On revelation

My reading this week was on the theme of consecration. I've decided to wait to write about the reading, though, until after Holy Week (which begins today, with Palm Sunday) and Easter. Today I want to respond to a comment someone posted about last week's reflection, "Joseph Smith is not a gospel principle." The commenter raised the question: Where does a liberal Mormon draw the line in deciding that some texts or teachings produced by Joseph or other church leaders are inspired and others aren't? "Are you going to do to the D&C what Jefferson did to the Bible: cut and paste the parts you like into your own book?"

I've reflected a little on this issue in an earlier post, "How can you pick and choose?" I want to take it up again, though, partly because I have to give a presentation in a couple of weeks about my understanding of scripture, and this offers me a good chance to achieve some more clarity on the subject. Also, the subject seems appropriate (even if in an ironic kind of way) as a theme for reflection on the occasion of General Conference.

So, here goes.

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Hi, Andrew--

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts! I'd like to respond by trying to summarize the experiences that have led me to understand revelation the way I do.

I grew up at a time when the leading scriptural authorities in Mormonism were Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie, whose views on scripture and revelation were basically fundamentalistic. Those commentators made some allowance for the idea that modern revelation could supersede earlier revelation, or for limitations of human authors (to explain things like weird grammar). But the basic understanding was the revelations were produced through a supernatural process approaching a kind of divine dictation—God gave Joseph Smith the words to write down. The various scriptural texts are therefore "true" in the simple sense that they expound a consistent body of doctrine and are perfectly reliable in the here and now as a guide for living and salvation (with the understanding that some mysteries will be clarified later and some changes will eventually be made in Church practice, like restoring the law of consecration and maybe polygamy).

That's the general understanding that dominated the Mormon communities I grew up in, and it was the understanding I subscribed to until I became a young adult—to be more precise, until I started work on my first college degrees—at which point it stopped being plausible to me. I saw too many internal inconsistencies or contradictions across scriptural texts, shifts in worldview, reflections of the historical environment, sexist and racist attitudes, failed prophesies, and self-serving teachings or instructions. Of course, orthodox scriptorians and apologists have developed ways of trying to explain away those kinds of problems; but those explanations ceased to be convincing to me. It was simpler to believe that the problems were due to these texts being human creations like any other text.

Now, up to this point, my story is a textbook case of an intellectual converting away from fundamentalism. But things are complicated by the fact that I also have a testimony of the scriptures of the Restoration. That testimony rests centrally on the experiences I had as a missionary, smack dab in the middle of my college education, the period in my life when I was beginning to find Mormon orthodoxy to be intellectually implausible (though experiences I had growing up in an LDS home have also been important in developing my testimony, as have experiences I've had in my post-mission years). As a missionary, I saw how the scriptures of the Restoration—and to a somewhat lesser extent, the teachings of contemporary LDS leaders—served as vehicles for communicating personal revelation and the life-changing power of the Spirit. I experienced it in my own life; I watched it happening in the lives of people I worked with. I know the scriptures are true in the sense that I've seen the Spirit use them to touch people's lives, my own and others'.

So the problem I faced in the years following my mission was: How do I make sense of these two experiences together—the intellectual developments that have made it impossible for me to subscribe to an orthodox understanding of the scriptures as supernaturally revealed texts, and the spiritual experiences I've had while studying and teaching from these same texts? The working solution I've arrived it—at least for now; who can ever say what the future will bring?—is the one you see reflected on this blog. The texts are human creations, flawed, biased, limited, self-serving, at times even self-deluded. But—a huge "but," and at this point I have to start talking in terms of the mysterious grace of God—these texts are the means that God uses to communicate with me.

Because the texts are human creations, they have to be read critically: I have to discern where God is trying to communicate something to me as opposed to where I'm just reading a reflection of Joseph Smith's own ideas or hopes or fears or fantasies. At the same time, though, because I am coming to these texts to be taught by the Spirit of God—which, like the wind, blows where it will—I have to approach the texts in a teachable spirit. That's why I can't just start cutting and pasting the parts of these texts that currently seem to me to reflect God's will and leave the rest on the cutting room floor. Revelation is a process, and it's entirely possible that parts of the text that, currently, I don't think have anything to do with God will turn out to be avenues through which God teaches me something. This is a kind of critical humility—not the self-abnegating humility of the hypothetical orthodox Mormon you describe, Andrew, who accepts everything a church leader says as inspired. But it isn't the blithely self-confident criticism of a Thomas Jefferson, either. It's something in between.

You raise the concern, Andrew, of a slippery slope. I want to speak to that concern, though what I'm going to say probably won't assuage it. The crucial question for me is this: What is at stake for orthodox Mormons in resisting the idea that the scriptures, or the teachings of contemporary church leaders, should be read critically? Answer: Maximizing the authority of church leaders. If a person starts asking, "So which passages in the Book of Mormon are inspired and which ones aren't?" [though I should interject that I wouldn't pose the question that way], or "Which passages in the D&C are inspired and which ones aren't?" that person is essentially passing judgment on Joseph Smith's claims to prophecy—which from an orthodox perspective would be fine if the judgment were simply, "Yes, this man is a prophet and I'll follow him to the end of the earth." But orthodoxy can't tolerate a judgment that says, "Here Joseph's words are inspired, but here they aren't."

Sometimes Mormon apologists can get away with that kind of judgment if it's the only plausible way to deal with an embarrassing statement from a church leader who's dead, like Brigham Young's teachings on race. ("Oh, he wasn't speaking as a prophet in that case.") But orthodoxy can't tolerate that kind of judgment-passing on the teachings of contemporary church leaders. Church leaders don't want to be judged or criticized in that way—Dallin H. Oaks has been breathtakingly, shamelessly explicit on this point. Church leaders want members to accept their words as inspired so they'll do what they say—period. If a pesky outsider suggests that this sounds like blind obedience, public relations people will rush to insist that members are supposed to gain their own testimonies, that they're free to dissent, etc. But watch what actually happens when someone dissents—when someone says, "Well, I think the Spirit's telling me that the church's opposition to gay marriage is misguided"—and all that p.r. spin goes up in smoke. Church leaders expect to be obeyed. And they're convinced, and the orthodox faithful are convinced, that church leaders can lay down that expectation because their teachings are inspired in the sense of being perfectly reliable. The Lord will not allow them to lead the church astray, etc.

My testimony tells me that's just not true. That way of understanding the prophetic authority of church leaders requires (to paraphrase D&C 21) that you accept the words of church leaders as if they were the very words of God. That's idolatry. And it creates situations where unrighteous dominion can flourish. To accept church leaders as prophets in a true sense has to mean something other than, "Their teachings are beyond criticism"—whether we're talking about scriptures written in the past or the talks church leaders are delivering this weekend at General Conference.

I believe in modern revelation. It's a big part of why I call myself Mormon. I believe, as D&C 1 says, that one of God's purposes in bringing about the movement we call the Restoration is that everyone will speak in the name of God. I seek inspiration to guide my life and the work I believe I'm called to do. I have felt moved at times to speak in the name of God against what I understood to be injustice. Church leaders, too, seek inspiration to carry out the work they've been made responsible for; they, too, speak out in the name of God against what they understand to be wrong. In that sense, sure, church leaders are prophets. But we're all prophets in that sense. Church leaders don't have any special access to God that the rest of us don't have. Their office isn't to "receive revelation," as if that were a right and privilege that pertained only to their office. Their office is to administer the church at the global level, and they should be seeking revelation as they do that, just as all of us should be seeking revelation in carrying out whatever responsibilities we've been given.

Again, a combination of criticism and faith is required: We trust that we're receiving inspiration, we trust that we're being led; but we also have to be self-critical enough to realize that we're flawed vessels, with limited understandings, and that what we think is inspiration might not be, or at least could be superseded later by a better understanding. The orthodox have an overabundance of faith in revelation; what they lack is critical humility.

We also have to recognize that because we're all limited human beings seeking inspiration according to our best lights, we're going to end up disagreeing about what's true or what God's will is. Again, criticism and faith are required: the faith to take a stand on what you're convinced is true but the critical humility to tolerate and dialogue with others who are convinced differently. And it takes further inspiration to develop a (provisional) conviction about when you should be open to dialogue and when you should take a firm stand.

I need to wrap up. Let's bring this closer back to the theme of scripture. The bottom line for me: The scriptures are not a collection of memos from God. They're documents produced by a man who believed he was a prophet in a way he actually wasn't, and which were accepted as scripture by a whole community of people who believed that man was a prophet in a way he actually wasn't. By definition, my way of seeing things makes me a marginal figure in that faith community—the community's functionaries have, in fact, ruled me to be an outsider. But I keep reading the scriptures every week because I know what they are: an instrument for revelation—not in the sense that they were produced through supernatural means in the past, but in the sense that the Spirit uses them to communicate with us in the here and now if we keep our eyes and ears and hearts and minds open. They're a devotional tool, though I don't like how pedestrian that sounds. The phrase "devotional tool" doesn't capture what these texts actually mean to me; for that I need the phrase "word of God," but of course I understand that term differently than the orthodox do.

Enough. Again, Andrew, I appreciate your taking the time to write and giving me the chance to think through these issues some more.