{"id":35261,"date":"2016-05-26T04:00:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-26T09:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=35261"},"modified":"2016-05-15T19:29:15","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T00:29:15","slug":"reading-nephi-1320-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2016\/05\/reading-nephi-1320-29\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Nephi – 13:20-29"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"068-068-the-liahona-full\"<\/a>After successfully subverting the lands and economies of the natives and then violently refusing to remain party to their political contracts with their countries of origin, Nephi now sees the new immigrant population prospering. What does it mean that they prospered? I immediately think of things like infant mortality and economic growth. What would Nephi have meant by this? Is it a foil to their being in captivity? Does it refer to the fact that they geographically spread? Is it their continued subjugations of and thefts from among the native populations? What were Nephi\u2019s family\u2019s own experiences in the New World? Did they<\/em> prosper? Did the biblical accounts of displacement together with their own displacement of natives make Nephi desensitized to the latter-day slaughter? Or was that facet simply absent from or downplayed in the dream itself? Or did Joseph\u2019s own view of a righteous American Revolution cover over its dark sides? These questions spring up at me throughout this chapter. And prospering<\/em> is a key concept throughout the Book of Mormon; I\u2019m not at all confident I know how this concept functioned for Nephi.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another contrast or at least link in the first sentence: this new people\u2019s prospering is placed alongside their \u201ccarrying forth\u201d a corrupted book. Again, I don\u2019t know what to make of the pairing. The emphasis on the corrupted nature of the book seems to argue against the idea that the Gentiles prospered because of their fostering a biblical culture. Is it perhaps an implicit warning against our being too comfortable with our success? Maybe prospering is disconnected from and potentially in contrast with moral flourishing\u2014perhaps prospering is not a sign of divine approval; even when things appear to be going well (prospering), central aspects of Zion might be rotten (based on a corrupted understanding of God\u2019s covenants)?<\/p>\n

The corruption of this abbreviated version of the Plates of Brass\u2014and like everyone, I assume this refers to the Bible\u2014is linked to the establishment of that great and abominable church. Since the days of Joseph we\u2019ve commonly imagined corrupt or incompetent priests making changes, deleting passages, making poor translations, and the like. Maybe destroying whole books or demanding that they be buried in the Egyptian deserts. We\u2019ve got an impressive historical record of the transmissions, however. Enough to know both that changes are inevitable and that there\u2019s never any such thing as a \u201cpure text.\u201d We also know that while there have been small but substantive changes (Hannah prayed inside <\/em>not outside <\/em>of the temple darn it!), our Old and New Testaments have remained remarkably consistent over the course of the last two millennia. So what does it mean that this book\u2014the Bible\u2014was pure when it proceeded out of the mouth of a Jew? What else (other than corrupt and incompetent transmission) could be happening?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m convinced this has more to do with culture and the nature of the hermeneutic community. Institutions do oversee the historical transmission of texts. But they also oversee the interpretation of the texts\u2014and the latter usually dictates their approach to the former. Plain and precious things aren\u2019t removed simply by deletion, they\u2019re more commonly removed by training our eyes not to see them. As the wise Ethiopian profoundly notes: none of us can understand these things without a community that interprets them for us. There must be an entrance point into reading and understanding a text. Unfortunately, doorways can also constrain the parts of the building to which we gain access.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is what I take to be the great and abominable church. In particular, materialist and hedonistic cultures\u2014that is, those cultures that enshrine economic prosperity as their central organizing and value-adjudicating principle\u2014corrupt our ability to see plain and precious truths in our texts. It makes it possible for a whole continent of \u201cChristians\u201d to utterly ignore and subvert Christ\u2019s (albeit complicated) pacifism and instead perpetrate horrific slaughter in the crusades. Similarly, culture allows swaths of \u201cChristians\u201d today to ignore Christ\u2019s teachings on wealth and waste their lives on getting rich and ignoring the poor. Here is the great and abominable church.<\/p>\n

On a deeper level, I wonder how much of this implicates the Judeo-Christian tradition at large. That tradition and the European peoples have certainly prospered<\/em> in an economic, material sense. And I\u2019m far too wedded to it myself not to hail and promote its other prodigious accomplishments\u2014the Restoration being just one of them. This is the great puzzle of this section. We prosper while being blinded to plain and precious truths by the great and abominable church. We prosper \u201cinsomuch that Satan hath great power over [us].\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After successfully subverting the lands and economies of the natives and then violently refusing to remain party to their political contracts with their countries of origin, Nephi now sees the new immigrant population prospering. What does it mean that they prospered? I immediately think of things like infant mortality and economic growth. What would Nephi have meant by this? Is it a foil to their being in captivity? Does it refer to the fact that they geographically spread? Is it their continued subjugations of and thefts from among the native populations? What were Nephi\u2019s family\u2019s own experiences in the New World? Did they prosper? Did the biblical accounts of displacement together with their own displacement of natives make Nephi desensitized to the latter-day slaughter? Or was that facet simply absent from or downplayed in the dream itself? Or did Joseph\u2019s own view of a righteous American Revolution cover over its dark sides? These questions spring up at me throughout this chapter. And prospering is a key concept throughout the Book of Mormon; I\u2019m not at all confident I know how this concept functioned for Nephi. There\u2019s another contrast or at least link in the first sentence: this new people\u2019s prospering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":34019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/068-068-the-liahona-full1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35261","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\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35262,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35261\/revisions\/35262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}