[You can find the whole series here.]
Scripture contains the word of God, in the words of human beings. Therefore each of these texts reflects the social and intellectual milieu of the people of their times. 1 Cor 14:33-34 reads something to the effect of “In all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent. For they are not permitted to speak but should be in submission, as the Law (of Moses) also says.”[1] In the Genesis creation/fall stories, Eve is told that Adam will rule her.
[Read more…]
Female Priests Among Christians and Mormons, Part 7
September 19, 2019 by 9 Comments
Female Priests Among Christians and Mormons, Part 6
September 18, 2019 by 16 Comments
[You can find the whole series here.]
Continuing from the previous post, I’ll just note that Vatican II had a salutary effect on relations between scholars (at least biblical scholars) and theologians with the Roman Catholic church. Theologians/scholars have some responsibility to see that the Bishops have not opened themselves to theological danger no matter how sensitive the issues. There is a danger to any such covenant however, it arises from the far right and far left. The former see every investigation and study as a threat if it doesn’t conform to their own canonical thought, previous investment, or expression, and from the latter who scorn any serious theology or associated scholarship. Of course, everyone thinks this kind of language names those they oppose.
[Read more…]
Be careful what you ask for
September 18, 2019 by 58 Comments
Just a quick note that if you’re going to send someone to God to ask questions, they might not get the answers you expect. [Read more…]
“God Loveth a Cheerful Giver” (2 Corinthians 8–13) #BCCSundaySchool2019
September 17, 2019 by 4 Comments
Another Paul who modified his ethos by mimicking the rhetoric of a “fool.”
Reading: 2 Corinthians 8–13
Main Topics: (1) Cheerful Giving, (2) Paul’s Fool’s Speech, (3) Thorns in the Flesh
1. Cheerful Giving
In 2 Corinthians 8–9, the Apostle Paul preaches about “cheerful” giving, emphasizing that Christ’s followers should come to the aid of others not through “exhortation” but out of their own choice:
“The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” (2 Cor. 9:6–7, NRSV)
Female Priests Among Christians and Mormons, Part 5
September 17, 2019 by 2 Comments
[You can find the whole series here.]
Modern knowledge, historical, scientific, theological, etc. is, or I think should be, part of a process that contributes toward reformation or modification of ancient (or just past) thought, yes, even doctrine. The important word here is contribute not control or dictate. No theologian, scientist, historian, etc., can formulate doctrine or perhaps a better word is teaching of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That’s an ideal I think and it also exists in other Christian denominations. When this boundary shifts it can be unhealthy for the institution and the individual. Scholarship of various sorts has to be assessed in the wider context of a church’s life as guided by the Holy Spirit. Yes, I think God is active in the guidance of sincere supplicants, be they lay persons, Popes, bishops, Mormon or not, and of course I don’t NEED to call this out but given the theme, women who lead in some church capacity.
[Read more…]
Female Priests Among Christians and Mormons, Part 4
September 16, 2019 by 19 Comments
[You can find the whole series here.]
I want to turn to theological issues now. As before, this continues to be merely my own thought process. I’m not seeking to be rigorous—I’m not going to multiply footnotes and references. That’s the hard work someone else can do. Here I’m just interested in exploring what I think and, of course, what you think as you respond in the comments.
[Read more…]
Monday Morning Theological Poll: Celestial Conveyance Edition
September 16, 2019 by 9 Comments
Female Priests Among Christians and Mormons, Part 3
September 15, 2019 by 21 Comments
[You can find the whole series here.]
Last time I was talking about potential for scandal among a sexually egalitarian clergy. I think that danger is overblown but it certainly exists. And if the past is a predictor of the future we might expect a conservative Mormon leadership to be as draconian about possibilities of scandal, given a few actual scandals, as they have been already. For Catholics, women in the priesthood has to mean women in the seminaries, the training ground for the Catholic priesthood. If there are female priests, won’t there be female bishops, archbishops, Cardinals, a Pope (some Anglican branches allow female bishops but no archbishops)? And of course the same goes for Mormon hierarchy. An interesting example that relates to both these groups is the Community of Christ. The CoC is in doctrine perhaps more like a mainstream Protestant faith than it is LDS. They still hold the Book of Mormon as a text useful in faith though many do not believe it to be a historical one and that is not a test of faith. The CoC has had a female clergy for many years now and while it did foment dissent when it was introduced, I don’t think there has been much scandal in the close association between men and women leaders in local congregations. Though I don’t know this as a statistical certainty.
[Read more…]
Female Priests Among Christians and Mormons, Part 2.
September 14, 2019 by 17 Comments
[You can find the whole series here.]
In the last part, I noted some parallels between certain Christian traditions (particularly Catholicism) and Mormonism. I’m not trying to argue anything about whether Mormons are “Christians” in some technical sense and I’m not going to address that here. Last time I mentioned some social factors that play into ordination of women.
During the ERA era (you see what I did there), there were more parallels between Catholics and Mormons. How much, for example has feminism touched the lives of typical Latter-day Saint women or women in Catholic parishes? It’s not at all unusual to see a woman in a Latter-day Saint pulpit (such as they are). But how would it affect the average Catholic wife, say, never mind her husband, if she suddenly saw a woman in the church/cathedral pulpit, playing a truly leading role in the parish? How would this work in a Mormon congregation? “Welcome to our ward, I’m sister Jensen, first counselor in the bishopric. Bishop Huxley has asked that I conduct this meeting.” It was certainly the case that Mormon women were divided over the ERA but it seems like there was a large segment of Mormon women who mobilized to oppose the passage of the ERA in the Mormon Corridor. They didn’t want it, and the scary predictions about a Huxley-future, had some real traction among Mormons and Catholics alike. Today, I think there is still a wide geography-driven difference in the way Mormon women (and men) see a future female priesthood. And would John Smith feel comfortable disclosing his recent sexual peccadillo to a female bishop? What is the, can I say real world, parity here with a women confessing sin to a male bishop? Does a female priest require already some kind of economic and social equality between men and women? And how does this play out in the Global South say, or for that matter perhaps the southeastern US?
[Read more…]
“The Ministry of Reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 1–7) #BCCSundaySchool2019
September 14, 2019 by 6 Comments
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation
–2 Corinthians 5:18
Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians presents us with a context that is difficult to understand. There is a good reason for this: it is not Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. It is at least his Third Letter to the Corinthians, and it may be an amalgamation of parts of his Third and Fourth Letters to the Corinthians. But we know that Paul refers to at least four letters to the Church at Corinth, and we know that only two of them appear in our scriptures. So we have to infer a lot.
Scholars today call the missing letter to the Corinthians “the Severe Letter” or “the Letter of Tears” after Paul’s description of it in 2 Cor. 2:4, “For I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears.” The Severe Letter, most surmise, involved Paul chastising the Church for something that he perceived on a previous visit. The two most common contenders are the toleration of sexual immorality and the encouragement of rival Christian missionaries. Both explanations have plenty of partisans.
Female Priests Among Christians (and Mormons), part 1.
September 13, 2019 by 16 Comments
This is a series of posts about female ordination. In it I will briefly consider some aspects of history, tradition, and scripture, various ecclesiologies, and other stuff. There are 10 parts, unless I get enthusiastic for some reason. You can find the whole series here.
First, I want to be clear that I’m not talking about a ministry of females or even female ministers. That exists already for most of the confessions out there. What I’m going to address is, for lack of a better general term, female clergy. And even this should really be parsed further among churches whose clergy go by the title of “ministers” and those whose clergy go by the title of “priest” or “bishop” and a few variations on that (say, “patriarch”).
This series relates most to churches who use the title “priest” (or some cognate) for their clergy and who are ordained to such offices. This might seem like semantics, but it is historical fact that it’s among these churches (like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Roman Catholic, or Orthodox, or some branches of the Lutheran faith, Anglicans, and some others, indeed, Mormonism had developed, by 1835, a whole mythos about church bishops and Old Testament Aaron, the first Mosaic priest Cf. final version of D&C 68) where there has been heated dispute over the issue of female leaders. After decades of discussion, Anglicans may undergo schisms over this. What is the problem about female priests over against female ministers?
[Read more…]
Designated Drinkers: Power, Privilege, and the Word of Wisdom
September 13, 2019 by 60 Comments
I recently had my first experience with designated drinkers–the opposite of designated drivers–who are assigned to drink heavily on behalf of someone who cannot or will not use alcohol.
[Read more…]CORRECTION: Turning our hearts
September 11, 2019 by
[Note: This post was written in collaboration with, and is posted by permission of Amy Tanner Thiriot.]
Earlier this month I wrote a post reflecting on Century of Black Mormons and introduced it with a short vignette about Caroline Skeen and John Butler. According to family histories, when they got married in 1831 the Skeens gave the couple two enslaved people as a wedding present. In these histories, the Butlers then freed these two individuals and converted to Mormonism. I used this rupture between generations to highlight how we choose to remember and forget. I was also wrong.
[Read more…]
The Great Tragedy
September 10, 2019 by
I gave this talk in Sacrament meeting this past Sunday. A few people in attendance asked for a copy, and suggested posting it somewhere where others could find it.
When my wife and I were in college, we became close friends with another couple from our stake—Rich and Angie [Note: Names changed for privacy reasons]. I had met Rich through work, but we became fast friends and ended up in the same stake as them, and our friendship grew closer and closer over time. Eventually they moved away after graduation, but we kept up a tradition of spending Thanksgiving with them for many years afterwards. One year, as Rich and I were watching a movie late at night, he told me that he had been struggling with his relationship with the church for some time, asked me if I would be willing to talk about it with him. I was happy to, of course, and he explained how he no longer believed many things he previously believed, and that he didn’t really know what to do about it. He asked me why I believed some of the things I believed. [Read more…]
The Pearl of Great Price in Brief
September 8, 2019 by
I wrote this little summary twenty years ago and a friend suggested that it might still be useful with a little updating, so I present it to you here. So much has been published on various aspects of the Pearl of Great Price (PGP) in the intervening years that I can only just gesture at it here. In particular, the Joseph Smith Papers contain still untapped riches on the subject, particularly in its Revelations and Translations series, and further work appears in recent volumes like Foundational Texts of Mormonism (Oxford, 2018), and the forthcoming, Producing Ancient Scripture (University of Utah Press, February 2020).
——–
The Pearl of Great Price is the smallest volume of LDS scripture, comprising about sixty pages in the current 2013 edition (this includes footnotes and illustrations). The book was the last among those constituting the Utah church canon to be officially recognized (1880). Other groups claiming a common heritage with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, such as the Community of Christ, Restoration Branches, etc., reject it as canon either wholly or in part.
The book was originally compiled by European church head and apostle Franklin D. Richards in England in 1851. Hence it is fundamentally a text of the Brigham Young led Utah church though its contents originate with Joseph Smith.
[Read more…]
The God Who Ranges: A Poem
September 3, 2019 by
I don’t write poems often, but sometimes I do. Here’s one. [Read more…]
Monday Morning Theological Poll: Latter Labor Day Edition
September 2, 2019 by
Praying to Jesus at Yoga (A Very Tardy Tribute To Jana Reiss)
August 29, 2019 by
Rebbie Brassfield, the author of this guest post, is a frequent guest-blogger at BCC and a copywriter living in Southern California. In 2012 she created the now-emeritus website Normons.com to try to prove how normal Mormons are (lol). Currently you’ll find her blogging here.
Jana Reiss’s 2011 memoir Flunking Sainthood spawned a thousand imitation experiments on religion. Mine took me recently to yoga.
I would never have gotten into yoga were it not for a friend from church. At first I thought she was nuts — she’d make comments in our Singles Ward Relief Society about how faith was like Aparigraha (roughly translated as the yogic principle of ‘letting go’) and I would cringe just a bit. Her comments were interesting, but it felt like the handbook might frown upon such pagan ideas being shared at church.
[Read more…]#BCCSundaySchool2019: “Ye Are the Body of Christ”
August 26, 2019 by
Many of the more quirky traits of Paul’s letters are evident in 1 Corinthians 8. The chapter is, first of all, a valuable illustration of the complicated nature of scripture. Paul’s letters are often dashed-off and wandering productions, dictated to scribes frantically scrambling to stay engaged with Paul’s meandering trains of thought (see, for instance, 1 Cor. 16:21; Romans 16:22), preoccupied with issues not fully explained (in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul tells us the letter we are reading—that is, 1 Corinthians itself—is Paul’s reaction to a letter from the Corinthians in which they are complaining to and querying the apostle. We know next to nothing about that letter), and intensely engaged with apparently mundane but today obscure and confusing beliefs and practices.
1 Corinthians 8 gathers all these points together. But it also illustrates Paul’s gift for taking seeming trivialities and drawing powerful themes from them. [Read more…]
Monday Morning Theological Poll: Planetary Paragon Edition
August 26, 2019 by
Turning our hearts: Century of Black Mormons
August 23, 2019 by
Some of the first of my relatives to join the church were a couple who lived on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. When they got married in 1831, relatives gave them two enslaved people as a present. Almost immediately and well before they had listened to the missionaries’ message, they released these people. I have taken pride in that. I could imagine that these were the type of people that found resonance with the gospel and moved to Missouri to help establish an egalitarian society, only to be crushed by the political and social reality of the time. I generally have ignored their parents, the enslavers; I’ve excluded them from my story.
[Read more…]
Lorem Ipsum Dolor
August 22, 2019 by
Anyone who spends much time writing things is probably familiar with the universal “dummy text” that begins Lorem ipsum dolor. Supposedly, typesetters in the 16th century used this scrambled Latin text to mock up books and show off designs. Lorem ipsum dolor now means something like, “don’t read the text; that will change when we have something better to say. Just look at the beautiful design. Oh, and also, something about pain.”
[Read more…]Faith without workouts
August 21, 2019 by
I don’t know how many people actually subscribe to church magazines anymore, now that they’re all available on the internet for free, and if people don’t have actual physical copies of the church magazines coming to their homes anymore, I wonder how many people actually read anything in the church magazines. The only people I know who actually read church magazines are the people who post about how horrible this month’s Ensign (or Friend or New Era) is, and I kind of wonder if most of them aren’t just hate-reading the church magazines.
I found out through the evil of social media that August’s New Era is “The Body Issue” and it talks about stuff like the Word of Wisdom and other body-related issues. I haven’t had time to peruse the whole thing, but I did read this article that was being hate-promoted on Twitter last week: “What I Learned from Having to Lose Weight for My Mission.” [Read more…]
Words of Wisdom, or is it Word of Wisdoms?
August 19, 2019 by
There is that perennial argument about the Book of Mormon, which is usually settled by someone eventually stating emphatically that it is “copies of the Book of Mormon.” But the Word of Wisdom is somewhat different, because it is more like variant editions. I think much of the anxious hand-wringing over our dietary constraints would be sidestepped if we acknowledge that there are many Words of Wisdom.
[Read more…]
Monday Morning Theological Poll: Sinful Stratification Edition
August 19, 2019 by
“Be Perfectly Joined Together” (1 Corinthians 1-7) #BCCSundaySchool2019
August 18, 2019 by
Sometime ago–I won’t say where or when–I was in a ward that got swept up in parties where people were expected to buy stuff. The two brands I remember most were “Creative Memories” and “Pampered Chef”–and something about Chinese magnets that were supposed to realign your feng shui or some such thing. Lots of people were into these businesses, and, for a few months, it seemed that there was a “party” every week or so that doubled as a ward activity
[Read more…]Parsing the Word of Wisdom
August 17, 2019 by
In light of the recent Church announcement regarding the Word of Wisdom, I’m seeing a lot of chatter on Facebook where people are trying to figure out how the text of the revelation actually relates to our current interpretation and practice. So I thought it might be worthwhile to set out the text of the revelation (omitting the beginning and ending that do not contain specific prohibitions) and give you my take on them, and give you an opportunity to add your own commentary. [Read more…]
A Conversation with my Catholic Husband on the Word of Wisdom
August 17, 2019 by
“Did you see your Church just officially banned green tea?”
“And vaping. That’s days-old news.”
“Mormon news isn’t real to me until the Washington Post covers it.”
“Fair enough. The best take I’ve seen so far is Jana Riess’s.”
“The Washington Post agrees: they quote her. The Word of Wisdom is ‘not necessarily a slam-dunk in terms of clarity.’ That seems accurate.”
“The problem is our cultural norms surrounding the Word of Wisdom have strayed so far from its literal text that we’re all left wading through layers of shame and confusion.”
“You know what Jana or you or some other sassy Mormon feminist should do? Write a Rachel Held Evans style book: ‘A Year of Word of Wisdomhood.’ It would be hilarious.” [Read more…]
The JST and the Adam Clarke Commentary
August 15, 2019 by
Two and a half years ago on March 16, 2017, Haley Wilson and her mentor for this research, Thomas Wayment, published “A Recently Recovered Source: Rethinking Joseph Smith’s Bible Translation,” in BYU’s Journal of Undergraduate Research, available here. This is not the research itself, but rather a precis; the actual research paper is still forthcoming. This is an exciting development, and I for one am looking forward to it eagerly. [Read more…]
Russian Taxes: A Bleg
August 15, 2019 by
Readers know that I’m interested in basically anything that has to do with the church and taxation. And the other day, I was looking at the Church History Library catalog and came across some fascinating snippets about Russian taxes on U.S. missions.
One comes from the Russia Samara Mission, between 1998 and 2001. The catalog summary includes this: “mission’s troubles with Russian tax authorities and KGB regarding financial matters; attempt to register Church in Kazan (15 August 1998.”
The second entry is for journals of a CES missionary in the Russia Rostov na Donu Mission. It includes this entry: “information about Russian tax system and hardship it caused missionaries renting apartments in Russia (22 October 2002).” [Read more…]
Recent Comments