Blog--Talking Points--Van Hale Program Feb 18, 2007

Sunday, February 18, 2007

4:24 PM

Assumptions of scholars taken as truth or fact by the naive: varied writing styles, therefore Paul did not write the Book of Hebrews, two Isaiahs because no one can see the future (denial of spirit of revelation, i.e. denial of the Holy Ghost.)

September 17, 1854: ...Brother Pratt also thought that Adam was made of the dust of the earth; could not believe that Adam was our God or the Father of Jesus Christ. President Young said that He was, that He came from another world and made this, brought Eve with him, partook of the fruits of the earth, begat children and they were earthly and had mortal bodies. And if we were faithful, we should become Gods as He was. He told Brother Pratt to lay aside his philosophical reasoning, and get revelation from God to govern him and enlighten his mind more, and it would be a great blessing to lay aside his books and go into the canyons as some of the rest of us were doing and it would be better for him. He said his philosophy injured him in a measure. Many good things were said by President Young-that we should grow up in revelation so that principle would govern every act of our lives. He had never found any difficulty in leading this people since Joseph's death.

The Real Explanation of the facts, which is all that true science has, not the junk science (evolutionism) believed in by Dr. Van Hale:

B. H. Roberts, The Gospel and Man's Relationship to Deity, p.281 - 282 "The theory set forth in this writing that before Adam was placed upon this earth to people it with his offspring, the matter of which it is composed existed in another planet, which by some mighty convulsion was broken up, and from its ruins was formed our present earth, at once affords a means of harmonizing those facts established by the researches of men and the facts of revelation. If scientists shall claim that myriads of years or of centuries must have been necessary to form the earth's crust, it may be allowed by the believers in revelation, for there is nothing that would contradict that idea in the revelations of God on the subject. If scientists shall claim that the fossilized remains in the different strata of the earth's crust reveal the fact that in the earlier periods of the earth's existence only the simpler forms of vegetation and animal life are to be found, both forms of life becoming more complex and of higher type as the earth becomes older, until it is crowned with the presence of man-all that may be allowed. But that this gradation of animal and vegetable life owes its existence to the process of evolution is denied. As before stated, the claims of evolution, as explained by philosophers of the Darwin school, are contrary to all experience so far as man's knowledge extends. The great law of nature is that every plant, herb, fish, beast and man produces its kind; and though there may be slight variation from that law, those variations soon run out either by reverting to the original stock, or else by becoming incapable of producing offspring, and thus become extinct."
 

Too often the real issue-the subtle but certain undergirding assumption of those who question the historicity of the Book of Mormon in whole or in part-is a denial of the supernatural, a refusal to admit the role of divine intervention in the form of revelation and miracles and predictive prophecy. It is the tendency, unfortunately, to adopt uncritically the secular presuppositions and methodologies of those who have neither faith nor direction. "It should be noted," Stephen E. Robinson observed, "that the rejection of predictive prophecy is characteristic of the secular approach to the scriptures, for the exclusion of any supernatural agency (including God) from human affairs is fundamental to the methodology of most biblical scholarship."

The naturalistic approach gives scholars from different religious backgrounds common controls and perspectives relative to the data and eliminates arguments over subjective beliefs not verifiable by the historical-critical method. However, there is a cost to using the naturalistic approach, for one can never mention God, revelation, priesthood, prophecy, etc., as having objective existence or as being part of the evidence or as being possible causes of the observable effects.

. . . If one starts with the a priori that the claims of Joseph and the Book of Mormon to predictive prophecy are not to be accepted, then that a priori is bound to force a conclusion that where the Book of Mormon contains predictive prophecy it is not authentic and must therefore be an "expansion." But clearly, this conclusion flows not from the evidence but from the a priori assumption. If one allows the possibility that God might have revealed future events and doctrines to Nephi, Abinadi or Samuel the Lamanite, then the so-called anachronisms disappear and this part of the argument for "expansion" collapses.

Naturalistic explanations are often useful in evaluating empirical data, but when the question asked involves empirical categories, such as "Is the Book of Mormon what it purports to be?" it begs the question to adopt a method whose first assumption is that the Book cannot be what it claims to be. This points out a crucial logical difficulty in using this method in either attacking or defending the Church.

I candidly admit to caution rather than eagerness when it comes to applying many of the principles of biblical criticism to the Book of Mormon. The quest for the historical Jesus of Nazareth has led thousands to the demythologization and thus the de-deification of Jesus the Christ. "It would be incredibly naive," Robinson noted, "to believe that biblical criticism brings us closer to the Christ of faith. After two hundred years of refining its methods, biblical scholarship has despaired of knowing the real Jesus, except for a few crumbs, and has declared the Christ pictured in scripture to be a creation of the early church." Our faith as well as our approaches to the study of the Bible or the Book of Mormon must not be held hostage by the latest trends and fads in biblical scholarship; our testimony of historical events must not be at the mercy of what we know and can read in sources external to either the Book of Mormon or the witness of revelation. In the words of Elder Orson F. Whitney, "We have no right to take the theories of men, however scholarly, however learned, and set them up as a standard, and try to make the Gospel bow down to them; making of them an iron bedstead upon which God's truth, if not long enough, must be stretched out, or if too long, must be chopped off-anything to make it fit into the system of men's thoughts and theories! On the contrary," he instructed the Saints, "we should hold up the Gospel as the standard of truth, and measure thereby the theories and opinions of men."

(Robert L. Millet, The Power of the Word: Saving Doctrines from the Book of Mormon, p.293-294)

Many fell away from the gospel and its plain and precious truths (1 Ne. 13:40). It was too simple. They preferred looking beyond the mark and searching for things they could not understand (Jacob 4:14).

The Apostle John denounced anti-Christs who taught that Jesus hadnt really come in the flesh (1 Jn. 4:3), implying that Jesus bodily appearance was an illusion designed to accommodate mortal incapacities (see John 1:1-3, 14).

Another hellenistic form of looking beyond the mark was interpreting clear, historical events as allegorical. These early denials of Jesus historicity are replicated in our day.

Reason, the Greek philosophical tradition, dominated, then supplanted, reliance on revelation, an outcome probably hastened by well-intentioned Christians wishing to bring their beliefs into the mainstream of contemporary culture.

Historian Will Durant also wrote: Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life (Caesar and Christ, p. 595).

Unfortunately, too many Church members, in Pauls phrase, wearied and fainted in [their] minds (Heb. 12:3).

By the middle of the second century, things had changed dramatically. Another scholar wrote of how the theological furniture had been significantly rearranged in ways which reflected a hellenized Christianity (see Stephen Robinson, Ensign, Jan. 1988, p. 39).

(Elder Neal A. Maxwell, From the Beginning, Ensign (CR), November 1993, p.18)

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)