Foreword

by James Faulconer¶

Bible readers are often handicapped by a lack of knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, the languages of the original manuscripts. They unknowingly read things into scripture that aren’t really there simply because they have no language to go on but their own, even though that was not the language of those who wrote the scriptures. Furthermore, a person can learn Hebrew and Greek but still overlook or misunderstand things because they don’t understand the cultures and histories of the times when various scriptures were written. If they do, they are likely to make a mistake similar to the linguistic one. They are likely to understand the things of scripture in terms of their own culture and history; that is, anachronistically.¶

That mistake is a particularly easy one to make, even for scriptural scholars, since we have inherited an anachronistic way of thinking about such things as history and truth from the Renaissance, and that anachronism has become as omnipresent and invisible to us as water to fish. With the more recent understanding of such things, we implicitly suppose that the new way of thinking is adequate for understanding everything, including the scriptures and prophetic teachings. We, then, read Genesis or the Gospels or Alma as if they were the kinds of books that we would write. We discover in them our thoughts rather than the thoughts of the prophets. We read Genesis, for example, as a quasi-scientific account of the creation rather than as a ritual text designed to remind us that God made the world and, in the process, to help us understand our covenant relationship with him and each other.¶

That difficulty can be particularly keen for Latter-day Saints even when we are not aware of it. We have received a prophetic Restoration of ancient things, yet because of our immersion in the waters of post-Renaissance thought, we usually use that (modernist) way of thinking to understand ancient things. Almost completely submerged as we are in the modern way of thinking, it is difficult to do otherwise. The danger is, however, that we may be unable to see much of the power of the Restoration if we unthinkingly see it as what amounts merely to another variation on European thought since 1500. After all, the scriptures were written before 1500, and they are not European. We may profoundly misunderstand what the scriptures teach about such things as truth, covenant, sin, and atonement, and we may see complications and paradoxes where there are none.¶

In Who Is Truth?, Jeffrey L. Thayne and Edwin E. Gantt offer important help for this problem. They don’t answer the question of how this or that particular doctrine or scripture would be different if we were able to think about the gospel and our lives in more ancient ways. No mysteries are revealed, at least not in the way the word mystery is usually used. Instead, they help us think about the ancient way of understanding things and how it differs from our ordinary understanding. Thayne and Gantt give us an overview of how thinking in a more ancient way changes the way things look and, so, changes our understanding. In turn, that new understanding brightens and freshens the gospel.¶

The understanding of things that Thayne and Gantt suggest is one that has helped me for much of my life. It has deepened my scripture study. It has helped me understand the weight of sin, the meaning of repentance, and the blessing of atonement better. It has helped me recognize the clash between the overarching structure of the modern world and that of the gospel and to find it easier to live the gospel while enmeshed in the world. It hasn’t answered all of my questions, but it has made many disappear, such as how there can be changes in Church teachings and how members of the Church can claim to know that the Church is true. It has helped me to have the faith—the trust—in God necessary when my understanding fails without asking me to abandon God-given reason.¶

Dante tells us that the motto inscribed on the gate of hell is “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” That could also be the motto over the entrance to the conceptual world that has structured our thinking and experience for the last 500 years. For that conceptual world makes faith, ultimately, nothing but irrational belief and religious practice nothing but superstition and magic. In contrast, the motto Thayne and Gantt could use might be “Raise up your hope, ye who enter here.” For the view for which they argue is one that makes faith and religion sensible and hopeful.¶