(Continuing from Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen and previous post Productive Ambiguity IV)
My piano teacher from my high school days was Reid Nibley, Hugh Nibley’s younger brother. Reid was a spiritually reflective but spiritually consummate artist. He taught me that higher sensitivity to music would increase my spiritual sensitivity adding that the Lord had given us nature and the arts “gladden the heart . . . and enliven the soul” (Doctrine & Covenants 59:18-19).
Then I encountered mentors who proceeded from different assumptions. My mission president, whom I loved and admired, introduced me to doctrines about knowing the Lord and relying on the Spirit. I came to prize those doctrines when I saw their fruits in missionary work. He often said, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). He emphasized Christ’s total reliance on the Father: “The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (John 14:10). . . . .
So my “religious problem” reflected the confusion I felt in trying to reconcile the conflicting viewpoints among these mentors. Our professor, West Benlap, said to me after my class presentation, “Well, some of our people have it in their heads, and others have it in their hearts. I think it best if we have it in both places.” I understood that as a call for simple balance. That attitude helped me to reject an either-or approach to my question. I also began to see the problem with each extreme.
For example, I witnessed the conservative extreme of overzealous religiosity. . . . . I was called as a stake missionary companion to one who was consistently “looking beyond the mark”. . . . . Such experiences reinforced my inclination to seek what I would simply call a balanced approach. I didn’t need to make a permanent choice between my heart and my head. I could see that the tension between faith and reason has a very long history. During the time of Christ, he taught his gospel almost exclusively with a Hebrew background. Not many years after His death, Gentiles from the Roman Empire who had a Greek heritage began entering the Christian Church, until Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century.
That huge historical shift merged the Hebrew and Greco-Roman cultures, combining two very different religious traditions. . . . .
These and other experiences reinforced my inclination to seek what I would simply call a balanced approach, I didn’t need to make a choice between my heart and my head. I could see that tension between faith and reason has a very long history. During the time of Christ, He taught His gospel almost exclusively to people with a Hebrew background. Not many years after His death, Gentiles from the Roman Empire who had a Greek heritage began entering the Christian Church, until Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. The huge historical shift merged Hebrew and Greco-Roman cultures, combining two very different religious traditions.
One historian said this merger superimposed the “entire Hebraic tradition upon classical [Greek and Roman] culture.) 40 And because Greek thought heavily influenced the Roman Empire, another wrote, “Here are two races [Greeks and Hebrews], living not very far apart [yet] in complete ignorance of each other. It was the fusion of what was most characteristic in these two cultures—the religious earnestness of Hebrews with he reason and humanity of the Greeks—which was to form the basis of the later European culture.”41
Speaking of this historic watershed, BYU’s Daniel Peterson wrote that the shift of Christianity’s center of gravity from Jerusalem to Athens and the Greek-speaking world gradually cut the New Testament’s ties to its roots in the Hebraic world of the Old Testament. The resulting Greek influence preserved Christ’s words in the New Testament only in the Greek language. “Mormons,”he wrote, “recognize in this [Greek absorption of Christianity] as least one aspect of what they term ‘the Great Apostasy.”’42
Both the restored gospel and American culture contain strands that draw upon both Hebrew and Greek heritage. That helped me see why I had felt the conflicts I did in my student days. For example, most U.S. coins carry two familiar phrases: “Liberty” and “In God We Trust.” The personal “liberty” of the individual was a key element in Greek values. To the Greeks, man was the measure of all things. For Socrates, nothing was more important than to “know thyself,” and this ultimate goal was to ennoble man through reason.
But the coin’s other phrase, “In God We Trust,” would have perplexed an ancient Greek—even though it spoke directly to the Hebrew soul, who put his whole trust in God. The Hebrew pattern sought to glorify God, not man, and one reached his goal through faith and obedience, not through human reasoning. This tiny comparison contains the seeds of countless arguments contrasting reason with faith.
The Restoration values both personal liberty and reason. No other religion of philosophy takes a higher view of man’s nature or potential, as evidenced by such scriptures as “This is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39) and “Man was also in the beginning with God” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29). Other scriptures stress the place of reason: “study it out in your mind” (Doctrine and Covenants 9:8) and “all things denote there is a God” (Alma 30:44) ~~~ Faith I Not Blind, Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen p.48-51
