Review of Robert A. Rees, A New Witness to the World (Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2020). 244 pages. $9.95 (paperback).

Abstract: Robert A. Rees has written about the Book of Mormon for over sixty years. In this book are collected sixteen essays that all focus on different aspects of the text of the Book of Mormon, and two that provide a personalized interaction. The topics range from the examination of the spiritual biographies of Nephi and Ammon to the issue of automatic writing as a possibility for the dictation of the Book of Mormon to an essay examining the Nephite 200-year peace.

A New Witness to the World collects Robert A. Rees’s essays covering six decades of serious thought about the Book of Mormon. It necessarily covers multiple topics. All writers who approach the Book of Mormon naturally view it with the tools in their personal kit. Rees is a literary critic and unsurprisingly examines themes in the Book of Mormon and comparisons to the literary world into which the Book of Mormon was presented. The breadth of his interests over time confirm that he takes the Book of Mormon seriously and thinks seriously about how it speaks to its readers.

Preamble: It Has Opened My Heart Wider to Experience His Love

Rees loves the Book of Mormon. That isn’t my description. It is his. The very first line of the very first essay (labeled as the Preamble) is “I love the Book of Mormon” (p. xvi). In total, eight of the sixteen paragraphs in the essay begin with “I love …” and develop a different aspect of the text. It is a testament to his literary sensitivity that the repetition enhances the [Page 192]message without becoming boring. I would like to imagine that it was an unconscious mirror of the parallelisms in the book he loves.

This essay is the oldest in the collection, originally having been published in 1989. Placing it at the beginning of the collection declares that it also reflects a current sentiment. As a preamble, it is intended to set the tone for the essays to follow, and therefore, the rest of the essays contextually become examples of things that Rees loves about the Book of Mormon.

There are a total of fifteen essays, including the preamble and introduction. Two essays date from the 1980s. Most were published in the 2000s. The introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 13 were written for this volume. I offer my impressions from each of the articles.

Introduction: Carrying Water on Both Shoulders.

Rees’s opening sentence is, “How are we to regard the Book of Mormon and how are we to read it?” (p. 1). The essay is a short tour through the ways that the Book of Mormon has been approached through history and moves to important changes that represent the current approaches. Rees’s discussion of history is on point, but what resonates is the current situation.

Rees’s love for the Book of Mormon is strong enough that he can use critical thinking when approaching it. He clearly keeps up with some of the best of the secular approaches to the Book of Mormon, specifically citing a work by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hicks.1 He does not review the articles but emphasizes their insight that the Book of Mormon continues to be polarizing and tends to form two camps — the religious and the secularist (p. 9). The history he has already described is evidence that this is a persistent issue, but it becomes one that needs to have some resolution. We are beginning to see a newer dichotomy that is no longer between true and false, but between faithful examination and secular examination. To be certain, secular examination separates itself from the religious, but it is a qualitatively different approach than past issues that focused only on truth claims.