The other day, as I was catching up on my podcasts, I ended up listening to: A Paradoxical Preservation of Faith: LDS Creation Accounts and the Composite Nature of Revelation. This was the recording of a talk Ben Spackman gave at the latest FAIR Mormon conference about how revelation is a collaborative effort between the Lord and his prophets. That revelation is not a handwritten memo sent from the desk of God, which the prophet merely retypes and sends along to the publisher. That it’s more complicated and nuanced than that. To quote from Spackman:

[W]hat I want to argue today is that revelation is not absolute, but composite; that is, revelation will always have a significant human component, along with the divine. Now, two years ago at this podium I spoke about an idea called accommodation, the idea that God must adapt revelation down to the human condition in a variety of ways. It has a lot of support in Christian and Jewish tradition and LDS doctrine and scripture and history. Today I want to speak about the other end of things. Accommodation is God doing the accommodating on his end. What I’m talking about today is, when the revelation comes to us, what happens? Once received by humans, it must be voiced, interpreted, understood, or implemented by us, humans. The end result involves human input to a greater or lesser extent. 

In contrast to this composite approach (or as I prefer to call it, this collaborative approach) he also describes an absolutist approach, which among other things is:

[C]haracterized by binary or polar rhetoric, which assumes clear bright line non-overlapping distinction between these things, e.g. “revealed/philosophies of men,” “correct/false,” “divine/apostate.” And this simple binary doesn’t reflect reality.  [Emphasis original]

The talk then includes five examples which support the composite view of revelation and refute the absolutist approach.

I urge you to either listen to the podcast or read the transcript, so that we’re entirely on the same page. Particular because I think it’s a useful framework for examining things, even if Spackman (or I, for that matter) is missing some of the nuance in the process. I especially think it’s a useful framework to apply to the battles being fought between various factions of the Church in our own day. But also the internal battles happening every day in people’s souls. 

Spackman seems to be directing his remarks primarily at this latter group, at the many people currently experiencing a crisis of faith. He makes the point that injecting a certain amount of human frailty and fallibility into the process of revelation and doctrine has the potential to resolve a host of issues. You can probably think of many examples and if you can’t Spackman provides several, but I’d like to bring in one of the more controversial examples: Brigham Young and the policy that blacks could not hold the priesthood. 

Spackman would argue that saying this policy was revealed, correct and divine, is to engage in the absolutist approach. That it automatically leads to the questions which provoke faith crises. How could a prophet of God be a racist? Does this mean that God was a racist, but isn’t any longer and therefore changes? If it was correct then why isn’t it correct now? And what about the blacks who received the priesthood from Joseph Smith, like Elijah Abel? 

On the other hand if the policy was partially or mostly a result of human fallibility, then we can just chalk it up to that, and move forward with faith. But if we do this then do we have to accept its inverse? That this policy was the “philosophy of men”, “false” or even “apostate”? I’m definitely not arguing that, and neither was Spackman, but what about the lesser charge, does it mean that Brigham Young was wrong? 

If you follow Twitter at all you may recognize this a recent point of contention, with some people, particularly those identifying with the #DezNat hashtag, arguing he didn’t do anything wrong, and others arguing that he did. How are we decide this question? For myself it seems clear both that Brigham was not infallible or perfect, but that he was also the anointed prophet of God. That he was the right man in the right place at the right time. And that the same can be said of President Nelson. For most people this would be the end of the discussion, but for some it’s not, for some, denying Blacks the priesthood, and reversing the policy of Joseph Smith was clearly wrong. And from that I think many have made to leap to deciding that President Oaks or even President Nelson are wrong as well.

Out of all this I think we can identify some distinct levels:

1. People who understand that Prophets are imperfect just like everyone else, that God works with those imperfections, and that despite being prophets these men are still working out their own salvation just like everyone else. All that said, they are God’s anointed messengers, specially prepared for the time they serve in and deserving absolute obedience.
2. People who take the acknowledged fallibility of the prophets and use it to question what they say and advocate for sweeping doctrinal changes (e.g. giving women the priesthood, not two hour church.) You might say they exercise significant ideological disobedience without much disobedience with respect to ordinances. I would add that my sense is that they do this not because they think the prophet might be wrong, but because they think he is probably wrong.  
3. People who go one step farther and exercise significant disobedience on all fronts. Those who stop attending church, but “still believe”. Single sisters pursuing artificial insemination. Or, those who refuse to attend the temple because the endowment is too sexist. These people generally go beyond “probably wrong” into “certainly wrong”. As in, “One day the policy will change to incorporate my views, I’m just ahead of the curve. In fact you might even say I’m more righteous!”

I would argue that we should all clearly strive to be at level one, though I know a lot of people (not necessarily in this space, but elsewhere) are going to get hung up on the phrase “absolute obedience”. Well, let me tell you a story.

One of my ancestors entered the Salt Lake valley in 1847, not with Brigham Young, in the group immediately following, and he stayed (most people don’t realize that Brigham Young went back to Winter Quarters.) You would think that being one of the very first pioneers in the valley that he would have had his pick of good land, and that he and all of his descendants would still be living in and around Salt Lake, but no. The Prophet told him to go colonize Manti, so he did. And then just as he was getting settled there, the Prophet sent him on the Cotton Mission, and he moved to the vicinity of St. George. And just as he was getting the hang of things there he was sent to Northeast Arizona. Which may have been the most god-forsaken place of all. And each time he was absolutely obedient.  

Does this mean he never sinned? Of course not! Does it mean he never questioned the commandments? I’d be surprised if he didn’t have any questions, but I’d be equally surprised if he voiced any of them in public. And as it turns out he was able to experience a lot of Brigham Young’s “wrongness” firsthand. Particularly his idea that cotton could be grown in Southern Utah, and yet he continued to be obedient. 

I think it’s this last bit that people who operate at levels two and three are missing: the importance of obedience. You know what is clearly wrong? Murdering your son, and yet that’s precisely what God asked Abraham to do and that’s precisely what he did, or attempted to do, before being stopped by an angel. Does this suggest that maybe obedience is more important than trying to figure out whether the prophets is fallibile on any particular issue? (Also, let’s be clear a lot of people spend zero time examining their own fallibility.) 

Does this mean that obedience is easy? Of course not, in may in fact be the hardest thing we have to do in mortality. Also to be clear we all need to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, but nothing about that includes fixating on how the prophet might be wrong and you might be right. And how best to demonstrate your correctness and wisdom to those less enlightened than yourself.

I understand people who no longer believe, even though it saddens me, what I don’t understand is people who think the church has some of the truth, but that they personally just happen to have even more…