Eugene England seemed to one of those crossing the brethren’s line with some of theological musings. Recently, Fiona Givens did as well with her discussion of Heavenly Mother. I asked Dr Terryl Givens if it was easy to unintentionally cross the brethren’s line.
Crossing the Brethren’s Line
Interview
GT: Well, cool. Would you say Gene was kind of a trailblazer as far as where we are today in the intellectual LDS community? We’re farther along because of Gene England, or did his work not matter? It feels like he really got punched down a lot.
Terryl 53:23 Yeah, he did get punched down a lot. It’s hard. One of the first things you learn as an intellectual historian, is that one of the most impossible things to actually prove is intellectual influence.
Terryl 53:34 Or paternity. Right? You can find correlations and correspondences. I personally, as his biographer, am a witness to the fact that the most irrefutable influence that he had was in the hundreds and hundreds of lives. Effectively, they’re affidavits. Charlotte collected two large binders of testimonials of people who wrote in the aftermath of his death, about the influence that he had had on their personal lives. So, I don’t know of any other individual, outside of an ecclesiastical position, who ministered to more people in effective ways. I think he has been a tremendously inspiring role model for a lot of Latter-day Saints who want to believe that one can be an intellectual in the best sense of the word and a disciple without compromise and integrate those two. I think he was one of the best modern examples we have of that. I think, ironically, much of his work, many of his contributions were a return to some of the original ideas and motivations of Joseph Smith. I think that in many ways, he was much truer to Joseph Smith, than the cultural varieties of Mormonism that evolved in the 20th century. He understood, as Joseph Smith did, that Protestantism did not pave the way for the restoration, doctrinally, at least. He understood that…
GT 55:14 Because missionaries teach that now, don’t we?
Terryl 55:17 I hope they don’t, but maybe they do.
GT 55:19 I did, I swear.
Terryl 55:20 Well, one might say, insofar as they fostered or at least exploited the press, dissemination of the word of literacy and religious pluralism, yes. But in terms of doctrine…
GT 55:36 Oh, yeah.
Terryl 55:37 There’s nothing that I can think of that the Reformers provided that led us closer to the restored gospel. What did they do? They took away the sacraments. They took away the principle of authority. They took away human freewill and agency and emphasized depravity, emphasized inherited guilt. Do I need to go on?
GT 55:57 Well, yeah, but it seems like we’re really trying to work hard to be nice to evangelicals, especially with regards to grace. Stephen Robinson is really pushing that. It seems like Robert Millett too.
Terryl 56:09 That’s one place where Gene England inserted himself into the conversation and felt that that was a misdirection. There is certainly a place for grace, an important place for grace. The problem is that language can be co-opted by dominant institutions, and cultural movements. That’s what’s happened to grace, so that now, if a born-again Christian comes to you and says, “Do you believe in grace?” Well as a Latter-day Saint, you could truthfully say yes, but that would be a mistruth, insofar as you would be communicating something to him that is radically inconsistent with what he thinks you mean when you say that.
GT 56:53 Right.
Terryl 56:54 Because, let’s be specific here, grace to a Protestant means imputed righteousness, it means I am not saved by anything I do. I am saved because when God’s piercing eye goes towards me at the last minute, Jesus stands in front of me and God judges Jesus on my behalf. That’s why I’m saved by His righteousness, not mine. We don’t believe that. We believe that’s defeatist. In Section 88 verse 32, Joseph Smith explicitly disallows that version of grace. He says, “We cannot be sanctified by mercy, only by conformity to law.” That doesn’t mean we earn salvation. What that means is salvation is the process of learning to live like God lives, to emulate his conduct, his behavior, his love, his relationality. We do that by seeing the guideposts that he calls laws and living in conformity with those principles and precepts. That’s how Gene England understood what was going on. So, he was dismayed about all this neo-orthodoxy where we’re all talking about, “Well, we’re saved by grace. We’re saved by grace.” Well, yes, in the sense that in the council in heaven before the world was created, Christ offered himself as an attoner, to make possible our repentance. But that’s a very different conception of grace than what one hears in the Protestant world today.
Terryl 58:21 So, Gene England was a kind of lone voice, saying, “No. We’re re-protestantizing Mormonism. We don’t want to do that.” He also liked to cite Brigham Young’s teachings, that God’s purpose is to make us as independent in our sphere as he is in his, and that’s a very Joseph Smith-ite kind of thing to say too. Joseph Smith said, “There are three independent principles in the universe, God, the devil and the human spirit.” Yet, Gene was alarmed that in Mormon culture, there is a movement toward just believing there’s this template. There is a blueprint for my life, and I’ve just got to conform to that. So, there’s this kind of slavish mentality that it’s always about conforming, instead of living in this beautiful grace-filled way, trying to just emulate God in freedom and creativity. Again, that’s that was Gene’s view.
Terryl 59:20 So that’s what I say, I can’t find anything in his theology that was not absolutely rooted in orthodoxy. And, more particularly, in a Joseph Smithian kind of orthodoxy that he thought culture had intervened. Same thing with his social policies, his emphasis on peace, and on treating women equally. These are all things that Joseph Smith could be seen as at the forefront. I mean, look at Joseph Smith’s positions that he articulated when he ran for president: abolish the prison system. That’s not exactly right-wing Mormonism. He saw the radicalism in Joseph Smith’s ideas and thinking. I think he also saw that Joseph Smith, and this is why I love Joseph Smith, he was so intellectually adventurous. I mean, from the School of the Prophets to the University of Nauvoo to Joseph’s personal library, which I’ve tried to reconstruct on my own. He had two books of Catholic devotion. He had books of Methodist devotion. He had a book on freedom of the will. I mean, he gathered from every religious tradition, and syncretized and assimilated in an inspired way, gathering with what he referred to as the voices in the wilderness.
Terryl 1:00:45 I think that energized and excited Gene England. We went through a phase that began really in the 1940s and 50s, the high point in the 1970s of a kind of anti-intellectualism where intellectuals were explicitly referred to as dangerous to the church.
GT 1:01:03 Feminists, gays and intellectuals.
Terryl 1:01:04 Exactly, and Gene England knew that was the opposite of what Joseph Smith had taught. So, yeah, he was prescient. Whether he helped us get there, or pushed too hard, too fast and retarded the progress it’s hard to say.
GT 1:01:24 Well, now it feels like the Church just kind of vacillates back and forth. There’s openness, and then they close and they’re open again, and they’re closed. I’m curious about your experience coming from Virginia, and now you’re back here at BYU. Lately, there’s been a big thing with Mother in Heaven. I talked with Margaret Toscano a few months ago. There was a big scuttle bit about Fiona, your wife, with mentioning Mother in Heaven. Margaret said, “I don’t understand. This is an ancient Christian idea.” So, it seems like there’s openness, there’s closedness. Can you talk about that issue?
Terryl 1:02:08 Yeah. Well, there are varying ways of invoking Heavenly Mother’s name. Or of talking about her or approaching the subject of Heavenly Mother in our theology or in doctrine. In the case of Fiona, she’s doing cutting edge research into the ancient traditions of the feminine divine, which should be completely innocuous, if not just a beautiful addition to the corpus of scholarly understanding of how can we document the fact that so many ancient peoples yearned to find some kind of feminine presence in the heavens? So, her work is one of excavation, of just trying to find where can we find traces in the Old Testament and in Syriac Christianity and other Near Eastern traditions? The problem is that there’s an institutional history associated with feminists in the 1980s and 90s, advocating prayer to Heavenly Mother, worship of Heavenly Mother. So, I think the institution, at times, gets very nervous, that one is going to bleed into the other. So that’s, I think, my interpretation of what’s at work here.
Terryl 1:03:33 Neither Fiona, nor I would ever advocate prayer or worship of Heavenly Mother and neither one of us certainly presume to have any doctrinal insights. But, I knew when I came to BYU, that I was moving from a secular sphere to a church institutional one. I read an essay many years ago by a theologian in the Catholic Church, by the name of Marshall. He wrote an essay called the Vocation of the Theologian and the Church. He points out that if you believe in an institution that is presided over by men holding authority and keys, they have the stewardship to speak in God’s name. The vocation of the theologian is to support and sustain and explicate those positions. I think that’s pretty consistent with how I understand the role and responsibility of a committed member of the Church who does work in theology or Church history. So, I don’t see my responsibility or my right to be that of breaking new ground, moving ahead, changing directions. I believe that everything that I’m doing is in support of what the Church teaches. I think there’s a lot of interesting work that can be done to explicate our history and our past and contexts and implications and ramifications and presuppositions. I think that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do.
GT 1:05:16 Is it easy to unintentionally step over a line that you didn’t intend to, and did Eugene England do that?
Terryl 1:05:21 Well, I think that line is a moving line.
Terryl 1:05:29 So, it’s impossible to know whose sensibility you’re going to offend? I think at any given moment, there–well, you’re never going to find–I don’t believe you would ever find perfect conformity on any number of doctrinal, well, they’re not doctrinal. [You’re never going to find conformity] on contested teachings and ideas. In fact, Eric Eliason and I just published a couple of months ago, a book called Yet to be Revealed: Open Questions in Mormon Theology. We can take an example, progression through the kingdoms. At any given moment in our Church’s history, there’s been a difference of opinion in the quorum about whether we can progress after judgment. The majority of voices in the early Church were [that] yes, of course we can. That’s why it’s called Eternal progression, said B.H. Roberts.
GT 1:05:32 (Chuckling)
Terryl 1:06:21 In around 1900, with the first edition of the Articles of Faith was published, a majority of the apostolic committee overseeing publication required James Talmage, to indicate that, yes, there’s progression through the kingdom. So, we know that was a majority opinion at one point. But, in no moment, has the Church ever officially declared that it’s this or it’s that. Three times the First Presidency has said [that] we don’t have an official position. So, I think there are many areas like that where we don’t have a Magisterium. We don’t have an official book we can go to and say, “Yep, that’s orthodoxy. Nope, that’s not orthodoxy.” It’s a kind of moving target. So, the vocation of anybody who presumes to work in the area of theology in the Mormon Church is always fraught with danger and risk. It is.
GT 1:07:14 Well, the last question I wanted to ask [and then] I’ll let you go is, I know you’ve been on John Dehlin’s podcast before and I know he’s made a big deal about you won’t go on there now. Do you have any comments on that?
Terryl 1:07:27 No, I would just say I’m willing to talk to anybody who’s asking genuine questions. I’ve got so many projects. I’ve got so many publication commitments and deadlines, so many requests to speak to people who are asking real questions, that I have to limit myself accordingly. There was a time when I would go on podcasts where the hosts were not committed members, but neither were they committed to opposition. Yeah, but if I feel somebody is a committed critic, then I just don’t see how it’s going to be productive. I don’t, personally, or in terms of productivity, I don’t see that it makes good sense. I will speak anywhere, anytime with anybody who’s asking questions.
GT 1:08:22 I won’t commit to you, but, I would love to talk about your Parley P. Pratt biography one of these days. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.
Terryl 1:08:30 We can do that another time.
GT 1:08:31 All right. Well, Dr. Terryl Givens, I really, really appreciate you for sitting down here on Gospel Tangents.
Terryl 1:08:37 It’s good to be with you. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
