End Times, with Adam Miller
“What does it look like to be a Christian disciple who is living, not just theoretically through the end of the world, but very literally through the loss of this world?”
About the Guest
ADAM S. MILLER is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. He is the author of nine books, including The Gospel according to David Foster Wallace, Letters to a Young Mormon, and Mormon: a brief theological introduction. He also directs the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar.
Best Books
Adam recommended The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy.
Transcript
ADAM MILLER: Christian discipleship is about facing up to the reality of continual loss, and to the responsibility of continually beginning again.
BLAIR HODGES: If you ask Latter-day Saint philosopher Adam Miller what he thinks the end of the world will be like, he’d tell you it looks like the day his son turned fifteen years old. Not because of anything remarkable that happened that day, but because it wasn’t really remarkable at all. I mean, it was a day that came and went and then it was gone. And it’s never coming back.
ADAM MILLER: Even if he and I live happily together, in contact, for the length of his entire life, it's nonetheless true that my fourteen-year-old son is gone forever. And my ten-year-old son is gone forever. He's never coming back. And whoever it was that I was when he was five, or ten, or fourteen—that person is never coming back, either. It's not as if I can even hang on to myself. Because I am, myself, constantly passing away and being recreated.
BLAIR HODGES: And we're not just dealing with those personal little daily apocalypses, though. We're also facing global catastrophes like we've never seen. So how are things going in your next of the woods? Welcome back to Fireside with Blair Hodges. Adam Miller joins us to talk about his book, Mormon: a brief theological introduction.
ADAM MILLER: Mormon was, for me, a case study, not just in living through all the little apocalypses that happen as our lives pass away, and we lose the things and people that we love. But as, on a global scale, our world turns a corner and we lose what we thought was not losable.
BLAIR HODGES: This is episode two, Endtimes. And if it sounds pretty bleak, well, stick around because I think Miller has some good ideas about how we might make our way forward anyway.
Apocalyptic Discipleship - 01:49
BLAIR HODGES: Adam Miller, welcome to Fireside.
ADAM MILLER: I am honored to be here Blair Hodges. I am very excited about this new project of yours.
BLAIR HODGES: Thank you for that! We're talking about your book, Mormon: a Brief Theological Introduction, which you wrote as part of the Maxwell Institute's brief theological introductions to the Book of Mormon series. It's a series of books on the Book of Mormon, one volume for each book, and you wrote the book on Mormon.
They're all good, but this one personally really moved me in big ways, especially having read it during this time of a global pandemic, COVID-19.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah, writing reflections on what it's like to live through the end of the world by way of Mormon ended up being a little more applicable than I intended when I wrote it.
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah. There's a quote right at the beginning here—it's the first line in the first chapter, it just says, “Mormon is a terrifying book.” So right out of the gate, you're already warning readers about what's ahead. You're talking about something you call “apocalyptic discipleship.” Unpack that a little bit, what you mean by that term.
ADAM MILLER: The thesis for the book, essentially, is that I take Mormon as a case study in apocalyptic discipleship. I take him as a case study in Christian discipleship writ large, but especially in the context of, what does it look like to be a Christian disciple who is living, not just in anticipation of the end of the world, but who is literally living through the end of the world. And I think that's what we see Mormon have to suffer through. And I think that is also a model for Christian discipleship in general, even though for most of us It doesn't happen in nearly as dramatic or horrific a fashion as it does for Mormon.
BLAIR HODGES: So what separates apocalyptic discipleship from maybe garden variety Christian discipleship is the fact that the world seems to really actually be ending?
ADAM MILLER: Yeah—
BLAIR HODGES: Or is there another way you would distinguish these modes of discipleship?
ADAM MILLER: I think what I'm after, especially, in the book is the idea that, at the end of the day, all Christian discipleship is a form of apocalyptic discipleship. Because the fundamental problem that every human being has to face is the end of the world. The fundamental problem that every human being has to face is the fact that they are going to lose all things. Everything is going to pass away. Their own lives, the lives of their family members, the things that they own, the things they hope to accomplish, the property they acquire—everything is going to pass away. And to be a human being is to be faced with the prospect that you can't keep any of that.
BLAIR HODGES: I think some Christian readers in particular might feel a little bit of tension when you describe it this way, because Christianity sometimes operates as a way to make up for anything that's lost or to bring everything back.
I think about, for example, how people read the book of Job. Job goes through horrible things, he loses everything, he loses his family, he loses his health, he loses everything, his possessions. But then, in the end of the book, there's this restoration that happens where he gets it all back to this fairy tale happy ending.
And I think, for me, sometimes my own Christian faith has tended to operate that way in losses that I've had of, well, you know, in the end, everything that matters will be restored to me in the best of ways. And you're suggesting that that's maybe not the way that Christians should be looking at it?
ADAM MILLER: Well, I think scholars have long doubted whether or not that ending to the book of Job is original on one score—[laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah—
ADAM MILLER: But it does testify to our deeply ingrained desire to have the story turnout in a certain way. But I think even in the case of Job, I mean Job loses his children at the beginning. And eventually he has more children at the end, but I don't think you would get Job to say, for instance, that he got his children back, the children that he lost. He didn't get them back. He got new children. He acquired new property. He had new possibilities and new blessings given to him, but they're not the things that he had before. And the business of being a human being is the business of struggling with the way that at the same time that God is constantly giving, he also is constantly taking.
That, in fact, is a famous line from Job itself, right? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. There's Job's own prayer, “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” he says, even as all this coming and going is happening. And I think that's what I have my eye on, especially when I'm trying to think about apocalyptic discipleship. I have my eye on the way that even as God is continually giving, all of that giving also arrives as a kind of taking. And we have to have a certain Christian posture in relationship to all that giving and taking that doesn't try to hang on to what, necessarily, has to pass way.
BLAIR HODGES: One thing it made me think about was people who I've lost in my life. So my father died when I was young. My mother-in-law died a few years ago while she was living here at our home. And with a thought of Christian resurrection and a hopeful anticipated reunion at some point, that can help someone feel a little bit better in that moment.
But what I kept coming back to was, there's a lot of time, especially with my dad, that I'm not going to get back, and it can't be restored to me in the same way that it could have been—from being a child to being a teenager to being an adult. And my dad's not, has not been there through those times and won't be. And for my wife, her mother is gone and won't be able to be here as we've had another child or as Kristen, my wife, is getting another university degree. So there's all these things that a future reunion still can't really make up for. Did you have that in mind, as you're talking about kind of the loss of all things that we face?
ADAM MILLER: Absolutely. There are things that can't be made up, there are holes that won't be filled, that can't be filled. Even if we're taking a really simple example with something like my son whose birthday is today, he turned fifteen years old today. Even if he and I live happily together in contact for the length of his entire life, it's nonetheless true that my fourteen-year-old son is gone forever. And my ten-year-old son is gone forever. My five-year-old son is gone forever, he's never coming back. And whoever it was that I was when he was five, or ten, or fourteen, that person is never coming back, either.
It's not as if I can even hang on to myself. Because I am myself constantly passing away and changing and becoming something new and being recreated. Christian discipleship, apocalyptic discipleship, is about facing up to the reality of this continual loss and to the responsibility of continually beginning again. And I think Mormon is a really striking and dramatic example of what this looks like, in pretty horrific circumstances.
BLAIR HODGES: I appreciated reading about that, especially during COVID, as I was working from home, and my children were doing school from home and my wife was home and we were all home. And I'm watching them grow up much more closely than I have at any point in their lives. And I'm realizing that even more acutely, this idea that I lose them over and over again.
I didn't expect this, I didn't understand that this is what parenthood demanded of us, and I think any human relationship really, whether it be friends or relatives or whoever. But for me, parenthood has really brought it home. I see pictures, and I almost barely remember that two-year-old. And to be able to put that in a theological context like you do, and to think of it through the lens of scripture, was a helpful exercise for me.
You connect it to the idea of sacrifice. In Latter-day Saint history Joseph Smith—or the Lectures on Faith, I guess, have this quote that says something to the effect that a religion that doesn't demand the sacrifice of everything can't have the power to save anything. And I feel like you kind of turn that quote on its head differently than how I’d previously thought about it.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah, I think this is what we see Mormon exemplify. As a case study in apocalyptic discipleship, or as a Christian we could simply say, he is positioned at the intersection of two things. He's positioned, one, at the intersection of the loss of all things. And two, he's positioned at the intersection of his Christian obligation to sacrifice all things.
I think what I was looking for in this case study with Mormon was—I was trying to look very carefully at how he was able to continually consecrate and redeem his loss of all things by continually sacrificing all things. It’s this Christian obligation to sacrifice that hallows and consecrates and redeems all of this loss, even as it holds itself open to whatever God is giving next.
Defining Theology - 10:51
BLAIR HODGES: That's Adam Miller. He's a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas, and he's written a ton of books. Most recently, he published Mormon: a Brief Theological Introduction. That's what we're talking about today.
Adam, I wanted to talk to you about the word “theology” and how that operates for you. How do you define theology?
ADAM MILLER: When I apply the word theology to my own work, I'm using it, I think, in a very particular way. I think it’s a much narrower way than how it tends to get used in general, especially in academia, when we talk about theology.
As a theologian, I'm interested in a question that I think rarely gets asked, especially in the context of scholarship in terms of theology. And it might be a little bit surprising, but the question is, what about God?
I mean, I'm interested in history. I'm interested in doctrine. I'm interested in scripture. I'm interested in all the standard things theologians are interested in. But I'm really only interested in those things in a secondary way. Because at the end of the day, I'm not interested in historical stories about God. I'm interested in the God that those historical stories are about. And for me, when I think about theology, I think about it as an attempt to investigate God's presence in the world as a live, active power. I'm using history and scripture and doctrine. I'm using these things, as I mentioned previously, as case studies that could open a window onto something beyond them, which is God himself.
And apart from that, at the end of the day, I don't know that I'm especially interested in the Book of Numbers, or the Book of Leviticus, or ancient apocalyptic Jewish literature.
BLAIR HODGES: How about those Chronicles, though? There's two! Two books of them!
ADAM MILLER: [laughs] Right! Apart from the fact that they could open some window for me onto the way that it's possible to connect with God here and now, I'm not especially interested in them.
What I'm interested in is, I'm interested in Christ in the world as a live active power. I'm interested in very practical questions about how to go about being redeemed. Not just theoretical questions about if God exists, or if redemption is possible, or if revelation happens. But I'm interested in really practical questions about how to do it, I want to do it. I don't just want to read about God. I want to do this thing that the scriptures are describing. And so for me, all of my theological reflections have this really practical, existential urgency to them, I think, that the animates the projects for me.
BLAIR HODGES: How do you think you arrived at that, that's a little bit different from other approaches like systematic theology where people want to sort of lay out logically a case for God's existence, or how God works in this kind of thing? How did you arrive at this kind of mode?
ADAM MILLER: I think, for me, it's the product of kind of a very practical urgency. I ended up in philosophy and theology because I wanted to pose very practical personal questions about what it would look like to not just think about God or talk about God, but to be redeemed. And not just at some future point, but right here and right now, what would it look like for God to be active in my life? What would it look like for me to “live” in Christ? Not just as an abstract idea, but as a kind of concrete reality.
BLAIR HODGES: This kind of goes against stereotypes, though, about philosophy and theology. What I mean is that some people think those are exercises to get above the real world and to get up in your head and to be thinking about all these things, you know? Philosophers are up in the ivory tower, they're disconnected from reality, or they're too learned to care about concerns on the ground. What do you think about that?
ADAM MILLER: Well, there's something to the stereotype, I think.
BLAIR HODGES: Guilty as charged?
ADAM MILLER: [laughs] I've read a lot of philosophy and theology, and yeah, the charge has some merit to it. But at the same time, it's been my experience that slogging through thousands and thousands of pages of really difficult philosophical and theological work that isn't always very practically oriented, has nonetheless equipped me to see things and say things and write things that I wouldn't have been equipped to write or say or think, otherwise.
Given my own questions, I've been able, I think, to extract from what otherwise could be pretty inert stuff very practical tools that have changed me in very personal and very fundamental ways.
BLAIR HODGES: I have this impulse to want someone like you, who's writing philosophy or theology, to just tell me what to do, to just tell me, what you mean. Like, what am I supposed to do now? I love these ideas, but now what do I do? What do I actually do? Do you run into that? I mean, you teach students at a college, do you run into that feeling very much where people say, Dr. Miller, what am I supposed to do? Tell me what to do?
ADAM MILLER: Yeah, I think that's not an usual sentiment. [laughs] And as you know, it's certainly something that I've felt myself on more than one occasion. But I think it's also true that, it turns out maybe in a really cliched way, that the kind of thing we're trying to describe when we talk about what it would look like to live in Christ and to “do” God actively in the present tense—that kind of thing is very resistant to direct description. And it turns out to be the kind of thing, as a practical matter, that you can only learn by doing it.
I mean, you can read the best manual about how to play the piano, but you're never going to learn how to play the piano until you sit down and plunk it out yourself!
The Mood of Discipleship - 16:41
BLAIR HODGES: Do you have an example that's related directly to your own practice of faith, your practice of religion?
ADAM MILLER: Can I give it a really direct example of the kind of thing that's too indirect to give direct examples for?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! Well said! [laughter]
ADAM MILLER: Well, one thing that occurs to me is something that I think Mormon himself models in a really strong and interesting way. One of the things that interests me most about Mormon is the way he describes himself and describes what makes him a Christian disciple. And what makes him an effective Christian disciple, by his own description, is two things. He describes himself as being sober, and as being quick to observe.
BLAIR HODGES: —A sober child in particular too, right?
ADAM MILLER: A sober child, right! In the opening chapter, he describes himself as sober twice.
BLAIR HODGES: Which seems contradictory.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah, he describes himself as sober first of all, in order to explain why as a child he's being given responsibility for the Nephite records. And then only a couple verses later, he uses the word sober again in order to explain why he was personally visited by Jesus Christ. He was personally visited by Jesus Christ, he says, because he was sober. That's a pretty unusual description. He doesn't say, “I was visited because I was so righteous,” or “because I was really good at keeping the commandments.”
No, the reason he gives is that he was an unusually sober kid. And this soberness he ties directly to the fact that he is, in his own words, “quick to observe.”
BLAIR HODGES: That suggests there's a mood about discipleship. Rather than Christianity being a set of facts that we assent to, or a list of commandments we follow, this introduces a mood to discipleship.
ADAM MILLER: I think that's right. What Mormon exemplifies for us here as a Christian disciple is a certain kind of existential mood. He has a certain kind of posture in relationship to the world—that this soberness and quickness to observe describes—that puts him in a position, I think, to witness the loss of all things. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: You mean that literally, right? Because his civilization in the Book of Mormon is collapsing. People are at war, people are being slaughtered, he's literally watching it happen.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah, and in a really dramatic, and a really horrific way, Mormon is witnessing what you and I, what we all go through in much smaller and more ordinary ways, right? Mormon is going through the same thing, but in a really dramatic, really violent, really horrific way. And it's his ability to witness these things—to not flinch, to not turn away, to be sober, to allow himself to be attuned by this kind of melancholy disposition, that attunes him to the reality of suffering, that puts him in a position to do something about it, right?
And so to come back to the reason I introduced this example in the first place, for me for instance, as a Christian disciple—as at least, an aspiring Christian disciple—
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] You're making an effort, that's good!
ADAM MILLER: —the bulk of the work for me for the past ten to twenty years has felt like, or it looks more or less like that. The daily work of being a disciple looks like me learning how to be sober, to be quick to observe, to be tuned in to the way that the world is passing away and to the way that, as a result, it's calling me to respond to its needs with a certain kind of love and compassion. And learning how to live tuned into the world around me rather than lost in the noise in my own head. I think that is a really concrete example of the kind of thing that you could try to describe to other people, but until you figure out how to do it in your own head you're never really going to get anywhere.
BLAIR HODGES: Right, and when you say Mormon is a terrifying book that's what comes to mind for me. You're not advocating for people to go off and just become disconnected. You're saying you actually need to lean into the fact that the world's ending, not look away from it, be attentive to it.
And Mormon exemplifies this when he takes a break from leading armies, but then he ends up taking up a sword again in a defensive way for his people. So he's not escaping it all. He's actually steering himself right into the eye of the storm.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah. And I think what happens then is Mormon, as a Christian disciple, by way of sobriety and a quickness to observe, is able to steer himself into an awareness of the loss of all things, because of his willingness to witness the loss of all things, he puts himself in a position then to participate in the recreation of all things. Because this I think, it turns out, this is the flip side of the story.
The reason that the world is continually, second by second, passing away—in a way that is irretrievable such that I'll never get my fourteen-year-old son back, I'll never get my ten-year-old son back, I'll never even get my son from yesterday back—the reason the world is continually passing away is because the world is continually being recreated. And if I refuse to participate in the world’s passing away, what I'm doing essentially is refusing to participate in God’s ongoing re-creation of the world. Instead of my participating willingly, compassionately, lovingly, in re-making that world, I'm flinching, I'm running away. And that's not, I don't think, a bad description of what it looks like to be a sinner. To be someone who refuses to participate in God's recreation of the world.
Without Faith and Without Hope - 20:26
BLAIR HODGES: Right, and people who read the book will see you define sin that way. You draw that out in one of the chapters in a helpful way. What's interesting to me about Mormon is that he eventually—as he's going through this process of leaning into the end of the world and being a disciple in that process, the more he becomes a Christian we could say—he says, he started to take action “without faith and without hope.”
As a reader, my first instinct to that would be to say, well, that's a problem. We need to have faith and we need to have hope. And here we have this scriptural figure talking about, “Well, you know what? At this point, I'm acting without faith, and without hope.” What did you make of that?
ADAM MILLER: Yeah, those are really striking, and really unusual formulations that we get from Mormon! And, as you mentioned, I don't want to be mistaken here for advocating for people to lose their faith and to lose hope. [laughter] Those are essential Christian virtues.
But I think Mormon is describing something really important when he uses those unusual turns of phrase. He's describing something really important about what it looks like to be a Christian disciple who, in the face of the loss of all things, is willing to sacrifice their attachment to all things.
And what that looks like partly, is it involves learning how to not be attached to the outcome of our actions, right? It involves Mormon, for instance, learning how to love his people in exactly the way that they need, even if it's not going to change them, even if it's not going to lead to the outcome that he wants, even if he's “without faith and without hope” that this thing is going to turn around and turn out the way that he would like, he is still one hundred percent committed to doing exactly what is needed in that moment. And it's that kind of acting without attachment, without any faith that I'm going to get what I wanted out of the circumstance, it's that kind of scenario, I think, that really allows charity to come into its own as this kind of selflessness that’s not about getting what I wanted from the situation.
BLAIR HODGES: So what does that mode of discipleship look like for you when it comes to say, like your—we'll go with your relationship with your kids? What does that end up looking like?
ADAM MILLER: The question goes right to the heart of what practicing Christian discipleship actually looks like.
For instance, to love my son, who turns fifteen today, what it looks like to love your child is to find yourself continually sacrificing your own ideas about who and what they were supposed to be. Right? I have a certain kind of set of expectations about, you know, how I would like him to dress, and how I would like him to do at school, and the things I want him to be interested in, and how I want his life to turn out. And none of those, you know—[laughs] those expectations are not going to be met, because nobody’s are, right?
BLAIR HODGES: [laughter] The more you make it more apparent, like the more likely they are to not be met, right?
ADAM MILLER: Exactly, exactly. There's all kinds of reverse psychology that goes into being a parent on that score. But to love the kid is to continually sacrifice my ideas about what I wanted them to be, and instead to observe who and what they are, and what they need from me as a result of who and what they are, regardless of what I thought I wanted them to be.
And it's that kind of continual sacrifice of all the things I had thought about them in light of what they actually are, that's where Christian discipleship, I think, really takes hold.
BLAIR HODGES: That makes me wonder what that could look like in a bad relationship. Say, in an abusive marriage, for example. I could see someone saying, “Well, I'm just going to sacrifice myself to this to this situation. I believe marriage matters. And so I'm just gonna put up with this.”
What are your thoughts about that?
ADAM MILLER: It's not hard to think of bad examples of this kind of thing. And in fact, one of the things that I think is really powerful about Mormon, the book, is the way he continually gives us really powerful examples of really bad uses of religion. Indicating the way that the religious project can constantly be hijacked. Instead of being the business of learning how to sacrifice all things, religion, as practiced by the Lamanites and Nephites, becomes about figuring out how to “get gain,” is the phrase Mormon and Moroni use. That religion is not about sacrificing, but about getting a sort of gain. But there's always the possibility, then, of this kind of perversion or hijacking of these basic religious ideals.
And I think for me, the key is to ask a question—when I'm sacrificing my ideas about how I want my children's lives to turn out or what I think I want them to be—the key for me is to continually ask, not “what did I want,” but “what is actually needed? What in light of God's law is actually good for this other person?”
For instance, if I'm in an abusive relationship and I ask myself, what's good for this person who is abusing me? It's not good for me to continue to enable their abuse. It’s not good for me and it's not good for them. If I'm going to actually act in a way that loves them, by attempting to respond to their needs, and do what's best for them, that would involve me breaking off the relationship. And I think it's that kind of question we have to constantly ask ourselves over and over again: What is needed here? What in light of God's law is actually good? And how do I go about, as a practical matter, enacting that good in the most useful way, both for me and for them?
Authenticity, the Self, and Joy - 27:45
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, in a sense, that brings up sacrifice yet again, right? The idea that sometimes you would need to sacrifice your wishes and dreams about a particular relationship—whether it be a child or a friend or a spouse—that you need to sacrifice that for the sake of them and you, especially if there's abuse or violence involved, but also when there's not, because sometimes people change and sometimes it requires that letting go, if your relationship with them is ever going to be authentic.
Actually, I’m interested to hear what you think about that word, “authentic.” People talk about authenticity and wanting to be their authentic selves.
ADAM MILLER: Well, let me say, first of all, that as best I can tell, this is what a good marriage looks like: A good marriage looks like my continually choosing my wife over who I wanted her to be. And it looks like her continually choosing me over what she wanted me to be. If we can do that, [laughter] if we can more or less continually choose each other over what we thought we wanted, then we're going to be in it together, right? That's what love looks like.
With respect to the word “authenticity,” especially the notion of an authentic self, I'm really suspicious of that sort of language. [laughter] Especially because I'm really suspicious of the idea of a self. Period.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, that's a can of worms! Go on! Let's spend a second with that bombshell.
ADAM MILLER: What most of us think about most of the time when we talk about our “true selves” is we're talking about the story that we want our lives to fit. And as best I can tell, Christianity isn't about becoming my “authentic self.” It's about my willingness to continually sacrifice my dreams of having an authentic self.
BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. That doesn't sound fun, Adam. [laughter]
ADAM MILLER: Well, nobody's, for instance, gonna describe Mormon’s life as fun!
BLAIR HODGES: Well, that's just it, right? Where's the joy in all of this? Latter-day Saints are prone to talking about the “plan of happiness” and things like this, and—
ADAM MILLER: Sure.
BLAIR HODGES: —you know, in fact, sometimes we try to short circuit the grieving processes. I've been at funerals where it almost felt taboo to cry, because people want to express faith and joy of a future reunion and that kind of thing. So where does the happiness and joy come into this mix when we're talking about Mormon as a sober person who's quick to observe. Where's the happiness? Where's the joy here?
ADAM MILLER: It seems pretty obvious to me, after decades of careful thought and experimentation, it seems pretty obvious to me that happiness is not possible without sacrifice. And in fact, in a way that is maybe predictably paradoxical, my own happiness is the kind of thing that only arises in the moment when I'm willing to sacrifice it.
Joy is the product of my sacrificing my own thoughts and expectations in love and compassion for someone else's needs. Joy and happiness and gratitude and appreciation are the kind of things that arise out of a deep attunement to the fact that this world is continually passing away.
Now, if I want to appreciate my children, if I want to go home tonight and appreciate the birthday cake that we have, and the few moments we get to have as a family when we open some presents and blow out those candles, moments that are never going to be repeated—if I want to appreciate them, I need to go in aware of the fact that this moment is passing away even as we're experiencing it.
And that generates, right—and I have to willingly sacrifice it as it passes through my hands—that generates the kind of appreciation and selflessness and gratitude that brings real joy, rather than the world's kind of counterfeit version of joy by way of gain and acquisition that is, at the end of the day, a fool's project, because gain and acquisition are at best, temporary illusions. Everything is passing. God is not going to stop recreating.
BLAIR HODGES: As I'm reading this book during COVID, I can talk about one of the ways it hit home for me in a practical way is, as I'm reading your thoughts about this, about sacrifice and about how each moment—you call it “the white hot tip of time’s spear” or something like this, as it's passing by, it's the kind of thing that makes me want to put my phone away. It's the kind of thing that makes me want to sit down and just see what my kindergartener's doing with his Legos and enter that moment with him and let that be what it is. Or to turn the TV off for a while or, you know, sit down with my wife at the end of the day and talk about something difficult that needs to be addressed.
Or, you know, that's the kind of practical thing your book brought me to, is trying to stay in the moment.
ADAM MILLER: I think sin’s most dependable hallmark may be boredom and distraction. My continual effort to flee what's happening, to avoid an awareness of the moment’s passing, to ignore the loss of all things, my continual effort to find places to hide by way of entertainment, by way of games, by way of movies, or films, or books—this is maybe sin’s most common and dependable manifestation, is my continual effort to check out. To not be sober. Not be quick to observe. And thus to not be faced with the reality of what needs to be done and what I need to sacrifice in order to give it.
What is Justice? - 33:22
BLAIR HODGES: I think this connects in really surprising ways to how you talk about the idea of justice.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: People, especially Christians, tend to think of justice—God's justice—as making things right, rectifying wrongs, punishing sin, and this type of thing. Justice seems to happen when everybody gets what they deserve. And you challenge that idea of justice. You offer a different view.
ADAM MILLER: Yes. This, in fact, is a topic that I've been trying to write about, more or less continually for the past twelve months. So be careful! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: You're hungry for justice!
ADAM MILLER: I’m hungry for justice! I am hungry for justice. But I do also think—as I kind of mention briefly in this book, and as you yourself mentioned just now—I do also tend to think that we tend to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of justice. And that this, as a result, leads us to misunderstand the purpose of God’s law. And then by extension, it leads us to misunderstand what Jesus is accomplishing by way of the atonement, and how he is accomplishing it.
And let me just say for the sake of our discussion here, let me just frame this in terms of the language that you just used. Normally when we think about justice, as sinners, we tend to think about justice in terms of meting out what is deserved, that the purpose of God's law, the purpose of justice here is to make sure that everybody gets what they deserve. And when we think about people getting what they deserve, we think about that in terms of the function of the law being to return to them whatever it was that they gave.
So for instance, if somebody did something good to you, then they should get, the law demands, that they should get something good back. Or conversely, if somebody did something evil, then the purpose of the law is to make sure that something evil is done in return to them. Good for good and evil for evil is the logic of desserts, right? It's the logic of giving people what they deserve.
Apart from the many, many different problems with thinking about justice in terms of this way, [laughs] one of the basic problems is that it makes a primary function of justice is to do evil to people. A primary function of justice is to do evil! Which I think makes zero sense with respect to the nature of justice, if justice is a good thing.
BLAIR HODGES: This kind of reminds me of like, I saw a parent in a store once spanking their kid, and saying, “We don't hit people!” Because I guess they'd like hit their brother, you know, I'm like, “okay.” [laughter]
ADAM MILLER: Right, right. That kind of that kind of underlying logic of good for good and evil for evil, I don't think it makes any sense in light of the actual nature of justice as a good thing. It makes a lot more sense, I think, to think about justice in the way that Jesus himself—to pick a random example here—[laughter] the way that Jesus himself goes about describing justice. As the business of returning good for good, and the business of returning good for evil. What does justice look like? Justice looks like the law requiring you to respond to anything, whether it be good or evil, with good, in order to make the world itself just.
So the question you have to pose in every instance is not, “what does this person deserve?” But the question that has to be posed in every instance in light of God's law is, “What does this person need in order for justice to reign?” And justice reigning involves not just you acting justly, but it involves you acting in a way that helps that other person to become just. What needs to happen here in order for this person to find what's good by becoming just?
So for instance, if I were to ask that kind of question in the context of an abusive relationship, I'm asking not just here about what does the abusive spouse deserve or not, in terms of my forgiveness or love or mercy—I'm asking about what does that person need in order for them to become a good person? What do they need in order to become a non-abusive person? And the answers to that question may vary depending on circumstances. But that's a very different sort of question. And that's a very different image of justice. And it's a very different image of what's at stake in God's law, when we don't think that the law is about giving people what they deserve, and instead, recognize that it is always about judging what people need in order to be good. What good is needed, right here and now?
BLAIR HODGES: I guess there's a temptation there to still turn it around on other people. So for example, I'm thinking of protests that happened during the summer last year, where people took to the streets to object to how Black people are treated by police or different things like this. And within those protests, there were occasions of vandalism or violence. And it was easy to point to those things and say, “Well, that's not how you're supposed to react,” and to focus on that, instead of focusing on why they're out there. Why people are in the streets.
ADAM MILLER: Part of what happens, I think, with a misunderstanding of justice is that when you try to answer the question, “What does someone deserve,” you are asking the question both in the wrong tense and in the wrong voice.
You're asking the question in the past tense, “What does this person deserve on the basis of what they did in the past?” Whatever kind of misdeeds they may or may not have done, whatever vandalism they did or didn't perpetrate. And you're asking a question passively about whether or not, for instance, they deserve to be loved, is the implicit question, is the implicit thing that's always at stake in what someone does or doesn't deserve. Do they deserve to be loved—passive voice—on the basis of what they did in the past tense? That, I think, is a textbook example of an immoral way, an unethical way to use God's ethical law. To use the law in the past tense in the passive voice to ask about whether or not someone deserves to be loved.
The only moral way, in my view, to use God's law is to use the law in the present tense and in the active voice. The only moral way to use God's law is to use it to judge what needs to be done right now in light of present circumstances.
So for instance, if we take the example of the protests last summer. If I use God's law to judge whether or not the people who participated in the protests deserve to be treated the way they were asking to be treated, then I'm gonna reach a certain set of answers that might very well excuse me from giving what they actually need in light of their circumstances. That, I think, is a pretty straightforward example of a misuse. A very, very typical misuse, a very tempting, very common misuse of God's law, to use it to decide whether or not somebody deserves me to love them. O whether or not, if we turned it around, whether or not I deserve to be loved by God on the basis of what I did or didn't do.
That's never, I think, that's never an appropriate way to use God's law. That's an unethical way to use ethics. The only ethical way to use ethics is to use God's law to ask, “Well, what do they need now, in light of all that has happened for good and for bad, in order to be better? What is needed for me what sacrifice is required right now in order for these needs to be met?”
Present tense. Active voice. Rather than past tense, passive voice, right?
BLAIR HODGES: And we should say, speaking of present tense, that all that is still ongoing, right? And those issues are still something that needs to be addressed. I really hope you keep writing about justice. I enjoyed that part of the book. I hope to read more from you on that.
ADAM MILLER: Well, that was a lot, and probably too much! [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: No, it's this—it's hard for me to actually move on from this, this part of the book really did stand out to me. Again, the book is called Mormon: a brief theological introduction. It's published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University. And Adam is one contributor to that series of twelve books and we'll have a link to that on the show page and in the show notes as well.
Climate Change and the End of the World - 41:38
BLAIR HODGES: Adam, I wanted to talk about your Afterword. You included an afterword in the book, where you step out of the Book of Mormon almost completely at this point and talk about how we in the present today might be facing an enormous catastrophe in our own time, particularly pertaining to climate change. I wondered why you wanted to end on that note.
ADAM MILLER: That was partly what motivated me to write the book in the first place, is that I had been thinking and reading about climate change. And “climate change” is maybe too optimistic a way to describe what is predicted, I think, with a great deal of confidence in light of an overwhelming amount of evidence, in terms of the catastrophic changes to our global ecosystems and climates here in the next fifty to one hundred years. We have, as best as I understand, more or less reached a point of no return here. And the physics of what's involved with our climate are going to unfold in a way that will utterly transform our world and the world that we give to our children and grandchildren.
BLAIR HODGES: This is in literal ways, right? We're talking about ecological changes and access to food, water, where people can live, how wealth is created and generated, how people can flourish. I mean, it's like real everyday implications about, you know, life and death and food and sex and everything else.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah, I think a fundamental economic, political, ecological transformation of our world here is at stake, that will leave us in an extremely precarious positions here going forward. The world that you and I live in is not the world that our children and grandchildren will live in.
BLAIR HODGES: I think we're already starting to see that. I mean, people in other countries have begun to see it in more catastrophic ways, I think, than I have here in North America and my little Utah, you know, here in Salt Lake City, for example. But yeah.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah. So for me, I mean, even pre-pandemic—
BLAIR HODGES: I call it the Beforetimes.
ADAM MILLER: The Beforetimes. The question for me was, what does it look like to be a Christian disciple who is living, not just theoretically through the end of the world here, but very literally, very concretely, as we pass through this point of no return, through the loss of this world. So much of the ecological and environmental beauty of the world upon which we depend is going to be irretrievably lost. What does it look like to be a Christian disciple in response to that?
And Mormon was, for me, a case study, not just in living through all the little apocalypses that happen as our lives pass away, and we lose the things and people that we love. But as, on a global scale, our world turns a corner and we lose what we thought was not losable.
BLAIR HODGES: By ending on that you take a risk, because it is a fraught issue that some people aren't even willing to admit is happening.
ADAM MILLER: Well, it is a fraught political issue. It’s not a fraught scientific issue. The empirical data at our disposal is decisive and overwhelming. And for us, the question is what to do about it?
I mean, we can entertain, you know, quasi-miraculous scenarios in which, you know, maybe none of the things predicted here in terms of global climate catastrophe come to pass. Maybe we invent some kind of miracle technological solution, for instance, and weasel our way out of having to pay the piper with respect to the way that we as a “first world” country in particular, have lived for the past hundred years—
BLAIR HODGES: I've proposed that we blow up the sun and create our own small sun.
ADAM MILLER: [laughs] But even if we did, even if we did, I think all the things that are at stake in Christian discipleship are still firmly in play. It seems to me, for instance, clearly, that the only hope for us as a planet going forward is to sacrifice everything and consecrate everything in light of what is needed.
What if global climate change doesn't have catastrophic results? What should we as Christians do? Sacrifice everything and consecrate everything. [laughs] Right? Regardless of the scenario, our obligation as Christians is to do that. Regardless.
BLAIR HODGES: And sometimes even without faith and without hope as Mormon experienced.
ADAM MILLER: Yeah. And perhaps without faith and without hope that we will get what we want or save what we wanted to save. We nonetheless have to give what's needed. And we nonetheless have to sacrifice everything. There's no getting around that call to duty. Even if the circumstances of that call to sacrifice everything aren't as catastrophic as we worry they might be.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, that's a happy way to wrap up that segment, Adam. [laughter]
ADAM MILLER: Happy to help!
BLAIR HODGES: I’ll remind people that you are author of a book that we're talking about today called Mormon: a brief theological introduction. You're a philosophy professor at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. And you've written a lot of books. You've written Speculative Grace, The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace, Letters to a Young Mormon—two editions of Letters to a Young Mormon, I should say! and a book called An Early Resurrection.
Adam, we're going to take a break for a second and then come back and talk a little bit about the best books.
[BREAK]
Best Books - 50:54
BLAIR HODGES: We're back at Fireside speaking with Adam Miller and we talked today about his book, Mormon: a brief theological introduction. But now it's time for Best Books. This is the segment of the show where I put you on the spot, Adam. I'm going to ask you for a recommendation. It can be a book that changed your life, it can be something that you read recently and that you can't get out of your head. So what have you brought for us?
ADAM MILLER: Now, I not only have a bachelor's degree in literature, but I am literally a professional reader. That's literally my job! [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Such a good job!
ADAM MILLER: Essentially, yeah, it's a great job if you can get it. So I’ve read a lot of books. But the book I wanted to recommend today to your audience is a book by Cormac McCarthy, a contemporary novelist. And the book in particular I wanted to recommend was, I think a less read, a less famous one of his books, a book called The Crossing.
I think the really striking thing about McCarthy's novels in general is the way that they are—They're essentially vehicles for contemplation, right? They're driven by observation, rather than by plot, or by the thoughts or feelings of the people involved in the plot. What they do, I think, in a way that I really love, and I think is really unique, what McCarthy's novels do is they dramatize silence. Because a kind of key feature of his writing is that he never reports to you what anyone is thinking or feeling. [laughter] Never! He never tells you any thought that anybody has or anything that anybody feels. All you get is this kind of continuous stream of observation. Sometimes you get reported dialogue. But even the reported dialogue is not given in quotation marks, suggesting the way that even the dialogue is a kind of object in the world, even the dialogue is a kind of external thing that you that you come across, rather than the product of some kind of inner life.
And the remarkable effect of this, I think, is the way that reading his books primes you to step outside of the noise of your own head. Because he’s dramatizing the silence of this external world for you by refusing to report all the noise in our own heads that normally occupies so much of our time and attention.
So if you're interested, if your listeners I think are interested in this different kind of contemplative novel reading experience that's not plot driven but instead driven by an exposure to this deep, deep silence, then it could be for them.
BLAIR HODGES: It sounds like a real ‘whodunnit’!
ADAM MILLER: [laughs] Yeah, it is kind of a real whodunnit. I picked out two shorter passages for you, to give you a flavor of it, if you'd like to get a feel for what this sounds like.
BLAIR HODGES: Fantastic.
ADAM MILLER: Nobody's voice is anything else like McCarthy's voice either, as far as I can tell.
BLAIR HODGES: I haven't found anything like it.
ADAM MILLER: If people are familiar with Cormac McCarthy, probably his most famous book is The Road, which is a post-apocalyptic novel.
BLAIR HODGES: It's a film too, right? They made the movie with—
ADAM MILLER: They did make a movie with Viggo Mortensen.
BLAIR HODGES: Right, he's a father and a son and they’re in the post-apocalypse world—
ADAM MILLER: Right, it's a father and a son and what happens to this father and a son after the end of the world.
BLAIR HODGES: I should say, I read all of these on your recommendation several years ago!
ADAM MILLER: Oh, excellent. The recommendations, they bore fruit!
Okay, so here's one passage that I especially love. The main character is a boy who's lost in Mexico. And he comes across a priest in a ruined church that's filled with cats, with just this priest and cats living in this ruined church. And he has this conversation with the priest. And one of the things that the priest says is this, he says, "To see God everywhere is to see him nowhere. We go from day to day, one day much like the next. And then on a certain day, all unannounced, we come upon a man, or we see this man who is perhaps already known to us and is a man like all men, but who makes a certain gesture of himself that is like the piling of one's goods upon an altar. And in this gesture, we recognize that which is buried in our heart and is never truly lost to us nor ever can be. And it is this moment you see, this same moment. It is this which we long for and are afraid to seek and which alone can save us."
One more. This is from the very end of the book. I'm not spoiling anything about how the book turns out by giving you the very closing lines of the book here. [laughs]
"He walked out. A cold wind was coming down off the mountains. It was shearing off the western slopes of the continent where the summer snow lay above the timber line. And it was crossing through the high fir forests and among the poles of the aspens. And it was sweeping over the desert plain below. It had ceased raining in the night. And he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called standing in that inexplicable darkness where there was no sound anywhere, save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and he held his face in his hands and he wept. He sat there for a long time. And after a while the east did gray. And after a while the right and God-made some did rise once again, for all and without distinction."
The end. That's the end of the book, too. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: That is The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy. That's the novel. It's part of a trilogy if I remember correctly, right?
ADAM MILLER: Yes, good. It's the middle book in the Border trilogy. But you can read it independent of the other two, because it's not plot centered. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Well, I will have a link to that in the show notes and on the website and on social media that people can check out. That's the best book recommendation for Adam Miller. Alright Adam, thank you so much.
ADAM MILLER: My pleasure.
Outro - 57:11
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. And also by the Dialogue Foundation. It’s a proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.
Alright, this episode is over but the discussion continues. You can hit me up on Twitter and Instagram at @podfireside. You can also email questions, comments, or even suggestions about future episodes to me. The address is blair@firesidepod.org.
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Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, right here in smoky, smoky Salt Lake City. My production assistant Kate Davis created the transcript. Special thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, Caroline Kline, and Kristen Ullrich-Hodges. Fireside’s theme music is by Faded Paper Figures.
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[End]
NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.