On September 22, 1827, in upstate New York, a 21-year-old farm boy announced that he had recovered a cache of metal plates from a nearby hill where they had been buried for some 1,400 years. Using several instruments deposited with the plates, Joseph Smith, Jr. translated the Book of Mormon in about nine months, from September 1828 to June 1829, dictating the text to several close friends. The new world scripture that was published in March of 1830 in Palmyra tells of a civilization sprung from the Hebrew prophet Lehi, who had departed Jerusalem in the sixth century before Christ and migrated to the new world. These people were advanced for the times in which they lived; they constructed magnificent cities and temples, produced advanced implements, and drafted sophisticated laws. The account continued through the fourth century AD, when these people were privileged with a visitation by the resurrected Christ and promised a future ingathering in which a new Jerusalem would be set up in North America.
By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion
OUP USA
336 pages
$18.02
A little more than a decade after the publication of this book, explorer John Lloyd Stephens and artist Frederick Catherwood returned from an expedition to Chiapas and the Yucatan with remarkable descriptions and drawings of ancient cities, including temple complexes, palaces, stone towers, and hieroglyphic tablets. This first English-language account of Mayan civilization in 1841 was, in the words of Terryl L. Givens, a “defining moment in the history of the Book of Mormon.” It is a mark of Givens’ candor (he writes as a committed Mormon), and an indication of the rigor of his method, that he describes in detail how Joseph Smith immediately shifted the provenance of the Book of Mormon from its connection with native North Americans to the ruins of a lost civilization in Central America. It was Smith himself who thereby “decisively thrust the Book of Mormon into a role from which it has never fully extricated itself.” The new world revelation was, by this act, forever connected with the intractable stuff of historical fact, and only much later would it become clear that the dates of the decline of Mayan civilization could be reconciled to the Mormon account only with difficulty. In fascinating detail, Givens’ book surveys the enormous advances that have been made in Mormon historical and literary research, particularly in the last 30 years. These advances are so significant that in a 1999 article, Mormon scholar Daniel Peterson can, in an off-hand remark, compare the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library in the mid-20th century to the “recovery” of the book of Mormon in the early 19th century.
Such a statement, however casually intended, is nothing if not contentious. Indeed, since the year of its publication, the Book of Mormon has been the subject of unparalleled critique and spirited defense, and the debate shows no signs of being resolved any time soon, as the chapters of The New Mormon Challenge amply testify. But the tone of the debate and the depth and seriousness of the research on both sides of the divide have changed dramatically, and both of the books under review are excellent examples of a significant, new departure. Givens’ treatment of the history of scholarship on the Book of Mormon is simply the best, most judicious and engaging survey available. His handling of all of the evidence surrounding the original discovery and translation of the plates is as clear, judicious, and balanced as one could wish. Throughout, he strives to maintain a tension between the use of evidence and his own Mormon convictions; on the one hand, he is well aware of the “fragility of the book’s historical claims,” but on the other, he describes an “extensive” and “continuous” body of evidence that he thinks supports “the tactile reality of supernaturally conveyed artifacts.” Smith’s every vision of God and every angelic visitation is faithfully recorded in ways that substantiate Mormon beliefs regarding his stature as a prophet and the Book of Mormon as revealed scripture.
Givens deals at length and even-handedly with the entire range of anti-Mormon literature, and he provides a full analysis of recent investigations into Smith’s involvement with magic and divination. Smith was indeed involved in a subculture of money diggers, but Givens reminds us that the modern study of popular culture and the occult has diminished the stigma that used to be attached to such practices. The book offers a detailed exposition of the actual discovery of the plates and their translation, with painstaking attention to concrete, everyday details. Givens credits the testimony of the witnesses who verified the existence of the plates, though he candidly admits that while a number of persons picked up the plates, they were usually wrapped in cloth, except on the occasions when an angel displayed them. The methods of translation and those involved in taking dictation are examined in fascinating detail. Above all, this study makes the early acceptance of the Book of Mormon in the popular imagination plausible. In a land of puzzling Indian mounds, and on a frontier that was beset by uncertainties and dangers on an ever retreating horizon, the Book appealed in powerful and paradoxical ways to American sensibilities. In an age in which archaeology was in its infancy and speculation about Christ’s soon return was rife, both the ancient past and the near future seemed unusually open to surprises. Hence, Givens argues, the Book of Mormon functioned more as a sign of larger truths than as a key to contested doctrine: it promised a true restoration and ingathering of Zion in the last days before Christ’s return.
The search for a genuine historical foundation for the Book of Mormon has promoted some of the most ambitious expeditionary efforts in American history, efforts that are in some ways reminiscent of the attempts of evangelical Christians to find the remains of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat. Mormon archaeological expeditions under the leadership of Benjamin Cluff to Colombia in 1900 and Thomas Ferguson to southern Mexico in the 1950s did not produce useful apologetic results, although, Givens claims, the latter attempts shed some light on Mesoamerican studies for the period “both preceding and postdating Nephite history.” Givens explores a subtheme of these efforts in the attitudes of church authorities toward the expeditions and the hopes and fears about what might, or might not, be found. He questions the archaeological orthodoxy that all pre-Colombian cultures are traceable to Siberian origins, yet he worries about “casting sacred text as secular history” with all the attendant risks of such a strategy. It is undoubtedly this equivocation that has led him and other Mormon scholars to the conclusion that the Book of Mormon should be studied as a sacred text in the context of other ancient texts, rather than an ancient document in the context of Mesoamerican civilization. Givens writes in a style reminiscent of the highly praised study by Richard Bushman, and like Bushman, in order to make his case, he relies heavily on the internal coherence of the Book of Mormon.
Presently the study of the Book of Mormon as a religious text offers more potential gains for Mormon apologetics than the study of ancient American civilization, and hence the focus of Mormon scholars has recently shifted decisively from the new world to the old. This shift has produced a genuine efflorescence of Mormon scholarship on the Book of Mormon, for which readers should consult Givens’ survey. Mormon scholars working under the aegis of the Foundation of Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and others based at Brigham Young University have undertaken a range of serious studies that tend to concentrate on the internal evidence of the Book of Mormon and its purported Semitic origins. For example, a Hebrew provenance for the Book that reaches behind the King James Version of the Bible has been sought in detailed studies of the Hebrew practice of arranging words and phrases in parallel, known as chiasmus. Once again, Givens achieves a laudable degree of balance by acknowledging that some passages in the Book of Mormon are less than felicitously written, even as he notes some impressive examples of chiasmus. Research on dozens of proper names found in the Book of Mormon has led to the conclusion that they possess Semitic roots. Other scholarly efforts are thriving as well; The Mormon History Association currently boasts a substantial and growing membership.
The latter portions of Givens’ book deal with two abiding challenges, one internal to Mormonism, and the other external. Not surprisingly, there is a significant range of opinions within the Church of the Latter-day Saints (LDS) on the question of the best method for handling matters of faith and historical evidence. Within a single generation, Mormon scholars have reproduced virtually the entire repertoire of Protestant interpretations of the Bible: one can now discern fundamentalist interpretations of the Book of Mormon, a kind of neo-orthodox understanding, an attempt at liberal reconstructions, and most recently, literary reassessments that attend to the narrative structure of the book but that have little patience with questions of history. Each of these views can be located on a spectrum that moves from the early and perennial concern with objective, historical fact to the more recent emphasis on textual interpretation and subjective personal experience. Givens is clearly sympathetic to the attempts of the “neo-orthodox” but places himself closer to those scholars who insist on a traditional grounding of the faith in history and evidence. The second challenge has arisen from evangelical Christians, and particularly the paper of Carl Mosser and Paul Owen given at a 1997 regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, to which Givens pays particular attention.1 But he ponders whether or not evangelical scholars will find the will or the means “to engage in the scholarly refutation” of Mormon scholars of the stature of Hugh Nibley, John Sorenson, and researchers at the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. Evidently, both the will and the means have been found.
Givens makes clear, from a Mormon perspective, that while the Book of Mormon itself was largely traditional with respect to the person and work of Christ, because of the idea of progressive and continuous revelation found in it, the book “poses the greatest threat to orthodox notions of canonicity and revelation that Christianity has yet seen.” Later Mormon doctrine is also radically untraditional in its essential points: for example, God is finite and plural; God created the world out of stuff that is co-eternal with him; humans possess a premortal existence and await a future exaltation that is different only in degree from that of God himself.
In The New Mormon Challenge, editors Francis J. Beckwith, Carl Mosser, Paul Owen and their nine coauthors look at each of these distinctive aspects of Mormon teaching and subject them to respectful but unremitting scrutiny. The editors call for Christians to move beyond the unfair stereotypes and caricatures of the past and engage in constructive dialogue in which truth claims are openly debated. The book continues the discussion in some ways inaugurated by Stephen E. Robinson and Craig L. Blomberg2 and the paper already mentioned by Mosser and Owen. The New Mormon Challenge is a carefully planned, well-organized, and thoroughly documented study, bringing massive learning to bear on the key historical and theological issues raised by Mormonism. The authors, all of evangelical persuasion, represent a range of denominations, including Anglican, Evangelical Free, General Baptist, Foursquare, Free Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Quaker, and in eleven chapters they seriously probe the key theological differences that distinguish Mormon thought from traditional Christianity.
Introductory chapters by Craig Hazen and Carl Mosser survey the historic efforts of Mormon apologetics and frame the issues in a broad overview of what is at stake for evangelical Christians in terms of Mormon missionary enterprise and rapid, worldwide growth. Increasingly, Mormon scholars are specializing in fields that bear directly on Mormon apologetics, including Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Egyptology, New Testament, and Early Church History, and they are publishing in recognized journals. Interestingly, the resurgence of Mormon apologetics since the mid-1980s is judged to be prompted more by Mormon dissidents than by excellent scholarship among evangelicals, though this book is likely to change that fact.
The second, and by far the longest, main section of the book examines the Mormon view of God and the universe, with chapters on creation and current cosmology that present substantial challenges to views of the eternality of material existence and a finite God. Paul Copan, William Lane Craig, Jim W. Adams, and Stephen E. Parrish show how a biblical understanding of creation ex nihilo is intrinsically connected to Christian theism. The tone throughout is respectful, and at points even hopeful about the possibilities of change in Mormon thought, in that there is little in official LDS teaching that actually excludes creation out of nothing. The biblical evidence from both the Old and New Testaments, the early church fathers, medieval Jewish exegetes, and contemporary philosophy all support creation out of nothing, and these chapters helpfully connect the doctrine of creation and monotheism to a total reliance on God for redemption. Mosser and Beckwith further relate the philosophical coherence of Mormon thought to the problem of evil and the metaphysical basis for objective moral values. This section of the book concludes with J. P. Moreland’s study of the difficulties with LDS Apostle Orson Pratt’s sophisticated defense of Mormon materialism.
The third part of the book examines the Mormon claim that early Christians did not teach monotheism. On the basis of the Old Testament, the intertestamental literature, and the New Testament, Paul Owen shows that Jews and Christians worshiped one God “and no other.” Owen provides a good, balanced treatment of contested areas, for example, those passages that deal with the “angel of the Lord” and the “council” of the Lord. In a carefully nuanced discussion of whether Mormons are Christians, Craig Blomberg invites Mormons to turn to those defining aspects of the Gospel that distinguish historic Christianity, graciously but firmly pointing out the inconsistency of the Mormon doctrine of total Christian apostasy on the one hand, and their desire for inclusion in the Christian story on the other.
The fourth and last section specifically examines the Book of Mormon and addresses two crucial questions, namely, whether it is, in the original, an ancient book, and whether the present form of the book is a translation and not a 19th-century composition. Thomas J. Finley’s careful comparison of the ancient use of metal plates for writing argues that the dissimilarities between what we find in the early history of the Book of Mormon and ancient practice outweigh the similarities. He further shows that the supposed Hebraisms in the form of proper names that are used by Mormon scholars to argue for a Semitic original are readily derived from names found in the King James Version of the Bible. David J. Shepherd, drawing on the latest translation theory and a close study of the Isaiah passages in the Book of Mormon, shows that Joseph Smith used the KJV in his adaptation of Isaiah and that he could not have been working from a Hebrew original since he took over the same proven errors that the translators of the 1611 version did. The “Hebraisms” isolated by Mormon John Tvedtnes are clearly connected to a pre-existing tradition of translation from the posited source language, in this case, a relatively literal translation of the Hebrew imbedded in the KJV in Elizabethan English.
It appears that Mormons and evangelicals are no longer talking past each other, and the new discussion outlined here is surely a hopeful development. If there is a common weakness in these two books it lies, paradoxically, in the relative neglect of the person of Christ himself. On the one hand, Givens thinks that Christians have somehow failed to appropriate a personal sense of revelation and failed to experience the companionship of the living Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. His slighting of the deep riches of the Christian mystical tradition is one of the weakest parts of the book, and at points, his dismissive treatment borders on travesty.
Evangelical scholars, on the other hand, have herein rightly defended the tradition of Christian theism, but in a way that avoids the disturbing question of how the Incarnation of God the Son bears upon issues of transcendence and immanence. We have here a monotheism that is shared with Jews and Muslims, but one that needs to be tied more directly to the Incarnation and the Trinity. It is hence not surprising that those Mormon scholars who have seriously sought to further the discussion with evangelicals have turned anew to the person of Christ, mining the Book of Mormon for its more traditional understanding of both his majesty and his humility.
It is, to this reviewer, at least interesting that the very qualities that Mormon thinkers wish to find in God the Father—the being and becoming of the creature, true human personality, understanding, sympathy, compassion, the undergoing of temptation, the enduring of trials; indeed, the learning of obedience through the things he suffered—all these, and more, are found in God the Son. Looking back into the vast reaches of time (or pre-time), the old Protestant scholastics, in order to avoid the idea that the Incarnation produced a change in the Trinity, concluded that the pre-incarnate Logos was, in the eternal counsel of God, the Logos incarnandus (the Word to be incarnate); the Word was never, strictly speaking, divorced from the Incarnation. Conversely, in looking forward into the ages to come, the Heidelberg Catechism (Question 49) locates our own humanity, our flesh, forever in heaven and in God, the Second Person of the Trinity, and takes hope from this fact—”as the sure pledge that he, as the Head, will also take us, his members, up to himself.” This is clearly not what Mormon teachers have traditionally taught, but one may ponder whether or not it is what they have always, in fact, sought.
James E. Bradley is Geoffrey W. Bromiley Professor of Church History at Fuller Seminary.
1. Carl Mosser and Paul Owen, “Mormon Scholarship, Apologetics, and Evangelical Neglect: Losing the Battle and Not Knowing It?”, Trinity Journal, Vol. 19 (Fall 1998), pp. 179–205.
2. Stephen E. Robinson and Craig L. Blomberg, How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation (InterVarsity Press, 1997).
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