Analogies, Power and Authority

Is this a good teaching tool?

A friend had this experience on Sunday"

Our teacher is a strong Dem. But today he said that there is a difference between authority and power of the Priesthood. The authority is like a cop with a badge. He/she has the authority to arrest a bad person. But if that bad person is threatening, the cop's gun is the power. I thought, oh great.

Good analogy? No, in this case the analogy is deeply flawed. You cannot substitutes "gun" for "power" and "badge" for "authority" in D&C 121:32-46 and have it make much sense. Since this is the seminal scripture on power and authority the substitution would have to make sense if the analogy has any value. Since it makes no sense with those substitutions, the analogy must be false.

A badge gives the bearer only a limited, delegated authority. A police officer is an officer of the court. The authority comes from the court as directed by the sitting judge. That authority is enforcement of the laws of the people The law is the authority, the police are delegated carefully controlled and limited parts of that authority. The gun is not the power of the officer. The power is the consent of the people to the laws in force. Even with a gun, a police officer does not have the legal or moral power to take life (the only power a gun has). Should he do so, he is subject to review and possible legal consequences. Generally, he may act as executioner only in circumstance in which his life or the life of another party is threatened.

Priesthood authority and power do not work like that. The power is God's, always. It is not delegated. His authority comes from His holiness, as does the authority of those He delegates to act in His name, the priesthood holder. Recall how much trouble Moses found when he called water from a boulder with his own power. A priesthood holder can call on God's power and authority when He agrees but not on his own authority.

Holiness is not God's badge and the power of the priesthood is not a gun. The power of the priesthood is to bring to pass righteousness, not to threaten, to injure or to kill. That the analogy doesn't bring this to light demonstrates how flawed it is, not just formally but in conception.
The concepts of priesthood power and authority are not that complicated, maybe we should just talk about them explicitly rather than trying to come up with apt analogies.

We have enough trouble with the analogies of the Savior, we don't need those of lesser individuals. If I hear one more time how the Parable of the Virgins says we have to store up testimony to be ready for the long night, I'll scream. The virgins weren't brides, they were the light bearers for the wedding to light the way for the wedding party, particularly for the groom to determine he was actually marrying the bride he contracted for (remember Leah's substitution for Rachael?) If the groom can't see the face of the bride, he refuses the wedding "I know you not". The point is that God needs to know who He bestows the celestial kingdom on, not whether they have oil or testimony saved up. Think temple covenants. He needs those with light (truth and knowledge) to shine light on the prospective inheritor of the kingdom. The other two parables of Matthew 25 make the point clearer, they are not isolated analogies but three stories pointing to the same thing: we will be judged by our works not our faith or testimony alone. The foolish virgins (unmarried young women but not brides) had faith (lamps) but had not works sufficient. They had some good works but they didn't have a pattern of continually doing good. The foolish were like the servant who hid his talent and like the priests who didn't help the traveler, living off what they had done in the past rather than what they did in the present. The wise virgins are like the servants who magnified their talents and the Samaritan (today I think we would use a gay or an illegal immigrant for this role) who had compassion for the injured traveler. Their works qualified them after their faith awakened them.

Put these three parables together with D&C 121 and you have all the lesson you need on priesthood power and authority.

Getting bad drivers off the roads

There are a lot of unqualified, under-experienced and clueless drivers with valid licenses on the roads. They pose a danger to anyone sharing that road. What to do?

Right now the police only disqualify the worst of the worst. They don't do anything to improve driving skills. Most of our driving regulation seems to be in the hands of a capricious private institution, the insurers. Their approach is not to get people off the road but to make bad driving more expensive than good driving. A number of insurers are now trying to go from a problem based method (have an accident or get a ticket, your premium goes up) to a semi-intrusive monitoring (drive by their model and your too-high premium goes down) Unfortunately their models of good driving are too simplistic and the flaws are glaring. You plug one of these little cell enabled gps microprocessor into your car and it watches how you accelerate, brake, turn, what speed you drive, etc. If you go outside the model it send a digital black mark, too many black marks and they sock you with a premium increase. The problem is that it's not very smart. It doesn't know that the swerve and panic brake you did was to avoid a collision or the sudden acceleration in the middle of an intersection was to avoid a truck running the light or that your hard cornering avoided the kid on the bike. It punishes good outcome as well as bad ones.

Who wants an insurance actuary to decide what good driving is? What about drivers that drive too slowly or too passively? Both cause accidents but are not penalized by insurance companies.

Neither the insurance industry nor police encourage good driving. What we need is system of education and rewards which encourage learning skills which keep us and our vehicles safer. What about a system that rewards trained and (genuinely, not the farce at motor vehicle bureaus) tested drivers? Lower the lanes, places and speed which the untrained can use. Increase them for the trained.

Well-behaved women seldom make history; …

"Well-behaved women seldom make history; …"

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, PhD (History)