Q&A with Denver

The following remarks were shared with a regional fellowship meeting held in Arizona on September 22nd, 2004.

Denver Snuffer: If I can talk for just a minute, I take for granted that we’ve got the same time in Arizona as we’ve got in Utah. And I know that that’s only true when we drop that Daylight Savings thing, which won’t happen until November. And I believe that the email alerted me to the time; I just didn’t pick up on that. We have (Steph and I have) an obligation that… We planned to have 90 minutes with you, and it’s now rather, more like 30 minutes—and I don’t want to talk about anything that isn’t relevant or useful to whatever you would like to hear about. And so I’m wondering if there are some things I can respond to, if you can lay out what, or ask questions, and then I can respond directly to a question, as opposed to just talking about something that may not be of value or interest to you.

So does anyone have a question? And I can’t hear unless someone’s up at the microphone.

(Oh, that mic is muted. I can’t hear anything.) 

Moderator: I unmuted it. Sorry.

DS: Yes? 

Question 1: Okay, great. I have a question, several ones to talk about, changes being in the Covenant of Christ, specifically Alma 42 (now Alma 19), basically the first verse. And Alma is talking about Adam and Eve [indecipherable], and he said because [indecipherable]… Because if Adam and Eve had immediately reached out and eaten from the tree of life, they would have lived forever, according to God’s word, having no time for repentance (Alma 19:12). Can you elaborate on that?

DS: At the same time that we’re working on getting the Covenant of Christ text finalized, I’ve been working for years with the Hebrew translation of the Book of Mormon, and we had a discussion about THIS two weeks ago (maybe it was three weeks ago) with the translation group.

The idea of judgment and of displeasing God and of it reaping consequences is a prominent theme in Judaism, and the idea that offending God causes results is a concept that gets repeated both in the Creation account and in the language of later prophets. And one of the things that the translators needed to understand, and it required me to explain to them that you need to go back into Moroni and Mormon, where the effect of the judgment/the feeling of being judged and being condemned is a description of what’s going on inside the person, as opposed to a description of God doing something; and that in the big picture, God ordains laws, and the effect of the law is essentially automatic. He sets the boundary, and if the boundary gets violated, the consequence that follows is whatever had been ordained beforehand. The structure of the story in the Creation about putting a Tree of Life (that would allow you to partake and live forever) and a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (the consequence of which would be death) were incompatible outcomes. You can’t partake of the Tree of Life and live forever while, at the same time, partaking of a tree the consequences of which are death. They’re incompatible. And so when the choice gets made to partake of what the judgment ordained was death, then it necessitates the removal of the option to live forever—because to have the ability to live forever would defy the condition that had been set and violated for the first. And the purpose of the story in Scripture, as I understand it, is to demonstrate that the decrees and the outcomes are irrevocable and that we can’t pursue a course that results in the rejection, condemnation, and exclusion of us from blessings and benefits that are ordained exclusively to be yielded by obedience. And therefore, the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall and the two trees and the choice that was made—and then the consequent barring of access to the tree that would have allowed life to continue indefinitely—is to remind us and to have us soberly accept the validity and the enforcement of God’s commands and God’s will for us. We don’t get to defy that and yet be blessed. We don’t get to set the condition aside and disobey the condition but then still reap a reward as if we’ve been obedient. 

And if that doesn’t cover the concern, then go ahead and clarify what else you want me to address. But I (as I understood the question), that’s how I understand the setup that is being described in those words of Alma.

Question 2: So someone in our fellowship asked, What would you recommend for those that attend both the local fellowship vote [indecipherable]?

DS: If they’re gonna attend, I wouldn’t… I would defer voting until the conference (if they’re gonna attend the conference) and just vote one time and in person. Anyone that plans to attend the conference can make it clear that they’re going to the conference to vote and that, therefore, it’s unnecessary for them to participate in the fellowship vote.

Question 3: There was a common question among us about the delineation between the 2017 Covenant ([pause] yeah, the 2017 Covenant) and the Covenant of Christ as a covenant. Are they separate covenants or are they the same [indecipherable]?

DS: The Covenant of Christ, in order to be accepted and to be of use, needs to be sustained using the same language that got used in the 2017 Covenant. But after (and on the assumption that it will get sustained—which I think is up to the vote, not up to us to impose; it’s up to the people, by their vote, to choose), the effect would be to change the section 158, verse 3, which is the second question—after a sustaining vote, if that happens: Do you have faith in these things and receive the scriptures approved by the Lord as a standard to govern you in your daily walk in life, …accept the obligations established by the Book of Mormon [and the Covenant of Christ] as a covenant, and to use the scriptures to correct yourselves and to guide your words, thoughts, and deeds? It would add “Book of Mormon AND Covenant of Christ” into that second question that’s in T&C [158], because we’re not to forbid using the Book of Mormon, even if we accept this. And so they both would become part of the same “accepting as a standard to guide our life.”

Question 4: It strikes me, considering what’s happening right now with this new Scripture, that actions are being taken/the vote, also [indecipherable] is to King Benjamin’s time, not to put anybody on the spot [indecipherable] …your thoughts…?

DS: Can you ask that question again (the speaker was sort of fluctuating), and let me hear the question a little more clearly? 

Moderator:  Yeah. And Denver, if you mute your end when we’re talking, it will help a lot.

Q4: The question goes to the similarities between what’s happening right now in the movement as a whole (in the remnant movement) and what was happening in King Benjamin’s time. The similarities.

DS: There are probably a lot of parallels that ought to be taken seriously. But ultimately, the only thing that, from my view, that is important is that when the Lord asks that something be done, that we do it, and we do it in the way that He asks. This project, when it was turned over to me, I did not think it would be anything other than a useful supplement/a guide to help us understand/a resource, but not something that would be, ultimately, covenantal. I didn’t learn that the purpose was what the Lord intended until after I had begun work on it for a few days and grew increasingly more impressed with guidance and changes that needed to be made. 

Let me go back and tell about an earlier thing. During the time that the Scriptures themselves were being put together, I learned that the Lord wanted the Book of John to be rendered again without the overlay of the Orthodox Christian views that had informed the original translation; that someone who was a believer in Joseph Smith, in the Restoration, and in what else has been added to us from the revelations of the Restoration, and that the Book of John should be redone and included in the Teachings and Commandments. And so I went out and tried to recruit people who had, in my view, who had the learning/the skill/the ability/the understanding, to see if I could get someone to step up and undertake that effort. And everyone that I felt was qualified turned me down. So I got my Greek Lexicon, I got the side-by-side Greek/English New Testament, and I plunged in to work on the project, only to (early on) reach a point in which there were so many options; the language that the New Testament was written in had a vocabulary that many words didn’t have a two- or three-deep meaning, they had sometimes 20 meanings, and sometimes the meaning of a single word could be modified by the context in which the word got used. And my level of frustration grew so great as I got early into the text that the problem-solving appeared (in my mind) to be far beyond anything I could accomplish (and certainly far beyond anything that could be accomplished within the time frame that the Scripture Project was expected to reach a conclusion). And so despite the fact that it was something that needed to be done, I prayerfully quit: I was apologetic, I let the Lord know I couldn’t get anyone to do it, and I let the Lord know it was beyond my capacity to accomplish, and therefore, I couldn’t do it—and I certainly couldn’t get it done in something less than a decade (and even then, I wouldn’t be confident that I had parsed through the language well enough to be able to accomplish anything).