On October 3, 1946, President J. Reuben Clark delivered a speech to the general Relief Society session of General Conference. Titled ” Our Wives and Our Mothers in the Eternal Plan” —reproduced here— it generated some internal discussion with Elder Joseph Fielding Smith.
More specifically, Smith took issue with Clark’s acceptance of an old earth, and this was a simple case of “accepting” scripture.
If we are willing to accept the word of the Lord as it has come down to us through the ages, then we cannot hold that this earth in its state before the fall could have existed ‘through one million or many millions of years.’
President J. Reuben Clark, Jr.
Clark’s reply is marked “unsent” in the archives; perhaps he thought better of it. Regardless, in his four-page defense, Clark points out in lawyerly fashion that Smith was applying technical definitions where they didn’t seem to apply, and that he was interpreting, the very thing Smith claimed not to be doing. (Elsewhere, he stated that he merely “related the facts as the Lord revealed them.”)
What is particularly interesting was this line, in which Clark raised the question of how to understand “death” in the Garden.
I think when we use death in this connection, that is as of the time when death came into the world, that its application might normally be applied to humans. Clearly, unless the animals lived on air, they consumed something, and even if they were all vegetarians, the plant life they ate died.
As I’ve pointed out before at length, there are scriptural and temple details which strongly suggest that we should not understand the Garden account as a documentary history, or even as history. President Clark obviously does not go that far, but clearly sees a kind of death as already existing and at work in the Garden. At minimum, the death of plants— and perhaps non-human animals— was operative concurrent with and within the Garden. In other words, when he says “its application might normally be applied to humans,” he apparently means “its application might normally be limited to humans.” In other words, instead of “No Death Before the Fall” position, President Clark seemed to take a “Some Death Before the Fall (see fine print)” position.
More broadly, this touches on the question, what is the extent of the Fall in LDS thought? Some LDS hold that the effects of the fall ranged through the entire universe, even to the extent that the Earth itself “fell” from its orbit(?) near Kolob.1I don’t believe this Others, like Clark here, have suggested that to assume the pre-fall nature was absolute and the effects were absolute is a misreading, an unjustified overriding of scripture and tradition.
I tend to side with Clark.
- I’ve quoted some other things from this Smith-Clark exchange before in a number of places, like here. Worth reading.
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August 22, 2022 at 11:24 am
I’ve discussed with others what was eaten in a pre-fall earth before. The fruit of “every tree” is by definition evidence of “birth before the fall”. Consumption of it, like Clark said, is death. Seeds like wheat have to be harvested when mature, and thereupon the plant itself dies. In this context, Genesis itself refutes the ‘no death before the fall’ argument in 1.29-30, which is perhaps more accurately understood as an expectation of vegetarianism — only plants are authorized as food: onions, not liver *and* onions (ewww).
But as you said, this is a symbolic text and not a description of any physical reality.
I wish I would have had this kind of information available when an institute teacher taught the No-Death position as doctrinally immutable in one of my classes (but he was also my SP at the time, and also good friends with the Devil (Michael Ballam), so that might have gone poorly).
August 23, 2022 at 8:22 am
In my opinion, no-death-before-the-fall was made up after the fact in attempt to manufacture something (anything) that might be used to argue against biological evolution. The usual proof text (2 Nephi 2:22) doesn’t say anything of the kind. First of all, the passage doesn’t even mention death. “Same state” and “no end” can be understood in a number of ways, and “no death” seems one of the least plausible (for a number of reasons, including the points made in this post). The passage doesn’t say anything about actual conditions *before* the fall; it only speaks of the hypothetical conditions that *would* have existed without the fall. In fact, the hypothetical conditions explicitly reference the time “after they were created,” saying nothing about the conditions *during* the creative process.
If you’re desperate to find something in the scriptures to argue for no death before the fall, this is probably the best you can do, but it’s pretty weak.
August 23, 2022 at 7:48 pm
Apostle James E. Talmage, in a letter to his son, Sterling Talmage, wrote that he, “was bold enough to point out that according to a tradition in the Church based on good authority as having risen from a declaration made by the Prophet Joseph Smith, a certain pile of stones at Adam-ondi-Ahman, Spring Hill, Mo., is really part of the altar on which Adam offered sacrifices, and that I had personally examined those stones and found them to be fossiliferous, so that if those stones be part of the first altar, Adam built it of stones containing corpses, and therefore death must have prevailed in the earth before Adam’s time.”
August 24, 2022 at 7:38 am
Here’s a thought. What if the “correct way” – in the sense of “things as they really are” – what if the correct way to look at 2 Nephi 2 is by looking at Lehi’s discourse as being representative of what he was taught in Jerusalem and possibly an affirmation of what was included on the brass plates. That second part is probably a little more difficult to substantiate.
In this view, I am comfortable affirming a testimony that the Book of Mormon is a revealed scripture because it affirms that the message (Garden of Eden / Fall of Adam) was successfully transmitted through the generations. I am also therewith freed to not accept a literal reading of 2 Nephi 2.
I would argue that is precisely what the data suggests. None of the data supports a young earth narrative. The data does support consistent messaging through the ages AND an old earth narrative.
The Book of Mormon can be revealed scripture that presents information that its prophets and historians knew about the creation narrative as contained in Genesis. That is what the data suggests.