Mormon blogging lost a friend last week, as reported in this T&S post. Clark Goble was a regular contributor from the very beginning of LDS blogging, as well as a frequent commenter here at W&T. He often brought philosophy into his commentary, so with a nod to Clark I’m going to try to carry on that tradition. Let’s talk about philosophical questions, the kind that spur insightful discussion but don’t lead to clear answers. There are also empirical questions, moral questions, and aesthetic questions. I’ll circle back around to Mormonism at the end, as theological questions are a lot like philosophical questions, which does not sit well with the Mormon sense that every religious question should have a short and sweet gospel answer.
Empirical Questions. Data answers empirical questions. Sometimes more data is needed, and sometimes the needed data may never become available or accessible, but if it did an answer could be fashioned. The continued success of natural science, a set of empirical disciplines, sometimes leads to the idea that data can answer every question, that all relevant questions are empirical. That is certainly not the case, and recognizing what kind of question one is dealing with is a necessary preliminary step to knowing what kind of answer one is looking for. Most historical questions fall under this category. Finding new documents after digging around the archives can dramatically change our view of particular past events.
Moral Questions. Life is full of moral choices and issues. These are not data-driven questions that admit to clear answers. For some insight, let’s hear from Jean-Luc Picard, that moral giant of our time. In the Next Generation episode “Conundrum,” he and the crew are tricked into attacking a technologically inferior race. When pressured to follow orders and continue attacking an obviously mismatched foe, Picard replies:
I feel as though I’ve been handed a weapon, sent into a room and told to shoot a stranger. Well, I need some moral context to justify that action, and I don’t have it. I’m not content simply to obey orders. I need to know that what I am doing is right.
We all want a moral context to justify our actions, whether we are commended to do something or whether we face a free and unfettered moral choice. We want to feel that what we are doing is right. We want to know that what we are doing is right. Feeling seems to trump knowing here. We rely on moral intuition and conscience a lot more than data and rational thinking when it comes to moral choices.
Aesthetic Questions. While not central to our discussion, I have to throw this in. It rounds out Plato’s trio of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, which he thought came together in the highest form or idea that organized thought and the world. In this context, the word beauty includes symmetry and proportion and propriety and fittingness. Nothing out of place. Think of Mormon temple grounds, the building and the landscape, how carefully they are laid out and how pleasant and uplifting it is to stroll around there. I was surprised one day to have a coworker, not in the slightest degree Mormon, tell me one day that he would drive up to the Oakland Temple once in a while and just walk around the grounds because it made him feel good. Think of Steve Jobs, who complained that computer equipment and programs, however efficient, were just ugly and inelegant. He insisted that Apple products were beautiful and inspiring.
Philosophical Questions. So if philosophical questions are not empirical, moral, or aesthetic, what are they? Philosophical questions can discuss empirical or moral or aesthetic issues, but not in the same way that science, ethics, or art and literature criticism do. Often philosophical questions are seen as second-order questions, at one remove from the direct questions that engage a topic. So ethics treats particular moral questions directly, while meta-ethics talks about the concepts and framework that might be relevant to that attempt. So in meta-ethics there are cognitivists who think an imperative like “thou shalt not steal” can be deemed true or false in the same way that a sentence like “George Washington was the first president of the United States” can be. Non-cognitivists see things differently, with moral imperatives making normative claims, not truth claims. But if a moral claim isn’t justified by reference to truth, what exactly gives it moral force? Power? Persuasion? Emotional feeling? This is a philosophical discussion that leads to insight but not clear answers.
Theological Questions. I see true theological questions as a subset of philosophical questions, sharing the feature that they can lead to insightful discussion but not lead to straightforward answers. Predestination versus human agency is a good theological example, paralleling the determinism versus free will issue in philosophy. In the LDS view, God is certainly in control of things and sees all future events, which is why He can empower prophets to utter prophecies about the future, yet at the same time we all have agency to make free decisions, some of which alter the future course of events. You can get very frustrated if you approach this as an empirical question that should provide a clear answer if the right sort of data could be produced. I don’t think you are ever going to get a clear answer. It’s not that sort of question.
Mormon Questions. So what does all this mean in a Mormon context? I’m just going to throw out some suggestions and let readers chime in with their own views and experience. First, I think many doctrinal questions are theological questions that do not lead to clear answers, but the LDS approach want to see these as empirical questions that, with the support of a scripture or two, give a clear answer. Take the nature of God. In Christian theology, the Trinity and the nature of God have been profitably discussed for two thousand years. The discussion continues. The modern LDS view is that the details, the data, of the canonical First Vision account solves the problem: God is two embodied beings, separate persons, along with a third omnipresent disembodied spirit being, also a separate person. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three separate Persons but One Eternal God. I think that’s giving an empirical answer to a theological question. It’s not so much whether that is the right or the wrong answer as much as that is the wrong *kind* of answer. It’s like if you ask a child which came first, the chicken or the egg, and they confidently reply, “That’s easy. The egg.”
Second, I think the LDS approach resists engaging with moral questions. Instead, principles and commandments are quoted, loyalty and obedience are invoked, and a clear behavioral path is identified. That’s an institutional context, not a moral context, as Jean-Luc would say. This neglected moral sense leads to strange consequences. I sat in a Sunday School lesson on Alma 30, the story of Korihor, with everyone nodding along that he got his due. No! Lynching people is morally wrong! We shouldn’t trample people to death or string them up at the nearest tree just because they preach different religious ideas than we have or because we think they are a witch (that is, because we think Satan whispered in their ear). The average member seems to think that if the Church says to do it or if it’s written in a manual or handbook, it can’t be wrong. The Church has trained the membership to think in terms of obedience rather than morality. That is institutionally convenient but pastorally deficient.
Conclusion. Summing up in a few phrases: We should think hard about the kind of questions we are asking or considering. We should look for moral issues hiding in institutional contexts, and grapple with them. We should engage with theological questions for the insight that comes from a good discussion rather than looking for simple answers.
I’m sure readers have other examples. Have you seen a fruitful discussion short-circuited by a loud, confident, simple answer? Why do we endorse moral agency (thinking about the right thing to do) but constantly talk about unquestioning obedience?
Good post and you raise some interesting points, this has certainly been the hot topic of conversation in the Church and it seems like most of the official Church outreach to youth and young adults addresses questions and doubts. I think the difficulty with Mormon questions and questioning is that conclusions are above questioning. The questions that lead up to the conclusions are very difficult to comprehend and process because they tend to lead to conclusions that are different from those set in stone. If you are willing to reach different conclusions, the questions become less difficult. For example, many Church members wrestle with JS’s polygamy because the data is so messy. I wrestled with this for many years and it never quite fit. It’s especially messy when the conclusion is that it was commanded by God and JS was following God’s commands. Why would God command such strange things? Why did JS sometimes go against the explicit instructions? When I allowed myself to reach a different conclusion, that it was not of God and was bad behavior on the part of JS, the data seemed to confirm my conclusion and it became less difficult.
We seem to be OK acknowledging that there are tough questions but don’t want to allow people to reach different conclusions.
I think if we were willing to tackle actual moral questions (“how are we in a capitalist society contributing to oppression of the poor as warned about in the BOM?) we would have more interesting discussions and be more ethical.
If we were more open to theological mystery, we would probably have less cut and dry theology but would have more interesting discussions, but might be able to acknowledge and process bigger questions, like why bad things happen to good people.
The wrong type of answer. I love it. It puts a name to something I’ve observed for a long time.
This reminds me of a gospel doctrine class I attended many years ago.
The teacher brought up the topics of predestination, free agency (as people called it at the time), and the omniscience of God. The teacher asked if these principles were in conflict. A class member strutted to his feet said that God knows everything, knows what we are going to do before we do it, yet we are still free to make the choice. That was the end of discussion.
This is how I typically see these conversations go at church. There are a lot of unasked and unanswered questions here, a number of unresolved paradoxes. How can an omnipotent, omniscient God allow us choice? Is it even possible? Our classes typically don’t get into the details paradoxes; rather they come up with a dogmatic answer to any question, and move on to the next topic.
I don’t expect it to change. I don’t even know if it should change. But I struggle. I still attend church, at least a little bit, with my family, but it’s really hard to be interested when the tough questions are dismissed this way.
felixfabulous hits it on the head with this: “We seem to be OK acknowledging that there are tough questions but don’t want to allow people to reach different conclusions.” This should be shouted from the rooftops. The problem with Mormonism isn’t that its theology is rigid (it’s actually more flexible in many ways than most members believe); the problem is that any answer to truly complex questions that isn’t simple and straightforward is seen as “wrong” or “apostate” or something along those lines. I think Mormons like things simple and in my experience, figuring out God, the universe, redemption, sin, and our obligations to our fellow human beings is anything but simple. Answers to complex questions tend to be complex and nuanced and since Mormonism’s chief anxiety concerns maintaining the status quo no matter what the cost to truth or to people, it just doesn’t do well with complexity. In fact, even acknowledging complexity causes most of the people in my ward to hyperventilate. I mean, they’re good folks generally, but trying to complicate any issue or question in Sunday school is just a waste of time.
And may Clark Goble rest in peace. I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but he modeled the kind of thoughtful, rigorous yet charitable discourse that we should all embrace and practice. May God bless him and his family.
If you listened to President Nelson’s devotional today there was such a doubling down of the infallibility of the 15 and how all prayers are answered only to affirm the direction that the leadership is taking the church. I know many active and faithful friends who left the Church as a result of the cognitive dissonance of the 2015 exclusion policy and the idea that it was a revelation from God vs. what they had learned all their lives about Christ and his feelings for his little ones. Some prayed and had such profound spiritual witnesses that the policy was wrong that they just left. They lost all faith in the authority claims of our leaders. I had other friends who have fallen into non-participation because they had their temple recommends yanked for not supporting and sustaining our leaders with respect to that policy. They had questions they couldn’t ask and when they expressed doubt they were penalized. I sat fearfully on the sidelines praying that our leaders would acknowledge the mistake of the 2015 policy so I could stay. I nuanced my way through my temple recommend interviews.
We have truly fantastic gay friends/neighbors and I have paid an emotional price fighting against my conscience when we decided to faithfully persist in our activity. Despite President Nelson’s statement today, I did not feel our leaders communicating God’s love either when the policy was announced nor when it was rescinded. My neighbors used to ask “where is our family’s place in your theological framework? Will we have our children? Do you believe that God truly created us only to consign us to lives of isolation?” The beauty and happiness of their family unit belies a lot of what I was raised to believe about homosexuality. And don’t even get me started on the hard questions about gender.
I know that President Nelson feels sure that he knows God’s laws but I am not so sure. He doesn’t seem to acknowledge that he sees through a glass darkly. He seems to think he has the empirical answers. There have been other prophets who have taught things with such certainty that are/were just flat out wrong. And, I am not sure we truly know what God’s laws are outside the laws taught in the Bible and Book of Mormon–The 2 great commandments and also faith, repentance, baptism by water and fire and that we are reconciled to God through Christ. But each time I hear President Nelson speak I realize that for our leaders there is no room for grappling with paradoxes or room to reach our own different conclusions. There is no theological mystery for them. They do not want us to engage with the tough moral questions. If it hadn’t been for a personal and profound sacred manifestation when reading and studying the Book of Mormon, then I would have been out the door to find a different spiritual home long ago. I am still grappling with what that manifestation meant and I am trying to allow for the fact that the answer might not be so black and white.
@OftenPerplexed: I also noticed, and reacted internally, to that doubling down in the devotional. When Pres. Nelson said that prophets and apostles speak the truth, I openly asked myself (because Pres. Nelson would not have been able to hear me, though I would love to have been able to ask him), “Are we sure they ALWAYS speak the truth?” It seems to me that so many of the issues that I see the Church wrestling with boil down to whether prophets and apostles always speak the truth or if they make some mistakes in their declarations.
I am reminded of this essay by Duane Boyce at Interpreter from earlier in the summer: https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/yes-its-true-but-i-dont-think-they-like-to-hear-it-quite-that-way-what-spencer-w-kimball-told-elaine-cannon/ Down in the comments, I suggested a case study of Pres. Kimball’s so-called “oral sex letter” to explore whether prophets always speak truth — even when they are confident that they are speaking truth.
IMO, until we come to a better understand of what it means to “follow the (fallible) prophet” that truly allows us to seek the Spirit to truly discern for ourselves what is truth and hat is error — not just in a rubber stamp kind of way accepting the real possibility that the Spirit may not confirm every single thing taught by prophets and apostles, we are going to continue to struggle with some of these difficult issues.
This devotional begged so many questions for me. The November 2015 Policy was downplayed from a revelation (which he said it was) to a policy aimed at solving a problem (the problem solving was mandated from the Lord as divine law). The reversal was part of the continued effort to work on the problem. The problem solving changed but the mandate did not. But if the whole point of the talk was that divine law doesn’t change and that our Church leaders are the source of truth, doesn’t this example contradict either or both? Either God changed his mind (divine law changes) or the leaders got it wrong and had to change course. Also, there are so many examples of what was taught as divine law changing (priesthood ban, oral sex ban, birth control ban, etc.).
My read of Gen Z is that most have a good nose for spin and I would guess this is going to cause more doubts than it will fix, but people like me may not be the intended audience. I would have responded so much better to a message that was real and vulnerable. I wish he would have said:
“We get revelation like you do, we do our best and are sincere, but sometimes we get it wrong. We got it wrong with the November 2015 and it hurt people and we are sorry. We are going to try to do better and ask for your forgiveness and prayers. Ultimately, it is your job to pray about what we say and get a witness for yourselves. Some of you felt like you got answers on the 2015 Policy. We are listening the great questions you are asking and are excited to keep progressing as a Church. You are the future of the Church and you are the Church.”
As I read about Nelson’s address today…the thought came (strong and unbidden) into my mind: “You know, I’m just kinda/sorta sick of Russell and Wendy’s never ending World Popularity Tour”. In my mind….I JUST. DON’T SEE. CHRIST. ACTING. THIS. WAY. Just a bit too much self aggrandizement, showmanship and needless puffing and chest pounding; let alone the sycophantic worshiping at their feet.. It’s quite a turn-off, I think. Personally, I don’t feel as though I need them – in order to approach my God.
I understand the appeal of certainty and black and white thinking. I was there for 15 years. But, there doesn’t seem to be a place for members when they have left that way of thinking. When I lamented to a counselor in a stake presidency about how stifled I felt he literally told me that I didn’t need to grapple–“that Heavenly Father didn’t want me to grapple.” “He gave us prophets to do that kind of thinking.” I just wish we were allowed to have a more nuanced view of prophets and revelation and scripture. I wish we could wrestle with theological questions. I wish questions truly were welcome and we could THINK. Again, the idea that the prophet(s) only speak “the truth” is just demonstrably not true. It wasn’t true in the ancient church either.
I believe that God reveals His will to His children, but his children often have trouble distinguishing between God’s will and their own thoughts and feelings. This problem is complicated by people in leadership positions being unable to recognize how much their own feelings and thoughts are intermixed with God’s revelation to them.
I also believe that God WANTS us to see through the glass darkly; that is part of our having to walk by faith in this life. From time to time, God lights the way for us, with things like the Book of Mormon, or D&C 76 and 93, or the visit of the Father and Son to Joseph Smith. But he also leaves unanswered, deliberately, I think, unpleasant and messy questions about these wonderful things. Faith is not easy, and I don’t think God WANTS it to be.
So when President Nelson claims that revelation led to both the POX and its rescission, I think he is sincere when he says that. But I have learned that intelligent people who seek the will of the Lord (and Russell Nelson is unquestionably smart and seeking God’s will) also have blind spots—and it is often their own intelligence, or their attempts to seek God’s will that makes it hard for them to see their own limitations. In the meantime, I am simply grateful that the blasted POX thing has been withdrawn.
So as a believing and practicing Mormon, I try to sustain Church leaders, while realizing that what comes from them is from God, “as far as it is translated correctly.” Like faith, this is not always easy. But I believe that God expects me to try.
Very often, it takes TIME to realize what is from God and what is from man. That is I think a hard thing for Mormons to accept, because as a Church we emphasize dramatic religious events, and our culture encourages certainty. This is true for both leaders and followers.
Thought: what Church leaders believe here and now is doctrine. But when subsequent events show that those beliefs were in error, then the discarded “doctrine” becomes policy that can be changed.
I am not being snarky or cynical here. This is an invaluable “escape hatch” that helps the Church get out of bad situations.I think that barring the occasional religious bolt of lightning like the BOM or the FV, this is how God chooses to let us grope toward His will. An answer that will satisfy neither most skeptics nor believers.
I have learned , and am continuing to learn, that God is guiding me, even when I don’t know what the Hell is going on. I suspect I am not unique.
I have just read Pres Nelsons much hyped devotional. He makes assertions like
The truth is, however, that in the beginning—in the beginning—marriage was ordained by God! And to this day it is defined by Him as being between a man and a woman. God has not changed His definition of marriage. Not sure BY knows this.
I am not aware of any revelation or scripture that says gay marriage is not acceptable to God. He asserts it is not, and claims God does too, but where? I’m sure if there was modern revelation to this effect we would have heard about it. This sounds like some of the assertions about race and priesthood. Is there Revelation or scripture?
He also says.
Finally, we also clarified that homosexual immorality would be treated in the eyes of the Church in the same manner as heterosexual immorality.
So hetrosexual imorrality is to have sex outside a legally recognised marriage. Is that the same for homosexuals? No. So what does he think it means? Obviously not what it says? He earlier says he recognises the law of the land.
Though it may not have looked this way to some, the 2015 and 2019 policy adjustments on this matter were both motivated by love—the love of our Heavenly Father for His children and the love of the Brethren for those whom we serve.
These are now policy adjustments not revelations. So can we please have a policy adjustment that includes gay marriage in our definition of marriage, as I believe God does.
No it does not look like anything but conservative culture, claiming to be from God.
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
As for the Pres. Nelson broadcast on Tuesday Sept. 17, that will probably be the subject of a forthcoming W&T post. Let me just comment quickly that what I noticed was both the Nov. 2015 policy and the recent modifications were uniformly described as “policy” and “policy modifications,” and not as revelation or “a revelation.” That lays the ground for further modifications or outright reversal, as happened with the temple and priesthood ban two generations ago. Shifting the description from “doctrine” to “policy” is the step that is needed for leadership to be able to consider a change. It’s a two-step process: “Wow, so it’s a policy not a doctrine, who knew. … Hey, now that it’s a policy, maybe we can change it!”
As for world travel, I suspect his thinking is that he should travel and visit the membership around the world while he physically can. That won’t last too many more years. Lots of retired couples decide to take their Caribbean cruise or their Euro-vacation while they are still healthy enough to enjoy it. Same idea.
I really like this post, Dave, particularly your discussion of Mormon questions. As other commenters have already said, we Mormons are in *love* with cut-and-dried answers that, as you put it so well, are the wrong *kind* of answers. I think you can see our love of answers in the popularity of books like Mormon Doctrine, which has the virtue of never having meet a question that Uncle Bruce didn’t have a definitive answer to.
Several of my sisters who have inhabited academic worlds I’m unfamiliar with like literature and philosophy have pointed out to me the contrast between Mormonism’s love of answers and their academic fields’ love of questions. I feel like I could be just as exhausted at the other end of the spectrum (sorry if I’m oversimplifying) where *all* questions are philosophical and nothing can have a definitive answer, but I would definitely welcome a little shift in the Church away from “there’s the right and the wrong to every question” at least a little toward the idea that there are questions that we can’t have definitive answers to.
“Have you seen a fruitful discussion short-circuited by a loud, confident, simple answer?”
For sure. One incident I remember vividly was when we had the prophet manuals and in elders quorum one day we read a statement from Brigham Young about how the world would be better off if everyone were always perfectly honest. I raised my hand and asked if this were actually true, given how many white lies are told as social lubricants (e.g., “that outfit looks fine on you”). Another guy in the quorum was just appalled by my question and quickly shut it down. “The prophet said it,” he said repeatedly, clearly not able (or willing) to comprehend that I might not accept that as definitive. Needless to say, my question was not considered further by the class.
Dave B., In 2019 he didn’t use the R-word for the November 2015 policy, but he had stated in January 2016 that “… the Lord inspired His prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, to declare the mind of the Lord and the will of the Lord [as to the November 2015 policy, and that], each of [the Q15?] during that sacred moment felt a spiritual confirmation. It was our privilege as Apostles to sustain what had been revealed to President Monson.” And in 2019 he stated: “We may not always tell people what they want to hear. Prophets are rarely popular. But we will always teach the truth!” So he will seem to some to have reinforced the claim that the 2015 policy was the revealed mind and will of the Lord from November 2015 until sometime before the April 4 reversal announcement. Of course, that is not the only possible reading.
Geoff-Aus, I believe the reference to treating hetero- and homo-sexual immorality the same was with respect to the April 4 announcement of the deletion of same-gender marriage from the special definition of “apostasy” for which a disciplinary court is “mandatory”.* RMN seems not otherwise to have mentioned that announced change. Also, “sex outside a legally recognised marriage” is not the Church’s definition of sexual immorality. In view of legalization of same-gender marriage, the Church finally got around to clarifying the language of the “law of chastity” in the endowment script. Listen for the “according to the law of God” language (possibly not quite accurately quoted here). It does not seem that “legally and lawfully” was ever intended to cede control of the definition of “chastity” or sexual immorality to civil authorities.
* It was not generally mandatory (absent other facts) for heterosexual immorality, but only “may be necessary”.
It will be interesting to see if and when the same-gender apostate language and the restrictions on ordinances and mission service for children of gay parents come out of Handbook 1.
My compliments to everyone; great, great discussion.
Over the past year (culminating with Nelson’s self-declared World Wide Birthday Bash) I’ve come to see that many of our LDS Leadership are now reminding me of the Sadducees from history. One sentence in particular really stuns me. It is: “The Sadducees were essentially elitists. They endeavored to preserve their priestly caste, and actively took part in political discourse to maintain their influcence”…….After this whole “same sex marriage” debacle – my respect and trust in these folks…has taken a nosedive.
“Socially, the Sadducees were more elitist and aristocratic than the Pharisees. Sadducees tended to be wealthy and to hold more powerful positions. The chief priests and high priest were Sadducees, and they held the majority of seats in the Sanhedrin. The Pharisees were more representative of the common working people and had the respect of the masses. The Sadducees’ locus of power was the temple in Jerusalem; the Pharisees controlled the synagogues. The Sadducees were friendlier with Rome and more accommodating to the Roman laws than the Pharisees were.”
“Sadducees were essentially liberal elitists. They endeavored to preserve their priestly caste, and actively took part in political discourse to maintain their influence over their fellow Jews. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were more religiously committed to keeping the statutes of the Oral as well as Written Law, and regularly took part in traditional forms of worship in the temple.”
I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed this post, and the thoughtful comments. I’m a mainly a lurker, but I really wanted this community to know what a difference you make.
Living in a small unit in Europe, I sometimes struggle to find anyone within our small church unit and stake to engage with in discussions of this nature.
You make me feel like I might still belong; that it’s entirely acceptable to think this way, and that others do too.
Thank you.
Good to see you M. I am from a ward in Australia where I feel similarly isolated.
Dave B., great post. And as usual the comment section has been world class!
Mildly tangential, I wanted to add that this topic is exactly why the Old Testament is my favorite book of scripture. It is full of morally ambiguous men of god whose lives—when studied in earnest, not just the church manuals—provoke more questions than answers. (Plus members aren’t as familiar with the OT so once you go even remotely off-script, talking about a non-manual story, most members don’t have Sunday School answers at the ready.)