followHIM - Using Credible Sources in Studying Church History

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

In this bonus episode, Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat explains how historians use various sources, how audiences should examine them, and why this matters. If you have ever encountered some disturbing piece of historical information from a friend, foe, or the internet, this episode is for you.

Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I'm Hank Smith. And I'm John Bytheway. We love to learn. We love to laugh. We want to learn and laugh with you. As together, we follow Him.

Welcome to this week's bonus episode on using credible sources and studying church history and avoiding pseudo-scholarship. Whenever you're looking at events from the past, not all sources are created equal. There's a difference between me writing in my journal as soon as we finish this podcast, right? I can't stand that Hank Smith. I will never give him Coke again, right? That captures what I feel in the moment. Well, let's say you asked me 10 years from now,

and in that intervening 10 years, you become an apostate and you burn my house down. That might color my impression, not because I'm deliberately trying to lie about what I thought about our first meeting, but because that's what happens. I mean, an even better way to think about it is most Latter-day Saints have had their patriarchal blessing. Try to remember exactly what you thought about each individual line in that blessing as the patriarch was giving it to you. It was a powerful experience. I certainly felt the spirit very strongly. I remembered some of these. A couple of days later, I got the transcript back from the patriarch.

Reading through it the first time, there were things where I was like, I don't remember him saying that. Oh, oh. And then I went throughout the remainder of my life thinking, well, I think this is what that means. And then life happened, right? Oh, this, this obviously means something to do with going on my mission, right? After that, you know, I got married. Oh, I can't believe I ever thought it meant this. I actually think it means this, right?

So even when we're dealing with our own history, our thoughts about what happened, they change over the course of time. So historians prize first and foremost, firsthand accounts, right? It's much better if I'm telling you what I think than someone else saying, oh yeah, that Garrett, he thinks that. But they also want contemporary accounts written at the time, right? So not, oh yes, I remember on my mission X. Again, that doesn't mean that you're being deliberately dishonest, but it certainly means that you have the benefit of hindsight looking back. You now know that that day on your mission when that door was slammed in your face wasn't the worst day of your life, but it might have been up to that point in your life.

And so perspective changes things. It's really hard, especially when people are looking back when they already know the end from the beginning. I mean, how many times you hear people say things like, oh, I should have known that he was a criminal because that one time we had a conversation and he was a little shady about it. Well, I could tell. Yeah.

Well, you couldn't tell enough to tell any of the authorities. So obviously it wasn't actually as big a deal as you thought at the time. This is even more important to be careful with the sources you use when we're dealing with religion, because fundamentally, religious truth claims are things that cannot be proven or disproven by historical sources. This is not just true of Latter-day Saints. This is true of all believers. The Bible tells us that Jesus walked on water. How would you prove, scientifically,

that Jesus actually walked on water? I mean, we could do an experiment, right? We could just take John and Hank down to Utah Lake and walk them out into the lake. And even with as much carp in Utah Lake, you still would eventually sink. But you can have the whole world to do that experiment, where the whole world walks out into the nearest body of water, and not one of them would walk on water. Would that prove that Jesus didn't walk on water? It wouldn't, because Jesus walked on

water. He walked on water because it was a miracle by the power of God. And so one of the things that historians don't have access to, however wonderful they think they are, they don't have access to the power of God. They can't replicate. There's no null hypothesis you can do to demonstrate whether or not an angel appeared to somebody. So what can historians do? Historians can say, this is what that person said. They really seem to believe it. Historians don't try to disprove the religious truth claims of people. You know, oftentimes what people are saying about, let's take Joseph Smith, for instance, what they're really saying is, well, I find it pretty hard to believe that an angel appeared to him.

It's more than hard to believe. It's impossible outside of the intervention of God. So you can't prove whether or not Joseph saw an angel. What can you do? You can certainly demonstrate, historically, that Joseph really believed that he did, that he acted like he did, that he lived his life as if he did. And that is the best you can come as a historian.

And so oftentimes antagonists of not only our faith, but of any faith, they want to attack the miraculous truth claims of that faith. And the reality is the very thing they're attacking is something that is not actually academic anymore, right? If you want to have a conversation about whether or not, you know, Joseph Smith should have instituted the high priest when he did, okay, well, that can be a conversation. But fundamentally, you actually can't have a conversation about whether or not God and Jesus appeared to Joseph Smith.

And anyone who is making that claim is no longer doing academic work, right? If someone says, well, this proves that Joseph Smith was lying and he never saw God. Well, first of all, that can't be proven. And second of all, that's just, you know, thank you for your opinion. You know, it's duly noted. There's lots of people who don't like Joseph Smith and thank you for joining the course. But that proves essentially nothing. So I would urge, you know, your listeners that antagonists of religion often try to use historical statements for their shock value.

To try to rattle people to say, bet you haven't heard this. Well, no one's heard everything from history. I've been doing history for my whole life. I hear things all the time like, oh, I had no idea. I just pretend that I still know, right? But the reality is that nobody knows everything, which means that always someone's going to be able to bring something up. And sometimes that can really rattle people because they'll say, well, I had no idea Joseph

Smith was using a seer stone and a hat, right? Sometimes that discomfort of not knowing is actually used. It's used against believers. You'll hear people make non sequiturs all the time. If Joseph Smith didn't tell the exact same story in every account of the first vision, that proves that he's a liar. First of all, no historian makes that argument, right? So you already know someone who makes that argument isn't qualified to make the argument they're making. Historians understand that people tell stories different ways, multiple different times, and that in no way demonstrates that someone's being dishonest. But also, fundamentally,

they understand if Joseph Smith changed every single word of the first vision, that would not demonstrate in any way whether or not Joseph actually saw God. Miracles are outside of the realm of historical inquiry. And that's the reason why we say that you have to have faith to believe. As desperately as we want to be able to prove every single aspect of the gospel, and as cool as those insights might be, fundamentally, as a Christian, you believe something that is utterly fantastic, entirely unprovable. You believe, you know, forgive my triteness, but you believe that a carpenter who lived 2,000 years ago was murdered by the Romans and came back to life, and that because he came back to life, you're going to come back to

life. That is not logical. It's not provable. No one else has done that. And it's absolutely true. We don't believe it because we can prove it. We believe it because it's true. I've had these conversations with you before personally, and I wanted everyone to hear this. I remember one time you and I discussing pseudo scholarship, that sometimes Latter-day Saints fall victim to what you call pseudo scholarship. Sometimes people mistake having read about something as being an expert on that thing, right?

I mean, there are things that I love to read about, right? I love to read about the creation of the universe and all kinds of astrophysics, right? I'm certain that I couldn't do better than a D-minus in any actual astrophysics class, right? Because it involves math and I don't have that ability. But sometimes people start to believe that because they're passionate about something, that that's the same thing as being an expert in that thing. If you were going in for a major surgery and you're nervous, you say to

your doctor, so where'd you get your medical degree? I don't have a medical degree, but you know what I have? I've seen a thousand episodes of the TV show ER. It might even be I've watched a thousand surgeries. Now that person probably will have more information and have a better understanding. But my guess is you're still going to want someone who's actually been certified by someone else as an expert in that, not a self-appointed one. If someone feels the need to be an expert on some aspect of church history, well, then maybe they need to go in and do the work to go get that PhD so they can talk about it. Because half of the arguments they make would be demonstrated as ahistorical, non-academic arguments their first year in graduate school, right? Look, you can't make the argument that X proved that Joseph Smith is a liar

about the gold plates. That's not an argument that can be proven, right? Pseudo-academic research is when someone uses, in some ways, the tools of academia, right? Here's a source, but almost always lifted from a larger source with very little context given on the background of it, with no explanation of what the other sources are surrounding it or mitigating it.

Simply, here's a source. Great example of that with Martin Harris. In 1838, a member of the church who apostatizes, and he attempts to persuade other members of the church to leave. And the way he does it is by, he writes a letter to his friend and says, Martin Harris told me that he never actually saw the plates. And in fact, the eight witnesses

all never actually saw the plates. And he just goes all down the line. He's writing to his friend saying, none of these people ever actually saw the plates. Okay, well, that is a source, right? It exists. It's a letter that exists from history. Is that the kind of evidence that should be destroying our faith and belief

in whether or not the gold plates existed? Because Martin Harris reiterates dozens of times in his life that he saw the plates. Oliver Cowdery reiterates he saw the plates. You know, David Whitmer, all throughout his life that he saw the plates. Oliver Cowdery reiterates he saw the plates. You know, David Whitmer, all throughout his life, as antagonistic as he was towards the church after his apostasy, reiterates that he actually saw the plates and actually saw the angel. So sometimes people confuse the fact that there is a source about something from the past for that source actually being a credible one, or even more so, one that should

affect our faith. Yes, many people claim that Joseph Smith was a liar in the past. And many people claim that Jesus was too. I think a lot of times it's simply because it's a shock to people. You know, I was told none of the witnesses ever denied it. Well, according to the witnesses, they never denied it. But just because someone says that someone said something in a conversation that I don't even know whether or not it existed is not proof. I don't actually know as a historian whether or not it happened. As a historian, I footnote that and I say, there was one apostate member of the church who once said that they heard Martin Harris say da-da-da-da-da-da-da. But that would never trump Martin Harris's own statements, right?

He's the one who had the miracle where he saw the angel. Only he is going to be able to tell you whether or not that happened, not some guy who claims he had a conversation. That's just not, that's not good history. Shock value of being able to say, see, I bet you didn't know about this. And again, the reality is there are lots of things that everyone doesn't know about church history that your average Latter-day Saint, they're studying the scriptures, they're studying the publications of the church.

My guess is most of them aren't combing through the letter archives of the church history department. That means that it allows for people to make arguments and to take things truly out of context, but especially out of historical context, out of the realm of what other sources exist that either mitigate that document, shed some kind of different light on it. Early detractors of Joseph Smith, many of them in Palmyra, would later sign affidavits to the effect that, oh yeah, Joseph told me that the whole thing was just made up and that he was lying about it. Okay, well, first of all,

that wouldn't stand up in any court of law, right? Someone saying that someone told them years earlier that they'd made up the, that's not how that works. And so are there detractors? Absolutely. Does the fact that there are detractors prove that Joseph didn't see God? By definition, it can't. So if you're ever making that connection, if you're ever saying, well, this person says this negative thing about Joseph, you're not doing history anymore. You're

allowing emotion and opinion to determine it, But you're not making a historical judgment. Historical judgment can't determine whether or not a miracle happened. One of the more effective things to do, if you have a fairly antagonistic person talking to you about things or quotes that they've read, is to demonstrate their own lack of time that they've spent on the thing that they claim matters, right? Well, you know, you know, Brigham Young said, you know, this and this and this, and the response can be, okay, what sermon did he say that in? Yeah. When did he say it? What else did he say? Well, I mean, I haven't read the whole thing. I know you haven't actually, that's the whole point of the conversation is you haven't

read the whole thing. I do that, do that all the time. When did he say it? Who was recording it? Was that his own monograph or did somebody else write that in their journal? Brigham Young did say some things that to modern ears are going to be odious. I mean, there's no question about that. But at the same time, even those things that are recorded that way that he did say because he was a product of his time, the way we're products of ours, they are not who that person is, right? So Brigham Young has, what, 1,600 sermons that are available that people could read? There are literally millions of words that people could study to learn about Brigham Young. And so when someone presents

something like that, well, you know, he said this, my guess is you haven't even read that sermon. So you're making a judgment about something that you're saying has all kinds of import, that this is going to drive who I am, but without actually coming to a full understanding at all. And, you know, every person we study from the past is going to have aspects of their character and especially their culture that are reprehensible to us. If you want to feel better about yourself, if you want to be able to slap yourself on the back about what a great boy or girl you are, then you can study history that way. And you'll come away, oh, I'm just so much smarter and better than people in the past. But you won't actually understand why they did what they did or who they really were.

A hundred years from now, people are going to be looking at you saying, what a terrible, odious person. I can't believe they did this, that they said this, that they... If they're talking about you at all. Yeah, which they won't be. That's what I love about this whole Joseph Smith story. That Moroni told him, your name's going to be had for good and evil in 200 years. And any teenager says that to you today, you'd be like, oh, sure.

And look at what we're doing today. It's amazing.