Here’s the main point: I don’t think either our history or our theology supports traditional and currently widespread – though often unarticulated – notions of what a prophet is.[1]
Reasoning Together – Prophets
Category: Cornucopia
Leaders are Fallible (No, Really)
The changes at the Gospel Topics section of LDS.org (which I wrote about two weeks ago) and especially the Church’s new Race and the Priesthood article have rekindled questions about the fallibility of Church leaders. After all, the Church’s current position completely disavows the past practice of denying the priesthood to blacks and all but explicitly states that the practice was an error from the start. Chalk it up with Adam-God and blood atonement and poor Brother Brigham seems to be batting 0.000 at theological innovation. It’s difficult to reconcile such grave errors with the statement, canonized in Official Declaration 1, that “The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray.” It’s possible that President Woodruff had in mind an even more grave contravention of God’s plan when he spoke and so is still correct, baseless priesthood ban notwithstanding. But if institutionalized racism is not “astray”, then what is? The simpler solution is that he was mistaken. I don’t think that suggestion should come as a mighty shock. The Book of Mormon (also canon, after all) specifically talks about its own mistakes in, eg, the title page (“if there are faults they are the mistakes of men”), Alma (“but behold, I mistake”), and 3 Nephi (“if there was no mistake made by this man in the reckoning of our time”). Just as no book in the Bible claims that the Bible is inerrant, no work in the broader…
My Beef with Goals
According to the de facto Mormon liturgical calendar, it is the time of year to talk about goal-setting. Most Mormon discussions of goals make me want to poke myself in the eyeball with a fork–a reaction I initially did not understand, since I set goals for myself all of the time. But after thinking about it for a while, I figured out a few reasons why the standard Mormon discourse on goals and goal-setting aggravates me so much.
Faulconer, Sorenson, Welch, and Others on Scripture Study and Teaching
Some borrowed thoughts I’ve found provoking recently.
Woohoo!
The January 2014 Friend has an Old Testament reading chart.
BYU-Idaho: the next ten years (II)
To keep the rest of this post in context, let me repeat that I think Rexburg is a fantastic place, that BYU-Idaho has gotten the most important things right in its transformation from a junior college into a four-year university, and that its dress code is not a terribly important issue. The university’s path forward to becoming the kind of university it hopes to be, although not simple, is clear enough. Another tricky question for the future of the university is how to strike the right balance between local heritage versus consistency with the system flagship in Provo: How much BYU, and how much Idaho?
Partaking of the Fruit of the Tree
One of my favorite parts of Christmas is sitting in the darkened living room, gazing at the lighted tree. There is something magical and transfixing about the warm, gentle light, the fragrance of pine, and the palpable presence of nature that fills my home with its incongruous beauty. I have many memories of reading Scripture by the light of the Christmas tree. Usually we read from Luke, with Matthew’s bit about the Wise Men added in; sometimes we expand into Isaiah, either spoken or set to Handel. This year, though, when I stole a moment of stillness out of the hectic holiday rush to sit beside the tree, the words that came to my mind were Nephi’s: “I looked and beheld a tree . . . and the bbeauty thereof was far beyond, yea, exceeding of all beauty; and the cwhiteness thereof did exceed the whiteness of the driven snow.” It had never struck me before how much meaning the Book of Mormon adds to our celebration of the Christmas tree. Scripture is rife with references to the Tree of Life, and the notion of everlasting life certainly accords well with what I was taught as a child: that the evergreen Christmas tree was a symbol of the eternal life brought to us by Christ. But Nephi’s education about the interpretation of the tree in 1 Nephi 11 is more specific. In answer to his query about the meaning of…
2014 Summer Seminar on Mormon Culture: The History of the Mormon Family
In the summer of 2014, the Neal A Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University, with support from the Mormon Scholars Foundation and the Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley Institution, will sponsor a summer seminar for graduate students and junior faculty on “The History of the Mormon Family.” The seminar will be held on the BYU campus in Provo, Utah, from June 15 to July 26. Admitted participants will receive a stipend of $3000 with an accommodations subsidy if needed. The seminar continues the series of seminars on Mormon culture begun in the summer of 1997. In 2014, the seminar will be conducted by Richard and Claudia Bushman. The question we will address is: how did the Church move in the course of a century from the most unconventional marriage system in the nation to a model of family stability? Mormons were criticized in the nineteenth century for their assault on family values. By the mid-twentieth century, they were lauded for the strength of their families. What resources could Mormons draw on to accomplish this transformation? Despite the bad reputation of plural marriage, what principles of family life were established in the nineteenth century that could ultimately produce the strong families of the twentieth century? What teachings and programs shaped Mormon family life and brought about the change in public opinion? Each participant will be asked to prepare a paper on some aspect of this general subject area for presentation in…
This Is War Like You Ain’t Seen
I’m spending time moving my family into our new home and getting ready for Christmas, so here’s a song from Dustin Kensrue’s Christmas album This Good Night Is Still Everywhere. It’s not the usual sound, but that’s part of why I like it so much. (And now I’m going to get some Mannheim Steamroller going…)
What the Smith Boys Said This Year
The Old Testament and Why Bible Translations Differ: My Religious Educator Article
BYU’s Religious Studies Center publishes The Religious Educator, a little-known LDS journal that deserves wider recognition.
Gospel Topics at LDS.org, A Change of Direction?
I told my Gospel Doctrine class yesterday afternoon that since we had run out of lesson manual for the year we were going to go rogue. Then I proceeded to give the first lesson I’ve ever given (I think) in which I exclusively used officially-approved Church materials[1]. I could pick anything I wanted to teach about, and I choose to cite three videos and four articles from the Gospel Topics section of LDS.org. And yet I did feel like there was something quietly revolutionary about the material we covered in the lesson. The article that has riveted the Bloggernaccle and even the world beyond this week is the article Race and the Priesthood [2], and that’s where I got started. I’d heard vague mentions about efforts on the part of the Church to revise the curriculum and/or to start addressing difficult issues head on. I even think I’d heard something about the article on the First Vision accounts, but I sort of figured that if there was a major policy shift I’d hear about it in General Conference or some other official outlet. I hadn’t heard anything definitive, but I went to the Gospel Topics section of lds.org (where Race and the Priesthood is posted) and started poking around in preparation for my lesson. Still under the impression that if anything significant was afoot I would have heard about it elsewhere, I started watching the three videos posted there. The first one, featuring Elder…
God, the Necessity of Scholars, and the Old Testament: A Long Post and a Short Announcement.
Among laypeople, one sometimes finds a distrust of scholarship as it applies to the Bible, particularly if that scholarship runs against a traditional interpretation, or if tells you an obvious face-value reading you favor doesn’t really mean what you think it does. LDS have competing traditions towards serious scripture study. On the one hand, we are not a Bible-based (or even Book of Mormon-based) religion, where doctrine comes primarily through exegesis and interpretation. No sir, we’ve got prophets! We make an end run around all that stuff. We don’t believe you must attend college and be trained for the ministry to preach the orthodox religion! If you’ve read the Ensign and served a mission, or you grew up in Utah, most weeks you don’t need to bother preparing anything at all to participate fully in our Sunday lessons. A great pity, indeed. So there can certainly be an anti-intellectual strain, the expression of which varies greatly by ward and geography. In tension with that, LDS have “the glory of God is intelligence”, “study out of the best books” “obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, and laws of God and man.” “Thy mind, O Man… must stretch as high as the utmost Heavens, and search into and contemplate the lowest considerations of the darkest abyss, and expand upon the broad considerations of eternal expanse.” Joseph Smith thought it worth the cost and trouble to import a Hebrew…
Deadline – New Summer Seminar in Mormon Theology
Just a reminder that the deadline for applications for the First Annual Summer Seminar in Mormon Theology, co-spsonsored by The Mormon Theology Seminar and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, is December 15, 2013.
The Old Testament, Scripture, Apostles, the Priesthood Ban, and Theological Diversity: Calibrating Our Expectations
(I’m probably cramming too much into this mishmash of a post, but frustration over certain conversations has collided with academic stress and lack of time to refine it. I may regret it, so consider this a preview, a beta.) The expectations we bring to reading scripture can radically affect our reading, our faith, and our communities. One frequent assumption, traditional in many religions, is that revelation (and scripture, as a subset of revelation) must be monolithic, unified, in harmony, univocal, internally consistent. This is not the case, and it is not an accident. Let’s back up, though, particularly as we get in to the Old Testament, and ask, what are our expectations of scripture? Are they properly calibrated? I think we tend to read the scriptures for three reasons, devotional (performing piety and seeking communion with God), doctrinal (stripping away the “irrelevant cultural dross” to extract “True Doctrine”), and moralistic (expecting to find simple models of modern LDS principles and standards). Certainly, those are worthwhile things to do, though the last two are problematic in their assumptions. The Old Testament wasn’t written for those reasons. (Heck, it wasn’t really “written” at all, but no time to get in to that.) The last two goals in particular, because of the the faulty assumptions on which they are built, are likely to be thwarted unless you are highly selective in choice of passage and stick with KJV. The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship…
The Wrongness of Being Right
It seems to me that any time you turn something into a point of conflict, you risk being in the wrong. It becomes more important to be right than it is to understand your fellow brother, to exercise compassion, to be humble and teachable.
Zion, Mortal Loneliness, and The Hall of Records
In my imagination there is a hall of records in the future Celestial Zion where anyone can review the mortal life of any other person as seen from their perspective. It is an imposing structure in its own right, one part great library and one part museum, but it lies in the shadow of grander and more glorious edifices. The business of Zion will be eternal progression, and so the hall of records receives fewer visitors than the other communal spaces of learning. It is vast and solitary place. A person could enter and spend an entire day walking between the towering shelves on the buildings many levels. Outside the sun would roll across the sky, and inside that person would encounter only a couple of other souls, and those at a distance, as each quietly pursued answers to their own questions. The shelves are loaded with the weight of a hundred billion human lives. The impressions, the thoughts, the fears, and the hopes. All that is learned and all that should have been learned. The fading echoes of all the confusion and glory and darkness of humankind’s brief but pivotal period of mortal existence reverberate quietly within that building. Mormon 5:8 And now behold, I, Mormon, do not desire to harrow up the souls of men in casting before them such an awful scene of blood and carnage as was laid before mine eyes; but I, knowing that these…
Responding as Mandela
Driving [1] to work Friday morning the news reports were of course all about Nelson Mandela who had passed away the night before. Mandela was unquestionably a savior on Mt. Zion in the Mormon sense
Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Reading and Resources!
December has finally arrived! For the last six months, I’ve felt like Old Testament is just around the corner. Finally we’re into the last loose stretch of D&C and I can put up the first Old Testament post. With the cyclic return to the Old Testament comes the perennial question, how do I make sense of this? Where should I turn to read “out of the best books”? Look no further, friend, for here is a scattered list. (I’ve been even busier than anticipated, and just don’t have time to polish or add images.) First, though, a note. All the books below can be divided into two structural categories. There are those arranged by book, chapter, and verse, and those that are not. The first category includes commentaries, introductions, guides, histories (generally), and Study Bibles. These are the easiest books to use because you simply read them along with our schedule, or go directly to the chapter/verse you need help with. Having information so focused has a downside, namely, that it tends to be narrow. The second category of books includes dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, general books, monographs, journals, and most reference materials. Building a broad knowledge of the history, culture, and thought of the Israelites and their neighbors takes time, study, and reading, mostly of this second kind of book. Even though category II books often contain scriptural indexes, these are usually to verses cited in that volume, not all the verses…
The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents Volume 2
On Monday I attended a launch event at the Church History Library for the second Documents volume of the Joseph Smith Papers. We were given a brief introductory presentation from historians and production editors who worked on the project. Documents Volume 2 covers the time period from July 1831 to January 1833. Three themes emerge through the documents covering this period of time. The first document is a revelation from July 20, 1831, which later became canonized as Doctrine and Covenants Section 57. It identified the land of Missouri as the land of Zion. This set the stage for the first theme of tension between the leadership in Missouri and Ohio, as well as the pedestrian difficulty of dealing with logistical issues of land acquisition and settlement. A second theme is that of Joseph Smith as a husband and father. The volume includes two letters to Emma, written in Joseph’s own hand. As with many of the documents, a facsimile of the original letter is included, along with a source note on the document and a historical introduction. And there are footnotes for everything. [fn1] The last natural theme that emerges from the documents covered by this time period is the development of our church’s theology and the clarification of the orders of the priesthood. We have the revelations that became Sections 76, 84 and 88. I love that this volume gives context for the these revelations. This immersion into…
The Fourth Point: Caring for the Poor and Needy
In 2009 the “threefold mission” of the Church was extended to include a fourth point: “to care for the poor and needy.” Obviously practical charity is not a new concept for Mormonism. The very same chapter that included the famous “If any of you lack wisdom…” verse that led ultimately to the First Vision also contains this emphatic assertion: Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (James 1:27) This New Testament precedent was echoed in modern revelations. For example, Joseph Smith revealed the link between poverty and spiritual unity in the definition of Enoch’s Zion: And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heard and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them. (Moses 7:18) Next year came an even more stark revelation: It is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin. (D&C 49:20) Clearly, Mormon doctrine has had an economic aspect from the very beginning. And of course it wasn’t just a matter of doctrine. The focus on economic welfare was maintained out of necessity throughout the Church’s early history. Persecution and the hardships of frontier life and intercontinental immigration ensured that temporal needs were always in focus. What’s more, this focus has not been lost in modern…
Hodayot: A Dead Sea Scroll Thanksgiving
One of the non-Biblical texts from the Dead Sea cache is known as hodayot or the Thanksgiving Scroll or Thanksgiving Hymns (or 1QHa and 1QHb, for you scroll groupies). It is so named because of the repetition of the line ‘odeka ‘adonai “I give thanks to You, O Lord…” The scroll is lengthy, nearly thirty columns, and fragments of seven copies have been found. Alas, the text is quite fragmented, and not terribly exciting to read, so I’ll link to Wikipedia instead of the text. While these poems/hymns/psalms “resemble the biblical psalms in many ways, these poems show a development of literary forms and express the theology of the Qumran group. They speak often of the psalmist, suffering, including attacks by Belial’s people, and of God’s grace to him despite his own unworthiness…. [In some of these] the speaker stresses the trials he has endured, God’s grace in saving him from them, and the knowledge revealed to him so that he could teach it to the community.” (The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 235.) The psalmist immediately states his reason for offering thanks by recounting what God has done for him: for example, “because you have placed my soul in the bundle of the living” (1QHa 10:22); “because you have redeemed my soul from the pit” (1QHa 11:20); “for you have illumined my face by your covenant” (1QHa 12:6); “because you have dealt wondrously with dust and mightily with a…
Bittersweet Thanksgiving
We grew up. All of those kids I went to high school with. Not just high school; my family never moved, so I started in with them in kindergarten and went through to graduation. Part of me never felt like I fit in. Being the only Mormon in my class may have had something to do with that. Not that many new people moved into our little town, although many of us have since moved away. How many, I’m not sure, as I’m one of the ones who left. But every once in awhile, I get a glimpse into the lives of those people who were once children that I knew as a child. They’ve all grown up. They have kids of their own who they haul around to ball games and dance recitals and piano practice, just like we went to when we knew each other, just like I do with my kids now. They have jobs. Several of my friends became teachers. Some are pastors. Some are coaches or directors. They have houses and cars and pets. When did we all get so old? The best part is seeing how much faith they have, how these irreverent high school kids grew into people of devotion. The girls married the guys who got them pregnant in high school? Still married and raising their kids right. If they went to church then, they go to church now. I remember being…
Religious and Secular Authority: Frying Pans and Fires
Dave Banack wrote just two weeks ago–here at Times And Seasons–about the atheological atonement. His two conclusions were first, that the Church doesn’t have a specific theory of the atonement and second, that this is probably a good thing: The Church’s prior forays into theology have produced questionable results. Silence on the subject gives LDS thinkers leeway to publish their own helpful speculative discussions. In any case, it’s the atonement that will save you, not a theory of the atonement or even the one true theory of the atonement. I definitely agree with the general wariness of formal theology Dave espouses, and there’s no contesting that the track record thus far is mixed at best. In fact, I think there are lots of additional reasons to view the atheological nature of our faith as a feature rather than a bug. If we accept that final theological truths are most likely far beyond the understanding we will attain in this life, the only real result of attempting to be final and precise in theology would be an endless argument where no one really knows what they are talking about and everyone is always wrong. (As I’ve said: don’t debate the Trinity!) That’s bad enough, but if the theology is formal and authoritative then the squabble becomes weaponized. No longer a pure contest of ideas, it must invariably become a struggle for power. In this sense, I think it’s quite plausible that official…
Happy 10th Birthday, Times and Seasons
I’m not sure what it is about this time of year that leads to the anniversaries that we have this week. In the U.S. many are obsessed with the coming 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Today is the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, leading to an effort this year to get many in the U.S. to memorize the address. And on November 19, 2003, Adam G. posted the first item on Times and Seasons, a post entitled “Whatever I say three times is true.” Since I wasn’t involved at the time, I’ll defer to someone from that time to give us a history of how and why T&S started. Better for me to simply point out the anniversary, say “Happy Birthday, Times and Seasons” and ask what it means and where we should go.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Business and Theology
The study of management—of human beings going about their ordinary business of making a living—is one of the richest and most profound venues for the study of theology. Once you’ve considered the idea, it seems obvious. But of course, most of us don’t consider that idea. I never did, until very recently. What could be more antithetical to spiritual reality than the world of business? Even if I thought Hugh Nibley’s critiques on business were a disappointingly infantile digression from an otherwise heroic figure, the idea that the world of mammon could actually be a source of spiritual insight (other than as a temptation to be denied or a trial to be endured, of course) never entered my mind. But why shouldn’t it? If we are to take seriously the theology of the mundane, and that is something I believe we should take seriously, and locate insight and meaning in pedestrian and everyday human activities, then why would we except the realm of business and commerce? Management always lives, works, and practices in and for an institution, which is a human community held together by the bond that, next to the tie of family, is the most powerful human bond: the work bond. And precisely because the object of management is a human community held together by the work bond for a common purpose, management always deals with the Nature of Man, and (as all of us with any practical…
The Atheological Atonement
I presented a paper on vicarious atonement at the recent SMPT Conference. To prepare the paper, I reviewed the various theories of the atonement offered by Christian theology as well as the LDS view(s) of the atonement. I came to two mildly surprising conclusions.
The Missing Mormon Literary Renaissance
Mark Oppenheimer wants to know why there are no great Mormon writers. More specifically: In the United States, Jews, blacks and South Asians, while they have produced no Milton or Shakespeare — who has, lately? — have all had literary renaissances. Mormons are more likely to produce work that gets shelved in niche sections of the bookstore. And as it turns out, Mormon authors themselves wonder if their culture militates against more highbrow writing. They have a range of possible explanations. Now, before we get to the question of why there are no great Mormon writers, I have to at least address the assumption that genre fiction cannot be great art. I don’t want to refight the whole high-brow vs. pop-art war, but I’m going to at least plant my flag and say that I believe that some popular works of “genre” fiction, whether we’re talking J. K. Rowling or Raymond Chandler, are great works of art without any qualification, caveat, shame, or apology. The presence of or aspiration for commercial success does not preclude artistic success. Ask Charles Dickens. Ask Mark Twain. Ask the Beatles. So the assumption that genre works must not be “real” art is highly suspect. This is especially true when the genre categories seem to be established precisely to maintain that illusion after the fact. Who thinks of Herman Hesse as a science fiction writer? And yet his novel The Glass Bead Game, which won the…
Stewardship
When I was in college, I took a Shakespeare class. The text was one of those huge editions of the complete works, with lots of notes further expanding its length.
“Cannot Change”
This announcement from the newsroom (related to ENDA and a statement from Harry Reid that “the church is changing” [ftnt1]) contains this sentence: “As such, traditional marriage is a foundational doctrine and cannot change.”