{"id":1005,"date":"2004-06-30T18:48:37","date_gmt":"2004-07-01T00:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1005"},"modified":"2005-02-25T12:11:05","modified_gmt":"2005-02-25T17:11:05","slug":"how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-elder-mcconkie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2004\/06\/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-elder-mcconkie\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Elder McConkie"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up in a home where I was taught from my earliest childhood to be skeptical of Elder Bruce R. McConkie. I was taught that he was overly dogmatic and that his urge to systemization was inconsistent with the spirit of continuing revelation and the core of the restored gospel. Good honor-thy-father-and-thy-mother-that-thy-days-may-be-long-upon-land child that I was, I imbibed this ethos and by the time I arrived at college I had a deep, anti-McConkie strain. While in the MTC I served with a missionary who was one of Elder McConkie’s grandsons. He (the missionary not the apostle) informed me that it was alright for there to be people like me in the church because there were people like him (the missionary) whom the spirit had endowed with perfect knowledge. This clinched it for me. No hope for McConkie or his kin. Of late, however, I have made my peace. I have learned to stop worrying and love Elder McConkie.
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\nThe nadir of my McConkie-hating came while I was taking a New Testament class at BYU. The instructor gave us one real assignment in the entire course. We were to read a book on the New Testament, give it a grade, and justify our decision. “Here’s my chance!” I gleefully thought. “I can stick it to both Elder McConkie and the Religion Department!” I chose one of McConkie’s Mortal Messiah<\/i> books. I intensely disliked the book. It was assertive and dogmatic. It clearly took potshots at other authors without even having the courtesy to cite them. It seemed resolutely unaware of any professional biblical scholarship. It was given to faux Churchillian arias that I found hopelessly pretentious. I gave it a “D.” My religion professor gave me an “A” and I graduated.<\/p>\n

There were two things that led me to soften my attitude toward Elder McConkie. First, I learned about Harold Bloom’s concept of misreading. According to Bloom, all literary texts are produced in reaction against other literary texts. All authors are haunted by the anxiety of influence. All writing is a “misreading” of an earlier text. For Bloom this is all inevitable. What is not inevitable is the quality of one’s misreading. If one is a “weak” misreader then one’s text is little more than a failed recapitulation of some earlier master. If one is a “strong” misreader, then one’s text ? while misunderstanding the earlier text on which it relies ? is powerful, new, and creative. According to Bloom, the history of great literature is the history of strong misreadings. He also applies this framework to Mormonism, paying to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young the highest imaginable compliments: Joseph powerfully misread the Bible and Brigham powerfully misread Joseph. With this set of categories, I could see Elder McConkie in a more favorable light. His theology was a powerful “misreading” of Mormonism. It was creative, seductive, and influential. I could admire his courage as a writer and the verve of what he was doing.<\/p>\n

The second thing that helped me to learn to love Elder McConkie was a better understanding of Joseph Smith’s revelations. Joseph labored over the text of his revelations. Some of them were revised several times. More suggestively, some of them were not even formal revelations in the sense of Joseph going to the Lord and asking a question. For example, section 121 was embedded in a long open letter to the Saints. Several sections from the Nauvoo period are simply excerpts from sermons. In other words, much of our Restoration scripture is what we might think of as inspired text rather than words dictated directly from the Almighty.<\/p>\n

I realized that what I took as faux-Churchillian rhetoric in Elder McConkie was actually something much more daring. Elder McConkie ultimately wasn’t trying to produce rhetoric, scholarship, or even theology. He was trying to write scripture. Once I realized this, I have to confess that I admired the ambition and chutzpah of the man, even if I think his success was limited. Rather than seeing him as a dogmatic, pompous, and plodding scriptorian, I saw him (at least in flashes of charitable interpretation) as a daring theological poet, powerfully misreading his predecessors. More than that, I saw an Apostle taking Apostleship very seriously. I saw a man struggling to move from the ranks of the ordained into the ranks of the lesser prophets.<\/p>\n

In his final sermon<\/a>, I think that Elder McConkie finally achieved what he was striving for his entire life. Furthermore, he was quite clear about his intentions. He began by saying:<\/p>\n