Jared Halverson Wonder of Scripture Lecture

Transcript

Jared Halverson: Thank you Kim, and thank you all for being here, even those that are here just to get extra credit in your religion classes. I lost a lot of sleep over the last few days in preparing for this. I hope that you don't make up that sleep for me in the next few minutes. I prefer the title “Brother” over “Professor.” I prefer lessons over lectures. I prefer firesides over conferences. I would rather prepare and teach rather than write and read. But in honor of the Maxwell Institute, and knowing that this is a lecture I wrote and I will read, but either way, it's an honor to be associated in any way with this institute as it's my second favorite thing, named after Elder Neal Maxwell. The first is my eldest son, whose middle name was an obvious choice, largely because my wife loves Elder Maxwell even more than she loves me, which might be a problem, or it not for the fact that I agree with her. I once spent so much time in this library creating a compilation of elder Maxwell talks that by the time I was finished, my wife had called the police to report a missing person. When they suggested that I was probably just hanging out with friends, my wife responded in panic, “He doesn't have any friends!”

Thankfully, then and now, I have a few more friends than my wife gives me credit for, but admittedly, many of them I've never met in person, only on the page. Ours is a bookish bond, but that is anything but a fictional friendship. The friends I've made in Scripture, for example, have influenced me as deeply as any living relationship, and it is that living, relational and transformative influence that to me, constitutes and even crowns “The Wonder of Scripture.” As I'll argue today, without that type of wonder, it wouldn't be scripture at all. We'll zoom in on scriptural wonder in a moment, but first, allow me to zoom out on the wonder of reading. Perhaps, like you, I choose books to read based on the worlds I inhabit, or is it the other way around, my books creating my worlds? Does my to do list determine my book list? Or is my library card a passport transporting me to places that no longer feel foreign. Like travel, reading creates reality and not through instruction, but by immersion. I ranged across Middle Earth long before meeting Tolkien. I entered Narnia through the wardrobe, not Lewis's life or letters. Even having grown up in the church, with bishops to guide me through all of life's stages, one of the priesthood's profoundest impressions came from a bishop I borrowed. From Jean Valjean, who called me to conduct a one-man neighborhood food drive my sophomore year of college, just by stuffing silver candlesticks into a convict's bulging sack.

Knowing my love of literature, my well read, eldest daughter gave me a book for Christmas, and knowing my love hate relationship with the comic iconoclasm of Mark Twain, she chose one that could not have been written without him. The book is called James, written by Percival Everett, and the titular character is none other than Jim, the escaped slave that Huckleberry Finn is not Christian enough to turn in. In Everett's imaginative rendering Twain's gym only sounds uneducated because he's smart enough to know that the better whites feel, the safer blacks are. He makes sure his children know that self-effacement is key to self-preservation. Taking great pains to train them in what he calls situational translation, in which they lower their language to the level their masters had come to expect far more than Jim the slave, James was, in fact, a master at least of the art he was teaching to his children. His term for it is fascinating, situational translation, the act of translating inner thoughts into an outer vocabulary more in keeping with the understanding, or in this case, the misunderstanding, of a particular audience, in terms of the racism that defined James' social position. This meant reducing elevated expression to the lower level of a culturally constructed slave speak more in keeping with the assumptions, indeed, the enforceable expectations of Jim's supposed superiors. Situational translation is new to people familiar with Jim's antebellum America, but the concept should not be new to students of the scriptures.

For those familiar with the principle of divine accommodation, situational translation, includes God's willingness to speak after the manner of our language, instead of his. An act of condescension in which he stoops to the level of weak servants that they might come to understanding. Yet there is more to this than placing heavenly treasure in earthen vessels as the incarnation of Christ would suggest. As we are learning from deeper digs into Joseph Smith's miraculous processes of scriptural production, translation has more meanings than one. Yes, it can mean to render into another language, which is the sixth of seven definitions in Webster's 1828 American Dictionary, but far higher on Webster's list is translation’s ability to bear, to carry, to remove from one place to another. That's his first definition, or more specifically, it's power to remove or convey to heaven as a human being without death. That's his second definition. This is the sense we use when we speak of translated beings, and it is in this sense that I want to wrestle with the concept of situational translation. As I see it, not only does the concept capture what God is doing when he gives us scripture, it tells us what we must do to fully receive it. In the case of James the slave, situational translation was a re rendering of words, but in the case of James the novel, it was a repositioning of people.

Percival Everett imaginatively entered a world first created by Mark Twain, and he invites his readers to do likewise. We are brought into the lived experience of Huck Finn and his old friend Jim, who we finally see as a very different James. In other words, we are translated or moved into their situation. What's more, such situational translation allows for an act of situational creation as well. In Everett's case, once he'd been translated into Twain's created world, he could continue Twain's creative act, making for Jim a world in which a slave could utter his own Magnificat. Even more importantly, this creation, born of translation, not only changed life retroactively along the 19th century Mississippi, but has the potential to affect life proactively in the racially charged situations of our day. How might recent history have been different if we looked at people like Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery or the black worshipers at Emmanuel AME Church, not as two dimensional gems, but as a James worthy of profound recognition?

Percival Everett's creative acts of situational translation are truly moving emotionally, yes, but also temporal spatially, he moves us to another time and place that is in order to change us before we head back into the present. Without that change, no real translation has occurred. We haven't occupied that world long enough or deep enough to want to change our own for that to happen, we'll need to feel the throbbing in our own leg when Jim, when James, is suffering from the snake bite. We'll need to spend a few sleepless nights worrying about our own children still in chains, somehow, imaginatively, emotionally, vicariously, I'll have to look down at my soft white hands and see the black, calloused hands of James, my twin brother. That is reading a book. That is allowing the words to be made flesh. Or perhaps you didn't know I was here to talk about Scripture.

As John begins his gospel, so we begin our understanding of how to study it with the word that awaits us in the beginning of any spiritual endeavor, a word that lets us be with God and makes us more like God. To do all that the word, as in Jesus, had to be made flesh first to dwell among us, or in our case, we have to dwell in the word as in Scripture and imprint it on our living flesh. We must wrap ourselves in Scripture the way Jesus wrapped our injured flesh around his perfect premortal spirit. We must clothe ourselves in the canon, an endowment of power from every page. This would be situational translation of the highest order, and by being translated into the Word of God, we can translate that word back into our world. In short, we can open the book, enter the page, and come back different.

But before we try that here, let's take the idea of situational translation from Percival Everett and add it to a concept from Kenneth Burke, one of the leading lights of mid 20th century rhetorical studies. Unlike his peers reaching as far back as Aristotle, Burke defined rhetoric less as persuasion and more as identification, which he felt was a better term for what rhetorical acts are trying to accomplish. Coming from a Latin that means “to advise,” suadēre, through to completion, “per” to “per-suede” is to successfully induce someone to agree with you, typically, by appealing to reason. To identify, meanwhile, suggests not only one sense of identity, but one that is essentially identical to that of someone else. Sameness and oneness are inherent in the term. In the mid 17th century, identification involved treating one thing as the same as another, and by the mid 19th century, it had taken on the psychological sense of becoming or feeling oneself, one with another.

That unified sense of self is what Burke held to be the name of rhetoric, a convincing and converting that emphasizes the calm the with at the heart of true agreement, a motivating connection occurs between speaker and hear in which they find common ground, or ideally, a common identity seen in this way, rhetoric is not as unidirectional and propositional as mere persuasion might imply, rather, it is cooperative and relational, emotive and empathetic and deeply experiential throughout. A phrase that Burke uses to capture this oneness of rhetorical identification is of particular interest to us here. He calls it a doctrine of consubstantiality. The theological resonance of this term is unavoidable, invoked in Trinitarian contexts to describe the oneness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Consubstantiality denotes an identity of substance despite a difference of aspect, a three that is essentially one in rhetorical terms. Burke invokes a similar sense of shared identity that outweighs difference, this time between speaker and hearer, between writer and reader a way of life is in acting together, Burke argues, and in acting together, men and women have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas and attitudes that make them consubstantial. Jesus said it far more simply: Be one, and if ye are not one, ye are not mine. Even when he spoke of persuasion, he couched it in terms which we identify with the character of Christ and thus want to identify with ourselves, long suffering, gentleness, meekness, love unfeigned. Under such influence, I am not persuaded against my will. Rather, my will is swallowed up in the will of one with whom I instinctively wish to identify. This level of identification with God and with others is what situational translation hopes to accomplish and what Scripture is meant to engender.

No wonder Jesus taught in parables. Stories draw us in presenting us with characters with whom we identify. We are translated into situations that alter our reality and inspire us to alter the reality to which we return. Scripture is an open door to substitutionary experience, to vicarious encounter, to identification with God and neighbor. It is consubstantiality made possible by words made living flesh. “Go and do thou likewise,” is a standing invitation to all who identify with its words.

So what of the wonder of scripture? Hopefully, the threads of my argument are starting to knit instead of fray. So ask yourself, first, is my experience in Scripture an act of situational translation? Am I transported into the text and changed by my time there? Second, do I sense my own consubstantiality with the people I meet within scripture? Do I identify with them in ways that help me identify with God? This might help explain the reliance of Nephi, “Mr. I glory and plainness,” on the writings of Isaiah, “Mr. I glory and something else.” In some ways, the rhetorical construction couldn't be more different. Yet their rhetorical identification makes them consubstantial in wonderful ways. Nephi’s soul delighted in Isaiah’s words precisely because those words mirrored Nephi other soul deep delights: the covenants of the Lord, His grace, justice, power and mercy, the truth of the coming of Christ, introducing his longest insertion of Isaiah, Nephi uses words like prove, proveth, and proving four times to describe why he is calling Isaiah to the witness stand. Yet this was not the proof of empirical persuasion that Isaiah supplied. Rather it was the pull of scriptural identification made possible through imagery and symbolism that was emotionally evocative and rhetorically resonant. As Nephi affirmed in his first invocation of Isaiah, Mr. Prose was enlisting Mr. Poetry to more fully persuade us to believe in the Lord our Redeemer. And this would happen not simply by reading Isaiah's words, but rather by likening them, a term Nephi and Jacob use repeatedly when drawing on Isaiah's rhetorical gifts. Again, mere reading would be woefully inadequate. With scripture we must enter into its imagery and identify with its transformative intent. We must learn to liken if scripture is ever to be for our profit and learning. Only then, wrote Nephi, can we truly have hope, lift up our hearts and rejoice for all men. And that seems to be what Scripture is for, when stated in most practical terms, joy for the journey, no matter how daunting the path.

Depending on the chosen metaphor, Scripture is manna, the sweet and satisfying daily bread that nourishes us through our wilderness wanderings. It is the Liahona, an object of curious workmanship, that guides us to the more fertile parts of our path. Scripture is thus both direction and provision, pointing us homeward and sustaining us until we arrive. To repeat the pairing with Lehi’s help, scripture is the iron rod which leads to the tree, but in a way, it is inseparable from the tree of life itself, with the incomparable fruit we feast on once we get there. Consider Nephi’s visionary rendering in which the tree is the love of God, which “sheddeth” itself abroad into the hearts of the children of men. The language of shedding abroad suggests a scattering of the tree's healing leaves, a generous distribution of its incomparable fruit, or, in keeping with Nephi prophetic vision, an extension of its beckoning branches. After all, as Nephi saw it, while the iron rod did lead to the tree from the perspective of those at a distance, it originally extended out from the tree, as exemplified in the ministry of Jesus. When envisioning Christ's condescension, Nephi sees the Son of God going forth among the children of men the tree reaching out all around it. Nephi then sees that the Lamb of God went forth to be baptized, and then went forth again, ministering unto the people. He later saw the Lamb of God going forth among the children of men yet again, to heal the sick, cast out devils, and comfort all who were afflicted.

Looking further into the future, Nephi similarly sees a book that is carried forth among the Gentiles, one that oceeded forth from the Jews to spread the fullness of the gospel of the Lord. Fifteen times in that portion of his vision, Nephi promises the extension of God's word into the world. It is carried forth. It proceeds forth. It will go forth. God will bring it forth. It will come forth with the help of those who seek to bring forth “my Zion” at the last day. Emphatically, Nephi is seeing that through Christ's mortal ministry and through the scriptures that contain his living word, the love of God would go forth into a world in desperate need of it, and the tree of life would extend in every direction. Book like branches, twig-like texts, reaching out like rods of iron as far as the eye could see, as a canopy under which all can find shelter. As the book of Proverbs says of the wisdom found in God's Word, she is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her. So when we lay hold upon the iron rod, we're taking the outstretched hand of God, that is situational translation into the all-encompassing love of God. That is rhetorical identification with the one who reaches out to us with His Word. Again, that is the wonder of scripture, and without that wonder, it isn't really scripture, at least not to us.

That last point is key, and to make it, I'll need the help of another writer. So alongside Percival Everett and Kenneth Burke, allow me to introduce you to Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Part Presbyterian minister, part Harvard Islamicist, Smith attempted to give scriptures something no one knew it needed a definition. As he observed on close inquiry, it emerges that being scripture is not a quality inherent in a given text or type of text, so much as an interactive relation between that text and a community of persons. Scripture is a bilateral term. It inherently implies, in fact, it names a relationship. That relationship is one of speaker and hearer, of writer and reader or reader and person being read. Ultimately, it is giver and receiver and without both parties participating, without both identifying, the relationship ceases to exist. Scripture ceases to exist. Thus, what is sacred scripture to one group is to others mere myth or tall tale, ancient literature at best and the stuff of Broadway musicals at worst, skeptics take all the world's religions and discard their texts as disparate delusions, blind to what Huston Smith called the winnowed wisdom of the world. We must do like otherwise, continuing to infuse meaning into the scriptures by infusing the scriptures into our lives. We can do the same as or we can do as Alma commanded Helaman to keep all these things sacred, which is not the same as merely keeping all these sacred things. In the latter construction, the sacredness is inherent in the things, but in Alma’s actual phrase, the sacredness was maintained, maintained by the keepers, keepers who did all within their power to help the scriptures retain their brightness, even small and simple things that others might consider foolish. As Smith put it, people a given community, make a text into scripture or keep it scripture by treating it in a certain way.

I want to speak more about the way of treating scripture in a moment, but first allow me to speak more personally about Wilfred Cantwell Smith, almost single handedly, he changed the trajectory of my own approach to Scripture when I stumbled across an article he had written a few years before I was born in reading it during graduate school, I was born again, at least as a student of Scripture. For it identified, and I identified with a perspective on scripture that I had long felt personally, but had never seen expressed academically, titled The Study of Religion and The Study of the Bible, it helped turn the library at the Vanderbilt Divinity School into an academic waters of Mormon. For there, I came to a knowledge of the type of “scriptorian” God wanted me to be. Without me even asking it to. It validated the past and outlined the future of my personal, pastoral and professional study of the Scriptures. Not bad for nine and a half pages. The article begins by describing the kind of religion department that Smith department that Smith considered worthy of the name, picturing a particular type, of course, that would be concerned with the Bible as scripture. Such a suggestion seems unnecessary at first. Of course, a religion department would study the Bible, but it's the last two words, “as scripture,” that demand our attention. For approaching the Bible in that way would indeed affect the course's content. What is it about the Bible that makes it scripture rather than some other type of ancient literature? What brings it into the homes of millions when most texts from that time interest only scholars or museum goers? Rather than historical artifact? What makes it a living force in the life of the church?

To answer these questions, or more accurately, to emphasize them, Smith turned to the Quran, which was one of his specialties, but did so to draw attention to the Bible, which he feared was being pigeon holed in academic circles. Studied deeply, to be sure, but not as broadly as It deserved if it were truly seen as scripture. To summarize his argument, he wondered why Quranic studies seemed to focus almost exclusively on 7th century Arabia, when the book was just as important in 15th century Spain or 20th century Indonesia. The attempt to understand the Quran he wrote is to understand how it has fired the imagination, and inspired the poetry, and formulated the inhibitions, and guided the ecstasies, and teased the intellect and nurtured the piety of hundreds of millions of people in widely diverse climbs and over a series of radically divergent centuries. Then drawing the parallel Smith turns to the Bible, through which people have found not merely ancient history, but present salvation, not merely Jesus, but Christ, not merely literature, but God, as millions attest. Consequently, Biblical studies must not confine itself to post exilic Palestine or the first century meditating Mediterranean world. The Bible was just as important in Luther’s 16th century Germany, or the 19th century America of Joseph Smith. Now, what concerned the later Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, was how the Bible was studied, which tended to end, end too early or begin too late. Bracketing out the stage when the book was actual scripture, as he later wrote, historical criticism explores the Bible's pre-scriptural phase, and literary criticism focuses on the post scriptural phase that emerged in a secular post-enlightenment. But the texts role in human life as scripture, rich, complex and powerful was during the long centuries in between. Furthermore, he added, it is not yet over. For Smith, the Bible's real life was its afterlife, a fitting concept concerning considering its contents, the life it began leadig after it came to be seen as scripture. In Smith's view, as important as it is to study what went into the Bible, it is just as important to explore what came out of it. As Smith passionately urged by all means, let us know how it became, but let us study further how and what it went on becoming.

What Smith's article did for me was offer a choice as to what kind of scriptural scholar I could become. Some study the world that created the Bible, others study the worlds the Bible creates. Smith's article delineated the three worlds of Scripture and called attention and needed commendation to the oft neglected third. The three worlds of Scripture are the world behind the text, the world within or of the text and the world in front of the text. The first deals with all that went into the Bible's creation, its preexistence, so to speak. The second focuses on the text itself, exploring its structure, symbolism and style. The third encompasses the ongoing influence of Scripture, how it has been interpreted by subsequent generations, and, yes, how it has inspired them through it. All these three worlds can be distinguished in other ways as well. Whereas the first is author and editor focused, the second is text based, and the third revolves around the reader. The first is approached historically and culturally. The second, textually and literally, the third, theologically and homiletically. In terms of biblical criticisms, sub subcategories the first world relies on source form, redaction, and historical. The Second World employs literary genre, textual, and rhetorical. The third is home to canonical criticism, reader, reception history, theological interpretation, and the history of hermeneutics. Admittedly, such compartmentalization minimizes the overlap and interplay between these three worlds. So flexibility is needed throughout, and not just flexibility, but synergy. This is the final point I wish to make. So let me state it clearly.

For the academic study of scripture to honor its subject as scripture. Scripture's three separate worlds must undergo a planetary alignment, and it is the third world, not the first, that must set the course. Were it not scripture, this ordering would not be necessary. As an artifact the Bible as history would be adequate. As a textual object the Bible as literature would be ideal. But as a contemporary agent and activating symbol, those are Wilfred Kent Will Smith's words, the Bible as scripture must be the perspective of choice. Yes, it must take into full consideration its historical formation and its literary construction, but with an eye single to its ongoing influence in the world. The moment our eye loses sight of that, is the moment we cease seeing scripture.

I may have just opened a can of worms I don't have time today to clean up, but before I'm run out of town on a rail by my historical and literary superiors, allow me to say what I emphatically am not saying. I am not saying that the first and second worlds of Scripture are unnecessary or inferior. Rather, I am saying they are foundational, but as forerunner voices in the wilderness crying, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” They are signposts, not final destinations, and unless they help people progress in their journey to the Tree of Life, they are no longer rods of iron, but something else entirely. Jesus seems to have had something like this in mind when he told the self-styled “scriptorians” of his day that they searched the scriptures as if they were source instead of signpost. “In them ye think ye have eternal life,” he chided, “but they are they which testify of Me.” Nephi understood this and never confused his scriptural means with Christ's salvific ends. “Hearken unto these words,” he said, noting the importance of scripture, “but believe in Christ,” emphasizing the purpose for which he had written them. He even added, “And if you believe not, in these words, believe in Christ,” showing he clearly understood the difference. But do we? Do scriptural scholars understand that today? Or do we sometimes act like scribes that prize pages over people? Do we research mint and anise and cumin while emitting the weightier matters: judgment, mercy, faith that bless living people. Again, I'm not trying to minimize the first and second worlds of Scripture, far from it, but I am yoking them to a holier aim. To conclude the verse I started re-rendering, the third world of scripture, “ought we to have studied and not to leave the others unstudied.” Speaking of scribes, in one of the few passages in which Jesus actually says something positive about them. He envisioned a scribe who was instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven, and compared him to a man that is an householder which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old. Notice the scribe's orientation, not solely looking down at the text before him or back from whence it came. Rather, he seems to be looking forward having been directed unto the kingdom of heaven with that intention in forming his scribal duties. Of course, the treasures he discovered would be both new and old.

The old things would likely be deepened exegesis, but the new things would put those insights to work producing novel applications, relevant likening's, helpful to those who similarly needed to be instructed unto the kingdom of heaven. The Book of Mormon’s final scribe, Moroni, put the matter starkly when he compared the record to the plates, obviously both were related with the record impossible without the plates and the plates empty without the record. But Moroni clearly saw the hierarchy within this synergy. “The plates thereof are of no worth,” he said hyperbolically, “but the record thereof is of great worth,” because of what it would do for the children of men. The plates provided necessary means, but the record would accomplish ultimate ends. Seeing this distinction would have come naturally to Moroni, because, despite his presence in the past, the world behind the text, he clearly saw our present, the world in front of the text, and spoke directly to us the world within the text. “I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not,” though Moroni and his father, Mormon broke the fourth wall more explicitly than most, they were not alone in aligning the three textual worlds, with the third one determining their aim. Malachi was one of the ancient prophets who had his eye fixed on the latter-day work. Others died before receiving the promises, but saw them afar off. Jesus told his New Testament apostles that many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see and have not seen them, and he could say the same to each of us today. In relation to the first and second worlds of Scripture, the third has not come to destroy but to fulfill. It is present. The others are past. It is purpose. The others are process. It is helm. The others are anchor and sail. None should be emphasized in isolation. Instead, contrary should be proved so that truth can be made manifest. Just as scripture cannot survive as scripture without a continually continuing community to maintain its brightness. Neither can it survive without being firmly rooted in the soil that gave its gave it birth. Scripture must be a tree with both roots and branches, ancient fathers and latter-day children reciprocally turning hearts. Isogesis without exegesis is largely unfounded, but antiquarianism without application is largely irrelevant. So keep them both, learn to be ambidextrous, train to play both ways, or at the very least, link arms and approaches with other experts, something which the Maxwell Institute and the BYU religion faculty do beautifully. Depth perception will come by combining both perspectives, real study and true spirit must be one in our hand.

Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery learned this while translating the Book of Mormon, a record that bridges past and future, if ever there was one having studied ancient texts that spoke of baptism. They then turned to the Lord for current application, and they received it. What's more, they received priesthood ordination and baptismal ordinance, and with it a spirit they had not felt before. With that spirit, they prophesied many things which should shortly come to pass, past, informing present, inspiring future. With that they then reversed direction, returning to the ancient world, but with newfound eyes to see. And what did they see? Our minds being now enlightened, we began to have the scriptures laid open to our understandings and the true meaning and intention of their more mysterious passages revealed unto us in a manner which we could never attain to previously, nor ever before had thought of. By meaning and intention, we once again prove contrary. Meaning is set by the writer. Intention is embodied in the reader. Meaning is exegesis, intention is application. Meaning is found through critical analysis. Intention tells me what to do as a result. And what are we to do?

Channeling this spiritual pragmatism I learned from William James, but brought with me at birth, I say we serve. People extending rods of iron and thus trees of life in every direction. We theologize with Paul and Peter, but then like them, we preach and bless and heal. With Moses, we plunder the riches of Egypt to later make tabernacle furnishings. Excavating antiquities, but putting them to their holiest use. Like the writer of Hebrews, we study to become intimately acquainted with every rain drop in our scriptural cloud of witnesses, but then we let that living water pour until it washes away every weight. With that let me end where we began, with wonder.

Not the superficial wonder of curiosity, though that matters. Nor the academic wonder of discovery though that too has its place. Rather, I speak of the transformative wonder that occurs when we allow ourselves to be translated into scripture's sacred space. Identify deeply with those we meet there and return changed to a world in need of changing. This is the wonder that sees Mosiah's people as they beheld those that had been delivered out of bondage. It's the wonder that moved Alma to rewrite his life story after encountering Abinadi’s words. It's the wonder that caused Joseph and Oliver to see the scriptures laid open in unimaginable ways. In each case, the wonder arose not from historical excavation or literary analysis alone, though both proved essential, but from the Living encounter with scripture as scripture.

When we enter scripture's three worlds, properly aligned, grounded in history, attentive to text, but oriented toward application and transformation. We extend what Wilfred Cantwell Smith called scripture's incredible ongoing career. The past comes to life, not as artifact, but as invitation. The text opens not as literature, but as lifeline. And our present circumstances shine with new possibility, as we recognize in James' terms, the need for situational translation in our own time. How might we draw warring partners toward the Prince of Peace? How can we, like Nephi, liken ancient wisdom to present need? How shall we, like Mormon and Moroni, write and teach for future generations, we can see only through the eye of faith?

The answers lie not in choosing between scriptures words, but in connecting them. We must be as comfortable with archeology as with application, as fluent in historical criticism as in homiletical creativity. But we must never forget that the purpose of our study is not merely to understand ancient texts, but to be transformed by living scripture, and then to transform the world. With that call and calling in mind, I invite us all to become not just readers of Scripture, but inhabitants of its worlds and keepers of its gardens. May our study be deep but never divorced from purpose, may our analysis be rigorous but always oriented toward renewal. Above all, may our engagement with scripture be wonderful, full of the wonder that comes when Heaven touches Earth through sacred text, when ancient words become living flesh, when we find ourselves translated onto holy ground and return bearing fruit from the tree of life. For in the end, that is the wonder of Scripture, not that it exists, but that it persists. Not that it was written, but that it continues to write itself upon human hearts. Not that it was, but that it ever shall be. As long as we approach it as scripture, embrace it as scripture, and allow its transformative power to work in us and through us the wonders that God still has in store. May we be saints and scholars who keep scripture sacred by treating it so, who help it retain its brightness by polishing it with practice. For the wonder is scripture, and we are its witnesses in the name of Jesus, Christ, amen.

That was the intro. Honestly, there's a big part of me that wanted to spend the whole time just giving examples. When you are one on one with someone in desperate need, and drawing upon your cloud of witnesses, a prophetic speaker comes to mind and begins breathing life into the world. That, to me is the wonder of scripture. When I'm sitting across from a human being, and that's the whole world, and they're leaving the church, or struggling in their testimony, or wondering where God is, and you just pray that your cloud of witnesses will come to the rescue.

You need to know everything you can about scripture, because it gives the voice to everyone who is trapped inside these pages. You'll have your Book of Mormon section. You'll have your Old Testament section, well Old Testament Section is probably in the back, and Isaiah raises his hand almost every time, and you never call on him because you don't understand what he's talking about. There's the Doctrine and Covenant section, and there's Pearl of Great Price. And the better you know Scripture, the more the price you've paid to amass a stockpile of permanent principles. Then in the moment of need, the householder will step into the treasury and bring forth the exact treasure they need. That's what it's for. Yes, it's catalog of other people's revelations, but it's catalyst for your own. And if you will be one who brings the bread, it will multiply before your eyes, you will find finite text feeding the famished. As words are brought to your mind by the word, who wants to help someone.

I struggle with scholarship. I have an occupational hazard, and it's a low threshold for irrelevance. And unfortunately, scholarship often seems to dabble or delve or dive straight in to irrelevance. Forgive me if my pragmatism goes too far, but I just want to help people. I want to make sure when Jesus comes back, he finds faith on the earth. And this is the one tool I've got. And if I can study it, if I can understand it, if I can explore its back story, if I can identify if I can situationally translate myself to that time until it starts to make sense to me, and Isaiah seems to be speaking my native tongue. Then and only then, when I'm sitting down with someone a little closer to home, Isaiah can speak up. He can raise his hand in my cloud of witnesses, and I'll actually have the courage to call on him. That's why we need to know this. This is not academic. Interesting that that term has become pejorative for or for largely useless. “Well, that's just academic.” Can we make it pastoral? Can we make it real? To me, there's something powerful about bending the branches of the tree of life until it reaches anyone in the midst of darkness. I know a lot of people there, and as I sit down with them and hear their story, I'm desperately calling out for companions from the canon to come to their rescue and mine. This book was given for such a time as this, and I don't know a better place on the planet than here. For you to combine head and heart. For you to marry past and present. For you to immerse yourself in lowercase ‘w’ word, to come to know the capital Word. But you got to make it flesh. Again in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. Thank you.

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