47 Comments

1. Thanks for the thoughts, Jeff. I appreciate the thoughtful commentary. I hope you don’t mind if I share some thoughts of my own. To begin, the post was not written with a primarily Mormon audience in mind. Most of my readership is not LDS, and I write almost exclusively for a general audience. Having said that, I take a slightly different approach to understand the LDS hermeneutic, informed partly by my time among Church members in several different countries and partly by my experience as a scripture translation supervisor for the Church.

   First, I have to disagree that figurative readings of scriptures comprise “waffling.” All language is figurative to one degree or another, and whether something is considered “literal” or “figurative” comes down more to the perspective of the reader than to any empirical standard. For instance, one person who disagreed with my post said that everything was literal, including the fact that “God literally smote Israel.” I had to laugh at this because the Hebrew word there literally means to physically strike with a hand or weapon. I wanted to respond, “You really believe God balled up his fist and literally punched the nation of Israel?” Obviously that would conflict with that person’s conservative notion of an incorporeal and non-anthropomorphic deity, but it underlined the fact that they asserted as literal a reading that is fundamentally figurative. Does that figurative reading indicate waffling? Of course not. It does no such thing for the Psalms, for the Prophets, for Revelation, and for numerous other places where the language is inescapably and intentionally figurative. It’s the literal readings of those texts that violate authorial intent.

   Now, there are absolutely times when “That’s figurative!” is a reification of conservative discomfort with literalness, but certainly you can see how that actually supports my position. Literalness is not unilateral. It operates in direct subservience to ideology, which is my entire point. “Scriptural literalism” is a degree literalism of where the reader wants literalism and figurativeness where the reader doesn’t want literalism (at least, as far as they understand the text). None of this serves Harris’ rhetoric, since every reader must appeal to both. No one manifests any more piety or purity of religion than anyone else. They all read to serve their ideologies.

   On the authority to interpret scripture, the notion of letting scripture interpret scripture (or letting “God” interpret scripture) is a fallacy known as the hermeneutic circle. If verse A interprets verse B, how do we know how to interpret verse A? Verse C? Ok, how do we know how to interpret verse C? And on and on into infinity. The answer is that the ideology the brings to the text identifies the concepts that will take priority and the ones that will need to be reinterpreted. While some reject it as a product of the Enlightenment, it’s a fact quit easily proven that there is nothing special about the text, language, or composition of scripture. It is just as open and available to secular examination as to any other. No one on this planet stands in a position of authority over the interpretation of the text unless someone willingly grants them that authority, in which case, again, it all comes down obeying ideology, not the text.

   On literary theory, my position is backed up by the best science and scholarship on the topic. While people can assert some special metaphysical properties of scripture that subvert the way our brains have been proven to work, they can never do anything other than just arbitrarily assert it. What I described is how all reading has been proven to work. Nobody transcends their own brain or is immune to its limits and processes.

   An appeal to Catholic and LDS authorities does not bear directly on my concerns with the notion of scriptural literalism. They are all humans just like any reader of the text, and their interpretations vary according to their presuppositions and their social and ideological exigencies, just as with all other humans. If one wants to arbitrarily insist that a person’s interpretation has authority or inerrancy, that’s certainly their prerogative for them, but that holds for no one else. LDS leaders largely refrain from attempting to nail the scriptural text down to hard and fast readings anyway. LDS leadership wants the scriptures to function more as catalysts for inspiration and revelation, and so they actively avoid placing strictures on their interpretation. This is why explanatory footnotes are minimal in LDS scriptures and why plans for study guide editions of the scriptures get rejected every time they are proposed. Living authorities get interpreted and reinterpreted differently just like dead ones, too. Mormons are no more immune than any other group.

   On your distillation of Harris’ argument, I would agree in part with both, but I would point out that appealing to authorities for help interpreting the scriptures only gets us further from understanding Abraham’s worldview. Modern authorities do not strive to reconstruct authorial intent, they strive for contemporary application, irrespective of what authorial intent may have been. It’s actually secular activities like the literary theorizing you poo-pooed above that help us to reconstruct the ways early religionists thought about the world and about the texts they were writing.

   Comment by Dan McClellan — September 22, 2015 @ 12:59 pm

2. Jeff, (I’ve not read Dan’s comment yet – later tonight) I think you’re downplaying too much the place of context in determining the signification of a sign. To me Dan’s piece is basic semiotics. And I fully agree with him that the real issue is assuming a given text (typically a particular translation) was written in terms of the public meaning those words would have in that community. Put simply too many read the Bible as if it were written to a bunch of conservative protestants living in the early 21st century.

   It’s that issue not “literalism” that is the problem.

   The second issue Dan brings up that I think is correct is that the texts are read against a background of particular presuppositions regarding theology. It’s really not allegory vs. literalism since most so-called literalists are fine with there being tons of allegories. However the presuppositions tend to bias where they see something as an allegory.

   But of course the very allegory/literal opposition becomes very problematic when applied to the key controversial texts like Gen 1 – 2. I’d say it’s quite easy to read them extremely literally in a manner akin to Philo where Genesis 1 is the form-creation and Genesis 2 is the physical creation. (The JST in Moses pushes that reading) In this case one’s still reading Gen 1 “literally” but these unstated presuppositions lead to radically different conclusions. Yet that sort of reading is inexplicably called allegorical by some.

   The whole allergory/literal opposition tends to just be very abused by people applying them.

   Comment by Clark — September 22, 2015 @ 1:34 pm

3. I don’t think you can approach the idea of scripture literalism from the LDS perspective without an acknowledgement that our doctrine explicitly accepts that the scriptures were written by fallible men and contain errors. Two (of many) examples:

   “And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men;” — Book of Mormon title page.

   “Wherefore, for this cause the apostle wrote unto the church, giving unto them a commandment, not of the Lord, but of himself, that a believer should not be united to an unbeliever; except the law of Moses should be done away among them,” — Doctrine and Covenants 74:5

   The scriptures are wonderful tools, but in the end that is all they are.

   Comment by Jonathan Cavender — September 22, 2015 @ 1:53 pm

4. That being said, I don’t disagree with your post or the role of modern prophets. In fact, the example from Doctrine and Covenants 74:5 tends to lend support to your idea of the central role of modern prophets and revelations.

   But it deserves to be mentioned that we have canonical scripture where the Lord reveals to a modern prophet that other canonical scripture from an ancient Church leader was not given from the Lord.

   Comment by Jonathan Cavender — September 22, 2015 @ 2:03 pm

5. Dan,

   You are too generous in your response! I comforted myself about my rather flippant comments with the conviction that you would never see them. :)

   “First, I have to disagree that figurative readings of scriptures comprise “waffling.” All language is figurative to one degree or another, and whether something is considered “literal” or “figurative” comes down more to the perspective of the reader than to any empirical standard.”

   This is where I start detecting waffling since I can see no other use for the literal/figurative distinction at all. On the one hand, if all language is figurative (with this I agree), then why bother pointing it out? What is being accomplished by explicitly rejecting the literal reading of one passage rather than another? I see no motive other than opening space to reject a some claim that they also feel some obligation to accept.

   By contrast, a more premodern approach would simply have no use for the literal/figurative distinction since they are just following the reading of their living authorities. Such a premodern reading isn’t committed to any kind of objective historiography that reconstructs the past or subverts an Orwellian rewriting of the past, etc. which might motivate biblical scholars. The more postmodern approach I detect in your post seems to take that distinction even deeper rather than sidelining it and I can’t help but wonder why? Whose interests are served by keeping that distinction at all? Postmodernism is at least as committed to subverting traditional religious authorities as modernism is/was…. which makes it very suspicious.

   That said, I 100% agree that any kind of empirical standard is almost completely beside the point… and I would agree that the fundamentalists were wrong to import a very modern concept of truth with an empirical standard into their readings of scripture. What I worried about in your passage was that in rejecting this very modern standard of truth, you choose to embrace a very post-modern standard rather than a more premodern standard. To repeat: We both reject a modern approach to scripture, but I think that the alternative appeal to a post-modern kind of literary theory is equally inappropriate.

   Thus, I hope it’s clear that you are I share a lot in common… I fully agree that ideology is at the bottom of all interpretation (although I think “discourse” is less pejorative). My question becomes, then, what is the ideology that motivates the literal/figurative distinction and the literary theory that you appeal to? These ideologies, I suggest, are hostile to traditional appeals to religious authority. Granted, the appeal to living authorities that I suggest is not at all compatible with Protestantism (fundamentalist or not) or literary theorists…. But this, I think, is exactly Harris’ point. You’re concerned (as is Harris) with “fallacies” in thinking that are the post-Enlightenment forms of blasphemy while a more premodern approach doesn’t care about such things. The sin in the hermeneutic circle doesn’t lie in an infinite regress but in our having the presumption to question sacred things.

   “An appeal to Catholic and LDS authorities does not bear directly on my concerns with the notion of scriptural literalism. They are all humans just like any reader of the text, and their interpretations vary according to their presuppositions and their social and ideological exigencies, just as with all other humans. If one wants to arbitrarily insist that a person’s interpretation has authority or inerrancy, that’s certainly their prerogative for them, but that holds for no one else”

   This is where the warning flags start flying for a Mormon. No, a living authority is not just one more human, no different from any other. Like you said earlier, these are not empirical claims but moral values that are being legislated. So when you call a living prophet’s qualifications to determine moral meanings “arbitrary” this looks like a huge problem. The fact that they have mental filters and ideologies was never relevant. Their interpretation is grounded in and legitimized by their calling and ordination, not in their somehow transcending the human limitations of textual analysis.

   “On literary theory, my position is backed up by the best science and scholarship on the topic.”

   I’m fully aware of this. But by the very same logic of this science and scholarship, it too is motivated by ideology and basically comes down to guesswork – and (this is the important part) all of this assumes an ideology and ontology that is very much at odds with traditional religion. They claim these assumptions to be “methodological” in nature, but then they (Both Sam Harris and literary theorists) get fussy when others reject these “assumptions”.

   “It’s actually secular activities like the literary theorizing you poo-pooed above that help us to reconstruct the ways early religionists thought about the world and about the texts they were writing.”

   But again, why should we care about reconstructing the past? All we should be interested in is what do I have an obligation and/or incentive to believe in the here and now and living prophets are fully authorized to tell us this. This however is the very definition of what literary theory and academic historiographies are designed to subvert!

   Comment by Jeff G — September 22, 2015 @ 2:35 pm

6. Clark,

   I don’t see how I’m downplaying context at all (again, I fully reject even the ideal of recovering a past meaning). I totally reject the idea that the common understandings of the past determine truths and i totally reject the idea that common understandings of the present determine it either. I also reject the idea that expertise determine it. Again these are not empirical positions about the way that things just are, but are contested moral assertions in which we are all suggesting and defending different ways of evaluating speech acts.

   My main point is a rejection of the idea that a sign means the same thing regardless of who speaks it. (You’re definitely more versed than I am here, so you might have to help me.) Modern theories act as if meaning was either 1) fully democratic or 2) asymmetries in the legislation of meaning are justified only by expertise. I reject both of these claims. I thus see appeals to the literal/figurative distinction as originally being based in (1) while I think literary theorists tacitly rely upon (2) when they tell us how meanings really come about.

   “Put simply too many read the Bible as if it were written to a bunch of conservative protestants living in the early 21st century.”

   Perhaps, but such people are still closer to the truth than those who think that whatever a 1st century meant when he wrote is at all relevant to what we are supposed to think and believe about the scriptures. The only people who can give us authoritative readings of the scriptures are those who are in authority – and this does not include literary theorists, dead prophets or your average WASP.

   “However the presuppositions tend to bias where they see something as an allegory.”

   Again, they are not unique in this. My point is that, yes, his criticisms of fundamentalists are basically right…. and literary theorists such as himself fall prey to the exact same criticisms. My aim is to

   “The whole allergory/literal opposition tends to just be very abused by people applying them.”

   According to who? Who wields the right to stand in judgment of such things? My whole point is that literary theorists are no more qualified to pass judgment on this than fundamentalists are.

   Comment by Jeff G — September 22, 2015 @ 2:55 pm

7. Dan,

   What is the ideology that causes me to entertain Mormon ideas of God? I believe you that all reading is informed by ideology but so few people understand Mormonism as an ideology. I would like to and can you place me ideologically

   Comment by Martin James — September 22, 2015 @ 5:10 pm

8. Jeff (6) I think we have to unpack what we mean by meaning before I could address whether a past meaning is recoverable. Likewise when we talk about truths I think we have a gap since you adopt a more Rortian style conception of truth or at least one closer to William James than I am comfortable with. I raise that simply because if we use the words “truth” and “meaning” but mean different things by them we’re probably just going to talk past one an other.

   I’d prefer to simply say that a sign signifies and interpretation from an object and does so via some code. For most people that code is the simple code they use to interpret everyday speech. That is a set of standard significations which are made against a set of de facto held beliefs. All I’m saying is that what is called literal is that movement which rejects deeper questions about original setting, original understanding and then deeper philosophical skepticism of our understanding of our belief. That is if I already have a set of beliefs about the rapture and read Revelation in light of that I likely will come to a very different reading than say someone doing comparison with 1st BCE – 4th CE apocalyptic literature.

   What I think happens in practice is that people apply that and when they still can’t make sense of passage they then ascribe a secondary movement to the text that they call allegorical. So Jesus isn’t really a chicken so the chicks and mother hen must be an analogy to something else.

   Where I’m criticizing is simply thinking that calling this literalist is very unhelpful as it obscures the hermeneutics movement at work.

   Clearly a sign doesn’t mean the same thing when two different people use it. If I yell fire in a room with smoke bellowing out of a window versus when directing a bunch of people with guns the meanings are different. What I’d say matters though is how we make a guess at authorial intent based upon clues around them combined with what I’d call a corporate meaning (or public common set of interpretations in a particular setting). The reason I think we have to make a separation between experts and causal readers is that typically causal readers are ignorant of those sets of interpretations.

   The problem with scriptural interpretation is really the old fact that in a combination authored work the intents of any one author don’t dominate the text. The question of “authoritative” readings in that case is almost meaningless.

   As for “according to whom” the literal/allegory opposition is abused. Well, according to me. While I’ve not read Harris but from what you’ve outlines I’d probably include him among those abusing the dichotomy.

   Comment by Clark — September 23, 2015 @ 1:16 pm

9. Clark,

   Thanks for the patient response, if only because I know that issues surrounding interpretation are perhaps THE major hangup between us – or at least between my authoritarian model and your acceptance of it. I agree that you and I understand “meaning” and “truth” differently and that this might infect our understanding of each other. The only way I can think of getting past these localized incommensurabilities is more engagement.

   (FYI, my concept of “meaning” is that language-use, for example, is the means by which we inter-subjectively manipulate and structure the incentives in terms of which we each practically engage the natural and social world around us. Roughly.)

   I’ll start with your appeal to context, if only to try and sideline it.

   If I yell fire in a room with smoke bellowing out of a window versus when directing a bunch of people with guns the meanings are different.

   I do not deny any of this. My point, however, is that the social standing/position of the person doing the yelling is also relevant and that when two people say the exact same thing within the same context, the meaning and validity is often very different. I see post-structuralist anti-humanism as a politically motivated attempt to sideline the identity of the author/speaker to the point of claiming that they are dead! By contrast, I want to say that two people reading the exact same passage from the pulpit is just such a case. The very fact that you example fails to mention who is doing the speaking shows that you either think (1) the identity is irrelevant or (2) identities are interchangeable when it comes to assigning meaning to a speech act. I reject both of these claims since the ideologies that motivates them is (1) an attempt to disguise the tacit claims to authority on the part of the scholars or (2) a modern egalitarianism that arose in opposition to feudalism.

   Now I will try to get at what we each might mean by literalism.

   what is called literal is that movement which rejects deeper questions about original setting, original understanding and then deeper philosophical skepticism of our understanding of our belief.

   If this is the definition of literalism, then the fundamentalists seem like they’re on pretty safe ground. What makes us think that we are supposed to chase after “deeper” questions or meanings within the scriptures? What makes us think that a “deeper philosophical skepticism” is a good thing in any sense at all? If this amounts to an “abuse” of the literal/figurative distinction from yours, mine or any other mortal’s perspective, why should they care at all?

   “The reason I think we have to make a separation between experts and causal readers is that typically causal readers are ignorant of those sets of interpretations.”

   This passage reinforces my suspicions since is presupposes that expert readers are “intended audience”, a standard against which the casual reader is an unfortunate deviation of sorts. It is only from an assumption like this that a quest for deeper meanings, questions and skepticisms makes any sense at all. And yet it is totally backwards.

   I am willing to grant that scholars may have more informed access to the original author’s intent. Fine. But you are assuming that the original intent is what we are actually supposed to be getting at. I totally reject this (even though fundamentalists might unfortunately agree with you). I think a stronger reading in favor of literalism (especially within a Mormon context) would be that the paradigmatic case of scripture reading is a casual reader trying to figure out what the Lord is trying to say to him/her right here and now primarily by leveraging how living authorities read and interpret those texts. At no point are literary or historical scholars invited to chime in with their unwelcome opinions and theories.

   Put simply, I interpret literalism more as a rejection of modern scholarship as a medium through which to read the scriptures, not as an affirmative claim regarding the nature of the scriptures.

   Comment by Jeff G — September 23, 2015 @ 1:55 pm

10. Jeff (9) I see post-structuralist anti-humanism as a politically motivated attempt to sideline the identity of the author/speaker to the point of claiming that they are dead!

    I don’t know if I agree with that. I think the poststructuralists problematize significantly the meaning of a fixed stable author. Certainly Derrida in Limited Inc is doing that. I don’t think that means the speaker/writer doesn’t matter. Far from it. Just that there’s not a single entity who is the authority or author. That leads to implications that undermine certain traditional philosophical projects. The problem of quotation is an obvious one since to quote is to divorce a text from it’s original context into a new one yet that movement still maintains a certain connection to the original context. Likewise the fact that a text when read will be in a new context matters a great deal as well.

    The issue of “intended audience” is difficult since of course often there isn’t a single intended audience and any audience is complex. However in general the authors of a text aren’t writing to a future audience with a radically different culture. To ignore that is to miss significant parts of the text.

    I think a stronger reading in favor of literalism (especially within a Mormon context) would be that the paradigmatic case of scripture reading is a casual reader trying to figure out what the Lord is trying to say to him/her right here and now primarily by leveraging how living authorities read and interpret those texts.

    That’s fine to do, however this then gets at our view of authorities and how authoritative their readings actually are. We fundamentally disagree there. I think by and large they are using scriptures as quotations to make a larger point rather than determining the range of acceptable readings of those scriptures. That is I think it’s still useful to have a use/meaning distinction even if in practice it’s blurry. The follows from the ability to quote where a quote can be used against its original contextual meaning. This isn’t new of course. The NT does this all the time. I just think the practice of looking at these uses as unlocking the original meaning of the quoted passage is perhaps unwise.

    Comment by Clark — September 23, 2015 @ 2:56 pm

11. I’d add that the very notion of hermeneutics as a type of modern practice arises with the move by Protestants towards the idea of a democracy of reading the Bible without authorities. This then (alongside the rise of legal and scientific hermeneutics) raises the question of how to read the texts. We don’t want to say any reading goes.

    This is why I tend to reject the whole label of literalism. The real debate isn’t literalism but what evidence we should attend to when doing a reading. Those accused of literalism typically really have the problem of only paying attention to a simple context and often a context foreign to the original authors.

    Comment by Clark — September 23, 2015 @ 2:59 pm

12. “However in general the authors of a text aren’t writing to a future audience with a radically different culture. To ignore that is to miss significant parts of the text.”

    This is exactly what I don’t think matters. It may – possibly! – be helpful to consider the original audience, etc. but we are under no obligation to do so.

    “The NT does this all the time. I just think the practice of looking at these uses as unlocking the original meaning of the quoted passage is perhaps unwise.”

    I don’t think we are under any obligation to “unlock the original meaning”. None at all.

    “I’d add that the very notion of hermeneutics as a type of modern practice arises with the move by Protestants towards the idea of a democracy of reading the Bible without authorities. This then (alongside the rise of legal and scientific hermeneutics) raises the question of how to read the texts. We don’t want to say any reading goes.”

    This is exactly right and – more importantly – is exactly why the Protestants were wrong. This democratic approach to Bible study is false religion! It was in their rejection of the living authorities of Catholicism that they sought the study of nature, textual analysis, historians, etc. The fundamentalists were absolutely right to object to the infiltration of the scriptures by so much modern ideology and intellectualism. What they did not get right, however, is that the cure to false living authorities is a restoration of true living authorities, not an appeal to democratic reasoning.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 23, 2015 @ 3:08 pm

13. Effectively the position you are taking is the one where all that matters is how we could use a text. I think that’s an important sense for a text but not the only important text.

    I suspect though that you do think there are obligations to unlock the original meaning. You think if an authority is speaking to you you have to obey, and presumably don’t think you can make that speech mean however you want.

    So you’re trying to have it both ways – have contemporary authorities limit texts but have them do this without producing a text that can be open.

    Comment by Clark — September 23, 2015 @ 3:20 pm

14. Not so. Why think that I require some definite meaning in either case? All I’m saying is that living authorities morally constrain our interpretations while original authors and living literary theorists do not.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 23, 2015 @ 3:34 pm

15. I don’t think I’m saying definite meaning. But it is constrained. What constrains our reading of authority speech?

    Comment by Clark — September 23, 2015 @ 3:36 pm

16. All those other ques that we both agree on. We ask questions about words and phrases and we get feedback from all those around us. It’s just that when their feedback clashes with that of ordained authorities, the latter win.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 23, 2015 @ 3:38 pm

17. Again, I’m fully on board with all the constraints that come from the natural and social world… I simply reject the egalitarianism that is tacitly built into the latter.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 23, 2015 @ 3:39 pm

18. Whatever happened to reading and interpreting scripture by the spirit?
    In context, it’s quite obvious that there are both figurative and literal parts to scripture. Why debate that fact? The real problem is that there are mistakes or copy errors/translation issues with some of the text. That is apparent with the Genesis, Moses, Abraham accounts of translation. Thus, interpreting the text works more like a logic puzzle coupled with the spirit of discernment. If we just apply a strict scholarly approach only the text gets lost in uppity egos of scholarly who become like gods to themselves who everyone looks to for discerning. Commentary is fine, but it must be authored by the Holy Ghost.

    Comment by Rob Osborn — September 24, 2015 @ 11:38 am

19. But Rob, you yourself have publicly put forward your own readings of scriptures in an effort to debunk those of others. How in the world do you propose to adjudicate a public process such as this solely by an appeal to something utterly private? Following the spirit within your own private life is fantastic, but as soon as you try to bring that authority out into the public realm problems arise.

    Literary theory and historical studies are aimed specifically at the problem of public readings for Protestants, and I think it is the wrong one. The Mormon (and Catholic) solution to that problem is living authority figures and prophets.

    One thing is for sure: an exclusive appeal to “reading by the spirit” won’t get the job done.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 24, 2015 @ 12:21 pm

20. Rob often with the spirit what matters are implications you draw from the text – sometimes completely at odds with what the text says. These are what I’d call secondary interpretations although there can also be inspired insights into how the text would have been interpreted by the author or their peers.

    I like how Elder Oaks put it. With James 1:5 the primary meaning of the text was to go into the woods and pray about what Church was right, not how James’ audience would have understood it.

    Comment by Clark — September 24, 2015 @ 12:32 pm

21. Jeff I’m not sure egalitarianism is how I’d put it since I tend not to agree with it on those terms. (Not everyone is equal in terms of skills of interpretation in any area – thus there’s inherently inequality)

    I do think though that individuals have the right and perhaps moral duty to inquirer and make the effort. Whereas you see a moral limit on inquiry and interpretation.

    Comment by Clark — September 24, 2015 @ 12:36 pm

22. Of course there are “natural” inequalities that not everybody tries to level (Rawls being a very notable exception). What modernity most definitely tries to level are “social” inequalities that are legitimized through inheritance, ordination, revelations, etc.

    “I do think though that individuals have the right and perhaps moral duty to inquirer and make the effort. Whereas you see a moral limit on inquiry and interpretation.”

    Actually, mine is an empirical claim that most societies through out time have, as a matter of fact, placed moral limits on inquiry. These limits typically protect some “sacred” source of legitimacy or another. (A contemporary example would be philosophical resistance to the zombie argument, which can be applied to any source of legitimacy.) These limits are exactly what “academic freedom” has always pushed back against throughout the millennia.

    My second empirical claim is that the modern inclinations that we feel to not place limits on inquiry come from secular sources rather than religious ones. Furthermore, the origins of these secular values were specifically designed to subvert traditional boundaries and values. (If a living religious authority figure fully rejected all limits on inquiry, I would be open to it.)

    I then leave my audience in the position to make a conscious choice between secular and religious values since it is, in fact, a open choice.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 24, 2015 @ 1:40 pm

23. Jeff,

    I think there are several levels here in play. First, there is absolute truth such as “we live in America”. Then there is belief such as “we believe in Christ”. Then, there is the level of “what constitutes church doctrine” that can be based off of a myriad of factors and conditions. Church doctrine itself can be either fully true, fully false, or, somewhere inbetween. We may even have church doctrines that are as vague as can be such as “eternal progression”. So what are we driving at here- absolute truth, belief, or church doctrine?

    Comment by Rob Osborn — September 24, 2015 @ 2:52 pm

24. Rob,

    By drawing distinctions such as these, you have already abandoned being guided by “nothing but the spirit.” That’s kind of the point

    As a recap, here’s my position:

    1) “Just follow the spirit” does not resolve public differences interpretation in practice.
    (Clark would agree with this. I think you would too.)

    2) “Just follow the spirit” is not even supposed to resolve public differences in interpretation, even in principle.
    (Clark disagrees with me here, believing that differing interpretations must be due to an error/shortcoming in somebody’s interpretation of the spirit. I think you disagree with me too.)

    3) To some extent, public differences in interpretation are not supposed to be resolved at all.
    (Given Clark’s view of consensus at the ideal endpoint of inquiry, I don’t think he would agree, but it’s not totally clear. Given your correction of others, I think you disagree with me. Again, it’s not totally clear.)

    4) To the extent that public differences in interpretation are supposed to be resolved, it is by an appeal to living authorities rather than the original author/context since only the former has any moral authority over us.
    (He definitely seems to disagree with me here, since he follows Dan and other Protestants in bringing in all sorts of scholarship that is specifically aimed at recovering the original meaning as if it had some kind of moral relevance. You, on the other hand, don’t seem to like either of these options. You seem to insist that “Just follow the spirit” – along with a bit of common sense, I suppose – is all we’ll ever have and all we’ll ever need.)

    Comment by Jeff G — September 24, 2015 @ 3:12 pm

25. Jeff,
    Not sure exactly what you are getting at here. My positionb with religious doctrine has always been classified as those three things-absolute truth, beliefs, recognized church doctrine. I believe we should follow church leaders even if we may not agree with church doctrine in every little detail. Trying to nail down absolute truth requires evidence and that evidence has to be real and genuine otherwise it’s just a “belief”. You have to put that into the context of discussion. For instance- the reality of Adam and Eve is for our senses both a church doctrine and belief. But, it doesn’t become an absolute truth until we can see and show the exact evidence. This brings into play a very important and needed principle called “faith”. Faith allows us to build a belief system of what we desire or cause to be perceived reality. Then connections are made and slowly one comes to the absolute truth of things even though most of it is based on beliefs and faith in those beliefs. Truly, it’s the Holy Ghost that becomes the deciding factor in defining truth. It’s our job to piece together all the small pieces, create a belief system, put it forth with trial and error, judge it, then keep it or discard it. Only we ourselves possess real truth. Now I can show others my pieces and my belief system and even persuade others in faith but it’s up to each person to find the truth on his own.

    Comment by Rob Osborn — September 24, 2015 @ 7:00 pm

26. Actually I don’t necessarily disagree with (2). It depends upon what we are discussing. I think some people assume what is good for one person is good for all people in their progress. Therefore if a person is led one way they assume it’s the same for all. That clearly is wrong. Yet there are also things that can’t be both true and false and clearly the spirit can’t contradict itself in that sense and be a testifier of truth. Of course I do agree that we can misinterpret the spirit, much like we can misinterpret anything.

    For (3) I think the “in the long run” interpretation may consist of many justified interpretations. Again it depends upon the signs in question. Some things have multiple meanings, some a manifold of meanings while others have a more limited set of meanings.

    For (4) I definitely disagree although in practice this is just because of where I see the place of authority. I don’t think authorities define truth and therefore can’t impose moral limits on interpretation. I’m fine with them imposing a lot of moral limits of course so long as it is within their designated authority.

    So for instance with church authorities I think their limit is with designating what church doctrine is but not what eternal truth is. (That’s God’s providence) Church doctrine is still fallible although sometimes we use the term equivocally in the second sense of signifying eternal truth. Ideally that’s the case but fallible is what fallible does.

    Comment by Clark — September 24, 2015 @ 7:08 pm

27. This looks like a great opportunity to nail down some of our differences, Clark!

    Your approach to (2) depends upon a strong distinction between what we can call “advice” and “truth” such that different people can receive conflicting kinds of advice but not truth. I totally reject this distinction since all the moral obligation that is to be found within truth is due to its also being advice. Put differently, a) I reject the idea of a universally consistent claim/description being universally binding, morally speaking, b) if something is not morally binding, it is not truth in any important sense, therefore c) universally consistent claims/descriptions are not true.

    I’m pretty confused by (3). My approach basically broke beliefs/claims into 3 categories: those we have an obligation to affirm (true), those we have an obligation to deny (false) and those that we can affirm or deny as we see fit (basically William James’ pragmatism of belief). Thus, in (3) I was simply saying that it is not the case that all of the third category must, in any time span or idealized situation, ultimately reduce to the first two categories.

    I think our different takes of (4) get into some pretty deep water. Basically, my approach is that of Rorty in that there is no access to the world, let alone the world of 2,000 years ago, outside of the vocabulary that we inhabit right here and now. Thus, there is no authority outside of living people who use our vocabulary. Do you disagree already, or do you merely disagree with the way in which I distribute authority among the living?

    Comment by Jeff G — September 25, 2015 @ 1:03 pm

28. I think our main difference is already nailed down. Effectively you reject anything remotely like truth, stable beliefs in terms of facts, or anything smacking of facts. To you all that matters are how texts are used politically to aims and inquiry after truth should always be distrusted for a variety of reasons.

    This view has a fairly long pedigree. You mentioned Feyerabend and of course Rorty is in that camp broadly speaking. I think in a certain sense Nietzsche is the patron saint of this way of thinking (although his own views are a bit more nuanced than most people realize).

    I just think this wrong. I think the notion of truth and inquiry are useful, describe real aims of humans even if they fall short of their ideal, and thus shouldn’t be discounted. To me discounting these notions misses something important about what humans are trying to do. While Nietzsche was a big skeptic of the will to truth I think even he recognized it important to understand these goals by humans.

    For (3) I’m simply noting that meanings as the stable beliefs need not be singular or totalizing. To give an example I often use, it may be that the three incommensurate yet mathematically identical formulations of physics may never be resolved. That is “in the long run” we may not be able to pick whether the Newtonian, lagrangian, or hamiltonian forms of mechanics are correct. When one moves to the “in the long run” of say literary works there may hundreds, thousands or more justified readings.

    So to say we converge upon a stable set of beliefs doesn’t mean those beliefs are fully determinate rather than being vague or open in a certain sense.

    My problem with how you formulate it is that the question of truth really doesn’t apply. Rather you just see the question of political/ethical affirming of a position. That is it’s all about political aims ultimately even when discussing truth.

    I don’t mind noting political or ethical issues in what we talk about. For instance I used to have a security clearance and there are still areas of physics I don’t talk about publicly because I feel it would be unethical given my commitments. But I don’t imagine that not talking about the details of a nuclear explosion has anything to do with the word “truth.” It’s that twisting of words I find problematic.

    With (4) I think vocabulary is always open and I think Rorty comes too close to buying into the limits of language that Sapir-Worf proposes. I just think that false. I think our contemporary language is extremely powerful and when it fails we can simply create new language. That is I don’t think our language fundamentally limits us. At best it biases us. And that may indeed be a big difference.

    Comment by Clark — September 25, 2015 @ 1:34 pm

29. “My problem with how you formulate it is that the question of truth really doesn’t apply. Rather you just see the question of political/ethical affirming of a position. That is it’s all about political aims ultimately even when discussing truth.”

    Perhaps, but that’s not a very charitable way of phrasing my position. I do not believe: “there is nothing but politics.” Rather, I believe: “there is no escaping politics.” The politics are necessary, but not sufficient.

    I believe this because I insist that there are no moral obligations outside of politics. If somebody wants to hold out for descriptions of the world that we have no moral obligations to whatsoever, that’s fine… but I refuse to call anything like that “truth”. Perhaps “information” or something like that.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 25, 2015 @ 2:17 pm

30. JeffG,

    Even if I agree with you that living leaders are the source of moral obligation there is still an important question of what we are to make of the moral injunction of living leaders to “study the scriptures.” What went out the front door is back in through the back. I’d like to hear more from you about your pragmatic tests in studying the scriptures as modern prophets say. They don’t say what is obsolete or to be interpreted differently. How do you propose this be done? The moral obligation to study the scriptures tells us very little about how to understand the scriptures.

    Furthermore, I’d like to hear more about the pragmatic tests that can be put to your believing that moral obligation only comes from the advice of living authorities. I think you are kind of defining it to be true but you also seem to be saying that we have the option to accept or reject this approach.

    Comment by Martin James — September 25, 2015 @ 4:28 pm

31. “They don’t say what is obsolete or to be interpreted differently. How do you propose this be done? The moral obligation to study the scriptures tells us very little about how to understand the scriptures.”

    On the contrary, a brief look through any study manual will tell you which passages to focus on, which can be skipped, provide stories and quotes that illustrate various passages, etc.

    At the bottom of this approach is the idea that the scriptures usefully supplement and elaborate our understanding of the living prophets, while the teaching of the living prophets morally constrain our understanding of the scriptures. They are most definitely not cut off from one another, even though all moral constraint is unilateral in direction.

    “you also seem to be saying that we have the option to accept or reject this approach.”

    Yes. The approach I provide basically assumes that we accept and sustain the living authorities as such. Of course, we are free to reject this and treat them as just one more person in the world, but this is not what the gospel teaches. In other words, mortals are not to punish anybody for their rejection of living authorities… although God certainly can and will.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 25, 2015 @ 5:01 pm

32. Clark,

    Put differently: suppose we have a Robinson Crusoe stranded on some island by himself. I fully accept that he will gather and manipulate plenty of information about his surroundings, information that our non-stranded community would call “true”.

    But the very fact that RC does not have such a community means that he has nobody to answer to in any morally binding sense. He has no obligation to justify any of his beliefs to anybody else at all. For this reason, I reject the idea that such a non-social being has anything that we would traditionally call “truth”.

    By contrast, it is precisely because institutions have been developed for the explicit purpose of gathering the same information that RC was gathering that that same “information” has come to be called “truth” in our society. First and foremost among these institutions is academia. To be sure, commnal regulation of information has always existed in some form or another, but its institutionalization is what really motivates our current temptation to think of all such “accurate and useful information” as being the epitome of “truth”.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 25, 2015 @ 5:26 pm

33. JeffG,

    Can you at least give us a substitute word for the information RC might want about such things as which plants are poisonous? I always find it interesting that the scriptures don’t use the world moral much. I don’t have much use for that word myself either.

    Comment by Martin James — September 25, 2015 @ 7:07 pm

34. But it seems to me that it’s one thing to say politics biases us (to which I agree) but quite an other to say it dominates (which I simply disagree with). So I don’t think that’s uncharitable but really gets to the heart of the matter.

    I’m not sure I’d say ethics applies only to politics. Politics is balances means towards particular ends. However it seems to me fundamentally the question is whether truth is an ends or whether it is only other human interests. Again following Nietzsche will to power versus will to truth.

    To authority I think it is this which leads to the difference where you see authority as a trump and I see as a burden of proof condition.

    To your Robinson Crusoe example, I think a person is always multiple. I always have an ethical duty to both my future self and past self in terms of how I take up consideration of them. Again, to say that truth doesn’t matter in this context because of a lack of strong community seems to again see that there is only will to power and never will to truth. Let me say I take many of Nietzsche’s criticisms seriously. Yet I am not quite so pessimistic as he about human nature. I suspect that is my difference with Feyerebend as well. A certain inescapable optimism on my part that we can know.

    BTW, have you read Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense”? It does seem to bear on our discussion.

    Comment by Clark — September 25, 2015 @ 8:23 pm

35. Martin,

    I would call RC’s beliefs good and bad, but not true or false, since these are morally loaded terms whose moral valence can only come from intersubjective interaction. Goodness and badness, however, are merely utilitarian terms that I am fully willing to use in such cases.

    Clark,

    Politics do more than merely bias our meanings and truths, they constitute them. Politics that “bias” the truth are simply politics whose distribution or arrangement we disapprove of as opposed to a presence when there was supposed to be an absence.

    “you see authority as a trump and I see as a burden of proof condition”

    Perhaps we should be clearer about this difference you keep coming back to. I think your way of putting it disguises the very open question of what would ever meet that burden of proof? Your answer would be an appeal to some things or methods that are totally unrelated to social status whereas I would not say this. Thus, we are right back in the same boat. After all, I could say that living authorities carry presumption on some position X (we both agree here). But what if X is the means by which a burden of proof is satisfactorily met? To say that an authority is not able to legislate that issue just is to say that they do not actually carry presumption in that matter.

    “I always have an ethical duty to both my future self and past self in terms of how I take up consideration of them.”

    I guess your free to think that, but why should anybody else? Who enforces this moral obligation? Where does this obligation come from, historically speaking?

    “to say that truth doesn’t matter in this context because of a lack of strong community”

    Again, you are assuming your own definition of truth. I’m not saying that truth doesn’t matter. I’m saying that it doesn’t exist such that there isn’t anything there to matter.

    This semantic difference is really at the heart of the point I am trying to make. Of course we typically dismiss semantic differences are not really being worth debating about, but I think, even if that is true, “truth” is an important exception.

    Your definition of truth is roughly “factual accuracy” in the way that a natural scientist would use the word. On this account, it is a very open question why, or if we morally ought to harmonize our beliefs and speech with truth. My definition builds these moral obligations right into the very heart of the concept, thus making “factual accuracy” a conceptually downstream aspect that truth tends to, but doesn’t necessarily have. If one looks at how the word is used in the scriptures and other premodern sources, I believe my definition is much closer.

    It would be nice if we could simply understand this difference in each other’s way of speaking and go on our merry ways, but that isn’t what happens. Instead people (especially academics) insist that we do have a moral obligation to make our beliefs/speech consistent with factual accuracy produced by scientists. In other words, they are trying to have it both ways in that truth is non-political in nature, but still morally binding. And when we ask why, they don’t have any decent response. The semantic ambiguity becomes a smokescreen – often called “the myth of objectivity” – whereby the guardians of factual accuracy demand the obedience of others.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 26, 2015 @ 9:49 am

36. I think we agree on our disagreements.

    I would say that 90% of any debate is actually getting the semantics clear so I think that they really are worth debating about,.

    I think the problem is that most people just disagree politics is as pervasive as you suggest. (Here I’m assuming you mean politics fairly broadly as a way of persuading and negotiating power relations) The problem is that politics/power that neglects aims misses the point. Now we can make the Nietzschean moves here about truth really being about power typically. (And that appears to be the type of move you make) I just don’t think that’s true.

    I think accuracy matters, although I think that more of a secondary effect. I think the scriptural sense of truth, especially in Hebrew, is tied to a kind of reliability of things as they act like the things they are understood. So linguistic truth is derived from this.

    The idea of “truth” as hidden politics seems alien to the scriptures. So if we agree upon where our differences are, perhaps you could explain why you think you see your use as being the scriptural use.

    Comment by Clark — September 26, 2015 @ 11:28 am

37. “I think the scriptural sense of truth, especially in Hebrew, is tied to a kind of reliability of things as they act like the things they are understood.”

    I agree as long as we also acknowledge that this is primarily concerned with the reliability things that have agency in some sense or another – typically people! … This places us square in the middle of politics! (I agree with your use of the term.) Almost all exceptions to this are objects with a telos towards which they are faithful, thus indirectly implicating the agency of creation.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 26, 2015 @ 12:41 pm

38. We have a perfectly adequate definition for truth in D&C 93:24 – “And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come”.

    In other words truth is about reality. With regard to the past and the present, it is about facts.

    With regard to the future, it is either about facts (if the future is fixed) or it is about inevitable constraints on future facts.

    D&C 93:25 suggests that we should give the greatest hostility to any conception of the truth that is not about reality, i.e. not about facts or inevitable constraints on future facts.

    Comment by Mark D. — September 26, 2015 @ 3:56 pm

39. Mark,

    I don’t think that section says what you want it to say. For starters, it limits all truth to a sphere that has been given it. I would also say that there are many, many uses of the word “true” that describe many things that are not “knowledge” of any kind (prophets, saviors, disciples, friends, tools, animals, etc.)

    I think it would be better to read the passage in the same way we read “God is love,” namely as something other than an equivalency or some such definition.

    Edit: I do confess, however, that that passage is definitely the most difficult for my model to deal with. Adding a little bit to what I said above, I would suggest that that particular definition is itself a historical product that was reflecting the usage of and thus adapted to the early 19th century audience.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 26, 2015 @ 4:19 pm

40. JeffG

    Thanks for the definition. Now that I’m clear on your terms. Your theory may be true but it’s no damn good. :)

    Comment by Martin James — September 26, 2015 @ 5:57 pm

41. Jeff, I don’t think the Hebrew use is focused on agency. That’s rather the point of those posts I made last week on my blog. Objects are true and words are true in a kind of secondary sense in that they are the understanding of the object and inseparable from it in a sense.

    It’s hard to see a plant having agency yet the metaphor of a true seed is an important one. Likewise we have a true road (Isaiah 22:23-25) and so froth. It’s true that relative to agents truth means reliable or faithful. But the reliable sense is much broader.

    When we’re talking a true seed in a garden it’s hard to see politics – even if what the metaphor relates to might be.

    As I said I don’t mind talking power relations and so forth. I just think narrowing this to human politics and human intentionality isn’t a reliable way of considering it.

    Comment by Clark — September 26, 2015 @ 8:12 pm

42. Mark, if you haven’t read it, check out my post on truth from last week. I’ve not yet delved into D&C 93 but I think it comports well with the Hebrew understanding. Truth is things that are reliably what they are. What’s more or less than this is not a true thing. But it’s things that are true, not representations or language separate the way say propositions are in our culture.

    Facts in our conception are wrapped up in the Greek notion of language corresponding to entities. For the Hebrews there are things and the understanding of the thing. But it’s a process relationship rather than a time slice as our Greek heritage tends to adopt. So a thing is the thing it is past, present future. It’s an ongoing process that is either reliable or not.

    Comment by Clark — September 26, 2015 @ 8:16 pm

43. I think it should be mentioned that anything that God has decreed and has the power to inevitably accomplish clearly falls under the D&C 93:24 definition of knowledge of things “as they are to come”.

    So in the very special case of divine power, power may indeed yield the truth about future events – like the resurrection, the judgment, the plan of salvation, the victory of sin and death, and so on.

    No other power can yield truth about the indefinite future, because no other power can be relied on in that way.

    This is a particularly important point if like me, one does not believe that the future is fixed in every respect.

    Comment by Mark D. — September 28, 2015 @ 7:40 am

44. Correction: victory over sin and death.

    Comment by Mark D. — September 28, 2015 @ 7:41 am

45. Mark,

    I like that reading a lot! Thanks for that.

    Comment by Jeff G — September 28, 2015 @ 9:09 am

46. Mark that’s an important point and as you note some conceptions of Mormon theology have an essentially open future. (Say Blake Ostler’s) It’s not a position I have strong feelings on, although I suspect that each bubble universe is formed whole — past, present, future — and thus isn’t open like Blake thinks. This gets into the question of the ontology of the soul and the place of retribution in judgment. Probably outside the topic of this post.

    For a concept of truth as reliable then God’s power to make objects reliable as the kind of objects they present themselves as is more than sufficient.

    Comment by Clark — September 28, 2015 @ 9:51 am

47. And I think that is what Jeff G is getting at (and probably why he likes it so much); the living Prophets and Apostles are the means of God imparting His Truth to the world. Since God is reliable and therefore truth, then His duly ordained authorities are themselves a form of truth or at least useful for spreading true knowledge. Scholars and “original meanings” have not that truth in them, for they have not been given any authority from God. They become, for lack of a better word, false teachers.

    Comment by Jettboy — October 3, 2015 @ 7:41 am