A book of remembrance was kept in … the Language of Adam for it was given unto as many as called upon God to write with the finger of inspiration and by them their children were taught to read and write having a language which was pure and undefiled now this was in the beginning which shall be in the end of the world”

The syntax is a little ambiguous. The question is, what does the “this” refer to? What was in the beginning and will be in the end of the world?

Eighteen months later, John Whitmer took up his pen again as Joseph made revisions to his earlier edits of Genesis. Coming to Moses 6, Joseph added a word which clarifies the vague demonstrative pronoun, “this.” His amendment reads this way: “[Adam’s] children” had “a language which was pure and undefiled. Now this…priesthood which was in the beginning shall be in the end.”

Whether the textual pairing of language and priesthood is meant as a doctrinal pairing I can’t say. However, the textual pairing is certainly richly suggestive. For priesthood, like the conception of language I want to outline today, brings two concepts into juxtaposition: love and presence. When we talk about the eternal priesthood, the priesthood of the temple and sacramentalism, the priesthood associated with Elijah the prophet, we are specifically invoking a power that turns children’s hearts to their fathers and fathers’ hearts to their children, binding them in love. Priesthood functions to conquer distance, to bridge both space and time and bring us back into one another’s presence, into communion and mutual encounter. So does love; and so, I want to argue, does language. Language is how finite individuals, bounded as we are by material shape and form and exteriors, encounter each other to constitute mutual presence, mutual encounter. This function—or at least this aspiration—of language may be why the book of Moses suggests pure language is a priesthood.

I hope to make clear today what I believe to be non-replicable about language understood in this way, as essential to our divinely authored humanity, and essential to the kind of knowledge of which organized intelligence is capable.

So what I am not doing today is to belabor the dangers of a culture overly reliant upon social media, technology, or artificial intelligence. I think those dangers to human thriving and human community are by now more than apparent to all. The benefits available via artificial intelligence are undeniable as well.

I want instead to propose a reinvigorated explication of the divinely human as our best defense against the indubitable assaults on humanity that over-reliance on technology already portend. And I want to frame that defense as intrinsic to the Latter-day Saint understanding of two dimensions of our humanity, in particular. What is special about human language? How is that language tied to love? And I want to suggest how LDS doctrine can help us articulate, celebrate, and preserve a sacred understanding of these two aspects of our humanity

That takes us back to Moses 6. Why was a paramount impulse in the Restoration—as in many traditions outside our own, this ever-present dream of an Adamic language. And how does AI move us toward or away from the capabilities of language in its most human—and I would say, in its most sacral—dimension?

Nothing is more fundamental to human nature, to human intelligence, than for one human intelligence to willingly enter into relation with another human being or beings.

In the great intercessory prayer, Jesus prays that his disciples “may be one, as we are one” (John 17:11). The Trinity has long served Christians as the model of perfect, loving community. Latter-day Saints are often quite comfortable with the general consensus that we are not Trinitarians. And admittedly we are not in the classically theistic sense. Yet the doctrine does have something to teach us. The medieval theologian Richard of St Victor (ca. 1100–1173) believed the trinity was logically necessary to love’s fullest expression. Love must be interpersonal by definition, he reasoned, so there must be at least two persons in relationship. However, in order for those two persons to be united in a shared outgoing of their love, they must have in common a third object to love jointly. Hence a necessary third person completes the divine loving community. We experience this truth at the simplest level when we say to a loved one, oh look at that shooting star! Oh, yes, I see it; isn’t that beautiful. Or with heightened significance, it is the shared love of two parents for a child that fosters a stronger bond of love between those two. The shared gaze of two parents upon a newborn that constitutes annew level of shared love that replicates the love found it St Victor’s Trinity. Two persons can love reciprocally. A community requires more than two, however, to make possible the fullest achievement of love: shared loving of the other. this is the interpersonal love that the trinity enacts. This is the aspiration Jesus bequeaths to his disciples in the prayer John records.

Paul referred to Christian communities as a “colony of heaven,” and there is more than metaphorical significance to the term. The community that followers of Christ constitute is not an incidental feature of the path of discipleship. It is the very constituting of that kingdom of heaven that many Christians have misconstrued to be the reward at the end.

Now several important insights derive from St Victor’s proposition. 1) Love can only exist interpersonally, and 2) it attains its highest expression in a community. And 3) a community consists of more than two persons.

But relationship has two prerequisites: boundedness, and a way across that boundedness. Love and language are implicated in both: Finitude and physicality are not obstacles to love—they are its precondition.

“The longing for relation” of which the mystic Martin Buber wrote, the “arrow of love” described in the Song of Songs, moves us feelingly in the direction of an imagined physical form. Love is the conquest of distance—and we calibrate love by the distance that embodied persons manage to elide. The language of affection and disaffection rely upon metaphors of special proximity: we feel “close” to someone of whom we are particularly fond, while one whose affection has waned has grown “distant.” The command to love one’s “neighbor” is rooted in the nearness that genuine charity creates—which Jesus recognizes by challenging his hearers to the more strenuous demand of becoming effectual neighbors to those separated from us by cultural or physical distance.

Some conceptions of romantic love—and some of divine union—imagine a blurring of identity, a merging into shared oneness as the ultimate consummation. However, the premium that Christianity places on embodiment (as evident in human creation and the Incarnation alike) should dispel that impulse so rooted in dreams of mystical union and romantic yearning alike. God did not conceal his divinity and majesty in a derivative material form. The Incarnation, John insisted time and again, was God’s living witness that the fullest, most perfect, most complete version of the divine IS the fleshly, material, embodied form, who weeps, eats bread, laughs, hungers, suffers, and washes his friends’ feet. (That mistake about condescension threw Christianity off course seventeen centuries ago and we repeat it at our peril).

“We enjoy being present to others,” writes Stephen Webb with counterintuitive insight, “because we take pleasure in the way that other bodies resist us and only gradually receive us. … Matter … is the means by which we come to know ourselves by engaging true otherness.”

Any love that is other than narcissistic love recognizes, celebrates, and reverences distinctness and difference from the other. Emmanuel Levinas captures the gravity of this misapprehension: “Communication [and a fortiori love] if taken as the reduplication of the self (or its thoughts) in the other, deserves to crash, for such an understanding is in essence a pogrom against the distinctness of human beings.” John Durham Peters’ commentary on that insight deserves ample quoting:

The body is our existence, not our container. … The body is not a vehicle to be cast off, it is in part the homeland to which we are traveling. … That any achievement of communion consists in a concert of differences is a blessing rather than a curse. … To view communication as the marriage of true minds underestimates the holiness of the body. … The paradox of love is its concrete boundedness and the universality of its demands. Because we can share our mortal time and touch only with some and not all, presence becomes the closest thing there is to a bridge across the chasm.

The boundedness of our body, and perhaps of God’s, is the essential precondition for whatever bridges of love we construct.

Let me push that possibility about God’s boundedness further:

Ian McGilchrist relates how the physicist Leo Szilard announced to his fellow physicist Hans Bethe that he planned to start keeping a diary.

“‘I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.’ ‘Don’t you think God knows the facts? ’ Bethe asked. ‘Yes’, said Szilard. ‘He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.’”

I love that story, in part because I think as Latter-day Saints we can detect a Restoration truth behind the wry humor.

The philosophical tradition, especially before Kant, and classical theism generally, presuppose that human embodiment, sensory mechanisms, situatedness in space and time, place limits on omniscience (whether the omniscience attributed to God or to a suprahuman technology, such as AI or ASI). The problem with this perennial misguided dream is that there is no such thing—even for God—as a “view from nowhere,” in Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase. Teppo Fellin makes the argument that it is in fact a particular perspective that actually constitutes, rather than delimits, knowledge. All “organisms operate in their own ‘Umwelt’ and surrounding. … Perception and vision are species-specific, directed, and expressive,” not “singular, linear, representative, and objective.” There is no “unique, all-seeing vantage point for perception. … Perception necessarily originates from a perspective, or point of view.” All perception, in other words, is “[directed] perception.” And as Mark Johnson convincingly illustrates, “any adequate account of meaning and rationality must give a central place to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world.”

Those “imaginative structures” are primarily the metaphors by which we constitute as well as communicate meaning—metaphors that turn out to “make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience of the world.” The Objectivist orientation according to which there is a correct “‘God’s-Eye-View’ of what the world is really like” is no longer tenable. Innumerable ways in which we unself-consciously organize experience derive from bodily immersion in a physical universe. We think of quantity in terms of verticality (more is always up); even things that are not spatial are “in” or “out” (I let my breath out, but I also leave details out). Force, containment, linearity, balance and a thousand other schemata derive from our bodily experience and shape how we make meaning. “The body,” it turns out, “is in the mind.” Or as Ian McGilchrist summarizes, “All meaning arises from personal experience in the body…. The meaning of language [in particular] begins and ends in the body – where it ‘cashes out’ in experience.”

But doesn’t language bypass the body? Isn’t language precisely the mechanism by which bodily situatedness is overcome, transcended? That is a widespread view, represented by the physicist David Deutsch who writes that “we only ever experience symbols.” My view, to paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, is that this statement is so absurd that it doesn’t even rise to the level of being wrong. To think such a thing is to miss the import of the Incarnation—and of our incarnation. There merest experience of the color red gives the lie to the phantasy that we have our being in a world of symbols only. One can exhaust the million words in the English language and never come within a light year of describing what it is to experience the red of a glowing coal. It is not the insufficiency of vocabulary that falls short, or the limitations of grammar that fail. The problem is in mistaking of what language does.

Physicists and biologists and neuroscientists and a good number of philosophers are converging on the recognition that reality—at its most fundamental level—is encounter; it is experiential, relational. “Sensible things” constitute “the only reality” we can actually know, wrote William James. “Process must be… fundamental” write John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson. Consciousness is irreducible and was present before matter, writes Colin McGinn; it is not emergent insists Edwin Schrödinger. Niels Bohr said physics properly aspires to track relations, not a supposed real essence; And so forth. What these statements have in common is the primacy of experienced reality over supposedly abstract unembodied truths that can be apprehended independently of the way our minds half-perceive and half create the world in a process of interaction. It is getting harder and harder to sustain the mechanistic, objectivist, materialist view of human identity or the cosmos. “Direct experience is … the only knowledge we ever fully have,” writes Bryan Magee.

So we have two general possibilities at hand. We are always at one remove from reality, and signs and texts and data transfers are the nearest we can get to it. In this view, language is a mere “instrument to encode information.” Or we can see in language a higher task of “bring[ing] about revelation-and-connection” in Charles Taylor’s optimistic vision. In this view, language has the power to fulfill our primal yearning for “Cosmic connection.” George Steiner’s magnificent book, Real Presences, is a prolonged defense of that latter idea ((as well as a rebuttal to the ethical nihilism of poststructuralism generally). Language, he writes,—that is, human language, like human intelligence generally—presupposes a real presence behind it: the birthing of relation, comic connection, a kind of priesthood of interconnection.

We can reduce language to verbal signs, or to data and simulacrums of experience: but language in its most fundamental dimension is the portal to encounter, not an endless play of signs. This premise is what Steiner calls “a wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, …which is to say … we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, [in] a wager on transcendence. This wager …predicates the presence of a realness, of a ‘substantiation’ (the theological reach of this word is obvious) within language and form.” That’s a complicated claim: let me try to illustrate.

We see the best example of what Steiner is saying in the case of scripture. And at this point I am going to rely upon a source often quoted by Elder Neal Maxwell: the Anglican theologian Austin Farrer. Some Christians, he notes, see scripture as simply the historical reactions—inspired or otherwise--of certain individuals to the fact of Christ. Others take the words of scripture themselves as constituting the truth behind the deeds and teachings. However, both of these positions would fail the test of how scripture grounds a living faith. Scripture is more than a set of propositions, or the record of past reactions to a set of propositions. Scripture must be the occasion for our own encounter with a living Christ. That is the principal function and majesty of scripture. Any reduction to historical artifact or a data stream makes of scripture just one more historical chronicle. And any substitution of the text for Christ himself is idolatry. Scripture—and perhaps this is what Joseph was reaching toward in the book of Moses with relating a pure language to priesthood—scripture is not a series of symbols we subject to textual decoding. Scripture is, ideally, the erasure of distance, a revelatory holy of holies in which we encounter the presence of God like a burning bush. Or as the theologian George Tyrell wrote, “Revelation is not a statement but a showing.” (I am reminded by his language of the fact that what I consider the greatest religious text outside the canonical works is the visionary account of the medieval nun Julian of Norwich, who called her work “the showings of Jesus Christ.)

Steiners point, I believe, is that scripture is just a limit case of language. “Any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis,” a wager on transcendence.

Literature and art more generally come closest to the limit case of scripture. This is because as with scripture, there is no “aboutness” in art. You can’t say what Beethoven’s fifth symphony is “about,” and you can say what a peom is about only in the most trivial sense. This is one of the monstrous fallacies of our day, a truth that is disappearing in the rush toward AI, and the operations by which intelligence and language alike are being trivialized and redefined as mechanisms of information rather than mediums of love and presence. Let me illustrate with a personal example if I may.

When I was sixteen, the first religious experience of which I have memory was reading a classic which this generation knows only as a musical. You remember the setting? A convict, now an escaped criminal, has stolen silver from a bishop’s palace. He doesn’t make it far before he is apprehended. He is dragged to the scene of the crime, so that the bishop can confirm his ownership of the stolen goods. I quote from the text:

“The door opened…. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three men were gendarmes. The other was Jean Valjean.” The bishop advanced to the group “as quickly as his great age permitted. ‘Ah! Here you are! He exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. ‘I am glad to see you. [But] how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with the forks and spoons [I gave you]?’ Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

…The gendarme retired…The bishop drew near to the convict and said, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belove to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you, …and give it to God.”

Jean Valjean was no more bewildered in that moment that I. I was … ambushed. That is my word for the suddenness with which I experienced the same moment of grace, as did Jean Valjean.

No master plots or Wikipedia entry or second-hand experience of my encounter would have been more than a desiccated skin of the original, living entity that we call Les Miserable. (I had a comparable experience at the same age, reading Paradise Lost: but don’t wait for the musical!) As McGilchrist summarizes, “The work of art exists precisely to get beyond representation, to presence.” If you paraphrase a poem, you can capture everything—except the poem.

Language, like scripture, does not exist primarily to convey information. It can do so only as a pale derivative of its principal function of registering the particularity of experience and bringing disparate consciousnesses into relation. It is a substitute—but never an adequate substitute—for experience or relationship. Consider for a moment the telling fact that, from an evolutionary point of view, poetry, music, art in general, have no purpose. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby direct the center for evolutionary psychology at UC Santa Barbara. They find themselves stumped in making sense of the humanities.

“Almost all the phenomena that are central to the humanities are puzzling anomalies from an evolutionary perspective…. In order to navigate the world successfully, one needs accurate information. Survival depends on it.” And yet, they note, the arts are foundational to all culture. Why? Maybe Star Trek’s character “Seven-of-Nine” got it right. Survival is not enough. Survival, proficiency, competence—these are far from enough. The highest purposes of language lie elsewhere.

Marilynne Robinson reminds us that “Humanists [and the term is not limited to English majors] are the curators, in their own persons, of …, language, …, and thought. The argument everywhere now is that the purpose of should be the training of workers for the future economy. So the variety of learning offered should be curtailed and the richness of any student’s education should be depleted, to produce globally a Benthamite uniformity of aspiration and competence?”

What we want to want, what desires and ends we cultivate, depend upon our hierarchies of values. And those values are reflected in what McGilchrist calls our hierarchies of attention. What do we attend to primarily?

Perhaps the problem we should be debating is not so much when or whether AI will emulate human intelligence—but to what extent our ideal of intelligence—and certainly our educational ideals—are already emulating AI. Human intelligence depends upon human ways of constructing “hierarchies of attention.

The task of the humanities is to challenge and refine and inspire the best, the most morally and aesthetically and spiritually edifying hierarchies of attention.

That means we show preference for some kinds of experience over other kinds of experience, and some kinds of knowing over other kinds of knowing.

Most languages convey, in this regard, what English does not. Saber vs. conocer, or Wissen vs. kennen. The first is a merely propositional knowledge. Data-driven knowledge. The second is experiential knowledge; The knowledge of personal encounter and presence. This difference seems implicit in Christ’s words that many who claim to know Christ, never knew Christ. McGilchrist captures this difference powerfully in his description of left brain thinking as analytic, syntax oriented, linear and logical, in sum the left brain MAPS reality, RE-Presents reality at one remove. And right brain thinking is organic, wholistic, gestalt-driven, value-informed, meaning driven, and as such it puts us in communion WITH reality; in McGilchrist’s language, it PRESENCES reality. Our society is at present obsessed with the first. Educational systems universally have reoriented around left-brain ways of engaging the world. The Humanities presented a counterbalancing influence which is fast fading.

“this overconfidence in the left hemisphere point of view on the world has twice before heralded the demise of a civilization, and I believe it is doing so for the third time as you read these words.” He words sound overly dramatic, but I share his concern

Yuval Harari ends his ambitious history of the world, Sapiens, with this warning:

the real question facing us is … ‘What do we want to want?’… Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

Can I put this in entirely different language? I have tried to make a foundational argument for the following principle: To paraphrase Michael Gazzaniga, we need to make the humanities the baking soda, not the frosting, of our educational systems. Obviously, education in or outside church institutions needs to be by accomplished through reason and faith, study occurring against a background of discipleship, scripture study, prayer and service. Equally obviously, one can hope, educational institutions will fulfill their educational purposes as institutions of learning—which means they cannot abdicate their responsibility to be stewards over the vital humanistic component of education. Neither can educators responsibly concede an ever-increasing dominion to AI approaches, believing that prayer and scriptures will compensate for the deficit.

This address was originally delivered at Organized Intelligence on November 4th, 2025.

Organized Intelligence

​Organized Intelligence - 2025 Conference ​

Organized Intelligence is a new initiative supported by the Future of Life Institute and partner organizations that brings together Latter-day Saint voices from across disciplines to explore the ethical, social, and religious implications of AI…

Read more

7 months ago · 9 likes

Subscribe now

Share

In his novel interpretation of how human cultures take shape, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio assigns an unexpected pride of place to feeling, affect, and emotion. Cultural development itself can only be understood, he argues, by recognizing the role of “feelings” as the “motives” behind intellectual creation, as the “monitors” of how our culture succeeds or fails, and as the compass for “negotiating” new directions of cultural development. Culture, unlike evolution, moves relentlessly beyond mere survival. It moves toward the satisfaction of desires, and we experience that satisfaction in the realm of feelings. In other words, “the affects related to fundamental desires,” are the core generators of all human cultural development, and these desires include the sensation of thriving, “the experience of elevation” and of “awe and transcendence.” What we really aspire to, what we register and what we shape our lives and our cultures around, are particular kinds of feelings. What are the theological implications of this fact?

It has been common since Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century (and even before) to insist that God does not experience love as an emotion. Why? Because emotions involve bodily changes and since God can neither change nor be posited as embodied, love must be “intellective” rather than “emotional.” Yet the human telos—the end which all human striving has in view—is happiness, or better yet, joyfulness. And as the theologians have said in agreement with Damasio, “a happiness which is only ‘thought’ or ‘willed’ is no happiness.” Joy is “patently an affective experience,” and “the only way to experience happiness is to feel it.”

The question is, must this be true of God as it is of persons? It seems inescapable that the joy that God knows and presumably hopes for his creation must be an experience of joy. Knowledge of or about joy is not joy. Reason, justice, wisdom—no divine attribute can itself constitute the experience of joy that is integral to the Divine Being. If love is the mode of God’s being (1 John 4:8), and joyfulness the condition he wishes to share, then affect—responsiveness to the other who constitutes any loving relationship—must be the essential core of God’s nature and of anyone made “in his image and likeness” and designed to become more like him. The divine nature cannot be conceived as independent of or purged from affect, feeling, responsiveness to and entanglement with the other. Love is affect in its holiest form.

God, following this line of reasoning, is more like us—and we more like him—than theology historically imagined. Here, too, positive developments in Christian theology have been underway for some time. Most contemporary theologians recognize that God must be “ethically good because the development of moral personality appears to be at least included in his purpose.” Such a purpose entails at least a minimal congruence between God’s goodness and the goodness to which we aspire. God and his perfections are our model, in simplest terms. John Burnaby sees that a critical turning point in Christian history occurred when Augustine failed to recognize this point, and built much of succeeding Christian thought on that error. In his formulation of an original sin imputing guilt to all, Augustine forfeited moral and rational coherence—and he could only do so by differentiating the moral sphere in which we humans participate from a different morality, “higher than human, . . . the more inscrutable and so much the further removed from ours.” No matter if the resultant concept of justice is “disturbing” to our moral or rational sensibility, as indeed it was disturbing to Augustine, his contemporaries, and is to many moderns. “Should Christians,” asked Augustine’s nemesis Julian of Eclanum, “really think that a merciful, loving God would torture infants just because they were not baptized?”

Gregory of Nyssa’s declaration anticipates a long line of dissent from Augustine’s position. “What is different in nature from the Good is surely something other than the Good,” the fourth-century Church Father from Cappadocia wrote. One of Hugo Grotius’s most audacious claims in the seventeenth century—one with the potential to relitigate the nature of God in ways consistent with its Johannine roots—was the proposition that God inhabits the same moral universe that humans do. “God himself cannot effect, that twice two should not be four; so neither can he [bring about] that what is intrinsically evil should not be evil. . . . Such is the nature of evil actions. . . . Therefore God suffers himself to be judged according to this rule.”

David Hume affirms the same principle in the next century. His fictional character Demea claims that we must not attribute human sentiments (like “love”) to God. Cleanthes responds, “The deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attributes, of which we can have no comprehension: But if our ideas, so far as they go, be not just, and adequate, and correspondent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this subject worth insisting on.” The congregationalist George MacDonald added his concern in the nineteenth century: “To say that what our deepest conscience calls darkness may be light to God, is blasphemy; to say light in God and light in man are of differing kinds, is to speak against the spirit of light.” This idea received a more forceful formulation in the shadow of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel has a character protest that if our truth “is not His as well, then He’s worse than I thought. Then it would mean that He gave us the taste, the passion of truth without telling us that this truth is not true!”

Even those who claim a Restoration of truth and authority need to recognize our very real human limitations, and speak with caution and meekness when we presume to approach the God who dwells in everlasting burnings—in actual deed or through human words. Still, we might affirm with Stephen Webb, “Whatever God is, he is much more than what we are, but he is still more like us than he is like anything else.”

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Audio produced by BYUradio. Subscribe to listen at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Youtube.

Subscribe now

“It is not symmetry but the presence of asymmetry that best represents some of the most basic aspects of Nature. Symmetry may have its appeal, but it is inherently stale: some kind of imbalance is behind every transformation. . . . From the origin of matter to the origin of life, the emergence of structure depends fundamentally on the existence of asymmetries.” —Marcelo Gleiser, A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe 

Snowflakes and starfish and honeycombs are beautiful because they appeal to our sense of harmony and balance—a kind of aesthetic equity. The physicist Gleiser reminds us that most development, transformation, and productive change in nature, however, comes out of asymmetry. It is the very asymmetry of human sex cells (massive ova, miniscule sperm), for example, that “leads to a cascade of evolutionary effects” that produce sexual differences in the species. The great human adventure was only launched when provocation punctured the static equilibrium of Eden.

More fundamentally, a troubling asymmetry seems not just to occasionally intrude upon, but to pervasively govern the world of human existence. This kind of asymmetry is the one that offends our moral sensibility. Nassim Taleb invokes it in its most threatening and destabilizing form: the disproportion of human influence for good and evil. In World War II, “It took seven or eight Poles to help one Jew. It took only one Pole, acting as an informer, to turn in a dozen Jews.” Instances could be multiplied endlessly from today’s news or from our own dark imaginings. No single good Samaritan can undo the damage or restore the losses inflicted by one random psychopath with a gun. The universe seems stacked in favor of pain over pleasure, evil over good. 

Justice is frequently envisioned and judicially implemented in the pursuit of a harmonious and symmetrical cosmic ideal. Yet lived experience and history alike tell a different story about earthly justice. The eye-for-an-eye ethic traceable to Hammurabi was not a principle of equivalence that pretended to bring pain and pleasure back to a zero sum. If you break my arm and I break yours, we have two broken arms and two miserable victims in the universe, not zero. Hammurabi’s code had as its end the containment of cycles of retribution, not cosmic harmony. If I can only break your arm in retaliation, that minimizes the sum total of pain that your violent act set in motion. It does not make either one of us happy again. Just as witnessing the execution of your friend’s killer does good to neither one. There are very good reasons for systems of law and punishment, but restoring symmetry to a fractured universe is not one of them.

So we may have recourse to the image of Christ in his role as universal judge at the end of time. In that case, earthly justice cannot satisfy our longings for symmetry and equity, but a heavenly administrator might. He will punish all outstanding debtors to the law and comfort all the aggrieved, we may imagine. But that particular version of a Christian hope was the scenario that the great Dostoevsky so enduringly shattered. (Though not, it must be said, for all Christians.) In the famous scene from The Brothers Karamazov, the God-doubter Ivan explains his rejection of Christian solutions to the problem of human evil and its attendant suffering. He narrates the pitious case of a sadistically tortured child and declares that in spite of its tormentors’ punishment, 

its tears have remained unredeemed. They must be redeemed or there can be no harmony. But by what means, by what means will you redeem them? Is it even possible? Will you really do it by avenging them? But what use is vengeance to me, what use to me is hell for torturers, what can hell put right again, when those children have been tortured to death? And what harmony can there be where there is hell: I want to forgive and I want to embrace—I don’t want anyone to suffer any more.

This may be the most piercing critique of our picture of a heavenly harmony based on symmetry—an expectation that x amount of punishment will balance out x amount of suffering, and all will be then in blissful balance. My (idiosyncratic) reading of the above words is that Dostoevsky is applauding Ivan’s inspired protest that our quest for cosmic parity and equity in some zero-sum kind of way cannot be the end of true religion—here or hereafter.

Centuries earlier, another writer offered his own complication in our craving for a symmetry of suffering and retribution. In a seldom quoted passage in his twelfth-century commentary on Romans, the monk Abelard raised a problem that faintly anticipated Dostoevsky’s doubts about hell balancing out heaven. Abelard pointed out that good and evil themselves are not always simple, symmetrical categories. That good men and women can do terrible things. Christ predicted this messy future for Christianity (including our own tradition): “an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God” (John 16:2 NRSV). 

Where, asks Abelard, are we to find resolution when the well-intentioned do hurtful and destructive things in good conscience.? In his era, Christians were killing Muslims—and they had long been killing other “heretical” Christians. How can that suffering be avenged or harmonized if there is no ill-intentioned perpetrator to punish? “For if they had shown mercy,” writes Abelard, “they would have acted against their conscience and so would have sinned. But again, since they killed the innocent, indeed, the chosen of God, which is unjust, shall we say that they do not sin? Or that they have a good intention in this which goes very wrong?”

Abelard does not resolve the problem. Neither can I. Yet I do believe that the solution—as Christ’s Incarnational Reconciliation (“atonement”) seemed designed to demonstrate—must have at its core a powerful asymmetry. Owen Barfield writes that something is different about the divine love manifest in Christ. Jesus, he writes, is deliberately “outraging” our “deep-rooted feeling for the goodness of justice and equity . . . because we are being beckoned towards a position directionally opposite to the usual one…. to experience the world of man as the object of a huge, positive outpouring of love, in the flood of whose radiance such trifles as merit and recompense are mere irrelevancies.”  “There is,” echoes Marilynne Robinson’s Reverend Ames, “no justice in love, no proportion in it.” 

I see a Christ at greatest pains to reshape the moral universe of a people who are genetically, socially, and culturally disposed to demand fairness, equity, symmetry, and due proportion in human relationships—and in the universe generally. Perfect love overflows all those bounds. “Are you envious because I am generous?” is the question that undergirds Christ’s conspicuous refusal to apportion love by any limiting criteria or categories (Matt. 20:15). As Anders Nygren wrote, “it is of the very nature of forgiveness that the one forgiven does not have a right to be forgiven.” What is forgiveness, if not the most perfect expression of this asymmetry?

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Paul Nash.

Audio produced by BYUradio. Subscribe to listen at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Youtube.

Subscribe now

An infinite past and a starting point for time—both propositions are beyond the human capacity to envision. What we are relatively certain of is that some 13.8 billion years ago an eruption in the spacetime vacuum eventuated in a dense plasma of quarks and gluons that coalesced into protons and neutrons which then fused into hydrogen atoms. Perhaps on the order of 10 to the 85th power of hydrogen atoms. Nothing else existed in the universe but trillions upon trillions of identical inert hydrogen atoms.

Has this process been repeated at other times in the history of this universe in an infinite regression—or is it still going on simultaneously in a plurality of universes we call a multiverse? Those questions seem beyond the grasp of both religion and science; since they appear to be non-testable claims and outside scripture or revelation, they are largely guesswork.

Somehow, we get from quarks to Christ, from hydrogen atoms to Mozart and Mother Teresa. Atoms aggregate, molecules form, material coalesces, gravity absorbs more and more matter, large clouds of hydrogen gas collapse under immense pressure to form the first stars. Pressure builds, after billions of years the core collapses, a supernova explodes and hurls a variety of heavy elements into space.

Some of those heavy elements hurled into space by exploding supernovas repeat the process of aggregation and gravitational formation into planets that are captured in the gravity field of other stars. One of those planets we call Earth, and its capturing star, the Sun.

The statistical odds behind the convergence of conditions necessary for life are deemed virtually nil even by atheists. As a consequence of the near impossibility of such fine tuning of hundreds of conditions (ranging from the force of the Big Bang to the ratio of total cosmic mass to the force of gravity, to the precise ratio of forces operating within the atom, to planetary tilt, properties of water and a hundred other factors), some atheists posit an infinite number of universes where one will inevitably emerge with these conditions.

In other words, cosmology has done no better than medieval logicians (Anselm) or watchmaker arguments (William Paley) to move the dial decisively toward belief in God. Doubt always has a response to arguments for God. The great Anglican theologian Austen Farrer (admired by Neal Maxwell) made an acute observation in this regard: “Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.” The surest foundation of faith in God is experiential: the firsthand encounters narrated by mystics and prophets, given to young boys in sacred woods, or to grieving parents in the epiphanies of consolation. And sometimes, unpredictable as the wind that bloweth where it lists, to those on their road to Damascus, or just to work.

On the other hand, more than one disciple has found the greatest evidence of God in the countenances and deeds of the sanctified or the simply and inconspicuously good Samaritans with which this world abounds. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins found his path (back) to faith illumined when he perceived the music of Christ played “in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”

Yet purely rational argument has a place, insofar as “not all have faith,” and reason can both reinforce and prepare the ground for spiritual ways of knowing. I have found my own faith reaffirmed by rethinking the nature of love.

The God of classical theism is defined in terms remote from human categories of experience and personhood, invisible, impassible (without passions), and incomprehensible: “He is neither soul nor intellect; nor has he imagination, nor opinion or reason; He has neither speech nor understanding, and is neither declared nor understood. . . . He neither has power nor is power; neither is He light, nor does He live or is He life . . . nor is He subject to intellectual contact. . . . For God abides above created intellect and existence, and is in such a sense unknowable and non-existent that He exists above all existence.”

It is impossible for me to reconcile this God with two objections.

First, it is very difficult to see why he should be particularly interested in humanity. In me. The theologian Mark Murphy admits as much, finding it “not only anathema, . . . but a mistake in terms of theism generally, to take God’s fundamental nature to be defined relationally.” Indeed, if one is positing God as the most totalizing instantiation of all perfection, exhibiting the plenitude of all values in their unadulterated fullness, then there is no reason to presume that humans would rank higher in that Being’s sphere of consideration than triangles, or that suffering should register more profoundly than geometric symmetry. A physicist has raised the same issue: “while humans would prefer that the world contain less evil than elegance, . . . God might have a much greater appreciation of the laws of physics.” God, from his omniscient perspective, would thus see human suffering as an “inevitable trade-off ” for mathematical beauty.

Second, if one simply asserts that this God of infinite perfection and power simply chose to make humans the object of his particular attention and concern, then too much is being asked of my faith. That of all the possible priorities and projects this ineffable power or process behind the universe could undertake, love just happens to be high on the list, sounds too much like simple wish fulfillment. I crave a reasonable basis for belief in God, and in God as the purest form of what we call love. Something more compelling than the miraculous good fortune of an always existing entity who arbitrarily chose to make love his distinguishing characteristic. That belief seems, as some critics have alleged, an only slightly refined improvement on the fantasy of Santa Claus: a cosmic being who just happens to be the kind of being we would most want to have unlimited power and dominion. Who wouldn’t want a universe presided over by a being whose principal object of devotion and interest is us?

What if, on the other hand, we consider the enormous body of research of recent decades that finds consensus in the single most important fact of human nature and need: love. The world’s “longest scientific study of happiness” derived one simple conclusion from decades of tracking thousands of individuals: “connecting with our fellow human beings” is the key to well-being, to flourishing, to a life of meaning and joy. Studies that confirm this fact have become too numerous to cite. “We are biologically hardwired to help others,” notes Samuel Wilkinson in a review of the literature. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman agrees that studies of human well-being conclude that “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.” This is what mystics have always taught. “The longing for relation is primary.” 

Suddenly, from all directions we hear a consensus that personhood at its most elemental level is conceivable only in terms of relationality. And this seems eminently reasonable, since as Plato noted ages ago, the capacity to affect—and be affected by—other beings is the defining criterion of a particular kind of thing: an agential being. In such a light, love is not a contingent phenomenon, not the simple fruit of an arbitrary choice to elevate caring benevolence above other qualities, but the mode of being in which alone intelligent beings—all intelligent beings—can flourish and exist meaningfully. What if, whether heavenly or earthly in their plane of existence, whether perfect in self-possession or vexed by contrary passions and inclinations, intelligent agents—by definition—naturally incline toward connection, toward willful situatedness in a complex of other agential, purposeful beings, finding only in that relation the circumstances necessary to fully flourish? In that case, what we call love is not a happenstance phenomenon in a field of myriad possible worlds, but the defining nature of an intelligence as contrasted with inert matter. The capacity to affect—and be affected by—other intelligences is the defining principle of each one of us—as it is of God. And such a capacity naturally finds its fullest expression in the vulnerability and the caring benevolence to which we attach the name, love.

That process of reasoning leads me to a rational support for my own belief in God. Characterizing love in that way does not only make belief in divine love reasonable; it elevates love to absolute primacy in that galaxy of possible attributes that we attach to God. I find love’s historical articulation most perfectly manifest in the life of Jesus; and all this comports with what I understand to be my firsthand, scattered but experiential, encounters with the Divine. Reason, history, and spiritual intimations point me in the same direction.

God is love.

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Arthur Dove.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Subscribe now

This week, a beloved friend with a lethal cancer learned her experimental treatment has provided miraculous improvement. This week, a son with three young children lost his job. Life is such a beautiful painful pilgrimage.

The fourth-century holy woman Macrina the Younger was convinced that God allots to each person a fixed sum of happiness and of sadness, and that we choose whether the proportions are allotted here or later. 

God divided the life of man into two parts, namely, this present life, and that “out of the body” hereafter; and He placed on the first a limit of the briefest possible time, while He prolonged the other into eternity; and in His love for man He gave him his choice, to have the one or the other of those things, good or evil, I mean, in which of the two parts he liked: either in this short and transitory life, or in those endless ages, whose limit is infinity. . . . [Some] soon use up on gluttony in this fleshly life the dividend of good which their constitution can claim, and they reserve none of it for the after life; but those who by a discreet and sober-minded calculation economize the powers of living are afflicted by things painful to sense here, but they reserve their good for the succeeding life, . . . and thus purchased by present annoyance future blessedness.”

I don’t believe the premise—that we have a fixed sum of happiness we can either enjoy here or enjoy later. But it's an interesting idea and may have been a comfort to the general mass of humanity who, in those times of massive infant mortality, rampant warfare, and a general precariousness of well-being, needed to believe their suffering was securing some benefit. The principle underlying Macrina’s conception is the early Christian devotion to “askesis,” (see Acts 24:16) which means spiritual discipline and training (analogous to that of athletes). Macrina’s point was that depriving ourselves of certain benefits and pleasures of mortality would be compensated by their redoubled enjoyment later. 

Spiritual discipline takes fierce hold in the Christian mind, and it is easy to track its flowering into a rich and diverse tradition of asceticism from those early Christian centuries to the present. Like most human attributes and qualities, self-discipline can be a virtue or a mania. Discipline of sexual and acquisitive and gluttonous appetite is requisite to holiness. It is doubtful, however, that spending decades on a tiny platform a hundred feet in the air was helpful to the renowned ascetic Simeon Stilites or to anyone emulating him. 

One possible explanation for the increasing emphasis on ascetic practices—extreme fasting, self-flagellation, lives of stark isolation and deprivation—was that, in the fourth century, Christianity was becoming mainstream. In previous times and places in the Roman empire, just being Christian—members of a despised and occasionally outlawed sect—came at a cost. Now baptism came with cultural capital rather than martyrdom, so some Christians might feel the need to demonstrate faithful sacrifice, “spiritual athleticism,” in self-inflicted ways.

Macrina’s legitimate point was the simple truth that disciples must be willing to deny ourselves those satisfactions that impede our spiritual growth—in the interest of that spiritual growth and its long-term benefits. Some took that principle of self-denial to extremes, cautioning against enjoying or loving anything that did not lead us to love God—and saw renunciation of bodily pleasure as the cost of spiritual union with God. Again, valid principles underlie the root motive: As incarnate souls, we are perpetually enticed to satisfy those purely biological drives that are part of the mortal condition. Sadly, it was easy to hear in those warnings against love of this world the suggestion that its attractions are always in tension with love for God. In its most extreme formulation, some taught that “God then alone is to be loved; and all this world . . . are to be despised.”

Few Christians today frame life in terms of such stark polarities. And yet, we often place inconsistent valuations on that which pertains to our physical world and life in it. In trying to make sense of beauty, for instance, one theologian has held (like many before him) that we love Mozart’s music or Michelangelo’s sculpture because “they call into being in our minds a whole spiritual world that is laden with a host of spiritual elements.” That’s a lovely sentiment—but notice that it is reducing exquisite music and superbly executed sculpture to vehicles through which we come in contact with higher, nobler realities. In similar language, others have believed our rapture in the natural world is based in our faint recollection of a premortal world of ampler, more refined and extensive beauties.

I fear these perspectives come at a cost. William Wordsworth embarked on numerous trekking adventures in his life. On an Italian expedition, he was excited to be making his first trek across the Alps. Having bustled anxiously along the path for days, tired and disoriented, he stopped to ask for directions through the last pass. A local peasant gave him the disappointing news.

For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant’s lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this,—that we had crossed the Alps.

So intent had he been on the distant goal that he had been oblivious to the sublime experience while it unfolded all around him.  

In a similar way we may be missing the point of embodiment, distracted as we are by metaphors of testing, proving, confinement in this mortal shell. Without a doubt, our brain functions more to limit than to enhance our interface with reality. Visions and imaginings of the afterlife—like the aspirations of medieval mystics—sought escape from the “prison of flesh,” spiritual sight unconstrained by these eyes of jelly, the spirit’s aery soul-flight unburdened by gravity and weighty matter.

And perhaps in a distant day, we may register an expanded electromagnetic spectrum and the new colors they herald; we may interface with new realms through senses never before imagined, like the electroperception of mormyrid fish or the echolocation of bats and dolphins. For the present, however, this tabernacle of clay fashions our encounter with this world. Whatever the route our bodies took to arrive here, and however this world took shape from an array of elements from hydrogen to uranium, they are our bodies and this is our adventure in the world. They are particular, and because they are particular, they are non-substitutable. 

Here is what that non-substitutability means. We seldom use the term omniscience in our tradition, and that is a good thing. Even for the incarnate Christ or the Father of whom he is the perfect image, there is no “unique, all-seeing vantage point for perception. . . . Perception necessarily originates from a perspective, or point of view.” As Teppo Fellin continues by way of example, “A tree is a place of shelter for one species, a nesting location for another, an object of beauty, an obstacle, shade, a source of food, or a lookout point. . . . We cannot point to a single, objective characteristic of an object.” We are always situated in a particular time and place and body—and no other perspective can perfectly replicate the particular experience we have of the world. The painful and the beautiful alike, as we experience them, are a form of knowledge for which there is no substitute or equal. That is why embodiment is additive rather than limiting in our quest for greater love and knowledge alike.

And that is why we err to our great loss if we believe that our love of this world, while we are in this world, is a threat to our devotion to God. In John Burnaby’s words, “we shall be using God that we may enjoy the world” or we will be “using the world that we may enjoy God.” But are they really in competition? I may enjoy a patch of flowers in my back garden. Learning a friend planted them for my delight heightens that delight, as it heightens my knowledge of and love of my friend. But my joy in the flowers is not merely instrumental, and no friend would worry that I become to immersed in the delight those particular flowers provide independent of any other consideration. The Lord himself has told us that “it pleaseth God that he hath given . . . the good things that come of the earth . . . unto man” (D&C 59:20).

Love and delight are not zero-sum games, and a God who believes they are is not the God I worship. From the perspective of Lady Wisdom in Proverb 8, “Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.”

This sounds to me like a God who invites us to rejoice in creation as much as they do, marveling alongside them. Nothing beautiful is instrumental. Beauty is ultimately its own end.

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Cristall Harper. Cristall Harper lives in American Fork, UT. Her website is www.cristallharper.com and her Instagram is @cristallharper.

Audio produced by BYUradio. Subscribe to listen at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Youtube.

Subscribe now

Some translations of holy writ can have enormous, even calamitous impact on the development of religious ideas. A most famous example comes from Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which chapter five refers to the consequences of Adam’s transgression. “So death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12 KJV). Augustine read the text as referring to Adam “in whom” all sinned. Not expert in Greek, Augustine relied upon a Latin text. As David Bentley Hart explains, the Latin version “contained a mistranslation of the final clause of the verse, one that seemed to suggest that ‘in’ Adam ‘all sinned’. The actual Greek text, however, says nothing of the sort.” The doctrine of original sin, as developed by Augustine, relied upon a mistranslation for its most enduring scriptural support.

In about the same era, Jerome encountered the New Testament term metanoia, and rendered this Greek term (“change your heart/mind”) as “do penance.” That set in motion a growing association with and eventual focus upon acts of self-punishment, emphasizing pain and penalty over transformation and freedom. 

An episode in the gospel of Luke also makes a translation choice that reverses the intended force of one of Jesus’s teachings. Jesus is dining with the Pharisee Simon. A certain woman in the city, apparently a notorious sinner, enters the scene and washes the Savior’s feet with her tears, then anoints them with precious ointment. Her presence and physical interaction with Jesus scandalizes the host, who mentally protests. 

Jesus, perceiving his thoughts, tells a parable of two debtors, one who owes a great debt and one who owes but little. Which debtor will love the creditor more? Jesus asks Simon. “He to whom [the creditor] forgave most,” Simon correctly replies (Luke 7:36-43).

The moral is unambiguous (even if the original Greek grammar is not): we are all debtors in that we all depend upon God’s bounty for our very sustenance as well as mercy. He forgives more than we merit, and those of us who feel the lifting of the greatest burden are likely to respond with the greatest love. In simplest paraphrase, that person who is forgiven the most, loves the most.

Jesus says precisely that to the woman—except in the King James version, the summative moral is rendered exactly backwards: “her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much” (7:47). In other words, she is forgiven because she loved. But that would be to rewrite the parable, which related that the debtor loved because he was forgiven—not the other way around. It’s the difference between saying, “you were kind to me and that is why I am happy” and saying, “you were happy and that is why I am kind to you.” Though both are conceivably possible, there’s a pretty important distinction. In the parable, God’s forgiveness prompts the love we feel. God’s mercy and grace cause us to respond with an outpouring of appreciative devotion. The New Revised Standard Version correctly has the verse, “her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.”

The parable is in this regard an echo of John’s words: “we love him because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Protestants (John Calvin in particular) get this point. Though the way in which the Protestant doctrine of grace develops (highly selective, effacing free will, imputing righteousness and so forth) is not a path in alignment with Restoration understanding, the primal insight is beautiful and beautifully true: God’s act of creation, their invitation to us to join with them in covenant relationship, Christ’s decision to provide incarnational atonement and universal resurrection, and God’s unstinting commitment to “love us to the end”—all of this abounding grace precedes any effort, work, or even recognition on our part. 

Like children, we awaken gradually with dawning, stupefied awareness of a love that anticipated our worst. Wendell Berry captures the effect: 

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home . . .

George MacDonald believed in kindred fashion that our greatest failure is that of underestimating God’s love. “One day,” he wrote, “we will laugh ourselves to scorn that we looked for so little from thee; for thy giving will not be limited by our hoping.”

For some disciples, too much grace sounds dangerously close to cheap grace.

Grace is never cheap because of its infinite and ongoing cost—to the Divinity and to the humans on both sides of what Paul calls the “ministry of reconciliation.” There is nothing in what Jesus taught about love that discounts genuine love’s real rigor. The same George Macdonald quoted above pointed out the obvious when he wrote that “God may be able to move the man to right the wrong, but God himself cannot right it without the man.” God is a consuming fire as well as a loving parent, and the rigor of love requires its own sermons. My point is more preliminary. The love of God precedes the wrong. If we think of discipleship as our response to God’s love rather than its precondition, then we become the woman of his parable. In recognizing the gifts already given, we are freed “to love much” in response. 

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Quin Boardman, @quinboardman

Audio produced by BYUradio. Subscribe to listen at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Youtube.

Subscribe now

No term of scriptural vocabulary is more central to the gospel than metanoia. In the first translation of the Bible into Latin, the international language of the learned, Jerome (345–420) rendered the Greek term as “do penance.” That translation had enormous repercussions for the next thousand years, as it colored Christian perceptions of just what Jesus and John the Baptist intended by the phrase. Protestant Bibles rendered the term as “repent,” and that word is one of the words more associated with the Christian call to renounce sin, amend one’s life, and choose Christ and the Way that he taught. Most persons today have learned that a more literal translation of metanoia would be “change your heart,” and that phrase is consistent with God’s call to cooperate in the remolding of our desires, our proclivities, and our affections.

The original Greek word, “nous,” is more commonly translated in non-biblical texts as “mind” or “intellect.” Given how colloquial expressions change from culture to culture, changing one’s heart is not an inaccurate rendering of the Biblical phrase. Yet it may be worth exploring the peripheral denotation of the original words. “Change your mind, change your mind, for the kingdom of God is near.”

Unless we are undergoing a brain transplant, changing one’s mind—like changing one’s heart—is a metaphorical expression. Neither one perfectly captures the original Greek, and notice that both English expressions have some overlap. When we overcome a negative first impression of a person and open ourselves to loving them—have we “changed our heart” or “changed our mind?” When we determine that science is not the field of our dreams, and decide to major in engineering instead, have we changed our heart or our mind? What about canceling our wedding—or dinner engagement?

My point is that both expressions (changing mind, changing heart) are inadequate to capture precisely the nature of those transformations, those reorientations within, that alter the paths of our lives by shifting our relationships to persons, to ideas, and to future ways of engaging the world. And yet, the phrase “change your mind” is seldom associated with spiritual renewal. Perhaps it should be. Because as my examples are meant to remind us, “mind” and “heart” are overlapping domains. They cannot be as fully teased out as we believe, and metanoia suggests both may be integral to discipleship.

With that possibility as a live hypothesis, a fruitful key to spiritual self-assessment may be to ask yourself, when was the last time you changed your mind? If repentance is a daily practice, then instances should come readily to mind (no pun intended). And yet in my case, I’m not sure they do.

Psychologists refer to the human tendency toward “cognitive entrenchment.” One scientist defines cognitive entrenchment as “a high level of stability in knowledge schemas that cause [persons] to be inflexible in their thinking.” Such entrenchment “blocks the generation of novel ideas,” makes it harder to “adapt to novel situations, and generate creative ideas.”  And it “leads to habitual behavior.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the phenomenon is most pronounced among experts in any given field. The more learned we are—or think we are in our given fields, the more unlikely we are to step out of the run of conditioned thinking. 

Many quirks in our psychological makeup condition us toward cognitive entrenchment—most famous of which may be “confirmation bias.” Our brains are simply attuned to latch onto whatever evidence is available to support rather than challenge preconceived notions. 

Curiosity is, in this regard, a human impulse that is always at war with other natural impulses. “I want to know the mind of God,” Einstein professedly said. And yet he could not let go of his commitment to the picture of the universe that quantum mechanics annihilated. Hence his tragic failure to fully participate in some of the most consequential advances of twentieth-century science.

Our cognitive entrenchment may lead to failure in many ways. We may fail to change our mind about the merits of Betamax over VHS (like Sony corp.), or of alternating over direct current (as Edison did), yet do so with more economic than spiritual harm. And yet, is the same moral quality involved across the spectrum of mind-changing? I think it may be.

“The highest ethical calling,” writes Brian Christian, “is curiosity.” Curiosity as an ethical calling? That claim is true if we think of agency in a more expansive way. We generally emphasize moral agency as the capacity to act in a certain way—a way of our own choosing. But we inhabit a world of manifold agents as well as manifold objects. We are biologically engineered and socially conditioned to make our self the center of our universe. For Augustine (who was correct this time), self-love, self-preoccupation, is the default condition of humankind. The disposition to de-center the self, in this context, might be exactly what Christian meant as an ethical calling. We are called by the lure of love, of growth, of transformation and becoming, to be open to the world and to the other—with genuine interest. That is the true meaning of curiosity. And it is an ethical stance because it is a decision fraught with moral value: asking questions is a gesture toward connection and commitment to the value of what lies outside and beyond. If our questions are “genuine,” Hans Georg Gadamer taught, then they are laden with risk. “Our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk.”

Perhaps now we are seeing why repentance might be related to changing our mind and not just our heart. Repentance requires us to be moldable. Open to being changed by what the universe and its inhabitants have to teach us. Theologian Rowan Williams applies this moral dimension of curiosity to one of the highest forms of human relationship—marriage. In his words, what to the world generally is only “the transient force of sexual attraction is [in committed marriage] transfigured. . . . Our crisis in sexual morality . . . is about a loss of the sense of personal mystery and the calling to explore and enjoy someone else's mysteriousness for a lifetime.”

The beauty and power of that invitation—to explore someone else’s mysteriousness for a lifetime (and beyond)—is hardly a challenge constrained by marriage. What might the world—and our community—look like if we listened to each other with that degree of curiosity? How might we be further shaped in happy and unanticipated ways?

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by John William Waterhouse.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Subscribe now

Every idea, thought, fact or insight that traverses the stage of our consciousness changes us. Literally, physically. Neural networks in our brain rearrange themselves in adapting to the new information. With eighty-six billion neurons and one thousand trillion connections, a whole lot of architectural rearranging is constantly taking place in our brain. We are in a continual process of rearranging the atoms that constitute our identity.

We don’t know exactly how the physical constitution of our brain is related to our spiritual self—but if that self survives death then what is taking place in our brains must have some kind of spiritual, durable counterpart. Otherwise, death would mean the erasure of everything we have ever learned and experienced. We may think of the self, the “I” that can observe the world and even our own thoughts (as mindfulness can train us to do more effectively), as something that transcends the physical world. But our thinking involves physical processes that can be measured and mapped neurologically. So we do not know how the physical configuration of atoms that make up the brain is related or mirrored or connected to the enduring self that is eternal—but we trust that it is.

And that means, to return to our original claim, that every idea, thought, fact, or insight that traverses the stage of our consciousness changes us—eternally. 

Generally speaking, our brains preselect the information reaching conscious awareness. That is fortunate, because if all the sensory data incoming from our (more than) five senses were not filtered and severely delimited, it would overwhelm us. We would flounder in a chaotic maelstrom of images, sounds, sensations, perceptions—bombarding us from all directions at every waking (and unwakeful) moment. 

Our sensory organs themselves do much of this filtering before mental processes continue the work. As one example, on a sunny day our eyes perceive only .0035 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum. Even within this narrow bandwidth, however, we are generally not consciously aware of the millions of visual cues bombarding our retina; in experimental conditions, we don’t even notice if up to 95 percent of the peripheries of our visual field are rendered in black and white rather than color. Evolution has trained us to mostly ignore what is static but respond attentively to movement (because it might signal prey or predator).

We have all had the experience in a social event of listening to the droning buzz of conversation, only to suddenly hear a familiar name (ours?) or topic of interest. Then, with focused attention, we suddenly draw the threads of that conversation out of the mix and discern every word. Without attention, however, our brains do enormous filtering work for us in a process called “auditory sensory gating.” Neuroscientist Charles Quairiaux explains: “Our sound environment is extremely dense, which is why the brain has to adapt and implement filtering mechanisms that allow it to hold its attention on the most important elements and save energy.” We seldom hear the air conditioning in the background or our own breathing, or a dozen other background sounds—unless we attend to them.

In myriad other ways, our brains monitor bodily systems and organs, allowing only the most urgent information to reach the level of conscious awareness. That’s a simple function of the efficiency necessary for living organisms to thrive in a competitive environment. “Our sensory systems limit the amount of information about the environment to a fraction of what is potentially out there, focusing on what is most significant” to our long-range survival or immediate situation.

How is all of this relevant to the life of discipleship? If we think in terms of analogies, we have arrived at a point in cultural history where our brains’ filtering mechanisms are no longer adequate to the task. 

Modern life is filled with more leisure than risk. Information that once required a lifetime of sacrifice and study is available with a mouse click. At the same time, social engineers have learned how to bypass our inherited tendency to focus on the needful or fruitful and channel our attention to what is frivolous and wasteful and destructive. 

Evolution was the primary driver of human development—but only until the introduction of language and culture. Part of what it means to be human is the ability to channel our attention in response to values rather than necessities. The philosopher Max Scheler writes that with this capacity, we can detach ourselves from bondage to the present, and from the pressure of mere biological needs. Animals are tied “to the boundary of their environment.” We can do something no other organism or other human before the advent of language and culture could do: we can admire, we can question, we can aspire to be other or different than we are. We can seek wisdom from those who have gone before and choose what parts of our cultural inheritance deserve our attention. Some variety of wonder or awe may possibly be experienced by other species (Jane Goodall thinks this is true for chimpanzees). However, studies have shown that the single most common variety of awe reported by other persons is the experience of being moved “by moral beauty.” That is a uniquely human response to the world.

Our brains do a pretty good job of “sensory gating.” Our unconscious circuitry has had countless generations to attune our awareness to what is most expedient for our physical survival. But our evolutionary past could not prepare us for this day when culture and language make available to us an avalanche of useless information that is deliberately orchestrated to find its way to our conscious awareness. Even as we have at the same time inherited the greatest repository of worthwhile knowledge and records of exemplary beauty the world has ever known. Attentiveness to what is edifying has never been faced with more competition—or attended by higher stakes.

We are biological organisms wired and evolved to thrive in an earthly environment. Scheler’s point is that we can break free of mere reactivity to that environment—yet only by consciously selecting the influences to which we want to be responsive. Arthur Peacock pushes this point even further. “Somehow, biology has produced a being of infinite restlessness, and this certainly raises the question of whether human beings have properly conceived of what their true ‘environment’ is.” Clearly, we are fitted to be actors rather than objects to be acted upon—yet contemporary forces have more resources than ever before to steer us toward the latter. Repentance in this light is but a religious term for the power—and allure—of aspiring to an eternal life of dynamic change and recreation in accordance with values we choose.

What we are reading, thinking, and inviting into the amphitheater of consciousness, neural connection by neural connection, is physically changing our brain. Τhese choices literally are “mind-changing” (metanoia/μετάνοια), thereby constituting a dynamic, ever-evolving identity. We are the doorkeepers at the temple of our own minds.

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Georgiana Houghton.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Subscribe now

Human love is relational; human love cannot be meaningfully conceived outside of and apart from a field of individuals who affect and are affected by one another. “When we are deeply connected to others, it is not clear who is affecting whom, and the causal direction does not really matter.” Does such a claim apply to God as well as to persons? It does if, as Stephen Webb writes, “God is more of a person than we are.” 

Harry Frankfurt writes that “love is, most centrally, a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it.” Any being who desires the maximal good of others, but without experiencing, sharing in, or responding to that enhanced good of another person, might act in ways that benefit others—but it is doubtful we can consider that being to be under the influence or the effects of love. An AI could be programmed to attend to the maximal benefit of those persons in its purview, but the machine intelligence could hardly be said to love. The moral freedom to choose and the capacity to respond emotionally are requisite. It is not an inconsiderable point that those who recognize or perform morally appropriate responses without feeling them are diagnosed as sociopaths.

Paul Bloom makes the case in Against Empathy that our psyches would be healthier and our social policies more effective if we had “less empathy, more kindness,” by which he means less feeling what others feel, or experiencing what they experience, and more conscious, deliberative response to what others feel and experience. (“There is a neural difference,” fMRI studies demonstrate.) That Bloomian tilt toward the socially beneficial rather than the loving, the benevolent rather than the empathic, may be roughly paralleled by those who want to strip biblical agape of any genuinely emotional or empathic content. Ludwig Wittgenstein insisted that the one thing love is not in Paul’s catalogue to the Corinthians (“love is patient, love is kind, . . .”) is a feeling. And Terry Eagleton agreed that “charity is a social practice, not a state of mind.” 

Unfortunately for Wittgenstein and Eagleton, Paul expressly denied what they claim: “If I give away all my possessions [to the poor] . . . but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3, NRSV). It would be hard for Paul to be clearer: the morally commendable “social practice” of charity, devoid of the motivational, affective dimension, may be a wonderful thing for the recipients of that social practice but it is not love. (Clearly, the feeling without the action is not love either!) In the genuine practice of love, we cannot insulate ourselves from vicarious participation in and susceptibility to the emotional experience of others. Love cannot be love without pain, without vulnerability. As the word’s etymology suggests, a compassion devoid of any shared suffering needs a name other than compassion (“to suffer with”), and while non-empathic responses might be helpful, they are a far cry from solidarity, relationship, or love. “More kindness, less empathy” might foretell great social policy, but it is not a basis for a personal relationship—with God or our neighbor. As Henri Nouwen writes, when “we try to enter into a dislocated world,” our connection will not “be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which we speak.”

The reciprocity of love means both individuals and their futures are interconnected and therefore changed. Paul Fiddes notes: “To love is to be in a relationship where what the loved one does alters one’s own experience.” This change is inevitably in the direction of both joy and pain prompted by the other. More recently, Nicholas Wolterstorff writes out of personal experience that “Love in our world is suffering love. Some do not suffer much, though, for they do not love much. Suffering is for the loving.” That is the universal condition of the loving—human or divine. Any definition that would delimit suffering love to “our world” reflects a theology that denies love as the primary mode of God’s being. The essence of love’s cost is not solely or even primarily in the pain it inevitably entails—but in the vulnerability to which such love exposes the lover. For example, a child may live a life that provides unremitting satisfaction to the parent, yet the parent is nonetheless vulnerable. The parent’s de facto self-identification with the welfare of that child is a de facto sacrifice of their impermeability to that child’s potential for suffering.

This vulnerability, this entanglement, is the indispensable dimension of love that is relational. Exposing oneself to the uncertainties associated with another person’s future is the height of risk. Not because one cannot foresee—but because one cannot determine—the emergent reality that any relationship summons into being and continually recreates. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote, “A throw of the dice will never abolish the risk.” In David Hart’s reading of this principle, “what is hazarded has already been surrendered, entirely, no matter how the dice may fall.” Once we place ourselves in loving relation, we have already paid love’s full price, even if we don’t know yet what that price is. This is why all genuine love is infinite love: to love is to entangle our destiny with another, to open oneself to an unpredictable and ungovernable emergent reality. If we take John at his word that God loves in the same way that Jesus did, in the same way that we are called to love, then we cannot do otherwise than perpetually renew our wonder in the God we worship. 

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Francesco de Mura

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Subscribe now

“It is of little consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may contribute most to the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other.”1

So wrote John Stuart Mill in reference to the role of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, in his own published works. (I gratefully acknowledge the truth of the principle from personal experience!). History is replete with other examples than Mill of women who exercised unheralded influence on a writer who—often because of women’s more obscure place in patriarchal society—ventriloquized a wife or—in two famous cases—sisters. 

William Wordsworth revolutionized English poetry, and is celebrated as the Father of British Romanticism. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, in an age of fervent optimism and revolution, Wordsworth gave powerful expression to the innocence of children and the fundamental goodness of human nature. His constant companion—more so than wife or friends—was his sister Dorothy. She was “a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath . . . independent of the wind.”2 He was the most celebrated English poet of his day. However, one can track in her journals the embryos out of which William fashioned some of his most famous poems. If journals and diaries had persisted as credited forms of literary expression, she might herself have achieved celebrity status. His poem best known to school children begins with the famous lines,

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze . . .

It is not clear that his words improved upon the unadorned account Dorothy recorded privately, earlier:

We saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.3

More consequential for the history of early Christianity was the remarkable woman Macrina the Younger—known to few besides specialists today, and largely overshadowed by her brother Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory became the most eloquent proponent in the fourth century of the theology of ascent—that view which sees humankind as a work in continual progress, participating in gradual sanctification and union with the divine. Gregory read the Song of Solomon as a beautiful allegory of human response to the “arrows of love” with which God relentlessly pursues his creation. Gregory developed the theme most lyrically in his Life of Moses, wherein he recast the prophet’s entire life as a universal model: “The great Moses, as he was becoming ever greater, at no time stopped in his ascent, nor did he set a limit for himself in his upward course. Once having set foot on the ladder which God set up (as Jacob says), he continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained.”4  

Yet Gregory left no doubt that his spiritual teacher and master was Macrina, “the common glory of our family.” Macrina had actually brought several of her brothers to Christ, and served throughout her life as their spiritual director. In 379, as Macrina lay dying, Gregory paid his last visit. Like Socrates the night before his execution, Macrina wanted to discuss the soul’s origin, God’s purpose in its creation, and what awaited us after death. Her last words were a testimony to the creation itself as an outflowing of God’s love—and reaffirmed those very teachings which her brother would make more famous. Gregory’s tribute, published as “On the Soul and Resurrection,” was his way of proclaiming to Christians the true author of  the most beautiful teachings that lighted the way for fourth-century Christians: his sister Macrina.

Rational nature was brought into generation for this purpose, that the riches of the divine goodness should not be idle.” We were fashioned as souls “with free wills . . . for this very purpose: that there would be some capacities able to receive his blessings, capacities that are enlarged by the addition of that which is poured into them.” God “has but one goal: the whole plenitude of our nature is brought to completion from the first human being to the last.” He will offer “to all a participation in the beautiful which is in him.5

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Artwork by Anna Ancher.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and perhaps the greatest of the Victorian poets. He suffered terribly from recurrent bouts of religious doubt and profound depression. In one of his “sonnets of desolation" we read a startling metaphor for spiritual struggle:

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

It took a harrowing image—carrion serving as comfort food—to shock Hopkins out of his diet of disappointment. 

In 1913, the Irishman Sir Hugh Lane proposed establishing a permanent modern art gallery in Dublin. He had secured pledges of funding to house and enlarge his own collection featuring such contemporary greats as Corot, Manet, Monet, Degas, and Renoir. The location was to be a middle-class Irish neighborhood—who could object to such an aspiration? Well, lots of people, actually. The country was on the brink of civil war; a citizen labor army of 20,000 had just armed themselves against violent police crackdowns; Dublin slums were pervasive and death rates high; the trauma of the Great Hunger was still a vivid memory among the aged; and the Great War loomed ahead, only months away. Dispensing even private funds—let alone public monies—for fine art in desperate times struck some as a tone-deaf indulgence. To others (like William Butler Yeats), affirming the enduring and the beautiful amidst hunger and squalor was an act of defiance against human fragility and contingency. (Aren’t the poor always with us?)  In spite of Yeats’ impassioned support, Lane’s proposal failed to obtain public approval, and Yeats wrote a poem of bitter consolation to his ally in the effort, Lady Gregory. Hopkins’ wrestle was spiritual and cosmic; Yeats’ was political and moral. But in both cases, grievance threatened to canker their soul, and both rebuffed the temptation.

Yeats’ magnificent poem, “To a friend whose work has come to nothing,” ends with a call that challenges the human spirit to one of the hardest tasks it can ever face:

. . . Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

According to Paul Ricoeur, love means “unconditioned solidarity with and affirmation of the other.”1 For Dietrich von Hildebrand, love is “the affirmation of the being” of the other.2 For Martin Luther King, “love affirms the other unconditionally.” We could add endlessly to the list. In love we affirm the other—that is, we recognize the claims of the other person, that she is an end and not an object, she is the “Thou” in the I-Thou relationship3, the “I”-view of the other into which one must enter imaginatively and feelingly.4 

The quiet heroism of Yeats’ poem is in its recognition that in so many of life’s transactions, we will not be affirmed. What then? Unrequited romantic love is the great fabric upon which poets embroider their tragedies. The desiccated desert of a loveless childhood, Romanian orphanages taught us,5 creates real-life shrunken souls that our most effusive compensations can seldom repair. Life in a close community wreaks its own wounds of neglect and disregard and slight. Our cultural moment has sensitized us to a plurality of individuals who feel insufficiently affirmed in their diverse identities. All the marginalized were the focus of Christ’s ministry and should be of ours.

There is, however, another deficit of affirmation that Yeats is addressing in his poem. Less morally urgent perhaps, less dramatic, but a hurt that spares no one and can nonetheless corrode the soul like a spiritual rust. It is the experience of disappointment—of seeing our projects or our plans, or our vision of a larger good, frustrated.

Human nature being what it is, in the absence of affirmation we just seek another kind of affirmation. Assurance that we are right in feeling aggrieved. Solidarity in our disappointment, frustration, sense of being wronged. We cultivate our own microbubbles of discontent. 

“Be secret,” urges Yeats. “Be secret.” There is a time to make our protests long and loud. But there are also times to bear one’s grievance in private. When Job declared, “my heart shall not reproach me as long as I live” (27:6), he was making a pledge about a life in the absence of affirmation. 

“And exult,” added Yeats. Exulting is usually a counterpart of success. Yeats makes it a companion of failure, of disappointment. How so? He gives us no drawn-out ballad about the heroism of tragic failure, or the pride of having done the right thing in a world gone wrong. Yet this capacity for which no name exists—the capacity to “be secret and exult”—seems necessary in the disciple’s spiritual repertoire.

Sometimes true discipleship is the courage to say hard things, to speak truth to power, and to put one’s reputation and life on the line. Sometimes, as we are implored in scripture ancient and modern, discipleship is the discipline to “stand still,”(Ps. 46:10), to “be still” (D&C 123:17). That may be a call to cease frenetic motion of mind and body and listen. And sometimes, it is a simple call to silence. 

Hopkins silenced the interior demons of despair. As a Jesuit, he understood that nourishing despair is a failure of belief in Christ, not in ourselves. Silence in those circumstances is the allowing of space for Christ to enter into our interior dialogue, bringing hope. 

Yeats silenced the inclination to spread disappointment like a canker. The “most difficult” thing is to know when to be quietly glad that some failures cause us grief—while we wait for renewed opportunities.

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Art by Gerard Dillon.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Subscribe now

Thomas F. Rogers passed away on June 24, 2024. Rogers is generally recognized as “the Father of Mormon drama” in Eugene England’s words. Huebner was the most famous of some thirty dramas he wrote. He had a storied career teaching at Brigham Young University, and served as mission leader in the Russia St. Petersburg Mission from 1993-1996. From 2007 until 2014, Rogers was a traveling LDS patriarch assigned to Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. During his eight years serving in this capacity, he made 24 trans-Atlantic crossings and bestowed over 2600 patriarchal blessings.

Tom Rogers once wrote, “It is very hard to live for and maintain [the Lord's spirit], but so worth it that anyone who has once experienced it [should] do everything necessary to have it with him or her at all times.”

Those of us fortunate enough to know the great heart behind decades of literary production know that he was doing everything in his power—and mostly succeeding—in bringing a radiant portion of the Lord’s spirit into his life and into the world.

I want to briefly touch on two aspects of Tom’s legacy. First was his picture of faith as a great intellectual adventure. That is a legacy he richly elaborated. And second I want to say a few words about a legacy that he left us more in the way of a challenge. A theme that is richly relevant at this moment of looming cultural Armageddon.

The first legacy: I discovered the gospel as a teenager. I came of age in the church when many giants walked the earth—one of those was Thomas Rogers. I encountered Brother Rogers at BYU when I was a freshman. He was one of a handful of professors who did more than inspire me. They nurtured in many of my generation a passion for this gospel—a gospel they so conspicuously apprehended as endlessly interesting. And a gospel that could sustain rigorous interrogation. In an era when many question of LDS intellectuals, why do you stay, Tom’s answer was that his faith was a joyous offering, not a position of last resort. 

Tom persistently reminded us, without saying so explicitly, that according to our narrative of the grand human epic, the great adventure loomed outside of the Garden, in a world of competing imperatives and perplexing dilemmas. He knew, as C. S. Lewis remarked, that all life is lived on the edge of a precipice. The more intimately we know anyone, the more we know this to be true. This did not mean for Tom that we should take gospel principles and standards less seriously, but more seriously. His was an adventuresome mind and spirit, and he was as well-travelled in his moral imagination as he was in geographical reality. He exemplified as well as any person I know the mandate to “stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity.”

Tom’s insights were no cheap palliative to the weary road-warriors on the path to Zion. Like Orson Pratt’s simple adobe observatory erected in the shadow of the Salt Lake Temple, Tom brought together in vibrant harmony the sacred and the searching. He was astoundingly well-read, and harvested a rich bounty of insights and wisdom from the vast library of Western—and Eastern—literary and religious texts. To read his essays is to be both moved by his erudition and embarrassed by one’s own limited repertoire. More importantly, perhaps, one will be inspired by his capacity to question himself, his presuppositions, and his own judgment—all in an effort to refine and preserve that which is most essential, most indispensable, in the life and belief of a disciple of Christ. 

As for the second element of Tom’s legacy, I will close with a few words about his last, wonderfully provocative work of art and theological questing.  A few months ago, Tom shared with me his recently completed novel. Its subject is a tragic episode in Utah history called the Aiken Massacre. Tom found in life’s toughest questions and darkest conflicts fodder for his most celebrated dramas. Art, said William Hazlitt, can refine our sense of beauty to the point of agony. In Tom’s great work, Huebner, a young latter-day Saint opposes Hitler, and finds himself arrested by the regime, disowned by his church, and martyred at the age of 17. In the story, we find precisely what Hazlitt described: our experience of moral beauty refined to the point of agony. In Fire in the Bones, he again explored the dilemmas of discipleship we encounter, when we find our call to Christ is mediated by flawed humans. His final project about the Aiken tragedy, the soon-to-be published Desperate Measures, is a troubling episode involving the killing of five travelers through Utah. Tom chose the rending subjects he did not because it is easy to sensationalize tragedies, but because they are so difficult to theologize. Tom wanted to confront the greatest challenges our faith involves, because of his absolute confidence that such faith can and must sustain the hardest questions. 

This last work by Tom is a play set within a novel. It is poignant to me that the setting of the play is the afterlife. The motif running through this work is judgment in all its multiple manifestations. The judgments we pass upon those in the past. The judgments we make about each other, and about other faith traditions. And, quietly between the lines, Tom is writing about our expectations surrounding the great and final judgment that awaits all of us. 

Tom wanted us—the readers—to interrogate some of our clichéd thinking about what final judgment might look like. Tom felt that our problem as earnest disciples is not so much under-belief but over-belief. We suffer not from too little faith but from too many assumptions. Assumptions that what are really open questions have already been settled. 

Tom’s thesis in his final work—which I applaud—is that God fills, and has yet to fill, many roles. But referee is not one of them. Characters arrive in the afterlife with unanswered questions, with hurts and regrets and misjudgments—but with a dawning awareness of each other’s circumstances, perspectives, and capacities for growth. In this beautiful work, Tom Rogers reveals a possible eternity where we—we ourselves—have to continue the exacting work of resolving those dilemmas that fracture conscience and families and communities alike. 

I love the fact that Tom Rogers ended his literary career, and his life as a disciple of Jesus Christ, not with closure but with a challenge; not with a depiction of resolution and healing imposed from without, but the invitation to a more rigorous love that must resound from within. Healing is hard work, and I take Tom to be telling us that we cannot employ a narrative of facile resolution and happy endings to abdicate our work of reconciliation and peacemaking, both here and hereafter. Reconciliation was the theme he most loved in film and literature. Reconciliation, he wrote, was one of the most sacred impulses within the human spirit.

In one of his finest addresses, he ended with this testimony. “As we arrive at and maintain an awareness of how we and others really are…we become more sanctified, and One. We each assume therewith a certain burden. That burden is a great privilege, for it is the burden of life—our life with others, and the burden of divine love.”

I’m grateful that Tom was a living witness to both that burden and that privilege.

Share

These remarks were delivered at Tom Roger’s funeral on June 29, 2024.

To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Subscribe now

The Feminine Divine has a storied history in religious texts and literature alike. Often, however, the face of the feminine divine shines through an earthly personage. In Goethe’s masterpiece Faust, the hero loses his duel with the devil. His contract with Mephistopheles requires the forfeiture of his soul, and in the drama’s closing scene, raucous devils arrive to ferry him to hell. The ending is poised to be yet another version of the morality play’s tragic conclusion as it had long played out in hundreds of versions performed in fiction and fairs across a vast cultural landscape over past centuries. But in Goethe’s Romantic version, a shocking reversal occurs: Angels intrude and pronounce Faust redeemed through the successful intercession of the soul of a young girl he had wronged—the maiden Gretchen. One of the greatest works of Western literature ends with the mantic pronouncement: 

                Das Ewig-Weibliche
		Zieht uns hinan
		[The Eternal-Feminine 
		Draws us on high.]

The most enduring version of this cosmic trope—and certainly one that Goethe had in mind—was from the masterpiece of the Middle Ages: Dante’s Divine Comedy. This trilogy, one of the first great works of literature written in the vernacular (Tuscan), depicted in an accessible and memorable way the theology of the Medieval church. Through the character of the narrator, we follow the paradigmatic journey of the pilgrim making his way through earthly travail, purgation, and into heaven. 

Spurring him along the entirety of his journey is his Platonic love for the idealized Beatrice, an Italian girl Dante had met briefly, but who captured Dante’s heart and served as his spiritual inspiration and poetic muse. In the epic poem, she sends Virgil the poet to guide Dante the pilgrim through Purgatory, at the summit of which she conducts him personally through ever higher and more radiant celestial spheres.

A most famous scene takes place in the final moments of his ascent. As the journey ends in the divine presence, Dante anticipates a beatific eternity in the company of Beatrice, “through [whose] power and excellence alone” he has “recognized the goodness and grace” that is the object and prompt of all his striving. In a moment, she is gone. He panics and sees Beatrice in the distance. He prays desperately to her who has “healed his soul,” seeking assurance of her abiding grace. In response, 

                she—far up the mountain, 
		As it appeared to me—looked down and smiled.
		Then she turned back to the Eternal Fountain.
		(Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana) 

The church of Dante’s era was rooted in the theology of St Augustine (in process of being overtaken in influence by Aquinas). A central feature of Augustine’s theology of love was that it is always one of two kinds: love is use or love is enjoyment; it is either instrumental or it is the deserving end of all our striving. Augustine is very explicit on this point: “humankind’s proper attitude to the world is not enjoyment (frui) but use (uti).”1 And the same holds true for other persons. Only God is to be loved for himself and himself alone.

That was Beatrice’s message to Dante.

C. S. Lewis admired Dante’s work and Augustine’s thought that had inspired much of it. A great struggle came into his life when death intruded upon his so-long-delayed marriage to Joy Gersham. After only three years together, she died of cancer and he agonized over her loss. He feared that in his hopes for future reunion he was just engaging in a sentimental projection. More painfully, he considered that Augustine and Dante were right, that we err in letting our longing for family obscure our only legitimate end: God himself. He journaled about his inner conflicts of human impulse against theological commitments.

That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a byproduct of the true End. Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet Joy again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?2

In the end, he concluded Augustine and Dante were right. In working through his grief, Lewis had at last an experience of “assurance,” of Joy’s continuing presence, precise yet “incredibly unemotional,” imbued with neither “joy nor sorrow.” The ultimate significance of the encounter was to interpret for him an experience he had had at Joy’s deathbed. On that occasion, Joy had said to the chaplain, “I am at peace with God.” Only now, it seems, in the aftermath of his visionary experience, does the import of that scene become clear to Lewis. After assuring the chaplain of her peace, he recorded, poignantly but I think tragically, “She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.”  Lewis takes those final words of Dante, verbatim, with which to conclude his own pilgrimage of love. He is now ready to relinquish Joy, as Dante did Beatrice.

We come at last to a third farewell, a third scene where a lover observes the pole star of his universe fade into the beyond. The moment is depicted in Wendell Berry’s masterpiece, Jayber Crow.

Jayber (who in the novel compares himself to Dante’s pilgrim) is now an old man, and he has had one love in his life: Mattie Chatham. Like Dante’s, it was a Platonic love, an admiration so rich and pure and sanctifying that it gave coherence and beauty to everything in Jayber’s uneventful life. Mattie had perhaps sensed his devotion, in the scattered moments of conversation and comfortable silence that they innocently shared over the years in a grove of trees where they occasionally encountered one another. Now Mattie lies dying in a hospital bed, her husband has sold for logging that small paradise of trees that had become their sanctified site of friendship and love, and Jayber has come to say his goodbyes.

“Jayber. Oh, he’s cutting the woods.” And so she knew. Her eyes filled with tears, but she said quietly, “I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it’s being ruined is hard.” Then, in the loss of all the world, when I might have said the words I long wanted to say, I could not say them. I saw that I was not going to be able to talk without crying, and so I cried. I said, “But what about this other thing.” She looked at me then. “Yes,” she said. She held out her hand to me. She gave me the smile that I had never seen and will not see again in this world, and it covered me with light.”

After a millennium of poetic error and theological misfires, Wendell Berry gets the ending right. God intends for all of us to be ends, and not merely means. In God’s universe, love does not compete with love. His project is only its multiplication.

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Subscribe now

Latter-day Saints claim unique understanding of the Atonement of Jesus Christ thanks to the ongoing Restoration initiated through Joseph Smith. Yet we’re also influenced by Christian traditions that emphasize the very notions of equity and fairness repudiated by Jesus in the New Testament—which can lead to flawed perceptions of salvation. In this interview with Kurt Manwaring, Terryl Givens traces the history of atonement theology and explains why it matters to Latter-day Saints.

What is atonement theology?

Atonement theology is the attempt to understand how the death of Jesus Christ makes possible human salvation.

Anecdotally, what might a typical church member’s understanding of atonement look like?

There are a range of ways in which Latter-day Saints understand the death of Christ, but many (or most) are a form of substitutionary atonement—either penal substitution or what has been given the name of governmental theory of atonement.

Penal substitution (developed fully in the Reformation) is the idea that Justice demands a penalty and Jesus is punished in our stead.

The governmental theory is that a punishment or consequence must follow sin according to the law. God cannot forgive in the absence of that penalty, or he has in effect nullified the principle of moral law.

Some Latter-day Saints incline more toward a third view, moral influence theory: the belief that Christ’s submission to suffering and death was such an overwhelming display of compassionate sacrifice that love is “kindled in our hearts,” in the words of Abelard (12th c.) We are moved to repent and be reconciled to him as a result. The mechanism of Christ’s suffering is generally thought to be divine empathy in this case, rather than the infliction of a penalty.

Have you seen anything in general conference that suggests a new impetus for learning about atonement?

President Nelson has warned against objectifying the Atonement of Jesus Christ as “an amorphous entity” that is elevated above or exists apart from the love that motivated Christ’s life and sacrificial death.

Otherwise, I have heard no apostolic teaching that attempts to move us in a particular direction.

What is sin?

Sin is generally treated as a violation of the moral law. I think that is a good starting point for a definition.

What causes internal remorse when we sin?

Ideally, we experience remorse when we recognize in our sin a failure to love and we see the consequent hurt that our sin causes to others and to our relationships with God and our fellow humans.

Justice plays a big role in today’s meditations on atonement. Summarize what that looks like.

Different voices, even scriptural voices, depict justice in differing ways and with differing emphases or perspectives. Sometimes justice is reified as a kind of Platonic absolute to which even God is subject. And sometimes—as in some passages in the Book of Mormon—justice is another name for the law of restoration, according to which God promises that we shall receive according to our desires.

In other words, as I read those passages, justice is the principle by which the sanctity of moral agency is upheld. As in Section 88, we get what we desire, what we are willing to receive.

Repentance is the process by which we continually redirect and reshape those desires in holier ways.

If justice is largely a human attribute intended for mortal endeavors, why does it feel so intuitive?

Justice certainly takes many forms in human instinct and in human institutions. It’s important to recognize that historically, justice became institutionalized (as in the Code of Hammurabi)—not as a reflection of some perfect system of equity but as a way of controlling and eradicating the cycle of retribution.

If I can only exact an eye for an eye, that short-circuits what otherwise might spiral into a blood feud of increasing violence.

We sometimes conceal our lust for retribution under a veneer of more noble-sounding “justice.”

I think much of the attraction justice has for us is of Darwinian rather than divine influence. Certainly, our criminal justice system has often veered more toward retribution than rehabilitation or reformation.

In early Christianity, many leading voices were insistent that divine punishment was always purgative, never punitive. That distinction seems crucial to ascertaining the true motivation and quality of the justice being invoked.

Little children want the pie cut in equal shares because they want their “due.” The loving parent cuts the pie equally because he or she wants each child to get the maximum goodness possible.

Love and justice can define the same thing but from different points of view. And they are not always equally exalted points of view.

What does it mean to say that early Christians taught a “theology of ascent”?

If John’s witness is correct—that God is love—and if the love of God is to have any semantic continuity with the human experience of love, then we can say certain things about it. It would be rooted in the active promotion of the thriving of the other. And love, being expansively relational, would necessarily be costly, universal, and inexhaustible.

If that is true of God’s love, then all theories of creation that see human creation as an endeavor to glorify God’s own self have to be mistaken. That account is clearly more narcissistic than loving.

The objective of bringing human souls into fuller relationship with and similitude to God would have to be the real motive. Hence, the world would be in a Johannine understanding a school for souls, and we are on a ladder of ascent to God.

That is how the major voices of the first four centuries understood human purpose and God’s designs–including Irenaeus, Origen, and the Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, and Basil the Great). And they persistently used the language of “ascent,” “divinization,” and “theosis.”

Conceptions of original sin, human depravity, predestination, and special election—as well as later notions of imputed righteousness—were radically incompatible with this understanding of God’s love and were unheard of until the invention of what became Christian orthodoxy largely at the hand of Augustine.

The emphasis had been on an upward striving, a loving and transformative response to God’s love. The arrow rather abruptly reversed, and salvation came to be bestowed gratuitously, selectively, and unidirectionally as an act of grace.

How did Christ’s teachings radically challenge notions of human justice?

We have become largely anesthetized to the moral revolution that Christ introduced into human relationality—and much of it centered on his overthrow of our ideas, both innate and cultural, that revolve around equity and fairness (or justice).

In Christ’s teachings, early and late laborers receive the same wage. The sun shines equally on the just and the unjust. Sinners are forgiven and told to go their way and sin no more. The first shall be last. The Lord washes the feet of the servants. The human obsession with due proportion, zero-sum outcomes, and balanced scales melts away before the radiant cosmic asymmetry of love.

Why did it take centuries for a theology of ascent to give way to misunderstanding?

I’d rephrase the question. The question is why did Christianity so largely repudiate the revolution and return to so many structures that Jesus had repudiated.

The church became allied with—rather than a challenger to—worldly power structures in the fourth century. Only slightly earlier, creation ex nihilo replaced creation ex materia, giving emphasis to God’s power over his loving engagement with Creation.

Christ as the loving servant gave way in art and rhetoric to Christ Pantokrator (Christ the All Powerful). Atonement became fixated on repairing God’s wounded honor or status rather than humanity’s woundedness. State sanctioned violence against heretics, rather than loving persuasion, was institutionalized.

Clearly, we humans generally—and we Christians specifically—have found it irresistible to migrate back to those forms of power and “justice” that Jesus so emphatically overthrew when he washed the feet of his disciples.

Jesus had rooted the gospel in the forward momentum of life as educative, love as a dynamic force of change, and evolving relationality with God and fellow humans as central to the Christian message. Repentance and love were always reflections of a future orientation rich with possibility.

And yet, an irrepressible human need to balance past accounts—both Eve and Adam’s transgression and personal sins—lead to an emphasis on “satisfaction” as a concept pertaining to God’s honor rather than human healing.

Fast forward to today. Is the core of our interpretations closer to those taught by Christ or those which surfaced centuries later?

I think a major contribution of the Restoration was to repair and reconstitute the epic sweep of the human saga according to the earlier model.

Premortality (not universally but often taught in the first centuries), graduation to the educative experience of life, God as the weeping rather than impassible God, and Christ as architect and tutor rather than repairman of a catastrophe, along with the prospect of eternal progress and companionship with the Gods—those are largely unparalleled contributions to religious understanding.

Sin is not the catastrophe that dooms the human family, but a kind of collateral damage that was anticipated and provided for in the Messianic mission of incarnation.

Explain your theory that Christ’s life and teachings are meant to inspire us to live higher and holier lives, and help us remove the burden of sin.

I think it is enormously significant that the question the angel asks Nephi is not, do you understand the atonement? Rather, he asks, “knowest thou the condescension of God?”

Ways we speak about the atonement can have the effect of passing too quickly over the infinite love manifest in Christ’s willingness to subject himself to life—let alone death.

His name, Immanuel, is a reverent acknowledgement that his desire to suffer with us alone makes him worship-worthy.

We could not know the love of God through his death alone—many have given their life for a loved one. We need the entirety of John’s story of how he suffered hunger and thirst, fatigue and disappointment, tears of solidarity and tears of anguish.

The particularity of his love manifest across a spectrum of interactions is the clearest revelation we have of God’s love—and we lose the force of his incarnational impact when all of his birth, life, ministry, teachings, personality gets distilled into one pivotal moment of death.

If atonement is at-one-ment, reconciliation, then it is a process into which we must be drawn. An expansive understanding of incarnation offers multiple points of contact, influence, and transformation for being “drawn” to him.

Christ’s life is essential to that approach. What do we make of so many people who have lived without access to a record of His example?

One strength of Restoration teachings is that we have some good answers to that question that has haunted Christian history. One natural response to the quandary of such limited access to Christ and his teachings has been, “Right—we are part of the elect lucky few. Too bad for the rest.”

I think we have three healthier ways of thinking about it.

First, Latter-day Saints place particular weight on the process of embodiment itself. If a body is required for a fullness of joy, then the mere fact of embodiment fulfills a cardinal requirement of human progression toward God.

Second, along with some other Christians past and present, we have a sense of what has been called “the invisible church.” Countless individuals may be examples of what God called “holy men [and women]” unknown to us, who practiced love and emulated Christ though they knew him not by name.

And finally, the fact that evangelizing and sacramental work reaches to those dead as well as living extends the reach of Christ’s example beyond those formally catechized here.

What do we make of Restoration scripture that uses language like “merit”, “justice” and “advocate”?

Both scripture and the institutional church have emphasized the role of culture in shaping our understanding of the gospel. God speaks “after the manner of their language,” he uses language suited to time and place to “work upon our hearts,” and traditions of the fathers can influence us. The creedal tradition, said Joseph, is like an “iron yoke” that “fills the world with confusion.”

A church website says that “revelation is a process,” that God speaks to us “within our cultures and according to our understanding,” using “symbols and language” from that cultural moment.

If Christ came in the 21st century, would subsequent generations of believers compare him to a CEO? That’s not as ridiculous as it seems.

We invoke languages, metaphors, and analogies that are ready to hand. Paul used many varied ones: Christ as sacrifice, as ransom, as mediator. Those are not synonyms.

I don’t think any image or dictionary definition can do full justice to the mysteries of the kingdom and the solemnities of eternity.

President Nelson said the Restoration is a process, and I for one relish the quest to seek better and better language to celebrate it.

Did any verses initially feel like obstacles to your understanding of atonement?

Sometimes I think theology is all in the prepositions. I believe Christ died (and lived!) for me, but I think more is possibly embedded in that “for” than we have assumed.

What does it mean if I say that I sacrifice “for” my children? Suddenly the phrase may mean both more and less than I thought.

What has Jesus directly said about His atonement?

Nothing specifically, because the atonement becomes a freighted word only centuries later. Though he did say he would “draw” all men to him. And that one who loves gives his life for his friends.

Could you share a brief testimony about Christ and atonement?

I don’t know what transpired in Gethsemane, and I don’t know the cause or effect of his abandonment on the cross. But my hope that I will live again and that I can continue my journey to be like him is rooted in his life and death and resurrection, and that is enough for me to consider him the author and finisher of my faith.

Share

Kurt Manwaring is the Editor-in-Chief of FromtheDesk.org, a Latter-day Saint history and religion blog, from which this interview originally appeared.

Terryl Givens is a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. He is currently working on a history of Christianity which includes a lengthy chapter about the evolution of atonement theologies.

Art by Georges Rouault.

Subscribe now

Once upon a timeless time, 13.7 billion years ago, a quantum energy fluctuation arising from a spacetime vacuum energy state produced an eruption into the universe of hydrogen atoms. An almost inconceivably large number of hydrogen atoms: 10 followed by about 85 zeros. No suns or planets or heaps of dirt or drops of water or dust or bacteria or any sort of thing larger than a hydrogen atom existed. 10⁸⁵ hydrogen atoms. 

Just a hair short of 13.7 billion years later, little human hands began to differentiate from a bean shaped embryo in the womb of a young Italian woman named Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. Twenty-odd years later, those fully grown hands, pulsing with blood and connected by neural pathways to one of the most magnificent brains in the history of human creativity—Michelangelo—chipped millions of flakes from a block of Carrara marble and produced the Pietá. 

Just what God’s role in Creation was is hard to say. Many early Christians believe that God shaped primordial matter into the cosmos that we know and live in. Later Christians—and many today—believe that God summoned that cosmos into existence by the power of his Word. I think the more interesting question is how we got from those hydrogen atoms to the Pietá.

The great physicist J. S. D. Haldane opined that “If our planet was created a few thousand years ago to end a few years or a few thousand years hence, it is conceivable that the main purpose to be worked out on it is the salvation and perfection of individual human beings.” Curiously, he believed the age of the earth was an argument against any divine involvement. “On a planet more than a thousand million years old, however, it is hard to believe—as do Christians . . . that the most important event has occurred within the last few thousand years.”1

Apparently, a God of instantaneous creation is easier for some people (and many Christians) to believe in than a God of infinite patience. The God I believe in is an artist. And Makoto Fujimura reminds us, “There is no art if we are unwilling to wait for paint to dry.”2 Whatever the mechanism or meaning of creation—it took a lot of time to get from hydrogen atoms to Michelangelo. Whatever the precise role of God in designing and guiding the growing beauty, complexity, and intelligence in the cosmos, something is going on that is garnering new attention and new explanations.  

For many years, the idea was dominant in evolutionary biology that humans and every living thing are the product of countless random variations generated by mutation. Re-wind the tape to the beginning of earth’s history and start again, in Stephen Jay Gould’s metaphor, and the story line would change completely, along with the result. Randomness, chance, accidents, molecular mishaps and genetic aberrations constitute a wild free-for-all of the unpredictable, the unforeseen and the unexpected. Life finds a way, negotiates its tortuous paths, and we end up with the delightful but utterly contingent world we see—but it could all have been otherwise.

Except that story of utter randomness is no longer persuasive. Life is a perpetual, unremitting, infinitely creative struggle to solve problems—and time and time again those solutions converge. Life takes different paths, but the results are the same. “It matters little what our starting points may have been: the different routes will not prevent a convergence to similar ends.” Life manifests a “recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same 'solution' to a particular ‘need.’”3 Life explores all possibilities, but freedom always operates within parameters of the possible.

The irrepressible drive of all that lives to engage the world, to see, to taste, to hear, to feel, extends beyond human examples and imagination. The nose of the star-nosed mole is a centimeter in width. It contains 25,000 sensory receptors and five times as many nerves as the human hand. It does not smell its environment; it “sees” it with a level of mapping detail more accurate than our eye. In some fish (mormyrids), their bodies respond so sensitively to electrical currents that they have an effectual picture of their environment. Mammals and mosquitos independently evolved hearing systems based on similar mechanics. The asymmetrical ears that give owls such exquisite targeting ability evolved independently five to seven times in evolutionary history. The impulse to be aware, to interact, to multiply the means of moral and physical agency, will not be thwarted. Evolution isn’t linear or unidirectional—except in the long run. Life is relentlessly surging toward an end. “What we call language,” writes Morris, “is an evolutionary inevitability.” More to the point: “our sentience was effectively inevitable.” His mapping of convergence upon convergence points him to one conclusion with enormous theological implications (though he is a paleobiologist): “Something like ourselves is an evolutionary inevitability.”4

More is implied in these patterns of adaptation and development of sensory mechanisms, communication, and social organization. Darwin insisted only survivability was the principle of change. For Morris, “larger and more complex brains, sophisticated vocalizations, echolocation, electrical perception, advanced social systems including eusociality, viviparity, warm-bloodedness, agriculture—all of which are convergent—. . . to me that sounds like progress.” In fact, he hypothesizes, if we ever discover alien life, the chances are overwhelming that we will encounter a species that solved the challenges of olfaction, vision, dexterity, respiration and oxygenation the same way we did. We will, effectively, be "looking at ourselves."5

How did we get from hydrogen atoms to the Pietá? To Mozart and Mother Teresa and your best friend’s love and laughter? Maybe there are yet to be discovered, universal laws of self-organization that pertain to the material. Even secular philosophers are beginning to consider that “there may be powerful principles of self-organization at work . . ., principles that Darwin knew nothing about and might well have delighted in.”6 Atheist thinker Thomas Nagel is also persuaded of a deeply rooted “teleology” driven by apparent “principles of self-organization or of the development of complexity over time that are not explained by [the known] elemental laws.”7 

Some theologians believe that God is this "living process of interaction," an "impersonal infinity.”8 I don’t. I think only a person who is a center of consciousness and personality can love us as God does. But I do think matter is majestic and marvelous—and that whatever animates it moves beautifully and relentlessly in the direction of abundance and creativity. 

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel and The God Who Weeps and All Things New.

Subscribe now

The evening of August 19, 1662, one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of the age died, perhaps of a brain aneurysm. Blaise Pascal was only thirty-nine. A few days following his death, his servant was putting his clothes in order when he noticed a curious bulge in the deceased man’s doublet. Sewn into the lining was a small, folded parchment written in Pascal’s own hand. It recorded an ecstatic vision Pascal had experienced eight years previously. He appears to have made the record immediately in the aftermath of the event, and the stark, staccato language reads like the sudden irruption from beyond the veil that it was:

The year of grace 1654,

Monday, 23 November,  . . . From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Greatness of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy . . .
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ . . .

Pascal never referred back to those luminous two hours, and it is impossible to say what transpired. Wordless communion? Angelic ministering? Visionary worlds? Language never before uttered but heard by him? Two lessons, at least, we can reasonably infer.

First, we can venture what the “certitude” referred to might be—and it was more than a simple statement about the reality of God. For Pascal, as for most Christians then as now, questions about the existence of God were seldom in play. The first great age of skepticism was still a century away. The words of the poet Robinson Jeffers applied to seventeenth-century Europeans like Pascal as well as to ancient Greeks: “O happy Homer, taking the stars and the gods for granted.”

What was in doubt was the only thing about God that really matters: in what does his nature principally consist? The paramount revelation to Pascal in the dark of that November night was by way of a correction. God was not the God sought and proclaimed by the philosophers and the learned—of whom Pascal himself was exhibit A. He later expounded the identity of that God of the patriarchs he had come to know:  “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the heart and soul of those whom he possesses.”1 

Institutional Christianity struggled to reconcile the suffering, incarnate Christ with the demands of classical philosophical influences. In part because the church soon acquired the very trappings of power and sovereignty that Jesus had repudiated. In the background, the human desire for a zero-sum universe of equity and fairness and retributive justice competed with a challenging new ethic of asymmetrical love and forgiveness. Under these pressures, increasingly, the God of the philosophers (the timeless, transcendent God without body, parts, or passions) supplanted the God of the disciples—in many cases with surprising self-awareness. One prominent Christian theologian of our own day writes with startling condescension that hoping to find a correct understanding of God from the earliest Christians is “expecting far too much.”2 Another similarly holds that “we should not be surprised” that “people so close to the apostles . . . understood the central mystery of the faith so badly.”3

Pascal’s certainty about God’s nature paralleled the apostles’ understanding, no matter how unsophisticated philosophically or theologically. The first disciples knew God to be love in the only way anyone experiences absolute love. Love is interpersonal, relational, costly, and inexhaustible. Rather than see them as first-century theological unsophisticates, the gospels affirm that these disciples knew firsthand who the early Christian convert Mathetes called the “Nourisher, Father, Teacher, Counsellor, Healer,”4 the God revealed in Jesus Christ. John Burnaby was correct in this regard: “It was as a person, living, speaking, acting, and suffering, that Jesus was known to his friends; and when the fourth gospel was written, the church was assured that to know Jesus in this way was to know his father also.”5 That seems to have been the certitude Pascal experienced. God is the God of love and comfort who fills the soul as we come to know him. 

The second lesson that may be drawn from Pascal’s memorial is the lesson of sacred silence. Pascal kept the parchment that commemorated his holy encounter concealed for two reasons: to maintain throughout his life the sacred privacy of his experience; and to wear it near his breast as a private, tangible, ever-present memorial of an encounter that shaped his subsequent life. Our access to the holy of holies may depend in part on our kindred capacity to cherish and nourish and safeguard those glimpses of the divine with which we are gifted.

The question all this leaves unaddressed, of course, is how can I experience the certitude—the conviction beyond any possibility of doubt—that I am loved as Pascal knew himself to be loved? Even in a community of faith, even sharing a common canon, common foundational teachings, and a shared revelatory heritage—it is unlikely that any two mental constructs of God held by any two modern disciples follow identical outlines. 

Matthew 7:23 anticipates a day when Jesus will say to many professed disciples, “ye never knew me.”6 In discussing this scripture with a small group, we referenced the prayer of C. S. Lewis (who was paraphrasing Augustine): “May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.”7 That petition has always struck me as the most fruitful consideration when aspiring to a prayer-centered life. The perpetual pursuit of self-honesty, and an openness to a revelatory process of learning to know God, go hand in hand. In this discussion, I was surprised by a young woman’s comment. “I fully expect,” she said, “when I meet the Lord he will be different than I imagined.”

What moved me was the tone behind her comment. Not fear that she had God wrong. Not disregard for the stakes or blithe acceptance of our limited light. She seemed, rather, to be expressing with hopeful optimism what one of the greatest early Christian teachers wrote: “For whatever it is that we are able to sense or know of God, it is necessarily to be believed that he is by many degrees far better than what we perceive him to be.”8

Share

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Subscribe now

My father was not much involved with his children; he read books obsessively, and if I wanted time with him, I found something in his book-lined den and sat on the floor near him, soon lost in some well-worn, illustrated volume. He often invited me to accompany him to a used bookstore, and would treat me to a book or two of my own I could add to his pile. By the time I left for college, he had opened his own used bookshop. Throughout several ensuing years, I worked in the shop weekends while pursuing graduate studies. My personal collection grew substantially over the decades. Now I often retrace my life-long spiritual and mental pilgrimage as I walk along the rows of musty shelves laden with so many tangible mementos of awakenings, discoveries, epiphanies and passions. 

Often I pull a volume out and smile to remember its story (a pamphlet on treasure digging from a quaint bookshop in Puget Sound; a 17th century vellum-bound volume from 1637, gifted by my father at the end of a summer stint working with him; a paperback fished out of a BYU bookstore bargain bin that kindled but could not sustain an alternate academic path in the sciences). This morning, I pulled out a collection of essays that caught my eye—only to discover, disconcertingly, that the margins were speckled with faint annotations I had made in a book no longer familiar to me. What happened to all those startling facts and stirring insights and provocations that once registered so profoundly on my heart and mind? I pause and scan the shelves and am pierced by the sense of loss, of waste, like fruit harvested but then forgotten and spoiled on a back shelf in the cellar.

As a graduate student in North Carolina, I went to hear George Steiner, one of the twentieth century’s greatest essayists and literary critics. On this occasion he delivered a passionate apologia for a life of learning. At one point, he recounted the story of a Russian scholar, a woman of vast erudition and a polyglot professor of literature. She had been convicted as a political dissident and was imprisoned in the Soviet gulag. How did she survive those long terrible years?

This woman had a vast store of beautiful poetry in her mind. She spent her time mentally translating every poem or fragment of verse she could remember into each language in her repertoire. The exercise occupied her barren hours and maintained her sanity and spirits. At this moment in his address Professor Steiner looked out at the hundreds of students in his audience and asked, “With what kind of furniture is the temple of your mind furnished? What resources of memory could you draw upon in time of need?” 

Modern neuroscience holds out the likelihood that vastly more memories reside in our brains that we can call to mind. In one of many such experiments, a test subject, when her temporal lobe was stimulated with gentle electrical pulses, vividly relived forgotten moments of her past: “a mother calling her little boy;” “watching a travelling circus” as a child; other vivid scenes like faded photos in an album springing to life in 3-D technicolor. A rare syndrome exists in which persons with “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM) actually remember every day of their lives in high-definition detail. Neuroscientists and clinicians who have studied such persons believe they do not form memories any differently than we do. Their working hypothesis is that some individuals spend more time absorbing, rethinking and rehearsing recent experiences so as to forge readier, more durable access to what Augustine called the “vast palace of memory.”  

I have a fantasy that in a life yet to unfold more fully, every beautiful word I have read, like every edifying conversation with friends I have relished, every forgotten taste of homemade bread I have savored, every kind thought I have entertained, will be mine again. Not like a 3x5 card in a file, or as data bits accessed by keyboard or cranial implant—but as part of a more fulsome present self. But I am beginning to think that such a fantasy may be to miss the point of that heroic prisoner of conscience quietly murmuring recalled poetry in a lonely cell, and the question George Steiner posed. 

The mind is always at work, assembling out of the materials we make available to it the furniture of the temple of the soul. Our memories are, in the most powerful sense, already present to us. They are always present to us. They are examples of those “things unknown” that, outside of our actual awareness, “have a secret influence on the soul.” Nothing that we love is ever truly lost. That is why we must love all and everything that we can.

Share

To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Artwork by Erik Desmazières.

Subscribe now

After all, whatever one’s philosophical views, so long as there is such a thing as truth there must be some truths that don’t have to be grounded in anything else.  —Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos

Albert Einstein called Kurt Gödel the greatest logician since Aristotle. In 1900, at an international congress of mathematics, the preeminent mathematician David Hilbert had confidently declared that every mathematical problem had a solution, that every mathematical claim could be proved or disproved. He challenged the next generation to resolve some of the unproven theorems. In 1931, Gödel made a discovery—a mathematical theorem—that shook the foundations of modern assumptions about truth and reason as dramatically as had Einstein’s own intellectual earthquake called relativity theory. Gödel proved that in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be truths that we cannot prove. “Every mathematical procedure is based on something that is not provably true.” No mathematical system is possible that can prove its own foundational axioms. We can know things in math that we cannot prove. 

Exactly how relevant his incompleteness theorem is to religious matters is disputed. Gödel himself wrote in 1963 that “It was to be expected after all that my proof would be made useful for religion sooner or later, for that is doubtlessly supportable in a certain sense.” What he did confidently believe based on his discovery was that “Humans will always be able to recognize some truths through intuition that can never be established even by the most advanced computing machine.”

Thomas Nagel is neither a mathematician nor a man of faith. In the epigraph above, he is simply drawing attention to the fact that if we believe in any truth at all, that truth never establishes itself. Wherever we arrive in our quest for truth, we have to begin, a priori, with faith in reason, or the evidence of our senses, or scriptural inerrancy, or the witness of a real Spirit. In wanting an absolutely unimpeachable foundation, we may play the game for a while, like a patient mother with a child. Why do I have to go to bed? Because it’s nighttime. Why is it nighttime? Because it’s dark outside. Why is it dark? Because the sun went down. Why did the sun go down? Because I’m your mother. Now go to bed. All “whys” lead to infinite regress—unless we acknowledge at some point a non-negotiable maxim with which we choose to address this universe of perplexity and mystery. 

Theologian Hans von Balthasar writes eloquently of the one reality behind which no “why” can ever emerge. It is love. What he calls the “why-lessness of love” is something most all of us have experienced. To put a reason behind our love is to make it contingent. Those blue eyes that entranced us may fade, the child’s sweetness may change to rebellion, the shared interests may diverge, the friend bound to us in loyalty may betray and the mother’s affection may be clouded by the ravages of age and time. Yet love endures and transcends the particulars. If there is a why behind the love, then love disappears with the why. In which case, Kierkegaard tells us, the love was never love. 

Balthasar concludes that in this universe of scientific reasoning and theological grappling, in our fractured lives desperate for assurance, solidity, and firm foundations, “love alone is credible.” In particular, Balthasar is referring to a life and death one cannot make sense of in any other terms—that of the Christ. The unparalleled credibility of that one life was essentially the message of the angel to the questioning Nephi. One could not give words to the meaning of the Christ. One could only call him “the love of God” and depict his birth, his life, his teachings, and his death for his friends. His life and death were the irrefutable witness to a love the world had not known.

When Nephi later experienced the holy fire of that love, he likened it to “the consuming of his flesh.” Along that path to the beatific vision, how do we ground our own search for a comparable beatific vision? To what truths do we meanwhile orient ourselves, like trail markers along a fog-enshrouded mountain?

The sociologist Peter Berger notes that certainties are in shorter supply than ever in our secular age. He makes an appeal that we attend to what he calls the plentiful “rumors of angels” that abound in and around our lives:

“I would suggest that theological thought seek out what might be called signals of transcendence within the empirically given human situation. By signals of transcendence, I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality.”

Berger suggests as examples the order we intuit behind the world’s disorder, the power that is always illusory, and the child’s laughter that points to truth. 

We may take those signals as mere hints and suggestions of transcendence. Or, as Gödel suggested, we may take such intimations as truths we are willing to claim because our experience of them is a non-negotiable reality. Our confidence in those rumors is, for us, “whyless.” When Paul tells the Galatians that “The fruits of the Spirit are peace, joy, love,” he seems to me to be doing what Nagel referred to: he is naming three truths “that don’t have to be grounded in anything else.”

Share

To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Artwork by Nigel Peake.

Subscribe now

Myriad writers have noticed the illogic of condemning Adam and Eve for committing evil before they knew what good and evil were. And Latter-day Saints have their own reading of Eden in which the choice to partake of a forbidden tree was...complicated. A transgression en route to a greater good,1 or a transgression of law but not a violation of God’s will or intent for the human family. A “heaven-ordained enterprise” deserving of “reverent honor.”2 In any case, if one believes the primal sin was not sin, then what was the first unambiguous sin recorded in the story of our first parents?

Abelard’s place in Christian history is largely a result of his effort to halt the slide of atonement theology in the direction of retributive justice. He believed the focal point of atonement was the “kindling of love” in human hearts that Christ’s example prompted. We belong to whomever we most love—and Christ’s overflowing mercy and selfless life and death shatter the shell of self-concern and turn us to the source of all goodness and light. It is our freely chosen response to love that makes us Christ’s again.

But Abelard also wrote to challenge what contemporaries were saying about human sin. Since Augustine, original sin had taken deep root, a doctrine which not only imputed guilt to the entire human family, but a paralyzed will as well. Abelard acknowledged that human nature had changed after the expulsion from Eden; our will was indeed inclined toward the natural man. As early as the fourth century writers had begun a taxonomy of sin to which we are naturally inclined: sloth, avarice, gluttony and all the rest. But Abelard resisted the contemporary belief that a corrupt will, sin, and guilt were all a package deal. Or that our inherited inclinations as children of Eve meant we were condemned from birth. He wanted to carve out more space for human freedom in the process—and he found that freedom in the principle of “consent.” 

Something in our nature inclines us to anger. The internal motion of our heart happens before we are even aware of it coming upon us. A spark of irritation. Or envy. Or a hundred other inclinations “that flesh is heir to.” Yet in the immediacy of that moment, writes Abelard, there is an interval wherein we “consent” or “consent not” to the impulse that wells up from our depths. It is, Abelard recognized, our response to natural impulses that defines our humanity. A modern philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, agrees.  We are not, he argues, “merely a passive bystander or victim” with regard to our desires and motivations.3 We can reflect, we can embrace, or we can resist them. If the story of the Garden has relevance for our own experience of sin—it may be in the first response Adam and Eve chose to their actions. 

In any decision we or Eve or Adam has made, time pauses long enough to “embrace or resist” the opportunity to own that action, before that action disappears into pastness. Augustine believed that the present was “the smallest instantaneous moment,” “an interval of no duration.”4 That’s not actually true. Neuroscience and cognitive science alike confirm that the present is experienced as a duration of 2-3 seconds.5 But whether our time of reflection is three seconds or three years, the consent or refusal to consent is always ours to give or withhold. Our bodily selves are acted upon by untold and unseen causes outside of and prior to our control. Biology, genetics, environment. Our eyes can see only .0035 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum; our hearing, our taste, our smell and touch, give us faltering, fragmentary glimpses of an almost infinite reality (access to less than one-millionth, opined Buckminster Fuller).6 And yet that relatively minute stream of data pouring into our brains is being processed by tens of billions of neurons creating a hundred trillion synaptic connections with such “combinatorial explosion that the human brain is capable of forming more thoughts than there are atoms in the universe.”7 Out of that bedlam of unconscious processes and chaos of interactions with a wildering world—no wonder we often get it wrong. Two to three seconds. Or weeks or years. In the moral echo chamber of that present, we own, we “consent” to what we have thought or done or said. Or we disown, reject, resist and repent. As George MacDonald wrote, what matters is “not the sins that men have committed, but the condition of mind in which they choose to remain.”8

“The woman made me.” “The serpent tempted me.” If we look for that paradigmatic moment, that morally instructive part of the story upon which to build our own life of discipleship, it seems to be this: Agency means the freedom to choose. If not our first, impulsive response to the world, then our response to that self we have just witnessed. And in that response, we are free to grow in a more and more godly direction until we are perfect in Christ.

Share

To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Artwork by Michael Cook.

Subscribe now

Origen was the principal Christian proponent of the spirit’s premortality. His views did not comport entirely with Restoration beliefs—he believed we transitioned to mortality to improve upon the conduct in our previous state of existence. Our life on earth is a moral hospital as much as it is a school for souls. (Given the woundedness of our condition—both metaphors seem entirely apt!). One of the loveliest aspects of his conception was his belief that some spirits did not enter mortality in order to improve their standing with God or to repent and reform; they had achieved a condition of holiness, but wanted to accompany the rest of us here in order to uplift, comfort, and assist. Dwelling like starfish in the tidepools, these beings do not appear miraculously as beings of light when called upon, but reside among us as fellow laborers in the ebb and flow of life’s constant struggles. These men and women “are ordained to suffer with others” for fitting out the state of the world and to offer service to those below them. They were “brought down from the higher and invisible conditions to these lower and visible ones” to “serve the whole world.”

On 20 August 2020, Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent, following his tireless unmasking of Kremlin corruption. For years he mobilized tens of thousands to stand against the most brutal and horrific forms of human evil, including armed domestic repression and the invasion of Ukraine. In 2014, refusing to flee Russia, he said “If I want people to trust me then I have to share the risks with them.” In 2021, he miraculously recovered from the Novichok poisoning in Berlin, and insisted on returning to his homeland. He knew he was flying home to certain imprisonment and likely death. “I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs,” he said explaining his decision, so unfathomable to others. Imprisoned above the arctic circle, he died in February 2024, just over three years later, aged 47.

Courage seems a weak word for the nobility of character evident in the actions of individuals like Navalny (and thousands who have been roused to costly sacrifices by his example). And I would not resist an interpretation that sees in such heroic martyrs an example of just what Origen speculated: a soul of a different order than I am, ordained “to suffer with others,” “brought down” from above to serve us lesser humans. 

To admire the noble and deplore the vile is itself a witness that the source of the Good exists and is revealing itself to our inferior though kindred selves. After all, as more than one theologian has pointed out, (Alvin Plantinga for one), to ask indignantly how evil can exist in a universe God created is already to admit that some true standard of the Good does exist independently of human constructs. If only good and bad things existed, we would not need a word like “evil” to differentiate ethnic cleansing from Bubonic plague. 

No mystery lies behind the power of transcendent deeds in the face of human evil to inspire me. But they always carry a trace of the unsettling as well. Perhaps it is because no moral labor is required to love the Good when it blazes forth so conspicuously. It is commendable but also easy to affirm such evident moral beauty. 

At all times, but especially in a time of national divisiveness such as our own, we are called to a more daunting challenge. Politics gives us all spiritual cataracts; we strain to glimpse the good that is obscured by our own—and others’—fervor. Some theologians virtually gave up the task. “If we would hold the true course in love,” preached one in the seventeenth century, “our first step must be to turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom might oftener produce hatred than love.” Turning away our eyes is hardly the path to acquiring empathy; it concedes defeat too easily, claiming a love only in the abstract. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story of a young man suddenly thunderstruck when he witnesses a “moment of tenderness . . . in one of the most abominable men”—and whose life is transformed by the glimpse. William Egginton writes that these intrusions of the Good into lives of mediocrity and even corruption led the philosopher Immanuel Kant to elaborate a whole theory of morality: 

“We see evidence for the existence of this moral law everywhere, he said; in the least impressive of our fellows, in the most abominable of men, we can at times glimpse an act of righteousness, a spark of goodness. And when we do . . . we can feel our spirit bow down in respect.”

Dichotomous evaluation is easy—whether to venerate the admirable, or to dismiss all of human nature as depraved. Fathoming the complexity of human desires and motivations is harder work. Even the legacy of Navalny is a complicated one—as is the case with all lives, however crowned with heroic gestures they may be. At the present moment especially, it is tempting to hope for figures of transcendent stature to rescue us from the cynicism and suspicion we have allowed to overwhelm our national ethos. Our urgent need on the homefront is to find more nuance in caricatures of evil we have flung about promiscuously in public and private discourse. We are heirs of a theological tradition that gives us reason to see each other more charitably and generously and perceptively than we are at present doing. And science increasingly supports a more charitable and nuanced view than popular accounts of our neighbors would have us believe. The most widely reprinted article ever published in a scientific journal was Garrett Hardin’s six-page paper from 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin’s thesis was that when cooperation for a public good competes with self-interest, self-interest will always triumph. “An appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run.” 

Doubtless the ease of cynicism, like the ease of admiring heroic gestures, makes a thesis like Hardin’s popular. Less widely known is the fact that a scholar named Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for her work that demolished Hardin’s despairing view. “The humans we study,” she said in her acceptance speech, “have complex motivational structures.” And we succeed in working together for the common good “far more frequently than expected.”

My own attempt to find glimpses of the goodness in those I cannot understand at present will be to try to model the father tenderly eulogized by Brian Doyle:

“The way he stared at your face as he spoke, with all his soul open and alert for your story, and how he would wait a few beats when you were done, in case there was a coda coming, and then he would lean back and consider what you had just said. . . . I want to celebrate his listening for it is now nearly gone from this world, and it was a rare and extraordinary and unforgettable thing.”

Share

To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Subscribe now