The Theological Turn in Book of Mormon Studies

I’ve dedicated a lot of years to reflecting on and writing about one question: If we take the Book of Mormon as seriously as possible, fully attentive to both its literary and its historical complexity, what do we learn about theology? When I first set out to answer this question, I didn’t anticipate anyone beyond a few friends caring about it. But these days there seems to be talk of a theological turn in Book of Mormon studies, as if the question that has long driven me and a few fellow travelers has become interesting to a widening circle.

I heartily welcome this development. At the same time, I’ve found that it has brought with it a peculiar and perhaps dangerous idea: that trying to do theology with the Book of Mormon is (largely) unprecedented, something new under the sun at last. And to be fair, I have myself been convinced at times that Book of Mormon theology is genuinely novel. I see things differently today, however, and uncovering the roots of recent developments seems increasingly important.

Perhaps the most important reason for tracing the genealogy of the so-called theological turn in Book of Mormon studies is that, when it’s viewed as unprecedented, people almost inevitably see it as a reaction to—or really a rejection of—certain well-established styles of doing intellectual work on the book. And because some who work within those well-established styles speak loudly and often of their faithfulness to the Restoration, people too often conclude that a primary reason for doing theology with the Book of Mormon must be to dodge the language and the commitments of faith while working on scripture.

For my money, that conclusion couldn’t be more wrong. 

The recent history of Book of Mormon studies began with the 2002 publication of Terryl Givens’s By the Hand of Mormon. It was the first serious book on the Book of Mormon to appear with a major academic press, addressed as much to those outside as to those inside the faith. In many ways, Givens’s book brought a previous era of Book of Mormon studies to a close, summarizing its history and taking its measure. And a whole host of important developments in the field have followed it: reader’s and student editions, text-critical resources, summative encyclopedias, new initiatives and institutions, fresh publication outlets, and so on. In short, there’s the field before Givens’s book, and there’s the field after it.

Certainly, the current wave of theologians working on the Book of Mormon began to swell shortly after the publication of By the Hand of Mormon. And they—or, really, we—found ourselves spurred to work by a reading of Givens’s book. But there’s a deep irony in that, since one of Givens’s principal arguments in By the Hand of Mormon is that the Book of Mormon shouldn’t serve as a major point of orientation for Latter-day Saint theological work. How could we theologians have taken Givens as a point of departure, given our inclination to do the opposite of what he argued for?

At any rate, amid so many other developments in Book of Mormon studies, theology seems especially to be gaining in steam. Adam Miller organized the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar in 2008, which is issuing its twelfth volume of scholarship this year. A few philosophers and theologians created Salt Press in 2011, an early publishing outfit for theological work on scripture (later absorbed into the Neal A. Maxwell Institute). In 2014, the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies began publishing theological work alongside other approaches. A group of scholars gathered at Utah State University in 2017 created the Book of Mormon Studies Association, which now holds annual conferences and features much theology. The Maxwell Institute published the twelve-volume The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions in 2020. And several monographs and collections of essays now forthcoming in 2023 and beyond from the University of Illinois Press feature theological treatments of the Book of Mormon.

Book of Mormon theology seems to be here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. But, again, was the 2002 appearance of By the Hand of Mormon sufficient on its own to provoke these developments in Book of Mormon studies? It has apparently seemed to many as if the theologians have come out of nowhere, set in motion solely by the event-without-context that was the publication of Givens’s monumental book. Is that right?

In By the Hand of Mormon, Givens tells—deliberately and for his own important reasons—a one-sided story about Book of Mormon studies in the second half of the twentieth century. He rightly makes the ministry of President Ezra Taft Benson the culmination of twentieth-century Book of Mormon studies. (President Benson famously gave a series of astonishingly well-received sermons, beginning in 1986, on the Book of Mormon’s importance to the Restoration.) And Givens convincingly shows that President Benson gave official imprimatur to something that had already been developing. But Givens also tells only half of the history of Book of Mormon studies leading up to the climactic moment of those mid-1980s talks.

President Benson surely didn’t speak into a void. His words about the Book of Mormon were seeds that found ready soil—among the Saints generally, of course, but also among Latter-day Saint scholars. But it turns out that there were at least two kinds of ready soil among the scholars. The story of twentieth-century Book of Mormon studies as it’s most often told recounts the preparation of just one sort of soil. Filling out the picture should clarify the meaning of the theological turn in Book of Mormon studies that’s playing out now in the twenty-first century.

The better-known part of the story of Book of Mormon scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century begins with the so-called “new Mormon history” spearheaded by Leonard Arrington. This was an intellectual enterprise that introduced professionalism into historical reflection on the Latter-day Saint tradition and even—at least for a time—won the approval of the institutional Church. With beginnings in the 1950s, a first flowering in the 1960s, and remarkable successes in the 1970s, the new Mormon history nonetheless entered into a kind of crisis in the early 1980s. That crisis would give serious impetus to a growing field of Book of Mormon scholarship.

What triggered the crisis for the new Mormon history was, above all, the fact that its historical work had begun to encroach on various foundational faith claims for Latter-day Saints. In particular, the new Mormon history had begun raising difficult questions about the historical origins of the Book of Mormon. (Key, here, was the circulation of numerous documents linked to Book of Mormon origins that were later proven to be forgeries by Mark Hofmann.) It didn’t help that the early 1980s also witnessed a massive evangelical effort at discrediting the Latter-day Saint faith. The Book of Mormon appeared to be under attack from various angles, and scholars among the Saints responded.

Especially important for Book of Mormon studies in all this was the rise of a new institution that took as its explicit purpose to provide responses to criticisms against the Book of Mormon. Well before President Benson stood at the pulpit in 1986, the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) was gathering scholars who hoped to continue the kind of work Hugh Nibley had pursued for decades. These set to work gathering evidence for the Book of Mormon’s origins in antiquity. When President Benson’s sermons began to circulate, then, those sermons were naturally heard as a ringing endorsement for the kind of work FARMS scholars had already begun to do.

By the early 1990s, FARMS was running on fuel that burned hot due to the Church’s collective response to a prophet’s call. The organization hit a peak in the late 1990s (when FARMS moved officially onto campus at BYU), its scholars dominating Book of Mormon scholarship right up until Givens set out to write By the Hand of Mormon. Apologetics of the sort FARMS produced was never for everyone, but their publications had a large readership, and their contribution to Book of Mormon studies couldn’t (and still can’t) be ignored. They created journals, massive research endeavors, regularly updated readers about ongoing research, gathered Hugh Nibley’s writings on the Book of Mormon into handy new editions, and issued a steady stream of tomes on the Book of Mormon.

This, then, is the better-known part of the story of Book of Mormon scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century. The seeds President Benson began scattering in 1986 found ready soil among FARMS scholars, intellectuals who were inspired by the task of defending the Book of Mormon against criticism.

But there was a whole other field of well-prepared soil into which the same sermonic seeds also fell. And this is the part of the story of Book of Mormon scholarship that’s (far) less often talked about. It requires a little setting up.

When the new Mormon historians coalesced into a recognizable intellectual movement in the 1960s, something like a slogan seems to have guided them. Jan Shipps, an active participant in the movement but never a member of the Church, spoke of this with the keen eye of an outside observer. She reported, “I heard the assertion that ‘Mormonism does not have a theology; it has a history’ so often it seemed to be the mantra of the LDS intellectual community.”

In one sense, it’s obvious why thinky Latter-day Saints would repeat such a thing to each other at that time. At mid-century the sincerest compliments coming to the Saints from broader America were about the grand narrative of the move west, the taming of the desert, and the creation of a unique culture in the Great Basin. It was Latter-day Saint history on the grand scale that gave American members of the Church a real sense of place in the United States. The acceptance they’d been seeking since the beginning of the twentieth century was found in part in a robust sense of historical self-awareness.

Another motivation for the mantra is equally apparent. As a young religious tradition, Latter-day Saints had less time to develop the kind of intellectual sophistication with respect to their own faith commitments that the older Christian traditions had developed with respect to theirs. If intellectual respect was to be desired, it wasn’t clear that it could be readily won by talking about theology. It had been through theological elaboration that leading Latter-day Saint minds had presented the faith to the world early in the twentieth century, but that pursuit had fallen out of favor.

There was also a somewhat less obvious motivation lying behind the slogan “Mormonism does not have a theology; it has a history.” Exactly contemporary with the rise of the new Mormon history was the emergence and cementing of a fascinating and unbelievably influential Latter-day Saint effort at constructing a systematic theology: that of Bruce R. McConkie. It seems to me almost certain that the historians’ mantra had as its polemical target McConkie’s then-growing intellectual authority. He was the era’s most powerful theological voice for the Saints, and he would shape mainstream Latter-day Saint thought for at least half a century.

To some, it will seem strange to speak of McConkie as a theologian. He had no professional training in theology, and he deliberately didn’t read leading theologians from his own time or from the past. Instead, his ideas grew out of commonsense readings of scripture honed by the rigors of courtroom argumentation (his training was in law). In a word, McConkie was a theologian more by disposition than by training, but a theologian he certainly was. Over several decades, he developed a near-systematic and decidedly confessional exposition of the Latter-day Saint faith. This he then offered to members of the Church for their consideration. Among his natural gifts was an ability to present his ideas as somehow simultaneously authoritative in their own right and fiercely loyal to those in authority over him within the Church—even when these clashed with formal Church teachings.

It's hard to overstate McConkie’s influence on Latter-day Saint culture and thought in the second half of the twentieth century. By the time of his death in 1985, whatever he called “Mormon doctrine” had essentially become Mormon doctrine. 

Today, McConkie is often portrayed as an anti-intellectual, and his influence is often talked of as a consequence of growing Latter-day Saint anti-intellectualism in the post-war era. That doesn’t seem right to me. McConkie was no academic, true, but his writings and sermons exhibit profound trust in the capacities of the mind. He was sure he could think his way to a complete understanding of the Restored Gospel. What McConkie represented was thus a layman’s rationalism, an intellectualism independent of the strictures of academia because it was tethered to other structures of authority.

The result of McConkie’s approach to the life of the mind was that his theological system naturally appealed to conservatively minded believers with intellectual inclinations. For instructors in the Church’s seminaries and institutes of religion, and in BYU’s departments of religion, his words fell like manna from heaven. This warm welcome wasn’t due to a desire on the part of McConkie’s most avid readers to dodge intellectualism or rationalism; precisely the opposite. For these educators, McConkie’s writings traced the contours of another sort of the life of the mind, a fiercely intellectual project that was shaped by other loyalties and presuppositions.

McConkie soon had imitators, lay intellectuals with some formal or informal training in rigor, who wished to help build a rational and binding system of the Latter-day Saint faith. Many of these naturally found their way to the religion departments at BYU, where they formed—with an unmistakable nod to McConkie—a “doctrinal” school of scriptural interpretation. In the mid-1960s, McConkie published the first volume of his Doctrinal New Testament Commentary. This quickly became a genre others could contribute to, whether in the form of whole volumes of doctrinal commentary or in the form of doctrinal essays on passages or chapters of scripture.

By the 1980s, the doctrinal school of scriptural interpretation was well established at BYU, always with a strong sense of deference to McConkie’s style of doing theology. There was thus a whole other field of ready soil onto which the seeds of President Benson’s mid-1980s sermons would fall.

It’s no accident that the first volume of a Doctrinal Commentary on the Book of Mormon, written by two of BYU’s religious educators, appeared just a year after President Benson’s first talks. Nor is it a coincidence that the BYU Religious Studies Center published the first in a nine-volume series of doctrinal essays about the Book of Mormon the very next year. Doctrinal interpreters of scripture welcomed the new emphasis on the Book of Mormon quite as much as did the scholars that were gathered around FARMS. 

And as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, doctrinal study of the Book of Mormon matured in ways parallel to the apologetic endeavor. Especially important were emerging studies of the theme of grace in the Book of Mormon. From a strictly academic perspective, much of the doctrinal work on the Book of Mormon was of questionable value. It was work that, often enough, continued in the vein of McConkie’s lay rationalism. It nonetheless—especially in the hands of its ablest practitioners—exhibited something that FARMS scholarship largely didn’t: a clear sense for the pastoral needs of the Saints in the pews.

Douglas Davies, a keenly observant anthropologist reflecting on the labors of the doctrinal school at the end of the twentieth century, brilliantly explained this phenomenon. He saw “a twofold development” occurring in such work: “the one answers the needs of devoted Saints, laboring under apparently impossible goals of achievement,” while “the other displays the preparedness of a Church that now need not fear its distinctive identity to accept wider Christian theological terms.” Among its best representatives, McConkie’s legacy had begun to do theological work in the most traditional sense with the Book of Mormon as its point of orientation.

Meanwhile, some FARMS scholars began to raise questions about the viability of the doctrinal enterprise with the Book of Mormon. In the very first issue of FARMS’s first-launched journal, Louis Midgley argued that the doctrinal approach tended to “downplay or ignore the historical setting and content, narrative structure, language, and literary form in the text,” proving itself “unable to take us much beyond the received opinion on Mormon beliefs.” Midgley even wondered whether the new prophetic emphasis on the Book of Mormon might be a response to “our urge to advance seemingly authoritative answers to questions that are not addressed” in the volume.

There’s important continuity between Midgley’s concerns from the late 1980s and Givens’s arguments a decade and a half later. The tacit opponent of By the Hand of Mormon would seem to have been the doctrinal school of Book of Mormon scholarship, those who had begun to take the volume as a key resource for theology—or, at least, for what they called “doctrine.” That Givens gives so much of his 2002 book to telling the FARMS story and to celebrating their intellectual accomplishments would seem to confirm this, especially in light of the volume’s more or less total silence about the endeavors to read the Book of Mormon in BYU’s religion departments.

Now we see more clearly that, when Givens’s By the Hand of Mormon appeared in 2002, it engaged only one of two establishment forms of Book of Mormon study at the time. And this seems to explain in part how people in and around the field of Book of Mormon studies have made sense of recent developments—and especially of the theological turn in Book of Mormon scholarship.

The story that Latter-day Saint intellectuals have been telling about Book of Mormon scholarship prior to the twenty-first century is one-sided. We’ve been talking as if the only major thing that happened for the Book of Mormon in scholarly circles between the mid-1960s and the late 1990s is that FARMS arose. And when people have only that story in their minds, they can’t avoid the feeling that the recent theological turn in Book of Mormon studies is ultimately a turn away from what FARMS represents.

Further, because FARMS set out to defend the antiquity of the Book of Mormon, telling a one-sided story inevitably gives the impression that the theologians are motivated by a secularizing desire to dispense with the Book of Mormon’s historicity. They simply must be trying to cozy up to the secular academy, a sign that they lack faith in the Book of Mormon. Why else would anyone abandon the task of defending the foundational faith claim that the Book of Mormon wasn’t a product of Joseph Smith’s mind?

But if one considers the fuller story summarized above, the theological turn isn’t much of a turn at all. It’s certainly not a turning away from faith in the Book of Mormon, or even a turning away from apologetics. The theological school of Book of Mormon scholarship represents a positive project of its own with roots going back into the 1960s and 1970s (just like FARMS’s heirs today can claim about their own intellectual heritage). 

In Davies’s words again, the theologians are rooted in a twofold commitment. On the one hand, they hope, pastorally, to speak to the concrete needs of the Saints. On the other hand, they hope, academically, to measure the distance and the proximity between the Book of Mormon’s discernible theological commitments and those of the larger Christian tradition.

From where I’m standing, then, the growing efforts to read the Book of Mormon theologically today are a continuation—but also therefore a development—of the doctrinal program inspired by Bruce R. McConkie. The scholars who have spearheaded the so-called theological turn are products of the Church Education System, where they were shaped by the idea that scripture, and the Book of Mormon especially, ought to serve as a key resource for understanding the life of faith. They’re driven, like the best of the doctrinal school that preceded them, by the notion that good thinking about scripture is best pursued in a confessional setting and is ideally offered up to the body of Christ for reflection.

Naturally, today’s Book of Mormon theologians, such as Adam Miller and Rosalynde Welch, don’t simply reproduce the style and conclusions of their forebears. They’ve taken very much to heart the concerns Midgley once expressed about the first published efforts at doctrinal commentary on the Book of Mormon. And so they attend in all earnestness to “setting and content, narrative structure, language, and literary form.” They scour the writings of past and present Book of Mormon scholars, doing their best to understand historical context as well. They’ve learned from their predecessors about the dangers of merely reproducing “the received opinion,” and so they labor to see what the text itself has to say that hasn’t yet been understood clearly. 

Those working within and around the theological turn in Book of Mormon studies thus hope to bring more rigor to an old task—that of asking what the Book of Mormon has to say in a theological vein. It’s a “doctrinal school” of Book of Mormon studies made new in the twenty-first century. The hope is to bring ever more rigor to the task, and to be ever more attentive to the real-life demands of those who hold to the Book of Mormon in faith.

For almost half a century, the Book of Mormon has been the center of gravity for Latter-day Saints hoping to experience life in Christ. It has been the concrete object that has bodied forth Christ in the world where the Saints live and move and have their being. From where I’m sitting, it’s marvelously good news that there is a fresh generation of scholars willing to begin from the conviction that the book is true and then seek to articulate what the book calls believers to do.

Let these glad tidings be added to those that have long sounded from Cumorah!

Joseph M. Spencer is a philosopher and an assistant professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University.

Artwork by Zoë Petersen.