Stumbling Over Seer Stones

The Redeeming Strangeness of the Book of Mormon

Scandalous Origins

A few years ago, during my first visit to the revamped Church History Museum, I happened to overhear a conversation between two recently returned missionaries as they read about the role of seer stones in the translation of the Book of Mormon, apparently for the first time. As they took in the exhibit’s large picture of Joseph Smith’s swirly, chocolate-colored stone, one turned to the other and asked, “So how’d it work?” The answer: a nervous laugh, then a shared shrug.

Religious history is full of the odd and extraordinary, but Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon is often seen as especially strange. Some of his contemporaries thought his claims so absurd they worried the Book of Mormon was “an atheistic plot to discredit all religion.” Many “knowing men” saw themselves as duty bound to stop such nefarious schemes and yet assured each other that the only people who took interest were the “unlettered,” believers in ghosts, goblins, and witchcraft. More recently, the claims are regularly mocked as crazy, if mostly harmless, in the musical The Book of Mormon.

Of course, then as now, bright, educated people have believed Smith’s story. But Latter-day Saints often share incredulity about his audacious claims, if only privately and with a different sort of apprehension and intensity. Is it really reasonable to believe them? And if so, how? To all of us, believers and skeptics, Joseph Smith expressed his sympathy: “I don’t blame anyone for not believing my history; if I had not experienced what I have I could not have believed it myself.”

Despite such permission to admit perplexity, Latter-day Saints often seek to normalize or divert attention from the Book of Mormon’s unsettling origins. We emphasize how participation in folk magic was fairly common in Smith’s time and place. We argue that his engagement in it was necessary preparation for the supernatural events of the Restoration. We point to strange stories in the Bible or peculiarities in other traditions’ histories. And we worry that preoccupation with seer stones diverts our attention from the subtlety and power of the text.

These various responses to the scandal of the Book of Mormon are understandable, and they can be an effective means of encouraging readers of all kinds to take the book seriously. But what would happen if we leaned into the strangeness of seer stones and other bewildering details of the book’s production? What if, in those disorienting details, we find help with the divine work the book’s words call us to join? What if our embarrassment and discomfort are central to the book’s purposes, a vital feature of its power to connect us to Christ, which also means to each other—the convicted and incredulous both?

To see what we might gain from embracing the strange, we have to first see the scandal in the New Testament’s sense of the term. A skandalon, the Greek term often translated as “stumbling block,” is a confusing, even offensive, surprise. Paul uses the term in an explanation to the Corinthians of Christ’s crucifixion: “We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” And he explains that the purpose of this challenging foolishness is to unify the human family in humility: “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong; God chose the insignificant and despised things of the world—yes, even things that don’t exist—to abolish the power of the things that do exist, so that no creature could boast in God’s presence.”

Falling over a stumbling block prepares us to be reoriented and remade, which is the aim of Joseph Smith’s broader project of translation. As Samuel Brown argues, the project included the Book of Mormon, the New Translation of the Bible, large sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, and the temple liturgy, and its aim was to transform what the Bible means—that is, what it does—to its readers. For Smith, the Bible was “a precious trace of the . . . presence of God and a . . . conduit to communion with the ancient authors,” and its readers, whether they believed it to be an inerrant universal text or a flawed regional history, were cut off from the conduit. The point of Smith’s project was to reconnect readers to that presence of God and their ancestors and gather them into a “simultaneous human family.”

Adding to Brown’s argument, I want to suggest that the mechanisms of translation may be an indispensable catalyst for the intended collective transformation, especially as the Book of Mormon’s seer stones are concerned. In his adaptation of a practice (folk magic) valorized by the unschooled for its material promise and demonized by the literate for its “mystical” pretensions, God frees us from prisons of class division and worldly wisdom as much as those of time and space. And by calling Smith to dig up gold plates only to return them to heaven, God challenges us to live with an eye toward a heavenly world that is deeply and mysteriously intertwined with our own.

The Function of the Skandalon: Reconciling the Wise and the Foolish

If we look away from the Book of Mormon’s bewildering birth too quickly, we may look past the way the unsophisticated (the Joseph Smiths of the world) are deeply connected to the well-being of the wise, and how God is calling us to be “familiar with all.” We may fail to fully appreciate the way God is at work in the weakness among us and how he calls us out of small-mindedness, using simple means to bring about remarkable things. Various passages in the book itself challenge us to consider how we are prone to resist these calls and how its peculiar origins will make them difficult for many to hear. The book seems profoundly aware that those who feel convicted by its claims will be put into a new, controversial relationship with the world, perhaps especially if they are, as the text would put it, “learned.”

The clearest example of this self-consciousness is Nephi’s application of Isaiah 29 to the origins of the Book of Mormon. He uses Isaiah’s talk of sealed prophecy to describe the Book of Mormon, whose power is essentially sealed off from the learned because they will not read it, leaving the power to be experienced by the unlearned. Latter-day Saints commonly read this passage as an anticipation of Martin Harris’s encounter with Charles Anthon, but as Joseph Spencer argues, Nephi has a larger group in mind. Spencer emphasizes the plural pronoun Nephi uses in expressing God’s response to the refusal of the learned to read the book: “Then shall the Lord God say unto him: The learned shall not read them, for they have rejected them, and I am able to do mine own work; wherefore thou shalt read the words which I shall give unto thee.”

It is tempting for contemporary believers to read this “they” as a reference to secular atheists, but the people Nephi appears to have in mind are the educated and pious who think they understand God’s ways. The next verses quote Isaiah 29:13–14: “Forasmuch as this people draw near unto me with their mouth, and with their lips do honor me, but have removed their hearts far from me, and their fear towards me is taught by the precepts of men—Therefore, I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people, yea, a marvelous work and a wonder, for the wisdom of their wise and learned shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent shall be hid.” These people try to escape or control God’s marvelous work by overconfident interpretation of scripture, so God produces more of it, and by unnerving means. 

Nephi describes the translation of the Book of Mormon by turning Isaiah’s image of a whispering ghost from the underworld (a “familiar spirit” in the King James Translation) into a picture of divine, intergenerational communication. On his account, the whispering is ignored by the learned, who build many churches but dismiss the power of God. Thinking themselves wise and capable enough to do the work of God without his power, they stumble “because of the greatness of their stumbling block,” which is perhaps the Book of Mormon itself.

God sends the Book of Mormon to them not merely to address their pride, but to combat the way it divides the human family. As Nephi sees it, the learned’s attempt to control sacred text and God’s work has higher stakes than arcane theological debate. The effect is to turn churches, even religion itself, into a project of self-aggrandizement resulting in factionalism and division: “Their churches have become corrupted, and their churches are lifted up; because of pride they are puffed up. They rob the poor because of their fine sanctuaries; they rob the poor because of their fine clothing; and they persecute the meek and the poor in heart, because in their pride they are puffed up.”

The Book of Mormon, Nephi sees, will enter this contentious, unequal world and “hiss forth” without much success because many are confident they know how God works in the world, or more specifically, because they want comfort and control rather than God’s challenging word. The Bible, then, becomes something to possess rather than something to be possessed by: “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible!” They do not reject the words of the book as much as the event of the book—its production, its claims to sacred history, its disruptive claim to the status of scripture. The Book of Mormon reasserts the transformative, unmanageable nature of scripture and its transformative demands. The learned resist this work and resist the interdependence it requires. They ignore, for instance, the way their Bible flows from the history of people they refuse to integrate and appreciate: “And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them?”

To confront these problems of pride, division, and inequality, God decides to confound the learned, or to quote my Jewish Study Bible’s translation of the verses Nephi is working with, to “baffle [the] people with bafflement upon bafflement” so “the wisdom of its wise shall fail, and the prudence of its prudent shall vanish.” To save the learned from their self-importance that stands in the way of justice and reconciliation, he has to work with the unlearned to reveal his power and aims in startling ways—new scripture through unexpected means (seer stones) and an unsophisticated messenger (Joseph Smith).

But limited as the learned may be, God has his eyes on the weaknesses of the unlearned as well, and the details of the Book of Mormon’s translation help us appreciate this, too. The folk magic in which the unlearned Smith participated involved not only weird and implausible claims but also a shadowy, greedy side. His connection to “money digging” is inextricably linked to his translation of the Book of Mormon, and without a sense of the conniving secrecy of that world, we miss the way God ennobled a lowly and lost soul.

Smith’s association with treasure hunting threatened production of the Book of Mormon. His First Vision set him on a new path, but his self-interested seeking after entertaining thrills and wealth kept hold of him well after he learned of the plates. As he recounts in his official history, “I was left to all kinds of temptations and, mingling with all kinds of society, I frequently fell into many foolish errors and displayed the weakness of youth, and the foibles of human nature; which, I am sorry to say, led me into divers temptations, offensive in the sight of God.” The society he has in mind here likely includes fellow money diggers, some of whom felt their shared enterprise entitled them to the gold plates, enough that they tried to violently steal the plates from him. Lust for riches among some of Smith’s associates was, evidently, quite strong.

The angel Moroni understood Smith’s connection to this society and saw his need to leave its small, shallow world behind. During that first night of visitations, he warned Smith that the plates could not be obtained by one seeking riches. Yet, as Oliver Cowdery recounts (in a history Smith read and approved), by the time Smith arrived at the Hill Cumorah, “the certainty of wealth and ease in this life, had so powerfully wrought upon him” that Moroni’s warning “had entirely gone from his recollection.” Smith tried to take possession of the plates but was prevented as “a shock was produced upon his system, by an invisible power which deprived him in a measure, of his natural strength.” This would not be the last time he would be prevented from obtaining them. Joseph returned on the same date, year after year, finally securing them on his fifth try.

Brigham Young is reported to have described the process of acquiring the plates as one in which God deliberately used Smith’s interest in riches to lead him to higher pursuits. In Young’s telling, God initially told Smith only that there was “treasure in the earth” that he wanted him to possess, and later led him along “day after day week after week year after year” until he produced the Book of Mormon. Only gradually did Smith realize that the Book of Mormon was the promised treasure.

Despite Smith’s significant transformation, some features of folk-magic culture survived. He remained, for example, interested in relics of the dead and spoke approvingly of seer stones up until his death. But through the production of the Book of Mormon, he turned decisively away from what might have been a life of avarice and frivolity, of desire for ease and a thrill-seeking spirituality. And in this turning, God revealed to both Smith’s contemporaries and to us today the emptiness of his prior aims.

What’s more, God revealed what he can do with flawed material and how human desires can be elevated and refined. Through producing the Book of Mormon, Smith developed a profound commitment to the life of the mind. Rather than merely boasting of his translation powers and thumbing his nose at the learned, Smith worked to join them. Though he had given modern readers an ancient book without aid of schooling or scholarship, he sat down to study Hebrew and Egyptian. His methods were not always conventional, but he sought teachers, pursuing learning rather than dismissing it. In seeking treasure, he looked for excitement and material security, but in seeking God, he found a noble quest for intelligence and communion with the human family across time, space, and class.

Strangeness for the Sake of Zion

God’s use of early American folk culture in bringing about the Book of Mormon, then, might be an essential feature of, rather than a distraction from, his marvelous work and wonder. By choosing Smith, he revealed not only the limits of the learned but also his power to pull the unlearned out of their foolishness. The foolish who partner with him learn the glory of intelligence just as the learned become as children, astonished out of their smugness and self-satisfaction. More importantly, he revealed that the learned and unlearned need one another. Perhaps the point of calling Smith in his weirdness is not merely to convince us that mystical things like seer stones exist, as if that in itself were a significant step in heaven’s direction. Rather, the purpose is to loosen the hold of misguided and often unconscious convictions that impede the building of redeeming relationships.

If the Book of Mormon is true, the wise need the foolish and the unlearned need the learned. If it is trustworthy, God is at work in the cosmos, which contains realities incomprehensible to every human being. If it is real, we should not be surprised that even believers wonder. As Smith’s wife Emma explained years after his death and in the face of compelling personal reasons to doubt him, witnessing the book’s miraculous reality didn’t make it any more believable. “Joseph Smith,” she told one of their sons, “could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter, let alone . . . a book like the Book of Mormon. And, though I was an active participant in the scenes that transpired, and was present during the translation of the plates, . . . it is marvelous to me, ‘a marvel and a wonder’ as much so as to any one else.” A challenging awe, not comfortable certainty, is what we should expect from experience with the divine power that brought about the Book of Mormon.

“By the power of God,” Smith proclaimed just before his death, “I translated the Book of Mormon from hieroglyphics; the knowledge of which was lost to the world; in which wonderful event I stood alone, an unlearned youth, to combat the worldly wisdom, and multiplied ignorance of eighteen centuries.” Yet the book is not an assault on learning. It calls for careful reading and celebrates the proliferation of books. Moreover, its production was not a celestial magic trick meant to display divine power for its own sake. Rather, the odd miracle of its advent is a spur to soulful seeking and socializing. Through it, God reveals the limits of human learning and worldly wisdom and directs them to divine ends—not merely the pursuit of sacred knowledge and connection to an unseen world, but the reconciliation of broken families, learning from sacred histories, healing of intergenerational wounds, and the building of Zion.

Stumbling over seer stones, we might welcome the possibility that God’s aim with the book involves both what it says and how its origin story challenges our common sense and worldly aims, even when they seem utterly reasonable and religious. Both the text and the event of the Book of Mormon call us to believe in a demanding but hopeful world wherein the way to heaven is not a path toward learned prudence or the security of wealth, but the walk of a community that puts wisdom in the service of God's call to seal ourselves together—rich and poor, ancient and modern, scholar and fool alike.

James Egan works as an attorney in health care in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the treasurer of Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, and his most recent release of piano-led pop rock is the album “Invisible Light.”

J. Kirk Richards is a visual artist based in Provo, Utah who specializes in Judeo-Christian themes.