robuchan wrote:Question for anyone but especially Uncle Dale.
I came across this analysis of parallels between Book of Mormon and Jonathan Edwards.
http://mormonthink.com/influences.htm Scroll down all the way to the bottom. I first saw this a few years ago, and I thought it was compelling.
1. Is this compelling to anyone else? Or is it a case of manipulating two large texts to show matches, which would randomly, naturally occur in any two large texts?
2. What do Rigdon theory proponents especially think of this? Is there a Rigdon-Edwards connection? Or Rigdon-Campbell-Edwards?
I greatly doubt that Rigdon was dependent upon any New England
divine -- Puritan or otherwise. At the most, he seems to have paid
attention to latter day revisionists like Elias Smith. Rigdon's idea
was that all establishment religion was hopelessly corrupt and
operated as the work of Satan in a terribly deceived world.
Of course Mormonism was still, in many ways, a stepchild of Puritan
New England -- but a stepchild only. It had roots in Calvinism,
without being Calvinistic. It had roots in anti-Universalism, without
having to acknowledge its debt to those who first fought the battles.
A more promising tie to Edwards-era New England religion might be
via Oliver Cowdery's Great Uncle, the Rev. Nathaniel Emmons. He
embodied the old Calvinist order, while at the same time being
enough of a freethinker to embrace Ethan Smith's off-the-wall
theologizing. Emmons actually offered published endorsements of
Ethan Smith.
That doesn't mean that Oliver Cowdery was an old school Calvinist:
not by any means. But, if we are looking for shared vocabulary and
shared religious imagery, Cowdery would be the first early Mormon
that I would look to, in order to discover some Edwards parallels.
UD