Revelation Nation

Harvard law professor Noah Feldman has a piece in yesterday's NYT on the historical relationship between Mormonism and U.S. politics. It also contains a couple of interesting observations on the idea of revelation, which involves occasions when various gods and succubi are summoned to offer suggestions and advice to human beings. Among the characters that are said to have received divine counsel are Moses, Saul of Tarsus, Muhammed, Joseph Smith, Mike Huckabee, and even George W. Bush, who Jesus reportedly commanded to go to war with Iraq.

There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt. But what is driving the tendency to discount Joseph Smith’s revelations is not that they seem less reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is so new. When it comes to prophecy, antiquity breeds authenticity. Events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time. Not so revelations received during the presidencies of James Monroe or Andrew Jackson.

On the other hand, as Prof. Feldman points out later, the cache of "sacred" documents unearthed in Egypt during the 1940s is largely discounted by traditional bibliolaters, despite their ancient provenance. Evidently only certain writings and pronouncements are allowed the official imprimatur of revelation, based on what criteria, God only knows (so to speak).

For many believers, God's mostly been on revelation hiatus for several thousand years, and these days generally concerns her-, him-, or (and?) itself with meteorology and engineering E. coli bacteria.

Sometimes (if not all the time) revelation is driven by political expediency, in what one might call negotiated revelations involving a third party — in this case, public opinion:

If Mormonism were to keep [Mitt] Romney from the nomination, the Mormon Church hierarchy may through continuing revelation and guidance respond by shifting its theology and practices even further in the direction of mainstream Christianity and thereby minimizing its outlier status in the culture. Voices within the LDS fold have for some time sought to minimize the authority of some of Joseph Smith’s more creative and surprising theological messages, like the teaching that God and Jesus were once men. You could imagine Mormonism coming to look more like mainline Protestantism with the additional belief not in principle incompatible with Protestant Scripture that some of the lost tribes of Israel ended up in the Americas, where a few had a vision of Christ’s appearance to them. If this hypothetical picture of a future Mormonism seems unimaginable to the contemporary LDS faithful, as it may, today’s Mormon theology would look almost as different to Brigham Young.

"Creative and surprising" are generous portrayals indeed; I'd have gone with "zany and koo-koo." Not to mention today's "mainline" Christian theology itself looking quite different to its originators.

A gentleman bearing the comically appropriate moniker Creflo Augustus Dollar and preaching the "gospel of bling" is currently under investigation by the U.S. Senate. Republican Charles Grassley of its Finance Committee is wondering — rightly — why Mr. Dollar's outfit (and several others) is enjoying tax exempt status while its principal is embarking from his Manhattan apartment via private jet and Rolls Royce en route to sumptuous gourmet dinners prepared by liveried servants in one of his other multi-million dollar homes.

A defiant "Reverend" Dollar, who raked in about 70 million of his namesakes last year, turned up on CNN with Larry King the other night, saying he's refusing to cooperate with Senator Grassley's demands for financial disclosure "on principle" and also based on a First Amendment theory, in that the gospel of bling is a sincerely held religious belief. We'll see how that goes.

Now those disclosures might be truly revelatory.