Comments On Talking With Mormons By Richard J. Mouw

[zerinus]

I just posted a blog article on Richard J. Mouw's recent book, Talking With Mormons, which you can read here. I may add further articles to it later on. Feel free to comment.

[Robert F. Smith]

I just posted a blog article on Richard J. Mouw's recent book, Talking With Mormons, which you can read here. I may add further articles to it later on. Feel free to comment.

Thank you for posting this.

President Mouw has always been very kind to the Mormons, and has never allowed his status as an evangelical Presbyterian to blind him to the need to be a sincere follower of Christ. He has often defended Mormons against the bearing of false witness by his fellow evangelicals, and has repeatedly apologized for such tawdry behavior by his corelgionists. And he is clearly an optimist who believes that it is important to maintain a dialogue with his Mormon friends.

Of course he is also a scholar, and it is no more fair to demand that he and other scholars stop being scholarly than it would be to demand that doctors not go to medical school, or that lawyers desist from going to law school. Consider whether you would want some untrained yokel doing brain surgery on your mother. If not, is it because he uses unfamiliar technical terminology?

It is true that the word "ontology" doesn't occur in Scripture, but then neither does "theology" or "trinity" or "sola scriptura." Some of that has to do with the way in which translators render particular phrases as clearly as they can. Their choice of word equivalents may be archaic or modern without necessarily doing violence to the text. At other times, such word choice is determined by a priori theological bias or tradition.

[zerinus]

And here is part II of my comments on Richard Mouw's new book, Talking With Mormons. Have no plans on writing a third part, unless ideas come to me later on.

[Robert F. Smith]

And here is part II of my comments on Richard Mouw's new book, Talking With Mormons. Have no plans on writing a third part, unless ideas come to me later on.

Thank you for that insight into Mouw's book. Also thank you for your running commentary, which was very helpful -- except for your comment that the early Christian Church apostatized in the first century. I'm not so sure that it took place that early.

[Palerider]

Personally I find the expression "being of the same species ontologically" (paraphrased) not much different than Orson Whitney saying:

"It teaches men that they can become divine, that man is God in embryo, that God was once man in mortality, and that the only difference between Gods, angels and men is a difference in education and development."

Or:

President Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 10:223

". . . . , yet man is the king of kings and lord of lords in embryo."

The word embryo certainly isn't scriptural and it always struck me as a little odd and yet I have had a number of leaders use the phrase.

As I read over the blog post it seemed as if you were kind of picking a fight where there really wasn't one.

I didn't see the B of M scriptures you quoted as having anymore weight or validity than the Biblical scriptures I have read regarding the Atonement. Actually they strike me as redundant.

Edited July 22, 2012 by Palerider

[Storm Rider]

And here is part II of my comments on Richard Mouw's new book, Talking With Mormons. Have no plans on writing a third part, unless ideas come to me later on.

Both of your entries were excellent. Thank you for sharing them here.

[theplains]

I just posted a blog article on Richard J. Mouw's recent book, Talking With Mormons, which you can read here. I may add further articles to it later on. Feel free to comment.

Thanks Zerinus.

Firstborn does not necessarily mean first-created. See a topic on gotquestions. Ephraim and Israel are also called firstborn

but they were neither first born nor first created (Exodus 4:22 and Jeremiah 31:9).

Jim

[zerinus]

I just posted a new article in my blog, this time a critique of Elder Christofferson last conference address regarding Church doctrine--but not entirely unrelated to the previous two articles on Richard J. Mouw's book. You can read it here. What do you think?

[Robert F. Smith]

I just posted a new article in my blog, this time a critique of Elder Christofferson last conference address regarding Church doctrine--but not entirely unrelated to the previous two articles on Richard J. Mouw's book. You can read it here. What do you think?

Thanks for the opportunity to review Elder Christofferson's recent sermon, and to compare it with the LDS Church recommendations to reporters. I think that Christofferson was completely justified in distinguishing the way in which normative christianity determines doctrine and the way in which the LDS Church does it, though I think that he intentionally avoided any real issues of controversy (something the news media love).

The key point is one of authority: It is all well and good for any of us to use our intellect and the best exegetical techniques in order to determine for ourselves what passages of Scripture may mean, although the LDS approach is to accompany that with inspiration of the Holy Spirit. However, the Prophet (accompanied by those who serve with him) has the final say on doctrine which is normative for the Church as a whole. Again, it must be accompanied for members by the confirmation of the Holy Spirit.

The problem, as some may see it, is that there appears to be little surface difference between the LDS faith and that of other churches, such that otherwise well-informed members (such as Kerry Shirts on a couple of other threads here) may not actually understand the crucial differences between the LDS and other churches. Normally this presents no problem since conversion is usually obtained through the witness of the Holy Spirit during teaching by the missionaries. In cases where the issue is joined through intellectual repartee, this might not be enough.

[zerinus]

Click on the following link, and them refresh the page once, in order to refresh my Blog's new favicon in your browser (in case it does not refresh automatically)!

http://www.zerinus.b....uk/favicon.ico

[Damien the Leper]

I just posted a blog article on Richard J. Mouw's recent book, Talking With Mormons, which you can read here. I may add further articles to it later on. Feel free to comment.

Nice.

I thought Mouw's praise for Margaret and Paul Toscano's book Strangers in Paradox: Explorations in Mormon Theology was kind and genuine. I like his bridge building that he seems to be dedicated to.

[zerinus]

Nice.

They used to call me Z-man on the Internet, so I thought Z would be the right favicon for my Blog!

Here is another neat trick I found. To post those Blog messages, I had to copy nearly ten pages of his book, which would have been a tedious job to do by hand. But then I found a site which can do free OCR (optical character recognition) for you online. You take digital photographs of the pages you want to copy, and upload it to the site, and it does OCR on it, gives you back the editable text; and provided your images are of a reasonable quality, the rate of character recognition is extremely good, almost a 100%. The best way to copy the pages is to use a scanner, which keeps the pages perfectly flat; but if you don't have a scanner, you can use an ordinary digital camera, and make sure the pages you copy are kept reasonably flat, and the images are of reasonable quality, and it still works. There are several sites that do it. This is the one I used, and the results were very good. Have fun!

[zerinus]

I thought Mouw's praise for Margaret and Paul Toscano's book Strangers in Paradox: Explorations in Mormon Theology was kind and genuine. I like his bridge building that he seems to be dedicated to.

I haven't read that book; but the content of it is available online at Signature Books. Judging by a very superficial look, it seems like a boring book to me. I doubt if I will have the patience to sit down and read it all. Richard J. Mouw's review of it, printed on the cover of the book, can also be seen from the same site, which gives the following assessment of the book:

“The important ferment that has been occurring recently in the Mormon intellectual community has been a well-kept secret in the larger world. Paul and Margaret Toscano, whose impressive book could do much to remedy this unfortunate situation, present a stimulating case for a Mormonism in which grace and justice play a much more prominent role. Strangers in Paradox deserves the careful and critical attention of both Mormons and non-Mormons alike.” —Richard J. Mouw, Provost and Professor of Christian Philosophy and Ethics, Fuller Theological Seminary

This "ferment" must be a very well guarded secret, because I am not aware of it either! I don't believe that there is such a "ferment" in Mormonism, or ever will be or needs to be. A very well balanced theology of "grace and justice" is already such a well preserved feature of Mormonism that I cannot see a situation where it might be the cause of any kind of "ferment".

I am also not quite sure I understand what he means by the "Mormon intellectual community". What I can best call "official Mormonism" doesn't recognize anything by that designation. I don't know who those people are; but their impact on the development of Mormon theology is likely to be zero.