Church

Against Systematic Theology

| briansabey

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

-Emily Dickinson

I participate in a theology book club in which we are reading Exploring Mormon Thought, by Blake Osler. Osler is interesting in that he is doing systematic theology, but at the same time he questions the value of systematic theology, doubts its ability to attain its own goals, and admits the limitations of language and the necessity of experiential and relational knowledge in spiritual matters, in contrast to propositional beliefs.

I agree with his questions, doubts, and admissions. I appreciate his work and consider it worthy of our time and attention, but I could be just as good a Christian without once cracking a book of systematic theology.

Now I want to be clear that I am fully in favor of careful thought and intellectual rigor, of seeking greater and greater light and knowledge. Indeed, doing so is a spiritual necessity. If our light and knowledge is not growing, it is shrinking (see Alma 12). Far more than most brands of traditional Christianity, LDS thought enjoins intellectual effort as a duty: we are commanded to “seek out of the best books words of wisdom” and informed that we cannot be saved in ignorance. My target here is not intellectual effort or even theological carefulness, but solely systematic theology. Continue reading →

Faith and Intellectual Integrity

| briansabey

I hope this essay will be helpful for dealing with honest questions and for helping others who are dealing with honest questions related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many of the things I write will apply equally or almost equally to faith journeys within other religions as well.

When people leave the Church, I would suspect that their questions about doctrine and history are not usually the main issue, but in many and probably most cases, they are one of the issues. And I think such questions can be more productively dealt with in a Church culture where there is, perhaps appropriately, certain pressures to express certainty and to stand united behind all the teachings of the prophets, and where our manuals and lesson plans tend—again, perhaps appropriately—to focus on reaffirming core doctrine rather than exploring the limits of what we know. Continue reading →

Why we must resist demonization, Even of the worst fascists

| briansabey

As I begin to write about the worst Fascists (i.e., the Nazis), it occurs to me that humanity is altogether more wonderful and more terrible than we commonly imagine it, more angelic and more diabolical. The mundanity and the moral and intellectual mediocrity of most lives is not the native and inevitable condition of the average human soul, but rather an impasse between vast forces of good and evil and immense impulses towards life and towards death. From this conflict we seek refuge in numbing routine and stultifying dogma, content for the most part to experience the battle at a safe remove, transmuted into art. Our impulse towards life and effort, fierce as the Sun, is satiated, because we are thinking and acting; and our impulse towards rest and stillness, inexorable as outer space, is mollified because our thoughts and actions rotate, like the Earth itself, in the same circuit every day. Continue reading →

Being Placenta

| joshsabey

So far, we’ve had two babies. Both boys. I’ve seen them come into the world, wet, followed by placenta. The nurse unfolded the slimy mound and showed it to me. “Look,” she said, “the tree of life.” It actually looks like a tree, the blue blood vessels forking like branches from a trunk. The way the nurse spoke, with rapture, it was clear she was not feigning her amazement. This was an authentic placenta fan. She had me run my finger across the oozy membrane. Like a fish, or ray, or some other deep ocean organism. My wife was less interested. 

And that was not surprising. Her body was full of recovery. The pain, still seeping out of her muscles, and relief swelling in like the tide. Of course, the placenta was nothing in this moment. Some seaweed caught in a wave. This was a moment when a new baby’s cry was filling the room as it tried to latch onto his mother’s breast. And so I took a picture, to show Sarah after. After she had some time to recover. After the baby was less marvelously new. When the miracle of a placenta might be observed for its own beauty, un-eclipsed and un-eclipsing. 

But Sarah never cared much about the placenta. It was, to her, just a little bit gross. Like observing her own fecal matter. Something her body produced that was necessary, but best unobserved. So Sarah is not a placenta fan. She is not like Dia, my brother’s wife, who eats her own placenta after birth. This might seem like crazy-granola-lady-hippie behavior. But it is common in almost all mammals and just about every animal that produces a placenta. There are only a few exceptions including aquatic animals, camels, and most humans. 

Continue reading →

My Spiritual journey – or, Why I Believe In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

| briansabey

I recall sitting in church on the lap of my Grandpa Sabey. I cannot recall the time of year, but it was presumably cold outside that morning, because I recall how warm and comfortable I felt in the chapel, despite wearing a tie. Grandpa whispered “sweet nothings” in my ear during sacrament meeting–his own phrase, not mine, though “sweet nothings” is an apt descriptor, because the particular words are nothing while the sweetness of kind attention is all. Except that the particular words did matter in my case, because it was the whispered “s” sound that made a delicious tickling in my ear, and that was my secret reason for asking for more sweet nothings. I enjoyed singing the familiar songs and seeing the familiar faces. I don’t remember anything particular from that meeting beyond these details–but I do remember being touched by particular teachings and songs and testimonies in other meetings, even as a very young child.

Some of the stories I then found moving I now find problematic. For example, the heartbreaking parable of the older boy who takes the younger boy’s whipping for him after the younger boy steals the older boy’s dinner. As flash fiction, it is effective, and it nicely captures the competing demands of law and order on the one hand and pity for hungry bread thieves on the other. As an analogy for the Atonement, however, it is, I now believe, extremely dubious.

But overall, my initiation into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was sound in every way–a happy embrace by the tradition of my ancestors since the mid-nineteenth century, conveying God’s hope-giving truth and his loving expectations.

Touching stories and music and grandpas who whisper sweet nothings in the warmth of the meeting place is, of course, far from unique to my religious tradition. Perhaps every religious tradition is capable of providing legitimate spiritual experiences as well as aesthetic and social enjoyment. This presents a double problem—how to distinguish legitimate encounters with God/Truth within one’s religion from mere aesthetic or social enjoyment, and how to justify, beyond family loyalty or mere familiarity, a belief in the truth of one’s religion relative to other religions. This essay does not purport to have any definitive answers. It simply presents some of my own personal struggles and resolutions and reasons for belief. Continue reading →

A Gentle Sense of Humor As God’s Power

| briansabey

In my reading, I’ve several times now run into the idea of a gentle sense of humor as being a godly power, linked closely to love and faith. It is an intriguing concept. Please consider the following three quotations, ordered both by length (the first is a fairly lengthy account) and by the chronology of my reading. I’ll provide some brief commentary between quotes.

***

From F. Enzio Bushe’s Yearning For the Living God

The following experience is probably one of the most sacred in my whole life. It happened in the very beginning of my service as a General Authority, after I moved to the United States. I was still very new and inexperienced and I had to rely completely on the Spirit to be able to do the many things I had to do.

On one trip, on assignment as an executive administrator, I gave a talk on welfare to a lovely group of people. I taught them in a special meeting and spoke about faith and the dimensions of faith and the importance of developing it. I quoted Matthew 17 to explain how the Lord expected his disciples to have faith and how frustrated He was when they did not have enough faith to cast out an evil spirit. I quoted that scripture in order to show our need not only to view faith as thought or feeling, but also as a power with which we can control or even change the circumstance of this world.

That evening, I began a tour of a neighboring mission and stayed in the basement of the mission home that night. I was very tired when I finally went to bed at around 11:00. I fell sound asleep as soon as I was in bed. I woke with a start when, at about 1:00 A.M., the mission president came into my room. The light was on and he was speaking to me, but I was still half asleep and did not understand what he was saying. I asked him if what he had to say could not wait until tomorrow. I could see that he was disappointed, but he nodded his head and began to leave the room.

By then, I was more awake and called him back and asked him to repeat the problem. I focused on listening to him and was surprised by what he said. He said that in the evening, a missionary had been possessed by an evil spirit. Continue reading →