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Critical Studies in the Book of Mormon

A Way in the Wilderness

For many decades Latter-day Saints and their critics were stalemated in a rancorous debate over the date and authorship of the Book of Mormon. LDS believers (Mormons) maintained their scripture was an ancient work written by Hebrew-Christian prophets in North America. Non-Mormons insisted the book was a nineteenth-century fraud. Only late in the twentieth century did a third option appear: what if the Book of Mormon was actually a genuine scripture but authored by Joseph Smith? Championed by liberal Mormons and sympathetic non-Mormons alike, this paradigm has made possible a rebirth of Book of Mormon scholarship.

The present collection of essays demonstrates how a flood of new light may be shed on the sacred American text on the hypothesis that Joseph Smith rewrote biblical passages to produce the Book of Mormon in much the same way that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John rewrote the Old Testament as the basis for their gospels. The use of source and redaction criticism, long familiar to biblical scholars, demonstrates new levels of meaning in the Book of Mormon, as well as a hitherto-unguessed literary and theological acumen on the part of its author, Joseph Smith. Such an approach vindicates his role as a genuine prophetic writer, not merely an amateur archeologist stumbling on a buried book in upper New York State. The present book, while bringing to bear an array of critical methods to which Latter-day Saints are unaccustomed, actually turns out to elevate the importance of their founder and their scripture, not least in the eyes of non-Mormons. And by showing the vast extent to which the Book of Mormon depends upon the King James Bible, this book will bring Mormon and non-Mormon Americans closer together by revealing their common scriptural heritage.

Epic and Ethic

I am not a Mormon. I am a Religious Humanist. And, for me, Humanism proceeds from and embodies two key insights, one from the Sophist Protagoras, the other from the philosopher Nietzsche. The first is that “Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” The second is that “God is dead.” There is no objective meaning center to the cosmos, and therefore meaning resides in the eye of the beholder. Even if there were a God, his would be but one more opinion, though theoretically we might be in danger, as less powerful beings, if we did not hold it, or pretend to.

It is no use pointing out that human ability to know is so limited that we can never, by ourselves, know that there is nothing to know. No, that is just my point. If there were an objective truth, it would remain unavailable, and is thus like the tree falling in the empty forest. All we as humans can do is to call it like we see it, since there is no other, better, position for us to occupy. The person of faith may urge us to believe that we can occupy the divine perspective by accepting the revelation he offers us in God’s name. But this would only provide supposition, not knowledge. Pretending I have knowledge is not the same thing as having it. My bank account is pretty much empty. I wish I had money in it, but pretending I do does not justify my writing rubber checks.

This godlessness is no bleak vision. We humans are in the position of an artist bursting with creativity and standing before a blank canvas. It is up to us to write the inscription of meaning onto the blank sheet of the world. Of course, we may only do this individually, though we may find we agree with the inventions of others and embrace them as our own. Thus there is a Humanist movement for those who think alike.

But it seems to me that, as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explain in their classic book The Social Construction of Reality, all movements, all collectivities, all societies have done the same. But they have hidden the fact from themselves and their successors. Many or most believe the rules governing them, and their beliefs, are not human products of history, but rather inevitable and immutable products of nature, or of God. They think us guilty of reductionism. We think them guilty of mystification.

Religion is, of course, the great case in point. Humanists like pointing out the human fingerprints that cover all these supposed products of divine creation, the ample marks of human invention of scripture, dogma, ritual. Like the astronomer La Place, when asked by Napoleon if his studies led him to believe in God, we say, “I have no need for that hypothesis.” Religion seems to us, from first to last, a human invention. But here Humanists divide in their sympathies.

Some seem to be disappointed believers who cannot seem to get over their dismay at discovering there is no more a God than a Santa Claus. They become jaundiced Scrooges and have no more to say about religion than “Bah! Humbug!” To them it is all priestcraft, an exploitative hoax, a predatory sham. It is as if they still wish it were all true and want to take vengeance on religion for not being true. But some of us take a more sympathetic view, borne of the academic study of religion. We approach religion with the anthropologist’s eye, as a fascinating human phenomenon, one of the most fruitful loci of human creativity. Religion, even theology, is art, epic, fiction. And much of it is great art. Its grandest claims are grand precisely in their extravagance, just as Camus maintained that art, by nature, must be gratuitous, art for art’s sake. All demands for art to serve some serious cause make it into dreary and grotesque propaganda, not to mention bad science and dishonest historiography.

As a Humanist, I believe that ethics must be autonomous, not heteronomous. That is, we must take an inductive approach to ethics, determining as best we can what will work to maximize security and freedom for everyone. This is the approach all cultures and societies have always taken anyway, which is why values are basically the same all over the world, with universal agreement that murder, theft, deceit, rape, etc., are wrong. There is plenty of disagreement over definitions and details, but that is true even within a single revealed religion. Christian, Jewish, Islamic ethicists have the same debates over ambiguous areas as those of us do who claim no revelation, as Ethan Allen said, except reason. Aquinas avoided the arbitrariness of Divine Command ethics (“It’s right simply because God said so.”) by positing Natural Law, the ethics of what works in the kind of world we find ourselves in. He believed God had created such a world; hence the most effective rules are his will. But the approach is the same even if one believes, as I, a Nietzschean, do, that the Universe is devoid of intrinsic and objective rules of right and wrong. Ethics, personal and social, is a game we create and live by, and we take it very seriously. But we may reason together morally whatever theory we may hold about where the world came from.

The exclusive preserve of religion, I think, is not nature, whence all our ethics, if we are wise, ultimately stem, but rather grace. Grace need have nothing to do with supernatural sacred force. It is basically the same word as gratuitousness, the icing on the cake, what is above and beyond the call of strict duty. Religion provides it, as music and art do, for religion is a member of the same species, a human creation, very often a noble and edifying one. All religions offer us an epic which we may embrace. They offer us symbols rooted, a la Carl Jung, in the unconscious, symbols we must, or at least may, access to facilitate the process of individuation. Ritual is the way we access them, like clicking on the icons on our computer screen to bring this or that program on line from the depths of the computer. The sacred is that artistic second-sight, that superimposition of the artistic and the fictive over the bare earth of pragmatism and the mundane. The secularist feels no need for it, just as one may feel no need for classical music. But having a tin ear is nothing to brag about either.

The grace, the gratuity, of religion includes a moral vision transcending the pragmatic, the lowest common denominator. As Aquinas knew, Aristotle had adequately defined righteousness, but Christ defined sanctification. One may be righteous without loving the enemy, but religion offers a vision whereby selfishness may be transcended by expanding the circle of the ego to embrace the estranged. Such is the path of the Bodhisattva. Heroism is not required, but it is admired. You have every right not to forgive. Justice does not require that you do. But if you heed the Buddha and the Christ, and forgive your enemy, you break through to a zone of transcendent freedom. As Tillich said, mercy is “creative justice.” And it is sacred. But we must not let it become legalism, literalism, so that one not only forgives the one who has injured one but also thinks it wrong to fight in defense of the innocent. In that moment, heroism has become fanaticism. Bravery has become snake-handling. Self-sacrifice has become repression.

I believe that both New Testament Christianity and Book of Mormon Christianity are human creations from page one. I know better than to think that either represents a set of facts written into the universe. Both are creations of the boundless and glorious human imagination And as a Humanist I cannot but stand amazed at the accomplishment of Joseph Smith, a man who willed a fictive universe into being, one so enriching and appealing to millions of people that it encircles the world today with zeal and works of mercy.

The Mormon Paradigm

As I say, I would find the Book of Mormon fascinating simply as a work of the artistic imagination My interest in it would require no further justification. No one, Mormon or non-Mormon, could convince me I am wasting my time with it. But, as it happens, I do find a good bit more in the Book. As I read it, there are at least four distinct levels of symbolism that speak to me as an American and as a Humanist.

First, we may see the Nephite struggle to survive with piety intact in the face of threats to body and to soul as a perfect self-mythologization of a religious community. For the early Mormons, as all know, were anything but armchair believers. They lived the epic of persecution for the sake of a new and radical faith. The Book of Mormon must have spoken to them because they were living it: how then could it not be true? It is a classic example of Bultmann’s dictum of myths expressing the self-understanding of the culture/community that produces them. When non-Mormons like myself look at the Mormon narrative, we know that it is true history—that of the pioneer Mormons of the nineteenth century.

Second, the Book of Mormon is a powerful statement of the traditional, patriotic American self-understanding, which I share, of our country. It is a new Promised Land brimming with opportunities, but with as many challenges and dangers, too, not the least of the dangers being complacency. Benjamin Franklin proposed that the national seal somehow make room for the scene of Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. He was typical of Americans who saw their fledgling country as a new Israel emerging from the tyranny of Pharaoh George III. The Book of Mormon writes the very same image even larger: the fleeing family of Lehi represent this new, American Israel, disembarking on the shores of a Promised Land. Will they fulfill their manifest destiny to make their new paradise a shining beacon of freedom and prosperity? The paradigm is especially useful for us modern Americans, because the “America = Israel” paradigm of Joseph Smith is not jingoistic, at least nowhere near as chauvinistic as one might expect. There is no smug triumphalism here, no obliviousness as to one’s national failures and lapses into evil. The Book of Mormon is unblinking in its readiness to scrutinize and to broadcast the sins of the chosen people. That is what I call a wholesome and unsentimental American self-understanding. It does not fall into the self-righteous America-worship of the Far Right or the sophomoric posture of many Leftists today, a national self-hatred. If we Americans viewed ourselves as the Book of Mormon teaches us to, we would neither espouse an arrogant belief in ourselves as a super race, nor would we condemn ourselves as some kind of fascist empire. In other words, we would swerve neither to the right hand nor to the left, as Deuteronomy warns. I will be comparing the Book of Mormon to Deuteronomy in their shared pseudepigraphical character. But just as important is the parallel situations both address. In both we are shown a dawn-misted vista of a great land lying before the adventurous people of God. In both we read of a set of conditions of fidelity to the God who grants that land to his venturesome people. As long as they remain faithful to that covenant, their God will cause them to prosper in their new home. But disaster lies ahead if they fail! How quintessentially American! How quintessentially biblical!

Third, as a Humanist, I see the Mormon epic as symbolic of the human species’ adventure facing a mighty wilderness and making it over into a habitable kingdom in our own image. As humans, we are like the Lehite settlers. The magnificent, beautiful, and terrifying universe, indifferent to our needs, indeed, to our very existence, stands before us just as the New World did to Lehi’s clan as they stepped off their ark. We must impose our codes of morality and social responsibility upon this hostile landscape which is alien and resistant to our efforts. We give order to the chaos of the blind universe. And we must remain vigilant because chaos is ever ready, like the primeval forest, to reclaim what we have cleared and built over. We lend the world meaning, and thus every cosmos of meaning is a fictive cosmos. Joseph Smith created, virtually single-handedly, such a cosmos, and millions live within it quite happily, like Hobbits in Middle Earth. More power to them!

Not Just Grape Soda

Fourth, the epic of the Book of Mormon possesses a special relevance to us and the situation we face here in the West at the outset of the twenty-first century. It provides an interpretive paradigm enabling us, like Joseph Smith peering through the Urim and Thummim, to discern the signs of the present time. What is the basic premise of the Book of Mormon? It depicts the history of two religious communities which split off from Judah. Thriving and growing, these communities, the Nephites and the Lamanites, frequently came into conflict. The Nephites found themselves again and again forced to defend themselves, their faith, and their way of life against the perverse incursions of the Lamanites. Finally the Lamanites overwhelmed and obliterated the Nephites. Bloodthirsty barbarians always have an advantage over civilized nations who are by nature reluctant to fight and would rather dialogue. The Nephite culture survived only in the form of a book, buried in the earth for centuries till someone found it. What a flood of light this scenario casts upon our global crisis today!

For the roles of the rival tribes, both separated from Judah/Judaism, read the communities of Christianity and Islam. It is not hard to see that the Christians are the Nephites, with radical Muslims the villainous Lamanites. And the two appear to be headed to an all-encompassing death struggle in which liberal, democratic, Christian civilization, already perversely despised, is the target of obliteration. And we must not wait till it is too late to steel our will and resist the onslaught, perhaps nuclear, of the Lamanites. We must not allow Western civilization to be buried in the dirt as many would love to bury it.

This is a hard saying. It seems bigotry to paint the whole membership of Islam as savage suicide bombers and terrorists. And I do not mean to. One would have to ask, if there had actually been any historical Lamanites, would every one of them have dreamed of destroying Nephites? Well, they might have, had they undergone a hate-spewing catechism of propaganda like Arab children do today. But I feel sure not all would have. (Samuel the Lamanite was somehow open to the truth, after all.) I know that not all Arabs or Muslims want to see the West fall today. We need not take the terms of the myth literally in order to take the broad outline seriously. Eminent and humane Shi’ite scholar Sayyed Hossein Nasr estimates that only ten per cent of Muslims are militant haters and Jihadists. Let’s see: that makes “only” one hundred million of them. I don’t think we need to worry about painting with too broad a brush. I say that in our moment of history, America (including its Christians, Jews, assimilated Muslims, humanists, atheists, and what have you) is in the position of the Nephites, far more sinned against than sinning, and the Muslim extremists (including the governments of Iran and Syria, as well as Hamas and al-Qaida) are the malevolent hordes of Laman. The Mormon paradigm makes sense of our world crisis like nothing else does. In the present moment, we are all Mormons.