“The journal features an article written by Cky Carrigan, national interfaith evangelism missionary with the North American Mission Board and visiting professor of missions at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. on the theology of Mormonism, one of the nation’s fastest-growing religious groups.

Carrigan’s article focuses on the Christology of Mormonism, which includes the atonement and the belief that Jesus Christ was born as the result of sexual intercourse between Elohim and Mary.”

[As an aside, I've actually met and talked with Cky (pronounced like the Greek conjunction "kai"). He attended a FAIR Conference once in an admirable attempt to get his facts straight about what Mormons believe; several of us spent about two hours after dinner one night trying to help him avoid misrepresentations in his thesis.]

Anyway, what I want to focus on in this post is “the belief that Jesus Christ was born as the result of sexual intercourse between Elohim and Mary.”

Critics of the Church of course love this scandalous nugget (some conflating it with the Adam-God Doctrine to have Adam having sexual intercourse with Mary). It is a commonplace in anti-Mormon literature and websites. And since on its face it appears blasphemous, we have a tendency to recoil from it, to be (overly?) defensive about it, and increasingly to reject it. My usual tack when asked about it is to point out that the idea is not now and never was doctrine; it was a speculation. It is not binding on anyone, and in fact my impression is that it has become very much a minority view in the Church, and that most Mormons do not accept this characterization of the physical generation of the mortal Jesus.

I will confess, however, that I actually like this idea. Maybe it is because I have a streak of old fashioned Mormonism somewhere inside me. But I find it appealing on several levels. First, there is a certain naturalism to the idea. I presume the mortal Jesus had 46 chromosomes, and that 23 came from Mary, but where did the other 23 come from? As a Mormon, I’m not big on the idea that they were created ex nihilo for this specific purpose. I like being able to say that Jesus really did have a father, not in a metaphorical sense only (the language of begetting in the creeds doesn’t mean litera begetting), but in a physical sense. He really was the Son of God.

I also find it fascinating that people see this idea as being so totally offensive. To me, that speaks not only to our radically different conception of God and man as being of the same species, our literalist notion of divine paternalism and our radical materialism, but also to our Puritan heritage. If it is so disgusting to suggest God sired a son by sexual intercourse, why, I wonder, did God ordain that to be the natural method by which we conceive our own children? Is that just some sort of a cosmic joke? Does God sit in yonder heavens and look down on his creatures and laugh at their disgusting and dirty and ridiculous actions? Isn’t it possible that, if God ordained sexual intercourse as the means by which we create children, that it is divinely appointed and not disgusting or dirty at all?

I freely concede that the old fashioned Mormon speculators didn’t think all the way through this idea, and there are theological loose ends, to be sure. But I am curious: does anyone else here kind of like this old notion, or is it Mormon materialism run amuck?

And whatever your opinions on the speculation itself, do you agree with me that it is a dying idea in Mormon thought, and that in another generation or two it will be completely dead?

I enjoy sports. I read the sports page on the train going in to work, and everything else on the train going home. I subscribe to Sports Illustrated. Things of course are more interesting when we have a rooting interest, and the default rooting interest is geographical. So yes, I am a fan of the Chicago Bears, the Bulls, the Cubs, and I have followed with interest the exploits of the Fighting Illini basketball team.

But I particularly follow Mormon athletes. I know who they all are (which annoys my 18-year old son no end). When they do well, I feel as though I’m on top of the world. When they tank, I feel depressed.

It’s almost as though I relate the strength of the truth claims of the Church to how well its athletes perform. I know intellectually that that is irrational; the Church was no more true on a night that Danny Ainge scored 24 points than it was on a night he laid up a bunch of bricks. It really shouldn’t matter that much to me. But it does, for reasons I cannot explain.

Does anyone else feel this way? Anyone care to psychoanalyze my little problem? (It’s really not *that* bad; I’m using a little hyperbole here for effect.)

I first joined MHA maybe a decade ago so that I could get the Journal of Mormon History. I don’t consider myself a Mormon historian; my efforts have always been focused more on LDS scripture than history. But I decided to teach an Institute class on early LDS history (mostly the New York period; I’ve taught that same class twice now), and so decided I had better start boning up on the history literature, and thus joined MHA. I wanted to teach the history class because I realized it would force me to learn more about the subject, which I have always been interested in. I tend to overprepare as a teacher and so I learn a lot about whatever subject I teach.

I really had no intention of ever actually attending an MHA Conference; I just wanted to get their Journal. But a couple of years ago they held their Conference in Kirtland, and that is a nice road trip from where I live in the Chicago area, and there were a lot of restored buildings that I hadn’t seen yet. So I decided to go. And I had an absolutely terrific time. (I also got to have dinner with T&S blogger Nate, sitting at the same table as James Allen and Dan Peterson.) Jan Shipps’ hotel room was right across the hall from me, and it was fun to rub elbows with all of the big names I had been reading. The presentations were generally very well done, informative and interesting. And the tours–there are always tours–were great. I also sang in the MHA choir (about 100 voices), and got to sit in the corner pews of the Kirtland temple for our Sunday morning worship service (we sang the songs from the original dedication and a few others from the period–really fun stuff!).

So I was hooked. Last year I went to the Provo Conference, this year I’m going to Vermont (I’ve never been there), and I intend to go annually from now on.

It’s a little bit pricey. Between airfare (since I live by O’Hare Airport I can fly directly into Burlington; most people have to fly to Boston to get there), a rental car, the hotel and the conference registration I’ll probably put out about $1,000. The demographic at these things tends to skew towards older, more affluent Saints. But it is so much fun, I think it is well worth the cost.

I’ve already gone through the preliminary program (which you can see at the MHA website I linked to above) to get a sense for which sessions I’ll go to. And I’m looking forward to the tour of the various places I taught my students about where the Smith family lived and farmed while trying to keep their heads above water, including Sharon, Joseph’s birth place.

I hope to see some of you there!

When I was just a boy our family got a personal tour conducted by T. Edgar Lyon (my father had been a student of his). He showed us where my father’s ancestor, Samuel Lee (also an ancestor of Harold B. Lee), once lived, on a lot that has never been restored.

I thought I would share a little Nauvoo trivia:

1. When I was a boy and you took the tour at Carthage Jail, in the upper bedroom they actually had a model of a pepperbox pistol, the kind Joseph used to fire blindly into the hallway at the rushing mob. You can get a sense for what one looked like here. It was an early form of six shooter, but there were six barrels that rotated instead of one barrel with a rotating chamber. These things looked like toys and were notoriously unreliable, which perhaps is why only three chambers fired, the others misfiring. I always get a chuckle when critics portray the events at Carthage as a shootout at the OK Corral rather than the assassination that it was.

2. Also when I was a boy, they would point out to you the stain on the floor from Hyrum’s blood where he fell. For many years it was actually under glass. Then they removed the glass and stopped referring to it. As it turns out, the stain wasn’t of Hyrum’s blood after all. When the Church acquired the jail, the son of the former owner said that the floor had been replaced, and the floorboards that are there now were cut with a type of saw that didn’t exist at the time the jail was first constructed.

3. My source for 2 above is Don Enders. Don also told me that they did tests of the John Taylor watch that supposedly was struck by a ball, saving his life. Think CSI. Well, it turns out that the damage to the watch wasn’t caused by a bullet. They think that Taylor fell from the impact of being hit by a ball and fell against the window sill, and that the force of that impact was what damaged the watch to record for time immemorial the time of the attack.

4. Willard Richards was the only one wearing his garments that day. The story has always been that the others put theirs aside to protect them from being desecrated by the mob. But according to John Taylor, who is our best informant on these events, that is not the case. In reality, they weren’t wearing their garments because it was so dang hot. (And if you’ve ever been to Nauvoo on a hot and humid day, like when my wife and I parked cars for the temple dedication, you surely will not blame these brethren for their eminently good sense.)

5. A few times I’ve encountered Colleen Ralson of the Nauvoo Christian Visitors Center. Once she was handing out facsimile reprints of the Nauvoo Expositor at the gates to the City of Joseph pageant. I appreciated receiving this gift very much, and used it as an exhibit when I gave a presentation on the suppression of the Expositor to our Chicago J. Reuben Clark Law Society (based on the Oaks Utah Law Review article). A few years ago the FARMS traveling Dead Sea Scroll exhibit was at Nauvoo, and at their request I went and gave a series of lectures and Q&A sessions on the Scrolls. I noticed Colleen in the audience at one of these sessions, and was sort of hoping she would take me to task on something in my presentation, but she never did.

6. Finally, here is a little piece I wrote once on the meaning of the name “Nauvoo.”

Do you have any Nauvoo experiences or trivia you would like to share?

This article was an exercise in speculative theology, in which England took the position that the marriage relationship in the Celestial Kingdom will be monogamous, not polygynous.

He basically recited five reasons for his point of view:

1. A requirement so central to our future salvation should be firmly grounded in the scriptures, but this one (celestial polygamy) is not.

2. If polygamy is the highest marital law of heaven, surely the Lord would want us to practice it whenever and wherever we can on earth, but such is not the case.

3. That women can be sealed to more than one man, and that we do not assume a practice of celestial polyandry, suggests that men being sealed to more than one woman may not have the significance we assign to it.

4. He rejects the assumption that there will be a surplus of women for the CK.

5. The idea is destructive to women’s sense of identity and self-worth *now*.

Well, that’s a brief summary so that people can comment without having to go back and read the whole article if they don’t want to.

When I read the piece, I thought that, although it was definitely outside the box at the time, I could see it becoming a more and more mainstream position in the Church as time went on, maybe 20, 50, 80 or 100 years from then.

Well, we’re not quite to the 20th anniversary of the article, and certainly celestial polygamy is by no means dead in Mormon thought. But what do you think: is England’s position at least an acceptable mainstream option (if not yet the definitive position)? IE is it permissible to think about the CK in these monogamous terms? And if not, do you think we’re indeed moving in that direction, however slowly? Or is celestial polygamy going to be our default understanding for the foreseeable future?

- It seems as though the main reason is a matter of wanting to preserve the dignity of the temple, to make the temple the site of marriage par excellence in the Church. We don’t want young people to think of the temple in secondary terms, as an afterthought. [But for those who believe in the efficacy of temple sealings in the eternities, how could the temple ever have such a second class status in the minds of our people?]

- Maybe there is a paternalistic concern to prevent young people from blowing a wad on extravagant wedding ceremonies. [But a hard and fast rule is unnecessarily overbroad; thrift and simplicity is already engrained in Mormon culture.]

- There may be a carrot effect in encouraging your inactive Aunt Sally to see her bishop and get her act together so as to be able to enter the temple for the wedding.

I must be missing something. What is it? Because here is how I see it:

1. I see no theological reason that the civil portion of the wedding has to take place in the temple. We are accustomed to bifurcating the civil marriage to comply with state law and the religious sealing for eternity (IE we don’t make new converts get remarried for time in the temple, we just encourage them to get sealed). There is nothing special about getting married for purposes of state law in the temple; what is special about the temple is the sealing.

2. Civil weddings followed by temple sealings are already allowed in various areas of the world (particularly in South America and Europe) where the government does not recognize civil weddings conducted in the temple. This practice doesn’t seem to have diminished the gravitas of the temple in these areas.

3. But my main reason for making this suggestion is that I don’t think we fully appreciate the *huge* amount of goodwill the Church loses when it tells people that they cannot witness the weddings of their sons or daughters. And this from the Family Church TM.

This may not come up that much among those who are in a position to really do something about this policy, since such people generally live in Utah, and when their children marry it usually involves the joining of large Mormon clans. But I live in Illinois, and out here it is not unusual for one or both young people to be converts and the only member of the Church in their families.

Have you ever had to have that conversation, telling someone that as a matter of policy our Church will not allow parents and other beloved family members to witness the wedding? That is a very, very difficult conversation to have. And since it appears to me to be theologically unnecessary, I think we should change the policy.

Please don’t tell me that a ring ceremony alleviates this situation. The rules are very strict to prevent such a ceremony from having the appearance of anything resembling a wedding or an exchange of vows. Well, those very rules prevent such a ceremony from having the desired effect of being a faux wedding ceremony, tossed as a sop to the non-LDS relatives. The ring ceremonies I’ve seen have been unavoidably lame, and you would have to think those non-LDS relatives are idiots to believe they would be satisfied by such a performance.

My best friend and I each got married at about the same time in August of 1980. We each married girls who were converts and the only members of their families. I got married in the Provo temple; he got married in a Lutheran church, and they waited their year to be sealed. At the time, I thought I was making the better decision. But in retrospect, none of my wife’s family was able to be there, and my own parents and most of my family weren’t able to be there either. As it happened, my father then died the night before our reception.

If I had it to do over again, I would have preferred to have a simple civil ceremony where *all* of our family and loved ones could be present, to be folllowed immediately by a temple sealing. But even without the policy change I suggest, I think that if I had it to do over again, I would have waited to get sealed. My inlaws were good sports about not getting to attend, but by now they are like my own parents, and I feel embarrassed that I married their daughter without them present. And I just don’t see the need for this exclusion.