What’s In It for Me?
Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina concludes with a man named Levin, a contemplative and episodically depressed character, finally experiencing spiritual illumination after years of doubt and difficulty. His awakening has less to do with exuberance over any particular theological system of thought and more to do with a fundamental revelation about the good – how the good elevates man’s nature, how it is uncreated, and how its unifying light shines on all people. He says,
I and millions of men who lived centuries ago and those who are living now: peasants, the poor in spirit, and sages, who have thought and written about it, saying the same thing in their obscure words – we all agree on that one thing: what we should live for, and what is good. I, and all other men, know only one thing firmly, clearly, and certainly, and this knowledge cannot be explained by reason: it is outside reason, has no cause, and can have no consequences.
If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence – a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect.
It is exactly this that I know and that we all know.
What greater miracle could there be than that?
It has become culturally common for us Latter-day Saints to speak of the good as if it were some sort of currency, something bartered for or exchanged with Heaven. A couple short
examples: A high council speaker recently offered, as significant rationale for doing home and visiting teaching, that if we do our duty in this way, we will find ourselves blessed in return, sometimes even more than we could have hoped for, out of proportion with what we gave. While this seems a perfectly innocuous observation if it happens to occur, there is a serious problem when it is offered as rationale for obedience. “If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence – a reward, it is also not goodness.” We serve (or at least seek to) because of grace, not for hope of reward – rewards cease to matter. The recognition of grace is the recognition that we have had our fire kindled and our meal prepared for us already; we are no longer bartering for warmth or for food.
Second recent example: a discussion ensued about tithing in a recent meeting, and it was offered as an idea that, in determining whether to pay tithing on gross income or net income, we could simply ask ourselves how many blessings we want, and then decide accordingly. Once our obedience devolves into a sort of currency such as this, and heaven turns into a sort of stock exchange, it seems we have missed the mark. My wife recently compared this transactional way of approaching Gospel living to the act of setting up an insurance policy with heaven. It simply does not work this way. Grace turns the whole thing on its head. As C.S. Lewis so effectively said, when we live after the manner of grace, we try to follow Christ
in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of heaven is already inside you.
I suppose we could agree with Tolstoy that goodness itself has no cause, but the goodness that we find imbuing our lives absolutely does have a cause, the great headwaters of this river being God. Yes, we open the door to it; but the animating spirit that crosses the threshold and becomes an integral part of our subsequent goodness, is all God. We could never conjure up anything suitable in order to place on the scales to barter for His goodness, blessings, or grace. Our obedience and humility, as crucial as they are, are like so many sticks and pebbles compared to the radiant gems of goodness that come to us even before we care to appreciate them. Such is the nature of redeeming love, and I imagine sometimes that God looks upon our paltry offerings with gladness, even absorbing our naiveté and childishness with a patient longsuffering smile. He is confident that we’ll get the hang of it someday.
4 Ways to Approach Book of Mormon Anachronisms
It’s time to wrestle with the anachronisms.
Not the ‘holy hand grenade’ variety of Monty Python fame, but rather the Book of Mormon variety – boring stuff like wheat and barley and horses. For those of us who have found much of the remarkable within the Book of Mormon, including the mere fact that it has served as a potent catalyst for spiritual experience and illumination, the challenge of anachronisms demands from us some honest contemplation.
After years of being buffeted by this or that opinion in regards to Book of Mormon anachronisms, I have begun to see roughly four ways to approach them. These approaches can be concisely summed up as follows:
1. Indicators of Fraudulence
2. Double-down on historicity
3. Label swap
4. Functional translation or expansion theory
We consider ‘indicators of fraudulence’ first because it is, to me, the most uninteresting of the bunch and therefore deserves the least exploration. It is uninteresting in this context precisely because it does not represent an effort to integrate challenging information into an existing worldview. If you already believe that the Book of Mormon represents a complete fiction, then the anachronisms easily fit into your rationale for rejecting it, thereby failing to prompt any deeper discussion. Coming from a place of faith, however, challenging information such as this prompts worthwhile reflection and, we shall see, reassessment of some common assumptions.
Double-Down
Considering the second approach, we find that some faithful LDS approach the Book of Mormon anachronisms by opting to double-down on the historicity and literalness of the record. That is, when the Book of Mormon makes mention of steel, wheat, barley, horses, sheep, goats, cattle, oxen, cows, and elephants, the argument is that all of these things surely existed literally for the Nephites and/or Jaredites, without semantic equivocation. If we accept that the Book of Mormon prophets and places are historically real, the argument goes, then it must follow that the constellation of details surrounding these prophets and places are equally historical and real. This is a common assumption routinely glossed over but perhaps not altogether solid, a subject to which we’ll return.
Before moving on to number three, let’s take a minute to evaluate the ‘double-down’ approach. It’s worth remembering that the arbiter determining what is currently considered anachronistic in the Book of Mormon is current scientific consensus, which is constantly subject to revision. It is, of course, unfair and puerile to discard science altogether simply on the basis that its consensus evolves Read the rest of this entry
Book Review – Exploring Mormon Thought
My attitudes toward theology have been through an evolution, and are yet still evolving. Blake Ostler’s book, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes of God, has marked a new phase in my 
attitudes. As a teenager and then as a missionary, the importance of theology (that is, to have the “right” theology) assumed center stage. Then came a period of relative apathy followed by an eventual resurgence in interest. Although interested, a gradual development of negativity took shape toward the entire theological enterprise, seeing in it little more than a grand exercise in arrogance and pride. Although virtues exist in the enterprise, more often than not they seem to be held hostage to pride, self-righteousness, and exclusivity. Ostler’s book has somewhat salvaged my feelings toward theology. Inasmuch as it is a vehicle to enhance my relationship with God, thereby enhancing my relationship with other people, I value it.
What is the Point?
When reviewing a nonfiction book (or at least one that tries to be nonfiction!), it seems that the framework of analysis has to begin with isolating the primary and secondary points the author is trying to make, which is sometimes harder than it needs to be. Then, how well are those points supported? What assumptions are employed, and can I grant those assumptions? And if I can grant the primary assumptions, has the author demonstrated persuasively that the conclusions follow from the assumptions? Before going further, however, a few words about assumptions seems in order.
That we as human beings assume a thousand things we cannot prove seems by now obvious. We live by assumption. We could envision a chain starting with our pre-rational assumptions, extending outward, each link representing an implication or consequence extending outward from our pre-rational starting point. What is interesting is how the chain seems to be ‘forwardly informed’ as well as ‘backwardly informed,’ meaning that our presuppositions often provide valuable impetus for discovery, while simultaneously our discoveries invite us to change or refine our presuppositions. Our presuppositions are by no means static; experience molds and crafts them. We find that certain presuppositions weather the fires and floods of life so well as to eventually become extremely reliable. Faith in Christ has been, for me, one such rugged presupposition. This chain, with its cascade of implication and entailment, collectively forms what is often referred to as a “paradigm.” The religious, philosophical, or ideological ocean in which one swims is the natural byproduct of this ambient chain of assumptions and implications. Real critical thinking accelerates, it seems, when we realize that we are in no way immune to paradigms – that neutrality and objectivity are chimeras – and that our own paradigms desperately need scrutinizing in order for us to understand them, to strengthen them, or to change them (that is, repent) if needs be.
So when it comes to Ostler’s book, what is he trying to say? What point(s) is he arguing for? Here are the bold, highlighted points I teased out of this somewhat lengthy book: 1) When the divine distance between God and man is collapsed, God becomes much more rationally comprehensible and spiritually meaningful, 2) The revelations of Joseph Smith paint a picture of cosmic history that is both unique and valuable, 3) Prophetic revelation, of which theology is a child, is inherently messy and, in a word, human.
Let’s start with #3 first, since it becomes something of a precondition for considering the other two in the sense that it comes logically prior, shaping the environment in which they find significance. Read the rest of this entry
Is Sunday School the Forum for Posing Difficult Questions?
We’ve all been there – you’re sitting in Sunday school, comments start flying that demonstrate very little grappling with the big questions of our history and our doctrine, and you want to say something that honestly troubles you, or you want to ask a sincere but provocative question, but you feel like you shouldn’t; you feel like it would make you something of a bull in a china shop.
So you stay quiet.
Some of us can stomach staying quiet, while others of us are more like pressurized canisters that need to find some kind of release. And sometimes we are fresh off of a sense of betrayal because we 
just learned that Joseph Smith married some women who were already married to other men, and no one ever told us this in seminary (assuming we were awake to hear it – a sizable assumption to be sure).
We end up with some members of the church who feel that Sunday school is almost worthless unless we valiantly wade into every difficult and controversial issue that confronts the modern church: polygamy and polyandry, Book of Mormon translation issues, sketchy episodes in church history, questionable doctrines of past church leaders, and so forth. While I greatly sympathize with them, and I eagerly hope for the day when higher quality dialogue takes place among us, I argue that Sunday School, Elders Quorum, and Relief Society are not the right forum for posing these types of questions.
My argument pivots on the meaning and implications of the word worship.
There ought to be a forum where such discussions can take place, but we can’t rightly demand that Sunday services, which exist for the purposes of worship, be a place of scholarly debate about the founding assumptions of the faith community. The Sunday church environment is a place where core worldview assumptions are taken for granted, not argued for, and the express goal of a worship service is to build on those assumptions, not to challenge them.
In general, it is perfectly acceptable to challenge the founding assumptions of any faith community, but you don’t do it in their place of worship, a place where believers have congregated with the Read the rest of this entry
A Distillation of the Arguments against Gay Marriage, with Commentary – Part II
Preface (repeated from Part I):
By reading over a variety of statements made by church leaders and others outside the LDS tradition, I seek to distill the arguments made against gay marriage and evaluate how they stand up to scrutiny. At the outset of this effort, I don’t have a firm and fixed position on this issue; this exploration is for the very purpose of finding that position through careful consideration of the arguments and through a sincere desire to do the right thing. The arguments are analyzed simply in the order in which I came across them upon starting this endeavor, not organized into any sort of hierarchy. My commentary should be seen for what it is: not reflections of a fixed, final position on the question of gay marriage, but rather as the stuff of which a position is gradually formed. It is always open to more information, more arguments, and more revelation; I must always remain open to persuasion, trusting that truth is better found when the varieties of arguments entertained are multiplied, not contracted.
Love is not sufficient cause to instantiate the legal right to marry. This statement is true, but it misses the point. In other words, it is a straw-man argument. It doesn’t capture the real complexity of the issue, nor the real request coming from gay people who want to be recognized by the state as “married.” They are not making so simple a case as saying that merely loving someone should constitute a legal right to marry that person. Their case involves a scenario where two consenting adults, who possess biological wiring that predisposes them to form the most intimate human relationships with people of the same gender, desire to form a long-term bond with each other and have it be equivalent to traditional marriage in the sight of the law. Now, whether this more complex scenario represents sufficient cause to instantiate the legal right to marry is a different question, with a different response. The appropriate response to the reason underlined above, however, is that it is simply a straw-man argument.
Having brought up the subject of legal rights, however, we must confront the question of whether the right to marry is analogous with the right of women to vote and with the rights of blacks to be treated fairly and equally. Making the fight for gay marriage of a piece with women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement is a highly popular and emotionally charged argument. Do these three belong in the same class, however? This is a lengthy debate in and of itself, but here is just one thought for now: there is nothing inherent about a woman that makes her less qualified to vote; there is nothing inherent about blacks that makes them less worthy of dignity and respect in society; there is, however, something inherent about a gay union that makes it fundamentally different than a straight union and thus worthy of differentiation: a gay couple cannot possibly create children together and raise those children as their biological mother and father. Therefore, just as it is not Read the rest of this entry
A Distillation of the Arguments against Gay Marriage, with Commentary – Part I
By reading over a variety of statements made by church leaders and others outside the LDS tradition, I seek to distill the arguments made against gay marriage and evaluate how they stand up to scrutiny. At the outset of this effort, I don’t have a firm and fixed position on this issue; this exploration is for the very purpose of finding that position through careful consideration of the arguments and through a sincere desire to do the right thing. The arguments are analyzed simply in the order in which I came across them upon starting this endeavor, not organized into any sort of hierarchy. My commentary should be seen for what it is: not reflections of a fixed, final position on the question of gay marriage, but rather as the stuff of which a position is gradually formed. It is always open to more information, more arguments, and more revelation; I must always remain open to persuasion, trusting that truth is better found when the varieties of arguments entertained are multiplied, not contracted.
Trust the prophets despite any personal hesitations because “not being ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ includes not being ashamed of the prophets of Jesus Christ.” Here we see a conflation of loyalties: being loyal to “the gospel” is seen as entailing, necessarily, a loyalty to the current set of men who lead the earthly church organization. I see this conflation as being fallacious as well as mildly offensive. The problem I have with this argument is that it obliterates the dignity of spiritual and intellectual freedom, and it brings into equivalence faith in God and faith in men, an equivalence that should never be made. I am supposed to simply “get in line” with the Brethren, even if something they declare seems wrong or misguided according to my discernment. This argument doesn’t recognize the primary importance of personal revelation and loyalty to individual conscience. Now, if the Brethren are united in making a statement, I would do well to pay close attention and give all possible deference to them, insofar as it does not openly conflict with personal spiritual/intellectual freedom. The above argument, in isolation, sounds too much like an Read the rest of this entry
Gay Marriage: Framing the Question
Sometimes our must trying spiritual dilemmas are not when good clashes with bad, but when good clashes with another good.
In an effort to decide where I stand on this most pressing and challenging issue of gay marriage, I first seek out a way to frame the question appropriately. What does it mean to frame it appropriately? I think what I mean by this is that one could dive into the issue directly, hearing the arguments for and against gay marriage, begin making value judgments, begin weighing both sides of the issue, etc.; or, one could first step back and frame the nature of the struggle itself, which involves a fundamentally different train of thought. This train of thought asks meta-level questions that rise above any arguments for and against, addressing instead the contours of the question itself and the categories it invokes.
For instance, instead of presupposing that one side must be ultimately standing in the right, while the other side is standing in the wrong – and our endeavor is to simply sort out who is standing where – it seems that framing the question of gay marriage appropriately begins with asking whether this starting presupposition itself is valid. And I have found that this particular presupposition of a ‘good side’ vs. a ‘bad side’ in the question of gay marriage is fundamentally flawed. This question, in other words, is not reducible to simply sorting out which position is “good” or from God, and which position is not.
Like many of the paradoxes that pervade life, it seems to me that woven into the nature of this question is a good clashing with a good, and we humans are left to sort through the wreckage. On the one hand, we have the good of canonized prophetic revelation – which in no place explicitly addresses gay marriage – but clearly honors heterosexual marriage and seems to imply that we ought not accept Read the rest of this entry
Book Review – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is exactly the kind of book I’ve always had a hard time assessing, and for this reason it becomes all the more important to write about it. “What’s the point of this story?” I often thought while Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi, their journey punctuated by random adventures and misadventures. The story’s meandering style, together with its sheer lack of overt moralizing, combine to give one the impression that here is a story for the sake of a story – nothing more. And perhaps that is what Twain intended. Perhaps he meant it when he said in the preface,
NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
Despite all warnings and advisements, I deliberately plan to run the risk of being prosecuted, banished, and shot. After all, human beings are thoroughly and inescapably moral creatures; they can’t help themselves. Just as our manners of speech – accent, dialect, and so on – betray our upbringing and provenance, so our writings and our stories betray our presuppositions about life and its meaning. As long as our stories depict people making choices and responding to the world around them, morality and philosophy are going to seep through. And of course, the absence of a moral code is just as much a guiding philosophy as is any strict religious creed. Neutrality turns out to be an impossibility.
Having said that, I don’t think we can reduce our analysis of a piece of literature to a mere appraisal of its underlying philosophy, to the exclusion of all other possibly noble and interesting attributes. Read the rest of this entry
Chiasmus in the Plan of Salvation
Chiasmus is a poetic literary structure that has been identified in texts going back almost 3,000 years. Chiasmus is a form of inverted parallelism where a sequence of ideas is laid out, then at some point the sequence repeats itself, but in reverse order. Simple and short chiasms can happen by accident or without much effort; complex ones are invariably deliberate and skillful. Examples of chiasmus have been found in various Greek and Middle Eastern writings, but particularly in Hebrew, with many examples found in the Old Testament.
Modern biblical scholars didn’t start noticing chiasmus in the Bible until the middle of the nineteenth century, and not until the 1960’s was chiasmus identified in many places throughout the Book of Mormon also. Alma chapter 36 contains a striking example – one that is lengthy, densely woven into the text, and features as its point of inversion the saving power of Jesus Christ, thus enhancing the meaning of Alma’s conversion story in the chapter. At the same time, it suggests an ancient origin for the Book of Mormon given the flat implausibility of Joseph Smith in the 1820’s crafting such instances of chiasmus on the basis of his own knowledge and skill. Here are two examples of chiasmus, one from the Old Testament, and one from the Book of Mormon:
Isaiah 6:10
a. Make the heart of this people fat,
….b. and make their ears heavy,
……..c. and shut their eyes,
……..c’. lest they see with their eyes,
….b’. and hear with their ears,
a’. and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.
Addicted to the Spectacle
Last night I found myself with a rare 1 ½ hours of free time and a desire to kick back and make use of my Netflix subscription. Browsing through the documentaries section (which is pretty much the
sole saving grace of Netflix these days), I ran across this intriguing title, “Lord, Save Us from Your Followers.” A couple Friday nights ago I stayed up until 1am watching a spate of Bill Maher YouTube videos, trying to understand where this man is coming from in light of his repeated invectives leveled at Christianity. The title of the Netflix documentary seemed to suggest that it contained the same sort of Bill Maher-like argumentation that Christians are mostly hypocrites, and Christianity (like all religion) is an antiquated philosophical construct, outdated in our modern, enlightened age.
What I got was not a critique of the Christian philosophical worldview, but a stinging rebuke of Christian hypocrisy…from a believing Christian.
But it was more than this. Dan Merchant, the maker of the film, highlights also the immense good that many Christians are doing quietly, softly, behind the scenes – just as the Gospel requires of us. So the film was not meant to bash Christians, but to highlight how Christian messaging to the outside world is often times deplorable, either because of obvious hypocrisy on the part of Christians or because of clear misunderstandings by Christians of their own Gospel. Essentially none of the unbelievers interviewed in the film had a problem with Jesus or with Christianity per se, but rather with the cultural incarnation of Christianity that often comes across as intolerant, unloving, uncaring, self-righteous, and exclusivist. That is, all the things Jesus wasn’t.
So, at least a couple things came out of the experience for me. First, a realization that most of the popular voices we tend to hear in the so-called “culture wars” between social conservatives and social liberals in America are not very representative of the American people themselves. The voices most often heard in the public square are the most polarizing ones, the most extreme, the most provocative. We seem to be addicted the spectacle, but it does not represent who we are as a people, by and large. I have a personal confession to make: I have too often assumed the worst in others, particularly my Protestant Christian brothers and sisters. I have too often assumed that any strong, believing Christian I meet is going to be antagonistic toward my Mormon faith. Why must I constantly anticipate conflict? I am buying into the interpretive framework of the polarizers, a framework that calls for continued defensiveness, a continual readiness to engage. It is all founded on pride.
Basically, I need to have more faith in people; more faith that our better natures will prevail more often than they will not. If we begin with divisiveness, of course division is what we will find. There is no more obvious law than this. The hermeneutic of suspicion always terminates in the rhetoric of contention. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is another way of saying that we have a choice in how to proceed. It is unfortunate that the polarizing voices tend to dominate the airwaves, but we can choose whether or not to imbibe their rhetoric. And when disagreement comes, which it always does and always should in a diverse republic such as ours, we should start by having a conversation instead of a contest. I think most of America intuitively understands this; we just have to find a way to shake our addiction to the spectacle of contention.
