Review
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Title: First Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith in Light of the Temple
Author: Samuel M. Brown
Publisher: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
Genre: Theology
Year Published:2014
Number of Pages: 167
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 978-0-8425-2880-1
Price: $16.95 (USD)
Reviewed by Les Blake for the Association for Mormon Letters
When I first read the title of Samuel M. Brown’s new book “Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith in Light of the Temple,” I thought “Huh, sounds like a blog post. Maybe a long essay.” But don’t make the same mistake I made in assuming the subject a little too narrow for book length treatment. Granted, it’s lean at 167 pages but thick with fresh and insightful commentary.
“Principles and Ordinances” begins with a conversion story. In his late teens Brown, an atheist from early youth, encounters a consuming and unexpected love in connection with a Mormon sacrament. “Atheism,” he relates, “has not been an option for me since.” One of the most crucial takeaways of that experience was that it set upon him communally. It occurred in the presence of others, while he sought to serve and commune with them.
This, it turns out, is the silver thread that stitches the whole book together. Brown sees faith, repentance, ordinances, and the Holy Ghost, as concepts that do not operate in a vacuum. On the contrary, it is through human connection and community that these gospel realities carry their most fundamental power.
Mormons, on the whole, have traditionally done a poor job at distinguishing between faith and belief. Brown adds his voice to a groundswell of Mormon thinkers who are beautifully articulating distinctions between the two. Brown proposes that in the same sense one nurtures fidelity in a marriage-like relationship, “faith is spiritually active, a kind of strenuous commitment that carries us through the vagaries of the fits and starts of our spiritual lives.” In other words faith is participative. It lives and breathes only to the extent that we live and breathe it. “Faith does not live in the echo chambers of an isolated mind,” Brown explains, “faith grows in strength as we enact it.” And enacting our faith can’t be a solo project.
In a recent Aaronic Priesthood meeting I attended, the instructor spoke of Zion. He asked the boys to name something that didn’t exist in Zion. One boy raised his hand and said, “Sin.” All nodded. It was written on the board. A short time later I asked the group to reconsider. Despite some push back, most eventually agreed that it wasn’t sin that was absent from Zion, but rather repentance. Brown’s insight is thus, “Zion serves as the eternal reminder of our interdependence. It is a story about the process of repenting and striving toward the unity that represents heaven on earth. In this Zion community view of life, sin matters to the extent that it estranges us from others, and it is in others that we find our repentance.”
Brown relates, with beautiful candor, his estrangement from and eventual reconciliation with his father. This touching narrative presents a microcosm of the relational foundation common to those very big ideas so succinctly stated in the fourth Article of Faith. For those struggling with overtly punitive views of sin and repentance, for those harboring doubts about whether or not God really requires a person to participate in an ordinance in order to be “saved,” then “Principles and Ordinances” will offer innovative approaches to these questions.
I chew on these questions myself. In parts I am reticent to accept some of Brown’s framing. The cynic in me perks up when I read, “what we practice seeing is what we become able to see.” That is just one line, to be fair, in a very thoughtful treatise on what it means to develop spiritual eyesight (a process I genuinely agree with, yet it is a process that is yoked to the potential for self-deception). His statement, I suppose, is a two-sided coin. While one side might account for so many borne testimonies that leave me shaking my head, the other side of that same coin accounts for just as many testimonies that move me in profound ways. Brown’s take really challenges me. I admire it, and though he doesn’t tie everything up into neat answers (thankfully) his writing kicks the can down the road, for me at least, in substantive ways.
Is “Principles and Ordinances” good? It is very good. It broadens Mormon thought in expansive ways without watering down its Mormonism. It is an excellent second installment in the Maxwell Institute’s “Living Faith” series – works that “cherish the life of the mind” but give a pragmatic boots-on-the-ground view of what lived faith actually entails. Brown’s prose carries the gravitas of a lifetime of self-examination, and this book is an eloquent articulation of gospel fundamentals that is outright novel.