Thoughts on Approaches to the Book of Mormon

A suggestive quote jumped out at me while I was reading for a very different project.  It proposed a lot of ideas and opened analytical paths about a passion of mine, Mormonism. 

It brought to mind immediately the endless arguments and hand-wringing among many Latter-day Saints about whether the Book of Mormon is an ancient American text, as it was claimed.  More about this, but first the quote. 

The American paleo-conservative philosopher Paul Gottfried, in a book about the political philosopher Leo Strauss—who evidently found the social sciences, my metier, unpalatable—observes, “there is no certainty outside of the acceptance of tradition that revealed truths, including the Decalogue, are anything more than ‘human speculations”.

Concerned with Jewish Law and hence many problems of the ethical and moral basis of society and their relationship with thought, Strauss notes the difficulty, if not impossibility, of demonstrating that revealed truths are both revealed and true outside of human thought, tradition, and acceptance. 

Inevitably, this is a problem of modernity with its awareness of the variety of positions found in different religious and philosophic traditions found in the West, and the inability of thought to guarantee itself outside of reasoned argument.

Strauss reminds me, in this, that Mormonism responds to this modernist problem with its historical and epistemological claims of a great apostasy and a restoration. It erases centuries of religio-philosophical debate in order to re-establish certitude with the heavens opening. Joseph Smith’s claims to revelation are meant to create a solid base of truth beyond the debates among experts of religion. 

However, the evident problems with this assertion are demonstrated by Joseph’s seeking out witnesses to provide written testimony of the veracity of his claims. That witnesses and testimony were needed shows a contextual doubt about his experience for other people, if not for himself.  The revelation was not self sufficient. 

As a result, it is not surprising that truth and witness—that is, testimony—became key to Mormon practice and faith. Even if these ostensibly establish sacred support for the claims of the religion, they are dependent on the ritualized and routinized “acceptance of the tradition” that Joseph was a prophet and that truth inheres in his restoration, including of the Book of Mormon.

Nevertheless, an oddity takes place in the faith around the Book of Mormon. It seems not enough to accept the book as sacred, nor as revealed. For many, the truth of the book rises of falls with 1) the demonstration of translation as an act outside of faith and 2) of attempts to ground the book in material evidence outside the text and outside faith. 

Many have argued this is necessary by comparing the Book to the Bible  for which they argue there is external support, even if on looking closely that evidence is not as solid or self-evident as people claim. This claim of evidence for the Bible appears curious when Strauss who strongly supported Judaism argues that the text, or at least the revealed portions of it, are matters of ‘human speculation’ and that is ok. (I have not read Strauss and so can only base myself on Gottlieb’s statement. As a result I must leave the door open to being wrong about Strauss, even though I am not sure that really matters for the analytical issues of Mormonism he suggests to me.)

I now find it odd, and something requiring historical and sociological investigation, that many, if not most, Mormons do not find sufficient a spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon as a text of sacred value. This makes me wonder how the fixation on translation and on a demonstrated location for the Book of Mormon and its characters came to take pre-eminence away from faith. I wonder how this developed within the Church and its intellectuals, as well as the context that supported it within modernism more generally.

I also find it intriguing that these issues of evidence for the book of Mormon come under the portmanteau term “historicity” yet they ignore the history of the book as a religious, a devotional object. This latter should be the evident meaning of the term, rather than how it is applied in Mormon Studies, including apologetics. I wonder how this other meaning developed and became dominant. 

These are questions that had never occurred to me and probably would not have had it not been for the accidental find of a suggestive quote that problematized and entire area of Mormonism for me. They are worthy ones, deserving of attention and thoughtful study. Thank you, professors Strauss and Gottfried.