MG 2.0 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 10:11 pm
I think that most humans can relate to this. Mother Teresa, for one.
The question I’ve asked myself over and over again is, “Why is God remote and seemingly unwilling to readily reveal Himself?” Of course, that question can be answered many ways. Some from a faith perspective and some from a non faith perspective.
So here we are.
Gold plates. Not seen, but heard (supposedly). Is that or isn’t that all we need?
How much is too much when it comes to God revealing Himself or not? How much is too little?
We can argue the answers/merits of these questions and a whole slew of others until the cows come home. But by then it may literally be too late.
The church gives us ready made answers should we choose to accept them after prayerful study and also by faith. This faith thingy can sure be a stick in the mud, however. I’m the first one to admit that.
Faith IS hard.
I really can't argue with this, nor wish to. I have no quarrel with people's faith nor do I think it ipso facto irrational or anything like that. I think what I was trying to get at with my post is how uniquely hard the Mormon version of it is. It seems inverted to me. My childhood assumption about the plates was a very natural one (and thus not a childish one) about the link between objects and the divine: like a relic, the plates were a physical, material symbol of god's power and especially his presence: something I can see and touch
as a believer, not as a skeptic demanding proof. I wouldn't have thought of them as evidence of god's existence or the church being true at all because such a question wouldn't have occurred to me at that age. That kind of thought was still ten years off.
To put it simply, Mormonism has a unique but anxious relationship with objects. The plates were like a medieval relic in the sense in that they were secondary to belief and something to enrich it and deepen it, not a support it—except that there were no plates to show me. That's the sort of thing that makes skepticism possible (I had the same reaction to miracles: where were they?). It would be as a if some medieval Catholic were to come to a center known for some relic or other only to be told that the relic was in heaven, and that they should rely on their faith in god to believe such a relic was ever there in the first place. Such an arrangement would imply that faith in god was a tool for believing in the existence of the relic, rendering the latter a kind of idol. That was the situation as I experienced it in Mormonism: "Pray to know if these things are true" means functionally "use your faith in god to feel better about your belief in this otherwise totally unlikely thing." Faith in god was thus rendered subordinate to belief in Book of Mormon historicity.
Obviously, most believers wouldn't see it that way, and there are further threads to pull on (especially how all of is tied to the authority of the church organization), but Mormonism is more susceptible to this than other Christian sects, because historicity is zero-sum as regards Mormon scripture. In terms of the Bible, historicity is a wide spectrum: most of it is historical in the sense that it can be connected to verifiable people, places, and events. One can reject the patriarchal narratives but still believe in the historicity of Jesus (or vice versa, for that matter!). But with the Book of Mormon it is all or nothing; you can't reject the historicity of 1 Nephi but accept that of Helaman—no matter what you do, you have to accept or reject that there were Nephites and Lamanites. The OP's question is a bit off, then, because there is no degree of intensity at which you can believe in historicity: you either do or do not.
There are degrees to which you can care about it, though. Personally, I think Russell Nelson is on to something in eschewing the word "Mormon" because it means that the LDS don't have to be defined by their relationship to that book, at least not in the first instance. Maybe that will prove to be his most prophetic contribution. I doubt they will ever go the way of "inspired fiction" (whatever the hell that is) or tumble into the theological chaos that is the Community of Christ; historicity will always be the official assumption. But I think it will be dethroned and de-emphasized to a considerable degree.
I wonder whether people like our friends at the
Interpreter, being limited in their vision and unable to think beyond Nibley (Beyond Nibley...there's a future book title for you, my Interpreters), will keep building their shrine to historicity with their pseudo-scholarly materials. It is pure idolatry over there. It's amazing to me how they use god as just an explanatory theory for their historical claims involving people who've been dead for 1,500 years, and who probably never existed at all.