Today my wife brought home the "2006 Outline for Sharing Time and the Children's Sacrament Meeting Presentation." Catchy title, huh? It is a fairly bland tribute to the principle that LDS people should not be allowed to think for themselves, since now even Sharing Time for Primary children demands a scripted outine.
And lest the children be led astray by all those ignorant adults with their false doctrines, this fun little booklet provides a doctrinal glossary that comes straight from Elder Packer's greatest hits. We all know what a fun-loving guy Elder Packer is. Here are the items we are not to be in confusion about. I add my comments in square brackets:
Accountability: Accepting responsibility for our actions [because the atonement just ain't gonna cover them].
Agency: The ability to choose and act for one's self. Use the term agency rather than free agency to describe our freedom to choose [because we don't want that freedom to sound too free]. Agency is the term used in the scriptures (see D&C 29:36; Moses 7:32).
Apostacy [one that every child can fully grasp]: A falling away from the gospel of Jesus Christ [as presently constituted in manuals such as this one].
Heavenly Father's Plan: Our Heavenly Father presented the plan of life and salvation in the Grand Council in Heaven. Only one [my emphasis] plan was presented. Jehovah (Jesus Christ) sustained the plan of our Heavenly Father [hopefully with a great deal more enthusiasm than that which I have when I 'sustain' items of business]. Lucifer (the devil, Satan, [el Diablo, ol' Scratch]) attempted to change the plan [damn him to hell anyway].
Jehovah: Jesus Christ, also known as Jehovah [in case you didn't get it the first time], is the God of the Old Testament [thanks to the wonders of non-LDS theology as imported into the LDS faith by James E. Talmage].
These items are marked with an asterisk (*) throughout this outline [whew!].
So there it is. No big deal, right? Sure. But I'll write a little about it for kicks and giggles.
First, free agency has been 'free' agency for some time now. The increasing discomfort of Elder Packer with the idea that anything could be free inspired him to remind his fellow GAs that the scriptures do not use the adjective free in connection with agency, which is more correctly called "moral agency" or simply "agency". Take a look at Brother Spencer J. Condie's article in the September '95 issue of the Ensign. Under the rather telling subtitle "The Price of Agency", Brother Spencer tells us how he was practically administered an Elder Packer smack-down so he would drop this hippie crap about 'free' agency. After all, so he continues and I paraphrase, the scriptures say we are "bought with a price" (1 Cor. 6:19-20). Brother Condie, and you have to love this, showed some real backbone and kept calling agency 'free agency' anyways.
It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside to consider how metaphors of slavery are so easily translated into metaphors of market capitalism in the Global Age. This works well now that we are no longer slaves to human masters, but the wage slaves of multi-national corporations, which simply exercise the rights of human individuals in a legal fiction of imposture that continually strengthens. But, I digress. You see, in Joseph Smith's day, agency was seen in the light of American constitutional democracy. 'Free' in this context had less to do with not being paid, and more to do with the freedoms associated with inalienable rights endowed by the Creator.
These days, however, in the new society of the Temple of Commerce, we are continually reminded by the Temple's moral wing--Commerce Christianity--, which supplies what little moral fiber the amoral system of Capitalism has (at least for the sake of keeping the masses docile), that we are bought and paid for by the Savior. What we are, even in the metaphysical sense, is not free. Agency comes with a high price-tag--complete submission to the right Master.
Sure, there is a certain truth in the metaphor. What bothers me is not the relative usefulness of it. It is instead the pervasiveness of the market metaphor and our inability to interrogate it that gets my dander up. Everyone just takes it for granted that their 'souls' are a commodity like anything else. In Mormon terms you have agency, but that agency is not free. If you exercise it incorrectly, you will lose your job (salvation). Let's face it, people were not calling agency free because they did not value it. They were calling it free because they associated it with freedom. So why change back? Simply to pull ourselves back in line with Joseph Smith's usage? Or is it that we are so stuck on market metaphors that we only associate free with money rather than human rights?
Moving on, I have a much bigger problem with all of this business about 'Our Heavenly Father's Plan.' One thing that continually bugs the living hell out of me is the obviously bogus statement the leaders of the Church make with regard to the primacy of the scriptures. They are wont to say, and I paraphrase, that their every teaching must square with the canon of scripture. This position is patently false, and nowhere more so than in the case of 'The Plan of Our Heavenly Father.'
Here's the deal folks: it ain't scriptural. If you go to Abraham 3:24-26, you read the following:
24 And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell;
25 And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;
26 And they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.
That's the plan. So here's the question: whose plan is it? One who is like unto God, which is, coincidentally, the equivalent of an English translation of the Hebrew name Michael. Setting that tidbit of info aside, what is the likelihood that the author of this passage intended us to read 'God' where he wrote "one who is like unto God. My guess is that he, whoever he is, did not.
Is this person Jesus? Well, Jesus certainly does appear later in the passage as "one...who is like unto the son of Man." Now, I would think that if the 'one who is like unto God' were the same person as the 'one who is like unto the son of Man', the author would not use two entirely different descriptions to refer to him, especially when the lack of names in the passage makes any descriptors crucial for properly differentiating separate identities.
So the first problem is that the plan is definitely not the plan of Heavenly Father. It is likely not even the plan of Jesus Christ. I think the best answer to the problem of the first speaker's identity is Michael. Son of Man is a New Testament title of Jesus. One who is like unto God is really a translation of the Hebrew Michael. Now, at this point the only way I can see that Michael's plan is Heavenly Father's is to side with Brigham Young on the identity of God, which would make God Adam (i.e. Michael). Something tells me the Brethren won't want to go there either.
Our Primary Glossary, the original spark for this blaze of ranting, was very specific about the number of plans presented: "only one plan was presented." Unfortunately for our trusty misreaders of latter-day scripture, the Book of Moses (chapter 4) seems to paint quite a different picture:
1 AND I, the Lord God, spake unto Moses, saying: That Satan, whom thou hast commanded in the name of mine Only Begotten, is the same which was from the beginning, and he came before me, saying—Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.
***
3 Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down;...
The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following among its definitions of plan: 3.a. A formulated or organized method according to which something is to be done; a scheme of action, project, design; the way in which it is proposed to carry out some proceeding. Also in weakened sense: Method, way of proceeding.
Now, I'm not saying that ol' Scratch had a Power-point presentation or a flowchart on a big dry-erase board, but it sounds like he had a plan to me. His plan, which is different from Michael's (sorry, I couldn't help myself), is that he will redeem humankind such that not one soul will be lost. In return, he wants God's honor. Evidently, the guarantee that all souls would 'make it' required that they not have agency, i.e. the ability to choose for themselves. Even if el Diablo's vision was essentially similar to Michael's except for these points: no agency, no loss, and 'all hail Satan!', it was certainly quite different in these few respects. In fact, I would say it was sufficiently different to qualify for the status of a separate plan entirely.
So why call Michael's plan Heavenly Father's Plan? Because it is the plan that God chose for his children, not the one he initiated. A relatively open dialogue seems to have been allowed in the first place to come up with a plan.
Now, if, in the spirit of Elder Packer, we want to be real sticklers about language, neither Moses nor Abraham use the word plan to describe Michael's proposal, Lucifer's tongue wagging, or Jesus' statement of allegiance. Moses uses the phrase plan of salvation to refer to the atonement (6:62). Abraham uses the word plan for the spiritual creation (4:21). The Book of Mormon refers to the "plan of redemption", the "plan of our God", the "plan of salvation", etc. If we want to preserve the context chronology of the scriptures, and not their production chronology, the plan became God's when he adopted it. From that point on it could be called "Heavenly Father's Plan" and not before.
By the way, here we have in the "Plan" narrative one of those many instances in mythology when some crafty character tries to deceive the head god, and pays dearly for it. Other examples include Prometheus, king Numa, and Loki. Satan falls in line with this tradition when he tries to slip the part about humans losing their agency past Hevenly Father. Heavenly Father is just too smart to fall for it. So he chooses Jesus as savior, who essentially says, "I'll have it your way, God." See, even here it is clear that Jesus has no plan. In fact, it seems that just about every major player except Jesus has one.
Why on earth are the Brethren so concerned that there only be one plan, and that that plan come from Heavenly Father? Well, my guess is that they want to reinforce the image of their own authority as emanating from the voice of the prophet alone. No one is to have a plan except the guy at the top, and everyone who knows what's good for him or her is to follow along. The actual scriptural stories present situations that are much less neat. A composite of Moses and Abraham shows that different figures are proposing different plans, and that God is the final decision maker.
Everyone is already exercising the eternal gift of agency in what they are doing (including employing their own initiative) in the Grand Council. Satan exercises his own agency in proposing his plan, but he hopes to rob everyone else of theirs thereby. This is where he goes wrong, not in suggesting something different. What is true, it seems, is that there wasn't anything like a vote. After God decided which plan he was going to adopt, people had the choice to exercise their agency by defecting to Satan or by assenting to the plan God had adopted.
The way I read between the lines of the Church's interpretation is that Satan was wrong in that he said anything and that that anything contradicted God's plan. You might say he was insubordinate. He didn't have a plan. He was just one of those annoying naysayers you see at any bad meeting who keeps anything substantive from getting done by carping at absolutely everything. Jesus had the right idea when he said, "What you said, Boss." This reading fits what we see in the LDS Church today.
There is a plan in Mormonism, and you didn't have any say in it. And guess what, you still don't have any say in it. Once the Gang of Fifteen has adopted it, and has sent it out to the stakes of Zion, your part is to say, "what you said, boss," and then proceed to do it. The worst thing you can do is to discuss openly any other idea for how things are or should be. Then you are consigned to that lowest circle of Mormon hell occupied by Sunstoners, Signaturi, and all other such apostates.
