Introducing the Mormon Canon Podcast

Welcome to the Mormon Canon Podcast, designed to build consensus around the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In this episode, I introduce this project, which is an evaluation of Bruce R. McConkie's seminal work Mormon Doctrine and what Latter-day Saints believe on these subjects today. Using Canonizer.com's consensus-building technology, we can determine where members of the Church stand on everything from Kolob to card-playing. 

In this episode, you will also learn about my Wikipedia edit wars, why I learned how to play Bridge with Rook cards, and who Elizabeth Taylor's husband will be in the Resurrection. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Hello and welcome. This is the maiden voyage of the Warman Canon podcast. My name is Jim Bennett. You may know me as the author of the reply to the CES letter. You may know me as one of the founders of the United Utah party or my podcast with my daughter's dinner table politics, but today we're going to launch a new project here and the purpose of this initial episode is to give you an overview of what it is that we're doing and why we're doing it. I don't know if anybody listening to this is nerdy enough to have actually edited Wikipedia, but that's actually something that I've done weird owl in his song, white and nerdy pointed out that that is a true sign of nerdiness, that you actually care enough about an article in an online encyclopedia that you go into edit it. Well, the subject of this article is probably one that is of no interest to anybody but me, but it's the ox 40 in theory of Shakespeare authorship. The idea that William Shakespeare was the pseudonym of Edward DeVeer, the 17th Earl of Oxford. And the article began by saying that there was no evidence to support this theory yet. Actually in the article there was a section called circumstantial evidence. How can you have circumstantial evidence and no evidence at the same time? So what I tried to do is go into the lead of the story and add a single word. The article begins by saying that there is a convergence of documentary evidence of the type used by academics for authorial attribution. That keyword there was documentary. The kind of evidence they're talking about is a specific kind. And I thought, okay, you can say that no such documentary evidence exists for Oxford's claim on Shakespeare authorship. So I tried to add a single word, the word documentary. Well that created an edit war behind the scenes. My edit got deleted and then I undeleted the delete and we went back and forth. And finally they banned me from Wikipedia for 24 hours for a cooling down period. And what I discovered was that Wikipedia is a great resource. If there's no controversy about the subject you're discussing, but if there is disagreement then there are edit Wars behind the scenes and people who have different opinions or different points of view about the facts aren't able to have those points of view represented by the objective article that can be edited by anyone. So canonize or.com takes a different approach. Canada iser.com allows anybody to write anything on any subject and then people who come and read these articles are given the to support a different camp, misses the lingo from canonized or all of these articles are referred to as camps and camps statements. And so if you're reading an article on a controversial subject and you read a camp statement you agree with, you simply join the camp and then the number of camps supporters represents the consensus that is forming around that particular point of view. Now, if you read a camp statement you disagree with, you are given the opportunity and indeed we are invited to create a camp statement of your own and that camp will compete with the other camp and people will look at this and decide which one represents their point of view and you can have any number of competing camps on any subject, but the camp with the most consensus is going to rise like cream to the top. That's the beauty of this is because you don't spend a lot of time in goofy edit Wars, you don't even spend any time debating. You just go to canonize sir and you're able to see the top camp that represents the consensus of the moment and if you can come up with a more convincing argument or you can come up with a more convincing position, people are free to leave one camp and join another. That's the beauty of it. Of course we're still in beta mode and we don't have a whole lot of articles up there yet, which is one of the reasons I wanted to launch this podcast because my foray into Mormon apologetics with the CES letter reply has demonstrated to me that there is a great deal of difference of opinion as to what it is the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints actually stands for and believes. Now, I hope you will forgive me for using the term Mormon. I recognize that that has fallen out of favor with faithful members of the church because the president of the church, Russell M. Nelson has told us that we should use the full name of the church and that we shouldn't rely on nicknames because we want to focus our worship on Jesus Christ himself and I think that is a lot of a goal. But the structure of this podcast is actually going to be built around a book that has Mormon in the title, the book Mormon doctrine by Bruce R McConkie. This book is no longer in print, but it's had an outsized impact on the thinking of members of the church from my generation and whether they realize it or not. It's had an outsized impact on the way the religion is practiced even by millennials and generationZ today. Prior to its publication, there wasn't any sort of definitive encyclopedic resource that o utline the c hurch's position on every possible issue. The problem was the church didn't really want to have that kind of a resource. The president of the church at the time that Mormon doctrine was published was my great grandfather, D avid O. McKay, and if you read Greg Prince's book and I that you do, i t's called David O. McKay and the rise of modern Mormonism. President McKay didn't want this kind of a book to be published because he thought that members of the church should have the freedom to interpret doctrine according to their own understanding and didn't think that the kind of hard and fast rules that Bruce R McConkie establishes on any kind of subject weren't necessarily a healthy way for latter day saints to worship. But if you read Mormon doctrine, especially if you've never read it before, I would think one of the things you'd be struck by is just how authoritative the tone is, which is really kind of audacious on elder McConkie part because he wasn't elder McConkie at the time he wrote this, or at least he wasn't a member of the quorum of the 12 apostles. He didn't have the official authority to be able to write this kind of definitive work and yet that didn't stop him and everywhere he goes, he writes about things as if this is the only way this can be interpreted. This is the only way that you can read the churches position. For example, let me read to you excerpts from the article on card to playing. If you read car playing, it says see apostasy, gambling, recreation, and this is an encyclopedia. This is the definitive word and Bruce R McConkie says, president Joseph have, Smith has stated the position of the church with reference to card playing and these words card playing is an excessive pleasure. It is intoxicating and therefore in the nature of of ice it is generally the companion of the cigarette and the wine glass and the latter lead to the pool room and the gambling hall makes me want to break into trouble from the music man anyway. If you indulge frequently in card playing and whose lives it does not become a ruling passion, a deck of cards in the hands of a faithful servant of God as a satire upon religion. Those who does indulge are not fit to administer and sacred ordinances. Now this goes on for a while but then there's the last paragraph where elder McConkie isn't quoting anybody. He's just establishing the authoritative Mormon doctrine on card playing. He says members of the church should not belong to bridge or other type of card clubs and they should neither play cards nor have them in their home. And then it goes on to say buy cards is meant. Of course, of course, the spotted face cards used by gamblers to the extent that church members play cards, they are out of harmony with their inspired leaders, innocent non gambling games played with other types of cards except for the waste of time in many instances are not objectionable. That last sentence governed all of my card playing growing up because we played all the same games that anybody else plays with face cards, but we played them with Rook cards because somehow it's more righteous to use cards that only have numbers on them to play all the same to play go fish to play gin. There was even a game called pirate Rook that was invented by the Mackay family that is essentially bridge with Rook carts. Uh, but I'm sure even David O. McKay played this game. It's something that the McKay's had been playing for generations and other than the waste of time in many instances has been a great delight to members of the McKay family for generations. I look at this now as an adult and I think why on earth would anybody care about a paragraph buried in a book written by somebody who does not have the authority to establish what Mormon doctrine is and somehow think that it was necessary to get rid of all face cards and only play with Rook cards. This is something I ran into when I was preparing my CES letter reply and when I've received responses to it pro and con from people who are upset about what I wrote or happy with. What I wrote is that there is this idea and I'm not quite sure where it comes from, but there is this idea that church doctrine consists of an irreducible set of facts that can only be interpreted in one way when in fact it is possible to take a statement of fact and come to two diametrically opposed conclusions about that fact and have both of those conclusions be valid. Case in point. When I read the CES letter, I was struck by how concerned Jeremy Reynolds was with the reality that Joseph Smith used a seer stone that he placed in a hat to translate the book of Mormon 14 times in the CES letter. Jeremy Ronald's uses the phrase a rock in a hat dismissively as if that is so self evidently ridiculous that nobody should take the book of Mormon translation. Seriously. I look at that and say, okay, Joseph Smith used a rock and a hat makes absolutely no difference to me because it doesn't change anything about what the book of Mormon is. It doesn't account for the miracle that is the book of Mormon and for all of the amazing things that the book of Mormon contains, that Joseph Smith couldn't possibly have known, and it doesn't account for the tremendous spiritual impact of the book of Mormon has had on millions of people who have read it down through the generations. So there you have a single fact that's interpreted differently. And as I was looking at Mormon doctrine recently, I was struck by the fact that I can look@thesedoctrinesandicaninterpretthemfardifferentlythanbrucermcconkiedidandithinkmyinterpretationsareequallyvalidandithoughtthatthiswouldbeaperfectframeworkorstructuretobeabletointroducetocanonizeor.com because everybody can look at these articles and what I'm going to be doing through the process of this is I am going to be publishing Bruce R McConkie. He's articles from Mormon doctrine under Bruce R McConkie, his name, and I'm going to say, all right, if you agree with Bruce R McConkie, you can go and join the McConkie camp and that will demonstrate that yes, I think in this instance Bruce R McConkey is interpreting the doctrine correctly that I will then I may end up joining some of Bruce R McConkey camps because I think I agree with him on a number of these issues, but there are several issues where I do not and if I do not, I'm going to use the canonized interface to create my own article and I'm going to saying, no, this is not how I think the church's position on card playing ought to be interpreted. I don't think the church really has a position on card playing. Nobody's spoken about card playing in general conference since the turn of the century and I just don't think that the modern prophets and apostles care about it enough to make it an issue. And the idea that you can't participate in church activities or you can't participate in church leadership if you have a deck of cards in your home is such an antiquated idea that I would be very surprised if anybody were to support that camp and say, yes, that's how I interpret church doctrine. So I think this is going to be a really fun exercise and I think at the end of it we will all have an opportunity to be able to better understand what it is we believe and how many people actually believe it. So right at the outset, I wanted to find a few terms. One is the word doctrine, which I think causes a lot of members of the church to stumble as to what that word actually means. We spend a lot of time contrasting doctrine with policy. See, policy can just be adapted to the circumstances at the time and the mores of the moment. And it can be changed at the whim of anybody who finds a better way to do something. Now, the problem with that is that there is not a doctrine in the church that hasn't undergone some degree of change over the course of our history. But what happens when the doctrine changes is that it's retroactively redefined as policy. So all of the terrible things that were said in the 19th and 20th centuries to justify excluding people of African descent from temple blessings and the priesthood were even at the time when they were being taught as eternal doctrine that will never change. Now it's all, those were just failed explanations. Those were just policies to justify the band and we could ignore those without a second thought. Well, I think rather than engage in those kinds of mental gymnastics to redefine words, I think it's better if we give a clear definition of what it is we're actually talking about. Because when we say doctrine doesn't change, what I think we're really saying is that truth doesn't change and we hope and we believe that the doctrines we teach as a church are reflective of eternal truth. And I think in most cases they are. But there have been occasions when they have not been. So the way I am going to use the word doctrine is according to the online dictionary definition of the word, which is a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church political party or other group doctrine, therefore is defined as what the church officially teaches. It is not defined as eternal, unchanging truth that cannot be modified when greater light knowledge enters the world. It astonishes me though how troubling that idea is to so many members of the church. We are a church that has as one of our primary articles of faith, the idea that we believe all that God has revealed all that he does now reveal, and we believe that he will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God. This is a church built on the idea that there is more knowledge to be had, that there is more truth to be revealed and why should we be surprised or reticent to accept a revelation of new truth that reinterprets our previous limited understanding that was reflected in our previous doctrines. Let me give you an example of this that comes directly from the son of Bruce R McConkie himself. Bruce R McConkie son, Joseph fielding McConkie was my mission president when I served as a missionary in the Scotland Edinburgh emission from 1987 to 1989 I know I'm very much dating myself by giving you those dates, but my first mission president was Ben B banks who was called into the quorum of the 70 while he was a mission president, he was supposed to be my only mission president. He came out right before I did, but he was called right near the end of my mission. So for the last few months of my mission, Joseph fielding McConkie came and one of the things that I was very struck by with regard to Joseph fielding McConkie was what a great sense of humor he had. He said that he got that sense of humor from his father. None of that humor informs any part of the book of Mormon doctrine. But president McConkie would come to zone conferences and hold forth and just have all of the missionaries eating out of his hand as he expounded the doctrines of the church and really fun and interesting and entertaining ways. And one of the things that he liked to do was take a scripture from the Bible that critics of the church use to demonstrate that the church was not true and show how that scripture could be better interpreted to sustain the doctrines of the church. And on this occasion, the scripture he chose was from the book of Matthew chapter 22 starting in verse 23 which says the same day came to him. The Sadducees would say that there is no resurrection. And asked him saying, master Moses said, if a man die having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up seed unto his brother. Now there were with us seven brethren and the first one he had married a wife deceased, and having no issue left his wife unto his brother. Likewise the second also, and the third unto the seventh and also last of all the women died also. Therefore in the resurrection, whose wife shall she be? Of the seven four they all had her. Jesus answered and said unto them, you do. Errr hasn't McConkie said the word is not air. The word is earth. You do earn not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God for the resurrection. They neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. Well, that kind of puts a damper on the latter day Saint doctrine that marriage is the most important eternal ordinance that we can enter into in mortality. But president McConkey proceeded to expound the scripture to us and point out a few things that we may have missed or the casual readers almost always miss when they read this story. This is a story being told by the Sadducees. The Sadducees, according to the scriptures say that there is no resurrection and that's why they were sad. You see. Anyway. So the reason they ask this question of Jesus is not to get him to expound on the doctrine of eternal marriage. It's to trip him up on the idea of a resurrection because they think they've come up with a paradox that shows that the resurrection doesn't make any logical sense. So Jesus is answer is not a definitive answer about marriage. So much as it is about the resurrection. And he points out that in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage. And president McConkie told us to pay attention to the antecedent, to the pronoun they, that Jesus is referring to. The example the Sadducees have provided, which is there was with us, and we want to give some attention to the pronoun us. In other words, there was a Sadducee who married seven different men who's going to be your husband and the resurrection. And Jesus says, your example stinks because if there are sad Jesse, they don't believe in a resurrection. So they wouldn't be engaged in any kind of an eternal ceiling. And so those people would neither marry nor be given in marriage because they rejected the authority to be married for eternity when they were here in mortality and he said to us, can you think of any woman in the modern era that has been married more than one time, perhaps seven or even eight times, and this was 1989 and the person who came to mind was Elizabeth Taylor and we said, Elizabeth Taylor. And he said, right, is there any question as to who will Elizabeth Taylor's husband is going to be in the resurrection? He said, Elizabeth Taylor is going to be lucky to be resurrected. Yeah. There's that sense humor, which I know may not go over well with many people because I know that the issue of eternal marriage and the issue of eternal ceilings and eternal polygamy is a very fraught one for a number of people who are concerned as to how all that's going to work out. But the thing that struck me when he told this story is that after he said all of these things, he said, the one thing we want to get away from is the idea that marriage is only an earthly ordinance and there will be no marriages performed in the millennium or after the resurrection. That's just nonsense. That's not what the savior is saying. The problem with that is I had read just that very explanation that morning in Jesus, the Christ by Jamesy Talmudge from page 548 quote in the resurrection, there will be no marrying nor giving in marriage for all questions of marital status must be settled before that time under the authority of the Holy priesthood, which holds the power to seal in marriage for both time and eternity. Now, it would be difficult for me to overstate just how significant this book was to me at the time. Jesus. The Christ was one of only a handful of books we were allowed to read with me were missionaries. And it's one of only a handful of non scriptural books at the time that was actually published by the church. And the legend was that elder Talmage never left the upper rooms of the salt Lake temple while he was writing this book. That's not true. He did come and go portions of the book were written in an upper room of the salt Lake temple, but they were also written in elder college's office and in a bunch of other places. Anyway, it doesn't matter. This book seemed to me at the time to be, if not scripture, close enough that anything that my mission president is saying that's contradicting it is causing me serious cognitive dissonance. So I made a point of sitting next to president McConkie at lunch and I said, president McConkie, can I ask you a doctrinal question over lunch? And his eyes lit up and he said, sure. And I said, well, you said this scripture means this Jesus. The Christ says it means this. What am I to do? I didn't put it that simply, but he looked at me and I will never forget the words that came out of his mouth were, well, elder Bennett, that's how the problem got started. And he went to say that elder Talmage had misinterpreted this scripture. This floored me because my idea was this was an apostle. How can an apostle misinterpret scripture? And how can a mission president say that his interpretation of scripture was better than an Apostle's interpretation of scripture? And he said, look, one of the reasons my father, Bruce R McConkie wrote his book, the new witness for the articles of faith, which to correct some of the errors, elder Talmage, his book, the articles of faith. And this just sort of opened up a whole new world for me. The idea that it was possible to look at scriptures and have apostles disagree as to what those scriptures mean. So this is where I need your help. I need you to look at these articles and determine where it is that you stand. Come to Canada,[inaudible] dot com join the camp that represents your point of view. If it's Bruce R McConkie who's representing your point of view, let people know that if it's me that's representing your point of view, that I'd be happy to have your support in my camp. But if neither one of us is expressing what you believe the doctrine ought to be, please feel free to start a camp of your own, create your own camp statement and let the discussion go from there. So this podcast is going to be released on a weekly basis. And until next week, this is Jim Bennett for the Mormon Canon project signing off. We'll see you at[inaudible] dot com.