Are you sure it was the Ford of Hosts, and not the Ghost of Fords?
I had frequent visits from Mormon missionaries one summer. They were young, earnest and helpful, so I encouraged their return and ensured I was working in the garden when they arrived. (They also invited me to attend one of their church services, after which my main comment was that the congregation were singing so reluctantly they clearly didn’t believe their god was listening).
I went to Salt Lake City once, and for the first (and only) time in my life I found myself miraculously surrounded by a throng of lovely young ladies vying for my attention. Then I found out they weren’t after my body, and they weren’t even after my mind. They were after my soul, so I reluctantly disengaged and got myself back to Earth.
Ah, Utah! The only place I’ve been where the local bookstore had more books on religion than on everything else combined.
I’m not sure. But there is an interesting point which the textual critics raise here. It is commonly assumed that the “Ford” referenced here is Henry, patron saint of motor vehicles. The reference is actually to a “ford” in the ordinary sense. Those who walk on water, not surprisingly, tend to drive on it as well.
My wife goes there for genealogical work. What she finds particularly funny is that the Mormon staff at the library have name tags which carry, in addition to the name of the staff member, the name of the church. The Mormons have been spending a lot of energy in recent years trying to portray their faith as merely another variant of Christianity, no more different from the others than Presbyterianism is from Episcopalianism. This has been reflected in the type sizing, as the title now is done as “The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter Day Saints,” with those two words in much larger size than the others. The result is that the nametags have very much the feel of “Hello, My Name is JESUS CHRIST” about them.
Ah, Mormon church services.
I’ve attended a few of those, and other Mormon events as well. I learned, at my nephew’s return from his mission, that the Lord of Hosts is also – Hosannah! – the Finder of Wallets, as divine intervention was required upon one occasion to induce a stranger to return his wallet when he’d left it in a bathroom.
When my wife and I were about to have our first child, the Mormon wing of the family came down upon us like a wolf on the fold. Evidently it is fairly common for people who are not religious to feel guilty about not being religious, and to feel that they must raise their children in religion, so they thought we were low-hanging fruit. But they learned, like Eve, that sometimes the low-hanging fruit bear unasked-for surprises.
So, instead of a conversation about how true the Book of Mormon is on a scale from 10 to 11, we had a conversation about the theological anachronisms in it. I explained to my brother that if these new-world Jews had come to America long ago, it was rather strange that their writings bore no resemblance to any work known in the ancient world, but DID seem to answer most of the questions that nineteenth-century Protestants were on about. The Book of Mormon even has Korihor, a man who is such a post-Enlightenment skeptic that it wouldn’t have surprised anyone if he’d been named Robert Ingersoll instead, and who has absolutely no known analogue in the ancient world. Mormons are accustomed to various ad hoc excuses for such things as the presence of horses and ironworking, but this seemed to not have come up before.
It was after a bit of this that my brother indignantly objected that “if you look at it THAT way, you’re never going to find ANYTHING.” But he was unable to point out what was actually the matter with looking at it that way. And he could hardly deny that if somebody came around to his house with a story that he had found a bunch of metal tablets in an Indian burial mound and had translated them, he would not believe this in a million years.
Disparity of scrutiny is the thing: it is the disease. If you discount accounts of the paranormal outside of your religion, you need to discount them inside of your religion. There are no good excuses for failing to do it; now and then one will run into a conclusory statement that the only supernatural claims that deserve to be taken seriously are those of the Christian faith, but that statement rarely comes from anyone literate in the claims of other traditions; when it does, it is only the more regrettable because the excuse-maker should know very well how false it is.
Are these standards “strict”? Yes, but only as strict as what we expect in every other imaginable context.