[…] Faulconer tells us, is to model ways of discussing controversial issues within a loving and supporting ecclesiastical community. Here the volume succeeds splendidly. Everybody comes in with their shields down and their phasers on […]
[…] soundbites on evangelical views of Mormonism. He’s taken a lot of heat for this within his religious community–early on being told that he didn’t know Mormons well enough and so would easily be deceived […]
The most common reading of Jacob 5 involves the history of the House of Israel. What follows is another approach to that allegory. This is not meant at all to replace the standard readings; it is just another approach.
Jacob 5 includes a contrast between tame and wild olive trees. The tame trees seem sure and steady, but they also prone to becoming listless, almost lethargic. The wild trees seem to brim with life and energy, but display a propensity to lack focus for that vitality. When the tame trees begin to decay, the Lord of the vineyard wants them to produce new life in the form of young, tender branches (Jacob 5:4). When this is only somewhat successful, the Lord of the vineyard determines to graft the tame branches with the wild branches (versus 7-8). What seems obvious from this is how the Lord of the vineyard seeks to keep the best of the tame branches, perhaps their good fruit and stability, and combine that with the vibrant energy of the wild branches.
[…] And one will begin to realize that one is not alone, that there is indeed an extensive community of Saints that know about these issues yet retain their faith and engagement with the Church. […]
Crossposted at By Common Consent.
By Blair Hodges
Did the law of consecration become effectively suspended or temporarily replaced by the law of tithing when the early Latter-day Saints couldn’t make it work out? Joseph M. Spencer answers no in For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope. Spencer’s latest book offers an analysis of the law of consecration through a close and detailed reading of selections from Paul’s letter to the Romans and Joseph Smith’s revelation now canonized as section 42 of the Doctrine and Covenants.
Crossposted at By Common Consent
Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem
By Michael Austin, Dialogue Board Member
Greg Kofford Books, 2014
$20.95
Academic approaches to scripture sometimes arouse suspicion in LDS circles, especially when they include the Higher Criticism (“Moses didn’t write the five books of Moses?”) or reading the Bible as literature (“So you think this is a work of fiction?”). People using or advocating these approaches often draw charges of privileging the intellectual ways of the world over the pure spiritual truth of God, of trusting in the arm of flesh, or of kowtowing to secular disbelief in the interest of seeming more acceptable.
When I heard that Professor Givens had embarked on a work of “Mormon Theology” I was more than a little skeptical. Not that it hasn’t been done before. That isn’t the problem. It’s just that theology, as James Faulconer has written, is something that just doesn’t seem to fit Mormonism. However, when I got my greedy little hands on Givens’ book, I was pleased to see that it is a work of theological heritage. In Givens’ words: “I am here tracing what I regard as the essential contours of Mormon thought as it developed from Joseph Smith to the present, not pretending to address the many tributaries in and out of Mormonism’s main currents.”(x)
[…] or viewing it as an imperfect but still divine text. But it seems like we as a community have yet to avail ourselves of some of the most interesting advances of biblical scholarship over […]
“Kristine Haglund, the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, said that while she found the church’s new transparency ‘really hopeful,’ she and other women she had talked with were disturbed that the essays do not address the painful teaching about polygamy in eternity.
“These are real issues for Mormon women,” Ms. Haglund said. “And because the church has never said definitively that polygamy won’t be practiced in heaven, even very devout and quite conservative women are really troubled by it.”
