Isaiah Reads The Book of Mormon, continued
Garbage has always fascinated me, things that get left behind, ruined, discarded. Trips to Hovenweep and Mesa Verde were highlights of my childhood. In junior high my archaeological interests turned to The Book of Mormon, pictures mostly–the words didn’t hold my attention, unlike the words in Robert Payne’s biography of Heinrich Schliemann, The Gold of Troy.
My father cautioned me one night that fascinating as the books were they were not a sufficient basis for a testimony of The Book of Mormon. He may have been remembering “The Archaeological Problem,” Appendix 1 to Hugh Nibley’s 1957 Melchizedeck Priesthood manual, An Approach to The Book of Mormon. But he was also saying a testimony needs to be based on familiarity with the book itself, on study and prayer.
(Incidentally, one of the surprises in Charles C. Mann’s 1491 was that the ruins whose pictures I had been looking at were closer in time to the Conquistadores than the Nephites and Lamanites. Indeed, the most ancient ruins he talks about barely got back to AD 400–the end of their civilization, let alone going back a thousand years earlier to the beginning, or two thousand to the early Jaredites.)
My father wasn’t the first suggest that external confirmation is not sufficient, and Stephen Mitchell, whose comment on the baptism of Jesus I recently came across in The Gospel According to Jesus won’t be the last.
Mitchell says Jesus had a profound spiritual experience at his baptism,
But any good spiritual teacher will discourage us from taking [visions and ecstasies] too seriously, and will teach us to let them come and go like any other experience. Why? In any vision there is still the subject and the object. We are here, the vision is there. We may see the Mother of God or God the Father on his imperial throne; but after the vision fades, if we haven’t seen the source of all visions,we take up our lives again untransformed (130-131).
“Let them come and go like any other experience.” That fits nicely with something I noticed years ago, but haven’t put down in words. When Peter sees Jesus walking across the water to the boat and begins to walk toward Jesus, he feels no danger as long as he is absorbed in the experience, but when he steps outside of what he’s doing and starts to analyze and marvel at it he sees how terrifying it is and starts to sink.
The idea of being unselfconsciously in the moment and flow of an experience runs throughout Mitchell’s book, but he doesn’t use the example of Peter’s walk on the water as illustration. He doesn’t include it as an authentic experience from Jesus’s life. Nor does he see the voice from heaven at Jesus’ baptism as an authentic experience. “Mark . . . heavily mythologizes this incident: sky opening, spirit descending in the form of a dove, heavenly voice acknowledging Jesus as the divine Son.”
Mitchell says in his introduction that the baptism must have answered Jesus’ deep need, as a memzer (a bastard), to find a father.
As Jesus looked into [John’s] eyes, or as he was thrust under the surface of the Jordan River, something broke open, not in the heavens but in his own heart. He felt an ecstatic release, a cleansing of those painfully hidden childhood emotions of humiliation and shame, a sense of being taken up, once and for all, into the embrace of God. “You are my beloved son; this day I have begotten you” (36).
So the voice from heaven is the church’s external projection of what Jesus felt inside. Here’s the beginning of the paragraph I quoted earlier about visions and ecstasies.
Visions, revelations, prophecies, ecstasies, experiences of being caught up;, like Paul into the third or seventh heaven and seeing things unspeakable–these occur east and west, north and south, in every shamanic and religious tradition, given the proper conditions of sensory deprivation of religious fervor or concentration (130).
It would be tempting to say that Mitchell can’t accept the reality of heavenly manifestations so he has to find a naturalistic explanation for what happened. But that’s not my point.
The body is our organ of knowledge (as Reynold Price pointed out–in A Palpable God, I think). All knowledge comes to us through the body, whether in the everyday experience of me writing these words and you reading them, or in experiences with spirits or the Spirit.
Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.
—D&C 8:2
We know the world around us, both seen and unseen, through physical bodies. That being so, it’s natural to want to know what the physics of our knowledge and experience are, how the Holy Ghost affects our body to let us know something in our minds and hearts, what happens physically in our tissues.
An experience that didn’t come through our senses would be inaccessible to us, so if we want to explain spiritual experiences in purely physiological and psychological terms we can. And by the principle of conservation if we have two possible explanations for a phenomenon we shave away the more complicated one with Occam’s finely honed instrument.
But maybe Occam’s razor shaves too close. It assumes the various explanations are either mutually exclusive or redundant, that there is one explanation for a phenomenon. The fact that my words cause effects on and in your body doesn’t mean they originated in your body. And for the most part no one will question my existence or my part in putting the words together.
But people who don’t want to believe that spiritual experiences come from a source outside us are free to do so. If not so we couldn’t choose to believe. I’ve just listened to Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, and found an interesting take on belief and choice.
Hawking spends a lot of time on the search for a theory of everything, a theory that could predict all things in the universe, but brings out an implication we don’t always think about. Theories predict, so a unified theory of everything would predict and determine everything. That is if the theory can predict everything in the universe it also determines everything, including all human action.
But as Werner Heisenberg discovered, there are certain things we can’t say for certain, which may mean we can’t develop a unified theory of everything. Human freedom is one implication of not being able to find a unified theory. There are other implications, which is why I mentioned the book.
If the universe is scientifically determined, there’s not much room for God, or maybe no need for God. But if there is uncertainty, maybe God has something to do–like managing the uncertainty, he suggests in one passage. Which may not be very far from saying God is another name for the Uncertainty Principle.
Another implication of uncertainty is that when we have two possible explanations for a phenomenon we can’t be sure that we really need to raze away one of them. The two explanations might co-exist. Or to put it another way, God seems to work on the principle of redundancy and abundance, not economy.
I started this digression on prophetic rhetoric because so much of what I read ignores the rhetorical dimension of scripture. Mitchell assumes the voice from heaven at Jesus’s baptism is a later addition to the story to give it a sense of wonder.
10 And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him:
11 And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
—Mark 1:10-11
But what if it serves a rhetorical purpose in Mark’s story that we don’t often think about, a purpose akin to God telling Joseph Smith to join none of the churches.
The first time I read the pamphlet I picked up at the visitor’s center on Temple Square during Conference–Jospeh Smith Tells His Own Story–I figured the answer to which church he should join would be the Mormons, but it wasn’t. The answer was that there’s no human means of answering his question because the Church of Jesus Christ was not organized on the earth at the time.
Similarly, the rhetorical function of the voice at Jesus’ baptism may be to emphasize that he didn’t call himself–that his call came from God.
I’ve concentrated on Isaiah because I think Jesus learned his rhetorical patterns from Isaiah, read Isaiah to find out how a prophet spoke. I’ve also suggested how Deutero-Isaiah could appear in a record dating itself before scholars typically date Deutero-Isaiah. My reasoning likely won’t convince scholars who don’t want to be convinced that Isaiah is a single work, or who don’t believe prophecy is possible. That’s why I suggested the real question might not be whether there is prophecy, but how scribes and record keepers who believe there is prophecy read the words of earlier prophets.
Matthew and Mark cite a lot of events as examples of prophetic fulfillment, so they work well as sources for examining how people who believe in prophecy read the words of prophets. So I think I’ll leave Isaiah at his table reading Nephi and move to looking at some of the rhetorical patterns of people who read Isaiah as a seer of future times.
Your turn.
I remember encountering a definition of story (courtesy, I believe, of Orson Scott Card, who did not however claim it as his own) as a set of events in chronological order connected causally. Using that definition, I think it’s also true that as much as we see the world through lens of physical bodies, we also see the world through the lens of narrative/story.
Scriptures are a certain type of story. But the explanations we take away from the scriptures (or impose on the scriptures) are also a kind of story. Story through story, and neither way nor the recorders, transmitters, and translators of scripture are capable of getting at scripture without coming at it through the lens of story.
Which may help explain why we have problems with indeterminacy. The nature of our narratives privileges causal and chronological explanation. I’m not sure we can really wrap our minds around systems that are inherently indeterminate. The most we can do (as Heisenberg does, as Hawking does, as Harlow does) is to suggest that there might be something there, even if we can’t actually wrap our minds and words around it.
Thanks, Jonathan. I always enjoy your comments. I’m puzzled by the privileging of causal and chronological narratives, given how much the stream of consciousness flows through 20th century literature. I usually think of causal and chronological narratives as a privilege exercised by religious believers, but occasionally things remind me that it ain’t necessarily so.
After I finished A Briefer History of Time OneClickDigital recommended Bertrand Russell’s Science and Religion. He was writing 8 or 10 years after Heisenberg, and says he thinks the uncertainty we see in describing the choices atoms make is only because we can’t see them at enough detail. If we could zoom in closer we could see the order behind what seems random. He shows a touching faith in scientific determinism. (There, I’ve said something as glib and condescending as Russell does.)
I suspect indeterminacy bothers us so much because we think if one thing is random everything else must be–if meaning in scriptures is indeterminate there’s no meaning in them at all. But that hardly follows. To quote what James E. Faulconer said in every class I took from him, “Plato’s Phaedo is not a recipe for poundcake.” Whatever the infinite abundance of meaning in Plato’s work, its boundaries don’t extend to the culinary sphere. No one’s going to look in Plato for a cookbook. Unless they want a hemlock cocktail–but they won’t find a recipe for it there.
“In every class I took from him.” Which implies something about your history with James E. Faulconer, but makes no actual claim. How very indeterminate of you!