I keep my visions to myself.
Have you any dreams you’d like to sell?

Mormons tend not to keep their visions to themselves. In his recent General Conference talk “How to Obtain Revelation and Inspiration for Your Personal Life,” Elder Richard G. Scott seems to be inviting Mormons to do the same with their dreams.

The talk starts out along predictable lines for a talk on personal revelation, describing revelation as important information communicated by the Holy Ghost that is “crisp and clear and essential,” whereas inspiration is merely a “series of promptings” that “guide[s] us step by step to a worthy objective.” Elder Scott describes his own approach to obtaining personal revelation: fast, pray to find helpful scriptures, then read and ponder and pray and read and ponder. Anger, hurt, defensiveness, loud and inappropriate laughter, and exaggeration “drive away the Holy Ghost”; exercise, a good night’s sleep, and “good eating habits” enhance spiritual communication. He then gives this interesting counsel on dreams:

Revelation can also be given in a dream when there is an almost imperceptible transition from sleep to wakefulness. If you strive to capture the content immediately, you can record great detail, but otherwise it fades rapidly. Inspired communication in the night is generally accompanied by a sacred feeling for the entire experience. The Lord uses individuals for whom we have great respect to teach us truths in a dream because we trust them and will listen to their counsel. It is the Lord doing the teaching through the Holy Ghost. However, He may in a dream make it both easier to understand and more likely to touch our hearts by teaching us through someone we love and respect.

As he uses the previously defined terms revelation and inspiration in that passage, it seems reasonable to think that a dream that is “crisp and clear and essential” would be a form of revelation.

What’s Doctrinal

What is LDS doctrine when it comes to dreams? The LDS Bible Dictionary offers half a sentence, stating that dreams are “one of the means by which God communicates with men.” (Sorry, ladies.) Brent L. Top offers a bit more in the entry “Revelation” in LDS Beliefs: A Doctrinal Reference (Deseret Book, 2011), giving scripture, the light of Christ, and the Spirit of God as revelatory conduits that induce revelatory thoughts (quoting Joseph Smith, “when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you” as “sudden strokes of ideas”) and revelatory feelings (quoting D&C 9:8, “your bosom shall burn within you” and “you shall feel that it is right”). He then adds, “Divine messages from God can also come in the form of visions, visitations, inspired dreams, and other direct and miraculous means.”

What’s Troubling

One pitfall that Elder Scott tries to avoid is the question of who is doing the communicating. In the paragraph quoted above, Elder Scott was careful to clarify the source: “It is the Lord doing the teaching through the Holy Ghost.” But earlier in the talk he acknowledged strength and support from “the other side of the veil,” suggesting that some sort of communication or influence comes to us directly from individual spirits. On the first reading, if dear departed Uncle Orville appears to you in a revelatory dream — one that is “crisp and clear and essential” and that you write down quickly upon awakening so you don’t forget the details — it’s not really a message from Uncle Orville, it’s a message from God via the Holy Ghost. But I suspect many recipients of such a dream would run with the second option and accept the dream as a communication direct from Uncle Orville.

Another wrong turn I can see would be if this talk spurs increased sharing of what are held to be personal revelatory dreams. Testimony meeting would, I suppose, be the natural venue for this sort of sharing, although I could see it happening in lessons as well. The title of Elder Scott’s talk seems to counsel against this practice by limiting the application to “your personal life,” but he didn’t really emphasize that limitation in the body of the talk. Besides, the line between personal life and public life is quickly disappearing. Once upon a time, “your personal life” implied private matters; nowadays, “your personal life” means your last ten Facebook posts and your Twitter feed. If a bishop were to be so bold as to quietly counsel a bit more discretion by someone who recounted a personal dream in some detail at the pulpit, I suspect the response might be: “I know it’s my personal life; that’s why I’m telling everyone about it.”

But the biggest trouble I have with recommending dream analysis as a form of personal revelation is there are no real boundaries. At least visions are relatively rare phenomena; dreams come to almost all people on almost any night. And there is nothing uniquely Mormon or even Christian about dreams or about claims that God communicates through dreams. Dreams (and visions too, for that matter) contain an array of symbols that tend to be, well, symbolic, and therefore susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations. Seven fat cows, seven lean; a large stone rolling down a hill; God on his throne surrounded by numberless concourses of angels. Dream analysis is tricky business. People who interpret their dreams tend to read meaning into them rather than out of them. It’s a form of projection, not the deciphering of an intentional message encoded in the recollected dream. I’m not sure the “crisp and clear and essential” test will permit objective discrimination between personal dreams (where people read meaning into their dreams) and revelatory dreams (where people receive messages from God).

There’s a third option of course: demonic communication, a message from the wrong source. Satanic influence and temptation is the flip side to divine inspiration, and it is held to operate by Satan or one of his fellow demons implanting tempting or misleading thoughts in your mind. Recall the experience Hiram Page who, following the example of Joseph Smith, started “receiving revelations” through “a certain stone” concerning “the upbuilding of Zion.” Seems like a worthy goal, and nothing suggests Brother Page had anything but good intentions. But Joseph was directed to tell Hiram Page that “those things which he hath written from that stone are not of me and that Satan deceiveth him.” Instead, “all things must be done in order, and by common consent in the church, by the prayer of faith.” (D&C 28 heading; verses 11 and 13.) That statement, like Elder Scott’s “crisp and clear and essential,” appears to be giving a method for discriminating between divine communication and not-so-divine communication, whether that be demonic communication or just introspective thoughts, such as spontaneously generated dreams. I’m not sure either formula really delivers on its promise. And if you can’t discriminate between divine, demonic, and autonomous dreams, what’s the point?

The simpler solution, in line with the traditional reading of D&C 28, is to say that only Joseph or his successors in office can get revelation through the appointed medium of communication, whether it be seer stones, dreams, tea leaves, or the entrails of sacrificed animals (recall the “other direct and miraculous means” referred to by Brent Top). That’s a simple, objective approach. “Keep your visions and your dreams to yourself” might be the better rule.

Note: Epigraph by Stevie Nicks, “Dreams,” on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977).

Overview

The book is dense enough that only a long and thorough review can do it justice. I consider this post to be a discussion of some interesting points raised by the book rather than a full or even a short review. I won’t even attempt a summary of the book (the table of contents and the description of the book from the dust jacket are available at the linked publisher’s page). This paragraph from the Introduction (p. 8) gives something like an overview and also a taste of the author’s approach:

After the Book of Mormon emerged as a distinctive grave artifact in the late 1820s, Joseph Smith continued to explore relics and rituals central to the problem of death. In the late 1830s, after moving to Ohio, Smith acquired and interpreted Egyptian mummies and their funerary papyri. Finally arriving in Illinois, where he founded a biblical-sounding utopia called Nauvoo, Smith elaborated his religious vision, encompassing an afterlife theology that could vanquish death, ensure permanent personal election, and maintain the human family intact forever in a sacerdotal structure. To this end, Smith drew on, adapted, and reformulated rites and doctrines from sources inside and outside normative Protestantism, yielding an intensely biblical system that combined elements of the Radical Reformation, Western esotericism, and Christian perfectionism. By the time of his death, Smith had revealed a polyvalent family system, a utopian communitarianism grounded in mystical traditions about Enoch, a temple liturgy that taught his followers how to negotiate the afterlife and promised them postmortal divinity, and a scandalously anthropomorphic God whom all humans could call Father. These surprisingly varied themes and innovations of early Mormonism find coherence in Smith’s encounters with, and attempted conquest of, death.

In the book’s favor, it does a better job of relating and synthesizing this material than prior book-length attempts. Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire went too far afield and did not make the case for causal connections between the hermetic material he reviewed and Joseph Smith. Brown stays closer to home with his material. Davies’ The Mormon Culture of Salvation has a thesis that is similar to Brown’s, but employed a variety of models from religious studies and the sociology of religion to guide the analysis. In contrast, Brown bases his discussion on a much larger set of detailed historical facts and employs no social science models (although he does cite the literature from time to time). I found Brown’s fact-based discussion more credible than Davies’ model-driven discussion. To compare favorably with both Brooke and Davies, two well-respected scholars, is certainly an admirable accomplishment.

Issues

At the same time, I have a few issues with the book. First, I’m not convinced foregrounding a “Mormon conquest of death” theme is defensible. First, there is nothing unique about the Mormon view of a “conquest of death.” Every Christian denomination takes the conquest of death as a common point of departure, rooted in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s not like existential dread hangs over most people or other Christians until they convert to a Mormon doctrine of salvation that promises unique access to immortality and the afterlife. Even the Mormon claim of eternal families is hardly unique: while not incorporated in the formal theology of other Christian denominations, most Christians nevertheless assume their families will be around in the next life. No one thinks of heaven as a form of solitary confinement where you would be barred from contact with former family members. “[T]hat same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there” (D&C 130:2).

More generally, there’s an odd connotation to the term “conquest of death.” It brings up images of familiar movie plots where some 19th-century eccentric is hacking his way through the African rain forest in search of the fountain of youth or the golden elixir of life. And there is a secular view, often enough reflected in media stories on religion these days, that all religious beliefs are in some sense strange, not much different from the jungle eccentric on a misguided quest for a technology of eternal life. To confirm that bias journalists are drawn to stories that accentuate strange and bizarre religious beliefs or practices. I don’t know what Brown’s own perspective is (the author reveals very little in the book), but making “the Mormon conquest of death” the central theme of the book perhaps unwittingly plays the same game, suggesting it is also the central theme of Joseph’s life and the central concern of modern Latter-day Saints. As noted in the book, Joseph lost several family members during his life, which understandably intensified his feelings on the subject (see D&C 137, for example). But the implicit suggestion that Latter-day Saints in general have a strange preoccupation with death is an idea that will not survive actual attendance at a Mormon funeral, which is more likely to give the impression that Mormons do not take the idea of death seriously enough.

Brown does attempt to define the term “conquest of death” in broader terms:

When … I refer to death “conquest,” I mean a set of approaches to the meaning of life, a framing of aspirations for the afterlife, and controversies about the security of stability of salvation, as expressed in human struggles with mortality. When and under what circumstances life ends, how much of earthly experience will persist, and what constitutes preparation for death are problems that can be distinguished from salvation per se. Framing Mormonism as an attempted conquest of death illuminates its theology and enriches the texture of the lived experience of believers. (p. 5)

I’m not sure that broad definition was really carried forward through the balance of the book. I don’t think a balanced discussion of an LDS view of the meaning of life or an LDS view of the stability of salvation would focus on the themes discussed in the book. My sense is that such a discussion would reflect what we used to call the Plan of Salvation (now known as the Plan of Happiness), essentially “salvation per se.” So my impression was that the book’s discussion of the “Mormon conquest of death” was rather narrower than the definition given by Brown implies.

Conclusion

So what’s the right perspective or balance for a book about Joseph Smith or early Mormonism? The topics and themes treated in Brown’s book are part of the story, of course. A very good discussion can be had over how much weight to accord those themes as opposed to others that generally get more coverage in a biography of Joseph Smith or a history of early Mormonism. I think the book would be stronger if a chapter were devoted to that discussion and an effort was made to place the themes discussed in the book within the fuller context of Joseph Smith’s life and early Mormonism.

That is a discussion that could easily apply to present-day Mormonism as well. So a case can be made that the book is more than just a discussion of (what I consider to be) marginal themes and practices in early Mormonism. Consider the rise of “temple Mormonism” in just the last generation: a vastly expanded temple construction program, coupled with a redefinition of normative Mormonism in which holding a temple recommend is now essentially a requirement of being a Mormon in good standing (rather than simply being a baptized, attending, believing member of the Church), even extending to the use of the temple recommend as a requirement for teaching at BYU or for confirming one’s son or daughter a member of the Church.

Both esoteric doctrine and temple Mormonism fall on the retrenchment side of Armand Mauss’s assimilation/retrenchment spectrum, emphasizing Mormon distinctiveness rather than community with other Christians. It may be that the direction of current LDS organizational and doctrinal change implies that the themes discussed by Brown, which I view as being largely marginal to present LDS belief and practice, are in fact becoming the new Mormon mainstream, but I hope not. I won’t give up without a fight.

Let’s start with Elder Christofferson’s recent Conference talk titled “The Doctrine of Christ,” which was both an admission that we have a problem and a bold step toward a solution. Here’s the admission:

We have seen of late a growing public interest in the beliefs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is something we welcome because, after all, our fundamental commission is to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ, His doctrine, in all the world (see Matthew 28:19–20; D&C 112:28). But we must admit there has been and still persists some confusion about our doctrine and how it is established.

As the Bott Affair made clear last month, the confusion is not restricted to journalists or outsiders but extends to insiders, Mormons, us. If a BYU religion professor can’t get the doctrine straight, we have a serious institutional problem.

Moving toward a solution, Elder Christofferson first noted that only apostles can announce doctrine: “[E]stablishing the doctrine of Christ or correcting doctrinal deviations is a matter of divine revelation to those the Lord endows with apostolic authority.” The recent LDS press release is a rare (at least up until now) example of a definitive official apostolic doctrinal statement. It said the statements made by Professor Bott “do not represent the teachings and doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Elder Christofferson continued:

At the same time it should be remembered that not every statement made by a Church leader, past or present, necessarily constitutes doctrine. It is commonly understood in the Church that a statement made by one leader on a single occasion often represents a personal, though well-considered, opinion, not meant to be official or binding for the whole Church.

Of course, as helpful as that statement is in providing a rationale for dismissing opinion (even well-considered opinion) rather than automatically elevating every statement of every leader to doctrinal status, that statement is itself just a well-considered opinion made by a single leader on a single occasion. Let’s hope it gets repeated by other apostolic speakers in coming months and years.

I’m certainly not the only one to sense that the confusing state of Mormon doctrine is suddenly a problem. At Peculiar People, the newest LDS group blog on the block, Matt Bowman discussed “Why Is It So Hard to Figure Out What Mormons Believe?” While noting the advantages of a pragmatic rather than a formal approach to theology, he nevertheless observed its key failing:

But there is no creed, catechism, or systematic theology to hold Mormonism to any fixed point, and therefore, the cluster of ideas that make up Mormon doctrine, all of which at some time or another seemed the unvarnished truth to some group of saints or another, is in a constant state of evolution.

Joanna Brooks weighed in as well:

Mormonism has no professional clergy, no theological-scholarly corps. There is no regularly recited doctrinal creed. For well over a hundred years the tradition has been conveyed by word-of-mouth in thousands of lay-taught Sunday School classes and around kitchen tables and campfires. A correlated, cradle-to-grave curriculum was developed in the 1950s, but beyond central tenets of what Mormons might call “the gospel” — faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism; the inspired origins of the LDS Church and Mormon scripture; the eternal significance of families — Mormonism remains a theological “jungle,” as one eminent LDS scholar put it.

So welcome to the jungle. But we don’t want a doctrinal jungle, we want Paradise City. How are we going to get there?

Examining claims of historical apostasy is a pertinent task for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For the last hundred years, the Great Apostasy narrative has shaped Latter-day Saint historical assumptions, contributed to the construction of Latter-day Saint social and theological identity, and impacted the ability of the Church to develop ecumenical relationships. The contributors want to raise awareness about the influence of this narrative as well as to reconsider some of the assumptions made by this narrative. We hope to cultivate scholarly discourse among the contributors as well as the Latter-day Saint community about the challenges and consequences of simultaneously acknowledging complexity, causality, and providence when interpreting history for theological purposes. We hope to develop a richer understanding of the definitions, connotations, social functions, and theological implications of Latter-day Saint conceptions of the apostasy.

So let’s take that invitation at face value and begin a discussion about “claims of historical apostasy” and “some of the historical assumptions made by this narrative.” The simplest form of the narrative is that there was an original church from which something essential (doctrine, scripture, authority, priesthood, the Spirit) was lost.

Looking for the Original Church

Until the 20th century, no Christian really questioned this assumption (of an original church), and few do now. Catholics claim an unbroken chain of authority and tradition from the original church. Protestants claim there was an original church, but that the excesses of the Roman Catholic church in later centuries necessitated Protestant reforms. The LDS Church claims there was an original church, but that reforms were not enough to restore lost authority: a restoration of divine authority and new provision of the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ through newly revealed scripture was needed.

Here’s the problem. Scholarship in the 20th century suggests that the original condition of Christianity in the decades following Christ’s death — the very beginning of the early church — was not any sort of essential unity but instead was radically diverse. In other words, there never was an early Christian Church, there were, at the very beginning, many different churches (and yes, I recognize that the term “church” is somewhat anachronistic in this early context, but that is sort of the point). Bart Ehrman makes the case for early Christian diversity in his book Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (OUP, 2003). He also summarizes that view in the last lecture in After the New Testament: The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers, a Teaching Company set of CDs (hey, I drive a lot). Here are his essential points from that lecture:

• Prior to the later 3rd century, there were many competing Christian groups with a wide range of beliefs and practices.
• The term “proto-orthodoxy” refers to those early Christians who held views that eventually (in the late 3rd century) pushed out competing Christian practices and doctrines.
• Older historians simply assumed that the orthodox view (held by the proto-orthodox) had always, even from the earliest period following the death of Jesus Christ, been the dominant one.
• They were wrong.

The standard account of orthodoxy and heresy derives from Eusebius, the Christian historian of the early 4th century. In his victor’s version of early Christian history, everything that wasn’t proto-orthodox was heresy. The newer account rejects the validity of those labels: “orthodox” as right-thinking was evident only in retrospect. It instead stresses the initial Christian diversity that only gradually, over the course of almost three centuries, developed into a more unified Christian Church, by way of an early, slow-acting version of correlation emanating from the influential church at Rome. Ehrman identifies Walter Bauer, a 20th-century German theologian, as the scholar who first articulated this newer view, although his original arguments have been updated by more recent scholars.

An example might help illustrate the degree to which the retrospective and biased view of history can actually obscure earlier events. This is from Henry Chadwick’s classic The Early Church (Penguin Books, 1967).

The Jewish Christians, excluded by their fellow-countrymen, continued to observe sabbaths, circumcision, and other Jewish feasts. As this distressed many Gentile Christians, they became lonely, unsupported groups. … From Irenaeus onwards Jewish Christianity is treated as a deviationist sect rather than as a form of Christianity with the best claims to continuity with the practice of the primitive church at Jerusalem. The Jewish Christians called themselves Ebionites, a name derives from the Hebrew word meaning “the poor” …. Since some of them had never accepted the tradition of the virgin birth of Christ, Irenaeus classified the Ebionites with other heresies that denied this; soon Tertullian was supposing that they originated with a person named Ebion, and later anti-heretical writers even felt able to quote from Ebion’s alleged writings.

And thus we see how a strong normative view of what was supposed to have happened in the past (like the orthodoxy and heresy view of the 4th century) can create its own facts, even its own documents.

An Emerging LDS View?

So here is a general question for the LDS view of the apostasy: How does the idea that the early church was, in fact, a variety of diverse churches with different beliefs and practices affect our view of the Great Apostasy? Rejecting the orthodoxy and heresy account and instead locating the emergence of a unified Christian Church in the later third century certainly raises new questions about what happened in the first and second centuries. Maybe the Great Apostasy wasn’t really so great.

The LDS view in the 20th century seems to be that the original church had God’s favor while the apostles were alive, but lost God’s favor when the apostles died without establishing proper successors. An alternative LDS view, sketched in 1 Nephi 13, is that the Bible (or sacred writings that preceded the Bible) once “contained the fulness of the gospel” (v. 24), but that parts of that fulness, “many parts which are plain and most precious” (v. 25, 28), were later removed.

A discussion that suggests updated LDS views is found in Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy (FARMS and BYU Press, 2005). In the opening chapter, “What Went Wrong with the Early Christians,” Noel B. Reynolds notes how Hugh Nibley’s work on early Christian writings refocused LDS scholars away from the Protestant critique of the excesses of the medieval Catholic Church and towards the first centuries and even the first decades following the death of Jesus Christ. Likewise, he notes that Richard L. Bushman, in a book review published in the mid-sixties, urged LDS historians to move away from Protestant models and take a fresh view of the apostasy. Reynolds highlights the early change from covenant-making ordinances to sacraments (dispensing God’s grace) as a key development in apostasy. He lists three myths about the apostasy that are critiqued by later contributors to the volume:

• Myth 1: The apostasy happened because of outside persecution.
• Myth 2: The apostasy was caused by the hellenization of Christianity or the incorporation of Greek philosophy and culture into the teachings of the early church. [This happened a century too late to be a causal explanation.]
• Myth 3: The Roman Catholic Church specifically is the great and abominable church spoken of in Nephi’s vision. [It is not.]

Reynolds notes that “as our knowledge of these times [the first Christian centuries] grows, the apostasy is again pushed back further, even into the first century.” So here is a second and more particular question for the LDS view: How early can the apostasy be pushed back? The harder we look, the earlier it seems to get. At some point you get early enough that the evidence no longer argues for an apostasy, it argues for the failure of an original church (from which the Christianity of later decades or centuries apostatized from) to ever be established or organized. You end up, I think, with the sort of early radical diversity posited by the Bauer hypothesis and updated by Ehrman.

So that’s a discussion I would enjoy hearing at the BYU conference next month. Can the LDS view of the apostasy be reconceptualized in light of this newer view of early Christian diversity? Maybe we view the original church not as a plane that crashed after takeoff but as one that never really got off the ground. Perhaps we can view the apostasy in two complementary stages, with the original church not enjoying God’s favor because it wasn’t really a church yet (a “proto-apostasy”) and the eventual unified church of the late 3rd century not enjoying God’s favor because it had, by then, lost or changed key doctrines or practices (the fulness of the apostasy).

Any other ideas about the apostasy you’d like to hear about from LDS scholars?

The Long Shadow of Mormon Doctrine

Everyone knows that the leading entry in the one-volume doctrinal reference field for the last two generations has been McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine (“MD”). I don’t know whether the title LDS Beliefs was intended to mirror the earlier title, but Deseret Book no doubt hopes the new volume will sell as many copies as the prior one. I certainly think we will all be well served if the general membership of the Church starts going to LDS Beliefs rather than MD for a helpful summary of Mormon doctrine on particular topics. Why?

There’s a big difference between today and the two decades following 1958, when MD was first published, then revised, and when it had its greatest influence. The difference is not so much in the substance of LDS doctrine as in its tone. LDS leaders of that era, including Elder McConkie, took positions on topics (and seemingly committed the Church to positions on topics) from which the 21st-century Church has gently backed away. For example, MD’s Evolution entry covered several pages, endorsing a 6000-year-old Earth and the view that there was no death before the Fall of Adam, then declaring: “There is no harmony between the truths of revealed religion and the theories of organic evolution.” [In fairness, the article also stated, "Obviously there never will be a conflict between truths revealed in the realm of religion and those discovered by scientific research."]

In contrast, there is no Evolution entry in LDS Beliefs. There is no entry on Science. This seems in line with the most recent counsel given by LDS leaders on the faith/science issue: “Leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church.” [From the Evolution entry in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism; see extended comments on that entry in the comments to this earlier post.]

Millet has been arguing for this narrower approach to LDS doctrine for years now, apparently as a result of his extensive interfaith work in a variety of settings. About the hundredth time you have to deal with a sincere question that starts out, “Why do Mormons believe …,” followed by an excerpt from the Journal of Discourses or an accurately quoted but speculative statement from a single LDS leader, you are ready to reassess the regularly repeated folk doctrine that every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of an LDS leader is LDS doctrine. Millet’s narrower formulation, which I have seen expounded at length in several of his books but which is expressed concisely in the LDS Beliefs entry “Doctrine,” is as follows:

Is it found within the four standard works or within official declarations or proclamations? Is it taught or discussed in general conference or other official gatherings by general Church leaders today? Is it found in the general handbooks or approved curriculum of the Church today? If it meets at least one of these criteria, we can feel secure in teaching it.

That sounds a lot like what a properly directed Correlation function should use as a guide to what should or shouldn’t be stated in official Church publications. If Correlation actually uses this sort of approach, then good for Correlation. If Correlation still defers to the traditional CES preference for statements (from whatever source) by Elder McConkie or Joseph Fielding Smith, then please, please get rid of current Correlation management [LDS bureaucrats, not senior leadership] and put Millet et al in their place.

True to the Doctrine

The booklet True to the Faith, an official publication of the Church, was originally directed to the youth. As I recall, when the booklet was first published a copy was distributed to each of the youth age 12 through 18 in their Sunday classes. However, the utility of an officially published doctrinal summary was quickly apparent, and the booklet became a primary resource for LDS doctrinal reference by adults as well as youth and by non-LDS as well as members of the Church.

LDS Beliefs offers more and considerably longer entries, of course, with authorship of each entry disclosed at the end of each article. It’s nice when actual authors are identified — this reinforces the claim that it is an individual speaking, not the Church, and provides a person to whom a reader may direct questions if they so desire. The standard disclaimer is given at the end of the Introduction to LDS Beliefs: “While we have sought earnestly to be in harmony with scripture and with the teachings of our leaders, this work is not an official publication of either The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Brigham Young University.”

When, as with Mormon Doctrine, the identified person speaking is a General Authority, the question of whether they are speaking as an individual or on behalf of the Church can be unclear. I think this confusion has generated much of the controversy over the status of the book Mormon Doctrine. The better practice, I think, is for general doctrinal summaries to have disclosed authors who are not General Authorities (as with LDS Beliefs) and for official Church publications (like True to the Faith) to have no authors listed. Yes, it sure would be nice if some sort of disclosure were provided of the process by which manuals and other official publications of the Church are prepared, but at the end of the day it is good to have a clear distinction between opinions or statements of individuals (however well informed) and statements of the Church as an entity (which should stand independent of who authored the statement).

Five Volumes is Four Too Many

The last comparison is to the five-volume work The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (“EOM”), originally published by Macmillan in 1991. This was a monumental publication that, unfortunately, did not get much attention in the Church as a whole. It’s the sort of publication that gets purchased by libraries but not by individuals (I don’t know any individual who actually purchased the five-volume set). And it is not just the price: the Joseph Smith Papers Project volumes aren’t cheap, but many individuals are purchasing copies. Single volume selections from EOM were published by FARMS around 2000 (I own To All the World, the single volume selection of EOM entries relating to the Book of Mormon) and the entire publication is now available and very accessible (for free) online. Still, my impression is that EOM did not live up to its potential.

Like EOM, LDS Beliefs lists authors and sources after each entry. It is fair to think of LDS Beliefs as a scaled-down version of EOM with (following the Millet doctrinal approach) a narrower view of doctrinal topics. Hopefully LDS Beliefs will succeed in a way that EOM did not. It is perhaps unfair to compare EOM, which was intended as a scholarly reference work, directly with LDS Beliefs, which is intended to be a popular reference work. A rewarding exercise for anyone consulting LDS Beliefs is to go look up the corresponding entry in EOM. But the bottom line is that there is a distinct need for a reliable and understandable one-volume doctrinal summary for the average Latter-day Saint. EOM did not fill that need; LDS Beliefs does.

A Few General Comments

J. Stapley posted a review of LDS Beliefs about a month ago at BCC which provides more details as to the particulars of the book itself. I’ll just add a few quick observations that I didn’t cover above. First, I was surprised that Lectures on Faith was given such lengthy discussion (a six-page entry) and was so frequently cited as a source. That’s a bit unusual. Second, despite the contrast I drew above between LDS Beliefs and MD, the book cites Elder McConkie and Joseph Fielding Smith rather frequently. Lesson for the senior LDS leader: write lots of general doctrinal commentaries and you will be cited by three or four generations of LDS scholars. I don’t recall seeing any citations to David O. McKay or Hugh B. Brown.

I am hoping to see some comments on this thread pop up on December 26 by those who unwrap this book Christmas morning and look through it. (I hope you have something better to do on the afternoon of the 25th than to post comments at T&S!)

***

In the Church, we’re suspicious of debt. Sure, we get a pass on student loans, a modest house, a first car, but, as a general rule, our leaders discourage incurring consumer debt, and celebrate those who have escaped debt’s clutches. Having grown up a member of the Church, and having heard the various talks and lessons, I suspect most members would say that Alex made the better decision;Alex has the Fire and no debt. Pat, on the other hand, has both the Fire and the debt.

***

Assuming you agree with my intuition that, in general, Mormons would think that Alex made the better decision, I want to push that intuition a little:

(1) Let’s suppose, first, that Alex bought with cash because he has $200 just lying around. Pat, on the other hand, doesn’t, and the only way she can afford a Kindle is by borrowing. But assume Pat has a steady, if low-paying, job with amazing job security, while Alex, though making more money,has a 70% chance of losing his job in the next three months, with an uncertain outlook for getting another job in the foreseeable future. Does that change your (Mormon) intuition?

(2) Or what if Alex leaves all of his money in a checking account that doesn’t pay any interest, while Pat borrows at a low 3% rate, while she earns a 10% return on her money, which has all been wisely invested?[fn5]

(3) Or what if Pat isn’t just paying a low interest rate, but no (or a negative) interest rate?

***

What I’m trying to get at is the underlying why of our discomfort with debt. I understand for financial purposes why consumer debt is often a bad idea. Even in a (2) situation, most people don’t invest their unborrowed money; they just leave it in their checking accounts, so the fact that they could earn a higher return in theory doesn’t mean anything in practice.

And maybe our discomfort is purely a practical one, borne out of speculative investing in Kirtland and several generations of General Authorities who lived through the Depression.[fn6] But is there a religious explanation? Like we don’t like consumerism/worldliness? (But didn’t both Alex and Pat buy a Kindle Fire?) We’re theologically opposed to risk? Interest (at least its payment) is spiritually harmful?

***

Even if the avoidance of consumer debt is purely a practical consideration, we can see better today why it’s a good idea than we’ve seen in 80 years or so. But I’m interested in your take on whether it might be something more.

—

[fn1] Note that it’s exam season, so I’m kind of in exam  mode. Oh, and good luck to all of the T&S-reading students on your finals!

[fn2] Actually, they both want an iPad, but it’s priced way out of their league, and they figure a Kindle Fire is good enough.

[fn3] ;)

[fn4] Yes, I’m asking you to judge Alex and Pat, without knowing their hearts or their genders. If it makes you feel any better, they’re fictional, anyway: this is just a thought experiment.

[fn5] FWIW, Pres. Hinckley wouldn’t have changed his mind.

[fn6] It’s probably also worth noting that the Law prohibited charging interest. For those of you who know the Hebrew Bible better than I, was there any underlying reason that interest would be prohibited, or is it solely because God said?

I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any renewal of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger and the love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit as swiftly vanishes away. Is there no way to prevent this — the continual decay of pure religion? We ought not to prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and save all they can: that is, in effect, to grow rich.

Wesley locates this process or progression — practicing “pure religion” leads to industry and frugality [which produces riches] which induces pride — in the life of individual believers, which is where I think it occurs, when and if it occurs. Pride is a characteristic of individuals, not of societies. The recent surge in LDS commentary discussing “the pride cycle” as some sort of social dynamic doesn’t seem to recognize that the concept, as applied to societies as a whole, is largely incoherent. Wesley’s quote seems like a nice way to enrich an LDS discussion of the topic. I wish we got material like this in LDS manuals instead of recycled quotes from the middle of the last century.

Note: I corrected the last paragraph to add riches to Wesley’s progression from religion to pride.

[For what its worth, this years' list of "Conference Books" will be available tomorrow morning here.]

What I noticed started with the new Relief Society book, Daughters in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society. In their addresses, all of the members of the General Relief Society Presidency mentioned the new book. This included Sister Barbara Thompson, who also mentioned it when she spoke during the Saturday Morning Session. [I was surprised, however, that no one else mentioned or cited the book. Why is that?]

Then I noticed that the speakers frequently cited the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church series of Priesthood and Relief Society manuals. While those manuals have been cited before, this time it occurred to me that the manuals are simply compilations of quotes from a variety of other sources; little in them is newly written. So, why didn’t the conference speakers cite the original works?

The answer is, I think, simple: availability. The reason for citing these works isn’t promotion of new instead of old. The reason is that these works are largely available to the vast majority of LDS Church members, regardless of language and location. The original sources might as well be located on the moon as far as many Church members today are concerned. They can’t get them and wouldn’t be able to get them without a large investment in learning English and a not insignificant expense (for many areas around the world) in purchasing and shipping copies of these books. So it is problematic to cite sources that so many members have no way to get if you can figure out a way to avoid it.

Understanding these issues, the manuals become a more efficient way of getting important portions of the original works into the hands of Church members. Instead of having to translate works like the History of the Church, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Gospel Doctrine, etc., the manuals simply contain the most used and useful excerpts from many of these vital works. In terms of translation, these manuals are much, much more efficient.

I know that this series has been criticized from time to time. For example, the first volume, on Brigham Young, was criticized for its failure to mention polygamy in its biographical pages. I don’t think my observation above suggests anything either way about these criticisms. Instead, this observation makes clear an important problem that we continue to face as the Church spreads into new countries and new languages: how to make the basic teachings available.

If nothing else, this observation makes the role of these manuals even more important—for many Church members they are the first, and perhaps even only, way to access documents that we, English-speakers, take for granted.

And, to my surprise, I learned that, although it looks suspiciously convenient, atonement does come from “at-one-ment.”

Fast-forward a decade or more. I continue to be skeptical of stories that seem a little too pat and convenient, including Elder Cook’s story of the missionaries who didn’t board the Titanic. It felt a little too much like the story of the missionaries who called off their meeting in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.[fn2] Thrown off, I didn’t catch the profundity of his remarks.

After Conference, I quickly Googled and discovered (a) there is credible evidence, predating Elder Cook’s remarks, that Elder Sonne, et al., did, in fact, cancel their fateful tickets, and (b) there is also credible evidence that Sister Corbett did, in fact, believe that Mormon missionaries would be on the Titanic with her.

As a result, the second time I listened, I actually listened. And I realized that I had entirely misheard Elder Cook’s talk. His was not a laundry-list of Mormon cliches—rather, he complicated our simplistic view that righteousness = happiness.[fn3] Elder Cook says that

[t]he scriptures are clear: those who are righteous, follow the Savior, and keep His commandments will prosper in the land.

But what does it mean to “prosper in the land”? Sometimes, apparently, it means our lives will be saved, whether through divine intervention or hapless lateness. Other times, though, it means we will suffer, even though we were “careful, thoughtful, prayerful, and valiant.”

Elder Cook does not suggest that the missionaries were spared because of their righteousness, or that Sister Corbett died because she lacked something. Instead, suffering is part of this life. Sometimes, Elder Cook says, challenges are the result of others’ agency; sometimes, they’re the result of our own. And sometimes they provide us with experience that we need.

Ultimately, Elder Cook does not try to solve the problem of evil. He acknowledges that there are things we don’t know.[fn4] But, he says, there are things we do know: we have a loving Heavenly Father, an atoning Savior, and are participating in a plan of happiness that doesn’t end with our death. And, unlike the Titanic, the Savior’s sacrifice provides lifeboats for all of us.

—

[fn1] Yes, I worked at the Writing Center, and yes, it was my favorite undergrad job (even better than teaching at the MTC).

[fn2] For the sake of anybody who doesn’t click on the link, let me make clear that there was no missionary meeting in the WTC to be called off. I don’t want to get rumors started again.

[fn3] “Happiness” may not be the word I want here, if you believe that happiness is the ultimate state of the righteous. But I mean happiness at a specific point in time; my righteousness clearly does not guarantee me that I will be happy every moment of every day, even if it does mean that ultimately, I’ll be happy, or that on a net basis, my happiness will exceed my not-happiness.

[fn4] That there are things we don’t know is not at all central to his talk, but is, nonetheless, profound: although we have access to all truth, that does not mean that we know everything. Sometimes when we struggle to understand, it is because we really and truly don’t have all of the information.

Let’s briefly consider two questions:

1. What is the LDS position on Creationism?
2. Regardless of that position, is Creationism nevertheless taught to LDS youth as the LDS position?

These are important questions. We need to teach our children well.

First, a couple of caveats. The topic of interest is Creation and the age of the earth, not evolution. Second, I am not really concerned with what Joseph Fielding Smith or Bruce R. McConkie taught a generation or two ago — that is about as relevant to LDS high school students in 2011 as sermons by Orson Pratt or Brigham Young in the Journal of Discourses. I am more interested in what the CES manual for seminary teachers says, what contemporary LDS publications say, and what LDS seminary teachers (both CES full-timers and the selfless volunteers who run early-morning classes) are actually presenting to students.

As to the first question, the CES Old Testament Teacher Resource Manual lesson that covers Genesis 1 contains the following statement, highlighted in bold font and with italicized terms:

The purpose of the scriptural accounts of the Creation is not to answer such questions as how the earth was created, how long ago the Creation occurred, or how long the process of creation took. Their purpose is to answer the more important questions of why the earth was created and who created it.

You can follow the link and peruse the lesson yourself, but at least on the topic of teaching Creation without teaching Creationism, I think the lesson does a pretty good job.

The chapter on Creation in the CES Old Testament Student Manual (for university students, often provided to seminary teachers as a supplementary resource) actually discusses three theories of Creation: (1) Earth was created in seven days; (2) Earth was created over seven thousand years; and (3) Earth was created over seven “eras,” each of which could be “millions or even hundreds of millions of our years” in duration. The CES manual concludes that “officially the Church has not taken a stand on the age of the earth.” That is a surprising and welcome admission. [However, honesty requires me to disclose the manual's favorable discussion of the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky in the Creation chapter — does *anyone* edit these manuals for content? Isn't this the kind of stupid discussion that Correlation is supposed to remove from LDS manuals?]

Another LDS resource is the True to the Faith handbook, published by the Church. The Creation entry notes that “the Lord organized elements that had already existed. He did not create the world ‘out of nothing,’ as some people believe.” (Citations omitted.) This clearly sets the LDS view of Creation apart from the standard Christian view, shared by Creationists, of ex nihilo Creation. It’s worth noting that ex nihilo Creation is not the biblical view from Genesis 1, which describes God fashioning Earth and the universe from pre-existing matter (“without form”) or at least from pre-existing something. The idea of ex nihilo Creation was imported into Christianity from Hellenistic philosophy. The LDS view of Creation from pre-existing material is the biblical view.

I think these three sources are enough to establish an adequate response to my first question: Creationism (as that term is understood in contemporary discourse) should not be taught as LDS doctrine in LDS seminary or institute classes or in any other LDS setting. Any seminary teacher who has unwittingly taught this position as LDS doctrine should probably announce a correction to the class.

Here are a few quick links for readers who want a broader discussion of the topic:

• “Creationism” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, noting both the broad and narrow meaning of the term. The narrower meaning is the relevant one for this discussion, generally affirming a seven-day or seven-millennium period of Creation and a global flood. “Young Earth Creationism” is the term often used to describe that set of beliefs.
• “Age of the Earth” at the FAIR wiki, disputing an alleged statement in the LDS Bible Dictionary that the Earth is 7000 years old and concluding that there is no LDS position on that point.
• “Age of the Earth” at Jeff Lindsay’s Science and Mormonism page.
• “Mormonism and the New Creationism,” an essay by LDS mathematician David H. Bailey, with helpful background about how some LDS leaders came to champion Young Earth Creationism.
• “Cafeteria Correlation,” my earlier T&S post that discusses the regrettable persistence of Young Earth Creationism in LDS discourse.
• “Evolution vs. Creationism in Seminary” at Wheat & Tares, hawkgrrrl’s recent discussion of very similar issues, although I tried to avoid bringing evolution into the discussion.

The second question is harder to clarify: is Creationism, regardless of what the manual or other LDS references state, nevertheless taught to LDS seminary students? Perhaps readers can provide some reports of their own observations and experience. After reviewing the three LDS sources discussed above, I am more hopeful about what happens in LDS classrooms than I was before doing this curriculum research.