One model of revelation we invoke often is “the still small voice,” which phrasing comes from Elijah in 1ki 19:12. But scripture and history often provide us with multiple models, and I think there’s another one we should consider.
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As you know, the book of Job is a sandwich; two slices of prose narrative surrounding a poetic philosophical dialogue about why bad things happen to good people. Job’s useless friends insist that he must have done something to merit the traumas that occur, and Job insists he hasn’t. Ultimately, God appears, and they converse. Twice, in Job 38:1 and Job 40:1, “God answered Job out of the maelstrom.”
I don’t know that we’ve talked much about the idea that God’s voice— revelation— can emerge from a chaotic, energetic whirlwind or maelstrom. Revelation may indeed come out of the still, quiet, pondering and study of the individual, but it may also come out of the loud, the unstructured, the argumentative, and collective. In fact, I would argue that much of the revelation governing the Church comes that way. D&C specifies that the President of the Church is to have two Counselors (though sometimes there are more) as well as the Quorum of the Twelve. This presupposes that inspiration is being sought through gathering of information, through discussion, through “proving contraries [in which process] truth is made manifest,” as Joseph Smith said. 1Note that “proving” in 1828 meant something like “testing, trying.” It means wrestling with opposing views or opinions, apparently discordant facts, perhaps.
While this model of “God spoke out of the whirlwind” may seem new, prophets have repeatedly taught that revelation has precursors, whether that’s D&C talking about “studying it out in your mind” or President Nelson’s teaching that “good inspiration comes from good information.”
President Eyring quoted President Harold B. Lee, that “if you want to get revelation, do your homework.”
President Kimball wrote to his son that
few people receive revelations while lounging on a couch. . . . I believe most revelations would come when a man is on his tip toes, reaching as high as he can for something which he knows he needs
–Lengthen Your Stride, 216
Research and discussion, even with strongly competing views, is part of the “studying it out in your mind” that precedes revelation. That’s the process among Church leaders, illustrated by this really interesting statement from President Eyring. (See here for video and transcipt.)
When I first came as the president of Ricks college, I attended my first meeting that I’d ever been in watching the General Authorities of the church, the First Presidency and others, running a meeting. I had been studying for the ten years I was a professor at Stanford how you make decisions in meetings in groups, so I got a chance, here’s my chance to see the way the Lord’s servants do it (of which I now am one).
I looked at it with my Harvard and Stanford eyes and I thought. This is the strangest
conversation I’ve [heard]. I mean, here are the prophets of God and they’re disagreeing in an openness that I had never seen in business. In business you’re careful when you’re with the bosses, you know.
Here they were just — and I watched this process of them disagreeing and I thought, “Good Heavens, I thought revelation would come to them all and they’d all see things the same way, in some sort of…, you know.” It was more open than anything I had ever seen in all the groups I had ever studied in business. I was just dumbfounded.
But then after a while the conversation cycled around. And they began to agree and I saw the most incredible thing. Here are these very strong, very bright people all with different opinions. Suddenly the opinions began to just line up and I thought, “I’ve seen a miracle. I’ve seen unity come out of this wonderful open kind of exchange that I’d never seen in all my studies of government or business or anywhere else.”
Eyring had thought that as prophets, they would just all get the same revelation simultaneously and that’s how it worked. He was dumbfounded to discover it did not, in fact, work like that; he saw inspiration— or at least unity— emerge from the whirlwind.
This idea is also found in the New Testament. Speaking of 1 Corinthians, New Testament scholar NT Wright says this (slightly edited)
When Paul says ‘prophecy’, he doesn’t just mean ‘foretelling the future’, though that may sometimes happen. (Even the great Old Testament prophets were just as concerned with commenting on the present as with warnings and promises about the future.) Nor is he simply referring to sudden flashes of inspiration in which someone comes to know something, or understand something, they couldn’t otherwise have imagined, and is moved at once to speak it out…. That, too, happens, and Paul would be the last to disparage it. But his central emphasis is on the God-given wisdom, understanding, insight and teaching that the church badly needs if it is to go forward instead of round and round in circles, if it is to be built up as a community instead of as an accidental collection of private individuals. As the chapter develops, we shall see Paul insisting over and over again that prophecy, like all ‘spiritual’ phenomena, does not need to be ‘spontaneous’ to be genuine.
The climate of our own age has tended to see spontaneous utterance as inspired, while something that needs working at is thought of as less inspired. This owes more to the Romantic movement, in which poets such as Wordsworth and Keats would pour out verses as though from a hidden source—in contrast with most poets before and since, who have laboured carefully to polish and shape their original ideas—than to anything specifically Christian. As with tongues, some have felt that an ‘inspired’ word about a person or situation must be given priority over the careful and prayerful thinking through of a situation, in the light of scripture in particular, out of which wise and rich teaching and instruction can be given. As so often in 1 Corinthians, Paul needs to give the church wisdom about wisdom itself, spiritual teaching about spiritual teaching itself. Today’s church urgently needs to listen in and see what lessons are still to be learned.
– Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians, 183–184.
Do we have another LDS example of this? We do indeed.
Photo via Good Free Photos
Based on D&C passages like 101:77-80, Latter-day Saints have a long tradition of calling the US Constitution “inspired.”
But how did this inspired document come about? Did a single person in quiet reflection and pondering pen its words while inspiration settled upon him like the dew from heaven? Not remotely! May 25, 1787 marked the first day of writing, which continued for roughly four months. The 55 delegates debated heavily, and some ultimately refused to sign over unresolved disagreements. This drawn-out, multi-person strongly argued whirlwind produced an inspired document. (And as I’ve discussed elsewhere, “inspired” doesn’t entail a divine Mary Poppins-esque “practically perfect in every way.” The Constitution certainly had some problems, which required a Bill of Rights and numerous Amendments.)
Whether to us with our problems or the Apostles with higher-level Church-wide issues, God’s voice may come out of the whirlwind, out of the process of research and “proving contraries.” Let’s not discount something as revelation because it may take time, group thought and (warm!) discussion, or seem to violate too-narrow conceptions of revelation. Indeed, remember that “still, small voice” model from 1Ki 1911-12? Note that the divine voice only comes after an earthquake, a great and strong wind, and a fire.
Perhaps these two models are not so different.
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October 5, 2024 at 10:15 am
To add another witness of the use of this model of revelation by Church leaders:
“When we convene as a Council of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, our meeting rooms become rooms of revelation. The Spirit is palpably present. As we wrestle with complex matters, a thrilling process unfolds as each Apostle freely expresses his thoughts and point of view. Though we may differ in our initial perspectives, the love we feel for each other is constant. Our unity helps us to discern the Lord’s will for His Church. In our meetings, the majority never rules! We listen prayerfully to one another and talk with each other until we are united. Then when we have reached complete accord, the unifying influence of the Holy Ghost is spine-tingling! We experience what the Prophet Joseph Smith knew when he taught, ‘By union of feeling we obtain power with God.’ No member of the First Presidency or Quorum of the Twelve would ever leave decisions for the Lord’s Church to his own best judgment!” (Russell M. Nelson. “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives.” Ensign, May 2018)
Their “rooms of revelation” include free expression, differing opinions, and prayerful listening. There are lots of examples of this in the Saints series, too.
This is also how revelation/inspiration typically comes in my marriage, as well. Talk, disagree, pray, talk again, and so on til we’re on the same page with each other and (we hope) with God.
Great post, as always!
October 7, 2024 at 11:34 am
Revelation can sometimes be a process – that’s what I am hearing here.
October 9, 2024 at 2:04 pm
As an active Latter-day Saint who is trying to integrate faith and reason in a way that properly honors them both, I have particular concern about this “maelstrom model” of revelation: how to identify God in this? The miracle I see is that a group of men can come together with strong opposing opinions and then, through humility and thoughtfulness, converge on some agreement where every person feels honored and heard. The miracle I do NOT see here is any sort of divine hand making itself known in the process.
If we posit that “God is behind all that is good” – echoes of Moroni chapter 7 – as a blanket answer, then I find this answer is deeply unsatisfying, since it does nothing to reinforce the idea that God is present in the maelstrom. If everything is exceptional, then nothing is. And conversely, if God’s presence is not found in some higher exceptional power entering in, but instead in the common rigamarole of human dialogue, then God’s presence becomes indistinguishable from the mundane of everyday human experience. So far I don’t see his presence; I see the same group decision-making process I see in business, government, and voluntary organizations, with one crucial difference: the suppression of ego, fear, and intolerance, resulting in, at least, a more harmonious arrival at consensus. I welcome your thoughts.
October 12, 2024 at 10:06 am
There’s no claim here that God is in every maelstrom nor every “common rigamarole.” Rather, the argument is that inspiration and revelation appear more than one way in scripture, and the lone person, sudden flash, still-small-voice is not the only model.
October 13, 2024 at 3:37 pm
I appreciate the response. I came to your site after listening to your excellent discussion on the Keystone podcast. We are certainly evolving as a church to incorporate more rationality, but I wonder whether it will be in the right areas and in the right amounts to sustain us and sustain the rising generations.
October 13, 2024 at 7:16 am
The premise I’d like to challenge here is that the mode of revelation, if from God, will always be distinctive and unique — and indeed MUST be, for we have no other way of determining if it’s from God or not. I don’t believe that’s the case. Many of my prayers, for instance, have been answered in the mouth of some regular person around me. But many people speak to me every day at home, at work, and elsewhere. If I were looking for an exceptional “divine hand making itself known in the process” among them, I would be at a loss, since the modality of communication is largely the same.
October 20, 2024 at 9:25 am
This is precisely where I’m having trouble. I think it’s great that we can find answers to our questions and feel that prayers are being answered, but if there is no discernible signature of God in the process that is clearly distinguishable then perhaps what we are doing is attributing to God what could be aspects of consciousness that we don’t yet fully grasp. Essentially I’m saying that we could be engaging in a sort of God-of-the-gaps argument here, where there are phenomena we don’t fully understand about how the mind works and we conclude too hastily that it must be a supernatural being orchestrating an outcome for us or communicating with us. We know for certain that the mind is a thing, but we don’t know for certain that God is a thing. I’m looking for more firm basis for belief in a higher power than this model suggests.
October 20, 2024 at 9:55 am
You’re asking this post to do things it’s not designed to do. This model is not for convincing people that God exists and speaks; rather, it’s broadening the expectations of people who already believe God exists.
“no discernible signature of God” What would this look like? What kind of experience could you have as an individual that, if you wanted, you could not write off as a trick of the mind, “aspects of consciousness we don’t fully understand”? Even in scripture, the vast majority of revelatory experiences are fully internal to the individual. Even major collective decisions come down to the collective voice and feeling (and inspiration), e.g. Acts 15:28, “it seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us”…
October 20, 2024 at 12:30 pm
You’re right, I’m responding to an implicit assumption of the post – that a God exists who communicates with humans – instead of to the main idea of the post, but I appreciate the way your thoughts sparked these additional thoughts. You ask a terrific question about what a signature of God would look like. As I try to combine rationality and faith in a way that hopefully preserves the good of both, I suppose the proper answer is that this is not up to me to decide. When we strike out into the unknown with a spirit of discovery we naturally don’t know what we will find. So I don’t know what the distinguishing signature of a god might look like; the burden of persuasion, it seems to me, is on those who declare there is such a signature; or, if we may be so bold, the burden is on God to disclose Himself in a way that is persuasive to someone to whom He has ostensibly given both the faculties of reason and the ability to sense a deeper reality than the world of empirical observation alone.
October 19, 2024 at 2:12 pm
I’ve wanted to improve my studies and revelation and I’m learning from you and my husband that not only does that come through scriptures and general conference talks but the best books. Right, this is not a book but this is a reputable source. Thank you for your work and expertise.
October 24, 2024 at 7:26 am
Hi Ben, I recently found your stuff on YouTube and am very intrigued by your direction of thought on science and religion. I’m curious if you’ve done any research or have any thoughts about W.H. Chamberlin, an early 20th century Mormon scientist and philosopher who was essentially preaching metaphysical idealism combined with evolution at BYU (he wrote an essay, “The Theory of Evolution as an Aid to Faith in God and Belief in the Resurrection” in the February, 1911 The White and Blue)? While I know that he is a minor figure in LDS academic science and philosophy history, I find it interesting that some of his beliefs are gaining steam in current science and philosophy circles over 100 years later. Any thoughts?