I haven’t read his other books, but this one was interesting and worth reading, especially in light of Temple worship.

As an example, if you look at the BoM, Mormon uses skin color as emblematic of broader moral issues. Realizing that he has a rhetorical usage of skin color to hammer home his points ought to make us at least question whether searches for Indians that look like Scandinavians would make any sense.

Comments?

It doesn’t change the fact, however, that LDS folks do, by and large, employ basically fundamentalist reading techniques. We say we don’t, because we tend not to want to be lumped with “Bible-believing evangelicals” who adhere to the doctrine that everything in scripture is literally true or can be redacted to a fixed, singular meaning, but out exegetical methods tend to be pretty similar (and similarly crude). I’m glad you don’t do this.

I have a hard time with Gaskill (and JF McConkie, who wrote the blurbs for one of his books) because their reading techniques overdetermine the text’s meaning. In my opinion, at least part of likening the scriptures to oneself is being open to the idea that meaning is not fixed, but is always in dialogue with culture, the individual, other texts, etc. Because that system is open, trying to fix it to specific meanings is a lesson in futility. That is not to say that there is no meaning, or that the text can mean anything: the fact that it is this text and not another text keeps meaning from dissolving into meaninglessness.

The irony is that Gaskill would probably maintain that in his work on symbols he is saving LDS thought from fundamentalism, but to me it looks like all he has done is recast the fundamentalist reading strategy in a way that says meaning can be in disguise, but it is still fixed. In his approach you just need the key to reread the symbolic passages as though they were literal and you are done.

Oh dude! I am so the last person on earth that you could possibly confuse with a fundamentalist!

Actually, what it reveals is an awareness that a definitive, responsible, historical-critical, diachronic presentation of the Genesis story will have to take into account the NT insights. No serious work can ignore them — or the DH.

Better now?

Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety. (1 Tim 2:15)

This sounds as if woman can be saved by enduring the pains of childbirth, as if the reason it brought so much pain was somehow to pay for her transgression in Eden.

The JST footnote to this verse changes one word to read:

Notwithstanding they shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety,

which now has the flavor of the parents being saved by providing bodies for their children and continuing in faith and charity. This view unites husband and wife in God’s work and glory (Mos 1:39) — bringing to pass their children’s immortality, by procreating their bodies that will become immortal and in fostering eternal life by lifting their children and each other in “faith and charity and holiness with sobriety” — instead of separating transgressor from innocent spouse.

This fits well with latter-day comments like DOM’s about heaven being a continuation of the ideal home on earth and HBL’s about our most important work being within the walls of our own home.

Whether we like it or not, the exegetical strategies of most LDS folks, GAs included, tends to be either essentially fundamentalist (with the “translated correctly” escape clause that lets us get out of anything, including things that are in fact translated correctly), or crypto-fundamentalist. By the latter I mean that we tend to assume that there is a correct reading and that the text conceals that meaning (you try to get behind symbols), but there is still a correct meaning. In general I think crypto-fundamentalist describes Gaskill’s strategy from what I have read of him.

As another point, I would have to fundamentally reverse Gaskill’s three points in interpreting whether something is literal or symbolic (I think the dichotomy presumed here reveals the crypto-fundamentalist assumption: scripture does not need to be one or the other, why could it not be both/and?). “Basic logic” is seldom as basic as we would like to think and always rests on a priori assumptions. The spirit should be the starting point. What the Brethren have to say is valid, but should be taken with a grain of salt since we don’t hold them to be inerrant and, as in the case of the DH, they often do not know everything that might be relevant.

In any event, a lot of the determinations regarding symbolism that Gaskill makes are not based on any of the three criteria he lists. For example, in his book The Lost Language of Symbolism, he treats the Epistle of Barnabus (without crediting it) as a more or less authoritative guide to interpreting the Law of Moses’ prohibition on the eating certain animals (weasels, camels, hares, etc.) in terms of them representing various classes of immoral people, even though it probably would not pass any of the criteria for determination for today’s audience. I suppose criterion #3 is a trump card and he can claim that he was inspired to know that it was correct, but Mary Douglas’ anthropological interpretation in terms of boundary maintenance (for example) makes a lot more sense.

Finally, regarding Mogget’s question, the presumption is that the author of I Timothy knew something we don’t. I would argue that the author was part of a long exegetical tradition, but I wouldn’t put too much weight on those words. (The question reveals a fundamentally fundamentalist interpretive strategy…) The better question to ask is why the author interpreted the Genesis account in that way and how he was using it and to what point.

Best,

Károly

Help me, I’m out of my depth here: What’s the rationale for thinking that R ever thought, “I’ll put these together because they make a coherent, non-contradictory whole” as opposed to thinking that R thought, “I’m not going to try to mediate, I’ll just put it all on the table and leave it for the reader to sort out this contradictory mess.” I’m thinking in the second instance of something like the Psalms, where we have entire psalms repeated verbatim–no effort to coordinate or synthesize, but just to record everything.