Customer Reviews

Faithful History: Essays on Writing Mormon History (Essays on Mormonism Series)

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This is an really fine collection of essays about the controversies over the writing of Mormon during the past 30 years. Both sides (conservatives and liberals) are represented. A special highlight is D. Michael Quinn's "On Being a Mormon Historian--and its Aftermath" which includes the complete text of Quinn's infamous lecture and a scalding account of the events that followed. Highly reccomended, and not just to Mormons but to anyone who likes intellectual history and is interested in the "culture wars" of today.

In the Editor's Introduction to this 1992 book, it states, "(T)he New Mormon History ignited similar controversy... Beginning in the 1950s, however, professional Mormon historians with greater access to important primary documents have begun to present a more inclusive past... Traditional Mormon historians, however, deny that the New Mormon History represents progress... Everything in the Book of Mormon must be accepted as historical fact... This discussion about alternative directions in LDS history continues. Current New Mormon Historians claim that they allow for the supernatural by recounting past religious experiences in the words of the people having them... From this perspective Mormon history addresses narratives of spiritual events without trying to authenticate them."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"This significantly different understanding has been called the 'New Mormon History.' It differs from the 'Old Mormon History' principally in a shift of interest and emphasis from polemics, from attacking and defending assumptions of faith. It is a shift from an evangelical towards a humanistic interest." (Pg. 35)
"To put it directly, the honest historian cannot say whether Joseph Smith saw--or even thought he saw--one being or two on a spring morning in 1820... Of course it may be argued that two is more likely; most of the accounts ... describe two beings. Unfortunately such reasoning misses the point. On historical grounds we cannot say with the certainty of the faithful apologist that one of these versions is the most truthful record of the past." (Pg. 49)
"The truth was that more than 250 plural marriages occurred from 1890 to 1904 ... by authorization of the First Presidency and by action or assent of all but one or two members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The official denial of that fact in LDS church statements and histories has actually given credibility to Fundamentalists in their promotion of new plural marriages after 1904 in defiance of First Presidency authority." (Pg. 87)
"It is interesting to this gentile to notice the Book of Mormon is not widely read in the church. People come to faith because living witnesses base their speaking and way of life on what they have read, 'heard,' there--and a new generation of children or converts comes to faith by 'hearing.'" (Pg. 184)
"(I)t is not altogther surprising that many New Mormon Historians were taken in by the Mark Hofmann forgeries. Hofmann knew how to invent the kind of documents such historians longed to find in order to flesh out their peculiar speculations about Mormon origins." (Pg. 246)
"New Mormon History arose out of new access to LDS sources in the 1950s and 1960s and an awareness of the possibilities for new questions and interpretations which were not possible within traditional approaches to the Mormon past." (Pg. 266)
"(T)he Utah-based Latter-day Saint church never canonized (Joseph) Smith's Bible but in 1880 did canonize a small portion which had already been included in the already published Pearl of Great Price... A century later the Utah church intercalated extracts from the Inspired version into their scriptural apparatus cross reference system, thus indirectly giving it canonical status." (Pg. 282)
"Martin Harris, one of the Three Witnesses, concurred, declaring that he had seen the plates only through spiritual means." (Pg. 296)

Thank god for these wonderful compilations of Signature. George D Smith has collected very important essays from four perspectives. One is the non-LDS like Foster, second is the Missouri based movement of Joseph Smith like Mesle, third the LDS traditionalists like Midgely and fourth, LDS liberals like Quinn. However, there are only two camps: the traditionalist visavi the rest. Very well done to have an essay from Midgley, however, one could have chosen one of his short essays - if there are any. (FARMS - the Brigham Young University's unit of Book of Mormon history writes short essays when they like something they read, so one could only guess why Midgley writes 30 pages ....)

Reviewing this magnificent book is a challenging task. It is useless to give a summary of every essay, because they are so philosophical. Every essay discusses the aspects of history, historical methods, objectivism, religious identity, facts, myths, authoritarianism, belief and faith.

All these are mentioned and interpreted in various ways, making the reading a bit complicated. Like how to define faith, belief and myth. For one author myth is a spiritual story for another myth is a non-historical story. One author even replace the word faith by something else ... One could say that the totality of LDS scripture and history (be it polygamy in Nauvoo, the First vision etc) is treated by the book. It is not the actual event, which is the focus of the essays but they exemplify their standpoints thru evoking some historical details.

So what are these standpoints? Just two simplify the liberal vs the traditionalist:

- god, as an actor in history, can only be evoked by a pre-understanding where s/he is felt as factual, where this relationship is of a spiritual nature not scientific (the liberal)
- to exclude god from history, can only be done if there is a pre-understanding that there is no god, wherefore god should be an actor as Napoleon and therefore miracles are possible (the traditionalist)

The book shows that the traditionalist point of view is not on the same level as the former. Why? Because there is a variety of gods/divinities. History is about writing from sources and deriving conclusions thru verifiable methods and these methods are universal, so one could actually "measure" - not the truth but - the OPTIMAL relationships between factors, causes and consequences in history. The method should be applied regardless of the text or its source (divine or human). Divinity reduces the relationship and in some way excludes factors, which could shed more light on a passed event. Just to exemplify: every human knows that virgins can't have babies. So the historian - instead of proving this, which would be weird - would try to see why was such a detail necessary to the Jesus story. The birth is only mentioned in two canonised Gospels so a historian would not argue against the story itself, because it is not her/his job promoting a specific ideology. An atheist could though do the promoting! The traditionalist in this case would attack the historian for excluding god from the picture because for god everything is possible and s/he would also try to find some minor inconsistencies in the work of the historian, making a hen of a feather, as we say in Swedish.

So, at last these twain camps will never meet, because no one wants to discuss on the same terms. The traditionalist wants to relativise every point of the historian just to make hers/his own point acceptable. But at the end they lose, because if the historian is subjective excluding god from history, how subjective is not the traditionalist having god in history? For me, the subjectivity of the historian is more relevant than the traditionalist, it is a subjectivity which doesn't believe itself to be the truth, what a historian writes today would change in 10 years time and s/he would not be angry about it.

The traditionalist will always stick to the truth and will surely find something in 10 years which could prove it more .... talk about research and development :-)