| Rating: | ★★★★ |
| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | Religion & Spirituality |
| Author: | Ostler, Blake |
While reading the latest installment of Blake Ostler’s “Exploring Mormon Thought” I was starting to become disappointed. Mainly, it was because he was treading ground that I have already explored. The first chapters deal with the Council of the Gods. While I know that among some it was a new concept, I have read quite a bit about the topic. As others have stated, most of the current scholarship is going down this route, (
http://farms.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=19&num=1&id=644)
What was of slightly more interest to me was his discussion on “Kingship Monotheism” and how that is the type of theism expressed in the OT and in the NT. Those are more convincing arguments, and a view that I already hold. Some of these are quite extensive and actually reference Ugaritic texts as well as DSS manuscripts (another set of writings I long to investigate). Since this is not anywhere near an exhaustive, or even anywhere close to a professional review, I’ll leave it to the reader to actually get into the text.
Then, after a month-long break, I decided to take the book up again. Really, I wasn’t nearly as excited about this book as the previous books. Now he started taking on the trinity. In the previous books he took on the ontological theories on the trinity and really slammed them in my opinion. This book seems to take on the identity questions about the trinity. I quote from the first paragraph on “The Latin Trinity, Logic, and Scripture”.
It is not uncommon to find traditional Christians who assert that Mormons must be excluded from the true Christian faith because of an erroneous ideal of the Trinity. However, irony abounds in such assertions. Rare indeed is the person in traditional camps who can elucidate the notion of the Trinity without falling into one of the many so-called heresies that lurk in the graveyard of Trinitarian theories. In fact, I have never seen a carefully spelled-out statement of the doctrine of the Trinity that did not commit either the heresy of modalism or of tritheism unless it simply propounded an unintelligible position or reveled in mystery. However, a person who asserts that Mormons must somehow get the doctrine of the Trinity right as a condition for salvation can hardly take refuge in unintelligibility or mystery, for a person must be able to understand what is asserted in a doctrine to be able to believe it and, even more importantly, to be mistaken about it in a way that merits exclusion from the body of the saved. If the ability to elucidate an intelligible doctrine of the Trinity that does not commit heresy is a condition for salvation, the number of saved will be very small indeed. Such a requirement would undoubtedly exclude all those poor souls who considered themselves Christians but just didn’t have the intellectual acumen to express an outright contradiction intelligibly. If it appears that I am trying to hide a thinly veiled contempt for the imposition of such a condition on Latter-day Saints, I am not trying to conceal anything; rather I am expressing my contempt forthrightly for the non-sense that it is.
The last several chapters dealt with theosis and the superiority of the LDS position, otherwise known as “Robust Deification”. He spent some time on the contradictions on some of the theologians take on the doctrine but overall he said that those who hold the creator/created paradigm cannot claim theosis as a valid doctrine, as we cannot approach God on his own terms. That also applies to the EOC take on sharing of the divine energies. If you ultimately believe that we are “other” in relation to God, we cannot share in what he has, on the same terms, as is spelled out in scripture.
The same problem exists for those that hold Creation Ex Nihilo. It demands that we are different than God and we can be obliterated by God at any time, therefore deification is not possible, because we don’t really share any of the nature of God when viewed in those terms. “What deification gives man, Ex Nihilo takes away.”
I did bypass some sections of the book, as they delved into weaknesses of other theories, most of which I was unfamiliar with. Overall, I enjoyed the book.
