Introducing John Hamer and the Episode

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is January 28, 2021, and today we are doing a live Mormon Stories podcast interview with someone that many of you know and love. His name is John Hamer. John Hamer has been on Mormon Stories podcast many, many times. He's definitely one of the most frequent Mormon Stories podcast guests in the past. He's, he's come on to talk about Joseph Smith, about authorship of the Book of Mormon, Book of Mormon historicity. He's also talked about his own faith journey and his conversion to Community of Christ. And we've had him on to talk about all sorts of cool stuff. And let me just begin by saying, John Hamer, welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast. It's always an honor and a delightful to have you with us.

John Hamer [00:00:54] Oh, it's wonderful to be back. I so enjoy your program and your community and so I'm really excited to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:02] I should also say you are a pastor for Community of Christ, Toronto, the congregation in Community of Christ in Toronto, and you are a 70 for community of Christ, the organization which maybe means something slightly different to you guys than it does for us. Tell us what that means. Sure.

John Hamer [00:01:20] So 70 is a calling that goes all the way back to the early restoration. So the same background. There was a difference in the LDS tradition where lots and lots of people were called to be 70s at some point or other through the, let's say the 1960s and stuff. And then they stopped that and then 70s became, I think mostly either general authorities of the LDS Church or maybe part time general authorities kind of thing. So anyway, that whole history and tradition really didn't occur in Community of Christ. There have always been fewer 70s. Originally the 70s would have been in a lot of cases full time what you guys called missionaries. So full time, let's say outreach ministers for the church. And then more recently, it's much more likely that a 70 will be self sustaining, which is to say not an employee, but still with the same idea of doing that kind of outreach.

John Dehlin [00:02:18] I love it. Okay, well, just to give my again, welcome back and just to give my, my listeners, our listeners, viewers, a sense of what we're going to be talking about today. Here's kind of the setup. The setup is that I've mentioned it many, many times when, when I was putting a survey together for people leaving Mormonism that ultimately went was kind of requested by John by Hans Mattson and Travis Stratford and Greg Prince and ultimately Marlon J. Surveyed about 3,000 progressive and post Mormons that were kind of really active on the Internet. And what we discovered was that over half of those who leave the Mormon church end up self identifying as either atheist or agnostic, which means also they kind of stop believing in Jesus or, you know, in, in Christianity. And oftentimes they stop identifying as Christians. Now, you know, obviously I don't have the dog in the fight, so to speak, about how people identify whether they believe or whether, whether they don't. Just for the record, I've never identified as atheist or agnostic. Personally, I don't like those labels. There are reasons why I don't like those labels, mostly because I don't think they're useful. I think they're more counterproductive than they are useful, although I have no judgment for somebody who chooses to identify that way. It's. They're very descriptive labels. But, you know, a couple reasons why I love this topic. A first reason is because, you know, I've always had this idea that religion, organized religion, and specifically Mormonism fills a bunch of holes in your soul, your identity, your sense of, you know, your need for spirituality, your need for community, your worldview, a way to look at the world. It provides you with a morality. It provides you with, you know, answers about the afterlife. That may not be true, but at least they sometimes can help assuage any existential ancs or concern you have and allow you to get about the business of life, which is living and, you know, having a partner, raising kids if you want to, you know, living a full and meaningful life. You know, Mormonism can kind of fill in all the holes that would otherwise potentially keep you from living that fulfilling and meaningful life. And I often try, as I've coached with and counseled people in the past who have left Mormonism or other religions, I often tell them a bunch of holes are going to develop in your soul, and if you don't fill them, you know, you can just feel empty and, you know, it could leave you kind of disabled a bit. And so one of the things that progressive and post Mormons and people who leave other religions have to do is fill those holes. And so some are going to not identify with spirituality. Some are not going to have an interest in even thinking about the word God or thinking about Jesus. Sometimes that's because there's a traumatic response, and sometimes it's going to be just because there's no interest. But other people are going to be searching and seeking to fill the God void, the Christ void, the community void. And I am Committed on Mormon Stories podcast, regardless of my own biases and worldview to providing role models and frameworks for people who are looking to fill the God, looking to fill those voids. And so in 2021, I want to bring on people who have found ways to resolve or to fill in some of those holes. So John Hamer, for me, represents someone who's really interesting. For those who don't know, John Hamer lost his faith in Mormonism very early. John has identified as gay from, I believe, what, your teen years on John. Is that right?

John Hamer's Personal Background and Coming Out

John Hamer [00:06:06] Well, yeah. Right. Well, I understood who. So this was a long time ago. I'm now getting quite old. I understood who I was attracted to. And when I came out, I came out in Utah Valley, Utah, while I was at byu, right around. Right around when I. Anyway, where everyone is around 20. And in part it was because I hadn't had any. In the culture, any, you know, kind of gay role models. I hadn't met any openly gay people. And it was really a week after meeting an openly gay person for the first time that I was able to say, oh, yeah, now this all makes sense. It puts the pieces together. So, yes, but definitely so from very early on, and that had been fortunately for me many years after, I'd sort of deconstructed Mormonism for myself. So I wasn't. I didn't actually have a faith crisis at that time or anything like that, because I would already. I'd already pushed that behind me.

John Dehlin [00:07:00] Yeah. And, John, you went to byu. You had a very robust Mormon upbringing. If you guys want to go watch some of my past interviews with John, he'll tell you he was, you know, in quorum leaderships all through Aaronic priesthood years, very orthodox in many ways, very committed to Mormonism and just lost his faith. But the other thing that I think is really important about you, John, is that, number one, there's a lot of people who leave Mormonism lose their faith. And Mormonism that are just like, well, now that I know the Book of Mormon wasn't what I thought, now that I know that the prophets probably don't have relationship to God, that I thought that the Book of Abraham isn't. You know what I thought? I can't, you know, I can't even think about God or Jesus because now I'm enlightened. And now all that's kind of out the door. They kind of basically just take it all and say anything that was associated with the Bible, with the Book of Mormon and with religion. I've got to Just get rid of. But it's also important to understand John Hamer that you probably identified as atheist. So there's no one that knows more about, well, let's just say this. I know very few people who know more about Mormon church history, Mormon truth claims, who have done more to deconstruct the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Bible, Christianity than you. I mean maybe Dan Vogel around the Book of Mormon. But like, I guess I want you to talk really briefly to, I mean I'll just vouch for your knowledge of your expertise in history deconstructing. But also my guess is there were many, many years where you self identified as atheist or agnostic and maybe in some senses you still associate with those identities. And what I'm trying to do is connect you to many of those listeners who are going to think, well this is all going to be woo and, and this is all going to be New age superstitious mumbo jumbo. I kind of want to let them know that they can relate to you. Can you talk about that a little bit?

John Hamer [00:09:01] Well, it's definitely not going to be New age superstitious mumbo jumbo. So I'll give you that assurance. To start out with. I don't identify with that anyway. So I guess I would say that from the time period when I was about a teenager, for when I became a doubting Mormon in the teacher's quorum essentially to when I went to BYU and decided, okay, I had thought up until that time I could still be part of this organization. Maybe there's something that it's doing that's meaningful or special or good community wise. And it was really when I got to BYU and I also started to really appreciate at a certain point just how sexist the organization was, I got to be an adult and understood. And that's when I decided, okay, well I'm really not going to have anything with it going forward forward. But in terms of from that point ON Then from 18 until I was 40, I was in a what you would call a non, I was a non adherent. What in the surveys people sometimes say when you what is your church? What church or religion are you part of? And you answer on the survey none. And so this is called the nones. And the rise of the nones is a, is a phenomenon that sociologists and people who study religion have been observing for decades now and so count as a person who was unchurched certainly from 18 till 40 when I formally joined Community of Christ. And during that time I would have definitely identified, like you say, as agnostic. I wrote an essay, I think when I was 20, 21 that I called the Word of Reason, which was a specifically targeting what I've been raised with in terms of what I thought were the faith claims or the philosophical claims that were being made about the LDS proposition for Heavenly Father, for a God being, as defined kind of, or promoted by my understanding anyway, promoted by LDS leaders and why I did not believe in the existence of that proposition, that particular God, but not in the same time. At the end of the conclusion, I'm not pulling out, I'm not saying that that proves that there is no such thing under any one of these kinds of terms, but rather that that proposition I think is self defeating or is falsifiable and has been shown to be false.

John Dehlin [00:11:33] Okay. Yeah. And so I guess what I'm just trying to get at is I think our listeners can know that you have fully explored and also with this.

John Hamer [00:11:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:11:51] The secular worldview, the atheist worldview, the agnostic worldview. And you're coming at this as someone who loves science, who values science, who values evidence and who, you know, who is. It's a very different approach than kind of the orthodox Mormon approach or even the traditional Christian worldview.

John Hamer [00:12:15] And also someone who is not in any way denigrating either atheism or agnosticism, especially agnosticism, which in any philosophical. Anybody who's talking about philosophy and whatever you're doing when your position is skepticism, especially if it is fully sided, all sided, balanced skepticism, that's the most philosophically defensible position you can ever have. And so there's no critique for me there. So that's not the issue. But what I've done here or what I would like to do here is say why I think that there is some value and some reasons and why we can re explore theism and go back in this direction and see is there something meaningful we can find back there as well.

John Dehlin [00:13:07] Yeah, I love it. And I'm just going to say that as someone that, you know, people come to me all the time saying, john, I've had a faith crisis, I need help. I don't know what I believe anymore. I feel a spiritual loss. I miss the spirituality that I once had in the church. And I just, I sometimes don't know what the purpose of life is anymore. I don't feel anchored. I don't feel like I have moorings, you know, they're searching. And one of the reasons why I've maintained a relationship with community of Christ and with you, aside from being your dear friend and you being mine, is that community of Christ is sort of, partly because of your association with it, is experimenting with innovations in religious participation that is inclusive of people that would identify as atheist or agnostic, but also trying to redefine these terms in ways that can make people that have just given up on anything related to religion or Christianity, that can make them feel like maybe there's a way for them to do this where they don't have to take leaps that they're no longer comfortable making, give trust in things they're no longer willing to give trust in, or frankly leave themselves vulnerable in ways they don't want to be vulnerable anymore. Is that fair to say?

John Hamer [00:14:32] Well, absolutely. So, for example, in my congregation, so right now we're like everyone else in pandemic mode. And so we haven't been able to have in person meetings in now almost a year. So beginning last March, but back before last March, when we were having in person meetings, by far and away the largest activity we had here in Toronto, the Toronto congregation, was our Tuesday night history, theology and philosophy group, where we get together a group of individuals who are committed to the community here and what we're doing for whom, many of whom who come every week and who, what may call tithe payers, in other words, donors, contributors who are committed to the identity of the group and of Toronto Center Place here, also identify as maybe as atheist or as agnostic. Actually a lot of people who are. We have wide membership and people who are actually Buddhists and Jewish and Muslim because of how diverse Toronto is. And so in that sense, the, the goal always of the group was that we recognize dual citizenship. You know, you can be, you know, you can go to the mosque on Friday or be a kind of a secular Muslim or whatever, and then also be able to talk about exploring your faith here. Because we are believing in kind of a shared open exploration, but with the ground rules of sort of civility and what we call anyway in community of Christ, faithful disagreement, but which is to say essentially being approaching with good intentions and being thoughtful and mindful of the other positions.

John Dehlin [00:16:13] I love it. Okay, so let's jump in. I think that hopefully that's enough of an intro to make people feel like they should at least give us a chance. And again, this isn't to sell any one point of view. It's just to provide people with options. So, so let's just start with the mindset. Let's just go way back. So someone's at a Faith crisis. They were taught that God is anthropomorphic, that God is this big white male that lives in the sky that probably has one or more wives. It's a God that when you pray to God, he's going to, you know, tell you where to find your lost keys. He's going to answer your prayers. Although most of the post Mormons that I talk to had very mixed results in that regard. In other words, they were taught that God will heal you. They were taught that God answers your prayers, but.

Why People Leave Mormonism and Lose Faith

John Hamer [00:17:04] Or if you pay the tithing, you're going to get the money back in terms of. But then you find out you're on food stamps or whatever. Right? Yeah. So.

John Dehlin [00:17:13] Or not. Or not. But one thing's for sure. Many people acknowledge they were never really sure if or when it was heavenly Father versus if and when. It was their own psychology or their own thoughts or just privilege or just luck. You're never really sure. But anyway, God is kind of the God of the lost keys. God is the God of like, are you masturbating? Did you touch yourself? Oh, did someone touch you in the wrong place? Are you obeying the church leaders? There's this stern kind of Old Testament element to God where God's overlooking and watching and judging and tallying your mistakes and punishing you with bad. If bad things happen. If you step off the wrong way, God's going to punish you, which is the dark side of that kind of interventionist God. But then God has all these, all these things he wants you to do. And God can be homophobic, God can be out for the gays. God can be racist. God can curse people with dark skin. God can choose his elect people, you know, which is oftentimes even like a genetic tribal subgroup that he plays favorites with, which then excludes everybody else. But that's what God does. And then God speaks to prophets, and then prophets tell us. But you're really, you're told to worship God, but really what you're doing is you're listening to your leaders because God really talks to your leaders. He doesn't quite talk to you. And so you're listening to your leaders, but then your leaders are adding all sorts of other stuff that ended up causing you to lose your faith. And let's just not forget, God speaks to us through his leaders, prophets, but also through his scriptures. But then these scriptures turned out to be fraught or questionable historically.

John Hamer [00:19:04] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:19:05] And so when it starts unraveling, it's like, well, the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith unravels because for all the problems with Joseph Smith, we won't get into them here. And then the Book of Mormon unravels because it doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny like we were set up to think it should in terms of it necessarily being an ancient record. But then you go to Bart Ehrman and you realize that the Bible has problems too. That what you thought the Bible was, Matthew maybe didn't write Matthew, Mark didn't write Mark, Luke didn't write Luke. And there's all the problems with racism and sexism and stuff in the Bible. All of a sudden the Bible gets deconstructed, which then means Jesus gets deconstructed. And you're angry because you feel betrayed, you feel lied to and you feel like it. You know, it taints God and Jesus, all these, you know, patriarchy and manipulations and deceptions. They taint God and they taint Jesus. They taint the Bible and the Scriptures and thus they taint organized religion. And you're just feeling like, I can't trust anyone anymore. I don't even know who God is. Now. Jesus may not have even been a historical figure or if he was, maybe he was just a, a wise kind of, you know, philosopher person. And you're just left with like this desolate arid land of like potential nothingness. But most importantly, a distrust of the whole enterprise. Anything that was associated with Mormonism, including the term spirituality, you're just like, I'm not interested. Like even the term spiritual prayer, like stepping into anything that calls itself a church and even bearing the title Christian, it's got some exclusivity connotations where it's just like, I don't, you know, if Jesus says this is the way that excludes Muslims and Jews and I don't want to be on anything exclusive. And so it's just an. Everything's a non starter. You throw it all away. Now let's just say that's where lots of people are.

John Hamer [00:21:18] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:21:19] Where do we start to rebuild? John Hamer? Where do we start to rebuild? Where should we start? Well, or should we restart?

John Hamer [00:21:26] You don't have to. So let me just begin by saying you don't have to. In other words, there are many different ways to live a meaningful and fulfilling life. And so that's not. So I'm not telling you that there's one way. And so like you were saying, there's one interpretation, that of, of when you hear from evangelical Christians or something like that, who everything comes down to for them, they'll say John 3:16, which I think is what you're saying, Christ's way or the highway. But I actually think that. I would argue that we're having here the. They're. They're having the interpretation as exactly opposite. It needs to be entirely flipped around. Because what should be said here is if, if Christ is the only way, then what we have to actually understand is that the definition that we've had of Christ or that we might think, which is to say, if Christianity is actually claiming to be a universal religion, then the term Christ in that equal sign of that mathematical equation has to be undefined from a particular provincial little thing. And it also must be universal. And so, in other words, the idea of what Christ has to mean has to be, as a term has to be much more inclusive than the narrow, let's say, components of Christian mythology or dogma or teaching. Rather, it would be inclusive of all other kinds of traditions, including ones that the universe is vast. And so it's not only just what's happening in one little part of one little planet. And so how would it be understood? How would that universal understanding apply more broadly? And so anyway, so that's one of the reasons why we had the session be called Undefining God, and that would also apply to Undefining Christ. So when we take this term God and we take this term Christ, I think one of the things that we have to do is blow up our fixed, constant definition of it and instead be open to a total undefinition and ultimately exploration, redefinition of what we could possibly mean by this if we are actually approaching something that would be meaningful and universal and not simply provincial and clearly, like you say, this small little thing that clearly isn't universal.

Willingness to Seek and Rethink Belief

John Dehlin [00:23:43] Okay, so I'm hearing a couple of things there that, that I'm. That I'm really liking resonating with. And I think it is, it is foundational. You have to be willing to say drop, deconstruct and drop everything you've been taught or led to believe. And that's, that's okay to do. You have the power, you have permission. And I think this is sort of psychologically one of the biggest roadblocks people have. They're so used to saying, wait, wait, Gordon McHinkley, what am I, what, what am I allowed to believe about God? Or, hey, Thomas S. Monson, like, wait, what's the nature of God? Joseph Smith, what, what does the king fall? It, you know, it's like, tell me what I'm supposed to think about God or the universe and what What I think I hear you saying is you start, I think you have to start by saying you don't have to believe any of this.

John Hamer [00:24:32] I actually, right from the start, when even talking about, I don't believe in Jesus anymore, I don't believe in God, I don't even like the, I don't even like the framework believe in. Why are we, why are. You shouldn't. We aren't starting with you have to believe in something to begin with. I don't think, rather I think we need to just pull back from that and even say what are we even talking about? Let's examine some of these things in terms of what are you doing in terms of what is giving your life meaning, Even just this kind of self introspection. Why are you operating? What are these things doing? And like looking in on that before we get to. I think everybody is actually is operating from, in a certain sense, beliefs because they can't, you know, that's just how they're working. But those need to be subject also to introspection and evaluation whether, whether, whether they're valuable, whether you understand, you know, whether they're based on anything. And I don't think that the premise should be, okay, well we've, we've written out something or other and you must start believing in that and fake it until you make it or something like that. I don't think that that's getting you anywhere.

John Dehlin [00:25:34] I love it. But also I'm trying to get to this. And so it starts, I guess Jesus once said, the kingdom of God is within, right?

John Hamer [00:25:46] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:25:47] And what I'm trying to get to is that for so much of our spirituality as Mormons, it was always extrinsic. It was like there's this patriarchy, there's this authority. They tell us what God is, they tell us what to think, they tell us what our identity is, they tell us what to believe, they tell us what morality is. And I think to be able to start on this journey and even to be open to a different path or even something like spirituality or even religious participation again, it's a radical shift to turn that upside down and say it begins with you, it begins with your self knowledge and you looking inward.

John Hamer [00:26:29] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:26:30] And that's a radical shift, don't you agree? For an orthodox Mormon, it's like, wait, I wait, I don't have permission to like. Number one, I feel burned. Number you know, two, I feel angry. But number three, that's not the way it works. I don't either have to have an external Authority telling me what to do or like or it's nothing. And there is a third option between having external authority and nothing. And that's going on the journey that some would argue Christ and Buddha and other great, you know, wisdom teachers were saying, which is go inside and start this incredible exploration of uncovering what truth, what goodness, what wisdom is for you. And that's why so many of the wisdom traditions start with meditation and mindfulness. It's not some weird form of prayer, it's not some hokey new age tradition. It's simply sitting with the practice of self discovery and self exploration as the starting point, not some religious creed that a couple white US missionaries come and tell you, here's the beginning. All these doctrines and rules in history that you have to accept as the beginning of your exploration. What I hear you saying, John, is the beginning of the exploration is the journey within, Is that fair to say?

John Hamer [00:28:01] Absolutely. And to your point in terms of the like, for example, with mindfulness and meditation. So one of our major activities when we have in person activities here at Toronto Center Place, at the church here in Toronto is the, is a, is a meditation group, a mindfulness group. And a lot of people who come into that for the first time, they have this sense that like so many people, whether they're religious or not, whether their non adherence, let's say, and they've been raised as agnostic or non adherence nuns, they nevertheless have a kind of a hankering or desire for the supernatural. And so they hope that they're going to come and have a supernatural experience in meditation or it'll be like getting high or something like that. And that is simply not what mindfulness is about. And so it's more like you're saying techniques for that kind of thoughtful awareness and introspection. Some of these ways that people have to both personally, but then also in community seeking after and kind of a path to looking for what do you find meaningful? Why are we doing these kinds of things? What if you believe, as maybe you ought to, that there's only so many years that you have in front of you. What are you doing with those? And why? What is this all about?

John Dehlin [00:29:16] Yeah, okay, so what I'm hearing so far is be willing to drop everything you've ever thought of about God or Jesus and work to let go of all those assumptions. And then the second point is it begins take your authority back. It's not about an extrinsic source of authority, it's about you as the primary authority. You and your and going on the inner journey within. And then, then the other thing I just want to tease out is one of the things kind of like one of the pillars of being willing to begin this journey that I heard you articulate is an immediate, universal, universalistic foundation. In other words, zero exclusivity, zero superiority, right? Zero sense of like chosen people or one true path. That it's starting with this idea that fully an idea of God that's fully inclusive and never exclusive in any way. That's universalistic. Is that right?

Community of Christ Versus the LDS Church

John Hamer [00:30:27] Absolutely. So people have asked that a bunch of times. The community of Christ comes out of the same tradition as the LDS Church. We're the same church for the first 14 years and then the church splits apart and this is two different expressions that continue to exist. And so therefore we have that background of the, you know, exclusivity claim, one and only true church. Well, that we completely abandoned as non profitable and non meaningful and just a false teaching decades ago, more than half a century ago.

John Dehlin [00:30:52] Wait, wait. Just so, just so you're clear, it's profitable financially, right? That sort of exclusive view is profitable. So when you say unprofitable, what do you mean?

John Hamer [00:31:01] I mean in an actual meaningful spiritual sense in terms of soul development, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's all kinds of ways to make money. So if you, if making money is your, is what you decide the meaning of life is, then that's a thing that you're going to be able to fulfill. Although if we go back to Boethius is one of the great Christian philosophers of all times, he argued quite, I think, compellingly that this is a. If your life's desire is getting more and more and more wealth, that this is one of the many meaning of life or desires in life that you'll find is an insatiable desire. Because there's always somebody who's a bigger billionaire than you. So whatever it is, there's always more that you can want to have. And so I'm not saying that having wealth is a bad thing or not good to have, but rather if that's where you're finding or drawing all meaning, what you might end up finding is that you're simply chasing the whirlwind or something where this isn't actually something where, where you'll find a true fulfillment at the end. I mean, I'm not saying that wealth is bad, but rather if that's the only meaning that you have, but maybe you do experience that and you can prove me wrong and you are just a very happy billionaire, which is fine. You can't be.

John Dehlin [00:32:17] And I was also going to say that from an organizational, church or religious standpoint, I think claims of exclusivity and superiority can be very profitable.

John Hamer [00:32:28] Yeah. It's also an easy mechanism for strong group identity. One of the reasons why, for example, my background is as a medieval historian and one of the reasons why Europe exploded as it did around the world in the age of colonialism, discovery, imperialism, was because Europe developed a very strong, when we say strong but bad, ultimately, us versus them mentality where Europeans were superior to everybody else. And so therefore they could justify all kinds of crazy things and it caused all kinds of development in this kind of thing. But it's. So it's strong in certain senses, but it's maybe horrifically regrettable in terms of sailing all around and imposing your own ideas as if they are better than everybody else's. And genocide, you know, and all the other kinds of things that happened can be, you know, that's where it's bad. Right. So it depends on what we mean as the values. But so in this sense, it's a strong identity when you have this exclusive thing. So it's good for boundary maintenance and group cohesion and that kind of thing. But it can also be quite bad because you might have. You might be doing very negative things. I mean, this is certainly things that happened in, I'm sorry, in Restoration history, in Nauvoo. So we have a very big us versus them. We're the Saints, they're all the Gentiles. And so when you do that, then all of the people, you're making everybody else into them. And so even people had to be, let's say, pro Mormon back then. They're a Gentile, if they're. And as a result, you assign them the same villainy as the, as the people who are actual enemies or antagonists anyway. So it is strong in a certain ways, but it also is a flawed model in other ways.

John Dehlin [00:34:13] And I think it limits personal spiritual development ultimately. And for me, it was always a matter of dissonance. The superiority never made sense. As soon as I got. Got to know other non Mormons, I'm like, these are great people. And then I was always living with the dissonance. So I think it, you know, if you, if you go with sort of this idea, two halves of life, first half of life is about just forming a shell that you can then fill with the second half of your life. You know, it may help you to get to your 20s, but if you want deep, rich spiritual fulfillment, you got to shed the exclusivity and the superiority. And so, okay, so, so we're going to let go of our old notions of God, we're going to reclaim our authority, we're going to shed the exclusivity and the superiority where what are some of the next steps potentially to kind of undefined God and to go on a spiritual journey. What comes next?

John Hamer [00:35:09] So there's some very significant, I think, levels of paradigm deconstruction that not all ex Mormons go all the way through. And so when you are raised in the LDS Church, an analogy that I sometimes make is let's say you were raised in North Korea, which at this point in the planet is a very unique, let's say, growing up experience. And growing up in North Korea, you might have like a very particular feeling about what government is and what government means. And you may be very well versed in that because you've had a lot of experience with the North Korean government. And then they'll say that people in North Korea just live that way their whole life and that's what they know. But then some of the people defect and they go to, they are able to sneak out and get to China. And so then they now have a little bit more perspective on government and that kind of a thing. But nevertheless, they're now living in China, which has its own interesting kinds of government. Right. And so what I'd say that the way, by analogy here, what a lot of Mormons do is they're raised in this very unique hermit kingdom style religion of the LDS Church. They get out and then they see this big noise of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, which has lots of the same negative resonances for them that the Mormon Church has. And then they just to extrapolate that and understand then that religion and God, in other words, their idea of government, their idea of what religion is, or even God therefore is kind of universally held on that tangent. In other words, within that still very fundamentalist and literalistic and negative and particular framework. And so the big thing that I'm additionally asking to do in terms of being able to even think about this is to blow past that paradigm and to understand that even modern American evangelical Christianity and fundamentalism, this is a very modern phenomenon especially developed in the 20th century, and that almost all of these extremely, let's say, very literalistic ways of understanding and defining God and all these kind of things are from the standpoint of an ancient and medieval historian, very recent developments and don't actually speak to the entirety of the tradition. And I suggest that we go back and ask actually what people were really meaning when they're talking about God and continuing in very progressive existences of Christianity, things like Quakers and other people. So what are other, what are other voices in this tradition understanding this to mean, as opposed to just these two big examples, the one you're very familiar with, and then this, this other one that is negative and noisy.

John Dehlin [00:38:06] So I love it. So what are some other ways? And by the way, I think we sometimes have this modernistic privilege, this, this preference or privileging of anything that's modern. In other words, if it, if it's older, it must be archaic, it must be unsophisticated, it must be, you know, inferior in some way. And if it was developed in the 20th or 21st century, you know, thumbs up. And that's not always the case. If you go back into the 17, 1800s, for example, and I bet you would argue 1500s, you can find some brilliant, amazing thinkers and Some would argue 3,000 years ago, you can go all the way back.

Ancient Literature and Moving Beyond Literalism

John Hamer [00:38:46] The very beginning of literature, which we have, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh has just this insight into humanity and frankly a much more, let's say realistic and no nonsense view of afterlife and even an idea that you got to live for this life than things that have happened much more recently. So it's amazing human thinking. There's been all kinds of advances, no doubt. Our technological advance has been ongoing this entire time and what we have as capacity to do is unbelievable. And there's also been evolution and ideas. But if you go all the way back, there are still brilliant geniuses. As long as we have records, they just have less access to the information and previous things, ideas. And so ideas are inventions and they don't have as many of those inventions to work with in order to put things together. But that doesn't mean that Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Boethius and Augustine and all of these kinds of people, Anselm, you know, Aquinas, that these aren't all super geniuses, they are.

John Dehlin [00:39:56] And Lao Tzu and you know, you know, Buddha and you know, mostly mythological,

John Hamer [00:40:03] but yes, the Buddhist interpreters, and everything like that.

John Dehlin [00:40:06] Exactly.

John Hamer [00:40:06] Yeah, yeah, probably is also mythological, but anyways.

John Dehlin [00:40:09] Right, right, right.

John Hamer [00:40:11] Whoever they represent, but exactly the founders of the movements and the main interpreters of the movements.

John Dehlin [00:40:15] And that's, you know, that's true of

John Hamer [00:40:16] Christianity too, because almost nothing that you will have. So, so we can't be literalists. So even though, even though Christianity's texts are closer to the historical Jesus than, than Lao Tzu or the Buddha. The Buddha's centuries and, and, and lots of may not exist at all. But anyway, the Christianity is like within a few generations, but nevertheless, almost. The studies of the historical Jesus have been very exacting and ongoing for centuries now. And what we can say about there probably was a historical Jesus. That's fairly wide consensus among all the scholars who have studied it. But what we can say about that figure is, is minimal definitively. And then based on different assumptions and different readings of the sources and things like that, you can make academically multiple, academically defensible cases for what the historical Jesus was like. So Bart Ehrman's position is one, and it's completely academically defensible. And anyway, and then there's other positions that would also be academically defensible.

John Dehlin [00:41:27] I love it. Okay, so I think the next question for me is what are other ways? I think what we just said is we have to let go of literalism. You know, when we think about the Scriptures, it's like, again, as Mormons, we've been kind of groomed. It's like God talks to Moses. Moses, you know, writes down, you know, the Pentateuch, you know, or, you know, if it says in Genesis that Adam and Eve existed, then they existed. And if it says that Noah had an ark and put two of every animal on it, then that's, you know, there's this literalism again that we've all been set up along with the exclusivity and the superiority. So what you're saying is letting go of literalism is important. And I also hear you saying that's not new. This idea of, this idea of like progressive looking, valuing the myth and viewing things in more of a story, like fable, myth, kind of, that's not a modern invention. Maybe that's how people were doing it centuries or even millennia ago. Is that so? Let's talk about that. How do we look at other ways?

John Hamer [00:42:39] So the modern invention is historicist literalism. And what do I mean by this? Okay, so, yes. Did ancient people, when they're reading texts, did they believe that this and that happened? Did they believe that probably Zeus existed and Zeus had all of these dalliances, maybe with IO and all of the women and all these kind of different things that were going on? Maybe very much so. So in other words, they hear those stories, those stories are part of their myths, and they understand them to have happened, but they didn't have the modern idea and understanding of historicity that we now have, where historians have done this exacting analysis of whether or not this is likely to have happened or this is not likely to have happened and this sort of thing. So in other words, they're not viewing it with that kind of precision in any sense. It's just a sense of, you know, things in the past happened. And so. And then simultaneously then they were able to hold that because they didn't really care about historicity or history and that kind of a thing. They just had a kind of a general underlying, uninformed assumptions about it. Instead, what was always the most important in those stories in their mythology, including Jewish and Christian mythology, is what is the meaning of the story? So why are we telling this story? And so for us now, in modern times, when we do have historicity, when we do have literary criticism and other academic disciplines, archaeology, history, that are able to tell us things like there's almost certainly, I mean, certainly Adam and Eve are not historical figures, that Moses is almost certainly not a historical figure, and so on. And so therefore the Pentateuch is not the Torah is not God, literally speaking to Moses and being writing down on tablets and that kind of a thing. How do we understand where these come from and what is the point of them and what do we get out of them and what are their points? But like you say to your point is this is a new idea? Absolutely not. So one of the most important Hellenistic Jewish thinkers of the first century, so a contemporary of Jesus, is a guy named Philo of Alexandria who wrote long philosophical commentaries on the Torah, on the Pentateuch. And Philo went through again and again and again and said in places where it says that he saw God's face or God's finger or something like that, Philo immediately will say things like, you know, we shouldn't be so stupid as to imagine that God has an actual face or something like that. And here the prophet is what the prophet is meaning is to say this or that, in other words, so he interprets this in an allegorical or meaningful sense. So that level of interpretation, you know, it goes all the way back. And. And indeed, that text is probably Philo in his thinking. It probably is even picked up by early, lots of early Christian writers, including possibly the author of the Gospel of John, who is saying things. At the beginning of John, in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. And so in other words, this highly abstract philosophical proposition that is very similar but not exactly the same anyway as of Philo's idea of logos word, what does this actually mean? Which is not literalistic. It's quite the opposite.

John Dehlin [00:46:06] So we're live streaming this on Facebook because we really do want to get people's comments and questions in. And I think we have probably a former orthodox Mormon asking what would be a very. A question we would expect from an orthodox Mormon. Anna Skelton writes, if we let go of Adam and Eve as literal, what implications does that have for Jesus story? And I'm gonna not have you answer that question specifically. I'm gonna make it even a little bit more broad. If it's not about Adam and Eve really existing and Noah and Moses, and again, there's problems with Abraham and Moses really existing, and all these stories are questionable as to them really happening. What are we doing? What are we doing? What is the enterprise? If the stories that you talk a little about philosophy, if the stories that we're reading from are truly myth, and in this case, myth can mean a lot of things, but I'll say myth meaning the stories and the people. Not only did the stories maybe didn't happen or didn't happen the way we thought, or maybe didn't even happen at all, maybe these people, including, like Abraham, who's supposedly the. The forefather of the covenants.

John Hamer [00:47:26] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:47:26] You know, if Moses may not have even existed, if Moses didn't even lead the children out of Israel, what are we doing? Right. So what is the core enterprise we're engaged in? If it's not, if it's not built upon a literal historical framework? What is the enterprise? What are we doing with these. With these scriptures and with these thoughts?

John Hamer [00:47:50] What do we do? I totally get it, because that's what the LDS Church, its focus has been, and that's actually central to the Restoration. So the Restoration tradition is a modern movement that's been born, frankly, in response to the Enlightenment, but as an intellectual reaction to the Enlightenment and also in an era when historicity was being developed and when people were increasingly focused on history, as, in other words, did this actually happen or did this not actually happen? And that meaning whether something's true or not. And so people will often ask me things like their entire framework is the Book of how can you be a pastor if you don't think the Book of Mormon is true? Where for them, the word true means history? And what I'm gonna say here is history is not truth, and truth is history. And indeed, even the study of history doesn't lead us to truth, because the study of history can inform our understanding of truth. But historians don't uncover truth. They undercover the most likely scenario of what happened, given the evidence. And so the problem is wanting to have because something happened in history, have that have be what's relevant. It doesn't really matter what happened in history. So to me, I would even say here, you know, not so, yes, Abraham is not a historical figure. Moses is not a historical figure. Nothing, almost nothing. We might as well. You're better off in terms of when you're reading the Bible to just presume that didn't happen rather than presuming it did happen. It's not a history book. And so for me, though, it isn't actually ultimately relevant whether Jesus is a historical figure, because history isn't the point of what I think we should be engaged in. So we're not basing claims on history and historicity. The engagement here is being in dialogue with everybody in the past, everybody who went before us, and also what our entire civilization is like, I say, rising up from as we are doing an introspection and finding value and meaning ourselves and in our community. So why are we operating the way we do? What do we even assign? Is there any such a thing as truth or good? What is our purpose in trying to, let's say, have different ends that we see as positive? And so there is a grounding in that philosophical and theological tradition that's relevant that history really isn't a part of in terms of whether something happened or not. History informs us of the context and the background and everything like that. So it's very useful for our exploration. But the end, just because something happened or didn't happen, I would say, isn't relevant.

Making the Case for Religious Seekers

John Dehlin [00:50:54] Okay, and so what is the core thing we're doing here when we say when you or others might be making the case for those who are looking for those who are seekers? Right. And you've actually used that term before. If they're like feeling a hole, feeling something's missing and they're seeking, if it's not about how do I become one of God's covenant people? Literally, how do I get the blood lineage or adopted into the blood lineage, and how do I find the prophet? That's literally speaking to a God who's giving us these literal ordinances that are going to literally get us back and literally allow us to have the right handshakes to get us into the right level. If that's not what it's about, I guess I would say, is it maybe, is it about living a good life? Is it about Living the best life you can find. What is the enterprise that we're seeking?

John Hamer [00:51:51] Well, we're not seeking any of those literal things. So everything that you were saying in terms of becoming one of God's covenant people, literally or because our lineage literally, or, you know, hearing literal words, we have to, you have to, you know, strike the word literal out of all those. So we're not trying to do anything in terms of that literally. There is a bunch of enterprise, I think, that, that we're doing. So one of the things I think that happens is when we, when we just decide that this, this literal edifice that was built when we, when we decide, for example, that the whole enterprise, let's say of organized religion or Christianity as I've heard it described, for example, by one ex Borman, is, is when you were a kid, you were told the Santa Claus story and you believed in Santa Claus and you believe that's where the presence came from. And then by the time you got a little older as a kid, you, you know, you realize that wasn't the, what wasn't the case. But then you grew up and you were still expected to believe the Jesus story where it's essentially the same story as the Santa Claus story, and yet you're supposed to believe that it's true. So that's in a literal sense. Right. So that is not what I'm calling upon, but rather one of the things that can happen. Then when you have then thrust all of that aside and, and are now sailing off on your own as an individual non adherent, it may well be that you, in your own exploration, have just cast those things aside without thinking about all of the underlying issues or all the other things that they're being. And so an example I have is that one thing that'll maybe happen is that you start to have a sense in your life. You keep on encountering, let's say you keep on going past and seeing signs for yoga. And then after having seen that multiple times, you say, well, the universe is telling me something. And so in that case, what I would argue is that you have done this thing, you have this hole in terms of where you're trying to find cause and meaning, you've encountered coincidence and you've interpreted that as a meaningful message, when in fact it, I would argue is probably actually one of the more primitive components of what might broadly be called religion. So superstition, where you are interpreting something, you know, totally in a non theistic or maybe even atheistic background, you're nevertheless falling into the you know, anyway, an uninformed way of living life. Right. And so I think that the point of doing this is to. To have a community and a forum where you are able to have these informed explorations as you are learning and learning in the past what people have. Have. How they've understood these things and found meaning without falling into, you know, the kind of. Kind of immediate errors that you might otherwise launch into because you don't have that kind of background.

John Dehlin [00:55:06] So are you saying, and this is just me trying to distill and summarize it so that I understand, is it sort of like, how do I find, or can I find a community of people, a group of people that are interested in questions like, why are we here? What is the purpose of life? How should I live? What does it all mean? How can I make the best of the life that I'm given? How can I make sense of existence? How can I make sense of death? It's basically, is there a way that I can have a group of people to associate with, to help me figure out what this all means for me and how to. How to have the best experience that I can while I'm a sentient being? Is that kind of the proposition?

John Hamer [00:56:02] Yeah, absolutely. And then further on top of it, how can you then, as a group, as a community, have good. That resonates? So once you have gotten together and have, let's say, come up with things that you see as being good and you have to have, what's the basis for that? So one of the things that I see as good here in. I live in a city. The city has problems like homelessness, housing, injustice, and that's especially pronounced right now in Covid, where on the one hand, people aren't able to be in shelters, and on the other, there's curfews and things like that that are preventing people from being outside when they don't have anywhere inside to be. And so one of the things, anyway, that's highlighted that injustice even more, and certainly in the wintertime. And so if I see that as. And I define that as bad, and I would like society to be better, can I be working then in a way that further than I could do as an individual? We are able to do that here in Toronto, where I've been able to serve as the president of the church's social housing organization. And that's helped us to house hundreds of people who mightn't otherwise be able to be housed anyway. That's one of the things. But again, part of that I Think ultimately is deciding on even a basis for why do you see that as a good end? Maybe that's not an issue that does appeal to, to you, or maybe that's not something that you are working towards. In some ways, the introspection is how are we coming to a place where we are defining good or not? Because these are open philosophical questions still. There's one of the huge philosophical questions of the 21st century is is there such a thing as, as good? Is there any fundamentals? Or is everything totally relative? Is there any. And that's, that's an open philosophical question, you know.

John Dehlin [00:58:09] Right, okay. So another thing to add is, you know, should, should we alleviate suffering and help make the world a better place? And if we should, maybe being part of a community can help, can help facilitate that to, to make it more enjoyable, to make it possible and, and to in fact engage in, in, in alleviating suffering and improving the world. And, and again, that's a big hole that many people who lose Mormonism have. It's like I used to always be serving and now I don't quite know how to serve. And of course you can find some charity and throw some money at it, or even go volunteer, but there are other ways to make a big difference in the community.

The Value of Community and Collective Action

John Hamer [00:58:53] You can leverage more, right? So in other words, any more than one individual can ever do, unless you're super rich and that kind of a thing, there's only so much you can do. But where in your community, you can always leverage more because you are able to build on institutional legacy and that sort of a thing. And so that's certainly binge case. And then finally another component of it that I think is very critical is that a lot of the cases when we're people who are ex Mormon, who have deconstructed this and they've gone off on their own, in a lot of cases, the. These are part of, when we look at it globally, we're part of a global elite, at least educationally, people who've been able to go to college and maybe graduate school. In other words, people who've been taught critical thinking, even though that's been much more widespread than any other time in human history, it's still just a tiny fraction of minority for the whole population of the planet. Not everybody in the rest of humanity has had this luxury and is able to devote the time or even has the, let's say, intellectual apparatus as a result of that educational opportunity to be able to do this kind of very important and meaningful introspection and so by not fully cutting yourself off from tradition and the way that people who haven't had that opportunity, by not cutting yourself off from traditional communities that are connecting leaders or potential leaders like yourself to everybody else, you are not then leaving all of those people, cutting them all off and saying, well, they don't know any better, or saying, I'm smarter than you, or whatever it is, and then leaving those folks to say less, let's say less, scrupulous potential leaders who might come in and want to lead them into dark directions, you know, and so in some ways, if there are only negative alternatives for just regular everyday spiritual or religious people, then there's nobody leading the positive ways to give them the alternative, and they don't have the apparatus maybe to do it. So I think that that's another important component, not cutting yourself off from, in that sense, from all of humanity and being able to influence it in a positive way.

John Dehlin [01:01:25] I love it. Okay, so we've talked a bit about the why. Let's go back to this idea of undefining God. And then there's got to be some defining and so what are some. What are some ways, ancient or modern, to start undefining and redefining or giving ourselves permission to even approach the idea of, I guess you don't want us to say believing in God, but like having a conceptualization about nature or energy or power or the divine. Because you'll find ex Mormons that still believe in energy or they believe in crystals, or they still believe in something like God or science or order or nature or purpose. And so what are some ways, what are some old or new ways to reconstruct a sense of the divine or a sense of God or divinity or anything?

Redefining and Undefining God

John Hamer [01:02:25] Yeah, well, when you were saying, on that list, when you're saying God or nature. So one of the great thinkers of the early modern times, Spinoza's definition of God, he would say, you know, God, or that is to say nature. And so some thinkers have decided to go kind of that path and have looked at, let's say, what is the underlying order of the universe. And there is. There's some order in the sense of. There's things like the gravitational constant, there's all these reasons why or not, you know, seemingly arbitrary, but let's say numbers that are the speed of light being that way at the set that it is. And so that might be a place that a person goes. That's not the only direction you could go, but it's certainly one that has historically been explored and is still in terms of what I would say is the kind of, the most critical thing I think for people to do is to pull back from the inherited image of the white bearded Anglo Saxon at this point, sky God picture in that literal, physical, in fact very physical in Mormonism, physical body, kind of limited picture of a divinity. We can even just trace in history the development, the origin of that image which, which really dates or really goes back artistically to Zeus or actually to Jupiter as opposed to anyone else. And so anyway, let's pull back from that. There was actually even in a lot of Judeo, Christianity, Islam, the idea of even making such an image is anathema in Judaism. It's certainly anathema in Islam. And one of the reasons why the original prohibition is that way is because when you, when you make a picture, you think the picture is literal and then you get this kind of conception, that's a problem. And so that's the whole reason for iconoclasm that exists in the sister religions, Abrahamic religions, in a way. Even though there's still idolatry that can happen, it goes down that path too. So I would say get away from that picture to begin with and get away from this intensely anthropomorphized image because I don't think that that's going to be helpful as we're doing a, let's say a more open ended exploration of trying to find meaning in this tradition. I'd go instead we can go to for example, one of the great thinkers of the Middle Ages is a guy named Anselm of Beck. Anselm of Canterbury is sometimes called who is Archbishop of Canterbury right after the Norman Conquest, who is one of the great thinkers who was essentially at the beginnings. And Plato and Aristotle are also being and logic are being really brought into what's becoming the medieval university system. He's known, if you know Sunstone. Sunstone's motto is Faith seeking understanding. And that is actually a quoting of Anselm. This guy Anselm has a definition of God which he posits, which is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. And so that's his starting point. Let's define God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. And when you do that and you go through and you read what Anselm has to say, we're definitely not getting to some limited anthropomorphic sky God who's very, very much kind of the way I think you might have interpreted the idea of the meaning of Heavenly Father or something like that. If you were growing up Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:06:11] So for me, that just sounds like creation. It sounds like existence. It sounds like nature. And for me, when I was in my progressive Mormon phase, I would basically say there's clearly some power behind the existence. There's some power causing, you know, electrons to spin around a nucleus and something binding the, you know, the, the particles in the nucleus together. There's something that's driving the evolutionary process. There's something that caused life or created life that's. I just said I, I'm just going to call that God, right? It's just existence. It's just. And it sounds like that's. Is that, is that kind of what you're talking about there?

John Hamer [01:06:56] Well, I'm saying that's certainly one way that people can go and it's a perfectly valid kind of exploration. So, so there's been a bunch of philosophers that have done that, especially like I was thinking, noses, in other words, at the beginning of especially our modern times when we have been really focused on what we might call materialism, which is to say when you're really thinking about the physical world and so you were just listing off electrons and all those kind of things. And so when you are really focused on the physics part of it, then that's been an approach that I think people have really wanted to. So for me, one of the most important parts, and this goes back to what you're saying at the very beginning, is that if we're going to really start getting focused in on that kind of materialism is that you also though have to be leery of what this whole, what I think is a dead end, which was this looking for what's called like the God in the gaps. And so as people, scientists, natural scientists, natural philosophers, understood more and more of how the natural world operates, what they were more or less saying is as humans understood this and that God is in these places that are still not understood, and then the gaps get tinier and tinier and tinier. And so it ends up being, I think ultimately it ended up being an intellectual dead end because what people in modern times. People in modern times created a concept called the supernatural and they defined God as supernatural. This is not an ancient idea. This is a modern idea because of the development of materialism and then an idea of the super materialism. And so this is what you're talking about when you're saying like an interventionist God. So this is the God that finds your keys and is helping you or is specifically making one tribe of people, people blessed and is cursing other people and that kind of thing. So I don't think that's a profitable way to look at God. And I think that ultimately, philosophically and theologically, once you start down that path, you're not going to be able to. There's a major philosophical or theological problem called the problem of evil. And so if you define God, for example, as good as. And you also believe that God is doing all kinds of supernatural interventions, ultimately you have to decide that those interventions are capricious and arbitrary and that when those happen, therefore, because God could have done other ones, that God is at the minimum, responsible for all horrors, including things like the Holocaust. And so therefore that God is causing horrific evil and is therefore potentially evil. And so this is a problem with, I think, bringing all of that together. So what I would suggest is, as opposed to, if you are going to kind of go down that path, you have to come up with some way or understanding of a kind of a universal goodness that is potentially available to everyone. And that maybe because you are attuned either through learning or mindfulness or openness, that you're able to participate in this kind of goodness. But it's not because of you've been singled out and someone else is being punished.

John Dehlin [01:10:15] As I think about kind of the Mormon God and what Joseph Smith would have given to us, there's some real security and comfort in that. It's. Yeah, it's basically saying, as humans, we know form. As humans, we understand parents. As humans, we all seek to be loved. As humans, we're afraid and we want, like to know what to do. And we want a structure. And so this. This idea of an anthropomorphic God or an anthropomorphic Jesus or Savior, there's so much that's compelling about it because it's like, oh, there's a father. I get that. I get what that means. He loves me. Oh, I want to be loved. He cares about me. Oh, I want to be cared about. And if my parents are jerks or life feels scary, well, I've got a loving father or a loving savior that cares about me. And then, well, I don't know what to do with my life. Oh, God's going to talk to his prophets, and the prophets are going to tell me I need to go on a mission. I need to get married in the temple, I need to serve in the church. And it's just. It's a. It's a meme. It's a framework that, because I experience lesser forms of this concreteness in my daily life than having this celestial Superior form of concreteness. I can understand it and I can listen to it and I can obey it. I can feel good about it. And now I know exactly what I need to do. And what you've done is you've highlighted the problems with that. What if you don't get an answer to your prayers? What if the things you were told to do don't lead to happiness? What if you don't find your keys? What if your child dies of cancer? What if you obeyed your patriarchal blessing and everything blew up, but you did everything like you were told to do? What about God then? And what about the way Then it all. For so many of us, just the promise unravels. And so you're saying, well, let's define it more broadly. What if it's meaning? What if it's energy? What if it's nature? What if it's purpose? What if it's goodness? There are different ways to look at it. But then I guess the challenge is you don't have that concreteness. And so if we start more broadly without some of that concreteness, that can provide some. And by the way, I'm going to say what Buddhism teaches you is that certainty is an illusion, that religions can make you feel, oh, I'm loved and, oh, I know the direction. But what if there's a hand inside the puppet? What if there's ultimately a charlatan or someone that's manipulating those constructs, ultimately, in a way where you're giving your time, you're giving your money, you're giving your reputation to something that's, that's bankrupt on the other end? You may have felt like there was certainty. You may have felt like there was something really concrete. But what if it was really, you were being played the whole time? That's why that, that illusion of certainty and concreteness can leave you feeling so betrayed. And I think what I hear you saying is, okay, we're going to lose some of the. A lot of the concreteness. We're going to lose a lot of the certainty. And that may beg the question of, like, well, what's the value? But what I'm hearing you say is if you can start at a more abstract, higher level, then that there still is some value to be had. And so I guess that's the next question. Let's say we define things more broadly. We go with a less material and a more overarching sense of the divine that's less general. Where can that take us in ways that are more concrete? What value is there if it's not in the certainty and not in the concreteness. Where do we go? Right from the, from there.

The Appeal and Limits of a Concrete God

John Hamer [01:14:16] Yeah. Well, so to your exact point, the no matter how, how much the concreteness is, is reassuring. It's very reassuring. Especially when the ship is sailing and everything's going great. Right. And when everything is going great, then you're self reinforced in that assurity. And so this is one of the reasons why to your point before, about in terms of the profitability of it and everything like that's called the prosperity gospel, which is when God, this idea that God blesses the righteous and curses the wicked. And so then when you are, and if you think of blessings in terms of material wealth and things like that, so when you're a very wealthy person, then you're definitely being assured that the fact that you have all this stuff is because God's given it to you, because you're righteous. So it's self reinforcing in that way. And that can be as satisfying as whatever, as long as that's going well. But then we all can experience suffering and loss. And so unfortunately you're ill equipped for that philosophically and in a community sense when that happens. And indeed actually one of the things that happens in Mormonism because you are called upon at all times to kind of put a happy face on things and make everything's going right because of showing that kind of prosperity and blessings, that if you actually admit to something horrible happening in life, you immediately become, it's clear that something's wrong with you. People in the community, in the ward are going to try to take care of you, but suddenly you're not one of the righteous ones. You're one of the people that everybody else is being righteous by helping. Right. And so it is a problem. So what do we do if you lose that? So absolutely, unfortunately you're not just buying into another very simple program. If you were to come into my congregation. So you're not going to just be handed the new booklet and find out that our version of the Happy Meal has different kind of food in it than what? Just a little bit slightly than McDonald's, it's a health beverage now or something like that. It's not like that. Rather it's horrible. Sweet freedom. And so as you are, as you are treated to, I mean, you mentioned Buddhism. So Buddhism at least starts with the noble truth that life is unsatisfactory, that life is suffering. And so at least it's kind of presenting that kind of as a way forward. It's still Completely possible in a modern times for their. In Asia, for example, there's all kinds of places where there's very literalistic and quite negative expressions of Buddhist religion. But nevertheless, that's a. It's a good philosophical grounding. And so in that same way, Christianity has those kind of abstractions to it going back as well. And so one of the places I mentioned, Anselm, one of the places from that definition you talked about going into a materialistic way we could define that other ways of doing things is to go to the realm of ideas. As we are talking about what is goodness, what is love? What are some of these characteristics of as we might define God as traditionally done in Christianity as goodness for goodness own sake or love for love's own sake. And as you start to identify with and have your own life's purpose be equated with those ideals, one of the things that happens is that you're more interested in furthering all of those ends because those become part of your identity than you're worrying about the little parochial provincial things about whether, for example, my name, John Hamer, is going to be engraved on a granite slab somewhere or a monument or a trophy or something. But instead, to what extent are the things that I truly value able to be forwarded throughout society and going forward?

John Dehlin [01:18:28] Okay, okay. So it's very abstract.

John Hamer [01:18:33] So it's still not. You're not biting into it and enjoying this yet, John?

John Dehlin [01:18:37] No, no, this is good. No, this is really good. I think we're laying an important framework.

John Hamer [01:18:42] Yeah.

Prayer, Worship, and Spiritual Practice Reconsidered

John Dehlin [01:18:42] So to ask a couple questions from the framework of a more concrete.

John Hamer [01:18:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:49] Background. What is what? So some of the things that we think of when we think of God, number one is we think about prayer. So we think about. Historically, prayer has meant there's a loving heavenly father that you talk to literally with words and you say thank you for things and you ask for things. And then somehow in theory, he sprinkles, he uses his power and he gives you things, he helps you find things, he blesses you, he takes care of you and protects you. And that's kind of what prayer is. What are some other ways to think about prayer then? If God isn't necessarily what we thought, and if prayer isn't exactly what we thought, then what can prayer be with a God that's a little bit less concrete?

John Hamer [01:19:40] So I think that there's three different types of prayer that are. There's maybe more, but I can think of off the top of my head that are still potentially, I think, very, very meaningful. And Useful and can be used in a positive spiritual way. And so the first would be like a personal private prayer. So if you are like my deceased friend George before he passed away, every night would pray. And he. One of the ways that he did that, one of his traditions was he went through all of the people that he cared about and thought specifically about each one of them each day. And that was an important ritual for him. And it also, I think, was one of the reasons why he was such a. Just an unendingly good person who was mindful of others because he always had them on his mind. Another way that you can have a personal prayer like that would be as you are struggling with different things, it is a capacity, as you articulate those, it is a capacity for you to be engaged in this process of introspection like we're talking about. So you are mulling over your problems and by even articulating them you are going to be open to having pieces fit together. We can call it inspiration or however you want to understand your relationship with the divine. Or even if you want to think of it as not in a non theistic way. I think this could be a very useful practice for you to be able to mull over things instead of just going thoughtlessly forward. That's personal private prayer. A second type of prayer would be public prayer. So when you're in a community and someone is saying a prayer, this is a thing, this is a group activity or community activity in general. What we would hope would be happening is that the person is trying to articulate goals that that community might have and their own personal take on those and sharing their own perspective. And hopefully again this is not. It could be done. Anything can be done for good or ill. So a person could be speaking and have their own selfish biases or some or those kind of things be coming through. And that wouldn't be a good iteration of it. But instead if you're trying to say something that is aspirational for what you're all, all trying to accomplish, then having that moment of ritual and shared ritual and community building and meeting together I think can be very valuable. And we definitely do that on a very regular basis in my community here. And then a third kind that is very unusual I think in the Mormon context because there's been a long time dislike of, let's say ritual. And that it would also be completely possible to have of a more like a more ritual prayer where you're saying the same kind of thing in a. In over over again as a could Be essentially like a mantra. And when you're doing that kind of a thing, there's another, that's also a way to get into a kind of meditative state. And there are ways of. And I think that that could also have, you know, where you're more in tune with what your life, the divine, all those kind of things. So I think that there are, there are reasons and benefits potentially for all three of those kind of prayers. And none of them are actually you might find your keys, by the way. So when you step back and do that, it's not because of a supernatural intervention has happened, but it is because maybe by stepping back and being not just continually hitting the, hitting your head against the wall in the same way you've stepped back, you're thoughtful, you're allowing potentially a different network in your brain to operate, you're in touch, whatever we're going to call spiritually more. And so maybe that is going to let you calm down and maybe retrace. Right. So I think it may, you might find your keys.

John Dehlin [01:23:56] Okay, this is great. So if I'm going to summarize what I heard, personal prayer can be number one, just a way for you to do feeling, self exploration, inner wisdom, self

John Hamer [01:24:12] knowledge, and then also reminding you what's

John Dehlin [01:24:14] important and then remind. And then remind in a way. If you want to be kind all the time. Right?

John Hamer [01:24:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:24:20] If you want to be a good person, if you want to be. If you want to remind yourself, I want to be a good spouse or I want to care about my kids, or I want to be, I want to be kind. Right. It's a way for you in your personal life to have a daily, let's just say, or a frequent ritual that grounds you in the values that you want to always remember versus forget and then get grouchy or forget and do bad things, or forget and do harm. It's a way to nurture an individual practice of self discovery and or reminding yourself of the values of the type of person you want to be and of the traits you want to incorporate and exhibit. There's value in that without there being some sky daddy that's, that's blessing you at the expense of others or, or worse, not meeting your expectations. Where you're like, wait a minute, you're going to bless me, but I just lost my job or you're going to heal my kid, but my kid just

John Hamer [01:25:17] died, or you have to just disappointed that after an entire lifetime of you believing literalism that you're. That you've never then heard A literal voice, because you shouldn't have, because there's not going to be a literal voice. And so that's not how it happens.

John Dehlin [01:25:32] And there's a great comment from one of our listeners. Sariah writes, the idea that it's not about you or me for her is actually assuring horrible things happen outside of me. Good things happen outside of me. Free will exists. The safety net that is God in faith catches me in those moments. The idea that I'm not at the steering wheel helps me understand my place and my attitude towards such things. I am not more important than the child praying for the bombs to stop dropping. By doing the right thing, I don't gain favor over the child's plea. And there's something. Thank you for writing in, Sariah. And there's something that I'm getting from that. In some ways, a concrete, literalistic idea of God and prayer and a relationship with God can actually be an obstacle instead of an asset to spirituality or growth or meditation or mindfulness, because it basically sets you up for all these expectations that end up getting unfulfilled and that leave you with more suffering. Is that fair to say?

John Hamer [01:26:31] It often can, you know. So I also want to say in all of this, when I'm specifically addressing the audience that I think we're talking about here in the podcast and most of your audience, generally speaking, like I said, I was talking about people who have had the opportunity to go to college and these kind of things and critical thinking. And you're engaged in these kind of things. And this is one of the reasons why you've had this disconnect and dissatisfaction with, let's say, being told that you have to literalistically believe in the Santa Claus story. But. And that's from that perspective. But on the other hand, I also don't want to privilege that and say the only good way to live life is to have gone to graduate school and to have that kind of worldview and paradigm that it's been completely valid way for people to live who don't engage in that and they have. And to instead be having a worldview that is based on primary education. Where the primary education is, is more about memorization of how things work in this kind of thing. And so it isn't about questioning assertions and that kind of a thing. And I don't want to privilege it and say that that's bad and the one is good and the other is bad. It's completely possible to have a very meaning and people have majority of people throughout time have always had life that way. I'm just trying to say this other component, this other section of people don't get spoken to very often by organized religion. In fact, it tends to not get talked to. And we just. People leave and for example, clergy or ministers, no matter how much they may be went to in a traditional Protestant church, they may well have all gone to seminary and they know all of these issues about the historical Jesus or anything like that. And they're scared to tell their parishioners anything of the kind because they're afraid of losing a bunch of people. And so then they lose other people because they aren't being fully honest. And so I'm not trying to denigrate one way, but I'm also trying to speak to people who haven't been spoken to.

John Dehlin [01:28:48] Got it? Okay. The other things I heard about prayer is that it's a great way for the community to express a united feeling or sentiment or intention. And then there's. And then there's the ritual aspects. And there is just this value of a weekly or a regular private or community ritual that again, helps center you, helped grind, helps ground you, helps remind you of things or just that helps you feel good, and that helps you feel good in association with others. That can build a sense of unity, a sense of friendship, a sense of togetherness that we're all seeking on some level. We're all seeking something social. We all want. You know, those of us who had good associations with our ward or our state growing up, we still long for that. And that. That's why we've tried oasis. That's why we've tried, you know. You know, different secular attempts, like thrive at community ritual or even community prayer can be one way to help build a sense of community and a sense of spirituality that's in a group setting instead of in an individual setting. Is that all fair to say?

John Hamer [01:30:02] Absolutely. And in fact, in that way, you know, even though I'm coming from obviously the position of being a pastor in a Christian, progressive Christian denomination, restoration denomination, if I'm called upon to, let's say, to have like a group prayer like that in a. In an audience that's much more mixed. Right. So in an audience, especially a post Mormon audience, I think it's completely possible and valid to do a formalized, where you're stepping back and you're doing the same thing that prayer does, which is you're kind of making a joint or shared sacred, if we don't use the word sacred, but let's say formal or intentional or mindful statement. And it doesn't have to overtly even call out to God. Right. And so you can say things that are broadly similar and accomplishing the same purpose without excluding people for whom, let's say that they, they have a strong objection to that with. For very good reason, because of their upbringing and, and where they're at and on their personal journey. And so, and so I prefer, especially in a circumstance like if I'm called upon during, for example, been able to speak at funerals for people who are, let's say, for someone who passed away, who's an ex Mormon, who was an atheist, and they have a broadly split family between their ex Mormon family, and they're still very devoted, active Mormon family. And so my goal in that circumstance was to be able to speak for both sides or, you know, in an inclusive way of both sides while honoring the memory of the person. And so therefore not. Not using any kind of divisive, divisive language.

John Dehlin [01:32:02] I love it. Okay, so some of our listeners are already. Well, I don't want to go too deep into this, but let's give the brief answer. So Alan is saying, is the private or public prayer speaking to a real God? So Alan wants to go right back to that literalism. Well, what's your quick answer to Alan?

John Hamer [01:32:18] Sure. So. So absolutely. So if we. But again, it's a God who we now have to. Where we don't have a fixed definition, where we had originally decided, well, this is what God is. God is a physical, limited being with a physical body who is living on a planet near the star Kolob and who is literally somehow your actual spiritual father in a literal sense, we're not saying that that's rejected and rather the kind of God that we're talking about, you know, in terms of real, one of the ways that real has been defined in the past, historically, realism, according to Plato, is that the. That ideas and concepts are real. So there is such a thing as goodness. There is such a thing as the archetype of love itself or peace, in that case, those concepts, if, you know, philosophically, for Plato, for most traditional Christian theology throughout down to the Middle Ages, those ideas are very real. And therefore that's essentially anyway in who we're invoking or what we're invoking, however you want to imagine that. So goodness for goodness, goodness its own sake, the ultimate goodness.

John Dehlin [01:33:43] So it's okay if Alan is really interested in this idea of it being real versus not real, whatever that means. You can, it can be real and it can Be as concrete as you want it to be or as general as you want it to be. But. But it can still be real, even if it's not this anthropomorphic, concrete, bearded God, Right?

John Hamer [01:34:02] That's what I'm saying.

John Dehlin [01:34:03] Yeah.

John Hamer [01:34:04] So in the same way that I. When I'm talking about the Book of Mormon, I don't think that there's any point in equating historicity with truth and the same thing with the Bible. I don't think we can say it's not history, that's for sure. But that isn't the same. History isn't true. I don't go and read Edward Gibbons the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and say that's true. It's not truth or not, it's history. And so I want to just definitely divorce the idea of history from truth and also the idea of literalism from real.

John Dehlin [01:34:41] Okay, I love it. So the next question is from Tammy. I love this Tammy. It's a great question. Tammy writes if he. So again, she's kind of. You can tell she's being influenced by the anthropomorphic male, you know, Mormon God or traditional modern Christian view of God. If he basically does nothing, why does he deserve to be praised and worshiped or even thought about? It's a great question. It's very common. Tammy. Thanks for asking it. What's your response to Tammy?

John Hamer [01:35:10] So I'm not saying that. And I actually do not use personal pronouns for God because I think that's counterproductive and problematic because. Especially because of English being a gendered language. And then you assume suddenly that you're talking about God, he, God, his, that kind of a thing. So I wouldn't mind myself. Don't do that. So I never. I don't. But I'm not telling people they can't. But anyway, that's just. Just for me. So what? Why would. I'm not saying that God does nothing. So, for example, we've talked about Anselm. So in following Anselm's trajectory, his successor would be Aquinas. One of the arguments about Aquinas is that God is being self and that every being that exists is ultimately experiencing being because you are participating in God, which is being itself. And so that would actually. The implication there is that God is actually doing absolutely everything at all times. And we would be participating that. If you were following a Thomas idea, you don't have to have that idea, but that's one idea where God would be doing not only something or not nothing, but actually Everything. It's just not individual little capricious things where God is actively intervening in all kinds of capricious and ultimately it would turn out evil ways, but rather is doing things in a vast, dynamic, universal way that we can be participating in. And in terms of praise, again, part of the problem, I think when people are thinking of praise and worship and things like that, we are going back to this analogy which has been with us the entire time, where ancient medieval, modern people think of God as an analogy for the Persian emperor or something like that, the king of kings, the Roman emperor. And then you are therefore thinking about worshiping or praising some guy. But if your worship and praise, or if what you're praising is love, the archetype of love, love itself, love is praiseworthy. If you were talking about goodness, I think goodness is praiseworthy. I think that the goal of furthering good, whatever we want to define good as, it's not what we want to. But in other words, whatever we end up defining through a process of thoughtful reflection, introspection, learning what understand to be good, I think that is by definition, or should be by part of our definition or corollary to our definition, praiseworthy. And so that's what I think we're talking about in terms of being praiseworthy or even worthy of worship. So what we sometimes say philosophically or theologically is that God alone is worthy of worship, not the prophet is not, the scriptures are not, no individual conception is, but rather just only that thing that than which nothing greater can be conceived, which could be, according to Anselm, anyway, goodness itself.

John Dehlin [01:38:30] Great. Okay. The next thing I think about when I think about God in prayer and then I want to talk about Jesus for a little bit, if that's okay. Yeah, absolutely. So there's this idea that you pray to God, you ask God questions or you seek help and then God gives you an answer. And in the Mormon context, the Holy Ghost is involved because God can't communicate with you directly, but he uses this Holy Ghost, which is, is another member of the godhood. And the Holy Ghost gives you feelings and that, that, you know, if you're, if you get really skilled, then that's, that's, that helps you figure out what God's telling you and what you're supposed to do with your life and making you feel reassured. Yes, go this way, no, don't go that way, etc. When people leave, lose their faith in Mormonism or orthodox Mormonism or God or whatever, there's still this sense of like, well, do I get inspiration Is the universe communicating me with me in some way or not? Or they're just like, no, I'm not even going to be thinking about that anymore. I'm shut off from all that. It's all my brain, it's all my chemicals. So there's this idea of no communication, no inspiration, or there's this idea of, well, I'm still feeling like there's. There's something that's made me think of something creative or gave me an idea, but I don't know how to think about it. Is it God? Is it not? So tell me, let's explore really quickly ways to think about this idea of wisdom out there or, or communication out there, or even inspiration or influence. If it's not a bearded God in the sky, if there's no Holy Ghost per se, in some concrete, you know, disembodied spirit sort of thing, is there a place for inspiration or wisdom or guidance or direction in this model? And if so, what are some ways to think about it? JOHN Hamer Yes.

Spiritual Confirmation and Personal Revelation

John Hamer [01:40:38] So I guess what I'd say that the. I personally reject the, the kind of model of spiritual confirmation that is generally, I think, promoted by how the LDS Church does it is essentially the Moroni challenge model, where if you do this thing, you read the Book of Mormon, you pray about it, and if you then feel good, then that somehow is the basis for all of this whole logical apparatus that means this and this and this and this is literally true. And that kind of thing, that the prophet has authority. That's true, true, or something like that. So I don't think that that's how, that's a valid proposition. I think that we, as people, our emotions are able to, we don't understand them always, and they're able to be influential for us, and we have them and they're real emotions. But if you, I mean, nowadays, if you are, you know, just experiencing media, the media, people who make movies, people who make TV shows are so good at this. You know, that if I watch great movies and they make me cry, that doesn't, I would say that that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, that anything was, was real in the sense of there's certain things that are predictable in terms of how you, you can play someone's heartstrings and this kind of thing. And we have, what do you call it when you have a false, A confirmation bias, right? So you want it to be true and then you have that kind of a feeling. That said, so I reject that as a proposition. In other words, that that's the spirit. When you are having a confirmation bias, when you're having a emotional reaction to something that's quite. That you'd anticipated that you would have that. Simultaneously though, I also reject kind of this premise that we should all be logical and Mr. Spock and that the only our reason works and this kind of thing and we have to be very cold hearted. I think we need to be in touch with our feelings, but we have to and that their feelings are valid and also important in an entire component of, of us. That we're whole physical and mental beings and that we need to also though reflect on our feelings. Why did I feel that way? You know, that may be one of the most vital parts of me is when I have these kind of feelings. But I don't want to draw, let's say inaccurate conclusions based on, you know, feelings that I've had. Instead I need to, you know, look at, look at the actual cause or rootedness in what? In my feelings. So I forgot the rest of the question.

John Dehlin [01:43:26] Okay, so what I heard you say is this idea that we all learn from Mormonism that emotions equal truth.

John Hamer [01:43:33] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:43:34] Right. Is not that epistemology is deeply fraught. I think we're all triggered by it because we know that the dudes who flew those planes, you know, into the Twin Towers or the Pentagon or whatever or the Crusades or pick your awful thing done. It was, it was because they felt really strong things. And so, so I love it.

John Hamer [01:43:56] Or it may not have been feelings. They might actually had a thought they thought was rational. Right. So they might have had a commitment because they, they believe a particular literalistic worldview. And that's just what they bought into. Whether or not, whether or not that was backed up by this kind of book Moroni challenge kind of emotionalism. So yeah, so now I remember the second half of your question. So the second half of the question was so if I reject that as being the Spirit, what is there any such thing as the Spirit? What do we understand or can we understand inspiration to even mean? So if we go back again historically. So Augustine, St. Augustine is one of the most important important thinkers in all of Christianity, the most important in the, in the west, all of civilization kind of goes through his thinking. Augustine identified in his definition of when he's feeling inspiration of the Spirit is when he has a moment of where suddenly everything that had been complex or he hadn't been able to get before all somehow just suddenly comes together and he more or less says eureka to himself. And so it's this moment of having that kind of an amazing breakthrough. And so if you're thinking about some very difficult subject and everybody's constantly talking to you about it and not getting it, not getting it, and then suddenly it all fits into place. That was how he defined it. That's not the only way that one could define it. But I would suggest that there's. So there's other ways that you've also talked about, for example, that would be kind of the intellectual path. Another path is something like the mystical path where you are pulling back from worrying about all of the exact front brain kind of talk, and you are instead opening yourself up to a different mental network taking hold as you're engaged in some kind of a mindful practice. But so there would be other kinds of ways of doing that. And I also don't ultimately. I'm not ultimately pooh ing the idea of your emotions have any value or something like that. Rather, though, you just have to be in all of these places engaging with these connections, these inspirations, these ideas, these intuitions that you're having, engaging with them in a responsible way where you're thinking about them and not just assigning like, say, supernatural and authoritative meaning to them. So a lot of times people want to do something and they'll. And they'll see that as a literal supernatural intervention. And this has given them, you know, like a definitive authority that they interpret one particular way and they're going to do it that way regardless of. Even if that ends up being a really bad decision.

John Dehlin [01:46:47] Right. Okay.

John Hamer [01:46:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:46:49] All right. So that helps us understand that we probably can let go of this idea that I guess the concreteness of God telling you what to do, or the Holy Ghost telling you through feelings that this is wrong and this is right. We can sort of hold that really loosely and. Or reject it. But what I think I'm hearing you say is that just being in the process of being open to thoughts, ideas, even, you know, influences that you're kind of. I don't know that there's kind of just this seeking, there's kind of this openness, there's this paying attention that the idea of God and prayer and a divine. It's almost hard to explain, isn't it?

John Hamer [01:47:48] Well, so I'll just say, look, I feel that I have. I feel for myself that I have a very strong sense of calling to be engaged in what I'm doing in terms of community building, in terms of working on, helping, in this case, my own kind of spiritual family community, the Toronto congregation And how as we are now navigating into a new universe that is the incredibly diverse 21st century downtown Toronto, which is not something that the congregation in its 170 years or whatever had previously kind of experienced. And so as we are, I have a sense of helping us push forward and be renewed and meaningful and helpful and doing good and community building and things like that in the 21st century. And I have, I think, a sense that that gives me meaning that I have explored down to my roots and say, why do I want to do these kind of things? And why does this, why does this move me? How much, you know, am I. Am I deluding myself in some kind of ways? And I'm not actually being productive in or doing other things that I actually value or not. And so in having gone through that exploration and also then I kind of affirm then that sense of very strong calling that I feel to the work. Right. And so I think that it's, though, not something that I have then therefore decided I've closed the book on it and I'm not ever going to question that again. But rather it allows me to move forward in a very particular way and actually not being just sitting around being not decisive. We're able to act based on all of these premises and conclusions and foundations in order to promote the direction we're kind of feel called to go. But it's also, it's not coming from a sense of, okay, I'm absolutely right my way or the highway, and I'm never going to rethink this thing again. Rather, we should always be open in the same way that that's how the scientific method works. In other words, scientists know this and that the other thing, until such a time as a new theory better fits the parameters and that causes them to do a rethinking of the paradigm.

John Dehlin [01:50:26] I think what I'm hearing, and I may reduce this in ways that aren't productive, but what I'm hearing is that you, as John Hamer, lived the secular life for as many years as you did. And at some point you're like, I, I am interested in kindness. I'm interested in love. I'm interested in community. I'm interested in meaning and purpose. I'm interested in gathering with others. I'm interested in ritual and things that will help remind me of the life I want to live, and I'm interested in doing good in the world. I'm interested in alleviating suffering and helping make things better. And what I find is that an openness to a Divine an openness to a participation in a religious faith community becomes this really great way for me to engage in personal betterment and refinement and development. And it allows me to commune with others, to meet that sense of community, but also to become engaged individually and with others in, you know, year after year endeavors to develop spiritually individually, to help others develop spiritually, to develop spiritually in a group, and then to work as a group in ways that help make the world, that alleviate suffering on an individual level, and then maybe even help make the world a slightly better place as we work together in a group and in a very concrete communal way. To go about that entire. That, that, that, that entire enterprise is, is that.

John Hamer [01:52:20] That's a, What a wonderful summary. Thank you. Yeah, but I also, and I would also then have that summary and, and totally buy into how you've phrased that and said that. But then also, you know, again, going back to our original proviso that it's not the only way you could do it, so you don't have to be part of a community like this to. In order to do it. Like I said, there are any number of ways that a person can live a completely meaningful and fulfilling filling life. That's not the only path. And I'm not making any such claim.

John Dehlin [01:52:52] I love it. Okay, going back to a question that I promised I would ask. Let's talk about Jesus for a second. Because when Community of Christ, you know, people will know if they don't know the history. Once upon a time, the Community of Christ was the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It was sort of a branch of the Joseph Smith Restoration, you know, that was founded by Emma Smith and Joseph Smith III and others that didn't follow Brigham Young to Utah, but still wanted to build on the restoration.

Community of Christ as a Christian Denomination

John Hamer [01:53:29] And it still is.

John Dehlin [01:53:30] Yeah, it still is. Yeah. But, but at some point, you guys had a wreck. You, you, you, you all had a, a renovation where you changed the name of the church to Community of Christ and you chose to not only continue to build on the restoration, but also to, to keep, as one of the things that you kept as you changed your name, keep the word Christ in the name of your church. So you're still fundamentally a Christian denomination. You still look to the Holy Bible, Old and New Testaments as an inspiring scripture as part of your canon. But you also call yourself Christians. This leads to a very concrete question that Anna wanted to ask. Anna writes, how do you personally interpret Jesus role? Do you believe him as a savior or rather just A great moral leader. And I'm going to add to Anna's question. You know, in the concreteness of the kind of like the Latter Day Saint tradition, Jesus is literally the Son of God. Like in the Brighamite tradition, like God somehow impregnated Mary and Jesus is like DNA wise the Son of God, somehow part mortal, part God's genes, genetic material. And then Jesus literally was on the earth as the Son of God, a perfect being, literally. Jesus was killed, but as a somehow divine and yet mortal. And then after three days like literally resurrects and becomes co God, like you know, separate from God the Father, there's Elohim and then there's Jehovah and there's now two gods and maybe there'll be other gods, but definitely Jesus is the Son of God literally, and a God literally. And he makes it so that we all can become resurrected and will live as corporeal resurrected beings someday after we die. There's a whole literalness to Christ and to Jesus. And I think Anna's saying how much of that is still part of what you, John Hamer and or participants of community of Christ or the church itself believe versus how much room is there for deconstructing but still keeping parts of the Jesus or Christ story in your beliefs and. Or creed and or worship?

John Hamer [01:56:02] Yeah, so practice. Maybe we'll say as opposed to creed since we don't have one or in beliefs. Again, I just want to.

John Dehlin [01:56:09] Yeah, yeah, we'll come back to that every time. Right.

John Hamer [01:56:12] So yeah, but by the way, our

John Dehlin [01:56:14] listeners are pulling us back to that.

John Hamer [01:56:16] I know. No, I understand.

John Dehlin [01:56:18] You're saying it very clearly. But then they're like, wait, what do I believe? What do I believe?

John Hamer [01:56:22] Delete all of literal. Every time the word literal was used, we got to delete that. So okay, it. So for Jesus, you know, like we were talking about boy, even back to Mary and Elohim and this kind of a thing. So the Christmas stories, for example, I think all historians, you know, are agreed that there's no historicity to that and indeed that the Gospels are not, not broadly, I would say anyway, there's more ways that you can do it. They're not broadly historical and we shouldn't be looking at those and actually really focusing on the historicity or anything like that. So in terms of this idea of Jesus as Savior, so what I'd like think it's very useful to do is to broadly separate in our minds a couple different ideas of Jesus. And so on the one hand there is the historical Jesus, I think that she was talking about here. Next there is the Jesus Christ of Scripture. And then finally we have the Christ of Christian theology. And so when we are talking about ideas like ideas of a Savior, or specifically the ideas of Christ as God, Christ as being, in the traditional Christian theology, a person of the Godhead, specifically the Logos, the Word. So in the Genesis, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word, or that's in John as well. But anyway, so God says the Word, let there be light. So the Word is there with God, as is the Spirit on the waters. And this again is a. Not history, but a mythological story at the beginning of Genesis, that it's talking about a theological idea or it's a precursor to what develops as a theological idea. So the idea of it is that God, which we've been talking about very much in the abstract, has had a traditional lens in Christianity through which people in Western civilization have envisioned the unknowable, the undefinable, something that is extremely abstract. There is a lens through which we have traditionally viewed God that the divine. And that is through the Trinity or through the universe, the Godhead, the three persons of Christian theology which are the. The Creator, Christ and Spirit. And so in this case, then the idea theologically of Christ is caught up with ideas of, like, the idea of Savior is also caught up with the ideas of somehow of connecting us as mortals to that which is totally beyond mortal, so that the us as finite to our conception of the infinite. And so, in other words, there is an idea conceptually of Christ being fully human and fully divine, so connecting between us and that unknowable God, the Creator. Who is that, as the Gospel of John says, no one's ever seen, that's beyond human conception and understanding. So that's the Christ of theology. And so you can definitely, if you want to say, believe in. You can definitely conceive of God in that form as Savior. And that still can be extraordinarily meaningful and something that you can build on and think about, think about that idea in the middle of these. So it's Christ of theology. In the middle, we had the Jesus Christ of Scripture. And so these are how we can understand Jesus Christ in the tradition of Christianity, the religion of the last couple thousand years, through the way that that is experienced, I would suggest, ritually and liturgically and things like that through church practice. So the reading of Scriptures, the reading of stories, these are not again, about history or any way, but. Or rather how it's like I was talking about before, about having Like a ritual prayer, in the same way you might be reading a text and thinking about that text, thinking about a text like the Good Samaritan, then you maybe think about how that's, how that kind of a story or how that is meaningful in life today. And I tend to want to specifically tell people to avoid making parables into analogies where you just think, oh, this is just a step, stand in for this and it's going to give us some kind of a simple answer. Rather, a parable or any kind of a reading should be an open ended dialogue, like a Socratic dialogue, like a question, where essentially us in our time are meant to engage with open ended questions. And the parable gets us up to the off on that kind of thinking and exploration, spiritual exploration. And then finally we have the historical Jesus. And I've already said at the beginning of this that it doesn't ultimately for the rest of this, in my opinion, for the Jesus Christ of Scripture, which are used traditionally and liturgically in other kinds of ways, ceremonially within the church tradition, for the Christ of theology, which is how we as a lens through which we do this theological exploration, neither of those are even relevant to whether there even was a historical Jesus. It doesn't matter because they're not based on it and they don't presuppose that it's not essential. And so the historical Jesus is a modern construction of historians that we try to go back and find. Nobody since Jesus's death experiences has had any experience with the historical Jesus in terms of the once all the people who ever knew the historical Jesus died, none of whose writings do we even have. There's no eyewitness accounts at all. We can't experience a historical being anymore. We can, as historians, use all of the different modern academic techniques of literary criticism and history in order to try to reconstruct our best guess for what the historical Jesus would be like. And that bases on our own reading of the sources primarily. And that's an interesting intellectual exercise. But it ultimately for me isn't particularly relevant for the other two more important components of it, both philosophically, theologically and also in the life of the church. And so in that same sense, the historical Jesus and even the other components aren't actually relevant for a universal religion. This is why I've said you don't have to do this in order because there's multiple paths for living a meaningful life. The reason why it's valuable to use this apparatus in Western civilization and indeed for community of Christ in restoration tradition. Our component of it. So for ex mos and everything like that, post Mormons is because this is a traditional apparatus that we've inherited that is going to be natural for us. And we can go back and look throughout all of time and history and all of our culture, all of our inheritance, all of these great classical works of music and literature and architecture, all of the remains and everything that goes on is built and exists within that infrastructure. Even all of our secular stuff ultimately has all of its roots. Everything in the west has come through 2000 years, of almost 2000 years anyway, of Christian roots at the stump. And so it doesn't hurt to know about it. You don't have to. It's not the only way to do the exploration. But that's why I think it's particularly vital to go ahead and it's meaningful to not just throw that all away. In other words, I think that there's a. Not. It's not necessary, but it's a useful and compelling reason to build on that.

The Historical Jesus and Myth in Scripture

John Dehlin [02:05:06] So some of the things that come to my mind as just maybe a way to restate what you're saying or to try and make sense of. Of it. I mean, at a minimum, Jesus can be, well, well, you know, there's the question of did he. Did he actually exist? You know, Glenn writes, you know, was there a historical Jesus?

John Hamer [02:05:24] So the answer is yes, there was a historical Jesus.

John Dehlin [02:05:26] Yeah, yeah.

John Hamer [02:05:26] So I'm saying it's not. I'm saying it doesn't matter if there was. I'm not saying that there wasn't one. There was one. So almost all historians agree. There's one, one or two historians who have kind of an extreme position that I think almost all scholars who have looked into this question, they agree there was a historical Jesus. We're actually very close to a historical Jesus, which is to say we have writings of an actual guy. Everyone agrees Paul was a historical figure. And Paul specifically says that he met Jesus's brother, James, Jacob and Jacob. And James are, you know, it's different names. James is the English word for the name Jacob anyway, so that James is Jesus's brother, was Paul's enemy. And so Paul and Paul was trying to assert his own authority, despite the fact that James was the head of the church. And so Paul wouldn't have a lot of reason to talk up the existence of Jesus own brother and indeed his main disciple Peter, both of whom were sort of enemies of Paul or at least rivals if they weren't. So we're really quite close to a historical Jesus. And there's no particular reason why we can imagine that this all developed. And indeed, like I say, there's a scholarly consensus that there was a historical Jesus.

John Dehlin [02:06:36] Okay, okay. And I agree. I had Bart Ehrman on who's one of the world's top scholars. He's secular. My guess is he identifies as atheist or agnostic. It's gonna be hard to find somebody who's thought more about this and studied more about this than Bart Ehrman and who would have every reason to.

John Hamer [02:06:55] Yeah, you know, he's actually one of the leading scholars on the question. And he.

John Dehlin [02:06:59] Yeah, and he. If he. If he were just trying to, like, advance an agenda, a secular agenda, he would have every motivation to reject the idea of a historical Jesus. And he will say he. He thinks the probability is high that there was a historical figure named Jesus upon. Upon which his teachings or life, you know, upon which the New Testament is based on, you know, a real life with a real set of teachings of a real person that once existed. But you're. You're also saying that's not the point. So to go one step further, what I. What I'm hearing is, is that you can try and just live a good life, know how to live, be, you know, to do good, but to have a. A set of teachings to kind of frame how you want to live, to have a person as a myth or as a role model or as an example that did live in history, who's saying be kind, who's saying forgive, who's saying to love, who's teaching stories and parables that have religious instruction. And I'm just gonna go back to just this idea of a role model of someone to try and emulate, of someone to inspire. Just having that. A set of teachings, a historical figure, a role model, an example, you know, if I want to be loving, it's nice to have an example of a loving figure I can look to to help instruct me, to remind me and to inspire me that there's value in that. If I don't have that, who do I look to? It's nice to have someone to look to and. And some text to give me guidance and to kind of point me in a direction. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm hearing you say that having some type of myth, some type of historical figure, some type of text, some types of framework to point you in a direction, there's value to that. Is that part of what you're saying?

John Hamer [02:08:57] Yeah. And I would just delete the historical word out of all that, so when you're talking about a model, and so there is a historical Jesus about which we can say very little or we can say make different competing, academically defensible explanations about how we think that historical Jesus was. So when you're talking about the mythology and, or the exemplar, then that's. Now we've convert, now we've moved over to that middle component, what I was talking about, which is to say the Jesus Christ of Scripture, and that's the Jesus that people will actually be able to read about and experience because that's the Jesus of the text. We shouldn't be worried about whether the text is talking about a historical figure or not. There's all kinds of things in the text. Texts are not historical. The texts are not meant to be history. They're not written by historians. They are, they are a different literary genre. And so they are doing something else for them. But they are actually are meant to be exemplars. And they also have other motives in terms of the authors of those gospels. And so. Yeah, but the, one of the issues, again on top of that, that I would say is important is some of the times, again, people take scripture then and Christians, especially in modern times, take scripture to be authoritative in a very harsh and literalistic way. And so they'll take a verse out of this and that and the verse will say something quite awful. Women can't talk in church or whatever, whatever thing that they want to quote and make that be some kind of universal commandment for now that should be rejected and that tendency should be rejected. And instead we need to have those texts be in dialogue with us now and understand the authors from 2000 years ago for their limitations where they had less. In some ways they had great insight and they have all kinds of, and maybe great inspiration. But there's all kinds of different ideas and understandings that they didn't have access to. And we shouldn't be living in the past in that way either. So there was. What they're doing should be revelatory anew. Even Paul says you shouldn't have the, the, the literal. The letter gives death, but the spirit gives life. So we should be engaged in a responsible interpretation and responsible interaction and dialogue in the present. And the meaning for now with those texts, as opposed to viewing them as some kind of rule book that hasn't been updated for 2,000 years.

John Dehlin [02:11:39] A lot of people are, are going to say to you, John Hamer, listen, for me, the concreteness and materiality of this is essential because I want to know that when I die, I'm going to keep living. I want to. And I like this idea of being resurrected and being perfect and living eternally in the afterlife. I want to know that I'm going to see my loved ones again. I want to know that this freaking life is even worth living. Yeah. And that. And that all the goodness, all the best things, my family, my kids, my relationships, me, it all persists. And what Jesus means to me is that someone conquered death for sure, literally. And that they were resurrected and that I will resurrect and see my loved ones again and persist. That's important. And if that's not coming along with the package, there's very little value here. And I'm gonna add one more thing. I want a set of beliefs and an institution that's talking about that a lot and emphasizing that and really promoting that. Because for me, that's why I'm in this. Yeah. Otherwise I'm gonna eat, drink and be merry. I'm gonna party, I'm gonna do whatever I want, or I'm just gonna end my life, because what's the point of it all? And so what if somebody's saying, no, the value of Jesus is the literalness of it, is the afterlife is the materiality, is the resurrection. And if you start getting philosophical and mythical, you're losing the value of why I'm in this. What would you say to that?

John Hamer [02:13:21] So I'd say that from my perspective, you just have it exactly the opposite. So you have the opposite as the case. So even if we were to accept the premise that the simple answer was the answer that the whole this, that and the other, you need the secret handshake. And then you're going to have a heavenly afterlife where you're fundamentally doing precisely the same thing that we're doing now. And let's say, to go to the eternal progression style, proposition or doctrine of the LDS Church, what's the purpose of that life? The only thing that's happening under these circumstances is, let's say you even do get it all there. You get to have the highest threshold of the celestial kingdom, and you and your wife and maybe all the other wives that get sealed to you in the eternities, you're now a God and you're just replicating all that does ultimately, if we're going to take that down to brass tacks of actual meaning, trying to get back to a meaning is reproduction. So you're just saying that the purpose of life for God is to have more God kids and to produce ultimately more gods and so on. So you still haven't achieved any meaning as a being in that food chain of reproduction. You're just taking it up to now God and planetary level, in my opinion, and in fact, actually philosophically, you're doing the kind of reproduction that is what I think we would say is a reproductive strategy on Earth, the lowest kind, where you're, you know, part of the. The kind of being that has thousands and thousands of little eggs that all, none of whom achieve adulthood. In other words, they don't become full gods, they all get eaten. And in this case, they all get not eternal punishment, but eternal stagnation, where they're caught in a telestial or terrestrial kingdom and nothing will ever come of these little embryos that essentially never develop into full godhood. So I don't agree that what you are looking for or think you found, even if you were to buy into the whole scenario of literalism, has actually achieved, achieved meaning, which is the threshold of what I'm talking about. And so this is why it's hard to get out of this paradigm when you are so focused on limited materialism, literalism, being so worried about your own mortal life and death and things like that, that you just like, I'll give anything in order to continue to have the appreciably the same existence that I have now after death or something like that. And so Jesus or Christ as the conqueror of death, this is not a literal conquering. What we're talking about here is death is an idea. It's also real. But the idea of it here is Christ is conquering this death in a very ideological, immaterial, also way, as opposed to a literal kind of way.

Listener Questions on God, Morality, and the Bible

John Dehlin [02:16:29] All right, so, you know, John Hamer, I, you know, as we, for me, meeting with you, bringing you on the podcast and talking about, you know, the idea of undefining and redefining God is an absolute. It's an obvious yes, I want to do that because you're always brilliant and you're a serious, thoughtful guy who I really respect, and you put your money and your time and your reputation where you know, where your mouth is, so to speak. And you're not a dude that goofs off or wastes time. You're a serious, thoughtful guy who works to live a good life and to make the world a better place. So for me, this is an automatic discussion worth having regardless of how it turns out. And I realize, as we've now spent, you know, 2 hours and 20 minutes on this conversation, that trying to Redefine God, let alone Jesus, let alone an entire religious worldview. It's not fittable in a two hour, two and a half hour conversation. Like just the conversation about God could be its own podcast series, let alone the conversation about Jesus, let alone the conversation about reconstructing your worldview. So in some sense we've bit off a tiny bite of like something that's impossible to do at all, let alone in two hours and 20 minutes. Right. So, yeah, yeah.

John Hamer [02:18:07] But I really appreciate giving the opportunity to do just this much. Right. Because I do think that this part of the, blowing up, this part of the paradigm, to even understand it is kind of critical because I get, I'm sure, sure you get this all the time too, but I get emails from people all the time who are like listening to my lectures or they have, or they have attended our Sunday service every, every week from my congregation. We live stream the service. And now during COVID that service is watched by about a thousand people around the world. It's been 80 different countries that people have engaged us. It's simultaneously we have it translated into, into, into French and Spanish so that it can be inclusive. And so people get through that. They're like, well, I, I appreciate everything that you're saying and I like, I like everything even in the service and I love all the lessons as you're talking about peace and you're talking about activism and all of these kinds of things, but I just stumble on this God picture that I have and I understood, I don't understand. Can you please define it for me? So I get emails to that quite frequently. And so just even having had the opportunity here in your forum to even kind of explore it as you giving me good strong pushback and saying, wait, John Hamer, what are you saying? This kind of a thing, I think it's very helpful. So even though we can't, like you say, do much more than scratch the surface, I think the part that we, we did here in terms of kind of like blowing up the main conception, hopefully has been very helpful.

John Dehlin [02:19:44] Yeah, well, I'm not done with you. But, but, but, but, you know, I think that's, I think maybe we didn't frame it this way quite right at the beginning, but the idea isn't for us. You were told that God was X and now we're going to tell you that God is Y. That was not what today was about. Right. It's to, it's to look at things totally differently instead of being told a set of attributes that now you can know have someone tell you what God is. It's saying what if, what if there's a value in, in letting everything drop to the floor and allowing yourself to go on the journey to discover where there might be a role for you to be in a conversation or an exploration about what the divine is. The point isn't for us to now give you the answer that's a different answer, but instead it's to say it's for you to ask yourself, huh, do I feel like I'm missing something? And do I feel called to start going on the journey of figuring out if there's a value for me in exploring what other journeys and, or ideas about the divine might be? So it's more of an invitation to a journey than it is a set of answers, right?

John Hamer [02:21:10] Well, absolutely. So, although a bunch of different times here, I guess I have given an opinion which is that I think that literalism and historicity are intellectual dead ends. And that's, I'm suggesting don't go down that path anymore, you know, in other respect in that. But when we've talked about some of these other paths, so whether it was either the God or nature, you know, kind of the Spinozan path, the, you know, I've quoted Anselm, I've quoted Augustine and Aquinas, in other words, there's Plato's path, any of these other kinds of, of the immaterial path. Those are I've tried to suggest as not the only way, but rather these, this is a valid path of exploration I think because it's still treading into areas that are still part of the, are part of open inquiry. And so, and so I'm not saying that there's only one path or that what I've come to or where I am right now is where everybody should be because frankly I'm on my own open exploration and my ideas have, have changed as I've been exposed to more ideas both in terms of reading things from the past, but also just by being in a community that has a broad diverse degree of different perspectives that I wouldn't otherwise be engaged in. I might otherwise just be in an ivory, my own little ivory made tower, you know, of reading ancient books and that kind of a thing and just, and getting my own mental loop going. But instead what has happened by being part of a, of a community and also having that community expand quite through the Internet and things like that, I'm able to, you know, you can really, you're only going to actually learn when you're challenging being Challenged by people who don't share your ideas. And so certainly, certainly as a result of that, my ideas and my thinking has changed unbelievably since in time we've known each other so back, you know, which is almost 20 years now. I'm in a very different place than I was and I'm in a different place than I was two, three years ago.

John Dehlin [02:23:18] Yeah. And if I had to kind of add to that for listeners that are, you know, I'll just, I want to read you some questions and some comments, but you know, there's a listener of mine that, that kind of lays out what be a little bit of a tough criticism. Let me find her comment. She basically wrote, I'll paraphrase. Oh no, this is it. So Jenny writes, I'm no more impressed with this than with Mormonism. The most convoluted dialogue I've listened to for a long, long time. Now I know Jenny and I know you, John, but I guess I just want to say, well, what would your response to Jenny be with that sort of like this is all philosophical mumbo jumbo. It's highfalutin, weird philosophical stuff and it's just not calling me at all. What would your response to Jenny be?

John Hamer [02:24:24] Yeah, no, I can totally understand that. So I think that even though she's not any more impressed with this than Mormonism, she's not, I don't think that that would be equating it because she's not saying that Mormonism was mumbo jumbo, but rather Mormonism was, was very clear and fixed and had a, had an easy, had a program that was clear and strong but ultimately false. Right. And now here's a program that's so seemingly, maybe if it's a program at all, it's so wishy washy, what's the point of signing up for this? And so, so I totally understand that. And so what I would suggest to you is that that is a failing that I have done in terms of explaining a value proposition. And so if I am not able to, I wasn't able to articulate that. That's where I have to go back and think about how I am formulating something that I find so valuable that I haven't been able to convey that. On the other hand, the other part of it is that there are different things that appeal to different people and there's not a one size fits all in any of these kind of ways. And we even understand that within, let's say, my own community, my own congregation, we routinely talk about different, let's say spirituality types, or however you want to call this, different types of ways that people are integrating or understanding or associating with our community identity. And so I tend to, my natural inclination is, tends to be the very sort of theological, philosophical, that kind of intellectual quadrant where that's where I really try to engage. And that becomes very meaningful to me. Lots of people are not worrying about that kind of thing. And that's not what moves them, what might move them. We've talked already before and today about like this, the meditative path, the mystical path, this path of having kind of spiritual practices which that goes all the way back in Christianity and beyond, as well as a very meaningful and legitimate way in order to express meaning and life and in community. And another one that we've already touched on too is kind of that activist quadrant. And so you really only find meaning in life, not when you're talking about wishy washy mumbo jumbo or whatever it is seems to you, but rather when you are concrete, hands on, you want to, you know, get out there and actually do the volunteer work right now, you know, and we don't need to worry about what the basis of that is because, you know, it. It's good because of the, because of the good you immediately see done.

John Dehlin [02:27:07] Yeah. And I'll just say to Jenny and to other listeners that are like, not finding value in this, what I can say for sure is that there are a lot of ex Mormons and post Mormons and ex religious people that are feeling a void, that are. That lack a sense of identity, that lack a sense of meaning, that lack a sense of purpose, that are wondering why they even want to live. They're feeling alone, they're feeling depressed, they're feeling anxious, and they are trying to figure out how to get energized or excited or connected in life. And so this may not be for you, Jenny, or this may not be for some people, but just go to my interview with Steven Veazey, who is the current president prophet of Community of Christ. Go to my past interviews with John Hamer. There are good kinds of powerful, loving, serious people that have found meaning and value in, for example, a belief in God more generally or a belief in Jesus more generally, or even Community of Christ as a path for exploration that I would be irresponsible to not provide examples and models to my listeners because there is need and there are people literally dying inside or dying physically because they are seeking for something and they can't find it. And so if someone is intelligent as you or as compassionate as you, or as, you know, living as good of a life as you or Steven Vesey or, you know, pick Susan Score or, you know, other great women or, you know, people within your tradition. If these people are finding out a way to find meaning and purpose and happiness and joy and fulfillment, then I think it's worth exploring, you know, even if, Jenny, you're not resonating with it. So that's.

John Hamer [02:29:04] And it doesn't have to resonate with everybody.

John Dehlin [02:29:05] That's right. Yeah. We started that way. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and read you. I'm just, we're going to spend, let's say, 20 more minutes or so. Yeah, just, just responding to a couple comments and these aren't going to necessarily come in any structured way. It's sort of like a freeform. Viewers and listeners are posting some comments or questions and it's kind of going to be a rapid fire. John Hamer, what's your response? Is that okay?

John Hamer [02:29:29] Sounds great.

John Dehlin [02:29:29] Okay. So one is more just an endorsement. Quinn writes after Mormonism, pursue what resonates. Quinn says, I did Christianity for seven years, then left for a form of agnosticism and later spiritualism. I loved my time in these pursuits. And Quinn is saying, so will you if you stay open to learning. So that's not necessarily a question, it's just an endorsement of the path of seeking, Right?

John Hamer [02:29:59] Absolutely. I was just chatting with a friend of mine who, growing up in the restoration and was in community of Christ also historian, very interested in the history. And I just did check back within with empathy. And he told me, I asked, I had invited him if he wanted to do a reading in our, in our Sunday service. And he said, well, since we last chatted, I joined Reformed Judaism and I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable. I'm like, wow, that is so cool. You know, tell me about this path. You know, and so that's just a very, I find that to be an open, interesting and open exploration. I've been to the, we have a very important synagogue here in Toronto in the Reformed tradition. It's called Holy Blossom. And it's been one of the kind of intellectual centers of that movement within Judaism. And I've been to, you know, the Sabbath service there four times and met the rabbi and some other rabbis. And it's, and that's, it's a very compelling and meaningful tradition. And so that's a path and, and same thing, our spiritual formation director here in Toronto, Congregation Leandro, prior to being. He's an Elder now in Community of Christ, prior to being part of our movement, he was ordained in. Not. Whatever, maybe not called ordained, but anyway, he was a leader in a Buddhist congregation, and he had grown up Catholic and had lapsed from that. And so there are different ways of exploration. I mentioned how a lot of the people in this community, and especially in our meditation groups and in our theology group, are dual citizens where they are some other. They have some other tradition that they're committed to, and then they're also engaged with us here. And that's wonderful.

John Dehlin [02:31:57] I love it. Okay, so. And I should. You know, we've mentioned this a lot before, but I think it always bears mentioning. If you don't like the patriarchy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, if you don't like the exclusion of LGBT members from full membership and participation, if you. If you're a feminist, if you're an intellectual, if you. If you have really alternative, you know, approaches to God or even identify as an atheist or agnostic or reject the historicity of the Bible. One of the great things about Community of Christ is that LGBT people can be leaders and bishops or leaders of congregations or even general or area authorities. Women can be leaders of congregations and have the priesthood, and it's just a very inclusive organization that's inclusive in terms of gender, of sexual identity, of gender, identity, of philosophical gender expression, all that stuff.

John Hamer [02:33:02] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:33:03] And I think that always is worth mentioning. I'll also say this comment from Tammy. When I left the Mormon Church 40 years ago, how I longed for a type of reform Mormonism, a community like Mormonism, where we could gather to support each other and do good works, but without any requirement to believe in the scriptures, the dogma, and the supernatural aspects of religion. That just didn't work for me intellectually and emotionally. I have huge admiration for Community of Christ today in fulfilling that role. Anything you want to say in response to Tammy?

John Hamer [02:33:35] Well, thank you so much, Tammy, but. Yeah, exactly. Me too. So that was something that I actually didn't necessarily even know I was. Was looking for when I left. But on the other hand, the. Yeah, those are the components that, you know, this kind of. That you, like, you list off this believe in things literally, and having that be held over you and all of these kinds of. That was what I wanted to get away from and wouldn't have come back into. And like, John was also saying, you know, if there was this, you know, if. If it was innately, you know, gonna still be sexist or racist or, you know, discriminating against transgender people, I wouldn't be able to be part of it. So I'm very happy that we've gotten to where we are. We're obviously a big human organization, and so there's all kinds of flaws and we're not, you know, nobody's perfect and there's still so much better to be. But I find that hopefully, anyway, we are on a, on a very good trajectory as we are repenting of past errors and trying to get to a better place as we go forward together.

John Dehlin [02:34:46] And just that idea of a church acknowledging, just following it, a church itself following the steps of repentance that it teaches, is such a novel and refreshing concept for so many of us. Okay, so this is going to be kind of a rapid fire. We've already addressed this some, but Tammy writes, so God becomes an umbrella term for all things good. Why give something that much power? Then you take the power from the actual individual person and give it to someone or something else. The person no longer gets the credit for being good or acting of their own conscience versus something, some thing telling them to. So. And she also says thank you for answering these questions and she loves these conversations, but she's basically saying, what about just a religion at all? And having any belief in something outside yourself is giving too much power when it's really the individuals that deserve the power and the credit, not. Not a church or, or a God. What would you say to Tammy Lynn?

John Hamer [02:35:51] So I don't think that. I don't think that it has to. I don't think that that has to follow that way. So, so even if, even if we define, you know, God as that which is good or goodness for goodness own sake, and that traditionally, even within all of Christian theology, there's a huge emphasis in the whole philosophical background to maintain the human free will in Christianity. And that's an open question still free will versus versus determinism. But in any event, Christianity has always been traditionally on the side of free will. And so even if we identify God as goodness, when individuals are good, that doesn't mean that they're not getting credit for being good. Rather, what you were saying is that you are participating in that which is good and ultimately therefore participating in God. But that doesn't mean that, I guess that shouldn't be denigrating to people. Right. I think that that means that that can mean, it can mean all kinds of different things, but it can mean that you are experiencing or you are participating in within our own capacity. And to the extent that you are able to Something which would be then eternal. If that's another, that would be another synonym. Right. So you're participating in that eternal good to the extent that we are able as flawed. I mean, I think we all agree that we're flawed. And I make mistakes all the time and I'm not always doing everything good and right and the way I'd like to. And I have all kinds of regrets. And so. But when I am in participating in that which is good and then I'm actually successful in doing that, then it doesn't say anything against me as an individual. I think just because that I might be participating in something that all, everything that is good is sharing in, in that eternal. Does that make any sense? I don't know if that.

John Dehlin [02:38:02] Yeah. No, that's good. Yeah. Okay, next question. And again, this is Tammy Lynn. She's asking a lot of good questions.

John Hamer [02:38:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:38:10] And this is something I think people resonate with. She writes. But, but when you give anything your power, which you inevitably, inevitably have to do within any organization, the power becomes to trump. The power begins to trump all power corrupts. The intentions may always start off good, but control is always lost at some point. And I'm just going to say, of course many of us are angry or sad or disillusioned by the way that they feel like we've been betrayed by the LDS Church or by the way that we feel like it's become corrupt or lost its way or was never true to begin with. I have had people reach out to me who were former members of Community of Christ and have said, you know, a lot less and a lot less severe. But it's like, I used to believe, but the church disappointed me or the church changed or the church, you know, wasn't what I thought or even it hurt me. You know, there are people who have even been in Community of Christ that have left it and said that they, they felt like it became corrupt or it hurt them in some way. So what about people that are just saying, I can't, I can't be a part of any institution because all institutions are corrupt. All institutions are going to disappoint me and they're all going to betray me at some point, so I'm not even going to set myself up for disillusionment? What would you say to that?

John Hamer [02:39:28] Yeah. So I don't know if you're hearing that. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, the hearing.

John Dehlin [02:39:35] What?

John Hamer [02:39:35] Oh, I was hearing some kind of ringing. I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:39:37] Okay, okay.

John Hamer [02:39:38] Sorry. Sorry about that.

John Dehlin [02:39:39] No problem.

John Hamer [02:39:39] Anyway, the institutions so What I would say is that institutions and ideas and any other thing in general, it's not that total universal truism can be all be used for good or ill. And so in the same way that a technological advance could have some kind of great benefit, and then it could also be used for some horrific end. And it doesn't mean that technology is bad inherently, although maybe some things don't have any positive benefits that could ever be imagined. But anyway, or some things it's hard to pervert. But in any event, I totally agree that humans institutions are inherently flawed. And there is a maxim that people have pointed out a lot of times, which is often a truism, which is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so the point of that is always then not that all power or all institutions are inherently untenable and unusable because we have to have institutions or some institutions, institutions, there's always going to be institutions. And so one of the things that's a problem is if we, if we dismantle all of our institutions that we have any sway over, there are still other institutions. And at just a certain point they're, they're just too big and too powerful and you have no way as an individual to do anything about. So you, in terms of your relationship, let's say to either the US Federal government and the office of the Presidency, or you, you in relationship to Amazon.com, you have almost nothing, you know, in terms of your power dynamic between those two. And yet if you are not engaged, let's say on the government level, let's say to some things that are more in your own size. So going down state, county, local precinct and that kind of a thing, you can actual juries, you can actually be engaged as a citizen in ways that you are able to impact a lot more than you can, let's say the president. Likewise, in terms of corporations, there are ways to have, let's say a local shop that you're supporting or co op or any number of other kinds of ways that those institutions can be had. And so in that same way as an institution or as a church, as a congregation, you don't want to give all power to somebody. For example, in the, the legal corporate structure of the LDS Church is it's a corporation soul where one guy is in charge of everything. And in fact no other person, no individual member has any ultimate say or stake or ownership of any of the property or anything like that, because it's all held as a corporation, sold by one guy. There are other ways to structure an institution where you don't have that temptation to corrupt. And so, for example, in my congregation, it's all by itself a legally incorporated charity. All the members themselves vote entirely on what our budget is, what our objectives are, who the officers are. As pastor, I'm elected by the members, not appointed from some one authority or something like that. And we also have inherently a definition of priesthood as servanthood authority. And so not hierarchical, where everybody has to obey the priesthood leader, but rather the idea is following that model of Jesus where he is washing everybody's feet. The person who is the leader is engaging in servanthood ministry. And so therefore it shouldn't be anyway, it shouldn't be looked at hierarchically. So that's our way that we try to deal within that human truism of power and institution and corruption. And we can either succeed or fail based on our own limitations. But that's at least where we strive.

John Dehlin [02:43:51] I love it. Okay, thanks for answering that. Trent says. Trent says. I have difficulty seeing any reason why I would need any gods. I don't know that Trent has been fully listening, but yeah.

Practical Advice for Navigating Belief Transitions

John Hamer [02:44:06] So I would suggest for that, eliminate for yourself the word God, because you have invested a definition in it. And so instead make it be like, let's use the word meaning. I have no reason why I would want to see any inherent or fundamental meaning in the. The universe. So I'm saying that the definition of God is open. We don't have to see some sky anthropomorphic thing, and you don't have to be thinking about it that way, but rather it's a quest for something like inherent meaning. So you can also think that this is an open philosophical question, that life is inherently meaningless. And that's certainly a philosophically defensible position. We're still in a place where that's an open intellectual inquiry right now. There's no such thing as meaning. Nothing is meaningful. You might, I think, do some introspection and do the math on it philosophically and wonder if you haven't now defined meaninglessness as an actual. Where you're saying the definition is meaninglessness. And do you have a. And. And have you been able to prove that philosophically? Same thing with that same thing happens with relativism. So if you're saying there's no such thing as good or bad, nothing is actually good, you weren't actually doing good because good. And there's nothing such thing as good. There's only relative. Everything is relative. That on the end of the day, relies on the. On a universal premise that everything is relative. So. So it's obviously much more complicated than that. But in any event, those are open, open philosophical questions and dialogue that's ongoing right now. And so. And so rather than, though, investing in the def. The whole. The whole definition of this. I'm sorry, the whole title of our presentation today was Undefining God. And so when you're saying, I don't see any need for Gods, put other words into the. That. Because we're going to have a new definition. So instead of thinking, I don't see any reason for. For Thor or Athena or Jesus, you can now instead say, I don't see any reason for believing that anything is good. I don't believe that there are such a thing as fundamental human rights, because I think everything's just relative or everything's just meaningless.

John Dehlin [02:46:31] And you're saying that makes. Maybe people will be able to find.

John Hamer [02:46:35] Yeah, because. Because I think. I think he probably does think that there's. That there's, you know, that some things are good or it would be good to do those things.

John Dehlin [02:46:42] Right.

John Hamer [02:46:42] And so what I'm saying is take. Take that term that is a variable. Replace the word with all of the connotations that are inside your head and actually are culturally widespread. And instead open this and undefine this term and put another term like meaning or any other or other thing like that in there and find out and see whether that is. If that actually holds any sway for you. That's what I'm saying.

John Dehlin [02:47:06] Got it.

John Hamer [02:47:06] I'm not. I'm not attacking him.

John Dehlin [02:47:08] No, no, no, no, no. Of course. Yeah. Okay. Back to Jesus. Anna writes, it sounds like you're saying that you don't believe Jesus is a middleman or our savior or connection to God, but you do view him as a good moral leader who can help one become a more loving, inclusive, kind human being. Question mark. Meaning, Is that how you view Jesus?

John Hamer [02:47:31] So Christ is savior and middleman and middle man in the sense of God between us and God and is God. Right? So that's the theological Christ. So all of those things in terms of exemplar, that was, like I say, the Jesus Christ that you read about in Scripture, who is a literary figure that we experience through thinking about and being in dialogue and using in ritual and liturgy, traditional Christian scriptures. And then the historical figure was a historical figure. So the historical figure is not God. The historical figure is a guy in history.

John Dehlin [02:48:14] Love it. We have a member of community of Christ, Soraya, who writes, we believe in the Trinity, we embrace the idea. He could be more of human example of how to, quote, fight a good fight here on earth, as well as an example of connection to a, quote, godlike human as we can come to. I am only speaking of my experience as a Community of Christ member.

John Hamer [02:48:42] So I should also reiterate that when I was giving that answer just a second ago, I am giving how I would answer. I am a Community of Christ member. I am not specifically speaking for the Church's formulation. The Church's formulation. In terms of history. We have a document that's principles of history. And one of the principles of history is that the Church makes no claims about historicity. So the Church makes no claims about the historical Jesus. And so you can believe different things based on your. The Church invites everyone to do their own academic study, to read through the sources and that kind of thing and come to their own historical awareness. And so lots of people in the Church can definitely believe that the historical Jesus did this and that and the other thing literally or whatever, that's fine. That's their view. The Church takes no position on that in terms of history.

John Dehlin [02:49:36] All right, Trent, erecting some straw men. But I think it'd be fun to get some pithy responses. Trent writes, we should build our own morality, not have it handed to us. So how would you respond to that straw man that Tretz directed?

John Hamer [02:49:52] Well, I mean, so it depends on how we mean by we. And so, for example, secular humanism might be a way that you're kind of talking about there. So humanism is one of the. We call it secular humanism because humanism comes out of Judeo Christianity in the, in the kind of Renaissance time period. And it's a way of looking at, instead of being just way too focused on the divine, instead looking at about good society from human motivations and what humans are doing and that kind of thing. And humanism is great. And secular humanism is also great. So in terms of making your own morality, I think that. So I think that that can be done responsibly. And so it's just a matter of you would want to again, be. Be thoughtful because you can also have an irresponsible license to make your own morality. That could go off the rails too. You know, I'm not saying that it has to, but both theistic and non theistic explorations of these kind of things can be done responsibly or irresponsibly and can have good consequences if you believe in good or bad consequences if you believe in bad, depending on if you, you know, how you view all those things. And so, yeah, I'm not saying that he can't do that.

John Dehlin [02:51:20] All right. Another, a lot of straw men coming from our listeners. Maria writes, many people like to live in a pretending life in a pretending life.

John Hamer [02:51:31] So I don't even know which. Which side that would be. So, yes, people do like that. I'd say people like to live in all kinds of different ways that are comfortable. I think that people don't like to. Don't like to be challenged all the time. I think that people would rather have everything, often would like to have everything be comfortable and rosy and, and if you call that pretending, it's a matter of. It's just that that's an unchallenged life. And so maybe it seems, and I don't know. So I think that, yes, there's all. So part of this, this uncomfortable kind of exploration that I'm kind of talking about is this awareness that that life isn't always rosy, that things don't always meet in that comfortable way, or we can't and we shouldn't pretend that they do. But rather there is going to be all kinds of occasion of loss and suffering and setback. And so you need to have, or it's helpful to have both a paradigm and also a community structure that is able to help process and work through the good with the bad and the bad with the good.

John Dehlin [02:52:50] I just have to say, from a process perspective, it's so nice to have kind of a church leader fielding any question, fielding difficult questions, even potentially insulting questions, but not getting angry, not getting defensive, not shaming the questioner, and just in a lovely way saying, huh, that's interesting. Here's how I view it. Like just that type of dialogue from a religious leader is so refreshing to me. I just have to say that. Thank you. So, Trent again, from Trent. If myth is sufficient truth, why not just make up your own myth, one that's better than Jesus?

John Hamer [02:53:27] Yeah. So hopefully I've said a couple times that nobody has to follow Jesus path and that kind of a thing in terms of the particular. Right. So I'm suggesting that ultimately what people call Christianity is to the extent to which Christianity made a decision to be a universal religion and to that sense, tap into the universal. That means that it has to be bigger than itself in as much as it actually is universal and it actually has any value. And so therefore the provincialism of actually saying words like Jesus or Christ or anything like that, as opposed to the bigger conceptual part of it that those are just provincial and they aren't necessary. So you don't need the particular stories of Jesus, let's say, or the Christian scriptures or even the traditional Christian theological lenses through which to view meaning in the divine and everything like that. That is a giant inherited apparatus, however, that we have in all of Western civilization, like I say, has its bases and roots on all of these. Everything from the great works of the past of art and music and architecture, the layout of our cities, the basis of almost all the roots of almost all of our ideas. They go through that long background. And obviously then they have deeper roots that are in the tradition that I also claim that predate Judeo Christianity. And so there's also longer deeper roots that are also relevant and meaningful to the conversation. So why. I'd say in part because this is a vast inherited apparatus and background that is our whole background and we can talk about it meaningfully and there's no reason to cut ourselves off from the root and just make up something brand new. But you certainly can, you can go ahead and make a new thing up and it could potentially be as resonant for you personally or for a group of people who you share that with, but it not, it's not critical that you do. But the second part being not only us and cutting ourselves off from all of our own past, but then again, like I say, also for the broad swash of people, but in the same exact way as I was applauding recently, like I said, my friend who's now in Reform Judaism and we can also, again with, I'd be very happy we're talking about here with other leaders in different faiths in Toronto of forming a Toronto Council of Affirming faiths where people who are in Reformed Judaism, the affirming mosque community of Christ, Quakers, other affirming, which is to say LGBT inclusive kind of communities, Buddhism are able to meet together for accomplishing shared goals. I'm very happy with all of those other paths. The reason why I'm talking about this path is I find it to be valuable and meaningful and especially relevant in my society, context, culture and history. But it is by no means the only valid path.

John Dehlin [02:57:03] Excellent, you've addressed this sort of. But I'm going to ask you just a little bit more directly through Michael. You don't need a bronze aged book to tell you it isn't good for society to murder and steal. And what he's basically saying is why do we need, you know, the Bible's got too many problems with it. It's written so long ago. What does the Bible even have to offer us today? That's a value.

John Hamer [02:57:29] Yeah, no, I mean, so again, if you were going to make the Bible a Bronze Age book, as, as Mike there points out, if you're going to make that be some kind of literalistic rule book where you also imagine that anthropomorphic God spoke it and then a prophet was like a Dictaphone and just wrote it all down and it has some kind of universal application for all times. That's just a, not a, not a profitable way to look at it. But I, you know, I counter in terms of if you have a, if you have a responsible use of text, that the Bible is actually this particular Bronze Age book along with a bunch of other Bronze Age books. But this one especially is very, very important and useful at the root of our entire culture, our entire civilization. All of these different ways that ideas and everything else like that throughout all of history have resonated. And so it's, it's a. You, it's an important thing to have as part of your context whether, whether you want to be nominally religious or not, because it's, it's informs all of our, our entire culture. So I, I also think I quoted, I didn't quote. But anyway, I was also saying how important I think still the Epic of Gilgamesh is. So it doesn't, but yes, you don't need, hopefully you don't need that book to tell you about not stealing and not killing. But on the other hand, we do have to have, we still do have to have like a, an ex. Dialogue about basis for these kinds of things. Because one of the things when you get into kind of a philosophical basis where we get into a place of total relativism or postmodernism, where everything is narrative and constructed and things like that, then there does have to be some talk about what's the basis for saying that there is good or not and therefore not killing and not stealing. And in general there'll be. There are other bases you can have for that and that's just fine.

John Dehlin [02:59:47] I love it. I'm going to just throw in a positive comment here. Johan writes, this has been one of the most important and meaningful conversations I have heard in my spiritual journey. Oh, wow. That's kind of high praise, right?

John Hamer [03:00:02] Yeah, I really appreciate that.

John Dehlin [03:00:05] I'm going to summarize a question several people have asked kind of cousins to this question.

John Hamer [03:00:12] Okay.

John Dehlin [03:00:13] It's kind of this idea and I know we probably got to go soon, but there's Sort of this question of, wait a minute, if you've lost your faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you know, you don't really believe the Book of Mormon is a historical document. You don't believe Joseph Smith is a prophet, you don't believe the Doctrine and Covenants anymore, the priesthood, blah, blah, blah. This is the general question that I think you probably get all the time in community of Christ, people get all the time. What is your relationship and your beliefs about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine Covenants, the Restoration. And if you feel like Joseph Smith did some unsavory things or maybe even misled people or did harm, what does it mean to build on the restoration when the restoration is fraught in so many ways?

John Hamer [03:01:01] Yeah, so yeah, we've stepped back through this whole thing, hopefully about to rejecting this framework of believing in. So believing in Joseph Smith, believing in the Book of Mormon, that's not the framework that I would be building on at all. So what's going on in the restoration? So the Restoration is an inherited tradition. It's our particular one. So for me, it goes back seven generations. Certainly for the institution here, it goes back all the way to the foundation. Every single, every single thing that we have that's, that's human has the same kind of human background in history, which is to say there's. It's all institutions and everything else are all flawed and human and there's good and bad. And it's not that there's some things that are true and are therefore supernaturally inherently good until we find out, no, wait a second, they weren't. And we have to now throw everything that went before us away. Rather hopefully with a living institution and a living tradition, we are continually learning and growing. We realize errors that we've had and we realize mistakes that we've made. We hopefully learn from those. We hopefully develop wisdom. But through process of repentance and fervent things that we've done in the past and growth for hopefully good things in the future in terms of Joseph Smith. Whereas we would also have, I would also have the same kind of. We also should deconstruct and undefine what you might have as a conception in your head of what the word prophet means. So I don't have any problem calling Joseph Smith a prophet, but you have to understand that we probably are going to have a different view of what profit means than what you might have had as a, as a Mormon kid who's very literalistic again and imagining a dictaphone or any other kind of thing that you have. But I also view him as a very flawed person who did things that I consider to be, for example, abuses of his spiritual authority as a person who was a church leader, so who did stuff that I think are both morally and philosophically unjustified. Although I understand the justifications that he made for them and that are ultimately in many cases, for example, with underage marriages and other things that he did just in general with the marriages were things that I would condemn and don't, don't justify in any way. So I would also say that there's been, there would be all kinds of. That's true for all kinds of Christian leaders. There's all kinds of things going all the way back that, you know, again, I wouldn't justify. So we don't go back and on the one hand say, well, you know, back in the first century A.D. when Paul, the Apostle Paul approves things like slavery or has very strange and what have been interpreted to be quite negative attitudes towards same sex sexual activity or whatever, that, that, that we can justify that because in his day slavery was okay. Well, I mean, they didn't, they couldn't conceive of any other thing in his, his discussion about, you know, like gender, so about thinking of women in a sexist way that, that was based on common Aristotelian Greek understanding of science at the time. So he's wrong. So, and that's fine. And we don't have to, we don't have to justify and say, oh, it's okay when there are people who are like that, or oh, when Joseph Smith did it, I guess he was supposed to do it. No, I mean, I would say that this is an abuse of his authority.

John Dehlin [03:05:00] Got it. There's one comment from Jennifer where she's basically just saying that she's really enjoyed your lecture series. So can you just tell our listeners really quickly? And it is true. It's an amazing resource of history and philosophy and it goes to kind of the caliber and the quality of sermons that you've been giving at Community of Christ Toronto and offering online. So, so can you just briefly describe that library or catalog of sermons or presentations and how people can access it if they want to?

Resources, the Book of Mormon, and Closing Thoughts

John Hamer [03:05:38] Yeah. So my congregation's website is this facility that I'm in, the church here is called Centre Place. And so in Canada you spell center, C, E, N, T, R, E. So it's like the center place in restoration tradition, which is the center place of Zion, where the temple is. And it Independence, Missouri Right. But anyway, it's spelled the Canadian way. Centre Place C N T R E Place ca. So CA is for Canada. Canadian website. And if you go to Centerplace ca, one of the things you can find there is the entire archive of lecture series. So for the last three, four years, every Tuesday night usually I will give a lecture on a kind of a broad base of topics. Theology, philosophy and history. There are all kinds of topics. Like, you know, we talked about several of these that are open ended questions. So we have a whole series on how philosophers have treated things like free will and determinism. That would be like one of the philosophical questions. We'll go through history. So what is the. How do we understand the historical Jesus or how do we do literary criticism so we can see for example, the Book of Daniel as a pious fraud, for example. In other words, it's not written by a guy named Daniel, it's written centuries after the fact. And that kind of a thing, just like the Book of Mormon kind of thing. So how do we understand the Book of Mormon in its context? So those kind of things. There's also theological lectures. So I've talked about Anselm here tonight today and Boethius and Augustine and so all of those. I've got lectures on those topics. So you can go to Centerplace CA and they'll just be the lecture series. They're ordered by categories and you can find anything like that that you're interested in. Generally speaking, it's about an hour and 15 minutes long each lecture. So it's a little bit of a time investment. But I also have lots of slides and then there's good discussions that we're having with the people here, here locally.

John Dehlin [03:07:41] One comment that'll be jarring to some, Dan writes, fill the void by going back to the LDS Church with a nuanced approach to literalism. Sense of community is still there. Sense of purpose is still there. Faith is still there. Goodness and charity is still there. I've seen too many people leave the LDS Church and just wander with no direction. Not all, but a great majority. So Dan is saying just stay in the LDS Church and just do it. As a progressive liberal.

John Hamer [03:08:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:08:06] New New Order Mormon. What would you say to that? John Hamer?

John Hamer [03:08:10] Yeah, so, so great example of someone like so Jana Reese. Right. So she's just one of the most thoughtful, educated, progressive Mormon thinkers and she is fully, I think, active in attending the LDS Church and is helping change it for the good in as much as members can be kind of empowered to have that and make that cultural change. And I also though, agree with her. I think I've read anyway that an essay that she had with her personal moral stance of because of the, the organization, how the organization is with its money in terms of not being transparent and doing all kinds of, you know, anyway, not, not having having any oversight into that from the members that she chooses to give her tithing to other charities instead that she knows are promoting things that she knows are good while she's there, therefore in her congregation and also in her denomination and helping it change for the good, she's not nevertheless helping, you know, contributing to ends that aren't as good.

John Dehlin [03:09:30] All right. Karen is also giving a shout out. There's a past presentation you gave, but also a couple Mormon stories episodes on could Joseph Smith have written the Book of Mormon? That's a really important piece of work you've done. You can find that on Mormon Stories. You can also find that in your catalog. But you know, so many people are like, you know, the Book of Mormon's a miracle because who else could have written it? So it must be true. John Hamer is a great resource for hearing a theory, just like Grant Palmer, about how Joseph Smith very much could have written the Book of Mormon. And I highly, I highly recommend that if somebody asks what's the difference between community of Christ and like the Unitarian Universalists, what would you say about that? John?

John Hamer [03:10:17] So Unitarian Universalists are an amazing tradition. It's a great organization community. I'm hesitate to call them. I mean they might they'd be okay probably with the word religious. So, you know, they are they have a tradition that goes all the way back Unitarianism and Universalism that have been engaged in like lots and lots of good so for example, the abolition of slavery, for example. So they have a great tradition. Where they've gotten to now is also really cool and exciting. Where it diverges from where we're at is that they have in a lot of cases, I think depending on what congregation you're in, they're less comfortable with having what has admittedly in this whole three hours or however long we've been together here chat today, this nuanced abstract God talk where we undefine God and so therefore are much more in a lot of cases post theistic. So you would have a lot less Jesus or Christ talk for sure. Even though they come from a tradition that the same kind of Christian, progressive Christian tradition. And maybe also they might be like way more open to all kinds of other diversity of traditions that they would be talking about. But I would think that it's also all talked about a little more arm's length. And so there is a lot more embrace of the fact that we are a Christian denomination, Community of Christ, but with all that nuance still there, but it might be a little bit more explicit and then also a little bit more post Christian for Unitarians.

John Dehlin [03:12:20] There's a listener, Robert, who really wants me to press you about the Book of Mormon. And he's basically saying. He basically say, do Community of Christ people still believe in the Book of Mormon? And then he kind of is wanting me to challenge you. Like, what is it? What if it's not historical? What if it was fictional? What's its value? We're not going to get into that today.

John Hamer [03:12:41] Well, so I just want to say again, every single time everyone says believe in, I just want to eliminate that. I would never say believe in. And I don't. And I don't think we should be focused on this believe in business. Do I believe in the Book of Mormon? It exists. It's right there. So I believe it exists. So it's, you know, I've got a bunch of copies. We have dozens of copies here. It's something that I can say. The Book of Mormon has been in my congregation in the last year. So in my congregation, like I say, since the shutdown, our livestream Sunday service, as many as a thousand people around the world tune into the Toronto congregation on a Sunday. And unusually, I would say, for Community of Christ, I think we had three sermons in the last year where the main scripture text that the speaker was talking about was derived from the Book of Mormon. And so how does that work? It works the same way as any other scriptural text. And so we are able to, in the same way that you are when you're not viewing this thing as any text in the Bible, I'm not viewing it literalistically. I'm not viewing it as authoritarian in some kind of a provincial kind of way, that some provincialism is being made to be oppressive to the modern times. And I'm also not. We're not viewing it literalistically. The same tools for responsible use of scripture that can be applied to any book of the Bible, whether it's talking about historical figures like Jesus or whether it's a clearly a pious fraud like the Book of Daniel or again, mythical figures like Moses or Abraham. The same tools that can be applied to responsible use use of the Bible can be used for responsible use of the Book of Mormon. So as far as I'M concerned the Book of Mormon has the same canonical status in community of Christ. It is just, I guess, just slightly different status, which is the Bible. We call this the foundational scripture. And then we say that the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants are canonical scripture in community of Christ, but obviously not, not more broadly in the rest of the Christian communion. And so how would it. So taking away the believe in is not relevant. It is scripture and it is used as scripture by me and also my congregation.

John Dehlin [03:15:27] And as a follow up, and this is just brief, Robert writes, where do you think the Book of Mormon came from?

John Hamer [03:15:34] Right. So the Book of Mormon is, is 19th century scripture. So he mentions golden plates. There are no, no literal golden plates. So if there are real golden plates, the real golden plates are an entirely spiritual object. And so it's a conception of how as a, as a, as a spiritual person, as somebody who claimed to be a seer, a prophet person who considered himself to be those things and was attempting to channel the story or the gospel for Native Americans when he was engaged in that practice. He then dictated it, as he called it, from the gift and power of the Holy Spirit. And so that's where the, the story arises. The story reflects what 19th century Americans viewed quite inaccurately was the history of the ancient Americas, which is to say the myth of the Mound Builders, that there had been these ancient races and one of whom, the civilized ones were exterminated by the descendants of the natives. This is a false story that was universally believed in Joseph Smith's time. But nevertheless, regardless of the fact that it has no relationship to history or historical figures, it is very meaningful and telling in terms of the stories for poor people who, European Americans, for the settler culture on the frontier of American society in the very early days of the young American Republic. And as a result of being modern scripture, it speaks much more closely to our own day than 2,000 year old or 2,600-year-old scripture, although there are universal themes always, but it's much more close to our context. And so it is therefore continues to be, can be used responsibly in a meaningful way. The same way that sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, which have been added to the canon within the last decade or so in Community of Christ, speak even more meaningfully or contemporaneously because they are very recent revelations, but also are dated from the instant they are canonized.

John Dehlin [03:18:02] All right, I appreciate that. Last question I'm going to ask you, and then we're going to wrap up. Anna asks A question that I think comes from a place of genuinely investigating community of Christ. So I think she's really looking into Community of Christ as a spiritual home. And I should say, if you live in Salt Lake, there is a beautiful Community of Christ congregation in Holiday, Utah, which is right close to where I live. I think there's also a group that meets in the Provo Orem area. And I think there's also maybe even a house church that meets in Logan. But there are Community of Christ churches all around the United States, including in Walnut Creek, California, including in Mesa, Arizona, you know, Wichita, Kansas. I've been to several of these buildings. Anaheim, California, you can find Community of Christ churches in lots of different areas, including in Salt Lake City. I think Anna is actually investigating. And so she's saying, you know, I'm having a hard time following John's beliefs. Are there, you know, basically where can I go to to find kind of like the core tenets of community of Christ? So if somebody wants to investigate, if they're not totally vibing with your explanations, where can they go to learn more about community of Christ?

John Hamer [03:19:24] So if you go to the community of Christ website, which is seeofchrist.org, it's gonna list off things, including even. There's even a. We even have. One of our current parts of our identity and mission and message and beliefs is a statement of beliefs. And these are general beliefs. And the problem with them is if you just read them, I think you won't understand them. It'll seem it'll the. The general beliefs, especially statement, you know, because all of these words. I'm suggesting here that all of these words can't be understood literally. And so once you read it, it could sound very, very much what you'd expect any Christian to say. And indeed, it's pretty similar to those kind of things. But when read with the kind of nuance of how it was intended, then it gets to be the place where I'm at. So where could we send people? So the rest of the website has other things on it. For example, the churches upholds especially nine enduring principles and five mission initiatives. And so those are at the core of Community of Christ identity. So in the same way, you know, she's wanting to have beliefs or doctrine, we are not about having doctrine. So it's not about having like a fixed program where you have to believe this, this and this and that kind of a thing. It's rather. Rather than having doctrine and rules and things that have to be obeyed because there's some authority that's giving you that. What we have instead are principles, enduring principles that you are called upon to understand or to try to discern how it should be lived in your life. So an enduring principle is things like the worth of all persons. And so we argue or say or uphold a view that all persons are of inestimable worth. We have another principle. All are called that. Everyone's called that. This is not some universe or not some parochial thing where we have the only truth. That instead that all, all are called. The principles are things like continuing revelation. So again, revelation, you know, all of the ancient words of scripture are made revelatory and new when they are interpreted responsibly, faithfully applied within prayerful and connection with the spirit, Spirit in the, in the spirit, as I tried to define it here, as opposed to just you having a good feeling about it. So those are the kinds of things that, that we're talking about. So one of the principles is responsible choices. So instead of, you know, like you were talking about John at the beginning of this, that people equate religion with this kind of Victorian values where people are telling you not to masturbate or whatever, this kind of thing, the. We don't have a list of those kind of things where, you know, it's this kind of, let's say, antiquated or social values that are just reflecting Victorian or 1950s America parochialism. But rather instead you're called upon to uphold the principle of responsible choices. And so one of the ways we have to do that is think about what's a responsible choice. And so it's not just a simple list of yes and no and obey or not, but rather there is a way where you are called upon to kind of understand what is a responsible choice. And so any number of things could be the thing that you're concerned about, whether it's how you're addressing climate change, what kind of the size of a car that you have in a commute, reducing your commute time, thinking about that kind of footprint, thinking about things like I was talking about earlier that we're focused on here, the issues of, of housing, injustice and homelessness. So how do you make responsible choices given the fact that there's all kinds of suffering and problems in the world and you can only do so much. And so those would be the ways, as opposed to like a rule based, doctrine based, those kind of things. It's upholding responsible choices. And then as a community together, where you have five mission initiatives, where we're kind of called upon to kind of act in the world and do this kind of activism, which are things like invite people into community, invite people to Christ, develop as disciples, to serve by again having servanthood, leadership and servanthood roles, but also continually learning and growing to abolish poverty and needless suffering, to promote peace and justice on earth, and to live life meaningfully together in community by experiencing congregations and missions. So we have those kind of. Those are kind of our actual active principles and initiatives as opposed to having, let's say, doctrines or let's say rules.

John Dehlin [03:24:23] I love it. I love it. And as you explain all this, in my Mormon brain, I'm like, I can see why there's going to be some people listening that are like, this isn't religion. This isn't what I'm expecting. But I also know there's people that have already shared on this episode that they've been touched and moved and inspired by this conversation and by the things you've shared. And that takes us back to how we began. Your point isn't that this is the one path, that this is the one truth. This is basically saying, if any of this sounds interesting today, if any of you feel called or desire to consider God again, to reconsider God again, to reconsider a seeking path of trying to find meaning, purpose, community, spirituality, this is just an invitation to say, hey, here's one set of thoughts that might be a way to begin a new journey if you feel called to do so. And that's why I adore you, John Hamer. That's why I support you. I support Community of Christ, and I'm always glad to have you on and to invite people who are looking for something and to just say, here's something to consider. Smart, but smart, good, kind people that I respect have found value in this way. And so I'm going to occasionally invite my audience to consider this along with lots of other ways. And that's why I adore you, John Hamer. That's why I adore Steve Veazey, Community of Christ. And that's why I say, listeners, check it out if you feel called or interested.

John Hamer [03:25:59] Thank you so very much. Yeah, absolutely. So I appreciate that reiteration, which is to say there is in no way, or am I saying that this is the one path, rather though it's a path but I've found to be incredibly valuable and meaningful, and it's a thing that, you know, has inspired my path and I feel called to share it in that way. So I think that we've got something that is worth talking about and sharing. But on the other hand, in no way, if it doesn't resonate with you, should you feel like, oh al, I really should be doing that. No, if it's not resonating, there's any number of other ways to live a meaningful and fulfilling and important life.

John Dehlin [03:26:42] I love it. And just to close. Just to close. Robert writes, thanks John for including my questions. Much love, brother. Anna is grateful that you answered her questions as well.

John Hamer [03:26:56] Oh good.

John Dehlin [03:26:57] I'm a huge fan of the Gluth sisters, Kristen and Aaron, both of which I think But Kristin writes, thank you John Hamer for all of your brilliant work. Your insights and contextualization of the Mormon movement and Christianity over the last few years have helped me evolve, discover and accept what God and Jesus mean to me, which is something much lovelier than when I was an orthodox believing Latter Day Saint. Thank you. Providing space for all to find that for themselves with no judgment. And then Kristen writes, I highly recommend Mormon Stories listeners tuning into John Hamer's previous interviews, which were all very insightful. I completely agree. Love you Kristen and Aaron, always thanks for tuning in. Brittany writes, grateful for your insights. John Hamer, in my early days of leaving the LDS Church, you really gave a compelling and convincing case to further check out the Community of Christ. I'm continually grateful for that.

John Hamer [03:27:51] Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:27:53] And because we're open to criticism, Robert writes, LDS rlds, Community of Christ are all full of bad word. If I was a holy prophet I would say golden rule and I think John and I would say bless you Robert, Good luck in your life. We're not offended and we encourage you to follow your path and all right. So John Hamer, we love you. Thanks for joining us and keep doing great work.

John Hamer [03:28:20] Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity. John.

John Dehlin [03:28:24] And if people want to follow you, give them one final way to follow you and your work.

John Hamer [03:28:28] So you can always look at all those things@centerplace ca so center spelled the Canadian way. R e you know C E N T R e Place Ca and then also you can find me on Facebook and friend me there. But then we also have My congregation is called community of Christ Toronto Congregation. If you follow that on Facebook and our YouTube channel Center Place, you can see things like our lectures and also like I say every Sunday our church service.

John Dehlin [03:28:53] All right, thanks again John Hamer. Thanks to all our listeners. You guys take care and comment on MormonStories.org or on YouTube or on Facebook if you want. Stay in touch. Thanks for your support. Your donations make this possible. And please tune in again soon for another episode of Mormon Stories podcast later. Bye everybody. Thanks again, John.

John Hamer [03:29:12] Yep.