Benjamin Franklin’s “First Principles”: More Inclusive Monotheism

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c 1816, Benjamin West

Newton?s views likely influenced a remarkable statement from young Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had met with John Conduitt, the man who said that Newton had said that God had appointed ?superior beings? over heavenly bodies.[1] Not long after, Franklin wrote the following which he entitled ?First Principles.? Here I simply quote the whole thing and will offer further thoughts in a later post.

I BELIEVE there is one supreme, most perfect Being, author and father of the gods themselves.

For I believe that man is not the most perfect being but one, but rather as there are many degrees of beings superior to him.

Also when I stretch my imagination through and beyond our system of planets, beyond the visible fixed stars themselves, into that space that is every way infinite, and conceive it filled with suns like ours, each with a chorus of worlds for ever moving round him; this little ball on which we move, seems, even in my narrow imagination, to be almost nothing, and myself less than nothing, and of no sort of consequence.

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September 11th and the Politics of Comparison

Most of us (of a certain age) have a very specific memory of where we were that day in 2001. I was sitting on my couch watching the Today Show as the plane hit the second tower. I set down my laptop and didn?t pick it back up that day.

At the time, it didn?t occur to me at the time that this was not the first time something horrific happened on September 11th. My abandoned laptop held evidence of another harrowing day in September almost a century and a half earlier?I had been reading newspaper articles about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Only later would I learn that 11 September was also the date of the Chilean coup in which elected President Salvador Allende was ousted (with help from the US) that led to the 15-year military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

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Inaugural Joseph Smith Lecture at the University of Virginia, Senator Harry Reid

Senator Harry Reid

The  inaugural Joseph Smith Lecture featuring a conversation with Senator Harry Reid, Senate Democratic Leader, will be held on Saturday September 26 at 2:00 p.m. in the University of Virginia’s Newcomb Hall Theater. The conversation will be comprised largely of questions from the audience.

Parking is available in the Bookstore garage immediately behind Newcomb Hall.

Tickets are available for free from University’s box office at https://tickets.artsboxoffice.virginia.edu/single/EventListing.aspx and may be picked up in the Theater’s lobby beginning at 12:24. Seating is open and tickets not picked up by 1:45 will be released to the public.

Isaac Newton’s Inclusive Monotheism

Newton and Joseph Smith had a lot of similar ideas about God

In my previous post, I mentioned Barbara Newman’s discussion of “inclusive monotheism” where intermediaries and other divine beings all work in harmony under a supreme being, as opposed to the radical monotheism of the Reformation which sought to get rid of such beings. Wouter Hanegraaff argues that when Max Weber referred to “disenchantment,” “he was describing the attempt by new scientists and Enlightenment philosophers to finish the job of Protestant anti-pagan polemicists, and get rid of cosmotheism once and for all.”[1]

Yet a major figure in the Enlightenment speculated about intermediary beings as well. Isaac Newton’s editor, John Conduitt, reported that Newton wondered toward the end of his life “whether there were not intelligent beings superior to us who superintended these revolutions of heavenly bodies by the direction of the Superior Being.”[2]  

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Scholarly Inquiry: Samuel Brown, Part 2

This is Part 2 of our two-part Scholarly Inquiry with Samuel Brown. For Part 1, see here.

4. You address some of this in First Principles, but who is the intended audience of for your devotional work, and what do you hope to accomplish with it?

That’s the hard question. I mostly wanted my non-academic friends to have an accessible summary of my sense of how the Gospel might work. I felt sorry for the good people who felt stymied by the academic tone of In Heaven. I also felt like I was being a tiny bit cowardly by not taking a personal stand (academic writing, which I love, is always a little cowardly in my view, so easy to hide so much in the conventions of disciplined scholarship). My secret agenda (there is always a secret agenda in writing; you don’t have to admire Leo Strauss to acknowledge that) in First Principles was to begin to advocate for a relational theology of Mormonism, one that was true to Mormonism?s roots and promise, thereby gently de-Protestantizing the theologies available to contemporary Mormons.

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Scholarly Inquiry: Samuel Brown, Part 1

Samuel M. Brown is a medical researcher, ICU physician, historian of religion and culture, and friend to many at the Juvenile Instructor. Today he fields our questions on his recent foray from academic research into devotional writing for an LDS audience. In particular we asked him about the significance of history for that kind of enterprise. This is Part 1 of a 2-Part feature. [For Part 2, see here.]

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What’s the Opposite of Strict Monotheism? A Question of Terminology

Hanegraaff concludes Esotericism and the Academy by arguing that the two principal points that Enlightenment scholars of philosophy labeled as pagan heresy–the rejection of creation ex nihilo and the belief in the uncreated, divine part of the soul (or nous)–are in fact the chief traits of what we might term Western esotericism.

Hanegraaff calls the rejection of creation ex nihilo, cosmotheism, which he sees as a counterpart of strict monotheism. Quoting the Egyptologist Jan Assman, cosmotheism is one where “a divine world does not stand in opposition to the world of cosmos, man, and society; rather, it is a principle that permeates it and gives it structure, order and meaning … The divine cannot be excluded from the world.” Such, Hanegraaff argues, is “the logical alternative to classic monotheism, where the invisible and eternal Creator is strictly separate from this visible and temporal creation.”  Hanegraaff sees “a deep structural conflict between the dynamics of these two mutually exclusive systems and all that they imply” (371).

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Guest Post: Jeff Turner, “Spring Musicals: Weirdness, Accuracy, and Introductions”

[We are thrilled to have yet another guest post from Jeff Turner, a PhD student at the University of Utah. See his previous offerings here, here, and here.]

?I actually learned something about Mormonism,? said my seat-neighbor at the Book of Mormon musical this past spring. Terrified, curious, and excited, I found myself wondering what he could have learned from the musical that he hadn?t known beforehand. So I asked. Surprisingly, his new piece of information had to do with the relationship between Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, namely that they knew each other in person, which made Young?s succession as the next church president more approachable to my seatmate (even though the succession was oversimplified in the musical). Well that?s not so bad, I thought, and I can see how he picked that up from the musical. We had a short chat about it afterward, and that was the end of it.

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Proposing Panels for MHA’s Annual Conference: A Few Thoughts

We are one month away from the deadline for MHA’s call for papers, so I thought this was as good a time as any to talk about the conference in general and conference papers in particular. I hope every reader of JI has had the privilege to attend MHA’s annual conference. It truly is a phenomenal time, with a mixture of solid papers and warm comraderie. It is quite unlike most historical conferences I attend where few people actually attend sessions and most people remain in the halls, at restaurants, and doing anything but hearing papers. There is certainly plenty of socializing and networking at MHA, but the thing that sets it apart is people actually care about the sessions, papers, and presenters. It’s refreshing, honestly. There are at times poorly-attended sessions, but more often than not the rooms are mostly filled, and not too infrequently they are overflowing with more anxious attendees than there are chairs. This is one of the conference’s great strengths.

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Fresh Update

You may have noticed the Internet has changed under your nose. Web standards have matured enough that designers have more flexibility in typeface choices, layouts, and interactive elements. The prime medium for delivering web content has pivoted from the static and simple browser window to the mobile app. To take advantage of these developments, we?re launching a new design. Readers, rejoice?the day of an on-the-go, crisply formatted, mobile-friendly Juvenile Instructor has arrived.

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