Thanks for digging this up. Midgley does not think much of the new historians, and
has taken Murphy to task for his paper. If you read the paper, you'll see that he
refers to papers Midgley wrote about the Church in New Zealand, but Midgley has
told me he confronted Murphy about twisting the meaning of what Midgley had wrote.
Murphy was squirming, as I understand it, but stood by his position. I would urge
all to take this the same way we have taken Bagley's book on the MMM; more heat
than light, and it shall pass quickly enough. Those with a real interest in it
might want to sign up for FAIR's listserve -- this has been a topic of fruitful
discussion there.
Jim Cobabe wrote:
A quote from Louis Midgley regarding those who question the Book of
Mormon historicity--Sterling McMurrin, former philosophy prof at the
University of Utah, typifies this crowd, and was the poster child of
many of the current followers of the dissident camp.
Revisionist HistoryThe Great Leap Forward
Some are still insisting that the Church must abandon the traditional
understanding of the beginnings of the faith. Why is such a revisionist
history, as it is now being called, especially by RLDS historians,
either desirable or necessary? Presumably, a competent, honest scrutiny
of the historical foundations of the faith, that is, a serious look at
the beginnings, discloses what Sterling McMurrin labels a good many
unsavory things. McMurrin, for example, charges that the Church has
intentionally distorted its own history by dealing fast and loose with
historical data and imposing theological and religious interpretations
on those data that are entirely unwarranted.
For McMurrin, the Mormon faith is so mixed up with so many commitments
to historical eventsor to events that are purported to be
historicalthat a competent study of history can be very disillusioning.
Mormonism is a historically oriented religion. To a remarkable degree,
the Church has concealed much of its history from its people, while at
the same time causing them to tie their religious faith to its own
controlled interpretations of its history. The problem, as McMurrin
sees it, is a fault of the weakness of the faith which should not be
tied at all to history. fn He strives to separate faith from history,
substituting naturalistic humanism fn for prophetic faithpromoting
the enterprise of philosophical theology as a substitute for divine
special revelations. McMurrin provides the least sentimental statement
of the intellectual grounds for a secular revisionist Mormon history,
that is, one done entirely in naturalistic terms. McMurrin sees the
Mormon past in what Leonard Arrington once called human or naturalistic
terms.
We should, from McMurrin's perspective, begin with the dogma that you
don't get books from angels and translate them by miracles; it is just
that simple. fn A history resting on that premise would require a
fundamental reordering of the faith. fn His program would retain only
fragments of a culture resting on abandoned beliefs. Marty, straying
from the core of his argument, eventually introduces many kinds of
integrity. Some of these are appropriate to insiders and others to
outsiders, some to church authorities and some to historians. fn But
given what Marty had already shown about the necessity of the decisive
generative events surviving the acids of modernity, it is difficult to
see how he could defend the integrity of a stance such as McMurrin's.
Certainly McMurrin's denials do not permit the survival of the crucial
historical foundations. But still, Marty defends the history being done
by some of those on the fringes of the Church whose arguments are not as
coherent as those of McMurrin, yet whose premises are not unlike certain
of his dogmas. fn
The Book of Mormon, when viewed as a fictional or mythical account, and
not as reality, no longer can have authority over us or provide genuine
hope for the future. To treat the Book of Mormon as a strange
theologically motivated brand of fiction, and in that sense as myth, is
to alter radically both the form and content of faith and thereby
fashion a new church in which the texts are told what they can and
cannot mean on the basis of some exterior ideology. To reduce the Book
of Mormon to mere myth weakens, if not destroys, the possibility of it
witnessing to the truth about divine things. A fictional Book of Mormon
fabricated by Joseph Smith, even when his inventiveness, genius, or
inspiration is celebrated, does not witness to Jesus Christ but to human
folly. A true Book of Mormon is a powerful witness; a fictional one is
hardly worth reading and pondering. fn Still, the claims of the text
must be scrutinized and tested, then either believed or not believed
without a final historical proof.
An historically grounded faith is vulnerable to the potential ravages of
historical inquiry, but it is also one that could be true in a way
