Dr. Nibley's Book of Mormon Challenge

I loved this. This is an assignment Dr. Hugh Nibley used to jokingly give the BYU students in his Book of Mormon class:

"Since Joseph Smith was younger than most of you and not nearly so experienced or well-educated as any of you at the time he copyrighted the Book of Mormon, it should not be too much to ask you to hand in by the end of the semester (which will give you more time than he had) a paper of, say, five to six hundred pages in length. Call it a sacred book if you will, and give it the form of a history. Tell of a community of wandering Jews in ancient times; have all sorts of characters in your story, and involve them in all sorts of public and private vicissitudes; give them names--hundreds of them--pretending that they are real Hebrew and Egyptian names of circa 600 b.c.; be lavish with cultural and technical details--manners and customs, arts and industries, political and religious institutions, rites, and traditions, include long and complicated military and economic histories; have your narrative cover a thousand years without any large gaps; keep a number of interrelated local histories going at once; feel free to introduce religious controversy and philosophical discussion, but always in a plausible setting; observe the appropriate literary conventions and explain the derivation and transmission of your varied historical materials.

"Above all, do not ever contradict yourself! For now we come to the really hard part of this little assignment. You and I know that you are making this all up--we have our little joke--but just the same you are going to be required to have your paper published when you finish it, not as fiction or romance, but as a true history! After you have handed it in you may make no changes in it (in this class we always use the first edition of the Book of Mormon); what is more, you are to invite any and all scholars to read and criticize your work freely, explaining to them that it is a sacred book on a par with the Bible. If they seem over-skeptical, you might tell them that you translated the book from original records by the aid of the Urim and Thummim--they will love that! Further to allay their misgivings, you might tell them that the original manuscript was on golden plates, and that you got the plates from an angel. Now go to work and good luck!

"To date no student has carried out this assignment, which, of course, was not meant seriously. But why not? If anybody could write the Book of Mormon, as we have been so often assured, it is high time that somebody, some devoted and learned minister of the gospel, let us say, performed the invaluable public service of showing the world that it can be done."

Mormons = Polytheists?

With this post I'm going to get a little deeper than I typically get in this blog, but I believe it's something that needs to be addressed. This topic is something that is rarely spoken about even in the LDS community with much depth, but it is something I'm sure every faithful Latter-day Saint thinks about, as it is a common attack against our Church. Know that my remarks are my own thoughts and not necessarily the official doctrine of the Church.

Well, yesterday I was reading a few LDS blogs. As anyone who has read blogs dealing with LDS topics can tell you, the comments can get pretty negative. On one of these blog posts, a discussion began among those commenting about Mormons being polytheists, and therefore were obviously some kind of anti-biblical, anti-Christian cult, etc., blah blah blah. Several Latter-day Saints posted responses, many of which began something like this: "Yes, we are polytheists, but . . . "

I appreciated their responses, but it's always struck me the wrong way when I see Latter-day Saints accepting the anti-Mormon idea of LDS Polytheism as a given.  We, when discussing with those who are attacking our beliefs, should not grant them their misconceptions by saying, "Yes, we are polytheists . . . " We need to make quite clear our understandings of Godhood, in contrast to the common idea of polytheism, which I'll define in a bit. I say this because this was an issue in my own conversion to the Gospel. I'll briefly relate my experience:

Before joining the Church, I knew of the Mormons being polytheists and wondered how they could square such a belief with the Bible, which clearly says "there is no God beside me" (Isaiah 45:5. See also Isaiah 44:6, Isaiah 45:21-22, Hosea 13:4, etc.). You see, I could not separate polytheism from the common idea of it, which is a pantheon of gods worshiped by ancient Romans & Greeks, modern Hindus, and others. In these and other polytheistic religions, adherents believe in a multitude of gods with a multitude of different purposes. There is a Sun god, a Moon god, an Earth god, a sky god, an ocean god, etc. etc. This is what polytheism meant to me. I knew that Mormons didn't believe in Sun and Moon gods, but I thought their gods were similar in that they were off doing their own things with their own special purposes, completely separate from our God. I imagined Mormon polytheism was just another form of idolatry that distracted from the worship of the True God.

My change of heart came when I began to understand the true nature of Godhood in Latter-day Saint theology, and just how rational it is. LDS polytheism does not distract from God, but helps us to understand God. Our theology makes sense to us because when we look around the world, it can be found in everything we see. Let me explain through real world experience:

In our world today, there are nearly 7 billion human beings, each belonging in some way or another to a family (in the sense that every person must have a father and mother in order to have been born, even if the father and/or mother are no longer around when the child is born). Now, does the existence of other fathers and mothers in the world distract from or change the fact that YOU only have one father? You cannot choose your father; you are stuck with him. You cannot go to a random father on the street and say, "Hey Dad! Because you are a father I choose you to be MY father!" Well, as it is in earthly things, so it is in heavenly things. I don't think I can state it much more clearly than St. Paul himself, when he said: "For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him" (1 Cor. 8:5-6).

Mormonism shows us that we can discover God from observations of reality, and not just by abstract philosophical thinking. I believe God placed us here in family units not because God decided out of the blue that that was the way to do things, but because He was extending the heavenly order of things into the earthly order of things. By placing us in families, ideally with a father and mother, He was placing us in a unit that could prepare us to receive heavenly things later on. And when we become fathers and mothers, it is a test of how seriously we will take the responsibility of raising our own heavenly families. In this sense Earth truly is a proving ground for God's children. We discover the attributes of godliness by discovering what is good down here on earth. We do not believe God is some strange, incomprehensible thing composed of three distinct personalities but in actuality is only one being. We believe God is literally "the Father of [our] spirits" (Heb. 12:9), just as the Bible plainly tells us. When Malachi asks "Have we not all one father?" (Mal. 2:10), we Latter-day Saints answer with a resounding "YES!"

So, what of the other gods then? Well, we ourselves are called gods by Christ (John 10:34), who in turn was quoting a Psalm which said the same thing (Ps. 82:6). It baffles me why these two scriptures do not immediately put an end to all disputation on this subject. If Christians truly followed the Bible as they repeatedly claim they do, then these two scriptures, which I submit are quite clear, should cause all Christians everywhere to say, "Oh, wait a minute, by using the definition of polytheism thrown at Mormons, we too must be polytheists! Here it is in plain black and white in my Bible, 'ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.'" Please, anyone out there reading this, carefully read those two scriptures, in context. Don't take my word for it. Jesus uses that scripture from Psalms to declare that it is not blasphemy for Him to call Himself the Son of God, because we are ALL children of God, and therefore gods ourselves (at least in embryo). So, in Latter-day Saint (and biblical) theology, all other gods out there exist only as a part of God's Eternal family. Yet, let me make it clear that even though we are called "gods" now because we are of Heavenly Father's family, we are nowhere near close to being like God Himself. He is our ONE and ONLY Father, and always will be. We can only attain our divine potential through our Savior and Mediator Jesus Christ, who came to Earth to remind us of that divine potential and to allow us to return to God's presence and to our Heavenly Family, where we belong.

I love this doctrine. It is logical, simple, biblical, and, in my opinion, the best part is that you can do something with it! The Trinity is a doctrine which has been described as one of God's mysteries. We are told we cannot really understand it because we are mere humans who cannot possibly understand what God is like with our simple little minds. Why would God create His children so different from Himself that we could not possibly understand Him? That belief does nothing for me. How is it even possible to truly love something we cannot understand? As a Latter-day Saint, I can understand my relationship to my Father and my Heavenly Family because I am given an earthly type of this Family.

So, in my opinion, "polytheistic" is not a good way to describe our religion. Technically, yes, we believe there are more gods than just God the Father. BUT, we believe all gods ultimately are a part of the same family as God our Father, and that all gods who have achieved the status of divinity (like Christ) have only done so by following the same laws and precepts by which God Himself abides. They therefore exist in complete and total unity, almost as if they are one and the same God.

At least that is how I understand it. I believe that this view is very much in line with what is in the Bible as well as what common sense and experience tell us.

Defining Mormonism

Sorry to be so consistently lacking in originality, but here is (yet again) an article copied from another website, in this case MormonTimes. It's short and sweet, yet packs a punch:

Defining Mormonism for Your Children
by Linda and Richard Eyre

Only Jon Huntsman Jr. himself knows what he meant when he told Time magazine that his religion was "hard to define."
He may have meant that it would take a while to explain his faith, or that it was none of the reporter's business, or even that he just didn't want to talk about it right then. And he may have been referring to his own personal inner faith and not to the institutional Mormon faith. We don't know, and we certainly are not making any judgments about former Ambassador Huntsman or about the context in which he said what he said.
But the "buzz" and the interest his comment aroused opens an opportunity to speak in our own context here in this column and to make the claim that "Mormonism" is not hard to define at all.
In fact it may be, among all religions, the easiest one to explain because of its uniqueness. It may be the easiest religion to differentiate simply because it is in a category by itself.
The LDS Church is relatively small but extraordinarily distinctive.
In our world of more than 6 billion people, about 1.5 billion of them are Christian.
Of that number, roughly half are Catholic and half are Protestant.
We said "roughly half" because the two halves do not exactly add up to 100 percent or equal the whole of Christianity — not quite.
Because there is a third category, a small one, making up only about 1 percent of Christians, and it is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
While, like Catholics, we believe in the necessity of priesthood and of a "line of authority," we are not Catholic, and while, like Protestants, we believe in a universal apostasy, we are not Protestant.
We believe that once priesthood and many of the doctrines of salvation were lost, a reformation could not bring them back. Only a restoration could. While we respect the initiative of the great reformers in trying to return the church to biblical ways, it was only the initiative of God himself that could reinstate his church. That divine initiative restored all that was lost, and all that God desired man to have, including completely unique-among-Christians truths like the premortal life, and the eternal marriage covenant, and the ongoing probation of the spirit world, and the full and restored authority and keys of the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods.
And it took more than a reformation to bring these things back. It took a restoration.
That is how unique our church is, and it is easy to define if not to defend. And we should each define ourselves by whether or not we believe it.
What does all this have to do with Mormon parenting? It has everything to do with it because if there is one thing our testimonies and our belief in parental stewardship should dictate us to do, it is to define, simply and clearly to our children, what the Restoration is, why God and Christ brought it about, and just what it was that was restored.
It is a mistake for parents to assume that their kids know of this distinctiveness, and it is an error to believe that they will be taught it fully and clearly in Primary or Sunday School or seminary or that they will just absorb it by being around us.
In each child's quest to define himself or herself, nothing will be more helpful than to have had parents who clearly defined the church, the Restoration and the gospel.

–The Eyres are the founders of Joy Schools and of valuesparenting.com and the authors of numerous best-selling books on marriage, parenting and family. Their mission statement, developed while presiding over the England London South Mission, is "FORTIFY FAMILIES by celebrating commitment, popularizing parenting, bolstering balance and validating values."

Their newest book, now available in stores and online, is "5 Spiritual Solutions for Everyday Parenting Challenges," and their blog can be found at http://www.deseretnews.com/blog/81/A-World-of-Good.html.  Visit the Eyres anytime at www.TheEyres.com or www.valuesparenting.com.

Joseph Smith Papers Free Online

I was excited to learn today that the Joseph Smith Papers project can now be accessed online for free, for all those who cannot afford the somewhat pricey print additions of the project (like me). I love the Joseph Smith Papers because they prove those wrong who insist that the Church hides/covers up/lies about its founding and history. With this ambitious project the Church is supporting the production of ALL of the major papers relating to Joseph Smith (including original manuscript and printed versions of early revelations, journals, official documents, church meeting minutes, etc.) for all the world to see, in an organized series. These papers are very interesting and a great way to begin to understand the heart and mind of the Prophet of the Restoration, in his own words. Through Joseph's personal journals and letters you can learn what his inner thoughts on certain matters were and discover his inner spirituality, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness. Through the church minutes you can see what church was like for the earliest members. Plus, you can learn further background about all of the Church's revelations by viewing their original editions. I am glad for this opportunity to learn much more about the Prophet Joseph Smith and this oft-misunderstood period of Church history.

The Joseph Smith Papers can be found online at josephsmithpapers.org