an allegorical Book of Mormon

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

The Book of Mormon Joseph Smith staked everything on the literal. Not on a feeling. Not on a metaphor. On an angel with a name. On a hill you can drive to. On plates with weight and heft, buried in the earth of upstate New York and dug up by his own hands. On a translation, by the gift and power of God, of an actual record kept by actual peoples who actually lived and fought and fell on this continent. That is the representation. That is the whole representation. He called the book the keystone of the religion and said a man would get nearer to God by abiding its precepts than by any other book. Eleven witnesses signed their names to testimony that they saw the plates, and some said they hefted them. The founding claims of this faith are not mystical abstractions. They are empirical claims about objects and events. And the missionaries still sit in living rooms and ask strangers to pray about whether the book is true. True. Not meaningful. Not inspiring. Not useful. True. Something has shifted, and I have watched it shift. More and more modern Saints will tell you the book may not be a literal translation of an ancient historical record. Maybe the plates were shown in vision rather than held in hands. Maybe they were not really golden, and maybe there were no Nephites, and maybe none of it matters, because the book still brings people to Christ. And then comes the clincher, delivered like a trump card: belief in historicity is not in the temple recommend questions. It is not in the baptismal interview. So you can doubt all of it and remain a member in good standing. They are right about the interview questions, as far as the letter goes. No one asks about historicity by name. But the interview does ask for a testimony of the Restoration, and the Restoration runs straight through Cumorah. The church’s own essays still affirm an ancient record and a prophet who translated it. The nuanced members have run out ahead of their own institution, and they mistake its silence for permission. I have tested this myself. From Los Angeles to Arizona, I tell Mormons plainly that I do not believe the book is an authentic ancient record in the literal sense. And they rush, almost in unison, to assure me that this would not keep me from the waters of baptism. Every time, my eyebrows go up. Because I am nearly certain that in the 1970s not a single member would have said that to me. Not one. The reassurance is offered as kindness. It lands as evidence. The ground is shifting under the very people standing on it, and they are calling the movement charity. The first problem is honesty. This liberal reading is not a version of Mormonism that ever existed. It is not the faith Joseph revealed, and he would adamantly reject it. His successors said so themselves. Joseph Fielding Smith taught that “Mormonism must stand or fall on the story of Joseph Smith.” President Hinckley said the book is either true or it is a fraud, and that there is no middle ground to occupy. Elder Holland stood at the pulpit in general conference and said that if the book is a fabrication, then Joseph is exposed as a deceiver and everything built on him comes down. The prophets themselves refuse the middle position. So the nuanced member is not defending the church. He is propagating a religion the founder never taught, and doing it under the founder’s name. The second problem is deeper. Call it the question of the ground. When you start reclassifying as allegory things that were never presented as allegory, what does not move? Allegory is legitimate where the text announces itself as allegory. The parables announce themselves. No one was ever asked to locate the inn where the good Samaritan paid the bill. And broader Christianity has argued for centuries over the opening chapters of Genesis, with fathers of the church reading them on more than one level from the earliest days. There is no ancient pedigree for an allegorical Book of Mormon.

Under a microscope

 

Clint Teeples

@TeeplesCY

"Mormonism's critics said modern scholarship would dismantle the claims of the Church. That has not happened. Mormon studies is embraced in academia, and the claims look better with age." They assumed the claims would collapse under a microscope. The opposite happened. Mormon studies went mainstream. The world’s top academic publishers print it. Major universities teach it. Scholars outside the faith take it seriously. That was not supposed to happen. Take the Book of Mormon. Critics called it an obvious fraud, the work of a conman. Now serious scholars, including non-Latter-day Saints, analyze it as a complex and sophisticated work. Literary structure. Naming patterns. Ritual forms. The conman theory is dead. Take the theology. God with a body. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as separate beings. Critics called these ideas wildly unchristian. The Harvard Theological Review published the research showing many early Christians believed exactly these things, centuries before later councils ruled them out. Take the temple. Critics called it invented and bizarre. Then a Methodist biblical scholar built her career mapping ancient temple worship, and the parallels were hard to miss. Covenant-making. Ritual clothing. Symbolic progression. These patterns are ancient, not modern. Take the Book of Abraham. Long treated as the weakest link. Then ancient Abraham texts surfaced decades after Joseph Smith died, telling details of the same story. Details found nowhere in Genesis. A Yale scholar reviewed it and said it recaptures archaic Jewish religion with enormous validity. Whatever Joseph was doing, guessing doesn’t explain it. A frontier faith with a founder who had an elementary education and spent his life in near poverty was supposed to wither under modern scrutiny. Instead it earned a seat at the academic table.

Kirk explains his problems

Kirk writes lots of interesting things. Here he explains why he is not LDS.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

I deeply love the Latter Day Saints. So the question I receive weekly is fair. If I admire them this much, why am I not one? My explanation is probably going to cost me half my followers, but so be it. 1. The Book of Mormon: Pragmatic truth versus historical truth. I'm a William James man. A thing can be true in the sense that it remakes a life toward the good, and by that measure the Book of Mormon is one of the most powerful texts America has produced. It sobers men, steadies fathers, holds families together. The fruits are real. But the LDS Church doesn't hand me the book solely as an archetype that works. Joseph handed it over as an artifact, a literal translation of real plates, kept by real peoples who really crossed an ocean and built real civilizations here. Moroni's promise asks you to know it's true in that sense, and you can't hold a recommend while quietly treating it as inspired fiction. That's a claim about the past, and the past answers to evidence. I can hold Genesis as theology without a literal Eden because Rome lets me. The Restoration won't extend the same room to the Nephites. I can affirm everything the book does. I can't affirm what it says it is, and Mormonism won't let me split the two. 2. Tithing as the price of the temple. The ordinances that matter most, the endowment, and above all the sealing that binds a man to his wife and children forever, sit behind a temple recommend. One of the questions at that gate is whether you pay a full tithe. No tithe, no recommend. No recommend, no sealing. A father without one can't even stand in the room when his own child is married. I've got nothing against tithing as a discipline. My problem is the tollbooth. In the old Christian grammar this sits a hair from simony, the one sin Peter named on the spot, when Simon tried to buy the gifts of God with cash. Grace is free. I can walk into any Catholic or Orthodox parish and be married, be communed, baptize my son, with no worthiness interview standing between me and the means of grace. 3. The leadership The wall everything else rests on. This is the one that actually keeps me out, because the whole Restoration hangs on it. The claim isn't that the Church teaches true things. It's that fifteen living men hold the keys, and that one of them is a prophet, seer, and revelator who can speak the mind and will of God for the entire earth. Follow the prophet is the load bearing wall. Pull it and the building comes down. So I look at the wall and my problem isn't that these men are corrupt. It's that they're weak. It wasn't always so. There was a Church with fire in it. Ezra Taft Benson thundered against socialism from the pulpit and treated the Cold War like a holy war. Bruce R. McConkie laid down doctrine like he was carving it into granite and bore his final testimony like a man who'd seen the thing with his own eyes. Boyd K. Packer stood up and named the dangers to the Church and didn't blink. They excommunicated the September Six and dared the rest to talk back. Whatever you make of the content, that was a Church that believed it held the truth and acted like it. It was willing to be hated. That Church is gone. What replaced it is a communications department. Focus grouped statements. "I'm a Mormon" ad campaigns selling minivan normalcy. An institution straining to be called Christian by the same evangelicals who spent a century calling it a cult. The 2015 policy barring the children of gay couples from baptism announced by Russell Nelson as the revealed will of the Lord, then quietly killed in 2019 the moment the blowback got expensive. A five million dollar check cut to the SEC to make a concealment case go away rather than stand and fight. And here's the raw of it: I don't want a chaplain. I don't want a beige, brand safe, please like us Church that trims its sails the second the culture frowns. If a man stands up and tells me he speaks for God, I want him to act like it plant the flag, hold the line, take the hit, be willing to be despised for the truth and never move an inch. I want the fire of the seventies. I want prophets who fight. What I got instead are managers who apologize. The Restoration lives or dies on whether these are oracles or executives. From where I'm standing, they govern like executives and you don't follow an executive into eternity. None of this is an attack. It's from a place of christian love. Ultimately, you are I are brothers in Christ.

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2070377593585709134?s=20

The Primary Pianist

@Primary_Pianist

I absolutely love this; thank you for the post. I do have a question, if I may… regarding the first one. What do you/we need to have proof that the Book of Mormon is more than inspired fiction and is an actual historical record? For me it is clear that the physical evidences for this book have been withheld at this time, for whatever reason. But I also fear that people may be looking for the wrong things when they are looking for “proof”. Meaning the book purports to be about Christ so I think too many people have it in their heads that we should be finding a bunch of ancient crosses all over the place. In my mind, if evidences are found that Christ visited a people somewhere in the Americas it is not going to look any like what we might expect it to look. We are coming at this from a western/catholic/protestant perspective and I don’t think we should expect to find anything familiar to that perspective.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

Disclaimer: I'm not telling you not to believe it. I want you to believe the Book of Mormon is true. Hold fast to the rod my brother. You're right that hunting for crosses is naive. A genuine ancient American Christianity wouldn't look like Rome. it would look strange to us. Foreign. Unrecognizable. And that's exactly where it falls apart for me. Because the Book of Mormon isn't strange at all. I'm not troubled by what we haven't dug up. I'm troubled by what's on the page. The book is not silent. It talks, constantly, on every theme and when it talks, I don't hear an ancient people. I hear the burned over district. I hear palmyra. The anxieties in that text are not the anxieties of Bronze Age refugees in Mesoamerica; they're the anxieties of Joseph's own front porch. A people who overthrow their kings and install a system of judges and the voice of the people that's American republicanism in a breastplate. Mass revival conversions in the exact emotional register of a camp meeting. Long stretches of Isaiah lifted in King James English. So your own principle is the thing that convicts it. You said: don't expect it to look familiar. I agree completely. The problem is that it looks entirely familiar. It reads like exactly what a brilliant, a GENIUS, scripture soaked nineteenth century American prophet would produce if he sat down to write scripture. It's a real prophecy aimed at us right now. A chosen land, a covenant people, pride cycles, a civilization rotting from secret combinations and destroying itself. That's why it lands so hard on the modern American soul: not because it's about the ancients, but because it's about America. I feel America in those pages. I don't feel Native Americans. None of this lays a finger on its beauty. A book need not be old to be true, and whatever else it is, the Book of Mormon remains one of the few things in American life that can still take a broken man and make him whole.

When faith is true

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

How do we determine if Mormonism is true? We have made a quiet mistake so deep that we no longer feel it as a mistake. We have decided that religion must prove itself the way science proves itself, with measurements and experiments and hard repeatable tests, and when faith will not fit under that lens we call it false. But faith was never made for this. You cannot weigh a song. You cannot put a mother’s love under a microscope, or measure grief in numbers, or prove a sunset the way you prove a mathematical formula. faith begins not in a feeling but in wonder, in a kind of awe before a world too vast and too holy to be seized. The moment we treat existence as only a problem to be solved, we have already gone deaf to the music it was singing. Religious truth does not live where scientific truth lives. It lives where music and love and beauty and grief live, in meaning, not measurement. There is one test beneath all the others, the one you cannot fake and cannot argue your way around, the one that comes for everyone. Sooner or later the existential floor gives way. A loved one is lowered into the ground. A relationship you built your life on ends. The doctor stops talking and the room goes quiet. Something you were standing on simply drops, and you are falling, and there is nothing underneath but the dark. In that hour no argument will save you. No clever proof has ever once caught a falling soul. What catches you, if anything does, is not a theory you could defend on paper but something you can stand on when everything else is gone, a faith that takes your full weight at the worst moment of your life and does not break. That is the only proof that finally matters. Not whether you can win the intellectual debate on a comfortable afternoon, but whether the thing holds you at three in the morning when you have nothing left. A hundred clever objections will not weigh as much as one grieving soul held above the abyss, discovering in the dark that what it trusted its whole life was real, and caught it, and would not let it fall. Mormonism is true for many by this standard. Bishop Hitz, this one is for you.