Mormon and Moroni’s Rhetoric: Reflections Inspired by Grant Hardy’s Understanding the Book of Mormon ePub feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship
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- Christianity
Abstract: Grant Hardy has shown that Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni have distinctive personalities, rhetorical strategies, implied readers, and thematic concerns. Mormon lived within history and wrote as a historian. He focused on the particulars of time and place and person, on political and military matters. But, Hardy says, Mormon lacked audience awareness. I argue Mormon’s historiography was well adapted to the needs of his initial envisioned audience, the Alma family. Moroni, who lived most of his life outside of history, wrote intertextually, in dialog with voices speaking from the dust. And he wrote as a theologian especially attuned to the tragedy of human existence without God. Unlike his father, Moroni was a reluctant and, initially, untrained writer. His initial lack of confidence and competence and his growth as a writer and as a person are apparent in the five different endings for the Book of Mormon that he successively inscribed over the course of his life. Moroni’s ultimate model as he so effectively closed the large-plates record was Amaleki, last author of the small plates. This article critiques Hardy’s assessment of Mormon’s and extends his account of Moroni’s rhetorical effectiveness.
Human beings choose the world they live in. The choice is not wholly unconditioned, unconstrained. Many features of the chosen world—for example, many connections between acts and consequences—exist as brute facts. But the overarching mental map of the world is always chosen. It is an interpretation. One can choose to live in a world created by God and full of miracles. One can choose [Page 192]to live in a godless world in which everything is reduceable to inert matter in motion. And while these two worlds each have numerous inhabitants, there are many other worlds in which human beings may and do choose to live, many of them being subsets of these two overarching worlds. While all get to choose their world, none has a choice about choosing. God or the universe confronts all of us with a choice and respects our agency. For now, we live in whatever world we and our culture have co-created through interpretation.
The world we choose to live in determines, among many other things, how we read scripture. Those who have chosen to live in God’s world read a different Bible and Book of Mormon than those who have chosen to live in a godless world. Dan Vogel and Dan Peterson do not read the same Book of Mormon. For Vogel, the Book of Mormon is a purely naturalistic product of Joseph Smith’s nineteenth century. For Peterson, the text has both ancient and nineteenth century provenance, being composed anciently and translated in the nineteenth century. For Vogel, Joseph Smith was the sole, purely naturalistic, human author of the book. For Peterson, the book has multiple authors and, since most of those authors are prophets, God strongly influenced the book’s construction and content. While those living in these alternative worlds may sometimes agree, e.g., about the Mosiah-first composition/translation of the text we now have, for the most part, their interpretations are not just incompatible but incommensurable. It is, thus, noteworthy when a scholar identifies a way of reading the Book of Mormon that is equally valid for those who live in these incompatible and incommensurable worlds. In Understanding the Book of Mormon, Grant Hardy has accomplished that difficult and noteworthy task.1
Understanding the Book of Mormon was published by Oxford University Press and is meant to address readers in both worlds, both faithful Latter-day-Saint and secular non-LDS readers. Hardy makes the book relevant to both groups by bracketing the main issue that divides them, the question of the book’s historicity. Hardy is able to bracket this contentious issue ...
Abstract: Grant Hardy has shown that Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni have distinctive personalities, rhetorical strategies, implied readers, and thematic concerns. Mormon lived within history and wrote as a historian. He focused on the particulars of time and place and person, on political and military matters. But, Hardy says, Mormon lacked audience awareness. I argue Mormon’s historiography was well adapted to the needs of his initial envisioned audience, the Alma family. Moroni, who lived most of his life outside of history, wrote intertextually, in dialog with voices speaking from the dust. And he wrote as a theologian especially attuned to the tragedy of human existence without God. Unlike his father, Moroni was a reluctant and, initially, untrained writer. His initial lack of confidence and competence and his growth as a writer and as a person are apparent in the five different endings for the Book of Mormon that he successively inscribed over the course of his life. Moroni’s ultimate model as he so effectively closed the large-plates record was Amaleki, last author of the small plates. This article critiques Hardy’s assessment of Mormon’s and extends his account of Moroni’s rhetorical effectiveness.
Human beings choose the world they live in. The choice is not wholly unconditioned, unconstrained. Many features of the chosen world—for example, many connections between acts and consequences—exist as brute facts. But the overarching mental map of the world is always chosen. It is an interpretation. One can choose to live in a world created by God and full of miracles. One can choose [Page 192]to live in a godless world in which everything is reduceable to inert matter in motion. And while these two worlds each have numerous inhabitants, there are many other worlds in which human beings may and do choose to live, many of them being subsets of these two overarching worlds. While all get to choose their world, none has a choice about choosing. God or the universe confronts all of us with a choice and respects our agency. For now, we live in whatever world we and our culture have co-created through interpretation.
The world we choose to live in determines, among many other things, how we read scripture. Those who have chosen to live in God’s world read a different Bible and Book of Mormon than those who have chosen to live in a godless world. Dan Vogel and Dan Peterson do not read the same Book of Mormon. For Vogel, the Book of Mormon is a purely naturalistic product of Joseph Smith’s nineteenth century. For Peterson, the text has both ancient and nineteenth century provenance, being composed anciently and translated in the nineteenth century. For Vogel, Joseph Smith was the sole, purely naturalistic, human author of the book. For Peterson, the book has multiple authors and, since most of those authors are prophets, God strongly influenced the book’s construction and content. While those living in these alternative worlds may sometimes agree, e.g., about the Mosiah-first composition/translation of the text we now have, for the most part, their interpretations are not just incompatible but incommensurable. It is, thus, noteworthy when a scholar identifies a way of reading the Book of Mormon that is equally valid for those who live in these incompatible and incommensurable worlds. In Understanding the Book of Mormon, Grant Hardy has accomplished that difficult and noteworthy task.1
Understanding the Book of Mormon was published by Oxford University Press and is meant to address readers in both worlds, both faithful Latter-day-Saint and secular non-LDS readers. Hardy makes the book relevant to both groups by bracketing the main issue that divides them, the question of the book’s historicity. Hardy is able to bracket this contentious issue ...