"I, the Lord, am not pleased with those among you who have sought after signs and wonders for faith, and not for the good of men unto my glory. Nevertheless, I give commandments, and many have turned away from my commandments and have not kept them. There were among you adulterers and adulteresses; some of whom have turned away from you, and others remain with you that hereafter shall be revealed. Let such beware and repent speedily, lest judgment shall come upon them as a snare, and their folly shall be made manifest, and their works shall follow them in the eyes of the people. And verily I say unto you, as I have said before, he that looketh on a woman to lust after her, or if any shall commit adultery in their hearts, they shall not have the Spirit, but shall deny the faith and shall fear. Wherefore, I, the Lord, have said that the fearful, and the unbelieving, and all liars, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie, and the whoremonger, and the sorcerer, shall have their part in that lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."
I've had a persistent Facebook Messenger dialog over years with an evangelical Christian who routinely posts questions "for Mormons" that set themselves up as dichotomous: the Bible says X but the Book of Mormon says Y. His binary approach immediately sets up an opposition, and determines "teams". It's an immediate us vs. them paradigm that prevents him from allowing any sympathetic reading of the texts together. Much of my conversations revolved around asking him to make two essential moves before drawing conclusion: 1. gather more context so we can more fairly compare the passages; 2. view the passages in a Venn diagram and clarify the overlaps before making a case for the dissimilarities. Because I'm approaching the interpretive problem looking for mutual confirmation, the passages rarely seem discordant or contradictory to me, and where they are on the surface, it's usually because there's an inaccuracy in his framing. On the other hand, because he's approaching the interpretive task looking for contradictions, he finds plenty--not because they're actually there, but because his hermeneutic approach has an inherent bias. I have no reason to suspect he's an adulterer, but I do include this experience to illustrate a principle.
As a lit prof, I've seen his kind of interpretive lockdown happen a lot. And it's hard to break students out of it. They generally come to readings with some healthy concepts: that texts are multivalent, and that diverse perspectives can shed new light and produce new readings. That's broadly true, but there are limits: some readings simply are not licensed by the text. You can shed new light on what a thing means through theory, experience, analysis, and just freshness, but you can't make it mean something it just doesn't. There is such a thing as an incoherent argument, and there is such a thing as an invalid opinion. Not all perspectives are equally valuable in the shedding of light. It's hard to keep the balance of valuing diverse perspectives and valuing accuracy, truth, and validity in analysis, because each perspective has the inherent danger of potential self-delusion. Just because you experience a thing a certain way, doesn't mean you're right, doesn't mean you've fully understood the phenomenon in question or how it has affected you, and doesn't mean the insight you get from it is applicable to the text or its interpretation. This self-deluding propensity fuels billions in counseling, psychotherapy, and psychiatry industries.
And to add a third illustrating example, this comes up in politics a lot as well. People tend to get invested in their ideology to the point that pointing out unfairness or inaccuracies in their opinions looks to them like defending their enemies, like you're on the wrong side. It's possible that I'm just a extraordinarily bad communicator and haven't learned the secret, yet, to smoothly enabling a friend to accept valid critique, but it's also true that it's largely an impossible task because of human nature. There's a reason it's considered impolite to discuss politics and religion at the dinner table, and it doesn't matter how honestly compassionate you are, or how eloquent you are, when people get told a hard truth, they tend to hunker down, get defensive, and hold all the tighter to the idea you just "helped" them to discard as erroneous.
None of this is surprising to folks who are familiar with Nephi's record of dealings with his own family members, and his quote to wayward and recalcitrant brothers that "the wicked take the truth to be hard." I don't mean to suggest that everyone who has a hard time accepting another person's "truth" is guilty of wickedness, but it's still true that wickedness infallibly distorts meaning.
One other way of restating that scripture's meaning is that attitude is everything. Attitude determines a person's interpretative horizons for every task of reading (and by reading, I mean in the broadest possible sense of making meaning out of anything). It doesn't authoritatively fix meaning, but it does determine what limits there are on your acceptance of it.
As context for this Section, a small, well-educated, and experienced group of potential leaders--all fairly new converts to the church because the church itself was barely into its second year of operation--were invited to travel to the physical location Joseph Smith would reveal as Zion. There was a purpose to the travel arrangements: some were to travel quickly to be present as close as possible to the arrival time of the Colesville saints who had begun their travels earlier; others were to travel through slower, less costly, and less comfortable methods so as to disseminate a missionary message along the way. To neutral and kindly disposed observers, these purposes seemed rational and acceptable. To a fault-finder, however, it might be noticed that the consequence was that higher ups got privileges that underlings couldn't enjoy. Attitude determines interpretive possibilities.
In a parallel situation, across two millennia, an influential, well-educated, and theologically trained group of Jews--established over generations as leaders of piety--were invited to witness miracles, and join the Light of the World as He taught the keys of His kingdom. Neutral and worshipful observers felt the Spirit testify of the Son of God burn within them as He spoke and ministered, as He taught and healed. But because He seemed to lead his followers to more flippant attitudes than they liked about the Sabbath day--a day for which they had devised and enforced elaborate extra rules above and beyond those written in the Law of Moses--they took up a fault-finding stance. It delivered them everything their hearts actually sought: contention and spiritual blindness. Attitude determines interpretive possibilities.
Now imagine what must be occurring in the mind of one who succumbs to the sin of adultery. They are under covenant vows, but the meaning of those vows means less and less to them the more they indulge tempting thoughts. They know, on some level at least, that the thoughts lead to actions, and that they should exercise self-discipline at the thought level in order to stay on the right side of an important line--one of the deepest possible kinds of betrayal, the betrayal of a spouse's intimate trust. But they progressively ignore both the evil and the covenant itself. They engage in justifying the unjustifiable: he doesn't deserve me, she's not keeping her side of our vows, my spouse owes me things they aren't giving, this isn't a 50-50 arrangement anymore. Whatever the proximal "reason", as distorted as it is, at some point, the idea occurs to them that they could take an action that would give them temporary benefits without the responsibility--they could indulge in the simulation of a relationship with someone with simpler rules, a more advantageous playing field for how that relationship was balanced, without counting the cost. They conceive--well before they act--of a self-delusion in which intimacy can be exchanged, even commodified, rather than earned through the self-sacrifice of investment in a covenantal relationship. And then they conveniently forget altogether that the covenant was between three parties, not just two. God drops out of the equation, and the sinner is left in their own selfishness. Light, love, and truth leave them entirely. If you have ever seen an adulterer, you have also seen a liar. If you have ever understood love, you understand how adultery is its thief. If you have ever served, learned, or felt light in the other ways God sends it to you, you can't imagine adultery as any less than shameful darkness.
John Bytheway uses similar language to describe the commonality between the mindset of the adulterer, and the mindset of the fault-finding sign-seeker who refuses to believe until they see God's power with their own eyes (and, again, attitude determining interpretive possibilities as it does, they've all already seen that power, and merely refuse to recall, or allow it entry for what it is).
"It comes down to a something for nothing attitude. I want the testimony. I don’t want to do the work. I don’t want to do the prayer. I don’t want to do the study. I don’t want to do the repenting. I don’t want to do the humility. Just show me it’s true first. With adultery, I want the pleasure of another person. I don’t want any commitment. I don’t want any expectation. I just want the pleasure. For me, it always just sounds like a real something for nothing type of mindset that both of them fit into."
And his guest on the podcast where they discuss this together, Dr. Scott Esplin, agrees and expands:
"Here’s another possible connection. He said that signs come by faith. We talk about when someone commits adultery, we use the same term. They haven’t been faithful. Both are rooted in this commitment of faith that I’ve made a covenant and I’m going to be faithful to that. Covenant signs come by faith. When someone commits adultery, we say they haven’t been faithful. Even in our vernacular, even in our language as we talk, we connect them both to faith in one way or another."
Attitude determines interpretive possibilities. It also determines meaning, purpose, and blessings. Signs come after faith because faith is the first principle of the Gospel that an omnipotent God atoned for our sins and will intervene for the growth of all who covenant with Him, who accept Him as their Savior. This good news puts us in a new state: a state of grace, a state of communion, a state of giving up our own will, even as He did, and finding life more abundant. It's a state of seeking oneness. And breaking it is unfaithful. Marital communion, the oneness of a new "we" replacing the "me" and the "you" that existed prior to the wedding vows and that the covenantal parties seek requires faith in the same way. We have to behave as if the becoming-one is true. We have to invest effort before the proof of the oneness is manifest. We have to take steps into the dark, building on common ground and expanding the ground that's in common before the blessings of the light are revealed.
Attitude determines interpretive possibilities. And this is why being faithful, hopeful, and charitable in putting the other's interests above your own allows you to grow in light, in love, in positivity, and in freedom together. Being one in heart is what Zion is made of. It's what the Lord prayed would happen for those that believe on His name--that they would become one even as He and His Father are one. And it's what makes every family a laboratory of faith. Because we seek oneness in faith, signs abound. Knowing they will abound--that we've been told they are logically connected in a causal relationship--doesn't remove the responsibility we have to act upon them, and doesn't diminish the test inherent in moving forward before the blessings arrive. Because it's not technically knowledge, but rather, more properly faith.
And the faithless--or rather the unfaithful--have an attitude preventing the possibility of faith's blessings, preventing oneness, preventing love, preventing liberty and power, preventing truth, preventing the Spirit. By choosing refusal to believe until X, they persist in the illusion that they are reasonable, honest, and open--even to the X they promise will convince them. Because their attitude determines their interpretive possibilities, and the refusal is the key defining element of their attitude, they can't even see that their very approach is fallacious, the very promise to believe when compelled by external evidence contains its own self-contradiction. They are set up for their own self-fulfilling prophecy--the signs don't come, and they remain unconvinced, but think it's for reasons. But from the outside, we can see that it is they who stand outside reason. They disallow evidence before it has a chance, and thereby fall prey to the larger delusion--that they are judging objectively at all. The material of the betrayal is different to that of adultery, but the thought process and scope of consequences stem from the same father of lies.
The Restored Church, in the 1830s as it still is now, has only ever had sinners as members. And the sins, if this Section is to be believed, ran as serious as sins of adultery, not merely bad attitudes toward the Prophet. I'm glad for a Redeemer capable of forgiving sin, and for commandments to avoid it. With the right attitude, that basic truth can make all the difference--seeing us through every challenge this mortal test can throw at us, and making us clean, whole, and eventually, potentially, consecrated enough for that oneness He promises. Maybe even on earth in a Zion society.
I'm working on my own attitude, and working outward beginning with my own family Zion, and beyond to my ward, community, and nation. The signs appear to be following my attitude.
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