Thursday, March 26, 2015

Mildenberger über Heilsgeschichte

Mildenberger emphasizes that the term itself is of 19th century origin (Erlanger Theologican J. Ch. K. v. Hofmann), even if pietistic Biblizism in the style of J.A. Bengel and F.Ch. Oetinger as well as the Federationtheology of the 16th century prefigure the notion (sp.1584).

Mildenberger notes that the premise to such thinking is accepting all of history as one reality, which only begins to take place in the 2nd half of the 18th century (sp.1584). Here, Heilsgeschichte effectively replaces metaphysics for dogmatics (sp.1584) and has to find a profile in comparison to world history.

Already in Hofmann's work the curious move, that Salvation History has existence independent of any knowing subject surfaces here (p.1585). Key criticisms of this position are Bultmann [presumably Geschichte und Eschatologie?, 1955?] and O. Cullmann's Heil als Geschichte, 1965.

Salvation history finds use in conservative positions that insist on the verbal inspiration of the Biblical writings, coupled with a modern notion of history, which is then intended to counter the historical critical reconstructions of the Biblical narratives.
Hier ist die mehr oder weniger streng gefaßte Vorstellung der Verbalinspiration mit einem modernen Verständnis geschichtlicher Tatsächlichkeit verknüpft. (sp.1585)
 However, Mildenberger indicates the problems that this approach has.
Heilsgeschichte als Systematisierung des biblischen Erzählens von Gottes Handeln erweist sich ## darin als problematisch, daß sie die biblischen Erzählungen in einen diesen fremden Zusammenhang einer einzigen Geschichte bringen will. Dabei kommt ein dem biblischen Reden fremder Begriff von Tatsächlichkeit und zeitlicher Kontinuität ins Spiel, der die biblischen Erzählungen auf einen hinter diesen liegenden Tatsachenzusammenhang hin befragt. ... dieser konstruierte Tatsachenzusammenhang (soll dann, RCK) als Heilsgeschichte die objektive Grundlage des Glaubens sein.  Die moderne Geschichtskonstruktion tritt an die Stelle des biblischen Redens, wo auch die einzelnen Inhalte der biblischen Erzählung entnommen sind. (sp.1586)
No approach of Salvation History can escape the assumption that history can be interpreted at all as such a unified process (sp.1586).
Die Bestimmung der Gesamtwirklichkeit als Heilsgeschichte setzt voraus, daß Geschichte überhaupt als sinnvoller zielgerichteter Gesamtzusammenhang erfasßt werden kann. Das ist aber ein keineswegs selbstverständliches Wirklichkeitsverständnis. (sp.1586)
Mildenberger proposes to drop the use of the term altogether (sp.1586).

Bibliographie

Friedrich Mildenberger, Art. Heilsgeschichte, RGG4, Band 3, sp.1584-1586.
  • O. Cullmann, Heil als Geschichte, 1965.
  • R. Bultmann, Geschichte und Eschatologie, 1955?
  • Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, 1949 (= Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen, 1953).
  • R. Koselleck, Art Geschichte, V-VII, GGB2, 647-717.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Portelli on the Difference of Oral History

Alessandro Portelli insists that as oral sources, the recorded tape is the actual document (p.33), which can therefore not be destroyed.

The transcription, as a written document the preferred form, is a removed object due to its various forms of interpretation, such as the punctuation which ties to replicate pauses in speech. (p.34)
The tone and volume range and the rhythm of popular speech carry implicit meaning and social connotations which are not reproducible in writing --- unless, and then in inadequate and hardly accessible form, as musical notation. (p.34)
It has no story for some speech properties, such as the velocity of speech, an ambiguous but meaningful property (p.34).
... slowing down may mean greater emphasis as well as greater difficulty, and acceleration may show a wish to glide over certain points, as well as a greater familiarity or ease. (p.34)
Because these properties are "sites" of important narrative functions, their loss reduces the emotional valence of the narrative. (p.35)
This is even more true when folk informants are involved: they may be poor in vocabulary but are often richer in range of tone, volume and intonation than middle-class speakers who have learned to imitate in speech the monotone of writing. (p.35)
Because oral history produces a narrative, the tools for analysis of narratives are relevant. (p.35) Such formal and stylistic analyses are not optional:
The greater or lesser presence of formalized materials (proverbs, songs, formulas, and stereotypes) may measure the degree in which a collective viewpoint exists within an individual's narrative. (p.35)
This equally applies to standardized language and dialect and their uses (p.35).

Oral history is concerned with meaning more than with facts (p.36); thus the factually `false` may still be psychologically `true` (p.37). Thus, in terms of the Russian formalists, it contributes less to the fabula than to the plot [we would say emplotment now, RCK] (p.36).
Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did. (p.36)
Portelli stresses that many written sources are fundamentally transcripts of uncontrolled oral sources, which can thereby never be analyzed for bias (p.37).
 ... memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings. (p.37)
Because of this meaning, there are systematic distortions, which are almost as informative as the facts to be recalled. As standards of acceptability of behavior change, editing and even hiding takes place, which is crucial information (p.38).

The difference between how the subject used to think and how the subject thinks now is a key contribution in understanding the change that has occurred (p.38). Those who cannot separate this shift out use an epic mode of presentation, because they claim a timeless relevance of the past for the present. The ability to escape this timewarp is a key skill the interviewer can contribute.
If the interview is conducted skillfully and its purposes are clear to the narrators, it is not impossible for them to make a distinction between present and past self, and to objectify the past self as other than the present one. In these cases --- Malcolm X is again typical --- irony is the major narrative mode: two different ethical (or political, or religious) and narrative standards interfere and overlap, and their tension shapes the telling of the story. (p.38) [emphasis in original, RCK]
[[RCK: Notice that this is the technical use of irony, not the standard common-sense on.]]

Portelli stresses that oral sources remain artificial, variable and partial. (p,38) This has to do with the fact that the interview situations is engineered; the oral replies given are not repeatable; and the knowledge of the informer can never be exhausted (pp.39-40).

The relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee cannot be overrated, because the interviewer is what makes the potential of an oral source into an actuality and causes "transmission" to take place (p.39). As a consequence, an oral source that is transcribed without the questions of the interviewer eliminates half of the interaction and obfuscates the variability, insinuating that the interviewee would have responded equally every time (p.39).
Researchers often introduce specific distortions: informants tell them what they believe they want to be told and thus reveal who they think the research is. (p.39)
Rigidly over-structuring the interview will only turn the interviewee into an echo of the views of the interviewer, merely confirming the frame of reference of the historian (p.39). Portelli calls that phenomenon "ventriloquizing" (p.40).

Variability needs to be addressed by re-questioning, but the fact that this cannot quiesce produces the partial nature of the oral source (pp.39f).

The oral source is the combined product of the historian and the interviewee, not the unfiltered voice of the silenced masses.
... the control of the historical discourse remains firmly in the hand of the historian. (p.40)
Even accepting that the working class speaks through oral history, it is clear that the class does not speak in the abstract, but speaks to the historian, with the historian and, inasmuch as the material is published, through the historian. (p.40)
[[RCK: To which I would add that the class does not speak either, but members of the class, but the intent is clear of course.]]

Finally, as a literary researcher, Portelli rightfully points out that, other than in the case of other sources, historians are an embedded narrator of the story, in the style of the modern novel, not the 19th century omniscient narrator using the third person voice (p.41). Portelli analogizes the situation to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, who has to ask other 'informants' in order to complement what he has heard and seen.
In the writing of history, as in literature, the act of focusing on the function of the narrator causes this function to be fragmented. (p.41)
On explicitly entering the story, historians must allow the sources to enter the tale with their autonomous discourse. (p.41)
Oral history has no unified subject; it is told from a multitude of points of view, .... oral history can never be told without taking sides, since the 'sides' exist inside the telling. And ... historians and 'sources' are hardly ever on the same 'side'. (p.41)  

Bibliographic Record

Alessandro Portelli, What Makes Oral History Different, in: Robert Perks, Alistair Thomson (ed), The Oral History Reader, 2nd Edition, London (Routledge) 2006, pp.32-41.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

book on 15th century Nuremberg

The book Endres Tuchers Baumeisterbuch der Stadt Nürnberg: (1464 - 1475) gives a description of the city of Nuremberg from the point of view of the people in charge of maintaining it. It enumerates for example the water pipes (roren) and the different fountains and gives how many buckets each fountain has.
Unmitigated awesomeness.

Depicting German Peasants in Poetry

I came to this topic by considering the fact that the son of Meier Helmbrecht, also called Helmbrecht, convinces his sister Gotelint, to marry his best friend among the robbers, Lämmerslint. And this struck me akin to the Muslim girls who would go off, sixteen years old, from London and Vienna, to Syria to marry ISIS warriors.

So I decided to re-acquaint myself with Meier Helmbrecht, leading to this English translation of both Helmbrecht and Hartmann von Aue's Poor Heinrich by Clair Hayden Bell, of the University of California, in 1931.

In the introduction, Bell furthermore discussed the works of the Austrian ministerials Seifried Helbing, who left us some fifteen poems (e.g. Kleiner Lucidarius, described here) and Reinmar von Zweter's poems. The Austrian ministerials benefitted from the relative peace and the excellent soil along the Danube river.

These two belong together so tightly that Reinmars and Seifried are at times neighbors in a manuscript.

Another fellow who belongs into this group is Ottackar von Steiermark, in the mind of Theodor Ritter von Karajan.

Bell also mentions Hugo von Trimberg, who wrote the famous didactic Medieval poem Der Renner, "welches die größte didaktische Dichtung des deutschen Mittelalters darstellt", which he wrote while in charge of the School of the priory St Gangolf. That text is available via Medaevium.de for the 14th century,  Von Trimberg is interesting as he received no university training and was a married man with a large family.

Dr Julius von Schlosser online

Austrian Julius Ritter von Schlosser (1866-1938) was in charge of the k.u.k. kunsthistorische Hofmuseum, and as such well versed in Art History. He published an important set of art historical documents and studies, many of which are now available on the Internet archive.
Schlosser was also a fan and translator of Benedetto Croce, whose writings he translated with permission (see also the dedication in Italienische Forschungen of 1920 to Croce).
After the death of Franz Wickhoff, Schlosser and Hermann took over the inventory of illuminated manuscripts of Austria; however, not all of the volumes are available online. The inventory is interesting however, since then Austria included Istria and Dalmatia.
  • Franz Wickhoff (Hrsg), Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der illuminierten Handschriften in Österreich,

Monday, March 23, 2015

Curiouser and Curiouser

When a friend of mine interviewed a pagan who wanted to know more about easter eggs, easter bunnies and easter foxes, this lead me to Georg Franck von Franckenau, a medical doctor and personal attendant to Christian V of Denmark, who wrote some 20+ Medical dissertations in the style of Latin Satires, published posthumously by his son in 1722, where Satire #19 is the first discussion of the easter egg and the easter bunny, with Latin and German quotes (p.396 in the book, p.413 in the PDF). The work of Franckenau, especially his analysis of the sexual and the erotic in these dissertations, is discussed in this paper, which places Franckenau squarely into the Baroque tradition of curiosity literature (p.88 Fn 14). The author makes a good case for the relationship between the extreme and marvelous and the Baconian inductive method on the other, which required these outliers to adjust the conceptual framework (p.96 Fn 55).

Among books that discuss the curiosity literature is Christoph Daxelmüller (1979), Barockdissertationen und Polyhistorismus. Die Curiositas der Ethnica und Magica im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg, 117–186, which is available at the Vienna FB for European Ethnography.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Current state of Pentateuch research

John Van Seters socio-historical study of the Pentateuch will be re-issued in October of this year.

The basic scheme is as follows:
= Dtrn (7th century)
= Josh to 2nd Kings (= DtrH the deuteronomistic historian) (early exilic period)
= Gen/Ex/Lev/Num (formerly J) (late exilic period)
= Pentateuch redaction under P in post-exilic times

The biggest worry I have with this is that it puts the Davidic/Salomonic United Kingdom too late. Under this view, it is not a theological retroprojection of the Josianic Reform movement that is to be restored, but entirely without historical context. That's a bit too radical even for my tastes.

(see the 2004 edition http://books.google.at/books… for details)

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Momigliano on Ecclesiastical Historiography

Momigliano begins his sketch by pointing to the difficulties that 18th century Italian historiographers faced with respect to the Church hierarchy, in a century-spanning way.
An event of the fifth century [i.e. Emperor Vallentinianus III giving the pallium to the bishop of Ravenna, as part of raising Ravenna to an archbishopric, RCK] as told by a local ecclesiastical historian of the ninth century [i.e. Agnellus of Ravenna, author of a Liber Pontificalis, RCK] still had practical implications for the eighteenth century---and not only in Ravenna, but everywhere in Christendom. (p.136)
This precedent-directed connection is glossed by Momigliano as follows:
The very continuity of the institution of the Church through the centuries makes it inevitable that anything which happened in the Church's past should be relevant to its present. (p.136)
[[RCK: That argument of course only holds because of the conservative nature, as a structure that cannot reform, only re-explicate or rephrase. Institutions such as companies that re-innovate themselves every couple of years do not have these problems at all; the fact that IBM used to make meat scales has zero impact on their current foundational physics research.]]

Clearly Momigliano is right, that even across the denominational ditches,
A Church that consciously breaks with its original principles and its original institutions is inconceivable. (p.136)
The Church knows a return to the principles, not a break with them. (p.136)
 Momigliano argues that this both simplifies and complicates the task of the ecclesiastical historian.
[The Church historian, RCK] ... has to write the history of an institution which began in a precise moment, had an original structure, and developed with clear changes. It is for him to judge where the change implies a betrayal of the original purposes of the institution. On the other hand the historian of the Church is inevitably faced with the difficulty of having continuously to relate the events of the individual local churches to the corpus mysticum of the Ecclesia universalis. (p.136)
Momigliano believes that secular historians can focus on retelling the past, without the chance of much challenging of their results (pp.136f).
The historian of the Church knows that at any point he will be challenged. (p.137)
Church historians prepare for these challenges by rigor in the documentation of their retellings of the past. (p.137)

[[RCK: The argument that historians have few challenges to their retellings, presumably outside of their discipline, is only true if they work on a topic whose connection to the present is unclear. In general, Momigliano seems to work with an inverted arrow of time; the question is the applicability to the present times, and it is the principles' impact on the present time that are at issue, not the relationship of these principles to the past. A biography of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or the other founding fathers is no less challenged in the present day US, because their principles project forward, because the history of politics in the US is interpreted as an unfolding of the original Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution plus Amendments. A biography of Sam Houston, outside of Texas, or of Davy Crockett, has no such projections.]]
We have defined what seem to us some of the essential elements of ecclesiastical historiography: the continuous interrelation of dogma and facts; the transcendental significance attributed to the period of the origin; the emphasis on factual evidence; the ever present problem of relating events of local churches to the mystical body of the Universal Church. (p.138)
Momigliano points out that this is but an enumeration of the features of the first Church history of Eusebius of Caesarea, who is effectively without predecessor in his creation of his ecclesiastical history.

Momigliano explains the analogy between Eusebius' endeavor and the "secular" historiography of the pagan contemporaries.
... the succession of the bishops in || the apostolic see represented the continuity of the legitimate heirs of Christ; whereas the preservation of the purity of the original teaching of the Apostles gave internal unity to the Church. Apostolic succession and doctrinal orthodoxy were the pillars of the new Christian nation [i.e. the Church, RCK]; its enemies the persecutors and the heretics. Thus ecclesiastical history replaced the battles of ordinary political history by the trials inherent in resistance to persecution and heresy. (pp.139f)
Though Eusebius was inspired by the Acts of the Apostles for the spreading, the Old Testament and Flavius Josephus for the Holy Nation, and the Books of Maccabees for the struggle against persecution, his conception was novel (p.140).

Momigliano believes that Eusebius was inspired by Diogenes Laertius and his history of the philosophical schools, where the term diadoche denotes the notion of "succession", and the distinction of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as well as thorough antiquarian documentation (p.140). Momigliano points to similar documentation in Flavius Josephus and Maccabees, and to the rabbinic tradition of succession as similar parallels (pp.140f).

Momigliano sees the very difficulty of Eusebius in his departure from a point where the Roman state and the Christian nation are two separate entities, a model that would no longer hold when what was Caesar's and what was Christ's would become indistinguishable (p.141).
There was a very real duality in Eusebius' notion of ecclesiastical history which was bound to become apparent as soon as the Christians were safely in command of the Roman state. (p.141)
Thus, the problem was spelled out for all followers of Eusebius:
... how to deal with this divine institution's very earthly relations with other institutions in terms of power, violence, and even territorial claims. (p.141)
A Church in power can hardly separate itself from the State in which it exercises its power. (p.141)
... wherever Church and State tend to coalesce, it is difficult to separate heresy from political rebellion, dogmatic differences from court factions. (p.141)
In fact, none of the other ecclesiastical historians of Late Antiquity mentioned to get past this problem, using the succession of the emperors rather to structure their work chronologically, instead of the succession of bishops or metropolitans (p.141).

Momigliano cites some of the immediate successors of Eusebius and shows how they deal with the amalgamation, both positively and negatively. Sozomenus---student of Socrates, another immediate successor of Eusebius---openly invites his emperor, Theodosius II "to revise and censor what he has written" (p.143). Theodoretus, a provincial involved in the Nestorian dispute, "warns the emperors that if they fail in their duty to orthodoxy they may be punished by God on the battlefield" (p.143).

As a corrective view, Philostorgius is useful, as he embodies the same principles in an non-orthodox way, as he was "an Arian of the Eunomian variety" (p.144).
... his Ecclesiastical History started with the origins of the Arian controversy .... He adopted clear apocalyptic tones and liked to believe that the disaster of Adrianopolis in 378 was not unconnected with the persecution of the Arians. He saw the importance of the sack of Rome in 410 ... [which goes almost ignored by the orthodox Church historians, RCK]. (p.144)
Momigliano sees the ecclesiastical history after the Latin condensation, the Historia Tripartita of Cassiodorus and Epiphanius (p.144), as as complicated by the fact that the illusion of a Universal christianity could not longer be maintained, and that all state history had become local too. The restoration of the Eusebian program did not really happen, inspite of the excellent work of Otto von Freising, Adam von Bremen, Beda Venerabilis and Hugo of Fleury, (p.146), Flodoardus of Rheims, Ordericus Vitalis of Normandy (p.148), until the Centuriae of Magdeburg in 1559 (p.146): Luther had studied the Rufinian translation; Caspar Hedio reissued parts of the text in his Chronica of 1530, which drew upon Eusebius and the Tripartita; and Flacius and the centuriators "knew their Eusebius by heart" (p.149).

[[RCK: The Centuria by Matthias Flacius and Johannes Wiegand of Magdeburg, among other achievements, exposed the Pseudo-Isidorian Canones that had become part of the Decretium of Gratian, through source critical methods, in an attempt to show the Catholic Church as the departure and the Lutheran Reformation as the Restoration of the true church. They were therefore, just as Momigliano would have predicted, busily appealing to the mystical body of the ecclesia universalis and using documentary evidence to make their case.]]
What both Protestants and Catholics wanted to prove was that they had the authority of the first centuries of the Church on their side. Consequently, the ecclesiastical history that the religious controversies of the sixteenth century demanded was a history of the Universal Church---not a history of special [i.e. particular, RCK] churches. (p.150)
Not only had the "standards of precise documentation" evolved since the time of Eusebius, but the latter "had no suspicion that the very course of events of the first Christian centuries could be disputed and that there might be more than one interpretation of basic events" (p.150).

This focus on the original Church dropped the Christian nation by the wayside.
They [i.e. Flacius, Baronio---the Catholic historian of the Counter-Reformation, cf. Vol 3 in German translation from the Baroque---and their followers, RCK] were concerned not so much with the Christians as with Christian institutions and doctrines. (p.150)
Throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, this focus on the Universal Church,  whether from the Protestant or the Catholic side, is not lost.
Even the revolutionary Gottfried Arnold, who sees the real church outside every existing denomination, does not yet doubt that the true ecclesia exists somewhere. (p.151)
Momigliano nominates several candidates for having shaking the consensus of "the existence of the invisible, Universal Church" (p.152). Momigliano points to Johann Lorenz von Mosheim's Institutionum historiae ecclesiasticae of 1755; Ferdinand Christian Baur, a student of Hegel; or Max Weber's religious sociology, which "put the Christian Church on a level with any other religious society---or perhaps with any other human society" (p.152). Momigliano's favorite is Pietro Giannone, who wrote a sketch in prison in the 1740s that could not be published until 1859, the Istoria del Pontificato de Gregorio Magno (p.152). [[RCK: Giannone had earlier written a History of the Kingdom of Naples in two volumes, which was how he aligned the political with the religious.]]

Momigliano reminds his audience that the first historian to write a history of the origins of Christianity, who was not a theologian, in Germany was Eduard Meyer in 1921 (p.152).

Momigliano draws the two irresolvable different positions, which he considers beyond mediation.
Those who accept the notion of the Church as a divine institution which is different from other institutions have to face the difficulty that Church history reveals only too obviously a continuous mixture of political and religious aspects: hence the distinction frequently made by Church historians of the last two centuries [i.e. 19th and 20th, presumably, RCK] between internal and external history of the Church, where internal means (more or less) religious and external means (more or less) political. (p.152)
By contrast, the historians of the Church as a worldly institution have to reckon with the difficulty of describing without the help of a belief what has existed through the help of a belief. (p.152)

Bibliographic Record

Arnaldo Momigliano, Ecclesiastical History, in: Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, (= Sather Classical Lectures Vol 54), University of California Press (Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford) 1990, pp.132-156.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Temple Lot Case at CHL

The Church History library offers the entire Temple Lot Case documentation online; up to now I was only able to find the RLDS published summary from 1893, e.g. https://archive.org/details/TempleLotCase.

Church History Library: Archives and Collections: Collections

Thanks to Brian Hales of Mormon polygamy fame for the link. Brian also had some advice on figuring out where what is.
A directory for the transcript using the CHL photo-numbering system can be found here:
http://mormonpolygamydocuments.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Temple-Lot-Transcript-Directory.pdf

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Islamic State and Modernity

In preparation for considering the problem of secularization, I am reading a set of essays edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Heinrich Meier, Politik und Religion: Zur Diagnose der Gegenwart, published in 2013 by C.H.Beck.

The essay by Hillel Fradkin, Die lange Suche nach dem islamischen Staat,  (the long search for the Islamic state), and argues that the Islamic world, after the conquering successes of Mohammed, reigned such a large stretch of land for such a long time (1400 years from Hegira to the Fall of the Ottoman Empire) that Modernity for them is like a nightmare, nibbling away their success first in colonialism and then in modern republican nationalism (pp.136-139). That the infidels should rule the faithful appears like a devilish perversion, because it negates the trope of the superior political organization.

After discussing the Brotherhood in Egypt and the Iranian Revolution, Fradkin turns to the problem of what modernity means as a configuration for Islam.
Denn objektiv gesehen, und nach Erfahrung der westlichen Politik zu urteilen, welche die muslimische Macht zurückdrängte, ist die Macht, deren es heute bedarf, um die Weltpolitik zu dominieren, eine Funktion der Aneignung der Moderne. Damit ist nicht nur die moderne Technologie, sondern zuallererst der moderne Republikanismus und das moderne Denken gemeint, das beides hervorbrachte. Nicht zufällig war dieses Denken von Anfang an in hohem Maße von der Frage der Macht präokkupiert. Zumindest was die Macht betrifft, hat das moderne Denken sein Versprechen gehalten, insbesondere gilt dies für die ökonomische Macht, auf der andere Formen der Macht beruhen. (p.159)
[Viewed objectively, and judged by the experiences of western politics, which have pushed back Muslim power,  is the power that is necessary these days, to dominate world politics, a function of the acquisition of modernity. This does not mean just modern technology, but before all else, modern republicanism and the modern thinking that brought these two about. It is no accident that this thinking was preoccupied from the get-go to a high degree by the question of power. At least as far as power is concerned, the modern thinking kept its promise, and this is especially true for economic power, on which the other forms of power are founded. (p.159)]
But that seems to invert several things, in my mind. While economic power is clearly not independent of resources and raw materials, is it not most heavily tied to technological advances and a workforce that can participate in their use and construction?  Now, one can argue that modern republicanism is a prerequisite for that, but the Chinese system suggests that this is not necessarily so.

Consecration and Stewardship Revelations

In addition to D&C 42, the core revelation for the Law of Consecration and Stewardship,  there are other revelations relevant to stewardship and consecration.

  • D&C 48 [received at Kirtland, Ohio, March 10, 1831] discusses the process of land procurement for the Saints, both around Kirtland and in the (yet undisclosed) Zion.
  • D&C 51 [received at Thompson, Ohio, May 20, 1831] discusses the process by which Bishop Partridge is supposed to accommodate the newly arriving Eastern Saints.
    • The organization by the Divine Laws is not optional, but necessary (vv.1f)
    • Partridge is to appoint the "portions, every man equal according to his family, according to his circumstances and his wants and needs" (v.3).
    • Partridge fills out a certificate for each portion, that designates that assigned as the man's inheritance, which he will lose if he "transgresses and is not accounted worthy by the voice of the church" (v.4).
    • Consecrated stuff belongs to the work of the church, even if someone leaves; only their deed stays with them (v.5).
    • All this shall happen without violating the laws of the land (v.6).
to be continued