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My Contribution to the SMPT Conference at Claremont

podcastThe Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology will hold a conference at Claremont, March 2-4. The schedule has been posted and includes several luminaries as well as night lights like me. I will present Saturday morning from 10-11, invoking Enuma Eliš, René Magritte, C.S. Lewis, Joseph Smith, B.H. Roberts, B.B. Warfield, Islamic abrogation, and Emily Dickinson (quoted below).

The Spirit Speaketh the Truth and Lieth Not”: The Complex Theological Intersection of Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics

LDS scripture includes several statements on the nature of revelation and truth such as Jacob 4:13, “the Spirit speaketh the truth and lieth not” (c.f. Num 23:19) and D&C 93:24 “truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.” These passages seem prima facie to posit an absolutist conception of revelation as necessarily “factually accurate,” and entailing a concordist and inerrantist hermeneutic. However, these passages are clearly in tension with demonstrably incorrect/non-scientific scripture (e.g. the cosmology of Genesis), inconsistent/contradictory scripture (Samuel/Kings vs. Chronicles), as well as scriptural teachings of progressive/relative revelation (2Ne 28:30). How, then, does “the Spirit speak truth” and in what sense?

I propose two interrelated principles or circumstances under which inspired scripture can be said to be truthful.

First, what the Spirit speaks is not complete and absolute but partial and approximate truth. God must communicate to human understanding, which means adapting both the degree and expression of knowledge (D&C 1:24). Christians and Jews have long used this idea, termed accommodation, as a statement about the nature of revelation and as interpretive method. To choose two expressions, the Talmud says that “The Torah speaks in human language,” echoed by Thomas Aquinas as “Scripture speaks according to the notions of the people.” While numerous General Authorities such as Joseph Smith have expressed this principle, Mormon scripture says that revelation is as true as God wishes to it be; “These are the words which I spake… and they are true even as I will” (Moses 4:32).

Second, I posit a hermeneutical necessity of awareness of scripture’s representational nature, that it constitutes a representation of reality, a metaphorical model of sorts. “In order to understand what a model intends to communicate, we must distinguish the aspects that are relevant to the reality… from those that are irrelevant.”[1] When reading something like the early chapters of Genesis, modern readers need to identify those aspects intended to correspond to reality (and how they correspond), the central truth claims, from those parts which constitute intrinsic but immaterial characteristics of the model. The great conceptual distance between modern readers and the language, culture, and worldview of scripture obscures or distorts the truth claims of a given text for modern readers. The central truth claims of a passage are frequently not what they seem.

My argument, then, is that revelation/scripture is indeed truthful, given these two provisions. First, that we correctly identify its central truth claims through careful contextual interpretation and second, that we understand those claims to be partial, approximate, and progressive. I close with an appeal to Emily Dickinson.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant…
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.

[1] Charles Hummel, The Galileo Connection- Resolving Conflicts Between Science & the Bible (IVP, 1986), 168.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

Greek/Hebrew Followup: Another Demo and more Free Stuff Through March 1

Screen Shot 2017-02-17 at 2.20.18 PMIt’s Logos’ 25th Anniversary, and they’re offering a $25 coupon through March 1. That means it’s a great time to invest in some of the supplementary Old Testament resources I suggested (below), or N.T. Wright books, or Peter Enns, or John Walton, or Jodi Magness’ book on Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, or a line-by-line commentary on how the New Testament uses the Old Testament, or why modern translations differ in the New Testament, or Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s JPS Commentary on Ruth, or or or… There’s so much.

Here’s the Old Testament stuff I recommended.

Now, I know Logos looks intimidating, but you can treat it like a Kindle until you start figuring stuff out. Below, I walk you through another tool to help with words and translations.

 

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

The Complexities of History in The Ensign

 

I want to highlight an important Ensign article in the February 2017 issue, “Understanding Church History by Study and Faith.” Written by the Church History Library Director Keith Erikson, it makes some important points that are not always obvious or instinctive to non-historians. Erikson echoes several points made in another important Ensign article about history 40 years ago, by Elder G. Homer Durham. I draw on both below.

Continue reading

How to Use Greek and Hebrew: New and Improved

genesis-hebrew2I’ll get back to my Transitional Mormonism and Tradition, but I was really excited about this development. 

I’ve seen several bad uses  flagrant abuses of original languages recently by people who don’t actually know the languages. They’re typically relying on Strong’s Concordance, which can be used legitimately (see my article here, the section called “original language resources”) but 99% of the time, Strong’s is abused by people who just don’t know better. They use it as a lexicon, as a guide to meaning, but this is highly problematic. If you read something citing Strong’s to establish what a word means, you can be fairly certain the authors have not actually studied Greek or Hebrew, and I strongly recommend not giving that source any scholarly weight or authority in Gospel Doctrine or Seminary.

I am terribly pleased to inform you that there is a new technology-assisted way to move directly from the KJV to legitimate scholarly Greek and Hebrew tools. And it’s free! I’ll provide a description, then walk through the steps to get it, demo some things on video, and then make some suggestions.

Logos just released the free version of its new engine, Logos 7 for Mac, PC, iOs, and Android. Logos is like a supercharged Kindle on steroids, which I use as my research library. I buy all my academic and popular books in it when possible. Back in 2000, I started using it because there was a screaming deal on the Anchor Bible Dictionary (which has been cited in General Conference!) With the upgrades and free resources now provided in version 7, the Basic engine will let you jump directly from the KJV to a decent basic Hebrew/Greek lexicon, included.  Moreover, it comes with both a decent Bible Dictionary and Study Bible, free (both produced by Logos.)

You will need to create an account, but the basic engine is indeed free. You will probably get marketing emails trying to get you to buy a package of books and higher-level functionality. You don’t need to do this, but if you’ve got the cash, go for it. BTW, once you create an account AND fill out a marketing thing, Logos gives you $20 credit every year on your birthday.

How to Get the Free Stuff

  1. Go here to get the free engine. It should ask you to create an account.
  2. It will download an installer file, which will then download the rest of the program and (I believe) the free resources. After downloading and installing, it will draw some processing power to index the new books.
  3. If you don’t see them in your library after everything downloads and indexes, here are the links to some free stuff you should have.
    • Lexham Bible Dictionary
      • Lexham is one publishing name Logos uses (Faithlife being another.)
    • Abridged BDB
      • This is the Hebrew lexicon, a simplified version of the $20 100-yr old lexicon most first-year Hebrew students buy, named after its authors
    • Faithlife Study Bible
      • Essays, introductions, visuals, diagrams, and verse-by-verse notes.
  4. Logos also does a free-book-of-the-month, with one free and one related for $1.99. This month, two books by N.T. Wright.
  5. Other free books are here. Pick up the Greek New Testament, SBL edition, Lexham English Bible, Abridged Brown-Driver-Briggs, and perhaps the Classics, Arabic, or Civil War And 19th Century America collections.
  6. Other books and series go on sale regularly, with both monthly sales and specials, and you can get steep discounts on Pre-publication or Community Pricing.

Supercharge your Old Testament study for $70

Things to learn to take maximum advantage of the free stuff

    • Learn the Hebrew alphabet and vowels here. Hebrew alphabet intimidates more than it is actually difficult. Practice the consonants with Psalm 119 in our KJV. It’s a Hebrew alphabet acrostic, so the letters are printed there.
    • Both BDB and CHALOT will use some unfamiliar but important terminology for verbs. You should learn what qal, niph., hiph, etc. mean or you won’t understand the range of meanings in the definitions for verbs. This is a decent introduction to this vocabulary.

Things I’ll point out in the screencast demo 

  • Note the scripture pop-ups.
  • Lock panes to scroll together.
  • Corresponding Words visual filter. (Only in the KJV or other purchased interlinears. I don’t do much with this in the demo, so click the link and watch their video.)
  • Link Bible to a lexicon! This and the KJV interlinear are the key to cutting out Strong’s.

(I recommend watching 1080p so you can read the text.)

Logos has an active forum free of theological discussion (where I am the resident Mormon),  a good wiki, and lots of how-to videos linked within the wiki.

So, go forth and download, but remember to keep some intellectual humility! You still don’t know the languages, you’re just using much better tools.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

Transitional Mormonism and Tradition: Part 1

George Cattermole, "The Scribe" public domain.

George Cattermole, “The Scribe.” Public domain.

I wrote the last post while traveling and have just started a new and busy semester, and so didn’t respond at all to the thirty-odd comments there. I’ll address them and some related issues, instead, in a multi-part series. I’ll get into what I mean by “transitional Mormonism” in the next post, but it’s nothing to do with “faith journeys,” “stages of faith” or anything like that. 
Peter Enns is both an Evangelical who holds the Bible in very high regard and a Harvard PhD in Hebrew Bible. He has been featured in the Maxwell Institute podcast and spoken at BYU along with James Kugel and Candida Moss (now in print here). I frequently steer Latter-day Saints to his books. Back in November, I linked to a forthcoming book cowritten by a Bible scholar and a geneticist, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. Enns has now offered a brief review over at Biologos, an excellent site for science/religion issues. Although it doesn’t all apply to the Mormon worldview (e.g. the issue of every human sinning “in Adam,” or “original sin”), the whole thing is worth reading. I want to highlight one of his comments.

Any discussion of the “historical Adam” cannot proceed one step forward without taking into account the story of Adam in its ancient context. I don’t mean to suggest this is easy as pie. There is a lot to work through, and room for some variation in points of view. But the conversation cannot go on as if we’ve learned nothing in the last 150 years about antiquity and the function that origins stories played in ancient societies. Placing Adam in his ancient context immediately and significantly affects how Genesis is brought into the discussion over evolution. (My italics)

I completely agree, but want to take this in a different direction. Mormons place very high authority on tradition, and rightly so given the LDS principles of priesthood authority, revelation, etc. But we are a young Church with underdeveloped mechanisms for weighing, balancing, and adjudicating statements within that tradition. While not perfectly analogous, there is no LDS equivalent of, say, the Islamic science of weighing and judging traditions about Mohammed (hadith) or the Catholic degrees of authoritative statements. Instead we play General Authority poker.

There is a common assumption that statements made by Church leaders represent both a revelatory position (vertical, with the divine) and representative position (horizontal, that all General Authorities hold the same view). At times, something calls this into question: conflict of various kinds, both perceived and real, which exists much more than most people realize. Whether conflict between contemporaneous General Authorities (like Brigham Young vs. Orson Pratt), historical (like Bruce R. McConkie vs. Brigham Young), conflict or differing views between scripture and General Authorities, or within scripture itself (see here), or conflict between (particular readings of) scripture and well-established human knowledge (e.g. Young earth creationists vs. lots of geology, biology, etc.) Such conflicts suddenly call into question common absolutist assumptions about the nature of Church leadership (eternally unified, monolithic, consistent, and purely divine, for all practical purposes) and can undermine faith, if unexpected.

There are plenty of General Authority statements indicating that these common assumptions are wrong. To take two examples, B.H. Roberts bluntly said that

Constant, never-varying inspiration is not a factor in the administration of the affairs even of the Church; not even good men, no, not though they be prophets or other high officials of the Church, are at all times and in all things inspired of God. Defense of the Faith and the Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1907), 1:525

That notorious liberal softy Elder Bruce R. McConkie similarly said that

With all their inspiration and greatness, prophets are yet mortal men with imperfections common to mankind in general. They have their opinions and prejudices and are left to work out their problems without inspiration in many instances. Mormon Doctrine, 547.

If, as I said above, LDS Church leaders are not merely offering human views, neither (according to McConkie, Roberts, and many others) are they somehow divinely cleaved and cleansed from their own minds, culture, knowledge, “their own opinions and prejudices” in McConkie’s terms. My suspicion is that this is not an on/off switch, not a clear “acting as prophet/not acting as prophet” binary as it is sometimes characterized, but a constant divine/human mixture that fluctuates for a variety of reasons. I believe that all revelation is inflected with humanity to some degree; it must be so, or God could not communicate with us, e.g. D&C 1:24. (But that’s another post, one I’ve probably already written.)

Here’s an example I think most will find non-threatening, regarding changes in garments in the early 1900s.

Although there was opposition to such changes among some Latter-day Saints, Elder Richards [an Apostle and Salt Lake City  Temple President] had learned some months earlier that such changes were both appropriate and normal. Some older members of the Church informed him that Emma Smith and Eliza R. Snow made the original temple clothing for the Prophet Joseph Smith. The reason they used strings on the garment was simply because they were too poor to buy [page] buttons. It was not necessarily God’s will that strings be used instead of buttons. The old-style collar was included because the seamstresses did not know how to finish the top of the garment and decided to do it with a collar. Dale C. Mouritsen, A Symbol of New Directions: George Franklin Richards and the Mormon Church, 1861-1950 (BYU Dissertation, 1982), 211-212. My italics.

In other words, people assumed that the received tradition (about the temple!) was fully prophetic and divinely ordained. The reality is that this aspect of the received tradition was dictated by human choice and historical circumstances. Addressing BYU professors, Elder McConkie once said that “Certain things which are commonly said and commonly taught in the Church [that is, “tradition”] either are not true, or, are in the realm of pure speculation.” Yes, he had a particular topic in mind, but that’s irrelevant to my purposes here. Suffice to say, he recognized that Church tradition includes aspects that, while popular, do not have much real grounding.

Returning to Genesis, evolution, and Enns, “the conversation cannot go on as if we’ve learned nothing in the last 150 years. When Mormons discuss various social, economic, religious, or scriptural issues, we tend to cite General Authority views, often from the relatively distant past. Can we legitimately cite those traditions as if they were pure expressions of divine knowledge intended for all time? (I think I’ve demonstrated above that it’s dangerous to assume that uncritically.) Or should we understand them as being influenced to some degree by the context and situations of the speaker as well as “their opinions and prejudices”?

Let me get very specific. Our knowledge of biology, biochemistry, genetics, evolution, and human origins, the topic of the book Enns is reviewing, have exploded in ways unimaginable in the early 1900s and even mid-1900s. (The timeline of this knowledge-production is quite interesting to study but secondary to my purpose here. Perhaps I’ll post a book list later.) The Church’s statement from over one hundred years ago was “that which is demonstrated, we accept with joy.”  Can we simply cite these and other such statements opposed to evolution as if they were purely divine and context-free declarations, and put the issue to bed? Or rather, are we obliged both to acknowledge them and their concordant authority and wrestle with what has been demonstrated and well-established in the last decades? Has the state of “demonstration” changed in the last hundred-plus years?

As a believing and orthodox Latter-day Saint, I take seriously the injunctions to study my scriptures and the words of the prophets, both living and dead. Indeed, it is precisely because I take it seriously that I study closely our religious tradition and have become aware of (as I mention above) the variety of views and opinions, sometimes even on central doctrinal issues, within scripture and LDS history. One of my old BYU professors quipped that “when it comes to church history and doctrine, you can have it all, or you can have it consistent, but you can’t have both.”

True indeed.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

Mormon Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It?

My image.

My image.

Occasionally, one hears Mormons (usually laypeople) critiquing Protestants for slavish and uncritical interpretation of the Bible, for “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” kind of bibliolatry. Certainly, some Protestants merit this critique. The intellectual crisis and problems among Protestants, and their effects on American culture and politics have been written about extensively by Mark Noll (e.g. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind), Randall Balmer, George Marsden, Grant Wacker, Kenton Sparks, and others. These scholars are themselves largely Evangelical, so it’s an internal critique.

No, my problem when this critique is made by Mormons is that oft-times Mormons are making it hypocritically. Continue reading

The Blog in the Coming Year and D&C

From BYU Special Collections-

From BYU Special Collections

I’ve agonized a bit over how to handle D&C this year. Here’s what I have decided and why.

If you compare my posts from the last few months to virtually any of my Old Testament posts, you’ll notice a distinct difference in length and quality. I’ve not been very happy with what I put out for the 2nd half of the Book of Mormon; I’ve taught that half much less, and so had far fewer blog-ready notes. I’ve also been wrestling with challenging coursework and papers, which do not allow much luxury time to overcome my note deficiency to write posts I’m happy with.

For the D&C and my next semester of coursework, I have even fewer notes and anticipate even less time. Consequently, I’m not going to try to write a weekly post on D&C lessons. The quality won’t be there, which would only increase my stress as I tried to crank out a weekly post in a timely way. I bet several wards are already into D&C lesson 2 or so.

What I will do is write on D&C occasionally, interspersed with my normal topics of LDS history, scripture, science, and Genesis. I have a few rough drafts of posts (both D&C and other) that can go up without too much effort, and then I anticipate slowing to 2-4 posts a month.

During my winter break, and now that family has returned home, I’m making a sustained Herculean attempt to finish my Genesis 1 manuscript and get it submitted in January. I have managed to set aside everything but writing for the next 20 days, so wish me luck.

Lastly, it is the season of gratitude. For all of you have supported me and my research by making Amazon purchases through my book links (that is, if you go to Amazon through here, I get a small referral credit. You just shop like normal though) or by donating directly to help me cover tuition (get an autographed copy of my book, once published!) I am deeply grateful.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

New/Forthcoming books of Interest

Update: Between now and Dec 5, get 5$ off any physical Amazon book order of 15$ or more. Details here.

One of the things I love about the massive American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature conference is the football’s field worth of booksellers with discounts, new books, preorders, and giveaways. A few recent and forthcoming popular books might be of interest to my readers. To be clear, I haven’t read any of these yet, but I hope to. Continue reading

A Vague Post on Joseph Fielding Smith, Evolution, and Other Sides of His Story

Screen Shot 2016-11-02 at 9.07.09 AMPeople are multi-faceted and complex. It’s very easy to develop an attitude of putting either a halo or a black hat on someone from one incident, one aspect of them, particularly when it’s a historical figure. It can be hard to get a full picture of someone. Elder Maxwell once said that the tragedy of Elder McConkie was that he had the most fantastic sense of humor, and no one in the Church knew it. (See my old post here.)

It’s well known that Joseph Fielding Smith was strongly opposed to evolution, embraced a young earth creationist view, and consequently had arguments with other General Authorities for much of his life. Continue reading