Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore

4. Raising the Dead: Mormons, Evangelicals, and Miracles in America

66 4 Raising the Dead Mormons, Evangelicals, and Miracles in America1 Matthew Bowman The power to raise the dead was among the gifts Christ gave his twelve apostles. The Gospel of Matthew records that he “commanded them, saying, Go . . . and as ye go, preach, saying ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils; freely ye have received, freely give.’” Later, Paul asserted that these promises of miracles were not mere rhetoric. However, neither were they to be marveled at, for Paul scoffed at Agrippa’s doubt, asking “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?”2 It should be no surprise, then, that those religious movements that preached a renewal of the spirit of primitive Christianity in the early years of the American republic claimed also the spiritual gifts that the Bible described. Indeed, these verses indicate two ways that American Christians understood the Biblical heritage of miracles. The tradition represented here by Christ identified the miraculous with the evangelical pulpit, with the force and emotion of Spirit-filled preaching and confidence bred of millennialism and imminent divine intervention. These were the miracles of the charismatic Methodist 1 A version of this essay was previously published in John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 27 (2007): 75–97, and is reprinted here by permission. 2 Matthew 10:5, 7, 8; Acts 26:8 (King James Version). Raising the Dead 67 tradition, of the rough-hewn lay preachers of the burned-over district and the Second Great Awakening. On the other hand, the tradition I identify with Paul deemed resurrection neither miraculous nor out of place in the natural world, but simply a sign of God’s authority over his rationally created natural universe. This was the Christianity of the Enlightenment and of the Puritan scholastics, a Christianity confident that miracles were a sign of careful divine design of the universe rather than of unpredictable divine intervention into it. As multiple reports of the dead raised3 followed across the nation in the wake of the charismatic fires lit by America’s Great Awakenings, Americans strove to reconcile these positions; to bring the undisciplined fervor and inspiration of evangelical religion into harmony with the natural theology that the Enlightenment had brought. The theological development of Mormonism—the most enduring and successful of the Second Great Awakening’s religious progeny—reveals these tensions in small scale; the Mormons’ discussions of, attempts at, and successes in raising the dead reveal both impulses at war in their thought. The absolutist confidence in supernatural intervention bred of their early evangelicalism became increasingly intertwined with theological rationalism and the growing church’s own institutional development. Like other American Christians, they sought both miracle and an understandable cosmos, and struggled ultimately toward a new conception of raising the dead. For a multitude of reasons, the possibility of miracles was of immense importance to American Christians of the early nineteenth century. Camps as theologically distant as rationalist Unitarians and charismatic evangelicals agreed that God indeed could and did raise the dead to indicate his favor or to affirm the divinity of Christ’s person and message. The basic supernaturalism of such an event—by which I mean that it occurred through divine intervention that altered or bypassed the natural processes of the universe—had remained unquestioned since John Calvin had enunciated his theory of miracles in the sixteenth century. For Calvin, miracles represented a clear departure from “the natural order of events”; they were thus intended to serve 3 Throughout this paper, I use the terms resuscitations, revivals, or simply raisings of the dead to describe the miracle in question; the term resurrection is reserved for the permanent transformation of the body associated with the eschaton. Matthew Bowman 68 only as accreditations of the supernatural divinity of Christ’s mission and authority. As the Reformers pursued no new gospel, new miracles were not required. Those who demanded miracles, then, revealed themselves to be “vain and false.” In this argument, Calvin made two critical distinctions—the first between the “natural” and the miraculous, the second between true miracle, whose age had passed, and false trickery. This was to remain theoretical Protestant orthodoxy for almost two hundred years, until Enlightenment figures such as John Locke began attempts to reconcile the miraculous claims of Christianity, however historic, with reason. In practice, however, lay...