The Road to Middoni: In Your Mind and In Your Heart (Part II)

There is, I think, one scripture that not only helps us understand prophetic mistakes but also gives us a sort of iron rod to hold on to when the going gets rough and we question our ability to receive personal revelation from Heavenly Father. This is not an obscure scripture. You’ve probably read and referenced it hundreds of times in your life.

We find this scripture in Doctrine & Covenants section 8, revelation targeted specifically to Oliver Cowdery and later canonized with the understanding that its lesson was applicable to all. Oliver Cowdery’s quest, after months of assisting the precocious prophet, was a sure knowledge. You’ll remember Oliver’s story: hearing rumors of new scripture, he visited the Smith residence near Palmyra, NY. Following a strong spiritual prompting after speaking most of the night with Hyrum, Joseph’s brother, Oliver struck out to join himself to the work of translation.

I think many of us can relate to this rash heeding of spiritual impulse. It has carried me to many major decisions in my life. A powerful spiritual experience as a 19-year-old led me to switch my plans 180 degrees and hurriedly submit my mission papers. My good bishop even marked my application as a “rush” so I could more quickly receive my call; back in those days, calls took months, and I can only imagine the chuckles that the presumptuous “rush” elicited at church headquarters. It wasn’t until a few months later that, safely immersed in the streets of Torino, Italy, the spiritual buzz evaporated. I looked around at a mostly silent senior companion, a sadistic zone leader, the puzzled looks on the street as I sought to communicate, and the growing blisters on my feet (which, incidentally, changed the shape of my feet…) and wondered what I had done. The following weeks of prayers kneeling on cold European floors basically amounted to me begging the Lord for a similar spark, for the same certain enthusiasm that had precipitated my decision to serve. I wanted to rush headlong into rash spirituality again.

I wonder if Oliver Cowdery had been wrestling with similar requests. Translating the Book of Mormon certainly wasn’t glamorous work, harassed by the neighbors and probably a couple nights going to bed hungry when the stores ran low. After rushing headlong to attach himself to this new prophet, I wonder if Oliver also prayed for the blessing of ardent faith rekindled. In a word, both Oliver and I sought spiritual knowledge, the kind of deeply felt certainty that had sent us off on our prospective missions.

The Lord recognizes that in verse 1: “Oliver Cowdery, verily, verily, I say unto you, that assuredly as the Lord liveth, who is your God and your Redeemer, even so surely shall you receive a knowledge [emphasis mine] of whatsoever things you shall ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that you shall receive a knowledge concerning the engravings of old records, which are ancient…”

It would appear here that Oliver is searching for a sure knowledge of his daily work’s divinity. He has felt that the plates that will become the Book of Mormon have been divinely guided into this small homestead in the early American republic. But he wants to know. He wants to know so that he can continue the frenetic, exhilarating pace of his work. Oliver, like so many of us, needs motivation to continue working. He won’t continue the struggle unless he knows it’s worth it.

But notice that the Lord does not just hand Oliver knowledge. He hands him a principle. And it is this principle that will be our iron rod for both explaining revelatory mistakes and ensuring revelatory success.

Verse 2: “Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.”

This is it. The Lord is teaching both Oliver and us a significant truth about revelation. So let’s figure out what exactly the Lord is teaching here. So often, we make the mistake of assuming this scripture describes only the metaphysical receptors through which the Lord will beam his pure knowledge into our souls. There is much more to be learned here, but the idea of mind and heart is still a good starting place.

Contemporary readers will be inclined to equate the terms “mind and heart” with “thinking and feeling” or “brain and gut,” and that’s not a bad place to start either. But these terms have very diverse meanings, especially in the early 19th century, and expanding our knowledge of these terms’ connotations will give us a clearer picture of what, exactly, the Lord is promising us.

Let’s start with mind. Mind certainly does refer to thoughts and thought processes, the kind of mental work we would refer to if we were telling a young student to “use your mind.” In addition, however, there is a powerful strand of meaning related to memory when the term “mind” is used in Joseph and Oliver’s time (and to a certain extent, in ours too). If I say, “That brings something to mind,” I’m referring to the marvelously complex abilities of human memory to accept a new idea or stimulus and connect it to an older thought.

So what does that mean? It means that, in the first part of this verse, the Lord is telling us that the Spirit will make use of our logical (and illogical) processes of thinking, but that it will also interact with our memories. If we add in the heart, and the connotation that word had (and still has) to represent our feelings, inclinations, will, and desires, we see that the still, small voice will not come to us like a flyer precariously pinned to our windshield at the supermarket. Instead, the still, small voice, amplified through our thoughts and our memory and our feelings and our will and our desires runs a incisive and expansive full-blown media campaign. If we are prepared, we will know what message comes from the Lord.

Which leads us to a complication of sorts, a complication we saw in the case of Nephi. What if the mind and the heart have been imperfectly prepared? Nephi’s memories of scripture were imperfect remembrances of imperfect scriptural texts. His memories of God’s sweet promise to him combined with this imperfect scripture allowed him to logically justify troubling violence. And as we mentioned earlier, if Nephi can suffer from this, where does that place us?

The next part of the verse uses significant language that sets the stage for this discussion. The Holy Ghost will interact with these various faculties in two distinct ways: it “shall come upon you” and it “shall dwell in your heart.” Let’s look at each interaction separately before we put them together.

Shall Come Upon You

There are several important concepts enunciated in this phrase. First, the Spirit will “come,” meaning that there will be an outside influence upon the mind and the heart. Second, it will come “upon you,” meaning that it will rest upon the foundation that is “you.” The individual assumptions, beliefs, thought processes, and prejudices form the foundation on which the Spirit can build. This is, in effect, how personal revelation becomes personal. Divine truth is filtered through the lens of individuality and personal circumstance. The Lord uses the Holy Spirit to meet us where we are in our spiritual development.

As we learn and develop intellectually, we have the potential to build a foundational infrastructure that either forms a constantly improving conduit to this revelation or confronts that revelation with an increasingly complex labyrinth of preconceptions. More importantly, our early spiritual experiences can either be incorporated into this foundation of “you,” correcting errors of human judgment and prejudice, or those experiences can be forgotten or short-changed, never becoming a part of the infrastructure of mind and heart.  

Shall Dwell in Your Heart

I like to think that the second interaction, the promise that the Spirit will dwell in our hearts, as being related to the first chronologically. That is, if we allow the Spirit to penetrate the labyrinth of our preconceptions and desires, then the Spirit is able to penetrate to the deepest parts of our heart, to communicate with us in a perfect and ineffable way.

This is the pattern shown in the first verses of 3 Nephi 11, when the survivors of the apocalyptic destruction that corresponded to the Savior’s death are gathered around the temple in Bountiful discussing the recent destruction and the prophecies of the Savior’s return. It was precisely while they were discussing, opening their personal labyrinths to greater light and knowledge, recognizing the limitations of their knowledge and refusing to commit to easy answers or folkloric explanations, it was “while they were thus conversing one with another, they heard a voice as if it came out of heaven; and they cast their eyes round about, for they understood not the voice which they heard; and it was not a harsh voice, neither was it a loud voice; nevertheless, and notwithstanding it being a small voice it did pierce them that did hear to the center, insomuch that there was no part of their frame that it did not cause to quake; yea, it did pierce them to the very soul, and did cause their hearts to burn.” (3 Nephi 11:3)

A small part of divine communication, one advance party of a larger spiritual salvo makes it through the imperfect labyrinth of human understanding. It makes it all the way through to these people’s hearts. And it pierces them. It causes their hearts to burn.

At this point, the people gathered in Bountiful have a choice, the same choice that we all face. Do I allow this feeling, this piercing, this pain of spiritual growth and discomfort of burgeoning understanding, do I allow this to dwell in my heart?

The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, teaches us what the potential is if we do allow that illuminating and peaceful discomfort to take up residence in our heart and, reaching outward, in our mind.

“I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith [emphasis mine]; that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.” (Ephesians 3:14-19)

If we make the choice to allow this piercing spiritual knowledge to remain in us, to change our nature, to change our prejudice and misconception, our thought process and very desires, then we have the potential to begin to see a greater breadth, length, depth, and height of divine knowledge, culminating in a perfect knowledge of the love of Christ or, in other words, life eternal (see John 17:3).

This is precisely what the people gathered around the temple in Bountiful do. Each time they give this “voice” a space within their hearts to change what they think and what they know, they turn around and listen again. Each time they do so, they are rewarded with greater knowledge. More of the divine light breaks through. More of that light is incorporated in a restructuring of knowledge and belief, ultimately leading to the appearance of Jesus Christ.

Thus, I think about these two actions as a positive feedback loop. In the event that inspiration, coming upon us, pierces our hearts, we can choose to let it dwell there. If we do, the inspiration within our heart enlarges our understanding and corrects our behavior and belief, which in turn allows greater conductivity of the Spirit through our conceptual labyrinth, resulting in still greater inspiration piercing our hearts. And so on.

Putting it all Together

This is the inspiring promise we receive in Doctrine and Covenants section 8. This is also the challenge we face. For, while the people of Bountiful model the idea of this revolutionary process in a matter of minutes, the actual process of using revelation to perfect our understanding takes lifetimes. At pivotal moments, the Spirit will be still come upon us and have to pierce a personal foundation of imperfect understanding. The difference between us and prophets is not a problem of kind, but of degree. Like us, prophets must deal with their own imperfect understanding of the world and how it works.

The good news that the Lord gives us is that he will tell us using multiple metaphysical channels. Our memory, our thought, our feelings, our desires will all coalesce into a unified message if the Holy Ghost is behind the prompting.

The bad news is that we are horrendously awful at waiting for that coalescence. Far too often, due to the exigencies of daily life and personal pride, we shortcut revelation. We fail to see the blind spots in our reasoning and our worldview. We receive revelation and then squander it by subordinating its inspiration to our agendas and prejudices, our imperfect hopes and our human reasoning. It is in this moment that we dilute not only the Lord’s revelation to us, but also the good that revelation could have led us to do. More or less, this is the source of all prophetic and personal confusion and mistakes.

Nephi felt that killing Laban was wrong. He shrunk from what his reasoning told him was the correct action. This was Nephi’s warning. His heart and his mind were not sending a unified message. When Nephi chose to subvert his revulsion against violence to the logical justification of Laban’s murder, he made a mistake, he misinterpreted in part, what the Lord was prompting him to do. He still achieved the objective of his divine quest, but his journey there created pain and sin at the same time it brought joy and knowledge to his family and posterity.

Next, we will apply this framework to the modern prophets who wrestled with the priesthood ban in the mid-twentieth century.

The Road to Middoni: In Your Mind and In Your Heart (Part I)

Before moving on to those central questions, I’d like to address my emotional response to such an interpretation of Nephi’s actions in 1 Nephi 4. And that emotion is fear. “Wait a second,” I (and you, perhaps) cry at this relentless logical march towards greater spiritual knowledge. “Wait! Before we go down this path that will reveal uncertainty and a stark view of the difficulties involved in receiving and interpreting divine revelation, isn’t there something safe to hold on to? What’s the iron rod here?”

I believe there is a principle of safety, and it’s a principle that helps elucidate an even deeper concern that I sometimes even hesitate to ask. How do you mess up something beautifully pure like divine communication? How do prophets mess up? How do I mess up in the exact same way? And if Nephi can miss or misinterpret part of the message, what can I possibly hope to gain from the moments when God speaks to me?

Both of these lines of questioning have, I think, a powerful answer contained in the scriptures. But before we get to that, let’s pause and contemplate the stakes of revelation.

In the previous chapter, we established something of a extreme--a prophetic leader seeking divine guidance while under massive pressure in a time-sensitive situation. This situation isn’t typical for divine communication, at least from what I can gather from my own experience and the stories put forth in scripture. Rather, the fact that God communicates with his children through what Nephi himself would call a “still, small voice” means that most of the time, communication from the heavens occurs in conditions fine-tuned for spiritual quiet and to ears fine-tuned to spiritual frequencies. Prophets are a group of individuals who have spent a lifetime learning to listen to this still, small voice.

That isn’t to say that the stakes aren’t high. In fact, when revelation from God is sought or received, the stakes are nearly always at their highest.

Take Moses leading the children of Israel as a case in point. Whatever the actual circumstances of crossing the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds), the divine command to “Go forward!” was surely given amid the din of panicked cries, wailing, animal moaning, waves crashing, and general bustle and hubbub (“Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?”).

Or take Abinadi, finding additional strength and knowledge poured into his soul at the very moment his life was under threat in the court of King Noah (“Away with this fellow, and slay him; for what have we to do with him, for he is mad.”)

But I will proffer here the idea that most revelation does not take place under physically taxing circumstances. Instead, the stakes are spiritually existential. Think of President Kimball wrestling with the tradition of liturgical racism, prejudice and segregation. Think of the spiritual stakes here. This was a razor’s edge, a theological minefield if ever there was one for a church that professes leadership through contemporary divine communication. One misstep, one decision taken for the wrong reasons, would have major ramifications. I think this chapter will make my interpretation of events quite clear, but try to put yourself in the shoes of church leaders in the spring of 1978. There were two logical possibilities in their minds.

1. God had truly decreed the ban against ordaining black men to the priesthood and against sealing black couples and families together in the temple, and despite both interior and exterior pressures to do away with the ban, doing so against God’s command would cut off the church from divine presence. As a result, the church would become a church of men, not a church guided by God.
2. The priesthood ban was wrong, and should be rescinded. At stake here was not only the spiritual well-being and access to blessings of millions of God’s children (and an institutional repentance process that would require the Atonement to make up for decades of missed kindness and salvation), but also the spiritual damnation among the current membership of the church if they were allowed to continue to hold on to racist beliefs that were not in accordance with divine truth.

I’ll grant you that I’ve somewhat oversimplified things (and we’ll see a third path charted by the very humbled Elder Bruce R. McConkie in the months after the church rescinded the ban), but that is how I imagine the spiritual stakes of the matter.

What has always bothered me about this process is not the origin of the priesthood ban. While the church hasn’t officially stated as such, the consensus among faithful members of the church who have thought and studied this deeply seems to be that cultural mores of the time, laced with a little political expediency and not a small amount of fearing men more than God all worked together to influence Brigham Young and other leaders to enact the priesthood ban, first officially articulated in an 1852 speech President Young gave to the Utah territorial legislature. Church leaders questioned the divinity of such a ban at first, but the passing of generations led to its general acceptance by both the general membership and leadership of the church as a hard and fast rule, even ascribing its origin to Joseph Smith. There are multiple excellent studies of this subject, some just recently published, so I encourage you to learn more if this all sounds new to you.

While tragic, I don’t find this hard to believe or destructive to my foundational belief in the church’s teaching and leadership. Just like Nephi, I can respect and listen to men who make mistakes. What is much more bothersome is the seeming reluctance among church leadership in the middle 20th century to question or move more quickly to rescind the ban. From what the scraps of history can tell us, it seems clear that each president of the church, from David O. McKay until Spencer W. Kimball ended the ban, sought with varying degrees of earnestness to receive an answer from the Lord concerning the matter. To put that in perspective, that’s at least 27 years of prophetic prayers (though likely a subject of prayer much earlier for these men as they served as apostles). Why did it take so long to learn the truth? Especially if we believe, as I do, that God’s truth is eternal, that racism has never received divine sanction, and that it was essentially waiting out there, in the ethereal heavens, for an attuned prophetic ear to hear?

Now seems like a good time to talk about that iron rod principle of revelation.

To be continued next week with a discussion of the iron rod principle of revelation and a close reading of prophetic interaction with race.

The Road to Middoni: Misreading 1 Nephi 4 (Part VI)

This section concludes the analysis of Explanation 5.

As Nephi stands over drunken, prostrate Laban, the divine creator communicates with Nephi by means of the Holy Ghost. I will reproduce that exchange here for reference, beginning with Nephi’s discovery of Laban, verses 6-18 of 1 Nephi 4, bolding significant parts of the story which I will discuss further below.

“6. And I was led by the Spirit, not knowing before hand the things which I should do.

7. Nevertheless I went forth, and as I came near unto the house of Laban I beheld a man, and he had fallen to the earth before me, for he was drunken with wine.

8. And when I came to him I found that it was Laban.

9. And I beheld his sword, and I drew it forth from the sheath thereof; and the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel.

10. And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him.

11. And the Spirit said unto again: Behold the Lord hath delivered him into they hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he also had taken away our property.

12. And it came to pass that the spirit said unto me again, Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into they hands;

13. Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.

14. And now, when I, Nephi, had heard these words, I remembered the words of the Lord which he spake unto me in the wilderness, saying that: Inasmuch as thy seed shall keep my commandments, they shall prosper in the land of promise.

15. Yea, and I also thought that they could not keep the commandments of the Lord according to the law of Moses, save they should have the law.

16. And I also knew that the law was engraven upon the plates of brass.

17. And again, I knew that the Lord had delivered Laban into my hands for this cause--that I might obtain the records according to his commandments.

18. Therefore I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.” (1 Nephi 4: 6-18)

Suspend, just for a moment, the linear progression of events that Nephi recounts here. Despite his temporal perception and account, let’s find an alternative starting point for this story within Nephi’s account.

Let’s begin with the prior communication Nephi had received from the Lord. Verse 14. Nephi has received a promise from God while he meditated in the quiet of a faraway oasis. With little distraction, Nephi had sought the Lord’s will. And he received it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it’s this communication, in addition to Nephi’s filial respect for his father-prophet, that is the key to Nephi’s remarkable persistence in the face of such long odds. Ancient preoccupation with seed aside, Nephi was in this for his future family, a powerful motivator for anyone. And those two important “P” words, prosper and promise, have pushed many a person beyond perceived limits.

So that’s the first tool available to Nephi, heart pounding, fatigued, and frantic in the dark streets of Jerusalem: a memory of past revelation, a remembrance of past promise.

What are his other tools? His understanding of prophetic discourse contained in holy writ and his powers of logical reasoning.

Let’s learn a little about the scriptural references Nephi had to draw upon. At the time Nephi was growing up in Jerusalem, a remarkable flowering of religiosity was in full swing. Scholars call this the Deutoronomic Reform. In 622 B.C. priests in the temple announced that they had found a book containing the words of Moses. This book began a canonization of sorts that lasted for hundreds of years, spanning the Babylonian captivity and eventually weaving together 3-4 earlier strands of prophetic myth, legend, discourse, and law, with additions and a powerful conclusion coming from a new strand--the Deutoronomic, or “D” text.

This D text was significantly responsive to the political pressures of its time. Unlike the other strands which demanded tolerance for neighbors and forebearance in hasty judgment, the D text recounted a proto-nationalistic and exclusive Israel, an attitude that closely matched the political exigency of the time. Caught between powerful empires in Babylonia and Egypt, absorbing refugees from the de- (and then re-) populated northern kingdom of Israel, the priestly class turned to a sort of religious fundamentalism that demanded a newly stringent monotheism as the identity for the kingdom of Judah.

This strand would develop and significantly influence the versions of the stories in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings that we have today.

This is the strand that would have fueled the teaching in the synagogues and among families. This was the scripture that Nephi had access to as he used texts and holy stories to interpret the options in the situations he confronted in his own life. I won’t make a claim about the inspired nature (or not) of the D text. But it’s clear that the scriptures Nephi had access to were mediated through the larger societal fears and hopes of his period, and that the fears and hopes of this period had led to a fundamentalist understanding of what God would or would not allow his people to do in their quest to survive the harsh political climate of ancient Palestine.

So, when Nephi thinks about applicable scripture to guide him in his actions, he thinks of the D text. Check out the footnotes for one of Nephi’s first scriptural applications in verse 11 (“Behold the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands”) Where do they go? Deuteronomy 3:3, a fundamentalist account of a (highly unlikely) massacre of the people of Bashan, and 1 Samuel 17:46, where God delivers Goliath to David’s sling, both of which are products of the D strand of the Pentateuch.

Now, go back towards the beginning of the extended passage from Nephi. Notice that Nephi notices Laban’s (probably bronze) sword. Then his neurons start firing to find scriptures. He likely remembers the latest stories told by the elders and priests of ancient Israel’s chosenness and the lengths to which they were allowed to push the limits of violence and cruelty in their charge of nation-building.

The Spirit does start to whisper to Nephi’s heart. It communicates that the Lord has led Nephi here. Here is the solution to his problem. Here is the means by which Nephi can accomplish the commandment he’s received of the Lord. Except, the Spirit doesn’t say “Slay him.” That’s what Nephi hears, but the Spirit has made it not to perfect ears or perfect understanding, but a man’s ears and a man’s understanding. The imperfect scriptural texts, aided by the visual stimulus of the sword corrupt the Spirit’s message into “Slay him.”

But Nephi recognizes that this doesn’t feel right. He recoils, and rightly so, from an act that is so ungodly. He searches, in his rapidly firing neurons, for a memory of past light and knowledge. Or revelation with which he can compare this new, ghastly command.

Nephi remembers. He remembers the oasis, the stirring breeze, the inexpressible happines that accompanied the realization that God knew him and spoke to him and had something great in store for him.

It is in that moment of bliss that Nephi makes his human error. Rather than compare the two spiritual experiences, Nephi thinks. Not usually a bad thing to do. But his focus on God’s promise to him allows him to justify the violence that he had found in scriptural precedent.

He thought about how he needed the commandments found on the brass plates to make God’s promise come true.

He brought to mind another, logical fact, that brass plates were a sure bet. He knew they contained the commandments he needed.

And with that thought and that fact, Nephi produced counterfeit truth based on half truth. God really had delivered Laban into Nephi’s hands. But murder was not in the intended equation. Nephi knew something that was not altogether true, and he acted on it.

But before you judge Nephi too harshly, imagine a network featuring a central node. The central node is Nephi, and moving towards him are an overlapping, mashed together stampede of inputs. There is no stable hierarchy for these inputs. Nephi is not a computer with impeccable code driving the information transfer. He is imperfect and he is human. In a matter of seconds, Nephi’s brain is processing:

• The visual stimulus of Laban’s sword.
• The scriptural accounts of violence and nation-building prompted by Laban’s sword and Nephi’s cosmic view of his own posterity.
• The powerful influence of the Holy Ghost, whispering pure truth into his heart and mind.
• The indelible memory of past spiritual experience.
• The logical process that is sorting out Nephi’s options.
• The real environment of Nephi’s surroundings and the resultant stress.
• The fatigue, fear, excitement, and the natural human predisposition to violence.

In a matter of moments, Nephi must process this information and act. His action is not the best of all possible options, but it is the option that Nephi is able to undertake based on the sum of the information he processes. Just like his brothers, who made it to the walls of Jerusalem but failed to make the optimal choice of accompanying their brother all the way on his quest, Nephi’s decision is not optimal, but does get the job done.

Nephi does obtain the brass plates, he does use their contents to guide his family to righteousness, and the plates do play an important role in generations to come. Mathematically speaking, more good is probably accomplished at the relatively small price of one murder. But that does not make the action God’s will. God willed the outcome, and Nephi made that outcome happen. He just got there like a man, not an omniscient deity.

As the dust falls, Nephi, just like anyone after a moment of trauma, must sort through his memory to create a sensible timeline that categorizes neatly his experience. As he works through this process, Nephi identifies the different strands that worked together in this pivotal moment, and he truthfully relates the experience as he lived it. God spoke to him, he recoiled, he recalled the stakes, and made the decision to kill Laban.

If Nephi is an archetypal prophet, then we’re left with a very unhagiographic vision of prophets. Yet, the inescapable fact is that God talks to these imperfect, good men. In fact, he’s chosen them to lead us, guide us, and show us what we must do in this life to walk beside our Heavenly Father again one day. It’s much easier to believe a prophet’s imperfection only extends to inefficient teeth brushing, incorrigibly leaving socks on the floor, and sleeping in once a month. It helps us to not doubt a word the prophet says or a single action he performs. It keeps us safe.

But when we are faced with a contradiction like 1 Nephi 4 and we have the intellectual curiosity and the deep-seated sense of ethical truth-seeking that won’t allow us to forget or push doubts under the rug until the millennium, the burnished image of saintly prophets is no longer enough.

At that moment, we have a choice. We can either throw up our hands in despair that the stories our parents and missionaries told us (and probably believed) about prophetic near-perfection weren’t true or we can rely on our faith and ask the hard questions:

• How does the Lord communicate with imperfect prophets?
• How do imperfect prophets communicate with us?
• How are we supposed to follow communication steeped in human imperfection?
• Why does the Lord choose such a messy way to run his church and teach his children?

The rest of this book will attempt to answer these questions based on the insights I have received over the past decade from my own study and experiences and the study and experiences of the many wise men and women who have taught me precious and important lessons throughout my life.

The next section, which will begin posting next week, will look closely at how the Lord communicates with imperfect prophets (especially when they're not stressed out with life and death split-second decisions).

The Road to Middoni: Misreading 1 Nephi 4 (Part V)

This post continues the discussion of possible explanations behind Nephi's murder of Laban. 

Explanation #4: Nephi tells the truth

On the other hand, Nephi could be telling the truth. He did kill Laban and he did hear a voice that clearly commanded him to take Laban’s life. Of course, if we continue to assume God’s omniscient love and care for his children, that only leaves the possibility that Nephi hearing voices means he’s become slightly unhinged, allowing his subconscious to take the form of divine command. A mentally unstable Nephi does little to improve his prophetic image in our mind, either. Enough said.

Explanation #5: Nephi does what any righteous but imperfect man would do with imperfect influences of fear, faith, stress, and ingenuity.

Based on my two assumptions about the nature of God and the internal evidence of the Book of Mormon taken as a whole (not to mention my gut), I believe that none of these first four interpretations of events really gets at what happened. I do not believe Nephi deliberately fabricated aspects of this story. In fact, I believe he tells precisely what happened. The divine words from God really did ring in his ears and whisper to his heart. However, when we look closely at Nephi’s account, we identify a distinct and realistic possibility that would allow a command from an omniscient and loving Father to translate into a heinous and bloody act of murder.

The key here is the distance between what God commanded and what Nephi interpreted/performed. I believe this distance is perhaps the most crucial principle to understand when it comes to learning to follow a living prophet.

Let’s pause here to contrast the communication between people that is found in 1 Nephi 4 with the communication between God and Nephi. Look closely at the potential for the types of miscommunication possible when specific words are used, as this will provide a significant contrast when we look more closely at how God communicates with his prophets.

In the first three verses of the chapter, Nephi stirringly attempts to inspire his brothers to take a third, dangerous trip into the streets of Jerusalem. One phrase that has personal and doctrinal significance for me occurs in verse 2: “Therefore let us go up; let us be strong like unto Moses; for he truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither, and our fathers came through out of captivity, on dry ground, and the armies of Pharaoh did follow and were drowned in the waters of the Red Sea.”

In this verse, Nephi models the very behavior that he will specifically counsel readers of future generations to do further on in his writings. He models how to apply scriptures from faraway times and places to immediate, personal situations. Nephi looks to the ancient actions of Moses to gain insight into what he must do, dusty, tired, recently relieved of his inheritance at spear-point, and with a group of less-than-motivated traveling companions who respect his opinion about as much as you would respect the inconvenient opinion of your own overbearing younger brother in times of crisis.

Significantly, verse 4 shows us what happens as a result of Nephi’s exegesis. “Now when I had spoken these words, they were yet wroth, and did still continue to murmur; nevertheless they did follow me up until we came without the walls of Jerusalem.” Nephi’s rhetorical flourish succeeds in inspiring movement towards the objective, but he fails to communicate powerfully enough to change the thoughts and feelings of his brothers. Now, consider for a moment all the reasons Nephi hasn’t successfully communicated the motivation he felt upon contemplating the bravery and strength of biblical Moses to his brothers’ hearts.

First, we might assert that these brothers were incapable of feeling such inspiration because of their wickedness. This may contribute a small part, but keep in mind that Laman and Lemuel had obeyed their father in every commandment thus far. They were obedient, if not fully committed.  

More importantly, we should take into account their humanity: two failures, coupled by sleepless nights awaiting what seemed like an inevitable assassin’s blade from Laban’s household guard and the accompanying fatigue, irritability, and clouded judgment that accompany fear, failure, and fatigue.

Going even further, the system of human language is inherently flawed, unable to precisely communicate the speaker’s intended meaning to his audience. Nephi’s use of figurative metaphor “strong like unto Moses” is fraught with miscommunicative possibilities as it moves from his mouth to the ears of Laman, Lemuel, and Sam. Perhaps the listeners have not read the text alluded to as recently or as fervently as Nephi has. Perhaps they have read it more recently, and have come to a different interpretation of Moses’ strength. All listeners have different experiences that inform their understanding of the word “strength.” Add in lisps, homonyms, dirt in ears, windy Jerusalem nights, and you can quickly see how even attentive listeners can so easily interpret a speaker’s word differently than the speaker intends.

And yet, despite all that, the brothers follow Nephi. Even with imperfect means, the right choice almost magically occurs.

Now, you may be thinking, what about a perfect communicative means? What about communicating through the Spirit? Indeed, truth and knowledge delivered by divine means avoids many of the communicative difficulties found in written and spoken language. The Spirit communicates directly to the spirit, mind, and heart of the listener, depending on the scriptural reference used. But, as we will see, even perfect communication risks corruption when filtered through imperfect intellect or inclination.

The final post of Misreading 1 Nephi 4 will be posted on Friday.