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The Scale of Creation in Space and Time

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 8 (2014): 71-80
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Abstract: The accounts of creation in Genesis, Moses, and Abraham as well as in higher endowments of knowledge given to the faithful are based on visions in which the seer lacked the vocabulary to describe and the knowledge to interpret what he saw and hence was obliged to record his experiences in the imprecise language available to him. Modern attempts to explain accounts of these visions frequently make use of concepts and terminology that are completely at odds with the understanding of ancient peoples: they project anachronistic concepts that the original seer would not have recognized. This article reviews several aspects of the creation stories in scripture for the purpose of distinguishing anachronistic modern reinterpretations from the content of the original vision.

This essay derives from a presentation made at the 2013 Interpreter Symposium on Science and Religion: Cosmos, Earth, and Man on November 9, 2013. Details on the event, including links to videos, are available at www.mormoninterpreter.com. An expanded version of the symposium proceedings will be published in hardcopy and digital formats.

The Extent of Creation

Genesis is often read as a description of the origin of the Universe rather than the Earth. But ancient views of the cosmos had no concept of anything remotely similar to our modern sense of the word “Universe.” In the ancient world [Page 72]the general concept was that Earth was the center of creation. The heavens were the night sky as seen by the naked eye from Earth’s surface, tacitly assuming it to be a local and Earth-fixed phenomenon. The cosmos so imagined by most philosophers may have been mere thousands of kilometers in diameter, although Archimedes suggested a size of about two light years. The cosmos (Greek: ὁ κόσμος; ”order”) was an intimate spherical volume centered on Earth and containing the Sun, Moon, and known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). These seven bodies were generally pictured as much smaller than Earth and very close. They were all assumed to travel around Earth, which was fixed and immobile at the center of the Kosmos. This set of seven wandering heavenly bodies, collectively called “planets” (Greek: oἱ πλάνητες ἀστέρες; “wandering stars”) was regarded as complete and final, since seven was a mystical number symbolic of perfection. Similarly, 3½ was regarded as a broken number symbolic of disaster, as in Revelation. In Latin, each such planet was referred to as stella errans, “wandering star,” or “unruly star,” with no concept that Earth and the planets were bodies of similar nature. The earth (lower case) was literally the ground on which we stood, in classical thought the sole fixed base in all creation. Earth (capitalized) is a modern concept that recognizes our planet as yet another member of a family of related bodies, a fellow-wanderer in the Sun’s family, not the center of all creation. It embodies the Copernican notion of Earth as an eighth wanderer.

The seven planets of antiquity wandered in complex and largely unpredictable (unruly; rule-less) patterns across the sky. There was no room for planetary satellites (moons), asteroids, etc. Meteors, comets, or meteorites in this conception must not be real material bodies, but signs sent by God. Further, the seven heavenly bodies must be perfect, featureless celestial spheres, not composed of gross matter. It was implicit that the creation of this tiny Earth-centered cosmos was a single [Page 73]creative event or episode. Our present understanding of the vastness of the Universe is a product of twentieth century astronomical research, completely alien to the ancient mind. Indeed, the Universe as now understood is vastly larger than any astronomer of the year 1900 could have imagined. Since all ancient creation concepts were Earth-centered and local, they were stories of the creation of Earth. Everything else was either incidental or non-physical. Earth was not so much the center of creation as the only material body in creation.

These conceptions persisted for millennia. There is a wonderful (but sadly undocumented) tradition that Thomas Jefferson, no mean natural philosopher himself, upon reading of the 1807 fall of the Weston, Connecticut, meteorite in Silliman’s American Journal of Science, responded, “I would find it easier to believe that two Yankee professors would lie, than that stones should fall from the sky.”1 As late as the mid-1800s meteorites were often assumed to be volcanic debris.

The cosmos thus pictured did not even include the stars. Until the seventeenth century it was nearly universally accepted that the surface of the cosmic bubble, the black “dome of heaven,” was close to Earth and enclosed all creation. This “firmament” was a solid (firm) dome surrounding our little cosmos. The stars were often described as pinholes in the firmament that admitted light from the celestial realms above into our tiny universe. The Latin word firmamentum conveyed no sense of vast spaces and countless other Suns and worlds. It meant a support, framework, or prop—a strong, [Page 74]solid structural element. The dome of the sky was just that, a dome. To the ancients, therefore, the heavens were just the local envelope that surrounded Earth and its seven celestial companions. The scriptural account of creation was a narration of the creation of Earth and, implicitly, its seven accompanying wanderers. Calling it an account of the creation of the Universe is a historical absurdity.

If we were to define “Universe” as meaning everything that exists, the Hebrews and Greeks would have pictured it as referring at least to Earth, and possibly to the realm of the seven wanderers (the part of the Solar System known to them), so that their understanding of the word “Universe” would have reflected a wildly different concept of the scale of material existence than that familiar to us. The heavens, what can be seen by the unaided eye from Earth’s surface, would correspond rather closely to their understanding of what “Universe” must mean. This was the general view of antiquity. This was the model adopted by Aristotle and passed by him down through the Middle Ages: a cozy, Earth-centered creation in which Earth itself was the only true material object. Aristotle, arguing that Earth was the center, and that “all things tend toward the center,” concluded that other gravitating bodies were impossible because “there cannot be more than one center.”2 There were no other stars, no other Earths. Scripture, interpreted in this manner, seemed to make Creation synonymous with the creation of Earth.

This conception had not been shared by all the Greeks. Some imagined the stars to be other Suns, each with a cosmos of its own, packed together like a barrel full of bubbles. But Aristotle argued that such bubbles had to be spherical (since, according to Plato, the sphere was a perfect shape, and everything in the heavens was by definition celestial and therefore perfect). Spheres, however, cannot be packed together so as to fill space. [Page 75]Therefore if there were other κoσμoι, there would have to be voids in the interstices between the bubbles. But this was impossible under Aristotle’s principle that “nature abhors a void,” and thus it was impossible for the stars to be other suns with their own families of planets. Note that all these governing principles (perfection of spheres, mystical numbers, abhorrence of voids) were nothing more than the wisdom of men, not based upon observations of the Universe and not even in principle testable or verifiable. The authority of a Plato or Aristotle took precedence over observation. Aristotle’s writings, adopted and taught by the Church, shaped interpretations of scripture for centuries to come: our understanding of sacred texts was made to conform to pagan philosophy.

The Age of Earth

Eighteenth and nineteenth century authorities typically take the word “day” in Genesis to be literally one modern Earth day, even though such days did not exist until day four of the creation, and the Hebrew word יוֹם (yōm) was used both literally and figuratively, as in English. It is well known that such a constrained time scale is ruled out by every available method of dating astronomical and geological history.

The antiquity of Earth was a subject of active debate in the early nineteenth century. Some adherents of a conservative interpretation of scripture ignored or sought to explain away the overwhelming evidence from geology. The more liberal scientific interpretations of geological history suggested an age of 100,000 to millions of years for Earth. Almost alone, W. W. Phelps, Joseph Smith’s Book of Abraham scribe, offered a vastly larger perspective. In the Times and Seasons, a letter from Phelps to the Prophet’s brother William states:

That eternity, agreeable to the records found in the catacombs of Egypt, has been going on in this system [Page 76](not the world)3 almost 2555 millions of years; and to know that deists, geologists and others are trying to prove that matter must have existed hundreds of thousands of years:—it almost tempts the flesh to fly to God, or muster faith like Enoch to be translated and see and know as we are seen and known!4

Lacking any explanation of what was meant by “this system” and “the world,” it is difficult to compare these numbers to much more precise ages of specific events determined by science. The nineteenth-century usage of “world” encompassed everything from planet to Creation, whereas the word “system” in an astronomical context suggests the Solar System.

The relationship between human time and God’s time is hinted at in several places in scripture. The Bible offers only a single explanation when Peter writes:

But, beloved, be not ignorant of one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. (2 Peter 3:8, emphasis added)

This certainly cautions us regarding the figurative nature of this measure of time, and suggests that God’s time is enormously flexible compared to our Earthly time. But both of the statements in 2 Peter 3:8 cannot simultaneously be literally true.

Elder Bruce R. McConkie has also commented that the days of creation are figurative, and not to be taken literally. In the June 1982 Ensign he wrote, “What is a day? It is a specified time period; it is an age, an eon, a division of eternity.”5 We [Page 77]commend this statement to those Church members who believe that Elder McConkie advocated a one-week duration for the creation.

Considering that Doctrine and Covenants 77:6 refers to “…this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence,” what led Phelps to speak of Earth as 2,555 million years old? The answer appears to be straightforward. Though 7000 Earth years is in conflict with all physical, chemical, genetic, archaeological, and linguistic evidence, 7000 years of God is not ruled out. The arithmetic is easy. One day of God is 1000 years of man, and therefore in Joseph Smith’s reckoning, a day of God is 365 × 1000 days of man. The 2.555 billion years in question therefore corresponds to 2,555,000,000/365,000 years of God, which is 7000 years of God for each day of Earth’s existence. A more careful calculation, using the true average length of the year including leap years (365.257 days) gives 2,556,799,000 Earth years. Clearly Joseph Smith did not intend the “7000 years” of Earth’s age to refer to Earth years.

The same number surfaces again in Elder McConkie’s address, “The Seven Deadly Heresies,” delivered at BYU in 1980. He refers to God as “an infinite and eternal being who has presided in our universe for almost 2,555,000,000 years,”6 but without any indication of the source or significance of that number.

In the Book of Abraham (5:13), after a discussion of the creation of Earth in which the stages are called “times” instead of days, we find “Now I, Abraham, saw that it was after the Lord’s time… for as yet the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning.” This may have been the scriptural basis for Phelps’s calculation.[Page 78]

Creation as an Ongoing Process

The creation of Earth is explicitly described in LDS scripture as a process of bringing order to chaotic matter, not as the creation of matter ex nihilo. This is in perfect accord with the scientific evidence regarding the creation of Earth. It also places the origin of matter in the distant past, not as a part of the events surrounding Earth’s formation, a conclusion also in accord with scientific studies of the origin of the elements starting 13.7 billion years ago.

LDS scripture, beginning with the Book of Moses, portrays creation as diachronic: spread out over time. Many worlds came into existence before Earth existed, and many no longer exist; creation continues to the present.7 In LDS doctrine, there are governing laws “irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundation of the world,”8 on the basis of which laws worlds come into being, age, and die. Life on earlier worlds is a natural consequence of this view.

President Snow’s couplet saying that God once lived in mortality on a world similar to ours requires that generations of planets pre-existed Earth. The laws of nature, on which the formation, evolution, and death of worlds over lifetimes of billions of years are predicated, must have been in existence long before the formation of our planet.

Thus the origins of the Universe and of Earth were widely separated events. The origin of Earth and the rest of the Solar System 4.55 billion years ago occurred in the context of a collapsing interstellar cloud, just as we see today in the Orion Nebula and elsewhere, accompanied by the simultaneous formation of thousands to millions of other stars and planetary systems in a starburst. The role of stars in the Earth Creation story is variously represented by the different scriptural [Page 79]sources. Genesis says that on the fourth day “he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.”9 The Book of Moses says “the stars also were made even according to my word. And I, God, set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.”10 The Book of Abraham likewise has the Sun, Moon, and stars “organized” in the “expanse of heaven” on the fourth “day.”11 We are also told in another place that “he caused the stars also to appear.” Is it just that the stars became visible from the vantage point of Earth’s surface on the fourth day, or were they created after Earth was already old enough to have life? Interestingly, the astronomical evidence favors most stars being far older than Earth, but the starburst associated with the origin of the Solar System would also have formed thousands to millions of nearby stars in the same creative episode, some forming a little earlier than the Sun, and some a little later.

LDS scriptures conform well to our reading of Genesis as the story of the creation of Earth. The extension of this scripture to the Universe and its origin is inconsistent with science and is an anachronistic misreading of the story, inserting the concept and word Universe where scriptures do not. Creation was going on for billions of years before the creation of Earth and continues today. Earth is indeed billions of years old, as Joseph Smith was one of the very first to say.

The visions recounted in scripture, viewed as attempts to convey the seer’s experiences without access to modern terminology, are remarkably informative and deserving of study. We would do well to try to picture what the seer saw, and to be cautious in our interpretation of those visions in terms of concepts alien to the seer’s conceptual framework.[Page 80]

  1. “Ursula Marvin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports that the closest remark recorded from Jefferson on the subject is as follows: ‘We certainly are not to deny what we cannot account for.… It may be very difficult to explain how the stone you possess came into the position in which it was found. But is it easier to explain how it got into the clouds from whence it is supposed to have fallen? The actual fact, however, is the thing to be established’” (Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, Asteroids, Meteorites, and Comets (New York City, New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010), 24). ↩

  2. Aristotle, On the Heavens, Book 1, Part 8. ↩

  3. “The phrase ‘(not the world)’ was added to the 1844 article as originally published. It is not known who added the phrase — Phelps, the editor, or someone else” (E. R. Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 190 n. 47). ↩

  4. W. W. Phelps, “The Answer,” Times and Seasons 5 (December 1844): 758. ↩

  5. Bruce R. McConkie, “Christ and the Creation,” Ensign (June 1982), 11. ↩

  6. Bruce R. McConkie, “The Seven Deadly Heresies,” in 1980 Devotional Speeches of the Year (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1980), 75. ↩

  7. See Moses 1:33-38. ↩

  8. D&C 130:20. ↩

  9. Genesis 1:16-17. ↩

  10. Moses 2:16. ↩

  11. Abraham 4:14-15. ↩

The Christmas Quest

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 8 (2014): 67-70
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Introduction: The following article from Hugh Nibley, written more than half a century ago, is a timely reminder of the contrast between empty holiday exuberance and the prospect of authentic Christmas cheer that can be provided only by the good news of “a real Savior who has really spoken with men.”

This article originally appeared in Millennial Star 112/1 (January 1950), 4-5. It was reprinted in Eloquent Witness: Nibley on Himself, Others, and the Temple, edited by Stephen D. Ricks. The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 17 (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2008), 121-124. Footnotes below have been added by Interpreter.

Long before the Christian Church was ever heard of, people throughout the world celebrated one great festival that far overshadowed all other social activities in importance. That was the great Year Rite, the celebration of the creation of the world and the dramatization of a plan for overcoming the bondage of death. It took place at the turn of the year when the sun, having reached its lowest point on the meridian, was found on a joyful day to be miraculously mounting again in its course; it was a day of promise and reassurance, heralding a new creation and a new age. Everywhere the great year festival was regarded as the birthday of the whole human race and was a time of divination and prophecy, marked by a feast of abundance in which all gave and received gifts as an earnest hope of good things to come.

There is plenty of evidence in the early Christian writings that Christ was born not at the solstice but in the spring, early [Page 68]in April.1 Much has been written on the shifting of his birthday celebration to make it coincide with the day of Sol Invictus, a late Romanized version of an oriental midwinter rite.2 In other parts of the world, people had no difficulty identifying the Lord’s birthday with the greatest of popular festivals. When Pope Zacharias rebuked the Germans on the Rhine for their pagan festival at midwinter, Boniface could answer him back, that if he objected to heathen feasts and games, all he had to do was look around him at Rome, where he would see the same feasting, drinking, and games on the same ancient holy days to celebrate the same blessed event—he was referring, of course, to the Saturnalia, the great prehistoric festival of the Romans. Our own Yule, carols, lights, greenery, gifts, and games are evidence enough that a northern Christmas is no importation from the East in Christian times but something far older.

Now, there is no law of the mind that requires all men everywhere to put just one peculiar interpretation on the descent and return of the sun in its course. This complex and specialized festival, which follows so closely the same elaborate pattern in Babylonia, Egypt, Iceland, and Rome, is now recognized to be no spontaneous invention of untutored minds but the remnant of a single tradition ultimately traceable to one common lost source.3 The essential feature of this great world [Page 69]festival everywhere is that it aims, if but for a few short days, to recapture the freedom, love, equality, abundance, joy, and light of a Golden Age, a dimly remembered but blessed time in the beginning when all creatures lived together in innocence without fear or enmity, when the heavens poured forth ceaseless bounty, and all men were brothers under the loving rule of the King and Creator of all. Is it at all surprising that the Christian world’s celebration of the Savior’s birth should fall easily and naturally into the pattern of the older rites? In the end they are really the same thing—both are recollections of forgotten dispensations of the Gospel; both are attempts to recall an age of lost innocence and lost blessings.

Lost? Who can doubt it? There is a nostalgic sadness about Christmas, as there is about the Middle Ages, with their everlasting quest of something that has been lost. Christmas is a small light in a great darkness; it is evidence of things not seen. It is not the real thing but the expression of a wish, for like the great year rites of the ancients, it merely dramatizes what once was and what men feel they can still hope for. A brief, brave show of generosity and cheer is our assurance that earth can be fair, and we gladly join with all mankind in the gesture. In so doing we would remind the world that Christmas is both a demonstration of man’s capacity for enjoying good and sharing it and of his helplessness to supply it from his own resources. The great blessings we seek at Christmas are not of our own making (the everyday world is our handiwork) but must come from another world, even as Father Christmas comes to the children as a visitor from afar. The painful fact that Christmas has an end and “all things return to their former state” is an adequate commentary on the actual state of things. The world, [Page 70]which denies revelation, once a year has a moment of lucidity in which men are permitted to hope; then it returns to its old disastrous routine—but because of Christmas that routine can never be the same. For men have allowed themselves to be caught off guard, for a brief moment they have let down the barriers and shown where their hearts really lie; Scrooge the man of business can never go back again after his Christmas fling—however ashamed he may be of it in the cold light of day, it is too late to deny that he has shown Scrooge the man of the world to be but a mask and an illusion.

So the Latter-day Saints have always been the greatest advocates of the Christmas spirit; nay, they have shocked and alarmed the world by insisting on recognizing as a real power, what the world prefers to regard as a pretty sentiment. Where the seasonal and formal aspect of Christmas is everything, it becomes a hollow mockery. If men really want what they say they do, we have it, but faced with accepting a real Savior who has really spoken with men, they draw back, nervous and ill at ease. In the end lights, tinsel, and sentimentality are safer, but a sense of possibilities still rankles, so to that we shall continue to appeal. For by celebrating Christmas the world serves notice that it is still looking for the Gospel.4

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  1. For differing views about the dating of Jesus’ birth, see Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “Dating the Birth of Jesus Christ,” BYU Studies, 49:4 (2010), 4-38; Lincoln H. Blumell and Thomas A. Wayment, “When Was Jesus Born? A Response to a Recent Proposal,” BYU Studies, 51:3 (2012), 53-81. ↩

  2. Though the idea that the date of Christmas was deliberately shifted to match Sol Invictus is commonly accepted, it has been challenged vigorously by some scholars. See, e.g., S. Hijmans, “Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas,” Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada 3:3 (2003), 377–398.  ↩

  3. Nibley made archaic year-rites the subject of his dissertation (Hugh W. Nibley, “The Roman games as a survival of an archaic year-cult.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1938). He distilled much of the material from his dissertation into a trilogy of articles published in the Western Political Quarterly and reprinted in The Ancient State: The Rulers and the Ruled, edited by Stephen D. Ricks, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 10 (Salt Lake City, UT; Deseret Book, 1991), 1-147). While many of the specific criticisms of research in this tradition are well deserved, no better explanation yet has been attempted for the evidence as a whole. ↩

  4. Hence the value of sharing the Gospel at Christmastime. See President Henry B. Eyring, “Family and Friends Forever,” Ensign 43:12 (December), 4-5. ↩

Māori Latter-day Saint Faith: Some Preliminary Remarks

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 8 (2014): 45-65
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Review of Marjorie Newton, Tiki and Temple: The Mormon Mission in New Zealand, 1854–1958 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012), xv + 328 pp. (including a glossary of Māori words, three appendices, bibliography, two maps, twenty-nine illustrations and a photography register, and index). $29.95 (paperback).

Abstract: Marjorie Newton’s widely acclaimed Tiki and Temple1 is a history of the first century of Latter-day Saint missionary endeavors in Aotearoa/New Zealand. She tells the remarkable story of what, beginning in 1881, rapidly became essentially a Māori version of the faith of Latter-day Saints. Her fine work sets the stage for a much closer look at the deeper reasons some Māori became faithful Latter-day Saints. It turns out that Māori seers (and hence their own prophetic tradition) was, for them, commensurate with the divine special revelations brought to them by LDS missionaries. Among other things, the arcane lore taught in special schools to an elite group among the Māori is now receiving close attention by Latter-day Saint scholars.

I have argued elsewhere that Marjorie Newton’s history of the first century of Latter-day Saint missionary endeavors in [Page 46]New Zealand2 is exemplary.3 Tiki and Temple is a fine book—one that I highly recommend. I also agree with Elder Glen L. Rudd, who knows the Church of Jesus Christ in New Zealand very well, that Tiki and Temple is genuinely faith-affirming. One reason is that its author “gives the reader a picture of the Lord’s purposes in sending the gospel to New Zealand, a country of great natural beauty and a country blessed with spiritual giants, Maori prophets, priesthood leaders, and dedicated missionaries who diligently and constantly battled against the many problems they encountered as they fulfilled the missions assigned to them by the Lord” (Foreword, p. 46).

The story of Māori4 joining the Church in large numbers has, of course, been told and retold5 and sometimes embellished, [Page 47]but it has also been discounted or explained away. Some of what has been written about these events has been excellent. For this and other reasons, Newton graciously acknowledges what she describes as the “fine work” of others on the history of the Church of Jesus Christ in New Zealand (p. xii).6 She also modestly grants that, “as an Australian,” she might be deficient in her grasp of, among other things, “Maori culture” (p. xiv). She hopes “that one day a Maori historian will produce a scholarly history of Mormonism in New Zealand that will remedy any omissions and defects” that her accounts may have (p. xiv). I fully agree that Māori scholars are best situated to provide an explanation of the faith of Māori Saints. And there is, fortunately, increased interest in recovering and preserving the crucial memory of what made the Church of Jesus Christ essentially Māori during much of its first century in New Zealand.

Those who know me well will testify that I am fond of the peoples of the South Pacific and obsessed with the Māori and New Zealand. But in important ways, I remain an interested outsider. I will, however, set out some of what seem to me to be the grounds, dynamics, and deeper dimensions of the faith of Māori Saints. I will sketch some of what I believe are the reasons for the truly remarkable faith and faithfulness of Māori Saints that supplement (or go beyond) what one can find in Tiki and Temple.

First, there are good reasons to see the old Māori prophetic tradition (mentioned by Elder Rudd in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this essay) as both roughly commensurate with what they embraced when they became Latter-day Saints [Page 48]and also as part what led them to become Latter-day Saints. Put another way, those first Māori to become Latter-day Saints were engaged in what I consider a providential joining of two prophetic traditions.

Something Long Anticipated

Although focused primarily on the events beginning in December 1882 that led to an essentially Māori version of LDS faith, Newton’s account begins in 1854, when the initial missionary efforts were somewhat ephemeral and focused only on the Pākehā (a person of European descent).7 Those first LDS missionary endeavors in New Zealand followed the method used successfully in England of renting halls and holding public meetings. In New Zealand, doing this was mostly ineffective in converting the independent, mostly indifferent, and sometimes hostile Pākehā. These intermittent endeavors also included gathering a few Saints who had been converted elsewhere, baptizing a few among their families or friends, and then occasionally sending them to Zion in Utah.

Newton sets the stage for the story she tells by skillfully identifying an interest in the Māori among some of the Saints long before efforts were made to convert them (see pp. 1–6). For example, in 1832—long before 6 February 1840, when the famous (or infamous) Treaty of Waitangi8 brought New Zealand under the Crown—W. W. Phelps, impressed by a description of the Māori he happened to notice, proclaimed that “the Lord will not forget them” (p. 1). In 1854, a few LDS [Page 49]missionaries began to labor in New Zealand. But a genuine effort to take the gospel to the Māori began only in 1881. This fact has annoyed me. Why did those first LDS missionaries not go immediately to the Māori? Had not Joseph Smith sent Addison Pratt (and his three associates, one of whom passed away on the long voyage) in 1843 to preach the gospel to the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific?9 Did they not have immediate and lasting success? This was the first real non–English-speaking LDS missionary endeavor. Newton mentions that, when passing between Australia and New Zealand, for a brief moment Addison Pratt had a hankering to stop in New Zealand and later wrote to Joseph Smith recommending that missionaries be sent there (see pp. 2–3 for details).

Newton deftly explains the difficulties those first LDS missionaries faced in New Zealand as well as some of the circumstances among the Māori that seem to have impeded (and even prevented) the long-hoped-for effort to bring the restored gospel to them (see pp. 22–24). In addition, I believe that LDS missionary endeavors with the Māori benefitted from the remarkable growth in literacy among a people who, prior to the arrival of the Pākehā, had no written language, hence their subsequent familiarity with and love of biblical narratives made available in their own language. LDS efforts to proselytize among the Māori, especially given the few LDS missionaries called to New Zealand for short assignments, depended upon earlier efforts by Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Anglican missionaries to establish their versions of Christianity among the Māori. These Christian missionaries were among the first British to settle in areas in which the Māori [Page 50]were concentrated. They had to learn Māori. Words had to be found or fashioned in Māori to convey their message and to make available portions of the Bible. The impressive immediate result of those early sectarian missionary endeavors was that for a while (and until the surge of Pākehā settlers swamped the Māori), most Christians in New Zealand were Māori. In addition, with the arrival of the Pākehā, for reasons that I will not go into, the Māori population began to decline. The faith of Māori Christians was not focused on dogmatic theology, but on biblical stories which seemed to them to describe their own situation and to convey hope in the face of the enormous changes and challenges resulting from both the arrival of the Pākehā and the dynamic of tribal hostilities.

After the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the Pākehā began to gobble up Māori land—that is, often stealing it. The result was a series of wars between some Māori and the Crown10 over what were considered insults and the theft of their lands. The Māori witnessed those who had brought them the biblical message become apologists for Pākehā greed. Only when these wars eventually subsided was the door opened for LDS missionaries. Where previous LDS missionaries, including mission presidents, had depended almost entirely upon the largess of the few generous Pākehā Saints, beginning in 1882 most LDS missionaries in New Zealand lived among Māori and depended primarily upon them for their sustenance. This took place only when armed hostilities had ceased, the Māori had lost confidence in the Pākehā preachers, and after they had became somewhat familiar with the Bible.[Page 51]

The Beginnings

When LDS missionaries eventually adopted a mode of teaching that entailed major cultural accommodations to Māori ways, they had remarkable success. The result has been described as an intercultural exchange, which I believe involved, among other things, the subtle melding of two commensurate prophetic traditions. The initial breakthrough began on 5 April 1881, when William J. McDonnel was called by William M. Bromley, the New Zealand mission president, to serve as a missionary to the Māori. McDonnel had joined the Church in New Zealand and served as branch president in Auckland, where he operated the dry dock at the bottom of Hobson Street. When called as a missionary, he went to work learning the Māori language. On 18 October 1881, McDonnel baptized Ngataki, a Māori he had met while working at the graver dock in Auckland. Ngataki was the first Māori baptized in New Zealand. Other than this one baptism, all efforts to proselytize the Māori proved fruitless until 24 December 1882, when McDonnel and two companions met one prepared by an encounter with the apostle Peter to hear his message. McDonnel had journeyed to Cambridge, a provincial town southeast of Hamilton, to visit Thomas Cox, who had recently moved there from Auckland. Cox had previously despised McDonnel, even mounting a petition to have him removed as branch president. Despite this, McDonnel and President Bromley decided to spend Christmas with Cox.

Bromley’s fine diary11 provides a nicely written, contemporary account of a remarkable encounter that he, Cox, and McDonnel had on 24 December 1882 with Hari Teimana, who indicated that he recognized Bromley and his [Page 52]associates. Teimana told McDonnel in Māori that the apostle Peter had recently visited him. Dressed in distinctive white clothing, Peter had shown him the three Latter-day Saints. Upon recognizing them, Teimana accepted their authority and then their message.12 On Christmas Day, the first of a series of baptisms took place, as well as the healing of the relationship between McDonnel and Cox.

As this account illustrates, it was often not an agonizing, difficult decision for Māori to accept Joseph Smith as a seer and to recognize both the message and authority of LDS missionaries. Unlike the Christian world generally, for some Māori the heavens were not closed by either dogma or habit. In addition, some Māori were prepared by special divine revelations for the arrival and message of LDS missionaries. Even in 1950 the Māori, I soon discovered, were not influenced as I had been by powerful elements of Enlightenment skepticism about divine things; they lived in a world where wonders are possible. Hence Newton correctly reports that “many Mormon families have told of visions received by their ancestors, guiding them to accept Mormonism” (p. 43).

I first heard accounts of these visions in 1950 in the area around the Bay of Islands north of Auckland. I assumed that they had all been recorded by earlier LDS missionaries, if not by the Māori Saints themselves. I was wrong on both counts. The Māori Saints were still accustomed to the habits of the older oral culture and usually did not record events.13 I am not aware of a collection of these stories. I now regret that I did not make it my business to record the stories I heard. My attention was [Page 53]primarily focused on what now seem to be rather trivial, but pressing, mundane things: the weather, food, transportation, and other similar matters. Even though I loved the stories I heard, unfortunately I followed in the footsteps of previous LDS missionaries and did not record them.

As that initial encounter of McDonnel, Bromley, and Cox with Hari Teimana illustrates, the Māori who became Latter-day Saints often lived in an enchanted, and—for me and some other LDS missionaries—an enchanting world. From the moment I knew that there was such a thing as an LDS mission, I expected to serve in New Zealand, and I did so in 1950–52. This was almost seven decades after the Māori began to join the Church. Over six decades later, I am still taken with those people and that place. Much like others who have served missions in New Zealand, my faith is anchored in part in the work of the Holy Spirit I have witnessed among the peoples in that land. I found in 1950 that the Māori were often strikingly open to the divine. Their test, they would point out to me, was moral or practical: it was not whether the restored gospel is true, which even non-LDS Māori would tell me was for them obvious, but whether they were really determined to remain genuinely faithful to the covenants with God required by the message LDS missionaries brought to them.

When I first arrived in New Zealand in 1950, I lived in the area in and around the wonderful Bay of Islands, where, at Waitangi, what the Māori tend to see as a compact between two peoples had been set in place. The Māori enjoyed pointing out that the Christian missionaries, whom at first they had trusted, had taught them to close their eyes and pray, but when they opened their eyes, the land was gone. Beginning in 1882, when such grievances were fresh in the minds of the Māori, LDS missionaries seem to have sided with them over the deeds flowing from Pākehā greed. Unlike the Pākehā, they saw the missionaries as equals who lived with them, loved them, and [Page 54]made no claim on their lands. In addition, much like the Māori, the missionaries were the object of oppression, legal restrictions, and sectarian derision.

The Māori Saints I met at that time were, in their own way, at least as “Mormon” as I was, and their conversion stories were often far more dramatic than those of my English ancestors. For these and other reasons, if there was cultural imperialism, it was not due to missionaries from the Wasatch Front imposing something foreign on the Māori. They clearly owned their faith. LDS missionaries (including mission presidents) have often been enthralled by the best in the Māori world. In addition, my experience has been that Māori Saints often feel that their faith enhances and deepens their Māori identity, which otherwise is transformed, eroded, and degraded under the sometimes demonic influences of the now-dominant sensual and increasingly highly secularized host culture.

Despite efforts to proselytize Pākehā and increasingly rapid changes in the situation of the Māori—some of which have clearly not been good—the Church of Jesus Christ in New Zealand in 1950 consisted primarily of Māori Saints, who most often worshiped in tiny rural branches. Māori were just beginning to surge into Auckland and Wellington, soon followed by Tongans and Samoans. In 1950, there was one LDS branch in Auckland. There are now ten stakes. In 1950, there were two Māori Saints who had university training. Now university training is common. The changes clearly have been enormous.

When my wife and I began to return to New Zealand in 1985, I was at first a bit disappointed at some of the changes that had taken place in the Church. My attachment to the Saints in New Zealand was partly frozen in memories of what amounted to a community of mostly Māori Saints. Much (but not all) of that, of course, has now changed, as my Māori friends explained, “for the better.” One of the changes has been in the [Page 55]variety within LDS congregations. Virtually every Sunday in 1999 and 2000, my wife and I, while directing the Lorne Street Institute in Auckland for the Seminary and Institute System, heard favorable comments about the diverse ethnic makeup of LDS congregations. My first mission president had sought to overcome the stereotype that the Church of Jesus Christ in New Zealand was Māori. This soon happened but not by its becoming Pākehā. LDS congregations in New Zealand are now packed with Pacific Islanders and other nationalities and ethnic groups in addition to Māori. But this is not the story Newton tells, as her account covers the first century, when the Church in New Zealand was essentially Māori, not the story of the subsequent six decades.

Māori Seers

Perhaps the incidents best known about the history of the Church of Jesus Christ in New Zealand are the accounts of LDS missionaries finding Māori who had been readied by their own prophets to accept them and their message. When we refer to Māori prophets, which Elder Rudd did in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this essay, we tend to reduce the strangeness of a people originally with no written language who, with the arrival of the Pākehā, still depended upon subtle mnemonic devices and a cast of experts to keep the memory of both human and divine things alive and who believed that knowledge of divine things could be revealed directly to human beings.

Drawing upon the work of Lanier Britsch and Brian Hunt (see p. 42 n. 5), Newton briefly mentions several Māori prophets—Paora Potangaroa, Tawhiao, Toaro Pakahia, Apiata Kuikainga, and Arama Toiroa (p. 42)—who, Māori Saints both then and now believe, prepared them for LDS missionaries and their message. The Māori themselves presented these stories to me as brute fact, and I have known them for over six decades. I am now more astonished and puzzled by what I began to [Page 56]learn in 1950 than when I first encountered it. Though these stories have been told and retold, there is more to be learned about Māori prophets. For several reasons, Latter-day Saint Māori scholars are in the best position to recover valuable information and set out new insights on this and other closely related topics.14 As passionate as I am about the world of Māori Saints, I operate only on its surface like an interested tourist struggling to take it all in.

There are, I believe, important bits of information that help open for us the world of Māori prophets. For instance, the Māori word poropiti (prophet) is actually a loan word—the English word “prophet” spelled in the Māori alphabet. The genuine Māori word is matakite—that is, seer.15 Kite means to see and perceive, to find or discover, and to recognize. It also means a prophetic utterance or prophecy. And mata is a medium of communication with a spirit, also a spell or charm. Hence, a matakite is a seer—one who foresees an event—but also the vision itself. In addition, the word matatuhi also means seer or augur. The word tuhi has come to mean both the action of writing and something that is written, but its primitive [Page 57]meaning is to delineate or draw, to point at, and to glow or shine.

Latter-day Saints should keep in mind that Joseph Smith was a seer before (and then in addition to) becoming a prophet authorized to speak for God. He also used the two stones known in the Book of Mormon as interpreters (see Mosiah 8:13; 28:13–16, 20)16 as well as his own seer stone, to see the text of the Book of Mormon, which he dictated to scribes. He also used his seer stone to receive further instruction from God, including many early sections of the Book of Covenants and Commandments, which we know as the Doctrine and Covenants.

There is also a place in Māori lore for whatu kura (seer stones), two of which have names.17 Seer stones had an important place in the initiation into the arcane Māori mysteries. This is not, however, the place to go into detail other than to assert that, from within the horizon of Māori tradition, both seers and seer stones are not problematic.

An Esoteric Māori Cult

What I learned in 1950 from some older Māori Saints was that when LDS missionaries arrived with their message, the Māori were already aware of a premortal life and a council in heaven where the sons of Io te Matua—the Māori name for their high god—considered the peopling of the earth, at which time a war broke out that goes on even now here below, also a way back to the glory of Io’s heaven and so forth. They attributed this knowledge to their own seers, whose teachings fit securely within the world view of specially trained tohunga (experts) whose task it was to keep alive the memory of an esoteric cult fully known only to an elite group of initiates.

[Page 58]When the Pākehā arrived in New Zealand, the Māori relied upon, among other things, rigorous memorization of vast amounts of genealogy and other closely related lore to keep alive their knowledge of divine things as well as a host of more mundane information and skills. Even though they rapidly became literate, the oral transmission of information was still very much in place in 1950. Of course, attention had to be given, even—or especially—within the community of Saints, to mastering English and the ways of the Pākehā. Inevitably, this has tended to supplant, if not erode, the authority and the knowledge of the old oral traditions. Some of the old lore was recorded. Neither the old lore nor its impact on the faith of Māori Saints has disappeared. And, as I will demonstrate, serious efforts are being made to recover and teach it.

For me, the very best portion of Newton’s fine book is the new and important information she provides (see pp. 171–73) on Hoani Te Whatahoro Jury (1841–1921). He assisted in the translation of the Book of Mormon into Māori and then joined the Church (pp. 52–53). Church leaders in Salt Lake City were aware of Te Whatahoro and even commissioned his portrait, which was first hung in the Salt Lake Temple, then in the Manti Temple, and eventually in the library at BYU–Hawaii (p. 171, including n. 62).

There is, however, more to Te Whatahoro’s story. Beginning at age twenty-two (between 1863 and 1865), long before any Latter-day Saint had influenced any Māori, he was the scribe for Moihi Te Motorohunga (c.1800–1884) and Nepia Pohuhu (d. 1882), who dictated to him the esoteric teachings of Ngati Kahunganu (p. 171).18 Newton sees the Te Whatahoro manuscripts as “sacred genealogy,” which in part they are, but they also contain the understanding of divine and human things—what might be called the esoteric religion—taught in [Page 59]a whare wānanga (house of learning or college, also known as wharekura) to an elite group of Māori. Te Whatahoro enhanced these manuscripts and eventually donated them to the Church. Clearly recognizing their importance, Church leaders made an effort to send them to the Church Archive in Salt Lake City (pp. 171–72). The New Zealand government blocked this effort, and they were instead preserved in a fireproof vault in the little LDS meetinghouse at Scotia Place on Queen Street in Auckland. These manuscripts were loaned to Maui Pomare, a famous Māori scholar, and were never returned. Presumably they were lost or deliberately destroyed. However, a copy was retained by Te Whatahoro, and they were published in both Māori and English under the title The Lore of the Whare Wananga by S. Percy Smith, an important early amateur ethnologist.19 The story Newton tells of the Te Whatahoro manuscripts includes much new and valuable information. But she does not give attention to the actual contents of those manuscripts, nor does she sense why the Church’s general leaders wished to honor Te Whatahoro and even pay his way to Salt Lake City so that he could receive his LDS temple endowment. (Unfortunately, he was too frail to make the trip.)

I believe that Te Whatahoro’s manuscripts, along with other similar and related materials, are part of the larger matrix of elements that may help to explain why those early LDS missionaries saw whole Māori villages join the Church. To sort out this matter, however, must be the work of Māori [Page 60]scholars.20 It seems that the higher celestial elements of what was taught in various wānanga were known to an initiated elite group, but not in detail by most Māori.

Māori Saints are often aware of the Māori high god known as Io, and of related accounts of the creation of the world, a premortal existence, a great council in the highest heaven, a war that began there in the deep past and continues on earth to this day, an ascent back to the glory of the tenth (or twelfth) heaven and to the presence of Io, and so forth.21 These and similar and related teachings were once transmitted to some select Māori in wānanga. It was from within this world of esoteric knowledge that Māori seers tended to operate. How much and in what way the Io cult influenced those first Māori to become Latter-day Saints is, however, still to be determined.

What is clear is that when LDS missionaries encountered Māori, some of whom had been prepared by seers for the restored gospel, they had remarkable success. When those early missionaries were able to convert Māori who were aware of elements of the Io cult, many others soon became Latter-day Saints as well. The reason is that initiates in the Io cult had what the Māori call mana, understood as “the enduring, indestructible power of the gods.”22 What I learned in October [Page 61]1950 in conversations with an old Māori at Waikare in the south end of the Bay of Islands was that even before LDS missionaries arrived, the Māori were aware of a premortal life and a grand council in heaven in which the sons of Io te Matua considered the peopling of the earth, at which time a war broke out that goes on even now here below. These and other similar or related teachings were known to an elite group of specially trained tohunga.

In addition, since there were disagreements both between and within iwi about the details of the Io cult, I believe there was also a longing or perhaps even an expectation that messengers would turn up to help sort things out. It is in this larger context that the words of Arama Toiroa (whom I see as the leading figure) and other Māori seers were understood by the Māori who first encountered LDS missionaries. It is from a passion for recovery of the genuine ancient lore that a Māori version of their encounter with Mormon things is even now beginning to take shape.

That there were Māori matakite is not challenged, nor is it denied that there were wānanga in which arcane lore was transmitted to future generations. However, some have insisted that, despite the solid evidence that the Io cult was taught in various wānanga in at least three iwi, Io was unknown prior to the arrival of Christian missionaries. In addition, some Māori—especially those who have been recolonized by Pākehā ways of understanding the world, who are hostile to any version of Christian faith and/or who have come to see Māori things through an essentially secular lens—now insist that the Io cult was a post-European invention by Māori seeking to fashion a past that would rival what is found in the Bible. What can be said with confidence is that the Māori did not borrow from sectarian Christian missionaries what was taught in wānanga. It is, instead, Latter-day Saints who see parallels and similarities between their own faith and hidden Māori lore. What I have [Page 62]yet to see is the argument that somehow in the 1860s, LDS missionaries had managed to introduce the substance of the Io cult to some Māori, who then cast those teachings in the Māori language and thereby made it their own.

Some Steps Forward

There is an increasing interest in traditional Māori lore and learning among Latter-day Saints which I see as salutary. This began late in the 1990s, when Herewini Jones, a truly gifted teacher, began holding wānanga for Māori with an interest in understanding the original links between Māori matakite and the restored gospel. The remarkable instruction given by Herewini Jones was fully endorsed and encouraged by Richard Hunter, President of the Auckland Mission from 1998 through 1999. It was also frequently utilized by Paul Mendenhall, who is fluent in Māori and who replaced President Hunter in 1999.

This public instruction in the arcane lore and related whakapapa (genealogy) demonstrates its links to LDS teachings. By 1998, the wānanga held by Herewini Jones became a primary vehicle in effecting new conversions and deepening the faith of the Saints as well as drawing lapsed Saints back into full fellowship. This endeavor made it possible for Māori to see that the very best in their esoteric lore and tikanga (governing rule, habit, controlling authority, the straight and right way) as essentially commensurate with the narrative upon which a solid faith in God can be grounded. From my perspective, this kind of instruction edifies and deepens faith. It has also opened the door for other LDS Māori scholars to probe the role played by the arcane teachings traditionally given in wānanga in the growth of the Church of Jesus Christ among the Māori as well as the place those teaching have for the faith of Māori Saints. Some of what Newton hopes will happen is actually beginning to take place.

[Page 63]In her bibliography (see p. 279), Newton mentions the late Cleve Barlow’s Tikanga Whakaaro.23 Dr. Barlow told me in 1999 that he was one of the last three Māori to actually receive instruction in a traditional whare wānanga24 and that the instruction he received matched LDS teachings better than the one recorded by Te Whatahoro. Should he publish his version? If he did not, he realized, the last living link with the important instruction he had undergone, elements of which he saw as agreeable with his own LDS faith, would disappear. Phillip Lambert, an LDS Māori scholar, has recently informed me that when Dr. Barlow eventually moved from Auckland to Hamilton, he began giving instruction in his own wānanga, presumably in an effort to pass on his own knowledge of the ancient lore forming the core of the old Io cult.

Some Concluding Remarks

On two occasions in October of 1950, I spent several days in Waikare, a very obscure place at the south end of the wonderful Bay of Islands. I engaged mostly in conversations with an aged tohunga with a remarkable command of the genealogy of the Ngati Hine hapū (subtribe) of the Nga Puhi iwi. He described some of the instructions he underwent in what I now believe was a whare wānanga, and he even wrote down some things for me. These conversations were the first time I had encountered someone with such a remarkable command of genealogy. He also introduced me to the related cosmogony and cosmology [Page 64]that included, among other things, a belief in a war in heaven which has spilled over into this world, a stairway back to the highest heaven, and so forth. I believe he indicated that his instruction had taken place at Waiomio, a little-known place just south of Kawakawa at the approach to the Bay of Islands. Recently I have learned from Jason Hartley that there was a wānanga at Waiomio which ceased to function in the 1930s. It had been shifted from further north to that place to avoid detection by the government, which was then striving to stamp out such institutions.25

I now regret that I did not record the contents of those conversations that took place in Waikare in October 1950 as well as other conversations I had with other Māori Saints. I wrongly assumed that several generations of missionaries had heard and recorded these things. I was busy urging the Saints to pay close attention to the Book of Mormon, not to gamble or drink beer, and that sort of thing. Looking back, I can now see that Māori I was teaching were also instructing me on how they read the Book of Mormon26 and how their own prophetic tradition grounded and buttressed their understanding and affection for both the message it contained and the community of Saints it engendered. Those who have ministered among the Māori are often captivated by them and their ways. Matters of the heart have had a truly lasting impact on LDS missionaries, as they made portions of the Māori world their own. Such has been my own experience.[Page 65]

  1. Marjorie Newton has received several awards for her book, and it has also been reviewed favorably. ↩

  2. Whenever I mention New Zealand, I also have in mind Aotearoa, which is its official Māori name. ↩

  3. See Louis Midgley, “Comments on the History of Mormon Maori Faith,” Association of Mormon Letters, posted 26 July 2013 at http://www.forums.mormonletters.org/yaf_postsm2657_Newton-Tiki-and-Temple-The-Mormon-Mission-in-New-Zealand-18541958-reviewed-by-Louis.aspx; and Midgley, Review of Tiki and Temple by Marjorie Newton, Journal of Mormon History 40/1 (2014): 253–56. ↩

  4. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the indigenous peoples of New Zealand had only tribal identities. They offered the word māori—which means normal, usual, or ordinary—to the Europeans looking for a name that embraced all the iwi (tribes), thereby for the first time creating their own single identity. The same word is found in the Cook Islands, and cognates are found in the Society Islands and elsewhere in eastern Polynesia, but the names given to those peoples most often came from that of the major island in a group or string of islands, whose names were sometimes given to those places by Europeans. Examples are the Cook Islands and the Marquesas Islands. The names for the indigenous peoples in the Pacific were sometimes thrust upon them by the first Europeans to “discover” them. ↩

  5. In two attempts to explain how the older Māori I knew in 1950–52 read the Book of Mormon, I have made a stab at doing some of this myself. See Louis Midgley, “A Singular Reading: The Māori and the Book of Mormon,” in Mormons, Scripture, and the Ancient World: Studies in Honor of John L. Sorenson, ed. Davis Bitton (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1998), 245–76; and Midgley, “A Māori View of the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 8/1 (1999): 4–11. ↩

  6. Newton specifically mentions R. Lanier Britsch’s Unto the Islands of the Sea: A History of the Latter-day Saints in the Pacific (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986), 253–345 and Brian W. Hunt’s Zion in New Zealand: A History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New Zealand, 1854-1977 (Temple View: Church College of New Zealand, 1977). ↩

  7. I have defined key Māori words parenthetically. ↩

  8. For those puzzled by some details in Tiki and Temple, an Internet search will supply the needed information. For example, one can easily access detailed accounts of the Treaty of Waitangi and its contentious subsequent history. Or, if one wonders how the Saints living in Maromaku—a tiny, entirely LDS community in the Northland—could have fashioned a chapel from one large log, a search for the word kauri will provide information about this kingly tree of the diverse hardwood forests of New Zealand. ↩

  9. This heroic adventure took Pratt and his companions from Nauvoo to New Bedford, Massachusetts, then by ship across the south Atlantic, around Africa, east through the Indian Ocean, then between Australia and New Zealand and northeast to Tubuai in the Australs, Tahiti in the Society Islands, and elsewhere in French Polynesia. ↩

  10. And their Māori allies, who sided with the Crown in an effort to avoid having their own lands confiscated or to settle old rivalries within and between tribes. ↩

  11. For details, see Bromley’s diary, now available as None Shall Excel Thee: The Life and Journals of William Michael Bromley, ed. Fred Bromley Hodson (n.p.: privately printed, 1990). I rely entirely upon Bromley’s account and not on the later supporting reminiscences of William McDonnel and Thomas Cox. ↩

  12. Bromley’s version of the encounter with the apostle Peter depended upon what Teimana told McDonnel, the only one of the three who could communicate with Teimana in Māori. ↩

  13. The habits of the old oral culture lingered in 1950. In 1985 when, with my wife, I started returning to New Zealand, I found that those I knew in 1950 could remember my stories better than I could. In their much detailed, more accurate versions, I was not a heroic figure but more of a brash and bookish comic figure. ↩

  14. For an example of a Māori scholar adding what is known about Māori prophets, see Robert Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange, Matakite Māori and the Mormon Church,” in Mana Māori and Christianity, ed. Hugh Morrison, Lachy Paterson, Brett Knowles, and Murray Rae (Wellington, New Zealand: Huia Publishers, 2012), 43–72. I am hoping that a version of this essay will be made available by the Interpreter Foundation because it is difficult to access outside New Zealand. See Dr. Joseph’s contribution to Professor Daniel C. Peterson’s Mormon Scholars Testify, at http://mormonscholarstestify.org/955/robert-joseph, for his academic credentials and his Māori style. ↩

  15. In this essay, unless otherwise noted, I rely upon Herbert W. Williams, A Dictionary of the Maori Language, 7th ed. (Wellington, New Zealand: A. R. Shearer, Government Printer, 1975), for my understanding of crucial Māori words (though I will not cite individual entries in this dictionary). This remarkable dictionary was first published in 1844 in Paihia in the Bay of Islands, near where the Waitangi Treaty was signed. The definitions are both drawn from and illustrated by very early Māori usage. Hence they tend to predate the changes that have taken place in Māori since the arrival of English. ↩

  16. These passages state that a king thought that a seer was greater than a prophet (see Mosiah 8:15) and was instructed that a seer is also a revelator and a prophet (see Mosiah 8:16). ↩

  17. Hukatai, which means sea spray, and Rehutai, which means sea foam. ↩

  18. A Māori iwi (tribe) located on the east coast of the North Island. ↩

  19. For the English translation of the most important of these manuscripts, see H. T. Whatahoro, The Lore or the Whare-Wananga, or Teachings of the Maori College on Religion, Cosmogony, and History, trans. S. Percy Smith (San Bernardino, CA: Forgotten Books, 2008). This is an exact reprint of the 1913 original issued by the Polynesian Cultural Society. It is also available in electronic form at ForgottenBooks.org. ↩

  20. I suspect that the first generation of Māori Saints were prying out of credulous and unsophisticated LDS missionaries such things as the LDS belief in a war in heaven and a pathway back to a celestial world for those true and faithful, much of which was similar to their own esoteric lore. Despite the flaws and faults of LDS missionaries, and even perhaps because of their lack of sophistication, the Māori saw signs of mana (spiritual power) among at least some missionaries. I benefitted from such generosity. ↩

  21. When Io is designated as te matua (the parent), te hunga (the sacred), and so forth, these supplements to Io’s name seem to me to describe his attributes. ↩

  22. In this instance, for the primitive and most basic meaning of mana, I rely on Cleve Barlow’s Tikanga Whakaaro: Key Concepts in Māori Culture (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998), 61, which can be called mana tapu, which understanding differs from that found in Williams, Dictionary of the Maori Language, where that crucial word is defined merely as “authority, control,” and then as “influence, prestige,” which it clearly is. ↩

  23. Cleve Barlow’s usefull Tikanga Whakaaro was first published by Oxford University Press in 1991 and reprinted in 1992, 1993, 1994 (with corrections), 1996, and 1998. ↩

  24. Professor Barlow was initiated into a Nga Puhi version of Māori arcane lore. Recently, supplementing the Te Whatahoro lore, a version of the Tainui wānanga has been published. See Pei Te Hurinui Jones, He Tuhi Mārei-kura: A Treasury of Sacred Writings: A Māori Account of the Creation, Based on the Priestly Lore of the Tainui People (Hamilton, New Zealand: Aka and Associates, 2013), with a companion volume entirely in Māori. ↩

  25. For those who might care to enter this charmed world, I recommend Jason Hartley’s account of some encounters here and now with divine things. See his Ngā Mahi: The Pathway of the Stars: A Story of Truth, a Message to Awaken, a Gift from the Past (n.p.: privately printed, 2010). This book can be ordered at www.ngamahi.com. ↩

  26. I have described the eventual fruit of these constant enlightening conversations about the Book of Mormon in two essays cited in note 5, above. ↩

The Cowdery Conundrum: Oliver’s Aborted Attempt to Describe Joseph Smith’s First Vision in 1834 and 1835

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 8 (2014): 27-44
8

Abstract: In 1834, Oliver Cowdery began publishing a history of the Church in installments in the pages of the Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate. The first installment talks of the religious excitement and events that ultimately led to Joseph Smith’s First Vision at age 14. However, in the subsequent installment published two months later, Oliver claims that he made a mistake, correcting Joseph’s age from 14 to 17 and failing to make any direct mention of the First Vision. Oliver instead tells the story of Moroni’s visit, thus making it appear that the religious excitement led to Moroni’s visit.

This curious account has been misunderstood by some to be evidence that the “first” vision that Joseph claimed was actually that of the angel Moroni and that Joseph invented the story of the First Vision of the Father and Son at a later time. However, Joseph wrote an account of his First Vision in 1832 in which he stated that he saw the Lord, and there is substantial evidence that Oliver had this document in his possession at the time that he wrote his history of the Church. This essay demonstrates the correlations between Joseph Smith’s 1832 First Vision account, Oliver’s 1834/1835 account, and Joseph’s 1835 journal entry on the same subject. It is clear that not only did Oliver have Joseph’s history in his possession but that he used Joseph’s 1832 account as a basis for his own account. This essay also shows that Oliver knew of the First Vision and attempted to obliquely refer to the event several times in his second installment before continuing with his narrative of Moroni’s visit.
[Page 28]

Joseph’s Early Writings about the First Vision

Joseph Smith made his first known attempt to write a history of the Church in 1832. Some of the account was written in Joseph’s own hand and the rest by Frederick G. Williams. Joseph’s history describes his first vision, Moroni’s visit, the loss of the 116 pages of manuscript, and the arrival of Oliver Cowdery. Joseph never completed it beyond that point, and it was never published during his lifetime.

A few years later, in 1835, Joseph produced an account of his First Vision in his journal. He told about how he described the vision to a visitor, a non-Mormon stranger, who had stopped by his home. This is the second known account of the vision written in the first person. Neither the 1832 account nor the 1835 account appear to have received any public circulation. The formal account of the vision would not be written until 1838. This is the account contained in the Pearl of Great Price.

Between 1832 and 1835, Oliver Cowdery, as editor of the Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate (hereafter Messenger and Advocate), determined that he would write an account of the history of the Church and publish it in installments. This account is both curious and confusing because the first and second installments describe clearly recognizable events leading up to Joseph’s First Vision and Moroni’s visit, but they do not mention the actual visit of the Father and Son. Taken together, the first two installments seem to imply that Joseph’s “first” vision was that of Moroni. For example, the Wikipedia article, “First Vision,” summarizes the Cowdery account as follows:

Therefore, according to Cowdery, the religious confusion led Smith to pray in his bedroom, late on the night of September 23, 1823, after the others had gone to sleep, to know which of the competing denominations was correct and whether “a Supreme [Page 29]being did exist.” In response, an angel appeared and granted him forgiveness of his sins. The remainder of the story roughly parallels Smith’s later description of a visit by an angel in 1823 who told him about the Golden Plates. Thus, Cowdery’s account, containing a single vision, differs from Smith’s 1832 account, which contains two separate visions, one in 1821 prompted by religious confusion (the First Vision) and a separate one regarding the plates on September 22, 1822.1

This summary, of course, is not consistent with the story of the First Vision and Moroni’s visit as two distinct events that Joseph described only two years earlier, nor does it match the account that he told in late 1835, less than a year after Oliver’s account was published. What, then, are we to make of Oliver’s convoluted account? Does it really describe a “single vision” as the Wikipedia article claims?

Oliver’s account does indeed raise some questions. Was Oliver unaware of Joseph’s First Vision? Was Oliver in possession of Joseph’s 1832 history? If so, why did Oliver not include the vision in his own history? The answers to these questions may be deduced by examining and comparing Joseph’s 1832 history with Oliver’s 1834/1835 history and with Joseph’s subsequent 1835 journal entry.

Oliver Cowdery’s 1834 History of the Church

In October 1834, Oliver Cowdery, as the editor of the first issue of the Messenger and Advocate, talked of the periodical’s intent to document the history of the Church. “We have thought that [Page 30]a full history of the rise of the church of the Latter Day Saints, and the most interesting parts of its progress, to the present time, would be worthy the perusal of the Saints.”2 In order to ensure its accuracy, Oliver went on to assure his readers that “our brother J. SMITH jr. has offered to assist us. Indeed, there are many items connected with the fore part of this subject that render his labor indispensable. With his labor and with authentic documents now in our possession, we hope to render this a pleasing and agreeable narrative, well worth the examination and perusal of the Saints.”3

What might these “authentic documents” now in the possession of Cowdery have consisted of? One document that we know existed at that time is Joseph’s 1832 attempt at writing the history of the Church, which includes the first known description of his First Vision. It would have made perfect sense for Joseph to give Oliver this document.

Surprisingly, it appears that Joseph was unaware of Oliver’s intent to publicly document the history of the Church in the pages of the Messenger and Advocate until he read Oliver’s statement in the October issue of his intention to do so. In a letter from Joseph to Oliver, which was included in the December 1834 issue of the Messenger and Advocate, Joseph is clearly interested in accuracy.

BROTHER O. Cowdery:

Having learned from the first No. of the Messenger and Advocate, that you were, not only about to “give a history of the rise and progress of the church of the Latter Day Saints;” but, that said “history would necessarily embrace my life and character,” I have been [Page 31]induced to give you the time and place of my birth; as I have learned that many of the opposers of those principles which I have held forth to the world, profess a personal acquaintance with me, though when in my presence, represent me to be another person in age, education, and stature, from what I am.4

Joseph was clearly concerned that accurate information be provided about his early life, and specifically that he be accurately represented regarding his “age, education, and stature.” Joseph provides this information in his 1832 history, and his spelling and lack of punctuation seems to underscore the point. Joseph notes that his family,

being in indigent circumstances were obliged to labour hard for the support of a large Family having nine chilldren and as it required their exertions of all that were able to render any assistance for the support of the Family therefore we were deprived of the bennifit of an education suffice it to say I was mearly instructtid in reading and writing and the ground <rules> of Arithmatic which const[it]uted my whole literary acquirements.5

It is therefore highly likely that Joseph provided Oliver with his 1832 history to use as a basis for publishing his new history. Oliver, as Joseph’s scribe, had plenty of experience rewriting and expanding upon Joseph’s words.[Page 32]

Oliver’s First Installment: Events Leading Up to the Vision

When Oliver Cowdery published his first installment of the history of the Church in the December 1834 issue of the Messenger and Advocate, he appeared to be relating a story that is very familiar to all Latter-day Saints today. Oliver writes his history in the form of a series of letters to W. W. Phelps. He begins by stating,

You will recollect that I informed you, in my letter published in the first No. of the Messenger and Advocate, that this history would necessarily embrace the life and character of our esteemed friend and brother, J. Smith JR. one of the presidents of this church, and for information on that part of the subject, I refer you to his communication of the same, published in this paper. I shall, therefore, pass over that, till I come to the 15th year of his life.6

Notice that Oliver has clearly established Joseph’s age as fourteen. In his 1832 history, Joseph says that “from the age of twelve years to fifteen I pondered many things in my heart,” and that he approached the Lord in prayer “in the 16th year of my age.” The phrase “the 16th year of my age” was added between the lines of Joseph’s handwriting by Frederick G. Williams after the account had been written, as an afterthought. Why would Oliver establish Joseph’s age as fourteen rather than fifteen if he possessed the 1832 document? Joseph’s letter to Oliver showed that he was quite obviously interested in correcting any inaccuracies regarding his early life. Thus Joseph stated, “I have been induced to give you the time and place of my birth.” Joseph appears to have corrected his age.

[Page 33]Oliver’s account continues, “There was a great awakening, or excitement raised on the subject of religion, and much enquiry for the word of life. Large additions were made to the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches.” Oliver describes the religious fervor that gripped the region:

[A] general struggle was made by the leading characters of the different sects, for proselytes. Then strife seemed to take the place of that apparent union and harmony which had previously characterized the moves and exhortations of the old professors, and a cry—I am right—you are wrong—was introduced in their stead.7

This, of course, is the familiar story leading up to the First Vision. Joseph wrote in his 1832 account that

my intimate acquaintance with those of different denominations led me to marvel exceedingly for I discovered that they did not adorn their profession by a holy walk and Godly conversation.9

[Page 34]Again, this is completely consistent with the events leading up to the First Vision. The “sequel” that Oliver refers to is the next installment of this history in the Messenger and Advocate, and he is alluding to a forthcoming description of a foundational event in the history of the Church.

Joseph’s 1832 history does not state that his family members joined the Presbyterians, though there is a possible, aborted attempt to do so. In the 1832 history, Joseph originally writes that he:

could find none that would believe the heavenly vision nevertheless I pondered these things in my heart about that time my mother and ….”10

Without completing the sentence, Joseph crosses out the phrase “about that time my mother and,” and replaces it with the phrase “but after many days I fell into transgression.” What was Joseph about to say about his family? Since Oliver was very specific about Joseph’s family members uniting with the Presbyterians, he had to have obtained the information from Joseph. Could the aborted phrase have been intended to refer to “about that time” that his mother and other family members were persuaded to unite with the Presbyterians? It would certainly fit into the narrative.

Oliver continues his history by stating that the profession of godliness should have a “benign influence upon the heart.”

After strong solicitations to unite with one of those different societies, and seeing the apparent proselyting disposition manifested with equal warmth from [Page 35]each, his mind was led to more seriously contemplate the importance of a move of this kind…. To profess godliness without its benign influence upon the heart, was a thing so foreign from his feelings, that his spirit was not at rest day nor night.11

Compare this to Joseph’s 1832 account, in which he talks of the influence that a belief in God should have upon the heart.

When I considered upon these things my heart exclaimed well hath the wise man said it is a fool that saith in his heart there is no God. My heart exclaimed all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotent and omnipresent power a being who maketh Laws and decreeth and bindeth all things in their bounds who filleth Eternity who was and is and will be from all Eternity to Eternity.13

[Page 36]Joseph’s 1832 account talks of his mind being “distressed” because he was “convicted” of his sins.

[M]y mind became exceedingly distressed for I became convicted of my sins, and by searching the scriptures I found that mankind did not come unto the Lord, but that they had apostatized from the true and living faith, and there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new testament and I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world.15

Latter-day Saints who are familiar with the account of events leading up to Joseph’s First Vision as they are described in the Pearl of Great Price will clearly recognize Oliver’s story so far. Oliver has quite accurately and thoroughly described the [Page 37]events in Joseph’s life that led him to call upon God, the details of which are entirely consistent with Joseph’s 1832 description as well as matching detail of Joseph’s later descriptions of the events leading up to the First Vision. Oliver is clearly priming his readers for the next installment, which the present-day reader might assume will reveal the actual details of Joseph’s First Vision.

This was not, however, to be the case.

Oliver’s Second Installment: An Abrupt Change in Direction

When Oliver published his second installment two months later, in February 1835, he did a very curious thing — he skips over the description of the actual First Vision. Oliver even “corrects” Joseph’s age from fourteen to seventeen, then proceeds to tell the story of Moroni’s visit. The story of Moroni’s visit is, of course, also included in Joseph’s 1832 account.

Oliver begins the February 1835 installment with an apology and a statement that “it was not my wish to be understood that I could not give the leading items of every important occurrence.”

In my last, published in the 3d No. of the Advocate I apologized for the brief manner in which I should be obliged to give, in many instances, the history of this church. Since then yours of Christmas has been received. It was not my wish to be understood that I could not give the leading items of every important occurrence, at least so far as would effect my duty to my fellowmen, in such as contained important information upon the subject of doctrine, and as would render it intelligibly plain; but as there are, in a great house, many vessels, so in the history of a work of this magnitude, many items which would be interesting to those who follow, are forgotten. In fact, I deem every manifestation of the [Page 38]Holy Spirit, dictating the hearts of the saints in the way of righteousness, to be of importance, and this is one reason why I plead an apology.16

Joseph no doubt recognized Oliver’s detailed description of the events leading up to Joseph’s 1832 description of his vision. During the intervening eight weeks, did Joseph indicate to Oliver that he was not ready to publish the details of his theophany? Something happened that caused Oliver to change his approach, for after he apologized for his apparent haste in documenting the history, he wrote:

You will recollect that I mentioned the time of a religious excitement, in Palmyra and vicinity to have been in the 15th year of our brother J. Smith Jr’s, age—that was an error in the type—it should have been in the 17th.—You will please remember this correction, as it will be necessary for the full understanding of what will follow in time. This would bring the date down to the year 1823.17

The claimed “error in type” allowed Oliver to skip from Joseph’s history at age 14 to age 16, although in 1823, Joseph would have actually been 17. He skipped over Joseph’s 1832 account of seeing the Lord, and moves straight to Joseph’s vision of Moroni.

Not only does Oliver skip the First Vision, but he also now seems to feel it necessary to minimize the importance of the religious excitement that he so thoroughly described in his first installment, stating,

I do not deem it to be necessary to write further on the subject of this excitement. It is doubted by many [Page 39]whether any real or essential good ever resulted from such excitements, while others advocate their propriety with warmth.18

After taking great pains to describe the religious excitement leading up to the significant foundational event alluded to in the previous installment, Oliver is now diminishing its importance before he continues his story. Oliver appears to be doing what we would today call “damage control.”

Yet, before fully proceeding with a description of Moroni’s visit, Oliver apparently feels that he cannot ignore the event completely and obliquely continues to describe events related to the First Vision, only now describing something that has already occurred in the past.

Oliver remarks on Joseph’s desire to know if a “Supreme being” existed during the period of religious excitement, stating,

And it is only necessary for me to say, that while this excitement continued, he continued to call upon the Lord in secret for a full manifestation of divine approbation, and for, to him, the all important information, if a Supreme being did exist, to have an assurance that he was accepted of him.19

Oliver then alludes to the First Vision by saying,

This, most assuredly, was correct—it was right. The Lord has said, long since, and his word remains steadfast, that for him who knocks it shall be opened, & whosoever will, may come and partake of the waters of life freely.20

[Page 40]Oliver is saying that something of significance happened in Joseph’s life prior to the events that Oliver would be describing next, and he assures the reader that “this, most assuredly, was correct.” Joseph asked, and the Lord answered.

“With a Joy Unspeakable”

Still not satisfied that he has adequately covered the period of the vision, Oliver continues to elaborate:

The Lord never said—“Come unto me, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” to turn a deaf ear to those who were weary, when they call upon him. He never said, by the mouth of the prophet—“Ho, every one that thirsts, come ye to the waters,” without passing it as a firm decree, at the same time, that he that should after come, should be filled with a joy unspeakable.21

Note Oliver’s use of the phrase “with a joy unspeakable” in association with Joseph receiving knowledge from the Lord. In his November 1835 journal entry, Joseph actually uses Oliver’s words in his 1835 First Vision description, in which he states, “a pillar of fire appeared above my head, it presently rested down upon me, and filled me with joy unspeakable.”[Page 41]with the description of the First Vision. Upon concluding his description of the First Vision, Joseph states that “my soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great Joy and the Lord was with me.”23 The phrase “joy unspeakable” is never associated with Moroni’s visit in any of these accounts. Clearly, Joseph associated such joy with the experience of the First Vision.

Oliver continues with yet another example:

Neither did he manifest by the Spirit to John upon the isle—“Let him that is athirst, come,” and command him to send the same abroad, under any other consideration, than that “whosoever would, might take the water of life freely,” to the remotest ages of time, or while there was a sinner upon his footstool.24

Here Oliver is talking about a manifestation “by the Spirit” to the apostle John when he sought guidance from the Lord. Oliver is referring to the vision that John had of Jesus Christ on the Isle of Patmos. Once again, Oliver is indicating that the Lord responds to those who seek guidance. This is yet another allusion to Joseph’s First Vision experience.

Finally, after what appears to be an extended effort to do his best to describe the importance of the First Vision without actually giving any details about the vision itself, Oliver states, “But to proceed with my narrative….”25 Oliver then proceeds to describe the visit of Moroni to Joseph Smith, which continues to correlate with Joseph’s 1832 history. Joseph writes,

I fell into transgressions and sinned in many things which brought a wound upon my soul and there were many things which transpired that cannot be [Page 42]written and my Fathers family have suffered many persecutions and afflictions and it came to pass when I was seventeen years of age I called again upon the Lord and he shewed unto me a heavenly vision for behold an angel of the Lord came and stood before me.26

According to the 1832 history, Joseph once again, several years after having received a forgiveness of his sins during the First Vision, felt a need to seek a forgiveness of his sins. Oliver writes,

On the evening of the 21st of September, 1823, previous to retiring to rest, our brother’s mind was unusually wrought up on the subject which had so long agitated his mind—his heart was drawn out in fervent prayer, and his whole soul was so lost to every thing of a temporal nature, that earth, to him, had lost its claims, and all he desired was to be prepared in heart to commune with some kind messenger who could communicate to him the desired information of his acceptance with God…. While continuing in prayer for a manifestation in some way that his sins were forgiven; endeavoring to exercise faith in the scriptures, on a sudden a light like that of day, only of a purer and far more glorious appearance and brightness, burst into the room.27

Joseph’s 1832 account also acknowledges that Moroni conveyed a forgiveness of sins, noting that “he said the Lord had forgiven me my sins and he revealed unto me that in the Town of [Page 43]Manchester Ontario County N.Y. there was plates of gold upon which there was engravings.”28 Oliver said that the angel “then proceeded and gave a general account of the promises made to the fathers, and also gave a history of the aborigines of this country, and said they were literal descendants of Abraham.”29

Why Did Oliver Not Mention the First Vision?

There is a substantial correlation between Oliver’s history and Joseph’s 1832 history, indicating that Oliver had it in his possession. The 1832 history most definitely describes the First Vision. Why, then, did Oliver give such an accurate description leading up to the First Vision and then not mention the vision itself? It seems, based upon his efforts to avoid describing the vision in the second installment, that he understood the importance of the event but was not allowed to describe it specifically. One possibility is that Joseph saw where Oliver was going with the first installment of the story and then decided that he was not ready to have Oliver introduce the story of his First Vision publicly. At this time, the story of Moroni’s visit and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon was already well known among Church membership. It would be expected that this event be included. There is clearly no reason for him to have skipped such an important foundational event in the prophet’s life unless the Prophet requested it of him. By 1835 Joseph was clearly relating the story of the First Vision to others, but the story of the First Vision would not become formally published until several years later.

Prior to the discovery of Joseph’s 1832 history and 1835 journal entries, Oliver’s unusual 1834/1835 account had been used by critics as evidence that Joseph made up the story of the First Vision, since, when the two installments are considered [Page 44]together, it appears that Oliver is relating the religious excitement to Moroni’s visit. It has been claimed that Joseph did not solidify the details of the First Vision story until 1838 in order to establish himself more firmly as prophet during a Church leadership crisis in Kirtland. However, a careful look at Oliver’s history in conjunction with Joseph’s 1832 and 1835 accounts shows that Oliver was quite consistent with the details. Oliver, it appears, knew more than he was allowed to write about at the time.

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “First Vision,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Vision as of 27 October 2013. Wikipedia articles are often modified, and this text is subject to change. The date “1821” referred to with respect to Joseph’s 1832 account is based upon the insertion by Frederick G. Williams of the phrase “in the 16th year of my age,” thus indicating that Joseph was 15 years of age rather than 14. Joseph, however, later corrects his age to 14 in his 1835 journal entry. ↩

  2. Introduction of Oliver Cowdery to W.W. Phelps, in Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate, 1/1 (Oct. 1834), 13. http://en.fairmormon.org/Messenger_and_Advocate/1/1. Hereafter this source will be abbreviated to Messenger and Advocate. ↩

  3. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/1 (Oct. 1834), 13. ↩

  4. Joseph Smith to Oliver Cowdery, in Messenger and Advocate, 1/3 ( (Dec. 1834), 40, http://en.fairmormon.org/Messenger_and_Advocate/1/3. ↩

  5. Joseph Smith, “A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr,” History, [ca. summer 1832]; handwriting of Frederick G. Williams and Joseph Smith; six pages; in Joseph Smith Letterbook 1, Joseph Smith Collection, Church History Library, 2. Original spelling retained. ↩

  6. Oliver Cowdery to W.W. Phelps, in Messenger and Advocate, 1/3 (Dec. 1834), 42. ↩

  7. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/3 (Dec. 1834), 42. ↩

  8. Smith, “A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr,” 2. Spelling has been modernized. Original spelling: “my intimate acquaintance with those of differant denominations led me to marvel excedingly for I discovered that <they did not adorn> instead of adorning their profession by a holy walk and Godly conversation.” ↩

  9. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/3 (Dec. 1834), 42. ↩

  10. Smith, “A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr,” 3-4. Spelling has been modernized. Original spelling: “and my soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great Joy and the Lord was with me but could find none that would believe the hevnly vision nevertheless I pondered these things in my heart about that time my mother and but after many days I fell into transgressions and sinned in many things.” ↩

  11. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/3 (Dec. 1834), 43. ↩

  12. Smith, “A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr,” 3. Spelling has been modernized. Original spelling: “when I considered upon these things my heart exclaimed well hath the wise man said the <it is a> fool <that> saith in his heart there is no God my heart exclaimed all all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotant and omnipreasant power a being who makith Laws and decreeeth and bindeth all things in their bounds who filleth Eternity who was and is and will be from all Eternity to Eternity.” ↩

  13. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/3 (Dec. 1834), 43. ↩

  14. Smith, “A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr,” 2. Spelling has been modernized. Original spelling: “my mind become excedingly distressed for I become convicted of my sins and by searching the scriptures I found that mand <mankind> did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatised from the true and liveing faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new testament and I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world.” ↩

  15. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/3 (Dec. 1834), 43. ↩

  16. Oliver Cowdery to W.W. Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 77-78, http://en.fairmormon.org/Messenger_and_Advocate/1/5. ↩

  17. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 78. ↩

  18. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 78.  ↩

  19. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 78. ↩

  20. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 78. ↩

  21. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 78. ↩

  22. Joseph Smith, Jr., “Sketch Book for the use of Joseph Smith, jr.,” Journal, Sept. 1835–Apr. 1836; handwriting of Warren Parrish, an unidentified scribe, Sylvester Smith, Frederick G. Williams, Warren Cowdery, Joseph Smith, and Oliver Cowdery; 195 pages; Joseph Smith Collection, Church History Library, 25. Spelling modernized. Original spelling: “a pillar of fire appeared above my head, it presently rested down upon my <me> head, and filled me with joy unspeakable….” http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/journal-1835-1836?dm=image-and-text&zm=zoom-inner&tm=expanded&p=25&s=undefined&sm=none. ↩

  23. Smith, “A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr,” 3. ↩

  24. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 78. ↩

  25. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 78. ↩

  26. Smith, “A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr,” 4. Spelling has been modernized. Original spelling: “I fell into transgressions and sinned in many things which brought a wound upon my soul and there were many things which transpired that cannot be writen and my Fathers family have suffered many persicutions and afflictions and it came to pass when I was seventeen years of age I called again upon the Lord and he shewed unto me a heavenly vision for behold an angel of the Lord came and stood before me….” ↩

  27. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 78-79. ↩

  28. Smith, “A History of the life of Joseph Smith Jr,” 4. Original spelling retained. ↩

  29. Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate, 1/5 (Feb. 1835), 80. ↩

Can a Man See God? 1 Timothy 6:16 in Light of Ancient and Modern Revelation

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 8 (2014): 11-26
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Abstract: Joseph Smith’s First Vision is a favorite target of critics of the LDS Church. Evangelical critics in particular, such as Matt Slick of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, seek to discredit the First Vision on biblical grounds. This article explores biblical theophanies and argues that Joseph’s vision fits squarely with the experience of ancient prophets, especially those who are given the rare blessing of piercing the veil of light and glory, the Hebrew kabod, that God dwells within.

“I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun…” –Joseph Smith Jr.1

One of the perennial points of conflict between Evangelical and Mormon theology is whether mortal man is capable of seeing God the Father. The vision of God, otherwise known as a theophany, is the centerpiece of Mormonism’s origin story. In 1820 Joseph Smith entered a grove of trees to inquire of God through prayer which of all the churches he should join. The answer to his prayer came in the form of a visitation from God the Father and Jesus Christ. Joseph Smith’s “First Vision,” as it has come to be called, forms the foundation of Mormonism’s claim to be the “only true and living church” (Doctrine & Covenants 1:30). The importance of Joseph Smith’s First Vision to Latter-day Saint theology renders the First Vision a natural target for critics of the restored church.

[Page 12]The First Vision also exists as an assault on traditional Christian teachings about the nature of God the Father, who, in their view, is immaterial and without physical form. Joseph described God the Father and Jesus Christ in his vision as “two personages” (Joseph Smith—History 1:17), separate, distinct, and visible. The First Vision directly challenges the traditional notion of God the Father, affirming that he has material form, in which light can reflect off his person and be seen by mortal eyes. This bold doctrinal claim is understandably met with criticism from ardent Evangelical defenders, who seek to show from the Bible that the vision of God the Father is not possible.

One representative example is evangelical apologist Matt Slick, the president and founder of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM).2 CARM is primarily an Internet-based organization, also featuring a weekly radio broadcast and active message board. On his website Slick lays out an argument from the New Testament for why Joseph Smith could not have seen God the Father and concludes that “since [Joseph Smith’s] first vision is foundational in Mormonism, without it, Mormonism cannot be true.”3 Slick’s argument against the First Vision centers on his interpretation of 1 Timothy 6:16.4 Speaking of God the Father, the passage reads:

16 Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen.5

[Page 13]This passage has been utilized by Slick in at least three different venues: an article on CARM.org,6 during interaction with Mormons in the CARM chat room,7 and in a YouTube video in which he proselytizes to LDS youth outside the rededication of the Boise Idaho temple.8 In his interaction with LDS youth at the temple, Slick quotes 1 Timothy 6:16 and argues that it prohibits anyone, including Joseph Smith, from the ability to see God the Father:

In 1 Timothy 6:16 Paul the apostle says that the Father, speaking of God as the Father, “dwells in unapproachable light who no man has seen nor can he be seen.” So the Bible—Paul the Apostle—says that God cannot be seen. Joseph Smith said he saw the Father…if Paul says you can’t see the Father, [but] Joseph Smith says you can, whose [version is] true?

For Slick, this passage rejects the possibility that Joseph Smith could have seen God the Father because “God cannot be seen.” Elsewhere Slick establishes that the individual being considered in this passage is God the Father, not Christ.9 Slick is correct on this point because it would not make sense for Paul to claim that Christ cannot be seen because Paul himself has seen Christ (1 Corinthians 15:8).
[Page 14]

“Who Only Hath Immortality…”

1 Timothy 6:16 follows a series of instructions to Timothy to be godly and remain faithful to the gospel. Paul concludes his exhortations to Timothy with a parenthetical aside extolling the greatness of God and proclaiming God’s transcendence over mortal man. Specifically, God is set apart from man because God the Father alone “hath immortality” and dwells in “light which no man can approach unto,” and therefore “no man hath seen nor can see” him. Paul’s description here of God’s nature and qualities should be interpreted as poetic doxology, a genre of writing defined as liturgical expression of praise.10 It is questionable whether Paul meant this to be interpreted as a technically precise theological guide to God’s characteristics (although a biblical inerrantist will see it that way, no doubt). At any rate, Trinitarian critics of Mormonism who wish to employ 1 Timothy 6:16 will first need to explain why the passage incorrectly describes God the Father as the only person who “hath immortality”.

The English word “immortality” in this passage is a translation of the Greek athanasia, which simply refers to a condition wherein death or extinction is not possible. There are clearly other individuals within mainstream Christian (and Mormon) theology who possess immortality. Jesus himself was raised from the dead into immortality, never to die again, as Paul well knew. Elsewhere Paul himself notes that mortal men will also be resurrected into immortality (1 Corinthians 15:53-55). So why does Paul describe God the Father as unique in this aspect? One could counter that resurrection into immortality, for Christ or anyone else, is accomplished and sustained by the power of God the Father, and it is in this sense that God [Page 15]the Father is the only person who truly “hath immortality.” Unfortunately for this argument the Holy Ghost is still a person who is immortal, never to die, and who, according to Matt Slick and all Christians, is “eternal.”11 Traditional Christians who endorse the Athanasian Creed affirm that the Holy Ghost is equally uncreated and infinite with the other members of the Trinity. It is therefore not wise to look to Paul’s doxological eruption of praise as a technical theological guide: God the Father, frankly, is not the only person who “hath immortality.”

“Dwelling in the Light”

Paul next describes God the Father as dwelling “in the light which no man can approach unto.” The motif of God dwelling behind a cloak of light, smoke, cloud, or fire that hides him from the eyes of mortal men is found throughout the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. The Hebrew word often used for this shroud of light or cloud is “kabod” (“doxa” in the Greek Septuagint), often translated as “glory.”12 The kabod of God emanates from him and simultaneously represents his presence as well as protects unworthy mortal eyes from beholding him. Referring to God’s presence among Israel in the wilderness following the exile, the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament suggests that:

Yahweh is present only in the “pillar of cloud” in the tent of meeting. The cloud indicates God’s presence while at the same time concealing God’s radiance…Thus “cloud” and “fire” symbolize God’s being and [Page 16]presence, while at the same time concealing God’s nature.13

Notable examples of this phenomenon in the Old Testament include the aforementioned pillar of smoke and fire that accompanied the wandering Israelites (Exodus 13:21-22, 19:18, 33:9), the “clouds” and “fire” that surround and emanate from God (Psalm 97:2), and the cloud that filled the temple, equated with the “glory of God” (1 Kings 8:10-11). Ezekiel also describes the “fire” and “brightness” of God (Ezekiel 1:4, 26-28). In each instance God’s physical presence is manifest by the kabod, but his physical form is simultaneously hidden.

The kabod of God is frequently understood to be a protection and a shield for mortal man because it was believed that a man or woman would face death were he or she to see the face of God. Upon seeing the burning bush (itself a shroud of fire), Moses hides his face because he is afraid to look upon God (Exodus 3:6). God explicitly stated to Moses in Exodus 33:20-23 that Moses cannot see God’s face and live; therefore when God appears to Moses his “glory” (kabod) will pass by, and God’s hand “will cover thee,” protecting Moses from death. The father of Samson, on seeing an angel of God, appears to be momentarily confused and fears that his death is imminent because he thinks he has seen God (Judges 13:21-23). In Exodus 19 [Page 17]God instructs Moses to keep the people away from God’s kabod for their own protection:

18 And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly… 20 And the LORD came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and the LORD called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up. 21 And the LORD said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish. (Exodus 19:18-21)

In the New Testament the kabod of God is frequently described in terms of light, such as the “bright cloud” at Christ’s transfiguration that accompanied the light that emanated from Christ himself (Matthew 17:1-8), the “rainbow” of John’s vision of God (Revelation 4:3), and, most relevantly, the “light” described by Paul (Acts 22:6, 1 Timothy 6:16). In 1 Timothy 6:16, immediately after referring to the unapproachable light that God dwells in, Paul notes that “no man hath seen nor can see” God the Father. The connection between these two statements is obvious: No man has seen nor can see God the Father because God dwells in light (God’s kabod) that is unapproachable by fallen, mortal humans. On this point evangelical author and theologian Gordon F. Fee agrees:

Him no one has seen or can see (cf. “invisible” in 1:17). These clauses reinforce his dwelling in unapproachable light and reflect a common OT theme (Exod. 33:20; cf. 19:21). The emphasis in these last two items is not the Greek one, that God is unknowable, but the Jewish [Page 18]one, that God is so infinitely holy that sinful humanity can never see him and live (cf. Isaiah 6:1-5).14

The reason God is unseen by mortal men is that men are not worthy to behold his face. Rather than describing an immaterial God who is in inherently unable to be seen by physical eyes, Paul is describing a God who theoretically can be seen but who is presently not seen. This is an important distinction. By way of analogy, a rock deep within the mantle of the Earth is presently unable to be seen by mortal eyes (the technology does not exist to retrieve it), but it is not inherently or metaphysically unable to be seen. The explanation for man’s inability to see God the Father does not lie in God’s non-physical nature but in God’s location behind a veil of glory impenetrable by mortal human eyes. Relative to humans, God is invisible only in practice, not in absolute reality.

“…Which No Man Can Approach Unto.”

Is it possible for God to strengthen or transfigure a person such that he or she could penetrate the kabod of God and be sustained in his presence? There are important instances in the scriptures in which this exact thing has taken place. This special, sacred blessing comes to some of those chosen by God to do his work, Moses being one prominent example. As mentioned above, Moses is warned that he cannot see God’s face and live, and yet on occasion God makes an exception to the rule for Moses and his associates. In Exodus 24:9-11 the author expressly states that Moses and the elders accompanying him “saw the God of Israel” and that God did not punish them for it. In Exodus 33:7-11 the general method by which Moses received God’s words and then relayed them to Israel is given. [Page 19]Moses would enter the tabernacle to commune with God, and the kabod of God in the form of a cloudy pillar would cover the tabernacle, simultaneously announcing and shielding the presence of God from Israel. Inside the tabernacle Moses, as the agent of God, was privileged to speak to God “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (see also Deuteronomy 34:10). According to Fabry,

Moses spoke with Yahweh “face to face” (Numbers 14:14; Exodus 33:11). In these passages Yahweh removed the concealing cloud, which actually represents an element protecting the partner in dialogue with God: when Moses came down from Sinai, his face reflected the radiance of the kabod (Exodus 4:29-35). All the Israelites were allowed to see the cloud and fire, but only Moses was allowed to look on Yahweh without his “veil.”15

This mode of communication is spelled out in such an explicit manner precisely because it was special and unusual. The general rule is that men do not speak to God face to face, but Moses was privileged to do exactly that. Later in the same chapter this privilege of visual contact with the Lord’s face is revoked (Exodus 33:19-23). It is a unique privilege reserved for rare and special occasions.

The patriarch Jacob was another who was blessed to see beyond the kabod of God (Genesis 32:30). After a nighttime encounter with God, Jacob calls the place of his vision “Peniel,” because, in his words, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” The special mention that his life was preserved after seeing God is testament to the fact that this was an exception to the general rule. The prophet Isaiah sees God in vision and fears for himself, shouting, “Woe is me! for I am undone…for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:1-7) Isaiah’s fear is calmed by a seraphim who declares Isaiah to be clean and holy, rendering him able to sustain the sight [Page 20]of God. The author of Hebrews noted that Moses’ faith was strengthened because he saw “him who is invisible” (Hebrews 11:27). This is an especially interesting comment, suggesting that God’s invisibility is only invisibility in practice, not in reality, and that exceptions exist to the rule.

The Book of Mormon contains a well-known example of a mortal man being privileged to see beyond the kabod of the Lord and gaze upon his physical form. The Brother of Jared sees the pre-incarnate, physical form of Jesus Christ in the spirit16 because “never has man come before [the Lord] with such exceeding faith” (Ether 3:9-16). In this moment “the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared,” a reference to the removal of the Lord’s kabod and the strengthening or momentary transfiguration of Jared’s physical body and mind so that he could endure the experience. Father Lehi likewise sees the kabod of God in the form of a pillar of fire and is later privileged to see beyond the kabod to see God sitting on his throne (1 Nephi 1:5-8). In the Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith describes a vision of Jesus that he shared with Oliver Cowdery in which the “veil was taken from [their] minds” and Jesus appears in light “above the brightness of the sun” (D&C 110:1-3).

Most important to the present discussion, in Joseph Smith’s retelling of his First Vision experience he variously refers to a “pillar of fire” or “pillar of light,”17 “pillar of flame,”18 “pillar of [Page 21]light… above the brightness of the sun,”19 and “brilliant light.”20 The fire and light is equivalent to the ancient Hebrew notion of God’s kabod, or glory. In a fascinating secondhand account by Joseph’s friend Orson Pratt we receive further insight into Joseph’s experience with the kabod of God:

And, while thus pouring out his soul, anxiously desiring an answer from God, he, at length, saw a very bright and glorious light in the heavens above; which, at first, seemed to be at a considerable distance. He continued praying, while the light appeared to be gradually descending toward him; and, as it drew nearer, it increased in brightness, and magnitude, so that, by the time that it reached the tops of the trees, the whole wilderness, for some distance round, was illuminated in a most glorious and brilliant manner. He expected to have seen the leaves and boughs of the trees consumed, as soon as the light came in contact with them; but, perceiving that it did not produce that effect, he was encouraged with the hopes of being able to endure its presence. It continued descending, slowly, until it rested upon the earth, and he was enveloped in the midst of it. When it first came upon him, it produced a peculiar sensation throughout his whole system; and immediately, his mind was caught away, from the natural object with which he was surrounded; and he was enwrapped in a heavenly vision, and saw two glorious personages, who exactly resembled each other in their features or likeness.21

[Page 22]From Orson Pratt’s account we receive several interesting details. Joseph’s surprise that the light did not consume the “leaves and boughs” echoes the surprise that Moses felt upon encountering the burning bush that similarly “was not consumed” (Exodus 3:2-3). Pratt may have intended this parallel to be made by his readers. We also learn from this account that Joseph experienced a “peculiar sensation throughout his whole system” just at the moment that the light, or kabod, of God fell upon him. Pratt must have learned of this unusual detail from Joseph Smith himself. It is tempting to suppose that this describes the moment in which Joseph’s physical body is transfigured so that he can endure the sight of God. The experience of Joseph Smith is similar to that of Moses and other ancient prophets singled out to see beyond the otherwise “unapproachable light” of God’s glory. The natural man, in his fallen mortal state, is forbidden and protected from seeing God’s physical form by the kabod of God, but this is a general rule which, like most rules, has proven exceptions. Paul’s words should be read in light of this.

John 6:46

Returning to the aforementioned YouTube video, on facing Slick’s criticism of Joseph Smith based on his interpretation of 1 Timothy 6:16, the LDS teens faithfully call upon their seminary training by citing Old Testament visions of God as evidence that God can in fact be seen. Matt Slick is prepared with a reply:

Jesus [said], “not that any man has seen the Father” [in] John 6:46, so they are seeing the pre-incarnate Jesus, never the Father.

Before addressing Slick’s conclusion that Old Testament theophanies are of Christ, a brief look at his use of John 6:46 is necessary. The passage indeed has Jesus saying “Not that any man has seen the Father…,” but Slick fails to quote the rest of [Page 23]the passage, which reads, “…save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father.” By consciously omitting the latter half of the passage, Slick appears to be subverting the true intention of Jesus’s teaching, which is that he which is “of God” is privileged to see God the Father. Some Evangelicals may contest this point by arguing that the reference to “he which is of God” is a reference to only Jesus Christ. However, the Bible refers to other individuals as being “of God” as well (cf. 1 Samuel 2:27, 9:6-10, John 8:47, 1 Timothy 6:11, 2 Timothy 3:17, Titus 1:7, 1 John 5:19). Furthermore, according to the dominant Christology espoused by mainstream Christians, Jesus’ nature is “fully man and fully God,” otherwise known as the Hypostatic Union.22 If Jesus is “fully man,” and yet is capable of seeing God the Father (according to John 6:46), then it is not wise to argue that a man, by definition, cannot see God the Father.

Sensus Plenior

Slick’s broader argument is that all visions of God in the Old Testament were actually visions of the pre-incarnate Jesus Christ. He reasons that because the New Testament doesn’t allow for man to see God the Father, the logical conclusion is that all Old Testament theophanies are visions of the Son, not of the Father. Of course, the relevant Old Testament pericopes do not specify that the God being seen is the pre-incarnate Christ. Slick’s conclusion that it is the pre-incarnate Christ is only possible by reading it through the lens of other scripture, in this case Slick’s reading of the New Testament.

This basic method is a common one throughout all of Christianity. Interpreting a passage of scripture through the [Page 24]lens of earlier or later scripture is an important part of the Judeo-Christian hermeneutical tradition historically referred to as sensus plenior, or “fuller sense.” It rests on the belief that the deeper, fuller meaning of a passage of scripture can sometimes be revealed only by contextualizing it with other passages of scripture composed separately, even if by different authors widely separated by time and space.

The first generation of Christian writers canonized this method by seeing prophecies of Jesus Christ in the writings of Hebrew prophets. Latter-day Saints are not an exception to this tradition; passages of LDS scripture are regularly interpreted in light of other passages of scripture. A relevant example of this LDS practice is that most Latter-day Saints would likely agree with Slick that the theophanies of the Old Testament are primarily of the pre-incarnate Jesus Christ. They arrive at this conclusion by reinterpreting Old Testament events in light of modern LDS revelations (most notably 3 Nephi 15:5). Latter-day Saints have no theological issue with Slick’s claim that Old Testament theophanies are generally of God the Son, not God the Father.

At first glance this may appear to undermine LDS arguments that appeal to Old Testament theophanies to demonstrate that God the Father can be seen. However, as has been argued above, biblical warnings about man’s inability to see members of the Godhead are due to God’s kabod, which both represents God’s presence and hides him from sinful eyes. Whether it is God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost, the visual inaccessibility by mortals to the members of the Godhead is due to the glory that emanates from them, an impenetrable barrier to mortal eyes except in those cases in which God chooses otherwise.

The principle of sensus plenior is another tool for Latter-day Saints to contextualize 1 Timothy 6:16 and similar passages. In the Doctrine and Covenants the following insight is provided: [Page 25]“For no man has seen God at any time in the flesh, except quickened by the Spirit of God” (D&C 67:11). In the Pearl of Great Price Moses has a marvelous vision of God the Father and his many creations. The aftereffects of this experience are illuminating:

And the presence of God withdrew from Moses, that his glory was not upon Moses; and Moses was left unto himself. And as he was left unto himself, he fell unto the Earth. And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing…But now my own eyes have beheld God; but not my natural, but my spiritual eyes, for my natural eyes could not have beheld; for I should have withered and died in his presence; but his glory was upon me; and I beheld his face, for I was transfigured before him. (Moses 1:9-11)

In this passage, Moses sees the face of God and lives to tell about it because God’s glory was upon him, and he was transfigured. Moses’s reference to “spiritual eyes” contrasts with “natural eyes,” or in other words the eyes of the “natural man” left to his own devices without the strengthening and protection of God’s power. These modern-day scriptures comport very well with the biblical teaching that man cannot see God unless quickened or protected from God’s kabod. Following in the long Judeo-Christian tradition of sensus plenior, Latter-day Saints can easily understand how the words in 1 Timothy 6:16 do not contradict Joseph Smith’s First Vision. The same principle can be applied to John 1:18, which notes that “no man hath seen God at any time.” Taken together with the entirety of scripture, ancient and modern, this passage clearly is referring to “unaided” man. Latter-day Saints argue, therefore, that Joseph Smith was transfigured, or quickened, by [Page 26]God’s glory such that he was able to view the face of God the Father while in the flesh.

It is not anticipated that non-Mormons interested in this issue will accept the validity of interpreting biblical passages through the lens of modern LDS scripture that they do not accept as inspired or holy. Jews, for example, would likewise reject Matt Slick’s claim that all Old Testament theophanies are of the pre-mortal God the Son, a claim he arrives at only by reading the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament. Nonetheless, non-Mormons must accept the basic logic of the practice: within the framework of a particular religious tradition (in this case, Latter-day Saint), it is wholly consistent to interpret scripture with other scripture that is a part of that tradition.

Conclusion

God the Father dwells behind a curtain or veil of unapproachable light and glory (kabod), which is not penetrable by the eyes of unaided mortal man. Only in rare instances of grace is a mortal strengthened by God’s power to the point that he or she can pass through this barrier and endure the vision of God. Paul’s doxological description of God’s transcendence over man in 1 Timothy 6:16 should be interpreted in that context. God is capable of revealing his physical self to man. Such was the case with Moses and other ancient prophets, and such was the case with Joseph Smith.

  1. Joseph Smith—History 1:16. ↩

  2. http://carm.org/. ↩

  3. Matt Slick, “Can the Father be seen?” at the CARM website, at http://carm.org/can-father-be-seen (accessed November 7, 2012). ↩

  4. 1 Timothy is traditionally ascribed to Paul the Apostle, though modern scholars now recognize that this “pastoral” epistle is pseudepigraphal. For purposes of homogeneity in conversation between Mormonism and Evangelical Christianity (especially, in this case, between Matt Slick and myself), I will continue to refer to the writer as “Paul.”. ↩

  5. All Bible passages quoted are from the King James Version. ↩

  6. Slick, “Can the Father be seen?”. ↩

  7. Experienced by the author circa 2010. Also, for a representative chatroom conversation between Slick and an unknown Mormon named “Alex” see Matt Slick, “Did Joseph Smith see God the Father”, http://carm.org/did-joseph-smith-see-god-father. ↩

  8. Carmvideos, “Boise, Idaho Temple rededication with Matt Slick and others” YouTube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYSQoPf0ts&feature=plcp. ↩

  9. Slick, “Can the Father be seen?”. ↩

  10. James L. Bailey and Lyle D. Vander Broek, Literary Forms in the New Testament: A Handbook (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 74, available online at http://tinyurl.com/mhgtg3y (accessed Aug 11, 2013). ↩

  11. Slick briefly describes the nature of the Holy Ghost on his website. Matt Slick, “The Holy Spirit,” http://carm.org/holy-spirit. ↩

  12. William J. Hamblin, “‘I Have Revealed Your Name’: The Hidden Temple in John 17,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 1 (2012): 74-75. ↩

  13. David N. Freedman, Mainz B. E. Willoughby, “‘ānān” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament XI, eds. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 256, available online at http://tinyurl.com/b9ctulr (accessed Feb 3, 2013). Cf. Gerhard Kittel, “doxa” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, eds. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1985), 178-81, http://tinyurl.com/bkqt55b (accessed Feb 3, 2013); Roger Cook, “God’s ‘Glory’: More Evidence for the Anthropomorphic Nature of God in the Bible”, FairMormon, http://www.fairmormon.org/perspectives/publications/gods-glory-more-evidence-for-the-anthropomorphic-nature-of-god-in-the-bible (accessed November 11, 2013). ↩

  14. Gordon F. Fee, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1984), 5-6 of ch. 17, available online at http://tinyurl.com/akbc6d3 (accessed Feb 3, 2013). ↩

  15. Henz-Josef Fabry, “‘ānān” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament X1, 256, online at http://tinyurl.com/b9ctulr. ↩

  16. Latter-day Saints believe that all spirit is physical matter. See Doctrine & Covenants 131:7-8. ↩

  17. Dean C. Jessee, “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” in Opening The Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations 1820-1844, ed. John W. Welch with Erick B. Carlson, (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 5. In the 1832 account, Joseph initially wrote “pillar of fire” but scratched out the word “fire” and replaced it with “light,” thus rendering it “pillar of light.” This may reflect the difficulty that many prophets seem to have in describing heavenly scenes with limited human vocabulary. ↩

  18. Jessee, “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” 8. ↩

  19. Jessee, “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” 14. ↩

  20. Jessee, “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” 18. ↩

  21. Jessee, “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” 21. ↩

  22. The “Hypostatic Union” is a formulation of Christ’s nature dating back to the early centuries of Christianity, which affirms that humanity and divinity are simultaneously present in the person of Jesus Christ. Latter-day Saints agree with this basic concept but for different reasons. Mainstream Christians generally believe that humanity and divinity are mutually exclusive. ↩

Of Tolerance and Intolerance

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 8 (2014): 7-9
5

Review of D. A. Carson. The Intolerance of Tolerance. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2012. 186 pp. with indices of names, subjects and scriptures. $24.00 (hardback), $16.00 (paperback).

In graduate school I was disheartened to find that while the school promoted tolerance as the highest virtue, such tolerance was more often honored in the breach. Tolerance was used as an excuse for hatred and bigotry. This is because it is simply impossible to tolerate everything. One cannot tolerate both childhood innocence and pedophilia (to take an extreme example). One must choose what one will tolerate. In some cases the choice to tolerate some things will unavoidably and perhaps unintentionally cause us to cease to tolerate others.

D. A. Carson explores this seeming paradox in his book The Intolerance of Tolerance, although he takes a different line of reasoning. Carson distinguishes between two definitions of tolerance that he says are confused and conflicted.

Carson claims that under the older understanding of tolerance “a person might be judged tolerant if, while holding strong views, he or she insisted that others had the right to dissent from those views and argue their own cases.”1 The older understanding was based on three assumptions: “(1) there is objective truth out there, and it is our duty to pursue that truth; (2) [Page 8]the various parties in a dispute think that they know what the truth of the matter is, even though they disagree sharply, each party thinking the other is wrong; (3) nevertheless they hold that the best chance of uncovering the truth of the matter, or the best chance of persuading most people with reason and not with coercion, is by the unhindered exchange of ideas, no matter how wrong-headed some of those ideas seem.”2 As a result, “the older view of tolerance held either that truth is objective and can be known, and that the best way to uncover it is bold tolerance of those who disagree, since sooner or later the truth will win out; or that while truth can be known in some domains, it probably cannot be known in other domains, and that the wisest and least malignant course in such cases is benign tolerance grounded in the superior knowledge that recognizes our limitations.”3

On the other hand, the newer understanding of tolerance assumes “that there is no one view that is exclusively true.”4 Therefore, “we must be tolerant, not because we cannot distinguish the right path from the wrong path, but because all paths are equally right.”5 Then “intolerance is no longer a refusal to allow contrary opinions to say their piece in public, but must be understood to be any questioning or contradicting the view that all opinions are equal in value, that all world views have equal worth, that all stances are equally valid. To question such postmodern axioms is by definition intolerant. For such questioning there is no tolerance whatsoever, for it is classed as intolerance and must therefore be condemned. It has become the supreme vice.”6

[Page 9]A consequence of this newer understanding of tolerance is that any questioning of the coherence or logic of the position of someone holding this view is considered intolerance and will not be tolerated.

Carson discusses the history of tolerance, notes the inconsistency, if not blatant hypocrisy of advocates of the new tolerance, and explores how tolerance becomes a pretext for the persecution of Christians. It is a thoughtful and thought-provoking work.

Many universities have compulsory freshman reading of works designed to help them become more tolerant. Carson’s work should be on those required lists, but probably will not. After all, his views would likely not be tolerated.

  1. D. A. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), 6. ↩

  2. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance, 6-7. ↩

  3. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance, 11. ↩

  4. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance, 11. ↩

  5. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance, 11. ↩

  6. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance, 12. ↩

Limhi’s Discourse: Proximity and Distance in Teaching

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 8 (2014): 1-6
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Abstract: The author introduces a syntactic technique known as “enallage”—an intentional substitution of one grammatical form for another. This technique can be used to create distance or proximity between the speaker, the audience, and the message. The author demonstrates how king Limhi skillfully used this technique to teach his people the consequences of sin and the power of deliverance through repentance.

“Enallage,” derived from the Greek word meaning “interchange,” is an intentional substitution of one grammatical form for another, such as changing pronouns from the singular to the plural or vice versa. This intentional substitution can also involve different combinations of switching the form of personal address. For example, enallage can include switching from second-person to third-person address or other variations.

Scholarly articles have demonstrated the possible existence of enallage in the scriptures.1 David Bokovoy skillfully illustrated how enallage has been used by authors in the Bible and the Book of Mormon to provide “a poetic articulation of [Page 2]a progression from distance to proximity.”2 In his article, he demonstrated how Nephi used this technique to draw his audience into a feeling of proximity in his discourse about and with the Lord. Nephi first created a sense of distance by referring to the Lord in the third person:

My God hath been my support; he hath led me through mine afflictions in the wilderness; and he hath preserved me upon the waters of the great deep. (2 Nephi 4:20; italics added in this and succeeding scriptural passages)

After talking about the Lord in the third person, Nephi shifted and began to talk directly to the Lord:

Rejoice, O my heart, and cry unto the Lord, and say: O Lord, I will praise thee forever; yea, my soul will rejoice in thee, my God, and the rock of my salvation. (2 Nephi 4:30)

The effect of this switch in person is to help personalize Nephi’s message of praise to the Lord. Nephi’s relationship with the Lord seems to become more intimate and personal to us, his intended audience.

A similar and even more dramatic effect was achieved by the prophet Nathan when speaking with King David about his dealings with Uriah and Bathsheba. Following the death of Uriah, Nathan, during an audience with David, told a story of “two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor” (2 Samuel 12:1). The rich man stole the poor man’s only lamb without justification or recompense. Upon hearing this story, “David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man,” and [Page 3]David pronounced the dire punishment that awaited the rich man (2 Samuel 12:5).

At this point, Nathan personalized the message for David by declaring, “Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:7). The effect must have been truly dramatic as David saw himself in the role of the rich man, with Uriah as the poor man and Bathsheba as the lamb. Telling the story about the two men in the third person helped create the distance that David needed in order to gain the proper perspective. Changing to the second person drove the message home to David’s heart.

A similar example of this type of syntactic technique is found in chapter seven of Mosiah in the Book of Mormon. Limhi and his people were in bondage to the Lamanites in the land of Nephi. Prior to their escape to the land of Zarahemla, Limhi called his people together and addressed them. He began his discourse by speaking directly to his people and referring to them using either the second-person plural pronouns “ye” and “you” or the first-person plural “we”:

O ye, my people, lift up your heads and be comforted; for behold, the time is at hand, or is not far distant, when we shall no longer be in subjection to our enemies, notwithstanding our many strugglings, which have been in vain; yet I trust there remaineth an effectual struggle to be made. Therefore, lift up your heads, and rejoice, and put your trust in God. (Mosiah 7:18–19)

In verse 20, Limhi identified the cause of his people’s bondage:

And again, that same God has brought our fathers out of the land of Jerusalem, and has kept and preserved his people even until now; and behold, it is because of our iniquities and abominations that he has brought us into bondage. (Mosiah 7:20)

[Page 4]Limhi was very clear; our iniquities and abominations caused our bondage. In verses 22 through 24, Limhi lamented the effects that this bondage brought upon them:

And behold, we at this time do pay tribute to the king of the Lamanites, to the amount of one half of our corn, and our barley, and even all our grain of every kind, and one half of the increase of our flocks and our herds; and even one half of all we have or possess the king of the Lamanites doth exact of us, or our lives. And now, is not this grievous to be borne? And is not this, our affliction, great? Now behold, how great reason we have to mourn. Yea, I say unto you, great are the reasons which we have to mourn; for behold how many of our brethren have been slain, and their blood has been spilt in vain, and all because of iniquity. (Mosiah 7:22–24)

Up to this point in his discourse, Limhi had been consistent in addressing his people in the first or second person. However, beginning with verse 25, he made a dramatic departure from this rhetorical pattern by switching to the third person. He stopped referring to his people as “ye” or “we” and began referring to them as “they”:

For if this people had not fallen into transgression the Lord would not have suffered that this great evil should come upon them. But behold, they would not hearken unto his words; but there arose contentions among them, even so much that they did shed blood among themselves. And a prophet of the Lord have they slain; yea, a chosen man of God, who told them of their wickedness and abominations, and prophesied of many things which are to come, yea, even the coming of Christ. (Mosiah 7:25–26)

[Page 5]This shift to the third person helped create distance between Limhi’s people and their actions. It allowed his people to view, perhaps a little more objectively, the severity of their crimes, including the murder of the prophet Abinadi. In verse 28, Limhi continued by saying:

And now, because he [Abinadi] said this, they did put him to death; and many more things did they do which brought down the wrath of God upon them. Therefore, who wondereth that they are in bondage, and that they are smitten with sore afflictions? (Mosiah 7:28)

It is striking that it is no longer “we” that are in bondage and afflicted, but “they” and “them.” In verses 29 through 31, Limhi pronounced the woes that would come upon the Lord’s people if “they” transgressed against God.

Similar to his dramatic shift to the third person beginning in verse 25, Limhi finished his discourse by reverting back to the second-person plural when referring to his people:

And now, behold, the promise of the Lord is fulfilled, and ye are smitten and afflicted. But if ye will turn to the Lord with full purpose of heart, and put your trust in him, and serve him with all diligence of mind, if ye do this, he will, according to his own will and pleasure, deliver you out of bondage. (Mosiah 7:32–33)

Just as shifting to the third person created distance between his people and their actions, Limhi’s switch back to the second person in the final verses helped his people get a personal look at their dire situation and recognize a possible solution to their bondage. As was the case with Nathan’s message to David, Limhi’s use of this syntactic technique helped communicate his message of repentance and deliverance with even more power to the hearts of his people.[Page 6]

  1. Kevin L. Barney, “Enallage in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3/1 (1997): 113–47; Kevin L. Barney, “Further Light on Enallage,” Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon: The FARMS Updates of the 1990s, retrieved from http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=98&chapid=1044. ↩

  2. David E. Bokovoy, “From Distance to Proximity: A Poetic Function of Enallage in the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9/1 (2000): 60–63. ↩

Elder Neal A. Maxwell on Consecration, Scholarship, and the Defense of the Kingdom

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): vii-xix
17

The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, or FARMS, was organized by John W. Welch in California in 1979 and then moved to Provo when Professor Welch joined the law faculty at BYU the following year. In 1997, while I was serving as chairman of the FARMS Board of Directors, Gordon B. Hinckley, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and chairman of the Board of Trustees of Brigham Young University (BYU), invited the Foundation to become a part of the University. “FARMS,” President Hinckley said at the time, “represents the efforts of sincere and dedicated scholars. It has grown to provide strong support and defense of the Church on a professional basis. I wish to express my strong congratulations and appreciation for those who started this effort and who have shepherded it to this point.”1

In 2001, FARMS was rechristened as the Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (ISPART), but then, mercifully, in 2006 we received permission to change its name to the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Elder Maxwell, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church since July 1981, had passed away in late July 2004.

[Page viii]On 27 September 1991—years before the Foundation’s affiliation with the University, a decade prior to the first of those name changes, and long before he became something of a patron saint to my Islamic Translation Series—Elder Maxwell addressed that year’s “FARMS Annual Recognition Banquet,” as it was then called, in the Wilkinson Student Center on the BYU campus.

I had joined BYU’s Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages in the fall of 1985, and then, in 1988, had been invited to launch and edit the Review of Books on the Book of Mormon—which eventually became the FARMS Review of Books and then, simply, the FARMS Review. Our first issue was published in 1989, and, for the first few years, the Review appeared only annually. In 1991, if I’m not mistaken, I was not yet a member of the FARMS board. I was very junior, and a very minor player.

Still, for what little it’s worth, I was present at that banquet, and, as it happens, I played a slightly embarrassing role, perhaps forgotten by the others who were there but still acutely memorable to me:

I had been invited to offer the invocation and the blessing on the meal. Immediately after I said “Amen,” Hugh Nibley called out “He didn’t bless the food!” A whispered but perceptible disagreement broke out among the audience about whether I had or hadn’t—I thought I had—and, after thirty seconds or so, a bit chagrined and determined to put the matter behind me, I took it upon myself to return to the lectern and offer a second prayer—an addendum, in which I most definitely did bless the food. For a still relatively new faculty member and associate of FARMS, the evening hadn’t begun altogether well. (At the conclusion of the program, though, Elder Maxwell sought me out and assured me that I had indeed blessed the food the first time. He was, among many other things, a remarkably gracious man, and I miss him very much.) But any embarrassment that [Page ix]I felt was soon forgotten in the sheer pleasure of being in the presence of, and hearing from, a living apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I have received permission from Elder Maxwell’s family to reproduce here the transcription of Elder Maxwell’s remarks at the banquet that was made from a recording by my friend and former Maxwell Institute colleague Matthew Roper on 5 October 1991, slightly more than a week after the event.2 While a more polished version of the speech eventually appeared in BYU Studies, it was considerably shortened and the references to its specific audience were largely eliminated. So far as I am aware, Elder Maxwell’s full banquet remarks have never before appeared publicly.3

I have, for clarity and exactness, modified some of the punctuation in the transcription and two or three cases of capitalization, but I have made absolutely no changes in its wording. I have also inserted a few footnoted references and explanations. (The scriptural references inserted into the text itself were supplied by Matthew Roper as he transcribed the talk.) In some cases, Elder Maxwell’s quotations (very likely made from memory) vary slightly from his sources; I have not corrected these variations. Elder Maxwell was a sophisticated wordsmith, but the version of the speech reproduced here retains its informal, slightly rough, oral, off-the-cuff style. I did not feel that I had the right to alter that, and neither did I think it important to do so. The prophetic voice of this modern apostle can still be plainly heard through these transcribed remarks. Indeed, as I read these words, I can hear Elder Maxwell’s literal [Page x]voice again in my mind, and I hope that others who knew and loved him will have the same experience.

I believe that they are important historically, but also because of the light they shed on the position that this very reflective special witness took toward the kind of work that FARMS was then doing and that The Interpreter Foundation now seeks to further.

****

Thank you very much, Jack.4

I’ve never made any secret of my appreciation for FARMS. As I see you grow larger and become more significant, I’ll never have any greater appreciation than I did a few years back when our enemies were lobbing all sorts of mortar shells into our Church encampment, and among the few guns that were blazing away were the guns of FARMS. That meant that Jack and Sister Welch and a few of you here were running mimeograph machines, pasting mailing labels on, yourself. I thank you and salute you for that kind of devotion. As big and wonderful as you will become—and I hope you do—my memories are always nurtured by those moments when so few stood up to respond, and among those who did were scholars who have taken the lead in FARMS. Really, that’s why I’ve come to pay thanks to all of you, individually and collectively. This organization, independent as it is, is nevertheless committed, as I see it, to protect and to build up the Kingdom of God and I thank all of you who have any part in it.

[Page xi]I want to thank, while I’m here, also so many of you in this room who have contributed to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Those like Jack and Dick Bushman and others not only wrote articles, but did yeoman service as editors. Of that project, people said it couldn’t be done or, if it got done, it would take ten years. It took three. They said it couldn’t be done. Ever so many things were issued in the way of jeremiads, but it’s been done and will be off the press in November. Again, that could not have been accomplished without the men and women in this room and so many others.

I hope you don’t underestimate the significance of what you do as articulators of the faith. In praising C. S. Lewis, Austin Farrer said the following (and, when I think of this quote, I think of FARMS), “Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced, but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief is possible.”5 An excellent quote.

One recent example of your being at the cutting edge, of course, is the discovery of certain passages in some papyri that bear a potentially significant relationship to the Book of Abraham and its facsimiles.6 So that you’ll get a sense of my response to that, I’ve been in a little correspondence with the ambassador of Egypt to the United States. Having met him a few months ago and talked with him about Abraham and Egypt, he’s quite fascinated by it, so off went one of your FARMS [Page xii]newsletters to that ambassador. There’s not been time for him to respond. And then an LDS man who works for a big bank in Saudi Arabia had presented me with a beautiful replication of the facsimile, framed and done in Cairo by an Egyptian artist. It’s hanging on the wall in my office. The artist in Cairo said, “What are you Mormons doing with these things about Abraham?” We’re in the middle of significant things, and at the cutting edge is FARMS, for which I express my appreciation.

What I see happening, brothers and sisters, is coming on the installment basis, in which there is vindication after vindication of the Prophet Joseph. And though he was not a perfect man, his bottom line about himself I read to you now: “I never told you that I was perfect, but there is no error in the revelations which I have taught.”7 We will walk through a series of events, as we do now, in which, on issue after issue, he will be vindicated in terms of his prophetic mission. I remember, with many of you, years ago, having the Prophet criticized or at least disdained because he presumed to say that doctors had come to treat his leg when he was a boy. Doctors in rural New England? And then, as you remember, Dr. LeRoy Wirthlin researched the matter several years ago and discovered that the doctor who came to treat young Joseph was from Dartmouth and brought with him medical students. It turns out, as you recall, that this doctor was years ahead of the medical profession in his treatment of that particular ailment.8 So what the Prophet says is, for us, going to be incrementally vindicated, whether, in my judgment, it’s a facsimile or who treated him, we will find [Page xiii]this is a remarkable man and we will see this occurring again and again.

I mention also to you, in the spirit of appreciation, that I believe much of the vindication that will come to the Prophet and to this work of the Restoration will come by scholars who are committed to the Kingdom, who are unequivocally devoted to it. His vindication will often occur through your articulation, you and others like you. So thank you for providing the climate that Austin Farrer describes so well.

By the way, I think you’re helping another group. I don’t know the demographics of this group. They are a most interesting group and it isn’t your primary constituency, but George MacDonald, who was C. S. Lewis’s mentor in absentia, had a quote I share with you: “It is often the incapacity for defending the faith they love, which turns men into persecutors.”9 Defenders beget defenders and one of the significant side benefits of scholars who are devoted, such as the men and women who are represented here tonight, is that we will at least reduce the number of people who do not have the capacity to defend their faith and who otherwise might “grow weary and faint in their minds” (Hebrews 12:3).

Even the title of your organization seems to be important along with what you’ve done. I myself would be reluctant if you ever moved away from what had become your traditional role. Enterprises of scholarship may be like some businesses who fail at enlargement or lose the essence of what they have been successful at doing. I appreciate what Jack and Steve delineated tonight, that shows a faithfulness at doing what you do best—and I would hope that you would always do this.10

[Page xiv]Now, I’m going to talk to you tonight because something has been on my mind, and it’s not any more relevant to this audience than it would be to any other audience, but I speak, more than to you, rather to another audience, an audience of one. I’m talking to myself now, and I speak because it’s on my mind.

It strikes me that one of the sobering dimensions of the gospel is the democracy of its demands as it seeks to build an aristocracy of saints. Certain standards and requirements are laid upon us all. They are uniform. We don’t have an indoor-outdoor set of ten commandments. We don’t have one set of commandments for bricklayers and another for college professors. There is a democracy about the demands of discipleship, which, interestingly enough, is aimed at producing an aristocracy of saints. The Church member who is an automobile mechanic doesn’t have your scholarly skills and I’ll wager you don’t have his. But both of you, indeed all of us, have the same spiritual obligation, the same commandments and the same covenants to keep. The mechanic is under the same obligation to develop the attributes of patience and meekness as are you and as am I. What’s different about this is that the world doesn’t hold to such a view. Frankly the world would say, if one is a political leader or a scholar and is successful in politics or superb in his scholarship, that’s enough, and no further demands are made. Thus one who is so gifted or so well regarded can then be as bohemian in behavior as he likes and it’s excusable. But it’s not so in the Kingdom, is it? Of course, we all enjoy the fruits of our secular geniuses and our world leaders, even when they are visibly flawed in some respect, and we would not diminish from [Page xv]the significance of their contributions. A just God will surely credit them. However, God excuses no one, including us, from keeping his commandments, and, I think, most significantly no one is excused by him or his Son in the requirement they’ve laid upon us to become like them.

Recently, my wife took a friend to hear a presentation by a talented Latter-day Saint. The friend, who has had considerable grief and disappointment in her life, truly appreciated the presentation. When it was over, she said to Colleen, “I hope he’s as good a person as he seems.”11 It’s a shame, isn’t it, that such reserve needs even to be expressed, but many have learned by sad experience that spiritual applause is sometimes given to the undeserving. (I hasten to add, from all I know in the case just cited, the applause was fully justified.)

Whatever our fields, including scholarship, the real test is discipleship. But how special, as in the case of so many of you here, when scholarship and discipleship can company together, blending meekness with brightness and articulateness with righteousness. But these desired outcomes happen only when there is commitment bordering on consecration.

I want to say, in closing, a few words about consecration.

You’ll recall the episode in the fifth chapter of the book of Acts about how Ananias and his wife “kept back part” of the monetary proceeds from their possessions (Acts 5:1-11). We tend to think of consecration in terms of property and money. Indeed, such was clearly involved in the foregoing episode, but there are various ways of “keeping back part,” and these ways are worthy of your and my pondering. There are a lot of things we can hold back besides property. There are a lot of things we can refuse to put on the altar. This refusal may occur even after one has given a great deal, as was the case with Ananias. We may mistakenly think, for instance, having done so much, [Page xvi]that surely it is all right to hold back the remaining part of something. Obviously there can be no complete submissiveness when this occurs.

Lately, as I have thought about consecration, it has seemed to me that, unsurprisingly, it’s related to the Atonement in a way that is quite profound. I read to you three lines from that marvelous Book of Mormon which we rightly celebrate here tonight: “Yea, even so he shall be led, crucified, and slain, the flesh becoming subject even unto death, the will of the Son being swallowed up in the will of the Father” (Mosiah 15:7). Marvelous imagery, and perhaps the ultimate demand made by discipleship. Willingness to have our selves and our wills “swallowed up” in the will of our Father. When pondering this concept and reading quite a bit from Brigham Young this summer, I was unsurprised to encounter this quote: “When the will, passions, and feelings of a person are perfectly submissive to God and his requirements, that person is sanctified. It is for my will to be swallowed up in the will of God that will lead me to all good and crown me ultimately with immortality and eternal lives.”12

Scholars might hold back in ways different from those of a businessman or a politician. There’s an almost infinite variety in the number of ways you and I can hold back a portion. One, for instance, might be very giving as to money, or in even serving as to time, and yet hold back a portion of himself or herself. One might share many talents, but hold back, for instance, a pet grievance, keeping himself from surrendering that grievance where resolution might occur. A few may hold back a portion of themselves so as to please a particular gallery of peers. Some might hold back a spiritual insight through which many could profit, simply because they wish to have their ownership established. Some may even hold back by not [Page xvii]allowing themselves to appear totally and fully committed to the Kingdom, lest they incur the disapproval of a particular group wherein their consecration might be disdained. So it is in the Church that some give of themselves significantly, but not fully and unreservedly.

While withholding is obviously a function of selfishness, I’m rather inclined to think, brothers and sisters, that some of the holding back I see here and there in the Church, somehow gets mistakenly regarded as having to do with our individuality. Some presume that we will lose our individuality if we are totally swallowed up, when actually our individuality is enhanced by submissiveness and by righteousness and by being swallowed up in the will of the Father. It’s sin that grinds us down to a single plane, down to sameness and to monotony. There is no lasting place in the Kingdom, the ultimate ranges of that Kingdom, for one who is unsubmissive, or for unanchored brilliance. It too must be swallowed up. And our obvious model is always Jesus himself, who allowed his will to be swallowed up in the will of the Father.

Those of you I know here tonight, I am so happy to say, seem to me to be both committed and contributive in an unusual degree. In any case, ready or not, you serve as mentors to a rising generation of Latter-day Saint scholars and students. Among the many things you will teach them and write for them, let them see the eloquence of your examples of submissiveness, and being swallowed up in the will of the Father. Just today, I was with someone who wanted me to know that he felt quite in tune with consecration and the concept of being swallowed up, “but,” he said, “that doesn’t apply to such and such,” and then described to me what he had chosen to hold back. It’s interesting how that happens so often.

May I close by citing to you what has become to me a focus for this summer’s reading. In an attribute—cited again, unsurprisingly, in the Book of Mormon, as also Isaiah and [Page xviii]the one-hundred and thirty-third section of the Doctrine and Covenants—is the attribute of Deity which is laid upon us as something we are to develop, and it is described in the word loving kindness. Coverdale first used that, I think, in 1535, in time for it to make its way into our biblical literature. When Nephi describes why Jesus did what he did for us, he said it was “because of his loving kindness and his long-suffering towards the children of men” (1 Nephi 19:9). When David made his great plea for forgiveness, he appealed to God’s loving kindness (Psalm 51:1). When Jesus comes again (and in the one-hundred and thirty-third section, it details how he will descend from regions not known, in red apparel, obviously to remind us of his having shed his blood for our sins), we are told that there will be dramatic solar displays, that stars will be hurled from their places, and we will witness that, for he has told us that all flesh shall see him together, and those living then indeed will. What’s striking about that is, in verse fifty-two of the one-hundred and thirty-third section, the thing that we will remember, or at least which we will speak of, is not the dramatic solar display, but we will speak of his loving kindness. How long? “Forever and ever” (D&C 133:52). The more you and I know of him and his glorious atonement, the more marvelous it will become, and we will never tire of declaring how we feel about his loving kindness and we will do it forever and ever.

And I salute him as I do you for his great sacrifice for us, and the marvelous Prophet Joseph who was processing words and concepts and doctrines which were, bright as he was, beyond his capacity to immediately and fully comprehend. Indeed, there is no error in the revelations which he has taught to us. Thank you for what you do to articulate these precious things of the Kingdom to help us all, including those who are not able to defend the Kingdom and who might thereby turn against it, some of whom you will deflect and keep them, in the words of the Book of Mormon, “in the right way” (Moroni 6:4). [Page xix]My salutation, my appreciation, to you all for what you do. May God continue to bless you. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

  1. “FARMS Becomes Part of BYU,” Ensign (January 1998), 80; online at https://www.lds.org/ensign/1998/01/news-of-the-church/farms-becomes-part-of-byu?lang=eng&query=hinckley,+%22FARMS+represents%22. ↩

  2. I also sought and received Matthew Roper’s permission to reproduce his transcription in this introduction. Unfortunately, as far as we have been able to discover, the recording is no longer extant. ↩

  3. See Neal A. Maxwell, “Discipleship and Scholarship”, BYU Studies 32, no. 3 (1992), 5-9. ↩

  4. Jack, here, refers to John W. Welch, the founder of FARMS. Immediately prior to Elder Maxwell’s remarks, he had discussed where the Foundation was headed during the coming year. He is, at the present time, the Robert K. Thomas Professor of Law at Brigham Young University and the editor of BYU Studies. Professor Welch recently contributed an article entitled “Toward a Mormon Jurisprudence” to Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 6 (2013): 49-84, online at: http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/toward-a-mormon-jurisprudence/. ↩

  5. Austin Farrer, “Grete Clerk,” in Light On C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1965), 26. ↩

  6. See “References to Abraham Found in Two Ancient Egyptian Texts,” Insights: An Ancient Window 11/5 (September 1991) ; online at http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/insights/11/5/S00013-Insights_An_Ancient_Window.html. At the time, Insights was the regular newsletter, aimed at a broad general audience of FARMS and of its successor organizations, ISPART and the Maxwell Institute. ↩

  7. Joseph Fielding Smith, ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1977), 368. ↩

  8. LeRoy S. Wirthlin, “Nathan Smith (1762-1828): Surgical Consultant to Joseph Smith”, BYU Studies 17, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 319-37; LeRoy S. Wirthlin, “Joseph Smith’s Surgeon,” Ensign, March 1978, 59-60. ; LeRoy S. Wirthlin, “Joseph Smith’s Boyhood Operation: An 1813 Surgical Success”, BYU Studies 21, no. 2 (1981): 131-54. ↩

  9. C.S. Lewis, ed., George Macdonald: An Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 108. ↩

  10. Steve refers, here, to Stephen D. Ricks, who was serving in 1991 as the president of FARMS. Earlier in the evening, he had reviewed the activities of the Foundation over the past year and presented awards to Lois Richardson, Michael Lyon, and John Gee for their outstanding service to the organization. Dr. Ricks is Professor of Hebrew and Cognate Learning at Brigham Young University and is a member of the board of The Interpreter Foundation and a contributor to this journal. See http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/author/stephen/. Dr. Gee has become a significant contributor to Interpreter, as well: http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/author/johng/. ↩

  11. The reference is to Colleen Maxwell, Elder Maxwell’s wife. ↩

  12. B. Young, Journal of Discourses, April 17, 1853, 2:123. ↩

The Late War Against the Book of Mormon

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): 323-355
83

Recently, the Exmormon Foundation held their annual conference in Salt Lake City.1 A presentation by Chris and Duane Johnson proposed a new statistical model for discussing authorship of the Book of Mormon.2 The study attempts to connect the Book of Mormon to a text published in 1816: The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain.3 The latter is a history of the war of 1812 deliberately written in a scriptural style. A traditional (non-statistical) comparison between this text and the Book of Mormon was apparently introduced by Rick Grunder in his 2008 bibliography Mormon Parallels. I will discuss only the statistical model presented by the Johnsons here.4

The history of author attribution is nearly as long as the history of reading and writing.5 Within the field of literary studies, author attribution has developed into a field of scholarship, complete with its own history, its discussions on methodology, and even its own tightly contested difficult questions. This development has resulted in large reference volumes like the Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature (based on a work first published in 1882-3, and expanded twice to the current publication’s 9 volumes, with the most recent volume added in 1962).6 Scholarly discussion of author attribution continues, but is largely unknown within Mormon Studies, whose participants rarely come from a field of literary and textual criticism. This has lent a novel feel to those engaged in statistical approaches to the authorship of the Book of Mormon, even though few of these techniques are really new. Most of the participants seem unaware of the body of scholarly work that already exists which often supports or points out critical flaws in current assumptions. These can be [Page 325]found in past and current searches for influence and author attribution. Scholars of literary studies have been engaged in this endeavor for over two centuries, critiquing and evaluating the success of various methods as they have moved along. I detail some of this history in my review essay on Grunder’s bibliography.7

This statistical modeling approach is in many ways simply an expansion of early attempts to investigate literary works using digital archives. However, after the first round of resulting scholarship it became apparent that electronic searches engaging in source attribution were plagued by many of the same flaws as non-electronic authorship attribution efforts. As an authority in the field, Harold Love, put it:

When Byrne wrote, the accumulation of parallels was a labour-intensive business which depended on incessant reading of the works concerned. Today a phrase can be pursued almost instantaneously through the magnificent on-line LION archive, which covers all fields of English and American drama and of authored volumes of poetry up to 1900, and in many cases beyond, and is rapidly expanding into prose…. Now that the capacity to multiply parallels — most of which will be misleading — is almost unlimited, intelligent selectivity has never been more important.8

Love’s point is that these digital archives create an almost unlimited supply of texts, in which searches can be performed easily for an almost unlimited number of phrases. When these searches are made, long lists of parallels are inevitably [Page 326]discovered. However, parallels found in this manner — stripped of context and extracted from their sources — are, for the most part, illusory. This situation is similar to the way that visual look-alikes eventually pop up — somewhere, sometime — for virtually every public figure. We marvel at the uncanny resemblance between the two people, sometimes even theorizing familial relationships, forgetting about the automatic massive-scale search for similarities that occurs whenever someone becomes a public figure. When literary parallels are the result of intensive searches of massive databases, they cannot help us identify an author (or even influences on an author), nor can they help us understand the relationships between texts. This doesn’t make these searches without value. Love points out where these electronic searches are most helpful:

Here LION, Gutenberg and similar electronic archives come into their own, since as well as providing illusory parallels they also assist mightily in shooting down those which arise from the common parlance of the time. Once we have encountered an unusual expression in the writings of three or four different authors it ceases to have any value for attribution. What we are looking for is occurrences restricted to two sources only: one the anonymous work and the other a signed one! Even that might not be final: if the two authorial corpora are both large enough, chance alone would dictate that they should contain a few exclusive parallels.9

This may seem counter-intuitive. Love is not arguing that parallels are only valid if they are unique. Rather, within the massive electronic search model, illusory parallels are inevitable and must be treated with caution. Hence, parallels are more likely to be valid indicators of influence if they are unique. [Page 327]Parallels can be identified with electronic searches – but must then be evaluated in more traditional ways to determine if there is evidence for borrowing or influence. I provided a tentative methodology that I use for this purpose in the second part of my review of Grunder. The Johnsons’ presentation seems to be based on the premise that numerical weighting of shared phrases between texts can overcome the weaknesses inherent in using an electronic search of a massive database to study the relationship between texts. I concur with Love in disagreeing with this premise. However, I believe there are additional problems with the Johnsons’ methodology and conclusions. On their website, they candidly list several potential weaknesses of their study. What follows is a discussion of the Johnsons’ approach, including additional problems with their database and algorithm.

Description of the Data and the Methodology

To introduce their methodology, Duane Johnson provided this “high level pseudocode” description of the score that he and his brother devised to measure similarity between two books:10

For each book, create n-gram frequency counts:

Clean the Text

1) remove non-alphabetic characters including newlines; keep spaces

2) normalize the case (e.g. lower case)

3) Slice the entire text into n-grams (i.e. “n” word sequences) e.g. in our study we chose 4-grams: “i nephi having been born of” becomes [“i nephi having been”, “nephi having been born”, “having been born of”] etc.

4) [Page 328]Sort the n-grams and count their frequencies

To Make a Baseline of n-gram Frequencies:

5) Randomly select a large sample of books (arbitrarily chosen number in our study: 5,000)

6) Add up all of the n-gram frequencies

7) Discard n-grams with frequency <= 4 (due to OCR errors, it’s common to get many, many erroneous n-grams. Incidentally, discarding 4-grams with freq < 4 is why our highest matches have a score of 0.25)

To Get a Score for Each Book:

8) Find common n-grams between the Book of Mormon and each book

9) Eliminate from the list of common n-grams any n-grams found in the KJV or Douay-Reihms bibles [sic]

10) Take the inverse baseline frequency (e.g. if the phrase “having been born of” shows up 6 times in all of the books sampled for the baseline, then the inverse baseline frequency would be 1/6 = 0.167.

11) Sum all inverse baseline frequencies for common n-grams to get a “score”

12) Finally, divide the score by the total word count of each book (since larger books will, by random chance, have more matches). The result is a score that can be used to rank books by similarity.

To Rank All Books:

13) Use the score / wordcount

14) exclude small books whose signal-to-noise ratio is low (“small” was arbitrarily defined as 15,000 words in our study).

The authors do recognize some problems in the data and methodology. The first identified problem involves dealing [Page 329]properly with variations in the lengths of the texts. The second is the problem of OCR errors. OCR stands for optical character recognition – the process by which a book page is captured as an image or a picture and converted into an electronic text for searching. Often, depending on the quality of the image (which in turn is affected by the condition of the book and other issues), the OCR process can create errors in the text. Sometimes the result is a recognizable (but different) word, but more often than not the resulting term is unrecognizable. The third issue is the confusion associated with the inclusion or exclusion of biblical texts. I will discuss this particular issue in greater detail below. To resolve the first, they excluded shorter texts. To resolve the second, they arbitrarily removed all of the word sequences that occurred fewer than four times. To resolve the third, all of the four-word sequences that could be constructed from the KJV or Douay-Rheims Bibles were excised from the data set. (This is not insubstantial as my own use of the KJV results in just under 680,000 different four-word phrases occurring in just that volume alone.)11

The data I am using for my analysis comes in part from Duane Johnson’s blog (see fn. 11). He does not recognize the historical problems associated with electronic searches for authorship attribution. But it is clear from statements in the blog that he believes that this study has uncovered a textual reliance of the Book of Mormon on the work by Hunt:

Using a “Uniform Match Score” (based on a size-independent matching scale), Hunt’s The Late War [Page 330]transmitted textual influence to The Book of Nullification is highest (0.37), followed by The Book of Mormon (0.24), and finally Chronicles of Eri (0.08).… all of which were significantly higher than the baseline scores, indicating textual transmission, or common influence.

According to this post, the textual reliance is either direct (from Hunt to the Book of Mormon) or based on a common source (i.e., a genetic connection of some sort is claimed to exist). However, Chris Johnson clarifies this in the comments:

After a few tests it was clear that the Book of Mormon was a product of its culture, and could not have been made before 1822 since it relied on too many phrases found only in an 1822 Koran. It also could not have been written prior to 1816 since it relies on Hunt’s The Late War.

Chris Johnson’s conclusion is much less ambiguous than Duane Johnson’s. In examining this claim, I will be providing my own analysis using a different set of tools.

My own work with texts and textual locutions began nearly a decade ago. I first wrote on this topic in an Internet forum, and my comments were eventually picked up and relocated.12 I have some limited abilities to compare larger sets – performing logical operations on these sets of locutions,13 but, in general, my tools are a bit simpler than those described above. I have an automated process – an algorithm – that takes a text, [Page 331]isolates the numbers, changes capitals to lower cases, and strips out all punctuation. This process is generally referred to as normalization and corresponds to the first stage of the text cleaning above.14 At this point, a text can be sorted in multiple ways. It can either be broken up into various-sized locutions (the n-grams used above) or sorted on frequency. Sorting on frequency provides details about the size of the vocabulary (in terms of unique words), and so on. Breaking up the text into locutions of a certain size creates a list of all of the phrases found in a text of a certain length.15 This new set of locutions can then be treated much like a normalized text. Its entries can also be sorted by frequency. With no repetition, a text can have almost as many unique phrases as it has words.16 The Book of Mormon is a good example of a text with a great deal of repetition (think: “and it came to pass”), and this can be seen in the larger gap between the number of total words in a text and the number of unique four-word phrases.

We can take this list of four-word phrases (along with their frequencies, if we choose) and compare them to similar lists from other books. The study in question proposed creating a baseline database – a combination of these frequency lists from a series of books chosen at random from a specific date range and matching criteria. This would create a very large list of phrases, along with total frequencies (the total number of times a phrase is used through the entire set of works). This overall frequency then became the basis for a weighting value for each phrase. My tools do not include this baseline database or the [Page 332]weighting it produces. My own analysis will not refer to a set of baseline data.

What follows, then, is a discussion of some of the inherent flaws in this basic methodology described by Johnson that are revealed through my own analysis and expectations.

Flaw 1. Preparation of the Texts

The first major issue occurs in the texts themselves. In preparing my notes, I used an existing digital copy of the Book of Mormon in my possession that I had cleaned up in a way similar to this method – by normalizing the text as well as removing material not strictly associated with the text or with its authorship. In the Johnsons’ video presentation, an awareness of this need is discussed. Hunt’s volume contained a lengthy appendix, which of necessity needed to be removed – it was described as creating noise.17 This appendix seems to have been an 18-page addition including the full text of three treaties made by the U.S. government.

In the blog post, we are provided with a list of the four-word locutions that they used to produce their weighted connection between the Book of Mormon and Hunt’s The Late War. The list is provided in ascending order of weights. While the earliest entries then have the least impact on the overall score of the connection, some of those entries are obviously problematic. For example, the text that was used to value the Book of Mormon included a copyright statement.

The copyright statement reads as follows (I have omitted the part in the middle that was written by Joseph Smith):18

[Page 333]Northern District of New York, to wit:

BE IT REMEMBERED, That on the eleventh day of June, in the fifty-third year of the Independence of the United States of America, A. D. 1829, JOSEPH SMITH, JUN. of the said District, hath deposited in this office the title of a Book, the right whereof he claims as author in the words following, to wit: …

In conformity to the act of Congress of the United States, entitled, “An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of Maps, Charts, and Books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned;” and also the act entitled, “An act supplementary to an act, entitled, ‘An act for the encouragement of learning, by the securing copies of Maps, Charts, and Books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned,’ and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints.”

This is seen in the list of parallels provided. In fact, of the 549 distinct four-word locutions given in the blog and shared between the two texts, 75 of them (13.7%)19 come from this [Page 334]copyright statement. This may have simply been an oversight. Unlike much of the text (except for the appendix, that they had already excluded), the copyright statement was not authored as part of the Book of Mormon, and it has a recognizable history.

The copyright statement comes from the copyright application form, a preprinted document in which the applicant had to fill in the blanks. The original application is known.20 Only part of the copyright statement is original to Joseph Smith, and those parts were produced in 1829 when the application was filed. The statement in the Book of Mormon simply duplicates this application (as was generally required). This use of a form may explain why it duplicates in such great quantity the material from Hunt’s volume (which was also copyrighted in New York and used an apparently identical or nearly identical pre-printed copyright application form.) It also explains why parts appear in so many other volumes [Page 335](as indicated by the low weights)21 – the copyright application quotes statements from the U.S. Constitution (from Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) and the Copyright Act of 1790. These statements (or portions of them) would appear in most works printed in the United States between 1790 and 1831. (In 1831 we had the first major update to the Copyright Law.)

Removing this text wouldn’t impact the weight much (it only reduces it by a little more than a half of one percent) because of the frequency in other texts. But it does dramatically reduce the number of parallels presented.

Additionally, there is the problem of the texts as they are. Most of the archived material that is searchable is produced by scanning the books into an image format, after which OCR is used to convert the images into a searchable text format. Despite recent improvements in the technology, texts that have been produced retain significant problems. The text I used for Hunt’s The Late War22 had some of these issues. In various places, ‘Gilbert’ becomes ‘6ilbert’, ‘With’ becomes ‘7vith’, and ‘account’ becomes ‘accouut’. Since it is the OCR software that makes these mistakes and since the same combination of letters which may be confusing in one book can also be confusing in another (there were fewer typefaces back then), OCR software often makes the same kinds of mistakes in different texts. To deal with this, the proposal above excludes phrases found less than four times across the entire studied body of works. This [Page 336]helps ferret out many of these errors.23) The result runs right into Harold Love’s suggestion about searching for parallels: “Once we have encountered an unusual expression in the writings of three or four different authors it ceases to have any value for attribution.” In an effort to deal with bad data, has this collection effectively crippled their own weighting system by removing all of the instances that Love would find of real value? I believe that it has, although part of that explanation will also come up a little later. For this system to work in the long run, it would need texts that had been checked and found to be free of error. This has already been done with popular texts that are still in print, like the Book of Mormon or the KJV. However, it is not so easily done with archived scanned images of less interesting and less read works. (It is certainly not a chore that we would look forward to doing with the 130,000 volumes or even the 5,000 volumes randomly selected for the baseline data.)

The impact of removing these phrases is to create a hole in the text where the problematic word exists. By removing the four-word phrases that include the error (and there would generally be four phrases removed if there were an error),24 it is quite likely that there is little impact on the baseline data. If a phrase is popular, it will remain popular in other works. However, the risk isn’t in the removal of the errors, it’s in the removal of legitimate phrases that are relatively unique.25
[Page 337]

Flaw 2: Length of Texts

A second major issue comes up with regard to the length of source texts. While the word count is referenced in the final score (generally with respect to the text in question),26 this application seems to ignore much of what makes text length (or word count) interesting to us. Two useful features when dealing with locutions (or n-grams) are the size of the vocabulary (the number of unique words) and the overall length of the text in words. Both of these factors can influence the degree to which the texts are similar. And these are somewhat related figures. Shorter texts generally have a smaller vocabulary, while larger texts correspondingly have a larger vocabulary.27 My lengths are likely to be a little different from those given by the blog site – due in part to minor differences in the process of cleaning the texts for use, and because I potentially use different sources for both texts. Given the size of the two texts, this discrepancy probably has a small impact on the outcomes of my examination.

The Book of Mormon text used in my apparatus was 269,551 words long with a unique vocabulary of 5,638 words (compared with the text of 271,240 words used in the Johnson study). The Great War was 56,632 words long (compare this to 55,378 words in the blog study – a difference most likely due to the inclusion of the appendix material) with a unique vocabulary of 5749 words. Significantly, the Book of Mormon text, while being nearly five times longer, has a vocabulary of similar size. And the shared vocabulary amounts to roughly forty percent of the respective vocabularies (specifically, they have a shared vocabulary of 2,281 words). My experience is that [Page 338]the vocabulary size of The Late War is consistent with books of similar length, while the Book of Mormon has an unusually small vocabulary. When we calculate the number of unique four-word locutions for each text, we can see the difference in repetition. The Book of Mormon contains 202,830 unique four-word locutions compared with The Late War containing 51,221.28 Why is this interesting to us? If we follow the weighted matches used by the blog, there are 549 shared four word locutions common to both texts. This means that of all the possible phrases found in The Late War, only 1.07% of them make it into the Book of Mormon. And within the Book of Mormon, of the potential 200,000+ unique phrases, only 0.27% could be derived from The Late War. This is not a high number. This ratio drops substantially when we back out the 75 parallels taken from the copyright application (with 474 parallels it becomes 0.93% and 0.23% respectively).

This sort of ratio (the size of the footprint relative to the size of the text) doesn’t come out in the calculations used. One of their supporting examples was provided in the blog:

Surprisingly, the Uniform Match Score between The Book of Mormon and The Late War (scoring 0.24) was more significantly correlated than Pride and Prejudice (1813) and its most influential book The Officer’s Daughter (1810), scoring 0.20. This indicates that Jane Austen’s work was less influenced by her literary culture than The Book of Mormon.

I took copies of these two works (due to the better OCR, I used a version of The Officer’s Daughter published in its original four volumes and combined them). I used the much cleaner text [Page 339]of Pride and Prejudice from Project Gutenberg.29 The Officer’s Daughter had a total word count of 140,245 with a vocabulary of 11,308 (some of this is undoubtedly due to OCR errors), while Pride had a word count of 122,880 with a vocabulary of 6,323. When I compared these two texts in a non-weighted comparison, it resulted in 1,934 common four-word phrases (conservative, due to the OCR errors in The Officer’s Daughter). Having then backed out the parallels from the KJV we end up with 1,677 shared phrases. This results in a ratio in Pride and Prejudice of 1.4%.30 This result is more than five times the overlap between the Book of Mormon and The Late War. Of the 6,323 words used in Pride, 3,996 of them are also found in The Officer’s Daughter (63%).

In other words, the ‘Uniform Match Score’ (a term coined by the Johnsons) focuses very narrowly on one aspect of the data that is tightly controlled. It seems to have very little to do with the actual density of the overlap in the texts. Later in the comments to the blog entry, Duane Johnson offers this:

Certain baseline data such as the false positive rate of our tools are still lacking. For example it is difficult to answer: “How often will our algorithm turn up the wrong books?” We don’t know, so we wish to test our tools on as many books as possible, especially a) mystery texts where influence or authorship is unknown b) books with known influences, so that we can determine accuracy and c) books that are translated from another culture, time, language or place so that we can see how distantly connected a real Urantia or Koran text might look.

[Page 340]Here, with Pride and Prejudice, we have a text where they suggest there is a weight that is incongruous with the text that was “its most influential book.” Rather than seeing this as evidence for an obvious flaw in their ‘Uniform Match Score,’ we instead get the conclusion that Jane Austen was simply less influenced by her environment than was Joseph Smith.31 Given the suspect nature of the weighting system, I am unconvinced that there is actually any influence between these two books.

Without considering the size of the texts, any sense of relative proportion is lost. Harold Love pointed out that we are likely to find some degree of coincidental overlap between any two texts of sufficient size. This is a relatively small footprint (textually) – finding only 474 parallels in more than 200,000 opportunities. It is much smaller than the connection between Pride and Prejudice and The Officer’s Daughter.

Flaw 3: Issues with the Biblical Text

In the discussion on method above, there is an attempt to sort out the influence of the biblical text. This was done by removing the four-word locutions that paralleled both the KJV and the Douay-Rheims translations of the Bible. Given the date of the two texts being closely examined, I only included the KJV in my testing. I did not exclude additional four-word sets equivalent to those in the Douay-Rheims.32 For some background details, my text of the KJV is 791,539 words long. [Page 341]It contains a vocabulary of 12,574 words. And it has 679,612 unique four-word locutions.33

I generated a comparison between this text of the King James and both The Late War and the Book of Mormon. The results showed an overlap with The Late War of 2,341 common four word locutions. The overlap with the Book of Mormon was significantly larger, at 25,020 locutions. This means that roughly 4.57% of The Late War duplicates material from the KJV, contrasted with 12.33% of the Book of Mormon duplicating phrases from the KJV. In both cases, these statistics trivialize the less than one percent overlap between the two books in question presented on the blog.

There are many potential reasons for excluding the KJV and Douay-Rheims phrases from consideration. I expect that including those phrases certainly skewed the baseline data. If I compare The Late War and The Book of Mormon using my texts without excluding the KJV data (that is, if I include all of the four-word locutions in my results), I end up with 1,478 shared phrases.34 Of these shared phrases, a majority (57.3%) are also in common with the KJV. This leaves, at best, 631 shared four-word phrases between the Book of Mormon and The Late War independent of the KJV.

[Page 342]Removing this data also hides something that ought to have been obvious to us. The biblical text creates language in the environment (or represents that language) in an incredible density. When The Late War attempts to duplicate this language, we get an exact match 4% of the time. The Book of Mormon uses this language 12% of the time. It is only in removing these kinds of statistics that we get the sense of how the method is working: Without this comparison, what is otherwise a trivial overlap between two texts is magnified.

Flaw 4: Problems with the Weighting of the Phrases

There are several issues with the weighting system. The first, Chris Johnson describes remarkably well in his presentation. Here are the comments explaining this idea from the blog:

if you find the two-word phrase “Millennium Falcon” in a book, and another two-word phrase, “it is” in a book, the former should matter a lot more than the latter. Why? Because almost every book in the world contains the 2-gram (bigram) “it is” but only a select few have “Millennium Falcon”. So, what does a “weighted” value look like? It’s just the inverse of the baseline frequency, i.e. 1.0/baseline-frequency. Using the example above: if “it is” occurs 5,847,361 in a sample of 5,000 pre-1830 books (which it does in our baseline sample) then the “weighted value” of the match is 1.0/5,847,361 or 0.000000171. Let’s say “Millennium Falcon,” on the other hand, occurs only one time in all of our sampled pre-1830 literature. Then, it would have a score of 1.0/1.0 = 1.0. So finding a “Millennium Falcon” match between the Book of Mormon and another book would be more than 5 million times more important.

Consider this challenge with respect to the biblical text. We know that the text of the KJV played a large role in the text of the [Page 343]Book of Mormon. (This is seen by the large language footprint we find using these four word locutions.) However, the sheer frequency of the phrases from the Bible in the environment make this weighting approach problematic. A large number of collectively common phrases – all coming from the same ultimate source – might have virtually no impact on the weighted score if their frequencies in the baseline data were high enough.

Clearly this occurs in the case of the copyright statement. There we have a portion of the text that is not original to the Book of Mormon. Once we see it for what it is, we can track it – both to its immediate source (the copyright application) and then to its more distant sources (the pre-printed form, the legislative acts of the federal government that serve as its sources, and so on). What is interesting is how this interacts with the electronic search. This is one part of the Book of Mormon for which we can produce a genealogy for the text. It’s also a part of the text that, because of its existence in the environment, doesn’t trigger significant movement on the weighted scale. The collective initial weight35 of these 75 phrases was roughly 0.33. The weight of a single phrase with a frequency of four across the entire baseline data was 0.25. All 75 of these phrases had less weight than two examples from the other end of the spectrum. So, on the one side, influence — if it is widespread, even if it comes from an identifiable source is considered negligible by this method. This is true of the copyright statement. It would also be true for the most part of the biblical text.

This fits right in line with Harold Love’s assessment. Finding the phrase in more than a couple of sources (in our electronic search) means that each individual source is unlikely to be the cause of the influence. That connection becomes illusionary. Likewise, there is zero possibility that the copyright statement [Page 344]in Hunt’s work could have been the cause of the copyright statement in the Book of Mormon.36

There is another corollary: Love’s assessment of electronic sources didn’t talk about frequencies of the phrases themselves across a corpus of work, but rather the number of sources in which a phrase occurred. The Book of Mormon uses the phrase “it came to pass” 1,353 times. If it were the only text to use this phrase, the baseline value for it would still be .000739. If that phrase occurred in only one other work, instead of being potentially highly significant (as Love suggests) it would be completely trivial in this weighting system. While this method tracks an overall frequency of a phrase within the collective pool of phrases used across an entire body of literature, it does not provide us with one very important detail, namely, how many works (or authors) use that phrase (independent of the frequency).

The next problem we have is with the sense of actual rarity. If, as Love argues, multiple instances are truly problematic, then our goal isn’t to try to create a random sampling that is uniform when compared to the larger body of literature; we want to find a sampling that is most likely to give up the bad parallels in a frequency large enough to control mis-valuing the phrases. In creating a range of texts that extends from 1500 to 1830, with no geographical limitations, we tend to dilute the texts significantly. That is, even with 5,000 texts, if we had an even distribution (and I recognize that we don’t), we would see a rather limited number of texts coming from an appropriate place and time. The distribution would have been far better had it been limited to a period around (both before and after) the publication of the Book of Mormon and from a much closer geographic perspective. It may not be that coincidental that [Page 345]the closer matches occurred in those texts written closer to the publication of the Book of Mormon than those farthest away.37 The dilution of the baseline data may enhance the value of these texts. How can we demonstrate this?

We can, as Harold Love suggested, use an existing database to function as a negative check. To do this, I selected a few of the highest scoring examples (those that have the minimal four occurrences across the selected set of texts). The texts were selected over the interval of 1500 to 1830. To duplicate this, I will use Google Books and perform a string search for identical text across that same interval. This won’t give me a frequency of occurrences within an individual source text, but it will indicate (through the number of hits) how many sources the phrase occurs in – and in doing this there is a minimal boundary for a frequency.38 Because the list is in ascending order based on score, I start from the bottom and work my way toward the top and search for the last ten items in the list.

  1. your-women-and-your: 1 hit39
  2. year-that-the-people: 2 hits
  3. year-on-the-tenth: 14 hits
  4. women-and-your-children: 1 hit
  5. with-his-army-against: 29 hits
  6. will-hearken-unto-him: 1 hit
  7. [Page 346]will-give-unto-you: 3 hits
  8. wickedness-which-had-been: 1 hit
  9. which-he-gave-unto: 13 hits
  10. were-upon-the-waters: 1 hit

These may be typical — or not. But, looking at these, three of them see a marked reduction in value. And while this may not be typical of the entire set, if it is, the impact would likely move Hunt’s source down the value list. There are clearly some phrases which are rarer than others, and they may be useful. However, the selection of texts seems problematic in this regard. If this selection process takes a phrase where we can find dozens of examples elsewhere and produces only four occurrences (just enough to keep it from being eliminated but not so many that the parallel isn’t simply removed), then there is clearly a problem with the process. And this valuation process could create a cumulative impact on the data. Either the number of texts in the base data is insufficient or the selection criterion needs to be re-tuned.

Part of this issue is in the assumptions that seem to be brought to the question. The desire is to identify a text which may have most influenced the text of the Book of Mormon, but to create the baseline of language you don’t simply stop with the publication date of the Book of Mormon. If the Book of Mormon is a piece of nineteenth-century literature, it is both a product of, and a contributor to that language of its environment. We might opt to test the significance of earlier books against this baseline data, but unfortunately the data itself is not robust.

When we create a random sampling for statistical use, we do so on the assumption that our random sample will correlate well with the larger population. However, the sample size of 5,000 is far too small (and no work was done to verify that this random sampling was in line with the larger population). Given the nature of the problem, though, and the desire to reduce the [Page 347]impact of phrases common in the environment, there doesn’t seem to be a need for a truly random sample. Instead we should hand pick those texts that are most likely to share the same language – those texts that come from a closer geographic location and a closer time frame. We should try to reduce the impact of common phrases as much as possible so that those that are really unusual can stand out appropriately. We can do this by providing books with a content of history and war (and even theology) and by using travelogues.

There is another aspect to this, however. The copyright parallels (all 75 of them) are clearly the only part of the Book of Mormon for which we can point to an exact genealogy of texts. We know the textual history of this bit. We know it isn’t original to the Book of Mormon, we know which sources were used, and so on. And yet if this was all that came up in the comparison, this weighting would immediately disqualify these parallels as irrelevant. There would be no reason to take a second look and discover what any one of us can see quite easily. In this regard the weighting system fails on both ends. It inappropriately overvalues some elements, and it inappropriately undervalues others. While I can suggest ways in which to accommodate for overvaluing some elements, I am not sure such an easy corrective measure can be taken to adjust for undervaluing other elements.

Finally, when we look at the list of weighted elements, we notice that many of them have little weight or value. The first 111 entries have the same value as a single later entry with a frequency of four occurrences. We can be fairly confident in these cases that the parallel is likely more environmental than direct. If we toss out all of the phrases where there are more than fifty occurrences in the baseline data, it would mean losing 225 (including the 75 from the copyright statement). This brings the overall footprint of Hunt’s text in the Book of Mormon down to an underwhelming 0.16%. The real reason [Page 348]for keeping them in the long list doesn’t seem to be much about the mathematical impact of these common phrases (which is virtually non-existent) but rather the psychological impact of having a large list of parallels.

Flaw 5: Textual Context

The final issue is over the challenge of context. When we take texts and reduce them to these strings, we eliminate context. We rip out punctuation. Our four-word phrases cross natural textual lines. Without a more nuanced parsing, this is the only possible outcome. But it doesn’t help us understand the relationship between texts. Because I quoted it verbatim earlier, the copyright statement makes a terrific example. Here are a few lines from it:

In conformity to the act of Congress of the United States, entitled, “An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of Maps, Charts, and Books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned;” and also the act entitled, “An act supplementary to an act, entitled, ‘An act for the encouragement of learning

The blog identified a couple of noteworthy parallels in this short text:

entitled-an-act-for : time-therein-mentioned-and : therein-mentioned-and-also : act-entitled-an-act : entitled-an-act-supplementary : act-entitled-an-act : entitled-an-act-for …

Each of these four-word phrases crosses a textual boundary. They move from the immediate statement to a quotation of another text. This movement is lost. These phrases cross sentences and paragraphs. They string words together that don’t belong together except in the sense of an n-gram – a [Page 349]computational model based on removing the markers of these divisions from the text. The relationships that can sometimes be seen in these parallels don’t exist for us as readers (or as writers). These aren’t phrases that occur for us (or in our environment) because they don’t actually exist as phrases (as locutionary acts). These are naturally rarer – because they are created entirely by coincidental circumstance and not by design of any author. And, in using them in a way that weights rarity more heavily, we tend to emphasize a feature of the language that doesn’t exist except in the computational representation of word strings that no longer correlate to real writing or to real speech. These fragments, strung together, cannot provide us indicators to the language usage in comparison because they don’t represent language usage at all.

Some Additional Observations

I had some additional concerns. Duane and Chris Johnson tend to use very ambiguous language to describe the relationships between texts. Some of it is incorrect, some of it is contradictory. Consider the following statements from the blog post:

Our results point to The First Book ofS (1809) influencing the creation of The Late War… Our preliminary analysis is showing that The Late War likely inspired the creation of quite a few books between 1820-1830, …

Using a “Uniform Match Score” (based on a size-independent matching scale), Hunt’s The Late War transmitted textual influence to The Book of Nullification highest (0.37), followed by The Book of Mormon (0.24), and to a lesser extent Chronicles of Eri (0.08). The influence from The First Book of Napoleon on Hunt’s The Late War was 0.06, all of which were [Page 350]significantly higher than the baseline scores, indicating textual transmission, or common influence.

We were interested in uncovering any books besides the Bible that may have played an influential role on the 1830 Book of Mormon.

This indicates that Jane Austen’s work was less influenced by her literary culture than The Book of Mormon.

After a few tests it was clear that the Book of Mormon was a product of its culture, and could not have been made before 1822 since it relied on too many phrases found only in an 1822 Koran. It also could not have been written prior to 1816 since it relies on Hunt’s The Late War. Also the Chronicles of Eri was more distant than the Book of Mormon to its most common ancestor, while The Book of Nullification was more connected to its ancestors than the Book of Mormon. I also tried tracing Solomon Spalding’s Manuscript Found, and The First Book of Napoleon, but couldn’t find a close source of textual transmission, meaning they were more out of place, and less explainable than the Book of Mormon.

These paragraphs present a confusing image. What does “influence” actually mean? Is it synonymous with reliance? By influence do the Johnsons mean that the Book of Mormon would not exist in the form it is today without the earlier book having been published? One thing that stands out to me is the statement about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. On the basis of their weighting system they connect this book to a relatively unknown work from 1810: The Officer’s Daughter. Jane Austen [Page 351]is considered one of the most influential novelists of the modern era. This would be the first time that this connection has been offered, and it’s being offered on the basis of an electronic search engine!

There is no evidence that this work was ever read by Jane Austen. In fact, just this year, Cambridge University Press released The Cambridge Companion to ‘Pride and Prejudice‘, in which we get details about the text, its narrative and characters, its philosophy, its composition and publication, even its historical background and literary context. Nowhere in that volume will we find a reference to Miss Walsh’s The Officer’s Daughter. For an author who wasn’t very “influenced by her literary culture,” an awful lot has been written about that culture and its influence. We actually know a great deal about Jane Austen and her literary influences. Part of this is due to the fact that literary scholars and historians have been discussing and detailing her achievements in terms of the relationship she had with prior literature since the mid-twentieth century (really beginning with the work of F. W. Bradbrook and Jocelyn Harris). For Austen, this interaction was often very deliberate – we know this not just from her books, but from the many letters that she wrote which detailed her own reading and re-reading. She tells us who her favorite authors were and why. And this is why we might be a bit startled to find out how this book, which she apparently never read, was in fact the most significant influence on her own writing.

Clearly something is off in this analysis. Yes, it’s possible, that through any of a number of ways, this text was the most influential to her writing. Perhaps her best friend read it and shared the details over and over with her until it became ingrained in her subconscious. It’s possible. It’s just not very likely. Similarly, when we get to Hunt’s book, there is this emphasis on the nature of the book as a school text. Actually, [Page 352]we don’t have any record of it being used in schools. There were, Rick Grunder points out:

at least sixteen editions or imprints 1816-19, all but two in 1819. All were published in New York City, under a total of ten different publishers’ names.… There was no edition in 1818, but in 1819 there appeared no fewer than six separate editions or imprints under the original title and eight more editions or imprints as The Historical Reader. All fourteen of these 1819 publications called themselves the third edition. In five instances that year, both of the titles were published by the same parties, including the author himself. Furthermore, most of the 1819 editions (irrespective of title) seem to have had the same pagination (233 pp., with possible differences in plates and ads).… A comparison of the Daniel D. Smith 1819 edition of The Late War (considered in this entry) and another in my possession under the same title, “Printed & Published by G. J. Hunt. Corner of Varick and Vandam streets,” 1819, reveals what appears to be the identical typesetting (including page 41 mis-numbered, “31”) except for the different publishers’ names on the title pages, and their own ads filling their respective final page of the book. G[ilbert]. J. Hunt’s ads at the end of his edition… provide some suggestion of his business and personality. Since the author appears to have been affiliated with both printing and a bookstore, I wonder if he printed these books himself (or had them printed), but then went around town soliciting orders from other booksellers or publishers, promising their own names on the title pages as publishers (as opposed to their appearing merely as distributors). In such a possible situation, we might be less surprised when we [Page 353]notice that after 1819, no further editions of this wildly published textbook appeared.40

The author appears to have marketed the book to book-sellers (and not to schools) in an attempt to get this volume into the public view. There is no indication that it was ever actually used in a school as a school text. This is further suggested by the fact that after his wild marketing scheme ended in 1819, the book was never re-published (or even reprinted). A great deal of inappropriate emphasis is placed on the book’s own description of its purpose as a way of suggesting that it be used and this potential connection to Joseph – that he likely encountered it in school as a “textbook used in the 1820s.”

Finally, on the blog we notice the collection of works to which this is being compared (for which we have the composite score presented). It is obvious that these works could not have been included within the baseline data. There are at least eight different copies of Hunt’s book, ranging from the highest (with an adjusted score of 4.2 to the twenty-third spot with an adjusted score of 2.3. That’s a significant range. Given the shift, we have to ask: exactly which version was Joseph supposed to have come into contact with? The first edition (assigned the highest score) was not (apparently) marketed for school children. That comes with the second edition in 1817, and in the many different copies published in 1819. Yet, from the list of scored texts provided by Johnson, it is the 1816 edition which has the highest score. Of the other seven copies scored by Johnson, the second highest (a copy of the 1819 third edition) comes in with a weighted score reduced by 25%. Is this gap caused by OCR errors or is it due to textual differences?

From the same list we also have several versions of the Koran, ranking from number eight to number two hundred [Page 354]and thirty. An explanation for the significance of the one version of the Koran was hinted at in this statement:

since it [the Book of Mormon] relied on too many phrases found only in an 1822 Koran.

This isn’t a claim of some sort of influence, or shared language caused by the environment. This is the claim that Joseph must have read this particular edition of the Koran (and not some other edition), and used it by incorporating it into his text of the Book of Mormon (along with the other imagined sources). This stretches credulity (although perhaps not as much as the claims about Jane Austen).

Conclusions

It isn’t a particularly difficult feat to reconstruct the Book of Mormon using phrases found from many different sources. In the 1960s, Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality to describe this feature of all texts. They were, as she described them, a ‘mosaic of quotations’ all coming from other sources. Some of this is certainly due to textual influence and reliance. There is no doubt that the Book of Mormon owes a great deal of its contents to the King James text. But, as Harold Love points out, given a large enough body of literature, you can also find these phrases caused by coincidence. In the long run we note that there are some real similarities that can be found in the texts of these two books. But, most of these similarities are not discovered by creating a list of these four-word phrases – because these phrases are not themselves meaningful. Does this process attempt to reduce the significance of the Book of Mormon to a few hundred four-word phrases, stripped of punctuation and context? That seems to be the outcome. Hunt wanted to create a text that read like scripture as a marketing tool. In this way we get a lot of biblical sounding text. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, doesn’t just use biblical [Page 355]language, it engages biblical issues – it asks questions about morality, about agency, about creation. It ponders the meaning of writing and reading. It describes religious experience.

At this point, this preliminary work of statistically mining electronic databases does not deal with Love’s concerns or rehabilitate the practice. Perhaps future refinements will help. I do see uses for these kinds of approaches to the text. They can help us see where to start looking for real potential overlap. Substantial phrasing that does not occur commonly will encourage us to return to the text and evaluate it in a more traditional fashion. Once we do this, we may find a copyright statement with an identifiable textual history, Or we may discover that the parallels tell us absolutely nothing because they are most likely due to coincidence.

Special thanks to Bruce Schaalje for his criticism and suggestions.

  1. The conference occurred between October 18th and October 20th, 2013. ↩

  2. The presentation was titled “How the Book of Mormon Destroyed Mormonism.” It was presented on Saturday, October 19th, by Chris Johnson. The study was co-authored by Chris and Duane Johnson. The presentation can be viewed here: http://buggingmos.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/chris-johnson-how-the-book-of-mormon-destroyed-mormonism. ↩

  3. The full title of the work is given as: The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain From June, 1812, to February 1815 (G.J. Hunt: New York, 1816). Rick Grunder provides this description of the various publications of this text: “This work went through at least sixteen editions or imprints 1816-19, all but two in 1819. All were published in New York City, under a total of ten different publishers’ names. First “Published and sold for the author, by David Longworth,” 1816… the book was then issued as The Historical Reader, Containing “The Late War… Altered and Adapted for the Use of Schools… ,” etc., promoted particularly as a textbook (Samuel A. Burtus, 1817). There was no edition in 1818, but in 1819 there appeared no fewer than six separate editions or imprints under the original title and eight more editions or imprints as The Historical Reader. All fourteen of these 1819 publications called themselves the third edition. In five instances that year, both of the titles were published by the same parties, including the author himself. Furthermore, most of the 1819 editions (irrespective of title) seem to have had the same pagination (233 pp., with possible differences in plates and ads).” (Rick Grunder. Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source. [Lafayette, New York: Rick Grunder—Books, 2008], p. 724.)  ↩

  4. I may at some future point deal in a more detailed fashion with the thematic parallels presented by Grunder, along with his discussion of potential Hebraisms in the text. ↩

  5. “The scholarly study of attributions made its appearance at a period when literacy had ceased to be the monopoly of small cadres of specialist scribes and reading was for the first time practiced by a substantial public, ministered to by booksellers, stationers, scribal publishers, schoolmasters and grammarians. In the Western tradition such a public seems first to have consolidated itself in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE in Athens,… One important project was to distinguish the genuine works of Homer from other works that still at that time went under his name.” (Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 14-15. ↩

  6. For further references and discussion see Love, Attributing Authorship, pp. 14-31. ↩

  7. I responded more generally to Grunder’s entire work in a two part essay found here: http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/finding-parallels-some-cautions-and-criticisms-part-one/ and http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/finding-parallels-some-cautions-and-criticisms-part-two. ↩

  8. Love, Attributing Authorship:, 90. ↩

  9. Love, 91. ↩

  10. See http://askreality.com/hidden-in-plain-sight/#phrases downloaded on 10/26/13. I have adjusted the formatting, replacing the bullets with numerical references. ↩

  11. My own work, which I will explain later, gathers just under 680,000 four-word phrases from the King James Version. All of these phrases were simply eliminated from the data set. I have not yet parsed the Douay-Rheims Bible at this time, and given the greater significance of the KJV for this discussion, it did not seem necessary. The primary necessity of excluding it seems to stem from the early date of included sources, starting in 1500, since it was published prior to the KJV. It seems reasonable though, that between the two editions of the Bible, close to a million four-word phrases were eliminated from consideration. ↩

  12. http://solomonspalding.com/SRP/parallels.htm. ↩

  13. My tools allow me to combine sets, to extract only elements common to two sets, and to subtract one set from another (removing all of the common sets). Using these tools, I could in theory build up a baseline data set similar to that used by Chris Johnson, although it would potentially take several weeks of constant computation, as they note, and a huge data repository. My tools were not designed with this functionality in mind. ↩

  14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_normalization. ↩

  15. Often a marker is reinserted into the text (a punctuation mark) so that the new phrase can be seen as a single word for comparison purposes. So the phrase: “I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents becomes “I-Nephi-having-been” : “Nephi-having-been-born” : “having-been-born-of” : “been-born-of-goodly”, and so on. Johnson’s blog post displays this feature in his data. ↩

  16. When broken into four-word phrases, it would in fact have three phrases fewer than the total number of words in the text. ↩

  17. The noise can come from additional instances of phrases used in the text itself. But it also creates new phrases when truncated elements are mashed together. I did not remove these pages. ↩

  18. The part written by Joseph Smith is a description of the text made at the time the application was made in June of 1829. This was hand copied from a proof-sheet of the title page of the Book of Mormon. While this text is closely associated with the Book of Mormon, it was never claimed to be a part of the translation of the text, and so its potential value in ascertaining authorship is likely to be limited. Further, it is likely that the similarities between the summary on the title page and the text itself are derivative of the text of the Book of Mormon. For these reasons, I have generally excluded the entire title page with its summary from my past assessments. ↩

  19. Listed alphabetically by the first word of each four word set: act-entitled-an-act, act-for-the-encouragement, act-supplementary-to-an, an-act-entitled-an, an-act-for-the, an-act-supplementary-to, and-books-to-the, and-etching-historical-and, and-extending-the-benefits, and-proprietors-of-such, arts-of-designing-engraving, authors-and-proprietors-of, be-it-remembered-that, benefits-thereof-to-the, books-to-the-authors, by-securing-the-copies, charts-and-books-to, conformity-to-the-act, copies-during-the-times, copies-of-maps-charts, deposited-in-this-office, designing-engraving-and-etching, during-the-times-therein, encouragement-of-learning-by, engraving-and-etching-historical, entitled-an-act-for, entitled-an-act-supplementary, etching-historical-and-other, extending-the-benefits-thereof, for-the-encouragement-of, he-claims-as-author, historical-and-other-prints, in-conformity-to-the, in-the-words-following, in-this-office-the, independence-of-the-united, it-remembered-that-on, language-of-the-people, learning-by-securing-the, maps-charts-and-books, mentioned-and-extending-the, of-designing-engraving-and, of-learning-by-securing, of-maps-charts-and, of-such-copies-during, of-the-independence-of, office-the-title-of, proprietors-of-such-copies, remembered-that-on-the, right-whereof-he-claims, securing-the-copies-of, such-copies-during-the, supplementary-to-an-act, the-arts-of-designing, the-authors-and-proprietors, the-benefits-thereof-to, the-copies-of-maps, the-encouragement-of-learning, the-independence-of-the, the-times-therein-mentioned, the-united-states-of, the-words, following-to, therein-mentioned-and-also, therein-mentioned-and-extending, thereof-to-the-arts, this-office-the-title, times-therein-mentioned-and, to-an-act-entitled, to-the-act-of, to-the-arts-of, to-the-authors-and, united-states-of-america, whereof-he-claims-as, words-following-to-wit, year-of-the-independenc. ↩

  20. For the full text of the original copyright application, see Nathaniel Hinckley Wadsworth, “Copyright Laws and the 1830 Book of Mormon.” BYU Studies 45/3 (2006), p. 97. ↩

  21. From the chart on the blog, simple math can be performed to discover the frequency of occurrences in the baseline data set. The formula is 1/[the listed value]. So, for example, from my list in fn. 19, if we make this calculation for the first five items in that alphabetical list, we get these frequencies: act-entitled-an-act – 3,350, act-for-the-encouragement – 360, act-supplementary-to-an – 241, an-act-entitled-an – 2,279, and an-act-for-the – 3,608. It is safe to suggest that a copyright statement with some degree of similarity occurs in a significant number of these texts. ↩

  22. For my analysis, I downloaded the text file at this address: http://www.archive.org/stream/latewarbetween_00hunt/latewarbetween_00hunt_djvu.txt. ↩

  23. It also reduces the size of the data accumulated and the times required to process and search the data compilations. (I am fairly confident that this wasn’t the intention, it was just a beneficial side effect. ↩

  24. The phrases will be the phrases with the error in each of the positions X-2-3-4, 1-X-3-4, 1-2-X-4, and 1-2-3-X. ↩

  25. There are several potential ways to correct this that would not be too computationally intensive. A separate database could be maintained of all of the phrases removed for a lack of frequency, and this separate database could be matched up against the text in question. The matches (which would in theory be a relatively small number if most of the removed examples are errors) could then be examined individually for significance). ↩

  26. In the comments, Duane Johnson points out: “When we say ‘Score / WC’ in the table, we mean ‘Score divided by wordcount’ which is the same slope you see in the graph.” ↩

  27. One of the reasons why word count studies can work with shorter texts is that they are far more interested in the common words rather than the unusual words that make up the rare phrases that the Johnsons are looking for. ↩

  28. For those interested, that means that the Book of Mormon has about 25% repetition at the level of four word phrases, while The Late War has only about 10%. ↩

  29. You can see these texts here https://archive.org/search.php?query=officer%27s%20daughter%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts and here http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342. ↩

  30. Pride and Prejudice contains 119,224 unique four-word phrases. ↩

  31. There is some irony here in the degree to which Jane Austen was entirely separate from her environment. Those four-word phrases which might be entirely unique to Austen (the phrases that could hint at the degree to which Austen was independent of the literary culture in which she wrote) would be excluded by this study – both as a potential source (in that the frequency might not be high enough to include) and in the results (with no overlap at all, it would never come up in comparison). We get a conclusion that really cannot be supported by the data collected. ↩

  32. With its earlier publication date, the Douay-Rheims Bible would have a greater impact on earlier texts used in the baseline data. Hunt’s volume was patterned on the KJV, and the Book of Mormon much more closely resembles the language of the KJV than it does the Douay-Rheims. For these reasons — and to keep the discussion as simple as possible — I only worked with the KJV. ↩

  33. Like my text of the Book of Mormon, this text is relatively free of OCR errors. I note that the repetition in the KJV is between the other two texts, at 15%. ↩

  34. This figure includes all of the four-word phrases used in both the Book of Mormon and The Late War. This figure is significantly different from the 549 weighted phrases used by the Johnsons to score the relationship. My figure includes low frequency phrases (including potentially OCR errors). Due to differences in the cleaning process, there are some additional variations. I did not include the copyright statement in the Book of Mormon (so the phrases exclusive to the copyright statement are not in this list) and I did not strip out an end material from Hunt’s volume. The larger collection of phrases is useful because it provides a picture of the total ratio of textual material in common between the two books. ↩

  35. Calculated by the sum of the inverse of the frequencies. ↩

  36. It’s also true that part of that statement was caused (with absolutely certainty) by the existence of the federal copyright act of 1790. This method could not point us to that connection. ↩

  37. I note in passing here that the KJV comes from a much earlier period of time. We don’t suppose that the extreme overlap between the two is due simply to common language in the environment. Part of this is that the KJV was the most published work in the time period leading up to (and following) the publishing of the Book of Mormon. ↩

  38. There may be some duplication in the hits due to multiple editions of a single work. ↩

  39. The general search looks like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22your+women+and+your%22&biw=1467&bih=608&sa=X&ei=MgtoUvSgFsHyyAGR_YCABA&ved=0CCMQpwUoBA&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1500%2Ccd_max%3A1%2F1%2F1830&tbm=bks . It is created by using quotes to designate an exact phrase, then using the search tools feature to indicate a custom date range between 1/1/1500 and 1/1/1830. ↩

  40. Rick Grunder, Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source, pp. 724-5. ↩

Passing Up The Heavenly Gift (Part Two of Two)

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): 245-321

Review of Denver C. Snuffer, Jr., Passing the Heavenly Gift, Salt Lake City: Mill Creek Press, 2011. 510 pp., no index. $25.97.

Claims #4 and #5: The Source of the Authority of Brigham Young and the Apostles After Joseph’s Death

Snuffer writes of the apostolic succession:

In 1847, Brigham Young publicly explained his understanding of the keys he obtained in these words: “an apostle is the Highest office and authority that there is in the Church and Kingdom [of] God on the earth. From whom did Joseph receive his authority? From just such men as sit around me here (pointing to the Twelve Apostles that sat with him.) Peter, James and John were Apostles, and there was no noise about their being seers and revelators though those gifts were among them. Joseph Smith gave unto me and my brethren (the Twelve) all the Priesthood keys, power and authority which he had and those are the powers which belong to the Apostleship” (87).1

[Page 246]Snuffer then delivers his killing stroke: “This explanation is misleading because Brigham Young was not ordained an Apostle by Joseph Smith” (87). A few pages later, he writes that “Brigham Young’s claim to have received the sealing power when he was ordained an Apostle is completely dependent on the Three Witnesses’ ordination in 1835. That ordination came a year prior to the 1836 visit of Elijah” (91).

An Incomplete and Misleading Citation

Snuffer, though, is putting words into Brigham’s mouth. Brigham did not say, “Joseph ordained me an apostle,” nor did he say, “I received all these keys when I was ordained an apostle.” He says, rather, that Joseph got his authority from apostles, and that “Joseph gave” all the power and keys “unto me and my brethren (the Twelve).” Here again, Snuffer is only giving us part of the story. In the very same talk, Brigham explained: “We do not recieve all at once but we recieve grace for grace. When Brother Joseph received the Preisthood He did not recieve all at once, but He was A prophet Seer & Revelator before He recieved the fulness of the Priesthood & keys of the kingdom.”2 He goes on to say that after receiving the Aaronic priesthood, Joseph

recieved the Patriarchal or Melchisedick Priesthood from under the Hands of Peter James & John who were of the Twelve Apostles & were the Presidency when the other Apostles were Absent. From those Apostles Joseph Smith recieved every key power, Blessing, & Privilege of the Highest Authority of the Melchezedick Priesthood ever committed to man on the earth which they held.3

But, this is not all. Brigham then says that
[Page 247]

Elijah spoken of in the Bible that He should Come in the last days to turn the hearts of the fathers to the Children & the children to their fathers. The fulfillment of this scripture is manifest in establishing the kingdom of God & Priesthood on the earth in the last days & those who hold the keys of the priesthood & sealing power have the spirit & power of Elijah & it is necessary in order to redeem our dead & save our Children. There is much more importance attached to this than Parents are aware of.4

Brigham has thus argued for a progression from Aaronic, to all Melchizedek keys and authority held by Peter, James, and John, and finally to the mission of Elijah. This may hint that Brigham knew of the basics of the Elijah visitation five years before the account from Joseph’s journal was published in 1852 (we will see below that Willard Richards had made a copy for the Manuscript History in 1843, and may well have informed Brigham of it, if Joseph did not do so during his instruction in the higher ordinances).5

This supposition is strengthened by Brigham’s concluding remarks, for he again invokes both Elijah and the keys associated with redemption of the dead: “A man that has embraced the gospel must [be?] some one who has the Priesthood & keys & power of Elijah & must attend to ordinances” for their kindred dead.6

It is, then, misleading for PTHG to pretend that Brigham lays claim to all priesthood keys and power from Joseph via his ordination by the Three Witnesses to the office of apostle. Brigham clearly understands this authority as something received in discrete steps, and one that ultimately encompasses [Page 248]Elijah’s power. His claim is simply that he got this power from Joseph, and that all such power rests with the apostles.

PTHG claims that

apparently all prior information, charges, ordinations, washings, endowments, sealings and instruction were not as clear to Brigham Young at the moment Joseph died as he would later make it appear. It was only as time went on that the accounts of Joseph passing keys to the Twelve grew to add detail and certainty” (70).

Still, 1847 was not Brigham’s or the apostles’ first articulation of their claim to possess the authority and power vouchsafed them by Joseph. (And, if PTHG viewed Brigham with even a hint of charity, he might be forgiven if his initial reaction at Joseph’s death was a sudden confusion—the New Testament apostles were much slower to grasp the implications of Jesus’ pre-crucifixion teachings.)

Earlier Claims Made by Brigham Young and the Twelve

In public discourse in 1843, Brigham Young made it clear that the government of the Church rested upon “the prophet” and “the Twelve”:

Among other things said that a man or woman may ask of God & get a witness & testimony from God concerning any work or messenger that is sent unto them. But if a person asks for a thing that does not concern him, such as governing the Church what shall the prophet or the Twelve do &c? He will not get an answer. If he does it will not be from God.7

Joseph was still alive and did not rebuke or correct Brigham’s claim. Within less than two months of the martyrdom, members of the Twelve and other witnesses were reporting the [Page 249]same thing that Brigham claimed in PTHG’s truncated citation from 1847:

Elders O Hyde and P. P. Pratt testifyed that Joseph the Prophet and Seer had ordained, anointed, and appointed the Twelve to lead the Church. Had given them the Keys of the Kingdom of God for that purpose.

W. W. Phelps and R. Cahoon bore testimony to the same thing, saying that Joseph said unto the Twelve upon your sholdiers the kingdom of God must rest in all the world. Now round up your sholdiers and bear it.8

Heber C. Kimball likewise said that “when Jesus was upon the earth his time was spent in endowing the twelve apostles that they might do the things he had left undone and carry out his measures, and upon the same principle we carry out Joseph’s measures.”9 Wilford Woodruff wrote:

And when they [the apostles] received their endowment, and actually received the keys of the kingdom of God, and oracles of God, keys of revelation, and the pattern of heavenly things; and thus addressing the Twelve, exclaimed, “upon your shoulders the kingdom rests, elders, and bear it; for I have had to do it until now. But now the responsibility rests upon you. It mattereth not what becomes of me.”…

[Brigham Young] has not only had much experience with President Smith, but he has proved himself true and faithful in all things committed to his charge, until [Page 250]he was called to hold the keys of the kingdom of God in all the world, in connection with the Twelve: was the first to receive his endowment, from under the hands of the Prophet and Patriarch, who have leaned upon him in connection with the Twelve, for years, to bear off this kingdom in all the world.10

Again, the claim is clear that Brigham was faithful, and he was eventually ordained to all the keys by Joseph in conjunction with his receipt of the higher temple ordinances in Nauvoo. Woodruff would elsewhere write:

The prophet called the quorum of the twelve together several months before his death, and informed them that the Lord had commanded him to hasten their endowments; that he did not expect to remain himself to see the temple completed, but wished to confer the keys of the kingdom of God upon other men, that they might build up the church and kingdom according to the pattern given. And the prophet stood before the twelve from day to day, clothed with the spirit and power of God, and instructed them in the oracles of God, in the pattern of heavenly things, in the things of the kingdom, the power of the priesthood, and in the knowledge of the last dispensation in the fulness of times.

And as his last work and charge to the quorum of the twelve, that noble spirit rose up in all the majesty, strength, and dignity of his calling, as a prophet, [Page 251]seer, and revelator… and exhorted and commanded the brethren of the twelve to rise up, and go forth in the name of Israel’s God, and bear off the keys of the kingdom of God in righteousness and honour in all the world.11

Orson Hyde said:

Before I went east on the 4th of April last, we were in council with Brother Joseph almost every day for weeks, says Brother Joseph in one of those councils there is something going to happen; I dont know what it is, but the Lord bids me to hasten and give you your endowment before the temple is finished. He conducted us through every ordinance of the holy priesthood, and when he had gone through with all the ordinances he rejoiced very much, and says, now if they kill me you have got all the keys, and all the ordinances and you can confer them upon others, and the hosts of Satan will not be able to tear down the kingdom, as fast as you will be able to build it up; and now says he on your shoulders will the responsibility of leading this people rest, for the Lord is going to let me rest a while.12

Still less than a year after Joseph’s death, Parley P. Pratt would explain:

We [the apostles] hold the keys of the ministry and ordinances of salvation in this last kingdom; and if the people choose to be benefitted by them, it is their own blessing: if not, it is their own neglect….

[Page 252]This great and good man [Joseph] was led, before his death, to call the Twelve together, from time to time, and to instruct them in all things pertaining to the kingdom, ordinances, and government of God. He often observed that he was laying the foundation, but it would remain for the Twelve to complete the building. Said he, “I know not why; but for some reason I am constrained to hasten my preparations, and to confer upon the Twelve all the ordinances, keys, covenants, endowments, and sealing ordinances of the priesthood, and so set before them a pattern in all things pertaining to the sanctuary and the endowment therein.”

Having done this, he rejoiced exceedingly; for, said he, the Lord is about to lay the burden on your shoulders and let me rest awhile; and if they kill me, continued he, the kingdom of God will roll on, as I have now finished the work which was laid upon me, by committing to you all things for the building up of the kingdom according to the heavenly vision, and the pattern shown me from heaven. With many conversations like this, he comforted the minds of the Twelve, and prepared them for what was soon to follow.

He proceeded to confer on elder Young, the President of the Twelve, the keys of the sealing power, as conferred in the last days by the spirit and power of Elijah, in order to seal the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of [Page 253]the children to the fathers, lest the whole earth should be smitten with a curse.

This last key of the priesthood is the most sacred of all, and pertains exclusively to the first presidency of the church, without whose sanction and approval or authority, no sealing blessing shall be administered pertaining to things of the resurrection and the life to come.13

Pratt clearly appeals to repeated meetings with Joseph in Nauvoo (i.e., well after their ordination to the apostleship) and to a deliberate bestowal of keys when Brigham was President of the Twelve (which he was not when first made an apostle).

Snuffer also ignores a vital document, which was likely prepared by the Twelve to articulate their leadership claim. (Snuffer relies heavily on D. Michael Quinn, and some have suggested that Quinn was unaware of this document—this may explain Snuffer’s silence concerning it.14) The document was published in 2005,15 and was written between September 1844 and March 1845, likely in the fall of 1844.16

We were present at a Council in the latter part of the month of March last [1844]… and the greater part of the Twelve Apostles were present….

[Page 254]In this Council, Joseph Smith seemed somewhat depressed in spirit and [said]…

Brethren, the Lord bids me hasten the work in which we are engaged. He will not suffer that you should wait for your endowment until the Temple is done. Some important scene is near to take place. It may be that my enemies will kill me, and in case they should, and the keys and power which rest on me not be imparted to you, they will be lost from the Earth…. Upon the shoulders of the Twelve must the responsibility of leading this church hence forth rest until you shall appoint others to succeed you….

After this appointment was made, and confirmed by the holy anointing under the hands of Joseph and Hyrum, Joseph continued his speech unto them, saying, while he walked the floor and threw back the collar of his coat upon his shoulders, “I roll the burthen and responsibility of leading this church off from my shoulders on to yours. Now round up your shoulders and stand under it like men; for the Lord is going to let me rest a while.” …

Joseph Smith did declare that he had conferred upon the Twelve every key and every power that he ever held himself before God.17

Snuffer distorts the apostles’ claim and creates a straw man by writing that “if information in the endowment alone is sufficient to pass keys, then Mormon dissidents Jerald and Sandra Tanner, who have published the various endowment [Page 255]ordinances and versions would hold the keys” (111). This is extraordinarily obtuse—the Twelve did not claim that merely having received the endowment conferred keys. Rather, they claimed that they had received the endowment and all the higher ordinances and explicitly been given keys under the hands of Joseph and Hyrum. As one attendee later described the meeting, “‘the keys of power committed’ to the Twelve consisted of ‘Keys of Endowments to the Last Anointing & Sealing[,] Together with keys of Salvation for the Dead. with the eternity of the Marriage Covenent and the Powr of Endless Lives.’”18

Brigham Young and the apostles’ claims to possess all the keys via ordination from Joseph appeared very early and never wavered. PTHG’s hypothesis of a gradual evolution and solidification of claims about keys from Joseph simply does not match the accounts which predate Snuffer’s incomplete 1847 citation.

Claim #6: Joseph Received Sealing Powers in 1829

It is disappointing to see Snuffer resort to an ancient anti-Mormon canard regarding D&C 84 (30). Church critics have long claimed19 that Joseph Smith’s theophany cannot have occurred because priesthood is required to permit mortals to tolerate the divine presence:
[Page 256]

And this greater priesthood administereth the gospel and holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God. Therefore, in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest. And without the ordinances thereof, and the authority of the priesthood, the power of godliness is not manifest unto men in the flesh; For without this no man can see the face of God, even the Father, and live (D&C 84:19–22).

Snuffer, like the Tanners before him, misreads the scripture, declaring that “Joseph Smith… necessarily holds this higher priesthood. For without it, no man can see the Father and live. Since Joseph beheld the Father in the First Vision, it was necessary for him to have this higher priesthood even before the appearance of the angels who later conferred priesthood upon Joseph” (30, citations removed). But this is not what the scripture says.

“Without this,” it reads, “no man can see the face of God.” To what does this refer? Its antecedent is clearly “the power of godliness”—thus, without ordinances and the priesthood authority necessary to perform them—”the power of godliness is not manifest unto men in the flesh.” And, without the power of godliness, one cannot abide the presence of God.20

In most circumstances, the manifestation of that power would follow the receipt of and obedience to the ordinances, which require the priesthood. But God can by grace clearly grant the power of godliness to one who has been unable to receive the ordinances due to the absence of an authorized administrator.

[Page 257]To solve the problem that he believes he has discovered, Snuffer follows Orson Pratt in declaring that Joseph held priesthood already from a pre-mortal ordination (30, 295). But this claim will not salvage other aspects of PTHG’s theory. Joseph Smith taught that “at the general & grand Council of heaven, all those to whom a dispensation was to be commited, were set apart & ordained at that time, to that calling. The Twelve also as witnesses were ordained.”21) Thus, if PTHG wishes to appeal to a pre-mortal conferral of priesthood for Joseph to meet his lack of mortal ordination, the Twelve could likewise appeal to pre-mortal ordination even if they did not receive it from Joseph in mortality.22

Date of Plural Marriage Revelation(s) and Implementation

PTHG claims that “beginning in 1831, Joseph obeyed the” command “concerning plural wives” (326). Here again, his grasp of the relevant history is lacking. There is no evidence that Joseph practiced plural marriage in 1831.

The first documented plural marriage was to Fanny Alger, whose marriage to Joseph has been dated by historians between 1832 and 1836.23 Furthermore, Snuffer is not cautious enough in his use of the term “sealing” (e.g., 92, 326).

[Page 258]During the Nauvoo period, sealing could involve the sealing of spouses. (The earliest references to marriages lasting beyond death are found in W. W. Phelps’ 1835 letters to his wife.24) However, during the Ohio period, Joseph and others would be spoken of in the revelations as “seal[ing]… up unto eternal life” (D&C 68:12).25 This usage of terminology may be compared to the Book of Mormon, which often speaks of “sealing up” for protection or security (e.g., title page, 1 Nephi 14:26; 2 Nephi 26:17, 27:8, 22; 30:3; Ether 3:22–28, 4:5, 5:1; Moroni 10:2). One sees the same usage in Snuffer’s often-cited D&C 124, where Hyrum Smith is said “to hold the sealing blessings of my church, even the Holy Spirit of promise, whereby ye are sealed up unto the day of redemption” (D&C 124:124). This blessing was given on 19 January 1841, i.e., prior to Hyrum’s knowledge of or acceptance of plural marriage. However, despite D&C 124, Hyrum was severely rebuked by Joseph for performing an unauthorized marriage sealing in June 1843, since “there is never but one on the earth at a time on whom this power and the keys of this priesthood are conferred” (D&C 132:7).26 Wilford Woodruff likewise sealed others up to eternal life in Joseph’s lifetime, but he had not received the sealing power involved in the higher ordinances.27 Thus, the two uses of “sealing” must not be confused if one is to understand Joseph Smith’s thought.

[Page 259]Furthermore, Snuffer uses remarks made by Brigham Young in 1872 as the basis for his claim that Joseph received the plural marriage revelation found in D&C 132 in 1829. PTHG declares that this “makes the conclusion inescapable that the original revelation… was provoked during and because of the translation of the Book of Mormon, and not the work done revising the Bible” (80). This is not a sophisticated approach to the issue. Many LDS historians have considered the matter, and most have concluded that there is other evidence that argues against Brigham being correct.28 It is ironic that Snuffer will reject Brigham Young’s account of his personal reception of priesthood keys from Joseph as a later elaboration or confabulation,29 but insist that Brigham’s late remarks about an event that occurred before he was even a member of the Church leads to an “inescapable” conclusion. The only conclusion we are forced to accept is that Snuffer is not doing serious history, and that he employs double standards in his evaluation of evidence depending upon whether it can be shoe-horned into his thesis.

The date of the marriage sealing power’s receipt is important to Snuffer’s broader argument because “I do not believe that Elijah’s [3 April 1836] appearance conferred sealing power on Joseph Smith. Instead, I believe it came to Joseph just as it came to Melchizedek…. It is delivered by the calling of God’s own voice” (327). As we will now see, for Joseph to receive authority from God alone, without an ordaining intermediary, is vital to Snuffer’s project of disputing whether transmitted priesthood authority is needed to perform ordinances.
[Page 260]

Elijah and the Sealing Keys

PTHG works tirelessly (326–327) to disprove the idea that Joseph received sealing keys in the Kirtland temple in 1836:

All the contemporaneous records kept by any party fail to record any mention by Joseph Smith of the Kirtland Temple visitation from Moses, Elias and Elijah. It was never taught by Joseph Smith, never mentioned in any sermon delivered by him, and was never mentioned in anything Joseph ever wrote (75).

This is excellent lawyering, since it is mostly true in a narrow, technical sense, but it hides several important points. One wonders, first of all, what a Snuffer-esque author in the first century would have written about Jesus’ encounter on the Mount of Transfiguration with the same individuals. Jesus wrote nothing about it, and said nothing about it to anyone afterward either. He likewise ordered the other witnesses present not to say anything (Matthew 17:9; Mark 9:9–10). Only when Jesus was gone did the apostles “conveniently recall” (our Snuffer clone might argue) this theophany and have it written down decades later.

Second, as Dan Vogel pointed out, there are two contemporaneous documents penned just after the Kirtland temple dedication which invoke the Elijah theophany.30 The first was written by a hostile source a week following the appearance of the Savior and those who bestowed keys:

They [the Mormons] have lately had what they term a solemn assembly. This was at the completion of the lower story of the Temple which is finished in a very singular order having four Pulpits on each [Page 261]end of the House and curtains between each. Also, curtains dividing the house in the center. They have had wonderful manifestations there of late behind the curtains. This was in the night. Their meeting held for several nights in succession. None but the Prophets and Elders were admitted. The number of Prophets now amounts to twelve. Some can see angels and others cannot. They report that the Savior appeared personally with angels and endowed the Elders with powers to work Miracles.31

The second more explicit account comes from a member, W. W. Phelps, who wrote his wife:

On Sunday, April 3, the twelve held meeting and administered the sacrament. It was a glorious time. The curtains were dropt in the afternoon. And There was a manifestation of the Lord to Br Joseph and Oliver, [by?] which they [learned?] thus the great & terrible day of the Lord as mentioned by Malachi, was near, even at the doors.32

Malachi 4:5 promised the coming of Elijah, and the Joseph Smith journal account would record that Elijah declared Malachi’s promise to be fulfilled (D&C 110:14), and said “the [Page 262]great and dreadful day of the Lord is near, even at the doors” (D&C 110:16). When Snuffer claims there are no contemporary sources, he is wrong.

Thirdly, why would Joseph and Oliver have spoken about the event frequently, since the full temple ordinances for which the keys were necessary were not given to anyone until much later? A review of the Nauvoo-era discourses shows Joseph preparing the Saints for these ideas and lamenting their reluctance to accept anything new.33 Extensive public teaching about such things would make little sense until the Saints were ready to participate in the ordinances. One wonders if even Joseph understood their full import initially.34

Fourthly, Joseph “wrote” very little, so his failure to write about Elijah is unremarkable. He would often dictate material, but seldom took up the pen himself. The account that we have of Elijah’s appearance is found in Joseph Smith’s journal, in the handwriting of Warren A. Cowdery. And so, Snuffer must dispense with that evidence: “So far as any preserved record exists, from April 1836, until their respective deaths in 1844 and 1849, neither Joseph nor Oliver ever mentioned this event to anyone. Only Warren Cowdery’s third person handwritten account mentions it” (75).

This borders on the absurd. Warren Cowdery was Joseph’s scribe, and made an entry in Joseph’s personal journal (the vast majority of which was always written by scribes, not Joseph himself). Where does Snuffer think the account came from, if not from Joseph or Oliver? And, why would he presume anyone but Joseph was the source, since it was placed in Joseph’s [Page 263]journal? Clearly, either Joseph and/or Oliver mentioned it to someone, and did so quite early on.35

Furthermore, we can narrow the time frame considerably—it need not stretch to 1844 or 1848 as Snuffer argues: “Warren Cowdery, who inserted the account of the vision in the… journal, could have written it at any time” (76). Technically true, but still misleading. An initial upper bound can be placed on its composition, since Willard Richards made a first person copy in 1843, which he inserted into the Manuscript History of the Church.36 This demonstrates that the text existed by then, and that Richards (who by that date had received the Nauvoo temple ordinances from Joseph) likely understood the vision’s significance. Yet he did not speak or preach about it publicly either. Richards was preparing the Manuscript History under Joseph’s direction, and had reached 5 August 1838 before Joseph’s martyrdom.37 Given that Joseph accorded a high priority to the history, and would periodically review it, Snuffer’s confidence that Joseph communicated nothing at all before his death about the vision seems misplaced (324). His claim that the vision was “unknown in the 1830’s and 40’s” is also shown to be false (77).

We can tighten the timeline further by noting that Warren Cowdery arrived in Kirtland 25 February 1836,38 was writing editorials hostile to Joseph Smith by July 1837, and in 1838 would leave the Church never to return.39 Unless Snuffer would [Page 264]have us believe that Cowdery somehow had access to Joseph’s journals after his estrangement, and moreover that he would make an entry about a spectacular manifestation when he was at odds with the Prophet, we have a narrow window between April 1836 and July 1837 during which the text was written.

PTHG later uses the fact that Warren wrote a March 1837 article about the Savior’s Mount of Transfiguration vision of Elias, Elijah, and Moses to argue “if Joseph and Oliver failed to mention the appearances of Moses and Elijah, the scribe who wrote the event displayed an interest in the subject” (77). But if Warren knew nothing in March 1837 (as opposed to simply having no permission to mention the event) this does not help Snuffer’s case—it would narrow the writing of the vision to between March and July 1837. Warren’s article may, on the other hand, have been stimulated by what he had already written for Joseph, but was to keep private.

PTHG’s account is also misleading when it claims that the Warren Cowdery account “was finally discovered and published in the Deseret News on November 6, 1852″ (77). Willard Richards had placed the vision in the Manuscript History in 1843, and the serial publication of that history began on 15 November 1851.40 The 1836 Elijah vision was not suddenly “discovered” and then published; it appeared nearly a year later when the on-going newspaper account had reached the events of 3 April 1836.41

Though he cites the Joseph Smith Papers project, Snuffer does not inform his audience of the editors’ conclusions that hurt his thesis. For instance, the editors point out that “this account of visitations closes the journal. After more than six months of almost daily recording of developments in Kirtland, [Page 265]entries ceased.”42 This might push the record back to within days of the event. Furthermore, Snuffer claims again that “we [do not] know what source told Warren… about the event,” and notes simply that “it is written in the third person” (76). He does not tell his readers that the editors indicate that as Warren worked on Joseph’s history, he “also produced third-person accounts. In that endeavor, he had before him a first-person text (the earlier entries of [the] journal), which he changed to third person as he copied them into the history…. For this material, he must have relied on another original text—no longer extant—or on oral reports from either or both of the participants.”43 It is thus unsurprising that Warren wrote as he did, and he likely did so on the basis of a first person account fairly soon after the event.44

Snuffer also claims that the language of D&C 110 proves that “rather than ordaining or conferring something, Elijah made a statement about what Joseph had previously received…. [T]he ‘keys of this dispensation are committed into your hands’ is a statement about what was already there. The sealing authority had been given to Joseph earlier” (92). This is quite a stretch—Moses and Elias had just appeared and “committed” their keys; why ought we to assume Elijah is simply there to point out what has happened years ago? Elijah speaks in the [Page 266]present tense, not the past. He does not say, “The keys have been committed,” he says they are committed—and Elijah then said that his prophesied coming was foretold and is now fulfilled. And Moroni had long ago told Joseph Smith Elijah would have a role in restoring priesthood: “Behold, I will reveal unto you the Priesthood, by the hand of Elijah” (Joseph Smith History 1:38).

One does not often see such tortured efforts to dispense with data fatal to one’s thesis.

Joseph’s Nauvoo Era Teachings About Elijah

Joseph Smith likewise would not have agreed with PTHG’s claim that Elijah only appeared to announce that all keys had already been returned. On 5 October 1840, the Prophet taught:

Elijah was the last prophet that held the keys of this priesthood, and who will, before the last dispensation, restore the authority and delive[r] the Keys of this priesthood in order that all the ordinances may be attended to in righteousness….

And I will send Elijah the Prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord &c &c.

Why send Elijah[?] [B]ecause he holds the Keys of the Authority to administer in all the ordinances of the priesthood and without the authority is given the ordinances could not be administered in righteousness.45

Joseph here explicitly rebuts two of Snuffer’s fundamental assertions by teaching that: (1) one must be authorized to perform the ordinances (see Claim #1); and (2) Elijah was [Page 267]sent because he holds keys necessary “to administer in all the ordinances of the priesthood,” and not simply to announce that everything had already happened.

Later, in the Times and Seasons of 15 October 1841, Joseph would discuss the concept that “the dispensation of the fulness of times will bring to light the things that have been revealed in all former dispensations, also other things that have not been before revealed. He shall send Elijah the prophet &c., and restore all things in Christ.”46

Joseph thus speaks twice of Elijah’s mission in the future tense even after April 1836. If this is not a mere rhetorical act (i.e., speaking for effect as if in the time of Malachi, looking forward to Elijah’s return) then it may undermine Snuffer’s claims even further. As Ehat and Cook noted,

Apparently in [Joseph’s] mind it was not sufficient that he alone had these keys and this power, but he intended by way of ordinances to confer a portion of this power on others who were faithful, thereby actually bringing about the restoration of all things…. It was not enough to Joseph Smith to be a king and a priest unto the Most High, but he insisted that his people be a society of priests “as in Paul’s day, as in Enoch’s day” through the ordinances of the temple (see 30 March 1842 discourse). Throughout the remainder of his Nauvoo experience, Joseph Smith taught and emphasized the importance of the temple ordinances, ordinances that would bestow upon members of the Church the knowledge and power he foreshadows in this discourse.47

This view is confirmed by an address given over three years later. Joseph declared, “The keys are to be delivered, the spirit [Page 268]of Elijah is to come, the gospel to be established, the Saints of God gathered, Zion built up, and the Saints to come up on Mount Zion.”48 We again note the future tense, which may be rhetorical, but seems here to also anticipate a culmination that was in the future. “But how are they to become Saviors on Mount Zion?” asks Joseph. He replies:

By building their temples erecting their Baptismal fonts & going forth & receiving all the ordinances, Baptisms, confirmations, washings anointings ordinations & sealing powers upon our heads in behalf of all our Progenitors who are dead & redeem them that they may come forth in the first resurrection & be exhalted to thrones of glory with us, & herein is the Chain that binds the hearts of the fathers to the Children, & the Children to the Fathers which fulfills the mission of Elijah.49

The ordinances seem vital, Elijah’s keys seem vital, sealing powers are bestowed by mortal ordination, and there is no hint that the Saints are in danger of losing them (claim #9). In fact, as we will now see, it would be absurd for Joseph to act as if these things were in danger of being lost, since he had conferred these ordinances upon the Twelve and others already.

Claim #7: Necessary Authority Could Only Be Transmitted in a Completed Temple

PTHG claims that D&C 124:28 proves that “by 1841, the fullness of the priesthood had been suspended or ‘lost’ from Joseph Smith. He was no longer authorized to use that fullness on behalf of the church. The details of how it was taken have not been preserved” (97–98).

[Page 269]Perhaps there is no record of the details because Snuffer is in error. When the verse is read in context, such suspicions seem well-founded:

Build a house to my name, for the Most High to dwell therein. For there is not a place found on earth that he may come to and restore again that which was lost unto you, or which he hath taken away, even the fulness of the priesthood. For a baptismal font there is not upon the earth, that they, my saints, may be baptized for those who are dead (D&C 124:27–29).

Snuffer often complains about LDS historians starting with a conclusion and “reasoning backward” (97, 99, 319, 321). He gives us a specimen of that approach here. The scripture says that something has been lost and taken away—but the text then immediately says that this includes the ability to do baptisms for the dead.50 But Joseph and the Saints had never done baptisms for the dead prior to August 1840, or had the privilege of doing them.51 Clearly, when God says something has been lost unto you and taken away, he does not mean taken away from the Church, but rather that the doctrines and powers associated with vicarious work for the dead were lost to mortals during the Christian apostasy. God deigns to restore these, but they can only happen in a temple, “For this ordinance belongeth to my house, and cannot be acceptable to me, only in the days of your poverty, wherein ye are not able to build a house unto me” (D&C 124:30). Meanwhile, for now “your baptisms shall be [Page 270]acceptable unto me” (D&C 124:31)—a clear sign that the Saints are not being deprived of a previous blessing or power. They are, instead, called to build a temple so that this work and the other ordinances associated with it can be restored and continue.52

“If a red brick store is an adequate substitute for a temple,” Snuffer archly observes, “then there must have been plenty of places that could be found for the Lord to come and restore again the fullness” (335). Yet, Joseph Smith specifically told the apostles and others53 that the Lord had commanded him to administer the ordinances and all the keys: “He told us that the object he had was for us to go to work and fit up that room preparatory to giving endowments to a few Elders that he might give unto them all the keys of power pertaining to the Aaronic and Melchisedec Priesthoods,” wrote one participant.54 After Joseph dedicated the upper room for this purpose,55 “Joseph washed and anointed [us] as Kings and Priests to God, and over the House of Israel… [because] he was commanded of God, [to do so]… and [thereby] conferred on us Patriarchal Priesthood.”56 Joseph told the Relief Society six days earlier, “the [Page 271]keys of the kingdom are about to be given.”57 Three days later, he preached on the “keys of the kingdom,” saying that there are “certain signs and words by which false spirits and personages may be detected from true, which cannot be revealed to the Elders till the Temple is completed.”58 Brigham Young reported succinctly once all the higher ordinances were given: “Brother Joseph said he had given us all that could be given to man on the earth.”59

(This is a far cry from PTHG’s dismissive claim that “Joseph instituted a form of temple endowment in May, 1842” (266). According to Joseph, he instituted all the ordinances, and he did so at God’s command.60)

Willard Richards, keeper of Joseph’s journal and among the first nine to be endowed on 4 May 1842, would note that Joseph was “instructing them in the principles and order of the priesthood, attending to washings it [sic] anointings, & endowments, and the communications of keys, pertaining to the Aaronic Priesthood, and so on to the highest order of the Melchisedec Priesthood, setting forth the order pertaining to the Ancient of days & all those plans & principles by which any one is enabled to secure the fulness of those blessings which has been prepared for the church of the firstborn, and come up into and abide in the presence of God.”61 Observed Ehat:
[Page 272]

Though this priesthood order did not confer the fullness of the priesthood, it “pertained to the highest order” in that it presented all the “plans and principles” that would “enable” anyone “to secure” in this life or before the resurrection the fullness of the priesthood.62

Almost a year later, at subsequent meetings, the same participants were sealed in eternal marriage.63 Joseph would then teach publicly:

If a man gets the fullness of God he has to get [it] in the same way that Jesus Christ obtain[ed] it & that was by keeping all the ordinances of the house of the Lord…. [I]t was one reason why Jesus said how oft would I have gatherd you (the Jews) together that they might attend to the ordinance of the baptism for the dead as well as the other ordinances the Priesthood Revelations &c.64

Ehat observed:

When Joseph spoke of “all the ordinances of the house of the Lord,” the “fulness of the Priesthood” and “revelations as God gives in the most holy place in his temple” regarding becoming gods in eternity, he had in mind the highest ordinance of the temple—the only ordinance he had not as yet introduced. It was the capstone of ordinances essential to full salvation. To the members of the Quorum—still only the original nine members—this seems to have been clear. On 6 August 1843, Brigham Young in public discourse said, “If any in the church [have] the fullness of the Melchizedek Priesthood [I do] not know it. For any person to have the fullness of that priesthood, he must be a king and [Page 273]priest.” Brigham had in 1842 with the eight others of the Quorum received an anointing promising him he would, if faithful, eventually receive another anointing actually ordaining him a king and priest.65

The highest ordinances were first introduced on 28 September 1843:

These ordinances, depending on the person’s ecclesiastical position, made the recipient a “king and priest,” “in,” “in and over,” or (as only in Joseph Smith’s case) “over” the Church. Moreover, the recipient had sealed upon him the power to bind and loose on earth as Joseph explained in his definition of the fullness of the priesthood.66

And on 22 November 1843, Brigham Young became the first of the Twelve to “receive the fullness of the priesthood” with his wife, Mary Ann.67 Joseph then instructed Brigham to perform the same rite for the other apostles.68

Snuffer also ignores the fact that the Saints continued to maintain that a temple was necessary for the fullness of priesthood practice—and not only because the rank-and-file of the Church were to be endowed and receive the other higher ordinances there. The proxy work of endowments and sealings for the dead (as opposed to proxy baptisms)—which Joseph insisted formed part of the fullness—could not be performed outside of a temple, and never was.69 Joseph taught, however, [Page 274]that all the ordinances for the living and all keys and powers which he had been given could be and were bestowed on the apostles (see claims #4 and #5). In part, PTHG simply has too narrow a definition of the “the fullness,” and refuses to accept Joseph Smith’s statements about the legitimacy of what he did in the maligned upper room of the red brick store, and why he did it. Snuffer’s views are made to trump even Joseph’s, mostly by ignoring the relevant historical evidence.

Claim #8: The Saints Sinned in Missouri and Joseph Offered His Life to Give Them Another Chance

Snuffer discusses the difficulties in Missouri between the Saints and their neighbors, declaring, “Our pride wants us to be the innocent victims of unrighteous and wicked outsiders. But the events are not so one-sided” (98). Snuffer may know some who wish to see it that way, but he cannot charge such views to the Church. B. H. Roberts’ introduction to the official Manuscript History of the Church contains a lengthy discussion of the various causes of the difficulties in Missouri, and among these he cites “the unwisdom of the Saints.”70 Roberts dates the Saints’ errors to at least November 1831,71 and says that

it is very clear that the reason why the Saints were prevailed against by their enemies and driven from the center place of Zion, was because of their failure to live up to the high requirements made of them by the Lord. In subsequent efforts to redeem Zion, by attempting to return the exiles to Jackson county, the Saints in all parts of the land again failed to respond with sufficient promptness and fulness to the requirements of the Lord.72

[Page 275]Roberts goes on to describe the events of 1838—including Sidney Rigdon’s “salt sermon”—as “untimely, extreme, and unwise.”73 Snuffer caricatures the views of generations of Latter-day Saints about these events, even in the official history. But he also ignores the clear implication of D&C 123—that the majority of Saints were more sinned against than sinners.

At any rate, Snuffer claims that because of the Saints’ sins in Missouri, Joseph “apparently offered his life in exchange for another chance. The Lord accepted both his acknowledgement [of sin] and his offer” (100–101). A look at the footnote reveals that this claim is not as sturdy as the main text would lead us to believe: “What was offered is not explained either in the revelation or by Joseph Smith” (101 n. 120). But, despite this lack of evidence, Snuffer declares that “subsequent events… make it clear what Joseph offered for this additional chance to complete the restoration and have the saints receive the fullness of the priesthood. He offered, and ultimately forfeited, his life” (101 n. 120).

This is a strange claim. PTHG admits that there is no evidence in the revelations or in Joseph Smith’s statements—and, as we have seen, Snuffer is exceedingly resourceful in finding dubious textual “evidence” to defend his theories. He claims that “subsequent events” make this reading obvious, but he does not cite any of this data, or demonstrate how it proves his case. He merely asserts it in a footnote. If Joseph made such an offer, why do none of his sermons in Nauvoo describe it? Why does he not explain these matters to the Saints so they understand the stakes? The text itself says merely:

Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you, my servant Joseph Smith, I am well pleased with your offering and acknowledgments, which you have made; for unto this end have I raised you up, that I might show forth my [Page 276]wisdom through the weak things of the earth. Your prayers are acceptable before me; and in answer to them I say unto you, that you are now called immediately to make a solemn proclamation of my gospel (D&C 124:1–2).

The answer to Joseph’s offering and prayers is that he is to proclaim the gospel. The solemn proclamation calls for the gentiles to bring financial aid and religious observance to Zion. There were many other offerings and acknowledgements made by Joseph besides Snuffer’s dubious claim about him offering his life for the Saints’ sins—Joseph’s letters from Liberty Jail, for example, instruct the Saints that they must set out the names of those who persecuted them, together with the costs (D&C 123:1–16). This is “a duty which we owe to God,” and the Saints ought to “waste and wear out [their] lives in bringing to light all the hidden things of darkness” (v. 7, 13). When they have done “all things that lie in [their] power,” then they may “stand still…to see the salvation of God” (v. 17). It is at least as likely that these efforts have been accepted, so Joseph may now call on the world to either help them or suffer God’s intervention. This off-the-cuff reading is at least as likely as PTHG’s, with more textual evidence.

Such speculation and tale spinning is great sport, but it simply isn’t history.

Claim #9: The Nauvoo Temple Was Not Built With Enough Speed; the Saints’ Suffering Is Evidence of Punishment

PTHG tells us that “the revelation [D&C 124] required the construction of the Nauvoo Temple…. There was a set time. If at the end of that time the temple was not constructed, the words are clear ‘ye shall be rejected as a church, with your dead, saith the Lord your God’” (104).

PTHG does not tell us that the First Presidency had already urged the Saints to build a temple in August 1840, and the [Page 277]Saints had sustained this plan at an October 1840 conference.74 The Times and Seasons announced temple construction had begun on 15 January 1841, four days prior to the revelation, which suggests the Saints were not particularly slack regarding the temple:

The Temple of the Lord is in process of erection here, where the Saints will come to worship the God of their fathers, according to the order of His house and the powers of the Holy Priesthood, and will be so constructed as to enable all the functions of the Priesthood to be duly exercised, and where instructions from the Most High will be received, and from this place go forth to distant lands.75

“In Nauvoo at the time of Joseph’s death,” Snuffer observes, “there were completed homes built, a Masonic Temple, and manufacturing and retail facilities, but the Nauvoo Temple had been neglected. It was nowhere near completed when Joseph and Hyrum died” (105).

It is certainly true that homes and commercial buildings had been built. Snuffer’s claim that the temple was “neglected” must be established from the evidence, not merely asserted because his theory demands it. The temple required much more labor to complete than homes or businesses. Furthermore, commercial structures were also necessary in order to provide the economic muscle to supply labor and materials for the temple, which could not be built in a void. Does Snuffer believe [Page 278]the Saints were to have no homes until the temple was built? Joseph Smith evidently did not think so—the Heber C. Kimball family was living in a 14- by 16-foot log house about a mile from the Mississippi river, but in the summer of 1841, Joseph urged a move. Heber’s daughter recorded that “the prophet Joseph being anxious to have my father nearer to himself and his brethren our place was exchanged for one on the flat where father built us a more commodious house.”76 The Prophet’s behavior is simply inconsistent with Snuffer’s theory that the temple was being neglected, or that improvements in housing were inappropriate with the Lord’s timetable. If Snuffer’s views were correct, Joseph would have surely urged one of his most obedient followers to dedicate still more labor to the temple, rather than a new home.

Absent from Snuffer’s entire discussion is the Nauvoo House, a hotel whose construction was commanded in the same revelation (D&C 124:22–24). The Saints were not, then, to focus on the temple to the exclusion of all else, and it would have been economically impossible to do so anyway.

Joseph’s Discourses in the Relevant Period

If Snuffer is correct, there ought to be evidence in the historical record—Joseph spoke often and frequently of the Nauvoo temple and its construction. Does Snuffer expect us to believe that God would allow his people to fail without first requiring the prophet to repeatedly warn them? Let us look at some of the historical evidence which PTHG does not provide.

24 April 1842

Joseph “pronounced a curse on the Merchants and the rich, who would not assist in building” the temple.77 But he gives no warning that the Saints are in danger of losing their privileges [Page 279]simply because a few wealthy folk are not helping. God does not punish the many for the inaction of a few. The day prior to Joseph’s speech, Nauvoo’s Wasp newspaper (operated by Joseph’s brother) would note, “We passed by the Temple, and was delighted at the prospect that here presented itself. A scene of lively industry and animation was there. The sound of the polisher’s chisel—converting the rude stone of the quarry into an artful shape—sent forth its busy hum: all were busily employed—the work was fast progressing.”78 Yet Snuffer claims that scant days later, “by May, 1842 Joseph could see the temple would never be completed in the time allowed” (285). Evidence that we will see below is not consistent with this hypothesis.

1 September 1842

A revelation states:

Let the work of my temple, and all the works which I have appointed unto you, be continued on and not cease; and let your diligence, and your perseverance, and patience, and your works be redoubled, and you shall in nowise lose your reward, saith the Lord of Hosts. And if they persecute you, so persecuted they the prophets and righteous men that were before you. For all this there is a reward in heaven (D&C 127:4).

The audience is encouraged to continue, but no warning or chastisement is forthcoming. (Note that the transitive verb “redouble” does not mean to “double,” but means “to repeat in return… to repeat often…. To increase by repeated or continued additions,” such as in repeated blows.)79 Less than a week later, Joseph Smith sent a letter:
[Page 280]

6 September 1842

Let us, therefore, as a church and a people, and as Latter-day Saints, offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness; and let us present in his holy temple, when it is finished, a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation (D&C 128:24).

Again, there is encouragement but no sign of condemnation. But in Snuffer’s telling, Joseph had already decided that failure was inevitable (285).

29 October 1842

About 10 {in the forenoon I rode up and viewed the Temple. I expressed my satisfaction at the arrangements, and was pleased with the progress made in that sacred edifice}.80

Joseph here praises the Saints’ progress and efforts.

15 November 1842

The Times and Seasons reported the enthusiastic response to the arrival of timber from Wisconsin for the temple. The temple committee made assignments by ward, and “requested all the carpenters to come together on the Thursday to prepare the timbers.” The response exceeded their expectations:

We had a cheering assemblage of wagons, horses, oxen and men who began with zeal and gladness to pull the raft to pieces and haul it up to the Temple. This scenery has continued to the present date and the expectations of the committee more than realized.

[Page 281]On Thursday we had a large assemblage of carpenters, joiners &c. who succeeded in preparing the lumber and laying the joists preparatory to laying the temporary floor and fixing seats &c….

Whilst watching for a few moments the zeal and cheerful labors of the brethren to accomplish this thing we could not avoid feeling grateful to the great Jehovah, and to the brethren engaged in this noble cause. We are constrained to feel thankful to the Almighty for the many blessings we receive at his hands for the prosperity of the place-for the harmony and good feeling prevailing in our midst-and for the great and glorious privileges granted unto us as a people….

Now brethren, if so great and glorious have been the blessings realized in so early a stage of the work what may we expect when the building is completed, and a house prepared where the Most High can come and restore that which has been taken away in consequence of transgression; even the FULNESS of the priesthood.

Truly, no exertion on our part ought to be lacking but to double our diligence because great, yea very great are the consequences pending.

As we have already said, we feel thankful to the brethren for the interest they have taken, not only on the present, but on all former occasions. They have come forth like Saints of God and great will be their reward. Not long since they were naked, destitute, afflicted, and smitten having been twice plucked up by the roots; but again they lift their heads with gladness and manifest a determination to fulfil the revelations [Page 282]and commandments of the Most High if it be at the expense of all their property and even their lives. Will not God reward them? Yea, verily!81

21 February 1843

Joseph urges both the temple and the Nauvoo House be built:

for I began it & will finish it. Not that public spirit here as in other cities dont deny revelation if the Temple and Nauvoo house are not finished you must run away….every thing God does is to aggrandize his kingdom how does he lay the foundation? build a temple to my great name. and call the attention of the great. but where shall we lay our heads…. The building of N. House is just as sacred in my view as the Temple.

I want the Nauvoo House built it must be built, our salvation depends upon it. When men have done what they can or will for the temple, let them do what they can for the Nauvoo House. We never can accomplish our work at the expense of another.82

We note that Joseph urges that the temple be given priority, though both are important. A few months later, he will urge a shift of resources to the Nauvoo House, suggesting that the temple was not being neglected.83

6 April 1843

Joseph discusses using the Twelve to fund-raise for the Nauvoo House—something for which he would be unlikely to slight [Page 283]the temple.84 He notes, in fact, that “there has been too great latitude in individuals for the building of the Temple to the exclusion of the Nauvoo house.”85 The Saints, then, can hardly have been slacking on the temple if Joseph wants them to put more emphasis on the Nauvoo House.

11 July 1843

He [Joseph] beautifully and in a most powerful manner, illustrated the necessity of the gathering and the building of the Temple that those ordinances may be administered which are necessary preparations for the world to come: he exhorted the people in impressive terms to be diligent—to be up and doing lest the tabernacle pass over to another people and we lose the blessing.86

Joseph encourages diligence—slackening would be unwise. Work on the temple had slowed over the spring, but this was due to the illness of a key craftsman, William W. Player. An English convert who was the temple’s principal stone setter, Player’s absence delayed the spring start on the walls. Technical problems with the crane needed to raise massive timbers and stones also slowed the work, but this cannot be blamed on a lack of zeal either.87

9 October 1843

“President Smith concluded with exhortations to the church to renew their exertions to forward the work of the Temple, and in walking before the Lord in soberness and righteousness.”88 [Page 284]Joseph discussed temple business, but no report is made of a rebuke or warning for being behind schedule.89

15 October 1843

Joseph responds to some critics about the economic cost of the temple—clear evidence that work was proceeding and diverting significant resources:

some say It is better, say some to give [to] the poor than build the temple.—the building of the temple has kept the poor who were driven from Missouri from starving. as has been the best means for this object which could be devised

all ye rich men of the Latter Day Saints.—from abroad I would invite to bring up some of their money and give to the temple. we want Iron steel powder.—&c—a good plan to get up a forge[?]. bring in raw materials, & manu[f]act[ur]ing establishments of all kinds.—& surround the rapids—90

1 January 1844

The Times and Seasons noted:

Considering the many improvements that have been made, and the difficulties in many instances under which the committee have had to labor, the Temple has made great progress; and strenuous efforts are now being made in quarrying, hauling, and hewing stone, to place it in a situation that the walls can go up and the building be enclosed by next fall.

[Page 285]There has not been much done at the Nauvoo House during the past season, further than preparing materials; most of the brick, however, and hewed stone are in readiness for that building; and the Temple and Nauvoo House committees, having purchased several splendid mills in the pineries, place them in a situation to furnish both of the above named buildings with abundance of excellent lumber, besides having a large amount to dispose of.91

We recall that delays had occurred in the previous year because a key tradesman was taken ill. There were also technical problems with the temple’s crane.92

21 January 1844

Snuffer cites this discourse, and uses it as evidence that Saints were ignoring Joseph’s warnings:

Interestingly, only Wilford Woodruff recorded the content of that talk. Willard Richards reports only that a talk was given, the weather was “somewhat unpleasant,” and the subject was “sealing the hearts of the fathers to the children.” Joseph’s warning that there was a limited time to ‘make use of the seals while they are on earth’ seems to have gone unheard by those in Nauvoo, and later their descendants. Even the leadership of the church at the time were tone deaf to Joseph’s alarm (106–107).

Unsurprisingly, this gloss distorts Joseph’s message:

I would to God that this temple was now done that we might go into it & go to work & improve our time & make use of the seals while they are on earth & the [Page 286]Saints have none to much time to save & redeem their dead, & gather together their living relatives that they may be saved also, before the earth will be smitten & the Consumption decreed falls upon the world & I would advise all the Saints to go to with their might & gather together all their living relatives to this place that they may be sealed & saved that they may be prepared against the day that the destroying angel goes forth & if the whole Church should go to with all their might to save their dead seal their posterity & gather their living friends & spend none of their time in behalf of the world they would hardly get through before night would Come when no man Could work & my ownly trouble at the present time is concerning ourselves that the Saints will be divided & broken up & scattered before we get our Salvation Secure for thei[r] is so many fools in the world for the devil to operate upon it gives him the advantage often times.93

Joseph’s advice to the Saints is not “hurry up and complete the temple.” Instead, he urges them to get all their living relatives in Nauvoo so they can be endowed (after all, most of the Twelve and some others had already been endowed and received all the temple ordinances). Joseph’s “only worry” about the Saints is not their failure or unworthiness, but of them being attacked. This is a risk not because of their failure—rather, it is because there are “so many fools in the world” whom Satan can act upon.

Furthermore, when Joseph speaks of the Saints having “none to[o] much time” to redeem “their dead” and “their living relatives,” this is not because the temple will not be done within God’s time limit—rather, he is explicit that the time is short [Page 287]because “the earth will be smitten & the Consumption decreed falls upon the world” and “the day that the destroying angel goes forth.” These are clearly eschatological concerns, “before night would Come when no man Could work” (see John 9:4)—the time before Christ’s second coming is short. Snuffer’s gloss abuses the text from start to finish.

It makes no sense for Joseph to encourage gathering to Nauvoo to receive living ordinances if his real message (as Snuffer claims) is that the members are being slothful in building the temple and are in danger of not being allowed to receive the blessings at all. It is likewise incoherent to argue, in light of this instruction, that Joseph had known since May 1842 that they would fail. The leadership is not “tone deaf”—they simply don’t hear what Snuffer’s bias and torture of the text creates out of thin air.

5 February 1844

The Manuscript History of the Church reports that Joseph told the Nauvoo Temple’s architect that

if he had to make the Temple ten feet higher than it was originally calculated; that one light at the center of each circular window would be sufficient to light the whole room, and when the whole building was thus illuminated, the effect would be remarkably grand. “I wish you to carry out my designs. I have seen in vision the splendid appearance of that building illuminated, and will have it built according to the pattern shown me.”94

Joseph declares that he has seen the finished temple in vision. There is again no evidence that Joseph worries that they will be denied its blessings.
[Page 288]

4 March 1844

at a meeting of the First Presidency, the Twelve Apostles, the Temple Committee and others, Joseph Smith announced that under the circumstances “he did not know but it was best to let the Nauvoo house be till the temple is completed. [W]e need the temple more than anything Else… we will let the Nauvoo house stand till the temple is done and we will put all our forces on the temple—turn all our lumber towards the temple.”95

Surely Joseph would tell the Twelve—nine of whom he had initiated into all the higher temple ordinances, including the “fullness of the priesthood”—if the Saints were slighting God with regard to the temple. But, he did not (compare 7 March 1844 below).

7 March 1844

A critic, Charles Foster, claims that the Saints cannot finish the Nauvoo temple due to the cost. Joseph therefore proposes that they prove him wrong: “who don[‘]t know that we can put the roof on this building this season? by turning all the means of the N[auvoo] House & doubling our diligence we can do it.”96 Joseph has thus been content with the pace at which the temple and Nauvoo House are progressing (at times urging more effort to be diverted to the Nauvoo House) and now suggests diverting all effort to the temple. Again, there is no condemnation, nor any hint that the Saints’ chances are running out with Joseph’s death fast approaching (compare 4 March 1844).
[Page 289]

10 March 1844

Joseph speaks extensively about election, and the spirit and power of Elijah, which

is that ye have power to hold the keys of the revelations ordinances, oricles powers & endowments of the fulness of the Melchezedek Priesthood & of the Kingdom of God on the Earth & to receive, obtain & perform all the ordinances belonging to the Kingdom of God even unto the sealing of the hearts of the hearts fathers unto the children & the hearts of the children unto the fathers even those who are in heaven….Then what you seal on earth by the Keys of Elijah is sealed in heaven, & this is the power of Elijah, & this is the difference between the spirit & power of Elias and Elijah, for while the spirit of Elias is a forerunner the power of Elijah is sufficient to make our calling & Election sure.97

In all this, there is no sign that the Saints are falling behind, or that they are in danger of losing these blessings—and Joseph’s death is less than four months away. He even takes time to assure the congregation that Christ will not come in 1844 as William Miller had predicted, and also prophesies that Christ will not come before 1890.98 Why would he not address the much more pressing issue of an incomplete temple if Snuffer’s fanciful historical reconstruction is correct?

15 March 1844

The Church’s official newspaper praises the Nauvoo saints and encourages those not gathered to Nauvoo to be likewise faithful in building the temple. There is no sign that the Nauvoo Saints are slacking or risking condemnation:
[Page 290]

We are also pleased that we can inform our friends abroad, that the saints here of late, have taken hold of the word on the Temple with a zeal and energy that in no small degree excites our admiration. Their united efforts certainly speaks to us, that it is their determination that this spacious edifice shall be enclosed, if not finished, this season. And a word we would say to the Saints abroad, which is, that the Temple is being built in compliance with a special commandment of God not to a few individuals, but to all. Therefore we sincerely hope you will contribute of your means as liberally as your circumstances will allow, that the burden of the work may not rest upon a few, but proportionately upon all.99

12 May 1844

It is not only necessary that you should be baptized for your dead, but you will have to go thro’ all the ordinances for them, same as you have gone through, to save yourselves; there will be 144,000 Saviors on Mount Zion, and with them an innumerable host, that no man can number—Oh! I beseech you to forward, go forward and make your calling and your election sure—and if any man preach any other gospel with that which I have preached, he shall be cursed, and some of you who now hear me, shall see it & know that I testify the truth concerning them; in regard to the law of the Priesthood—there should be a place where all nations shall come up from time to time to receive their endowments, and the Lord has said, this shall be the place for the baptism for the dead—every man that [Page 291]has been baptized and belongs to the Kingdom, has a right to be baptized for those who are gone before, and, as soon as the Law of the Gospel is obeyed here by their friends, who act as proxy for them, the Lord has administrators there to set them free—a man may act as proxy for his own relatives—the ordinances of the Gospel which was laid out before the foundation of the world has been thus fulfilled, by them, and we may be baptized for those who we have much friendship for, but it must be first revealed to the man of God, lest we should run too far.100

Less than two months before his death, Joseph spoke again of both making one’s calling and election sure and of performing ordinances for the dead—both of which he had insisted require the temple. He did not, however, rebuke them or tell them that they were being slothful. Why teach them of matters they cannot—in Snuffer’s telling—have?

There is, in short, little or no evidence that the Saints were being slothful in building the Nauvoo temple. At various times, Joseph expressed his pleasure with their progress, encouraged them to diligence, asked that more resources be given to the Nauvoo House, declared he had seen the completed structure in vision, and then later moved full attention back to the temple. He encouraged members to bring all their family to Nauvoo so they would have time to receive their endowments before the wicked disturbed them—a strange command if he believed they would not be permitted to receive those blessings. The textual record simply does not match Snuffer’s rather speculative reconstruction.

How Much Time?

Snuffer argues that “it is critical to know when the time period of that ‘appointment’” with God in the completed temple [Page 292]“ended” (104). It probably would be critical—which is why the silence of Joseph on this matter is so telling.

A look at some figures does not, however, suggest that there is an obvious problem. The Nauvoo temple was 60% larger than the Kirtland temple, with over three times the floor area.101 The Kirtland construction was commanded on 27 December 1832 (D&C 88:119), and the Saints were severely rebuked for their lack of speed on 1 June 1833 (D&C 95:3, 11–17). The dedication took place on 27 March 1836.102 From commandment to dedication was 1186 days.

From the commandment to the martyrdom at Nauvoo, 1255 days had elapsed. It would seem unreasonable for the Lord to expect a structure more than half again as large to be built within essentially the same number of days, while also building the Nauvoo House, settling a new city on malarial swamp land,103 and developing all the infrastructure necessary to support both a city and temple construction.

Kirtland’s temple cost $40–60,000;104 Nauvoo’s was 16–25 times more, requiring a minimum of $1,000,000.105 Thus, [Page 293]while Nauvoo had a population of 11,057 by 1845 (with a total of 15,000 Mormons in all Hancock County),106 compared to Kirtland’s 2,025 by 1836,107 the cost of Nauvoo’s temple was still three times greater on a per person basis: $66.67/citizen compared to Kirtland’s $29.63/citizen. The construction times also favor Nauvoo over Kirtland: Kirtland did $50.59 of work per day, while Nauvoo did $518.94/day to its dedication on 30 April 1846.108 To be completed by the martyrdom, the Saints would have had to do a staggering $796.81/day.

Put simply, even with Nauvoo’s larger population base, the cost per citizen was two to three times higher than Kirtland, with at least ten times more labor and materials expended per day of construction. Only someone committed to seeing the Saints as failures would condemn and downplay this accomplishment, especially as almost all had arrived in Nauvoo destitute. Even getting adequate food was an on-going issue:

“Even the best providers were often short of flour, milk, butter, eggs, and other staples. Almost every letter from this period deals with the great struggle for food.” On balance it should be reported that food [Page 294]supplies were much better by the fall of 1845. Fruit trees planted earlier were now in production, and grain and vegetable products were plentiful. Distribution of these commodities now became the problem as farmers in outlying areas were driven from their farms by mobs, and crops were destroyed.109

It seems even more capricious for God to see the Saints fail without a single clear warning from the Prophet or the Lord himself. We can profitably compare the rebuke of June 1833 at Kirtland with the essential silence at Nauvoo:

For ye have sinned against me a very grievous sin, in that ye have not considered the great commandment in all things, that I have given unto you concerning the building of mine house.… Verily I say unto you, it is my will that you should build a house. If you keep my commandments you shall have power to build it. If you keep not my commandments, the love of the Father shall not continue with you, therefore you shall walk in darkness (D&C 95:7, 11–12).

The Saints Were Punished?

PTHG claims that D&C 124:47–48 can be used to determine if the Saints failed at Nauvoo. It claims that “we know for certain”:

A. “The spot was not consecrated by the Lord, or made holy by His or the angels’ presence. At least there is no record of it having occurred;

B. “The church was moved out of the spot;

C. “The temple was utterly destroyed;

D. The migration westward was more than difficult and harrowing” (381).

[Page 295]We will consider each claim in turn.

Point A: Spot not consecrated by divine or angelic presence?

This claim is false. “Others also beheld angels and the glory of God,” reported one witness at the Nauvoo temple.110 The research in PTHG is not adequate. This issue is treated in more detail below (claim #10). Even Strangite apostates saw the glory upon the temple, though they had a more prosaic explanation:

Uriel C. Nickerson (a Strangite) said that on Sunday night last the Temple was illuminated from the top of the Belfry to the ground and swore that he saw men passing back and forwards having candles in their hands and wanted to make the people believe that there was a visitation by angels, but they were the Mormons themselves. Thus has a Strangite born strong testimony of the glory of last Sabbath.111

Point B: Church moved out of the spot?

Snuffer here plays fast and loose with the text, though earlier he does cite the text that speaks of the Church being “moved out of their place” (380, 381). The scripture in question reads:

If ye labor with all your might, I will consecrate that spot [the temple site—see v. 43] that it shall be made holy. And if my people will hearken unto my voice, and unto the voice of my servants whom I have appointed to lead my people, behold, verily I say unto you, they shall not be moved out of their place (D&C 124:45).

PTHG makes it appear that the Church was promised that because the temple (“that spot”) would be made holy they would not be moved out of a physical “spot” or “place”—i.e., [Page 296]Nauvoo (compare 267–270). This reading is not plausible. The Lord spoke in almost identical wording on 16 December 1833 in the wake of troubles in Missouri. He reassured the Saints: “Zion shall not be moved out of her place, notwithstanding her children are scattered” (D&C 101:17, emphasis added).112

Thus, the heirs of Zion could be physically scattered or driven by wicked men, but this did not mean that they were “moved out of [their] place.”113 This promise served to reassure the Saints that they would not lose their blessings or station before God—and, the condition placed on the commandment is an interesting one, given Snuffer’s hostility to the apostles: “If my people will hearken unto my voice, and unto the voice of my servants whom I have appointed to lead my people… they shall not be moved out of their place” (D&C 124:45).

And, finally, though forced from Nauvoo by armed men, the Saints were not “scattered.” They remained together in a body under apostolic direction, withdrew in a planned and orderly way, and a large majority followed the Twelve to the Great Salt Lake.

Point C: The temple was utterly destroyed

The temple’s destruction is an uncontroversial, if irrelevant, point. There is no promise in D&C 124 that the temple would endure forever, and PTHG’s textual contortions do not find one either (269). (Given that the Jewish temples were both destroyed, if consistent Snuffer would have to argue that they too were never holy spots.) Section 124 does, however, include important teachings on the allowances for the evil actions of others which the Lord will make:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, that when I give a commandment to any of the sons of men to do a work unto my name, and those sons of men go with all their [Page 297]might and with all they have to perform that work, and cease not their diligence, and their enemies come upon them and hinder them from performing that work, behold, it behooveth me to require that work no more at the hands of those sons of men, but to accept of their offerings. And the iniquity and transgression of my holy laws and commandments I will visit upon the heads of those who hindered my work, unto the third and fourth generation, so long as they repent not, and hate me, saith the Lord God (D&C 124:49–50).

Were Snuffer not so dedicated to his theory, he might see the situation differently, as Brigham Young did:

I was thankful to see the Temple in Nauvoo on fire. Previous to crossing the Mississippi river, we had met in that Temple and handed it over to the Lord God of Israel; and when I saw the flames, I said “Good, Father, if you want it to be burned up.” I hoped to see it burned before I left, but I did not. I was glad when I heard of its being destroyed by fire, and of the walls having fallen in, and said, “Hell, you cannot now occupy it.”114

Point D: Suffering during the exodus from Nauvoo

In a way, this is the most disturbing of the charges because Snuffer presumes to condemn others, becoming an accuser of his brothers and sisters, declaring (based upon tendentious history and a distorted reading of scriptural texts) that the judgments of God were upon them. If he is wrong, then he condemns a noble group who sacrificed to the uttermost for their covenants.

One thinks again of Alma and his band of believers that fled from King Noah—they had to leave their homes to escape an army (Mosiah 18:34–35), settled a new land [Page 298](Mosiah 23:1–4), suffered enslavement (Mosiah 24:8–12), had to flee again (Mosiah 24:20), reached another area of sanctuary, had to flee yet again (Mosiah 24:23), and ultimately had to return to Zarahemla for safety (Mosiah 24:25). Snuffer could doubtless distort this experience through his sin-seeking lenses—yet we are told explicitly in the scripture that the suffering was permitted despite their obedience: “nevertheless the Lord seeth fit to chasten his people; yea, he trieth their patience and their faith” (Mosiah 23:21).

Snuffer could also doubtless find evidence for evil in the Christian martyrs of Rome, or in Ammonihah when those who believed were stoned, driven out, and had their wives and children burned alive (Alma 14:7–12). Sitting thus to arraign others appeals to some, but it is an easy game. There is enough tragedy in any life to provide fodder for such facile judgmentalism—but the scriptures warn against it:

Cursed are all those that shall lift up the heel against mine anointed, saith the Lord, and cry they have sinned when they have not sinned before me, saith the Lord, but have done that which was meet in mine eyes, and which I commanded them. But those who cry transgression do it because they are the servants of sin, and are the children of disobedience themselves (D&C 121:16–17).

Claim #10: There Were No Pentecostal-Type Experiences in the Nauvoo Temple

Here again, one wonders if Snuffer is simply ignorant of the historical record, or if he is willfully withholding information. Multiple accounts from the Nauvoo temple are extant:

  • “After the dancing had continued about an hour, several excellent songs were sung, in which several of the brethren and sisters joined… I called upon Sister Whitney who [Page 299]stood up and invoking the gift of tongues, sang a beautiful song of Zion in tongues. The interpretation was given by her husband, Bishop Whitney, and me, it related to our efforts to build this house to the privilege we now have of meeting in it, our departure shortly to the country of the Lamanites, their rejoicing when they hear the gospel and of the ingathering of Israel. I spoke in a foreign tongue; likewise, Brother Kimball. After a little conversation of a general nature I closed the exercises of the evening by prayer.”115
  • “I stayed all night in the Temple of the Lord. The Spirit of God seemed to fill the House and cause every heart to rejoice with a joy unknown to the world of mankind, for the Lord manifested himself to his saints.”116
  • “I labored in the Temple assisting in the endowments. The Spirit of the Lord filled the House insomuch that the brethren shouted for joy. Brother Orson Spencer said he could no longer contain himself. President Young told him to speak; and he opened his mouth and spake in power and demonstration of the Spirit of God.”117
  • “At sundown went to the Temple. 14 partook of the Sacrament after which we had a most glorious time. Some of the brethren spoke in tongues. Bro. Z. Coltrin and Brown held a talk in tongues which was afterwards interpreted and confirmed. Some prophesied. Bro. Anderson related a vision. And all of us rejoiced with exceeding great gladness. A light was flickering over br. Anderson’s head while relating his vision, Phinehas Richards face shone with great brightness. Two men [Page 300]arrayed all in priestly garments were seen in the n.e. corner of the room. The power of the Holy Ghost rested down upon us. I arose full of the Spirit and spoke with great animation, which was very cheerfully responded to by all, and prophesied of things to come. A brother testified that our meeting was accepted of God. And we continued our meeting until after midnight, which was the most profitable, happy, and glorious meeting I had ever attended in my life, and may the remembrance be deeply rooted in my soul for ever and ever. Beautiful day.”118
  • “At sundown went to the Temple to pray. While there heard last night Chester Loveland was called out of bed by his mother in Law stating that the Temple was again on fire. He dressed as quick as lightening and ran out of doors and saw the Temple all in a blaze. He studied a few seconds, and as it did not appear to consume any, and there was no others running, he was satisfied it was the glory of God, and again went to bed. Another brother saw the belfry all on a fire at a 1/4 to 10. He ran as hard as he could, but when he came to the Temple he found all dark and secure…. Thus was the Spirit, power and glory to God manifest, not only at the Temple while we were there but also in our families for which my soul rejoices exceedingly.”119
  • “About the same time Sister Almira Lamb while in her own room saw a vision of her dead child. It appeared to her in great glory and filled the room with light. She was afraid. It went away and after she was calmed down, her child appeared again to her and told the mother to remove her bones from where they were buried among [Page 301]the Gentiles, and bury them among the Saints, and again disappeared.”120
  • “At sundown went to the Temple to pray…. The Spirit was upon me and we all had a most glorious meeting. The glory of God again resting on the Temple in great power.”121
  • “Sunday, March 22nd, 1846. I went to my Seventies Quorum meeting in the Nauvoo Temple. The whole Quorum being present consisting of fifteen members…. Dressing ourselves in the order of the Priesthood we called upon the Lord, his spirit attended us, and the visions were opened to our view. I was, as it were, lost to myself and beheld the earth reel to and fro and was moved out of its place. Men fell to the earth and their life departed from them, and great was the scene of destruction upon all the face of the land, and at the close thereof, there appeared a great company as it were of saints coming from the west, as I stood with my back passing to the east and the scripture was fulfilled which saith, `Come, see the desolation which the Lord hath made in the earth’; and the company of the saints who had been hid as it were, from the earth; and I beheld other things which were glorious while the power of God rested down upon me. Others also beheld angels and the glory of God…. The sacrament was administered. Our joy increased by the gift of tongues and prophecy by which great things were spoken and made known to us.”122

[Page 302]

Conclusion

I will give you one of the keys of the mysteries of the kingdom. It is an eternal principle that has existed with God from all Eternity that that man who rises up to condemn others, finding fault with the Church, saying that they are out of the way while he himself is righteous, then know assuredly that that man is in the high road to apostacy and if he does not repent will apostatize as God lives[.] (Joseph Smith, Jr.123)

In sum, PTHG’s history is both selective and dubious. Where does all this lead the author?

“Proud Descendants of Nauvoo”

Snuffer seems almost obsessed with the fact that so many current Church leaders are descended from those of the Nauvoo era. “The proud descendants of Nauvoo,” he grumbles, “who have always retained control of the church’s top leadership positions, claim to hold all the keys ever given to Joseph Smith. They teach that they can bind on earth and in heaven. They are the ‘new Popes’ having the authority the Catholic Pope claims to possess” (303, see also 66, 263). “The idea of men holding God’s power is what led to the corruptions of Catholicism,” (37) and “[w]hen it is believed a man can bind heaven, then it is believed that salvation is available by and through that man” (263).124 This grousing about lineage is a constant refrain:

  • [Page 303]“Ever since the expulsion of church members from Nauvoo, the highest leadership positions in the church have been held by Nauvoo’s proud descendants” (113).
  • “The proud refugees from Nauvoo and their descendants have always claimed they succeeded in doing all that was required” (381).
  • “If [my] new view of history is more correct than the narrative offered by the proud descendants of Nauvoo…” (420; see also 116, 118).
  • “The Nauvoo saints and their proud descendants would necessarily diminish. This view is unlikely to ever be accepted by a church whose leadership is filled overwhelmingly by those same proud descendants of Nauvoo. There hasn’t been a single church president without Nauvoo ancestors” (119).

It is difficult to escape the impression that on some level Snuffer resents not having opportunities in Church leadership. He berates members, claiming that “we envy those who fill leadership positions because we want the power granted through priestly office and position” (415). I do not think most Latter-day Saints of my acquaintance envy leaders or lust after power. One wonders if Snuffer is projecting his own struggles onto others. He lists his Church callings in the books he sells.125 As a convert to the Church, one wonders if he feels unjustly boxed out of the leadership positions that purportedly go almost exclusively to “the proud descendants of Nauvoo,” since “Church leaders at the highest levels… most often have family ties to other church leadership. Almost all Apostles and members of the First Presidency are related by blood or marriage” (209). He invokes the figure of the prophet Samuel, who “was called [Page 304]by God. Although he was not of the chosen family, he received the prophecy. Through him, God condemned the family of Eli, foretelling their destruction” (306).126 The analogy is hardly a veiled one. The autobiographical element in many of his claims is not subtle:

[In] the Dispensation of Moses, there were two traditions that operated independent of one another. The one was official and priestly. The other was unofficial and prophetic. The priestly tradition held recognized office, and could be easily identified. The other was “ordained by God himself,” and those who possessed it had His word to them as their only credential…They were not merely regarded as unofficial. They were persecuted by both the leaders and followers of the official religion. They suffered for their testimony of the truth…. [I]n every dispensation the truth taught in purity must come from unheralded, questioned and reviled sources. Therefore, those who obtained this higher priesthood during the Dispensation of Moses were denounced, rejected and almost always came from outside the recognized hierarchy…. The “line of authority” consists of only one: God. (292, 296).

Snuffer seems to have almost returned to the Baptist upbringing of his youth—he has concocted a kind of LDS priesthood of all believers. His model does the Protestants one better, however, since only the elect, the truly saved—those whose calling and election is sure, those who receive priestly [Page 305]power from beyond the veil—have any real power or priesthood authority.

Snuffer discusses a change to the LDS temple ceremony: “As long as [these elements] remained as a part of the ceremony,” he says, “it was clear to those who participated that there were no mortal sources who could claim they were ‘true messengers.’ Mortal men were universally depicted as false ministers in the ceremony Joseph restored. The only source of true messengers was God or angels sent by Him” (276, italics added).127 But, if this is true, that rules Snuffer out as a true messenger, since he too is mortal.

“Unless the Spirit witnesses to the truth, or an angel comes bearing unmistakable signs, no teaching should be accepted,” he says elsewhere (340). So perhaps mortals can be true messengers if the Spirit bears witness? But if so, why does he complain when members bear testimony that the Spirit has borne witness of the reality of President Monson’s calling (488–489)?128 In all this, the intent and effect is clear—to disqualify the prophets and apostles by any means necessary, and to insist upon Snuffer’s bona fides.

On 11 September 2013, Snuffer announced that he had been excommunicated for apostasy.129 He reported that the Church’s action resulted from his refusal to cease promoting and distributing Passing the Heavenly Gift. The book was the subject of a letter from his stake president, which Snuffer posted online prior to his excommunication. His stake president writes, in part:

The issue for consideration to [your] disciplinary council is whether the continued publication of Passing [Page 306]the Heavenly Gift constitutes an act of apostasy and, if so, what the appropriate remedy should be….

Denver, I am not anxious to chase people out of the church. My goal is the opposite—to enable all to enjoy the blessings of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I have tried to be open minded about the issues we have discussed. I am sympathetic with those who face crises of faith.

I cannot deny, however, the spirit’s influence on me and the responsibilities I have to protect the interests of the Church. I have tried to persuade you that PTHG is not constructive to the work of salvation or the promotion of faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The book’s thesis is in direct conflict with church doctrine. In your effort to defend the restoration, you have mischaracterized doctrine, denigrated virtually every prophet since Joseph Smith, and placed the church in a negative light. The book is a misguided effort to [p. 2] attempt to bridge the gap between the church and its dissidents. PTHG will never be the solution to hard questions that you believe it is. Like every other such effort, it will attract only the attention of those whose spiritual eyes, ears and hearts are obscured from the truth. Your work pits you against the institution of the church and will lead to the spiritual demise of you and your family.130

Having read the book, I can vouch for the accuracy of this summary. Snuffer’s attitude toward the counsel he was given [Page 307]is made obvious both by his decision to post it, and his later comments:

  • “I do not want [my audience] to attend [my speeches] thinking all is well between me and the powers in control of the church.”
  • “The church must act in accordance with one law, and I must act in accordance with another for the purposes of the Lord to be fulfilled.”
  • “Right now, I don’t think [Stake] President Hunt thinks he has any other choice. He probably doesn’t. That is fine. I bear no ill will toward him or any other member of my stake. No one gets ahead in the institution by disregarding instruction from above. Actually, I do the same. However, for me, ‘above’ has little to do with 47 East South Temple and the institution is not where I expect any future. I try to help the church regardless of its opinion of me. I simply have no axe to grind no matter the outcome on September 8th [the date of the disciplinary council].”131

“The authorities are to be respected and sustained,” Snuffer writes early on, later adding, “It is not the responsibility of church members to judge church authorities” (28–29, 422). But, when those authorities instruct him, he lashes out:

  • “A temporary, corporate organization that is owned by a sole individual, which IS The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints won’t survive beyond the veil. There you leave behind your money. You can’t buy or sell in that better place. Since I’ve been there already, the turbulence here is of little moment to me.”132
  • [Page 308]“The book brings to light the [B]abylonian methods church leadership uses to make rapid and dramatic changes. We are not now the same church restored by Joseph Smith. Passing the Heavenly Gift shows how that happened.”133

Disdain for Rank-and-File Members

Snuffer claims he wants to help members,134 but his attitude toward those who disagree is best described as contemptuous. His tone is more off-putting because of the air of sanctimony that attends some of his text—Snuffer dispenses homilies on what true religion and real belief are about: “Real saints always appreciate anything the Lord condescends to give them. They are never ungrateful, impatient, or demanding. They qualify by patience and obedience to receive more. Then they petition in humility and gratitude to receive it” (308). He paints himself as the long-suffering, respectful martyr, and says that his stake president told Snuffer and his children that he is “worthy of a temple recommend.”135 Snuffer emphasizes to his children that he sustains his bishop and stake president.136 However, he refuses to attend his disciplinary council if his children cannot [Page 309]attend. He left his council without learning of its decision.137 He will not honor his leaders’ instructions to cease teaching that which Church leaders have declared to be false doctrine, and only days earlier was jabbing Church leaders in Salt Lake:

I’m not sure if that meets the requirement for “repentance” in this current predicament, but that’s what I can do. If the church wants to make me another offer, then let the stake president know and I’m sure he’ll pass it along. Given how little time remains I thought I’d skip the middleman and put this up here because you guys downtown read this blog (as we can tell from the blogmeter).138

Actions speak louder than mere words. “It is not for me to say,” he observes piously, “when such a line [to priestcraft] has been crossed” (211). But he has said it and implied it over and over again, and continues to do so.

Thus his irenic pose is frequently undercut by his switch to caricature and attack upon members and leaders of the church for not measuring up to his standards (all while denying that this is what he is doing):139

  • “When [the temple ritual] becomes a substitute for actually receiving the heavenly gift offered by the Lord, it can make those who participate think they are better than others who cannot” (287).
  • “The saints still claim we fulfilled everything required by the revelation in January, 1841 (Section 124)…. According to their account of the historical narrative, all [Page 310]is well in their Zion. They intend to build Zion some day, when they get around to it” (303);
  • “The gentiles140 will be prideful, taught by false teachers, and learning false doctrine….False religions offer everything but worship of Christ. They will use good ideas, virtues, even true concepts as a distraction to keep followers from coming to Christ.141 The way to prevent souls from receiving redemption is to distract them…. So long as they are kept occupied with hollow virtues and sentimental stories they cannot come to Christ, enter His presence, and gain salvation. The stories urged by false teachers are filling, but not nourishing to the soul” (336–337).
  • “We have moved further away from Zion since the time Joseph Smith was Prophet… until [the Lord] sends someone who can teach what is necessary… we will continue to lose light, discard, truth, forget what is expected, and dwindle in unbelief” (402).
  • “The gentile church will be secure with false teachings that tell them Zion is intact. Everything is fine. The power to redeem, to bind on earth and in heaven is with them. Zion is prospering and enjoys God’s favor. There is no need to repent and return to Christ, because everything is well with the church. But these ideas are not only false, they come from the devil” (338).
  • “The gentiles will console themselves with the thought that ‘there is no hell,’ instead only varying degrees of glory. In the end all will be saved to some state of glory. Repentance can be postponed. So, also, can study of [Page 311]the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There is no hurry…. Follow the broad mainstream of the institution, and all will be given in the Lord’s own time as we are prepared to receive more” (339).

As is so often the case, Snuffer’s self-appointed jeremiad mixes truth with error. He warns about the very real risks of mistaking mere sentimentality for the Holy Spirit, but in the next breath implies that the current church (“the gentiles”) all make the mistake: “The effect of the Holy Ghost is not sentimental. Moving someone to tears or thrilling them is a false emotional tool, employed by storytellers, writers, film makers, and composers. The gentiles could avoid errors if they had the Holy Ghost. But they confuse sentiment for the gift” (340).

Snuffer is perhaps most offensive when he decides to attack mainstream members’ testimonies or expressions of belief:

  • “Each week these gentiles will declare to one another ‘I know the church is true’ as a mantra to console them. Yes, ‘All is well’ with this imitation Zion” (339).
  • “In Mormon ‘testimonies’ each Fast Sunday for many years now… Mormons praise the church president by reciting a mantra. (‘I know President Monson is a prophet of God’ and also confirming ‘I know the church is true.’) Seldom does Christ’s name get mentioned in Mormon testimonies anymore, other than as an appendage to the ‘testimony’ confirming the exalted status of the president of the church, and the truthfulness of the church itself. The church has become a substitute for Christ, and in that sense has become the modern idol of the gentile church, just as Nephi, Christ, Moroni, and Joseph Smith predicted” (488–489).

Snuffer’s witness and claims, then, are to be praised and accepted. Others’ testimonies are to be ridiculed. I think it a pernicious slander to claim that Christ’s name is “seldom” [Page 312]mentioned in Mormon testimonies. Perhaps Snuffer’s ward is some type of anomaly. But one cannot reason with this kind of blind prejudice. He will notice only those things which prove his point, even if they are exceptions rather than the rule, or only in the observer’s jaundiced eye.

Disdain for Modern Apostles

The misrepresentation and criticism is also prelude and justification for the disdain Snuffer exhibits toward the modern apostles. He sometimes tries, I think, to hide it, but it tends to show itself anyway.142 His attitude is perhaps best summarized by his chapter title, “Prophets, Profits and Priestcraft” (185). Apostles are chosen, he insists, because of “proven management talent,” (209) and “talented business, civic, and education backgrounds, according to leader’s [sic] own explanations, outweigh religious backgrounds” (210). “In place of prophecy and revelation, church management focused on an effort to gain uniformity and control” (241).

He thus refers to the Church’s current leaders as “modern administrative Apostles” (61):

Today, testimonies of the presiding authorities, including the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve, assert only vaguely they are “special witnesses” of the Lord…. A great number of active Latter-day Saints do not notice the careful parsing [sic] of words used by modern administrative Apostles. They presume a “witness of the name” of Christ is the same as the New Testament witness of His resurrection. The apostolic witness was always intended to be based upon the dramatic, the extraordinary…. Without such visionary encounters with the Lord, they are unable to witness about Him, but only of His name (62).

[Page 313]PTHG also claims that there are “two different kinds of Apostles”—”one is an administrative office in the church. The other is a witness of the resurrection, who has met with Christ” (34). Thus, Snuffer sees himself as an “apostle” (and not a mere administrative one either). He repeatedly accuses leaders of the Church of fostering a “cult of personality” (241, 264, 352, 359–360), claiming the prophets believe “they are entitled to the adoration of followers” (359–360). His treatment of Brigham Young and blood atonement is simply vintage anti-Mormonism (132–141).143 He even has a preemptive warning should disciplinary action be taken against him:

For us [the Church] the coming sifting will be done by the Lord, not by us diving ourselves into splinters. Of course, the church can judge and reject true believers. If it elects to do so, and to thereby cause a separation, the responsibility for that will lie with the church leaders. Leaders have already been warned about persecuting the saints, as this will result in them forfeiting whatever priesthood remains with them (317).

Snuffer and Quinn on David O. McKay

PTHG does some persecution of its own. Snuffer quotes D. Michael Quinn: “A First Presidency secretary acknowledges that [David O.] McKay liked his ‘celebrity status’ and wanted ‘to be recognized, lauded, and lionized’” (349). He cites Quinn’s Extensions of Power volume, which gives as its source a book by secretary Francis M. Gibbons.144 A check of these references is discouraging, but not surprising for those familiar with [Page 314]Quinn’s methods.145 The actual text of Gibbons’ volume for the pages cited reads:

[263] The encroachment on [McKay’s] private life that celebrity status imposed… was something President McKay adjusted to with apparent difficulty. He was essentially a modest, private person, reared in a rural atmosphere, who at an early age was thrust into the limelight of the Mormon community. And as he gained in experience… as wide media exposure made his name and face known in most households, he became, in a sense, a public asset whose time and efforts were assumed to be available to all. This radical change in status was a bittersweet experience. To be recognized, lauded, and lionized is something that seemingly appeals to the ego and self-esteem of the most modest among us, even to David O. McKay. But the inevitable shrinkage in the circle of privacy that this necessarily entails provides a counter-balance that at times outweighs the positive aspects of public adulation. This is easily inferred from a diary entry of July 19, 1950…. The diarist hinted that it had become so difficult to venture forth on the streets of Salt Lake City that he had about decided to abandon the practice. For such a free spirit as he, for one who was so accustomed to going and coming as he pleased, any decision to restrict his movements about the city was an imprisonment of sorts. But the only alternatives, neither of which was acceptable, were to go in disguise or to ignore or to cut short those who approached him. The latter would have been especially repugnant to one such as David O. McKay, who had cultivated to the highest degree the qualities of courtesy and attentive listening.

[Page 315]It was ironic, therefore, that as the apostle’s fame and influence widened, the scope of his private life was proportionately restricted…. [347]

Everywhere he traveled in Australia, or elsewhere on international tours, President McKay received celebrity treatment. Enthusiastic, cheering, singing crowds usually greeted him at every stop, sometimes to the surprise or chagrin of local residents. A group of well-known Australian athletes, about a flight to Adelaide with President McKay’s party, learned an embarrassing lesson in humility. Seeing a large, noisy crowd at the airport, and assuming they were the object of its adulation, the handsome young men stepped forward to acknowledge the greeting [348] only to find that the cheers and excitement were generated by the tall, white-haired man who came down the ramp after them (italics added).

It takes a certain talent to transform an account that praises McKay as a “modest, private person,” (whose privacy and personal convenience suffered because of how unwilling he was to appear rude or short with anyone) into an “acknowledgment” that McKay “liked” his celebrity. The original line about being “recognized, lauded, and lionized” is obviously intended to point out that such things are a danger to anyone because they appeal to the ego, and all would be tempted by them—but it is likewise clear that Gibbons does not think that McKay succumbed to that temptation. Snuffer is helping Quinn bear false witness against both McKay and Gibbons.146 He is credulous, using unreliable sources that reinforce what he wants to believe.
[Page 316]

A Closed Mental System

Snuffer clearly sees himself as one called by God to straighten out Church members, prophets, and apostles.147 He has created a hermetically closed mental system, in which any disagreement with his ideas is simply evidence that he is correct and fulfilling prophecy. “Prophetic messages can be suppressed, censored or discarded,” he declares without a hint of irony, “They can be ignored or condemned” (273):

We [the Latter-day Saints] claim to hold keys that would allow men filled with sin to forgive sins on earth and in heaven, to grant eternal life, or to bar from the kingdom of God. Using that false and useless claim, we slay the souls of men, thereby committing murder. We are riddled with priestcrafts (414).

Snuffer even manages to persuade himself that a call to reform the Church must come from someone who is not a leader, because Nephi condemns “those who ‘lead’” since Satan “leadeth them away carefully down to hell” (337–338, citing 2 Nephi 28:11–14):

Those who claim repentance is necessary will be accused of looking beyond the mark. They will be thought of as false messengers, with a false message, trying to steady the ark. They will be asked by what authority they preach repentance, because they are not called to lead. However, Nephi condemned those who “lead” because they “teach by the precepts of [Page 317]men,” and not by the Holy Ghost. Therefore, a call to repentance cannot come from a leader. It must come from elsewhere. When it does, the result will be anger, even rage, as Satan stirs up the hearts of men (338).

(If this argument were valid, one could argue that because the Good Shepherd “leadeth me beside the still waters,” one should follow leaders. This is simply sophistry or desperation.)

Thus, Snuffer must be believed, because to accuse him of being a false messenger is to fulfill prophecy and to confirm his association with past prophetic figures. Like conspiracy theories, no evidence or argument can penetrate this kind of self-referential thinking. Snuffer claims that the absence of miraculous experiences at the Nauvoo temple proves its bankruptcy—but I do not expect that my having demonstrated that there were miraculous events reported will change his mind (claim #10).

Snuffer repeatedly casts himself in the role of beleaguered prophet, crying in the wilderness:

  • “If any dare to criticize the false Zion and its corrupt teachings, they will be met with anger, even rage” (337).
  • “If a gentile follower of this false Zion encounters an inspired view of their own awful state, they can awaken…. Unfortunately, that is unlikely because anger and rage at the truth will keep them from seeing it” (339).
  • “The call to repentance will be painful, difficult to bear, and unpopular” (340).
  • “The gentiles will be in a state of awful darkness. They will not know revelation when it comes, and reject it when offered to them. They will say they have a body of doctrine and trusted leaders, and they do not need anything more” (341).
  • [Page 318]“Any voice crying repentance is labeled a dissenter, and their words are condemned and attacked. They are thought to be ‘of the devil.’ By stirring up strife we succeed in making people fear truth. We close our minds, become deaf and blind” (415).
  • “The latter-day gentiles will be unenlightened by the Holy Ghost, rejecting the Spirit’s condemnation of them, and unwilling to receive anything more from God” (342).
  • “As to the messengers sent [after Moses to rebellious Israel]… they all held higher priesthood. Their power and authority came directly from the Lord, not from a priestly hierarchy which perpetuated authority” (406).
  • “False prophets benefit from their claims. True ones are never popular, and always preach repentance…. any time a true prophet is sent, all who reject him become part of ‘the world.’ Those who are of ‘the world’ fail to receive the messengers God sends, preferring the false ones that men admire. The result of their false religion is damnation alongside the liars, adulterers and whoremongers” (409–410).

One is reminded of Carl Sagan’s rejoinder to physics cranks who cry, “They laughed at Galileo, you know!” Replied Sagan: “They also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” One is not automatically right or inspired simply because others disagree.148

Now that Snuffer has been excommunicated for apostasy, that too will likely provide him with more evidence that he is right.149 If others’ testimonies disagree with him, they will be said to be deceived, corrupted, and lacking the true insight [Page 319]that he has been vouchsafed. To reject his “revelation” is to be unwilling to receive more from God.

All this is, to be sure, his privilege. But, Snuffer is not entitled to his own historical data. And, given how wrong he is about those things, one can only hope that he and his audience pause to wonder if he could be equally confused about matters of even greater import. “False messengers always imitate the true ones, claiming to be what they are not,” he warns. “They seek, of course, to deceive the very elect if it is possible” (276–277). This is a caution that cuts both ways—if we let it.

In this paper, I speak only for myself and not for any person or group. I’m grateful for discussions, references, and advance readings from Russell Anderson, Connor Boyack, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Cassandra Hedelius, Bryce Haymond, Dennis Horne, Ted Jones, Daniel C. Peterson, Stephen O. Smoot, and S. Hales Swift. Special thanks are due Matthew Roper of the Laura F. Willis Center for Book of Mormon Studies at Brigham Young University for pointing me to several primary sources. Any errors remain my own.

[Page 320]

Appendix 1 — Square Footage of Kirtland and Nauvoo Temples Compared

Kirtland. Heber C. Kimball wrote that the Kirtland temple “was 80 x 60 feet, and 57 feet high to the eaves. It was divided into two stories.”150 The temple also had a full attic. Thus: 3 levels x 80 feet x 60 feet = 14,400 square feet.

Nauvoo. Nauvoo had a basement baptistry, and a first and second floor. Each of the first and second floors had a half floor or “mezzanine” on either side (labeled “a” and “b” in the table below). The temple was crowned by an attic, and a multi-level tower. A bill for temple construction reports 2,225 square feet of flooring used for the entire tower, and so I have used that value here.

Level Length (ft) Width (ft) Total Area (ft) Source
Basement baptistry 80 120 9,600 Colvin, 182
1st Floor 80 120 9,600
2nd Floor 80 120 9,600
1st Floor Mezzanine (a) 18.5 100 1,850 Colvin, 207
1st Floor Mezzanine (b) 18.5 100 1,850
2nd Floor Mezzanine (a) 18.5 100 1,850 Colvin, 210
2nd Floor Mezzanine (b) 18.5 100 1,850
Front attic section 86 37 3,182
Main east attic 88.2 28.75 2,536 Colvin, 214
Tower (multi-level) – – 2,225 Colvin, 213
44,143

The ratio between Nauvoo and Kirtland is thus conservatively 44,143 ÷ 14,400 ≈ 3.1
[Page 321]

Appendix 2 — Temple Costs Compared to Population

Estimates of the Kirtland temple costs vary from $40–60,000. As discussed in the main text, the 1845 Mormon population in Hancock County is estimated at 15,000. An older work estimates 25,000 Mormons in and around Nauvoo in 1844. The tables below allow readers to compare these figures:

Temple Cost Population Days to Construct Cost/Citizen Cost/Day
Kirtland $40,000 2,025 1186 $19.75 $33.73
$60,000 2,025 1186 $29.63 $50.59
Nauvoo $1,000,000 15,000 1927 $66.67 $518.94
$1,000,000 25,000 1927 $40.00 $518.94

Costs Per Citizen

Nauvoo Compare to Kirtland at $40,000 Compare to Kirtland at $60,000
Nauvoo pop 15,000 3.4 2.3
Nauvoo pop 25,000 2.0 1.4

Even reading the data with the most favorable slant for Snuffer’s thesis, the Nauvoo temple cost 1.4 times as much per citizen as Kirtland.151

Costs Per Day

Nauvoo Compare to Kirtland at $40,000 Compare to Kirtland at $60,000
Nauvoo at $1 million 15.4 10.3

The most advantageous reading of the data for Snuffer’s thesis still shows the Saints spending ten times as much.

  1. Snuffer cites Richard S. Van Wagoner, editor, The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 2009), 1:241. The original is in the Woodruff diaries; see Scott G. Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 1833–1898, 9 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1983–85), 3:257 (15 August 1857). Cited as WWJ hereafter. ↩

  2. WWJ, 3:257 (15 August 1847), emphasis added. ↩

  3. WWJ, 3:257 (15 August 1847). ↩

  4. WWJ, 3:258 (15 August 1847). ↩

  5. See note 36 herein. ↩

  6. WWJ, 3:259 (15 August 1847). ↩

  7. WWJ, 2:271 (6 August 1843). ↩

  8. WWJ, 2:455 (25 August 1844). ↩

  9. Heber C. Kimball, cited in “Conference Minutes, October Conference Minutes,” Times and Seasons 5/20 (2 November 1844): 693–694 (from 7 October 1844). ↩

  10. Wilford Woodruff, “To the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, Greeting,” Times and Seasons 5/20 (2 November 1844): 698–700 (from 11 October 1844), italics added. Snuffer quotes this statement (110), but acts as if this is a change in the apostles’ stance—even though this statement predates the 1847 statement by Brigham Young upon the misrepresentation of which Snuffer hangs so much (87–88). ↩

  11. Wilford Woodruff, “To the officers and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British isles,” Millennial Star 5/9 (February 1845): 136. ↩

  12. “Trial of Elder Rigdon,” Times and Seasons 5/17 (15 September 1844): 65. ↩

  13. Parley P. Pratt, “Proclamation to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Greeting,” Millennial Star 5/10 (March 1845): 151; dated New York, 1 January 1845. ↩

  14. Alexander L. Baugh and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, “‘I Roll the Burthen and Responsibility of Leading This Church Off from My Shoulders on to Yours’: The 1844/1845 Declaration of the Quorum of the Twelve Regarding Apostolic Succession,” Brigham Young University Studies 49/3 (2010):6–7 and 7 n. 4. ↩

  15. Baugh and Holzapfel, 9. ↩

  16. Baugh and Holzapfel, 11, 12 n. 18. ↩

  17. Declaration of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Brigham Young Papers, LDS Church archives, cited in Baugh and Holzapfel, 13–19. ↩

  18. Andrew F. Ehat, “Joseph Smith’s Introduction of Temple Ordinances and the 1844 Mormon Succession Question,” (Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1981), 163; citing Dean R. Zimmerman, I Knew the Prophets—An Analysis of the Letter of Benjamin F. Johnson to George F. Gibbs, Reporting Doctrinal Views of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young (Bountiful, Utah: Horizon Publishers, 1976), 3. ↩

  19. The source for many seems to be Jerald and Sandra Tanner, The Changing World of Mormonism (Chicago: Moody Press, 1979), 149–150. A more recent repetition can be found in Richard Abanes, Becoming Gods: A Closer Look at 21st-Century Mormonism (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 2005), 3. ↩

  20. This reading is also followed by, among others, H. Dean Garrett and Stephen R. Robinson, Commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants, Vol. 3 (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 2004), entry for 84:20. ↩

  21. Samuel W. Richards record, discourse of 12 May 1844; cited in Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, Words of Joseph Smith (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 1980), 371, italics added. (This work cited as WJS hereafter. ↩

  22. Orson Pratt taught that Joseph had a pre-mortal ordination to priesthood which allowed him to survive the First Vision (“The Divine Authority of the Holy Priesthood, Etc.,” Journal of Discourses 22:29–30 [10 October 1880]). (Journal of Discourses hereafter cited as JD.) I think Pratt makes the same error in reading that Snuffer and the Tanners make. If, however, Pratt et al. are correct and I am mistaken, then by Joseph’s statement, the Twelve were likewise ordained in the pre-mortal worlds (see note 21 herein)—a claim about which Pratt agrees in any case (JD 22:28). Neither scenario helps Snuffer’s theory. ↩

  23. George D. Smith has suggested as early as 1832, Todd Compton argues for the date range of “early 1833,” and Brian Hales inclines to “some point prior to 1837.” [George D. Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy: “…but we called it celestial marriage” (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 2008), 38; Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1997), 4. Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2013), 85.] Hales reviews all dating theories on pages 99–106. ↩

  24. W. W. Phelps Phelps to Sally Phelps, letter, 18 May 1835, 2–3. Phelps would mention the idea publicly about a month later: W. W. Phelps, “Letter No. 8,” Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate 1/9 (June 1835): 130. ↩

  25. See discussion in Hales, 1:119, 3:85–86. ↩

  26. See discussion in Ehat thesis, 66–70. See also Hales, 1:619–623. ↩

  27. Woodruff sealed William Clayton up to eternal life on 21 January 1840: “Thou art one of those who will stand upon the mount Zion with the 144,000….and I seal thee up with eternal life….” [George D. Smith (editor), An Intimate Chronicle; The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1995), 8; see also James B. Allen, Trials of Discipleship: The Story of William Clayton, a Mormon (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 29]. ↩

  28. Snuffer is aware of these views (79) but does not engage them or even discuss their evidence. See Hales, 2:68–70 and references therein. ↩

  29. See Snuffer, 87–91, and discussion at notes 2-6 herein. ↩

  30. Vogel demonstrated his expertise in early Mormon sources in a Facebook thread: https://www.facebook.com/groups/themormonhub/permalink/580554425314552/ (14 October 2013). I’m grateful for Cassandra Hedelius bringing it to my attention, and for Vogel’s industry regarding primary sources. ↩

  31. Lucius Pomeroy Parsons to Pamelia Parsons, 10 April 1836, Family and Church History Department Archives, cited in Steven C. Harper, “Oliver Cowdery and the Kirtland Temple Experience,” in Oliver Cowdery: Scribe, Elder, Witness, edited by John W. Welch and Larry E. Morris (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship), 263–264. Vogel cites Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OH, as quoted in H. Michael Marquardt, The Rise of Mormonism: 1816–1844 (Longwood, FL: Xulon Press, 2005), 422. ↩

  32. William W. Phelps to Sally Phelps, 1–6 April 1836, William Wines Phelps Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, quoted in John W. Welch, Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844 (Provo, UT: BYU Press; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 349. ↩

  33. Joseph Fielding Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1938), 91 (TPJS hereafter). See WWJ, 2:342 (21 January 1844). ↩

  34. See Hales, 3:86–89. ↩

  35. The other option is that the event did not happen at all—but Snuffer does not accept that hypothesis: he insists that the visitation of Elijah was real, as we will see shortly. ↩

  36. Trever R. Anderson, “Doctrine and Covenants Section 110: From Vision to Canonization,” (Master’s thesis, Department of Religious Education, Brigham Young University, 2010), 76. See also Hales, 3:88 n. 6. ↩

  37. Anderson, 7—8. ↩

  38. Anderson, 5. ↩

  39. See W.A. Cowdery, [“Editorial”], Messenger and Advocate 3/10 (July 1837): 534–541. Compare with the more friendly article in Messenger and Advocate 3/8 (May 1837): 505–510. ↩

  40. Anderson, 9. ↩

  41. Anderson, 9. British Saints would have the same material published from 5–12 November 1853. ↩

  42. Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen (editors), Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, vol. 1 of the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed., Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman (Salt Lake City, UT: Church Historian’s Press, 2008), 223, emphasis added. ↩

  43. Jesse, et al., Journals, 217. ↩

  44. Anderson likewise argues that the vision was written on “the day it occurred or soon after” (4, see also 15). Anderson’s research, like the Joseph Smith papers, is also cited by PTHG (75 n. 83), but Snuffer does not include these details for his readers, perhaps because they weaken his efforts to downplay the vision’s importance to Joseph’s thinking by claiming that we don’t know what role Joseph had in creating Warren Cowdery’s account of it. Given that the account was written into Joseph’s journal and then included in the Manuscript History while Joseph was alive, these claims are dubious. ↩

  45. Robert B. Thompson, original manuscript, discourse of 5 October 1840; cited in WJS, 43. See also TPJS, 172. ↩

  46. Times and Seasons 2/24 (15 October 1841): 577–78, citing a speech of 3 October 1841; also in WJS, 76–79. ↩

  47. WJS, 54–55 n. 22. ↩

  48. WWJ, 2:341 (discourse of 21 January 1844); cited in WJS, 317–319. I have here modernized the spelling, and added punctuation for ease of reading. ↩

  49. WWJ, 2:341–342 (21 January 1844). ↩

  50. Note that Snuffer ends the citation before the line about baptism for the dead on 101–102, and it is also absent from his gloss on 97–98. Necessary context has been omitted, since the citation on p. 102 ends with verse 28, and then resumes with verse 31 on p. 104—the lines that make it most clear that baptism for the dead is the “lost” matter are here absent from Snuffer’s discussion. ↩

  51. H. David Burton, “Baptism for the Dead: LDS Practice,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols., edited by Daniel H. Ludlow, (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992), 1:95. ↩

  52. Baptisms were discontinued at the conference held between 2–5 October 1841 [Discourse of 3 October 1841, reported in Times and Seasons 2/24 (15 October 1841): 577–578; cited in WJS, 76–79]. The temple font was dedicated on 8 November 1841, and baptisms for the dead resumed there on 21 November [Joseph Fielding Smith, Essentials in Church History (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1922), 256–257]. See note 79 for a contemporary reading which accords with this view. ↩

  53. Ehat thesis, 272 n. 291 cites as examples: Joseph Smith, Jr, Manuscript History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Documentary History). 7 vols. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1978, 4: 608 (hereafter cited as Manuscript History of the Church.); Mills, “De Tal Palo Tal Astilla,” 120–21; WJS, 116; Bathsheba W. Smith, “Recollections of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” 245; Lucius N. Scovil, letter to Deseret News Semi-Weekly, 15 February 1884; Justus Morse, affidavit, in Shook, True Origins of Mormon Polygamy, 170. ↩

  54. Lucius N. Scovil letter to Editor in “Higher Ordinances,” Deseret News Semi-Weekly (15 February 1884): 2; cited by Ehat thesis, 26, italics added. ↩

  55. Ehat thesis, 27. ↩

  56. George Miller to James J. Strang, 26 June 1855, from H. W. Mills, “De Tal Palo Tal Astilla,” Annual Publications—Historical Society of Southern California 10 (Los Angeles: McBride Printing Company, 1917): 120–121; cited in Ehat thesis, 28. ↩

  57. Nauvoo Relief Society minutes, discourse of 28 April 1842, cited in WJS, 116–117. See Ehat thesis, 31. ↩

  58. Manuscript History of the Church, discourse of 1 May 1842, cited in WJS, 119–120. See Ehat thesis, 35. ↩

  59. Heber C. Kimball, journal, 26 December 1845; cited by Ehat thesis, 80. ↩

  60. See note 97 herein. ↩

  61. Draft sheet of the “Manuscript History of the Church,” in the hand of Willard Richards, 4 May 1842, Historian’s Office Church Records Group, Church Archives; cited in Ehat thesis, 29. ↩

  62. Ehat thesis, 30. ↩

  63. Ehat thesis, 60–63. ↩

  64. WWJ, 2:230–231 (11 June 1843); cited in WJS, 213. See Ehat thesis, 77–78. ↩

  65. Ehat thesis, 79–80. Citation for Brigham’s discourse is WWJ, 2:271 (6 August 1843). ↩

  66. Ehat thesis, 95. ↩

  67. Ehat thesis, 121–122. ↩

  68. Ehat thesis, 145–148. See also 122, citing George A. Smith discourse, Millennial Star 37 (2 February 1875): 66, reporting 25 December 1874 discourse. ↩

  69. See Richard E. Bennett, “‘Which Is the Wisest Course?’: The Transformation of Mormon Temple Consciousness, 1870–1898,” Brigham Young University Studies 52/2 (2013): 5–43, especially 19–23. ↩

  70. Manuscript History of the Church, 3:xxxii. ↩

  71. Manuscript History of the Church, 3:xxiii. ↩

  72. Manuscript History of the Church, 3:xxxix. ↩

  73. Manuscript History of the Church, 3:xliv. ↩

  74. Lisle G. Brown, “The Sacred Departments for Temple Work in Nauvoo: The Assembly Room and the Council Chamber,” Brigham Young University Studies 19/3 (1979): 361. ↩

  75. Manuscript History of the Church, 4:269; citing Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Hyrum Smith, “A Proclamation of the First Presidency of the Church to the Saints Scattered Abroad, Greeting,” Nauvoo, [Illinois], 15 January 1841. It was also discussed by Joseph in a report in Times and Seasons 1/12 (October 1840): 18. ↩

  76. Stanley B. Kimball, “Heber C. Kimball and Family, The Nauvoo Years,” Brigham Young University Studies 15/4 (1975): 454. ↩

  77. Manuscript History of the Church, discourse of 24 April 1842; cited in WJS, 114. ↩

  78. The Wasp (23 April 1842); cited in Don F. Colvin, Nauvoo Temple: A Story of Faith (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; printed by Covenant Communications, 2002), 22. ↩

  79. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English language (1828), q.v. “redouble.” ↩

  80. Manuscript History of the Church (material in braces from “Book of the Law of the Lord”), discourse of 29 October 1842; cited in WJS, 132. ↩

  81. “The Temple of God in Nauvoo,” Times and Seasons 4/1 (15 November 1841): 10–11. ↩

  82. Willard Richards, Joseph Smith Diary, discourse of 21 February 1843; cited in WJS, 164–166. ↩

  83. See notes 84-85 herein. ↩

  84. See note 82 herein, where he asks that the Nauvoo House be next in priority after one has donated to the temple. ↩

  85. Willard Richards, Joseph Smith Diary, discourse of 6 April 1843; cited in WJS, 175. ↩

  86. Eliza R. Snow Diary, discourse of 11 June 1843; cited in WJS, 215–216. ↩

  87. Colvin, 22–23. ↩

  88. “Minutes of a Special Conference,” Times and Seasons 4/21 (15 September 1843): 331–332, reporting discourse of 9 October 1843; cited in WJS, 254. Joseph Diary, kept by Willard Richards, notes “Hasten the work of the temple. and all the work of the Last Days. Let the elders & saints do away light mindedness and be sober” (255). ↩

  89. “Minutes of a Special Conference,” 330–331; cited in WJS, 252. ↩

  90. Willard Richards, Joseph Smith diary, discourse of 15 October 1843; cited in WJS, 25. ↩

  91. “Editorial Address,” Times and Seasons 5/1 (1 January 1844): 391. ↩

  92. See note 87 herein. ↩

  93. WWJ, 2:342 (discourse of 21 January 1844); cited in WJS, 317–319; Snuffer cites TPJS, 330–331. ↩

  94. Manuscript History of the Church, 6:196–197. ↩

  95. Ehat thesis, 154; citing Joseph Smith, Diary, 4 March 1844. ↩

  96. Willard Richards, Joseph Smith Diary, discourse of 7 March 1844; cited in WJS, 322. ↩

  97. Wilford Woodruff Journal, discourse of 10 March 1844; cited in WJS, 329–331. Also in WWJ, 2:361–362. ↩

  98. WJS, 331–332; see WWJ 2:361–362. ↩

  99. “Our City, and the Present Aspect of Affairs,” Times and Seasons 5/6 (15 March 1844): 472. ↩

  100. Thomas Bullock report, discourse of 14 May 1844; cited in WJS, 365–369. ↩

  101. Wikipedia lists the Kirtland temple floor area as 15,000 square feet, and Nauvoo as 54,000 square feet. See my conservative calculations in the appendix, which yield 14,400 square feet and 44,143 square feet respectively. ↩

  102. Milton V. Backman, The Heavens Resound: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio, 1830–1838 (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1983), 142–149, 157, 286, 286–294. ↩

  103. See Kyle M, Rollins, Richard D. Smith, M. Brett Borup, and E. James Nelson, “Transforming Swampland into Nauvoo, the City Beautiful,” Brigham Young University Studies 45/3 (2006): 125–157. “Drainage benefits were slow in coming [to Midwestern states’ swampland] and generally were not realized until after the Civil War…. [T]he drainage efforts in Nauvoo represent a rare early success story” (125). The city’s main drainage ditch alone “would have required at least 22,100 man-hours of effort to complete by hand,” and labor on drainage was a constant throughout the Mormons’ stay in Nauvoo (153). ↩

  104. Backman, 161; Eugene England, Brother Brigham (Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1980), 26. ↩

  105. Colvin, 44; citing Andrew Jenson, Historical Record 8 (June 1889): 872 and Deseret News Church Almanac (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret News, 1975), F4. ↩

  106. Glen M. Leonard, Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 2002), Chapter 8. An earlier work [Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958), 17] estimated 25,000 Mormons in 1844. The calculations using these older estimates can be seen in the Appendix. ↩

  107. Marvin S. Hill, Larry T. Wimmer, and C. Keith Rooker, “The Kirtland Economy Revisited: A Market Critique of Sectarian Economics,” Brigham Young University Studies 17/4 (1977): 403, 408. The authors note (409) that their assumptions may lead to an underestimate of Kirtland’s population. In all my calculations, I have used the largest estimate for Kirtland’s cost ($60,000), and used the estimate of 15,000 for all Mormons in Hancock County. I have assumed that the entire population was present throughout, which is an obvious over-simplification. My estimates are thus conservative, since these factors will underestimate the cost to individuals who helped throughout construction. Those living away from Nauvoo would also have been less able to provide volunteer labor, though monetary donations were solicited. ↩

  108. From 19 January 1841 to 30 April 1846 is 1927 days. ↩

  109. Colvin, 44; quotation from Kenneth W. Godfrey, “Some Thoughts Regarding an Unwritten History of Nauvoo,” Brigham Young University Studies 15/4 (1975): 420. ↩

  110. See note 122 herein. See also note 118 herein. ↩

  111. Thomas Bullock Journal, 17 March 1846; cited in Gregory R. Knight, “Journal of Thomas Bullock,” Brigham Young University Studies 31/1 (Winter 1991): 62–63. ↩

  112. See similar eschatological imagery used in Revelation 2:5. ↩

  113. Similar usage can be seen in D&C 97:19. ↩

  114. Brigham Young, “Funds of the Church,” JD 8:203 (8 October 1860). ↩

  115. Manuscript History of the Church, 7:557–58. See George D. Smith, editor An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1995), 244. ↩

  116. Jacob Gates Journal, 9 January 1846, cited in Joseph Heinerman, Temple Manifestations (Manti, Utah: Mountain Valley Publishers, 1974), 50. ↩

  117. Jacob Gates Journal, 15 and 16 January 1846; cited in Heinerman, 50. ↩

  118. Thomas Bullock Journal, 15 March 1846; cited in Knight, 61–62. ↩

  119. Thomas Bullock Journal, 16 March 1846, in Knight, 62. ↩

  120. Thomas Bullock Journal, 16 March 1846, in Knight, 62. ↩

  121. Thomas Bullock Journal, 18 March 1846, in Knight, 63. ↩

  122. Journal Book of Samuel Whitney Richards, 22 March, 1846, Book No.2, 7–8; cited in Heinerman, 50–51. ↩

  123. Joseph Smith remarks made at Brigham Young Dwelling, Montrose, Iowa Territory (Tuesday, 2 July 1839), recorded in Willard Richards Pocket Companion; cited in WJS, 413. See also TPJS, 278. ↩

  124. As he often does, Snuffer distorts a text or the Church’s teachings. In fact, the keys are said to bind “on earth and in heaven,” not to bind heaven (i.e., God) against God’s will (Matthew 16:19, 18:18; D&C 124:93). Surely Snuffer knows this. If such a claim is beyond the pale, then so were the New Testament apostles. Joseph Smith made the same claim, see note 97 herein. ↩

  125. “He has served on the High Council, taught Gospel Doctrine and Priesthood classes for twenty-one years… and instructed at the BYU Education Week for three years” (509). “I have taken assignments as a home teacher, gospel doctrine teacher, ward mission leader and high counselor [sic]” (3). ↩

  126. Snuffer also writes that “The family of Eli had filled the Lord’s House with corruption, extortion, and sexual perversion…. The end of Eli’s house came in a single day…. Thus ended the house of Eli. God’s judgments established Samuel as the new, presiding priest and prophet. When this happened, once again there was a man among the Israelites who could provide what Moses had earlier offered” (305, 307). ↩

  127. I have elided the more specific elements of the temple ceremony, which Snuffer mentions explicitly. ↩

  128. These sections are examined in detail following note 141 herein. ↩

  129. Denver Snuffer, “Yesterday,” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 11 September 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/09/yesterday.html. ↩

  130. M. Truman Hunt to Denver Snuffer, “Notice of Disciplinary Council,” letter (21 August 2013), 1–2. Online at Denver Snuffer, “Don’t call me. (Yes, that means you too!),” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 23 August 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/08/dont-call-me-yes-that-means-you-too_23.html. ↩

  131. Denver Snuffer, “Current Events,” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 26 August 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/08/current-events.html. ↩

  132. Denver Snuffer, “Contentment,” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 7 September 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/09/contentment.html. ↩

  133. Denver Snuffer, “Compliance (So Far As Possible),” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), September 4, 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/09/compliance-so-far-as-possible.html. ↩

  134. “If the church has been condemned, rejected and cursed, it may be a blessing for you. If a new narrative acknowledging this, allows us to avoid inappropriate adoration of men, I may save your soul” (467). ↩

  135. It is not clear how an accusation that he persists in teaching false doctrine is consistent with the stake president agreeing that Snuffer qualifies for a temple recommend. If Snuffer’s account is accurate, I presume the stake president meant that Snuffer was not charged with “immorality, dishonesty, or some serious moral transgression,” not that his leaders felt they could issue him a recommend. See Denver Snuffer, “Last Night’s Family Home Evening – Don’t call me,” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 9 September 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/09/last-nights-family-home-evening-dont.html. ↩

  136. Snuffer, “Last Night’s Family Home Evening – Don’t call me.” ↩

  137. Denver Snuffer, “Don’t Know,” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 9 September 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/09/dont-know.html. See also Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Did Mormons boot writer? Church isn’t saying and he doesn’t know,” Salt Lake Tribune (10 September 2013, 9:29 a.m.). ↩

  138. Snuffer, “Compliance (So Far As Possible). ↩

  139. Compare his written claim that Church “authorities are to be respected and sustained” (28–29) with his attack on prophets and apostles below. ↩

  140. Snuffer’s interpretation requires that “the church restored through Joseph Smith [be] referred to throughout the Book of Mormon as the ‘gentiles’” (331). ↩

  141. It is ironic that this tactic is precisely that adopted throughout by PTHG—true principles are mixed with false claims. ↩

  142. See, for example, the claim that, for him, “instruction from above… has little to do with 47 East South Temple” in note 131 herein. ↩

  143. “Murder was allowed,” reads one representative sentence, “but only when President Young thought it was needed for the salvation of the victim” (223). ↩

  144. The citation is from D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1997), 363. Quinn cites Francis Gibbons, David O. McKay: Apostle to the World, Prophet of God (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1986), 347, 263. ↩

  145. See Part 1, note 44. ↩

  146. Snuffer uses similar tactics to distort (210–211) the meaning of Jeffrey R. Holland, “Prophets in the Land Again,” General Conference, October 2006. ↩

  147. “I have an assignment given to me I intend to discharge. It is because I love God and therefore love His children. It will cost me a great deal to accomplish that. Not only ire of the organization, but the money I will spend to accomplish the task” – Snuffer, “Contentment,” (note 132 herein). Such a claim violates D&C 42:11: “It shall not be given to any one to go forth to preach my gospel, or to build up my church, except he be ordained by some one who has authority, and it is known to the church that he has authority and has been regularly ordained by the heads of the church. ↩

  148. “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” [Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain (New York: Random House, 1979), 64.] ↩

  149. See notes 129, 131—133 herein. ↩

  150. Whitney, 100. ↩

  151. Estimates for both temples typically include labor and materials. See William Edwin Berrett, The Restored Church: A Brief History of the Growth and Doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, fifteenth edition revised and enlarged (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1973), 125; and Colvin, 44. ↩

Passing Up The Heavenly Gift (Part One of Two)

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): 181-243

Review of Denver C. Snuffer, Jr., Passing the Heavenly Gift, Salt Lake City: Mill Creek Press, 2011. 510 pp., no index. $25.97.

The Basic Thesis

…the Latter-day Saint church was predicted to fail, and in all likelihood has failed to secure the fullness of the priesthood (Denver Snuffer1).

Denver C. Snuffer, Jr. claims to have had a vision of the resurrected Jesus Christ.2 A convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he is the author of eight books (509). The thesis of the most recent—Passing the Heavenly Gift—is summarized by his book’s cover photo: a snuffed out candle, smoke curling upward, with a dim ember persisting at the tip of the wick.

[Page 182]Snuffer claims that Joseph Smith was an inspired prophet, but Joseph’s commands and revelations were not heeded adequately. As a result, Joseph was betrayed by Church members and murdered prior to the completion of the Nauvoo Temple (104). This made it impossible, in Snuffer’s view, for Joseph to pass on all the necessary ordinances and doctrines, notwithstanding the endowment and other ordinances given to the Twelve prior to Joseph’s death (105–110). Brigham Young, the Twelve, and their ecclesiastical heirs did not, therefore, perpetuate the fullness of Joseph’s mission (87–89, 268, 272–276, 283). Some of their acts, and the changes that Snuffer believes they have made to Church doctrine, practice, or administration, were not sanctioned by God, and constitute the “passing of the heavenly gift” (287, 400). This loss was, in Snuffer’s telling, predicted by Joseph Smith, and the time is now ripe for members of the Church to reclaim these blessings (315–317, 400–402, 447–499).

Prophecy and Historical Claims

If you can control people’s ideas of the past, you control their ideas of the present and hence the future. (Hugh Nibley3)

Snuffer provides a reading of Joseph Smith’s statements and the Book of Mormon’s prophecies that accords with his opinions. One could—and perhaps should—contest these interpretations vigorously. As Hugh Nibley once noted, though, the uninspired interpretation of prophecy is a notoriously fickle and inexact science—and Snuffer would doubtless consider my [Page 183]interpretation as uninspired as I regard his.4 Since we disagree about which authorities might be appealed to—for I have a much higher regard for LDS prophets after Joseph Smith than he does—only divine revelation could settle the issue. Such divine endorsement or reproof is not, however, amenable to citation here.

Snuffer’s claims rest, however, on a foundation of historical interpretation and reconstruction. He insists that his work was provoked because “among friends of mine there is an increasing unease with official accounts of the history of the church” (xii). “A great deal of what is regarded as ‘well settled’ [in Church history] is, upon close investigation, merely a series of inconsistent leaps of faith unwarranted by the record” (xiii). Snuffer tells “faithful Latter-day Saint” readers that they therefore “will need to be open-minded” (xiii). Open-mindedness is a virtue, and yet, as many wits have warned, we should not be so open-minded that our brains fall out.5

Snuffer is somewhat dismissive of previous efforts to recount Latter-day Saint history. “History does not belong to the historians. Their techniques only permit them to offer an interpretation of events. Your own opinion is as valid as theirs” (38). This is an excellent example of PTHG’s tendency to make statements that are absolutely true, and then couple them with a conclusion that is dubious. It is certainly true that all history is an interpretation; no historian is infallible, nor are only professional historians allowed to “do history.” But it is absurd [Page 184]to claim that any opinion is as valid as any other opinion. If I am firmly of the view that the Church was first organized in Japan in 1930, instead of New York in 1830, my opinion is simply wrong, however sincerely I hold it. Snuffer continues:

I am a lawyer, not an historian. This book is a view of the events as I have come to understand them. Any historian will offer only his editorial opinion dressed in an academic discipline to pretend it is more than mere opinion. But history written by the academics suffers from all the bias, blindness and foolishness of the one who writes (5).

He is certainly correct that authorial bias cannot but contaminate any work. Elsewhere, however, he seems to declare himself above or immune to such concerns. There is not much intellectual caution in his self-portrait:

Taking this scriptural framework, (not as an historian but as a believer in the prophetic insight about us) I then tracked through our history. I used a lot of primary sources, including journals and diaries of church leaders. What I found was that the events in our history could be viewed as an exact match for the prophetic warnings given us in scripture (Book of Mormon/D&C). The result was not history, but truth. If the book is true (and I am persuaded it is the most correct account of our dispensation written so far) then we need to awaken to our present peril and repent.6

Not only is Snuffer’s work “truth” (rather than biased history), and not only is it the best account of our dispensation, but “I think I understand [Joseph Smith] as well as any person who has reviewed the written record about him” (40). But [Page 185]even if this lofty self-portrait is true, if anyone’s opinion about history is as valid as anyone else’s, it is not clear why we ought to listen to Snuffer at all.

Snuffer claims that “the problem with Passing the Heavenly Gift has not been its accuracy. The issue raised in the notice I received from the stake president does not say the book is false, contains errors or makes mistakes in history.”7 His stake president may not have said it—priesthood leaders are generally not tasked with evaluating the accuracy of history—but I will. The book makes many false statements and conclusions, contains errors, and makes mistakes in history—and it is difficult to believe that some of those mistakes are made by oversight.

I therefore propose to first outline the various historical claims upon which Snuffer’s reconstruction of the Restoration rests. I will then consider each point in detail—we will see that Snuffer’s reconstruction is simply implausible or in error. It ignores documents that do not match the story he tells and it distorts or misrepresents some documents that he cites. He does not interact with previous scholarship in a responsible way. It certainly cannot pretend to pure “truth,” and often shades into frank error.

Summary of Snuffer’s Historical Reconstruction

One searches in vain for a succinct summary of PTHG’s argument.8 The book wanders, repeats itself, and usually does not include the author’s entire argument in a single place—it is scattered throughout. The claims do not always seem entirely [Page 186]self-consistent. The following points, however, provide the framework for his interpretation of LDS scripture and history.

  1. Priesthood conferred by ordination is just a potential (“many are called”) and not actual bestowal of power (“few are chosen”). To truly receive priesthood power, a type of divine theophany is necessary (36).
  2. Oliver Cowdery gave a charge to the original twelve apostles requiring them to seek to behold the face of God. This charge was discontinued in the early 1900s because so few had a theophany-type experience (88–89).
  3. Brigham Young, many other post-Joseph Smith leaders, and modern apostles sometimes explicitly deny having had theophany-type experiences, “parsing” [sic] their words carefully to give false impressions to their unwary listeners (61, 65, 87–88, 243).
  4. Brigham Young was ordained an apostle by the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, not Joseph Smith, and so he did not receive priesthood keys or authority from Joseph Smith (87).
  5. Brigham appealed to his ordination as an apostle as the ground for his right to lead the Church following Joseph’s death. Brigham could not have received all the necessary keys from Joseph (especially the sealing keys), since traditional LDS history dates their receipt to 1836, a year following Brigham’s ordination to the apostleship (87–89, 105–110). Furthermore, Joseph did not ordain the apostles (see point #4) and so could not have given his keys to Brigham and the Twelve.
  6. Joseph Smith did not receive the ultimate sealing powers in 1836 from Elijah in the Kirtland temple, but instead had received them by 1829 in association with the receipt of the revelations that later became D&C 132. This 1829 receipt of authority met the criteria outlined in point #1 above (75, 327).
  7. [Page 187]Despite the apostles’ claims, the necessary authority from Joseph could only be fully transmitted in a temple—since Joseph died before the temple was finished, it was impossible for them to receive everything God wanted them to receive (268, 272–276, 283).
  8. The Saints sinned in Missouri, and Joseph Smith had to offer God his life in order to get them another chance (98–101, 104, 285, 404).
  9. God commanded the Saints to build the Nauvoo temple, but warned them of dire punishment if they did not do so with enough speed or zeal. The Saints’ sufferings subsequent to Joseph’s death are evidence that God was punishing them for not building the temple quickly enough, as he had warned them he would (197, 202–206, 268–270).
  10. There were no divine, Pentecostal-type experiences in the Nauvoo temple as there were in the Kirtland temple. This demonstrates that God did not fully accept the temple because of the Saints’ delay in building it (381).

Snuffer’s Conclusion: The apostles’ lack of full authority, and God’s displeasure with the Church subsequent to Joseph’s death, means that since Joseph the leaders have been misguided. They have introduced inappropriate innovations in practice or doctrine. Mormonism has lost some vital truths which members, independent of the institutional Church and its leadership, can reclaim if they are faithful.

Undergirding everything is Snuffer’s claim to have seen Jesus Christ, and to therefore have his “calling and election made sure.” A large portion of his critique focuses on the supposed absence of this blessing among post-Joseph Smith leaders of the Church. Furthermore, Snuffer has portrayed himself as an expert on the topic in books and elsewhere:9

[Page 188]The books I have written do not ever touch upon Calling and Election, nor discuss the Second Anointing. But they will tell you what is required to go and learn from the Lord about these things directly. If you want answers about that, then follow the same path as the ancients did, as Joseph Smith did, and as Abraham did. I’m only interested in helping you understand the path…. Most people who spend time writing about second anointings and calling and election don’t know what they’re talking about. The best treatment of that subject is something which ought to come from the Lord directly. Or an angel assigned by Him to minister to the person who has prepared.

The challenge is preparation. I’m all about that. That is what I write to explain and what I encourage all to do.10

These doctrines and the experiences that go with them are among the things that Snuffer sees the post-Joseph Smith Church as minimizing and rejecting, in part because of what Joseph could not pass on and in part because of the failings or inadequacy of subsequent leaders. Because Snuffer claims [Page 189]experience and expertise in a matter about which he says the modern leaders are either ignorant or inappropriately silent, this forms the implicit basis for his effort to steady the historical and ecclesiastical ark. “The culminating ordinances of Joseph Smith’s restoration… [is that w]e are to be prepared in all things to receive” direct revelation from God.11 “The real thing is when a person actually obtains an audience with Jesus Christ, returns to His presence, and gains the knowledge by which they are saved. This was the topic I first wrote about, and has remained the underlying theme of everything I have written” (53, italics added).

In a sense, Snuffer is more right than he knows when he claims to be a lawyer, not a historian. He is also absolutely correct when he says that he has not provided us with history. What we have, rather than the unadulterated “truth” he claims to provide, is simply a type of legal brief. In this case, however, the lawyer does not address—or even mention—evidence that does not support his client’s case. And so, we must proceed to cross-examine his presentation.

Claim #1: Power in the Priesthood Requires Theophany

Writes Snuffer:

Any person who has priesthood conferred upon him will need to go into God’s presence, and receive it through the veil for power in their priesthood. That is, for any person who has priesthood conferred upon them, they will not gain power in the priesthood until they come to God from whom this power comes through the veil. Not as a mere ceremony delivered by the church, but through contact directly with God. It is [Page 190]the voice of God, through the veil, which activates the dormant power conferred by ordination (36).

Snuffer here falls prey to all-or-nothing thinking: If one does not have the fullness, then Snuffer declares that one does not have anything at all: “They will not gain power in the priesthood until they come to God….through contact directly with God.”

Power versus Authority of the Priesthood

Snuffer quotes President Packer:

We have done very well at distributing the authority of the priesthood. We have priesthood authority planted nearly everywhere. We have quorums of elders and high priests worldwide. But distributing the authority of the priesthood has raced, I think, ahead of distributing the power of the priesthood. The priesthood does not have the strength that it should have and will not have until the power of the priesthood is firmly fixed in the families as it should be.12

Snuffer couples such remarks with a repeated appeal to D&C 121:36, which rightly notes that “the powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness.” Snuffer takes this vital observation, however, and then concludes, “The power of the priesthood comes only one way, and, as the revelation to Joseph Smith states, men do not have any right to either confer it, or prevent it from being conferred” (28). This, however, is a distortion of what the text says: it speaks of conferring the priesthood, but it says nothing about having priesthood power without ordination. Surely whether power comes is dependent upon God’s will—in that [Page 191]Snuffer is correct—but this does not mean that ordination is of no real importance.

In addition to the all-or-nothing view of power that we see above, part of the confusion arises because Snuffer falls victim to the fallacy of equivocation. This logical error involves a word or expression that has more than one meaning. The fallacy occurs when differences in meaning are blurred or ignored. Snuffer does so repeatedly with the term “authority.” President Packer speaks of distributing the authority of the priesthood (i.e., the legal right to carry out priesthood ordinances). He also speaks of how those with authority do not always measure up and receive power. So far so good, and he and Snuffer agree that power is contingent upon God’s approbation, not mere ordination. (That is, it seems to me, President Packer’s point.)13

Snuffer, however, draws repeatedly on D&C 121:37, which warns that “when we undertake to cover our sins, or to gratify our pride, our vain ambition, or to exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness,” then “Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man” (D&C 121:37, emphasis added). Snuffer concludes (sometimes implicitly) that this use of the term authority means the “legal right to carry out priesthood ordinances.” If this is so, then he sees a grave problem—since we cannot know that a priesthood holder is worthy, if real priesthood power and authority are contingent, then ordinances performed by priesthood authority must be of relatively little importance: otherwise, members would forever be at risk of receiving ordinances that are null and void because “Amen” has been said to the authority of the man performing them (319–324, 336).

This is, however, only a problem because of Snuffer’s fallacy of equivocation around authority. In D&C 121, the scripture is [Page 192]not speaking about the right to perform ordinances. Instead, the “power” and “authority” to which it refers is power and authority over other people. The scripture is concerned with those who “aspire to the honors of men,” because they will interpret their ordination as a right “to exercise unrighteous dominion,” but “no power or influence can” be exercised on anyone by virtue of priesthood office. This says nothing about the right or authority to provide necessary ordinances—it is a simple declaration that any authority over a person than one presumes to have based upon priesthood ceases to exist. The only “dominion” that one gets now or in the future because of priesthood comes “without compulsory means” (D&C 121:35–46).

To distinguish these two uses of the term “authority,” I will refer to the right to officiate in priesthood ordinances as “right of legal administration” or “being a legal administrator.” As we will soon see, Joseph used such expressions and indicated that such rights were absolutely essential.14 It is in this sense that President Packer uses the term “authority”—we have not done well in distributing the right to have authority or dominion over people (because such a right does not exist), but have rather done well in creating many legal administrators. Whether those legal administrators receive any power in their own lives is, of course, entirely up to them—just as whether recipients of the ordinances receive any power or benefit is dependent upon their personal righteousness.15

[Page 193]Authority Not Vital for Ordinances?

Snuffer insists elsewhere, with some justification, that

The ceremonies and ordinances of the church all point to [God]. They are not the end of the search but instead teach you how to conduct the search. If all you receive are ordinances, you have nothing of real value. They are dead without a living, personal connection with God. God alone can and will save you (55).

This is certainly true. Yet, Snuffer seems determined to always deny the importance of the Church’s role as the sole authorized source of the necessary ordinances.16 “God wants you to know Him,” Snuffer tells us, “You can know Him. You do not need another person to speak to Him for you. You should speak to Him directly” (55). This is all true—but Snuffer ignores another theme that is equally prominent in Joseph Smith’s revelations and thought: an authorized representative is also necessary to perform vital and non-negotiable ordinances. This is something that cannot be done by oneself—the priesthood officer must play a role. But Snuffer says, “Since the language of the baptismal covenant was given by revelation, it has been approved by the Lord. Using the language for the ceremony authorizes the covenant to be performed” (421). “If the Holy Ghost will visit you even without an authoritative ordinance,” Snuffer declares, “then the responsibility to live so as to invite the Spirit is all you need to have that same companionship the ordinance could confer” (460, compare 33). This view contradicts Joseph Smith:

There is a difference between the Holy Ghost and the gift of the Holy Ghost. Cornelius received the Holy Ghost before he was baptized, which was the convincing [Page 194]power of God unto him of the truth of the Gospel, but he could not receive the gift of the Holy Ghost until after he was baptized. Had he not taken this sign or ordinance upon him, the Holy Ghost which convinced him of the truth of God, would have left him.17

“Even if you give the most optimistic assessment of the restoration and current condition of the church,” declares PTHG, “it can do nothing for the individual Latter-day Saint. We must all find salvation for ourselves” (305). Yet, in contrast, D&C 121:19 regards being “severed from the ordinances of the Lord’s house” a grave consequence—suggesting that they offer something which cannot be had (despite Snuffer’s insistence) outside of the Church. Less than two months before his death, Joseph would declare: “I advise all to go on to perfection and search deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Godliness—a man can do nothing for himself unless God direct him in the right way, and the Priesthood is reserved for that purpose.”18)

As an example of this neglect of priesthood authority, in an extensive list of what Joseph Smith accomplished, PTHG says that Joseph restored “Understanding of Aaronic…Priesthood [and]….of Melchizedek Priesthood….[and] [k]nowledge of a third order of priesthood referred to as Patriarchal Priesthood” (58) but completely omits Joseph’s role as restorer of that priesthood authority. The omission is telling, given that the author regards priesthood ultimately as something that comes [Page 195]only from God direct to each individual, and unnecessary for ordinances. PTHG later downplays the ordinances:

Rather than trust ordinances which may have become invalid, blessings which may have been unauthorized, and messages which may have become tainted, I will seek for Christ and His presence. I want to know my standing before Him, not whether a man has recommended me (344).

We again see an example of PTHG taking a true statement and drawing a false conclusion. The necessity of Christ’s approval is certainly paramount—but, PTHG then claims (contrary to Joseph Smith and the scriptures he gave) that one can seek Christ’s approval and acceptance without the necessity of ordinances performed by authorized administrators, promising the reader that “the required priestly authority is still available through the veil” (468). Yet, Joseph taught that there were now authorized mortal administrators upon the earth, and said that any claim to ordination by divine messengers was evidence of either lying or deception:

The angel told… Cornelius that he must send for Peter to learn how to be saved: Peter could baptize, and angels could not, so long as there were legal officers in the flesh holding the keys of the kingdom, or the authority of the priesthood. There is one evidence still further on this point, and that is that Jesus himself when he appeared to Paul on his way to Damascus, did not inform him how he could be saved. He had set in the church firstly Apostles, and secondly prophets for the work of the ministry… and as the grand rule of heaven was that nothing should ever be done on earth without revealing the secret to his servants the prophets…. [S]o Paul could not learn so much from the [Page 196]Lord relative to his duty in the common salvation of man, as he could from one of Christ’s ambassadors called with the same heavenly calling of the Lord, and endowed with the same power from on high—so that what they loosed on earth, should be loosed in heaven; and what they bound on earth should be bound in heaven.19

Orson Hyde reported Joseph’s attitude toward one who claimed angelic ordination:

One Francis G. Bishop, an Elder in our church, was very anxious to be ordained a High Priest, but he was not considered a proper candidate to fill the office at that time; and his urgent solicitations to be promoted to the High Priesthood, confirmed the Saints in the opinion that he wanted a high station without meriting it, or without being called by the Spirit of God to that work. He was sent forth into the world to preach in capacity and calling of an Elder; but he was not long out before he declared himself to be a High Priest—and that he was ordained from heaven. This made much stir in the branches of the church and also in the world. But when the news of his proceedings reached the prophet Joseph, he called Bishop home forthwith. He was introduced into the school of the prophets, and there closely questioned upon his course. He said he was ordained by an angel to the High Priesthood; yet, on a more close examination, he crossed his own testimony and statements–became confused, and blushed with [Page 197]shame and guilt–he fell down upon his knees and confessed that he had lied in the name of the Lord–begged to be forgiven and cried aloud for mercy. We all forgave him, but we could not give him our confidence, for he had destroyed it.… Brother Joseph observed to [Bro.] Bishop that he knew that he had lied before he confessed it; that his declarations were not only false in themselves, but they involved a false principle. An angel, said Joseph, may administer the word of the Lord unto men, and bring intelligence to them from heaven upon various subjects; but no true angel from God will ever come to ordain any man, because they have once been sent to establish the priesthood by ordaining me thereunto; and the priesthood being once established on earth, with power to ordain others, no heavenly messenger will ever come to interfere with that power by ordaining any more…. [Joseph tells the story of Cornelius as above.] You may therefore know, from this time forward, that if any man comes to you professing to be ordained by an angel, he is either a liar or has been imposed upon in consequence of transgression by an angel of the devil, for this priesthood shall never be taken away from this church.20

Thus, Snuffer’s view cannot—despite his strenuous efforts—be squared with Joseph Smith’s approach, nor that of later prophets and apostles. The Doctrine and Covenants insists upon the ordinances as vital, and as a good gauge for judging the religious pretensions of others:

[Page 198]Wherefore he that prayeth, whose spirit is contrite, the same is accepted of me if he obey mine ordinances. He that speaketh, whose spirit is contrite, whose language is meek and edifieth, the same is of God if he obey mine ordinances (D&C 52:15–16, emphasis added).

To those who sought to be right with God without rebaptism by authority, the Lord said:

Wherefore, although a man should be baptized an hundred times it availeth him nothing, for you cannot enter in at the strait gate by the law of Moses, neither by your dead works. For it is because of your dead works that I have caused this last covenant and this church to be built up unto me, even as in days of old. Wherefore, enter ye in at the gate, as I have commanded, and seek not to counsel your God (D&C 22:2–4).

And Joseph Smith insisted that John the Baptist’s legitimate Aaronic priesthood required even Jesus to submit to him:

There was a legal administrator, and those that were baptized were subjects for a king; and also the laws and oracles of God were there; therefore the kingdom of God was there; for no man could have better authority to administer than John; and our Savior submitted to that authority Himself, by being baptized by John; therefore the kingdom of God was set up on the earth, even in the days of John.21

Snuffer concedes that “it would be good to have an authorized minister to perform the ordinance,” but insists that “it does not matter whether there is an officiator with authority [Page 199]from God on the earth or not” (418). He justifies this distortion of Joseph’s teaching by claiming:

The language of Section 20 [of the Doctrine and Covenants] is not contingent upon authority. Rather, it is the faith of one receiving baptism which determines the ordinance’s validity. The church offices described in Section 20 are not dependent on priesthood authority. Nor is authority given to the church dependent upon a man. The direction to organize the church is all that was required (418).

It is certainly true that faith is necessary for the baptismal ordinance to be valid—without faith, even with a legal administrator, Heber C. Kimball said, one might as well give all the ordinances to “a bag of sand,” “if you do not live up to your profession and practice your religion… except through faith and obedience.”22

However, PTHG again draws a false inference from a true statement. If an authorized minister is not necessary, why did John the Baptist ordain Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery prior to their baptism (D&C 13:1) and then promise that this authority “would never be taken again from the earth”? The same D&C 20 to which he appeals declares that “an Apostle is an Elder & it is his calling to Baptize & to ordain other Elders, Priests, Teachers & Deacons…The Priests duty is to…baptize…& ordain other Priests, Teaches & Deacons,” while “neither the Teachers nor the Deacons have authority to [Page 200]baptize,”23 which makes it clear that not every member (or even every priesthood holder) may baptize.

Joseph Smith’s revelations also taught that “they who are of the High Priesthood, whose names are not found written in the book of the law, or that are found to have apostatized, or to have been cut off from the church, as well as the lesser priesthood, or the members, in that day shall not find an inheritance among the Saints of the Most High” (D&C 85:11). “Wo unto them,” declares the Lord elsewhere to Joseph, “who are cut off from my church, for the same are overcome of the world” (D&C 50:8). Snuffer’s doctrines contradict Joseph Smith’s. Contrary to PTHG, both the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 11:35, 36) and the Doctrine and Covenants seem to condemn his approach: “They who will not hear the voice of the Lord, neither the voice of his servants, neither give heed to the words of the prophets and apostles, shall be cut off from among the people; For they have strayed from mine ordinances, and have broken mine everlasting covenant” (D&C 1:14–15).

If Snuffer is correct, why did Joseph teach that there was “no salvation between the two lids of the bible without a legal administrator”?24 Why does the Book of Mormon place such great emphasis on the necessity of valid priesthood authority for baptism and other ordinances (Mosiah 21:33, Moroni 2–5), including a concerted effort by the resurrected Christ to make this perfectly clear (3 Nephi 11:21–28)? Christ did so precisely so no one would dispute—as Snuffer is doing—over the proper form or requirements for baptism. Joseph Smith taught:

Whenever men can find out the will of God & find an Administrator legally authorized from God there is the Kingdom of God but whare these are not, the [Page 201]Kingdom of God is not[.] All the ordinances Systems, & Administrations on the earth is of no use to the Children of men unless they are ordained & authorized of God for nothing will save a man but a legal Administrator for none others will be acknowledge either by God or Angels.25

Snuffer’s reading is idiosyncratic and smacks of desperation. This muddled thinking leads Snuffer to compare the LDS “dilemma” to that faced by the Catholics during the Donatist heresy (321). He quotes Daniel C. Peterson26 and notes that “the winning side in the dispute decided priestly authority was not dependent on the officiator’s worthiness” (319). He concludes that this would mean that “Catholics could not have forfeited priesthood” in the Great Apostasy since “wickedness, error, and foolishness would never be a reason to remove their authority” (320). (In all these cases, “authority” is being used in my sense of legal administration.)

But Snuffer is mistaken—if one is authorized to perform an ordinance by those holding the keys, then one may act as a legal administrator. But once the keys have been lost—with, for example, the passing of the apostles—then even a legal administrator has no right or authority to call new leaders, pass on priesthood authority, and so on.27 A legal administrator [Page 202]cannot create more legal administrators without the approval of those who hold the keys, nor can he perform essential ordinances without that same approval—and so the authority comes to a halt because such administration would not be legal. The legal administrator is not constrained only by death as Snuffer claims (320) because no one can grant him the right to use his authority in a legal way without keys.28 But Snuffer is determined to reject the idea of apostolic stewardship and guidance based upon the keys, so he sees a dilemma where there is none.29 Yet he accuses others of shoddy reasoning because “the result you want to avoid absolutely CANNOT be true” (322, emphasis in original). His treatment of these concepts is unintentional evidence for this proposition, applied to his own reasoning.

Perhaps the most deadly argument against Snuffer’s reading is simply that Joseph Smith didn’t embrace the conclusions to which PTHG’s confusion leads. I am aware of no evidence—and Snuffer cites none—to suggest that Joseph Smith or the early Mormons ever repeated ordinances that were performed by priesthood holders who subsequently proved to be unworthy. Given the apostasies and dissident groups which formed throughout Joseph’s prophetic career, considerable attention ought to have been given to this matter if Snuffer’s conclusion is the proper one. But the early Mormons seem to have agreed with Peterson—one’s status as a lawful administrator was not [Page 203]contingent on righteousness, though one’s personal status before God certainly was, as was the true power or authority to influence others that one could wield in his behalf.

Necessity of Theophany?

With respect to the sealing power, Snuffer cites a long list of prophets in an effort to demonstrate that “this kind of covenant is established between God and man in the first person; never through another” (85). The prophets mentioned include Nephi, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He then concludes that “Brigham Young’s [claim] that Joseph Smith had the capacity to confer such power independent of the Lord’s direct involvement is a marvelous, even unprecedented claim” (87). No Latter-day Saint would dispute the idea that the sealing power must come from God, and that he is personally involved. It is not clear, though, why another prophet cannot be involved in the transfer of that authority or power (which transfer God would, of course, have to ratify and endorse). However, Snuffer insists that Joseph cannot have transferred it to Brigham.

PTHG also makes a link between having one’s calling and election made sure and the sealing power:

Nephi [the son of Helaman] received his calling and election. Calling and election is connected with holding the sealing power…. Sealing power is always connected to calling and election…. Only through that personal contact with heaven were their calling and election, sealing power and covenant established (81, 85, 86).

It is not entirely clear to me exactly what PTHG is arguing—do all who have their calling and election made sure receive the sealing power? Are a sure election and the sealing power interchangeable terms? These readings of PTHG seem unlikely given that “there is never but one on the earth at a time on [Page 204]whom this power and the keys of this priesthood [sealing] are conferred” (D&C 132:7). I think he means that having one’s calling and election made sure is a necessary prerequisite to receiving the sealing power, or that they must at least happen at the same time.

In any case, we should not be surprised that many prophets granted the sealing power had a theophany experience—those in scripture are often the founding prophet of a dispensation or for a specific group of people. A theophany is their only option, since no legal administrator is to be found.

In scripture receiving one’s calling and election does not require that one see God or Christ personally. Alma the Elder, for example, was one of the wicked priests consecrated by King Noah (Mosiah 17:2). Converted by Abinadi’s preaching, he escaped the king’s court and taught while in hiding (Mosiah 18). He eventually led a group of believers to Zarahemla (Mosiah 23–24), where King Mosiah made him the supreme head of the Nephite Christian church, giving him “power to ordain priests and teachers over every church” (Mosiah 25:19, 26:8). Later, when troubled by a matter of internal dissention, Alma received a revelation:

And it came to pass that after he had poured out his whole soul to God, the voice of the Lord came to him, saying: Blessed art thou, Alma, and blessed are they who were baptized in the waters of Mormon. Thou art blessed because of thy exceeding faith in the words alone of my servant Abinadi…. Thou art my servant; and I covenant with thee that thou shalt have eternal life; and thou shalt serve me and go forth in my name, and shalt gather together my sheep (Mosiah 26:14–15, 20).

Alma is the head of the church. He here has his calling and election made sure—he is promised eternal life. Yet, God [Page 205]explicitly points out that Alma has believed simply because of Abinadi’s words. Until now, he has had no theophany, seen no angels, nor seen the face of God. Even now, he only hears God’s words. Enos likewise hears a voice, but reports no vision (Enos 1:5, 10).

The death knell for PTHG’s claim that mortals cannot be involved in the transfer of the highest priesthood power occurred on 27 August 1843 when Joseph spoke of Abraham’s receipt of “a blessing under the hands of Melchesideck even the last law or a fulness of the law or preisthood which constituted him a king and preist after the order of Melchesideck or an endless life.”30 This is significant for two reasons—(1) it defines precisely how Joseph saw the “fullness of the priesthood,” the last and final power that could be given on earth: he spoke of it in the same terms used to describe the higher temple ordinances; and (2) Joseph declares that Abraham received it by ordination under the hands of another mortal.31 The Prophet offers this as a paradigmatic example—for who can be a greater disciple than Abraham?—something that Snuffer declares to be impossible. If Joseph is an authority, then Snuffer’s thesis is false.

Could Brigham Young Qualify to Claim Sealing Power?

Despite this, Brigham Young also meets Snuffer’s criteria for receiving the sealing power: “by the calling of [God’s] own voice” (314, citing JST-Gen. 14:29). Orson Hyde described a heavenly manifestation given to all the Twelve. It has close affinities with Alma’s account:

In the month of February, 1848, the Twelve Apostles met at Hyde Park, Pottawattamie County, Iowa, where a small Branch of the Church was established…. We [Page 206]were in prayer and council, communing together; and what took place on that occasion? The voice of God came from on high, and spake to the Council. Every latent feeling was aroused, and every heart melted. What did it say unto us? “Let my servant Brigham step forth and receive the full power of the presiding Priesthood in my Church and kingdom.” This was the voice of the Almighty unto us at Council Bluffs, before I removed to what was called Kanesville. It has been said by some that Brigham was appointed by the people, and not by the voice of God. I do not know that this testimony has often, if ever, been given to the masses of the people before; but I am one that was present, and there are others here that were also present on that occasion, and did hear and feel the voice from heaven, and we were filled with the power of God. This is my testimony; these are my declarations unto the Saints—unto the members of the kingdom of God in the last days, and to all people.

We said nothing about the matter in those times, but kept it still.32

Of note is the reluctance of the Twelve to talk too freely about a divine manifestation. Hyde went on to describe the earth shaking, which led non-members to believe there had been an earthquake. Brigham confirmed the account, adding:

Brother Hyde, in his remarks, spoke about the voice of God at a certain time. I could tell many incidents relating to that circumstance, which he did not take time to relate. We were in his house, which was some ten or twelve feet square. The houses in the neighbourhood [Page 207]shook, or, if they did not, the people thought they did, for they ran together and inquired whether there had been an earthquake. We told them that the voice of God had reached the earth—that they need not be afraid; it was the power of God. This and other events have transpired to satisfy the people—you, and all who belong to the Church and kingdom of God upon the earth.33

Snuffer claims that “this higher priesthood… comes from God’s own voice declaring it to the man” (295). Well, in addition to ordination by Joseph, here we have the voice of God declaring before all the Twelve that Brigham should have “the full power of the presiding priesthood.”

Snuffer also quotes Brigham Young denying that he can “commune in person with the Father and the Son at my will and pleasure” (90) and not having been “able to talk with some Being of a higher sphere than this” (91). Snuffer interprets this to mean that Brigham denied having “any being, angelic or otherwise, from a higher sphere speak to him” (90). This presumes too much. Brigham reported a vision of and instructions from the martyred Joseph Smith at least twice—Joseph himself would thus be acting in an angelic role, though Brigham apparently did not regard him as being of “a higher sphere.”34 Brigham likewise reported visions on several occasions.35 Brigham may not, then, be ruling out all such contacts as absolutely as Snuffer believes—denying that one can speak with the Godhead at one’s “will and pleasure” is not the same as denying one has ever been spoken to by them at [Page 208]Theirs: “I hold myself in readiness that he can wield me at his will and pleasure” (90).

Brigham also said that he received revelation on Church organization as soon as he was back in Nauvoo following Joseph’s death:

When I met Sidney Rigdon, east of the temple in Nauvoo, I knew then what I now know concerning the organization of the Church, though I had told no man of it. I revealed it to no living being, until the pioneers to this valley were returning to Winter Quarters. Brother Wilford Woodruff [p.198] was the first man I ever spoke to about it. Said he—”It is right; I believe it, and think a great deal of it, for it is from the Lord; the Church must be organized.” It then went to others, and from them to others; but it was no news to me, for I understood it then as I understand it now.36

We also have Joseph Smith’s witness of Brigham’s worthiness to enjoy the divine presence. Heber C. Kimball reported Joseph’s anxiety for the Twelve on their mission to England:

He saw the Twelve going forth, and they appeared to be in a far distant land. After some time they unexpectedly met together, apparently in great tribulation, their clothes all ragged, and their knees and feet sore. They formed into a circle, and all stood with their eyes fixed upon the ground. The Savior appeared and stood in their midst and wept over them, and wanted to show Himself to them, but they did not discover Him.37

Snuffer might conclude from this section that he is correct—that the Lord would have unveiled himself to the Twelve, but [Page 209]they failed to be ready because they did not realize they were in his presence. Yet this was not Joseph’s conclusion, as the vision continued:

He (Joseph) saw until they had accomplished their work, and arrived at the gate of the celestial city; there Father Adam stood and opened the gate to them, and as they entered he embraced them one by one and kissed them. He then led them to the throne of God, and then the Savior embraced each one of them in the presence of God. He saw that they all had beautiful heads of hair and all looked alike. The impression this vision left on Brother Joseph’s mind was of so acute a nature, that he never could refrain from weeping while rehearsing it.38

Brigham would report that Joseph had told him that his and the apostles’ “calling and election” had been made sure:

Before Joseph’s death he had a revelation concerning myself and others, which signified that we had passed the ordeal, and that we should never apostatize from the faith of the holy gospel; “and”, said Joseph, “if there is any danger of your doing this, the Lord will take you to Himself forthwith, for you cannot stray from the truth.” When men and women have traveled to a certain point in their labors in this life, God sets a seal upon them that they never can forsake their God or His kingdom; for rather than they should do this, He will at once take them to Himself.39)

[Page 210]In like manner, Heber C. Kimball’s diary of 6 April 1839 noted:

The following words came to my mind, and the Spirit said unto me, “write,” which I did by taking a piece of paper and writing on my knee as follows:…. “Verily I say unto my servant Heber, thou art my son, in whom I am well pleased; for thou art careful to hearken to my words, and not transgress my law, nor rebel against my servant Joseph Smith, for thou hast a respect to the words of mine anointed, even from the least to the greatest of them; therefore thy name is written in heaven, no more to be blotted out for ever, because of these things.40

Heber too could have this privilege, despite also saying “I know this. I know it by revelation by the Spirit of God, for in this way my Heavenly Father communes with me, and maketh known unto me his mind and will. I have never seen him in person, but when I see my brethren I see his image, and I discover the attributes of God in them.”41 This ought to call into question Snuffer’s tidy conclusion:

Those who fall short of [receiving the Holy Spirit of promise], and do not receive this witness from Christ in mortality but receive it afterwards, will be Heirs of the Terrestrial Kingdom. These good but deluded souls trusted in men, rather than in Christ (432, emphasis added).

[Page 211]Alma, Heber, Brigham, and the Twelve could claim God’s power and authority—all had heard the voice of God. Callings and elections could be made sure without a dramatic vision.42 Might it not be sign-seeking for Brigham to insist upon a theophany when Joseph had already given him a revelation regarding his status? “Blessed are they,” said the risen Lord, “that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:27). Snuffer ought not to ignore these historical and scriptural witnesses, or the implications of the promise which described the ways in which God would unveil himself:

Sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you shall see him; for he will unveil his face unto you, and it shall be in his own time, and in his own way, and according to his own will (D&C 88:68, emphasis added).

Claims #2 and #3: Brigham Young and Subsequent Apostles Were Not Personal Witnesses of Christ

The first apostles were charged by Oliver Cowdery with the “necessary” duty of their being able to “bear testimony… that you have seen the face of God…. Never cease striving until you [Page 212]have seen God face to face,” for “your ordination is not full and complete till God has laid His hand upon you” (89).43

In Snuffer’s view, the apostles and their successors failed in this charge, which “was rarely realized, and that failing gave rise to feelings of inadequacy among Apostles who were never able to obtain such a blessing” (243). (Snuffer relies here upon D. Michael Quinn’s Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power44 for documentation, and his account suffers from some of the same flaws.45) As a result, claims Snuffer:

The first phase of Mormonism was dominated by visions, angels, and direct involvement by God. Those experiences are still celebrated and taught. However, they are only used as a legitimizing credential for a demystified church. The current phase of Mormonism is missing the direct appearance or involvement of God, angels, and visions. There is a disconnect between the miraculous events upon which Mormonism is based, and current church events (47).

All of this is part of Snuffer’s view that “Mormonism has become increasingly less mystic, less miraculous, and even less tolerant of ‘gifts’ of the Spirit. Although it retains an emphasis on personal revelation, there is no continuing expectation of new scripture, new commandments, or Divine visitation” (45). Snuffer ignores all the documents that prove otherwise, including Elder Bruce R. McConkie’s extensive discussion [Page 213]of apostolic witness, where he not only quotes Cowdery with approval, but indicates that both the present-day Twelve and all Church members have the same privilege and duty.46

Snuffer’s claims are simply false—and I do not mean false in the sense that I have a differing interpretation or reading of the history. They are false because there is evidence that directly contradicts them, which we will now examine.

[Page 214]Modern examples—New Scripture

Snuffer provides no evidence that new scripture is not anticipated—though he does reject the authority of the apostles and prophets who could provide such scripture. Elder Neal A. Maxwell told an assembled Book of Mormon symposium:

The day will come, brothers and sisters, when we will have other books of scripture which will emerge to accompany the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Presently you and I carry our scriptures around in a “quad”; the day will come when you’ll need a little red wagon.47

Elsewhere, Elder Maxwell promised that “many more scriptural writings will yet come to us,” mentioning those of Enoch, John, the ten tribes, and the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon.48 If new scripture is not anticipated, why would an apostle say this to a roomful of scripture scholars? Snuffer’s claim is false.

Modern Examples—Angels

Revelation continues with us today. The promptings of the Spirit, the dreams, and the visions and the visitations, and the ministering of angels all are with us now. And the still, small voice of the Holy Ghost “is a lamp unto [our] feet, and a light unto [our] path.” (Ps. 119:105.) Of that I bear witness. —Elder Boyd K. Packer49

Despite Snuffer’s claim (45, 47), the expectation and experience of angels is not lacking in the modern Church. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland has spoken extensively about angels, quoting Moroni 7:35–37 on the persistence of angelic visions “as long as time shall last… or there shall be one man upon the face thereof to be saved.”50 In a 1982 BYU devotional address, he taught that “when we’ve tried, really tried, and waited for what seemed never to be ours, then ‘the angels came and ministered unto him.’ For that ministration in your life I pray in the name of Jesus Christ.” “Angels and ministers of grace to defend us?” he asked in 1993 general conference, “They are all about us, and their holy sovereign, the Father of us all, is divinely anxious to bless us this very moment.”51 “Our defense,” he told a CES audience in 2000, “is in prayer and faith, in study and fasting, in the gifts of the Spirit, the ministration of angels, the power of the priesthood.”52 In 1994, he taught the following:

[Page 215]May I suggest to you that one of the things we need to teach our students, and one of the things which will become more important in their lives the longer they live, is the reality of angels, their work, and their ministry. Obviously I speak here not alone of the angel Moroni, but also of those more personal ministering angels who are with us and around us, empowered to help us, and who do exactly that….

I believe we need to speak of and believe in and bear testimony to the ministry of angels more than we sometimes do. They constitute one of God’s great methods of witnessing through the veil, and no document in all this world teaches that principle so clearly and so powerfully and so often as does the Book of Mormon.53

These are not the words of someone convinced angels are safely in the past, useful only for “legitimizing…a demystified church.” Snuffer is simply wrong.

“When we keep the covenants made,” by baptism and the sacrament, said Elder Dallin H. Oaks, “we are promised that we will always have His Spirit to be with us. The ministering of angels is one of the manifestations of that Spirit.”54 “Visions do happen,” he said, “Voices are heard from beyond the veil. I know this.”55 “I feel compelled, on this 150th anniversary of the Church, to certify to you that I know that the day of miracles has not ceased. I know that angels minister unto men,” said Boyd K. [Page 216]Packer.56 Elsewhere, he said, “The Lord reveals His will through dreams and visions, visitations, through angels, through His own voice, and through the voice of His servants.”57

Modern Examples—the Necessity and Reality of Ongoing Revelation

Snuffer declares that “unless there is a constant stream of revelation coming to the latter-day gentiles then they do not have the gift they claim” (342). This is certainly true. But he then decides that this warning applies to the Church of Jesus Christ—and not to just some members of the Church, but to all those who are leaders as well. But how does he know this?

He is not privy to the councils of Church leaders. And to maintain this stance he must dismiss repeated testimony that such revelation guides the Church. Examples abound—Brigham Young: “Now, be sure to get the spirit of revelation, so that you can tell when you hear the true Shepherd’s voice, and know him from a false one; for if you are the elect, it would be a great pity to have you led astray to destruction”;58 Joseph F. Smith: “Christ is the head of his Church and not man, and the connection can only be maintained upon the principle of [Page 217]direct and continuous revelation”;59 Marion G. Romney: “The guidance of this Church comes, not alone from the written word, but also from continuous revelation, and the Lord gives that revelation to the Church through His chosen leaders and none else”;60 Joseph Fielding Smith: “The remark is sometimes made by thoughtless and unobserving persons that the spirit of revelation is not guiding the Latter-day Saints now as in former times…. I say to you that there is revelation in the Church…. We have revelations that have been given, that have been written; some of them have been published; some of them have not”;61 James E. Faust: “I can testify that the process of continuous revelation comes to the Church very frequently. It comes daily”;62 and Gordon B. Hinckley:

There has been in the life of every [prophet and apostle I have known] an overpowering manifestation of the inspiration of God. Those who have been Presidents have been prophets in a very real way. I have intimately witnessed the spirit of revelation upon them…. Each Thursday, when we are at home, the First Presidency and the Twelve meet in the temple, in those sacred hallowed precincts, and we pray together and discuss certain matters together, and the spirit of revelation comes upon those present. I know. I have seen it.63

On a fundamental level, Snuffer is engaged in a form of sign-seeking. He will not sustain the prophets—and induces [Page 218]others to disregard them—because they will not satisfy his demand for the sensational. As Elder Oaks cautioned, “It is usually inappropriate to recite miraculous circumstances to a general audience that includes people with very different levels of spiritual maturity. To a general audience, miracles will be faith-reinforcing for some but an inappropriate sign for others.”64

Snuffer also ignores the warning and witness given by President Kimball:

Expecting the spectacular, one may not be fully alerted to the constant flow of revealed communication. I say, in the deepest of humility, but also by the power and force of a burning testimony in my soul, that from the prophet of the Restoration to the prophet of our own year, the communication line is unbroken, the authority is continuous, and light, brilliant and penetrating, continues to shine. The sound of the voice of the Lord is a continuous melody and a thunderous appeal. For nearly a century and a half there has been no interruption…. Every faithful person may have the inspiration for his own limited kingdom. But the Lord definitely calls prophets today and reveals his secrets unto them as he did yesterday, he does today, and will do tomorrow: that is the way it is.65

Elder Packer’s observation should be taken to heart: “There has come, these last several years, a succession of announcements that show our day to be a day of intense revelation, equaled, perhaps, only in those days of beginning, 150 years ago. But then, as now, the world did not believe.”66

[Page 219]Modern Examples—Theophany or Divine Visitation

I approach this section with some trepidation. Such matters are sacred, and Snuffer strikes me as far too glib in his criticism of leaders who do not measure up to his views about how apostles ought to undertake their witness. I have taken as my guide the statement of President Packer:

I made a rule for myself a number of years ago with reference to this subject [of keeping spiritual experiences sacred]. When someone relates a spiritual experience to me, personally or in a small, intimate group, I make it a rigid rule not to talk about it thereafter. I assume that it was told to me in a moment of trust and confidence, and therefore I never talk about it. If, however, on some future occasion I hear that individual talk about it in public in a large gathering, or where a number of people are present, then I know that it has been stated publicly and I can feel free under the right circumstances to relate it. But I know many, many sacred and important things that have been related to me by others that I will not discuss unless I am privileged to do so under the rule stated above. I know that others of the Brethren have the same feeling.67

I will, then, confine myself to published reports, though I am aware of other less-public accounts. A year after his call to the apostleship, Elder Packer said:

Occasionally during the past year I have been asked a question. Usually it comes as a curious, almost an idle, question about the qualifications to stand as a witness for Christ. The question they ask is, “Have you seen Him?”

[Page 220]That is a question that I have never asked of another. I have not asked that question of my brethren in the Quorum, thinking that it would be so sacred and so personal that one would have to have some special inspiration, indeed, some authorization, even to ask it.

There are some things just too sacred to discuss.68

Elder Packer later expanded on these ideas, writing:

Though I have not asked that question of others, I have heard them answer it—but not when they were asked. I have heard one of my Brethren declare, “I know, from experiences too sacred to relate, that Jesus is the Christ.” I have heard another testify, “I know that God lives, I know that the Lord lives, and more than that, I know the Lord.” I repeat: they have answered this question not when they were asked, but under the prompting of the Spirit, on sacred occasions, when “the Spirit beareth record.” (D&C 1:39.)

There are some things just too sacred to discuss: not secret, but sacred; not to be discussed, but to be harbored and protected and regarded with the deepest of reverence.69

Elsewhere, Elder Packer warned, “Do not mistake our reverent hesitation to speak glibly or too frequently of Him to mean that we do not know Him. Our brethren of Judah knew Him in ancient times, our brethren of Ephraim also. He is no stranger to His Saints, to His prophets and Apostles now.”70 [Page 221]And, he gave clear insight into the nature and burden of the modern apostleship:

We do not talk of those sacred interviews that qualify the servants of the Lord to bear a special witness of Him, for we have been commanded not to do so. But we are free, indeed, we are obliged, to bear that special witness…. I am a witness to the truth that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, the Only Begotten of the Father; that He has a body of flesh and bone; that He knows those who are His servants here and that He is known of them. I know that He directs this Church now, as He established it then, through a prophet of God. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.71

Elder Packer referred again to such instructions: “I bear witness that the Lord lives, that Jesus is the Christ. This I know. I know that He lives. I know that He directs this Church. Sometimes I wish that there were the authorization to say more, say it plainer, but that is the way we say it—the same as a Primary child would say it, that He lives, that we know.”72 Elder Oaks made similar observations:

Why don’t our talks in general conference and local meetings say more about the miracles we have seen? Most of the miracles we experience are not to be shared. Consistent with the teachings of the scriptures, we hold them sacred and share them only when the Spirit prompts us to do so…In bearing testimonies and in our public addresses we rarely mention our [Page 222]most miraculous experiences, and we rarely rely on signs that the gospel is true. We usually just affirm our testimony of the truthfulness of the restored gospel and give few details on how we obtained it.73

Marion G. Romney likewise observed, “I don’t know just how to answer people when they ask the question, ‘Have you seen the Lord?’ I think that the witness that I have and the witness that each of us [apostles] has, and the details of how it came, are too sacred to tell. I have never told anybody some of the experiences I have had, not even my wife. I know that God lives. I not only know that he lives, but I know him.”74

For those with ears to hear, the message is clear. The apostles speak and testify as they do by divine instruction. Who is Snuffer to gainsay them? Would he have them disobey God to satisfy standards which he has imposed?

Despite the cautions and commandments referred to by Elders Oaks and Packer, sacred manifestations have been reported throughout the post-Joseph Smith period of the Church. I include a selection below.

Wilford Woodruff

  • President W[ilford] Woodruff told some of the Saints that our Saviour had appeared unto him in the East Room in the Holy of Holies, & told him that He had accepted of the [Salt Lake] Temple & of the dedication services, & that the Lord forgave us His Saints who had assisted in any manner towards the erection and completion of the Temple—that our sins were forgiven us by the Lord Jesus Christ.… Pres[iden]t Woodruff said the House had been full of revelation, more so than he had ever witnessed at [Page 223]any dedication of the previous Temples and he had been present at all of them from Kirtland to this present one.75
  • I feel at liberty to reveal to this assembly this morning what has been revealed to me since we were here yesterday morning. If the veil could be taken from our eyes and we could see into the spirit world, we would see that Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and John Taylor had gathered together every spirit that ever dwelt in the flesh in this Church since its organization. We would also see the faithful apostles and elders of the Nephites who dwelt in the flesh in the days of Jesus Christ. In that assembly we would also see Isaiah and every prophet and apostle that ever prophesied of the great work of God. In the midst of these spirits we would see the Son of God, the Savior, who presides and guides and controls the preparing of the kingdom of God on the earth and in heaven.76

We note that President Woodruff emphasized that he “felt at liberty” to disclose some of what he had seen by divine manifestation. Were he not at a temple dedication, he might well have been more reticent. Snuffer, by contrast, claims that “it was as if the church labored under Divine disapproval. It was as if the Lord’s ire was on display [given] nature’s reaction to the Salt Lake Temple dedication” (206). Snuffer does not accept Woodruff’s witness of divine approval, so he seeks to appeal to the weather for insight into the divine mind.77

  • [Page 224]I know what the will of God is concerning this people, and if they will take the counsel we give them, all will be well with them…. Speaking of the administration of angels. I never asked the Lord in my life to send me an angel or to show me any miracle…. I have had the administration of angels in my day and time, though I never prayed for an angel. I have had, in several instances, the administration of holy messengers….The room was filled with light. A messenger came to me. We had a long conversation. He laid before me as if in a panorama, the signs of the last days, and told me what was coming to pass. I saw the sun turned to darkness, the moon to blood, the stars fall from heaven. I saw the resurrection day. I saw armies of men in the first resurrection, clothed with the robes of the Holy Priesthood. I saw the second resurrection. I saw a great many signs that were presented before me, by this personage; and among the rest, there were seven lions, as of burning brass, set in the heavens. He says, “That is one of the signs that will appear in the heavens before the coming of the Son of Man. It is a sign of the various dispensations.”…. Now, I have had all these testimonies, [Page 225]and they are true. But with all these, I have never had any testimony since I have been in the flesh, that has been greater than the testimony of the Holy Ghost. That is the strongest testimony that can be given to me or to any man in the flesh. Now, every man has a right to that, and when he obtains it, it is a living witness to him.… I know what awaits this nation. I know what awaits the Latter-day Saints. Many things have been shown to me by vision and by revelation.78

George Q. Cannon

  • I know that Jesus lives; for I have seen Him.79
  • I would not dare to tell all that the Lord has shown unto me.80
  • I have been greatly favored of the Lord. My mind has been rapt in vision and have saw the beauties and Glory of God. I have saw and conversed with the Savior face to face. God will bestow this upon you.81

Lorenzo Snow

Lorenzo Snow’s granddaughter related his witness:

One evening while I was visiting grandpa Snow in his room in the Salt Lake Temple, I remained until the door keepers had gone and the night-watchmen had not yet come in, so grand-pa said he would take me to the main front entrance and let mc out that way. He got his bunch of keys from his dresser. After we left his [Page 226]room and while we were still in the large corridor leading into the celestial room, I was walking several steps ahead of grand-pa when he stopped me and said: “Wait a moment, Allie, I want to tell you something. It was right here that the Lord Jesus Christ appeared to me at the time of the death of President Woodruff. He instructed me to go right ahead and reorganize the First Presidency of the Church at once and not wait as had been done after the death of the previous presidents, and that I was to succeed President Woodruff.”

Then grand-pa came a step nearer and held out his left hand and said; “He stood right here, about three feet above the floor. It looked as though He stood on a plate of solid gold.”

Grand-pa told me what a glorious personage the Savior is and described His hands, feet, countenance and beautiful white robes, all of which were of such a glory of whiteness and brightness that he could hardly gaze upon Him.

Then he came another step nearer and put his right hand on my head and said: “Now, grand-daughter, I want you to remember that this is the testimony of your grand-father, that he told you with his own lips that he actually saw the Savior, here in the Temple, and talked with Him face to face.”82

[Page 227]Joseph F. Smith

His vision of Christ and the redemption of the dead (D&C 138) is well-known to every member. “There is no reason why we should not have the ministration of angels if we were worthy.”83

George Albert Smith

Recalling a time of great sickness, President Smith said:

I became so weak as to be scarcely able to move. It was a slow and exhausting effort for me even to turn over in bed. One day, under these conditions, I lost consciousness of my surroundings and thought I had passed to the Other Side…. I saw a man coming towards me. I became aware that he was a very large man, and I hurried my steps to reach him, because I recognized him as my grandfather.

When Grandfather came within a few feet of me, he stopped. His stopping was an invitation for me to stop. Then—and this I would like the boys and girls and young people never to forget—he looked at me very earnestly and said:

“I would like to know what you have done with my name.”

Everything I had ever done passed before me as though it were a flying picture on a screen—everything I had done. Quickly this vivid retrospect came down to the very time I was standing there. My whole life had passed before me. I smiled and looked at my grandfather and said:

[Page 228]“I have never done anything with your name of which you need be ashamed.”

He stepped forward and took me in his arms, and as he did so, I became conscious again of my earthly surroundings. My pillow was as wet as though water had been poured on it—wet with tears of gratitude that I could answer unashamed.84

David O. McKay

Brethren, I know as I know I am looking into your faces that the gospel of Jesus Christ is true and that he is my Savior, as real as he was when Thomas said, with bowed head, “My Lord my God!”85

As David O. McKay approached Samoa in 1921, he reported:

I then fell asleep, and beheld in vision something infinitely sublime. In the distance I beheld a beautiful white city. Though far away, yet I seemed to realize that trees with luscious fruit, shrubbery with gorgeously-tinted leaves, and flowers in perfect bloom abounded everywhere. The clear sky above seemed to reflect these beautiful shades of color. I then saw a great concourse of people approaching the city. Each one wore a white flowing robe, and a white headdress. Instantly my attention seemed centered upon their Leader, and though I could see only the profile of his features and his body, I recognized him at once as my Savior! The tint and radiance of his countenance were glorious to [Page 229]behold! There was a peace about him which seemed sublime — it was divine!

The city, I understood, was his. It was the City Eternal; and the people following him were to abide there in peace and eternal happiness.

But who were they?

As if the Savior read my thoughts, he answered by pointing to a semicircle that then appeared above them, and on which were written in gold the words:

“These Are They Who Have Overcome The World — Who Have Truly Been Born Again!”

When I awoke, it was breaking day over Apia harbor.86

Harold B. Lee

I know that this is the Lord’s work. I know that Jesus Christ lives, and that he is closer to this Church and appears more often in holy places than any of us realize, excepting those to whom he makes personal appearance.87

Elsewhere he said:

[Page 230]I shall never forget my feelings of loneliness the Saturday night after I was told by the President of the Church that I was to be sustained the next day as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. That was a sleepless night….

And then one of the Brethren, who arranged for Sunday evening radio programs, said, “Now you know that after having been ordained, you are a special witness to the mission of the Lord Jesus Christ. We want you to give the Easter talk next Sunday night.”

The assignment was to bear testimony of the mission of the Lord concerning His resurrection, His life, and His ministry, so I went to a room in the Church Office Building where I could be alone, and I read the Gospels, particularly those that had to do with the closing days and weeks and months of the life of Jesus. And as I read, I realized that I was having a new experience.

It wasn’t any longer just a story; it seemed as though I was actually seeing the events about which I was reading, and when I gave my talk and closed with my testimony, I said, “I am now the least of all my brethren and want to witness to you that I know, as I have never known before this call came, that Jesus is the Savior of this world. He lives and He died for us.” Why did I know? Because there had come a witness, that special kind of a witness, that may have been the more sure word of prophecy that one must have if he is to be a special witness.88

[Page 231]President Lee also addressed the very charge which Snuffer raises—that an apostle must be a personal witness of Christ’s resurrection:

May I bear my own testimony. Some years ago two missionaries came to me with what seemed to them to be a very difficult question. A young Methodist minister had laughed at them when they had said that apostles were necessary today in order for the true church to be upon the earth. They said that the minister said, “Do you realize that when the apostles met to choose one to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Judas, they said it had to be one who companied with them and had been a witness of all things pertaining to the mission and resurrection of the Lord? How can you say you have apostles, if that be the measure of an apostle?”

And so these young men said, “What shall we answer?”

I said to them, “Go back and ask your minister friend two questions. First, how did the Apostle Paul gain what was necessary to be called an apostle? He didn’t know the Lord, had no personal acquaintance. He hadn’t accompanied the apostles. He hadn’t been a witness of the ministry nor of the resurrection of the Lord. How did he gain his testimony sufficient to be an apostle? And the second question you ask him is, How does he know that all who are today apostles have not likewise received that witness?”

I bear witness to you that those who hold the apostolic calling may, and do, know of the reality of the mission of the Lord. To know is to be born and quickened in the inner man.89

[Page 232]Spencer W. Kimball

Said President Kimball:

“I know that God lives. I know that Jesus Christ lives,” said… my predecessor, “for I have seen him.” I bear this testimony to you brethren in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.90

Brethren and Sisters, we come now to the close of this great conference. You have heard from most of the Brethren, as I have said and their testimonies have been inspiring. What they have told you is true. It has come from their hearts. They have this same testimony, and they know it is true. They are true servants sent to you from our Heavenly Father. I pray that you will be listening, that you will be remembering, that you will take these many truths with you to your homes and in your lives and to your families. Brethren and Sisters, I want to add to these testimonies of these prophets my testimony that I know that He lives. And I know that we may see him, and that we may be with him, and that we may enjoy his presence always if we will live the commandments of the Lord and do the things which we have been commanded by him to do and reminded by the Brethren to do.91

[Page 233]Ezra Taft Benson

As one of those called as special witnesses, I add my testimony to those of fellow Apostles: He lives! He lives with resurrected body. There is no truth or fact of which I am more assured, or know better by personal experience, than the truth of the literal resurrection of our Lord.92

PTHG simply does not fairly or accurately characterize the record on this point. It ignores explicit discussion and explanation of the issue, and remains silent about many exceptions to its claims. We will conclude by considering the case of Heber J. Grant, upon whom PTHG expends considerable ink.

Heber J. Grant

Snuffer treats President Grant as a prototype of the new type of Church leader (245–264). PTHG claims that “spiritual manifestations were effectively eliminated from the church president’s office in the third phase, as demonstrated by President Grant’s diary” (256)—as we will see (and as even readers of Snuffer’s book can see if they are alert) the diaries do nothing of the sort. The record shows that Grant did not have many of the types of experience which Snuffer has declared to be vital—but there are reasons for this observation that are unique to Grant, including a personal request he made to God. Despite PTHG’s claim, Grant was very clear that he believed in, sought, and received “spiritual manifestations.”93

[Page 234]A key bit of Snuffer’s evidence is Grant’s supposed admission that he did not know of anyone who had seen Christ since Joseph Smith. Snuffer bemoans the fate of members who learn this, only to “lose faith in the church” (65):

[Grant’s 1926 letter reads:] “I know of no instance where the Lord has appeared to an individual since His appearance to the Prophet Joseph Smith.” It is the gap between the misconception held by many Latter-day Saints of Christ’s regular appearances to church leaders, and the reality of His absence that creates distress (65).94

Since this reading matches Snuffer’s thesis, he apparently does not challenge it. But, just one page earlier, Snuffer has cited Heber J. Grant from fifteen years later:

I have never prayed to see the Savior, I know of men—Apostles—who have seen the Savior more than once. I have prayed to the Lord for the inspiration of his Spirit to guide me, and I have told him that I have seen so many men fall because of some great manifestation to them, they felt their importance, their greatness (64).95

[Page 235]President Grant’s 1926 letter says he knows of no one that has seen “the Lord”—and Snuffer reads this as a reference to Christ. Yet, this 1942 statement says that he has seen “so many men fall,” because of pride in spiritual manifestations, and he knows of apostles who have had a Christ theophany more than once. If we put aside the possibility of Grant lying in one or both instances, there remain two options—either he has suddenly learned of such events in the intervening years, or his letter in 1926 refers to something else.96 I suspect that it refers to the Father, rather than to Christ as Snuffer mistakes it—Grant says he has prayed to “the Lord,” and it seems unlikely that he was praying to Jesus, since LDS practice has always been to pray to the Father.97

And if apostles did not seek out and have such theophanies, why would Grant feel it necessary to explicitly pray to God and ask not to receive one, and also explain why he had done so? This evidence does not match PTHG’s picture of a leadership disinterested in heavenly gifts.

Grant described his sense of inadequacy on being called as an apostle:

There are two spirits striving with us always, one telling us to continue our labor for good, and one telling us that with the faults and failings of our nature we are unworthy. I can truthfully say that from October, 1882, until February, 1883, that spirit followed me day and night, telling me that I was unworthy to be an apostle of the Church, and that I ought to resign. When I [Page 236]would testify of my knowledge that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the Redeemer of mankind, it seemed as though a voice would say to me: “You lie! You lie! You have never seen Him.”98

It is troubling to see PTHG adopt and repeat the evil spirit’s message. A year later, Grant described the same events:

I was a very unhappy man from October until February. For the next four months whenever I would bear my testimony of the divinity of the Savior, there seemed to be a voice that would say: “You lie, because you have never seen Him.” One of the brethren had made the remark that unless a man had seen the Lamb of God—that was his expression—he was not fit to be an apostle. This feeling that I have mentioned would follow me. I would wake up in the night with the impression: “You do not know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, because you have never seen Him,” and the same feeling would come to me when I would preach and bear testimony. It worried me from October until the following February.99

PTHG cites another entry in Grant’s diary from 1890 that touches the same themes:

Heber J. Grant. Stated that he had never had an inspired dreaming his life and that although he had always desired to see his father in dream or vision that he had never been allowed to enjoy this great privilege. He had at all times been afraid to ask for any great [Page 237]spiritual manifestation as he would then be under greater obligations and he had feared that he might become unfaithful as others had done who had been blessed with great manifestations…. I have always felt that I am greatly deficient in spiritual gifts.100

However, less than a year later, Grant would, in a private meeting with his fellow apostles, describe how his mind was put at ease:

When I was called to the apostleship I felt so unworthy that I desired to decline the honor. Even after my ordination this feeling continued until about three months later while on a mission with Brigham Young Jr. in Arizona. I was one day riding alone and thinking of my unworthiness, when the Spirit impressed me just as though a voice had spoken, “You were not worthy but the Prophet Joseph to whom you will belong in the next world, and your father, have interceded for you that you might be called, and now it remains for you to prove yourself worthy.”101

It is perhaps significant that Grant’s call to the apostleship happened while he was young and, by his own report of what the Spirit told him, unready. His maturation and further preparation would happen during the apostleship, rather than prior to it.

[Page 238]Snuffer also tells of how Grant’s mother reported that some believed her son “filled with pride” and that he ought to be relieved of his apostleship (250). It is worth asking—as Snuffer does not—whether Grant’s protestations of inadequacy, his sense that he was weak in spiritual gifts compared to others, and his acute awareness of the dangers of pride were actually evidence of a deep humility. Snuffer notes that “recording criticism from his own mother proves that record is an authentic and candid source. He is not trying to hide himself in its pages,” (250) but misses the obvious corollary—if Grant is indeed authentic, candid, and not trying to hide himself, that too is excellent evidence of his deep humility. And so, his protestations of spiritual weakness and inadequacy must be read in that light. Many early members described revelations in which Grant’s role as an apostle was foretold,102 but Grant tended to focus instead on his weakness and downplay the possibility of holding high office.103 “I think I am safe in saying,” he wrote, “that about half of the Latter-day Saints if not two-thirds of them were simply dumbfounded when I was chosen to be a member of the Apostles.”104 Soon after his call, he wrote another friend:

[Page 239]You know the true sentiments of my heart on this subject… I did not, nor do I now, feel that my knowledge, ability, or testimony are of such a character as to entitle me [168] to the position of an Apostle, The Lord knows what is for the best and I have always trusted in Him for aid and assistance in the past and shall continue to do so in the future.105

When reassured of his capacities by a friend, Grant responded with a long list of his inadequacies, concluding that only God could help him qualify.106 As a young stake president, Grant was given a blessing by the patriarch who said “‘I saw [Page 240]something I dared not mention.’ President Grant said later it was made known to him at that moment he eventually would become the President of the Church. He never divulged this to anyone until it became a fact.”107

Snuffer grants to Joseph Smith the right to have an expanded and increased understanding of his First Vision experience: “Often, Prophets do not understand what God shows them the instant it is revealed. Sometimes unlocking the vision takes time and care, together with careful, solemn, ponderous thought, before they are understood” (15). This is true. Unfortunately, Snuffer denies Grant the same privilege, since he ignores or omits a reference to Grant’s later description of his revelatory experience regarding his suitability as an apostle. In Grant’s later account, his visionary experience included the Savior—but the manifestation simply does not take the precise form that Snuffer has decided it must:

I seemed to see, and I seemed to hear, what to me is one of the most real things in all my life. I seemed to hear the words that were spoken. I listened to the discussion with a great deal of interest…. In this council the Savior was present, my father was there, and the Prophet Joseph Smith was there…. No man could have been more unhappy than I was from October, 1882, until February, 1883, but from that day I have never been bothered, night or day, with the idea that I was not worthy to stand as an apostle…. I have had joy in… proclaiming my absolute knowledge that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the redeemer of the world….

[Page 241]I do not make this statement because of any desire to magnify myself.108

In his telling a year later, he reiterated:

I had this feeling that I ought not to testify any more about the Savior and that, really, I was not fit to be an apostle. It seemed overwhelming to me that I should be one. There was a spirit that said: “If you have not seen the Savior, why don’t you resign your position?”

As I rode along alone, I seemed to see a council in heaven. The Savior was there; the Prophet Joseph was there; my father and others that I knew were there….

I can truthfully say that from February, 1883, until today I have never had any of that trouble, and I Can bear my testimony that I know that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, the Savior of the world and that Joseph Smith is a l prophet of the living God; and the evil one does not try to persuade me that I do not know what I am talking about. I have never had one slight impression to the contrary. I have just had real, genuine joy and satisfaction in proclaiming the gospel and bearing my testimony of the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the divine calling of Joseph Smith, the prophet.109

This experience was sufficient to silence Grant’s self-doubts and the evil voices who questioned his suitability for the apostleship: we see once again his acute awareness of the perils of pride, and an anxious concern that others not misunderstand his intent. He did not have a “personal,” (i.e., one on one) vision, [Page 242]but his experience sufficed. It is unfortunate that it does not satisfy Snuffer, who later tells us that Grant “would resist any effort to pursue a spiritual manifestation the remainder of his life” (247). This claim is plainly false, as the historical record shows—Snuffer is not giving us good history, and he is certainly not giving us unvarnished “truth.”

For example, Grant described how, in response to his prayer, “the voice of the Lord from heaven” reassured his young daughter that “in the death of your Mamma the will of the Lord shall be done.”110 Grant also reported a visionary dream in which his deceased wife came to claim his son’s spirit during a mortal illness. This initially troubled him, but upon entering his son’s sickroom, he felt the presence of his late wife. His living wife was in the same room and identified the deceased wife’s presence without Grant having said anything. Contrary to Snuffer’s distortion of the record, spiritual manifestations were sought by Grant, and were “a sweet, peaceful, and heavenly influence in my home, as great as I have ever experienced in my life.”111

PTHG says that by Grant’s day, “knowledge of Jesus Christ was not only unnecessary, it was viewed by the church president as both negative, and potentially something leading to pride and fall from grace” (64). This reading is absurd—Grant is instead worried about his own proclivity to pride, and asks God to spare him that risk, even if it requires that he not have a personal visitation as he knows many others have. He does not see such a witness as a negative, or a knowledge of Christ as unnecessary—that is pure editorializing by PTHG, and directly contradicts Grant’s own testimony. Grant does acknowledge the risk of pride—though given that Snuffer lays claim to such theophanies only to now attempt to marginalize and correct [Page 243]the apostles, pride is apparently not a merely theoretical concern. The members of the Church whose testimonies worry Snuffer need not be concerned regarding President Grant, save if they rely on Snuffer’s dubious interpretation, and ignore all the other evidence.

In this paper, I speak only for myself and not for any person or group. I’m grateful for discussions, references, and advance readings from Russell Anderson, Connor Boyack, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Cassandra Hedelius, Bryce Haymond, Dennis Horne, Ted Jones, Daniel C. Peterson, Stephen O. Smoot, and S. Hales Swift. Special thanks are due Matthew Roper of the Laura F. Willis Center for Book of Mormon Studies at Brigham Young University for pointing me to several primary sources. Any errors remain my own.

  1. Denver C. Snuffer, Jr., Passing the Heavenly Gift (Salt Lake City, Utah: Mill Creek Press, 2011), 447. All future citations to this work will be in the form of page numbers in parentheses. I will refer to the book as PTHG for brevity. ↩

  2. “The Lord does still personally appear to mankind. I am a witness to that fact. He first appeared to me February 13, 2003. I have written a book about the topic…. That book does not contain any details about the Lord’s ministry to me, but affirms it took place” (452). See also Denver Snuffer, “Current Events,” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 26 August 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/08/current-events.html, and John Dehlin, “321-322: Denver Snuffer – A Progressive, Fundamentalist, Non-Polygamist Mormon Lawyer Who Claims to Have Seen Christ,” Mormon Stories Podcast, 12 February 2012 at http://mormonstories.org/321-322-denver-snuffer-a-progressive-fundamentalist-non-polygamist-mormon-who-claims-to-have-seen-christ/. ↩

  3. Hugh Nibley, “The Way of the Church,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity (Vol. 4 of Collected Works of Hugh Nibley), edited by Todd Compton and Stephen D. Ricks (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company; Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1987), 217. ↩

  4. “Nothing is easier than to identify one’s own favorite political, economic, historical, and moral convictions with the gospel. That gives one a neat, convenient, but altogether too easy advantage over one’s fellows…. This is simply insisting that our way is God’s way and therefore, the only way. It is the height of impertinence.” [Hugh Nibley, “Beyond Politics,” Mormon Studies Review 23/1 (2011): 150.] ↩

  5. The earliest variant that I’ve found of this aphorism is Max Radin, “On Legal Scholarship,” The Yale Law Journal (May 1937), as cited by Peter Olausson, factoids, http://www.faktoider.nu/openmind_eng.html. ↩

  6. Snuffer, “Current events,” italics added. ↩

  7. Snuffer, “Compliance (So Far As Possible).” ↩

  8. Snuffer’s blog summarizes it in one sentence, however: “We are not now the same church restored by Joseph Smith.” See Denver Snuffer, “Contentment,” from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 7 September 2013, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2013/09/contentment.html. ↩

  9. The Second Comforter: Conversing with the Lord Through the Veil (Salt Lake City, Utah: Mill Creek Press, 2006). On Snuffer’s public claims about having seen Christ, see note 2 herein. Snuffer says (51 n. 46) that the results of the Second Comforter are discussed in his book Beloved Enos (Salt Lake City, Utah: Mill Creek, 2009). The introduction of the Father by Christ is “not appropriate to set out except through symbols and allegory,” and Snuffer claims to have done so in his Ten Parables (Salt Lake City, Utah: Mill Creek, 2008). Snuffer’s grandiose characterization of his work (see note 6 and subsequent main text herein) is not absent from these books’ promotional material either: “This commentary sheds light on Enos in a way which has not been provided by any previous writer. It will reveal to the reader some of the deepest and most profound messages of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” (Beloved Enos). Ten Parables tells us that “this collection of parables weave together symbols to illustrate profound truths. While meaningful in a single read, you will discover layers of meaning with careful review.” ↩

  10. Denver Snuffer, “Clarification” and follow-up comment, from the desk of Denver Snuffer (blog), 2 May 2010, http://denversnuffer.blogspot.ca/2010/05/clarification.html. ↩

  11. Snuffer’s text is more explicit, but since it quotes language from the LDS temple ceremony, I have elected not to reproduce it. ↩

  12. Boyd K. Packer, “The Power of the Priesthood,” General Conference, April 2010; cited by Snuffer on p. 27. ↩

  13. Compare with his earlier discussion in Boyd K. Packer, “The Aaronic Priesthood,” General Conference, October 1981. ↩

  14. See note 25 herein. ↩

  15. See note 22 herein. ↩

  16. Snuffer concedes that “baptism continues to be essential to salvation for any soul” (421), but doesn’t believe a legal administrator is necessary (418, 421). ↩

  17. Joseph Smith, cited in “For the Times and Seasons. SABBATH SCENE IN NAUVOO; March 20th 1842,” Times and Seasons 3/12 (15 April 1842): 752; see Joseph Smith, Jr, Manuscript History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Documentary History). 7 vols. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1978, 4:555. Hereafter cited as Manuscript History of the Church. ↩

  18. Thomas Bullock report, discourse of 14 May 1844; cited in Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, Words of Joseph Smith (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 1980), 365, emphasis added. (This work cited as WJS hereafter. ↩

  19. Joseph Smith, “Baptism,” Times and Seasons 3/21 (1 September 1842): 905. Snuffer tries elsewhere to defuse these statements as they apply to the sealing power (300), but here we apply them to matters such as baptism and confirmation. ↩

  20. Orson Hyde, “Although Dead, Yet He Speaketh: Joseph Smith’s testimony concerning men being ordained by angels, delivered in the school of the prophets, in Kirtland, Ohio, in the Winter of 1832–3,” Millennial Star 8/9 (20 November 1846): 138–139, emphasis added. ↩

  21. Manuscript History of the Church, 5:258; this entry is based on Wilford Woodruff’s diary for 22 January 1843, also reproduced in WJS, 156–158. ↩

  22. Heber C. Kimball, in Journal of Discourses 3:124 (6 October 1855). Kimball would agree with Snuffer’s uncontroversial claim that “if all you receive are ordinances, you have nothing of real value. They are dead without a living, personal connection with God. God alone can and will save you” (55). No Latter-day Saint apostle or informed member has ever presumed otherwise. ↩

  23. Dean Jessee (editor), Revelations and Translations: Manuscript Revelation Books, The Joseph Smith Papers, Facsimile ed. (Salt Lake City, Utah: Church Historian’s Press, 2009), 85; see D&C 20:38–60. ↩

  24. Joseph Smith Diary (23 July 1843); cited in WJS, 235. ↩

  25. Wilford Woodruff Journal (22 January 1843), cited in WJS, 158. ↩

  26. Daniel C. Peterson, “Authority in the Book of Mosiah,” FARMS Review 18/1 (2006): 149–185. Snuffer claims that Peterson “even cites to [sic] the Catholic precedent to justify Mormon claims!” (322, citing Peterson’s footnote 40). This is false, as can be seen from the section cited by Snuffer. Peterson merely draws an analogy between the two traditions, where both faced the same issue and came to the same conclusion “for good reason” (322), because the alternative is utter chaos and uncertainty about which ordinances are valid or legal. Peterson has confirmed to me that I have read him correctly. ↩

  27. It is also dubious to suggest that the Catholic Church ever held divine authority, from the perspective of LDS doctrine. The formation of Catholicism post-dated the passing of the apostles and their keys. See Noel B. Reynolds (editor), Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 2005), particularly Reynolds’ introductory essay. PTHG’s command of early Christian history seems as muddled as its version of LDS history. ↩

  28. Snuffer shortchanges the LDS view: “It does not matter how wicked or evil a man is who holds the priesthood power, the keys of the church will guarantee it cannot be lost” (336). In fact, the LDS claim is that one can remain a legal administrator of essential ordinances despite sin if one is authorized by those who hold the keys. Ultimately those key holders are the apostles, who despite their weaknesses the Saints do not concede to be “wicked or evil” or deprived of that authority. ↩

  29. For further discussion, see Part Two, Conclusion. ↩

  30. James Burgess Notebook, discourse of 27 August 1843, cited in WJS, 245–246. ↩

  31. The mortal Melchizedek is also one whom Snuffer agrees held the sealing power—see 295–296. ↩

  32. Orson Hyde, in Journal of Discourses 8:233–34 (7 October 1860). ↩

  33. Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses 8:197 (7 October 1860). ↩

  34. Manuscript History of the Church 7:435–436 (17 August 1845); Manuscript History of Brigham Young (23 February 1847), 528–530; reprinted in Juvenile Instructor (15 September 1883): 283–284. ↩

  35. Journal of Discourses 1:132–133 (6 April 1853); 3:208–209, 212 (17 February 1856); 12:153 (12 January 1868); 18:241, 243–245 (23 June 1874). ↩

  36. Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses 8:197. ↩

  37. Orson F. Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1988), 93–94. ↩

  38. Whitney, 94. See note 42 herein regarding the identity of these apostles. ↩

  39. Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses 12:103 (17 November 1867); cited in Andrew F. Ehat, “Joseph Smith’s Introduction of Temple Ordinances and the 1844 Mormon Succession Question,” (Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1982), 138. (Note that this section of the thesis includes a reference to the Joseph Smith III blessing, now known to be a Hofmann forgery. ↩

  40. Heber C. Kimball, Journal, Library-Archives, the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah; cited in WJS, 17–18 n. 6. ↩

  41. Heber C. Kimball, “Men Ought to Practise What They Teach, etc.,” Journal of Discourses 11:82 (19 February 1865). ↩

  42. It is of note that the members of the Twelve who were in England, and thus were the subject of Joseph’s vision regarding their salvation, did not experience any apostasy: Heber C. Kimball, Orson Pratt, Parley P. Pratt, Willard Richards, George A. Smith, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Brigham Young. Two quorum members who did not attend the mission as commanded would apostatize after Joseph’s death (John E. Page and William B. Smith), while the third went west to Utah (Orson Hyde). One spot in the quorum was vacant at the time. [James B. Allen and Malcolm R. Thorpe, “The Mission of the Twelve to England, 1840–41: Mormon Apostles and the Working Classes,” Brigham Young University Studies 15/4 (Summer 1975): 502–503.] All eight of the English missionaries plus Hyde would also receive the full temple ordinances from Joseph at Nauvoo, including the second anointing—see claim #7 herein. Page would receive nothing, and William Smith only the endowment (Ehat, 194). ↩

  43. Manuscript History of the Church, 2:195–196. I have omitted PTHG’s boldface emphasis to the original. ↩

  44. D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1997. Hereafter cited as Extensions of Power. ↩

  45. The misleading claims and citations in the opening pages of Quinn’s mammoth work are reviewed in Duane Boyce, “A Betrayal of Trust (Review of: The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, by D. Michael Quinn),” FARMS Review of Books 9/2 (1997): 147–163. For another example of Quinn’s shoddy work and dishonest footnotes, see Extensions of Power, 363 cited in Part Two, Conclusion. ↩

  46. Bruce R. McConkie, The Promised Messiah: The First Coming of Christ (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1978), 592–595. ↩

  47. Neal A. Maxwell, “The Children of Christ” in The Book of Mormon: Mosiah, Salvation Only Through Christ eds. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate, Jr. (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1991), 1. ↩

  48. Neal A. Maxwell, Wonderful Flood of Light (Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1990), 15. ↩

  49. Boyd K. Packer, “Revelation in a Changing World,” Ensign (November 1989): 16. ↩

  50. Jeffrey R. Holland, “For Times of Trouble,” Brigham Young University devotional (18 March 1980). See also Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Inconvenient Messiah,” BYU devotional address (15 February 1982). ↩

  51. Jeffrey R. Holland, “‘Look to God and Live,’” Ensign (November 1993): 13. ↩

  52. Jeffrey R. Holland, “Therefore, What?” CES Conference on the New Testament, Brigham Young University (8 August 2000), 1–2. ↩

  53. Jeffrey R. Holland, “‘A Standard Unto My People,’” CES Symposium on the Book of Mormon, Brigham Young University, 9 August 1994, 10–11. ↩

  54. Dallin H. Oaks, “The Aaronic Priesthood and the Sacrament,” General Conference, October 1998. ↩

  55. Dallin H. Oaks, “Teaching and Learning by the Spirit,” Ensign (March 1997), 14. ↩

  56. Boyd K. Packer, “A Tribute to the Rank and File of the Church,” Ensign (May 1980): 65. Snuffer also quotes Elder Packer’s talk “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect”, 5th annual CES Religious Educator’s Symposium, 22 August 1981 (reproduced in BYU Studies 21/3 (Summer 1981): 259–278) as evidence that Packer advocates the view that “though He did not appear, speak or send angels, God was not absent” (256 n. 318). As demonstrated by the main text, Snuffer distorts Elder Packer’s views—he refers in the August 1981 talk to those to whom “the hand of the Lord may not be visible.” He does not deny that God speaks, appears, or sends angels, and in fact urges those who write history to be those who “believe that the successors to the Prophet Joseph Smith were and are prophets, seers, and revelators; that revelation from heaven directs the decisions, policies, and pronouncements that come from the headquarters of the Church” (p. 13 in online reprint). ↩

  57. Boyd K. Packer, “Personal Revelation: The Gift, the Test, and the Promise,” General Conference, October 1994. ↩

  58. Brigham Young, “Source of True Happiness—Prayer, Etc.,” Journal of Discourses 6:45 (15 November 1857). ↩

  59. Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine: Selections from the Sermons and Writings of Joseph F. Smith, edited by John A. Widtsoe (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1919), 104–105. ↩

  60. Marion G. Romney, Conference Report (April 1942): 17–18. ↩

  61. Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1954–1956), 1:281–282. ↩

  62. James E. Faust, “Come Out of the Darkness into the Light,” CES Fireside for Young Adults (8 September 2002). ↩

  63. Gordon B. Hinckley, Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1997), 71, 555. ↩

  64. Dallin H. Oaks, “Miracles,” CES Fireside in Calgary, Canada, 7 May 2000, 3, italics added. Reprinted in “Miracles,” Ensign (June 2001). ↩

  65. Spencer W. Kimball, “Revelation: The Word of the Lord to His Prophets,” General Conference, April 1977. ↩

  66. Packer, “A Tribute to the Rank and File of the Church,” italics added. ↩

  67. Boyd K. Packer, Teach Ye Diligently (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1975), 326. ↩

  68. Boyd K. Packer, “‘The Spirit Beareth Record,’” General Conference, April 1971. ↩

  69. Packer, Teach Ye Diligently, 86–87. ↩

  70. Boyd K. Packer, “Scriptures,” General Conference, October 1982; reproduced in Boyd K. Packer, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled (Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1991), 11. ↩

  71. Packer, “Tribute to the Rank and File,” 65, italics added. ↩

  72. Boyd K. Packer, Address at Ricks College Faculty and Staff Dinner, 24 August 1988; cited in Boyd K. Packer, “I Have That Witness,” in Mine Errand from the Lord, complied by Clyde J. Williams (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 2008), chapter 28. ↩

  73. Oaks, “Miracles,” 3. ↩

  74. Marion G. Romney, cited in F. Burton Howard, Marion G. Romney: His Life and Faith (Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1988), 222. ↩

  75. Wilford Woodruff, in Collected Discourses Delivered by: President Wilford Woodruff, His Two Counselors, the Twelve Apostles, and Others, edited by Brian H. Stuy, 5 vol. (BHS Publishing, 1987–1992), 5:225.; citing John Lee Jones biography (no date) and Minutes of Salt Lake Temple dedication on 6–24 April 1893, 16th session, 13 April 1893. ↩

  76. Woodruff in Stuy, Collected Discourses 3:274; citing third dedicatory session and Archibald Bennett, Saviors on Mount Zion, 142–143. ↩

  77. “To many who witnessed it,” noted Brian Stuy, “the raging storm stood as a manifestation of the anger and fury of Satan and his angels…. This event took on added significance when sea gulls were sighted hovering over the Temple…. Thus the symbols of the Gulls and the Gales became a powerful indicator to the observant Saints that the Lord was indeed pleased with the labor of His people, but that the adversary was angry with the completion of the Temple” [Brian H. Stuy, “‘Come, Let Us Go Up to the Mountain of the Lord’: The Salt Lake Temple Dedication,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 31/3 (1998): 107–108]. One participant wrote, “It is claimed that Heber C. Kimball once predicted that when the Salt Lake Temple should be dedicated the power of Satan should be loosed and the strongest wind storm ever witnessed in Utah should be felt on that occasion. In pursuance and fulfillment of this prediction, a strong breeze began blowing upon our entering the grounds at 9 a.m. and increased to a hurricane of great violence at the precise time the dedicatory prayer was being offered by Pres. Wilford Woodruff” [John Franklin Tolton, Autobiography, 6 April 1893; cited in Stuy, 108.

    The Deseret News was also grateful for the wind’s effects, noting that it dried up some of the early spring melt that threatened to cause flooding [“‘It’s An Ill Wind,’ Etc.,” Deseret News (7 April 1893): 7]. Snuffer does not consider the contemporaneous reaction before seeking to divine God’s opinions. ↩

  78. Wilford Woodruff, “Administration of Angels,” (3 March 1889); in Stuy, Collected Discourses 1:216–218. ↩

  79. George Q. Cannon, “Supporting Church Leaders,” (6 October 1896), reported in The Deseret Weekly 53 (31 October 1896): 610; reproduced in Stuy, Collected Discourses 5:225. ↩

  80. Cannon, in Stuy, Collected Discourses, 3:277, citing twenty-first session of dedication, 15 April 1893. ↩

  81. Cannon, in Stuy, Collected Discourses, 3:285, citing Francis Asbury Hammond, Journal, 20 April 1893. ↩

  82. LeRoi C. Snow, “An Experience of My Father’s,” Improvement Era 33/11 (September 1933): 677. ↩

  83. Joseph F. Smith in Stuy, Collected Discourses 3:380, citing fifteenth session of Salt Lake Temple dedication (12 April 1893). ↩

  84. George Albert Smith and Preston Nibley, Sharing the Gospel with Others (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1948), 111–112; also available in Leon R. Hartshorn, Classic Stories from the Lives of Our Prophets (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1971), 239. ↩

  85. David O. McKay, Conference Report (April 1949): 182. ↩

  86. David O. McKay world tour diary, 10 May 1921; cited in Clare Middlemiss and David O. McKay, Cherished Experiences from the Writings of President David O. McKay (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1955), 102; also available in Hartshorn, 286–287. ↩

  87. Harold B. Lee, “Everlasting Covenant,” MIA conference address, 29 June 1969, 9–10; cited in Living Prophets for a Living Church (Salt Lake City, Utah: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1973), 119; also in Teachings of Harold B. Lee, 11 and portion in Ye Are the Light of the World (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1974), 10. ↩

  88. Harold B. Lee, Joint Nottingham and Leicester Conference Nottingham Stake, England, 2 September 1973; cited in “Speaking for Himself—President Lee’s Stories,” Ensign (February 1974): 18; also in Hartshorn, 337. ↩

  89. Harold B. Lee, Stand Ye in Holy Places (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1974), 64–65. ↩

  90. Spencer W. Kimball, “Strengthening the Family—the Basic Unit of the Church,” General Conference, April 1978. President Kimball attributed this quote to John Taylor. The actual quote is from George Q. Cannon (see note 78). See discussion in Dennis C. Davis, Letter to the editor, Sunstone 15:5/8 (November 1991). ↩

  91. Spencer W. Kimball, “The Cause is Just and Worthy,” Ensign (May 1974): 119. ↩

  92. Ezra Taft Benson, “Five Marks of the Divinity of Jesus Christ,” University of Utah fireside, 9 December 1979. Published in New Era 10 (December 1980): 48 and Ensign (December 2001). ↩

  93. For example, Grant once prayed to be able to speak beyond his natural ability in order to help his brother develop a testimony of the Church. When Grant sat down, President George Q. Cannon was urged to conclude. He declined, but when pressed rose and said, “There are times when the Lord Almighty inspires some speaker by the revelations of His Spirit, and he is so abundantly blessed by the inspiration of the living God that it is a mistake for anybody else to speak following him, and one of those occasions has been today, and I desire that this meeting be dismissed without further remarks.” The subject of Grant’s address was “a testimony of my knowledge that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and to the wonderful and marvelous labors of the Prophet Joseph Smith, bearing witness to the knowledge God had given me that Joseph was in very deed a prophet of the true and living God.” [Heber J. Grant, Conference Report (October 1922): 188–190. ↩

  94. The citation is from Heber J. Grant to Mrs. Claud Peery, 13 April 1926, in First Presidency letterbooks, Vol. 72; Snuffer cites it from Quinn, Extensions of Power, 4. A typescript copy is also reported in the Lester Bush papers, University of Utah archives. ↩

  95. Snuffer cites from The Diaries of Heber J. Grant, 1880–1945, abridged (Salt Lake City, Utah: Privately Published, 2010), 468, entry for 4 October 1942. See also Snuffer, 256 for repeat citation. ↩

  96. Grant also knew of Lorenzo Snow’s theophany; see Snow, “An Experience of My Father’s,” 677. ↩

  97. John Taylor also showed some ambiguity in his use of the title “Lord”: “The Lord appeared unto Joseph Smith, both the Father and the Son” (Journal of Discourses 21:65). Joseph Fielding Smith wrote that “it is well for those who address the congregations of the people to use these holy names [of Deity] sparingly when other expressions will suffice. The term Lord whether applied to the Father or the Son is permissible” (Doctrines of Salvation 3:121). ↩

  98. Heber J. Grant, “Opening Conference Message,” General Conference Address, 4 April 1941; reproduced in Improvement Era 44/5 (May 1941): 267 and Conference Report (April 1941): 4–5. Also in G. Homer Durham (editor), Gospel Standards: Selections from the Sermons and Writings of Heber J. Grant (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1941), 194. ↩

  99. Heber J. Grant, Conference Report (October 1842): 26. ↩

  100. Diaries of Heber J. Grant, 1880–1945, 115; cited by PTHG, 246–247. ↩

  101. Heber J. Grant, quoted in Abraham H. Cannon Journals, L. Tom Perry Special Collections Department, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, entry for 2 April 1891; reproduced in Dennis J. Horne (editor), The Journals of Abraham H. Cannon (Clearfield, Utah: Gnolaum Books, 2004), 179. In the same meeting, Grant also spoke of a spiritual manifestation concerning his deceased brother: “When my brother George accidentally shot and killed himself I felt very sad, because he was a most faithful Latter-day Saint. I brooded over his death until the Spirit impressed me that my father desired his services on the other side. I then felt easy.” Again, where is the Church leader disinterested in spiritual manifestations? Only in PTHG’s fanciful reconstruction. ↩

  102. Many of those who knew him believed he was destined to the apostleship. These included: Edwin D. Woolley, Heber C. Kimball, Eliza R. Snow, Zina D. Young, his mother Rachel R. Grant, Charles Savage, Anthony W. Ivins, and Richard W. Young. See Ronald W. Walker, “Young Heber J. Grant’s Years of Passage,” Brigham Young University Studies 24/2 (Spring 1984): 131–132, 149 (reprinted in BYUS 43/1 (2004): 41–60) and “Young Heber J. Grant and His Call to the Apostleship,” Brigham Young University Studies 43/1 (2004): 167 (reprint of BYU Studies 18/1 (1977): 121–126). ↩

  103. “Heber often brushed these [claims about his future] off as being the illusory yearnings of a widow for her only son.” [Francis M. Gibbons, Dynamic Disciples, Prophets of God: Life Stories of the Presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1996), 155. ↩

  104. Heber J. Grant to Willard Young, 1 February 1892, Grant Letterpress Copybook 12:240, LDS Church Archives; cited in Ronald W. Walker, “Young Heber J. Grant: Entrepreneur Extraordinary,” Brigham Young University Studies 43/1 (2004): 111 n. 41. ↩

  105. Heber J. Grant to Anthony W. Ivins, 22 October 1882, Grant Letterpress Copybook 5:7–10, LDS Church Archives; cited in Walker, “Call to the Apostleship,” 168–169. Again, the disinterest or suspicion of spiritual manifestations is simply not in evidence. ↩

  106. “With reference to my new calling and my abilities to magnify the same, I must say that I consider my position much in advance of my knowledge—I regret very much that I have not a better knowledge of grammar, as I murder the ‘Queens English’ most fearfully—my orthography is perfectly Emense to say the least—I have not a good memory, or if I have it has been so badly neglected that I have not found it out that it is good, My information on subjects relating to the advancement of a community am[oun]ts to nothing, I know little or nothing of History—and were it not that I have from 15 to 25 yrs. in which to study to overtake such men as Lyman, Jos. F. Smith and others, and knowing that I have the right to call upon our Heavenly Father for assistance I assure you that I should feel almost like backing out—A knowledge, of grammer and orthography is necessary for a public speaker and one that has more or less writing to do,—I naturally dislike both of these studies and have not much faith in becoming proficient in either—Your inventory of my abilities is ‘way up.’ I should like to have you get someone to accept of your ideas but think it would be a difficult task, I may have a little common sense—In fact I know that I have, I also know that my first ideas, impressions, or quickness to see a point which ever you see fit to call it, is not bad, but this really am[oun]ts to but very little when you are looking for a substantial leading man. Reasoning powers and depth of thought are the qualities that count—There is one thing that sustains me, however, & that is the fact that all powers, of mind or body, come from God and that He is perfectly able & willing to qualify me for His work provided I am faithful in doing my part—This I hope to be able to do faithfully.” – Heber J. Grant to Richard W Young, 16 November 1882, Grant Letterpress Copybook 5:62–63; cited in Walker, “Call to the Apostleship,” 172–173. ↩

  107. Gibbons, 158. ↩

  108. Grant, “Opening Conference Message,” 315; also in Gospel Standards, 195–196 and Conference Report (April 1941): 4–5. ↩

  109. Grant, Conference Report (October 1942): 26. ↩

  110. Heber J. Grant, “In the Hour of Parting,” Improvement Era 43/6 (June 1940): 363. ↩

  111. Grant, “In the Hour of Parting,” 383. ↩

Sophic Box and Mantic Vista: A Review of Deconstructing Mormonism

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): 113-179
17

A review of Deconstructing Mormonism: An Analysis and Assessment of the Mormon Faith (Cranford, N.J, American Atheist Press: 2011) by Thomas Riskas and of Myths, Models and Paradigms: A Comparative Study of Science and Religion (New York, Harper & Row: 1974) by Ian J. Barbour.

Abstract: Riskas’s Desconstructing Mormonism claims that believers are trapped in a box for which the instructions for how to get out are written on the outside of the box. He challenges believers to submit to an outsider test for faith. But how well does Riskas describe the insider test? And is his outsider test, which turns out to be positivism, just a different box with the instructions for how to get out written on its outside? Ian Barbour’s Myths Models and Paradigms provides instructions on how to get out of the positivistic box that Riskas offers, and at the same time provides an alternate outsider test that Mormon readers can use to assess what Alma refers to as “cause to believe.”

The important thing, however, is that we are dealing here not with the old donnybrook between science and religion but with the ancient confrontation of Sophic and Mantic. The Sophic is simply the art of solving problems without the aid of any superhuman agency, which the Mantic, on the other hand, is willing to solicit or accept.1

[Page 114]

This started as a review of Deconstructing Mormonism but soon changed into a double review, since reading Riskas reminded me just how good a book Ian Barbour’s Myths, Models, and Paradigms is. Riskas claims that believers are trapped in a box for which the instructions on how to get out are on the outside. He challenges believers to submit to an “outside test for faith.” But how well has he described the insider test? Are the instructions for how to get out really hidden from those on the inside? Is there anything important that an insider test considers that his outsider test overlooks? Is his outsider test, which turns out to be off-the-rack positivism, valid? Is his outsider test just a different box with the instructions for how to get out written on its outside? And what happens if we submit his outsider test to another test outside of that? Riskas provides no clue as to where a person might go to find a test of his outsider test. Happily, Ian Barbour’s brilliant little book provides just that: clear instructions on how to get out of the box that Riskas asks believers to climb into, and at the same time it presents a different outsider test that Mormon readers can use to reexamine their own “cause to believe.”

The introduction to Riskas’s thick, densely written book is provided by one Kai Nielson, a professor of philosophy who assures us that what is to come “is both impartial and religiously sensitive.” Further it is “balanced, firmly argued, clearly articulated and fair minded.”2

Is it any of these things? And if it is not, why bother? Impartial?

At a more specific and personal level, my reasons for challenging and criticizing the Mormons in particular (as well as my reactive attitude to them and other theistic believers ) are rooted, it would seem, in the affront that they are (in virtue of what they stand for, [Page 115]espouse, and aspire to be) to my basic humanity. They are painful reminders, through their own adherence to their faith, of the systematic, institutionally and theologically administered shame inflicted upon me, and experienced over many years as a practicing Mormon. To these two personal reasons, I would add a third: at a general, collective level, there is the very real danger their beliefs pose to society, and the damage and indignities their beliefs and attitudes so often inflict on the minds, body, and intellect of believers, unsuspecting investigators, and more importantly, innocent and defenseless children.3

The impartiality displayed here was preceded by this statement of personal experience:

The Mormons and other mostly Christian believers I have known over the years, have, for the most part, been pleasant enough people (at least socially), and have done not intentional harm to me personally that I know of.4

How do such pleasant people become an affront to humanity? Riskas refers to “programs and methods of authoritarian conditioning” and “the shaming discipline of the inherent moralistic core of their faith; a discipline that requires them to abide by the oppressive, life-negating rules of their faith’s implicit code of patriarchy and to never give head-room to real doubt concerning their fundamental religious beliefs.”5

Is this how a philosopher defines “impartial”? If so, how many people entering the legal system would, or should, trust [Page 116]their cases to this kind of impartiality when displayed by the prosecution?

Religiously sensitive? Here is a sample of Riskas’s religious sensitivity in describing how LDS children are taught:

Such brainwashing for Mormon children, as we shall explore in more depth in the Personal Postscript, continues in earnest with the use of religious language in the home and teaching of faith in a factually unintelligible, supernatural being (or Heavenly Father), and continues through the teaching and encouraged superstitious practice of prayer as actual, two-way communication with this invisible, incomprehensible, and factually non-existent being…

As Mormon children approach the age of eight years, they are then encouraged by their parents to superstitiously participate in religious “ordinances” which somehow magically bless them and enable them to be saved and return to Heavenly Father and live together as a family forever.6

The use of such emotionally laden and rhetorically loaded language, such as “brainwashing,” “unintelligible,” “superstitious,” “magically,” and “factually non-existent being” strike me as something other than “religiously sensitive.” But Riskas extends the same degree of (in)sensitivity to people of all faiths:

To be sure, all theistic religions are, in my view, an affront to man’s rationality and intellect as incoherent belief systems built on superstition and metaphysical nonsense. All theistic religions are also an affront to man’s humanity. Because of the irrational faith they [Page 117]require and the inhuman, performatory and behavioral demands they make, they shamefully and shamelessly exhibit a disguised disdain for human reason, human nature, and human dignity through various forms of abusive boundary violations, including mind-control, and moralistic intrusion into the personal lives and choices of its adherents in the name of love and concern for their temporal and eternal welfare…. Such, in part, is the personal price believers pay for their stupidity and ersatz or illusory happiness.7

Balanced? How about Riskas as balanced?

In his personal introduction, Thomas Riskas refers to his two decades in Mormonism as providing his personal warrant to comment with authority, and observes that “Most [Mormons] have likely only a superficial knowledge of Mormon theology as taught in our scriptures or by the more renowned Church theologians and General Authorities of the Mormon Church, such as Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, Orson and Parley P. Pratt, John A. Widtsoe, James E. Talmage, Brigham H. Roberts, Joseph Fielding Smith, to name a notable few.”8

This is true enough. Later however, he claims that “I was, by any standard within the church dedicated and [Page 118]theologically well informed through my extensive and continuous study of all the Standard Works (scriptures) of the Mormon church, as well as the scriptural commentaries, doctrinal teachings, writings, and official discourses…”9

His “by any standard” may be correct with respect to his personal dedication while a member, but it strikes me as naïve and as a bit of wishful thinking with respect to his being theologically well informed. To me it is clear from his personal accounts in Deconstructing Mormonism and the content of his bibliography that Riskas spent most of his Mormon years as one whose knowledge was rather superficial. And it remains so despite his adding a handful of contemporary LDS thinkers, such as Robert Millet, Dallin Oaks, and Blake Ostler to those he mentions before. He makes statements about fundamental LDS claims that strike me as wrong in the way that people who never bother to think or read seriously on those issues tend to get them wrong. (I’ll get to a few of these later.) In his introduction, he lays down a spread of Robert D. Anderson, Fawn Brodie, Dan Vogel, and Grant Palmer as four Aces, an unbeatable hand that demonstrates “very serious historical problems concerning the claim that Joseph Smith was who he said he was and is who he is believed to be by faithful Mormon believers.”10 It is permissible for Riskas to bring these books and others like them to a discussion. But if you want to claim subsequently that the discussion is “balanced,” I should expect an honest, fearless, well-informed critic to mention that these books have been critically reviewed by people who strike me as being far more informed than Riskas.11 And I would expect a mention of important books by Richard Bushman, Richard L. Anderson, Larry Morris, John Sorenson, John Welch, Terryl Givens, and Hugh Nibley, among others, in the name of honesty and fairness. It is easy to walk up to a balance scale, drop some weights on one side, and smile with pleasure at the [Page 119]“clunk” sound produced as the unopposed weight dramatically tilts the scale. But you have to be quite naïve to expect that any wide-awake person would conclude that what they have seen in such a one-sided display has anything to do with balance.

The imbalance that Riskas displays in passing here continues through the book and into the bibliography. In reading through Riskas’s lengthy bibliography, I notice a great many books on psychology and militant atheism, a sampling of prominent anti-LDS books, a light smattering of conventional though mostly dated LDS texts, but no real balance. We see Brodie but no Bushman, Southerton but no Sorenson, Palmer but no Ashurst-McGee. His LDS books, for the most part, do not come from those I would consider as the prime representatives of contemporary LDS intelligentsia. He offers some Blake Ostler, Mormon Doctrine (and only that) from Bruce R. McConkie, one book by Robert Millett, some Widtsoe, one essay by Truman Madsen on B. H. Roberts’s “The Way the Truth and the Life,” and one book from Sterling McMurrin. We get the expected titles from Signature Books, that is, the most negative ones in the recent catalogue. He lists nothing from Nibley, Welch, Peterson, Gardner, Bushman, Givens, Paulson, Falconer, Goff, Roper, Morris, etc. We do get a list of the reports of the Mormon Alliance, a recommendation of the Tanners’ work, directions to the IRR website, and a range of stock anti-LDS sources of the kind that Mosser and Owen described as characteristically neglecting current LDS scholarship.12 Where Riskas’s bibliography demonstrates overwhelming bias, it is actually more balanced than his Appendix B, “To Those Who Are Investigating Mormonism,” provided by Richard Packham, which demonstrates total bias. “By proving [Page 120]contraries,” Joseph Smith said, “truth is made manifest.” By suppressing contraries, ideology is made manifest.13

Firmly Argued? Let’s look at Riskas’s method.

How does he go about deconstructing Mormonism? Not the way Jacques Derrida would. (Derrida is not listed in the bibliography, a fact that may matter only to those with enough background with the term to wonder about the significance of a title promising to “deconstruct” something.)

Riskas builds on a metaphor, taken from M. Scott Peck, of believers “being trapped inside a box, and the instructions on how to get out of the box are written on the outside of the box.” Riskas says that “this dilemma pertains, of course to all believers—of all religions—who suppress or deny their doubts and refuse, for whatever reasons to seek after the best justified knowledge they can acquire.”14

In the World and the Prophets, Hugh Nibley quotes Payne:

There is always danger of a metaphor once adopted becoming the master instead of the servant15

Approaching the issue of deconstruction from the perspective of an English major and as an LDS believer, I have to offer dissent over the controlling generality that Riskas gives to the metaphor of the box with instructions on the outside. As a believing LDS, I’ve never been as isolated from inside controversies and issues, outside perspectives, and alternative views regarding faith as the Riskas “box” metaphor implies. Even as a teenager growing up in a Utah suburb during the ’60s, I easily found and considered a whole range of detailed instructions on how to get outside of the box of LDS faith. [Page 121]Though involved in LDS culture, I was not boxed in to the exclusion of books, films, radio, music, school, textbooks, TV, newspapers, and magazines as well as non-LDS people and views on a daily basis. While inside the box of LDS culture, I have been exposed to a wide range of alternative cultures and belief systems. In my twenties and thirties, I got more and more interested in the notion of testing belief systems, and I sought to understand why different people came to such different conclusions while looking at the same things. Indeed, I’ve read several of the books that Riskas recommends as particularly destructive for LDS faith. For my part, I found them wanting, largely because of my readings in sources that do not appear in his bibliography. I’ve lived not so much in an isolating box but in among overlapping cultures and societies, each offering competing sets of values, and many of them eagerly pressing into my hands just the kind of instructions that the box metaphor suggests are totally unavailable to me as a consequence of my participation in LDS society.

How well does Riskas actually describe the LDS insider test for faith? Not well. He writes that “revelation is considered true if it is sought with a ‘sincere heart, and with real intent, having faith in Christ,’” citing Moroni 10:4.16 The actual text refers to sincerity, real intent, and faith as conditions for a manifestation by the power of the Holy Ghost (Mor. 10:4-5), not as the validation of revelation. The “if-then” structure should make that clear. He then cites a few of the more commonly known verses, including D&C 9, on the burning of the bosom, feeling that it is right, and the stupor of thought. He mentions D&C 121:33 on “pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul.” The D&C 121 passage does not talk about revelation but the means by which priesthood holders can have any power or influence, that is, by obtaining and applying “pure knowledge,” [Page 122]which characteristically “enlarges the soul without hypocrisy and without guile.” By implication, the passage does raise the question of what kind of influence impure knowledge has, by implication—a contraction of the soul, and the presence of both hypocrisy and guile. (Let’s not go there now.)

Riskas briefly mentions Alma 32 but does not comprehend what is happening in that chapter.17 I’ve several times compared it to the epistemology for paradigm choice developed in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.18 Though Riskas uses the term “paradigm” here and there, he does not cite Kuhn. I’ve compiled a detailed list of LDS scriptures that describe the different ways that prayers are answered, dividing them into those that address thinking and those that address feeling, which work through the mind and heart.19 Riskas doesn’t work that hard, sticking to a few commonplace verses and trying to reduce it all to a subjective over-reliance on feeling.20

Before talking about the Mormon concept of revelation, he says, “Since there are no reliable objective and generally accepted human criteria for validating claimed revelations, the claims that ‘true revelation exists’ and that ‘Revelation is the Ultimate Source and arbiter of God’s truth are both incoherent.’”21 He does not seem to notice the positivism at work here, something that is not a generally accepted human criterion due to the self-referential nature of its workings. As Kuhn observes, “When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its [Page 123]own paradigm in that paradigm’s defense.”22 Riskas defends his positivism via positivism, blind to the circularity of his own position.

“Further,” Riskas says, “if the concept of ‘God’ and the use of the term ‘God’ are in fact incoherent, unintelligible, and factually or cognitively meaningless, then it logically follows, that the very concept of revelation is incoherent—even without the need for validation.”23 Why bother? Sterling McMurrin was more succinct than Riskas when he famously told Blake Ostler that he had concluded “at a very early age, earlier than I can remember, that you don’t get books from angels and translate them by miracles; it is just that simple.”24 But without a reading of the book, this is trial by ideology, not by investigation. Joseph Smith provided the book, and McMurrin never bothered to read it. Should the book be tried by ideological dismissal or serious investigation? As Kuhn says, “There are also, however, values to be used in judging whole theories: they must, first and foremost, permit puzzle formulation and solution.”25 Think of the contrast to McMurrin in Margaret Barker’s approach to the Book of Mormon: “What I offer can only be the reactions of an Old Testament scholar: Are the revelations to Joseph Smith consistent with the situation in Jerusalem in 600 BCE?”26 Whereas McMurrin dismissed the problem, Barker formulated a puzzle based on her expert knowledge, grounded in study and sources unavailable to Joseph Smith, and offered her solution.

Are there significant pieces of evidence that the insider test explores which Riskas’s outsider test might completely overlook? [Page 124]Kuhn reports that “led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before.”27 The implication for Riskas is that the outside the box and inside the box approaches may be considering very different sets of information. One of the things that my reading of Riskas provides for me is a look at his view from inside of his box. From that vantage, I see that a great many things which I think are important do not show up there. Kuhn comments that “particularly persuasive arguments can be developed if the new paradigm permits the prediction of phenomena that had been entirely unsuspected while the old one prevailed.”28 That is, a reader of Riskas’s book and bibliography might not suspect that LDS scholars (or anyone else) have come up with any cause to believe or that they had responded in detail to books that Riskas uses to pave his way. He mentions FARMS once, in a footnote discussion of the Roberts Study, reporting that John Welch had argued that B. H. Roberts had not lost his faith.29 But he does not trouble to specify exactly what Welch had written, where, or what sources he had employed.30 More importantly, Riskas does not mention that Welch had written a detailed essay called “Answering B. H. Roberts Questions and an ‘Unparallel.’” There is a pattern of ideological selectivity throughout Deconstructing Mormonism. Riskas cites Quinn [Page 125]when it suits him to challenge traditional LDS histories but ignores his defense of the First Vision narratives.31 He cites John Bradshaw on “toxic shame” but ignores him when it comes to the efficacy of prayer and the value of spirituality.32

Does a Mormon insider test for faith exclude consideration of the results or methods of outsider tests? Joseph Smith thought not. “By proving contraries,” he wrote to Daniel Rupp, “truth is made manifest.” Riskas argues for the necessity of relying on an “outside test for faith,” though not so much on how to go about testing his outside test for faith. Given a choice of different outsider tests for faith, which ones apply best to any theistic or LDS truth claims? Is the positivistic approach that Riskas offers the only outsider test to consider?

Much of Riskas’s argument stands on his use of this metaphor of believers being trapped inside a box. One of the most important things I learned about the process of literary deconstruction is to pay close attention to the metaphors a person uses. No matter how much a person claims to depend entirely on reason and rationality, much of the person’s reason, data selection, and valuing operate within the constraints of his or her metaphors. These metaphors, in a powerful way, reveal any writer’s boxes and the accompanying set of instructions that operate to keep a person inside. Riskas’s own box is obviously positivism, and he seems unaware of the existence of instructions that describe the way out of that box, let alone that positivism as a box has come in for a great deal of criticism over the past seventy years. It is not only a well-known box but an obsolescent one at that. I’ll say more about positivism as we go.

[Page 126]A useful text I got while working on my English degree was Madan Sarup, Post-Structuralism and Post Modernism. He has this to say about Derrida and deconstruction:

Derrida has provided a method of “close-reading” a “text” very similar to psychoanalytic approaches to neurotic symptoms. Deconstructive “close reading,” having “interrogated” the text breaks through its defenses and shows that a set of binary oppositions can be found “inscribed” within it. In each of the pairs, private/public, masculine/feminine, same/other, rational/irrational, true/false, central/peripheral, etc. the first term is privileged. Deconstructors show that the “privileged” term depends for its identity on excluding the other, and demonstrate that primacy really belongs to the subordinate term instead.33

Sarup explains how Derrida strives to locate “a moment that genuinely threatens to collapse that system.”

One of the ruling illusions of Western metaphysics is that reason can somehow grasp the world without close attention to language and arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method. Derrida’s work draws attention to the ways in which language deflects the philosopher’s project. He does this by focusing on metaphors and other figurative devices in the texts of philosophy…

His method consists of showing how the privileged term is held in place by the force of the dominant [Page 127]metaphor, and not, as it might seem, by any conclusive logic.34

Riskas privileges his positivism by means of the closed box metaphor as applied to believers not by means of any conclusive logic or consideration of any outside tests of positivism.

In Appendix A, Riskas reports that he was raised in a “patriarchal family culture by a loving but strict Greek mother and a loving but authoritarian, superstitious (‘God-fearing’), and at times abusive Greek father. I was conditioned from childhood to feel at home in the familiar, superstitious Mormon patriarchal culture…. And underneath the God of my parents were my ‘parent-gods’; the unconscious, idealized (i.e., ‘god-like,’ or powerful, magical, loving, nurturing, protecting and favoring) parent images internalized as a young, pre-verbal infant and child unknowingly projected onto all the fictitious gods I admired and followed throughout my life.”35 Before his LDS conversion, he reports a period of late-sixties rebellion in response to “the suppressive authoritarian control imposed by my parents, particularly, my father.”36

Just over one hundred years earlier, Brigham Young had commented to a Mormon audience on the effects of such a repressive parenting style:

For example, we will take a strict, religious, holy, down country, eastern Yankee, who would whip a beer barrel for working on Sunday, and never suffer a child to go into company of his age, never suffer him to have any associates, or permit him to do anything or know anything, only what the deacon, priests, or missionaries bring to the house; when that child attains to mature age, say eighteen or twenty years, he is very [Page 128]apt to steal away from his father and mother; and when he has broken his bands, you would think all hell was let loose, and that he would compass the world at once.

Now understand it, when parents whip their children for reading novels, and never let them go to the theatre, or to any place of recreation and amusement, but bind them to the moral law, until duty becomes loathsome to them; when they are freed by age from the rigorous training of their parents, they are more fit for companions to devils, than to be the children of such religious parents.37

Here is another point where Derridian deconstruction comes in. Despite his chronic complaints about the toxic effects that such authoritarian parenting and religious instruction can cause, Riskas asks why God does not “use his putative power to more directly, efficiently, and tellingly to accomplish his alleged purposes and promote the required and necessary knowledge of his existence as theologically conceived?”38 And why, he asks “the absence of divine intervention by notably and consistently stopping or even significantly reducing or eliminating and/or at least explaining, through personal revelation, this god’s specific reasons for allowing such human and natural evil.”39 Later he asks rhetorically, “Wouldn’t he unquestionably and irrefutably, beyond all doubt, establish up front – through demonstration, coherent explanation, and facilitated understanding, – god’s [Page 129]and his [Christ’s] existence and divinity, god’s gospel, and god’s mind and will and word once and for all to all mankind?”40

Why, Riskas seems to be asking – without realizing either the fact or the implications – why does God not behave like a suppressive, authoritarian, controlling parent of the sort that he himself rebelled against during the 1960s? A parent, a society, or a religion that behaves that way, Riskas says, is toxic, and a God who does not behave that way somehow demonstrates non-existence. Imagine living in a universe, or for that matter with a parent, for whom efficiency and not love was the first and great value upon which all else stands, before which every other concern must be compromised. In a conflict of values, freedom and love bow to efficiency. Does that sound like paradise? From my perspective, his system deconstructs.

But Riskas does not consider Derrida. Riskas’s method involves accepting an uncritical adoption of positivism and being hypercritical from that stance.41 Mote-eye considerations (Matthew 7:3-5) don’t enter in before making judgments. He demands absolute precision in language, absolute verification for any assertion, potential falsification for any belief;42 and he behaves as though his rhetorical questions and blanket assertions provide irrefutable falsification. He also demands that wide social consensus should uphold any interpretation, as though anything that is not popularly believed could not be true (think Great and Spacious Building). He spends a chapter on a Socratic dialogue with himself in which he interrogates a sock-puppet Mormon on the notion of God, demanding that the believer be required to unambiguously define God in terms that are precise and testable according to positivist notions of verification and falsification.43 One might as well [Page 130]ask a philosophy student in a cafeteria to specify why the food that she claims had once been visible on her lunch tray is nourishing, claiming that if she cannot on the spot explain via pure logic the full detail of the Krebs cycle, he can conclude that nutrition is an incoherent illusion. If she responds that the food tasted good and made her feel better and gives her energy, it’s easy to dismiss “tastes good” as subjective, “feel better” as emotional, and “gives energy” as incoherent rationalization.

Clearly articulated? Here is Riskas’s own description of his mode of articulation:

The style of the analytical parts of this book is, for the most part, more formal and scholarly, with at times extensive footnoting and quotations and, in places, the use of elaborate sentences and redundancy. This is so both deliberately, and necessarily, given the nature of and implications of the arguments made, the conclusions reached, and their importance to the overall purpose of this book. More specifically in this regard, the nature of this work is necessarily complex, and the central argument made is sophisticated and, in certain aspects, nuanced, even counterintuitive. These facts required a necessary level of detail, and again, redundancy, not only to offer as clear and unambiguous an explication as I could economically provide, but also to anticipate and forestall, as best I could, inappropriate generalizations and irrelevant counter arguments. In taking this approach I realize that I have taken the very different risk of perhaps losing a certain group of readers who either do not enjoy such writing, or who might find this style of writing too cumbersome, difficult, or demanding, given the level [Page 131]of interest, or perhaps, given their need for an excuse not to engage the necessary work required.44

Forgive me, but I find this bit of writing both hilarious and accurate, especially with regard to redundancy, the tendency to being “difficult, and cumbersome” and “again, redundancy.” In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye says, “We may observe that much of the difficulty in a philosophical style is rhetorical in origin, resulting from a feeling that it is necessary to detach and isolate the intellect from the emotions.”45 When I was working on my English degree many years ago, I chanced upon a book called Simple and Direct by Jacques Barzun. No one who reads Riskas would conclude that he had read Barzun. I also read Language in Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa, who observed that much academic, legal, and philosophical writing is dreadfully dull and difficult because it tends to get stuck at single levels of abstraction, rather than moving from general concepts, down to increasingly to specific details, and back up again to general principles. Reading Riskas reminded me again how I am grateful for what I learned from Hayakawa.

Fair minded?

Riskas reports that Mormonism “multiplies both actual and potential harm, abuse, and danger”46 in several ways, the first being through its “meta-belief that it alone is the only truth faith, that all other faiths, because of an alleged Great Apostasy, are false, and ‘an abomination before God’… This meta-belief [Page 132]is what I regard as the first multiplier of negative effects. It is this meta-belief of exclusive, absolute, and actual Truth because of, and in virtue of apostasy, and restoration through divine revelation.”47

Thomas Kuhn explains that

Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm. The more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides for of anomaly, and hence, an occasion for paradigm change.48

The more precise and far reaching Riskas can make LDS claims appear, the easier it is to generate anomaly and thereby leverage. An insistence on perfection, for example, has the effect of making any imperfection, and only imperfection, decisive. But is his rigid and brittle paradigm of LDS belief accurate and fairly representative? Has Riskas here unknowingly misused a “multiplier of negative effects?” Is Mormonism the “only true faith”? Are all other faiths “an abomination before God”? Are LDS truth claims exclusive of all other truth? Do Mormons possess absolute and actual truth? By this I presume he means utterly static and changeless doctrines and histories. Are these a valid set of expectations against which a fair-minded investigator should view the LDS church?

The first section of the Doctrine and Covenants was received in Hiram, Ohio on November 1, 1831, as a formal statement of “mine authority, and the authority of my servants.” (v 6). The leading verses describe how people have “strayed from mine ordinances and have broken mine everlasting covenant.” Verse 17 describes the calling of Joseph Smith in response, and verse 18 describes how God also gave commandments to unspecified [Page 133]“others.” Later, God explains that “I the Lord am willing to make these things known unto all flesh; for I am no respecter of persons.” (v 34-35). Truth and revelation here are important for LDS claims, but both are expressly non-exclusive.

Speaking of the LDS leaders against the notion of absolute and actual truth as static and unchanging, see verses 24-28:

These commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.

And inasmuch as they erred, it might be made known;

And inasmuch as they sought wisdom they might be instructed;

And inasmuch as they sinned, they might be chastened that they might repent;

And inasmuch as they were made humble they might be made strong, and blessed from on high, and receive knowledge from time to time.

The truth the LDS possess is here explicitly imperfect and incomplete rather than absolute and final. Because the formal claims made for LDS authorities include incompleteness and imperfection, the presence of such should not diminish their authority any more than the imperfections and incompleteness of science diminishes the authority of science. By formal definition, both societies offer not static absolute truths but self-correcting processes.

My reading of verse 30, regarding the distinction of the church, suggests that the word “only” applies to the phrase “with which I, the Lord am well pleased.” (Consider a sentence about the “only blue and idling car upon the face of the whole parking [Page 134]lot, with which I, the attendant, am well pleased.” That is not just a florid and emphatic way to say “only blue car” but provides a very different thought.) The “well-pleased” designation in D&C 1 applies to the church and is relative to what “true and living” means as descriptive qualities for church. It happens that the Biblical occurrences of true and living cast light on the meaning: “true vine,” “true treasure,” “truth and life,” “tree of life,” “living bread,” “living waters,” “new and living way through the veil” (Hebrews 10:20); and “true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water” (Heb. 10:22). The Bible imagery of “true and living” has to do with the voice of warning (Jeremiah 10:10, and D&C 1:2), priesthood (true vine, John 15:1-5), living bread and living waters (sacrament and baptism, Holy Spirit inspiration, scripture; that is, ordinances and covenants and revelation), and finally, tree of life and “living way through the veil,” which both point to the temple and Christ’s role as the Melchizedek High Priest who enters the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement.49 The themes that go with Biblical “true and living” imagery parallel the themes of D&C 1 point for point, verse for verse. Collectively all of these Bible images based on “true and/or living” center on the ongoing revelation and the distinctive priesthood ordinances and covenants, scriptures and temple worship that do, in actual fact and practice, distinguish the LDS from other faiths. But the designation is expressly non-exclusive and incomplete relative to truth, revelation, and human virtue. Riskas refers to “‘the only true Church’ on the face of the earth today,” but he has not considered the fact of his misquotation50 and consequent inaccuracy of thought, and therefore he has not considered the implications of his own misreading as a “multiplier of negative [Page 135]effects.”51 My point is that the expectations that I get from a close reading of D&C 1 are far more tolerant and robust than the expectations that Riskas uses to test LDS truth claims. I can matter-of-factly expect many of the same things that he sees as decisive anomalies. My assumptions make a different set of predictions for Mormonism. Different predictions direct me to different methods, problem fields, and standards of solution.

Of course, it’s easy to object that many LDS think and behave as though D&C 1 says exactly what it does not say. There happens to be a very good reason for the common misreading that goes beyond repetition and commonplace thinking. Brigham Young commented that “there is one principle I wish to urge upon the Saints in a way that it may remain with them—that is to understand men and women as they are, and not understand them as you are.”52 One of the ways that has helped me better understand “men and women as they are” has been the Perry Scheme for Cognitive and Ethical Growth. The Perry Scheme is based on a study of the way students develop during their college years in moving from provincial communities to a diverse university environment.53 Here are Positions 1 and 2 of 9:

Position 1 – Basic Duality. (Garden of Eden Position: All will be well.)

The person perceives meaning divided into two realms—Good/Bad, Right/wrong, We/They, Success/Failure, etc. They believe that knowledge and goodness are quantitative, that there are absolute answers for every problem and authorities know them and will [Page 136]teach them to those who will work hard and memorize them.

Position 2 – Multiplicity Prelegitimate. (Resisting snake)

Now the person moves to accept that there is diversity, but they still think there are true authorities who are right, that the others are confused by complexities or are just frauds. They think they are with the true authorities and are right while all others are wrong. They accept that their good authorities present problems so they can learn to reach right answers independently.54

The point here is that the attitude toward a group’s authorities that Riskas sees as a distinctive Mormon claim applies to a position of human development that everyone faces regardless of their cultural background. Because Mormons are human, these positions will always be found among Mormons. But it is not a binding Mormon doctrine, simply an expected expression of human attitude toward their chosen society at a particular level of personal growth. As I have shown, D&C 1 expressly contradicts the assumptions of these initial positions and thereby encourages further growth. Later, I’ll return to the Perry Scheme and show how Joseph Smith compares to the later positions, demonstrating cognitive and ethical growth in the prophet that Riskas, who is clearly stuck at Position 2, does not show. Riskas has merely exchanged the locations of [Page 137]his labels for those who he sees as TRUE authorities and those who are confused and are frauds.

Though Riskas puts quotation marks around “an abomination before God” as a Mormon attitude about all other faiths, he does not provide a source. Joseph Smith famously did use a different phrase in the 1838 account of his first vision. His actual statement is of a declaration that “all their creeds were an abomination in his sight” (Joseph Smith, History, 19). Having misread the evidence, and therefore, missed the crucial clue, Riskas does not seek out Joseph Smith’s clear explanation of the problem with creeds even though he does list in his bibliography the source where I first read it, The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith opposed creeds, not because they are false teachings (“all of them have some truth”), but because “creeds set up stakes, and say, ‘Hitherto thou shalt come, and no further’; which I cannot subscribe to.”55 Joseph Smith also explained that “the most prominent difference in sentiment between the Latter-day Saints and sectarians was that the latter were all circumscribed by some particular creed, which deprived its members of the privilege of believing anything not contained therein, whereas the Latter-day Saints have no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.”56 The real problem with creeds is not their content57 but their function. When in place, creeds place a person and a society beyond repentance, beyond change. Creeds box a person in and throw away the keys to further light and knowledge. If that is not abominable, what is?

[Page 138]Joseph Smith’s Mormonism celebrates the notion that if we come across new information or new ideas that don’t fit with our preconceptions, we have the option to change rather than shatter. When the word sprouts, grows and swells our souls, as Alma 32:34 says, our understanding can be enlightened, and our minds can expand. If our leaders have been wrong about something, that is no big deal. D&C 1 matter-of-factly declares, “Inasmuch as they have erred, it shall be made manifest.” If no one asks the right questions, why expect the answers?58 When we do ask questions we have not asked before, why not be open to the new information and understandings that result?

Riskas further attempts to shore up his brittle background expectations when he quotes the infamous 1945 Home Teaching Message that reads, “When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done.”59 He does not report the letter from President George Albert Smith that stated, “I am pleased to assure you that you are right in your attitude that the passage quoted does not express the true position of the Church. [Page 139]Even to imply that members of the Church are not to do their own thinking is grossly to misrepresent the true ideal of the Church, which is that every individual must obtain for himself a testimony of the truth of the Gospel, must, through the redemption of Jesus Christ, work out his own salvation, and is personally responsible to His Maker for his individual acts. The Lord Himself does not attempt coercion in His desire and effort to give peace and salvation to His children. He gives the principles of life and true progress, but leaves every person free to choose or to reject His teachings.”60

Riskas reports that the Mormon view of truth as “knowledge of things as they [really] are, as they [really] were, as they are to come,” based on D&C 93:24 and Jacob 4:13,61 which is correct. But then he goes on to assert that we must hold that “fundamental religious truths are considered or believed to be objective literal realities which are both ‘absolute and eternal,’” for which he cites D&C 1:39 and D&C 88:66, which do not contain the words he puts in quotes. These absolute and eternal truths, Riskas says “can be known with certainty by faith,” and he cites Mormon 10:3-5, which does not mention absolute and eternal truths. Truth is simply “what is real.” Can we know what is real with an absolute perfect knowledge? Or can a Mormon read and take seriously the distinction that Alma 32:18–19 makes between those who yearn to “know” with final certainty,62 and those who simply have enough “cause to believe” to support ongoing faith that falls short of perfect knowledge? Riskas does not seem interested in or even aware of the concept of “cause to believe” in support of faith as a preferable alternative to perfect and final “knowing.” [Page 140]His program of deconstruction of absolute certainty directs attention in a very different way than would an attempt to seek increased understanding in support of an open-ended “cause to believe.” His misreading of fundamental claims functions as a “multiplier of negative effects.”63

When I was a small child, my dad drove us to the Cleveland Lloyd dinosaur quarry in Central Utah. There, out in the desert, under a hot sun, in the dusty wind, I saw bones in the rocks. As a child, I knew those bones were real. Nothing I have learned since then has changed that. But a great deal of what I have learned about those bones has changed over the past fifty-five years. Such changes in science, some not just incremental but revolutionary, have done nothing to undermine the authority of science because science is a process, not a static body of knowledge. And D&C 1 expressly describes LDS community knowledge as being in process, just as Alma 32 describes a process for individuals. Just because I do not know everything at once or know perfectly at all does not mean that nothing I know is real. It is my knowledge of reality that changes, my knowledge of truth, not the reality itself, not truth. As long as I fall short of omniscience, I have room to learn. My faith is based on dynamic “cause to believe” based on the contents of a wine skin, not the temporary skins I use at different times to keep it in. What Riskas wrestles with at length is not a fundamental LDS truth claim, as formally stated in D&C 1, but an unreasonable demand for absolute certainty as the only viable grounds for faith. Measured against the Perry Scheme, a relevant outsider test, it reflects Position 2 thinking. There is something wonderfully ironic about someone who says, in effect, “How can I have faith in God without Absolute certainty?” And of course, he also declares, without any awareness of the irony, absolute certainty with respect to his disbelief.

[Page 141]Kuhn talks about a moment when “the issue is which paradigm should in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely. A decision between alternate ways of practicing science is called for, and in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than future promise. The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often so do in defiance of the evidence provided by problem solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the old paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.”64

Many of the problems that Riskas finds insoluble for LDS derive not from the facts and statements that he wrestles with but the unreasonable expectations against which he attempts to process them and his obvious selectivity. Jesus explains, in the parable of the sower, how the same seed can yield a completely different harvest, depending on the soil and nurture given.65 “Know ye not this parable?” he asks. “How then will ye know all parables?” (Mark 4:13) I find that the value of a seed is most evidenced in the work of those who have demonstrated the most impressive yields. Riskas offers one thick book claiming that the Word yields exactly “nothing,” whereas the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, to cite one author missing from his bibliography, offers nineteen volumes of exuberance as the barest glimpse of the potential harvest. Comparison with those who claim different yields from the same seed always demonstrates obvious differences in the soil, patience, expectations, interests, and nurture.
[Page 142]

Riskas and His Outsider Test for Faith

One obvious feature of the Outsider test for faith which Riskas offers is that it amounts to positivism.

This is worth repeating again and again: an actual fact is what an actually true statement states…For a statement to be justified, it must be justifiable. For a statement to be justifiable, it must be minimally intelligible and coherent conceptually. It must have truth conditions that can be possibly empirically confirmed or disconfirmed. That which is not factual cannot possibly be empirically known or considered as knowledge of objective reality. In other words, that which cannot be empirically known is a non-reality.66

Riskas frequently refers to the need for empirical verification and the potential for falsification behind all statements. He refers to spiritual experience as “subjectively interpreted, unverifiable, and unfalsifiable in principle and can be justifiably and more economically explained naturalistically.”67 The frequency with which he makes the standard claims demonstrates how fully enmeshed he is in positivistic thinking. He seems unaware of the social history, the potent criticism of positivism made during the past 60 plus years nor of the predictable implications for his own patterns of thought and behavior in adopting such thinking. Writing in 1974 Ian Barbour paints a vivid picture of what it might mean to build one’s case on positivism.

To rehearse the inadequacies of positivism now would be whipping a dead horse, but some of the reasons [Page 143]for the rejection of the idea of verification in science should be mentioned.68

Here is some social history from Ian Barbour’s wonderful book, Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. Comparison with Barbour’s observations makes it clear that Riskas’s thought straddles a positivist mount that is not in the best of health.

During the 1930’s and 1940’s the positivists had taken science as the norm for all meaningful discourse. Religious language was considered neither true nor false, but meaningless. The positivists had declared the famous Verification Principle, which states that, apart from tautologies and definitions, statements are meaningful only if they can be verified by sense data.69 Accepting an oversimplified view of science as the prototype for all genuine knowledge, they dismissed religion as “purely emotive.”

During the 1950’s positivism came under increasing attack, but many of its assumptions were perpetuated in the empiricism which came to replace it as the dominant interpretation of science. Among the empiricist claims were the following. (1) Science starts from publicly observable data which can be described in a pure observation-language independent of any theoretical assumptions. (2) Theories can be verified or falsified by comparison with this fixed experimental data. (3) The choice between theories is rational, [Page 144]objective and in accordance with specifiable criteria. Philosophers under the sway of such empiricism continued to say that religion can legitimately make no cognitive claims.70

Riskas talks like the empiricist philosophers that Barbour discusses here, in part because Riskas has missed out on the more recent developments. Barbour observes that:

These ideas came under increasing attack in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and three counter-claims were advanced. (1) All data are theory-laden; there is no neutral observation-language. (2) Theories are not verified or falsified; when data conflict with an accepted theory, they are usually set to one side as anomalies, or else auxiliary assumptions are modified. (3) There are no criteria for choice between rival theories of great generality, for the criteria are themselves theory-dependent.

The attack on empiricism was carried a step further in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn held that the thought and action of a scientific community are dominated by its paradigms, defined as ‘standard examples of scientific work which embody a set of conceptual, methodological and metaphysical assumptions’. He maintained that observational data and criteria for assessing theories are paradigm-dependent.71

All of this raises several issues for the positivism that Riskas holds up as a presumably unbiased outsider test. Think about his repeated calls for empirical verification. Barbour explains:
[Page 145]

Let us look next at the debate as to whether or not theories can be verified or falsified. To the positivists, verification had seemed a clear-cut and straight-forward process. It was assumed that theories are verified by their agreement with experimental data. Knowledge, it was said, consists of proven propositions established by the hard facts. The famous ‘Verification Principle’ went on to assert that, apart from formal definitions, the only meaningful statements are empirical propositions verifiable by sense-experience…

No scientific theory can be verified. One cannot [Page 146]prove that a theory is true by showing that conclusions deduced from it agree with experiment, since (1) future experiments may conflict with the theory, and (2) another theory may be equally compatible with present evidence. From a finite set of particular observations one cannot derive a universal generalization with certainty (the much debated logic of induction can provide no inferential grounds for making assertions about all cases when only a particular group of cases has been examined).72

Riskas’s book shows me that he has (1) neglected a great many important experiments, and (2) he has neglected many important theories. And the fact that his bibliography is selective and limited shows that his universal generalizations and certainty lack complete support.

Riskas can’t get very far in his book without repeating his call for falsifying conditions. Barbour has this to say:

Cannot theories at least be falsified, then? Even if many instances of agreement with experiment do not prove that a theory is true, it would seem that even a single counterinstance of data which disagrees with theory should conclusively prove it false. Karl Popper, acknowledging that scientific theories are never verifiable, contended that they must be in principle falsifiable. Science advances by bold conjectures and stern attempts to refute them. Popper dwelt on the importance of “crucial experiments” through which an hypothesis is definitively eliminated. Intellectual honesty, he said, requires the scientist to specify in advance experiments whose results could disprove his theory. Statements which are in principle unfalsifiable have no place in science.

But Popper’s view has in turn received considerable criticism. Discordant data do not always falsify a theory. One can never test an individual hypothesis conclusively in a “crucial experiment”; for if a deduction is not confirmed experimentally, one cannot be sure which one, from among the many assumptions on which the deduction was based, was in error. A network of theories and observations is always tested together. Any particular hypothesis can be maintained by rejecting or adjusting other auxiliary hypotheses.73

Riskas doesn’t see that his network of theories and observations can be questioned on many issues that control his background expectations. He demands absolute perfection, absolute consistency from Mormonism and absolute certainty for himself. His assumptions about the rigidity of LDS claims underlie his conditions for verification and falsification. Change those assumptions, and ask for evidence of real inspiration rather than perfect, publicly repeatable and verifiable inspiration, and [Page 147]that makes differences that ripple through the entire network of assumptions. My own very different expectations provide me with a different set of predictions and direct my attention to a different set of observations, which I measure against Alma’s tentative and open “cause to believe” (Alma 32: 18) rather than a demand for absolute and final “knowing.” Riskas lives in a thought-world in which the critique of verification and falsification has not so much as knocked at the door, let alone completely undermined the foundations.

Barbour discusses the way that the debates about verification and falsification spill over into debates about science and religion.

My complaint … is that they treat “falsifiability” and “unfalsifiability” as absolute and mutually exclusive categories. I have urged that even within science there are degrees of resistance to falsification, with paradigms and metaphysical assumptions most resistant but by no means totally invulnerable in the long run to cumulative empirical evidence. I would assign scientific paradigms a position near the middle of the “falsifiability” spectrum—not at the extreme of “objectivity” or “falsifiability.”… Religious paradigms I would assign towards the “subjective” or “unfalsifiable” end of the spectrum, because of the influence of interpretation on experience—but not at the extreme of ‘subjectivity’ (in the sense of immunity to evidence)…. Thus in comparing science and religion on a spectrum of degrees of resistance to falsification, I can point to both similarities and contrasts—whereas those who use only two boxes, labeled “falsifiable” and “unfalsifiable,” have no option but to view science and religion either as similar (assigned to the same box, whichever it is), or contrasting (assigned to different [Page 148]boxes). I believe that recent work in the philosophy of science here casts significant light on the protracted debate about falsifiability in religion.74

Riskas claims that “The open-minded person follows where the evidence leads,”75 which also assumes that you have not misread or overlooked the evidence in front of you. Alan Goff observes that “Naturalism is a circular position, for it will accept as evidence only historical claims that can be verified in naturalistic ways; when the researcher talks about those verificationist methods of validation, he or she then turns into a positivist.”76 Kuhn points out that “paradigms provide not only a map, but some of the directions for map making.”77

It’s the ideology that tells a person what counts as evidence. Against a demand for perfection, only imperfection is decisive. Against a demand for absolute certainty, any open question is decisive. I take a different ideology to the problem. Asking whether Joseph Smith’s inspiration is real calls for an entirely different method, problem field, and standard solution, than asking whether it is perfect. For example, I’ve tested the Book of Mormon account of Alma’s conversion against contemporary near-death experience research. I’ve tested the Book of Mormon against Margaret Barker’s reconstruction of First Temple theology. I’ve tested B. H. Roberts’s questions against subsequent research by John Welch, John Sorenson, and many others. My paradigm leads me into countless fruitful lines of inquiry that leave no trace of existence, let alone nurture and experiment, in the thought world that Riskas offers. As Kuhn observes, “Particularly persuasive arguments can be developed [Page 149]if the new paradigm permits the prediction of phenomena that had been entirely unsuspected while the old one prevailed.”78

Look at the way Riskas approaches the evidence in the Doctrine and Covenants and Alma 32 as part of his “Deconstruction of the Mormon Concept of Revelation.” He emphasizes the D&C 9 passage that Oliver would “feel that it is right,” and in Alma 32, how a planted seed will “swell within the breast” of the recipient of the word, and by such a swelling sensation, a person shall then “feel” and thereby know the word is good. He focuses on the overtly metaphoric description in verse 28 rather than the more prosaic verses 34–35. He mentions “enlarge my soul” without pausing to explain what that means. (Enos demonstrates the process during his conversion, in his expanding circles of human concern. It follows that contracted souls do the opposite, a phenomenon most clearly seen under the influence of propaganda.) Riskas neglects his own mention of Alma’s “enlighten my understanding” to conclude, “Many other instances of revelation and conversion by revelation are in the Book of Mormon, all of which emphasize the primary role of affect (or feelings and emotion) in revelatory experience.”79

Having become interested in how prayers are answered in the LDS scriptures, I determined to go past the commonplace references, and examine all the evidence. The results led me to conclude that “mind and heart” (D&C 8:2) are equally involved.80 Further, in considering Bible passages describing what person must do to find truth, it became evident that those actions and attitudes have the effect of putting at risk what a person thinks and requires that each person be willing to risk what they most desire.81 The direct consequence of not taking [Page 150]these actions means that arguments against biblical prophets by biblical peoples always reduce to their saying, in effect, “it’s not what I think” and/or, “it’s not what I want.”82

In a discussion of naturalism, Alan Goff says that “the positivist has to intervene to deny the claims the historical actor provides in order to supply ones that accord with his own epistemology and ontology. The religious language has to be replaced with a naturalistic one, and that translation is done under the aegis of a metaphysical conception of reality.”83 Riskas displays this process in his appendix as he reinterprets his LDS conversion in positivistic terms.84 Goff goes on to say:

The primary function of an ideology is to conceal from the person who adheres to it the fact that he or she is operating under the influence of that ideology. The creed works, in other words, by convincing the subject that he or she knows how the real world works and that the others who disagree are apologists or are otherwise operating under a false set of beliefs.85

Riskas claims to follow the evidence with an open mind, but he looks for evidence only of the kind and from the sources that his ideology allows. That is why he overlooks Nibley, Sorenson, Welch, Gardner and Peterson, Givens, and countless others. It’s not just a matter of being open-minded and following the evidence as though any random bit of evidence anthropomorphically knows not only where it should go, but why he or I should follow it there. What questions do you ask? What procedures do you follow to resolve them? Where do you look? What methods, problem field and standard of solution [Page 151]does a person hold in defining what counts as evidence? Are you willing to risk what you currently think and desire, to offer as a sacrifice a broken heart and a contrite spirit?

What Riskas’s choice of paradigm provides is neatly predicted in Nibley’s “Notes on the Sophic and Mantic.”86 For example:

Proposition 2. The foundation of Sophic thinking was the elimination of the supernatural or superhuman, i.e., anything that could not be weighed, measured, or sensed objectively from a description of the real world.87

From start to finish, Riskas marches to the tune of this ancient drum beat.

Proposition 3. Having dismissed the Mantic, the Sophic becomes impatient of its lingering survival, which it views with uncompromising hostility.88

“Uncompromising hostility” is a far better description of Riskas’s attitude than “balanced” “religiously sensitive,” and “fair-minded.”

Proposition 4. Claiming magisterial authority, the Sophic acknowledges no possibility of defeat or rivalry. In principle it can never be wrong. Its confidence is absolute.89

As an example of his own open-mindedness, Riskas says, “It would seem that the honest answer to the question of what [Page 152]would convince me that there is a god (or to return to a god) could be reduced to a one word answer: ‘Nothing.’”90

Proposition 9. The world without the Mantic offers the best test of the Sophic. It is marked by (A) piteous disappointment, (B) a puzzling deadness of spirit, and (C) a world plagued by doubt, insecurity, cynicism, and despair.91

Riskas sees believers as striving to avoid “the clear cosmic meaningless and ultimate extinction that weighs on them despite their adamant denials and claimed beliefs and attestations to the contrary.”92

Riskas includes a section that weighs on the “Problem of Evil”93 and repeats the stock protests and claims throughout his book. He starts by stating, “The classic, perennial problem of evil entails the apparent incoherence of the claimed existence of a god who is a sufficiently-to-all-knowing, powerful, loving, and morally perfect being, given the extent of nonsensical and extreme human and animal suffering and premature death in the world that can be attributed to both natural and immoral human causes.”94 After sixteen pages of quoting some LDS sources and scriptures, he winds down by declaring that “the existence of evil is a real, vexing, and I think, irresolvable problem—philosophically, empirically, and experimentally.”95

Overall, Riskas strikes me as tone deaf to the quality of the LDS answers in comparison to philosophical issues. Ian Barbour has a concise and enlightening chapter on various models of God.
[Page 153]

Four models of God’s relation to the world have been mentioned, patterned respectively after an absolute monarch and his kingdom, a clockmaker and a clock, a dialogue between two persons, and an agent and his actions. In the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead, a fifth model is presented: a society of which one member is pre-eminent but not absolute. The universe is pictured as a community of interacting beings, rather than as a monarchy, a machine, an interpersonal dialogue or a cosmic organism.96

Process thought provides distinctive analyses of the problems of freedom and evil. The ways in which freedom is built into process metaphysics from the outset have already been indicated. If the classical ideas of omnipotence and predestination are given up, God is exonerated of responsibility for natural evil. If no event is the product of God’s agency alone, he works with a world, given to him in every moment, which never fully embodies his will. The creatures, and above all man, are free to reject the higher vision. Suffering is inevitable in a world of beings with conflicting goals. Pain is part of the price of consciousness and intensity of feeling. In an evolutionary world, struggle is integral to the realization of greater value. As Teilhard de Chardin maintained, evil is intrinsic to an evolving cosmos as it would not be to an instantaneous creation. Suffering and death are not punishments for sin but structural concomitants of what he called “the immense travail” of a world in birth.97

[Page 154]From my LDS perspective, I find this picture of process thought resonates beautifully not only with the description of the council in Abraham 3, but also with emerging scholarship on the importance of the council in the ancient world.98 I’m also very impressed by the way that Joseph Smith anticipated Whitehead’s Process Model.99 And Hugh Nibley has pointed out how much can change when we consider this life as though the middle act of a three-act play.100 Even if we do not fully grasp the meaning of much of what happens, the notion that life extends beyond this life means that many issues that seem troubling from one perspective might be resolved in the next. For Riskas, the moment of death is the final answer and end of meaning.

Riskas complains about the “very existence of different faiths, each with different and conflicting concepts of gods and revelations from them.”101 Alma realizes that his own wish to speak with a voice of thunder and resolve everything by forceful demonstration is wrong and that “the Lord doth grant unto all nations of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, all that he seeth fit that they should have” (Alma 29:8). Nephi remarks that God “speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 31:3), which explains how “he remembereth the heathen, and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile” (2 Nephi 26:33), how “all things which have been given of God from the beginning of the world unto man are the typifying of him,” (2 Nephi 11:4), and [Page 155]how there are “divers ways that he did manifest things unto the children of men which were good” (Moroni 7:24).

Riskas complains about prayer’s “incoherence, non-necessity, and unreliability”102 in ways that all derive primarily from his positivistic stance and his demand for absolute certainty. If you expect God to behave as predictably as an Omniscient Vending Machine that provides for you on request without your even needing to ask, since He should know already, you may frame the issues, test, and conclude as Riskas does. But if you view God as an Agent operating under wide range of other considerations besides the need to pander to the whims of skeptical philosophers, the different expectations can lead to a different method, problem field, and standard of solution, and a very different interpretation of experience. I can be very impressed by a few personal examples of answer to prayer, and have a context in which to consider seeming silences.

Riskas includes a postscript that describes his de-conversion experience during his crisis of faith: prayer brought a thought “just like all the others that came merely, and exclusively from my brain.”103 Consider how Riskas would or could describe how his own statement could be verified or falsified with absolute, final, popularly accepted certainty. Take your time.

In considering the interpretation of experience, Ian Barbour observes:

There is, in short, no uninterpreted experience of the sort which the positivist posits. We don’t simply see; we “see as.” In the act of perception, the irreducible “data” are not isolated patches of colour or fragmentary sensations, but total patterns in which interpretation has already entered. Our experience is organized in the light of particular interests. Language itself also [Page 156]structures our experience in specific ways. Conceptual presuppositions are transmitted by culturally-provided words which give form to experience. What we count as “given” depends on our conceptual framework and the interests which it serves. The positivist’s quest for the certainty of an incorrigible foundation for knowledge cannot be satisfied.104

In The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye comments that “to defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore is to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right with some measure of independence from the art it deals with.”105 He’s talking about literature, but the point applies to any criticism. For instance, the omnipresent term “politically correct” comes from Marxist thought, and its use presupposes a dependence on the Marxist thought through which it deals with everything. He’s talking about the need for a way for a critic to provide independent criticism, remembering here that discernment is another word for criticism, and that discernment is listed as one of the spiritual gifts.106 “Not politically correct” originally meant “not Marxist.” It is a dependent form of criticism. It functions in the same way that “not orthodox” does in any society. It means “not us,” and it is dependent on the originating society. It is one thing to test Mormonism by an outside ideology, as Riskas does, and as all of the sources in his Appendix B do, but quite another thing to test Mormonism in an independent way by religiously sensitive criteria that are not ideologically dependent. It is also one thing to try to validate Mormonism by an inside approach, as our own pedagogical texts tend to [Page 157]do, or to criticize outside faiths in terms of being “not us.” That sort of criticism has no independence. It works at Position 2 of the Perry Scheme. We need to find a mode of criticism (that is, discernment) that answers the question, “Why us?”

Frye argues that a critic should “let his critical principles shape themselves out his knowledge of that field.”107 That is just the sort of thing that Barbour does in his discussion of religion. Barbour provides an alternate Outsider Test that has a measure of independence because it takes its critical principles from a survey of the field of religion, rather than by adopting a ready-made ideology outside of religion, as Riskas does, or inside a specific religion, as most people tend to do. Barbour proposes to evaluate religions by means of criteria that are not paradigm dependent. He offers a Mantic approach, rather than a Sophic one.

How does he manage? Ian Barbour offers a position that I accept and endorse, which he calls critical realism.

To summarize: the scheme I have outlined accepts the three “subjective” theses that (1) all data are theory-laden, (2) comprehensive theories are highly resistant to falsification, and (3) there are no rules for choice between research programmes. It also preserves Kuhn’s most distinctive contributions concerning paradigms: the importance of exemplars in the transmission of a scientific tradition, and the strategic value of commitment to a research programme. At the same time I have made three assertions which seem to me essential for the objectivity of science: (1) rival theories are not incommensurable, (2) observation exerts some control over theories, and (3) there are criteria [Page 158]of assessment independent of particular research programmes.108

In order to permit a meaningful degree of communication between rival paradigms, Barbour argues for the need to retreat to issues where the basic observations are not in as much dispute because they are less paradigm-dependent.

I would conclude that interpretive beliefs are brought to religious experience as much as they are derived from it. There is a greater influence in religion than in science “from the top down”: from paradigms, through interpretive models and beliefs, to experience. But the influence “from the bottom up,” starting from experience, is not totally absent in religion. Although there is no neutral descriptive language, there are degrees of interpretation. Therefore religious beliefs, and even paradigms, are not totally incommensurable. There can be significant communication between paradigm communities. One cannot prove one’s most fundamental beliefs, but one can try to show how they function in the interpretation of experience.109

If the kinds of basic experience that underlie religious belief can be approached without reference to any particular doctrinal interpretation, Ian Barbour suggests that such experiences can serve as a common ground for discussion, a place of solid footing, a point of little disputed reference from which to examine the varied interpretations and traditions. Those that I see as most interesting (generally following Barbour110) can be seen as generally framing a movement:

[Page 159](a) From responses to external impressions regarding:

  • Order and creativity in the world
  • The common mythic symbols and patterns underlying most religious traditions111
  • Key historical events that define separate traditions and bind individuals

(b) Through the innermost experiences of the individual:

  • Numinous awe and reverence
  • Mystical union
  • Moral obligation
  • Reorientation and Reconciliation with respect to personal sin, guilt, and weakness, the existence of evil, suffering, and death, and tensions between science and faith.

(c) Then returning to the external world as human action:

  • Interpersonal dialogue, in which you begin interpret external events as God speaking to you, and you answer through your own actions.
  • Social and Ritual behavior

[Page 160]These matters cannot objectively prove the existence of a God (whether personal or impersonal), but, as I hope to demonstrate, they do constitute the core of religious experience for believers of all faiths. They provide the ground of experience on which reasoned and feeling assessments of the validity and worth of faith are based. They encompass the ways in which spirituality is manifest in history and symbol. They are the wine—and doctrine the wine-bottles. To argue and contend about doctrine rather than these kinds of experience is to emphasize the wine skin over the wine. In Alma’s terms, it is to emphasize what you think you “know” over what ultimately gives “cause to believe” (Alma 32:18).

If we have a body of observations upon which disputants can agree to at least begin discussion, the next issue involves the recourse to criteria for judgments that are not paradigm dependent. Barbour says, “As outlined earlier, the most important criteria are simplicity, coherence, and the extent and variety of supporting experimental evidence (including precise predictions and the anticipation of the discovery of novel types of phenomena). But there are no rules, no specific instructions, that is, for the unambiguous application of the criteria; there is, in Kuhn’s words, ‘no systematic decision procedure which must lead each individual in the group to the same decision.’ Yet the criteria provide what Kuhn calls ‘shared values’ and ‘good reasons’ for choice; they are ‘important determinants of group behaviour, even though the members of the group do not apply them in the same way.’”112 That is, we do not have recourse to a set of objective rules that coerce everyone to the same conclusion, but we can turn to a set of constraints that can give weight to our judgments. As Kuhn says, “It makes a great deal of sense to ask which of two actual and competing theories fit the facts better.”113

[Page 161]As Barbour explains:

I am not claiming that moral and religious experience or particular historical events can constitute a proof for the existence of a personal God. I am only saying that it is reasonable to interpret them theistically and that it makes a difference whether one does so or not. It makes a difference not only in one’s attitudes and behaviour but in the way one sees the world. One may notice and value features of individual and corporate life which one otherwise might have overlooked.114

When I look through the LDS culture for evidence of these kinds of experience, I can find all of them. For instance, in the 1832 account of Joseph Smith’s vision we find this account of his response to Order and Creativity in the world:

For I looked upon the sun the glorious luminary of the earth and also the moon rolling in their magesty through the heavens and also the stars shining in their courses and the earth also upon which I stood and the beast of the field and the fowls of heaven and the fish of the waters and also man walking forth upon the face of the earth in magesty and in the strength and beauty whose power and intiligence in governing the things which are so exeding great and marvilous even in the likeness of him who created them and when I considered upon these things my heart exclaimed well hath the wise man said it is a fool that saith in his heart there is no God my heart exclaimed all all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotent and omnipresent power a being that makith Laws and decreeeth and bindeth all things in their bounds who [Page 162]filleth Eternity who was and is and will be from All Eternity to Eternity.115

The vision itself is a key historical event for us as are the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon, and the pioneer exodus. We share appreciation of other key historical events, such as the life of Jesus, with Christianity as a whole.

Barbour’s comments on myths have obvious relevance to LDS temple worship. For instance:

Myths offer ways of ordering experience. Myths provide a world-view, a vision of the basic structure of reality. Most myths are set at the time of creation, or in a primordial time, or at the time of key historical events—times in which the forms of existence were established, modified or disclosed. The present is interpreted in the light of the formative events narrated in the myth, as Mireca Eliade has shown.116

We can also look at Joseph’s vision and the vision of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price and see distinctive numinous qualities. Barbour summarizes the numinous as “a sense of mystery and wonder, holiness and sacredness, in a variety of contexts. Rudolf Otto’s classic study finds in numinous experience a combination of fascination and dread. Often there seems to be a sense of otherness, confrontation and encounter, or of being grasped and laid hold of. Correspondingly, man is aware of his own dependence, finitude, limitation and contingency.”117

Mark Koltko’s insightful essay, “Mysticism and Mormonism,” explores parallels between various Mormon [Page 163]scriptures and certain characteristics of mystical experience.118 Koltko’s “eight central qualities of the mystical or transcendent experience” are the “ego quality” (cf. D&C 88:6; Moses 7:41); the “unifying quality” (cf. D&C 88:41); the “inner and subjective quality” (cf. Moses 7:48); the “temporal/spatial quality” (cf. Moses 1:27–29); the “noetic quality” (D&C 38:1–2), the “ineffable quality” (3 Nephi 19:19); “the positive emotion quality” (2 Nephi 4:21); the “sacred quality” (3 Nephi 11:15; Moses 1:11).

According to Ninian Smart, the numinous and mystic poles of experience influence patterns of doctrine.

If you stress the numinous, you stress that our salvation or liberation (our becoming holy) must flow from God the Other. It is he who brings it to us through his grace. You also stress the supreme power and dynamism of God as creator of the cosmos. If, on the other hand, you stress the mystical and non-dual, you tend to stress how we attain salvation and liberation through our own effort at mediation, not by the intervention of the Other…. If we combine the two, but accent the numinous, we see mystical union as a kind of close embrace with the other—like human love, where the two are one and yet the two-ness remains. If the accent is on the mystical rather than the numinous, then God tends to be seen as a being whom we worship, but in such a way that we get beyond duality.119

Here, I believe, is an essential distinguishing characteristic of Mormonism—the blend of the numinous and the mystic. This explains the Orthodox discomfort with the Mormon idea [Page 164]of deification (something quite unthinkable to one caught up in a purely numinous tradition), as well as the Eastern discomfort with our literalism and personal God (again, something quite unthinkable to one caught up by the emptiness of pure mysticism). For the same reason, the blend in Mormonism explains Nephi’s insistence on combining grace and works—”By grace we are saved after all we can do.”120 Our need for grace offends the self-reliant mystic, and our effort toward perfection offends those who depend on pure grace. By pointing out the experiential roots behind such doctrinal disagreements, I feel that we have much to gain. Against the background of comparative world religion, Mormonism appears as the more comprehensive and inclusive faith.

For one thing, it becomes apparent that by treating numinous and mystic experience as contraries, we can solve various problems that come up in other traditions because one or the other aspect of the sacred has been excluded. Benjamin deliberately strives to awaken in his people a sense of their nothingness (Mosiah 2:25, 4:5), in contrast to the numinous majesty of the Almighty. But when that necessary awareness has done its work, he describes his people as “the children of Christ” (Mosiah 5:7).121 The danger in a strictly numinous tradition is that humankind tends to be seen as depraved and contingent. For example, Barbour comments on how “Luther’s outlook, with its undue respect for power and authority, and its sense of the complete sinfulness and evil in the human being when left alone”122 can be seen as unhealthy to the human psyche. On the other hand, a mystic like Emerson can [Page 165]preach an admirable “Self Reliance.”123 But even the memory of an experience of unity with an impersonal Oversoul turns out to be altogether inadequate when he had to confront the terribly personal implications of the death of his son, Waldo.124 Mormonism provides the strength gained from the union of complementary experiences.125

One example of moral obligation deserves mention here because of its unusual complexity and intensity, as well as its vivid presence in the Book of Mormon. Sociologist Terrence Des Pres made a study of the experiences of individuals who have survived extreme horrors created by fellow humans.126 A striking type of survival behavior that emerged from Nazi and Soviet death camps came as certain persons developed a will to “survive as witness” and to create a specific genre of survival literature. These Survivor-Witnesses can be described as follows:127

  1. The will to remember and record anchors the survivor in the moral purpose of bearing witness, thus maintaining his own integrity in conscious [Page 166]contradiction of the savagery around him (Mormon 3:11–16; Moroni 9:6–25).
  2. Witnessing of his experience is viewed as a duty, even a sacred task (Mormon 4:16; 8:14; 9:31).
  3. It is instinctively felt, an involuntary outburst of feeling, born out of the horror that no one will be left (Mormon 6:17–22; 8:1–3).
  4. The task is often carried out despite great risks; often in secret or by depositing the record in a secret archive (Mormon 6:6; 8:14).
  5. Survivors do not witness to inflict guilt or to rationalize their own survival. Their mission transcends guilt and their irrepressible urge to witness arises before any thought of guilt surfaces and at the initial stages of adjustment to extremity (Mormon 9:30–31; Moroni 9:3–6).
  6. They speak simply to tell, to describe out of a common care for life and for the future, realizing that we all live in a realm of mutual sacrifice (Mormon 4:17–22; 8:37–40; Moroni 7:45–48).
  7. Survival in this sense is a collective act; the survivor has pledged to see that the story is told (Mormon 4:16).
  8. The survivors speak to the whole world, as a firsthand eyewitness, one whose words cannot be ignored (Mormon 4:16–22; 9:30).
  9. [Page 167]The view themselves as a necessary connection between the past and the future (Mormon 4:17–22; 5:12; 7:1–10; 9:30).
  10. They perceive that “out of horror… the truth will emerge and be made secure,” that “good and evil are only clear in retrospect,” for wisdom only comes at a terrible price. Thus their mission is to display the “objective conditions of evil” (Mormon 5:8–9; 9:31; Moroni 9–10).

In discussing reorientation and reconciliation, Barbour observes that “In individual life, acknowledgment of guilt and repentance may be followed by the experience of forgiveness. Persons unable to accept themselves are somehow enabled to do so. Such reorientation may lead to a new freedom from anxiety, an openness to new possibilities in one’s life, a greater sensitivity to other persons. Grace is experienced in the healing power of love at work in our midst when reconciliation overcomes estrangement.”128

The account of Alma’s conversion (Alma 36) is a remarkable description of reorientation and reconciliation with respect to sin. Reorientation is a change of thinking. And reconciliation is a change of feeling. This is why it is important to recognize that answer to prayer in LDS scriptures balance thinking and feeling processes and why the search for truth must involve a willingness to risk preconceptions, and a willingness to put aside personal desires.

Barbour explains Interpersonal Dialogue in these terms:

The interaction between two persons is sometimes characterized by directness, immediacy, mutuality and genuine dialogue. In an “I-Thou” relationship, [Page 168]as Martin Buber describes it, there is availability, sensitivity, openness, responsibility, freedom to respond; one is totally involved as a whole person. Buber suggests that one can interpret the neighbour’s need as a divine summons. Encounter with the human Thou is a form of encounter with the eternal Thou. One understands oneself to be addressed through events. “The sound of which the speech consists are the events of personal every-day life.” A person replies through the speech of his life; he answers with his actions. Events in daily life can be interpreted as dialogue with God.129

Richard Bushman provides an account that illustrates this kind of experience in an LDS context:

I had been a branch president and Bishop, and was then president of the Boston Stake. Those offices required me to give blessings in the name of God and to seek solutions to difficult problems nearly every day. I usually felt entirely inadequate to the demands placed upon me and could not function at all without some measure of inspiration. What I did, the way I acted, my inner thoughts, were all intermingled with this effort to speak and act righteously for God. I could no longer entertain the possibility that God did not exist because I felt His power working through me .… Only when I thought of God as a person interested in me and asked for help as a member of Christ’s kingdom did idea and reality fit properly. Only that language properly honored the experiences I had day after day in my callings.130

[Page 169]Barbour had commented that while such experiences do not constitute coercive proof, theistic interpretation is reasonable, and given that interpretation, “one may notice and value features of individual and corporate life which one otherwise might have overlooked.”131 Riskas deals with nothing of what I have discussed here. When he describes his own LDS spiritual experiences, he devalues them as nothing but the workings of his own mind. Many of Riskas conclusions and methods have been predicted and undermined by both Nibley and Barbour. Yet nothing whatsoever in Riskas’s book predicts any of the notions and evidences that I have just briefly touched upon.

An evaluation of competing accounts of these kinds of religious experience based on criteria that are not paradigm dependent means we should look to the values that Barbour summarized as “simplicity, coherence, and the extent and variety of supporting experimental evidence (including precise predictions and the anticipation of the discovery of novel types of phenomena).” I’ve compared these things with Alma 32’s reference to “delicious,” an effect of “enlightening the understanding” of demonstrable growth in response to experiment, and “expansion of the mind.”

Another interesting effect of Barbour’s approach in considering the LDS experience in this way is that we have a wide range of experiences to consider that combine as strands in a rope, rather than links in a logical chain. No one strand holds all of the weight. The presence of one strand does not require the presence or absence of another. But the presence of many strands means greater strength. The significance of this reality should not be lost when we consider the significance of key historical events. Barbour observes that “every community celebrates and re-enacts particular historical events which are crucial to its corporate identity and its vision of reality.”132

[Page 170]“What distinguished Mormonism,” writes Richard Bushman, “was not so much the Gospel Mormons taught, which in many respects resembled other Christians’ teachings, but what they believed had happened—to Joseph Smith, to Book of Mormon characters, and to Moses and Enoch [and later to the pioneers, during their archetypal Exodus to the west]. . . . The core of Mormon belief was a conviction about actual events. . . . Mormonism was history, not philosophy.”133

It is these key historical events that define our community, but even if these events did not exist, the other strands may remain independently of them. We all too often fall into a pattern of all or nothing rhetoric and thinking that overlooks the full range of experience that exists. While it is dramatic, I don’t think it is necessary because those under the spell of such thinking run the risk of unnecessarily ending up with nothing. If many strands of different kinds of experience exist in support of personal faith, any individual strand might be expendable. If the number and quality of strands tends to increase over time, then one possesses a stronger “cause to believe.”

In contrast to Riskas’s claims to have offered a definitive falsification of Mormonism, Barbour says, “Though no decisive falsification is possible in religion, I have argued that the cumulative weight of evidence does count for or against religious beliefs. Religious paradigms, like scientific ones, are not falsified by data, but are replaced by promising alternatives. Commitment to a paradigm allows its potentialities to be systematically explored, but it does not exclude reflective evaluation.”134

Given these kinds of resources, Barbour can say this:
[Page 171]

I would submit that religious commitment can indeed be combined with critical reflection. Commitment alone without enquiry tends to become fanaticism or narrow dogmatism; reflection alone without commitment tends to become trivial speculation unrelated to real life. Perhaps personal involvement must alternate with reflection on that involvement, since worship and critical enquiry at their most significant levels do not occur simultaneously. It is by no means easy to hold beliefs for which you would be willing to die, and yet to remain open to new insights; but it is precisely such a combination of commitment and enquiry that constitutes religious maturity.

If faith were simply the acceptance of revealed propositions or assent to propositions, it would be incompatible with doubt. But if faith means trust and commitment, it is compatible with considerable doubt about particular interpretations. Faith does not automatically turn uncertainties into certainties. What it does is take us beyond the detached speculative outlook which prevents the most significant sorts of experience; it enables us to live and act amid the uncertainties of life without pretensions of intellectual or moral infallibility.135

Riskas, it seems to me, offers his text with just such pretensions. I’ve mentioned the Perry Scheme and how Riskas displays Position 2 thinking, something that, truth be told, everyone displays at some point. And this brings in the opportunity to take this outside test a bit further. Where do Ian Barbour and Joseph Smith end up as measured by the Perry [Page 172]Scheme? And what might that imply as to the value of their work?

Originally, the Perry scheme was meant to be descriptive, but the possibility is that it can be pedagogical, that if students and teachers become more self-aware about their own thinking processes, they might be able to move through the nine positions more easily. Alma 32 puts forward the idea of a final, static “knowing” versus an open ended “cause to believe.” Alma clearly favors an orientation towards “cause to believe” in a which a person is fully aware that their knowledge is “not perfect”, and that they are engaged in an ongoing process of learning, in which experiment is ongoing, knowledge and understanding expanding, and yet in which they can have faith. “Is this not real?” even though your knowledge is not perfect.

If a person can move along through to Position 6: Commitment Foreseen, they come to this point:

He starts to see how he must be embracing and transcending of: certainty/doubt, focus/breadth, idealism/realism, tolerance/contempt, stability/flexibility. He senses need for affirmation and incorporation of existential or logical polarities. He senses need to hold polarities in tension in the interest of Truth.136

This puts me in mind of 2 Nephi 2 on opposition in all things, the temple, and Joseph Smith’s comment that “by proving contraries, truth is made manifest,” remembering that “truth is knowledge of things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come” (D&C 93:24).

He begins to maintain meaning, coherence, and value while conscious of their partial, limited, and contradictable nature. He begins to understand [Page 173]symbol as symbols and acknowledges the time-place relativity of them. He begins to affirm and hold absolutes in symbols while still acknowledging them to be relativistic.137

This puts me in mind of Nephi’s comment that we cannot understand the Jewish prophets without knowing the cultural context (2 Nephi 25:1-5). It’s why I continue to find enlightenment from learning more about other cultures. It goes back to my discovery that what the English meant by “biscuit” is much like what I thought of as a cookie, and was different than what I might make from a box of Bisquick. “Cookie” as a word is merely a social convention relative to a specific time and place that points to something else, but that something is not merely figurative but real. I should know, because I bake them regularly. That someone from Liverpool might call them biscuits does not make them less real.

He begins to embrace viewpoints in conflict with his own.138

Think of Alma 29, where Alma says that even though he might want to speak with a voice of thunder and coerce everyone into repentance, yet he knows that is a sin, and that God gives unto men all that he sees fit for them to have. This does not mean that Alma takes his vision as merely symbolic, merely figurative. It’s real and binding, but not the same thing as instant omniscience, and not binding on anyone else. It does not give the right to coerce or judge, though it does drive his need to testify. He knows he has room to grow. Joseph Smith is the same. He’s not a fanatic, saying “Submit or die!” but says, “If I cannot convince you that my way is better,” we’ll work with your way.

[Page 174]Perry’s Position 7: Commitments in Relativism developed, includes this:

He senses need to be: wholehearted—but tentative, to be able to fight for his own values—yet respect others.139

Joseph Smith’s later discourses are full of this attitude.140 He doesn’t condemn other people for not having had his experiences, yet he accepts his own experience as binding on him, and worth offering to others.

Now the person has a field-independent learning style, has learned to scan for information, accepts that hierarchical and analytic notes are evidence of sharpening of cognition. He is willing to take risks, is flexible, perceptive, broad, strategy-minded, and analytical.141

Here I think of the passages about seeking out of the best books words of wisdom (D&C 88:118), preparing our minds to understand more tomorrow (3 Nephi 17:1-3), of searching the scriptures, of recognizing the need to study others and cultures and times to understand as they understood (2 Nephi 25:1-5), and not presume it’s just a matter of memorizing our favorite proof-texts, ignoring context, and calling that “scripture mastery.”

Perry’s Position 9: Commitments in Relativism further developed, has this:

The person now has a developed sense of irony and can more easily embrace other’s viewpoints. He can accept life as just that “life,” just the way it is! Now he holds the commitments he makes in a condition of Provisional [Page 175]Ultimacy, meaning that for him what he chooses to be truth IS his truth, and he acts as if it is ultimate truth, but there is still a “provision” for change. He has no illusions about having “arrived” permanently on top of some heap, he is ready and knows he will have to retrace his journey over and over, but he has hope that he will do it each time more wisely. He is aware that he is developing his Identity through Commitment. He can affirm the inseparable nature of the knower and the known—meaning he knows he as knower contributes to what he calls known.142 He helps weld a community by sharing realization of aloneness and gains strength and intimacy through this shared vulnerability. He has discarded obedience in favor of his own agency, and he continues to select, judge, and build.

Compare this from Joseph Smith:

The great designs of God in relation to the salvation of the human family, are very little understood by the professedly wise and intelligent generation in which we live. Various and conflicting are the opinions of men concerning the plan of salvation, the requisitions of the Almighty, the necessary preparations for heaven, the state and condition of departed spirits, and the happiness or misery that is consequent upon the practice of righteousness and iniquity according to their several notions of virtue and vice.

But while one portion of the human race is judging and condemning the other without mercy, the Great [Page 176]Parent of the universe looks upon the whole of the human family with a fatherly care and paternal regard; He views them as His offspring, and without any of those contracted feelings that influence the children of man, causes “His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” He holds the reins of judgment in His hands; He is a wise Lawgiver, and will judge all men, not according to the narrow, contracted notions of men, but, “according to the deeds done in the body whether they be good or evil,” or whether these deeds were done in England, America, Spain, Turkey, or India. He will judge them, “not according to what they have not, but according to what they have,” those who have lived without law, will be judged without law, and those who have a law, will by judged by that law. We need not doubt the wisdom and intelligence of the Great Jehovah; He will award judgment or mercy to all nations according to their several deserts, their means of obtaining intelligence, the laws by which they are governed, the facilities afforded them of obtaining correct information, and His inscrutable designs in relation to the human family; and when the designs of God shall be made manifest, and the curtain of futurity be withdrawn, we shall all of us eventually have to confess that the Judge of all the earth has done right.143

Joseph Smith, it seems to me, operates here at Position 9 of Perry’s Scheme of Cognitive and Ethical Growth, whereas Riskas is stuck at Position 2. Who should I take as a guide on issues of cognitive and ethical growth, based on this outside test?

[Page 177]Well, Riskas has argued at length with a few Mormon philosophers and claims that he has deconstructed the basis of our faith. Back in 2001, Daniel Peterson addressed a gathering of philosophers and made this comment:

I love philosophy. But philosophy is not a primary mode of religious reflection for Latter-day Saints. Nor is systematic theology. Not even a secondary mode. Nor a tertiary one.

We tell stories.144

Here is Blake Ostler telling a story from an essay that Riskas lists in his bibliography.

Now, I want to talk a bit about this experience. At that point in my life I was merely a spiritual neophyte like we all begin… I was going into the gymnasium and a girl that I barely knew came and sat down by me. She was a Senior and I was a Sophomore, and she was pretty and I was intimidated. Now normally I would have never said anything to her because to speak to a pretty Senior girl when you’re a lowly Sophomore is just simply verboten. But there was nothing I could do to stop from saying, “I know this is going to sound really strange, but I have a message to you from our Heavenly Father. He wants you to stop thinking about suicide.” And her eyes got real big and her jaw dropped and she said, “How did you know?” And I told her as honestly as I could, mustering all the courage I had, “I don’t know; I simply know.” And she explained to me that she had laid out on her bed stand a whole bottle of pills that she was going to go home and take right after [Page 178]that assembly. In fact, the next day she came and told me that I’d literally saved her life. And it dawned on me at that moment in my life, “What if I hadn’t listened?” What if, instead, I had gone to my head and thought it through? What if I had relied on my own noggin? Well, the answer’s very simple, she would be dead. She’s not, she’s a mother and she’s doing well.145

Riskas refers to this essay but says nothing about this particular story in his text.146 The recurrence of that kind of nothing in Riskas, to me says everything. Ian Barbour observes that

Participation in a religious tradition also demands a more total personal involvement than occurs in science. Religious questions are of ultimate concern, since the meaning of one’s existence is at stake. Religion asks about the final objects of a person’s devotion and loyalty, for which he will sacrifice other interests if necessary. Too detached an attitude may cut a person off from the very kinds of experience which are religiously most significant. Reorientation and reconciliation are transformations of life-pattern affecting all aspects of personality, not intellect alone. Religious writings use the language of actors, not the language of spectators. Religious commitment, then, is a self-involving personal response, a serious decision implicating one’s whole life, a willingness to act and suffer for what one believes in.147

[Page 179]

  1. Hugh Nibley, “Paths that Stray: Some Notes on the Sophic and Mantic” in Stephen Ricks, ed., The Ancient State, Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol. 10 (Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1991), 380-–381. ↩

  2. Kai Nielson, Foreword to Deconstructing Mormonism, xi. ↩

  3. Riskas, 385. ↩

  4. Riskas, 384. ↩

  5. Riskas, xix—x. ↩

  6. Riskas, lxxii. ↩

  7. Riskas, 38. ↩

  8. Riskas, xvii. He could better explain that “renowned Church theologians” and “General Authorities” are not necessarily the same category. A person can be, one or the other, or both, or neither. ↩

  9. Riskas, lxv. ↩

  10. Riskas, xlvi. He is referring to Robert D. Anderson; Anderson’s Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999); Fawn M. Brodie’s, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945); Dan Vogel’s, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004); and Palmer’s Grant Palmer, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002). ↩

  11. You can find reviews of all four here: http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?reviewed_books&vol=14&num=1&id=41. ↩

  12. Carl Mosser and Paul Owen, “Mormon Scholarship, Apologetics and Evangelical Neglect: Losing the Battle and Not Knowing it? Trinity Journal n.s. 19 (Fall 1998): 179-205. ↩

  13. History of the Church, 6:428. ↩

  14. Riskas, xxxi-–xxxii. ↩

  15. E. A. Payne, cited in Hugh Nibley, Mormonism and Early Christianity Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol 4 (Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book and Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1987), 194, note 2. ↩

  16. Riskas, 169. ↩

  17. Riskas, 170. ↩

  18. Kevin Christensen, “Paradigms Crossed” in Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 7/2 (1995) 144-218. ↩

  19. Kevin Christensen, “A Model of Mormon Spiritual Experience,” Appendix A, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22100469/model_of_experience.pdf. ↩

  20. Riskas, 153. ↩

  21. Riskas, 167. ↩

  22. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 94. ↩

  23. Riskas, 167–168. ↩

  24. Sterling McMurrin, “An Interview with Sterling McMurrin,” interview by Blake Ostler, Dialogue 17/1 (1984): 25. ↩

  25. Kuhn, 185. ↩

  26. Margaret Barker, “Joseph Smith and Preexilic Religion,” BYU Studies 44/4 (2005), 69. ↩

  27. Kuhn, 111. ↩

  28. Kuhn, 154. ↩

  29. Riskas, 112, after Reviewer’s notes, in the continuation of a long footnote quoting Joel Groat of IRR on Brigham D. Madsen and B. H. Robert, Studies of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992). He does not mention the existence of John Welch’s detailed paper, “Answering B. H. Roberts Questions and an Unparallel” (Provo: FARMS Preliminary Report, 1984). ↩

  30. See John W. Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book and FARMS: 1992) 83–91; and John W. Welch and Melvin J. Thorne, eds., Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon (Provo: FARMS, 1999), 289–292. ↩

  31. D. Michael Quinn, “Joseph Smith’s Experience of a Methodist ‘Camp-Meeting’ in 1820,” Dialogue Paperless, E-Paper 3, Expanded Version (Definitive), 20 December 2006, online at http://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/QuinnPaperless.pdf. ↩

  32. Frequent reference to “toxic shame” in Riskas derives from John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You, (Dearfield Beach: Health Communications, Inc., 1988). ↩

  33. Madad Sarup, Post-Structuralism and Post Modernism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 50. ↩

  34. Sarup, 51–52. ↩

  35. Riskas, 40. ↩

  36. Riskas, 408. ↩

  37. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 2:34, cited in Ben Spackman, “Brigham Young, Studying Evil, Living in a Bubble” at Patheos, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/oneeternalround/2010/08/brigham-young-studying-evil-and-living-in-a-bubble/. ↩

  38. Riskas, 133. ↩

  39. Riskas, 336–337. ↩

  40. Riskas, 337. ↩

  41. Riskas, 24–25. ↩

  42. Riskas, 115. ↩

  43. Riskas, 24. ↩

  44. Riskas, lxi. ↩

  45. Northop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 330. ↩

  46. Riskas, 383. The reference to “potential harm” reminds me of Nibley’s discussion of the “unfulfilled condition” as a useful rhetorical technique. See Hugh Nibley, Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 11: Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass (Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1991), 501. “Rule 19: Use the unfulfilled condition to make out a case against Mormons where there is neither evidence, nor absence of evidence, i.e., where nothing at all has happened” (501). ↩

  47. Riskas, 383. ↩

  48. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 65. ↩

  49. See Margaret Barker, “The Great High Priest” BYU Studies 42/3&4 (2003): 64–84. ↩

  50. Riskas, 174. Contrast D&C 1:30. ↩

  51. Riskas, 383. ↩

  52. Journal of Discourses 8:37. ↩

  53. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Perry#Perry.27s_schem. ↩

  54. I was introduced to the Perry Scheme by this emailed summary from Veda Hale. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22100469/Perry%20Scheme.pdf. She had written a study of Levi Peterson’s Canyons of Grace, using the Perry Scheme as a framework to understand the character arcs. I prefer the Perry Scheme to Fowler’s Stages of Faith, since Fowler’s model is concerned more with the conclusions a person comes to, whereas the Perry Scheme deals more with how a person processes information. ↩

  55. Joseph F. Smith, ed. Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), 327. ↩

  56. Joseph Smith, History of the Church, 5:215. ↩

  57. “I want the liberty of believing as I please, it feels so good not to be trammeled. It doesn’t prove that a man is not a good man because he believes false doctrine.” Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center Monograph, 1980), 183–84, spelling modernized. ↩

  58. See, for example, 3 Nephi 15:14–22. ↩

  59. Riskas, 300. He cites a source which claims that “the message has never been rescinded in any official way” (fn 169). Since it is contradicted by D&C 1 which officially declares “the authority of servants,” why would it need to be? And of course there is President George Albert Smith’s direct rebuttal. That Riskas qualifies his remarks as referring to “any official way,” it suggests to me that he knows about President Smith’s letter, and prefers to suppress the information. Incidentally, official statements like this won’t be truly ‘heard’ by those at a Position 2 understanding of LDS authorities because comprehension and acceptance of such statements is contingent on developing an advanced understanding of human authorities. The transition cannot be forced by statements from authorities. As President Smith’s full letter and D&C 1 shows, such statements have been made by the highest LDS authorities on several occasions. One might think that those who most depend on authority figures for guidance would have noticed, but the issue is not the thoughts expressed, but the thinking about authority that filters perception and guides thinking at those positions. The best we can do is to nurture those in transition, and the best way to nurture individuals through transitions is to understand the individual types and developmental positions for what they are. It also helps to look up “sustain” in a good dictionary. ↩

  60. See http://www.fairlds.org/authors/misc/when-the-prophet-speaks-is-the-thinking-done and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19:1 (Spring 1986), 35-39. ↩

  61. Riskas, 48. ↩

  62. Riskas,11. ↩

  63. Riskas, 383. ↩

  64. Kuhn, Structure, 158. ↩

  65. Mark 4:3–20. ↩

  66. Riskas, 115, note 80. ↩

  67. Riskas, 225. ↩

  68. Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 98. The chapter is conveniently online here: http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2238&C=207. ↩

  69. Compare Riskas, 115. ↩

  70. Barbour, 3. ↩

  71. Barbour, 9. ↩

  72. Barbour, 98. ↩

  73. Barbour, 99. ↩

  74. Barbour, 132–133. ↩

  75. Riskas, 74. ↩

  76. Alan Goff, “Dan Vogel’s Family Romance and the Book of Mormon as Smith Family Allegory,” FARMS Review of Books 17/2 (2005): 329. ↩

  77. Kuhn, Structure, 109. ↩

  78. Kuhn, 154. ↩

  79. Riskas, 153. ↩

  80. See Kevin Christensen, “A Model of Mormon Spiritual Experience,” 19–21, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22100469/model_of_experience.pdf. ↩

  81. See Kevin Christensen, “Biblical Keys for Discerning True and False Prophets.” http://en.fairmormon.org/Biblical_Keys_for_Discerning_True_and_False_Prophets/Seeing_the_trut. ↩

  82. See Christensen, http://en.fairmormon.org/Biblical_Keys_for_Discerning_True_and_False_Prophets/Rejecting_true_prophet. ↩

  83. Goff, 335. ↩

  84. Riskas, 394–39. ↩

  85. Goff, 335. ↩

  86. Hugh Nibley, The Ancient State, 380–478. ↩

  87. Nibley, 38. ↩

  88. Nibley, 38. ↩

  89. Nibley, 39. ↩

  90. Riskas, 338. ↩

  91. Nibley, 431. ↩

  92. Riskas, xxxi. ↩

  93. Riskas, 241. ↩

  94. Riskas, 241. ↩

  95. Riskas, 257. ↩

  96. Barbour, 161. ↩

  97. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms, 168–169. ↩

  98. For example, David Bokovoy, “‘Ye Really Are Gods’: A Response to Michael Heiser Concerning the LDS Use of Psalm 82 and the Gospel of John,” FARMS Review of Books 19/1 (2007): 267–313. ↩

  99. Floyd Ross, “Process Philosophy and Mormon Thought” Sunstone 7/1 (January-February 1982): 17–25, with a reply by Sterling McMurrin, 25–27. ↩

  100. Hugh Nibley, “Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and Sophistic” in The Ancient State, 370–371. ↩

  101. Riskas, 260. ↩

  102. Riskas, 264. ↩

  103. Riskas, 395. ↩

  104. Barbour, 120. Also http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2238&C=2080. ↩

  105. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 5. ↩

  106. D&C 46:23. ↩

  107. Frye, 6–7. ↩

  108. Barbour, 118. Also here: http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2238&C=2079. ↩

  109. Barbour, 124. ↩

  110. Barbour, 53–55. ↩

  111. Though Barbour has useful observations on myth (21–22), he does not include the patterns among his basic evidences. I think it belongs and brings a complementary symmetry to “key historical events.” That is, we should appreciate both the temporal and the spiritual. ↩

  112. Barbour, 115. ↩

  113. Kuhn, 147. ↩

  114. Barbour, 55–56. http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2238&C=2077. ↩

  115. Dean C. Jessee, The Papers of Joseph Smith, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1989), 6; cf. Alma 30:44 and D&C 88:42–50. ↩

  116. Barbour, 20. ↩

  117. Barbour, 53–54. ↩

  118. Mark E. Koltko, “Mysticism and Mormonism: An LDS Perspective on Transcendence and Higher Consciousness,” Sunstone 13/2 (April 1989): 14–19. ↩

  119. Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Cross Cultural Explorations of Human Belief (New York, Charles Scribners: 1983), 71–72. ↩

  120. 2 Nephi 25:23. ↩

  121. A similar shift occurs in the account in Moses 1:10, 18 as he reports his sense of nothingness, and then asserts “I am a son of God, in the similitude of his Only Begotten;… and I have other things to inquire of him. ↩

  122. Smart, Worldviews, 76. ↩

  123. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance” in Carl Bode and Malcom Cowley, The Portable Emerson (New York: Penguin, 1981), 138–164. ↩

  124. See The Portable Emerson, 269, and “Threnody,” 656–664. ↩

  125. Smart’s examples of the blend of the numinous and mystic in Worldviews come from Hinduism, which, compared to Mormonism, lacks a balancing historical orientation (something distinct from a historical tradition) to complement its rich exploration of symbolism. ↩

  126. Lisa Bolin Hawkins and Gordon Thomasson, “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee: Survivor-Witness in the Book of Mormon,” FARMS Preliminary Report, 1984. Their paper is based on Terrence Des Pres, “Survivors and the Will to Bear Witness,” Social Research 40 (1973): 668–69, and Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). ↩

  127. I am quoting the summary in the Hawkins–Thomasson paper, “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee,” and am parenthetically adding references to appropriate passages from the experiences of the key figures of the final chapters of the Book of Mormon. ↩

  128. Barbour, 54. ↩

  129. Barbour, 54–55, as Interpersonal Dialogue. ↩

  130. Richard Bushman, “My Belief,” in A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars, ed. Philip L. Barlow (Centerville, UT: Cannon, 1986), 24. ↩

  131. Barbour, 56. ↩

  132. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms, 55. ↩

  133. Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 187–88. ↩

  134. Barbour, 172. ↩

  135. Barbour, 136. ↩

  136. Veda Hale, email to Kevin Christensen on the Perry Scheme, Position 6. ↩

  137. Veda Hale. Position 6. ↩

  138. Veda Hale, Perry Scheme summary. Position 7. ↩

  139. Veda Hale, Perry Scheme summary, Position 7. ↩

  140. For example, TPJS, 313. ↩

  141. Hale, Position 7. ↩

  142. Think of Joseph Smith’s remarkably post-modern statement that “the different teachers of religion understood the same passages so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible” (Joseph Smith–History, 1:12). ↩

  143. History of the Church 4:595. ↩

  144. Daniel Peterson, “Historical Concreteness or Speculative Abstraction?” FARMS Review of Books 14/1-2 (2002): xii. ↩

  145. Blake Ostler, “Spiritual Experiences as the Basis for Belief and Commitment” at http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences/2007-fair-conference/2007-spiritual-experiences-as-the-basis-for-belief-and-commitment. This is listed in his bibliography and is the only mention of FAIR in Riskas’s book. ↩

  146. Riskas, 158. ↩

  147. Barbour, 135–136. ↩

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): 97-112
13

Review of The Mother of the Lord, volume 1: The Lady in the Temple by Margaret Barker, 2012, London: Bloomsbury.

Mormons who know about her are usually fans of Margaret Barker. Disclosure: I am one of them (Mormon who knows about her, and fan). For further disclosure, she paid attention and respect to the writings of Hugh Nibley, to whom I was and am filially devoted. So it isn’t as if I am unbiased in appreciating Barker’s work. I am also not alone; there are quite a few of us who read and love her. Indeed it may be said we love her because she first loved us—or at least unwittingly agreed with us. With her 2012 book, The Mother of the Lord, volume 1: The Lady in the Temple, she has once again written about ancient biblical events in ways that can cast Mormon scriptural claims as possible, if not consciously validated or proven. Barker is no Mormon apologist, after all, though she is sympathetic. Her Protestant views understandably color her writing, as do classical training and sympathies with Roman Catholic sensibilities, particularly about Mary. Of course it is not her book’s project to engage Latter-day Saints and our issues specifically, even if we are enthusiastic about what Barker finds. Her discoveries and claims have a place for Mormon teachings, but the fit we see is many times an odd one, unexpected, sometimes uncomfortably not on our terms. My friend compared reading Barker to having a non-Mormon archaeologist discover absolute proof of New World Book of [Page 98]Mormon cultures: a beautifully preserved city in the heart of, say, Guatemala, with road signs and a legible library of all the civic records of Zarahemlah—and having the discovery include copious affidavits describing the Dineh People’s tribulations crossing the Kamchatka Peninsula and down the Rockies. Topping it off, the documents are signed by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Catherine of Sienna and are notarized by John Wesley. “Great! See, we were—wait, what?” My friend’s example is a little extreme, but the comparison works on the chuckle level.

A Bible scholar and Methodist minister who has been the president of The Society for Old Testament Study (1998), Barker studied at Cambridge and has written fourteen scholarly books on the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, including half a dozen on the Messiah’s role in ancient Israelite religions and more than that about ancient temple worship. She is frighteningly well-read, and her vast complex of source material is mind-boggling. Barker’s views are not always appreciated in all circles, and there might be a bit of an edge detected in some scholars’ pointing out that her doctor of divinity is a degree bestowed by the Archbishop of Canterbury instead of by an academic administrator.1 But there is no question that she has an audience and a message both for that audience and for her detractors. And as messages go, hers are fascinating and important enough not to be ignored.

In her scholarship as a whole, Rev. Barker works from the assumption that the oldest biblical religions were different in type and degree from the ways in which they have been taught subsequently but that traces of the original ideas remain, revealed in textual and extra-textual clues. What those specific differences are is the subject of her books; the object is the evidence she finds in texts available from the Hebrew Bible, the [Page 99]Christian Testaments, and any extra-canonical contemporary accounts she can use to explore such a remote complex of cultures. Barker’s interpretation assumes a dynamic, developing religion, beginning with Abraham’s prophetic call and his rejection of Ugaritic traditions and evolving over centuries into the monotheism recognizable in most interpretations of the Old Testament.

Barker’s Thesis for The Mother of the Lord

The Mother of the Lord builds on themes from Barker’s previous work in The Great High Priest (2003) and Temple Theology (2004).2 Her thesis for this volume is that worship in the first temple venerated not a monotheistic supreme Creator God, but a Family of divine beings within an even larger Council of Gods. This Family consisted of the Father, called the Highest; the Mother, identified with the consort-Goddess Asherah and known as the personification of Wisdom; and the Son, who was named the Lord. She presents arguments to show how the Son and Father were collapsed and convoluted into the One God of the Hebrew Bible we read now, and Wisdom the Mother was banished entirely, surviving only in clues and fragments. According to Barker, Abraham’s earliest version of temple worship was deliberately changed, “purified” by King Josiah in the sixth century bce, to align with The Book of the Law. This book, which was discovered as the temple was renovated, is arguably either a version of Deuteronomy or an extracanonical law code. Its adherents, aligned with Josiah’s reform efforts or he with theirs, are referred to as the Deuteronomists. Their temple and worship overhaul caused the loss of what were likely many plain and precious things. Among these were the older ideas, symbols, possibly entire rituals, and [Page 100]forms of words from the temple as its adherents had known it, including the Lady Wisdom. At the time of the purge, Barker notes, groups of traditionalist believers (we may think of Lehi and his family) left or were driven from Jerusalem, and in their exile they continued the older forms of Abrahamic worship (Barker, 75).

It is Barker’s assertion that these older beliefs are discoverable both in the Bible and in texts such as The Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach, The Book of Weeks and The Apocalypse of Enoch (and LDS can see echoes in the Book of Mormon as well). In addition to extra-biblical texts recording descriptions of the Lady in the temple, Barker offers close readings and re-readings of the Bible itself, finding evidence for the older traditions in Ezekiel, Psalms, Micah, Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, and parts of Isaiah. Many of the prophets are condemning not just foreigners, enemies, or invaders from without the kingdom but also the changes they saw from the religion of Abraham to that of Moses, and his Law.

One of Barker’s tools for examining Bible texts involves suggesting alternate orthography for certain words and explaining possible scribal emendations to show how a few pen strokes could disguise one word as something subtly—or drastically—different from its original form or spelling. Sometimes a different reading is possible simply by applying different vowel values to the words, which is one of the ways Hebrew exploits its rich possibility for punning and polysemy, an integral feature of the written language and its literature. This interpretive methodology has been questioned by readers like Michael Heiser and Paul Owen as being too speculative.3 Certainly if cast in terms of a conspiracy-theorist style [Page 101]proof-texting, it’s easy to see how that objection arises. If I selectively changed the word “whale” into the word “world” and “ship” into “shop” (they look and sound alike, after all) in Herman Melville’s proof-copy of Moby Dick, I could create some fascinating readings myself and alter the history of American literature forever. But it isn’t as simple as that.

To a non-specialist reader like me, the problems with the critics’ rejecting out-of-hand what Barker has found are first, the sheer number of “speculations” that support her conclusions; second, the consistency and sensibleness of the patterns they reveal; and third, that there are extra-biblical texts and archeological evidence to support her claims. To refute a single word-change as fanciful is reasonable; to refute all of them and then reject the textual and archaeological external witnesses as well seems overwhelming and even a bit petulant. In The Mother of the Lord, Barker uses her methods of emendation and multiplying examples to show that the Deuteronomic and Josiahan reforms resulted in the rejection of the council of gods idea and the expulsion of the divine family in favor of the One God, in an effort to maintain (or retroactively create) a “history” of consistent, correlated monotheism. To me, four hundred pages of example and explanation (of volume 1!) are convincing.

Though the specifics of Barker’s methodology are challenging for some, especially traditionalist religious teachers preaching the orthodox tenets of their heritage, scholars of the ancient world are largely in agreement that religion of the Hebrews in its earliest iteration was closer to the polytheistic religion of the Canaanites and other neighbors/rivals than the Bible-as-received has allowed. They also acknowledge that [Page 102]female deities, specifically Wisdom as expressed by Asherah the Mother of the Lord, were lost after the sixth century bce.4

Implications for Abrahamic Religions

This was an enormous change for the religion of Abraham. It was nothing less than the recasting of an entire cultural world view that had been based on belief in a divine multiplicity into a rejection of that multiplicity per se, including erasing the relationships among divine beings. If God is always and only One, then “other” gods are not only blasphemous but worthless, being newly nonexistent, and if God is always and only One, then God is not part of a Family. Thus, in its initial narration, the Bible recorded a society in transition, elevating one God above the other gods. But far more important, in its canonization with Deuteronomist editing, the Bible elevates that particular God to a supremacy resulting in the obliteration of all the other divine persons. This results in a complex collection of cultural and social changes, probably the most severe of which was the gendering of God.

MonoGod = Male God

For many readers, Barker’s description of worship of the Mother Goddess is one of her most radical claims (“radical” in the sense of “rootedness”—it is a “deep” claim). Historically, one of the most problematic sociocultural aspects of all the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—has been their identification of a single and singular God with a [Page 103]necessarily and immutably male God. Western culture has been breathing this air for so many millennia it seems outrageous to suggest any alternatives, but that sensibility is the very legacy Barker is exposing.

It is a truism among modern monotheistic religions that “primitive” or “unsophisticated” religions are too anthropomorphic, casting divine persons as far too human, including somehow enfleshed bodies with attendant drives and appetites. This is one reason polytheism and primitivism are usually coupled. In creedal Christianities, proper theology rejects the scandals of physicality and multiplicity and describes instead the One God as an impossibly remote, wholly Other, different-species, utterly-not-us, and ironically male but sexless divinity (see Bokovoy, 2012).5 Joseph Smith suggested a return (restoration) to a family model with a physicalized and thus sexualized model of God, God as a Father along with a Mother. At this point, some LDS may holler loudly and polysyllabically about our claims to her, about our exclusive, deeply ecclesiastically problematic and schizophrenic recognition/avoidance of a “Mother in Heaven.” They will quote from Doctrine and Covenants 10 and sing Eliza Snow—all four verses; others will mutter and change the subject. Quickly. Though I would love nothing better than to count myself among the hollerers, I must save that for later; Barker’s identification of the temple goddess is quite independent from our own intranecine squabbles.

One of the Gods of the Council was the female figure of Asherah. There are archeological as well as textual references to her throughout the geographical area claimed by biblical history, datable to the times before Josiah’s purge (Barker, 154 ff.). Asherah was known mostly as either a consort of the Highest or of the Lord, or she was the Mother of the Lord; [Page 104]Barker argues for her role as Mother of the Lord (hence the title of the book). From thence Barker makes a case for Mary the Virgin as Wisdom’s manifestation in the mystery of the Incarnation. As Wisdom, the goddess was the female element of divine nurturance, and when Old Testament prophets reference Wisdom, it is almost always a reference to her (Barker, 234). Without Wisdom, worshippers were left in the hands of the Law without consideration, without mercy or understanding (Barker, 364-65). She was the recognizable sign of God’s presence among the people, though her identity was obscured by her many manifestations; she was Wisdom, Khokhmah; she was the presence of God, Shekinah, Pillar and Shadow; her iconic symbols were indicative of her being the Mater-matter of life: the Breath of God; the Spirit; Holy Fire (she speaks to Moses from a burning, unconsumed fruit bush); fertile fields; high places (mountains or hills; the proto-temples of Abraham, Moses, etc.); the abundance and faithful generosity of fruit-bearing trees (including their derivatives, wooden totems); and the vessel that bears the Lord, sometimes represented as a dish or bowl but often symbolized as the Throne (see chapter 5).

These symbols are named as idolatrous in Josiah’s reforms, and they were cast out of the temple (Barker, 7) and identified with “the Harlot.” But according to Barker’s postscript, the actual “harlot,” the usurping imposter, was the religion that replaced the Lady: “Jerusalem was burned by the Romans in 70 CE, and the heavens rejoiced that she had been destroyed with fire, the prescribed punishment for a priestly harlot (Rev. 19:1-5; Lev. 21:9). Only when the harlot had gone could the Lady of Jerusalem return. The Bride of the Lamb appeared, the heavens opened, and the Warrior came forth to bring judgement on evil and to establish His kingdom” (375). This Lady is identified in John’s Revelation as both the oldest temple Asherah and the Blessed Virgin Mary; both are allegorically tied to the covenant of the True Church, and both retain feminine grammatical [Page 105]forms as well as personified feminine divinity. In the Revelation, there is no way to interpret the Lady with the Child as anything other than godly, honored for herself as well as her child. The allegorical depth of the imagery and symbolism is striking, and no single interpretation can dismiss others. Barker sees the polyvalence of John’s imagery as complementary: she is Mary, she is the Holy Covenant; she is God’s Wisdom and Presence and Spirit; she is the Mother.

We need to be open to seeing the overlap of such ideas and symbols, of entertaining many names for the Heavenly Family to whom we have always belonged. They are not far from us, but we foolish mortals have drifted far from them. Barker says “It has become customary to translate and read the Hebrew Scriptures as an account of one male deity, and the feminine presence is not made clear. Had it been the custom to read of a female Spirit or to find Wisdom capitalized, it would have been easier to make the link between the older faith in Jerusalem and later developments outside the stream represented by the canonical texts. At the beginning of Genesis, there would have been, and should be, ‘the Spirit of God, she was fluttering over the face of the deep’ (Gen. 1:2) and in the Psalms, that the Lord made all his works with Wisdom (Ps. 104:24). The problem is not just one of the modern translations; there are gender ambiguities even in the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch” (Barker, 331-332; emphasis Barker’s).

Aside from (yet rooted to) religious understanding of the nature of the divine, the cultural heritage of these changes has been harsh. To muddy even symbolic representations of the feminine deity (all the way down to confusing grammatical gender of the nouns) into debatable forms and further to disparage the feminine divine to the designation of harlot is reductive and damaging. And then further still to purge the temple of female-associated iconography and restrict the Lady from the realms of the divinely possible is to reject the potential [Page 106]goodness of anything female and the femaleness of anything good. And despite efforts to counteract the harm, this has been the result of a solely male God for hundreds of years of Western history.

An exclusively male God-idea assigns gender to the qualities of humanity that differentiate mortal (male) men from everything Other and places males on the side of God, which is now ontologically opposed to the side where mortal women find themselves. In a structuralist sense, the masculinization of God implies and inevitably assigns females down its slippery slope either to earthly realms, to “natural” realms, or to some equivalent of Hell, Gehenna, or Sheol. God is in the image of Man, rather than the other way around, and again in a structuralist configuration, “man” does not include all humans. Rather, “man” becomes what he is by contrast to all that is not “man”; this includes the inanimate world, the “natural” world, or brute reality, the state of childhood (a “man” is not a “boy”) and of course the “female.”

Fortunately, the universe is not necessarily structuralist.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter.

The preponderance of human civilizations have developed codified expectations of gendered behavior, and rarely (never) are the expectations “fair” to the actual individual persons trying to meet them. Ancient Judaism is no exception. Bringing religion into this mix—or bringing this mix into religion; they are usually inseparable—always adds fuel to all fires set by such unfairness, and no one living on this planet is spared the repercussions of the resulting imbalances. (For far too many examples, see thousands of years of commentary on the Adam and Eve story.)

[Urgent aside: This is the point in the essay where we pretend to have already had the “battle-of-the-sexes” conversation. We did it brilliantly and courteously, using well-supported claims and not insisting on our own anecdotes as data but also not [Page 107]dismissing others’ personal experience as irrelevant, raising salient points and disagreeing with respect nigh unto reverence for each others’ viewpoints, life stories, and opinions. Not a single logical fallacy was committed, no harsh words were exchanged, no guilt trips or traps laid or sprung, no names called and no offense meant or received. It was breathtaking, really, how intelligently our difficult but sensitive and nuanced conversation about problematic non-absolute biological sexual dimorphism, Cartesian dualism, and gendered socialization unfolded, and we all came out of it enlightened, refreshed, and feeling all the more fond of each other, affectionate, heard, understood, and loved. Because we are amazing like that. Practically Saints.]

The Mediterranean ancient world was undeniably sexist, with advantages accruing disproportionately to the men and the disadvantages to the women (see: all of human history). Judaism was far from alone in either its antifeminism (the belief that women cannot and should not be equal in legal status or standing to men) or its misogyny (the belief that females as females are ontologically inferior to males and possibly irredeemably evil). Most all civilizations have had varying degrees of power imbalances based on questions of sex (biological morphology) and gender (social codes of expected behavior). Historically there have been long, tedious arguments as to whether and how much of this difference-produced philosophical quandary is legitimate, including the perennial question of women having souls (I am not making this up). Since the answer is “none of it,” and we have already sorted the problem ourselves (so well!), we’ll not revisit the generalities but consider where Barker’s observations contribute.

Typical readings of the Books of Moses set God’s religion as monotheist and the Children of Israel as reformed polytheists who keep backsliding into old traditions with other gods. The Deuteronomist system is absolute. Since other gods are not the [Page 108]One God, then recognition of all other gods must be sinful. The equation becomes this: if not the One God, then polytheist; if polytheist, then pagan; if pagan, then condemned/condemnable. Then: if not pagan, then monotheist. If monotheist, then the One God; if the One God, then no Goddess. These are all dualist propositions; in this syllogism there are no options “C.”

But if Barker (and, coincidentally, Joseph Smith) is correct, there is an option “C.” If the non-pagan, respectable divine can possibly include a variety rather than a singularity, the problem of half of humanity as intrinsically less than the other half simply doesn’t exist as such, and we can toss out the horrible debates of pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers about “whether” women have souls or not and get right down to the far more serious theological question of whether they can or should wear trousers to church.

I kid. I wink, I try to lighten the mood. Because the Barker thesis is a light in darkness, irrespective of trivial mortal concerns (like clothing-in-context), this is Woman being “returned” to the Heavens. The fact that Barker’s compelling description of Mother Goddess coincides (once again) with one of the more outrageous propositions of LDS thought gives us pause as well as hope. I am not quite sure what to do with such an idea coming from Barker’s studies because, in the absence of latter-day prophetic instruction on the matter, I am also not quite sure what is to be done with our own LDS version of it. Our version is not Catholic. The Protestant version is not Catholic. But the two not-Catholics are not-Catholic in slightly different ways.

Catholics venerate Mary as the Mother of God and therefore holy, so she can be an intercessor with God. Though not God herself, Mary is blessed among women and holds a unique place in the religion. Veneration of Mary is unacceptable to Protestants, because they see Mary as merely a human whom God chose to be the mortal mother of Jesus; [Page 109]worshipping her or praying to her (or any intercessory other than Christ) is somewhere on the spectrum from useless to blasphemous. Though Catholic and Protestant understanding of trinitarianism settles the problem of polytheism by making the three persons into One God, some Protestants see Catholicism’s veneration of Saints, and particularly of Mary, as creeping polytheism. Mormonism does not venerate Mary, and the reasons given are usually the same as those in Protestantism but for different reasons. LDS objection to venerating Mary is not a rejection of polytheism in the guise of Mary since we do not accept trinitarianism. And it is not a rejection of the female possibilities of the divine since we do continue to admit to “Heavenly Parents” even publicly. It may simply be that, absent a prophetic revelation in this dispensation, we do not know the identity of our Mother in Heaven. Speculation does not help because it leads in very uncomfortable directions: toward Joseph Smith’s polygamy (“We don’t know who ‘she’ is because there are many mothers”), or Brigham Young’s Adam-God theory (which does make Eve the Mother of all living, but also makes Adam God.) Without more information about either, both are more than problematic. Barker’s proposition that Mary does not merely represent an older Goddess but is, as the mother of Jesus, the true Mother of the Lord and as such a Goddess in her own right, confounds both trinitarianism and traditionalist monotheism. Even the part Mormonism has become comfortable with.

Implications for Latter-day Saints

The ways of ancient Abrahamic temple worship and modern Mormon temple worship, for all their apparent or reputed similarities, are also substantially different. And when it comes to Mother in Heaven and the temple, if she is correct in claiming the Goddess of Israel a place of veneration in temples of antiquity, then Barker’s book widens that gap, rather than [Page 110]narrowing it. There is no cause for anyone inside the LDS Church or out of it to claim that our temples are places where we consciously, communally worship any female deities as Barker describes the oldest Israelites doing. Though LDS doctrine allows and even requires a Heavenly Mother, the American Christian context Mormonism was born into included anti-pagan, anti-polytheist, and anti-woman implicit and explicit assumptions. In America at the time of the Restoration of the Gospel, the bickering Protestant communities were in agreement about one thing at least: they were all pleased not to be Catholic. Roman Catholicism is the only one of the mainstream Western descendants of Abrahamic religions to make a place for a woman to be revered, in the person of Mary, Mother of Jesus. For many early Protestants, Catholic veneration of Mary was one of the reasons to protest (Calvin rejected any praise for anyone other than God; Luther called a belief in intercessory saints idolatry). “Popery” as the early Protestants called the Catholic church, tipped into idolatry (polytheism) in its inclusion of the intercessory powers of patron saints, and none was more to be feared than the Saint whose Motherhood threatened monotheism and whose femaleness was not male.

That Barker and other scholars have had to defend the possibility of an ancient Abrahamic religion with a Goddess is telling. Like a paranoid dream coming true, it seems that Josiah’s redactions and insistence on absolute male monotheism as de rigeur, rather than being a scandal itself, has worked! It succeeded in creating a history and subsequently an entrenched tradition of reverence for its monotheist status quo wherein any polytheist counter-thought is heresy and our Mother is the scandal: No! A God, a God; we have a God and there can be no more God.

Centuries of theologizing God have removed the divine impossibly far from us, yet we would not want to return to God if there were not something in common between God’s “good” [Page 111]and our mortal experience of “good.” Which always, always, includes love. In their book The God Who Weeps, Fiona and Terryl Givens say, “God’s nature and and life are the simple extension of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. However rapturous or imperfect, fulsome or shattered, our knowledge of love has been, we sense it is the very basis and purpose of our existence.”6 Heaven is not joyless, and joy is not solitary, exclusive, exclusively male, or even aspirationally male (sorry, Paul; sorry, Phillip; sorry, Timaeus). Joseph Smith had the audacity to suggest a re-anthropomorphized God who is (blasphemously, for the creeds) like us in more ways than even we, Joseph’s followers, are comfortable admitting. The history of religion informing social constructs is almost the entire history of history, so when religion split humanity along gender lines, elevating half and discarding the other half, the results were tragic. When our lives are controlled not by striving to conform to God’s will but to conform to a seriously flawed social expectation, there is something fundamentally broken, fallen, wrong with all of us, requiring enlightenment, repentance, and Atonement. Joseph Smith wanted Zion, where the Last shall be First. He wanted Zion, where there are no poor (no class divisions based on anything) among us. Where “all are alike unto God, black and white, bond and free, male and female” (2 Ne. 26:33). Zion is not a solitary place of stark silent sterility or a shame-based hierarchy of good and better but an ever-expanding community of sloppy, sentimental joy, where “they will fall upon our necks, and we shall fall upon their necks, and we shall kiss each other” (Moses 7:63)

One other important tenet of the Protestant Reformation was to reject overt priestly and papal interference with the sacred bond of God and mortal child, a sentiment the LDS [Page 112]can certainly sympathize with. In Barker’s English Protestant heritage is the poet-preacher George Herbert, who writes not on a stone altar but offers himself as the locus of worship, makes of his own heart a temple altar.7 If Josiah’s changes can so harshly throw the Mother of the Lord—our Mother—out of the temple and out of the religions that descended from it, perhaps we can quietly, defiantly strike back. Taking a leaf from the Protestants who so graciously blessed us with the likes of Margaret Barker, we Mormons could each carry our Mother back into the temple, giving her back her place, beside Father, on the altars of our hearts.

  1. http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1241/archbishop-of-canterbury-awards-lambeth-degrees ↩

  2. Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (London: T&T Clark, 2003); Margaret Barker, Temple Theology (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004). ↩

  3. See Michael Heiser, “Margaret Barker Manufactures a Goddess in Isaiah 7,” PaleoBabble, October 31, 2008, http://michaelsheiser.com/PaleoBabble/2008/10/margaret-barker-manufacturing-a-goddess-in-isaiah-7/ (accessed September 27, 2013); Paul Owen, “Monotheism, Mormonism, and the New Testament Witness,” in The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement, Francis J. Beckwith, Carl Mosser and Paul Owen, eds. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 301-308. ↩

  4. See William G. Dever, Did God have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005); Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Susan Ackerman, Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and biblical Israel (New York: Doubleday, 1998); Mark S. Smith The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002); David E. Bokovoy, Yahweh as a Sexual Deity in J’s Prehistory (PhD dissertation, Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, 2012). ↩

  5. See Bokovoy, Yahweh as a Sexual Deity in J’s Prehistory. ↩

  6. Terryl Givens and Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life (Ensign Peak, 2012), 109. ↩

  7. George Herbert, “The Altar,” in George Herbert: The Country Parson, the Temple, John N. Wall, ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 139. ↩

The Original Text of the Book of Mormon and its Publication by Yale University Press

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): 57-96
7

[Page 57]An earlier version of the following paper was presented 5 August 2010 at a conference sponsored by FAIR, the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (now FairMormon). The text of this paper is copyrighted by Royal Skousen. The photographs that appear in this paper are also protected by copyright. Photographs of the original manuscript are provided courtesy of David Hawkinson and Robert Espinosa and are reproduced here by permission of the Wilford Wood Foundation. Photographs of the printer’s manuscript are provided courtesy of Nevin Skousen and are reproduced here by permission of the Community of Christ. The text of the Yale edition of The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (2009) is copyrighted by Royal Skousen; Yale University Press holds the rights to reproduce this text.

In this paper I discuss the work of the Book of Mormon critical text project and the attempt to restore and publish the original text of the Book of Mormon. I’ve been working on the critical text project from 1988 up to the present, and thus far ten books have been published as part of this project. Continue reading →

I Do Not Think That WORD Means What You Think It Means

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): 49-55
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[Page 49]Review of E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2012), 240 pp. $16.00.

Of course, the correct quotation of Inigo Montoya’s famous line in The Princess Bride is “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Unfortunately, it made too long a title, though in homage to Richards and O’Brien’s book, I have substituted the culturally defined Word for its more common reference. That is precisely the message of the book. You keep reading that Word. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. From their introduction:

Continue reading →

An Essay on the One True Morality and the Principle of Freedom

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 7 (2013): 1-47
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[Page 1]Abstract: The author introduces the subject of the essay based on scripture by observing that one true morality governs the heavens and exists to govern mortality, which contains all possible ways to live in time and eternity and orders them into a hierarchy of rational preferability. In order to live their endless lives with enduring purpose and fullness, humankind must undertake two stages of probationary preparation, one as premortals and one that begins with mortality and concludes in the post-mortal world with the final judgment, in which they come to know for themselves the one morality and accept its ordering of the many never-ending ways of life and hence the ways they have proven themselves willing to receive. With that introduction in mind, in the next two sections of the essay the author explores what some latter-day scripture reveals about the moral facts that make possible knowledge of the one morality, about how humankind determines good from bad ways to live as they undertake the second stage of probationary preparation, about how they can come to a knowledge of the best way of life contained in that morality, and how in the end they have a perfect knowledge of it.

In the final section of the essay, the author investigates how it was that in the premortal world the hosts of heaven, knowing and accepting as they did the one true morality, nevertheless became deeply divided over two incompatible plans of salvation as they prepared for moral life and went to war over them. A major theme of the essay is that the one morality, and every way to live it contains, [Page 2]center on persons becoming and living as agents unto themselves. The upshot is that the principle of freedom, which prescribes the full collective and personal realization of human agency and which belongs to all humankind at every stage of their endless existence, is the fundamental principle of that eternal morality. Continue reading →

Introduction, Volume 6: The Modest But Important End of Apologetics

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 6 (2013): vii-xxv
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I first became involved in apologetics because I wanted to defend the truth of beliefs that are important to me and to defend the character of leaders for whom I have great respect, even veneration, against attack. I’m offended by falsehoods, prejudice, and injustice. I wanted to help faltering members who were sometimes besieged by intellectual challenges for which they had no adequate response. I also desired to assist interested observers to see sufficient plausibility in the Gospel’s claims that they would be able to make its truth a matter of sincere and receptive prayer. My hope was to clear away obstacles that might obscure their recognition of truth. These continue to be my motivations, and I expect that others who are engaged in apologetics feel much the same way.

Recently, though, I’ve read a book by an Anglican minister in Canada who believes that “apologetics is a very serious threat to Christian faith.”1 “I am against apologetics,” writes Myron Penner in The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context, “because its modern forms undercut the very gospel it wishes to protect.”2

Plainly, Dr. Penner’s volume is a sharp challenge to the legitimacy of Christian apologetics in general, and, as such, it merits attention from reflective Latter-day Saint apologists. [Page viii]The Interpreter Foundation and this, its journal, are, in part though not entirely, apologetic enterprises. Thus, it seems clear to me that the book deserves some consideration in these pages. Perhaps, too, since I’ve been publicly associated with Mormon apologetics over the past nearly twenty-five years, it’s worthwhile for me to put on record something of my own personal reaction to Dr. Penner’s book.

As might be expected from a self-described postmodernist, Penner tells several stories—”narratives,” if you prefer—in his book. I’ll consider two of them here. The first comes from his days as an undergraduate student:

One of the popular forms of modern apologetic discourse is the academic debate. My initiation into apologetic debates happened during my first year at university. A Christian apologist, who was touring university campuses, was invited by my university’s chapter of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) to debate the resident atheist in our philosophy department. This particular atheist professor had banished belief in God as a rational thought from countless freshmen philosophy students’ minds and had planted seeds of doubt in the hearts of many a fervent member of our IVCF group…

So a good number of us were elated to learn that an expert in Christian apologetics was coming who would definitively prove to everyone at our university that belief in God is rationally superior to atheism—and that we Christians are not as naïve and asinine as we are often made out to be.3

[Page ix]The latter goal, of proving “that we Christians are not as naïve and asinine as we are often made out to be,” strikes me as entirely legitimate, since the conviction that Christians hold their beliefs out of naïve asininity would probably deter an outsider from giving the claims and attractions of Christianity serious consideration. In this regard, apologetics serves a defensive function.

I’m reminded of a comment from the great English apologist C. S. Lewis: “Good philosophy,” he said, “must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”4 And I also think of Lewis’s good friend, the Oxford theologian and New Testament scholar Austin Farrer. At least until last year, a statement of Rev. Farrer’s, much beloved of Elder Neal A. Maxwell, served as something of an unofficial motto for the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and then for its successor organization, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship:

Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.5

Challenges need to be answered. If they are not, they can block sincere seekers from finding the truth. I’m somewhat less urgently concerned, I confess, about demonstrating that one belief is superior to another, though sometimes that, too, is important, and it can often be valuable and helpful. I’m interested in defense, but I have little interest in offense and [Page x]rarely if ever engage in it. I have no desire to attack other worldviews, let alone other religious faiths; I’m far more inclined to proclaim and advocate my own.

But back to Dr. Penner’s story:

To make the conclusion unambiguous, the audience would be polled to determine the winner… In the end, the Christian apologist was the winner with about 80 percent of the popular vote. The result was decisive, we felt, and it was regarded as a triumph for the cause of Christ. I remember being a little uneasy, though, as I looked around the room and noted that about 80 percent of the people in the room were people I knew from IVCF (or their guests).6

Implicit in Penner’s uneasy reminiscence is the suspicion that, very possibly, the whole effort was in vain, pointless: Those who went into the debate as convinced Christians left as convinced Christians, while those who rejected Christianity before the program presumably still rejected it after the lights of the room were turned off.

Nevertheless, I don’t think the conclusion follows, from Dr. Penner’s impression that few if any changed teams as a result of the debate, that the exchange was without value.

First of all, it may well be the case that some of the attendees who were associated with the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship had been wavering in their convictions as a result of intellectual concerns raised by that atheist professor, but that they left the debate that evening with their faith strengthened. They may not actually have changed their votes, but the conviction behind their votes may have been more firm, less troubled. From the standpoint of Christian commitment, this would be no small thing.

[Page xi]Second, the two occurrences of the word “about” in Dr. Penner’s story (“about 80 percent”) are not insignificant. In political campaigns, what happens to the undecided middle is often of crucial importance. While the “base” of each rival candidate may be firm, so that virtually nothing would be able to change their allegiance and their vote, a small shift in the inclinations of the less firmly committed voters in the center can make or break a candidacy. More significantly still, even the conversion of a single person is, or should be, of great value to believing Christians, as it undoubtedly is to God himself:

Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God;… And if it so be that you should labor all your days in crying repentance unto this people, and bring, save it be one soul unto me, how great shall be your joy with him in the kingdom of my Father! (Doctrine and Covenants 18:10, 15)

According to data presented by the Latter-day Saint social scientist Gary Lawrence in his important 2008 study How Americans View Mormonism, five percent of Americans say they would be willing to seriously investigate the Church.7 On one level, this seems very bad news. Only five percent? That means that fully 95% apparently wouldn’t be willing to seriously consider the claims of Mormonism. We could certainly wish the facts otherwise, but we shouldn’t overlook the good news: Five percent of Americans—which translates, given current figures, into something on the order of sixteen million people—would be willing, or so they say, to give real attention to the question of whether Mormonism is true if those claims were presented to them in an adequate manner. In other words, “the field is white already to harvest” (Doctrine and Covenants 4:4).

[Page xii]My own father joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, relatively late in his life, partly because of his exposure to apologetic arguments. (I baptized him when he was nearly sixty years old, on the night that I was set apart as a missionary.) He had married a semi-active member of the Church, my mother, and had long been supportive of ward activities even though he rarely attended worship services. Years after his baptism, he explained to me that one of the factors leading to his becoming a Latter-day Saint was picking up a volume—I don’t recall which it was—by Hugh Nibley. As he read, he found himself asking the question “Could this stuff actually be true?”

Apologetics was far and away not the only thing contributing to his conversion. Years and years of experience with Latter-day Saint friends, discussions with his wife and his two sons, and admiration for the general values of Mormonism also played important roles, and my imminent departure for two years in Switzerland plainly forced the issue. But Hugh Nibley’s apologetic writing was an important catalyst, and I can say with absolute confidence that apologetics proved its value to our family, at least, and made a profound difference for the good.

The second story from Dr. Penner’s book that I wish to consider here comes from later in his life:

John is a self-described atheist-Roman Catholic. He earned a PhD in philosophy at an Ivy League university and is a philosophy professor at a small, prestigious college in the United States. We met several years ago at a research center, and I noticed a deep spiritual hunger in him. John was fascinated by my faith and confided in me that although he felt he no longer had faith, he nevertheless experienced this as a profound loss. John confessed that he desperately wished he could believe [Page xiii]in God again and had even spent time in two different monasteries hoping to reignite his faith or find some deeper spiritual reality in which he could believe.

During our second week at the center, John and I were joined by two graduate students from a nearby seminary who had come to research for their master’s theses. Our new friends informed John and me that they had just completed a modular course on Christian apologetics with one of the leading contemporary apologists. Jokingly, they related how the apologist described himself as “the hired gun” who rode into town to shoot down the bad guys (atheists) and their arguments and make the streets safe again for Christians.

It did not take our budding apologists long to clue into the fact that John was not a professing Christian. And despite John’s protestations that he was not interested in arguing about faith, what he did or did not believe, or how far his beliefs were or were not justified, our two apologists went to work. They took aim and started to shoot holes in the reasonableness of John’s beliefs with their shiny, new apologetic six-guns.

John objected to this treatment. What bothered him, he said, was the impersonal way both he and his beliefs were being treated—as if they were abstract entities (like propositions) instead of reflections of spiritual realities with which he personally struggled. John told the apologists he found what they were doing offensive. Undaunted, our defenders of the faith assumed the apologetic right-of-way and continued with their inquisition in the name of unloading their [Page xiv]responsibility for John’s errors into God’s hands—informing John at one point that it was necessary so that his “blood would not be on their heads” (actually citing Ezekiel 3:18). Needless to say, this did not make a positive impression and did nothing to show John the truth of Christianity.8

Few of us have much difficulty, I expect, in grasping part of the point of this story. These two clueless Christian apologists should have been more sensitive to John as a person. They shouldn’t have been so manifestly at ease with offending him in the name of Jesus. Such ham-fistedness is wrong on every level—and, of course, is ineffective. Nobody had appointed them as inquisitors. It’s very difficult and perhaps altogether impossible to entirely avoid giving offense—some people, indeed, seem oddly eager to take it—but these two aggressive evangelists pretty obviously didn’t care, and there’s no justification for such an attitude.

Apologetic arguments, says Oxford University’s Benno van den Toren, “when used as a ‘battering ram’… will only force people to barricade their door stronger, notwithstanding its cracks and even because of its cracks, as long as they feel that they have no valid escape.”9 As the old saying goes, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”10

But Myron Penner is making a deeper point, I think, than merely the obvious one that we should be nice.

[Page xv]I’m quite familiar with the kind of Christian apologist who had trained these two. And, in fact, although I don’t know who he is, there’s a reasonable chance that I’ve met the very person in question or at least read some of his writing. I’m guessing that he’s an Evangelical Protestant. (And, obviously and unsurprisingly, he’s male. Christian apologetics is overwhelming dominated by men. We could speculate as to why this is so, and some critics of apologetics will have obvious answers that fit their agenda, but such speculation is beyond the scope of this little essay.)

I’ve noticed, with such apologists, what sometimes strikes me as astounding overconfidence in the power of reasoned argument and evidence to effect conversion. The presumption seems to be that, if you will simply attend to the evidence and the logic that is being set before you, you will, if your intellectual and moral faculties are properly functioning, necessarily recognize the truth of Christianity.

I reject that presumption. The Evangelical apologist Paul Feinberg observes that “a demonstrably sound argument is coercive in the sense that anyone who wants to retain rationality must accept the argument.”11 But I don’t believe that any such arguments exist—demonstration is to be understood here as a technical philosophical term—for basic questions such as the existence of God. I don’t believe that God seeks our coerced acquiescence, in any form. What Latter-day Saints call the “veil of mortality” is essential to the divine plan.

(Curiously, some critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seem to make an analogous but mostly opposed assumption: To them, the facts disproving the claims [Page xvi]of Mormonism are so undeniably obvious that failure to accept their force and to act accordingly can only be the result of stupidity, ignorance, or intellectual dishonesty. I reject this assumption, as well.)

“Rational coercion,” Dr. Penner says,

attempts to leverage others into a position in which they do not wish to be and to accept beliefs they do not see as contributing to their own interests as persons. They are forced to acknowledge priorities and values that are not their own…. And so, when I try to coerce or force unbelievers to accept my Christian witness through cleverly devised apologetic arguments and brilliantly devised pieces of rhetoric, I often compel them to believe me despite themselves.12

As Dr. Penner expresses the view that his postmodern perspective seeks to replace, given

the modern epistemological paradigm, that human beings are essentially epistemological entities—”things that think”—whose most basic need is to accept the right propositions, then it is easy and perhaps even natural to assume that the best thing I can do for an unbeliever is to reason with them [sic] militantly in such a way as to win the argument and force my conclusion. It is “true,” after all, and I am right! My focus will be on what I argue about—the conclusions and propositions, the facts and the evidence to support them, and whether my opponent and I believe them—not how I engage another person. And, in the end, it will be difficult to escape the conclusion that my primary objective in an apologetic encounter is winning the argument. I may further believe people with beliefs [Page xvii]different than mine are morally suspect, since there might not be another explanation for why they refuse to accept my rational conclusions.13

By contrast, Dr. Penner believes in a distinctly limited but still important role for reason: “Human beings,” he writes, “are not adequate, in and of ourselves, to discover the most important truths about ourselves, others, God, or the world we inhabit.”14 Therefore, “faith is not a matter of settling all the issues first, or rationally justifying all our beliefs before we accept them.”15 “Reason’s function,” he says, “is not to ground our truths but to explain them. Reason depends on a (logically) prior Truth to situate it.”16

I suspect that Latter-day Saints will be inclined to agree with Penner on this point. We don’t believe that faith or a “testimony” comes principally or even at all by means of syllogistic reasoning from a starting point in indisputable axioms. Rather, it comes by revelation, as taught in Moroni 10:4-5 at the close of the Book of Mormon.

With that in mind, Penner says, “we will need to shift from an epistemological approach to something like a hermeneutical one,” with hermeneutics being defined as the discipline of textual interpretation.17 (The text, or revelation, is already given before hermeneutics comes into play.) “Hermeneutics… does not focus on abstract philosophical problems or on establishing an epistemological ground zero from which to launch an absolutely certain body of knowledge or to guarantee the rationality of belief.”18

Indeed, Penner contends,

The Judeo-Christian tradition is… hermeneutical in the philosophical sense. It has its origins in revelation — with an event expressed in language (text) that is interpreted within the [Page xviii]tradition and not by means of rational “first principles” (Greek philosophy). Ours is the God who speaks and reveals. The first moment of critical reflection in this tradition then is to wait and listen— to hear from God. Subsequently, the Judeo-Christian “logos” (word, reason) is one that always exhausts human reason and always comes to us from the outside.19

“The revelation is proclaimed,” Penner continues, “and it is ours to understand and interpret, but not to justify or rationalize directly in the sense of establishing its legitimacy.”20 “If,” he says, “the modern epistemological paradigm is focused on the question, ‘Is it (belief about the world/reality) true and justified?’ the hermeneutical paradigm I want to replace it with puts at the center of its inquiry the question, ‘Is it intelligible and meaningful?’”21

Now, I happen to believe that those are very important questions. Furthermore, as it turns out, many if not by far most of the articles that have appeared and will appear in Interpreter focus less on demonstrating Latter-day Saint scriptures to be true than on attempting to plumb their depths, to exhibit their richness, to demonstrate them to be both “intelligible” and extraordinarily “meaningful.” (Viewed through Dr. Penner’s lens, Interpreter seems a very appropriate name for this journal.)

Christianity isn’t merely a set of propositions or a system of doctrines, Penner correctly insists. It’s a way of life.22 “The reason I accept Christian faith,” Penner writes, “is it enables me to interpret my life fruitfully and the world meaningfully through the practices, categories, and language of Christian [Page xix]faith, so that I have a more authentic understanding of myself and a sense of wholeness to my life.”23

Still, it seems to me that the actual truth of the scriptures and the legitimacy of Mormon doctrine are worth defending when they’re under attack. Mormonism, like Christianity more generally, isn’t merely a matter of propositions and intellectual assent, but such propositions and assent are an essential part of it. I cannot imagine the restored Gospel providing full satisfaction to the soul under a conviction that its central claims are, in fact, false. This is where I part ways with Dr. Penner’s postmodernism because I don’t believe that modernism in his sense is entirely dead. (And I’m not sure that it should be.) Most people—certainly those outside of the postmodern academy—still need to believe that the fundamental claims upon which they construct their lives are true, and truth claims sometimes need to be defended, not merely asserted.

Recently I saw a quotation circulating online that is attributed to the late Hugh B. Brown, who served as an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from April 1958 until his death at the end of 1975, and in the Church’s First Presidency from 1961 until the death of President David O McKay in 1970. His was a beloved voice of my own youth. “We don’t need to ‘defend’ the gospel in a military sense,” he’s quoted as saying. “Rather, we should do with religion as we do with music, not defend it but simply render it. It needs no defense.”

As nearly as I can determine, here is how his actual statement reads, in its original context:

There are altogether too many people in the world who are willing to accept as true whatever is printed in a book or delivered from a pulpit. Their faith never goes below the surface soil of authority. I plead with [Page xx]everyone I meet that they may drive their faith down through that soil and get hold of the solid truth, that they may be able to withstand the winds and storms of indecision and of doubt, of opposition and persecution. Then, and only then, will we be able to defend our religion successfully. When I speak of defending our religion, I do not mean such defense as an army makes on a battlefield but the defense of a clean and upright and virtuous life lived in harmony with an intelligent belief and understanding of the gospel. As Mormons, we should do with religion as we do with music, not defend it but simply render it. It needs no defense. The living of religion is, after all, the greatest sermon, and if all of us would live it, we would create a symphony which would be appreciated by all.24

The quotation seems to be seen, by at least some of those who have hailed it, as validating a denial of the value or even of the religious appropriateness of apologetics. A defense of one’s religious beliefs, on this view, is only necessary where religion isn’t being lived or “rendered.” Indeed, engagement in apologetics could be seen in this light as ipso facto evidence that the apologist isn’t living his or her religion but has put some secular, idolatrous substitute in its place.

I suspect that Dr. Penner would agree with such a reading, but I cannot. Let me grant, up front, that quietly living our faith, acting it out in love and service, is and will always be the best way of advocating it.

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

[Page xxi]Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 5:13-16)

“I would like to distinguish between theology and religion,” President Brown also said.

Religion is my preference. Someone has said, “I hate botany, but I love flowers.” I would say that I do not care for theology, but I love religion.… The Mormon church has a religion aside from its theology.… The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has this practical view of religion: that religion should help us here and now.… So the religion of the Latter-day Saints is not just theory from a book or taught in church.25

But President Brown plainly wasn’t saying that there is no propositional or intellectual content to Mormonism, or that such content is unimportant. His insistence, above, on getting past superficial understanding and driving down to the bedrock of truth, and on “intelligent belief and understanding,” should make that clear enough. Nor was he denouncing defense of the Church, as such. “I should like to see everyone prepared to defend the religion of his or her parents,” he said, “not because it was the religion of our fathers and mothers but because they have found it to be the true religion.”26 Indeed, he himself provides a very simple example, from his days as a Canadian army officer, of his own defense of the Church on the matter of [Page xxii]plural marriage.27 And one of his best known personal stories is in a very definite apologetic vein: “The Profile of a Prophet.”28

And how could it be otherwise? There is, in most normal people’s lives, no area in which it’s considered a virtue to offer no reasons for one’s beliefs and behavior, and a violation of the spirit of religion to do so. If missionaries are told, as I was more than once in Switzerland, that the Bible never mentions baptism for the dead, it would be rather strange to refuse to point to 1 Corinthians 15:29. In view of the most recent attempt to explain the Book of Mormon away by means of the wearisomely-familiar theory of the Spalding Manuscript, was it inappropriate and somehow unchristian for the editors of the late FARMS Review to commission responses?29 If you’re asked why you’ve chosen restaurant A over restaurant B, or invited to justify your decision to pursue this marketing plan rather than that one, or requested to explain your preference for one candidate instead of another or your enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, should you virtuously decline to give any reasons? But even a simple justification or defense is, in the strictest sense of the word, an apologetic.

But how, in Penner’s view, should such defense be conducted (assuming that, against his apparent wishes, we’re determined still to engage in such defense)? “A hermeneutical approach,” he writes, “is better construed in terms of the metaphors of conversation and dialogue, as opposed to the epistemological model of trial and debate.”30 Or, as Austin [Page xxiii]Farrer puts it, “Religion is more like response to a friend than it is like obedience to an expert.”31

We don’t, and almost certainly can’t, act or make our most fundamental, life-orientational decisions on the basis of pure reason or purely intellectual considerations. (“Thou believest that there is one God,” says James 2:19, “thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.”)

Faith is a matter that involves the whole soul, not merely the intellect, and whether or not we believe in the first place depends upon the response of our entire souls. Prophets don’t argue that their message is rationally justifiable or that it represents clever analysis or that it should be accepted because they hold special secular credentials. They invite their audience to accept it because it comes from God.32

The contexts in which we accept beliefs (or have faith) vary widely and are utterly personal, and they rarely fall entirely, or even largely, under our direct, conscious, rational control.33 Thus, “Joan N.,” commenting on Amazon.com with regard to Dr. Penner’s book, asks

Do we really come to faith as a result of rational persuasion (modern apologetics)? Or do we come to faith in the context of living life? Do we witness because we hold rationally proven beliefs or because we have heard God speak?

She is precisely right. And yet, although humans aren’t purely rational logic machines, reason is one of our principal gifts—and a healthy faith clashes with reason only when that’s absolutely necessary. Thus, I have fundamental reservations [Page xxiv]about the overall position argued by Myron Penner in The End of Apologetics.

“Christians should be against apologetics,” writes Dr. Penner,

at least of the modern variety. I am against the apologetic culture of experts that is funded by the modern secular condition, with its assumption that genius is the highest authority for belief and the reasonability of a belief— and my ability to demonstrate it — is the only thing that makes something worthy of my acceptance. I am also against the notion that our task as Christians is to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of Christian belief—as if we are Christians by dint of our genius. And finally, I am against the apologetic mind-set that sets “us” against “them” and then proceeds to try to win the marketing and merchandising race so that “our” superiority is thereby unquestioned.34

I agree wholeheartedly with Myron Penner on these points. But I don’t agree that apologetics as a whole is entirely illegitimate. I cannot see that his reasons here entail its total rejection.

Apologetics, properly done, can help. I know this, among many other things, from the personal experience of my father and my family.

But apologetics is limited, both in appeal and in scope. Most people aren’t interested in it or in the issues with which it deals, and many (for those or other reasons) don’t need it. We should be modest about what apologetics can do. Our arguments, no matter how learned and no matter how sound, can’t force belief. We can’t reason people into faith. Reasoned argument can nourish and protect a seed and can even prepare [Page xxv]the soil for the sowing of a seed, but it can’t cause a seed to germinate where none has been planted.

Faith isn’t purely intellectual and, for many people, it’s not an intellectual matter at all. Moreover, it’s ultimately a gift. (See, for example, 1 Corinthians 12:8-9). But sound apologetic arguments can perhaps help clear away objections that interfere with faith in both believers and unbelievers. They can persuade investigators or wavering members of the Church to regard the claims of Mormonism as what William James called a “live option” rather than a dead one—in other words, to give faith serious consideration. This is a relatively humble role—a modest “end” or telos—but it can, for at least some, be vital.

And, even more broadly, faithful scholarship can explain the value and richness that believers see in the Gospel, the depth and insight that are to be found in the scriptures, the meaning that a life of discipleship confers. This journal, Interpreter, was established slightly more than a year ago to further those aims. I’m grateful for all who have contributed to its launch and who have made its continued flourishing possible.

  1. Myron Bradley Penner, The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 76 (emphasis deleted). ↩

  2. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 73. ↩

  3. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 47-48. ↩

  4. C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 58. ↩

  5. Austin Farrer, “Grete Clerk,” in Jocelyn Gibb, ed., Light on C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1965), 26. ↩

  6. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 4. ↩

  7. Gary C. Lawrence, How Americans View Mormonism: Seven Steps to Improve Our Image (Orange, CA: The Parameter Foundation, 2008), 97. ↩

  8. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 77-78 (emphasis in the original). ↩

  9. Benno van den Toren, “Challenges and Possibilities of Inter-religious and Cross-cultural Apologetic Persuasion,” Evangelical Quarterly 82/1 (2010): 50-51. ↩

  10. This statement has been ascribed to various writers, including Benjamin Franklin and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, but may go back to Samuel Butler’s seventeenth-century poem Hudibras, which reads, in part, as follows: “He that complies against his will/ Is of his own opinion still/ Which he may adhere to, yet disown,/ For reasons to himself best known” (III.iii.547-550). ↩

  11. Paul D. Feinberg, “Cumulative Case Apologetics,” in Steven B. Cowan, ed., Five Views on Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 248. As I read him, Feinberg likewise denies the existence of such arguments, though he believes (as I do) that a good cumulative case can be made in support of the plausibility of the existence of God, etc. ↩

  12. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 145 (emphasis in the original). ↩

  13. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 143. ↩

  14. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 67. ↩

  15. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 73. ↩

  16. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 170. ↩

  17. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 67. ↩

  18. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 70. ↩

  19. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 70. ↩

  20. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 71-72. I’ve corrected the punctuation slightly for clarity. ↩

  21. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 67. ↩

  22. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 68. ↩

  23. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 76. ↩

  24. Edwin B. Firmage, An Abundant Life: The Memoirs of Hugh B. Brown (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988), 135-136. ↩

  25. Firmage, The Abundant Life, 136-137. ↩

  26. Firmage, The Abundant Life, 135. ↩

  27. Firmage, The Abundant Life, 136. ↩

  28. Hugh B. Brown, Eternal Quest (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1956), 127-135. ↩

  29. See, for example, G. Bruce Schaalje, Matthew Roper, and Paul J. Fields, “Examining a Misapplication of Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification to Investigate Book of Mormon Authorship,” FARMS Review (23/1): 87-111; Matthew Roper and Paul J. Fields, “The Historical Case against Sidney Rigdon’s Authorship of the Book of Mormon,” FARMS Review (23/1): 113-125. ↩

  30. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 68; compare 83. ↩

  31. Austin Farrer, Ann Loades, and Robert MacSwain, The Truth-seeking Heart: Austin Farrer and His Writings (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2006), 183. ↩

  32. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 82-86. ↩

  33. See Penner, The End of Apologetics, 78-79. ↩

  34. Penner, The End of Apologetics, 72. ↩

Stretching to Find the Negative: Gary Bergera’s Review of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 6 (2013): 165-190
11

Abstract: At an author-meets-critic Sunstone Symposium on August 2, 2013, Gary Bergera devoted over 90% of his fifteen-minute review to criticize my 1500+ page, three-volume, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology. This article responds to several of the disagreements outlined by Bergera that on closer inspection appear as straw men. Also addressed are the tired arguments buoyed by carefully selected documentation he advanced supporting that (1) John C. Bennett learned of polygamy from Joseph Smith, (2) the Fanny Alger-Joseph Smith relationship was adultery, and (3) the Prophet practiced sexual polyandry. This article attempts to provide greater balance by including new evidences published for the first time in the three volumes but ignored by Bergera. These new documents and observations empower readers to expand their understanding beyond the timeworn reconstructions referenced in Bergera’s critical review.

During a spirited exchange at an author-meets-critic session during the 2013 Sunstone Symposium, Gary Bergera served as one of three reviewers of my three volumes, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology. He was diplomatic and kind in his delivery, but his comments were overwhelmingly critical.1 I might compare his review to my own comments [Page 166]delivered at a similar author-meets-critics session at the John Whitmer Historical Association meeting in Independence, Missouri, in 2009. There I critiqued Nauvoo Polygamy: “…but we called it celestial marriage” authored by George D. Smith of the Smith-Pettit Foundation (Gary Bergera’s employer). While I believe on that occasion I was more balanced in my review, I did portray Nauvoo Polygamy as being flawed in many ways, especially regarding its scanty use of the historical evidences in reconstructing the story of Joseph Smith’s polygamy. Somewhat ironically, I find Gary’s review of my volumes to share the same weakness of the George D. Smith book—he fails to deal with all of the available evidences in his counterarguments. In doing so, he leaves himself vulnerable to a more expanded review that may reveal his interpretations to be problematic.

This response will touch upon only some of Bergera’s concerns, but similar weaknesses in virtually all his criticisms can be identified. As a writer seeking to know how to strengthen a possible second edition, Bergera’s critique provided few useful suggestions.

Use of Late Recollections

In his comments during the Sunstone session, Gary Bergera criticized at length my use of late recollections as primary sources of information. These are documents written by and recorded from Nauvoo polygamists but sometimes many decades after the described event occurred. Gary eloquently outlined the weaknesses inherent in such reminiscences by quoting several notable historians. In fact, Gary and I agree that when people remember events and conversations many years afterward, inaccuracies can creep into the accounts, and in extreme situations entirely erroneous details may be related. These observations are pertinent to any historical reconstruction.

[Page 167]In my response I noted that Bergera seemed to promote a double standard. I reviewed his own articles dealing with Joseph Smith and plural marriage, including “Identifying the Earliest Mormon Polygamists, 1841-44,” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 2005. There he quotes numerous late recollections, which are the same documents found in my trilogy.2 I observed that all authors to date have employed later reminiscences because those are essentially the only sources available. Demanding that such sources be filtered or eliminated from historical reconstructions regarding Joseph Smith’s polygamy would compromise (and greatly shorten) the works of other accomplished authors like Todd Compton and Larry Foster, not to mention Gary Bergera’s own useful articles.

Gary is undoubtedly aware that there are only two known documents providing contemporaneous teachings from Joseph Smith regarding plural marriage, the Revelation on Celestial and Plural Marriage (now LDS D&C 132) and a few entries in the journal of William Clayton. Joseph dictated two other documents in conjunction with the expansion of polygamy, but neither mentions plural marriage. The first is a letter from Joseph to Nancy Rigdon written in the spring of 1842 and first published by John C. Bennett on August 19, 1842, and the second is a letter Joseph Smith received on behalf of Newel K. Whitney on July 27, 1842.3 However, beyond these documents, [Page 168]no firsthand accounts from Joseph Smith are available.4 In summary, criticizing my sources without criticizing other authors (and himself) who have used these same sources seems a little inconsistent.

What Was the Purpose of Plural Marriage?

A second concern in Gary Bergera’s review deals with the reasons Joseph Smith recounted for the need for plural marriage. The Prophet gave three justifications, one of them much more important than the other two. Regardless, in the Sunstone session and elsewhere, Bergera has insisted upon emphasizing the explanation dealing with sexual reproduction: “multiply and replenish the earth.”5

[Page 169]The first reason mentioned by the Prophet is the need to restore Old Testament polygamy as a part of the “restitution of all things” prophesied in Acts 3:21. The necessity to restore this ancient marital order was apparently the only justification given in Kirtland, Ohio, in the mid-1830s when Joseph married Fanny Alger. Benjamin F. Johnson recalled in 1903: “In 1835 at Kirtland I learned from my Sisters Husband, Lyman R. Shirman,6 who was close to the Prophet, and Received it from him. That the ancient order of plural marriage was again to be practiced by the Church.”7 A few years later in 1841, Joseph Smith even attempted to broach the topic publicly. Helen Mar Kimball remembered: “He [Joseph] astonished his hearers by preaching on the restoration of all things, and said that as it was anciently with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, so it would be again, etc.”8 This need for a restoration is mentioned in section 132: “I am the Lord thy God…. I have conferred upon you the keys and power of the priesthood, wherein I restore all things” (v. 40; see also 45).

It might be argued that this was the only reason Joseph Smith ever needed to give. He simply had to say, “Old Testament patriarchs practiced polygamy and I’m restoring it.” There was [Page 170]no need for a complicated and detailed theology of celestial and eternal marriage. Authors like Fawn Brodie who affirm that such was needed to assuage Joseph’s conscience simply do not understand the evidences.9

The second reason given by Joseph Smith was that through plural marriage additional devout families would be created to receive noble pre-mortal spirits who would be born into them. Nauvoo Latter-day Saint Charles Lambert quoted the Prophet discussing “thousands of spirits that have been waiting to come forth in this day and generation. Their proper channel is through the priesthood, a way has to be provided.”10 Helen Mar Kimball agreed that Joseph taught of “thousands of spirits, yet unborn, who were anxiously waiting for the privilege of coming down to take tabernacles of flesh.”11 These recollections from the 1880s could have been influenced by later teachings. However, this rationale is also explicated in the revelation on celestial marriage: “they [plural wives] are given unto him [their husband] to multiply and replenish the earth” (D&C 132:63).

It is true that “multiply and replenish the earth” is one of the three reasons. The presence of sexual relations in plural marriages is required to fulfill this purpose of reproduction. Several writers have selectively emphasized this while completely ignoring the most important justification. One author went as far as to write: “Celestial marriage was all about sex and children.”12 Bergera similarly instructed the Sunstone [Page 171]crowd: “The intent of Smith’s doctrine is clear: to reproduce and provide bodies for children.” This statement inadequately explains Joseph Smith’s teachings and constitutes an unjustified endorsement that libido was driving him to establish plural marriage. It also implies that any plural marriage that was without sexuality, such as Joseph Smith’s sealing to Ruth Vose Sayers, which was “for eternity” only (see below), could not fulfill the primary goal of plural marriage in his theological teachings. This is not true.

Joseph Smith clearly described the third reason in the July 12 revelation on eternal and plural marriage (now D&C 132):

Therefore, if a man marry him a wife in the world, and he marry her not by me nor by my word, and he covenant with her so long as he is in the world and she with him, their covenant and marriage are not of force when they are dead, and when they are out of the world; therefore, they are not bound by any law when they are out of the world.

Therefore, when they are out of the world they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but are appointed angels in heaven, which angels are ministering servants, to minister for those who are worthy of a far more, and an exceeding, and an eternal weight of glory.

For these angels did not abide my law; therefore, they cannot be enlarged, but remain separately and singly, without exaltation, in their saved condition, to all eternity; and from henceforth are not gods, but are angels of God forever and ever (D&C 132:15-17).13

[Page 172]Verses 61-63 also specify that a plurality of husbands is adultery and a plurality of wives is acceptable and occurs “for their [the plural wives’] exaltation in the eternal worlds.” The Prophet also explained: “Those who keep no eternal Law in this life or make no eternal contract are single & alone in the eternal world” (see also D&C 131:1-4).14

Whereas the first two reasons, the need for a “restitution of all things” and “to multiply and replenish the earth,” are significant, the third reason is vastly more important because it deals with eternity. As described, worthy women without a sealed husband would live “separately and singly, without exaltation, in their saved condition, to all eternity” (D&C 132:16), which is damnation in the context of D&C 132 (see vv. 4 and 6). The eternal significance of the principle of a plurality of wives is that all worthy women are able to be sealed to an eternal husband prior to the final judgment.

Accordingly, I discouraged Gary from describing the primary purpose of Joseph Smith’s polygamy as sexual because there is essentially no historical evidence to support his statement. To do so is to miss the most important explanation, which deals with the eternal benefits of the ordinance.

Contradictions?

Bergera also outlined a series of “contradictions” that he identified in my books. In one example, he referred to two references to the space accommodations in the Homestead, the first domicile the Smith’s inhabited in Nauvoo. In Volume 1, I wrote that they “may not have been as cramped as described.”15 [Page 173]Later, Bergera observed that I assessed that the living space “would have been very crowded.”16 This alleged contradiction is remarkable for two reasons. First, he ignored my comment in the footnote about a conversation I had with Community of Christ historian Lach Mackay wherein he suggested that perhaps the west addition to the Homestead may have been added during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. Most historians to date have believed that the home was composed of a kitchen with a small outbuilding, the living room, and a small upstairs during Joseph Smith’s day. Without the annex, the family with boarders would have been especially cramped. Even with the addition, accommodations would have been tight. The second important observation regarding Bergera’s “contradiction” is that he apparently had to scrutinize the text in great detail, even examining minutia, in order to discover and expose an apparent incongruity.

Another “contradiction” identified by Bergera involves my statement that “there is no known evidence that Joseph Smith taught that all men and women, irrespective of the time and place they existed, must practice plural marriage in order to be exalted.”17 Bergera provided several quotes from the volumes wherein I acknowledge that between the 1840s and 1890, the practice of plural marriage was a commandment to the Latter-day Saints, implying a contradiction.18 This “contradiction” appears to be based upon a straw man argument. Nowhere in my text do I declare that polygamy is God’s commandment to all of His followers regardless of when they are born or where they live on earth. Nor does it appear that such a declaration has ever been made by Church leaders. There is no question that obedience to the principle of plural marriage was required in order to be a devout Latter-day Saint between the 1840s and [Page 174]1890. However, no Church leader during those decades taught that all of God’s followers in all places and times were similarly commanded and that the monogamist generations in the Book of Mormon and New Testament will be eternally condemned for their lack of polygamous unions.

John C. Bennett: A Polygamy Insider?

Bergera also observed that 40% of the pages of volumes 1-2 deal with three topics, John C. Bennett, Fanny Alger, and polyandry. He disagreed with my interpretations regarding whether John C. Bennett was a polygamy insider, whether Fanny Alger was a plural wife of Joseph Smith, and whether the Prophet practiced sexual polyandry. Supporting his explanations, Bergera quotes a few selected evidences. However, his arguments would have been much stronger if he could have invalidated the historical documentation I present in my books that supports my new interpretation and contradicts his views.

For example, regarding John C. Bennett, Bergera observed that Cyrus Wheelock learned about plural marriage from Joseph Smith in 1841. Regarding Wheelock, Bergera affirmed: “Hales does not allow Bennett, who for a time was demonstrably closer to Smith than Wheelock, the same opportunity.” In other words, Wheelock was a polygamy insider, but he was geographically more separated from Joseph than Bennett. Therefore, from an interpretation perspective, Bennett deserves the “same opportunity.” This argument may seem persuasive until we consider three historical observations.

First, research shows that individuals much closer to Joseph Smith did not learn about plural marriage until almost a year after Bennett left Nauvoo. By his own recollection, William Law, second counselor in the First Presidency, was introduced to the secret polygamy teachings in mid-1843. Sidney Rigdon, first counselor in the First Presidency, never learned about plural marriage from the Prophet. Hyrum Smith, Joseph’s brother, [Page 175]Associate Church President, and Church Patriarch, didn’t learn about celestial marriage until May 1843.19 Similarly, Emma Smith was taught in the spring of 1843. These observations support that if Joseph Smith could have kept William Law, Sidney Rigdon, Hyrum Smith, and Emma Smith in the dark until 1843, he could have easily kept Bennett out of the loop through June 1842.

Second, Bennett admitted in an October 1843 letter that he did not learn about eternal marriage the entire time he was in Nauvoo.20 In other words, we are to believe that Bennett knew about plural marriage proposals to Sarah Pratt and Nancy Rigdon and the other polygamy related interactions with Joseph Smith that he reported.21 However, no one bothered to tell him the marriages were for eternity. We do not have any record of Joseph teaching plural marriage except within the context that they could be eternal. In addition, there is good evidence he taught eternal marriage before he taught plural marriage.22

Third, an examination of the topics discussed in The History of the Saints written by Bennett and published in October 1842 fails to identify any teachings similar to those privately taught at that time by Joseph Smith or those written in July 1843 as the revelation on celestial and plural marriage (now D&C 132). If [Page 176]Bennett had learned anything from Joseph Smith, it is strange that he did not exploit it in his writings, instead choosing to fabricate details that even the most ardent disbeliever could not accept, like polygamous women divided into echelons of Cyprian Saints, Chambered Sisters, and Consecratees of the Cloister.23

In summary, Bergera’s claim that because Cyrus Wheelock was a polygamy insider in 1841, Bennett should be afforded the “same opportunity” is a weak argument, without any credible supporting historical documentation. In contrast, the contradictory observations and evidences that Bergera fails to take into account seem to be more convincing.

Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith: Plural Marriage or Adultery?

In an interesting defense of the position that Joseph Smith committed adultery with Fanny Alger in 1835, Gary Bergera affirmed: “The more contemporary the account of Smith and Alger, the more Smith’s involvement is interpreted as an extramarital affair. However, Hales tends to privilege later statements, which support the idea of a marriage (1:151), over earlier statements, which he dismisses as unreliable, the product of ignorance or misunderstanding or of animosity towards Smith.”

This statement is problematic and misleading. I reproduce all nineteen known accounts dealing with this relationship. None are dismissed.24 Furthermore, I classify them as to [Page 177]whether they support adultery or plural marriage but ultimately allow the reader to make the final judgment.25

The earliest known account referring to the Joseph-Fanny relationship is from 1838, at least two years after the relationship ended. Three additional references are identified that were composed prior to the end of 1842 for a total of four “more contemporary accounts.” The problem is that none of the four accounts discuss whether a plural marriage ceremony was performed.

Of the four, two are ambiguous regarding details of the association. The two remaining include the 1838 narrative from Oliver Cowdery, who labeled the relationship a “dirty, nasty, filthy scrape”26 and a reference from John C. Bennett’s History of the Saints quoting Fanny Brewer, who recalled that in 1837 there were rumors in Kirtland, Ohio, of sexual impropriety between the Prophet and a servant girl.27 It is clear that both of these accounts reflect the belief that the relationship was not a [Page 178]valid plural marriage. This could be due to one of three reasons. First, Cowdery and/or Brewer may have known that a plural marriage ceremony was performed, but they did not think it was valid. Second, they may not have known that a ceremony was performed. Third, no ceremony occurred. Bergera affirms that Cowdery’s and Brewer’s statements support adultery, but they could also support that a formal plural marriage was performed but that Cowdery and Brewer were either unaware or did not think it legitimate. Regardless, it is impossible to prove something did not happen (see 1:162, 377, 408, 446; 3:66).

Importantly, there is evidence that a plural ceremony did occur. Mosiah Hancock left a record detailing how his father, Levi Hancock, united Fanny Alger to Joseph Smith as a plural wife.28 Regarding that narrative, Todd Compton wrote: “I accept it as generally reliable, providing accurate information about his own life, his family’s life, and Mormonism in Kirtland, Nauvoo and Salt Lake City.”29 Surprisingly, Bergera fails to mention a new document discovered by Don Bradley in the Andrew Jenson Papers at the Church History Library. Jenson interviewed Eliza R. Snow in 1886 and wrote in his notes that she was “well acquainted” with Fanny Alger and knew about the aftermath of the discovery of the relationship.30 Then Eliza listed Fanny as a plural wife of Joseph Smith, writing Fanny’s name in her own hand.

[Page 179]In summary, by not including evidences that contradict his position, Bergera reports that the relationship between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger was an “extramarital affair.” However, “more contemporaneous” documents referenced by Bergera fail to address the primary question of whether or not a plural marriage ceremony was performed. Recently discovered documents first published in Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology provide a newly identified recollection from an eyewitness that Fanny Alger was indeed a plural wife of Joseph Smith.

Sexual Polyandry: Was it Part of Joseph Smith’s Plural Marriages?

In his presentation, Bergera continued to promote the position that Joseph Smith practiced sexual polyandry and is critical of my treatment of the topic: “[Hales] suggests that the lack of any surviving record regarding sexual activity involving Smith and his polyandrous wives is likely evidence of no sexual activity (see chaps. 11-16). He does not seem to entertain seriously the alternate interpretation that Smith married already-married women to conceal the paternity of possible plural children and that his married wives had compelling reason to avoid mention of legally adulterous sexual activity. This, to my mind, at least, is an equally plausible explanation.” Of course Bergera is entitled to his own views, but to assert sexual polyandry occurred to hide a child’s paternity (should pregnancy have resulted) is a remarkable oversimplification of an alleged behavior that is inherently very complex and would have been shocking to Nauvooans in the 1840s.

For Gary and other proponents of the position that Joseph Smith practiced sexual polyandry, the overriding question that helps delineate the problem with their interpretations is whether such relations were part of Joseph Smith’s marriage theology or were they in contradiction to that theology. In [Page 180]other words, do proponents of sexual polyandry believe that Joseph taught his followers that it was morally acceptable? Or did Joseph Smith teach that such behavior would have been grossly immoral?

If sexual polyandry was adultery, where are the expressed concerns or criticisms from skeptical participants and others who may have been more cynical? Is it possible to believe that Joseph was so authoritative and charismatic and that participants were so gullible that no one complained of his blatant hypocrisy? (And no one did.) Also, why didn’t John C. Bennett or William Law capitalize on such alleged relations? The first charge of sexual polyandry I have found by any person was published in 1850.

If Joseph Smith taught that sexual polyandry was a correct principle, where are the documents recording those teachings either written contemporaneously or in later recollections? Where are the defenses of the behavior from participants and from the other believers who knew of those plural sealings and would have felt compelled to defend the practice if it occurred? Where are the later apologetic explanations from LDS leaders like Orson Pratt or Joseph F. Smith? Why was sexual polyandry a non-issue throughout the nineteenth century? (A review of the historical record during the nineteenth century reads as if sexual polyandry didn’t exist.)

Polyandry was Universally Condemned

Another important question is why the three references to sexual polyandry in section 132 (vv. 41-42, 61-63) label it “adultery,” in two cases stating that the woman involved “would be destroyed” (41, 63). Also, why have all other Church leaders and members continually condemned the practice? When asked in 1852, “What do you think of a woman having more husbands than one?” Brigham Young answered, “This [Page 181]is not known to the law.”31 Five years later Heber C. Kimball taught, “There has been a doctrine taught that a man can act as Proxy for another when absent—it has been practiced and it is known—& its damnable.”32 The following year Orson Pratt instructed: “God has strictly forbidden, in this Bible, plurality of husbands, and proclaimed against it in his law.”33 Pratt further explained:

“Can a woman have more than one husband at the same time? No: Such a principle was never sanctioned by scripture. The object of marriage is to multiply the species, according to the command of God. A woman with one husband can fulfill this command, with greater facilities, than if she had a plurality; indeed, this would, in all probability, frustrate the great design of marriage, and prevent her from raising up a family. As a plurality of husbands, would not facilitate the increase of posterity, such a principle never was tolerated in scripture.”34

Belinda Marden Pratt wrote in 1854: “‘Why not a plurality of husbands35 as well as a plurality of wives?’ To which I reply: 1st God has never commanded or sanctioned a plurality of husbands….” On October 8, 1869, Apostle George A. Smith taught that “a plurality of husbands is wrong.”36 His wife, Bathsheba Smith, was asked in 1892 if it would “be a violation of the laws of the church for one woman to have two husbands [Page 182]living at the same time….” She replied: “I think it would.”37 All of these individuals were involved with Nauvoo polygamy, and several were undoubtedly aware of Joseph Smith’s sealings to legally married women. First Presidency Counselor Joseph F. Smith wrote in 1889: “Polyandry is wrong, physiologically, morally, and from a scriptural point of order. It is nowhere sanctioned in the Bible, nor by the law of God or nature and has not affinity with ‘Mormon’ plural marriage.”38 Elder Joseph Fielding Smith wrote in 1905: “Polygamy, in the sense of plurality of husbands and of wives never was practiced in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah or elsewhere.”39

The New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage Supersedes All Other Marriage Covenants

An important revelation that all authors who declare Joseph Smith practiced sexual polyandry overlook is that D&C 22:1 states that the new and everlasting covenant causes all old covenants to be “done away.” Hence from a religious standpoint, the legal covenant of a civilly married woman is “done away” as soon as she enters into the new and everlasting covenant of marriage (see D&C 132:4). She would not have two husbands with whom she could experience sexual relations, at least according to Joseph Smith’s revelations. Going back to her legal husband would be adultery because in the eyes of the Church, that marriage ended with the sealing.
[Page 183]

“Eternity Only” Sealings Did Occur

Joseph was sealed to 14 women with legal husbands. Studying polyandry is complicated because the 14 sealings were not of the same type or duration. Contrary to the assertions of several authors, “eternity only” sealings were performed in Nauvoo. That is, a woman like Ruth Vose Sayers, whose husband was a non-member, was allowed to be sealed to another man for eternity only, with no marriage on earth. Sayers was sealed to Joseph Smith for “eternity only” as documented in Andrew Jenson’s handwriting in his notes found in the Church History Library.

Andrew Jenson's notes on Ruth Vose Sayers, Church History Library

Of the 14 civilly married women, I believe 11 of the unions were of this type: “eternity only” sealings. The 3 remaining women were sealed for “time and eternity,” which probably included sexual relations with Joseph. Two (Sarah Ann Whitney and Sylvia Sessions) were already physically separated from their legal husbands, so no change in marital dynamics between them and their civil husbands was required. Information regarding Joseph’s relationship with the third [Page 184]woman, Mary Heron, is so limited that anyone giving details is simply speculating.

Why Were Women Eternally Sealed to Joseph Instead of the Legal Husbands?

The question arises as to why women would be sealed to Joseph Smith instead of their legal spouses? In several cases, the husbands were ineligible because they were not active Mormons. However, some of the women were married to devout Latter-day Saints. Evidence indicates that in each case, the woman made the decision. Lucy Walker remembered the Prophet’s counsel: “A woman would have her choice, this was a privilege that could not be denied her.”40 The lack of clarifying documents creates an incomplete picture that seems strange in several respects. However, nothing currently available supports that Joseph behaved hypocritically or committed transgression. None of the participants, the men or women who knew the details of what was going on ever complained about Joseph Smith allowing these sealings.

No Evidence that Joseph Smith Forced Any Woman to Marry Him

Stories that Joseph Smith forced women to marry him are sometimes repeated in antagonistic literature, but they are not supported by available historical evidences. One popular anti-Mormon narrative recounts how Joseph Smith met a woman and gave her 24 hours to comply or she would be cut off forever.41 [Page 185]The story is folklore, but it is based upon the introduction of the previously unmarried Lucy Walker to plural marriage.

Joseph introduced the principle to Lucy in 1842. She did not accept, but she agonized for many months as he patiently waited. She related: “I was tempted and tortured beyond endurance until life was not desirable. Oh that the grave would kindly receive me, that I might find rest…. Oh, let this bitter cup pass. And thus I prayed in the agony of my soul. The Prophet discerned my sorrow. He saw how unhappy I was….”42 Finally, on April 30, 1843, Joseph saw her anguish and spoke to her, pushing her to resolution: “I have no flattering words to offer. It is a command of God to you. I will give you until tomorrow to decide this matter. If you reject this message the gate will be closed forever against you.” How did Lucy respond to this challenge? Not as cynical writers have portrayed Nauvoo polygamists in their narratives, as gullible dupes who lacked the fortitude to reject the charismatic Joseph. Instead, she responded as skeptics would today:

This aroused every drop of Scotch in my veins. For a few moments I stood fearless before him, and looked him in the eye…. I had been speechless, but at last found utterance and said: “Although you are a prophet of God you could not induce me to take a step of so great importance, unless I knew that God approved my course. I would rather die. I have tried to pray but received no comfort, no light,” and emphatically forbid him speaking again to me on this subject. Every feeling of my soul revolted against it.43

[Page 186]Lucy called his bluff. She had the same questions that observers voice today. Then she demanded a divine manifestation from the same source Joseph said he had received the commandment to practice plural marriage:

Said I, “The same God who has sent this message is the Being I have worshipped from my early childhood and He must manifest His will to me.” He walked across the room, returned and stood before me with the most beautiful expression of countenance, and said: “God Almighty bless you. You shall have a manifestation of the will of God concerning you; a testimony that you can never deny. I will tell you what it shall be. It shall be that joy and peace that you never knew.”44

She related how Joseph’s promise was fulfilled shortly thereafter:

One night after supper I went out into the orchard and I kneeled down and prayed to God for information. After praying I arose and walked around the orchard and kneeled again and repeated this during the night. Finally as I was praying the last time, an angel of the Lord appeared to me and told me that the principle was of God and for me to accept it.45

Another common behavior attributed to Joseph Smith, but is not documentable, involves John C. Bennett’s claim that Joseph would destroy the reputation of any woman who turned him down.46 We know of five women who refused the [Page 187]Prophet’s plural proposals.47 After each one he exerted no force and told no one. The only reason we know of those proposals is because each woman (or one of her relatives) related it later. Sarah Kimball was one of the five women – her husband being a nonmember. She later related:

I asked him to teach it to some one else. He looked at me reprovingly and said, “Will you tell me who to teach it to? God required me to teach it to you, and leave you with the responsibility of believing or disbelieving.” He said, “I will not cease to pray for you, and if you will seek unto God in prayer, you will not be led into temptation.”48

It is true that Sarah Pratt and Nancy Rigdon accused Joseph Smith of impropriety, and he aggressively defended himself against their allegations. However, his interactions with the five other women indicate that if Pratt and Rigdon had remained silent, he too would have quietly left them “with the responsibility of believing or disbelieving.”

In summary, to simply state Joseph may have practiced sexual polyandry to hide paternity fails to address the multiple complexities of the marital processes as discussed above and in my chapters (11-16) in Volume 1. Furthermore, multiple observations and evidences support that such relations did not occur and would have been considered to be adultery by the Prophet. Polyandrous wives chose Joseph as their eternal [Page 188]husbands for reasons that are unclear, but there is no credible evidence that he forced any woman to marry him polyandrously or otherwise.

Conclusion

Gary Bergera is entitled to his opinion of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology. When requested to review it in a session at Sunstone, he was asked to share that opinion. However, reviewers will often seek a balance in presenting both positive and negative aspects no matter how hard they may have to look for those qualities in the texts. It is interesting that Gary failed to mention several important new contributions the three volumes provide to their readers. Specifically they:

  1. Contain documents from the Andrew Jenson papers published for the first time anywhere, including high resolution reprints of several originals (black and white). Regardless of whether a researcher agrees with the content of the Andrew Jenson papers, they are very significant to the study of Joseph Smith’s polygamy.
  2. Contain a complete list of all known documents supporting plural sealings of Joseph Smith to 35 wives, including Todd Compton’s “possible wives” and the additional wives listed by George D. Smith (Appendix B).
  3. Contain a collection of all 22 known accounts of the angel and the sword appearing to Joseph Smith (Volume 1, Chapter 8).
  4. Contain all known narratives supporting sexual relations in 12 of the plural marriages with ambiguous evidence in three more (Appendix E).
  5. Contain transcripts of the 19 accounts dealing with Fanny Alger—all that have been found to date (Appendix D).
  6. [Page 189]Contain a chart showing all the plural wives listed by all known contemporaries of Joseph Smith, as well as lists from all known compilers (Volume 2, Chapter 33).
  7. Contain the most complete set of extractions from the 1892 Temple Lot case published to date.
  8. Contain an in-depth discussion of why Joseph Smith established plural marriage, presenting virtually all available theories, including anti-Mormon and apologetic sources. It is the first publication ever to address this topic in a complete volume (Volume 3).
  9. Include a useful and complete bibliography. The bibliography in Volume 2 has more than 1300 entries, with repositories and manuscript numbers identified when applicable.
  10. Include a detailed index with sub-entries rather than a computer generated generic version.

Other reviewers have noted positives regarding the volumes. Cheryl Bruno referred to the three books as “clearly the single greatest guide to available resources on the practice of polygamy in Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo”49 and Larry Foster wrote that the volumes are a “path-breaking and indispensable… study [that] provides the most comprehensive documentation and assessment yet available of the extant evidence on the topic.” Todd Compton considered the three volumes a “landmark in the historiography of Mormon polygamy.”50

Observers comfortable with Gary Bergera’s description of Joseph Smith as a womanizer, who had an extramarital affair with Fanny Alger and who practiced sexual polyandry, may believe that additional discussions on his polygamous activities [Page 190]are like beating a dead horse. Nevertheless, the reality is that my three volumes provide new evidences and new observations that cannot be swept under the rug or ignored. It is hoped that reviewers, even those who disagree with my interpretations, will acknowledge these additional pieces of the plural marriage puzzle and upgrade their previous reconstructions to include them.

  1. Approximately 223 words (of the total of 3348) or 6.7% of the review were positive. ↩

  2. See for example, Gary James Bergera, “Identifying the Earliest Mormon Polygamists, 1841-44,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38/ 3 (Fall 2005): 4 n.7, 5 n.8, 6 n.10, n.12, 7 n.14, 8 n.15-16, 9 n.18, 9 n.20, 10 n.21, 11 n.24, etc. ↩

  3. John C. Bennett, “Sixth letter from John C. Bennett,” Sangamo Journal (Springfield, Illinois), August 19, 1842; rpt., John C. Bennett, The History of the Saints: Or an Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism (Boston: Leland & Whiting, 1842), 243-44. The revelation for Newel K. Whitney, July 27, 1842, holograph in LDS Church History Library. is quoted in H. Michael Marquardt, ed., The Joseph Smith Revelations: Text and Commentary (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999), 315-16. ↩

  4. Four dissenters recorded contemporary accounts. Oliver Olney and William Law left journal entries for the Nauvoo period. Olney began his diary shortly after being cut off from the Church in 1842. (See Oliver Olney Papers, Beineke Library, Yale University; microfilm at LDS Church History Library,MS 8829, item 8.) He also published The Absurdities of Mormonism Portrayed: A Brief Sketch (Hancock, Ill., 1913). In 1843. William Law was called as a counselor in the First Presidency on January 19, 1841, (D&C 124:126) and was personally familiar with the revelation on celestial marriage (now D&C 132). However, he did not begin his journal until January 1, 1844, just weeks before his own excommunication. (See Lyndon W. Cook, William Law: Biographical Essay – Nauvoo Diary – Correspondence – Interview [Orem, Utah: Grandin Book, 1994], 37.) Although its references to plural marriage are limited, the Nauvoo Expositor printed June 7, 1844, provided a few additional details. John C. Bennett published his History of the Saints in November of 1842, which was based on six letters published earlier that year in the Sangamo Journal. Lastly, Joseph H. Jackson printed: A Narrative of the Adventures and Experiences of Joseph H. Jackson in Nauvoo, Exposing the Depths of Mormon Villainy (rpt. Morrison, Ill., 1960) just weeks after the martyrdom. Much of his material came from letters Jackson wrote to the New York Herald, September 5 and 7, 1844, and to the Weekly Herald (New York City), September 7, 1844. Of these four authors, only Law was personally taught plural marriage by Joseph Smith. The usefulness of their documents is limited by anti-Mormon biases, a lack of specificity in the reports, internal contradictions, and the advancement of obvious untruths. ↩

  5. See, for example, Gary James Bergera, “Vox Joseph Vox Dei: Regarding Some of the Moral and Ethical Aspects of Joseph Smith’s Practice of Plural Marriage,” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 31/1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 42. ↩

  6. Sherman was a close friend and devout follower of Joseph Smith. He was called as an apostle but died before learning of the appointment. See Lyndon W. Cook, “Lyman Sherman—Man of God, Would-Be Apostle,” BYU Studies 19/1 (Fall 1978): 121-24. ↩

  7. Dean R. Zimmerman, I Knew the Prophets: An Analysis of the Letter of Benjamin F. Johnson to George F. Gibbs (MA Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1967), 37-38; Joseph H. Jackson referred to three Nauvoo women who served as intermediaries as “Mothers in Israel.” Joseph H. Jackson, A Narrative of the Adventures and Experiences of Joseph H. Jackson, 13. ↩

  8. Helen Mar Whitney, Plural Marriage as Taught by the Prophet Joseph: A Reply to Joseph Smith [III], Editor of the Lamoni Iowa “Herald,” (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor, 1882), 11; see also Jeni Broberg Holzapfel and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, eds., A Woman’s View: Helen Mar Whitney’s Reminiscences of Early Church History (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 1997), 142-43. See also Joseph A. Kelting, “Affidavit,” March 1, 1894, images 11-16a; see also Kelting, “Statement,” Juvenile Instructor 29 (May 1, 1894): 289-90. ↩

  9. See Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1971), 297. ↩

  10. Charles Lambert, “Autobiography,” 1883, quoted in Danel W. Bachman, “The Authorship of the Manuscript of Doctrine and Covenants Section 132,” 43 n. 44. ↩

  11. Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, Why We Practice Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor, 1884), 7. ↩

  12. George D. Smith, “Persuading Men and Women to Join in Celestial Marriage,” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 30 (2010): 161. ↩

  13. See discussion in Samuel Brown, “The Early Mormon Chain of Belonging,” Dialogue 44/ 1 (Spring 2011), 28. ↩

  14. Andrew F. Ehat, and Lyndon W. Cook, eds. The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1980); Franklin D. Richards reporting. 16 July 1843, 232. See also Lorenzo Snow, “Discourse,” Millennial Star 61/ 35 (May 8, 1899): 547-48. ↩

  15. Brian C. Hales Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books), 1:550 n17. ↩

  16. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 2:90. ↩

  17. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 3:192. ↩

  18. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 3:7, 3:218. ↩

  19. George D. Smith, ed., An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 106; see also Andrew F. Ehat, “Joseph Smith’s Introduction of Temple Ordinances and the Mormon Succession Question.” (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1982), 56-60. ↩

  20. John C. Bennett, “Letter from General Bennett,” dated October 28, 1843, Hawk Eye (Burlington, Iowa, December 7, 1843), 1. ↩

  21. Bennett portrays himself as assisting Nancy from being “ensnared by the Cyprian Saints… taken in the net of the chambered Sisters of Charity… [and avoiding] the poisoned arrows of the Consecratees of the Cloister…” (Bennett, The History of the Saints, 241.) Bennett’s description of polygamy in Nauvoo is unsupported by any other source and contradicted by all other available evidence, suggesting he was fictionalizing his assertions. ↩

  22. Parley P. Pratt, Jr., ed., Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt, One of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1976), 297-98 (1985 edition, 259-60). ↩

  23. Bennett, The History of the Saints, 220-25. Lawrence Foster suggested one possible parallel between Bennett’s descriptions of polygamy in Nauvoo and Joseph Smith’s teachings on plural marriage: “Thus, ‘wives and concubines’ could well correspond to Bennett’s two upper levels of plural wives.” (Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community [New York: Oxford University Press, 1981], 173.) There is no evidence of women being designated as concubines or of concubines being married in Nauvoo. Nor is there any form of official sanction of concubinage in the Church before or after Joseph Smith’s death. ↩

  24. See Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 2:369-378. ↩

  25. See Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 1:125, table 5.1. ↩

  26. Oliver Cowdery, Letter to Joseph Smith, January 21, 1838; copied into a letter of Oliver Cowdery to Warren A. Cowdery for the same date, Oliver Cowdery Letterbook, 80, original at Huntington Library. In “Letters of Oliver Cowdery,” 80–83. In New Mormon Studies: A Comprehensive Resource Library; emphasis mine. It is not known if Joseph ever received the original letter. ↩

  27. Fanny Brewer, quoted in Bennett, The History of the Saints, 85–86; emphasis mine. It is doubtful that Brewer had firsthand knowledge of the event, since Fanny Alger was not an orphan but a housemaid in the Smith home. In 1889, dissident Benjamin Winchester wrote a reminiscence about “Primitive Mormonism” that was published in the Salt Lake Tribune: “[In 1835] there was a good deal of scandal prevalent among a number of Saints concerning Joseph’s licentious conduct, this more especially among the women. Joseph’s name was then connected with scandalous relations with two or three families.” Winchester, “Primitive Mormonism—Personal Narrative of It,” 2. Winchester was present in Kirtland during the 1835–37 period, but he was born August 6, 1817; thus his youth would have likely prevented him from becoming a confidante of Joseph Smith regarding his first plural marriage. Furthermore, Winchester’s recollection of scandal “with two or three families” is unsubstantiated by any other witness. It appears Winchester was repeating rumors he had heard rather than recording firsthand recollections. ↩

  28. Levi Ward Hancock Autobiography with additions in 1896 by Mosiah Hancock, 63, CHL; cited portion written by Mosiah (Ms 570, microfilm). See also Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997), 32. We are indebted to Compton who discovered that both published versions of the journal (The Mosiah Hancock Journal, Salt Lake City: Pioneer Press, n.d., 74 pp and The Levi Hancock Journal, n.p., n.d. 58 pp) are incomplete having had all references to the Fanny Alger marriage removed. See also Todd Compton, “Fanny Alger Smith Custer Mormonism’s First Plural Wife?” Journal of Mormon History, 22/1 (Spring 1996) 1:175 n3. ↩

  29. Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 29. ↩

  30. Andrew Jenson Papers [ca. 1871-1942], MS 17956; CHL, Box 49, Folder 16, documents 1 and 2. ↩

  31. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 1:361, August 1, 1852. ↩

  32. Minutes of the Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1835-1893 (Salt Lake City: Privately Published [Smith-Pettit Foundation], 2010), 160; see also 157. ↩

  33. Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses, 18:55-56, July 11, 1875. ↩

  34. Orson Pratt, “Celestial Marriage,” The Seer, 1/4 (April 1853): 60. ↩

  35. Belinda Marden Pratt, “Defense of Polygamy: By a Lady of Utah, in a Letter to Her Sister in New Hampshire,” Millennial Star, 16 (July 29, 1854): 471. ↩

  36. George Albert Smith, Journal of Discourses, 13:41, October 8, 1869, emphasis in original. ↩

  37. Bathsheba Smith, deposition, Temple Lot transcript, respondent’s testimony (part 3), page 347, question 1142. ↩

  38. Joseph F. Smith to Zenos H. Gurley, June 19, 1889, CHL. Richard E. Turley, Jr. Selected Collections from the Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (Provo, Utah: BYU Press), vol. 1, DVD #29. ↩

  39. Joseph Fielding Smith, Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1905), 48. ↩

  40. Lucy Walker Kimball, “A Brief Biographical Sketch of the Life and Labors of Lucy Walker Kimball Smith,” CHL; quoted in Lyman Omer Littlefield, Reminiscences of Latter-day Saints: Giving an Account of Much Individual Suffering Endured for Religious Conscience (Logan, Utah: Utah Journal Co, 1888), 46. ↩

  41. See for example George D. Smith, “The Forgotten Story of Nauvoo Celestial Marriage,” Journal of Mormon History, 36/4 (Fall 2010):157. By selectively quoting Lucy Walker’s account, George D. Smith makes it appear as if Joseph introduced plural marriage and then immediately gave her a twenty-four hour ultimatum to participate, when in reality many months passed between the two events. ↩

  42. Littlefield, Reminiscences of Latter-day Saints, 46; see also testimony in Andrew Jenson, “Plural Marriage,” Historical Record 6 (July 1887):229-30. ↩

  43. Littlefield, Reminiscences of Latter-day Saints, 46-48; ; see also testimony in Jenson, “Plural Marriage”:229-30. ↩

  44. Littlefield, Reminiscences of Latter-day Saints, 46-48; see also testimony in Jenson, “Plural Marriage”: 229-30. ↩

  45. Untitled typed sheet “The following was given by Judge D. H. Morris of St. George, Utah…” copy in Vesta P. Crawford Collection, Marriott Library, University of Utah, MS 125, bx 1, fd 5. ↩

  46. See for example Bennett, The History of the Saints, 231 (Sarah Pratt) and 253 (Widow Fuller). ↩

  47. Besides Sarah Granger Kimball, included are Ester Johnson (Benjamin F. Johnson, My Life’s Review, Mesa: 21st Century Printing, n.d,. 85.), Lydia Moon (Smith, ed. An Intimate Chronicle, 120.), Cordelia C. Morley (Autobiography, holograph, HBLL, BYU, 4.) and Rachel R. Ivins Grant (quoted in Ronald W Walker, “Rachel R. Grant: The Continuing Legacy of the Feminine Ideal,” in Supporting Saints: Life Stories of Nineteenth-Century Mormons, Donald Q. Cannon, and David J. Whittaker, eds. [Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1985], 22. ↩

  48. Andrew Jenson, “Plural Marriage,” Historical Record, 232. ↩

  49. Cheryl L. Bruno, “First Thoughts on Joseph Smith’s Polygamy by Brian Hales,” Worlds Without End: A Mormon Studies Roundtable, March 4, 2013, at http://www.withoutend.org/thoughts-joseph-smiths-polygamy-brian-hales/ (accessed August 2, 2013). ↩

  50. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, dust jacket. ↩

“Endless Forms Most Beautiful”: The uses and abuses of evolutionary biology in six works

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 6 (2013): 105-163

Review of:

  • Michael Dowd. Thank God for Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. 336 pp., with index. $13.95.
  • Karl W. Giberson. Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. 239 pp., with index. $9.98.
  • Daniel J. Fairbanks. Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007. 281 pp., with index. $15.86.
  • Howard C. Stutz. “Let the Earth Bring Forth”, Evolution and Scripture. Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2010. 130 pp., with index. $15.95
  • David C. Stove. Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution. New York: Encounter Books, 1995. 345 pp., with index. $18.95
  • William A. Dembski. The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2009. 229 pp., with index. $22.99

The position of the Church on the origin of man was published by the First Presidency in 1909 and stated again by a different First Presidency in 1925:

[Page 106]The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, basing its belief on divine revelation, ancient and modern, declares man to be the direct and lineal offspring of Deity…. Man is the child of God, formed in the divine image and endowed with divine attributes…

The scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how, though the Lord has promised that he will tell that when he comes again (D&C 101:32–33). In 1931, when there was intense discussion on the issue of organic evolution, the First Presidency of the Church, then consisting of Presidents Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, and Charles W. Nibley, addressed all of the General Authorities of the Church on the matter and concluded,

Upon the fundamental doctrines of the Church we are all agreed. Our mission is to bear the message of the restored gospel to the world. Leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church.… Upon one thing we should all be able to agree, namely, that Presidents Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, and Anthon H. Lund were right when they said: “Adam is the primal parent of our race.”

—First Presidency Minutes, April 7, 19311

Introduction

For many, evolutionary biology ranks with politics and religion as a subject best not debated in polite company. This sentiment is not without some justification, since in all except the absolute basics and fundamentals of the faith (about which there can be no compromise), it is vitally important that [Page 107]our convictions or intellectual life not alienate us from others—or alienate others from us. Our reticence to discuss a matter on which opinions have differed widely has had some occasional side effects. For example, Mormon scholarship can be affected as some Latter-day Saints invoke biological concepts in a muddled way, bringing confusion, not clarity.2 And of greater concern is the worldly and secular philosophy, polemic, and propaganda that invoke evo-bio while going far beyond what science can tell us. Prominent examples include the militant atheism and philosophical materialism of people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Such philosophical claims often intersect with vital gospel truths and invoke evo-bio, such as whether free will/moral agency is an illusion. I think these conceptual extensions of and parasitism upon evo-bio are of far more significance and a far greater intellectual and spiritual threat to me and mine than biological Darwinism.

The reader is entitled to know with what presuppositions I approach these reviews. First, I do not believe that anyone has this all figured out—theories and models will change, and where once we thought we saw the whole picture, I suspect we will eventually find that there is much more going on. Second, I think evolutionary biology is very poorly understood among most Church members (at least in North America). This is not surprising, since evo-bio is poorly understood among North Americans generally,3 and LDS members are no exception [Page 108]to that general rule. We have in addition some LDS leaders who have expressed decidedly anti-evolution ideas that might discourage some members from learning more. As a result of all these factors, nearly all critiques of evo-bio or appeals to creation science that one hears from LDS members are deeply flawed because the writers of these critiques either misunderstand or misrepresent the evo-bio position.4 Rarely, I think, is this inaccuracy intentional. However, its pervasive presence undercuts the many good things which such critiques hope to accomplish. Even if evo-bio were to be a complete fiction from beginning to end, those who oppose it based on limited understanding will lack credibility with those they hope to convince. Latter-day Saint youth who are indoctrinated into a poorly-reasoned critique of evo-bio (even if the field merits critique and denunciation in the strongest terms) will not be well-served when they learn in college that such critiques are built upon sand. Critics of evo-bio must first understand what evidence is invoked in its support and what concepts make it convincing to the vast majority of thinkers in the field. Evidence must be confronted and reanalyzed thoroughly and with rigorous honesty.

In short, I think there is truth and value to be found in evo-bio work, but I do not think that all the questions are adequately answered. If the theory itself is no threat to Mormonism, I do see at least spiritual dangers and sophistry in some of its [Page 109]applications. I’ve written this essay because I’m interested in how Latter-day Saints‚ and Christians generally, integrate biology with theology.

Thank God For Evolution [Michael Dowd]

Reverend Michael Dowd is former pastor of three United Church of Christ congregations. He has worked for many years in environmental causes. His book is praised by many, including “Eugene” C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education, the vice-director of the Vatican Observatory, liberal theologian and humanist Bishop John Shelby Spong, and five Nobel Prize winners.5

It is with some trepidation that I align myself against these and other worthies. I do not exaggerate, however, when I say that this is the worst book I have ever read on religion and science—possibly only equalled in its flaws by Whitcomb and Morris’s influential but maddening The Genesis Flood.6

After a long history of pastoring and marriage to his wife, Connie, Dowd encountered a course on “The New Catholic Mysticism” taught by Albert LaChance, who “began by telling the scientific story of the Universe in a way that I had never heard it told before—as a sacred epic. Less than an hour into the evening, I began to weep. I knew I would spend the rest of my life sharing this perspective as great news.” (2) It is telling that his wife—who does not believe in God—is able to embrace his current mission with equal vigor.

Dowd is certainly not modest in his goals. He tells Christians that “whether you consider yourself conservative, moderate, [Page 110]or liberal, my promise to you is that the sacred evolutionary perspective offered here will enrich your faith and inspire you in ways the believers in the past could only dream of.” Other religions are assured that “it will be easy to apply most of what you find here to your own life and faith.” Agnostics, humanists, atheists, and freethinkers “will find nothing here that you cannot wholeheartedly embrace as being grounded in a rationally sound, mainstream scientific understanding of the Universe. I also promise that the vision of ‘evolutionary spirituality’ presented here will benefit you and your loved ones without you needing to believe in everything otherworldly.” (xxii) This desire to pitch a broad tent is admirable, but to do so Rev. Dowd has essentially tossed everything that matters about Christianity except some benign bromides about wholeness and living authentically. (The science in Dowd’s book is accurate, if very broadly sketched—readers will learn little or nothing new about how science works, or why evolutionary biology or a host of other disciplines make the claims they do.)

I confess that as I read, I kept imaging Dowd as a sort of Tony Robbins: half populist preacher on tour and half motivational speaker. I picture Dowd dashing about the stage, capped teeth gleaming, wireless microphone strapped to his head, pumping up the crowd about the glories of evolution—or “The Great Story,” as he calls it (24). The book has that type of feel to it.

Dowd’s whole project smacks less of Christianity than it does of New Age spirituality and self-help seminars. “We are in the early stages of one of the most far-reaching transformations into which human consciousness has ever ascended. Today’s conflict between science and religion is the catalyst by which both will mature in healthy ways.” (12) You can almost hear the opening bars of “The Age of Aquarius.”

I apologize for being slightly silly about the book but, though evidently composed with earnest seriousness, it is an [Page 111]awfully silly book. There’s no doubt Reverend Dowd believes what he says. But his declarations (and they are declared, not argued) are either trite or patently false, depending upon how they are understood.

For example, Dowd rhapsodizes about the interconnectedness of all things and our unity with the cosmos. Fair enough, evolution would certainly argue for that. He then writes:

The good news here is that while it is possible to feel alienated from the Universe.… the fact is that it is impossible ever to be alienated—no matter what. You are part of the Universe. Achieving enlightenment, freedom, salvation, and empowerment is as easy (and as challenging) as developing a habit of trusting what’s real and growing in humility, authenticity, responsibility, and service to the Whole—that is, growing in evolutionary integrity (60-61).

If we define “the Universe” as everything that is, then it is trivially true that we (being part of all that is) are part of the Universe. On the other hand, we are also “part of humanity” or “part of a family,” and we might well feel alienated from these groups. And isn’t alienation really more about how we perceive things? If we feel hated or ignored and thus feel alienated or act alienated, that is the problem—that’s what alienation is and reassuring us that we’re in fact part of the whole by a type of logical deduction from set theory rings rather hollow.

There is a lot that rings hollow in Dowd’s project. It is easy for the worried well who feel vaguely unfulfilled in the affluent West’s suburbia to talk about how we can be enlightened or saved by being more authentic or responsible—but I wonder what this fairly vacuous declaration would say to someone in Dachau or the Killing Fields of Cambodia, suffering a civil war and famine in Africa, or with a debilitating terminal illness.

[Page 112]Dowd ventures straight into issues of death with his bubbly good cheer:

Perhaps there is no more alluring portal for discovering the benefits of evolutionary spirituality than death understood in an inspiring new way. Thanks to the sciences… we can now not only accept but celebrate that:

• Death is natural and generative at every level of reality

• Death is no less sacred than life (94).

Dowd goes on to argue that all life requires some death (from the “death” of stars to create heavy elements to the “death” of continents separated by continental drift, to animals that require the death of something for food or the death of some cells for embryo development). This strikes me as too clever by half, and it trades on the equivocation introduced by the metaphor of “death.” Stars may be said to “die,” and a supercontinent that breaks up may be “dead,” but these are analogies—they are not the same thing as the death of a living organism, much less of a thinking, feeling human with connections to others who grieve the loss. (Unless, of course, one sees humans as no more consequential than balls of fusing hydrogen or hunks of planetary crust—but that view has its own problems.) “An evolutionary understanding of death in no way diminishes the grief we suffer when a loved one dies, …if we acknowledge that there is something profoundly right with death with the fact that we grow old and that we must die, it will be easier to clean up unfinished business before it is too late” (97, italics in original). One problem, however, is that not everyone grows old and dies. Some people suffer horribly and die young. Even evolution itself requires an enormous amount of suffering and death to achieve its purposes. Virtually everyone leaves some unfinished business, and often the unfinished business [Page 113]remains so because the person who died was not willing to be reconciled with the survivors, no matter how much the latter might have wished it. Is our business with those we love ever “finished”? Can we say, “It is enough?” The celebration of death as something “profoundly right” strikes me as making a virtue of necessity, almost a type of Stoicism. It certainly isn’t Christian in any meaningful sense.

Dowd tries to make it Christian by saying that this “mirrors the core message of the early Christian scriptures: on the other side of Good Friday is Easter Sunday.” “Death,” claims Dowd, “never has the final word, that it virtually always contains the seeds of new life.” (100) I think of this as “The Circle of Life” theology. It is not calculated to bring much comfort; it strikes me as little more than the standard atheist’s whistling past the graveyard. If I told bereaved parents that their newborn daughter had just been killed, could we expect them to derive any comfort whatever from the idea that their baby was dead but that she would be eaten by bacteria and worms—and therefore new life has come from death, and there is something profoundly right about this? The idea is repugnant.

Of course, Christian scriptures do tell us that death is not the end, but that is because of personal continuity after death and eventual resurrection and renewal. Evolution (or any science) certainly cannot promise this, and the universe revealed by science alone may eventually run out of any life (even the metaphoric “life” of stars and tectonic plates) as everything sinks into a heat death of maximum entropy, Bertrand Russell’s “extinction in the vast death of the solar system.”7 All Dowd can urge on us is “a profound faith, a radical trust, that whatever awaits us and our loved ones in the beyond, if anything, is just perfect.” (100, emphasis added) The “if anything” does not exactly fill me with hope. If there is nothing, how can this be [Page 114]said to be “perfect”? If the vast majority of humanity suffers in hell for eternity, that is also not good news. And so on.

This highlights a fundamental problem with the book—Dowd’s message is not Christian in any conventional way, save perhaps for some of the ethics. But there is certainly no hint that Jesus is Lord or that He is risen indeed. “The core teachings of Christianity will remain foundational” (76), he tells us (save, it would seem, for that aspect which featured so prominently in early Christian confessions of faith, “how that Christ died for our sins… was buried… and… rose again the third day” [1 Cor. 15:3–4]). “Of necessity,” Dowd admits, “this evolutionary effort will also mean that some of the teachings will be translated almost beyond recognition” (76). Indeed! Small wonder that atheists, skeptics, and humanists can embrace this project: it is “Christian” only in the sense that Christian imagery can be seen as a type of dim shadow or allegory of the evolutionary worldview. I had difficulty finishing the book—perhaps it gets really good in the last few pages, but I doubt it.

Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution [Karl W. Giberson]

Giberson’s book is everything that Dowd’s is not—learned, measured, and a joy to read. Latter-day Saint readers will probably find it more useful for its history than its theological suggestions. That is, Giberson is a worthy guide to the sorts of questions we should be asking, though some of his answers are not as applicable to Latter-day Saints as to other Christians.

Giberson began life as a young-earth, fundamentalist creationist who entered college with a firm determination to learn everything he could about this worldview so he could better defend it. He gives a moving and nuanced description of how wrenching he found it to be compelled by the evidence to alter his perspective (1–16). Of all the books I’ve read on this subject, I think Giberson best treats young-earth fundamentalists, [Page 115]dyed-in-the-wool evolutionists, and everyone in between with real sympathy and insight. He does not disparage his younger self or treat these ideas as something childish that he had to grow out of. Those of a more traditionalist, creationist bent will likely identify with his experience. Those inclined to an evolutionary viewpoint would also do well to study Giberson’s account, especially when he points out how difficult it was to find anyone to help support his shattered fundamentalism in a way that would let him retain anything of value from the Bible:

Further complicating my struggles, the religion scholars I consulted were quite accepting of evolution. An Old Testament scholar with a Ph.D. from Boston University assured me that “Genesis was never intended to be read literally.” He and his colleagues had made their peace with evolution, apparently as toddlers, and had been at peace about this ever since. They were surprisingly disinterested in the struggles of those who, like me, were trying to hold on to some version of their childhood faith, while portions of its foundations were slowly removed, like the pieces of a Jenga tower that may or may not come crashing down as once extracts the tiny logs.

Acid is an appropriate metaphor for the erosion of my fundamentalism, as I slowly lost my confidence in the Genesis story of creation and the scientific creationism that placed this ancient story within the framework of modern science… [It] dissolved Adam and Eve; it ate through the Garden of Eden; it destroyed the historicity of the events of creation week. It etched holes in those parts of Christianity connected to these stories—the fall, “Christ as second Adam,” the origins of sin, and nearly everything else that I counted sacred (9–10).

[Page 116]Giberson spends several chapters discussing the history of creationism within Christianity. Despite its huge role in many American denominations, creationism is of relatively recent date. Most interesting for Latter-day Saint readers, I think, is the story of how the introduction of young-earth “creation science” to mainstream creedal Christianity has parallels in its rise to prominence in our own history. Despite the later popular histories that portray Darwin and religion as immediately and irrevocably locked in combat, most Christians adapted quite quickly to the new perspective if they were aware of it at all. The trend to secularization among Christians had far more to do with intellectual currents within religion than it did with an assault from science (44–58).

However, one religious leader in America threw down the gauntlet—Ellen White. White had been a member of the Millerite sect. Miller had prophesied Christ’s second coming in either 1843 or 1844. Following Christ’s non-appearance—”The Great Disappointment”—some followers went on to form the Adventist movement. White began having visions, and in 1863 the Seventh-day Adventists were formed with her as a key leader:

In 1864, five years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, White wrote that God had given her a vision of the actual creation: “I was then carried back to the creation and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week.” These and other prophetic writings by White rooted the Adventist movement firmly in the soil of young-earth creationism (58).

Thus, for much of the nineteenth century, young-earth creationism was mainly the province of Adventist groups, who were marginal to mainstream Christianity. (LDS readers can [Page 117]likely readily appreciate how well a self-proclaimed prophet—and a female one at that—was received in nineteenth-century America.)

Meanwhile, mainstream Christian denominations were preoccupied with internal conflict over the modernizing, liberalizing trends fostered by some leaders and scholars. This eventually led to the publication of The Fundamentals, a four-volume set of essays that sought to “identify the essential core ideas of Christianity—the fundamentals—and rally Christians to protect those beliefs and keep them from being swept away by the rising tide of modernism” (60). While evolution was mentioned in about a quarter of the essays, young-earth creationism was conspicuously absent. (This absence is clear to Latter-day Saints, who have the benefit of hindsight; the absence would not have been remarkable at that time precisely because young-earth views were neither widespread nor terribly vocal.) Moreover, the authors of The Fundamentals were not at all united on what “good Christians” ought to think about evolution—a sharp contrast to most labeled evangelicals or Fundamentalists today. Meanwhile, the Adventist views of Ellen White continued in relative obscurity, though the Adventist university at Loma Linda began to propagate them (123). The obscurity would come to an end with George McCready Price:

White’s interpretation of the flood became widely known outside Adventist circles through the writings of George McCready Price (1870–1963)…. A self-taught geologist with little education beyond high school, Price was a gifted writer, amateur scientist, and tireless crusader in the cause of anti-evolution. His The New Geology, published in 1923, was catapulted into relevance by William Jennings Bryan, who wielded its anti-evolutionary arguments in his crusade against [Page 118]Darwinism.… Lay readers, unfamiliar with geology, often find Price’s argument[s] convincing. William Jennings Bryan certainly did. But informed readers are appalled (124, 126).

Price, then, was the vehicle for Ellen White’s revelatory views. Regrettably, Price’s scientific arguments were not plausible when he wrote, much less today:

Despite Price’s emergence as “the principal scientific authority of the Fundamentalists,” he had little formal scientific training, virtually no publications in peer-reviewed journals, and no credentials of any sort beyond an introductory education to which he kept adding.… In the final analysis Price’s ideas served little purpose beyond providing an “authority” for fundamentalists to invoke against evolution. Bryan and other leading anti-evolutionists certainly looked to Price as an authority. And for decades he was the scientific authority (128–29).

One reader who found Price’s arguments compelling was LDS apostle (and later Church president) Joseph Fielding Smith. During discussions among the apostles about the evolution issue in the 1930s, Elder Smith referred frequently to Price’s work.8 Elder James E. Talmage wrote of how he used the science of the day to “show up James [sic] McCready Price in all his unenviable colors.”9 Arguments against Price did not, however, persuade Elder Smith, and he would appeal to the Adventist’s book when he wrote his own: Man, His Origin and Destiny (1954).10

[Page 119](Elder Talmage’s son, Sterling, was a Harvard-trained geologist whose riposte about Price’s The New Geology is worth quoting: “All of Price’s arguments, in principle at least, were advanced and refuted from fifty to a hundred years ago. They are not ‘New.’ His ideas certainly are not ‘Geology.’ With these two corrections, the title remains the best part of the book.”)11

How, then, would Price influence the wider scope of American Christianity, especially given his “disreputable” links to Adventism? Price’s book and his “public image was that of a geological clown, a strange one-man scientific community combing the planet for evidences to support the bizarre visions of a nineteenth-century prophetess.” John Whitcomb and Henry Morris—an Old Testament scholar and a PhD hydrological engineer, respectively—set out to reclaim Christianity from the errors into which they believed it had fallen:

In Whitcomb’s early draft of The Genesis Flood, Morris had noted with caution that the geology was “merely a survey of George McCready Price’s arguments.” Mindful that Price’s book had flopped, Morris worried that a recycling might not fare much better. Whitcomb agreed, and they set out to recast Price’s work in a way that retained its strengths but hid its origins. When The Genesis Flood was finally published, there were but four references to Price in the index and nothing of substance in the text itself. Morris, forever gracious, was concerned about this move and apologized to Price when he asked him to review some of the chapters that drew heavily on his work. Price was not upset, but some of his supporters felt Whitcomb and Morris [Page 120]were disingenuous and unprofessional in concealing their debts to Price (133).

Thus did Ellen White’s views come to have an enormous influence on American Christianity and church-state jurisprudence in the twentieth century. For example, Price and those who drew on his work succeeded in convincing half of Americans that the earth was only a few thousand years old (121, 142).

Giberson goes on to review such events as the Scopes trial, the battle over creation science in the public schools, and the Intelligent Design movement. He treats legislative battles, and the concept of culture war. He also points out the real dangers of scientists imposing a scientific sheen upon pronouncements that are really philosophical or religious, and thus beyond both their expertise and hence science. He then reviews the basic categories of evidence upon which evolution rests.

Giberson seems to hope, through his review of history, to demonstrate that young-earth creationism is neither necessary to Christianity nor of ancient date. Latter-day Saints will find this interesting, but the underlying argument may be less compelling because of LDS views regarding the primacy of modern prophets and the many doctrinal errors that they believe have been propagated in other Christian churches.

Giberson concludes with an account of his experience as a teacher. Here, I think his humility and his sense that these questions are both weighty and difficult are apparent:

Today as I was leaving class a thoughtful student approached me and wanted to know if I was going to “come clean” about evolution and let the students know what I believed. I had been lecturing on Darwin, trying to get the students inside the great scientist’s head as he wrestled with the observations that eventually led him to the theory of evolution. This student, like me, was [Page 121]raised to believe that Darwin was evil and evolution was a lie. But, also like me at his age, he was having second thoughts as he was becoming better informed (or brainwashed by his professor, depending on your perspective).

When I teach Darwin, I avoid taking a position, partly so students can feel free to reject evolution if that is their choice. More important, though, I want the students to wrestle, as Darwin did and I did when I was their age, with the implications of cruelty in nature and bad design. They need to confront, on their terms, the mass of data that can’t be reconciled with the Genesis creation accounts. If I lay my position out too clearly, some students will make their decision based on what they think of me, rather than the issues at stake.

Many college students, and most Americans for that matter, have little interest in evolution as science. Their concern is that science not crowd out their religious beliefs. At some level they fear Daniel Dennett’s “universal acid” may actually have the power to dissolve their beliefs. And they don’t want to find out if that is true.

Their fear is understandable. Almost everyone who talks about evolution insists that we must make a choice between evolution or creation, materialism or God, naturalism or supernaturalism (215).

I share Giberson’s conviction that these types of stark choices are almost always unnecessary, but that the way in which some teach these matters may predispose young people to believe they must make such a choice. If we rely on the badly [Page 122]dated and flawed “science” of Price, Morris, and Whitcomb, the decision will almost inevitably be for modern science, which the student will then mistakenly decide means that the gospel must be false. Whatever the ultimate truth or falsity of various elements of evo-bio theories, our students deserve better. Price et al. granted the scientists more power and made them more of a threat than they were or are. (As is often remarked, there is irony in their decision to apply Enlightenment views of science and knowledge to the Bible in an effort to combat the excesses of the Enlightenment.)

While Giberson’s book may not point the way to an easy resolution, it helps us understand the debates more clearly. And it models an approach to teaching and discussing evo-bio that people on either side of the issue would do well to emulate.

Relics of Eden [Daniel J. Fairbanks]

I was worried about this book simply because of the publisher—Prometheus Books.12 I had seen enough other offerings from Prometheus—founded by atheist philosopher and strident secular humanist Paul Kurtz—to expect that a diatribe against religion or “superstition” might be ahead of me.13) I was pleasantly surprised, and then thrilled to find nothing of the sort. The author, Daniel J. Fairbanks, is a Latter-day Saint and obviously a gifted teacher.

[Page 123]His book sets out to detail and explore the evidence for evolution as it applies to human beings, especially the genetic evidence. As a science, the analysis of the genetic code has been possible for only about half a century, and the oceans of data in which we are now drowning have been available in only the last few decades. Even those undisposed to accept any form of evolution should read this book carefully—it gives an excellent introduction to the type and scope of evidence with which students will be confronted.

The book requires no previous genetics experience or background, and it is by far the most accessible treatment of genetics for the non-expert that I have ever read. Fairbanks is to be congratulated on both his clarity and creativity. This book will equip the reader to navigate the less-clear presentations found in other works.

After a tour through the genetic evidence, Fairbanks ranges more broadly. In the last two chapters, he addresses issues of faith and belief. The penultimate chapter describes his difficulties with and objections to Intelligent Design theory, which dovetail nicely with the genetic data he explores in the first eight chapters. In the final chapter, Fairbanks bemoans the tendency of some scientists and religionists to create a science-religion conflict where there is none. But he does not stoop to the caricature of the believer that I had feared from Prometheus Books. He lays out the risks frankly, however, and I suspect that he has seen such difficulties in Latter-day Saint youth. I share his concerns, for the same reasons:

I am dismayed over how often the authors of antievolution books misrepresent science. I can understand how a minister or a parent with little scientific training could oppose evolution on religious grounds. But many authors of antievolution literature are well educated in the sciences, and the claims they [Page 124]make in their books are, for the most part, unsupported by scientific evidence.… I suspect that most of them truly believe they are engaged in a noble cause. Once they accept the evolution-creation dichotomy as real, they seem willing to paint an extremely selective picture of science, even misrepresent it…

The irony here is that such an effort may do more to harm faith than to promote it. Especially vulnerable are college and university students. Several surveys show that a significant proportion of students enter their college years accepting the dichotomy. Although not well informed about evolution, they already reject it. A general biology course is a standard requirement at colleges and universities, and professors who teach such courses typically present abundant evidence of evolution along with the analytical skills students need to understand the evidence. Any preconceived notions that the scientific approach is weak or wrongheaded get shattered. Students quickly acquire information and discard the unsupported claims of creationists and intelligent design advocates. Recalling the propaganda about a dichotomy, they may end up questioning their faith (167–68).

I would add that the typically poor or superficial exposure to evolution in US high schools means that most students will confront this difficulty suddenly and with full force in college or university. They and their parents will not have had the opportunity to work out the implications in a “friendly” environment and at a more leisurely pace.

If only because of the above concerns, Fairbanks’s book should be read so that opponents of evolution appreciate the data they are up against. But there are far better reasons to read [Page 125]it. He does not offer a reconciliation of Genesis with modern science but shows us some of the depth and range of data that any reconciliation must address.

“Let the Earth Bring Forth”: Evolution and Scripture [Howard C. Stutz]

This is a delightful book by a Latter-day Saint, Howard Stutz. The late Dr. Stutz was a plant biologist and emeritus professor of genetics at BYU. My chief complaint with this work is simply that it is too brief (Stutz himself refers to it as an “essay”). He brings a lifetime of learning to his work, and he has the obvious love for his subject that characterizes all great teachers. He reviews major lines of evidence for evo-bio, including embryology, mutation, speciation, the fossil record, biogeography, comparative anatomy, biochemistry, and genetics.

The leitmotif for this volume is found in the title: “Let the Earth Bring forth”—Stutz here invokes the recurrent phrase from Genesis that describes the earth’s obedience to God’s commands. In his view, Abraham 4:11, which speaks of the earth being “prepared” to “bring forth,” provides an excellent theological framework to accommodate natural processes such as those described by evolutionary biology:

Being properly prepared, there could be no alternative to these processes. Operating within the framework of these conditions, with these laws, the Earth would bring forth. The numerous intricacies involved in the creation process were not the product of chance. God established them as the most probable and the most predictable of all alternatives (79, italics in original).

What I most enjoyed about Stutz’s treatment is his focus on the neglected half of biology—the plants. Evolutionary texts and polemics are quick to focus on the more flashy organisms: vertebrates get pride of place, and oceans of ink sufficient to [Page 126]drown a lungfish have been spilled over the vertebrate eye, the giraffe’s neck, and tropical isles’ finches. Practical bench research and lab work in genetics focuses on bacteria, yeast, fruit flies, or on the delicate tracery of C. elegans, a worm whose every cell is known and numbered, and whose name always seems to me to deserve the italics that adorn every species’ Latin name.

In all this, the plants are often forgotten or, worse, taken for granted. And yet, plant biology is fascinating in its own right. Plants are almost like alien life-forms, accustomed as we sometimes are to the biochemistry and lifestyles of animals (especially mammals, for obvious if parochial reasons). Plants are also far more tolerant of mutation, and their adaptation and speciation is easy to observe directly within human life spans, both in the lab and in the wild. They are also often easier to breed and study than large vertebrates. It is, after all, from Mendel’s pea plants that we scented the first bloom of the genetics revolution.

Stutz’s work is a good introduction to evo-bio, but those who have read quite a bit in the field will, if they are like me, find great satisfaction in hearing some of the same melodies in a different key. Evo-bio texts and popular science books often present a common set of examples, a sort of “Greatest Hits” that any self-respecting author feels almost obliged to cover—for good reason, because they are arresting, well-studied, and useful for illustrating broader principles and themes. (Less flattering reasons also suggest themselves, such as the human tendency to copy what has gone before rather than expend more effort to find novel examples. On occasion, errors have been perpetuated by generations of textbook authors.) Stutz’s work is something of a revelation in that it finds many examples in the plant world that throw a new light on common evo-bio themes usually described in animals or single-celled organisms. Only a specialist would have encountered them.

[Page 127]Stutz’s book is a wonderful reminder of the nearly inexhaustible richness of the natural world, much of which goes unnoticed every day. He need not venture to Africa or New Guinea for his examples. They are all around us, including in the plants of Western North America upon which Stutz focused much of his professional attention. It would have been fascinating to walk around the desert with him, and I regret that I will never have the chance.

Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution [David Stove]

This is a book that I dearly wanted to like but couldn’t. Its approach is something I appreciate—an examination of scientific or cognitive overreach. Where better to find such things than in evolutionary biology? Sadly, the book is marred by misstatements and misunderstandings about scientific matters, and this undercuts its plausibility. It demonstrates, I suspect, the perils of increasing academic specialization. Stove is a philosopher, and it is no small thing to master a completely separate discipline, especially one as complicated and rapidly changing as evo-bio. But that is what is required here, and he has too many lapses.

Stove’s goal is blunt—to rebut both Darwin and modern Darwinism: “My object is to show that Darwinism is not true: not true, at any rate, of our species. If it is true, or near enough true, of sponges, snakes, flies, or whatever, I do not mind that. What I do mind is, its being supposed to be true of man” (xiv). Stove goes on to say that he is not a Christian and is, in fact, not religious at all. His objections are based on how he sees the evidence (or lack thereof).

It is important here to realize (which I did not, until I had read the entire book and then returned to it) that when Stove says “Darwinism” or “neo-Darwinism,” he is not so much talking about evo-bio per se. Rather, he is more concerned with [Page 128]the philosophical extrapolation or claims made with Darwin as a buttress. He is not clear about this, however, and I’m not certain that it is always clear in his own mind that this is the core of his project. As a result, he veers from talking about the philosophical problems and unwarranted leaps made by people such as Richard Dawkins—about whose less scientific ideas he is generally on point—to questioning the biological evidence itself, which he often gets wrong, frequently embarrassingly so. But the clue to his real preoccupations does appear early, though the water is muddied by his unnecessary attacks upon the biology:

In 1859, [Darwinism] was the best explanation of evolution available, and hence, indirectly, the best available explanation of the many facts which evolution in turn explains: the adaptation of organisms, their distribution, their affiliations with other species existing or extinct, and so on. It is still the best explanation available of all those things. That is under-praising it, however, because the best available explanation of something need not be a good one. But the Darwinian explanation of evolution is a very good one as far as it goes, and it has turned out to go an extremely long way. Its explanatory power, even in 1859, was visibly very great, but it has turned out to be far greater than anyone then could have realized.…

Even the best available explanation need not be equally good at all points. For some of the matters it is meant to explain, a certain theory might be a good approximation or even be the complete and exact truth and at the same time glaringly incomplete or even obviously false with respect to some of the other things it is meant to explain. That is, I believe, the [Page 129]way matters actually stand with neo-Darwinism. In particular, I believe that neo-Darwinism, though a very good approximation of truth and completeness for many of the simplest organisms, is an extremely poor approximation in the case of our own species. Or rather, to tell the truth, I think that it is, at least in the hands of some of its most confident and influential advocates, a ridiculous slander on human beings (33, italics in original).

This might all seem like a sane and reasonable approach to the question: to grant the good and even embrace it, but throw out the nonsense and overreach. Yet it is hard to credit Stove’s argument completely when he surrounds it with such blunders as claiming that the whole idea of natural selection makes no sense when applied to humans:

In a “continual free fight,” any man who had on his mind, not only his own survival, but that of a wife and child, would be no match for a man not so encumbered. [Such a] man, if he wanted to maximize his own chances of survival, and had even half a brain, would simply eat his wife and child before some other man did. It is first class protein after all (7).

Clever as the phrasing is, this is just nonsense. Darwinism does not argue simply that “those who survive will prosper.” The key claim is that “those who survive and succeed in leaving more of their DNA behind than others will have descendants who prosper” in the long run. A male who did nothing but eat his mate and offspring would be a speedy loser in the evolution sweepstakes—it does not matter if he lives for centuries; if his strategy is to consume mate and offspring as soon as possible, then he leaves no progeny behind, and his DNA will perish with him. This seems such an obvious point that one wonders if Stove realizes the argument’s unfairness, but he uses it anyway.

[Page 130]Stove also makes what I think is a mistake in tactics, and that is a preoccupation with Darwin himself. While Darwin is certainly foundational to evolution by natural selection, the field has moved forward enormously. (Darwin knew nothing of genes or heredity, for example.) Stove seems to treat Darwin more as one would treat an important founder of a philosophical school. So if you want to rebut the Young Hegelians, you spend some of your fire on Hegel. (And this is perhaps not surprising if he does perceive his target, “evolution,” as more of a worldview or philosophy than an empirical science.) But if Stove is attacking evo-bio as science, the focus on Darwin is somewhat misdirected. It doesn’t really matter if Darwin got something right or wrong—what matters is the current state of the art. Yet Stove spends a lot of time fencing with Darwin.

However, he is often outmatched. For example, Darwin’s insight that organisms would tend to reproduce until they had exceeded the available resources (e.g., food, oxygen, living space) was likely influenced by Malthus’s essay on the supposed inevitability of human famine, given that humans (like other organisms) reproduce geometrically, while food supplies can only increase linearly. At some point, argued Malthus, population will outstrip food supplies, and then only famine or war or disease can prune it back. Stove regards this claim (which most would regard as self-evident, once pointed out) as absurd:

If a population is to be always as numerous as its food supply allows, or nearly so, reproduction would always have to begin as early as possible. In nearly all species of animals, all the earliest opportunities for mating are opportunities for the young to mate with a sibling or with one of their parents. You would expect, therefore, if the Malthus-Darwin principle were true, to find throughout the animal world a distinct bias towards [Page 131]incestuous reproduction, at least during early adulthood (38).

Once again, this is just silly, and it’s hard to think that Stove cannot see why. If organisms adopted an incestuous mating strategy, everyone knows what would quickly happen—the fitness of the offspring drop as genetic errors accumulate. (All—or nearly all—human cultures have strong incest taboos, for example.14) While it might be a very good thing for a generation or two of organisms to mate incestuously (and some animals do so at least some of the time), on average this is not as effective a strategy in the long term. (The whole advantage of sexual reproduction—which is costly for the individual organism—is the overwhelming benefits which genetic variety and reshuffling bring to the species as a whole.) Again, what matters in Darwinism is not the individual, but how successfully the individual passes on DNA to offspring that can likewise compete effectively. (The best DNA in the world is useless if your offspring is sterile, for example. Ask mules without fertility clinic access how well that works out.) Stove takes a very blunted “short term” view, whereas anyone who has studied, say, the Hapsburg monarchy15 or any royal family in Europe can see that in-breeding is not typically the best approach for long-term (or even medium-term) biologic success. (It is, on the other hand, a wonderful strategy for conserving economic success within a lineage—hence its appeal to the imperial courts of Europe.)

[Page 132]Confused about these basic matters, Stove then concludes as follows: “Hence I am unable to suggest what a struggle or competition for life among [animals of the same species] could possibly be a struggle or competition for, except food” (56). He may be unable but should not be. Animals compete among themselves for many things: food, water, hunting or living territory (e.g., space on a coral reef, nesting sites for birds), and mates. They also compete in matters of strength, speed, or other means of evading predators—like a movie teenager pursued by zombies, a doe chased by a lion need only be faster than her neighbor. Plants likewise compete for nutrients, water, access to sunlight, and adequate growing space. Some alter soil chemistry to prevent other plants from growing near them; others produce toxins to render themselves less appealing to those who would eat them—plants with better toxins will be less likely to be eaten than their less-obnoxious fellows. Bacteria that produce enzymes to degrade penicillin outlast those sister bugs that do not, and so on.

At any rate, this confusion about competition leads Stove to deprecate “the Malthus-Darwin principle of population: that population always presses on the supply on food, and tends to increase beyond it. And this principle does require child mortality to be terrifically high, in our species and in every other” (92, italics in original). He gives too little credit to the idea that child mortality has historically been high (the introduction of practices such as birth spacing, hormonal birth control, or abortion are cultural factors with a long history—they too would be expected to alter purely Darwinian mechanisms, just as the invention of eyeglasses means that near-sightedness will no longer be a trait subject to much selection). While acknowledging high rates of child mortality, he insists that it would have had to be on the order of 80% according to Darwin, though he provides no citation for this claim (92). But Stove also ignores that Darwinian mechanisms play out of [Page 133]vastly longer periods of time—in a hypothetical example, he claims that “the Malthus-Darwin principle tells us that this ecological niche will be filled this year” (92), but the principle says nothing of the sort. Animals with small litter sizes and long generation times (such as humans) will not expand that rapidly even under ideal conditions, much less after a setback.

Nor, as Stove claims, does Darwin’s hypothesis claim that there can be no “declining or stationary numbers: all populations must always increase in numbers” (105). A population of animals could achieve a type of dynamic balance between births and death due to predation and other competition—no organisms exist in isolation, after all, save under lab conditions. Or a disease might strike that decimates a population, even though there are ample resources (a human example would be the New World’s population implosion due to Old World diseases—as many as 95% may have perished, but not because food supplies were exhausted).16 I suspect the Darwinist rejoinder would be that all organisms eventually outstrip the resources available to them if nothing else checks their reproduction. Such checks could be predation, or other environmental constraints besides food (this is where Stove’s inability to imagine anything besides food being a locus of competition leads him astray), or social behavior (such as human birth control).

But even this is not the whole of Stove’s error, since there are examples of humans doing exactly what he claims humans cannot and do not do: reproducing beyond what food supplies can support. Any time there is a famine, the demand for food exceeds supply. As human populations have grown, the only option has been to find a new source of food and other resources (e.g., emigration, switching emphasis to fishing over farming), or to find ways to increase the productivity of current sources [Page 134](e.g., England’s innovation in crop rotation prior to industrialization, the twentieth century’s “green revolution”). William Bernstein describes a fairly Malthusian scenario played out over half a millennium:

If, as historians have suggested, crop yields quadrupled in the years between ad 1000 and 1500, that represented a growth rate of just 0.28% per year over the period. Between these two dates, population increases forced poor-quality marginal land into cultivation, canceling out most, if not all, of the increase in agricultural productivity that occurred in that half-millennium. Thus, the standard of living of purely agricultural societies remained relatively static.17

Thus, for humans, these limits are not reached quickly, but they can be reached. This is most easily seen on smaller scales, such as on Pacific islands, where resources and populations are both smaller and are isolated from resource import or population export.18

[Page 135]Stove has much more of value to say when he turns to the hyper-Darwinism of people such as Richard Dawkins or E. O. Wilson. “As for those sociobiologists who by implication deny the very existence of human altruism,” he writes, “my reason for disagreeing with them is simply that I am not a lunatic” (96). (Sociobiology does not, however, deny altruism—it argues instead that natural selection can produce altruistic behavior in self-interested organisms, especially social ones.19) Stove is on somewhat firmer philosophical ground when he critiques Dawkins’ claims about altruism:

I do not believe that humans are the helpless puppets of their genes, and cannot even take that proposition seriously. Why? Because I have heard far too many stories like that one before, and because it is obvious what is wrong with all of them.

“Our stars rule us,” says the astrologer. “Man is what he eats,” said Feuerbach.”We are what our infantile sexual experiences made us,” says the Freudian. “The individual counts for nothing, his class situation for everything,” says the Marxist. “We are what our socioeconomic circumstances make us,” says the social worker. “We are what Almighty God created us,” says the Christian theologian. There is simply no end of this kind of stuff.

What is wrong with all such theories is this: That they deny, at least by implication, that human intentions, [Page 136]decisions, and efforts are among the causal agencies which are at work in the world. This denial is so obviously false that no rational person, who paused to consider it coolly and in itself, would ever entertain it for one minute…

The falsity of all these theories of human helplessness is so very obvious, in fact, that the puppetry theorists themselves cannot help admitting it, and thus are never able to adhere consistently to their puppetry theories. Feuerbach, though he said that man is what he eats, was also obliged to admit that meals do not eat meals. The Calvinistic theologian, after saying that the omnipotent Creator is everything and his creatures nothing, will often then go on to reproach himself and other creatures with disobeying this Creator. The Freudian therapist believes in the overpowering influence of infantile sexual experiences, but he makes an excellent living by encouraging his patients to believe that, with his help, this overpowering influence can be itself overpowered. And so on.

In this inevitable and tiresomely familiar way, Dawkins contradicts his puppetry theory. Thus, for example, writing in the full flood of conviction of human helplessness, he says that “we are… robot-vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,” etc., etc. But at the same time, of course, he knows as well as the rest of us do, that there are often other causes at work, in us or around us, which are perfectly capable of counteracting genetic influences. In fact, he sometimes says so himself, and he even says that “we have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth.” As you see, he is just like those writers [Page 137]of serial stories in boys’ magazines, who used to say, in order to extricate their hero from some impossible situation, “With one bound, Jack was free!” Well, it just goes to show that even the most rigid theologian of the Calvinist-Augustinian school has got to have a Pelagian blow-out occasionally and deviate toward common sense for a while.

Here is another specimen of Dawkins contradicting his own theory. He says, “let us try to teach generosity and altruism” but also says that “altruism [is] something that has no place in nature, something that never existed before in the whole history of the world.” Well, I wonder where we are, if not “in nature”? And… who are Dawkins’s “us,” the ones who are to teach altruism? Principally parents, no doubt. Well, parents are not what Dawkins implies they are, just some shoddy temporary dwellings rigged up by genes. But neither are they creatures from beyond, “sidereal messengers,” or sons and daughters of God sent down on a mission of redemption and reformation. Parents are just some more people, and hence, if you believe Dawkins, are selfish. Where are they, on his theory, to get any of the altruism which he wants then to impart to their children? And as for altruism having “never existed before”: one longs to learn, before when? Before Homo sapiens? Before the eighteenth-century Enlightenment? Before the British Labour Government of 1945? Dawkins should not have omitted to tell us at least the approximate date of an event so interesting, and (apparently) so recent, as the nativity of altruism (183–185, italics in original).

[Page 138]Now this is the stuff of philosophy, and Stove’s analysis (of which I’ve included only a small sample here) is more nuanced and cogent (though still not without flaws and missteps) than his critique of the biology. His style is infectious, and his wit sharp. He is concerned about matters of far more significance than mechanisms of speciation—he’s defending the idea of human free will and (we would say) moral agency. It is evolution’s apparent threat to values and doctrines of this sort that rightly troubles many believers. The worldview urged by many neo- or ultra-Darwinians (you will note I do not say, “by many evolutionary biologists,” since such metaphysical or philosophical claims go beyond biology, though they may invoke biology for support) is false and inadequate and ought to be withstood.

Yet Stove’s tendency to sneak in jabs—which are dead wrong—at the biology undercuts his effectiveness. His is, in this sense, a cautionary tale; even those convinced that evo-bio is fatally flawed must be careful, exceedingly careful, to get their science right. (We recall that this was George McCready Price’s chief failing.) Stove could, I am persuaded, have written a convincing, even important book. His unfamiliarity with material beyond his discipline means that he did not. And so his valid critiques are too easy to miss or dismiss because he undermines his own credibility.

The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World [William A. Dembski]

Dembski is no stranger to the creation-evolution wars. A “research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas,” he is also “a senior fellow with [the] Discovery Institute” (dust-jacket). The Discovery Institute has been the primary force behind the “Intelligent Design” movement. But the work here reviewed is not concerned with that. Rather, Dembski sets out to create [Page 139]a justification for human and natural evil—a theodicy—and reconcile three claims of creedal Christianity:

  1. God by wisdom created the world out of nothing
  2. God exercises particular providence in the world.
  3. All evil in the world ultimately traces back to human sin (8).

Given that LDS thought rejects points #1 and #3, it is not surprising that I find Dembski’s offering unsatisfying. His work is worth examining to see why he takes these stances, and what implications follow.

Part I – Evil

Creatio Ex Nihilo—Creation Out of Nothing

Dembski does not like “open theism,” which he says consists of “a pared-down view of divine wisdom, knowledge, and power. We thus get a god who means well but can’t quite overcome the evil in the world, a god who is good but in other ways deficient…. Evolving gods constrained by natural laws are much the rage these days” (8). Open theism, says Dembski, means that “strict uncertainty about the future means that God cannot guarantee his promises because the autonomy of the world can always overrule God. Of course, we could try to get around this by saying that God can step in when things get out of hand, but that defeats the point of openness theology, which is to limit God and thereby absolve him of evil” (20). I am no expert on open theism, but it seems to me that Dembski here ignores its great driving force: the necessity of human free will, or what the Saints know as moral agency.20 I think most open theists would also reject the contention that any uncertainty about the future means God cannot guarantee his [Page 140]promises—God would, in an open theism, be fully capable of responding to any eventuality in a manner that would bring to pass his purposes. The point is not to simply absolve God of evil, or “limit” him, but rather to argue that the creedal view of God’s omnipotence vitiates true human free will. Open theists strive (however imperfectly) to balance God’s power and foreknowledge with genuine human moral freedom. In a creatio ex nihilo framework, this is difficult, and I do not think Dembski succeeds in doing so. He lays the problem out starkly:

Since everything is created by God [ex nihilo, from nothing], a will that turns against God is one of his creations. But a good God presumably created a good will. How, then, could a good will turn against God? I’m not sure that any final answer can be given to this question. Invoking freedom of the will is little help here. Certainly, freedom of the will contains within it the logical possibility of a will turning against God. But why should a good will created by a good God exercise its freedom in that way…? (27)

This question haunts Dembski’s theodicy, as it must. He does not here mention an even graver problem—if a created entity (call her Lilith) does choose to use the will given her by God to rebel against him or choose evil, God could have created Lilith without such a tendency or inclination to ultimately make such a choice. Or he could have created her with a character that might rebel but also respond to offers of reconciliation and salvation. This makes God directly responsible for every evil act, since he is the final cause of the beings that commit such acts and those beings’ proclivities. Dembski is right that no final answer can be given—he cannot even produce a good provisional one. All he offers is the possibility that Lilith’s sin may arise because she might reflect upon her “creaturehood” and “realize that [she] is not God… This may seem unfair [to [Page 141]her].… The question then naturally arises, Has God the Creator denied to the creature some freedom that might benefit it?” (27)

But this solves nothing—God could have a created a will uninterested in such questions, or one inclined toward sufficient trust to decide that such worries were of no moment. “Turning back to God cannot be coerced” (28), according to Dembski. But what does it mean to have a contingent, created will that is not coerced? Lilith will still respond to God’s entreaties or hints based upon her character and nature, which are ultimately entirely dependent upon God’s previous creative act. To turn back is no credit to her, any more than turning away was ultimately her moral responsibility but instead is due to God’s ex nihilo creative decision. At any rate, these issues are mentioned and dispensed in only two pages (27–28). Dembski’s failure—and, I am convinced, conventional theism’s incapacity—to answer this problem is fatal.

All Evil Derives from Human Sin

Dembski moves quickly to a second kind of evil—what philosophers call “natural” evil. These are not the evil acts of moral agents, like humans or devils, but the “bad things” that happen in nature. Animals are hunted and die in pain; terrible diseases ravage us; children are born deformed or handicapped; natural disasters kill thousands or millions.

Here, Dembski has an even more serious problem. A God who creates ex nihilo bears complete and ultimate responsibility for the natural world. Dembski has specifically denounced those who might make a “god” (the lack of capital is his) that is in any way constrained by natural law. He also wants nothing to do with a natural world that works “on its own” outside of God’s absolute foreknowledge. And one cannot even directly blame the contingent “free” wills of humans for these evils—it is not immediately obvious that we cause earthquakes, plagues, or the pain a deer feels when a lion attacks it in the same way we murder or create concentration camps.

[Page 142]For Dembski, there is a stark choice: “If you’re going to blame evil on something besides God, you’ve got two choices: conscious rebellion of creatures (as in humans or the devil disobeying God) or autonomy of the world (as in the world doing its thing and God, though wringing his hands, unable to make a difference)” (9). He opts for the first—to absolve God, all natural evil is due to human sin. The alternative, in traditional creedal Christianity, is unacceptable.

Now this might seem a huge burden to lay upon us. But Dembski assures us that “humanity, in becoming captive to evil, gave its consent. Humans are complicit in the evil from which God is striving to deliver us” (44). Really? We all gave our consent to every evil? How about my newborn son? Did he? Did I? Did I approve the Indian tsunami, guinea worms, and chimpanzees that kill infant chimps? And if I did somehow accede to all the evil in the world, if God created me, isn’t he responsible for making me inclined to do so? This seems rather like a forced contract because God is the ultimate determiner of whether I will be disposed to sign on the dotted line. And for Dembski, Adam and Eve (or some representative group of earlier humans) were the ones that spoiled it all in the first place. Am I to be made responsible for their choices? And if so, could I not in justice complain that if God had only made Adam and Eve of a more responsible disposition, none of this would have happened?

Dembski also rejects the idea that God might permit natural evils, or even create them, because his purposes for humanity require them:

According to Whorton’s Perfect Purpose Paradigm, God creates a world of suffering not in response to human sin but to accomplish some future end… But this, again, makes human suffering a means to an end. And even if this end is lofty, we are still being used. [Page 143]Used is used, and there is no way to make this palatable, much less compatible with human dignity (79).

Given Dembski’s presuppositions, he is right. After all, a God who is omnipotent and omnicompetent can create both beings and circumstances in any way he likes. Why need he waste time with a world full of suffering and evil to accomplish any purpose when he could have had that purpose realized from the moment of his ex nihilo creation? Remember, Dembski will not tolerate a God bound by any natural laws, so the sky really is the limit.

These sorts of problems go on and on. But Dembski addresses none of them.

Part II – Young Earth and Old Earth

Having defined the problem, Dembski then lays out his solution. He reviews the reasons which creedal Christians might have for accepting either an old earth or a young one (52–91). Dembski agrees that traditional Christian readings assumed a young earth, and that this produces fewer problems for scriptural literalism, adding that he “would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it” (55). He faults the young earth position for ad hoc reasoning and special pleading: “Is there any solid evidence for nuclear decay’s acceleration that does not depend on the need to establish a young earth?” (57) “When young-earth creationists question the constancy of nature,…typically it is not because they have independent evidence to question it but because their belief in a young earth requires that nature behave inconstantly” (60). “The inference that [catastrophic plate tectonics] is a real phenomenon comes less from the evidence of science than from the presupposition of a young earth” (61).

[Page 144]To those (such as young-earth creationist Kurt Wise) who insist that the Bible must trump all these issues, Dembski replies, “Why should Wise’s particular interpretation of Scripture occupy such a privileged place? Although the truth of Scripture is inviolable, our interpretations of it are not” (75). That our interpretation of scripture is not entitled to the same respect as scripture itself is certainly true, and it also applies with at least equal force to Dembski’s view about the source of evil and ex nihilo creation, since these depend on the hellenized post-biblical creeds.21 But he does not seem to realize that his own interpretation is as contingent as Wise’s—but given how axiomatic most of Christian theology regards the creeds, this oversight is not surprising.

At any rate, though Dembski briefly reviews possible problems with an old-earth model (78–81), his sympathies obviously lie there and not with the young earth. But he will attempt to reconcile both approaches. The heart of his solution requires the effects of the Fall to travel backwards in time:

If humans, through their sin, are responsible for all corruption in the world, the world’s corruption must postdate human sin. Causes after all, precede their effects. Or do they?

[Page 145]I will argue that we should understand the corrupting effects of the Fall also retroactively (In other words, the consequences of the Fall can also act backward into the past). Accordingly, the Fall could take place after the natural evils for which it is responsible…

Such “backward causation” may seem counterintuitive, though science-fiction readers will recognize in it familiar paradoxes connected with time travel. The point to note is that what is impossible for science and paradoxical for science fiction can be standard operating procedure for the Christian God (50–51).

Dembski points out that Christ’s atonement is an example of an event whose effects apply both before and after it happened. This is the best that can be said for the idea, but I do not think the analogy holds, at least as Dembski describes it. I will indicate why below.

Part III – Divine Creation and Action

Dembski then shifts to a discussion of creation. He veers first into information theory and error correction, and applies this allegorically to the Nicene Trinity. “None of the preceding analogies between information theory and the God-world relation is, I submit, strained. Quite the contrary, they match up precisely and capture the essence of Christian metaphysics” (88). I would not have said “strained” so much as “pointless.” Surely analogies to the Trinity can be (and have been) found everywhere. What the existence of an analogy proves, however, is not clear. He goes on to argue that:

Information, like God, is nonmaterial and eternal. To be sure, information can be realized in objects that are in material and temporal. Moreover, when those objects disintegrate, the information in them will be [Page 146]lost—from those objects, that is. But the same information can always be recovered (certainly by God) and then realized in other objects (93).

LDS readers will disagree, obviously, with the claim that God is immaterial. But I think most scientists would also dispute the claim that information is necessarily nonmaterial. Paul J. Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton, wrote:

One of the sacred principles of physics is that information is never lost. It can be scrambled, encrypted, dissipated, and shredded, but never lost. This tenet underlies the second law of thermodynamics and a concept called unitarity, an essential component of unified theories of particles and forces. Discovering a counterexample or new ways to preserve information could be a real game changer.22

Physics is the study of the material, not the immaterial—and Steinhardt argues that this information cannot be destroyed, even in a physical sense.23 But Dembski is claiming that information is nonmaterial. Even if we provisionally grant that his claim is congruent with current science, what does it [Page 147]mean for information to be immaterial and eternal? (And if God is the only self-existent being, and creates everything ex nihilo, how can information be eternal? Can eternal things have a beginning? Did God “contain” all information from all eternity? Are, then, the world and all information in it merely an emanation or instantiation of God? Is some type of pantheism right after all? I doubt Dembski would agree—such ideas are heterodox if not heretical to creedal and LDS Christianity—but his claim seems to leave the door open for them, at least to my inexpert eye.) If information is not somehow stored (e.g., in a computer, in a brain, in a text, in nature), how can it be said to “exist” immaterially? In what does this existence consist? This sounds like some type of Platonism, where an ideal form of (say) Fermat’s Last Theorem exists somewhere perfect and immaterial, from all eternity to all eternity.

In Dembski’s theology, God knows everything in fine detail. (This is possible, in his opinion, perhaps because God created everything ex nihilo.) So no information can be said to be destroyed even when one destroys the objects in which information is realized. That much is clear, and it follows from his dogmatic premises. This claim seems, however, to be circular or merely a matter of definitions—God knows everything, God is immaterial, therefore all knowledge (which God must, by definition, possess) is immaterial and eternal. There may be great truths here, but Dembski did not make them clear enough for me to grasp, or even be sure whether I agree with them or not. And the claim that information is immaterial and thus not dependent upon any material realization strikes me as a fairly unscientific one—it is not an assertion (and Dembski only asserts it, he does not argue for it) at which many or most scientists would simply nod, I suspect.

Reviewers of Dembski’s work in Intelligent Design have not been kind to his efforts to invoke the same types of ideas. “Dembski’s idiosyncratic concepts of complexity [Page 148]and information are misleading, and his so-called Law of Conservation of Information is fatally flawed,” writes one, warning that his “standard of scholarship is abysmally low, and… is best regarded as pseudoscientific rhetoric aimed at an unwary public which may mistake Dembski’s mathematical mumbo jumbo for academic erudition.”24

This was, I must say, how I felt as I encountered these sections of his book—I felt as if I was being bamboozled but did not know exactly how. It is not clear to me how the appeals to information theory or Trinitarian signal processing add to Dembski’s argument. My reaction was a bemused “What? Where did that come from?” I cannot but wonder if Dembski isn’t just “dressing things up” to appear more scientific; he has been charged in the past with needlessly including pointless and arcane mathematical notation.25) Perhaps this is a philosophical or theological version of the same tactic. Or perhaps he has found a favorite hammer, and now everything (even a rivet or screw) looks like a nail. At any rate, after reading the reviews of his other works that mention the same concepts, my gut reaction to these sections made more sense. Readers better informed than I am will have to judge Dembski’s use of information theory—all I know of it, I learned from him,26 and I obviously do not know enough.

[Page 149]Dembski seems to want his immaterial information to allow God to affect reality in a manner that is undetected:

Thermodynamic limitations [to the flow of information] do apply if we are dealing with embodied information sources that need to output energy to transmit information. But nothing prevents God, who is immaterial from enlisting (seemingly) random processes and imparting to them information. If divine action takes this form, the problem of “moving the particles” simply does not arise. Indeterminism means that God can substantively affect the structure and dynamics of the physical world by imparting information and yet without imparting energy (117).

Here again, the same problems haunt me. Even if God is immaterial, how does he affect material things without energy? Since he ultimately intends for his immaterial actions to affect the material world (by the information he imparts to “random” physical things or processes), mustn’t it ultimately somehow come down to some thermodynamic change? If his information makes the physical world do something that it wouldn’t have done otherwise, does labeling the information and process an “immaterial” cause mean we can hand-wave away the fact that a physical, material effect has occurred? Can such effects truly have no thermodynamic consequences? I do not know the answers to these questions—but they are the questions that I took just enough thermodynamics to know need to be answered.

And if we assume that thermodynamics must apply (as Dembski seems to—else why go to all the trouble?), I do [Page 150]not think he has solved his problem. Why not rather simply conclude that God can violate the laws of thermodynamics? Since we are dealing in miracles, why not simply assert that God (who can do anything in Dembski’s world, not being limited even by time, space, or natural law) can create energy out of nothing? After all, he created everything that exists ex nihilo, so what’s a small bit of fluctuating quantum vacuum or picovolts of potential difference between friends? If nothing is too hard for God, can he not dispense with entropy as he likes? Dembski posits a God that is maximally omnipotent—that is, utterly unconstrained—and then falls back on a rather strange tale of immaterial things affecting material things so as not to violate the laws of thermodynamics. Joseph Smith’s contrary assertion that “there is no such thing as immaterial matter; [a]ll spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” seems even more sane than usual when compared with this alternative (D&C 131:7).

Enter the Mormons

Hearing an LDS perspective was the last thing I expected at this juncture. Yet, to my delight, Dembski quoted Stephen R. Covey with approval:

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, leadership expert Stephen Covey offers an insight into creation that is at once obvious and profound: “All things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation and a physical or second creation to all things.” (107, italics in original)

Dembski then employs this idea to argue that the first (“mental,” presumably immaterial) creation is perfect, since it comes from God. The second creation is then fouled up by “the creation’s” rebellion—the Fall (108). (Even this is not entirely self-consistent—the creation of man as set out in Genesis predated the Fall; therefore, at least part of the physical creation [Page 151]must have been imperfect, since man can hardly sabotage his own creation before it happens, unless he is allowed the time paradox powers that Dembski grants God. Once again, we are back at the first difficulty which Dembski has never really answered—how do we absolve God from the fact that his ex nihilo created beings spoiled God’s perfect plan? And can God’s creation of man be said to be perfect, given the outcome that followed inexorably from it?)

Dembski evinces no awareness that Covey was a Latter-day Saint or that his perspective on the creation draws from LDS scripture—Moses 3:5–7 as well as similar ideas in Abraham 4–5, which are cited by the Saints to flesh out their understanding of Genesis. The scenario outlined in the Pearl of Great Price is not as clear-cut as the brief gloss attributed to Covey implies—though I expect Covey did not intend it to be a full exegesis of an LDS text. In the first place, the first creation is said to be “spiritual”—but “spirit” in LDS doctrine is clearly not “immaterial” nor is it necessarily simply “planning.” (In addition, from an LDS perspective, even Dembski’s category of “mind” is not immaterial.) There is planning in Abraham 4 compared to the subsequent chapter, but this planning phase need not necessarily be equated with the spiritual creation, though that is certainly a plausible and popular reading.

Some Uniquely Mormon Questions

This raises another point worth pondering in an LDS context, though I do not presume to answer it—how does the spiritual creation relate to the second presumably physical creation? Does creating “spiritually” speak only of the mental, theoretical preparation? (This is how Dembski and Covey seem to see it.) Or does it rather refer to the actual creation of spirits that will only later receive physical bodies during the second creation? Assuming (perhaps very dubiously and unwisely) that causality and temporality function in God’s world the same way they function in ours, is there a direct cause-and-effect [Page 152]relationship between the spiritual creation and the present physical world, or does the first merely lay out a set of plans and principles that will be set in motion or allowed to unroll during the second? (See Stutz’s work, discussed above, for an approach that seems to partake of this perspective.)

If there is a causal relationship between the first and second creations in LDS thought, in which direction does the effect run? Does God foreknow the outcome of the physical, temporal creation and pattern the first after it? (More, perhaps, of Dembski’s time-travel?) The more straightforward option is for cause and effect to run from first to second. If so, this creates obvious difficulties for a neat reconciliation with evo-bio, since contingency and chance play a role in evolution as currently understood, which is hard to square with a spiritual creation that is a done deal. For this to work, we might have to do as Dembski suggests with immaterial information—perhaps the material spirit creation of Mormonism somehow affects, controls, or parallels the material “natural” world, despite what appears to be a nondeterministic, even chaotic temporal process of evolution. Or does the scriptural account of the spiritual creation truly mean (as many have concluded) that evo-bio is completely (or mainly) false, a case of barking up the wrong tree of life? And if this is so, why does the evidence appear to match the evolutionary model with all its waste, inefficiency, death, and dependence upon contingency? But on the other hand, are we so confident we could distinguish God’s intervention from contingency or “chance”? If I toss a hundred coins, I expect fifty to come up heads, within statistical margins of error. But could I then determine that God had influenced the thirty-seventh coin toss to make it come up heads, while leaving the other results to random natural law? I don’t see how.

Finally, for completeness, can we rule out the possibility that the processes may, in some way we do not fathom, have a mutual influence, with feedback loops running from the spiritual to [Page 153]the physical, and back again? Are causality and temporality fundamentally different in God’s world? Is spiritual creation an ongoing process linked with the continued development and ramification of life on earth? I have not Dembski’s boldness and do not essay an answer. But at least I can cling to the questions and keep looking.

Part IV –Retroactive Effects of the Fall

Dembski is now prepared for his reading of Genesis. He sees Genesis 1 as God’s original plan for creation. “God’s immediate response to the Fall is,” according to Dembski, “not to create anew but to control the damage” (145). We are again left to wonder why God did not “control” the damage by creating humans who did not foul up the first plan. How could an all-powerful and all-wise God get it wrong in the beginning of his creative endeavors?

“The challenge God faces,” Dembski says, “is to make humans realize the full extent of their sin so that, in the fullness of time, we can fully embrace the redemption of Christ” (145). To describe an omnipotent God as “challenged” seems odd. Doing so raises some questions: Why did God not simply create humans who would choose to avoid evil? Why make a world in which there is even the possibility of evil and hence a Fall? Why did God apparently need human beings at all, or need human beings who could and would sin? He is bound by no laws or constraints, save those he wills. Why did God not simply create humans able to experience the crushing, drowning sense of the depth of their estrangement from him upon their Fall? Why was a Fall necessary? Even if we grant that he could somehow create a moral agent ex nihilo who was genuinely free, why could he not at least slip in an adequate warning system in the event the worst happens? Or why can God simply not plant the perspective of the full extent of their sin into the fallen humans as needed?

[Page 154]Instead, Dembski decides that God must use the created world to bring this needed understanding home to us. Thus,

God does not merely allow personal evils (i.e., the disordering of our souls and sins we commit as a result) to run their course subsequent to the Fall. In addition, God allows natural evils (e.g., death, predation, parasitism, disease, drought, floods, famines, earthquakes, and hurricanes) to run their course prior to the Fall. Thus, God himself wills the disordering of creation, making it defective on purpose. God wills the disorder of creation not merely as a matter of justice (to bring judgment against human sin as required by God’s holiness) but, even more significantly, as a matter of redemption (to bring humanity to its sense by making us realize the gravity of sin) (145).

There is much to digest in this extraordinary passage—it is incredible, in the formal sense of the word. In the first place, it is difficult to see how disordering all creation (because the God who created everything out of nothing and fixed it so that the first human prototype fell and became totally depraved) is a manifestation of divine love and justice—at least as that justice applies to the rest of creation. Dembski says that God, from his perspective, quite rightly inflicts the consequences of mankind’s sin upon all creation because mankind is the “covenant head… in creation” (147). As covenant head, then, humanity’s actions in effect speak for all and thereby condemn all of creation to corruption. Omitted from this argument is a consideration of why humanity is the covenant head: because God said so. “God, having placed humanity in this position, holds creation accountable for what its covenant head does” (147). Did the rest of creation “vote” for humanity to take this role? Was there informed consent? Dembski says that God [Page 155]placed us there, but God then holds creation (not himself) accountable for the covenant head’s actions.

We here encounter all the problems with the notion of ex nihilo humans, writ large. Ex nihilo bunny rabbits, bugs, birds, birches, and the rest are created from nothing and then become totally corrupt because a group of two-legged eventual reprobates will not only be at the head, and hence in charge, but will represent them all before the Creator. (Recall that God knows with absolute foreknowledge that the Fall is assured, since he caused everything out of nothing and also has absolute knowledge of everything that will ever happen in that which he has created out of nothing.) Did the plants, rabbits, and company have any choice about the matter? If they did have any choice, can this choice be said to be truly free, when their wills (if they have any), nature, and predispositions will be every bit as much a product of divine fiat as ours? All of creation obeys God, save mankind—and so, because of the Fall, all of creation must retroactively suffer?

This is no trivial problem. On the subject of animal experimentation, one wit dryly observed that he would rather that a rabbit get polio twice than he get it once. I can sympathize—I am no animal rights sentimentalist who thinks that there is no difference between the suffering of a human child and that of a monkey, a rabbit, a rat, or a frog. There is a difference—morally, if nothing else. And yet I do not and cannot regard the suffering of the rabbit with polio as of no consequence at all. There can be no question that the natural world at present (and if evo-bio is believed, the deep past as well) is full of enormous suffering on an enormous scale. Darwin himself gave a poignant and perceptive articulation of the problem:

I cannot see, as plainly as others do evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to be too [Page 156]much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice (from Giberson, 35; partially in Dembski, 149).

Giberson (reviewed above) explains Darwin’s distaste for the Ichneumonidae (a species of parasitic wasp that feeds on caterpillars):

The mother wasp inserts a paralyzing chemical into the nervous system of the caterpillar and then places her eggs inside the still-living host, where they hatch and then gradually devour the paralyzed caterpillar from the inside. The hatched baby wasps emerge with pre-programmed instincts to consume the internal organs of the caterpillar in a sequence that keeps their caterpillar host alive as long as possible (Giberson, 34).

As the product of a natural process, the above exerts a kind of morbid fascination, even admiration, at its complexity and elegance. But as a manifestation of God’s power or loving kindness, it fails. Ichneumonidae—and a thousand other equally terrible examples—are part of the “problem of evil” that Dembski has set out to solve, and his solution here seems to me to do nothing for it. Even if we grant that humans deserve everything that the Fall brought to them, we cannot say that rabbits and even the poor Ichneumonidae‘s caterpillar deserved the suffering they got because of the legal fiction that a covenant head dropped the ball, especially if that covenant head could not have done otherwise and was also not chosen freely by its ultimate victims. So in this matter, Dembski has made matters much worse—God appears guilty of copious divine overkill, a petty legalism, and a distinct lack of foresight in choosing the [Page 157]earth’s covenant head. Even on a bad day, the dolphins might well have done better. They could hardly have done worse. And God would have known it, infallibly. At the very least, why did he not advise the rest of creation a little better in whatever smoke-filled room covenant leaders were chosen?

But there is a second problem with Dembski’s account: God inflicts this punishment forward and backward in time. It is hard to think of anything better calculated to hide what God is attempting to force through our thick skulls. It would be one thing for humans to be in an idyllic world and then be forced out of it by sin. (Even such an account is difficult for most to credit when there is no evidence of it outside of scripture. Fallen corrupted beings might be expected to respond better to, say, the sudden appearance of predation in the fossil record around 4000 bc. Not being given such “proofs,” only revelation will do.) It would be even better had we all started childhood in a paradise that lacked daily drive-by feedings by Ichneumonidae toughs. Our sin and subsequent expulsion might then make the point more clearly.

But instead of this, Dembski claims that God foresees human sin and so inflicts natural evils (upon caterpillars, rabbits, and all the rest of non-sinning creation) before the sin is committed. This sort of thing may seem plausible and natural to Dembski’s atemporal, time-hopping God: but it makes absolutely no intuitive sense to those not indoctrinated in some form of sectarian creedal Christianity. We live in a temporal world, a world where time rules, a world where cause-and-effect seems to hold near absolute sway. Furthermore, Dembski claims that we are not easily able to understand what we have done—and yet he has God choose an approach that is hardly likely to teach us what we desperately need to know. How would we regard a parent who takes a sledgehammer to his son’s bicycle (and his sibling’s bikes, and all the bikes in the neighborhood, and decades later to his son’s children’s [Page 158]bikes) because he knows that his son tomorrow will throw a rock through the kitchen window? When confronted with the sledgehammer, punctured inner tubes and bent handlebars, the parent calmly assures us that it was fully just and hence all for the best, since (a) he arranged his son’s election as head of the children’s tree-house club, and so all must suffer for his son’s crime; and (b) after the son will throw the rock tomorrow, the bicycles that he finds smashed today will have made him understand how horribly he was going to have behaved. (The scheme is so convoluted that I despair of proper verb tense to describe it.) What could be more counterproductive? Even if Dembski is correct, we clearly hadn’t got the message until he finally puzzled it out.

In all this, however, I think Dembski does have a few ideas that are potentially useful—he suggests that since the fallen world must exist before humans, the Garden of Eden represents a type of “segregated area,” where the effects of the Fall are not felt, and Adam and Eve are driven out into the fallen world (whose existence pre-dates their own) after they sin (151, 154). This has obvious affinities to some LDS teachings about the Fall. Unusually for one opposed, in general, to evo-bio, Dembski even suggests that human bodies could have been the result of evolutionary processes prior to their introduction into the Garden; they become “humans”—rather than simply animals—only when God “breathes into them the breath of life” when they are placed in the Garden [152–155]. He seems, however, to prefer a “special creation” model for humans, which will resonate with many LDS readers like me.27

[Page 159]With some modification, Dembski’s basic model of creation could absolve God of some natural evils. In this reading, God allows natural processes to unfold with a minimum of interference. Thus the devious but ingenious devices of the Ichneumonidae, the Black Death, and HIV are not crafted by a divine designer. They are, instead, the unfortunate outcomes of natural processes which are permitted to unfold. God might intervene to prevent any “game-ending” developments—for example, a plague too virulent, or a predator with which no other organism could cope. Dembski thinks, however, that attempts to see natural evil wholly as subversions (by Satan or evolution in a fallen world) of good things originally created by God is a non-starter, since “invoking God’s permissive will can never fully eliminate divine responsibility for natural evil (at least not if one’s conception of God is classical and thus includes omnipotence as one of his attributes)” (150). And so we have come back to the dilemma of classical theism, which Dembski has still not solved, or even really articulated fully—God is ultimately to blame for all this, because he is the only source for everything.

Advantages of LDS Understandings

The Latter-day Saint understanding of divine and human things has a number of advantages over conventional theism in confronting such questions, of which I will briefly mention five.

The first is overwhelming: God does not create everything, including mankind, ex nihilo. Our nature and our moral agency (or free will) are not the product of his or any other being’s absolute creative power. We simply are what we are, both good and evil, and reap the effects wrought by use of our moral agency. [Page 160]God could not create or alter our ability or tendency or moral temptation to sin. This is a philosophical advantage that cannot be overstated—I do not think that any other theism can offer so compelling an argument for both God’s beneficence and power and our own genuine moral autonomy. Joseph Smith almost casually hit this issue out of the park without even seeming to understand how many leagues lay between him and the fence. This doctrine is, to me, one of the great miracles—though often underappreciated—of the Restoration.

The second advantage is nearly as great: as pre-existent beings, God had our consent and support for our choice to experience mortal earth life. He did not place us in these circumstances for his own inscrutable purposes. We cannot claim that we are being used, even with the best of intent. Rather, we agreed and covenanted to come, with joy. Although we know little of how God interacts with the rest of his spirit and physical creation, their preexistence suggests to me that their involvement and consent (to the degree of which they were capable) was sought—which casts quite a different light on the suffering that we and they endure.

A third advantage involves the LDS understanding of the requirements of mortal life—we understand that the purposes for which we came to earth cannot be accomplished in any other setting. Mortal life requires a telestial world in which cause-and-effect is typically brutally indifferent to our hopes or needs. Tragedy must be frequent and unavoidable. Moral and experiential opposites must be available. Sickness and death must come to all. Thus God did not corrupt the world as punishment for a covenant head that let him down (though he presumably knew that this would happen, and set circumstances that would permit it). Instead, he created an environment that was the only way to meet his children’s (and other creations’?) needs. God is maximally powerful, but even he cannot create a morally perfect being by simple decree—mortal life in a [Page 161]telestial state is essential, perhaps even logically necessary. Even he cannot do logically impossible things, like make round triangles, or ex nihilo saints.

The fourth advantage ties into the third: LDS doctrine ought not, it seems to me, lead us to expect that we can prove God’s existence from the material world. For moral agency to be effective in a telestial mortal experience, we must be genuinely free to believe in or disbelieve in God’s existence, his commandments, and host of other ideas. A physical world that one cannot plausibly explain save by divine action would create an intellectually compulsive case for God’s existence. It is just such a case that young-earth creationists hope to establish. But I think that LDS doctrine does not anticipate that this ought to happen, which is partly why I do not find it unexpected that humans exhibit evidence of common descent. (This factor also suggests that such evidence may not be completely probative, since it must appear that we have a plausible origin that does not require God if we are to be free to choose faith or doubt. On the other hand, I do not think God deliberately deceives us either, and so that evidence must mean something.) I have said more about this advantage elsewhere, and will not belabor it here.28

A final advantage of the LDS framework is compelling to me, though others may not find it so. I like the idea of evo-bio mechanisms at least playing some role in the development of creatures that impact us so terribly. I prefer to think that HIV was not concocted in God’s laboratory. I do not like the idea of him crafting the Yersinia pestis that would wipe out at least a third of Europe. The malaria parasite and its mosquito vector were not his magnum opus. I do not think he had it in for the [Page 162]Ichneumonidae‘s dinner. I prefer, rather, to see these as “biologic tsunamis”—natural disasters which telestial natural processes make inevitable in some form. God regrets the suffering they cause, but will (by agreement with us and creation) not prevent them because of the necessities of the telestial state. (God did, however, enter into mortality to suffer all their effects with us and for us [Mosiah 13:28; Alma 7:11–13].)

I am confident that God rejoiced with us when we wiped smallpox from the planet—I do not think he sighed and reached into his bioweapon toolbox for a new horror because we had thwarted a heretofore useful goad. I think the telestial world is trouble enough without his help or encouragement to it. Perhaps it is only the physician in me. But to borrow from Joseph Smith, this personal belief “tastes good” to me. Once again, if I am right then the doctrines of pre-mortal consent and the fact that such an environment is indispensable further remove any moral taint from God’s policy of non-interference.

Concluding Thoughts on Dembski

But lacking the perspectives of the restored gospel, and trapped in the straightjacket of classical creedal theism and creedal Christianity, for all Dembski’s brilliance and creativity he seems to me to advance not a step in his goal to create a workable theodicy for natural evil. It is said that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic priest and biologist, was asked what he thought of people who did not believe in God. He reportedly replied that they must not have heard of God in the correct way.29 In the same spirit, I cannot blame anyone for whom theism is unconvincing morally, emotionally, or intellectually. Dembski is but the latest example of how little there is in most creeds that would appeal to my own hypothetical agnostic self. And I sympathize with those who do not feel to share my own theistic brand. Like Joseph the Prophet, “If I had not experienced what [Page 163]I have I should not have [believed] it myself.”30 But we often forget the riches that are strewn with such great profusion about our feet from the Restoration. We do not claim to have all the answers—but we are vouchsafed far more satisfying responses to the questions that truly matter.

  1. Cited in William E. Evenson, “Evolution,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Vol. 1, (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992), 478. ↩

  2. For example, see my lengthy review of a misguided and misinformed use of DNA and evo-bio concepts in Book of Mormon studies: “Often in Error, Seldom in Doubt: Rod Meldrum and Book of Mormon DNA (A review of Rediscovering the Book of Mormon Remnant through DNA by Rod L. Meldrum),” FARMS Review 22/1 (2010): 17–161. See also Michael F. Whiting, “Lamarck, Giraffes, and the Sermon on the Mount (A review of Using the Book of Mormon to Combat Falsehoods in Organic Evolution by Clark A. Peterson),” FARMS Review of Books 5/1 (1993): 209–222. ↩

  3. For example, a 2004 Gallup poll found that one third of those surveyed felt that evolution was one of many possible scientific theories and that it was not supported by evidence, while another third felt they did not know enough to have an informed opinion. (Frank Newport, “Gallup Poll: Third of Americans say evidence has supported Darwin’s evolution theory,” (Princeton, NJ: Gallup Organization, 19 November 2004), http://www.gallup.com/poll/14107/Third-Americans-Say-Evidence-Has-Supported-Darwins-Evolution-Theory.aspx. ↩

  4. Critiques of evo-bio made on theological or scriptural grounds, I leave to one side as a separate issue. Even these can be somewhat derailed, however, if their arguments get the science wrong. I provide an example below of such a failure in my review of Stove’s attempt to rebut Darwinism on philosophical grounds, Darwinian Fairytales. Those who seek to do the same thing on religious grounds can profit from studying how the secular Stove goes wrong, and thereby weakens what is, at base, a legitimate argument. ↩

  5. Scott’s first name is, in fact, “Eugenie,” and she has been head of the NSCE (a prominent lobby group for biology teachers that resists efforts to introduce creation science in public school classrooms) since 1987. While many endorsements are on the dust-jacket and first few pages, a complete collection is online at http://www.thankgodforevolution.com/book. ↩

  6. John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1961). ↩

  7. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Religion,” in his Mysticism and Logic, and other essays (New York, Longmans, Green and Co., 1918.), 46–57. ↩

  8. Jeffrey E. Keller, “Discussion Continued: The Sequel to the Roberts/Smith/Talmage Affair,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15/1 (Spring 1982): 83. ↩

  9. James Talmage to Sterling Talmage, 21 May 1931; cited in Keller, “Discussion Continued,” 83. ↩

  10. Elder Smith would acknowledge permission to reprint extracts from Price’s The New Geology. He also recommended The Phantom of Organic Evolution and The Geological Hoax, also by Price, as being “of great benefit to any who are confused by the hypothesis of organic evolution” (Man, His Origin and Destiny [Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1954], xv). ↩

  11. Sterling Talmage to James E. Talmage, 9 February 1931, italics in original; cited in Keller, “Discussion Continued,” 83. ↩

  12. For more background on Prometheus Books and examples of its publications, see Louis C. Midgley, “Atheist Piety: A Religion of Dogmatic Dubiety,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 1, (2012): 111-143. ↩

  13. On LDS matters, for example, see Ernest H. Taves, Trouble Enough: Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1984). Kenneth H. Godfrey would write of this work that “at least once a decade, it seems, someone publishes a book about the Latter-day Saints without taking the necessary ‘trouble’ to adequately research the subject… Ernest H. Taves, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist with both Mormon and Mennonite roots, would be a strong candidate for the [Mormon History Association’s “Worst Book”] award this year.” (“Not Enough Trouble,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19/3 (Fall 1986): 139. ↩

  14. William D. Gairdner, The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defence of Universals (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 310, 318–319, 326. ↩

  15. Gonzalo Alvarez, Francisco C. Ceballos, and Celsa Quinteiro, “The Role of Inbreeding in the Extinction of a European Royal Dynasty,” PLoS ONE 4/4 (2009): 1–4, http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005174. ↩

  16. Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), 211. ↩

  17. William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 47, italics in original. Bernstein also points out that the shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture causes a human population boom—how are we to understand this, save as a case where the resources available (through farming, which produces more calories per square mile than hunter-gathering) have increased, allowing more children to be born and survive to reproductive age? ↩

  18. See, for example, Jared Diamond’s discussion of Easter Island, where 66 square miles held perhaps as many as 15,000–30,000 people (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [New York: Viking, 2005]). At potentially over 450 people per square mile, Easter Island demanded intensive agriculture, leading one archaeologist to exclaim, “I have never been to a Polynesian island where people were so desperate, as they were on Easter, that they piled small stones together in a circle to plant a few lousy small taro and protect them against the wind! On the Cook Islands, where they have irrigated taro, people will never stoop to that effort!” (92). The population eventually decimated every single tree on the island; a total of twenty-one plant species vanished (104); the six native sea-birds are also no more. These losses decreased the islanders’ ability to deep sea fish (they lacked the trees to build sea-worthy canoes), causing severe resource strains. By the 1700s, there were 70% fewer homes constructed (strongly suggesting a population crash), and the islanders were reduced to cannibalism to survive (140). If this is not Malthusian, nothing is. ↩

  19. See, for example, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), 241-269. ↩

  20. LDS philosopher Blake T. Ostler has explored some of the ideas inherent in open theism in a specifically LDS context. See, for example, The Problems of Theism and the Love of God, Exploring Mormon Thought series, Vol. 2, (Salt Lake City, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2006), 409–429. ↩

  21. Blake T. Ostler, “Out of Nothing: A History of Creation ex Nihilo in Early Christian Thought (review of Review of Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, “Craftsman or Creator? An Examination of the Mormon Doctrine of Creation and a Defense of Creatio ex nihilo,” in The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement, edited by Beckwith, Mosser, and Owen),” FARMS Review 17/2 (2005): 253–320, http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=17&num=2&id=590; Stephen D. Ricks, “Ancient Views of Creation and the Doctrine of Creation ex Nihilo.” in Revelation, Reason, and Faith: Essays in Honor of Truman G. Madsen, edited by Donald W. Parry, Daniel C. Peterson, and Stephen D. Ricks, (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2002), http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=100&chapid=1113. ↩

  22. Paul J. Steinhardt, “Black Holes: The Ultimate Game Changer?” in This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future, edited by John Brockman (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 308. ↩

  23. An enormous debate among theoretical physicists about whether information that fell into a black hole was lost constituted what one participant called “the black hole war.” See Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking To Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, and Co., 2008). Curiously, Susskind gets in a tangential dig at Joseph Smith (“God ordered Joseph to marry and impregnate as many young girls as possible”) and Mormonism, which he uses as a type of symbol for Stephen Hawking’s “powerful charismatic influence over many physicists” (279–81). Susskind’s grasp of LDS history (or even Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy) is tenuous. See Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History (Salt Lake City, Greg Kofford Books, 2013), 1:277–302. ↩

  24. Richard Wein, “Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates: A critique of William Dembski’s book No Free Lunch,” 23 April 2002, http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/. ↩

  25. “All these piles of mathematical notations are irrelevant to his thesis. They serve no useful role except for impressing readers with the alleged sophistication of Dembski’s discourse.” (Mark Perakh, “A Free Lunch in a Mousetrap,” 27 February 2002, updated 5 January 2003, http://www.talkreason.org/articles/dem_nfl.cfm. ↩

  26. In this, I exaggerate slightly. By pure serendipity, after reading Dembski I stumbled onto a description of the classic paper on signal processing which Dembski cites, Shannon’s work of 1948: see John MacCormick, “Error-Correcting Codes: Mistakes That Fix Themselves,” in Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, England: Princeton University Press, 2012), 60–79. This account is much more accessible than Dembski’s, but it only deepened my confusion regarding these ideas’ appearance in Dembski’s theodicy. If I am the prototype for the kind of reader Dembski’s wanted to reach with his argument, he failed in this case. ↩

  27. This is not to say I doubt the evidence—and substantial evidence it is—upon which secular theories about the human body’s origins are based (a small chunk of that evidence is reviewed in Fairbanks, above, for instance). I understand why that stance is accepted in the scientific world (including by most academically trained and believing LDS scientists), and I do not see another viable theory, given the current state of the scientific evidence. I find some of my own ambivalence expressed well by Elder Boyd K. Packer, “The Law and the Light,” in Jacob through Words of Mormon: To Learn with Joy: Papers from the Fourth Annual Book of Mormon Symposium, edited by Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate, (Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, distributed by Bookcraft, 1990), 21. In deference to his request on p. 1, I have not reproduced his actual text here. ↩

  28. “Often in Error, Seldom in Doubt,” 150–161. For an additional view that contradicts the idea that God deliberately planted evidence in the material world in order to obfuscate evidence for how creation took place, see, e.g., the article by LDS scientist David H. Bailey, “Is God a Great Deceiver?” 1 June 2013, http://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/theology/deceiver.php. ↩

  29. Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (New York: Doubleday, 1999), ix. ↩

  30. “Conference Minutes,” Times and Seasons 5/15 (15 August 1844): 617. ↩

Misunderstanding Mormonism in The Mormonizing of America

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 6 (2013): 85-104
21

Abstract: The Mormonizing of America by Stephen Mansfield has been touted as a solid, impartial look at Mormon history and doctrine. Unfortunately, on closer examination, the book is seriously lacking both in substance and impartiality. This article discusses the book’s numerous problems.

Review of Stephen Mansfield. The Mormonizing of America: How the Mormon Religion Became a Dominant Force in Politics, Entertainment, and Pop Culture. Brentwood, TN: Worthy Publishing, 2012. 264 pp. $22.99.

Stephen Mansfield’s The Mormonizing of America was published in 2012 at the height of the so-called “Mormon Moment,” which coincided with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. The book was generally well received by reviewers in publications like US News and World Report and The Washington Post. A number of reviews on Internet blogs were especially laudatory. On the “America Done Right” blog, for example, the reviewer stated how, after reading the book, he had “come away with a better understanding of the history of the Mormon religion and a healthy respect for their beliefs thanks to an honest author.” The reviewer ended by advising, [Page 86]“If you are interested in learning about the Mormon religion then this is the book for you.”1

Among some of the Christian blogs and publications, the reviews were particularly positive. One review explained, “Although Mansfield is writing from a Christian perspective, he is very respectful towards LDS beliefs, writing from an impartial stance and leaving the evidence to speak for itself.”2 Another Christian blopgspot enthusiastically proclaimed, “The Mormonizing of America is a book I’d recommend as a primer on Mormon history and, more so, as a means of understanding why Mormonism has gained such popularity in recent days.”3

Even among some people studying Mormon history and doctrine there was praise. One historian wrote regarding critiques of The Mormonizing of America, “The book has received high marks for its objectivity and balance. Selecting quotes out of context from the author of the book to argue for anti-Mormon bias is inexcusable.”4

In spite of the numerous accolades and applause for The Mormonizing of America, not all readers nor reviewers were impressed. Doug Gibson of the Ogden Standard-Examiner [Page 87]described the book as “a soft-sell piece of ‘Bible-bookstore’ anti-Mormonism, in which the author tries to tone down his righteous indignation using a ‘I-have-a-lot-of-Mormon-friends-I-admire’ maneuver.” Gibson ended his review by predicting the book “is too simple a work to find much of an audience beyond bookstores of the types that have sections devoted to anti-Mormonism books.”5

Gibson’s prediction was partly true. While it certainly was carried in Christian bookstores across the country, it became more popular than expected and certainly more popular than deserved. This review takes an in-depth look at Stephen Mansfield’s The Mormonizing of America and discusses what Mansfield got right and what he got wrong.

Stephen Lee Mansfield, a Georgia native, was born in 1958. The son of a United States military officer, Mansfield lived at military posts around the United States but spent most of his early years in Germany. After a conversion experience, Mansfield attended a Christian college where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy. He spent twenty years as a pastor of a Texas church. While in Texas he also completed two master’s degrees, hosted a radio show, and became a popular speaker. In 1991 he moved to Tennessee, where he pastored a 4,000 member church.6

In 1995, Mansfield released his first book, Never Give In: The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill. This was followed by biographies of Booker T. Washington and George Whitefield, as well as other publications. The Faith of George W. Bush (2003) was highly acclaimed as was Mansfield’s The Faith of the American Soldier (2005). He later wrote The Faith of [Page 88]Barack Obama (2009), which received mostly positive reviews. He also wrote Pope Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission (2005) and The Search for God and Guinness (2009).7

In 2002 Mansfield’s first wife filed for divorce. That was the same year he resigned as pastor of Nashville’s Belmont Church and quit the ministry. In 2007 he remarried, and he and his wife continue to reside in Tennessee to the present. Mansfield continues to undertake numerous writing projects as well as speaking and teaching engagements, including conducting a seminar on Mormonism.8

That Stephen Mansfield would teach a course on Mormonism is ironic given his apparent lack of understanding when it comes to Mormon doctrine and history. It is difficult for almost any historian and scholar to write on a subject that is basically foreign to them. Christians writing about Islam or Judaism, or Catholics writing about Southern Baptists, for example, must understand and discuss doctrines, practices, and worldview different from their own without adding judgment or terminology that would taint their work. While Mansfield claimed to have done that for The Mormonizing of America, he was not successful.

Examples of this basic lack of understanding range from the silly to the substantial, manifested when almost immediately into the book Mansfield recounts how some Brigham Young University students had joked about the amount of candy consumed on campus by explaining that M&Ms are Mormons’ drug of choice. He then writes, “And there we stood, a member of the Mormon priesthood and a decidedly non-Mormon [Page 89]guest, laughing about what would have been too painful to discuss not too many years ago.”9 It is difficult to figure out what had been so painful, Mormons talking to non-Mormons or Mormons eating M&Ms. Either scenario being portrayed as painful is strange, to say the least.

Mansfield doesn’t even get the name of the present LDS church president correct, referring to him as President Robert S. Monson.10 He also announces that “some Saints carry mental images of Smith or Young or Monson (current LDS president) or even Glenn Beck or one of the Marriotts that inspire them as a framed photo of Vince Lombardi might someone else.”11 Such a declaration is obviously impossible to either prove or disprove. The reality is that if most Mormons were asked what mental image they carried with them to seek inspiration, they would probably say they think of the Savior. Many would not have a mental picture—rather they would think of a favorite hymn or scripture that strengthens and inspires them. Fewer would suggest a mental image of Joseph Smith or Thomas S. Monson, the current LDS president. It would be a very few, if any, Latter-day Saints who would mention either Beck or the Marriotts, especially since most members of the church do not know nor care what any of these men actually look like and would certainly not hold them up as spiritual exemplars to follow devotedly.

[Page 90]The book contains an embarrassing number of factual errors.12 Some are just plain silly. For instance, there are nonsensical mistakes like calling the belief in continuing revelation “progressive revelation”13 and describing David O. McKay as the “First President” rather than the president and prophet in the First Presidency.14 Mansfield states that the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants “had 138 recorded revelations in its pages.”15 Not only were there not 138 revelations in the 1835 edition, the 138th section of the LDS Doctrine and Covenants was a vision that was not received until 1918 and not added to the Doctrine and Covenants until 1981. Later he explains that “women are now allowed to go on missions”16 as if that was a recent policy change. How difficult would it have been to perform just a little research and find out that the first Mormon sister missionaries were Inez Smith and Lucy Jane “Jennie” Brimhall, who were set apart in 1898 to serve a mission to England?17

However, there are more serious doctrinal and historical problems. Among the doctrinal problems are when Mansfield states that men “assume [the] priesthood at the age of fourteen” and then several pages later he has an unnamed person say that a young man becomes “a priest at twelve years old.”18 In reality, a young man, if worthy, is ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood, as a deacon at age twelve. Most young men become priests at the age of sixteen.

[Page 91]On another topic, he makes a faux pas by stating, “During this ‘premortality,’ families were already formed and destinies determined.”19 Determining destinies is not Mormon doctrine. That is predestination as taught by Calvinists and others in mainstream Christianity. Mormons outspokenly reject “the belief in predestination—that God predetermines the salvation or the damnation of every individual. The gospel teaches that genuine human freedom and genuine responsibility—individual agency in both thought and action—are crucial in both the development and the outcome of a person’s life.”20 Latter-day Saints do believe in what they call foreordination. Foreordination is the belief in “the premortal selection of individuals to come forth in mortality at specified times, under certain conditions, and to fulfill predesignated responsibilities.”21 But such foreordained roles depend upon whether or not the person makes the right choices and remains worthy.

Mansfield also errs when he describes Jesus Christ as the creator of the plan for spirits to come to Earth and live in mortality as a way of learning and testing.22 Latter-day Saints actually believe Jesus Christ championed God the Father’s plan that Lucifer had rejected. Mansfield also misquotes the famous Lorenzo Snow couplet regarding the progression of man. The Mormonizing of America gives the couplet as follows: “As man is, God was; as God is, man may become.”23

[Page 92]Mansfield describes Mormon history and its potential problems as “the soft underbelly of the Church.”24 Whether or not that is actually the case, Mansfield appears to not have been able to even find the animal let alone discover the so-called “underbelly,” given the historical mistakes he makes. For example, he explains that Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered in 1842 rather than 183225 and that Joseph gave the full Masonic call when he was killed at the jail at Carthage rather than a partial call of “Oh Lord my God …” as quoted by numerous sources.26 At least three times Mansfield refers to Oliver Cowdery as Oliver Crowdery.27 He even gets the name wrong of Joseph Fielding Smith, tenth president of the LDS church, by calling him Joseph Field Smith.28

Not only is Stephen Mansfield wrong about aspects of Mormon history, he is also wrong about some Mormon historians and even wrong about non-Mormon history. He makes a simple, avoidable historical error of referring to Christopher Columbus as an admiral when Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492.29 While Columbus had been promised an admiralship, it was based on the success of his initial voyage. Therefore, Christopher Columbus was not an admiral when he discovered the Americas.

In one of the incorrect and misleading moments in the book, Mansfield refers to Richard Lyman Bushman as “one of [our] own sainted historians.”30 What exactly is meant by that is unknown other than it insinuates there must be other [Page 93]“sainted historians” but their names are not given. While this reviewer has a great amount of respect for Richard Bushman and his work, the sad reality is that most of the members of the Church have neither heard of nor read his works. To suggest Bushman is held up on some kind of pedestal by the majority of the Church membership is not only incorrect, it is deceitful.

But the Bushman canonization for sainthood pales in comparison to how Mansfield handles Fawn Brodie. He inaccurately describes Fawn Brodie as a professor at the time of her excommunication. Fawn Brodie did not even begin teaching at a university level until 1967, when she was hired as a part-time lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles.31 She did not become a full professor until 1971. That was a full twenty-five years after Fawn Brodie was excommunicated by the LDS church. Even more troubling than his misidentification of Brodie’s credentials is Mansfield’s mangled description of her biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Richard M. Nixon as being “celebrated.”32

Contrary to being celebrated, Brodie’s biography of Thomas Jefferson was, by far, her most controversial and most criticized. Despite the book’s popularity among the general reading public, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History received harsh criticism among Jeffersonian and early Republic historians for what they claimed to be “speculations about Jefferson’s private life” and [Page 94]groping for “extremely subtle evidence.”33 The Richard Nixon biography was even more problematic and has been described by Brodie biographer, Newell G. Bringhurst, as Brodie’s least successful book.34

Why Mansfield would make such glaring mistakes is at first puzzling until the above references are read in context. Before calling Richard Bushman a “sainted historian” Mansfield uses another made-up conversation that is supposedly based on a real discussion to demonstrate that “Joseph Smith’s entire religion was rooted in hatred of his father.”35 After obtaining sainthood, Bushman is then quoted, “If there was any childhood dynamic at work in Joseph Jr.’s life, it was the desire to redeem his flawed, loving father.”36

In discussing why the gold plates had to be a fabrication on the part of Joseph Smith, Mansfield introduces Fawn Brodie, who “thought that Smith invented the whole tale,” as an “eminent historian,” “gifted scholar,” and “celebrated for her biographies.” Then, to make sure to bring home her qualifications for believing Smith was a fraud, he identifies her as “Professor Brodie” at the time of her excommunication,37 stating that “she considered the act [of excommunication] a gift [Page 95]of liberation.”38 In fact, later in the book, he again mentions Brodie in a supposed dialogue between two non-Mormons. In the course of the conversation that Mansfield, like some kind of fly on the wall, is able to copy verbatim, the man says that Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Biography is his favorite book, that he also has read No Man Knows My History and that Joseph Smith is “a total liar.” His wife then says about Fawn Brodie, “What I’m saying is that here she is, this huge historian from UCLA, and she writes all of these big biographies. And the one on Smith gets her booted from the Mormon Church, right?”39

Such purposeful and accidental twisting of historical facts shows up in other parts of the book. During his discussion about Anne Wilde, a Fundamentalist Mormon, he quotes Wilde saying that her parents never knew that she was a Fundamentalist because “it would have been too much for them.” He further quotes her saying that all of the wives of her husband, Ogden Kraut, are dead and that she is “actually quite lonely.”40 Anne Wilde sent a letter to Stephen Mansfield taking him to task for his mistakes. She wrote, “I realize that authors take liberties in their writings, but there are certain statements you made about me that are absolutely incorrect and will reflect badly upon me when friends, family members, and acquaintances read it.”41 Wilde suggested a number of changes to the section discussing her and her experience with plural marriage. At one point, she emphatically stated, “I was NOT and am NOT lonely.” She also wrote, “Most Important: Please make the distinction that I am no longer a member of the LDS [Page 96]church; I’m an independent Fundamentalist Mormon who lived plural marriage separate from the mainstream church.”42

Mansfield claims Joseph Smith received a revelation “that told a fourteen-year-old girl she should marry him.”43 This no doubt is a reference to Smith’s plural marriage to Helen Mar Kimball. Smith actually did not claim any revelation demanding Helen Mar Kimball marry him. Instead, her father, Heber C. Kimball, offered his daughter as a wife to Smith.44 Mansfield also claims that Joseph’s wife Emma Smith “threw several women out of her house and cursed them for overfamiliarity with her husband. She didn’t know the women were her husband’s other wives.”45 This, of course, is absolutely incorrect, as Emma Smith witnessed the marriages of Joseph Smith to Emily and Eliza Partridge.46

To portray Joseph Smith’s plural marriages this way, however, falls more in line with how Stephen Mansfield views Joseph Smith. From plural marriages to accusations of occult practices,47 Mansfield focuses on what he feels would be the most negative. He announces that Joseph Smith “made part of [Page 97]his living through occult practices.”48 Later, while discussing the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, Mansfield makes reference to “the doctrines of the hat and seer stone.”49 He continues to make references to the Smiths and the occult. For example, he comments that even after Smith’s divine visions Smith continued to make “a living in the occult.” Instead of quoting directly from the readily accessible D. Michael Quinn’s Early Mormonism and the Magic World View about how the Smith family owned “magical charms, divining rods, amulets, a ceremonial dagger inscribed with astrological symbols of Scorpio and seals of Mars, and parchments marked with occult signs,”50 he quotes Quinn by way of Occult America: White House Séances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation. Could it be that the title of the other book sounds even more potentially sinister than Quinn’s book and, therefore, casts an even darker blot on Joseph Smith’s character? It would not be surprising if that were Mansfield’s goal, as his contempt for Joseph Smith is very obvious.

Regarding Smith’s revelations and prophetic claims, Mansfield writes that “Joseph Smith concocted revelations whenever he needed them.”51 He continues, “Smith’s revelations seem to be self-serving, a product of his need and will.”52 At another point he describes Smith as a “misguided mystic” who “lost all restraint.”53 Smith’s revelations and religion, according to Mansfield, “started to get petty” and then “got strange.” From there, “it left being strange and became destructive.”54

[Page 98]Admittedly, it is impossible for a historian to be completely neutral. As the British essayist and theorist Sir Isaiah Berlin, wrote, “The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.”55 Nevertheless, those writing history are encouraged to recognize and admit their biases, and then do their best to hold those biases in check in order to produce a good history. Unfortunately, Mansfield appears not only to have resisted any restraint in his negative portrayal of Joseph Smith and aspects of Mormonism but he seems to have fled from scholarly objectivity like Joseph of the Old Testament fled from Potiphar’s wife.

Although once in awhile the book actually has some interesting insight, most of it seems to be a series of attacks under a thin guise of supposed scholarship. For example, while it is not expected a non-Mormon like Stephen Mansfield would believe in the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, is it too much to at least expect a modicum of respect for what approximately fifteen million people view as sacred scripture?

Mansfield makes it clear he believes the Book of Mormon to be nothing more than a cheap nineteenth-century knockoff of the Bible. After complaining that “more than 27,000 words in Smith’s writing came straight from the Bible” and the phrase “and it came to pass” was used “more than 2,000 times,” he writes, it made “the book sound like the King James Bible’s little brother.”56 He continues, “This should come as no surprise. The Book of Mormon’s plundering of the Bible is flagrant. Poor Isaiah took particular abuse.”57

Further on Mansfield writes, “The most searing indictment of the Book of Mormon is the way the story it tells seems to [Page 99]grow organically from the soil of the United States in the early 1800s. Settlers from the East come west by ship to escape an evil system. They settle in a New World and must battle for survival against a darker-skinned enemy. One expects the Mayflower and Squanto to be mentioned by name.”58 Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm to complain about the Book of Mormon, Mansfield seems not to have realized that the Book of Mormon never did say which direction the ship sailed. In fact, given where they were supposed to have sailed from, probably Lehi’s little band sailed east rather than west.

However, with the help of the supposed off-the-cuff but still verbatim recorded anonymous conversations peppered throughout the book Mansfield was able to more fully reveal his contempt for the Book of Mormon. In the course of a conversation two college roommates are supposed to have had about Mormons, one states that the Book of Mormon might have been “written by a demon.”59 Later, one of the roommates says, “And there’s this voice. I mean if you get past all the ‘yeas’ and the ‘verilys’ and the ‘and-it-came-to-passes,’ there’s this personality speaking that is bloated and haughty and—I don’t know, maybe ‘domineering’ is the word. It’s irritating. Freaky.”60 Mansfield didn’t stop there regarding the Book of Mormon. “And it starts to get gross how arrogant it is. I mean there are pages and pages where you haven’t got a clue what’s going on for all the high and holy rambling but you’re still running up against the voice.”61

These undocumented conversations are used to attack not just the Book of Mormon. In another conversation one person exclaim, “Their religion is a joke. Between the underwear and the no drinking and Proposition 8 and now their priests that [Page 100]are twelve. It’s hard to take seriously.”62 Another conversation the ever-vigilant Stephen Mansfield is able to capture is one that supposedly took place between two non-Mormon businessmen. In the course of the conversation, one says about a proposed wine and cigar bar, “We should never have tried to put this thing anywhere near LDS land… They just aren’t going to let a wine and cigar bar anywhere near their holy ground. Even near their city!” The other one answers, “No. And they’ll fight you most anywhere in the state.”63 In the course of the conversation, one of the men says, “It’s a Mormon Taliban around here.”64 The conversation then includes a laundry list of real and perceived problems in Utah. These negative aspects of life in Utah include the high number of porn subscribers, the highest rate of arrest of people who “have sex in the woods,” the climbing rate of sexually transmitted diseases, and the high use of Prozac, ending with the comment, “This state’s a loony bin.”65

The references to Taliban and Utah’s being a “loony bin” are part of an underlying theme of how strange Mormonism and Mormons are. At the very beginning, Stephen Mansfield portrays “secular America,” viewing the so-called “Mormon Moment” as “yet another occasion for the passing parade of oddities that Mormons have long supplied.”66 Near the end of the book, he discusses the meaning of the word “cult.” To Evangelical and Christian conservatives, the word almost [Page 101]always means “an organization built upon a perversion or significant revision of traditional Christian doctrine.”67

In case the readers were questioning if Mormonism fit into that category, Mansfield does not want to leave them wondering long, as the very next sentence states, “This is exactly what Smith, Young, and company intended and it is, by their own confession, what the LDS is.”68 This assertion is given without any documentation or explanation.

Further isolating Mormonism from the rest of Christianity and following in the footsteps of so many other writers, Mansfield compares Joseph Smith to Muhammad and Mormonism to Islam. He then explains that Islam is so successful partially through the power of the sword and partially through the simplicity of its system. In this matter of simplicity, “Islam is to religion what McDonald’s is to food: easily remembered, easily consumed, easily replicated.”69 Like Muhammad, according to Mansfield, Joseph Smith popularized and simplified religion. “Though Mormonism appears complex to the outsider, it was actually an attempt to be something like the McDonald’s of American religion.”

After various attacks on the character of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and other early Church leaders as well as mockery of Latter-day Saint history and doctrines, Mansfield seems to offer an olive leaf. He refers to “the Mormon people, the true heroes of the Mormon tale.”70 He then explains:

This is what their experience produced, often despite their leaders and despite doctrinal oddities. They became a people. Even if their Prophet was a liar and their doctrines proved mere fantasies, on earth and [Page 102]in this life they became a people who, in striving to progress and achieve, became exceptional.71

While the backhanded compliment is lovely, it is, nevertheless, a backhanded compliment and exemplifies pretty much the whole message and tone of the book. Throughout the book, Mansfield repeatedly attacks the character of Joseph Smith, the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, and the foundations of Church. He naturally brings up real and perceived problems in Mormon history and doctrine. That, of course, would be expected in a book of this nature. That is what would be expected in a scholarly book.

Unfortunately, this book is far from a scholarly look at the LDS church and its members. There were numerous examples of poor research and analysis.72 Even worse is Mansfield’s barely [Page 103]concealed disdain evident throughout the book. There are a number of non-Mormon scholars who obviously do not believe Joseph Smith’s claims of visions, revelations, and translation of the Book of Mormon. Nevertheless, scholars like Jan Shipps, Lawrence Foster, and Sarah Barringer Gordon, to name a few, have been able to produce outstanding scholarly work that attempts to be both neutral and informative.

Their publications have not included language such as “those two handsome missionaries just back from the field. What miracles they’ve seen! Heavenly Father has proven himself once again.”73 “The next day of destiny came on September 21, 1823.”74 “Or, perhaps Cowdery could see nothing in the stones because Smith was a fraud manipulating even his own wife into believing he was hearing from God.”75 “It is hard to escape the conclusion that Joseph Smith concocted revelations whenever he needed them.”76 And, “their version of their history is like something out of Disney anyway.”77

And finally one of the more egregious examples of a negative, biased tone is the following:

It is a pious sentiment but it will seem to most outsiders like an excuse: Mormons make dramatic statements about history but then claim God does not intend for the facts that support those statements to be proven. It is frustrating, intellectually unsatisfying, and perhaps even duplicitous, but it is consistent with what every Mormon repeatedly affirms—”I have received the [Page 104]witness of the Spirit, and I bear testimony that the Book of Mormon is true.”78

In conclusion, Stephen Mansfield’s The Mormonizing of America is a poor excuse of a scholarly work and cannot be recommended for anyone who appreciates decent scholarship.

  1. “Book Review: The Mormonizing of America by Stephen Mansfield,” America Done Right: Ideas for a Better United States of America (n.d.), http://americadoneright.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/book-review-the-mormonizing-of-america-by-stephen-mansfield/, accessed 9 January 2013. ↩

  2. “Review: The Mormonizing of America by Stephen Mansfield,” Iola’s Christian Reads (28 July 2012), http://christianreads.blogspot.com/2012/07/review-mormonizing-of-america-by.html, accessed 9 January 2013. ↩

  3. Tim Challies, “The Mormonizing of America,” Challies: Informing the Reforming (1 August 2012), http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/the-mormonizing-of-america, accessed 9 January 2013. Challies’s opinion is not without bias. In his review he describes Joseph Smith as “a polygamous, philandering, ego-centric, irrational confidence trickster.” He continues, “Brigham Young was no better, another polygamous sociopath who presided over a reign of terror in Utah.” ↩

  4. Copy of a page of comments sent to the author on 4 January 2013 and presently in the author’s possession. The name of the historian has been withheld as a common courtesy. ↩

  5. Doug Gibson, “Book on ‘Mormonizing’ of America is Bible-bookstore anti-Mormonism fodder,” Standard-Examiner Blogs (21 May 2012), http://blogs.standard.net/the-political-surf/2012/05/21/book-on-mormonizing-of-america-is-bible-bookstore-anti-mormonism-fodder, accessed 16 June 2013. ↩

  6. “Mansfield Memo – Long Bio,” The Mansfield Group, www.MansfieldGroup.com, accessed 16 June 2013. ↩

  7. “Mansfield Memo – Long Bio,” The Mansfield Group, www.MansfieldGroup.com, accessed 16 June 2013. ↩

  8. Bob Smietana, “Stephen Mansfield finds career in God, politics,” The Tennessean (6 January 2013), http://www.tennessean.com/article/2013106/NEWS06/301060095, accessed 8 January 2013 and “Stephen’s Seminar on Mormonism,” The Mansfield Group, http://mansfieldgroup.com/2012/07/01/new-seminar-on-mormonism, accessed 9 January 2013. ↩

  9. Stephen Mansfield, The Mormonizing of America: How the Mormon Religion Became a Dominant Force in Politics, Entertainment, and Pop Culture (Brentwood, TN: Worthy Publishing, 2012), xvi. ↩

  10. Mansfield, 81. Throughout The Mormonizing of America, little vignettes are included with made-up names that are, according to Mansfield, changed. In other words, whole undocumented conversations take place in which the reader is left to depend upon the author’s word these conversations really took place and he somehow was able to get whole conversations verbatim. The fact he couldn’t even get Thomas S. Monson’s name correct calls into the question the veracity of all of the so-called conversations. ↩

  11. Mansfield, 213. ↩

  12. For example, there were basic errors like incorrectly explaining on page 159 how temple garments are worn and how to properly dispose of old temple garments. ↩

  13. Mansfield, 161 and 180. ↩

  14. Mansfield, 27. ↩

  15. Mansfield, 178. ↩

  16. Mansfield, 160. ↩

  17. Diane L. Mangum, “The First Sister Missionaries,” Ensign (July 1980), http://www.lds.org/ensign/1980/07/the-first-sister-missionaries, accessed 16 June 2013. ↩

  18. Mansfield, 159 and 164. ↩

  19. Mansfield, 158. He then explains, “The ignoble spirits of preexistence are non-Mormons on earth” (which is incorrect). ↩

  20. Richard D. Draper, “Predestination,” in Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., et al., The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Predestination, accessed 25 June 2013. ↩

  21. Brent L. Top, “Foreordination,” in Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., et al., The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Foreordination, accessed 25 June 2013. ↩

  22. Mansfield, 158. ↩

  23. Mansfield, 159. ↩

  24. Mansfield, 254. ↩

  25. Mansfield, 211. ↩

  26. Mansfield, 110. According to “The Third, or Master Mason’s Degree,” sacred-texts.com, http://www.sacred-texts.com/mas/morgan/morg12.htm, accessed 27 June 2013, the full Masonic call for help is “Oh Lord my God, is there no help for the widow’s son?” ↩

  27. Mansfield, 69–70. ↩

  28. Mansfield, 254. ↩

  29. Mansfield, 143. ↩

  30. Mansfield, 99. ↩

  31. Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 181. Bringhurst explains that Brodie was initially hired only as a part-time lecturer rather than the entry-rank of instructor or assistant professor because “she did not possess a doctoral degree in history. In fact, she had not earned any degree in history. Both her bachelor’s and her master’s were in English.” In fact, according to Bringhurst (on p. 205), Brodie did not become a full professor of history until December 1971, and only after initial opposition by fellow faculty members who were concerned about her lack of history degrees as well as all of her work being in biography rather than traditional historical research. ↩

  32. Mansfield, 125. ↩

  33. Bringhurst, 185 and 216–19; and telephone interview of Craig L. Foster with Newell G. Bringhurst, 16 June 2013. During the phone interview, Newell Bringhurst commented that the criticism for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was extensive with a number of prominent historians lining up against her, particularly over the suggestion that Jefferson had an affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings. It should be noted that Brodie was proven partially correct when Hemmings descendants did test positive for Jefferson DNA. Unfortunately, that does not prove Thomas Jefferson was the father, only that a male Jefferson was the father. ↩

  34. Bringhurst, 261–64. This in spite of positive reviews by some Nixonian scholars. Brodie’s biography was published nine months after her death in January 1981. ↩

  35. Mansfield, 97. ↩

  36. Mansfield, 99. ↩

  37. Mansfield, 127. ↩

  38. Mansfield, 127. ↩

  39. Mansfield, 164. ↩

  40. Mansfield, 4. ↩

  41. Anne Wilde to Stephen [Mansfield], 7 July 2012; copy in author’s possession. ↩

  42. Anne Wilde to Stephen [Mansfield], 7 July 2012; copy in author’s possession. [Emphasis in original.] Regarding her requested corrections and changes, she wrote, “They may not seem important to you, but they are VERY important to me.” For his part, Mansfield responded with an e-mail dated 8 July 2012 in which he stated, “I will be happy to make those changes. I certainly did not mean to distort anything about your story.” Copy of e-mail in author’s possession. ↩

  43. Mansfield, 48. ↩

  44. Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, vol. 2 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013), 24 and 28. It appears Mansfield attempted to emphasize the young age of Helen Mar Kimball, being age fourteen. For more information on the common age of marriage during Joseph Smith’s lifetime, see Craig L. Foster, David Keller, and Gregory L. Smith, “The Age of Joseph Smith’s Plural Wives in Social and Demographic Context,” in Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster, eds., The Persistence of Polygamy: Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormon Polygamy (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2010), 152–83. ↩

  45. Mansfield, 48–49. ↩

  46. Hales, 2:48–49. ↩

  47. Mansfield, 47. ↩

  48. Mansfield, 120. ↩

  49. Mansfield, 134. ↩

  50. Mansfield, 109. Mansfield did not quote directly from Quinn’s Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. Instead, he cited Quinn as quoted in Mitch Horowitz, Occult America: White House Séances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation (New York: Bantam Books, 2009), 23. ↩

  51. Mansfield, 131. ↩

  52. Mansfield, 132. ↩

  53. Mansfield, 176. ↩

  54. Mansfield, 192, 193. ↩

  55. “Quotes about History,” History News Network (26 December 2005), http://hnn.us/articles/1328.html, accessed 28 June 2013. ↩

  56. Mansfield, 142. ↩

  57. Mansfield, 142. ↩

  58. Mansfield, 144. ↩

  59. Mansfield, 136. ↩

  60. Mansfield , 137 [emphasis in original]. ↩

  61. Mansfield, 138. ↩

  62. Mansfield, 164. ↩

  63. Mansfield, 13. Such statements are not only inflammatory, but also completely inaccurate. According to Visit Salt Lake, at http://www.visitsaltlake.com/restaurants/nightlife/?listsearch_submit=1&listingGetAll=0&subcatID=2209&regionID=109&listing_keyword=Keywords…&submit=#searchBr, downtown Salt Lake City alone had thirty-four bars and lounges. ↩

  64. Mansfield, 13. ↩

  65. Mansfield, 14. ↩

  66. Mansfield, 1. ↩

  67. Mansfield, 238. ↩

  68. Mansfield, 238. ↩

  69. Mansfield, 60. ↩

  70. Mansfield, 197. ↩

  71. Mansfield, 198. ↩

  72. A number of examples of silly, almost ridiculous mistakes have already been given in this review. These mistakes represented two things. The first was that Stephen Mansfield did a very poor job of research. The second point was that the editorial staff at Worthy Publishing did not do their job when it came to editing this book. On p. 29 of Mormonizing of America, Mansfield writes, “The LDS Church capitalized on it all. It sent volunteers, missionaries, and publicists scurrying to every venue. It hosted grand events for the world press. It made sure that every visitor received a brochure offering an LDS guided tour of the city.” He uses “Mormon Church’s Public Relations Effort amid Olympics Games Sparks Debates,” The Salt Lake Tribune (19 March 2001), http://business.highbeam.com/3563/article-1G1-71876499/mormon-church-public-relations-effort-amid-olympics as his source. Why would he use an article that was almost a year before the actual Olympics? Would it not have been better to use post-Olympics analysis? Simply Googling Mormon Church and 2002 Olympics brings up a number of articles. Near the top was the article by Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Remembering the ‘Mormon’ Olympics that weren’t,” The Salt Lake Tribune (17 February 2012), http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/lifestyle/53520793-80/church-mormon-games-lds.html.csp, accessed 3 July 2013, which states in part, “What most participants and observers found instead during those 17 memorable days was an absence of Mormon missionaries. . . . Plus, Mormon leaders sent out the edict that there would be no proselytizing, no pamphleteering, no handing out copies of the Book of Mormon away from, say, Temple Square. LDS volunteers were trained in how not to share their faith.” Much earlier than Stack’s article was Larry R. Gerlach’s in-depth article titled “The ‘Mormon Games:’ Religion, Media, Cultural Politics, and the Salt Lake Winter Olympics,” Olympia 11 (2002): 1–52, in which he describes the efforts of the LDS church to downplay the so-called Mo-lympics and have an understated presence at the games. ↩

  73. Mansfield, 80. ↩

  74. Mansfield, 104. ↩

  75. Mansfield, 123. ↩

  76. Mansfield, 131. ↩

  77. Mansfield, 164. ↩

  78. Mansfield, 156. ↩