I think His message is that goodness defines and reveals the truth, rather than the other way around.

Something I cannot stress enough is that I don’t think anyone should feel guilty or bad about themselves because they wrestle with their faith. We should, of course, feel guilty for sin, and sometimes sin can lead to doubt and disbelief, but that does not mean all doubt and disbelief is the result of sin. The “veil” ought to make it obvious that God wanted to give us a reason to doubt; he wanted us to have to struggle to see and understand him, and maybe even to see how we would choose to live our lives believing that he’s not even there. We also acknowledge in our Ninth article of faith that there are many great and important things that we don’t understand. So knowing that we’re still missing some major pieces of the puzzle, I don’t blame anyone in the Church who is having a hard time seeing how it all fits together. I think every thoughtful person is in that boat to some extent or another.

I like Matt Thurston’s words above about his faith journey changing his understanding of what it means to be a prophet. That has been one of the main effects of my own faith journey as well. It doesn’t make me appreciate Joseph Smith any less. To the contrary, when I consider his shortcomings, I am awed and heartened by the many beautiful truths that he gave us. The fact that some of the things he said or did might have been wrong (which he himself acknowledged when he said some revelations are of man or the devil, and when he referred to himself as a “rough stone”), does not take away or negate all of the many beautiful truths he restored.

And it gives me hope. I know I’m pretty flawed, but I also still feel like God loves and talks to me in spite of my flaws. If my flaws don’t prevent me from being inspired, why should I ever conclude that Joseph’s flaws prevented him from being inspired?

Overcoming the right/wrong, true/false dialectic was a difficult but major breakthrough for me. It culminated for me about three years ago at about 4:00 in the morning after another sleepless night wrestling with my faith demons. My chief concern was Joseph Smith, and my inability to determine if he was a true or false prophet. Each answer resulted in extreme cognitive dissonance, for different reasons.

It wasn’t until I came to see him as “a prophet” (i.e. as a vessel — person, scripture, song, etc. — through which God communicates to his children) as opposed to “The Prophet” (i.e. the foreordained person, second only to Jesus, who ushered in the Restoration for which all mankind, past, present, and future, must eventually accept or reject) that the dissonance cleared, and I was able to begin the long but incredibly rewarding process of piecing together and, really for the first time, owning my faith/beliefs.

It is a testament to how hardwired my paradigm of “being right” was, that this 4:00-in-the-morning epiphany, if you can call it that, which seems so obvious to me now, felt like the equivalent of solving some great mystery wrapped inside a riddle inside an enigma.

I know that’s not precisely the same thing you’re talking about in terms of “being right” — I have no claim to have a mastery over “The Truth.” But your thoughts on taking exclusionary satisfaction about being “right” amid those who are less right have got me to thinking.

Exactly.

Excellent point. When you learn about the “dark sides” of Mormon History/Doctrine there are two paths you can take. One is to embrace post-modernism and throw away exclusive Mormon claims to truth. The other is the accept the truth as it is and re-evaluate what it means and how to understand it. All too often people take the first route, without realizing that it makes just as many exclusive claims to truth. “It’s all good, all religions are just fine” makes the same type of epistemological claims about objective reality as saying, “This is the one true and living church,” it is just more PC to say the former rather than the latter.

The challenge in learning the dark side is not to throw out the baby with the bath water. You have to move beyond being pleased as pie that you have “The Truth” to “What does it mean and how do I understand this?” Even scarier, “I am radically free and I am forced to make choices. Sometimes prophets say stupid things, so I can’t slavishly follow and believe everything they say. Even if it were the case that I could, I don’t have enough time to do everything asked. This leaves me radically free, I HAVE to choose, now what?”

There are many times in life you have to ask yourself: “Do I want to be happy, or do I want to be right?”
Because more often than not, you can’t have both.

With regards to my friend “Truth”:
It will set you free. But the freedom comes with a price that is sometimes much more than you expected to pay.

It is sometimes hard to remember and reconcile the two because they do have a different feel. The BOM does not have the same emphasis as the OT on sacrifice and the feeling of a people who couldn’t learn right from wrong because we see the contrast. That is, while there was a group of people who were slow to learn, they were balanced by another group, and the record focuses on the group that was eager to do good for most of the record. The OT, by contrast, focuses heavily on the flaws of a basically good group, rather than contrasting it with the much more egregious evils of other groups.

Remember too, that ultimately that both the Nephites and the Jews suffered very similar fates: they were largely destroyed and scattered. The Jews have been restored to Jerusalem, but the Nephites have not yet been restored in any meaningful way, if indeed they will ever be restored and not simply integrated to the church as what few now indirect descendents they have are alive are baptized unknowingly into the churh.

I think I had a point. What might it have been, I wonder?

Clay, this post reminded me of a William James book I read in college about the ‘Pragmatic Theory of Truth’. As I remember it, he made a similar argument that Truth with a capital ‘T’ is unattainable and, even if it were, we would be incapable of recognizing it as final Truth. Instead, though, we approach truth by how well ideas and approaches [to whatever] practically fit into our lives- by how dependable an idea is and how well it helps us get on in the world. This seems to mesh with your approach of pursuing those ideas and practices that bring you and others joy rather than being so concerned about that elusive Truth, irregardless of its ‘fit’ in your and others’ lives. Thanks for the great post.

OK, I see what you are getting at, you are looking for a different model of how the atonement works. Mormons do tend to emphasize the penal substitutionary model of atonement (based usually on Alma), which is not appealing to me either. I don’t know which of the other competing models I like best, but I like penal substitution the least.

“Each human owes atonement to God for his own sins, and owes it to his fellow humans to help them to make atonement to God for their sins. Only an individual sinner can repent and make apology, but others can provide him with the means to make reparation (and penance) (the two other parts of atonement). Jesus Christ, who, being God, owed nothing to God, provided his life and death as something that we can offer to God as our reparation (and penance) for our own sins and those of our fellows. This model of atonement, tantamount to the ‘satisfaction’ model of Anselm (as qualified by Aquinas) and to the biblical model of ‘sacrifice’, is the most satisfactory of the traditional theological models of the Atonement.”

I was trying to get at my dissatisfaction with contemporary LDS ways of describing the Atonement and why it is necessary. What I like about the sacrificial model is that in it, Christ is not compelled to suffer himself to die by a cosmic judge (like in the debtor analogy popular in CES). That analogy makes God (as the judge) out to be a cold sadist at worst and at best, a helpless pawn of “Justice”. Which begs the question, why we worship such an impotent God who can’t trump an impersonal law for the sake of human love? (Which begs yet further questions)

In the sacrificial model, it’s more like Christ out of love for us, asks us to look at his life and death so that we will see how seriously he takes our sin, and therefore how seriously we should take the actions we are responsible for which hurt others. We then mentally accept this and offer Christ’s sacrifice to God as part of our repentance.

I wouldn’t be so hard on the Old Testament, nor would I pigeon hole it into “sacrificial models.” In all honesty I have read the Old Testament completely wrong my entire life, and I think most Mormons (and all other Christians) make the same mistakes. As proof of this, Jews read the Old Testament completely differently and come away with teachings of compassion and love that Jehovah has for his people, and that His people should have for each other and all of the world. As Mormons we tend to impose a view on the Old Testament that the law of Moses was given for less righteous, stubborn people. We also impose the false dichotomy that Jesus taught love and the Old Testament taught the law. In my opinion both notions hurt much more than they help and mask a great deal of the meaning of the Old Testament.

I can’t really say much more than this in a short space. The Old Testament is easily the most complicated book of the canon and even after months of dedicated study I still have barely scratched the surface of the what the Old Testament has to offer.

I’m not familiar with that one, but I generally feel that the Old Testament is pretty brutal in its methods of getting us to take God seriously. You better take him seriously or else he will crush you. If that’s who God is, tell him to crush me already because I am not interested in his kind of society. In my experience, there is no motivation that is so complete and effective than that of love. We naturally want to please those who love us and will go to further lengths to do so than those we fear. Usually, when motivated by fear, we only do what we have to to avoid the crushing, and we resent it the whole time.

I totally believe in taking joy seriously, to the point that I should be more conscious of how my actions (sins) might steal joy from myself or others. Personally, I think that’s where the definition of sin ends. I don’t necessarily think that blood must be spilled to get us to take it seriously, if we are motivated by the right thing.

David, great point. This is a big struggle for me. The rest of your comment was great, too.

I have often thought that what I need most from the atonement is to heal my relationships. We are taught that sin results in our alienation from God, but it also alienates me from others as I become self absorbed and feel less able to trust myself to reach out to others. The atonement not only removes the sin, but also mitigates the personal knowledge of wrong-doing by replacing that pain and knowledge of wrong-doing with a joy/knowledge that all will be made right for those I have hurt. The pain and the knowledge go together, but the pain seems to sap me of energy as I am generally able to ignore the knowledge of the small wrong acts that led to the pain of dis-ease and insecurity. Faith in Christ means faith in his ability to heal everyone. It is not necessary for him to have already healed the individual I have wronged for my pain to leave me, the fact that he will heal the individual sooner or later (or after death) is sufficient.

There is no truth more important to me than to know that those I have hurt will be healed as I have been healed. I must be an agent of healing in the lives of those around me. Because I have been given much, I too must give. That is joy, that is truth. Any other “truth” will not bring happiness. No other truth has been so self-evident (at least for me growing up in the gospel with parents who have been good examples to me) but so difficult to really “know”. It is only by living forgiveness and service that the joy promised the saints is accessible to me. No prayer is answered more quickly without fail than the opportunity to serve another. Any attempt to know God or find joy without this paradigm has been self-defeating for me.

Thanks for this post, it’s nice to see other people on the same and/or parallel journeys. I think we are in similar places. For me, the big realization came when I decided to stop trying to defend the version of “The Truth” that I had received and simply accept truths as best as they can be known. At that point the question for me became, “How do I understand these truths and what do they mean?” This is opposed to my old way of thinking where I was just pleased with myself that I had “The Truth.” Slightly different than your experience, but most likely compatible since the meaning of a truth is going to involve, to a very large degree, the happiness and joy of myself and those around me.

I think the cautionary tale for those who have taken this journey is to not try and force others to come along for the ride. You cannot force, lead, coerce, convince, etc. anyone to leave the stage where one is simply pleased at having “The Truth,” it’s just too embedded in Mormon culture and human nature. You can help someone who has started the journey themselves, but they have to start it themselves. I am not accusing anyone of doing this, just something that I have learned on this journey myself.

I think that one of the big things that this journey has taught me is that there is so much work to do in the church. When you are simply happy to have “The Truth,” the church simply becomes a repository for “The Truth,” while we all wait for some appropriate end-time event (death, millenium, final judgement, etc.). However, once you get beyond that you have to pursue making the church a happy and beautiful place, a place where people want to go, in short, Zion. This is a lot more work than just sitting around holding “The Truth.” I thought for a long time that the church would be doomed if we did not focus like a laser on having “The Truth,” but if we offer more beauty and happiness than anyone else can offer (which is predicated on having “The Truth”) then people will flock to the church more than they ever have.

This post has made me smile, and I’m sure many others. You have succeeded.

The Atonement and the different analogies used to describe and prescribe it to me and other LDSaints has dogged me my whole life. I have found Richard Swinburne’s take on it to be the most satisfying, which relies on the sacrificial model of the Old Testament and the need for mortals to take sin seriously, without at the same time feeling like Christ suffers more in a retroactive way for every new sin I commit. That always disturbed me.

Legal models like the debtor and justice needing to be paid seem to be antithetical to what Christ was about as a person anyway. A bit too “Pharisaical”.

I think you’ve hit on a great truth, of one of the ways that we can seek the mysteries of Godliness and the peaceable things of the Kingdom of God. Very much enjoyed your post.