A Brief Theological Introduction to the Book of Ether (feat. Rosalynde Welch)

Dr. Rosalynde Welch, senior research scholar and associate director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU joins me to talk about the "literary turn" in Book of Mormon studies, postsecular critique, scriptural theology, and her recent book on the Book of Ether. Welch argues that the Book of Ether—a kind of microcosm of the Book of Mormon of which it is a part—presents a theology of scripture that focuses on the interaction between written text, reader, and the Holy Spirit. We discuss the nature of scripture, the "weakness" of God, the Book of Ether's close intertextual engagement with and revision of Pauline notions of faith, and the atemporal nature of the Book of Mormon's Christology.

Transcript

A Brief Theological Introduction to the Book of Ether

Stephen Betts: Welcome back to Scholars and Saints. I'm your host, Stephen Betts. 

I'm joined today by Dr. Rosalynde Welch, associate director and senior research scholar at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. We're talking today about her recent book, Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction published by the Maxwell Institute. Thanks for joining me today, Rosalynde.

Rosalynde Welch: My pleasure. I'm glad to be here. It's nice to meet you, Stephen. 

Stephen Betts: Thanks. So, Rosalynde, you're, by training, a literary scholar. One of the more interesting developments in Mormon studies and certainly the study of Latter-day Saint scripture within the last decade has been what is increasingly being called the “literary turn” in Book of Mormon studies, or more broadly, a postsecular orientation towards the relationship between religion and society in studies of Mormonism.

Can you talk a little bit about, situate your own work within those developments and talk about how your work on Ether might fit into those? 

Rosalynde Welch: Sure. Yeah. So, I was trained as a literary scholar. I did my PhD in literature, early modern English literature at UCSD. I bring to my reading of scripture many of those tools that I learned in the literature department. In particular, interpretive skills, close reading skills, and interest in sort of the patterns and structures of text, in sort of the workaday tools of written language, writing and reading and interpreting and understanding written language. I also bring, or I'm equipped with a kind of set of critical skills as well, right. A kind of broadly post-Foucauldian genealogical method. Right. Which ultimately takes a kind of historical-ideological approach to understanding text, right, as sort of broadly over-determined by their historical horizon, by the dynamics of power playing out in its particular context and a deep interest in tracing and understanding those dynamics of power, in particular with the kind of liberatory focus.

So, I was trained to read text in that way, and I think I know how to use those tools and I appreciate and recognize how they're being used. There has been, as you say, a very exciting literary turn in Book of Mormon studies. It's kind of focused and crystallized in this volume, Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon that was edited by two scholars, Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, and it was published by Oxford in 2019. And it sort of was the culmination of about ten years of really exciting growing interest in the Book of Mormon by what we would call secular literary scholars in the academy. So, these scholars obviously don't approach the Book of Mormon as believers, but neither do they approach it as debunkers. In fact, that's very important to their method, that sort of growing out of a kind of broadly religious studies framework, which takes a kind of neutral approach to religion's truth claims. Sometimes we use the language of “bracketing.” In that same spirit, these literary scholars approach the Book of Mormon, not with a kind of debunking agenda.

On the contrary, I think they pride themselves as readers in their ability to take the text on its own terms. And so, they see that many of these scholars represented in this volume see themselves as working in kind of a postsecular space. In fact, although of course they, they're employed at secular universities. They see themselves engaged in a kind of postsecular project, which undertakes a kind of genealogy of secularism, right? There's a kind of meta-aspect to this. They're trying to desacralize secularism, as it were, by looking at the ways that secularism itself has kind of been a vehicle for power. And the way that the, that the ideal of the secular have worked to kind of legitimize certain forms of religion, certain forms of being and to de-legitimize others. So, the Book Mormon, of course, would fall into that latter camp, right? Sort of despised as, as foolish, incredulous, far too wild and unscientific to be acceptable in sort of the polite society of a secular culture and so shunted in that category of bad religion, right, of primitivism that we're trying to move on from. So, when postsecular scholars, literary scholars see that move, that disposes them to read the Book of Mormon with a lot of sympathy, right? Because they see the Book of Mormon as a kind of victim of what is ultimately the kind of coercive power regime encoded in this idea of secularism. So, they approach the Book of Mormon with a lot of sympathy. The Book of Mormon is a kind of underdog in secular society, and they're interested and open and curious to hear its voice and to hear how it contests the voice of a kind of ascendant secular establishment.

Rosalynde Welch: So, for those reasons, their readings of the Book of Mormon are incredibly sympathetic, incredibly open, insightful, flexible, and in a lot of ways they kind of bring the best of the genealogical method to the Book of Mormon. One way in which this particular literary moment and literary turn differs from the broader kind of religious studies approach to the Book of Mormon is that these literary scholars explicitly eschew the kind of bracketing move, right? They say, “we actually don't want to bracket the Book of Mormon's own truth claims for its historicity. On the contrary, we want to go all the way, right? We wanna put the pedal to the medal and see what happens if we actually take the Book of Mormon's historicity at its word,” and so they don't bracket the question of historicity, they double down on it and they note something that theological readers have been also noting in the last ten years. And that is when you really look at how the Book of Mormon positions itself in history, it's much more complicated than a question of an ancient text or a modern text. In fact, the Book of Mormon kind of sees itself as precisely the prism or the mechanism that scrambles the categories of ancient and modern.

So if you really take the Book of Mormon at its word, you have to see it as both ancient and modern at the same time, and be willing to set aside a kind of strict chronology and instead, open yourselves up to a kind of complex and beautiful dance of time. Right. And so, in that sense, these literary scholars, I think really put their finger on something very, very important in the Book of Mormon, which is the way it sees itself as this kind of eschatological accelerator, right? It's bringing the future into the present to fruition now. And it does so precisely by bringing these ancient voices of the past into the present. So, it's scrambling categories of past, present, and future. And at doing so through its sacred character. So, in that sense, I think that this literary approach is very congenial to what I'm doing as a theological reader of the Book of Mormon.

There are some ways in which what I do is different. Right. And I think the easiest way to put my finger on that would be to say that I don't really employ the genealogical method, right? For me, ideology, history, and power aren't the final horizons of meaning and signification for the Book of Mormon. For me, they are more existential and frankly, religious questions of salvation. To me, I see the, the question of salvation, what it means to be saved in Christ as kind of the central and defining question of the Book of Mormon and sort of the horizon against which I read it and understand it.

Rosalynde Welch: So, in that sense, I think there do remain some sort of fundamental differences. Of course, it's possible for me to read in the genealogical mode and often I do, but I think the stakes are different when it comes right down to it. To their credit, these postsecular scholars, especially the very best of them represented in this volume and it in that category, I would put the editors, Jared Hickman, Elizabeth Fenton, and Tracy Fessenden and Pete Coviello and others. They understand that they recognize how even the postsecular can kind of replicate or repeat the same movements and gestures of the secular. Right. There's something about wanting to analyze and understand a text that puts you in a position of mastery over that text, right? And so, you tend to kind of reinscribe these dynamics of categorizing and understanding and explaining and all these different moves that we do that puts the critic in a very particular kind of relationship to the text: one of mastery and exhaustion, right? We want to figure out exactly what the book means. So, I think they recognize that that movement is that work even in postsecular critique. And that would be my main criticism of that method as well. Right. That it wants to nail down the book in a way that I don't want to. Right. I want to leave the book open to signify and resignify again and again. 

Stephen Betts: Rosalynde, you're part of a group of interpreters of Latter-day Saint Scripture who've been working for a number of years through forums such as the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar, as you mentioned, on theological interpretations that are less interested in textual mastery and pinning down certain kinds of exegetical meetings and instead trying to view the text as having certain kinds of generative potential for a kind of endless array of meanings and readers. I wonder if you could talk about, broadly, interpreters such as yourself, who called this “scriptural theology,” although that's a contested term even among yourselves. Talk about scriptural theology. What is the practice of scriptural theology and you know, why is it problematic to think about theology as Latter-day Saint, or why is it generative? 

Rosalynde Welch: Yeah. Oh boy. I gave you a long answer to your first question, and I could give you an even longer answer to this one. Try to keep it short. When we think about, yeah, the category of theology in relationship to the Restoration tradition it is problematic because we are a tradition that explicitly opens the canon. And we affirm a kind of continuing revelation. So, if theology is conceived as the work of kind of codifying, categorizing, and explaining the belief system of a faith tradition, that's impossible to do from the Latter-day Saint tradition, right? There might be a few kind of core tenants that you could try to work from, but really it's a fool's errand to try to pin it down. So, if we're not gonna have a systematic or a dogmatic theology, what else remains right? How else can we engage intellectually with the meaning of our faith tradition?

Well, one approach is historical theology, right? It's to look at the original deposit of faith in the revelations of Joseph Smith, and then it's very early interpreters within the first several decades. And to kind of see them as a kind of pristine or at least privileged site for understanding the, the real meaning of the Restoration.

So you go back and you historize and you recontextualize and you try to tease out the development of the ideas as they've come to us in our doctrines today. So, this is the kind of really, really good, fascinating, important work that Terryl Givens and Jonathan Stapley and Samuel Brown do. Ultimately, I think for some of us, there's a sense that if what's really at stake in theology is the question of God, is the question of salvation, then history isn't gonna get us all the way there. There needs to be a more kind of present oriented, existentially resonant way to understand what our faith tradition means.

And one way to get there is through scripture and through focusing and only on scripture. And the reason why is because scripture is written language and it sort of, in its very, very bones, right, at the very deepest level of how written language works is a kind of decontextualization, right? The writer writes down these words. But then immediately they leave the body and yet they persist. Unlike oral language leaves my body, then it dissipates (unless it's being recorded, right?) But the written word leaves me, and then it persists in that form, and it can be moved around. It can travel from context to context completely divorced from my ability to control how it's interpreted, right? So, at the very center of how written language works is this idea of its ability to be interpreted and reinterpreted. Not only its ability, the necessity of interpreting and reinterpreting again and again it's meaning. And yet with scripture it has this wonderful sense of authority over us as well, right? It's binding because it's canonized as a scripture, and yet it must be interpreted and reinterpreted again and again. So, these two sort of conditions of scripture, there's a tension there that kind of uniquely allows reflection on God primarily, and on God as revealed in the Latter-day Saint tradition that is relevant. It has to be relevant because it has to be done over and over again. That is generative, gives itself to being slotted into different contexts and, and resgnifying. And that is deeply personal, right? It's performative, it performs within the reader him or herself. And so in that se sense is able to get really to the heart of what's at stake in theology and scripture, which is the condition of the soul, right?

Rosalynde Welch: So for all those reasons, we've seen scripture as a kind of privileged site for encountering God. When we come to scripture, we tend to approach it through a kind of close reading method, right? Slowing down, bracketing, you might say sort of other questions that might overdetermine our reading like, “what are the current teachings of the church?” Or, you know, maybe sort of strictly devotional personal questions like, “what is the personal question I'm wrestling what's in my life?” So, we set this aside for a moment and try to come to the text with a minimum of baggage so that we can kind of best discern the kind of latent structures and patterns and meanings of that text rather than imposing anything on it. Also central to our method as I've gotten at, is a kind of hermeneutic sensibility is that we're not after a kind of definitive meaning, right? We're certainly not after an original meaning. And we're also definitely not interested in making authoritative interpretations that would be binding on any member of the Church. One reason why is because I'm not a church leader. So, in our tradition, kind of the authority to make binding doctrinal pronouncements comes through ecclesiastical channels. And I don't occupy, it's not my stewardship. I don't occupy one of those roles. So, sort of definitionally speaking, anything that I say won't be binding. But it's much deeper than that, as I've tried to convey, right. Sort of inherent in our method itself is this idea that scripture is like the Liahona, like the brass ball, as you recall, right?

We often tend to think about the spindle as the main director of the Liahona, but just as important, if not more so was the writing that appeared on it. But that writing would change, right? Every so often they would wake up, look at the brass ball and they would have new writing on it. So we see scripture as functioning in that same way, right? As giving us an opportunity to encounter God newly. And then again, I think the last thing I would say, as I think I've pointed to is that the point of theology as we practice it, and James Faulconer I think has put this in my favorite way, is “to do theology in the shadow of the apocalypse.” The apocalypse is the Revelation of God, right? So, we hope that if our efforts succeed, it will do something to reveal the nearness of the kingdom of God in the lives of readers, right? As it is active in the scriptural text and then hopefully activates some kind of existential or spiritual current in the reader, him- or herself. So, there's a kind of urgency that is deeply existential in its weight, I think, in the kind of work that many of us do. 

Stephen Betts: You talk in the book that we're talking about today about scripture as an agent, which I think captures a lot of what you're saying, scripture as having its own sort of personality even that meets the reader in a middle space where together the reader—and you articulate a reader-centered theology of scripture that I'd like to talk about a little bit later— that co-creates with the reader and in the reader, not just meaning, but, yeah, life and existential force. I think it bears asking what is scripture? Scripture can certainly be thought of in the Latter-day Saint tradition as official pronouncements of Church authorities. Of course, the Doctrine & Covenants defines scripture as whenever someone speaks by the power of the Holy Ghost. The Book of Mormon: a little bit different. We think about scripture as something that's translated, and of course that's a fraught term, “translated” by the gift and power of God. So, talk a little bit about what scripture is and then I'd like to dive into the Book of Ether. Maybe talk about what is the book of Ether and what does it have to offer as far as helping us understand what scripture and translation look like.

Rosalynde Welch: Yeah. That question, what is scripture [laughter] has launched a thousand books, right? and a thousand theories. I think most simply for us, scripture is that which is canonized, right? And, of course, canonization itself is a complex and rich historical and social process. And it's not, it's not a simple question and by any means, but scripture is that, which is canonized. So, it is authoritative in the sense that it defines the boundaries of a community. So, there is a deeply inherently communal dimension to scripture. A Latter-day Saint, you know, especially nowadays, Latter-day Saint from one part of the world and from another part of the world would share very little in terms of a kind of common cultural inheritance, perhaps even in their lived experience of the religion. But they would share their reverence of the Book of Mormon, right? They would both be subject to the Book of Mormon and to all canonized Latter-day Saint scripture in the same way. As I alluded to earlier, we don't take a sola scriptura approach to scripture in the Latter-day Saint tradition, precisely because of this idea of ongoing prophetic revelation.

And actually, that's a great gift to us because it allows us to approach scripture so much more flexibly, right? We don't have to look to scripture to define the contours of our ethics for instance, right? We can look to it for deeply fruitful and rich ethical reflection as we do, but it doesn't need to be authoritative in the sense of defining dogma. So that allows scripture to be much richer, much more flexible and for us to read it in many other ways, right? Many different ways, and through different purposes. So, scripture is that which is canonized. It's inherently communal, it's non-authoritative in its meaning. And ultimately, scripture is this kind of interaction. It's a process, right? It's a process more than an object. It’s a process that's co-created with the writer, the reader, and then of course the Spirit of God, right? And so, the process by which those words are produced, transmitted, received, interpreted, and then brought to life in the reader. I think that is scripture. 

Stephen Betts: Yeah, so talk a little bit about the Book of Ether. Of course, the Book of Ether is one of the fifteen books in the Book of Mormon. Of course, originally it would've been sixteen books. The Book of Lehi was lost in the early translation period of the Book of Mormon, but one of the fifteen books in the Book of Mormon, second to last, right before Moroni. It's a complex, redacted document, even narratologically. Right. So, talk about that and kind of situate us theologically within the Book of Mormon's scope. 

Rosalynde Welch: Yeah. So, the Book of Ether, oh, it's just so much fun. It's kind of like the Book of Mormon's “mini-me,” I think it how I put it in the book. It comes near the end of the Book of Mormon. It's the self-contained kind of discreet unit that kind of reprises many of the themes of the Book of Mormon itself. And because of that, it allows Moroni the opportunity to reflect on the themes of the Book of Mormon as a whole, to underscore certain themes and to comment on them, right? So formally, it occupies this extremely fun, um, and complicated role as a kind of, um, internal mirror to the Book of Mormon, an internal mirror and condensed version of the Book of Mormon itself, within it. Kind of like in Shakespeare, you'll have the “Dumbshow,” a play within a play, right? It's kind of the book within the book of the Book of Mormon.

So as, as you know, Stephen, probably, the Book of Ether was produced in some way by Moroni, probably not translated, it's probably working with Mosiah’s translation, but it was redacted and condensed and compiled by Moroni to fulfill his father's promise, Mormon's promise that it would be included. The book is named After Ether, who is a Jaredite prophet. The book contains the history of a people called the Jaredite people who came to the New World, the chosen land, millennia before the Lehite migration and the Mulekite migration. And then, of course, overlaps—doesn’t overlap with the Nephites—but overlaps in complicated ways with Nephite history.

So, it's named after Ether. It's the record of the Jaredites, but Moroni’s narrative voice really prevails, right? It contains only one verse in the first-person voice of Ether. It's really Moroni’s sensibility that prevails, especially in the theologically rich sections, right? There's a kind of annals of the kings, Jaredite kings, where we don't hear too much from Moroni, but we see Moroni’s sensibility in a couple of ways. First of all, he breaks in with, I think, six editorial comments that are in his own voice, right? “I Moroni,” frankly speaking in his own voice and speaking to present-day readers of the book. But then we also see Moroni's sensibility just in the way that the record is compiled. What elements are deeply condensed? What are expanded? What does he give extra attention to? And I think it's quite likely that he's probably rewritten some of what he inherited from Mosiah, precisely because what he wants to do is point out all the points of consonance between Nephite history and Jaredite history. So, I think, the Nephite theophany, and of course the brother of Jared's theophany.

Rosalynde Welch: So, I think he's probably rewritten sections of it to highlight those similarities and what he sees as the generalizability of the Jaredite record. So Moroni is a kind of, he's like a time traveler, right? He's a ghost. He's traveling far back and immersing himself in this ancient civilization. The people that, to him, were the indigenous people of the land that the Nephites came to, right? There's a kind of double indigeneity that happens here, so he's throwing himself into their world and their records, his own people and his own culture have virtually vanished. So, he lives kind of in a split-screen. Between this ancient people and then in the world of the 19th century, right?

The world where the Book of Mormon will come forth. And he speaks directly to the book's earliest readers whom he calls “the Gentiles.” And he's very concerned about their welfare in the kind of apocalyptic future that he sees. But in this kind of split temporality. He's very concerned about universals, right? He’s deeply convinced that Jesus Christ is the God, not only of the land that the Nephites, the Jaredites, and the Gentiles all had in common, but he is the God of the world, right? There is a God, and he is Jesus Christ as the Book of Mormon puts it. And so, Moroni is deeply interested in questions of, universal questions of salvation.

Stephen Betts: Yeah, you talk about universal salvation. He, like Paul, and of course as people like Grant Hardy have pointed out, I mean he explicitly sort of quotes Paul several times and engages theologically with what Paul is doing.[1] But he's concerned about the limits, the limitations of the Abrahamic covenant and the Nephitic covenant. Right. What does it mean for example, the Jaredites, this text, he's immersed in these texts. What does it mean for them to be in relation with the same God he believes as the universal God of all the earth, in a way that is outside of these historical covenants that he's aware of with whole peoples being in relation with that God. And so, you see him working this out with the Jaredites. You see him working it out with the Gentiles, this group he calls the Gentiles. Right? And again, sort of drawing on and engaging with Paul's notions of the times of“the fullness of the Gentiles.” 

Something that occurred to me as you were speaking is the relationship for him between universality and particularity is really interesting because unique to his almost atemporal position is this ability to see and a desire to see how God's salvation is universal and God's power is universal, while also being able to describe how God's “weakness” is central to God's power. You talk about God's “weakness” and I think we can get into that. So, you have a kind of universality of a particular of a God who's the God of all the earth and nevertheless inhabits a single body. And at the same time, a particularity of universal, right? And so he, he's almost this Archemedian point where he just is, is kind of, he is in historical time, but like you said, he's a kind of time traveler. He doesn't quite fit anywhere. And of course, part of the story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon is, you know, this embodied Moroni, resurrected Moroni, same person coming back and giving the physical plates to Joseph Smith, right? So yeah, talk about how does he resolve this problem of covenant and being in covenant? What does, what does faith look like for him? Because obviously the Book of Mormon is very adamant about certain kinds of law-based or works-based righteousness. Of course, faith is very important, but Moroni's sense of faith is rather distinct from a lot of the other teachings about faith in the Book of Mormon.

Rosalynde Welch: Yeah, this is such a fun question. And you're right that Moroni's kind of own positionality, reprises the shape a Book of Mormon Christology in general and in really interesting ways. So yeah, Nephite Christology has this very, very interesting shape. On the one hand, they have this understanding of the Lamb of God who was slain from the foundation of the world. So, there's this kind of overarching, atemporal, always already saving efficacy of the atonement of Jesus Christ. And that's why he's God as the premortal Jesus Christ, who visits the brother of Jared. That's why he's God as the postmortal, Jesus Christ who visits the Nephites. Right? It's because the atonement has this kind of atemporal effect. 

At the same time, if Nephite Christology is adamant about anything, it's about the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, right? And an Incarnation that is entirely absent from the narrative of the Book of Mormon. Right? Isn't that fascinating that this idea of the condescension of God and that Christ will come down among the children of men and dwell in a tabernacle of clay is just consistently preached throughout the Book of Mormon, and yet it's entirely absent from the narrative history of the Book of Morman, right? So, at the same time that Jesus Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, he’s also the Son of God who dwells among us in a tabernacle of clay. So here you have this universal and this particular dimension. The problem is that the particularity of Christ is important, right? If it matters, as the prophets insist it does that Christ existed as a human being in a certain historical context at a certain time and place, what does that mean for the people who are distant from that moment, that particular moment, right? The people who, the Nephites who lived hundreds of years before Christ comes and who will never witness Christ as a mortal man. Or the Gentiles who live hundreds of years after Christ, right? Don't have access to his mortal ministry. Is it possible for faith to be founded on Christ under conditions of temporal separation? This is a question that really worries Nephi at the beginning of the Book of Mormon, and we see how Nephi works that out. He teaches his people to look forward to the coming of Christ, but to look forward to it as if it had already happened.

So, he says, “You have to look forward to it. It's gonna happen in the future, but you can't get fixated on chronology. You have to believe now as if it had already happened. It's only through believing as if had already happened that the law of Moses can be efficacious for us.” Right. And so, I think Moroni sees what Nephi has done before the coming of Christ. And he’s trying to do the same thing for those who live after the coming of Christ. He's saying, “Yeah, Christ lived a long time ago, and that matters. You need to know that history, right? And to be aware of that. But you can't get fixated on the chronology. Christ is actually present to us all the time, right? through his universal and a temporal dimension.”

Rosalynde Welch: And so, the question of how you can be saved millennia after the saving event occurred is resolved for Moroni through the category of faith, right? And similar to Paul, right? Similar to any reader of the New Testament will recognize this theological solution. But the faith of the brother of Jared, a person who existed long before Christ outside of covenant. So in that sense is like the Gentiles who exist long after Christ and are also outside of the covenant, faith is the mechanism by which they can be numbered among the children of Israel. There had been a promise at the beginning of the Book of Mormon in sort of Nephi’s apocalyptic vision that the Gentiles would be numbered among the children of Israel, but he really doesn't discuss how.

And that question seems to be really important to Moroni, and I think he sees in this Jaredite record a solution to that problem. If the Gentiles will exercise the same kind of faith that the brother of Jared did, then they too will have access to the, the redemption that comes through covenant. So, I think that's Moroni’s overriding theological question and his overriding insight that he finds in the Jaredite record is a solution for the Gentiles. 

And then, if I'm not mistaken, I think in Ether chapter four, we start to see Moroni’s mind pushing perhaps even beyond the categories of Jew and Gentile. By and large, those two categories, Jew and Gentile, kind of exhaust the range of possibilities for most Nephite thinkers, right? Everybody who's ever existed can probably be slotted into the category of Jew or Gentile. But the Jaredites raise this interesting question, right? Are they Jews? Not, not really, right? They're not Abrahamic peoples at all. And the Book of Mormon has thought a little bit, it talks about “the heathens” at one point, right? The question of the heathens arises just glancingly and the question of “the isles of the sea,” right? These early Nephite thinkers are starting to think about, well, are there peoples beyond these two categories of Jews and Gentiles? And in Ether 4, when is reflecting on what the experience brother of Jared means for the modern day Gentiles, and what it means is that they too can be saved. If they can exercise the same kind of faith, then I think he starts thinking beyond that, “Well, what about people who've actually never heard about Jesus Christ? Or what if Jesus Christ comes to them under a different name? Right? What if he looks different?”

I think the Jaredite record has kind of jolted him into realizing that, that these theophanies happen in different ways. And when he, you know, as he's musing on this idea that “anything persuades men to do good is of me.”[2] Nothing good comes except through Jesus Christ. So, if there's anything in the world that is leading a person to do good, then that is Jesus Christ. That is Jesus Christ in another form. I think there his mind is pushing beyond those categories and he's beginning to contemplate these larger questions of a genuinely universal salvation. He isn't able to fully solve that problem. I think that's a problem that falls to us, right? For us, the question of whether or not the Gentiles can be saved isn't is answered right. We know that they can be, but that's not a live theological question for us anymore. But there continue for us, I think, very live theological questions about the salvation of peoples who for whatever reason cannot be incorporated into the covenant structure that we now have.What of their salvation, how are they to be saved? This is a question that's urgent and live for many of us now, and it's the same question that motivated Moroni and I think he encourages us to think creatively and to think boldly in, in what he does in the Book of Ether. 

Stephen Betts: And importantly, I think something you point out is that it's not just about him thinking as it were paternalistic about people who need to be saved. It's also a live question of how do the people who view themselves as being in covenant with God, how do they come into relation with these people around them in ways that are fruitful for both of them, right? That's not paternalistic, that's not colonizing. Right? You know, I love how you put it that Jesus Christ might appear in many forms, but that all good as Moroni says, all good, anything good, must necessarily be coming from Jesus Christ. He's the source of goodness. That's a really interesting way and of thinking about what does it, what does it mean to engage with the thought of people who for whatever reason, may reject what these people view as true, and nevertheless, somehow be in a very lively and vibrant relation with the covenant.

It reminds me of a short vignette in the Book of Mormon earlier, you have Abinadi, a prophet who makes a brief appearance, brief but powerful appearance in the Book of Mosiah, who shows up and, he's warning a wicked king of impending doom to his society if he doesn't repent. And he's kicked  out of the land. He comes back in disguise and it's always, you know, made me wonder like, what does that mean? “He came back in disguise.” Why is that worth including as part of the story? And maybe, yeah, maybe in, in this sort of way, we can think about it as well, sometimes disguises are necessary, right? Sometimes disguises are how you enter into relation without undergoing unnecessary conflict. 

Rosalynde Welch: I love that. And you know, that idea of “the hidden Christ” is actually central to Book of Mormon Christology. Right? This is the point that Benjamin makes, that Abinadi makes is that, you know, Book of Mormon peoples know Christ as God, right? And so it's unthinkable to them that God could be unrecognized among his people. Right? So, Benjamin and Abinadi are trying to explain, “He's going to be, he's gonna look like a man,” right? They're not gonna recognize him because he's gonna basically be in disguise, at least his divine dimension will be temporarily occluded by his tabernacle of flesh. Right? And it's because, and yet this disguise is exactly what allows him to be in solidarity with them, right? To calm down some heaven and to be among them as one of them with them.

And it's that solidarity. This is the Book of Mormon theory of salvation. It's precisely that solidarity that enables a kind of identification and empathy. That's the mechanism through which the saving action of the atonement works, right? So, this idea of, of the hidden Christ, the Christ in disguise is at the heart of Book of Mormon soteriology and its model of how Christ saves us.

Stephen Betts: Well, and this hidden Christ, I think brings us to one of the stories you've talked about, the brother of Jared's vision or theophany in the Book of Ether, where brother of Jared sees a premortal Jesus Christ in spirit form. Right. He has a problem, which is that God who has not yet revealed himself to Jared or the brother of Jared, has commanded Jared's family to cross the ocean after coming out of the Tower of Babel. Right? So their language hasn't been confounded. They're the only people whose language hasn't been confounded according to this story. And he says, “Okay, you're gonna build some boats and you're gonna go across this great ocean, ‘this great deep,’” which is this great phrase, right? And he says, “Come up with a way that you would like to have light in your vessels, because they're basically these, these sort of submarine type barges with no windows. They're not, they don't float on top of the water necessarily. They're gonna be submerged in waves and the brother of Jared, who apparently knows how to work with metal and stone, he goes and he makes these sixteen glass stones basically out of molten stone.

And he brings them up on a mountain and he says, “If you'll just touch these, I think that'll work. That it'll imbue these stones with light and that will give us light for our journey.” And then Jesus Christ reaches out his finger and touches the stones, and it just shocks this character. So, tell us about this moment and why you associate this with what you call “the weakness of God” And why is that “weakness” maybe so central to what you're articulating as a reader-centered theology of scripture? 

Rosalynde Welch: Yeah. This is, you know, just one of the classic narratives of the Book of Mormon. It's so powerful. Talk about writing that can signify and resignify and resignify right. The theophany of the brother of Jared is such an incredibly rich text and has been so meaningful to all readers of the Book of Mormon. So, I offer kind of another reading of it here, but I wanna recognize its power to mean, and then to mean again. But yeah, there's this really interesting textual problem of the brother of Jared’s reaction to the finger. And it's a problem for two reasons. First of all, it's a problem because why does he react with such shock? Because he's just asked the Lord to touch the stones. And so, then the Lord does exactly what he asked him to do. So why does this surprise him so much? That's one puzzle. The other puzzle is that there are actually two explanations that are given for his shock in that same chapter, just within a matter of verses. One is that the first one that we hear it, the Lord asks him, “Why have you fallen down?” And he says, “Because I was worried you were gonna hit me,” right? “I was worried that you would smite me.” To me, this doesn't feel quite right. I don't know. There some weird things about the grammar that suggest there may be a kind of redacted scene that's happening right there. And it also doesn't fit in the narrative. Right? Why would the brother of Jared have asked him to touch the stones if he was worried that God was a violent God? Right? So, to me, I'm not quite sure if I'm convinced by that one. It's then there's another explanation for his shock that occurs in Moroni’s gloss of the episode a few verses later. 

And he says he fell simply because he realized this was the finger of God and it was as the finger of a man. So that suggests to me that the brother of Jared had in mind maybe some kind of superhuman, right? That God, he must have envisioned some kind of anthropomorphic form because he asked him to touch it with his finger, right? Touch the stones with his finger. But he probably envisioned some kind of extra-large superhero ginormous finger, you know, reaching down. And instead what he sees as literally a guy's finger. Appearing and touching the stones, and I think it's the weakness and the smalls, the ordinariness of the finger that shocks him first and then terrifies him.

You know, Moroni notes that the Lord shows himself to the brother of Jared in the same body as he showed himself onto the Nephites. So, the spirit body apparently already carries the marks of crucifixion. This has to do with this idea of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. So, the spirit body of Christ bears the marks of crucifixion. So, it bears the fleshly evidence of its vulnerability, right? It can be injured, it can be pierced. It is passable in the extreme. It can be mangled. It can be destroyed, it can die. Yet this is the God that the brother of Jared is putting his full faith into carrying them across the water. They're about to undertake this impossible voyage, impossibly dangerous putting themselves and their families, their children in immense danger. And they're relying solely of strength of God to carry them across. And he sees that God has a hand just like his. How is this God going to save us? Right? And I think that is what terrifies him. And ultimately that also I think is Moroni's point when he talks about, “Faith like the brother of Jared had is the faith that saves.”

He was ultimately able to invest his faith in the weakness of God, in a weak God. Right. And  I wanna be clear here, I don't think we should mistake the “weak force of divinity” as being without power or without efficacy, or without activity, without agency. Not at all. But as we know from the Doctrine & Covenants, right, it's, it's power without coercion and it's a kind of efficaciousness without domination, right? It works through persuasion, through long suffering, through meekness and through love. And love I think is probably what's communicated most strongly in the mangled hand of God that shows itself to the brother Jared. And that is the fate that we are to emulate. So how does this speak to the question of scripture?

Rosalynde Welch: Well, I have this, this reading, I present a new reading of another, reading, another reading of this, the theophany of the brother of Jared. What I noticed is that there are these very interesting kind of linguistic connections between the stones, the sixteen stones, and the Book of Mormon itself, which as you noted, consisted of sixteen books, right?

I first started to notice this interesting phrase, “these things,” right? And it's really, it's kind of a non-descript phrase. You see it everywhere. But it shows actually tons of times in the Book of Mormon. And once you are alerted to it, you'll see it everywhere. Not all the time, but most of the times that this phrase, “these things” is used, it's used to refer to the work of the Nephite prophet-historians, in other words, [inaudible] the Book of Mormon before it is scripture. Right? The Book of Mormon. Right. In that in between stage as it's coming into being. So, all what in Moroni 10:4 right? The famous scripture, “I would exhort you to ask God if these things are not true,” right?

We see that phrase used again and again and again to refer to the Book of Mormon in embryo, right in its processual stages. So that phrase reappears when the brother of Jared brings the stones to the Lord, and he asked the Lord to touch “these things.” So that got me thinking. This is interesting here. And then there's another really important sort of textual connection between the Book of Mormon itself and these questions of scripture and the stones. And that is this image of something “shining forth out of darkness,” right? So, frequently when Nephite prophets, particularly Mormon and Moroni, think about the way that the, the Book of Mormon will come into being, they use this image of “light shining forth out of dark,” right? The plates will be unearthed and the records then will shine forth to it in the latter days as a kind of prism that will hasten the Second Coming as this kind of eschatological prism. And that is the exact same language that Morona uses when that he puts it in brother of Jared's mouth, right?

He asks the Lord to touch “these things” that they will shine forth in the darkness and carry us across the waters. So, on the strength of those connections, I think that as Moroni is redacting and retelling and renarrating this story, he is seeing himself and he's seeing his avatar in future Joseph Smith, in their work of bringing forth the Book of Mormon. They are doing their best, their level human best with what they can. But Moroni is filled with anxiety about his ability to write, right? And Nephite prophetic culture in a lot of ways is centered around, right, I should say charismatic culture is centered around powerful oral performance. Preaching, right? They're powerful preachers. But it's a lot harder to write. They're pretty good at translating, but writing is something different. It's hard, and he's not good at it. And he's full of anxiety that what he's producing is not gonna be strong enough to be the vehicle for God's providential purposes in the last days. Right? In his mind, everything depends on his ability to get this right, because it's the Book of Mormon in the latter days that is going to provide the foundation of salvation for the Gentiles and be usher in the Second Coming. So, there's a lot at stake and he is concerned that he can't do it, right and he's gonna fail.

I think he finds comfort in the story of the brother of Jared and comfort that then is confirmed in Ether 12 when he brings this anxiety directly to the Lord and says, “Lord, I'm doing my best here. I'm not very good at this. I'm worried that the Gentiles are gonna mock at what I produce. They're just gonna laugh at it, and I know it has mistakes. It's not gonna succeed in bringing Jesus Christ into their presence. And what should I do about that?” And I think he expects the Lord to say, “Okay, I'll fix you. I'll fix you Moroni. You're weak. I'll make you strong and I'll make you strong writer.” Sometimes that's how we interpret that famous verse, Ether 12:27, right? “I'll make weak things become strong.” We think it means God is going to fix our flaws. That's essentially not at all the process that God describes to Moroni, he says, “On the contrary, I just want you to do your best. What's gonna happen is that I am going to give grace to the Gentiles, and this grace is gonna enable the Gentiles to receive the book with charity.” So, the Book of Mormon is going to become scripture full of the power and presence of God at the moment when the Gentiles are touched with grace and they read the book with charity. So, I call this a reader-centered theory of scripture, that the power of scripture is not encoded in text at the moment when it's written. It doesn't need to be infallible. It doesn't need to be inerrant. It doesn't need to be rhetorically, rhetorically, forceful. Instead, what it needs to do is it needs to be touched by the finger of God as it comes into the possession of the reader, right? Just as these stones are about to be deposited in the barges, God touches them. They don't shine because of the brother of Jared's inherent artisanal capacity. They shine because of the power of God that comes at the moment of reception, and I think that that is the theory of scripture that we get in the book of Ether. Scripture becomes scripture at the moment of reading.

It's a process, not an event or a moment, right? It's a process that occurs over time, every time the book is opened, and that God's finger touches the work in its weakness. So, we won't expect to turn to scripture for inerrancy, for definitive declarations of doctrine, for final meaning or for conclusions. Instead, we turn to the scriptures for the kind of raw materials that can be touched and illuminated by the finger of God, and brought to light in our own heart, mind, and reading process. 

Stephen Betts: That's Rosalynde Welch talking about her recent book, Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction. Thanks for chatting with me today, Rosalynde.

Rosalynde Welch: My pleasure. Thanks Stephen.

Stephen Betts: Thanks for listening to Scholars and Saints. This podcast is made possible by the Mormon Studies Program at the University of Virginia. To learn more, visit mormonstudies.as.virginia.edu. Music for this episode is used by permission of the artist Ben Howington. The track name is “Wayfaring Stranger.” To hear more, visit mormonguitar.com.

*Transcript edited for clarity

[1] See Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 248–67.
[2] Book of Mormon, Ether 4:11–12, “But he that believeth these things which I have spoken, him will I visit with the manifestations of my Spirit, and he shall know and bear record. For because of my Spirit he shall know that these things are true; for it persuadeth men to do good. And whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do good is of me; for good cometh of none save it be of me. I am the same that leadeth men to all good; he that will not believe my words will not believe me—that I am; and he that will not believe me will not believe my Father who sent me. For behold, I am the Father, I am the light, and the life, and the truth of the world.” See also Moroni 7:16.