From the pen of Jim Faulconer: Joseph M. Spencer’s most recent book (unless he has done another in the few weeks since this one was published) is For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope (Kofford Books, 2015; 157 pages, with index). I go back a long way with Joe, back to when he was still a recently-returned Mormon missionary and still an undergraduate at Brigham Young University.
Category: News and Politics
Politics – Current Events – Media
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #12
What Was Satan’s Plan?
There’s an article in this month’s Ensign that makes two interesting moves. (There are also a few really unpleasant aspects of this article, but that’s a topic for a different post.)
For Zion — Part 8
Chapter 9, “Zion as Project”, gets right down to business. Having previously and rather brilliantly tied up his various scriptural themes and contexts — Old Testament eschatology, early Christian history, Pauline hope, faith and love, the Book of Mormon’s revision of Pauline hope, early Restoration history — Spencer brings these all to bear on the earliest version of the consecration revelation that eventually became D&C 42. He focuses on what are now verses 29-37. (I link to the modern D&C for convenience, but of course the earliest version was different, and those differences are a major focus of the analysis.) Spencer initially assesses the basic outline of the primitive form of Restoration consecration: the transactional process by which a member of the church would irrevocably deed his property to the Church, and would be in turn given a portion of property commensurate with his needs to be held under his stewardship for his family’s use — the rich would receive less than they had given, while the poor would receive more. An excess would remain for funding general Church projects. But Spencer soon discourages the reader from pursuing this kind of thinking: [T]o present the law of consecration as a kind of system, as I have done here, is to mislead in an important way. Simply put, this way of presenting consecration is too economic. It falls into the trap of regarding consecration as first and foremost an economic order.…
For Zion — Part 7
Chapter 8, “Zion in Prophecy,” marks an important transition in Joseph Spencer’s For Zion. Opening with a tour de force theological dissection of hope in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, followed by a thoughtful interlude on the Book of Mormon’s conceptual bridge between Paul’s early Christian hope and the Zion of the Restoration, the book turns in chapter 8 to what most of us came expecting: Spencer’s close reading of Joseph’s latter-day revelations on consecration and Zion. The analysis opens with an overview of the historical moment into which the revelation eventually known as D&C 42 arrived. Soon after Joseph’s arrival in Kirtland in February 1831, he recorded the earliest version of the revelation, introducing the Saints to the law of consecration and sketching the order in which the Saints were to live. Over the ensuing months and years, additional revelations arrived, gradually filling in the details of the new Zion in Jackson county. This gradual crescendo came to a halt in the summer of 1833, which Spencer describes as a kind of collapse of Mormonism 1.0. Beset with mob violence in Missouri, the instability of the consecration economy in Ohio, and ongoing high-level defections, the Saints’ dream of Zion seemed to be dashed. The destruction of the printing press hard at work on the new Book of Commandments seemed to symbolize the ruin of the revelatory promises. A re-boot flickered to life in 1835, with appearance of the significantly…
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #11
Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan
I’ve published a new little book, Grace Is Not God’s Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It’s an experiment both in reading Paul and in self-publishing. My family and I were reading N. T. Wright’s “Kingdom Translation” of Romans and the kids were having a blast. Paul’s a great read in contemporary English. They loved, especially, Paul’s rhetorical questions (“Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Certainly not!”) and I loved, especially, the force of the letter when read out loud.
A Mormon Maximalism
I’ve been practicing a kind of Mormon maximalism for a long time now. This impulse toward maximalism is itself religious in spirit. More, the impulse is aesthetic. It’s driven by a kind of wild hunger for the feel (literally, the aesthesis) of words, facts, theories, things, and people. I’m roaming the earth, eating everything in sight.
For Zion – Part 6
One more time, from the pen of Ben Peters: One of the most tempting yet misplaced complaints lodged against Joseph Spencer’s For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope might be that, for all its talk about Zion, For Zion does nothing to suggest actionable proposals or bullet points for how to build Zion.
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #10
Seafloor Spreading, or Why I’m Mormon
Let’s acknowledge that beginnings are important. This is one reason why we care so much about history. So let’s go back to beginning. Let’s go back to the origin, to the source, to what the Greeks called the arche. But how? Where is the origin?
For Zion – Part 5
From the pen of Ben Peters (see previous post): Chapter five in Joseph Spencer’s For Zion turns to what he calls “the space of hope.” Here his discussion focuses on the space of “what remains to be seen” and to a similar effect as chapter four on the time of hope.
For Zion – Part 4
From the pen of Ben Peters: I’m thrilled and humbled to take part in this roundtable. By way of introduction, I’m Ben Peters, a husband, a father of four, a media historian and information technology theorist (more on my work here), a lifelong member, a long-time T&S reader, and first-time poster. My family has lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma since 2011, following an education trek stretching from Provo and Stanford to New York and Jerusalem. A disciplinary mutt, I have no real business commenting on the work of professional philosophers, especially chapters likely to trip up readers more careful than I am. Those wanting a scholarly review of his argument will have to look elsewhere. With that warning, read on as I think out loud in three installments about the central proposition of the second quarter of For Zion (chapters four through seven): all we have to hope for and consecrate, even that which remains to be seen, is already present. —————————————————— “The Time of Hope” Let us begin with the general problem. Hope, viewed critically, risks utter foolishness. Only those who hope can be disappointed. As Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche have made famous, hope for a brighter future can blind us to the concrete press of the present. Marx and Freud—it is worth noting at the beginning—also inspired projects that have mostly since shed, in G.A. Cohen’s phrase, their “empirical carapace” in favor of moral philosophizing. (Marxism, in my view, is at…
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #9
Black History Month: Elijah Ables in Cincinnati, 1842-1845
To purchase Black Mormon: The Story of Elijah Ables or For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013, click here or here. As the first documented priesthood holder of African descent, Elijah Ables already enjoys a singular place in the history of black Mormonism. But in most discussions of Ables’s place in Mormon history, he serves as a foil for understanding the origins and development of the Mormon priesthood restriction on the black community; seldom does he enjoy the full subjectivity and personhood that a person of his accomplishment and stature would demand. Indeed, no phase of Elijah’s life highlights the troubled relationship between the early LDS and black communities in the way that Elijah Ables’s time in the slums of East Cincinnati does. Likely a runaway slave from western Maryland (a probability borne out by the fact that 4/5 of the black residents in the area were slaves), Ables had been slowly winning Joseph Smith’s favor since coming joining the LDS community in Kirtland between 1832 and 1835. Joseph had a general distaste for black people, to be sure; in April 1836, he wrote that blacks made up a “a community of people who might. . .overrun our country and violate the most sacred principles of human society; chastity and virtue.” And Missouri had left the Saints rattled about any perceived relationship with the black community. Governor Daniel Dunklin warned W.W. Phelps that if the Saints did…
On Not Giving a Fig for Historicity Debates
There’s a lot of discussion lately about the relationship between scripture and history. In this post, I suggest, by way of a case study, that the trees are obscuring the view of the forest for those gazing at historicity questions.
Urkirche, Urtext
For Zion – Part 3
I’m honored to participate in this roundtable on Joe Spencer’s book For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope. I’ll be tackling chapters 2 and 3 today; Adam treated chapter 1 here. Like many T&S readers, I presume, I come at this book as an amateur: I was trained in literature, not philosophy, and the densely analytical style of philosophy can be challenging — though always rewarding — for me to work through. These chapters are full of interesting ideas and new readings. Rather than react or respond to Joe’s theology here, I’m just going to do my best to summarize the argument as completely as I can. At my level, that’s always a necessary first step. So here goes. Chapter 2: Faith and Hope In chapter 2 of his book, Spencer takes on the fourth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which focuses largely on the relationship between faith and hope. Paul takes as his starting point Abraham’s faith, as expressed in Genesis 15:6: “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.” (I’m going to link to the NIV throughout the post for the reader’s convenience, but Spencer provides his own translations throughout, which sometimes differ in important ways from standard translations.) Paul glosses this verse in Romans 4: 18-22. The crucial points, in Paul’s reading, are that 1) Abraham’s faith preceded his righteousness (verse 22), and 2) his particular kind of faith is defined by its relationship to hope (verse…
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #8
When Symbolism isn’t Symbolic
A few weeks ago I listened to an episode of This American Life with an unfortunate title: Batman.[1] The title, which really doesn’t set the right tone for the episode to follow, refers to Daniel Kish, a blind man who taught himself to echolocate as a child. He gets around the world relatively unaided (including, for example, riding a bike) by clicking and then listening to the echoes. This ability has made him world famous, but it really shouldn’t be so unusual. And perhaps the most chilling thing is the fact that most blind kids will intuitively start clicking or snapping or stamping to test out their environment with sound. But they are so often discouraged that they never get the chance to develop their skill to the level Daniel did. They are discouraged, of course, because clicking or snapping repetitively isn’t conducive with normal social expectations. Thus far the tale is sad, but it is not unusual. The idea that social conventions can be repressive isn’t unusual. But it’s not just the freedom to break with social convention that allowed Kish to develop his talent. It was also having a mother who, in ways that seem cruel or uncaring, treated Kish more or less as though he could see even though he couldn’t. Kish says: From the fifth grade on, I walked to school almost every day. I had to cross major streets. I participated in extracurricular activities. I made my own breakfast. I…
Religion of a Different Color
The Branch of Love: A Black History Month Tribute to Valentine’s Day
To purchase For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013, click here. This piece tells the story of a long-forgotten black Latter-day Saint, William P. Daniels, who enjoys a singular position in LDS history: the only known black branch president to function in his office without holding the priesthood. William P. Daniels loved to cook and looked dashing in a three-piece suit. A tailor by trade, Daniels had a charisma about him. Missionaries adored him, church leaders trusted him, and his name rang throughout the Church. No one enjoyed reading the Book of Mormon more than he did, and no one was more aggressive in handing out copies. But Daniels also had a problem. He was a black man in the white South Africa Mormon Church of Mowbray. Daniels knew well the kinds of doctrines that the Saints believed about his people. Daniels had visited Utah himself in 1915 and asked Joseph F. Smith to his face why the priesthood restriction was in place. By Daniels’s account, Smith gave him a blessing, assuring him that he would receive the priesthood in the next life. Before departing for South Africa, Daniels asked President Smith: “What do you want me to tell them?” Smith responded: “Tell them the truth, Brother Daniels.” Evan Wright, a former missionary to South Africa, remembered Daniels bearing his testimony of the Church “with tears running down his cheeks and dropping off his chin” that “someday,…
Is excommunication a medieval solution to a modern problem?
I believe it was Joanna Brooks who first formulated the idea that “excommunication is a 19th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.” It bears the marks of her elegant, intelligent phrase-making. Since it was first uttered, this idea has fed a swelling criticism of the practice of excommunication, following from the high-profile disciplinary action against Kate Kelly and now John Dehlin. This particular criticism is separate from — though often prompted by — the specifics of the Dehlin and Kelly cases: it’s a denunciation of the practice in general, either for apostasy or for any transgression. To expel a dissident from a community is “medieval, punishing, barbaric,” as Dehlin put it in his recent Radio West interview, a throwback to the brutal religious ideology that motivated the Inquisition. In turn, this criticism has prompted several defenses of the practice’s sociological utility and spiritual legitimacy. It’s a complicated question, and I respect voices on both sides. As with many issues, I hesitate somewhere in the middle. Today I just want to make a narrow point about excommunication’s meaning in the 21st century, apart from the question of its legitimacy in general or its justification in the Dehlin case. Is it really the case that excommunication is an atavistic relic from a brutal past, one that has no place in the present? It’s easy to see why the idea resonates. Excommunication from a religious community for apostasy strips an individual, at least temporarily,…
For Zion – Part 2
The first chapter of For Zion lays the groundwork for Spencer’s reading of Paul’s theology of hope. It focuses especially on Paul’s letter to the Romans. Understanding the details of this “theology of hope” is crucial to understanding Spencer’s full account of what’s at stake in the law of consecration.
For Zion – Part 1
Whatever happened to Zion? Whatever happened to the law of consecration? Aren’t these things from a long time ago? Or for some time way in the future? No. They are only ever for now. Saying that we’re not ready for Zion is like telling a guy lost in the desert he’s not ready for water.
Who gets to be a Mormon?
I have a few questions about boundaries and numbers that I would like to put before the group for your collective insight. While the questions are related, they are not building any particular argument. 1. If the Church excommunicated everyone who quietly disbelieves any or all of the core doctrines that John Dehlin has rejected, how many people would we lose? 2. If the Church dropped from its rolls all those people who have slipped or stomped out of activity, those who opt out of meetings and callings and the home and visiting teaching programs, how big would be the fold of the Lamb of God? 3. Can people remain “Mormon” without belief and/or activity? Has our church been around long enough to have secular Mormons? What does it mean to be a Mormon? 4. John Dehlin has said that he will continue to call himself a Mormon, but “Mormon” is trademarked. Is the Mormon Stories Podcast vulnerable to legal action? 5. I can understand the rationale for excommunicating Dehlin. Moves to make the tent bigger could also been seen as undermining and destabilizing the existing tent. And this excommunication vindicates the position of both those in Dehlin’s camp and those who are very concerned about boundary maintenance in the Church. But there are people in the middle, how many, it’s hard to say, who are troubled, people who want to remain in the community but are still struggling through doubts…
Congo! Heart of . . .
A Sad Day
Thoughts today are with John and his family.
New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #7
No Apology
“I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me early.” Hosea 5:15