Reflections of a Mormon Historian – Leonard Arrington

[Anonymous]

Reflections of a Mormon Historian, a collection of essays by Leonard Arrington, edited by Reid L. Neilson and Ronald W. Walker (Arthur Clark 2006)

I really enjoyed this book. In many places I thought Arrington expressed his faith combined with his intellect in a way that I could relate to.

Here are a few highlights from Chapter 4:

“My path of commitment to and belief in the [Church] developed around four basic religious questions I encountered as I grew up. 1) Is there a living God? 2) Was Jesus a teacher worthy to be worshipped? 3) Was Joseph Smith a prophet deserving of allegiance? 4) Is our LDS culture meritorious – worth defending and working for?”

…“I believed the intellect to be enormously important – more important than the heart, more important than tradition. If my mind could not confirm the truth of my religion, I felt I would be unsettled and apprehensive. …I acted as a believer, willing to assume there was a loving and powerful Creator. But I was not satisfied until I had studied the matter through and came to a conviction that my intellect could defend.”

Arrington states one of his early influences came in the form of Lowell Bennion’s manual: What about Religion? In it Bennion “can one accept all of the miraculous events that surrounded the restoration of the gospel?” He then explains “that truth may be expressed not only through science and abstract reason but also through stories, testimonies, and narratives of personal experience; not only through erudite scholarship but also through poetry, drama, and historical novels. …[Religious myth] is an account that may or may not have a determinable basis of fact or natural explanation. The truth of a myth is beyond empirical or historical accessibility. Examples are the Christian story of the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, and the creation of the world as described in the book of Genesis. These are ways of explaining events or truths having religious significance that may be either symbolical or historical.” …“I was never preoccupied with the question of the historicity of Joseph Smith’s first vision (though I find the evidence overwhelming that it did occur) or of the many reported epiphanies in Mormon, Christian, or Hebrew history. I am prepared to accept them as historical or as metaphorical, as symbolical, or as precisely what happened. That they convey religious truth is the essential issue, and of this I have never had any doubt.”

Some other quotes that grabbed me:

p.165 (discussing Ernst Cassirer)“Reason and mythmaking are both avenues to truth and beauty and goodness. Man requires and benefits from both reason and poetry, both reason and imagination, both reason and religion. If reason helps man to think objectively, myth enables him to utilize and exhibit the power of subjective feeling of the poetic aspect of life.”

p.217 We might close with the analogy of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. The human soul, like a charioteer, must drive two horses as it progresses toward Heaven. The horses must work together or the chariot will just go round and round. …It would be unfortunate if either should outstretch the other. Over-emphasizing intellect to the neglect of spirituality, and over-emphasizing faith without the application of reason are both unworthy of practicing Latter-Day Saints. We cannot achieve spiritual excellence without intellectual rigor, and intellectual excellence is hollow without active spirituality. We need to have the spirit as we learn, and we need to have learning as we build faith. Working together, faith and intellect help us achieve the Latter-day Saint goal of eternal progression.

[Anonymous]

sheesh.

i need this book.

[Author]

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