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“Teaching Bible Stories”- History vs. Fiction in the Improvement Era

Public domain, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=8577&picture=old-books

Public domain, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=8577&picture=old-books

The Improvement Era in September 1925 ran a short article in the Editor’s Table called  “Teaching Bible Stories.” To set the stage a little, this was 14 years after the 1911 Crisis at BYU over evolution and how to read scripture (see here as well), and immediately after the 1925 Scopes Trial over teaching evolution. I included an excerpt and  little analysis here in the larger context of Elder Stephen Richards May 1925 address to BYU. I’d like to revisit it.

Recently a number of communications have come to the Era setting forth in splendid language and in very clear thought the literary advantage of teaching Bible stories; also, that Bible stories are mainly literary tales “written for the simple Israelites to glorify God, and that they should therefore not be taken too seriously. In other words the idea is expressed that they are not historical, not actual, but that they are fiction.

In our opinion, if God is left out in teaching Bible stories, and literary excellence, rather than historical truth, made the only reason for their study in school or otherwise, we may as well study Shakespeare. We think the teaching of Bible stories in this way would be unfortunate. We dislike to call the Bible stories “tales,” which means legends or fiction, in other words. The whole trend of such teaching is to impress the reader that the stories of the Bible are literary fictions, “made up” to boost the God of Israel and the Israelitish religion— they are not real. Taught this way they become a joke, and God a myth. We mean by Bible stories such stories as the creation, the flood, the wooing of Rebecca, Joseph and his brethren, Moses, the Ten Plagues, the passage of the Red Sea, the Ten Commandments received on Mount Sinai, the golden calf, Samson, David and Goliath, Jonathan and Bathsheba, Daniel, and many others.

The Bible must be studied for more than its literature, however excellent that is. That more is the vital and essential purpose, the underlying fact of all facts — to gain a knowledge of the Fatherhood of God and a testimony of his existence, and interest in mankind as his children and offspring. This lesson must be impressed above all others, for it is the paramount truth which rises above the Bible’s wonderful poetry, its concise, direct, clear and beautiful orations, essays and songs, and reaches to the spiritual heights to which the Latter-day Saint youth and all American citizenship must rise if we shall continue a Christian
nation. — A.

What is the value of fiction? Can fiction teach truth? What truths are necessarily of a historical nature? If the Bible makes use of such a loaded category as “myth,” does that render it “a joke and God a myth”? C.S. Lewis didn’t think so. Neither do a lot of other conservative Christians.

But lets steer away from “myth” and talk about “history” with the same scarequotes. Robert Alter’s Art of Biblical Narrative, which talks about how the Hebrew Bible tells its stories, has given me the signature for my email—“history is far more intimately related to fiction than we have been accustomed to assume.”

Alter makes a distinction we should make as well, between “history” as “what actually happened in the past” and “history” as “a record or account of the past” the latter being much closer to fiction than most people realize.  As Elder Homer Durham wrote in The Ensign,

The “events themselves,” which took place in the past, whether yesterday or 5,000 years ago, are beyond exact recall with our present facilities. We cannot re-experience an event. Thus, we are left with records of events, all of which are interpretations of events. (Even television involves a human judgment on where to point the camera.) Furthermore, despite the contributions of archaeology, linguistics, and the natural and social sciences, most history is a form of literature. Naturally, the most reliable records come from qualified participants in the events or from analysts with access to all the records, but their re-creation of the event for us will always be shaped by their own perspective. [My italics]

So Elder Durham says that written history constitutes, in essence, an interpretive form of literature. History is highly interpretive because it involves choosing a subset from among the very small number of sources that survive (whether written, archeological, or artifacts), and then telling a story from a certain perspective. “Fiction” comes from latin fictio, meaning “something made or fashioned.” In that limited sense, all history-writing is “fiction” because all history is the conscious attempt by someone to select certain points and make or fashion a story with them. A different person at a different time with a different focus or access to different data might select different points, and tell a radically different story. I know a couple who cannot tell their engagement story because they disagree so much on the details and their meaning. No one disputes that they got engaged and married. But the stories of the past they tell are different stories.

This is not to undermine “history” as a profession. Indeed not, it is professional historians who are most trustworthy to handle historical materials and narratives, because they are the ones most aware of its pitfalls and concomitantly the most careful about making sweeping authoritative historical claims.

To bring this back to the Old Testament, Samuel/Kings and Chronicles tell the same stories in very different ways, because the lens of the authors has changed. For no one in the Bible are the stories merely recounting the “facts” of the past.

Says Peter Enns in one of my favorite books,

All historiography  [or history-writing] is a literary product, which means it is about people writing down (or transmitting orally) their version of that history. In other words, historiography is by definition an interpretive exercise. There might not be much that is interpretive about saying “David lived,” but when you give an account of David’s life—what he did, when, with whom, why, what the implications were—you are most certainly engaged in interpreting these events. How  so? Anyone who communicates historical events must be very selective about what is communicated. You simply can’t say everything, nor would you want to. You say only those things that are important to the point you want to get across. Also, you will say those things in such a way that will drive your point home. In other words, this presentation, this literary product, looks the way it does because the author has a purpose in mind for why those events should be reported. The presentation is not divorced from the events, but it is a purposeful representation of those events.These three elements are always interconnected. All written accounts of history are literary products that are based on historical events that are shaped to conform to the purpose the historian wants to get across.” – I&I 61-2.

Like many authors, including me, Enns repeats himself. In a more popular, easier-to-read book, he reiterates that

Recalling the past is actually never simply a process of remembering but of creating a narrative out of discrete, imperfect memories (our own or those of others), woven together into a narrative thread that is deeply influenced by how we see ourselves and our world here and now. All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not “straight history.” There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.

So we can’t just nakedly assert in any and all cases that “scripture says x, therefore x happened,” especially if we haven’t even asked if that particular part of scripture was intended as “history” in the first place. Even for those parts of scripture that are intended to be historical, the bright line between “history” and “fiction” doesn’t really exist, and has to be teased apart carefully. Alter expounds.

What the Bible offers us is an uneven continuum and a constant interweaving of factual historical detail (especially, but by no means exclusively, for the later periods) with purely legendary ‘history’; occasional enigmatic vestiges of mythological lore; etiological stories; archetypal fictions of the founding fathers of the nation; folktales of heroes and wonder-working men of God; verisimilar inventions of wholly fictional personages attached to the progress of national history; and fictionalized versions of known historical figures. All of these narratives are presented as history, that is, as things that really happened and that have some significant consequence for human or Israelite destiny. The only evident exceptions to this rule are Job, which in its very stylization seems manifestly a philosophic fable (hence the rabbinic dictum ‘There was no such creature as Job; he is a parable’) and Jonah, which, with its satiric and fantastic exaggerations, looks like a parabolic illustration of the prophetic calling and God’s universality. – Art of Biblical Narrative, 33.

Ultimately, the question we should be asking in scripture is not “why did it happen this way?” (which assumes way too much) but “whether history or not, what is the author trying to teach by telling the story this way?” That question produces much better thought questions and discipleship.

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.

BoM Gospel Doctrine Lesson 39: 3Ne 17-19

These chapters constitute the end of Day 1 of Jesus’ visit (ends in 19:3) and the beginning of Day 2 (19:4-26:15)

Outline

17- Jesus, moved by the people, stays longer than planned (or so the text appears to say). He addresses the multitude, heals people, prays.

18- Bread and wine for sacrament, various instructions and teachings, then Jesus ascends into heaven.

  • 18:5-7, 10-16 to disciples (“administrative” instructions)
  • 18:18-25 to multitude
  • 18:27-35 back to disciples

19- Everyone goes home, tells their neighbors, gather again, but into 12 groups, each taught by a disciple. People baptized. Each group prays, and Jesus prays, somewhat like John 17, the “great intercessory prayer.”


3Ne 17:3 “Prepare your minds for the morrow.” Get ready to receive. Cf. Alm 16:16, Alm 48:7 (Ready to endure.)
This or the next or the next General Conference something may change. It may be something minor, a policy or practice. Maybe something major, akin to polygamy being given or rescinded, or the revocation of the priesthood ban. Are we ready to receive something that potentially goes against our presuppositions, whatever they are?

We have some tight places to go before the Lord is through with this church and the world in this dispensation…. There will be some things that take patience and faith. You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church. It may contradict your political views. It may contradict your social views. It may interfere with some of your social life. But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord himself, with patience and faith, the promise is that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; yea, and the Lord God will disperse the powers of darkness from before you, and cause the heavens to shake for your good, and his name’s glory.” (D&C 21:6.) Harold B. Lee. Conference Reports, 1 October, 1970, p. 152.

3Ne 17:6- “Bowels filled with compassion” two notes here, one on meaning, one on translation. In the KJV OT, “bowels” translates a few words that refer to your internal (Num 5:22) and reproductive organs (Gen 15:4, Gen 25:23). Israelites localized strong feelings there, both positive and negative (Jer 4:19), “a feeling of love, loving sensation, mercy (originally designated the seat of this feeling, meaning bowels, inner parts of the body, the inner person).”- HALOT  When feelings are intended, modern translations often go with “heart” (Lam 1:20), since that often captures the modern pseudo-physiological “location” of strong feelings.I doubt they are speaking Hebrew at this point in time, but to the extent that the Book of Mormon echoes (often literalistic) KJV idiom, to have his “bowels filled with compassion” is an expression of very strong feeling.

Modern translations of the Old Testament read differently. They’re translating the sense across cultures.

“There is, it is important to note, no movement among conservative Christians to argue against the modern viewpoint that our thinking and emotions are not centered in either the heart or the bowels but the brain. Indeed, I think it is worth pointing out that many Christians find themselves able to believe that they are “Biblical literalists”, and that the Bible is in all things scientifically accurate, precisely because they read the Bible in translations that have translated ancient Israel’s literal understanding into modern metaphors, replacing bowels with compassion and heart with mind where necessary.And thus we have the Catch-22 that the better the job that translators do, the more likely it is that Christians reading the Bible may be unaware that they are thinking in ways that may be similar to ancient Israelites in crucial ways, but are also vastly different from them in terms of understanding of anatomy and other matters of science.”- From this review of John Walton’s book on Genesis 1, which I review here.

3Ne 17:7 According to the New Testament, what kind of miracle did Jesus perform in Israel that he does not do here? Like with the missing altar, read the text for what it doesn’t say that we might expect it to. The New Testament has Jesus casting out demons/devils/evil spirits (e.g. Matt 9:32-35). Jesus himself doesn’t do that in the record here, although others do (3Ne 7:19, 22). “Demons” make brief appearances in Mosiah 3:6 and Helaman 13:37, both apparently figurative passages. None of these seem to imply what the New Testament does, i.e. some kind of spiritual or demonic possession. What does this mean for the beliefs of the Book of Mormon people about the supernatural? Or is the lack of “demons” a function of Mormon’s editing or Joseph’s translating?

“Halt” apparently means unable to walk whereas “lame” means an appendage that is obviously less or non-functional due to withering or injury or birth defect, e.g. clubfoot.
“leprous” = skin disease, not leprosy or Hansen’s Disease. In OT never actually refers to leprosy. “NT lepra, if it refers at all to leprosy, does so only as one among many skin conditions.”-Anchor Bible Dictionary (must be out of print, the price has doubled!)

3Ne 17:14 If Jesus groans “within himself,” how do the people or Mormon, four-hundred years later know about it? Cf. John 11:38 “Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.” There the Greek means “to be greatly disturbed, deeply moved.”

3Ne 18:7-11 Sacrament symbolism begins. Bread = body= physical resurrection/rebirth. Wine=blood=atonement/spiritual rebirth/salvation.

3Ne 18:27-35 Administrative instructions given to disciples about who can and can’t attend and partake of the sacrament.

What was the status of the disciples?
They’re given power to give the Holy Ghost by laying on of hand in 3Ne 18:37.
They don’t have the Holy Ghost “given to them” until 3Ne 19:9. Is this the gift of the spirit or just a manifestation thereof?
They are then baptized in 3Ne 19:12 (or rebaptized?)
Then the Hoy Ghost falls upon them. 3Ne 19:13

3Ne 19:23 Cf. John 17:21. Oneness of God.

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.

An update and book preview

Wrestling with ideas, writing, organization. Gustav Doré, public domain.

Wrestling with ideas, writing, organization.
Gustav Doré, public domain.

I wrote four draft posts on Saturday, two for Gospel Doctrine lessons, and two on other topics (reading the Bible with children, and one on Chaim Potok, Isaac Asimov, and reading scripture). I meant to get up early and post the next Gospel Doctrine lesson before anyone on the east coast got to Church, but things happen. Now that it’s too late for anyone English speaking today, I’ll finish it later. I still am uncertain what I’ll be doing next year for D&C, but I’m committed to doing something, and I thank you for your comments I solicited a few weeks back.

In the meantime, I was looking at a section of my book I worked on several months ago. It’s always pleasing to return to something you’ve written long enough ago to have forgotten your words, read it, and not hate it entirely. Heck, I was pretty happy with it.

What I quote below is the current introduction and (short) conclusion to section two of my book, which is all about the LDS-specific creation accounts and making sense of them. Some of this language will certainly be tweaked; I don’t like, for example, “solving the problem” or “resolving the problem” because it seems too mathematic and precise, not capturing well the adaptive or creative nature of revelation.

Introduction- <<For Latter-day Saints, any discussion of the early chapters of Genesis is complicated by the existence of the parallel creation accounts found in the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, and the Temple. A full exploration of these accounts is further complicated by temple covenants of narrow non-disclosure, which is expanded by most LDS into a culture of near-silence. Close attention to these creation accounts raises a number of related questions: if they are all revelatory, why don’t they all agree? Why are they different? What is the relationship between them? Don’t Moses, Abraham, and the Temple supersede Genesis? If so, why focus on Genesis?

In this second part of the book, I examine these three accounts. Although much scholarship exists on Abraham and Moses individually, examining them together with (vaguely and respectfully) the Temple account and how they are different will prove fruitful in explaining why they are different. Moreover, understanding the nature of the Book of Moses and Joseph Smith Translation are the key in unlocking most of these questions.

In producing the JST, Joseph Smith was highly attuned to problems in the biblical text— contradictions, inconsistencies, seams, “bumps,” as well as italicized text in the KJV. Many of the changes he made modified such passages. The very first chapters of the Bible offered a massive bump, which I term the Double Creation Problem. That is, Genesis 1-2:4 offers one creation account, but then Genesis 2:4 seems to start over and create everything again. They are back-to-back creation stories.

Joseph Smith went at this problem in what would become a stereotypically Mormon way, one which also echoes ancient prophetic, interpretive patterns. 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” (per Robert J. Matthews).  Joseph provided one solution to the Double Creation Problem by embedding new prophetic knowledge (premortal existence) into a reworked text of Genesis, the Book of Moses, which is formally the JST to Genesis. After several more years of revelation as well as studying Hebrew, he provided a slightly different solution in the Book of Abraham, again embedding new prophetic knowledge and reworking the text in a JST-like process. Still apparently wrestling with this problem through study and thought accompanied by revelation, the Temple account resolved the Double Creation Problem in a way distinctly different from, but based on his previous work in Moses and Abraham. The trajectory of Moses and Abraham point to the Temple.

To be clear, I am examining merely one facet of the creation portion of Moses, Abraham, and the temple. I do not think Joseph’s wrestling with the Double-Creation Problem fully accounts for these texts and rituals, but is an important and unrecognized aspect of them. Moreover, framing the Moses, Abraham, and Temple creation accounts as outgrowth of Joseph’s JST mindset and prophetic problem solving greatly reduces the problems that come from assuming they are merely English translations of fully independent ancient revelations to Moses and Abraham. Framing it this way shows what he was doing, namely, solving a textual problem by applying new doctrinal knowledge, not serving as prophetic typewriter for three identical copies of the same ancient revelation.

I begin by examining more fully the Double-Creation Problem, the nature and process of the JST, the nature of Moses, Abraham, and the Temple accounts, and their potential solutions to the Double Creation problem.>>

Conclusion-<< Likely prompted by the command to translate the Bible, and confronted with the Double-Creation Problem found at its beginning, Joseph Smith progressively transformed Genesis 1. From a narrowly-focused, non-scientific ancient Near Eastern account (see Part 3), it became Moses, then Abraham, in the process revealing truths about premortal existence, the council in heaven, and others. The culmination of this progressive transformation was the temple. Therein, Joseph definitively solved the problem of double-creation, simultaneously rendering Genesis into its most modern and scientifically-compatible form while providing the structure and narrative for a ritual of covenant making, priestly initiation, and royal coronation. Such is the modern Mormon interpretive life of Genesis 1, but its ancient Near Eastern biography remains to be told, in the next section.>>

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 Backstory to Elder Eyring’s Age of the Earth Comment and Creationism

genesis-hebrew2Elder Eyring told a story in this recent General Conference.

My father… was a seasoned and wise holder of the Melchizedek Priesthood. Once he was asked by an Apostle to write a short note about the scientific evidence for the age of the earth. He wrote it carefully, knowing that some who might read it had strong feelings that the earth was much younger than the scientific evidence suggested. I still remember my father handing me what he had written and saying to me, “Hal, you have the spiritual wisdom to know if I should send this to the apostles and prophets.” I can’t remember much of what the paper said, but I will carry with me forever the gratitude I felt for a great Melchizedek Priesthood holder who saw in me spiritual wisdom that I could not see.

A few of my friends thought this put a nail in the coffin of the anti-evolutionists, but it doesn’t really. See, we need to talk about the different kinds of creationism and define some terms, before we do the backstory to Elder Eyring’s comment. Continue reading

Books, Homes, and Al-Jahiz

My bookshelf

My scripture bookshelf

Living in New York for six years, I developed the habit of looking for new housing. New Yorkers are constantly on the hunt for a deal on a bigger place, a cheaper place, a better place. For comparison, we lived in a 700-ft2 apartment in Brooklyn for $1500/month and considered ourselves lucky. Now when visiting Utah, my wife and I and her family sometimes do the Parade of Homes in Salt Lake City, or St. George. Now, “Utah” is not always a good proxy for “Mormons,” and the Parade of Homes even less so, but every time we go, I have the same gripe at virtually every house— “There are massive TVs in every room, but no bookshelves anywhere! They’ve got a Home Theater room, but no library. They’ve got built-ins, but no built-in bookshelves! Do these people not read?! Is there really a market for wealthy illiterates?!”

I thought of this recently while reading Darwin’s Ghost’s: The Secret History of Evolution. It details Al-Jahiz, a 9th-century Muslim scholar living in Basra, who had some ideas like Darwin, though less developed. But it was the world Jahiz lived in that struck me.

“Wealthy patrons built elaborate palaces, libraries, and gardens in Baghdad and lavishly endowed hospitals, but they displayed their wealth most ostentatiously in competing to commission translations as a demonstration of their sophistication and their pious dedication to the expansion of knowledge” 

“compelled by the desire to rediscover and translate lost knowledge, [they] sent out emissaries to hunt for ancient Syriac and Greek manuscripts in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. Scholar-explorers knocked on the doors of monasteries and sent requests to patriarchs in Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, and Gundeshapur in the hope of discovering more Greek manuscripts, many of which, like Aristotle’s, had been banished to basements or cellars or left to rot in derelict and crumbling libraries.”

So, wealthy people showed off their wealth with… books and translations of books, and a dedication to knowledge? Huh.  This Muslim collection, preservation, and translation of ancient philosophy and science is what eventually kick-started the Renaissance, btw. What motivated Jahiz and these others? “It was the scientific curiosity of the world Jahiz lived in, a curiosity enjoined by the Qur’an…”

I’m not familiar with those Qur’an references, but I thought of various D&C passages.

 seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith. (D&C 88:118; 109:7)t

study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people. (D&C 90:15)

grant, Holy Father, that all those who shall worship in this house may be taught words of wisdom out of the best books, and that they may seek learning even by study, and also by faith (D&C 109:14)

obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, of laws of God and man (D&C 93:53)

American society in general is turning away from reading, for pleasure or otherwise. Do we Mormons take these injunctions seriously? Do we seek books, knowledge, learning, languages, history, etc.?

As for Jahiz, what was his fate? A noble and learned death.

“According to popular lore, he was crushed to death when a wall of books fell on him.”

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.

Critical Scholarship and Faith at BYU, Brief Partial Summary and Thoughts

Jacob wrestles with critical scholarship. Gustav Doré, public domain.

Jacob wrestles with critical scholarship.
Gustav Doré, public domain.

Several weeks ago, the Maxwell Institute’s Studies in the Bible and Antiquity journal sponsored a small non-public conference  at BYU on the topic of “Critical Scholarship and Faith.” If you’re unsure why this is an issue for LDS, read Julie Smith’s post “the next generation’s faith crisis.” I largely agree with her, and was thus quite excited to see this conference happen.

“Critical scholarship,” of course, does not mean scholarship that finds fault or is nit-picky. Its use of “critical” is more along the lines of “critical thinking.” (See my post on critical thinking and BYU here.) The term is shorthand for a vague collection of modern issues, ideas, methods, and conclusions that can seem to (or actually do) undermine faith in scripture and/or God. They are largely things most LDS have never heard about, and that’s a problem.  While scholars talk about “critical scholarship” as shorthand for a variety of issues and methods, it might be better to say, “modern biblical scholarship” which is a) often strongly persuasive, b)based on close readings of the texts themselves, and c) doesn’t always cohere well with some elements of either the broader Judeo-christian tradition or narrower LDS tradition. And we haven’t dealt with it very well yet, if at all, as Mormons.

The afternoon session consisted of three LDS scholars David Seely (BYU), J. Kirby (Phd Catholic University of America), and Phillip Barlow (PhD Harvard, now at Utah State).

The morning session, which I’m focusing on, consisted of three non-LDS scholars talking personally about their own religious traditions conflict and interaction with critical scholarship and faith. Peter Enns (PhD from Harvard, now at Eastern University) represented a Protestant view, Candida Moss (Notre Dame) Catholic, and James Kugel (Harvard) Jewish.

This collection of people and speakers was fantastic. Readers may know that I’ve greatly appreciated the work of Enns and Kugel, so it was fantastic to interact with them in person. I knew Moss’s name, but as she has not written as directly on topics pertaining to Biblical interpretation or related issues of interest to me, I hadn’t read any of her books. Since my wife and I are about to celebrate 17 surprisingly childless years, I have now added Moss’ Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness to my reading list.

Each talk (morning and afternoon sessions) will be published in the MI’s journal in the coming months, so I won’t rehash too much.

Kugel recounted some of the history found in his books, especially the excellent intro material in How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now. He’s a little bit of a Jewish Richard Bushman, as I describe here. Someone asked him a question about his faith community (he’s an Orthodox Jew), and he replied that “I often feel that,with my views, my faith community consists solely of James Kugel.” 🙂

Moss talked about her experiences teaching at Notre Dame. This was eye-opening; many of my academic LDS friends have “Vatican II” holy envy, wherein the Vatican essentially gave a blessing to critical scholarship and approved translating the Bible into modern vernacular. Moss showed us that Catholicism has still not fully dealt with the ramifications of critical scholarship, Vatican II notwithstanding.

Enns recounted some of the American Protestant history of critical scholarship from the turn of the century, and referred to his own experiences as an Evangelical scholar who was “let go” from a prominent Seminary for publishing a book that was deemed not orthodox enough.

All of these, in some ways, evoked the BYU student and professor experience. In other ways, they differ sharply. One thing was clear. A full confrontation of critical scholarship yet awaits Mormonism. While we may have our own variations to confront, other faith traditions have walked this path before, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can learn from the experiences of others in other faith traditions.  Indeed, one of the reasons I’ve pushed Enns and Kugel is because they offer a model of faithful interaction with critical scholarship. Their answers are not necessarily ours, but they can certainly help. This conference felt like a great first step, and I look forward to further discussions.


 

If the names above aren’t familiar to you from reading me, let me rehash. These are good scholars to read on the Bible.

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.

David O. McKay, Genesis, and Evolution: Part 2.

In a previous post, I detailed President McKay’s explicit, published, written approval of a very pro-evolution LDS magazine article. This served as evidence that President McKay did not understand Genesis 1 to prohibit an old earth, evolution, etc.

Shortly after the 1954 publication of Joseph Fielding Smith’s Man, His Origin and Destiny, BYU History professor Richard D. Poll and his wife were invited to discuss the book with the author. Knowing that President McKay disagreed strongly with the book, they managed to arrange a meeting with him on the same day. According to the Polls’ combined notes, made immediately afterwards, President McKay, “striking the desk for emphasis… repeated that [Man, His Origin and Destiny] is not the authoritative position of the Church.” He went on to recommend two books on “the problem of man, nature, and God” which considered “two of the outstanding books of the century”: A. Cressy Morrison’s Man Does Not Stand Alone and Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, Human Destiny Continue reading

A Note on Pioneer Day Talks, Sweetwater, and Tradition

I didn’t grow up in Utah, and never heard of Pioneer Day until I was on my mission in France/Belgium. There, a PR event was organized for the Sesquicentennial that included a large parade with handcarts, historical garb, dancing, etc. It wasn’t actually held on Pioneer Day, but a few weeks later in August. It had some Church News coverage, and a local member filmed and edited over an hour of video, all in French.

-Related reading: Eric Eliason, “The Cultural Dynamics of Historical Self-Fashioning: LDS Pioneer Nostalgia, American Culture, and the International Church” Journal of Mormon History 28:2 (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA2X0XrdJXI&sns=em

BYUI historian Andrea RM offers some great tips on Pioneer Day talks here, and briefly mentions the famous Sweetwater River Rescue. I heard this retold recently in a missionary farewell, so it was on my mind. Sweetwater plays a role in my book where I discuss the influence of tradition upon knowledge and scriptural interpretation (see  my post here as well). In essence, the story as often told is, well, inaccurate for the main reasons we tell it. The traditional information comes from one late source, and looking at contemporary sources undermines it.

The evidence indicates that more than three rescuers braved the icy water that day. Of those positively identified as being involved in the Sweetwater crossing, none were exactly eighteen. Although these rescuers helped a great many of the handcart pioneers across the river, they carried only a portion of the company across. While some of these rescuers complained of health problems that resulted from the experience, most lived long and active lives that terminated in deaths that cannot be de nitively attributed to their exposure to the icy water that day.

Consequently, Brigham Young never eulogized three youths (since there were more) who died (because they didn’t), promising them the celestial kingdom for that act alone.

How do we know? Chad Orton published an article in BYU Studies examining it. A fantastic follow-up article in BYU’s Religious Educator summarizes Orton’s conclusions and looks at the problem of teaching the actual history to LDS students when the traditional version has been told in General Conference by such as Presidents Hinckley and Monson.

I asked my students something like, “What’s right and what’s wrong with that account?” The first hands went up on the back row, where three or four male students sat (all returned missionaries). Soon after the first student started talking, I felt heat rising on the back of my neck. He said that “he only ‘felt the Spirit’ when reading the traditional account.” Then a nearby student weighed in: “I don’t see what’s so wrong with that version anyway,” he said, questioning the value of revisiting the story. And one of them raised another issue: Why would President Hinckley use this story if there’s something wrong with it? In retrospect, these seem like predictable concerns, but they caught me by surprise that day…

The author goes to on to talk about framing the history, lowering emotional barriers to learning, and other bits. Perhaps most importantly, he concludes by pointing out that Sweetwater was told again in General Conference by Elder Cook in 2008… who cites the BYU Studies article in footnote 5.

The takeaway? Be careful about uncritically repeating traditional stories, even if you heard them in General Conference.


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