Non-member in the classroom

This journal entry is dated Thursday, January 9, 2003. I had a tendency for dramatization in my journaling that kind of makes me wince to read now—I was 20 years old and still held to some kind of self-centered belief that the weight of the world was on my shoulders alone or something—but I think I would rather just quote most of the entry verbatim rather than summarize it, so bear with me.
The names of all parties involved have been changed.
—————————————–
I know that they didn’t mean to. I know that they’ve never had a student like me before, and that they’re as new at this as I am. I know what LDS doctrine teaches. Nothing they said today was new. And yet somehow, it still hurts. It hurts to sit there and listen to them teach the rest of the students in the room that what I believe is false. It shouldn’t. It’s what Mormons believe and they can’t help it. But it does. It really does.
Dr. Jones has been trying to talk me into taking [a class on ancient Christianity] with him & Dr. Smith. I told him I’d sit in on the class today. So I came to it, and sat there and quietly listened throughout the class. They said many things that I disagreed with . . . It wasn’t new to me.
I’ve noticed how all my professors, even [another professor I liked], avoid eye contact with me whenever they’re talking about something that they know I’d disagree with. I guess I can’t blame them. They must wonder, perhaps even dread, what I think of all this. Sometimes I think my professors would be better off if they didn’t know there’s an EV Christian in the room. But I know God brought me here to be bold, not silent.
Anyhow, Dr. Jones was talking about how the ancient Jews were to the ancient Christians what today’s non-LDS Christians are to today’s Mormons. He slipped and made eye contact with me, and burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, Jack,” he said, referring to what he was teaching. I shrugged and chuckled too. Then Dr. Smith said something about me not being a non-member, but a future member. This was all so completely gratuitous. I hadn’t said anything to them at this point.
I decided it was time to say something, so I raised my hand and asked, “It may be my filthy Gentile ignorance, but if the Jews were completely in apostasy and there was no authority on the earth, where did Zecharias, the father of John the Baptist, get his authority, and where did John the Baptist get his authority?”
I should probably note here that earlier Dr. Jones had passively said that the Jews of Christ’s day were in apostasy. Karen Reynolds had raised her hand and asked him to clarify what he meant by “apostasy.” He had responded, “I mean as apostate as apostate can be, a complete apostasy, there was no authority on the earth.” Apparently him and Karen had a sharp disagreement on this point in his other class last semester, and his blatant response had made Karen cry after class.
Anyways, as soon as I asked it, I heard Karen whisper, “Jack, that’s why I love you!” That felt so good. But Dr. Jones & Dr. Smith both chuckled. Dr. Smith said, “Jack, there’s two nice young men we could send over to your place to teach you this.” “You don’t know the answer, do you?” I countered. But then Karen and Karl started trying to whisper the answer to me, and Dr.’s Jones and Smith were talking about it with a professor sitting next to me, so I didn’t hear either answer very well.
I was pretty hurt by all this. I mean… I didn’t give them permission to tell the class I wasn’t Mormon. About half the class already knew; the other was very confused. And my question was serious; it should have been given a serious response.
But I guess that’s the life of an evangelical at Brigham Young University.
—————————————–
  • deathglareIt was probably very wise for professors to avoid eye contact with me when discussing something they knew I was going to disagree on. I have an impressive death glare that would make any man’s blood run cold! We managed to catch it on camera once, on my wedding day of all days. (see photo on the right)
  • I think I was too hard on Dr. Jones’s “outing” of my non-member status. He knew me well and knew that I was fairly open about it, and the laughter outburst in the midst of the lecture really was accidental, so he felt that he needed to explain that. The missionary jokes, on the other hand… not welcome and not needed.
  • Hopefully now you see the point of my previous post on John the Baptist, Jews and apostasy. I was just trying to establish whether Dr. Jones’s “total apostasy” assertion was some kind of widely-held LDS standard since he and Dr. Smith tried to say that the reason I didn’t “get it” was because I was a non-member.
  • I tried to play this off as a Mormon v. evangelical encounter in my journal entry at the time, but in retrospect, I see that I wasn’t even really arguing the evangelical position. I don’t believe in institutionalized apostasy, just personal apostasy and really widespread personal apostasy, so I didn’t even have a dog in that fight. I was just pointing out inconsistencies in my professor’s position and inadvertently taking the “not-total-apostasy” stance in the process, which happens to be closer to what I as an evangelical believe about the Jews in Christ’s day.
  • Jones and Smith didn’t treat me very well that day, and were pretty dismissive of me because of my non-member status. But you know what? I didn’t act very well on other days. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with journal entries about what a jerk the evangelical girl in their class was on given days. I don’t need any apologies for their behavior, I’m just sharing one encounter of many, and I’ll be moving on to more positive ones soon enough.
  • I should also say that these professors were good friends and were very kind to me in many, many other ways. As the first paragraph of my journal entry says, they weren’t used to having outspoken non-members in their classrooms, and they handled it badly this day. I think we’re all allowed to make mistakes though. God knows I do.
  • “Karen” was also a good friend and went into more details for me after class on her disagreements with Dr. Jones on the subject of Jews and apostasy. I got the impression that a lot of the students in the class disagreed with him on it. It simply took a non-member to stand up to him and poke holes in his argument, which I think shows how useful people from other faiths can be in exposing the weaknesses of our own positions.
  • There was a newly-minted PhD sitting in on the class, that’s what I meant when I referred to a “professor sitting next to me.”

Comments

Non-member in the classroom — 10 Comments

  1. “which I think shows how useful people from other faiths can be in exposing the weaknesses of our own positions.”
    Indeed. Interesting story.
  2. “It simply took a non-member to stand up to him and poke holes in his argument, which I think shows how useful people from other faiths can be in exposing the weaknesses of our own positions.”
    This sheds a whole new (and helpful) light on the two quotes I recently used on my own blog. Just insert “and women” after “men”:
    “God, the Father of us all,” Ezra Taft Benson said, “uses the men of the earth, especially good men, to accomplish his purposes. It has been true in the past, it is true today, it will be true in the future.” Elder Benson then quoted the following from a conference address delivered by Orson F. Whitney in 1928: “Perhaps the Lord needs such men on the outside of His Church to help it along. They are among its auxiliaries, and can do more good for the cause where the Lord has placed them, than anywhere else.
    “God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of His great and marvelous work. The Latter-day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, too arduous for any one people.” Elder Whitney then pointed out that we have no warfare with other churches. “They are our partners in a certain sense.”
    Anyway, I like you Jack. It’s because of people like you that I try harder to think about assumptions I have of “truth” and also the way in which I express it. You seem to have a highly active “bs” sensor, so naturally I wouldn’t want any of that to fly back into my face. :)
  3. I chuckle at this incident because I know exactly the professors you’re talking about. I took the same class in another year. Jon Rainey had the same reaction you did, if I remember correctly.
  4. I figured you would know who the professors were, Jon. I’m not trying to embarrass them though so I didn’t want to name them.
    Doesn’t surprise me that Jon Rainey and I would think similar on this. He was always full of win like that. You would think that maybe they would have learned not to blatantly push the “Jews-in-total-apostasy” view after this incident, but I guess not.
  5. Interesting story. I think I’m pretty up on Mormon thinking on this subject, and it’s not blatantly obvious to me that the Jews were in absolute apostasy. I think your question was a perfectly reasonable one that should have been addressed without shunting it to the side.
  6. I have a deeper appreciation for how tough it would be for an Evangelical college student to be in that environment.
  7. Wow. Seriously, Jack, everytime I think of you at BYU, I get a little confused–and then a little happy. Because I’m pretty sure BYU didn’t know what to do with you. Very interesting experience. I bet that kind of stuff got old fast.
    But can we talk about your evil look of death a little bit more? The wedding dress is a particularly nice touch. It’s almost like you’re saying, “Come hither, man…so I can EAT YOU ALIVE.”
  8. The apostasy thing isn’t meant as a slight to the Jews; it comes from this notion of Dispensationalism in Mormonism. As it goes, there are 7 great dispensations (culminating in the current one) and each has a particular prophet associated with it and that prophet restores what was previously lost (which means that the world was in apostasy, of course). It’s all silly and makes no sense, but it is something we have taught and will continue to teach, I would guess, in places where people like doctrine that is silly and doesn’t make any sense. Here is a link to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism link.
  10. it’s not blatantly obvious to me that the Jews were in absolute apostasy.
    Well, the Jews (including all the other remaining tribes) weren’t worshiping Baal, or idols, at the time of Christ, unlike some of the eras of the Old Testament era. Considering the price they had to pay for that, wise move.
    How shall I say this? The Catholic Church is also different today than at the start of the Reformation.
    I’m not wanting to offend anyone, it’s just both of those movements have had changes, and many agree for the better, over the centuries.
    Truth be told, I know my Scandinavian ancestors were pagan before ~1000AD.
    I have a deeper appreciation for how tough it would be for an Evangelical college student to be in that environment.
    Yes, often it’s the LDS in the minority in most settings.
    Jack, you don’t look too happy in that Wedding picture! But, I don’t call it a “death glare”. Maybe it’s different in person.
Categories:

Related Post:



0 коментарі:

Post a Comment

ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity