335 search results for "hell part 2"

NT Sunday School Lesson 14: Matthew 18; Luke 10

by Jim F. • March 20, 2011 • Comments Off

Matthew 18 Verses 1-4: Why do the disciples ask the question that they pose in verse 1? What does it suggest about their understanding of Jesus’ message? What do you make of the fact that they are arguing about who shall be first so shortly after Jesus has talked about his coming death (Matthew 17:22)? In verse 3, the verb “be converted” translates a Greek verb that means “turn.” To be converted, to repent, is to turn back, to return. In what sense is repentance a return? Christ says that no one can even enter the kingdom (or reign) of heaven without becoming like a child. Then in verse 4 he says that if a person humbles himself and becomes as a child, then he or she is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. A logical conclusion from the two claims (though rhetoric may trump logic here) is that everyone who enters the kingdom of heaven is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. How do you make sense of that conclusion? In Israel and Rome at this time, the child was not a legal person. Children were the property of their parents. Is that relevant to understanding what Jesus meant when he said that we must become as children to take part in the reign of heaven? How is what Jesus says an answer to the disciples’ question? Verses 5-6: Having answered the disciples’ question very briefly, Jesus…

Cornucopia

The Original Text of the Book of Mormon IV: Word for Word Control over the Original Text

by Royal Skousen • March 4, 2011 • 19 Comments

In this last section, I want to mention the evidence that the original text of the Book of Mormon is a precise English-language text, specified word for word, and that when it was given by means of the instrument to Joseph Smith, he could see that text and he read it off to his scribe.

SS Lesson – New Testament

NT Sunday School Lesson 8: Matthew 5

by Jim F. • February 7, 2011 • Comments Off

The lesson this week picks out the first part of a longer sermon. Matthew 5-7 give us Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Even if preparing for only the Sunday School lesson, it is probably best to read the entire sermon to see the context of this part. At the time of Jesus there seems to have been considerable controversy over who was “in” and who was “out” when it came to being the children of God. This controversy had been on-going for some time, at least since the time of the return from exile. The Samaritan community was one of the earliest to be excluded, but they were not the only ones. We know of other groups, such as the Essenes who lived in Qumran and who left us the Dead Sea Scrolls. They thought of themselves as “in,” in other words as true to Israel’s covenant, and of everyone else as “out.” The controversy centered on a number of things, but perhaps most prominent among them were who had the right to be the temple high priest, whether the temple ritual had been corrupted, and what lineage had to do with being one of God’s people. Besides the Essenes, this controversy had resulted in a several overlapping, more dominant groups (those supporting the temple priests, the Sadducees; the scribes, those who taught the Law; and the Pharisees, those who sought to reform Judaism by strict obedience to the Law…

SS Lesson – New Testament

NT Sunday School Lesson 4: Matthew 3-4; John 1:35-51

by Jim F. • January 18, 2011 • Comments Off

Matthew 3 Verses 1-2: What function did the herald of a king serve in ancient times? Why did kings need heralds? Is John the herald of a king? Why does this King need a herald? Compare John’s message to Jesus’s message in Matthew 4:17. Why do you think Matthew uses almost exactly the same words in each case? What is he teaching? Given Matthew’s focus on Jesus’ royal birth, how are we to understand “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”? How many ways can you think of understanding that the kingdom of heaven is soon to come or is nearby? Does it help to know that the word “kingdom” might better be translated “reign”? Verse 3: Matthew (like the other three synoptic Gospel writers) quotes from Isaiah 40:3 to describe John’s mission. (Matthew quotes from the Greek version rather than the Hebrew, which explains why there are differences between what he says and our version of Isaiah 40:3.) How does that verse from Isaiah explain John’s mission? Does it shed any light on what John means when he warns that the kingdom of heaven is at hand? Verse 4: This verse reminds us of Elijah. (See 2 Kings 1:8; see also Matthew 11:14 and 17:10-12.) Why is that parallel important? Does Zechariah 13:4 teach us anything about John the Baptist? Verses 5-6: Notice the contrast that Matthew sets up between “Jerusalem, and all Judaea, and all the region round…

Cornucopia

Reactions to Single, Female, Mormon, Alone

by Julie M. Smith • January 18, 2011 • 86 Comments

So this column was definitely the digital equivalent of kicking over an anthill.

Book Reviews, Nature and Environment, Philosophy and Theology

Home Waters: Recompense

by Adam Miller • December 27, 2010 • 9 Comments

Of his awakening, Dogen says, “I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers, the great wide earth, the sun, the moon, the stars.” Tinged with enlightenment, you see what Dogen saw: that life is borrowed and that mind itself is mooched. Every day you’ll need something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. Mind borrows mountains and rivers, earth, sun, and sky. But you can’t just keep these things forever. Even if they weren’t quite what you wanted, they gave what they had and now some compensation is needed, some recompense is required. “Recompense is payback,” Handley says. “It means to weigh together, to bring back into balance” (xi). What was loaned must be returned or replaced. What was given must be given back. Nobody gets to start from scratch, not even God. To make a world is to borrow, recycle, and repurpose the matter that, even if disorganized, is already out there mattering. All creation is reorganization. Even the mind of God must mooch its mountains, cajole them, persuade them, serve them, compensate them. This is messy and its messiness is compounded by the fact that everything is in motion. “Nothing is still,” Handley reminds us (3). Nothing can be still because recompense is itself never done. Recompense compels the world’s motion: everything is in play as everything borrows from everything else in giant, intermittently harmonious rounds of exchange, compromise, and negotiation.…

General Doctrine, News and Politics

Apportionment tomorrow likely means more Mormons in U. S. Congress

by Kent Larsen • December 20, 2010 • 13 Comments

On December 21st the U.S. Census Bureau will release the initial results of the 2010 census and indicate which states will gain members of Congress and which states will lose members of Congress. From the estimates made by third parties, it seems likely that the number of Mormons in Congress will increase as a result.

News and Politics

Armistice Day and What We Honor

by Kent Larsen • November 11, 2010 • 33 Comments

Today is Armistice Day. You were supposed to bow your head in a minute of silence at 11:11 today, the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, in recognition that peace was achieved at that time in 1919, ending what we now call the First World War. Did you do it?”

Cornucopia

The Angel and the Internet

by Kaimi Wenger • September 10, 2010 • 56 Comments

A few years ago, the confluence of the Mitt Romney campaign and Proposition 8 (and to some extent Harry Reid) focused sustained national attention on the church and its members. The church’s profile has only continued to grow since then, raising a variety of questions about assimilation, retrenchment, and the future of the flock. Mormonism has long inhabited a liminal state between cultural insider and outsider. Armand Mauss’s pioneering work The Angel and the Beehive charts the church’s uneasy relationship with mainstream status, a cycle of ebb and flow driven by the specific benefits and drawbacks on each side of the spectrum. If the church is too peculiar, it will suffer in its growth prospects and place in society. At worst, disrepute can lead society to treat such a church as a threat to be eradicated (a possibility of which Mormons are quite aware). This creates strong pressure to assimilate in order to avoid social costs and reap the benefits of societal acceptance. However, this raises the question of whether the church community can gain respectability without giving up its distinctive cultural and doctrinal markers — and so, as Mauss notes, the community adopts different strategies at different times. At times the organization and its members may embrace assimilation, while at other times they feel a need to “reach ever more deeply into their bag of cultural peculiarities to find either symbolic or actual traits that will help them mark…

Science

God and Science

by Dave Banack • August 30, 2010 • 22 Comments

The conflict between science and religion is generally overstated. But it is certainly true that science is the matrix that most people of our day — believers or not — use as the basis for understanding the natural world we live in. Atheists and agnostics stop there; believers add a supplemental layer of faith to their view of the universe that includes a doctrine or idea of God and that reflects a view or theory of how God acts (or doesn’t act) in the natural world. So does science strengthen our faith or threaten it? Is it easier or tougher to be a believer in the age of modern science than, say, the time of Hellenistic philosophy and paganism or the early modern era of demonology and witch-hunts? This general question of achieving faith while living in the age of modern science is the subject of physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne’s book Belief in God in the Age of Science. The book is based on a series of visiting lectures delivered at Yale in 1996, so it is a short book aimed at a general audience rather than a detailed work of theology. But it asks the right questions and does not finesse its answers by misstating the science or by employing faithful handwaving rather than engaging in serious discussion. The book seems like a helpful starting point for a discussion of religion and science. I’ll make a few general…

General Doctrine

The End of the World

by Dave Banack • July 2, 2010 • 16 Comments

I took a stroll through the End of the World last week. Brought the wife and kids and a picnic lunch. It was beautiful, as always. But one of these days (and it won’t be long) it will be gone. Maybe us too.

Cornucopia

The Doctrinal Problem of Evolution

by Adam G. • June 3, 2010 • Comments Off

The scriptural problem of evolution is well understood. The creation accounts in Genesis and other scripture are not obviously describing speciation through natural selection.

Cornucopia

Easter Sunday

by Eric Huntsman • April 4, 2010 • 8 Comments

Because Easter is not a biblical term (and has pagan origins), some suggest that “Resurrection Sunday” would be a better term. The word itself only appears once in the King James Bible at Acts 12:4, where is is better translated as “Passover.” So significant was the event of that Sunday morning that Christians since have celebrated it as “the Lord’s Day,” and it has become our weekly sabbath, replacing the Saturday of the Old Testament. Still, for millennia the term “Easter” has come to be synonymous with resurrection, hope, and the joyful refrain “He is risen!”

Cornucopia

Saturday before Easter

by Eric Huntsman • April 3, 2010 • 2 Comments

D&C 138; 3 Nephi 9 and 10 Christian tradition relates the so-called “Harrowing of Hell,” wherein Jesus broke the bonds of Adam and Eve and brought them and other Old Testament saints from hell into heaven. Although LDS doctrinal statements do not include statements such as “and he descended into hell” as do the Apostolic and other creeds, Restoration scripture does stress that “he descended below all things” (e.g., D&C 88:6, 122:8). The real state of the righteous dead before the Atonement of Christ and Jesus’ own activities among them during the time that his body lay in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea were revealed to Joseph F. Smith on October 3, 1918: As I pondered over these things which are written, the eyes of my understanding were opened, and the Spirit of the Lord rested upon me, and I saw the hosts of the dead, both small and great. And there were gathered together in one place an innumerable company of the spirits of the just, who had been faithful in the testimony of Jesus while they lived in mortality; And who had offered sacrifice in the similitude of the great sacrifice of the Son of God, and had suffered tribulation in their Redeemer’s name. All these had departed the mortal life, firm in the hope of a glorious resurrection, through the grace of God the Father and his Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ. I beheld that they…

Cornucopia

Discovering That What I Thought Was The Spirit Was Not

by Dane Laverty • March 23, 2010 • 67 Comments

From my youth I’ve wanted to do right. A desire to follow the Holy Ghost occupied much of my spiritual reflection in my teens and early twenties. I made it a point to be aware of my feelings, and after a time I identified a few particular feelings that I identified as being the Spirit. The most powerful of those feelings was a compulsion to do or not do a thing. When I defied that compulsion I felt guilty and unworthy. I sought the Lord’s guidance in prayer on even very minute matters, and so I would feel compelled in things as small as which route to drive home or what color shirt wear. The summer after I got married, I took a construction job doing residential framing. One Friday afternoon as we were cleaning up, my boss told me that he would be working Saturday, and that I was welcome to join him if I wanted to get some extra hours in. I was looking forward to the weekend and had no desire to work, but I felt that familiar compulsion come upon me, the feeling that God wanted me to work those hours on Saturday. When Saturday morning came, I defied that compulsion and chose to stay home. And what happened? I spent the day with my wife and had one of the best Saturdays of my life. I don’t remember what we did — probably just went…

Scriptures

Genesis and Genre

by Dave Banack • February 25, 2010 • 49 Comments

When we read Genesis, what exactly are we reading? The distinctions and categories we modern readers bring to books and narratives (fiction or nonfiction; science or folk tale; history or literature; poetry or prose; author’s original text or quoted source) may not serve us well when we read the Old Testament, a collection of ancient literature. Its writers used different conventions. What were they? What exactly are we reading when we read Genesis?

Old About Page

by Kaimi Wenger • February 8, 2010 • 0 Comments

Technical Details This blog is powered by WordPress. It is coded by Kaimi, Matt, and Gordon. We have received helpful advice at various points from Clark Goble and Daniel Bartholomew (aka Danithew). We’re using plugins developed at Mt Dew Virus and Rebel Pixel Productions, as well as the WordPress Blacklist developed by Laughing Lizard and based on the MT Blacklist of Jay Allen (with a slight modification by Kaimi). We’ve also benefited greatly from the tips at The Girlie Matters and ScriptyGoddess. The revolving theme is based on an idea Kaimi first saw at a now-defunct blog, not affiliated with T & S, called Tainted Law. All errors and/or bad coding are due to our own boneheadedness. What does Times and Seasons mean? The Times and Seasons was the periodical of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the early days of the church. It was published in Nauvoo, Illinois, from November 1839 until February 1846. Various issues of the newsletter were edited by Joseph Smith and John Taylor, among others. The Times and Seasons carried the so-called “Wentworth letter” of Joseph Smith, explaining basic LDS beliefs, which has since been canonized as the LDS Articles of Faith. Further information can be found at various historical sites (not affiliated with this blog) such as here. Origins: why, when, or how did we start this blog? In the early days of the bloggernacle (before the Mormon blogosphere was…

Cornucopia, Music and Poetry

Church + Music = Fun

by Robert R • January 25, 2010 • 39 Comments

Music is a wonderfully enriching part of church life, both in worship services themselves and in church culture generally. It’s a blessing in many, many ways—including ways that are light-hearted and fun. Forgive me, then, for sharing the following not-so-serious and rather random stories with a musical twist. (1) The ward where I grew up was blessed with a strong number of musically talented individuals, including organists, choristers, and singers. One of those in the chorister rotation was an older gentleman who was a retired professional musician. I’ll always be grateful to him for giving me one of my favorite church memories. Here’s the situation: the sacrament meeting went long, and the bishop announced that we would only sing one verse of the closing hymn. We sang the first verse of said hymn and everyone—bishopric, congregation, and organist—stopped and prepared for the closing prayer. Rather unfortunately, however, the chorister himself didn’t get the message. He loudly belted out the first word of the second verse entirely by himself. The split second it took for him to realize he was singing solo was probably one of the most awkward of my young life. He stopped singing with a horrified look on his face, that lonely note just hanging in the air. The poor man took his seat, crestfallen, as the congregation crackled with laughter. I would swear that even the bishop was chuckling during the closing prayer. (2) During a stake…

Cornucopia, Scriptures

Reviving the Hebraic

by James Olsen • January 25, 2010 • 15 Comments

Every four years we have a celebrated ritual during the second hour of church: it is the discussion by all members present on the topic of being uncomfortable studying the Old Testament.

SS Lesson - Old Testament

OT Lesson 1 Study Notes: Moses 1

by Jim F. • December 29, 2009 • Comments Off

As the title of this post says, these are notes for studying the lesson rather than for teaching it, though presumably one who studies the lesson will have material from which to teach it.

Cornucopia, Life in the Church, Parenting

Parents are people

by Kaimi Wenger • November 20, 2009 • 32 Comments

It’s been a stressful time for us. My father in law had been battling leukemia for over a year, when he suddenly took a turn for the worse. FIL’s illness lasted a few more weeks, and he finally passed away. This has affected the family in a number of ways; most importantly for this post, it resulted in a complicated set of travel plans.

Images, Latter-day Saint Images

A Mormon Image: Memorial

by A Mormon Image • November 11, 2009 • 7 Comments

from Bill of Wasilla, who writes:

Dad is the man who lies in this flag-draped coffin. I will not say too much about him for now, except that he was a good father and that, thanks to him, and many more like him, most of them gone now, the evil dream of a man named Hitler died in flames and blood.

We buried Dad on June 2, 2007. He died on Memorial Day.

Cornucopia, Life in the Church, Women in the Church

True Adventures in Turning the Other Cheek, Pt. Two

by Patricia Karamesines • November 3, 2009 • 82 Comments

For the next several weeks, I attended church when I could. Participation often included lowering my eyes when the bishop or his first counselor walked by and gave me stern “We’re watching you” stares. In some ways the whole business interested me so I wasn’t suffering as much as some might suppose. But given the treatment of these two ward leaders, I did feel somewhat cordoned off. Perhaps that’s why when a prettily decorated invitation to a special R.S. council arrived in my mailbox, in a fit of high irritation, I nearly tossed it.

Cornucopia

Spiritual Pickpockets

by Rory Swensen • August 16, 2009 • 93 Comments

Does God want you to be rich? Certainly! If you believe Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, preaching their form of Prosperity Theology. They are the focus of an August 15 article at the New York Times. (H/T BCC)

Life in the Church

Life on the Fringe

by Dave Banack • August 8, 2009 • 24 Comments

I’ve seen several links but no discussion of the Slate piece on the hypothetical future role of Mormons, “The Catholic Church helped preserve Roman civilization. Can Mormonism do the same for America?” It’s part of an eight-part series on the theme How is America going to end? by a Slate senior editor.

Church History, Comparative religion, General Doctrine, Guest Bloggers, Philosophy and Theology

Grassroots-Style Dispensations

by James Olsen • July 7, 2009 • 18 Comments

Are Mormons exclusivists or universalists?

Cornucopia, General Doctrine, Latter-day Saint Thought, Life in the Church, News and Politics

Obama’s Mom, Holocaust Survivors and Proxy Temple Work

by Marc Bohn • May 5, 2009 • 55 Comments

The Mormon practice of proxy ordinance work has once again made its way into the news, this time involving someone no less prominent than our U.S. President’s late mother.

Cornucopia, News and Politics

Memories of Bill Orton

by Marc Bohn • April 20, 2009 • 17 Comments

Presidential campaigns aside, one of the first political races I can remember paying attention to growing up was the 1990 congressional race between Karl Snow and new comer Bill Orton to fill retiring Rep. Howard C. Nielson’s 3rd District congressional seat. I was 12 at the time and delivered the Utah County Journal, a free area newspaper.

Cornucopia, News and Politics

The Miracle of Forgiveness

by Marc Bohn • March 9, 2009 • 8 Comments

Thursday night I heard a short piece on the radio that brought me close to tears. Part of NPR’s on-going series of personal essays called This I Believe, the segment illustrated for me the meaning of true forgiveness as perfectly as anything I’ve ever heard. The essay was delivered by two people, Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson-Cannino. Ronald is a man who spent 10 1/2 years in prison for a crime he did not commit based primarily on testimony given by Jennifer, a woman who had mistakenly picked him out of a line-up as the man who had raped her.

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