In Tents #78 The Rhetoric of Baptism Narratives, part 3

June is a month to celebrate–give thanks for–prophetic religion.  And not just because June is the month when Spencer W. Kimball chose to mark the U.S. Bison Ten Eel not with a patriotic panegyric about the joys of living in a free country, but with a stern warning about “The False Gods We Worship“:

We train a man in the art of war and call him a patriot, thus, in the manner of Satan’s counterfeit of true patriotism, perverting the Savior’s teaching:

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

“That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.” (Matt. 5:44–45.)

Two years later, the second Friday in June, I spent the morning with some other missionaries out at the Martin Harris Farm, cutting grass and getting it ready for the horde of Pageant visitors next month. When we came back to the Hill Cumorah for lunch, Jennie (foreman Ralph’s 9-year-old daughter) ran out of the quonset hut behind the hill, excited, “Guess what, the blacks have received the priesthood. It was on the radio.” I didn’t believe it at first. Announce something so important at a press conference rather than over the pulpit?

I soon had cause to repent of my unbelief, though I’ve often wished that announcement had been written as a revelation with a section number rather than an Official Declaration. Surely a revelation of that importance calls out for the language of The Olive Leaf, or at least the eloquence of D&C 85:6:

Yea, thus saith the still small voice, which whispereth through and pierceth all things, and often times it maketh my bones to quake while it maketh manifest, saying:

Which raises the question, what do we expect of scripture? Writing this series on scriptural and prophetic rhetoric I’ve been impressed over and again (yes, I’ve been listening to some BritLit) by how different our conception of scripture is from other Christian religions. We may think we define scripture in the same way, just more of it, but our idea of what constitutes scripture, of what scripture does and how, is quite different.

Let’s approach the difference from an oblique angle. At the end of 1978 or start of 1979 The Church News published a 5-year anniversary issue on the Kimball administration, including an interview with an exchange that went something like this:

Q. You used to choose a theme for your conference talks and develop it with lots of examples in an almost literary way, but lately your talks are “Do this, do that, do this, do that.”

A. Yes, I’ve gotten a lot busier.

Perhaps the contrast between the eloquence of “The False Gods We Worship,” and the rather pedestrian language of Official Declaration 2 reflects this busierness. In 1976 President Kimball still had the leisure to pick a theme and develop it into a long article (Word says 3,162 words with title, WordPress 3,130). Two years later he probably didn’t and may have assigned the task to his counselors. Checking that impression against Edward L. Kimball’s article “Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood,” BYU Studies 47:2, I find that he “asked Elders Packer, McConkie, and Hinckley each to propose in writing a course of action.” That is, he asked the three to propose “how to announce the decision.” Francis Gibbons made of those “memoranda a composite draft”  which “the First Presidency revised. . . , spending a good deal of time on the exact wording” (p. 59-60).

Careful wording is not the same as elevated language, but is elevated language necessary for scripture to accomplish its work?

That question is complicated enough that the answer could expand and expand and expand, but consider that enigmatic note in the header to Section 67, about the revelations being prepared for The Book of Commandments, “some conversation was had concerning the language used in the revelations.” You can sense some of the conversation from the edits in Revelation Books 1 and 2, the manuscript books used to prepare the The Book of Commandments for publication, and I may give some examples next month.

John Whitmer was the chief scribe, so I spend a few minutes each morning before work reading a few lines of his handwriting, and thinking about the corrections from Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery, W.W. Phelps and others. They corrected the text rather freely, and as I ran for the bus May 30 I was thinking about the freedom and authority they felt to do that, and it occurred to me that the Lord had called them as editors so they would have some experience receiving and recording revelation. “Oh, that’s what President Kimball was talking about in ‘The Angels May Quote From It.'” I wrote a note later in the day,

I’ve thought of this as a call for us to write uplifting personal histories that can inspire our descendants, none of depressing, distressing messiness of life, but this morning it occurred to me that SWK was talking more about creating scripture. The Book of Mormon suggests scripture is created by people faithfully keeping a record other people can draw on. That being so, the invitation here is to create such a record, not to pretend pain and messiness don’t exist.

So President Kimball may have asked the three apostles to draft the announcement to give them experience writing down and expressing revelation. That is, a passage’s character as scripture depends less on its eloquence and more on its ability to record an event.Or perhaps he assigned drafting the announcement to the apostles for another reason.

A few Sundays earlier (May 13, I think) while I was walking over to the care center for the days’ meetings, the phrase “stewards over the revelations” from D&C 70:3 caught my ear, so I had been thinking about the phrase, turning it over and examining it. The whole verse says,

I, the Lord, have appointed them, and ordained them to be stewards over the revelations and commandments which I have given unto them, and which I shall hereafter give unto them;

I think it caught my ear because I had just recently realized that The Book of Mormon isn’t alone in its concern for how scripture is put together. While Mormon shows us how scripture passes from prophet to prophet, the Doctrine and Covenants concerns itself with how to publish scripture, how to get it into a form that can be widely disseminated. (See sections 3, 5, 10, 17, and 19 for The Book of Mormon, and for the Doctrine and Covenants see sections 1, 67,  70, 72:21-22, 78, and 69 where the Lord assigns John Whitmer to travel with Oliver Cowdery who was carrying the revelations and money to print them. See also Matthew C. Godfrey’s essay, “Newel K. Whitney and the United Firm.”)

Looking the verse up once I got to my meeting I found a link to I Cor. 4:1:

Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God.

Does that mean the early apostles appointed stewards over the revelations, people who tried to gather the sacred writings into one place? Thinking about this it occurred to me to juxtapose two passages. First Mormon’s introduction to a group of plates he appended to his record:

I searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands, and I found these plates.

Now Luke’s introduction to a record penned for someone he calls Theophilus:

1 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, 2 Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; 3 It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, 4 That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

 Was Luke a steward of the revelations? The question has implications for the nature of scripture and why the view of scripture we see in The Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants is so different from the view of scripture held by a tradition that insists on a closed canon.

Your turn.