Nate Oman: Messiness and a thoughtful faith.
John: I have a special place in my heart for those who have studied and become shocked or bewildered by historical stuff they didn't know about or has been uncovered in terms of history or culture and really struggle because I’ve gone through my own phase in life with that.
There's a lot of people who believe in an absolute literalist way and then they feel like their only option is either maintain a literalist belief [perhaps causing them severe distress or cognitive dissonance] or to throw it all away and abandon it.
I’d like to share your perspective of Joseph Smith considering him to be a prophet but still considering the hard things.
Nate: The important thing for me is you can't subscribe to the notion that everything that Joseph Smith says or does is directly dictated by God.
The point is this, generally, I think about revelation and inspiration, the important claim is not that everything is revealed or inspired but enough of it is revealed and inspired to accomplish God's purposes in the world.
I don't expect or demand anything more than that when I'm studying and looking at the past.
I don't expect the past to be like the present. It’s like foreign country where people do things differently. I expect to find things that are strange and odd there.
We live in a fallen messy world and that means that our beliefs about the world and how we understand the world are going to be fallen and messy. That doesn't preclude us having firm convictions and certainty about certain things. It tells me that there are a lot of things that we don't know or don't understand and in the end where we just have to operate on Hope and Faith and that's just fine in my book.
Even there I think that things are always more complicated than they appear and if it turns out that a sort of cartoonish picture of Joseph Smith as a holy inspired automaton is false it's equally false that the cartoonish picture that you get, the notion of Joseph Smith as a sex-crazed fraud is equally false if not more so.
And that what you're going to find is theological understandings that are different than the ones you have now but are familiar and your belief in some sense our continuation and modifications of those unfamiliar and you're going to find practices that are very very different than they are now and can be shocking but are not the sort of cartoonish things that you might suppose that they are.
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