A Living Text

Kevin Bywater, a former LDS member, has been writing about his recent interactions with the missionaries here. Check it out.

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, and said so publicly. However, he prepared to write the book for seven years, keeping notebooks from which he prepared.

Joseph Smith claims his first vision occurred in 1820. He claims that Moroni (or Nephi in his accounts) visited him in 1823, and that he was not able to obtain the plates until 1827. If we accept the date of the first vision, this gives Smith seven years to outline the Book of Mormon’s contents in his mind. He could prepare a narrative in his head, something most authors would be familiar with.

While modern LDS apologists assert that the Lamanites are only one of many groups that fathered the people we now call Indians, early Mormons were of a quite different persuasion. Writing in 1831, the prophet’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, said:

…the more wicked part of them being led by one of the sons of Lehi named Laman arose up in rebellion against their brethren and would not keep the commandments of God therefore he sent a curse upon them and caused a dark skin to come over them and from Laman our Indians have descended…

Indeed, the first issue of the Church’s own Millenial Star said:

The present American Indians are their descendants…

It is quite clear that early converts for many years taught and believed that all Indians were Lamanites, and that the end of times was upon them. In fact, Joseph Smith prophesied (falsely) in 1835 that the Lord would come soon:

“President Smith then stated … it was the will of God that those who went to Zion, with a determination to lay down their lives, if necessary, should be ordained to the ministry, and go forth to prune the vineyard for the last time, or the coming of the Lord, which was nigh—even fifty-six years should wind up the scene.”

Writing in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Valentin Arts discusses the sealed portion of the gold plates and says that Mormons should expect more Scriptures to come forth in the future:

The Book of Mormon itself prophesies that the sealed portion will come to us in some future time when we exercise enough faith. When it comes to us, it will again be translated with the aid of the Urim and Thummim.

The story of the record of the brother of Jared is not finished. It will be revealed to us also if we continue to grow in faith.

Although LDS splinter sects claim to have this new scripture from time to time, I believe that nothing of this sort will ever come forth. The LDS Church has moved from a radical organization led by charismatic leaders who believed that Jesus was coming back at any time to a business-like bland bureaucracy that doesn’t like to make waves. If a 19 year old boy came forward with a story of gold plates and seer stones in our day, he would be quashed by the clear-thinking leadership of the church. We will never see the sealed portion coming forward from the LDS church.

The LDS church has been steadily shifting its’ definition for who the Lamanites are for quite some time. Recently, and already infamously, the church has stated that the Lamanites were “among the ancestors” of Indians in America. However, in the founding days of the church, revealed truth declared in no uncertain terms that Indian = Lamanite. For example, in Doctrine and Covenants 54:8, God tells Newel Knight:

And thus you shall take your journey into the regions westward, unto the land of Missouri, unto the borders of the Lamanites.

So Missouri is ‘the borders of the Lamanites.’ To shed further light on this incident, the History of the Church from this time contains a letter from Oliver Cowdrey, where he writes:

I am lately informed of another tribe of Lamanites, who have abundance of flocks of the best kinds of sheep an cattle; and they manufacture blankets of a superior quality. The tribe is very numerous; they live three hundred miles west of Santa Fe, and are called Navahoes (his spelling).

So the Navaho are Lamanites to Cowdrey, and all the tribes around Missouri are Lamanites according to God via Joseph Smith. And yet current Mormons engage in extensive campaigns to locate Book of Mormon lands in Central America and make the Nephites and Lamanites small bands of people who never amounted to much. This displays a willful ignorance of their own revelation and history, and a shameful treatment of the facts.

LDS scholar Truman Madsen responded to the theology of liberal Protestant Paul Tillich by setting forth some propositions. These propositions shed light on unique and non-Christian LDS doctrines. They include:

There is more than one self-existent being, self-existent and co-existent with God.

God is conditioned by uncreated human freedom.

God is finite in some respects and infinite in others

LDS Professor James McLachlan describes some Mormon doctrines that emphatically differ from orthodox Christianity:

Latter-day Saints…accept that God is not the metaphysical ultimate and sole ground of being. Joseph Smith indicated that both God and “man” are “self-existing” beings.

On the difference between immortality and eternal life

With respect to life after death, the LDS church is a universalist religion. All beings have immortality through the atonement of Christ. Joseph Smith claimed that not only humans but animals and planets have eternal spirits. Every creature is immortal, having everlasting life, but “eternal life” is interpreted as deification…all will attain immortality, but only those who learn to love perfectly will attain godhood, eternal life.

On God ‘developing compassion’

In LDS doctrine…God cares, in part, because God, as a once finite and human person, developed compassion through the experience of temptation and suffering in human existence…Christ could not fully understand the suffering of this world until his immortal spirit-body became mortally embodied and fully human.

LDS professor Richard Sherlock offers a provocative thesis regarding the nature of the LDS Church. He writes:

These remarks are a prelude to a far-reaching claim I wish to make about Mormonism. Mormonism represents a hierarchical ecclesiastical order that holds special powers of priesthood and leadership combined with an emphasis on personal obedience and righteous works as having merit before God, which is at least Annabaptist in its flavor and background. In more traditional terms theological terms, Mormonism combines an authoritative magisterium with an emphasis on righteous works characteristic in Christian theology and history with its exact opposite.

In other words, the LDS Church has a Catholic hierarchy, with an Annabaptist, radically Pelagian theology and practice. In fact, Sherlock offers great honesty when he says:

These [Book of Mormon] passages and others do not articulate a strong theology of grace as clearly as Luther or Calvin may have wished. There is a Pelagian (or semi-Pelagian) ring to a number of the passages, and individuals who have claimed that Mormonism is essentially a modern Pelagianism are not entirely mistaken in such an assessment.

I confess that I did not realize the literal identification that Mormons make between Israel and the LDS Church. Roger Keller writes:

Latter-day Saints believe that there is no salvation outside of Israel. If persons do not belong to the house of Israel, either by blood lineage or by spiritual adoption, full salvation is not accessible to them. Israel is not a metaphor; it is literally the chosen people of God in the present-day world. The LDS church is one visible manifestation of that people. The other visible community of Israel is the Jewish people.

I am reading Mormonism in Dialogue with Contemporary Christian Theologies. The Christian sections of the book are next to worthless, so I am skipping most of them, but the LDS responses are a rich source of material for understanding current Mormon thought. Roger R. Keller wrote a response to a piece on Karl Barth, in which he offers one of the best short summaries of what the Mormon faith is about that I have seen. He writes:

Any sense of predestination or determinism is totally absent from Latter-day Saint theology. Instead, what holds a prominent place in Latter-day Saint thought similar to election in Barth’s theology is the “plan of salvation.” Essentially, the plan of salvation holds that Christ covenanted with the Father in the premortal world to enter history and atone through his suffering and death for the sins of all Heavenly Father’s children. This atonement allows humans to return to the Father as they repent of their sins. Upon this foundation, premortal spirits were and are willing to enter earthly life. They know the plan of salvation before they enter mortality, but a veil of forgetfulness comes over them as they come to earth, and they must rediscover the plan once on earth. People find Christ, rediscover the plan of salvation, and learn of their divine destiny through the teachings and preachings of the LDS church:

(he quotes Madsen’s Eternal Man) “Such a learning process recollects more than it researches. It is the opposite of amnesia. It is less discovery than recovery…One begins mortality with the veil drawn, but slowly he is moved to penetrate the veil within himself. He is, in time, led to seek the “holy of holies” within the temple of his own being.

If we just had this kind of thing front and center in our discussions, I think it would be much easier for all to see why historic Christians of the Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox camps do not consider the LDS church to be Christian. This idea of a finite Jesus, premortal spirit people, and recovering a past consciousness of yourself prior to entering mortality is utterly foreign to the creeds, liturgies, and thought life of the people of God throughout history, unless one accepts LDS Scripture as true.