Loan shifting the anachronisms away

[Gadianton]

Ben,

Your Carmack discussions mirror some discussions I had during or slightly after school with a couple professors. You'd get some juicy stuff that was unexpectedly candid, but there's always that shift back to priesthood leader mode. (in your case insisting it could only be Christ, which doesn't follow)

A big problem I have with nuanced theories of Mormonism can be framed in an idea of Jacques Derrida's himself, and that is an author is responsible for both readings and misreadings. It's one of his more practical ideas. Maybe his only one. Take Nietzsche. I had a prof who was just enamored with Nietzsche, the gospel is Nietzsche through and through, and Nazism grossly takes Nietzsche out of context. Well, that could be true, but, c'mon, there definitely seems to me to be material in Nietzsche that works pretty well with Nazi ideals, whereas there are plenty of other philosophers whose works would be very difficult for a Nazi to distort into something useful for the cause.

when it comes to polygamy or alternative ideas about the Book of Mormon, I've got issues with any nuanced theories because God, likewise, is accountable for his readings and misreadings. If the Book of Mormon isn't fundamentally a prop to establish Joseph Smith as a prophet and legitimize his work, boy, the Church sure has been caught up in one big misreading. Is that the fault of the reader, or could God have done a little better job communicating? Polygamy is even worse. Did God consider for one second the vast and very legitimate misunderstandings people could have about polygamy before he instituted it? If Nietzsche could have seen how he's been read by many, he might have rethought how he put a few things. If my prof was right about his intentions. What's God's excuse?

[Philo Sofee]

I don’t think you’re a troll, but I know that Shulem and Marcus often consider you one. I disagree with them on that issue, but I understand both you and their positions. I was more thinking of AM and Binger.

I couldn’t find a right way to express the thoughts that you put here eloquently, that this guy is being treated by some as an “enemy” (so to speak) before he even has much of a chance to interact with the board. I’d like the board to be a little more welcoming, is all I’m trying to say.

Thank you for that clarification. Yes, it doesn't take long for a newcomer to be treated as an outlier if they don't strictly conform to the prevailing narrative. In this case, however, I think that there is enough 'waffling' on the part of the poster in question that I think he might be able to hang around a bit longer before he leaves.



Regards,
MG

If you had better evidence and arguments you wouldn't be running into this problem.

[Physics Guy]

Does Lord of the Rings present itself as scripture in the style of the Bible? Is its intent, as the Book of Mormon's clearly is ... to lay the foundation for a church?

The way that a text presents itself clearly affects how we read it.

Once upon a time ...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.

They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.

There's more to a story's frame than just its opening line, but first lines do so much to set reader expectations that most stories just keep going that way. Anyway, the frame affects the picture.

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence ...

I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents ...

In the case of the Book of Mormon, though, can we say more about how the framing as Scripture rather than fantasy makes a difference?

I ask because I realize that I'm not clear what kind of frame the genre of Scripture really is. It's a rather sparse genre, as genres go. There are more Scriptures out there than just the few big ones, but not all that many more. So I'm not sure just what the frame, "This is Scripture!" actually implies. I'm not sure it means the same thing for everyone. Genres like "hard-boiled detective story" or "fairy tale" are represented by enough popular works that I think most people have the same frame expectations, but I'm not sure that's true for the Scripture genre.

What Scripture genre implies for the Book of Mormon is probably set by the Bible as the genre paradigm. The Bible has a lot of passages that aren't presented as any kind of history: parables, exhortations, prophecies, visions, laws, poems. It also has a lot of passages which tell stories as if they really happened. For an awful lot of the Bible's readers, the Bible's status as Scripture has meant precisely that those Bible stories must indeed really have happened. If we tell those folks that the Bible's stories don't have to be historically accurate because the Bible is Scripture, not history, they'll just hear us to be saying something nonsensical like "scarlet doesn't have to be red, because it's scarlet, not cherry". They're thinking that scarlet is by definition a shade of red, and Scripture is by definition accurate history.

Maybe other folks have different concepts of Scripture, though, and so belonging to the Scripture genre doesn't have to mean historicity of accounts. What else can Scripture mean, though, if not that? In particular, if stories in Scripture aren't presumed by the genre to be historically accurate, then how does the frame of the Scripture genre make those unhistorical Scripture stories different from detective stories or epic fantasies or fairy tales?

That's a serious question, not a rhetorical challenge. I can't think of an answer myself, so I'm thinking that maybe there is no difference between unhistorical Scripture and historical fantasy, but on the other hand I recognize that Philip Marlowe and Bilbo Baggins appear in stories of quite different kinds, so maybe there's things to be said about how Nephi also differs from Marlow and Bilbo.

[Moksha]

I recognize that Philip Marlowe and Bilbo Baggins appear in stories of quite different kinds, so maybe there's things to be said about how Nephi also differs from Marlow and Bilbo.

Books like The Silmarillion, The Chronicles of Narnia, Small Gods, Eifelheim, and Hyperion Cantos all touch on religious themes. I think it is the intent of the author as whether to peddle them as religious starting.

Can you imagine the Bombadil Institute at Tolkien University spending years validating the location of the Mines of Moria or bearing their testimonies as to the truths found in the Music of the Ainur? Would Uranus testify of the Ainur?!!!

[Benjamin McGuire]

Something to keep in mind. Ben McGuire is a recent entry into this forum. He hasn't been here long enough in order to be considered to be 'the enemy'. In fact, much of what he has said here essentially makes him a 'friend of the court', so to speak. He's innocuous.

No, I am just an infrequent visitor. I originally joined (the forum tells me) on January 15, 2007. By early February of 2008, I had only accumulated 35 posts. The beginnings of my on-line forum participation really goes back to the mid- to late-80s, when I was a regular visitor to the Mormonism forum on AOL. I spent a lot of years participating at ZLMB before this forum started - and I generally spent more time on the FAIR boards (now Mormon Dialogue). So, I don't think that everyone would think me to be that innocuous. I have a long history with some of these posters. Paul (Shulem) and I have argued for a long time - even when he was defending Mormonism. It would take quite a bit, I think, for him to get under my skin anymore. Kerry (Philo Sofee) and I go back even further. There was a time when we spoke regularly (if infrequently) on the phone. I still have some of our correspondence someplace.

On the other hand, I've been in and out of this board for years. I've built a reputation of not being one that will lay down and accept the status quo or accept the prevailing narrative. Ben beats around the bush. At the end of the day it is very difficult to pin the label of either believer OR disbeliever on him. He is more or less lukewarm in proclaiming any sort of faith/belief/testimony in the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the truth claims of the LDS Church.

This occurs for a couple of reasons. First, I am not a participant in these forums to proselyte. Second, I believe that there should be a rational argument for the Gospel. I don't mean, when I say this, that simple belief isn't (or can't) be rational - but rather, that if I have to rely on simple belief - if my only justification is a spiritual witness, then I think that there is a problem. At the same time, I also recognize that because much of what we are (and what we think) is so tightly connected to what we experience, it isn't something that is particularly useful to share. It's what makes an LDS Testimony meeting so fascinating to me. You want to talk about truth claims, and yet the statement "I know the Church is true" is a hollow statement, stripped of content. What people mean when they say "I know the Church is true" (at least what they mean if they have a real belief) is that there are propositions that hold about the LDS Church that are true. Church's can't be true (except perhaps in an existential way). And when I sit in the pews, and I say Amen, I am confirming that I know the LDS Church is true - and by that I mean that I also hold a set of propositions about the Church that I believe are true - and the two sets of propositions (yours and mine) don't really have to be that closely related to one another. It is a beautiful thing.

When I participate in these forums, I do not want my belief or faith to be the subject of discussion. It is really that simple. Others are much better at putting their belief out than I am. More power to them. What keeps my attention isn't that discussion. I am interested in the academic discussion - and sometimes I participate just for the privilege of being able to articulate (and then re-articulate) what I am thinking in a context where it will be overly scrutinized, until I feel that I have finally gotten to where I am explaining what I am thinking. And in the process, I get to expose my thoughts to a high level of skepticism. For me, it's kind of a win-win - and historically, when things get too far off track, I simply step away.

I may very well be misappropriating/misinterpreting what he is actually saying. Maybe is saying...directly...that there were gold plates, that there was an actual angel Moroni, that there were Lehites that left Jerusalem and came to the New World. But I'm not seeing it or hearing it.

Part of the challenge is that we have a text. We don't have the Angel Moroni. We can't ask him questions. So, there isn't anything to look at from this perspective. It doesn't help me understand the questions about the translation of the text or the implications this would have for reading it. So why do I need to engage that question in a discussion like this? Only because people want to make what they view as orthodox belief a part of the discussion - it becomes a distraction that takes us away from the questions we are dealing with. The insistence on historicity is (as I have been suggesting here) a problematic assertion - as much as insisting that we should read the Garden of Eden narrative as if it was also historicity (or for active LDS, that we should view the endowment play as historicity). So I avoid those issues because I have no interest in that discussion - and since I am able to control what I discuss, I don't engage it.

There is an interesting way, I think, to discuss this issue - and that is through a note I received from Kristine Haglund back in 2013. I had submitted what was to become my Postmodernist Reading essay to Dialogue, and she was the editor at the time. I had submitted it there because at the time, the ongoing changes at the MI were causing issues - and at the time of submission, Interpreter wasn't a thing yet). This is what she wrote:

Ben, your paper may now be the most-read submission in Dialogue history. I keep sending it to people to try to get an idea of what direction to go, and every reader wants significant changes in different directions. I think that must mean it's just an awkward fit for Dialogue--it's a little shorter than most articles, and a little more devotional (though I don't think overly so) and a little less reliant on secondary literature... And I find myself not really wanting to chop off its legs to fit in any of the suggested beds.

One of the people I asked to read it also is working on the soon-to-be-resurrected Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, and he seemed enthusiastic about it in more or less its current form. I would suggest submitting it to them. But if it doesn't find a home there, I think I'd be willing to override all my readers because I'd like to see it published, so let me know what happens.

By the time I got this, I had already been invited to participate on the editorial board of Interpreter. I updated it, and published it there. I could have waited, I think, for BYU, but its reception there was uncertain, and I was ready to move on to something else. But you can see how this reflects that sometimes difficult to navigate place between faith and academic writing.

My religious life is complicated. One of my children is a trans-man. Because of the policies of the Church today, my wife refuses to have anything to do with the Church (she still maintains a few friendships, and a mail correspondence with her ministering Relief Society Sister). My children (for the most part) are antagonistic towards the Church. Under those sorts of circumstances, perhaps my reluctance to have those discussions is understandable.

At any rate, I am not under any sort of illusion that my views are typical of LDS Church members. I know very few other LDS members who share my interests. One of the things that I received the most criticism (historically) in this forum was for my postmodernist leanings, and the way that I view my faith and religion through that lens. That search and discovery has been one of the more rewarding aspects of my thinking about the Gospel. My first really public foray into that arena was as a guest blogger on Patheos nearly 15 years ago. It's been a contested journey ever since. But I feel that I have come to a place where I am able to articulate what I believe, and why I believe it.

And there you have it. I think that if I upset certain groups of critics and believers, I am probably staying true to my beliefs.

[Benjamin McGuire]

A big problem I have with nuanced theories of Mormonism can be framed in an idea of Jacques Derrida's himself, and that is an author is responsible for both readings and misreadings. It's one of his more practical ideas. Maybe his only one.

The first thing of Derrida's that I read that I really, thoroughly enjoyed was his essay Edmund Jabes and the Question of the Book in his book Writing and Difference (I have the 1978 Chicago edition translated by Bass). It was when I first read that essay that I knew that I wanted to write something about Nephi and the Book of Mormon. Derrida starts with this sentence: "Our rereadings of Je bâtis ma demeure, will be better henceforth." I suppose that has become the goal of everything I have written about the Book of Mormon.

when it comes to polygamy or alternative ideas about the Book of Mormon, I've got issues with any nuanced theories because God, likewise, is accountable for his readings and misreadings. If the Book of Mormon isn't fundamentally a prop to establish Joseph Smith as a prophet and legitimize his work, boy, the Church sure has been caught up in one big misreading. Is that the fault of the reader, or could God have done a little better job communicating? Polygamy is even worse. Did God consider for one second the vast and very legitimate misunderstandings people could have about polygamy before he instituted it? If Nietzsche could have seen how he's been read by many, he might have rethought how he put a few things. If my prof was right about his intentions. What's God's excuse?

There has always been this issue that, on the surface, the Book of Mormon is highly critical of polygamy. And then, when you get deeper into the text - when you make a close reading of it, it is only even more critical. The only justification you can take away from the Book of Mormon is that maybe it could be allowed if God commanded it - but the Book of Mormon itself rejects polygamy in no uncertain terms - and does so in exactly the same way that some Jewish groups reject it. I find the Book of Jacob in the Book of Mormon to be one of the most textually interactive sections of the text - and by that, I mean that Jacob engages the Old Testament frequently and allusively - he is presenting one side of a dialogue and he expects his readers to be familiar with the sources he engages (both the ones he quotes and the ones that he alludes to). It is a brilliant text in that way. In prooftexting it (which is what those trying to use the Book of Mormon to justify polygamy do), something is lost. Walter Brueggemann made this statement that has also influenced my thinking more than a little bit:

Our study of chap. 18 is evidence of the way in which attention to literary strategy in the narrative advances our theological understanding of the text. Unless we stay with the internal coherence and intentionality of the text, the various fragments and elements fall apart, as they have with many efforts in conventional historical criticism. When the text falls apart methodologically, we face only interesting factual questions and literary fragments; we likely will miss the hidden cunning that the narrative invites us to ponder. The chapter as it now stands requires that we look for a cunning that is more powerful and inescapable than analytic fragmentation suggests.

There is something of this in my approach to anachronisms in this thread. When we pull them from their context, we lose something that is not really replaceable.

Edit: I realize that I really didn't answer your last question.

One of my consistent views is that we have to treat the text of the Book of Mormon as we would any other text. There is nothing special about it in the sense that we still have to read it, and our minds process it, just as happens with every text. God is incapable of producing a text that doesn't have a target audience, that isn't presented from a specific point of view. To be a competent reader of the Book of Mormon is, in a sense, to make oneself as close to that intended audience as possible. And even if God is the author, this doesn't change. The best that we could say is that God doesn't have to write to an imaginary intended audience, he can write to that specific audience who could, in theory, understand that text perfectly. That audience would be an audience of one. This is the back drop of that statement I made with regard to the EME theory earlier -

At the risk of taking some liberties, this is something like suggesting that while the translation was quite fluent, it simply could not be helped that this translation would not be read for a significant period of time, and that its first readers would not appreciate the fluency of the text – because they did not resemble the audience envisioned by the translator.

Replacing that last word with God puts this squarely into view. When people read, they have a hierarchy of meanings. We might value the reading that we believe represents what the author intended as the most important meaning. Sometimes, especially in arguments (and in things like criticisms and apologetics), we find that context gives us a reason to prioritize other possible meanings over that intended meaning. I think that if we recognize that even God cannot give a text a meaning that will be consistent for everyone, everywhere, and even everywhen, then it is likely that people force meanings on the text when it suits their purposes.

This line of argument - about God doing this or that - is pretty much a non-starter for me because I think that it only matters when we start from the position that texts can only have one meaning - and that for scripture, this usually means that God is the author of that meaning, and that the text is appropriately self revealing (and just coincidentally, the meaning that God meant to give the text is exactly the one that I had in mind ....) We ask for God's excuse, but really, it's the fact that the reading of the text is often just a mirror.

[Kishkumen]

The way that a text presents itself clearly affects how we read it.

I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents ...

In the case of the Book of Mormon, though, can we say more about how the framing as Scripture rather than fantasy makes a difference?

Yes, you are right, and to understand how the Book of Mormon presents itself, we actually need to go to Joseph Smith's story of finding, preparing to receive, and translating the Book of Mormon. We also need to look at the original title page:

THE
Book of Mormon

AN ACCOUNT WRITTEN BY
THE HAND OF Mormon
UPON PLATES TAKEN FROM THE PLATES OF NEPHI
Wherefore, it is an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites—Written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the house of Israel; and also to Jew and Gentile—Written by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation—Written and sealed up, and hid up unto the Lord, that they might not be destroyed—To come forth by the gift and power of God unto the interpretation thereof—Sealed by the hand of Moroni, and hid up unto the Lord, to come forth in due time by way of the Gentile—The interpretation thereof by the gift of God.

An abridgment taken from the Book of Ether also, which is a record of the people of Jared, who were scattered at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, when they were building a tower to get to heaven—Which is to show unto the remnant of the house of Israel what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever—And also to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations—And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ.
TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH SMITH, Jun.

I ask because I realize that I'm not clear what kind of frame the genre of Scripture really is. It's a rather sparse genre, as genres go. There are more Scriptures out there than just the few big ones, but not all that many more. So I'm not sure just what the frame, "This is Scripture!" actually implies. I'm not sure it means the same thing for everyone.

I am coming at this question from critiques of the field of religious studies for using Protestant paradigms as normative interpretive tools in understanding religion. Religion is a Western construct, largely developed by Protestant Christians, which created the concept of scripture based on the model of the Bible. So, now many Western scholars assume that the texts of religions are "scriptures," thus imposing a lot of their own expectations about what a text does in a tradition.

In the Mormon case, however, the use of the Bible as the model is explicit and obvious. For this reason, I feel comfortable speaking of the genre of scripture as way of discussing and thinking about the Book of Mormon's clear emulation of the Bible. It is more or less the way that Vergil used the Iliad and Odyssey as models for his Aeneid. The relationship between these texts is obvious to those who come at the Aeneid with a knowledge of Homer's works. By the way, I also think that the Book of Mormon in certain respects emulates the Aeneid. This is because the Book of Mormon comes at the end of a long tradition of Christian epics that also emulated both the Bible and the Classical epics. The most famous early examples would be Dante's epics. The first Christian epic, however, is the Historia Evangelica by Juvencus, dating to the fourth century CE, which is a mashup of the Gospels in poetic form.

What Scripture genre implies for the Book of Mormon is probably set by the Bible as the genre paradigm. The Bible has a lot of passages that aren't presented as any kind of history: parables, exhortations, prophecies, visions, laws, poems. It also has a lot of passages which tell stories as if they really happened. For an awful lot of the Bible's readers, the Bible's status as Scripture has meant precisely that those Bible stories must indeed really have happened. If we tell those folks that the Bible's stories don't have to be historically accurate because the Bible is Scripture, not history, they'll just hear us to be saying something nonsensical like "scarlet doesn't have to be red, because it's scarlet, not cherry". They're thinking that scarlet is by definition a shade of red, and Scripture is by definition accurate history.

I have struggled to help people appreciate this situation. The expectation that history be an account that best reflects the facts of a given set of events is something that was arrived at after many long centuries of false starts beginning with Thucydides, who insisted on the importance of autopsy, in the late fifth century BCE. Even Thucydides and those who followed him were not committed to a kind of factual transparency that the scientifically minded person of today would hope to see. History was always very much wrapped up in rhetoric. Unfortunately, today the mistaken idea that texts from the past just convey objective accounts events as they happened is so internalized that it is almost hopeless to get people to realize that no ancient text is reliable in this way, especially the texts of the Bible, which have almost no relationship with Thucydides and the tradition that followed him. Not having any concept that they should be telling the facts, Biblical authors did not set out to do so in the first place.

Go back to the title page of the Book of Mormon above, and let it tell you what the book is and what it is for. At least it gives us an idea of how the author intended it to be received.

By the way, on the topic of the history of history, I found the following essay useful:

https://jnnielsen.medium.com/scientific ... 4623208131

[Benjamin McGuire]

In the case of the Book of Mormon, though, can we say more about how the framing as Scripture rather than fantasy makes a difference?

Sometimes, I think that this is simply a matter of choice. As I noted in that one essay that I keep referring back to:

To use an example from Rabinowitz, if we read Cinderella without participating in the narrative audience, we end up reading the story of a “neurotic, perhaps psychotic, young woman subject to hallucinations” instead of a children’s fairy tale.

For me this is part of the central issue that is illustrated by this thread. MG wants me to read the text with the conviction that this text has historicity - and that I should realize its truth claims through that sense of historicity. Others have suggested that it is nothing more than a fairy tale - and that this assumption should serve for the starting point of any reading of the text. I would say that if I read the text as scripture rather than a history or fairy tale - then I come away with something different from either choice. But (and this is a big issue), I also have to have some sense of what scripture is and what it means. There was that funny (but important) observation earlier from drumdude:

If the Book of Mormon is described by the LDS church as a piece of scripture comparable to the Bible, does this also not apply to the Book of Mormon, in their minds?

I was reminded of a similar thought I had using a different statement - this one from Brigham Young (and it should be reasonably familiar to everyone here):

I have never yet preached a sermon and sent it out to the children of men, that they may not call Scripture. Let me have the privilege of correcting a sermon, and it is as good Scripture as they deserve.

And my response would be the same as my approach to scripture more broadly - it cannot be an expression of absolute truth - but perhaps something on the way there. The problem is that in our present day context, where there is a prevalent belief in scriptural inerrancy, this is usually used in the other direction - that since scripture in inerrant, so too must be the sermon. I am reasonably comfortable with the idea the Brigham Young did not believe that scripture was inerrant - rather it was a progressive revelation.

I ask because I realize that I'm not clear what kind of frame the genre of Scripture really is. It's a rather sparse genre, as genres go. There are more Scriptures out there than just the few big ones, but not all that many more. So I'm not sure just what the frame, "This is Scripture!" actually implies. I'm not sure it means the same thing for everyone. Genres like "hard-boiled detective story" or "fairy tale" are represented by enough popular works that I think most people have the same frame expectations, but I'm not sure that's true for the Scripture genre.

I think that we have really made this a confusing issue in the past couple of hundred years. I once read a good book about this subject by Kevin Vanhoozer titled Is There a Meaning in This Text? It is not a book I normally would have picked up, but I read a review about it from an author I have a lot of respect for, and he said that the book was fascinating - it had all the right discussions, and yet the reviewer argued with him on every page. That was a glowing recommendation. The book was fantastic - and not because I agreed with the author - but because I too argued with him on every page. Whatever the genre of scripture is, it isn't going to be the same as history, and it won't be the same as romantic fiction. It likely simply doesn't care about some of our concerns over history and reasonableness. But it will challenge us in ways that makes it meaningful.

That's a serious question, not a rhetorical challenge. I can't think of an answer myself, so I'm thinking that maybe there is no difference between unhistorical Scripture and historical fantasy, but on the other hand I recognize that Philip Marlowe and Bilbo Baggins appear in stories of quite different kinds, so maybe there's things to be said about how Nephi also differs from Marlow and Bilbo.

There is an interesting comment that I really like from one of my favorite Old Testament scholars, a woman named Adele Berlin. Several years ago, she wrote some things on the Book of Esther in the Old Testament. She included this comment:

On what grounds is a story to be judged fictional? Because it is easier to accept a patently unrealistic story, fictionality was sometimes determined by whether or not the events of the story could have happened or by whether the story seemed realistic. But to judge a story's historicity by its degree of realism is to mistake verisimilitude for historicity. Verisimilitude is the literary term for the illusion of reality. Just because a story sounds real does not mean that it is. Realistic fiction is just as fictional as nonrealistic fiction. Among the leading arguments for Esther's historicity are that its setting is authentic and that its knowledge of Persian custom is detailed and accurate. But this realistic background proves nothing about the historicity of the story, as our aforementioned commentators were well aware.

This isn't the same as your question - but its related. Some LDS would argue that if it is realistic it couldn't be fiction - because that would create an anachronism in the modern text. I am not a fan of that argument. But it points to the problem of history as the genre. We tend to like history because it creates this reasonable pattern by which to pass judgement.

The closest I have come to answering your question is through Donald Davidson - this is from his essay: "The Third Man" -

Writing deviates startlingly from the original triangle. The object directly observed by both reader and writer is the text. It is produced by the writer, but in the case of literature the text is alienated from its creator by the lapse in time between when it is made and when it is read; the interaction between perceiving creatures that is the foundation of communication is lost. Plato marks the gulf between talking to a person and reading his words:

That's the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive: but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words: they seem to talk to you as though, they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, they go on telling you just the same thing for ever.

It's true that generally neither the text nor its author can respond to the reader. The interaction is of another sort. The text, unlike most objects, has meaning, and its meaning is the product of the interplay between the intentions of the writer to be understood in a certain way and the interpretation put on the writer's words by the reader. For the most part this interplay is, and is meant to be, routine, in the sense that the writer knows pretty well how he or she is apt to be understood, and the typical reader knows pretty' well how the writer intended to be understood. This is not always the case. Writers like Shakespeare, Dante, Joyce, Beckett strain our interpretive powers and thus force us into retrospective dialogue with the text, and through the text with the author. Authors may choose from many devices to rouse the reader to wrestle with the text: thought provoking puzzles, ambiguous authorial attitudes, plays within plays, stylistic references to other writers, autobiographical hints. But however it is done, and to whatever extent the reader's connivance is won, authors have contrived or commandeered an arena of ideas and assumptions large enough to contain both themselves and their audience, a common conceptual space.

Umberto Eco probably had some things of interest to add, but I would have to look them up - if my memory holds, his point of view is that there can be an indifference to the questions we want answered. Scripture may know that fantasy and history exist - and it may be relatively indifferent to the difference.

The point that I want to make here is that there problems we have today. The first is that we have, to some extent, lost our cultural understanding of the notion of scripture that was prevalent two centuries ago. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, it just happens. The second point is that the Book of Mormon itself - in ways that Tokien wouldn't do - tries to align itself to that definition of the scripture genre. The use of archaic language (something that we would identify today as a terrible translation style) is one part of this effort. The first readers of the Book of Mormon had no problems identifying it as such (although that recognition isn't an indicator for belief or rejection). A third point is that the blurring of our modern conception of the text - both in regards to the discussion over text and authorship (and textual criticism) and in the discussion over history as a reflection of truth - have worked to change our views both of scripture, and of how we should read scripture. These changes came with arguments that persist - and within Mormonism, the Book of Mormon itself becomes a part of that debate. We still have questions like - should we accept the quoting of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon as evidence for the claim that Isaiah is a relatively well preserved text with a single author? Does the Book of Mormon's use of King James language provide evidence for the quality of the King James translation, and so on.

I prefer Davidson's approach. I think that it is much clearer that the author (no matter who you claim that author is) intended for the text of the Book of Mormon to be read as scripture. With Tolkien, that argument would be harder to make. But, as Davidson suggests, time is the real issue - and thus my much earlier reference in this thread to the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.

[Chap]

Several years ago, at Clairmont Graduate University, I had the pleasure of hearing a 90+ year-old Armand Mauss talk about the changes he had seen in the church in the time he was alive. By this time, many of the changes that President Nelson had made were already in effect like the two-hour block, elimination of the high priest groups, replacing home teaching and visiting with ministering and other things. When asked what he thought of these changes, he replied that he thought we were getting rid of many of the unique attributes that differentiated Mormonism from other Christian sects.

I think if Mormonism has expanded to embrace those who do not believe in a historical Book of Mormon, then this is just another step toward doing away with what made Mormonism distinct. A non-historical Book of Mormon is not the Mormon church in which I was raised. I am not saying this is good or bad but if we keep moving this way, eventually we will just be another Community of Christ.

From what I have learned as a Nevermo participating in debates on this board for a number of years, I would say that this sounds a plausible point of view.

[Doctor Steuss]

Something to keep in mind. Ben McGuire is a recent entry into this forum. He hasn't been here long enough in order to be considered to be 'the enemy'. In fact, much of what he has said here essentially makes him a 'friend of the court', so to speak. He's innocuous.

Most here have interacted with Ben on the previous version of this board, and the other board that many people are expats from. Many of us have "known" Ben for decades.

The way many are engaging him isn't because he's "new." It's because he's thoughtful, knowledgeable (and incredibly generous with that knowledge), respectful, intelligent, nuanced, engaging, and a joy to interact with and share ideas with.

To reduce him to being "a recent entry" and "innocuous" is a wee bit rude, in my opinion.