Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements

New Bibles and New Revelations

E. Gallagher

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137434838
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión comparada

New religious movements both read the Bible in creative ways and produce their own texts that aspire to scriptural status. From the creation stories in Genesis and the Ten Commandments to the life of Jesus and the apocalypse, they develop their self-understandings through reading and writing scripture.

I

New Visions

Introduction

Every reading of a scriptural text is an interpretation. Even the assertion that a reader is simply apprehending the literal meaning of the text is based on assumptions about how the text’s meaning and message can be received and expressed. But, whether they are ostensibly personal readings or ones that intentionally locate themselves in a tradition or a community of interpreters, comparatively few readings of scriptural texts announce themselves to be such new, compelling, and radical departures from established reading practices that they merit the kind of widespread acceptance that would lead to the transformation of allegiances. Few offer comprehensive new visions of scriptural texts and the roles that they should play in the lives of individuals and communities. Fewer still claim that a new social group needs to form around the new reading of scripture. Periodically, however, readers of scripture proclaim that they have achieved an unprecedented insight into the meaning of a text or an entire religious tradition. They claim that their insight is so fresh, distinctive, and powerful that nothing less than a complete reevaluation of all previous thinking about the text in question must be undertaken. From that perspective, the new reading constitutes a new beginning, a refoundation of all that has preceded it. Some readers of scripture, that is, have grand ambitions. They want, often desperately, not only to read scripture their way but also to have others embrace, re-enact, and act upon their new reading.

Such grand ambitions are not easily achieved. Dramatic breaks with traditional readings, especially when coupled with the claim that everyone who encounters them should accept them, need to be persuasively articulated. But even then they quickly provoke a string of questions that revolve around the issue of authority. Anyone proclaiming such a dramatically new reading of a familiar text or tradition must satisfy a potential audience’s questions about the authority of such claims if the claims are to have influence on anyone beyond the individual who makes them. Bruce Lincoln sums up the kinds of questions that can come up:

Who is able to speak with authority? Where and how can one produce authoritative speech? What effect does such speech have on those to whom it is addressed? What responses does such speech anticipate? What responses does it allow? And what consequences can unanticipated and disallowed responses have for the construction, exercise, and maintenance of authority?¹

The three chapters in this part focus especially on Lincoln’s first question. They investigate how selected readers of scripture have attempted to legitimize their dramatically innovative understandings of familiar texts, both for themselves and for the audiences they hope to attract to their new messages.

All but one of the examples hinges on some type of prophetic experience. Joseph Smith, for example, recounts a series of visions that led him to recover the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon, a new scriptural text for a new church, was inscribed. Locating himself squarely within the tradition of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in the early twenty-first century a less well-known prophet, Matthew Philip Gill, claimed that visionary experiences led him to produce The Book of Jeraneck that includes “a further testimony of Jesus Christ & a record of the former inhabitants of the British Isles.”² Similarly, to secure his position as the leader of a small sect of Bible students within the Adventist tradition, Vernon Howell alluded to an experience of ascent into the heavens while in Jerusalem in 1985; that experience bestowed on him an unshakeable sense of mission that was summed up in the name that he took thereafter, David Koresh. After Koresh’s death in 1993 a new prophet arose in the Davidian Adventist tradition. Calling himself the “Chosen Vessel,” he detailed a new revelation that continued and supplemented what Koresh had preached. Initially, Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan and author of The Satanic Bible, seems not to fit in with Smith, Gill, Koresh, and the “Chosen Vessel.” He claims no supernatural authorization and he attributes the material in his new Bible solely to his own insight. But The Satanic Bible does constitute a reading of the Christian tradition. LaVey’s Church can be seen as a “counter-Christianity” that endeavors to undo and reverse the distinctive emphases of the Christian tradition. LaVey, the “Black Pope,” sets himself up as a counter-prophet. At least part of The Satanic Bible, which LaVey claims should be “revelation” to those who doubt established truths,³ makes surprising and innovative use of material from the Christian scriptures. Finally, when a sectarian split occurred in the Church of Satan in 1975 and Michael Aquino left the group to found the Temple of Set, Aquino himself claimed prophetic authority for his leadership based on a revelation given to him by the ancient Egyptian deity Set.

The individuals in this section grounded their innovative interpretations of the meaning of scripture and tradition on their claims to extraordinary experiences of revelation or insight. Those experiences gave them unprecedented understanding of texts long recognized as scriptural and authoritative. They were convinced that the new truths that they had discovered could only be accommodated by the founding of new and distinctive religious communities. With the intriguing exception of LaVey, they all answered the question of “who is able to speak with authority?” with some variation of the assertion that “I am, because I have been contacted by powers beyond the human realm who have authorized me to speak.” They all claim, in short, some sort of charismatic authority.

When Max Weber developed the analytical notion of the charismatic legitimation of authority, he opposed it to two other forms. He posited that legal authority was legitimized on purely rational grounds. It rested “on a belief in the ‘legality’ of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands.”⁴ In contrast, Weber described traditional authority as “resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority under them.”⁵ Different from the other two forms of legitimate authority, however, was charismatic authority. It rested “on devotion to the specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of the individual person.”⁶ Crucial to Weber’s understanding of charismatic authority, was the contention that “it is recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is decisive for the validity of charisma.”⁷ Lacking an audience that is willing to recognize and act upon charismatic claims, charismatic authority has no social impact. As Charles Lindholm describes it, “Charisma is, above all, a relationship.”⁸ The individual claimants to charismatic authority discussed in this section are trying to form relationships with audiences that recognize their charismatic claims to interpret scripture and tradition in innovative ways. Beyond seeking recognition of the legitimacy of their interpretive attempts, they are endeavoring to enlist others in the remaking or refounding of a preexistent tradition. They want to move people, intellectually, religiously, and socially. More than simple assent, they seek transformation of their audiences’ commitments and loyalties. Along with their new visions of the meaning of scripture come new visions for individual’s lives and for religious communities that will provide the contexts in which the new vision can be lived out.

The ways in which individuals who aspire to sweeping renovations of the meaning of scripture, and of human life lived in accordance with the message of scripture, construct, communicate, defend, adjust, and extend their claims to interpretive authority form a platform for further innovation. From that platform new visions of scripture’s meaning can support the construction of new interpretive readings, which themselves may often be codified into new texts. Those texts, like Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon, David Koresh’s unfinished commentary on the book of Revelation, and Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible, may eventually themselves claim and be granted scriptural status. In that sense the process of making new Bibles begins with an individual’s claim to authoritative speech. If there is no positive response, the claimants simply fade back into the woodwork or, at most, are remembered as amusing curiosities. But such claims sometimes spark a chain reaction of claims and responses, affirmations and challenges, acknowledgments and dissents, disputes and resolutions—which together may exercise substantial social influence. Because such claims rest on charismatic legitimation, they are particularly fragile and volatile. Also, because claims to charismatic authority offer an alternative to authority legitimated on either rational-legal or traditional grounds, they are viewed by those invested in the status quo as particularly threatening. So the claimant to charismatically legitimated interpretive authority faces a particularly daunting task.

By anchoring their innovative messages in texts widely recognized as authoritative, the figures in this section strike a tense balance between tradition and innovation. On one hand, they proclaim a truth that is unprecedented in human experience. But that truth is also anchored in one of the most influential texts in human history. When they try to moderate the full extent of their claims, they purport simply to be drawing out from familiar texts meanings that have somehow always been missed, misconstrued, or otherwise mangled. But when they focus on the distinctiveness of their new readings, they are portrayed as nothing less than the pivotal moments in human history. How individuals navigate between the extremes of self-effacement and self-aggrandizement as they seek to engage the attention and elicit the commitment of an audience has much to say about the future course of their movements.

1

A Teenaged Prophet, a Golden Bible, and Continuing Revelation

Joseph Smith’s account of the events that led to his founding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is an arresting story. He claimed that in 1820 when he was only 14 years old he had encountered in a vision a divine personage. In his vision Smith was assured that his sins were forgiven and that all of the Christian sects contending for conversions were wrong. Smith also reported that in subsequent visions he was directed by an angelic intermediary to dig up and translate a set of gold plates that recounted previously unknown history of the people of Israel, including the presence of Jesus himself in the New World. As his improbable prophetic career unfolded, Smith came to refer to his early experiences as a fundamental justification for the establishment of his new Church. By the 1880s Smith’s story of his “First Vision” had become a fundamental topic for theological reflection in the Mormon Church. As one observer sees it, “next to the resurrection of Christ, nothing holds a more central place in modern Mormon thought than that sacred event of 1820.”¹

Born as the third son in a family that scratched out a living from farming and odd jobs in early nineteenth century Vermont and then across the Appalachian mountains in the Finger Lakes area of New York, Smith received little schooling. His family moved frequently in constantly frustrated efforts to gain a solid economic foothold. From each side of his family Smith inherited both an interest in religion and an inclination to heterodoxy. Nothing in Smith’s background, however, could have predicted his extraordinary career as an American prophet and the founder of a new world religion that has continued its explosive growth to the present. One of Smith’s biographers, Richard Lyman Bushman, has called him “the only person in American history to produce a second Bible.”² While subsequent chapters of this book will show that Bushman exaggerates Smith’s uniqueness, the impact of Smith’s new religious movement on the United States and the world has nonetheless been extensive.

Joseph Smith: From Experience to Text

Smith’s stories about his early experiences changed over time. He started to compose the fullest version of his narrative only in 1838, some 18 years after his initial experiences, and that version was only published in 1842 when it was serialized in the Church’s newspaper, Times and Seasons.³ It appears that Smith dictated the text over time to four different scribes. Earlier and briefer accounts of Smith’s experience, however, appeared throughout the 1830s. While it is clear that Smith was convinced that he had undergone a transformative experience, beginning at age 14 and culminating with his bringing forth the Book of Mormon, the multiple stories cast that experience in different lights. Consequently, ever since the first mentions of Smith’s extraordinary experience partisans and opponents, and popular and scholarly observers, have been wrestling with how to understand them.

Bushman, for example, reads the various stories developmentally. He proposes that “as Joseph became more confident, more details came out.”⁴ He argues that Smith only gradually found his prophetic voice and that 1828, when he dictated 116 pages of the Book of Mormon and received a revelation in the voice of God, marked a decisive break with his earlier life. Dan Vogel stresses the apologetic ...