Monday, November 27, 2023

Another Liberal Latter-day Saint Revealing their Modernist, Anti-Supernatural Assumptions

  

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

 

Et Incarnatus Est: The Imperative for Book of Mormon