I have always thought of this chapter as the Bible Chapter, for reasons that will soon be made clear. In this (second half of the) chapter, the angel spirit guide shows Nephi a vision of the origin of the Bible and its corruption by the Great and Abominable Church. Which is something we talk about a lot as Mormons, I think. I always find it interesting that we focus so much on the intentional corruption of the Bible, as if there were hundreds of shifty-eyed monks who did nothing all day but erase crucial words from Isaiah and cloak the words of Paul in dense symbolism. That's what the angel focuses on in this vision, as well, with the phrasings like "take out" and "keep back.". However, I like to think that not all that was lost from the Bible was discarded intentionally, but rather .... lost, in the literal sense of the word. As in, by accident. Over the course of thousands of years, mistranslation, semantic shift, etc. are bound to happen. I wish we would give the Catholic Church more credit for preserving what we have instead of dissing them for messing it up. Just a thought.
One more potentially controversial idea. This chapter also talks about the motivation behind the corruption of the Bible, that the representatives of the Whore of All the Earth did so intentionally because they wanted to "blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the children of men" Here is my thought, although it may be overly kind, I don't know. So remember what I said in the previous post about Columbus and the Founding Fathers being used for righteous purposes even though they weren't very righteous guys? That allows for the idea that the Spirit can work through imperfect vessels without them really understanding what is going on. Is it possible that those people who messed up the Bible and threw out the old covenants didn't do it because they were trying to build Satan's kingdom on earth, but rather because they thought they were doing the right thing and got confused? Maybe this is what really happened more often than not, and we just don't talk about it When I taught about the Apostasy as a missionary, we focused a lot on the idea that good people without the Priesthood make mistakes. If we had tried to tell Hungarians that all non-Mormon Christians were shifty-eyed Satanists who throughout the ages had tried their best to destroy Jesus and everything He stood for, we would have had even less success than we already weren't having. Again, just a thought, I'm open to correction. Good thing nobody reads this. And I really mean nobody.
Something I often said to fellow missionaries who trashed the Catholic Church too much was, "YOU try running a church without the Priesthood! See how far you get!"
It gets a little more upbeat around verse 30 when the angel spirit guide reassures Nephi that God won't allow the Bible-thumping Gentiles to completely destroy his descendants. You know, not utterly. Just mostly. He also points out that He won't allow the Gentiles to remain forever in their state of ignorance, which is great news because I think the Puritan life in the 1600s is seriously some of the most depressing stuff I have ever read about. He describes the Gentiles as "stumbling exceedingly," which is a fantastic image, I think. I much prefer the image of the Puritans stumbling through the dark rather than flipping off the lights, know what I mean? it implies that they, like the Lamanites, weren't so much rejecting everything good but rather living as best they could in relation to what they knew, which wasn't quite enough. Poor Puritans. Maybe I can even feel sorry for them.
Next, we have the Restoration! Yay! This version of it focuses almost entirely on the bringing forth of the Book of Mormon, which given the emphasis on the Bible earlier on in the chapter, makes a whole lot of sense. the angel spirit guide says that those who we will help to bring forth the new Zion will be very blessed.
"And ablessed are they who shall seek to bring forth my bZion at that day, for they shall have the cgift and the dpower of the Holy Ghost," it reads. So it's not you, and it's not them. It's the Holy Ghost that makes the difference. I like that. It's compassionate. At the end of this chapter, angel spirit guide reminds Nephi that, after all the negative vibes we were getting in the last few chapters, there is still one God and on Shepherd over all the Earth, and everything is going to work out OK. Good, because I was getting sad.
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I have similar concerns about this chapter. Whenever I read this history, I can't help but think that it doesn't quite square with how I would write it. Was Columbus inspired? My Mexican roommate actually just took a class on this. He read a lot of primary source documents about what Columbus did, etc. I never got a complete story out of him, but he told me that his professor thinks Columbus had good intentions in the beginning, that he later made some very bad decisions, and perhaps that he seemed to have repented at the end of his life. Assume for the sake of argument that this is true.
How can you tell the story of Columbus in one verse? I suppose you could preface each verse by saying, "It's a lot more complicated than this, but basically..." Hey, maybe that's what "And it came to pass that..." means! But really, when you tell a story, you necessarily exclude important details. Heidegger said that every revealing was a concealing. I can apply that to stories. To give some set of events the cohesive feel that a story ought to have, you need to exclude information. You have to decide what's important and what's not important. And that means that you'll conceal some other way of seeing things in the process.
The entire Book of Mormon is one giant problem of what to include. Book of Mormon prophets mention space restrictions and the difficulty of writing on the plates. They exhort future generations not to alloy the spiritual record with temporal matters. They cover a thousand years of history in half as many pages (and, perhaps to flaunt his editorial acumen, Moroni condenses even more history into thirty pages). The agonizing task of abridging loomed heavily over each Book of Mormon author. To make the cut, it had to be more than good. It had to be central to the Book's purpose.
That means that there wasn't time for many disclaimers. The story leaves out a lot of detail that we might feel is important. Given some of the horrors of colonialism and racism, we are rightfully dismayed at the Book of Mormon's apparent insensitivity. Don't they realize that dark skin is just as attractive as light skin? Don't they know that Columbus kicked off centuries of oppression?
It might seem like these stories are mutually incompatible, and that therefore the Book of Mormon forces us to a decision about what the real history is. I'm not sure they are incompatible. I think that these stories have very different goals. The goal of Nephi's story is to show how events led to the Restoration of the Gospel, how people were returned to a knowledge of their Savior, how his brothers' posterity was saved. Whether or not Columbus was a righteous man all his life, the only aspect of Columbus's life germaine to Nephi's story was his being inspired to travel to the Americas. That was a crucial step in getting the Gospel to Nephi's people. Similarly with the Catholic Church. Many great things happened in the Catholic Church, but for Nephi, whose eyes were fixed on the fulness of the Gospel, the time from the Apostacy to the Restoration was a dark age. He might have agreed that there were many great Catholics, but as far as his story was concerned, they didn't make the cut. There just isn't room for everything.
And honestly, there never is. No matter how many volumes you produce, there's never enough space to obviate all misunderstandings. For the same reason, General Authorities often come off as insensitive. We expect them to be sensitive to everyone's worries and include enough disclaimers and clarifications to soothe our fears and salve our tender wounds. That's just unrealistic. Of course, there are more and less insensitive ways to talk. There are remarks that show a greater degree of cultural isolation. But there's never a remark that can't be taken the wrong way. In the end, we are responsible for charitably interpreting the story and reconciling it with our own version of the story.
I think you may be right on in your readings of Columbus and the Catholic Church. It's equally important not to misread history by assuming that Nephi has told the only story there is to tell as it is important not to reject Nephi's story on the grounds that it seems to glorify jerks and demonize saints.
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