Clay Painter, “Hello, and thanks for tuning in.  My name is Clay Painter and I’m a guest interviewer for this episode.  Today we have the extremely distinguished guest, Dr. Robert M. Price.  Bob Price got his Masters of Theological Studies from the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Drew University.  Later he received a second Ph.D. this time in New Testament Studies from Drew University.  He is a former pastor and now is an atheist but still finds religious studies fascinating. Furthermore, he still appreciates some religious liturgy and occasionally attends church services.

Bob is a prolific author and a well-known scholar.  His books include Deconstructing Jesus, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, The Reason Driven Life, and the Pre-Nicene New Testament.  And those are just a very few of the many books that he has written.  He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, an interviewer for the Point of Inquiry podcast, and he runs his own podcast entitled the Bible Geek.  Bob Price, welcome to Mormon Expression.”

Bob, “Well, thanks for having me.  It’s a great treat to be here.”

Clay, “Yeah absolutely.  I contacted you for this interview to primarily discuss one of your new books, Latter-Day Scripture, which is a critical examination of the Book of Mormon. Mormon Expression actually had a panel discussion of the book in episode 169, but I thought that it would be really great to hear you speak about your own work and again thanks for making the time.”

Bob, “Oh, It’s great.  No problem.”

Clay, “Just to kind of give the listeners a heads up of where this podcast is going, like I said in that episode 169, the panel did a pretty good job at discussing what your main points of the book were, that the Book of Mormon is a pseudepigrapha and that you address it as a pseudepigrapha, and then you critically analyze it holding and revealing the multiple sources that Joseph Smith used to kind of create this pastiche work that the Book of Mormon is.  But before we get to that, for listeners that aren’t acquainted with you, can you give us a brief summary of maybe your transition from Christian apologist to a pastor to a liberal Christian and now an atheist?”

Bob, “Well, I was converted to, I guess I always believed in God and Christ and so on.  Growing up my parents were Southern Baptists, but not militant.  Once we moved from Mississippi to New Jersey when I was 10, we began going to a Conservative Baptist Association Church.  I don’t know why the Southern Baptists hadn’t, but they quickly pressed home this whole business of accepting Jesus into your heart and all of that, and I did and I was pretty devout on into junior high and then high school.  I was interested in this whole new thing.  I don’t even know that I even heard the word apologetics yet, but I began to hear it suggested that you can defend the faith and show that it was very probably true or pretty much prove it was true with historical evidence and such.  Geez, this sounded fascinating so I started reading all the stalwarts like John Warwick Montgomery and Josh McDowell and so forth, and I really got into this, Jay and Dee Anderson, and anything published by New Varisty, you name it.

I was armed to enter the battle.  A couple of years later after I had gone through college and studied more but also began to press home my own questions, I began to think, you know I think I’ve only heard one side of this.  This is always kind of a danger for people who get into apologetics defending the faith because if you’re going to present arguments and you don’t want to come off looking like an idiot, you have to weigh the arguments yourself and say, now if I were not a believer, would I find this convincing?

The more I did that, the more problems I had and then I started stumbling on other historical phenomena, kind of like the rise of Christianity, and I began to compare them and to understand what historical method was and I guess I was half way through my master’s program at Gordon Conwell even before I realized I just can’t buy this, the Biblical authority business just seems to me to die th death of a thousand qualifications.

The notion that Jesus definitely existed and rose from the dead and that proves he’s the Son of God.  That’s just full of holes.  There’s no real reason to believe it and so I embarked on an aggressive reading program in other liberal neo-orthodox etc. theologians.  Once I got the degree out of the way, I started at Drew on another theology degree where I studied more of these people.  I was rapidly becoming agnostic about any supernaturalism.  I read Buldman and Paul Tillick and I thought now this is a good way of dealing with it.  There certainly is such a thing as a religious experience.  There certainly is profundity albeit symbolic in the Bible.  So I kind of went to a very extreme, I’d say liberal type of theology, and figured I had some kind of Christian faith.

I began going to a local Baptist church with a real fascinating pastor who was Southern Baptist, but much educated and very much into Kierkegaard and so on.  I then went down to North Carolina to teach at a free-will Baptist college.  I was still very skeptical and didn’t hide it, but I was loyal to the church.  I began going to the Episcopal Church.  I loved the liturgy etc.  I started to think well probably there is some sort of God albeit, not really personal.

About this time I had been down teaching at Mount Olive College about four and a half years.  The pastorate from my old church in New Jersey came open and I applied for that.  I was accepted.  My wife and I and our new baby moved up there and I was pastor for that church for about six years. During that time, I started the second Ph.D. program in New Testament at Drew University. The more I read of the old critics like F.C. Bower and so forth, and also the more I read by Jacque Derendaugh and Don Cubot I began to realize I had unexamined assumptions that there was probably no real reason to believe in spiritual entities more real than physical entities: in other words, Idealist Metaphysics.  I then sort of moved over into religious humanism.

Well the further I got into that I began to think that this is just religion eroding itself and sublimating into the air.  It’s got less and less to it.  It seems to be just trying to evolve into secular humanism.  So I became a religiously friendly atheist and humanist.  Well, I moved back down to North Carolina to be near my in-laws who were having health problems and started going to the Episcopal Church again and I thought, you know, I guess I can be a Christian without solving all the philosophical problems.  I can enjoy the liturgy and the Eucharist and have spiritual experience, which I did.

But then I guess it just goes inevitably back and forth.  I began to think, do I really see anything in this?  It began to wear on me.  So my fondness for and fascination with religion has never dissipated, but I kind of go back and forth on whether I want to identify with it, whereas I do know that I’m an atheist and a skeptic.  You can not easily combine those.  I guess I’m not hot and cold on that.”

Clay, “No absolutely.  Thanks for sharing that story. I think this whole idea of examining critically and studying your way out of religion and religious belief is shared by many listeners that are going to be listening to that.  So after you’ve done this and you’ve published multiple books, and you’re involved in the higher criticism circle, what draws you to Mormon Studies and the Book of Mormon?  How did you even become involved in that?”

Bob Price, “Well, uh, I think it was now looking back a few years, I somehow got in touch with Mark Thomas at BYU.  I got him to write a fascinating article for the Journal of Higher Criticism that I had started/edited, and he did this thing on basically a history of critical study of the Book of Mormon.  People gradually trying to apply to the text methods of modern biblical criticism, and I just found the whole idea fascinating.  I already figured it was a modern work.  I’d read enough of it to know that and I began to read some of these symposia from Signature Books and I thought ‘Wow, this is just a burgeoning field of fascinating scholarly inquiry so I tried my hand at it and got involved with Mark and the Book of Mormon Roundtable and prepared papers for that, and that’s what most of the stuff in my collection Latter-Day Scripture is.  I just found it so fascinating to consider what I already knew about the Book of Mormon in light of what I had learned about the Bible.

For instance, this original debate that still rages: is the Book of Mormon from the 19^th century or is it an ancient book?  Well, I figured that was settled but in light of Biblical studies, for it to be a forgery in a sense, a pious fraud, that looks a lot less bad in terms of the history of scripture because so much of all scripture is pseudepigraphical, it’s almost part of the scripture genre.  It’s over-simplified to say this is a rip-off, it’s a hoax or a fraud.  It’s not quite that way.  It’s just certain writings on certain subjects have to adopt the pose of venerable, ancient, perhaps lost scripture in order to underline the depth and the archaic antiquity of the ideas they are trying to expound.

And so, I wrote an essay that was in Dialogue I think, called Joseph Smith: Inspired Author of the Book of Mormon.  I said, ‘you know you LDS Christians, you shouldn’t be that worried about this.  Here’s what mainstream, at least orthodox, liberal Christians and scholars know about the Bible, an awful lot of it is fake, if you want to call it that.  But that’s no real problem, maybe you could see it that way too and rid yourself of an awful headache, and it would make more sense if you admitted yes, Joseph Smith is the author of our scripture.  Wouldn’t that actually befit his role as a founding prophet more than the idea that he’s just an archaeologist who’s stumbled on an ancient text?

I mean he is the authority, you recognize that in your other books like the Doctrine and Covenants.  Why not come clean and admit that yeah, he wrote this too, and that’s fine. He’s the prophet.  Do you think he is or don’t you?  Of course, I don’t have the personal faith but I look at It in sociological terms.  Is this man the founding prophet of a religious community?  Yes he is.  Is Reverend Moon?  Yes he is.

Functionally, the guy is a prophet and even a Messiah if you want to call him that. You don’t really have to push it farther than that.  And once you see, ok I have a scripture here, revered by zillions of people, maybe I could be of some help showing how the dilemma is not as bad as they think it is, and that’s sort of the approach I’ve taken.  I don’t regard myself as an apologist for the Book of Mormon, but I do think you can reframe the whole debate in a way that’s much more healthy and positive and productive.

Clay, “No that’s great.  You know I hear you saying that Joseph Smith, he’s the author of the Book of Mormon, but let’s not worry about it so much because he’s just doing what thousands of years of history, you know historical prophets have done in the past when they’ve had a message, they’ve reframed it, they’ve claimed authority from other people that have religious clout.  Is that correct?  Is that kind of your main point there?

Robert, “Well, it’s half of it.  I’d go on from there to say that once you recognize this isn’t just a straight forward history, nor is it just a hoax pretending to be straight forward history, you begin to open a window into understanding the deeper dimensions of the text.  Once you say now, this sounds a lot like the Bible, but Smith wrote it, how’d he do that?  Did he combine certain passages because he liked elements of this one and that one and cross them into a new synthesis?

Well yeah he did, and this really did give me great respect for this man, as a creative theologian and writer.  It’s just fascinating, the way in 3 Nephi for instance, his narrative of the Second Coming of Christ into the Western Hemisphere, the way he’s combined various elements of the gospels and why he did and the theological implications.  This guys’ not—I mean even a non-Mormon, even an anti-Mormon shouldn’t look at this guy and say he’s just a hoaxer.  No, No, No.  You’ve got a real creative mind here, a literary genius in some ways.  But you’d never recognize that.  You’d never be free to recognize it if you didn’t realize the sacred game the guy was playing, just like the authors of Deuteronomy and the Book of Daniel, and the Book of Revelation and so much other biblical material did.

Clay, “No that’s good.  Let’s back up just a tad and talk about pseudepigrapha in general.  You mentioned that the Bible is littered with pseudepigrapha.  Do you have kind of a—you mentioned three books there but what books in the Bible are fairly conclusively pseudepigrapha?”

Bob, “Well, unless you’re just a fundamentalist stopping your ears up, Daniel is just very obviously pseudopigraphical and there are many other books not in the canon that take the same approach where the author poses as some wise man of the past, usually more of a scribe than a prophet which is kind of a wink to the reader to signal that this is a literary work, not a transcription of a vision despite the content of it—it’s all a kind of a shtick.  You summarize the history of Israel or the Church or whatever, up until your own time—you the writer, but you say that this is written by an ancient scribe who foresaw it.

Why do that?  Well, it’s a way—these things are usually written in times of great stress.  It’s a way of saying, look, it may look like great chaos to you but God had a plan and that’s working itself out. It’s like a parable about divine providence you might say.  Or sometimes it’s just a case like with the so-called Deutero-Isaiah, or 2^nd Isaiah, or 2^nd Zechariah.  You had somebody that revered the oracles of an early prophet and had more to say in that community but humbly felt, who am I?  I’m gonna put this under the aegis of the great prophet.  I’m not going to have the brazenness to make myself equal with him.  Another way with less admirable motives, you might say, ‘nobody’s gonna take me seriously if I used my own nom de plume.  If I say here’s the prophecy of Bill or the Apocalypse of Chad.  Who’s going to listen to this?  So I better get a hearing with a great name and then the value of it will be apparent to the reader.  That’s generally called a pious fraud.

It is a fraud, but it is pious.  So Daniel is certainly one of those. Deuteronomy—Moses said all of this?  There’s no way.  The law is totally different than it was in earlier law codes defined in Exodus, etc.  The whole premise is kind of vague and self-contradictory.  Is Moses talking to the people who survived the 40 years in the desert? He talks to them as if they were, ‘you did this, you did that’, but then he says they’re all dead and so I’m giving you, their heirs, a pep talk about the law.  Well what is it?  This isn’t historical.  It’s a chance to update the Torah, and the people think that’s really what happened under King Josiah, much, much later.  Well there’s several of those law codes put under Moses’ name.  The rabbis continue to say that they’re oral tradition of interpreting the Torah was part of the Torah, that ‘oh we really didn’t come up with this, Moses did, and he repeated it orally without writing it down and it came down to us.’  That’s pseudepigraphy.

In the New Testament, it seems to me that the letters of Paul are pseudepigraphical. This is way out there, I mean very few scholars think this, but I follow the Dutch radical school of the 19^th century that says that all of these letters are by different Paulinists, and that’s why you have so many different viewpoints in them.  So I think they’re pseudepigraphical.

The Gospels have no names on them, so they were really anonymous.  It was somebody later on, perhaps Polycarp of Smyrna who kind of guessed who had written them, and that’s all it was.  So by far, most of the Bible is anonymous or pseudonymous. The Psalms—there were originally no names on them. They certainly don’t go back to David.

Clay, “Sure. Uh huh.”

Bob, “But neither do they claim to.  That’s just an ancient editorial convention.  We don’t know who wrote virtually any of the Bible, and when you have names, it’s either ancient guesswork or false pen-names.  It’s almost the rule, not the exception.”

Clay, “No, that’s great.  You know, is it fair to say that if we’re going to objectively be critical of all of our scripture, not just our own scripture, not just someone else’s scripture, but if we’re going to be objective and unbiased, and if we’re gonna throw out the Book of Mormon, then heck, we might as well throw out half the Bible.”

Bob, “Oh yeah, you’d have to, yeah.”

Clay, “Or we can be kinder, accept it as pseudepigrapha, acknowledge that is shows insight into the men of the times who wrote it, and may say something about the sociology and religious evolution of that time, and analyze it as that?”

Bob, “Yeah, and that can be edifying too for the reasons you just mentioned.  Any fool can see that the Book of Mormon is the charter for what happened to the Mormon Church’s in their trek across the country. They had their own exodus, their own persecutions.  I mean it’s fascinating.  It’s this updating and Americanizing of the Bible and Christianity.  That doesn’t contradict it being a modern work.  In fact it makes – the truth of it is made all the more clear if you realize it was written in the 19^th century.

I can’t think of the name of whoever said this but in view of the whole DNA thing that just shot the whole premise of it to hell, right?  That there’s no Semitic DNA in the American Indians.  Some traditionalist Mormon made this great statement.  He said maybe the issue isn’t really, ‘Are our stories true?  Maybe the issue is are we true to our stories?’  Bingo, There’s somebody that’s using his brain.”

Clay, “Absolutely, And to be fair, you’re not saying that as an atheist—I don’t think that you’re saying that Joseph Smith somehow foresaw the exile of the Mormons and how they had to trek across the plains, but more you’re saying that’s why it speaks to Mormons as scripture.  Is that correct?”

BoB, “Yes. Yeah, I mean he already had adventures of a kind that almost placed him in the Book of Mormon, but yeah, had it gone another way, probably nobody would even remember it today, but they did see themselves in it.”

Clay, “No, that’s great.  I don’t want to change gears too much, but I’m really, really interested in how this was received at BYU, and how this Book of Mormon Roundtable shook out.  What was that experience like?”

Bob, “Well, we had some people from FARMS, who as of course you know are kind of rock-rimmed apologists for the Book of Mormon as an ancient work.  Is there a Jack Sullivan or something like that?

Clay, “There could very well could be, I’m not sure.”

Bob, “He’s a major character, it’s my failing memory. He’s very significant.  I should remember his name but he’s written truckloads of stuff.  He’s very erudite, but I think he’s wrong.  I had a couple of friendly confrontations with him around the table and said, look, you just can’t ignore the fact that the King James Bible is quoted in this supposedly ancient work, and it’s not just mistranslation of the text and so on.

Well, everybody was well-mannered, but that was pretty much the end of the thing.  We had to have what turned out to be our last meeting in a library downtown or something.  It was no longer under the auspices or should I say wasn’t even tolerated by BYU and they fired Mark Thomas and so they’re just not interested in any kind of revisionism, though there were several people in the roundtable who were traditionalist believers that said, hey, look any perspective that sheds any light on this thing, I want to hear it.  It was a really great, creative collegial atmosphere.”

Clay, “No that’s good to hear that there was at least a mixed bag.  There were those that were absolutely opposed to it, but those that actually maybe welcomed the intellectual honesty and intellectual debate in and of itself.  No that’s great.  I guess we covered a lot of ground on why we should examine the Book of Mormon, but should the Book of Mormon be important to non-Mormons, ex-Mormons, theists and non-theists?  If so, why should it be examined?  What does the Book of Mormon have to add to the religious discussion on a global scale, if anything?  You know, maybe it doesn’t.

Bob, “Well, I’d say it’s importance—this is obviously, you know, just my limited perspective, I’m not pontificating on anything, but it seems to me that it’s most important for understanding the Mormon Church, though it’s limited even there since very little of it appears to have determined the theology of Mormonism; Joseph Smith’s other writings did more of that.  I don’t know that Mormonism would be much different theologically if you didn’t have a Book of Mormon actually.”

Clay, “Yeah, that’s true.  I mean the theology within the Book of Mormon is fairly early 1800’s protestant, not at all like it is today, you know.”

Bob, “That’s right, yeah.  What they have today is far more interesting.  It’s fascinating stuff.  I have to admit—well it’s interesting to me as a student of the Bible because it provides a kind of a testimony of how American Christians have always read the Bible, picturing ancient Israel as Christians already in advance.  Of course, the Bible doesn’t actually put it that way, you have to read it in like Abraham and everybody knew about the atoning death of Jesus and his Resurrection and they were just looking forward to it happening and their faith is predicated on that.  Well that historically [chuckles] that’s absurd, but that is what Christians have believed so the Book of Mormon does them a favor of actually in effect re-writing the Old Testament as if that were true, they just have it happen in the Western Hemisphere.

So it’s very fascinating, but I have to admit I did not find much that was all that edifying about it.  It seemed to me to be pretty turgid.  I gotta say on the other side though, well once somebody said to me, a young Mormon missionary that , have you read this thing, it’s so great and all that, and it couldn’t have been written by mere mortals or something like that, and I said, well, to tell you the truth, I find the Lord of the Rings to be more satisfying scripture, and I stick by that but I don’t mean to condemn the Book of Mormon, there’s a lot of the Bible that’s not that exciting either.  I guess that’s not the point of it.

There is in the Book of Mormon a curiously relevant, modern, narrative that you’ve got these people that share the heritage of Israel and they split and you’ve got the Nephites and the Lamanites and the latter group is dangerous to the former group.  I know this is real politically incorrect, but it seems to me you’ve got a great analogy of what’s going on in the world today.  You’ve got Jews and Christians who are like the Nephites and radical Muslims who are like the extremely dangerous Lamanites who want to settle the hash of the Nephites.  The Nephites better wake up and do something about it.  I think that again you’re not really supposed to say that kind of thing.”

Clay chuckling, “Yeah that’s pretty inflammatory Bob, I don’t know what to think about it to tell you the truth.  I’m not sure—well, I don’t know.”  [Clay chuckles]

Bob, “Well keep in mind that I say this only about radical Muslims and their sympathizers but according to an acquaintance, colleague of mine, Said Hussein Nasir, a very erudite Sufi scholar.  He says, ‘oh it’s only about 10% of Muslims worldwide.’

Oh you mean 10 million?  I’d say we’ve got a problem.  I do not think that all Muslims are like this.  I’ve studied Islam.  I find Islam fascinating.  I love Islam and the Koran, but you can’t ignore the danger that a huge army of fanatics poses.”

Clay, “Oh yeah,  sure.  Thanks for qualifying it as well.  I guess to kind of close, as an outsider and as someone who has a lot of experience with higher criticism within Mormon scriptures and non-Mormon scriptures and just global scriptures in general, what guidance would you have for Mormons who have become disillusioned with the Book of Mormon, with the Book of Abraham, which is even more objectively pseudepigrapha.  You know we’ve got the Book of Abraham, it’s the Book of Breathings.  They’ve translated it.  It doesn’t has nothing to do with Abraham.  You know I see a lot of these people trying to fall back on Biblical scriptures and kind of entrench themselves in Christian scriptures.  I guess as an outsider, would you have any guidance or suggestions for these people who have become disenfranchised from Mormonism and Mormon scriptures and are searching elsewhere?”

Bob, “Well, I would just plead for consistency that they shouldn’t think that the Bible is immune to the kind of debunking, if that’s what they call it that the Book of Mormon is subject to, and I guess what I’m really thinking here in terms of a pastoral concern, they’re just setting themselves up for another even worse disappointment.  I would suggest that they might kind of take the view that reconstructionist Jews do and say, look, we have a community and a tradition and certain values that we believe in and we love.  We have a book here that we find edifying that we love.  Suppose it turns out that it’s fiction like The Pilgrim’s Progress, and it’s not history.  How much does that really matter?

Whatever Joseph Smith said or thought, we do know what he did.  I mean it’s the same way most of us view Dr. King.  This guy had his problems morally, but really who cares?  Look at the balance.  Look at the big picture, what this man did for everybody, and I say the same for Joseph Smith.  I wonder if it’s not better to kind of take a de-mythologized chastened view and to say, I’m a Mormon and proud of it.  Alright I no longer believe certain things, I put away childish things but does Mormonism stand or fall with them?  I don’t think so.

I mean if it does, you’ve got a pretty shallow faith.  If Mormonism is really no more than a dubious belief about people that came to the Western Hemisphere back in the 6^th century BCE, I mean even if that’s true, who cares?  They ideas of Mormonism really have nothing to do with that.  So I say don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Clay, “Yeah, no, that’s interesting, and it’s really interesting to hear from an outsider Bob.  It seems like you have, on some of your work you’re considered, I don’t know, fairly fringy and radical with your Jesus Myth Theory, but then on the other side you’re incredibly moderate and incredibly accepting of religion in general and I don’t know if that makes any sense or not.  But it’s interesting because what you say right now, and I’m not sure if I’m convinced of it or not.  I’m not sure if there is a baby in the bathwater but what you’re saying right now is something that I hear many more moderate, liberal Mormons say, and that’s an interesting perspective, so yeah, it’s good to hear that from an outside source as well.”

Bob, “Well if they find nothing of value in it, they shouldn’t stick with it, but I’m just thinking about the plight of those who say that it is a thriving matrix for their community and society.  Well, that seems to me to transcend the issues that are bothering them.  And it’s not necessarily all or nothing.  If however it’s a burdensome experience, well, that’s another whole matter that you should leave it like I left fundamentalism.“

Clay, “Sure, no absolutely.  Well Bob, if people wanted to learn more about your views, your work, your books, where would they go to find that out?”

Bob, “Well I got this nifty website my wife made up for me called robertmprice.mindvendor.com. There’s an archive of my old sermons, my various articles on things, my short stories reviews, just anything and everything.”

Clay, “No that’s great.  You know Bob, I want to thank you again for taking time to talk with us today. For listeners that are interested, go to robertmprice.mindvendor.com.  You’ve got an upcoming book that’s published through Signature Books if I’m not mistaken?”

Bob, “Yeah. The Amazing Colossal Apostle:  The Quest of the Historical Paul.”

Clay, “Perfect.  So thanks for tuning on.  As always, the discussion continues at MormonExpression.com.”

What are your impressions?

For a bit of background, Jana Riess was raised by an atheistic dad, and her mom wasn’t very religious either.  Yet, Jana felt pulled toward religious faith, joining with the Presbyterians before embracing Mormonism.  John questioned why it is hard for atheists to keep their children away from religion.  This corresponds immediately after their conversation that I transcribed previously.

John, “Yeah, right.  Ok in this last part of the segment I am just going to bring it back to your childhood for a second.  So right now, based on our data, you know, people are leaving the church at an exponentially increasing rate. Intellectual issues really are most prominent. There are spiritual reasons people leave, there are cultural or political reasons people leave, but by and large, it’s the types of things we have been talking about today.

I think it’s important to look ahead and see where that takes future generations, because (I’m sorry that this is a bit long of a statement) I say across the table from Sam Harris.  I had lunch with Sam Harris.  I sat across the table with Michael Shermer, I had lunch with Michael Shermer.  These are two of the worlds’ great atheist writers and thinkers.  I asked them point blank.  I said, ‘when my wife gets cancer, when is one of your people going to be showing up at our door, delivering a casserole In Logan?’

What I mean by that is—and I don’t mean it socially—if you believe in evolution at all, and most people who leave the church probably do, you would probably concede that if religion weren’t adaptive to the human species, it would have died out, right?  It would have gone by the wayside, but actually, my understanding over the past century is that mankind’s gotten more religious, not less overall. Even though right now there might be a little waxing and waning going on.  So, I think there’s a lot of people leaving religions, leaving Mormonism, envisioning this sort of post-religion world where religion is dead and as soon as we can shake off the chains of religious oppression, then rainbows will emerge and it will rain gumdrops and butterflies will fly around.”

Jana, “Oh unicorns!  Don’t forget the unicorns.”

John chuckling ,”Unicorns will come out and we’ll all be enlightened, and it’s just fascinating to ask what if Jana Reiss, what if Jana Reiss is one of the outcomes of this mass movement towards secularism.  In other words, what if we just ain’t escaping this religious thing as a species any time soon?  The minute that we think we are, as Greg Prince said, atheists are having a hard time keeping their kids in the fold.

[Jana chuckles, John continues.]  What if we’re going to boomerang whether we –what if society is going to boomerang back to religion whether we want it to or not?  And if it is, why not stay and make it as great of a place to stay if our grandchildren are going to end up back here anyway?  That was not even a question.  I’m embarrassed that I just said all that and didn’t even shape it into a question.  Feel free to comment on it.”

Jana, “You have nothing to be embarrassed about.  This is a conversation, it’s not an interrogation.  You have nothing to be embarrassed about.

Well, the things that occurred to me while you were talking, first of all, I can understand that people within Mormonism will be very concerned about disaffection, disaffiliation, people leaving the church.  It is a concern, and I sure hope that people at the church are taking notes on why this happens and that they are planning to make changes in the way we do things, particularly the way we set up these either/or dichotomies in which people are essentially forced out  if they have questions.  But I would also say, and I think you alluded to this, that this is not just the trend within Mormonism.  The trend towards disaffiliation is happening everywhere, and it’s a really fascinating moment in American culture.

I read a book a few Years ago by Christian Smith called Soul Searching, where he was doing research on teenagers and religions, an then he followed up on those same teenagers some years later when they became adults, so college age and in their early 20’s to find out specifically what happened to those kids, but more generally what happens to this whole generation, and I really recommend reading those books in tandem because it’s quite illuminating of how this is affecting.

In the first book, Mormonism comes of very well actually, because Mormon teens at least know what they’re supposed to believe and they report praying regularly, they report  devotional practices that would demonstrate some kind of personal commitment. But even those things are not really enough to hold people in the fold.  So Mormonism more recently, just last year, Oxford published another book by Kenda Creasy Dean who had been one of the researchers on the youth and religion project that Christian Smith started.  (I hope this isn’t boring people.)

The upshot is that she had a whole chapter on Mormons. Are they the success story in how their kids are learning the faith, being indoctrinated in the faith, and then staying in the faith?  I think the chapter was very good in terms of how it examined Mormon kids and how they are acculturated.  I don’t think it did such a great job in terms of looking at the darker side in the fact that a lot of these people then leave even returned missionaries will come home and sometimes leave for whatever reason.  People you would expect to have the highest levels of commitment to the faith.

But much of that is because we are living in a culture in which now 14% of young adults claim no affiliation, so that is a significant change even from a couple of decades ago when it was more like 6 or 7, so it has doubled, so it’s not just Latter-day Saints.

John, “Yeah, and that’s all true, and in Europe religion’s really struggling, and there’s some predictions that in nine countries across the world religion will become extinct, but that’s kind of what I’m wondering is—I wonder about the human condition there’s just no escaping God and belief overall.  I wonder if we’re destined as a species to boomerang back to faith or if science or social engineering is going to someday lead us to a better place?  Have you thought about that at all?”

Jana, “I have thought about it some, but not enough.  I think those are important questions for the future, but no I don’t have any grand sweeping wisdom to give you.”

John, “But as far as you’re concerned, well, what you represent to me is a testimonial that it’s not as simple as yank your kids out of church, you know, and teach them secular ways, because somehow at least for some that spirit just calls them right back, right?”

Jana, “Sometimes that happens.”

John, “Yeah.  I mean I remember speaking of a faith episode with Krista Tippett where there was a liberal loosey goosey Catholics who raised their kids outside of the faith and low and behold, by the time they were adults they were like fundamentalist Catholics.  Have you seen that dynamic happen in Judaism or other religions? “

Jana, “Yes, there is a whole kind of trend and it is very interesting to observe. I think the book that you are referring to from the Krista Tippets show was called the New Faithful.  Colleen someone, I can’t remember her last name, but she was looking at this phenomenon precisely of people who you would think are going to embrace largely secular values and then take a turn for conservative religions, in that case conservative Catholicism, why?  What is it that they are finding there?  I think that the reductionistic sociological answer is that people want to know what they’re supposed to believe, and never more so than a time of confusion more generally.

I don’t think that kind of explanation gives people very much credit.  It doesn’t hold true with people that I talk to.  They don’t say, ‘I wanted to know the truth so that my life would be simpler.’  Their lives are rarely simpler because of the changes that they’ve made.”

Why do you think atheists and religionists seem to have a hard time keeping their children “in the fold”?

John Dehlin recently interviewed her on Mormon Stories. In part 2, he discusses her book quite a bit, but in part 1, he discusses her background and perspectives on various issues. Jana grew up in an atheist family. As part of her “rebelious” youth, she went to church, eventually settling down with the Presbyterian faith. She felt called to the ministry and attended seminary to become a pastor. During her time in seminary, she converted to Mormonism. She has a Ph.D. in American Religious History from Columbia University.

There are some people who believe that the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham are frauds.  John questioned Jana about this line of reasoning, and I thought Jana gave some interesting insights (1) into the idea of a Mormon Midrash, and (2) truth doesn’t have to be empirical.  I wanted to quote from their interview, starting with about 30 minutes left in part 1.

John Dehlin, “The Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon were like top 5 issues for people that have caused them to leave, and a lot of us just have the assumption that the only people who haven’t left are those who don’t know about Book of Mormon and DNA and the Book of Abraham, and everybody else has left, you know.  How in the world do you stay knowing about that stuff?”

Jana Riess, “Well, I don’t know that this is going to be a satisfactory answer to be honest with you because one of the things that I have found is that some of the people, most of whom are men, who get very exercised about  being in the know about what really happened with the Book of Abraham, etc. are not persuaded by arguments that rest on spirituality.  They only want arguments that meet them point for point, saying—again this is an either/or proposition as well—the whole way they approach the question.  If the Book of Abraham is not a divine translation of this ancient document, if it is in fact an ordinary funerary document that Joseph Smith completely expanded, embellished, elaborated on or if you are looking at a more cynical view, just simply lied about, then what do we do with the rest of our faith?

Well, let’s step back first of all and think about how important is the Book of Abraham to the Mormon faith in general?  I don’t think it’s terrifically important, but that’s just me.  But we need to have a tradition of midrash.  We need to have a tradition where we can look at a prophet in the way that Jews have looked at prophets of old and say, ‘this is a midrash’ on a revelation, or this is a midrash on an earlier work of scripture.”

John, “What does that word mean?”

Jana, “Midrash, well it’s basically any expanded teaching.  I don’t know what the exact definition would be, but an expanded teaching is something where in midrashim, you are taking a core text and then thinking about it cosmically, you’re thinking about it theologically, and you could look at, for example, the entire Pearl of Great Price as a midrash. You have Moses as a midrash on Genesis, right?  If you think about it in those terms, the literal nature of it is less important than what the book is trying to teach us about who we are as children of God.  I think that is where we need to be looking, and I frankly don’t give a hoot about some of the arguments about historicity, DNA, the more troubling avenues is of course Joseph Smith, the more troubling aspect is not the scripture itself, but what Joseph Smith said about and whether he can then be relied upon as a prophet of God.  Based on my work on the Hebrew Bible, I would say yeah.  Have you looked at those guys lately?

I mean we have this completely ridiculous idea of what a prophet is supposed to be.  No human being can measure up to that and there’s certainly no biblical example that does, and yet we conveniently forget about it. We come up with these stupid Gospel Doctrine lessons that encourage us to look at people in the Old Testament as if they were perfect and they we look at our own leaders to be perfect as well, and when they aren’t, well we leave.

John, “Right.  And then that all is a compelling, you know, a viable intellectual response and I want to dig into that a bit in a second.  But, it sounds like what you were also gonna say is there’s a strong spiritual component to it as well, is that right?”

Jane, “Yes there is, and I worry that we don’t emphasize deep reading of scripture in the way that we ought to.  We talk about reading the scriptures all the time.  Don’t get me wrong, and I think that’s an important devotional practice.  I think our church actually does a fairly good job of encouraging people to dig into the scriptures every day.  But we’re doing it for that informational thing that I was talking about before.  We’re doing it so we can learn the scriptures, we have the same thing when we go to the temple.  The temple is not a worship experience.  The temple is a learning experience, instruction.  That’s not at all the same.

We don’t have any corporate worship in Mormon culture, and that’s a huge problem.  I think if we have more authentic experiences of worshiping in community, of reading the scriptures together in community, not in the Gospel Doctrine sense where we’re there to learn about so and so, but in the sense that we have a small group of people who get together, who read the scriptures, who pray together about the needs in their lives, that is a completely different understanding of the scriptures, and we don’t do that.  I have no idea why we don’t.

John,”Hmmm.  And yet you feel it sounds like your Mormon-ness has been overall spiritual edifying for you and that’s part of what’s kept you around, right?  So have you just had to supplement on your own?”

Jana, “I do a lot of supplementing, yes. [chuckles]  That’s well said.  Yeah I do, I do a lot of supplementing.  I think that’s one of the blessings of having not grown up in this tradition.  I worry about people who basically feel that they have to leave Mormonism because they are convinced that the world out there is so much better, right?  It always is going to look that way.  Sometimes it actually is that way, but they don’t understand that it is possible to learn from other traditions without leaving your own, and instead to bless and enrich your life as a Mormon.  You know I’ve been enriched as a Mormon by studying Buddhist texts from Tibet, and about mortality and Tibetan prayer beads and how they sit and think about death, because the prayer beads are actually made of human bones and skulls, and they sit there and they touch them. They think about ‘yeah, I’m going to die.  How does that change the way I live now?

I want to clarify that I don’t actually have such a rosary, I don’t have anything that’s constructed out of human bones and skulls [John chuckles], but the idea of it, just the idea of it has transformed my spirituality and how I think about prayer and mortality, the fact that this is sooo fleeting.  We are here for such a short time.  We have to think about that every day.”

John, “Hmmm.  I’m going to kind of use this as a way to close this first hour, so don’t think that I’m going to now dig into some big deep exploration of this, but well, I guess I have two questions.  One is, um, I won’t ask them at the same time.  So the first question is what about the person that says to you, No Jana, either the Book of Abraham is what Joseph Smith said it was, or it’s a fraud.  Either the Book of Mormon is what Joseph said it was or it’s a fraud, and truth actually matters, facts matter.  A fair reading of the archaeological, anthropological, genetic, whatever evidence of the Book of Mormon, and a fair reading of the text, the funerary text that Joseph claimed to have translated the Book of Abraham from, you know, points that it was not true.  If it’s not true, I’m outta here because it’s based on fraud and deception and isn’t what it claims to be.”

Jana Riess, “But you are defining truth in this incredibly narrow way when you do that – not you personally, but anyone who does that.  You are defining truth in the way that enlightenment philosophy has taught us to define truth which is that it is factual, that it is historical, that it is epistemologically verifiable, right?  Well truth does not have to be factual, historical, or epistemologically verifiable.  It’s awfully nice when that happens because we can explain it to our friends and not sound like spiritual idiots.  But I’m afraid it doesn’t always work that way.  I think it bothers me—God bless the people at FAIR, I think they do wonderful work and it’s very persuasive for some people, but they’re not asking the bigger question—at least sometimes, about ‘why is this important?’

I once heard a fantastic sermon when I was in seminary.  It was called ‘The Second Question.’  The preacher, this professor had been to a magic show by Penn and Teller, and the guy behind him just basically spoiled the experience for the preacher by saying, ‘Oh, I know how they did that. I know how they did that.’ At one point in the show, either Penn or Teller said, ‘probably there are some people out there who are saying to themselves, ‘I know how they did that, but that’s not the important question.  The important question is ‘why do we do that?’ Why do we do this every day?  The preacher then extrapolated from that this whole sermon called ‘The Second Question.’

If we were to apply that to this situation—for example using Book of Mormon DNA as our test case, right?  The problem with the Book of Mormon DNA is that it demonstrates that you have this understanding of the Book of Mormon that simply cannot be factually true.  They’re right—it cannot be factually true in that sense.  Why does it have to be factually true? This is where I really disagree with Terryl Givens that you had one your show, and I love Terryl, and I think his work has been so important.  I think it’s awesome that he came on your show, but Terryl sets up this situation in [his book] By the Hand of Mormon where he says, “if you don’t believe it happened this way, everything else falls apart.  The rest of it hinges upon the literal nature of this, and I think that when we do that, we are setting everyone up to fall.  Because first of all, it may not be factually verifiable, but why do we care about that?

I think we care about it to a ridiculous degree because we are concerned about how it all sounds to other people. We’re a persecuted religious minority; we’re very sensitive about how our faith plays in Peoria, which by the way, it doesn’t, because I grew up near Peoria, and I can tell you it totally doesn’t.  So the apologetics issues and the questions that are asked, let’s get to the second question, and let’s look at some of these scriptural texts prayerfully, and ask God before we even start reading what do you want to teach me from this?  How does this have bearing on my life?  That’s a very transformative way to approach the scriptures.”

John, “So you’re saying, ‘Forget if Mormonism is factually, historically what it claims to be.  Live it, and if it transforms your life, then you’ve enjoyed a transformed life.  Is that what you’re saying?”

Jana, “I don’t think it’s quite as reductionistic as that.  This is not Pascal’s wager where we are just saying I am going to live as if this were true and see what happens.  Because there is an element beneath this entire experience that is that seed of faith, that yearning, that desire to believe, and that undergirds everything else.  That undergirds every spiritual question.  I think that you’re right that you say, at some point there is this point where it’s a leap of faith, and you do take that faith, leap on faith, as they say for better or for worse.

You have to do it with both eyes open, and this is where I look at some of the people I know in charge, and it all just seems to come so easily to them and of course this is all true, and I was raised on this with mother’s milk and how dare you ever question this.  That is so immature.  That is as immature as it is for someone to say, well this one thing wasn’t factually true so I’m throwing it all out because it’s all lies.  We have to grow up. That’s the whole point of Mormon theology where the burden is upon us with our agency that we need to search for truth.”

John, “Right, so you’re not saying truth doesn’t matter, you’re saying there’s gotta be a core hope or belief that at some level there’s some validity of truth to what’s going on, and then from there the struggle is part of the point.”

Jana, “YES IT IS!!! Well said.  The struggle is part of the point.  I think when Pilate makes this comment that just seems like a throwaway afterthought, ‘ha, what is truth?’ as though that’s this kind of cynical approach, I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt here. I’d like to think that there’s a part of Pilate that really wants to know, what is truth to you, Jesus?  Because you’re totally blowing my mind.  Why don’t we have that curiosity ourselves?

There’s a Gnosticism to people who say ‘I have discovered the real truth’, whether it’s the conservative Mormons who believe that they have discovered the real truth and everything else is crap outside the church, or it’s disaffected former Latter-day Saints who say I’ve discovered the truth about the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham and everything else is crap.  That’s Gnosticism. When we believe that some sort of sacred, secret teaching has awakened us and opened our eyes and that everyone else is in the dark, that is not Christianity.”

John, “And for someone who didn’t believe in Christ, what would you appeal to?  It’s just not what, mature, or broad-thinking, or enlightened?”

Jana, “Mm Hmm.  That’s a good question. Yeah, I think it is not spiritually mature.  If we, as progressive people want to be able to say that we are in fact progressive people, we need to entertain other points of view, and I find that on both of those extremes, there’s often a hardness and a coldness to investigating new truth, and I worry about that.”

John, “Right.  Isn’t that if I’m just going to play pro-LDS for a second, Isn’t that one of the beauties of what Joseph Smith left us, is a legacy of, we will follow the truth and be willing to accept new truth when it comes?”

Jana, “You know, I am so pleased that you brought that up, because unfortunately, we don’t live that way.  It comes in even how people talk to me about my conversion.  I converted in 1993.  That’s the official story, right?  But I am always converting.  I am on a journey of conversion and I’m not the same Christian that I was in 1993 when I became a Latter-day Saint Christian, and I won’t be the same Christian in 18 years from now.  I am always converting, and I hope that I am always going to be open to new truth and wherever God leads me.”

What are your thoughts on a Mormon Midrash, the Book of Mormon, Abraham, and truth doesn’t need to be empirical?

Dr Jeffrey Chadwick, BYU Jerusalem Center

In his 1915 classic entitled Jesus the Christ, Elder James E. Talmage maintained that Jesus Christ was born on April 6 in the year 1 BC.¹ Talmage was apparently the first LDS writer to propose this particular date.  Nearly a century has passed since his book appeared, and in that time it has become practically axiomatic among Latter-day Saints that Jesus was born on April 6 of 1 BC.

The above quote comes from the January 2011 issue of BYU Studies.  Jeffrey Chadwick has undertaken a study to figure out when Jesus was born, and he comes to the conclusion that December was the correct month.  Trying to precisely date the birth of Jesus is problematic, because Luke and Matthew can’t even agree on when Jesus was born.

The Gospel of Luke states that Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem due to a census that was being taken when Ceasar Augustus was head of the Roman Empire and Cyrenius (also spelled Quirinius) was governor of Syria.  A footnote for the New American Bible (a Catholic study Bible) states:

Although universal registrations of Roman citizens are attested in 28 BC, 8 BC, and AD 14, and enrollments of individual provinces of those who are not Roman citizens are also attested, such a universal census of the Roman world under Ceasar Augustus is unknown outside the New Testament.  Moreover, there are notorious historical problems connected with Luke’s dating the census when Quirinius was governor of Syria and the various attempts to resolve the difficulties have proved unsuccessful.

P. Sulpicius Quirinius became a legate of the province of Syria in AD 6-7 when Judea was annexed to the province of Syria.  At that time, a provincial census of Judea was taken up.  If Quirinius had been legate of Syria previously, it would have been before 10 BC because of the various legates of Syria from 10 BC to 4 BC (the death of Herod) are known, and such a dating for an earlier census under Quirinius would create additional problems for dating the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

A previous legateship after 4 BC (and before AD 8 ) would not fit with the dating of Jesus’ birth in the days of Herod.  Luke may simply be combining Jesus’ birth in Bethelehem with his vague recollection of a census under Quirinius to underline the significance of this birth for the whole Roman world: through this child born in Bethlehem peace and salvation came to the empire.

The Gospel of Matthew states that Jesus was a decade earlier than Luke.  In Matthew, Jesus was born just before Herod’s death.  Chadwick takes considerable effort to precisely date Herod’s death.  The ancient historian Josephus recorded a lunar eclipse 10 days to 2 weeks prior to Herod’s death.  Astronomical research places this eclipse on March 13 in 4 BC, so Herod’s death must have occurred in late March or early April of 4 BC.  Most scholars generally agree that Herod died in 4 BC, placing Jesus’ birth some time before 4 BC.  (Chadwick notes another eclipse occurred in September 15 of 5 BC, but argues that

this date fell months prior to Passover and is otherwise difficult to reconcile with the known length of time Herod is recorded to have reigned, as noted by Thomas A. Wayment’s study.  Wayment–and Brown, Griggs, and Hansen before him–seem willing to at least consider the September 15 eclipse of 5 BC as the one mentioned by Josephus, but they seem more convinced by the 4 BC eclipse of March 13.³⁶ The present study argues that a September eclipse and November death date for Herod in 5 BC are not possible in view of what is known about the length of Jesus’s life.

Chadwick notes many other historical pieces to the puzzle, but I want to hit the crux of why he thinks Jesus was born on December.  Though most scholars believe that the census in Luke was not related to the birth of Jesus, Chadwick calculates that Gabriel appeared to Mary (also known as “the Anunciation of Mary”)

to announce to Mary that she would conceive and bring froth a son to be named Jesus (see Luke 1:27-31).  In the Jewish context of this account, this would mean that the month of Adar, the sixth month of the Jewish year occurred from mid-to-late February to mid-to-late March….

From the account in Luke it appears that the Annunciation actually occurred near the end of Adar (mid-to-late March) and that Mary conceived immedately or within a day or two of the angel’s visit.  This is all evident because Luke reported that after the Annunciation Mary traveled “with haste” (immediately) to Judea, where she stayed for three months with her older kinswoman Elisabeth, and that the older woman, six months pregnant with her own child, instantly recognized that Mary was also carrying a child in her womb (see Luke 2:39-43).

Of course, nine months after March would put Jesus birth in December.  Chadwick goes on to say that “it is quite possible, perhaps even probable that Jesus was born during Hanakkuh at the end of 5 BC.”

Now, I’m sure this flies in the face of conventional LDS thought.  Chadwick references other studies of the birth of Jesus and notes problems with the dates proposed.  Here is a summary.

April of 1 BC.  As mentioned earlier, this is the date proposed by Elder James E Talmage in Jesus the Christ.  However, since it has been demonstrated that Herod died in 4 BC, the year is wrong.

April of 4 BC.  Orson Pratt and Bruce R. McConkie have postulated a date of April 11 for this year.  Chadwick states

Herod died within days of the beginning of April that year, and Jesus has to have been born at least two months, and more likely three to four months, prior to Herod’s death in order for all the events described in Luke and Matthew to have taken place before Herod’s passing.  This would push the latest historically plausible date for Jesus’s birth to December of 5 BC.

April of 5 BC.  Chadwick explains why this date is unworkable as well.

Any date in April of 5 BC, whether it be April 6 or some other day, is likewise unworkable as the natal date of Jesus.  The death of Jesus must have occurred in early April of AD 30, the only other year in which Passover fell late in the week and which also allows Jesus to have lived thirty-three full years from his birth.  But April of 5 BC was thirty-four full years prior to Jesus’s death, and the language of the Book of Mormon does not allow for thirty-four full years to have passed from Jesus’s birth to his death.

Spring or Autumn of 5 BC.  Chadwick rules out Autumn as well, because the Annunciation of Mary occurred in the Jewish month of Adar, corresponding to March.  As for any other spring date, Chadwick notes that other authors have also excluded Spring or Summer dates as well.

Dates in 6 or 7 BC.  Chadwick notes that some non-LDS scholars have proposed earlier dates.  Some reference that Herod wanted all children two years and younger killed, so they have proposed an earlier date.  Such dates would put Passover on a Tuesday at the death of Christ, making him stay in the tomb longer than the requisite three days recorded in the Gospels.  Earlier dates would also conflict with John the Baptist’s ministry that occurred

“in the fifteenth year in the reign of Tiberius Ceasar” (Luke 3:1), the commencement of which can be confidently dated to autumn A.D. 27. Jesus cannot have died in the same year that John began preaching, since Jesus himself only began preaching at Passover (spring AD 28), just months after John’s advent.

Daniel Peterson

Dan Wotherspoon put together a 4 hour interview with BYU Professor Daniel Peterson on a variety of topics.  It is available on the Mormon Stories Website or at iTunes.  I really enjoyed the interview, and decided to create a transcript for part 3 where Peterson talked about his (futile) experience trying to improve the church manuals.  On Part 3 at the 34:48 mark:

Dan Wotherspoon, “I sense that there has to be some level of frustration at times with for instance, FARMS has been doing all this work for 25 years.  We have the Limited Geography thing.  That message is not getting out to CES. We still have kids that are coming through seminary and then they’re going to hit this wall.  So inoculation isn’t happening.

Peterson, “Right”

Wotherspoon,”Talk more about that.”

Peterson, “Well, we’ve talked already about the fact that I wish church history were taught better than it is. I served for 8 or 9 years on the Gospel Doctrine Writing Committee for the church, and I remember when I was called (by George P. Lee by the way), I said ‘I’m not sure I’m the person you want because I don’t like the church’s manuals very much.’  [Lee said], ‘You’re just the person we want because we want to improve them.’  Well, when I got onto the committee, in fact, there wasn’t much we could do.  We were constrained within certain limits…”

Wotherspoon, “Was it Correlation Committee or was it certain personalities that had…?

Peterson, “I was never clear—I think it was Correlation, I think it was the Curriculum Committee.  They would lay out certain things about the way they wanted us to do it.  For example, we were doing the Old Testament one year and we wanted to put in some historical background.  People can’t make sense of this if they don’t know what’s going on.  I think a big aid to understanding Isaiah is to understand the politics of his day. Isaiah and Jeremiah were reacting to great power politics, and if you don’t know any of that, you can’t make any sense of it.  A lot of it is talking about their day.

We tried to put some of that in and we were rebuked by someone, some nameless bureaucrat up in Salt Lake who said, “you’re just trying to show off.’  I thought ‘How?  We’re anonymous.  Who would know?  We’re just trying to help people out there by saying, look: one paragraph.

The Assyrians were doing this, the Egyptians were doing that, Israel was caught in between.  Isaiah is warning against x, y, and z. Half the passages make sense once you know that.  It doesn’t take a lot to make sense of those passages, but we weren’t allowed to do it.  We went through a period where we were allowed only to have bullet points, scriptural references, and Life Applicational questions.

I remember some of mine I had put in jokes sometimes.  We all did.  [We would] come and discuss on Sunday morning, [and] critique each other’s proposed lessons.  Mine was Life Applicational Questions.  “Do you think it would be a good idea to be a wicked Judahite king? What steps can you take toward this?”

My favorite was one that I actually told on numerous occasions where they really wanted Life Applications and no history.  I was doing the passage in Acts where you have Uticus up in the rafters at Troas.  Paul drones on and on so long that he falls asleep, and falls out of the rafters. He’s taken up dead it says and Paul has to restore him to life.  So I thought, “Alright, have a class member read Acts–whatever the passage is.  Now, have you ever killed anyone with a Sacrament Meeting speech?  How did it make you feel?  What steps could you take in the future to avoid this?”  The funny thing is that it passed Correlation.

Wotherspoon, “That part did?” [chuckling]

Peterson, “It did, I can only assume that people chuckled at every point and it made it.  When I saw the final draft, final gallies, it was still there!”

Wotherspoon, “No way!  Wow.”

Peterson, “I went through a real crisis of conscience there.  I thought, ‘I would love to see this go into the manual! But I finally called them and said, “I’m not sure that you’d want that particular bundle of questions there.’  [and they said] ‘Oh good grief! good grief! We’ll take it out!  We’ll take it out!’  And I thought ‘it would have been great to see that in Tagalog, Chinese, German, and Spanish all around the world.”

Some of our manuals I think are not very good.  They’re not very deep. I understand the danger.  I think if you allow people to simply go wild, you’ll get some really weird Gospel Doctrine classes out there with people grinding their own axes and having little hobbies, teaching false doctrine, and so I understand the need to sort of reign people in, but on the other hand, the lessons can be really, really pablum and boring.

Wotherspoon, “And completely without any context—no link to context”

Peterson, “Yeah, and I love to give historical context and background.  I don’t care if it’s Doctrine and Covenants, Old Testament, whatever.  Right now I’m back into teaching Gospel Doctrine, which is my favorite position in the church. I mean I love it!  I just have a lot of fun with it. But I remember once, I had a letter once when I was serving on that committee that exempted me from all local callings, which was something that I treasured.

I remember being called in once by the stake presidency and they’re all sitting there and they had me and my wife come in and it was obvious they were up to something.  The stake president said, ‘I understand—I was just told that you’ve got some sort of letter from the brethren?”  I said, “YES!  I do.  Here it is!”

Wotherspoon, “In other words, we’re using up enough of his time that…”

Peterson, “Yep.  Because we met every 2 weeks for 2 or 3 hours every Sunday morning to critique each other’s lessons, and so on.  It was a lot of time involved in that, so that was my church calling for a long time, except I did teach gospel doctrine in my home ward—that I was willing to do because I love it! Now if it had been Scoutmaster, I would have said I’m sorry, I’d love to do it but I can’t.

Well then, at one point the stake Sunday School president came into my Gospel Doctrine class and he sat through the whole thing.  My lessons still is the way I teach them.  I look at the lesson to see what the passages are that I’m supposed to teach, then I put it away.  I mean I mean to read it, but I don’t.  I never do.  Then I read the passages, and then I comment on them and come up with what I think is the theme of the passage and try to give a historical background and so on.

Well this guy sat through my lesson and came up afterward and rebuked me, that I wasn’t using the Gospel Doctrine manual. Did I not realize that these were given by revelation and so on and so forth?  [I responded] Well, you should know that I’m on the committee that writes them, and I don’t like them at all.

So, that would be one of my complaints about church practice.  I would love to see better teaching.  I don’t know if we’re capable of it in a typical ward.  Maybe this is the best we can do and those manuals are necessary.  But there are some places where there are really superb teachers, and I hope they’re not constrained by the manual.

Wotherspoon, “Yeah I hate that fact that the manual mentions no outside sources and some people take that so seriously that people do feel constrained.”

Peterson, “I understand the danger. I’ve been in some pretty weird lessons where people were using it to teach some bizarre form of politics or just plain false doctrine, bizarre racial theories, and things like that so maybe without those manuals, we’d sink to a lower level.  But still, I’d like to see us do better.  I’d like to see us teach out history better.  That is a concern we’ve already mentioned.  I think it does us damage when our people grow up and hear about things that could have been conveyed to them in a faith promoting way.

Even Mountain Meadows, I think can be conveyed in a faith promoting way.  I think it’s a lesson to us about the fallen nature of human beings, and how even good people can get sucked into doing bad things.  I would love to teach a Gospel Doctrine lesson on the Mountain Meadows Massacre.“

I’d love to hear that lesson.  How about you?

Some have wondered why I call myself a heretic.  I have 2 reasons.  First, many say that Mormons are “not Christian”, but I believe they really mean that Mormons are heretics.  Mormons don’t subscribe to some aspects of traditional Christianity, such as the Trinity.  To many Christians, such as stance is heresy, but they confuse the issue by saying that we’re not Christian.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Not only do we share a belief that Jesus was born, died on the Cross, and was Resurrected, but we go further and have another set of scriptures called the Book of Mormon, which contains a record of Christ’s visit to another group of people.  However, this set of scriptures is also considered heretical, because most Christians believe that the Bible is all of God’s word.

Secondly, Here is a definition I really like,

Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma.^[1] It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one’s religion, principles or cause,^[2] and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion.^[3] The founder or leader of a heretical movement is called a heresiarch, while individuals who espouse heresy or commit heresy, are known as heretics….Heretics usually do not perceive their own beliefs as heretical.

I see Abraham, Jesus, Joseph Smith, and Galileo as not only heretics, but probably a group of heresiarchs (Galileo is a stretch.)  These are the people I would like to emulate because I view them as “good heretics.”  I’m just trying to be a heretic like Jesus!

Apparently Jarrod didn’t like me calling Jesus a heretic.  He responded,

Jesus was not a heretic by definition because he did not cause “a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs”. Jesus was the fulfilled the old law. He did not destroy it or change it.

Ok, seriously Jarrod, did you read the definition of a heretic?  Jesus fits it to a T.  Are you saying Jesus was not controversial?  If so, why was he crucified?  Are you saying he didn’t cause a change to a system of beliefs?  Are you saying that Christians are really just Jews?

Yes, I agree with you that Jesus fulfilled the old law, but it’s just silly to try to say that Jesus was not controversial and did not cause a change in beliefs.  If Jesus didn’t cause a change in beliefs, then most of us would either be Jews, or we would have continued practicing gentile beliefs (Zues, Hades, Egyptian gods, Paganism, etc.)

Then Jarrod actually wants to tell me what he doesn’t like about Mormonism.  Once again, this has been debated ad nauseum, but to give Jarrod his 15 minutes of fame, let me re-write his comment here.

Here is my major problem with Mormonism.

The Deity of Jesus Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, yet the Mormons deny this truth. He is exalted as a man to “god status”, but Jesus Christ is not acknowledged as the eternal Son of God in the Mormon church. The Mormon Jesus was a preexisting spirit who was exalted, just as Mormon followers hope to be exalted someday.

God is a Trinity (I Jn. 5:7), and the second Member of that Trinity is the Lord Jesus Christ. John 1:1 says that “the Word was God,” and John 1:14 tells us that “the Word was made flesh.” Jesus Christ is the Word incarnate, and John 1:1 tells us that the Word was God; so Jesus Christ is God.

Jesus allowed Thomas to address Him as “My Lord and my God” in John 20:28. In Isaiah 9:6, He is called “The mighty God” and “The everlasting Father,” and we read in Micah 5:2 that Jesus is “from everlasting.”

Our Lord allowed people to worship him in John 10:38 and in Matthew 14:33, and since He is “God with us” (Mat. 1:23) He also has power to forgive sins (Mk. 2:5).

Jesus Christ is clearly Deity, yet this doctrine is denied by the Mormons.

Jarrod, on my “About” page I acknowledged differences.  You seem to claim to be an expert on Mormonism, but have made some factually incorrect statements.  Let me address them.

Incorrect statement #1:  ”The Deity of Jesus Christ is a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, yet the Mormons deny this truth.”  Jesus is divine.  I don’t know a single Mormon that would ever deny this.  You’ve got a misperception here.

Almost Correct statement:  ’He is exalted as a man to “god status.”’  This is partially true.  Jesus had a human mother, and a divine father.  HE has both divine and human qualities.

Incorrect statement #2: “but Jesus Christ is not acknowledged as the eternal Son of God in the Mormon church.”  FALSE.  Absolutely false.  I don’t know a single Mormon that believes this.

Correct Statement:  ”The Mormon Jesus was a preexisting spirit who was exalted, just as Mormon followers hope to be exalted someday.

Incorrect statement:  ”God is a Trinity (I Jn. 5:7)”. I acknowledge that Mormons don’t believe in the Trinity–we believe in the Godhead.  Frankly, this whole godhead/trinity issue is splitting hairs, but as a Mormon, let me give you the typical response.  Notice the word “Trinity” isn’t even mentioned any any version of the Bible, and especially not the verse you quoted:  Here are many translations from http://bible.cc/1_john/5-7.htm

New International Version (©1984) For there are three that testify:New Living Translation (©2007) So we have these three witnesses– English Standard Version (©2001) For there are three that testify: New American Standard Bible (©1995) For there are three that testify: King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.) For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. International Standard Version (©2008) For there are three witnesses- Aramaic Bible in Plain English (©2010) And The Spirit testifies because The Spirit is the truth. GOD’S WORD® Translation (©1995) There are three witnesses: King James 2000 Bible (©2003) For there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit: and these three are one. American King James Version For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. American Standard Version And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth. Bible in Basic English And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is true. Douay-Rheims Bible And there are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one. Darby Bible Translation For they that bear witness are three: English Revised Version And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth. Webster’s Bible Translation For there are three that bear testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. Weymouth New Testament For there are three that give testimony– the Spirit, the water, and the blood; World English Bible For there are three who testify: Young’s Literal Translation because three are who are testifying in the heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these — the three — are one;

To be honest, Jarrod, if I changed the wording of your comment, Mormons would find tremendous agreement with you.  Here’s how a Mormon would re-word your comment.

God is [part of the Godhead] (I Jn. 5:7), and the second Member of that [Godhead] is the Lord Jesus Christ. John 1:1 says that “the Word was God,” and John 1:14 tells us that “the Word was made flesh.” Jesus Christ is the Word incarnate, and John 1:1 tells us that the Word was God; so Jesus Christ is God.

See, a few changes, and now we are on the same page!  I have nothing to disagree with here.

Jesus allowed Thomas to address Him as “My Lord and my God” in John 20:28. In Isaiah 9:6, He is called “The mighty God” and “The everlasting Father,” and we read in Micah 5:2 that Jesus is “from everlasting.”

Our Lord allowed people to worship him in John 10:38 and in Matthew 14:33, and since He is “God with us” (Mat. 1:23) He also has power to forgive sins (Mk. 2:5).

Then you tie a false and true statement together.

True statement “Jesus Christ is clearly Deity.”  You’ll get no argument from me.

False statement: “yet this doctrine is denied by the Mormons.”

Jarrod, you need a Mormonism 201 course.  Would you like to present Mormon beliefs correctly, or do you prefer to issue false statements about Mormon beliefs?

On page 8, Harrell describes what a proof-text is.

A proof-text is a scriptural passage lifted out of its original context and given an interpretation other than that which was originally intended–or at least as can be determined by the most reasonable reading of the text.  BYU religion professor Stephen Robinson notes that even Latter-day Saints have a tendency to read Mormon beliefs into the Bible as proof-texts, largely because they assume that the doctrines of the Restoration are all corroborated in the Bible.⁴⁰ Most occurences of proof-texting are the innocent result of careless or uninformed reading of the scriptures, though they can still be detrimental.  When however, one deliberately twists the meaning of a passage in order to justify a personal belief or bias, it is condemned in both the New Testament and the Book of Mormon as “wresting [i.e. twisting] the scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16; Alma 13:20, 41:1).⁴¹

Harrell describes a proof-text well known to missionaries.  Often Christians will refer to Revelation 22:18, and state that the Bible is the end of God’s word, so there is no need for a Book of Mormon.  Missionaries will often counter that a similar scripture is found in Deuteronomy 4:2, and would have left the Bible far smaller if Deuteronomy was the end of scripture.

But Christians are guilty of proof-texting as well.  Zechariah 13:6 reads (quoting from page 9, formatting changed):

And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands?  Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.

Latter-day Saints, like many other Christians, interpret this passage as a prophecy of Christ.⁴⁴ The Doctrine and Covenants (D&C 45:51-52) alludes to Zechariah 13:6 this way and even adds wound to the “feet”, which makes the fit more obvious.

According to most biblical scholars, the wounds referred to in Zechariah are actually in the chest (the Hebrew reads “between” the hands) and, in the context of Zecharaiah 13:2-6, were inflicted on “the [false] prophets” in Israel (v. 4).⁴⁵ The NSRV uses the pronouns “they” and “them” thoughout verses 2-6, making it clear that verse 6 is speaking of the same false prophets alluded to in verse 4.  Pagan prophets were often self-lacerated (Lev. 19:28; Deut. 14:1; 1 Kgs. 18:28) for reasons that are not entirely clear.  Methodist Bible commentator Adam Clarke censured popular Christian applications of this verse to Christ noting that it was clearly referring to false prophets who alleged that they have received these marks in their own families when, more likely, the wounds “had been dedicated to … idols.”⁴⁶

Harrell notes that New Testament writers often looked for parallels in Christ’s life, and then found them in the Old Testament.  Some examples found on page 10: (formatting changed)

• Hosea 11:1:  ”When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt”; he then applies it as a prophecy of Christ’s infancy in Egypt (Matt 2:15), even though in its original context it had reference to the historical exodus of Israel from Egypt.⁴⁹
• Matthew also cites Jeremiah 31:15 (“A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not”) as a reference to Herod’s slaughter of Bethlehem’s male children, while the original context referred to the slaughtering of Jerusalem’s inhabitants and the Babylonian exile of the children of Israel (Jer. 31:16).

There is no harm in finding shadows and types of Christ in these passages, but one should not confuse later allegorical meanings with the originally intended meaning.

Harrell describes other proof-texts in the New Testament.  He also notes that there is a common misperception about Old Testament prophets.  While many of us like to think that ancient prophets saw our day clearly, Harrell says that ‘Old Testaments prophets were more forthtellers than foretellers, with their attention being focused on immediate times and situations” rather than being prophecies of the distant future.’

A recent comment on Stephen Marsh’s Sunday School post decried the use of “proof texting of modern LDS concepts from the ancient texts”.  However, it seems that the LDS, like ancient and modern Jews and Christians, are all guilty of proof-texting.

In order to avoid proof-texting, one must really understand the ancient cultures of the Bible.  Is it realistic to believe that church members without a degree in theology can really avoid proof-texting?  Is it acceptable to look for parallels between Christ and the Old Testament? Are these proof-texts valuable in finding new meanings from old scriptures?

Concerning these surveys, Yale University Professor Harold Bloom said,

I can understand the two surveys you cite only if the Mormon Ph.D.’s employed an absurdly narrow definition of an “intellectual.” Joseph Smith, even to a Jewish non-Mormon like myself, is the only American creative enough to be called a prophet, seer, and revelator, that is, a religious genius. There was Emerson, of course, but ultimately his was more a literary mind than a religious one. I greatly admire McMurrin, and Roberts also, but if “intellectual” means what it should mean, then Smith clearly is the most eminent intellectual in Mormon history. He was an authentic visionary, and totally original in mind and spirit—really a kind of mortal god.  I cannot understand why he is not honored by more Americans.

The above letter was written in response to a query by Henry Miles.  Miles developed a correspondence with Bloom over the past 2 decades, and published the series of letters in Dialogue.  Bloom is one of the most high-profile non-Mormons that has extensively studied Smith, and has written or spoken about Smith on many occasions.  What do you think of Bloom’s characterization of Smith?  Do you think Smith was undervalued in the 2 surveys?

Brian Hales gave a very interesting presentation on Joseph Smith’s polygamy. I was late and didn’t hear the beginning of the presentation, but he discussed the issue of Joseph being sealed to other men’s wives. Most refer to this as polyandry, though Larry Foster has disputed that terminology in the past, preferring the term “proxy husband” or something similar. At any rate, Hales contends that there is no evidence that Joseph had sexual relations with any of these women. He notes that many other experts disagree with this position, and wasn’t surprised that many in the audience disagreed with that position.  He also discussed the reliability of John C. Bennett’s words about polygamy.  Bennett was Nauvoo Mayor, and Assistant President of the Church before he was excommunicated for unauthorized polygamy.  Bennett later wrote an expose of Mormonism and some believe he was one of the instigators of the mob that killed Joseph.

Hales did a great job presenting his information.  He stated that Bennett was very unreliable (as most experts agree.)  He also noted that many of the allegations that Joseph had sexual relations with these “polyandrous” wives occurred at least a decade after the marriages, so there is nothing contemporary from Joseph’s lifetime.  While Hales makes a good point, on this second issue I am not persuaded.  I asked him 2 questions.  First, I asked him about a really odd story about surrogate parenthood in the days of Brigham Young. Click here for full details. In brief, a convert couple could not conceive children due to a medical condition of the husband. Brigham Young proposed a temporary civil divorce. The wife (Mary Richardson) was civilly married to a man by the name of Frederick Cox. He fathered two children in a sort of levirate marriage (mentioned in the New Testament). Then they divorced, Mary re-married (and was sealed) to her original husband. It’s definitely an odd story.

My point is that this seems to be a sort of polyandry. Kathryn Daines mentions that it was “family legend” that the Richardsons obtained a divorce. Brian Hales indicated he felt it was solid evidence and not adultery. It sure seems like if the Richardson divorce was arranged with an understanding of re-marriage, that it was a form of sexual polyandry, with a wink and a nod to civil law. If Brigham Young sanctioned it, it seems to me that Brigham must have felt that such an unusual arrangement must have been ok with Joseph Smith.

Secondly, I asked about an unusual issue with Emma Smith. Quoting from my previous post,

Some of the footnotes are very interesting on this subject. Footnote 26 on page 305 quotes an 1844 expose of Mormonism. I don’t know if this can be corroborated, but I found it interesting.

“Emma’s threat to “be revenged and indulge herself” may have been merely a warning to the prophet to give up his spiritual wives. But Joseph H. Jackson, a non-Mormon opportunist who gained the confidence of the prophet in Nauvoo, recorded in an 1844 expose of Mormonism: “Emma wanted [William] Law for a spiritual husband,” and because Joseph “had so many spiritual wives, she thought it but fair that she would at least have one man spiritually sealed up to her and that she wanted Law, because he was such a ‘sweet little man.’”

Although there is nothing to suggest that Law and Emma were more to each other than friends, Law later confirmed that Joseph “offered to furnish his wife Emma with a substitute for him, by way of compensation for his neglect of her, on condition that she would forever stop her opposition to polygamy and permit him to enjoy his young wives in peace and keep some of them in his house and to be well treated, etc.” (Salt Lake Tribune, 3 July 1887.)

D&C 132:51 seems to refer to this incident. It says,

Verily, I say unto you: A commandment I give unto mine handmaid, Emma Smith, your wife, whom I have given unto you, that she stay herself and partake not of that which I commanded you to offer unto her;

If Emma had accepted in time, perhaps she would have been a polyandrous wife.  Of course that is just speculation, and the rest of verse 51 says it is an Abrahamic test. But it still seems like another odd incident.  Though I don’t agree with all of Hales’ conclusions, he was well prepared, and I was impressed with his presentation.

LDS members Newell Bringhurst and Craig Foster, along with RLDS members Bill Russell and Mark Sherer held a panel discussion on the Presidential candidacies of Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney.  (Mark was the moderator and did not present.)  Russell had high praise for Huntsman, saying the he was the best republican field.  Russell noted that Huntsman seems well-versed in other cultures and religions, and said that Huntsman would be able to describe other religions “in laymans, as well as Lemuel’s terms.”  Russell also indicated that if a Mormon wants to run for office and have religion be a non-issue, then they should be a democrat.  He noted that Morris Udall lost narrowly to Jimmy Carter for the democratic nominee in 1976, and noted that Harry Reid, the Senate Minority Leader does not have questions about his religion.  It was a great discussion.

Following lunch, I attended two controversial sessions.  Fred Collier gave a very academic presentation on the relationship between Yahweh and Satan.  He showed that Dead Sea Scroll discoveries seemed to corroborate the JST translation.  He specifically seemed to reference Deuteronomy quite a bit, with a bit of Genesis and ancient Jewish writings.  In LDS theology, Yahweh is considered the son of Elohim.

While Collier’s presentation was interesting, he fell apart during the Q&A session.  I asked him about the Documentary Hypothesis.  In brief, the hypothesis states that Elohim and Yahweh are interchangeable terms for God.  Collier hand-waved the question away, saying the hypothesis was completely debunked as far as he was concerned.  I was a bit flabbergasted with his response, as I completely disagree with this characterization.  Collier seemed completely unprepared to answer the question.

The next question was ever worse for Collier.  During the presentation, Collier said that ancient Hebrew scriptures said that Abel was the first born of Adam and Eve, and Cain was not his brother.  Rather Cain was the son of Lilith and the Serpent.  It was an interesting position–I’ve heard that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, but cast out when she refused to submit to Adam and was cast out of the Garden for saying the name of God.  Apparently she hooked up with the serpent after the expulsion and conceived Cain–that part was new to me.

At any rate, an audience member asked who the offspring of Cain were.  At first, Collier seemed to give a humorous response by saying “international bankers.”  When pressed to clarify, Collier shocked the audience by saying that “international bankers are Jews.”  The questioner was appalled, called Collier an expletive, and a few audience members stormed out of the room.  I was appalled at the anti-Semitic remarks, and was saddened that Collier holds such views.  The views overshadowed what was an otherwise interesting presentation.  It saddens me that anyone would hold such views, and I call on Fred Collier to apologize for the offensive remarks.  A few other people asked more about the curse of Cain doctrine.  Thankfully, we were out of time; I’m afraid of what other racist remarks may have come out of his mouth.

The last presentation was controversial as well.  Janice Allred, Joanna Brooks, and Margaret Toscano gave excellent presentations discussing the recent BYU Studies article titled, A Mother There: A Survey of Historical Teachings About Mother in Heaven. Janice and Margaret were both excommunicated in the 1990s for discussing Mother in Heaven in Sunstone.  Both had praise for the BYU Studies article, though they had some criticisms as well.  Margaret noted that the article referenced over 600 references in the past 167 years in General Conference or official church publications.   The BYU authors seemed to indicate that it is acceptable to discuss Mother in Heaven, and indicated an “abundance” of information on the subject.

However, Toscano noted that in the most recent 2 day General conference, there were 900 references to Father in Heaven.  She said that the BYU authors should be discussing the dearth of information on Mother in Heaven, rather than framing it as “abundant” information.  She also noted that official church pronouncements refer to the equality of husband and wife, but do not refer to “God the Mother” and “God the Father.”  I thought these were a valid points.

Joanna Brooks gave a very interesting presentation discussing some anecdotal references in her ward.  For example, On Mothers Day, the primary chorister in San Diego ward she attends non-chalantly showed a painting of a Mother in Heaven in the clouds teaching children.  During Sacrament meeting talks, there were surprising references to Mother in Heaven as well.  She tweeted about these incidents and received a variety of responses, indicating that some other wards seemed to reference Mother in Heaven as well.

The session was marred by Holly Welker, the moderator.  Holly has no manners, and seems to enjoy mocking religion.  She gave some thoughts that indicated that she does not believe in God, yet announced at the beginning of the session that they would hold a prayer circle to pray to Mother in Heaven at the end of the session.  She allowed people to leave if they were uncomfortable with the process.  Many people left because they were uncomfortable.

It seems to me that Holly enjoys shocking people, and she has poor manners even with other panelists.  For example, an audience member asked why Mother in Heaven was not present in the First Vision.  Janice Allred started to explain her belief about this incident, but Holly cut her off, saying that Holly didn’t believe in the First Vision (ignoring that Janice did), and cut off Janice’s answer because Holly was “uncomfortable.”  Yet Holly didn’t mind mocking believers with her prayer circle.  She marred an otherwise great session, and I have no respect for her.

Due to some controversial presentations in the 1990s, Sunstone has a cold relationship with the church, and the church still refuses to allow some employees to participate.  There has been a thaw in relations, though it’s still cold.  I would really like Sunstone to gain favor in the church.  However, with people like Holly Welker and Fred Collier, I can understand why the church has a cold war with Sunstone.  It makes me sad that these people can spoil such a wonderful opportunity to discuss theology and Mormonism.  Comments?

Griffiths describes the battle on page 92.  Theological liberals are

called “modernists”, and and their conservative enemies, termed “fundamentalists”….In the battle between the two camps, one that hoisted the banner of science and another that decried the abandonment of traditional biblical views, where would the Latter-day Saints land?

In the late 1800′s and early 1900′s, the LDS church established schools.  These schools were tremendously expensive to run.  The church experimented with high school and college seminaries in Utah and Idaho.  These seminaries were much less costly than church schools.  The economic savings and stock market crash of 1929 persuaded the church to turn over nearly all church schools to the state, and focus on funding seminaries for high school, and Institutes of Religion for college campuses.  But there were some problems.  The Utah State Board of Education recommended (on page 96)

that Church seminaries and public high schools be completely dissaciated, release time eliminated, and credit for biblical studies withdrawn.  A major point of Williamson’s criticism was the teaching of LDS doctrine in biblical classes offered for credit.  Williamson charged that such teachings as “the Garden of Eden was located in Missouri;…Noah’s ark was built and launched in America;…Joseph Smith’s version of the Bible is superior to King James version; and…Enoch’s city, Zion, with all its inhabitants and buildings, was lifted up and translated bodily from the American continent to the realms of the unknown” were being taught in biblical classes for which the state offered credit.²⁴

Joseph Merrill was the church commissioner of Education.  He recommended that BYU become a training school for seminary teachers, and that these teachers not only obtain a teaching certificate, but be trained in theology.  Just prior to the scathing Williamson report, some LDS members had received training in theology on their own.  From page 93,

Sidney B. Sperry, on his own initiative, left in 1925 to attend the Divinity School of Chicago.  He received a Master’s Degree in 1926, specializing in Old Testament studies.¹⁰ At the same time, Heber C. Snell, a teacher at Church-owned Snow College, attended the Pacific School of Religion, majoring in biblical studies.

Impressed with this theological training, Merrill issued a call to Daryl Chase, Russel Swenson, and George Tanner to attend the University of Chicago’s Divinity School.  From page 98,

Why the University of Chicago?  Besides Sperry’s already existing relationship with the school, there were several compelling reasons to send seminary men there–and several reasons for concern.  Chicago was among the most liberal divinity schools in the country.  At the time, the divinity school…emphasized research and academic freedom.  The views of scholars there fell highly on the modernist end of the spectrum, stressing historical methodology and critical linguistic, sociological, and psychological approaches to the scriptures.³¹ Many of the conclusions reached by the Chicago scholars ran contrary to orthodox views of the scriptures among Latter-day Saints.

…

Doubtless there were professors on both sides of the spectrum from Goodspeed, but on the whole the young school prided itself as being a “hotbed” of radical theology.³⁴…the school emphasized non-confrontational approaches toward those who held more conservative views on scripture.  Russel Swenson recalled, “In all the time I was there I never heard one criticism by the professors against the fundamentalist of conservative point of view.”³⁶

Page 99 notes the famous Scopes Monkey trial of 1925.  This trial on evolution seems to be the pinnacle of the arguments between fundamentalists and modernists.  From page 99,

When Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan argued in a Tennessee courtroom over evolution and the inerrancy of the Bible, Darrow, a Chicago attorney, was using ammunition supplied by Chicago scholars.³⁸

So once again, this leaves the question, Why the University of Chicago?

Indeed, one of the ironies of the situation may have been that only a very liberal school would accept Latter-day Saints as students in the religious climate of the time.³⁹

Merrill was interested in improving the scholarship of seminaries.  In showing that Sperry was still a conservative scholar, Merrill noted that (pages 99-100)

“Sperry had been back there and apparently this hadn’t hurt him at all.”  He said Daryl Chase had concluded that “Joseph Merrill had so much faith in the gospel that he thought if we went there we’d be able to find the material so that we could just positively lay out the proof for all of our claims.”  Chase believed that “Joseph F. Merrill was naive enough to believe that that would lead us into proof positive of the various positions we had taken.”42  While the men may have believed that Merrill was being naive, there is ample evidence to believe he also knew the risk he was taking.  Each of the men was informed that if they changed their views, they might not have a position when they returned.⁴³ Overall, Merrill’s attitude indicated a cautious optimism about the venture.

Griffiths notes good and bad experiences for LDS students.  Some embraced the school, while others weren’t impressed. Swenson wrote that “the past year will be a bright year in my life” and “They have no diabolical scheme to undermine the truth, but the reverse, to discover it.”  On the other hand, T. Edgar Lyon wrote the professors were “either infidels or agnostics…I fail to see how a young man can come here to school, then go out after graduation, and still preach what we call Christianity.”

Eleven LDS students obtained advanced degrees from the University of Chicago.  Swenson and Sperry became faculty at BYU, and Merrill (not a graduate) was later called to be an apostle.  Chicago graduate Howard Snell created controversy among Institute teachers when he questioned the historicity of the Book of Jonah, and said that God used evolution to create life.  This provoked a strong reaction from Joseph Fielding Smith who was very antagonistic toward evolution.  On page 107, J Reuben Clark, a member of the First Presidency

warned that if unorthodox teaching continued, “we shall face the abandonment of the seminaries and institutes and the return of Church colleges and academies.”  He added, “we are not now sure, in the light of developments, that these should ever have been given up.”⁸⁸

President Clark’s address provoked strong reactions among educators present.  Sterling McMurrin, a young teacher present, remarked, “We divided ourselves up…into liberal and conservative camps…Clark laid it out very firmly, and there was considerable discussion about it around our campfires.”⁸⁹

…

[page 109] At the end of the 1938-39 school year, when Guy C. Wilson retired as the head of the Religion Department at BYU, J. Wyley Sessions, who did not hold a PhD, was appointed as his replacement, which was perceived as a signal that faithfulness was more important than scholarship in Church education.

President Clark wrote a letter stating (on page 110),

“Teachers will do well to give up indoctrinating themselves in the sectarianism of the modern ‘Divinity School Theology’.  If they do not, they will be no longer useful in our system.”  The letter asked teachers to teach “the gospel and that only, and the Gospel as revealed in these last days.”  They were also warned not to use the term “ideology”, which the First Presidency felt placed “the Gospel in the same category with any and every pagan religion or theology.”  The letter continued, “This concept reduced to its lowest terms, may be expressed as conceiving that religion is man-made, that man makes his God, not God his man–a concept which is coming to be basic to the whole ‘Divinity School Theology,’ but which is contrary to all the teachings of the Church and to God’s revealed word.”¹⁰²

Griffiths notes that the Chicago men varied from quite orthodox (Sperry) to liberal (Snell).  It seems quite clear that the church made a swing toward fundamentalism, and away from modernism.  Even apostle Joseph Merrill seemed concerned with some of the more liberal teachers.  T Edgar Lyon was the last person to attend divinity school for the next 30 years.  Griffiths notes some of the good things that happened with the divinity school experiment.  From page 121,

Nearly all of the Chicago men noted that their time at the divinity school opened ecumenical doors for the Church and helped bring Mormonism further into the mainstream of American religious discourse.  At the same time, the scholarly methods learned in Chicago, applied toward modern scripture, led to huge leaps in the quality of Mormon apologetics.  Sidney Sperry, T. Edgar Lyon, Russel Swenson, and other Chicago scholars wrote the majority of Sunday School and priesthood manuals used in the Church for decades after they returned from Chicago.”

I am saddened that the fundamentalists won, but I am encouraged that it seems the modernists are making some headway in the church.  What do you think of this history?  Are you a fundamentalist, or a modernist?