The Gospel According to Jeffrey

Following my August 26 post regarding Michael Crook and Mitch Mayne, I received a question in the comments. Strangely, I was not notified of its existence until just now, so I am now endeavoring to respond. Hopefully the author won’t be too unhappy with me. The question was as follows: Jeff, I appreciate that you've thought about the situation critically. That's awesome. That got me on a deep-think track about a few subtle differences between sexual orientation and the inclinations to which you've referred (e.g., to steal a Twix bar). You've basically asserted that all inclinations are basically on the same playing field. What happens, though, when God says to one person "You can act on this inclination" then turns to another person and says "I'm sorry, you can't act on this inclination"? That's how I view sexual orientation in the LDS Church: God has told straight Mormons, Date! Hold hands! Kiss! Develop these powerful urges withi...

First of all, if you’ve somehow missed the first four parts, I invite you to start at the beginning . Enjoy! At some point this morning, a friend wrote me to see if I had noticed the major differences between President Packer’s spoken Conference address. Curious, I decided to listen to the audio of the discourse while reading the official transcript. I didn’t have any trouble with the obvious verbal slips that anyone can make (misread words, etc.), but I thought it rather interesting that one of the paragraphs I cited in Part III —the one that had so many people up in arms—had, in fact, been slightly changed. Spoken version: “Some suppose that they were preset, and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and the unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, He is our Father.” Printed version: “Some suppose that they were preset, and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn temptations toward the impure and the unnatu...

“This is according to the account of Nephi; or in other words, I, Nephi, wrote this record.” Dr. Hugh Nibley, arguably the father of Latter-day Saint apologetics, points out that the First Book of Nephi “starts out with a colophon telling us whose hand wrote it, what his sources were, and what it is about” ( Since Cumorah , 170-171). This is far from unique in scripture ( e.g. the Jerusalem Colophon ), but the statement is important. Latter-day Saints understand that while the scriptures are indeed the word of God, they are the word of God filtered through the minds of His prophets. The level of perfection to which any scripture can attain is only to the extent that its author was willing and able to write His words in the way that He intended, and to the extent that the reader ( e.g. us) is willing and able to understand them in the way that He intended. By opening his record in this way, Nephi is stating, “This is scripture, but I’m totally responsible for the way it’s written. If...

“They take the daughters of Ishmael to wife.” I suppose we’ll deal with this in more detail when I get to 1 Nephi 7, but I think it bears mentioning that Nephi found this tiny little detail—his marriage—important enough to mention in his headnote. With very few exceptions, women are never mentioned in the scriptures unless they are essential to the story or chronology. So by even mentioning it, we can see that Nephi views his marriage as a major event in his life and history. So what can we learn from this? Although Nephi’s parting commandment to his brother Jacob did allow him to “touch… lightly [upon] the history of this people” ( Jacob 1:2 ), the commandment that Nephi had himself received from God (ostensibly just before writing the headnote!) was that he “should make these plates, for the special purpose that there should be an account engraven of the ministry of [his] people” ( 1 Nephi 9:3 ). Furthermore, he states that: “the things which are pleasing unto the world I do n...

“Nephi taketh his brethren and returneth to the land of Jerusalem after the record of the Jews. The account of their sufferings.” I think this passage speaks a lot to the character of Nephi. Grant Hardy points out that Nephi, while not merely “a biased, self-aggrandizing character,” nonetheless “offers a didactic, one-side narrative that severely truncates events and flattens characters” (Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon , 44). I think this comes through quite clearly, in this passage. The events here summarized begin in 1 Nephi 3, when Lehi instructs his sons—on behalf of the Lord—to “go unto the house of Laban, and seek the records, and bring them down hither into the wilderness” ( 1 Nephi 3:4 ). While Nephi is certainly portrayed as the more obedient party, he never mentions “taking” his brethren with him; they simply “took [their] journey in the wilderness, with [their] tents, to go up to the land of Jerusalem” ( 1 Nephi 3:9 ). (Incidentally, the fa...

“He taketh three days’ journey into the wilderness with his family.” It’s so funny that I would get to this sentence, this morning. Last night I was researching something related to the Bible and discovered a web site that mocks the Book of Mormon. Such sites are, of course, a dime a dozen, but this one was different: never before have I seen such inaccurate information as this. I mean, it’s one thing to take issue with the doctrines or even the historical narrative; it’s quite another to come up with such incredibly obvious straw man arguments. Such is the statement that is brought to mind by this passage: “It only took Nephi and his family three days to travel from Jerusalem to the Red Sea. (A distance of 250 miles)” Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that this author couldn’t even manage grammatical accuracy in his argument. Where on Earth did s/he get this idea? Lehi didn’t start from the city of Jerusalem; he started from “the land of Jerusalem” (see “ Headnote, Part II ”). J...

“…because he prophesieth unto the people concerning their iniquity and they seek to destroy his life.” When the prophet Jeremiah—arguably the President of the Church in Lehi’s time—wrote of the impending destruction of Jerusalem, King Jehoiakim was, shall we say, not pleased. He burned the record and commanded that Jeremiah and his scribe, Baruch, suffer a similar fate ( i.e. imprisonment, if not death; see Jeremiah 36:21-26 , cf. 37:4 ). While Jeremiah was not there to hear the king’s words, the Lord gave him the sound-byte version: “Why hast thou written therein, saying, The king of Babylon shall certainly come and destroy this land, and shall cause to cease from thence man and beast?” ( Jeremiah 36:29 ). It didn’t take long for Jeremiah’s prophecy against Jehoiakim to come true, and Zedekiah was installed as his successor—and succeeded where his predecessor had failed ( Jeremiah 37:15 ). So when Nephi says that the people sought to destroy his father, he knew what he was talking ab...

“The Lord warns Lehi to depart out of the land of Jerusalem….” Over the years, I’ve had plenty of run-ins with those who would seek to destroy the Church. Some call them “anti-Mormons”; others, avoiding that colloquialism, use “contra-LDS” (as in Michael Ash’s Shaken Faith Syndrome ) or simply “critics.” Regardless of what they be called, these people often come back to an argument that they think proves the falseness of the Book of Mormon: that Alma 7:10 states Jesus shall be born in or at Jerusalem. While we’re obviously a few thousand verses away from Alma 7:10, it occurs to me that right here in the headnote to the First Book of Nephi, we see just why Alma would reference “Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers”: that’s what Lehi did—and with good reason. The late Hugh Nibley points out that: Though he “dwelt at Jerusalem,” Lehi did not live in the city, for it was after they had failed to get the plates in Jerusalem that his sons decided to “go down to the land of ou...

So today I’m returning to the world of scripture study. I’m not sure how regular it will be—I’d like to think daily—but I’ve got a goal, and I’m starting towards it. My goal is simple: one verse per day, with my insights and commentary posted here. If it goes really  well, I may break it off into a separate blog, but I’m not going to open that can of worms right now. So without any further ado, here we go!

For the last couple of mornings, I’ve been studying Lesson 3 of the Gospel Principles manual. (Yes, I know; I’m behind. So what? I read almost the whole thing, last summer.) But before I tell you about that, I’ll have to explain something else: the way I study the scriptures. The first time I read the Old Testament all the way through was in Seminary . I was determined to get through the entire volume during the course of the school year, and I did—though partly because I couldn’t attend much of Seminary, I’m not sure I got much out of it. Then, during the summer between high school and college, I did the same with the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church —with similar results. During my freshman year at IU , I took a full-year Institute class on the New Testament . This marked a turning point in the way I studied scripture: my professor, Brother Robert Marrott, was a student of Hugh Nibley and acted like it. He taught me how to get the most out of the scriptures, how to actuall...