My Mormon world

Brigham Young, on education

2011-12-08T13:27:00.001-08:00

“How gladly we would understand every principle pertaining to science and art,
and become thoroughly acquainted with every intricate operation of nature,
and with all the chemical changes that are constantly going on around us!

How delightful this would be,
and what a boundless field of truth and power is open for us to explore!

We are only just approaching the shores of the vast ocean of information
that pertains to this physical world,
to say nothing of that which pertains to the heavens,
to angels and celestial beings, to the place of their habitation
to the manner of their life,
and their progress to still higher degrees of perfection.”

- Brigham Young

How would you describe the visitation of an angel?

2011-09-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

Today I rediscovered this powerful testimony that is unfortunately not often read, though it has long been included with our scriptures (bold font is mine):

Oliver Cowdery (1806 - 1850), Second Elder of the Church, Assistant President of the Church, On the Visit of John the Baptist to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, May 15, 1829.

"These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven, awakened the utmost gratitude of this bosom! Day after day I continued, uninterrupted, to write from his mouth, as he translated with the Urim and Thummim, or, as the Nephites would have said, ‘Interpreters,’ the history or record called ‘The Book of Mormon.’

To notice, in even few words, the interesting account given by Mormon and his faithful son, Moroni, of a people once beloved and favored of heaven, would supersede my present design; I shall therefore defer this to a future period, and, as I said in the introduction, pass more directly to some few incidents immediately connected with the rise of this Church, which may be entertaining to some thousands who have stepped forward, amid the frowns of bigots and the calumny of hypocrites, and embraced the Gospel of Christ.

No men, in their sober senses, could translate and write the directions given to the Nephites from the mouth of the Savior, of the precise manner in which men should build up His Church, and especially when corruption had spread an uncertainty over all forms and systems practiced among men, without desiring a privilege of showing the willingness of the heart by being buried in the liquid grave, to answer a ‘good conscience by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.’

After writing the account given of the Savior’s ministry to the remnant of the seed of Jacob, upon this continent, it was easy to be seen, as the prophet said it would be, that darkness covered the earth and gross darkness the minds of the people. On reflecting further it was as easy to be seen that amid the great strife and noise concerning religion, none had authority from God to administer the ordinances of the Gospel. For the question might be asked, have men authority to administer in the name of Christ, who deny revelations, when His testimony is no less than the spirit of prophecy, and His religion based, built, and sustained by immediate revelations, in all ages of the world when He has had a people on earth? If these facts were buried, and carefully concealed by men whose craft would have been in danger if once permitted to shine in the faces of men, they were no longer to us; and we only waited for the commandment to be given ‘Arise and be baptized.’

This was not long desired before it was realized. The Lord, who is rich in mercy, and ever willing to answer the consistent prayer of the humble, after we had called upon Him in a fervent manner, aside from the abodes of men, condescended to manifest to us His will. On a sudden, as from the midst of eternity, the voice of the Redeemer spake peace to us, while the veil was parted and the angel of God came down clothed with glory, and delivered the anxiously looked for message, and the keys of the Gospel of repentance.

What joy! what wonder! what amazement! While the world was racked and distracted—while millions were groping as the blind for the wall, and while all men were resting upon uncertainty, as a general mass, our eyes beheld, our ears heard, as in the ‘blaze of day’; yes, more—above the glitter of the May sunbeam, which then shed its brilliancy over the face of nature!

Then his voice, though mild, pierced to the center, and his words, ‘I am thy fellow-servant,’ dispelled every fear. We listened, we gazed, we admired! ’Twas the voice of an angel from glory, ’twas a message from the Most High! And as we heard we rejoiced, while His love enkindled upon our souls, and we were wrapped in the vision of the Almighty! Where was room for doubt? Nowhere; uncertainty had fled, doubt had sunk no more to rise, while fiction and deception had fled forever!

But, dear brother, think, further think for a moment, what joy filled our hearts, and with what surprise we must have bowed, (for who would not have bowed the knee for such a blessing?) when we received under his hand the Holy Priesthood as he said, ‘Upon you my fellow-servants, in the name of Messiah, I confer this Priesthood and this authority, which shall remain upon earth, that the Sons of Levi may yet offer an offering unto the Lord in righteousness!’

I shall not attempt to paint to you the feelings of this heart, nor the majestic beauty and glory which surrounded us on this occasion; but you will believe me when I say, that earth, nor men, with the eloquence of time, cannot begin to clothe language in as interesting and sublime a manner as this holy personage. No; nor has this earth power to give the joy, to bestow the peace, or comprehend the wisdom which was contained in each sentence as they were delivered by the power of the Holy Spirit! Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind.

The assurance that we were in the presence of an angel, the certainty that we heard the voice of Jesus, and the truth unsullied as it flowed from a pure personage, dictated by the will of God, is to me past description, and I shall ever look upon this expression of the Savior’s goodness with wonder and thanksgiving while I am permitted to tarry; and in those mansions where perfection dwells and sin never comes, I hope to adore in that day which shall never cease."

Oliver Cowdery, Messenger and Advocate, vol. 1 (October 1834), pp. 14—16 Also displayed as footnote at the end of Joseph Smith-History chapter in the Pearl of Great Price (Page 59) Also see Doctrine and Covenants Section 13

Jewish scapegoating

2011-09-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

Reading an otherwise excellent book: Monasticism, Gateway to the Middle Ages (Duckett, 1938), I am disturbed by its casual acceptance of the claim that the Jews in a certain medieval French city, Arles, attempted to betray the place to barbarian (Frankish) besiegers by tossing down a message stone from the walls -- a claim that came just in time to take the pressure off the city's ecclesiastical leader, one Caesarius. I searched through James Carroll's Constantine's Sword and found no mention of the episode. Rather surprising, since Carroll's theme is the tortured relationship of Christianity and Judaism, and Caesarius was the controversial Vicar Apostolic of all Gaul and Spain at the time. His allegiance to Arles was several times questioned, since he was of Burgundian birth. What would the local Jews possibly have gained from having Arles pass into Frankish hands? Even the best books of history are written by mortal men and women, and a good scholar doesn't unquestioningly swallow their every word, however authoritative.

Shashua -- taking delight in the law of the Lord

2011-08-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

"Unless thy law had been my delights,
I should then have perished in my affliction."-- Psalms 119:92

Not after our trials, but during the very worst of them, we can experience happiness, delights or pleasure (Heb. shashua), by focusing on the law -- the word -- of God.

I am reminded of the vision of the Prophet Lehi, in which he saw a rod of iron representing the word of God, leading to the Tree of Life, the love of God. While partaking of the fruit brought ultimate joy, we can believe that the journeyers also experienced delight along the way by "holding to the rod."

Doctrine and Covenants 38: Beauty of Doctrine

2011-08-23T05:36:00.000-07:00

This week, I will finish seven months of study of the passage of scripture titled "Doctrine and Covenants 38." Such a dry, utilitarian title obscures the incredible beauty of this revelation.

If the sections of the Doctrine and Covenants attributed to Joseph Smith, first prophet of the Restoration, were indeed merely creations of his own mind, we would see them evolving in complexity over time, as the youth became a mature man. We forget sometimes just how young Joseph Smith was as leader of the Church.

But Section 38 was revealed when the Church was not even a year old, and the Prophet himself was only 25 years old. It is a fully mature,expansive passage that reveals not his mind but that of the omniscient, eternal God who revealed it to him:

"Thus saith the Lord your God, even Jesus Christ, the Great I AM, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the same which looked upon the wide expanse of eternity, and all the seraphic hosts of heaven, before the world was made ...

... Let every man esteem his brother as himself, and practise virtue and holiness before me ...

... Let your preaching be the warning voice, every man to his neighbor, in mildness and in meekness ..."

I see these particular verses as highlighting the grand themes of the revelation: The introduction, declaring the majesty, power and imminence of God; the principles of the Zion society that He was preparing to restore to the earth -- a people of equity, purity and compassion preparing for the return of the Messiah; and the call to share the word.

Verses 31 and 39 have been footnoted to 2 Peter 3:14 and Haggai 2:8, respectively. Most apppropriate. Following the footnotes last night, I was powerfully impacted by the reality that our Eternal God works upon the same Plan that He has always had, "never varying from that which he hath said," and that all of these verses,though vastly separated in time and place, fit together beautifully, being ultimately from the same Mind, to declare the same principles of Zion, Paradise on Earth, whether amongst the ancient covenant Children of Israel, the earliest Christians or the saints of the Restoration.

God is in charge, all things are His, Zion will see the Desire of Nations, Messiah's rule of equity for all, with the glorious temple of God at its center, served by a people prepared in heart.

And I picture the Prophet Joseph on that frosty January day of 1831, gathered with the saints at Fayette, N.Y., with but a wood fire to warm the room; I hear the scrape of boots on the rough floor and the rustle of ladies' skirts. Then the light of heaven shines upon Joseph and he begins to speak the words of revelation and all the congregation is hushed as the very Laws of Zion are set forth again in supernal beauty.

die Mauer

2011-08-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

This month, Germany marks 50 years since the building of what may have ranked as the ugliest piece of architecture in human history -- the Berlin Wall, die Mauer as they called it.

It is gone now, along with the totalitarian state that erected it to imprison its own citizens. It seems inconceivable that some Germans today are expressing nostalgia for it ... but it is human nature over time, in all societies, for the rough edges of memory to soften and blur.

My father visited then-East Berlin in the 1980s,when it was still under the Communist boot heel. He remembers the sadness on the faces of the people, and the grim, gray streets.

In my home library is an old book from that era,"Berlin, East and West." It closes with this note:

"There is a popular Berlin song with a refrain that goes, 'In fifty years it'll all be over' ... These are the words of the optimist. The pessimist knows that short of nuclear holocaust, the only thing safe to predict about the future of East and West Berlin is that they will go on existing ..."

The optimists were right this time. Today, a reunited Berlin has regained its place among the great metropolises of the world, with a people reknowned for generosity and zest for life.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14514916

Mysticism

2011-07-31T12:43:00.000-07:00

In every major religious movement, runs a trend towards so-called mysticism. Ecstatic movements and some forms of monasticism in Christianity, Sufism in Islam, Kaballah in Judaism, etc.

Can a Latter-day Saint gain any insight, learn any truth, from mysticism? Or should it all, like seances and ouija boards, be left alone as utterly incompatible with our faith?

I ask because my personal study of history and literature has now brought me to the Middle Ages, when Christian mysticism was all the rage, and I would like to understand its foundations. I read 30 pages of Dionysus the Areopagite's "The Divine Names" today and understood virtually nothing of it -- it seemed as bizzare and contradictory as the Tao philosophy of China. Clearly, some mental effort will be required to gain even a basic understanding.

Count Belisarius

2011-07-30T08:27:00.000-07:00

Way too late last night, I finished Robert Graves' 1938 novel, Count Belisarius. My edition was a battered 1966 paperback reprinting I bought at some booksale years ago and finally have read.

If Graves' depiction of this era in history, the world of sixth century Byzantine Rome, is to be believed, there perhaps never existed a stupider, less grateful sovereign than Emperor Justinian, nor a better, less-appreciated general than Belisarius. Time after time, the general saved the Eastern empire from its enemies, only to be punished again and again by his myopic, jealous emperor, against whom he never would raise a finger, however justified. I heard echoes of the Saul-David story, and even of Stowes' Uncle Tom-Simon Lagree portrayal. Evil is ever resentful of good. The more patient in suffering the good, the more incandescent in fury true evil becomes.

They say every writer is a product of his or her times. But Graves' novel didn't feel dated, other than one odd reference to primitive communism.

Now, time to move on, to a very strange old book given to me by a good friend, Chuck B., who knows that I love strange old books. Mystical Theology and the Celestial Hierarchies purports to have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite of New Testament fame, but is believed by scholars to have been composed sometime around the 5th Century A.D.

Meditations on China

2011-07-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

I read some pages in Chinese history today. I thought about a program I recently watched detailing the incredible feats of engineering now underway in that land -- highways, bridges, dams and cities that dwarf anything in the West.

For thousands of years, the land we in the West call "China" was at once a place of immense mystery and incredible innovation. Clock mechanisms, paper, silk, gunpowder,sailing technology, ship rudders, the compass and other inventions enriched her culture and then crossed the borders into the West. Her explorers traveled the world.

Then she turned inward. She became weak. The rising West took full advantage and China suffered. And she has never forgotten.

Now we are in 2011 and China has again become the colossus of Asia. She has, her admirers will say, finally regained her historic, rightful place in the world. There's just one problem. She's carried with her into the new century the ragged remnants of a Western political disease called communism -- jettisoned most of its basic philosophy but hung onto its most loathsome symptom, an obsession with tyrannical control over her own people. She insists on it, for stability.

Who knows what the future holds? Will the Middle Kingdom ultimately become a democracy, allowing full freedom of speech, worship and the press? Or will it forever manage to alienate those inalienable rights?

China must also now share the globe with nations unborn in the days when she, Persia and Imperial Rome alone ruled the world. That day has passed forever. How will she behave amongst new friends, foes and rivals? Will the global community ultimately bless or curse her modern rise to power?

Ask a Tasman, if you can still find one, how enlightened the British Empire was in its behavior towards his ancestors ... or a Cherokee how the rising U.S. nation treated his people ... and these are the "good guys" of history. What will be said of China? The page is yet unwritten.

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/world-new/2011/jul/25/tdmain02-china-sets-its-sights-on-moon-mars-venus-ar-1194042/

Study in triplicate

2011-06-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

Everyone has their own way of immersing themselves in scripture. Whatever works for you, go for it!

I like to copy out the passage that I am contemplating into a notebook, then write my thoughts. If it's the Bible I am reading, I look up the Greek/Hebrew as the case may be.

Last night, I went a step further. I may try this again if it continues to be enjoyable. I wrote out the KJV passage, from Psalms 119:78, speaking of the proud ones (zedom) who persecute a righteous man/woman.

Then I blew the dust off my Hungarian translation of the Bible (from missionary days), and wrote the passage again, this time in Hungarian. Hungarian being a beautiful, rhythmic language, it read like poetry, which was a pleasure. After that, I got out my Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and carefully wrote out the Hebrew original.

Writing the passage three times, in three different languages, caused me to think carefully about each word in the verse -- and it still remains in my head these many hours later.

As a last step in the learning process, I looked up the verse in Malachi in Tanakh, which I remembered speaks of the proud being burned as stubble. I was quickly able to confirm that "zedom" underlies that text as well.

The finger of God

2011-02-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

Perhaps my long, painful journey through Augustine's City of God will have been worth it for this one astounding insight. In Book 16, verse 43, expounding upon the Exodus, Augustine mentions the "finger of God." That is a very rare Biblical term, in Hebrew etsba Elohim, and first appears as a description of God's power against the magicians of Pharoah. In the N.T., it resurfaces, in Greek of course, dactylo theo, in reference to the Spirit of God. (Cf. Luke 11:20 and Matthew 12:28). The scholar R. Steven Notley

http://www.jerusalemperspective.com/Default.aspx?tabid=27&ArticleID=1450

notes that the Greek text, by construction, appears dependent on a Hebrew original. I.e., is a Semitism. He also notes that on Passover, Jews customarily recite an ancient Rabbinical commentary on the concept of the finger of God empowering the Exodus.

Of course, the Book of Mormon has a well-known, singular, finger of God episode, appearing in Ether. The finger of God touches stones upon a mountain, enabling a group of God's chosen to travel across the sea to their promised Land.

Jaredites weren't Hebrews and the Exodus of Israel was still a future event at the time of this theophany. But it is interesting to contemplate God using the same symbolism here as He would later. Can we really credit farm-boy Joseph with such an insight? I doubt he had been to very many Passover sedars when he translated the Book of Mormon, nor was very familiar with St. Augustine.

We have a duty to defend ...

2011-01-19T13:16:00.001-08:00

Latter-day Saints have a duty to defend their faith, not by strife but by knowledge and gentle persuasion. We ought to know our scriptures, including the Bible, well enough not to falter at every sling and arrow of attack. Consider:

On a certain website devoted to creating a "crisis of faith" for Mormons in order to save their souls, one of the first suggestions is to assert that every Biblical theophany had witnesses. Joseph Smith had no one with him in the grove when he purported to receive his First Vision. Therefore, his story violated Biblical precedent.

Seems to me this theory falls apart with even a cursory reading of the Bible. Is anyone besides Noah reported to have heard God's direction to build the Ark? Who was with Abraham when he was called to be a father of many nations? Who witnessed the marvelous vision of the Lord to Isaiah, when "His train filled the temple"? Surely, there are many, many more of these.

It is sad, very sad to me, that any of my brothers and sisters in the Church could be so ignorant of the Bible and so weak in their faith as to actually fall prey to such silly attacks. But they do.

The Bible is the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. We take so much heat for such a self-evident statement. Can the Bible be translated incorrectly? Of course! Anyone with a pen and paper could accomplish that task! Are incorrectly translated passages still the word of God and therefore binding upon us? Did not someone many centuries ago mistakenly translate one of the Ten Commandments?

I have just read a chapter in St. Augustine's City of God in which he struggles for quite a few paragraphs to reconcile differences between the Hebrew manuscripts and the Septuagint version of the Bible regarding the lifespan of Methusaleh. If the great Christian Augustine could concede that copyists of the Bible before his day could introduce errors into the text -- even dare to consider that some were malicious -- can a Latter-day Saint be faulted for the same belief?

Latter-day Saints do not believe the Bible is corrupt or unreliable, as our critics claim we do. It is precious. It is beautiful. It is living word for our daily lives. But just as it was wrong of uninspired men to close the "Old Testament" canon with Malachi (as the Samaritans do after the Pentateuch), so it is wrong of man to close the lips of God after the Revelation to St. John.

Credibility

2011-01-04T12:15:00.001-08:00

I have never deleted any comments to this blog, except for obvious spam. The truth needs no protection.

So I am saddened to stumble across yet another Internet attack-site today posting a copious list of supposed failings of the Mormon Church, complete with at least ten glowing reviews by fans. And yet ... not one criticism of the site or its methods, not even one feeble little possibility of a question or a refutation.

It sounds like the election results from a dictatorship. Most egregious, one of the posters praised the site's "lack of bias." Bias, I am sorry to say, oozed from every nook and cranny of that site.

If you are going to spend your time criticizing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at least have the honesty to allow for the possibility that someone somewhere might have a response to your claim.

Otherwise, a truly intelligent mind will see right through you, and you do no favors for the cause of Christ.

Humbled

2011-01-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

Twice now, I have been asked to lead the lessons in Elder Quorum, as part of my calling.

Both times, I have had grand ideas but the delivery, to me, seems to fall very short.

Perhaps I am being taught to be more humble, to rely more on the Spirit to be the teacher, and less upon other means, such as props, video clips and my own "wisdom."

Perhaps I am a glutton for punishment but I welcome the chance to try again. This time, I resolve to clear away every visual aid, every prop, everything except the basic scriptures and the lesson manual.

We will have a clutter-free discussion.

Or so I hope.

We might just have a three-minute lesson.

Answer me this ...

2010-10-19T06:40:00.000-07:00

I have recently finished reading Augustine's "Confessions" and have now begun to enjoy his "City of God."

I have no doubt that he was sincere in his love for God -- who would doubt that? And I picture God, upon Augustine's arrival in heaven, embracing him in His all-loving arms and thus sweeping away in an instant all the Hellenistic philosophical baggage that encumbered this great man in his search for truth.

"Precious Augustine, I do have a face to look upon you, and for you to see, My child. I do have arms to hold you."

"Why, my child, if you understood My Son to be God, as you did, omniscient and all-powerful as I am, with a body of flesh and bone, as He did testify, and that that Son did not die twice, was it so very hard for you to accept that I, His Father, also possess a body, a perfect, omniscient, all-powerful body but a body none-the-less?"

"No matter now. You have always loved Me, and sought to serve me. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter into my rest."

Of temples

2010-10-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

"And the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple ... and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi ..." -- Malachi 3:1,3.

Please tell me, if temples are part of the old covenant, done away with, and the Mormons are wrong to build them, then how will this Millennial prophecy be fulfilled? To where will the Lord suddenly come?

The Lord repeated a portion of this prophecy in December, 1830, in direct first-person revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith, just a few months after the Church of Jesus Christ was restored on the earth.

Celestial Marriage Paradigm

2010-07-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

In the first pages of his classic work on human behavior, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, Stephen Covey talks about paradigms -- how we see the world -- and the enlightenment that can result from adopting positive new paradigms.

Although Covey is LDS, and thus his book is anethma to certain rabid Mormon-haters, Seven Habits is a secular work, meant for the general public. Perhaps if it were directed towards a specifically LDS audience, or with the intent to bear testimony of the Restored Gospel, he might have used the following splendid example of a paradigm shift:

The Apostle Parley P. Pratt, a companion and follower of Joseph Smith, recounted in expressive detail what a transforming influence it was upon him to learn the doctrine of celestial marriage from the Prophet Joseph. He wrote:

“[Joseph Smith] taught me many great and glorious principles concerning God and the heavenly order of eternity. It was at this time that I received from him the first idea of eternal family organization, and the eternal union of the sexes in those inexpressibly endearing relationships which none but the highly intellectual, the refined and pure in heart, know how to prize, and which are at the very foundation of everything worthy to be called happiness. . . .

“It was from him that I learned that the wife of my bosom might be secured to me for time and all eternity; and that the refined sympathies and affections which endeared us to each other emanated from the fountain of divine eternal love. It was from him that I learned that we might cultivate these affections, and grow and increase in the same to all eternity; while the result of our endless union would be an offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, or the sands of the sea shore. . . .

“I had loved before, but I knew not why. But now I loved with a pureness an intensity of elevated, exalted feeling, which would lift my soul from the transitory things of this groveling sphere and expand it as the ocean. I felt that God was my heavenly Father indeed; that Jesus was my brother, and that the wife of my bosom was an immortal, eternal companion; a kind ministering angel, given to me as a comfort, and a crown of glory for ever and ever. In short, I could now love with the spirit and with the understanding also.” (Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, Revised and Enhanced Edition, 2000, pp. 361-362)

Societal paradigms also seem to be part of the intriguing theory of heresies, as described by Hillarie Belloc, about which I blogged a few years ago: http://mymormonworld.blogspot.com/2008/10/arianism.html

"[Belloc] makes another great point: the religious beliefs of a people shape their entire societal outlook. This is why he states that the study of heresy remains so important: a Protestant-based society will of necessity always be very different from a Catholic-based or a Muslim society."

Like a Trumpet

2010-07-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

"Thus saith the Lord God, the Mighty One [Heb. abiyr] of Israel: Behold I say unto you, my servant Edward, that you are blessed, and your sins are forgiven you, and you are called to preach my gospel as with the voice of a trump." -- D&C 36:1.

Thus spake the Lord to Edward Partridge, a faithful early Latter-day Saint, calling him to missionary work, echoing the words to Oliver Cowdery earlier that same year of 1830.

Isaiah, the poet-prophet, may have first recorded this divine metaphor:

"Cry aloud
spare not
lift up thy voice
like a trumpet."
-- Isaiah 58:1

When I think of a trumpet, I think bold, compelling, clear ... and beautiful. Such should be our witness.

500 reasons

2010-07-14T05:11:00.000-07:00

Somebody on some sad site somewhere scribbled out "500 reasons" to leave the Mormon Church.

Surely there are more productive uses for one's time.

I skimmed the list the other day. Some were the dusty detritus of old critics, to which answers have long ago been provided, answers which are stubbornly ignored by each new generation of axe-grinders. Some were as thin and weak as watered-down soup. Some simply didn't make sense.

Perhaps I could scribble out 500 refutations of 500 reasons to leave the Mormon Church (aka the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). But I only need one. The restored Gospel is true.

Right you are, governor!

2010-06-28T19:48:00.000-07:00

Q: What is the history of the position of "governor" in the Book of Mormon?

A: It appears suddenly in Alma 2, rather late in the history of the Nephite nation, persists for less than a century, then vanishes for good. The circumstances appear to be the threat of a civil war, led by the Amlicite faction.

No mention of such a position is made in the great governmental reform that replaces a monarchy with judgeships.

The Bible helps us to learn that it is certainly not some 19th century anachronism -- and provides a clue that may solve the mystery of its origin. One of the Old Testament words translated "governor" is "sar," which Strong's concordance also translates as "chief captains."

Go back to Alma 2, verse 13. Facing the Amlicite threat, the Nephites appointed "captains, and chief captains, according to their numbers."

It seems to me that the Nephite governors were not so much politicians as are our modern governors, as they were chief-chief captains, sarim. More akin to the old Roman Republic emergency dictators.

Exploring Book of Mormon names

2010-06-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

In the second chapter of the Book of Alma, within the Book of Mormon, seditionists wage war atop the hill Amnihu, east of the river Sidon, near the capital city of the Nephites.

The Biblical King David had a son, Amnon, which according to Strong's Concordance can be transliterated Aminon, but I think the etymology of this place derives from another Biblical word ... Near Damascus in the Holy Land is the hill Amanah, which is Hebrew for "faithful."

Yet another amazing cooincidence for the imaginative Joseph Smith, or a neat little mark of authenticity? You decide.

What of the river Sidon? Why would Nephites, expatriate Hebrews, name their principal New World river for that Phoenician -- foreign -- city?

Perhaps they did for the same reasons the United States has a Paris, Moscow, Memphis, Philadephia, New London, etc.

Or perhaps it is because Sidon is Hebrew for "fishery." Which could be expected to be a major business upon a major river. Old World Sidon may not have come to their minds at all.

Typically, the New Testament has Sidon while the Old has Zidon -- both of course translating the same word which in Hebrew begins with the letter "tsadee," pronounced "ts," which is neither an s or a z but a little of both. Hence the difficulty. We see this with other words such as Melchizedek (OT) and Melchisedec (NT).

But Sidon appearing in the Book of Mormon is hardly an anachronism. If you are still not convinced, Genesis 10:15 should put your mind at ease.

Experiencing the divine ...

2010-06-08T19:34:00.000-07:00

"I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it." -- 1 John 2:21.

By this statement, the writer of this epistle seems to make clear that he is not addressing outsiders or even potential converts to the Christian faith. He is writing to Saints already grounded in the gospel, those who already know the truth. His purpose? "That your joy may be full."

And yet, this seems to contradict his earlier declaration, in which he states that his purpose in writing is that "ye may also have fellowship with us." At first glance, that appears to be precisely an invitation to outsiders, an appeal to join the family of the saints.

I puzzled over that tonight. Then the Spirit spoke to me. John is indeed addressing the membership, telling them: You know the truth. Now I invite you to ascend to the next level -- experience it, even as we apostles have!

To quote LDS author Robert Millet, referencing certain saints in his recollection: " Their [testimonies weren't] simply an intellectual disclosure but rather a report of personal engagement with things divine." (Holding Fast, P. 1)

We know from Jesus' words that the pure in heart are promised that they shall see God. And God keeps his promises.

Cain's gain

2010-06-01T05:01:00.000-07:00

Students of the Bible have long wondered at Cain's motive for killing Abel. Simple jealousy? Modern revelation, in the Book of Moses (Pearl of Great Price) adds back the lost information that the crime was not so much about hurt feelings and sibling rivalry as it was about something far more evil.

Cain had made a pact with Satan, being convinced that by killing Abel, he could become wealthy -- get gain.

It is terribly ironic that the very meaning of Cain's name is "possession" or "gain." That last detail I just learned yesterday, reading in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible). I'm not sure that Joseph Smith the Prophet had any idea of that connection, when he brought forth the lost details of the Book of Moses to the world.

Conversion

2010-05-14T06:34:00.001-07:00

It is wonderful to be home visiting my family in Wash. for a few days. Dad took me along on a missionary split last night. We visited a young couple where the husband has recently been reactivated and his wife will soon be baptized.

It was a sweet, peaceful feeling in that home, in spite of some "youth minister's" attempts to poison her against the church with a list he sent to her of the usual, stale, tired, long-ago refuted anti-Mormon nonsense.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ -- the same Gospel that Paul and the other apostles preached, that came to them from Christ and the angels of heaven, not some new gospel -- is pure, sweet and exhilarating. By it we know what the Bible means when it says that when Christ comes, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. By it we know what the apostle meant when he confirmed that we are the offspring of God. By it we know that God works today in the same way that He always has, through prophets and living revelation.

Lehi's Dream and Psalmic connections?

2010-04-19T19:38:00.000-07:00

"Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word." -- Psalms 119:9.

That is the King James Version. But reading the Jewish Publication Society translation of this passage of the Tanakh opens up a rich field of contemplation for me.

"With what shall a young man keep his way pure? By holding to thy word."

Holding to the word (bmr in Hebrew) immediately brought to mind the vision of Lehi in 1 Nephi 8, in the Book of Mormon. Then the similarities seemed to leap out at me. I hardly think I can be accused of paralellomania but judge for yourself:

The writer of the psalm has sought the Lord with his whole heart and pleads "O let me not wander from thy commandments." He prays that his eyes may be opened, as one might when wandering in a mist of darkness. He is a stranger in the earth, just as the visionary was in a broad field as it were a world.

He says the Lord has rebuked the proud who are cursed, which do err from the commandments, who held him in reproach and contempt as one who kept the commandments ... even princes sat and spoke against him.

The way of God's testimonies brought him joy.

I really believe Lehi, as a pious Jew, could have had this psalm in mind the night he beheld his great vision -- especially if his mind was harrowed up with concerns for his sons, his young men, as he specifically stated that it was.

Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

2010-04-19T09:31:00.000-07:00

Visiting a friend's Christian blog recently, on the subject of the proverbial "wolves in sheep's clothing," I was struck by a terrible fact: In order for a wolf to put on the "clothing" of a sheep, a sheep must first die. Or rather, a soul must become vulnerable to the enticings of the evil one and leave the safety of the flock, where the wolf can possess it and thus gain entry to the flock.

Apiculture in Ancient America

2010-04-13T09:14:00.000-07:00

On a certain internet forum, some 13 pages of discussion revolve around whether the Book of Mormon account of honeybees in the Jaredite settlements of the New World proves said Book of Mormon to be false.

13 pages!

Once, I took a very long journey, from Washington State to Utah to Texas to Germany to Hungary. The trip was by air, with a soujourn in Utah for some training. It should be obvious to anyone that by the time I finally reached Hungary, the contents of my suitcases had changed slightly.

Had I scribbled down an inventory of my original baggage, would some hypothetical person at the other end of the flight have been able to disprove not only my journey but my very existence, by the changes in my stuff?

Notice, the Book of Mormon says the Jaredites started their journey in the Old World with honeybees. Who knows for how long they traveled before they finally made their trans-oceanic crossing? Who knows what they kept with them and what they jettisoned along the way? The Book of Mormon makes NO mention of honeybees once the Jaredites finally reached America.

Could it be possible that they didn't bring the bees with them in their boats? Can critics squeeze that possibility into their cranial spaces? Or do they simply derive endless joy from kicking a straw-man?

Right

2010-03-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

Alma 2:4: "[Amlici] being a wicked man, would deprive them of their rights ..."

The last word in this phrase caught my attention. This is not its first appearance in the Book of Mormon. But it appears nowhere in the Bible, not even in the form of any possible synonyms such as claims or privileges.

I am no student of political science. It would be interesting to learn from such a person whether the concept of "rights" appears in the writings of philosophers pre-Declaration of Independence or even pre-Enlightenment. Under monarchies of the ancient world, did people speak of their rights?

In other words, can we defend this odd word purporting to derive from a first century B.C. expatriate Hebrew culture, or is it simply an anachronism deriving from the milieu of Joseph Smith's 19th century American environment?

Some scholars today give the Native Americans, such as the Iroquoi Confederation, significant credit for inspiring the democratic ideas that led to the American independence movement. By the first century B.C., the Lehites of the Book of Mormon had been in the New World around 500 years, completely cut off from the various kingships, tyrannies and empires of the Old World. Is it plausible that they, like the later English settlers, could have derived primitive democratic ideas from their New World neighbors?

The noun-sense of the English word "rights" as claims or privileges goes back at least as far as Old English, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Almost a fool

2010-03-01T05:55:00.001-08:00

It is true, Latter-day Saints can tend to have an overly sensitive persecution complex.

But what can you say when dozens of webpages, hundreds of books and even special sessions at other churches are devoted specifically to attacking us?

Still, I have to laugh at myself for what happened the other day. And also, be grateful for what didn't happen.

A friend of mine on Facebook posted about how she and her husband were now preparing to go to the temple. Someone chimed in, in capital letters: BUT WHAT PRIESTHOOD DOES DAVID HOLD NOW?

Silly me. I immediately assumed this was some kind of a weird attack on LDS priesthood conceptions, based on the Biblical David, along the lines of Christians are all a priesthood of believers or the Mormon Aaronic priesthood is an anachronism or some such thing.

But I held my Internet tongue.

A day later, the original poster replied that her husband, David, was an elder now.

That's what it was all about.

Strabo and the Jaredites

2010-02-21T11:34:00.000-08:00

Strabo's third volume of "Geographica" (written during the time of Tiberius Caesar, 1st Century A.D.,) discusses the people and places of Iberia, today's Spain and Portugal. I have found many details to be of interest.

Quite striking is the mention of a city of Moron. Of course the word in English is quite unflattering, but certainly a transliteration from some other language wouldn't have the same meaning. Moron also turns up as the name of an ancient New World Jaredite city in the Book of Mormon, surely the subject of derision from people unable to comprehend the above principle.

So perhaps Joseph Smith copied "Moron" from a map of Spain, right? Not likely, since that ancient name has long since given way to Al-Merim.

If the Iberian "Moron" is of Punic origin, it fits nicely into the possible Semitic connections of the Jaredites. But suppose it is purely Celtic? Not a problem either, since the Jaredites may actually be of a different ethnic stock than the children of Shem -- and they are certainly not Hebrews like the Lehites. Celts and Jaredites may be of closely related ancestry. Strabo himself notes that the Iberian Celts "share traits with the Thracian and Scythian tribes," who ranged across Europe and into Eurasia, the latter being where LDS scholar Hugh Nibley placed the Jaredite wanderings.

Those Iberian Celts also had a "sort of women-rule," says Strabo (3:14:18), a concept that Nibley also finds among the Jaredites.

All about joy!

2010-02-12T05:18:00.000-08:00

The gospel of Christ is all about joy.

Hope.

Triumph.

Love.

Peace.

Courage.

Comfort.

Joy.

All God's children, except for those very few who in full knowledge openly reject Him, who "deny that the sun is shining at noon-day," as it were, have a place in His heaven. Those who have developed their talents and Christ-like qualities, will qualify for greater responsibilities, and the blessings that go with them. We give those levels of progression the titles of "terrestial" and "celestial" -- and are reminded of the teaching of Christ that within His Father's house are many mansions.

But the point is, for the majority of God's children, we have reason to rejoice.

We will never be perfect in this life. Is that reason to hang our heads, and grovel in the dirt of depression? No! To do that is, verily, to reject Christ and deny His Atonement. Do not make that mistake!

The gospel is Joy, Joy, Joy!

The dastardly demagogue

2010-02-09T19:37:00.000-08:00

The Book of Mormon uses a rare word, scriptorally speaking, to describe the villain Amlici. He is a "cunning" man.

All instances of that word in the KJV Old Testament go back to its older, non-perjurative sense, as in skillful. Only in the New Testament, and only once, do we find it denoting a bad person. That is, Ephesians 4:14, speaking of "cunning craftiness."

The Greek behind that phrase is "panourgia," which translates, fittingly enough, as specious or false wisdom. Indeed, the enemy of righteousness may appear to be a clever person, honey-tongued and quick-on-his-feet, but ultimately, he is a fool with a sad fate ahead of him.

I wonder if the Hebrews, without the long history of sophistry and rhetoric of their Hellenistic neighbors, truly had a societal concept, an archetype, of the "cunning man," the panourgia, the demagogue, among them.

The closest that the Old Testament seems to get is the tale of how Absalom organized rebellion against his father, David. His doomed uprising began with beguiling promises to the disaffected subjects of his father's kingdom. ((2 Sam. 15:4) But his grandstanding seems rather clumsy -- no Greek sophist would have been impressed.

If the "cunning man," the demagogue, is not to be found among the ancient Hebrews, from whence did the New World Hebrew expatriates, the Lehites, derive the concept? Is this an anachronism? Or is it in fact a subtle clue that the Lehites were not alone in their new home, that there were among them remnants of another people who did indeed understand the concept and used it against them?

New villain on the scene

2010-02-05T18:40:00.000-08:00

I have just reached the second chapter of Alma in my study of the Book of Mormon and am curious about the villain we meet there, Amlici. As with many of those who sought to overturn the order of things in the Nephite world, Amlici himself is an enigma. Was he wholly a Nephite or of some other ethnic derivation with an axe to grind, perhaps considering himself an aggrieved minority in the Nephite culture, as might an Ainu in Japan or a Native American in the United States today? Consider his very name -- impossible to derive from the m-l-k root so familiar in the Book of Mormon, if the transliterated "c" is in truth to be pronounced as an "s."

If he was simply a power-hungry Nephite, or if this is a title put upon him by his Nephite enemies (there is a long history in Native American culture of doing so -- just ask an "Eskimo") then I may be very off base but his name might mean "Man of Aml," if "ic" is a garbled version of the Hebrew "aish" and the final "i" is a possessive marker.

The enigma of Abgar

2010-02-01T06:38:00.001-08:00

The enigma of Abgar:

Within the first few pages of the venerated History of the Christian Church, by Eusebius, occurs a peculiar story, which brings up a lot of questions.

Abgar was supposedly king of the Edessa region circa 30 A.D. According to Eusebius, he somehow got word of the miracle-cures being performed by one Jesus of Nazareth and wrote Him a letter, to which Jesus responded by promising to later send a disciple.

So accustomed are we Christians to our specific picture of Christ from the Bible that it is difficult, for me at least, to picture him writing a letter or even dictating to an amanuosis. The Gospels present no hint of him ever doing such. Then again, He is never mentioned fluffing his pillow or washing His hands but surely He did at some point.

The closest that we come to such a dictation, is more of a verbal command than anything else: Tell that fox (Herod) and we are not told whether anyone dared comply with that request.

But that is a trivial issue. Writing a letter is no sin and if He did, He did.

Bigger item number one: If these are genuine words of Jesus, even if they are approximated elsewhere in the New Testament, they are scripture. And if scripture, then they are a precious fragment that belongs within the canon, not buried in an old book that apparently only scholars read anymore.

Bigger item number two: This text seems to thrust a spear into the heart of scholarship that early Christians considered themselves still under the Jewish umbrella – just sectarian rivals as it were. Jews were erring brothers, not an alien race, not Christ-killers or demon spawn to be caricatured, despised and persecuted. That attitude came later as Gentiles took over leadership of the church and misunderstood the position of the first Christians.

Abgar, however, is presented as a man full of rage against apparently the whole Jewish nation for purportedly holding the still-living Christ in contempt. If his letter is genuine, then Christian anti-Semitism is much older and began even while Christ was yet alive.

If Eusebius were simply presenting a hoary old legend that he heard from a friend of a friend, the enigma might not be so perplexing. But he insists that he read the Abgar story first hand, from the official files of Edessa. That alone wouldn’t prove its purported date, provenance and authorship, but it would certainly strengthen the case.

And yet in my 30-plus years of being a Christian and reading every author from C.S. Lewis to Pope John Paul, I have never heard this story before.

Book of Mormon, Part II

2010-01-27T19:22:00.001-08:00

I am reminded of my youthful years when I was quite ignorant and very briefly questioned the truth of the Bible when I discovered the word "corn" within its pages. Any American schoolboy/girl knows that corn was an American crop, unknown to the Hebrews. Of course, corn is actually an old English word for any grain, not just maize. How foolish I was!

What of the Liahona-compass? God created a director-ball, the Book of Mormon says, and God had no need, any believer in Him must agree, to borrow the idea from ancient China. "Compass" is a good English translation-word that helps us understand the concept. But notice that no magnetism is ever mentioned, the device worked by faith, not science, and no Nephite copies of the thing were ever made. Why should they have been? How could they have been?

Shame on never-Mormons who knowingly perpetuate a lie in order to catch a man in what they suppose a lie, as God Himself warns them not to do! And double-shame on anyone who has known the light of the Gospel but throws it away over such trifles as barley, steel, whatever. How do you feel learning that massive, pre-Columbian iron slag heaps have now been found? Do you feel silly when you realize that your quotation of "an endless number of horses and chariots" from 2nd Nephi, rather than being an anachronism of the New World, is actually a direct quote from the Biblical book of Isaiah, and thus perfectly in place amongst a group of Hebrew emigrants, whether there were an endless number of horses upon the land or not?

There is an LDS chapel somewhere in your city -- you are welcome, or welcome back, next Sunday.

Book of Mormon

2010-01-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

The Book of Mormon is truly a complex, beautiful work of scripture. (Computer programs are not; Blogger has twice deleted this post).

If you intended to start a new religion, you might draw up a list of rules and find support for them in current scripture. You might even dare to claim direct revelation from God and write them down, or publish an edifying book of inspired thoughts. But who would be so insane as to thrust upon the world an entire volume of purported sacred history -- and even worse, make itg more than 500 pages long? Why work so very hard? Joseph Smith could simply have scribbled out the Book of Nephi and called it a day -- why pile upon himself a second Book of Nephi, and a Jacob, and an Alma, and a Helaman, etc? Why such overkill?

The Book of Mormon has withstood more than a century of unabated attack but what puzzles me is that the critics never admit defeat on any point. You will still find websites gloating, for example, about the loss of testimony of the late B.H. Roberts, an LDS General Authority. In truth, that great man kept his belief in the Book of Mormon to his dying day -- whatever unanswered questions about the Book he may have had at some point in his life.

One by one, we find answers for the supposed anachronisms within its pages, but the critics never listen. If the King James version of the Bible can have dragons and unicorns, which any Bible scholar knows are merely English approximations for original Hebrew words that have no connections to mythical beasts, then we can certainly agree that Hebrew immigrants to the New World who found and grew wild American relatives of Old World barley, could call it something that translates to barley in English!

What, for another example, about another howler, houses of cement? Pray tell, if you did not have the word adobe in your vocabulary, as the Prophet Joseph did not, what word would you use to describe a structure made of that material? Moot point, since ancient Native American cement architecture has now been discovered anyway. Acknowledgement by the critics? I hear crickets chirping.

Bad Medicine

2010-01-26T07:14:00.000-08:00

I have on my shelf an old medicine bottle, a 19th-century artifact. Its contents supposedly purified the blood and gave new life to the imbiber.

In the old days, the purveyors of such quackery often had to be quite mobile, ever seeking out fresh, vulnerable prey.

I see the same phenomenon with those sad people whose goal in life is to destroy the LDS Church. Everlastingly, restlessly, they roam the Internet, they drop off pamphlets in classrooms, they seek to shake faith. Everlastingly, they pretend as if their arsenal of cherry-picked old quotes torn from the Journal of Discourses or other obscure writings of the early Restoration prophets, are something new and shocking. Usually, they are utterly silent on whether any attempt at refutation has ever been made of their claims.

What is the result? Most Latter-day Saints ignore them. A few have their faith shaken. Of those, a handful may then move on to some other Christian church. The attackers must hope and pray that the methodology they used to poison the testimony of such people will not in turn, be used by them, in time, against whatever other brand of Christianity they embrace.

Others drop into numbed inactivity or even embrace atheism. What then, has been the gain for Christ?

Council in Heaven

2010-01-10T11:42:00.000-08:00

Unique to the Restoration understanding of the Plan of God is that we, His children, were there! We were those "morning stars" that sang with joy at the day of Creation, as Job wrote. And we were there when our Savior accepted His Father's will to fulfil His role in the Plan.

About the other guy... Satan, the "old dragon" of Revelations 12, never presented a viable alternative in the Premortal Council. We must be clear in our understanding of that. He was not a valid candidate. He was an unauthorized write-in, of sorts, and what he suggested was not a plan but a mutiny.

Adversity

2010-01-09T19:28:00.001-08:00

Some of the ills which beset us in this life, are just part of the mortal experience. The holiest of men and women still suffer aches, pains and sorrows.

Other miseries we bring upon ourselves. These adversities result when we turn from God and pull out from beneath the shelter of His protection. It is then that the consequences of our foolishness can be described as divine chastening.

"Chasten" in Hebrew transliterates to "yacar" and can carry the meaning of not just punishment but instruction. God never lashes out in blind rage as we mortals sometimes do. He wants to teach us, that we might choose to return to Him. As scripture says, He takes no pleasure in our death. Therefore can the Psalmist sing, in great relief:

"The Lord hath chastened me sore but he hath not given me over to death." (Psalms 118:18).

Aaron

2010-01-09T05:33:00.000-08:00

As good a place as any to start, with a topical, alphabetical exploration of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Aaron, brother of Moses. Hebrew, Aharown.

One might say the Restored Gospel brings his name into more prominence than was typical in the rest of Christianity. Other Christians tend to consider the priesthood of Aaron as an Old Testament relic, fulfilled along with the rest of the Law.

But modern revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants goes into some detail about that priesthood and its relevance in the Church. I will treat that priesthood in a separate blog entry.

It is interesting that although the resurrected Moses appeared to Joseph Smith, no mention is made of Aaron having done so.

Aaron and Moses form one of the more positive sibling pairs in the scriptures, as opposed to Jacob and Esau, Joseph ben Israel and his brothers, Nephi and Laman/Lemuel, and Rachel and Leah. A model for Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum.

Got to do better

2010-01-08T20:12:00.000-08:00

I have not given this blog the attention that I need to give it. I resolve to do better.

Today I encountered a horrible anti-Mormon website -- detailed, well-organized, a true labor of hate. I've seen plenty of such sites but this was truly the worst. I resolve, not to emulate in any way such a bitter sowing, certainly never to waste my time and quench the spirit by attacking some particular church, but at least to do a better job of learning about and explaining my faith via this blog. I am thinking of proceeding in some sort of alphabetical order, topically.

Of the ites

2010-01-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

As I was reading scripture today, I had a flash of insight:

There is no such thing as an Israelite. Nor an Ammonite, Canaanite or Geshurite.

At least, not linguistically.

--ite is an English suffix. Not Hebrew.

Odd that I had never realized that before.

The original Hebrew suffix would be in some cases "-i" or, as per the masculine plural ending in Biblical NW Hebrew, -ima.

So there were actually no Book of Mormon Nephites or Lamanites either. They would have called themselves Nephi-i and Laman-i, or Nephima and Lamanima. One LDS apologist has conjectured that the Pima tribe of Native Americans might derive their name from that background.

Little hard to get used to.

The Sin Lists

2009-12-31T16:55:00.000-08:00

As I read slowly through the first chapter of the Book of Alma tonight, I realized that I have hit upon a specific scriptural phenonomen: the sin list.

It would be interesting to catalogue all of these lists from the Book of Mormon, as well as the Bible. To note in which elements they differ, in the order of presentation, etc.

For example, tonight I focused on "envyings and strife," which appears as a pair in each Book of Mormon list that I have studied so far. Strife is of course the natural fruit of envy. An astute Biblical scholar would remember that the writer of the Epistle of James in the Bible, also paired the two. (3:16). More shameless plagiarism by the pretended prophet Joseph Smith? Hardly. The Palmyra farmboy, I have long ago realized, would have to have memorized virtually the entire New Testament, if he were simply attempting to pad his Book of Mormon, so many quotes are similar.

Other explanations present themselves. As he translated, he translated the Hebrew original into the way of speaking English that was familiar to him in connection with sacred things -- the King James structure. And both he and the ancient writers derived their inspiration and their words from the same source, our Father in Heaven.

My grandfather is fond of calling God the greatest scientist in the universe. I like to think that He is also the greatest writer and poet.

The Poetry of Prophecy

2009-11-16T05:22:00.000-08:00

One of the pleasures of spending time with scripture -- real time, making the words and phrases into your friends -- is beginning to recognize the sheer poetic genius of the text.

How would you describe the assault of myriad enemies upon you? What metaphors would you use?

The psalmist (118) compares them to angry bees. (dvrm), surrounding and encirling him (sevev). Anyone who has ever been surrounded by a swarm of bees, or hornets, instantly understands the sheer terror of such an attack -- and that you cannot employ normal weapons to defeat it. The comparison is perfect.

What is the solution? The Psalmist draws his strength from the name of God. And when do we invoke the name of God? In prayer, at baptism, in the Sacrament and when administering a blessing. That is when the power of God scatters the assaults of our spiritual enemies.

Some pie for the cherry pickers

2009-10-11T08:06:00.000-07:00

In a certain discourse relentlessly cherry-picked by critics who attempt to force the late Brigham Young into the same cultural mold that we currently inhabit, rather than allowing him to be a man of his time, flawed and mortal, as all prophets have been, we do find a beautiful quote that those same cherry-pickers consistently ignore.

"All those who have done according to the best of their knowledge, whether they are Christians, Pagans, Jews, Mohammedans, or any other class of men that have ever lived upon the earth, that have done honestly and justly with their fellow-beings, walked uprightly before each other, loved mercy, tried to put down iniquity, and done as far right as they know how, according to the laws they lived under, no matter what the laws were, will share in a resurrection that will be glorious far beyond the conception of mortals."

Journal of Discourses, Vol. 7, p. 288.

Mormon Culture: Arnold Friberg

2009-09-27T06:02:00.000-07:00

Above: Mormon Bids Farewell to a Once Great Nation

Love him or hate him, his work is part of our culture. And I was fascinated to find a painting by this artist on display at Mt. Vernon, home of George Washington.

http://mi.byu.edu/publications/jbms/?vol=10&num=1&id=238

Humbled

2009-09-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

This week, this pathetic, weak, sinful soul was given a precious gift. I was asked to lay my hands upon the head of a young child and pronounce a blessing, by the authority of the priesthood of God.

It was a powerful, humbling experience.

She will be going home from the hospital today, not with the feared syndrome that everyone thought she had, but rather in a state of recovery from a virus.

I don't know what to write. I don't know what to say. Just that this has affected me greatly.

Zion

2009-09-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

ןויצ

Zion.

The Utopia of scripture.

A place, a concept, a passion.

No human utopias have ever survived. Some noble attempts dissolved or faded away. Others began with awful premises and became horrific nightmares, such as the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.

As a student of history, I have read over and over again of people who attempted to create -- if not Utopias -- then at least better societies. They range from the founders of the ancient Roman republic to the sectaries of Qumran, from the Puritans of England to the Icarians who resettled Mormon-bereft Nauvoo. But none of them succeeded in fully extirpating the evils to which humanity is prone: violence, envy, laziness, greed, etc.

Are we doomed to endure such miseries for all time?

The secularist must concede that it is so. Without an omniscient and incorruptible God above, men below will be forever at the mercy of the ruling human guardians that Plato envisioned, who themselves need guardians, who will need guardians, too, an impossible and intolerable conundrum.

The believer remains hopeful. Jews and Christians both long for the coming Messianic Age. Both speak reverently of Zion, the divine Utopia.

Zion is on my mind this week. Zion must begin with me. Zion is all the members of my ward family, too, and, to quote the prophet Brigham Young, "all those who journey with them." (D& C 136)

Not the amassing of wealth, not the trappings of fame, not the sceptre of power, can truly satisfy the human heart and fill the void in our souls. Legion are the miserable rich and famous. I think of Michael Jackson who pined for a lost childhood and couldn't sleep at night. I think of Marilyn Monroe, eye-candy for a generation and mistress of a president, who died a suicide.

Only in building Zion, can anyone find lasting joy.

I will engrave the letters for Zion (ןויצ ) upon my home, and work to engrave them in my heart and do what I can to build it, with what little talent, time and possessions I have, from this time forward.

Septuagint

2009-08-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Eusebius' "History of the Church" and today came across his discussion of Justin Martyr and Trypho. Found it very interesting -- Justin accuses the Jewish religious leaders of "cutting out" passages from the scriptures that referred to the coming Messiah.

What passages? Apparently a few from Ezra and Jeremiah and also from the Psalms.

What is his evidence? That these passages still can be found in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew (Masoretic) text.

I wonder, if these passages are still not included in the modern Christian Bibles, what that does for those who believe in Inerrancy?

I have been aware for awhile of the nature and history of the Septuagint. Now I realize that I need to include it in my own library, as a student of scripture.

The LDS-authored notes accompanying my copy of the KJV (p. 622) assert, after all, that "[Septuagint manuscripts] in some cases have no doubt preserved older and truer readings."

A point of interest: that men have cut out passages from the Bible is LDS doctrine. However, the Book of Mormon lays the blame, not upon the Jews, but upon the Gentiles.

"...The book that thou beholdest is a record of the Jews ... and when it proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord ... wherefore, these things go forth from the Jews in purity unto the Gentiles ... and after they go forth by the hand of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, from the Jews unto the Gentiles, thou seest the formation of the great and abominable church ... after the book hath gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God." 1 Nephi 13: 23-28.

Diagnosis or autopsy?

2009-07-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

"In describing the situation at that time Hegesippus goes on to say that until then the Church had remained a virgin, pure and uncorrupted, since those who were trying to corrupt the wholesome standard of the saving message,if such there were, lurked somewhere under cover of darkness.

"But when the sacred band of the apostles had in various ways reached the end of their life, and the generation of those privileged to listen with their own ears to the divine wisdom had passed on, then godless error began to take shape, through the deceit of false teachers, who now that none of the apostles was left threw off the mask and attempted to counter the preaching of the truth by preaching the knowledge falsely so called." -- Eusebius, History of the Church,3:33, written circa 300 A.D.

Eusebius clearly believed that this evil was snuffed out and that the Christianity of his day had triumphed over that campaign of falsehood and apostasy. But every man must judge for himself. In 300 A.D., the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, all lay in the future -- the Church had barely tasted of the temporal power that it would hold for the next 1,000 years.

What were some of the key tenets of the "knowledge falsely so called," Christian-speak for gnosticism?

An incorporeal, unapproachable, incomprehensible God.

De-emphasis -- even abhorrence -- of marriage and family life.

Denial of any literal resurrection.

Judge for yourself how many of these notions made their way into the post-apostolic Christianity.

I first encountered this quote by Eusebius in Nibley, Mormonism and Early Christianity, p. 132, where Nibley states:

"This outbreak of gnostic pretenders ... never could have occurred had apostolic authority remained in the church to overawe the upstarts, or had the true "gnosis" been available to oppose their false ones."

Ultimately, are Eusebius' words the diagnosis of past disease that he intended them to be, or a page for the coroner's report?

What's in a name?

2009-07-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

It started with the unusual name: Holy Ghost Living Tabernacle.

Please note: I myself am a member of a church with an odd name – I saw firsthand as a missionary the challenge of translating the title The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into a non-English language – so I am not in any way making fun.

The Holy Ghost Living Tabernacle in McKenney, Virginia is doing a great thing for the school district where I work, and in the process of trying to establish communication with that faith group, I became curious: Was it a new, stand-alone Christian movement, or part of a larger church family?

I’m getting pretty Internet savvy and was quite pleased to untangle the mystery in less than 20 minutes. My initial guess that this congregation were Pentacostals was wrong – but not quite.
The church is in fellowship with the Full Gospel Baptist Church, which consider themselves Baptists of course, but who specifically embrace the kind of charismatic expression more typically seen in Pentacostal congregations.

Their motto is “Giving Baptists Freedom of Choice.”

Bezaleel

2009-07-12T18:38:00.000-07:00

We talk a lot about the Tabernacle of Israel, and the ark at its holy center. But far less familiar to us is the ancient craftsman who was called to put it together, Bezaleel son of Uri.

How I would love to have a conversation, someday, on the other side of the veil, with this man of whom the scripture says, "[God] hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship." (Exodus 35:31).

His name has powerful significance, too. It is rendered by the KJV from the Hebrew Be-tsal-el, which means "In-the shadow/protection-of God."

"Tsl" has the meaning of shadow, the symbolism of protection, and also can mean "image." It is virtually the same phrase that appears in Genesis 1:27, in the Creation Story, "In the image of God created He [man]."

So in effect, each time this man's name was called, a piece of the Creation Story was retold, quite fitting for a man whom God blessed with powerful talents of creation himself.

Psalms 118:8

2009-07-10T19:12:00.000-07:00

"It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man."

"Trust" is a fine word. But the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh translation prefers the literal meaning of the Hebrew word thusly translated by the KJV: "take refuge in." (chasa)

I like that better as well. "Trust" can be two people at the same level making an exchange, two businessmen shaking hands. "Take refuge in" implies a certain level of need and humility.

Motormouth Nephi

2009-07-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

I came across an odd passage in the Doctrine & Covenants tonight. In the middle of a "missionary chapter," Section 33, v. 8, Elders Thayre and Sweet are told to "open their mouths and they shall be filled and you shall become even as Nephi of old..."

Now Nephi was a great guy and all but he never served a formal mission. So what are we supposed to understand from this?

Fact is, he spent his life sharing the gospel among his family and friends, and the cross reference to 2 Nephi 1:27 answers my question. He opened his mouth, it was filled by the Spirit and "he could not shut it."

Such was the promise for Thayre and Sweet, or any missionary filled with the Spirit. They followed in the footsteps of Jeremiah, who so burned with the zeal of the Spirit that it was "as a fire shut up in his bones and he could not forbear. (Jer. 20:29)."

Happy Birthday, Brother Brigham!

2009-06-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

Brigham Young, the second prophet of the Restoration, was born today in 1801, in Vermont, the ninth of eleven children.

He was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 15, 1832, a cold, snowy day. A few days before that, he recalled:

"According to the words of the Savior, I felt a humble, child-like spirit, witnessing unto me that my sins were forgiven."

Every prophet is called by God with gifts of the Spirit that are needed for his era. Thus with Brigham Young, too, whose leadership and courage were vital to the settlement of the Mountain West -- not just Utah, but settlements, too, in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada and beyond.

Blog of the week

2009-04-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

Check this one out:

http://whatmormonslike.blogspot.com

Temple

2009-04-15T18:43:00.000-07:00

The cool rain fell on my face as I looked up at the elegant marble building before me. The hot car engine pinged beneath its hood, protesting the punishing drive that had brought me here, through some of the worst traffic in the United States.

We were at the temple, my dear wife and I, after too long away.

The sacred, the ceremonial, is nearly extinct in the modern world. The temple preserves it.

Someday, our Virginia will have a temple and no longer will we have to endure the D.C. Beltway drive nor set aside an entire day for such a trip.

Holy to the Lord is the House of the Lord, a place of simplicity, a place of peace, a place where heaven and earth meet.

If only the Bible ended on page 5

2009-02-01T17:01:00.000-08:00

If only Moses had put down his pen in the middle of Genesis, Chapter 3!

After all, the Creation story had been told and the Fall, too, of mankind. The enemy of righteousness had even been introduced. What more was there to say?

Surprisingly, I fail to find a single sect anywhere that would take that drastic a set of scissors to the scriptures, although most of religious history has been a dreary tale of people trying to tell God that He could no longer add to His word, drawing lines in the scriptural sand that they forbid Him to cross.

If the Bible ended in Genesis 3, circa verse 13, then the critics of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ might indeed have a valid point when they attack the doctrine of humanity's birthright as children of a Heavenly Father, our destiny, through the grace of His Son, to become like Him.

You see, page one of the Anti-Mormon Handbook generally goes something like this:

"Satan told Eve that if she ate of the forbidden fruit, then she would become like God, knowing good from evil. This was a lie, the Big Lie -- and those wicked Mormons are deluded by it, too."

Unfortunately for the critics of the doctrine of theosis, the Bible doesn't end with Satan's sneaky little speech. And, in fact, it is God Himself, in verse 22, who throws a wrench in their gears.

For God Himself declares: "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil."

Is this still the Big Lie? Obviously not.

If Satan never told a truth, or mixed truth with lies, he would be far less convincing. His very important omission, in his words to Eve, was that even though knowing good from evil is indeed the first step to becoming like God, a lot more is involved in order for us to get there. Important things like repentance, obedience, ordinances and the grace of Christ. Hence, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden that they might not eat of the fruit of the tree of life without having done any of the above. Immortal beings they would indeed have become, but cut off from God, spiritually still-born.

We are indeed the offspring of God, as Paul declared. And someday we may see Him and be like Him and inherit everything that He has, as joint-heirs with Christ, as the New Testament teaches repeatedly.

Prosperity, continued

2009-01-25T08:29:00.000-08:00

The late Hugh Nibley, in examining Egyptian papyri concerned with the exaltation of the soul, draws attention to the formula by which royalty is addressed: Health, Life, Prosperity! This formula is also pronounced just before the candidate for exaltation enters the celestial realm, according to the ancient Egyptian Book of Breathings.

But "wd3" ( the transliteration of the word rendered "prosperity") like the Hebrew tsalach I mentioned in a previous post, is more expansive than the English equivalent. It carries the idea of making vigorous, even of all nature flourishing. (Cf. Nibley, Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, p. 358.)

So how does this all tie together? A righteous people, a people of God, are even a royal priesthood, as we are reminded in I Peter 2, and all nature flourishes under their care, is in harmony with them, as it was in the days of Enoch and as it is in the Master's hands.

Done with Gnosticism!

2009-01-20T11:52:00.000-08:00

I have finished.

I can safely say, that the Nag Hammadi Library was the most difficult canon of literature that I have ever read.

Its often fragmentary nature didn't help.

I found myself saying, over and over again as I tried to comprehend notions of Yaldabaoth and Sophia and Barbelo; of aeons and demiurges and First Thoughts and Second Thoughts -- how could anyone make sense of this stuff? Even the Apostle Paul at his most complex, does not approach these writings in obscurity.

And yet, make sense of it many people apparently did. Gnosticism was enough of a threat to the early Christian Church as to occupy some of its best minds in the battle against it.

Gnosticism approached the problem of evil in the world by deciding that the so-called God of the Old Testament was an inferior, lower being who acted out of ignorance at best, malice at worst. Some strains of Gnosticism continued this line of thought with a blacklist of a number of Biblical personages hailed as heroes by orthodox Christianity, even Jesus Christ; and to call Biblical acts of godly vengeance against evil (the Flood, the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah) attacks of evil against good.

The true Supreme Being remained esconced in an unapproachable, celestial pleroma and was utterly indescribable and beyond comprehension.

My thought on that would be, that this approach doesn't solve the problem of evil, it just pushes the question to another level: So the God we thought we knew is not really deserving of the title and it is to a higher God that we must look for perfection and to whom the question must be posed: Why did You allow evil in the world if You are perfect? But of course, that God, in the Gnostic mindset, wouldn't answer. He is, in their words, a non-being.

It will be interesting to discover, as I continue to read in Christian history, how much of his Gnostic (aka Manichaean) baggage St. Augustine carried with him into the Christian Church of his day.

On prosperity

2009-01-08T19:05:00.000-08:00

Is it naive to believe that a godly life will be a prosperous life?

No, it is not. It is not necessarily the key to heaping sacks of cash in your bank vault, but the godly life is one of order, honesty and diligence -- recognizable attributes for success. In fact, Stephen Covey, in his famous Seven Habits of Successful People, reminds us that lasting success depends upon such deep-rooted character.

The orderly, compassionate, diligent people of the Church described in Alma 1:31, prospered, far more than those who wasted their time and energy in character assassination, disorder and vice.

Of interest: the Hebrew word for "prosper," transliterated tsalach, literally means "to push forward."

So, remembering 2 Nephi 3 and the hymn based upon it, if we as Saints "press forward," we, with God's help, will also "push forward."

A residency question

2009-01-06T06:42:00.000-08:00

If God resides at a point within the universe, such that Abraham could be pointed in its general direction (the vicinity of Kolob), then where did He reside when the universe was compressed into the tiny speck from which the universe is believed to have exploded in the Big Bang?

Obviously, neither Kolob nor any other star or planet in our universe was in existence at that time.

It is entirely possible that there are universes beyond our universe and that our God took his place within ours at that time, in the great plan of Eternal Progression.

The Psalms and the Book of Mormon

2008-12-29T18:31:00.000-08:00

I have been reading through the Psalms for some time now, and it is fascinating, and entirely reasonable, that a careful reading of them turns up many similarities to the early chapters of the Book of Mormon. They are of the same milieu, after all.

Last night, I noticed something in Psalms 118.

Some translations (including, very disappointingly, the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh [aka the Hebrew Bible]) obscure the idiom that the King James Version preserves.

Namely, the psalmist writes:

"I called on the Lord in distress: the Lord answered me and set me in a large place."

The original word is rechab, which translates as broad or large.

Out of the confines of difficulty, the Lord brings the penitent into the open spaces of freedom. One familiar with the desert thinks easily of its narrow and dangerous canyons, difficult in many cases to escape.

And the Book of Mormon prophet Lehi reports in his vision a strikingly similar scene (1 Nephi 8:8-9):

"And after I had traveled for the space of many hours in darkness, I began to pray unto the Lord that he would have mercy on me ... And it came to pass that after I had prayed unto the Lord, I beheld a large and spacious field ..."

The Book of Mormon as art

2008-11-30T20:07:00.000-08:00

Mark Twain, perhaps disappointed that the Book of Mormon wasn't written for laughs, called it chloroform in print.

Brodie said it sprung from a boy's imagination, overflowing "like a spring freshet."

And yet, it continues to inspire the humble in heart, from the slums of London to the cantons of Switzerland, from the Hungarian Alfold to the heartland of America.

Now I read of Robert and Georgia Buchet, who have dedicated years of their lives and an amazing amount of labor to rendering one portion of the Book, The Allegory of the Olive Tree, Jacob 5, at a level that is nothing less than exquisite.

From BYU Today:

All of the paper is handmade, watermarked with an olive branch and bound in either olive wood or silk and leather. The Bucherts made 50 copies, taking years to delicately hand paint each image. The paints are made from precious stones. Each letter of type was handset and the first letter on the first page is gilded with 24-karat gold.

Their work won the 2008 J. Carl Hertzog Book Design Award.

Gnosticism

2008-10-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

In my wanderings through literature, I have recently paused to study Gnosticism for a while. I have read some of the early Christian writings which attacked it, so now I want to examine the other side.

I am not one of those credulous folk who got caught up in the recent Gospel of Judas hoopla. I have been a student of pseudepigraphical writings for more than a decade.

It is intriguing to compare the positions of Gnosticism with some of the developments in the LDS faith. It is not possible, as some half-wit critic might suggest, that the Prophet Joseph borrowed ideas from Gnosticism, since, aside from fragments, almost nothing of their writings was extant until the Nag Hammadi library was unearthed in the 1940s.

So any similarities are either coincidental, glimmers of original truth that "orthodox" Christianity later lost, or perhaps represent decisions that every religion must make.

Nothing trumps the testimony of the Holy Spirit to truth, in LDS experience. For Gnostics, the ultimate experience was a mystical sort of enlightenment -- and both fight the perceptions of critics that it's all about warm fuzzy feelings or even hallucinations. The LDS Church, however, combines the testimony of the written Word and the promptings of the Spirit, as the ultimate guide to truth. All churches must choose what will be their authority: sola scriptura or the baptism of fire. Some go one way, some the other, some, as we do, combine the two.

Original but garbled truth may lie somewhere in the Gnostic considerations of a Heavenly Mother.

Original but garbled truth may lie somewhere in the Gnostic considerations of a structured heaven and certain steps taken to get there which I will not discuss here.

The early LDS Church seemed to be a movement, like the Quakers, in which all could receive equally valid revelation, whether apostle, prophet or candlestick maker. But such a society could quickly get out of hand, with competing and contradictory revelations cropping up. It came to a head with Hiram Page, after which the Lord revealed His pattern of revelatory order. Revelation would continue -- a path long ago rejected by "orthodox Christianity" when the same dillema was faced --but only in each person's allotted sphere: the prophet for the whole Church; a father for his family, etc.

Finally, it is fascinating that in the Gnostic Gospel of Peter, that Apostle is told by the Lord to place his hand over his eyes and only then does he truly "see." Compare this to the account of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price, when the Lord places His hand over Abraham's eyes, after which that one truly sees, all the cosmic works of God. (Abraham 3:12). This bears some similarities to the account in Mark 8 of Jesus healing the blind man, but the latter account is purely a healing, not a doorway into spiritual visions.

Belloc, continued

2008-10-06T03:14:00.000-07:00

What would this great Catholic thinker have said about Mormonism?

It is a puzzle that he devotes not one word in his "Great Heresies" to our faith. Granted, in the 1930s, we were still a small body, a drop in the world's religious ocean. Still, some aspects of our faith ought to have intrigued him.

Namely, we were unique among the many churches that arose in the Protestant milieu - we were a heresy within the Protestant heresy, he would have said -- in consciously becoming more like the Mother Church of Rome, rather than less. This flies in the face of the law of religious entropy.

Not councils of presybters, not a priesthood of all believers, but rather one man was to be Christ's representative on Earth -- our Prophet rather than a Pope.

A specific line of priesthood authority traceable to very Peter himself, not a mystical "calling," was to be rigidly required in order to administer in the ordinances of the church.

The word of the Prophet would be on a par with the canonized scriptures. As opposed to Sola Scriptura.

We would reclaim the office of bishop -- anethma to many 19th century Protestants. Indeed, some in the early LDS Church were quite concerned when this was done.

And we give consideration to a Divine Mother.

The point should not be carried too far, but our missionaries -- rigidly celibate, cutting themselves off from any worldly books and music or other such entertainment -- also live much like monks, albeit in the world, not in a cloistre.

Arianism

2008-10-05T07:44:00.000-07:00

Ducking into a bookstore out of the sunshine at a festival yesterday, I found a wonderful old book by the late Hilaire Belloc, entitled "The Great Heresies."

Published in 1938, it remains astonishly relevant to our time, as Belloc virtually prophesies that the Islamic world, hardly a concern to the West in those days, might very well become an issue again; and that the great Protestant movement, though then dying, might see a rebirth as well -- which is to some degree beginning to happen as fervent Christians from Europe's former colonies now seek to convert the urbane and materialistic great grandchildren of the missionaries who once brought them their faith.

The first great heresy that Belloc examines, is Arianism.

That is intriguing because Mormons are sometimes accused of being modern Arians.

The Arian ideas were that Jesus was not God but man and that Jesus was a created being.

Although I am still studying out these concepts and am certainly no philosophic expert, I know that Mormons absolutely believe that Jesus is God -- in fact, we proclaim that He was Jehovah of the Old Testament. And though we may believe that the Father created His spirit body as well as His physical body (the latter being a point obviously accepted by "mainstream" Christianity, we also say that He has always been, that something of His nature is Uncreate.

So we are not Arians.

In fact, the whole Catholic vs. Arian quarrel comes about precisely because Catholicism inherited from the chaos of the Great Apostasy the apostate rejection of the igospel principle that God and man are the same species, even though such a doctrine is very much at home in the New Testament.

We mortals are simply at a much earlier stage in our development than our Father and the Savior are, and we are flawed and imperfect, though commanded by Him to become perfect. We are only different in the sense that a baby is different from its earthly Father, not in the sense that a worm is different than an orchid -- and also that Christ passed through His mortality without ever yielding to sin. Presumably, the Father did so as well.

Were that to have been understood and believed, the whole argument underpinning the Catholic vs. Arian debate would have been moot.

Back to Belloc: He makes another great point: the religious beliefs of a people shape their entire societal outlook. This is why he states that the study of heresy remains so important: a Protestant-based society will of necessity always be very different from a Catholic-based or a Muslim society.

When a heresy takes control, it changes the outlook of a society. Arianism, he said, appealed to those in the Roman world who wanted to see Catholicism weakened, who feared or resented Catholicism's cohesive structure and the social revolution that it was bringing about. It also appealed to those who considered themselves socially superior to the great masses of persons in the Empire. Thus its adherents were many of the nobility as well as virtually the entire army.

I hope that I have not mangled Belloc's conclusions too badly. I may come back and refine this rather hasty post.

Based on his theory, a Christian world in which Arianism had triumphed rather than Catholic Christianity, would have been an entirely different society.

That brings to my Mormon mind the story of the Zoramites, from the Book of Mormon. They were not godless folk. They were heretics -- devout elitists who overtly denied the divinity of Christ. Very much in the Arian spirit -- and the kind of society that they created in their sphere of influence seems to be exactly what Belloc suggested that Old World Christianity would have become had Arianism triumphed there.

My last thought: it would be interesting to study the kind of society that develops from a Mormon worldview, whether one believes as Belloc no doubt did that Mormonism is a heresy, or whether one accepts the claims of the Church that it is the restoration of the original Christian Church.

How do our distinctive beliefs affect our outlook?

Can such a study, however, even be made with a Church that is so aggressively a proselyter amongst other Christians? In other words, with so much of our membership becoming composed of people who were born and raised in another Christian tradition, with another outlook, would such a study be impossible to scientifically carry out? Would it have to be limited only to some small, isolated Utah hamlets?

Where God is

2008-09-28T16:32:00.000-07:00

Among the singular claims made by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that God dwells within our universe, not beyond it.

Perhaps that is hard doctrine for some. But, as Jesus once asked his disciples when some grumbled about His hard doctrine and left, "Wilt thou also go away?"

To believe that heaven exists within our universe does not change the omnipotence or the omniscience of God.

I have begun to read a little book entitled the Kolob Theorom, by LDS author Dr. Lynn Hilton. He goes so far as to assert - and is careful to note that he alone is responsible for his opinion -- that the dwelling place of God, Elohim, is in the center of our galaxy, a region of blazing stars that our probing technology has not been able to penetrate.

Perhaps.

The concept of space, with its billions of stars and its unfathomable distances between them, and even the possibility of infinite worlds, is very exciting to me.

Of Clement

2008-09-07T19:12:00.000-07:00

I have been reading this weekend the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians.

It dates to about 90 AD and many scholars believe that it is older than the canonical Gospels of the New Testament. Scholars also believe, although he never names himself as the author, that it is the genuine work of Clement, third bishop of Rome.

It was accepted as scripture by several of the Eastern Christian churches, though it is not included in the canon today.

It has stimulated me to some thoughts: firstly, that as a Christian, I owe a great debt to these early Christians of Corinth and other branches of the Church. The persecutions they endured are unspeakable.

From a cursory bit of Internet research, I gather that there is no "Mormon" ward in Corinth (Korinthos) today; the reception of the people in modern Greece to the message of the LDS church is as resistant and rocky as the ground beneath their feet.

http://www.mormonstoday.com/010525/N1GreeceMissionaries02.shtml

Something in me sorrows to read that; the same way that I sorrow to know that most of the progeny of the late Joseph Smith Jr., prophet of the Restoration, are not members of the Church that he restored.

But it is also sorrowful, to me, that I am nearly 40 years old and just discovering Clement for the first time. Are not the life and writings of this man just as important as that of Alma, or of Parley P. Pratt? I don't think even the most dogmatic of Latter-day Saints believe that the early Christian Church had fallen into complete apostasy that early in the era -- 90 A.D.

Clement was a brother in the faith, an exemplary brother. Whether I am Mormon or Baptist or Roman Catholic, he and others of his era are, or ought to be, part of my Christian heritage.

So maybe I won't light a candle on November 23, his feast day. But I will certainly think about him and re-read his impassioned letter, still ringing with conviction nearly 2,000 years later.

Astounding Claims

2008-08-31T19:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight I studied 1st John, which epistle launches with a sober yet astounding claim:

Its author, traditionally John the Apostle, declares without equivocation, that he has seen, heard and touched the Word of Life, even Jesus Christ.

This was not the typical literature being published in the 1st century A.D. The bestsellers of the day were more likely to speak of ancient myths in which no educated person still believed; of philosophy, such as the Stoicism of Epictetus; or of the natural sciences, such as the writings of Pliny or Strabo.

Christianity was completely out of step with the jaded, materialistic, oh-so-modern temper of the times, and was most unwelcome.

1,800 years later, in a veritable age of railways, as the late Dickens dismissively noted, a New York farmboy had the audacity to relaunch Christianity with all its original fervor, miracles and bold doctrines. He would even dare to announce that he had personally seen the Father and the Son, as well as a host of other notables that some of the learned Christians in his society had dismissed as mere myths, such as Moses and Elijah; and others whom the skeptics of the day might agree had once lived but were long vanished from the universe: John the Baptist and Paul, for example.

He would declare even that the Apostle John had never tasted of death but had received the call from the Lord to walk the earth and minister until He saw fit to call him back.

Which claim would surely lead to the consideration that John is no stranger to the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City and might even have a desk there.

A question

2008-08-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

Jesus identified Himself clearly in the New Testament as I Am, which any Jew of the time knew meant Jehovah. Therefore, they took up stones to execute Him for blasphemy.

So a question to believers in the Trinity: How can Jesus be God but not the Heavenly Father if God the Heavenly Father is Jehovah -- I Am -- but not Jesus?

Chains and cords

2008-08-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

I noticed a few weeks ago the similarities, in words and tone, between Psalms 116, in the Bible, and Alma 36, in the Book of Mormon.

It is quite possibly that the author of Alma 36, being of Hebrew derivation, knew and loved this psalm, though it is not as familiar as others to our modern ears.

Psalms 116: 3-4, 16:

"The sorrows of death compassed me,
and the pains of hell gat hold upon me:
I found trouble and sorrow.

Then called I upon the name of the Lord;
O Lord, I beseech thee,
deliver my soul

...Oh Lord, thou hast loosed my bonds."

Alma 36: 18:

"... I cried within my heart:
O Jesus, thou Son of God
have mercy on me,
who am in the gall of bitterness
and am encircled about
by the everlasting chains of death ...

In my study of the Hebrew Tanakh today, I learned that the word, (chbl) translated "sorrows" in this Psalm can also be translated as "bonds" or "cords." The authors of the King James Version preferred to stick with "sorrows" but the authors of the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh use "bonds," which runs a clearer thread of continuity through the psalm. The bonds (chbl) mentioned at the beginning are released at the end.

The latter translation also more closely matches Alma's psalm, he who had found himself encircled about by the everlasting chains of death. True, "chains" (ziyqah) is a different word from cords or bonds, yet easily a synonym.

Alphabet, Word, Creation

2008-08-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

A Jewish associate of mine on another website reports that the first sentence of the Bible – bereshit bara elohim shamayim eretz – actually is a little bit grammatically more complex than that. It requires an “et” before shamayim (heavens).

“ET is a word that is not translatable into English. It is like a marker that says - "a definite direct object is next." Thus there needs to be an ET before THE heavens and THE earth. If there was no the, there would not need to be an ET, but there is a deeper meaning. ET is spelled - Aleph Tav. And Aleph Tav is an abbreviation for the Aleph -BET. Aleph is the first letter of the ALPHABET and Tav the last. So in a beginning God created the ALPHA-BET. And God did this before creating the heavens and the earth. God used the letters, the building blocks, to create the world.”

Could John have had this very concept in mind when he spoke of Logos, The Word, which was with God and was God? When you create Alphabet, you create Word. And it seems to connect as well with the Savior’s statement that He is Alpha and Omega, the Greek equivalent of Aleph-Tav, the beginning and the end.

Time

2008-08-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

"And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days, and years."

-- Genesis 1:14

The ancient Hebrews did not reckon time by minutes or by hours, according to Mary Ellen Chase's classic work, Life and Language in the Old Testament. The word "hour" does not appear in the Old Testament, except for one instance in the late Book of Daniel, and was not part of the Hebrew lexicon.

Even the Hebrew word "mowed," translated as "seasons" above , does not match our modern conception of the word: spring, summer, etc., but is far more indefinite.

"When the ancient Hebrew writer told of events in the past, he did not remember them as we do in the light of the present but instead took himself back into their time, real and living, if indefinite to him. His time knew no perceptible beginning or end, no clearly defined past, no circumscribed present and no discernible future except that in the Infinite Mind of God," Chase writes.

[Thus the famous KJV, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,' betrays the mindset of the 17th century English translators, and some versions of the scripture opt instead for, 'When God began to create ...']

Chase quotes the late Willa Cather: "This same dreamy indefiniteness, belonging to a people without any of the relentless mechanical gear which directs every moment of modern life ... we are among a shepherd people; the story has almost the movement of grazing sheep."

I am reminded of the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob, a Hebrew, who wrote: "Our lives passed away as a dream ..."(Jacob 7:26).

The word "hour," I have also discovered, appears only once in the Book of Mormon, which was the product of a Hebrew people. That single reference is quite vague, referring to the coming of the Messiah, not time on a clock. The original word translated hour could easily have been the Hebrew"mowed." [Ed. update: "hours" in the plural appears once as well, in Lehi's dream, 1 Nephi 8., i.e., he traveled for many hours in darkness -- again a very vague concept]

Yet, in the Doctrine and Covenants, a modern work of scripture, "hour" makes frequent appearances, as it also does in the New Testament, written in a different era than the Old Testament.

But of course Old Joe Smith, that pretended prophet, just got lucky once again.

Shamayim

2008-07-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

Word number four in the Hebrew Bible: Shamayim, translated "heavens."

From a root meaning lofty.

In the Satires of Juvenal, a Roman work of the 1st Century AD, Juvenal speaks of Jews worshipping the numen of the heavens. In the footnote to my edition of the Satires, by Dr. Peter Green, numen is suggested as the translation of shamayim, and Dr. Green suggests that shemayim is one of the alternate names of God in Jewish tradition, to avoid pronouncing His actual name.

Is shamayim then a synonym for Great Mind or did Dr. Green confuse the term with HaShem, another alternate name for God?

I have put the question to a Jewish webgroup of which I am a member and have not yet received a response.

From whence we came ...

2008-07-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

The idea that we came from heaven to this earth is instinctively felt and cherished by many in Christianity though their clergy officially revile it.

The pre-Earth existence -- not reincarnation but simply the idea that we once lived as spirits with God our Father and now live here, clothed in mortal flesh -- is one of the beautiful doctrines explained in the restoration of the Gospel.

While reading in 1st John the other day, I came across this exquisite verse:

"I write unto you, little children, because ye have known the Father."

If we did not once live, as conscious, sentient beings, with our Heavenly Father, what could this verse possibly mean?

Bibliolatry

2008-07-23T06:41:00.000-07:00

Some people are very disturbed by one of the Articles of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, namely:

"We believe the Bible to be the word of God, as far as it is translated correctly." (The Article continues with: "We also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God." That will be the subject of another discussion.)

Why should this be a problem? Should Christians be bound to believe that an incorrectly translated passage in the Bible is still the word of God? That's rather scary, to me. I cannot believe that every person in the world who takes up the job of translating the Bible is inspired or infallible. Some make glaring errors, such as the infamous edition which left out a very important "not" from the "thou shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments.

The above statement and common sense also proves that it IS possible to incorrectly translate the Bible. In fact, critics of the Prophet Joseph Smith routinely accuse him of having done so himself.

I love the Bible. I read it as often as I can. I firmly believe that it is inspired of God. I also believe that it does contain some errors suffered in the many thousands of years that it passed through the hands of man, but that those errors are few and that the Book remains Scripture.

Check out this very good, non-LDS essay on the whole concept of Bibliolatry -- worshipping the Bible. http://www.newreformation.org/heresy3.htm

A question of perspective

2008-07-20T19:31:00.000-07:00

Psalms 116: 15: is translated in some cases: "Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints/holy ones;" elsewhere, as in the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, "Grievous in the eyes of the Lord ..."

The word in question is yakar, dear or expensive. Is the word in this context better understood as a great loss, therefore grievous, or as something valuable, therefore precious, as in these holy ones die in God and are taken to Him?

More Hebrew word-play?

2008-07-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

In Alma, chapter 1, in the Book of Mormon, covering events circa 90 B.C., the abridger Mormon describes the organization of the congregation of the righteous -- their shul, I suppose.

He lays emphasis on the priests imparting the "word" of God. Word in Hebrew is "dabar." And what was the effect of imparting that word? They did establish the "affairs" of the church. "Affairs, " as in business, not infidelity, is a rare word in scripture. It shows up only a handful of times. One of those times is in Psalms 112:5, which very passage Mormon seems to have had in mind. For the psalmist talks about a good man handling his affairs with discretion -- and being generous, lending to those in need.

Which is exactly what Mormon says that Nephite congregation did. (cf. Alma 1: 27).

Strong's Concordance of the Bible informs us that "affair" in Hebrew is "dabar," too, perhaps because business involves words.

So we have two instances of dabar, one leading to the other: imparting the dabar of God ... leads to the establishment of the dabar of the church.

Iran

2008-07-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

This month's National Geographic features Iran, and in a few minutes, I am going to sit down and enjoy reading it.

Iran -- such a puzzle of a country! To many minds today, the word evokes a shudder. Yet, by its ancient name, Persia, the most romantic of imagery is conjured up: Persian rugs, Persian cats, etc.

To the ancient West, Persia was the perennial enemy -- whether the Evil Empire that threatened heroic Greece, the land of the once Great King who fell to Alexander the Great, or the Parthians who frustrated Roman advancement into the East.

Ironically, when the West embraced Christianity, it embraced a book which portrayed a completely different Persia. To the Jews before the Common Era, Persia was a benevolent master, much preferred to the horrible Babylonians that came before. Cyrus, king of Persia, may have been a hiss and a byword to the Athenians but the Bible venerates him. And the Jews had far more trouble from the Hellenizing legions of Alexander than they ever did from the Persians.

Yet this very land of Persia, today's Iran, has to be modern Israel's greatest nightmare.

In the image of God

2008-07-06T17:50:00.000-07:00

We look like God.

Does that bother you?

It shouldn't.

Genesis says that we are created in His image. The Apostle Paul boldly declared that we are His offspring.

Of course, as mortals, we are but pale shadows of His perfect and eternal image. No man can look upon His glory and live -- unless transfigured, strengthened as it were for the purposes of God. He which is of God, he hath seen the Father ...

Does Genesis refer only to a spiritual image, personality or something non-physical? Not likely. The Hebrew word is tselem, and it is used elsewhere in scripture to refer to the carved idols that pagans made which they believed to be the very likenesses of their gods. It does not have reference to some airy allegory.

The Bible, word by word, continued

2008-07-06T17:40:00.000-07:00

The third word in the Tanakh is Elohim, bereshit bara Elohim. It is always translated God, and therefore perhaps the mystery surrounding the word is appropriate.

For, literally, in the Hebrew, Elohim should be translated "Gods." Plural. eloh + im. But nobody does that, not even the Mormons, accused though we are of polytheism. We designate Elohim as the sacred, personal name of the Father, who is one Being, as differentiated from Jehovah, the Son.

I am told that Allah of the Muslims derives from the same root, without that puzzling pluralization.

Perhaps a secularist would resolve the mystery by deciding that the early Hebrews were polytheists and Elohim is a leftover from that distant age, preserved like literary amber in the text of the Tanakh by the reluctance of later scribes to alter the ancient wording.

Outnumbered?

2008-07-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

I visited some pathetic anti-Mormon site the other day that practically cackled in glee to announce that more anti than pro Mormon sites and blogs exist on the Internet. This, the writer exulted, signals the beginning of the decline of the Church.

Balderdash.

The Church has always been outnumbered. A hundred years ago, far more printing presses cranked out attack literature about the Church than ever anything positive. And yet, the Church survived.

Creation

2008-06-22T11:41:00.000-07:00

The second word in the Bible transliterates to "bara."

Create, in English.

Bereshit bara. When/in the beginning [God] created ...

The footnote to my LDS version provides also the synonyms "shaped" and "fashioned."

Those would be more conducive to the LDS concept of "bara" being carried out with pre-existent matter, not "ex nihilo."

I'm no expert on the whole ex nihilo (from nothing) doctrine or why "traditional Christianity" weds itself so tightly to the notion.

Richard Hopkins, How Greek Philosophy Corrupted the Christian Concept of God, finds no direct Biblical support for ex nihilo. (p. 290).

Ex nihilo is a purely Platonic concept, based on the idea that the universe was created from illusory matter having no being. (p. 295).

In the Hebrew ...

2008-06-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

For about two years now, painstakingly, I have been trying to learn Hebrew, to understand the Tanakh (the "Old Testament") in the original tongue.

It has not been easy, of course. No language ever is. But I am enjoying the process.

Of course, the Bible begins with a beginning, the famous "In the beginning."

Transliterates to "bereshit." I'd love to reproduce the letters here but blogger doesn't seem to have the Hebrew font.

In his own studies of Hebrew, the Prophet Joseph Smith at one point suggested that the "be" was unnecessary and that the "resh" or "rosh" meant "head," as in head God, which he expanded to "the head God of the Gods brought forth/called together the Gods."

However, he never offered up this suggestion to be canonized as revelation and in the parallel accounts in the Pearl of Great Price, the closest to it is this:

Abraham 4:1: At the beginning, they, the Gods organized/formed the earth.

The JPS Tanakh translates "bereshit" as "When [God] began ..."

Strong's Concordance seems to agree with the Prophet at least as far as in deriving "bereshit" from "rosh," to which the "be" is a prefix.

Linguistics aside, it is when we consider the concept of time, beginnings and endings, that we become most conscious of our mortal state, even of our nothingness in this vast universe. We can dam up the biggest rivers on the planet. We can prevent polio. We can walk on the moon. But no man can call back one measly minute of time or speed it forward or hold to life after the sands of his hourglass have run out.

Look out upon the vast universe and contemplate how long it would take even the fastest spacecraft simply to reach the nearest star to our own.

Consider that paradox that Einstein suggested about the twin who hypothetically travels at the speed of light somewhere into space and comes back to find that on Earth, a completely different measure of time has elapsed.

Bereshit. The beginning. Before which was nothing but God, in traditional Jewish/Christian theology. Before which, were we, with Him, according to LDS doctrine, spirit children, in time indefinite.

Bereshit. And the super-dense marble-sized lump that contained all the matter in the universe exploded, the Big Bang, and creation began.

The seven habits of highly unoriginal critics, number one

2008-06-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

It is a well-worn tactic of the critics of the Church to try to use our own Book of Mormon against us, to suggest that its claims about the nature of God are different from what the Church now teaches.

They state that the Book teaches the Trinity, the uncreated status of God and His eternal, unchanging nature, things, they say, that Mormonism came to deny, along with ancient heresies such as Sabelianism, that Christ is the Father.

But this alleged discrepancy never seems to have troubled the Prophet Joseph Smith or the vast majority of Church members, then or now. Was he and are we all just blind and stupid?

The truth is, we DO teach the Trinity. The Father is God. Jesus Christ is God. The Holy Spirit is God. They are one.

We DO teach the uncreated status and eternal nature of God. More detail on that later.

We just differ in certain ways in HOW we believe these things, what they mean, where the line is drawn.

Let's take one example: In a sense, Christ certainly is our Father, as the Book of Mormon teaches. We are reborn spiritually because of His atonement and we take upon us His name. That does not mean that we confuse him with the person of our Heavenly Father, who created our spirits in the first place. The latter is Sabellianism.

Now, was that so difficult to understand?

I have neglected this blog ...

2008-06-13T11:01:00.001-07:00

... I have neglected this little blog lately and I resolve to do better.

The theology of the Restored gospel is so beautiful and the lifestyle it advocates is so intuitively attractive, at least to one not blinded by lusts and addictions! Even such a one, though enslaved, though sunk in a pit, will often still sense the higher way of living that the Restored gospel offers and long for it -- but, wrongfully, think it to be out of their reach.

It is amazing how in a few simple, almost casual words my grandmother relates in her 1975 journal, that my parents were preparing to join the Mormon church. In truth, a seismic change was taking place in their lives, a rebirth.

Difficult habits had to be given up. The Sabbath became a different kind of day. Callings of service were offered and accepted.

A milestone tonight

2008-05-18T18:09:00.000-07:00

I finished reading the first chapter in Genesis, in Hebrew.

There were several -- okay, many -- words that I still don't know and a few letters that still trip me up but when I compare where I am now to where I was a year ago, I'm getting somewhere.

This is not an easy language. There's one letter that doubles as a vowel or a consonant and also can serve as a prefix meaning "and." N and B look almost alike, as do B and C. I know what the aleph looks like but the average Hebrew kindergarten student can probably draw it more accurately than I can.

Most of the consonants change shape depending on whether they are at the front or the back of the word. The vowels are like Morse code -- and in grown-up Hebrew, they don't even bother with them.

China connections

2008-03-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

I clipped a column from the paper today about historic trade relations between China and the U.S. One paragraph grabbed my attention, as it bears most interestingly upon the history of the LDS Church.

"U.S.-China trade began in 1784, when the ship Empress of China set sail from New York, bound for Canton -- now Guangzhou -- with a cargo of fur and ginseng, prized in Asia for its healing properties.

"It turned a handsome profit," said [Craig] Canning, historian at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. "And right away, other Americans went out to seek their fortune."

One of those Americans, was Joseph Smith Sr., father and namesake of the future Mormon prophet.

Writes Richard Bushman, in "Rough Stone Rolling," a biography of the prophet, p. 18:

"It was a fateful turning point in the Smith family fortunes."

The man entrusted by Smith to transport his ginseng, one Stevens, turned out to be a rascal who fled to Canada with all the profits. The Smiths, who had been getting by relatively well until this time, were unable to pay their debts and were reduced to destitution. They were forced to move several times during the next few years, finally settling in Palmyra.

On Theosis

2008-03-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

My dear wife and I visited the local Christian bookstore yesterday, hoping to find an Easter tie for her father.

Ah, you know what's coming!

On the way out, I glanced briefly at a book about defending one's faith. I don't remember the title or the author. But of course it had the obligatory chapter about "the Mormons."

I really am not quite sure why the rest of the Christian world so vehemently recoils from the ancient Christian doctrine of theosis: becoming like God. That it is taught in the LDS church is considered by many to be one of our greatest sins, right up there with believing that God can still write scripture.

The last time I read the Bible through, it was full of statements such as the command for us to become perfect; the promise that we would be heirs of the Father and joint-heirs of Christ; that we are the offspring of the Father, and that ultimately we would become like Christ, who is, let us note, fully God.

The author of the aforementioned book said that many Mormons he met did not understand/defend/present consistent statements when asked about said doctrine.

Is that not to be expected? Could every "traditional" Christian one meets, possibly be expected to understand/defend/present consistent statements on any given permutation of "traditional" Christian doctrine, such as, say, the definition of the Trinity?

It was not one of the finest moments of the late Gordon B. Hinckley, our recently passed-away prophet, when he said, "I don't know that we teach that [that as man is, God once was, as God is, man may become]. That was during an interview several years ago with Larry King. But I understand why he didn't want to become embroiled in theological technicalities that the show's format would not have allowed him to properly explain.

We do not need to back away from or be ashamed of this doctrine. We are the children, the very offspring of God, heirs to all that He has. We certainly won't ever dethrone Him. An earthly father does not cease to be a father when his son becomes a man and begets a child.

Re the Facsimiles

2008-03-17T10:03:00.001-07:00

When I attended college a few decades ago, I discovered a wonderful literary invention called an anthology. Inside two covers, selections from the works of dozens of authors could be sandwiched. You might start with the Epic of Gilgamesh at one end and wrap up with the writings of Maya Angelou at the other.

So it is not hard for me to understand, although critics of the Church apparently cannot grasp the idea, how the remaining fragments of a certain papyrus roll once possessed in fullness by the Prophet Joseph Smith could contain a text different from that which he translated as the Book of Abraham.

Last night, I learned a new Hebrew word. I am working my way slowly through the text of Genesis and “firmament” was my subject for the evening.

Transliterates to “rawkeya.” Something about that word struck me as familiar so I pondered for a while, then it hit me. I opened up those curiosities of the Pearl of Great Price, the facsimiles.

Sure enough, Facsimile 3 had it. It is the scene of a person on a “couch,” with another person beside him, a winged being above him, and symbols inscribed beneath. On that, all can agree.

The Prophet declared that the person lying down was Abraham, about to be sacrificed on an altar by the person standing up. The winged being was the angel of the Lord. Beneath him, the crocodile represented the god of Pharoah, and the four jars represented the nations surrounding Egypt, Canaan, Libya, Cush and Anatolia. A series of small rectangles represented the pillars of heaven, above which was, of course, rawkeya, heaven, or the cosmic expanse, the firmament, in which the crocodile god of Pharoah was wont to swim. (The Prophet wrote the firmament word as “rawkeyang,” for some reason.)

Traditional Egyptologists declare that the person on the altar was Osiris. But Osiris and Abraham both were messianic figures and one could quite comfortably stand in for the other in the bounds of Egyptian religious ritual. Standing in for a god was a basic part of those rituals.

The winged being, they state, was Horus, the hawk god who protected Osiris. The Prophet does no violence to the text to call him the angel or messenger of God.

It annoys me when people who know nothing at all about Egyptology simply shrug off the Prophet’s work in this field because the name Abraham doesn’t appear in big Hebrew block letters on top of these facsimiles or in a fragment of the papyrus that once accompanied them. It would be different if we still had the whole papyrus that Joseph Smith once owned. It would be different if the ancient Egyptian language lent itself more easily to translation. And it would be different if his translations weren’t quite so plausible.

We mourn

2008-01-28T03:02:00.000-08:00

Our beloved prophet and president of the Church, Gordon Bitner Hinckley, has passed away.

We mourn because we will miss him. For him, it is surely a joyous event, passing into the arms of the Lord whom he served all of his life, and to the presence of his dear wife, who preceded him in death.

He has gone the way of all the earth and has "left a fame and name" that will long be remembered.

Pres. Hinckley took up the prophetic mantle the year that my wife and I were married.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22873523

The Lady is a recommend

2008-01-27T11:41:00.000-08:00

In Commentary, Part 2, (pp185-186) of the late LDS apologist Hugh Nibley's "Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri," we are introduced, albeit briefly, to Maat.

This chapter, and the book itself, is a subtle and appropriate comparison of the revealed LDS temple doctrines with the ancient, rather garbled Egyptian equivalent.

Maat is an Egyptian goddess but not really. Like so many of the earliest deities in myth, she is more concept than a specific being. She is truth, justice and order.

I remember encountering this phenomenon in Hesiod's "Theogony" and in the "Enuma Elish."

Justice, Victory, Wisdom, Discord, even Vengeance all had quasi-divine or anthropomorphic status among peoples of the ancient world -- perhaps this was the missing link between the original religion revealed to Adam and the degenerate, pagan theologies which ruled the world by Abraham's day.

Wisdom is even personified within the pages of the Bible.

Writes Nibley: Maat's presence [with the initiate in the temple] signifies that all is correct and in order -- the equivalent of a temple recommend. Maat herself is not a regular deity: she has no temple, cult [reader, please understand this term in the classical sense, not the modern notion of a"spurious religion"] or mythology of her own.

Should Mormons learn philosophy?

2008-01-14T10:54:00.000-08:00

I am in my mid-30s. I have been an LDS missionary, a graduate of LDS seminary and later of Brigham Young University. I am active and participatory in Church, including Sunday School. I seek learning out of the best books, as the Lord advised in revelation.

So what to make of the fact that, until 20 minutes ago, I did not know the definition of "ontological?" I had to lean on my dictionary.

It's probably a basic word for a "traditional" Christian. Refers to being. As in the Trinitarian "ontological" unity of God. God is one in being.

I still don't understand how this concept is understood. What is the traditional Christian concept of "being"?

We are told as Latter-day Saints that the early Christian Church stumbled when it stepped off the rock of revelation and attempted to engage its intellectual tormentors in their own philosophical language. Thus words like "homeostasis," "essence," and the aforementioned "ontological" came into play, to try to make primitive Christianity agree with the Hellenic notions of a passionless, bodiless Prime Mover.

The Church does not want to make that mistake again. So the learning bloc on Sunday is kept as simple as possible, bereft of such terms. Every official Church gathering that I know of, keeps to those same rules.

But shouldn't the average Latter-day Saint at least be able to understand the terminology of his or her modern colleagues in Christianity? At least be able to say, "Here's the LDS response to the doctrine of one divine essence"?

We need to learn the words and how to respond to them. That is my opinion. We may find that we agree with other Christians more than we thought in some areas, and they might be able to realize that as well. We will find other areas in which we still sharply disagree. But at least we will be able to understand each other.

False Prophet?

2008-01-13T10:08:00.000-08:00

Some critics of the Church like to claim that the Prophet Joseph Smith prophesied the Second Coming of the Lord in 1890.

This is the text, from History of the Church, on which they base their statements:

" I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following:

"'Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.'

"I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face. I believe the coming of the son of Man will not be any sooner than that time."

Joseph Smith made this statement at a conference held at Ramus, IL, on April 2, 1843.

Only the most bitter or blighted of minds could possibly label this a false prophecy of the Second Coming. Joseph Smith himself declares that it wasn't a prophecy of such an event. And, in fact, he stated elsewhere:

"The Lord has not shown me any such sign ... The Lord will not come to reign over the righteous, in this world, in 1843, nor until everything for the Bridegroom is ready." -- HOC 5:291.

More information:

http://www.shields-research.org/General/LDS_Leaders/1stPres/Joseph_Smith/56_Year.htm

The emotions of God

2008-01-13T09:46:00.001-08:00

Jesus wept.

So the scriptures say. But He was both man and God.

Does the Father weep?

The scriptures speak often of the anger of God.

And the Prologue to the Quran of Islam also speaks of the poor souls who have "earned the anger" of God.

Is this anger of the same type that we feel when confronted with injustices? If so, it almost seems that God Himself would be the most miserable of beings, cognizant of billions of daily injustices against His children all over the world.

Or is this anger simply a human way of attempting to describe the actions of God when confronted by sin? Man sins, God punishes according to divine law, impartially, like a courtroom judge, without emotional involvement.

Is God without passions, as the creeds of historic Christianity declare? Could such a God, though, truly love His children? Could I run to such a God when I reach heaven, and throw my arms around Him, as He throws His arms around me, and love Him and be loved by Him?

Plural marriage, change in the church and Joseph Smith

2008-01-11T10:58:00.000-08:00

Dear world:

Yes, the Prophet Joseph Smith was sealed to more than one wife. No, this does not shake my faith. I believe I have known it since I was a teenager, in spite of the fact that many critics of the church are shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that Joseph actually engaged in the very practice that was revealed to him as recorded in the Doctrine & Covenants. Apparently, in the minds of some, polygamy sprang fully formed, like Athena from Zeus, from the wild mind of Brother Brigham.

Shocked they also are that the Church doesn't rent billboards trumpeting this knowledge to the world. After all, a knowledge of the names of the wives of the Prophet will be required of every member hoping to achieve celestial glory. (I'm being a little sarcastic there.)

Yeah. Boggles the mind.

I know all about the Helen Kimball thing, too, the 14 year old to whom the Prophet was sealed in some capacity. It is quite a stretch, a very slanderous stretch, to call a man a pedophile -- our critics' new favorite word for the Prophet -- for being sealed and that not to a child but to a teenager. In many states of the US, it is still perfectly legal to marry a teenager. Furthermore, there is no clear evidence anywhere that the Prophet ever had any intimate relations with Helen Kimball. Sealing is a doctrine, like many doctrines, that took time to be fully and properly understood and fully unveiled.

The bigger picture: Aside from one line in the New Testament about certain qualifications of being a bishop, the Lord issues not one word of condemnation in the entire Bible about plural marriage and, in fact, even called the polygynous Abraham His friend.

Latter-day Saints do not practice this principle today, because the Lord can command and the Lord can revoke and He has currently revoked. Thus He had no problem with judicious use of wine in Biblical days but has told us to refrain in this modern era -- so please do not trot out that tired line about Timothy and his stomach or Jesus drinking wine so why don't we? Thus He forbade pork in Biblical days but does not forbid it now.

Silence is golden?

2008-01-11T05:18:00.000-08:00

Silence.

Nothing but silence.

When I created this blog, I expected silence at first. And perhaps it is still too early to be fretting about it.

It is a mixed blessing, I suppose. On the one hand, there is no point in a blog which no one reads and where no one posts comments. On the other hand, my subject is controversial and I am no master of rhetoric, no doctor of theology, no kind of brilliant intellectual. I am very comfortable within the pages of scripture but not so much in philosophical arguments -- homoestasis and transcendence and all that sort of thing.

I have visited a few blogs in hopes of drawing some interest here, so far without success. I could be a glutton for punishment, I suppose, and pass the news of this blog to Recovering From Mormonism or the anti-Mormon Saints Alive website, but I'm really not interested in that.

No, I want to talk with ordinary people, Mormons and others, keeping the discussion as simple as possible. I don't want to shy away from controversy but neither do I want to spend what little time I have here dealing with people who hate my faith.

Whence the unknowable God ...

2008-01-10T16:38:00.000-08:00

I am currently reading "Lives," the magnum opus of the 1st century Roman writer Plutarch.

In his account of Numa Pompilius, the legendary successor to Romulus, Rome's first ruler, Plutarch speaks of the Greek Pythagoras thusly:

"[He] ... conceived of the first principle of being as transcending sense and passion, invisible and incorrupt and only to be apprehended by abstract intelligence ... all access to God [was] impossible except by the pure act of the intellect."

This doctrine of the Greeks found its way into the apostate Christian church through Greek converts steeped in the tradition, as it had earlier found its way into the Jewish church through the likes of such as Philo, and it reigns supreme today.

How refreshing and daring the declaration of Joseph Smith, supported by John 17, that we can know God, we MUST know God and that we, as Paul declared in Acts, are veritably His offspring. Though we are mortal and flawed and He is immortal and sinless, yet He declares throughout scripture that we are His children.

Book of Mormon names

2008-01-06T18:07:00.000-08:00

I'm kind of jumping ahead of my schedule here, but someone -- I wish I could remember on what website -- recently poked fun at the name of one of the early characters in the Book of Mormon, Sam, the brother of Nephi.

"That's a Yankee name, not a Hebrew one," she wrote.

Well, tell the current leader of North Korea or many other Koreans that Kim is an American girl's name and see what they have to say about that.

Sam, according to the late apologist Hugh Nibley, who spoke Arabic, Egyptian and Hebrew, is a perfectly good Egyptian name, the normal Arabic form of Shem and possibly even a Hebrew dialectic version of that same name.