Joining Mormon Matters host Dan Wotherspoon in reflecting on this current moment are podcast veterans, professor, blogger, and LDS commentator Joanna Brooks, professor and holder of the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University Philip Barlow, and first-time podcast guest and business strategist Scott Holley, who served as a key analyst for the survey.

We hope you’ll enjoy the discussion and will share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Links to Sources:

Preliminary results of Open Stories Foundation Survey

Joanna Brooks Religion Dispatches blog post on Mormonism facing its history

Reuters article reporting on Elder Marlin Jensen’s remarks at Utah State University

Salt Lake Tribune article about topics under discussion in this podcast

Deseret News article about topics under discussion in this podcast

Carrie Sheffield Washington Post essay on LDS Church in need of reform

In this podcast, Mormon Matters host Dan Wotherspoon and panelists Joanna Brooks, Todd Decker, and Scott Heffernan engage in a far-ranging discussion of these issues and basically have a great time discussing (mostly with great affection) some of these unique Mormon emphases along with their current status within the tradition and whether or not those currently enjoying less of a role will or should stay in the background. In the end, even at nearly two hours in length, there was just too much to be discussed, so this particular episode mostly lands as a good beginning point for listeners to jump in: What are your favorite deemphasized LDS teachings or practices? How do you feel about where the LDS Church is today in terms of what is emphasized publicly or in internal discussions? We look forward to your joining in!

Here’s the FAQ:  Are there restrictions based on race or color concerning who can join the Mormon Church and have the priesthood?

From the “official” response:

There are no race or color restrictions as to who can join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are also no race or color restrictions as to who can have the priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. . . .

. . . “We believe in the old adage that many hands make light work. We have a lay priesthood, and every worthy man is eligible to receive this priesthood.”

Best answers:

• No.  Shortest is best.
• No, and I’m black.  It’s clearly less unsavory than a bunch of white people talking about how enlightened we are now.
  • “No. I am openly accepted, welcomed and loved by every member of the Mormon church. People are forthright and honest with their questions if their exposure to blacks have been limited and not once have I felt any prejudice only love, the love of Jesus Christ. Black men are accepted into the priesthood, and black men, women, and children serve alongside not only whites but other ethnicities. The church is extremely accepting of ALL races, ethnicities, and cultures and temples exist all over the world for all its members to partake of its blessings. Don’t believe the rumors, there are black mormons and there are mormons of different races and ethnicities. Only the adversary will promote otherwise.”
  • “Anyone of any ethnic or racial background is welcome to join the church. All worthy male members of the church can hold the priesthood.”
  • “I am proud to be an African American. But something i’m even more proud of is that i hold the Priesthood. There are no restrictions based on race or color. I’ve been a member of this Church for over 10 years and have never encountered racism within it! I serve alongside of brothers and sisters of all colors and races and hold the same priesthood of God as any other brother in the church.”
  • “There are no restrictions as to who can join the Church. We are all children of our Father in heaven and all of us are in need of his love, guidance and his gospel plan for us.”
  • “No, there are not. I hold the Priesthood, which is an incredible blessing for myself and my family.  For a time, there were restrictions, and it seems that there were some bad feelings towards the Church about it, but consider this…In my own personal studies, there was not a single Church or religion in the United States, or throughout the world in the last century who did not practice some kind of segregation or discrimination. Humans are far from perfect (Which is why we ALL need the influence of a loving God in our lives).  In the mid 1800′s, leaders of our church particularly suffered major persecution for allowing slaves to live and have membership among the Mormons and were tarred, feathered, beaten, and even driven out of their homes for it. In fact, in 1844 when Joseph Smith (The first prophet of the Latter- Day Church) ran for President of the United States, one of his major platforms was to have slavery abolished by 1850. This did not go down very well in a state that owned slaves as property. Like any other faith, people are striving to be better through living fully the principles taught by the savior, which comes line upon line, precept on precept.  With all this said, the Church that has an official declaration that is printed within Latter-Day Saint scripture announcing to the world that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as a whole, do not permit any form of discrimination against color anywhere in the church. I am not aware of many faiths that have an official document like this included in pages of scripture used by all Latter-Day Saints.  There is great power in personal revelation and it can be given to all men who seek the Lord and have desires to know his will..It is amazing!!”
• No, we have all races in the church.  I think keeping this global and broad is how to avoid tokenism (see below).
  • “We have members of all races, from hundreds of nations around the world. The Book of Mormon clearly teaches that God “denieth none that come to him, black and white, bond and free, male and female…and all are alike unto God” (2 Nephi 27:33).”
  • “When I was a missionary in Detroit I had the opportunity to teach people of many different races and backgrounds, including Africans, Hmong, and Chaldeans.”  Chaldeans, like Abraham?
  • “No there are not…in fact while my husband was attending graduate school in Philadelphia, the majority of the people in the Mormon congregation we attended were African American. The congregation was also led by an African American…President Johnson. There were also entire congregations of Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking members. They were not divided because of race, but rather by language spoken so that the members could hear the Word of God in their own language.”
  • “I am proud to sit in class with African, Indian, Hispanic and Asian members in our ward.”
  • “Our members are from the vast majority of countries of the world.  They comprise of all races, colours, and peoples, from Mongolia to Mauritius, Russia and the Baltic States to Japan, from Ghana to Guatamala, from Korea to Brazil, and most places inbetween.  It might surprise some to learn there are more spanish-speaking members of the Church than english-speaking ones. Twice-yearly Conferences of the Church are transmitted to our Church Meetinghouses worldwide in more than 90 languages.”
  • “I am the branch president of a small congregation that includes white, Hispanic, African-American, Asian, and Haitian members. We fellowship together in unity born of the Spirit of the Lord.  I lived in Alaska for many years. Alaska is truly a “melting pot” for Mormons. Our stake included Tongans, Samoans, Hawaiians, Koreans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Germans, and Native Americans along with white and African-American members. The same sort of harmony prevailed among us.
• No, and we don’t know why there was a ban.  I think it beats speculating anyway.
  • “No, there are not. The Priesthood (or right for men to officiate in the church) was not not available to men of African ancestry before 1978. We don’t know all the reasons why this was the case, but assuredly we rejoice in the fact that all worthy men may hold the Priesthood today.”
  • “Past restrictions appear to have been grounded in cultural, social and spiritual understanding at the time.”  If this is speculation, it’s got the benefit of being likely true.
  • “I do not know the meaning of all things, but I know that God loves His children of whatever tint and hue. I know that sometimes He sees fit to try our faith, to give us a tiny sample of the bitter cup so that we can appreciate more fully what He did in draining it to the dregs. I know that there are generational things that need to be worked out in all of us. I know that prophets are inspired and that the Lord has His reasons for everything that happens in His Church. I’ll be interested in finding out the details of this situation when I get to the other side but it’s not an issue now.”
  • “For reasons we don’t fully understand, there was a time when the priesthood was not made available to all people.”
  • “These kind of questions are very legitimate concerns. No, there is not a restriction. However, at one time this was different. I don’t have the answers but I do know that it’s too easy to get caught up in the thick of thin things and miss entirely the true gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Answers I liked slightly less:

• No, and priesthood is always restricted.  This is perhaps the least unpalatable explanation, but I’m not sure it makes a boatload of sense either since the church was being restored.  It comes dangerously close to implying it was a doctrine, not a policy, a distinction that I think we’ve been pretty careful to make.
  • “For a time the priesthood was restricted to certain bloodlines, as it was in the Old Testament when only the sons of Aaron and Levi were allowed the privilege. However, modern prophets were clear from the beginning that in the Lord’s time the priesthood would be extended to all races, just as the Gospel was finally extended from the nation of Israel to the whole world in the time of the early Apostles.”  A few issues here:  1) not sure the term “bloodlines” is accurate or relevant to the ban in practice, and 2) saying that it was clear from the beginning that the PH would be extended is optimistically naive.  There are many early leader quotes that contradict that.
  • “Priesthood had historically been limited as to who could hold it during ancient times as well as modern, for purposes known only to God. For example, during the time of the Old Testament, only one tribe of the 12 tribes of Israel, (Levi) could hold the Priesthood. In the New Testament times with Jesus only Jews could hold the Priesthood, no gentiles at all. It took a revelation from God to Peter that the Gospel could be preached openly to non-Jews.”  This is probably the best version of this type of answer I saw.
  • “Priesthood in the LDS Church is not a “right” or title. Rather, it is the authority to act in the name of God. Only those who live God’s teachings to guide their lives can receive it, and even then, it is only active when the priesthood holder is living in harmony with God. As a result, throughout history most people have not been given the priesthood. Not that they will never get it–they’ll just get it when God feels that they are ready for it.”  OK, this one sounds like he’s implying that blacks didn’t have it because they weren’t worthy (and by extension, that women are not worthy?)
• No, and women are still restricted.  I suppose girl power is great and all, but why bring that up?  Actually, the more I think about this, the more I think it’s a bit tone-deaf not to mention it when we’re patting ourselves on the back for being so color-blind.
  • “That is true, but the only restrictions now are dependent on worthiness… and gender, I suppose. Men are the only ones allowed to hold the priesthood, but it is part of a wonderful design to keep order. Women have just as much right to the priesthood as men do, but do not themselves hold those keys.”  You go, girl!
• No, and I know someone black who is a Mormon.  At best this seems like tokenism.  At worst, it reminds people how rare black members still are as a result of this practice, and points out (truthfully) that only one race was restricted.  This works better if the person we know is someone close to us, not if we knew some black person once who was OK with being Mormon despite the policy.
  • “No. Where I live, in the Washington DC area, we have a number of black members. Several years ago, we had a black member of the bishopric. One of the other wards in my stake has a black bishop. Gladys Knight, a black gospel singer, is a convert to the Church and has performed in our Stake Center.”

Mormon-speak:

• Into the Waters of Baptism.  “Since the beginning of the Church people of all races have been welcomed into the waters of baptism, given the gift of the Holy Ghost, and equally promised the highest blessings of salvation.”  I suppose it does point out the fact that we are baptizers by immersion, but it just seems like a GC-wannabe way of saying people can join the church.
• Bloodlines.  “For a time the priesthood was restricted to certain bloodlines”  Outside the history channel and the church, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “bloodlines” used.

Other interesting observations:

• Policy.  We seem to be pretty consistently in agreement that the race ban was a policy, not a doctrine.
• Ham doctrine & other racist protestant teachings.  Racist speculations about the reasons for the ban (e.g. less valiant in pre-existence) have likewise been put to bed.

What I might have said:

• No, and I’m black (but the picture might give me away).
• I would probably just say “no,” and that the church is global and includes members of all races.  I would probably not even mention the PH ban.

What would you say?  Did you like the member answers to these questions?  Different ones than I did?  Discuss.

Here’s the question:  Do you really believe there is a prophet like Moses alive today?

My initial reaction is that this is a weird way to word this question, but I suppose it was done because “Moses” is probably the only Biblical prophet most people know by name (who does not know the story of Moses leading the animals onto the ark?).

First, the “official” answer given on the site:

Throughout history, God has chosen prophets, such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, and others, to teach the gospel and direct His Church (Amos 3:7). It is no different today. We all need God’s guidance in a world that is sometimes confusing. Because God loves His children, He continues to send living prophets. Joseph Smith (1805–44) was the first prophet of our time. Thomas S. Monson is God’s chosen prophet today.

Just as God led the Israelites out of slavery and to a better place through His prophet Moses, He leads His children today into happier, more peaceful lives when they choose to follow His living prophet. We invite you to listen to the words of living prophets and consider how knowing God’s will can benefit your life.

Answers I generally liked:

• Moses as an allegory for a prophet.  It’s such a stretch to compare someone as highly mythologized as Moses with someone who is as contemporary as Pres. Monson.  To do so, you have to point to the man in the Moses myth or the myth in the mantle.  It can be tough to pull off, but many here do it pretty well.
  • “Who was Moses… a righteous man, not a perfect man.”
  • “Just as Moses’ people needed guidance in his day, we need guidance in ours as well.”
  • “You must remember that although Moses was a great prophet, he was a man. God calls men to be prophets.”
  • “Without Moses to lead them as a living prophet, would the Children of Israel have been led out of Egypt? They followed the prophet.”  This was a nice twist on the meaning of “follow the prophet” implying following a person’s example and doing what they do rather than doing what they say.
  • “He has been taught the teachings of God, like Moses. He has embraced God, like Moses. He’s committed himself, his life, his abilities, his heart, to God, like Moses.”
  • “Well, I’m not sure how much like Moses he is, but we certainly do have a living prophet today.”  Hear, hear.  Stupid question.
  • “In 1831, a Methodist preacher named Ezra Booth asked Joseph Smith Jr., “Do you believe that you are a prophet, like Moses or Abraham?” The Prophet replied, “I don’t think that what you believe and what I believe are all that different. You believe that God used to talk to man. I believe that he still does.”"  So, apparently someone else asked this same stupid question 160 years ago.
• Practical & personal.  Those that shared personal thoughts about the benefits of having a prophet were generally on point, IMO.  Generally, I was OK with testimony bearing here under that same umbrella, although I’m not sure how well that works in this medium and for a non-Mormon audience.  My favorites were those who linked the topic to their own conversion story.
  • “I know as I have followed God’s living prophet it has brought peace and hope into my life.”
  • “That is probably one of the first things I marveled at, the knowledge that a wise and loving Heavenly Father could show His love by this simple act. What parent would not want to guide their children back and what better way to show His love than to still speak to His children today. The heavens are still open and in my mind it would be odd to think otherwise.”
  • “He receives revelation directly from God. Revelation that has guided my life on a personal level.”
  • “Yes! This was something I was so excited to learn about when I was investigating the church and being taught by the missionaries. Growing up while attending a religious school, I was always taught about the prophets of the Old Testament and amazed at what incredible men they must have been.”
  • “Yep. This is one of the things that I understood and looked for in a church. I grew up reading the Bible and loved reading how regularly and consistently God spoke through his prophets so his people received clarity and direction, as a people, when they chose to listen. People say that God stopped talking to men as a group after Jesus’ death, but that’s not so.”
  • “I have had the privilege of meeting in person President Thomas S. Monson, current Prophet. He is a joyful person. He makes everyone feel like they are his friend.”
  • “Before I joined the church in college, I didn’t think prophets would still be used by God in this day. No other church I had studied had this belief.  In my process of joining the church, I prayed to know if there was actually a prophet, like Moses, on the earth today. Not surprisingly, I received direct revelation from God that there was, in fact, a prophet, and he was at the head of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
• Personal revelation caveat.  I liked those few who remembered to mention the fact that all members of the church are entitled to their own revelation for themselves, and to be able to discern truth through the spirit, not just blindly follow others.
  • “My personal prayers guide my own personal life, but the prophet’s counsel guides the whole membership.”
  • “When God wants YOU to know something, he’ll tell you personally if you’re listening. When God wants THE WORLD, collectively, to know something, he’ll pick someone, and tell him–simple as that.”  I thought this was the most straightforward answer.
  • “This does NOT mean that God doesn’t talk to me. The Holy Ghost still gives personal revelation to everyone who remains worthy since their baptism and who does the work to pay attention.”  Another favorite.
  • “That is not to say that I am exempt from working on my own relationship with God. Just as the prophet receives direction from God regarding the doctrines of the church, the organization of the church, and instruction related to the church and priesthood, I too must seek inspiration and instruction from God.”

Answers I didn’t like so much, or that might sound strange to non-Mormons:

• Culty-sounding stuff.  Even just saying the prophet speaks for God can sound a little nutty to those not of our faith without some level of caveat attached.  Any sort of prophet-worship also falls into this camp.
  • “Follow the prophet. He knows the way!”  Cue the spooky music.
• Apocalyptic answers.  These are answers that sound like “crazy uncle” talk about the world ending.  Why is it that we think Evangelicals are nuts for raving about the Rapture, but we hear similar things at church sometimes without raising an eyebrow?
  • “I believe that as we near the end of the world that there is no greater time for us to have spiritual direction from a chosen servant of the Lord then (sic) right now.”
• “The world is bad.”  These answers sound like fear-mongering and tribalism.  Inside the tribe, they sound OK.  Outside the tribe, they don’t ring true because those outside the tribe don’t generally think the world is full of invisible dangers.
  • “It gives me great comfort in this troubled world that I can look to the leaders of the LDS Church and know that I can hear the mind and will of Jesus Christ.”  Implying you can’t get your own revelation, of course.
  • “today’s world is a vast maze of concerns that could be very confusing without a prophet to see ahead and warn us of impending danger.”  This sentence got more and more alarming as it went.
  • “There is a constant attack against the commandments God has given to us. Immorality, violence, swearing, and an obsession with wealth are hugely common. There are wars and natural disasters like no other time on this earth. God’s commandments have not changed, but an increasing amount of people are fighting against them. The prophet today helps to protect the faithful members of the church from the influence of those fighting against God’s commandments.”  This one sounds a bit on the culty side to me.  Also, I suggest this person needs to crack open a history book based on some of these claims.
  • “Prophets were around in the Old Testament to lead people, to guide them, and to protect them from the evils of the world. Great prophets like Moses, Abraham, and so on all provided the people of the time with valuable knowledge that was tailored for them to combat the temptations of a wicked world. How much more wicked is our world today?”  I don’t know.  How much?
• Unintentional doctrinal mistakes.  I didn’t see any biggies here, which is good.
  • “Our prophet is a wonderful man.  I have met one of his apostles, and the spirit around them is incredible.”  Wait, the prophet has apostles?  I thought they were Jesus’ apostles.  Also, if you’ve only met one, how do you know what the spirit around “them” is like?
• Mormon-speak alert!  Many of these FAQs have highlighted some words we hear a lot at church but almost nowhere else.
  • Mouthpiece.  Does anyone else on the planet use this word?  What is a mouthpiece anyway?  It sounds like dentures.

What I might say:

• The likeness between our current prophet and Moses is best taken allegorically as the challenges faced in our day differ from those faced in a mythologized historical tradition.
• Prophets are people too.  We don’t believe they are infallible.  Unlike Moses, TSM has not killed any Egyptians (so far as I know), but he is also not perfect.
• Everyone is entitled to the guidance of the holy spirit and direct personal revelation.
• While prophets lead the church, they sometimes speak as a man, and sometimes inspired.  It’s up to us to discern the difference through our own personal revelation.
• Prophets provide advice, guidance and inspired insight.  A prophet doesn’t absolve anyone from responsibility for their own choices and actions.

What did you think?  Do you agree it’s weirdly worded?  How would you answer this question?  Discuss.

Here’s the question members were asked:  Does the Mormon church endorse political parties?

This is the church’s official party line that was posted on the site:

The Church has made the following public statement on multiple occasions prior to major elections: “Principles compatible with the gospel are found in the platforms of all major political parties. While the Church does not endorse political candidates, platforms, or parties, members are urged to be full participants in political, governmental, and community affairs.”

Here are some of the member profile answers I liked best:

• No.  Most of these were basically a recitation of the same statement that’s read over the pulpit regularly.  So, there’s clarity and consistency of message.
  • “No. The church does not endorse political parties. The church believes in free agency, and let’s its members decide which political party to join on their own.”  I like the shout out to free agency.
  • “No, THANKFULLY. I don’t believe any political party has the corner on morality.”  My favorite simple “no” answer.
• No + we’re not all Americans.  Thanks to those members who rememered that little fact.
  • “No it doesn’t. The Church has always encouraged Church members to be knowledgeable about political issues and to participate in the political process e.g. voting in their respective countries and at all levels of governance.”
  • “I personally know active and faithful members of the church (in the U.S. and worldwide) who are Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Tories, Labourites, Libertarians, Greens, etc.”  Yeah, for this guy who has met a non-US Mormon.
• No + 11th Article of Faith.  Adds a twist of “doctrine” to the refutation.
  • “I’m happy to say that there are members of the Church of all different political backgrounds. The Church does not endorse any specific party. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”
• No + pray / vote conscience.  Adds a nice religious touch that feels universal.
  • “No it does not. It does however encourage you to pray before you vote to help to choose.”  I do have a weird feeling about the wording, though, which sounds a lot like, “it puts the lotion on its back.”

I had mixed feelings about these, although again, they were mostly pretty good:

• “No, we’re not all Republicans” or conversely, “No, as evidenced by the fact that I’m a Democrat.”  As they say, the exception proves the rule, but that just means that “the rule” is Republican, something I’m not quite sure we should be conceding.  It also rings a little hollow because it sounds like we’re protesting too much.  Frankly, I think that’s a good message for those who are aware that there are a lot of Republicans in the church (whether they are members or not).  It just has the potential to ring a little false if someone didn’t think that was a foregone conclusion.  And saying “I know some democrats at church” sounds just a smidge defensive like saying, ”I have lots of black friends” to prove how culturally savvy you are.  Yet I do know that political affiliation is a badge of honor for folks in a democracy like ours.  I prefer the ones that are more personal.
  • “I know many people connotate Mormons and Conservatism and the Republican party, but it is a misconception. I can say this as a devout Mormon and democrat!”
  • “I think our church teaches us to be as informed and educated as possible, and that’s why I am an independent and consider each issue and candidate carefully, regardless of party affiliation.”  Actually this one I like better, probably because I too am an independent.  In addition to being as informed and educated as possible (just kidding on that one!).
  • “I am a fairly liberal democrat, while most fellow Mormons in my congregation are very conservative republicans. It can be a little tricky at times, but Mormons are a kind and caring community.”  I particularly like the comment about a kind and caring community, which for me rings true.  Nicely done!
  • “The Mormon church absolutely does not endorse political parties. In fact, my husband and I, faithful members of the Mormon Church, both belong to different political parties. I feel that the platforms of both political parties endorse some good things and that no party has all the answers.”  I like the mixed-politics marriage angle here.
• Answers that are US-Centric.  This ran the gamut from those just talking about their own politics, and they happen to be American (not too bad) to those God-bless-Americans that sound tone-deaf to non-Americans (like most Americans sound to others).
  • “No, I used to think that all Mormons happened to be Republican, but they aren’t. I’ve met plenty of people in all parties. However, I think it’s safe to say, we do tend to be a bit more conservative no matter which party.”  I’m not sure I agree that Mormon Democrats are all middle-of-the-roaders.  Also, this forgets the 50% of Mormons who live in other countries.
  • “The Mormon Church does not endorse political parties. Members of our Church belong to both major political parties.”  Both the Tories and the Labor Party.  Right?

Answers I (in my wisdom) would not have approved if I were a reviewer:

• No, but (hint, hint) God’s probably a Republican.  First of all, just as it’s anachronistic to think of God as a Mormon, he’s clearly not an American, so associating him with contemporary political issues in our little square inch of the globe seems off-key and presumptuous.
  • “any political party that approves of God’s teachings, and lives them consistently, is more likely to attract Mormons. Likewise, any political party that prefers different standards, or opposes the teachings of Jesus Christ, will be more likely to offend Mormons.”  I am unaware of any political party that approves of all of God’s teachings or any political party that wholeheartedly rejects them, so this comment seems suspect to me.

There has been some criticism of the profiles, stating that it implies wider diversity of thought than one actually experiences at church.  While I think that may be true, I think it’s a natural by-product of the process:

1. Participants self-select.  Those who are confident in their uniqueness (and reasonably photogenic) will be more inclined to participate.
2. It’s on the internet.  The outlier Mormons are more likely to be internet-savvy than the stereotyped ones.  And younger members are more likely to proliferate the internet and have more progressive views.
3. There’s no “common” review process.  Each profile is reviewed by a team of 20-30 MTC employees who make personal decisions about what to approve or decline.  If there was a single reviewer, there would be more consistency of response.  This is better, IMO.

Here’s what I might have said:

• No, I’ve been in wards in the U.S. that were predominantly Democrat and wards that were predominantly Republican.  And I’ve known members outside the U.S. with a very wide spectrum of political belief.
• IMO, both parties are full of hypocrits and philanderers as well as genuine good guys who haven’t yet become hypocrits and philanderers.  Give them time.
• Generally speaking, members avoid discussing politics in my experience because they are polite and understand that politics can be divisive; most members recognize the power of politics to divide friends and families.  But as with any large organization, there are a few bulls in the China shop.

Have you created your profile yet?  Let’s talk politics!  How would you answer this question?  What answers did you like or not like?  Discuss.

After the Satan figure is given permission to afflict Job as a test of his faithfulness, three of Job’s friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, come to visit him, sitting with him in silence for seven days. On the seventh day, Job speaks, beginning a conversation in which each of the four men shares thoughts on Job’s afflictions and adversity in general in profound poetic statements.  This is a lengthy dialogue between characters who alter their moods, question their motives, change their minds, and undercut each other with sarcasm and innuendo. Although Job comes closest to doing so, no single character articulates one true or authoritative opinion. Each speaker has his own flaws as well as his own lofty moments of observation or astute theological insight.  I believe the Book of Job is a jumping-off point for the reader to deeply explore questions of theodicy and the difficulty of understanding why an all-powerful God allows good people to suffer.

Eliphaz believes that Job’s agony must be due to some sin Job has committed, and he urges Job to seek God’s favor. Bildad and Zophar agree that Job must have committed evil to offend God’s justice and argue that he should strive to exhibit more blameless behavior. Bildad surmises that Job’s children brought their deaths upon themselves. Even worse, Zophar implies that whatever wrong Job has done probably deserves greater punishment than what he has received.  A character who is introduced later in the book, Elihu, also assumes that Job must be wicked to be suffering as he is, and he thinks that Job’s excessive talking is an act of rebellion against God. The interaction between Job and his friends shows the folly of trying to understand God’s ways.  The reader is privy to the information that Job has been righteous and the adversity comes from a bargain that has been made between God and Satan.  The fault of Job and his friends lies in trying to explain the nature of God with only the limited information available to human knowledge, as God himself notes when he roars from the whirlwind, “Who is this that darkness counsel / by words without / knowledge?” (38:2).

In spite of the criticism of his friends, Job believes that there is a “witness” or a “Redeemer” in heaven who will vouch for his innocence (16:19, 19:25). After a while, the upbraiding proves too much for Job, and he grows sarcastic, impatient, and afraid. He laments the injustice that God lets wicked people prosper while he and countless other innocent people suffer.  He feels that wisdom is hidden from human minds, but he resolves to persist in pursuing wisdom by fearing God and avoiding evil.

• Why DOES a loving and an all-powerful God allow human suffering?

Here is an explanation I heard in Houston, Texas, and I think it has a lot of merit. It’s distinctly LDS, it’s very simple, and it combines several of the common theodicies.

The Good Adversity

The first type of adversity one might experience can be said to be “good.” It is the kind of adversity that exists to strengthen the human soul. It may be a result of living in a fallen world. Just as a corollary to living we knock up against all kinds of adversity, such as natural disasters. I would add that not all people will choose to use this type of suffering as a chance to grow, but that is its purpose, and theoretically it is possible to overcome, and to learn from it.

The Bad Adversity

Another type of adversity that exists in the world comes as a result of bad choices that we make. This goes along with the scripture “Wickedness never was happinesss.” In general, right living leads to peace, prosperity, and happiness, while wickedness, evil, and sin will tend to cause misery and pain. Note that this principle is not the only factor leading to suffering. That is why it may appear that a righteous person is experiencing much more adversity than his/her wicked neighbor.

The Ugly Adversity

Ugly adversity occurs when another person’s free agency conflicts with someone else’s life. God allows us to make our own life choices and rarely interferes. Thus innocent humans may suffer as a result of someone’s poor choices. Latter-day Saints believe passionately that free agency is a vital ingredient for attaining sanctification. Thus ugly adversity must exist, causing unneeded suffering. Why did God organize the world this way? Because without choosing freely we could never develop the qualities necessary for godhood.

Now it’s your turn! How do you explain the problem of evil and adversity in the world?  Could an omnipotent God have created free beings that were already morally perfect, thus eliminating the need for adversity?  Does the Book of Job illuminate or obscure our understanding of this principle?  How do you understand and come to terms with adversity in your life?

First of all, here is the phrasing of the question:  Why don’t women hold the priesthood in the Mormon Church?  How do women lead in the Mormon Church?

The first “answer” was just a quote by Gordon B. Hinckley, and frankly it was the one I liked best, although I worried a smidge about how outsiders might perceive part of it:

“Women do not hold the priesthood because the Lord has put it that way.  (Here we run the risk of sounding like we are saying “because the Lord, who is a man, told the leaders, who are all men . . .”  You get the point).  It is part of His program. Women have a very prominent place in this Church. Men hold the priesthood offices of the Church. But women have a tremendous place in this Church. They have their own organization. It was started in 1842 by the Prophet Joseph Smith (need I say “a man”), called the Relief Society, because its initial purpose was to administer help to those in need. It has grown to be, I think, the largest women’s organization in the world… They have their own offices, their own presidency, their own board. That reaches down to the smallest unit of the Church everywhere in the world…

“The men hold the priesthood, yes. But my wife is my companion. In this Church the man neither walks ahead of his wife nor behind his wife but at her side. They are co-equals in this life in a great enterprise.” (This is my favorite part of his quote).

Common member answers that I thought would be generally acceptable to outsiders:

• God sets the rules.
  • “Well, the quick answer is God’s priesthood, God’s rules. In reading the Holy Bible you can see that the priesthood of God has always been exclusive. I’ve heard lots of speculation on this over the course of my years in the Church, but I still think that the quick answer is only one we know for sure right now.”
  • “I have a pretty simple understanding of this question. It’s God’s priesthood. He can give it to, or withhold it from anybody He chooses. If I thought the church was led by men, instead of by God himself, then I might think that they were selfish, or old fashioned, or just wrong. But knowing that the head of the Church is God, I let Him govern His Church any way He so chooses. But from the outside looking in, I know that you might not know that God really is in charge. You might still be suspicious. I can understand that. Still, the true answer is to ask God. If this is truly His church, then we have less objections to Him choosing to run it His way.”
• Priesthood is always restricted.
  • “The Lord has throughout the scriptures given different responsibilities to different people, based on all sorts of things.”
  • “In the days of Moses, for example, not every man had the priesthood. It is only in our day that every worthy male may be ordained into the priesthood of God.”
• It’s only a matter of time.  (This seemed a bit progressive, but the censors didn’t object.)
  • “My faith is placed in God, and should He choose to extend priesthood to the women of the church, I’m okay with that idea. It’s His church, His priesthood, and I will follow Him any way He leads.”
  • “As to why women do not hold the Priesthood, my answer is it is a matter of the Lord’s timing.”
• Priesthood blessings are for all, and it’s only used for service.
  • “The priesthood is used to serve others and perform ordinances of the gospel, the blessings of which are enjoyed by both men and women.”
  • “The priesthood power is not a gift or a right but an oath and covenant that a worthy man makes with the Lord. It is not a power for man’s own gain and a man is not better off than a woman because he holds this power. Women and men are entitled to the same blessings and promises when they live righteously.”
  • “I have no doubt that I, woman, am as significant to my Heavenly parent as any man. If you understand that the priesthood is all about service, then perhaps you’ll see how this is a vehicle for men to serve God and their fellowman.”
  • “The priesthood however, is not to be used to benefit yourself, but to benefit others, such as the sick, or anyone else (family or otherwise) who is in need of a blessing from God.”
• Women hold key leadership positions in the church. Sample comments:
  • “There are certain positions that are held by men, and certain others that are only held by women.”
  • “There are innumerable opportunities for women to serve and bless the lives of others through their church service. In the church I have always felt important and cherished. I feel that my contributions are appreciated and needed.”
  • “Women do lead in the church in many callings, and do a spot on job of it.”
  • “The five women in my life are leaders. They know what they want and what they don’t want. When they speak, I know I had better listen. While they do not currently have the Priesthood, they do certainly influence me. So do women who lead the children (the Primary organization) and the women’s organization (the Relief Society) and those who speak or pray or serve in the Lord’s house, the Temple.”

Common members answers that made me nervous:

• Priesthood?  No, thanks!  I’ve got my hands full with these dishes and dirty diapers, thank you very much!
  • “When I read or hear similar questions such as these I want to laugh. To me a question like this is akin to asking for more responsiblity, more accountablity, more work, more angish (sic) etc. . . . I guess my question would be, why would a woman want to hold the priesthood?”
  • “Honey, we women have enough to do! Why worry about holding the priesthood too? Just lovingly hold that dear husband of yours and support him as he honors the priesthood.”  I think I threw up in my mouth a little on that one.
  • “Personally, I would rather lead at home as a mother, than anywhere else.”  I have been rendered incapable of speech by that one.
• Men and women are inherently different.  Mommies have babies, and daddies do (insert awesome entitled stuff).  All right, that’s a very loose paraphrase.  But the old “boys and girls are different” routine often strays into sexist stereotypes easily sniffed out by investigators (unless they too are sexist).
  • “Just as men have not been appointed to bear children in this life, so women have not been appointed to bear the priesthood.”
  • “Men and woman have different responsibilites. The man has the responsibility of holding the priesthood and using those keys given to them (sic) in righteousness. Woman (sic) have another kind of responsibility that of bareing (sic) and rearing children.”  Seriously, what is up with the grammar and spell check on mormon.org??  There is clearly no basic editing.  (same comment)  “Each of us, man and woman have a sacred roll (like the shewbread of the temple?) like our Heavenly Parents that is not talked of much, but is essential just the same.”  I’m unclear what it is that is not talked of much.  The roles of parents seem talked about a lot.  Heavenly Father is talked about a lot.  So does this mean that Heavenly Mother is not talked about?  If so, there’s subject-verb disagreement in that sentence.
• Women have access through men.  This is really close to saying women still get the blessings, but it has the twist of sounding like men take care of women and women are dependent on men.
  • “As a woman I have total access to the blessings of the priesthood through my father, husband, bishop, and home teachers. Our home teachers visit my family in our home monthly and look after our well-being.”
• Women lead by example (aka being modest).  This one kills me with its irrelevance.  How do we go from a question about women and the priesthood to talking about how women should dress?  Yet, here we go.
  • “Many women in the Mormon Church also lead by setting an example of virtue, and do not follow the tight/low cut/body revealing fashions of this day but instead understand their true beauty is enhanced by their choice to be modest in dress.”
  • “Young girls need righteous examples of Christlike women to whom they can look as they try to make good decisions in today’s world. Women who are modest, caring, honest and virtuous lead these girls to Christ.”
• Men need the priesthood because women are better than they are (aka Male Guilt Syndrome).
  • “My wife is a remarkable woman, and does all of this without the priesthood. I, however, need the priesthood because I’m not a woman, and would fail miserably without it.”
  • “Because men are rather selfish and self-centered by nature, they need extra guidance and teaching to acquire compassion and selflessness. Serving in the priesthood is that schooling process for them. Women, on the other hand, are much more natural in their abilities to love and serve and teach. Priesthood is not required for them to emulate the Savior’s commandment to love one another.”

Here are some things I could possibly say if I were answering this question:

• I don’t know why women don’t.  Perhaps that will change at some point in the future.  Women do use priesthood power within temples (but it’s not suitable for mormon.org which is primarily focused on a non-LDS audience).
• We have no paid clergy at the ward level, so priesthood is not a career in our church.
• Women hold at least as many leadership positions as men at the ward level, and are probably more influential in these roles.  Women speak in church to the congregation every Sunday and teach lessons to adults.
• Our scriptures specifically state that anyone who uses “unrighteous dominion” loses his priesthood power.

What were your reactions to these answers?  Did you like some I didn’t like or dislike ones I liked?  What would your answer be to that question?  Are you motivated to create your own profile yet?  Discuss.

First of all, this campaign is slick and attractive.  I applaud efforts to show the diversity that exists in the church, and to showcase some of the cool non-celebrities who are actual Mormons.  These are family-centric people with a wide variety of interests.  There are many of these people whom I would really enjoy on a personal level.  So, kudos on a very effective campaign!

On the downside, some of the answers to the difficult questions are problematic for various reasons (no more problematic than what you hear on a given Sunday from lay members, but they are now public):

• some answers contain factual errors, including some doctrinal mistakes (see below)
• there is no spell check or editing; perhaps this is “keepin’ it real”
• this exposes some of the most common speculations and assumptions that are comfort food to lay members on these tough issues; there’s an upside to this, too.  Perhaps this is an opportunity for the church to clarify or deal with some incorrect assumptions.
• some of the answers are not going to be very appealing to those outside the church.

So, first things first.  Let’s start with the FAQ on polygamy that members answered:  Why did your church previously practice plural marriage (polygamy)?

Reading through the posted responses, this is the one I liked the best.  He refrains from speculating or spinning pet theories that are easily debunked, and he simply talks about trusting God.  It’s not perfect because it really doesn’t answer the question, but it is a very tough question to answer given that it’s not relevant to our daily experience as church members:

I struggle with this question, myself. I believe, as I have been taught, that it was a commandment from God. I’ve heard many theories about why God commanded it but, as far as I can tell, none of the theories can be proven. I do consider the question from time to time but, in the end, I simply have to return to the fact that I trust God and do not understand all of His ways.

Another answer I somewhat liked was this one.  What I liked was that she talked about polygamy on a personal level, about her own family.  But again, it’s no justification for it (can there be?):

My great, great, great grandmother was a polygamist. She immigrated as a late teenager and would have had little opportunity to find a righteous and good husband had she not married my great, great, great grandfather as his third wife. She raised 6 children mostly on her own, since her husband died before their last child was born. The legacy she left continues to inspire me to be stronger and better. I believe she was a polygamist wife for the benefit of her posterity.

There are some other good statements as well, but I wanted to highlight a few that seem problematic for various reasons:

The Prophets have said “to raise up a righteous generation unto the Lord.” The righteous women in the Church outnumber the righteous men. That is another one of those male-female inequalities. This was especially true in the early days of the Church. Plural Marriage permitted every righteous women to be the wife of a righteous man and then to raise up a righteous family. The problem is not so severe nowadays.

The old romantic paternalist argument that women are more righteous than men.  It is demonstrably false that there was a shortage of marriageable men in the early days of the church.  Census numbers in Utah from 1850 to 1960 show more males than females in the state:

Utah population:
                       1850 total 11,380      male 6,046          female 5,334
                       1860 total 40,273      male 20,255        female 20,018
                       1870 total 86,786      male 44,121        female 42,665
                       1880 total 143,963    male 74,509        female 68,454
                       1890 total 210,779    male 111,975      female 98,804
                       1900 total 276,749    male 141,687      female 135,062

The caveat “righteous” is a bit of a two-edged sword; does that mean that Mormons of that era who did not practice plural marriage were unrighteous?  Because another defense of polygamy is that only a select few ever practiced it (see below).  Can’t have it both ways.  Here’s another comment I found troubling:

See the Book of Jacob in the Book of Mormon where the then current Prophet banned the practice because of the unrighteousness of the people. Will the practice ever come back officially? Only the Lord knows, and he hasn’t confided in me.

This seems mixed up or is just worded strangely.  It is not doctrinal that polygamy is the higher law only given to us when we are righteous; that’s the law of consecration.  The admonishment in Jacob is they were being unrighteous by committing polygamy.  My other concern is that leaving the door open that polygamy is coming back (alarming enough to suggest in its own right) just sounds creepy coming from a man.  I don’t see this one winning any converts.  Moving on.

Let’s look at some facts: in the 19th century, about three quarters of the world’s population lived in countries or societies where polygamy was sanctioned or even encouraged. In non-polygamous societies, like Europe, having a “mistress” was common and acceptable by society. I think it’s much more honorable to be legally and lawfully wedded to two wives, than to have one wife and a “mistress”.

It’s true that there are many societies that have allowed polygamy (encouraged might be a stretch), but do we really want to draw this parallel?  Many of these are the same countries that also allow stoning of women or wife burning.  I’m also not sure I would call all of Europe a “society” as if it’s all one country (apparently a society of adulterers – are we not also looking for European investigators to visit this site?  We just called them immoral here). And he just inadvertently classed polygamy in the same boat as keeping a mistress, as if both are simply inevitable, so you might as well make it legally binding.

In the early days of the Church, there were more women than men. In the harsh frontier times, survival for single women was difficult.

Again with this old chestnut that has been disproven.  There were not significantly more women than men (see above).  Yet I grant that frontier life was tough due to lack of fast food chains and toilet paper.

It’s my understanding that scarecely 3 percent of Church members practiced polygamy.

The 3% estimate is disproven.  More accurate estimates indicate 20-30%.  And the other issue is that it contradicts the notion that only the righteous practiced it (so between 70 and 97% of all church members were unrighteous?)

However, when the representative who speaks for God a prophet says that God wants you to do something, you do it. That is what happened back in the day. God told Joseph Smith that He wanted them to practice plural marriage and so they did.

This one sounds rather cultish, like saying “Shaddup and do whatcher told.”  I am quite sure most investigators would want more clarification on how God’s will is understood clearly and how you know when you should listen to this prophet and when not (since investigators don’t blindly follow leaders of a church they haven’t joined).  This is not a very useful answer to those outside the church, the target audience.

God has commanded humans to practice polygamy in many different instances throughout history. Readers of the Bible will remember that Abraham and Jacob Israel were affiliated with this practice. Even the great King David had multiple wives.

IIRC, it was the infertile wives (Sariah, Rachel and Leah) and conniving fathers-in-law (Laban) who were behind polygamy in the OT.  There is no scriptural account in the OT of God commanding polygamy.  These were people who wanted more children and didn’t want to wait for them.  Also, David and Solomon are not examples of God-sanctioned polygamy.  Whoever wrote that answer should read the Book of Mormon:  “for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son. Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord.” —Jacob 2:23-24

It was from God’s order out of necessity to take care of many women who were widowed with children and those who were alone.

Again with this old chestnut. I’m telling you, this is one of those very convincing very appealing explanations that we would love to find out is true, but unfortunately, it isn’t upheld by actual data.

OK, the point is not to pick these things apart.  I’m sure we’ve all heard more or less the same types of answers our whole lives in Sunday School, whether they are accurate or not.  And it takes a lot of guts to get on line and say these things with your picture plastered there, so I applaud the courage.  There are MTC volunteers who are reviewing for content and accuracy, so I suppose it is consistent with whatever average missionaries believe is accurate.  Since this is an external-facing campaign, that approach makes sense.  Feedback on doctrinal inaccuracies in the profiles can be submitted to bairdct@mtc.byu.edu.

I gave this some thought, wondering how would I answer such a difficult question for an audience of mainly investigators.  Here are the things that I could say in good conscience that might pass muster:

• I don’t know why.  (I really just have to bite my tongue on this and stop there because I am personally open to the idea that polygamy was not inspired, although that doesn’t bother me in the slightest since I view church leaders as fallible, which is also doctrinally sound.)
• Personally, I find it hard to imagine life under such an arrangement and am glad it is not something that is directly relevant to my own church experience today.
• I am hesitant to judge the actions of others who acted in faith in different times under circumstances that are so different from my own.  Many of those individuals made great personal sacrifices.

So, your turn.  How would you answer this question?  Do you have a mormon.org profile?  Which answers do you like the best and why?  How should the church address mistaken assumptions about things like this?  Discuss.

I’ve observed 4 general categories of struggles that people have in the church (possibly in any church, and there are likely parallels in any type of organization):

1. Cultural. They dislike aspects of Mormon culture, may feel they don’t fit in, or may simply not want to fit in (“I’m a loner, Dotty.  A rebel.”).
   • Examples:  Church activities, social norms, opinions people express, how people dress, unwritten rules of behavior, church standards.
2. Historical. They find aspects of our Mormon history unsavory (even faith-shaking) and white-washed or misrepresented (and sometimes have been unpleasantly surprised due to only having known the uplifting “correlated” version).
   • Examples:  Polygamy, BOM origins, aspects of church leaders’ lives, doctrinal changes, restrictions on priesthood, temple origins, events from church history.
3. Doctrinal. They disagree with certain doctrines of the church or the interpretations of those doctrines they’ve encountered.  While there may be some overlap between historical events that relate to truth claims, it is possible to view these items separately.
   • Examples:  Mormon view of the atonement, Godhood, marriage and sealing, priesthood authority, ordinances, historical claims that are related to truth claims may also fit here, plan of salvation, the role of prophets, Temple Recommend questions related to belief, interpretation of scripture.
4. Personal. They have had a personal issue that has harmed them and caused dissonance with the church.
   • Examples:  marital issue, abuse, interpersonal conflict, depression

It seems that a person could have issues in more than one of these areas, or may find that they are less impacted by a disconnect in one or more of these areas.  For example, one may find historical facts like Mountain Meadows Massacre troubling, but feel that they are personally less important because of no direct personal connection to the historical church.  If an area is of high importance and is also an area of strong concern, that’s when people leave if they can’t resolve their concern satisfactorily.

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It seems to me that for people who care very deeply about a specific area (culture, doctrine, history, or personal experiences), they are more prone to disaffection for that issue if something goes wrong in that area.  Likewise, if it’s extremely important to them and it’s going well, that can strongly solidify their commitment to the church.  What are your observations?  And which of these areas are most important to you?  Have they caused you any cognitive dissonance?  Discuss.

Here’s the talk in a nutshell:

1. Why we need the spirit.
   • “Throughout the ages, many have obtained guidance helpful to resolve challenges in their lives by following the example of respected individuals who resolved similar problems. Today, world conditions change so rapidly that such a course of action is often not available to us.”  I think E. Scott just admitted that old folks haven’t necessarily “been there, done that.”  It’s kind of a radical thing for an octogenarian to say.  Frankly, I’m not sure all 80-somethings would admit that.  Kudos, E. Scott!
   • “Personally, I rejoice in that reality because it creates a condition where we, of necessity, are more dependent upon the Spirit to guide us through the vicissitudes of life. Therefore, we are led to seek personal inspiration in life’s important decisions.”  So, he’s saying we shouldn’t do things just because of tradition or what others who are older tell us to do, but we should find out for ourselves the best course.  Personal accountability–one, blind obedience to authority–zero!
   • “Spirituality yields two fruits. The first is inspiration to know what to do. The second is power, or the capacity to do it. These two capacities come together.”  Features & benefits of the Spirit.
2. How to get the Spirit.
   • “I am convinced that there is no simple formula or technique that would immediately allow you to master the ability to be guided by the voice of the Spirit.”  Decrying a formulaic approach to spirituality.  Down with checklists!  Spirituality is personal and subjective.
   • “Our Father expects you to learn how to obtain that divine help by exercising faith in Him and His Holy Son, Jesus Christ. Were you to receive inspired guidance just for the asking, you would become weak and ever more dependent on Them. They know that essential personal growth will come as you struggle to learn how to be led by the Spirit.”  I love the notion that we are supposed to live up to our potential, not just let others make decisions for us.
   • “Your confidence in the direction you receive from the Holy Ghost will also become stronger. I witness that as you gain experience and success in being guided by the Spirit, your confidence in the impressions you feel can become more certain than your dependence on what you see or hear.”  There’s a little bit of implied confirmation bias here, but by the same token, it’s how we develop decision-making ability and intuition:  through experience.  We learn what works and what doesn’t.
   • E. Scott shares 2 contrasting teacher styles and how each resulted in inspiration for him.  While the contrasting examples seem designed to reinforce the correlation committee’s guidelines (the first teacher stuck to the materials and the second one used archane and unusual references), both lessons resulted in personal spiritual guidance for E. Scott.  Of the second experience, E. Scott shared:  “I received such an outpouring of impressions that were so personal that I felt it was not appropriate to record them in the midst of a Sunday School class. I sought a more private location, where I continued to write the feelings that flooded into my mind and heart as faithfully as possible.”  I’m pretty sure he just admitted to ditching Sunday School to write in his journal.
   • “Impressions of the Spirit can come in response to urgent prayer or unsolicited when needed.”  I think it’s hard to chalk it up to the Spirit when it could be confirmation bias – unsolicited one-off ideas are more easily attributable to the Spirit, IMO.
   • “However, the Lord will not force you to learn. You must exercise your agency to authorize the Spirit to teach you. As you make this a practice in your life, you will be more perceptive to the feelings that come with spiritual guidance. Then, when that guidance comes, sometimes when you least expect it, you will recognize it more easily.”  Part of this does strike me as confirmation bias; however, I have experienced an unexpected idea to do something that if I followed it worked out, and sometime I have not and it didn’t work out.  To me, that’s the spirit.
3.  What prevents us from getting the Spirit.
   • “The inspiring influence of the Holy Spirit can be overcome or masked by strong emotions, such as anger, hate, passion, fear, or pride. When such influences are present, it is like trying to savor the delicate flavor of a grape while eating a jalapeño pepper. Both flavors are present, but one completely overpowers the other. In like manner, strong emotions overcome the delicate promptings of the Holy Spirit.”  I like the analogy.  The idea sounds true enough.
   • “Sin is spiritually corrosive. Unrestrained it becomes all-consuming. It is overcome by repentance and righteousness.  Satan is extremely good at blocking spiritual communication by inducing individuals, through temptation, to violate the laws upon which spiritual communication is founded.”  So, sin is bad then . . . right?
   • “With some, he is able to convince them that they are not able to receive such guidance from the Lord.”  I think this is a real issue for people.  I think many have these high-falutin notions of what constitutes “the Spirit” and anything short of meeting JC on the road to Damascus isn’t cutting it.  I think that’s a misunderstanding.  If you re-read E. Scott’s talk and substitute the word “instinct” or “inspiration” for “the Spirit,” you can get a real sense for how commonplace these experiences are.
   • “Satan has become a master at using the addictive power of pornography to limit individual capacity to be led by the Spirit.”  Let’s not make this a porn post, shall we?  But the rest of the talk is basically about how porn makes it impossible to recognize the Spirit.  Personally, I’m no fan of porn, and I think the point is valid.  Porn’s blocking of spiritual guidance is not the worst of its influence in society.  On the subject, E. Scott waxes eloquent.  Anyway, ’nuff said on porn.  Moving on.  Nothing to see here.

Here are some points I think worth discussing from the talk:

1. Does this jive with your experience feeling the Spirit or inspiration or whatever you kids are calling it these days?
2. Do you like the idea that you can be equally inspired in a lesson regardless the instructor?  I found these examples fascinating; although ostensibly the “not as good” instructor was “out of policy,” it had no adverse impact on the spiritual guidance received.  Doesn’t that mean that maybe we can quit wringing our hands over this?  Does that make church a BYOS (Bring Your Own Spirit) institution?  I say yes.
3. Have you ever felt the Spirit when in the throes of strong emotion?  If so, let’s have the deets!
4. Overall, did you like the talk or not?  I am of the opinion that not all talks are for all people.  This one was one I happened to like, but that doesn’t mean everyone should.

Discuss.

• I like the idea of Jesus as a lawyer for humanity.  Having a defense attorney, someone totally in your court who will fight for your cause is enormously appealing to me.
• I like the symbolism of the atonement:  olive press (Gethsemane), the name “at one” ment, the mingling of the divine and the human.
• I like the idea of Bodhisattva, a voluntary sacrifice for others.  But I like it more as one who might sacrifice than as one who would be the recipient of the sacrifice.  Similarly, I’m somewhat uncomfortable receiving gifts.  Although I’m not that comfortable giving them either.  So there you go.

What I have generally not loved about the concept of “atonement”:

• that it creates a religion of losers, appealing to the down-and-outers. Dennis Miller once observed that the prison inmates always seem to find Jesus when no one else down here will talk to them anymore.
• that it is a contrasting idea to theosis (the seeds of divinity within man), a concept which I find inherently more appealing. I’d rather focus on strengths & potential than weakness and shortcomings.  I’m just a cock-eyed optimist!  I do find sadness somewhat off-putting.
• the idea of justice and mercy that is represented feels man-made and not like something that God would be bound to follow. I don’t like the legalistic metaphors often used to explain the atonement.

Here are a few of the ways the atonement has been viewed over the centuries, each with a unique insight:

• Ransom Theory.  In this metaphor from the 4^th century, Jesus liberates mankind from slavery to Satan and thus death by giving his own life as a ransom. Victory over Satan consists of swapping the life of the perfect (Jesus), for the lives of the imperfect (mankind).  A variation of this view is known as the “Christus Victor” theory, in which Jesus defeats Satan in a spiritual battle and frees the enslaved humans from their captor.  (like an action movie with hostages being rescued).  This one sounds kind of cool in a Die Hard sort of way, but it also doesn’t ring quite true for me.  A variation of this I heard on my mission was someone buying a cage full of dirty, diseased birds with lousy attitudes.  Not my favorite perspective on humanity.
• Penal Substitution.  Another metaphor, from the 11^th century, is that man is in debt to a sovereign God who has the power to forgive debt, but also has to uphold the laws. In this metaphor, only a perfect sacrifice could satisfy the demands of the transgressed laws, and Jesus, being both God and man, was this perfect sacrifice.  A slight variation of this is the Protestant “penal substitution theory,” which sees sin as the breaking of God’s moral law, and Jesus takes the punishment in the sinner’s stead.  This is probably the most common metaphor used for the atonement, but it is very legalistic and leaves me cold.  I think we let the metaphor become the thing it symbolizes in this one.  I suspect the atonement is not entirely encompassed by this view.
• Moral Influence.  A third metaphor from the 11^th century, and speaks to the power of the image of a suffering Christ who sacrifices himself out of love for man, and mankind, moved by the extent of God’s love is transformed and healed by the power of the Holy Spirit.  I appreciated this one because I think we LDS tend to look at the crucifixion images in Catholic churches as ghoulish and morbid, but this metaphor explains their appeal to millions of worshippers in a whole new light for me.
• Theosis Metaphor.  Eastern Orthodoxy views the atonement as not a legal release, but a transformation of the human nature itself in the Son taking on human nature. The Orthodox emphasis is that Christ died to change people so that they may become more like God.  This is one I find very appealing, although it’s not one I ever recall hearing at church.  It lines up nicely with our idea that we are sons & heirs of God, with the seeds of godhood within us.

As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we expand on these metaphors by recognizing and emphasizing some additional components to the atonement:

• Christ’s suffering in Gethsemane. Modern day revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants adds emphasis to the role of Gethsemane in the atonement process: “…how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, yea, how hard to bear you know not…. Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit…”  I like the focus in LDS theology on the sacrifice being deliberate on Jesus’ part, that he chose to do this of his own free will despite how hard it was.  I like the emphasis on free choice, not so much on the difficulty which feels like a major guilt trip (I suppose because it IS).
  • The name Gethsemane literally means oil press.  In Gethsemane, Jesus as the Son of God is pressed as the olives were.  Oil was and is used for all sorts of purposes: to perform priesthood ordinances, to anoint the body, and to heal the sick and restore them to health.  Metaphorically, Jesus is the ultimate healing and anointing oil.
  • In a talk on the Symbols of the Atonement in 1991, E. Russell Nelson said:  “Olive trees are special in the Holy Land. The olive branch is universally regarded as a symbol of peace. This tree provides food, light, heat, lumber, ointments, and medicine. It is now, as it was then, crucial to life in Israel. It is not a deciduous tree, but ever bearing—always green. Even if the tree is chopped down, life will spring from its roots, suggesting everlasting life.  Jesus came to the base of the Mount of Olives to affect the first component of the Atonement. This He did at the Garden of Gethsemane. The word Gethsemane comes from two Hebrew roots: gath, meaning “press,” and shemen, meaning “oil,” especially that of the olive.  There olives had been pressed under the weight of great stone wheels to squeeze precious oil from them. So the Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane was literally pressed under the weight of the sins of the world. He sweat great drops of blood—his life’s “oil”—which issued from every pore.  Jesus was accorded titles of unique significance. One was the Messiah, which in Hebrew means “anointed.” The other was the Christ, which in the Greek language means “anointed” as well. In our day, as it was in His day, the ordinance of administration to the sick includes anointing with the consecrated oil of the olive. So the next time you witness consecrated oil being anointed on the head of one to be blessed, and these sacred words are said, “I anoint you with this consecrated oil,” remember what that original consecration cost. Remember what it meant to all who had ever lived and who ever would yet live. Remember the redemptive power of healing, soothing, and ministering to those in need. Remember, just as the body of the olive, which was pressed for the oil that gave light, so the Savior was pressed. From every pore oozed the life blood of our Redeemer. And when sore trials come upon you, remember Gethsemane.”
• Empathetic purpose. Christ did not only suffer for the sins of all men, but also to experience their physical pains, illnesses, anguish from addictions, emotional turmoil and depression, “that His bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:12; compare Isaiah 53:4).  This empathy allows Jesus to be a more effective advocate and personal friend to us.  This sounds remarkable similar to the one about the image of the suffering Christ creating empathy in humanity (the reverse of this).  But I think when you put them both together, it adds some interest to the perspective.
• The relationship between justice, mercy, agency, and God’s unconditional love. We focus on the need for free agency.  Just as Jesus had the ability to choose to lay down his life, if we are truly penitent we will voluntarily come unto him to receive his grace.  We do this through the process of repentance.  I do find this idea useful – the focus on our personal choice.

I liked the idea that there are many different ways to interpret the atonement, and some of these are more appealing to me than others. How about you?  Were any of these helpful?  How do you feel about the atonement?  Discuss.

Determinism

Determinism states that every event is causally determined by previous events. This further implies that if we knew all the events (causes) we could actually predict exactly what a particular agent would do. I think this is where most people have heartache with determinism (i.e. they don’t like to feel controlled, even if only by nature itself). However, I don’t think most people would deny that there is indeed an element of determinism in our behavior. There are enough commonalities between most people that we can quite accurately predict how a person will act in a particular situation (within limitations of course).

Libertarianism

On the other hand, Libertarianism states that agents have free will. Libertarians (again not the political philosophy) assert that free will is logically incompatible with determinism, making the two mutually exclusive. The defining factor for libertarians is that an individual is able to take more than one possible course of action in any given scenario.

Artificial Intelligence and Humans

More recently, as our technology advances, debates over the capability and morality ofartificial intelligence (AI) have become more frequent. We see it in movies, books, and even in scientific journals. The issue explored in movies like iRobot is that AI eventually becomes so advanced it develops free will on its own. This seems to imply superiority of free will over determinism (i.e. the “robot” evolved to a higher state of intelligence making in on par with humans). And indeed, while I have met some who were convinced determinists, most people I know are at least compatibilists (those who assert free will and determinism are not logically incompatible and hence accept both positions), if not libertarians.

Rather than spur a fruitless debate over whether or not humans are deterministic or have free will, I want to discuss why one would be, or is, better than the other? Why, in Mormonism (and in humanity generally it seems to me) do we assume that free will is better than being deterministic? If we are deterministic beings, are we less interesting, or somehow not as good as we would be if we had free will? Is there some benefit that a free will agent has over a deterministic one?

An Aerospace Example

Consider the following example. In my research lab we are interested in autonomous uninhabited aircraft. Though we (as a society) have had autonomous airplanes for a while now, they’re not truly autonomous. There is always a human somewhere in the loop, whether at a computer screen, watching the aircraft, etc. The question is, could we design a fully autonomous (i.e. from launch to landing, including the proper handling of all unanticipated problems) aircraft that would perform as well (or better) than an expert pilot?

Before answering too quickly, consider:

• The laws of physics are well known and generally not subject to negotiation.
• Assume I can build a computer as intelligent as a human.
• Assume the computer can sense, or has access to ALL the information that a human pilot would.

If you believe the answer is no, why? Is there something intrinsically better about free will that makes such an agent better at flying an airplane than a deterministic one? Is having free will a more “enlightened” state than being deterministic? Why?

If you believe the answer is yes, do you also believe that humans are deterministic? Is it only a matter of time before we discover ALL the causal influences that impact human behavior and will thus have the ability to perfectly predict it?

Now, suppose I could actually demonstrate such an autonomous aircraft to you in an arbitrarily large number of flights. Would you concede there is nothing inherently better about free will, or would you hold out that there is always one untested case in which the expert pilot would do better?

How do your beliefs influence your answer?

So, re-reading the Book of Mormon stayed on the to-do list for a while. But then the press became more persistent and insistent: “No, you REALLY need to re-read the Book of Mormon,” and the very persistence began to get through my blocks of rationalization. So I kept moving it up the to-do-list until it was high among the emergencies and the recurring tasks, and I began to read.

I had not gone cover-to-cover since I was in elementary school. I still have my first Book of Mormon given me as a baptism gift, and almost every verse in it is underlined: I didn’t know what went with what back then, and figured just about everything must be terribly important and interrelated. So I absorbed the story for a story important in my religion, and soaked up any theology unconsciously in the process. In the decades since, I used the Book of Mormon many times in preparing sermons; you preach a lot when you live in a denomination of mostly small congregations where priesthood is not the province of all worthy males. I taught many individual topics in classes or missionary efforts. I even had a few verbal jousts on my front steps with LDS missionaries before I learned that was fratricide that wasted everyone’s time. But the focus on the immediacy of my assigned tasks didn’t convey the global oversight of that first boyhood reading. In the later readings, I had the theology, both from the Book itself as well as from a deeper understanding of the other scriptural sources of Christian theology, but had lost track of the story as story.

From this perspective, as I began to read I began to understand overarching themes I’d missed before because they hadn’t been “on task”. Among them, I began in particular to see the books of 1^st Nephi through the Words of Mormon as sort of an “old” Old Testament concerned with the overwhelming question of the first generations of Nephites: “Is there still a place for us with God?”

After all, in 600 BC, Judea was the “church”. You didn’t think of personal salvation outside of the structure of your Jewish tribal identity, and keeping the covenant kept your identity guaranteed by the only true God. I mean, look what had happened to the Northern Kingdom. Just gone! Conceptually to the Jews then, it didn’t matter whether individuals in the 10 tribes had been obedient or disobedient, just or unjust. The Kingdom of Israel had been judged unworthy of God’s continued protection as a whole kingdom. The fate of the people as individuals simply was not a question that had any place in the mental landscape. What did God care about a just Assyrian or Egyptian compared to a Jew?

What does it do to your mental landscape, then, when God starts telling you that you are to leave your tribe, and you aren’t ever coming back? You are being further told that the tribe itself is about to be conquered and won’t be there if you do change your mind. You are amputating your culture, and you have little to replace it with, physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. There is beyond the wilderness and the sea a “land of promise” to fill the physical hole, if you cling to your faith, but what replaces everything else?

Lehi and Nephi had their visions. They went, but you can see their frustration and anger at the Jews in their writings over the sheer stupidity of the disobedience of the covenant that was bringing the Babylonian disaster upon them. Laman and Lemuel turned their anger toward their father instead. Everybody was supposedly committed to going into the wilderness, but they all kept forgetting things (like wives) and finding reasons to have to go back to Jerusalem to get them. They seem to have been in shock. Stay! Go! Make up your mind!

And so the scriptures about the ultimate fate of Israel/Judea, as discussed by Isaiah or Zenos, become dominant concerns in this Book of Mormon “old” Old Testament. It is not an abstract theological debate to the Nephites; much of their personal focus and records are devoted to testifying that God has promised a reconnection of their seed (and even the seed of their rebellious Lamanite brethren) to the Israelites in a future time. Acceptance of Christ is seen as the means of this reconnection as well as the means of personal salvation. In fact, personal salvation is the newer, more revelatory concept which is increasingly emphasized as the story moves toward its historical climax. Even at the time of Christ’s appearance, this societal reconnection is on the minds of the people, and Christ takes time to reemphasize it along with his teachings about personal salvation. Indeed, “convincing of the Jew” of Christ’s divinity is as important as “convincing of the Gentiles”; the land of promise is not just a promise for the Nephites, but a means of keeping a promise by God for everyone else.

Many of those who come to this site feel either their “sense of the Spirit” or the “sense of their intellect” calling them into the “wilderness”. Whether it is because the church is not found to be as-advertised, because it changes too slowly, or because it changes too much, the shock and the anger are real and pretty much the same for all. They often no longer can support parts of the culture, but have nothing clear in their sights to replace it. They leave, miss something they left behind, go back, and try again to follow one direction or the other. Some fraction of them experience rejection by the community because they are perceived to be rejecting the norms of the community first. And sometimes they don’t know whether to be angry at others or ashamed of themselves.

They are reenacting this great dilemma of the early Nephites. How are they and their families to be connected to the purposes of God, when they have previously experienced their “tribe” as the only authorized means of connection? Yet, if the call is genuine, it will keep persisting and growing more insistent. There will be a land of promise for those who follow that call, and if the Nephite example holds, it will not just be a land of promise for those “wandering Mormons”. It will be a land of promise of those who come after them, and, in the long run, a blessing for the tribe they left behind as well. Experiencing being called into the wilderness isn’t a strange thing in Mormon history; it’s sort of what makes you one of the tribe in the first place.

The following statement was made by the LDS Church last Wednesday in conjunction with the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner by firing squad in Utah.  I see this as a misunderstanding or a misrepresentation of what was taught in the past regarding the doctrine.

Mormon Church Statement on Blood Atonement

In the mid-19th century, when rhetorical, emotional oratory was common, some church members and leaders used strong language that included notions of people making restitution for their sins by giving up their own lives.  However, so-called “blood atonement,” by which individuals would be required to shed their own blood to pay for their sins, is not a doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in and teach the infinite and all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ, which makes forgiveness of sin and salvation possible for all people.

Some church members and leaders used strong language

This statement glosses over the fact that it was the prophet and second president of the Church Brigham Young who initiated and publicly taught this doctrine numerous times, followed by later prophets and General Authorities in official discourse:

“There are sins that men commit for which they cannot receive forgiveness in this world, or in that which is to come, and if they had their eyes open to see their true condition, they would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins; and the smoking incense would atone for their sins, whereas, if such is not the case, they will stick to them and remain upon them in the spirit world.

“I know, when you hear my brethren telling about cutting people off from the earth, that you consider it is strong doctrine; but it is to save them, not to destroy them….

“And further more, I know that there are transgressors, who, if they knew themselves, and the only condition upon which they can obtain forgiveness, would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering to appease the wrath that is kindled against them, and that the law might have its course. I will say further;

“I have had men come to me and offer their lives to atone for their sins.

“It is true that the blood of the Son of God was shed for sins through the fall and those committed by men, yet men can commit sins which it can never remit…. There are sins that can be atoned for by an offering upon an altar, as in ancient days; and there are sins that the blood of a lamb, or a calf, or of turtle dove, cannot remit, but they must be atoned for by the blood of the man.” (Sermon by Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 4, pages 53-54); also published in the Mormon Church’s Deseret News, 1856, page 235)

so-called “blood atonement,” by which individuals would be required to shed their own blood to pay for their sins, is not a doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Officially, the doctrine of Blood Atonement was to be practiced voluntarily.  However, Michael Quinn has shown evidence that this practice was carried out among church members and leaders and sanctioned by Brigham Young in the early days of Utah. (The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, Vol. 2, pp. 241-261)

An appeal to Latter-day scriptures on the application of blood atonement to the sin of murder results in confusion. Alma 24 :10 states that murderers can receive forgiveness by repentance, while D&C 42:18 teaches that murder is unpardonable.  Attempting to doctrinally resolve this seeming conflict in a Deseret News article on July 4, 1883, Apostle Charles W. Penrose taught that in some cases such as murder done in anger or provocation, murder might be forgiven, but only after the guilty party atones for the murder by the shedding of blood. (Charles W. Penrose (July 4, 1883), “An Unpardonable Offense,” Deseret News 32 (24): 376.)  President Joseph Fielding Smith agreed, while making it clear that this should be completely voluntary on the part of the sinner:

Through the atonement of Christ all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel…Man may commit certain grievous sins — according to his light and knowledge — that will place him beyond the reach of the atoning blood of Christ. If then he would be saved he must make sacrifice of his own life to atone — so far as the power lies — for that sin, for the blood of Christ alone under certain circumstances will not avail…But that the Church practices “Blood Atonement” on apostates or any others, which is preached by ministers of the ‘Reorganization’ is a damnable falsehood for which the accusers must answer. (Joseph Fielding Smith (1954), Bruce R. McConkie, ed., Doctrines of Salvation, 1, Salt Lake City, Utah:Bookcraft.)

According to both Penrose and Joseph Fielding Smith, the doctrine of blood atonement was the reason the founders of Utah incorporated in the laws of the Territory provisions for capital punishment, giving murderers a choice to be shot by firing squad as a “willing expiation” for their sin.

Blood atonement was understood to be a doctrine of the Church, and influenced policy-making and practice among nineteenth-century Mormons.  I believe that the majority of modern members will welcome a change in this policy.  But to present this change as anything but a departure from that which was taught by early Church leaders as doctrine is disingenuous.

We believe in and teach the infinite and all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ, which makes forgiveness of sin and salvation possible for all people.

Finally we come to  the connection this post has to this week’s Sunday School lesson.  It is a common misperception that the Church teaches “the infinite and all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ.”  But in reality, our manuals and even our LDS edition of the scriptures teach that there are sins for which complete repentance through Christ’s atonement is not possible.  The murder of Uriah by King David is one of these.  Though David spent the rest of his life and hundreds of Biblical passages repenting of this sin, D&C 132:39 states:

The Bible Dictionary explains:

[David] was guilty of grave crimes; but unlike Saul, he was capable of true contrition and was therefore able to find forgiveness, except in the murder of Uriah. As a consequence David is still unforgiven, but he received a promise that the Lord would not leave his soul in hell. He will be resurrected at the end of the Millennium. Because of his transgressions, he has fallen from his exaltation.

Even the Sunday School manual concurs, backing up the position with a quote by Marion G. Romney:

Note that adultery is a serious sin, but David forfeited his exaltation because the Lord held him accountable for the murder of Uriah.

President Marion G. Romney said: “David, … though highly favored of the Lord (he was, in fact, referred to as a man after God’s own heart), yielded to temptation. His unchastity led to murder, and as a consequence, he lost his families and his exaltation” (in Conference Report, Apr. 1979, 60; or Ensign, May 1979, 42).

The LDS stance that King David was unable to be completely forgiven despite his obvious and sincere repentance has greatly bothered me.  Most other Christian churches teach that the atonement was active in David’s case, wholly cleansing him from all of his sins.  But the Mormon church does not.  That the fallen condition of David is so pervasively taught in LDS scripture, General Authority addresses, and curriculum materials lends credence to the doctrine of blood atonement as taught in the past.  In such cases, the Savior’s sacrifice is insufficient to cleanse transgressors from certain sins such as murder.  I witnessed one of the ramifications in Church policy when an investigator friend of mine in college was denied baptism into the Church because she had previously had an abortion.

I am curious to know the opinion of our readers on this subject.  First, do you feel the recent official statement above reflects an honest articulation of the teachings of the Church on Blood Atonement? Next, do you think that David lost his exaltation, and if so, does this place limits on the effects of Christ’s Atonement?

Mormonism today runs a balancing act between its roots of free speculation and the need to create a cohesive religious and cultural organization.  The social bond of a church is based at some vital level on common belief and understanding among people practicing their religion.  Lacking firm creeds, we conduct this balancing act on a personal level.  Problems arise when we attempt to impose our speculation on others.  Conflict occurs when we need others to validate our individual interpretations.  There is a line between personal belief and the beliefs that all Mormons must share in common.  But where is it?

There has to be official Mormon doctrine.  There has to be something common that brings people together in the religion.  Don Ashton recently published a paper on this topic at http://www.staylds.com.  It is called “What is Official Church Doctrine?”  You can find it in the “Additional Support Resources” section of the website: http://www.staylds.com/?page_id=29

Don argues that the official and binding core of ideas, the cannon of doctrine that is fixed, is actually limited and abstract.  That abstract characteristic allows following generations to interpret and develop the core to suit the needs of their contemporary environment.  The same can be done by individuals to meet personal needs in their eternal journey of progress towards divine enlightenment.

Don summarizes this nicely in his opening section:

The 14 million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are spread across 160 countries on 6 continents. Yet there is a remarkable consistency in beliefs, attitudes, teachings and practices among Mormons everywhere. A traveler visiting congregations throughout the world will find familiar curricula materials, beliefs, and attitudes on most every religious topic.

Yet Mormonism is not dogmatic. There is no creed or statement of core beliefs which adherents are obliged to accept. Both members and leaders alike hold varying opinions ranging from whether watching TV on Sunday is sinful, to whether every statement by a General Authority must be explicitly and unconditionally obeyed.

Such questions may be insignificant or disquieting. If a person is struggling with faith issues, it may become important to distinguish between Official Doctrine and less authoritative council. A clear understanding of Official Doctrine can reduce controversy, minimize anxiety and perhaps open up new options for resolving faith issues. This essay attempts to evaluate the authoritativeness of council ranging from canonized scripture to conventional wisdom.

The practical implications of this speak to a common encounter, which is a feeling of having to believe or practice things sometimes that do not make sense to us.  The first question should then be whether the problem stems from an unbending core of fundamental doctrine; or instead, is it actually our own incorrect expectations and assumptions, someone else’s personal speculation, or something that we can freely explore.

Many ideas and practices touted as “official” are not.  They are someone’s personal speculation and interpretation of the core doctrine.  That means we are free to agree or disagree.  It does not mean that person is wrong in their religious journey.  What they do and believe may be valuable to them.  But we should feel justified and even compelled to use our free agency and God-given intelligence to build what works for us.  That is the soul inherited from our Church founding, and it is a theme to be nurtured today.  We should expect our understanding to evolve over the course of our life.  We should also expect the larger and broader concept of Restoration in the Church to continue its course of evolution from the past to today, and on into the future.

What do you think?  Discuss.

I really enjoyed studying about ritual – the ways that we use ceremony to create value and meaning – we just experienced one with our sacrament.

And I enjoyed learning about “memorates” – personal experience stories that people tell about their own encounters with the supernatural. In the church, we often call these faith-promoting stories, and that’s the way that folklorists look at them too – that these stories function to justify and validate the beliefs of the people who tell them. They create certainty in the face of uncertainty, and whether the stories themselves are true or not, this is a very valuable thing.

It was an interesting time, and I went through many shifts and changes as I looked more closely at what I believed, why I believed it, and how it fit with the beliefs of other people all over the world. It was a pretty humbling experience, to say the least. And as a result, I have developed this constant, nagging, unshakeable, internal tug-of-war between the skeptic and the believer. It is very much like the lyrics to a song:

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
clinical, intellectual, cynical.

There are times when all the world’s asleep,
the questions run too deep
for such a simple man.
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
but please tell me who I am.

That about sums up my graduate experience. It was kind of like worlds colliding. I had become skeptical, cynical, but I still had to exist in a believing world. What was I to do?

One thing I did was turn to the scriptures and to the counsel from general authorities and modern day prophets:
Mormon 9:27 - “Doubt not, but be believing.”  Thanks, but too late.
Bruce R. McConkie – “Doubt is an inclination to disbelieve the truths of salvation… it is a state of uncertainty… faith and belief are of God; doubt and skepticism are of the devil.”  Really? Yikes!
President Monson – “Remember that faith and doubt cannot exist in the same mind at the same time, for one will dispel the other. Should doubt knock at your doorway, just say to those skeptical, disturbing, rebellious thoughts: ‘I propose to stay with my faith, with the faith of my people. I know that happiness and contentment are there, and I forbid you, agnostic, doubting thoughts, to destroy the house of my faith. I acknowledge that I do not understand the processes of creation, but I accept the fact of it. I grant that I cannot explain the miracles of the Bible, and I do not attempt to do so, but I accept God’s word. I wasn’t with Joseph, but I believe him. My faith did not come to me through science, and I will not permit so-called science to destroy it’.”

With these quotes, I think it is pretty clear where I ought to be when it comes to doubt and faith. But if I’m being honest, I fall far short of these ideals. I just can’t accept the premise that faith and doubt cannot co-exist in the same mind. They have to. Because they both exist in mine. And I don’t know any other way to be.

I do want to endorse President Monson’s counsel, however, that if you can dismiss doubt when it knocks on your door, from my experience, you will be much more comfortable and far less troubled — so by all means, if you can do it, do it.

But if you’re like me – if you can’t just dismiss your doubts – there must still be a way to keep those doubts from destroying the house of faith. Right? Please? Because I can’t not doubt, but I still want to hold on to my faith. So what am I to do?

Well, the simple answer is that I have had to redefine my faith to make room for my doubts and to find a value in these doubts – so I want to share with you how I have done this.

MY TOP TEN

I want to walk you through my top ten personal beliefs about faith and doubt. Disclaimer – these are just my own imperfect opinions based on my own limited experience. I could be wrong. But this is how I have found personal peace and balance in my life amidst this constant tug-of-war between the skeptic and the believer. So I share these with you because they have helped me, but I also reserve the right to change my mind at any time – it’s happened before, it can happen again.

If I really wanted to be borderline irreverent I might say that these are the philosophies of Glenn, mingled with scripture – but I don’t, so I won’t.

So here are my top ten:

1. Faith – at its most basic level – is desire.

I think this is consistent with the scriptures. Especially Alma 32. This is where Alma is preaching to the poor among the Zoramites.

You may remember that the Zoramites were condemned for their incredible pride – they would stand up on their rameumptom and show forth false humility – praising themselves for being the elect chosen of God, and condemning everyone else around them for following foolish and corrupt traditions. They cast out the poor and were very exclusive in their membership.

So Alma went among the cast out poor and taught them an allegory about faith – that it starts with desire – and that desire can be nurtured and tested and grown into a firm conviction. He compares it to a seed that is planted in fertile soil and cultivated until it grows and bears fruit and you can taste the fruit to know that the seed was, in fact, a good seed.

So faith starts with desire, but it isn’t JUST desire – you have to act upon that desire.

One of my basic desires is to be fair to people and respectful of their beliefs. And this desire has had a great influence over the mental gymnastic that you are about to see, because I also desire to hold on to my faith in spite of all of my doubts.

2. There is really no such thing as “doubt”

I guess you could say that I doubt doubt.

“Doubt” is just a word. It’s a word that we use to describe someone else’s belief that is contrary to our belief. For example, I could say, “I believe it is going to rain today.” And you could say, “No, I doubt it.” That’s really the same thing as saying, “No, I don’t believe that it will rain today.”

My point here is that “doubt” isn’t really anything but another way of saying “I don’t believe.”

3. There is really no such thing as “don’t believe”

I’m playing a game of semantics again. When you say that you “don’t believe” that it will rain, what you really mean is that you “do believe” that it will not rain. It is still an active belief.

I believe it will rain – you believe it will not rain. Your belief vs. my belief. And we may both have valid reasons for believing what we are choosing to believe.

I believe it will rain because I trust the forecast – it’s been right more than it has been wrong, and I don’t mind carrying an umbrella.

You believe it won’t rain because, despite the forecast, you just looked outside and no Japanese person in sight is carrying an umbrella, and the Japanese are never wrong about this sort of thing. Plus, you don’t want to be the only one carrying an umbrella, cuz then you’d look stupid.

So the point here is to define belief as an active thing, despite whatever words we use – whether we call it doubt or say we “don’t believe” it is all really just belief.

4. Faith and Doubt are not opposites – they are equivalents

If both faith and doubt are active beliefs, then they are really the same thing, aren’t they? They are both beliefs, just pointed in different directions.

Someone may say that faith has action but doubt has no action, but I would challenge that.

Yes, the faithful person takes an umbrella even if they are uncertain whether it will rain or not, and that is a faithful act.

But even the doubter takes action by choosing to NOT carry an umbrella and still walking outside anyway. Both are beliefs and both inspire action. Maybe this is the secret key to unlock the mystery of believing “all things” that we have been admonished to do. And then again, maybe not.

5. Faith and Doubt can co-exist

President Monson said that doubt and faith cannot exist in the same mind at the same time – and maybe I am using this quote out of context – but don’t we all doubt some things while simultaneously having faith in others?

For example, I doubt the traditional meaning behind the James 2:20 scripture mastery scripture “faith without works is dead.” I was originally taught that this was James’ response to the atonement of Christ. That we are not saved by grace alone, but must also show forth works for our eternal salvation, for faith without works is dead.

But when I went back and read all of James chapter 2, I saw that James’ message wasn’t about the atonement. It was about our own exercise of faith. It is saying that you have to put your money where your mouth is. If someone comes to you seeking food, and you say “bless you, and hunger no more” but you don’t actually give them any food, then you aren’t actually going to save them.

So I doubt the way that I was originally taught this scripture, but I still have faith that the message is a good message and that it comes from a good source. And that is a balancing act between doubt and faith.

6. Faith without doubt is dead

That is the GOT – the Glenn Ostlund Translation of James 2:20. Faith is a hope and a desire, but it is not a perfect knowledge. So there must be uncertainty, some degree of questioning or doubt, otherwise faith would be knowledge. Uncertainty in and of itself is not a bad thing in my world. And when uncertainty or doubt spurs us to positive action, it can actually be a very good thing.

7. Uncertainty is a scary thing

Without a doubt, doubt will make you more unsure about what you used to be very sure about, and this can be a scary thing. But one lesson that I learned as a kid is that anytime the scriptures say “have faith” you could interchange the phrase for “fear not” and the meaning would stay the same. So even with all of the different conflicting messages all around us in the world every day – even with all of the valid and reasonable reasons to have doubt, if we nurture our faith, we do not need to fear doubt. Doubt does not have to destroy our faith – it can bolster and lift it and lead us to new light and knowledge.

8. Our church has been built upon doubt – or at least upon the positive interaction between doubt and faith.

The First Vision would not have happened unless Joseph had experienced some questions and doubts about what he was hearing in the different revival meetings. But he also had faith that the Lord would answer his prayer. A pretty successful one-two punch, if you ask me.

And throughout the history of the church, doctrines and policies have been added or removed or amended because people have debated and doubted and questioned and reached out in faith, and received further light and knowledge. So there is a lesson to be learned here, that doubt and faith can interact together towards a good end.

9. Repentance without doubt is dead

We are constantly encouraged to evaluate and examine how we are living our lives. We are encouraged to repent when we need to repent, and I think that doubt plays a role here.

I have always found illumination in the Japanese word for repentance – kuiaratameru. If I understand it right, it literally means to remorse and to change. What causes this remorse? What leads us to a realization that we are in error? We must at some point doubt our very selves – we must doubt that our actions have been good actions. So perhaps this is another area where doubt can have a positive influence in our lives.

10. Humility is the key

Whether as individuals or as a church, regardless of what we currently believe or how strong our convictions, further light and knowledge can always reveal new truths, and our beliefs can always change.

Shouldn’t that awareness then lead to greater humility on our parts? Isn’t humility the way we learn to show Christ-like empathy and compassion and forgiveness for others, even when we disagree with them or when they disagree with us?

Isn’t that the humilty that caused the good Samaritan to stop and help the man on the side of the road, even though he probably doubted the other guys’ beliefs?

Isn’t that the compassion and empathy that caused Christ to say “forgive them father, for they know not what they do?” even as they were in the very act of doubting him to a painful and undeserved death?

Back to Alma 32 – Alma rejoiced when he saw that the poor among the Zoramites had been cast out. Why? Because they had been compelled to be humble, and that softened their hearts. No one wants to be compelled to be humble, but I think we should all have soft hearts — believers and skeptics alike. We should be open-minded, tolerant of different ideas, willing to admit our own imperfect understanding.

Doubt – for me – has compelled and pounded and softened my heart. It has lead me to a humilty in my beliefs, or at least an ability and a desire to step off of my own rameumpton and drop any pretense that I am any more elect than anyone else around me. Doubt has helped me repent of this pride.

In conclusion, I have atheist friends who are some of the most charitable, kind, Christ-like people that I know. When I ask them about God, they often say that it makes no sense to them that a loving God would put us in a no-win situation, and would punish us for living in a sinful world that God himself created.

There are many responses to this, but I want to give just one. If the story of the atonement is true – if Jesus Christ took upon himself the sins of the world and died for our sakes – then isn’t that the responsible thing for a God to do? Doesn’t that mean that he has personally erased the effects of sin and death that have come to us as a result of our following his plan and entering into this mortal probation full of death and sin? To me it is like he is saying, “don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. Have faith. Fear not. Now just go and love each other as I have loved you. “

I find great beauty and hope in this approach. And I have a firm desire for this to be true. I also have a strong faith in the principles of charity that we read about in Moroni:  “Wherefore, if a man have faith he must have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope. And he cannot have faith and hope, save he shall be meek, and lowly of heart. Otherwise, his faith and hope is vain; and he must needs have charity; for if he have not charity he is nothing; for charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.”

This is my hope and my faith, in spite of my doubts.

How do you feel about doubt and its relationship to faith?

Eternal Progress.  This means that individuals in this life are progressing and growing, learning new things, and becoming more and more like our heavenly parents on our (long) way toward godhood or god-adult-hood.  In fact, if we do not continue to learn in this life, we also cease to learn and grow after death, being relegated to one of the “static” kingdoms:  telestial or terrestrial.  Two alternate twists on this, though, allow for progress after death even if one does not merit exaltation (the Celestial Kingdom):

• Multiple Mortal Probations.  In this version, as with reincarnation, someone can return to progress through another mortal life.  This theory would also explain how Jesus could be perfect (maybe it wasn’t his first life?).
• Progress between Kingdoms.  Although decried as one of the Seven Deadly Heresies by Bruce R. McConkie (who also had some enchanting things to say about evolution), this version allows for individuals who did not merit exaltation to continue to learn and grow throughout eternity, and move between kingdoms as they increase in light and knowledge.

Eternal Increase.  An alternate understanding of the doctrine of eternal progression is that it merely refers to a continuation of one’s dynasty through eternity, adding spiritual offspring (increase) to someone who is righteous.  This model is likely to be favored by those who are more inclined to view God as static and omniscient rather than also continuing to learn and grow.  It also seems to be the version of this doctrine that is more in vogue with the current correlation committee’s emphasis.  Because it does not require continuous learning, it can be supported by a strict obedience model  (because individual learning and development is a byproduct of trial and error).

Assorted Quotes on this Doctrine:

“We prepare for eternal life by daily learning, improving, and building the kingdom of God.What are we here for? Eternal life is the ability to progress and increase forever. This is the greatest gift that can be conferred on intelligent beings, to live forever and never be destroyed.”  Brigham Young

“Satan does not have a body, and his eternal progress has been halted. Just as water flowing in a riverbed is stopped by a dam, so the adversary’s eternal progress is thwarted because he does not have a physical body.”  lds.org (from a CES statement)

“We will have the blessing of being sealed in a family forever with the promise of eternal increase.”  Henry B. Eyring

“And through Joseph Smith he says: “This is eternal lives—to know the only wise and true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent. This exaltation meant godhood for them and creation of worlds with eternal increase for which they would probably need, eventually, a total knowledge of the sciences.”  Spencer W. Kimball

“Developing spirituality is critical to our eternal progress. The fruits of eternal progress are manifest in joy, peace, love, hope, increased confidence in the Lord.”  Elaine L. Jack

So what’s your view?

[poll id = "179"]

Discuss.

The emphasis on the “physicality of God” even in the spiritual realm grew in concert with notions of the Eternal Family and its role and function in achieving and living in Celestial Glory. The elaboration of this theology was natural as the early church leadership began to push, even if at first secretly, new forms of marriage and family life, but it was not an inevitable evolution of the theology of the 1830 Restoration. For example, no one in the Community of Christ expects that the afterlife is about progressing to populate new worlds with our own spiritual offspring, as Heavenly Father populated our own world. In one denomination, it is the Heavenly Father; in the other it is Heavenly Father, with the seldom spoken inference that there may be Heavenly Mother lurking in the theology as well.

Today, because of this history, Mormons have a well-integrated belief system about how and why the Divine interacts with the physical universe that, nevertheless, is very different from its “prairie cousins”, let alone in comparison to more distantly related Christian denominations. As a prairie cousin with an abiding interest in the theological role of the physical, this fascinates me. LDS theology raises questions about the limits of acceptable definitions of “children of God”, and what God might do to see His children come out on top that would never occur to me in CofChrist theology. These are the kinds of questions I’d like to ask openly in this post.

Let’s look at extreme cases first, and then try to focus in on cases closer to home.

We know that the universe is a violent place. Creation is violent itself, and often involves destruction on scales we can barely comprehend. My favorite example is the “Death Star Galaxy”. We have in that example a small galaxy – a mere few billion stars is small – that has wandered into a radiation jet being emitted by a larger galaxy. The jet is obliterating thousands of solar systems, and any life there, as we watch by telescope.

What does that tell us? Are planets with life so rare that God can let planets be destroyed wholesale without moral consequences? Or perhaps there are not moral consequences because the life there is not human and thus has no spirits? Either way, would God be able to “write off” a great deal of reality under LDS theology because His “children” weren’t involved? He just has to watch over those special few worlds ideal for humanity. The worlds with just the right size, at just the right distance from stars of the proper temperature and age, with the proper orbital stability and a big brother planet like Jupiter nearby to protect against too frequent impacts from comets. The list of requirements is lengthy, but with infinite space to play around in, they’re bound to pop up here and there even if God doesn’t directly favor them with a helping hand.

Or perhaps God has to actively “weed out” competition for his favored species. You could interpret the evidence that way, too. Consider the destruction of the dinosaurian ecosystems 65 million years ago, or the even more catastrophic Permian extinction scores of millions of years still earlier. Our existence and physical forms today depend in complex, but critical, ways on details of those events. For example, the locations within their general orbits of all the inner planets of our solar system, including the earth, are known to be chaotic on only the order of 5 million years. Start out an orbital simulation with the earth relocated by as little as a millimeter, and in 5 million years, the earth could be on the other side of the sun. A “miracle” performed a hundred million years ago that protects humanity from destruction by asteroid strike or clears the world of big reptilians so mammals (and man) can take over could be too small to notice. Far easier than Moses calling on God to make the sun stand still during battle or parting the Red Sea.

What LDS theology would define to be human gets tougher to distinguish as we get closer to humanity. How close? Well, within the last few weeks, evidence has been published on the results of sequencing Neanderthal DNA. The evidence, first reported in Science, but more accessible here at Science News, shows that modern humans whose lines remained in Africa do not share Neandertal DNA. However, all of the rest of us get one to four percent of our genes from interbreeding with Neandertals that occurred after leaving Africa 45,000 or so years ago. We don’t carry Neandertal body types, but we do seem to carry something important from that population in our internal chemistry and in our brains. Eternal Family reunions might be more surprising than our expectations.

So, did the Neandertals die out because our body type was a little more divine than theirs? Or were the ones who bred with Homo sapiens the more righteous ones? Or do we extend the moral capability and need for redemption to an extinct species at all? Do we instead decide that we are all descended from ancestors who practiced bestiality? Were physical specimens of humans who had no Spirits walking around contemporaneously with Adam?

Look closer now as we get to Biblical or Jaredite times. Now we picture God as acting in detail to favor one nation over another, one individual over another. We try to point to specific reasons for that favoritism in terms of justice, mercy, or obedience in this life or in preexistence, and we can often convince ourselves that such reasons exist. I could argue a very good case, for example, that slaughter of entire Canaanite cities down to the last child might actually produce fewer casualties in the long run.

But the more uncomfortable I become unless I make the case in such terms, the more I realize that tying God’s plan of salvation to things other than intelligence, or justice, or mercy, or obedience – properties that have little to do with the shape or functions of my body – raises doubts. Wouldn’t exalted beings give up such narrow notions of the boundaries of humanity as part of the progression toward exaltation itself?

So I look at the criteria with which we define relationships with God through their physical manifestations – species, race, gender, diet, clothes – and I wonder. Is God really concerned about those things when He decides to claim His children. Or are we just engaging in a very destructive and provincial form of sibling rivalry?

In my Father’s house are many mansions. Maybe some reefs and rookeries, too. Maybe some hives for natural clones or collective minds.

And if that’s true, then certainly there are places for Homo sapiens with same-sex attraction, or childless couples, or singles – every form of Eternal Family we might imagine from the occurrence of those forms here on earth.

I recently read Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman. One of the interesting realities on which Ehrman elaborates is that early Christianity was anything but homogeneous. More specifically, there were many factions, some heterodox, some orthodox, some in the middle. Some of the books of the apocrypha, gnostic texts, and other early Christian writings seemed to support various theological ideas not represented, and in fact, even repressed in what became the canonized New Testament.

A few of particular interest are adoptionist (Christians that thought Jesus was fully mortal), docetic (Christians who thought Jesus was only divine and merely “appeared” to be human), and separationist (Christians who thought Jesus was two separate beings, one Jesus (human) and one Christ (divine)). There were many other heretical ideas that various Christian groups espoused. Some parts of our canonized New Testament were intentionally modified to suppress these views.

Translations in Mormonism

In Mormonism we have a very strange use of the word “translation.” Joseph “translated” the golden plates to produce The Book of Mormon. He “translated” some egyptian scrolls to produce the book of Abraham. In each of these instances I think that “translation” is probably a bit misleading. “Divined,” or “revealed,” perhaps, but “translated” in our modern colloquial usage is quite a stretch in my opinion!

To me, “translation” as it relates to Joseph’s work with the Bible, seems to imply that Joseph was a textual critic, much like Ehrman. That is to say, his goal, like a textual critic, would have been to correct the errors in translation and copying to return the scriptures to their original form. The 8th Article of Faith further gives weight to the idea that Joseph would have been interested correcting the translation, as it was the thing that had errors (as opposed to the original manuscripts themselves).

Yet, it is reasonable to me to question whether or not the original manuscripts of the canonized New Testament actually contained accurate teachings of Jesus. Surely if there were many different theologies, all of which claimed to be Christian, differing radically in their implications for modern Christian understanding, is it safe to assume that the books that “made it” into the canon even represent Jesus’ teachings? What of the process that came to finally accept a “canon” of scriptures? It was a process of gradual (read: hundreds of years) consensus among orthodox Christians (read: the Roman Catholic church), culminating finally in the Council of Trent in the 1500′s! Is this really what we now authoritatively accept as Jesus’ teachings and doctrines? And if Joseph’s goal, as translator, was to revert the text to the original, have we really made much progress in understanding the true Gospel as Christ taught?

Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible

Fortunately, as I’m sure many of you are silently screaming about, I think the Joseph Smith “Translation” is, again, a misnomer. It seems to me that Joseph had no business being a textual critic (despite being rather schooled in the Bible), and in fact, I don’t think this was Joseph’s goal at all. A casual glance at the Wikipedia article on the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible indicates that Joseph seemed to be using the Bible as an impetus for revelation. From that article, Philip Barlow thinks there are six different types of changes in the JST:

• Long revealed additions having no Biblical parallel (including visions of Moses, Enoch, and passages on Melchizedek).
• “Common Sense” changes.
• “Interpretive additions” often signaled by the phrase “or in other words.”
• “Harmonization” in which Joseph reconciled seemingly conflicting passages.
• Grammatical improvements.
• Unclassifiable changes.

I think this is a fair list, but I would add to it. I think the Doctrine and Covenants is a form of the JST. That is to say, Joseph was not a textual critic, and the JST is not a translation at all. It is a series of revelations that hoped to obtain what should have been in the Bible. I think Joseph was interested in discovering, through revelation, the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ, not in a restoration of the words of the original manuscript of the books that make up our canon.

In this vein, I am completely baffled as to why the LDS church does not adopt the JST and why we don’t rely more on Joseph’s revelations, and less on the Bible. I would even go so far as to argue that Mormonism shouldn’t even really care about the translational accuracy of the Bible. Between The Book of Mormon, D&C, and modern revelation, it seems we have a rich, full theology, that are Christian in their own right!

JST in the LDS Church

The JST manuscripts were preserved by Emma Smith after Joseph’s death. As a result, the then Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (RLDS, now Community of Christ church) published and copyrighted the JST in 1867. The LDS church had only a partial collection of the JST manuscripts.  Ostensibly the LDS church was unable to verify, independently, whether or not the compilation of the JST by the RLDS church was indeed accurate and, possibly, to avoid simply accepting the JST as espoused by the RLDS church (relations have not always been good), perhaps the LDS church just used what it had. That copyright has long since expired, and as recently as 2004 the LDS church, with full support from the Community of Christ church, produced a full facsimile of all the original manuscripts. So why not adopt it now? Here are some possible reasons why we have not adopted the JST:

• Tradishuuuuuun, tradishun! Yep, the LDS church is very slow to part with tradition. As we have officially used the KJV (with a few additions) for many years, and have gone to great lengths to print it and bind it, and have incorporated it into many lesson manuals, perhaps we are just sluggish to change.
• Perhaps we are afraid of the label “Joseph Smith Translation.” We already know that “translation” as used in other contexts is a stretch, so maybe we’re nervous about adopting another, possibly erroneous “translation.”
• Maybe there is some interest in differentiating ourselves from the CoC church. After all, from an LDS perspective, it would be easy to view the CoC church as having gone astray. If we adopt their book, who knows what will happen.
• There may be changes in the full JST that cast doubt on LDS church policies, procedures, rules, revelations, culture, etc. (I have not read the full JST so this may be a stretch).
• Doctrinal salmagundi was the modus operandi in Joseph’s day, but today’s church is quite sensitive to new, unprecendented doctrine and/or changes. We seem to be moving toward mainstream Christianity, and adopting the JST might send us in the other direction.

So what do you think? Was the JST really a “translation” in the sense that Joseph was trying to restore the text to the original, and is this even a useful thing to do for Mormonism? Or was Joseph really more interested in getting to what he believed Jesus actually taught? Why do you think the LDS church has not adopted the JST?

Church History Principles

1. Continuing exploration of our history is part of identity formation. As a church we seek always to clarify our identity, message, and mission. In our faith story, we see clearly God’s Spirit giving this faith community (not a word we use in the LDS church) tools, insights, and experiences for divine purposes. A people with a shared memory of their past, and an informed understanding of its meaning, are better prepared to chart their way into the future.  (It feels like this is a little too intellectual for us, although I don’t see anything that is directly contradictory to our views.  I think it also implies a consensus-based faith tradition that differs from our authority-based tradition.  In the LDS side of the house, we take our divine instructions pretty literally, and as individuals, we don’t get a vote.)
2. History informs but does not dictate our faith and beliefs. The foundation and continuing source for our faith is God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Studying history is not about proving or disproving mystical, spiritual, or revelatory experiences that birth or transform religious movements. (Is this a swipe at the LDS church’s truth claims?) Sound history informs faith (whereas inaccurate history misleads faith in either direction), and healthy faith leads to insights about history (ergo, unhealthy faith leads to misconceptions about history). Theology (too big a word for us – half our membership just tuned out) and faith, guided by the Holy Spirit, must play an important role in discovering the enduring meaning of such events as well as the deeper truths found in them (implying:  not just superficial truths based on an inaccurate understanding of history). Our understanding of our history affects our faith and beliefs. However, our past does not limit our faith and beliefs to what they were historically.  (This last statement holds more true to the CoC than it may to the LDS church.  The LDS church is more reliant on truth claims that are rooted in history.)
3. The church encourages honest, responsible historical scholarship. Studying history involves related fields. Historians use academic research to get as many facts as they can; then, they interpret those facts to construct as clear a picture as possible of what was going on in the past. This includes analyzing human culture to see how it affected events. Historians try to understand patterns of meaning to interpret what the past means for our future. This process should avoid “presentism,” or interpreting the past based on a current worldview and culture instead of the culture of the time.  (This bias of interpreting the past based on current worldview is at heart of a lot of negative views of history and is a worthwhile caution).
4. The study of church history is a continuing journey. If we say that a book on history is the only true telling of the story, we risk “canonizing” one version, a tendency we have shown in the past. This blocks further insights from continuing research. Good historical inquiry understands that conclusions are open to correction as new understanding and information comes from ongoing study.  (This is an excellent point that the LDS church could easily adopt).
5. Seeing both the faithfulness and human flaws in our history makes it more believable and realistic, not less. Our history has stories of great faith and courage that inspire us. Our history also includes human leaders who said and did things that can be shocking to us from our current perspective and culture. Historians try not to judge—instead, they try to understand by learning as much as possible about the context and the meaning of those words and actions at the time. The result is empathy instead of judgment. Our scriptures are consistent in pointing out that God, through grace, uses imperfect people for needed ministry and leadership.  (I love this one, and find it very useful.  However, I think this points to a generation gap that has been discussed elsewhere by the handsome Carter Hall.  There is a bias among the older generations to view flawed heroes as insufficiently heroic.  Baby boomers and onward tend to prefer flawed heroes.  Promoting “perfect” heroes results in disillusionment for these later generations, IMO).
6. The responsible study of church history involves learning, repentance, and transformation. A church with a mission focused on promoting communities of reconciliation, justice, and peace should be self-critical and honest about its history (of course, these are not the focus of the LDS church.  Instead our verbs are “perfecting, redeeming, proclaiming, and caring” – very action oriented verbs.  Hmmm.  Not a religion of reflection). It is important for us to confess when we have been less than what the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to be. This honesty prompts us to repent, and it strengthens our integrity. (Again, this is an interesting perspective.  It takes the faults of the organization and personalizes them.  In the LDS church, the tendency is to view sin or flaws as personal failings, not organizational.  We do not internalize the flaws of the organization or personify the organization as something capable of repentance.)  Admitting past mistakes helps us avoid repeating them and frees us from the influences of past injustices and violence in our history. We must be humble and willing to repent, individually and as a community, to contribute as fully as possible to restoring God’s shalom on earth.  (I don’t think this part translates well for us.  This emphasis on communal responsibility and repentance is a bit foreign to the LDS church.  I suppose that’s a byproduct of CoC being more of a consensus / communal authority rather than authoritative/oligarchical.)
7. The church has a long-standing tradition that it does not legislate or mandate positions on matters of church history. Historians should be free to draw their own conclusions after thorough consideration of evidence. Through careful study and the Holy Spirit’s guidance, the church is learning how to accept and responsibly interpret all of its history. This includes putting new information and changing understandings into proper perspective, while emphasizing the parts of our history that continue to play a role in guiding the church’s identity and mission today.  (This one is interesting.  For one, the LDS church doesn’t really take a direct stand on historical matters.  Richard Bushman and Truman Madsen can write two very different books on the same topic, and the church does not officially endorse either.  Yet we do emphasize lessons that are based on history but only presented with the intention to edify and increase commitment.  If the history is damaging, we do not discuss it in our lessons because it would be counter-productive.  Whatever does not promote the mission of the church is correlated away).
8. We need to create a respectful culture of dialogue about matters of history. We should not limit our faith story to one perspective. Diverse viewpoints bring richness to our understanding of God’s movement in our sacred story. Of course, historians will come to different conclusions as they study. Therefore, it is important for us to create and maintain a respectful culture that allows different points of view on history. Our conversation about history should be polite and focused on trying to understand others’ views. (I do think this is an area where the LDS church could improve.  We tend to be extremely defensive when confronted with any negative interpretations of our history.  I think we could do better at being polite and focused on understanding while maintaining our own more faithful interpretation of events.  But to do that, the faithful interpretation of events needs to pass muster, which it frequently fails to do.)  Most important, we should remain focused on what matters most for the message and mission of the church in this time.
9. Our faith is grounded in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and the continuing guidance of the Holy Spirit. We must keep our hearts and minds centered on God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. As God’s Word alive in human history, Jesus Christ was and is the foundation of our faith and the focus of the church’s mission and message.  (A great wrap up statement for both churches, IMO).

Are these principles that the LDS church should likewise espouse or are they problematic in their own right?  Would the LDS church have difficulty with some of these principles if put into practice?  Is there a better approach?  IMO, the CoC approach has some good elements we could adopt, but does not directly translate into LDS culture on the following points:

• Community vs. authority.  The LDS church doesn’t take doctrines to referendum.  Decisions are made in consensus at the Q15 level, based on prayerful consideration.  If the Q15 don’t agree, status quo prevails.  By contrast, the CoC is more egalitarian in its decision-making, making decisions “by common consent.”
• Responsibility for the past.  Because the LDS church is more of a top-down organizational church and less of a “faith community” (as evidenced by the fact that the term “faith community” sounds like some sort of PC term for a free-love hippie commune to my LDS ears) there is no group ownership for mistakes of past individuals, even generally among the leadership, but certainly not among the membership.  Passages that reflect this POV don’t resonate for that reason.
• Directness.  The LDS church definitely doesn’t favor this kind of direct approach that ties our hands.  While the CoC talks and writes about openness and change, creating collateral materials that can be reviewed time and again, the LDS church prefers to minimize collateral.  Even the collateral that exists (lds.org, Gen Conf talks, etc.) is often subtly contradictory and written from contrasting viewpoints that enable multiple interpretations, creating a patheon of doctrine.  If you search “Church History” on lds.org (go ahead, I’ll wait), there’s really not much there at all.
• Intellectual approach.  There are church leaders who favor an intellectual approach and who would find these principles appealing; yet, the style of these principles and the ideology seems like it might be inaccessible or off-putting to many lay members of the much larger LDS church.

Here are some principles or talking points that I would suggest for the LDS church (written as if I had to draft it for the church, which I don’t, thank goodness!  Because it was actually really hard to come up with these):

• All history is biased.  Historical elements in scripture are also biased by authors, cultural markers, and limited understanding.  Church history is similarly biased.  Understanding history requires a respect for the inherent biases in what we are reading, whether those biases are in favor of or against the church or an individual.  And our understanding of history is biased by our personal experiences, our views, and time in which we live.
• Understanding history can provide insight.  We can better understand patterns that influenced behavior and that tend to repeat over time within a culture.  We can empathize with our predecessors; our hearts are turned to our fathers and mothers in reviewing their experiences.  We are given countless examples that illuminate our own path, either as cautionary tales or as role models and most often as both.
• Church history is still being written.  Although divine instruction is timeless, our ability to understand it can shift over time and the relevance of different instructions can change as circumstances change.  We should be mindful of the temporal biases inherent in our human understanding as we strive to follow God’s will and comprehend our common history.
• Personal experience leads to faith.  We encourage church members to follow the spirit and to prayerfully seek instruction from Heavenly Father.  This type of humble truth-seeking can help us avoid errors in discernment and criticism of others that can lead to self-justification and sin.
• Our aim is to lead people to Christ.  While history can inform us and provide insight, ultimately it is through seeking a personal relationship with Christ and following His teachings that we grow spiritually and achieve our potential as sons and daughters of God.

What do you think the church should say regarding thorny historical issues?  Anything?  Discuss.

We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost.

While these verses lay out the principles/ordinances, they do little to explicate what these terms actually mean. And indeed, the confusion over these principles is the subject of many theological debates in Christianity. In Mormonism, however, I think we have some fairly clear explanations for how these principles/ordinances are used in our theology. For example, to establish a definition of faith, most Mormons will refer to Hebrews 11:1, or perhaps Alma 32:21 (not quoted for sake of brevity).  Additionally, at least to me, I sense a kind of loose cultural consensus for what faith is, and is not.  For baptism we can look to D&C 20:73. As for the Gift of the Holy Ghost, modern revelation confirms the method of the “laying of hand by those who are in authority,” and we have a ready explanation of the difference between the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the influence of the Holy Ghost.

I confess, I find some of the typical Mormon explanations of these principles and ordinances somewhat (okay, at least for faith very) unsatisfying. Faith, when described as “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” leaves me wondering about the difference between God and electromagnetic waves or general relativity! In the case of Alma, it is worse because we bring a new term “knowledge” into the mix without an appropriate definition. After such standard definitions it is little wonder to me why we argue over semantics, and describe those who either fall away, or reject the church, as “faithless.” Faith often becomes the lynchpin for anyone who doesn’t see things our way!

Likewise, even the explanation for baptism in D&C 20 leaves me wanting. What is so magical about immersion in water? Is it entirely clear from the New Testament that Jesus was “completely submersed” in the water like we believe is necessary in LDS theology? It feels like there should be more to this ordinance than simply a bath!  Even coupling it with repentance (as it should be) just clouds the waters of my mind.

In “A Rational Theology,” Widstoe lays out a compelling alternative for these standard definitions. Not that he repudiates them, but he explicitly differentiates between the abstract meanings of the principles and ordinances, and the concrete implmentation on terra firma. I think his words are enlightening:

In God’s Plan for life on earth is a system of laws representing eternal realities, to which man must conform. Such a law, for instance, is faith, which, in its simple, universal meaning, is man’s certainty that in the universe is found everything he may desire for his upbuilding and advancement, and that the eternal relations of universal forces will prevail in the end for his good. Another such fundamental law, to which man must conform, is that of repentance, which in its larger sense is merely faith made active. Passive faith can do little for man’s advancement. Yet another such law is that of baptism, which is essentially obedience to existing laws. And still another such law is that of the gift of the Holy Ghost, which perhaps means that a man may place himself in touch with the whole of the universe, including the beings of superior intelligence that it contains, and draw knowledge from forces beyond the earth. – John A. Widstoe, “A Rational Theology” pp 42-43

Here, it is clear that the first four principles and ordinances of the Gospel are eternal laws, are independent of the LDS church, earth, priesthood, or any other convention, organization, or authority in the universe. I believe this offers us perspective on the larger context in which the specific LDS implementation resides. It also makes allowances for God’s other non-terrestrial children to experience different forms of these basic laws and principles.
Widstoe goes on to say:

Life on earth deals directly with gross matter and the forces pertaining to it. The laws formulated for the guidance of man are especially devised for earth conditions, and belong to the earth. For instance, water baptism, the symbol of obedience to God and acceptance of his love, is essentially an ordinance of and for this earth. It is not thinkable that water baptism is practiced in a future estate for water is an earth substance. If this be true, then all who enter upon the earth-career, and who desire the perfected joy derived from the Gospel, must have baptism on this earth. – John A. Widstoe, “A Rational Theology” pp 44-45

Then the all-encompassing explanation provided formerly, couched in the reality of earth life, offers a surprising explanation of vicarious ordinances, necessarily performed here, on behalf of those who did not receive them while “in the flesh.”

Should some of the spirits refuse, while on earth, to accept the Gospel, or fail to hear it, baptism, belonging to the earth, must be done for them, vicariously, on earth, so that they, having had the work done for them here, may accept or reject the ordinance in their life beyond the grave. This is the motive of the work for the dead. The earth ordinances must be done by or for every soul born upon the earth so that the earth-experience may not be in vain, should the Gospel be accepted in the remotest day of eternity. This view becomes more important when it is recalled that the ordinances of the earth, belonging primarily to the earth, stand for vast, eternal realities, indispensable to man’s progress. – John A. Widstoe, “A Rational Theology” p. 45

For me, I find the deeper theology here enriching, satisfying, and meaningful, particularly in my state of uncertainty with regard to the plenitude of truth claims in the LDS church.

So how do you view Widstoe’s rational “first four principles and ordinances”? Do his explanations provide you with more insight? Is he right? Or is this just another attempt by an “apologist” to justify his belief system? Is there scriptural backing for his claims? We do not emphasize such distinctions in the church today. Is this because we don’t really know, or is it just not important?

Because of her family’s hospitality toward searching and studying, Sister Kimball says, “I’ve always had an inquiring mind. I’m not satisfied just to accept things. I like to follow through and study things out. I learned early to put aside those gospel questions that I couldn’t answer. I had a shelf of things I didn’t understand, but as I’ve grown older and studied and prayed and thought about each problem, one by one I’ve been able to better understand them.”

• polygamy
• priesthood ban
• historical issues / MMM / Joseph Smith / BOM historicity / BOA / restoration detail discrepancies

• experiences they’ve had as a detective since that case have given them new perspective
• new evidence has emerged.  For example, DNA evidence and fingerprint evidence (and other forensic sciences) have changed substantially over the last decade, casting new light on old crimes.
• similarities to subsequent crimes can change the overall understanding of the case
• evidence relating to witnesses or suspects or even victims can emerge or change over time

So, this analogy works better for me, but also puts these issues in the realm of “hobby” in my mind.  These are issues that are a curiosity, something fun to explore, and while they are personally important to the individual, they may or may not be “solvable” or “conclusive” cases.  We just have to make a decision based on the evidence we have, or move on and revisit them later.  Once you’ve made a decision on a case, right or wrong, you tend to move on past it and work on another issue.

Does the “cold case” analogy work for you?  What are your cold cases?  Are there cold cases you’ve ultimately solved to your satisfaction or do you hang onto them and mull them over again every so often?  Discuss.

“Delegation Takes No Action on Human Sexuality Issues: Church Will Continue Dialogue.”

Headline  by John Hamer on BCC on Thursday, April 15, 2010:

“Gay Rights Revelation Added to The Community of Christ D&C”

———-

The two headlines above generally cover the spectrum of opinion about what happened at the Community of Christ World Conference as it completed the process of canonization of a new Section 164 for its D&C. The spectrum of opinions about whether what happened was a good thing or bad thing, of course, runs even more broadly. Indeed, I’m not at all certain that we’ll even be able to see how intense the various “colors” of that spectrum will prove until information about the conference filters down to the bulk of the North American church that maintains no real connection to the World Church in the “Blogitorium”. As in many churches on the Christian left in North America, that membership tends to be somewhat more traditionalist than its leadership.

Nevertheless, I’ll give my view as someone from one part of the peanut gallery, focusing on what was in each portion of Section 164 and the effects of associated legislation passed to begin implementation. A future post will provide a similar analysis on legislation considered by the Conference not specifically addressed by Section 164 and suggest something about the overall direction of the Community of Christ in the future.

SECTION 164, PARAGRAPHS 1-4

President Veazey describes the experiences of meditation, particularly on portions of Galatians 3:27-29, that led him to offer the Section. After commending the church for similarly seeking to discern the Spirit in a structured process that has been going on for well over a year, he makes explicit an understanding of the church and its sacraments which has been implicit in CofChrist theology for a number of years.

“…Instruction given previously about baptism was proper to ensure the rise and cohesiveness of the church during its early development and in following years. However, as a growing number have come to understand, the redemptive action of God in Christ—while uniquely and authoritatively expressed through the church—is not confined solely to the church. God’s grace, revealed in Jesus Christ, freely moves throughout creation, often beyond human perception, to achieve divine purposes in people’s lives.”

The Community of Christ is to see itself as “one true church”, not as the “one and only true church”. How serious is this theological intent was earlier signaled by something I haven’t seen commentators note elsewhere. The first sessions of Conference always feature certain speeches of welcome. One is usually a non-CofChrist speaker. This speaker is often a local Congressman or a Missouri Senator. The speech is strictly non-political even then, but the identity is interesting because trends over time seem to show the direction of the church leadership’s interest.

This year that slot went to the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches. Kinnamon unabashedly spoke of the Community of Christ having unique gifts that should be seen as adding to bodies such as the NCC, rather than as a body going its own way. Ironically, contacts between the RLDS and the NCC were among the suspicions cited by fundamentalist opponents of the church circa 1970 as evidence of apostasy. Thus, such a speech 40 years ago might itself have been too controversial to occur.

Section 164 then lays out specific instruction (that will be followed quickly by formal administrative policy guidance to become effective by September 1, 2011). These policies will result in acceptance into membership into the Community of Christ upon confirmation by CofChrist priesthood – without requiring rebaptism if the original baptism: a) involved water;  b) was performed by an ordained Christian minister;  and c) as a personal expression of faith in Christ. In particular, we will not require someone to present proof of their baptism or the baptizing minister’s credentials, since that would be impossible in many places throughout the world. This clearly expands the notion of true priesthood authority beyond the boundaries of those called through the priesthood line passed to Joseph Smith.

The phrase “using water” also allows for baptisms done by immersion, pouring, or sprinkling, while upholding the church’s own standard practice of baptism by immersion at the age of accountability. There is also some additional specific guidance regarding the substance of the prayer of confirmation (Baptism of the Spirit) that is now the means by which one moves from being part of the Body of Christ into membership within the denomination. And preparation for confirmation will now be a formal requirement for the ordinance to occur.

Paragraph 3 contains a call for all members to serious consider and live the meaning of their baptismal covenants (water and Spirit). Paragraph 4 ties this call to consideration of the role the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper should play in renewing, witnessing, and amplifying our covenant. (Portions of the preamble specifically warn us to NOT make the meaning of the covenants atrophy even as we broaden the procedures, because of the concern that in some places this has happened with open communion).

This portion of the Section makes the Community of Christ look very Protestant – if you can call becoming more Protestant through modern revelation a Protestant concept in the first place.

SECTION 164, PARAGRAPHS 5-7

These are the paragraphs whose approval generated the widely divergent headlines above. Their actual content is to call attention to “serious questions about moral behavior and relationships” – but to prioritize those questions not simply as they are listed within the dominant culture of the denomination.

“These issues are complex and difficult to understand outside their particular settings because of strikingly different cultural histories, customs, and understandings of scripture. For example, the issues include female submission, female genital mutilation, child brides, forced marriages, and sexual permissiveness. They include cleansing and exploitation of widows, harsh conflicts over same-gender attraction and relationships, and varying legal, religious, and social definitions of marriage, to name just a few.”

More importantly, the Section calls us to see the solutions for these moral dilemmas as arising from an understanding of Christianity as a community that transcends definitions by economic status, social class, sex, gender, or ethnicity. They simply are no longer primary. Relationships are to be rooted in the principles of Christ-like love, mutual respect, responsibility, justice, covenant, and faithfulness, against which there is no law.

Section 164 then extrapolates that these principles require that the church move the resolution of moral issues to the church in the cultures most affected by them rather than let the dominant North American church decide for the rest of the world. Field Apostles, under the guidance of the Presidency, are authorized to call and set the agenda for field, national, or (non-geographical) cultural groups to deal with issues such as those listed above as they feel directed.

Uncertainty about the nature and timing of these conferences is generating the widely divergent headlines about gay rights. First, everyone in the Community of Christ seems to understand that the leadership feels that it must not expose our leaders and members in cultures where discussion of gay issues is taboo. If so, they can hardly move toward expanded gay rights in the United States unless they can find a way to maintain what the government would call “plausible deniability”.

Second, there is a large body of conservative members in the US church (and non-members in society) whose reaction must be anticipated and allowed for. The LDS experience with Prop 8 shows what happens when the church in the US takes any position on controversial issues in the political arena. Many feel the church has moved too hesitantly and will continue to do so; others are likely to feel the church is moving in the wrong direction entirely.

Finally, there are logistical questions. It seems unlikely that the US church has the resources to assemble a national conference on gay rights issues before the spring of 2012 at the earliest. It will take until September, 2011, simply to implement the new conditions for membership.

The greatest sign of movement toward gay rights comes from something in administrative minutia. It is normal for the church to realign Apostolic Fields following a World Conference (our Apostles retire, so there are usually changes in the Twelve). This time a gerrymandered field has been carved out for Apostle Susan Skoor that stretches from Southern Australia to Eastern Canada – and just happens to cover all of the non-US jurisdictions that proposed World Conference legislation expanding full priesthood and sacramental rites for gays. The extension of rights in that Field or in nations within that Field might be granted while maintaining sufficient distance from the World Church (and prying media) to protect the church in cultures hostile to gay rights.

Expansion to the US is much more difficult to do while maintaining any credibility to foreign governments and religious bodies that “this is just local jurisdictions acting on their own.”

Perhaps more significantly in the long run than the particular moral issues – at least from the perspective of this Washington spectator – is the change these paragraphs make in the legislative rights of mission centers to set the agenda for the church. The Presidency immediately ruled 21 legislative proposals that had been painstakingly brought to the conference as out of order because they reflect National or Regional concerns. These rulings were entirely appropriate under Section 164 guidance.

However, the Conference later passed implementing legislation for the field and national conferences that make them “special conferences”. Such conferences operate under different parliamentary rules than World Conference. In particular,  Mission Centers lack the right to place items on the agenda of special conferences; that agenda is set only by the Apostle who calls the conference with the approval of the Presidency. In short, this revelation makes the Community of Christ less democratic and more theocratic than it was a year ago.

SECTION 164, PARAGRAPH 8

Paragraph 8, by contrast, shows the flexibility and speed with which the Community of Christ can move on organizational issues when it wishes to do so. The Twelve and the Presidents of the Seven Quorums of Seventy have been meeting for several years in response to the immediately previous revelation (Section 163) to consider organizational changes to increase evangelistic effectiveness. Paragraph 8 is taken as authorization to make these changes.

Within 24 hours of Section 164 approval, the number of Quorums of Seventy was increased from seven to ten, the additional Quorum Presidents were named, and they were approved by the Conference and set apart to that calling. Jack Bauer couldn’t have moved faster. Clearly, the outcome of these discussions among the leading quorums was well prepared in advance, while they are still feeling their way around the notion of how and when national conferences will function.

Reorganization of the Twelve, while not fundamental, essentially separates the world into 10 Fields for the moment, each led by an Apostle, with the remaining two Apostles focusing on Headquarters-oriented tasks. For the first time, a single Quorum of Seventy will be aligned with the geographic or other missionary focus of a Field Apostle.

SECTION 164, PARAGRAPH 9

The final paragraph of the document is a benediction of sorts, and a challenge that the rise of Zion is no farther away than the willingness of all of us – all the “beloved children of the Restoration” – to overcome our insecurities and embrace a Christ-like life.

“The mission of Jesus Christ is what matters most to the journet ahead.”

Seeing that ‘the importance of discerning correctly that which is figurative and that which is literal would be hard to overstate’ [p. 133] we might expect that the insights that Bro. McConkie will offer would reflect this seriousness. Yet his answers seem facile and ill-thought out. For example, his first insight into working through this dilemma is that often ‘the scriptures provide the answer’ [p. 134]. Following this he then explain that Adam was clearly born (literally) because of the scripture in Moses 6:59 (Adam is described as being ‘born’ in this verse).

His second insight is that sometimes ‘things spoken of in the scriptures are both figurative and literal’ [p. 134]. What is confusing here for me is that he argues that sometimes symbols are used in the middle of real stories, for example in the Garden of Eden. However, what those symbolic aspects are is less clear. Certainly Pres. Kimball’s declaration that the Eve-Adam-Rib story was figurative would be one example of what McConkie is discussing here. Yet, Pres. Kimball’s remark assumes a particular understanding of the Garden of Eden narrative to make that argument (i.e. that the story is literal and that they were born). Why is this reading any less literal than the born passage? Could the rib be literal and the reference to born be figurative?

His third insight is the most troubling for me. He writes that, ‘When scripture provides no clear answer by which we can discern what is figurative and what is literal, we are reduced to our own good sense and wisdom’. He continues ‘This… may well be quite deliberate, for it creates an opportunity for [God] to get a measure of our judgement, spiritual maturity and spiritual integrity’ [p. 135]. Really! ‘Figure it out for yourself’! That’s your key to discerning between what is literal and figurative. However, what is more perplexing is the implication of McConkie’s discourse.

By invoking issues that relate interpretation to spiritual maturity McConkie is creating an implicit ‘orthodoxy’ which places the reader in a position of spiritual uncertainty regarding their position with God. This is surely spiritually destructive. To encourage individuals to read the scriptures in a way that is reflective of their spiritual standing is to place them in a situation of tension of with God. For if their interpretation is wrong then they are not ‘saved’ and are in need of repentance. Moreover it allows those who are in authority to question worthiness upon the basis of differing interpretations. I believe that if we are to benefit from the scriptures, i.e. if they are to draw us God, then placing the individual into a spiritual uncertain situation while engaging with the texts is spiritually unproductive.

A recent post by SteveP, at BCC, argues that there is a temptation to approach the scriptures literally when they were not intended to be read in that particular way. I think this is fundamentally correct, however, I am convinced that there is a tendency within such arguments to find those who derive spirituality through a literalistic approach to the scriptures as incorrect or mis-informed. I am not arguing that SteveP would advocate this but rather that I have seen some who do. In one sense this form of argument can be used just like McConkie’s but instead to defend a non-literal orthodoxy.

Though SteveP frames his debate within the context of the literal/figurative binary, his position is rooted to the idea that the scriptures are intended to help us related to God and to ‘spiritual’ truth. My contention is that perhaps the literal/figurative dichotomy is part of the liahona/iron-rod split. Applying Richard Poll’s analogy here is useful because it helps us see that Liahona (figurative?) and Iron-Rod (literal?) readers of the scriptures are not in competition and should learn more empathy for the other position.

I am not convinced that literal readings of the scripture do violence to the depth the scriptures have to offer (though I am concerned about how they view more figurative readers). Yet, I am convinced that they do violence to the depth’s that SteveP sees in the scriptures (and I admit that feel the same). For another person that literal reading might derive other depths that (perhaps) non-literal readers might miss. Each paradigm has its failings and flaws, just like Liahonas and Iron-rods.

I think that a better way, a more complex and certainly less clear way, of approaching the scriptures is with different lens of literalism. If we rather see the scriptures literally in a way that both groups can accept, i.e. the scriptures can literally help us to come to God, then perhaps both sides could be more willing to apply these different lens of literalism to the same story and deal with the challenges that each will bring. Though a non-literal reader by inclination I have felt the challenge of trying to reconcile a literalistic reading of certain OT passages. Though I do not feel bound by such a paradigm, trying to read them in that literal way has proved a spiritually productive venture. Moreover, I hope that I am still able to plumb the depths that a non-literal paradigm has often provided for me.

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Discuss.