Come, Follow Me March 4-10: 2 Nephi 20-25
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Context or Prophecy? Embracing Cultural Difference in a Global Church
By Rosalynde Frandsen Welch
When we come ashore in 2 Nephi 25, landing on the far side of a thirteen-chapter quotation of Isaiah, we catch our breath and look back for a moment on the voyage we’ve just taken. Nephi has steered us through a three-stage narrative of the covenant history of the house of Israel.[1] In the first stage (2 Nephi 12-15), we pass through several quick juxtapositions of the rebellious, degraded present state of Judah with the blessed, renewed future state of gathered Jacob. This helps us establish where this covenant history starts and where it will end, to better appreciate the magnitude of God’s work. In the second stage (2 Nephi 16-21), we follow a long trajectory from the hardened, stiff-necked people whom Isaiah rebukes in Judah and Israel, through the judgments of God by means of devastation at the hands of successive imperial invaders, to the emergence of a living “branch” and a “root” from the ravaged stump of Jacob—the Messiah and the purified remnant prepared to be gathered to their Savior. Finally, in the third stage (2 Nephi 22-24), we see the downfall of the imperial powers who, though they were unwittingly on the Lord’s errand to chasten Jacob, now wickedly exult in their own bloodthirsty strength and thus require chastening themselves.
This is an exhilarating, beautiful, sobering, and hopeful ride. Yet it seems to leave Nephi with a serious problem: what can it have to say to his own people, who have left their old world to start over halfway around the globe? He is convinced that the prophecies of Isaiah hold essential truths about God’s judgment and mercy, but in the determinate form in which they appear on the brass plates, they’re inaccessible or irrelevant to his people. Apparently, some among them have supposed that the words of Isaiah are not “of worth” to them (2 Nephi 25:8) and it seems that—in their original form, at least—Nephi can only agree with that assessment: “Isaiah spake many things which were hard for many of my people to understand” (25:1).
What’s the obstacle that separates Nephi’s people from the prophecies of Isaiah? It seems to have something to do with cultural and linguistic differences: Isaiah is hard for his people to understand because they lack knowledge of “the manner of the Jews” (25:2). This is understandable enough: the prophecies of Isaiah are packed with people and places specific to a region that most of Nephi’s people only dimly remember or have never seen. Furthermore, many literary features, including biblical-type scenes like the prophetic commission and arcane imagery, would have been unfamiliar to a people no longer immersed in the language world of Isaiah’s Jerusalem.
Nephi’s problem—the problem of cross-cultural difference and the need for cultural translation—is familiar, even ordinary, to contemporary readers in a globalized, hyper-connected world where a busy pageant of cultural difference plays constantly across our screens and, sometimes, our streetscapes. For us, the solution to Nephi’s problem seems obvious: Nephi’s people need to be supplied with the missing cultural and historical context that would allow them to properly interpret Isaiah’s prophecies. This has become the commonsense social and political lubricant of secular, pluralistic Western societies: cultural awareness and contextual understanding are essential when resolving conflict cross-culturally. Sounds like great advice, right?
Nephi possesses all the necessary contextual knowledge: he admits that he “dwelt at Jerusalem” and “know[s] concerning the regions round about” and the “manner of the Jews” (25:6). He could carefully place Isaiah’s prophecies in their proper cultural and historical context for his people, help them extract universal principles of God’s dealings with humanity, and then re-apply those universal principles to his people’s particular lives. This would be an informed, responsible, and defensible interpretive process at every step.
Yet Nephi wants nothing to do with the contextual method. He has intentionally declined to teach Jewish cultural awareness to his people despite his immense gratitude and respect for their prophetic tradition (see 2 Nephi 29:4-5). His root reason for this refusal seems to be his fear that the contextual method will mislead some and cause them to “err” (25:7). It’s not exactly clear what “error” he has in mind; perhaps he is concerned that teaching the cultural context of Judah will lead his people to adopt some of the cultural practices of Judah, like polygamy, which Lehi hoped to escape by leaving Jerusalem (see Jacob 2:23-26).
In any case, Nephi’s problem is clear: how can he transcend the cultural difference that makes Isaiah inaccessible to his people without reconstructing its historical and cultural context? Isaiah speaks to Judah in its contextual particularity, yet his prophecies of judgment urgently implicate all nations—and thus, for God’s judgment to be just, all nations must somehow be warned. How can Nephi cross-particularize God’s word of judgment and mercy without relying on the contextual method?
We see Nephi’s answer in the geyser of prophecy that bursts from his mind over the next six chapters, as he proceeds “with mine own prophecy, according to my plainness” (25:7, emphasis mine). He won’t contextually interpret Isaiah’s prophecies but rather will use Isaiah’s words as raw material for his own prophecy—a prophetic process he elsewhere calls “liken[ing] [Isaiah’s] words unto my people” (2 Nephi 11:2). Notably, “likening” is not powered by the contextual expertise Nephi possesses from having “dwelt at Jerusalem,” but on the contrary by the spiritual gift of prophecy “which hath been with me from the time that I came out from Jerusalem with my father” (25:4). It is not having lived in Jerusalem but having left Jerusalem, obedient to the divine word newly flowing to him and his father, that enables Nephi to re-utter the ancient covenant history in a language that will speak with urgency to his own people.
Nephi’s problem, and his solution, are acutely relevant to the Church’s situation in the twenty-first century, where our most vibrant growth is occurring in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, widely separated from the early American origins and foundational history of our people—let alone from the language, culture, and covenant history related in the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Yet we know that God’s word of judgment and mercy must also speak urgently and comprehensibly to them. Our challenge is very like Nephi’s: how do we overcome the cultural and historical difference that separates God’s children from his revealed word?
So far, we’ve largely relied on the contextual method. The top-notch historiography of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, the Saints volumes, and the forthcoming history of the Young Women’s program—publications that I deeply value in my own professional and spiritual life—all work to make our history comprehensible to us by reconstructing its historical and cultural context. In fairness, Mormon and Moroni, later in the Book of Mormon, take up something like this historical-contextual method in order to make the lessons of the Nephites’ demise relevant to the book’s modern Western readers, who likewise stand on an existential precipice. So, it’s not as though the historical method has no grounding at all in Restoration scripture. And certainly, cross-cultural contextualization and understanding will remain a key secular tool for strengthening multicultural communities.
But perhaps Nephi’s embrace of prophetic “likening” over historical contextualization should spur us to think beyond history, too, as the borders of Zion’s tent expand (to use a culturally specific metaphor!). Is it enough to merely make our history and scripture comprehensible in widely removed contexts? What would it look like if, beyond contextualizing early Latter-day Saint history or the ancient Near Eastern setting of the Book of Mormon, we did much more to liken it to the far-flung trees in the vineyard (far-flung only from my perspective, of course)? What is the new prophecy equivalent to Nephi’s for Saints in Africa and Asia? Is it the continuing revelation flowing through President Nelson and the apostles as they travel and minister extensively in these regions of the world? Certainly, that must be an indispensable part of it. What else might the Lord have in store to accomplish his work in the latter days?
I, like Nephi, delight in the words of Isaiah, the words of Nephi, the history of the Church, and the rewarding work of patiently, responsibly reconstructing the meaning they contain. And I look with awe at the freedom and beauty that infused Nephi’s writing when he stepped out of history and into prophecy.
[1] The three-stage schema I lay out here is based on the three original chapter divisions in the first edition of the Book of Mormon, as interpreted by Joseph M. Spencer in A Word In Season: Isaiah’s Reception in the Book of Mormon. Most of this essay is inspired by Spencer’s groundbreaking work on “likening” in A Word in Season.