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lifeafterthewatchtower · 6 years ago

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Mormons vs. Jehovah’s Witnesses Part 01 // Priestly class and leadership

This post series is based on a fascinating discussion I had with @markruscianism on the topic of “Thought Crime” (see the original posts here and here). Turned out they were baptized Mormon and in one of their replies shared a lot of information on the LDS church and how it is structured and organized.

Since I didn't know too much about Mormonism, I thought I'll compare what they wrote to Jehovah's Witness doctrine and practices and share some insight on how the Watchtower Bible And Tract Society does things.

I don’t want to leave anything out but also don’t want to flood the dashes with post even longer than my usual texts, so I split it up into smaller parts. Here’s part one.

Markcruscianism wrote: "For reference, I was a baptized Mormon for a period in late teens/early twenties. I never agreed fully with all of their teachings, and always disliked the intellectual climate. The establishment of a “priestly class” (used here loosely) can cause a lot of problems. The LDS (Mormon) church tried to escape this with their structure of teachers and Bishops, but in the end, they just ended up moving the “priestly class” further up the hierarchy, even more inaccessible and unaccountable than a local Bishop would have been. (...) Mormons consider most of the men who give (...) talks to be Prophets"

My reply: I was never baptized Jehovah’s Witness. But I was born into this religion and was part of this organization during all my childhood and teenage years. I faded away in my early twenties. I was an unbaptized publisher and part of the (now discontinued) “Theocratic Ministry School”. I never really conformed with all JW teachings, but as a believer I hated myself for not doing so. Which eventually - after about 15 years after I left - made me re-evaluate my religious upbringing. I fully agree: Putting human beings in charge of spiritual matters can become problematic. Jehovah's Witnesses claim to not have any sort of human leadership (or priests for that matter). A claim that is - mildly speaking - questionable. Actually, it's a lie. At least when JWs use it as a way to set the Society apart from other religious organizations.

JWs are organized hierarchical. At the time of writing, the leading figures are/is the so called "Governing Body", which consists of eight members - all men. They make all the decisions concerning the organization. In 1943 the GB was announced as the "legal governing body" of anointed Jehovah's Witnesses, but its real function was somehow undefined, because until January 1976, it was the president of the Watchtower Bible And Tract Society who had complete control of doctrines, publications and activities. More on that to be found here. On a lower level there are branch-overseers, circuit-overseers, elders ("congregation overseers"), Ministerial Servants (assistants of the elders), publishers (baptized JWs), and unbaptized publishers. None of them have any influence on anything the Society decides. Overseers and elders are “the sheperds”.

The publishers are divided into two groups: regular publishers and pioneers. Pioneers are publishers, who are held in high esteem. They make a living on their own but somehow manage to do a lot more "field service" than the "usual JW". To my knowledge there are no written rules but regular publishers are expected to do around 10 hours of field service per month. Pioneers around a 100 hours per month. All the branch- and circuit-overseers are employees of the Watchtower Society and are full-time traveling Witnesses who visit congregations and give talks and ... well... do their overseer work. They are - sort of - “mega-elders”, directly in contact with the JW headquarters or branch-offices. Those JWs who work in the headquarter, or one of the branches, are called Bethelites because they work in the “Bethel” (the name of the headquarter). I don't know if they are required to be pioneers. But basically they are regular baptized JWs who "just" work for the Society. But because they work in the Bethel they are also held in high esteem. Some fascinating insight on Bethel work in Ray Franz' book "Crisis of conscience", in which he shares a lot of information based on his status of being a member of the Governing Body before he left. Also very interesting info in Barbara Anderson's book "Witness to deceit". Barbara Anderson used to work as a researcher for the writing department, and has lots of insight to share.

Until late 2012, the Governing Body described itself as the representative and "spokesman" for God's "faithful and discreet slave class", a class of 144.000 allegedly “anointed by God” Witnesses (who have “heavenly calling”), and who are - according to 1972, April 1st Watchtower magazine, "the modern-day “prophet”, the spirit-begotten, anointed ones who are the nucleus of Jehovah’s Witnesses today" and who - according to the 1986, May 15th WT - claim to be the "channel for new spiritual light". Interestingly enough, the Governing Body is the only group of people, who formulates policy and doctrines or approves material for publications and conventions but the majority of so called “anointed Witnesses” have no authority to contribute to the development or change of doctrines. They are not consulted, but even instructed to "stay modest" and not "wildly speculating about things that are still unclear" (1997, June 1st WT). Basically, anointed JWs who are not part of the Governing Body are just regular JWs, who don’t even have the status like a typical elder or Ministerial Servant. Just as every other JW, they have to accept whatever the WT tells them to do, say, and believe. Also interesting that there are indeed women among the anointed. But throughout JW history none of these so called anointed women was ever part of the Governing Body. How does an anointed JW know that they are indeed one of the "chosen ones"? They just know. That is the explanation. The Watchtower warned that not everyone who claims to be anointed is indeed anointed and admits that they do not know how many of the 144.000 anointed are still on earth. As mentioned, in 2012 the Watchtower changed its doctrine again, and declared the "Governing Body" to be the "faithful and discreet slave". So they do not claim to be the "spokesman" of a class that is said to be God's channel anymore, but to BE this channel. A huge but actually merely technical change because "the anointed" who were not part of the Governing Body never were involved in development or change of doctrine anyway, but nevertheless this change put much more spotlight on "the eight men". How to become part of the Governing Body? They appoint and invite people. Sometimes these were family members. Like Ray Franz who was Fred Franz’ nephew. So there are eight men who decide everything and claim they have direct connection to God, eight men who - by democratic vote - decide what will be done or not be done (Ray Franz, a former Governing Body member describes this quite interestingly in his book "Crisis of conscience"). Where's the difference to other religions that have priests and popes, and whatnot, who also claim to directly get God's instructions? Why are those religions with human leadership and JWs are not? Needless to say that none of the leading figures (from Ministerial Servant up to member of the Governing Body) has any sort of credentials, specific education or training, or any sort of scholarship other than that they know JW doctrine. So - if we want to put it this way - the better you can parrot JW teaching and the more time and effort you put into organizational work, the better your chances are to climb the JW hierarchical ladder. (Only if you’re a man of course). Being a JW is not about discussing the Bible (or “theology” for that matter), it’s not about growing and evolving. It’s about accepting what the leadership tells you and to parrot that. But more on that in future posts.

In the next part: Bible study and Supplemental material

#Mormonism #lds church #Jehovah's Witnesses #jehovah's witness #ex jw #comparison #markcruscianism #my writing

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gracewillcarryme · 7 years ago

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Oh also, you guys should know I’m considering leaving the LDS church. For real this time.

The policy change anniversary... snapped me out of my idealistic haze, honestly. It’s no secret that I’ve always disagreed with the church’s positions on same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships, and gender identity.

When I went back to church that hadn’t changed. I just thought I could put it aside. That maybe the church could change. I could be a force of good from the inside. What I disagreed about could be put to the side. But it can’t.

I can’t ignore the theology I fundamentally disagree with. I can’t put aside that the LDS church teaches that if you are gay you must remain celibate. I can’t put aside the fact that the loving, Christ-following same sex couples I know and adore are wrong and sinful in the eyes of the church. For being who they are. I can’t ignore the plight of trans members. I can’t keep hoping that change will come when the church is actively moving in the opposite direction.

I have a strong, unshakeable testimony of a loving God and our Saviour in Jesus Christ. These things... don’t add up with that knowledge.

If I’m being honest, the only reason I’m going to church on Sunday is so that I don’t hang the other Gospel Doctrine teacher out to dry.

I haven’t made a final decision yet, but if I leave, this time it’s for good, unless something fundamentally changes within the institution.

I understand this isn’t how a lot of you feel, and I think that’s wonderful. Do what makes each of you happy. This is just my lived experience.

I love you all. You’re in my prayers, always.

#queerstake #personal #theres also this one piece of dumb doctrine thats been bugging me since I learnt it #but thats not whh I’m leaving kt just pisses me off

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seekingheavenlymother-blog · 6 years ago

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While I no longer remember the exact words my house mate said to me on that day, I remember her fervor. As she sat perched on the edge of her bed, expressing her sadness that not everyone knew they had a loving Heavenly Father and a Savior who died for them, I thought of my Mother – the Heavenly Mother, so unknown and oft-ignored, yet so powerful and vitally important to my testimony. It was that testimony that had brought me to this point, serving as a missionary in Santiago, Chile. I had chosen to serve a mission for many reasons, but among them was my belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ as the most empowering, ennobling force for good in the world. A key element of its empowering nature is found in the belief that godliness and divinity is not only for men, but for all of God’s children, as reflected by the existence of Heavenly Parents. To leave out one of our Heavenly Parents is to lose one of the most beautiful truths the gospel contains – and yet, this omission occurs often.

It is hard to say at what precise moment I became aware of my Mother’s existence. It certainly did not occur in my Primary classes, where we learned about the all-male Godhead. It also did not come from my years in the youth program, where all the young women recited every week about their identity as daughters of a Heavenly Father. The only clue I have as to the beginnings of my awareness is a piece of wrinkled paper I found among my childhood things. On the paper is drawn a family tree. It lists my immediate family and extends off into other beloved relatives. At the top is listed, “Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother, and Jesus.” In my rough, childhood handwriting, I found the beginnings of my testimony of my Mother. I remember that as a young child, I asked a relative about my Heavenly Mother and was told that she was too sacred to discuss. This standard, doctrinally incorrect response given to questioners who go seeking for traces of her was acceptable to my young mind. For years, my thoughts of her dimmed to a dull awareness in the back of my subconscious. I testified from the pulpit of the Father and the Son; I celebrated their plans for me as outlined in my patriarchal blessing. For a long time, I was happy without answers. I was complacently content.

It was when I was fourteen that my journey truly began in earnest. I did my Faith project for the Personal Progress program on the priesthood. I wanted to confront the controversial questions regarding women and the priesthood head-on, especially since gender issues had begun to appear in my life during my early adolescent years. I compiled a binder, overflowing with documents, that contained everything from scripture references to blog posts on the subject. I felt satisfied. At that time, I still did not recognize my hunger for Mother, but I had already begun my search. I had studied priesthood because I wanted to understand power, and in order to understand power, I needed to know its source. Therefore, questions regarding the priesthood, church policies, gender roles, and all other doctrinally-based discussions related to womanhood were all stepping stones in the journey.

At sixteen, I again became conscious of my questions while in the car with a friend whose husband had left the LDS Church. She did not know everything about our religion, but she knew a lot – and she definitely knew why her husband had left years before he married her. She never told me exactly why, but I came to understand that it had something to do with equality. She asked me questions about temples and gender, but I did not have answers for her. As I myself had not been endowed, I did not know what happened in sacred temple rituals or if any of the rumors she had told me were true. I was unsettled, uneasy, and concerned. Again, questions filled my mind about power and the worth of women.

At the age of seventeen, I was looking for answers to these questions when I found my Mother. She was tucked in the pages of a piece reconciling doctrines related to women and ideas of equality – it was a faithful feminist theology. Mother was an integral part of it, and I rejoiced. I came to see her as the counterpart to Father – which she literally is, of course. Rather than simply try to understand what power men had and why I did not have it, I began to think in terms of my own power as a woman and where it came from, as well as how it could be manifested. My journals filled with pages seeking for knowledge and explanations. I drew, I diagrammed, I outlined. More than anything, I was happy. I had a Mother and a Father, and they loved me.

It was at age eighteen that everything shifted once more. I had just started college, and I was seeking to find my path in the world. The experiences of new people and new places opened my mind to bigger problems than I had encountered at home. The answers that had once seemed satisfying were now inadequate. If women had a Mother and were empowered to become like her, where was the power and where was the Mother? I felt a physical ache that would not go away. I cried and prayed and pleaded. Were men destined to become gods, but women destined only to be priestesses and helpmates? Where were the answers?

As I look back now, I blush at my impatience. So many other questioners have spent years and lifetimes asking and suffering. Much of their work that was born out of their struggles was essential to me as I began my own search. After three weeks of nausea and confusion, I was blessed with a measure of peace. I say only a measure, because to come to the awareness of the Mother and then see how forgotten she is by her children, one is never fully at peace again. Nevertheless, this measure of peace did come, and it gave me the strength to push on. It did not bring me all the answers, but it strengthened my convictions enough to motivate me to search for them. Re-established firmly in my mind was the truth that equality is innate – men and women, my male counterparts and I, the Father and the Mother. The two halves must be equal, for everything has its balancing force. To weaken and degrade one half was to endanger the whole. Yet, now that I had my convictions firmly in place, the questions were even more pressing. If they were equal, why was she absent? Where was she? What had happened?

Just as I had done for my Faith project years before, I began to search. I found blog posts and poems and articles and artwork. At about this time, the Church published an essay about Heavenly Mother, and I rejoiced. I devoured it, I shared it, and I celebrated it, but I did not pause. I displayed quotes from church leaders on my dorm room door that gave evidence of her existence. I shared copies of the essay with every woman in my hall. I began to include the words “Heavenly Parents” in every single testimony I bore from the pulpit. I continued my search for her as I prepared to serve a mission. As I boarded the plane to the Mexico City Missionary Training Center, I carried a copy of the Heavenly Mother essay in my luggage. For me, it was more than just a reminder of her existence; it was also a reminder of who I was, what I could become, and the testimony I had that motivated me to serve.

It was in the early part of my mission in Santiago, Chile that I sat and listened to that eager house mate, so anxious to tell the world of her Father and Elder Brother, but so wholly apathetic to the presence of her Mother. Her testimony, though beautiful, grated against my heart, reminding me of the absence of my divine counterpart. Though I had found her, it seemed that few others were even searching.

It was months later that my companion, the young missionary I was training, bluntly and loudly told me that Heavenly Mother was important, but Heavenly Father was God. Eve was subject to Adam, women were subject to their husbands, and that was the way things were. Her proclamations were so bold, so disturbing, and so deeply painful. It was so odd to hear such an empowered, fiery young woman declare with resolve her subordinated status, both here on earth and in the eternities. No matter what I said, she would not hear me, would not listen, would not feel what I felt. She made it clear that she had no interest; she was convinced that there was nothing to be known about our Mother. The reaction I received from her was the most painful rejection of my mission – far more heart-wrenching than any door slammed in my face.

Despite this painful experience, I persevered in my journey. I continued to keep copies of the Church essay with me, as it was the only Church approved resource about Her that I could find. I had copies of it in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. I was ready to present it to any fellow missionary that showed the least bit of interest in knowing their Mother. Eventually, I was inspired to share knowledge of Heavenly Mother with a few members as well – most of whom were converts and had never even heard of her before. As I did so, I kept reminding myself: “if not now, when? If not me, who?” How else would they come to know their Mother if I did not share? Most of my experiences were overwhelmingly positive. While a few members showed disinterest, most responded with joy, happiness, and surprise that they had not learned of her before. It seemed to them that knowledge of her was important and inspiring.

At about this time, the Church produced a new missionary pamphlet about families and temples. The opening paragraph talked all about our Heavenly Parents. It was the first missionary resource outside of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” to even acknowledge her existence. It was a valuable tool for me in my efforts to spread knowledge of her. I quoted the opening paragraph in a Church talk, and I used it for my spiritual thought after meals with members. I gave copies of the pamphlet whenever I could and urged members to study it with their families. While I still spent most of my days testifying of only the Father and the Son, the moments of my mission when I spoke of my Mother are the ones that changed me the most.

After eighteen months of service, I completed my mission. The year that followed was filled with more searching, questioning, and learning. More books had been published, filled with poetry and light and love for the Mother, since I had last been home. I eagerly tore through the pages, finding others who, like me, had felt her absence and longed for her presence. As I sought for direction about how to continue with my life, I realized that I wanted my search for my Heavenly Mother to be a central part of it. I wanted to help others who questioned their power and worth as women to come to know her. More than anything, I wanted to discover why she had gone missing from our collective memory and testimony as a Church, and thereby find a way to restore her to her rightful place in our religious understanding.

Almost exactly a year after my return home from my mission, I agreed to do an interview with a student researcher on Latter-day Saint cultural beliefs about Heavenly Mother. It was in that interview that I came to an incredible realization. As I explained to her my way of connecting to Heavenly Mother, a phrase fell out of my mouth that took me by surprise. “For me, research is a form of worship.” As I heard myself say the words, they rang true. Heavenly Mother is not explicitly mentioned in any official ordinance, any frequent practice, any corner of our temples, any page of our canonical scriptures, or any element of our normal, everyday experience as Church members (outside of an occasional reference to Heavenly Parents). However, my act of seeking for her in each of these places and in the voices of other disciples had become my act of worship and adoration. Research – the act of seeking information, recording it, analyzing it, and searching for more – had become a habit to me when it came to my Heavenly Mother. I never stopped searching, seeking, or asking. I never let a setback stop me. I had come to know of my Mother, and I would never let her go.

As I reflect back on my house mate who so boldly proclaimed her love for the Father and the Son and her desire to serve a mission to share her knowledge of them, I now feel a bit of gratitude along with my pain. I too love the Father and the Son and seek to share my knowledge of them. That was part of the reason I chose to serve a mission for eighteen months. I recognize in myself the same feeling she had – but for me, it is not only for the Father and the Son. It is for the Mother, too.

Though I no longer wear a name tag, have no official mantle, and have been given no formal call to serve by my Church, I find myself once again on a mission. This is a mission for my Heavenly Mother. I bear her image, I carry her spiritual DNA, and I have the potential to one day become like her. I am her daughter, she is my Mother, and this is my lifelong calling. While I will also spend my life proclaiming the truth about my Heavenly Father and my elder brother Jesus Christ, I recognize that in those missions I am joined by the millions. In the mission for my Mother, those of us who serve are far and few between. Yet, we are persistent. We believe that by questioning, we have received answers; by searching, we have become enlightened. Now that we have been given the gift of knowing, we cannot – we will not – turn away.

The doctrine of the gospel of Jesus Christ is indeed powerful, transformative, and uplifting. It is for everyone, always. There are no exceptions to the plan of God – it is for all. However, I have come to know that we cannot harness its full power unless we include our Mother in our doctrinal consideration. Learning to live like our Heavenly Parents requires coming to know both of them. The pathway may not seem obvious – Heavenly Mother is not found in manuals or Church magazines. However, it is in taking the unseen path that we learn to rely upon the Spirit. It is in following the questions of our heart and soul that we find what our true mission in this life may be. In my searching, I found not only my Mother, but also myself. I learned why I am here, at this moment and in this time.

I have been called to serve by Her. Her truth, Her existence, and Her love I will proclaim.

#journey of faith #kayla bach #lds #mormon #the church of jesus christ of latter day saints #tumblrstake #heavenly parents #heavenly mother #seeking heavenly mother

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sharionpage · 6 years ago

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Thoughts on Sam Young, Excommunication, and Responding to Internal Dissent

This past week Sam Young announced that he had been excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for his aggressive advocacy to change the youth interview process. In Sam Young’s excommunication letter, he was informed by his Stake Presidency that:

The issue is not that you have concerns–or even that you disagree with the Church’s guidelines, rather it is your persistent, aggressive effort to persuade others to your point of view by repeatedly and deliberately attacking and publicly opposing the Church and its leaders. You are entitled to your opinion or position, but you cannot remain a member in good standing while attacking the Church and its leaders and trying to get others to follow you.

Over at By Common Consent, Steve Evans shared his reactions to this line of reasoning:

In my opinion, what we fear in this church is not necessarily truth-telling, or change, or even public expressions or protests. What we fear is ceding control and authority, destabilizing our structure. This organization depends on a few cultural elements for its ongoing survival, and hierarchy is part of that culture. Sam Young was able, quite safely, to decry the practice of bishops’ interviews. What was the line he crossed that brought him into church discipline and excommunication? Quite simply, it was his refusal to stop when his local leaders asked him to stop. It has little to do with his activities and everything to do with his disregard (perceived or real) for the order of the church. …

This is the cardinal sin within Mormonism, for activists: failing to recognize the authority of leaders. You can say whatever you want, act as you please. But when your leaders call you to heel, you best step in line. This is because our church depends on this authority from top to bottom. It is infused in our culture and our discourse. Presiding authority is commemorated in our church programs. Authority and “keys” are invoked in almost every meeting, every week. Even the act Young decried, bishops’ interviews, are an exercise in authority. So, Young’s refusal to comply with leadership goes right to the heart of the contemporary church. The public spectacle engineered around his discipline is only further evidence of the central offense. Young demonstrated that his movement was more important to him than perceived loyalty to the institution.

At the Flunking Sainthood blog for Religion News Service, Jana Riess writes:

In recent years, the driving factor that distinguishes excommunicants from those of us who merely voice our disagreements seems to be whether we have started a movement around our ideas. Sam Young, for example, founded the website Protect LDS Children, organized a hunger strike for three weeks, and called news conferences to publicize his position.

If there’s a change between the LDS excommunications of a quarter century ago and the ones we’ve seen more recently, it’s that the people singled out now have all started organizations and active protests, rather than simply writing about controversial or inconvenient facts of history, like D. Michael Quinn did in 1993.

Last fall I attended a political science conference where Dr. Gary King shared his research about how the Chinese Communist Party exercises control over the social media activity of its citizens. When people share posts that are critical of the regime in power, they often find that their posts are deleted by government censors:

We found that the government does not engage on controversial issues (they do not censor criticism or fabricate posts that argue with those who disagree with the government), but they respond on an emergency basis to stop collective action (with censorship, fabricating posts with giant bursts of cheerleading-type distractions, responding to citizen grievances, etc.). They don’t care what you think of them or say about them; they only care what you can do. [LINK]

In other words, “the Chinese government doesn’t regularly respond if someone says on the internet that the government is full of scoundrels, but if someone says ‘the government is full of scoundrels so let’s meet up next Saturday to do a public demonstration in favor of clean government’ the Chinese internet monitors will quickly remove the social media post.”

…

I can’t help but be struck by the parallels. When we in Western liberal democracies see political governments treating outspoken critics the same way that the LDS Church treats its outspoken critics, we call it “authoritarianism” and we don’t usually applaud it. Indeed, we often condemn these governments for violating human rights. We don’t (until recently) hold them up as model citizens of the world community.

To be sure, private religious institutions are not liberal democratic governments and are in no way obligated or expected to provide their members the same freedom of speech, expression, and assembly as liberal democratic governments. In free liberal democracies, private organizations are free to structure themselves undemocratically if they like. One of the blessings of the Enlightenment and secularism, however, is that religious organizations are no longer empowered to deprive someone of life, liberty, or property on account of their opinions or public speech. Usually, the most they can formally do is kick them out.

And yet… it still makes me uncomfortable that the modern LDS method of dealing with internal dissent has such strong parallels with global authoritarian regimes. At the very least, I would think that this should give us pause and prompt some deep self-reflection. Do we really want the Chinese Communist Party and the North Korean regime to be our neighbors in organizational behavior when it comes to dealing with internal rabble-rousers and critics? When it happens in China and North Korea, we in liberal democracies say it’s because its leaders fear losing control and so they respond by cracking down on dissent among its citizens. How likely is it that LDS policies on dealing with public dissidents is not similarly motivated to some extent by fear and anxiety of losing control, given that imperfect humans are at the helm and basic human social psychology is at work in all humans and human organizations? Do we ordinarily consider fear and anxiety to be praiseworthy motivations for decision-making? Does that represent our best selves?

This is all the more troubling when one considers the doctrinal implications of excommunication in the LDS Church. For orthodox Latter-day Saints, excommunication literally means eternal banishment from the presence of God, one’s eternal companion, and forever family, if one does not repent and submit to the institutional hierarchy. Is that really the type of God we believe in? One who would forever banish from Their presence someone who is sincerely, yet imperfectly, advocating for justice and progress in communities that they deeply care about? Is that really the type of God that we want to believe in?

As the largest institutional expression of the Joseph Smith Restorationist tradition in the world, I want the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be the very best version of itself that it can be. I want it to embrace and model the expansive vision of truth and the cosmos that Joseph Smith so compellingly articulated to his followers. This is a theology that embraces “further light and knowledge” and “continuing revelation” and preaches that “we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same” [emphasis added]. This theology can handle a bit of well-meaning disagreement among its members. It can handle sincere attempts by those who are doing the best they can with the light and knowledge they have to advocate for positive change (as they see it) in the Church.

After all, does the Jesus of the Gospels teach his followers to submit to unjust institutional religious authority? That’s not my read of the Gospels. The Jesus of the Gospels routinely challenges institutional religious authority.

Can we not have more of a space in our religious communities for those who do likewise?

[Photo credit: Jason Wilson, Wikimedia Commons]

Thoughts on Sam Young, Excommunication, and Responding to Internal Dissent published first on https://bitspiritspace.tumblr.com/

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jeremyevelandus · 7 years ago

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Old Testament Lesson 13 - Gospel Doctrine #GospelDoctrineHelps Here is a link to a BYU Studies article about Margaret Barker and Temple Theology - http://bit.ly/2tUDMaV Here is the link to the book I read from: http://amzn.to/2FZdNUv Here is the link to the Holy Scriptures (JST) online for free - http://bit.ly/2GBmAdh Here is the LDS appendix version online - http://bit.ly/2IwNx2v Here is a link to Price Publishing to buy a new copy of the JST http://bit.ly/2tVX0wJ Here is a link to a book store in Salt Lake that might be able to get you a USED copy of the Holy Scriptures aka JST - http://bit.ly/2pjI8nk Please let me know if I forgot any resources that I mentioned in the video and I'll add them here. If you have questions, suggests for a show, or comments, please leave them in the comment section below. I'll do my best to respond or find the resource you need. Reminder - I don't make money off of this. These aren't affiliate links. If you want to support this work, do something good for your neighbor. Do an act of selfless service. Give money to the poor and needy. May God bless you in your teaching. Old Testament Lesson 8 - https://youtu.be/9-RkcWiLlhA Old Testament Lesson 9 - https://youtu.be/XmyROm_BRKI Old Testament Lesson 10 - https://youtu.be/s-ZrwDDaHp8 Old Testament Lesson 11 - https://youtu.be/DABnRxLvL8o Old Testament Lesson 12 - https://youtu.be/JcmwS4oPXKI XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX I want to give special thanks to The Interpreter Foundation for releasing Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 63: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 13, Bondage, Passover.... Here are some of my other favorite youtubers and their videos! Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 62: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 12, "Fruitful..." Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 61: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 11, "How Can I..." Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 60: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 10, Birthright/Marriage Old Testament Lesson 13: Bondage, Passover, and Exodus Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 58: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 8, Living Righteously Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 57: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 7, The Abrahamic Covenant Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 56: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 6, "Noah..." Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 55: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 5, "If Thou Doest Well..." Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 54: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 4, "Because..." Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 53: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 3, The Creation Hugh Nibley, "The Heritage of Cain" (Pearl of Great Price Lecture Series - 20) DEBATE: Exodus 12, Did the Old Testament "Passover Lamb" Include Everyone? Time Team Special 30 (2008) - The Real Knights of the Round Table (Windsor, Berkshire) Exodus 12-13: Passover Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 52: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 2, "Thou Wast Chosen..." Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 51: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 1, "This Is My Work..." The Tree of Knowledge as the Veil of the Sanctuary - Jeffrey M. Bradshaw A Tower Of Literary Beauty: Wordplay and Chiasmus in the Story of Babel - Jeffrey M. Bradshaw Daniel Smith: The Ancient Israelite Tabernacle, Its Accoutrements, and the Priestly Vestments Six Steps to Passover - Part 4: The Bread and The Wine The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation This Week in Mormons The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation BYU's Maxwell Institute CAnswersTV Fillask Yale Divinity School The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation The Interpreter Foundation BeyondTodayTV Take a look at The Interpreter Foundation stats and you'll understand why I am a fan. Video Url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGOtyy9FqjQ Video Title: Interpreter Scripture Roundtable 63: Old Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson 13, Bondage, Passover... Username: The Interpreter Foundation Subscribers: 2.1K Views: ------------------------- More at https://youtu.be/gV_DAslicOA from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3fvc-Ak3I0DDFudELbkO1g

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essaysonmedia-blog · 8 years ago

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A Former Mormon Missionary’s Perspective on ‘The Book of Mormon’ Musical

This is a musical about naive outsiders inserting themselves into a foreign culture…written by naive outsiders inserting themselves into a foreign culture.

A couple disclosures at the outset: I’m Mormon. I haven’t seen the show live, I’ve just listened to the album. I thought the musical was largely funny.

But I have issues.

It would be petty and pointless to catalog the inaccuracies of Mormon belief in The Book of Mormon, especially since a major plot arc involves the gleeful distortion of Mormonism as it gets translated into Ugandan culture. But I will argue that The Book of Mormon fails as satire. Successful satire distills some true essence from experience and infuses it with humor or criticism or ridicule. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, lobs its humor, criticism, and ridicule at targets that are far removed from (and at times purely antithetical to) actual, real-life Mormonism.

There are times when the satire stung because it was good satire. The opening number, “Hello!,” for example. There’s something ridiculous about overly enthusiastic 19 year olds marching door to door in ill-fitted short-sleeved button-down white shirts, like so many knife salesmen, trying to “teach” people about life, the universe, and everything. I get it. That was me. Touché.

But thereafter, any real resemblance to authentic Mormon experience dissipates. Listening to The Book of Mormon felt like listening to a song about me, composed by a Martian whose source material was stuff people wrote in my high school yearbook.

Spooky Mormon Hell Dream

Let’s begin with “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream,” which is an excellent demonstration of how the show suffers as outsiders-looking-in.

The premise of the song is that Elder Price is racked with guilt for having broken a mission rule. He’s haunted by visions of fire, brimstone, pits of sulphur, and yes, Johnnie Cochran. While this vision may sound like familiar ground to many Protestants and Catholics, it is utterly divorced from Mormon experience.

"Fire & brimstone” preaching has always had a hold in American culture. One of the nation’s earliest and most influential preachers, Jonathan Edwards, described man’s relationship with God like this:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Elder Price’s “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” fits neatly into this theology. It’s less compatible with Mormonism itself, where “hell” is reserved for the slimmest minority of the human race who have rejected God after having received a perfect knowledge of him. I think it’s fair to say that most Mormons believe that (contrary to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s depiction) Hitler, Johnnie Cochran, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Genghis Khan are probably ineligible for hell as it’s commonly understood. In Mormon cosmology, the lowest regions of heaven will eventually welcome the redeemed “liars,… adulterers, and whoremongers” of the world.

When Joseph Smith first preached this, many early Mormons struggled with the idea, seeing it as flirting with Universalism. Brigham Young, for example, said the teaching “was a great trial to many.” “My traditions were such, that when the [teaching about heaven and hell] came first to me, it was directly contrary and opposed to my former education.…I did not reject it; but I could not understand it.”

But this radical departure from the common understanding of heaven and hell would ultimately become fundamental to the very nature of Mormonism. Mormons no longer saw themselves as “sinners in the hands of [the] angry God” of Jonathan Edwards. Rather, they worshiped a God with such profound feeling for humanity, that when he sees human sin and suffering—he weeps.

I really don’t think this is splitting hairs. Parker & Stone are lampooning an idea that has nothing to do with Mormonism, an idea that Mormonism has rejected since 1832. I honestly question whether any Mormon missionary in the past 100 years has ever spent a second fretting over the agony of hellfire.

I Believe

I’ll turn my attention now to the show’s flagship song, “I Believe.” The rhetorical device in the song works like this: it catalogs a bunch of weird shit that Mormons supposedly believe and then punctuates each one with the full-throated, shoulder-shrugging, blind faith of “I am a Mormon! / And a Mormon just believes.”

I won’t comment on the catalog of supposed Mormon beliefs in the song, but I will argue that the main thrust of the song is antithetical to Mormon experience.

Joseph Smith famously claimed that he saw God. Of this claim, he later wrote, “I don’t blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself.” His attitude about his own experience mirrors the Mormon approach to epistemology. It’s the LeVar Burton approach.

If Mormon missionaries were ever to wear you down enough to the point that you let them in your house, you’d find that their approach is the opposite of Elder Price’s. Rather than asking you to “just believe,” they would ask you to find out for yourself that what they’re saying is true.

Joseph Smith didn’t see his revelatory experience with God as an exception, but rather as a model that everyone could achieve. The Mormon scholar Terryl Givens wrote:

Joseph apparently believed that the personal epiphany he experienced in his visitation by the Father and the Son—heralding full immersion in the divine light, with all its epistemological fullness and certainty—betokened an order of knowledge that was the right and destiny of all faithful Saints. That very real possibility informs Mormon life, worship, personal aspirations, and shared purpose. To attend any LDS testimony meeting, for example, is to enter into a rhetorical universe in which a language of calm assurance and confident conviction and even professions of certain knowledge overwhelm the more traditional Christian expressions of common belief. It may well be that this sense of shared knowledge—its possession or pursuit—is an even more potent community builder than shared faith.

(emphasis mine)

Elder Price’s “I Believe” also runs afoul of several critical passages of the Book of Mormon, which emphasize the importance of the personal investigation and verification of truth claims.

Again, it’s not that my feathers are ruffled over an apt parody. It’s that The Book of Mormon fails as a satire because it ridicules Mormonism for traits absent in Mormonism. To call it a strawman is an insult to scarecrows everywhere.

It’s telling that the show’s most effective satire, “Hello,” is also the only song that requires only external knowledge of Mormonism.

Evangelical scholar John Mark Reynolds went so far as to call the musical a minstrel show. “When [African] Americans were hurt by the cruel stereotypes, they were told it was 'just a joke' and were painted as petty for not laughing along.” His criticism is excessive by degree but not by kind.

(And of course I haven’t mentioned the play’s alarming depiction of Uganda, but others have.)

So yeah. The Book of Mormon is funny, I guess. But it’s also irresponsible. And I question the morality of ridiculing (rather than satirizing) a minority group for cheap laughs.

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free-mormons-blog · 8 years ago

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Historicity of the Bible -- Old Testament and Related Studies -- HUGH NIBLEY 1986

Historicity of the Bible

The problem of the historicity of the Bible is exactly the same today as it has been since the days of the first apologists. One reads the Bible and decides for himself what is history in it and what is allegory, and what is myth, and what is legend, and what is interpolation.

There are two main schools of thought on the subject. There are the fundamentalists, who believe that everything put forth in the Bible as history actually happened as they find it stated; and there are the liberals, who about the year 1925 (according to the study of Eduard König)1 reached the general consensus that the historical value of the Bible is nil. The LDS people have always stood between these two extremes.

Thirty years ago there was such a solid consensus of learned opinion about the real nature of the Bible and the ancient Hebrew and Christian religions in both camps, both fundamentalist and liberal, that a student needed only to consult any handbook to put him in harmony with the “scholars” on all major issues. That is no longer the case: today all is doubt and confusion.

The principal cause of this confusion has been what one scholar calls “the breakthrough of the eschatological interpretation,” which he compares to a strategic military break-through that throws a whole army into panic and disorder.

Before we describe the breakthrough, it is important to know what eschatology is. The eschatological viewpoint is that which sees and judges everything in terms of a great eternal plan. Whether we like it or not, we belong to the eternities; we cannot escape the universe. All our thoughts and deeds must be viewed against an infinite background and against no other. Eschatos means “ultimate” and refers to that which lies beyond all local and limited goals and interests. Limited objectives are commendable in their way, but only as contributing to something eternal. Extreme as this doctrine may seem, the only alternative, as the philosophers of old repeatedly observed, is a trip to nowhere, a few seconds of pleasure in an hour of pain, and after that only “the depth of emptiness.” But the eschatological view of life is more than a philosophy; it is a specific religious tradition, teaching that there actually was a great plan agreed upon at the foundation of the world, and that all that has transpired on earth since the beginning or shall take place hereafter is to be understood as showing forth the operation or attempted frustration of that plan. (An interesting corollary to that is that all things are party to this plan, so that when man sins he puts himself at cross-purposes with all nature, which becomes his enemy and crosses and checks him with all kinds of diseases and allergies. These are simply forms of frustration that the rabbis believe resulted from the fact that we are trying to go one way while the universe insists on going another way. We do not belong anymore.) Everything is in terms of this plan.

This “eschatological breakthrough” was the realization, climaxing a generation of cumulative study and discovery, that the eschatological view of man’s life on earth, though highly distasteful to the doctors and teachers of conventional Christianity and Judaism, was nonetheless the very heart of the original Christian faith and was firmly held by important groups of Jews in ancient times. Accordingly, “since the breakthrough of the eschatological interpretations of the concept of the Kingdom of God in the preaching of Jesus, the question of the content and meaning of Jesus’ message has never been satisfactorily settled.” Conventional and long-established views of the nature of the Christian religion, whether liberal or fundamentalist, are so completely out of line with the new discoveries that there is now afoot an extremely widespread movement to put the whole Christian faith on a new “existentialist” footing that will ignore history altogether. An eminent Christian scholar, S. G. F. Brandon, commenting on this movement, observes, “It is eloquent witness to the increasing embarrassment felt by Christian thinkers about the assumed historicity of their faith. Such a suggestion of embarrassment in this connection may possibly cause surprise and provoke an instant denial that such a situation exists in any significant academic circle. However, the historical character of Christianity, which was once proclaimed apologetically as the greatest argument for the validity of that faith, has gradually been found to be a source of great perplexity if not of weakness.”2 Until now, according to this authority, Christian scholars have willingly accepted “the claim that, if Christianity derives its authority from certain events which took place at a specific place and time, then that claim must be investigated by the most austere standards of historical judgment. For many decades under the aegis of the liberal tradition of scholarship, this task was undertaken with fervent conviction, and great was the knowledge amassed by such methods of research about Primitive Christianity. But in time this process of investigation into Christian origins has gradually revealed itself to be a journey ever deeper into a morass of conjecture about the imponderables which lie behind or beyond the extant literary documents.” 3

Note there that what is found wanting is not the Bible, but man’s interpretations of it, the root of the trouble being that they simply do not have enough evidence to go one way or the other.

If this is true today, it was even truer thirty, forty, or fifty years ago—but the scholars did not know. On both sides they felt convinced that they had the final answer. (The Swede, Olaf Linton, wrote a very good dissertation on that.)4 They could both speak with perfect confidence because of what I call the gas law of learning, namely, that any amount of information no matter how small will fill any intellectual void no matter how large. A simple and natural misunderstanding lies at the root of almost any biblical study you can find from around 1900: that was the belief that since the New Testament is, after all, the whole of our evidence on such things as the life of Christ and the Apostolic Church, it must necessarily tell the whole story. This theory that we know all there is to know is a very flattering one, but during the last twenty years it has been subject to a series of fatal blows.

In the business of scholarship, evidence is far more flexible than opinion. The prevailing view of the past is controlled not by evidence but by opinion. The scholars, like the fundamentalists, have believed what they wanted to believe. The liberals have in the past been more willing than their rivals to change their opinions in the face of overwhelming evidence. But now things have come to an impasse with them; they are in open revolt against history. The findings of the last two decades have been of supreme significance, but they have not confirmed the preconceptions of the liberals, who now propose simply to ignore them. The existentialism of Bultmann, Barth, and the Roman Catholic Marcel as a champion of Thomistic theology, is, says Brandon, “a truly vehement repudiation” of history.5 They say we must reject all historical study of Christianity as “negating its present relevance by demonstrating its relevance to the environment in which it took its origin.”6 What is relevant to life and conditions of one age cannot possibly be relevant to another (the Book of Mormon clearly and fully disproves this thesis, which is based on Spengler’s Unwiederkehrlichkeit); if a thing happens once it can never happen again. Here we have as the very essence of the apocalyptic pattern of history the doctrine that things happen in cycles and recur. Both Harnack and Schweitzer laid great emphasis on the claim that virtually nothing is or can be known about a historical Jesus. This freed them to work out a kind of a Jesus that pleased them. “We are thankful,” wrote Schweitzer, “that we have handed down to us only gospels, not biographies of Jesus.”7 When new discoveries come out, they receive, to say the least, a very cold reception. If the real Jesus walked in on them, they would invite him to leave. They have the Jesus they want, and they do not want more. The scholars made their own Jesus: Kierkegaard and Dilthey decided that if we must take history we can at least make it into a thing expressive of our own experience; this led to the existentialism of today, in which the individual rejects as myth anything he does not feel inclined to accept. It is the negation of the open mind. Bultmann writes: “It is impossible to make use of electric light and radio, and, in case of illness, to claim the help of modern medical and clinical methods and at the same time believe in the New Testament’s spirits and miracles.”8 On the other hand, I have heard General Authorities cite the electric light and radio as proof of the possibility of miracles. Bultmann’s statement is simply untrue, but it is very significant as demonstrating how scholars control evidence instead of being controlled by it. The case of the radio can be taken as equally convincing evidence for or against miracles, depending on how one wants to take it. Bultmann sees in it only evidence against miracles—it apparently never occurs to him that it might provide an argument for the other side. He believes what he wants to, and frankly admits it when he tells us, if history does not suit our theory of religion, to throw out the history.

In all this, it is not the weakness of the scriptures but the willfulness of men that is exposed. It has taken a hundred years of guessing and counterguessing to convince the learned that they were not solving the problem of “the content and the meaning of Jesus’ message”; the discovery, instead of teaching them humility, has turned them bitterly against the scriptures, whose historical claims Bultmann and his school now attack with “truly vehement repudiation.” The eminent Jewish scholar Torczyner tells us how the old established ideas about the uniform nature of the Bible have had to be given up: “This uniform picture of Biblical criticism has finally been forced to shatter, after the first faint suspicions of certain individuals had gradually grown up to the stature of the communis opinio. Scientific investigation has disclosed the richness and variety of the Biblical literature . . . revealing as it does both life and individuality, contradiction and differentness.”9 Torczyner’s own reaction to this recognition of a fact familiar to all Latter-day Saints since the founding of the Church has been to turn him violently against the Bible as history, declaring it to be a “total misconception—or even falsification—of the real state of things.”

“It is a heavy loss,” writes another Hebrew scholar, “that the old historical works no longer survive intact and independent, but only as worked-over materials inserted into the structure of a late compilation and buried under the rubble of many re-editings. The only hope lies in textual analysis, but in the end even that can give us no more than a lot of fragments, whose connection with each other is largely damaged or totally destroyed.” Over one hundred years ago, the Prophet Joseph Smith shocked the world by announcing that the very first verse of the Bible has been altered and corrupted by “some old Jew without any authority.” If he offended the fundamentalists as much as the liberals, the new discoveries have been equally damaging to both.

Out of this hopeless inadequacy of man’s knowledge has grown what now goes by the name of “the Modern Predicament,” which is “that man seems to be faced with an unbridgeable gulf between . . . knowledge and faith. . . . Religion was born in a world different from ours—a tiny, comfortable world. . . . That ancient world has been nibbled away by science and the question arises whether against a new and scientific background religion in any form will find it possible to survive.”10 It was just that “tiny, comfortable world” of conventional Christianity that was so mortally offended by the coming forth of latter-day prophecy; the mighty revelations of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price were an unpardonable affront to the established barriers of time, place, and custom. The Christian world is now for the first time learning how wrong it was, and the experience is not a pleasant one. In all the journals, Catholic and Protestant, a cry of distress goes up: “What is left to us,” they ask, “if the things we have always been taught are not so?”

It is hard to believe that men would search for “a religion without faith,” yet that is the title of a book designed to guide modern religious thinking. The author begins with a quotation from David Strauss: “The religious area of the human soul is like the region of the Redskins in America, which is becoming inexorably smaller from year to year.” This leads to the question “What remains for the man who does not believe? What can we salvage of religion and its benign influence for the confirmed agnostic who is convinced that we can know nothing of another world?” Incidentally, since we cannot prove a negative, being convinced of one is a pure act of faith. In other words, how can we enjoy the fruits of faith without any faith at all? “Modern humanity,” says a contemporary theologian with a nod of approval, “is for the most part of the same opinion as Pliny, . . . that belief in a rebirth or life after death is simply a sop for children.” Since Pliny was an ancient dilettante and not a modern scientist, we cannot lay this state of mind to the charge of science; in their ways of disbelief the clergy have led the field. This can be seen in Marneck’s final definition of a “religion without faith,” for in the end he recommends “to the non-believing person access to religious feelings through the substitution (Auslösung) of religious feelings by like feelings of a non-religious nature.” These “non-religious” feelings which are accessible to the complete “non-believer” are found in social good-works, aesthetic experience, brotherly love, the psychological search for the deeper self, and the Ethical Gospel. But these are the very things that for many years have made up the substance of religion as taught in liberal theological seminaries everywhere: truly a “religion without faith.” “Never before,” says a leading Egyptologist, viewing our times against a sweeping background of world history, “was the human race . . . farther from the divine than it is today. It has in this respect sunk to the lowest abyss.”

It is not only in the field of religions but in all ancient studies that preconceived ideas are being uprooted on all sides. The religious take it harder than others because they are committed to a “party line”—usually so deeply committed that a major readjustment produces disillusionment and even disaffection. Yet the discoveries that have proven so upsetting should have been received not with hostility but joy, for if they have a way of shattering the forms in which the labors of scholarship have molded the past, they bring a new substance and reality to things that the learned of another age had never thought possible. The same discoveries that to their dismay are rebuking the favorite theories of the doctors are at the same time vindicating that Bible world that they had consigned to the realm of myth. Years ago the celebrated Niebuhr observed that ancient history is always treated “as if it had never really happened”—it is a thesis, a demonstration, an intellectual exercise, but not a real account of real people. “Ingrained in our subconscious,” says a recent study of ancient Egypt, “is a disbelief in the actual existence of those times and persons, which haunts us through the schools and in the theaters and libraries and impregnates the whole concept of ‘Antiquity.'” In a word, artificiality is to this day the very substance of ancient history.

From this mood of precious academic make-believe, the learned are now rudely aroused to face another world entirely. We live in a time of the reexamination and reevaluation of all ancient documents now extant. They are being completely gone over from beginning to end. They are not as we thought they were at all. This may seem a late date to ask, for example, “What is the Book of Mormon?” It should seem far stranger to ask, “What is the Iliad?” “What is the Apocrypha?” “What is the Book of the Dead?” or “What is the Bible?” Yet those questions are being more seriously considered today than at any other time. Up until the present, scholars have thought they had a pretty good idea of what the historical, literary, philosophical, or religious writings of the past were all about. Not so today! The whole question of ancient records is now undergoing a thorough reinvestigation.

How this state of things has come about may best be illustrated by considering the case of the famous Eduard Meyer. In 1884 the first volume of his great History of the Ancient World (Geschichte des Altertums) appeared, presenting to the world “for the first time a history of the Ancient East in a scientifically satisfying form, a work which at the time produced a veritable sensation.” Before many years, however, the author was hard at work revising the whole thing, for the history of the ancient world must be constantly rewritten. By considering a few of the things that happened between Meyer’s two editions of his own work, one may gain some idea of the tempo of discovery in our times. As Walter Otto summarizes the developments:

The History of the Ancient East had taken on a totally different aspect. . . . Times and areas which formerly had been almost or completely unknown were brought to light; we have become acquainted with completely new languages and learned to use them as sources; peoples known formerly only by name now stand before us as concrete realities; the Indo-germanic element, which serious scholarship had long concluded was of no significance for the Ancient East, . . . now shows more clearly every day as an important historical element even in the more ancient periods; empires, such as the Mitanni and especially the Hittite, of whose history and structure not long ago only a few scattered details were known, have recently emerged as worthy rivals of the great traditional empires of the east, who actually recognized the Hittites as their equal.11

In the two decades since those words were written, things have gone faster than ever. To mention only a few of the developments, there is afoot today a general reevaluation of the oldest Egyptian texts and a far-reaching reinterpretation of the very essentials of Egyptian religion; the origin and background of Sumero Babylonian civilization is being reconsidered completely in the light of excavations made along the periphery of that area and of epic texts whose real significance has just begun to dawn on the experts; the unearthing of the oldest known villages gives us a new and unexpected picture of a civilization that “seems to have come into being with relative (even revolutionary) suddenness,” instead of with that evolutionary gradualness with which all such things were once supposed to have happened; the involvement of the Hebrew Patriarchs, especially Abraham, with our own Indo-European relatives has called for a wholly new picture of Old Testament times and peoples; the application of new methods of dating has cut down the conventional time scale, especially for the earlier periods (for example, as at Jericho) abruptly and drastically; the discovery of a new date for Hammurabi has called for a thoroughgoing revamping of ancient chronology; “the Hurrians have emerged from total obscurity and have come to occupy a stellar role. . . . A new planet has appeared on the historical horizon and an area that was formerly dark has been flooded with a new and strange light.” Within the last five years with the discovery of a single inscription a whole world of Greek myth and legend has been transmuted into the category of flesh-and-blood reality; within the same short period the decipherment of the Minoan Script B has with a single sweep rubbed out two hundred years of laborious speculation and acid controversy on major aspects of the Homeric problem, and shown us the Greeks writing good Greek a thousand years before anyone had credited them with literacy; at the same time the mystery of Etruscan has been solved, and the true nature of the mysterious Runic writing of our Norse ancestors explained; today nearly all scholars accept the original identity of the Hamitic, Semitic, and Indo-European languages—a thing that the less informed and more opinionated gentlemen of a few years ago laughed to scorn as a fundamentalist pipe-dream.

In all this fever and ferment of discovery and reevaluation, no documents have been more conspicuously involved than those relating to Israel’s past and that of the earliest Christian church. Since World War II the greatest discoveries ever made in these fields have come to light. In the great days of “scientific” scholarship, when the only safe and respectable position for any man of stature to take was to give a flat “no” to any suggestion that the Bible might contain real history, not the least sensational of Eduard Meyer’s many ingenious pronouncements was the startling declaration that the Old Testament was not only history but very good history—by far the most accurate, reliable, and complete history ever produced by an ancient people, with the possible exception of the Greeks, who came much, much later. Time and research have strikingly vindicated this claim.

Eduard König treats the subject in a study that deserves to be summarized here.12 He tells how all the scholars brushed aside the account in Genesis 23 of Abraham’s dealings with the Hittites as a fabrication or a mistake—until the Amarna discoveries proved that the Bible was right and they were wrong. The account of Judah’s sealring in Genesis 38:18 was treated as a clumsy anachronism until about 1913, when the use of seals in early Palestine was proven by excavation. The favorite creed that the early history of Israel rested entirely on oral tradition was blasted by discoveries proving widespread literacy in the earliest days of Israel. The universal belief that Israel had no interest in real history is disproven by the care with which memorial stones, trees, and so on were designated, and by the fullness and detail of early accounts. It was taken for granted that the early histories of Israel did not reflect the ancient times they purported to describe, but depicted actually the much later periods in which they were written; yet archaeological, ethnological, and philological findings in and around Israel show that these texts do not depict the Aramaic times but give an authentic picture of a much earlier world. Naturally it was assumed that the early historians of Israel knew nothing about the correct use of sources and evidence; yet they are careful to cite their sources (often now lost), have keen eyes for historical changes, and often include comments and sidelights from various related sources. The prevailing conviction that Israelite history was a “harmonizing and rationalizing” piece of free composition is disproven by the very scholars who make the charge when they claim they are able to detect a great variety of styles and levels of composition—in other words, that the texts have not been harmonized. The very common claim that the history of Israel was all painted over and prettied up so as to quite conceal the original, runs contrary to the many unsavory and uncomplimentary things said about Israel and her founders throughout these writings; the weaknesses of Israel’s heroes are not concealed, as such things are in other ancient histories, and the actions of the nation are certainly not “bathed in a golden light,” as the scholars claimed.

It is hard now to realize that as recently as 1908 Eduard Meyer could announce to the Berlin academy: “Twenty-five years ago there existed not a single historical document” to confirm the early history of Israel as given in the Bible. It was quite suddenly in the late 1800s that such documents began to appear, and then it was like the coming of our spring floods, with the great collections of stuff—no mere trickle—pouring out year after year in a breathtaking sequence that appears not yet to have reached its crest.

The present decade has seen epoch-making departures in the direction of new and daring comparative studies. Enough documentary material is now available to justify bold attempts at generalization that would have been out of the question less than a generation ago. As late as 1930 a leading Egyptologist, T. E. Peet, while marveling at the amazing parallels between them, could stoutly affirm that the literatures of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Greeks were each the result of separate and independent evolutions, and even as he was writing the Ras Shamra, records were being unearthed to establish beyond a doubt the interdependence of these “independent” cultures. The ancient world is now all one. It was a favorite thesis of Eduard Meyer that Greece and Israel produced parallel historical literature in complete ignorance of each other. What would he say today to serious studies of such themes as “Homeric Epics in the Ancient East” or “Linguistic Relationships between the Ancient Orient and the British Isles”? These are no mere crackpot aberrations.

The greatest linguist of our day (Hrozny) could write not long ago: “Accepted today beyond all possible doubt is the close affinity of the Hamitic with the Semitic races and languages . . . and of the Indoeuropean with them!”13 and go on to explain this phenomenon in terms exactly corresponding to those of the Tower of Babel story. Yet such a thesis is far less radical than those that now emphasize the extreme suddenness of the emergence of languages, whole linguistic families appearing full-fledged and completely made within a decade! The vast range of these comparative studies, most of which, of course, are still highly conjectural, we cannot examine here. We bring them up only to show what is going on and to make it clear that the picture of man’s life and thought and action in the past is by no means the one we were taught to accept in our childhood.

It is especially important to note that the easy, lazy, flattering evolutionary bias that once solved all questions of the past from an armchair, by a simple rule of thumb, simply won’t work any longer. This can be illustrated by the effect of the Ugaritic texts of Ras Shamra, texts that showed Professor Peet to be wrong in attributing the growth of Hebrew literature to an evolutionary process, leading the great orientalist A. H. Sayce to confess that his own conception of the primitive beginnings of the record was a mistaken one: “There is no longer any difficulty,” he wrote, “in believing that there were abundant literary documents for compiling the earlier books of the Old Testament. . . . Consequently there is no longer any need of our believing as I formerly did that cuneiform tablets lie behind the text of the earlier Biblical books. . . . In the Mosaic period the Oriental world was as well stocked with books and what we would call public libraries as it was in the Greek epoch.”14 Using the same texts, Dr. Gordon has concluded that the fundamental criteria of the higher critics in their reconstruction of a hypothetical evolution of the Old Testament text are not binding: “It is against the background of Ugaritic that we must evaluate the multiplicity of God’s name. . . . Elohim and Yahwe need not imply dual authorship in a chapter of the Bible any more than Baal and Hadd do in a Ugaritic myth.”15 No less questionable than the names of God as a key to the structure of the Bible are variations in style, heretofore believed to indicate with perfect certainty changes of authorship within the various books: “The rediscovery of the lost literature of the Bible world shows us that most biblical books could be accepted in Israel as single compositions. . . . The magnificent structure of the Old Testament higher criticism is not to be brushed aside; but its individual results can no longer be accepted unless they square with the Hebrew text as we can now understand it in the light of parallel literatures from the pagan forerunners and contemporaries of the Hebrews, in Bible lands.”16

Haldar, studying priestly and prophetic institutions, reaches a similar conclusion regarding accepted principles of the higher criticism: “It follows that the evolutionary view of the Old Testament prophets cannot be accepted; instead . . . heavy stress must be laid on continuity.”17 “The greatly increased knowledge of the world surrounding Israel in the ancient Orient” shows, according to Mowinckel, “that the ‘sources’ of the Old Testament at any rate might be much more ancient than those held by the prevailing evolutionary view of literary criticism.” 18

The major shift in orientation in Bible study from the old literary to what Mowinckel calls the “traditio-historical method” has been the result of a growing necessity of seeing the Bible in a much broader setting than it has heretofore been placed in. As Gordon said, the results of Bible criticism “can no longer be accepted unless they square with the rediscovered ‘lost literatures of the Bible World.'” The Bible World is no longer the world made by the Bible, but the much wider world in which the Bible finds itself along with other books, sacred and profane. Today, we are told, “the Old Testament horizon must be expanded and its history interpreted against this larger background. Here, indeed, we must learn to hold converse with the whole universe.” “The Bible strikes root into every ancient Near Eastern culture,” writes Albright, “and it cannot be historically understood until we see its relationship to its sources in true perspective.”19 The same may be said of any other ancient text: all fields of study seem to be converging at present on the single theme of the oneness of the ancient world. The interrelationships between ancient writings are being drawn closer all the time; they are already so close, in fact, that Haering can now proclaim that all ancient literature, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, may be regarded and must be read as a single great book!

A century and a quarter ago, a young man shocked and angered the world by bringing out a large book that he set up beside the Bible not as a commentary or a key to the scriptures, but as original scripture—the revealed word of God to men of old—and as genuine history. The book itself declares that it is an authentic product of the Near East; it gives a full and circumstantial account of its own origin; it declares that it is but one of many, many such books that have been produced in the course of history and may be hidden in sundry places at this day; it places itself in about the middle of a long list of sacred writings, beginning with the patriarchs and continuing down to the end of human history; it cites now-lost prophetic writings of prime importance, giving the names of their authors; it traces its own cultural roots in all directions, emphasizing the immense breadth and complexity of such connections in the world; it belongs to the same class of literature as the Bible, but along with a sharper and clearer statement of biblical teachings contains a formidable mass of historical material unknown to biblical writers but well within the range of modern comparative study, since it insists on deriving its whole cultural tradition, even in details, directly from a specific time and place in the Old World.

The Book of Mormon is God’s challenge to the world. It was given to the world not as a sign to convert it but as a testimony to convict it. In every dispensation the world must be left without excuse. It is given without reservation or qualification as a true history and the word of God: “A record of a fallen people, and the fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and to the Jews also.” The bold claims of this book were meant to invite comment and question. If the Book of Mormon is to be the guiding star for a world that has lost its bearing, “proving to the world that the Holy Scriptures are true” (D&C 20:11), it must stand firm and unmoved without any external support. The Bible has been systematically dismantled by men who in the end did not want to believe it. For a hundred years they have been whittling away at it with dogged determination, and now they are all out to “demythologize” and “deeschatologize” it for good. But the Book of Mormon cannot be so dismantled, even by those most determined to reject it. It is a single monolithic block, given to the world at one time and place. Unlike the Bible, it cannot lead “into a morass of imponderables” due to the obscurity of its sources, for it is not the product of centuries or generations of editing and transmission. Unlike the Bible, it cannot be partly true, for the Book of Mormon itself closes the door on such a proposition.

Throughout the Middle Ages wild reports circulated through Europe and Asia from time to time that a letter had fallen from heaven. These reports caused an immense sensation among Christians everywhere, and though they always turned out to be false, the world never ceased hoping that someday a letter or some other tangible thing from heaven would fall into the eager hands of a yearning Christendom. We may smile and ask, “Is anything as crass and tangible as a letter from heaven to be taken seriously by right-thinking people? Must one hear voices and see visions or otherwise have experiences unfamiliar to everyday experience? Are such things necessary?” Whether one likes it or not, Christianity is a very literal-minded religion. The recent attempt to “demythologize” it, that is, to treat as expendable everything in it that smacks of the miraculous, supernatural, or literal has met with a surprisingly vigorous storm of protest from ministers everywhere who, when confronted with a flat “either-or” have been forced to admit that Christianity with the miraculous, the apocalyptic, and the tangible elements removed would not be Christian at all.

In the Book of Mormon, the world finally has, so to speak, its “letter from heaven.” Those other epistles were easily tested and found wanting; though sometimes written and presented with considerable skill, they could not fool for long even the unscientific and uncritical ages in which they came forth. There is no reason why the Book of Mormon should not be subjected to every possible test, textual, literary, and historical, for it pleads no special immunity of any kind. It says in 2 Nephi: “Ye have closed your eyes, and ye have rejected the prophets. . . . the Lord God shall bring forth unto you the words of a book, and they shall be the words of them which have slumbered. . . . The learned shall not read them, for they have rejected them, and I am able to do mine own work. . . . For behold, I am God; and I am a God of miracles; and I will show unto the world that I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; and I work not among the children of men save it be according to their faith. . . . For the wisdom of their wise and learned shall perish, . . . the terrible one is brought to naught, and the scorner is consumed. . . . they also that erred in spirit shall come to understanding, and they that murmured shall learn doctrine.” (2 Nephi 27:5—6, 20, 23, 26, 31, 35.)

In the Book of Mormon the very questions about the Bible that now oppress the liberal and fundamentalist alike, to the imminent overthrow of their fondest beliefs, are fully and clearly treated; no other book gives such a perfect and exhaustive explanation of the eschatological problem; here we learn how the Christian and Jewish traditions fit into the world picture, and how God’s voice has been from the very beginning to all men everywhere; here alone one may find a full setting forth of the exact nature of scripture, and of the vast range and variety of revelation; here you will find anticipated and answered every logical objection that the intelligence or vanity of men even in this sophisticated age has been able to devise against the preaching of the word; and here one may find a description of our own age so vivid and so accurate that none can fail to recognize it—all these things and much more by way of “proving to the world that the holy scriptures are true.” (D&C 20:11.)

So you see that when Joseph Smith brought forth the Book of Mormon, he shocked and angered the world. You remember that within a week the announcements started coming out in the papers: “the Book of Mormon—Blasphemy,” and so on. He shocked and angered the world by setting up beside the Bible another book as original scripture.

I think we may see it come to pass that the Book of Mormon will prove to the world that the scriptures are true. There are things in the Bible that are historical and things that are not. The guide to follow is the Book of Mormon.

NOTES

* “Historicity of the Bible” is the edited transcript of an address given to the Seminary and Institute faculty at Brigham Young University on June 19, 1956.

1. König, Eduard, “Ist die jetzt herrschende Einschätzung der hebräischen Geschichtsquellen berechtigt?” Historische Zeitschrift 132 (1925): 289—302.

2. Brandon, Samuel George Frederick, “The Historical Element in Primitive Christianity,” Numen 2 (1955): 156.

3. Brandon, p. 157.

4. Linton, Olaf, Das Problem der Urkirche in der neueren Forschung (Uppsala: Almquist und Wiksell, 1932), n.p.

5. Brandon, p. 157.

6. Bultmann, Rudolf, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” New Testament Studies 1 (1954): n.p.

7. Schweitzer, Albert, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1913), p. 2.

8. Bultmann.

9. Torczyner, Harry, “Das Literarische Problem der Bibel,” Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenländischen Geschichte 85 (1913): 287—88.

10. Paton, Herbert James, The Modern Predicament (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 374.

11. Otto, Walter F., “Zur Universalgeschichte des Altertums,” Historische Zeitschrift 146 (1932): 205.

12. König, pp. 289—302.

13. Hrozny, Bedrick, Ancient History of Western Asia, India and Crete (Prague: Artia, 1940), p. 52.

14. Sayce, Archibald Henry, Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies (London: Religious Tract Society, 1910), n.p.

15. Gordon, Cyrus, Ugaritic Literature (Rome: Pontifical Institute of the Bible, 1949), n.p.

16. Gordon.

17. Haldar, Alfred Ossian, Association of Cult Prophets among the Ancient Semites (Uppsala: Almquist und Wiksell), p. 199.

18. Mowinckel, Sigmund, Religion und Kultus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1953), n.p.

19. Albright, William Foxwell, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins Press, 1946), n.p.

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