Many people claim that distinctive LDS doctrines like temple ceremonies, exaltation/theosis, and heavenly mother are not found in the Book of Mormon. But Dr Val Larsen from James Mason Univ disagrees. In our second interview with Val, he will touch on his research which shows these distinctive LDS doctrines are found in the Book of Mormon. Check out our conversation….
Don’t miss our other conversations with Val: https://gospeltangents.com/people/val-larsen/
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Distinctive LDS Doctrines ARE in Book of Mormon
Interview
GT 00:30 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have Dr. Val Larsen back on the show. Last time, we talked for three hours, but that wasn’t nearly enough.
Val 00:41 I’m not sure about that from your viewers point of view. {both laughing}
GT 00:47 And so we want to finish that conversation. It was about the Book of Mormon. Before we do that, though, can you just give us a brief rundown of who you are, where you work and where you live?
Val 01:00 I am a professor of marketing at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I’ve been there since 2000. I did teach English, for a time, at Virginia Tech University.
GT 01:16 Because one Ph.D. is not enough. You had to get two.
Val 01:20 Well, yes. The second one was a lot more lucrative than the first. {both laughing} Marketing pays a lot better than English does. It’s a joy to teach on either subject, but I’ve been very fortunate to have the career I’ve had.
GT 01:39 That’s awesome.
Val 01:40 I should say that the English Ph.D., has fed into this work that I do in the Book of Mormon, much more than the Marketing Ph.D. does. But basically, I got good training in both the humanities and the social sciences, because marketing is essentially a social science. So, it’s great to be able to approach all these different subjects from multiple perspectives. You do this a lot in all your interviews, like Ryan Cragun was pure social science.
GT 02:10 Right.
Val 02:11 But, you have a lot of literary-type approaches to that, like that Rosalynde Welch interview that you did, was a literary approach to the scripture. So, it all brings insight and knowledge. My training helps me appreciate both.
.GT 02:27 Yeah, and Rosalynde’s a PhD in English, too. You guys have a lot of synergy there. And we’re going to talk about that interview, too.
Val 02:33 Yeah, a little bit.
GT 02:35 I’m excited. And then, I probably, we keep talking about the Book of Mormon, which is fine, and it’s great. But one of these days, I need to get some marketing help. Do you do free consulting for…
Val 02:48 I’m happy to talk with you about any marketing questions that you want to talk about.
GT 02:51 All right, all right!
Val 02:52 How useful it will be, keep in mind, I’m an academic, not a practitioner. So, all we know is theory. We don’t know how to actually do anything. {both laughing}
GT 03:00 All right. Well, cool. Well, let’s talk about the Book of Mormon.
Val 03:06 Okay.
GT 03:06 I’ll let you take it away. Where are we going?
Val 03:09 All right. So, as I mentioned at the beginning of our last interview, what I say in these interviews, could be seen as a response to Steve Pynakker, your Evangelical friend, who’s also a friend of Joseph Smith and the Restoration. Steve’s a charitable guy, a devoted Protestant, follower of Christ, who builds bridges to others, as Christ would have us do.
GT 03:31 People say he’s not a true evangelical because he likes Joseph Smith.
Val 03:35 I know. But he’s a true follower of Christ, I think we would certainly agree. Anyway, Steve said he likes the Book of Mormon, in part; I mentioned this last time, because there isn’t any Utah Mormon theology in it. And I’m arguing that Steve’s wrong about that. The most important and distinctive aspects of Utah LDS theology are in the Book of Mormon.
GT 03:57 You’re killing all his evangelical cred here.
Val 04:01 That’s right. Theosis is there. God being subject to eternal laws outside of himself, is there. A distinctive and powerful LDS theory of Atonement is there. My friend, Newell Wright, and I are working on a theory of the atonement paper right now that shows the assumptions of the Nauvoo theology are very much already present in the Book of Mormon. More broadly, there’s a connecting theological thread running through the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price, that those of us in the Utah branch of the Restoration are especially well equipped to see. The fact that God and man are of a kind, that as children are fundamentally like their parents, so humanity is fundamentally like God. That’s not something believed by Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. In those theologies, God and man are fundamentally different kinds of beings. So, this is actually, probably, the single most distinctive aspect of LDS theology and what we’re arguing is, it’s present in the Book of Mormon, already in the Book of Mormon. So to reiterate the main point I made in the first interview, my core argument is that distinctive doctrines of the Restoration found in the Book of Mormon are found there, including Theosis, man becoming what God is. Theosis is linked to the temple, which really lies at the heart of Restoration theology, as it’s articulated by the Utah Church, and a strong case can be made for the presence of the temple in the Book of Mormon. Jack Welch’s, Sermon at the Temple really shows this linkage.
GT 05:32 And that’s Rosalynde’s father-in-law.
Val 05:34 Right. But I think one gets the most comprehensive argument for the ubiquity of the temple in the Book of Mormon by reading D. [David] John Butler’s work. I’m really pleased that you’ll be interviewing him soon. David Butler is trained in ancient Middle Eastern languages, but he writes like an author of popular fiction, which he is. His two temple books, “Plain and Precious Things” and “The Goodness in the Mysteries,” find, in all the scriptures, echoes of an ancient temple ritual which he calls the worship of the Shallems, or in Greek, the tellioi, the ones who are completed or finished. So, along with Jack Welch, Dave addresses another dimension of Brother Pynakker’s claim that there’s no distinctively LDS doctrine in the Book of Mormon. They show that the temple, as it exists in the LDS Church, is pervasive there. So, before turning to some other powerful examples of theosis in the Book of Mormon, I want to address a specific issue [that] our evangelical friend raises: the fact that in Mosiah 15, Abinadi seems to talk about God in a Trinitarian way. There have been a number of different explanations for how chapter 15 can be harmonized with our LDS conception of the Father and Son as separate beings.
Explaining Trinitarians Verses in Book of Mormon
GT 06:49 Now, I’m just going to throw in here, because you and I were talking off camera, but Paul Toscano, and his wife Margaret, and then, Margaret’s, sister, Janice Allred, all point to this scripture in Mosiah that say that it’s not really, they’re not quite Trinitarian, but they’re definitely more Trinitarian than LDS on this point. They point to this scripture, as God and Jesus being one.
Val 07:17 Right. Yeah. So if you wanted to find–actually, something in any place in Scripture, that would be the single best Trinitarian scripture there is out there. And so, if they’re trying to make a Trinitarian point or some variant of a Trinitarian point, yeah, that’s a good place to go. So in some sense, it’s a difficult scripture. I just wanted to chat about it briefly.
Val 07:43 My favorite explanation for it is one Jared Cook provided in 2016 in By Common Consent. Cook argues in some detail there, that Abinadi’s point is that Jesus personifies, or embodies the Atonement by becoming one with the Father, and the Holy Ghost, while in mortality. He does this by submitting his will to the Father and His flesh to the Spirit. And he talks about that how that logic works, so that that preserves the separation. But I actually want to focus on an alternative possibility that, for good reasons, Abinadi didn’t have an entirely clear understanding of the Godhead.
Val 08:22 So, let’s use a Restoration analogy. The First Vision happened in 1820, and the Church was organized in 1830. But members of the Church came from many different theological backgrounds and had all kinds of different ideas about who the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were. In “Lectures on Faith,” which were part of the scriptures for decades, the Holy Ghost wasn’t even a separate person, even though Joseph had explicitly taught that he was. So, the Church’s official doctrine of the Godhead wasn’t established until 1916, 96 years after the First Vision and 86 years after the organization of the Church. And the point here is that revelation tends to be a line-upon-line process. We very often don’t glean the meaning of revelation until some time has passed. I think that explains why Abinadi’s account of the Godhead is so confusing.
Val 09:15 In 2021, I published an article in “The Interpreter” entitled “Josiah to Zoram, to Sherem to Jarom and, the Big Little Book of Omni.” What I show in that article is that by the end of the small plates, that is, by the end of theBbook of Omni, the Nephites had lost their knowledge of and belief in Christ instead of the Abrahamic religion of Lehi and Nephi. They now embrace the monistic Deuteronomist religion of Josiah that we talked about in some length last time. How did that happen? To be brief, Nephi split his political and religious power before his death. His son became the new king, his brother Jacob became the high priest. Nephi’s son was not a righteous man. We know from a sermon Jacob gave that he allowed the rich and the powerful to exploit the poor. He also enhanced his power by letting surrounding peoples lead away captive the daughters of his people, probably to cement political alliances. When Jacob publicly chastised the king’s behavior, the king enlisted Sherem to take down Jacob, his critic and rival. The theology of Sherem that he teaches is recognizably the one Josiah promulgated, theology that emphasizes keeping the Law of Moses and denying that there could ever be any Christ, any other god with the one God. The fact that Sherem was permitted to come and teach this among the Nephite people indicates that he must have the support of the king. Because if both the king and the high priest were opposed to him, there’s no way he could have taught those things.
Val 10:52 So, how did this new theology, championed by Josiah and the Deuteronomists get to the New World? Laman and Lemuel were Deuteronomists. We talked about that somewhat last time. I don’t remember at how much length. We can say this judging by everything they say and do. But for the Nephites, I think the main source was Zoram. Zoram was a scribe in Josiah’s Jerusalem, a keeper of plates, just the kind of person that one would expect to be well drilled in Josiah’s preferred theology. Expert knowledge of the scriptures would have given him religious authority, and Nephi promised Zoram that if he would come with them, he would have all the same freedoms Nephi, himself, would have. That freedom would include the right to teach his own theology. Nephi and Zoram were friends. But that doesn’t mean they had the same theological beliefs. I know that you, like me, have many friends whose theology differs from yours.
Val 11:45 Sherem’s name is similar to Zoram’s, in Hebrew, differing only in the initial consonant. Sherem has all the linguistic and rhetorical skills one would expect to find in a scribe, skills he could have acquired from Zoram, his father or grandfather.
Val 11:59 So, Deuteronomism also would have been an attractive theology to a king who wanted to exercise complete power. The theology posits a solitary God, all powerful, all power concentrated in just that one being. The religion of Abraham, by contrast, posits to a Council of Gods with the exercise of power diffused among various members of the Divine Council, the So’od Elohim, was what it was called. Nephi splitting his power was consistent with that theological view, the Abrahamic view, but the evidence suggests that his son wanted sole power, and certainly to dissolve the authority of his critic, Jacob. So, Sherem goes around ostentatiously looking for Jacob, and thus gathers a crowd. I mean, it was a tiny community. It would have been easy to find Jacob, but he seems to be going from place to place to get everybody to follow him, you know, ‘where’s Jacob, I want to talk to Jacob.’
Val 12:55 He then accuses Jacob of several capital crimes under the Law of Moses, as specified in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy instructed the people to kill any man or prophet who taught any doctrine not in the Law of Moses. In Sherem’s encounter with Jacob, his intent seems to have been to get Jacob killed. Instead, he gets a sign from Heaven, is nurtured by God for several days, then becomes conscious again and declares that he was in error, that there will be a Christ who will come and save the people. In the moment of Sherem’s confession, Jacob and the religion of Abraham seem to have triumphed, but they don’t, not ultimately. The king had the power to appoint High Priests. By the end of his life, Jacob feels depressed and marginalized. What Jacob says there at the end is the most depressing thing in all of Scripture. “I mourned out my days.” But leading up to that, it’s really depressing. Jacob’s family members have no special status after he dies. We see their decline from one generation to the next, with each person writing less than the one who came before him. They ultimately describe themselves as just foot soldiers in the king’s wars. They tell us [that] there are no more prophecies. Christ is not mentioned at all. Jarom, Jacob’s grandson, who is the only one who briefly alludes to him after that, [Christ] is not mentioned anymore. From then until the end, the small plates, the last small plates author Amaleki, Christ disappears. But while there are no revelations or prophecies in Amaleki’s day, Amaleki, nevertheless, talks about Christ. Amaleki finds his religion and knowledge of Christ in the writings of Nephi and Jacob which he has in the small plates. Everything Amaleki says about Christ is a direct quote of something Nephi or Jacob had written. Amaleki’s two-verse summary of the Gospel of Christ, which again, he gleaned from reading Nephi and Jacob in the small plates, then became Moroni’s model when he wrote Moroni, Chapter 10, the final chapter in the Book of Mormon. I’ve got an article coming out in The Interpreter that shows, I think, conclusively that Moroni 10 is mostly an expansion of Amaleki’s gospel pressies in Omni verses 24 to 26.
GT 15:11 So that’s why you call it “the big little book,” because it’s one of the shortest books in the Book of Mormon.
Val 15:16 It is, it’s short but it is packed with information and actually covers–the biggest part of that history is actually there in Omni; most of the speakers are there in Omni. Anyway, it makes sense that Moroni, who was not a confident writer, took as his model, when writing his final farewell, the author who Mormon envisioned as the final author in the Book of Mormon. Under Mormon’s plan, the small plates were appended to the large plates, which meant that Amaleki was the last Book of Mormon author, under Mormon’s plan. And so, when Moroni was looking for a model, he went and, well, who did Mormon envision would be the last person speaking? And he took Amaleki, then, as his model. I think people if they want to look at that article, they will be persuaded that what Moroni did when he was writing his final farewell was [he] went and saw what Amaleki had done at the end of the small plates, and just took that and expanded it. And that became that powerful ending that we have there in Moroni 10.
How Josiah’s Monotheism Apostasy Took Us Away from Abraham’s Religion
Val 16:21 But getting back to the original thread, Mosiah, the King in Amaleki’s day, who was a prophet and leads a migration to the land of Zarahemla, apparently, [he] didn’t know anything about Christ. The Gospel of Christ had to be restored to his son, Benjamin, by an angel. In the land of Nephi, it had to be restored by Abinadi. So, now we’re back to Abinadi, that’s where we started out with Steve’s and Margaret’s and everybody’s focusing on that passage in Abinadi. Neither restoration would have been necessary, if the Nephites had not previously abandoned and forgotten their earlier faith in Christ. So, before he received his revelation about Christ, Abinadi, probably had Deuteronomist beliefs, like the priests of Noah and the rest of the people in the land where he lived. So, theologically, he would have been in a circumstance similar to that of the people in 19th century America, who came to the Restoration with the monistic assumptions of Orthodox Christianity, since it took the saints 86 years to get clear about the relationships and roles of the members of the Godhead.
Val 16:26 It’s no surprise that Abinadi, who’s in the first years of a new dispensation may be somewhat confused about the Godhead relationships. He knows there’s a Father and Son, but he apparently doesn’t fully understand how they relate to each other. Or at least that’s a plausible explanation for why he says what he does about the Father and Son. So the main point here is there were two theologies that came into the Americas. And the older Abrahamic theology seems to have been expunged by this newer Deuteronomist theology. All this helps explain why we find the clearest Book of Mormon exposition of theosis at the beginning of the Book of Mormon, in the writings of Lehi and Nephi. Lehi and Nephi were at the tail end of a long tradition of theological pluralism. They had a well-developed understanding of the Divine Council of the Father, Mother, Son, and Holy Ghost. The maturity and fullness of that tradition is reflected in the richness of the experiences they have and the accounts they give. Following the apostasy that happens in this remainder of the small plates, the Nephites never fully recover that understanding. But there are, nonetheless, quite clear indications of theosis in Mormon’s abridgement of the large plates. We’ll look at three large plate manifestations of theosis. Let’s start with Alma the Elder.
GT 17:28 Well, let me jump in there. It’s interesting. When you look at the composition of the Book of Mormon, because we start, well there was the lost 116 pages. Right? So, we don’t know what was on there, although Don Bradley has a fabulous book.
Val 18:12 He did. Everybody go read that book of Don’s. It’s fabulous.
GT 18:24 Go buy it. It’s a great book. Anyway, so the lost 116 pages, our Mosiah Chapter One is actually Mosiah Chapter Three.
Val 18:38 Yes, it was part of that, right.
Joseph’s Evolving Godhead Understanding
GT 18:40 Okay. So if we look at the composition of the Book of Mormon, you’re saying, and correct me if I’m wrong. You’re saying that that section, is that where Sherem is?
Val 19:37 Sherem, no. Sherem’s in the, well, the small plates of course recapitulate the lost 116 pages.
GT 19:44 Yeah, because you started talking about Mosiah, and I thought wasn’t that in Jacob?
Val 19:48 Well, no. You had Nephi and then Jacob succeeds him.
GT 19:55 But those are on the Small Plates.
Val 19:55 Yeah. So, all this is happening on the small plates which replaces the lost 116, right?
GT 19:56 Right.
Val 20:01 So, by the time we get down to Omni, we’ve had, like, 400 years passed. So, we’re a long ways from Jacob at that point. Jacob had been in the first generation and Mosiah is coming in right at the tail end of that 400 year period. They spent 400 years in the Land of Nephi and then that first Mosiah comes in and leads the migration that takes them down to the land of Zarahemla.
GT 20:24 Okay.
Val 20:25 Or up to the land of Zarahemla.
GT 20:27 It doesn’t seem like 400 years to me, but maybe you’re right.
Val 20:30 Well, you have all these different–most of it is…
GT 20:33 Oh, you’re right, because you have all this.
Val 20:36 You have—
GT 20:36 I wrote this and I gave it to my brother, and he writes the next 3 verses.
Val 20:39 Omni, Abinadi you get all, they each write.
GT 20:42 I forgot about that.
GT 20:41 Okay, so at any rate, I’m trying to look at the composition timeline. So, Joseph and Oliver translate Mosiah through the rest, until Mormon, including the brother of Jared. So that’s this Deuteronomist understanding of God?
Val 21:06 Well, the Deuteronomist understanding of God comes in. I mentioned last time, that it’s really pretty providential that the Book of Mormon starts when it does, because that is the moment when LDS theology diverges from all the other theologies.
GT 21:23 Right.
Val 21:23 Josiah’s reform is what gave us this one God outside of time and space. Before that they had the Council of Gods, and the secular Old Testament scholars are pretty much in agreement about this. This is not a controversial point. So, a change was made in theology in Lehi’s day.
GT 21:41 Okay.
Val 21:41 Lehi didn’t go along with it. That’s my argument.
GT 21:44 Because we talked last time about how Abraham wasn’t a true monotheist.
Val 21:50 Right.
GT 21:50 And it wasn’t until Josiah, where Josiah was, like, (hopefully I get this right,) ‘Jehovah is God. There’s one God.’ We merge YHWH (Yahweh) and Elohim…
Val 22:04 Elohim.
GT 22:05 …together. And so, you’re saying Lehi was not a true monotheist?
Val 22:13 Well, at least, I mean, look at his opening vision. He sees God’s sitting on his throne, which is corporeal. Right? And that’s something else that was disappearing was this idea of God being a corporeal being. Then he sees another being descending down from, he sees Christ, followed by 12 others. So, he sees the Father. He sees the Son descending out of heaven, in a body. So, he sees the corporeal Father, the corporeal Son, descending down, followed by 12 others. So, that’s not this God outside of time and space, who sits all by himself and existed as the only existing entity before He created everything else. That’s a God surrounded by concourses of angels, with the Son there, with the 12 others and lots of others there. That’s the theology that Lehi is holding on to, but Josiah was getting rid of.
GT 23:06 Okay. So, the reason why I’m trying to do this, because you said, Abinadi–let me make sure I get this right. That’s where it sounds very Trinitarian.
Val 23:21 Yes, so, Abinadi–the priests of Noah, were clearly holding on to this Deuteronomist theology. They didn’t have any place for Christ.
GT 23:31 Right.
Val 23:31 They rejected the idea that there could be any kind of a Christ. And Abinadi probably grew up in that area with that theology. Because where did he come from? He probably was just some person in that community, called to be a prophet. But he got a revelation that there was a Father and a Son, which was, again, Sherem had tried to make that a heresy that could get Jacob killed, holding on to this competing Deuteronomist theology. So Abinadi is raised up, just like everybody was in America, under this Deuteronomist theology.
GT 24:11 Or Malaysia. No, just kidding. {Rick laughing}
Val 24:14 Or the Delmarva Peninsula.
GT 24:16 South America.
Val 24:17 or
GT 24:17 Sri Lanka.
Val 24:18 You’ve had many places.
GT 24:21 Sorry. Anyway. {both laughing}
Val 24:23 But I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the 19th century Americans.
GT 24:27 Yeah.
Val 24:28 The 19th century Americans all believed in this Deuteronomist God. Right?
GT 24:32 Yeah. My point is, here’s what I’m trying to go with. This is more for those with a naturalistic explanation for the Book of Mormon. So, if we look at the composition timeline, it sounds like Abinadi is a little bit Trinitarian. We go through, we get to some really interesting temple stuff with the brother of Jared. You need to go watch the Don Bradley interview with the temple stuff with the brother of Jared, which is incredible, mind blowing.
Val 25:03 Yeah.
GT 25:04 So you get some temple stuff. I like what Don says there. Then you get to Mormon. The book ends. And now Joseph gets the small plates to fill in for those lost 116 pages. And so, I wonder if you could argue, because you’re going to start pulling some stuff out of 1st and 2nd Nephi, which was translated last, if Joseph’s theology of Trinity/Godhead was changing. Do you see what I’m saying?
Val 25:41 Yeah, so here’s the thing is, we talked about the small plate stuff last time. We’re now going on to the rest of the Book of Mormon, and I’m going to give you three examples of this same kind of thinking.
GT 25:55 In the large plates.
Val 26:03 Yeah.
GT 26:04 Okay.
Val 26:04 Yeah, in the stuff he immediately started translating. I’m first going to talk about Alma, the Elder.
GT 26:05 So you’re arguing that the small plates and the large plates harmonize.
Val 26:10 Yeah. And as I said, I’m writing a paper right now on atonement theology, which is our approach to the atonement. We have all kinds of possibilities of atonement.
GT 26:24 Oh, and this is why we’re going to have to talk again. {both laughing}
Val 26:27 Maybe next summer, I might have it done by then. And that’s totally anchored or mostly anchored. I mean, I anchor a little bit of it in Lehi talking about opposition in all things. Because there’s a metaphysics there, but most of it is anchored in Alma talking about atonement. And that is, it’s very divergent from the Orthodox version of atonement. He’s got God constrained, a constrained God there, which fits with LDS theology, but in ways that it doesn’t fit with Orthodox theology.
{End of Part 1}
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