We may have
overlooked a significant promise given us by a prophet of God.
Moroni, writing his
own observations in the Book of Ether, had this to say to us, the members of
the modern church:
Come unto me, O ye house of Israel, and it shall be
made manifest unto you how great things the Father hath laid up for you, from
the foundation of the world; and it hath not come unto you, because of
unbelief.
Behold, when ye shall rend that veil of unbelief
which doth cause you to remain in your awful state of wickedness, and hardness
of heart, and blindness of mind, then shall the great and marvelous things
which have been hid up from the foundation of the world from you—yea,
when ye shall call upon the Father in my name, with a broken heart and a
contrite spirit, then shall ye know that the Father hath remembered the
covenant which he made unto your fathers, O house of Israel.
And then
shall my revelations which I have caused to be written by my servant John be
unfolded in the eyes of all the people. Remember, when ye see these things,
ye shall know that the time is at hand that they shall be made manifest in very
deed. (Ether 4:14–16, italics added for emphasis.)
In these verses,
Moroni seems to be saying that the day will come when John’s enigmatic
Revelation in the New Testament, also known as the Apocalypse of John, will be fully
understood.
Is that possible?
Well, if Moroni is to be believed, it must be.
That begs the
question, is it understood now? Some Mormons might be tempted to say yes, that
Christian ministers and teachers, including some LDS scholars who say
essentially the same things, have managed to wrest the intended meaning from
John’s peculiar imagery.
Certainly, numerous
efforts have been made down through the years to decipher the message John
penned two millenia ago. And despite the seeming unanimity Christian scholars
appear to have developed regarding its interpretation—including concepts such
as the Rapture, the Battle of Armageddon and the Antichrist—the fact remains that
the Savior told Joseph Smith in his First Vision that none of their teachings
were correct. If that was so then, it is equally true now. Furthermore, consensus
should never be mistaken for correctness.
Still, far too many
church members have failed to perceive that the Lord’s condemnation of
Christian doctrine in that First Vision also includes their popular interpretation
of John’s prophecy. Again, if they were wrong about prophecy in Joseph Smith’s
day, they must still be wrong today because their interpretations of it have
changed little. In this author’s opinion, most of them have been misguided.
I have elsewhere noted
that many church members and scholars have imprudently adopted the mainstream
Christian or Millennialist view of Revelation. This has taken LDS thinking on
the subject down a dead end path. Revelation is therefore as much a “sealed
book” for us as it is for any Christian scholar.
That leaves
thoughtful Latter-day Saints to wonder when and how Moroni’s prophecy will be
fulfilled. Will the time come when we can read and fully understand the meaning
behind John’s curious and seemingly unfathomable imagery?
Until recently, no
methodology has been proposed that would allow anyone to truly “unfold” John’s
enigmatic writings. But a way to do so may now be at hand. Clearly, Joseph
Smith understood the book. He called it “the plainest book.”
Let me make this bold
assertion: One need not be a prophet to read and understand the revelations of
the prophets—both ancient and modern, John’s included—with all their arcane and
bizarre imagery. Anyone can read those revelations as easily as they read a
newspaper or magazine, given the proper training.
How is that possible,
you say? Let’s look at this together.
Curiously, the only
way to properly and understandingly read John’s writing is, in this author’s
opinion, with a thoroughgoing comprehension of the cosmological metaphors he
employs. The very element we see as a stumbling block is the key to deciphering
the text. This is my assertion: All the enigmatic imagery John used in his
great Apocalypse (Revelation) in the New Testament is based in cosmic imagery,
the common denominator in all ancient cultures and religions.
We see this cosmic
symbolism everywhere in ancient cultures, from their myths and legends to their
sacred traditions and religious iconography. Certainly, it is on display for
all to see in their monuments, temples and texts. To our eyes, it looks like
paganism, the worship of cosmic gods and goddesses, chaos monsters and world
threatening dragons. But a careful parsing of those riotous images and
conflicting imagery, looking back into the past at the original archetypes and
motifs instead of the later variations and elaborations, we discover a
commonality that is otherwise hidden. That commonality became the common
denominator for prophetic imagery.
As it turns out,
John’s seemingly indecipherable book is a missionary
tract, intended for investigators and new converts. John rehearsed all the
primary themes of ancient religious lore from his day to illustrate how it fit
into the new religion of Christ and to lay claim to ancient roots for the new
Christian religion. It was a conversion tool, used to persuade pagans who held these
cosmic traditions as sacred that Christianity honored, respected and
incorporated their former beliefs and traditions, that they were all intended
to point to and culminate in Christ.
Revelation, then, is
more of a rehearsal of past catastrophic events and the cosmic images that went
with them than it is a prediction of the future. There’s where mainstream
Christianity went wrong. We believe John was looking primarily to the future in
his tome, when he was, instead, looking to the sacred, cosmic traditions of the
past.
So, Nibley was right.
“Cosmisim,” as he dubbed it, is a key component of the Restored Gospel, just as
it is in John’s Revelation. Upon serious consideration, how could it be
anything less? We encounter cosmic imagery at every turn in Mormonism: in Doctrine
and Covenants, in The Pearl of Great Price (especially there), in the Book of
Mormon, in the teaching of Joseph Smith and on the exterior walls of our modern
temples and in our sacred endowment. It is the cosmological side of the
Restored Gospel.
Yet today’s Mormons
eye the concept of sacred symbolism with suspicion and misgivings. Like their
Christian cousins, today’s church members, for the most part, see sacred,
cosmological symbolism as either inconsequential, having no real merit, or a
satanic effort to distract us from the teachings of Christ, a perversion of
truth, foreign to the gospel of Jesus Christ and the antithesis of Christianity.
So in that context, would
it be heretical to suggest that the revised view of prophetic pronouncements
espoused by this author, using cosmological imagery from hoary antiquity, is
the very mechanism by which, as Moroni declared, John’s Revelation will be
“unfolded in the eyes of all the people”? There is only one way to know for
sure: Put it to the test. Study these concepts and then apply them.
“And then shall my revelations which I have
caused to be written by my servant John be unfolded in the eyes of all the
people.”
Isn’t it a bit
curious, in light of Moroni’s words, that most Mormons still do not understand
John’s Revelation? Yet, with the cosmological key, the book becomes “the
plainest book,” as Joseph Smith declared it to be. It can then be read like any
other document, word by word, verse by verse, with nearly complete
comprehension.
I know this much: One
need not be a prophet to read and understand the revelations of the prophets,
with all their arcane and bizarre imagery. Anyone can read Revelation as easily
as they read a newspaper or magazine, as long as they employ a knowledge of the
archetypes and motifs of ancient cosmological imagery.
There are hundreds of
Latter-day Saints who can now do so because they have taken the time and made
the effort to master the imagery and symbolism of the ancients and the
prophets.
Would you care to be
one of them?
