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.
No comments:
Post a Comment