This position can be explained historically, but it cannot be replicated for a present-day Protestantism that has undergone the transformations of Modernity.
When Martin Luther approached the reformation of the Catholic Church, he tried to replace the control of the Church hierarchy with the Bible as a document that he considered unassailable. (This stance is close to Spinoza's position, though updated to reflect present day scholarship in terms of literary criticism and biblical archaeology.) This holds especially true for the prophecies of the Old Testament, which I cannot interpret as metaphorically encoded announcements of a divine plan, but rather see as political speculations of the respective and often competing elites of the times of authoring in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Given the plurality of laws, narratives and words of wisdom that the Old Testament espouses, all of which require filtering from conceptual models that are external to the Old Testament, in order to be applicable to the present-day-such as a cosmopolitan, interracial, gender-sensitive stance-there seems to be little profit of going to that document rather than any other. I see the Old Testament as the founding document of the religion that Jesus of Nazareth who became the Christ himself practiced, and into which his movement was embedded historically. Rasmussen in the LDS Encyclopedia as untenable. However, on reflection it occurred to me that the disagreement was really higher up stream than that, and mostly driven by an analogy between Martin Luther and Joseph Smith Jr.įundamentally, I see the LDS position on the Old Testament as sketched for example by Ellis T.
After another weekend of reading various theories about how the Book of Mormon came into existence-Spalding no, Spalding yes Revelation versus Fraud etc etc etc-I felt it was time to summarize my position on the matter.
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