The lecture can be found here.
John Hamer is a trained historian. He, I believe, has taught at several universities. He spends most of his time now as the pastor for Community of Christ’s Toronto, Canada congregation. He has been pumping out quality lectures on various religious topics for a while now.
His most recent lecture was titled “The Bible As Seen through Reformation Lenses”. He goes through how the Bible has been viewed and what it meant to people over the centuries.
He starts off talking about how we have a bias towards our current understanding. He talked about how you have to try to put yourself in the shoes of the people that existed in the time and place that you’re studying by giving up your own biases and understandings of familiar topics – such as the bible. He talked about how apologetics and anachronisms are often the result of trying to force an old narrative to a modern view.
He then moved on to talk about what protestantism was, and how it differed from Catholicism. He boiled it down to differences in where they derive authority. Catholics derive it from apostolic succession, tradition, church fathers’ teachings, the Bible, whereas protestants simply use the Bible. Protestantism has lead to a rise of a democratization of narratives, which has often lead to irresponsible interpretations such as literalistic interpretations and scripture worship. Literalistic interpretation is about the worst way to interpret the stories in the Bible (we’ll talk about why in a second). Protestantism has also lead to people placing scripture as the sole source and authority of God. This has lead to people focusing so closely on it that it is essentially itself worshipped, instead of worshipping the God that it points to. Scripture essentially becomes an idol.
Hamer talked about classical interpretations of scripture, namely:
- Literal: This is viewing scripture as a history book that testifies to the supernatural. This is considered the lowest and least important understanding of scripture, because it robs the text of any other meaning.
- Allegorical: what does the story signify? Very symbolic and subjective. Noah’s flood was used as illustrate the cleansing importance of baptism.
- Tropological (“Moral”): What is the lesson learned from the story?
- Anagogical (“reasoning upwards”): How does this story point us to the divine?
An interesting thing that Hamer also described is how scripture worked. Many books of scripture are texts whose claimed author is not the true author, or a work whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past. They are usually used to speak to peoblems in the true author’s day. These works are known as “Pseudepigraphas“. Hamer theorizes that Joseph Smith recognized that protestantism really only recognized the authority of scripture, so set out to create new scripture. Hamer quoted Alexander Campbell (who was an influential contemporary and former spiritual leader of Sidney Rigdon) who spoke of the Book of Mormon:
This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last 10 years. He decides all the great controversies – infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man…
In otherwords, The Book of Mormon is a pseudepigrapha that spoke to the concerns and issues of 1830. In the Q&A part of the lecture, Hamer was asked if Community of Christ might employ pseudepigraphas again in the future. Hamer said that he had advocated for this and CoC isn’t expressly opposed to it. He implied that a sort of crowd-sourced pseudepigrapha could be used which could use a democratic process to add to the book. It would be really cool to create a new book of scripture that uses stories to stimulate spiritual reflection.
In short, this was an awesome lecture. I highly recommend watching the full lecture.