The Goodness and the Mysteries

Thursday, February 7, 2013

The Blood of Bulls and of Goats

A bull and two goats are some of the Day of Atonement sacrifices recorded in Leviticus. Hebrews then quotes several verses from Psalm 40, suggesting that the context for that Psalm is the Day of Atonement.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

There Is a Remembrance

The Day of Atonement is a remembrance. This is key, and a plain statement, because other passages connect the ideas of remembrance, the dressing of the high priest, and the incarnation of the Lord. See, for instance: Leviticus, Luke, Exodus, and Matthew.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

A Shadow of Good Things to Come

The "law" (of Moses) can't make anyone perfect. That's because it lacks the "image" of things to come, and contains only the "shadow" of that that image.

Hebrews is telling us that before its apostasy, the First Temple contained the image of things to come and perfected its worshippers. This precedes a discussion of the Day of Atonement, which Hebrews understands as -- in its original, uncorrupted form -- teaching of the coming of Christ.

Monday, February 4, 2013

The Patterns of Things in the Heavens

The Day of Atonement rite pre-enacted Christ's once-for-all self-sacrifice. The temple is heaven on earth, containing the presence of God.

Men die and face their judgment: this is the dressing and judgment at the veil within the temple.

Having made his sacrifice, Christ will now come spotless with salvation: this is the high priest-the Lord emerging from the temple on the Day of Atonement.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

He Is the Mediator

Christ is the mesites, the one who stands between. Those who are "called" grasp (labosin) the promise of eternal inheritance.

One can only inherit something when the one who possesses it has died. This makes sense because Christ is the Lord-Yahweh-the King. Having died, he can now meet shalems at the veil and acknowledge them individually, if worthy, as his children and heirs.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Neither by the Blood of Goats and Calves

Christ comes as the high priest and also the sacrifice of the Day of Atonement. His coming is an element common to the Day of Atonement and the Worship of the Shalems, and it is that coming that gives both ordinances their power -- until then, they are just forms and figures, parables.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Meats and Drinks, and Divers Washings

The apostate services, though they include meat, drink, and washing, are unable, without the mission and presence of Christ, to make the worshippers "perfect" (teleiosai) (compare with Matthew 5:48).

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By Way of Explanation

This blog started as an email list, to which I sent daily updates of my Book of Mormon reading, as I promised my Elders Quorum I would do. Then it came to this URL as a private blog, and then to a Drupal-powered site. I wanted to invite people to join a private community that talked about the Book of Mormon.

The Drupal site, tragically, has crashed (probably nothing to do with Drupal), so I brought the blog back here. In the meantime, I've also published a couple of books -- Plain and Precious Things: The Temple Religion of the Book of Mormon's Visionary Men and The Goodness and the Mysteries: On the Path of the Book of Mormon's Visionary Men.

As of year end 2013, I've been called to teach Gospel Doctrine in my ward. So I'm leaving up all the old posts and comments, and I'm now going to use this blog to post class outlines, book recommendations, and so forth. Please feel free to share and comment!

Here I Stand

Here are some things I think about the Book of Mormon, the Bible and the origin of the Nephite community. This is not systematic, but intended to explain what might seem like idiosyncratic perspectives.

A) I believe the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be.

B) I believe the Bible is a collection of books recording the experiences and thoughts of Israel and the early Christians.

C) I think both halves of the Bible have been doctored by people who didn't like the true ancient religion of Israel and the true doctrines of Christ, and wished to conceal them beneath their own teachings.

D) I think Lehi left Jerusalem during one of the great moments of conflict in Israelite religion, when reformers (often called "Deuteronomists" by Bible scholars) were changing the way religion was practiced in Israel and rewriting the holy documents to prove themselves right.

E) We read these reformers as heroes in the Bible, because they won, and got to tell the story the way they wanted it. Lehi belonged to the other party, the "prophets" or "visionary men", who lost. This "loser's view" of the sixth century B.C. makes the Book of Mormon an invaluable resource that secular Bible scholars would kill to have. Ironically.

F) This is gross simplification, but: the visionary men went underground, but didn't cease to exist. 1 Enoch is one of their books, along with much of what we call Second Temple or Intertestamental literature or the Apocalyptic Books or the Pseudepigrapha or the Apocrypha. The Dead Sea Scrolls people inherited many of their ideas. The first Christians were Israelites of the traditional religion, more heirs of the visionary men, who recognized Christ as the Messiah who had been promised by the ancient faith.

G) Lehi and his people carried the practices of the visionary men into the promised land. They loved the temple, and its rites were the sources of their prophesies. Crucially, they had visions, the imagery of which was derived from temple furniture, architecture and ritual (1 Nephi 8 and 1 Nephi 11-14 are showcase examples of this). I think it is demonstrable that the Nephites knew an endowment rite, which is expressed both in 1 Nephi 8 and in the Sermon at the Temple (and elsewhere, as I discuss in Plain and Precious Things). That and the Day of Atonement rite were the "rock" and the "salvation," the two ordinances central to the doctrines and prophecies of the visionary men.

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