exploring mormon culture, thought and texts
Two LDS scholars have recently voiced their thoughts on the academic study of religion. One can be found here; the other can be found on pages 136-145 of the recent issue of the Religious Educator (14.3, 2013). I’ve brought these two pieces into dialogue for the readers of FPR.
NOTE: I have taken things out of context, but I have not changed any of the words except as marked by parentheses.
Enjoy! Continue reading “Two LDS Perspectives on Religious Studies (A Parody)”
Paul claims to be an apostle by virtue of his vision/s of Jesus.
He does not claim to be an apostle by virtue of Jesus ordaining him to any priesthood.
He does not claim to be an apostle by virtue of Peter, another of the twelve, or anyone else ordaining him to any priesthood either, though he does want to point out that years after the fact James and Peter and John accepted him (Galatians 2:6-10).
When he refers to apostles (arguably including the woman Junia in Romans 16:7) and deacons (clearly including the woman Phebe in Romans 16:1-2), he does not have any priesthood or ordination to it in mind.
In the pastoral epistles attributed to Paul (but arguably not written by him), where the qualifications of a bishop are listed, no priesthood or ordination to it comes up. Ordination of elders comes up (they are ordained in the KJV of Titus 1:5 anyway) but not ordination to any priesthood. ‘Paul’ does say here that he was ordained an apostle (ordained in the KJV of 1 Timothy 2:7 anyway), but again he says nothing about any priesthood or who it was that ordained him an apostle, if indeed it was anyone but God.
Thus Paul and even ‘Paul’ never mention priesthood or ordination to it.
Furthermore, when Jesus calls the twelve and seventy(two) in the gospel accounts (written after Paul), he is not made to say anything about priesthood or ordination to it. He does ordain the twelve (he ordains them in the KJV of Mark 3:14 anyway), but it is not to any priesthood.
In Acts (also written after Paul), when Matthias is ordained an apostle in place of Judas (ordained in the KJV of Acts 1:22 anyway), it has nothing to do with any priesthood. It has to do with him having been there at Jesus’ baptism, resurrection, and everything in between. That is, Paul would be excluded as a candidate here (but see Acts 14:14). It also has to do with a kind of divination. Matthias is ordained (again in the KJV anyway) as God chooses him by sortition. None of the eleven place their hands on his head to ordain him. Rather, they give a lot to him and lot to another candidate, and the lot falls to Matthias because, it was believed, God made it happen.
Later in Acts, when Peter and John bring the spirit to the baptized Samaritans, something Philip is supposed not to be able to do, there is a power mentioned to be sure. And Peter and John do place their hands on the heads of the Samaritans. But the power they have is not called priesthood. Likewise, when Paul re-baptizes the Ephesian converts of Apollos.
Apostle, seventy(two), elder, bishop, deacon are not priesthood offices in the New Testament. Much less do they comprise a priesthood organization in which to become an apostle, seventies first become elders, bishops, and deacons.
The only priesthood organization in the New Testament is the Jewish temple priesthood. Jesus was a Jew but he was not a Jewish priest in the temple; in fact, he seems to have gotten along poorly with most who were.
It is only in the book of Hebrews (which does not even claim to be written by Paul) that Jesus is said to be a priest. There he is said to be a cosmic priest ministering in a heavenly temple/tabernacle. Not exactly literal.
The only occurrences of words for priesthood in the New Testament are in Luke (1:9 Jewish temple priesthood); in Hebrews (7:5, 11-12, 24 one after order of Aaron and another after order of Melchizedek); and in 1 Peter (2:5, 9). It is in the latter that believers in Jesus are referred to as a priesthood. But they offer spiritual, i.e., metaphorical sacrifice. If the sacrifice is non-literal, what about the priesthood?
Believers in Jesus are also referred to as kings and priests to God and Christ (or vice-versa) in the book of Revelation (1:6, 5:10, 20:6), it is true. But it is not clear what that means when God and the Lamb are said to be the temple of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:22).
Up shot: there is no precedent in the New Testament for men or women being ordained to priesthood offices of apostle, seventy(two), elder, bishop or deacon. Men and women are referred to as apostles and deacons, the term apostle being used in more than one way by different New Testament authors and probably even the same author (Luke-Acts). Men are also referred to as seventies, elders, and bishops. This has nothing to do with any priesthood or ordination to it. In some New Testament texts, Jesus and believers in him are said to be priests or priestly, but it is only on very broad analogy with the priesthood of the Jewish temple or Israelite tabernacle.
In a recent post TT made some interesting observations about Korihor and secularism in the context of the BoM narrative. He expressed skepticism that Korihor should be understood as an anachronistic representative of Enlightenment atheism and provocatively suggested that the narrative is actually arguing in favor of secularism if understood as the separation of ecclesiastical from political powers.
I don’t find this reading of the narrative to be persuasive, however, even though many of TT’s questions are well-placed and aspects of his analysis have caused me to reconsider the issue.
Continue reading “Korihor: An Anachronistic Exemplum of Atheism and Infidelity?”
When I opened up my new issue of the BYU magazine, I immediately encountered a short article entitled “Ask the Expert: Hebrew School” that attracted my interest. The article was a brief discussion of several Hebrew names/terms by Donald Parry, a professor of Hebrew, accompanied by a rather large photo of him holding some Hebrew scrolls.
I was interested to see what Parry had to say, since he is a well-known Dead Sea Scrolls/Old Testament scholar who has published widely, and to find out why BYU magazine would devote space to what is generally regarded as an arcane and intellectually intimidating subject. Initially I was hopeful that Parry would use the opportunity to show how careful Hebrew study could deepen and expand one’s understanding of the Hebrew Bible. But unfortunately upon reading I was disappointed to discover that the article reflected a lack of rigor and familiarity with current biblical scholarship and a problematic eisegetical tendency to project modern Mormon theology back into the text of the Hebrew scriptures.
Continue reading “BYU Professor’s Mormonizing of the Old Testament”
The online LDS response to the NYT article describing Hans Mattsson’s struggle with doubt about the Mormon faith that he had once believed in has been interesting to watch. Most responses have been generous and sympathetic, realizing that some serious soul-searching within the community is in order, while others have been more reactionary.
One aspect of this discussion I have found particularly interesting has been the conversations that have ensued over Mattsson’s confusion and concern over Joseph Smith’s polygamy. Some immediately queried, “How could Mattsson have not known about polygamy?” Is his case simply a product of his relative ignorance about Church history and doctrine, which would have made him more vulnerable to difficult new information? Others focused more on how they have personally dealt with the uncomfortable historical data, with attitudes ranging from, “I found out about Joseph Smith’s many wives a long time ago, so now these kinds of issues don’t bother me anymore” to “Polygamy is something that I struggle with and don’t have a good explanation for.”
Still others advocate for increased inoculation efforts, with the assumption being that the more transparent the Church is about Joseph Smith’s polygamy and the more we educate people early on in safer settings, the less likely they are to be broadsided with information that could lead to a severe faith crisis.
I myself am not against inoculation. In fact, I think a full-throttled institutionalized effort to be open about such issues is the only way to go. Yet I also believe that we need to go in with both eyes open, recognizing that while transparency and sensitively appropriate discussion at the right times will significantly reduce the numbers of those who feel a strong sense of betrayal by their leaders for not being more forthcoming, in the long term increased knowledge of Joseph Smith’s relationship to polygamy is also surely to have inevitable repercussions on the way we think about his prophethood and may eventually lead to substantial evolution in LDS theology. We may come to think of Joseph Smith less as a prophet with ontologically unique revelatory access to the divine will and more as a radical religious visionary whose “revelations” were a product of his own distinctive interpretive sensibilities as they interacted with the particular cultural context in which he lived.
With the new direction at the Maxwell Institute, the launch of the Mormon Interpreter, the latest about the BYU New Testament Commentary project, and the search for a new dean of Religious Education, which culminated last week, there has been some talk about the future of LDS scriptural studies, including, but hardly focused on, the Bible.
In talking about the future, we might consider the history of scriptural studies in other faith traditions, such as Catholicism. Broadly speaking, Catholics were late to the game of biblical scholarship, a game that Protestants had been playing for some time. Catholics were late to the game because they were discouraged from participating until changes in the 1940s and 60s.
One of the most prominent Catholics to engage in mainstream biblical scholarship was Raymond Brown (1928-1998), priest and professor. As a professor, he was and still is well respected for his extensive publications, representing the middle of the road, hardly fundamentalist on the one hand or radically skeptical on the other. As a priest, though, he was and still is something of a polarizing figure, either loved or hated by his fellow Catholics.
Mormons, it would seem, have been and continue to be discouraged from participating in the game of biblical scholarship, even at the level of textual criticism and translation (see e.g. this), not to mention historical criticism and, in a word, subsequent theory, or in a few more words, subsequent narrative, social scientific, and cultural criticisms—none of these kinds of criticism necessarily being mutually exclusive.
But if things were to change, and if one day in the future there were to be an LDS Raymond or Raymona Brown, how might that turn out?
There is no way to know for certain of course until we reach that point. If we reach that point. And there is no reason to expect that Mormonism’s history with biblical scholarship will mirror that of Catholicism. All the same, it does not hurt to consider their history in thinking about our future.
What would an LDS Raymond or Raymona Brown be, first off?
This would be someone who publishes widely on the Bible, who serves as president of the Mormon Biblical Association (the imaginary LDS equivalent of the Catholic Biblical Association), as well as the Society of Biblical Literature, and the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas.
In other words, an LDS Raymond or Raymona Brown is generations away at the absolute soonest. For one thing, there is no Mormon equivalent of the Catholic Biblical Association. Imagine a religious scientific association of LDS biblical scholars and their colleagues, having 1500 members, a quarterly journal with a subscription of 3800, and a monograph series. (Those are the recent numbers for the CBA, not what they were when Brown was president.)
Anyhow, say the time comes, and conditions are right. Then what?
Some Mormons, even a few high ranking Mormons, might be supportive. Pope Benedict XVI, before he became pope, is purported to have said once that he “would be very happy if we had many exegetes like Father Brown.”
But other Mormons, even among those with advanced degrees, and even among those with training in biblical and related studies, are likely to be opposed to the kind of work that would result from LDS engagement with mainstream biblical scholarship. Brown was and is considered to be a dissident, heretic, and so forth, by some of his fellow Catholics who have written against him in books (at least one anyway, entitled The New Biblical Theorists, by George Kelly) and various online venues. Like here (January 2010) and here (May 2010) and here (April 2009) and here (January 2008).
One Christian apologist with a bachelor of divinity degree recently wrote the following in an online opinion piece punctuated by mocking and anti-intellectual scare quotes:
‘Father’ Raymond Brown (1928-1998) was a Roman Catholic “Bible scholar” who spent many years undermining the New Testament, something most Catholics have never forgiven him for.
This apologist cites another, Catholic apologist with a BA in religion and an MA in theology, as well as a PhD, who has this to say about Brown’s heresies:
Up until his death in 1998, Fr. Brown was upheld by many as the premier Catholic biblical scholar. Unfortunately, despite his well-recognized scholarly erudition, he has probably done more to undue [sic] much that we have held sacred in biblical studies than any one single person in Catholic history. … That a man with such a liberal background and radical ideas could actually make it to the top of his field in Catholic biblical scholarship gives a good indication of the sad state of affairs both at the Vatican and Catholic academia.
What sorts of things did Brown write in his middle-of-the-road scholarship that were so pernicious? What might an LDS scholar who engages in mainstream biblical scholarship write?
Well, for starters, Brown argued that the idea of Jesus’ preexistence in Paul and John and the idea of Jesus’ virgin birth in Matthew and Luke were originally separate, and that they were only harmonized as the orthodox doctrine of incarnation through parthenogenesis in the second century (The Birth of the Messiah, p.141-142).
What would LDS reactions to this be? What should they be? (Before turning immediately to our extra-biblical scriptures, it might be informative to try find the ideas of Jesus’ pre-existence and virgin birth together anywhere in the New Testament.)
As final food for thought, the Catholic apologist quoted above in opposition to Brown, the one who says that Brown “has probably done more to undue [sic] much that we have held sacred in biblical studies than any one single person in Catholic history,” this apologist, by the way, argued in his massive dissertation, now published in three volumes, that the earth, not the sun, is at the center of our solar, er, geo system.
Truly, Galileo was wrong.
And Father Brown was a heretic.
This is a repost from four years ago. I was reminded of it and thought it worth rereading. Original with comments here.
Jesus set up an impossible paradox when he explained that the two great commandments are to love God and to love one’s neighbor (though he was not the first to summarize the Law in such a way). The problem is that one simply cannot do both, as Jesus himself elsewhere noted that one cannot serve two masters.
King Benjamin saw the impossible tension between these two contradictory commandments and attempted to resolve it by collapsing them into one single ethical imperative. He said: “when ye are the in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God” (Mos 2:17). The attempt to equate the love of God and the love of neighbor as simply one ethical imperative elides the problem of having two competing duties. The problem (or promise, depending on your perspective) with such a position is that the duty to love God cannot possibly come into conflict with the duty to love one’s neighbor.
Continue reading “From the Archives: King Benjamin Killed God”
The Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) has sometimes been put forward as one of those features of Christianity that marks it as distinctive from Hellenism. Traditional Protestant scholarship on the Bible reproduced popular racialized conceptions of culture in their analysis of ancient categories of thought. For instance, Adolf von Harnack distinguished between Judaism and Hellenism in his analysis of early Christianity. To this may be added the idea that Christianity represented something unique and distinct from its surroundings. In this narrative, the unique (=true) form of Christianity faced the risk of being corrupted by influence from Judaism and Hellenism. Harnack mapped all ancient heresies according to how much Judaism or Hellenism they exhibited.
Scholars today have largely abandoned these polar divisions between Judaism and Hellenism, some going so far as to call Judaism itself a Hellenistic religion. This movement has had significant impact on the study of ancient Christianity. Far from imagining Jesus as either ignorant of, or opposed to, Hellenism, we might best think of him as belonging to a cultural complex that represented the confluence of Greek, Israelite, and other cultural contexts. Among these, we can see the SM as part of this confluence, including several Hellenistic elements.
Continue reading “Hellenism and the Sermon on the Mount”
Book of Mormon geography is an area of research that has taken interesting turns in recent decades. Scholarly apologists have come to recognize that traditional interpretations of the Book of Mormon that understand it to have encompassed the lands of both North and South America are historically untenable and so have constructed alternative limited geographical models that see the events recounted in it as having occurred in a relatively small area of Mesoamerica (or, as some would have it, in the Great Lakes region of North America).[1] On the other hand, critics have countered that a close reading of the Book of Mormon argues against this approach and suggests that the narrative itself presupposes a hemispheric or continental perspective.[2] On this view, geographical considerations necessitate that we understand the Book of Mormon to be a fictional and mythological account of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas produced during the 19th century.
I would like to briefly expand on the argument for reading the Book of Mormon as myth by taking a closer look at the Book of Ether and its description of the land of the Jaredites, ie. the Land Northward. I will try and suggest not only that the land occupied by the Jaredites is best understood as the North American continent as a whole, but that we may be able to plausibly identify the Jaredite land Moron with a particular geographical locale within the borders of the United States as it was known to Joseph Smith.
We can begin by summarizing the evidence that the land of the Jaredites was coextensive with North America:
Continue reading “The Land Northward and the Land of Moron in the Book of Ether”
President Spencer W. Kimball’s most famous sermon recently received a makeover in the June Ensign. Kimball delivered one of the most enduring sermons of his career, “The False Gods We Worship,” in 1976 in the context of the bicentennial celebration of the United States. Kimball was a conservative political thinker, but this talk has endured in part because it appealed to conservatives and liberals alike.
There are two sins that are at the heart of Kimball’s critique of society. First, Kimball warns about the idolatry of wealth. He sees materiality in conflict with spirituality, and the searching for wealth in conflict with service in the gospel. These plentiful resources compete for our time, attention, and allegiance. These resources should be put to use to bless others. He express regret that some have chosen their wealth or possessions over service in the church.
Second, Kimball expresses opposition to war. Preaching in the wake of Vietnam, but also in the context of the Cold War, Kimball condemns the use of resources, the training of soldiers, and the perversion of the Savior’s teaching to “love your enemies.”
Continue reading “The Politics of Editing “The False Gods We Worship””