Philip Barlow Wonder of Scripture Lecture

Steve, thanks. Friends, I’m so glad to be with you today. Thanks for friendship with Terryl and for his words, and I’m 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 full 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 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.

Ravi said, “I’d be so glad to come down there and meditate on that title.”

We think of “the wonder of scripture” variously. JB had a fertile phrase, and it’s given me a little thought. Within scripture, “wonder” sometimes betokens curiosity, and at other times astonishment or awe, or it refers to miracles—as in “signs and wonders.” We can also find wonder provoked by scripture itself: its character, its oddities as we may see them, its puzzles, or its transcendent themes—such as the reorienting language of the Sermon on the Mount, or the portrayal of a Messiah capable of speaking about forgiveness while impaled on his instrument of torture.

Or we may find, as I have in this series earlier this semester and last, wonder at some thoughtful scholar unpacking and illuminating a single passage in such a way that Oz turns emerald instead of black and white. I’ve lived with 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 yet remain unseen and unnamed. Or perhaps they remain unseen because they are unnamed. There are phenomena or principles in the world, in scripture, and in our modern gospel life that have no name and yet are pervasive. Because of that, we have little way to identify or ponder them. One of these is time.

Time Is Strange

I used to teach at Hanover College, as Terryl mentioned—a beautiful little private place in southern Indiana. 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. Some did, and most did by the time they were through, but not all at first.

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 to me that many roads in that conversation led to time.

So I eventually spun off a course called Religion and the Concept of Time.

I’m not going to talk this morning—nor am I actually equipped to do so at a high professional level—about esoteric time or technical time: the sort of time that physicists lead us into when we talk about time-space and gravity, bending space-time like a bowling ball on a mattress. I’m not equipped to teach that. I’d be your fellow student in that subject.

But I’m thinking about time through the lens of discipleship.

The little book in the Maxwell Institute’s Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants 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 time.

And time is strange. Have you noticed?

I don’t mean the kind of time when you’re late, or when you forget your grandmother’s birthday. I mean Time with a capital T—a concept that one might study like chemistry or physics: a phenomenon, a mystery, a thing.

It’s strange. And Nephi’s successor, Jacob, found it so. Toward the end of his short little book in the Book of Mormon, he laments his hard life. He’s sad, old, and 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, “and the time passed away, and our lives passed away like unto us as 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. Around your age, you begin to experience what I call the collapse of time. You recognize that what once seemed long now passes rapidly. Your sense of time evolves.

Augustine also found time strange. In my night dreams I sometimes trace genealogies, and I was tracing one the other day and learned that Terryl Givens is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Augustine. Maybe it was a dream.

Around the year 400, Augustine had a crisis—a time crisis. He noticed, “I know what time is if no one asks me about it. But if someone asks me about it, I don’t know—it’s too hard to explain. And also… what the heck is it?”

“The past doesn’t exist except in memory,” he reasoned. “The future doesn’t exist except in anticipation. And the present—well, by the time you say the word ‘present,’ the first syllable is already past. The present exists, but it has no duration.”

So—when am I?

That’s not the kind of question most people, except philosophers or Latter-day Saints, go after. But Augustine puzzled and puzzled, and out of it came a new genre of writing and thinking: autobiography.

He concluded, “I don’t know where I am. The present doesn’t have any extension. The past doesn’t exist. The future doesn’t exist.” So he called himself into being. He wrote the first autobiography with real inner reflection—examining what it means to be human. He didn’t always get everything right.

Many college students also find time strange and threatening. Back at Hanover, in that class on Religion and the Concept of Time, I invited students to do creative projects instead of standard papers.

One young woman decided to survey her classmates. Her first question: “What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say time?”

Here are the first twenty responses she received:

• Stress.
• Intense.
• Hourglass.
• Goes fast.
• Schedules.
• Stress.
• Always going.
• Never enough.
• Calendar.
• Wasted.
• Stress.
• Stress.
• Restriction.
• Chases us.
• Clock.
• Goes fast.
• Awe
• 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 is just three things:

1. A brief comment on what the gospel is about—that might frame our considerations. We all know what it’s about—sort of—but that can go awry and we get amnesiac about what it’s about sometimes.
2. I’d like to offer an outrageous proposition: that time is the zeroeth principle of the gospel.
3. I’d like to have us ask together the question we should all ask after every class or lecture we attend: So what?

1. What is the Gospel For?

So, what is the gospel for? Sometimes the gospel we carry in our heads is too small. We think of it—maybe unconsciously—as obeying lists of rules, going to church, doing all the stuff we do at church, making covenants, having authority, and presiding the heck out of things.

Thought of this way, many people lose a sense of the relevance of the gospel to their lives—and they fade, to our lament, from our midst. So, it helps 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 and Covenants 88 tells us we must learn “things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth;” 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 after us—“shall give thee 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. God is purely good, as I understand God, but He’s 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:

1. Our relationship with God;
2. Second, like unto it, our relationship with one another;
3. Our relationship with our oft-broken, very complex selves;
4. Our relationship with time; and
5. Our relationship with the external world, however we can access it—by thought and reflection and talking and depending. This last is not very popular in today’s America—dependence upon serious experts: serious thinkers, philosophers, scholars, scientists, etc. But the gospel is all about that—it’s about relationships.

2. The Zeroeth Principle of the Gospel

Second, an outrageous proposition: time is the zeroeth principle of the gospel. I made up the “zeroeth” affair to signal that I recognize this is an unofficial proposition—or rather, 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.

I also want to assert that time undergirds and interacts with every other gospel principle—hence its zeroeth status. This is obvious for some principles that have time-laden names: prophecy; preexistence; vicarious work for the dead; the Millennium; birth; death. But I want to go further and say that time applies to all gospel principles—even the first principles.

Faith is a time-soaked concept. We’re counseled to have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, whom we’ve never met in the flesh, who lived thousands of years ago, whose biography is actually quite obscure and hard to get at and nail down. (One “biography” doesn’t exist in our modern sense—certainly not in the Gospels.) We’re also asked to have faith in things before Creation, and far into the future. We’re invited to have faith unto repentance—or other actions.

And 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—it’s a profound reconciliation of the past and the present. And baptism: we could have handed out certificates or stars on our foreheads to show that we’re disciples and members of the Church now, but we do this ritual patterned after death, burial, and new birth. Those are time things.

Then we receive confirmation and are blessed with the Holy Ghost in a different way, and we renew those covenants in the sacrament, which concludes with the astounding promise “that they may always have his Spirit to 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 bit: if faith and repentance are the first principles of the gospel—when Joseph Smith explained that to a newspaper editor, trying to get across some general beliefs about what “Mormonism,” as it was then called, consisted of—he said, “We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are…” But when I was being raised, over local and general pulpits I heard that obedience was the first law of heaven. Obedience traces its original meaning back not to obeying little checklists so much as to 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 first principles, he ended up with faith, hope, and love (or charity, as rendered in the KJV)—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 out on top. And what about agency? Can we even have love or faith if we don’t have the agency to choose them?

So when Joseph wrote to that newspaper editor—Mr. Wentworth—did he mean “first principles” in a necessary chronology? Or did he mean first principles like, “These are the things that aren’t going to offend you; we won’t get into the wilder doctrines”? Was he orienting the public? Or did he mean first in importance? What I think is: our principles are not so time-laden that they’re sequential; rather, they exist as a constellation—more like a molecule than an atom.

3. The Sabbath: Time in Conversation with a Gospel Principle

Third and finally, I want to take a little example 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 wrote. 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 ten or so more minutes. I invite you to not commit the sin of being bored (which is a time-laden theme that misses the mark). Our culture isn’t very good at this; we have a shrunken attention span; we have people in our ear. So hang in there for ten or twelve minutes.

The Bible has a lot to say about the Sabbath, but we don’t consider it very much. We remember that God rested on the seventh day, so we should too—but the Old Testament actually gives a number of reasons for why we commemorate the Sabbath. The Doctrine and Covenants seems to take the Bible for granted throughout; but there are only eight or nine verses in the entire Doctrine and Covenants about the Sabbath, all concentrated in Section 59 (except for a passing reference elsewhere, such as D&C 68:29). Do those few verses signal it isn’t important? I’ve come to think it’s just the opposite.

Here’s the gist of it. Verses 9–16 of Section 59 seem clear, consequential, and blessedly simple. “In order to remain unspotted from the world, and to receive the gifts promised”—Sabbath is a time thing. Everything that follows is a time thing, because Sabbath is a day, but it’s not reducible to a square on the calendar. Sabbath is a philosophy in the form of time—an ambience in the guise of time.

Doctrine and Covenants 59 tells us—an anxious, frenetic, hurried, and lonely generation—that in order to receive (that’s us listening), we should—with thanksgiving and cheerful hearts—do four things and four things only on the Lord’s day:

1. Rest from our labors;
2. Go to the house of prayer;
3. Offer up sacraments, vows, and oblations (confessing our sins); and
4. Prepare our food with singleness of heart.

“Do none other thing,” saith 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.

A Radical Experiment

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 afterworld; 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.

What Happened

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 seemed 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 seemed 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 reverenced and learned from. I saw human beings better when I was in Sabbath mode.

Because of the Sabbath, my awareness quickened.

This is important. It didn’t come from Pharisaic thou shalt nots. It didn’t emerge from don’t-do-this, don’t-do-that, or how many steps you could walk, or whether you could watch a football game.

It came from one simple decision: I’m only going to do these four things, and every action that I take is going to be an oblation—a devotion to God. Every person I meet, I will try to see God and Christ in them.

Because of the Sabbath, my awareness quickened to an unceasing invitation—to and from God, to and from eternity.

Moments of the day began to feel like a portal, a beckoning to something wider and finer.

My capacity for joy expanded—despite a simultaneously enlarged compassion for the world’s ails.

In this frame of mind, I seemed to take in more reality on that day: more color, more nuance, more sound, more texture, more possibility, more prompting, more education, more love, more awe—or wonder.

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

How was all this so? How was it possible?

A “Radical” Sabbath

What I experienced—the enhanced aliveness—was strange but simple. It 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 time, or check things off during the day, so much as I was noticing things, being among them, marveling at them, and responding—as scripture describes—with thanksgiving and cheerful hearts and countenances.

When steeped in such gratitude, 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 Doctrine and Covenants 59 suggests. Oddly, to my little-boy self, I once thought, “You’re going to try to persuade me that this fasting gig is bringing me joy?” But that’s exactly what happened.

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 that by keeping a radical Sabbath—and “radical,” as some of you may know, does not mean “extreme.” That’s a derivative sense we’ve given it. The root meaning of radical is to get at the root, as in a radish—a root vegetable.

So I sought to craft for myself, or rather to yield to the divine, a radical Sabbath—a Sabbath rooted in Doctrine and Covenants 59 and its biblical background.

The word “Sabbath,” by the way, doesn’t really mean rest—not hammock rest, and certainly not vacation rest. It comes from ceasing—letting go.

And 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, the next things, the checklists—it wasn’t imprisonment. It was freedom. Freedom from the anxieties and diversions of the ordinary world.

And I could hear the voice of God better—and thus answer President Nelson accordingly.

Among the ways I hear Him is through the Sabbath day.

So I titled the chapter that explores this idea in my book, “Radical Sabbath Acoustics.”

You can hear better.

By radical I do not mean fanatical. I think of a fanatic as someone who doubles their speed when they’ve lost their way.

A Sabbath is the opposite of that. A radical Sabbath is the slowing and tempering of your speed so you can find your way.

To end: If time is the zeroeth principle of the gospel, then it can go beyond this little biopsy of the Sabbath to touch every gospel principle.

And it can yield superpowers.

Conclusion

So, I’ll leave you with those thoughts. You can change the past. You have just enough time. Time is pliable and malleable—and you can help with the malleasizing. There are superpowers, including hearing God in time, especially on the Sabbath. Agency itself 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’ve touched on today.

How we think about the Millennium can also hurt us, if we imagine a vengeful, unforgiving, implacable God—that view can prove Marx right—that “religion is the opiate of the people.” Errant religion can indeed lull people into waiting—waiting for Jesus to come back, as some did even in biblical times, and as some have done in every century since.

And it can create not serenity and peace, as Section 59 suggests we should have, but a state of chronic urgency like my Hanover College students—an anxious generation, including me. That’s not a healthy way to live.

So that’s a little glimpse of the weird way I put it: time is the zeroeth principle of the gospel.

And speaking of time, maybe we’re out of it. Who’s the boss here? Kristian, are you the boss? I think we are out of time and that means I blew it because we wanted to questions but I’m a bad person. When I say unusual things like this about time, I’m loath to casually end “in the name of Jesus Christ,” because, again, I’m just a kid from Bountiful.

So I am going to end in the name of Jesus Christ—meaning that I hope these things stimulate some thoughts about how to be a better disciple: a more effective, more joyful disciple.

Even if Barlow was wrong about X or Y, I hope it stimulates your 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.

Download the transcript here.