Three passages, culled from comments on blogs made by people who disagree with Ralph Hancock, William Hamblin, and me about some trends in Latter-day Saint academia:
1.
“I firmly believe that sacred and secular don’t need to be at war as some are currently trying to portray in an effort to foment political outrage among our ranks.”
I don’t know who these people are who’re attempting to foment strife and faux outrage within the Church. (I think that “our ranks” is intended to refer to the Saints generally.) But I condemn and oppose their cynical and, indeed, evil plotting.
I hope that I’ve made it abundantly and unmistakably clear over decades of writing and speaking and teaching that I’m no theocrat, and that I don’t believe that sacred and secular approaches to anything are inevitably in conflict. I am, as it happens, extremely fond of entire huge sectors of secular learning and activity. As ought to be obvious.
2.
“Philosopher Joseph Spencer . . . has argued that the Book of Mormon transcends questions of historicity. Spencer, who on many occasions has clarified that he believes that Book of Mormon characters are real figures from the past, argues that approaching the text in terms of its historicity can distract from the book’s religious agenda.”
As somebody who’s long been fairly prominently associated with approaches to the Book of Mormon in terms of its historicity, I want to go on public record as stating that, yes, such concerns can distract from the book’s religious agenda. And so can many other worthwhile things.
I’ve never seen this as an either/or.
While serving as a principal leader in the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and, later, in the old Maxwell Institute, and while writing, speaking, and publishing a great deal on questions related to Book of Mormon historiography, I also spent many years as a Gospel Doctrine teacher in Sunday School and even on the Church’s Gospel Doctrine writing committee. (And, of course, as a member of two high councils, two bishoprics, a bishop, a home teacher, an assistant high priests quorum leader, a priesthood quorum instructor, and so on and so forth.) I didn’t devote a lot of time in those positions to the precise GPS coordinates of the Jaredite city of Lib, nor to attempts to correlate Nephite history with Mesoamerican chronologies, nor to Pre-Columbian metallurgy. I taught, and acted, pretty much the way normal Latter-day Saints teach and act in such callings.
It’s possible — I can testify from personal experience — to do both. They’re not even remotely incompatible.
But historicity matters. If there were no Nephites, if Jesus never visited the New World, if Moroni didn’t exist, the claims of the Restoration and the Book of Mormon’s power as a second witness to Christ are fundamentally altered. They’re greatly weakened if not altogether negated. If Jesus didn’t actually, physically, rise from the dead, Christianity becomes something essentially other than what Christians for the past two thousand years have believed it to be.
As I’m often inclined to do in such contexts, I call attention to the late John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter”:
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.EW COMMENTS
The sheer fact that Jesus’ dead body returned to life, emerged from the tomb, and ultimately ascended into heaven doesn’t even remotely exhaust the significance of the Resurrection. But the significance of the Resurrection would be fundamentally transformed — and, most would argue, entirely lost — if that dead body simply remained in the tomb and decomposed. No matter how sentimental the first disciples might have been about their lost leader, Christianity sans Resurrection would be a very different thing than Christianity with the hope of universal resurrection and of an advocate who sits on the right hand of the Father.
3.
Finally, a passage that’s cited from the late Elder Carlos Asay and that is implied to be precisely targeted at apologists such as I:
“Do not contend or debate over points of doctrine. The Master warned that ‘the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil.’ (3 Ne. 11:29.) We are inconsistent if we resort to Satanic tactics in attempting to achieve righteous ends. Such inconsistency results only in frustration, loss of the Spirit, and ultimate defeat. Remember, ‘We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege’ (Eleventh Article of Faith).”
Daniel Peterson, William Hamblin, Louis Midgley, Gregory Smith, and others of that low ilk are said to be infuriated by such exhortations. Of course, Elder Asay’s speech was delivered in 1981, when I was still living in Egypt as a graduate student, and nearly a decade remained before the wicked FARMS Review was even conceived. But that’s quibbling, and, anyway, Elder Asay was presumably inspired to see our day.
I simply want to register a gentle dissent: If anybody can point to anything that I’ve ever published or said or edited for publication, or anything of that kind from any of my co-conspirators, in which any of us have endorsed or advocated the spirit of contention, Satanic tactics, and/or the forceful suppression of alternative views, I would be most interested to see it.
Obviously, the Saints are to avoid contention. And, just as obviously, there’s a persistent human temptation to fall into contentious argument. That temptation should be guarded against, and resisted. But disagreement, as such, isn’t evil. Standing up for what one believes, and opposing, where necessary, what one believes to be seriously misguided, is not only not wrong, it’s sometimes a duty. And not only a religious duty, but, in some cases, a secular one. It’s at the very heart of academic scholarship, too, for that matter.
“I . . . exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints,” says Jude 1:3. “Put up a real fight for the faith,” says J. B. Phillips’s translation of the same passage. “Be ready,” says 1 Peter 3:15, “always to give an answer [apologian; ἀπολογίαν] to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”
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