;-D

Sorry; couldn’t resist! Carry on.

Martin James (39) I certainly don’t think appeals to authority solve all problems. Authority to my mind (and I differ with Jeff here) is about the role one has. But being in that role doesn’t give one anything akin to infallibility. It just gives one responsibility which is far from the same thing. Our role is to help them in their responsibility. The reason I give the brethren the benefit of the doubt is because if there is a clear revelation to the church it’ll come through them and because I’m convinced from my meetings with the brethren they’re simply far more in tune with the spirit than myself.

However by way of analogy I compare it to my ignorant freshman self in college learning from extremely wise and well educated professors with doctorates. Their vastly superior skill didn’t mean they might not make a mistake in an equation that I could catch. However that simultaneously didn’t make the classroom a democracy. Now of course as an analogy it breaks down quickly but it gets at the kind of relationship I see with the brethren. Theirs is the duty to lead (and thankfully one I don’t have – I’d hate to even be a Bishop) and my duty is to figure out how to help them. Dealing with leaders when they are making a mistake (although often we only see that in hindsight) is a big challenge. I think the assumption of how to respond by many self-designating as liberal is misplaced somewhat.

Martin (42) I think that’s right. The trick is how to cooperate not with people you necessarily think evil (that’s rarely the case) but cooperate with people with deeply held erroneous ideas. Again I think we ought consider Christ who presumably understood ethics quite well dealing with a very primitive, superstition, racist and sexist group of people in first century Palestine. I think we often forget what they must have been like. Compared to the society Jesus grew up in Isis in Syria was wonderfully progressive. Yet somehow he was able to cooperate with so many in that culture and love them. If he could do that, isn’t it far easier for me to cooperate with people from a fairly ethical society I differ with only slightly?

MirrorMirror (9:42) If you mean by liberal merely accepting of divergent views I think you then have to get at the issue of what areas were seen as acceptably divergent. Again, I think if you think Talmage and company were as accepting of divergence as some suggest I suspect you’re just plain wrong. Likewise I think that in other contexts McConkie and others were far more accepting than you might think. Going by talks over the pulpit perhaps isn’t the best way to judge them.

And your point about the word “liberal” being used in this discussion to identify someone who is willing to accept divergent views is spot on. I don’t know whether the politics of Widtsoe, Talmage, or B.H. Roberts were liberal or conservative, but I do know that their acceptance of the theory of evolution was heretical in the opinion of many of their colleagues, who refused to entertain any teaching at variance with the creation myth in Genesis. What we are left with today are apostles who reject the Big Bang theory because they think it is tantamount to an explosion in a printing shop producing a dictionary. (I wish I were making this up, but I’m not.)

It is troubling to witness the pervasive inability on the part of so many in the church to tolerate, let alone accommodate, divergent points of view. That this is occurring in tandem with the polarization of our national politics is probably not a coincidence. And the result, of course, is that we all retreat to our personal echo chambers and become victims of groupthink. But, as General Patton once observed: “When everyone in the room is thinking the same thing, no one is really thinking.”

P.S. I share your assessment of President Hinckley. Though not perfect, he was one of the must humble church leaders in recent memory.

I agree with everything you said, especially the quotes at the end.

And Jeff G, you do seem to be coming down on Far Side very hard, and saying her or his words are “unMormon” and “quite foreign to faithful membership” is the exact kind of assigning others to one’s preconceived categories that I feel is so terribly harmful. It’s Jesus Christ’s church, so who are you to say who does or doesn’t belong in it? Are you so much better than Far Side, that God has given you authority to say whether or not he or she is Mormon or a faithful Latter-day Saint?

The apostles aren’t chosen because they’re great people. The revelations are quite clear on that. When God says He uses the weak and the simple, I take Him at face value. If that’s true, and I really, truly believe it is, then isn’t it possible apostles could be chosen based on any qualifications, only one of which is direct revelation? You don’t have to agree with that possibility, but is it really worth kicking other people out of Jesus Christ’s church because they do? How does such a belief violate the gospel, which is repentance, baptism, and becoming like a child? Especially given certain other possible positions, like preventing children, whom, remember, we are supposed to become like, from being baptized for a decade. Of the two, one looks like it could go against Jesus’s three components to his gospel, and it isn’t thinking apostles might sometimes be chosen by other criteria in addition to revelation.

Clark Goble, I think in the context of this conversation, “liberal” is being used to mean accepting of divergent views. So for me, Brother James Faust’s liberalism was shown not because he was a registered Democrat, but because he shared a story in General Conference about forgiveness where the heroes of his story are a different religious group than our own, the Amish. Brother Dieter’s liberalism is shown when he tells a story where the hero is a middle-aged woman who never got married, but who was able to be a perfect example to her great-niece of what it means to find joy in living the gospel.

In this conversation, I think President Gordon Hinckley was a lot more liberal than we give him credit for. His actions look very conservative now, but we need to remember that when he issued The Family document, the Democratic president of the United States was supporting the Defense of Marriage Act. He exhibited a lot of benevolent sexism, it is true, but that was in a climate of a lot of hostile sexism. Saying woman was God’s crowning creation was helping elevate women to the same level of men, who have always been told that they are the holders of God’s power. And Marjorie Hinckley was probably the most influential wife of a prophet since Eliza Snow.

If his presidency of the church started today, I wonder how he would do things differently.

mirrororrim:

I can understand wanting to self-identify. But I just don’t see how that carries over to any beneficial utility of consigning others, without their willing participation, into one’s preconceived categories.

Clark Goble:

I confess to being very confused about what is meant by liberal in all this discussion. I’m not sure I’d call Talmage, Widstoe, or Faust particularly liberal. It seems to me this term is being used at best in a very ambiguous way and most likely we’re all equivocating over it.

mirrorrim and Goble, ftw.

I don’t much care how faithful you as a person are or are not. When you start talking about “ultra-conservative” apostles getting all real-politik and unilaterally determining who could and could not be made an apostle, I see very little room for divine guidance in this process. If you had acknowledge that God may have guided these ultra-conservatives in this process, I wouldn’t have a problem… but then the political leanings of these men would be largely irrelevant.

But I also entertain the possibility that our leaders (and each one of us) periodically deceive themselves into believing that the warm and fuzzy feeling they have about a particular decision comes from God, not their own emotions. In the 1950s, David O. McKay was convinced that the Lord wanted the church to make a huge financial investment in shortwave radio stations in various parts of the world to further the spreading of the gospel. As it turns out, that was a bad and costly decision. I know there are those who will tie themselves into knots trying to defend the prophet in such circumstances—”This is what God wanted to happen all along; we just aren’t sufficiently enlightened to understand why”—but, at that point, there is nothing further to discuss. I cannot reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.

Always good to hear from you, Clark.

So I understand if you want to call yourself a McConkie Mormon, and gain a sense of self-identity from that which you feel benefits you in some way. But can’t you do that without classifying other people as being either England Mormons or McConkie Mormons?

One does need to compare and contrast. While it may be possible to not classifying others – and even if you do you have to allow room for others to change – you at least need to be able to classify talks or statements as being one or the other. And it’s kind of handy if someone really identifies with one group, to induce that future comments from them will also align with their chosen group.

And furthermore, while there might be benefits to the kind of self-identification you talk about, aren’t there just as many downsides to it?

Oh, there are tons of downsides to it. War, tribal conflict, gang turf wars, someone getting beat up and hospitalized just because they cheered for the other team, etc. It’s very easy to see the ‘others’ as the ultimate problem with all that’s wrong in the world and discriminate, abuse, abolish, or kill the other group. There are huge downsides to it! I’m not saying that it’s the greatest thing in the world, you just asked why it happens, and so I pontificated on the subject.

I have made no such assumption at all. And for you to imply that my point of view is unMormon and unfaithful seems rather un-Christian and divisive. Sadly, this is not the first time I have been on the receiving end of such intolerance.

I have never said that inspiration does not play a role in the selection of our leaders, but to deny that the personal preferences and biases of the prophet play a role in the selection process is, at best, naive and, at worst, delusional.

Hugh B. Brown was the first and only member of the first presidency in the history of the church who was not asked to continue as a counselor when the sitting prophet (David O. McKay) died. I suppose there are members who believe that Brother Brown’s staunch support of the civil rights movement and for reversing the priesthood ban—views that were directly contrary to those of Harold B. Lee—had nothing to do with President Lee’s decision not to include him in the first presidency, but I’m not one of them.