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A disclaimer. I'm a recommend-carrying, uber active member of the church. I am happy to sustain Thomas S. Monson and all the rest as prophets, seers, and revelators. But I'm pretty clear-eyed about things as well. And I don't think one needs to be a SeattleUte-style Son of Perdition to recognize that the workings of the bureaucratic church are as much a function of institutional inertia as inspiration. This is the kind of thing we liberals and moderates acknowledge when we're honest with ourselves and, in my less bleak moments, I don't think it's necessarily anything to be lamented. We have pretty much followed Weber's description of how charismatic leadership is transformed into faceless bureaucracy to a T. That's just the nature of the beast.
Do the FP and Q12 exercise their keys in the kinds of ways that we, as eager 19-year old missionaries once led our investigators to believe? I think of the things that I simply assumed and unhesitatingly taught--that the Prophet speaks with the Lord face to face; that revelation is initiated by the Lord and is ubiquitous and ongoing; that more scripture will soon come forth; that the Second Coming is an imminent historical event; etc. etc.--and I shudder to think how I naive I was. Not that any of those claims are simply false, per se. It's just that in every case, things are more complicated than I had once thought.
I can't help wonder as well if there isn't a sense of disappointment or disillusion even at the top. I imagine the GAs' lives are filled with administrative minutiae, attending meetings, calling leaders, putting out the many fires that spring up on a daily basis in an organization as large and complex as the church. Are they also aware of this kind of deficit of clear, distinct, unequivocal revelation that is not primarily administrative in character? Are they aware of the kind of yearning of all members of the church--conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike--to feel that the heavens are still open and that new revelations might come forth? That many members hang on their every word at General Conference, eager to seize on anything that would remotely hint at a form of revelation that goes beyond the familiar exhortations to greater personal righteousness? Not that those aren't needed, of course.
I can't help but wonder if the Church's propensity to wander into the US culture wars--say, from the 1970s ERA movement to the present--is not a consequence of our leaders' own awareness that real, honest-to-god revelation is rare indeed. In the absence of dramatic new revelation, perhaps they felt a need to to assure church members that they do speak with divine authority (not as the scribes, as it were) by speaking clearly and forthrightly on the moral issues of the day (which, of course, tend to look very much like the "moral issues of the day" as defined by conservative and evangelical American Christians and the Moral Majority, but that's a subject for another post). My questions, in brief, are these:
(1) Should the Church's forceful engagement in social issues from the 70s onward be construed as a way of speaking "prophetically" while sidestepping any awkward claim to having actually received fresh revelation?
(2) Does the Church's recent (let's say, post-Prop 8), ever-so-gentle backpedalling on social issues hint that the time when evidence of prophetic leadership was equated with waging the cultural wars is drawing to a close?
Do the FP and Q12 exercise their keys in the kinds of ways that we, as eager 19-year old missionaries once led our investigators to believe? I think of the things that I simply assumed and unhesitatingly taught--that the Prophet speaks with the Lord face to face; that revelation is initiated by the Lord and is ubiquitous and ongoing; that more scripture will soon come forth; that the Second Coming is an imminent historical event; etc. etc.--and I shudder to think how I naive I was. Not that any of those claims are simply false, per se. It's just that in every case, things are more complicated than I had once thought.
I can't help wonder as well if there isn't a sense of disappointment or disillusion even at the top. I imagine the GAs' lives are filled with administrative minutiae, attending meetings, calling leaders, putting out the many fires that spring up on a daily basis in an organization as large and complex as the church. Are they also aware of this kind of deficit of clear, distinct, unequivocal revelation that is not primarily administrative in character? Are they aware of the kind of yearning of all members of the church--conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike--to feel that the heavens are still open and that new revelations might come forth? That many members hang on their every word at General Conference, eager to seize on anything that would remotely hint at a form of revelation that goes beyond the familiar exhortations to greater personal righteousness? Not that those aren't needed, of course.
I can't help but wonder if the Church's propensity to wander into the US culture wars--say, from the 1970s ERA movement to the present--is not a consequence of our leaders' own awareness that real, honest-to-god revelation is rare indeed. In the absence of dramatic new revelation, perhaps they felt a need to to assure church members that they do speak with divine authority (not as the scribes, as it were) by speaking clearly and forthrightly on the moral issues of the day (which, of course, tend to look very much like the "moral issues of the day" as defined by conservative and evangelical American Christians and the Moral Majority, but that's a subject for another post). My questions, in brief, are these:
(1) Should the Church's forceful engagement in social issues from the 70s onward be construed as a way of speaking "prophetically" while sidestepping any awkward claim to having actually received fresh revelation?
(2) Does the Church's recent (let's say, post-Prop 8), ever-so-gentle backpedalling on social issues hint that the time when evidence of prophetic leadership was equated with waging the cultural wars is drawing to a close?
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