Maxwell Institute Podcast #166: Is Baptism for the Dead or the Living? Featuring Ryan Tobler

Rosalynde Welch: Hello, Ryan Tobler, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Ryan Tobler: Thanks so much for the invitation. Glad to be here.

Welch: So Ryan, today we are talking about the living and we're talking about the dead. We're talking about the way the living and the dead are connected, not just through memories and emotions, but through acts, through ritual acts of rescue and of relief. In 2013, you published an article titled Saviors on Mount Zion. Mormon sacramentalism, mortality, and the baptism for the dead. So this article will be our springboard today talking about these issues and talking about the temple and baptisms for the dead in our own lives. Tell us a little bit about when you wrote this, what it meant to you at the time, and the questions that you were seeking to answer with this article.

Tobler: Right, so this, it's hard to believe, but this has been about a decade since, more than a decade since I started working on this topic. And then yes, published the article in 2013 in the journal Mormon history. Part of the impetus was my exposure as someone just sort of beginning to think about religious history and the study of religion was to a sort of school of scholarship called lived religion loosely that focused on some of the parts of religion that scholars had not at least scholars of American religious history hadn't given much attention. And one of those was the domain of practice, religious practice. So through a lot of the scholarship showed really interesting things about religious institutions and religious ideas and religious phenomena, social phenomena. But what some of these scholars pointed out was that we really don't know a great deal about what religious people actually did, how they did it, what it meant to them, and the sort of histories of those practices. And so I was kind of intrigued by this. I was aware of, you know, baptism for the dead as being a very distinctively Latter-day Saint practice. And I found in looking at the scholarship that had been done at that point, there was relatively little that had been done specifically on Latter-day Saint practices either. I cringe looking back at some elements of it because it was written while I was sort of wet behind the ears and still trying to figure out how to do the work of scholarship. But it's been really important, the themes that it surfaced, the kind of questions that it raised, turned out to be really critical for me going forward with my own scholarship and my discipleship too.

Welch: Tell us a little bit more about which of those themes have been most compelling to you as a scholar and also as a saint.

Tobler: So I mentioned that there were several different kind of spurs to thinking about this. One of the others is my sort of exposure to and experience with Latter-day Saint temple worship, which I found originally, I think like from my conversations with other Latter-day saints, foreign and challenging initially. I found the sort of whole ritual mode. temple worship to be hard to understand. And because of that, it tended to be something of an obstacle for feeling at home in the temple and being able to be comfortable enough to be susceptible to spiritual promptings and revelation. And so ritual more broadly has turned out to be a really important theme for me. I went on in my doctoral dissertation to write... a study of ritual in the 19th century United States, mostly among Christian groups, and found how remarkably contested ritual practices were during this period. So it led me, baptism for the dead as a practice, led me into a broader study of ritual that has been and continues to be really central to my thinking and my questions as a Latter-day Saint about how my religion works and how I ought to best practice it.

Welch: So ritual isn't a word that we use a lot in the church. Tell us what you mean very simply by the idea of a religious ritual. What is a religious ritual? Where do we practice them as Latter-day Saints?

Tobler: Right, so it turns out that the term ritual is much trickier and slipperier and more deceptive than you might think. So typically when we think of ritual just in our everyday parlance, we think of something that is really regularized, something scripted, something practiced with regularity, something with recurring movements. And we have an array of practices as Latter-day Saints, some of which are more, what we might call more ritualistic than others that are more structured, more scripted, more regularized and stylized than others. But often when I'm talking about ritual, like I say, you can take a very... elastic view of what ritual is, but often I'm thinking of the things that are highly ritualized. But those are the kinds of practices that I'm... primarily concerned with is the sort of highly ritualized practices of temple worship, baptism, the things that we tend to call saving ordinances.

Welch: So we might think about taking the sacrament on Sunday, the bread and water. That is a ritual. That's a religious ritual. We do it every Sunday in more or less the same way. When we go to the temple, of course, we engage in very sacred temple rituals there. So kind of the fabric of our religious lives together is marked by these actions and moments that we share in a very scripted and yet also living way together. Scholars would talk about this as religious rituals. So you, Ryan, did you go through the temple for the first time before your mission, the way that many young Latter-day Saints do?

Tobler: I did, yeah. I did. I went through the temple ceremonies in preparation for, as the elders in Kirtland did, the intention being sort of an endowment power that was intended to bolster their abilities for preaching the gospel and helping others to bringing other people into the church. And that was... That was my experience also. So I was relatively young, having gone through just a year of college. And yeah, it turned out to be a very sort of surprising and challenging experience at first.

Welch: So you go through the temple, you're challenged, maybe a little surprised, fair to say maybe a little bit confused by your experience there, but you go on your mission, you come home, you go through college, and now you're contemplating graduate school. And as you say, in this moment, there's this scholarly turn towards precisely these moments of... the actions that we do together as saints, right? The actions that we do as believers. And so there's both a personal context and a scholarly context behind this article that you write. So tell us, diving into this article now, what is your overarching thesis or idea that structures this article, Saviors on Mount Zion?

Tobler: Right, so I went into this without too many preconceptions about what I'd find. I was aware of how distinctive and unique the practice was, and that was often the subject of conversation. But it was unclear to me what its overall historical significance would be. But I found something really interesting as I started to delve into the history of how this practice emerged, how it developed, how it originated. And I found that it's situated at a really critical moment in the history of our worship. And that is that with the introduction of baptism for the dead, and this becomes the thesis of the article that I'd written, baptism for the dead introduces Latter-day Saints into a fully, what we call a sacramental theology. That is, it introduces and locks them into a kind of logic, a way of thinking about worship that is very unusual for the Protestant milieu in which it's originating, and that turns us, the tradition in a very intriguing direction that historically, you know, develops thereafter. So baptism for the dead is introduced, it’s not originally a temple ordinance, soon thereafter becomes incorporated into the temple and thereafter the temple ceremonies as they coalesce as well, it becomes integrated into the temple liturgy as well.

Welch: Yeah, so Ryan, when we hear the word sacramentalism, a lot of us probably think about taking the sacrament, right, taking the emblems of Christ's body, the bread and the water on a Sunday morning, but you use the term sacramentalism in a broader sense. Tell us a little bit about the way you use the term sacramental and how it's used in religious studies.

Tobler: Right, so yeah, we think of sacrament as the sacrament, as the singular practice that we use each Sunday to fulfill this commandment together often and worship, offer our sacraments and oblations. I mean, that's the term, way that it's used in the revelations. Historically it has quite a different meaning or at least a much broader meaning. The term sort of goes back into early Christian history, and it's most closely associated among Christians more broadly with a set of practices that were standardized in the Middle Ages within Roman Catholicism, that a sort of certain set of practices, not only what they would have called the Mass, and we call sort of the Lord's Supper or something sort of an equivalent. but also other practices like baptism as a sacrament, and last rites are a sacrament. These are especially sacred and especially efficacious practices that are part of a sacramental class. So there are more than one sacrament. And that concept becomes prevalent and becomes orthodox within the medieval church, Protestants come along thereafter and challenge the whole idea of this set of what were seven, typically seven sacraments in the Catholic Church. And so, they reduce the number of sacraments. And then Protestants also are kind of uncomfortable with the language of sacraments. It doesn't show up in the Bible, and they, with their emphasis on the Bible, are hesitant to use other terminology. And so they start to come up with other terms to describe these practices. And one of them that emerges in at least by the 17th century, especially in England among Baptists and other dissenters is the concept and the word ordinance. And the idea there is ordinance refers, I mean, if you think about city ordinances, this is a matter of kind of law and rules, but it's a set of laws. And that was the interest of Protestants was to say, Sacraments aren't possessed of any special power. They're part of God's law more generally, and they sit alongside roughly equivalent to preaching. They are kind of a form of preaching. So, and that's where we come in later in the historical trajectory, is that we inherit the language of ordinances from Protestants. We inherit that terminology, but then soon we start thinking, and partly precisely through baptism for the dead, we come to link salvation with those ordinances in a way that Protestants would have been very uncomfortable with. And so it’s the concept of the term saving ordinances would have been a sort of contradiction in terms to them. But in any case, Latter-day Saints do use that terminology, and so we speak of saving ordinances, but when we do, we really, you know, that terminology has become standardized for us. It appears in our scriptures, and so that's what we use. But the concept and the underlying logic of those practices is actually much closer to what traditionally are called sacraments.

Welch: So if I was talking to, let's say, a Catholic neighbor, and I could say something like, yes, we celebrate the sacrament of marriage in the temple, or we celebrate a sacrament of healing by the laying on of hands. And that would make sense to them because each of the ordinances in a broader sense can be thought of as a type of sacrament.  Is that right?

Tobler: That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. That would be very intelligible, especially to a Catholic neighbor to understand that, really the essence of what sacramentalism is, it's a religious doctrine that grows out of Christianity that suggests that God's power and God's grace flow to us in these distinctive critical ways through certain religious practices. In Latter-day Saint thought in particular, these practices or rites or rituals or ordinances are, some of them, some critical ones, establish these covenant relationships. They're instruments that set up a relationship, and then it's through that relationship that God blesses us in a variety of ways.

Welch: For me, the idea of sacramentalism is really important to my own spiritual life. As you say, the ordinances are a kind of door or portal that we, through our own bodies and our own actions, can open to allow God's grace to stream in an especially concentrated fashion at a particular place and a particular time. And part of what's so remarkable about the whole idea of a sacrament is that matter itself, our bodies, the bread and the water, the oil, those ordinary elements and molecules can come together and can be made sacred. They can be made a kind of vehicle of grace that takes on a power and a meaning beyond what we typically ascribe to it. And I guess as Christians, the premier example of this, of course, is Jesus Christ. That God himself came down, took on a material body, and so showed us that matter itself is sacred and that matter itself can be this connection between us and divinity. Thinking about it that way has really helped me feel closer to God. during moments like the sacrament, during moments like temple worship.

Tobler: You're exactly right about the significance that ritual, how it underscores how essential embodiment is within our belief, how inextricably connected our bodies are from the process of our salvation and from our potentialities. So, and that's something that's, as I've done this research, that's been sort of driven home time and time again. So I think of Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, to Corinthians, he says, "'For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that everyone may receive the things done in his body according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.'" And then in the Doctrine and Covenants, the revelations, we have Joseph Smith's kind of distinctive statement or the revelation from God that the spirit and the body are the soul of man. So collectively or conjointly, these are the essence of our identity. I feel like perhaps we don't understand all of the reasons why our bodies are so critical to our discipleship yet, that there's still quite a bit to learn, but there is a non-negotiable, kind of inevitable linkage there. And if we can understand more of how dramatically our bodies govern and shape and condition our life experiences, I think those provide ways that we can also deepen our discipleship.

Welch: Well, and Ryan, one thing you say in the article that really, really struck me, made a big impression on me, you wrote this line, anyone with a human body had something to offer those who did not. So this doctrine of sacramental embodiment, right, those are big words, but they just mean we can use our bodies to elicit God's saving grace. Anybody with a body can do that. We have that power intrinsic to our human embodiment. And it doesn't matter whether you have an Olympian body or whether you have a disabled body. It doesn't matter whether your body is young or old. If you have a human body, you have something to offer those who do not. I find that to be just profoundly equalizing and profoundly hopeful.

Tobler: Absolutely, yeah, that is one of the takeaways that I think is also quite profound. We have interesting records that show that Black Latter-day Saints who were converted to the Gospel, there was some question about their eligibility for participation in some ordinances. Their status was a bit undefined at that point, but they too participated in these proxy ordinances. they had a human body and they were able to offer through that body something special to those who were no longer embodied. Joseph Smith in some of his Nauvoo discourses talks about how is it possible for someone to be saved when their body is moldering in the dust? So suggesting that salvation, you know, really it's critical to have a whole and live body to go through the processes that are essential for salvation. And so, yeah, and there's some really fascinating language in some of his discourses that talk about being deputized for work on behalf of others. And that they become, and that the title of this article is called, Saviors on Mount Zion, Latter-day Saints who collaborate and participate in these processes, these rituals, become saviors in the sense of a small s, sort of a auxiliary helps to the process of redemption which flows through the power of that stems through Christ's atonement. But there are things that people can do and I think that was just sort of transitioned back toward the experience of what it was like for early Latter-day Saints was that that's really one of the things that made it so compelling and so joyful for them was that after a long period of feeling inert, helpless to be able to do anything about the people that they loved and cared about and worried about their spiritual salvation, those who had died, there was an opportunity for them. There was a way, an instrument that would allow them to contribute something. And they really embraced that with alacrity. When they were introduced to the concept, they were elated, they were effusive, there was this kind of outpouring of enthusiasm. Wilfrid Woodruff has a great recollection. He said, how did we feel when we first heard that the living could be baptized for the dead? He said, we all went to work at it as fast as we had an opportunity. We were baptized for everybody we could think of, which captures a sense of enthusiasm. sense of the saints excitement about this. In fact, evangelical revivals that are happening at the same period have a similar sense of this profound emotional energy that grows out of the practices and the encounters of that. And this is about the baptisms for the dead among Latter-day Saints in the Mississippi River come about as close as anything to what we could call a Mormon revival. which is the spectacle of a collective engagement, joyful and emotionally robust sort of engagement in religious practice. He also remembered that, you know, thinking about a summer evening, a Sunday evening, one summer in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith, you know, was in the river. He baptized a hundred people for their dead. He said, I baptized another hundred. The next man, a few rods down the river, baptized another hundred. You know, he said, we were strung up and down the Mississippi baptizing for our dead. It was a massive effort. It was collective. It was joyful and effusive. And it's quite a picture to see Latter-day Saints wading down into the river, strung up and down the Mississippi and performing this ordinance that brought them what by all accounts is a considerable amount of joy.

Welch: I love that picture. You describe how Joseph first preaches this doctrine of the baptism for the dead at the funeral of Jane Niman in Nauvoo. And almost immediately, I don't know if it was that same day, but as you say, almost immediately the saints responded with this incredible enthusiasm and made it happen, made it real right where they were, which was the Mississippi River. Within about a year though, Joseph had another revelation and he taught the saints that this was an ordinance that needed to be performed in a temple and in an ordered and a bit more formalized way. So tell us about that next scene. Of course, the Nauvoo temple was under construction, but it would be a long time before it was completed. The saints didn't want to wait as long as it would take to finish the temple. So tell us about those first baptisms in the temple. What did those look like?

Tobler: Right, well, they looked like a construction zone, really. The temple was being built. This was in 1841 when Joseph Smith announced that his revelation that this was a temple ordinance that needed to be folded into the practices, the liturgy of the temple, and restricted access in the river for the time being. It turned out that having the temple font built in the excavated basement of the temple was adequate to satisfy this commandment, this requirement. And so in relatively short order, there was a large baptismal font that was constructed in the basement of the temple. It had a lot of the same iconography that we see in our temples today. That's the oxen standing in these cardinal directions, reflecting some of the tribes of Israel. It was carved out of wood by some craftsmen in Nauvoo, and it became kind of a tourist attraction that people would come to see for a time there, where visitors would come and see this, and they would say, wow, this is a really interesting implement. This is a really interesting font. We've never quite seen anything like it. But it significantly changed shifting the practice of baptism for the dead from the river to the temple. It was part of a much bigger sort of process of regulating and trying to see that all this was done in an orderly way and recording and the sort of records of these ordinances that were performed were a really critical part of that too. And that's where we get the origin, that's the origins of our ritual recording, the notion of that these practices need to be, that the practices are not complete. unless a record is kept and preserved.

Welch: That's one of the images that is going to stay with me from this article. And a scene I had never really understood before is that this first font was in the unfinished basement with this temporary roof over the top. So it must have been dirty and muddy and perhaps noisy around and yet this beautifully carved ornate wooden font is kind of... plopped here in the basement and the saints are not going to be held back. They have fulfilled the Lord's commandment and they will get back to the work of saving their dead. I love that image there.

Tobler: Yeah, they were not about to be deterred.

Welch: So we've talked about what baptism for the dead and proxy ordinances more generally teach us about ourselves as embodied human beings. Tell us a little bit about what they teach us about God. about God's character and about who He is in relation to us.

Tobler: Right. So much much of the, I think the profundity of what this teaches about God is kind of lost on us now in our own historical moment because we've become accustomed to thinking of God as kindly and exclusively interested in our welfare. We as Latter-day Saints believe that his, I mean, it's his glory, work and glory, right, for immortality and exaltation. We've come to recognize that. But that was not the case necessarily when this practice was first developed in the earlier 19th century, there was a lot of concern and anxiety and debate over God's character because there were some problems with the way that the sort of Christian scheme of salvation had been laid out. And there was a legacy, especially in the sort of Northeastern United States, of reformed or Calvinist thought, and sort of its doctrine of predestination, which is that God kind of arbitrarily, independent of really what happened in the world, that God had already sort of made decisions about what would happen to people hereafter. And that it really wasn't appropriate for people to sort of question those determinations, that it was human reason fell far short of an ability to understand God's purposes. So there was a really kind of a new willingness to subject God to common sense understandings of what was good and what was just. And so people were still quite, you know, they thought that some of the doctrines that they'd been exposed to didn't really say a lot for God's character and his justice and his mercy. And so, you know, this practice was very significant in that it resolved some really long-standing problems in sort of the theology of Christian salvation. It had been unclear for a long time. I mean, what happened to people who were unbaptized? Baptism for the Dead was a very interesting and compelling solution to some of these problems that what happened to people who never had heard of Jesus or never had received the gospel and had never been baptized, there wasn't too much provision made for those kinds of people previously, whereas baptism for the dead showed that God actually in creating his plan of salvation had made provisions for them. And that showed that God was mindful of everyone and not just sort of particular people. So there's some really fascinating statements by early Latter-day Saints who were profoundly moved by, they could see the implications for God's character of what baptism for the dead meant. So Wilford Woodruff, he became one of the greatest champions of proxy work and really important leader later in Utah. He said that he experienced baptism for the dead like a shaft of light from the throne of God to our hearts. It opened a field wide as eternity to our minds. It enlightened my mind and gave me great joy. It appeared to me that God, the God who revealed that principle unto man was wise, just and true, possessed of both the best of attributes and good sense and knowledge. I felt he was consistent with both love and mercy, justice and judgment. and I felt to love the Lord more than ever before in my life. So this practice went a long way to helping people to reconciling people to the character of God and to helping them to understand how God had made God's plan of salvation, that it was bigger and broader and more capacious and more generous than anybody had realized.

Welch: I love that and I've often reflected on that myself. I think in addition to showing us God's love and His wisdom, I think it also shows us His trust in us and His desire to partner with us. You mentioned a few minutes ago how record keeping became much more important as the baptisms moved from the sort of enthusiastic scene of the river into the more ordered scene of the temple font. One way to read that transition is as a kind of routinization. There's an idea in religious studies that oftentimes you'll see a big explosion of religious meaning as a new religion is founded and then it'll kind of become, it'll pull back and it'll become a little bit less enthusiastic and more routine and maybe a little bit more boring. So maybe that's one way you could read the transition from river to temple and the record keeping, but I actually read it differently. I think that the introduction of the record keeping actually extends the radical nature of the doctrine of baptisms for the dead. We know in sections 127 and 128, what Joseph comes to understand through Revelation is that these records are not just a kind of clerical leftover or trace of what really matters, which is the baptism, but the records themselves are a sacred and sacramental act. And what we record here on earth is recorded in heaven. What we bind here on earth is bound in heaven. And it's extraordinary to think that God gives us imperfect humans that responsibility, that he trusts us to keep the records of heaven here on earth, and that we are building the foundations of our heavenly society through our actions and our records now. So I see the introduction of record keeping as an extraordinary development in Latter-day Saint teachings, and one that really shows us the extent to which God sees us as His children, to whom He wants to give all, whom He wants to raise to be with Him and like Him. in every way.

Tobler: Yeah, I agree. I think he definitely, the sort of plan which involves human beings, God's children as agents, even in these sort of ancillary ways, does suggest and sort of testify to the notion that our experience and our purpose is for growth and development. And God wants to involve us, whether it's in the creation of the earth. or the recording of rituals or the performance of ceremony, or even in less sacramental ways. And we typically think about being his hands in service to other people. Yeah, we are definitely integrated and we're considered part of the work. And that's why calling his saints, saviors on Mount Zion is significant. Again, this is not really the same category as the way that Christ serves as our Savior, but we have a sort of salvific function, or we can, subject to certain conditions and in a certain limited way. But nonetheless, God does expect us to participate. And that became clear initially when baptism for the dead was introduced, it was a privilege and sort of an opportunity for Latter-day Saints. But it soon became clear that it wasn't sort of merely a privilege for those who were interested. It was actually really quite central to the work of salvation, the work of redemption. And so it became a requirement. It became integrated into the work of salvation. And so it's not just our privilege to help out, but it's also part of our designated responsibility.

Welch: I hope you’re enjoying this interview with Dr. Ryan Tobler. We’ve been talking about the earliest practice of baptism for the dead among latter-day saints, their joy at the teaching and their enthusiastic obedience in the swampy waters of the Mississippi river and the muddy basement of the Nauvoo temple. Baptism for the dead answered as many questions about this life as about the afterlife. It introduced the saints to the idea of sacramentalism, or the sealing power, as we more often call it, sharing in God’s power, we can use our bodies in conjunction with priesthood authority to create relationships of eternal significance. What we bind on earth is bound in heaven. Speaking of bodies, I wanted to clarify something I said earlier. I contrasted the body of an Olympic athlete with the body of a person with a disability, making the point that all kinds of human bodies can be instruments of salvation for our dead. In reality, of course there are many incredible athletes, including Olympians who live with a disability. My own sister Gabriel is an example of this. I’ll never match her upper body strength. I love the diversity of human embodiment and I celebrate all forms of human ability. Let’s get back to the second half of the interview where Doctor Tobler talks more about the present-day practice of baptism for the dead and its empowering potential to heal some of the modern challenges we all face.

Ryan, an important figure in this article is Alvin Smith, Joseph's older brother. Alvin had died as a vigorous and beloved young man, the oldest brother in the family, who was a leader in the family in many ways. And the Smith family mourned deeply his death. You actually describe how a minister calls into question Alvin's eternal salvation because he had not been baptized. And under a Protestant or an earlier Christian framework, without baptism, you must go to hell. And so, not only the grief of his death, but the deep concern about his eternal fate weighed very heavily on Joseph's mind and was a real spur to revelation for him. In section 137, he actually sees a vision of Alvin in the celestial kingdom. He had known already from section 76 that the unbaptized could be saved in the terrestrial kingdom, but now he knows that they can be saved in the celestial kingdom. He just doesn't know how. And that is the question that baptism for the dead answers for him. Knowing how prevalent death was in Nauvoo. And of course in earlier times more generally, how many children were lost, how many funerals were held, especially in the early days of Nauvoo. It was a sickly time and place and death stalked the community all the time. I'm very sympathetic to the saint's desire to overcome death and to find and grasp hope in the midst of these very grim scenes. At the same time though, the question that your article raises for me that is closest to my heart, this is the most urgent question that it raises for me, is in fact the question of death. You talk about how for the saints the teachings of baptism for the dead and proxy ordinances were an aggressive conquest of death. And I understand why they would seek that. At the same time, it seems that the ordinance of baptism itself, which is a similitude of the death, and the life of Jesus Christ and the atonement teaches us that we need to walk meekly toward death, that we need to accept death before we can overcome it. Speaking here as a Christian disciple, not as a scholar. Should we be seeking to avoid and conquer death, or should we be embracing it and walking towards it as a disciple of Christ?

Tobler: Yeah, that's a very fascinating question. Part of my inclination to see this, the immediate context of death and sickness and despair in early Nauvoo, I think it's a critical part of what motivates Joseph Smith to start seeking answers to these questions. Because these are real pressing that are troubling the saints and tearing apart their families and people were terrorized. They were injured. They were wounded in really deep ways. So I can understand why this was compelling to them also. But you make a good point that death is the baptism itself is a sort of submission to death and a willingness to reenact Christ's death as a symbol of our devotion to him and our commitment to him. I think perhaps what baptism for the dead offers is a reminder and the ability to contemplate death, to accept it and submit to it, but without any terror. We know that Christ, he conquered sin and death, and that gives us sort of an understanding that this is not something that ultimately we should fear, but baptisms for the dead also provide a practice and a way of approaching death and in a way sort of transcending death, not minimizing it, but showing that it was only, that it was a moment of transition and not a moment of terror and disruption.

Welch: And ordinances, rituals, actions can be so comforting and so meaningful to concretize, to make real and concrete ideas, right? So in the ritual of baptism for dead, we can give an action and a body to our knowledge and our faith and our testimony that Christ died for us and we die with him and can be raised in him again.

Tobler: Yeah, absolutely. I think so that's one of the things that rituals in general, like you say, there is comfort in ritual and there is a reassurance. Yeah, it's not based on our contemplation of an idea or even on a sort of abstract internalized experience. It's based on actual things done in the body and in the world. And if we accept that these practices are connected with God's power, then there's something that's been accomplished. There's something that's been done. There's a new situation, a new condition that's been etched into the order of the universe. And those, for Latter-day Saints, are the sort of covenants that are associated with the rituals that we perform. To me, my way of thinking, this offers profound form of assurance that we are bound, we are bound to God and for Latter-day Saints in particular we're bound to other people. This is conditional on us honoring our covenants and fulfilling the conditions of those covenants. But the reality is that the order of the universe is such that we are bound to them and all that we need do is to fulfill sort of those conditions and live in a way that proves worthy of those blessings.

Welch: Bound on earth and bound in heaven.

Tobler: Right. Absolutely. I should say too, there is some danger in ceremony and ritual, and this is something that helped to motivate Protestants reformation. And many of their attitudes since then is that rituals do give a form of assurance, but the critique has been for a long time that they allow us some form of rest, some kind of unmerited comfort, false comfort that they distract us from the work from the essence of faith. And I think that's a danger that we are susceptible to any tradition or group that has a sacramental theology, there is some danger to resting in the ordinances, resting in the rituals. And so, part of a real robust sacramental theology is understanding how those practices are contingent on many things. They're contingent upon faith, they're contingent upon the conditions of our souls. They don't work independently of themselves. That there has to be this undergirding spiritual power and reality that's linked to them. And so it's important whenever we talk about rituals to, I think, to remind people that there is an underlying structure of spiritual realities that is connected with them, and that without that, they don't serve the purposes that they're intended to.

Welch: That's right. And part of the beauty of the repetition of ordinances, especially that proxy work affords us, is that the ordinances themselves can start to shape our character. So our character matters. It's not just a matter of going through the forms, right? We have to become new creatures in Christ, but the rituals themselves, the ordinances themselves, can equip us and can enable us to endure to the end. in faith and in living faith. That's part of what I find so beautiful about the teachings of proxy ordinances is that it allows us this learning by repetition in the temple. Ryan, in D&C 84, we learned that it's in the ordinances of the priesthood that the power of godliness is made manifest. I just wanted to talk more personally now about how the power of godliness has been manifest in your life as a Latter-day Saint, whose lived religion takes him to the temple for these profound ordinances there.

Tobler: Well, one thing I would certainly point to is that I mentioned that my initial exposure to the temple was discomforting in a way, right? It was sort of not as productive or as reassuring as I thought it might be. And so I think at the time that was sort of a disappointment to me. And I could see that I didn't fully have the terms or the understanding to see exactly what was happening there. But since then, this is a good example of how I think historical reflection can enable and open the path to scholarship. We often think of the details of history as only working to trouble our faith or something, but in reality, historical work can also remove barriers and challenges to our worship, to our discipleship. And I think that's the case for me. My own sort of reflection on this and study of how rituals have been conceptualized in the Western world has eliminated many of the concerns that I had and the sort of barriers that I felt, the anxieties that I felt around ritual. And that has enabled me to participate more deliberately and mindfully and profitably in temple worship. and in the practices that we have when we attend our sacrament meetings.

Welch: Ryan, I know you're raising a family of your own like I am. As your children are growing up and approaching the age where they will enter the temple to perform proxy baptisms and then eventually go to the temple for their own temple endowment, how are you helping them to understand the temple and our actions in there more richly?

Tobler: Yeah, so they're not quite to the age where they're ready to go to the temple, but they soon will be. And I think having worked through the material of the article gives me some resources for helping them to see what baptism for the dead is about, how valuable and distinctive it is, what a revelatory insight it is. And maybe above all, we touched on some of this earlier, but it also underscores how marvelous it is to have life and have a body that can be used for constructive purposes. And in the temple, through proxy ordinances, that's one of the ways in which we can use our body for good. And that our bodies have power to change things on the largest scale for people. Our bodies have power to serve. others in critical ways, both those who are departed, those who have died, but also those others around us. And so I think bodies, maybe among some young people, there's not as much tendency to keep to sacralize our bodies to understand our bodies as sacred and powerful. And I think this also prepares them well potentially as they go forward to make further temple covenants as they take upon themselves the garment that come with later temple worship and to understand that their bodies are sacred and empowered and ought to be used for good purposes, the good purposes for which they've been given.

Welch: It really struck me as well, Ryan, so many of us have broken or profoundly troubled relationships to our bodies, whether that be because we may have suffered abuse, somebody else misusing our body against our will. I think social media can create a profoundly confused and conflicted relationship to our own bodies as we compare. And as you know, visual filters can change our appearance. All of these can leave us feeling profoundly separated, even to feel hatred towards the body that we live in and we exist in. And it strikes me that there's potential in the teachings of proxy baptism and the power of the body to heal those broken relationships. There's something empowering and healing about knowing that I can use this body, however imperfect it is, I can give it as a gift for somebody who doesn't have one now. And I can use it in this constructive way, regardless of its exterior appearance or characteristics. It seems to me like there's profound potential there for healing.

Tobler: I think so too. I think that that's exactly right and that's one of the lessons that comes of this historical research too, is that bodies, whatever their characteristics might be, I mean it underscores the point which is sometimes becomes trite for us that we're children of God and that we have an inheritance not only of our spirit but of our body that's been created. and has certain powers and certain abilities. And our ability for anyone who is worthy of any condition or any situation, anyone who qualifies to be able to participate in proxy ordinances has a ready reminder that their body is a gift and that it's a gift that comes with power from God. And the way that our bodies are sometimes thought about or classed or configured or really is inconsequential that ultimately it's sort of the divine quality that God gives us vested in our bodies that is most important.

Welch: That has absolutely been my experience as well. The light of history makes the Restoration shine even brighter in my own path of discipleship and my one process of learning. And I'm grateful for you to be with us on the Maxwell Institute Podcast today. Thank you, Ryan Tobler.

Tobler: Thank you so much.