The Joys & Dangers of a Textual Faith

Wrestling Towards Wisdom

I confess to a textual faith. I am not proud of this fact. I think that I would be a better disciple if my faith centered more on service to others, personal communion with God, or vanquishing my sins, but the core activity of my spiritual life is reading scripture. I have experienced great joy in this approach. But there are dangers too. Consider Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon, 
There we sat down, 
Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; 
And they that wasted us required of us mirth, 
Saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
	
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
Let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, 
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; 
If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom 
In the day of Jerusalem; 
Who said, “Rase it, rase it, 
Even to the foundation thereof.”
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; 
Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee 
As thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth 
Thy little ones against the stones.

The first three sections of the psalm, verses 1–6, capture beautifully one of the central experiences of being a believer: alienation from the world. In mortality, we find ourselves cast out of Eden, living in Babylon while longing for Jerusalem. We must endure the taunts of those who do not understand the difficulty of singing the Lord’s song in a strange land. We pray that we can remember those moments when we have experienced Zion and seek to bind ourselves to them, pledging the cunning of our right hand in the hope of our own faithfulness. In short, reading Psalm 137:1–6 can both capture a central spiritual experience and in so doing capture our hearts, giving us tools to sacralize our discomfort with the world.

However, beginning in verse 7, where the psalmist invokes Edom, the experience of reading becomes very different. Now we are to remember the Bronze Age enemies who called for the sacking of Jerusalem. We are not to forget the need for violent retribution against Edom. We must cultivate our thirst for vengeance. The viciousness escalates as the psalm moves to its conclusion, addressing itself to the daughter of Babylon, a mother of young children, and exulting in the brutal murder of her “little ones.” As I read it, the bloody schadenfreude of these verses repulses me. 

At the beginning of the psalm, I sink uncritically into the language. I let the anguish and longing of the images play across my heart and mind. I insert myself into the scriptural text, and I let that text describe my experience. When I read the end of the psalm, however, I scramble to distance myself from the text. No longer do I read this in terms of some spiritual universal with an authority that applies to me. Rather, my impulse is to historicize, contextualize, and limit the authority of the text. I find no spiritual sustenance in the image of infant brains dashed on rocks, nor do I want anything to do with an authority that would demand such things. Hence, while I am willing to hear the voice of God in verses 1–6, any God who would bless the climax of verses 7–9 would be a monster.

Part of what it means to accept a text as scripture is to accept its authority in the hope that the process of reading scripture has a unique power that other texts lack. Thus, to read a scripture faithfully is to read it hopefully, to read it in the conviction that the act of reading can bring us closer to God. But faithful reading, like all faithful action, comes with challenges—trials and sins that seem to damn our hopes as foolishness. Most Latter-day Saints have little difficulty understanding this dynamic when it is applied to the challenge of following God’s commandments in the face of despair and temptation. We would do well to realize that the same is true of the mental activity of faith, perhaps nowhere so much as in reading scripture. 

The scriptures contain any number of monstrous passages. Deuteronomy calls for genocide (Deut. 20:17). Revelation delights in images of an orgy of violence against the wicked (Rev. 17). Leviticus decrees the death penalty for gay men (Lev. 20:13). The Book of Mormon contains patently racist verses equating skin color with righteousness (2 Ne. 5:21). What are we to make of such passages? How do we read the scriptures faithfully without succumbing to the darkness that these verses seem to call us toward? Let me suggest two ways of approaching these hard passages.

First, we can take them as part of the test of mortality. In Alma 34, Amulek teaches that this life is the time to prepare to meet God, “which is given us to prepare for eternity, behold, if we do not improve our time while in this life, then cometh the night of darkness wherein there can be no labor performed” (v. 32–33). We understand this process of preparation in terms of learning to discern between right and wrong, choosing to follow God, and repenting when we fail to do so. We can read the scriptures in light of this teaching. Consider two passages in the Book of Mormon. One of the hardest verses to read in a world that recognizes the evil of racism is Nephi’s account in 2 Nephi 5:21:

And he [God] had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing to my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.

There are layers of ugliness in this passage. It links righteousness to skin color. It suggests that the Lord uses disgust at miscegenation as a providential tool. It has been the font of much damaging and racist theology. I hate this passage of scripture. I hate reading it. I hated reading it to my children and then laboring with them in the teeth of the text to reject its racist theologizing. But 2 Nephi 5:21 is not the only thing that the Book of Mormon has to say about race. We can contrast it with the later teachings of Nephi in 2 Nephi 26:33:

For none of these iniquities come of the Lord; for he doeth that which is good among the children of men; and he doeth nothing save it be plain unto the children of men; and he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.

In contrast to Nephi’s earlier teachings, Nephi here presents a universal view of God’s love, one where we are not to impute iniquities to the Lord and where “all are alike unto God.” We can understand the process of reading 2 Nephi as presenting us with a choice: Will we follow Nephi’s earlier teachings, or will we follow his later teachings? They are not consistent with one another. There is a contradiction between the frank conflation of race and righteousness in the earlier passage by Nephi and the universal vision of the later verses. 

When we choose Nephi’s earlier teachings, we are led toward the world of tribal hatred and human degradation that later passages of the Book of Mormon so graphically illustrate. When we choose to stand with the later verses, we are invited to love those who are different, to seek community as children of God, and strive to see others in the way that those verses teach us that God sees them. We can deploy the authority of the text for either vision. The scriptures are a challenge to us, inviting us to reveal who we wish to become and how we choose to understand God’s purposes.

Second, we can learn from the terrible passages of scripture. As he closes his father’s record, Moroni is poignantly aware of the difficult text that he is leaving to us. Directly addressing his readers, he says:

Condemn me not because of mine imperfection, neither my father, because of his imperfection, neither them who have written before him; but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been (Mormon 9:31).

We often think of wisdom as something that we acquire from reading the scriptures, rather than something that we must bring to them if they are to teach us. Moroni suggests a complex process, one where we are invited to recognize the imperfections in prophets and scripture as a way of being “more wise” than they. This is not a matter of coming to the text as a moral authority trumpeting our superior enlightenment. We become “more wise” through the process of reading itself, of wrestling humbly with the text, and then giving thanks to God for any wisdom received. The emphasis on thanksgiving shifts the source of wisdom from self to the Lord and dictates the moral and emotional stance we are to take to this process: humility and gratitude rather than pride or self-congratulation.

The danger of fundamentalism in reading scripture does not lie merely in mistaken claims about science or history. Rather, it lies in the mistaken belief that we can accept scripture as a single transparent authority. It pretends that we can follow every teaching and every example in the sacred text and come out the other side with a life both coherent and moral. This is a conceit. It is not true that scripture can be such an authority. A fundamentalist view of scriptural authority is false both because scripture often speaks with conflicting voices—think of the earlier and later teachings of Nephi on race—and because that fundamentalist view fails to recognize the monstrous evil of dashing out the brains of infants on rocks. 

But there is a danger, as well, in the kind of reading that I am advocating here. The danger is that we always judge and read scripture based on the beliefs that we bring to it and lose the possibility of scripture confronting and changing our beliefs. A sacred book that does nothing but provide us with an opportunity to glibly issue judgments based on our pre-existing beliefs would be of very little value. Such an approach would reduce scripture reading to something more like a political scrum on social media, a kind of vacuous moral preening. Part of the value of a revealed text must be that it challenges our existing beliefs, forces us to reconsider them, and, one hopes, helps us acquire new convictions and commitments that will bring us closer to the Lord.

If we reject the idea that the authority of scripture lies in its status as a complete and consistent encyclopedia of moral and theological teachings, there is also the danger of simply rejecting the authority of scripture. To do this, however, would be to lose the joy and power of a textual faith. Such a faith is based on the hope that through the experience of humbly reading and wrestling with scripture, we experience God and draw closer to him. Like all of mortality, this is a perilous and contingent endeavor, one in which we can give ourselves no assurance of success and can only hope for aid from the Lord and his spirit.

As we struggle toward the light, our only hope lies in a hand that reaches down from above and helps us upward. The text of scripture is a place where that struggle occurs, but what reaches out to us is not the text of scripture but the hand of the living God. The authority of scripture lies in the faith and hope that such an experience can be repeated again and again as we read its pages, including those that we are tempted to pass over.

Nate Oman is a law professor at the College of William & Mary who writes, among other things, about law, politics, religion, and books.

Artwork by Fidalis Buehler

Correction: An earlier version of this essay incorrectly identified the speaker in 2 Nephi 26:33 as the prophet Jacob. The author wishes to thank Grant Hardy for pointing out the error.

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