2007 talk at Sunstone Session: “Critical Vision: The Research and Writings of Jerald and Sandra Tanner.”

“Critical Vision: The Research and Writings of Jerald and Sandra Tanner.” 

As I reflected on what small contribution I could bring to such a distinguished panel, of all the subjects I could have spoken on I decided to speak on something that only I can speak on, namely what the Tanners have meant to me first as a Christian and then as a scholar, or more particular as a Christian scholar. I apologize in advance for speaking so much about myself in a session dedicated to the Tanners but given my subject it was unavoidable.

Psalms 31:5 and 65:16 refer to God as the God of Truth.   When I first became a Christian in 1976 I expected that Christians would be honest, and be careful to try and make sure that what they said was true.   Very quickly I learned that that unfortunately wasn’t always the case.

Naturally very early on I came into contact with Christian writing on Mormonism.  Some of it was quite good and accurate, as I knew even then from having lived for a time with a Mormon family as a teenager. Others however were very offensive to me because they seemed to be written not with the purpose of sharing the true and living Christ with Mormons, nor even training Christians how to do so, but rather with entertaining Christians by feeding them tantalizing morsels of the kind of deliciously scandalous blasphemies Mormon leaders had been in the habit of uttering down the years. 

It was in June of 1980, I believe, that the importance and uniqueness of the Tanners began to become clear to me, through my friend Chris Vlachos, now of Wheaton College in Illinois.  I derive the date from the conversation in question was at a place I worked at only since June 1, 1980 and yet it was still before the  Steve Mayfield, who under the name Stan Fields had penetrated deep into the Christian Community by pretending to be a Christian named Stan Fields.   Mayfield was exposed in July 1980 when H. Michael Marquardt happened to turn up at the wrong place at the wrong time and identify who he really was.   But already before that Chris had concluded that he was a Mormon spy because of the fact that although as part of his disguise, Mayfield/Fields regularly parroted Christian clichés, when asked about them he really had no idea what they meant.  Jerald was also very skeptical of him as well before he was actually caught.

Naturally this intelligence from Vlachos about Mayfield’s spying did not cause me to be impressed with the LDS Church.  I was never much inclined to view spying on people as something to include among the legitimate callings and ministrations of churches.  Apart from that however I was not particularly troubled by the story because I did not personally embrace Mormon truth claims. One thing that did bother me however, as I said, was my growing appreciation of the fact that several writers who bore the name Christian were neither careful nor accurate in the things they wrote about Mormonism.  It was not long after that Chris told me the story of how Ed Decker’s Simple Guide to your Temple Tour Tract claimed that the words Pay Lay Ale that used to be used in the Temple ceremony was Hebrew for “Marvelous Lucifer” or “Wonderful False God.”  He also told me how the Tanners had published a repudiation of this tract (this occurred on June 29, 1982). In response some people continued to pass out the tract but wih the offending words blacked out.  A second tract with the same information was run through a printing press a second time to cover the claim with a black block.

Naturally the account of these reprehensible shenanigans vexed me no end, but it warmed my heart to see the Tanners watch dogging Christian responses to Mormonism and exposing them when they went out of bounds.   Over the years I have seen them continue to fulfill this role again and again. We may think for example of their book the Lucifer-God Doctrine (1988) which was written in response to the further growth of the whole Pay Lay Ale claim that followed Decker’s joining forces with William Schoenbelen, and their Problems with God-Makers II, where they went to great lengths, for example, to defend Gordon B. Hinckley against certain outrageous charges that some of the people being interviewed raised against him.  

On a broader front, and here I come close to talking about what they mean to me as a scholar, the Tanners were always interested in finding out what the truth was even where it appeared to strengthen the hand of their opponents.   When Richard Lloyd Anderson challenged them about the authenticity of Oliver Cowdery’s Defence of My Grounds for Separating Myself from the Latter-day Saints, supposedly written in 1839, the Tanners pursued the issue and published a small booklet on 7 April 1967 declaring it a forgery, a thing that displeased Fawn M. Brodie more than a little.  On May 10, 1967 Brodie wrote to the Tanners in response saying: I regret to say that I cannot agree with you about the Cowdery “Defence.” After a most careful reading, I still b believe it to be genuine…I think your approach has been rather too mechanical. The document seems to have been written by a sensitive, visionary man, with considerable writing talent.”  As has been the case in so many instances throughout Jerald’s career, it is his view that went on to become the consensus view among scholars.  And then of course there was the issue of Mark Hofmann’s Salamander Letter, which Jerald openly and publicly doubted from the beginning (1984).  By avoiding the temptation to special pleading in these instances the Tanners rather than pitting them against one another as so often happen served the cause of both truth and the of Christ.

Now to the issue of how the Tanners have helped me understanding my calling as a scholar, and most especially as a Christian scholar. During much of the time in which I pursued my graduate and post graduate studies I received the Tanners newsletter.  I must admit that during those years I the question of Mormonism receded even deeper into the background than it already was.  During those years I seldom encountered a Mormon.  As important and pervasive as Mormonism appears in Utah, in fact there are many places where it’s footprint is very small.  A few years ago at the Toronto School of Theology reception at the meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Association of Religion in Atlanta, I was talking to an old friend about life in Utah, when an old professor of mine Schuyler Brown, of Saint Michael’s College, by that time having become fairly well lubricated by the wine that flowed rather freely at that event sidled over to our table and said rather loudly: “Did you say Mormon, I had a Mormon student once!”  So even though I enjoyed continuing to hear what was up with the Tanners, I lacked both the time and energy to closely follow their ongoing chronicling of that perpetual Watergate that goes by the name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.   All that would effectively change when I actually began working on my doctoral dissertation.  The reason for the sudden shift in attention is attributable to the structure of the University of Toronto, Toronto School of Theology doctoral program, which requires that you have two majors, mine were second temple Judaism and the Synoptic Problem, which relates to Historical Jesus research and two minors, in my case patristic and Paul, after which you are free to write your dissertation on anything you darn well please, so long as you can persuade someone to direct you.  So while during most of my doctoral program I was publishing articles on such things as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gospels, I suddenly shifted gear in order to write a dissertation on the interpretation of the seventh chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans from after the reformation until 1928, focusing especially on the reading of that chapter in the American Revivalist Tradition. The first thing I ever published on Mormonism was a study of Joseph Smith’s rendering of that chapter in the Joseph Smith Translation in Dialogue.  Part of the reason I chose this subject is that I was then living in Western New York, near the most significant sites of the Second Great Awakening.   This naturally brought me into contact once more with the many colorful an eccentric religious leaders that peopled the local landscape during much of the nineteenth century, Robert Matthews, Joseph Smith, John Humphrey Noyes,  Henry Foster, the Universal Friend (Jemima Wilkinson), and so on.  

And it was at this point that I began to face an interesting situation in that I found myself bumping up against a potential conflict between the responsibilities imposed on me by my scholarly calling and what might be called academic orthodoxy.  Every community has things that it can and cannot say.  This is true of Mormonism, of Evangelicalism, and of the scholarly guild when addressing religion. If you want to get along you ride with the wind of the currently reigning sensibilities.  Failure to do so invariably leads, at the very least to a rough go.  The Tanner’s provided a model for me in that they did not let the sensibilities of either the Mormon community nor the Christian community to compromise their quest for the truth.  The issue at hand that I was bumping up against in relation to the scholarly realm is well illustrated by an incident that took place here at Sunstone, in a session with the that gracious biographer of Joseph Smith, Robert Remini.  At that session I asked Remini how he would treat a figure like historical figure like John Humphrey Noyes, who had no followers today, differently from someone like Joseph Smith, who does have followers.  His answer was that in the latter case he would never write anything that would offend.  As a result I believe Rimini’s biography ended up being flawed in those points where his calling as a historian came into conflict with his desire not to offend, in cases, for example, like the dating of the revival that is supposed to have served as the backdrop of the first vision. In Rimini’s case, where he had been asked to write in an area in which by his own admission he had little expertise, and he was producing something for a popular audience, most of whom would be Mormons, this is forgivable.  Where it becomes difficult is in instances where one has to very creatively invent good motives for religious leaders of the past, where the historical evidence really suggests something else. To come right to the point, one of the difficulties in evaluating Joseph Smith as a historical figure is that when spiritual teaching tends to facilitate sexual misadventure on the part of a teacher the discussion of potential religious fraud or at the very least serious self-deception being operative cannot be ruled out of bounds in the scholarly discussion.  History is filled with religious leaders who parallel Joseph Smith in this regard, including the second-century Gnostic Marcus, Jan of Leyden, during the Reformation, nineteenth century figures like Robert Matthews, John Humphrey Noyes, Joseph Smith and Henry Foster, and in our own day people like David Berg of the Children of God and Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I am not talking about people who were simply found out to have clay feet, people like Jimmy Swaggert, Karl Barth, Ted Haggard, and certain Catholic Priests of the Diocese of Boston, but of people who attempted to provide theological legitimacy for ethically dubious sexual behavior.

           
Here again a scholarly orthodoxy as it attempts to offer equal though limited legitimacy to virtually all human religious expressions temps the scholar to create historical fictions to serve that end, leading a great deal of what is written in the field of religion to amount to feats of creativity and word magic rather than real solid historical research.  Following the Tanner’s examples I have tried to conform my scholarship to reality rather than to the demands placed upon me by the sensitivities and  prejudices of the various communities of which I am a part.

Finally there is the issue of self-promotion in scholarship.  I remember very well one of my professors had his articles on a desk inside the door of his office.  Students like myself had the tacit understanding that whatever we wrote for this professor had better think of some way to include reference to his work.  He was also forever in search of a protégé to perpetuate the legacy of his thought.  My working closely with him led to conflict on a number of occasions since I could not see my way clear of fulfilling that role for him.   I came away determined not to promote myself, nor to try to form others in my image, but rather to help them find their own idiom.  In all of this Jerald and Sandra presented me with as good a model as I have ever known.  In addition to this I could name right now a number of prominent scholars from distinguished universities who have imposed very artificial constructions on the evidence of history as a way of winning their fifteen minutes of scholarly fame.  Sandra, in contrast, has often commented in my presence on how much one can accomplish if one doesn’t care who gets the credit.  Some time ago the then Cardinal Ratzinger made the point that the less a truth claim is able to stand on its own the greater the temptation to try to prop it up by the illegitimate use of power.  Recently I was looking at a very nicely bound set of the collected works of a well known scholar of the last generation, in this case a Mormon, and I thought to myself how nice it was that he had people devoted enough to him to undertake the labor and expense of trying to preserve his legacy.  I am convinced however that otherwise he would have had no legacy since none of his idiosyncratic theories had theories were substantial enough to stand the test of time. The Tanners work however was different.  No one need preserve it, it was built to last, because it was built on a foundation of a commitment to truthfulness as basic to what it means to be a disciple of the God of truth. And I for one am thankful for their contribution.