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The Book of Mormon itself never claims to be the “word of God”, does it? Does the Bible? It seems to me that they both only claim to be records of ancient religious experiences, much like a collection of journals. Brown wrote:The Book of Mormon itself never claims to be the “word of God”, does it? Does the Bible? It seems to me that they both only claim to be records of ancient religious experiences, much like a collection of journals.
Good point. In fact, the Book of Mormon clearly says it likely has mistakes of men. “Just because this here book has mistakes of men, don’t condemn the things of God.” So if the Book of Mormon and the Bible are largely the abominable imaginations and traditions of barbaric and darkened people, what’s to prevent them from having some sublime mysteries in there (Isaiah 58, Matthew 5, 6, 7, Luke 12, 16) also?
For what it’s worth (FWIW), I picture Joseph Smith with just a bit of a redness in his face, a big larger than usual veins in his neck, a slightly set jaw, and maybe just a touch bigger chest when this moment happened, “I told [them] that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and that a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts that any other book.” It’s good, but it’s not THAT good (or that safe). Heber13 wrote:…my point was that in the Church we see the Book of Mormon as the word of God, and
if there are errors in it which require them to republish with corrections, those corrections are to correct mistakes made by man and are minor grammatical changes, not substantial to the meaning behind the words…I think most Christians believe the same about the Bible, even if they agree it has errors in it, it is very much the word of God…Tom Haws wrote:Brown wrote:The Book of Mormon itself never claims to be the “word of God”, does it? Does the Bible?It seems to me that they both only claim to be records of ancient religious experiences, much like a collection of journals.
Good point. In fact, the Book of Mormon clearly says it likely has mistakes of men. “Just because this here book has mistakes of men, don’t condemn the things of God.” So if the Book of Mormon and the Bible are largely the abominable imaginations and traditions of barbaric and darkened people, what’s to prevent them from having some sublime mysteries in there…also?For the Book of Mormon, I think the nearly perfect “word of God” assumption is mostly a product of Joseph Smith’s story about where it came from and how it was translated through supernatural assistance. So the idea is that it should supposedly be approximately what God wanted us to have or else this could have easily been corrected during this whole process. For example, we have the disclaimer in the Articles of Faith that we believe the Bible is the word of God “as far as it is translated correctly” but the BoM is treated as if it was given directly from God to trustworthy prophets with no way this information could have been corrupted.
So the BoM is presented as being similar to the Bible but even better because it supposedly wasn’t ever mistranslated or altered by “uninspired” priests. However, the problem I have with this whole word of God theory is that I don’t see why exactly the Bible needs to be the literal word of God to begin with even if we had access to all the unaltered writings of the original authors in Greek, Hebrew, etc. To me it looks much more like it was often clearly the words of men from the beginning because there are so many examples of purported historical narratives and apparent opinions and hearsay with no indication whatsoever that they were all supposed to have been inspired or revealed directly by God.
Maybe the Bible contains some words of God if we want to assume that there are some legitimate revelations recorded in it and that Jesus was the incarnation of God but even Jesus gave the impression that there were some things he didn’t know (Mark 13:31-32). Personally, I like to give Paul, Luke, John, etc. the benefit of the doubt that they were telling the truth based on their own understanding and that they weren’t completely delusional but I don’t see why everything they wrote should automatically be considered the literal word of God even if the general idea of what they were saying was true.
I think you make a very good point DA. DevilsAdvocate wrote:Personally, I like to give Paul, Luke, John, etc. the benefit of the doubt that they were telling the truth based on their own understanding and that they weren’t completely delusional but
I don’t see why everything they wrote should automatically be considered the literal word of God even if the general idea of what they were saying was true. No more than the next guy. I think the concepts that the gospel writers recorded are “true,” to their understanding, but yeah, the literal word of God? Please?
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