MORMON FEMINISM- Peggy Fletcher Stack just published an article in the SL Trib titled "Where have all the Mormon Feminists Gone?" located here. You all should read it all the way through...I think you'll be surprised at how close we are to the heartbeat of Mormon feminism! The article describes the changing face of Mormon feminism throughout the church's history. Most significant is that it describes a softening of both feminists and the church. It also notes the difficulties with the term 'feminism' in today's academy. The central issue of women serving in priesthood leadership has yet to be resolved to the satisfaction of many feminist thinkers, but it does seem that on almost every other question the church has made great strides.


I think that the article does a great job of describing the status questiones, but does little to describe what the future of Mormon feminism is. A few years ago, when Claudia Bushman spoke at Harvard, she predicted a retrenchment from much of the progress the church has made recently, expecting an increased focus on "family values" in order to increase family sizes to compensate for diminishing converts. This may be true, but I suspect that many of the values held by today's LDS women on social issues, such as career, education, and family roles, as well as ecclesiastical issues, such as making women present in general conference, and expectations of providing input in local church matters, will be increasingly hard to reverse.

ADOLF VON HARNACK In a discussion about anti-Judaism in the scriptures in church last week, I was asked rather directly whether I believed that the scriptures were political documents or divinely inspired texts. Admittedly I was somewhat shocked by the question and I answered it badly. I tried to respond by asking why the person was making such a distinction. Why must there be an either/or? The question, however, has made me reconsider exactly what I believe the relationship between the “Gospel” and the “world” to be.

I received some points to ponder this afternoon while I was reading Harvard professor Karen King’s new book, What is Gnosticism?, which deals with the question of ancient and modern constructions of Gnosticism. It is an excellent read, and has a fascinating chapter on the great scholar of early Christianity Adolf von Harnack. Harnack retold the story of early Christianity in a powerful way that still has profound influence on historiography today, over a century later. He wrote about the place of Christianity in its historical context, and noted that it was inextricably linked with both the Judaism and Hellenism of its day. However, he saw these features are historical accidents, the historical husk that surrounded the pure kernel of true Christianity. When these two forces unduly affected Christianity, its essence was occluded and either a Judaized or Hellenized form of Christianity was taken for the real thing. Thus, all ancient heresy could be traced to one of these two influences, either being too Jewish or too Hellenized.

So what did the essence of Christianity look like for Harnack? Not surprisingly, it looked like the liberal Protestantism of his day. Harnack’s methodology is familiar to many Mormons. The LDS concept of apostasy and the Protestant version of the history of Christianity share a lot of common ground. Of course, the conclusions are different. When we tell the story, the pure essence of Christianity looks a lot like late 20th century Mormonism. But the structure of the story is the same. Do Mormon’s take their cue from historians such as Harnack who criticize the Hellenization of Christianity through Catholicism? I am not sure. I know that many LDS scholars such as Hugh Nibley have relied upon Harnack. However, this kinship in thought may not be from direct borrowing, but it may emerge from a complex world of thought about apostasy and return to origins shared by both Harnack and Mormonism, such as that described by Dan Vogel in Religious Seekers and the Advent of Mormonism.

Whatever the origins of the shared beliefs, my question is about the validity of the methodological strategy. Both Mormons and Harnack criticize Christianity for having adopted Greek philosophical thought. Yet, they are both willing to admit a certain level of historical “mixture” with the Gospel. Mormons even have historicism built into their theology of revelation, recognizing that some aspects of the Gospel are given only for specific times, like polygamy, or even the Word of Wisdom. Other passages even suggest that many more commandments are given to humanity in their weakness, within the bounds of their cultural framework (D&C 1:24). God works through “language,” the ultimate human construction to teach them. The question is whether what is being taught transcends language, or culture, or Hellenism, or whether it is so bound together that it cannot escape. Harnack (and many Mormons) believes the former. There is a kernel and a husk.

The ultimate irony of Harnack’s hierarchy of beliefs that understands the Gospel and the world around it as separable is that such a method is solidly Hellenistic! The notion of essence and appearance, of substance and accident, are ideas worked out by Greek philosophers of antiquity. The very language he uses to save the Gospel from Hellenism is a product of it!

Mormons desire to arrive at a historically transcendent form of Mormonism, no doubt, based on our belief in a Restoration, a return to pure origins, something that has been practiced and believed by Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and then Joseph Smith. The problem doesn’t stop there, for the link between the early world of emergent Mormonism and routinized 21st c. Mormonism must also be made clear. The search for an essence that has been transmitted throughout time is no easy task, historically or theologically.

My question is whether the search for an essence needs to be abandoned all together. It is a powerful rhetorical tool, but it often leads us to take too much for granted, to stop seeking, and to rely on a flawed epistemology that cuts us off from revelation. We must be closer to our Heavenly Father. To believe that our revelations, both personal and institutional, are always a product of their time, spoken in “weakness” after the manner of our own language, does not diminish them, but rather makes the continual forging of a new relationship with God imperative. Just some thoughts.

A MORMON HERMENEUTIC: I recently posted a version of the following message to a group of LDS graduate students in religion. I post it here in order to solicit thoughts from the Elders on this topic that has long plagued me. It has been brought to the fore recently as a result of a new seminar at BYU this summer that is producing LDS commentaries and articles on the New Testament. The note is pasted below:

I have never had a chance to systematically work through anything, but I have had a lot of amateurish thoughts on it. The problem is whether or not there is such a thing as a "Mormon hermeneutic". There are of course traditional hermeneutic approaches that fall under the headings of "historical" or "literary" criticism. Additionally, many people have worked out hermeneutic systems for various social and political categories focusing on liberation. As LDS, is there a particular method that is more philosophically "true" to our heritage? Is this even a valid question? A more basic question is whether or not our faith should be the controlling factor in our hermeneutics. But I suspect that most of us don't believe that our faith is irrelevant in our interpretations. If that is true, than how exactly does our faith affect our interpretations? Are we affected in the same way as any other believing Christian, or is there something different? It is the "something different" that I am trying to pin down. A similar question is being asked in the field of Mormon literature. Bruce Jorgenson and Richard Cracroft have debated this at the Society of Mormon Letters. For a sample of essays on this issue see some essays on Mormon criticism. Perhaps this debate can shed a little bit of light on the problem. The question is what does it mean to call something "Mormon literature"? What is the referent? Is it anything that is produced by someone who is "Mormon"? But what is a "Mormon"? Or, is it anything that deals with Mormon themes, subjects, and history?

On the subject of the LDS New Testament commentary, How will an LDS commentary look any different from any other commentary? If there are differences, what sort of methodological moves are being made? How are they justified? How do these moves related to other hermeneutical strategies? I would really love some thoughts on this, or at least some new questions that I might want to consider that other people share.

FAREWELLS: I wish to bid to fondest possible farewell to the Lawyer. His departure will no doubt be felt deeply in our midst for a long time to come. He has had a profound impact on my own thinking and will no doubt have a profound impact on many more disciples. I have every confidence that one day we will all be indebted to his insights into many key Mormon topics. In the not too distant future we will be basking in his fame, proud to say, "I know him!" I am also sure that the times we have shared with him will be enshrined in legend someday. Best of luck, my friend.

So what is so great about the body anyway? Ah yes, it is 'postmodern,' it is 'hermetic'. But it isn't exaclty these things either... In fact, our body isn't really 'ours' at all. This body is the dust of the earth. There is nothing uniquely "me" about the material that consititutes my body at present. In fact, 7 years for now that material will be entirely replaced. The essence of me is not my present physicality, is it? This is the corruptible body, which I take all of our sacred texts to subordinate in importance. The resurrection provides us with a new body that doesn't suck. Part of being mortal is having a terrible body. Our bodies are weak, sickly, fallible, located, old-getting, etc. The body that we get in the resurrection doesn't seem to follow any of the rules that our present bodies follow. They can appear anywhere, move through walls, not be subject to corruption, etc. Exactly what is the same between the body that we have now and the body that we have then? It seems that the only thing that is the same about them is that our spirit (material or material-esque) happens to occupy both of them.

And thus we see, Platonism is insidiously intertwined with Mormonism. The entire notion of the unembodied spirit, the pre-existent form, and the eternal soul are are critical to the LDS plan of salvation and the Platonic myth of the soul. Why celebrate the materially constituted body? Why celebrate the matter of this world? I reserve my praises for the good body to come...

Happy birthday to the Lawyer and to the name-to-be-determined Baby Litcrit!

This is the talk I gave on Sunday.

I have had a lot of time to think about the scriptures, what they mean and how they mean. I have had the amazing opportunity to study the scriptures and related material from a variety of different instructors, from atheists, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, feminists, postmodernists, and even a Mormon once. I have read the history of the times in which these texts were produced, and learned all sorts of theories about their development. Clearly, I think that these things are not only interesting, but also extremely useful for making the scriptures real, seeing in them both the humanity and divinity, and at the same time obliterating such binary distinctions, which I take to be the essential message of Mormonism.

As LDS we do not assign the status of inerrancy to any scriptures. We recognize the fact that God speaks differently to different people at different times, and we engage in a hermeneutic, or interpretive process that accounts for such divine insight. We know that human beings always mediate the word. In the beginning was the Word, and this word, the logos is the intermediary between God and humanity. Christ came to demonstrate this fact precisely. Rather than being an ontological absurdity of a half divine, half human creature, contrary to what many of even our own theologians have imagined, Christ was fully human and fully divine, in the same way that we are. Christ was the metaphysical exemplar of our path to salvation, not the metaphysical exception. He is the Word because it is through language that we are able to relate to God and he may relate to us, and he embodies what the Word of God is: it is experience, human experience with God and with others. We read about these events to know how to live them.

In different traditions the Word of God has different value. The mere existence of the word on the page is not enough to give it meaning, nor is the concept of “scripture” enough to precisely define it. It must be received, interpreted, and assigned meaning.My message is simple. We misuse the sacred texts if we expect that they will in and of themselves provide us with salvation if we read them. This mistaken view of the Word of God is enshrined in a very early Christian text known as the GTh. The opening lines are, “These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus uttered and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down. And he said, “Whoever finds THE MEANING of these sayings will not taste death.” That is, for this text the key to eternal life is found in the text itself and its correct and definite, “the meaning,” interpretation. Often times we conceive of the scriptures in much the same way, as esoteric texts with a hidden meaning. I don’t think that the scriptures are to be enshrouded with mystery. Instead, contrast this with John’s record of Jesus, “He who hears my word, and believes on him who sent me, has eternal life” (5:24). And the words of Alma, “awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith” (32:27). The different view of the Word of God that these scriptures offer is that salvation is not in the hearing, nor in its correct interpretation, but that the word is to be acted upon, to be experienced, to be used as a tool to gaining the real fruit. Again from John, “this is life eternal, that they might know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ” (17:3). Mormonism has beautifully understood this idea of salvation, of developing a relationship with God. Joseph Smith’s own experience of his First Vision is the prototypical example of this new mode of relating to God.

Our or way of knowing truth, is not from a correct reading of the scriptures, but from experiencing them, receiving the revelation for ourselves, recreating them in our own lives and communities. We do not read the scriptures to learn about what we should know; rather we read the scriptures in order to know, to create the situation for knowing ourselves, for experiencing God to speak to us, through the scriptures. D&C says: “And whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation. Behold, this is the promise of the Lord unto you, O ye my servants” (68:4-5). The scriptures do not tell us what to do, but God tells us what to do as we read the scriptures. The Word of God is not his communication to us, but rather God communicates directly to us as we read the word. The message of the scriptures is not that Abraham, or Nephi, or Isaiah received revelation from the Lord, but that we can too! I hope that as a teacher this year I can help excite and inspire you to learn more about the scriptures, to come to love them, but mostly I hope that during your scripture study you can strengthen your relationship with our Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

On the arrow of time:

It seems that Mormonism posits two trajectories for time and ordering. One the one hand, the Kingdom of God (the second coming has already begun with Elijah coming to the Temple) is growing and becoming stronger; in a sense, progressing and becoming increasingly ordered. On the other hand, the world is unraveling creation by turning it into chaos. This seems to occur primarily at the site of moral degeneration. This latter part seems to be very much a part of a previous generation's romantic construction of their own past, and perhaps this is what all generations do as they are displaced: they wax nostalgic about the "good old days" when people were good and so forth. The oldest documents complain that children don't respect their parents anymore! So in Mormonism we combine a sense of nostalgia for a past purity with a future eschatological purity. The ordering principle hear seems to be morality, and this is the message of all apocalypse.

For secular society, it seems that the ordering principle is replaced by things like wealth and other quantifiable successes. How does this engage the issue of prospertiy and sin?

I am very intrigued by the Scientist's deconstructionist reading of the BoM on the point of prosperity. I think I will use that in the future. It definitely seems to set a paradox...the blessings of God sow the seeds of their own destruction. More needs to be done on this "cycle of prosperity" than just identifying it. Rather, I think we need to explain it in the BoM's own terms, that is in providential ordering. In what way is this cycle useful for God's ultimate purposes? I also think that the distinction being made between individual and communal prosperity is important, but I am not sure exactly how yet. (or maybe we just leave it deconstructed and rejoice in the paradox itself... that sounds like religion to me!)

I do think it is important to note that politics/economics and religion can never be seperated really, especially when dealing with ancient religion. My question is how explicit should we make this, and how dogmatic should we be about it?

Concerning the deuteronomic promise of the BoM... I not only think that there is a connection, but a very very close connection. I hope to publish this sort of thing some day, so for now just the highlights. Consider that Jeremiah, a close personal friend of Lehi's family, is one of the most likely authors of Deuteronomy! His prophetic book is very similar lexically and is being produced the exact same time that Josiah "finds" the Torah in the Temple. To me, it seems that this sort of message is not just a theodicy of poverty, but also of foreign domination under the Assyrians and later Babylonians. Lehi looses hope in this promise ever being fulfilled in Israel, so there is a new exodus/creation in order for the promise to be fulfilled.

After reading Ostler on Christology, I realized what a serious problem he is trying solve. There needs to be some definition of God that accounts for Jesus' divine status in his pre-mortal state (not to mention the Holy Ghost). This Christological problem arises from our conception of soteriology. In order to be gods, we must have physical bodies and have passed through mortality and obtained all those important experiences to make us love enough, but Jesus was God before any of this. The problem is further complicated by the fact that we claim that Jesus created the world. We generally think that when we become gods we will create our own worlds, but God assigned this to Jesus. So, what exactly is God's role in all of this if Jesus, a premortal spirit, was given the opportunity to govern this world, and what does that mean we will be doing when our turn comes? BH Roberts sees Jesus (rightly) as the exemplar of our salvation rather than some bizarre metaphysical exception of divine/human mumbo jumbo. So, if this is true, how do we define "divine" or "God" as to include all three members of the Godhead and their various metaphysical/experiential conditions?

The discussion about authoritative texts is an important one, and though I am always impressed by the creativity of the Literary Critic and the Lawyer in this regard, they seem to be overlooking some issues. I think that my discomfort with the authoritative texts on doctrinal matters is precisely because it limits the amount of creative interpretation possible in the scriptural canon. Despite Dworkin, the more texts you have and the more specific they are, the less room there is for potentials. Now, people still try to get creative with these texts. I once heard a female lawyer in NYC discuss the Proclamation on the Family. She applied a very creative reading of the text, specifically this "clause" that comes after a weighty discussion of gender roles: "Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation." She understood "other circumstances" as "or, if you don't really believe all of this crap you can disregard it." I thought this was a nice lawyerly reading, but at the same time gutted the text of any authority. My point is that texts do have limits, despite what literary critics and lawyers sometimes think... Now, coming up with a grand unifying theory of everything sounds good to me, but I am not really sure that it can be done without either badly interpreting some things, or just excluding them altogether, especially within the plurality we call Mormonism.

The second problem is related, but it is less about the flexibility of interpretation of texts than their ontological status. There is a tension in Mormonism between the status of revelation, church proclamations, and even scripture as authoritative, and the concept of continual revelation. The moment a revelation is given, it is subject to revision due to its ontologically contigent status. It makes even the most foundational texts in Mormonism radically contigent. This is kind of scary. Worse, it calls into question the reason for reading any of the canonical texts at all. Is there a standard for navigating one's way through these texts and knowing what it is that one is supposed to believe in them, and what one is supposed to disregard? Do I know that King Follet supercedes Mos 15:1-4 because it comes later, or is better, or do I just prefer it? If so, why should I read Mos 15:1-4 at all? With all of the possibilities for doctrine within Mormonism, BoM, D&C, Bible, early JS, late JS, BY, etc, how do I know which one is correct? Or, as the Literary Critic seems to be saying, are none of them "correct"? If revelation is always contingent, and nothing is safe from revision, what exactly am I supposed to believe?