The exchange that takes place in this book–a frank but friendly exploration of the differences between Mormons and evangelicals by two people who have carefully studied each other’s thought–is long overdue. Actually, I have been waiting for it since a Sunday night in the 1950s when I sat as a teenager in a fundamentalist church in northern New Jersey. Walter Martin, the well-known evangelical “cult expert,” was doing a series of weekly talks in that church, and on this particular evening his subject was Mormonism. The session had been widely advertised, and the small church was packed. A dozen or so Mormons were in attendance, seated as a group near the front of the auditorium. We had seen them walking in, carrying their copies of the Book of Mormon. Martin was well known to both Mormons and evangelicals. His book The Maze of Mormonism had been around for a few years, and he had recently renewed his published attacks with a larger book, The Kingdom of the Cults.
Martin was an effective rhetorician, and I was captivated by the way he made his case against non-Christian groups. He had a fine one-liner, for example, about Christian Science: just as Grape Nuts are neither grapes nor nuts, Mary Baker Eddy’s system of thought is neither Christian nor science. On this particular evening it was clear that the Mormons had come armed for debate, and Martin was eager to mix it up with them. During the discussion period, one young man was quite articulate as he argued that Martin misunderstood the Mormon teachings regarding atonement and salvation. Martin was not willing to yield an inch, and what began as a reasoned exchange ended in a shouting match. The young Mormon finally blurted out with deep emotion: “You can come up with all of the clever arguments you want, Dr. Martin. But I know in the depths of my heart that Jesus is my Savior, and it is only through his blood that I can go to heaven!” Martin dismissed him with a knowing smile as he turned to his evangelical audience: “See how they love to distort the meanings of words?”
I am paraphrasing the preceding from a memory reaching back over about four decades, but I can still hear in my mind what the Mormon said next, with an anguished tone: “You are not even trying to understand!”
I came away from that encounter strongly convinced that Martin’s theological critique of Mormonism was correct on the basic points at issue. But I also left the church that night with a nagging sense that there was more to be said, and that the way to let it be said was captured in the young Mormon’s complaint: both sides had to try to understand each other. Craig Blomberg and Stephen Robinson’s How Wide the Divide? proves that it can be done.
When InterVarsity Press sent me the manuscript version of this book with a request that I provide a jacket blurb, I read it eagerly and sent back my words of praise. When I received my copy of the book, I immediately read the published endorsements. Most of the other evangelicals hedged their bets in offering positive comments, explicitly signaling their sense that this kind of dialogue is a risky venture: the book “will undoubtedly draw fire from every side [and] I may reserve some fire of my own”; “it is sure to spark controversy on both sides of the divide”; “readers from either side may differ at points with their representative writer and wish some other crucial issues could have been featured.”
It is understandable that evangelicals would approach this project gingerly. Relationships between Mormons and evangelical Protestants have always been stormy. In his narrative describing his “First Vision,” Joseph Smith made much of his own youthful worries about a religious atmosphere characterized by a “war of words, and tumult of opinions.” But his own new “revelations” did nothing to quiet the tumult. The resultant charges and countercharges between his followers and their evangelical neighbors only served to increase the level of hostility in American religious life.
It is time for some folks on both sides to lower the rhetorical level, even if doing so entails risk. This book makes a strong move in that direction. It is coauthored by the right kind of people, two scholars who should have considerable credibility in their own communities. The Latter-day Saints leadership has been greatly agitated in recent years by some of the writings produced by LDS intellectuals. The independent Mormon journals Dialogue and Sunstone regularly feature attempts to synthesize Mormonism with Jungian, feminist, and neo-pagan, even Roman Catholic, motifs. But Stephen Robinson, who teaches Ancient Scripture studies at Brigham Young University, demonstrates no interest in those innovations. He develops his case exclusively with reference to “acceptable” Mormon texts, deviating from this pattern only to show his familiarity with mainline and evangelical Protestant scholarship. Similarly, Craig Blomberg, a New Testament professor at Denver Seminary, employs standard evangelical formulations regarding inerrancy and premillennialism in making his case. Thus the argument is joined by two scholars who–unless the fact of their partnership is itself made to count as evidence to the contrary–represent the basic orthodoxies of their respective traditions.
This also means, of course, that some important topics are left untouched. The intellectual renaissance experienced in both the evangelical and Mormon communities in recent decades has in each case been led by specialists in American religious history. The result has been an impressive output of highly insightful historical investigations by scholars who have a loving but critical posture toward their own traditions. There is much in this literature for the two communities to discuss together. This book, however, is for all practical purposes ahistorical, focusing almost exclusively on questions of systematic theology.
But that does seem to be an appropriate place to start. While it will be necessary eventually to look together at the historical contexts in which the theological agenda of each group was shaped, there can be no way around a frank discussion of what both groups believe here and now about the basic elements in the drama of creation, sin, and redemption.
The title of this book poses the right question: how wide is the divide between Mormons and evangelicals? That there is a divide is beyond challenge. The dialogue here demonstrates, however, that it is not quite as wide as many evangelicals think. Robinson’s call for a more charitable evangelical reading of Mormon doctrine emphasizes at least three kinds of concern.
First, he wants us to distinguish carefully between official Mormon teachings and various speculations on specific subjects, such as the Adam-God theory, offered by Mormon leaders and sometimes endorsed in popular Mormonism.
Second, Robinson asks us not to decide too quickly that we understand what Mormons are really meaning to say about doctrinal matters. For example, Robinson admits that in talking about the relationship of faith and works, “LDS terminology often seems naive, imprecise and even sometimes sloppy by Evangelical standards, but Evangelicals have had centuries in which to polish and refine their terminology,” and besides, “we have no professional clergy to keep our theological language finely tuned.”
Third, even in assessing official teachings, he asks that we evangelicals look carefully at what things are actually emphasized in the life of the Mormon community. While doctrines like “God’s corporeality and God’s nature as an exalted man” may indeed be “linchpins in LDS theology,” they are not, he insists, regularly featured: “more important, more in evidence, more often preached, more often studied, explained and pondered by the Latter-day Saints are the more central doctrines of the gospel of Christ.”
These points are well taken, and Craig Blomberg responds in a way that models evangelical civility. While some of us might nuance the evangelical case differently at a few points, I for one never worried that he was misrepresenting us, or conceding too much to his dialogue partner. Nor does he seem to be motivated by any deep desire to vindicate every charge evangelicals have ever made against Mormon belief and practice. To commend this spirit is not to espouse timidity in opposing false teachings.
Where the Latter-day Saints are wrong, and especially where their teachings are dangerous to human souls, we need to expose their errors. Walter Martin was fond of quoting Galatians 1:8 in his critiques of the writings that were allegedly delivered to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!” This warning must not be ignored–always remembering, of course, that the same apostle asks us to avoid “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions [and] envy” (Gal. 5:19-21).
But again, how wide is the divide? As Robinson would have it, Mormons certainly do believe more than the New Testament’s presentation of the gospel, but they do not believe less. The core of what they commonly confess with evangelicals, he insists, should be sufficient for evangelicals to be “willing to admit the truth: that Mormons accept the New Testament and worship the Christ who is described there”–a compliment, incidentally, that he seems quite willing to return.
I need more convincing. Stephen Robinson says that we are sinners who are desperately in need of divine mercy, and that “God through grace has provided the gift of his perfect Son. If humans accept this gift and enter the gospel covenant by making Christ their Lord, they are justified of their sins, not by their own works and merits, but by the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ accepted in their behalf.” Should I be pleased to see Robinson making that confession? Perhaps. I can honestly say that I would like to be pleased. I certainly find nothing wrong with the way he says it here; if someone whom I was evangelizing said those same words with obvious sincerity, I would be hopeful that I had witnessed a genuine conversion. Why, then, am I reluctant to rejoice when a Mormon says them? Because I still worry about the larger set of beliefs and practices in which this confession is nested.
Blomberg and Robinson report that their disagreements run deepest on questions about the nature of God and human “deification.” Differences on such matters are not easy to downplay. As John Calvin put it in the opening pages of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the knowledge of God and knowledge of self are so intimately intertwined that “which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern.” Confusion about who God is and who we are before the face of that God is a very serious business. For the Christian tradition, clarity about these very fundamental matters has always required a recognition that God is the sovereign Maker of all things, separated by an infinite ontological gap between his own transcendent being and the creaturely realm. We believe that the acknowledgment of this gulf between Creator and creation is fundamental to biblical faith. To confuse the two is to commit idolatry.
Mormons do not acknowledge this gap. That, for many of us, is bound to produce a very distorted understanding of our human condition and of the Source of the grace that alone can save us.
Robinson has a ready reply to this line of argument. The point I have just made about a gap between the being of God and creaturely reality is, as he sees it, an example of the way we traditional Christians have imposed Greek philosophical categories on the message of the Bible. This anti-Greek theme is a constant refrain in his discussion. Mormons “reject the interpretive straitjacket imposed on the Bible by the Hellenized church”; “disagreeing with the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon is not the same as disagreeing with the New Testament”; Mormon teaching “does contradict Plato” but that doesn’t make it unbiblical.
Anyone who is tempted by this “de-Hellenizing” rhetoric–and it is not uncommon in Christian circles these days–should read John Courtney Murray’s The Problem of God (Yale University Press, 1964). There the great Jesuit thinker convincingly demonstrates that the classical creedal formulations about “being” and “substance” were not impositions of alien philosophical categories but the result of a necessary search for words that would capture the sense of Scripture to guard against dangerous misreadings of the biblical texts. Murray’s insistence that such formulations are not only good but also inevitable is confirmed in Protestant history as well. Even the strictest “no creed but Christ” churches introduce, in some form or another, extrabiblical formulations that rule out eccentric interpretations of biblical teachings.
The choice between Mormon and Christian teaching is not one between an uncluttered reading of biblical texts versus an interpretive system laden with philosophical categories. The Mormon sociologist O. Kendall White argued in his Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy: A Crisis Theology (Signature Books, 1987) that for all of its uniqueness, Joseph Smith’s theology had some striking affinities with the emerging Protestant liberalism of the nineteenth century. Both perspectives featured a finite God, a perfectible humanity, and an emphasis on works righteousness.
This is an important suggestion to pursue, since it points to some key philosophical assumptions that Mormons bring to theological discussion. Many Protestant liberals have admitted that their very similar assumptions do not easily comport with the full range of biblical teaching. If LDS thinkers want to claim biblical fidelity, they must argue, not that they alone come to the Bible unencumbered by philosophical commitments, but rather that their peculiar metaphysical constructs are more adequate explications of the biblical message than those of historic Christianity.
It is important for Mormons and traditional Christians to talk about these things. But for starters we should be encouraged to speak to each other in very personal terms about how we came to sense the need for a Savior, and how we have responded to the healing that he brings in his wings. The conversation must also move to larger issues about what it means to proclaim and teach the gospel in its power and purity. We would also do well to reflect together about the history of our relationships with each other; here evangelicals may have to admit that Mormonism has sometimes flourished, whatever its confusions, because we have not always been very faithful in our own teaching and practice.
Perhaps–perhaps–these conversations will even convince us that we have more to learn together about the gospel itself. At the very least, our discussions can help us to avoid bearing false witness against our neighbors. This book should be carefully studied by anyone who is convinced that such a dialogue is a good and important thing to pursue.
Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is on the editorial board of Books & Culture.
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 11
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