A member of another faith asked me the following question:
In the [LDS] service that I attended, the speaker said that service to the Temple is the most important service that we can provide. Is this opinion common across members of the LDS church? Why is service to the Temple held in higher regard than, say, service to the poor?
This is how I replied: [Read more…]
As I was researching for the posts on the ankh, I came across some information which was interesting, describing the Egyptian concept of “time” and “eternity.” These concepts almost seem repetitive and redundant to our modern way of thinking, but to the Egyptians each of these terms represented something concrete and distinct, and both were invoked in certain rituals, texts, and illustrations. It is clear that the Egyptians considered these two ideas as unique, but they often used them together, and so it seems difficult for our present Egyptologists to distinguish or disambiguate what the Egyptians meant by them individually. There has been plenty of speculation.
The two symbols used for the commonly translated “time” and “eternity” are neheh (nhh) and djet (dt), respectively, and looked something like this:
Jan Assmann described the difficulty of pinning down an understanding of these hieroglyphics: [Read more…]
The other article that impressed me from the latest Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 16/2 (2007), was Donald W. Parry’s “Service and Temple in King Benjamin’s Speech.” Why did it impress me? Because it related subjects in the Book of Mormon to the temple, something that we haven’t seen a lot of yet, but is becoming more common in recent days. Some of our detractors like to criticize the fact that the Book of Mormon appears to have little content related to the temple, while on the other hand the Church emphasizes the importance of the temple and the ordinances that occur therein. It is articles such as this one in the JBMS that clearly show otherwise. The temple plays a central role in the gospel, even in the text of the Book of Mormon, but we must be willing to look for it, and search a little deeper. I can attest that once you have this focus, the temple appears everywhere in this book of scripture as it does in all scripture. [Read more…]
The television station KREX Channel 5 from Grand Junction, Colorado, aired a news piece yesterday about the “Sacred Secrets of the LDS Church.”
I think that the news anchors, save being as objective and unaffected as anchors could possibly be, did a decent job of trying to understand what the LDS temple is all about. The members interviewed, on the other hand, I think missed a tremendous opportunity to share more and clarify our beliefs and practices of the temple. Stake President Richard Landes did a substantially better job than Elder Smith in explaining some of the reasons for the temple, but it still left the anchors with misconceptions.
At one point the anchor asks Elder Smith, “What goes on in the temple?”
Our missionary unfortunately replied, “I don’t know how to explain that. . . . I’m going to pass on that one.” [Read more…]
Jesus Washing Peter's Feet by Ford Madox Brown. 1852-56, retouched several times up to 1892. Oil on canvas 46 x 52 1/4 in Tate Gallery, London.
A reader has asked, “Do you have any insight into what happened to the washing of feet? Could the washing of feet have been preparatory to the full ordinance of washing as we now have it in the initiatories?”
The ordinance of washing of feet is still performed in the temple, for it is a restored ordinance, but it is part of the culminating sealing ordinances which are reserved for those who make their calling and election sure through faith. Temple scholar Matthew Brown has offered this:
The Lord mentioned in a revelation on 1 November 1831 that he had granted unto his disciples the authority to “seal both on earth and in heaven” (D&C 1:8). During the same month he indicated that God the Father would reveal to his servants who should be sealed up “unto eternal life” by this power (D&C 68:12). The ordinance of the washing of feet was then introduced by the Lord as the means whereby someone could be rendered “clean from the blood of this generation” (D&C 88:138-141), and when Joseph Smith administered this ordinance, he stated that those who received it were not only “clean” in a ritual sense but were also “sealed up unto eternal life” (HC, 1:323-24; see also MD, 829-32). ((Matthew B. Brown, The Gate of Heaven, 235.))