Category: Genre

Joseph Fielding Smith, 2 Nephi 2:22, and “Death Before the Fall” in Church History

February 4, 2024 /

As many of my readers may know, President Joseph Fielding Smith (1876-1972) considered evolution not just incorrect, but devilish; he believed scripture taught a young earth, with no death of any kind anywhere before the fall of Adam c. 4000 BC.  His key scriptural evidence was 2 Nephi 2:22-25, which he cited dozens of times in books, articles, and private letters.  I want to explore and document a few related questions here.

  1. Does Smith’s understanding of this passage represent a clear and historically consistent Church position?
  2. Does Smith, in essence, overclaim?

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Four in the Furnace, by Ted Larson

Come Follow Me: Daniel 1,3,6 AND Esther 3-5, 7-8.

October 31, 2022 /

Obviously from the fact that the chapters I’m covering today don’t match up, I haven’t had time to revise these. 

Today we are rushing through an intro to Daniel AND Esther, and the next post is devoted solely to Daniel 2. What’s interesting is how the comparison between Daniel and Esther actually serves the manual’s purpose, which is to “help class members have the courage to live according to gospel standards.” How so?  Continue reading

Proverbs 31

Come Follow Me— Proverbs and Ecclesiastes

August 23, 2022 /

This is the lesson you’ve all been waiting for. Most scripture wasn’t written for the purpose of “daily application” or even “how to live a righteous life.” If that’s what you’ve been looking for in the Old Testament, it’s probably been difficult. Schlimm calls this the “Searching for Saints” model of reading; it doesn’t work very well, because scripture was not intended to provide ideal models to emulate and liken. However, this lesson is the motherlode, because the chapters in question WERE intended to teach daily application and how to live right.

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My image.

Virtual Sperry Fireside On Reading the Old Testament in Context (Updated with text)

May 5, 2022 /

This paper and presentation introduces a couple kinds of context and how to get at it, in order to understand the Bible better. Update 05-05-2022, I have made my formal paper draft available here. 

If you missed attending one of my firesides or the Sperry Symposium, this is for you. I recorded the audio/powerpoint from my final presentation last weekend, which benefitted from having done it three times. The length is about 1:10, and unfortunately I cut the audio before I closed with some testimony about the utility of the Old Testament, my appreciation for it, etc. The first slide is up for almost two minutes, they do change. And below are books/authors I quote or allude to in the slides. The actual paper has many more references, of course, and I’ll be posting it in chunks. And if you want to link, please link to this post, not direct to the youtube video.  
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Public domain

“We don’t know how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden”: Genre and the Temple, Part 3

July 26, 2020 /

See here and here for parts 1 and 2

Some Latter-day Saints, including some General Authorities like Joseph Fielding Smith, have tried to resolve apparent discrepancies between scripture and science on the age of the earth by asserting that “we don’t know how long Adam and Eve were in the garden.” The implication is that the while the earth went on existing, potentially for millions or billions of years, Adam and Eve remained effectively in stasis in the garden planted eastward in Eden.

I see three arguments against this view.

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Science and History as Myth and Fiction: Exploring Some Common Labels

April 20, 2020 /

(Originally published in 2010 elsewhere) Most people know the genre of “parable” because they’re in the Gospels, but “myth” is poorly understood and the term carries a lot of negative baggage. Like “literal” you have to be very careful throwing around the term without defining it. One simple definition of myth is that myth is worldview in narrative form. That is, it’s a way of explaining one’s conception of how the world works in everyday language or story form. Continue reading

Creation of the Sun, Sistine Chapel

A Paradoxical Preservation of Faith: LDS Creation Accounts and the Composite Nature of Revelation

September 26, 2019 /

My 2019 FAIRMormon Conference presentation is up now, here. There’s a lot in the footnotes as well.

The takeaway is this: Many LDS have unsustainably fundamentalist assumptions about the nature of revelation, prophets, and scripture. The conflict these cause sometimes leads to a loss of faith, instead of recognizing and reexamining the assumptions. Continue reading

Red brick store in Nauvoo, where the first endowments were done on May 4, 1842.

Genre… and the Temple

September 12, 2019 /

The red brick store in Nauvoo, where the first endowments were done on May 4, 1842.

If you follow me, you know I talk a lot about the importance of recognizing genre in scripture: podcast here, Sperry symposium here, posts here, here, etc.

Evolution is also a topic I address with some frequency, such as here (a BYU guest lecture) and here (in context of “what prophets know”).

I also talk a lot about Genesis, how and why it’s historically been misread (e.g. my presentation here and accompanying post here), as well as the parallels in Moses and Abraham (see here for my FAIR talk transcript, and here for a fireside video.)

And I’m writing a book on Genesis 1 where I tie a lot of this stuff together… but I’ve left a lot of hardest writing for last, including my chapter on the temple. So, let’s talk.  Continue reading