Blog--Talking Points--Van Hale Program--Interview with Helen Whitney, Producer of "The Mormons" on PBS

Sunday, April 29, 2007

4:24 PM

Copy of email sent to Van while listening to this interview and the fawning graciousness, and hail and well-met attitude of the cultural Mormon to "scholars" is telling.

Van,

 

Your "tradition" as you put it is not Mormonism, but Darwinian backwardness and foolishness (self-confessed).  The reason they (GAs) do not criticize is because they are as corrupt as you.  I am not anti.  They (GAs) are Darwinists as well, that is why they adopt so-called "Progressive Revelation" which is not progressive at all.  What is progressive about denying the Holy Ghost, which is eternal, and perverting the right way of the Lord?

 

This sycophancy you have with the world and lusting after praise thereof is sickening.

 

Proof of your apostasy:

 

 A key: Every principle proceeding from God is eternal and any principle which is not eternal is of the devil.    

 

   (Joseph Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, selected and arranged by Joseph Fielding Smith, p.181)

 

There never has been a day for ages and ages, not since the true church was destroyed after the days of the Apostles, that required the faith and the energy of godly men and godly women, and the skill, wisdom and power of the Almighty to be with them, so much as this people require it at the present time. There never was that necessity; there never has been a time on the face of the earth, from the time that the church went to destruction, and the Priesthood was taken from the earth, that the powers of darkness and the powers of earth and hell were so embittered, and enraged, and incensed against God and Godliness on the earth, as they are at the present. And when the spirit of persecution, the spirit of hatred, of wrath, and malice ceases in the world against this people, it will be the time that this people have apostatized and joined hands with the wicked, and never until then; which I pray may never come. 4:326.     

 

   (Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, selected and arranged by John A. Widtsoe, p.112)

 

Col  2:8
 8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
 

You have joined hands with them, as Ogden noted.

 

Corrupt as hell.

 

Sincerely,

 

Art

If we accept the separation of doctrine from history, truth ceases to be a knowledge of "things as they are" (D&C 93:24), and becomes a mere collection of beliefs endorsed for their utility. The purpose of religious language is no longer to give knowledge but to give comfort. I have known scores of professionals in the field of religion who insist we cannot know whether there really is an afterlife, or even whether there is a God, but who endorse the practice of religion because it makes us feel better to think there is, and because thinking we are accountable to a God makes us live more ethical lives. And thus religion is reduced to a sophisticated form of whistling past the graveyard. In such a system one does not have faith in Jesus as the Son of God and Savior of the world who actually suffered in Gethsemane, actually died on the cross and actually rose on the third day. One merely affirms that this is a comforting story whether it happened or not. But a mythological Christ can promise only a mythological salvation, and a mythological promise is no promise at all. Once the tie is severed between doctrine and "the real world," we are alone again in the universe, and doctrine or belief is merely a prop to comfort us or to motivate socially desirable behavior. Even then the types of behavior that are judged to be desirable are determined only by relative human standards.

In fact all of this is precisely what has happened in liberal Protestantism in the last two centuries or so. The "God is dead" movement of the 1960's and 70's was just the end of a long tradition of scholarly thought in which liberal scholars finally admitted that the idea of God was just a prop in their theology and that human beings did not need the deception anymore and could just let the idea of God die.

The rejection of the historicity of the Book of Mormon, whether by expansion theorists or others, parallels the course previously taken by liberal Christianity in relation to the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular. It should not surprise anyone that if we adopt the same assumptions relative to the Book of Mormon that liberal scholars have for the Bible, and if we employ the same methods they do, that we shall arrive at the same kinds of conclusions. This is precisely what the expansion theory urges upon us: "I suggest that we view the original, ancient text of the Book of Mormon much as scholars view the expansion of the words of the historical Jesus in the New Testament" (Ostler 107).

(2) Religion is relativized and subjectivized. Since "salvation history" is subjective belief and interpretation rather than objective fact, there can be no "true" church and no "false" ones. There remain only religions with different "salvation histories," and we are free to take our pick or make up our own. The results of such relativization are described in Doctrine and Covenants:

They seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol, which waxeth old and shall perish in Babylon, even Babylon the great, which shall fall (1:16).

(3) If the claims of the Church are to be understood as story rather than history, then authority in the Church will eventually pass from the Brethren to the scholars, just as it happened in ancient Israel and in the early Christian Church. For if the scholars know the "objective truth" about the Book of Mormon through their research while the "benighted Brethren" are still struggling under a false perspective and with archaic interpretations, then modern revelation and authority are just part of the myth, part of our "salvation history," and we, like the ancient Church, will ultimately abandon the idea of living prophets and turn to scholars for the "truth." God help us if it comes to that.

(Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate, Jr., eds., Second Nephi: The Doctrinal Structure, p.401-403)