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I always figured that part in the book of Mormon was Mormon reporting some local speculation - the urban legend of the day. He admits they don't know, but in a sort of "wouldn't it be nice" kind of way.
Added: It's little touches like that that are some of my favorite parts of the Book of Mormon. The leaders dealing with various members refusing to deal with the poorer members, or else creating prayer towers for everyone to watch them, or else the "bad guys" being the ones who are faithful and kind to their families. It's a nice dose of "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Mormon sticking in the bit about Moses not actually dying but being taken up by the Lord, but putting a disclaimer on it, feels like the sunday school teacher tossing his tie over his shoulder and telling a three-nephite story. Very human. I love it.
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Part of the point about Moses is that he was alone when he died. There were no witnesses to his death or his burial, and so nobody really knew. They assumed he had died, because he was all alone in the desert at the age of 120. And he may very well have died. But some people (among them, many Mormons) aren't so sure.
One reason has to do with the Mormon belief that tangible, physical bodies are important, and even required, for some things. Sometimes, for instance, God sends angelic messengers to do something that requires that the messenger have a physical body.
But before the resurrection of Christ, there was no resurrection at all. The only way around this was to have a messenger who had been a living person, but hadn't died. Instead, like Elijah, the person was "translated," or changed and taken physically into the presence of God without tasting death. As far as we know, this has always been an extremely rare occurrence.
In LDS theology we believe we know of handful of translated beings: Elijah and Enoch are the two most well-known, as well as all of the inhabitants of Enoch's city of Zion. Then there's the three Nephites and the apostle John, who are a special case and may not actually have been translated.
Back to Moses. He was sent as a messenger on at least one occasion before the resurrection of Jesus, at the Transfiguration. On that occasion, he appeared to Jesus, Peter, James and John. He was accompanied by Elijah, who was definitely translated. This makes a lot of Mormons think Moses probably was as well.
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Q, assuming you mean my local congregation, the one I currently attend is somewhere over 200; the attendance figures aren't posted on the wall there. It's a college congregation, though. The main churches I grew up in hover around 50 (for my earliest years, and the one my family at home now attends) and 150 (the one my stepfather attended and that we went to for a good while until they started having trouble picking a good preacher).
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guys, it is interesting to read the posts. Being new here, makes it hard to post - since I am not sure what y'all have posted before.
Back to the (non)-instrumental thing. I think we should also look and the historical context. What I mean is that there is enough evidence that back in NT times no music was used as part of worship - in contrast of pagan worship services, where music was used rather vehemently. In the works of the Apostolic fathers (according to my limited knowledge) we find no mention of the instrumental music used in worship of early Christians. We also know, that the instruments (such as organ) were not introduced into the church (and I mean predominantly catholic church) until sometime around 1000 AD, 1000 years after the church was established! Then, look at the Eastern orthodox churches (church of Russia, Greece etc.) Up till today they do not use instruments. We may and as a matter of fact should ask why? Could it be, that once the Eastern and Western church did split (Great schism) the Eastern churches stuck with no music, as it was for the first 1000 years and the western church started introducing music, then celibacy and all sorts of things? Something to think about.
I believe that we have enough historical evidence supporting the non-instrumental worship in the church.
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Sure we have historical evidence (which, as I said, seems the better argument). However, like you said, it's a contrast to the pagan worship of the time. Can we say it's a preference of God when we can't find any dictum to back that up? Or is it a move by the early church to be what they were literally intended to be, "the called out ones"?
And as such, can we really say there's a call to non-instrumental worship today? I mean, heck, the only pagans I know are pretty acappella, not being prone to using organs or pianos.
Okay, so I'm being a little snarky. It's just that this seems to be a moot point. When we talk about the "Restoration" movement, what in the world are we trying to restore? The forms of worship found in the early church, the church of the first century, or do we want to restore what Christ prayed that the church would BE? It seems like we want to take the church at Rome or the church at Corinth and become them again. Well, we can't. They're dead. And reading the letter to the Romans and the letters to the Corinthians, I can't say that I'd even want to be those churches. They had some serious issues.
So much of what we in the Restoration movement get caught up in watchdogging each other about really seem like non-issues. Not worth all the divisiveness and disfellowshipping, that's for sure.
Personally, I think it's come down too much to being about what we like or dislike. Well, y'know what? I don't like the idea of hell, either, but I believe there is one. I don't like that Christ had to die for me, but I'm thankful he did. It's not about what I like or dislike, and we really need to sort that out before we go trying to pass off preference and caution as matters of doctrine.
Just my overbearing $0.02 of frustration,
Q.
[edited to add that this is largely addressed to fellow c of C'ers, that I'm not trying to press my views on anyone and that I don't expect others to start with the same set of assumptions (i.e. that God exists, that the Bible is his word, etc) that I do and that it's about more than 'other-ness']
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"When we talk about the 'Restoration' movement, what in the world are we trying to restore?"
Unless the Churches of Christ make sure their members wear garments of natural fiber and unspun wool, and don't have any forged steel or polymers in any of their churches, we can safely assume that they don't take this restoration thing all that seriously.
Me, I don't understand the appeal; it sounds rather grim, humorless, and self-defeatingly nostalgic. But if your goal with any religion is to foster a sense of "other-ness," it probably does that pretty well.
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When did Christ or any of the New Testament writers mention unspun wool or natural fibers? The restoration movement (the specific historical 19th-century movement the churches of Christ came from, I mean) was never at attempt to restore biblical Judaism. You can criticize restorationists on various levels, but that particular argument doesn't hold water.
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Plus, Paul kinda got on to some Christians for trying to restore Judaism. Okay, okay: for "judaizing" -,they got into more than a little trouble for trying to make people Jewish before they could be Christian: circumcision, holidays, the whole bit.
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"When did Christ or any of the New Testament writers mention unspun wool or natural fibers?"
My point is that we know spun wool and polyester were not present at any early Christian service -- know this, in fact, with far more certainty than we know that instruments may or may not have been present. So if we're going to ban instrumentation because the Bible doesn't explicitly mention the presence of instruments, it logically follows that other things which must NOT have existed at the time ALSO be kept out of the ceremonies -- like, say, the English language.
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Electric lighting would be right out as well.
And congregationists would probably need to leave their glasses, watches, zippered items, etc. at the door.
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But of course, such arguments could be refuted easily enough by claiming that while the use of musical instruments is directly related to the act of worshipping, the composition of the congregationalist's clothing, their light source, and their vision aids, and their method of keeping their clothes fastened are not.
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I think deciding which acts are "essential to worship" is a purely arbitrary thing, don't you?
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Of course it's arbitrary. That doesn't mean it's random.
We use music as worship. "Hymns of praise" and all that. We don't use lights or eyeglasses or shoes as worship.
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But light, eyeglasses, and shoes all facilitate individual acts of worship -- like congregation, hymnal reading, and dancing -- in the same way that instruments facilitate music.
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He obviously doesn't understand the question of the Restorationists. It isn't about going back to living standards, but worship practices. Clothing can be a serious question if under the right context. There is no hint of the elaborate cloaks worn by many Catholic Priests, or the black suits of Mennonites as worship necessities. According to pictures of the second and third century, worshippers wore simple white tunics with only traces of elaberations.
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Tom and Noemon, we know from the way Christianity spreads as recorded in the Scriptures that there was a good deal of cultural variation between churches. Jews, Greeks, Romans, Galatian Celts, and a wide variety of other ethnicities had members who accepted Christ. It hardly seems that they were all required to take on a single cultural identity, or that the spread could have continued if they were--and we know that they were not required to become Jewish, the most likely possibility if a cultural shift were necessary. On the other hand, there must have been similarities between congregations or they would have been mutually unrecognizable. The business of a serious restorer is to work out what is intrinsic to the religion and what was simply a carryover from someone's culture. In the process, naturally mistakes will be made; nonetheless, some things are more obvious than others.
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Nevermind, I learned about Seventhday Adventists and decided I'm not one. Now I just have to figure out what I am.
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My beliefs are inchoate and hard to explain--I'll post something on that in the next couple of days.
quote: like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day -- we relive the same life over and over and over again. I'm not sure whether this is punishment (by whom? for what?), a chance to better ourselves (again, by whom and for what?), or purely random expansion and contraction of matter/energy.
ClaudiaTherese, that's a fascinating belief. Belief in reincarnation is one thing, but yours is a very evolved working-out of it. What do you base that on, just feelings? Also, the book Replay deals with these themes you are talking about, similarly to Groundhog Day but of course more serious. I liked that book immensely, and feel it has been unjustly over-looked. I read it several times, of course.
quote: It's occurred to me that if sequential time is just a matter of perception, there is no reason why multiple incarnations of a person couldn't exist in what we perceive as the same time. In fact, we could all be one being, in much the same way that a ball of yarn appears to be composed of discrete loops of yarn, but is actually just one long length of yarn looped around itself.
Philosophers (Hindus? I know next to nothing about Hinduism) and science fiction writers have explored this and similar themes, including Heinlein. If sequential time is only an illusion, its also possible that our individual consciousnesses flit from event to unconnected event disjointedly and non-sequentially without any awareness on our part, and the "operating system" of the Universe supplies context and continuity, like a computer OS taking care of all the number-crunching and memory management with out the human user knowing or caring what's going on in the background. Except for hackers. I think Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five has this as a theme, but I've never read it, only seen parts of the good but confusing movie.
One of the nuttier 20th century physical/cosmological theories involved the idea that the Universe in it's entirity could consist of one particle, possibly an electron endlessly shuttling back and forth through time and space, with the illusion of 10^78 particles somehow generated via hidden quantum effects. It is implied or supported by unexplained time symmetries in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity equations, quantum mechanics and maybe Maxwell's electomagnetic equations as well. But nobody really believes its true, as far as I know. If is true, I call dibs. Hey, you kids get off my electron!!
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Noemon, that's intriguing. Sort of a space-time worm over four dimensions, with 3D plane slices through the "ball of yarn"? What brought this to your mind?
I have had more episodes of "deja'vu to the nth power" feelings than I can count. I.e., "I've remembered remembering this before, over and over again," like a long reflected hallway of mirrors. The power of those feelings to shape my understanding of the world is one of the main reasons I can't fault irrational faith. At least, I can't look down on it in others.
Morbo, that's pretty much where the conviction came from for me. I like the One Electron theory, though. "One nation, under The Electron, indivisible ..." Puts a whole new spin on patriotism, eh? Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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You should read Replay, CT. If I can dig it up I could mail it to you, or give it to someone who comes to Wenchcon to pass it on. Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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I'm not getting from scripture, but from the hymns. The words of the hymns of praise and the participation of the congregation. For many modern congregations, the music (especially on Sundays on which the Euchrist is not served) is one of the few participatory parts of the service. It's one of the reasons people come together - to sing as a group. So, it's part of the worship.
It's like prayer - whether or not you pray by candle or lightbulb doesn't seem essential, but how you address your formal prayers (kneeling and saying "Dear Lord" as opposed to, say, kicking back in a chair, putting your feet on the desk and thinking, "Yo - God-dude") does.
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But how are you qualified to judge, kat? Surely the decision that musical instruments are more important than lightbulbs is founded on nothing but our gut feelings and scriptural assumptions -- and if we're going by gut feelings and scriptural assumptions, what's the POINT of Restorationism?
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Not the instraments - the music. Singing in church is like prayer - an integral part of the service. Hymns of praise. Songs unto the Lord. "Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee." That's addressing the Lord.
The instraments part I don't know about, but there is definitely a case for the form of music being like prayer - a part of worship and personal address about which the Lord could justly have an opinion - rather than like electricity.
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But unless you believe God's nature changed between the Old and New Testament how can you read the Psalms and believe that God doesn't approve of instruments used in worship?
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quote: unless you believe God's nature changed between the Old and New Testament
I would seem that one would have to believe that either the bible is flawed, or god did change from an angry activist god, to a loving isolationist god. But of course, since the bible states god to be perfect, he must also be un-changing. It is not possible to be more-perfect.
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Are you asking me? I don't think that. Based on their premise, though (wanting to return to form described in New Testament, relying only on New Testament to do so), the answer to the debate is not axiomatic.
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Rob, you are assuming that there is a single "perfect" state and that any change would have to be from better to worse or vice versa. I am not sure that is the case.
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Macc, that is my assumption. I would qualify it with the idea that due to God's foreknowledge of all time and events, for he/she/it to change over time, based on what people do, would seem to be an indication of less than perfect knowledge, or a fundamental change in the "values" of God.
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I am not too certain about perfect foreknowledge either. At the moment I am looking toward what is sometimes called "open theism". Ever heard of it?
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I'm having trouble finding one that isn't strongly against it. There is an organizational site for it but it is under reconstruction at the moment.
Here's a very comprehensive anti-open-theism site: Open Theism. I haven't yet looked it over in detail, but it seems to be from a Calvinist point of view which I have little sympathy with.
Worth noting: open theism is not a doctrinal position espoused by the churches of Christ as a group, although sometimes individuals such as T.W. Brents have spoken out in favor of it.
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Thats a very interesting concept. It certainly seems much more reasonable than most organized religions' views of God. It would seem that as humans gain more and more understanding about the world and the laws that govern it, they revise their view of God. I cannot help but think that this all leads to the ultimate revision, he does not exist. Of course I am not here to convince you of this, I am merely curious about people's views on this trend.
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Rob, naturally I expect humans to revise their view of God, as we certainly are not all-knowing. Our knowledge of him is limited to what he chooses to reveal, so of course there are many points on which we must make guesses. I don't see any reason why this revision should necessarily lead to a rejection of God's existence, though it seems the anti-open-theism folks tend to agree. Posts: 1041 | Registered: Feb 2002
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I think Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five has this as a theme, but I've never read it, only seen parts of the good but confusing movie.![[Mad]](mad.gif)
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