This is a long post, with four sections, but I ask you to read it because I think it’s important.
I’ll explain the nature of my concern, the two emblematic issues involved, and conclude by inviting you to do something.
Intro/Why I’m concerned
The 2019 Seminary manual for Old Testament is now available. I skimmed through some early bits, and I’m concerned for the future faith of our LDS youth.
My concern can be summed up with this: we treat ancient scripture very differently than we treat Church history, but ancient scripture needs it just as much, if not more.
In the same year that Seminary students are learning about Joseph Smith’s seerstone, that ground-breaking history Saints is published, that we have the Gospel Topics essays, that faithful professional historians like Kate Holbrook and Matt Grow are featured in face-to-face videos for youth, the Joseph Smith Papers, and so on… the way we teach ancient scripture to youth remains so simplistic as to be misleading and even factually incorrect at times.
Elder Ballard’s words about necessary expertise (he specifies Biblical studies and ancient history) have not yet affected the way our manuals are written for teaching and understanding ancient scripture. When they do cite scholarship, it tends to be old and/ or unreliable. To paraphrase Elder Ballard elsewhere, our traditional approach and “curriculum, though well-meaning, does not prepare students for today—a day when students have instant access to virtually everything about the Bible from every possible point of view.” This well-meaning overly simplified approach paves the way for the next generation’s faith crisis (please read that if you haven’t.)
I want to emphasize that my concern here is pastoral1That is, I am concerned about the flock not academic. President Faust quoted President Hugh B. Brown that
God desires that we learn and continue to learn, but this involves some unlearning. As Uncle Zeke said: ‘It ain’t my ignorance that done me up but what I know’d that wasn’t so.’
For whatever reason, some LDS internalize whatever Church manuals say as divinely revealed Truth, the Way Things Really Are. “If not correct, such statements wouldn’t be in manuals approved by the First Presidency,” goes the reasoning. (I have seen some teachers and Church employees essentially hold manuals to be inerrant.) So what happens when those things LDS have to unlearn are things that were explicitly presented to them in correlated and approved manuals? Are we contributing to future faith crises?
The more simplistic the claim and the tighter it is linked with the truth of scripture, the easier we make it to reject scripture and faith when that claim turns out to be wrong, or just more complex than presented.
Please do not misunderstand me; Seminary should not be a graduate seminar in complex scriptural issues, but it also shouldn’t simplify to the point of misleading or incorrectness. It needs to be accessible to the high-school student as well as the new-convert Mandarin- or Russian-speaking teacher. But there are ways to acknowledge and prepare people for complexity without presenting it. (I offer one example below.) At minimum, we need to avoid creating the expectation that there IS no complexity, that this simplicity is all there is to know.
What’s potentially damaging or challenging to faith depends entirely, I think, on one’s expectations…. Any kind of experience can be shattering to faith if the expectation is such that one is not prepared for the experience…. the problem is the incongruity between the expectation and the reality.
So wrote LDS historian Davis Bitton.
What expectations does the manual create? Do people expect further information, expansion, or nuance later? “Milk before meat” is a true principle (one I think we commonly misapply), but we do have to let people know the “meat” exists and actually provide it somewhere or point people to it! Manuals must create proper expectations, or they put faith at serious risk. Church History is now being presented in its fullness and complexity… but not ancient scripture.
Two Examples from the Manual
I could certainly pull out more examples, but these were in the introduction and Genesis is near to my heart.
- Who wrote Genesis and the Book of Moses?
The manual states bluntly that Moses wrote Genesis through Deuteronomy. This is certainly traditional, but it’s also much more complicated than that. As stated, the manual doesn’t even reflect the nuance of the LDS Bible Dictionary, which portrays Genesis as a Mosaic document based on pre-existing documents and with post-Mosaic editing.
The Seminary manual says “Who wrote the first book in the Bible? Turn to Genesis 1 to find out.”
Genesis 1 doesn’t say anything about authorship, unless you’re looking at the heading, which is not actually part of scripture.2The headings were all written by Elder McConkie, who explicitly said they were not official nor doctrinal, but “aids and helps only.” What does Genesis- Deuteronomy actually say about who wrote it? Here’s a link to a Jewish perspective looking at that question in depth.
Well, what about the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses? Don’t they settle the question of the authorship of Genesis-Deuteronomy? Again, these are complicated, but the manual makes no room for acknowledging “complicated” and that, again, is the real problem.
There’s no evidence that God revealed “Mosaiac authorship” to Nephi as much as Nephi assuming it on the basis of received tradition when he talks about “the five books of Moses.” Scripture tends to reflect the cultural assumptions of the time, and even revelation cannot be assumed to be ultimately correct in a historical/scientific/factual/doctrinal sense. That’s both a genre issue (which our manuals tend to ignore) and a theological one. These are topics I’ve written about extensively in places like the FAIRMormon Conference, the Maxwell Institute (paper not publicly available yet), BYU’s Sperry Symposium, and UVU’s Mormon Studies Conference. As for Moses, see my paper from the Joseph Smith Papers conference on the relationship between Genesis, Moses, and Abraham, and what it tells us about the nature of revelation. I greatly expanded on that at the 2019 FAIRMormon conference.
I’m uncomfortable doing so, but if it carries any weight, let me emphasize that I’m an active, believing, temple-recommend carrying Mormon, that the relatedness of scripture, science, and interpretation is my area of professional expertise, and that these arguments are made in (at least quasi-) academic, vetted, faithful venues like the Joseph Smith Papers.
Since I try not to criticize unless I can contribute, if I wrote the manual, it would read something like this.
While tradition attributes the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy to Moses, the Biblical text itself does not actually say that Moses wrote it, and different kinds of clues in the text suggest that different authors and editors at different times contributed to these books as we know them today. For example, unlike Nephi’s repetitive first-person “I Nephi,” the Bible consistently refers to Moses in the third-person, “He, Moses,” even describing his death in Deuteronomy 34! The Church is not committed either to strictly Mosaic authorship nor to other views. As the First Presidency said in 1922, it is not ultimately authorship that matters, but whether the doctrine is correct.
2. Revelation as Dictation
Moses 1:40 says, “And now, Moses, my son, I will speak unto thee concerning this earth upon which thou standest; and thou shalt write the things which I shall speak.”
The manual takes this passage as proof of Mosaic authorship of both Moses and Genesis and then uses it as a paradigm for revelation and scripture.
I find that problematic from several different angles. I can’t address them all here nor lay out my own view of the relationship between Moses 1 and 2-4, which parallel Genesis 1-3, but see my FAIRMormon Conference talk and my DC Temple fireside.
First, the manual assumes the absolute historical/documentary nature of the Book of Moses. That’s not in keeping with what we know of the JST, nor is it actually argued, just assumed. That’s a genre issue.
Second, it implies that the entirety of the Old Testament (and revelation in general) is God dictating to prophets! Prophets as mere scribes, mechanically and passively taking down the words that God dictates! I know some LDS hold to this idea, but it runs against everything we know about scripture ancient and modern. Let’s stick with modern for a moment.
Very orthodox Mormon scholars in orthodox venues looking closely at D&C have argued strongly for a very different view of revelation. For example, The Ensign has carried the statement about D&C from Robert Woodford that
Elder Orson Pratt confirmed President Woodruff’s statement and added: “Joseph … received the ideas from God, but clothed those ideas with such words as came to his mind”
That’s not divine dictation.
Steven Harper, former BYU professor who then became a historian for the Church, an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers, and new Editor in Chief of BYU Studies, writes of the “process of revelation” in a BYU publication, concluding
Joseph knew better than anyone else that the words he dictated were both human and divine, the voice of God clothed in the words of his own limited, early American English vocabulary. He regarded himself as a revelator whose understanding accumulated over time. Joseph recognized as a result of the revelatory process that the texts of his revelations were not set in stone. Rather, he felt responsible to revise and redact them to reflect his latest understanding.
If Joseph merely received God’s word and wrote it down— and Harper details how William McClellin thought this— then he should have known not to change it. But that wasn’t Joseph’s understanding of revelation!
Similarly, according to the pioneering JST scholar Robert Matthews, quoted in The Ensign, (and remember the manual presents the Book of Moses as the JST)
[the JST] was not a simple, mechanical recording of divine dictum, but rather a study-and-thought process accompanied and prompted by revelation from the Lord. That it was a revelatory process is evident from statements by the Prophet and others who were personally acquainted with the work.
Sometimes, like with D&C, Joseph made revisions or translated the same passage differently. Sometimes he preached according to the KJV, not the JST. And usually, the Book of Mormon matches the KJV, not the JST. These are difficult things to account for, if you assume that revelation is dictated by God.
Grant Underwood, another BYU professor, gave a fantastic BYUH devotional about “Relishing the Revisions: Joseph Smith and the Revelatory Process” and also has a BYU Studies article called “Revelation, Text, and Revision: Insight from the Book of Commandments and Revelations.” He also presents strong evidence against a dictation model of revelation.3C.f. his paper in the volume Foundational Texts of Mormonism
The preeminent scholar of the text of the D&C, Robert Woodford, wrote several articles in The Ensign which militate against divine dictation, like this one.
Joseph Smith did not receive all these revelations as word-for-word dictations from the Lord (although he may have received some this way). Rather, he received inspiration and wrote the revelations using his own words, often couched in Victorian English.
Revelation can work more than one way, of course, but presenting a “dictation” model as THE WAY we got the Old Testament overreaches dangerously, in my view, by presenting it as THE PRIMARY WAY prophets get revelation. This is too simple and too rigid, and also can’t account for modern or ancient scripture. Why are we teaching Seminary this way? Why not teach explicitly that revelation is a process, that scripture is usually God’s word in human words? (A simpler and fantastic version of that book is this one.)
This idea of revelation as process, as divine/human collaboration, makes much more sense of the difficulties of the Old Testament that are much much harder to square with faith if the whole thing was just dictated by God.
What expectations does the manual create for students and teachers by presenting divine dictation as the primary mode of Old Testament revelation and, by extension, modern revelation? Are those expectations accurate and well-founded? Are they healthy for the long-term sustainable spiritual health of our youth and soon-to-be-missionaries?
What You and I Can Do
As much as I think we misread the story of Uzzah, I am not comfortable with what’s typically called “steadying the ark” or “counseling the brethren,” but then, I don’t think that’s what I’m doing here. These manuals are not dropped out of heaven, nor written by Apostles under divine inspiration. These manuals invite feedback and even correction for mistakes. Moreover, President Nelson recently taught that “good inspiration is based upon good information” and I hope I am providing some of that.
I know that there is currently a group writing a manual to replace the Old Testament Institute manual; the very problematic 1980 manual remains current. (That manual forces a dichotomy between accepting evolution OR the Gospel on p.34, and contains a 2000-word (!) extract from a Seventh-day Adventist pamphlet against evolution, written at a creationist research institution, p.34-36.)
However, if my sources are reliable, the new writing committee, while no doubt good people and teachers, has no expertise in Bible, ancient Near East, Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic, etc. The Bible is an ancient book written for ancient people, and when we try to read it as modern Mormonism, we misunderstand it, to our detriment. Are we looking at a repeat of the Seminary manual’s simplistic tradition, but now aimed at college students around the world?
The manual introduction says
Comments and corrections are appreciated. Please send them, including errors, to…. ces-manuals@ldschurch.org [Also copy them to scriptures@ldschurch.org] Please list your complete name, address, ward, and stake. Be sure to give the title of the manual when you offer your comments.
If any of this concerns you as it does me, the proper way to express those concerns is through the two email addresses above. Please do so in a constructive way, either in detail or generally, without rancor, but expressing the experiences and needs of your family in Seminary, Institute, and Gospel Doctrine. I hope you would express a concern and hope that we bring Ancient Scripture up to the level of Church History, that we provide LDS around the world with the equivalent of Revelations in Context for the Bible. We need some collaboration or even oversight between the manual writers and reliable LDS scholars of Bible, history, ancient near east, etc. In short, we need Ancient Scripture to catch up to Church History, and this for the faith of our youth and adults.
The Bible, after all, is our primary point of contact with Jews, Christians and Muslims, and the foundational scripture of our beliefs. All our modern revelations presume a knowledge and base of the Bible. To quote Elder Ballard again, from a talk called “The Miracle of the Holy Bible,”
The more we read and study the Bible and its teachings, the more clearly we see the doctrinal underpinnings of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. We tend to love the scriptures that we spend time with. We may need to balance our study in order to love and understand all scripture. You young people especially, do not discount or devalue the Holy Bible. It is the sacred, holy record of the Lord’s life. The Bible contains hundreds of pages more than all of our other scripture combined. It is the bedrock of all Christianity.
Sending out our missionaries with a simplistic view of the Bible’s inspiration and content does not prepare them fully for their work, and is sometimes a distinct disadvantage. Shortchanging the Bible and ancient scripture for sake of tradition undermines our missionary program.
So write in, if you feel so moved. But also, study on your own, and contribute to making your ward’s various classes better. Act within your sphere of influence. Balance your study to include the Bible in context. Good teachers and knowledgeable parents and friends can mitigate less-than-ideal manuals in adapting to local needs, and we are each commanded to study and learn out of the best books, as well as teach each other. In doing so, we fulfill our individual call to discipleship.
September 30, 2018 at 11:34 pm
First, I want to thank you for bringing this up. I don’t think that we have anything to fear from high-quality, faithful scholarship, but our current correlated materials do not prepare someone to engage with the Old Testament.
Second, I know we have to start somewhere, but we have a lot of work to do. I haven’t taught the Old Testament at the Seminary or Institute level, but I *have* taught it at the Primary and junior Sunday School level, and it’s a struggle. In my experience, the early lessons–from the Pearl of Great Price–are fine. It’s the later ones, where we have accumulated so many poor, traditional interpretations of the Old Testament that things get difficult. For instance, just this morning I taught a lesson on Isaiah to a class of eight-year-olds, and the manual said that Isaiah 29 is a prophecy regarding the Book of Mormon.
Sometimes lessons can be “fixed” with a few tweaks, but sometimes I have to scrap the whole thing.
Third, I wonder if part of the trouble is that it would be a lot more work to teach the Old Testament well. In my lesson on Isaiah, for instance, I talked about poetry and the gap between our language and his. That seems like it would be difficult to do in such a way that translates easily into other languages. We need to do better though, for the reasons you mentioned.
October 4, 2018 at 11:12 pm
Correlated materials exist by way of priestcraft. Priestcraft is forbidden. The fact that you are “fixing” lessons with a “few tweaks” should wake you up to the disaster we are in the middle of. We are supposed to be asking God to enlighten us and teaching our children based on that and His Holy Word, not figuring out how to tweak lessons to teach somebody else’s kids.
1 Hearken, O ye Gentiles, and hear the words of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, which he hath commanded me that I should speak concerning YOU, for, behold he commandeth me that I should write, saying:
2 Turn, all ye Gentiles, from your wicked ways; and repent of your evil doings, of your lyings and deceivings, and of your whoredoms, and of your secret abominations, and your idolatries, and of your murders, and your PRIESTCRAFTS, and your envyings, and your strifes, and from all your wickedness and abominations, and come unto me, and be baptized in my name, that ye may receive a remission of your sins, and be filled with the Holy Ghost, that ye may be numbered with my people who are of the house of Israel.
If the Savior warned the Gentiles about priestcraft then it goes double for Zion who is also warned against it.
October 1, 2018 at 12:52 pm
Thank you so much for this article. I hope it will help shift us in the right direction as an organization.
October 3, 2018 at 6:48 pm
Thanks for reading and commenting!
October 1, 2018 at 2:55 pm
Ben, I really appreciate your efforts, including your efforts at good faith, humility and an attitude of helpfulness. There are two kinds of criticism; the kind that seeks to build up and the kind that seeks to destroy. One is based on love, the other based on hatred. I think that your is appropriate.
October 3, 2018 at 6:48 pm
Thanks! I appreciate the feedback. Some people have not been able to perceive my good intent.
October 2, 2018 at 7:51 pm
From what I’ve read of the current manuals they’re not much worse than the instruction in seminary in the 1980s. I’d already read the Bible multiple times and other things like Isaiah commentaries and Bible dictionaries and the entire Pseudepigrapha and Jewish folk legends before the Old Testament year and found the curriculum subpar and deathly uninteresting, so this seems like more in a grand old decades-long tradition. (Trying to remember if that was the year that the seminary teacher preached the gospel of hockey all year, or the year the seminary teacher talked about the temple ceremonies and sex with his newlywed wife. And was that the year that all the kids were weeping over a horticulturally impossible story about a rose? And the cut-and-paste xeroxed handouts from Skousen books! The details have mercifully started to blur. I suppose I should just stipulate that the curriculum wasn’t written for everyone and move on.)
And I still can’t wrap my mind around how anyone can actually read the Bible and come out of the experience thinking that Moses wrote the books of Moses. It’s like they’re practically shouting that they’ve never read the Bible, or if they have, have never taken the text seriously. I guess it’s like knowing so well that there are three wise men that you can read the entire New Testament and not realize that it never says three wise men.
And, yes, this a fairly high level of snark from someone who loves the scriptures and thinks they should be taken seriously, but rarely saw that in seminary and have a hard time seeing that in the current manuals. I understand the goals of Seminaries and Institutes are different than mine, but I still find it unfortunate.
October 3, 2018 at 6:47 pm
Oof, Skousen books? That’s an excommunicatable offense, in my book 😉
October 3, 2018 at 10:24 am
The Doctrine and Covenants admonishes the saints to “Seek of of the best books words of wisdom,” not “seek out of the approved books and pop culture, words of orthodoxy.” It would be nice if the manuals are better, yes, and making efforts to improve them is important if we want students who are prepared, but it’s also important to remember that none of us are helpless in the face of what a committee created despite the existence of better books. Anyone who wants better information can find better books. And not just skeptical approaches, or fundamentalist approaches, but faith-filled and mind expanding and enlightening approaches. Benjamin, Kevin Barney and many others have done very good work that also points toward the best books.
October 3, 2018 at 6:46 pm
That’s true, but this is not really about what material students have access to; it’s about not providing manuals that are so simplistic/misleading that they’ll create faith crises later.
October 4, 2018 at 5:14 pm
This is thin ice covering deep waters… and it should not be so. Note the extreme caution even this highly skilled expert uses… one assumes necessarily.
My professional background provides a useful fact. “Credentials” and “political oversight” correlate poorly with highly effective leadership… so much so that they permeate well into the negative left-side of a correlation co-efficiency scale.
After reviewing many thousands of critical incidents we were able to factor out the most obvious (most frequently appearing) behaviors associated with each of two leadership styles… “Power and Control” versus “Shared Values and Vision”.
Long story short… very little “truth” trickles down… it almost always bubbles up. Leadership that doesn’t recognize and facilitate this reality… using methods akin to what the author is suggesting… would be “tagged” by our research as power-based.
Revelation must certainly involve “feedback”.
October 4, 2018 at 10:25 pm
Ben, I read the title of your post, paused, pulled up the new manual, read parts of the introduction, cringed, then cringed again, then read your post. You are spot on.
Not only does this manual hold to Mosaic authorship, but it emphasizes it more strongly than the previous manual. All current S&I manuals treat scripture simplistically. I’m disappointed that this new one follows their lead.
I am over the youth Sunday school in my ward, and since next year’s curriculum covers the NT, for the past month or so I’ve been thinking about Julie Smith’s article. I’ll probably write in.
October 4, 2018 at 11:14 pm
Elder Pearson seems to address, at least in part, your concern in his recent address at the FairMormon Conference. He validates your worry and confesses that the Church will continue to publish well-polished yet lacking/incomplete materials. He then pleads for faithful individuals, like yourself, and organizations (e.g. FairMormon, Interpreter, Book of Mormon Central, etc.) to continue their vital work. He wholeheartedly acknowledges the indispensable importance of their research to enhance and enliven the official published church materials. He emphasized, “Don’t wait for the Church to take the lead on every single question or issue”. (start at 17:40; https://www.fairmormon.org/blog/2018/08/08/the-2018-fairmormon-conference-in-review).
Having taught full-time seminary and institute for more than 20 years I can attest to the invaluable contribution that faithful scholars have made. Their work is helping the rising generation to not be deceived (D&C 123:11-15) and, additionally, helping them to cherish the supernal truths found in the restored Church of Jesus Christ.
October 6, 2018 at 4:29 pm
Well, that’s true, but there are different issues at play. My primary one was, as commonly phrased, “can I trust Church materials to be complete/true”? There’s problems with that framing and problems with the materials.
Another is “how many people have access to a good local teacher who is well-informed beyond Church-approved sources”?
And how do you help the first group that rejects anything not published by the Church, including the trustworthy-but-unapproved who might disagree with or extend beyond the manual? I think this group is small, but not insignificant.
October 6, 2018 at 2:33 pm
Bro. Spackman,
Thank you for this post, and for all of the information you have provided on your blog. Could you within the next month or so post a list of books and resources to help us in our study of the New Testament similar to those you recommended for the Old Testament?
Thank you.
October 6, 2018 at 4:26 pm
Hi Doug. If you go the link below (all my Resource posts), and scroll down to 2014, you’ll see my three New Testament posts. I’ll be rewriting and updating them, probably going up in November.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/benjaminthescribe/category/resources/
October 27, 2018 at 4:34 pm
I liked this article a lot, and while teaching seminary this year have been grateful for all the material we have like Revelations in Context, Saints, JS Papers etc, yet I sometimes have been frustrated and disappointed by what the manual discusses this year. I haven’t yet looked through the Old Testament manual, so I cannot comment.
I tend to want to teach things like, did Joseph Smith really have a sheet or blanket between him and his scribe while translating, or did Parley Pratt know Sidney Rigdon before his mission to the “lamanites” (Saints ch.10 tells the story a little differently implying they didn’t know each other, but Pratt’s autobiography states he used to be in his congregation). I love discussing things like that, especially if they are controversial (ex: Do you have to have the priesthood to give a blessing?).
In one of my local seminary teacher trainings, it was mentioned we teach for conversion, not for content. I want to dig deep into details, but sometimes I need to just make the lessons relevant to the students and recognize they don’t care like I do about stuff like that. In the end, the students won’t remember 95% of the stuff I taught them, but their testimonies will hopefully be strengthened, and they’ll learn that learning the gospel can be complex and maybe one day decide to dig deeper.
I do teach anything that can be controversial and used to attack the church. I don’t want my students to learn that Joseph was a polygamist, or a “treasure hunter” from non-lds sources first. They need to hear it internally first. I remember how I felt when I first learned that Emma didn’t follow the church with Brigham Young. I was an adult before I knew that. I was shocked because everything I had ever heard about Emma was very positive, and honestly I felt a little betrayed. I don’t want my students to feel like I’m sugar coating the gospel as I teach them.
Here’s my $.02. I wish there were a formal place for adults to discuss more studied knowledge with other adults(outside of institute for young adults). I can read and study on my own, or even discuss with my family, but I would love to have an adult advanced Sunday School class, or advanced Institute class with no age limit or something. Wouldn’t that be fun? The average member could dig deeper into things like the Abrahamic Covenant – which we rarely talk about, but is important to our salvation, and have different published articles written by scholars as reading assignments.
I also am disappointed to see the Sunday School program moving away from sequential scripture teaching(as we adopt Come Follow Me). Outside of seminary or institute, where can we learn the scriptures sequentially?
October 27, 2018 at 4:44 pm
By my response, I don’t want to seem unappreciative of Come Follow Me or other church resources and programs. In general, I like the direction the church is moving. I just worry about what we may be leaving behind or haven’t yet provided.