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Kevin Barney

The Book of Abraham

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I just returned from a couple of weeks in Europe where I presented at FAIR conferences in Darmstadt, Germany and Milan and Rome, Italy, on the Book of Abraham.  (Other presentations included topics like the Book of Mormon, race issues, polygamy, and Joseph Smith’s visions.)  This was my first trip to Europe and I had a great time.  Now that I’m back, I thought I would post my remarks on the BoA here for your interest and so that I can conveniently refer people to them in the future.

The Book of Abraham

Kevin L. Barney

When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought with him a small army of scientists and artists, whose published reports of the wonders of Egypt in the many volumes of the French series “Description of Egypt” published between 1809 and 1813 soon fueled a wave of Egyptomania among Europeans.  This intense interest in all things Egyptian spurred a demand for Egyptian antiquities, which men like Antonio Lebolo, the excavator of the Joseph Smith Papyri, were all too willing to meet.  The Italian Lebolo had been a gendarme during Napoleon’s occupation of the Italian peninsula.  When Napoleon was defeated, Lebolo moved to Egypt in voluntary exile.  There he was employed by Bernardino Drovetti, the former consul general of France in Egypt, to oversee his excavations in Upper Egypt.  Lebolo also did excavating on his own.  Some time around the year 1820, give or take a couple of years, Lebolo excavated 11 well preserved mummies from a pit tomb on the west bank of the Nile opposite the ancient city of Thebes (modern Luxor).  These mummies were shipped to Trieste and consigned for sale through Albano Oblasser.  Oblasser sent the mummies to New York, where they were purchased by an entrepreneur from Pennsylvania named Michael H. Chandler some time early in the year 1833. [Read more…] about The Book of Abraham

Help Thou Mine Unbelief

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In the Sunday afternoon session of General Conference, Elder Holland (hereafter “EH”) gave an address with the title “Lord, I Believe.”  He sets the stage by recounting the story of the father of an afflicted child, desperate for whatever help might be afforded.  The disciples were not able to provide the needed blessing.  The father then appealed to Jesus with last-resort desperation:

“If thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us.

Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

EH tells us that the man’s initial conviction, by his own admission, is limited, but he has an urgent, emphatic desire on behalf of his only child.  And we are then told that that is good enough for a beginning.

EH astutely notes the plural pronouns the father uses in his plea:  “have compassion on us, and help us.”  The help needed was not for the child alone, but for the father himself as well.  And in response to this new and still partial faith, Jesus heals the boy.

At this point EH states that he is addressing the youth of the Church, but then he clarifies that he is including under that rubric those young in age, young in years of membership or young in faith, which one way or another probably includes most of us.

He then offers a series of observations.  Observation No. 1: Hold fast the ground already won.  He observes how the father asserts his strength first, and only then acknowledges his limitation.  “Hold fast to what you already know and stand strong until additional knowledge comes.”

Observation No. 2: Lead with Your Faith.  Do not start your quest for faith by saying how much you do not have, leading as it were with your “unbelief.”  In an image that is sure to become a classic, EH tells us “That is like trying to stuff a turkey through the beak!”  He makes clear that he is not asking us to pretend to faith we do not have, but he is asking us to be true to the faith we do have.  “Sometimes we act as if an honest declaration of doubt is a higher manifestation of moral courage than is an honest declaration of faith.”  We should be as candid about our questions as we need to be; life is full of such questions on one subject or another, but don’t let those questions stand in the way of faith working its miracle.

A third observation (introduced by “Furthermore“) is that we need to realize that we have more faith than we may think if we will but pay attention to the fruits we experience from living the Gospel.

Don’t Freak Out!  Well, that’s my way of saying it.  EH says “don’t hyperventilate if from time to time issues arise that need to be examined, understood, and resolved.”  They do and we will.  “In this Church what we know will always trump what we do not know.  And remember in this telestial world everyone is to walk by faith.”

So, EH observes, we need to be patient with human frailty, both our own and that of others.  “Except in the case of his only perfect Begotten Son, imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with since time began.”

Last Observation:  Ask for help.  When doubt or difficulty comes, do not be afraid to ask for help.  If we seek it as honestly and humbly as that father did, we can get it.

Know v. Believe.  EH then tells the story of a 14-year old boy who recently said to him, a little hesitantly, “Brother Holland, I can’t say yet that I know the Church is true, but I believe it is.”  EH then hugged that boy until his eyes bulged out.  EH explained that “belief” is a precious word, and an even more precious act, and he need never apologize for “only believing.”  Christ himself said, “Be not afraid, only believe,” a phrase that sent GBH into the mission field.  Our AoF each begin with “We believe…”  EH told the boy how proud he was of him for the honesty of his quest.

Then, with the advantage of an additional 60 years since he too was a newly believing 14-year old, he went on to tell some things he knows, and conveyed an Apostolic testimony, finally inviting us, if our faith is ever tested in this or any season, to lean on his.

“Hang on.  Hope on.  Honestly acknowledge your concerns but first fan the flame of your faith, because all things are possible to them that believe.”

So in summary:

  • Hold fast to the ground already won.
  • Lead with your faith.
  • Upon reflection, you may realize that you have more faith than you thought.
  • Don’t freak out.  BREATHE!
  • Ask for help.
  • If you have to, lean on his faith.

I was particularly pleased to see EH’s allowance and even encouragement for framing one’s testimony in the language of faith (“I believe, I trust, I have faith that”) in contrast with the language of absolute assurance (“I know”), since my own practice has long been the former and not the latter.  That may mean that I’m closer to that 14-year old boy than to an EH, but I can live with that.

 

Cross posted from By Common Consent

Notes on Apologetics

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Over the last couple of days I’ve seen a number of comments around the Bloggernacle and on Facebook that reflect some fundamental misunderstandings of Mormon apologetics in general and FAIR in particular. (Such as a confusion of material on the Mormon Dialogue Board with FAIR, and such as attributing material from the FARMS Review to FAIR.) I thought it might be worthwhile in light of this kind of persistent misunderstanding to share my comments on apologetics from this past summer’s Sunstone Symposium. Kaimi organized a session on the topic, featuring him, me, Bridget Jack Jeffries and John Charles-Duffy. Below I have attempted to produce a rough transcript of my comments. At the end I have reproduced the questions, followed only by my own comments (not those of the other panelists). (To hear the entire session, you may order a download from Sunstone for under $3.00.)

Hi. This is my vacation so I didn’t really prepare anything to say. I plan to just talk off the cuff a little bit. First of all, let me tell you a little bit about what apologetics is. As Kaimi said I’m involved with FAIR, which stands for the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research. I was not involved in the formation of the organization or the choice of the name, which name is somewhat unfortunate. For years we have gotten e-mails asking us “Why are you apologizing?” Because apologetics is a word that is not really native to the Mormon tradition. It is well known in other traditions, but not in ours. It comes from the Greek word apologia, which means “defense,” and refers to that branch of theology that has to do with defending religious faith by rational means. There are Mormon apologists, Evangelical apologists, Catholic apologists, Jewish apologists, and Muslim apologists. If you’re a religious group that seeks to interact with the wider world, you need apologists. So that’s the first thing.

Second, in Mormon discourse a lot of times the word apologist is thrown around as a slur. I personally don’t perceive it that way. Jack and I both have a background in classics at BYU, and I remember reading Plato’s Apology, in the original sense, not the modern English sense. So to me being an apologist is a perfectly honorable thing, not something one has to ashamed of.

Also, I think apologists often wear different hats at different times. I know I certainly do. I sometimes act in the role of an apologist and wear that hat. Sometimes I wear the hat of a scholar. (I’ve published some 30-odd articles in Mormon studies, some with an apologetic slant and some without.) I wear the hat of a regular member as well; I teach Sunday School in my home ward. I sometimes wear the hat of a social critic. Some of you are aware that I blog at By Common Consent, and in that forum I often have occasion to critique the Church and its policies. Among apologists there is a spectrum, and I think it’s fair to say that I’m very liberal in the world of apologetics; probably about as liberal as one can be and still wear that particular hat. Kaimi mentioned LGBT rights. I’m there with Joanna; Ralph Hancock is not, if you read his post on Times and Seasons. So there is a wide spectrum of belief and practice within the apologetic universe.

What I’d like to do now, in the wake of what happened at the Maxwell Institute, my friend Russell Arben Fox sent around an e-mail to about 15 of us, asking for our thoughts on apologetics. And I want to use my response to him as a framework for this address.

I think of apologetics as operating within three different spheres. First is what I call (these labels are just my own) “engagement apologetics.” What I mean by that is when you engage directly with the critic. That’s like debate, the aggressive style people think of. Rhetorical combat in the octagon; two people enter, one leaves, that kind of mentality. Today a lot of that takes place on message boards; that is the venue for this style of apologetics. Personally that’s not my style and I don’t do it. That is partly because I know myself well enough to know I wouldn’t be any good at it. A lot of that is just a personality issue; I’m a very empathetic person. Kaimi mentioned Dan Peterson and Lou Midgley; I know those guys, I’m friends with those guys, and I don’t view them as the Anti-Christ. But I know and am friends with everyone else, too. I really don’t want to roll around wrestling in the mud with someone; it’s just not my style. I don’t care much for message boards; I’m much more of a blog person. I’m a live and let live kind of guy.

There is also what I call scholarly apologetics. John Charles-Duffy in his lengthy Sunstone article was not only insightful but perhaps prescient in a way we wouldn’t have known in 2004. He talks about a number of tensions. There is an anti-contention tradition in the Church, and that style butts heads with that. There is also an anti-intellectual tradition in the Church, and apologetics by its nature uses scholarship, in a way that traditional Mormonism hasn’t, so in many ways apologetics has been a progressive influence in the Church. I agree with his conclusion there. I mention this article because he talks about “orthodox scholarship,” which is a good label, but I’m going to include this under the rubric of apologetics.

What I mean by scholarly apologetics is sort of classic FARMS. FARMS stands for the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, a foundation established by John Welch in 1979. It was eventually absorbed into BYU in the 90s at the request of GBH (hard to say no to him!). I’m not part of FARMS but I know those people, and I know there was a lot of concern at the time with going into BYU, and there was concern that what has happened would happen. Scholarly apologetics is applying the tools of scholarship assuming Mormon faith claims. It involves things like peer review and cite checking and footnotes and linguistic tools and dead tree publication. So FARMS would put on a conference on the Allegory of the Olive Tree, a two-day conference, and they would invite scholars and then publish a book with the proceedings. That was not directly engaging anyone but providing a scholarly apparatus around Mormon faith claims.

The third kind of apologetics is what I call educative apologetics. And that is what I see as the role of FAIR today. Now FAIR originated almost exclusively as an engagement apologetics organization. FAIR originated as an internet-based group in the late 90s (I wasn’t around then). What happened was that there were religious discussions on the old AOL message boards, and the Mormons were getting pushed around. They were the 98 pound weaklings because they didn’t control the venue. The people that did limited their access and things like that. So FAIR originated as a group of people banding together electronically for self defense. And so FAIR created its own message board. And in those early days it was very much this engagement style, let’s arm wrestle over this stuff. Then after a few years it changed its focus and gave up its message board. Some people still refer to that board as the “FAIR boards,” but FAIR has had no control over those boards for about a decade now. FAIR’s mission became one of educative apologetics. Its focus is inward, on members of the Church.

So a Primary teacher goes to prepare a talk, opens up google and enters some innocuous search term. Somehow she goes down a rabbit hole and she finds out some weird thing about the church she’s never heard before and is freaked out. So what does she do? Well in the Mormon tradition you go talk to the bishop. But the bishop has a degree in engineering from BYU; he’s never heard of this thing and is of no help. Probably no one in her ward knows anything about it. So where does she turn? That’s where FAIR tries to help. FAIR has a wiki it has developed over time, using wiki software and collaborative editing, crowd sourcing, that sort of thing. It has become a repository of every anti-Mormon argument there is. Some people think that’s a bad thing, because we’ve cataloged all of these arguments against the Church, and it is in effect a smorgasbord of anti-Mormonism. But you gotta do it, because people are going to find this stuff. We live in the internet age. When I was a missionary you would only encounter these things if you specifically went looking for them or if your crazy Aunt Sally sent you a tract in the mail. That’s not the case anymore; you’ve got the internet, baby. You’re one search away from finding this stuff. And we’ve got a lot of skeletons in the closet, a lot of bodies buried in the backyard. And we haven’t been very forthcoming as a Church about all that stuff. The Church kind of hopes people won’t find it and we won’t have to talk about it. That doesn’t work anymore; someone has to be able to talk about it

FAIR also has a feature called Ask the Apologist. If you can’t find what you want on the wiki, you can write in and it will go to a private e-mail list with over 100 volunteers, and someone on that list will respond to your question. I’ve probably answered over a thousand of those questions over the years. I love doing that, helping someone who is troubled by something. A lot of times it’s just a matter of putting something in context. People come to these things with fundamentalist, black and white thinking, very presentist, so sometimes you just need to inculcate a little historical consciousness in them. And when you practice that kind of apologetics it’s a virtue to be conversant with the literature. I’ve been reading Dialogue and Sunstone and JMH and everything else for decades. So I’ll remember that there was an article about that, and I’ll suggest they read that.

So those are the kinds of apologetics as I conceive of them. I do think there is a role for engagement apologetics. Whether it has to be under the umbrella of a university, I don’t know; I’m a little ambivalent about that. I can understand NAMI wanting to go a different direction. If this takes place I imagine that FARMS will reform under a different name and continue doing what it did before. [Since then the appearance of The Interpreter has confirmed this.] I don’t know, that’s just a guess.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject, so I’ll sit down.

Questions:

To what extent does the Church countenance FARM or FAIR? I want to add something on the FAIR aspect of that. FAIR has always been clear it is completely independent of the Church. We have to be. For some people that’s a problem; they won’t listen to us without an explicit endorsement. If so, so be it. Some of the brethren are more supportive of apologetics than others.

Lutheran pastor; doesn’t understand the controversy. As Kaimi mentioned, Dan Peterson was the long time editor of the FARMS Review (the name has changed over time). That organ is the most explicitly apologetic of NAMI. He was on a lengthy trip to Europe, and received an e-mail from Gerald Bradford that he was being removed as editor. Universities remove editors all the time; it didn’t have to be this controversial. I don’t know Bradford personally, but I respect his scholarship. I suspect he thought it would be easier to do this way. Dan Peterson is a very controversial figure. I talked about different styles of apologetics, but they bleed into each other at the margins, and Dan has been active on the message boards, and that style has bled into the Review to some extent.

Can a career be made in apologetics? To what extent should an organization maintain its original mandate v. adapting to changing times? I’m going to answer your first question: “No.” Although some of the people involved are university professors and use those skill sets tangentially in apologetics.

Different parties are asserting institutional support or not. How do we define apologetics when there is no specific institutional backing? Mentioned Joanna Brooks. I think I see where you’re going with this now. I love Joanna, and in many ways what she does is apologetics. She’s making the case that you don’t have to check your brain at the door to be a Mormon. A lot of people would say that some of what Richard did in RSR is a kind of apologetic. Much of the Bloggernacle is apologetic in some sense. Apologetics is much broader than what people usually think of under that rubric.

[More on the controversy.] I don’t know that there was any GA impetus behind this move. Someone wrote a paper critiquing John Dehlin’s work, he got wind of it, and contacted a GA about that. That may have given Gerald an opening to do something. There has long been an anti-apologetic wing of FARMS, which sounds weird to people, because they assume FARMS is monolithic. There is academic politics involved. I’m not convinced this was a GA driven thing, but rather a matter of academic politics. Attitude of GAs towards apologetics remains a mixed bag; some favor it, others don’t.

Questioner talked about an independent objective reality. How does apologetics cope with that? Don’t you have to throw up your hands and say it’s ridiculous to defend a God who drowns all those people? I don’t know that there is an objective reality. We think we see things as they are, but instead we see things as we are. This is actually a big issue in apologetic discourse and involves postmodernism. (From audience member to questioner: “Study philosophy.”)

This entry was cross-posted from By Common Consent

Ben Witherington on Whether Mormons Are Christians

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So, over at Patheos Ben Witherington has a blog post titled “Why Mormonism Is Not Christianity–The Issue of Christology,” which you may read here. I’m familiar with Witherington from his articles in Biblical Archaeology Review (I’m a subscriber), which I generally enjoy. But I suppose it should come as no surprise that I thought this blog post was weak sauce.

In general I didn’t have too much of a problem with his catalog of differences between Evangelical and Mormon thought. It is true that Mormons reject an ontological Trinity (he poisons the well by characterizing this position as “polytheism”); it is true that Mormons believe in an embodied God (I wonder whether he realizes how many people historically he just kicked out of Christianity by making this a standard); guilty as charged on our rejection of biblical inerrancy.

But I was surprised at his lack of historical sense and sophistication. He portrays Mormonism as evolving, which is certainly true, but he is blind to the evolution of thought over the centuries in historical Christianity. He cites the historic policy of the priesthood ban, and while I personally think we deserve to take our lumps over that, he doesn’t seem to be aware that the original Mormon policy was an (unfortunate) importation of Protestant biblical thought into the Church (there is a case where if we had been a little less Christian in the 19th century we would have been better off!). He seems to think we are somehow dissembling by calling our meeting places “churches,” and he notes that we don’t have crosses gracing our buildings, apparently unaware of the largely Puritan, low church origins of our Church. As religious history, I was not impressed by his treatment.

He grants that many Catholics and Orthodox are Christian; I wonder how they feel about this supposed magnanimous judgment on his part. I can’t help but wonder whether Catholics and Orthodox might wonder who appointed him the arbiter of who qualifies to be reckoned a Christian. He also allows that many Mormons would pass the test of being decent and honest and loving human beings. Magnanimous indeed.

Here’s the thing. I know what he’s trying to say, and I actually agree with him. From his Evangelical perspective, being Christian is tantamount to being saved, and most Mormons are not saved according to Evangelical theology. I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is his throwing around the word “Christian” without bothering to define it, but just assuming his narrow Evangelical definition. Because out in the real world, that is not the way people understand the word “Christian.”

A christianos is a partisan of Christ, just as a Herodian was a partisan of Herod or a Caesarian was a partisan of Caesar. And that is the way the word is understood outside of the Evangelical bubble from within which Witherington is writing. To the person on the street, a Christian is someone who believes in Christ, that he is the Son of God, he lived and died, atoned for the sins of the world, the third day arose again, and dwells in yonder heavens at the right hand of the Father. For most of the world, Christian is a broad generic category of history and culture and belief, not a narrow club for the saved per Evangelical dogma.

Elsewhere I have shared the following (true) story, which illustrates well why simply calling Latter-day Saints non-Christian is inherently misleading. A family with several young daughters used to live in my ward. This family was friendly with a neighbor woman, who would often babysit the girls. As Christmas was approaching, the woman gave each of the girls a Christmas gift, which turned out to be a coloring book featuring Jesus Christ. The girls enjoyed the gift and colored the pictures.

Some time later this woman came to the family’s home, ashen, and apologized profusely for having given their daughters such a gift. It turns out that the woman had just learned at her church that Mormons are not Christian, and therefore she of course assumed that she had committed a grievous faux pas in giving the girls coloring books featuring a deity their family did not believe in.

Now in this story the woman understood the claim that Latter-day Saints are not Christian the same way the vast majority of people would, as meaning that they do not believe in Christ. This is because she naturally applied the public definition of the word to her pastor’s words, not some narrow, undisclosed private definition.

We can see by this story the mischief that results from the semantic legerdemain of calling Latter-day Saints non-Christian. The fact is, they are Christians in the generic sense of the word, even if, from an Evangelical point of view, they are theologically in error and unsaved (i.e., being a Christian is not necessarily tantamount to being right). I personally would have no difficulty with certain shorthand distinctions that would make clear that Mormons neither are nor claim to be creedal or orthodox Christians. But to say they are not Christians at all without such a modifier is to fundamentally misrepresent the nature of their beliefs.

Cross-posted at BCC

Review of Stephen Taysom, The Patheos Guide to Mormonism

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Stephen Taysom, The Patheos Guide to Mormonism (Series Editor Kathleen Mulhern), available in e-book formats for $2.99.  For details, see this website:  http://www.patheos.com/Books/Patheos-Press/The-Patheos-Guide-to-Mormonism.html

Remember when you were in high school, and you were assigned a five-page paper?  Oh, how you struggled to reach that goal of five pages!  If you got desperate enough, perhaps you played with fonts, margins and line spacing in an effort to cross the finish line with some hopefully-not-too-obvious space padding techniques made possible by the computer age.  What a relief it was when you finally achieved the assigned length.  Maybe you would even add an extra paragraph, so it wouldn’t look too obvious how much you were straining to get to five pages of text.

Those were the days, weren’t they?  Stephen Taysom, an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Cleveland State University (and a blogger at the Juvenile Instructor http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/), was recently faced with a grown up’s inverse of this problem: He had to try to give a coherent introduction to Mormonism, a very complicated topic, in what has amounted to a mere 77 pages.  I would venture a guess that there were times during his work on this project that he sincerely wished for 500 pages to play with, rather than 77.  But the brevity of the text is a large part of its appeal (and I freely acknowledge I was much more willing to undertake a review of a 77-pager than I would have been the 500-pager), so what must have been a very challenging exercise in pruning had to be undertaken.

Does it work?  I decided before reading it that my standard would be whether I thought I could have done a better job.  It is conceivable that I might have done a better job if I had 500 pages to play with, but it is highly doubtful that I could have improved upon this effort if I were limited to less than 100 pages.  So yes, as a very concise summary of and introduction to Mormonism, especially for those with limited prior exposure to the religion, it does indeed work, and I highly recommend it.

All Patheos Guides follow the same basic structure of five chapters, each with five standardized subsections.  This is done purposefully to allow easy comparison of different religions using the respective Guides for those faiths.  Below is the Table of Contents to the Mormon Guide:

CHAPTER ONE: ORIGINS

Beginnings: First Vision

Influences: Awakening and Restoration

Founders: Smith and Young

Sacred Texts: The Standard Works and an Open Canon

Historical Perspectives: Apologists and Critics

CHAPTER TWO: HISTORY

Early Developments: Mobs, Murder, and Moving West

Schisms and Sects: Challenges to Polygamy

Missions and Expansion: From New York to the World

Exploration and Conquest: Migration, Deseret, and Utah

The Modern Age: A Manifesto and Statehood

CHAPTER THREE: BELIEFS

Sacred Narratives: From Michael to Lehi

Ultimate Reality and Divine Beings: From Man to God

Human Nature and the Purpose of Existence: A Training Ground

Suffering and the Problem of Evil: War in Heaven, Choice on Earth

Afterlife and Salvation: A Hierarchy of Kingdoms

CHAPTER FOUR: RITUALS AND WORSHIP

Sacred Time: From the Second Coming to Eternity

Sacred Space: Chapels and Temples

Rites and Ceremonies: Fathers and Priests

Worship and Devotion in Daily Life: Sacrament, Family, and Temple

Symbolism: Signs of Hope and Promise

CHAPTER FIVE: ETHICS AND COMMUNITY

Community Organization: Wards and Common Care

Leadership: Presidency, Quorums, and Bishops

Principles of Moral Thought and Action: Avoiding Sin and Practicing Charity

Vision for Society: Politics, Protests, and the Apocalypse

Gender and Sexuality: Patriarchy and Heterosexuality

One consequence of this standardized format is a fair amount of duplication, since each chapter needs to stand on its own for comparative purposes with other Guides.  I read the book straight through, like a novel, so the duplicated explanations of things like the First Vision or visits of Moroni stuck out to me.  But that is simply an unavoidable consequence of the desired series structure, and once one gets beyond the early chapters the duplicative material quickly becomes much less common.  (One duplication that was probably unintentional was the repetition of the precise sentence “In addition, Mormons set aside Monday evenings as a period of family togetherness” a mere two paragraphs from each other in the first section of Chapter Four.)

A couple of illustrations will show Taysom’s skill at conveying complex information in a succinct and understandable way.  First is this explanation of the First Vision from the first section of Chapter One:

In 1820, at age 14, his prayer for guidance led to an experience that became the founding event of Mormonism and gave rise to his career as a prophet. In his accounts of this event, recorded many years later, Joseph wrote of being nearly overwhelmed by darkness and then seeing a pillar of light encircling two beings, God the Father and Jesus. He was told that he was forgiven of his sins and that he was not to join any church, since none embodied the true faith; all had gone astray.

Second, from the first section of Chapter Three, is this explanation of the Mormon concept of Jesus Christ as Jehovah:

Mormons take a slightly different approach to some of these stories than many other traditions, however. For example, in the Mormon version of the sacred creation narrative, Jesus Christ, who before his birth was the Jehovah of the Hebrew Bible, created the earth and all things in it at the direction of God the Father. Jehovah was assisted in this by other “noble and great” spirits, most notably the angel Michael. Michael, according to the Mormon narrative, was born on earth as Adam, the first mortal man.

Taysom has skillfully conveyed the gist of these ideas, which normally would require pages of explanation, in but a single paragraph each.

I liked the way Taysom put the origins of Mormonism into the broader religious context of the Second Great Awakening, and the specific revivalism of the burned over district.  I also appreciated how he easily and straightforwardly broached topics that some might consider controversial, such as treasure searching.  For instance, see how he discloses post-Manifesto polygamy in a very just-the-facts-ma’am, matter of fact way: “After years of attempting to establish their constitutional right to practice polygamy, the Mormons finally disavowed the practice in 1890, although it would continue to be practiced in some quarters until the second decade of the 20th century.”  Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

I personally have an interest in Joseph Smith’s use of Hebrew, and twice Taysom seems to reflect a certain doubt as to whether Joseph’s explanation of the origin of the place name Nauvoo as a Hebrew word was really correct.  (The applicable quotations are as follows: “named Nauvoo [after the Hebrew word for beautiful, he claimed]” and “Joseph Smith re-christened the town Nauvoo, which Smith suggested was a Hebrew name denoting a place of rest or refreshing.”)  This was not merely a claim or suggestion of the Prophet, but a demonstrable fact.  It is true that the word nauvoo is obscure, and if you ask your Hebrew-speaking friend what the Hebrew word for “beautiful” is, he surely will not say nauvoo.  But although the word is rare, it is also quite real.  In the beginning of Isaiah 52:7, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings,” the Hebrew word rendered “beautiful” is (in modern transliteration) na’wu, the pilel form of the verb na’ah.  Joseph gives the word as nauvoo, using the Sephardic transliteration method he learned at the Kirtland Hebrew School, where au represents the vowel qamets, the v is the letter waw, and the oo represents the vowel shureq.  Indeed, the word nauvoo actually appears on p. 28 of the Joshua Seixas grammar that was used at the Kirtland Hebrew School, as one can see at this page:  http://www.fairlds.org/authors/barney-kevin/is-nauvoo-a-hebrew-word .

Near the end of Chapter Two we read “In 2008, Mitt Romney became the first Mormon contender for the presidential nomination for a major political party,” but as written that cannot be correct, since Mitt’s own father, George, preceded him as a one-time contender for the Republican nomination.

The very tight space requirements do not allow much space for a discussion of nuance or development of Mormon ideas over time.  In the section on Ultimate Reality and Divine Beings: From Man to God, Taysom simply assumes the B.H. Roberts tripartite theory of the nature of man (intelligence, soul, body).  Now, if I were in his shoes I would have done the same thing, as to my eye that is the most common understanding today, but it is not something that has been universally held throughout the history of the Church.  I think it is proper to use things like this that historically have been majority views, but I do lament the lack of space for putting these ideas into a little bit more context in terms of their development over time.

Taysom is very careful not to overwhelm the reader with in-house vocabulary that a non-Mormon would not understand, which is I think absolutely essential in a project such as this.  One small lapse in this area was in his discussion of tithing:  “Mormons also pay 10 percent of their annual ‘increase’ as tithing to the Church.”  He put the word increase in quotation marks, but gives the reader no clue what it means.  Something like a bracketed “i.e., income” would have been helpful here.  But in the context of the book as a whole, these things are mere trifles.

Believe it or not, I actually had a dream about the first section of Chapter Four, in which Mormon worship services are described.  (How is that for my commitment as a book reviewer!)  In the dream, I was serving a mission to the Philippines (doubtless because my former bishop’s son just received his own call to that area).  I realized that we were asking people to come to Church, but we weren’t explaining to them carefully what they could expect to happen there, and no one wants to go into a strange situation without a sense of what to expect.  As they say, “If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.”  So my companion and I put together a pamphlet that we had printed, that included our pictures, something about us such as where we’re from, and how to contact us.  We also put in there a picture of the local ward building, both external and internal maps, times of the different services, and then we actually explained what they could expect to happen in, say, sacrament meeting, much along the lines of Taysom’s own explanation.  (For instance, we should explain that there is no offertory; one simply cannot assume that people will know about something like that.)  I think we also threw some of our basic beliefs in there, maybe a copy of the Articles of Faith.  And of course we had great missionary success based on our little pamphlet (I did say it was a dream, didn’t I?).

In this current Mormon Moment, when college students are taking classes in Mormonism, journalists are struggling to wrap their arms around the faith, ordinary voters are trying to figure out what it all means for their voting decision, and on and on, this book is just what the doctor ordered to give people a much needed overview of what Mormonism is all about.  I congratulate Professor Taysom on a job well done, and hope the book receives a wide audience.