Thought of the Day 04.29.09

In Bible interpretation, as the expression goes, people can easily miss the forest for the trees. Consider the subject of polygamy, a practice which most modern people rightly abhor.

If a person starts taking the Bible seriously, it will to frustrate him that polygamy isn’t more strongly condemned. Far from making a rule against it, Genesis shows all the patriarchs engaging in some form of it. Realizing this, people find many clever ways to rescue the Bible from its glaring omission. But it’s not really necessary.

Precisely because the Bible shows us these examples, we can see for ourselves the twisted family relationships and suffering polygamy causes. In an ancient world where plural marriage was normal, the Bible would have been revolutionary not because it prohibited polygamy but because it dared to portray it so honestly as a corrupt practice.

Genesis condemns polygamy as soundly as any commandment could by showing the reasons in flesh and blood. Yet to a proposition-oriented culture too scientific to read stories properly, such obvious conclusions sometimes escape us.
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5 comments:

Lee said...
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April 30, 2009 at 5:42 PM
Lee said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
April 30, 2009 at 5:43 PM
Lee said...

Last year a former coworker who was raised in Utah and now lives in Mesa used email to try to convert me from agnostic to Mormon. I gave him many email pages worth of opportunity to do so, but I also used it as an opportunity to convince him that he ought to examine whether his own beliefs make sense. I mostly argued from the point of view of agnosticism, but I was also interested to see how he would deal with non-LDS Christian criticisms of LDS doctrines, so I tried those out on him as well. After a number of email exchanges, he wrote to say he was giving up on me. He recently re-established email contact with me and is trying again to convert me.

He is not in the FLDS branch that still practices plural marriage, but he did say that he thinks that is the way God wants us to live, and that Mormons are temporarily ignoring God’s will out of political expediency. That is, they have to abide by the secular law against plural marriages for the time being.

Yesterday I quoted Andrew Tallman’s blog (giving attribution to “a talk show host on Christian radio” and today I got a response from the Mormon fellow. I will quote it (preserving his spelling and punctuation) but in the interest of brevity I will leave out the passages of scripture that he included, and will just mention the chapters from the Bible and from the Doctrine and Covenants (“DC” as he calls it) that he made use of. Since I am not smart enough to set off his text with color or italics, I will just use some plus signs for that purpose, okay?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

That radio talk you heard to state how evil and bad plural marriage aka: Polygamy, is… to me shows a lack of knowledge and understanding of the scriptures.

[Here he echoed Mr. Tallman’s words back to me]

… the above reasoning leads me to feel that this preacher or “teacher’ of the Gospel knows little of the Old Testament… let alone of the New testament… this preacher has not the Spirit of understanding the scriptures to make these ‘orthodox’ Christian declarations…
..from the part of the address you provided…I didn’t read of any scriptures he referenced to for verification or proof of his statements/accusations…
… again, to me..it is “man’s understanding” of the Gospel usually ‘sprinkled’ with a verse or two in support of that reasoning…but, in this case ..no scriptures are given…

I will give at least three examples of other men in the scriptures for my evidence in positive support of this Doctrine:
Father Abraham…. Jacob, renamed ‘Israel’…. And King David.

Let’s go to: Genesis 25
…
John 8
…
DC 132
…

… by this scripture we see by revelation again, that David did not break the law of plural wives…until the case of Uriah…
… again the Lord identifies Nathan as His servant(the Prophet) and other Prophets… who hold the “keys of this power”..
Now for Jacob….
Genesis 30
… this is three testimonies on the case of plural marriage and it was lawfull… except for the one involving Uriah…
… so, now you have the preachers teachings of ‘mans thinking’ without any backup or scriptural proof…
.. and those examples from the Bible I have brought to you showing 99% otherwise…. With a sprinkling of mans(mine) understanding of those examples…
..
I leave this with you to think about and consider…

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

That gives a pretty representative taste of his emails to me. He is willing to take considerable time to try to hammer home his points, I’ll give him that. But he did not come close to converting me to his beliefs, and as far as I can tell I didn’t come close to shaking his conviction that the LDS doctrines are flawless. He has a “burning in the bosom” that God spoke directly to his church’s prophets, and so whatever they said carries the same weight with him as though God had spoken the words directly to him.

April 30, 2009 at 5:54 PM
Andrew Tallman said...

If you look at the family dynamics in every situation in Genesis, what you see are lawful but awful situations, the majority of which can be directly traced to the plural wives. Leah and Rachel is probably the most ghastly and obvious. To read these stories with this in mind and still maintain that the Bible has nothing bad to say about polygamy is to be deliberately dense or intractably dogmatic. I don't know your friend well enough to say which it might be. The evidence from David's life and even from Solomon's (!) is even more convincing in this regard.

April 30, 2009 at 7:31 PM
Lee said...

Off topic, but in case anyone is interested, here is a question I recently asked the Mormon fellow in an email. “As I snap my fingers right now, somewhere in the universe there is probably a planet being torn to shreds by the tidal stress of a black hole that has hundreds or thousands of times the mass of our Sun. Can you speculate as to why God is doing that?”

A few days later he answered. (The ellipsis is present in his email, not added by me here.)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yes…I do.. we are taught this in our Church… … I will use this analogy…
When a child goes to Kindergarten for the first time this child is about 6 yrs old… they may know all their abc’s and numbers to 10? Maybe some more… but…you will never see the teacher trying to teach 99% of these children Algebra! They can’t understand it…

… 99% of people start at the bottom rung of any ladder then go up… very rarely do they start at the middle or the top…

…no builder worth their license, will build the roof first then support it with a flooring and then walls…

… so… like wise with some of your queries… without a basis of training…teachings of the first rung…flooring… the answer to these queries won’t help…. Trust me… I have been through it for years… I have been in the Church all my life and I am just beginning to more fully understand some of the simple doctrines of the Kingdom…
As the Saviour said… there are quite a bit of teachings the require the Holy Ghost for us to comprehend.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

When I boil down his answer in my mind, I think he is saying to me, "I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you."

;-}

May 12, 2009 at 6:34 PM

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