This surprised me because the Petersens are Protestants, and I had always thought that this was an exclusively Mormon hymn. I had assumed this because of the opening lines -- "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, / Is laid for your faith in his excellent word" -- in which saints is used to refer to all believers, implicitly including even those who may be struggling with their faith. I had always thought that this was a distinctively Mormon use of that word, that in the larger Christian world a "saint" was always an extraordinary person of exemplary holiness, and that our giving ourselves the title "Latter-day Saints" must sound incredibly pretentious to outsiders, as if we had dubbed ourselves "heroes" or "geniuses" or something.
Well, that just goes to show how little I really know about non-Lutheran Protestantism. Here's Wikipedia setting me straight:
In many Protestant churches, the word saint is used more generally to refer to anyone who is a Christian. . . . The use of "saint" within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) is similar to the Protestant tradition.
I suppose this shouldn't surprise me. Mormonism grew up in a Protestant milieu and would naturally express itself in a Protestant-derived idiom.
One question I haven't been able to find the answer to: Do the less-Catholic branches of Protestantism (excluding Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists) use saint as a title, as in St. Peter, St. Paul, etc.? Mormons don't, but I had always assumed that most other Christians do -- based, for example, on references to "St. Peter" in bluegrass music, Negro spirituals, etc. If any of my readers happen to be of the Protestant persuasion, perhaps they can enlighten me.
But this post isn't really about the use of the word saint. As the title indicates, it's a revisiting of my November 2022 post "In Mormon Russia, the Lord consecrates things unto YOU." In that post, I noted that in the Bible, people always consecrate things to the Lord, while in the Book of Mormon, the Lord always consecrates things to people. The one exception is a single reference, which appears in both books (Micah 4:13, 3 Ne. 20:19), to the Lord consecrating things to himself. Well, like the broad use of saint, this turns out not to be as distinctively Mormon as I had thought. Here is the third verse of "How Firm a Foundation":
"When through the deep waters I call thee to go,The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress."
The whole verse is in quotation marks because it is meant to be the Lord speaking -- saying that he will sanctify to you, Christian, your deepest distress. This is very close to the language of the Book of Mormon: "thou knowest the greatness of God; and he shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain" (2 Ne. 2:2).
The word used is sanctify, not consecrate, but these are more-or-less synonymous. Checking all occurrences of forms of sanctify in the Bible, I find that it is generally used without a preposition, but when things are sanctified to someone, that someone is always the Lord. (See Ex. 13:2, Lev. 27:14-22, Num. 8:17, Deut. 15:19, 2 Chr. 30:17.) In the Book of Mormon, things are always sanctified by the Lord to people. (See Jacob 4:5, Moro. 4:3, Moro. 5:2). This is the same pattern I found with consecrate.
"How Firm a Foundation" -- which first appears, with an anonymous author, in a 1787 Baptist hymnal -- follows, or rather foreshadows, the Mormon usage.
