Review of Michael R. Ash, Rethinking Revelation and the Human Element in Scripture: The Prophet’s Role as Creative Co-Author (Redding, CA: FAIRLatterDaySaints.org, 2021). 770 pages. $34.95 (paperback).

Abstract: A new book by Mike Ash examines to what degree the human mind is involved in receiving revelation. Ash sums up his view by saying, “prophets have a special calling, but not a special brain.” He then spends 700+ pages describing what that means and how it works. In essence, prophets do not go into a trance-like state, put a pen in their hand, and engage in a process of automatic writing only to wake from the trance and read what has been given. Instead, Ash helps us see how God uses the brains and personality of any particular prophet to bring His word forth. God does not bypass the prophet’s humanness; rather, He relies on it to contextualize His words for a particular people in a particular time.

One might think that an author as prolific as Michael Ash might have run out of things to say by now. After all, he has produced ten books, over 160 articles in such periodicals as the Ensign, Sunstone, the FARMS Review, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He has also been featured on almost 100 podcast episodes and in 30 videos. And yet his latest work, Rethinking Revelation and the Human Element in Scripture: The Prophet’s Role as Creative Co-Author, weighs in at a whopping 750+ pages. It is an impressive (and heavy) tome.

Ash’s thesis is deceptively simple: God and the prophet work together to produce scripture. He uses that thesis to thread the very tiny needle of understanding how humans have a place in God’s revelatory work without asserting that they alone create the reality. In a phone interview [Page 140]Ash was quick to say that his thesis is not to be taken as supporting the position that says, “Joseph Smith made up the Book of Mormon,” but it’s also not to be taken in support of the idea that a prophet acts like a human dictation machine either.

Why Is This Book Important?

In some ways, Ash’s book is the more academic version of his earlier work, Shaken Faith Syndrome,1 and he references that book frequently. But where Shaken Faith Syndrome attempts to catalog all the difficult issues that cause members to leave the church or investigators to be wary, this book specifically addresses those concerns that come about where human will meets God’s agenda. Ash is seeking to help believers and skeptics embrace the intersection of inspiration and intellect.

Scholars in many other parts of the Christian world have been playing with this idea for decades, but it’s a particularly tricky idea for many Latter-day Saints. It might be fine to think of the Bible as having an element of “creativity” in it because Latter-day Saints already hold some suspicion toward the Bible — it is only worthwhile as it is translated correctly. Ash demonstrates that there are two extremes which should be avoided. One is believing that since the Prophets had a role in creation of scripture that it is therefore all fiction. But the other is believing that Prophets go into some trance-like state and practice some kind of automatic writing where they channel the mind of God without those thoughts needing to be processed through their own brain and language. So, when Ash says that the Prophet has a role in co-creating scripture, he is using the word “create” to mean, “to bring into existence,” and not to mean “creative writing,” a form of fiction writing.

Literalists, Mythicalists, and Extensibilists

Ash observes that faithful members of the Church generally...