MIPodcast #179: Time (Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants) Featuring Philip L. Barlow

Rosalynde Welch: From Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute Podcast: Faith Illuminating Scholarship.

This is Rosalynde Welch, your host, and today I have a terrific interview with my colleague Philip A. Barlow on his new book Time, just out from the Maxwell Institute. Phil is a senior fellow and my colleague here at the Maxwell Institute. But long before I had this office down the hall, I worked from home as an independent scholar in St. Louis, Missouri, for many years. I wrote essays and gave occasional conference presentations on Latter-day Saint topics, but I wasn’t acquainted with many of the Utah-based giants in the field. One day, I found an email in my inbox from a prominent scholar who had read a recent article of mine and took the time to write a note of appreciation. I was amazed first that anybody noticed what I wrote, and second that this important person would take the time to encourage me. That scholar was Dr. Phil Barlow. In recent years, as we’ve enjoyed closer association, I’ve learned that I am definitely not alone in being lifted and helped by Phil. He’s as generous a mentor and scholar as any I’ve met, and he’s made a deep impression for the better on the field of Latter-day Saint history.

You’ll notice his kindness and humor during the interview, and you’ll also notice his wisdom and creativity. Phil is a legendary teacher: he taught for many years at Hanover College, and then served for more than a decade as the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History & Culture at Utah State University. He’s the author of an important book, Mormons and the Bible, and lots of other notable publications. He’s currently working on a fascinating study of the war in heaven.

The book we’re talking about today, Time, is one of our Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series. Phil invites us to consider a question I’d never thought to ask before: What if time isn't just something to be managed, but a fundamental dimension of the gospel itself? He shows how time is an often-unrecognized but nevertheless crucial aspect of, for instance, the Sabbath. After all, Sunday is one seventh of the week, a unit of time, and he shares his personal experiment with what he calls a “radical but not fanatical Sabbath.” He explains how time separates but also connects us to our ancestors and descendants. In fact, he makes the claim that time should be considered the “zero principle” of the gospel--underlying and giving rise to the familiar “first four principles and ordinances.” Perhaps most provocatively, he argues that we might actually possess the power to change the past. If you’d like that superpower--listen on. It might just change your life.

Hello, Phil Barlow, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Philip Barlow: Thank you, ma’am.

Welch: Today we are talking about your volume in the Maxwell Institute's book series, Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants. The title and the topic, the theme of your volume is Time, a peculiar topic as you yourself called it in the introduction. Tell us how you settled on the topic of time to write this book on.

Barlow: Life, according to Joseph Smith's restoration or the restoration that he ushered into the world, is not merely a consequence of a calamity of our original ancestors, and it's also not merely a moral test. But it's also equally a school. It's a lab for how to be in the universe as section 128, or I'm sorry, section 88 and section 122, and elsewhere suggests life is a school as well as a test. And I came as a scholar to the conclusion that the tree of life, or rather the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, alluded to in early Genesis is better translated the tree of knowledge of good and bad, which is to say it's about life, it's about becoming human, it's again discerning how to be in the universe together and to pursue a godly, a more godly existence.

Welch: Hmm.

Barlow: And that happens by way of relationships, and I construe in my own thinking that four relationships are crucial in the gospel. Our relationship with God, our relationship with one another, our relationship with our often fractured selves, and our relationship with time. And if we screw up any one of these relationships, the others are affected. If I am messed up about time, I'm messed up to that degree in my relationship with others or myself, or my Lord.

Finally, until something is identified and named and located so that we have a handle to think about it, we sometimes don't know what's there, and we don't know what's carrying us along in grace or buffetingness or confusingness. And time is like that until...

We all know we deal with ordinary time and we fuss because we have too much of it or not enough of it or we're bored or whatever, but we don't often separate time as a category to go after and think about its qualities and how it's affecting us, and certainly not in a gospel context very often.

Welch: Yeah, that's something I've really noticed too. It's sort of like when you learn about a new author or a new movie, and suddenly you see everybody talking about it. You see references to it everywhere, where before you hadn't seen them at all. You've become newly sensitized to this.

That's what I experienced as I read your book about time as well. Suddenly, I started noticing that time is kind of at the heart of many of our gospel principles. I started thinking about it in a new way. You named it for me. You gave it a kind of shape. And then I started to notice it everywhere.

I think we can tend to inherit sort of unconscious ideas about what time is just from the culture around us, right? That time is something to be managed, or time is something to be saved. This isn't a book about management. It isn’t a book about maximizing your productivity and is not even a kind of disquisition on the metaphysics of time. You talk about time in relation to the basic principles of the gospel. In fact, you call it the zero or the zeroth principle of the gospel. Why should we think about time as the zero principle of the gospel?

Barlow: You pronounce that better than I'm able to. So the zeroeth principle of the gospel. Faith, which we commonly express as the first principle of the gospel, is all about time when you start to think about it. It's faith...unto repentance, implying an action, a subsequent thing, and anything that's subsequent is involved in time. It's faith in the cloud of witnesses that Scripture tells us about from the past who are...who those witnesses are, testifying things that were taught and we learn are crucial to the present. It's faith about things far into the future. So we don't even get any further than what we commonly call the first principle of the gospel, to notice faith is about time.

Repentance similarl,y is a reconciliation of the past and the present so that we can move forward in the future.

And they all work like that. We take the sacrament that His Spirit may always be with us, and that always is something we ought to choke on enough to pause and meditate. And when we take that sacrament, always. So I came ultimately to conclude that there isn't a gospel principle I can come up with that isn't engaged with time.

In my very unofficial opinion, there's an unofficial contest about what principles are first. Are those first ones in the fourth article of faith first in sequence? Or are they first in being most important? Are they first in the way the new convert should act, but if we stop and think about it,

Welch: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Barlow: Does anything come before faith? Because when Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, his answer was love of God and our fellow people. And when Paul himself wrote about faith, hope, and love, or in the King James Version, charity, the chiefest was love.

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Barlow: When I was being raised, we learned often over the pulpit that the first law of heaven was obedience. And now I'm thinking about the war in heaven in my next project. And so I'm thinking more deeply about agency, and can we have authentic faith and repentance and love and obedience without agency? So I think these fundamental principles of the gospel work…

Welch: Yes.

Barlow: Are more like a molecule than they do discrete atoms. They work together in harmony and in relation to one another. each, and then circling back to the premise of the book or the argument of the book or the conceit of the book, each gospel principle is enmeshed in time if we stop and analyze it and are thoughtful about it. So, hence my zero if I meant to make people…

Welch: Yeah. Yeah.

Barlow: Be annoyed with me and stop and think about whether they hated me or not.

Welch: Hahaha. No. Well, one thing I want readers to know about this book is that you are an extremely skilled prose stylist. So I want readers to know if you are somebody who reads books, not only for the ideas, but for the language and for the style and for the expression, this is going to be a great one to pick up. You won't be disappointed.

So, right. So time is at the foundation of it runs through all the other principles of the gospel, precisely for the reason that you've expressed a few times now, which is that the gospel is about life. The gospel is about living life in Christ. And life, of course, is time. It's the way that we interact with time. Our life is a beautiful dance that we play with time.

And one of the moves in that dance, one of the steps in that dance, we might say, is the Sabbath. So you turn early in the book to the principle and the practice of observing the Sabbath. As you point out, there's not a lot of material in the Doctrine and Covenants about the Sabbath, but what we have in section 59 is very rich and very suggestive.

Before you dive into close readings of those verses from section 59 though, you share a really enjoyable personal narrative of how you yourself grew up observing the Sabbath and how you came to internalize and kind of own the practice of Sabbath observance for yourself. So I'd love for you to share with our readers how you learned to observe what you call a radical but not fanatical Sabbath.

Barlow: Thank you. Yeah, I came of age before there was an internet and before there was quite the far-reaching scrutiny of a younger generation on the nature of their relationship with the church. There's been a lot of turmoil, and when I was being raised, I thought there was enough turmoil to deal with. So I decided, I kind of wondered if I was taking the gospel seriously enoug,h and if my friends around me were taking the gospel seriously enough.

So when I was in my twenties, I decided, am I taking this seriously? I'm supposed to live a Sabbath day because God rested on the Sabbath day, so I'm going to rest the heck out of things because God did it. Is that really clicking with me? Like God's creating galactic clusters and nebulae and life of all manner and then lay down in the hammock and went… I was glad to take a break here. Is that what rest meant? It prompted me to examine, am I serious about this gospel? I think I'm going to put this to the test. I'm going to take these seven or eight verses and take them very seriously, and my friends are going to raise their eyebrows at me. You can't even do this with me on Sunday. We've done this all our lives. And see what happens. And then that will be my version of trying the doctrine. So I wasn't lonely, but I was alone while I tried it because no one wanted to do it with me, quite. It did seem impractical, but

The result was a revolution and a revelation, and a conversion to me. I discovered that my sense of sacrificing for righteousness or whatever I thought was going to happen-- The apparent constrictions of only do these four things, I can name them in a minute. Well, I've made a note here: to rest from their labors, to go to the house of prayer, to offer up sacraments and vows, to confess their sins, and to prepare their food with singleness of heart. Do none other thing, says the Lord. Says Philip in return, really?

Welch: Nothing else than just those four things.

Barlow: And what I found was that I got smarter on the Sabbath day. It took a lot of work on, not a lot of work, but deliberate work on Saturday to this is how this is going to play out tomorrow. I'm not going to get up and start planning because that's a form of work, and I'm going to get more radical than that.

Welch: Mm-hmm.

Barlow: So I had to plan a little bit on what was going to happen, including planning for, and if I'm surprised, like on most days, the X or Y comes up, I'm going to be prepared to respond to that as I want to in the spirit of these four mandates from Section 59. And I found I was smarter, which is to say I was less diverted and more attentive to the day, the experience of the day, and to other fellow travelers in the day. And that's a little curious, but that's what happened. And I walked lighter in the day, and I refused to think of doing things with little checkoffs, like on the other day, I'm going to check this off, I'm going to do this, I'm going to accomplish this, even if it's less in preparation and stuff.

Welch: Mmm. Yeah.

Barlow: There was an unwanted workfulness about it if I went about it in a certain mindset. I guess I let go of a mental or spiritual or emotional framework, psychological framework, of do's and don'ts, thou shalts and thou shalt nots. Instead, I was going to rest for my labors and go to the house of prayer and offer up sacraments and vows and confess my sins and think about them and prepare food with singleness of heart.

And the spirit of it all was to be joy. That's everywhere in the Bible, that this was to be a joyful thing. So I had to be strict with myself. This is going to be joy. So it's not that I didn't serve or didn't do things, but it came through a different portal and it came, spiritual portal and mental portal, and it came not...

Welch: Ha ha.

Barlow: An embargo on behaviors, the thou shalt not. Rather, I learned to amend the notion of Sabbath rest because the word in Hebrew biblically actually comes not quite from rest, that's an iteration of the original meaning, it comes from ceasing, cessation. So it was a spirit of letting go of ordinary things,

Welch: Mm-hmm.Hmm.

Barlow: And ordinary concerns and ordinary tasks and the whole experience felt more free.

I call it a radical rather than a fanatical Sabbath. We often casually use the word radical to mean extreme, but that's a derivative use of the word. And etymologically, radical comes from origins or roots, getting at the core of an activity or of a conception. And so I found getting back to these elements that would make for a radical--that is, an original rooted--Sabbath in the scripture of section 59 with its biblical backdrop of cessation and joy as the spirit of the day gave me all these rewards. It was like a gerbil getting positive reinforcement in my little maze. It was a more alive day for me. I was closer to real living, kind of like going up to mountain air and breathing deeply or something.

But that's not a fanatical Sabbath. A fanatical is the contrary of a radical Sabbath. I think of a fanatic as a person who doubles her speed when she's lost her way, as opposed to a person seeking a radical Sabbath who slows her mind and her path and her choices in order to find her way. And that, I didn't put it this way in the book, but…

Welch: Mm. Yeah.

Barlow: That's how I felt. I felt found.

Welch: Yeah, so a radical Sabbath is one that starts from our mindsets, one that transforms our actions, yes, but begins from changing the way that we are at rest in the world. And that changes the way that we see each other. There was a line that you wrote that really stuck with me. It's “when we're in Sabbath mode, we see people differently.” And maybe that's because we've taken a rest from the kind of status games and the striving to impress people and the striving to find our place in the pecking order. If we can set that aside, at least for this Sabbath day, that allows us to see people differently.

And I have a strong memory of an experience just like that. When I was at church, I remember the setting in the hallway right outside the bishop's office, and I was introduced to a woman who had just moved into our ward. And in that kind of Sabbath mode, there was something that felt important and momentous even about that introduction. And the Spirit whispered to me, This is somebody that you will get to know. This is somebody for whom you have a responsibility of care. And we did go on to form a wonderful friendship, caring for each other and helping each other in different ways. And I think it's partly because I was able to see her in a different way, in that Sabbath mode.

You talk about the Sabbath as a kind of temple in time, right? Whereas Latter-day Saints, we're used to thinking about sacred space. So let's think about the Sabbath as a temple in our week, right? Sacred time that we enter and we leave aside worldly things during that period of time.

Barlow: That's lovely, and it does seem to share the experience that I had with it. And to see people differently is, of course, attached to the notion of attention. And my attention was fundamentally altered on the Sabbath towards people and also towards something else, maybe a little bit mystical.

If I were as clever as Franz Kafka, I'd write of my dreams where this reality is just in my peripheral vision and I can't quite get there by turning my head. I felt something akin to that, only it was all pleasurable. And I didn't know if that was God. I didn't know if that was eternity, but it was invitational. It was beckoning.

President Nelson's question that he posed to us on behalf of his brethren as a whole. How do you hear him? And for me, I found a new way. I found the Sabbath is saying something. It speaks. And as a very poetic Jewish writer, Abraham Heschel put it, eternity utters a day in the guise of the Sabbath.

Welch: Yeah.

Barlow: And when I thought of it that way, I could approach it like any other language. I don't understand you. Huh? What are you saying? But it had me leaning spiritually and mentally into the day, into the moment. And that means when I encountered a new person, that was part of the speech of the Sabbath. And when I inquired a surprise, that was part of the speech of the Sabbath.

Welch: Yeah. Thank you.

Barlow: It lifted and changed me.

Welch: Yeah, you title the chapter, “Radical Sabbath Acoustics.” And the acoustics refers to just what you've been talking about, the sense that there's something for us to hear in reverberating through that sacred time of the Sabbath. And we have to listen, right? We have to attune our attention quite rigorously, I think, to hear the music of eternity that sounds through the Sabbath.

So I think listeners might be getting a sense now for the way that you are using the idea of time as something very flexible, something that ebbs and flows, something that is the substance of our life. And that might help us then to understand how you're using the concept of time when you turn to the question of family history.

If we think about time just as kind of a ceaseless march onward of empty time that we use or we exploit in the best way that we can--that gives us one concept of what it means to be a descendant or an ancestor. But when we have a more flexible, almost looping concept of time, that really changes the way we think about our families, about our positions in a long line of, a long network of human beings. Talk about family history and time.

Barlow: Yeah, thank you. The idea of talking in loops I borrowed from a novelist named Dani Shapiro. And so by loops, I don't mean, and she doesn't mean ancient circular time, like the book of Ecclesiastes, the sun rises, the sun sets, the rivers always flow towards the sea, but the sea is never full. Ancient Babylon and many ancient cultures thought of time as a great circular thing that we are…

Welch: Mm-hmm.

Barlow: Usually doomed. Fall will come around again, or winter will come around again, death will come around again. If you're part of a reincarnation ideology in some cultures, life will come around again. It's all circular. And the Jews were actually instrumental in breaking through to a more linear sense of time, where God enters human history and makes new things happen.

But these loops that I'm talking about with family history are a little bit different. there are important ways in which we are our ancestors.

Welch: Hmm.

Barlow: Not just metaphorically, but we literally carry some of their cells and some of their DNA, a lot of their DNA, and their mystical experiences that can happen. The Latter-day Saints are full of a close connection to our kin, both our ancestors and a consciousness of our progeny, those who come after us. Who we are as individuals is never successfully just individuals, whether it's marriage or family, including family that comes before and after us. There's some deep hard-to-explain ways, whether it's philosophy or psychology, or theology, that we're bound up with our ancestors.

Welch: Yeah.

Barlow: And so we do vicarious work for the dead, and sections 123, 124, 128 have, if I got that right, is there 127 part of that, but two or three of them, especially 12,8 have us do ritual connections. And that's a radical thing to do, to go around baptizing everyone who's ever died on the planet of the earth.

But it presupposes a linkage and that we are mutually dependent. We're not just nostalgic for our ancestors. We are by scriptural instruction, mutually dependent on them. And that is mutual. That's they without us, but also we without them cannot be perfected, which is to say made whole or put in right relation.

So it's pretty awesome our identity is all woven into this conversation and our identity, that is who we think we are, is in some ways more fundamental than our ethics because our range of acceptable behavior is always framed by who we think we are and what story we think we're walking in.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know, this is maybe the most challenging section of the book, although you present it very gently. But I think our, you know, sort of famously American culture and the American way of life has encouraged us to see ourselves as individuals, right? See our lives as our own, something that we own and that we make of it what we will, that we have sort of an unlimited scope to make of ourselves what we want to be and determine our own identities.

And you're suggesting something very different. You're suggesting that in many ways, our lives are not actually our own, and who we think we are may be something more complex. In many ways, our ancestors are living with us, in us. They are exercising agency together with us, just as we in some ways are working with our own descendants, right? In these sort of loops of time, we are acting with, thinking with, feeling with, and becoming with our ancestors and our descendants simultaneously. How is it that we can think forward towards our descendants? How can we become good ancestors for our future descendants?

Barlow: Yeah, that's an important question. How can I be a good ancestor? And I think culturally, we sort of spat over that sometimes quite fiercely. What sort of…

Welch: That's right.

Barlow: An environment shall we leave our children? What sort of air shall we leave our children? Shall we leave our children enough water? Do I need this castle thing I'm building right now? Do I have to add these three? What are the implications for clean water, clean air?

It is not a silly question to say, am I thinking long term, do I see the Lord's countenance not just in that underprivileged person in this parable in the gutter, but do I see it in the unborn?

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a hopeful, I like flipping the question that way because it helps me to feel hopeful about time. I'm thinking of a listener who might have been, you know, following along in this discussion and thinking about the ways that our ancestors are still with us and still in us and thinking, hang on, there are some things in my family history that I want to end.

There are some things in my family history that shouldn't continue in me. There are some aspects of my ancestors that I don't want to live with and become with. I want to believe that change is possible. I want to believe that new things and good things can emerge in time when they need to, to break with a past that maybe hasn't been what it should have been.

So thinking of ourselves not only as the progeny of our own ancestors, but as the ancestors of our descendants, I think helps me to feel hopeful and energized and optimistic about time itself. It loops, but it can bring us to good new developments in the world and in ourselves.

Barlow: Yeah, that's lovely to say it that way. So you've made a more lovely point than I made, but it's optimistic. And I also call that sort of thing, and some other examples in the book, a superpower. So it's hopeful and it's empowering to be imaginative at being an ancestor. Like, I actually influence a lot of people outside my reach. I don't know their names and I don't know what color their eyes are going to be, but I can participate in love in this service now, today, in this presence. So I find it hopeful with your lovely articulation of it and empowering.

Welch: Yeah. Well, let's talk more about this superpower. You make the point that when we become aware of time, when we recognize it around us and understand how we move through it and how it intersects with principles of the gospel, that becomes a kind of superpower, and it allows us to do things that we might not otherwise have been able to do. In particular, you make the provocative suggestion that when we understand time and handle it rightly with love, we can actually change the past. Tell us a little bit about what you mean by that.

Barlow: Hmm.

Yeah, thank you. When I used to teach a course on religion and the concept of time I would tell them that you can change the past. Sometimes I wouldn't give them a syllabus for the first week. I would just start and the first line of the course would be, you can change the past. And then I'd sit on the table and wait for them to yell at me and, no, you can't.

Welch: Haha.

Barlow: And I'd say, oh, yes, you can. I have a PhD. And they'd say, well, you may have a PhD, but oh, no, you can't. Or, OK, wise guy teacher, I know what you're saying. You're saying we might be able to change how we think about the past, but we don't actually change the past. mean, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. I can't do anything about that. And then I would try to get them to say what…

Welch: Hahaha.

Barlow: Other past do you have than the way you think about the past? Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and the Vietnam War happened and you have some impression about it or it's irrelevant. It's a factoid but it's not really a part of your active past and the way you're living.

So you not only can change the past by being thoughtful about time, you do change the past whether you're thoughtful or not, because when you were humiliated and that little girl spat upon you in the third grade and you were embarrassed and had spit on you and other people were laughing, then you either became that embarrassment and incorporated it into yourself and

Welch: Hmm.

Barlow: and got too shy or too socially dysfunctional because that past, that laceration was with you--or something happened, your agency, or someone being kind later to some other embarrassment, where you look back on that episode and its meaning became something different to you. So we do change our past all the time, kind of passively.

Welch: Hmm.

Barlow: And once you grasp that, that is the past that matters, the past that is what we think of and what we remember. And even if we've forgotten episode X or Y, we remember it emotionally, and we respond to people in some way. If one believes that Christ existed and was crucified and doesn't believe it was followed by a resurrection, that past, that event means something different than if you do have faith in the resurrection.

Welch: Yeah.

Barlow: We sometimes skip over the crucifixion too much and don't grasp the deathfulness of death and the pain and stuff because we're optimistic, cheerful people. So I think we need to grasp the penultimate event, the crucifixion and the death, as well as the ultimate, the resurrection. But that's faith. That's a very lively example of faith is relevant to changing the past, right?

If you have faith in resurrection, you're going to change what the meaning of the crucifixion is. If you have faith in a kindness that was just done to you, you may reinterpret early events in your life, including our own sins, right? Repentance is a way of not just turning a corner and changing our future, but our past becomes something different with that repentance.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Barlow: Or with our own enactments of love, or with our living the Sabbath day as we already talked about, and seeing people differently because we've made more psychological and temporal space. We've made more time because of blocking out and ceasing, letting go of ordinary activities on the Sabbath. We're freer to see people differently, and when we do that, we can feel the newness of it we can feel. This is better than yesterday. I like this.

Welch: Yeah. Yes. Yes, this idea that time can bring us, can bring newness, it can bring goodness, it can bring change, it can bring us toward Christ. That's one of the beauties of time is that it continues to unfold, and the future isn't decided yet. I think it's such an important point and just worth underscoring that we can change our past, depending on the meaning that we give, let's say, a painful event in our past, we can change what it means. It can be one point that begins a kind of downward spiral in our life, so that the meaning of that past event is part of a tragic story. Or then, right, we can change the meaning of that event so that now that difficult event becomes a kind of turning point or an inflection point, and it becomes a part of a story of hope and of change and of new life and new creation. We really can change the past, and that is a superpower that we have because of our hope in Christ and our faith in the reality of repentance and forgiveness. I think it's worth dwelling on that for a moment.

Barlow: Yeah, thank you. It's a superpower, and it's not a power until we empower it. I mean, it's going on as a phenomenon, but to be relevant, meaningful in our life, that's really a superpower.

Welch: Yeah. Phil, I'd love to switch gears a little bit now away from the volume itself. I hope that listeners now are excited about this and intrigued, and are eager to go out and read the volume. But I want them to get to know the person that I have come to know over the past few years at the Maxwell Institute, who is a person of great compassion, great wisdom, great integrity, and great accomplishment.

One of the, you're an historian and you've written about Latter-day Saint theology, you've written about Latter-day Saint scripture and Latter-day Saint history, of course. But a theme that pervades it throughout all your work is the way that you bring together your own scholarship and your own faith. And I want to, I know you've thought--you actually are in the process of editing a book that's precisely about…

Barlow: Thank you.

Welch: This question of being a thoughtful believer. How have you, how can you, what can you share with us about how you've been able to navigate being both a believing Latter-day Saint and a critical historian?

Barlow: Thank you. In construing my understanding of the glories that the Prophet Joseph brought us, is the premise that it's not possible to think too well. We sometimes get fussy about intellectuals and over there being eggheads and we're over here being spiritual and we try to dig a ditch between us.

Welch: Hmm.

Barlow: But what we're really critiquing, or should be, when we don't like the way some or another egghead behaves is their arrogance or their aridly being mired in factoids instead of meaning-making and goodness-making and making of loving acts and such. But Joseph taught us that we are…

Welch: Mm.

Barlow: Ontologically, existentially, intelligence is by nature. God is the greatest of these. But we can't unintelligence ourselves without unbecoming, right? And we can't partition ourselves like that. We're intelligences in Joseph's teachings, fully as much as we are spirits.

So that's one way I hold it together is: this is what I am and this is what you are and this is what God is, as scripture declares. God is spirit. God is intelligence. So it's a mistake to think that we're championing Joseph for the restoration when we try to sunder those concepts. We can be critical of intellectual preening and arrogance, but

Welch: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Barlow: What we really should be criticizing is preening and arrogance, not intelligence, because any form of power and intelligence is one of them, but any form of power is subject to those same dangers. If you're the most beautiful person in the room, if you're the wealthiest person in the room, if you have the greatest political or ecclesiastical office in the room.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah.

Barlow: All of those are subject to preening, and scripture declares that here and there in various ways. So separating those sorts of diversions and mistakes from the idea of education or scholarship or intelligence, I find helpful. Faith is a dangerous prospect if we don't apply intelligence to it, because we can have faith in all sorts of dangerous, stupid, erroneous, even wicked things if we're not careful. But faith is, in fact, an essential way to enact and grow in intelligence.

Welch: Yeah.

Barlow: To get to certain kinds of understandings unless we lean into them and trust them and test them. And then we get a little experience with them just as we do in a friendship or a marriage partner or a parent to a child. We trust them more and then we come to know that X or Y is good, as Alma 32 teache,s because the Hebrew word behind our translation of it, to know something, is to experience it. To know something biblically is to experience it and by that organic process. We do that properly with our heart, mind, and strength. And if we shortchange any of those, we get out of balance, and we're not. We may be smart as all get out. I'm surrounded by people smarter than they, but it…

Welch: Mm-hmm.

Barlow: Doesn't generate wisdom and a course to living joyfully and spiritually unless we embrace both the mind and the heart, both the mind and this intellect, and the spirit. And I just happen to have chosen history as one way to bring me to those processes. It's not the only method I believe in, but I do believe.

Welch: Yeah.

Barlow: I do have a testimony of the importance of the intellect and the heart and the spirit. You could have said that in a single word, huh? In a single sentence.

Welch: Yeah. And... No. No. No. That testimony is evident in the person that you are. I admire you greatly. I think that you truly live into the Book of Mormon's admonition that to be learned is good if you are humble. And you embody both of those qualities of humble love as well as intelligent questing. I wonder in this quest of yours over a long life now, are there moments in our people's history, in our scripture or our theology that are touchstones for you, that you return to again and again as a person of faith to nourish the spark of faith in your heart?

Barlow: It's not that I so often turn to this event or that event, and that's the point of inspiration. It's more the art and discipline of learning to think historically so that I can track change across time in search for constancy amidst perpetual change, and what is shown to be redeeming in all sorts of situations, instead of incidental to this scene or that scene. So part of it is learning to think historically. But I do think that I'm often inspired by religious thinkers and leaders when they're under duress, because if I'm under duress like some magnificent maw of dures,s like I have a canker and I'm grouchy.

Welch: Your life is so hard, Phil.

Barlow: Yeah. Or when I was younger, if I didn't have enough food and I had one too many children and I lost one too many jobs or something, if I'm stressed economically, if I'm stressed because I'm not enough sleep to get done the duties I need to as a provider and as a father, husband, person, then I can get dull or I might get grouchy, et cetera.

And if you put a lot of duress on people, real serious or radical duress on people, you can get human flaws to the point of danger or evil, right? But there's also the refiner's fire principle. There's also people who somehow bear their nobility under those kinds of pressures.

Muhammad Gandhi did it when he was fasting or going to prison. Martin Luther King did it when he wrote his history-changing letter from Birmingham jail as he suffered for his people.

I'm transported by, touched by, is Jesus in the midst of his being impaled, saying, Father, forgive them. That seems more than human, and that pulls me somewhere. Similarly, when Joseph is being abused in a jail, Liberty Jail, and he's starved, and how long, Lord, and…

Welch: Mm. Yeah.

Barlow: Is this real? Like, are you with me here, God? People are being ravaged, pillaged, exiled, murdered, and I'm in here. And out of that matrix comes the magnificence of section 121 or 122 that are things that soar and are above, analogous to, in a way, Jesus speaking on the cross with compassion instead of something else. So that's an example that moves me. I go back to when you, thy confidence will wax strong in the presence of the Lord in the middle of the stench and hunger and despair of imprisonment, comes to me deeply.

Welch: Yeah. Yeah, well, it strikes me that these acts of magnificent love and forgiveness and open-heartedness are themselves related to time in just the way that we've been talking about. The actions of Jesus on the cross or Joseph in prison they show us that we don't have to be prisoners of the past. We don't have to be prisoners of time. The gift of time is in this gift of new creation and newness, and that there comes a moment when we are confronted by something evil or deeply hurtful, where we can exercise agency. Time gives us the space to exercise agency and change that narrative from one of hatred to one of forgiveness, from one of cruelty to one of love.

So those great moments in our history that we turn to are themselves the gift of a perpetual resource of time unfolding itself to us and inviting us forward into it in a new way.

Barlow: Yeah, thank you. That's beautifully said.

Welch: Phil, as we wrap up our time together today, I wanted to invite you to answer a question that I pose to all of my guests at the end. The title of this podcast series is The Questions We Should Be Asking. You've already suggested one very important question, one very good question we should be asking ourselves, which is, How can I be a good ancestor to those who come after me? Would you suggest any other questions that we as Latter-day Saints should be asking ourselves about time?

Barlow: Yeah.

I think that if I imagine time as a language, you know how we spoke of the Sabbath as speaking. And so to call it a language is metaphorical, but I'm not quite sure if it's just metaphorical. I think it might be literal and metaphysical, or existential as well.

I know that it's true, at least metaphorically. I believe there's something more going on there. In our discussion about the Sabbath, in my writing about my experiment with the Sabbath, I thought of the Sabbath as a question, and I experienced it as a question.

I talked about it as an invitation. I felt in my cells, in my mind, in the space that was created because I had let go of, I had ceased ordinary, I've got to do this, I've got to do this in this next moment. And it's an invitation, it's a beckoning, but if you salt that concept a little more and make it a language, then it also became interrogative.

The Sabbath's an invitation, but it's also a question put to me. And in my course on time, I've thought about time a good bit. I've come to think that one way to understand life is that it, too is interrogative. So, in short, life is a question.

Welch: Hmm.

Barlow: Here's my answer to your question: What's a good question about time? How should we respond?

Welch: How should I respond to the invitation that the Sabbath and that the Savior and that the time of my life itself is posing to me? That seems like a question we should be asking. Thank you so much, Phil Barlow, for joining us today on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Barlow: Thanks for the conversation.

Welch: Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Phil Barlow on time as a spiritual dimension in Latter-day Saint life. Remember, our podcasts are also available in video on the Maxwell Institute’s YouTube channel.

If you found yourself intrigued by his ideas about the "zeroth principle" of the gospel or his personal experiment with Sabbath observance, his book is available now from the Maxwell Institute and can be purchased through Desertbook.com or Amazon. We think that every book in this series will help you slow down and go deeper in your study of the Doctrine and Covenants this year. For more information, visit mi.byu.edu.

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