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.

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 book took a while to finally get through. After two failed attempts at an ebook, I finally succeeded thanks to a LibriVox audiobook!

I have mixed feelings about the book, though I ultimately liked it. Tolstoy’s ideas are radical, and though I aspire to a certain radicalism in my faith and politics, that is certainly not my nature, so I brought some resistance with me into the text.

Even accounting for that, though, I don’t think Tolstoy’s argument is as self-evident or well reasoned as he thinks it is. He sometimes seemed to spend more time assuring the reader that his conclusions were sound than actually presenting an argument that led to those conclusions. Similarly, he has some views that smack of supersessionism and even racial superiority that need to be wrestled with.

On a friend’s recommendation, I’m currently reading (well, listening to) James Goodman’s But Where is the Lamb?, an interesting volume taking a look at the story of Abraham and the Binding of Isaac. This passage stood out to me yesterday:

To say that you prefer your church and its stories to another church and its stories is one thing. But to say that your church annuls another church (completes it, voids it, supersedes it) is quite another. And when that other church and its people are still with you—in other words, when the superseded past is still with you—well, that reading of history is a recipe for disaster.

I’ve never had qualms about listening to Christmas music outside of December, but it still surprises me that I’ve been listening to parts of Handel’s Messiah during my morning routines over the past couple of weeks. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the music of Messiah, and in recent years, I’ve let go of my attachment to King James language and learned that a lot of the passages quoted in Messiah represent Christian prooftexting of the Hebrew Bible (here’s a great post on the subject by Pete Enns—and here’s another). In theory, this ought to sour me on Messiah even more, but I’ve spent a big chunk of this morning listening to this performance of excerpts—and really enjoying it!

Over the past several months, I’ve been slowly working my way through Mark Scherer’s three-volume The Journey of a People, the most recent quasi-official history of Community of Christ. The first volume was interesting, since it covered an era of Mormon history that I’m familiar with from a perspective that I’m not familiar with. I found the second volume a bit harder to get through—some individual sections were fascinating, but it seemed to lack an overall throughline or narrative. I’m currently working my way through the third volume, though, and I think it might be my favorite. It’s fascinating to watch The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints become Community of Christ, and I’ve thought to myself several times that as happy as I am to be part of the latter, I don’t think I would have ever joined the former, even though they’re simply the same institution at two different points of history.