The Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) has sometimes been put forward as one of those features of Christianity that marks it as distinctive from Hellenism. Traditional Protestant scholarship on the Bible reproduced popular racialized conceptions of culture in their analysis of ancient categories of thought. For instance, Adolf von Harnack distinguished between Judaism and Hellenism in his analysis of early Christianity. To this may be added the idea that Christianity represented something unique and distinct from its surroundings. In this narrative, the unique (=true) form of Christianity faced the risk of being corrupted by influence from Judaism and Hellenism. Harnack mapped all ancient heresies according to how much Judaism or Hellenism they exhibited.

Scholars today have largely abandoned these polar divisions between Judaism and Hellenism, some going so far as to call Judaism itself a Hellenistic religion. This movement has had significant impact on the study of ancient Christianity. Far from imagining Jesus as either ignorant of, or opposed to, Hellenism, we might best think of him as belonging to a cultural complex that represented the confluence of Greek, Israelite, and other cultural contexts. Among these, we can see the SM as part of this confluence, including several Hellenistic elements.
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President Spencer W. Kimball’s most famous sermon recently received a makeover in the June Ensign. Kimball delivered one of the most enduring sermons of his career, “The False Gods We Worship,” in 1976 in the context of the bicentennial celebration of the United States. Kimball was a conservative political thinker, but this talk has endured in part because it appealed to conservatives and liberals alike.

There are two sins that are at the heart of Kimball’s critique of society. First, Kimball warns about the idolatry of wealth. He sees materiality in conflict with spirituality, and the searching for wealth in conflict with service in the gospel. These plentiful resources compete for our time, attention, and allegiance. These resources should be put to use to bless others. He express regret that some have chosen their wealth or possessions over service in the church.

Second, Kimball expresses opposition to war. Preaching in the wake of Vietnam, but also in the context of the Cold War, Kimball condemns the use of resources, the training of soldiers, and the perversion of the Savior’s teaching to “love your enemies.”
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With the arrival of Salt Press at the Maxwell Institute, we have finally entered an era of “theory” as part of mainstream LDS scripture studies. At the same time, we LDS have not fully processed the moves made in biblical studies. There was a short spurt of LDS feminist criticism in the 1990′s, but this did not engage the scriptures as a primary point of inquiry. Poststructuralism, cultural criticism, and queer studies have had almost no impact on LDS scripture studies.
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I cannot speak more highly of Grant Hardy’s phenomenal The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition.  This text will transform your experience reading this sacred text.  Hardy’s version organizes the text into readable paragraphs, formats poetry into verse, minimizes distracting footnotes by focusing on essential, clarifying materials, and includes a top notch appendix full of useful information.  Right now, I just want to bring your attention to the fact that the e-edition of this book is on sale on Amazon for only $2.99.  Check it out!

I have a weird problem with personal stories.  It is not that I don’t like them (I do quite a bit!).  Rather, I do not trust them because I do not think that there is a “personal” that is not the product of some cultural force.  I feel the problem acutely as a Mormon because I find that I am nearly incapable of telling a personal story, which is the dominant way that one’s life of faith is expressed.  I marvel at how my fellow Latter-day Saints can so easily see symbolic importance in the events in their lives, wherein truths are revealed in compelling objects lessons.  I am moved and persuaded by the moral lessons and personal stories of loss and redemption, challenge and vindication, or tragedy and reinterpretation.  However, when I teach or speak, I find only meaning in the abstract, the theoretical, and the textual.  When I try to find meaning in the events of my life, even to tell the story of how I have arrived where I am, I see only contingency and circumstance, rather than agency and meaning.  I sometimes feel that I lack a narrative that holds my life together at all, and as a result I can feel disconnected from my brothers and sisters who dwell in such richly meaningful lives.

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This year was an interesting year for FPR.  We moved to Patheos at this time last year, but it didn’t seem to change us much.  In fact, you would hardly know it was the Mormon Moment by visiting FPR this year.  Not a single post on Mitt Romney, the Book of Mormon Musical, or Pantsmaggedon.

We did, however, actually play some important part in the Mormon Political Moment with Chris H.’s bid for Wyoming’s congressional seat.  Chris also suffered a real tragedy with the murders on his college campus by a gunman.

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The analysis of power seems to be something that I care about. Whether it is D. Smith or Ralph Hancock, who in my view accord too much power to LDS leadership, I seem to get riled up about this issue. While Nate Oman takes a view very similar to my own to how power operates (perhaps to his chagrin), there are some points that I want to further push with respect to his analysis.

Oman has the enviable knack of frequently saying really interesting and provocative things about Mormonism. Most recently, Oman blogged about how power operates in Mormonism. He argued that we have two historical models of change. In 1978, the priesthood ban was lifted and was embraced widely by the leadership and membership alike. In contrast, in 1890-1911, the church abandoned polygamy, which, Oman notes, “literally tore the Church apart.”

The implications of this analysis for Oman is that there is wisdom in waiting for the church membership and leadership to arrive at certain views of what the church should do before instituting change. Had the racial ban been eliminated too early, it may have had the same kinds of disastrous consequences that the end of polygamy brought. Too radical of changes can undermine the power and unity of leaders’ authority. This view of power suggests that power must be wielded in fundamentally conservative ways. Power is resistant to change because power seeks primarily to reproduce itself.  Were the church’s power to not reproduce itself, the church could fracture. Schism and mass excommunications are the potential “ecclesiastical costs” of keeping up with broader American attitudes.
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It is academic job application season and for the last little while Church History and Docrine at BYU has been including an interesting and thought-provoking question as part of the application process. In addition to traditional application materials, the job advertisement asks for:

…a statement (no more than 500 words) regarding your philosophy of integration of faith and reason in your scholarship and teaching. President Spencer W. Kimball charged BYU professors to “become ‘bilingual’ in speaking the language of scholarship and the language of the spirit.” Your statement should explain the role of faith and reason in your own academic experience and detail how you plan to integrate the “language of the Spirit” and the “language of scholarship” in your role as a BYU religion professor.

This question has got us thinking about what it means to be “bilingual,” and the nature of the division between ‘spirit’ and ‘faith’ on the one hand, and ‘scholarship’ and ‘reason’ on the other. Over the next few weeks FPR bloggers will be proving their answers to these tough questions. We invite our readers to offer their own thoughts as well.