Orson Pratt - Diligently Seeking the Gifts

This failure to realize all the blessings and powers of the Priesthood does not apply to the elders and lesser Priesthood only; but it applies to the higher quorums, and comes home to ourselves, who are Apostles of Jesus Christ. We are presented before the Church, and sustained as prophets, seers and revelators, and we have received oftentimes the gift of prophecy and revelation, and have received many great and glorious gifts. But have we received the fullness of the blessings to which we are entitled? No, we have not. Who, among the Apostles have become seers, and enjoy all the gifts and powers pertaining to that calling? And those who are called to perform special missions in opening up dispensations of the Gospel to the children of men, as Joseph and others were called of the Lord, He endows more fully with these gifts; but this does not hinder others from enjoying similar gifts according to His promises, and according to our faithfulness. And I have thought the reason why we have not enjoyed these gifts more fully is, because we have not sought for them as diligently as we ought. I speak for one, I have not sought as diligently as I might have done. More than forty years have passed away since these promises were made. I have been blessed with some revelations and prophecies, and with dreams of things that have come to pass; but as to seeing things as a seer, and beholding heavenly things in open vision, I have not attained to these things. And who is to blame for this? Not the Lord; not brother Joseph—they are not to blame. And so it is with the promises made to you in your confirmations and endowments, and by the patriarchs, in your patriarchal blessings; we do not live up to our privileges as saints of God and elders of Israel; for though we receive many blessings that are promised to us, we do not receive them in their fullness, because we do not seek for them as diligently and faithfully as we should.

-Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses 25:145-146

Daymon Smith - Blessings and Agency

We have no reason to assume our blessings have come of our own righteousness. This means there is no compulsion nor bribery which leads to righteousness, and no measuring worth doing; for you’ll find that the wicked are often blessed equally, if not in profusion, should you compare how much rain one has received with that sent upon another. If there is no material reason for righteousness, nor fear of wickedness because God will smite you with a plague, the only reason to do good, it seems to me, is because one prefers that to doing evil. And so we really are free to act.

-Daymon Smith, "Like Unto = Evil"

John Taylor - I Would Not Be a Slave to God!

I was not born a slave!  I cannot, will not be a slave.  I would not be slave to God!...I'd go at His behest; but would not be His slave.  I'd rather be extinct than be a slave.  His friend I feel I am, and He is mine: --a slave!  The manacles would pierce my very bones--the clanking chains would grate upon my soul--a poor, lost, servile, crawling wretch to lick the dust and fawn and smile upon the thing who gave the lash!  Myself--perchance my wives, my children to dig the mud, to mould and tell the tale of brick and funish our own straw!...But stop!  I'm God's free man: I will not, cannot be a slave!  Living, I'll be free here, or free in life above--free with the Gods, for they are free..."

-John Taylor, Life of John Taylor by B.H. Roberts, 424

J. Bonner Ritchie - Security Religion vs. Growth Religion

Security religion provides refuge.  It builds an ecclesiastical wall which protects from the onslaught of questions and doubts and decisions.  Growth religion, on the other hand, forces its adherents to grow, to accept responsibility, to assume the burden of proof, to move beyond extrinsic constraints.  Growth religion provides not a wall but stepping stones to climb for the purposes of understanding, analyzing, serving, and making choices. We all seek the safe harbor at times.  We need to be protected, to rest so we can go back for the battle.  Security needn't be an inhibiting force; it can and should be positive.  Whether it is or not depends more on how the member responds to the system than how the system makes demands of the member.

J. Bonner Ritchie, "The Institutional Church and the Individual",

Philip L. Barlow - A Self Critical Faith

"...it isn’t authentic inquiry as such that tends toward the erosion of faith. Without faithful inquiry, spiritual growth is not possible. Indeed, faith by itself, although necessary, is not necessarily good. Terrorists who fly jets into tall buildings full of innocent people have deep faith. What is required for mature spiritual health, however, is a thoughtful and even self-critical faith, which includes faithful inquiry."

Philip L. Barlow - "12 Answers From Philip Barlow: Part 2"

William James - The Choice & Consequence of Faith

"What do you think of yourself?  What do you think of the world?...These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them.  They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them...In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark...If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken.  If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken.  Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.  We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive.  If we stand still we shall be frozen to death.  If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces.  We do not certainly know whether there is any right one.  What must we do?  'Be strong and of a good courage."  Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes...If death end all, we cannot meet death better."

-Fitz James Stephen, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

Quoted in William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - The Logic of Faith

...a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - Sceptics of Faith

We cannot escape the issue [of faith] by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.  It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home.  Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisevely as if he went and married some one else?  Scepticism, then is not avoidance of option; it is an option of a certain particular kind of risk.  Better risk loss of truth than chance of error - that is your faith veoter's exact position.  He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.  To preach scepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true...dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?

William James - "The Will to Believe"

William James - Science, Morality, Religion defined.

Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.

First she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word.  "Perfection is eternal" - this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we beleive her first affirmation to be true.

William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - Faith in a Fact Can Create the Fact

Do you like me or not?...Whether you do or not depends in countless instances, on whether I meet you halfway, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation.  The previous faith on my part in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes your liking come.  But if sI stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt...ten to one your liking never comes....The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence
...
There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.  And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the 'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking can fall.  Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!

William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - Fear of Becoming a Dupe

Clifford writes..."It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

...

Beleive nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.  You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is very small compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true....he who says, "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe.  He may be critical of many of his desire and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys...It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound.  Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained.  Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness of their behalf.

-William James, "The Will to Believe"

James Faulconer - On Religious Expectations

When our religion ceases to challenge our ordinary expectations, either we have reached perfection or it has lost its power for us.

-James Faulconer, "Challenging Expectations," Speaking Silence

James Faulconer - On Alleviating Suffering

It is easier to give when we see pictures of disaster or when our heartstrings are tugged by someone forlorn. It is easy to understand the psychology of our reaction: seeing pain or suffering we want to alleviate it, and the closer the person suffering is to us, either spatially or in a relationship, the more our desire to help. But understanding why we are more prone to help our own doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to also help those who are not ours.

There are always people in need. We cannot escape our obligation to help them, even when we do not know who or where they are, or why they suffer. If we have received God's grace, we must share it. Not to share it would be to receive it ungratefully.

James Faulconer, "What Can I Do?", Speaking Silence

James Faulconer - Suffering With God

Paul tells us that life in the Spirit results in becoming part of the family of God, joint heirs with his Son. He says, "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (Rom. 8:16-17).

The glory of the divine inheritance provided to the disciple of Jesus Christ is wondrous, but the condition put on that bequest is puzzling: "if so be that we suffer with him." Divine glory requires not only the divine suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. It also requires our suffering with the Son.

The Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations to Joseph Smith, tells us why the Lord suffered: "I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent" (D&C 19:16). Yet it responds to our demand for an explanation of our suffering, not with a method for escaping suffering or a claim that we do not really suffer, but with this rhetorical question: "The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?" (D&C 122:8). If even God himself, the Son of God, cannot escape suffering, how should we expect to do so?

God weeps at our pain and our death. He also, and probably more so, weeps at our sinfulness.
Enoch's response to God's sorrow—the way in which he becomes like God—is to weep like God.

To be like God is to suffer with him on the behalf of others. It is not to weep only with those who weep because they have been wounded (Mosiah 18:9), though that is essential. It also is to weep, as God does in Enoch's vision, for those who wound. It is to take responsibility for the sinner as well as the sinned-against.

Divine power is the power to feel pain with and for others, the power to feel pain and sorrow. To be in the family of God is to accept suffering as Jesus did. It is to respond to God's suffering as Enoch did. We too must stretch forth our arms. Our hearts too must swell wide as eternity. Our bowels also must yearn until eternity shakes. Like Enoch, like God, we must weep for humankind.
Only if we stretch and swell and yearn and weep as God does can we do what those who suffer need. Our righteousness requires our suffering. The redemption of anyone or everyone, whether temporal or spiritual redemption, requires our weeping.

-James Faulconer, "Suffer With Him", Speaking Silence.

Adam S. Miller - Religious Transformation.

The point of religion is to wake up.  "The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin" (WS 437). 

On Latour's account, the test for religious competence is clear.  "If, when hearing about religion, you direct your attention to the far away, the above, the supernatural, the infinite, the distant, the transcendent, the mysterious, the misty, the sublime, the eternal, chances are that you have not even begun to be sensitive to what religious talk tries to involve you in" (TF 32).  Religion has no interest in selling you insurance or in telling you something you don't already know.  It does not want to teach you or inform you.  Religion wants to change you.  It wants to render you sensitive to the passing worlds alrady hard upon you.  "Information talk is one thing, transformation talk is another" and religion is about the latter, not the former (TF 29).

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 156

Adam S. Miller - The Art of Losing

Subjects, whatever the limitations imposed upon them, can have their constraints transubstantiated into grace and liberation.  This is the message of the cross: redemption unfolds as the practice--as the art--of losing.  The cross is that most intimate detour to salvation.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 150

Adam S. Miller - Religion and the Two Faces of Grace

Religion corrects for our farsightedness.  It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen.  To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness.  Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace.  Redemption turns on this revelation. 
...
Double-bound, grace has two faces.  On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude's resistance.  On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility.  Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance.  Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of Grace.
...
The business of religion is "to disappoint, first, to disappoint" (TF 32).  Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects.  Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace.  To disappoint this drive, "to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after (TF 32).  Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the invompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside.  Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional.  Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by ta black box for the sake of obscuring grace.  In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely.  But in religious practices, "incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer" (TF 39).  Great effor is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable.  "Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored" (TF 36).

Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.
...
...This revelation of the ordinary as a grace already given, as a life already being lived, is nothing exceptional, but it is something that must be enacted. It is a revelationt aht must be practiced.  Attention is difficult to exercise, it resists focus and is available for distraction.  It is a little bit subtle and requires great care.  Religion, rather than fleeing, practices attending.  It bends the flight of our attention back toward the ground that's already bracing us.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 143-145

Adam S. Miller - Pluralistic Religion

In the same way that religion gets into trouble when it tries to out-science science, science gets into trouble when it tries to out-religion religion.  This is particularly true when science apes the confused, traditional view of religion as something that is all things to all people, a mixture of everything, and the final word on all of it.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 136

Adam S. Miller - The Relationship between Religion & Atheism

Belief is a lure, a shiny, spinning distraction.  Faith, in contrast, is the work to which religion calls us.

If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand.  If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our own laziness.  "Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers" (TS 228).  There are nothing but translations all the way down.  If contemporary religion remind s us a bit too strongly of a dry well or a gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live.  It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating, aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again.  Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism.  When, Latour asks, "will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept the the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?" (TS 232).  Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work.

"Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it had to use the obvious common parlance of ancient people for whom God was as unproblematic as market forces are for us today. (TS 229)"

The force of religious speech depends on its ability to speak plainly about obvious things.  Religion addresses the most ordinary features of our most common objects and renders the difficult grace of the nearness visible again.  God himself has always insisted, not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary, the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor.  The path beat by their feet marks the way.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 133-135

Adam S. Miller - God Suffers Grace

The very premise of an object-oriented metaphysics excludes the possibility of a traditional, omnipotent, impassible, wholly transcendent God who created the world out of nothing...God, if he does or will exist, is an object, one among many, who suffers the grace of resistant availability like the objects that compose him.

Adam S. Miller - Religious Expectations Revealed

To expect a modest arrangement of people and frescoes and bread and hard wooden pews to do what the Hubble telescope does and lay down a through-line to deep space is to court pretty certain disappointment.  But to think that a modest arrangement of these objects has no disclosive power is to miss religious phenomena altogether.  Religious practices do not, like scientific practices, send us far away.  Religious practices work in the opposite direction: they ratchet us down and in.  They display the invisible grace of what was already available.  Saying a prayer isn't like flying off to an exotic locale, it's like squishing your toes down through layers of mud.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 131

Adam S. Miller - Religion is not about "Belief"

Religion aims at illuminating objects that are too near rather than too far.  Religion is the work of making-present what is already available.  Religious narratives, rather than conveying us to some distant place, are meant to enact the nearness of what is already given. Enacting this nearness is the key to redeeming the present and unveiling grace. "The truth-value of those stories depends on us tonight, exactly as the whole  history of two lovers depends on their ability to re-enact the injunction to love again in the minute the are reaching for one another in the darker moment of their estrangement" (TF 33).
...
Religion should not and never was defined by belief in things absent and distant,  invisible and beyond. God is not the object of a belief-action" (TS 231).  Rather, religion requires something of an entirely different order. It requires that I be faithful to the grace of what has already been made available.  Only this fidelity can redeem the present of presence.  Religious work depends, of course, on faith, but "faith and belief have nothing so say to one another." (TS 231).

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 126-127

Adam S. Miller - Science and Religion

For Latour, religion and science do have distinguishable magisteria--but these magisteria are anything but "non-overlapping" and, more critically, Latour finds their commonly assigned division of labor laughable.  "What a comedy of errors!  When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of the beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous soul-lifting, uplifting.  And it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy" (TF 36).  It is the work of science to build fragile bridges of carefully constructed, painstakingly tested, and incessantly extended chains of reference.  It is science that gropes out into the dark beyond and bring us into relation with the distant and the transcendent.  It is science that funds the miraculous, defends the counterintuitive, excavates the unbelievable, and negotiates with the resistant and unavailable.

But the invisibility of the resistant and transcendent is only one kind of invisibility.  The invisibility of the available, obvious, familiar, local, repetitive, sturdy, matter of fact phenomena remains.  This invisibility,while quite different in character, is just as difficult to breach. "The far away is just as foreign, just as difficult to reach, just as unrealistic, and I would add just as unreasonable as the nearby" (WS 465).  Confusion results when it is assumed that all invisibility is reducible to a single kind, and accessible from a single line of sight. In particular, confusion results when it is assumed that the invisibility proper to religious phenomena is identical to that of scientific phenomena.

On Latour's telling, though the analogy is mine, the story of our common confusion about science and religion goes like this:  To great applause, science works out dependable methods that correct for our near-sightedness and bring into focus distant, transcendent phenomena.  However, full of its own success and egged on by religious pretensions, science can't help but draw some unflattering conclusions about its neighbors.  Science borrows some spectacles from religion (spectacles meant to correct for our far-sightedness), puts them on, and then loudly complains that these glasses are useless.  Seen through these lenses, all of science's hard-earned, transcendent objects have suddenly become blurry or disappeared altogether.  

The mistaken assumption that commonly follows--for many religious people and scientists alike--is that religious talk, because it doesn't address the transcendent objects articulated by science, must then be referring to "an invisible world of belief" that is even more distant, even more transcendent, even more miraculous, than the one science itself is articulating (HI 433).  As a result, both science and religion get backed into a corner. Scientists think such religious talk about the super-transcendent is ridiculous and many religious folk feel compelled by the strength of their own practice--knowing that religion does in fact bring something crucial into focus--to make a public virtue out of believing in the super-absurd.  "Belief," claims Latour in response, "is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science" (TF 45).  both of these caricatures need to be abandoned.  Science doesn't deal with obvious facts any more than religion deals with magical beliefs and "the fights, reconciliations, ceasefire, between these two 'worldviews'are as instructive as a boxing match in a pitch black tunnel" (WS 464).

...

The same competencies needed to be good at science are those needed to be good at religion.  The practitioner needs patience, modesty, persistence, curiosity, concentration, generosity, creativity, rigor, care, and of course, and objective bent.  As commonly understood, neither knowledge nor belief describes the work of science or religion.  Both science and religion require the same compentencies and both science and religion produce the same output.  Both induce revelation.  However, where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our myopia, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our hyperopia.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 119-122

Adam S. Miller - Religion and Science, correcting two kinds of invisibility

Objects that are either too resistant or too available will fail to appear.  Both the unavailable and the acquiescent tend toward invisibility.  In one case, the object is too distant, too opaque, too transcendent.  In the other, it is too close, too transparent, too immanent.  Science and religion differ in that they address two different kinds of invisibility.  Where science aims to illuminate resistant but insufficiently available objects, religion aims to illuminate available but insufficiently resistant phenomena.  Science is a third-person exposition of the unavailable.  Religion is a first-person phenomenology of the obvious.  Science corrects for our nearsightedness, religion for our farsightedness.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 119

Adam S. Miller - Ontology & Hermeneutics, no original meaning to recover

The need for interpretation and translation is not the mark of a fallen world, it is the substance of life.  To live is to interpret.  This can be hard to swallow.  "When you speak of hermeneutics, no matter which precaution you take, you always expect the second shoe to drop: someone inevitably will add: 'But of course there also exist "natural," "objective" things that are "not" interpreted'" (RS 144-145).  But no--there are, of course, not.  This is not because all natural objects have been contaminated by the interpretive meddling of other objects.
...
There is no original meaning to recover.  There are only objects to be persuaded. The more, the better.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 108

Adam S. Miller - Truth is the product of a mundane democracy

In a metaphysical democracy, every object gets a vote. Producing statements that only some humans find persuasive won't get you very far. If you want to speak truthfully about icebergs, then it is not enough to convince your fellow scientists, some influential politicians, or even a bevy of soccer moms. To have real traction you must also convince the icebergs themselves to line up behind what you say. If you want to make claims about honey, your alignment will have to queue not just bee-keepers, but flowers and hives and bees as well. The more bees that agree, the more substantial your claim becomes. When it comes to truth, appeals to authority carry only as much weight as the masses that such authority can muster. Blanket appeals to truths sponsored by absent gods, angels, Platonic forms, natural laws, or noumenal things-in-themselves have no force...Truth is the product of a mundane democracy, not the province of a magic kingdom. In order to vote, you have to show up at the polling place.
...
Truth is a function of both popularity and durability.  If a truth hits it off with a persuasive mass of humans and (in particular) nonhumans and then manages to get itself copied and repeated, ti has a career on its hands.  Truths "are much like genes that cannot survive if they do not manage to pass themselves on to later bodies" (SA 38).  Claims that are not persuasive to humans and nonhumans alike will quickly die out.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 103-104

Suffering and responsibility are both universal.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 94

...to be is to be passible.  God is no exception to this rule.  God, should such an object exist, would be one being, one particularly complex multiple, that composes, is composed of, and is in interdependent relation with many other objects.  Like every other object, God would be available, passible, resistant, and graced by the unavoidability of hard work.

This last point about the link between grace and passibility is crucial to the experiment I've undertaken because it fundamentally reframes the problem of suffering.  To say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of passibility is to say that grace guarantees the universality of suffering.  Moreover, it is to say that the imposition of suffering (classically understood as the problem) and the reception of grace (classically understood as the answer to this problem) are equivocal....both sin and salvation turn on this equivocity.

However, whatever the nature of salvation, suffering, because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be expunged.  To be is to suffer and, outside of classical theism, suffering must characterize both activity and passibility.  Available for relation, every object passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, repurposed, or redistributed by other objects.  Moreover, even in actively influencing other multiples, each object will suffer the only partially reducible resistance of those objects it means to influence.  And it is important to note that, because every object (God included) must also suffer itself.

This universality, though, is not simply bad news because suffering is the universal mark of grace.  Without exception, grace comes.  Suffering it to be so, grace is what enables us to act, think, feel, love, an be.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 80-81

Grace is suffered in that it is passively received rather than actively controlled...There are no exceptions to the rule of availability, interdependence, co-composition, passibility, and passivity.  This means in turn, that there are no exceptions to the rule of grace.  Every object is shaped by forces and relations that exceed its knowledge and control.  Every object suffers the conditioning and enabling gifts of the other objects that compose, sustain, and cannibalize it.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 79

As a working agent, every possible object is dependent both on the other objects that compose it and on the other objects that can be leveraged into business with it.  Grace is enabling precisely because the gift of agency is always borrowed.  Grace may no longer make every impossible thing possible, but it does enable the fermentation of every possible thing.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 78

Knowledge, though engaged in the work of tallying objects, is itself a tallied object. Facts unfold as workable chains of partially linked, abstracted, or reduced subsets of objects that, in their novel configuration, are added to or folded back into the multitude of objects from which they came.
...
Strictly speaking...knowledge (as a faithful, mirror-like reflection without surplus or deficit) does not exist.  Such "knowledge does not exist--what would it be?  There is only know-how.  In other words, there are crafts and trades.  Despite all claims to the contrary crafts hold the key to knowledge" (PF 218).  To know an object is to know how to connect with it, how to link it with other networks, how to repurpose it as a flexible widget in some novel situation.  This kind of knowledge is intimate, messy, hands-on, adaptive, and above all, real.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 76

Additionally, if we do try to divide "Nature" from "Society" in a neat and tidy way, then the transcendence that traditionally characterizes the supernatural simply gets transposed into Nature itself.  Nature becomes that which forever "transcends" any of our feeble attempts to represent it.  "When," Latour asks, "will we finally be able to secularize nonhumnas by ceasing to objectify them?" (PN 51).  When will we stop taking objects as masks for noumenal things in themselves?  Latour's response to this version of "natural" tanscendence is identical to his response to claims of "supernatural" transcendence: he doesn't deny transcendence, he affirms it while multiplying it.  he flattens and secularizes it by rendering it ubiquitous.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 64-65.

The human and the nonhuman bleed into each other as human intentions are animated by powerfully purposeless forces and purposeless processes like natural selection bear the emergence of order and direction...Agency is always only borrowed and a specifically human agency can be borrowed only from a complex of nonhuman objects.  Everything human is organized around an unavoidable detour through the nonhuman because everything human is composed of and dependent upon nothing else. 

..every agent is a machine that dissembles the multitude from whom its strength is borrowed.  An agent is an object that speaks on behalf of others fromt he sake of itself.  But such agency is always a two edged sword because there is no simple way to determine when the agent is ventriloquizing the multitude and when the multitude is ventriloquizing the agent.  We're not likely to go wrong if we say taht agency is always both.

In an object-oriented theology, grace is the concurrently imposed and enabling strength that emerges in the give and take of agency.  Grace shows up in the way that agency simultaneously endows an object with and divests it of itself.  Agency ist he grace of acting for oneself on another's behalf.  Or, agency is the grace of acting for another on one's own behalf.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 57-58

The world, always an imbroglio, is no different now than it is has ever been [sic].  It is the urge to reduce and purify that desacralizes the world, not the world's own ontological promiscuity.  We cannot be guilty of mixing up this world with another or of cutting the string that once tied us to a higher plane because this world (i.e. these transcendences) is all there is.  If the gods exist, they live and move and have their being in the same motley pluriverse as every other object. 

The good news is that, "as soon as there is no other world, perfection resides in this one" (PF 233).  Every object is simply and perfectly whatever that object is.  "There is no rear-world behind to be used as a judge of this one" (RS 118).  This does not mean that legitimate judgements cannot be made, but it does mean that non-messy, non-provisional, non-concatenated judgments cannot be made.  It means that the messiness of these judgments does not stem from our poor access to what is real, but from the messiness of the real itself.  And it means that, with nowhere else to go, "God has come down from Heaven to Earth" and he too must go "to work to discuss, through experimentation with possible worlds, the best of deals, the optimum that no one is allowed to calculate in others' stead" (PN 177).

..if we can manage to renounce our dreams of revolution and reduction, then "the most ordinary common sense suffices for us to take hold, without am inute of apprenticeship, of all the tools that are right here at hand" (PN 163).  This work of acknowledging both the modesty and adequacy of the tools an dinstruments at hand--of confessing both the "perfection" and sufficiency of the grace of this disheveled world--is the work of an experimental metaphysics.  and, if there were to be such a thing, it would be the work of an experimental religion as well.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 47-48.

The first superscripted word in each of the four Gospels is the Greek proposition kata.  The basic sense of this preposition is "according to..." The gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark, the gospel according to Luke, and the gospel according to John.  That this little preposition should so prominently headline each of the gospels is significant.  It indicates that what follows, in all of its personal particularity, is not an abstract or objective recitation of facts but a profoundly personal and subjective declaration of Jesus's atoning grace.

It is sometimes tempting to view the incongruous particularities of each of the gospel narratives as a kind of deficiency that needs to be corrected by correlation--but it is not.  Rather, the fact that each gospel narrative necessarily comes to us filtered through the beating heart of a particular, individual experience of God's love marks the exact point at which truth without truthfulness would show itself to be utterly inadequate to the gift Jesus wishes to give.  When it comes to the announcement of the good news, bare truth is no virtue.  The very aim of the gospel in confronting us with certain truths is to induce in us a reorientation of our subjective relation to the truth.  In order for the gift of grace to be received, we must take up the truth as our own, as something spoken truthfully with our own mouths about our own selves.  The kata that opens each of the Gospels indicates that what they give to us is not simply the truth, but their own personal experience of its truthfulness.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 117

The humanities remain essential to any genuine education not because they directly address the question of the being of the world (this is the work of science), but because they are faithful to the question of what is other that "what is."  Religion, art, fiction, music, film, theater, poetry, etc., are all essential because they protest the vanity of the world and aim to induce the birth of the new.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 110

The image of the "veil" plays a crucial role in Moroni's elaboration of faith in Ether 12 because (1) the image of the veil ties together faith, weakness, and grace, and (2) their divergence in relation to the veil marks the difference betweent he power of the word and the power of the sword.  Where the sword professes strength and refuses to acknowledge the limit of the veil, the word takes as its strength nothing other than a confession of the weakness that the veil marks.

Thus, to exercise faith, Moroni argues in verse 19, is to be like the Brother of Jared "whose faith was so exceedingly strong" that he "could not be kept from within the veil."  As Moroni recounts, "When God put forth his finger he could not hide it from the sight of the Brothe rof Jared, because of his word which he had spoken unto him, which word he obtained by faith" (vs. 20).  In this parting of the veil, all of the concepts at work so far come together.  Note the logic of their intersection.  (1) The veil can only be penetrated by faith.  (2) Faith comes only in response to the power of the word.  (3) The word reveals to us our weakness.  (4) To come unto to God, to penetrate the veil, is to be shown our weakness and, more importantly, it is to be shown the truth of this weakness: that our weakness is in fact the strength of God's grace.  When, in the presence of God, we see the truth of weakness, then "weak things become strong" unto us, not because our weakness has been expunged but because we have ceded our debilitating claim to mastery or autonomy.

The irony of the veil, then, is that it is self imposed.  We are separated from God by our unwillingness to faithfully confess our weakness.  God is hidden by the veil that we throw over our own weakness in a vain attempt to cover it.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 105

In reference to Ether 12:26-28

the Lord does not address in this passage the question of our human "weaknesses" (plural) but the question of human "weakness" (singular).  The difference is crucial.  The Lord is not claiming to be responsible for the particulars of whatever various sins or weaknesses we may have.  However, the Lord does claim to he "gives unto men weakness."  The weakness referred to here is constiutive and essential. Rather than naming our sinfulness it names precisely the opposite.  Weakness names our createdness, our lack of autonomous sovereignty, our persistent dependence on God and his grace for life and agency.  In short, weakness names our essential relatedness to God and, thus, our unity with him.  Or, again: our weakness is God's grace.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 104

A testimony, in order to be true to its unmitigated reliance upon the Atonement of Jesus Christ, must accept the indefensible weakness imposed upon it by its own boundless certainty.

The sign-seeker finds this prospect of weakness and dependence impossible to accept. In contrast to the humble submission needed for a testimony, every search for a sign is motivated by a desire for mastery and control.  To look for a sign is, like an adulterer, to want to be in control. To look for a sign is to say, in effect, that you are unwilling to take the risk that a testimony's objective weakness demands.  It expresses an unwillingness to cede control to God.  "We will participate," the sign-seekers say, "but only on our own terms and only if we are in control of the evidence."  Sign-seeking misses not only the point of a testimony, but the whole logic of a saving relationship with God: it fails to submit its will to his.  Saving truths, insofar as they are distinct from knowledge of actual facts, always take the form of a testimony.  They are always centered on the task of bearing the world-opening possibilities that God wishes to bestow.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 69

The stregnth of a testimony becomes inteligible only when it is distinguished from and purified of every desire for a sign.  A testimony can purify our hearts only to the degree that it is itself pure.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 67

It is nonsense to say that someone has a testimony apart from their actively and directly experiencing the power of the Atonement...Testimonies do not refer to objects or creeds.  They refer only to a living experience of what solicits their witness.  Testimonies are no accidental by-product of God's grace.  Rather, they are its indispensable embodiment....

To have a testimony of the Book of Mormon can only mean that through it one has experienced the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  The same follows for Joseph Smith, President Monson, tithing, the word of wisdom, the Church as an institution, etc.  To have a testimony of these things is to have experienced the Atonement in connection with them--nothing more, nothing less.  Who would be more horrified by the idea of people having a testimony of Joseph smith than Joseph Smith?  Who would be more horrified by the idea of people having a testimony of the Book of Mormon than Mormon?  We may be justified in making certain inferences about Joseph Smith, President Monson, or the Book of Mormon based on our experience of God's saving grace in connection with the, but this is not the same thing as having a testimony that refers directly to them.

In each instance, the message and the messenger are only as effective as they are transparent.  To claim otherwise is to claim for them something that they would not claim for themselves.  To claim otherwise is to exchange a testimony for a sign.  The moment when any person, object, doctrine, or principle detaches itself from the task of occasioning an experience of Christ's atonement is the moment when that thing becomes a sign, a dead limb splintered from the tree of life.  If adultery is a desire for sex without the demands of genuine intimacy, then the trouble with adultery is that it substitutes the sign of love for love itself.  In this sense, Joseph Smith was right to claim that every sign-seeker is undoubtedly an adulterer.  To want a testimony grounded in signs is to want the idea of a thing without the responsibility of submitting to the difficulty of the thing itself.  It is to want "a form of godliness" while "denying the power thereof" (2 Tim. 3:5).  Such is the perpetual temptation of religion.

The world will resist you.  It will exceed your grasp.  It will gractivce indifference towards you.  Like a borrowed shirt, it will fit you imperfectly, it will be loose in the neck, short in the cuff, and the tag will itch.  The world will irritate you, bruise you, thwart you, anger you.  In the end, it will even--for at least a time--kill you.  Suffering the indignity of these rounds, yo will, be default, be tempted to just flit from one offense to the next, simmering in frustration, stewing in quiet desperation.  But to live, you will have to let these offenses go.  You will have to learn how to make and accept recompense.  You will have to forget the fiction of cash equivelances and barter with whatever is at hand.  You didn't get what you wanted?  Or even what you needed?  Your life was repurposed by others fro something other than what you had in mind?  Join the party.  I'm sympathetic, but in the end these objections are going nowhere.  That bus, while always idling, never actually leaves the station.  You presume a world that doesn't exist, and you fantasize a fixer-God who, unlike ours, is Himself doing something other than divinely serving, borrowing, and repurposing.  Ask instead, what were you given?  where were you taken?  what was your recompense?  Learn to like lemonade.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 57

To address the unconditional character of the present moment is to address the nature of my relationships with my parents and family.  To lay aside the screen of judgment and preference in favor of life is to set myself the task of unknotting the threads of fear and desire that have prevented me from unconditionally embracing my family and my family from unconditionally embracing me.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 17

In sin, we become unplugged.  When we refuse the givenness of life and withdraw from the present moment, we're left to wander the world undead.  Zombie-like, we wander from one moment to the next with no other goal than to get somewhere else, be someone else, see something else--anywhere, anyone, anything other than what is given here and now.  We're busy.  We've got goals and projects, We've got plans.  We've got fantasies.  We've got daydreams.  We've got regrets and memories.  We've got opinions.  We've got distractions.  We've got games and songs and movies and a thousand TV shows.  We've got anything and everything other than a first-hand awareness of our own lived experience of the present moment. 

If we are not capable of being where we are right now, we will not be capable of being fully present when we arrive at some ostensibly more desirable destination later on.  Thus unplugged, what good would heaven be?

The zombie-life of sin sets us wandering away from the present moment because it sifts everything through a screen of preference that inevitably filters out the absolute givenness of life itself.  Spiritually undead, we see things only in terms of our own (often legitimate) preferences.  Undead, we see things only in terms of our selves.  How will this benefit me?  How will this harm me?  How might this current situation be leveraged for my own profit?  If something doesn't show up as being to my advantage, then typically it doesn't show up at all.  Absent the appearance of what fails to comport with my preferences, the fountain of life is squeezed back to a trickle.\

....

Sin refuses the unconditional givenness of life by imposing its own conditions.

The results are predictable. Striving after the gnat of pleasure, straining away from the sting of pain, we ignore the bulk of life and marvel at our own morbidity.  Failing to be where we are, to receive what is given, to feel what we are feeling, we fantasize instead about what has not come, fret over what has already passed, and are bored to tears by the grace of what is actually present.

Fantasy, fear, and boredom: the hallmarks of sin.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pgs. 11-12

The present moment, so irreparably and unconditionally given, brings the full weight of life to bear upon us.  givenness gives without consulting us, without condition, without recourse.  We suffer the imposition of its grace with an unavoidable passivity.  In opening our hands to receive what it offers and give what it requires, we must confess our dependence, our insufficiency, our lack of autonomy.  but we grit our teeth at the shame of it, refuse to suffer the grace of it, and seek refuge from the present moment in the conditional character of sequence.  we cower before the absolute, failing to recognize its image in our countenances, and hide behind a fragile veil of fantasies, memories, and projected improvements.  we withdraw from the present, abandon life, give ourselves wholly to the past or future, and die.

Sin: a refusal of life.

Sin: a refusal of givenness

Sin: a refusal of grace

Sin: a refusal of the present moment

Sin: death.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 10-11

A formula for attending to the givenness of life: take no thought for tomorrow but attend to the unconditional character of the present moment.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 6

To the extent that work is instrumentalized as a means to an end, its value is conditioned by that end.  Work, in and of itself, is devalued.  In order to take work seriously, a theology would hav to uncouple work from its outcomes and consider it non-sequentially.  That is to say, in order to take work seriously as work, we would have to acknowledge its unconditional givenness.  We would have to see work as a grace.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 8

Grace is not a kind of conditional supplement ot the present moment that takes us to some other place we would rather be.  Rather, grace is the unconditional fullness of the present moment.

Grace is the substance of life itself.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pgs. 8-9

A common feature at work in all of this living is that things are given and things are recieved.  Breath, rest, words, food, excrement, handiwork, sensations, ideas, bodies, and intentions--each of them, the very stuff of life, are given and each of them are recived.  Life is this giving.

A guiding axiom: life is givenness

A theological version of this axiom: life is grace.

Grace names what comes as a gift.  In short, grace names what is given.  Or, more precisely, as Jean-Luc-Marion puts it, grace names the givenness of whatever is given and received.

Givennes names the giving and receiving that constitute life.  It names our interdependence.  It names a dynamic process of exchange, of giving and receiving, acceptance and conversion, that is always already dependent on things outside of itself.  here, to be alive, to give and receive, is to be in an open relation of interdependence with the world for food, air, words, materials, sensations, and companionship.
...

The primary difficulty faced in approaching life in terms of grace is that grace so easily slips the knot of our attention.  Our preoccupation with what is given and received so easily eclipses any awareness of its having been given, of its givenness.  How easy it is to receive a gift from someone and, in light of its heft, shine, and appeal, forget that it is a gift.  How difficult it is to keep its gifted-ness at the forefront of our attention.

Addressing ourselves to the givenness of life (and not just to what is given), will require a kind of focused attention that we don't generlaly employ.  We will have to attend to the immediacy of life with a kind of awareness that we rarely bring to bear.  We will have to shift down a few gears, ease off the gas, and be patient enough to linger with the given-ness of the present moment.  If we are racing off to somewhere else, we will see only what is given and its givnness will fail to appear.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 4-5

In Mormonism, Christ's work of atonement is generally seenas operating on two related but distinct planes.  I propose that as a basic schema, we should see it as working on at least three planes.  Traditionally, Christ's atonement (1) gathers up and reunites human bodies with human spirits through the resurrection, and (2) reunites or reconciles human beings with God.  This is sound Biblical doctrine.  But in light of Joseph Smith's revelations, it seems essential to see the atonement as being at work on at least one additional plane: Christ catalyzes not only the reunion of bodies with spirits and humans with God but, additionally, he gathers and seals husbands to wives and parents to children.  Christ's work will not end until the whole human family has been gathered together in "one."

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 3-4