"Faith cometh not by signs, but signs follow those that believe. Yea, signs come by faith, not by the will of men, nor as they please, but by the will of God. Yea, signs come by faith, unto mighty works."
I'll need another post to flesh this out a little more, but for now, a short comment about context, and a framing of questions.
Joseph Smith and companions have arrived back at their still very new home in Kirtland after some muggy summer travel to the physical place everyone has been dying to learn about and go to: Zion. Land was dedicated in Missouri, and faithful saints arrived and started to get settled, with their leadership organized by the Prophet and with a few new revelations to help them get over some grief, steel themselves against tribulations to come, and to help them understand one of the first principles of a Zion society: Sabbath observance (complete with covenant renewal, and fasting).
Arriving back home, however, things were not all hunky dory. And it was rpedictable because it had happened before, even with the Prophet around: the topic of Zion, curiosity about where it is, when we'll know, how we'll know, how to get there, and all the surrounding details, were topics several enthusiastic saints were quick to make claims to special knowledge about, Hiram Page most notably. In this case, apparently a number of rumors and questions had arisen in the Prophet's absence, and the administration of the consecrated economic system seemed complicated by the prospect of some members getting called to journey to Zion before the winter. Worse, it seems there were enough instances of sin--"lying, hypocrisy, rebellion," and even adultery--to require some serious redress, and even a re-establishment of control and leadership.
While I'm not asserting historical accuracy, the text, its preamble, and some outside summary sources lend themselves to wondering about what spiritual questions might have been on the mind of Kirtland members in general around this time. Having joined a movement based on a highly democratic idea--that God could reveal Himself to anyone, and did and still does to their leader, with others getting revelations in their own scope and assignments--and having brought with them common experiences with varied Christian spiritual practices of the day, including charismatic manifestations, it isn't hard to imagine a skeptical mindset among a critical mass of members. Just as the squeaky wheel gets the grease, loud, public claims or attention-grabbing behaviors and speech might begin to seem like "evidence" of Joseph Smith-esque contact with messages from the Lord. And the absence of this kind of behavior or claims to have seen miraculous things, or heard marvelous messages, could then be mistaken for evidence of lack of inspiration. As an example of how this kind of thinking might surface, I once shared a living space with a missionary who had the habit of pronouncing, at the end of common evening prayers that included pauses too long for his liking, that such a prayer was uninspired, because the sign of inspiration would require steady and fluid flow of ideas, and an uninterrupted locution.
In hindsight, the temptation to put the proverbial cart before the horse in matters of spiritual "signs" seems understandable, given the newness of the experience with a mantic Prophet, a democratic faith, and a community without its economic and spiritual intertwinings worked out into standardized "best practices" just yet. So this Section's revealed insistence on faith coming first, and signs coming chronologically later came as a timely doctrinal corrective.
What I'm not sure I quite understand yet is the connection between signs and adultery.
I've often tried to offer an operational definition of faith as "acting as if X is true." That way of framing it captures a few things about faith: 1. that it is oriented toward truth, and that it therefore must be willing to abandon the efforts it inspires if a given experiment on the Word doesn't come back confirming growth in the direction of truth; 2. that faith is distinct from knowledge in the way seeds are distinct from trees--that faith is a sort of proto-knowledge not yet fully formed, but worthy of basing actions upon; 3. that it is a principle of action, and motivates behavior, rather than being merely cognitive or informational in concept; 4. that while open to evidence feeding back into a decision for future action, it essentially is a matter of will to take steps without certainty of result, and therefore entails the concept of risk-taking.
What are the ways this faithful mindset is opposed to the mindset that motivates some to act on lustful thoughts? What are the ways in which seeking for signs first--the anti-faithful mindset--are parallel to the mindset that sets ones own long-term, covenantal relationships at naught, in exchange for petty, temporary, physical indulgences? Why is it that being faithful to marital vows is similar to worthiness to receive promised returns on spiritual investments of effort, as we are taught to expect? And does the relational dimension of covenants, and its opposite transactional nature of logical conditional propositions (like the Moroni's promise in the Book of Mormon's closing pages that the Spirit will manifest the truth of Y if we do action X) have any light to shed on how the Savior can chide Pharisees for being an adulterous generation that seeks after signs?
What is the problem with expecting signs, when we're told to seek after the thing that we're taught brings them?
I'll take these questions up, alongside a hypothesis that might reconcile the surface contradiction at play here, in the coming days. My suspicion is that attitude determines everything, just as reading position fixes interpretive possibilities in any given hermeneutic paradigm.
No comments:
Post a Comment