I would still argue that JS’s thought exhibited the tension of wanting to hold on to the Bible as an authoritative text. However, as you note, he was only willing to hold on to the parts he felt were still relevant, and the other parts he still felt willing to revise. Obviously his desire to retain the Bible as authoritative tends to be on the more liberal side of the protestant antebellum spectrum.

Also, commenting on one of my little-commented post from several months back is the epitome, I think, of a slow “news” day.

while Smith brought new scripture, he never desired to replace Bible in the scriptural cannon. Rather than disregarding the past in order to emphasize the present, Smith bridged the two in a way that allowed the balance needed to make them both authoritative.

I think that you might be underplaying Joseph Smith’s subversion of the Bible and its role in Protestant thought, especially in the aftermath of the 2nd Great Awakening. An outsider might argue that Smith was literally re-writing the Bible in the idiom of his particular religious vision, rather than simply building a bridge. In other words, he built a bridge to the bible, but it was clearly crafted to suit his particular re-working of the Bible.

Back in the 1970s, one of the men in our University of Utah singles branch told a story about how his stiudy of the Romantics led him to conclude that God was up to something in that period, and that led him to look at Joseph Smith.

I’ve long wished that Blake could have lived long enough to read the Book of Mormon. The marginalia that he came up with would be fascinating.

Kevin Christensen
Pittsburgh, PA

Of course that kind of spirit which was very much a part of the transcendentalists (and perhaps neoPlatonists in general) ran up quickly against practical problems: how to adjudicate disagreements. Thus the revelations establishing hierarchy which continued to extend until today. Yet there still is that sense, very much like the transcendentalists, today in our Church.

Consider the idea of a father giving blessings in their home where the ideal is literally divine pronouncements as the blessing is offered.

I should also note that Hugh Nibley in a series of writing about the Mantic and Sophic with a fairly over neoPlatonic thrust adopts this same transcendentalist approach. I’d written about that at my blog a few years back. I don’t think it ultimately works precisely because of the temporal problem you point out. There’s always that focus on the saying and never the said. It is as if what counts is the ecstatic moment of writing but not communication. It becomes a focus on words without focus on where they lead. Just an excitement of the coming forth of the words.

One could argue though that in the early Church this was often exactly how revelation was viewed. Consider the Book of Mormon and how it was viewed but so rarely used as a text.