I’ve had a bad bug for a week, but I’ll have some Gospel Doctrine updates soon. And as a side note, an intro volume I recommend is currently on Kindle sale. This post is a follow-up to my essay on the nature of prophetic knowledge. Although I’ve quoted Stephen L. Richards at length before, it turns out I’ve never posted this important excerpt. Sustained as an Apostle in 1917, Richards wrote on occasion about science, religion, and General Authorities. In... Read more
I was grateful for the invitation to speak at UVU’s Mormon Studies Conference on Mormonism and the Challenges of Science, Revelation, and Faith in February. I spoke about how and why we’ve come to understand the creation chapters of Genesis certain ways, and then participated in a panel on evolution with two BYU biologists. You can watch my presentation here, with subtitles. My slides aren’t visible, but you can download them here (pdf) to follow along. I won’t post my text, as it was messy... Read more
Insert here my usual gripe about how we’re trying to cover so much ground in so little time, but let’s talk about The Ten Commandments. It’s a common-knowledge topic, and everyone’s seen the film, so we all know everything about them, right? (more…) Read more
As we move into Exodus, time passes suddenly. We move away from the individual novella of Joseph to several hundred years later, just as we often do in the Book of Mormon. Just how long, we don’t actually know. Depending on how one calculates or what part of the Bible one reads, it could be 430 years, 400 years, 4 “generations” (whatever that might mean) or much less time; Moses is the great-grandson of Levi, for example. The problem is... Read more
These chapters carry on the novella of Joseph in Egypt. It’s over 10 chapters, which is a lot of time and space to devote to one story about one person; creation occupies 3 chapters, by contrast. Why so much space? What makes this story so significant that it was told and retold, and eventually merited being written down? Is there anything of doctrinal value, from an LDS perspective? What, then, from the Israelite perspective?I don’t have a good concise answer for that,... Read more
Regardless of what you think about evolution, it poses a problem. In the past, the issue might have been framed as “since we know scripture is true, the science behind evolution must be false. How do we make sense of this?” Today, the hypothetical teenager might wrestle with this question from the other side. “Since we know human evolution is true, and God knows all truth, why don’t God’s earthly proxies like scripture and prophets seem to know it?” This is... Read more
Link to the lesson manual. Today, I’ve got a bit of writing about these chapters in General, an article I wrote in the past on Genesis 38, and some useful tidbits (more…) Read more
One of the aspects of scripture study as commonly practiced by LDS is the idea of applying the texts to ourselves. While we use Nephi’s term “likening” (1 Nephi 19:37) to refer to this, we haven’t really understood what Nephi means by it, which I’m not going to analyze here. What we do instead, typically, is to read the scriptures expecting to find one of two things: We look for simple models of modern standards of behavior (and then putting ourselves into... Read more
This weeks’s chapters are difficult and socially significant like last week’s, which makes them difficult to write on. My approach, therefore, will be to come at it from a few disconnected directions in which I ask questions I don’t really have good answers to. Before moving on, I strongly recommend you read Robert Alter’s literary translation and commentary on chapter 22 as well as my post on why all the chapters leading up to Genesis 22 are important for Genesis 22. What makes this... Read more
I suspect this lesson will be somewhat charged and sensitive, given the variety of experiences and views among LDS. And be aware, due to the nature of the text, some of the discussion below could be traumatic to people who have been sexually assaulted. Note also that I do not consider what I write in these posts to be “how I would teach the lesson” as much as useful background, details, and resources; I don’t think I would use language... Read more
Benjamin the Scribe
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