The Gospel According to Jeffrey

A Facebook friend asked a question about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . She has a friend who has left the Church because he feels all it does is guilt people into not doing bad things. My friend, on the other hand, remains faithful because she doesn’t see any attempt at guilt, only loving encouragement to be the best person she can be. Ultimately, these alternate foci would have the same outward results, but inwardly, the directions are obviously worlds apart. Her question, therefore, is a request for others’ opinions on the subject. As my response is characteristically verbose, I figured I’d post it here. 😊 The way I see this is as a matter of perception. Allow me to share a story from my own personal history: I joined the Church of Jesus Christ when I was 16 years old, and given my age, was introduced into a quorum of priests . Our quorum advisor, Brother Hurst, frequently taught us that despite the great power in our Priesthood office, we of ourselves were nothi...

It’s time for yet another installment of Responding to Facebook , the show where I share stuff that’s really just way too long for microblogging. For the last few months, the Bloggernacle has been rife with stories about the Ordain Women Movement , a group that seeks to have The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints change its longstanding policy of only ordaining men to specific offices in the Priesthood. While the reasons behind this are far too complex to be treated in this post, the point is that this group wants this change to occur, and has been attempting to effectuate this change through a variety of methods—not the least of which is showing up at the Priesthood Session of the Church’s Annual and Semiannual General Conferences and requesting admission to the men’s meeting. (As an aside, the men’s meeting is always preceded by a General Women’s Meeting, the preceding Saturday. Of course, all women are invited to attend this meeting, and men requesting admissio...

A woman on Twitter just referred me to page called Difficult Questions for Mormons to Answer . I thought the page was so concurrently sad and funny, I just had to post the questions (and my responses) here. Enjoy. If the Book of Mormon is true, why do Indians fail to turn white when they become Mormons? (2 Nephi 30:6, prior to the 1981 revision). The Book of Mormon isn’t about Indians; it’s about the descendants of a Bedouin sheik. You’ll notice that the Lamanites whose skin became “white” are not all those who joined the Church, but those who actually amalgamated themselves into Nephite *society*. This is completely consistent with Bedouin culture, which regards city dwellers as “white-skinned” and nomads as “dark-skinned,” presumably at least in part because of the dirtier lifestyle of the latter. If the Book of Mormon is true, then why has the Mormon church changed it? Examples are: 1 Nephi 11:21; 19:20; 20:1 and Alma 29:4. Compare these with the original Book of Mormon....

“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...

“…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...

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...