Jesus Calls a Female Preacher

I've been reading Harvey Cox's fantastic book on Pentecostalism, Fire from Heaven. One of the points he makes is that Pentecostal history is full of female leaders and preachers because the work of the Spirit in women tends to trump the chauvinism of certain Bible passages. For most Pentecostals, as for the Apostle Peter in Acts 11, the profound experience of Spirit-revelation cannot be denied even when it seems to contradict the "letter" of the law.

Cox provides an amusing but powerful example of this phenomenon that he heard at a rural West Virginia church. The speaker that Sunday was the minister's 24-year old daughter. She had been injured in a car accident and had been in terrible pain. While hospitalized, she had a vision of Jesus in which Jesus took her flying above the earth and pointed down at all the people below and told her how much they all need the Gospel.

The he says, "Betty Lou, you listen to me. I want you to go bring my word to them. I want you to tell them about how I died for their sins and how I sent the Holy Ghost to comfort them. I'm gonna take you back to that hospital now, and you're gonna be alright. But I want you to become a bearer of my word."

"Well," I says to him, "I think you got the wrong party. My papa's the preacher in my family. I got my hands full with a husband and two kids. I didn't even finish high school. I thank you for the healin', I really do, but you got the wrong addressee for this letter, especially me bein' a woman and all, and what the Bible says about women preachers and all that."

Well, by this time we was headin' back to the hospital. And he says to me, "Betty Lou, I don't make mistakes. I know who I am talkin' to. I am healin' you for a purpose. Now let's not hear any more complaints."

So I says, "Well, Lord, I guess you're right. You don't make no mistakes. I know that. So if you're really healin' me and this is not just a dream, then I'll do what you say. I'll preach your word, in season and out. I do promise. But I got to make sure."

...The next day the doctor came by, and he took one look at me and he said, "What's gotten into you, Betty Lou? You look 100 percent better." [Here Betty Lou mugged the astonished look on the Doctor's face and the congregation laughed.] ...Well, three days later I was out. And here I am standin' here, not because some man told me to, but because Jesus Christ himself told me to. And [here the congregation joined in the refrain] he . . . don't . . . make . . . no . . . mistakes.

God Is Love... and Love Is God

One of my favorite passages of scripture is found in the fourth chapter of 1 John:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

I have always sort of fixated on the phrase "God is love" when I read these verses. It was only this last year that I noticed the sentence that comes before: "Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God." Wow! What a sentiment! Everyone who loves has been born of God. Everyone who loves knows God. Everyone who possesses love also possesses God! Even the conservative religionists will agree that "God is love," but the implications of the preceding verse are far more radical and far less likely to be acceptable to conservative readers of the Bible. A few verses later the author of this epistle continues,

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. Really? That's all it takes? Just love one another? Could it really be that simple?

I love what John D. Caputo has to say on this subject in his book On Religion:

But notice how easily saying "God is love" slips over into saying "love is God." This slippage is provocative and it provides us with an exceedingly important productive ambiguity, opening up a kind of endless substitutability and translatability between "love" and "God"[...]. As love is the first name of God, "of God" is the best name we have for those who love. To love God is to love something deeply and unconditionally. But it is also true -- there is no stopping this slippage or reversal -- that to love deeply and unconditionally is to be born of God, to love God, for the name of God is the name of love, and the name of what we love.

If God is love, is love God? If to have love is to have God, are the two one and the same? The epistle-writer's statement "No one has ever seen God" is suggestive. God, it seems, is something ineffable: a verb, an action, a mode of being, the ground of all being and loving.

Lest I be accused of reducing God to mere love, let me emphasize that in my view there is no "mere" love. Love is alive and powerful and irreducible. It is not merely brain chemistry, but the stuff of meaning and of thinking and of life itself. No, "mere love" is not God. But real and living love? That is God.

Book of Abraham as Autobiography

It's well-known that Joseph Smith included in the Book of Mormon a number of autobiographical elements. Lehi's family mirrors Joseph's own, as does the Brother of Jared's. Many of the Smith family's relationships and struggles find their way into the Book, as does the prophet's conversion and miraculous ability to receive revelation through sacred stones. I'd like to suggest that there are some similarly autobiographical features in the Book of Abraham. There aren't many, since the book is so short, but the extant text is suggestive in several respects.

Take for example Abraham's journeys. Now, I don't want to make too much of this, because the BoA account of Abraham's journeys are largely based on the Bible. Nevertheless, Joseph may have selected this particular biblical narrative precisely because it was suggestive of his own life, and some of the ways he modifies the biblical narrative are suggestive. In the Book of Abraham, Abraham starts in Chaldea and then moves to Haran, where he stops and settles for a time on the way to the promised land of Canaan. In Haran, Abraham gathers followers; these followers come with him when he finally travels on to Canaan. When Joseph stops translating in 1835 at Abr. 2:18, Abraham has just entered the land of Canaan. When Joseph resumes translating in 1842, the Nauvoo period, he has Abraham almost immediately fall upon hard times in Canaan and choose to flee to Egypt. The prophet died before he could tell the story of Abraham's return to the promised land.

The stages of Abraham's journey correspond roughly with the stages of Joseph's.

Joseph grows up in Palmyra, New York, his "Chaldea". His "fathers" are in apostasy, but he is a seeker of greater righteousness, and so miraculously receives the priesthood. Like Abraham, Joseph's contemporaries refuse to listen to his message. Like Abraham, Joseph undergoes a traumatic event (in his case, leg surgery) in which he is held down on a table while someone cuts him with a knife. Joseph's anger at the surgeon is perhaps expressed in the narrative by the fact that the idolatrous priest Elkenah is smitten and dies. Just as Abraham's father repents and Abraham preserves the ancient records in Abr. 1:30-1, so Joseph Smith's own father repents and Joseph reveals the Book of Mormon.

The Prophet soon moves to Kirtland (his "Haran"), a sort of waystation on the road to the promised land of Missouri. Here he does much of the work of revelating, just as Abraham receives visions during the same period. Promises are made to him about a promised land. The translation of the BoA ends during this period at a point roughly corresponding to Joseph's own point in his journeys.

Joseph doesn't take up the pen again until after the expulsion from Missouri. He of course intends to return there to reclaim the promised land someday. He has Abraham almost immediately forced from the land of Canaan by famine, and go to sojourn in Egypt. Here God tells Abraham to lie about his marital relations for safety's sake, and commands that he ask Sarah to do the same. Similarly, safety required that Joseph lie about the practice of polygamy, and that he ask his wives-- notably Emma-- to do the same. Unlike in the biblical narrative, where Abraham does this on his own initiative, the Book of Abraham represents this as a command directly from God. It is also in Egypt that Abraham has visions about the cosmos, pre-existence, and creation; these things first come into Smith's theology during the same period. I will just briefly add here that the structure of the cosmos-- described most fully in the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar-- mirrors the structure of the LDS priesthood. Like the Abraham narrative, Joseph's life was cut short before a return to the Promised Land could be effected. Neither return was ever completed, for Brigham Young set his sights past Egypt/Nauvoo, to the vast and unknown frontiers beyond.

Upcoming SMPT Conference

The preliminary list of papers for the upcoming Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology conference has been posted! The conference will be held at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California from May 21 to May 23. Among the presenters are myself, Richard Bushman, John Cobb, Daniel Peterson, Margaret Toscano, and many others.

My paper title is "Sibling Rivalry: Why Mormons and Pentecostals Just Can't Get Seem to Get Along". (Yes, they appear to have butchered it on the website. Bastards.) Here's the abstract:

Pentecostals and Mormons have more unfavorable views of each other than of other Christian groups. To a large degree, this animosity stems from their similarities rather than from their differences. The two groups share a common ancestry, similar maps of the universe, similar theologies and experiences, and similar missionary ambitions. Despite modest strides toward reconciliation in the United States, it is likely that mutual demonization will continue for the foreseeable future, especially as the two faiths compete for converts in the global south. Both groups must overcome significant theological and cultural obstacles to dialogue if they are to leave sibling rivalry behind in the spirit of Christian brotherhood.

Among the other paper titles that look quite interesting are "'God With Us': Panentheism, Pansyntheism, and the Mormon Concept of God" by Jacob Baker, Sheila Taylor's "Doctrinal Development and Continuing Revelation" (a subject I've discussed a bit before, myself), and Margaret Toscano's "The Jesus Rivals: Authority and Salvation in the Mormon-Protestant Debates". Give the website a look and do consider attending!

Kurt Aland on Canonization

Pastor Bob Cornwall posts a quote about canonization from Kurt Aland:

The confusio hominum ("confusion of men") connected with the determination of the canon cannot be disputed by anyone who takes the trouble to look some into its history. But on the other hand, I would think, just as unmistakable is the providentia Dei ("providence of God"). Despite all the lack of principles, despite all the arbitrariness, despite all the errors--what the church has received in the New Testament stands on an incomparably higher level than all other early Christian literature. None of the Apostolic Fathers can even remotely compare with those of the New Testament. (Kurt Aland, History of Christianity, Fortress Press, 1985, 1:113-114. )

I can't help but think that if different books had made it into the canon, Aland would have made exactly the same claim. The problem, of course, is that we evangelical types have been trained all our lives to believe that biblical books are better than all others. So we're not exactly the most unbiased judges.

Quite frankly, I think Aland is wrong. There's no way that the book of Revelation, a fairly run-of-the-mill apocalyptic pseudepigraphon, is more valuable than the Didache. Nor can I see the value in having forged and chauvinistic epistles like 1 and 2 Timothy or 2 Peter rather than a document whose authorship is known and respected like 1 Clement. One of the commenters over on Cornwall's blog, Mystical Seeker, made an excellent point, with which I agree wholeheartedly:

I think that drawing a boundary between canonical and non-canonical is problematic to begin with. Throughout the canonical texts we find moments of sublime inspiration interspersed with nonsensical or offensive passages. The same can be said of non-canonical texts as well. Maybe instead of "canonical" we can instead look at these ancient works as "honored", or "respected".

The Cult of Abel in JST Genesis

In the Joseph Smith Translation, Genesis 17:3-7 describes an ancient cult allegedly practiced by Abraham's fathers that centered on the blood of Abel:

Genesis 17:3-7 (JST)
And it came to pass, that Abram fell on his face, and called upon the name of the Lord. And God talked with him, saying, My people [...] have turned from the commandment, and taken unto themselves the washing of children, and the blood of sprinkling; And have said that the blood of the righteous Abel was shed for sins; and have not known wherein they are accountable before me.

Joseph Smith "translated" this passage by March 7, 1831 (for JST translation chronology see here), a time when infant baptism and original sin were still important theological issues for Joseph Smith. The prophet evidently intended this passage as a midrash on Hebrews 12:24:

Hebrews 12:24 (KJV)
And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.

The passage in Hebrews is contrasting the terrible old covenant (vv. 18-21) with the wonderful new covenant (vv. 22-24). The referent of the bit about Abel's blood is undoubtedly Genesis 4:10-12:

Genesis 4:10-12 (KJV)
10 And [God] said [to Cain, who had just murdered his brother Abel], What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

Here the blood of the murdered Abel "speaks" a curse. By contrast, Hebrews tells us, Jesus' spilled blood "speaks" a blessing: it becomes for us the atoning "blood of sprinkling". (In the Old Testament, the blood of sacrifical animals was sprinkled for purposes of atonement and purification; cf. Lev. 5:9, 16:15).

Joseph Smith, apparently confused by the allusion in Hebrews, creates a new referent for for it. Thus he gives us JST-Genesis 17:3-7, which describes a heresy perpetrated by Abraham's "fathers" in which the blood of Abel apparently was thought to atone for sin, and in which infant baptism was practiced. Interestingly, this is basically a Judeo-Christian heresy rather than the mostly pagan one Smith attributes to Abraham's fathers in the later Book of Abraham, which was written at a time when the issues of original sin and infant baptism had ceased to interest the Mormon prophet.

The Night I Spoke in Tongues

I was probably in the seventh or eighth grade when, at a prayer service in a side room at the Rock of Roseville, I made the decision to be prayed for to receive the Pentecostal gift of tongues. A number of people, some of them my own age, some of them adults, gathered round and placed their hands on my head and shoulders. Their prayers tumbled forth in a fervent, almost musical harmony. Some of their speech was unintelligible: a babble of unknown tongues, the tongues of angels. Most of it sounded sort of Arabic. "Shalalalabahelophetenjintunkalapotolel," they moaned in a rapid-fire stream of alien-sounding syllables. When praying in English, their words took on an almost poetic rhythm. Swaying piously with their eyes closed and brows crinkled, they entreated, "Fill him with your Spirit, God. Let your love just wash over him, Father God. Send your power and your grace, Lord Jesus. We pray in the name of Jesus for the gift of tongues, Lord God."

I wasn't the only one being prayed for this night. The room was packed with pious youths and their adult leaders, gathered in groups around newbies like me. We had been taught that tongues was a miraculous sign that Spirit-baptism had been received. If I didn't receive it this night it wouldn't be the end of the world. There would be other opportunities to be prayed for some other night. But my friend James had just received it, and others in the room were singing out triumphantly in the angelic language. Turning my eyes toward heaven, praying aloud with great zeal and tears in my eyes, I begged my Father for the heavenly gift.

I had heard different accounts of what tongues felt like. I had been told by some that they had felt it welling up inside them, by others that it felt like their tongues had been taken over by the Spirit itself. I experienced no such sensations this night, no such loss of control. It was terribly disheartening. Why was the Spirit ignoring me where it had spoken through so many others?

My mother, a devout Pentecostal since college, had related to me a more mundane theory of what it means to speak in tongues. In Acts 2, all the members of a multi-ethnic crowd understand each others' words as if they are being spoken in their own language. My mom's idea is that the miracle of tongues takes place in the hearer rather than in the speaker. She believes that tongues-speakers do their actual speaking under their own power, but that God fills their words with meaning. That account never satisfied me. It seemed to me that tongues was supposed to be a real gift and a real miracle. The way my mom explained it made it sound awfully mundane. On this night, one of the adult leaders took me by the shoulders and proffered much the same explanation. Then he laid his palm on my forehead and told me to "just begin to speak out." I had to make a decision to speak, he told me. It was me who had to do the speaking. I needed to let go of my fears and insecurities and just start babbling. I hesitated, but I did what he said. Awkward phonemes tumbled from my lips, all of them consciously chosen and formulated in my mind beforehand. "Hallelujah," my peers around me intoned sincerely. "Praise God. Thank you Jesus." Everyone in the group dispersed that night satisfied that God had showed up and bestowed upon me a miraculous gift-- everyone, that is, except me.

I went home that night and sat on the floor next to my bed and prayed and cried and prayed some more. There, alone, with no one to lay hands on me and no one to pressure me, I spoke in tongues again. It still felt like it was me doing the talking, but it flowed more freely, and this time I let go more than I had earlier in the evening. Although it didn't seem that anything properly miraculous was happening, I was uplifted in my mind to a feeling of deep and personal closeness with God. Babbling like this had had a curious cathartic effect: it emptied my mind of rational thought, making room for sheer emotion and the raw sensation of transcendence. It was a mystical experience, rather like that sought by Buddhists. Of course, I didn't make that connection at the time. At the time I only knew that at long last I had been filled with the Holy Spirit.

I now consider my old Pentecostal belief in a "gift of tongues" to be naïve, but the practice itself is not as silly or worthless as most non-Pentecostals are at first inclined to believe. As with so many other religious ideas and rituals, the literal meaning of tongues is absurd, but the experience and symbolism of it are profound. Pentecostal theologian Frank Macchia has written that tongues symbolizes the fact that "language cannot follow one into the depths of the encounter between the mystery of God and the mystery of the self before God." He also adds that "It is the lowest common denominator between people who might be very different from one another, revealing a deep sense of equality that cannot be denied and that challenges any discrimination based on gender, class, or race." I am speaking from experience when I say that I think that that's true. I no longer speak in tongues, because it doesn't make much sense to me to do so without the literal belief or the communal solidarity that I learned to associate with it. But what I am searching for in my spiritual journey today is not really something fundamentally different. It is simply a new way and a new symbol under which to have the same experience.

Why I love Writing Research Papers

When I tell people that I love to write research papers, they typically think I'm crazy. They're probably right. But actually, I'm convinced that most people who hate studying history and hate doing research have never done enough of it to get to the really interesting stuff. When you're writing a paper on a topic that was assigned to you, and you're getting most of your information out of textbooks and boring secondary sources, and you've never been the first to discover something new that no one has ever noticed or written about before, no wonder you hate it!

I hated history too, when it was all textbooks and Jane Schaffer. But being immersed in the study of history has changed everything.

For one thing, I've discovered historical questions that actually matter and are actually interesting. I really don't give a crap what year Columbus sailed the ocean blue or how many people died in the Civil War. But did Jesus claim to be divine? Was Joseph Smith an inspired prophet? Was America founded as a Christian nation? Has marriage always meant one man, one woman? Do vouchers or gun control or socialism or religion or democracy or libertinism or mutually-assured destruction or Betty Crocker's recipes really work? These questions fascinate me. Other people will be fascinated by different questions, of course, but these are the ones that interest me. And studying them has changed everything for me. My entire outlook on life. No, really. It has.

Another thing that's happened is that I've discovered primary sources. There's nothing quite like reading some famous person's private diary, or her love letters to her husband, or the salacious gossip she shared with her friends. Sometimes you can get into a famous historical person's head and get to know her in a way you couldn't get to know members of your own family.

But most importantly, I have tasted the thrill of discovery. I'm no Neal Armstrong, but I have definitely been the first to notice some really interesting things in historical sources. The adrenaline rush one feels upon being the first to make some astonishing or scandalous discovery is downright addictive! And falsifying a prevailing interpretation that nearly everyone takes for granted is a little like the thrill of combat, I'd imagine... minus the danger of death!

So yes, I love writing research papers. And yes, I'm probably crazy. But don't knock it till you try it. I mean really, really try it. Who knows: you might surprise yourself. ;-)

Is God Dead (Again)?

Newsweek magazine weighed in this week on the recent survey results that showed America is more irreligious than ever. The article's hard-hitting title, "The End of Christian America", has been compared to an April 8, 1966 Time Magazine cover that demanded to know, "Is God Dead?"


The point of the comparison, of course, is to say that "the end of Christian America has been prophesied before, but instead evangelicalism-- especially of a conservative variety-- continued to flourish. Why should this be any different?"

The comparison, however, is not as illuminating as it might at first seem. The 1966 Time article was about an erosion of conservative religious conviction, and how some theologians were responding to it by attempting to conceive of God in less personal and traditional terms. The article was not about an erosion of religious identification or adherence, and it made no predictions concerning the end of religion (or even of conservative religion) in America. In fact, it acknowledged that there had been a "postwar revival" and that Christian adherence in America at the popular level was as strong as ever. I should add that the trend with which the Time article was concerned did not reverse itself as thoroughly as conservative Christian critics would have us believe; one recent study showed that the religion of young Americans, including those who identify as "Christian", is in fact more like "moralistic therapeutic deism" than the conservative faith of evangelicalism.

Religious conviction within the boundaries of the Christian church has always had its ebbs and flows, has always waxed and waned. But what the new Newsweek article documents is something quite different: Americans are actually turning away from Christian adherence altogether. They are ceasing to identify with the Christian label, are ceasing to understand their culture in Christian terms, and are ceasing to place themselves within the Christian narrative. This is crucial, because studies of secularization have shown that identity makes all the difference. As long as patriotism and national and personal identity are tied to religious adherence, religion remains strong even in times of waning belief and church attendance. But what the numbers are now showing is that the ties between American and Christian identity have broken down for a large number of Americans. The Newsweek article quotes Al Mohler,

"The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture." When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. "Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society," he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

The article is of course careful to say that this does not mean the end of Christianity. But it does mean that America will continue to become less Christian. I'd bet money that that's true.

Mormons and Black-White Intermarriage

I was pleased to see that Connell O'Donovan has posted his fantastic Sunstone West presentation on the Internet. Here's a very important excerpt about the origin of the LDS priesthood and interracial marriage ban:

Here in Nauvoo, Brigham Young told recently ordained Warner McCary that holding the priesthood had nothing to do with race. On March 26, 1847, Young told McCary that holding LDS priesthood had “nothing to do with the blood for [from] one blood has God made all flesh, we have to repent [to] regain what we av lost" (a paraphrase of Acts 17:26).

[...]

As shown, by December 1847, things had significantly changed for Brigham Young. Warner McCary had come out in open rebellion against the church and had started his own version of Mormonism, including a highly sexualized sealing ceremony, in which McCary was “sealed” to the white women of his disciples by sleeping with them. In response to all this, Young called a meeting of the members of the Twelve who were present in Winter Quarters, and had Appleby appear to personally give an account. Here are Thomas Bullock’s minutes of that meeting:

bro Appleby relates...
Wm. Smith ordained a black man Elder at Lowell & he has married a white girl & they have a child
Prest. Young If they were far away from the Gentiles they wod. [would] all on [sic - ot? ought?] to be killed - when they mingle seed it is death to all.
If a black man & white woman come to you & demand baptism can you deny them? the law is their seed shall not be amalgamated
Mulattoes r like mules they cant have children, but if they will be Eunuchs for the Kingdom of God Heaven's sake they may have a place in the Temple
[...]
O. H. Has taught that if girls marry the half breeds they r throwing themselves away & becoming as one of them
B. Y. It is wrong for them to do so.
[...]

It is here in this meeting that the Mormon theology prohibiting marriages between blacks and whites was born.

Connell's paper is positively packed, and I strongly recommend that anyone interest in the subjects of the priesthood ban or the gay marriage ban take a look at the article. One poignant point that Connell makes is that the arguments modern Saints use in defending the gay marriage ban are quite similar to those used to defend the proscription of interracial marriage. If the Church could change its position on interracial marriage, it can do so again with respect to same-sex marriage.

Oops...

I snagged this from Ellen Decoo's Facebook:

"The Daily Universe took the extraordinary step Monday of re-calling all its 18,500 copies from newsstands around campus and the community to reprint the entire 14-page issue due to a typographical error on the front page." (http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/72090)

Good thing I managed to grab a forgotten copy from a couch in the Wilk.
(Please read caption)



My heart bleeds for the girl who made this mistake.

But it does make me feel a lot better about all those typos I've made in my life.