Thanks, mb, for that quote! That’s exactly what I believe. So far, as regards women’s equality, the swallowing is yet incomplete, but this inalienable truth will come eventually to be incorporated fully within the system. In other words, women’s equality is a fundamental truth of the gospel that simply has yet to be fully swallowed into our system of church government including the temple ceremony.

The salvific power of the ceremony, then, can’t be tied to any one particular wording. It seems clear to me that there must be something else about the ceremony that imbues it with salvific power, perhaps our willingness to make strong promises. We do our best, then God makes up for our lacks. My feeling is that the current specific wording of the temple ceremony could be one area in which Heavenly Father is making up for the imperfections of our current system.

Just a couple of things. Doctrine is not a subset of culture nor is culture a subset of doctrine. Nor are they separate entities. They are two different sets with an overlapping subset. Think of Venn diagrams from your early math days. The process is not so much of one influencing the other (though that does happen) but rather of people receiving continuing insight as to which elements of each should belong in the shared subset.

Secondly, when I claim that others “see through a glass darkly” I also must claim that I do as well. That is a given that I probably didn’t articulate well. My job in this life is not to clear the glass, but rather to see as well as I can with the glass that exists for me and then live as true to what I understand as I can. That means I will not only feel free to reject other church members’ perceptions that seem wrong to me but that I must also be fully aware that my best understandings may well be fraught with errors too. And I therefore must be completely fine and not feel threatened by others of my faith who reject my ideas of truth. For some people this is unsettling, but I have no problem living with ambiguity as I believe that God (who does see the whole picture, though his children, including his prophets, fail to see and relay it absolutely perfectly) simply expects me to live as true to the truth that I do I find as I am able to. And one of those truths for me is that many of his imperfect children are doing the best they can and I need to be kind and loving towards their imperfect efforts. Hopefully they will be so towards me, and many of them are.

Finally, as a Christian, I take as my basic foundation the statement that “God is love”. Therefore, when I encounter an idea (mine or anyone else’s) about God that attributes to him actions or doctrines that are unloving or arbitrary or capricious or insensitive or segregationist or irrational or whatever, I feel free to reject that idea as a “through a glass darkly error” BUT, though I find that erroneous thinking annoying, it doesn’t rock my boat, make me feel like the whole church is off base or that I need to worry about whether or not other members see what I see. You see, I know that I’ve most likely got erroneous thinking going in my head too on one doctrinal subject or other, and, just as I expect God to overlook my “glass darkly” errors, I feel responsible to be patient with those of others even as I regard them as false.

Certainly, when I see unkindness being done in the name of God, or God being misperceived as unkind and rigid (as in some of the ideas we have all encountered either in our own heads or in what we think we hear others say), I try to move in to repair the damage that does. And because I believe that Jesus can heal all wounds, when, to my sorrow, even my best efforts fall short of that healing while I am there, I fully trust that he will ultimately undo the damage, carefully straighten out the errant truth-seekers (one of whom might well be me at one point or another ), and fully comfort and restore.

(a) It seems that the larger cultural climate may have been more receptive to the wedding of Christian and feminist values in the 19th century, where in the 20th century these ideologies began to be constructed as in opposition to each other, and in both instances the Church was likely influenced by these broader attitudes.

(b) For the most part, it’s going to be women who agitate for women’s rights and opportunities. There’s a correlation between the existence of an autonomous women’s organization in a denomination, for example, and the likelihood that women will be ordained. While there may have been other factors at work (convincing the larger culture that Mormon polygamous women were not a suppressed voice?), it’s also the case that it was women who were attending national conferences on suffrage. Emmeline B. Wells could hold a public debate with then-Apostle B. H. Roberts on the suffrage question. The space in which such open disagreement in the church thrived is barely comprehensible post-Correlation, and (obviously) men lead the Church.

It is essential that thinking, educated women be able to discern the difference between the culture they live in and the gospel at its heart. Way to many times we women simply look at the temporary, earthly, social manifestations of LDS lifestyles and various annoying “through a glass darkly” statements by people with name recognition who don’t see the whole picture clearly and fail to study, embrace, trust and follow what is really true.

As I read your comment, you’re proposing two different approaches to difficult issues in church teaching: (a) aspects of Church teaching we find uncomfortable belong to the “culture,” not “doctrine,” and (b) people who disagree with us see “through a glass darkly.”

I’m extremely suspicious of the doctrine-culture dichotomy, maybe because I’ve never seen it applied with anything approaching rigor. Culture refers to human behavior, so doctrine is simply a subset of it. If the methodology underlying this distinction is that we reject anything for which we can find parallels in the surrounding culture, we’re going to have to be willing to eliminate very central claims. The First Vision? Other people Joseph’s age in his area had very similar visions. Word of Wisdom? Clear parallels from the time. Are American Indians descended from ancient Israelites? That was a popular notion in JS’s time. Is Jesus the Messiah? Just seepage from creedal Christianity, misreading the Hebrew Bible. Closer to home, from the perspective of feminism, while it’s true women’s subordination was a part of 19th century American culture, it’s also true gender egalitarianism is a widely trumpeted value in our own time. What’s our basis for suggesting it’s doctrinal? (On the other hand, polygamy was pretty shocking in Joseph’s culture, so playing by these rules that might qualify as a “doctrinal” element of the culture. But then even that grew out of OT practices.)

It’s true we all see “through a glass darkly.” But, from my perspective, many of the “annoying” statements are coming out of the mouths of prophets or are put directly in the mouth of God. Maybe those people are misinformed, but why should I suppose I see so much more clearly through that glass than Joseph Smith or Thomas S. Monson? It’s not very Mormon to reject all religious authorities. On the other hand, maybe God is just one of those “people with name recognition [check!] who [doesn't] see the whole picture clearly and fail[s] to study, embrace, and follow what is really true.”

But that reading is seriously difficult to maintain in light of the fact that God enjoins women to covenant to be subordinate to their husbands. Do we need to promise to accept any other conditions of mortality–like maybe promise God we’ll age, suffer sickness, and die? The temple supposedly lays out the heavenly pattern for living. It hardly makes sense to assert that those who have never been are allowed to have celestial, equal marriages where those who were married in its hallowed halls are obligated to live the telestial model.

It might be useful here to distinguish between symbols and ciphers. In interpreting symbols the “signifier” continues to have resonance in its interpreted, elaborated context, where ciphers are simple codes in which one term/object is arbitrarily substituted for an unrelated one. In effect, a cipher cancels out the literal meaning where a symbol does not. I think much of our “reading” of symbols in the church actually posits the existence of ciphers.

In either case, I see a cluster of related problems in advancing such an interpretation: (a) How do we recognize symbols/ciphers? Are there are actual rhetorical clues in the text itself? Too often we recognize “symbols” because they make us uncomfortable–i.e., anything with which we disagree in our sacred texts is said to be symbolic of something with which we agree. This is a suspect hermeneutic for fairly obvious reasons. (b) How do we reconcile the tension between asserting the temple is symbolic and the temple is essential for our salvation? The more effort we expend in evacuating the literal meaning of the text, the odder becomes the claim that this text in all its particularities has salvific power. The former stresses generalities through the alleged elasticity of meaning, where the latter stresses rigid particularities. (c) How do we maintain limits on the interpretation such that the text does not devolve in our system into meaninglessness? If the text is simply an empty vessel which the Holy Ghost can fill according to whim with any interpretation du jour, have we not effectively asserted that the text in itself is meaningless? And if so, why this particular text portraying women’s secondary status? Would any text do equally well in this system? Why not use a text about Heavenly Mother, or for that matter, Shakespeare’s King Lear? Why keep a text without meaning secret or sacred? (d) If we read it as a symbol we’re stuck with a God who’s comfortable demanding women’s subordination as part of his broader aims–the symbolic reading doesn’t erase this portrayal but simply builds on it; if we read the text as a cipher we can get around women’s secondary status but only by positing a God who deliberately makes statements he does not mean (in the apparent hope that people will uncover an unrelated “true” meaning through the spirit). That sounds dangerously close to lying. If people stick to the straightforward meaning of the text (subordinating women to their husbands), how can God object? That’s what he asked them to do, and not everyone received the Holy Ghost’s magic decoder ring arbitrarily rendering this reading null and void.

So, if what you have written is what you feel you have learned by the Holy Spirit, I will not say that you have not. I cannot and should not declare what you feel spiritually as valid or invalid any more than you should say that what I have learned by the Holy Spirit is or is not of God either.

Therefore, though I fully support you (and anyone else’s) right to worship and understand God as you feel dictated by your spiritual experiences, I must just simply and honestly say that what you have learned and extrapolated from that particular symbol is quite different from what the Holy Spirit has taught me.

I am glad that you attend the temple. It is a good place for learning. All the best to you.

Now, back to the topic at hand….