Inspiration
and Scholarship
When I present this kind of information,
one of the reactions I get from non-scholars is a kind of brusque dismissal.
They assume that secular scholars do not believe in revelation or inspiration,
and that they are therefore biased against the scriptures. I myself used to
hold this view, and it is an understandable sentiment. After all, I have argued
that the passages typically used to prove that Jesus was the Messiah do not, in
fact, refer to Jesus, and that those passages used as a proof of the Restoration
do not, in fact, refer to Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon. I have also
argued that the prophecies in books such as Daniel are not prophecies at all;
instead, they are history written down long after the fact and presented as if
they were from an ancient author. This can look like an all-out attack against the
inspiration of scripture, but it is actually just an indication of the
differences between how scholars and believers often to read the scriptures. (Alex
Douglas, The Old Testament for Latter-day Saints [Salt Lake City:
Signature Books, 2023], 123-24)
Mormonism
without Mormon
It is true that Old Testament
scholarship is not flawless; it cannot give us a 100 percent definitive verdict
on the Book of Mormon’s historicity. However, everything we know about the Old
Testament undermines the idea that the Book of Mormon recounts the lives of
historical people. From its reliance on an actual Tower of Babel to its many
anachronistic beliefs, from the difficulties involved with the brass plates to
its unchanging nineteenth-century Christian theology, every indication is that
the Book of Mormon story is not ancient history.
Latter-day Saints often talk about the
Book of Mormon as the keystone of our religion, that if we take the Book of
Mormon out, the entire arch will crumble. If the Book of Mormon is not a
historical text, does that then leave us with no religion? Does Mormonism
depend on a historical Mormon, Moroni, and Nephi?
Imagine that question framed this way:
Did Israelite religion depend on the truthfulness of the stories in Genesis
through Deuteronomy? The Pentateuch, after all, gives the account of how Yahweh
created the world and chose Israel from among all the nations. If the foundational
story has turned out to be untrue, would that have negated the Israelite religion?
. . .
Does a non-historical Book of Mormon
mean that Mormonism is untrue? I cannot deny the problems I see when I examine
the Book of Mormon through the lens of biblical scholarship, but I also cannot
deny the experiences of millions of Latter-day Saints as they experience God in
their lives. What a non-historical Book of Mormon does mean, however, is that
Latter-day Saints need to reevaluate how we think and talk about it. Maybe the
value of our religion lies not in how many facts we have about God, but in how
much good it prompts us to do in the world. Or maybe it lies in the comfort
that the plan of salvation can bring to those who mourn, or in the way it
brings us closer to God, or in the strength of the community we build together.
In the King James Version of the New Testament, James describes “pure religion”
as “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself
unspotted from the world” (James 1:27). I may be in the minority of Latter-day
Saints by holding this opinion, but I wonder if letting go of the historicity of
the Book of Mormon may be exactly what is needed to more closely approach the “pure
religion” spoken of by James. (Ibid., 185, 186)
Fortunately,
Douglas is in the minority with his anti-supernatural worldview and adherence
to modernism, where there is no objective “true” and all that really matters is
“being nice.”
On
the necessity of a historical Book of Mormon, see my friend Stephen Smoot’s
article