Bonus Episode: Song of Songs (Song of Solomon)
Guest co-host Christopher Hurtado fills in for Ben and talks with Shiloh about meaning and identity. It is prior to and through suffering and sacrifice narratives—”For after much tribulation”—that we create meaning of traumatic experiences that form the strongest aspects of our identities. In August of 1831, the early Saints were still learning what their new identity was and what it means to belong to “Church of Christ” (the formal name of the church that we know today—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—wasn’t revealed until 1838). God reveals the first foundational principles of the Saints’ relationship with secular government, and it varies from known axioms of political philosophy. From D&C 58 we learn that the Saints were to be “subject to the powers that be” not out of any civic obligation or matter social utility but because God had commanded. This conversation has an old and deep intellectual history in Augustine’s City of God and City of Man distinctions that would later be addressed by Aquinas and Luther/Calvin. What does it mean that “God is offended”? Can God really be “offended” as we experience offense? Elder Bednar has said that being offended is a choice, so does God choose to be offended or is there something of about D&C 59:21 that calls for greater clarification? ...
Ben and Shiloh talk about the love, mercy, and compassion of God in our weakness. How often do we find ourselves believing that disappointment, pain, struggle, or sadness are because of our sin and wickedness and that if we were just more righteous then we would be happy, joyful, and always feel like rejoicing? How often in our weakness, self-accusation, and trauma do we imagine a God that is various shades of disappointed in us or that is disinterested in our pain and struggles because we deserve the consequences for our actions? What if pain, struggling, sadness, etc., were not merely the consequences of sin and wickedness, and what if the idea of a disappointed and apathetic God was not God’s nature at all? What would change in our behavior if we knew that we were always already completely, fully, and unconditionally loved by God and that what was needed was merely for us to recognize, believe, and experience this love uniquely in our own lives? What if we don’t have to bind God down to bless us, but what if God is naturally and hyper-actively vigilant in creating that which is good in our lives at all times and places? What if we didn’t have to use covenants to hold God’s feet to the fire to bless us in ways that God wouldn’t bless us otherwise, but what if covenants were merely modalities (read: ways and means) by which we can overcome our own fear, distrust, and unbelief in God’s already hyper-active work in our own lives? ...
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes ...
