Isaiah Visits The Book of Mormon, continued
The purpose of this blog, sooner or later, is to examine the rhetoric of Jesus’s encounters with the Pharisees, so it’s useful to explore rhetoric and how prophets use it. In the last column I suggested that prophetic rhetoric is always bounded. God’s works are endless, as are God’s words, so no passage or bit of prophetic rhetoric can contain all them, or all their meanings–no passage can ever be the last word, not even,
The fundamental principles of our religion are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it.
That’s a ringing declaration, but lest we assume the appendages aren’t worth much and do a doctrinal appendectomy Joseph Smith immediately added a qualifier:
But in connection with these, we believe in the gift of the Holy Ghost, the power of faith, the enjoyment of the spiritual gifts according to the will of God, the restoration of the house of Israel, and the final triumph of truth. (Elders’ Journal, July 1838, p. 44; reprinted in History of the Church 3:30, and quoted in Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith)
The rhetoric of prophecy offers some challenges because in a sense all prophecy is about the past. Consider this passage from John’s account of the Last Supper, which struck me when I was reading E. V. Rieu’s translation of The Four Gospels (Penguin Classics, 1952) recently:
But I warn you of these trials now so that when they come you should remember that I told you. I did not warn you of them in the early days, because I was with you. But now I am going back to him that sent me. (Rieu, p. 231, John 16:4-5)
John ends his gospel with two declarations, 20:30 and 21:25, that he could not include everything Jesus said and did, which suggests there may have been other prophecies he didn’t include. So what was John’s principle of selection? Were there other prophecies whose fulfillment he couldn’t verify?
And we could ask how we even know Jesus actually said that, or whether someone put it in later to add a touch of authenticity to the work–we could ask the kinds of questions the early church did when trying to determine which documents were authentic, which gospels, letters, and histories had canonical authority, which documents could ask for and receive our loyalty. (See Bart Ehrman’s discussion in his 24 lectures on Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication, or in the similarly titled book.)
One of the assumptions scholars have developed is that if a text mentions an event it can’t have been written before the event happened, so Matthew couldn’t have been written before A.D. 70 because Matthew 24:2 mentions the destruction of the temple.
But that assumption has its own problems, since a lot of prophecies are fairly general. “Wars and rumors of wars” can describe any time in the last 10,000 years or so. If you’re trying to date ancient books by historical references you have to look for a political situation that fits the book. The situation in Babylon at the end of the exile fits the last half of Isaiah well enough that scholars are generally comfortable assigning that half to a prophet writing at that time.
But there is another piece of prophetic rhetoric from Jesus to balance out the prophecy he gave at the seder, a statement emphasizing that there are a lot of ways to read a prophecy, and a lot of ways it can be fulfilled.
14 I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following:
15 Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.
16 I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face.
—Doctrine & Covenants 130:14-16
Joseph suggests three possible fulfillments for the prophecy. And for a fourth possibility I read somewhere that in 1890, as the eighty-fifth anniversary of Joseph’s birth approached, a lot of people wondered if the Second Coming wouldn’t happen shortly before Christmas. A fifth interpretation is that the prophecy turns on that word if. (If you can keep your life when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . . )
A sixth interpretation is that the Lord is saying, “When you think about prophecy you have to be willing to exist in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after certain knowledge and reason.”
Wait a minute though, I hear someone saying, just before this passage doesn’t Joseph give a very specific prophecy with a definite fulfillment? Is that what you mean by all prophetic rhetoric being bounded by other rhetoric, one piece acting as opposite/apposite to the other?
12 I prophesy, in the name of the Lord God, that the commencement of the difficulties which will cause much bloodshed previous to the coming of the Son of Man will be in South Carolina.
13 It may probably arise through the slave question. This a voice declared to me, while I was praying earnestly on the subject, December 25th, 1832.
—Doctrine & Covenants 130:12-13
But notice that phrase, “may probably arise,” notice the uncertainty. The fuller account of that prophecy is fairly ambiguous, though we don’t think about it as such.
1 Verily, thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death and misery of many souls;
2 And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place.
3 For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States, and the Southern States will call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain, as it is called, and they shall also call upon other nations, in order to defend themselves against other nations; and then war shall be poured out upon all nations.
4 And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war.
5 And it shall come to pass also that the remnants who are left of the land will marshal themselves, and shall become exceedingly angry, and shall vex the Gentiles with a sore vexation.
6 And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn; and with famine, and plague, and earthquake, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also, shall the inhabitants of the earth be made to feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations;
7 That the cry of the saints, and of the blood of the saints, shall cease to come up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, from the earth, to be avenged of their enemies.
8 Wherefore, stand ye in holy places, and be not moved, until the day of the Lord come; for behold, it cometh quickly, saith the Lord. Amen.
–Doctrine & Covenants 87
Because the 150th anniversaries of all the years from 1861-1865 have come and gone it’s easy to see this as a prophecy about the Civil War, and not notice that only the first three verses specifically mention the war. The rest of the prophecy is about war being poured out upon the world, and the idea of slaves rising up against their masters can apply as well to “Proletarier aller Laender, vereinigt euch!” and serfs in Russia uniting to throw off their chains as to slave revolts in the American South.
This isn’t quite what I thought I would be writing about this month. I was going to go into some detail about Deutero-Isaiah, but when I reread last month’s post I realized I needed to give a more extended account of why I think the idea that prophecies are written after the fact to reflect specific events doesn’t do justice to the nature of prophecy. So I’ll say a little more about Isaiah reading the Book of Mormon next month.
In the meantime, what are your thoughts on what Sections 87 and 130 tell us about the nature of prophecy?
And D&C 130:6 seems to suggest a scenario that has not yet taken place, but which Orson Scott Card turned into the basis for a kind of chilling interpretation of the prophecies about the Lamanites in Third Nephi in his short story “America” — a story that in my opinion should be required reading for pretty much everyone with an interest in brilliant but unconventional Mormon fiction, regardless of whether or not they like sf&f.
Part of the problem, of course, is that insisting that prophetic utterances must be post-hoc additions indicates that the critic doesn’t believe in the possibility of prophecy at all. I think, though, that what you’re saying is that in so concluding, such readers and critics are eliding the role of interpretation in determining the meaning of prophecy, including the likelihood (astonishing to many Mormons, though probably not to anyone else) that even a prophet may not understand the meanings of his or her own prophecies. And that there are multiple “meanings,” not just one determinate meaning.
The fundamental question of your essay series, it seems to me, is just what it means when we as believers say that a text is scripture — what is therefore true and not true about it, and what we may think is true but ain’t, as the saying goes. Prophecies are perhaps the most extreme case of this, since in this case the role of the prophet as human interpreter seems to be closest to transparent. Of course, “closest to” is far from the same as “is.”
I was reading a bit today from Steve Peck’s Evolving Faith essay collection, when a parallel occurred to me between the assumption of always reading forward from events to texts that reference them to the modern scientific assumption that sees it as a fallacy to view natural processes such as evolution as being directed or inclined toward some particular end. In each case, there is no logical necessity guiding the assumption: only an unwillingness to postulate explanations involving some guiding intelligence or overarching pattern.