Grace Available

I have recently been learning about a number of things that lead to trouble. In recent months I have been introduced to ideas like the possibility that some of the apostles may have been involved with the murder of Joseph Smith or that Brigham Young and others may have framed Joseph for introducing polygamy as it was taught and lived under his administration as president of the church in order to participate in the practice of spiritual wifery that Joseph denounced. There are other topics as well that we may get to later, but either way, these are not the topics one brings to discuss in elder's quorum. Doing so seems like a good way to get called before a disciplinary council for apostasy.

So, what is there to be excited about if it seems like there's danger here? I think the answer to that lies in the most recent topic that I have started learning about. It was news to me very recently that there is some dispute about the age and provenance of the book of Deuteronomy, whether it was written by Moses or much later around the time of Josiah. If it was written around the time of Josiah it has extremely interesting implications for the Book of Mormon narrative. Why does this matter? Because it provides a model for understanding elements of what might be going wrong today and we can draw from the patterns of the Book of Mormon to help refine our map of the territory.

If Deuteronomy really was written around the 7th century BC and started being enforced around that time then the changes coincide with Lehi leaving Jerusalem. If Deuteronomy coincides with the corruption that was happening at Jerusalem that was leading to the wickedness of the people and their desire to take away his life as mentioned in 1 Nephi 1. It is noteworthy that in Deuteronomy 13:6-10 we see the instructions that you must stone someone that leads you away after other gods in improper worship and in 1 Nephi 1:20 stoning is the method used by people in Jerusalem to slay the other prophets.

Details are hazy, but I'm finding hints that around this time is when the theology changed and instead of having both a Father and Mother gods, the Mother disappeared and we became a single parent spiritual family. This may also be the time when worship became centralized instead of distributed and available wherever people happened to be.

The Book of Mormon talks about plain and precious things being removed from the Bible and the questions I'm finding about Deuteronomy lead me to wonder if this was anything short of a religious coup. Driving the divine feminine out of the theology and labeling her as one of the false gods of the Canaanites seems about par for the course. It feels like a foreshadowing of our modern church where people feel the need to cover femininity or otherwise respond with shame when women are anything other than quiet and hidden. We clearly have some variety of repressed mommy issues here and we're probably projecting them on women everywhere.

What does this have to do with the modern church? There is a possibility that Deuteronomy was a tool of the administrations around Josiah that was a corruption that hid important doctrine and centralized religious authority. This is an interesting pattern that rhymes with some of the other church history issues I brought up in the beginning. I regard it as possible that at the death of Joseph Smith the church experienced a coup similar to what may have happened at the time of Josiah. I find it interesting that in the King Follett Discourse Joseph indicated that the subject he was clarifying might upset people only two and a half months before he was killed. After this point the church appeared to go through a centralizing shift in its culture. The revelations recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants appear to describe a more decentralized organization than what we have today.

If we still operated according to that model the various stakes of Zion would each manage their own local resources and there was be no central organization that needs to manage its billions in assets. It would also not be such a clear target for litigation or other infiltration by people who want to influence the philosophies that are taught as part of the gospel.

What am I so excited about then? I did say in the title that I'm getting excited, but this all sounds like some heavy stuff to deal with. I would say I'm excited because Lehi's experience provides a map that I can use. While the leaders in Jerusalem were centralizing the faith and requiring everyone to only do sacrifices in the temple at Jerusalem Lehi went to the wilderness and offered sacrifices in a manner that had previously been acceptable. Instead of putting his faith in the central authority he communed with God directly according to the distributed pattern of nature. Jesus came to Jerusalem and declared a God that was as available as water, a god that wasn't locked up inside the system of priests and scribes at Jerusalem. Lehi already knew this God and escaped as a branch transplanted to preserve the fruit as described in Jacob 5 when the tree he came from only produced wild fruit.

Just as Lehi went directly to God that is what we must do if we are to find any sort of clarity. Make no mistake, the church today is a mess. I frequently say that there appears to be nothing more Christian than a good schism, but it is also expected to be a mess. In 2 Nephi 28 we read that the people who say "All is well in Zion" are being cheated. When detractors cast accusations at the church it can be hard to refute because they're right enough that there is something to be examined. There are many things in the church that we who participate need to repent of, but we don't even see it sometimes because in our individualistic society we only see sin as a personal behavior problem, and we have forgotten that sinning and missing the mark as a group is even a possibility. We do not see that we need to repent on an institutional basis and our institution has even abused the story of steadying the ark to kill the feedback loop that would allow the members to resist it in its march toward whatever it has decided must be done.

I now find comfort in everything being so messed up. It can be easy to ask ourselves, if all of the doctrine is true, why aren't there greater manifestations of the glory of God that seemed to be a part of ancient experience? If we have institutionally gone astray then that would explain the apparent cessation of miracles, that would explain why the most amazing and magical things we could participate in feel dead. People don't leave the church because they are simply offended, they have reason to leave because the organization at times becomes an idol that replaces God while trying to simply be a worthiness certification authority to help us approach him.

Now that I have laid all of this out, I feel the need to ask you for a favor. This writing is a part of my process of working out my understanding of God. I do not promise that it will be at the level of a well-researched academic paper. There is every possibility that I have described things imprecisely despite my best efforts. I will ask you for the same grace that I already know that I will receive from God. If you are upset by what I have written, I will let him judge between me and you. I may be exceeding my reach in this one, but that is a chance I'm willing to take if it helps anyone else frame their ability to maintain or develop faith better.