Last evening HP called my attention to a recent post on M*. I think I’d like to add a little to the business of er…bloodlines and OT exegesis.
So let’s do a little textual criticism. Here’s the text of Is 48:1:
Mormonism is a Humanism
Readers may recognize that this title riffs off of Jean-Paul Sartre’s influential essay “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Though the German existentialists might have rejected this association, Sartre’s desire to locate Existentialism within the humanist tradition shows the powerful impact that humanism has in the imagination of the West. It’s influence is so profound that for Sartre, humanism is the genus and existentialism is a species. Can the same be said about Mormonism? Is Mormonism simply an expression of the backbone of the Modern West’s philosophical framework?
What got me thinking about this topic was a recent performance I attended by Julia Sweeney called “Letting Go of God.” Julia was the SNL comedian that is famous for playing the lovable androgynous “Pat.” In it she recounts her failed search for religion and belief in God. (As a side note, there was a long discussion of her encounter with the Mormon missionaries and her reactions to the first discussion. But I’ll save this for another post). Now she considers herself a secular humanist and has even been given awards by humanist societies.
Humanism really traces its roots to modernity and the turn to ethics of and concerning the individual subject. The concept of rights, democracy, the intrinsic worth of humans, and universal rationality are all the products of humanism. Humanism is the philosophical framework behind feminism, civil rights, the end of torture, invasion into Iraq, public schools, and universal health care. There is no one humanist ideology since humanists claim all sorts of competing positions within the same issue. For example, pro-choice and pro-life movements might be suprised to learn that they are both rooted in humanism, though they are configuring its constitutive elements differently.
Mormonism seems to sit squarely in the humanist tradition with its emphasis on the sacred character of each individual, its positive view of the nature of human beings (the rejection of Original Sin was a halmark of modern humanism), and its focus on human progress. Indeed, the Mormon doctrine of God can in some ways be seen as the theological zenith of humanism.
Secular humanists (and religious one’s as well) locate the basis of ethical behavior outside of revealed religion. “Thou shalt not kill” doesn’t really take a revelation to figure out. In fact, one of the most important developments in modernity (esp. Hume and Kant) was to separate ethics from theology. Even most Mormons accept that being a good person can be determined without reference to theological criteria.
All of this is a round about way of asking what Mormonism’s value add is to humanism, even in its secular form. Do we learn anything more about ethics that cannot already be argued from within the humanist tradition? Or, is Mormonism just another expression of the ways in which humanism has already framed our view of the individual subject? If not, then why be a Mormon and not just a humanist?
The Wisdom of Hannah
So…
I wrote this for a ward RS board meeting, just after finishing my third semester of Hebrew. And I was sooooo proud of what I could do! Now, it looks naive and sentimental to me.
On one level I cringe as I read it, but on another I smile as I remember what it was like in those wonderful, happy, first days of being able to actually deal with scripture. I was free of the constraints of English and of the enforced interpretation of another’s translation — free forever.
Read and smile with me, won’t you?
–Dissy-writing Mogget
The Wisdom of Hannah
Like many of the Bible’s great stories, the tale of the childless Hannah’s petition for her son Samuel is very short. Hannah’s husband is Elkanah. He has a second wife named Peninnah, by whom he has a number of children. The family makes a yearly pilgrimage to Shiloh. Shiloh is under the care of the over-tolerant Eli and his two thuggish sons, Hophni and Phineas. Each year during their stay at Shiloh, Peninnah torments Hannah over her barren condition, causing her to weep and to refuse participation in the ritual meal. Finally, Hannah takes the matter to the Lord and Samuel is born – Elkanah being something of an afterthought in the whole process.
Readings of this story traditionally focus on Hannah’s distress, seeing it solely in terms of a lack of fulfillment of her maternal instincts and perhaps a desire for relief from her co-wife Peninnah’s provocations. But this is too simple an analysis. It seems to me that there is a difference between Rachel’s lament to Jacob: “Give me children or I’ll die,” (Gen 30:1) and Hannah’s petition: “Lord of Host, if you really will look on your servants’ woe…and give your servant male seed, I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life…” (1Sam 1:11) Rachel’s lament is focused strictly inward, on herself. But Hannah’s petition has both an inward and an outward component. Hannah seems to think that the boy baby she’s asking for might also be something the Lord could use as well. In fact, she’s so sure of it that she makes it the centerpiece of her petition!
Now if this is the case, and I think it may be, then it has some significant consequences for our understanding of Hannah. Among other things, Hannah goes from being a simple country girl sunk in her own misery and waiting in a sort of mindless faith and humility to an alert, intelligent woman with the initiative to attempt a partnership with the Lord. So as we read the story together, I am going to point out more reasons why I think these things to be the case and to suggest a broader appraisal both of Hannah’s virtues and of how an appreciation for them might influence us.
The Demonic Holy Ghost
When did the Holy Ghost become a demon (aka, daimon, daemon)? By “demon” I don’t mean to refer to the malignant spirits that tempt or haunt human beings in Christian mythology. Rather, I mean to refer to the Greek and Roman meaning of the term, a mythical creature that could be either good or evil, but who whispered to the mind of its patron what they should or shouldn’t do. Our term ‘demon’ dervies from this Greek word, though Christians argued that these pagan creatures were by nature wicked since they did not come from God. The most famous daimon belonged to Socrates and told him what he should do. He claimed in his Apology that he only followed what this divine creature had told him to do.
It strikes me that for Mormons at least, the Holy Ghost functions as a sort of daimon. Testimony meetings are replete with accounts of the Holy Ghost telling someone not to go somewhere or to give someone a call. The basis of these testimonies is that they don’t know why they are doing these things other than that they heeded the call of the still small voice. Sometimes they find out why, sometimes they don’t.
But this is not the only way that the Holy Ghost has been depicted in the history of Christianity, nor is it the uniform picture of the Holy Ghost in Mormonism. Most famously, the Lectures on Faith say that the Holy Ghost is the communal mind of God and Jesus Christ. Moroni 10:5 says that the Holy Ghost bears truth to all things, but this seems a bit weightier than whether I should go to a sleepover or where my keys are. Many New Testament books don’t even mention the Holy Ghost and others speak of the Spirit as a more abstract principle. So, where does this idea that the Holy Ghost is a daimon who whispers into our ears what we should do come from?
The Power of Symbols
A few recent posts in various blogs has got my thinking about symbols. Wade at The Straight and Narrow Blog and Mark Bulter at M* have both identified symbols in their posts. The issue here is how we are supposed to know a symbol when we see it, how we are supposed to know the correct interpretation of that symbol, and how we are supposed to act both mentally and materially in response to it. These issues have been debated at lenght among anthropologists.
From the 1960’s to the end of the 1980’s, symbolic anthropology ruled the academic roost. Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner and others argued that culture and religion were a system of symbols, “webs of signification” and members of a culture (or religion) interpreted these symbols in order to act and navigate the world. Geertz, who looked quite a bit at religion, described it primarily as a symbolic system that induced beliefs, dispositions, and behaviors in its interpretors. The attractiveness of symbolic anthropology in the academy at large is that it brought a wide variety of disciplines such as history, literature, anthroplogy, and linguistics under one common methodological umbrella, namely, the art of interpretation. However, it saw symobls (and rituals) as a stimulus and human behaviors as a response, without much to mediate that relationship.
Beginning in the 1990’s scholars of religion began to be increasingly skeptical of symbolic anthropology, precisely because it couldn’t explain the relationship between symbols and practices. How exactly does a symbol inculcate certain values, dispositions, beleifs, etc? Instead, scholars began to turn to “practice theory”, a particular anthroplogical approach developed mostly in France. Foucault, Bourdieu, Certeau and others focused on the relationship between cultural symbols (discourses) and practices. Anthropologists of religion such as Talal Asad picked up on these insights and showed how a wide variety of practices are involved in inculcating religious beleif from symbols. He argued that symbols themselves were inneffective at bringing about religious dispositions and behaviors without power that ensured the proper interpretation of symbols. He looks at how St. Augustine authorized the use of violent force against heretics who misunderstood the scriptures as a way of showing that the texts themselves could not be properly interpreted without the sword.
The cumulative effect of both anthropological approaches was to show that symbols are not natural. They are the products of traditions and that a variety of interpretations exist within and between religious cultures about the meanings of symbols. What practice theory also showed is that these symbols required power to ensure their proper interpretation and to give them to ability to have meaning.
As Mormons, we really don’t have a very deep reflective tradition on the power and nature of symbols. We seem to be stuck in a particular moment that sees symbols as naturally occuring or as self evident to astute observers, rather than the product of our own interpretation. As such, we are unwilling to see how our interpretations of symbols are produced within a superimposed ideology. Further, we tend to see symbols in a stimulus-response model and don’t consider how interpretations are authorized by our culture.
I guess the question that I have is what sorts of practices, disciplines, sanctions, etc are at work in the production of Mormon identity and the relationship between Mormon symbols (temple, scriptures, hierarchy, etc) and behavior? Note, these words sometimes have a negative valence, but for anthropologists, they are simply descriptive terms for how societies work. I want to know how Mormon society works, how its symbols are produced and how they produce Mormons.
A Resurrection of Flesh and Bone?
In 1 Cor 15, Paul declares that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” This text appears in the larger context of a defense of the resurrection, which seems to create a problem. How can Paul defend the resurrection, but in the very same passage declare that flesh and blood cannot go to heaven?
The difficulty of this passage was debated strenuously in antiquity. Those who defended the “resurrection of the flesh” wrestled mightily with this problem, while those who argued for a more spiritual resurrection relied heavily on this text to prove their point.
Mormons have been bothered by this passage as well not only because we are defenders of a resurrection of the flesh, but also because we have a notion of an embodied God. To my knowledge, our exegetical solution to this problem is unique. We argue that is true that flesh and blood together cannot inherit the KoG, but that the combination of “flesh and bone” can. We simply drop blood out of the equation. In antiquity they wondered about the blood of resurrected beings. Origen argued that Jesus’ blood was not Ichor, the sacred blood of the gods. He never said what it was instead.
So what then do resurrected beings have in thier veins? Is blood the only thing that is missing from the resurrected body? Can a body really be a body without it, or is it something else?
The Death of Jesus in Mark IV
And so we come to the last of my little four part series. If you’ve just dropped in, the first three are below. Other than that, enjoy!
The Burial of Jesus
As the day draws to a close Mark’s readers are suddenly confronted with a bewildering set of religious and statutory complications regarding the corpse of Jesus. Jewish law required that the corpse be buried by sundown to prevent defilement of the land. Roman law prohibited removal of the body from the cross without permission of the prefect. Burial is a matter for the male disciples, but they are nowhere to be found. And in this case, the situation is more urgent because it is now late Friday and the Sabbath is approaching.
Like the great knot formed at the death of Jesus, this smaller tangle that has spun off the events on Golgotha must be unsnarled. But as the little knot slips free and Jesus is buried, the great knot will also begin to loosen, drawing Mark’s readers irresistibly forward toward a faint post-crucifixion future.
The Death of Jesus in Mark III
Hello everyone! I had a good weekend but now, as usual, I need a rest. In any case, here is the third installment, covering Mark’s report of various initial reactions to the death of Jesus. The first to react is God, followed by the centurion. Finally, Mark mentions the fact that some women have been watching, as well… And if you’ve just wandered in, the first two pieces are below.
Reactions to the Death of Jesus
With the stark narration of the death of Jesus, attention begins to spill out from the cross. The first to respond is, appropriately, God, who now makes his interest immediately apparent. Next, a final bystander will speak. But this one, who must be presumed initially hostile, is apparently far more alert than those who stood around waiting for Elijah. As Mark tells the story:
“And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.
And when the centurion, which stood over against him, saw that he so cried out and gave up the ghost, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”
The Death of Jesus in Mark II
Just in case you have wandered in accidently, this is the second of a series on the death of Jesus in the Second Gospel. To find the first entry, scroll on down and make yourself right at home.
The Ninth Hour
In Gethsemane Jesus had addressed God, eloquently affirming his freely chosen submission to the divine will in spite of personal dismay (14:36). Now his isolation is so intense that the serenity which has characterized his behavior thus far finally breaks. When he calls out, after some three hours of darkness, it will be in the words of a scriptural passage that cannot be understood as anything other than an exquisite lament: “Elōi, Elōi, lama sabachthani,” translated “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is what Mark reports and these words are, according to Mark, the only and final words spoken by Jesus from the cross.
The Death of Jesus in Mark I
Some years ago, when I was a sweet, young Mogget, I thought to participate in Education Week by way of offering a four-class series on the death of Jesus in the Gospels. My intent was to bring out the unique theological insights offered by the authors of each of these exquisite pieces.
In order to compete for a position, I had to actually write up and give one of my proposed classes. In the end, my proposal was not accepted and I probably should not re-use my rejected work. But since things are getting exceedingly boring around here while I do dissy stuff, I guess I’ll serialize it and post it. You can make of it what you will.
The Death of Jesus in Mark
As Mark’s story of the mortal ministry of Jesus comes to a close in the Second Gospel, three major narrative strands running throughout the entire Gospel chave become tangled in a great and potentially insolvable knot:
–The first strand is the consistent failure of the disciples to recognize and respond to Jesus for who and what he is.
–The second strand is the failure of the Jewish leadership and polity to likewise react properly to Jesus.
–The third strand is the apparent, and I stress the word apparent, failure of Jesus in his mission and role as Son of God, Messiah, and herald of the approaching kingdom of God.
When Jesus dies, these three strands of real and apparent failure come together in a great tangle that to the mortal eye has no loose ends.