Book of Mormon Studies Podcast: Moroni Scholarship with Joseph Spencer

Rosalynde Welch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Maxwell Institute's Book of Mormon Studies podcast. My name is Rosalynde Welch. I'm the host of the podcast and I'm joined today by Dr. Joseph Spencer. Dr. Spencer's name has been all over this podcast from day one. So listeners know who you are, Joe. Nevertheless, Dr. Spencer is an associate professor of ancient scripture here at Brigham Young University. Among many notable accomplishments, I'll just note that he is the author of a new book, A Word in Season, Isaiah's reception in the Book of Mormon that was published last year in 2023. We're not going to spend a lot of time talking about that book today, but I'll just say that it's actually very relevant to our discussion, and that is the way that the Book of Mormon was received in the 19th century when it came forth. So as listeners will see, if you hang with us here, it will become very relevant to our discussion today. So Joe, welcome to the podcast.

Joe Spencer: Thank you. Thanks, glad to be here.

Welch: It is December. This is the last official episode of this podcast. An episode on each book of the Book of Mormon diving into the text and then an episode on the highlights of the scholarly literature around each book in the Book of Mormon. Today we're talking about scholarly literature on the Book of Moroni and then we're going to transition into speaking a little more broadly about reception scholarship, as I've talked about. The Book of Moroni is a wonderful book. It is a testament that the heavens are open, that God still speaks, and that in the midst of darkness and destruction, grief, mourning, and violence, we can be filled with faith, hope, and charity through the abundant gifts of God.

It's a beautiful book and it has prompted beautiful reflection and beautiful scholarship. I'm gonna kick us off today, Joe, by introducing to our readers the last of the Maxwell Institute's Brief Theological Introductions. We have talked about each of the 12 books in this series, and this final book was written by David F. Holland, who is a professor at Harvard Divinity School. And he authored this final theological introduction to the Book of Moroni. It's Holland's primary take on the Book of Moroni is that it is a book about gifts. The first sentence of the book is, “Moroni comes to us as a proclaimer of gifts. Not only by specifically talking about spiritual gifts, but by gifting us words, the words of other prophets, the words of his father Mormon, and of course the sacred words of the sacrament prayers and the ordinances that the Nephite church adopted from the Savior in 3rd Nephi. So Moroni is a prophet who comes bearing gifts and testifying that the windows of heaven are open continually to those who will receive the gifts that shower down.

So it starts out, as all readers know, with the ordinances. And Holland sees this as very, very significant. It's poignant and striking that Moroni is alone. He has no community to worship with, and yet he often speaks of we and of us. You can tell that he's living in his mind and his kind of his once and future religious community. And I think that he includes the precise wording in the form of the ordinances of the Nephite church because they're central to what a well-ordered, Christ-centered people should look like and should be.

Before he jumps into his reading of the ordinances though, Holland does something very interesting. He sees chapters eight and nine in the Book of Moroni, which are a little bit of a mystery, right? There are these two letters from Mormon that kind of show up here. They have a different tone. They're quite negative, especially sandwiched between chapter seven and 10, but he sees them as providing a very necessary corrective to his discussion of ordinances. In chapter seven, he sees a warning. Chapter seven, of course, Moroni, I'm sorry, Mormon, in a letter to Moroni warns against a kind of empty, formalistic ritualism in insisting that all children must be baptized or they are damned, right? He argues against infant baptism. And, and Holland sees that as a kind of warning that as we, as we practice the ordinances, we have to remember, um, that if we emphasize only the outward observance without recognizing the spiritual content and the higher meaning of the ordinances, the living power supplied by the Holy Ghost, um, then we've missed the whole point of the ordinances.

Likewise, in chapter eight, he sees a kind of converse warning. On the contrary, if you de-emphasize the importance of exactness and of order in observing the ordinances, then we can descend into a kind of unconstrained disorder. Holland points to Moroni 9:18, where Mormon says of his people, “they are without order and without mercy.” So he sees a kind of link between the order that something like ceremonial ordinances can provide, and human decency.

So with these two warnings in chapters eight and nine as sort of guardrails to keep our interpretation of the theology of ordinances in the right path, he goes on to examine what he sees as Moroni's theology of sacramentalism, his theology of what the ordinances mean and how they function in the world, in our religious lives.

He makes a very interesting, he notes a very interesting paradox, which is that in his ministry to the Nephites, Christ communicated some things that were only made available to the 12 disciples, right? Not to the entire multitude that was assembled. And yet, Moroni has included these items in the Book of Mormon, and so they are now made available to a broad audience of readers who read the Book of Mormon.

What David Holland makes of this is that this apparent tension or apparent discrepancy here in the Book of Mormon gestures toward a defining feature of the Restoration, namely, here in the latter days, we live in a confluence of all the previous dispensational cultures. We have elements from each of the previous dispensations that come together in the integration of the new and everlasting covenant. Sometimes there can be overlapping interplays, sometimes outright collision of ancient and modern revelations, he says. He sees that happening here, in this point in the text. The Nephite church, perhaps, was a bit more hierarchical with an emphasis on kind of restricting information flows only to Church priests and teachers, the leaders who needed to have that information. Whereas in the modern day, in the Latter-day church, he says we have a kind of greater readiness to highlight priesthood doctrine that transcends distinctions like ranked offices. And we see this in things like the church handbook instructions now being open and available to anybody, for anybody to read online, whereas once it was a bit more restricted.

So he sees the trajectory of the modern day church moving toward a kind of more transparent and open access to all information. That's hard though, right? That poses a challenge because in the modern church, we want to maintain a high notion of priestly power, but we want to distribute it widely, right? We want to make priesthood special. We want to keep it special, but also make it widely distributed without reducing its specialness. So he sees this as a kind of characteristic tension of the Restoration that structures how we as Latter-day Saints live and experience priesthood and ordinances.

And he sees these kinds of tensions in the gospel as invitations to careful and prayerful reflection. He says it's intended, it's meant to be the case that different dispensations converge in the fullness of time and that the tensions and discrepancies, apparent discrepancies that can result from that piling up of dispensations can help us to winnow out what is truth. What is eternal truth

from what is kind of what he calls cultural chaff. And it's part of the process by which God continues to reveal his will and make clear to us what is essential in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So I thought that was an interesting take on this little feature of Moroni 2. What do you make of that moment in Moroni 2, Joe, where Moroni basically makes available what before was restricted only to the disciples. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Spencer: Yeah, I mean, I love the way that Holland approaches this, and you've summarized it, I think, really beautifully. I don't know if I have a ton to add, except that it's part of the larger pattern in the Book of Mormon, right? You've got certain prophecies, Alma coming to his son, Helaman, and saying, I'm going to tell you this, but you can't tell anyone about it for a time, but there will come a time when this will be widely known, and then Samuel the Lamanite later gives exactly that content to the whole population in Zarahemla, and you're like, wait, it's not the time that Alma said it's supposed to happen, right?

Or you've got this kind of worry about the plates of Ether and whether they're circulating ahead of time and so on that Alma's worried about and that others are worried about, no, don't worry, the secret combinations didn't arise because they got hold of that. We didn't do it before this right time. So there is a kind of constant worry in the Book of Mormon about the timing of what's been private or in a small group going forward to others. And this is sort of a piece. And there are times where it does seem to happen paradoxically before the time or against expectation. Yeah.

Welch: Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. And you're exactly right. This is a kind of through line throughout the Book of Mormon: that which was buried will come forth. That which was sealed will be opened, right? That there is a kind of large scale trajectory as we move toward, kind of, Zion and the beloved community and the coming of Christ where things that were restricted will now be made available. And perhaps this is like a moment in that larger trajectory. And the Book of Mormon, of course, plays a crucial role in that general project of bringing to light what before hadn't been known. So yeah, fantastic connection.

Well, I think, you know, Holland has more to say about ordinances. I won't cover everything that he says, but he makes a couple of really beautiful points that ordinances are, they're sort of two things at once. On the one hand, they're kind of practice, right? They're sort of like a pianist’s scales. What might appear from the outside to be a kind of empty, formalistic ritual, that they're just going through the motions, that gets repetitive and stale. On the contrary, from the inside, as a religious believer, that kind of repetition of ritual has a profound effect on shaping our souls.

He makes the point that a Latter-day Saint who lives to the age of 80 will probably partake of the sacrament about 4,000 times over the course of their life. And he says, 4,000 moments to consciously quiet your soul, come to the Lord in prayer and in repentance with a contrite spirit. This can kind of build a sort of spiritual muscle memory that can form who we are. So the ordinances that we go through every week really have a powerful formative effect in helping us become like Christ, help shape our character in the mold of Jesus Christ.

But that's not all it is. He's eager to make sure that we understand it's not just a kind of mechanistic process. There's truly divine power. The emblems, the bread and water are blessed to be sanctified, that is to be made holy, and then in the same way that Christ himself was holy, so that the emblems and the body of Christ share a common quality of sanctity, of holiness. And when we, as disciples, ingest the emblems of Christ's body and blood, we ourselves are infused with that same kind of sanctity.

And this is part, he argues, of what it means to be made one in Christ, just as Christ and the Father themselves are one, when we partake of these sanctified emblems, we take into ourselves something of the holiness of Christ himself. So I thought it was a beautiful reading of what the sacrament means to us, how we can make our observance of the sacrament more meaningful to us each week as kind of spiritual scales and also as a moment to genuinely take into ourselves the holiness of Christ.

What do you make of all that, Joe? How do you see the theology of ordinances working kind of structurally in the Book of Moroni or reflect on how Holland digests that material?

Spencer: Yeah, I think he does a remarkable job of putting all this together. And reading it, I was left with a lot of questions, right? Which is good. That it provoked a lot in me, right? It got me thinking about a lot of possibilities. So I'll throw a couple of things on top of what Professor Hollander said, I think so ably to, I don't know, do I want to call them like missed opportunities or something, right? In the Book of Moroni. One is that I think he does a really interesting job at teasing out what's happening there with the administering of the flesh and blood of Christ, but then doing it in remembrance, right? He's very, I think he's very savvy in seeing that sort of tension between what looks like a very Protestant sort of lower conception of sacraments and then what looks like a kind of Catholic and higher conception of sacraments.

What's very striking is that if you go back to 3rd Nephi, Christ institutes the sacrament twice over in the course of 3rd Nephi. He does it at the end of his first day of ministry, and he does it again at the beginning of his second day of ministry. And on the first day of ministry, when he explains what he's done with the bread and the wine, he uses the language of remembrance. Do this in remembrance of my body, do this in the remembrance of my blood.

But on the second day, he uses the language of eat my flesh, drink my blood. And what's very striking there is that on day one, no one has been baptized, but day two, the disciples have been baptized. They've replaced the children by being gathered right around the body of Christ himself, and then they're surrounded with angels and fire, just like the children had been surrounded by angels and fire on the first day. And now they're prepared to hear this whole sermon that Christ had to interrupt on the first day, and it almost sounds as if there's almost a kind of hierarchized relationship between these two conceptions of sacrament. There's a first preparatory way where this is done as a kind of intellectual affair, and then a further one where this is like an identification with Christ. I incorporate him into my person. And I wonder if one way to read what Moroni is doing there is he says, this is how they ministered the flesh and blood of Christ, which sounds very day two. And then he gives us the prayer from day one. The way you're going to get to the kind of intense intimate relationship with Christ that's signaled on day two is by starting with the day one kind of experience. First, get this muscle memory, right? Do your scales and so on. And at some point, this will help you transition, so to speak, through a veil, like through the angels in the fire and really come face to face with Christ.

Welch: Yeah, oh, that's fascinating.

Spencer: There's, there's one thought. The other missed opportunity, I think, I have been struck for a long time by the fact that in Moroni 10, when we get the very famous promise of Moroni, the title that Moroni uses for God when he recommends that prayer to us, he says, pray to God the Eternal Father. You would ask God the Eternal Father in the name of Christ. If you go searching through scripture, that title for God appears only in that recommendation in Moroni 10 and in the sacrament prayers that Moroni records and then appear in the Doctrine and Covenants. That's it.

Welch: Oh wow, yeah.

Spencer: That title is otherwise not used for God. God the Eternal Father is a sacramental prayer for Moroni. And for us, the Doctrine and Covenants follow suit, which I think suggests that the way Moroni is trying to teach us to pray over the truth of the Book of Mormon is supposed to be modeled on all of the sacramental reflection early in the Book of Moroni and as a kind of culminating gesture here now, like bread and water that we put on an altar and it becomes the flesh and blood of Christ. We're supposed to take paper and ink or your phone screen or whatever it is and put it on the altar and then it becomes the Word in flesh. And this prayer is a kind of sacramental offering of the Book of Mormon.

Welch: Yeah, that is beautiful and it's really ringing true to me. Thank you.

Well, let's shift gears just a little bit now. Over the course of this year now, this year-long adventure of studying the Book of Mormon and, in particular, getting to know the scholarship that has been written about the Book of Mormon, I've discussed with my various guests and with our listeners a lot of different kind of approaches, scholarly approaches to the Book of Mormon. We've talked about literary approaches. Probably that's been the primary way that we've approached the text, that is looking inside the covers of the Book of Mormon. We've talked about figures like Richard Rust and Grant Hardy and an important book called Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon. We've talked about historicist approaches to the Book of Mormon. This is where you look outside the text and you contextualize the Book of Mormon in the ancient world. We've spent a lot of time on theological approaches to the Book of Mormon because I've touched on each of the Maxwell Institute's brief theological introductions to each book in the Book of Mormon. We've even talked about intertextuality in the Book of Mormon. We've talked about ethical or ideological approaches to the book. We read a wonderful chapter from Hugh Nibley's Approaching Zion.

So I think we've gotten a pretty wide scope of the different kinds of scholarship that are out there on the Book of Mormon. But there's another category of Book of Mormon scholarship that's very important, and that we're actually gonna spend the remainder of our time talking about today. And that's called reception history, or reception scholarship on the Book of Mormon.

And David Holland is actually a nice figure to make that transition for us because he himself wrote an important work of reception history, his 2011 book, Sacred Borders, Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America. This book is about much more than the Book of Mormon, but it is in part about the Book of Mormon and it places it in this early American context where it would have been received by its first readers Joe, I'm going to turn it over to you now, and you can kind of dig a little deeper on what reception history is and how that has played out over the years as people we've come to understand the Book of Mormon at deeper levels.

Spencer: Yeah, I mean, it's worth saying that reception history is very recent as an approach to the Book of Mormon. It's really only appeared in the last 20 years or so, and for most of our history of scholarship, which we've of course been doing scholarly work of a sort for 150 years on this book, right, and especially for the last 100 years, it's a, it's a, this is a very, very recent development.

There are kind of two ways one goes about doing reception history. So one is to look just very specifically at the original moment of the Book of Mormon's reception. How is this book landing or supposed to land or something like how does the book sort of anticipate an audience and then how does that earliest readership recognize very clearly or very forcefully a certain dimension of the book. And so often in my own A Word in Season, which you mentioned earlier, that's how I'm using reception. I don't look at the last 200 years of how people have read the Book of Mormon. I'm looking at how someone's looking at it in 1829, right? Right at the outset.

But the larger history of reception, this is the second angle, is to look at how we have approached the Book of Mormon very differently, decade to decade, century to century, how different kinds of people have read very different things in the Book of Mormon, and so on, and reception history there. It's very wide-ranging. There's some sense in which this is the biggest field of Book of Mormon scholarship that ever could be if enough people start working in it because the resources are endless, right? We could simply ask questions about how the Children's Friend magazine has portrayed Book of Mormon characters, and you could literally write a bookshelf worth of books on that topic alone, enacted scenes from the Book of Mormon, setting aside scholarly articulations, setting aside general conference talks, and it's just an endless, endless supply, 200 years of how we've read the Book of Mormon. And it might seem like it's, at first to many, I think reception history might feel like it's almost beside the point in reading the Book of Mormon, right? Like, if I want to understand Nephi, shouldn't I be doing either history or theology or literary work? What is the reason? How does the way we've read Nephi matter for understanding Nephi?

But I actually think this is very important. Reception history shows us a couple of things. For one, if we look at the history of how we have used the Book of Mormon or a certain passage of the Book of Mormon, that very history tells us about the very possibility that's bound up inside the text. It offers itself in a variety of ways, and this shows us something like the flexibility or the availability or the virtuality of the text, what's its capacity? It's carrying capacity. What can it do, right? And the whole record of our history of interactions shows us just how much more than what we have heard over the pulpit in the last few years or what we've heard in Sunday school or what we've read and seen it again and again. There's much more that has gone on and that opens us up to how much more could be read.

The other reason it's important though is that it helps us to just unsettle a little bit. It's very common for readers of the Book of Mormon these days to sort of feel like, I know the book, I know what it says, I got the stories, I got the doctrines, and reading reception history can sometimes just make you wake up and go, oh wow, right? What if the reading that I have settled on in my head since I was a missionary or whatever it is, what if that reading is just one of so many possibilities?

I should slow down. I should come back. There's more here.

So it's a rich field. It's very young, and so it's not the kind of thing you can read super widely in yet, right? But there are a couple of key works that are probably worth at least touching on here, right? One that many Latter-day Saint listeners may not be familiar with is called The Book of Mormon, a Biography. It's by Paul Gutjahr. It's part of a book series called Lives of Great Religious Books published by Princeton University Press.

These are all very accessible, punchy little books. It's got volumes on the Book of Revelation or the Book of Common Prayer from the Anglican tradition or on St. Augustine's Confessions or the Bhagavad Gita from the Hindu tradition. But just looking at, it's a “biography” as it's called, right? This is the life that some particular religious text has lived in the hands of its adherents. And Paul Gutjahr, who is not a member of the church, but is one of the loveliest souls in academia, was asked to write this book. He's a scholar of the history of how the Bible has been used in America. And so he wrote this lovely book summarizing 200 years of how the Book of Mormon has sat in the hands of the Saints. It's extremely readable and I think very enriching for Latter-day saints. I often have my students read chapters from this book and they always find it very illuminating and very faith-affirming.

So Gutjahr does a number of things. He has, it's what, six chapters in his book. And the first part of course just covers the ground of making sure that everyone knows where this thing came from and so on. But then he has chapters on how people respond by way of criticizing the book and how it is that defenders have responded to those criticisms. He has a really--eight chapters, I said six--but he's got a really lovely chapter on the history of how the Book of Mormon has been used in missionary work and then especially translation as a result. It really examines the process of how does this Book of Mormon get translated into all of these different languages and how does that become sort of systematized and controlled over time because once you're when you're dealing with more than a hundred languages this book how are you sure that this is the same message that's getting out?

He has a chapter on scholars in the book, just how scholars have interacted with it. And then two chapters that are particularly rich and interesting, one on visual arts in general, and then one on stage and screen, how the Book of Mormon has been on Hollywood and how it's been in theater. And those are just particularly fascinating parts of our history for those who have never thought to ask that question, right?

So Gutjahr is a nice, gentle introduction to reception history. He's not got an argument, there's nothing he's trying to force down your throat. It's really just a kind of sweeping survey that gives you a sense of just what the Book of Mormon has done among the Saints and even outside the Church for 200 years.

Welch: Yeah, I appreciated the book for so many reasons. One of them is that he really kind of crystallized and helped me understand the way in which the Book of Mormon as we have it today came into being. I sort of was vaguely aware that like the first edition of the Book of Mormon looked a little different and its chapters were a little different, but he really helped me understand. He walks through the process by which Orson Pratt, yes, how Orson Pratt, divided the Book of Mormon into smaller chapters and then divided those chapters into verses. And he actually kind of shows how those editorial actions on the Book of Mormon are themselves a kind of reception of the Book of Mormon, right? Orson Pratt read this book, it electrified him, and he wanted to make it more readable for other people as well. So part of the way that he received and responded to his testimony of the book is by doing this kind of editorial work on it.

So I really appreciated both Gutjahr walking me through that history. It helped me realize that Orson Pratt had to make some decisions about how to divide those chapters. He had to make decisions about how to divide verses. So we're seeing some of Orson Pratt's interpretation overlaid on the Book of Mormon when we just kind of pick up a normal copy every day. And it might be worth thinking like, well, I wonder what would happen if we re-versify this chapter or what happens if we rethink how the chapters are divided. So it was really useful for me in that regard.

And it also expanded my understanding of what reception looks like. It's more than just reading. It often involves doing something with the book, like maybe dividing it into chapters, or maybe writing a play about it, or writing an oratorio about it. All of those are ways that we, as readers, receive the Book of Mormon.

Spencer: And it's maybe worth just illustrating very quickly what that can look like, because I think that can feel very abstract to many members of the church. Sort of like a, yeah, so what if we re-chaptered it? Right? It's the same words, but here's a little sample I think that's very telling. It is extremely common to hear members of the church say, oh, the first chapter of First Nephi ends with a kind of thesis statement, right? It ends with Nephi saying, here's what this book is about. I am going to show you the tender mercies of the Lord and how they're on all those who have faith.

What's striking if you know the history of Orson Pratt working on the Book of Mormon is that's about a fifth of the way through the first original chapter, right? It's not a concluding word of a chapter. It's just part way into the first story. But because Orson Pratt felt to break that into a chapter and then make that verse 20 of the first chapter, we read it as we're coming to the end of the first chapter and here's the sendoff and that has affected generations of interpretation of the Book of Mormon. And if we re-chaptered it, it could feel very, very different.

Welch: Yeah, that is so interesting. And you know, there's nothing wrong with it. It's kind of a beautiful thought, right? And it's very interesting to think, okay, well, what does the Book of Mormon look like if we read it through the lens of this thesis statement? But it also helps us to think more broadly and think, well, maybe there's something else. We've been talking about the interpretive richness of the Book of Mormon, and maybe there's something else that comes out if we place the emphasis elsewhere. Yeah. Well, that's so helpful.

Spencer: Right, exactly.

Welch: Like you, I really do recommend this book. It's very readable. It's not at all intimidating like some kind of scholarly tomes on the Book of Mormon might seem. So again, it's The Book of Mormon: A Biography by Paul Gutjahr.

Joe, you're now going to walk us through another really important, I would say definitive kind of work of Book of Mormon reception history written by my colleague and neighbor here at the Maxwell Institute, Terryll Givens titled By the Hand of Mormon. What's so important about this book, Joe?

Spencer: It's hard to overstate, right, just how important this book is. In a lot of ways, this book created reception history of the Book of Mormon as a field. It also, in a lot of ways, created Book of Mormon studies as we know it today in general, right? So the book came out in 2002 from Oxford University Press. At the time, Terryl Givens was not a household name like he's become among members of the church. In fact, I was once talking to Richard Bushman and he said, when he read Terryll's first book, which it came out a few years before this, he read it and he thought, wow, someone outside the church can write that smartly about us?

Welch: Yeah, not knowing he was a member of the church. Yeah, yeah.

Spencer: Like, I had no idea who Terryl was, right? Um, yeah. Uh, and By the Hand of Mormon, it had that kind of impact. I think when it dropped, uh, I was a college student at the time, and, uh, it was, um, it was like an atom bomb on us undergraduates, at least, uh, that someone could write this sophisticatedly about the Book of Mormon for Oxford University Press, it was a revelation. And it's, I think for an entire generation of Latter-day Saint scholars, especially young scholars at the time, it was a kind of call to rise to the occasion of the Book of Mormon and its ability to say something to the world in a non-defensive tone.

Part of what's so striking about the book is it's not defensive. It doesn't have to articulate an argument for the Book of Mormon. It simply assumes that the Book of Mormon is an object worthy of study, not only for Latter-day Saints, but for literally everyone working on the history of religion or on religious texts. And yeah, it modeled something. It sort of performed something.

And the angle that Givens takes in the book, of course, is basically reception history. It has a couple of chapters that introduce you to where the Book of Mormon came from in the first place, but then it works through four dimensions of how the Book of Mormon has been received. It has a couple of chapters on the history of attacking and defending the Book of Mormon. It has, but it also has chapters simply on how the Book of Mormon has served for members of the church as the kind of thing that negotiates our faith in the institution and in the Prophet Joseph Smith. We tend to claim the truth of the Book of Mormon and then say that means the Church is true, much more than we tend to invest ourselves in the details of the Book of Mormon, at least before, say, 1985 or so.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Meaning when President Benson challenged the saints to really turn back to the Book of Mormon and make it, reading it, a center of our spiritual lives.

Spencer: Exactly. He's got a lovely chapter on how the Book of Mormon has been addressed by the evangelical community in particular, and then how Latter-day Saints have responded to that. And then there's a chapter that is probably the one that's received the most attention, really, is his chapter on the Book of Mormon’s dialogic revelation, where he reflects on a style within the Book of Mormon of revelation being not just like the revelation of God, but revelation with words, right? Specific content that's communicable and that, and the Book of Mormon is modeling this very clearly and Givens does a nice job at saying there's something here that's kind of uniquely Latter-day Saint in the larger religious context.

So the book has been, I mean, blockbuster is probably the right word, right? Certainly in the world of Latter-day Saint scholarship.

Welch: He can write to beat the band, that man can. So he's a wonderful writer, very, very clear and synthesized tons of information and really just gave me a new way of thinking about the Book of Mormon, a way that I was proud to claim, right? It gave me a sense of pride that this is a book that can stand up, that can stand up to the world on its own two feet. It doesn't constantly need to be just parrying attacks, it actually has something that it can that it can forthrightly say.

I've kind of had my own, my own journey with the kind of famous idea of dialogic revelation. For me, that's not how revelation really works. So for a long time, this was, this was kind of hard for me because I said, Yeah, I see, I see what you mean. And yet, for me, the Spirit doesn't actually speak to me in words and in sentences and in the kind of dialogue that Terryll drew out. So I struggled for a long time to kind of really connect that theme with my own personal life. And I think that I still do in some ways. But recently, Joe, actually reading your brief theological introduction to the book of Nephi actually helped me to see it a little differently. And I'm seeing it in new ways now. You make the point that there's something about the experience with Laban and about the way that Nephi, kind of his own conscience, comes into contact with the Spirit. It's almost as though Nephi pushes and pushes and pushes the Spirit to take these ever more definitive modes of relation to him. Later on we see that in Nephi's vision, where now he actually pushes the Spirit not only to speak to him dialogically, but to appear to him in an embodied form.

So I've come to revisit that idea, I think, understanding that there really are a lot of very fruitful possibilities for thinking about the way that revelation works in the Book of Mormon, the diversity of ways that revelation works and in particular how it can respond to our own particular situation, our own particular needs and our own particular kind of relationship to the Spirit, right? Yeah, I don't know if any of that...

Spencer: Yeah, and your comments there put me in mind of your utterly brilliant essay that I'll recommend to everyone on “Lehi's Brass Ball” that was published in the journal Book of Mormon Studies because I see you, now I see you wrestling with exactly this question in that essay, right? Nephi experiences what we call the liahona as a kind of instrument, right? And as a matter of inscription, there are words that show up on part of it and so on, and he knows exactly where it's pointing him. Whereas Lehi, as you argue, and I think very clearly in the text, you're right, that Lehi constantly experiences the brass ball just as an object of astonishment and overwhelming and a frightful thing and so on. And there's room for both experiences of the brass ball. We would not want to be like, well, Nephi gets this right. Lehi is just wrong. There's something about that mysterious encounter and there's something about that kind of almost mundane communicative encounter. And yeah, the Book of Mormon leaves space for both of these experiences in a rich way.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. What man among you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? That scripture from the Sermon on the Mount has just been my guiding motto as I read the Book of Mormon this year. What we ask from the Book of Mormon matters, I think. What we come to it asking, God will respond to us through the Book of Mormon, I think, in the way that we need to meet it.

So, good. Well, Joe, you had some thoughts about kind of, we're trying to merge these two disparate ideas today in this podcast. One is the Book of Moroni and the other is reception history itself. Do you wanna talk about the reception history of the Book of Moroni?

Spencer: Yeah, that's worth doing, I think. And it might illustrate nicely what this actually looks like for those who aren't familiar, right? The book of Moroni, I mean, there it sits at the end of the book. We all just sort of obviously think, well, there it is. It gives us this instruction and so on. But if you look over the history of how people have interacted with the book of Moroni, there's some telling history that kind of unsettles us maybe a bit in a productive way. Like, oh, maybe I should think about the various possibilities here. The, in a lot of ways, the really first serious interactions with Moroni as a book are from Hugh Nibley. And that's no surprise, right? He tends to be the first one who did anything we talk about with the Book of Mormon. But sort of along the same lines that David Holland moves there, Nibley writes a number of essays that appear in that book, Approaching Zion, you actually mentioned earlier, called, one called “Gifts,” one called “Deny Not the Gifts of God,” and of course his famous “Work We Must But the Lunch Is Free.”

Throughout these he's interacting with this theme of gifts in Moroni's writings generally in the book of Ether and Mormon 8 and 9 as well as in the book of Moroni, but Nibley is the first one to sort of touch on this like Oh, Moroni's got a unique message and it's about gifts And so Nibley sort of opens a space there.

But then it's not really until the 1980s or 90s that you see someone try to take Moroni on directly And there's a scholar at the time named H. Donald Peterson who wrote a book, simply a book about Moroni, and trying to think about what it is for this figure to be a wandering, lost, lonely character, and then reflecting sort of piece by piece on the contributions he makes in the Book of Moroni. And that shows us something, I think. Not only is the timing clear, like President Benson has called Latter-day Saints back to the Book of Mormon, and now we get our first substantial treatment of Moroni. So the timing there makes sense and tells us something about the reception. But also, the 80s can feel like a very lonely time for Latter-day Saints. And there's a kind of devotional call to the individual Latter-day Saint to walk away from a world that is filled with violence and contention. If you think of the kinds of scares going on in the 80s, right? And especially these are the years of the culture wars, and there's a kind of call here to be like Moroni and walk away from the changing Hollywood culture and the changing music culture and so on. And simply, can you stand alone even if you feel lonely? There's something in Moroni as a figure that is grabbing us, right?

But then we don't see a lot until Grant Hardy, really. But Grant Hardy's 2010 book, Understanding the Book of Mormon, which has gotten a great deal of attention this year in these podcasts. But Hardy dedicates a whole third of his book to the voice of Moroni. And he's of course looking at Moroni's several contributions and doesn't narrow in on the shape of the Book of Moroni or something like that, but isolates Moroni as a very unique kind of voice, who's concerned in a very specific way about Gentiles and who is drawing on the small plates in a way that Mormon never does. And someone who has got the very unique responsibility of finishing this thing, not sure how to do so, right? So there's a kind of Hardy's version of Moroni that has shown us some things and speaks very much to the moments in the early 21st century, where we're trying to, we're much more attuned today for various reasons to unique voices, different projects, right? In a way that we weren't before. And then recognizing that Moroni is not just a figure of loneliness, he's a figure who's got to somehow bring something to an end, and in an age of sort of like competing interests and unending work and so on, Hardy's Moroni speaks to a 21st century person. How do I ever get what I've got responsible, all my responsibilities? How on earth do I ever get these done, right? And how do I bring anything in my life to some kind of a definitive conclusion in an age without rites of passage and where the secular world is sort of crowded out decisive or final meaning. Hardy is giving us a Moroni that rings true.

And then of course, Holland's Moroni here, someone who, right, for Holland Moroni, as you've summarized so beautifully, Moroni is someone who's thinking about sacraments and so on, and this is of course in an age when sacraments are hard to get our heads around. Why are we doing this again? We're not living in a world that's rich with symbols. We're not living in a world that's rich with ritual. And for David Holland to sit with that aspect of the Book of Moroni and ask us to go back to the pews and take the sacraments again, but with renewed meaning, he's clearly getting Moroni as a voice we need to be speaking to us right here and right now. I think there's something very rich about that history. And that's a very brief history, because we don't have a lot on the Book of Moroni per se until just a few decades ago. But you can sort of see decade by decade how we're finding in Moroni meaning that we feel we need right in the moment. There's something here we're seeking, we're yearning for.

Welch: Yeah, I absolutely see that. You've drawn that out so clearly from sort of the 80s and the sense of embattlement and kind of a changing, coarsening culture through to kind of the frenetic business that we all felt with the advent of kind of globalization in the beginning of the 21st century.

And then now it's sort of just when the last couple of years, a kind of growing sense of secularization and that church membership is falling off. And how do we stay strong in that kind of world, each one of these scholars has found in the Book of Moroni answers to the questions that preoccupy them and their own religious community.

It just goes, I think, to confirm something that we talked about earlier, which is that scholarship itself is a form of reception. So every time that I write an article, that's an act by which I'm receiving the Book of Mormon and kind of metabolizing it. And it's going to reflect a particular moment in time. There's a history to scholarship, obviously. And I suppose in a way this is obvious, but it can be easy to forget it when you're just reading an individual book or an individual article. And you might be tempted to kind of take it as like fully definitive or just totally transparent comment on the text.

But almost always it's a part of a longer conversation that reflects what's happening in the world at large. It reflects what's happening in the church. It reflects what's happening in the academy. All of these levels of analysis are relevant to what a scholar does. So when we go back and read scholarship from 40 to 50 years ago, we'll start to feel the difference, right? It'll feel different from what we're doing now. But there can be real value still in reading that scholarship. First of all, there's likely to be really rich textual work done, right? Close readings done that can teach us something new about the text we hadn't seen before. And also I think it can just help ourselves to locate ourselves in this large and beautiful flow, ongoing flow of time and change as we all work together in the project of building Zion, one way or the other, yeah.

Spencer: Yeah, yeah, beautifully put. I think that's really important. There's sort of two sides of that, right? There's--that can be hard to miss, I think, for many readers. As you've, I think, really rightly said, one part of that is we can just read it as if this is, oh, well, the scholar told me that this is what this means, so this is what this means. But it's always more complicated than that, right? And the other side of that is, occasionally, it's common, really, to hear scholars today talk about agendas, to talk about the ideological bent of an author and so on and people can get very nervous about that. And for good reasons--sort of like oh everything's now ideology and everything structures of power and everyone's fighting for their cause and so on. But part of what's beautiful about reception history is that you can start to see how like the way we were just summarizing what Peterson or Hardy or um Holland, each has an agenda but we're not talking about everything being reducible the structures of power we're talking about how they're reading a book and seeing a need in a community and asking how that book can speak to it. And they're finding very real things in the book. Book of Moroni is not being somehow like ground into pieces and then just glued back together in the way they want it. They're seeing something in the book that the moment brings out of it. And that's what I think most of the time scholars mean when they talk about the fact that every writer is going to have a kind of agenda. What they're saying is there is more than just facts at play there.

But what's more than just facts sometimes is beautiful devotional attentiveness to the needs of the Saints. And that's, yeah, that's an important part of what we're doing when we read the history of Book of Mormon Scholarship.

Welch: And I think of all the narrators in the Book of Mormon, Moroni would probably be the most delighted to see that happening. He himself was so attuned to the conditions of the latter days. And he, of all the narrators, I think was most aware of what this book would mean and the needs that it came to address. So I think he would welcome us using his work in that way as a way to minister to our communities.

Well, maybe I'll just, I'll kind of close the circle on this discussion of reception, Joe, by returning now to one other piece of reception scholarship that I think, again, will provide kind of a concrete example of what this really looks like. This is an article by a scholar, Janiece Johnson, that was published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies in 2018, and it's titled, “Becoming a People of the Books: Toward an understanding of early Mormon converts and the new word of the Lord.”

So the specific kind of research question that Johnson wants to answer in this article is how the Book of Mormon became scripture for early Mormon converts, Latter-day Saint converts. And it kind of takes it as a given that as individuals build a relationship with the sacred text as they interact with it in different ways and spend time with it over a period of time, the text kind of assumes greater and greater personal power and authority in their lives to the point that they then are able to accept it as scripture. And that this process happens in particular in personal devotional practices. It's the way that we personally react with the book, interact with the book that really draws to light its scriptural power, more so than the way maybe it's talked about in public discourse or the way it's discussed in newspapers or periodicals. It's really our own personal interaction with the text that draws out its scriptural dimension.

So the way that she goes about making this case is by looking extensively at personal writings. Earlier scholars, Terryll Givens among them, Grant Underwood, had done a really comprehensive survey of Latter-day Saint periodicals, newspapers and circulars. For one reason, those were more easily accessible at the time. And so they read deeply. And as you alluded to, kind of what they found was that the Book of Mormon was not terribly prominent in public Latter-day Saint preaching, in formal evangelizing, formal missionary work, and in kind of the face that they put forward to the world. The relative absence or at least lower profile of the Book of Mormon in sort of periodical public facing writing, this narrative kind of emerged. The Book of Mormon actually mattered more for, as a sign of Joseph Smith's prophetic calling than it did for actually what it said. It was necessary to say, look, God is still speaking, he's speaking to our prophet, our prophet has produced a new work of scripture, and that was kind of enough and you could leave it at that.

So that was kind of a narrative that existed around the place of the Book of Mormon for early Latter-day Saints. But Johnson really wants to dig into that and question that. And she finds actually that it's a lot more complicated than that. Yes, for individual Latter-day Saint readers of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Mormon did function as a kind of sign of Joseph Smith's prophetic power and prophetic calling, but it did much, much more than that as well. It took a little bit of time. The Book of Mormon is a big book. It's a complicated book. It takes a while to get your mind around it. So it took a little time before early Latter-day Saint converts were fully able to internalize, understand, and assimilate the content of the Book of Mormon. But she finds that they do that and that actually what the Book of Mormon says matters a lot to them in their own personal spiritual lives.

So she points to a number of ways that this process works, the process of Latter-day Saints, or often they weren't Latter-day Saints yet, right? Early American individuals encountering the Book of Mormon. They read it intensely. And they read it alongside their Bibles often, right? The Book of Mormon and the Bible were read in kind of a parallel way. And she documents the way that the Book of Mormon was read in church and temple services, in letters between family members, just in daily domestic life. The saints were reading the Book of Mormon.

It especially helped when the second edition came out, which was smaller and much more portable. Then the Saints could carry it around easily. And they were even more easily able to read, study and meditate on the Book of Mormon. She points out that Orson Pratt memorized, long passages of the Book of Mormon, clearly the product of intense engagement with the text. So the book becomes a part of the lives of these early converts, a part of their conversations, a part of kind of their mental furniture, the ideas and the characters and the words that they use to interpret the world around them.

She traces how people shared the Book of Mormon as a kind of missionary tool through family and local networks. You know, hey, I encountered this amazing book. You have to read it. Let me lend it to you. You can borrow it from me. So these personal reading practices spread through local networks. Early Latter-day Saints used the Book of Mormon as a kind of interpretive key to understanding the Bible. So they found that when they read deeply in the Book of Mormon, it didn't actually supplant or undermine the authority of the Bible. It helped them to understand better what the Bible was saying. And this again strengthens their relationship to the Book of Mormon and the meaning of the Book of Mormon in their spiritual lives when they found that it actually opened their minds to the Bible as well.

Some of these early saints prepared kind of personal reference materials. They would make lists of page numbers with references that were significant to them on the fly leaves of their own Book of Mormon. They found passages that seemed to speak to their own personal circumstances. They saw their lives kind of echoed in the pages of the Book of Mormon. She tells a wonderful story about early Latter-day Saints Laura Phelps and Orson Pratt in Missouri, where Laura Phelps' husband was imprisoned. And she was reading the Book of Mormon and she comes across the passage where Ammon tells Lamoni, my brethren are imprisoned. And she sees her own life circumstances echoed there in the pages of the Book of Mormon and that just brings it alive to her and emphasizes to her the scriptural power of this text.

Over time, Latter-day Saints start to incorporate words and phrases from the Book of Mormon into their own personal language. Think Neal A. Maxwell here, right? The way that he kind of seamlessly incorporated Book of Mormon language. As the saints had more years to interact with the Book of Mormon, they themselves began to incorporate Book of Mormon phrases, both into their written expression and into their oral expression as well.

So in all these ways that Johnson very carefully tracks, the Book of Mormon became a part of both community and individual devotional practices over time. A lot of that sounds probably very, very familiar because it's the same ways that we tend to interact with the Book of Mormon today, right? We read it in our daily lives. We share our favorite scriptures with each other. We share our books with each other. We see our own lives echoed in its pages and we find that its phrases and its ideas and its images come to mind when we ourselves are thinking of the things of God.

So in just the same ways that we as Latter-day, present-day saints interact with the Book of Mormon, so early-day saints interacted with the book as well. They became, she has this really nice formulation, you'll recall I said, the title is “People of the Books.” They had been, most of them, virtually all of them, coming from a Protestant context, they had been a people of the book, the Bible, the Bible alone was their scripture. They become a people of the books, where the Book of Mormon joins the Bible as a guiding scriptural light to give shape and meaning to their lives. So it's a really beautiful, very smart work of reception history, tracing the concrete ways that the Book of Mormon becomes a part of the fabric of these early Latter-day Saints lives.

Well, Joe, I think we've had the last word on reception history, right? Like it's over now. We've done it. Your point was a good one that reception history is sort of inexhaustible in some ways, an inexhaustible field of inquiry because it's continuing to unfold every moment of every day as somebody else somewhere in the world reads the Book of Mormon and has a response to it. So it seems like this is probably one of the areas of Book of Mormon scholarship that's likely to continue to be vibrant in the future as we go forward. Do you think that's fair to say?

Spencer: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Welch: Wonderful. Well, thank you, Joe, so much for all that you've shared with us today. As I always do, I would love to end our conversation today by sharing with each other a scripture that's particularly meaningful in our lives, just in all the ways that Johnson showed. We too read the Book of Mormon, you and I, as believers, and we receive from it divine light.

So I'll go first. I'd love to share a passage that really really struck me with force the last time that I read it. And it's in Moroni chapter seven, right here at the very end, verse 48. So this of course is Moroni's wonderful sermon on faith, hope and love. And he ends with this exhortation here in verse 48. “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all ye who are true followers of his son, Jesus Christ, that ye may become the sons of God, that when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is, that we may have this hope, that we may be purified even as he is pure." And then he ends it with his amen.

And what really struck me as I read this is the importance of prayer in obtaining this love. Mormon instructs us here, pray unto the Father that ye may be filled with this love. And this just struck me in a new way this time. We've talked about how we bring our own lives to the text as believers. And I was doing the same thing there, thinking about a family member that I was worried about and thinking about the way that I pray for them. And oftentimes, as I pray for a family member I love, I'll kind of visualize God's love coming down from heaven and kind of surrounding them, right? And almost like a bubble or a circle of light. And in my mind, that's an image for the way that they'll be protected from harm and from hardship and from grief.

But I think Mormon is telling me to do something different here. He's saying, actually, it's not so much that we have God’s love over us. We need to pray that God's love will be in us and that God's love will be in our own heart. And suddenly that changed the way I thought about praying for my children. What if I prayed instead that their hearts would be filled with the love of Christ? And in that way, if their hearts are filled with love, they can cope with whatever they encounter. They don't need to walk around in a continual bubble that will shelter them from grief and pain and heartache, because if their hearts are filled with the pure love of Christ, they'll be able to cope in a loving and graceful way with whatever comes their way. And maybe it's just a small thing, but it was really powerful to me to think about where is the locus of the true love of Christ that I pray for? Is it over and around me or is it inside of me?

And Mormon teaches me to pray that it will be in my heart. And I'll pray that it will be in the hearts of my children and my loved ones. And that this then gives us a kind of confidence and a power to walk through a world, the world that Moroni lived in, of course, was unthinkable, Mormon as well. They witnessed the unthinkable. The love of Christ was not in evidence in the world around them, but it was in their hearts. And it was because the love of Christ was in their hearts that they were able to continue to receive the gifts of faith, hope, and charity that are the greatest of all. So I appreciated Mormon changing my perspective there on where we just seek to locate Christ's love in our lives.

Spencer: I love that. Yeah, I mean, thank you for that reading. As you're talking to a part of that verse struck me in a way and it hadn't in a way that it hadn't before. And this is just one of those happy juxtapositions that happens in life. Just yesterday, I was teaching third Nephi in my classes here at BYU, and we were looking at third Nephi 19 where Christ is praying in the midst of his disciples and going out a little ways and coming back. He does this three times. And part of what's striking is that the first time he goes out and prays, he says, right, I thank you that you've heard these disciples of mine and you've poured your Holy Ghost out upon them. But the second time he goes out, he now says, I thank the Father that thou has purified them. And it describes them being pure even like unto Jesus. And I'd never connected that with this verse, right? But it's almost as if Mormon here and Moroni then telegraphing it to us. Mormon's telling us how to work our way through that same procedure, right? That's being described in 3 Nephi 19, that the disciples in the presence of Christ go from simply receiving the Holy Ghost to this kind of purification. Is this their prayer? Anyway, so thank you. Yeah.

I'll share a verse everyone knows very well, but just a part of it that's really struck me a great deal in the last few years. And this is part of Moroni's famous promise in chapter 10, so 10 verse 4. Of course, Moroni famously exhorts his readers to ask God the Eternal Father in the name of Christ if these things are not true, and then says, here's the promise itself, if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost. What's really struck me the last few years here is that phrase, he will manifest the truth of it unto you.

We tend to, because we think of the prayers, it's, you know, ask God the Eternal Father if these things are not true, and we tend to think of that, so I'm looking to know is the Book of Mormon true or not. I think we then tend to not look carefully at this language that's used at the end of the verse, where he doesn't say you'll find out it's true, or you'll find out it's not true. He promises that God will manifest the truth of it unto us.

Now here are two things there. One, it feels to me like the truth of it is way bigger than whether the Book of Mormon is true. Right? The truth of it is going to involve the fact that the Book of Mormon is true, but it's also going to be like the shape of the thing, and the meaning of the thing, and the heft of it, and what the whole thing is trying to accomplish. If I just want to know whether it's true that so-and-so was in a car wreck, that's one simple thing. But if I want to know the truth of the matter, I want a lot more than just whether they were in the car wreck, right? How did this unfold, and what happened and how is this what are the larger implications and I feel like that's what Moroni seems to be promising is a lot more than just oh good it's true right.

But then also second the verb manifest has just really grabbed me the word manifest if we use it as a as an adjective just apparent plain obvious right there right at hand is the literal meaning of the word right and to say that God will manifest the truth of it, that feels to me just concretely right, phenomenologically right. My experience with the Book of Mormon is not that I've just developed a kind of intellectual conviction of its truth, though I've got that. It's something more like an obviousness of its truth, and the more time I spend with it, it is simply a part of the world I inhabit and it is just right there and its truth is obvious and apparent in the same way that it's obvious to me that this set of books is next to me or that this right it's just part of the furniture of the world in a way that I can't not interact with it and that feels to me at a devotional level like it gets something gets at something very deep the Book of Mormon and the ways that Janiece Johnson is talking about right for the Saints from the beginning. The Book of Mormon is just part of the furniture of our world. It shapes our language and it shapes our devotional understanding in all the richest and right ways. And certainly for me, that's been that's been the case.

Welch: Yeah, using Janiece's words, I am a woman of the books. From my earliest years, the Book of Mormon has shaped who I am to the point where, yeah, if I'm asked to share my testimony of the Book of Mormon, sometimes I have to stop for a minute and think, how do I even separate that out from just my experience of the world? It's woven into the tapestry of what I see and what I hear and what is ready at hand to me. So thank you. Thank you for that reading, Joe. I think that's a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much, Joe Spencer, for sharing with us all that you know about Book of Mormon scholarship and especially your abiding and burning love for the book. Thank you for joining us today. Bye bye.

Spencer: Yeah, thanks Ros.