Like many Christians I like to read and re-read Romans 5-8. Paul uses very vivid imagery to portray both sin and grace as powers that can exercise dominion over human life. Death and the law are likewise rendered in apocalyptic terms. These chapters come to something of a climax in Rom 8:3
3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Now I’ll stop here and ask you to reflect on what sort of things strike you as important about this passage. Since there are no wrong answers you are free to answer in whatever fashion you like but do take a moment and think about it.
When I go through this exercise I find myself thinking along various lines. For example, sometimes I’m struck by how God chooses to wield his power. He’s not what you might call heavy-handed in this regard. It’s also clear that God is quite interested in saving his children – that’s the import of the phrase “sending his own son…” Finally, you’ll also notice that God appears to remain interested in the law because he has taken pains to ensure that “the just requirement of the law” is fulfilled.
Now for a question.
Did anybody read this and then focus on whether these ideas might have been new to Paul’s earliest readers? Anybody? I know something about the extent of Paul’s innovation because it’s of interest in certain academic circles but if you were to ask me what I personally found significant about Rom 8:3-4 I’d never respond with a judgment on its novelty unless that were the focus of a direct question.
Now we’re going to shift to a modern case.
Consider, please, a blog post by Professor Kent Jackson, Associate Dean of Religious Education at BYU. Professor Jackson, writing for the Religious Studies Center blog, sets himself the task of celebrating this month’s 179th anniversary of the JST. His choice in this endeavor? The newness of Moses 1. Professor Jackson suggests that this newness takes three broad forms. First, the narrative itself is not found in the traditional canon. Second, certain doctrines within this section are likewise not found in the canon. Finally, these ideas are likewise not part of mainstream 19th century Christianity.
While there is perhaps some temptation to try to “quantify” the Restoration in terms of the number of new ideas it has contributed, this should be resisted. I suggest that there is a better alternative. It is not the newness of the knowledge but the newness of life that such knowledge engenders that is the real gift of the JST. Since one man’s insight may be another’s “duh” moment this may be a very personal response. Nevertheless, it is an appropriate one and by moving from a focus on new knowledge to that of new life we may preclude concluding that we are somehow superior because we know more.
Just as you can read Paul quite profitably without attention to the novelty of his thoughts, so also you can read Moses 1 without explicitly thinking through the question of historical and cultural antecedents. As always, productive reading generally takes place when the reader is sensitive to genre. If we choose to read Moses as an apocalypse we might use this generic definition:
An apocalypse is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality, which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world. The purpose of an apocalypse is to encourage the recipients to continue to pursue, or if necessary to modify, their thinking and behavior to conform to the perspectives of the vision.
If we wish to celebrate the contributions of Moses 1 we might then read closely to identify the perspectives it espouses and then ask how conformity to these viewpoints contributes to a more Christ-like life. There is no need to explicitly distinguish those ideas that are unique to the JST from those that found elsewhere in the canon. We simply read, ponder, and enjoy as we profit from its insights.
Sometimes our appreciation of textual perspective is sharpened by comparison with other texts that are somehow similar and yet different. When applied to Moses 1, one rich source of such foils is the traditional canon. Consider the following possibilities:
• Most apocalyptic narratives have a heavenly intermediary who explains and interprets the vision to the human recipient. Notice that Moses 1 has no such mediator. God himself interacts with Moses and the thoughts he chooses to express require no interpretation. What is this narrative’s perspective on the human-divine relationship? Is there anything else in Moses 1 that is in tension with this openness and intimacy?
• Moses 1 also features a temptation narrative in which Satan is every bit as immanent as God. Compare this to the temptation narratives in the Gospels. How does Moses’ defeat of Satan differ from Jesus’ approach? What is this narrative’s perspective on the relationship between humankind and sin if our ability to recognize and begin to resist evil is somehow “built in,” that is, based on our creation after the pattern of Christ?
• Christian portrayals of heaven include the active presence of Christ and give pre-eminence to his redemptive role. Moses 1 gives us a Christian Moses and a Christian God but we see no Christ. Moses 1 also says very little about the redemption. I suggest, however, that it shows Christ as the Redeemer. Is showing a more powerful form of conveying information than telling?
For a fact, God did send “his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to deal with sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3) and I must say that it makes little difference to me whether I find this testimony in the traditional or Restoration canon. In the end it is not the newness of the text that matters but our response to the accumulated testimony. Likewise, it makes no difference whether this or that idea is novel; we will know its goodness by its fruits. If we do not appreciate scripture for the life it leads us into can we say that we really appreciate it much at all?
Wonderful as always.
Have you read N.T Wright and others from the New Perspective on Paul and what do you think of their views from an LDS perspective?
I think we should throw in 1John 3:9 just to make this a little more muddy. 🙂 I would love to be in the SS class that tried to tackle it. (Only as a fly on the wall of course)
Yo Eric. Good to see you again, and thanks.
John Willis: Can’t say as I have an “LDS perspective.”
CEF: If by “throw in” you mean something like “attempt to harmonize” then you deserve whatever angst you generate. Sufficient unto the verse are the challenges thereof, and all that. 😉
Thank you Mogget, that made me laugh. However, it made me wonder, should not truth be harmonious?
“. . . should the truth not be harmonious?”
If you follow this line of thinking too far, you’ll end up overlooking (or worse, rejecting) the paradoxes on which our religion is built.
If you follow this line of thinking too far, you’ll end up overlooking (or worse, rejecting) the paradoxes on which our religion is built.
Yes, you still have to do your home teaching this month. Nice try, though. 😉
And I bet we can talk about the challenges that harmonization presents w/o worrying about these sorts of issues.
Mogget — To be clear, in comment #6 I am referring to CEF’s line of thinking about harmonization in comment #5, not your thinking from the original post. You probably got that, but I can’t tell for sure from your last comment . . .
Yes, I got it — I was just laughing about how we segued so rapidly from my mundane points into your paradox. I thought about writing at more length on the John/Paul diversity, but decided against it.
So. John and Paul both write about sin. Some of their thoughts are reasonably similar, some distinct. Both share the idea of impeccability, that is, the inability to sin, however they have rather different ideas about how this impeccability was/is brought to pass. Both also admit that we do indeed still sin, however, they have different ideas about how to deal with it.
And so on. The best approach is to compare and contrast in order to illuminate the ideas involved. The worst approach is to assume that they must be saying the same thing in every case and then try to “force” the point.
Unity and diversity, unity and diversity. Just like ya gotta let your friends be themselves, so ya gotta let those Biblical authors be themselves, as well. And especially so if you ya wanna be their friends…