Benjamin the Scribe
First off, go listen to my old podcast here where I talk about David, Goliath, and the Philistines. (more…)
This page gathers together both audio/video and some essays I consider “major,” arranged in rough chronological order.
It was the last week of the semester, we got sick, and some other distracting things happened this week (see #3). Fortunately, if you missed my updated posts, thanks to #1, you can find my old ones easily.
First, I’ve gone back and tagged a lot of my previous posts, so they can be accessed in groups. That is, scroll down to the bottom of a post, and you’ll see “select category” next to “select month.” Now that I’ve tagged many of my posts, you can see just my posts related to Evolution, or to Gospel Doctrine Resources, or to Genesis, or to Books or to Scripture Study
Second, I’ve been blogging for a long time, at various places, so I’m going to start rerunning old posts on various things. I find them useful, I doubt most people have seen them, and due to repeated technical migrations, some of them have actually disappeared from the web, so I couldn’t even link to them if I wanted to.
Third and more exciting, my wife and I will be moving to the Phoenix/Mesa/Tempe area this fall, where I will work on preparing for my comprehensive exams (American Religious History, Reformation History, History of Science) and writing a dissertation proposal.
Fourth, I have two upcoming events. In June, I’m at the Mormon History Association conference in Boise, ID. My paper is “’Latter-day Saints Accept the Scriptures, But Every Man Must Interpret Them for Himself’ —Recovering David O. McKay’s Views on Genesis and Evolution”. The other two papers in my session are “Darwinism, Evolution, and Latter-day Saint Church Education, 1875-1911” and “‘One of the Most Valuable Books I have Ever Read’: The Influence of William Jennings Bryan on 20th Century Mormon Responses to the Theory of Evolution.”
Then in October, I’m speaking at the Joseph Smith Papers Conference on Translation. There’s no schedule yet, but I know some of the other people, and it should be an interesting conference. My paper, partially derived from part 2 of my book manuscript, is “Translation, Creation, and Revelation: Implications of Textual Differences in the Pearl of Great Price.” I’m looking at those places in the text where Moses reads differently from the KJV, but Abraham matches the KJV. Part of my conclusion is that these changes imply that revelation is not a straight line of upwards progress, but a mediated human-divine dialectic process which sometimes becomes “frozen” as scripture. The implication is that scripture is not necessarily composed of divinely revealed eternal facts, but contains human elements and understandings common to the time. This can account for differences between inspired texts which, according to common assumptions, “should” be identical.
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here. You can get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right) and also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook.
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 this “Open Letter to College Students,” the lead article in The Improvement Era (June 1933), Richards expresses the view that although revelation to a prophet may reveal high truths of a progressive nature, a step or two beyond the prophet, that prophet will inevitably express said revelation in the language and forms he knows. In making this argument, Richards is trying to “fortify [the reader] against unwarranted doubt and agnosticism and perhaps encourage you to a more ardent and intelligent devotion to ideals you have long espoused.”
What if Hebrew prophets, conversant with only a small fraction of the surface of the earth, thinking and writing in terms of their own limited geography and tribal relations did interpret [God] in terms of a tribal king and so limit His personality and the laws of the universe under His control to the dominion with which they were familiar? Can any interpreter, even though he be inspired, present an interpretation and conception in terms other than those with which he has had experience and acquaintance? Even under the assumption that Divinity may manifest to the prophet higher and more exalted truths than he has ever before known and unfold to his spiritual eyes visions of the past, forecasts of the future and circumstances of the utmost novelty, how will the inspired man interpret? Manifestly, I think, in the language he knows and in the terms of expression with which his knowledge and experience have made him familiar. So is it not therefore ungenerous, unfair and unreasonable to impugn the validity and the whole worth of the Bible merely because of the limited knowledge of astronomy and geography that its writers possessed?-The Improvement Era 36:8 (June 1933), 451-453, 484-485.
In other words, Richards explains the apparent limitations of the Bible’s knowledge as a function of humanity; God speaks to the prophet, but the prophet will inevitably receive, conceive, and frame it within his own cognitive environment, his language and conceptions. So, God may well “speak down” to us and accommodate our state, but even otherwise, if a prophet were get the full stream, as it were, that human prophet will have to express revelation within human cognitive bounds. The end result, whether “direct revelation” or not, is that revelation, as spoken by prophets or recorded in scripture, gets filtered through human words, human concepts, human culture. This means that inspired revelation is, in some sense, a joint human-divine collaboration.
So, yes, Richards says, ancient Israelites thought the world was flat, and that’s not a problem once we understand the nature of revelation correctly. Richards is trying to make sense of the nature of revelation and prophets and scripture, what they know and how it is expressed. This, I think, we need more of. And I’ve seen some recently, looking at the various revelations of Joseph Smith. All of these, below, note how close study of these revelations shows how revelation is a joint human-divine process.
Benjamin Sommer similarly argues for a human “participatory theory of revelation” in a Jewish context, and Kenton Sparks in an Evangelical one, that scripture is God’s Word in Human Words. And I’ll be making a similar argument in October at the JSP Conference on Translation (details to come!) We should not be surprised when divine revelation has human fingerprints all over it, and speaks in a human voice, even with human limitations.
Returning to the article, Richards defends Darwin against the charge of “atheism” and invokes the science of Millikan and Einstein. Einstein you know, but Millikan, along with LDS scientist Harvey Fletcher, was responsible for the Oil-Drop experiment, which measured the charge of an electron and won him the 1923 Nobel Prize.
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through the Amazon links I post. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). You can also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook. If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.
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 and I went off-script a good bit. And as is often the case, I wish I had said a few things differently, or included X and left out Y, but it is what it is; an ambitious paper by a graduate student covering lots of territory in too little time with too many generalities. Nevertheless, whatever its flaws, I felt like this was an important paper in an LDS context.
Here’s my attempt at a short summary.
Part 1- Assumptions and Interpretation
Part 2- The Scientific Deformation of Genesis
Part 3- The Reformation of Genesis
Part 4- Where is Mormonism in this History?
the power and significance of these stories [of creation in Genesis] can be best appreciated when they are compared with the ancient creation stories that were known in cultures surrounding ancient Israel. In the last 150 years, archaeologists working in the Near East have uncovered hundreds of thousands of records from the ancient world. Scholars have identified in these records many examples of creation stories from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan that give us insight and understanding of the ancient worldviews about creation.
“seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.” If you have a question that requires an expert, please take the time to find a thoughtful and qualified expert to help you. There are many on this campus and elsewhere who have the degrees and expertise to respond and give some insight to most of these types of questions.
Conclusion?
I think it will be very interesting to see how the Church and its faithful scholars navigate these waters in the future, as we reexamine our collective inherited assumptions.
Some of the quotes and sources I named explicitly
You seem to think I reject the scriptures, or some of them. I do not intend to do so, but obviously I am no more bound by your interpretation of them than you are by mine…. Now, as to what the earlier brethren have said–where they have declared themselves as speaking under inspiration and by the authority of the Lord, I bow to what they say. But where they express views based on their own understanding and interpretation, then none of us are foreclosed from exercising our own reasoning powers, inadequate though they may be; but the earlier views do not foreclose us from thinking. This is particularly true, where we come to interpreting their interpretations.
Gradually the Bible’s apologists shifted the basis of belief from a personal faith empowered by the Holy Spirit to the more defensible and culturally respected position of empirical evidence.
One of the hardest things to convince students of in general is that ideas and ways of thinking and ways of understanding the world have a history. Although most generations and cultures view their own ways of thinking about the world as somehow “natural,” ideas, including our most fundamental ways of thinking, change over time and have a particular history. Revolutions in ways of thinking are in many ways the most influential and far-reaching of all revolutions.
While creation in its ancient sense is a theme not infrequently alluded to in Sumerian and Babylonian texts, works specifically devoted to it are so far unknown. [Creation] appears incidentally to other interests.
A few things I didn’t use
Hyers, Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science, 3, 6.
It is not too much to see in all this a common preoccupation with the scientific method, scientific evidence, and scientific results, which descend upon these ancient pages like a cloud of termites eager to devour and digest the materials in terms of their own appetites. This is not to debunk science or historiography as such. Rather, the issue is one of appropriateness. Our contemporary preoccupations could hardly have been the preoccupations of ancient Israel…. It is quite doubtful that these texts have waited in obscurity through the millennia for their hidden meanings to be revealed by modern science. It is at least a good possibility that the “real meaning” was understood by the authors themselves…. Charles Darwin, in comparing his observations of nature with the biblical accounts of creation, assumed that they were the same sort of statement and declared that the Old Testament offers a “manifestly false history of the earth.” While religious objections have tended to focus on the word false, and many evolutionists—following Darwin—have been inclined to agree that it is false, the central issue is whether the biblical materials are being offered as a “history of the earth” in a sense comparable to the modern meaning of natural history. If they are not, then both the attempts at demonstrating their scientific falsity and the attempts at demonstrating their scientific truth are inappropriate and misleading.
Those are my italics. I have come to believe from my studies that Genesis is not at all trying to offer a “natural history” of the earth’s physical origins, not even in symbolic or veiled language. You can read my “conversion story” here.
Henry Eyring, Sr., Reflections of a Scientist
In the long run, the truth is its own most powerful advocate. The Lord uses imperfect people. He often allows their errors to stand uncorrected. He may have a purpose in doing so, such as to teach us that religious truth comes forth ‘line upon line, precept upon precept’ in a process of sifting and winnowing similar to the one I know so well in science.
Here Eyring Sr. loosely equates the process of revelation to the process of science.
This Far Side cartoon, and this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon almost made it in.
Some things I didn’t use about the meaning of “literal”
Note how this Dilbert cartoon illustrates a common assumption (in an extreme way, of course), that those who engage in “interpretation” do so to avoid the obvious and correct “literal” meaning.
As I argue, we all interpret, all the time.
As for “literal,” it has taken on odd meaning today when talking about scripture.
For Augustine and many others, “literal” means “in the way the author intended.”
So a literal reading of a poem is a poem, a literal reading of fiction is fiction, a literal reading of parable is parable, a literal reading of history is history, but a reading of non-history as scientific/historical is… NOT a “literal” reading. It’s a face-value, context-free misreading.
A true “literal” reading requires understanding historical and cultural context.
Places I have developed these ideas
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through the Amazon links I post. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). You can also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook.
Let’s talk about origins. We seem to think origins are important; “where we came from” forms a part of our our identity, helps us understand ourselves. This is pretty deeply embedded and reinforced in our culture in a number of ways. Superhero movies tend to begin with an origin story. Even Batman movies, as often as we’ve seen it and as much as we know it, typically begin by retelling the trauma of young Bruce seeing his parents shot. Jennifer Lopez sang, “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got; I’m still Jenny from the block; Used to have a little, now I have a lot; No matter where I go, I know where I came from.” Or look at arguments about the importance of Rey’s parentage in the recent Star Wars film (SPOILERS!)
But perhaps you’ve seen recent ads for Ancestry or 23AndMe DNA testing, framed as something like “Well, we always thought we were German, but our DNA turned up lots of Scottish, so we traded in our Leiderhosen for kilts.” (The DNA stuff is somewhat problematic, both in the actual testing, supposed significance, advertising, and framing I think.) Or stories about white supremacists learning they have Jewish or African DNA instead of being “pure.”
Just as for us, origins mattered to the Israelites, and Genesis represents different attempts to account for Israelite origins and identity. In the early chapters, for example, one author has argued that the Adam/Eve story is representative of Israel’s history; “The story of Adam is the story of Israel writ small.” That is, Adam/Israel was put in a priveleged place (Eden/Israel), but through their own choices (fruit/Deuteronomy) were divinely driven from that place to somewhere lesser (“the world”/Babylon). This is the argument of Seth Postell’s Adam as Israel: Genesis 1-3 as the Introduction to the Torah and Tanakh.
Along those lines, we should also call attention to the brevity of these chapters. Christians today put enormous importance on these chapters for doctrinal and cultural reasons, but creation stories occupy three chapters, while the story of Abraham and his descendents gets dozens. Heck, Joseph in Egypt runs from Genesis 37-49. That plus the lack of revisiting Adam/Eve in the Hebrew Bible is quite suggestive. As LDS scholar Sidney Sperry wrote in his 1940 Spirit of the Old Testament,
the writer of Genesis (in its present form) is more interested in showing to Israel who its great ancestors were than to tell about the origin of life and its institutions. This is readily seen in the fact that the origins of life and its institutions are briefly and concisely handled in the first eleven chapters, while thirty-nine chapters are required to tell about Abraham, the father of the faithful, and his immediate family.
Takeaway: the inspired ancient authors of these chapters may see their purpose and import very differently than we do today.
Moving on. In my experience, lessons on “the Fall” often bring comparisons between “what LDS believe” and “what Christians/Catholics/Protestants/Evangelicals believe.” I think these kinds of comparisons are usually less helpful, for two reasons. 1) They’re rarely well-founded and 2) they’re usually to establish some kind of simplistic “LDS Church’s Doctrine Good; Other Churches’ Doctrine Bad.”
Just as LDS tend to bristle when other Christians misunderstand and misstate what LDS believe, so LDS also tend to misunderstand and misstate what other Christians believe on this topic. We should also distinguish on both sides between official teachings on the Fall i.e. the Catholic Catechism and Papal bulls or declarations vs. what that Catholic guy said that you met on your mission. It’s best to focus the discussion on what the scriptures actually say (being careful not to read tradition overtop of the text), what they mean, and how they have variously been interpreted by LDS authorities.
So, I want to focus on clarifying Adam and Eve a little. These comments on Adam are drawn from the Mormon Theology Seminar on Genesis 2-3, which I participated in. The conference papers are published here, but you can check out the verse-by-verse commentary from the collaborative blog (starting at the bottom and working up, with comments on each post) and the audio of the conference.
What does ‘adam mean in Hebrew? In summary,
These distinctions are blurred and misconveyed by the KJV. For example, when it says later on in 5:2 that “he called their name Adam,” God is not naming them both Adam. (I once had a teacher explain that the scriptures talked about Adam Adam and Eve Adam, on that basis, like a last name.) Rather, we should understand “and he designated them humanity.”
This means that Genesis is more about prototypical humanity writ large, Human and Life (Eve=Heb. chawwa=“life” more or less) instead of the documentary retelling of a particular couple. See the paraphrastic “campfire retelling” translation I did for the Theology Seminar and my published paper.
As for Eve, I get to keep my Inigo Montoya theme this week. Let’s talk about “help meet” first…
I’ve talked about “help meet” before, but as I keep seeing the older and incorrect usage, this needs to be repeated until it really gets around. I’m not so rigidly prescriptivist that I can’t stand to see incorrect usages, but this is a spectacular misunderstanding with real-world implications for the role of women, which has been part and parcel of bad theology in the past.
In Genesis 2:18/Moses 3:18, Eve is described as “a help meet for” the man. First, the noun here is “help,” not “help meet,” “helpmeet,” or worse “helpmate.” Help can be of various kinds, and it’s often been implicitly understood that Adam is primary and Eve is his helper. Subordinate somehow. Genesis isn’t necessarily making this case. (To be sure, it’s also not suggesting some kind of modern ideal of gender equality either.)
‘ezer, pronounced ay-zair (like Canadian “eh” and “air” with a -z- in between, accent on the first syllable) does mean something like “help” or “aid”, and appears in several Biblical names, such as Ezra “God is a help” or Azriel/Eliezer “God is (my) help.” However, it’s not the standard kind of help. Though other humans get to “help” using the verbal form, ‘ezer as a noun is applied only to two characters in the Bible, namely, Eve and God himself. (Thanks to Boyd for making me check up on that.)
If you’re in a group of two, and the other member is God, that’s a fairly elite group. In other words, Eve is akin to some kind of divine aid to Adam, and the nature of that help is not subordinate, like that of a secretary, a gopher, an assistant, or when parents say of their three-year old “he’s such a good helper.” It’s God-like aid. God is a help and clearly not subordinate, and that’s apparently the kind of “help” Eve is.
“Meet” is actually an translation for second part of this, kenegdo, (kuh-neg-dough.)English “meet” is an adjective, and though not common anymore, it appears several times in the archaic English of our scriptures. Let’s get some general ideas of what the English term might mean from the contexts it’s used in. (This is, btw, the way dictionaries ancient and modern, English and Hebrew are put together.)
1 Nephi 7:1 …after my father, Lehi, had made an end of prophesying concerning his seed, it came to pass that the Lord spake unto him again, saying that it was not meet for him, Lehi, that he should take his family into the wilderness alone; but that his sons should take daughters to wife, that they might raise up seed unto the Lord in the land of promise.
Alma 5:54 …will ye persist in the persecution of your brethren, who humble themselves and do walk after the holy order of God, wherewith they have been brought into this church, having been sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and they do bring forth works which are meet for repentance— (This phrase also appears in Alma 9:30, 12:15, etc.)
New Testament
Mark 7:27 But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.
1 Corinthians 15:9 Paul says “For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.”
Those are both NT passages, a different time and language than Genesis. What about Old Testament passages?
Exodus 8:25-26 And Pharaoh called for Moses and for Aaron, and said, Go ye, sacrifice to your God in the land. And Moses said, It is not meet so to do; for we shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians to the Lord our God: lo, shall we sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes, and will they not stone us?
From all of these, it would appear English meet means something like “worthy (not in the moral sense), fitting for, appropriate for, equivalent to.” Would this make sense in Genesis 2:18?
” And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help [one that is worthy/fitting/appropriate/equivalent] for him.”
That general realm of semantics seems to fit Genesis 2:18. Fortunately in this case, we can look at the Hebrew term instead of the English which also turns out to mean (probably) something like that. (If you want to see how to work with the Hebrew or Greek instead of English, see my Religious Educator article.)
Consequently, Eve is not created as a subordinate to Adam, but as David Freedman translates it, “a power equal unto man” (see here.)
Further reading on this topic:
The second aspect regarding Eve is the passage post-fall which places these words in God’s mouth- “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” The manual quotes President Kimball to the extent that we should read “rule” there as “preside.” While there are certainly discussions to be had about the semantics and practical applications of that term, let’s specify that President Kimball believed that marriage should be “a full partnership. We do not want our LDS women to be silent partners or limited partners in that eternal assignment! Please be a contributing and full partner.” (Link)
The Ensign in 2007 ran an article that addressed this passage and the “help meet” passage. Unfortunately, it made some claims about the Hebrew text that were not supportable. The passage here does indeed mean “rule over,” not “rule with” as the Ensign claimed. (I wrote a detailed and critical but charitable take here.) However, there’s another way to deal with this passage. President Kimball apparently viewed this passage as prescriptive, as the way God intends and wants things to be, the ideal. This approach assumes scripture functions, essentially, as a rule book of consistent and unchanging principles. I see this passage as descriptive. In other words, I view Genesis as describing the natural circumstances of a non-Edenic state, our earthly imperfect impulses and conditions, not a heavenly ideal we should try to emulate here. I can see why someone concerned with equality who also viewed the passage as prescriptive would want to soften it.
The third aspect I want to touch on is the question of “beguile.” In order to not write 20 pages, I limit the scope of this very narrowly to what Genesis itself says. A number of LDS bloggers and authors have cited Nehama Aschkenasy in order to argue that “the Hebrew word which has come to be translated as beguiled is a rare verb form of unusual depth and richness. Because it is a form no longer in use, it is almost impossible to translate.” The problem, I think, is that none of the LDS citing Aschkenasy actually know Hebrew themselves, and have thus misunderstood what she is claiming. I have looked up the original Aschkenasy sources and also the Hebrew text. The short version is, the Hebrew here is not mistranslated. It clearly means something like “cheat, deceive, trick, create false hope” as in its other usages like 2Ki 19:10, Jer 49:16, Oba 1:3, 7, etc. (As a side note, should we expect deception or honesty from the devil?) So beguile means beguile. BUT…
What is clear in the text is that chawwa/Life/Eve is mentally engaged in evaluation of her surroundings, and this, I think, is what Aschkenasy is getting at. That is, in the interaction between Life and the serpent in 3:1-7, before Life eats the fruit, the text says that she saw “that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate.” She doesn’t eat mindlessly. She sees, which here means something like “determines, evaluates, decides” (as in Genesis 1, where God “sees” that X is good). She determines that the tree is good for food, aesthetically pleasing, and a source of wisdom. I think it is this mental process of observing and weighing that Aschkenasy is getting at, not some kind of simplistic mistranslation. Also notable in the Genesis text is that Human (‘adam) has nothing to say in this exchange. Genesis portrays Human as present during this exchange (“with her” in 3:6), but he has no conversation, no thought process, no evaluation or discernment. In contrast to Life’s mental evaluation, Human eats mindlessly when the fruit is offered to him.
One other takeaway from this: Do not trust people opining about Hebrew unless they know Hebrew and well. (Even then, sometimes, people make bad arguments.) If you see someone citing Strong’s Concordance for “what the word means in the original Hebrew,” that’s a warning sign that they are amateurs. Just as professionals can get things wrong, amateurs can certainly get things right, but the lack of training means they are typically unaware of common pitfalls and unable to use more technical or professional tools.
Tidbits:
Terminology– Sin vs transgression. Note that the Genesis text doesn’t use any of these words, sin, transgression, Fall, etc. I think Elder Oaks and Joseph Fielding Smith, as quoted in the manual, are implicitly responding to certain ideas about the fall being sexual. (See below.) Oaks makes use of lawyerly distinctions of malum prohibitum (something that is wrong because only it has been prohibited) vs malum in se (something that is always wrong) to talk about sin vs. transgression.
Hebrew makes different distinctions. When they aren’t used synonymously, sin or chatta (that’s a gutteral ch like loch, not like check) means “to take one’s best shot and miss” whereas transgression is “willful violation.” But Hebrew has a wide variety of terms for this kind of thing, and often they can be substituted for each other. Consequently, we shouldn’t make a habit of reading in technical meaning wherever we see a particular word used.
As a secondary tidbit on this topic, one sometimes hears the term “immaculate conception.” This does not refer to the virgin birth, but to Mary’s birth. That is, a long-standing mainstream Christian tradition maintained the following. “Although the early church fathers refer to Adam’s fall, they generally retain a strong emphasis upon individual human responsibility. Not until Augustine do we find an extended attempt to define clearly a doctrine of the fall in terms of the connection between the sin and guilt of Adam and the sin and guilt of all humanity. Augustine… thought of original sin as inherited sin, the fallen nature of Adam transmitted biologically through sexual procreation from fathers to their children. Moreover, since all were germinally present in Adam, all actually participated in Adam’s sin….Augustine’s interpretation was largely confirmed at the Council of Orange (529). Despite modification by Anselm and moderation by Thomas Aquinas it remained generally that of the church throughout the Middle Ages.” New Dictionary of Theology, “Fall.”
Thus, since Jesus was born of a virgin, he was free of original sin. But what of his mother? The immaculate conception is “[t]he Roman Catholic teaching that Mary the mother of Jesus was supernaturally prevented from being tainted by original sin so that she could give birth to Jesus as God’s own Son.”
Genre– It’s not necessary to read Genesis 2-3 as some kind of documentary history in order to recognize the presence of sin and death in the world and the need for redemption from them. That is, we sometimes hear that “Without original sin (ie. a literal Fall in Genesis), there’s no need for a savior figure (Jesus).” I don’t find this argument coherent, myself. Regardless of what one thinks about physical origins or how to read Genesis, we still die. We still acknowledge the terrible presence of human evil and incompetence in the world. Regardless of how we got here, we need an antidote, a way out, and that is the Atonement of Jesus Christ. That is true, even if, as devout a Christian as C.S. Lewis thought, these early chapters of Genesis are “myth.”
Related, since it may come up, see my post about evolution and the early chapters of Genesis. I’ll be addressing the topic at UVU on February 22. For other related posts, see here (point 2) on creation, separation, and naming, here for some discussion of 2 Nephi 2 and Lehi interpreting Genesis. Also, Evolution and the Fall has some fantastic essays, and Enns’ Evolution of Adam and Walton’s Lost World of Genesis 2-3 are both worth reading.
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through the Amazon links I post. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). You can also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook.
This is the first of my Old Testament Gospel Doctrine posts. (Yes, it’s Lesson 3. Mea Culpa.) I’ll be updating my old posts and changing the date on them so they reapper.
Inigo Montoya sums this lesson almost perfectly.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Actually, I don’t feel we can even sum up here. (more…)
UVU’s annual Mormon Studies Conference will be held (and streamed!) February 22-23. The topic is Heaven & Earth: Mormonism and the Challenges of Science, Revelation, and Faith
Presentation titles are not available yet, but topics over the two days include
Day 1
Day 2
Each presenter will also participate in a panel discussion, moderated by Blair van Dyke of UVU.
I look forward to what Worthen has to say about Mormonism, as she’s an astute historian of religion and intellectual history, which happen to be my interests as well.
I read her book last semester along with Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief (fantastic book about the changes in worldview that have made atheism possible), and The Erosion of Biblical Certainty: Battles over Authority and Interpretation in America.
These all get into the same wrestle as the conference, and the last two in particular are provocative. Both argue that religious advocates contributed directly to the displacement of the Bible and made disbelief intellectually possible. Turner (Without God) is particularly blunt about this. “Unbelief was not something that ‘happened to’ religion. On the contrary, religion caused unbelief. In trying to adapt their religious beliefs to [various scientific discoveries and intellectual shifts], the defenders of God slowly strangled him.” (xii)
Turner’s thesis is discernable in Lee’s book (Erosion of Biblical Certainty) in updated and narrower form. Explicitly writing against the prevailing view that belief in the Bible as a “supernaturally inspired and infallible text eventually crumbled under the relentless assault of secularizing forces,” Lee counters that “the Bible’s most able and vigorous defenders played a key role in the demise of its authority.” (1-2)
Turner offers this narrative of the intellectual changes from 1500-1890, briefly recounted. As the construction of knowledge shifted towards the factual, “mechanical,” empirical, and rational, the basis for justification of belief became one of intellectual propositions and amassed facts. The very nature of “belief” changed because the proponents of belief accepted the new intellectual frameworks around them. The natural and supernatural, previously undistinguished, were cleaved into two. Since knowledge had to be scientific and historical, religion required scientific and historical shoring up to remain legitimate knowledge (as Lee takes up). Once God, revelation, and the heart had been displaced from the their central role, they became, in essence, irrational and illegitimate. This was not lost on various observers, generating widespread fears of atheism, tracts against atheism, and so on. Turner concludes that “unbelief resulted from the decisions that influential church leaders… made about to confront the modern pressures upon religious belief….[Those decisions] boiled down to a decision to deal with modernity by embracing it—to defuse modern threats to the traditional bases of belief by bringing God into line with modernity.”(266)
My presentation (at least, as planned right now) will touch on this history, talking about the role of interpretation of scripture and the assumption of concordism in creating conflict between Genesis and evolution. I’ll also talk about how modern discoveries which led to new understanding of the ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis have helped undermine concordism, preserving, ironically enough the authority of creation account in Genesis 1.
So, looks like a great conference, it’s free to the public, and will also stream online. If you’d like to put up a flier somewhere, there’s an official one here.
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