“In sacred history, the divine is an actor in the drama, a direct participant, not a supernatural presence. Because the divine is a natural part of the process, sacred history inevitably takes on a mythic character which makes it ‘truer than true,’ if by truth one means that which is established and verified according to the canons of historical scholarship. Sacred history has other characteristics as well. It is stripped down — in artistic terms, stylized – so that the story is told in blacks and whites, with no grays. The persecuted and persecutors, the people of God and the people of Satan, good and evil are locked in mortal combat in which compromise is out of the question. All the ambiguity and complexity of human existence is shorn away. Moreover, the context is left ambiguous enough to keep the narrative from being either time-bound or culture-bound; it functions as scripture… Mormonism’s sacred history, like all sacred history, is a part of the mythological dimension of this religion. By its very nature, it can only be retold and defended; not reinvestigated, researched.”
Jan Shipps, Sunstone Magazine, ‘The Mormon Past: Revealed or Revisited?’ (Salt Lake City, UT: Sunstone Magazine, November/December 1981 – Volume 6), 57.
