Review
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Title: The LDS Gospel Topics Essays: A Scholarly Engagement.
Editors: Matthew L. Harris, Newell G. Bringhurst
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages:386
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781560852872
Price: $19.95
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
The closet in our home office has accumulated odds and ends over the years. A partial inventory includes two guitars, a down parka more suitable for the North Slope of Alaska, a broken wall clock in a heavy wooden case, items of clothing that we will never wear again, D-Cell batteries, an orthopedic leg brace, swim goggles, obsolete technology items, and participation trophies left behind by our adult children. We keep thinking we should deal with it but haven’t.
Beginning in late 2013, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began “cleaning the closet” by publishing the Gospel Topics Essays on their official website. These short essays address areas of history and doctrine considered problematic both within the church and by critical outsiders. The list includes polygamy, multiple accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, how the Book of Mormon was translated, what we know about our Mother in Heaven, and what it means when church members and leaders talk about “becoming like God.” With these essays, the church is attempting to publicly deal with accumulated issues from almost two centuries of history.
I say “problematic” because the church is trying to balance the need for greater transparency and honesty about its history and doctrine with concerns about undermining the faith of members in their past prophets and leaders. It also underlines that for some of these topics, there are still more questions than answers. In The Gospel Topics Series: A Scholarly Engagement, editors Matthew Harris and Newell Bringhurst have assembled a collection of articles that take a closer look at the first thirteen essays that make up the Gospel Topics series. As with any collection made up of the writings of multiple contributors, it is hard to judge the overall product without responding to each individual’s contribution. Overall, the collection does give important context to the Essays, both by representing their strengths, as well as where they fall short of complete answers. Before I get to the high points, I need to deal with the first two chapters. It is unfortunate that they appear at the beginning. Don’t give up, there is better material deeper in.
Craig Blomberg, a New Testament scholar, addresses whether or not Mormons are Christian, the first gospel topic essay published on the church’s website in December 2013. Writing from a traditional Protestant Christian perspective, Blomberg examines the arguments that the Church puts forward in defense of its claim to be a Christian church. While the church has reemphasized the full name of the church and de-emphasized the use of the name Mormon, for many outside the church, the problem still exists. Despite years of effort, scholars, leaders, and theologians of the major Christian traditions are still not convinced. Blomberg dismisses the arguments put forth by the essay’s anonymous author(s) by resorting to standard Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox claims of the right to define who is and who is not Christian. Because the LDS church rejects creedal doctrines of the early Christian church and the concept of sola scriptura with an open canon, we don’t fit their definition. In such an environment, the exclusive truth claims of both sides probably defy reconciliation. Blomberg’s circular logic does little to advance the discussion.
I also found the arguments advanced by Richard Sherlock, a convert to Catholicism from Mormonism, missed the mark about LDS claims of the potential to become like God. Sherlock overlooks some basic theology integral to the LDS doctrine of eternal progression. Familiar with the King Follett discourse that was the first public discussion of these doctrines, Sherlock writes of different definitions of deification, arguing that scriptural references and writings by the early church fathers used in the essay can be interpreted differently than current LDS views. In so doing, he ignores the preesistence, one of the major concepts of Joseph Smith’s King Follett Discourse, and a key element of LDS doctrine. Sherlock never addresses Smith’s assertion that men and women are eternal and uncreated, and that this mortal life is an extension of that prior state. While he does add context to the writings of Irenaeus, Clement, and others used in the Gospel Topics essay, Sherlock takes the traditional Catholic concept that God is essentially unknowable, and humankind are purely contingent creations of that God. As such, we are not at all like God and incapable of understanding Him. This appears to this reviewer to be an intentional oversight. The LDS doctrines of eternal intelligences or uncreated spirits are incompatible with an ex nihilo creation narrative. Smith’s teachings about our eternal nature open new doors to exploring so many of the paradoxes of theology, such as the problem of evil. Granted, much of what Joseph Smith introduced in the King Follett Discourse remained unexplained in the wake of his death just weeks later, but Sherlock never confronts this idea directly.
Most of the articles, however, are better at explaining the context behind the problems addressed in the Essays. Steve Taysom reviews the problems surrounding the Book of Abraham. In his chapter, he acknowledges that the pieces of papyrus linked to the Book of Abraham owned by the church do not actually translate into the published English text. He discusses the church’s explanations surrounding what “translation” might mean and why the many epistemological gaps in the Book of Abraham can’t currently be filled in with satisfactory answers. Taysom does emphasize that in the end, much of the internal evidence of an ancient origin for the text of the Book of Abraham remains unchallenged by critics, with most problems focused on the translation and provenance issues.
There are helpful articles about the concept of Mother in Heaven, violence in 19th-century church history, and the translation of the Book of Mormon. Three different authors tackle the history of polygamy in the church, each addressing one of the three Gospel Topic Essays on that subject, Gary James Bergera writes about the murky beginnings of the doctrine in Kirtland and Nauvoo. George D. Smith looks at the practice in Utah once the doctrine became public knowledge. Newell Bringhurst reviews how polygamy changed during the 20th century from an essential doctrine to a practice now considered apostasy, and its persistence among Mormon fundamentalist movements All three of these articles are helpful in comparing the strengths of the essays with the parts of the history that are still not well understood.
To be sure, the Gospel Topics essays exist because the problems they address defy simple explanations. In the introduction, editors Harris and Bringhurst relate the mostly unknown genesis of the ideas behind the Essays. An explosion of information on the internet proved to be challenging to many church members unfamiliar with the historical and doctrinal roots of the questions addressed by the Essays. The easy accessibility of information that seemed to run contrary to what some members felt they were taught prompted many questions but few answers. In 2010, concerned stake presidents in Sweden asked for help addressing the high numbers of members leaving the church there. Church Historian and General Authority Marlin Jensen, accompanied by Assistant Church Historian Richard Turley met with some 600 troubled Swedish saints in an effort that became known as the “Swedish Rescue Mission.” The meeting prompted the Church leadership to consider how to address such concerns. Several initiatives came out of those discussions, including the Gospel Topics Essays. While the essays are an important and much-appreciated effort to deal with the information gap, the balance between transparency and undermining faith appears elusive still. Harris and Bringhurst’s volume makes it clear that not all of the problems have been resolved, and may not be in the near future. The Gospel Topics Essays should be read not as a final word on the problems, but an honest and good faith effort to address them. In the same sense The LDS Gospel Topics Series: A scholarly Engagement is an interesting if incomplete, companion volume for further study.