Quote
Theology grounds itself, in the end, beyond history's horizon. Regardless of the accuracy with which Stapley reconstructs early Mormon priesthood discourse-and I have no reason to doubt it-his work is a runway for theological reflection. In particular, it raises two related questions about the ultimate nature of being. The first is the question of time and its relation to salvation. Is the kingdom of heaven only to be inaugurated on earth at some future (if impending) time by a dramatic and universal imposition of divine transcendence? Or is the kingdom of heaven present even now, within us, among us, somehow accessible through the conditioned, compromised, and confined parameters of this world, these lives? Is the kingdom of God imminent, or immanent? Is heaven another world, or another way of being in this world?
My hunch for the latter is no doubt clear, and Stapley's work suggests that, for what it's worth, that perspective has historically been available to Latter-day Saints. Any time that the Saints stand together at the altar, incarnating priesthood as they knit their always-dying bodies into an ever-fractalizing fabric, that is the Kingdom come. Brigham Young gets at the radically immanent metaphysics of Mormon millenarianism. The real essence and effect of the Millennium, he says, lies waiting within us already:
Let the people be holy, and the earth under their feet will be holy. Let the people be holy, and filled with the Spirit of God, and every animal and creeping thing will be filled with peace; the soil of the earth will bring forth in its strength, and the fruits thereof will be meat for man. The more purity that exits, the less is the strife: the more kind we are to our animals, the more will peace increase, and the savage nature of the brute creation vanish away. If the people will not serve the devil another moment whilst they live, if this congregation is possessed of that spirit and resolution, here in this house is the Millennium. Let the inhabitants of this city be possessed of that spirit, let the people of the territory be possessed of that spirit, and here is the Millennium. Let the whole people of the United States be possessed of that spirit, and here is the Millennium, and so will it spread over all the world. ( Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 1:203, 6 Apr. 1852)
To shatter and scatter the sacred telos of time such that its abundance is seeded throughout and within chronological time, not cloistered at its end, is, arguably, a central gesture of early Mormonism. Yet its implications have been scarcely understood. What can law, obedience, accountability, or divine judgement mean aside from the carrot or stick-or perhaps better, for Mormons, the big carrot of celestial glory and the baby carrot of lesser glory-waiting for us at the end of time? How are we to make sense of a 'plan of salvation' without the inexorable draw of the glorious (or less-glorious) culmination pulling us (or goading us) through life's blind curves? Closer to the concerns of the book, how are we to understand the promise of eternally sealed relationships if not as a bridge from the chaos of this death- and sin-strewn life to a truer home of order and infinity where all is as it should be?
My sense is that early Mormon theologians did not really begin the work of answering these questions. Yet if Stapley is right, if the cosmological priesthood indeed materializes a thousand-faceted heaven at every time and place of its exercise, a corresponding reconception of our soteriology is in order. Contemporary Mormon theology is on the job.Share
Sign In to comment on this quote
