Needs, and Liking Your Mom

People're a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can't hold, needs for things you can. Adverts know this. Shops know this...I've got what you want! I've got what you want! I've got what you want! But walking...this afternoon, I noticed a new need that's normally so close-up you n ever know it's there. You and your mum need to like each other. Not love, but like.

-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 194

Perspectives On Bullies and Bullying and Being Bullied.

Contrary to popular wisdom, bullies are rarely cowards.

Bullies come in various shapes and sizes. Observe yours. Gather intelligence.

Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice.

Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable.

Which is worse: Scorn earned by informers? Misery endured by victims?

The brutal may have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed.

Let guile be your ally.

Respect earned by integrity cannot be lost without your consent.

Don't laugh at what you don't find funny.

Don't support an opinion you don't hold.

The independent befriend the independent.

Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty.

-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 212-213

Hate

Dogs hate foxes. Nazis hate Jews. Hate doesn't need a why. Who or even what is ample.

-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 198

On Poetry

Once a poem's left home it doesn't care about you.

- - -

"Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You beleif a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. Am I right?"

"Sort of"

"Your 'sort of' is annoying. A yes or a not, or a qualification, please. 'Sort of' is an idle loubard, and ignorant vandale. 'Sort of' says 'I am ashamed by clarify and precision.' So we try again. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it is not a poem. I am right?"

"Yes."

"Yes. Idiots labor in this misconception. Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue."

- - -

...the poem is a raid on the inarticulate...Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if its themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, cliches of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes, makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is.


-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 146-147.

Being Right

"...not hurting people is ten...thousand time more...important than being right."

-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 118

On War

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 109

Listening to the Earth

The earth's a door, if you press your ear against it.

-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 91

One True Church and Christian Exclusivity

Each of the enduring religions is a mediator of "the absolute," but not the absolute itself. Applying this understanding to being Christian, the point is not to believe in Christianity as the only absolute and adequate revelation of God. Rather, the point is to live within the Christian tradition as a sacrament of the sacred, a mediator of the absolute, whom we name "God" and who for us is known decisively in Jesus. Christianity is not absolute, but points to and mediates the absolute.

Within this framework, what happens to the passages in the New Testament that proclaim Jesus to be "the only way"? We should remember that they are relatively few. Moreover, passages in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament suggest a larger view of God's presence and accessibility. But the "only way" passages are there, most famously John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to God except through me." Also well known is Acts 4:12, which says about Jesus, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved." We can understand these as expressions of both truth and devotion.

Truth: the path seen in Jesus is the way--the path of death and resurrection, that path of dying to an old identity and way of being and being born into a new identity and way of being that lies at the heart of Christianity and the other religions. This is "the way" expressed in Christian form. For us as Christians, Jesus is the way, even though not the only expression of the way.

Devotion: to say Jesus is the "only way" is also the language of devotion. It is the language of gratitude and love. It is like language used by lovers, as when we say to our beloved, "You're the most beautiful person in the world." Literally? Most beautiful? Really? Such language is "the poetry of devotion and the hyperbole of the heart." Poetry can express the truth of the heart, but it is not doctrine. And such language, when not hardened into doctrine can continue to express Christian devotion. To echo Krister Stendahl again, we can sing our love songs to Jesus with wild abandon without needing to demean other religions.

When a Christian seeker asked the Dalai Lama whether she should become a Buddhist, his response, which I paraphrase was: "No, become more deeply Christian; live more deeply into your own tradition." Huston Smith makes the same point with the metaphor of digging a well: if what you're looking for is water, better to dig one well sixty feet deep than to dig six wells ten feet deep. By living more deeply into our own tradition as a sacrament of the sacred, we become more centered in the one to who the tradition points an in whom we live and move an have our being."

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 215

Saint or Communist

To paraphrase Roman Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara from Brazil: "When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint; when I asked why there were so many poor, they called me a communist."

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg.201

Faith and Works

We are saved by "faith," not "works." To many Protestants, practices sound like "works." But the point of practice is not to earn one's salvation by accumulating merit by "works." Rather, practice is about paying attention to God.

Christian practice is about walking with God, becoming kind, and doing justice. It is not about believing in God and being a good person; it is about how one becomes a good person through the practice of loving God.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 188, 205

Eternal Life Now

Though [John's gospel] affirms life after death, his phrase "eternal life" does not mean primarily that. The English phrase translates to a Greek phrase that in turn expresses a Jewish notion: "the life of the age to come." "Eternal life" means "the life of the age to come." Thus, for example, John 3:16 could be translated

For God so loved the world that God gave God's only begotten Son; whoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have the life of the age to come.

[Importantly] in John, "eternal life" is often spoken of in the present tense. "The life of the age to come" has come. It is here. Eternal life does not refer to the unending time beyond death, but to something that can be known now. "This is eternal life," John affirms, and then adds, "to Know God." To know God in the present is to experience the life of the age to come. It is a present reality for John, even as it also involves a future destiny. We can know it now, experience it now. The point is that even John's language about "eternal life" has a strong present dimension.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 175

Spending time in "thin places"

The Christian life is about the "hatching of the heart," the opening of the self to the Spirit of God by spending time in "thin places"--those places and practices through which we become open to and nourished by the Mystery in whom we live and move and have our being.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 161

In Defense of Drone Prayer

When we pray the Lord's Prayer together, the point is not to "think hard" about the meanings of the words and to mean them. As a child, I remember being told that it was important not simply to say the Lord's prayer, but to pray the Lord's Prayer--that is, to really mean it. So my attention became focused on thinking hard about the words. I no longer say or pray the Lord's Prayer in such an effortful manner. Rather, the point is to let the drone of these words that we know by heart become a think place. For Simone Weil, one of the twentieth century's remarkable Western spiritual figures, saying Lord's Prayer consistently brought her into a thin place, and not because she was paying attention to the meaning of the words.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 159

Worship as a "Thin Place"

Worship can become a thin place. Indeed, this is one of its primary purposes. Of course, worship is about praising God. but worship is not about God needing praise. I recall hearing a radio preacher talking about how "God just loves to be praised." He made God sound like a narcissist. Rather, worship has the power to draw us out of ourselves. Worship is directed to God, but is in an important sense, for us.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 157

God's Justice vs. God's Mercy?

[One reason we have overlooked God's passion for justice] is because of a common misunderstanding of "God's Justice." Theologically, we have often seen its opposite as "God's mercy." "God's justice" is understood as God's deserved punishment of us for our sins, "God's mercy" as God's loving forgiveness of us in spite of our guilt. Given this choice, we would all prefer God's mercy and hope to escape God's justice. But seeing the opposite of justice as mercy distorts what the Bible means by justice. Most often in the bible, the opposite of God's justice is not God's mercy, but human injustice. The issue is the shape of our life together as societies, not whether the mercy of God will supersede the justice of God in the final judgement."

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 127

On being born again and Spirituality

Being born again is the work of the Spirit...Spirituality is midwifery.

Spirituality combines awareness, intention, and practice. I define it as becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God. The words are very carefully chosen. Becoming conscious of our relationship with God: I am convinced that we are all already in relationship to God and have been from our birth. God is in relationship with us: spirituality is about becoming aware of a relationship that already exists.

Becoming intentional about our relationship to God: spirituality is about paying attention to the relationship. Though God is "Mystery," there is nothing mysterious about paying attention to our relationship with God. We do so in the ways we pay attention in a human relationship: by spending time in it, attending to it, being thoughtful about it. We pay attention to our relationship with God through practice, both corporate and individual: worship, community, prayer, scripture, devotion...

A deepening relationship with God: in what is now a familiar theme, the Christian life is not very much about believing a set of beliefs, but about a deepening relationship with the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Paying attention to this relationship transforms us. This is what our lives are to be about: a transforming relationship to "what is," the "More."

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 120

On "Dying to self" and "Taking up your cross"

But the cross is the means of our liberation and reconnection.  It is not about the subjugation of the self, but about a new self. And so to avoid the potentially negative meaning of "dying to self," I prefer to speak more precisely of an old and new identity and way of being.  The way of the cross involves dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and being raised to a new way of being, one centered in God."

To be born again involves dying to the false self, to that identity, to that way of being, and to be born into an identity centered int he Spirit, in Christ, in God.  It is the process of internal redefinition of the self whereby a real person is born within us."

To relate this to John's affirmation that Jesus is "the way": the way that Jesus incarnated is a universal way, not an exclusive way. Jesus is the embodiment, the incarnation, of the path of transformation known in the religions that have stood the test of time.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pgs. 112-113,117, 119.

Jesus' Life, Death, and Atonement Theology

Jesus is, for us Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God.

In the judgement of the majority of mainline scholars, atonement theology does not go back to Jesus himself. We do not think that Jesus thought that the purpose of his life, his vocation, was his death. His purpose was what he was doing as a healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator. His death was the consequence of what he was doing, but not his purpose. To use recent analogies, the deaths of Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. were the consequence of what they were doing, bu not their purpose. And like them Jesus courageously kept doing what he was doing even though he knew it could have fatal consequences.

In it's first century setting, the statement "Jesus is the sacrifice for sin" had a quite different meaning. The "home" of this language, the framework within which it  makes sense, it he sacrificial system centered int he temple in Jerusalem. According to temple theology, certain kinds of sins and impurities could be dealt with only through sacrifice int he temple. Temple theology thus claimed an institutional monopoly on the forgiveness of sins; and because the forgiveness of sins was a prerequisite for entry into the presence of God, temple theology also claimed an institutional monopoly on access to God.

In this setting, to affirm "Jesus is the sacrifice for sin" was to deny the temple's claim to have a monopoly on forgiveness and access to God. It was an antitemple statement. Using the metaphor of sacrifice, it subverted the sacrificial system. It meant: God in Jesus has already provided the sacrifice and has thus taken care of whatever you think separates you from God; you have access to God apart from the temple and its system of sacrifice. It is a metaphor for radical grace, of amazing grace.

Thus "Jesus died for our sins" was originally a subversive metaphor, not a literal description of either God's purpose or Jesus' vocation. It was a metaphorical proclamation of radical grace; and properly understood it, it still is. it is therefore ironic to realize that he religion that formed around Jesus would within four hundred years begin to claim for itself an institutional monopoly on grace and access to God.

Because the sacrificial metaphor has often been taken quite literally, we in the church have often domesticated the death of Jesus--by speaking of it as the foreordained will of God, as something that had to happen,a s a dying for the sins of the world. But it ant he other purposive ways of seeing the death of Jesus are post-Easter retrospective providential interpretations. They matter, they're important, and rightly understood, they continue to be a way of proclaiming the gospel. but they should not be allowed to eclipse the historical reason for his execution.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 92-95

The Post-Easter Jesus

The post-Easter Jesus is what Jesus became after his death. More fully, the post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian experience and tradition. Both nouns are important. By the post-Easter Jesus of Christian experience, i mean that Jesus continued to be experienced by his followers after his death as a divine reality of the present, and that such experiences continue to happen today; some Christians, but not all, have such experience.  The post-Easter Jesus is thus an experiential reality. By the post Easter Jesus of Christian tradition, I mean the Jesus we encounter in the developing traditions of the early Christian movement--int he gospels and the New Testament as a whole, as well as in the creeds.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 82

Grace, Transformation, Life, Heaven

Unconditional grace is not about how we get to heaven or who goes to heaven. The notion that salvation is primarily about "going to heaven" is a distortion; and when it is seen as primary, the notion of unconditional grace leads to the notion that everybody gets to go to heaven, regardless of their life and faith. However, unconditional grace is not about the afterlife, but the basis for our relationship with god in this life. Is the basis for our life with God law or grace, requirements and rewards or relationship and transformation? Grace affirms the latter.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 77

God: Dimensions of Meaning

To echo a comment made...by Paul Tillich, one of the twentieth century's two most important Prostestant theologians: if, when you think of the word "God," you are thinking of a reality that may or may not exist, you are not thinking of God. Tillich's point is that the word "God" does not refer to a particular existing being (that's the God of supernatural theism). Rather, the word "God" is the most common Western name for "what is," for "ultimate reality," for "the ground of being," for "Being itself," for "isness."

So, what meaning or content can we give to personal language for God? Thus far I have been able to see three dimensions of meaning:

Whatever God is ultimately like, our relationship to God is personal. This relationship engages us as persons at our deepest and most passionate level.

I am persuaded that God has more the quality of a "presence" than of a nonpersonal "energy" or "force." To use language Martin Buber used, I am persuaded that God has more the quality of a "you" than of an "it," more the quality of a person than the quality of an impersonal "source." I see this sense of God as a presence, as a "you," as grounded in experience.  I also see it reflected int he centrality of the notion of covenant in the Jewish and Christian traditions. We are in a covenantal relationship with "what is" and covenant is an intrinsically relational model of reality.

Moreover, I think God "speaks" to us.  I don't mean oral or aural revelation or divine dictation. But I think God "speaks" to us--sometimes dramatically in visions, less dramatically in some of our dreams, in internal "proddings" or "leadings," through people, and through the devotional practices and scriptures of our tradition. We sometimes have a sense--I sometimes have a sens of being addressed.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 72-73

God, Divine Intentionality, and Interventionism

Rather than speaking of divine intervention, panentheism speaks of divine intention and divine interaction.  Or, to use sacramental language, it sees the presence of God "in, with, and under" everything--not as the direct cause of events, but as a presence beneath and within our everyday lives.

[This framework] allows for prayers to have effects, including prayers for healing.  It does not rule out extraordinary events.  But it refuses to see efficacious prayer or extraordinary events as the result of divine intervention.

From  [the panentheism] point of view, interventionism not only has insurmountable difficulties, but claims to know too much; namely, it claims to know that "intervention" is the explanatory mechanism for God's relation to the world.  Except in the very general sense of "divine intentionality" and "divine interactivity," panentheism does not claim to have an explanation of the God-world relation. It is content not to know.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 66-69

The Truth of Metaphor

As I use the word, "metaphor" is a large umbrella category.  It has both a negative and positive meaning.  Negatively, it means nonliteral.  Positively, it means the more-than-literal meaning of language. Thus metaphorical meaning is not inferior to literal meaning, but is more than literal meaning.

I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true?  Literally true, no.  Really true, yes.

A Catholic priest once said in a sermon, "The Bible is true, and some of it happened."

I say to my students, "Believe whatever you want about whether it happened this way; now let's talk about what the story means."  The statement applies to the Genesis stories of creation, the gospel birth stories of the Bible generally: a preoccupation with factuality can obscure the metaphorical meanings and the truth of the stories as metaphor.

The Bible as metaphor is a way of seeing the whole: a way of seeing God, ourselves, the divine-human relationship, and the divine-world relationship.  And the point is not to "believe" in a metaphor--but to "see" with it.  Thus the point is not to believe in the Bible--but to see our lives with God through it.

Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 49-54

Faith is Faithfulness to our relationship to God

If one thinks that "belief" is what God wants from us, then doubt and disbelief are experienced as sinful.

Faith is faithfulness to our relationship to God.  It means what faithfulness does ina  committed human relationship...Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God, whether bibilical, credal, or doctrinal.  Rather, it means faithfulness to the God to whom the bible and creeds and doctrines point.  Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God

...when the prophets indict Israel as adulterous or Jesus speaks of "and evil and adulterous generation" they are not saying that there is a lot of wife swapping going on.  Rather, they are referring to unfaithfulness to God and God's covenant.

Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pgs. 30, 32-33

The Bible and the Emerging Paradigm

Historical: For the emerging paradigm, the Bible is the historical product of two ancient communities, ancient Israel and the early Christian movement. The Bible was not written to us or for us, but for the ancient communities that produced it. A historical approach emphasizes the illuminating power of interpreting these ancient documents in their ancient historical context.

Metaphorical: The emerging paradigm sees the Bible metaphorically, by which I mean its "more than literal," "more than factual," meaning. It is not very much concerned with the historical factuality of the bible's stories, but much more with their meanings.  It is not bothered by the possibility that the stories of Jesus' birth and resurrection are metaphorical rather than literally factual accounts.  It asks, "Whether it happened this way or not, what is the story saying?  What meaning does it have for us?"

Sacramental: The emerging paradigm sees the Bible sacramentally, by which I mean the bible's ability to mediate the sacred.  A sacrament is something visible and physical whereby the Spirit becomes present to us.  A sacrament is a means of grace, a vehicle or vessel for the Spirit.

...the emerging paradigm sees the Bible as sacred scripture, but not because it is a divine product.  It is sacred in its status and function, but not in its origin.

...the emerging paradigm sees the Christian life as a life of relationship and transformation.  Being Christian is not about meeting requirements for a future reward in an afterlife, and not very much about believing.  Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms life in the present.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pgs. 13-14.

The Androcentrism of Scripture

Biblical scholarship will never yield Bibles full of women. Nonetheless, closer scrutiny and improved methods in this expanding field have shown a remarkable and often overlooked tradition of female authority. Further, critical attention to the history of Biblical interpretation has revealed two and a half millennia of repeated efforts to suppress traditions of female authority and to present misogynistic readings as normative. Most modern appeals to biblical precedent on this subject fail to account and adjust for the cultural medium and biases by which that precedent was established. Reconstructing a world based on a thoroughly androcentric text produces a thoroughly androcentric world. Recognizing this, biblical scholars like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza have largely abandoned the attempt to recover a robustly egalitarian ministry between the pages of the text partly because it results in the misguided search for pristine origins that conform to the observer’s desired view of the future. Instead Schüssler Fiorenza focuses, as I will here, on possibilities opened by historical accounts in which the struggle between egalitarianism and hierarchy is visible, thereby revealing a past not so dissonant with the present. Attention to the implicit and explicit evidence of struggle within the text has the potential to inform current discourses.

-Cory Crawford, Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 48, No. 2

How Not to Need Resurrection - Michalle Gould

How Not to Need Resurrection

Children like to play at death—
they hold their breath,
and cross their arms and shut their eyes
until they forget to be dead; then rise
from their nest of pillows and play instead
at being lost or married,
as if their state was mutable, as if, like water
they could flow or freeze or climb without a ladder
into the heavens then drop back down—
they are the first resurrectionists, they alone
understand the trick is not to try,
that once you believe in death, you must surely die.

--Michalle Gould

Frances Lee Menlove - On Institutional and Individual Honesty

It is impossible for the Church to face the great problems and threats of our age without individual members being free to express to themselves and to others what they think and believe. With the almost unlimited possibility for new scientific discoveries, new sociological and anthropological insights, new ways of explaining human behavior, modern man cannot escape perplexity. "What the Church needs today, as always, are not adulators to extol the status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are no less than their passion for truth; men who brave every misunderstanding and attack as they bear witness; men who, in a word, love the Church more than ease and the unruffled course of their personal destiny." The members of the Church are responsible for the Church.

 -Frances Lee Menlove, "The Challenge of Honesty" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1966), pg.53

Frances Lee Menlove - On the Limitation of Revelation

Any revelation must be filtered down through the mind and intellect of the receiver, pressed and squeezed into language inadequate to handle it, and altered and changed by the boundaries of human understanding and experience.  Both the fact that the Church exists and expresses itself in a particular cultural and historical context an the realization that we have only finite and limited understanding about infinite matters must be made explicit.  Failure to make these distinctions accounts for some of the most acute abuses of individual conscience.

-Frances Lee Menlove, "The Challenge of Honesty" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol.1 No. 1 (1966): 49

The definition of a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat which isn't really there. The definition of a theologian is somebody who finds it.

-Lord Byron, Michael Ruse, Dashiell Hammet, Ernest Gellner, Wendy Doniger

"It [the revelation extending priesthood to all worthy males] is a tremendous thing. It came as a result of great effort and prayer, anxious seeking and pleading. Anyone who does not think that is a part of receiving revelation does not understand the process." -Gordon B. Hinckley, interview with Ed Kimball on July 12, 1978

On my argument, the Book of Mormon must be regarded as neither historical nor unhistorical, but as non-historical. This is not to suggest that the events it records did not happen. On the contrary, it is to claim that it must be subtracted from the dichotomy of the historical/unhistorical because the faithful reader testifies that the events—rather than the history—recorded in the book not only took place, but are of infinite, typological importance. Any enclosure of the Book of Mormon within a totalized world history amounts to a denial of the book’s unique claim on the attention of the whole world. In the end, then, to take the Book of Mormon as either historical or unhistorical may be to miss the nature of the book entirely. Both positions in the debate about Book of Mormon historicity—whether critical or apologetic—are founded on a common, backwards belief. The historicity of the Book of Mormon is not in question. Rather, as Alma makes clear, it is the Book of Mormon that calls the historicity of the individual into question.

-Joseph M. Spencer, An Other Testament: On Typology, pg. 28

Dear darkening ground,
you've endured so patiently the walls we built,
please give the cities one more hour

and the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor — let their toils
still hold them for another five hours, or seven,

before that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.

Just give me a little more time!
I just need a little more time.
Because I am going to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they're real and worthy of you.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. And as you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, this intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world shall cease to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
And to the rushing water speak, I am.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I have been circling around God, that primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and still I don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

Rainer Maria Rilke

Importantly, this idea--namely, that the Book of Mormon is evental--has been argued before, and by a non-Mormon.  Jan Shipps, in her study Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, describes "the profound historylessness of early Mormonism," effected precisely by the appearance of the book of Mormon.  At some length, she analyzes that rupture in history, brough about for the believer: "Since [the Book of Mormon] was at one and the same time prophecy (a book that said it was an ancient record prophesying that a book would come forth) and (as the book that had come forth) fullfillment of that prophecy, the coming forth of the book of Mormon effected a break in the very fabric of history."  Latter-day Saints are thus, according to Shipps, "suspended between an unsusable past and an uncertain future," giving themselves to a "replication" (an evental resurrection) that amounted to an "experiential 'living though' of sacred events in a new age."  Mormons are, for Shipps, a thoroughly typological people.

I believe this analysis clarifies the problem of hte Book of Mormon's historicity.  On my argument, the Book of Mormon must be regarded as neither historical nor unhistorical, but as non-historical.  This is not to suggest that the events it records did not happen.  On the contrary, it is to claim that it must be subtracted from the dichotomy of the historical/unhistorical because the faithful reader testifies that the events--rather than the history--recorded in the book not only took place, but are of infinite, typological importance.  Any enclosure of the Book of Mormon within are totalized world history amounts to a denial of the book's unique claim on the attention of the whole world.  In the end, then, to take the Book of Mormon as either historical or unhistorical may be to miss the nature of the book entirely.  Both positions in the debate about Book of Mormon historicity--whether critical or apologetic--are founded on a common, backwards belief.  The historicity of the Book of Mormon is not in question.  Rather, as Alma makes clear, it is the Book of Mormon that calls the historicity of the individual into question.

Joseph M. Spencer, "An Other Testament: On Typology" pg. 28

It is perhaps this that is most deeply meant when Latter-day Saints speak--quite commonly--of the Book of Mormon as the "missionary tool for conversion."  It does not mean that scriptural texts are means to an end, but ends in themselves--or perhpas means without end.  It is a tool of conversion indeed, but the work of conversion is not therefore outside or beyond the task of reading the book; conversion is, rather, the work of reading the book itself, of reading the book in a certain way--on its own terms or in the way it itself prescribes.  The Book of Mormon thus comes, as every graceful thing does, announcing only itself.  It asks its reader nothing more than to read it, nothing more than to be converted in reading it.

Joseph M. Spencer, "An Other Testament: On Typology" pg. 27

“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.”

- Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"

"Put in Almas own words, typology is a question of allowing a new thought to rework memory, so that it becomes possible to advance in the knowledge of God."

-Joseph M. Spencer, "An Other Testament" pg. xii

Although most likely influenced by the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, adopting such themes as the presence of a snake, a plant that grants a type of immortality, a focus upon human death and morality, and ht use of sexuality to siginify a type of rite of passage that transforms people from being animal-like into human beings, J has its own unique story to tell. Like the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh, J observed that human sexual behavior is different than the types of activities in which animals engage.  For J, humans possessed an advanced knowledge of sex unlike the animals, but very much like the gods.

-David Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis - Deutoronomy, pg. 107

When reading the Garden story contextually, the "knowledge" that the fruit imparted in J's story, making the primordial couple "like gods," appears specifically linked with sexual awareness.  As the myth opens up, the man already possesses the basic attributes of knowledge and discernment.  Prior to eating the fruit, the man holds enough knowledge to recognize and name the animals Yahweh creates, and the man shows enough discernment to recognize that the woman proves fit for the role of a "helper."  Therefore, the knowledge that the primordial couple obtains in J's myth is not simply intelligence, for the man already possesses this attribute prior to  consuming the forbidden fruit.  The knowledge the couple gains is sexual awareness.

-David Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis - Deutoronomy, pg. 105

My Bright Abyss - Christian Wiman

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this:

The only real cure for provincialism is not dictated by our awareness of the size and diversity of the human family alone, but also by our awareness of the staggering size and diversity of the more-than-human community of nature.

George B. Handley - Home Waters, pg. 42

George Handley - Environmentalism rehabilitates humanity

Whatever environmentalism seeks to be, it must not denigrate the uniqueness of human experience.  This is because environmental degradation is itself our own suicidal impulse.  And this self-destructiveness is not only an indifference to beauty but an intolerance for the bald fact that we are subject to death and dying.  We need to rehabilitate what it means to be human.  We cannot risk self-hatred.

George B. Handley - Home Waters, pg. xvi

B.H. Roberts - Revelation, Inspiration, and Church Admin.

There is nothing in the doctrines of the Church which makes it necessary to believe that [men are constantly under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit], even...men who are high officials of the Church.  When we consider the imperfections of men, their passions and prejudices, that mar the Spirit of God in them, happy is the man who can occasionally ascend to the spiritual heights of inspiration and commune with God!...
We should recognize the fact that we do many things by our own uninspired intelligence for the issues of which we are ourselves responsible...He will help men at need, but I think it improper to assign every word and every act of a man to an inspiration from the Lord.  Were that the case, we would have to acknowledge ourselves as being wholly taken possession of by the Lord, being neither permitted to go to the right nor the left only as he guided us.  there could then be no error made, nor blunder in judgment; free agency would be taken away, an the development of human intelligence prevented.  Hence, I think it a reasonable conclusion to say that constant, nevery varying inspiration is not a factor in the administration of the affairs of the Church; not even good men, though they be prophets or other high officials of the Church, are at all times and in all things inspired of God.  it is only occasionally, and at need, that God comes to their aid."

-B.H. Roberts, "Relation of Inspiration and Revelation to Church Government," Improvement Era 8 (March 1905): 362

Blake Oster: Cocreative Participation Model of Revelation

When individuals attempt to verbalize their experience, they further interpret by using a conceptual framework of language. Concepts affect how we perceive, however, even before we interpret and explain. The way we conceptualize the world influences how we will perceive it. Further, language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of various items of experience, it also contains a creative, symbolic organization which not only refers to experiences already acquired but actually defines experience. Language constitutes a logic, a general framework within which we categorize reality (Bishin and Stone 1972, 159). Anyone who has learned to think in another language knows that there are expressions and nuances of thought that cannot be translated into English, for the cultural frame of reference necessary to understand the concept is missing. As Michael Polanyi (1962) noted, culture and language entail a tacit knowledge which  impacts upon how we conceptualize experience. We assume a structure of reality in the act of attempting to communicate about our experience.

These observations about experience are crucial to understanding revelation, but they are not the total explanation of revelation. If they were, nothing new could be learned in revelation; revelation would be a mere restatement of cultural and preconceptual presuppositions. Revelation is not experienced from God's viewpoint, free of cultural biases and conceptual limitations, but neither is God limited to adopting existing world views or paradigms to convey his message. Revelation is also a revolution in human thought, a real breakthrough that makes new understanding possible. In Mormon theology, revelation is necessarily experienced within a divine-human relationship that respects the dignity of human freedom. God does not coerce us to see him as God; that is left to the freedom of human faith. Revelation cannot coerce us because the divine influence is, of metaphysical and moral necessity, persuasive and participative rather than controlling. We exercise an eternal and inherent freedom even in relation to God. Revelation becomes a new creation, emerging from the synthesis of divine and human interaction. Revelation is part human experience, part divine disclosure, part novelty. It requires human thought and creativity in response to the divine lure and message (Cobb and Griffin 1976,101-5).

The ultimate reality in Mormon thought is not an omnipotent God coercing passive and powerless prophets to see his point of view. God acts upon the individual and imparts his will and message, but receiving the message and internalizing it is partly up to the individual. In this view, revelation is not an intrusion of the supernatural into the natural order. It is human participation with God in creating human experience itself. Revelation is not the filling of a mental void with divine content. It is the synthesis of a human and divine event. The prophet is an active participant in revelation, conceptualizing and verbalizing God's message in a framework of thought meaningful to the people. Human freedom is as essential to revelation as God's disclosure.

Blake Ostler - "The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source"

Eugene England - A Non-Metaphysical Atonement

It is clear that long before Christ had actually performed the central acts of the Atonement—the suffering in Gethsemane, the death on the cross, the resurrection—men were able to be affected by those acts through the prophetic knowledge that God was willing to perform them in the future. What this means is that the mechanics of the mission itself did not occur in time as a necessary precursor to their effect on men, as some theories of the Atonement would require; Christ’s mission was not to straighten out some metaphysical warp in the universe that Adam’s taking of the fruit had created. The effects of the Atonement were not metaphysical but moral and spiritual: they reach men living at any time and place through each man’s knowledge of the spirit and events of the Atonement.

-Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer"

Eugene England - Unsatisfactory Theories of Atonement

The question “Why is man’s salvation dependent on Christ and the events surrounding his death?” is the most central and the most difficult question in Christian theology. The answers (and there are many) are, as i have said, the chief scandal of Christianity to the non-believer. Attempts to define logical theories of the Atonement based on New Testament scriptures have been largely contradictory and ultimately futile—mainly because the New Testament is not a book of theology, a logical treatise, but rather gives us the reactions, the varied emotional responses, of men to the Atonement as they experienced it and tried to find images for their joy. Some men clearly felt released from the powers of evil and darkness which they believed, much more literally than any of us today, were all about them. Some believed that their souls had been bought from the devil. Some felt that Christ had taken their place in suffering the just and necessary punishment under the law for their sins. The explanation i have tried to develop, based largely on Book of Mormon scriptures, is at significant variance with most of these theories, especially on one major point: The redemptive effect of the Atonement depends on how an individual man responds to it rather than on some independent effect on the universe or God, which theories such as the ransom theory, the substitution theory, the satisfaction theory, etc., all tend to imply. of course, the rich reality of the Atonement lies beyond any theory or explanation, including the one I am suggesting here, and some men bring themselves into redeeming relationship with God from within the framework of each of these theories as they somehow reach through to that rich reality. But the need for powerful personal response and for a release from the immobilizing demands of justice within man seem to me crucial and best served by an explanation different from the traditional theories.

Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer"

Eugene England - On the "Demands of Justice"

Christ is the unique manifestation in human experience of the fulness of that unconditional love from God which Paul chose to represent with the Greek term agape.  As Paul expressed it, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Christ's sacrificial love was not conditional upon our qualities, our repentance, anything; he expressed his love to us while we were yet in our sins--not completing the process of forgiveness, which depends on our response, but initiating it in a free act of mercy. This is a kind of love quite independent from the notion of justice. There is no quid-pro-quo about it.  It is entirely unbalanced, unmerited, unrelated to the specific worthiness of the object (except in that each man has intrinsic worth through his eternal existence and God-like potential), and that is precisely why it is redemptive. It takes a risk, without calculation, on the possibility that man can realize his infinite worth. It gets directly at that barrier in man, his sense of justice, which makes him incapable of having unconditional love for himself--unable to respond positively to his own potential, because he is unable to forgive himself, unable to be at peace with himself until  he has somehow "made up" in suffering for his sins, something he is utterly incapable of doing.  The demands of justice that Amulek is talking about, which must be overpowered, are from man's own sense of justice, not some abstract eternal principle but our own demands on ourselves, demands which rightly bring us into estrangement with ourselves (as we gain new knowledge of right but do not live up to it) and thus begin the process of growth through repentance, but which cannot complete that process.  an awareness of the true meaning and source of that last sacrifice and its intent has the power, as Amulek says, "to bring about the bowels of mercy, which overpowereth justice, and bringeth about means unto men that they may have faith unto repentance."