Title: Thinking Otherwise: Theological Explorations of Joseph Smith’s Revelations
Author: James E. Faulconer
Publisher: Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Provo, UT
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 177
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781950304004
Price: $15.95
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
I will admit that I have sometimes struggled with writings on theology. It seems that the authors are writing in a secret language spoken only by other theologians. At other times I have read and thoroughly enjoyed theological works that have helped me deal with concerns and troubling questions. I suspect that I am like most members who are much more concerned about living their religion as disciples of Christ in a chaotic and often difficult world. Still, it is important to realize how some of the theological elements of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints truly make us different in our perspectives on basic doctrines, such as the preexistence, man’s relationship with divinity, and the problem of the existence of evil in the world.
The good news is that James Faulconer, of BYU and the Maxwell Institute, has written a book, Thinking Otherwise: Theological Explorations of Joseph Smith’s Revelations, with theological overtones that focus on a few concepts taught by Joseph Smith and how they may affect our approach to lived religion. Faulconer has had a long career teaching Philosophy of Religion at BYU and other institutions and most recently has served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU. While he is certainly conversant with the secret language of theologians, Thinking Otherwise is an attempt to communicate to the general reader the basics of the theology of the LDS church as taught by Joseph Smith, but more importantly, how those elements of theology can and should be understood in ordinary terms.
Faulconer begins with the hardest part, laying out some of the problems with theological concepts embraced by most of Christianity. The “Parmenidean One,” as he terms it, describes the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and immaterial God of Christianity. The One is an attempt to describe this being in terms of the single moving force of all that exists and happens in our observable universe. All we experience is created by the One ex nihilo, or from nothing. It is the One that accounts for everything else. It is the single necessary element of existence, while Humankind and our world are all contingent upon this first and ultimate cause.
From that, Faulconer contrasts the theology that Joseph Smith laid out in his King Follett funeral sermon. Smith’s view of a God with a physical form like ours, an organizer rather than pure creator, and of humankind as Gods in embryo, uncreated and eternal like our Heavenly Parents, is full of promise and invites the development of a closer relationship with the Divine. The proper application of this kind of theology, Faulconer argues, is in daily, deep scripture study to help us create those relationships. This “Performative Theology,” as he describes it, centers on scripture study using the tools of close reading to change our lives to be more in tune with God and to emulate the Savior’s example in our daily actions. It’s an interesting approach, even as Faulconer recognizes that for many of us, knowing much about theology isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for living a good life.
I have read other theological works by LDS writers. While some of these works are interesting, the vocabulary of theology makes for a more challenging reading experience than I prefer. My favorite book on theology has been The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion, written by Sterling McMurrin in 1965. McMurrin’s book is based on a series of lectures he gave while teaching Philosophy at the University of Utah. He didn’t avoid the language of theology, yet his writing was reasonably accessible to a lay reader such as myself. He outlined the basics of the unique elements of Joseph Smith’s revelations, especially in the nature of humankind as uncreated and necessary beings in a world organized by a finite, material God. These particular doctrines, including continuing revelation, a loving and compassionate God with a familiar physical presence, and an eternal family structure based on Heavenly Father and Mother, are key parts of a theological foundation that is antithetical to the God of mainstream Christianity.
Faulconer recognizes that in spite of this different view of God, we sometimes struggle with abandoning some of the language of traditional Christian theology. “We continue to think in terms of the One we have inherited from American religious culture…our thinking has been dominated by the ways in which traditional theology and the philosophy of religion have thought about God, often even when we believe that we are explaining how we are different” (p. 30). The cure for this, he writes, is in the privilege of scripture study. We are richly helped in this with the additional scriptures of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price.
This alternative to an academic approach to theology is explained in his fourth chapter. Here, he states:
Even if theology could give us proof that the claim “Jesus is Lord” is a theoretically sound claim—in other words, that is consistent with the relevant evidence and logically productive of further generalizations—that is the most that theology could possibly do…But even if it could do that, it would hardly be enough to tell us what effect that claim should make on us, how we should respond to it, or what kind of praise the claim entails, the questions that are at the heart of religious conviction and experience. (p 73)
God in his final judgment, he proposes, is not going to refer to a checklist of questions about the orthodoxy of the beliefs we held, “…but he is going to be interested in the lives we led: the widow and orphan we comforted, the hungry we fed, the prisoners we visited, the ill we nursed” (p 75).
Faulconer explains how a close reading of scripture can turn our theology into action. Close reading is a way of being taught. It means reading the scriptures, maintaining an awareness of our presuppositions, forgetting our familiarity with scripture stories, and asking questions about the words that we read. He devotes his last two chapters to examples of close reading, first the story of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden as described in Moses chapter 5, and of the “gentle rebuke and powerful promise” of Doctrine and Covenants 121, written by Joseph Smith while in the depths of a cold winter and harsh confinement at Liberty Jail.
This close reading can help us avoid the trap of thinking that the scriptures mean what we have always thought them to mean. “If passages of scripture mean whatever we imagine them to mean, we risk turning them into mirrors in which we see only ourselves and our ideas and emotions…they will not challenge us and take us beyond where we already are” (p122).
Thinking Otherwise may seem light on theology, but actually may help us turn our theological musings into action that brings us into closer relationships with Christ, our Heavenly Parents, and with each other. If faith without works is dead, then theology with action might be life. Faulconer offers us both a practical sense about how to live better in this challenging world and understanding the richness of our unique doctrinal foundations.