Albert Raboteau and the Power of Images

In spring 1993, I was a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill nervously awaiting word from the Ph.D. programs to which I had applied. I still remember the thrill of receiving an acceptance letter from Princeton University signed by Albert Raboteau, dean of the graduate school.

Albert Raboteau was a familiar name. As a religious studies major, I had encountered his classic Slave Religion (1978), a pioneering study of the rise of a distinctive Christianity among enslaved peoples in America.

He was a professor in what would become, after I accepted Princeton’s offer, my new academic home: the Department of Religion, which has been well represented among Princeton’s graduate school deans. (My own dissertation adviser, John F. Wilson, was dean of the graduate school from 1994 to 2002.)

As a new graduate student, I was more than a little intimated to serve as a teaching assistant in Professor Raboteau’s class on African-American religious history. But I soon discovered that Al (as graduate students knew him) was warmhearted, soft-spoken, and unpretentious.

Albert Raboteau died last weekend, September 18, at age 78. Princeton University and Americanist historians everywhere have lost a renowned scholar, a trusted friend, and a gracious human being.

Nearly three decades after I began graduate school, I’m still teaching Professor Raboteau’s work. This week in my American Religion class at IUPUI, my students are reading his essay, “Richard Allen and the African Church Movement,” collected in A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (1995).

My appreciation for Al’s lyrically written scholarship has only increased over the years. But my favorite memory of him is not about words but images. While I was in graduate school, I was intrigued to learn that Al was enrolled in a class on icon painting (or as Eastern Orthodox Christians call it, icon “writing”). A convert to Orthodoxy to from Catholicism, Al had embraced that most characteristically Eastern Christian form of piety—meditation on images.

I’ve since come to realize how fitting this was. A scholar who had written about the biblical images that animated the Black Church was now creating literal images of Christ and the saints. He later wrote about the experience of seeing a Russian Theotokos (Mother of God) icon in an exhibit at the Princeton Art Museum and how this had turned him on the path to Orthodoxy. “She seemed to hold all the hurt in the world with those eyes,” he recalled. “I stood in front of her for a long time. I gazed at her and she gazed at me.”

Images have an unaccountable power. Though I’ve spent much of my career writing about controversies over doctrine, I’m convinced that images hold greater sway over the psyche than any rational argument. This is no less true of the verbal images—the biblical stories—that enliven the Black Church. One of Professor Raboteau’s most famous essays, “African-Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel,” is about the power of the Exodus motif in the African-American experience.

To a greater or lesser degree, all Christians dwell in the Bible’s images. The hold of biblical imagery over the Christian imagination is vividly expressed in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which Al Raboteau assigned to his class when I was his TA. As Deborah, one of the novel’s characters, tells her husband, Gabriel (a pastor): “ain’t no shelter against the Word of God, is there, Reverend? You is just got to be in it, that’s all.” To be “in it” means to make the Bible’s characters one’s own, to inhabit biblical stories as if entering a life-size mural of salvation history.

Some Christians, especially the Orthodox, also dwell in literal images, filling their churches and homes with icons. The Orthodox justification for the use of icons is twofold: humans are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and God becomes incarnate in Christ. Humans, like Christ himself, are images of the invisible God.

When I imagine Al Raboteau in the afterlife, I picture him writing an icon. May we follow his example and learn to find the divine image in each other.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

Albert Raboteau described his encounter with the Russian icon in Albert J. Raboteau, A Sorrowful Joy (2002; Reprint, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 41-42. His essay “African-Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel” appears in A Fire in the Bones (cited above).

“Urgently Beating East to Sunrise and the Sea”: On the Religious Meaning of Turtles and Spiders

The sound of ocean waves crashing on the shore always stirs in me a kind of religious awe. But at the North Carolina coast recently, I had a different kind of mystical experience.

During an evening walk on the beach on the first day of my annual getaway with my sister and her children, we came upon a group of volunteers from a sea turtle rescue organization. They were gathered around a nest where a fresh indentation in the sand indicated that buried turtle eggs might be hatching.

We stood there for a long time as darkness fell, hoping to see the hatchlings emerge. But nothing happened.

Heavy rain the next few days interrupted the volunteers’ vigil. During breaks in the rain, we kept returning to the same spot, but each time, there was no change in the fenced-off place in the sand.

On our last evening at the beach, we had little hope of seeing anything. But when we arrived at the nest, the volunteers pointed to a small hole that had just opened in the sand. A hatchling was about to emerge.

About ten minutes later, a baby loggerhead sea turtle poked its head through the hole. We were transfixed as its tiny body, barely two inches long, appeared. Crawling out tentatively at first, it soon beat a steady path down a shallow trench the volunteers had dug to ease its passage.

Guided by instinct, the fragile creature made its way to the water’s edge as the tide was coming in. Then it was gone, swept away by the sea.

What happened to that little turtle? With so many predators lurking by water and by air, the odds of its survival were not great. But with a little luck, it might grow to adulthood and return someday to lay its own eggs at the shore.

The baby turtle’s inexorable journey to an unforgiving ocean brought to mind Robert Lowell’s haunting poem, “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (1946), based on the colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards’s famous “Spider Letter.”

In that manuscript, the young Edwards described what naturalists today call “ballooning,” in which certain spiders fly considerable distances by casting themselves on gossamer threads to catch the wind. By this method, Edwards observed, spiders flew eastward toward the sea, only to be consumed by the waters.

Lowell’s retelling of Edwards’s letter is a poetic masterpiece:

I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die
Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea

To Edwards, spiders displayed the wisdom of the Creator, who kept nature in balance by seeing to the destruction of some of them (by water or by birds) while constantly replenishing their numbers such that “taking one year with another, there is always an equal number of them.”

Lowell’s poem is darker, invoking in its later stanzas Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which a spider dangled over the pit of hell becomes the image for a condemned sinner. Lowell questioned the logic of a theology in which God predestined some humans as vessels of wrath fitted to destruction.

I’m less sure than Edwards or Lowell about the theological message of spiders—or turtles. The empirical side of me says that certain things just are and that it’s futile to look for deeper meanings. But the mystical side of me wants to know what spiders and turtles are seeking when they urgently beat east to sunrise and the sea. Surely the ocean, like nature itself, conceals vast mysteries that we humans can scarcely imagine. 

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Illustration credits:
Loggerhead sea turtle hatchling at Indian Beach, N.C.: Peter Thuesen
Detail of Jonathan Edwards’s “Spider Letter”: New-York Historical Society
Robert Lowell: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life Magazine

Bibliographical Note

Robert Lowell’s “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” originally appeared in Lord Weary’s Castle (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946). Jonathan Edwards’s “Spider Letter” appears in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 6, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 163-169.

Edwards on the Atom, 300 Years Later

Three centuries ago, a 17-year-old graduate student named Jonathan Edwards began writing a scientific treatise, “Of Atoms.” His conclusions reveal how much—and how little—has changed in 300 years.

Edwards, who would become colonial America’s most important theologian, enrolled in Yale as an undergraduate when he was not quite 13. After his graduation in 1720, he remained for master’s degree study in New Haven, where he had access to a library of the latest books covering all branches of learning.

Though he would follow developments in natural philosophy (the eighteenth-century term for science) throughout his 54-year life, his primary motivation was religious rather than scientific. So when he sat down to consider atoms in the summer of 1721, he was less interested in the things themselves than in what they revealed about the Creator.

About the same time, he experienced an intense religious conversion in which, as he recounted years later, “there came into my mind, a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express.”

Given this context, it’s not surprising that Edwards found in atoms clear evidence for the existence of God.

The theory that the world is made of atoms dated back to the ancients. Edwards accepted this hypothesis but was intent on showing that there’s more to the universe than the mere matter. He feared that the materialist philosophy of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes was a slippery slope to atheism because it assumed that the world is an autonomous, self-sustaining system of mechanical laws.

An atom, Edwards reasoned, is “indiscerpible” (a term he borrowed from philosopher Henry More), meaning that it can’t be broken or divided by any finite power. What, then, accounts for its resistance to division? Divine intervention, he insisted. “The constant exercise of the infinite power of God,” he wrote, “is necessary to preserve bodies in being.”

Edwards concluded that atoms’ continuous resistance to division is “an incontestable argument for the being of God.”

This deceptively simple argument belied his involvement in a complicated series of debates over the essence of matter—is its essential property extension or resistance?—and even whether matter really exists. For Edwards, matter was not a substance but the power of resistance, a power inseparable from God.

Modern subatomic physics would have blown Edwards’s mind. We now know that atoms, or rather their nuclei, can be split by human power, as in the nuclear fission reaction of an atomic bomb. This fearsome release of energy led physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to quote two passages from the Bhagavad Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one” (11.12); and “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” (11.32).

We can only imagine what Edwards would have thought about the unleashing of the atom’s power and the ethics of nuclear warfare.

The dawn of the nuclear age is not the only scientific revolution that has happened in the three centuries since Edwards wrote about atoms. Quantum mechanics introduced the problem of uncertainty at the subatomic level, and chaos theory probed the apparent randomness in otherwise deterministic systems like weather.

But one thing has hasn’t changed. The connection between the universe and God is still as much a matter of speculation today as it was in the eighteenth century.

Some contemporary theologians have labored to reconcile divine intervention with quantum and chaos theory. Others have maintained that religion and science are separate ways of knowing. Neither option offers any universally acceptable proof (or disproof) of God.

Still, there’s value in the speculation—the perennial project of reckoning with the world and its origins. That’s what makes Edwards’s youthful theorizing about the atom both timebound and timeless.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Illustration credits: Jonathan Edwards by Joseph Badger, c. 1750, Yale University Art Gallery;
Detail of p. 1 of “Of Atoms,” c. 1721, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Bibliographical Note

Jonathan Edwards’s “Of Atoms” appears in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 6, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 208-218. Edwards’s account of his conversion experience (quoted above) appears as “Personal Narrative” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 16, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 790-804. On the date of “Of Atoms” in the context of Edwards’s career, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “A Chronology of Edwards’ Life and Writings.” For additional context, see George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 72-74. For an evaluation of Edwards’s arguments in “Of Atoms” in relation to the philosophy of his time, see William J. Wainwright, “Jonathan Edwards, Atoms, and Immaterialism,” Idealistic Studies 12, no. 1 (1982): 79-89. On Edwards’s engagement with scientific literature, see The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 26, Catalogues of Books, ed. Peter J. Thuesen (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 93-98. For a helpful overview of modern developments in theoretical physics, see Kirk Wegter-McNelly, “Fundamental Physics and Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 156-171.

The Melody of Theology, or Requiem for a Piano Teacher

This week I received word of the death of my childhood piano teacher, Thelma Rast, in West Columbia, South Carolina. She was 96.

Miss Rast, as she was known to her students, was for decades a music professor at Lenoir-Rhyne College (now Lenoir-Rhyne University) in Hickory, North Carolina. My parents also worked at the college, so it was natural that they would hire their colleague to teach piano to my sister and me.

I vividly remember weekly lessons in Miss Rast’s studio, where she had two pianos, a grand and an upright. She was graciousness personified. Even when I hadn’t practiced enough, which was more often than I care to admit, she never betrayed a hint of impatience.

In my case, piano didn’t quite take. Whether from insufficient effort or lack of ability, I never developed the sightreading skills that would enable me to sit down at the piano and easily play a tune. My sister always did better at this, and so have my three kids.

But one thing did stick with me: a love of music as an art so sublime and transcendent that it surpasses rational description.

It’s no accident that Lenoir-Rhyne, a Lutheran college, would employ great musicians like Thelma Rast (herself a United Methodist) on its faculty. Martin Luther was enraptured with music and commented extensively on its ability to calm the heart and drive away the devil. “Except for theology,” he famously declared, “there is no art that could be put on the same level with music.”

Music, for Luther, had a singular power. “Nothing on earth is more mighty to make the sad gay and the gay sad,” he wrote. “With all my heart I would extol the precious gift of God in the noble art of music, but I scarcely know where to begin or end.”

Luther’s attitude distinguished him from more radical Protestants such as Ulrich Zwingli, who feared the idolatrous potential of instrumental music and sanctioned the destruction of church organs. Of such iconoclasm, Luther didn’t mince words: “I have no use for cranks who despise music.”

I’m a huge fan of organ music, so Zwingli’s iconoclasm strikes me as barbaric. He was so convinced by the Protestant notion of “scripture alone” that he rejected organs partly on biblical grounds, since they don’t appear in the New Testament, his blueprint for the reformation of the church.

This fixation on the word alone fails to recognize the value of instrumental music for conveying the ineffable qualities of the divine. To me, a Bach fugue played on a majestic organ speaks more than can be contained in any book.

Happily, though I’m a lousy pianist and have never played a pipe organ, I now carry a library of professional recordings on my iPhone. My downloaded purchases include not one but two versions of Bach’s complete organ works, and a growing piano repertoire. My wife and I also enjoy sharing music with our kids, two of whom have pursued advanced piano study and one of whom is in the St. Olaf Choir.

I can’t imagine life—or religion—without music. I credit my parents and Professor Thelma Rast for making it such an important part of my spiritual formation. 

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved 

Illustration credits: Thelma Rast: Hacawa 1976, Lenoir-Rhyne College
Grace Chapel, Lenoir-Rhyne University: Photo by C. E. Moser

Bibliographical Note

Martin Luther quoted in Robin A. Leaver, “Luther on Music,” Lutheran Quarterly 20 (2006): 125-145 (quotation on 125); and in Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: New American Library, 1950), 266-68. On the destruction of organs in Zwingli’s Zürich, see Charles Garside, Jr., Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 61-62.

Preparing for the Big One: The Lesson of the St. Louis Tornado, 125 Years Later

Great Tornado.jpg

When it comes to preparing for disaster, Americans have often lived in denial.

Take tornadoes. A common myth in the nineteenth century was that they never hit big cities. An 1887 article in Chicago’s Inter Ocean newspaper said that because a large city “bristles with rods and spires, and is covered by a netting of electric wires,” this would likely repel tornadoes.

But on May 27, 1896—125 years ago today—a tornado a half-mile wide tore through the heart of St. Louis, then the nation’s fourth-largest city. At least 255 people died and more than 1,000 were injured. The upper span of the landmark Eads Bridge collapsed, sending huge granite blocks crashing to the railroad tracks below. The entire electric streetcar system was disabled, and some 7,500 buildings were either destroyed or badly damaged.

The human suffering was appalling. Some persons not killed by flying debris died in fires sparked in the aftermath. Two-year-old Oliver Bene was burned alive as his mother, trapped under heavy fallen beams and unable to reach him, watched in horror.

Some 200 funerals were held on Sunday, May 31, in houses of worship that survived the storm. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the mournful “mingling of life and death” at St. Patrick’s, East St. Louis, as 130 Catholic children, many of them bandaged and limping, were confirmed by the bishop as bells tolled for the dead across the city.

In the weeks after the disaster, the ongoing agony of victims belied a narrative of civic boosterism as the local press touted the city’s rapid recovery. Under pressure to host the Republican National Convention as scheduled in mid-June, St. Louisans worked day and night to patch up the urban infrastructure. “After the storm, the sunshine,” declared the Post-Dispatch on June 3. “In a few weeks, the scars which Nature’s violence inflicted … will be healed.”

The cheerful spin fit a long American pattern of overconfidence before the forces of Nature. Even a storm as big as “the Great Cyclone,” as locals called it, would soon be forgotten by other Americans.

But the lesson of the St. Louis Tornado is that no city is immune from natural disaster. And while technology in some ways has made us safer—there was no weather radar in 1896—it has also made us more vulnerable, increasing our reliance on electricity, for example, to power our digitally dependent society.

That’s why the Biden administration’s announcement this week of $1 billion in new spending to help communities prepare for disaster is welcome news. The federal infusion comes none too soon as climate change has increased the frequency and destructiveness of wildfires, floods, and other hazards. In 2020 alone, the United States experienced a record-breaking 22 disasters costing over $1 billion each.

Recent history has again reminded us of the potential for destruction in major cities. The two costliest U.S. hurricanes on record, Katrina (2005) and Harvey (2017), exposed the extreme vulnerability to flooding in New Orleans and Houston.

Given the urgency and scale of the dangers, some experts have questioned whether the $1 billion in new federal spending is enough. But as Daniel Kaniewski, FEMA’s deputy administrator for resilience in the Trump administration, told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times, it’s “a down payment to reduce future disaster impacts.”

I’d add that universities also have a major role to play. Research institutes such as the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware and the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder are more important than ever as we try to be proactive, rather than merely reactive, in the face of threats to our collective future.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Illustration credit: Library of Congress

Bibliographical Note

Details on the St. Louis Tornado are from Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 93-100. The quote about “rods and spires” is from “Tornadoes and Large Cities,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), August 7, 1887. Daniel Kaniewski is quoted in Christopher Flavelle, “Biden Doubles FEMA Program in Preparation for Extreme Weather,” New York Times, May 25, 2021. For an incisive historical analysis of the most notorious big-city disaster in modern U.S. history, see Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020).

What’s in a Name? On the Use of “Mormon”

When Russell M. Nelson was sustained as president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2018, one of his first official acts concerned the church’s name. The word “Mormon,” whether in reference to the church or its members, was now to be avoided, despite the apparent success of the “I’m a Mormon” public relations campaign begun under Nelson’s predecessor, Thomas S. Monson, in 2010.

Though the new policy made an exception for historical expressions such as “Mormon Trail,” it ruled out “Mormonism” as “inaccurate,” favoring instead “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.” The policy stipulated that references to the church itself should begin with its full name, with later mentions shortened to “Church of Jesus Christ” or “restored Church of Jesus Christ.”

The impulse behind the new directive was understandable. After enduring endless attacks from writers charging that Mormonism is a non-Christian cult, the Latter-day Saint leadership wanted to lay claim to the church’s fundamental Christian identity.

But churches’ efforts to control their names rarely go according to plan. In 1988, three Lutheran denominations merged to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The term “evangelical” was a throwback to the German evangelische Kirche, or “Protestant church.” Leaders of the ELCA thought they could reclaim this sixteenth-century connotation and its root meaning of “evangel” (gospel).

The problem was that in America, “evangelical” was—and still is—synonymous with conservative Protestant. Evangelical Protestants show no signs of ceding the term to the liberal ELCA. Witness the reaction of Southern Baptist conservative Albert Mohler when the ELCA elected its first transgender synodical bishop earlier this month. “I’m just going to state very openly,” Mohler said, “[the ELCA] is not by any kind of theological definition evangelical.”

The ELCA is now in the confusing situation of trying to distinguish itself from its more “evangelical” breakaways such as the North American Lutheran Church, founded in opposition to the ELCA’s ordination of LGBT clergy.

Words assume a life of their own in popular usage, sometimes for the sake of convenience. Mormons are not the only group known by a one-word nickname. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing is more familiar to most people as the Shakers. Members of the Religious Society of Friends are better known as Quakers.

Popular usage also dictates how words are understood. Today’s hyper-partisan political environment has reinforced the evangelical Protestant association that many Americans have with the word “Christian.” If someone says he bought a cake at a Christian bakery, few Americans would take this to mean a bakery run by a liberal, mainline Protestant.

Still, as I tell my students, we can endeavor to be more precise. “Christian” is a term that inevitably begs to be qualified. For starters, there are the most basic distinctions among the faith’s branches: Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. And in the introductory course I teach on the Christian tradition, I add a fourth branch: Mormon Christianity.

All four branches follow Jesus as the Messiah and savior of the world, which is why I regard them as different expressions of a common faith in Christ. But beyond that basic agreement, they make incompatible claims, including Mormonism’s adherence to the additional body of revelation contained in the LDS scriptures.

The uniqueness of that claim is one reason I believe “Mormon” (a term taken from the name of the Nephite prophet in the Book of Mormon) remains the most historically precise shorthand for this American-born branch of Christianity.

While I have no problem with “Latter-day Saint Christianity” and have tried, in deference to the church’s guidance, to use it more often, we still need a handy “-ism” comparable to Catholicism or Protestantism. That’s why I’m not alone among historians (including Latter-day Saint ones) in continuing to refer to “Mormonism” and “Mormon” in scholarly writing.

The church’s directive to use “the Church of Jesus Christ” or “the restored Church of Jesus Christ” as shortened references is unworkable outside of LDS contexts. The Church of Jesus Christ is the whole Christian world—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Mormon. And “restored Church of Jesus Christ,” as the LDS journalist and historian Jana Riess has explained, “posits a theological claim about restoration that it is not journalists’ job to validate or invalidate.”

So as the church’s new regulation on nomenclature approaches its three-year anniversary, I hope the hierarchy will reconsider the benefits of “Mormon” and “Mormonism.” While I can’t speak as an insider, I think the church’s “I’m a Mormon” campaign had it right: this is a name to embrace, not avoid. There’s so much to admire about the tradition—from temple rites such as baptism for the dead, to the exuberant open-endedness of the LDS scriptures, to the warm-hearted generosity of Latter-day Saints themselves—that “Mormon” should be a term of honor, not embarrassment.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Mormon Temples and the Consecration of Place

All religions have holy places, and Mormonism will soon have 20 more.

At the 191st General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 4, 2021, President Russell M. Nelson announced the construction 20 new temples, the most ever proclaimed at one time.  (The previous record was 12, announced in October 2018.) 

LDS temples are reserved for the church’s most sacred rituals, including the eternal sealing of marriages and rites done on behalf of members’ dead ancestors.  The words of the rituals are not written down but are guarded as what Kathleen Flake has called an “oral canon.”

From a religious standpoint, the temple is the center of the world—the axis mundi, to use Mircea Eliade’s term—where the earthly and heavenly planes intersect.  Forty years ago, there were only 20 LDS temples in the world, but in recent years, the church has accelerated temple building in order to allow more of its members to experience the connection point between earth and heaven.

Utah still has more temples than anywhere else; the temples just announced include the 25th for that state. But the newly planned temples also include the first ever in Austria, Belgium, Norway, Mozambique, and Singapore, reflecting Mormonism’s increasingly global character.  Much of that growth has been in Latin America: Mexico will receive its 16th temple in this latest round of construction.

Temples are just one of the ways in which Mormonism consecrates place.  In a revelation received in 1831, the Prophet Joseph Smith announced that Independence, Missouri, is the “center place,” the location of the city of Zion (Doctrine & Covenants 57:2-3).  Though the Saints eventually built other Zions, the millennial expectation that America is the site of the promised New Jerusalem is still expressed in the LDS Articles of Faith.

In his millennial zeal, Joseph Smith took for granted that God’s power comes down in unexpected places, including in his own life as a farm boy in western New York.

Latter-day Saint and Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has written movingly of this consecration of unlikely spots in an essay I assign to my “Mormonism and American Culture” class.  She tells how she loves Joseph Smith’s “ecstatic recital” in Doctrine & Covenants 128:19-21.   In that scriptural passage, the Prophet recounts some of the locations of his visions and revelations:

Now what do we hear in the gospel which we have received?  A voice of gladness!  A voice of mercy from heaven; and a voice of truth out of the earth. . . .

A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county. . . .

The voice of Michael [the archangel] on the banks of the Susquehanna. . . .

The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broome county. . . .

And again, the voice of God in the chamber of old Father Whitmer, in Fayette, Seneca county, and at sundry times, and in divers places through all the travels and tribulations of this Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints!

Ulrich comments: “Joseph’s litany of homely place names, his insistence that the voice of God could indeed be heard on the banks of an ordinary American river or in the chamber of a common farmer, gives his message an audacity and a power that cannot be ignored.”

That same audacity, the vivid belief in what Eliade called the “incursion of the sacred into profane space,” is what drives the current LDS campaign of temple building around the world.  It also kindles my scholarly fascination—this notion that God’s power can be called forth to make even the most unassuming of places holy.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Further Reading

Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (1952; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Kathleen Flake, “‘Not to Be Riten’: The Mormon Temple Rite as Oral Canon,” Journal of Ritual Studies 9, no. 2 (1995): 1-21.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Lusterware,” in A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars, ed. Philip L. Barlow (Centerville, Utah: Canon Press, 1986)

“A Heap of Something Soft,” or How I Got Hooked on Religious Studies

In the fall of 1989, I arrived as a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with dreams of an eventual career in journalism or the foreign service.  I was particularly fascinated by Russia—Mikhail Gorbachev was then pursing the reforms that would end in the Soviet Union’s collapse—but the Russian history course I wanted to take was already closed.  So on a whim, I registered for Professor Peter Iver Kaufman’s Religion 27: Introduction to the History of Christian Traditions.

Professor Kaufman was a whirlwind of energy, and I was blown away.  It was a large lecture class, with auditorium-style seating, and he fairly leaped from place to place, often calling on students at random.

Throwing caution to the wind, I signed up for the Honors section, which involved meeting with him in a small weekly recitation.  There he was no less energetic, spilling much red ink on my papers.  I still laugh in recalling his marginal note when I misspelled the verb tailor as “taylor”: “As in James?” he wrote, referencing one of Chapel Hill’s favorite sons.

But the best part of the class was the way Professor Kaufman made bygone episodes in the history of Christianity come alive through storytelling.

One quirky example has always stuck with me.  It came when he was lecturing on the Donatists, the faction of militant purists who accused some of the early Christian bishops of being too lax in their compromises with the state.

The Donatists’ most famous opponent was Saint Augustine, who was determined to show that they, not the Catholics, were the morally reprehensible ones.  In a letter to Boniface, a Roman general, he recounted the treatment of Maximian, a Catholic bishop, by a violent Donatist mob.  After beating Maximian savagely, they threw him down from a high tower.

Fortunately, according to Augustine, Maximian landed on “a heap of something soft.”  At this point in the narrative, Professor Kaufman paused over Augustine’s words.  “A heap of something soft,” he repeated, with a mischievous grin.

Maximian had landed in a pile of manure.  In all likelihood, it was a pile of human excrement, as the townspeople were accustomed to defecating at the base of the tower.  But in recounting the incident to an imperial official, Augustine had euphemized—softened—his language: Maximian landed in “something soft.”

Why did this so capture my eighteen-year-old imagination?  Perhaps it appealed to my juvenile sense of humor.  But on a deeper level, it revealed to me how historical texts are never sterile but are mixed with complicated human motives.  Even the church’s saints like Augustine were not above posturing, exaggerating, obfuscating, and, yes, euphemizing, as the situation demanded.  Even the saints sometimes wallowed in the dung.

Before the end of that semester, I was hooked on the history of Christianity.  In Professor Kaufman’s class, I fell in love with dissecting historical texts for the surprising stories they reveal.

I still remember the excitement I felt sitting in a study carrel on the eighth floor of UNC’s Davis Library and realizing that I could, with diligent effort, make sense of dense primary sources by Augustine and other greats.  (When I was done highlighting the readings in the photocopied course pack, I suspect there was more yellow on the pages than white.)

It takes a great teacher to light that sort of fire in an undergraduate.  Not surprisingly, Professor Kaufman has received numerous honors over the years, including the 2016 Distinguished Alumnus Award from his graduate alma mater, the University of Chicago Divinity School.  He’s still teaching today in an endowed chair he accepted at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies after his retirement from UNC.

I had other great teachers at UNC—its Department of Religious Studies surely had some of the best professors in the nation—but I credit Peter Kaufman with first drawing me into the program.  As a professor myself, I’ve tried to emulate his model, recognizing that the flash of inspiration for a student can come unexpectedly, even in a heap of something soft.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

Augustine’s “heap of something soft” euphemism occurs in De correctione Donatistarum (ep. 185), circa 417, in Political Writings, ed. E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 190. See also the discussion in Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 527n89, 529.

The Wisdom of Mormon Baptism for the Dead

The opening of the Indianapolis Temple in August 2015 was a milestone for Hoosier Latter-day Saints and a thrill for my IUPUI “Mormonism and American Culture” students, who were able to tour the temple during the public open house.  For me, it was special honor to have as our guide my friend Paul H. Sinclair, an Area Seventy and chairman of the local temple committee.

I’m not a Latter-day Saint, so it was my first time inside an LDS temple, which is normally open only to church members holding a temple recommend, or proof of having met the requirements for participation in temple ordinances.

The most remarkable of these ordinances is baptism for the dead.  In the temple’s baptistry, living members of the church are baptized as proxies (stand-ins) of people who died before the founding of the LDS Church or who, for other reasons, were never exposed to Mormon teachings.  The living person is immersed in water and baptized according to the biblical formula (“in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”) on behalf of the dead person.  Church members may be baptized for several people on the same day, repeating the ritual each time.  Latter-day Saints do not believe that the ordinance makes the dead person a Mormon but simply gives him or her the opportunity to accept the baptism in the afterlife.  This is why Mormons are so interested in genealogy—to identify as many of their ancestors as possible for vicarious baptism.

I have long thought the early Protestants made a mistake in rejecting sacraments for the dead.  In their excessive zeal to root out Catholic “superstition,” Protestants repudiated masses offered for the souls in purgatory.  Masses for the dead were so common in medieval religious practice that some priests were occupied with little else.  As the historian Eamon Duffy has put it, “Catholicism on the eve of the Reformation has been described, with pardonable exaggeration, as a religion of the living in the service of the dead.”

One does not have to believe in a literal purgatory to realize that something was lost when Protestants cut the dead off from sacramental practice of the living.  Duffy, an Irish Catholic, has written movingly of how prayers for the dead knit the living and the dead together in a common communion.  “Prayer for the dead is neither fear nor fire insurance,” he writes, but rather “an exercise in the virtues of faith and hope and love” and “a bridge across the gulf of separation which is death.”

A bridge across the gulf of separation is exactly what Latter-day Saints achieve in the temple work they perform for the dead.  And they have the Bible on their side.  A passing reference by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:29 reveals that some members of the ancient Christian community at Corinth practiced a ritual of baptism for the dead (“Else, what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?”).  The Corinthian rite does not appear to have caught on widely.  The early church father Tertullian admonished readers to “never mind that practice (whatever it may have been),” and until the nineteenth century, most Christians ignored the disputed verse.

But in an 1840 funeral sermon, the Prophet Joseph Smith returned to 1 Corinthians 15:29 and soon thereafter reinstituted the practice of baptism for the dead.  Today, the LDS scriptures contain an astonishing revelation, given at Nauvoo in 1842, in which the prophet elaborated the logic of the ordinance, arguing for a holy interdependence between the living and the dead: “For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect” (D&C 128:18).

It’s a beautiful expression of mutuality, and one that deserves to be more widely known outside of Mormon circles.  Within Protestantism, prayers or rituals for the dead remain mostly absent.

One exception from my own Episcopal tradition is the Eucharistic petition for the faithful departed that reentered the Book of Common Prayer in 1928 (and was preserved in Rite I of the 1979 BCP): “And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy love and service, and to give us grace to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom.”

By remembering the dead sacramentally, we give thanks for them and acknowledge the claims they still make upon our lives.  We also acknowledge the reality, as Duffy puts it, that “death leaves unfinished business—damaged and damaging relationships, misunderstandings unresolved, words of love or apology or explanation unspoken, the need to forgive, and to be forgiven.”  He concludes: “What are we to do with such pain and incompleteness, but place it in the hands of God?”

Among the diverse Christianities of the world, Mormonism offers the boldest answer to the problem of our unfinished business with the dead.  In defiance of death, Latter-day Saints declare that no persons—not even our far-distant ancestors—lie beyond the church’s sacramental intervention.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Further Reading

Eamon Duffy, “Praying for the Dead,” in Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition (London: Continuum, 2004).

Terryl L. Givens, Feeding the Flock: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Church and Praxis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Massey Hamilton Shepherd, The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950).

Stay at the Manger of Christ the Man

Christmas inevitably brings out the Lutheran in me, for while my adoptive Episcopal Church has its own wonderful traditions, my Danish and German forebears took special delight in the annual celebration of Christ’s birth.  “The happy Christmas comes once more,” begins a beloved hymn by the Danish theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig, and those words always come to mind as I am stringing Danish flags on the Christmas tree, in keeping with family custom.

This year, though, perhaps because of the pandemic, I have more solemn words ringing in my ears.  As an undergraduate, I first encountered Martin Luther’s Lectures on Genesis, where he distinguishes between God’s absolute nature, which is unknowable, and the incarnate God in Christ.  He then advises the reader in terms that have always stuck with me:

I follow this general rule: to avoid as much as possible any questions that carry us to the throne of the Supreme Majesty.  It is better and safer to stay at the manger of Christ the Man.  For there is very great danger in involving oneself in the mazes of the Divine Being.

Luther’s “flight to the manger,” as B. A. Gerrish put it, was an antidote to the terror of predestination, or the hidden intentions of God’s inscrutable will. Luther seems strangely prescient in our own time as we confront the terror of a pitiless Nature in the form of a microscopic virus.  What is our own place in nature, to say nothing of God’s?

Modern people, Gerrish noted in a classic 1973 essay, experience Pascal’s fear that humans are “lost in this remote corner of nature.”  As Gerrish wrote: “Here, in the anxiety of finitude and insignificance, modern man experiences the hiddenness of God.  And faith can only mean that in the revealed God he finds the possibility of affirming the meaning of life in spite of this anxiety.”

Luther’s flight to the manger is therefore a conscious decision to embrace life and hope even in the face of agonizing unknowns.  For me as a scholar of religion, staying at the manger of Christ the Man also means resting in the peculiarity of religious traditions even as we recognize that no religion can possibly contain the sum total of ultimate truth.

To be sure, my scholarly doubts about the finality of any single tradition go far beyond Luther’s pious reticence about God’s hidden will.  Even so, like Luther, I find comfort at the manger. I can therefore sing with my Danish ancestors, “The happy Christmas comes once more, / The heavenly Guest is at the door, / The blessed words the shepherds thrill, / The joyous tidings: Peace, good-will.”

© 2020 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Further Reading

B. A. Gerrish, “‘To the Unknown God’: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God,” Journal of Religion 53 (1973): 263-92; reprinted in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Hymnal for Church and Home, 2nd ed. (Blair, Neb.: Danish Lutheran Publishing House, 1928).

Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, in Luther’s Works, vol. 2, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Daniel E. Poellot (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1960).