Open Canon: Scriptures of the Latter Day Saint Tradition

The open canon in Mormonism rests on a “foundational assumption”: that prophets would continue to produce revelation and new scriptures into the future (4). Scholars have thoroughly explored how Mormon history, particularly after Joseph Smith's death, was marked by a complex network of prophets, schisms, churches, splinter groups, and scriptures. Yet although these features of the “Latter Day Saint tradition” have often been studied, the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants—which, along with the Bible, comprise the canonical scriptures for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—receive the vast majority of close scholarly attention.1 Conversely, scholars have tended to neglect the enormous body of texts produced through revelation and claimed as scripture by prophets and their communities since the 1840s. Open Canon: Scriptures of the Latter Day Saint Tradition, edited by Christine Elyse Blythe, Christopher James Blythe, and Jay Burton, aims to fill this lacuna in the scholarship. Examining a range of scriptures, both self-proclaimed and church-authorized, in their historical, spiritual, and cultural context, this book proves a wide-ranging and valuable contribution to Mormon studies.In selecting texts to consider as part of the “singular scriptural tradition” of the open canon, the editors cast a wide net, counting anything as scripture that has been “categorized as such” by either its producer or its audience (6). The kaleidoscopic archive examined in the essays thus ranges from the canon-adjacent (decanonized sections of the Doctrine and Covenants and variants of the Book of Mormon) to the fringe (untranslated plates purportedly found in the mid-twentieth century and disputed as forgeries). In addition to examining these texts, the essays also recount the rise of many Mormon denominations deriving from and in concert with these prophetic scriptures, from early rivals like the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), to the very recent, such as a present-day sect in England with only twenty members.As much as it is about the canon itself, then, the book recounts tensions and debates among the many participants in the Mormon tradition as contested through and within scripture. An examination of these texts and sects presses on the key questions animating the early church and its schisms: Could anyone receive revelation? Should a prophet alone or the church community collectively hold power to authorize scripture? Should the church accept or reject contested beliefs like polytheism, human godhood, and polygamy? Open Canon examines the history of such questions and reminds us that these complex interpretive contests continue in the Mormon tradition today.One of the most significant realignments the volume offers is its orientation toward the texts as both physical and sacred objects. In one of three introductory essays, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp argues that we should see Mormonism's origins not as rooted in “a single prophetic individual who offered scripture as a sign of divine presence,” but through “the authority of scriptural logic” (18). Although Maffly-Kipp points out that an open canon is hardly unique to Mormonism, the Mormon tradition's biblical intertextuality and its “pronounced commitment to writing and recording as a sacred act” make it distinctive (25). While many scholars (including Philip L. Barlow, Richard Lyman Bushman, Paul Gutjahr, Jared Hickman, Elizabeth Fenton, and Grant Hardy, to name a few) have taken up these same topics in the context of the Book of Mormon, D&C, and the Bible, far fewer have addressed scripture produced by prophets other than Joseph Smith or accepted by other Mormon denominations.2 It is intellectually refreshing to view familiar themes in Mormon scriptural study, such as the centrality of retellings, the presence of witnesses, and the importance of the physical manifestation of writing, through the lens of new texts. What do we learn by considering not just the “scriptural logic” of the golden plates of the Book of Mormon, for instance, but that of two eight-foot-tall Jaredite mummies and hundreds of inscribed tablets and plates purportedly discovered by treasure hunter Earl John Brewer in the mid-twentieth century? In his essay on Brewer, Christopher C. Smith makes the provocative claim that “it may be time for scholars to revisit religious narratives with treasure hunters’ eyes, in search of those luminous artifacts that drive conflict, confer authority, and enliven religious history” (343) as a counterpoint and antidote to the typical Protestant biases of religious scholarship.Open Canon begins with three introductory essays and four essays on the reception of Joseph Smith's revelations, which collectively provide the analytical structure for the volume. Two key interwoven topics emerge: the processes of canonization and the history of Mormon schism.First, the essays chronicle how the process of canonization and decanonization has been addressed over time and by different groups in the Mormon tradition. Because there is no fully standardized process for canonization, debates about the status of scripture reveal fault lines within and between denominations about church structure, collective versus individual authority, and doctrinal controversies. Maffly-Kipp's essay, “Anchored in Revelation: Scripture and Schism in the Restoration,” introduces this topic by showing how the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints split with the Latter-day Saints along “principles of interpretation, of inclusion and exclusion” (33). The RLDS Church, focusing on “communal cohesion” above all, “emphasized caution when deciding which scriptures counted as authoritative,” and enacted a “gradual deauthorization” of some teachings, ultimately returning to the Bible as its central text (37).Extending this study of “inclusion and exclusion,” Kathleen Flake's insightful essay, “Joseph Smith's Letter from Liberty Jail: A Study in Canonization,” focuses on the 1876 revision of the Latter-day Saint Doctrine and Covenants led by Orson Pratt. Using Smith's letter as a case study, Flake shows how ordinary personal writing can transform into scripture by “making sense of religious disappointment and suffering . . . turn[ing] event into history . . . and legislat[ing] a preventative boundary” (119). Smith wrote the letter under terrible conditions in the winter of 1838–39, after the Mormon War and the failure to build a temple in Missouri. Flake unpacks why only 40 percent of the letter was included by the redactor in the Doctrine and Covenants in the 1870s (119). Because the chosen sections perform a critique of the church's role in its own failings, Flake concludes, canonization can act as legislation, providing a “standard by which power was to be judged as good or evil” (128).The implications of canonization are similarly examined in “Lectures on Faith in the Latter Day Saint Tradition” by Richard S. Van Wagoner, Steven C. Walker, Allen D. Roberts, and Christine Elyse Blythe. This essay scrutinizes the line between scripture and revelation, asking why the Lectures on Faith, which are generally considered to have been written by Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, were removed from the Doctrine and Covenants by a committee of Latter-day Saint apostles in 1921. Several other churches in the Mormon tradition kept or restored the Lectures on Faith's canonization, revealing “point[s] of difference and thus identity for many of the movements” (142). The essay illuminates another crucial debate over the prophetic individual versus “the principle of common consent in canonizing revelation” (138).The volume's second major thematic focus—one closely linked to the debates over canonization—is the relationship of the open canon to the Mormon diaspora, schisms, and new churches in the Mormon tradition. In “Revelation, Scripture, and Authority in the Latter Day Saint Diaspora, 1840–1870,” Richard Saunders provides a thorough overview of the tensions among prophets and sects in the era after Joseph Smith's death, arguing that “it is helpful to see the breakup of the church and of Latter Day Saint society partly as tension over human leadership: should the church value the charismatic and prophetic or the corporate and priestly traditions . . . ?” (43). Delving into the many nuances of the diaspora—the demographic features, geographical spread, personality clashes, and doctrinal disputes—Saunders offers a detailed history of the nineteenth-century Mormon diaspora that lays groundwork for future researchers. Saunders reminds us just how complex this moment was, but also attempts to show why those churches that emphasized corporate and priestly authority, including the LDS Church, eventually won out, asserting that the “charismatic tradition alone was not a sufficiently viable foundation on which to build and sustain a church” (55).Other branches in the Mormon tradition approached scripture and revelation differently from the LDS Church, however. Chrystal Vanel's essay sketches the history of the Church of Christ (Temple Lot) and analyzes this church as establishing a “sola scriptura Mormonism” in the Protestant tradition. Vanel argues that as a result, the Church of Christ, unlike the LDS Church, values scripture and individual interpretation over church authority. In his “Books of Mormon: Latter-day Saints, Latter Day Saints, and the Book of Mormon,” Joseph M. Spencer shows how, in editions of the Book of Mormon published by the LDS Church and the RLDS Church, seemingly minor changes in formatting, footnotes, headings, and prefatory materials resulted in divergent editions that “operated as functionally different texts” (65). Such comparative analyses provide a broader and more diverse picture of the “Latter Day Saint tradition” than we might typically see in Mormon studies.The second half of Open Canon presents individual case studies of scripture from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The nine essays offer a trove of scriptural examples—most of them minor or obscure texts that have not been studied extensively—that will serve as a valuable resource for researchers. The best of the “case study” chapters use textual analysis to extend and illustrate the arguments of the first half around canonicity, schism, and modes of prophetic voicing. For example, Christopher James Blythe writes on the Book of Enoch, Charles B. Thompson's 1852–53 retranslation of an apocryphal ancient text brought to England from Abyssinia in 1773, and originally translated in 1821 by Richard Laurence, a professor of Hebrew at Oxford. Laurence's Book of Enoch had already drawn attention from early Mormons when Thompson performed his “corrected” retranslation, under mediumship, with the guidance of a spirit named Baneemy. Blythe performs an in-depth analysis of how Thompson likely created a “composite text,” combining the Book of Enoch with writings of Joseph Smith and the Book of Jasher, “a midrashic volume documenting the history of the patriarchs,” in an “effort to make polytheism and polygamy heretical” (202, 215). In the process, Blythe shows that under the open canon, scripture “served as a strategy of contest” over doctrine, with “polemical texts leveraged against one another” (215).Similarly, Matt Bowman's essay on “Matthew Philip Gill, Joseph Smith, and the Dynamics of Mormon Schism” analyzes the scriptures of a tiny twenty-first-century English church, the Restored Branch of Jesus Christ, which has its origins in the twelve-year-old Gill's visitation by the angel Moroni in 1990. These scriptures, the Book of Jeraneck and the Book of Rayaneck, which combine to form the Chronicles of the Children of Araneck, tell a story parallel to that in the Book of Mormon in which God brought ancient people to the British Isles. Bowman argues that Gill's scripture, in decentering America from the Mormon tradition, “reveals the extent to which the dynamics of Mormon schism reflect the complicated cultural dynamics of the LDS Church itself. . . . The Restored Branch is best understood as a practical attempt . . . to adjust the balance of tension within and without the church” (347). This essay offers a welcome insight into the continuing dialogue between scriptures of the open canon and their cultural context—in this case, a contemporary LDS Church with a growing number of non-US converts.Some of the case studies are narrower in their claims, but still useful in their archival work. Four essays focus on scripture produced by nineteenth-century prophets who made claims to succeeding Joseph Smith: James J. Strang, William Bickerton, Sidney and Phebe Rigdon, and Smith's mother Lucy Mack Smith. These essays guide readers to understand the fractious post-Smith period and demonstrate the range of prophetic technologies, from translation and dictation to revelation-by-mail. The essay by Daniel P. Stone on Bickerton's church is particularly notable for its elucidation of Bickerton's “egalitarian” and “cooperative views” of scripture, which “opened the priesthood to men of color and gave women the opportunity to hold an ordained office” (232). Janiece Johnson's essay on Lucy Mack Smith takes an alternative approach by reading a text that is not considered canonical by any group but which partakes of canonical “claimed authority” by weaving biblical allusions to create “a new sacred history” (154). In the twentieth-century context, Thomas G. Evans and Christopher James Blythe write on Harry Edgar Baker's “The Word of the Lord,” a scripture that critiques the LDS Church and calls for an external prophet. Casey Paul Griffiths discusses the Levitical Writings of the House of Aaron, a sect based since the 1930s in Eskdale, Utah, which merges several Christian and Mormon traditions.As is the case with many edited collections, the authors here take diverse and sometimes conflicting approaches; the volume therefore does not always fully meet its goal of treating these texts as a cohesive tradition. Some authors read texts primarily through what Flake calls “the role of human actors in the production of its scriptures,” while others take scriptures’ status as divine revelation for granted (117). Moreover, the book examines no less than six categories of Mormon scriptural texts: historical translations, revealed translations, correction literature, dictated revelation, visionary accounts, and contemporary documents from church leaders. Given this vast range, it is sometimes difficult to find clear common ground. A single and more elaborated introductory essay, rather than the three provided here, might have helped frame the other essays more robustly and cohesively. But on the whole, Open Canon provides an essential overview, not yet attempted at this scale, of extra-canonical scriptures and lights the way for further scholarship on the hundreds of churches founded in the “Latter Day Saint tradition” since Joseph Smith's death.