Jacques Ellul and Joseph Spencer on how to evaluate the Book of Mormon

I love it when different books I’m reading come together in interesting ways. That happened recently while rereading Joseph Spencer’s 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction and restarting (this, time, in English) Jacques Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word. In this post, I want to take up a distinction that Spencer makes in his book, suggesting that:

Question’s about the Book of Mormon’s truth tend to be of two sorts. First, we want to know whether it all really happened. Second, we want to know whether it really shows us who God is.

Spencer’s distinction roughly maps onto a distinction that Ellul makes between “reality” and “truth” that I’ve found helpful ever since beginning Humiliation of the Word (and that shows up elsewhere in his writing, too). I’ve been thinking a lot recently about “reality vs. truth” when it comes to the Book of Mormon, and this post is a chance to get some of those thoughts down.

evaluating the Book of Mormon as reality

As suggested above, Spencer’s first criterion for evaluating the Book of Mormon has to do with whether the book is what it claims to be. (For the record, I reject the Book of Mormon’s historicity). Here’s his elaboration of this idea:

First, then, we might ask whether the book is true to history. Was there a real Nephi who lived anciently and wrote these things? This question arises when we encounter arguments that the book came out of Joseph Smith’s head rather than the ancient world.

This, for Ellul, is less about truth than it is about reality. I think the translator of Humiliation of the Word puts it very succinctly in her preface to the book:

Reality deals with fixed things not open to discussion, things which one can only observe. It forces us to conform.

History is not as “fixed” (and is more “open to discussion”) than far too many people acknowledge, but historicity is still clearly a question of reality in that either Nephi existed or Nephi did not. However, I’m especially interested in the translator’s second sentence: “[Reality] forces us to conform.” One of the reasons that I’ve been so intrigued by Ellul’s reality vs. truth distinction in the context of the Book of Mormon is the way that this connection between reality and the need to conform plays out in Mormon arguments about the Book of Mormon: If the Book of Mormon is “true” (er, “real”), Joseph Smith must have been a prophet, and (so long as we skip over a very messy succession crisis in the 1840s), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints must be the only true church on the earth.

Or, take this example from Terryl Givens’s book on 2nd Nephi, which I’m almost done with:

Contemporary biblical scholarship may dispute the extent to which Isaiah’s prophecies are Messianic; however, Nephi explicitly invokes Isaiah because “he verily saw my Redeemer” and “my soul delighteth in proving unto my people the truth of the coming of Christ” (2 Ne. 11:2, 4)

Not to spoil my future review of Givens’s book, but I find this kind of appeal to “conforming to reality” particularly dangerous. It’s not just contemporary biblical scholars who reject that Isaiah was prophesying of Christ it’s also, um, Jews. In this same volume, Givens goes to some length to suggest that the Book of Mormon helps fix the problem of supersessionism, and yet, this insistence that “because it’s in the Book of Mormon, it must be so” lends authoritative weight to one of the core assumptions of Christian anti-Semitism (and its milder cousin of anti-Judaism). Whereas biblical scholarship rightly notes (to the deflating of supersessionism and Christian anti-Judaism) that there is no clear case for messianic references in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Mormon has pre-Christian Nephites definitely suggest that yes, Jews did misunderstand their scriptures and went on to reject Jesus. That’s great for Latter-day Saints, I guess (and I think there are responsible ways to read Christ into the Hebrew Bible, so long as it doesn’t come with that force to conform), but Givens’s suggestion here is not only surprisingly skeptical of scholarship for a retired professor but also supportive of the kind of thinking that he tries to combat earlier in the book.

evaluating the Book of Mormon as truth

So, not only do I think that the Book of Mormon fails to live up to Ellul’s idea of reality (by being ahistorical), but I’m also concerned about danger present in appeals to the Book of Mormon’s reality (in their insistence that problematic arguments must be accepted simply because they’re in the Book of Mormon). Yet, I’m still interested in the truth of the Book of Mormon. Let’s start with Spencer:

But a second sort of question about the book’s truth can steal along and worry any read.r. This time the question is whether the book is true to God. Granted there was a Nephi who lived anciently and wrote these things, can we trust him in things of the Spirit? Are we sure he’s a reliable witness for God?

Now, I do have two quibbles with how Spencer puts things here. First, he frames this question as dependent on the first one: We can consider truth, but in doing so, we assume reality. I think Ellul’s distinction of truth and reality as different, overlapping spheres is more productive—not least because of my skepticism of Book of Mormon reality. Second, as a non-theist, my interests are more broad (or at least more metaphorical) than whether the Book of Mormon is “true to God.”

Without making an entire case for how I’d prefer to put things, let me just quote this passage from the foreword of Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief:

Ivakin recalls an 1881 conversation in which Tolstoy said to him: “What is it to me if [Christ] was resurrected? If he was resurrected, then God bless him! The questions important to me are: What should I do? How should I live?”

Whether one prefers “true to God” or my broader view, I think Ellul’s idea of truth is relevant. For Ellul, truth is more powerful, even as it is less trustworthy. In terms of power, he argues at length (and indirectly, but I won’t bore you with the details) that encounters with God are always situated in truth, rather than reality. He also concedes that truth is less self-evident than reality (while also arguing that reality seems more self-evident than it actually is). Especially important for what I’m trying to argue here is that something being in the realm of truth does not necessarily mean that it is true.

To quote RLDS writer A. Bruce Lindgren (here, from a 1986 Dialogue article):

The most significant threat to the Book of Mormon, then, is not questions of its historicity. The most significant threat is that it will be ignored by the faithful. If we refuse to ask questions and listen to its responses, we will have an artifact which has no scriptural function despite our reverence for it.

[…]

As we encounter these issues within the Book of Mormon, I expect we will find ourselves arguing with the book’s answers much of the time. This is not an uncommon response, however. The book of Jonah argues with the notion of Jewish exclusiveness espoused by Ezra and Nehemiah. The book of Job argues with the piety-prosperity theory espoused by Judges through 2 Kings. The New Testament includes arguments between Paul and James.

conclusion

When I say that I’m interested in the truth of the Book of Mormon, I mean that I agree with Lindgren here. I don’t think that all of it is true (I desperately hope that its depiction of a resurrected Jesus raining fire down on entire cities is not true to God). I’m not sure that any of it is real (with some exceptions for a historical Babylonian exile, etc.). I think it’s worth engaging in conversation with, though. To once again quote Ellul’s translator:

Truth, like the word, is infinitely open-ended and invites reflection, response, relationship, and dialogue.

This is all I want out of the Book of Mormon: Not being forced to conform to anything in its pages (or anything held to be consequent from its purported reality), but to continue to reflect on it and dialogue with it.

• Jacques Ellul
• The Humiliation of the Word
• 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction
• 2nd Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction
• Joseph Spencer
• Terryl Givens
• Book of Mormon
• reality vs. truth
• supersessionism
• anti-Judaism
• anti-Semitism
• Christian anti-Semitism
• non-theism
• Leo Tolstoy
• The Gospel in Brief