Newly posted today on the never-changing website of the essentally moribund Interpreter Foundation: Steadfast in Defense of Faith: “God, Humankind, and Eternal Progression: Brigham Young and Church Doctrine,” written by Thomas G. Alexander. Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Steadfast in Defense of Faith: Essays in Honor of Daniel C. Peterson, edited by Shirley Ricks, Stephen D. Ricks, and Louis Midgley. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/steadfast-in-defense-of-faith/.
“To understand Brigham Young’s views of the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is important to recognize that he spread his ideas to the Latter-day Saint people and the world at large through sermons rather than through writing.”
And here, by the way, is the official site for Becoming Brigham: https://becomingbrigham.com/
The two lengthy passages below, from Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) make a really significant point. It’s one that I had considered myself, but Professor Bushman put it into writing:
The Book of Mormon’s candor about its own making is at odds with the prevailing sense of how scriptures came to be. Most Christians in 1830 thought that the Bible, which the Book of Mormon devotedly emulates, had been composed by pure inspiration. They assumed that words came to prophets in the manner described by the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo, who believed that prophets “proffer nothing of their own, but matter altogether foreign to themselves, and communicated to them internally by the operation of God. So long as the state of a prophet be rapture, he knows nothing of himself.” Scripture was purely God’s word, unsullied by human thought. The Book of Mormon was compiled in another way. Mormon selected and blended materials from various plates, making editorial decisions all along the line. Scripture emerged from his work as an editor, extracting the history from his sources, much like other historians. This unconventional view had relevance in 1830. This was a time when the problems of constructing the Bible were of growing interest to Christian scholars. In the century preceding the publication of the Book of Mormon, scrutiny of the Bible had made the text seem more like a history than the privileged word of God. This movement toward the historicization of biblical texts came primarily from Germany where scholars were emphasizing the human influences on the production of the scriptures. They argued that to understand the composition of biblical texts readers had to grasp the historical conditions under which they emerged, in the process humanizing scripture-making. American scholars were bringing back this new biblical scholarship just as Joseph Smith was translating the gold plates. (31)
And this:
Anxiety about fallible human influence on scripture-making was absent from the Book of Mormon. A book whose origins were enshrouded in miraculous events was surprisingly at ease with historical influences on the actual production of scripture. Although Joseph Smith had no known connections with German biblical scholarship, his translation depicted scripture as emerging from specific historical circumstances and consisting of texts stitched together by a later editor much as the German scholars envisioned the origins of the Bible. While the text of the Book of Mormon insists on its privileges as inspired writing, readers of the Book of Mormon are permitted to view the very human process by which the text came into existence. It was a conglomeration of texts just as the new critics claimed the Bible was. Mormon, the general editor, took pains to explain exactly where the various elements of his book came from, making clear that the Book of Mormon consisted of the writings of various prophets and leaders going back through time and recorded on various plates. The book does not even shy away from the possibility of human errors creeping into the text. The Book of Mormon’s title page warns that “if there be fault, it be the mistake of men,” pretty much summing up the Unitarian view of holy writ. The Book of Mormon and the higher criticism both returned scripture to history. The essence of the German critical approach was to imagine biblical authors as writers grounded in concrete cultural and historical circumstances. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bible critics read the book as they would any historical document, discerning the influences of its times on its production. Book of Mormon writers followed the same pattern. In the book’s pages, the scriptures are a human production: minds writing under heavenly influence but in particular historical circumstances, diligently inscribing events and inspiration on plates made by human hands. Alike as humanistic scholarship and the Book of Mormon were, however, the two actually pointed in opposite directions. If the thrust of German scholarship was to turn holy scriptures into human history, the Book of Mormon did the reverse: it turned history into holy writ. The biblical critics said little about how texts edited, blended, and revised by human editors rose to be treated as the word of God. The Book of Mormon offers itself as an example of that elevation. It reveals how a record kept as a history was in time transmuted into scripture. (32-33)
I loved Mr. Trump’s explanation, there in Davos, Switzerland, that had it not been for the United States in World War II, they would all be speaking German today. Since I’m a former German-speaking missionary in Switzerland, his comment had a special personal meaning for me. Perhaps, instead of trying to communicate with the Swiss in German, I would have been more successful had I tried the actual local language. Whatever that was.
We try as hard as we can here to keep up with the firehose of dispiriting horrors that is the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. But it’s really, really difficult. There’s just so much! And the stories are absolutely relentless. They keep coming, day in and day out, week after week, month after month, year after oppressive year. Here’s a small collection of representative specimens:
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