As part of a project I’m currently at work on, I’ve been reading as systematically as possible through the literature on the Book of Mormon that has been produced by adherents to the Community of Christ movement (formerly, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). It’s been a remarkably instructive experience for me, and I hope that the written result of my studies will be available in published form at some point. In the meanwhile, I thought I’d offer a few reflections on just one very-current Community of Christ reader of the Book of Mormon: Alan Tyree. What interests me in particular in Tyree’s treatment of the Book of Mormon—as found in his 2013 book, Millions Call It Scripture—is his use of William James. Let me generate a bit of a review of Tyree’s book here for a few paragraphs, and then I’ll raise some questions about the hermeneutical stakes of the sort of approach to the Book of Mormon Tyree recommends in James’s name.
Alan Tyree’s Millions Call It Scripture is one of two rather major interventions on the Book of Mormon issuing recently from Community of Christ. It appeared in 2013 alongside Dale Luffman’s The Book of Mormon’s Witness to Its First Readers, both published by Community of Christ Seminary Press. Both books take as their aim to get Community of Christ to “remove the Book of Mormon from the shelf and place it once more in the lap of the church so it might again responsibly inform the church,” as Luffman puts it (Witness, 200). Both books make their plea, crucially, while nonetheless explicitly rejecting the (ancient) historicity of the Book of Mormon. Together, then, Tyree’s and Luffman’s books mean to reclaim the Book of Mormon for their tradition precisely by determining what it means to read it as an inspired but unhistorical word directed specifically to a nineteenth-century American audience.
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