Bridging The Gulf
Richard J Mouw is the President of Fuller Theological Seminary, perhaps the leading Evangelical post-graduate educational institution in the world. (Of course, as a former student at same I could be accused of prejudice in the matter.) Dr. Mouw penned both a Foreword and Afterword for the book, "A Different Jesus? The Christ of Latter-Day Saints." , by Robert L. Millet of Brigham Young University. Dr. Mouw placed himself squarely in the crosshairs of enormous criticism from the creedal Christian community in general when he wrote these words in that Afterword, "I think that an open-minded Christian reader of this book will sense that Bob Millet is in fact trusting in the Jesus of the Bible for his salvation." I am not sure I would agree with the words as Dr. Mouw drafted them, but I would endorse wholly the sentiment behind them.
While very theological in nature, Dr. Mouw's Afterword is the best expression I have encountered of what creedal Christian attitude towards Mormonism should be. Such an attitude would naturally leave the door wide open, perhaps even non-existent, for creedal and Mormon Christian political cooperation and alliance. Therefore, I present it here in its entirety.
On several occasions I have called publicly for evangelical Christians to tone down the rhetoric in order to take a fresh and honest look at what Mormons really believe. And each time I have received angry responses from evangelicals who see me as calling for ungodly compromises with a religion that is fundamentally and unalterably opposed to biblical Christianity. Before looking specifically at what Robert Millet has said in these pages, then, I want to explain briefly why I am convinced that those of us who profess the teachings of the historic Christian tradition should wrestle seriously with what he has written here.
My interest in getting clear about these matters goes back to a Sunday night in the 1950's when I sat as a teenager in a fundamentalist church in northern New Jersey. Walter Martin, the well-known evangelical “cult expert,” was doing a series of weekly talks in that church, and on this particular evening his subject was Mormonism. The session had been widely advertised, and the small church was packed. A dozen or so Mormons were in attendance, seated as a group near the front of the auditorium. We had seen them walking in, carrying their copies of the Book of Mormon. Martin was well known to both Mormons and evangelicals as an itinerant lecturer, and he soon would become even better known from “counter-cult” books that he would author, especially his influential The Kingdom of the Cults.
Martin was a highly effective public speaker and debater, and I was captivated by the way he made his case against non-Christian groups. He had a fine one-liner, for example, about Christian Science: just as Grape Nuts are neither grapes nor nuts, he said, so Mary Baker Eddy’s system of thought is neither Christian nor science. On this particular evening it was clear that the LDS contingent had come armed for debate, and Martin was eager to mix it up with them. During the discussion period, one young man was quite articulate as he argued that Martin misunderstood the Mormon teachings regarding atonement and salvation. Martin was not willing to yield an inch, and what began as a reasoned exchange ended in a shouting match. The young Mormon finally blurted out with deep emotion: “You can come up with all of the clever arguments you want, Dr. Martin, but I know in the depths of my heart that Jesus is my Savior, and it is only through his blood that I can go to heaven!” Martin dismissed him with a knowing smile as he turned to his evangelical audience: “See how they love to distort the meanings of words?” I am paraphrasing from a memory reaching back over about four decades, but I can still hear in my mind what the Mormon said next, in an anguished tone: “You are not even trying to understand!”
I came away from that encounter strongly convinced that Martin’s theological critique of Mormonism was correct on many of the basic points at issue. But I also left the church that night with the nagging sense that there was more to be said, and that the way to let it be said was captured in the young Mormon’s complaint: both sides had to try to understand each other. And I vowed to myself that someday I would make an effort to facilitate that kind of effort.
I have tried over the decades since then to pay some attention to LDS thought, but it is only in the past five years that I have had the opportunity to delve seriously into the subject — an investigation greatly facilitated by regular meetings that I have helped to convene between LDS and evangelical scholars. I have studied Mormon writings and questioned my LDS friends at length on key topics. I have made an effort to listen very carefully; my goal has not been so much to win arguments as to be sure that I have understood as best I can what they really believe.
There are two general points that I want to be very clear about here. One is that I am no closer to accepting the historical claims of Mormonism than I was the night that I listened to Walter Martin make the case against Mormon teachings. I do not accept the Book of Mormon as divine revelation, nor do I believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet called by God to restore ancient teachings and practices that had long been lost to the traditional Christian churches.
The second point is that I have absolutely no suspicions that my friend Bob Millet is deceiving us in this book about his own deepest convictions. This has to be said, because many of my fellow Christians view the things that Mormons say with much cynicism about what they “really” mean. The most common charges along these lines are that LDS leaders are so eager to be accepted as a mainstream religion that they are deliberately misleading us about their actual beliefs and that when Mormons utter Christian-sounding words, such as that “Jesus died for our sins,” they are using the words in very different ways than do we in the Christian tradition.
I believe that I know Bob Millet well enough to say that these suspicions should be set aside in evaluating the case he has made here. He has made every effort to provide as clearly as he can an honest and frank account of what the LDS believe about the person and work of Jesus Christ. He has shown earlier drafts to me and to other evangelical friends, and he has always responded willingly and enthusiastically to all of our suggestions about how he can best explain his position. This book is a sincere statement of faith by an honest man.
The question of whether he really does mean what, say, an evangelical means when he uses the same words that we employ is, of course, a more complicated matter. In a very important sense, I think that he does mean what we mean on some very basic points. For example, take his story — one that I find very moving — about what he replied when he was asked by an evangelical theologian about what he would say to God about why he, Bob Millet the Mormon, ought to be allowed into heaven. I believe that Bob means in his testimony the same thing that I mean when I say that my only plea before the judgment seat of God is that I am covered by the mercy and merits of Jesus Christ. My question is not about the adequacy of his reply to this all-important question. My continuing worry is whether his other LDS beliefs can properly sustain him in — whether they provide a solid theological grounding for — his deep and sincere conviction that his only hope for eternal life is the substitutionary work of Jesus Christ that was completed for his salvation on Calvary. And this is why energetic and sustained — and mutually respecting — arguments between Mormons and traditional Christians have to keep going!
Three things about this book make me hopeful that we can make some progress together in keeping at those arguments. One is the way Bob Millet makes it clear that we are at least developing a shared understanding of some basic theological terms. In his groundbreaking book-length dialogue with evangelical theologian Craig Blomberg, Stephen Robinson, Bob Millet’s colleague at Brigham Young University, made the important observation that “LDS terminology often seems naive, imprecise and even sometimes sloppy by evangelical standards, but evangelicals have had centuries in which to polish and refine their terminology,” and besides, he added, “we have no professional clergy to keep our theological language finely tuned.” In this present discussion Bob Millet gives much evidence of having read many evangelical authors carefully — John Stott, Cornelius Plantinga, John MacArthur, and others — and in a way that brings considerable clarification of the intent of some key LDS doctrines.
Second, reading this book has made it even clearer to me that many — not all, but many — of the arguments that I as a Calvinist evangelical have with Mormons are not too far removed from the arguments that I have pursued with theologians who represent traditions that are clearly in the Christian mainstream. We evangelicals argue at length with Roman Catholics about whether the Bible is our only authority or whether there are additional sources of revealed truth that must be taken as equally authoritative. The question of “divinization” — of how we must think about the apostle John’s promise that, while we are already God’s children, “it does not yet appear what we shall be,” but we can be assured that someday “we will be like Him” — has been much discussed between Christians of the Western churches and the Eastern Orthodox. And Bob Millet’s insistence that the “good work” that we must perform in order to gain saving grace is the act of having faith — well, this is not unlike a claim that I regularly argue about with my friends in the Arminian tradition.
Of course, we will have to see whether the Mormon “spin” on these matters means that the apparent similarities with admittedly intraChristian perspectives are deceptive. But the recognition that something like these and other teachings have been long debated within mainstream Christianity can give us some new handles for assessing the unique “spin” that Mormons put on them.
A third hopeful sign is the kind of interpretations that Millet offers for what many of us have taken to be very harsh-sounding LDS claims. Not the least of these is the insistence by Joseph Smith that the “creeds” that many of us profess are an “abomination.” To be sure, my own reaction to this kind of rhetoric in Mormonism has long been tempered by an awareness of a similar harshness in my own tradition; the historic Reformed confessional documents that I subscribe to depict, for example, Catholics as “accursed idolators” and Mennonites as people whom we Calvinists must “detest.” But Bob Millet helpfully shows that Joseph Smith himself says things about mainstream Christians that do not fit well with a thoroughly nasty interpretation of his “abomination” statement.
For all of that, though, there is still what Millet rightly sets forth as the “more” of Mormonism. Baptism for the dead. The importance of the temple rites. Multiple heavenly realms. The restoration of the ancient offices of prophet and apostle. Golden plates. New revelations.
This is not the place to rehearse the standard — and, I am convinced, the compelling — Christian objections to these and other “more” teachings of the Latter-day Saints. These uniquely Mormon beliefs have to be kept in mind as reminders that the divide between many LDS doctrines and some key beliefs of Christian orthodoxy is still wide indeed. And I will continue to be deeply bothered by this divide, even as I nervously stick to what I have said by way of appreciation for what my good friend has written.
At the heart of our continuing disagreements, I am convinced, are very basic worldview issues. Judaism and Christianity have been united in their insistence that the Creator and the creation — including God’s human creatures — are divided by an unbridgeable “being” gap. God is the “Wholly Other” — eternal and self-sufficient — who is in a realm of existence that is radically distinct from the creation that was brought into being out of nothing by God’s sovereign decree. On this view of things, to confuse the Creator’s being with anything in his creation is to commit the sin of idolatry. Mormons, on the other hand, talk about God and humans as belonging to the same “species.” Inevitably, then, the differences are described, not in terms of an unbridgeable gap of being, but in the language of “more” and “less.”
This kind of disagreement has profound implications for our understanding of who Jesus Christ is. In traditional Christianity, the question of Christ’s saving power cannot be divorced from how we understand his “being.” If we believe that we are, in our fallenness, totally incapable of earning our own salvation, then the crucial questions are:
What would it take to save us? What would a Savior have to be in order to pay the debt for our sin? And, faced with answers given to these questions by teachers who saw Jesus as less than fully God, the church leaders gathered at the Council of Nicea set forth, in AD. 325, this profound confession of who Jesus is. “We believe,” they wrote,
in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father. Through him all things were made.
And only when we acknowledge all of this about him, the Council stipulated, can we move confidently to this bold and amazing proclamation:
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven.
As an evangelical Christian I want more than anything else that people — whatever disagreements I might have with them on other matters — know Jesus personally, as the heaven-sent Savior who left heaven’s throne to come to the manger, and to Gethsemane, and to Calvary, to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. I also know that having a genuine personal relationship with Jesus Christ does not require that we have all our theology straight. All true Christians are on a journey, and until we see the Savior face-to-face we will all see through a glass darkly.
But I also believe with all my heart that theology is important. There is a real danger for all of us that we will define Jesus in such a way that we cannot adequately claim the full salvation that he alone can provide. I think that an open-minded Christian reader of this book will sense that Bob Millet is in fact trusting in the Jesus of the Bible for his salvation. That is certainly my sense. And this is why I find it especially exciting to be in dialogue with him and other LDS friends about what it means to have a theologically adequate understanding of the person and work of the One who alone is mighty to save. I hope that reading this book will inspire many people — traditional Christians as well as Latter-day Saints — with a new motivation for engaging in that eternally significant conversation.
Richard J. Mouw
Lowell adds a brief post-script: Dr. Mouw's analysis is weighty and heartfelt, I believe. It is important for creedals to understand, however, that any devout Mormon will read some of Mouw's words with puzzlement and a sense that the "divide" seems so hard to bridge. For example, it is simply baffling that Mouw needs to engage in such careful analysis in order to conclude that Mormons are "in fact trusting in the Jesus of the Bible for [their] salvation." Our response would be, "Of course we do. What other Jesus is there?" But that's a discussion for another time.
[tags]Mormons, Christians, Jesus Christ. Robert Millet, Richard Mouw[/tags]
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