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Armand Mauss says:
May 9, 2018 at 11:06 pm
Steve LHJ :
Not only is Ardis right about the relatively late resort to PGP scriptures in trying to justify the race policy, but those scriptures don't necessarily mean what you think they mean. Dialogue has had a project this year called 'Shoulder to the Wheel' - a set of supplements to the 2018 G.D. course. I prepared a supplement for Lesson Five, some of which I excerpt here:
Troubling Scriptures and Their Resolutions :
*Are we not told, in both the Old Testament (Gen. 4:8-15) and the Pearl of Great Price (Moses 5:35-40), that as a result of Abel's murder, the Lord placed both a 'curse' and 'mark' on Cain and his descendants?
1) Yes, but nowhere do the scriptures say what the 'mark' was, except that it would protect its bearer from being killed; and also:
2) Nowhere do the scriptures say that the 'curse' on Cain and his descendants had anything to do with race or with the priesthood.
*But doesn't the PGP say that the descendants of Cain were black?
1) Yes, but notice that these passages (Moses 7:8) say a 'blackness came upon' the people of Canaan long after Cain's time; we don't even know if these are the same people described later as 'the seed of Cain' (7:22); also that:
2) This chapter of Moses comes from a vision to Enoch (Moses 7:4-7), several generations after Cain, about a time yet in the future even later than that.
3) These passages still do not say just what this 'blackness' was, or that it had any relevance to the mark put upon Cain or to the priesthood.
*Yet there was also a curse put on Ham, in Noah's time, that denied the priesthood to his descendants - right?
1) Not really. Notice that this curse was a result of Ham's disrespect for his father Noah, and that it actually was placed on Ham's son Canaan (Gen. 9:20-27; also:
2) There is no reason to assume that this curse had anything to do with the priesthood; and also:
3) It was the lineage of Ham's wife that was 'cursed as to the priesthood' (Abraham 1:20-27); again, we do not know that this curse had anything to do with Cain or his posterity (or even with the curse on Ham-s son Canaan).
*Don't the scriptures say somewhere that some spirits were assigned to be born in cursed lineages in mortality because of their lack of faithfulness in the pre-existence?
1) No. That was just an idea circulating around the Church in an effort to 'explain' why black people were not eligible for the priesthood.
2) The only thing that the scriptures tell us about differences among the spirit children of our Heavenly Parents is that some were designated to become leaders in mortality because they were especially 'noble and great' (Abraham 3:20-23).
the race issue.
These scriptures were made to support the erstwhile LDS race policy only by assuming the policy's doctrinal authenticity a priori and then reading such doctrine back into those scriptural passages.— Armand Mauss
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