Historian of Religion, Science, and Biblical Interpretation
A new Church History Topic essay on Organic Evolution appeared recently. These are not full-blown essays, like the Gospel Topics. Rather, they are meant as concise historical/conceptual summaries provided as background for the Saints volumes, not as a stand-alone lengthy exploration of a subject. You can find them linked, in footnotes, in Saints online. I’d like to provide some notes and comments on this short background essay.
In 2017, I participated in the Maxwell Institute’s Summer Seminar, with the theme Mormonism Encounters the World and run by Philip Barlow and Teryl Givens. The seminar involves an intense few weeks of researching, workshopping, and writing. The result is a public conference of papers. Unfortunately, the papers that year were never posted onto the MI website, but WVS provided a summary here.
My paper looked briefly at the vertical relationship between Latter-day Saints and God but primarily at the horizontal relationship between Latter-day Saints and “the world.” I proposed two historical and competing models, ways of thinking about our interactions with “the world:”
My paper received some very kind and enthusiastic comments, and I post the unrevised working draft here. I hope, eventually, to revisit and revise for publication, but in the meantime, enjoy.
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President Joseph Fielding Smith took his understanding of geology and cosmology from his readings of scripture. One of his central premises was that scripture consisted of divinely-revealed facts of religion but also science and history; and therefore, scripture— as he interpreted it— should take precedence over limited and flawed human theorizing, i.e. modern science.
On two occasions, Smith commented on the mountains of Utah, and these illustrate his premises.
Today’s take-away is simple: Don’t use the Old Testament Institute manual for Genesis. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk…
It is somewhat well-known that Joseph Fielding Smith did not like the idea of astronauts; scripture, in his view, was clear that humans were limited to this planet, and attempts to get off it, at all, would fail. It even made the Ensign, in 2015.
My last post talked about Cleon Skousen’s book, The First 2000 Years. Today I came across an interview with BYU professor Bertrand Harrison, a biology and botany professor. If you’ve ever been to the garden or duck pond on the south end of BYU campus, on 800 North, that’s the Bertrand F. Harrison Arboretum, pictured above
Harrison had written one of the most pro-evolution articles ever published in a Church magazine, and it was specifically read and approved by President McKay to appear in the magazine. That article was part of a controversial pro-science series in Church magazines in 1965, which I detailed here.
I came across this interview with Harrison, wherein he relates an anecdote about George Hansen and Cleon Skousen. Continue reading
Cleon Skousen, via Wikipedia
Cleon Skousen‘s opening book in his Old Testament series came off the Bookcraft press in 1953, The First 2000 Years. Skousen had worked on the series for 15 years, to “try and bring together in one volume everything the Church has received thus far concerning the first 2000 years of human history— from Adam to Abraham.”1Preface
A young and pugnacious James E. Talmage, per the picture in the BYU Geology Dept.
The idea of progression between kingdoms in the afterlife has long been debated, with Church leaders taking differing positions. One interesting and well-known point in this debate is textual differences between the first and later editions of Talmage’s The Articles of Faith.1See Dialogue 15:1 (Spring 1982) “Is there Progression Among the Eternal Kingdoms?” p. 181ff However, no one has ever explained why Talmage apparently changed his mind.
A brief and incomplete story, illustrating Elder Maxwell’s language fun… even in internal memos.
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