Love wins and Charity loses

[juliann]

7 hours ago, European Saint said:

Only Hancock can answer for the minutiae you demand, but I -- as a family member and outside observer -- have listened to Hancock's talk, read the transcript, and read Hodges' blog posts and comments for years (so yes, not just the one). Honest question: has Hancock not captured the thrust -- however subtle -- of Hodges' argument? I believe he has, and I believe an objective third party (not Hancock's offspring or Hodges' bowling partner) would state as much.

First, I appreciate your more respectful tone. Second, I have not deviated from my thinking Hancock unfairly represented Hodges, to the point that he maligned him. No, he has not captured what was said. The more you disclose, the more it is evidence that this really isn't about that blog. It is about disliking someone.

Quote

 

The larger question is why, in a post about Hancock's FM talk, is the entire focus of discussion attempted to be limited (rather fervently, I might add) to the Hodges section (and not, well, the entire talk)? Do you folks disagree with Hancock's warnings about the incursions of the Love Wins mentality into the church membership? Do you agree that this is a negative development? Why or why not?

 

 

Again, here you are asking questions while never having responded to mine. I explained before that this blog became the focus because it was a short blog. It was also the first "young scholar" that was attacked, thus the most logical to address first. I have not read Miller's book and won't be for the purposes of a message board, but I do intend to move on to the next blog mentioned.

I don't know who you consider to be "you folks." I don't find talking in memes, such as "love wins" conducive to understanding or engagement. That tells me that whatever follows is going to be highly subjective and probably disrespectful from the get go. What I find most difficult in this maze is working out how anyone can support the church while demeaning scholars that church employs and pays! Does that not represent the incursion of another kind of "mentality into the church membership?"  One can now accuse others of not supporting the church while not supporting the church? Pres. Uchtdorf and Elder Oaks, the two apostles whose names have been used to justify this behavior, sit on the BYU Board of Education!! What more needs to be said about the status of these scholars? 

Quote

If you agree, well, I think the topic just might merit careful thought and discussion... but that hasn't happened here (we might ask who among the commenters is/are dodging the core issue here?).

You have dodged every question of mine while I respond to yours. 

Quote

Discussing replies to the aforementioned questions, IMO, is what an intelligent conversation would look like. What I read above is instead the Olympic Games of hair splitting. And not the slightest bit charitable to my father, I might add (Why would he doctor quotes? Why would he make up quotes? I see no motivation in the man of integrity I know and love to do so. He has no bone to pick with any of the scholars he references, but he recognizes the bifurcations from the Gospel in their arguments about what love means.)

When my name is associated with what happens on FM turf, I have a duty to "hair split." (There you go again being insulting while claiming to want to have an intelligent discussion, BTW.)  It matters little to me why quotes were doctored and embellished, it only matters that FM has a talk up where it has been done. I also see the men he has done this to (it is not unreasonable to assume he has done it to them all) as men of integrity. But what does that have to do with behaving with integrity ourselves?  You see, I can also say that Hancock bifurcates from the gospel in his approach if that is where you want to take this. 

This sounds a lot more like Blair than what I heard from Hancock:  https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2007/04/the-tongue-of-angels?lang=eng  It does no good to have the "right" thoughts if we are not drying tears, healing hearts, elevating lives and building hope and confidence. That is what FM strives for. It doesn't mean we agree with everything somebody thinks on every issue. 

Quote

So, brothers and sisters, in this long eternal quest to be more like our Savior, may we try to be “perfect” men and women in at least this one way now—by offending not in word, or more positively put, by speaking with a new tongue, the tongue of angels. Our words, like our deeds, should be filled with faith and hope and charity, the three great Christian imperatives so desperately needed in the world today. With such words, spoken under the influence of the Spirit, tears can be dried, hearts can be healed, lives can be elevated, hope can return, confidence can prevail. 

 

Edited September 3, 2016 by juliann

[Gray]

On 9/1/2016 at 5:01 PM, Scott Lloyd said:

OK. 

I gather from this, then, that you can't identify or document any point or instance in history when the Church of Jesus Christ embraced or approved of homosexual behavior and, correspondingly, any indication of it reversing course on such an alleged policy of approval. 

I would say for the first 100 years or so there was no policy or doctrine in the church around homosexuality.

 

Quote

I suspected as much. 

Furthermore, it would seem that Church leaders began to issue guidance on this subject about the time it began to be a public issue in America. No real surprise there. 

But to assume this was engendered by sectarian Christendom is to engage in both circular reasoning and the post hoc fallacy. 

Past doctrines justifying the priesthood ban were directly lifted from American Christian apologetics justifying slavery. I believe the same is true of LDS positions regarding gay people, as they postdate fundamentalist Christian positions and echo the same language.

If you'd like to discuss further, let's do so in a separate thread so as not to derail this one.

Edited September 4, 2016 by Gray

[Scott Lloyd]

Deleted because of screwed up formatting. (Sometimes this new board software makes me so mad!)

Edited September 5, 2016 by Scott Lloyd

[European Saint]

On September 3, 2016 at 2:09 PM, juliann said:

It does no good to have the "right" thoughts if we are not drying tears, healing hearts, elevating lives and building hope and confidence. That is what FM strives for.

I endorse this message.  I have no idea how much good you've done in your life, just as you have no idea how much good I've done in mine. This is why we cannot and should not presume to be in a position to judge each other's degree of righteousness. (For the record, I do not question the integrity of the scholars whose arguments have been critiqued by my father, but I believe they are mistaken in their embrace of love wins... just as they presumably feel regard my failure to do so.)

What I don't think is appropriate is using the aforementioned quote as a weapon, meaning, "BEING charitable is what matters, so let's not talk about questions of right and wrong." Interestingly enough, this is the very strategy that Hancock addressed/critiqued in his FM talk.

It is my prayer that we as a church will more widely and more fully "lift up the hands that hang down" and "strengthen the feeble knees" by getting out of our comfort zones, serving others where they are, and standing for what's right instead of what's popular.

 

[Calm]

3 hours ago, European Saint said:

I believe they are mistaken in their embrace of love wins... just as they presumably feel regard my failure to do so.)

You still haven't demonstrated that Blair actually embraces your version of "love wins" as you claim so we are not even to the point you should be saying "they are mistaken in their embrace" etc. if you are including him in "they".

Quote

"BEING charitable is what matters, so let's not talk about questions of right and wrong."

Blair from what I have read and quoted above clearly approves of talking about things people disagree about and that most likely includes "right and wrong".

Edited September 5, 2016 by Calm

[juliann]

6 hours ago, European Saint said:

  (For the record, I do not question the integrity of the scholars whose arguments have been critiqued by my father, but I believe they are mistaken in their embrace of love wins... just as they presumably feel regard my failure to do so.)

 

 

This is question begging and you are right back where you started.

I will take this as a concession that you have not and cannot provide any support whatsoever that the scholars that have been slurred embrace some hashtag that this talk defined and pinned on them. 

[BHodges]

Calm, I appreciate you and others taking the time to read my blog post, identifying ways that it contradicts Ralph Hancock's reading of it. The transcription published by FairMormon differs in a few significant ways from the remarks he actually delivered at the conference, but his modifications still misattribute ideas to me and he still pulls implications out of my writings that my blog post itself accounts for and contradicts. 

I transcribed the portion of RH's address from the video since the transcript altered it without calling attention to the alterations or correctly attributing any of my writings. Here's a portion of the transcript where RH tries to get at the crux of the matter, followed by my quick response. The transcript may have an error here or there (you'll want to compare it with the recording), but I believe it is quite accurate.  

Quote

RH: Hodges goes on to defend the equivalence between the two girl's cases, one favoring real marriage, the other marriage equality, by invoking love for one another as "the only reliable indicator of our Christian discipleship." Now you see that I've posted this quotation on the slide. "The only reliable, the ONLY reliable, the only RELIABLE indicator." Of course, the statement itself is incontrovertible, but the whole question concerns the status of particular commandments and principles in relation to the great and ultimate idea of love.

This is the first instance where RH changed the meaning of my words by literally changing my words—taking out some words and inserting a word I didn't use as a key piece of evidence for his own interpretation. I did not write that "love" is the "only reliable indicator" of "our Christian discipleship." Here's the actual quote from the blog post: 

Quote

"I believe that how we treat each other—especially when it comes to the things we disagree most about—is a generally reliable indicator of the level of our Christian discipleship. As John 13.35 has it, 'By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.'"

So the New Testament says "if you have love one to another, other people will see you are my disciples" (John 13.35). I claim that the way we treat each other is one way, a "generally reliable indicator," by which others can see our devotion to Christ—the level of our discipleship. For whatever reason, his PowerPoint slide that begins with this quote doesn't misattribute the word "one" to me, but verbally he quoted me as saying it.

Here's another example where RH changes my meaning, this time by omission instead of insertion:

Quote

RH: Hodges disposes of this question with this decisive affirmation. "If we can be united on this one single idea, we will be united in the one thing that ultimately matters." The one thing. There's one thing that ultimately matters. 

RH removed an important word out of the sentence and then didn't include my very next sentence. Both of those things overturn his interpretation. My post says:

Quote

"If we can be united on this one single idea [the importance of remembering common ground and loving each other despite disagreements], we will be united in the one thing that ultimately matters today. We're all still learning." 

This is important because his critique is built on the idea that I would propose a "secular" or "liberal" "love wins" argument, an "aggressive" position he says, rooted in sheer relativism, as though I believe or would argue that ultimate truth is always inaccessible, or perhaps that it really doesn't even exist. Removing my temporal qualifier ("today") changes the meaning of my sentence in the direction that favors his misreading. I'm not making a metaphysical claim about ultimate Truth or stating an epistemological law in the blog post as RH appears to believe. I'm referring to the fact that each of us grows, learns, and develops at different paces in life. Therefore, patience and love are the oil that can keep the engine running until all the Truth gears lock into place. 
 

Quote

RH: Hodges, citing scripture, he thus counsels us to regard all opinions on matters such as gay marriage and abortion as personal perspectives that admit of no certainty and that don't ultimately matter anyway. 

I neither believe nor make such counsels or claims, especially that such things "don't ultimately matter anyway." Again, as the very next sentence observes, "We’re all still learning." If these things didn't ultimately matter I wouldn't argue that we would need to ultimately learn them. In other words, there are many things any particular person may have a testimony of in line with the teachings of the gospel as the Church espouses them, and some things that they might not. (Notice RH selected only two of the examples from my post, abortion and gay marriage, when I also included things like gun rights and whether mothers should work outside of the home.)

Ideally, I believe, we all work toward Truth throughout our lives—some make faster progress than others, perhaps, but the general idea is that we all continue to advance in our understanding. Far from truth "not mattering anyway," an idea RH incorrectly attributes to me, I understand it to be one of the grand purposes of mortality to increase in "intelligence," as Joseph Smith taught.

I go on in the blog post itself to explain that people who differ from our Church on any particular belief likely already feel beleaguered. I'm suggesting that forcefully pushing someone on any particular point may extinguish some of the light they already had a glimpse of. Truth can be spoken of by the spirit in love, or it can be spoken naked on its own. I'm arguing that the former way is better than the latter way, not that there isn’t any Truth that matters, but that the way we communicate about things—the medium—is as important as the message. When the content and spirit of communication align I believe the Spirit has the best opportunity to testify of the truth. And what's more, sometimes people can come to a knowledge of certain truths peripherally, even just by the general love and good influence of someone in their life without that person trying to argue with them. I believe there's a certain ecology about preaching the gospel and that we should strive to maintain good balance as best we can. Regardless of what exactly the matter of difference of view is, especially when we have other things in common and especially when there are a variety of ways we can teach our beliefs that don't involve aggression or arrogance.

Quote

RH: Since we don't have perfect knowledge, it seems we should consider love to be the only absolute truth. And this, then, is a love that has been severed from any opinion we may have about such things as commandments and purposes. 

RH repeatedly tries to highlight an irony in my post—the idea that I'm saying "we can't know anything—except one thing: that love is all that matters." That's not my belief and that's not the message I'm conveying in the blog post.

Quote

RH: Of course, if Mr. Hodges were merely saying that all our dealings with other human beings, especially our fellow saints should be informed by love, then he would be saying something very true and very uncontroversial. 

Yes, that is a very big part of what I was merely saying. It's my main point, really. (And for me it's not a matter of whether what I'm saying is "controversial" or not, it's about whether we—myself included—are successful in implementing this way of living together. It's hard to do. Writing and talking about it is a way of reminding us, not least of all myself, of its importance.)

Quote

RH: But he is saying more than that. In the guise of claiming, in the notion of love, a higher ground above all mere opinions liberal and conservative, he is in fact laying out what seems to me an aggressively liberal position, a position of effective relativism. 

Here I'm depicted as operating in bad faith. I'm making a claim, RH says, under a "guise." I suggest he detects a guise because he's trying to read between the lines of my blog post, and he ends up seeing things that aren't there. He believes he knows the truth behind the post which I've hidden under a guise, and he will undertake to expose it. He told me he knows the implications of my argument better than I do. But he does not succeed in actually representing my argument in the first place. His imported assumptions twist my blog post into something that it's not. My words don't line up with his interpretation (they actually directly counter it) and so he invokes a "guise" to help account for the discrepancy. One among many statements in my post that counters the charge of "aggressively liberal" relativism is this:

Quote

"If you’re right and they’re wrong, you can rest assured they will find out the truth someday. And if you’re wrong and they are right, you will, too. But either way you’ll be bonded together through your love for each other in spite of your differences. And you don’t have to wait to find out about that."

I explicitly argue, as Calm and other posters  observed, that there is a right and a wrong. I'm writing about how we deal with our individual limited understandings in a fallen world. I'm arguing about the way we should treat each other in spite of it, not about the existence of Truth—which I affirm in the post itself—which I believe we can access enough of, receive enough of, to be saved, exalted, to progress, etc.

But nowhere do I suggest that all views are equally good, reasonable, likely, or that in the name of love we should ignore all differences and just accept or believe anything we want, etc.

I'm talking specifically about how we can become alienated from each other by the way we treat each other or how we can draw together as disciples of Christ. Paul's letters in the New Testament talk so often about trying to bind a fractured community. That's what I'm talking about. And how can we know that such charity itself is a true principle? By living it and tasting its fruit. Perhaps this is a hard saying that some people have a hard time accepting. We can have great knowledge about charity and the way it can bless our lives and help make Christ manifest in our midst, and show others that we are Christ's disciples, today. Knowledge about it isn't really the key, though. Implementing it is. Show me your faith my your works, etc. 

Quote

RH: We can't know if Elder Andersen is right, or if the girl favoring gay marriage is right, so let's put them on the ground of equal ignorance of the ultimate truth. Since we could be wrong about any particular subject—but not it seems about something called love, we can be wrong about everything but that—our beliefs concerning the content of God's love for us—that is, concerning his plan for us—must not enter into the way we show love.

Again, my blog post directly contradicts RH's interpretation. For example:

Quote

"I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t talk about our disagreements, either. I’m suggesting that our love for each other should be manifest in so many other ways that such conversations will be saturated with it already. I’m suggesting that our love shouldn’t be made conditional upon their agreement with us on any particular point."

This is perhaps the most important paragraph in the entire blog post. It is the crux of my argument but it didn't make it into RH's analysis, presentation, or edited transcript, even after I contacted him to inform him of this fact.

Quote

RH: If we are ignorant of the ultimate truth, then how can we really object to anyone's preferences, since all these preferences are equal? And why would we ever presume to offer correction to someone who just happens to find themselves "in a minority position within the church." 

I don't claim that all preferences are equal because I don’t believe they are.

Quote

RH: So I conclude that Blair Hodges's plain debunking of knowledge—particularly knowledge of moral standards in favor of love, his severing of love from knowledge of right and wrong, good and bad—is a clear example of the appeal for Mormons of the secular "Love Wins" idea.

I think most reasonable readers will be able to see now that my blog post isn't a "plain debunking of knowledge," or even an attempt to be one (I'm not even sure what that would entail. What is a plain debunking of knowledge?).

My blog post does not entail RH's interpretation of it. I do not "sever love from knowledge of right and wrong, good and bad," but rather I make the claim that love is intimately bound up in right and wrong, good and bad—and especially in the ways we talk about these things.

As I have demonstrated, according to a transcript of RH's own words, he changes things I wrote in order to align with his interpretation and he ignores other things I wrote wherever they head off his interpretation. I'm flummoxed as to how he could so badly misread my blog post. I see nothing salvageable in the section of his presentation that discusses my blog post. I didn't listen to the rest of his presentation after it was clear how much he misrepresented me. I can't speak for the others he interacted with, but if he handled them in the same way I wouldn't trust what he wrote.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts about it. I'm moving on to other things. Thanks again to my friends who read my post and recognized the problems in RH's interpretation. Thanks to my friends at FairMormon—Juliann included—who recognized these problems and have been very kind about the whole situation. I was happy to see that the Deseret News coverage did not highlight portions of the address that constituted direct criticism of myself or others. As I've outlined here, that would have perpetuated inaccurate (and I would argue, unfair) attacks on fellow church members. Now let's make sure ourselves to avoid personal attacks on RH. We should think of him as a fellow church member in need of as much grace as we're in need of. 

Edited September 5, 2016 by BHodges
adjusted a point of grammar, fixed spelling, cleaned it up, etc.

[Scott Lloyd]

15 hours ago, Gray said:

I would say for the first 100 years or so there was no policy or doctrine in the church around homosexuality.

 

Right, so the Church of Jesus Christ never had a position approving of homosexual behavior, contrary to your insinuation.

Quote

Past doctrines justifying the priesthood ban were directly lifted from American Christian apologetics justifying slavery. I believe the same is true of LDS positions regarding gay people, as they postdate fundamentalist Christian positions and echo the same language.

Again, this is fanciful conjecture amounting to indulging in the post hoc fallacy and circular reasoning at the same time. (Wow! Two for one. Good job!)

 

Quote

If you'd like to discuss further, let's do so in a separate thread so as not to derail this one.

I think not. It's clear that your argument lacks substance and thus does not merit discussion.

Edited September 5, 2016 by Scott Lloyd

[Calm]

Thanks Blair for weighing in and sharing your POV.  I also am bewildered by the misreading.  Your blog, in my opinion, was very focused on the one issue of dealing with each other in love even when disagreeing so I don't understand the insertion of other concepts not discussed by you.

Hopefully this is now settled.