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The Plan of Salvation makes sense to my spiritual mind only. Some symbolic things can only work if you teach as literal. Like Ray, I’ve no issue with certain things being taught as such if they are able to carry more weight to the majority. As to the questions about the creation and the garden in the endowment. I view it only as a story (or parable). I don’t think any of it actually happened in history. Try something next time you go. Consider how parables use inanimate objects to represent people (grains, coins, branches). Replace all references to ‘world/earth’ with any word for the human existence ‘body/person/people/eternal soul.’
I consider it a ceremony in learning about the human experience. From beginning to end. The endowment is one of the few threads that keeps me tied to the church. Even though most of it probably came from Joseph’s head and environment. There’s enough that possibly didn’t. Collectively they are still spiritual engaging for me.
I’ve got some nice references on this so will dig them out.
(Now back to my Chinese
I wrote a long reply but it went off on a tangent so I think it’ll get it’s own thread soon. As for the temple specifically I think it’s all completely symbolic. As for the necessity of work for the dead…I don’t have a stand. Especially since whatever we do will supposedly all be done in the millennium. I think it helps us consider where we’ve come from a lot more. I really appreciate that connection to my past regardless of the actual ceremony.
I think that as others have said, the endowment has great value as a symbol. I think that the parts of it that tell the Adam and Eve story in particular have great value in teaching about the human condition. I don’t take the endowment–or the Book of Genesis–very literally. Like everything else in church I just have to try to take the good and set aside the rest. Fortunately this is much easier for me in the temple than Sunday meetings. Honestly our temple worship and our Sunday worship don’t seem like they even belong to the same religion…
I also take the way we draw the plan of salvation in church with the little circles and arrows and sun, moon, and stars pretty symbolically. I think eternal progression is a beautiful thing. I love it. I also think that many of us like to have everything displayed neatly in a little diagram that shown exactly what is going on. The problem is that we don’t really know exactly what is going on. We can’t really know in this life what exactly is going on. But pretending we do helps some people. For others of us who have realized we really have no idea what is going on the little diagram seems like a lie or deception. But it’s not. It’s just an overwrought attempt to explain a reality both simpler and more complex than we can understand right now. I think that we can accept the general ideas of the plan without accepting the specifics of separate kingdoms and who can visit who and who is going where and what work we have to do to see our loved ones again etc. etc….
The plan is really about us coming to earth to learn how to choose right from wrong on our own using our own agency. I will use mine to set aside the literalist interpretations of the endowment and the plan of salvation and just believe in trying to better myself and my family day by day.
Mormonism is typically viewed as taking the most dogmatic and restrictive view that it is the one and only way to heaven. You must be baptized, anointed, endowed and otherwise properly schooled in the narrow way. Yet, simultaneously, it is one of the most expansive and all-encompassing religions around. It says without equivocation, that every man, woman, or child that has ever lived, or will live, will have the opportunity to fully hear and accept the Gospel along with all of its saving ordinances, in the next life if not in this. That applies for Jack-Mormons, Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists, Muslims, Agnostics and Atheists. Everyone will have an opportunity to accept or reject truth and goodness.
IMO, as long as a person is following the highest good that he knows he will fare well at the judgement bar. His honesty and integrity will serve him well before God. For Mormons who use their church standing to advance their self interests, their selfishness will serve them not so much.
I believe the ordinances are at worst just clerical details that can be easily rectified as necessary. While I don’t understand why they are required, they don’t bother me, because their implications are that God is loving and merciful to all mankind. That gives me reason for hope.
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