For the last few months, a relatively small group of vocal, activist feminists (hereafter just ‘feminists’) have petitioned church leaders to allow women to pray in General Conference.  Many members of the church were not aware that this was going on, and would be surprised that women had not prayed in conference before.  Women pray in other meetings of the church, and have spoken in conference quite frequently.

Church leaders did what the feminists requested, and at the conclusion of the opening session of General Conference, a woman said a prayer for the first time.  There was no special announcement for this, and for many  members this was about as close to a non-event as it gets.  I do think this was a big deal, but perhaps not for the reasons you might expect.  I think this is a big deal because the church has now fed the feminists.  Now what?

I do not expect for a moment that this act will permanently satisfy these feminists.  Not by a long shot.  I doubt that many of them will be satisfied until there is a female prophet.  And now that the feminists have been fed, the protests will be louder, and more public.  The pressure will only build.  The most likely next step for the feminists is to seek ordination to the priesthood, which is an organized effort already underway.

That step would be so large, that it is difficult to imagine it being successfully taken.  The Mormon Church is not the only church that does not ordain women, and many of the same biblical scriptures that the Catholics use to explain this, would be used by Mormons as well.  Additionally, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has D&C 107 which is hard to ignore.  To me it would take a significant amount of feminist eisegesis to avoid the clear intention of a male priesthood in this canonized revelation.  We also have this quote from the most recent prophet on the matter.

An emboldened group of feminists, and a church that is committed to a male only priesthood could make for an interesting few years.

As man now is, God once was;

As God now is, Man may be.

This statement is sometimes seen as controversial.  President Hinckley declined to address it once in a public interview.  Critics will point to this couplet as an example of highly unorthodox teachings within Mormonism.  They will also claim that the church no longer teaches this – perhaps implying that the church may be ashamed of the teaching.

I think there is some significance to this statement being prominently quoted in the current Priesthood and Relief Society manuals.  There was no hiding from this quote – in fact, it was set off from the rest of the text as its’ own paragraph.

The lesson speaks of the background behind this statement.  It seems that President Snow felt that it was revelation, and that it was consistent with what Joseph Smith taught.

I have always like this statement.  It rings true to me.  And I am glad that the powers that be included it so prominently in the current lesson manual.  Hardly the act of a church that is embarrassed by or hiding from the idea.  The lesson can be read here.

Here’s an excerpt:

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We have recently moved to a small town in western Ohio.  My #2 son is one of only two young men in the local high school (as far as I know).  He is participating on the football team and just the other day the team had a meal together.  At the table where he sat, the conversation turned to the practices of Mormonism.  The report of the conversations went something like this:

“So you believe there should not be any sex before marriage.”

“Yes”, my boy said.

“Seriously?”

“Yes”

“What would you do if a pretty girl came up to you, unzipped your pants, and gave you a hand job?”

“I would probably slap her face.”

“No you wouldn’t”

“Yes I would”

“What about Adam and Eve, they weren’t married”

“Yes the were”

My son then pulls out his IPod and goes to Genesis 1 to show that Adam and Eve were husband and wife.

“Dude.  You have the scriptures on your IPod?!”

The boy seemed to handle it pretty well.  And seems to have no fear.

Spirit Birth – Our spirit bodies are begotten spirit sons and daughters of Heavenly Parents.

Spirit Adoption – Our spirits are not begotten sons and daughters of Heavenly Parents, but are adopted by God.

Now we can quibble about these definitions if anyone wishes to, but I would mostly like to describe why the idea of spirit adoption as the fundamental relationship between God and man (as opposed to a literal parent/child relationship) does not appeal to me.

- Who would prefer to be adopted rather than a literal child?  Especially when we are talking about omniparents here?   What prince or princess would like to hear that they were not really descendants of the perfect King and Queen, but were instead adopted?

- Ontalogical Gap.  If we were adopted by God, then He may very well be an entirely different species of being than we are.  If our spirits are not His offspring then what are we?  And who is He?

- My view of the afterlife is to become like God and live the type of life He does.  This whole notion potentially goes down the toilet if we are merely adopted.

I suppose I could go on, but I think this might do for now.  I really so no theological advantage to the notion of spirit adoption being the fundamental relationship between God and man.  I know that there are scriptures that suggest that we become the sons of God, but I feel that these ideas add to the literal parent/child relationship rather than to contradict it.  Thus we can have both literal and adoptive ideas together if we start with the literal offspring relationship.  But if we reject that literal relationship then we can never fully get it back.  An adopted child cannot become the literal child of an adoptive parent.

- The Church wastes a lot of paper.  Yep, that is the top of my list.  And I am no tree-hugger either.  But good grief.  Somebody updates a phone number or email address and MLS kicks out a new Membership record update and asks if you want to print an extra copy for the bishop.  Page after page comes out and I often could not see any reason why.  Much of this will get shredded right after it is printed.  I do think there is some improvement in this over recent months, but there is still a ways to go.

- I was able to see what people pay in tithing.  This included many of my coworkers and the CEO of my former company.  And I don’t care at all.  This could cause some people grief, and I was a bit wary of this at first.  Maybe I was blessed to not care, but I don’t care.  There is a lot of confidentiality that a Ward Clerk needs to have – I think I did okay.

- I am glad I was in a small ward without much turnover.  It was hard enough keeping track of the presidencies of the youth groups, a few ordinances, move-ins, etc.  I feel for those poor souls who have a complicated ward to keep track of.

- Sending records from one ward to another is a snap.  It is almost instant and painless.  All you need is a name and a birth date.  Just tell the clerk, records can be pulled or pushed.  I had the impression that there was something difficult about it, but it is as easy as pie.

- You often do not have to deal with people all that much if you don’t want to.  Not like being an Elders Quorum President or something.  You will often have you clerical tasks to complete, they are often fairly easy to execute, and boom! you are done and can move on.

- On the flip side of the above, I did find myself getting even more … distant from people in this calling.  In some ways you are in the loop so to speak, but not on the front lines.

- The church does have some excellent training available on-line.  Some great strides here.

- Tithing settlement is a pain in the butt.  Don’t have your kids bring their coins with them to tithing settlement.  The bishop will tell you it is alright, but it causes grief.  You don’t have to be all caught up for the year to declare yourself a full tithe payer.  Do the clerk a favor and just pay tithing at the regular times.  I used to violate the above advice all the time.

- The priesthood quorums are generally much worse at sending in their quarterly reports than any other organization.

- It is kind of cool to have an office at church.

I was glad to serve as a ward clerk, and would gladly serve in this capacity again if asked.  But I think it would be good for me to deal with more people more directly – though perhaps not good for them.

If you want to help out your ward clerk, pass along information when you find it.  If someone moves, dies, has a child, changes their phone number, etc.  Write it down.  It is impossible for a couple of people to keep track of everyone.

Freedom

God must be free to bring about anything that He desires.  With his omnipotence (having ultimate power within logical possibility) and omniscience (knowing anything knowable) he would have complete freedom.  About the only provision we might add is that God is subject to moral law.

Goodness

God is perfectly good.  Mawson’s explanation is that God’s goodness is such that He will do the best action whenever there is a best action.  I am good with this and I believe all Latter-day Saints will be good with this as well.

Necessity

This is to say that God has always existed, and that He could not not exist.  He is not contingent on any other being for His existence.  In fact, He is not contingent on anything for His existence.  Mormons will certainly not have a problem with this, and will in fact extend it to all mankind.  There is something about all of us that was not created nor made, and thus, at some level all  mankind are necessary beings.

Omnipotence

Mawson presents some of the typical definitions and examples of omnipotence that many of us has heard many times.  Questions like whether God can make an object that is both perfectly spherical and perfectly cubical at the same time?  Mawson will have none of that, and rightly categorizes logical impossibilities as ‘nothing’.  It is not a limit on God’s power to not be able to accomplish logically impossible things.  He eventually ends with a definition of omnipotence as having all power that it is logically possible to have.  He also makes an interesting point that one would need to be omniscient themselves to fully understand what this means.

Omniscience

The definition that is given here is that omniscience means that if something is true, an omniscient being knows that it is true, and if something is false, an omniscient being knows that it is false.  Mawson addresses the logical problem of absolute foreknowledge and free will, and I believe rightly sees the clear problem.  He also rightly sees that the disagreement often comes down to what one thinks of the eternality of God, and whether He is temporal or atemporal.

Eternality

What is meant by eternality is that there was never a time when God did not exist, and will never be a time when God will cease to exist.  Most will not argue with this, but when it comes to the subject of time there will be much disagreement.  This will come down to whether or not we believe that God is temporal or atemporal.  To be temporal is to be within time, and to be atemporal is to be outside of time.

For me, there is good reasons to believe that God is within time.  Whether this is the free will of man, or an active, embodied and passionate God.  One like me will feel that there will always be certain aspects of the future that simply cannot be infallibly known, and to suggest that there is not is almost like the sphere and the cube question.

For others that feel that God is atemporal, they will feel that there is nothing in the future that God does not absolutely know with complete infallibility, because of being atemporal along with being omniscient.  But they ought to accept the implications of this.

For me, I like Mawson’s explanations of omnipotence as having all logically possible power, omniscience as knowing the truth of all that is knowable, and eternality as always existing – in an atemporal way.

When it comes to a personal God, I do not think there is a Mormon on the planet that would disagree.  We believe that God has a body of flesh and bone for crying out loud.  We believe that God cares, hears us, interacts with us, etc.  I feel that it would be hard to find a group of people that believes God is a person more so than members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Now when it comes to God being incorporeal, most of us would strongly disagree with this in any literal sense.  Again, for Mormons, God simply has a physical body.  Yet, in the lecture itself, the definition of incorporeal became less objectionable to me.  It had to do with God being able to know and control stuff directly other than indirectly.  It also had to do with God not being more present in one area than He is anywhere else.  While I still do not quite buy this in a literal way, I do not have a problem with God functionally being able to know and control stuff directly, and also functionally able to be as present in one location as He is in any other.  And the lecture  ended up concluding that perhaps transcendence may be a better word than incorporeal.  And as a Mormon I certainly am more comfortable with that term.

Similarly, God being literally omnipresent is something that I cannot accept in a literal way.  Yet the lecture eventually discussed this as God not being absent from anywhere.  Again, from a functional standpoint, I have no problem with this, just from a literal one.  And once again, the lecture ended up using another word for this that I am more comfortable with – the word it Immanence.   This would mean that there is no place where God is absent.

I do tend to be a stickler on an embodied God, but this lecture helped me to better understand that from a philosophical standpoint, I perhaps can have an embodied God, that is not literally incorporeal and omnipresent, yet is transcendent and immanent.   Which I think is functionally the same thing, just with a physical body.

One of the big criticisms against Romney is that he has flip-flopped on his positions in the past.  This could have been an area of attack for the Obama campaign.  However, with this quite public reversal, Obama may have given away this advantage.

There may be some strategic advantages to this change of heart though.  It could serve as a distraction issue.  It may be better for Obama’s election hopes if the country debates the merits of gay marriage instead of the state of the economy for example.  Additionally, if the majority of Americans are currently in favor of gay marriage, this may become an even greater advantage to Obama than Romney’s past flip-flops.

The upcoming election, with gay marriage as a hot topic, and a Mormon running for office, could make for a very interesting season for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.