I remembered liking this book a lot when I first read it five or so years ago, so it was actually kind of disappointing to reread it now. There was a lot of it that didn’t feel relevant to me or that I felt I disagreed with. That said, I appreciate Spencer’s work a lot, and there are some great observations in here, so I’m trying to give it some grace in my rating.

This review—like all my reviews in this series will be—is muddled by my complicated feelings about the Book of Mormon. I think there’s a lot of potential in the book as scripture, and I’m a lot keener on it than many (most?) folks in Community of Christ. Yet, I also believe it’s a product of the 19th century, and I’m impatient with any effort to use it as a prooftext for Latter-day Saint beliefs that evolved or emerged after 1830.

I think Spencer does a better job than some of the series authors at treating the Book of Mormon as speaking for itself rather than as a source for talking about how great Latter-day Saint doctrines are (for example, I already know that I’m going to be grumpy about the next volume, because I was five years ago, too). However, I am also too burned by Christian supersessionism to be interested in what the Book of Mormon has to say about the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, no matter how carefully and respectfully Spencer teases that out from the text.

So, I think Spencer does a good job here, and I hope it traces a productive path for reading the Book of Mormon, but a lot of it doesn’t speak to what I’m looking to get out of 1 Nephi, and that makes the whole thing hard to evaluate.

• 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction
• Joseph Spencer
• Book of Mormon
• supersessionism
• 2nd Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction
• theology
• The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions