Some may be unfamiliar with the term “Murderers’ Row.” Those who are may find it strange to see it applied to a lineup of Latter-day Saint writers.
Murderers’ Row was the colorful description a sportswriter gave to a 1927 baseball lineup that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, the Titans of a team that set the record for home runs and tied the record for wins. It was the year that Ruth set the lyrical, mystical, magical record for home runs with 60. (Gehrig hit 47 that year, becoming the only other player ever to hit more than 39. Together, they were Zeus and Hercules.)
It would be difficult to overstate the fame of that lineup. Let’s settle for the fact that the term became a common American phrase to characterize an outstanding group.
All that is to say that a Murderers’ Row of Latter-day Saint theological thinkers has been assembled for a new series of short books on themes in the Doctrine and Covenants. For example, the profound and prolific theological scholar Terryl Givens is the author of “Agency Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants.”
The series emanates from BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, which rounded up a similar Murderers’ Row in 2020 for 10 short volumes about the Book of Mormon. That astonishing lineup included Givens, Adam Miller, Rosalynde Frandsen Welch, David Holland and James Faulconer — hi, professor. (I took a class from Faulconer while a student at BYU.)
Each volume in that series provided a brief theological introduction to a book of the Book of Mormon.
The new series is divided into themes instead. Givens wrote a 91-page volume (shortest in the series) on “Agency Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants.” Deseret Book’s Janiece Johnson wrote 127 pages (longest in the series) on “Revelation Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants.”
The concept is to help readers seeking a life of faith in the modern world by combining scholarly insight with practical application, according to the Maxwell Institute.
The other authors in the D&C themes lineup are the Maxwell Institute’s Philip Barlow, BYU academic vice president Justin Collings, BYU’s Amy Easton and Amy Harris and BYU-Hawaii’s Mason Kamana Allred. The books are available from Deseret Book and Amazon for $10.39 to $12.99 or on Kindle for $12.34.
Givens, who is now working at the Maxwell Institute, agreed to a brief interview about working on both projects.
Deseret News: You wrote about Second Nephi for the 2020 series. Why join for a second time?
Terryl Givens: It’s the kind of thing that Maxwell is uniquely suited to do, to approach scriptures and gospel topics with a little more theological training and rigor than might be possible in other departments. The Book of Mormon series did tremendously well and had a great reception, so we thought we would try the same thing with the Doctrine and Covenants. We were all invited to choose our own themes.
DN: Why did you choose agency?
Givens: I’ve always been intrigued by the theological profundity of Joseph Smith’s treatment of agency as depicted in the Doctrine and Covenants. There’s a prominent scholar of American religion who refers to Latter-day Saints as having an obsessive preoccupation with agency, and I think there’s something to that. We’re the only people who reconstruct the whole pre-earth narrative of the war in heaven as a war about agency, rather than a war about good and evil. So, even before the earth’s foundations, Latter-day Saints are already putting agency at the center of the cosmos.
It also, I think, is important to understand the 19th-century backgrounds. When Joseph says that he was torn between the Methodists and the Presbyterians, well, it’s the issue of agency where they differ, right? Calvinists are all predesitinaterians, and the Methodists are mostly free-willers. There are historical as well as theological reasons why I think Latter-day Saints are particularly attuned to that topic.
DN: Do you like the paperback format and shorter-length of these books?
Givens: I have my own longer projects that I work on independently, and so it’s nice to have some collaborative kind of endeavors that are a little shorter term and directed to a Latter-day Saint, rather than academic, audience. I feel like for the last 20 years, I’ve kind of been able to switch gears back and forth between those two formats and those two audiences. I think it’s important for Latter-day Saints to try to do both. It seems to me that if theology doesn’t have any pastoral application, that our theology must be bad, so it seems hard and undesirable to separate those two, especially within our Latter-day Saint culture, where both the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit are indispensable aspects of discipleship.
DN: What is a thought from this volume on agency that you would share to whet someone’s appetite for the book?
Givens: I’ll mention two things I hope are useful contributions. One is we think of agency as highly individualized, and I think that’s one of the dangers that we’re subject to in Latter-day Saint culture, a propensity to imbibe this atomistic individualism that is a part of our culture. I think it’s dangerous, and I think it’s contrary to the spirit of Christianity and to the spirit of Mormonism. Joseph Smith emphasized the communal nature of salvation, the sociability of heaven. So in some ways, it seems to me that we have to situate agency within a communal or relational context. I’ve tried to do a little of that work.
The other hook maybe would be that we have become aware to a degree that no previous people has ever been aware of the extent to which we all suffer generational trauma and woundedness and that our agency is fractured and impinged upon by all kinds of environmental and genetic and social factors. A truly live question today is, to what extent am I free? And I think it’s possible to recognize the many things that shape and condition our freedom without abandoning the core principle, that root that we all have a certain degree of freedom to transcend our circumstances.
DN: What are we going to see next from you?
Givens: I’m working on a major history of Christian thought formed by a Latter-day Saint perspective. We’ll see if that someday sees the light of day.
To see a blurb on each of the seven themes and books in the D&C series, click here.
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Terryl Givens, a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and author of “Second Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction,” speaks about his forthcoming volume at an event held at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. (Blair Hodges, Maxwell Institute)
