Is Satan the Fruit of Tree of Knowledge? Is Divine Mother in the Temple ceremonies? We’ll talk about these and other issues like why Christ was baptized, and why Dr Val Larsen thinks Moral Influence is the best atonement theory. Check out our conversation…
transcript to follow
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Christ Baptized for World
Val 00:38 So juxtaposed as it is here, the maternal fountain of pure water that flows from the tree becomes the waters of baptism. As in Heaven, so on Earth, our Divine Mother plays a role in our spiritual birth or rebirth. Christ sets the example here, rising from the amniotic waters to a new life, a new ministry, a Savior of the world. Following his example, we too rise to new spiritual life, born of and cleansed by both the amniotic waters of the Mother and the redeeming blood of the Son. I think we should, every one of our chapels, or I think almost all of our chapels nowadays has a baptismal font in it. That baptismal font is a symbol of the Divine Mother, on this reading. We are born of the Mother. She’s the fountain of pure water. And that’s where we go into that fountain of pure water. It’s in the temple, too. Right? Let’s see our Mother in these baptismal fonts. Because, again, everybody recognizes this is a birth. Who are you born of? You’re born of a mother? Who are you born of spiritually? You’re born of your spiritual mother. And in here, in the Book of Mormon, it immediately goes from the tree and the fountain of pure water to the baptism of Christ in water.
GT 02:00 Born again, like Nicodemus, said.
Val 02:02 Yes, exactly. So, Christ is setting the example for us. Now, Christ’s baptism was different from our baptism. When Christ went down into the water, he was taking on him the sins of all the world. It wasn’t washing the sins away. For us, baptism is joyous. For him, he was reluctant to be baptized. And it’s actually there at the end of 2nd Nephi. It talks about how he submitted Himself to the Father to be baptized. And you can understand why he wouldn’t be that eager to be baptized. That baptism is connected to Gethsemane and the cross. That’s the first step on the path to Gethsemane and the cross. Well, for all of us, that’s a joyous path of redemption. For him, that’s the path of suffering. And so, you get that clear hint in 2nd Nephi of his reluctance to be baptized. Anyway, as our spirits enter our bodies at our physical birth, so at our spiritual rebirth, through baptism, the Holy Ghost descends upon us. Mother, Son, and Holy Ghost join together with the Father, in whose name we’re baptized, to enroll us as members of the Divine Council. By being filled with the Holy Ghost, we become Heavenly Host, Malachim, angels, companions and surrogates of the So’od principles. Nephi later explains that having been baptized, we speak with the tongue of angels, beings who are part of the Divine community. So, baptism makes us part of the Divine community, just like coming to the tree, and the various symbolic ways that we do that. We’re part of the So’od Elohim. But Nephi’s experience in this vision suggests that we become more than mere angels, we become gods. Nephi, who stood in the Divine Council at the beginning of the vision, declares that his own words, like those of Lehi, after the first vision, are the words of God. Remember, Lehi speaks God’s words, about condemnation of Jerusalem? Well, Nephi is going to tell us his words also become God’s words. So, when you’re speaking God’s words, you can see that that’s, in itself, is a form of Theosis. Right? You are made God, if you’re speaking God’s words, at least in some sense.
Val 02:03 So, Nephi says this, “If you shall believe in Christ, you will believe in these words, for they are the words of Christ, and He has given them unto me. Christ will show you with power and great glory, that they are his words at the last day, and you and I shall stand face-to-face before his bar. And we shall know that I have been commanded of him to write these things.” So, along with the 12 Divine apostle judges, who descended to earth with Christ in Lehi’s first vision, exalted Nephi will appear as divine witness or judge at the judgment bar. He’s telling us. So again, that’s theosis. Right? These are divine beings. These are not just ordinary human beings that are sitting there in judgment of us. You got the 12 apostles of Lamb that descended with him, but now become Gods sitting as judges. And Nephi is right there with them as a Divine Being judging us and holding us accountable for whether we’ve received the Savior or not received the Savior in our lives. Nephi’s vision of Yahweh’s ministry ends like his father’s, at a tree, the cross, where the Savior’s body hangs as the white fruit hung from the sacred tree in Lehi’s vision. The cross is called a tree in Acts chapter 5, verse 30. So, when we talk about the tree, the cross is a tree. Mary, the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh, stands at the foot of the cross, and shares in the pain of her son. So, the Gospel of John is describing that.
Val 05:47 As Simeon had prophesied, “That which pierces him shall pierce thy own soul, also.” Mary was told that when he was pierced, she would be pierced. In both surrogate, Mary is a surrogate of the Divine Mother, and symbol, tree, the cross is a tree, the Mother of the Son of God, after the man of the Spirit, is also present with her Son while he suffers for the sins of all her other children. As the symbol suggests, like Mary, the Divine Mother is pierced as her son is pierced. Simeon said that. Right? You’re going to be pierced as your son is pierced, just as she was pierced, what I’m saying here is, the Divine Mother is pierced as her son is pierced. And so, when the nails pierce Christ’s body, they also pierce the tree. The tree, the symbol of the body of the Divine Mother, she deeply feels his pain, her suffering, His suffering, may be reflected in an Old Testament era scripture quoted in an early Christian work, the Epistle of Barnabas. It says this, “God points to the cross of Christ and another prophet who sayeth, ‘And when shall these things be accomplished. And the Lord sayeth, when a tree shall be bent down and again arise, and when blood shall flow out of wood.’”
Val 07:13 These words may poetically describe the suffering of a divine mother, who feels the agony of, and metaphorically bleeds with her beloved son. If the tree is the symbol of the mother, Christ was laid on the tree, the nails are pounded into his body. But in that very same act, they go into the cross. And I’m saying here that that cross is a symbol of our Divine Mother. Now for Christ to fully bear our sins, He had to lose this intimate connection with the Father, Mother and Holy Ghost. He couldn’t have fully experienced the consequences of our sins, which includes separation from the Council of Gods, if he had maintained his normal unity with them. That necessary separation is documented in Isaiah. He’s prophesying here, “I have trodden the wine press alone. And of all the people, there was none with me.”
Val 08:09 It’s more proximately documented by Christ’s cry on the cross, Eli Eli Lama sabachthani. Eli is daddy. He’s calling upon God. Why have you departed from me, God? He’s separated from God. Right? He had to be. But while Christ could not be with them as he suffered, those who loved him could not avoid being with him. This is the key point. His suffering caused suffering for all who are unified with him in the Divine Council, in this Divine Circle, this circle of shared purpose and love. His pains pained the Father and the Mother and the Holy Ghost and all the hosts of heaven. And it takes nothing away from the Savior, who fully bore the pain of our sins, to know that his pains, as our proxy, were and are shared in substantial measure, by all who profoundly love him, including all those divine beings, of course. Indeed, our own broken hearted contrition as we contemplate what he suffered on our behalf, seems to be an essential component of our transformation into beings who have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually. We can’t be saved if we don’t empathically feel some of the great sorrow Christ bore for us on our behalf. So, that broken heart and contrite spirit is essential to redemption. And I think a way of crystallizing this is we have to be full of gratitude for what he did. That’s what the brokenhearted contrition is. We’re just filled with gratitude for what he did. And that is, I believe, what creates the alchemical transformation of us. It makes us more than we could have been. We’re uncreated. God didn’t create us according to Joseph Smith. We have unending intelligence that is coexistent with God, and God can’t change that. That’s the locus of our choice, the locus of all of our decisions. And that’s why God is not responsible for those decisions. Because he didn’t create that uncreated essence.
Moral Exemplar Atonement
Val 10:17 He’s trying to redeem us. It’s like nature and nurture. The nature part is the uncreated intelligence. It just has its own character. All God can do is change the context in which those beings come forth. And the way he changed that context is, he And Christ and our Mother in Heaven, and all the Divine Council, put together this plan where Christ was going to suffer our sins, and bear all of our burdens, and experience all the negative that we could ever experience. And now the question becomes, does that mean anything to those uncreated souls? When they contemplate Christ’s willingness to do that, and the Divine Council’s willingness to do that on their behalf, does that affect you or doesn’t it? If it affects you and fills you with a broken heart and contrite spirit, and with just profound gratitude that he was willing to do that, you are born again as a new person, like in King Benjamin’s discourse. So, the mechanism of our redemption, I believe, is the gratitude we feel as we contemplate this act of the Son on our behalf. But what I’m saying is, this isn’t an act only of the Son. The Mother is there having the nails driven into her, too. And the Father is experiencing that. All of them were experiencing it. But they couldn’t. They can’t directly affect us. This is why God’s off the hook for sin, in our theology. We’re self-existent beings like him in our essence. In our choosing essence, he didn’t create us. What he’s doing, he’s putting everything in place for us, to get us back to being our at our full potential. But there are some people when they hear about Christ died for your sins, the Mother and Father suffered all this, “I didn’t ask them to. I have no obligation to them, or any recent…”
Val 12:18 Okay, if you’re on your own, then. You’re unredeemed, and you’re going to experience the full measure of what Christ experienced. That’s what the Scriptures are telling us. But if we can see Christ there in Gethsemane and on the cross, and if we can feel of what he experienced on our behalf, if we can just have a broken heart and contrite spirit, we’re reborn in that moment, that’s the rebirth that takes place for us. We’re a different person than we otherwise would be, because of the context that the gods have provided for us. That can change us into a new being who has no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually. Now, this isn’t an instantaneous thing, always. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had that experience. I’ve been filled with the Spirit. And in that moment, I had no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually. If I could have continued through my whole life, like in that moment, I mean, I would have been filled with joy, because I was filled with joy in those moments, and I get them periodically. Christ’s Atonement can get me and can get all of us, if we respond to it with a broken heart and contrite spirit, to where that’s our constant state. And in that moment, because God doesn’t care about what we were. He only cares about what we are, all of our sins, we’re not going to be punished for our sins, because that’s not who we are anymore.
Val 13:40 I’ve talked about this in some of my other articles, but justice is just you are what you are. You get the consequences of your actions. So, every action has consequences that follow on and the consequences of sin, are all kinds of misery as a natural consequence. God doesn’t have to visit this on us, it just naturally follows. So, when we’re in heaven at the judgment, standing before God at the judgment day, it says in the Book of Mormon, he doesn’t say– I mean, there’s other places that say, “Depart from me.” Right? But there it just says [that] we’re miserable, pull the mountains in on us. We cannot stand, as a sinful person, to be in God’s presence. It’s the most miserable place to be. So, our damnation is just a consequence of who we are, natural consequences of our sinful actions. And what Christ is letting us do is become a different person, if we have that gratitude. So, that gratitude for what Christ did for us is the lynchpin of the Atonement. If we don’t have that, we cannot be saved. And I hope everybody listening will come to the Savior with a broken heart and contrite spirit and experience for themselves, what that feeling is in that moment. I mean, that’s redemption, I think.
GT 15:02 Did you see my interview with Terryl Givens about atonement theories?
Val 15:08 I can’t remember. But I know some things about the different atonement theories. And this is not the divine substitution or any of those things that don’t make any sense. This is the divine transformation theory. So, I think I did watch that one with Terryl. I’ve watched a lot of stuff with Terryl over the years. If I haven’t watched it, I know it’s on my list of things to watch.
GT 15:29 Because, whenever I hear about Christ needing to die on the cross, it seems to me, and I think most LDS we’re with penal substitution.
Val 15:41 Yeah. I doesn’t make any sense.
GT 15:41 Oh, well, that makes me feel better.
Val 15:47 Because the penal substitution theory is this. It offends God so much, that…
GT 15:57 Somebody’s going to have to pay.
Val 15:58 …anyone would commit a sin, that he feels like, somebody’s got to have some stripes.
GT 16:01 Right.
Val 16:02 And instead of giving them to us, he’ll give them to Christ, and then he’s satisfied. Huh? And actually, in the Book of Mormon, it talks about this. It says, “There is not any man who can sacrifice his own life to atone for the sins of another.” I’m not quoting it exactly, but it says that. There’s no person who can [atone for sins.] If Joe does some horrible crime against somebody in my family, kills somebody in my family, and Joe has a brother, Sam, I’m not satisfied that we now go kill Sam, and leave Joe alive. There’s no justice in that. That’s kind of the idea here. It’s like we commit all the sins, but God insists that somebody’s got to be whipped.
GT 16:48 And so Jesus is whipped.
Val 16:50 So he says, “Well, okay, draw Jesus out.” And he’s, he’s sort of satisfied now that Jesus has been whipped. That doesn’t make any sense to me. But what does make sense is, we are just who we are. God can transform the context in which we live. And so, this is a moral transformation theory. It’s like God has created a new context, someone who loved us so much, that he’s sitting there. He’s suffering all of our sins in a profound, deep way. And if we’re able to respond to that, we become new people.
GT 17:26 And you call this divine transformation?
Val 17:29 I think that’s not my term. They have the different theories. And one of them is that the atonement somehow transforms us into new better people. And that’s the one I’m going with. That’s one of the theories that’s out there. And that’s the one that I think really makes sense. And especially…
GT 17:45 So, because Christ suffered, if we accept that suffering, we’re transformed.
Val 17:54 Yeah, think about it this way. There are people who will say, they’re about to do some horrible crime. And then they think of their sainted Mother, and what effect will this have on this mother, who loved me more than anyone else ever did? I mean, you hear stories about this sometimes, that somebody was changed by the love their parents had for them or something. Right? They can’t dishonor that love. So, that love that they received made them into a different person. Actually, we need to have some mercy for people raised in really difficult circumstances, who didn’t have that. Right? We shouldn’t judge them. Let’s leave that to Christ because they didn’t have the blessing of that love. But the biggest love of all, the most transformative and powerful love of all is what Christ did for us. So, if we can engage that, if we come to the Gethsemane, and we’re there, and we’re saying, in our heart, I’m accepting what you’re doing. And on the cross, I’m accepting what you’re doing. You love me so much, I can’t help but, within myself, I just feel it. I mean, I’m brokenhearted at what you’re going through as all these other beings are being brokenhearted. And we have to be. And when you’re in that brokenhearted state, you’re a different person. I mean, if anybody that’s really felt this profoundly, you know you’re a different person there.
Val 19:16 So, in a way, in that moment, you are coming to Christ. You’re in the presence of Christ. And you can’t commit sin anymore. And the fact is in those of us who are here on the earth, in the pre-existence, we were not able to commit sin and in the presence of God. The big dividing line between those who did and didn’t keep their first estate was whether you could defy God face-to-face, which the third of the hosts of heaven could, and they had to be thrown out of heaven or it wouldn’t have been heaven anymore. You can’t have a bunch of reprobates there. None of the rest of us can defy God face-to-face. That’s why when we come back into his presence, if we’re sinners, we want to flee immediately. And we can only come back and find it a tolerable place if we don’t have sin. Not that we’ve never committed sin, but that we’re beings now who have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually. Because we’ve engaged with Christ. We’ve felt brokenhearted contrite spirit, and that’s not who we are anymore. So we’ve been remade. That’s my theory of how the atonement works. But it’s not just my theory. I mean, this is the, I think it’s the moral transformation theory. It has been out there as one of the…
GT 20:30 Yeah, that sounds more familiar.
Val 20:33 I think that’s right. The other part just, instead of saying Christ has to be whipped, why doesn’t God just say, “Alright, I’m going to overlook this. I’m not going to make Christ suffer. Why would I do that? He’s my beloved Son, why would I do that?
GT 20:50 The law of justice.
Val 20:51 Yeah, but see, justice is consequences. You are what you are. This is evident in Alma’s discourse with his sons.
GT 21:00 I mean, when we have Sunday school lessons, what you’re teaching is–we’ll talk about the law of justice, the law of mercy. They both have to be satisfied.
Val 21:08 Right. But there’s two different versions of law. Right? Law can be legislative law, and it can be natural law. Justice and mercy are natural laws, not legislative laws. Within LDS theology, everything can be natural law. It’s just, this is just the way the universe is. It’s just how we are. We’re uncreated. So, when we’ve talked about natural laws, it’s not like God had to make it up. Right? It’s just descriptive. It’s just the case that if you do certain acts, certain consequences follow. They naturally follow. God doesn’t have to cause it to happen. That’s just the nature of reality. So, justice is the fact that all acts have consequences. And that if you do certain things, you’re going to receive the consequences of those things. Mercy is this. If Christ steps in and suffers for us, for those who can respond to it, they become a different person. If you become a different person, you get different consequences. So, if we’d been left to ourselves as these intelligences, in a universe that didn’t have Christ, every one of us would have done acts and do acts, that make it so we can’t stand in God’s presence and feel any tolerable comfort. We flee for our own comfort, to hell, the hell created by our own actions. But, if we respond to Christ, now we become a different person. And so a new set of natural consequences follow. And among those natural consequences is, we have no trouble being in God’s presence. Because, again, it’s not what we were, it’s what we are that matters. And Christ helps us move to a whole different level of existence than we ever could have gotten to on our own, if we can respond to His Atonement, if we can feel it. So that’s the critical thing. You got to have the broken heart and contrite spirit, as you contemplate what Christ did. If you don’t have that, you’re just on your own. And so nature, this series of causes and effects, every sin has effects and those effects are misery down the road. You’re going to get it and you’re going to suffer everything Christ suffered. That’s what he says. Because you didn’t let him step in, do it for you, and then be reborn as a new person, by virtue of your emotional, spiritual response to that thing that was done for you. Anyway, that’s my theory.
GT 23:38 Interesting. I’m glad you’re not on penal substitution. I just have to say that.
Val 23:42 No, I think that makes no sense whatsoever to me.
GT 23:46 Same.
Satan is Fruit of Tree Knowledge?
Val 23:47 All right. Well, let me get back to the sacred tree.
GT 23:51 Okay.
Val 23:52 Let me pause here and note that the sacred tree is an important element in all of Lehi’s major teachings, his dream, the allegory of the olive tree, which as I said, you see it with Zenos. But it was also, actually, Lehi’s teaching, and his final Patriarchal Blessing of his descendants. At the end of Jacob’s patriarchal blessing, Lehi mentions Mother in Heaven, and her two most prominent sons, two divine beings who stand in opposition to each other. So, the fallen angel, Satan, who seeks to destroy humanity and the mediating Messiah, Christ who seeks to save them. He then mentions two sacred trees, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. Satan is associated with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. He gives us its fruit. He probably is its fruit.
GT 24:43 Satan is the fruit of the…
Val 24:45 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
GT 24:46 Wow.
Val 24:47 Okay, now think about this. The tree is the Divine Mother. And her two most prominent sons in the pre-existence are Jehovah and Lucifer. And, again, the fruit of the tree…
GT 25:03 This is another reason why [mainstream] Christians don’t like us.
Val 25:06 Yes. The fruit of the tree is the children of the Mother. It is the consistent symbol. So, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, I’m saying it’s Satan. Let me go on here in the way I want to say it and I’ll come back to it in a second, okay. So, when we partake of that fruit, we come to know who Satan is, to know evil. Adam and Eve knew good before they met Satan. They already knew good, but they couldn’t fully understand what good was until they partook of the fruit that Satan gave them. After partaking of that fruit, Eve quickly figured out who Satan was. She and Adam set their sights on getting back to the Tree of Life, where the other fruit was available. Christ who can usher them, again, back into communion with the gods.
Val 25:39 But it isn’t just Eve and Adam who have to partake of these two trees. The trees mark a cycle of departure from Father and Mother in Heaven and return to them that all of us have to experience. These symbols suggest that each of us takes leave of our Mother in Heaven as we entered this world. And when we decide to leave her and the Father through birth, we, like Eve, partake of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We encounter Satan. Then we come to Christ, if we come to Christ, and repent and partake of the fruit of the Mother Tree of the Tree of Life. We’re reincorporated in the Heavenly Council and can live forever like our Father and Mother in Heaven.
Val 26:40 So these two trees, one tree is bearing Satan. Satan gives Eve the fruit. She eats of the fruit. Now she knows what evil is. She knows. She recognizes Satan and evil. And her task now is to get back to the Tree of Life, but she can’t get there before she’s had an encounter with Christ. They need that altar. And they need to make sacrifices and they need to receive Christ, and receive the skins that he’s going to give them and repent of their sins, and now come back and partake of that Tree of Life, which is the atonement. That’s actually the thing that when they’re making the sacrifices and doing all that, they’re actually, in a sense, partaking of that tree. But through that repentance and brokenhearted[ness] and contrition, that’s what gets them back.
Val 27:32 So, Adam and Eve are actually emblematic of every one of us. Bruce Hafen and Marie Hafen talk about this in powerful ways. But every one of us partook of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We did that when we made the decision to depart out of the Eden we were in, which is the pre-existent time, and enter this world where we’re going to know Satan. So birth into this world is to encounter Satan. And Satan is a son of the Divine Mother. So, the Divine Mother has these two sons. She’s right there with us as we enter. I mean, I think we depart from our [heavenly parents.] It’s just like Nephi. Nephi is coming down from the tree in heaven. So are every one of us. So, we depart from our Divine Mother and come into this world. And first thing we do is we encounter Satan. Now we know both good and evil in more profound ways. And hopefully we get back to Gethsemane, to the Mount of Olives, and partake of that fruit of that Mother again, that second son that’s going to save us.
Val 28:42 All right. So, the especially strong coupling of the Mother and the Son is apparent there in the Tree of Life. The tree, our Mother and the fruit, the Savior, are inseparable. That inseparability is also signified by the matching marks in the Son’s body, and in the cross, the tree that is the symbolic body of the Divine Mother. And this coupling of Mother and Son is apparent in something deeply meaningful to Latter-day Saints, our temple garments. The marks in the garment have the rough configuration of the marks and Christ’s body. The breast marks correspond to the marks in Christ’s hands, the navel mark to the mark in this side, and the one knee mark corresponds to the one nail that penetrated both feet. I’m indebted to Margaret Toscano for this insight, which has been precious to me ever since I learned it some years ago.
GT 29:39 On my interview?
Val 29:42 It wasn’t from your interview. I think it was from reading As Strangers in Paradox.
GT 29:48 Okay, because she said that on mine, too. Yeah.
Val 29:51 I think it was in that book. I’m pretty sure it was there.
GT 29:56 Yeah, we talked about that a lot.
Val 29:57 So, this precious item of ritual clothing, signifies a garment a skin garment made for us by Yahweh. It’s made from the skin of the sacrificial lamb. I think it’s the way we should think about it. But, of course…
GT 30:15 Now wait a minute. I’ve got to ask you a question. Because this article is coming out in Interpreter. Right?
Val 30:20 Yeah.
GT 30:21 Are they allowing you to quote Margaret and Paul Toscano?
Val 30:24 I don’t remember if I did. Actually, this isn’t in in that article.
GT 30:32 Okay.
Val 30:32 Because this part of it isn’t in the article.
GT 30:36 Okay. So this is bonus material?
Val 30:38 Yeah, yeah. Well, a bunch of this stuff is not in the article. I’m not, I mean…
GT 30:44 Well, I love that you’re giving credit to them, because they feel like they don’t get enough credit, especially from faithful scholars. So, I would consider you a faithful scholar.
Val 30:52 I’m very much a believer. And I mean, there are things in that book [that] I don’t agree with that. I should add that, but this, this is one of the most powerful spiritual insights that’s come to me. I mean, it’s meant so much to me. Because, again, the garment is the skin that Christ gives us. Right? We get our garment from Christ. And to think, okay, what did he give us? He gave us the skin of a sacrificial lamb, which has what marks? The marks in his body. So, when I wear my garment, and Margaret, thank you. I mean, I’m so grateful for this insight. When I wear my garment, I’m wearing the skin of Christ. When we wear our garment, we are clothed in the skin of Christ, which bears the marks of his wounds. So, when we partake of the sacrament, we put Christ’s Body and Blood inside us and receive power as we become symbolically one with him.
Val 31:57 We likewise receive great power and protection, when we clothe ourselves externally in his skin. We have him both in us with the sacrament and around us with our temple garment. And those are the greatest blessings we can receive in this world is the sacrament within, the garment, without, that both recreate us, as the children of Christ, help us to receive that atonement and be transformed into these completely new people that can stand there comfortably in the Divine Council. And I mean, this is not an instant process. It’s a long process of engagement with the Savior, deeper and more profound engagement with the Savior. But he’s there with us. He’s there with us in the sacrament we’re taking every week, and for those of us that have been endowed, he’s with us in these garments that we wear around with us all the time.
Val 32:57 So, that the divine mother felt the nails pierce her son’s body, as signified in the Christ, should not surprise us. I mean, almost all human mothers are going to be able to understand this. Fathers, too, really, but I think I’d say more profoundly the mothers. They can’t help but suffer, as they watch their children suffer. So, the garment marks are the nail marks in both the Son and the Mother. But that’s a secondary, symbolic meaning. Literally, the marks are located at the points where we’re nourished by our mother, at birth, at the breasts; before birth at the navel. Then we have the mark at our mother’s knees, the place where we’re born. The nail meaning of the knee mark–well, let’s say this. The nail meaning of the knee mark, which I said was like the feet. Right? You have a nail going through the feet. So, the feet is that knee mark. That converges with the idea that the knee mark, marks and signifies the point of birth. In the Old Testament, the feet are a common euphemism for the genitalia. So, when they want to refer to the genitalia, they say the feet. Right?
GT 34:20 That’s what Ruth did with Boaz, right?
Val 34:23 Yeah, right. Yeah, maybe there and David dancing before the Lord and covers his feet. There’s, in various places. So anyway, the feet, which I think that mark is a mark of the feet, but it’s just a convergence here. It’s also the genitalia or the point of birth. The birth and nourishment of children has always been life’s biggest overt miracle, and that birth and nourishment is inherently female. So, we should recognize that, along with the Savior, our Divine Mother, is signified by these marks in the garment and the Temple veil, the linking of Mother and Son is totally there on our garment, is part of what I’m arguing here. In the temple, as in Lehi’s dream, the importance of Mother in Heaven is apparent in the Tree of Life. And at all three points where we enter eternity, the endowment room altar, the veil and the sealing room altar. At each of these points, we have male/female dyads, with the couples always connected in the same sacred way. I won’t say anything about that. But at the endowment room altar, we have the Old Testament symbolism. Christ is the sacrificial lamb at the center of an eternal circle, a Zion community that can exist only because Christ is at the core. And people should reflect on what they do in that circle. Because if they do, they’ll more deeply understand the meaning of the signs that they receive. That’s where their meaning becomes apparent. If they’ll think about what they’re doing there, and think about it hard, they’re going to discover meanings that they wouldn’t otherwise be aware of. So, participate in the prayer circle and think about what’s going on there, because that’s a deeply meaningful ritual.
Divine Mother in Temple
Val 36:14 And the Divine Mother used to be present in the prayer circle. So, in the temple, the person behind the veil is divine. So, when women went behind the veil, they symbolically became the Divine Mother just as the man behind the veil is the Divine Father. So, the person behind the veil, always a divine being. Unfortunately, because the veil has a different meaning outside the temple, and because we had no tradition of discussing its possible meanings, we didn’t recognize how the temple veiling honored women. We had women behind the veil at the altar, then the men behind the veil at the temple veil. Then, in an important sense, each behind the veil in the sealing. Our garments are the veil. The marks in our garments are the marks on the temple veil. When we wear them, the configuration of the marks puts us in the place of judgment. So, when we wear our garments, we’re constantly before the veil. If you think about the marks, they place us before the veil in their configuration. So, we’re constantly at that place. So, in the sealing, the person on the other side of the man’s garment is the wife, who is thus in the position of a divine being. The same is true for the woman, she’s in the place of judgment with her husband in the position of a divine being. Husband and wife are both human and divine. They’re both who they now are and who they ultimately will be, both those things are signified, both their divinity and their humanity.
Val 38:05 As in the prayer circle, so in the sealing, we enter eternity not as individuals, but as a divine community. So, the image in the facing mirrors suddenly arcs up. And that seemingly infinite series of images will ultimately arc into a full circle, signifying the same Zion community that the prayer circle signifies. So, in those two places that we enter eternity, we are entering in a circle of male and female dyads connected together, again, in a similar way. And so, the bottom line is that just as in the Book of Mormon opening, so in the temple, our Heavenly Mother is very much present, not just in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life, that both signify her, she’s also represented, sadly, now less clearly, in all the sisters in their priesthood robes. And you know, I was over at the Mount Timpanogos temple one time and a couple of temple workers were sitting there in the lunchroom. And one of them was asking, why did the women veil their faces? Because this was an issue that they had been asked about by one of the sisters. And at that time, I hadn’t come to understand that when the women veiled their faces, they were in the divine position that was the Divine Mother. And I was so deeply appreciative that she was signified there. Well, sadly, because we didn’t recognize that’s what it symbolized, we’ve thrown Mother in Heaven out of the temple in one of the main places that she was there. And it’s been done, because the sisters are the ones that felt uncomfortable with it. We didn’t ever talk about it and say, “Let’s think about this a little bit more.” I think what we should have done, instead of ceasing to veil the women there, is we should have put the marks of the temple veil on their veil.
Val 40:07 And then it would be clearer that when they’re behind the veil, they’re in the position of the Divine Being. So, again, woman in the position of the Divine Being at the altar, man in the position of the Divine Being at the Veil, both in the position relative to the other of a divine being at the sealing altar. And in every case, a dyad of a divine man and divine women not El and Ella, but Elohim. Ella is Asherah. Right.
GT 40:37 Ella is Asherah?
Val 40:39 Yeah, as a matter of fact, the name, the word Ella means either God us or oak tree in Hebrew. So, the tree and Goddess are connected right there in the name Ella, which is one of the ways you can say goddess in Hebrew. So El, and then Ella, it’s the feminine. So, El and Ella, are the Elohim, the gods. I mean, look. The word Elohim is used in other ways in the Old Testament because everything we have came down to us through the Deuteronomists. Joseph actually said that if the Old Testament was translated properly, all the Elohim would be coupled with plural verbs, and they’re not, all the way through the Old Testament. So, you’d have the Elohim, and then with that followed by a plural verb, rather than a singular verb, because they are the gods. They’re not just God acting there.
Val 41:43 Well, let’s get back to the Book of Mormon. We can see the narrative there, as in our modern temple rites, how the gods make us divine. Like Lehi, Nephi sees the heavenly host who descended from Yahweh, in Lehi’s vision. He sees them ultimately sitting as divine Last Judgment judges. But he also witnessed a kind of echo of the collapse of Lehi’s great and spacious temple, a collapse precipitated by the Jerusalem Jews rejection of the heavenly host, who also descended with Lehi. That local event becomes cosmic when Nephi attributes the collapse to his more cosmic, great and spacious building, which he calls the pride of the world, and, to its rejection of and fight against the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb. Lehi gives the local, familial version of the dream. And then Nephi gives us the cosmic world historical version. So, it’s the same thing, but it’s told in a local family way, and then in this historical way, the vast scope of Nephi’s vision makes it clear that he sees, not as a man sees, but as a God sees. Thus he sees in the history of his, he sees the history of his own descendants from beginning to end, he sees their wars across many generations, the destruction that precedes the visitation, then the visitation of Christ. He sees the Twelve Apostles chosen from among his descendants, who also function as divine Last Judgment judges. He sees the apostasy of his people and their final destruction at the hands of the Lamanites and then how they’re all scattered in the New World. So this is not a human way of seeing the world. That’s how God sees the world.
Val 43:31 At the conclusion of his God’s eye vision. Nephi sees John the Beloved, one of the Twelve, who descended with Christ in Lehi’s first vision, still dressed in white. And John, he’s told, shall write many of the things that thou has seen. Among those things will be a more literal description of Mother in Heaven, from whom Christ descends, thus] we read in Revelation. And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head, a crown of 12 stars. That’s a great description of the Divine Mother. And she being with child cried, prevailing in birth and pain to be delivered. And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. And her child was caught up to God and to his throne. Well, who’s that? That’s the birth of Christ in Heaven to this glorious woman. So, what was described more symbolically in Nephi’s first vision, Nephi says, I’m seeing the same things John is seeing and you want to fill out what I’m seeing, take a look there. Here we see the literal description of that birth that Nephi gave us symbolically with the descent from the tree. This explicitly describes Christ being born of Divine Mother in Heaven.
Val 44:51 So, John also explains though, why our mother became mostly invisible, except in symbols. When the dry dragon saw that he was cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the child. The woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared of God. Satan has a special hatred for Heavenly Mother. His war on her has been especially vicious. And unfortunately, probably without understanding what he was doing, King Josiah was Satan’s best ally in chasing the Divine Mother into the wilderness. That’s where she got really chased into the wilderness and hidden. And now we see her symbolically, but not explicitly the way we see the Father. Now, let me offer an opinion on the future of the Restoration. I think the day will eventually come when we, like Lehi, Sariah, Sam and Nephi at the sacred tree, will openly worship our Mother in Heaven. My second cousin once removed, President Nelson, I claim no authority from this by the way. He’s the Prophet. I am not and I have no authority whatsoever. President Nelson has said, “We are witnesses to the process of restoration. If you think the church is fully restored, you’re mistaken. Wait till next year, then the next. Eat your vitamin pills, get your rest, it’s going to be exciting.” I think part of that future restoration will be to bring Mother out of the wilderness and to direct toward her the open worship she receives in Lehi’s time, in our in our foundational Scripture, the Book of Mormon, which is opening with people worshipping at the tree. We’ll recover this practice that is so clearly modeled there in the Book of Mormon.
Val 44:51 Now, for some populations, we would get a big missionary boost if we more openly talked about Mother in Heaven. Patrick Mason saw this and, of course, he taught at Claremont University. When he was there, his non-LDS students were astonished to learn about our Mother in Heaven doctrine. And they wanted to know why we were hiding, what was for them, the single most attractive element of our theology of our religion. Now, fortunately for the world, most of our Heavenly Parents children don’t have the profile of Claremont Graduate students. And I say this as someone who spent far more time in school than is normal, even for people with a Ph.D. So, we don’t want the world to be full of Claremont Graduate Students or people like me, who spend all their time working on Ph.D.’s. Our Heavenly Parents love all their children. And they and Christ loved the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our most effective missionary work is now happening in places like Africa and the Philippines. And it’s not obvious to me that the work in these more harvestable fields would be advanced by more open worship of Heavenly Mother. When it’s time to have Mother in Heaven emerge from the shadows, if it ever becomes time, as I hope and expect it will, the prophets and apostles will have to receive the revelation and take the lead in making it happen. I do think it will happen and pray it will happen. And I think it will be more likely to happen if we long for and pray for that day. But in the end, our Heavenly Parents are in charge, and they communicate their will for the institutional church through those called to lead it. And I personally have a lot of faith in our leaders, and I trust they’ll take us where Father and Mother in Heaven want us to go in this matter. But, at least for me, I long for that day to come when we can openly credit our Mother in the way she seems to be credited in the Book of Mormon.
Val 48:40 Let me wrap up my discussion of Lehi and Nephi by noting this, what’s evident in Nephi’s expansive vision is the fact that the core members of the Divine Council work together to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. All contribute and cooperate and wherever possible involve others in their work of salvation. Their involvement of others is not incidental, for others may become like them only if they, too, consecrate their time and talent to the soul-saving work of the So’od Elohim, the Council of Gods. If we so consecrate ourselves, the divine destiny of Lehi, Sariah, Sam and Nephi may be ours. Like them, we may be transformed into precisely the kind of divine beings that our Father, Mother and older Brother now are. In other words, we can participate in the process of Theosis and become gods. Now, that ends the talk about Nephi and Lehi. I do have other examples in Book of Mormon which I’m prepared to go on to and talk about, at your discretion. So I’m going to go on unless you want to stop me.
GT 49:51 We have been three hours. I’m not opposed to a part two, but maybe we should take a [break.] I don’t want to take all your time up today.
Val 50:03 Well, it doesn’t matter with my time, but it matters that there’s the time of your audience and what they’re willing to tolerate. And there’s your time. I will be back here in Utah in the spring.
GT 50:18 Okay.
Val 50:18 And if you wanted to continue on, if you find there’s a response to this, and you wanted to follow on to the other places that this shows up, I’ll be happy to…
GT 50:29 Let’s do that. I do want to ask you a few questions, though.
Val 50:34 Yeah, let’s pause and do that.
GT 50:39 Did you see my Don Bradley interview by chance?
Val 50:41 I haven’t. And Don Bradley is my favorite reader of the book. Well, Grant Hardy, and Don Bradley, my two favorite readers. I love Don, and Don does such great work.
GT 50:50 Don’s awesome. One of the, I would say, criticisms of Don, from certain segments were that–because he’s got the book on the lost 116 pages.
Val 51:07 Yes, it’s wonderful.
GT 51:07 And it seemed like he would take a little piece and then just kind of blow it up into a big point. And a lot of people were saying, “Don, you’re just making stuff up?” I mean, do you get that? Because it feels like you’re doing a lot of the same things that Don is doing.
Val 51:24 That’s why I love Don so much, because Don is a great close reader of the text. I actually talk about the theory behind what I’m doing and what Don’s doing in the first article that I published in the Interpreter, which is In His Footsteps, Ammon 1 and Ammon 2. I start in that with the theory about what we’re doing, and here’s what’s going on.
GT 51:52 So, do you get some pushback like that, too, that you’re just making stuff up?
Val 51:55 I’m not nearly as prominent as Don is. Nobody really talks to me that much. I’m sure I would. I mean, I’ve been a teaching, I got started on Book of Mormon scholarship in the 1980s, when I was teaching a Sunday School class. And I was teaching the New Testament, and I went and this was at the University of Virginia in the ward there. And I went and bought some New Testament commentaries. And man, it was just like, they really opened up the scriptures to me in whole new ways. Because of the kind of attention the scholars were giving to the New Testament, it just made it way more coherent and had a lot more depth to it. We came to the Book of Mormon, the next year, and I thought, “Oh, boy, I’m in a world of hurt here.” I’d read the Book of Mormon, like 20 times at that point, but I had never read it in the way the scholars were reading the New Testament to see the profound depths in it. When I came to the Book of Mormon and started trying to read it in that way, there were no commentaries, so I was on my own. But I brought all my literary training to bear and wow, the Book of Mormon is just so full of– it’s got these tremendous depths. But Mormon tells us [that] there’s not a hundredth part of what happened. And that’s exaggerating, there’s not a millionth part of everything that happened in their history. And so, in that article on In His Footsteps, Ammon 1 and, Ammon 2, I talk about the different types of information, that we have to get through implication. Some things we have to get through recognizing problems in the transmission of the text. For instance, Royal Skousen says, and there’s another brother who wrote this first in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, and he was in my word actually here, except they’ve just split the word. And I barely, I met him one time, who first noticed this. The Amalekites and the Amlicites are the same people. The Amlicites disappear at the very moment the Amalekites appear. The Amalekites have…
GT 51:57 Is it just a spelling error because they’re very similar?
Val 53:46 Yes, because use c and k, so if you say Amalekites, and the Amlicites, if you just put the accent on the first syllable, it’s the same thing. But they were spelled in two different ways. And so, they became two different people. Now, that’s somebody figuring out through this kind of careful reading of the text, that okay, there’s a transmission/spelling error that happened, and it made it seem like you had two different people, who are actually the same people.
GT 54:44 Is Royal Skousen on board with that?
Val 54:47 He confirmed it, certainly. I wish I could remember the name of this brother who wrote the article. Anyway, this guy went to Royal Skousen and pointed it out to Royal, maybe. I mean, I talked to him. I don’t know what the whole story is. Anyway, Royal is on board with that idea. So, the Amlicites and the Amalekites are the same people. Well, that’s something you get through close reading where you’re discovering an error that was made in the textual transmission process.
Val 55:14 Now, there’s other kinds of things like, just assumptions about culture and how the culture worked, that you don’t get unless you really read carefully to say, well, how did the Nephites see the world? And even like this symbol that I’ve just come up with, like the tree. Okay, I went back to look at the Old Testament and the tree is very prominent there. I just said, okay, let’s say that Lehi really existed. If he really existed, what would he think about a symbolic tree? It would have been very clear what this would have meant. If you believe the Book of Mormon is a work of history, you should be able to reconstruct from what we’ve been given, some of those millions of pieces that were part of their lives, but that Mormon couldn’t fully explain. Like, whenever you’re writing, there’s all kinds of assumptions you have to make about readers. And so, what we’re doing is, and Don does this beautifully. He does it very persuasively. He’s scavenging the nooks and crannies of the text, finding these little pieces that are kind of throw away, in a sense. But if you take those things and you think about them carefully, as he does, he’s really good at this. You start to see that they have a connecting pattern that provides a background, a context in which the narrative that we’re reading takes place. And when you do that you suddenly see whole new depths and coherence to what’s going on in the text.
Val 56:55 Like, in another place, I was going to actually talk about it today, if we’d gone on. At the Waters of Sebus, it’s one of the most incoherent seeming narratives that you could get. And maybe if we do part two, I’ll work through that and talk about how all these parts don’t fit together. But then, if you have an insight, it was partly an insight that Brant Gardner had about, about the Lamanite politics and then I added another part to it, which I think if you put that together, all of a sudden it all makes sense. Like one of the things that doesn’t make sense is, I’ll just mention a couple. These marauders are coming and stealing the king’s flock all the time. And it’s predictable. He knows they’ll do it. But he keeps sending the flock out there without a sufficient force to protect it. Okay, that’s one thing. Why does he do that? And then he kills his servants if they don’t protect it. And then, the people that were doing the marauding are showing up at the palace later, the robbers, the people called robbers. How is that possible? I mean, how can a bunch of people that are robbing the king’s flocks just be wandering around? And the ones that are wandering around are criticizing the common people for saying that the reason Lamoni is having problems is because he killed his servants. And these people are saying, that’s not true. That wasn’t the reason.
Val 58:25 Well, they’re a bunch of nobles. This is an inter-noble conflict. Brant Gardner saw this and I added a little bit more to it. Once you see that, you see that which wasn’t coherent on its face, becomes coherent. Beyond that, if we had gone on, I would talk about you all of the sudden get this powerful allegory at the waters of Sebus/of Christ saving us from out sins. But you’ve got to figure out the political dynamic. Right now, people are going to read that as an adventure. It’s not an adventure story. I mean it is an adventure story. It has depth to it, but it is also an extraordinarily powerful allegory. You don’t get that without saying, “What was the political context? What was going on here? Who are all these people? How does all this make sense?”
Val 59:18 Another part of that is the name Ammon was in Egypt. Ammon was a top god. And the Mulekites…
GT 59:31 Amun.
Val 59:32 Yes, Amun, right. And it shows up in the Doctrine and Covenants as Ahman. His name is a divine name. That comes into play a little bit. But these are little details. It’s not something that the ordinary person reading through would know. They wouldn’t know it but they are going to miss this powerful allegory of Christ saving people like those servants who are utterly doomed if Ammon hadn’t been there. Because they were caught between two laws if you read it carefully. But I love what he is doing because you really need to approach a text.
Val 1:00:08 Don is just great at this. The stuff that I’m doing, I say he is a master of it. That’s why I love what he does. I mean, I’m didn’t even know Don was doing this stuff before. I was doing the same thing. But I love what he is doing because this is how you really need to approach a text to it’s steps. This is what Old Testament scholars do all of the time.
GT 59:54 Are you presenting this kind of stuff at BOMSA?
Val 59:59 I would. They let me present the one thing I told you about King Benjamin’s discourse and how the first Mosiah and Zeniff are being contrasted with each other and Zeniff is apostatizing. Anyway, I gave a presentation about that. And also about the contrast between King Benjamin and Noah. It is a very finely drawn contrast. They let me present that, but I’m not part of the club, exactly, I think. I may be wrong about this. BOMSA people, I love you. I’ve submitted a couple of other things which they haven’t accepted, which I think they’re pretty good. I think there’s kind of a group there. But I’ve done a lot of close reading on lots of different parts of the Book of Mormon. And I’ve been publishing articles I published a number of them. I ultimately hope to, when I get retired in a couple of years, pull them together into a book. Because there’s a lot of things I haven’t done. And that one article, The Interpreter didn’t publish that I was talking to you about earlier and this one about King Benjamin and Noah. I mean, I think, even though a lot of their reviewers liked it, they had their reasons. So, I’d like to be able to get that out. A lot of people have like it.
Pushing Back
GT 1:02:06 I wanted to ask you another question. This comes from more of the critical side of the Book of Mormon, Colby Townsend, among others. Even, I think Trevan Hatch mentioned it. But Colby, especially, has said the books of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses weren’t written until after Lehi left Jerusalem. And so, it almost seems like the plates of Laban were made up. Okay, so how would you respond to that?
Val 1:02:43 I’d say, where did he get that idea?
GT 1:02:47 From biblical scholarship.
Val 1:02:49 Exactly. And I remember when I quoted that piece about what are the evidential foundations of biblical scholarship? They are extremely thin. Meaning that it’s literary criticism. They’re doing the same thing that Don’s doing and that I’m doing. That’s where all this stuff comes from. So, if I’d had a chance, if we’d gone on, maybe we will later, but I wanted to talk about D. John Butler, because what he does is he finds the temple all the way through scripture. He has a theory about an ancient temple ceremony, the worship of the Showers.
GT 1:03:26 You’re saying the temple ceremonies are in the Book of Mormon, when everybody says that they’re not?
Val 1:03:31 Oh, yeah, he’s got out there. Yeah. Hey, Steve, temple ceremonies are in the Book of Mormon, take a look at D. John Butler’s stuff. So, yes, he finds it all through scripture. And he’s reconstructed this ancient temple ceremony. Now, one of the things he says, and I think he’s right about this absolutely right. He says, [that] if the current Old Testament scholars believed that the Book of Mormon is what it says it is, they would trample each other to death in their rush to get a copy. Because what we have is a book with the ancient provenance, for those who believe, the best provenance of any ancient texts we have that talks about the time of Lehi at the pivotal moment in theological history. And so, what happened with it? Remember when the text at Ugarit was discovered, and they suddenly figured out…
GT 1:04:27 When was that, by the way?
Val 1:04:28 That was like in 1927, I think it was. So, they all of a sudden find out these Canaanites believed in El and Asherah, and the Son Ba’al and we’re seeing the same pattern here in the Old Testament. And they’re not, as we’d always assumed, and as the Bible text was telling us, these Deuteronomists were telling us, Right? The Deuteronomists [are] the one god guys are telling us, that they are completely other than us, Hebrews. Well, we already had glimpses of that from the residue in the earlier, older parts of the Old Testament. But still, that really helped confirm and reshape people’s thinking about the Old Testament. Well, the Book of Mormon, if it’s historical, dramatically reframes a lot of this stuff. And that one point [that] it would immediately resolve, would be that question. I mean, if you believe the Book of Mormon is a historical book, then it immediately becomes clear that the Torah was in shape. And actually, some of the scholars do think…
GT 1:05:31 So you’re arguing the Torah was there?
Val 1:05:33 Yeah, yeah. And, again, I’m not saying there isn’t– these guys that are arguing other things. They’re really smart people. And they look at all these details and ransack all the nooks and crannies the way Don does with the Book of Mormon and the way I do. And then they try to put together coherent theories. But the theories change across time as people emphasize different elements. And if they took the Book of Mormon, as a relevant Old Testament text, it would dramatically refashion Bible scholarship. For one thing, it would establish that you need a dispensationalist idea of theology rather than a purely evolutionary theory. So, the evolutionary theory, the further back you go…
GT 1:06:21 Kind of like documentary hypothesis?
Val 1:06:24 Well, look, the documentary hypothesis is perfectly consistent with, at least a lot of it, with the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is a bunch of documents being put together, right. And so there’s a lot of the documentary hypothesis–the Book of Mormon has a documentary hypothesis, in effect.
GT 1:06:40 Well, I mean, the reason why I’m bringing it up.
Val 1:06:42 Not all parts of it.
GT 1:06:43 Because you’ve got a very interesting theory with this whole idea of Ba’al and Yahweh are sons of El. Because from what I understand, you had J, D, P, and E, sources for the documentary hypothesis. And there was Elohim and Yahweh. I mean, it’s a little different than what you’re saying. With the documentary hypothesis, they were saying that one group, worshipped El, one worshipped Yahweh, and then they kind of combined them together.
Val 1:07:12 That kind of thing has clearly happened. There’s no question that there’s been some documents put together. That part is, I think that’s beyond question. On the other hand, those folks were also working back before the Ugarit discoveries. Right? So, the documentary hypothesis, I don’t think had so much the idea of the Abrahamic religion ahead of time. That’s a different set of ideas than the J. I mean, there might be parts of it [that] overlap. I’m not an expert in…
GT 1:07:49 And Colby has even said that it’s changed since what I just said.
Val 1:07:53 Yeah, it clearly has. The documentary hypothesis doesn’t have the same purchase. And part of what happens with this stuff is, you keep slicing the salami, narrower or narrower, because you’re working from these fragments. Again, that’s what we’ve got to work from, it’s fragments. And there’s different ways of putting them together. And so you have to say, well, what’s the more coherent ways? Well, again, if you have the Book of Mormon, if that is a text, if Lehi and if Nephi is writing, really writing from that period, boy, that would be so useful to people. But for sure, it would revolutionize a lot of their ideas. And what I said about the evolutionary idea versus the dispensationalist idea, the dispensationalist idea is God makes these revelations and Christ is there in the Old Testament, was clearly there. So someone like Margaret Barker tends to find Christ in the Old Testament. And that’s why she converges with us on so many things. She also finds a Divine Mother in the Old Testament. So, she’s doing it just by piecing together the scraps.
Val 1:08:58 And then we come to the Book of Mormon and the part I’ve been reading, man it just wallops you with the Divine Mother, if you read it in the context of what the scholars have pieced together, right, the Book of Mormon really fits into that period, except in one respect. Yahweh that son is Jesus of the New Testament. And so there you can find Yahweh as son, not nearly as clearly as what you find in the Book of Mormon, but little fragments that suggests that. So, someone like Margaret is saying, El was different from Jehovah/Yahweh and they were collapsed by Josiah, the stuff I’m talking about. And she’s getting all that just from being a very careful reader of the Old Testament the way Don is a careful reader of the Book of Mormon, and the way I try to be a careful reader of the Book of Mormon. So, it’s true that someone can say, “Well, it’s not there.”
Val 1:10:03 On the other hand, the Book of Mormon merits close reading. It merits that and what the people who read it closely, like Joe Spencer, who is in the club, the head of the club that I was talking about earlier. He’s a great reader of the Book of Mormon in terms of just the details he gets into. He really knows that well, those BOMSA that people really know the Book of Mormon well, and they see a lot more going on there. And it’s a lot more coherent for them, than it is for the ordinary person reading the Book of Mormon. So, there’s tremendous richness, a new understanding and theological depth we can get if we take the Book of Mormon seriously enough to say, look, this is a historical work. There were these huge civilizations and all kinds of things going on. And fragments of all that stuff that’s going on is showing up in the text, just like it is in the Old Testament text. And if somebody’s willing to pay the price to read this thing closely, and look at every little detail here, and start to reconstruct, hey, look, here’s a piece over here and a piece over here that fits together. And starts putting them together. Now the text starts to cohere in a way that it didn’t before.
Val 1:11:11 Like the Old Testament, when most people read the Old Testament, it just does not make much sense to them. There are all these allusions to things, they have no idea what it’s talking about. Well, the Old Testament scholars, they pay the price to figure out what this is alluding to this, and this is also mentioned over here. And if we put the two together, we can now start to figure out what’s going on. When you do that, you get a whole new level of understanding and appreciation.
Val 1:11:34 And that’s what’s happening to the Book of Mormon, for those who choose to read it in that way. And as I say, my two favorite readers of the book is Grant Hardy, who’s great at this. An Understanding the Book of Mormon is the best thing that’s been done on the Book of Mormon in the last 20 years and really going back. I mean, like Hugh Nibley, did a revolution. He made such a huge contribution. But he didn’t read the Book of Mormon, as closely. He just connected it to ancient context, which was very important. But Grant reads the Book of Mormon with great care as to the people that are there, the attitudes they have, and he finds different voices in the Book of Mormon, and he finds all kinds of structure. And then Don is just great at this. His idea that the temple was such an important part to Lehi, and that Lehi was bringing the temple with him. I mean, he’s just really good at it. And because I read the Book of Mormon really carefully, when I see Don doing that stuff, I said, “Man, that is good. That is so insightful.” And the book just starts to come to life in his hands, because of the way he reads it. And I’m hoping that for some people, the same can be true, as they see some of my stuff. But, get out there and take a look at Joe Spencer’s stuff. I mean, he’s doing really good work, and the people associated with him over at Maxwell Institute.
Val 1:13:06 And take a look at The Interpreter. I mean, there’s some really good [stuff.] If you love the Book of Mormon, don’t just sit on the surface of it. I mean, read some of the stuff that’s done in the The Interpreter, too, and it’ll just open up new depths to the text. That’s what comes out of all of this. You love the book a lot more than you did before. Because where you’ve seeing this level of meaning. Now there’s this level and this level and this level, down below it, that still connect into Christ and bear testimony of Christ. Do we want the surface testimony of Christ? Or do we want the fuller testimony. And we’ll never get clear to the bottom of the Book of Mormon, it just keeps opening up new treasures for those that study it closely. So I mean, that’s what I would argue. I mean, yeah, you can say, look, Don’s making a lot of something of these pieces. But then it just all coheres. And if you use it, this is actually the way science works, too. It’s like a theory is not just a collection of pieces, you have to have the pieces that fit together as part of a puzzle. And that’s what Don does. He grabs all the pieces. And then he pieces together the puzzle. This is a puzzle. It still has missing pieces in it. Because again, we only have, not even the hundredth part, right? Not even the thousandth part. But we still have lots of parts. You can’t write history like Mormon’s writing, and not throw in all kinds of details that if somebody is attentive, they’ll begin to see, oh, yeah, look.
GT 1:14:47 Yeah, that’s good. All right. Well, I don’t want to keep you forever. But we are going to have you back on.
Val 1:14:57 I’d love to come back on. I have other articles or we could go on with what I meant to say here because I mean Abish and the Queen, and Lamoni, Divine Mother, definitely.
Will Val Get in Trouble?
GT 1:15:11 Well, now you just brought up one more thing. One of the big things that President Hinckley was like, was like we believe in a Divine Mother, but we don’t we don’t want to talk about her. You’ve been pretty open about it, even, is her name Asherah? Can we say that?
Val 1:15:28 Well, Shaddai, Asherah, Ella, Wisdom, Shekinah. There’s lots of names. God has lots of names. The Father has lots of names.
GT 1:15:40 You’re not worried that six months after this interview airs, you’re going to be called in for a high council because we were talking about Heavenly Mother?
Val 1:15:46 Well, okay, folks, I have no authority. I’m just giving my opinion here.
GT 1:15:53 Paul and Margaret said that all the time, too. The Toscanos.
Val 1:15:57 I said, in all sincerity, that the people who are leading the Church, I am not Mormon Alliance guy, right. I’m not trying to go out and find abuse of the people. Because for me, we’re lost, if we don’t have them. The thing that makes for the unity of the faith is the Q15. That is the unity of the faith. If we don’t have them, we fly to pieces. Because you’ve got everybody giving their ideas, this person’s got their ideas, that person’s got their ideas, and the Church…
GT 1:16:34 So, when they come to you and say, “Are you willing to repeat everything you said on Gospel Tangents,” you’re going to say, yes?
Val 1:16:39 What I’ll say is, “That was just my opinion. Those are my insights and opinions. I have no authority.” So I mean, I don’t think they– I would be surprised if they come to me and say, “Don’t say that that’s your opinion.” Because I mean, I’d have to lie to say that’s not what my thoughts are, and my opinion. But my opinion is just my opinion. And if people are persuaded by my arguments, look at the details and see whether you find it persuasive or not. If you find it persuasive, and enriches your love for the Book of Mormon, good.
GT 1:17:12 And if it ticks off the brethren?
Val 1:17:14 Well, again…
GT 1:17:16 Because I think that’s really what the issue was. Because everything that you’re saying, Paul and Margaret Toscano and Janice Allred also said. “It was my opinion.” But they don’t like their opinion.
Val 1:17:27 Yeah, but they were doing, that Mormon Alliance was not about– it’s just my opinion that they’re abusive. They’re abusive in their exercise of authority. That was what their opinion was.
GT 1:17:41 But that was after.
Val 1:17:43 The Mormon Alliance was formed before they were excommunicated. Yes. Yeah. Paul was saying in his interview with you that they were having a Mormon Alliance meeting the day of his trial. They had had one at his house.
GT 1:17:58 Well, but they were, it was because of what he had been saying.
Val 1:18:02 Paul, as he would probably say himself, a kind of, it’s not cantankerous, exactly.
GT 1:18:11 Obstreperous.
Val 1:18:12 Obstreperous personality, and he was directly challenging the leadership and their authority and their right to–he was saying they weren’t doing a good job leading the Church. He said that to some extent then.
GT 1:18:25 “The worst apostles in the history of mankind.”
Val 1:18:30 I sustain them and want people to follow them. And I want them to love the Book of Mormon more. I’m just saying, I’m agreeing with President Nelson. Our theology is not fully revealed. We believe all that God has revealed, all that he has now revealed and he will yet reveal many great and important things. That word precious, when it talks about plain and precious parts that are taken out, that’s all happening right there in the context of this sacred tree in Nephi’s vision. So he has this idea of the plain and precious parts that will be taken out of Scripture. How did Nephi know that? Because he just watched it happen with Josiah, right? He had seen Mother in Heaven thrown out of Scripture, in his own time. And then he’s looking forward in the future, some of that sort of thing will happen. But the biggest place it happened was right there in Nephi’s time. So I don’t know. If they come and discipline me, I’m going to accept their discipline in the sense of, they are apostles of the Lord. They have the right to speak. They speak for the Church, but I just have the confidence that they don’t care that much about people having opinions on theology, and opinions about the scripture. They do care if you start trying to gather a following and set up like Denver Snuffer. And especially if you start saying the Church is in apostasy, which I don’t believe.
Val 1:19:58 I believe it’s beloved of Father and Mother and is the instrument of so much of the redemption that they’re trying to bring about in the world today. It’s the leaven of the of the world. So I’m all in on the church. I’m all in on the importance of the temple. I’m all in on our theology, on the power of our theology. I think, as I said, this solitary sovereign. I agree with Joseph Smith, as well as the Father in Heaven said, that there’s a big problem there, even though I admire the philosophical depth that created it. I mean, the minds of the people that are involved, I really, they’re great thinkers. I mean, the Catholics have these brilliant theologians. Their theology is thought through so carefully. And some people in Catholic Church appreciate it, but many don’t. I appreciate a lot of the great work that they’ve done on theology. I just think they have a bad premise, in that Josiahian, Aristotelian, outside of space and time God that they have. And Joseph Smith restored the God that Lehi believed in, and that kinship between them is just remarkable, don’t you think? I mean, there it is right there with Lehi. And Joseph Smith is giving us this. And I’m not saying that Joseph Smith got any of this from the Book of Mormon, like the King Follett discourse, that is not coming from the Book of Mormon. Joseph couldn’t have seen these things, because Ugarit hadn’t been discovered. Scholars hadn’t read the Old Testament in the way that starts to say, hey, we have the plural gods in the Old Testament, in the way that became more apparent later on. So, Joseph, we get two independent attestations of the Divine Family. We get it in the King Follett discourse. But then the King Follett discourse doesn’t have give us that Mother, Son, dyad that’s so powerfully laid out in the Book of Mormon. That’s the point. But, Joseph does give us there, and elsewhere in the Doctrine & Covenants, he gives us, or the Pearl of Great Price. I’m trying to remember. He gives us, The Pearl of Great Price, I think. The idea of the intelligences, the intelligence that are uncreated. Right? I don’t find that in the Book of Mormon, and I’m not surprised that I don’t find it.
Val 1:22:22 It’s in the Book of Abraham. Well, yeah, you find it in the Book of Abraham. That’s right. So, that would, again, within our faith, say, “Well, this was known anciently.” Actually, that’s the Abrahamic religion, right there. That would be the way to answer that would be to say, “There’s the Abrahamic religion,” they did understand that the intelligences were uncreated, which fits very nicely with this pluralistic theology that I’m saying is the Abrahamic theology, that even the scholars are saying is there in the Old Testament. So, yeah, that’s just another data point. That’s a way to get back to incorporate it. But you don’t find that in the Book of Mormon. You do find it there, as you say, in the Book of Abraham. Right,
GT 1:23:01 Right. Well, cool, cool. All right. Well, I’m going to let you go. I appreciate it. And there will definitely be a sequel.
Val 1:23:12 Right. We can either continue on with this or I wouldn’t mind doing that piece I have on the Book of Mosiah with you.
GT 1:23:21 Okay.
Val 1:23:22 I don’t have another outlet for that, since it got torpedoed the very last second, when I had it submitted to the–there was every expectation it would be in there, but I wouldn’t take out one piece and so they decided not to take it.
GT 1:23:35 Oh, wow.
GT 1:23:35 Well, sounds like a good thing to talk about. All right. Well, Dr. Val Larsen, I really appreciate you for being here on Gospel Tangents.
Val 1:23:42 Thanks so much for having me. And thanks so much for exposing folks to all these different, to the richness of the tradition that Joseph Smith gave to us. The Restoration is really a wondrous thing that God has done in the world. And I’ve learned a lot about, just all kinds of branches of the Restoration I had no clue about, like this guy in England.
GT 1:24:08 Oh, I know, Matthew Gill.
Val 1:24:08 Matthew Gill, I just listened to that one when I was trying to get ready for this and kind of see what you do. And it’s so interesting. And to some extent, you just have to wonder, I know some people will just say, “This is all the devil at work.” For me, I’m open to the possibility that God works in very many mysterious ways. I’m not going to endorse that one. I haven’t even looked into it much. But I do think God deals with his children in the Catholic Church, in all the Protestant churches, the Community of Christ, he’s ministering to his children, in the Jews. I mean, the Jews are so talented, they truly are the chosen people. And it’s just so evident in all kinds of ways. And the Buddhists and the Muslims and their devotion to God. It’s like, God doesn’t forget about any of his children. And he’s there available in all these different ways. And you, what you’re showing in your work is partly the manifold ways that God is dealing with his children. But I still hold to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Temple Square. It is an especially precious and important and essential part of God’s ministry in this earth. It’s a kind of leaven, as I said. I think God loves it. And so, these doctrines that I’m talking about, they will come forward to the extent that they’re helpful to this institution, because this institution is really important.
GT 1:25:52 Very good. All right. Well, thanks again for being here on Gospel Tangents. I appreciate it.
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