Very clear and candid writing. Thanks. This is what is coming and you are feeling it:
Our privilege and burden as Latter-day Saints is to take covenantal responsibility in the quest to shape a better society, rather than merely depending upon a future eschatological reality (i.e. the Second Coming) to undo all that is terrible in the world in the twinkling of an eye, as if God stands before existence like a hand hovering over a lightswitch, deliberating when precisely he should turn on the lights and end all suffering.
Zion is a social-economic-political project (again) in the 21st century that invites people of good will to contest the common good with loving respect for their rivals. The LDS are (as you note) going to do this internally before they can revolutionize the world like Joseph Smith aimed to do. Zion is bigger than the church, bigger than mortality—it is the program to heal heaven of wars with sacrificial love.
Amen, Randall. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as with many things, seems to occupy the beautiful center that needs to "hold": we are pre-millennial in the sense that Christ ushers in the Millennium and post-millennial in the sense that we are called to build Christ's Zion now. And by our understanding of the idea of religious freedom - its borders are to enlarge and by default - and things I hear from the tops of the mountains, seem to include as we go, believers of so many varieties.
Very clear and candid writing. Thanks. This is what is coming and you are feeling it:
Our privilege and burden as Latter-day Saints is to take covenantal responsibility in the quest to shape a better society, rather than merely depending upon a future eschatological reality (i.e. the Second Coming) to undo all that is terrible in the world in the twinkling of an eye, as if God stands before existence like a hand hovering over a lightswitch, deliberating when precisely he should turn on the lights and end all suffering.
Zion is a social-economic-political project (again) in the 21st century that invites people of good will to contest the common good with loving respect for their rivals. The LDS are (as you note) going to do this internally before they can revolutionize the world like Joseph Smith aimed to do. Zion is bigger than the church, bigger than mortality—it is the program to heal heaven of wars with sacrificial love.
Amen, Randall. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as with many things, seems to occupy the beautiful center that needs to "hold": we are pre-millennial in the sense that Christ ushers in the Millennium and post-millennial in the sense that we are called to build Christ's Zion now. And by our understanding of the idea of religious freedom - its borders are to enlarge and by default - and things I hear from the tops of the mountains, seem to include as we go, believers of so many varieties.