Of late I have\u00a0been thinking of late about how to read\u00a0Mormon scriptures.\u00a0 In particular, I have been working on some passages in the Book of Mormon on legal interpretation and thinking about how best to approach these sections.\u00a0 By and large, it seems to me that there have been three basic models of how to read LDS scriptures.\u00a0 First, there has been what I think of as an external, sectarian reading.\u00a0 This consists essentially of proof texting in debates and discussions with Protestant outsiders.\u00a0 There is a sense in which this is the oldest kind of LDS hermeneutic.\u00a0 The first Mormons to carefully study the scriptures with Mormon eyes were looking for biblical verses with which to answer Campbellite critics and other Protestant naysayers of the Restoration.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The second LDS hermeneutic has been internal.\u00a0 It is aimed not at outsiders but at Latter-day Saints and it has served two purposes.\u00a0 The first,\u00a0and\u00a0\u00a0in my opinion overwhelmingly the most important, reading\u00a0has been homiletic.\u00a0 We have used the scriptures as a way of motivating ourselves to godly action.\u00a0 On this view, the successful use of scriptures is measured not by integrity to the text per se but rather by the effectiveness of the reading in leading others to live better lives.\u00a0 The second part of this internal hermeneutic has been the elaboration of Mormon doctrine as a body of systematic theology using the scriptures as sources.<\/p>\n
The third mode of LDS hermeneutic has been an apologetic aimed at the problems of historical consciousness and anxiety about the truth claims of Restoration scripture.\u00a0 The dominant figure here is Hugh Nibley, although in many ways his work was prefigured by that of B.H. Roberts and Sydney Sperry.\u00a0 Nibley’s primary goal was to demonstrate the historicity of the Book of Mormon by locating it within an ancient context, showing how external and internal evidences of ancient origins could be marshalled to meet the accusations of critics.\u00a0 In many ways, the results of this apologetic have been impressive.\u00a0 It represents the most sophisticated engagement with LDS scriptures to date, and it has certainly deepened our understanding of textual complexities and possible external parallels.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, however, I think that we need to get past all three of these modes.\u00a0 It is not that I think that we should stop bible bashing (with that increasingly limited audience that cares), using scriptures to preach sermons and elaborate doctrine, or seeking to respond to critics of Book of Mormon historicity.\u00a0 All of these hermeneutics are valuable in different ways, and I don’t foresee that any of them is likely to disappear.\u00a0 Nor would I want them to.<\/p>\n
However, I would like to see an engagement with scripture that is more textual and literary, less doctrinal, homiletic, and apologetic.\u00a0 In particular, I think that the scriptures reward a very careful, textually sensitive reading, one that seeks to find the strangeness in the text and understand what it is saying.\u00a0 The best model in Biblical studies for what I would like to see is Robert Alter.\u00a0 Alter is not trained as a Biblical scholar per se.\u00a0 Rather, he came out of the literature department at UC Berkeley.\u00a0 Modern biblical scholarship is largely dominated by source criticism, the desire to unravel the various claims of J, P, E, the Deuteronomist, Q and the rest of the cast of characters that inhabit the Biblical text.\u00a0 Alter’s work represents not a rejection of source criticism, but a turning away from it.\u00a0 The Bible, he in effect argued, is a very carefully composed text and even acknowledging its indebtedness to earlier sources needn’t imply the belief that it was assembled thoughtlessly or artlessly.\u00a0 For example, rather than seeing the repetition of stories as the crude seams between different underlying sources, he suggested that they should be read as commentaries on one another or examples of a type-story that the author is deliberately playing with.\u00a0 And so on.<\/p>\n
It seems that we need something very much like this for LDS scriptural studies.\u00a0 It is not that I think we should turn to literary readings because the debates over historicity are pointless or unwinnable.\u00a0 Rather it is that such debates are in some sense a distraction from the real work of reading the text.\u00a0 Furthermore, without naming names, I think that some of the work coming out of the Nibley tradition, even when it is not self-consciously apologetic, spends too much time with extra-textual parallels that distract from full engagement with the text itself and often have limited hermeneutic (as opposed to apologetic) value.\u00a0 I am interested in ancient parallels when they are closely enough tied to the text that I am confident that there is some real interpretive pay off to using them.\u00a0 On the other hand, even when the apologetic payoff may be substantial, I am less interested in parallels when the hermeneutic payoff is meager.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the end, I think that far and away the most important outside text for understanding the Book of Mormon is the King James Bible because this is the book toward which the Book of Mormon text that we have now most frequently gestures.\u00a0 Some LDS scholars are uncomfortable with this fact because they are frightened of playing into the hands of critics who insist that the Book of Mormon is nothing more than a crude re-working of the KJV.\u00a0 The English text of the Book of Mormon, however, is shot through with biblical references, more over the language of those references is the language of the KJV.\u00a0 I think that we are justified in embracing this fact.\u00a0 Doing so\u00a0does not, I believe, concede the apologetic question, and a careful reading of the Book of Mormon, I am convinced, reveals that it is anything but a crude re-working of the KJV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Of late I have\u00a0been thinking of late about how to read\u00a0Mormon scriptures.\u00a0 In particular, I have been working on some passages in the Book of Mormon on legal interpretation and thinking about how best to approach these sections.\u00a0 By and large, it seems to me that there have been three basic models of how to read LDS scriptures.\u00a0 First, there has been what I think of as an external, sectarian reading.\u00a0 This consists essentially of proof texting in debates and discussions with Protestant outsiders.\u00a0 There is a sense in which this is the oldest kind of LDS hermeneutic.\u00a0 The first Mormons to carefully study the scriptures with Mormon eyes were looking for biblical verses with which to answer Campbellite critics and other Protestant naysayers of the Restoration.\u00a0 The second LDS hermeneutic has been internal.\u00a0 It is aimed not at outsiders but at Latter-day Saints and it has served two purposes.\u00a0 The first,\u00a0and\u00a0\u00a0in my opinion overwhelmingly the most important, reading\u00a0has been homiletic.\u00a0 We have used the scriptures as a way of motivating ourselves to godly action.\u00a0 On this view, the successful use of scriptures is measured not by integrity to the text per se but rather by the effectiveness of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,35,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-of-mormon","category-latter-day-saint-thought","category-mormon-studies","category-scriptures"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7116,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7113\/revisions\/7116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}