Philip Barlow Wonder of Scripture Lecture

Transcript

Steve, thanks, friends. I'm so glad to be with you today. Thanks for friendship with Terryl and his words, and thankful to the Maxwell Institute for initiating this series, The Wonder of Scripture. I wish you could come visit where I work. Make it a point if you're tempted to stop by the Maxwell, where thoughtful, entirely devoted people bring their entire resources together, and don't avoid problems, but work through them faithfully. They don't even avoid injustice or other problems when they see them, but act with grace. It feels like intellectual, spiritual Zion there, come visit.

When my friend Ravi Gupta, an internationally regarded scholar of Hinduism, was invited to come down and give this lecture last semester, he said to me, “I love the title.” I don't even know, Kristian, who invented the title? Was it Kim or you or JB? JB? Just joking. JB, invented The Wonder of Scripture, and it is a delightful title, and Ravi said, “I'd be so glad to come down there and meditate on the title”. We think of The Wonder of Scripture variously, so JB had a fertile phrase, and it's given me a little thought within scripture, it sometimes be tokens of curiosity, and other times astonishment or awe, or just refers to miracles as in signs and wonders. Or we can find wonder provoked by scripture, its character, its oddities as we may see them, its puzzles, or transcendent themes, such as the reorienting language of the Sermon on the Mount, or the portrayal of a Messiah capable of talking about forgiveness while impaled on his instrument of torture. Or we may find, as I have in this series earlier this semester and last semester, wonder at some thoughtful scholar or another unpacking and illuminating a single passage in such a way that Oz turns emerald instead of black and white. I've lived and been familiar with the passage for a long time, and all of a sudden it is radiant. This morning, though, I'd like to talk about a different kind of wonder, namely, that there are gospel principles that pervade the scriptures that remain unseen And unnamed, or remain unseen unnoticed because they're unnamed. There are phenomena or principles in the world and in the world of Scripture and in our modern gospel, for that matter, that have no name and yet are pervasive, so we have little way to identify and ponder them. One of these is time.

I used to teach at Hanover College, as Terrell mentioned, a beautiful, little private place in southern Indiana. And every freshman at Hanover College was required to take an introduction to philosophy, and every sophomore was required to take an introduction to theological studies, whether they liked it or not, and some did, and most all did by the time they were through, but not all did up front. Like my colleagues in the department, I had to find a way to organize an introduction to the study of religion and theology, so I chose the theme of religion evil and human suffering. As I worked through that for a few years, it recurred and recurred and recurred to me that many roads in that conversation led to time, so I eventually spun off a course from religion, evil, and human suffering called Religion and the Concept of Time. I am not going to talk this morning, nor am I actually equipped, at a high professional level to talk about esoteric time, technical time, the sort of time that physicists lead us into when we get to time space and gravity, bending time space like a bowling ball put on a mattress, and I'm not entirely equipped to go after that, at least not to be your teacher, I'd be your fellow student on the subject. But I'm thinking about time through– I’m thinking about discipleship, I want to talk this morning as a disciple and the little book the Maxwell Institute's themes in the Doctrine Covenant series of which my volume on time is a part, is not a work of philosophy, though it tries to be informed, and it's not a work of physics, though it tries to be informed. It's a work of discipleship through the lens of a consideration of time, and time is strange. Have you noticed?

I don't mean the kind of time we were late, I don't mean remembering or forgetting your grandmother's birthday. I mean time with a capital T, a concept that one might study like one can study chemistry or physics, a phenomenon, a mystery, a thing. It's strange, and Nephi’s successor, Jacob, found it so. Towards the end of his short little book, in the Book of Mormon, he laments his hard life and he's sad and he's old and he's tired, and he ruminates, ‘I was born in the wilderness, it hasn't been easy, and our brethren seek our lives.’ He was part of a persecuted people, and felt oppressed and weary, “And so I end this record,” he says, by saying, “And the time passed away, and our lives passed away like unto us as it were a dream”. I have garbled that little bit as it were unto us, likened to a dream, our lives and the time passed away as though it were a dream. Many of you in the audience are young from my considerably ancient perch. You look very young and precocious and brilliant, but young and you're not so young, but you would have experienced this that happens around your age, and that is the collapse of time. You've begun to recognize that which seemed long, not long ago, now passes rapidly. Your sense of time has evolved.

Augustine also found time strange in my night dreams, sometimes I trace genealogies, and I was tracing one the other day, and learned that Terrell Givens is the great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson of Augustine. Maybe it was a dream. Augustine, somewhere around the year 400, had a crisis. His crisis included a Time Crisis, and he noticed, “I know what time is if no one asked me about it, but if someone asks me about it, I don't know, too hard to explain, and also –I guess it's related– but what the heck is it?”

“The past doesn't exist, except in memory,” he reasoned, “and the future doesn't exist except in anticipation. And the present, I guess, exists, but by the time you say present and get to the second syllable, the first syllable is already the past, and the present exists, but it doesn't have any duration. It doesn't have any hang-in-there value, any extension. So when am I?”

And that's the sort of question, except for you philosophy majors and Latter-day Saints, don't necessarily go after in droves. But he puzzled, and he puzzled, and out of it came a new genre of writing and thinking, autobiography, self-life writing. He concluded, “I don't know where I am, and the present doesn't have any extension time to it, and the past doesn't exist, and the future doesn't exist,” and he had to call himself into being. He wrote the first autobiography with any inner reflection, any introspection to it that was really examining what it meant to be a human. He didn't always get everything right.

Many college students also find time strange and threatening. Back at Hanover College, in that class on Religion and the Concept of Time, I made students, I induced students, I invited students to do a project for the course that involved creative responses that eclipsed the kind of papers that we had to write in style. One young woman decided to go do a survey of students, and the first question she asked them was, what is the first thing that comes to your mind when I say time? Here are the first 20 responses she received: stress, intense, hourglass, goes fast, schedules, stress, all was going never enough, calendar, wasted, stress, stress, restriction, chases us, clock, goes fast, ah, stressful, running out, in motion, time flies, stressful. What's the matter with this picture? That's all a bit large, the strangeness of time for this morning. So what I'd like to do this morning is just three things. First, a brief comment on what the gospel is about, which might frame our considerations. We all know what it's about, sort of, but that can go awry, and we can get amnesiac about what it's about sometimes. Two, I'd like to offer an outrageous proposition that is, time is the zeroth principle of the gospel. And third, I'd like to have us ask together the question that you should all be asking after each one of your classes and lectures you visit: “So what?”

So, what is the gospel for? Sometimes the Gospel we carry about in our heads is too small. We think of it, maybe unconsciously, as obeying lists of rules and going to church and doing all the stuff we do at church and making covenants and having authority and presiding the heck out of things. Thought of in this way, many people lose a sense of the relevance of the gospel to the concerns of their lives, and they fade, to our lament, from our midst. So it helps us to remember what the gospel is fully about. Life is about living. The gospel is about existence and becoming. As per the wondrous scripture of Moses 1:39, that lays out God's self-assigned mission statement: What God does for a living is love, reaching out to lift other intelligences about the gods. Life, then, is not solely a moral test, it is also a school, and it is also a lab in that school for becoming. Doctrine Covenants 88 tells us we must learn things in the heavens, above and in the skies and underneath the seas, and all the travails and deliberations and ways and wars of the nations. We're told in section 122 that all these things, nausea, life-threatening junk, the jaws of hell gaping out after us, all these things shall be for thy experience. The gospel is not just about learning to be good and to be nice. It's learning what it might mean to participate in the divine nature, and God is purely good as I understand God, but he is also purely wise and purely intelligent and purely deft, purely creative as a creator.

Religion in general and the restoration in particular are ultimately about relationships, as we become together. Restoration words like atonement, repentance, family, genealogy, love, eternal progress, and sealing are relationship words. There are five primary relations, by my reckoning, our relationship with God, the second, likened to it, our relationship with one another, our relationship with our oft broken, very complex selves, our relationship with time, and our relationship with the external world, however, we can access it by thought, and reflection and talking and depending. This is not very popular in today's America, and dependence upon serious expert, serious thinkers, philosophers, scholars, scientists, et cetera. The gospel is all about that, but it's about relationships. Second, an outrageous proposition, time is the zeroth principle of the gospel. I made up the zero affair to signal that I recognize this is an unofficial proposition, or rather, it's an official proclamation to only me, and that I'm just a kid from Bountiful and don't have any authority. It's an invitation for your consideration from a fellow traveler. Also, I want to assert that time undergirds and interacts with every other gospel principle, hence its zero status. This is obvious for some principles that have time-laden names, like prophecy, like pre existence, like vicarious work for the dead, like the millennium, like birth, like death. But I want to go further than that and say that time applies to all gospel principles, even if we consider the first principles of the gospel, faith, to be a time-soaked concept. We're invited to have faith, counseled to have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, whom we've never met in the flesh, who lived 1000s of years ago, whose biography is actually quite obscure and hard to get at and kneel down. One doesn't exist in our modern sense of the word biography, certainly not the Gospels. We're also asked to have faith in things before creation, and we're asked to have faith in things far into the future, or if it's really chronological, or invited to have faith unto repentance or some other actions, and yet there exists an unrecognized contest for which principle of the gospel is the first principle, if there must be just one. After all, repentance is a time thing, right? It's a profound reconciliation of the past and the present, and baptism. We could have handed out certificates or stars on our forehead to show that we're disciples and members of the church now, but we do this ritual that was patterned after death, burial, and a new birth. Those are time things, and we get a confirmation of our membership and are blessed with the Holy Spirit in a different way, and renew those covenants of the sacrament. That includes the notion, in fact, that's the end point to the sacramental prayer “that thy spirit might always be with them”. We get used to that phrase, but that's an astounding notion. Is it possible? If so, it's a wonder.

Pulling back the camera a little bit, if faith and repentance are the first principles of the gospel. When Joseph Smith explained that to a newspaper editor by trying to get across some general beliefs and orientations about what Mormonism, as it was then called, consists of, he said, “We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the gospel are,” but when I was being raised over the local and general pulpit, I heard that obedience was the first law of heaven, and obedience traces its original meaning back to not obeying little checklists of commandments so much as hearing and attention. Can you even get to faith unless you know what to pay attention to, what to hear? Or when Paul deliberated on what the first principles of the gospel, he ended up with faith, hope, and love, or charity, as it's rendered in the King James Version of the Bible, and as you all know, love came out on top. When Christ was asked, which was the great commandment, love of God and neighbor came up on top. And what about agency? Can we even have love or faith if we don't have the agency to choose them? So did Joseph when he wrote that to the newspaper editor, Mr. Wentworth, did he mean first principles, as in some sort of necessary chronology, or did he mean first principles like these are things that aren't going to offend you, and we can't go into wild things like becoming gods and polygamy and stuff, so is he orienting the public, or did he mean first in importance, or first in chronology? What I think is our principles of the gospel are not so time-laden that they're sequential, but they have to exist as a constellation, more like a molecule than an atom.

Third, and finally, I want to take a little example of what I'm talking about, of putting time into conversation with ordinary principles of the gospel. I'm choosing the Sabbath, it's the first chapter in this little book I read. But when we talk about the Sabbath, it's familiar to us, and familiarity can be the death knell of thinking if we're not careful. So I'm only going to talk for 10 or so more minutes, I'll invite you to not commit the sin of being bored, which is a time-laden theme, and it misses the mark, and our culture is not very good, and we have a shrunken attention span, we people in our ear, so hang in for 10 or 12 minutes. The Bible has a lot to say about the Sabbath, but we don't consider it very much. We remember a passage where God rested on the Sabbath day, so we're going to do that, but the Old Testament actually gives a lot of reasons, a number of reasons, for why we commemorate the Sabbath. The Doctrine Covenants seems to take the Bible for granted as a given before, just throughout the Doctrine and Covenants. Still, there are only eight or nine verses in the entire Doctrine and Covenants about the Sabbath. They're all concentrated except for one passing reference in Section 59, and these eight verses that does that signal they're not important? I've come to think that it's just the opposite. Here's the gig, and here's what I'm saying about it. Verses nine through 16 of Section 59 seem clear, consequential, and blessedly simple. In order to remain unspotted from the world and to receive the, if I was a little elliptical there, Sabbath's a time thing. Everything about this conversation follows is a time thing, because Sabbath is a day, but it's not a day that can be reduced to a day on the calendar. Sabbath is a philosophy in the form of time. It's an ambience in the guise of time.

Doctrine and Covenants; in order to receive you and I, who are part of an anxious generation and a frenetic generation, a hurried generation and a lonely generation, that's us talking, in order to receive, that's us listening. I hope the four gifts of temporal peace, the fullness of the Earth, a fullness of joy and eternal life, starts to sound like it's connected with Moses 1:39 the Saints were told on the Lord's holy day that with thanksgiving and cheerful hearts, we are to do four things and four things only, to rest from their labors, to go to the house of prayer, to offer up sacraments and vows and oblations, to confess their sins and to prepare their food with singleness of heart, “do none other thing”, said the Lord. “None other thing,” really? Is that what your Sabbath looks like? I was raised in an active, good family, and we kept the Sabbath day, and we had debates about whether you get a watch the Detroit Lions play on Sunday, or whether you don't. We parsed rules. We are like Amish, deciding whether their cars had to be all black, or you don't even get cars, or you could have silver bumpers on them, we'd have those kinds of conversations about the Sabbath. I had a privileged childhood, but really, is the Lord serious? Or do we not want to think about that because it doesn't exist in Sections 49 and 23 also. So I decided at one point that I was going to get serious about the gospel and conduct some experiments, some personal experiments. I wrote this down carefully, I'm going to read a page to you, to you accounting for my experiment, so forgive me for reading. “With the autonomy of young adulthood, the stakes about the church seemed to rise for me, my peers and I entered college and the grown-up world, and those who studied this world, as well as merely preparing for a career, also encountered complexity and ambiguity. Some friends continued in the faith with little turmoil. Others grew confused, indifferent, or even hostile. Over time, I was provoked to face a mirror more searchingly than in my earlier life, not to drift from the church with friends who did would require compelling reasons. I was not preoccupied solely with a distant after world, I was more immediately moved by the question of how I was to exist in the here and the now. The quality of my human life was up for grabs as I became more exposed to the world's cacophony, to its wonders and puzzles and conflict and calamity, I had to judge in what voices I should invest. How was I to employ my days and with whom and to what end? What did I fundamentally believe and on what grounds, who and what was I to become.”

As I decided to conduct this experiment, it was as applicable to the slice of time that we call the Sabbath as to the other gospel principles. Hence, I interrogated my understanding of it. I interrogated others in heaven too. Taking the sacrament remained meaningful to me, and meeting regularly with the saints seemed good, but how essential to me were Sabbath days as a whole? Was I confident deep down that the ascetic Sabbath routine delineated in Section 59 would somehow make me more holy?

A summary question governed all the others, I began to ask of the Sabbath, of the many choices before me, would it genuinely benefit me and please God, if I were to expend 1/7 of the remainder of my life encompassing the Sabbath, doing just those four things. 1/7 in my life doing just those four things, was that what holiness looked like? I realized that leveling that divot, against my time, against my life, would be more costly, a more costly chunk of my life than tithing was of my funds. Provoked to and by such inquiry, I decided to put God's words to the test, as God's word advises. I studied, I thought, I spied on people, and watched how they did Sabbath and how it worked. My sixth-month experiment centered on the attempt for one day each week to live a radical Sabbath, to separate sacred time from mundane time, more thoroughly than ever I'd previously done, to see what would transpire.

Each Saturday, I took brief but real pains to design what the following day would look like within the Spartan constraints of Section 59. My friends doubtless thought me somewhat immoderate, but the experiment intrigued me. It was a good project for the curious. Here's what happened: when I kept my new Sabbath, I mean, really kept, that I didn't get up and plan what it was going to be like, I did that on Saturday, I had it framed out. When I kept my new Sabbath, I became smarter, less distracted by trivia or annoyance, and more attuned to wonder, worship other people, and the things that matter most because of the Sabbath, my prayers changed. At times it seems like the prayer, like the day, became prayer, not wholly on my knees, but centered on listening, attention, service, and an inner celebration of life and trust and freedom. Although I continued to plead with the Lord, sometimes I did so with a near absolute proviso of “Thy will be done,” more aware that my own will, untethered from God's will, is apparel. Hence I came to pray less for what I want than to be open to what already surrounds me, to see the Lord's hand in all things, and to make more room for the privilege of being, of abiding, of choosing. I seem better able to detect those in need and how I might act in allegiance with them, and to better detect others who are not so much in need as they are people to be revered and learn from. I saw human beings better when I was in Sabbath mode. Because of the Sabbath, my awareness quickened. This is important, and it didn't come from Pharisaic thou shalt nots. It didn't emerge from, don't do this and don't do that, and only walk too many steps, and you can or can't watch a football game. It just was, I'm going to only do these four things, and every one that I listed already, and every action I take is going to be an oblation, an old-fashioned word, a devotion to God. Every person I meet, I'm going to see God and Christ in them. Because of the Sabbath, my awareness quickened to some unceasing invitation to and from God or to and from eternity. Moments of the day began to feel like a portal, a beckoning to something wider and something finer. My capacity for joy expanded despite a simultaneously enlarged compassion for the world's ails. In this frame of mind, it seemed I was taking in more reality on this day, more color, more nuance sound, more texture, more possibility, more prompting, more education, more love, and more awe, more wonder.

Last paragraph, and then I’d better wrap up, because Chronos presses.

How was all this so? How was it possible? What I just experienced, the enhanced aliveness, strange but simple, became possible because the new Sabbath made more psychological and spiritual space in which I could operate. It made more time, as it were, to apprehend what was all about me, unhurried and unbored. I wasn't trying to use time or solve a problem with time or check things off or prepare things during the day, so much as I was noticing them, being among them, marveling at them, and responding as Scripture describes, with thanksgiving and cheerful hearts and countenances. When steeped in such gratitude as this, I found I was full of grace, more conscious of the giftedness of all things, including each breath; this, in turn, spawned joy. Ironically, this kind of joy deepened when fasting, just as the Doctrine and Covenants section 59 suggests, oddly to my little boy self, you're going to try to persuade me that this fasting gig is bringing me joy, that's what happened, too. The abstention from stomach comfort freed me for heightened attention to my experiment and to an alliance with those in want. It also brought a sense of empowerment; I was capable of pausing the ordinary world.

Now I've got to skip a few things and see if I can end I'll end with this last page.

I found by keeping a radical Sabbath, and radical, as some of you would know, does not mean in its history and its origins, it does not mean extreme, that's a derivative sense we have, but rather radical means to get at the root, like a radish, a root of a vegetable or an idea, is a radical one. I sought to craft for myself, or to yield to the Divine, to a radical Sabbath, D&C, 59 with its biblical background, because the word doesn't really mean to rest, by the way, Sabbath comes from ceasing, which is letting go of not hammock rest, or certainly not vacation rest. I found that the Sabbath speaks. I found in the Sabbath a way to respond better to President Nelson's challenge to all of us. How do you hear him? I found that if I shut up with my consciousness and the chatter of the planning and the next things and the check-offs, not imprisonment, but rather freedom from the anxieties and diversions of the ordinary world, and I could hear the voice of God better and answer President Nelson accordingly. Among the ways I hear him is the Sabbath day, so I titled the chapter that spreads this out a little bit more in the book Radical Sabbath Acoustics, you can hear better. By radical, I do not mean fanatical. I think of fanatical as a person, a fanatic as a person who doubles their speed when they've lost their way. A Sabbath is the opposite of that, a radical Sabbath is slowing, tempering your speed so you can find your way.

To end, the time is the zeroth principle of the gospel that can go beyond this little biopsy I've suggested of the Sabbath to every gospel principle, and it can yield superpowers, so I'll leave you with those thoughts. You can change the past, and you have just enough time, and time is pliable and malleable, and you can help with the malleablizing. There are superpowers, including hearing God in time, on the Sabbath. Agency is a mirage, apart from mastery of a certain class of time, and we all suffer from a time wound of various sorts, some of which we have touched on today. How we think about the Millennium can hurt us and create an image of a vengeful, unforgiving, implacable God who, and it can prove Marx right. Errant religion can be the opiate of the people, and it constrained faith people who are waiting for Jesus to come all the way back in biblical times and sometimes some people in every century since, and it can create not common serenity and peace, as section 59 suggests we will, but a state of chronic urgency, like our Hanover College students and again, anxious generation, including me, that's not a healthy way to live. That's a little glimpse of the weird way I put it time is the zero principle of the gospel.

It's a pleasure to be with you when I say unusual things like this about time, I'm loath to casually say in the name of Jesus Christ, amen, because, again, I'm just a kid from bountiful so I am going to end in the name of Jesus Christ, meaning, I hope these things stimulate some thoughts for how to be a better disciple, a more effective and more joyful disciple, even if Barlow was wrong about X or Y, it may stimulate thought because you are required by divine commandment to be creative and not to be commanded in all things, but to exercise creativity and agency. So go forth, my friends and do that. Thank you.

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