Paul H. Dunn once told BYU faculty that during his first Thursday morning meeting in the tenple as a general authority he could understand how the war in heaven got started. This according to a report on the annual August university conference that appeared around 1981 in The Seventh East Press, a short-lived independent student newspaper whose distribution was banned on campus after running an interview in which U of U philosopher (and Swearing Elder) Sterling McMurrin said he had come to believe early on that angels don’t appear to 14-year-old boys.
I can see the article and the paper’s demise as suggesting the limits of dissent in the Church, but I usually think of them separately. The report was a welcome confirmation to my sense that being of one heart and mind did not necessarily mean sharing the same opinion on every matter. Indeed, there were some items–like the exact nature of God’s foreknowledge–that were matters of vigorous debate among General Authorities, Elder Dunn had said. (I appreciated that comment because I have never been comfortable with the idea that God knows every detail of everything that will happen before it happens. It’s hard to reconcile with the idea of human freedom, and it implies that God knew before the creation of the earth in which kingdom each person would end up.)
Several years later, maybe seven or eight, I took a class from James Carver at the Institute in Seattle where he told us he had read a book claiming that Jesus was a Pharisee. For example, if they were his enemies why would the Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod wanted to kill him? (See Luke 13:31.) Over the next twenty years I kept coming back to that idea periodically, looking for other examples. Willis Barnstone’s commentary in The New Covenant, Vol. I, gave me some things to think about, then I came across a recording of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. It contains a remarkable scene where Danny invites Reuven (the narrator) to his home for a Sabbath Talmud/Torah study. There is a huge, vociferous debate, but Reuven realizes at the end of the evening that the rancor of the debate exists only within the debate.
So, what if the Hassids are the descendants of the Pharisees, including their style of scripture study and debate? What if the debates we see in the Gospels are more like the debates in a philosophy class than the shouting matches around Temple Square during General Conference? That is, what if the Pharisees are rabbi Yeshua’s students and friends, testing his ideas as vigorously as they can. I want to examine that idea in the coming year, to examine the encounters between Jesus and the Pharisees and try to figure out where the animosity in the Christian interpretive tradition comes from.
Put another way, I want to reinterpret the tradition. People out to reinterpret a tradition usually have a subtext suggesting that texts don’t behave the way we think they do. That feels like Reza Aslan’s subtext in Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He says at the beginning of the book (and he told Doug Fabrizio the same thing on Radio West) that once you realize crucifixion was a punishment Rome reserved for insurrectionists everything else falls away and you can see Jesus as a human being, a zealot preaching the violent overthrow of Rome.
Of course, if you say, “You don’t understand the text you’re interpreting” you open yourself to the counter-charge, “No, you’re the one who doesn’t understand.” I originally started this digression to question some of Aslan’s assumptions, particularly that Rome’s executing someone as an insurrectionist means he was one. (As Palestinian Lutheran pastor Mitri Raheb says in Faith in the Face of Empire, the Empire will always paint the people it wants to get rid of in the most threatening, violent light it can.) But saying texts don’t always act the way readers think they do raises the question of how you think the people you’re replying to think texts behave.
This is a complicated question with scriptural texts, especially when the people who hold them as scripture hold the idea that the texts were inspired by an ethical God who wants us to “Be holy as I am holy” (see Lev. 20:7 and others). When you think of scriptures as revealed texts you also have to think about what revelation is, and how it proceeds out of the mouth of God. For much of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world the idea of scripture is related to the idea of a fixed text with fixed meaning, existing in a fixed canon. A fixed, certain canon assures us we have the last word, the final, complete word, so people who challenge the canon can feel like nihilists, even when they want to open the canon rather than to refute its character as revelation.
Mormons want certainty as much as anyone, but our collection of Doctrine and Covenants begins with an explicit statement that scripture is imperfect,
“given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding” (D&C 1:24). Latter-day Saints may be alone among religious traditions in believing that scripture can be imperfect and still be true–as we can be imperfect and still be true to our covenants, and our doctrine.
Which means epistemology, for Mormons, is based in uncertainty–not that the grounds for knowledge are uncertain, but that uncertainty itself is the basis of knowledge. We can never say we have the final word because there are many great and important things yet to be revealed pertaining to the kingdom of God (see Article of Faith 9).
The idea that our epistemology is based on uncertainty will sound startling to anyone who has been to a testimony meeting (or listened to General Conference), but it’s implicit in the idea of an eternal search for truth.
I hope to spend some time next month on why I find Aslan’s reading of the Gospels a very Protestant reading, in style if not content, then start the new year by finally getting around to looking at Jesus’s encounters with the Pharisees (yeah, right.)
Thy round.
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Harlow—
I usually read half your posts, get distracted, never leave a comment. But I do enjoy your posts, and this one in particular I found provocative in a helpful way.
Thanks, Th. As Humpty Dumpty says, “It is very provoking,” even boldly so, I thought after posting this. I suppose I’d be safe in arguing that the trend of western epistemology is toward certainty–toward knowing something for certain, toward unassailable objective truth.
Mormons talk about knowing for ourselves, but that’s not really the same as knowing something for certain. When we talk about knowing something for ourselves we mean that someone else has told us that thing is true. The fact that that someone else is divine doesn’t make the Holy Ghost less of a someone or an else.
When we talk about the Holy Spirit as the Comforter and Confirmer we’re actually saying we believe someone who knows truth is willing to tell us that truth, and won’t lie. That means the law of witnesses is more important to us than the concept of objective truth, indeed, more important than the subject/object dichotomy. Truth is neither subjective nor objective, but communal. It doesn’t exist solely outside of me or inside me, but within us.
How’s that for provocative?
Very nice.
What strikes me about the Mormon notion of scripture is not just that it is imperfect, but also that it is instrumental, utilitarian: “that they might come to understanding.” It’s less important that they *be* true than that they bring people closer to truth.
This reminds me of something that nagged at me about the time I started asking myself why scriptures include the precise words they include: why does D&C 93:24 refer to truth as “knowledge of” things as they are, were, and are to come? Isn’t truth simply the way things are? Along with suggesting that truth may not exist without someone to know it, this scripture suggests (for me) an instrumental thrust: truth exists for the purpose of being known, and (only?) in the way that it can be known by someone.
A quick Google search found the following quote from Madeleine L’Engle: “Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.” So what does it say about Mormonism that we do, in fact, conflate the two, at least to some extent?
If you are a Catholic and believe in Papal Infallibility, you wouldn’t want to confuse truth and knowledge. If you are a Mormon who was taught from his youth that Papal Infallibility is a load of Papal Bull, you would want to steer clear of it or anything like unto it. If you are young and confused and someone says “When the prophet speaks, the debate is over” you might just hear “When the profits peak, the rebate is over.”
Unfortunately, I cannot say that I know with every fiber of my being that my comments above are true. But I would rather believe that there is the possibility of knowledge than believe in the perpetual uncertainty of faith. But, with faith, all things are possible. So is it really true that I can’t believe in my doubts?
Well, I suppose some people would prefer a serving of bull to a steady diet of worms. So maybe the possibility of knowledge and the perpetual uncertainty of faith are opposites that hold each other in check. Maybe we can have both.
Thanks, Jonathan.
Your comments often give me so much to think about that I spend a few weeks organizing a reply, and then, lo, it’s time to post again.
My first reaction was, Madeleine L’Engle hasn’t given sufficient thought to the place of fact in a religion based on a declaration of fact, “He is risen.”
My second reaction was that as a fiction writer she wants to preserve the ability of fiction, including parables, to tell truth.
My third reaction was to wonder why we want to privilege either fact or truth. They’re not mutually exclusive.
My fourth reaction was to think about opposition as the force that holds reality together. We often want to choose one of a set of opposites over another, reason or revelation, say. Why not see both as opposites that keep each other in check, as equals not rivals?
My fifth reaction was to think that we haven’t really begun to understand the power of the idea of opposites holding the universe together.
Then I reread L’Engle’s quote. Her opposites are truth and knowledge, not truth and fact. But my sense that she hasn’t thought deeply enough about her religion still holds when I think about Jesus’s intercessory prayer, with that phrase “this is life eternal, to know thee.” Knowing has to have something to do with eternity,
Earlier this year it occurred to me that we humans have a lot invested in the idea that truth is beyond us. If Christians have the sense that God is wholly other than us, atheists have the existential void, and the duty to make sense of life, even though trying to make sense of nothingness is futile. For both groups the true nature of the universe is inaccessible.
Our insistence that truth and knowledge are intertwined may mean that the concept of opposition in all things has explanatory power we haven’t fully explored–or haven’t fully expounded.