{"id":47453,"date":"2024-06-19T10:12:08","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T16:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=47453"},"modified":"2024-06-28T10:14:37","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T16:14:37","slug":"joseph-spencer-on-bruce-r-mcconkies-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/06\/joseph-spencer-on-bruce-r-mcconkies-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Joseph Spencer on Bruce R. McConkie’s Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Long-time followers of my blog posts (if any exist) are likely aware that I have a complicated relationship with Elder Bruce R. McConkie. He was hugely influential to me in my teenage years and early twenties before my own views of Latter-day Saint theology began to conflict with his in a few very notable ways. I still have a large amount of respect for him, both for his role as an apostle and his intellectual efforts to create a systematic theology, but I also find that his authoritarianism and some of his views rub me wrong. I don\u2019t seem to be alone in this wrestle, however, as there seems to be a large segment of Latter-day Saints who have downplayed McConkie\u2019s contributions, even while other Latter-day Saints tend to see his work very favorably (hello there, Dennis Horne!). Joseph Spencer has recently offered a reassessment of Bruce R. McConkie<\/a> in an interview on the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk<\/em> that has led me to ponder more on Elder McConkie\u2019s legacy. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview (a shorter post with excerpts and some discussion).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

To start, I will note that Joseph Spencer isn\u2019t advocating for a wholehearted acceptance of all aspects of McConkie\u2019s work. When asked about Mormon Doctrine<\/em>, for example, he wrote that \u201cI find less theological strength in Mormon Doctrine<\/em> than I do in some of Elder McConkie\u2019s other writings\u2014his \u2018Messiah\u2019 series or his Doctrinal New Testament Commentary<\/em>.\u201d He added that \u201cI don\u2019t know that Mormon Doctrine<\/em> ought to serve as a foundation for theologians today. \u2026 I don\u2019t know that young theologians would be especially benefited by returning to Mormon Doctrine<\/em> to see how Elder McConkie did things.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, Joseph Spencer highlighted the overall impact that McConkie had on Latter-day Saints engagement with the scriptures as being the best takeaway from his work:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Elder McConkie was the most serious advocate in the Church\u2019s history for real engagement with scripture. No one before him, and no one since, has done more to convince the Saints that they ought to consecrate their intellectual faculties to the study of scripture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever faults he may have had, that one success\u2014in my view, at least\u2014makes him among the tradition\u2019s most important voices.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While Spencer may not have been a direct disciple of McConkie, this aspect of Elder McConkie\u2019s ministry has been important in shaping the type of theologian he wants to be:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

For me, at least, the point of doing theology is always just to understand better and more richly the scriptures that the Latter-day Saints take to be binding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every reading is offered up to the public only for whatever it\u2019s worth, and the labor to produce it is undertaken out of deep devotion to the scriptural words that have been given to guide the Saints toward lives of faith. For my own part, at least, I want my work in theological reflection to do no more than sharpen my own (and maybe others\u2019) sense of what it means to be faithful to the Restoration.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Thus, given the importance of scriptures in McConkie\u2019s theological project, Joseph Spencer sees himself and similar Latter-day Saint theologians as heirs of McConkie\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than just shaping a cultural emphasis on the scriptures, however, Spencer does feel that McConkie deserves more credit than he has generally been given among the intellectual Latter-day Saint community:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

When he was at the height of his influence (in the 1960s and 1970s), which was strongest among religious educators within the Church Educational System, many Latter-day Saint intellectuals felt him to be more authoritarian than authoritative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That attitude has persisted and, as Elder McConkie\u2019s influence has waned in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has also grown more widespread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has often been accused of treating alternative views dismissively, using words like \u201cheresy\u201d even when referring to ideas once held by earlier presidents of the Church. In many ways, he has become for many a symbol of authoritarian or doctrinaire leadership.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This view, while accurate in assessing his tone as authoritarian, misses a large part of what Elder McConkie did:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Caricatures are easier to deal with than real people, and this is one problem with many criticisms of Elder McConkie. Whatever the general understanding of his views and personality might be, he was a more complicated individual than they suggest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bruce R. McConkie was a fierce advocate for the serious, academic study of Latter-day Saint history. He privately pleaded with other leaders for more openness about controversial ideas taught by Church leaders of previous generations. He happily conceded his errors when he was corrected by his leaders and publicly disavowed his own teachings when revelation proved them to have been speculative or misguided. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elder McConkie was an interesting and inventive thinker, one whose thought hasn\u2019t yet been taken seriously enough by intellectual historians to see for its real contribution.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

(I will note that the fact that while “he happily conceded his errors when he was corrected,” that did not always lead to as far-reaching of efforts to concede errors as is sometimes thought, especially with his teachings related to the priesthood and temple ban<\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While intellectual historians are often opposed to McConkie\u2019s work on the basis that it has some anti-intellectual elements, McConkie was an intellectual in his own right:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

It isn\u2019t hard, I think, to see the appeal Elder McConkie\u2019s work had for many members of the Church. For anyone who had a rationalist bent, a kind of inclination toward reasoning and intellectual labor, but who also held traditional suspicions about the skepticism of the sciences, Elder McConkie\u2019s writings struck exactly the right balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project was deeply intellectual, wholly a matter of reasoning and reflection, and yet it expressed obedience to divine authority rather than to the self-arrogated authority of \u201cintellectuals.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s of course true that many of the more academically inclined among the Latter-day Saints accused Elder McConkie of embracing a certain kind of irrationalism\u2014or of being simply allergic to the life of the mind.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That, however, is an unfair assessment. It was just that Elder McConkie represented a rather different life of the mind than the one they embraced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McConkie was an intellectual, just not in the same mold as many academic scholars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more discussion about Joseph Spencer\u2019s reassessment of Bruce R. McConkie<\/a>, head on over to read the full interview on the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk<\/em>. There\u2019s plenty more there to consider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long-time followers of my blog posts (if any exist) are likely aware that I have a complicated relationship with Elder Bruce R. McConkie. He was hugely influential to me in my teenage years and early twenties before my own views of Latter-day Saint theology began to conflict with his in a few very notable ways. I still have a large amount of respect for him, both for his role as an apostle and his intellectual efforts to create a systematic theology, but I also find that his authoritarianism and some of his views rub me wrong. I don\u2019t seem to be alone in this wrestle, however, as there seems to be a large segment of Latter-day Saints who have downplayed McConkie\u2019s contributions, even while other Latter-day Saints tend to see his work very favorably (hello there, Dennis Horne!). Joseph Spencer has recently offered a reassessment of Bruce R. McConkie in an interview on the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk that has led me to ponder more on Elder McConkie\u2019s legacy. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview (a shorter post with excerpts and some discussion).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10397,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2934,2890],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-20th-century-history","category-from-the-desk"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47453","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\/10397"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47453"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47455,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47453\/revisions\/47455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}