Apparently, you can’t say polygamy was not God’s will. But you can say that a male-only priesthood is not God’s will. Go figure.
Month: August 2010
God and Science
The conflict between science and religion is generally overstated. But it is certainly true that science is the matrix that most people of our day — believers or not — use as the basis for understanding the natural world we live in. Atheists and agnostics stop there; believers add a supplemental layer of faith to their view of the universe that includes a doctrine or idea of God and that reflects a view or theory of how God acts (or doesn’t act) in the natural world. So does science strengthen our faith or threaten it? Is it easier or tougher to be a believer in the age of modern science than, say, the time of Hellenistic philosophy and paganism or the early modern era of demonology and witch-hunts? This general question of achieving faith while living in the age of modern science is the subject of physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne’s book Belief in God in the Age of Science. The book is based on a series of visiting lectures delivered at Yale in 1996, so it is a short book aimed at a general audience rather than a detailed work of theology. But it asks the right questions and…
Sunday School Lesson 33: Jonah 1-4: Micah 2, 4-7
This is another long set of study notes. I have adapted parts of them from a set of notes that Arthur Bassett made several years ago—but don’t hold Art responsible for any mistakes you see here. They are probably mine. I will provide study notes for both sets of readings, that from Jonah and that from Micah, but I will concentrate my notes on the book of Jonah. With this lesson we begin to study a group of writings called the Minor Prophets. Jews divide the Hebrew Bible (what we call “the Old Testament,” but what is probably more accurately called “the First Testament”) into the Law (the first five books of the First Testament, also called the Pentateuch), the Writings (parts of which are also called “Wisdom Literature”; the Writings consist of Psalms, Proverbs, Job, The Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles), and the Prophets (Joshua, Judges Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—the Major Prophets—and Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zepheniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—the Minor Prophets) . The terms “Major Prophets” and “Minor Prophets” have nothing to do with the relative importance of the prophets in question. The…
“War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives” Proposal Deadline Sept. 1
I recently received an email asking “if the LDS Church has an official (or unofficial) Social Doctrine, similarly to other churches”. In this and many areas, the Church has little in the way of an official position, and this wisely allows for a rich and diverse discussion among Mormons about how the Gospel should shape our participation in society and politics. I am excited to see such a discussion of Mormon perspectives on war and peace is being planned for this spring
Sunday School Lesson 32: Job
Word Biblical Commentary quotes this very nice poem from W. H. Auden, “Thomas Epilogises”: Where Job squats awkwardly upon his ashpit, Alone on his denuded battlefield, Scraping himself with blunted Occam Razors He sharpened once to shave the Absolute . . . Eliphaz, Zophar, Bildad rise together, Begin to creak a wooden sarabande; “Glory to God,” they cry, and praise his Name In epigrams that trail off in a stammer. Suave Death comes, final as a Händel cadence, And snaps their limbs like twigs across his knees, Silenus nods, his finger to his nose. One lesson on Job and, so, about one week of reading and thinking about it rather than several months is so little that it is difficult to know what to do. The scholarly material on Job is enormous. The Anchor Bible volume on Job is over 400 pages long. In Word Biblical Commentary, the bibliography of recommended reading runs to 53 pages, and there are additional bibliographies for each of the commentary’s subsections. However, even if we ignore the scholarly material in the interest of focusing on the book as material for Sunday School and for self-reflection and meditation, a week is scarcely long enough.…
Temples & Mosques & Zoning
Although I grew up in the Washington D.C. suburbs when the Temple was being built, I don’t remember the controversy and protests to its construction, since I was just a deacon when it was dedicated. I’ve been told that there were objections from the neighbors — one of the early examples of what has become a very normal part of constructing a Temple both in and outside of the U.S.
Myth and Ritual
Like some of you, I’ve been reading a book or two on the Old Testament, this year’s Sunday School course of study. Most recently I read Susan Niditch’s Ancient Israelite Religion (OUP, 1997), described in the jacket blurb as “a perceptive, accessible account of the religious beliefs and practices of the ancient Israelites.” Too often our approach to the Old Testament is essentially cherrypicking — highlighting passages that affirm our own beliefs and understanding while skimming over or simply ignoring everything else. We can do better. Niditch takes a worldview approach, suggesting we ought to strive to see how the Israelites saw the world as a way to understand Israelite religion. Myth and ritual are two aspects of this “worldview analysis,” which, along with experience and ethics, form the template Niditch uses to examine the Israelite worldview revealed by the texts of the Hebrew Bible and by surviving archeological artifacts. I’ll touch on a few of the points Niditch makes under each category, then do a quick comparison with LDS religion. The Experiential. “The experiential dimension has to do with direct experiences of the numinous — visions, trances, messages from God, and more subtle indications of a divine presence” (p.…
Where Is Mormonism Headed?
That theme is addressed from many different angles in The Future of Mormonism series at Patheos. It might be the best online event on Mormonism I’ve seen, with contributors drawn from across the Mormon spectrum. Here are a few highlights. Mormonism in the New Century by Armand Mauss — Mauss sees the retrenchment-assimilation pendulum swinging back toward assimilation as the Church moves into the 21st century. He lists several signs of this “new posture of diplomatic outreach by the church leadership.” Mormon Publishing, the Internet, and the Democratization of Information by Kristine Haglund — Dialogue’s editor weighs in on “the challenges facing Mormon publishing.” Like blogs, which Haglund rather coyly describes as showing “that people really like to hear themselves talk.” I like her suggestion that the bottom-up efforts of independent journals and blogs may help Mormonism develop a “framework for engaging the ever-broadening discourse about Mormonism in the new media world.” Partnering with our Friends from Other Faiths by Elder Quentin L. Cook — And it came to pass in the year 2010 the people beheld the first apostolic blog post. Elder Cook sounds an interfaith message, endorsing “a mutual respect for each other’s beliefs and a desire to…
Perceptions of Mormonism
The Deseret News posted an article (“Mormons need to work to increase favor“) summarizing remarks by Gary Lawrence at the recent FAIR Conference held last week in Sandy. He addressed perceptions of Mormonism, based on data gathered by his polling firm. We’ve got some problems, it seems.
Farewell and Thanks from a Bad Blogger
As I mentioned in my first post, I was reluctant to be a guest blogger, mainly because I doubted I’d have anything to add to the conversation. I also didn’t realize then that this blog is as active as it is– the other blog I sometimes contribute to almost never elicits more than a couple of comments, alas– and I’m afraid I haven’t kept up with and answered some comments as I should have. For me, though, it’s been an interesting experience, and has given me a lot to think about. And I’ve been gratified by the friendly, engaged, and welcoming manner of most of the contributors. My week is up (and I’m off on a short, foreign vacation tomorrow– as soon as church is over, of course), but I appreciate having had the privilege of trying to be your guest blogger for the past few days. Keep the faith, and keep up the good fight!
Instruction as Worship
It’s no secret that we Mormons aren’t big on praise worship in our meetings. You won’t hear any “hallelujahs” or “amens” in our sacrament meetings. And that’s fine for us. I think that members of our church tend to believe that worship is best accomplished through living in accordance to God’s commandments — that obedience expresses reverence. And since “righteous living” is difficult to perform in a Sunday meeting (as opposed to, say, praise), we settle for the next best thing: instructing each other toward righteous living. Now the fact that we spend our church meetings in preaching rather than praising isn’t news, but I’ve just come to realize how pervasive instruction-as-worship is our church. In all the places traditionally associated with worship-through-praise, we instead tend to worship through instruction. This is obvious in our Sunday meetings, general conferences, and temples, but it’s also true of our less formal religious gatherings — in our home and visiting teaching, in our family home evenings, and in our youth programs. Back in high school I spent an evening at the home of a Christian friend. After dinner, the father gathered the family together for a family worship service. It was different from…
Faith and Reason as Moral Ideals
The sense of many today that faith is antithetical to reason grows partly out of the Reformation and Enlightenment, in which people on both sides found they could not intellectually reconcile the conclusions of faith and reason. Just as importantly, faith and reason each came to represent a different moral ideal. As I see them, though, the moral ideals of faith and reason only make sense together,
Sunday School Lesson 31: Proverbs and Ecclesiastes
I laughed when I saw what this lesson covers, “only” slightly less than 16,000 words in Proverbs and slightly more than 23,000 words in Ecclesiastes. If we have the full 40 minutes, that means we should try to cover the content of about 1,000 words per minute (assuming that we don’t have opening or closing prayers and that we don’t do any introductions or visiting—and that Sacrament meeting ends as scheduled). Obviously we cannot look at everything in these books in Sunday School class. Equally obvious is that if we spend fifteen minutes to an hour a day studying the assigned material, we will be able to get read both books. But it will be difficult to spend much time actually studying them. Because it is so seldom read and talked about, and because it is such a beautiful book, I am going to focus my study notes on Ecclesiastes. This time, however, my notes will consist primarily of a synopsis of how I read Ecclesiastes rather than questions about it. I hope my notes will help you study that book during the week before the lesson. To use these notes to study the Book of Ecclesiastes, read a chapter…
Mormonism within Christianity; Christianity within Mormonism
Every so often the question “Are Mormons Christians?” gets batted around; the question has probably grown tedious for many. The discussions I’ve heard or read, though, usually leave me dissatisfied, in part because they treat Mormonism as if it were some unitary thing of definite and agreed upon content, and then argue about whether that unitary thing should be placed in the general category of “Christianity.” To me this approach seems false to the more complicated reality, and it misses the ways in which the question of Mormonism within Christianity is not just an abstract theological issue, or a polemical point (one that gets made in connection with Mitt Romney, for example, or Prop 8) but a live and important personal issue– at least for some of us. Here I venture, with trepidation, onto ground that some contributors to this blog have certainly traveled and charted more carefully than I have. But my own judgment has long been that Mormonism has elements and teachings that fit well with historic Christianity, and it has other elements that are more distinctively or even uniquely “Mormon” and that are pretty hard to square with historic Christianity. I think of the Book of Mormon–…
Ripples in History
I recently finished Victor Davis Hanson’s Ripples of Battle (Doubleday, 2003), with the give-it-all-away subtitle How wars of the past still determine how we fight, how we live, and how we think. Generalizing a bit, not just wars but many major events and some small, unnoticed ones send ripples into the future, silently influencing future generations. Could the present, our present, have turned out differently?
Antichrist to an Antichrist
I’m currently through the beginning of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. I like what I’ve read, and I’ve identified a few possible Nietzschean approaches to Mormonism. Joseph and Neitzsche as two men whose respective philosophies are fundamentally similar. Latter-Day-Saintism as Nietzsche’s “Revaluation of All Values”. Joseph as a realization of Neitzsche’s ubermensch. Now I’m no educated philosopher, and I’m only basically familiar with Nietzsche’s work. That said, here we go. 1. Joseph and Neitzsche as two men whose respective philosophies are fundamentally similar. Nietzsche’s states that “it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted” (1.1), and that “the sense of truthfulness, developed highly by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history” (1.2). Joseph expresses similar feelings in his youthful response to Christianity, saying, “[N]otwithstanding the great love which the converts to these different faiths [Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist] expressed at the time of their conversion, and the great zeal manifested by the respective clergy…it was seen that the seemingly good feelings of both the priests and the converts were more pretended than real…that all their good feelings one for another, if they ever had…