First, I’ll note that these verses have a fairly complicated textual history, for which it is useful to return to Grant Underwood’s textual analysis, pp. 123-126.
Verses 53-56 add an important clarification to the ideas of consecration and stewardship, by making a distinction between the system being revealed here and fully common ownership. I stumble a bit at the idea of Saints paying each other directly, rather than having all transactions go through the storehouse. Is there some secondary economy contemplated, in which people could buy and sell laterally? And “pay” introduces some questions–are we talking about a monetary transaction, or system of bartering? Does it matter? Ultimately, though, it seems to me that this clarification makes it possible that one should “stand in the place of [her] stewardship”–setting up the requisite confidence in personal ownership to motivate careful and efficient care and husbanding of resources.
Verse 56 seems like an abrupt interjection of a new and, at first glance, unrelated topic. The traditional interpretation of these verses asserts that they refer to Joseph’s “translation” of the New Testament that was underway at the time this revelation was received. This seems historically reasonable, but hermeneutically unsatisfying. We have to wonder why these verses are included in this important revelation, and whether they are intended to have a wider valance than a strictly historical interpretation of the text can render (which is to say that, to a lit. crit. wannabe, practically everything looks like an invitation to grandiose speculation on the place of The Text in the large scheme of things).
I don’t think I have anything like a coherent interpretation of these verses, so for the sake of getting discussion started, I’ll just throw out some sets of related questions.
1) What is the place of textual production and reception within a Zion community? It’s interesting that the discussion of receiving/translating/interpreting scripture follows a proscription against idleness and an enumeration of healing works. What does it mean about revelation if receiving it is considered work or part of a stewardship?
2) What is the function of scriptural texts in representing the community to the world? Why is it important for this particular iteration of scripture to be received in full before being discussed, when the process of revelation, revision, and canonization was otherwise ongoing and fairly public? Do the consequences in v. 60 attach to those who have been taught in every nation, kindred, and tongue, or is there a turn in verse 59 from scripture that is to be taught to everyone and scripture that becomes law and is exclusively binding upon the church?
3) What does it mean that these scriptures are denoted “law”? In particular, if this passage is referring to Joseph’s midrash of the New Testament, where do we find “law” in the NT? We (or at least I) generally think of the Old Testament and the Doctrine & Covenants as the site of enumerated laws, and the New Testament and Book of Mormon as something different–textual sites devoted mostly to working through of abstractions, the theoretical underpinnings and soteriological context of those laws and their fulfillment. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, but does this passage potentially illuminate that distinction (or eliminate it)? (Perhaps this is an invitation to Nate to tell us why it’s all law!)
4) Where does the authority that saves or damns (v. 60) inhere? Some of the earlier versions of the text leave room for an interpretation of v.56 that suggests that receiving the scriptures means that the people of God will be preserved in safety. Is the Word itself salvific? Or is the Word a source of a set of rules (a “law”?), adherence to which is the mechanism of salvation? Is it particularly Joseph’s mediation of the New Testament that creates this law, or is it the extant text, merely clarified by Joseph’s interpretation? Or, looking ahead to v. 61, is it the project of receiving and codifying revelation, and creating a community devoted to this project, that brings joy and eternal life?
Extra credit: Assign antecedents to the pronouns in these verses. Golly!
Embracing the Law 
July 7, 2009 at 1:01 pm
For questions 2/3, I have a few ideas. Verse 59 says, “thou shalt take the things which thou hast received … to be a law.” From Karen’s corner it appears that 56-57 refer to some yet-to-be-revealed text, which could refer to the New Testament translation, to the rest of the Old Testament translation, or even to the promise in verses 9 and 62 that the place of the New Jerusalem was yet to be revealed. This word, when it is fully received, will “then” (v.58) be taught to all the world. If that is the case, that this is yet to be revealed and yet to be taught, it seems there must be a break before verse 59, which talks of “things which thou hast received” already. The things they have received will be used to govern and judge the church. It wouldn’t seem to make sense to say this was what they had “so far” of the new translations, since v. 57 says not to teach them until received in full (if we indeed take those verses to mean the new translation…). Then we are left with a “law” that is elsewhere “in scripture” (v.59). That is interesting to me, since I thought we were receiving the law here in D&C 42. This seems to open the door to all sorts of interpretations; where in scripture are we talking about? Maybe Kristine will give extra credit for that one too. 🙂
July 7, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Also, I liked the connection between v. 53 and 54. I couldn’t find one myself, and I liked your idea: if things are not just common property, then you actually do have a stewardship with boundaries to take care of.
July 8, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Kristine, you’re asking my kinds of questions: anything to get us closer to a “theology of writing”!
I want to take up each of your sets of questions in turn, but I’m under the weather today, and feeling more like sleeping than thinking, so I’ll add only a word for now, and that about the New Translation more generally here.
I too feel the abruptness of verse 56, and yet….
And yet there has been something all too important about the New Translation in this revelation that we have more or less overlooked. In verses 1-10 (at least on my reading), Joseph and Sidney were excepted from the task of preaching precisely so that they could take up the task of the translation—and this as part of the law! In verses 11-17, the question of the translation was again brought up, since the elders and priests were commanded to teach in a certain way until the translation was complete. And then on top of that, there have been at least hints that this law in general is intertwined with Joseph and Sidney were working on (cf. Marquardt’s discussion of Genesis 14).
So I think your questions are right on, even more so than you yourself seem to think: this revealed law is raising important questions about the role in the Church of the New Translation.
July 8, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Two quick points:
I love the notion that commerce continues in Zion! As for the question of payment, as a historical matter what people paid with was generally neither cash nor bartered goods and services. Rather they paid with notes. For complex reasons having to do with the history of American banking the problems of bimetalism, America in general and the frontier in particular were cash starved. There just wasn’t that much money circulating. There was some barter, especially of labor. However, people would often pay with a written promise — a note — declaring that they would pay the bearer a fixed sum at some point of time in the future. They could also pay with the notes of others, which they held. The notes, of course, would circulate at a discount based on the credit worthiness of the signer. The system, of course, presupposes a pretty complicated system of contract and commercial law. Indeed, the final link in the creation of the system — the full negotiability of contracts — wasn’t really put in place until the early nineteenth century.
On law and scripture, I think that a careful reading of the Book of Mormon’s discussion of law reveals a vision of law as the enactment of stories. I did a series of posts on this at T&S taking the form of a commentary on 1 Ne 19. The other place where we see this is in the rule regarding freedom of belief in Alma 30. I’ve got lots of notes on this that may someday become an article. Given Joseph’s penchant for creating institutional, political, and ritual re-enactments of scriptural stories I think that this particular notion of law is very important for understanding how he (and the D&C) use the idea of law.
So yes, it is all about law.
July 8, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Kristine,
I really like your thoughts here, especially about the question of “pay” in v. 54 and the abrupt-feeling switch to scripture itself (referring to, but not limited to the translation project) in v. 56. You claim that Joseph was working on the New Testament translation at the time—do you have a source for this? I was under the impression, probably from Marquardt’s article, that Joseph was working on the OT at the time (hence my repeated referring back to Gen 14 in particular), but I haven’t found the time track down any sources for dates and texts of the New Translation project. Thanks for any help (you, or anyone else)….
July 9, 2009 at 9:45 am
Robert, you’re right. D&C 45, received March 7, contains the commandment for Joseph and Sidney to switch from the Old to the New Testament (D&C 45 contains some snippets of a different version of Matthew 24, and so the Lord tells them to get to work on the NT). Between February 1st and March 7th, Joseph seems to have translated Genesis 7-25, which may well have put him around Genesis 14 when D&C 42 was received.
July 9, 2009 at 10:53 am
Thanks, Joe. I’m not sure it makes a huge difference to the questions I’m asking, but maybe it does.
I’m thinking, and will hopefully have some time to write tonight. (I HATE summer evenings now–pining for the dead of winter when it’s dark at 5 and my kids are in bed at 7!)
July 11, 2009 at 9:58 am
Says Kristine:
This puts me in mind of all the revelations in the D&C that concern building houses for translation, for printing, etc. It also makes me think of the eventual establishment of councils, the head of which was to receive revelation in an almost routine fashion (and, according to Bushman’s argument [in his “Theology of Councils”], this more or less in the place of the translator Joseph Smith eventually!). At any rate, it is a perfect example of Terryl Givens’s theme of Mormon paradox: Revelation! As part of the routine!
July 11, 2009 at 10:07 am
Again Kristine says:
We seriously need to do some work on the New Translation, which has not yet really been treated in anything like a satisfactory way. From passages like this, it would appear that the New Translation was originally slated to play a much larger role in the Restoration than it ever did play. That some kind of secrecy needed to be attended to is especially interesting. Was there something dangerous about the translation? Would the thing be ridiculed if it were circulated in an early, less than fully articulate rendition; while once it was complete it would carry a power that would convince? Were the things to be revealed in the translation so beyond the conception of the Saints in 1831 that it was necessary to tell them not to say a whole lot, because they had no idea what was coming?
July 12, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I also think it’s interesting that this hasn’t been edited out–we speak so often in the church as if the development of the current form of the LDS church had been a more or less smooth progression, with Brigham picking up where Joseph had left off, and each successive prophet picking up the reins and driving forward along the same track. Of course it’s not like that, and one needn’t know all that much about church history to know that it isn’t, but it’s interesting to have canonized evidence that not every project a prophet undertakes necessarily comes to fruition.
And, of course, the whole section is canonized evidence of a larger failed project, and yet we’ve kept it as “the law.” It seems to me that this could be a interrogated as a case study in the relationship between doctrine and practice, and also between text and doctrine. We’ve clearly evolved some mechanism whereby canonized texts that prescribe particular actions can remain in the canon despite changing practice, so that canonized text is not equivalent to doctrine.
One might even speculate (though it’s purely that) that precisely the _failure_ of the New Translation is where we’d find this lesson–if Joseph’s project of revising the canon to fit with current doctrinal understandings was abandoned or frustrated, but the record of that attempt is preserved as part of the law, perhaps that tells us something about the relationship of canon and covenant and which has primacy in God’s law-giving interaction with his people.
July 13, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Kristine,
Very rich thoughts, thoughts I’ll try to respond to substantively tomorrow….
July 14, 2009 at 7:02 am
“I also think it’s interesting that this hasn’t been edited out–” That IS very interesting.
“if Joseph’s project of revising the canon to fit with current doctrinal understandings was abandoned or frustrated,”
That is food for thought in and of itself, but I like this direction.
“And, of course, the whole section is canonized evidence of a larger failed project, and yet we’ve kept it as “the law.”
Yes, yes, this is a huge jumping off point for some theological discussion, especially as you put it: “canonized text is not equivalent to doctrine.” I’d love to see you keep going with this… maybe a good paper idea? 🙂
July 12, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I like this discussion of doctrine, practice, unfinished projects, etc. Not sure what to make of it yet.
1. “Appointed.” I’ve been thinking about the transitional context of verse 53, from the discussion of faith and healing to the question of stewardship. Kristine has already mentioned the sudden transition in verse 56 from stewardship and the storehouse to the New Translation project. I wonder if the “appointed” link between verses 48 and 56 might not help make sense of these transitions.
In verse 56 we read “my scriptures shall be given as I have appointed.” What does “have appointed” mean here? Is this referring to a previously-made promise by the Lord that he’s holding himself to? Or should we read this more in terms of a primordial plan, “as was appointed since the foundation of the world” or something?
In verse 48 a present tense verb is used—rather than “as I have appointed” as in verse 56, we have “and is not appointed unto death.” We also have a switch from the negative construction in verse 48 (“not appointed”) to the positive construction in verse 56. This highlights the wording in verse 48: rather than healing being appointed, death is what is not appointed. There seems to be an implicit link here between death and God’s word: both are “appointable,” being either appointed or not appointed.
I’m inclined to link this connection back up with the sense in which “appointed” is used in other verses of this section (vv. 10, 31, 34, 48, 56, 71). In verse 10, Edward Partridge is referred “whereunto I have appointed him.” In verse 31 the antecedent is a bit unclear to me, though it seems that the conselors are what are “appointed and set apart for that purpose.” In verse 34, the residue which is kept in the bishop’s storehouse, “to administer to the poor and the needy,” is what is appointed, “by the high council of the church.” So, we see in these cases people being appointed as well as goods and/or money (however we are to understand “the residue”).
This underscores, on my reading, the link between consecration and appointment. I’m inclined to read these terms as breaking the natural or netural logic of economy. Death is not just a fact of life; rather, it becomes consecrated, caught up within the larger logic of the covenantal community’s purposes and meanings. Death, properties, stewardships—all of these are given a position and purpose within the larger communal vision offered in this section.
2. “Thou shalt pay for that which thou shalt receive.” What’s most interesting to me in verse 54 is the explicit sense in which a payment-based economy is not rejected but embraced. This redemption of traditional economics is surprising since economics and gifts are typically contrasted with each other (Derrida and Marion and countless sociologiest and anthropologists have written about this, all stemming mostly from Marcel Mauss’s work). Here, no tension seems to be acknowledged. Almost matter of factly we have this notion of payment mentioned in a way that seems to reject the idea that the covenantal community should be subtracted from the most wordly of practices and traditions (economics); rather, it seems that the practice of payment simply appointed or consecrated—gathered up in the larger workings of the community and covenant.
Accountability according to stewardships seems to be linked the practice of economic accounting. I’m still chewing on the significance of this….
July 14, 2009 at 6:57 am
“This underscores, on my reading, the link between consecration and appointment.”
Very, very interesting! Consecration is to make something sacred, to act upon it, to appoint it a meaning or significance. I like it.
July 13, 2009 at 10:50 am
A couple of random thoughts:
1) Kristine, Robert and Joe all bring up, in different ways, JS’s Inspired Version–or “New Translation,” if that’s the consensus preferred name for it here on the blog–of the Bible, and I heartily concur that there is a lot of thinking, in the broad, conceptual sense, that has yet to be done in regards to its connection to Smith’s restorative and revelatory work. Not only was his work on the Bible a constant prompt to him in terms of subject matters to approach the Lord about and ponder over in his own mind, but that working, that treating of the Bible as a kind of palimpsest, gives us insight into how we should be reading these revelations in the first place. In the same way that the Book of Mormon, taken on its own terms as a text that we are invited to gain a “testimony” of, has given to Mormons a notion of “dialogic revelation” as Terryl Givens puts it, so too it may be that the New Translation, when fully appreciated in its historical place, will suggest that all engagements between God and man, all attempts at Zion building, are necessarily incomplete, revisable, provisionary. Food for thought, anyway.
2) Are we making too much of “payment”? There is no necessary connection–at least not any that I can see–between the idea of “payment” and an economy of contracts, specialization, profit, or anything else beyond simple reciprocation. The scripture reads:
Thou shalt not take thy brother’s garment; thou shalt pay for that which thou shalt receive of thy brother.
Presumably, in a consecrated community devoted to collective self-sufficiency, plainness, attentiveness to stewardships, and the provision for the poor, theft is not to be endorsed. So let us assume that the “taking” mentioned here is when garments are available for the taking. Even so, you pay for what you receive. You are accountable for your gifts; what you are given, you give in return. Does such reciprocity undermine the whole point a gift-giving? I don’t think so; I can see how it can, but I don’t see that it necessarily will. John Milbank and other “radical orthodoxy” thinkers have done some important work here, exploring the “middle ground” between an economy of money and an economy of pure gift. (I discuss some of this in an old post of mine here.)
July 14, 2009 at 7:14 am
I am not educated much in law, commerce, economy, etc., but from my own perspective I do wonder if we should be careful how much to read into this one sentence in verse 54. I like Russell’s comment: “theft is not to be endorsed” is the main point of this verse. I admit is does get sticky once we add monetary transactions into the mix. Looking at verse 55, I think the direction to give to the storehouse if “thou obtainest more than that which would be for thy support” is interesting because it would serve to eliminate problems of greed and money-making on the side that you get in our economy, since if you were given more than you needed you simply gave it to the storehouse. And if you didn’t have enough to pay, you went to the Bishop as well, correct? So we have an odd system here. Certainly not the “supply and demand” price situation we work with. We saw one group deal with it one way (as Nate provided some historical information for us) but I would love to see how else this law might be lived.
July 14, 2009 at 7:46 am
Underwood suggests that this was just making an explicit distinction between this law and the practice of other utopian religious experiments, where all property was held in common and, presumably, you could just pick up your brother’s garment and take it, because it was yours, too.
July 14, 2009 at 10:15 am
Underwood suggests that this was just making an explicit distinction between this law and the practice of other utopian religious experiments, where all property was held in common and, presumably, you could just pick up your brother’s garment and take it, because it was yours, too.
Well put, Kristine.
I would argue–or at least I would be open to arguing–that “pay” in this line, to the extent that we want to assume that Joseph and/or others who contributed to the final version of the revelation were choosing that word carefully (as opposed to just throwing out a “don’t think you can just go and take stuff randomly!”-type warning), serves the same conceptual role that “gift” does. It demarks property: this is mine, and because it is mine, I can give it to you, after which it is yours, and no longer mine. I pay you, you give to me, I make a gift to you, you reciprocate. There is stuff that is part of an assigned stewardship, and there is the stuff in the bishop’s storehouse, and there are exchanges and payments made in the context of all that stuff. So, obviously, no anarchism or communism; this is a community where things belong. But what is not said about that belonging? “Buying.” “Selling.” Anything that connects commerce with self-interest and maximization. So Joseph and others wanted to make it clear–at least in the 1835 version–that they were definitely not talking about a commune…but there is no reason to assume that they were talking about markets either.
July 15, 2009 at 8:04 am
Two comments, one in response (at last) to Kristine’s very productive comments about “canonized failure,” and one in response to this whole question of payment.
(1) Kristine, I think I’m a bit less prepared than you seem to be to call the project of consecration a “failed” one (I’m inclined to speak, rather, of a failed people who ignore the scriptures because they function something like our guilty unconscious). Nonetheless, I think what you’ve brought up, and the way you’ve brought it up, is so rich that I want to explore it, setting aside my own basic approach for the moment.
Actually, regardless of how I think about this particular project, I think you’re absolutely right that “We’ve clearly evolved some mechanism whereby canonized texts that prescribe particular actions can remain in the canon despite changing practice, so that canonized text is not equivalent to doctrine.” This is obviously the case with most of the revelations originally gathered in the Book of Commandments, since these were directed to particular individuals under particular circumstances, etc.
Hmmm. Actually, as I write, I’m wondering whether we’ve constructed a mechanism for allowing the texts to remain canonical, or whether we’ve constructed a whole series of mechanisms for making sense of these sustainedly canonical texts. One could argue that it was quite simply the death of Joseph was the mechanism that cemented the prescriptive revelations in the canon in their unchangeable state. But this fact has led us to create a number of interpretive approaches to these increasingly untimely canonized revelations: (a) the “average” approach: we simply ignore the texts; (b) the CES approach: we look for universal principles in the historical particularities and then abstract them from the text so that we can apply them to our own historical particularities; (c) the new Mormon history approach: we use D&C 1 to suggest that the revelations are ultimately sources for making sense of the early history of the Church, or we claim that any genuinely prescriptive meaning that can be derived from the text must be infinitely deferred while we sort through the historical record; (d) the “doctrinal” approach: we mostly ignore the history and all questions of application in an attempt to determine what eternal doctrines surface in the texts; (e) the philosophical approach: we find ourselves unable to think about any particular text because we shift from it to the broad question of the curious meaning of history in Mormonism; (f) the typological approach: we attempt to breathe life into the texts by allowing the text to frame our own experiences, etc.
There is much to think about here.
(2) As for this question of payment:
I think Kristine is right to point to Underwood’s clarification. And I think Russell is right to express caution about taking the mention of payment as a kind of opening of the capitalist floodgates. But we do have to face the fact that the text uses the word “pay.”
It seems to me that what is implied is simply that money still circulates, allowing for the abstraction that allows for fluid circulation of goods. However, I don’t think that the existence of payment implies the profit motive, since one knows that one is to give all of one’s excess to the storehouse. It seems to me that the question of payment simply ensures (1) that goods are not held as simply public goods, something that would undermine the basic structure of stewardship as such; (2) that those involved in consecration have the means to purchase things needed for the good of the order but not available within the order itself; and (3) that goods can circulate fluidly, especially when an order is small.
July 16, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Joe, the profit motive is not condoned, but what is interesting to me is that profit itself (i.e., “residue”) in fact does seem at work here.
July 16, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Yes. That is exactly what I would argue.
July 15, 2009 at 8:32 am
Joe, what’s the difference in your mind between a “failed people” and a failed project? I think it may be a useful distinction, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
July 16, 2009 at 8:26 am
I don’t know that I had anything particularly insightful in mind. I am motivated by the concern that if I were to call consecration a “failed project” in a Sunday School class, there are those who would understand me to be saying that the Lord messed up, that the revelation was Joseph’s rather than the Lord’s project, etc.
In the end, I think I like to see us as a people failing to measure up to the revealed text, rather than the text as a revelation failing to being “realistic” enough to yield productive results.
July 16, 2009 at 8:40 am
No disagreement there. I tend to be very careful, and therefore usually very quiet in Sunday School!
I think I don’t distinguish as much between the text and the attempts at implementation as you do–maybe it’s the physicist’s kid in me reading the text as a lab instruction manual. On that view, the “failure” of the project has to do with a) misinterpretation of God’s will, at one stage or another of transmission, b) difficulties in translation, from God’s language to Joseph’s or from the idealized language of revelation to the specific and practical language of on-the-ground implementation, c) a failure of human aspiration and will to perform the experiment correctly, and d) the degree of difficulty of such an experiment in a world subject to physical and spiritual laws and the effects of the fall.
At least.
July 16, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Quite fair, then. I retract my concerns. 🙂
July 16, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Russell, I actually read the post on your blog about Milbank back when I was studying Radical Orthodoxy a fair bit. I quite like several points that Milbank makes about expectations of reciprocity not negating the gift-nature of a gift. I think what is most important (for Milbank and for me) is that an exchange with payment involved should not be reduced to merely an economic transaction. In this sense, economic reductionism is the enemy—if the transaction which might look on the surface as a mere economic transaction is supplemented with something like genuine trust, good feelings, a higher purpose, etc., then the transaction is not merely economic and thus can have many gift-like characteristics.
So, I think it is interesting that we have payment mentioned here, but I don’t think that this is necessarily problematic. Rather, this seems to rule out certain kinds of anarchy, or at least anarcho-communist, at least as being necessary for the establishment of Zion. Indeed, it seems that private property and payment are both elements of capitalism that are not inherently iredeemable….
(Now on to the next post, I promise!)
July 17, 2009 at 6:58 am
Indeed, it seems that private property and payment are both elements of capitalism that are not inherently iredeemable.
I agree. I’ve tried to tell some friends of mine in the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) the same thing, and they wonder why I’m not just a regular Democrat. To me, the difference between targeting all kinds of private and property transactions, and targeting specific (impersonal, self-interested, corporate, etc.) types of property transactions, is obvious, but it isn’t so much to some other radicals. Baby steps…