One of the most influential theories for explaining religion over the last 50 years has been that religion is a system which divided people, places, and things into essentially two categories: the sacred and the profane. This view, popularized by Mircea Eliade, held that the sacred was a locus of holiness, where God could be encountered. Temples, churches, special times of the day for prayer, holy days, priests and priestesses, etc were examples of the sacred. The profane was everything else. Sometimes the profane was forbidden, but usually the profane was just the ordinary. This way of thinking about religion has come under some scrutiny for various reasons, but it is a useful way for thinking about Sister Beck’s controversial Conference talk.
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The myth of applying all scripture
An argument that I occasionally see floated in blogs is the argument that ideas are to be shunted aside simply because they neglect to consider all the scriptures. This is a strange argument to me. No single argumentative notion is capable of encompassing all scripture, or even most scripture. There may be one or two exceptions, but I would tend to think that they would be promoted by ideologues who dismiss counter-arguments without real consideration. Sure, all scripture may testify of Christ, but that argument reduces the Jews to a group of incompetents and ignoramuses. We need to accept that it helps us, in seeing the obviousness of Christ being testified of everywhere, that we are already Christian.
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The Excommunication of Father Feeney
In 1953, Pope Pius XII excommunicated Father Feeney for refusing to submit to ecclesiastical authority. The issue in question was Feeney’s rejection of the liberalization of Catholic Doctrine (a broad movement culminating in Vatican II). Specifically, Feeney was excommunicated for his insistence on the traditional, historical doctrine of the church, extra ecclesiam nulla salus (There is no salvation outside of the church). Feeney maintained that salvation was only for those who had been baptized, rejecting the idea that good people throughout history who may not have had the opportunity to know about the church could receive salvation. This conservative position earned him global fame and a direct confrontation with the Pope.
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Julian of Norwich and the Atonement
I don’t know if you have ever heard of Julian of Norwich. She’s a 14thcentury mystic, an anchoress, really, in Norwich, England. When she was thirty years old, she became so ill that her local priest came to administer the Last Rites. As she fixed her eyes on the crucifix, she experienced a series of sixteen visions (shewings), beginning with a vision of the blood running down Christ’s face as the crown of thorns was pressed home. She produced one version, called the Short Text, quite soon after her visions. Fifteen, or maybe twenty years later, she produced the Long Text, after she’d had time to think on what she’d seen and after she’d had one more visionary experience.
Her ideas about sin are, how shall we say it, unconventional, and especially so in comparison to Medieval Christianity. Where the church taught that Man was naughty and God was angry, Julian said that God was not and never had been angry and that sin was not “a deed,” that is, something that humans do, but that it was basically Man’s unawareness of God’s love and nearness. In a [hazel] nutshell, God didn’t blame Man. She knew she wasn’t in line with the church (ah yes, the Inquisition) and so she wrote in Chapter 50:
For I knew by the common teaching of Holy Church and by mine own feeling, that the blame of our sin continually hangeth upon us, from the first man unto the time that we come up unto heaven: then was this my marvel that I saw our Lord God shewing to us no more blame than if we were as clean and as holy as Angels be in heaven. And between these two contraries my reason was greatly travailed through my blindness, and could have no rest for dread that His blessed presence should pass from my sight and I be left in unknowing [of] how He beholdeth us in our sin. For either [it] behoved me to see in God that sin was all done away, or else me behoved to see in God how He seeth it, whereby I might truly know how it belongeth to me to see sin, and the manner of our blame…I cried inwardly, with all my might seeking unto God for help, saying thus: Ah! Lord Jesus, King of bliss, how shall I be eased? Who shall teach me and tell me that [thing] me needeth to know, if I may not at this time see it in Thee?
Is the “Family” the problem?
It is evident that the LDS church has made the institution of the nuclear family its centerpiece in both its external PR and internal emphasis. There are many wonderful things that can be said about such an approach. The rise and fall of the nuclear family in the 20th century is certainly an interesting moment in history and much can and should be said about this trend in the coming years. I have been doing a bit of reading lately that has got me thinking about the role of the family and the critiques it has faced by different religious thinkers.
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The Informal “You” In European Missions
Everyone knows that missionary work in Europe is a massive failure. The church has need of substantial PR boost and an entirely new strategy for appealing to contemporary Europeans and their immigrant populations. I suspect that there are a number of problems that need to be addressed, not least among them is that the traditional method of proselytizing in Europe is seen as outmoded at best and an offensive version of American imperialism at worst. However, all of these problems are compounded by a long-standing policy for European missionaries to only use the “formal” form of “you” in all conversations, regardless of whether it is culturally or grammatically correct to do so.
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True or False?
Salvations
As Mormons can we talk about “salvation” in the plural?
It seems that part of the restored gospel is the pluralization of “salvation”. We teach multiple “kingdoms” after death–where people receive different kinds of salvation. Granted we teach that these “salvations” are gradated, with the Celestial Kingdom being the highest (and even gradated within itself); but it does seem proper to talk about different “ends”, beyond the paradigm of simply Heaven or Hell.
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(Anti-)Intellectualism in the Church
A very good friend of mine, MantiHigh, wrote me recently to suggest that I include in some future post a discussion of some issues of (anti-)intellectualism arising in recent General Conference talks. I thought s/he spelled out things nicely, and in a different way than is usually done (I’m sure the commenters will let me know if I’m wrong.) In any case, with MantiHigh’s permission, I copy the following for your discussion:
Anti-intellectualism in the Church is a favorite concern of mine given my experience and observations. Maybe I’m hypersensitive to this, but I think the data are pretty clearly supportive of an ongoing, long-term undercurrent of suspicion towards intellectuals. (Just try bringing up your favorite intellectual topic in Sunday School or PEC sometime.)
Given my fears, I was really surprised to find something interesting in Pres Hinckley’s talk in Priesthood Session of Apr 07 GC.
Learning to Love Apostate Christianity
One sign of our institutional and historiographical maturity is the increasing attention that the “Great Apostasy” has been receiving (see for example Noel Reynolds, ed., Early Christians in Disarray, 2005). Since the oppositional pairing of apostasy and restoration is so fundamental to our view of ourselves and proximate others, understanding its potential and realized meanings and implications will remain, I think, one of the more significant tasks of those who think and write on our tradition. This task is all the more urgent, and complicated, because it is heavily tied to the contingencies
of historical scholarship and the particular politics of location in which they are grounded.
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