Unity and Worldview -- 1 Corinthians 12: 14-19

"For the body is not one member, but many.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.

And if they were all one member, where were the body?" (1 Cor 12: 14-19)

 In a lesson on unity yesterday in elders' quorum, we talked about this passage. The high council member who was teaching used it to make a good point: being unified does not mean we need to be the same. Different people contribute to the work of God in different ways. And we should respect that.

I completely agree with him, but I'm not sure our discussion did justice to just how difficult it is to respect a different member of the body of Christ. Our whole ideas about discipleship are so shaped by our own talents and roles it's difficult sometimes to realize that other people's very different attitudes and behaviors might also have an equal place in the kingdom. 

Let's talk first about a foot. What role does a foot play in the body? It helps it move from one place to another. What makes a foot good at its role? It should be reliable, strong, and consistent. It should take direction well. A good foot makes subtle modifications to maintain balance, but largely stays the course once in motion.

Let's talk next about an ear. What role does an ear play in the body? It helps gather and process certain types of information from the outside world so the body can remain oriented within its surroundings. What makes an ear good at its role? It should be open and attentive to many different sources. It should be able to pass on what it gathers. A good ear should be patient and non-judgmental. 

Odds are, good feet and good ears drive each other crazy.

From the perspective and values of a foot in the body of Christ, an ear must seem so lazy and distracted. "Why can't you be more focused?" the foot might say, "Why can't you just do what you're told like a good Latter-day Saint?"

But the foot seems just as crazy to the ear. "Can't you sit still even for a moment?" the ear might say. "Can't you be more flexible--even the hand is flexible!"

And so it is that the ear offends the foot and the foot offends the ear. And perhaps, through their mutual offense, both foot and ear become disaffected with the body as a whole.

"The body of Christ is basically a cult," the ear might say. "Just a bunch of feet obsessed with obedience."

"I don't see much point in going to church," the foot might say, "all they do is talk and talk--what's the point?"

We can be unified across our differences. But in order to do so, we need to work hard to appreciate people on their own terms. We need to understand that some of their most frustrating behaviors may be closely intertwined with their greatest strengths. And we need to stop expecting others to speak the language of values we know best, or taking offense when their advice reflects their perspective rather than ours.

I like to think about things a lot, but I owe a lot to people who act more quickly than I do. I enjoy nuance, but I owe a lot to people who can bring out a little more of the black and white in some of my favorite shades of grey.

May God bless me to stay grounded in my gratitude for such people. May God bless the earth through the gifts he gave them and not me. And may God give them the grace to let me do work their virtues cannot qualify them for, to reach people they might never reach. 

August Insanity--Kira's Bracket

On the Mormon Lit Blitz Facebook group, we're currently running a bracket challenge called "August Insanity." Basically, we've pitted sixteen works of Mormon Lit against each other in a fight for glory, which I've described here. (Sidenote: I swear it is pure coincidence that both urls I've linked to so far end in 666.)

Anyway, I just gave my nine-year-old daughter brief plot synopses of each work and she just filled out her bracket:

For the first round, I also wrote down her justifications for each first round choice:

Folk of the Fringe is one of my favorite books, but Tennis Shoes wins easily for Kira “because it’s my cousin’s book, and he’s one of my favorite cousins.”

A brief plot synopsis of Bound on Earth impresses Kira “because I think you can, like, learn lessons from there.”

She has a tougher time with the next match but chooses Hooligan over Charly: “I like the idea of Charly, but she dies.”

Though she's intrigued by Jesus appearing to someone in the form of a cowboy, she chooses Byuck “because Byuck has one of my favorite college schools because my parents teach there.”

When I mistakenly tell her that Death of a Disco Dancer is about a boy whose grandmother's ghost comes to visit him, she leans toward it. But when we look up a synopsis and discover the grandmother is (disappointingly) still alive, she switches sides and chooses Saturday’s Warrior “because it’s like an eternal family. And I like eternal families.”

She goes for Added Upon “because the other one sounds kind of spooky.” Sorry, Luisa!

And then comes the bombshell. Her initial enthusiasm at seeing my book on the list is quickly dwarfed by the excitement of finding out its opponent is by Mel Larson! After a plot synopsis of
Martyrs’ Crossing, I have to come to terms with elimination in the first round on my own daughter's bracket. Why? Why Martyrs' Crossing?  “Because it’s by one of my daddy’s favorite friends and it sounds interesting because they are spirits and stuff," she says. "And I like the other one my dad wrote, too.” Thanks, Kira.

In another surprise, she chooses A Short Stay in Hell over her ancestor's classic dialogue, “because it has a library and I like to read.”

After the first round, she doesn't seem to do much head-to-head comparison of the books. Her cousin's coolness outweighs learning lessons in the second round and her parents' workplace in the semi-final.

But even the aura of coolness around Tennis Shoes leave it short of victory. Kira picks A Short Stay in Hell to win it all "'cause the guy is stuck in a library!"

Guess I can't be too upset about my own book going down in the first round when her bracket ends with such a lovely justification.

Good luck to all the competitors in the real tournament--and congratulations to Steven Peck for making it to the top of my daughter's bracket. 

Reza Aslan's "Zealot" and "The Five Books of Jesus"

It was the Fox News interview that drew my attention to Reza Aslan's new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

"You're a Muslim," asks Lauren Greene as she opens the interview, "so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?"

Now: if Aslan had been writing from a religious Muslim perspective, he might have said, "Because Jesus is also a sacred figure in Islam," or "Because I think my Islamic values help me see some things in  the gospels many modern Christians miss."

But Aslan did not write the book from a religious Muslim perspective. Aslan wrote unabashedly as a modern academic in the humanities, which means that his assumptions owe more to Marx than Muhammad.  "My book [contradicts] pretty much everything Islam believes about Jesus as well,"he tells Greene.

But Greene still can't get over the Muslim thing. She has to know why Reza wants to write about a major historical figure. "I'm a scholar," Aslan explains to Lauren Greene, "I get paid for this." And then he explains it again, more slowly. And then again, because she's been checking instant messages about what a dangerous crypto-Muslim he is instead of listening.

Now, just because Aslan is a scholar doesn't mean he's right. Though he goes on at some length about the number of sources he's consulted, Aslan still emphasizes that historical scholarship consists mostly of debates between well-read people over ancient events and figures. Jesus scholarship, in particular, involves a lot of conjecture and debate.

I haven't finished Zealot yet, but having read the beginning and several literary reviews that sum up its main arguments, and having researched and written my own Jesus novel, I want weigh in on four points Aslan seems to be making in his #1 Amazon bestseller.

Zealot Point #1: Jesus lived in a turbulent world

In Aslan's description of Jesus' world, brutality is common enough to feel almost banal. Judea and Galilee are awash in apocalyptic thought and deep-rooted, burning resentment of the Romans. Divisions run deep between ethnic, religious, and political groups.

This is not your typical Jesus and lamb painting. In this world, the shepherd boys travel armed and shoot first if you get too close.  In this world, people who want to live watch their tongues.

Both Aslan and I agree on these essentials of the regional background. Jesus lived in the sort of times that produce the men who become legendary freedom fighters or hated terrorists (largely depending on whether they win or lose). Jesus walked down roads where dirt regularly mixed with blood. 

Zealot Point #2: We can know the historical Jesus by considering what would have been typical in his world.

Starting from this setting, Reza Aslan borrows an old distinction between Jesus of Nazareth (the historical figure) and Jesus the Christ (the religious figure). Like German researchers in the 19th century, he wants to strip the Christ of faith from the gospels to find Jesus the man. And he believes that studying typical Jewish life in Jesus' time and place will help him know who Jesus really was.

I'm not sure I buy that basic assumption. For one thing, Aslan may be overestimating how much we can say about Jesus' time and place--one review points out he uses a source from the 180s CE as if it were contemporary with Jesus. For all the Roman documents and archeological digs that have been done, our sense of everyday life way back then isn't all that precise.

More importantly, though, I'm not convinced that studying a cultural pattern can really help us pinpoint an individual person. Would we reject 1890s Mormon sources on Joseph Smith whenever they don't match the broad patterns of a Second Great Awakening preacher or visionary? I hope not. Because we'd end up with a view of Joseph Smith that does nothing to explain Mormonism's difference from other movements. And yet Aslan seems prepared to throw out any parts of the gospels that suggest Jesus was different than any other murdered Messianic revolutionary in his century. He tries to project that broad pattern onto the individual person.

Which is a little bit, come to think of it, like Lauren Greene trying to discover the real, concealed Reza Aslan based on what she knows about tensions between America and radical Islam in the 21st century. If we are willing to say that Jesus was a typical apocalyptic revolutionary because he came from a violent time in Galilean history, why not say that Reza Aslan is a fierce anti-American because he was born in a turbulent Iran?

I guess my approach to Aslan is to focus on how his thought plays out in his books rather than to analyze him primarily through the lens of broad trends in his place and time. Even today, the tools of history can't necessarily tell us what a person was really thinking. But they can help us understand what they wrote.

A fundamental difference between Zealot and The Five Books of Jesus is that Aslan tries to use historical tools to find the historical truths the gospels hide, whereas I try to use historical tools to understand what the gospels were saying to people in a culture we've largely forgotten. While Aslan looks primarily for a Jesus who was a typical Jewish revolutionary of the era (with missing archetype DNA borrowed from revolutionaries of subsequent eras), I look for what made the Jesus Christ of the gospels (whether or not he's also the Jesus of History) so much more compelling to people of the time than all the other prophets, mystics, and miracle workers they had stories of.

In the end, the difference may be in which part of Jesus we think is missing. Both Aslan and I want to look beyond the Christ of contemporary faith--but I think the Jesus Christ of the gospels is even more surprising and unexpected than any historical image of Jesus a scholar can construct.

Zealot Point #3: Pilate was a jerk. And the gospels soft-pedal that. 

Speaking about endless pages of footnotes and the Romans' penchant for record-keeping might give the false impression  that we can look up detailed information on Pilate in an old government file. So far as I know, what we know about Pilate outside the gospels is that the Roman-employed Jewish historian Josephus and the Hellenized Jewish philosopher Philo didn't care for him. Both cited his cruelty and incompetence in explanations of later Jewish revolutionary violence. 

In other words, there's tension between the softer Pilate of the gospel accounts and the brutal, arrogant Pilate of Jewish accounts. Both have ulterior motives: the Jewish historians are looking for low-ranking fall guys to blame the Jewish revolt on so authorities won't blame the entire Jewish community. The gospels are trying to communicate a radical message about God's order without getting mistaken for run-of-the-mill revolutionary propaganda.

Whose version of Pilate do you believe?

Both Aslan and I opt for the "Pilate was a jerk" view of classical Jewish writers. Aslan does so not because it's proven, but because it sounds more natural in a volatile province to punish first and ask questions later than to agonize over a fairly routine execution. The Five Books of Jesus features a cruel Pilate because I think that view helps a modern reader see in the gospels what a contemporary listener or reader likely knew without being told: that rulers are not tame. And that trials come down to the whim of a hostile stranger (rather than the procedural protections we might imagine reading from America's twenty-first century). 

Zealot Point #4: The gospels feature a thoroughly Romanized faith at odds with Jesus' Jewish teachings.

Aslan seems to believe that the likely soft-pedaling on Pilate is evidence of a larger pattern: that the gospels were written for assimilated Roman citizens largely at peace with the Empire.

As someone who has studied the allusions and rhetorical strategies of the gospels, it's hard for me to agree. If the gospels were written to serve happily assimilated Romans, they did a pretty bad job. 

The gospels, especially the synoptic gospels, rely on readers' knowledge of Jewish prophecy and precedent to deliver their core messages. They constantly allude to the Hebrew Bible's motif of the kingdom of God ultimately smashing the kingdoms of the earth to pieces. They leave out the cosmopolitan cities of Galilee--places like Sepphoris and Tiberias--which would have been the perfect locations for pro-Roman scenes, and focus on traditional Jewish farming and fishing villages instead.

If they were so focused on helping Gentiles and assimilated Jews feel good about themselves and the Empire, why did they leave so much kingdom theology in their accounts?

The Christian community that developed after Jesus certainly differed from the Kingdom of God movement he developed in his lifetime, but I think scholars like Aslan underestimate the overlap between the two. Paul's thought is apocalyptic just as surely as Jesus' is--and for all his outreach to Gentiles, it matters a great deal to him to see converts as transformed into descendants of Abraham. The gospel writers still seem to be waiting for a day when the apostles rule over a restored House of Israel. And the gospels' view of Atonement owes far more to Yom Kippur imagery and psalms in their narratives of Jesus' death than they do to pagan views of the relationship between men and the gods.


What a modern scholar or reader needs to understand that, though, is not just historical research into the political and economic conditions of Jesus' time. It's textual research into how the story-world of the gospels built on the story-world Jesus came from.

And though my book may never find nearly as many readers as Aslan's, that's exactly what The Five Books of Jesus delivers and Zealot seems to lack.

If you want a sociologist's conjectures about the typical sort of figure 1st century Galilee might have produced, with some added thoughts on the religion some Romans might have made out of him, read Zealot. But if you want to understand what the gospels might have meant to people with an intense longing for another way of living and with "ears to hear" a message which remains revolutionary, make the time for a good, careful read of The Five Books of Jesus. 

-James Goldberg

Note: The Five Books of Jesus is available in print or eBook forms through Amazon. To celebrate the recent surge of interest in Jesus and history around Zealot, I'll be setting the eBook price to free this Thursday through Saturday.

DOMA and Prop 8 Rulings: Initial Reactions

I have not read the full rulings for either of the cases the Supreme Court ruled on today, but since people are talking about them now, I want to weigh in quickly.


Thoughts on the role of the Supreme Court

Sometimes we want the Supreme Court to play Solomon, resolving difficult cases between people by looking for the best solution. But the Supreme Court is not actually supposed to care about the solution nearly so much as about the procedure. They are supposed to be umpires, not arbitrators.

And umpires are not supposed to pick who wins the game. They are just supposed to see whether rules are being followed.

Rather than reacting to these decisions, then, as for or against one side of the immediate issue, can we talk about their impact on the rules of the lawmaking process?

What the decisions were

What did the majority in each case actually decide about rules?

The DOMA ruling seems to be that the Federal Government cannot reject a given state's definition of marriage. In this case, that means that a same-sex couple with a marriage license must be considered married under federal law. The ruling did not, however, insist that states accept each others' marriage certificates with equal impartiality. And it didn't weigh in on what the definition of marriage is beyond "whatever individual states say it is." 

The Prop 8 ruling was even more technical. It is that if a state law is challenged in court, only official representatives of the state have the right to defend that law. Which in this case means that all legal actions over Prop 8 since Vaughan Walker's August 2010 District Court ruling don't count. 

Prop 8 Analysis

While one side-effect of the Prop 8 case decision is that same-sex marriages will likely resume in California, the actual issue in the Supreme Court case is really about who can defend a law. I don't want to say here whether the Court was right or wrong, because it's fairly complicated. But I do think it's clear that there's a procedural problem here that needs to be fixed.

The problem I see with the court's Proposition 8 ruling is that it throws a wrench into California's system for balancing the authority of state government with the direct authority of the people.

Some background to make this clear. In the summer of 2008, California's state supreme court struck down all language in the state law code specifying genders in reference to marriage. Many Californians celebrated the ruling and the same-sex marriage rights it opened up, but others objected to having such a fundamental change come from a few justices.

And California had a system for dealing with disagreements with its high court or other top state authorities. When they were strongly at odds with their state government, California allowed its voters to change the state constitution through a fairly laborious and expensive process of setting up and passing a voter initiative. In other words, you could check the top of the state appeals system by going straight back to the roots of power. It's sort of a check-and-balance circle instead of pyramid.

Proposition 8 advocates managed to get the old definition of marriage onto a voter initiative and narrowly passed it. But opponents, now finding themselves at odds with the process, looked for the next method of appeal--which was leaving the state system for the federal system.

Under the federal system, of course, anyone can challenge a law they feel harmed by. But not anyone can defend a law: in most cases, only the government which passed the law can defend it. And California's administration--which hadn't actually passed the law in the first place--wasn't really interested.

This difference between the federal system and the California system creates a dilemma. California allows voter groups to check the state government--but those same voter groups rely on the state government for protection in federal appeals. Should the federal court system honor the spirit of California's voter initiative system--or should they stick to their own standard of who can defend a law?

I can't say that I blame the Supreme Court for sticking to federal precedent, but I think the Prop 8 decision leaves California with some thinking to do about its process of voter initiatives. If California still wants voter initiatives to be a meaningful check on the state government's power, they should find a way to give initiative backers standing--maybe by having each initiative name a special representative who would be empowered within the state attorney's office to defend that initiative.

Or California could give up on the voter initiative system altogether. It just seems strange to me to hold out the promise to citizen groups that they can check the state bureaucracy and then let the state bureaucracy's disinterest be the deciding factor in the federal system of courts.


The DOMA case 

The central rules issue here seems to be: who defines marriage? And the answer seems to be twofold: 1) the states do and 2) the federal government causes harm to individuals when its definition conflicts with the state laws they've built their lives around.

As a Solomon-esque answer to the debate over same-sex marriage, that has a certain appeal. Let New York have the final say on New York. Let Utah have the final say on Utah. Keep the federal government out of the debate so that no one ends up married on one form and not another.

Unless, of course, a married couple from New York moves to Ohio. In that case, they should be married on New York forms, unmarried on Ohio forms, and, um...married on federal forms but only if they attach a notarized copy of their New York marriage license? Or unmarried on federal forms until they move back to New York? Or something?

I'm curious to see how that part will work out and about how we'll reconcile the idea that DOMA caused active harm by creating a conflict between marriage laws with the idea that each state can be allowed to define marriage for itself. If federal-state conflicts on such an emotional issue are unconstitutionally harmful, I'm not sure how state-state conflicts are going to stay somehow okay. 

Which leads me to another question about the idea that states have the right to define marriage: will the same rules hold if a state changes the definition of marriage again?

Imagine, for example, that New York decides to stop associating marriage so closely with sexual relationships and issues marriage licenses to any two adults interested in keeping a household together long-term. These living arrangements are common, of course: why should two people with a sexual relationship and no intention of having kids get benefits which are withheld from, say, two divorced sisters now raising their children together?

The logic of the DOMA ruling seems to be that New York has the right to redefine marriage to include these people. After all, marriage is what states make it.  The DOMA ruling allows suggests that if taxpayers and voters in other states object and try to restrict benefits at a federal level, they are causing an unconstitutional level of harm to the citizens of New York.

But would the court be willing to uphold the same logic here? Would they balk if the extension to siblings also resulted in large numbers of close friends deciding to share mortgages and tax privileges despite their disinterest in sharing a bed?

I'm wandering a bit, but I think the question I'm asking is whether the court really believes that states define marriage, or whether it's still relying on a cultural understanding of marriage not rooted in law so much as in media. Right now, our stories associate marriage primarily with committed romantic love and intimacy, and the court seems to want to limit the rights of the federal government to go against that culture. It has done so, in the DOMA decision, by saying that states choose their own marriage laws and the government has to accept them, but I'm not sure that's a standard we'll follow for long.

If a state were to reverse its recognition of same-sex marriage, would the Supreme Court stick to its states' rights position? I don't know. I sort of doubt it, based on Kennedy's assessment of the human damage of federal restrictions. 

If a state were to extend the definition of marriage further, would the Supreme Court still bar the federal government from distinguishing between marriage types? I don't know. It might depend on how big the change felt to the justices.

Recent Writings and Guilt vs. Repentance

At Real Intent, I was asked to write a post last week related to the upcoming Father's Day Sunday. After reading someone's offhand comment in a Facebook group about how difficult Father's Day is for her (and having put a lot of thought to paternal disappearing acts thanks to my wife's first husband), I decided to write something about fathers who leave. Partly, I just wanted to say something about how disappointing I find it when men are unprepared or unwilling to live up to the demands of fatherhood. Partly, I wanted to explore some of the tensions that millions of fathers might be running from. 

This week, it was my turn to write on the Association for Mormon Letters blog. I've been reading a lot of Young Adult novels recently, and wanted to talk about their depictions of sexuality in a way that focused less on the question of detail and more on the question of framing and context. Partly, I wanted to complain about the way sexual operates in our cultural story-world. Partly, I wanted to think about what other pressures might be leading writers to treat sexuality in a certain way.

Thinking about both those blog posts, I am now thinking about the relationship between guilt and repentance. It's interesting to me that in both cases, the obvious problem (leaving a family or having an irresponsible attitude toward sex) likely comes from a less obvious root problem (such as difficulty dealing with pressure or a lack of clear rites of passage).

Since feelings of guilt typically come from a sense of accountability, I'm OK with guilt. It's uncomfortable, sure, but it's better than being a sociopath. I think repentance, though, often involves backing up a few steps from the thing we feel guilty about to understand what subtle problem in our attitudes or behaviors might be making us so susceptible to the more obvious sin in the first place.

Three Degrees of Motivation?

Most children who grow up in the church are probably four years old or so the first time someone teaches them about the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial degrees of glory. Those are awfully big words for a four-year-old, but we teach them anyway because they're an important part of our core story about what life is about. It's not just about getting things wrong or right, we're saying. Life is about choosing the kind of being you want to be and then letting God shape you into it.

A four-year-old will not, of course, understand much of this. But we plant the story early, so they can process it as they grow.

It's been a long time since some wise woman drew circles on a chalkboard and told me about eternity. It's been a long time since I was taught that decency isn't the same as valiance and that Christ can heal us from our sins, but can't force us to change the fundamental carelessness that causes most of them. I've known about the three degrees of glory for a long time, but I'm still trying to process what this story of three means.

Three degrees of glory, we say. Like there's a light in you and you're choosing how much to let through. (And how much of the consequences of your actions are you really willing to see?)

Three kingdoms of glory, we say other times. Like there are three visions for how people can live together. (And which are you willing to step up and help build?)

And then sometimes we drop the glory and just call them laws. Telestial law, terrestrial law, celestial law. Like they are ways of being inscribed into the universe like grooves and you are still vacillating above, choosing one to settle into.

I've been wondering lately if it also makes sense to talk about telestial, terrestrial, and celestial parts of the human brain.

A deep part of your brain, after all, is genuinely focused on seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Which seem to be the dominant characteristics of telestial motivation. Another part seems to be concerned with group belonging and basic relational dynamics. Which seems to be central to terrestrial motivations. And as I understand it, only the most recent, outermost layers of the brain enable us to think ahead, to keep promises even when there are social costs, and so on. Are those parts of our brain necessary for celestial motivation?

According to my brief internet research, a "triune brain" model entered neuroscience in the 1960s and had become quite popular among laypeople for its simplicity, especially if you talk about the three layers as reptilian, mammalian, and human. That oversimplified version understates the complexity of many reptiles, exaggerates the uniqueness of humans, and fails to account for the complex interactions between layers, but still seems to articulate the important truth that different layers of motivation compete within us.

What do you think? Is it helpful to think of three degrees of motivation competing in our brains?

Mormon Lit Blitz Voting Results

With the month of May over in every timezone and all votes counted, readers' four favorite pieces in the 2013 Mormon Lit Blitz are:

#4: "Actionable Intelligence" by Jonathon Penny

#3: "When I Rise" by Kimberly Hartvigsen

#2: "In Which Eve Names Everything Else" by Katherine Cowley

and our Grand Prize Winner:

#1: "Birthright" by Emily Harris Adams

Congratulations to all the finalists!