FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS OF MORMONISM, Latter Day Saints have held

distinctive views about scripture. Particular, even peculiar, Latter Day Saint understandings of scripture surface at the very foundations of the movement. Historian Jan Shipps suggests that one of the difficul-ties with beginning the Mormon story with the First Vision account, as became common in the 1880 s, is that it obscures the centrality of the story of the appearances of Moroni and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and, as a result, also obscures the extent to which Mormonism, through its demonstration that divinity had not ceased direct inter-course with humanity at the end of the apostolic age, responded to the concerns of the inhabitants of the biblical culture out of which it emerged. She adds, Surely the story of the vision is important, but too much emphasis on it takes the Book of Mormon away from the limelight, obscuring the fact that it was this "gold bible " that first attracted adherents to the movement. (Shipps 1985, 31) While the presence of the divine and the texts witnessing to this presence appear at the heart of Mormonism in general and the Re-organization in particular, both major streams of the Latter Day Saint movement remain curiously without an exegetical tradition. Comment-ing on the lack of such a tradition (and I would suggest the lack is even more pronounced in the Reorganized Church), Louis Midgley rightly laments that neglecting the texts heightens both churches' vulnerability to the competing values and ideas of the surroundin