I Have Questions wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 1:58 pm
You think a person can hold an opinion that Moroni wasn't a real person but still answer "Yes" to the following questions and genuinely think they're being honest to the spirit of the question in doing so?
"Do you have a testimony of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ?"
"Do you support or promote any teachings, practices, or doctrine contrary to those of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?"
Yes, I do.
Part of me doesn't want to make this the focus, but I think it's something that needs to be said. What is the spirit of the questions? The second question was added to the temple recommend interview in the 1940s - specifically to address fundamentalist off-shoots and their push to continue polygamy. That historical context seems at odds with your claims about the spirit of the questions. Perhaps the question's intentions have shifted somewhat - but I don't think they have shifted that far.
I want to go back to something that I touched on earlier - the statement made by Luke Johnson in his book
Contested Issues in Christian Origins and the New Testament:
The historical study of Jesus began due to Enlightenment in Europe. At the time, two related convictions became popular among those considering themselves to live in an age of reason. The first was that for religion to be true it had to be reasonable; the second was that history was the most reasonable measure of truth. The claims of Christians about Jesus must therefore also meet those standards.
Johnson isn't alone in looking at the way in which religious belief is both supported and attacked on the grounds of history. There are two other quotes I would like to bring up - Johnathon Z. Smith wrote something that has resonated with me for quite a while (in his book
Drudgery Divine) - and I apologize that its a bit technical - it's hard to cut out something that is both easy and appropriately sized for a forum like this:
The uniqueness of the “Christ-event,” which usually encodes the death and resurrection of Jesus, is a double claim. On the ontological level, it is a statement of the absolutely alien nature of the divine protagonist (monogenes) and the unprecedented (and paradoxical) character of his self-disclosure; on the historical level, it is an assertion of the radical incomparability of the Christian “proclamation” with respect to the “environment.” For many scholars of early Christianity, the latter claim is often combined with the former so as to transfer the (proper, though problematic) theological affirmation of absolute uniqueness to a historical statement that, standing alone, could never assert more than relative uniqueness, that is to say, a quite ordinary postulation of difference. It is this illicit transfer from ontological to the historical that raises the question of the comparison of early Christianity and the religions of Late Antiquity.
I also want to quote a bit from Larry Hurtado's book
Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity:
Before we proceed further towards analyzing Christ-devotion as a historical phenomenon, however, it may be helpful to note a relevant (and in my view misguided) assumption shared by both the pre/anticritical and the history-of-religion approaches. ... Wishing to preserve the religious and theological validity of traditional christological claims, the anticritical view attempted to deny or minimize as far as possible the historically conditioned nature of early Christ-devotion. On the other hand, the history-of-religion scholars were convinced that their demonstration of the historically conditioned nature of early Christ-devotion proved that it was no longer to be treated as theologically valid or binding for modern Christians. In both views the assumption is the same: if something can be shown to have arisen through a historical process, then it cannot be divine “revelation” or have continuing theological validity.
It may be hard to understand why I think this is relevant, so I will try to explain (from my perspective of course). What I see in this question is an attempt to push belief in Mormonism's teachings back on to a historical question. Rather than confronting the religious ideas of Mormonism, the push is to go after this shared belief that to be reasonable something must be demonstrable from the historical record. So when I see questions like this, this is where my mind jumps first - that these questions are meant to be attacks on the reasonableness of Mormonism - not through its message but through its history. And the assertion that its message is history is this illicit sort of transfer that Smith mentions. The idea that these questions really encapsulate this idea of history in them is just fluff to try and push the point - that history rather than message is the real yardstick by which we should measure the truth claims of Mormonism.
And this goes right back to the issues that I have taken consistently in this thread over the question of anachronisms (on both sides of the table). You cannot establish the truth of Mormonism or the Book of Mormon by trying to place Mormonism into a specific historical context in a specific place and time. Similarly, the truth of Mormonism does not hinge on whether or not I have some specific belief about the history of a Moroni figure. But this is effectively what these questions are trying to push.
Do I think that a member of the LDS Church can honestly answer those questions affirmatively even while believing that it is possible that the Book of Mormon is some sort of inspired fiction? Sure. Do I think that a member of the LDS Church can honestly answer those questions affirmatively while believing that Moroni was this real person, whose life's details exactly match the events described both in the Book of Mormon and in later descriptions of encounters with early LDS leaders? Yes, I believe that too.
In my opinion there's some serious (and dishonest) mental gymnastics going on for a person to claim a testimony of The Restoration whilst quietly holding the belief that Joseph made it up and that Moroni was a figment of Joseph's imagination.
I get why someone would want to put all the discussion about the veracity of the historicity of the Book of Mormon etc to one side and instead concentrate solely on some of the messages that they can clean from the book. It avoids discussing all the problems with Joseph's and The Book of Mormon's claims of historicity with one wave of the hands. The source of a message is important. The Book of Mormon's messages have different importance depending on whether they came from an ancient record of God's dealings with the inhabitants of the Americas, or from a 19th Century fantasists imagination. The implications of the latter are massive, regardless of the message.
And yet, I see people who are more than willing to push the message aside and focus entirely on the issues they perceive with the messenger and its history.
I don't disagree with you that the message can be understood differently depending on the assumptions we bring to the text. But there is something about this text which is unusual in that the text itself embraces this perspective with it strategy of likening the scriptures unto ourselves. But this idea that history is the best way in which to evaluate the truth claims of the text is an interesting proposition - especially in the absence of any discussion about what those truth claims are, and what they mean. Likewise, I think that there is a problem for believers who argue that all we need to know about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon is that it was written by a real, historical Moroni.
In the long run, others can debate the history - I am not a historian (I only read history from time to time). I am a reader with a penchant for literary theory and philosophy. And so this is how I evaluate the text and its meaning. The question of whether or not there was a real Moroni who wrote the gold plates isn't particularly relevant to the way that I read the text. If I substitute a little bit in 2 Nephi 26 I might read this:
I know that the Nephites do understand the things of their prophets, and there is none other people that understand the things which were spoken unto the Nephites like unto them, save it be that they are taught after the manner of the things of the Nephites.
And since I haven't been taught this way, I find myself in the same shoes as Nephi's descendants about whom Nephi wrote:
For I, Nephi, have not taught them many things concerning the manner of the Jews; … I, Nephi, have not taught my children after the manner of the Jews.
Just like the Nephites being forced to liken the Jewish scriptures to themselves for understanding, I have to liken the Book of Mormon to myself for understanding. And since all I learn about the Nephites, I learn from the text - the question of whether or not Moroni was a real person isn't particularly important to the way that I understand the text - there is nothing that will help me understand Moroni the historical person differently from Moroni the character in the text.
My final point is this - this discussion is ostensibly about loan-shifting in the Book of Mormon. All of this discussion about my personal beliefs and the potential inconsistencies that might exist between my beliefs and Mormon orthodoxy is a side show away from that discussion. Let's not get too derailed over the fact that I have a certain degree of flexibility and acceptance of ambiguity that others may not share.
