Today, I attended the Seventh Interpreter Matthew B. Brown Memorial Conference. The overall theme of these conferences, as befits Matt Brown’s interests, is “The Temple on Mount Zion.” The theme of this particular 2024 iteration of the conference was “Seership, Craftsmanship, and Fellowship.”
The conference was not live-streamed, but it was recorded, and I presume that the conference videos will eventually be made public. In the end, too, the proceedings of the conference, perhaps including (in at least some cases) longer versions of the papers delivered, will be issued as an Interpreter Foundation book. I’m looking forward to it.
The conference’s first speaker was Don Bradley, and the title of his presentation was “Acquiring an All-Seeing Eye: Joseph Smith’s First Vision as Seer Initiation and Deification Ritual.”
Don’s paper argued an interesting thesis, that, although other claims to visions that were superficially comparable to Joseph Smith’s First Vision can be found from roughly the same period — he explicitly referred to the case of the famous Protestant evangelist Charles Grandison Finney — the theology implicit in Joseph Smith’s First Vision is not that of the revivalists of the Second Great Awakening. Alhough it clearly parallels a good deal of their doctrine, including conviction for sin, divine mercy, and the redemptive role of Jesus Christ, it rejects the ontological gulf between the human being and God. Even the traditional Latter-day Saint understanding that the vision reveals a God who is like human beings, Don contends, understates its theological radicalism. The First Vision is not only the revelation of an anthropomorphic God, but also of theomorphic man. For Joseph Smith, the visitation of God did not reveal human beings as hopelessly “other” from him, nor as creatures who must shatter in his presence, but as fit vessels for his power and attributes, to be filled up with divinity.
The second presentation of the morning, given by David Calabro, was titled “Abraham on the Bishop’s Throne: Egyptian Christianity and the Book of Abraham”:
David’s paper is part of his larger project to investigate the historical and ritual context of the Book of Abraham. Several elements of the Book of Abraham, including its occasional use of New Testament phraseology and concepts (Abraham 2:9-11; 3:21-28), point to an early Christian hand in what may have been a complex textual history. At the same time, he says, the Book of Abraham shows evidence of being oriented to a ritual context, possibly one having to do with priesthood initiation (after all, Abraham’s obtaining of the priesthood is a major theme of the book). The paper focused on comparisons between the Book of Abraham and the Coptic enthronement rite of the Patriarch of Alexandria as it is described in liturgical books. Dr. Calabro argued for the thesis that a text like the Book of Abraham probably influenced the Coptic rite. The evidence discussed in the paper, he said, may also suggest that the Book of Abraham functioned liturgically in an early Egyptian Christian enthronement ritual, although — as he expressly mentioned in the paper’s conclusion — other explanations are possible.
The third speaker was Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, who addressed the subject of “The Abrahamic Covenant: Then and Now.”
Jeff gave a very lucid exposition of the Abrahamic covenant, asserting that the wealth of insights that ancient and modern scholarship can shed on the relevant scriptural accounts is generally underappreciated. He argued, too, that Abraham’s spiritual journey of covenant-making and covenant-keeping provides the backbone of his story in both the biblical book of Genesis and the Book of Abraham.
Fourth in the line-up of speakers was John S. Thompson, under the title of “Oracles Against the Nations and Prophetic Imitation of Temple Liturgy.”
The Major Prophets, Brother Thompson explained, have a segment of their writings that prophesy the demise of several foreign nations. The Egyptians and other ancient societies also have texts containing curses against foreign nations or enemies and art depicting the demise of those enemies or nations. Strikingly, however, these often appear in the context of temple/tomb rituals. Prompted by the temple context for the smiting or destruction of enemies in antiquity, Brother Thompson explored the question of whether the oracles against the nations found in the prophetic books are part of a larger temple structure in the text as a whole.
Breck England was the fifth speaker of the morning. His topic was “The Bright and Morning Star: The Book of Revelation through the Lens of the Temple.”
A wave of interest in a ritual reading of the Apocalypse or the Revelation of John appears to have been gaining strength over the past few years. Some scholars argue that “heavenly liturgies” mirroring the rites and ordinances of the ancient temple make up the framework of the book. Such scholars non-Latter-day Saint commentators as Leonard Thompson, Allan T. Georgia, Richard Herbert Wilkinson, and Margaret Barker seek, in Georgia’s words, to make explicit “the implicit importance of temple ritual for conceptualizing the practices, expositions, and narratives” of Revelation — which might understandably catch the interest of Latter-day Saints.
In his project The Bright and Morning Star: Finding and Following Jesus Through the Book of Revelation, Breck England has tried to combine the insights of these and other scholars with ancient and modern temple theology and apocryphal materials in order to “recuperate” the Apocalypse as a ritual text. In his presentation today, Brother England outlined very clearly how the Revelation of John depicts the sacred drama of the temple, from the initiatory stage through the primordial heavenly council, through the “great tribulation” of mortality to the “unveiling” (apokalypsis) of the divine presence. He showed — persuasively, I thought — how redemptive temple ordinances mark the progress of the pilgrim John along the path to the idealized Holy of Holies that is the New Jerusalem.
There. That takes the program up to the break for lunch. This was a rich, rich day. And it didn’t hurt at all that BYU defeated Baylor, at Baylor, during our conference. There was real meat in these presentations and, when the book appears, it will be well worth purchasing. I’ll return to the remainder of the conference presentations in tomorrow’s blog entry.
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