Scripture as witness rather than as history

On March 30, 2007, the Community of Christ's World Conference accepted a document presented by prophet president Stephen M. Veazey as Section 163 of the church's Doctrine and Covenants, its living book of continuing revelation alongside the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Among its instructions, the section states plainly that scripture is not to be worshiped or idolized, since only God, the one scripture testifies to, is worthy of worship, and it teaches that scripture itself has been written and shaped by human authors through their own experiences of revelation, language that treats the human hand in scripture's composition as an ordinary and acknowledged fact rather than a difficulty to be explained away. That framework is what allows Community of Christ to keep publishing and reading the Book of Mormon in worship while declining to make belief in its ancient historical origin a requirement of membership or a qualification for ordination. The book remains scripture in the fullest sense the church uses that word, testimony to Jesus Christ formative for the community that reads it, while the separate question of whether its narrative describes real ancient events is treated as a matter on which individual members may hold genuinely different views without either view placing their standing in the church at risk.

The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints renamed itself Community of Christ on January 1, 2001, after delegates to the church's 2000 World Conference approved the change by close to eighty percent, a rebranding meant to state plainly what the church had already become rather than to announce a sudden shift in direction. The reorganization itself traces back to 1860, when Joseph Smith III accepted leadership of a body of Latter Day Saints who had rejected Brigham Young's claim to succeed his father and had never followed Young's westward migration to Utah, giving the Missouri based reorganization and the Utah based church separate leadership, separate histories and, over the following century and a half, separate approaches to their shared founding scripture. The Book of Mormon is the clearest place that divergence shows today. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints in Utah treats belief in the book's ancient historical origin, an actual record of ancient American peoples translated by Joseph Smith from real golden plates, as foundational to membership and to temple worthiness. Community of Christ, non creedal by explicit conviction and governed by continuing revelation rather than a fixed confession, holds the same book as scripture without holding its members to any single verdict on that historical question, a difference in how one shared text is held rather than a difference over which texts count as scripture at all.