we’re not actually missing anything of Mosiah.
GT 17:46 Because it starts very differently. It feels like it’s missing an introduction.
Joseph 17:50 Right. But I think there’s a lot of details to sort out there. But I think, yeah, I mean, do you want my whole theory?
GT 17:59 This is Gospel Tangents! We go off on tangents. Yeah!
Joseph 18:02 I don’t know how ready I am to go public with that. It’s something I’m working on right now. So maybe I’ll just leave this as a teaser.
GT 18:09 Oh, come on. We’re going to have to have him back, I guess. But wait a minute. So you’re disputing Don Bradley? Well, it’s not just Don.
Joseph 18:17 Yeah, lots of people have made that argument. And other people have made other arguments, as well, that are very different. But I’m unconvinced by the arguments that our Book of Mosiah starts partway into the book. Yeah, I’m totally unconvinced.
GT 18:29 Because every other book has an introduction.
Joseph 18:32 Yeah. It has a heading. You’re referring to the headings above the book?
GT 18:35 Well, it’s still, “I Nephi having been born.” There’s no, “I, Mosiah” or “I, King Benjamin.”
Joseph 18:41 Right, though it’s Mormon who’s writing at that point. So if Words of Mormon is the introduction to it, then that would be a different thing. We would have an introduction. And Mormon says, okay, so here’s who I am. Here’s why I’m writing and then starts to tell the story of King Benjamin. So, I suspect that Words of Mormon is the beginning of the same thing we call the Book of Mosiah. But it would take a lot of argumentation to lay that out in detail.
GT 19:06 You’re teasing me here.
Joseph 19:08 Well, I’m literally writing a book on this. I’m still working on all my details on it. {both laughing}
GT 19:16 I don’t want to move on, but I guess I will.
{End of Part 1}
[1] Kyle called it unitarianism. See https://gospeltangents.com/2023/05/are-mormons-christian/
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