Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Are Mormons Christian? Do Latter Day Saints believe they're going to get their own planet? Was God once a man? How does a Latter Day Saint believe that they are saved? And how does this all compare with other Christian religions?
These are questions of theology. And the best way to help us answer these questions is by learning a systematic theology, which is why today we're going to be talking about the book Latter Day Saint Theology Among Christian Theologies. And this was authored by, by Grant Underwood. So thanks for being here today, Grant.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Pleasure here.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: So Grant Underwood is a professor at Brigham Young University in history. He's authored a number of books, including the award winning Millenarian World of Early Mormonism. He's been an editor on a couple volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers, is accomplished in a number of ways and most especially the fact that he and his wife Sherry are the parents of seven children, six of whom are daughters, and he has two sets of twins within that. And that is incredibly impressive.
So, so we're really excited to have this discussion. This book is. Is massive, first of all, but it's remarkable in a number of ways, one of which is the fact that it wasn't even published in a Latter Day Saint press. This was published with Erdman's publishing. This is a Christian press. But before we get into the context of the book itself, I would love to just like, answer the question, why should Latter Day Saints care about theology? Usually we talk about doctrine in the church, but why is understanding our theology and how it compares to other Christian religions, why is that a valuable thing to do?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Great question.
I think we can begin with an awareness that doctrine as we use it is perhaps very similar to theology as other Christians use that term.
So thinking of theology as maybe some very complicated, difficult to appreciate field of learning, it's really much closer to doctrine. Doctrine literally means teaching Latter Day Saints. We tend to use the term in an every Sunday sense as official teaching.
We give it a little different accent.
But doctrine is generally the whole body of that which is taught by Latter Day Saints. And among Latter Day Saints and theology maybe is understood as taking that perhaps a little more seriously in the sense of trying to organize it and think through some of the more challenging issues.
Latter Day Saints love to talk about the Gospel, and I think therefore they would appreciate any kind of theological discussion shouldn't be perhaps put off by the term or afraid of the term because it's the same endeavor. Our fellow Christians who use that term, even the people who are formally known as theologians, are simply trying to understand that which God has imparted and that which we should be taking seriously in our lives. Latter Day Saints do that. So I think that we needn't see a big divide here. It's serious, sustained, even systematic study of the gospel. That's what theology really boils down to. And Latter Day Saints seem to have a real passion for that.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:54] Speaker C: I think it's worth pointing out, and you cite several of these figures in your book, that Latter Day Saints have a history of wanting to systematize our doctrine, as it were.
I can think of Orson Pratt, James E. Talmadge, Bruce R. McConkie, Joseph Fielding Smith, B.H. roberts, B.H. roberts. Perhaps not writing in an academic setting like you are, but from a Latter Day Saint, sort of quasi academic or devotional certainly status. They have wanted to gather and systematize what we believe. So you're, you're not coming here in a vacuum, in other words, or out of nowhere. Grant, it seems like you're, you're building off of this tradition. What's really great about your effort here, publishing it with a premier Christian academic press is sort of heightening the academic rigor and sort of raising the bar on the academic rigor to how we do, if you want to call it systematic theology of what Latter Day Saints believe. And I think there's very much has been a need for this kind of.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: Work and maybe even like also comparing it to other Christian, contextualizing it within broader Christianity. Whereas when we talk about doctrine like Bruce Armaconki's Mormon doctrine or even the articles of Faith or even like the missionary discussions, it's, it's not, they're usually presenting that as like its own sustained self contained thing. Whereas this is also making sure it's like, okay, well let's Latter Day Saints believe this and this is how it compares to the broader Christianity.
[00:05:12] Speaker D: Yeah. And I do think that's actually really unique because I think at least I'm not aware of anything else that's ever done that before. And the extent to which we do often get comparison with other belief systems, it's often polemical. Right.
It's in the context of look at how much our theology is better or whatever. Right. But this was really written, being published by Eerdmans. And I think we should maybe because our audience talked about what that is, we might want to explain who Eerdmans is a little bit in the broader picture of Christian publishing. But because this was published with Eerdmans and was really probably targeted primarily to non Latter Day Saints, it's not it's not polemical. It's not really an apologetic work.
I felt like reading it. It was something that, like I, as a Latter Day Saint, I learned a lot about Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity reading it. And obviously someone from any of those traditions is hopefully going to learn a lot about Latter Day Saint theology. But it's the kind of book that serves both audiences, I think, in an important way in helping bridge the gap and of understanding.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: So let's start with the first thing, God. So our first article of faith is we believe in God, the Eternal Father and His Son, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost. Well, other Christians seem to believe that as well. What is it about our conception of God that distinguishes us from other Christian faiths?
[00:06:38] Speaker B: Well, perhaps the most obvious aspect of that would be our view of God, as it says in section 130, having a tangible body of flesh and bone, a glorified body, glorified celestial flesh, as one of our colleagues, not a Latter Day Saint, put it.
That's certainly distinctive and that fits into a broader scheme of the relationship between human beings and God I discuss in that chapter. I don't back away from the distinctives of the Latter Day Saint faith to make it more palatable for our Christian friends. And I say we have a very distinctive kind of theory of being. And there's a fancy word for that, it's called ontology.
But sometimes big words are off putting to people, but they're also economic. In other words, instead of saying it in 10 words, you can say it in a word that specifically means that thing and then just have that in mind. So we have a different ontology, a different understanding of being. Whereas for most of our Christian friends, there's a big divide between the Creator and the created, the created or creation or creatures.
When Christians talk about us, we humans are creatures, that's not to be demeaning.
That's like saying we are the created. And in terms of our nature, it's very, very distinct. God is wholly other, and creatures or the created are that which he produced. And there's an unbridgeable chasm between the two.
God loves his creatures and he created. Creation is good, and all of that is very positive.
But they're not categorically the same Latter Day Saints. We have a sense that we're all essentially on one continuum of the nature of being, that we all are the same race, the same species, the same type of being. It's just that God is so incredibly and incomprehensibly advanced beyond where we are. But Our destiny, our constant message to people is that actually, though there's this vast gap, we are literally the offspring of deity, we have a divine DNA in us, and our ultimate destiny, albeit eons from now, to become like our heavenly parents.
That whole conceptualization of this idea of that intimate, filial, familial relationship with our heavenly Father, that's pretty distinctive. Do other Christians say that they're children of God? Absolutely, but it's come through a process, through grace, being adopted into the family of God and becoming heirs in that way.
The language is very similar.
We just take it in a little bit different direction and a little bit more literally and ontologically than many others do. But the idea that we're all children of God, or particularly that Christians who have embraced God's teachings and come into a relationship with Christ are children by adoption. Once you're at that point, the discourse, the discussion is very similar.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: We were chatting with some friends a little bit ago talking about how because we believe in an embodied God and we are made of the same sin stuff of God, we have a kinship with him. It gives a closeness to God that sometimes leads to a little bit of casualness where it's just like, oh, God is just that guy down the street.
Whereas other Christian faiths, because of that massive chasm, there is a greater sense of awe, of worship, of true, just like humble devotion because of that chasm. On the flip side, though, one of the things I love about our conception of God is that, like you said, we have a kinship with that divinity and it ennobles us. It motivates me that, like, wow, I can become something so much greater. I don't have a glass ceiling that I can't surpass. I actually can do great things if I follow Christ and if I grow close to him. And I love the familial aspect too, that it. I mean, family is something that I relate to viscerally. And so the idea that, like, my God can love me the same way a father loves me is very motivating and humbling for me.
[00:11:50] Speaker C: I was going to add something, Grant. You were. As you were speaking, you mentioned using the example of children of God, how other Christians will use these terms in ways that are distinct from Latter Day Saints. It's the same vocabulary, but different definitions. This is a problem I've encountered or an issue I've encountered in many settings, often to the frustration of the communicants, Latter Day Saints and others, where we will use the same terms but sometimes have wildly different meanings or definitions of those terms.
One thing I very much appreciate about your book is how scrupulous you are to define your terms and how important that is. Not just to show how we are different, which is important, but also to show where there's overlap and to show conceptual merging together in ways that may have been lost if we just had assumed that all of our terms were being used the same way and that we meant everything the same way every time that we use these same words. And so if I like to say, what's the price of admission for a book? Is it worth it? I think that alone is the worth. The price of admission is to say, if you want a very clear and succinct definition of these terms that get thrown around there, even like on social media. Lots of discussions on theology on social media. Are Mormons Christians? And why or why not?
[00:13:03] Speaker B: Right?
[00:13:03] Speaker C: So often people will just blurt these terms out and we can talk past each other. So for that reason alone, doing the systematic approach with this very scrupulous method was very enlightening to me. And to define clearly these terms as they're being used in different faith traditions.
[00:13:19] Speaker D: What I actually noticed and thought was interesting is, yes, there's an overlap in terminology, where sometimes we're using similar vocabulary but meaning different things. But there's also a number of places where we're using different vocabulary, but we actually do have similar concepts to the broader Christian world.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: But because we Ammon in Lamoni, when he's like, oh, do you believe in the great Spirit that is God? Great.
[00:13:41] Speaker D: Yeah, because we use a different vocabulary and a different terminology, we maybe often miss the fact that, hey, there's actually a similarity here, and there's that kind of barrier in communication as well. So it's kind of an interesting problem.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: I love what both of you said. This is great. I want to give you high fives on that.
But first, I want to come back to something Jasmine said, I think, in the beginning of her comment about how she admires the sensibility and the feeling that some of her Christian friends have toward God.
And it's certainly not a casualness, that there's a reverence toward our Heavenly Father.
I think that's beautiful, and I absolutely agree with that. And I think it's an example of why I have such an appreciation and admiration for the many Christian folks that I have encountered over the years. I've learned from them perspectives and attitudes that deepen my own faith and my own personal spirituality. And that's a very good example of. I have many, many Times thought, wow, these people, I could learn so much from them about how I should be thinking and feeling and acting as a Christian.
And that's just a great example. Thank you for bringing that up. That's wonderful.
And what both of you said about.
I just, I love, Stephen, that you were able to kind of zero in on the importance of definitions.
That is so vital in any kind of communication. I love what you said about people throw terms on the Internet, just throw out terms. They don't really.
Nobody pauses to define. And so we're speaking past each other so often.
And what Neil said about the kind of discoveries of like mindedness that await us as we really kind of burrow into this a little bit.
It's an exciting experience and I hope anyone who reads the book or some part of the book would have that kind of excitement, that exhilaration of realizing that there's a lot of camaraderie and we should be celebrating the camaraderie and just bulldozing down as many walls as we can that needn't be there.
[00:16:54] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: One of the things that Latter Day Saints hear a lot on social media, especially recently there's been a shooting in Michigan, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Latter Day Saints have been in the headlines a lot. And one of the big things is Mormons aren't Christian. And part of that comes down to our conception of God. But specifically people bring up the concept of the Trinity. Could you speak to how Latter Day Saints view of God differs from creedal Christianity?
[00:17:24] Speaker B: Well, I think in the very first chapter I try to show that there isn't such a vast gulf between our view of our Heavenly Father and other Christian views because I focus on as characteristics of God that we share with so many other Christians.
If you look at what do we think God is like?
Well, in terms of qualities, characteristics, etc.
We think very similarly to many other Christians.
So it kind of comes down to this wonderful, unspeakably incredible Heavenly Father God that we have.
There's a similar sense of, among all Christians of that we put that amazing God inside of a physical body and they don't see that God with all those characteristics as corporeal or embodied.
And that's why to kind of make that point, I use one of, I mean our general authorities, our apostles and prophets are wonderful, amazing and inspired.
In addition to all of that, they're also very smart and very articulate.
And of course, we could just use the example here. I use Elder Jeffrey R. Holland and his comment aboutthere's a lovely passage I put in the book from him where he says they are one in this way and that way, in mercy and love and justice, in knowledge and everything. And he finishes by saying, they are one in every conceivable way except physically united.
And that inspired me or prompted me to kind of go further with that and then kind of use a phrase, separate being trinitarianism. So I'm trying to say, my friends, in reality, we don't have to despise or be put off by trinitarianism, because so much of what they're saying about the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, we absolutely embrace and share.
It's just we have a different kind of sense of their being. And so I'm signaling camaraderie by continuing to use the word trinitarianism and yet acknowledging distinctiveness by saying, well, we believe in separate being trinitarianisms. Trinitarian, traditional. I mean, over the centuries, most formulations of trinitarianism have described it as, in terms of the being part of it, as three persons in one being.
And so I'm saying, okay, all that you say about the three persons, you know, most of it we're right on board with.
But we believe in separate beings, that those incredible beings of love, justice, mercy, knowledge, all the Omni characteristics, etc.
They're all there in these three separate glorified beings. So I kind of hope that that gets over a little bit of the divide and some of the, let's say, anti trinitarianism that we have kind of embraced because we haven't really understood trinitarianism. And you talk about challenge. I can tell you that over many years of trying to immerse myself coming in and saying, okay, what is trinitarianism really involving in all of its fullness and richness and seeing so many good things, that's kind of changed my view that it's not a term to be disliked, it's a term to be understood. And where our distinctiveness is. I would come back to the. I think the elder Holland sums it up as well as anybody could, that there is essentially a oneness, except in being, in being.
[00:22:34] Speaker D: So I'm totally with you. I have actually, I came to the conclusion a while back that we actually are Trinitarians. We believe in Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
We believe that they're one.
[00:22:49] Speaker C: The Book of Mormon is a trinitarian text explicitly.
[00:22:52] Speaker D: We are actually trinitarians. We're just not creedal Trinitarians, if you will. Right. We're not Nicene Creed Trinitarians and I actually a couple, I guess it was probably, I don't know if it was last year or two years ago I was consulting with someone who was trying to create some websites that would answer common questions about the faith for non member audiences. And one of them was like our Latter Day Saint, do the Latter Day Saints believe in the Trinity or whatever? And my, my advice to them, they did not take it. But my advice to them was just say yes, yes, we believe, we believe in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, but we're not. But, but clarify. I, I latched onto the term and you talk about social trinitarianism in, in the book I said just, just say we're social Trinitarians. Now there are maybe some distinctions between exactly what we believe and social trinitarianism. But that is one thing I do think you highlight in the book, both with trinitarianism but also in a lot of other places is sometimes these conversations focus in on a particular type of belief. The threeness and oneness of God is actually a really interesting conundrum for Christianity throughout the ages. And there's been a lot of different ways people have tried to solve that puzzle of how is God 3 and how is God 1?
And sometimes our beliefs are compared to just like one particular solution. And that's how they oh, but you're so different. You do such a good job, I feel like of bringing the entire Christian tradition and the full broad range of beliefs that have fallen under that umbrella to help illustrate that Latter Day Saints aren't so far divided.
When you consider the full range of what Christians have, how Christian Catholics believe.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: About the Trinity, where Orthodoxy believes versus what Calvinism believes or other, how Christians.
[00:24:35] Speaker D: Have tried to answer this question over the millennia.
When you consider that full range, Latter Day Saints aren't so far outside that umbrella as many, many people might think. And again, that's not just with the Trinity. You do it over and over again, I feel like with lots of different topics that are kind of considered sticking points for a lot of people.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: So what you did point out though is what really distinguishes us is the embodiment why is it so important that God has a body?
[00:25:05] Speaker B: Well, that's a question that could probably be answered in a variety of ways.
One way is it connects to that idea that we talked about a moment ago about who we are.
The gentleman quoted on the back side of this book, one of the little endorsements. Richard Mao, former president of Theological Seminary, is a really remarkable man and A remarkable Christian. I've known him for many years.
In fact, when I was the Evans chairman.
And by the way, I should add that in the introduction we said I was a professor at byu. Actually, as of a few weeks ago, I've retired.
[00:26:03] Speaker D: Well, congratulations.
[00:26:04] Speaker C: Now you have time to write another book, Part two.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: That's right. So you're still a professor, but now they say professor Emeritus. Isn't that a fun, fancy title?
Anyway, when I had this Evans Chair, which is another great and fascinating story about who Richard L. Evans was, an apostle and how he made so many friends outside of the church. And it was those folks who came to the church and said, we want to do something to continue his legacy.
And that generated the creation of the Richard 11th Chair of Religious Understanding at BYU.
And different folks have held that chair. Of course, it began with the incomparable Truman G. Madsen and then it was passed on to lesser lights.
And I ended up with my little tenure with it recently and invited folks using you get some resources. And so I invited some folks to come and lecture. One of them was Rich Mao. And it was a.
By the way, you can see this on the Richard L. Evans. Any of our listeners who might be interested, I would strongly encourage you to go onto the Richard L. Evans website.
And we have all those lectures saved there. And the one by Rich Mao is absolutely a home run.
At the end of that lecture, I said something with deep feeling. I said, a few of you folks know my admiration for Rich. And now you'll understand why I say that when I grow up, I want to be a Christian like Rich Mao.
And Rich Mao is one who has taken a lot of risks to be appreciative of the Latter Day Saints and from his evangelical colleagues. He taught at Calvin College and he's been president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a flagship of evangelical Christianity, or at least perhaps a particularly open, embracing kind of evangelicalism.
And he here makes a comment about let's be done with the cult terminology, labeling Mormon's cults. He tells some great stories about how he wrestled with that kind of very mean spirited animus in the kind of anti cult movement. And he's invested a lot of time, energy and personal capital to kind of do away with that and build bridges rather than reinforce walls.
And one of the things that comes out of that, and it comes back to your question about in the media and people use the term Christian, that's a classic example of this matter of definition.
What denotes something or what's the proper understanding of a particular Christianity or what is Christian.
And I have to mention recommend a couple of recent books on that very topic. Now let me go back first and say one of the real pioneer bridge builders on that topic was the late Jan Shipps, a Methodist scholar who lived into her 90s, was a wonderful contributor.
Actually, we're celebrating the 40th anniversary. I don't know who's celebrating. I am. The 40th anniversary of her book called Mormonism, which is a real milestone in Mormon studies. And Jan Shipp's a devout Methodist who never converted to the church but who always was appreciative and understanding of it.
She has a lot of good things to say about this whole conversation of what is Christian and what is Christianity. One could benefit from her.
More recently there have been a couple of books.
One of our own Latter Day Saint friends, Matt Bowman down at Claremont, published a book a half a dozen years ago simply titled Christian.
And the subtext was, I think it was like the politics of a word in American life or something like that. And he talks about how the word Christian has been deployed almost kind of weaponized really to say more about a person's cultural values in the culture wars or their political orientation, a kind of Christian right attempt to monopolize or demarcate the use of that term.
He gives an interesting overview of that, perhaps even more to our point, here is a book that came out last year by an author, David Congdon, entitled and We're Talking. These Are University presses.
David Congdon's book who is a True Christian?
Contested Identity in American Life. This is a knockout volume. If you want to have a book length study about how people throughout Christian history have tried to appropriate that term for their own advantage and define it in, in a way that basically just sanctifies their own particular take on matters and how the quest for an essence of Christianity or historic Christianity, he deconstructs and unpacks all of that and shows the inherent bias in all of it. So nobody owns the title, nobody owns the label. And that has been recognized across the centuries.
What you have, the most recent or relatively recent example of that was really generated about 100 plus years ago when a group of ministers wrote a series called the Fundamentals in which they tried to say, okay, in the face of a kind of liberalizing Christianity out there, we are going to dig our heels in and say these are the must believes and if you want to be Christian, this is what you've got to believe. And of course the fundamentals. Then as people, a small group embraced that those can came to be labeled fundamentalists.
And that exercise of saying who is Christian and who is not, rather than being aware historically of the incredible breadth and range of theologies with a particularly narrow perspective, one just really omits the richness that is there. And in this book, I'm not here just interested in engaging evangelical or fundamental Christianity.
Heaven knows that's been done. I was part of a group that did that for 20 years. That's a wonderfully well plowed field. But that's only one furrow in that field, one slice of that pie.
Roman Catholic Christianity, Orthodox Christianity. Even there, you name any particular subset of Christianity, and within that there are distinctives.
There's a wonderful study by a scholar named Peter Lamp, who even goes right back to the first two centuries in a very interesting book, I think it's titled From Paul to Valentinus. Valentinus was a Christian in the second century who kind of adopted, had a distinctive view and some followers, and often gets considered a nasty Gnostic.
But what Lamp shows is that even in Rome, let alone in the Roman world in the first two centuries of Christian history, there's such diversity that Rome in North Africa is different than. I mean, it's true, Rome is different in North Africa than Rome, but Christianity in North Africa is different than in Rome and, and in Antioch or in Alexandria.
And this, of course, is something that folks who are trying to say this is Christianity and nothing else.
You can't even establish clearly what Christianity is in the beginning centuries, let alone 2,000 years later. Right.
[00:36:19] Speaker C: I know that the work of Bart Ehrman, another scholar who's touched on this, he has argued lost Christianities. Yeah, exactly. He's made a big point to say, you know, historically, especially Protestant scholars of early Christianity wanted to say there was like the faith, the, the true orthodox faith of Christianity and then there were the gnostic heresies. And I know that Ehrman and other scholars you've mentioned have sort of challenged that narrative to say just the. The sheer diversity of Christian belief in early and late antiquity. Right.
It seems to put that to the lie. The idea that you can just narrow down on a core, definitive version of Christianity, Orthodoxy, perhaps. That seems to be a different question. Right. Of what is quote, unquote, orthodox. And I won't speak for my co panelists here. I have no problem saying I am certainly not an orthodox Christian in the sense that I don't affirm the orthodox creeds or things like that. Right. But I agree with your point strongly with narrowing that down, as this is what makes a Christian. Somebody who affirms the ecumenical creeds or particular sectarian creeds. Right.
That, that seems problematic on, on many levels. And so I appreciate this conversation you've had to, to raise that point to say we need to be careful not to have these prescriptive definitions of these terms, which is basically being weaponized to exclude other people from the club, if you want to put it in those terms.
[00:37:42] Speaker D: And, and you mentioned, and I, it's actually an aspect I really appreciate about the book is this isn't just like comparing or dialoguing with an evangelical point of view. Right. You bring in Catholicism a lot. You bring in Eastern Orthodoxy. And I was really kind of stunned on a number of occasions at how similar.
I don't want to, I don't want to say that overstate and say that we're identical, but I was really surprised how frequently we had very similar beliefs to Eastern Orthodoxy. And, and I was completely unaware in many cases, and I haven't seen a lot of work to compare our theology to that. And so could you maybe comment on that? Like how. What did you think as you were doing the research and finding some of this stuff in Eastern Orthodoxy? What did you think about some of the similarities and differences between our theology and theirs?
[00:38:39] Speaker B: I had the same reaction you did, Neil.
Wow, this is cool. I had no idea.
Well, interestingly, last year there's a group called the International Orthodox Theological Association. Lovely iota. What a great acronym.
[00:38:57] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, there you go.
[00:38:58] Speaker D: That's perfect.
[00:38:58] Speaker B: And so they have a conference every four years. At the last conference, I presented a paper on the similarities between Orthodox theology and Latter Day Saint theology. And this was not a conference that Latter Day Saints attended. This was clerics and theologians and other folks from the broad Orthodox tradition. And there are multiple Orthodox sees even within what we call Eastern Orthodoxy.
And, and it was, I think it was interesting to get the reaction of the fellow panelists and the reaction of the audience.
Your reaction was replicated from quote, the other side.
It was.
I mean, we all tend to live, I mean, not intentionally, but we just are limited humanness. We tend to live in silos. You know, we only can know so much.
And this is a tribute to human beings and human nature. You know, these folks were delighted by the discussion.
Nobody said, okay, boy, can you set me up with some missionaries? I'm ready. No, no, no, no, no. But there's an openness and an appreciation. I think most people have a willingness unless they've just been over indoctrinated or conditioned. And, and these days, most people haven't in any particular doctrine or theology.
And there's a good heartedness and an openness. And I think that we do share much. And that's part of what I think is what I feel is a contribution about the book is to go there where Latter Day Saints really haven't plowed that field or plumb the depths of that kind of exploration.
And it's interesting because Eastern Orthodoxy hews a little more closely to the earliest centuries, to what we call the patristic period, from the word for fathers, these leaders or fathers, spiritual fathers, and particularly in the kind of pre Constantinian era, the pre Nicene era. If you go back, as I regularly quote, a number of these folks, and these are people that are respected and cherished really throughout Christianity, but especially in the East. You know, they're Greek speaking and that's a kind of a dominant. Though there are more Russian speaking Orthodox now than Greek speaking. But so there's that exciting dimension to it.
I want to come back to something Stephen said about the use of the term Orthodox. Oh, my heavens.
If you're looking for a contested term, that is a perfect example of it. You know whose orthodoxy?
Oxford University Press has done a series of volumes called, you know, Oxford Handbook of Et cetera. There's one called Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. And in that book, Karen King, who's long standing professor, Harvard Divinity School, has one of the opening articles with I forget the exact title, but like it's who's Christianity? You know, what are we talking about?
Folks who really get into this realize why the title of this book is among Christian theologies there is no singular Christian theology. Now, people love to talk about the great tradition. And all these are rhetorical devices to say what I currently believe actually is what everybody's believed, who's seen things correctly for centuries, and that is historically not demonstrable.
Don't take it from me, take it from Congdon in his book who is a True Christian? You can't read a book like that and come away going, oh wow, it's far more complex than I ever imagined.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: The editor in chief of Eerdman's, James Earnest, did an interview with the blog from the desk talking about why he published this book with Eerdmans. Can you speak to why you felt like the press wanted to publish Latter Day Saint theology?
[00:44:25] Speaker B: Well, I think that James Earnest is the editor in chief and vice president of Eerdman's and he actually in that interview explains that.
And I know Stephen read that. I wonder if, Stephen, you might like.
[00:44:43] Speaker C: To, I'm being quiz.
Sure. Yeah.
So basically there were a lot of points he touched on the interview, but some of the highlights I have here from my notes.
First of all, Eerdmans is a Christian press, but it's not a dogmatic press. Right. In other words, he made the point to say they are not in the business of like policing doctrinal publications.
[00:45:04] Speaker D: They don't have a creed.
[00:45:05] Speaker C: A creed or sort of an orthodoxy. And so they, they have a very broad tent within the Christian world. If it is rigorous, if it is well argued, if it is well written, then they will consider for publication. So I thought that was important context to understand why Ehrmans would publish a book like this.
Yeah, he says that they're not going to do boundary set thinking is what he kind of mentioned here. Right.
And so according to James Earnest's comments, he wanted to publish your book in part because also talking about polemical accounts, past publications from Erdman's on Latter Day Saints, in his words, quote, were either polemical or tendatious.
And so a little bit of wanting to raise the bar on their end, as I understand, to publish something that doesn't dip into polemics or misrepresentation. Right.
He also in this interview mentions he's very glowingly recommend recommending of you as a scholar, Grant, saying you're, you are competent in both the Latter Day Saint tradition and the history of Christian theology. And so you seem like a natural candidate to bridge these two sort of worlds or these two traditions and to present them both fairly for, for readers.
So yeah, those are kind of the main. I'm probably missing some other stuff. It was kind of a long interview, but if I had to distill it from my understanding, they it's a broad, broadly minded Christian publisher. They're not policing orthodoxy, so they're willing to consider a variety of perspectives. They want to raise the bar on their publications on Latter Day Saints, which in the past has. Has unfortunately not been as high as it could be. And you seem like a perfect candidate to come up here to intelligently and coherently translate, if you will, Latter Day Saint teaching for a Christian audience and put those teachings in dialogue with other Christian traditions, since you have expertise in that as well. Have I kind of hit all the, the high notes from that interview?
[00:46:58] Speaker B: I think you got it spot on perfect.
[00:47:00] Speaker C: Okay, I passed the test.
[00:47:03] Speaker A: So not only do you put the Latter Day Saint faith in dialogue with other Christian traditions, but what you consistently did in your book is regardless of if we're talking about God or Sacraments or church structure. You frequently tie it back to ancient Christian and Jewish tradition as well. What did you learn about how the Latter Day Saint faith connects to ancient Christianity?
[00:47:24] Speaker B: Well, I think we actually, for a long time, maybe in less formal or detailed ways, have said, well, we are the restoration of ancient Christianity and we are in interesting ways, but maybe not exactly like we've traditionally viewed that.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: So we didn't have like burlap walls and upholstered pews in 100 AD 1st.
[00:47:57] Speaker C: Century Relief Society potluck.
[00:48:00] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think, I don't know if you got to the chapter on.
I think it's chapter seven.
There's two chapters on the church. Chapter seven is where I use the terms out of the Apostolic Creed, the Apostles Creed, that the church is one, holy, et cetera, and apostolic. And under the apostolic. Have some fun exploring what that has meant again, terms, what is, what constitutes what they call apostolicity or being apostolic.
And in that I discuss the sixth article of faith.
We believe in the same organization that existed in the primitive Church, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think historically at least growing up, I thought, oh, great apostles, prophets, past teachers, evangelists, we've got all that.
We structurally look the same as first century Christianity.
That's not actually to the best of our historical excavation and reconstruction, that the kind of current organizational flowchart cannot really be found in the first century.
So what do we do with that article of faith? Well, what I do with it is I say, ah, we are the same in terms of function.
What did those terms identify functionally in the earliest years?
And then I go through that and say, yep, yep and yep.
If you're moving beyond a kind of literalistic, well, our kind of organizational list of officers and responsibilities is exactly the same as it was in the first century.
That's really an unsustainable claim.
But nobody says we have to make that claim. We have to understand that article of faith in a richer, broader way that affirms its legitimacy as an affirmation of faith, but also accommodates, as best we can reconstruct it, the historical realities of the first century.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: So.
[00:50:49] Speaker B: Yes, we do. We have a long standing. I mean, that's part of our kind of popular narrative that, you know, the true church, basically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was there, you know, for a few decades or a few hundred years. And Latter Day Saints have never really determined. I mean, the just ordinary neighborly Latter Day Saints have never really determined, well, when the apostasy began.
But at some point the apostasy set in and then the lights went out and they didn't come back on again until 1800.
Which by the way, is one of the things I'm excited about the book is there is this wonderful quote, I just have to read it to your listeners here if I can pin it down quickly, where John Taylor, President of the Church, John Taylor, Apostle John Taylor, is saying that throughout the ages there have been individuals to whom God has revealed himself and who have had a profound faith and have shed important light on matters pertaining to God.
And John Taylor in a great line, and I, it would be better if you read it in a book. But he says, you know, we often call those the Dark Ages. And he says, if that's darkness, give me a little darkness.
[00:52:45] Speaker D: Yeah, I remember reading that.
[00:52:47] Speaker C: Yeah, we could find the quote, put it up on. Yeah, both pen pointed. So people.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: The other thing is there I also put in what President Oaks says, beautiful expression of appreciation for all these. And he uses the word light, if I'm remembering correctly, the quotewhere they have kept the light alive and we honor them as servants of God. And then I finish by putting in out of the latest general handbook of instructions the quote that says these people basically are wonderful and good and God has had interaction with them and so forth. And that's a very different set of expressions than kind of what I grew up with. And it was probably just my, I'm sure it was my ignorance because actually we've been saying lovely things about other Christians from day one, from Joseph Smith onward, but we just haven't emphasized those. And that's one of the real, really lovely aspects of the last half century in our church's history is that we're more aggressively bringing that perspective out there and not, you know, we don't, you know, the book by our wonderful predecessor, James Talmage, on the Great apostasy, you know, we've had other books, I mean, celebrating the apostasy prior to the Restoration.
You can actually frame the restoration and how you define the restoration in a way that doesn't necessarily have to denigrate centuries of devout Christian thought and experience and remembering. These are God's children.
They're not his enemies.
That these people are not. And Elder President Oaks says as much that these are good people. And the vast majority of both pastors and theologians and lay people over the centuries have been exemplary in their worship and honoring and doing the best they can. I mean, they model, I mean, to think that the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages were dead. That's one of the richest eras in the history of Christianity, broadly understood.
It's just an unending stream. But what we have since 1820 is Elder James Talmadge used a great story.
Now it just popped into my mind. I wish I could remember it.
There were lamps in his day as growing up, and there was talked about a particular kind of lamp that you had to light, and it gave off a certain amount of light. And then the. Then they discover, I don't know, the argon lamp or whatever. And it gave so much more light and he used that to contrast so much more. Sounds like we're looking down at. But it was so delightful to have even more light than we had in the past. And I think to see the Restoration, we can celebrate what God has done through the prophet Joseph Smith and all successive prophets by celebrating the additional light. And that, by the way, is what George Albert Smith 100 years ago was saying.
I kind of outlined that in that chapter, and I hope people will actually make it to that chapter.
[00:56:53] Speaker C: I was just going to add to that real quick, just to remind all Latter Day Saints listening to this. When Joseph Smith sits down in the spring of 1820, he reads his Bible, right? James 1:5. And he goes and asks God, that Bible did not poof into existence out of nowhere, right? It took centuries of Catholic and Protestant Christians to devout, pious Christians who were affirming the Nicene Creed the entire time, right? And these other creeds we take issue with, it took them to get Joseph Smith, that Bible in his hands to then turn to God. And so I absolutely agree that we need to appreciate and be cognizant of the rich history that leads up to the Restoration upon which a fuller light can be shed on the world. But we shouldn't diminish the past.
[00:57:37] Speaker D: I did want to comment along those lines. One of the things that was interesting for me to learn as I was reading is these categories of exclusivist versus inclusivist versus pluralist approaches to Christianity and just saying those terms and not knowing how they're defined. My intuition was we're exclusivist. We are. You know, we're the one true church, and everyone else is wrong.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: You hear that narrative online.
[00:58:03] Speaker D: And you hear that narrative online. But I was. I was interested in. It was interesting for me to learn that actually we're an inclusivist faith because while we do claim to be the one true church, we affirm, just as you were just talking about, that there has been light and truth that has been received by other people of good and just merits and things like that throughout the history and that the grace of God has, has been shed on many people outside of our tradition. And, and there are, and I grew up hearing quotes about that. There was the first presidency quote about, you know, different religious leaders, different world religious leaders receiving light and knowledge according to their, according to what they could receive or whatever. I can't remember exactly how it goes, but I was, it was, it was kind of interesting to me to learn that that is actually framed as an inclusive understanding, the pluralist understanding being that, you know, there's multiple paths to God. We still believe we're the one true path, but we include others in among those who have received divine light and grace.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: Why do you believe in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints?
[00:59:10] Speaker B: Well, I believe that I believe in. Let me answer your question. I believe in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints because when I was 15 years old I had a life changing experience through reading the Book of Mormon and a powerful witness of the Spirit that God is doing something unique, that in a way this church is uniquely blessed by him.
Without taking anything away from all the other wonderful folks out there, like my good friend Mike Campbell, that I mentioned in the preface, there's something extra here, something essential particularly that relates to the restoration of what we call the priesthood and its gateway into covenantal opportunities for all of us and where that can lead us.
That, and I tell my family, I mean, they know this, we talk a lot about everything.
They say, well, gee, dad, it's great to have your book here. I really, I mean, very sweet. One of my daughters just wrote me a note actually in the last week that she had started reading the book and it brought a certain kind of emotional appreciation to her for she could hear her dad in it and she could hear her dad's conviction in it.
I've had that witness and all that the intervening 40 some odd years of study have done is to deepen that which is available to every Latter Day Saint.
When I was at byu, Hawaii, I had the opportunity to go down and film some of the pioneers in.
[01:01:32] Speaker D: What.
[01:01:32] Speaker B: We call Melanesia, the southwestern quadrant of the Pacific. We're talking Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, places like that.
I remember being powerfully impressed here. Papua New guinea at the time. This is, geez, 25 years ago, Papua New guinea had a very, very high illiteracy rate, a very, very high crime rate, a very, very high unemployment rate.
If you're looking at rosters of where nations fit they're way down there.
But I could see that God was blessing with his spirit and his love these people that had the most limited resources for education and opportunity in life, and yet he was blessing them powerfully with his spirit. And I was able to capture that on film.
When I would go film, they would come to the church building and sit all day long, waiting hours and hours for the chance to make their expressions. And you talk about takeaways.
I mean, I thought, good grief, you know, I have so many opportunities.
I should be really taking advantage of them. Yes. But it was so exhilarating to see that God loved, you know, the least of these. My brethren are his children. He has not forgotten them, and he loves them. And by the way, it was super exciting to see then a few years ago that they announced the temple in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. And I just read that they've opened up a new mission, that the work is booming. I knew this would be happening 25 years ago. I could see that their day was coming, that the 21st century would be the century of the church in places like Melanesia and Africa, you know. So, anyway, it's remarkable.
[01:03:56] Speaker A: And the more I've studied other religions, the more I've been able to appreciate their faith and the more I've been able to understand them, but also my own. I feel like the more that we learn about how our theology intersects with other religions, the more we can understand deeply our own faith and also appreciate and love and find conviction. So thank you so much for sharing your scholarship, for sharing your testimony, your conviction. This has been a delightful and enlightening discussion. For those of you who do want to learn more, you can read Latter Day Saint theology among Christian theologies. And always remember, you can study deeply and still believe boldly. So we'll see you next time.
[01:04:33] Speaker B: Amen to that, Sa.
