Joseph Smith and Animal Sacrifice

The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith viewed the pre-Mosaic era as a sort of idyllic age of purer priesthood, ordinances, and even language, and was determined to reincarnate that age in his utopian latter-day society. His efforts to recover the pure Adamic language (Cf. here) are a helpful example of this phenomenon. Another is his restoration of animal sacrifices. In an 1840 discourse, Smith suggested that after the building of the temple and the “purification” of the Aaronic priesthood, animal sacrifices would be “fully restored”. Smith’s logic was essentially that since sacrifice was practiced “prior [to] Moses’s day”, it needed to be restored in order for the “restitution of all things” to be accomplished:

Why send Elijah because he holds the Keys of the Authority to administer in all the ordinances of the priesthood and without the authority is given the ordinances could not be administered in righteousness. It is a very prevalent opinion that in the sacrifices of sacrifices which were offered were entirely consumed, this was not the case if you read Leviticus [2] Chap [2-3] verses you will observe that the priests took a part as a memorial and offered it up before the Lord, while the remainder was kept for the benefit maintenance of the priests. So that the offerings and sacrifices are not all consumed upon the Alter, but the blood is sprinkled and the fat and certain other portions are consumed These sacrifices as well as every ordinance belonging to the priesthood will when the temple of the Lord shall be built and the Sons Levi be purified be fully restored and attended to then all their powers, ramifications, and blessings--this the Sons of Levi shall be purified. ever was and will exist when the powers of the Melchizedek Priesthood are sufficiently manifest. Else how can the restitution of all things spoken of by all the Holy Prophets be brought to pass. It is not to be understood that, the law of moses will be established again with all it rights and variety of ceremonies, ceremonies, this had never been spoken off by the prophets but those things which existed prior Moses's day viz Sacrifice will be continued --It may be asked by some what necessity for Sacrifice since the great Sacrifice was offered? In answer to which if Repentance Baptism and faith were necessary to Salvation existed prior to the days of Christ what necessity for them since that time [This excerpt is from seemingly the only discourse of Joseph Smith which was written before being delivered. It was given October 5, 1840. Original manuscript, in hand writing of Robert B. Thompson (a clerk for Joseph Smith); LDS Church Archives. Cited in Smith, William V. A Joseph Smith Commentary on the Book of Abraham: An Introduction to the Study of the Book of Abraham. 2nd ed. Provo, UT: The Book of Abraham Project, 2002, pp. 65-66.]

Smith was apparently trying to fulfill the prophecies of Ezekiel concerning blood sacrifice in a last-days temple. A reminiscence of Oliver B. Huntington suggests similarly eschatological overtones:

I heard the Prophet [Joseph Smith] reply to the question: 'Will there ever be any more offering of sheep and heifers and bullocks upon altars, as used to be required of Israel?' He said: 'Yes, there will, for there were never any rites, ordinances or laws in the priesthood of any gospel dispensation on this earth but what will have to be finished and perfected in this the last dispensation of time -- the dispensation of all dispensations.' [Cited in Andrus, Hyrum L. and Helen Mae Andrus, They Knew the Prophet (SLC: Bookcraft, 1974), pg. 62.]

Wandle Mace suggested in his journal that animal sacrifices were actually performed in the Kirtland Temple:

The Quorum of the Twelve had been filled, but of the number selected one--Willard Richards--was in England and Joseph was instructing those present of that Quorum how they must proceed to prepare themselves, that they might ordain Willard Richards to the Apostleship when they should reach that country. Joseph told them to go to Kirtland and cleanse and purify a certain room in the temple, that they must kill a lamb and offer a sacrifice unto the Lord which should prepare them to ordain Willard Richard a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Sidney made some remarks, when Joseph spoke with great power and spirit, said he, 'I know the law'. To a remark made by Heber C. Kimball he said, 'It will be the sweetest smelling savor you ever smelled.' [Journal of Wandle Mace, typescript, Harold B. Lee Library, BYU, pg. 32.]

The scandalous apostate John C. Bennett also wrote of the performance of animal sacrifices. Bennett was not entirely trustworthy, but his account may be at least partly authentic all the same.

'Well, sister Pratt,' says Joe, 'as you have refused me, it becomes sin, unless sacrifice is offered:' and turning to me he said, 'General, if you are my friend I wish you to procure a lamb, and have it slain, and sprinkle the door posts and the gate with its blood, and take the kidneys and the entrails and offer them upon an altar of twelve stones that have not been touched with a hammer, as a burnt offering, and it will save me and my priesthood. Will you do it? 'I will,' I replied. So I procured the lamb from Capt. John T. Barnett, and it was slain by Lieut. Stephen H. Goddard, and I offered the kidneys and entrails in sacrifice for Joe as desired; and Joe said, 'all is now safe -- the destroying angel will pass over, without harming any of us.' [John C. Bennett to Simeon Francis, editor of the Sangamo Journal, July 5, 1842. (Cf. also Wasp Extra, July 27, 1842; Sangamo Journal, July 15, 1842).]

Read through the lens of Bennett's account, it seems very likely that D&C 132:60 is meant to be taken literally: "I will justify him [Joseph]; for he shall do the sacrifice which I require at his hands for his transgressions." There may also be a hint in D&C 124:39 that sacrifices were being performed:

Therefore, verily I say unto you, that your anointings, and your washings, and your baptisms for the dead, and your solemn assemblies, and your memorials for your sacrifices by the sons of Levi, and for your oracles in your most holy places wherein you receive conversations, and your statutes and judgments, for the beginning of the revelations and foundation of Zion, and for the glory, honor, and endowment of all her municipals, are ordained by the ordinance of my holy house, which my people are always commanded to build unto my holy name.

Brigham Young followed in his predecessor’s footsteps by suggesting the inclusion of a room for sacrifices in the Salt Lake City Temple, but apparently never followed through.

[Speaking of the temple plan] Under the pulpit in the west end [Aaronic priesthood end] will be a place to offer sacrifices. There will be an altar prepared for that purpose so that when any sacrifices are to be offered, they should be offered there." [Journal of Wilford Woodruff, December 18, 1857, LDS Church Archives. Cited in Smith, William V. A Joseph Smith Commentary on the Book of Abraham: An Introduction to the Study of the Book of Abraham. 2nd ed. Provo, UT: The Book of Abraham Project, 2002, p. 66.]

On another occasion Young announced,

"When we see a temple built right, there will be a place for the priests to enter and put on their robes, and offer up sacrifices, first for themselves, and then for the people." [Heber C. Kimball Journal, January 2, 1846. Cited in BYU Studies, Vol. 16, no. 3 (Sp 1976), p. 384.]

At present, animal sacrifice is considered “suspended” by the First Presidency of the Church:

The members of the Church are reminded that the practice of polygamous or plural marriage is not the only law whose suspension has been authorized by the Lord and adopted by the people. The law of animal sacrifice, in force in ancient Israel, has been suspended, but the Prophet Joseph asserted it would be again restored, and such is the effect of the statement made by John the Baptist when restoring the Aaronic priesthood. The law of the United Order has likewise been suspended, to be reestablished in the due time of the Lord. Other laws might be mentioned. [Messages of the First Presidency, vol 5, p. 327]

Joseph Smith’s fascination with animal sacrifice may have had other sources besides his fascination with the pre-Mosaic age. As Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn has notoriously documented—earning him ostracism and excommunication from the Mormon community, by the way—Joseph Smith was fascinated by folk magic. He began his career not as a prophet, but as a seer; he would put a stone into a hat and peer into it, claiming to be able thereby to discern the location of buried treasure. In 19th century treasure-digging lore, buried treasures tended to be protected by guardian spirits. A variety of rites and incantations were used to appease or defeat the guardians, including—one some occasions—animal sacrifices. An early neighbor of the Smith family, William Stafford, remembered,

… another time, they devised a scheme, by which they might satiate their hunger, with the mutton of one of my sheep. They had seen in my flock a sheep, a large, fat, black weather. Old Joseph and one of the boys came to me one day, and said that Joseph Jr. had discovered some very remarkable and valuable treasures, which could be procured only in one way. That way, was as follows: – That a black sheep should be taken to the ground where the treasures were concealed – that after cutting its throat, it should be led around in a circle while bleeding. This being done, the wrath of the evil spirit would be appeased: the treasures could then be obtained, and my share of them was to be four fold. To gratify my curiosity, I let them have a large fat sheep. They afterwards informed me, that the sheep was killed pursuant to commandment; but as there was some mistake in the process, it did not have the desired effect. This, I believe, is the only time they ever made money-digging a profitable business. [Howe, Eber D., Mormonism Unvailed, 1834, pages 238-239. Also cited in Early Mormon Documents, Vol. 2, pp.59-61.]

Thus Joseph Smith’s interest in animal sacrifice may originally have been sparked by occult wonder-lore, and only later imbued with theological significance.

Project "Universe"

Space was quiet and empty. Then with a blaze of light, gigantic masses of matter and energy expanded and were propelled at millions of miles per second away from the tiny point into which they had been compressed. The raw matter and energy continued to expand and travel outward even as the magnetic force of gravity did its work. Soon, the young universe’s building blocks were beginning to swirl together in some places.

* * *

James gazed into the crystal ball, as though he could see what was happening inside it. Of course, the ball’s sides were opaque so as not to contaminate the delicate environment inside with the energy produced by the lamp on his desk. Fortunately, the computer he had hooked up to the sphere provided more than enough information. He hurried to his desk, stepping over a mass of cables and flopping down into a cushioned chair on rollers.

He scooted to the monitor and watched in awe as the display scrolled through screen after screen of information. A small window off to the side indicated that the constantly updating information was only a half-second behind what was actually happening within the sphere.

He grinned. Everything was working perfectly. The behavioral subroutines he had created to dictate things like physical laws were flawless. An ecstatic gurgle extracted itself from his throat. Another whole universe was forming in there. He glanced to the sphere. His science project was going to be the best one ever built.

* * *

Millions of galaxies formed, composed of dust and fiery infernos of raw energy. Billions of stars were born in each galaxy, and many of these in turn gave birth to planets, melding together the dust that swirled in their orbits. Free-floating gas created primitive atmospheres. Water vapor condensed to form rivers, oceans, and lakes. Volcanoes spat lava and earthquakes shook the ground. Mountains and valleys emerged where none had been before.

* * *

James hit a key and suspended all activity within the sphere. The flow of information stopped, and he scrolled up and down the screen, hitting keys here or there for more information about certain sectors of this universe he had created. It had to be in here somewhere. At least that’s what the odds said. He created a search function, specifying exactly the properties he was looking for, and the computer whirred for a few moments. Then a tiny window popped up. It had only one match, a small planet circling a dwarf star. He grinned. Perfect conditions for the evolution of lifeforms. He thought for a moment, then tapped in a name for the little blue planet. Earth.

* * *

Tiny lifeforms emerged from the primordial soup of Earth. They fought, learned, mated, and diversified. Soon, creatures that were once restricted to the sea had developed legs and lungs and crawled slowly across the barren landscape. Plants of all kinds sprouted, the wind carrying their seeds far and wide.

The single large landmass of Earth split apart. The moving tectonic plates carried its pieces in all directions. At the same time, life continued to spread and to evolve. Before long, creatures with an appetite for blood began a reign of terror. Other animals were forced to evolve protections against predators, to grow larger and stronger than ever before. Their successors would come to refer to them as “dinosaurs”.

* * *

James gaped at the display. He could not turn his head for fear of missing some vital event in the history of the magnificent world he had created. This was too good to be true. Not even the results his teacher, Mr. Goody, bragged about from past projects were this good. James smiled. Astounding animals of all kinds had developed within the small sphere. This would give Mr. Goody something to gloat about.

* * *

None of the dinosaurs that had evolved suspected that a huge rock was hurtling through space towards their home, nor that it would cause their complete destruction. The three-mile-wide meteor hit earth’s surface full-force. The dust and debris caused by the collision, not to mention the shaking of the impact itself, caused a holocaust like none ever seen on earth before. The dust blocked out the sun for months. Plants withered and died, and so did the dinosaurs. Yet some other animals survived the destruction.

These continued to evolve, and unlike the dinosaurs developed not brute strength, but intelligence.

* * *

James closed his eyes and sighed when the meteor hit. Oh, well. At least he had everything on record to show at the science fair. It would still be a breathtaking display, and perhaps the tragic end of all the planet’s life would just add another interesting factor.

But when he opened his eyes, he was sorry he had ever closed them. What was this? As time inside the sphere zipped by, he watched the creatures he thought had been destroyed evolve even further. They were developing intelligence! This was impossible. It was unheard of. He decreased the speed as humans appeared. He shook his head and narrowed down the scrolling information to cover several specific communities.

* * *

The primitive humans fought and scavenged for food. They learned to build and to communicate. They developed tools, weaponry, languages, and cultures. As time passed, they began to organize into nations. Wars broke out. Empires rose and fell. Huge world wars threatened the peace that was established. Soon, such fearsome weapons were developed that humanity’s very existence was threatened by their use. A burst of technological development placed them nearly on a par with James’ own world.

* * *

Fascinated, James slowed the time inside the sphere down to parallel his own.
He narrowed down the flow of information as much as possible, and concentrated on a top-secret American research facility. He brought up a new display window, turned up the computer’s speakers, and watched and listened as several people in white coats talked excitedly. Using the sphere’s video and audio functions caused lag-time to increase dramatically, and the much-magnified images were blurry at best, but James didn’t care. He was making history.

* * *

Dr. Jerry Brown leaned over his computer screen. “Amazing, absolutely amazing! This is the breakthrough of a lifetime! Reduce image speed, see if you can increase the image quality, this is still very scratchy.”

Another scientist whistled as he fiddled with some wires connected to a blue plastic box. “Somebody’s gonna be impressed with this. We’ll all get Nobel prizes.”
Jerry leaned in closer to the computer monitor. Then he pointed. “What’s that? It looks like some kid hanging over a screen of some sort, but what’s in the background? A sphere connected to a bunch of wires. Look! Adjust the view! Look at his screen! He’s doing the same thing we are! Pause it, pause it!”

A tiny voice emerged from the speakers. “What the—”

Another of the lab-coated scientists hit the pause button.

* * *

James gasped. They were looking at a picture of him! “What the—”

He hit the pause button.

* * *

Neither James nor Jerry had time to react. You see, they were both on pause.

God's Healing Strategy by Ted Grimsrud: A Review

In God’s Healing Strategy, Ted Grimsrud attempts to distill the message of the Bible by portraying it as a single, coherent narrative. In the narrative, he distinguishes two parts. The first, the Old Testament, introduces the fundamental problem that faces humankind—sin—and God’s initial attempts to solve that problem. The second, the New Testament, provides the solution for the problem of sin. Grimsrud’s image of society is one of continual healing and advancement toward an ultimate idyllic vision. His Biblical perspective is designed to exhort believers to reject the mistakes of the past and to pursue healing in their relationships, all the while seeing their lives as a natural continuation of God’s healing strategy as described in the Bible.

Grimsrud begins his book by enunciating what he sees as man’s fundamental problem. He writes that there is a loving God, but that man’s relationship has been broken. The tale of how this brokenness came to be is one that he locates within the Old Testament. Though many Christians are uncomfortable with the Old Testament and try to avoid it, Grimsrud feels that it is a useful tool for understanding God’s healing strategy. He provides several warrants for using the Old Testament, the chief of which is that it “provides a rich record of the history of God’s people striving to understand God” (25). It is this history that he examines in the first seven chapters of his book.

Grimsrud walks chronologically through the Old Testament narrative, naturally starting with Genesis. In Genesis chapter 1 he finds a very important statement upon which his entire Biblical theology is based. God, after bringing order from the chaos of the void, looks at his creation and sees that it is good. God, after creating humans to be in relationship with him, looks at them and sees that they are good. Grimsrud thus sees goodness as the natural and proper state of the world. It is the natural and proper state of humankind. Humans were created inherently good. But then a problem arises. Adam and Eve sin. They destroy the goodness of God’s creation. They break the good relationship that God created them to be in with him. This chasm between God and man is the fundamental problem of the Bible, and it is a chasm that only seems to widen as the Genesis narrative continues. God meets Adam and Eve’s sin with mercy and attempts at healing. They don’t die immediately. He continues to talk to them. Then Cain kills Abel. Again God meets him with mercy. But the world grows darker and farther away from God. At this point, Grimsrud suggests, God has two options. He can either destroy his creation and start over, or he can try to restore his creation to its original goodness. Grimsrud sees the Flood as an abortive attempt at the first option. The rainbow is a sign that God has changed his mind and committed to the second option (Grimsrud draws from this the controversial theological conclusion that “God is changeable” [36]). The story of the Bible then, is a story of restoration. It is a story in which God desires for all of creation to return to its original goodness.

Grimsrud traces this story through the remainder of the Old Testament, largely with the purpose of differentiating between what the healing strategy tries to move away from and what it tries to move toward. Grimsrud characterizes this movement as bringing “newness”, and offers Abraham as the first in a long line of evidences of God’s newness. Abraham and Sarah, Grimsrud says, are the beginning of a community of faith. Not only does God bring newness to Abraham and Sarah, but he promises to make them and their descendants a blessing to all the earth by bringing that newness to all people. This strategy of moving toward “newness” (perhaps better characterized, considering Grimsrud’s depiction of the original human condition, as “oldness”) is one that God is clearly committed to over the long-term.

But what is newness? What does newness move toward, and what does it move away from? Grimsrud concludes that newness moves toward salvation and liberation, as evidenced by the Exodus account. The same account, says Grimsrud, makes it clear that newness moves away from violence and from the injustices of imperial Egypt. The rest of the Old Testament is the story of God’s people wrestling primarily with these two issues. The kingship brings these issues into primary focus. When Israel asks for a king, the prophet Samuel tells them that a human king will make them slaves and will return both to injustice and to empire. The Bible vividly depicts this loss of liberation and triumph of injustice in the characters of David and Solomon. David, Israel’s greatest king, falls into terrible sin. Solomon, its so-called wisest king, transforms his role into an oppressive authoritarian regime. The Prophets then appear to speak out against the kingship and all its injustice. They teach that God loves his people, even though they seem to have intentionally moved away from his newness, and that he remains committed to healing. God brings exile, destruction, war, plague, and death to purge Israel of dehumanization, exploitation, and religiosity. And still he remains committed to the healing strategy.

As Grimsrud moves into the New Testament, he ceases to use the language of problems and begins instead to use the language of solutions. He starts his analysis at the logical place: the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus came to establish a kingdom of liberation. In Jesus’ time, oppression still remains, despite all the best efforts of the Prophets. In one way, he simply continues where they left off. He continues to denounce the powers that be and to preach justice and repentance. His message continues to be one of critique and of healing. In fact, Jesus makes his healing even more impactful than did the prophets by extending it into the physical realm. His mercy, compassion, and genuine desire for healing are made manifest in the miracles he performs. He does just enough of these to make his point, but not enough to make it seem as though the miracles are the substance of his mission. At some point he turns away from the supernatural works that had characterized his early ministry and turns wholeheartedly to teaching. His teachings are down-to-earth, teach a positive view of life, challenge people’s expectations, and champion liberation.

Jesus’ teachings and miracles, of course, would be as vain as the Prophets’ if he did not qualify them with an even more radical kind of newness. This newness manifests itself in his death and resurrection. Jesus is willing to go the way of suffering, and he teaches his followers to do the same. His death seals his message. It gives it an air of finality. It shows the world just how serious he is. And it provides a prime paradigm for others to follow. His resurrection is at least equally significant. It vindicates his life. It shows that God’s love is stronger than death, and gives the healing strategy some teeth. And most importantly, it keeps God’s healing strategy going. If Jesus had stayed dead, then that would be the end of his revolution. But instead he rises again, and with him rises the vision of a perfected, restored community.

But again, there would be no point to all Jesus’ work if his message, his paradigm, his strategy were not embodied by the people of God. In chapters 10 and 11, Grimsrud describes the transformation of God’s people that results from Messiah’s teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection. He starts in the Book of Acts, which especially drives home the important point that Jesus’ healing strategy is a continuation of the healing that occurred in the Old Testament. The Church expands first to Judea, then to Samaria, then to all the world, recalling the promise to Abraham that his descendants would be a blessing to all nations. On the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit removes the confusion of languages that occurred at Babel. Peter preaches Jesus not as something entirely new, but as a culmination of the Old Testament’s healing strategy. Though the community after Christ seems to be much more successful at moving toward healing, moving toward justice, and moving toward newness, Acts emphasizes that this is not a different strategy. It is merely the old healing strategy finally embodied. Grimsrud then moves on to quickly mention Paul, who works chiefly to motivate “good” people who do bad things to trust in God’s mercy as a solution for their sin.

Revelation, for Grimsrud, is partly a present reality and partly a future hope. It is another call for Christians to reject the norm of emperor-worship and injustice, and the embrace faithfulness. But it is also a description of the New Jerusalem: the ultimate embodiment by God’s people of the healing strategy. In some sense this is achieved by the believers in Christ in the first century. In another sense it is looked forward to as those believers spread their message to the ends of the earth. In the New Jerusalem is the victory of healing, the return to Eden, and the restoration of goodness.

Grimsrud closes with a summary of his theology. In essence, he says that the Bible is intended a coherent narrative that points toward ultimate healing. It is a single story that promotes justice and faithfulness and rejects empire. Grimsrud also challenges believers to continue to pursue the healing that the Bible describes with the ultimate hope that one day we may once and for all fulfill the vision of the New Jerusalem.

Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries: A Review

The late Jaroslav Pelikan’s 1985 book Jesus through the Centuries describes itself as a history of Jesus’ “place in the general history of culture,” as opposed to Pelikan’s earlier, more theological history of Jesus (xv). In “A Personal Preface” to the 2000 edition of the book (two years after his conversion from Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodoxy), he claims to be “by no means tone-deaf to other Christologies than the Orthodox” and to be studying “not…what the New Testament meant, but what it has been taken to mean” (xx-xxi). The extent to which he has accomplished these stated goals is debatable, but there can be no question that his book is an important contribution to Christian historical scholarship.

If Pelikan’s sympathies are orthodox, the organization of his book is not. Rather than working through successive epochs or through successive Jesus-portraits he combines the two methods, so that for every epoch Jesus is discussed in relationship to a major movement or debate that was important during that epoch. While this undoubtedly narrows his focus and thereby makes it possible for him to engage the whole of Christian history in a mere 233 pages, it also results in a book that is more theological than cultural. Pelikan is a historian of theology and tends to choose theological rather than cultural issues (not that the two are always easily separated), so that rather than reading about martyrs, catacombs, and Christianity’s interaction with Roman culture in the early period we read instead about Augustine, Eusebius, and the “new historiography” in which Jesus is “the turning point of history” (26). In the nineteenth century we find a treatment of Romanticism and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (194-205) rather than, for example, of the Jesus of Frederick Douglass, the circuit riders, or even the temperance movement. In almost every chapter Pelikan’s choice of subject matter results in a treatment of elitist, intellectual culture rather than of culture at the popular level. There is also a sense in which, though he claims to sympathize with Christologies other than his own, his choices in each chapter exclude perspectives he does not like. His discussion of Jesus as “prince of peace,” for example, means that we get a healthy dose of Luther’s social ethic but little of his Christology, whereas the Anabaptist Christology is presented thoroughly and sympathetically (168-181).

Pelikan also has a definite tendency to elide some of the difficulties inherent in historic Christian orthodoxy. He mentions in his “Personal Preface” that he believes “the Church did get it right in its liturgies, councils, and creed about Jesus Christ” (xxi), and that belief is as evident in what he neglects to mention as in what he does. Nicea, for example, is presented as having established instantly and universally a standard for Christian orthodoxy (52,58); no mention is made of the ensuing controversy with all its church councils and their conflicting rulings. Constantine’s contribution to the council is relegated to a single insightful suggestion (52-53), and the question of the emperor’s conversion to Christianity is at best oversimplified (50-52). The difficulties, fortunately, are not entirely omitted; Pelikan does an excellent job at assessing the contributions of Greek philosophy to Nicene orthodoxy (41,58,61-62), and in most of the book’s other chapters he is willing to deal with the problematic as well as the faith-promoting aspects of Christian history.

For all the criticisms that might be leveled against Pelikan’s book, there are many more praises that can be showered upon it. It is a pleasant and informative foray into the history of ideas, and covers aspects of some important debates that do not often find expression in a book of this sort. The illustrations, for example, bring different cultures’ Christ-portraits to life in a way that the written word cannot. The mosaic of Christ Militant wielding his cross like a sword, for example, typifies all too well the early Roman church’s imperial mentality (51,53-54). The Ecstasy of Saint Margaret of Cortona, too, beautifully expresses the nearly-erotic ecstasies of the 13th-century Christ-mystics (130-131). Nor does Pelikan stop at a discussion of paintings; he finds traces of each era’s Christology in its statues (110), its music (163), and its literature (207-209). In all these cases he is asking, primarily, what the depictions of Jesus in these artistic mediums can tell us about how the artists and their cultures perceived him. It is not only Jesus’ role in an image that is important to Pelikan, but also such things as lighting and realism, from which we can glean insights about how “high” or “incarnational” a particular Christology might be. This sort of attention to detail lends a level of nuance to Pelikan’s own portrait that is rarely matched in studies of the history of theology.

Pelikan is willing, also, to discuss politicians as well as theologians, so that we learn about the Christologies of such eminent men as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln (190-193,209). Especially compelling are his portraits of Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (212-218). It is clear that Pelikan is invested in these figures, which investment—though it was mentioned as a weakness earlier in this review—makes for the sort of sympathetic and convincing treatment that characterizes a good biography. These last three individuals Pelikan apparently takes as an antidote to the revolutionary excesses of Latin American liberation theologians (218). A key text for all three, the Sermon on the Mount, is evidently also a key text for Pelikan, and like these figures, Pelikan believes the Sermon should be applied literally to every category of life (213,216). This literal hermeneutic comes out also in his account of the life of Antony (for whom the story of the young rich man is a commandment to be literally obeyed) and in his discussion of the Anabaptists (where Luther’s bifurcated private-and-public ethic serves as a foil) (113,169,176). The discussion of the Anabaptists provides still further insight into how Pelikan reads the Bible, since he makes it quite clear that a Christology of right praxis is more important to him than a Christology of right doctrine (176,180-181).

In some respects, Pelikan’s treatment tells us as much about himself as about the history of Jesus-portraits in Christian culture through the centuries. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; he leaves us with valuable insight, based on his decades of reflection on the subject, about which of these Christ-portraits is more faithful to the genuine article. Pelikan does not offer us a series of detached, academic, historical observations that have no real implications for Christian life and practice; rather, he offers us the real and relevant wrestlings of the men in history whose answers he finds most insightful. He teaches us through their experience how now we should live, and instructs us through their hermeneutic what it means to be a faithful imitator of the Savior. That, perhaps, is more valuable than an objective history, so that

when to every man and nation
comes the moment to decide,
in the
strife of truth with falsehood
for the good or evil side,
we can say with
Russell Lowell’s men
“with Christ we shall abide” (210).

The Worlds of Joseph Smith: Mormonism and Historiography

The following are notes on The Worlds of Joseph Smith conference at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., May 6, 2005. This conference is available for free in video format from the LDS Church website.

Richard Bushman, “Joseph Smith’s Many Histories” –
* (citing his wife Claudia Bushman’s “America Discovers Columbus”) Christopher Columbus was almost totally neglected in pre-Revolutionary histories, was only acknowledged as discoverer of America after the Revolution, when the new country needed a new hero. Calls Columbus “grandfather” of the USA.
* Each of us has many histories, each one designed for persons of different cultural contexts. We can draw from any of these histories in order to explain who we are.
* The context in which JS is placed affects how we see him: Mohammad-like? Jesus-like? A money-digger? A seer?
* People who are impressed with JS tend to place him in a more universal historical context, whereas those who are unimpressed place him in an exclusively local context. By limiting the historical horizon, we can make him seem smaller as a figure.
* Mormons call JS an American in order to charm Americans. Non-Mormons call him American in order to make him seem a product of American culture. “Mormons see him as a prophet with an American accent;” non-Mormons see him as purely a product of his American environment.
* Mormons place him in a history of apostasy and restoration dating back to the Bible. Critical historians who nonetheless consider him important (like Josiah Quincy and Alexander Campbell) placed him in a long line of false prophets and religious frauds. Campbell offers a whole bunch of examples including the Egyptian magicians.
* Unfortunately, the anti-fanatics, inflamed by their hatred of fanaticism, have resorted to violence to quell the fanatics, as often as the fanatics have taken up arms in the cause of their faith. Religious fanatics as violent and dangerous is one of the oldest stereotypes. One “Turner” placed JS and Mohammad into this category: dangerous and terrible, but grand.
* I. Woodbridge Riley: narrowed the context to a purely American and psychological history. JS as deformed offspring of Yankee culture. Rejected Spalding theory. “Riley exploded this frail argument” (the Spalding theory) “and looked for evidence that Smith had written the book himself.” Said JS had suffered epilepsy, chalked his visions up to side effects of seizures. Much of JS’s behavior the result of a childhood injury. “Riley believed he had fully accounted for JS and he did not amount to much.” Riley: “Was he demented or only degenerate?” Riley model set the pattern for other JS biographies, incl. Fawn Brodie.
* Brodie makes JS fit the “impostor” psychology type. “Purely a Yankee product.”
* Vogel’s bio is in the same tradition. Sociological analysis, family systems theory, and American environment influences explains all we need to know about JS. No one has gone as far as Vogel in linking BoM plot to persons and events in JS’s immediate context. Vogel carries the Riley model “to its ultimate realization, in extreme detail.” “Vogel’s work diminishes JS by limiting” his historical horizon.
* Books of this sort do not open up new vistas for readers, merely reduce JS to a colorful fraud. Do not plumb his depths. In Bushman’s opinion, we have reached the end of the line in this tradition of bios and will return to the 19th c. sort of transnational histories of JS.
* Transnational histories: Jan Shipps, John Brooke, and Harold Bloom. Shipps “dazzled me with her brilliant analysis of early Mormonism” in her 1985 study Story of a New Religious Tradition. Did not limit Mormonism to Burned-over district. Compared Mormon origins to origins of X’ty, departs from X’ty as X’ty departed from Judaism.
* John Brooke Refiner’s Fire. Placed Mormonism in hermetic tradition. Smith was a miracle-worker of magus who sought divinity. This book dumbfounded Mormon readers because its connections were so tenuous. Nevertheless, it broke through the purely national boundaries of JS studies.
* Harold Bloom thinks of Smith as supreme example of American religion, but also finds echoes of Biblical antiquity. Smith had an “uncanny ability to uncover ancient types such as Enoch or Metatron” that Bloom could “only attribute to his genius or demon.” A man in touch with religious currents from the deep past.
* These authors enlarge Smith, giving him greater scope, even though they do not all have a high view of him.
* “For a number of years, in my opinion, Joseph did not know who he was.” “Not until he translated the Book of Mormon did he know…” First Vision, discovery of seer stones, and command to translate plates (his mix of tresure-digging and religious involvement as a youth) are the “prophet puzzle,” and may have been as puzzling to JS as to us.
* JS was unable to go through an emotional conversion and so was worried about his sins. In the vision, the first words were “thy sins are forgiven thee.” He may have considered this a particularly dramatic “new birth” experience like what revival preachers talked about. His first reaction was to consult a minister—why do this if he had just been informed that all ministers are corrupt? He was confused and wanted guidance, like other new converts.
* Vogel argues that JS may have wanted to make a career out of treasure-seeking, but Bushman sees him as compelled by his father and neighbors, an unwilling participant. “JS knew his future did not lie with the treasure-seekers, yet he had a gift…” he did not know how this gift fit into the history of religion.
* In the case of the vision to translate the gold plates, there was no precedent to attach himself to.
* “An incomprehensible mixture of possible identities” were very confusing to JS.
* Seeing lost objects in the stone prepared him to look into the Urim and Thummim and translate.
* JS did not care much for Anthon’s opinion but he was thrilled to find that his response fulfilled a biblical prophecy. At last a thread tied JS to the Bible and thereby a broader history. But it was the BoM that finally tied JS to a broader history: king Mosiah, a seer and prophet.
* BoM places Israel on a world stage. Isaiah uses “isles of the sea” once, Nephi uses it 8 times.
* Our stories of JS must comprehend his story of himself.
* Could JS have created the BoM narrative himself? Doubtful that a small, purely American history could take all this into account. “A small history will not account for such a large man.”
* My thought: interesting that Dr. Bushman seems to have a higher opinion of Brooke than Vogel, even though Vogel’s use of sources is considerably more careful and responsible. But Brooke’s work presumably could have a faith-promoting function in that it aggrandizes Joseph Smith and ties him to something much bigger than himself. Thus, I think, Bushman’s preference for him.

1st Respondent – Robert V. Remini –
* Joseph Smith is the quintessential American. Everything about him strikes me as American.
* If you try to become a theologian or a psychologist, you are not a historian. If you try to defend him you’re not a historian but an apologist. If you condemn him and call him a fraud or a charlatan then you’re not a historian. The historian just looks at the facts, tries to find the rational reasons for why a person did the things they do.
* “I don’t think anybody at any time is divorced from the period, the environment, the country in which he lives. You are shaped by those things. And I believe JS was shaped very much by the fact that he was born smack-dab in the middle of the Second Great Awakening.” Joseph Smith said he went to camp-meetings and wanted to experience the wild stuff but couldn’t; his family was very religious, father had dreams. How could Joseph not want to feel the presence of God?
* When Joseph talked to the clergyman he was contemptuous, not because Joseph was a child or because he claimed to see a vision; it was the message that all the denominations were wrong and their clergy corrupt.
* There is something about Joseph Smith that people either revered or wanted to attack… why was he hated so?
* Americans are very uncomfortable with what is strange and different, and this man was different.
* Bushman asks in a draft, why do foreigners go for it? Remini: foreigners have been going for all things American for ages. They love our government, music, movies, science. Why not our religion?
* Mormonism is an American religion and we ought to be proud of it. Look at what we’ve contributed!
* Places the BoM in a line of American documents stating who and what we are, alongside the Mayflower Compact, Decl. of Ind., Const., Bill of Rights.
* Because of JS’s surgery he was a very quiet boy.

2nd Respondent – Richard Hughes –
* Campbellism and Mormonism shared much in common, one of which was adult baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins. Pepperdyne put up a statue of Columbus pointing out over the waters. “See, here’s water. What doth hinder my being baptized?”
* The Restorationist vision flourished in antebellum America to a degree that it has scarcely flourished at any other time in the past 2000 years (though it is an older vision).
* Almost every version of Restorationism in 19th c. America (incl. Campbell, Shakers, and Oneida) believed they were ushering in the millennium.
* What divided JS and Campbell was the way they envisioned the task of Restoration. JS was a Romantic, writing and speaking about the days of yore when prophets walked the earth. Campbell, on the other hand, was a child of Rationalism and the Enlightenment: God could speak only through the Bible.
* Shakers believed that if they recovered the purity of the church’s original purity (vis a vis celibacy), they would usher in the millennium. Official name of the church had to do with 2nd Coming. Ann Lee won only a few converts in England, but membership exploded into the thousands upon coming to America. John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida community: rejection of selfish thoughts and selfish ways, so did away with monogamous marriage in preference to “complex marriage,” or free-love. Noyes was a Restorationist who believed the Millennium had already come in 70 AD, thus could they could they restore a perfect society. Noyes attracted hundreds of followers.
* Restoration and millenarianism were built into American culture. The Decl. of Ind. And also Thomas Paine spoke of American government as a return to the original principles of nature as they were in the Garden of Eden. They also believed America would usher in a final golden age for all. Case in point Lyman Beecher. Seal of the United States says novus ordum seclorum: new order of the ages.
* These themes of the “cosmic rhythm of restoration and millennium” informed the many new restorationist sects.
* Joseph did have a history that transcended 19th c. America: the biblical saga.
* JS had “one foot in American culture and one foot in biblical culture” and “fused the two in a profound act of creative genius.”

3rd Respondent – Grant Underwood –
* Consider Joseph in terms of Utopianism, alternative family values, biblical primitivism, millennarianism.
* Tertullian wrote that in the suppression of Montanism, the Holy Spirit was chased into a book.
* In the USA leading up to JS there was an extensive visionary culture in such groups as Methodists and Presbyterians.
* One study has identified more than 400 prophets during this period.
* God had more prophets, tongues, and oracles than ever before. The problem became one of God’s loquacity rather than God’s hush.
* The minister’s disdain for JS’s vision was because it was just another of a long string of claims to visions and charismatic experiences.
* Ann Lee “God’s work in these latter days is a strange work—even a marvelous work and a wonder.”
* In one of Joseph’s earliest letters he predicts the near arrival of the apocalypse to sweep away the Mormons’ enemies. In a public address he called people to repent and flee to Zion before the Second Coming came and scourged them. Later Joseph’s apocalypticism softened.
* The dichotomy between magic and religion is a false one. Samuel was sought after for his ability to locate lost donkeys as well as to proclaim words of YHWH. Seer stones and mineral rods have been employed by prophets throughout the ages. In both biblical history and early Mormonism, the written word of God overshadowed and superceded divinatory aids.
* In Tibet, the Termas are texts written in a cryptic language hidden all over the country. Those who find them and called Tertons and are considered great bodhissatvas. They renew the tradition by interpreting them.
* JS is repeatedly likened to Moses and to ancient apostles.
* The proper realm of the historian is the visible world, but it would be a mistake to think history is opposed to a view in which God is the driving force behind events.
* Uniqueness of a religion does not prove divine origins. Comparative analysis does not necessarily say anything about origin, but rather only about similarities and differences.
* Parallelomania has given comparative analysis a bad name. Its problems are both inappropriate parallels and inappropriate inferences about origins.
* Comparisons to Kabbalah are not genetic. Mormon doctrine of divinization is very different on close analysis from what is found in the Kabbalah.
* Careful attention must be paid to Joseph’s immediate circles of discourse. We must understand his culture and verbal language.

Question and answer:
* Richard Hughes: there is an essential Joseph Smith, but it’s really hard to get at that, so we will continue to have many Joseph Smiths.
* Remini: As people in different times and places have different needs and things, people will continue to paint new portraits of JS.

Jacques Derrida and Mormonism: Notes from John D. Caputo's 1999 Sunstone Presentations

At the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium in 1999, there were two sessions with John D. Caputo. Each may be purchased and downloaded for $1 from the Sunstone website-- a great deal, if you ask me! The first session was "Toward a Messianic Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Religion." The second was "Derrida among the Mormons? Question and Answer with John D. Caputo." Caputo is actually a member of the Catholic Church, who has written at great length about postmodernism and religion. These sessions are a sort of interfaith sharing of his findings. The following are my notes on the two sessions.

Toward a Messianic Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Religion
Deconstruction: a movement that’s not quite a movement.
Postmodernism is a philosophy of difference. Difference is the focal concept.
Modernity tends to focus on unity: Enlightenment rationality focuses on universality.
Postmodernists worry about the hegemony of this Enlightenment rationality.
2 versions of Postmodernism: one from Nietzsche (the Dionsysian version), the other from Kierkegaard (the messianic version).
Levinas and Derrida are of the messianic variety. Most objections against Postmodernism are directed against the Dionysian variety.
Nietzsche introduced “perspectivalism”: we not only have a perspective, but we are a perspective.
No true or false perspectives; just stronger or weaker ones.
All our beliefs are interpretations. Even grammar is a prison that forces us to think a certain way. Nietzsche wanted to “unleash” the play of interpretations. This is the kind of thinking people denigrate as “nihilism”.
Postmodernism says things don’t drop out of heaven; they’re historically constituted. This idea has been useful for some Postmodern theology like feminist theology, for example to show the genealogy of patriarchy.
Postmodernism is hated by conservatives and the classical left (which is modernist). It is adopted by the Nietzschean left.
“Difference” means not diversity but alterity, “otherness.” We live in our own world of “sameness,” which gets shattered by the “other.” Levinas tells us to try to think from an “other” perspective.
“Wholly other” is something that shatters all our expectations.
We can’t have or understand another’s experience because that would require being them. They are structurally unavailable to us.
Levinas: to answer a call you never heard = creation.
Levinas and Kierkegaard have a very religious kind of post-modernism.
Derrida adopts the concept of the “wholly other” but without the religious framework.
Derrida sees “messianisms” (individual “messianic” faiths) and extrapolates the abstract idea of “the messianic”: a formal structure without religion.
Derrida grew up a French speaking Jew in Arab-ruled black Algeria. He spoke “Christian Latin French.”
Negative theology says “I pray God to rid me of God”; it didn’t want to make a God-concept idolatrous, and wanted to get to the God beyond God, so to speak.
Derrida loved the self-effacing language of negative theology. The difference is negative theology had a faith in who the “wholly other” is, whereas Derrida did not. He did love the structure of prayer and weeping for this “wholly other.” “Who do I love when I love God?” The way Derrida most often translated this God is in terms of justice. In this sense he is similar to the anti-cult OT prophets with their justice-emphasis.
Blancheau: Messiah will never come. Structure of “the messianic” is to be always to come. Even when Jesus had come we wanted him to come again. If messiah ever came it would be a disaster.
Derrida: once a structure hardens, it’s dead. Deconstruction doesn’t mean “take apart,” but “make pliable”: find room for discussion and different voices. Make room for what’s coming—the wholly other—which of course is a risk because we don’t know what it is.
Derrida’s prayer is, “come.” Coming is the structure of history. We’re always looking forward.

Derrida among the Mormons? Question and Answer with John D. Caputo
“Deconstruction” is not destroying but finding inherent tensions and allowing them to be constructive (e.g. dissident voices, etc.).
Any rich religious tradition is inherently polymorphic.
Much of what we call orthodoxy is a power play.
Derrida: the best way to receive a gift is w/ ingratitude, so you break the cycle of debt-obligation.
In literary criticism, this means we can’t let the author control interpretation.
Forget about going back to the author’s intention.
Determinate messianisms spell war. Which tradition would Messiah be? Which language would he speak? When the messiah actually arrives, he acquires a determinacy that is dangerous.
Exclusive religious claims give us a convenient vehicle to make war on each other.
Caputo: if you claim to have privileged access, you’re lifting yourself out of the human race.
We all have to have some kind of faith—faith is just a construal of things—we’re crossing our fingers.
Caputo argues for messianic indeterminacy. Revelation in Christ is unique but not exclusive. God doesn’t favor one people over another.
Deconstruction is Jewish, Parisian, atheist, democratic. It is a kind of messianism itself.
Caputo: things don’t drop out of heaven; inspiration is a way of interpreting things where we see traces of God in existence.
We can’t get behind the play of language and interpretation.
Derrida likes literature because you can’t get behind it; there is nothing behind it. Derrida says everything’s like that.
Scriptures are written in historic, human language.
Radical hermeneutics insists on subjectivity of interpretation.
Postmodernism rejects mind-body dualism as Greek, not biblical.
Nietzsche sees individuals as bundles of forces.
Nietzsche says you can’t separate deed from doer: determinism, no responsibility (“innocence of becoming”). No good and evil, just events discharging themselves.
Deconstruction doesn’t deny reference but does say reference isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.
Not anything goes; some interpretations are better than others.
You have to act; you can’t wait for all the results to come in.
Kierkegaard: there must be equality in love, so w/ God there must be descent or elevation.
You don’t deconstruct things; things are auto-deconstructing. We just find inherent tensions.
Caputo criticizes Catholic views of women and homosexuals.
Doesn’t think Derrida believes there is a “way things are in themselves”.
In philosophy we talk about the sum total of possible perspectives, not about one objective perspective or “the way things really are”.
Derrida doesn’t argue against standard scholarly approaches; just against closure or exclusivity.
Derrida wants to make us aware of our Eurocentric perspective. Other cultures have different categories.
Derrida wants to weaken faith-reason distinction, because even reason is a type of faith.
Enlightenment notion that reason is pure light is a fiction.
Derrida’s method isn’t “grounded” except in his own conventions.

Deconstruction and Mormonism: Notes from Sunstone 1991

At the 1991 Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium, Mormon scholar Travis Anderson gave a presentation called Through the Looking Glass: Deconstruction and Mormonism. Anderson's presentation may be purchased and downloaded in MP3 format from the Sunstone website. The following are my notes on his presentation, which was was chiefly concerned with the postmodern philosophy of Jacques Derrida as it relates to issues of reading and translation in a Mormon context. Grant Boswell was the respondent to Anderson's talk, and I also made some notes at the end on Boswell's comments.

Jacques Derrida: defining deconstruction is difficult; all statements of the form “deconstruction is x” a priori miss the point.
Derridean deconstruction is different from Paul de Man’s method of “deconstructionism”.
Derrida finds discontinuity in metaphysics in the “infinity of the end of man”.
Hegelian dialectic: a testing process whereby we measure correspondence of knowledge and its object. We always falsify the correspondence, but in a moment of “overcoming” bring aspects of its “alterity” (otherness) into our consciousness. For Hegel this process leads ultimately to “absolute knowledge.”.
Derrida argues this is a process of the death of the old consciousness and the birth of a new one. We can only know that the old one was inadequate from the perspective of the new one, so it’s impossible to know if we ever arrived at an “absolute” knowledge except from an objective perspective. The telos of absolute knowledge therefore stretches into infinity.
The only way we can arrive at absolute knowledge is to inscribe all “otherness” within the “sameness” of the self: to appropriate everything.
Deconstruction’s task is thus to expose that appropriation has a limit.
Deconstruction in Derrida is actually a translation of a German word Heidegger uses of his own investigation of the history of metaphysics.
Not deconstruction like “destroy” but deconstruction like a “taking apart” to see what something’s made of.
Derrida does not believe in the “death of philosophy”.
Deconstruction has been called a kind of negative theology.
Translation is the fundamental question of deconstruction. It does not deny “the contextual difference” b/w sign and signifier, but liberates the sign from a “pure signification.”
Deconstruction ends true translation in the classical sense (which means “pure” correspondence b/w sign and signifier).
Translation per se is not possible: all translation is interpretation and commentary.
It is impossible, then, for a book to be “closed” (complete) in the sense a summa, encyclopedia, or Bible might claim to be.
A book that is not “closed” can have no final or authoritative reading.
Joseph Smith’s process of translation is quite compatible w/ deconstruction.
Mormonism agrees that Bible is not a closed book.
This is not to say Mormonism should uncritically ally w/ deconstruction.

Grant Boswell
Restoration and deconstruction are compatible.
Levinas: translation could be equated w/ “metaphor” or “transfer”.
Levinas’ question: “how are we borne beyond?” Unlike Derrida, this assumes there’s a sense in which we can move beyond the limits of philosophy.
Objects become meaningful on basis of language, not the other way around.
“Words are not the signs of things but things the signs of words.”
The spectator is an actor, “operates in the midst of the spectacle it welcomes,” assembling it.
Both subjectivity and objectivity at once.
Levinas endorses a Heideggarian theory of metaphor: a meaning cannot be separated from access to it; the access is part of the meaning.
Levinas’s theory of language is that the signifier is not a thing, the signifier is the agent of signification: “the other”.
The first language is the command to respond—this is the ethical relationship.
Sense, trace, and meaning are major concepts for Levinas.

Questions and Answers with Travis Anderson
Translation is what we’re involved in every time we read the scriptures.
We can’t totally equate “tree” with “arbol”. There will always be a “remainder” that doesn’t carry over in translation. Translation in the classical “pure” sense is impossible. This moves us away from a passive sense of translation because the way we live our lives will affect how we approach the text; a righteous person will read it differently than a sinner, for example.

Notes on Sam Brown's Sunstone 2007 Presentation on the Kirtland Egyptian Papers

At the 2007 Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium, on August 9th, Samuel M. Brown gave a presentation titled "Joseph Smith's Kirtland Egyptian Papers: Hieroglyphs, the Sacerdotal Genealogy, and the Antidote to Babel". Brown's presentation is one of the most significant steps forward in understanding Joseph Smith's Kirtland Egyptian Papers in recent history. Brown's presentation may be purchased and downloaded from the Sunstone website. The following are my notes on Brown's presentation, for your convenience. While I don't agree with everything he says about the history and text-critical nature of the documents, I think that his understanding of what Smith was doing in them is really very carefully thought out. Although Mormons may find little in the presentation that upholds a traditional view of Smith and his work, any who are willing to consider viewing Smith as a sort of contemplative, creative, poetic genius employing his gifts to get in touch with the meaning of the universe-- sort of like how Emerson viewed Jesus-- will find much here that is worthwhile.

Brown’s ambition is to treat the KEP as religiously significant documents in their own right.
USA in the time of JS hummed with Egyptomania, including diffusionist theories of Native American origins.
American Masons and other metaphysicians sought the secrets of eternity in Egypt, in Hermes Trismegistos.
Hieroglyphs were thought of as mystical pictographs/pictograms.
Early Americans eagerly sought the language of Adam in Eden.
1834 – Phelps believed hieroglyphs protected great mysteries from the uninitiated.
JS repeatedly demonstrated his desire to move beyond the curse of Babel to find “pure and undefiled” language in Enoch and the Jaredites.
Glossolalia as language of Adam – JS used it to reveal ancient place names in America.
1832 Smith writes to Phelps of a desire to escape crooked broken language.
Smith wrote in his diary “oh may God endow me with learning, even language”.
Phelps looked forward to the day when all redeemed multitudes would “speak a pure language”.
Part of JS’s title was “translator”.
He was interested in Hebrew, JST during the Kirtland period.
He lectured to his family during the KEP project on “the science of grammar”.
Phelps demonstrated considerable fervor.
Scribal contributions to the KEP are not trivial.
JS’s vision is clear in the outlines and scope of the project, but Phelps helped shape his approach.
KEP are incomplete drafts of an intended grammar.
Smith died before he could return to the project in 1843.
KEP provide a compelling view of how JS and inner circle experience Egypt, hieroglyphs.
KEP are not a grammar of hieroglyphs, they are a hieroglyphic grammar—they express deep meaning of pictographic language. They are the products of creative minds exploring death transcendence while proposing a means to encompass the universe of the living and the dead in a single vision.
KEPE 2-5 “follow” KEPE 1?
A “degree” in the Alphabet and Grammar is associated with increasing syntactic complexity.
The hieroglyphs are treated as pictograms. The character Smith calls “iota” and translates with the English verb “to see” looks like an eyeball. A symbol shaped like a little man with upraised hands is translated “intercessor”.
Other symbols are treated as spatial, temporal, or geographic – a vertical line is translated “upright”, and/or “vertical ascent”.
“Sueh” is a top-semicircle, translated “the whole earth”.
A bottom-semicircle is “going down”.
Russell suggested that all of humanity’s earliest writing was pictographic; Emerson that every word if traced back to its origins is derived somehow from its meaning.
Moses Stuart’s grammar, used in Kirtland school, made much of the pictographic nature of Hebrew.
JS saw a number of overlaps b/w Hebrew and Egyptian.
Cowdery claimed that Hebrew characters were recognizable on the Egyptian papyri.
Several Hebrew letters are invoked as names for KEP glyphs.
Cowdery claimed that many characters are exactly like the present form of the Hebrew without points.
There is Greek also in the KEP: Haddis (?) an upside-down lambda and Ahmeose, related to alpha and omega.
Smith’s Egyptians even used Arabic numerals, all matched with similar appearing hieratic characters.
Upside-down question mark appears as “an interrogative pronoun”.
Iota = I, Ki = me (English homophony?).
The Grammar’s rules make amplification obligatory.
Katumin and Onitas were the mummies in whose breasts the papyri lay.
KEP system of degrees derives from genealogical scope? Zip zi points to first woman.
In Webster’s 1828 dictionary “degree” has genealogical significance – a certain distance in a line of descent, determining the proximity of blood.
Smith investigating the great chain of being, connecting all life to the creator? A patriarchal and sacerdotal hierarchy of intelligent beings.
Pseudomasonic recapitulation of Solomon’s temple.
Images of patriarchy and lineality permeate the KEP – Hoeoophah is about patriarchal authority. As it is increased by degree it can be through marriage, through anointing; fifth degree is a king w/ universal dominion. This fits with Smith’s concept of becoming a ruler by enlarging family connections, doing priesthood ordination, anointing by oil, etc.
Elements of the 1832 three kingdoms vision show up in KEP.
Kingdom whose subjects differ from one another in glory – telestial kingdom?
Kingdom without glory = hell.
Inherent to God of the KEP is an internal hierarchy? And a closely related astronomical view.
Cubits measure the length of an orbit, one day to a cubit.
Flosisis – light is related to life – cp. D&C 88
Smith’s followers believed they could translate themselves to Kolob in defiance of death.
Buck believed heaven had to be a physical location and cited as a proof the translated beings like Elijah and Enoch. He mentioned that some ancients believed they would reside in the sun.
Thomas Dick mentioned that universe’s center was throne of God.
Kolob the astral equivalent of God.
Celestial bodies are treated as planetary patriarchs.
Klifloisis refers in 2nd degree to John the Baptist.
Kolob is “the last or the eldest”.
JS said earth would undergo translation, become a urim and thummim, participate in chain of being.
1832 – Smith said stars bear testimony of a God who creates and regulates them. Similarly Alma in debating Korihor.
Astrology had receded in 19th c., but wonder-lore persisted.
Millenarianism hung on to this wonder-lore, connected comets for example with second coming.
Cowdery connects papyrus to Enoch’s pillar in Josephus, which is astronomical in nature.
A variety of 19th century sources identified deceased people with stars—eulogy of JS Sr. says he shined like the stars.
Lucifer as a fallen star.
All lines of the KEP converge on Adam and Eve in Eden.
Depiction of Eve and serpent were taken as proof by the Mormons of the truth of the Bible.
Smith and scribes connected Eden to afterlife in one interpretation.
Inspection of KEP shows it is not a grammar of hieroglyphs, would not pass muster w/ any Egyptologist.
KEP don’t require any sophisticated understanding of Kabbalah.

J. Denny Weaver on American Civil Religion

In his book Anabaptist Theology in Face of Postmodernity, J. Denny Weaver mounts a vigorous assault on American civil religion, contrasting it with the Canadian ideal he believes America should emulate. It is a testimony to the tolerant nature of the American cultural mosaic that such a book found a willing publisher on this country’s soil. Weaver argues that American civil religion and Public Protestantism represent a continuation of the Constantinian synthesis of church and state and therefore a threat to Mennonitism, whereas Canada’s only problem is that the government is so rosy-faced that Canadian Mennonites sometimes forget all governments are the enemy.

American civil religion, Weaver says, is a sort of unofficial political religion. It teaches a link between freedom and violence, because of course American freedom would not have been possible without the Revolutionary War. Today this link manifests itself in Bush’s pious war on terror. Civil religion uses primarily ambiguous civil terminology to describe God (e.g. supreme being, supreme judge, etc.), allowing all denominations to become subcategories of it. It also promotes the idea that one serves God by serving the nation. It upholds democracy and capitalism as ultimate, unquestioned beliefs and also teaches the ultimacy of human rights. To this point, Weaver is merely repeating an idea first enunciated by Robert Bellah in 1967. Of course, unlike Weaver, Bellah actually had a moderately appreciative view of American civil religion.

Whereas civil religion is orthodoxy in the “secular” American sphere, Public Protestantism is the norm among religious Americans. It is a “quasi-established church that complements the civil religion.” It places its emphasis on moral concerns and tends toward reductionism; the gospel is simple and can be understood by everyone. Here Weaver is generally following a 1970 study by Martin Marty, though Marty has since written that evangelicalism has replaced reductionistic liberalism as Protestantism’s public face.

Where Weaver breaks new ground is in arguing that civil religion and Public Protestantism continue the Constantinian synthesis that identifies the church with the social order. After the disestablishment of the church in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the religious majority in America decided it still wanted its faith to be transformative to the society and to influence political systems and decisions. It thus chose to voluntarily Christianize the nation, which evil act Weaver feels will be the undoing of us all. The idea that the USA should be a Christian nation remains current even today.

Weaver also mentions the influence of the concept of America as a “melting pot.” The concept of a melting pot requires that people go out of their way to be a part of the society, whereas in Canada the “cultural mosaic” allows Mennonites—Weaver’s faith community—to more readily close themselves off from the people of the world. A melting pot requires people to abandon parts of their old identities and to adopt a new, distinctly American one. This, Weaver concludes, is a bad thing.

Although Weaver admits that Mennonites tend to resist civil religion and the melting pot (though they have given up their language and dress), he mourns their apparent desire to become part of Public Protestantism. American Mennonites claim many of the innovations that are accepted by American Protestantism (e.g. freedom, voluntarism, and separation of church and state) as their own. Our author even believes that Anabaptists have partially bought into the notion of violence as the basis of freedom, though the evidence he presents to support this point is paltry at best.

Unlike the Land of the Heathen and Home of the Knave, Weaver says that Canada lacks a unifying civil religion and the notion of a melting pot. It is the story of many cultures and speaks instead of a “cultural mosaic”. In fact, the only thing wrong with Canada according to Weaver is that the government and people are so great that it’s easy to get comfortable with them and forget that Mennonites are supposed to be separate. In his zeal to promote a non-violent Christology, however, our author has even leveled criticism against Mennonites in Canada. Here the Mennonite tradition has gone largely unchallenged and so has happily accepted its place within the cultural mosaic. It is thus less inclined to create a distinctive theology of its own and to see the violent roots of Chalcedonian theology. It also tends to underestimate its own importance.

There is undoubtedly some value in a study that calls for caution where civil religion and public Protestantism are concerned. This has been done well recently, for example, by Noll, Hatch, and Marsden in The Search for a Christian America. Evangelicals who hope for prayer in schools and for Protestant hegemony in government have forgotten the principles upon which this country was founded, which were designed to protect the church from the state as much as the state from the church. At the same time, however, it seems unlikely that it could be acceptable for a genuine Christian believer to entirely insulate his or her faith from the public sphere. Surely our faith must affect our actions in every realm of life in which we participate. And for those of us who do not find Weaver’s vision of radical Christian separatism from the culture appealing, we can scarcely help but participate in the public sphere. I tend to resonate instead with Wilfred McClay, who has written, “responsible critics of civil religion have to be willing to offer a serious and persuasive vision of what things could be like in this country, or any country, without it. I doubt that they can.” Civil religion is an attempt to find a via media—a middle way—between what McClay calls “the extremes of fusion” and “alienation, extreme theocracy” and “extreme sectarianism.” Voices like Weaver’s are important reminders that we ought not to fall into the former extreme, but neither I think should we resign ourselves to the latter. The difficult task of navigating between these extremes is one that will undoubtedly try the church, but from which she cannot shrink.

Rosemary Radford Ruether: A Profile

Rosemary Radford Ruether was born in 1936. Her father died when she was young, so she was raised by a family of strong, independent women. She was raised and educated as a Catholic. In the 60’s she was deeply involved in the civil rights movement, advocating for blacks and studying black theology. She participated in a number of sing-ins and pray-ins, and has been concerned with social justice ever since. For this reason, Ruether classifies herself as a “liberation theologian” concerned with justice for all the oppressed, not just for women.

Ruether is a reconstructionist feminist, and hers is an egalitarian view of gender. She has chosen not to identify with radical feminism because it simply reverses the system of domination, placing women at the top instead of men. In Sexism and God-Talk she says that women cannot denigrate men, even in an effort to affirm their own humanity. She has chosen not to be a reformist feminist because she recognizes that there are a number of texts in the Bible that denigrate women; on the other hand, neither is she a revolutionary feminist, since she wants to maintain ties to the church and to liberating traditions about Jesus. As a reconstructionist feminist, Ruether advocates the ordination of women. She believes that women are fully gifted for pastoral ministry. She chooses to remain dependent on the church, but also reconstructs its patriarchal theology and symbols. She promotes a Christocentric model of theology that takes Jesus as a paradigm of liberation: he modeled inclusive community and a discipleship of equals.

Ruether’s method is threefold. First, critique the patriarchy in Christian texts, history, and practice. There are two religions in the Bible, she says: the sacred canopy (which sacralizes oppressive androcentric and patriarchal systems) and the prophetic critique. We must challenge every element of the patriarchal tradition while at the same time retaining and affirming the prophetic critique. The second step is “recovery”. In this step Ruether sifts through sources and throws out those that reflect patriarchal culture; she wants to find the “usable” tradition. There are 5 kinds of sources to be filtered by this process: Hebrew and Christian scripture, heretical and marginalized Christian traditions, primary themes of dominant classical theology, non-Christian Near-Eastern and Greco-Roman religion and philosophy, and critical post-Christian worldviews. In the process of recovery she applies the Critical Principle of Feminism: the full humanity of women. Ruether affirms the primacy of women’s experience in doing feminist theology. Anything that is out of line with this principle must be rejected. The third and final part of her method is called “reconstruction”. Here she revises traditional Christian symbols. Ultimately Ruether calls this three-step process “dialectical”; it puts current attempts to speak about God in conversation with previous attempts to do so.

One of the most important revisions Ruether offers to traditional Christian theology is the terms God/ess and “primal matrix”. These terms move away from parental language about God, which cannot help but be gender-specific and dualistic. Rather we should speak in terms similar to Tillich’s Ground of Being—God is a fundamental matrix that underlies all reality. He is both male and female. At the same time, he is neither. Another revision Ruether offers is to do away with a dualistic universe, which she says is a very male way to look at things. Dualism has tended to equate women with weakness, sin, and physical reality while conflating maleness with strength, righteousness, and spiritual realities. This fuels the system of oppression. Ruether has also offered some correctives to Christology. Christ’s work, she says, is a paradigm and a norm for our experience. He is not, however, the final revelation. His work lives on in female experience. Further, there is no atonement in Ruether’s thought. The cross was a “political assassination” similar to the way women have been silenced by the use of violence throughout history.

Some assorted notes on Ms. Ruether:

God/ess –
- God language is analogous, meaning our knowledge of God is by analogy, not literally true.
- God/ess is both male and female, which is why we write it with the “/ess” on the end, much like we would do with the personal pronouns he/she.
- To give God only male attributes and the male image is idolatry.

Christology –
- Christians have tended to see Jesus as the Savior. The end all, be all. But in Jesus’ own words there is a sense of expectancy. There is a proclamation of repentance in anticipation of “One who is to come.” Jesus is not the last voice of God—God’s voice continues to be heard through the HS from the marginalized peoples of the world, like (in their time) the disciples. There continue to be representatives of Christ in history—both men and women, despite what the patriarchal leaders would have us believe. Jesus was only a partial disclosure of God because he was bound by historical and socio-economic reality.
- Patriarchal Christologies (including image of Jesus as a warrior-king, simply delaying this aspect until the parousia) tried to cut women off from being prophetic representatives of Christ. We need to find alternative Christologies that are not patriarchal, like the following:
* Androgynous – Adam contained both male and female. When he was split it disintegrated his unity. Jesus, then, is the one in whom unity is again attained.
* Spirit Christologies – Christ is a power that continues to be revealed in persons, both male and female – Shakers
* Feminist Christology – Strip Jesus of Messianic and Logos mythology, leaving the critic of social and religious hierarchy. The terms “Savior” and “Christ” do not refer exclusively to Christ, but to any person who liberates by engaging in prophetic critique. Jesus is an instance of the redeemed humanity that goes ahead of us, calling us to yet incompleted dimensions of human liberation.
- Kenotic principle – “Kenosis” is self-emptying, and generally refers to Jesus’ surrender of his divine nature when he became a man. Ruether uses it to refer to his surrender of his patriarchal authority and his denunciation of religious patriarchy. Jesus seeks to empty religion of patriarchal notions.
- Iconoclastic prophet – tearing down images, overthrowing traditional, popular ideas and institutions.

Theological Anthropology –
- Egalitarian anthropology – wants to acknowledge the differences between men and women, but also wants equal access to social roles and equal opportunity to realize full human potential.
Sin = the perversion and corruption of human nature – the good, authentic, and potential self.
- No one moment represented the “fall” of mankind. Historically people have believed creation started good, then became totally depraved and evil because of the first sin in Eden. I believe instead that God’s creation is still good, but that sin is a choice we continually make to be oppressors and deniers of other people. By our continual sin we continually allow creation to be in some ways perverted by it. When we stop sinning and finally listen to the prophetic critique that calls for justice and equality, then God’s kingdom will finally prevail on the earth.
- In the traditional creation story, there is a reversal of the order of nature. Man gives birth to woman! And then it is woman who sins first! This passage is then used by the Deutero-Pauline epistles as justification for putting women down. No longer is the oppression of women seen as a curse to be overcome by Christ’s blood, but rather it is the order of nature—the natural law. Women are presented as part of creation, to be dominated by man. All these passages are what I would term a “sacred canopy” constructed by advocates of the status quo. They are destructive rather than constructive traditions and should basically be thrown out of the canon (although it’s not quite so clear cut as all that, of course).
- There is also a strain in Christian thought (perhaps borrowed partly from Hellenism) that identifies man with spirit and woman with body. Women are objects to be looked at and they are domestic servants. Men are transcendent beings: the conduit to the divine. Women are created for men, men are created for God. I reject both the body-spirit dualism and its resultant male-female dualism.

Method –
- Dialectic – Sacred canopy vs. prophetic critique, two religions in the Bible
- Critique, Retrieval, Reconstruction –
* Sifts through sources and throws out those that reflect patriarchal culture; wants to find the “usable” tradition.
* 5 sources to be filtered by this process – Hebrew and Christian scripture, Heretical and marginalized Christian traditions, primary themes of dominant classical theology, non-Christian Near-Eastern and Greco-Roman religion and philosophy, and critical post-Christian worldviews
Critical Principle: the full humanity of women
* Open Canon - (closing the canon was an attempt to promote patriarchy by preventing further prophetic critique: now those who say “direct revelation” are heretics)
* Primacy of women’s experience – all theology is experientially based. For feminist theology, women’s experience is primary.

Ecclesiology –
- Is a Catholic, but thinks of “Church” in a broader sense, like a universal community.
- In the modern church women are still not recognized as equal. They are excluded from priesthood and thought of as less-than-capable leaders. Women’s gifts are restricted within certain boundaries. When a woman succeeds at a “man’s game”, she is rebuked for being “manly.”
- The church thus needs to be liberated.
- The (Catholic) church cannot simply adapt itself to feminist ideology. The patriarchal ideologies is too deeply rooted. The church must be broken down and reconstructed anew. It is a risk, and some people—especially the wealthy—will undoubtedly leave.
- There must be a new liturgy. It must not be clergy-led. All spiritual gifts in each person must be acknowledged as essential to the whole. There must be a new style, a new church culture, new creedal statements, new rules.

Shaping Forces –
- Civil rights movement, being a woman. PhD in classics and patristics.

Scripture –
- Bible didn’t beam down – it wxists within history.
- Entire Bible is just human words about God
- God’s word is found only in the dialectical method – current context and current attempts to speak about God in conversation with previous attempts to speak about God.
- Two religions in the Bible: sacred canopy and prophetic critique. Prophetic critique is its central thread.
- Destructive traditions promote sacralization of patriarchy and dehumanization of women.
- Bible has an internal dynamism, self-critique, and development.

Ethics –
- Women are doubly oppressed, so liberation must begin with them

Esther, Woman of Action

For my undergrad Esther, Ruth, Daniel class I had to compose a children's story. The following is my sort of feminist version of the book of Esther. I drew all the pictures except the last one. OK, so I'm no artist... but it was a fun assignment.

The Anabaptist Vision by Harold Bender

Many Americans could probably tell you a little about Martin Luther, and maybe even John Calvin. These are the theological ancestors to whom most evangelicals trace their origins. But there was another group that emerged contemporaneously with them that is in many respects a nearer relative: the Anabaptists. Americans owe their evangelicalism and their religious freedom largely to English Dissent. Independents, Presbyterians, Quakers and Methodists were four of the more important constituencies that arrived from the old world. Since Anabaptism does not constitute a major or direct ancestor to any of these constituencies, they tend to get forgotten except as the forefathers of a fifth constituency, the Baptists. But if they are historical forefathers of evangelicalism only indirectly, they are nevertheless the modern evangelical's spiritual kin.

Harold Bender's book, The Anabaptist Vision, is the classic statement of what it means to be an Anabaptist. He begins with some common definitions of Anabaptism. Generally these identify the movement with the concept of the separation of church and state, the equality of all men (Bender’s non-inclusive word, not mine), and the rejection of the use of force (3-5). Bender argues that all these are important characteristics of the movement, but that none of them capture its “true essence” (5). He also offers several competing views on the function Anabaptism performed in the broader Reformation, and rejects most of them as grossly distorted or inadequate. Rather, he says, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the notion that Anabaptism was the culmination of the Reformation, the fulfillment of Luther and Zwingli’s original vision (13). Over the course of the book he summarizes the Anabaptist vision in three parts: discipleship as transformed life, the church as a brotherhood, and the ethic of love and nonresistance.

According to the Anabaptists, Bender says, Protestantism was supposed to be about more than just a rejection of Papal ceremonies; it was supposed to be about living the true Christian life, abstaining from evil, showing love and giving to the poor. It was supposed to be about repentance “evidenced” by fruits (15-16). In their eyes, the magisterial Reformers had failed in this regard. They observed that Lutheran and Zwinglian preaching, while biblical, focused less on moral than on theological concerns. Luther himself seems to have been aware of having failed in this regard. Near the end of his life he was tormented by the apparent lack of life-change in his congregations. Faced with moral stagnancy, he didn’t know what to do (17). The Anabaptists posed an answer to this problem that Luther himself had considered but rejected: they established a church solely of earnest Christians (18). They emphasized the transformation of the believer and society as necessary evidences of repentance (20). The grace that is inwardly experienced by the Christian, they argued, needed to be applied outwardly to all human conduct and relationships (21). Bender argues that the Anabaptists successfully realized the tenet of discipleship as life change, whereas the magisterial reformers did not (24).

The concept of the church as brotherhood affirmed voluntary church membership and attendance based on choice and commitment to holy living, as opposed to a “mass church” with the entire population enrolled by compulsion in its books (26). The rejection of infant baptism was a symbol of this tenet. The magisterial reformers made infants members of the church at birth; the Anabaptists argued that a rational, adult decision must be made to enter into the Christian commitment. How could an infant make a decision for Christ (26-27)? They also emphasized the importance of separation from the world. The church could never accomplish the redemption of the world and should never try to redeem it by force, so they took the opposite route: they separated themselves from it entirely so that their transformed community would stand as a witness against it. Naturally, this resulted in persecution and suffering, which the Anabaptists quietly bore together as brothers and sisters (28). For Bender, this is a witness to the force of conviction the vision carried. A final and very concrete way that brotherhood was practiced within the Anabaptist church was by the practice of sharing possessions to meet the needs of others in the community (an extreme form of which is found among the Hutterites, 29-30).

The final tenet of Anabaptism, which is highly important but requires little clarification, is that of nonviolence and nonresistance. The Anabaptists argued that a true Christian would never protect himself with the worldly sword, because his swords have been beaten into plowshares and his spears into pruning hooks (31).

In sum, says Bender, the Anabaptist vision had two focuses: first it argued that Christianity is not primarily about receiving grace, but rather about transformation of life through discipleship. Second, it says that the church is no more or less than a brotherhood of love in which the Christian life is practiced. Calvinism, Catholicism, and Lutheranism all embraced the existing social order (though with varying degrees of enthusiasm), whereas Anabaptism utterly rejected it (34-35). According to the Anabaptists, it is the task of the Christian to live the Kingdom of God within (and presumably against) the kingdom of the world. Jesus’s commandments to us were neither unattainable nor unrealistic; we are meant to live them here and now (36).

I look to the Anabaptists as my own spiritual forefathers if for no other reason than that, while the Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics persecuted and murdered them, they preached a gospel of suffering love and nonresistance. They seem to be to have been the true reformers, the true followers of the gospel of Christ in the sixteenth century. Theirs is a powerful witness; they witnessed with their blood. Modern evangelicalism cannot afford to forget the Anabaptists, and it cannot afford to forget their vision: a vision in which church and state remain separate (for the good of the church, not of the state) and in which the sword is no Christian tool.

Ellul on the Eschatological Role of Jerusalem

Jerusalem is not alone in either the judgment or the mercy that God extends to her. The way that God deals with her is characteristic of the way he has ultimately chosen to deal with all cities. She is merely the first, the paradigm, the city on a hill for all others to envy. Ellul assigns to Jerusalem two eschatological roles by which she is to communicate God’s message to the rest of man’s cities. The first is very much grounded in temporal realities, whereas the second is more of a future expectation.

Babylon has become, both in the Bible and in popular modern literature, a sort of universal symbol for wicked cities. In the same way, Jerusalem is a symbol. Jerusalem’s idolatry and perversion make her more wicked than other cities, such as Sodom and Samaria. In Isaiah’s oracles against the nations, he lists Jerusalem alongside Damascus and others that are to be judged for their wickedness. Clearly Jerusalem is to share in their fate. Conversely, the other cities of the earth are to share in the grace that God extends to Jerusalem in cleansing, redeeming, and rebuilding her. According to Ellul, Samaria, Sodom, and all other cities are given to Jerusalem as sisters and daughters. All cities are represented in the holy city. Ellul also makes it clear that as the representative of God on earth and as the representative of earth to God, Jerusalem serves as an envoy. She has a message to carry to the earth. She accomplishes this less by traveling outward and declaring the message verbally than by being a visible example for other cities.

This brings us to Jerusalem’s first eschatological role. She is to be a sign of God’s dealing with cities. If God rejects his holy city because of her wickedness, then the nations had better tremble! They have no explicit covenant with Yahweh. They do not know him, save through Jerusalem. They are certainly guilty of Jerusalem’s crimes, and are therefore subject to her judgment. Indeed, though Yahweh temporally elects Assyria to destroy Jerusalem, he then proceeds to pronounce the same fate upon her. Of course, God’s declarations of judgment and destruction against Jerusalem are followed by promises that she will be rebuilt and that she will be healed. As other cities share in Jerusalem’s judgment, they can also share in her grace. God is engaged in a constant process of dispensing grace to his holy city. He dethrones the fallen angel that is at the heart of her existence and he establishes faithfulness to Yahweh in its place. He does so freely. Jerusalem’s only obligation in response is to stand as a witness for all the world to see. Other cities see the temporal happiness that God brings to her, they see the justice being established in her, and it is a sign to them. They see how God deals temporally with her, and they recognize that he also deals temporally with them in the same ways.

Jerusalem’s second eschatological role ties in with and in many ways completes the first, but it is much more forward-looking. Jerusalem is to be a sign not only of present spiritual realities but also of future spiritual realities. She is to be a sign not only of present socio-political deliverance but also of future socio-political perfection. The Word of God that comes through his prophets to Jerusalem to explain the significance of his temporal dealings with her speak very clearly of a future reality in which the current Jerusalem will pass away and be replaced by a New Jerusalem. Jerusalem, in essence, prophesies her own end. She tells of a day when she will pass from existence and be replaced by a better existence. The work of man will at that point be fully wrested from him and fully turned to God’s purposes. As a representative of all the cities of the earth, Jerusalem is naturally to be joined in her fate by all of them. All cities, all of man’s prideful creation, will be subverted—or perhaps converted—by Yahweh.

According to Ellul, Jerusalem’s eschatological meaning is her glory. Stripped of this meaning, she is nothing. She is to be a witness to the cities of the world of God’s work among them, and she needn’t even say a word. Her very existence—her continued existence even through severe unfaithfulness—is witness enough.