Ann Madsen – Understanding Isaiah with the Help of the Holy Ghost

Kelsey Wilding:  So, do they truly understand Isaiah, if you don’t have the spiritual component of it or is it just…

Ann Madsen:  I don’t think you can understand scripture, the words of the Lord without caring about the Lord and caring to understand or hear his voice in the words. If you don’t hear the voice of God in the words, that means it’s just a literary production. It’s like Moby Dick, you know you can read Moby Dick and you can find all kinds of metaphors and other things in it but is it the Bible. I mean as latter day saints, we say we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it’s translated correctly, and we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. Well, that’s a different stance. We believe in an open canon too, we believe in a book, that there can be more. Every time we have general conference, we have more, and other people believe in closed canon. It’s done and it’s so now we’re going to study it. We’re going to pull it apart. Nobody does it better than the Jews. They go through the Old Testament, their scripture, and they have a whole other book about interpreting it, you know, because you keep interpreting it and then another rabbi interprets it and then someone else interprets it and they’re still interpreting. Those people in Jerusalem are over there in schools, interpreting what the other rabbis interpreted.