“And God answered out of the maelstrom”: Rethinking Revelation with Job, the Constitution, and President Eyring

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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