a memory of Book of Mormon Christology

This isn’t a particularly deep post. There’s not a thesis to it, I’m not critiquing what I’m describing, and I don’t know that there’s anything to really take away from it. I just had a memory come to mind last night related to Book of Mormon Christology that I wanted to hold onto by sharing.

When I was a Latter-day Saint missionary, the Preach My Gospel missionary manual that we used had a suggested activity encouraging missionaries to read through the Book of Mormon and record “each reference to Jesus Christ (any of His names or pronouns related to Him).” The point of the exercise was to demonstrate just how central Jesus is to the volume of scripture, and early on in my service, I decided that I would give it a try.

It didn’t quite go as well as I’d hoped! Here’s what I wrote about it in my journal:

I’ve started to read the Book of Mormon again but this time I took a journal that I was going to use as this one’s successor and I’m making a note of every reference to the Savior. It’s not going as smoothly as I expected: I spend a lot of time quibbling about whether a particular verse refers to the Father or the Son. Oh, well, it’s still a good project.

What I didn’t recognize at the time but what I understand better now is that Latter-day Saint Christology has evolved over time. The Book of Mormon isn’t perfectly Trinitarian, but it’s much closer to Trinitarian than 1840s-onward Latter-day Saint teachings, and so there’s a bit less distinction between God the Father and God the Son than modern Latter-day Saints would make.

If my (more than fifteen-year-old) memories are correct, I was particularly having trouble with the phrase “the Lord.” In modern Latter-day Saint parlance, “the Lord” is almost always a clear reference to Jesus Christ, whether in his incarnated or resurrected state or in his premortal role as Jehovah. In fact, I once expressed surprise to a friend in Community of Christ that members of my current church sometimes pray to “the Lord.” In Latter-day Saint circles, that would have felt wrong, because “the Lord” is Jesus and we always prayed to the Father.

Yet, equating Jesus with Jehovah—but not God the Father—has always been one of the more complicated bits of Latter-day Saint Christology, and in the Book of Mormon text, it sure seemed like the phrase “the Lord” was sometimes a reference to God the Father instead of Jesus. (As a side note, a semi-official apologetic explanation for why Joseph Smith only refers to a single figure in one of his earliest accounts of his famous “First Vision”—instead of a distinct God the Father and Jesus in the canonized account, which has taken on considerable theological significance—relies on the possibility of the title referring to either of these figures).

As a nineteen-year old rookie missionary, I didn’t know what to make of it, and I think I was probably more troubled by it than my journal account lets on. Fifteen-plus years later, things seem more clear. Theology, to quote a good friend (and the title of Daniel Migliore’s book on the subject), is “faith seeking understanding,” but that understanding is not always straightforward. Christology, like any other effort at theology, is an attempt to make sense of a complicated mess of scriptural accounts, personal experiences, and religious history. 1830s Book of Mormon Christology doesn’t perfectly line up with 1840s Latter-day Saint Christology; it didn’t line up with my personal Christology in the 2000s, and it doesn’t line up with my Christology today.

I think that’s okay! Theology evolves, its constituent elements aren’t pieces that perfectly form a straightforward puzzle, and I like to think it’s more about questions than answers anyway. So maybe there is a lesson to learn from this memory after all.

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