{"id":1171,"date":"2004-08-12T12:04:31","date_gmt":"2004-08-12T18:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1171"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T06:00:00","slug":"the-efficacy-of-condemnatory-prophecy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2004\/08\/the-efficacy-of-condemnatory-prophecy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Efficacy of Condemnatory Prophecy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bob Caswell has an interesting comment <\/a>over at Meg Kurtz’s new Book of Mormon blog<\/a>. Bob writes of Lehi:<\/p>\n

Wouldn’t you be angry if a random person in your town claiming to be a prophet came to you and “testified” of your “wickedness and abominations”? Maybe this is the way the Lord wanted it, but I have to think there could have been a more tactful way if Lehi REALLY wanted people to listen to him. Bottom line: I’m glad I didn’t live in Jerusalem at the time because I probably would have been annoyed at Lehi (big mistake!).<\/i><\/p>\n

Bob has a point — where is the commitment pattern, the “building relationships of trust,” the rest of the missionary toolbox that we use today? Condemnatory prophecy — “Hey, Bob, I testify to you that you are wicked!” — doesn’t seem to be the most effective missionary tool. Why do they seem to use it so much in the scriptures?
\n
\nA few possibilities come to mind:<\/p>\n

1. Lehi really didn’t care if anyone followed him (and note — no one did!). He was just concerned about “washing his hands” of their blood. Kind of callous, if you ask me.<\/p>\n

2. This was just how they did things back then. We can’t expect Lehi to have access to modern tools. He may have been a bad missionary, but he was doing the best he knew how. (Query: Why would God allow people to be bad missionaries for thousands of years?).<\/p>\n

3. The people were just so wicked that you had to yell at them. But wouldn’t that be an unusual circumstance. In contrast, we hardly see any<\/i> soft missionary tools used in the scriptures? Perhaps a few, but the standard tactic seems to be to walk up to someone and tell him that he’s wicked.<\/p>\n

4. We’re all a bunch of pansies now, with our “building relationships of trust” and whatnot. We should be telling more people that they’re going straight to hell. <\/p>\n

5. For some reason, scriptural writers almost uniformly left out the touchy-feely commitment pattern stuff and just wrote down the bold proclamations of wickedness and destruction. (Why?)<\/p>\n

I’m not thrilled with any of these, but perhaps (likely) there are possibilities I’m missing here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bob Caswell has an interesting comment over at Meg Kurtz’s new Book of Mormon blog. Bob writes of Lehi: Wouldn’t you be angry if a random person in your town claiming to be a prophet came to you and “testified” of your “wickedness and abominations”? Maybe this is the way the Lord wanted it, but I have to think there could have been a more tactful way if Lehi REALLY wanted people to listen to him. Bottom line: I’m glad I didn’t live in Jerusalem at the time because I probably would have been annoyed at Lehi (big mistake!). Bob has a point — where is the commitment pattern, the “building relationships of trust,” the rest of the missionary toolbox that we use today? Condemnatory prophecy — “Hey, Bob, I testify to you that you are wicked!” — doesn’t seem to be the most effective missionary tool. Why do they seem to use it so much in the scriptures?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-missionary"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}