When the Orthodox God was Lost

A few years ago I was convinced that the thing that went wrong with Christianity in the First Century was when the Christian theologians took the neo-Platonic conception of God, then, in an effort to do the philosophers one better, they came up the idea of creatio ex nihlo. Because of this people are able to ask this this series of predicates.

1) God is Good.
2) God created the world the way it is by fiat (creatio ex nihlo).
3) There is suffering in the world.
4) Therefore God must want suffering and is not worthy of worship.
5) God cannot stop suffering and is not worthy of worship.

The supposed fact that God made everything by an act of will has some logical paradoxes that many people are unwilling to live with.  If I were not LDS I'm afraid that I would agree with this line of thinking.  Luckily I'm not.

The LDS do not have arrive at this conclusion because we say that God did not create everything, in the idea that God did not create matter or intelligences.  Also, we believe that God in a moral being and is capable of making choices, including wrong choices.

Of course when there are problems when the LDS say that there are co-eternal intelligences that Heavenly Father did not create.  They think that is blasphemous and when we then say that he didn't create matter but simply organized it their heads seem to explode. I understand their concerns, but it make much more sense to me to worship a logical God than an irrational one. I wonder what the philosophers would make of the LDS God. So far as I know only the LDS think about our conception of God and we, or the LDS, philosophers don't seem to have a problem with it, but I guess that I don't really know what's been said or written about it.  However, some of the thoughts that philosophers have talked about sound very familiar.  I'm starting to think that I'd like to study this stuff more in depth instead of just listening to the lectures, although listening to the lectures is fun.

I Had to Know

I've been reading the testimonies of LDS Scholars and they're very interesting.  Many of them talk about having an experience where they had an experience that told them the truth of the Book of Mormon.  I honestly can't remember when I didn't believe the scriptures.  I feel like an idiot when I ask that question in prayer.

I remembered an event that was similar I think though.  On my mission I one time felt that I had to find a street where we would find someone to teach.  I went and felt that I was not going to get off my knees until I had a street to go to.  After a while I absolutely knew which street we would find a "golden contact".  I went in to my companion, very excited, and told him we needed to plan the next day.  I told him I wanted to go to a new area to teach.  He said OK.  I picked the area that had my street.  We prayed for confirmation and I felt the spirit again, but I could tell my companion hadn't, not like me.

In the morning the zone leaders called.  They wanted to go on splits and they wanted me to leave the area.  I told companion not to go to "my" street.  I got back after splits in the afternoon.  We did find a golden family.  The wife was especially excited.  We set up an appointment to come back and when we showed they weren't there.  We finally found the father at home after a couple of days, and his wife had passed away!  I was shocked.  We asked if we could do anything for his family and him.  He said his congregation was helping them.  As I thought about this I probably should have offered to teach about the plan of salvation.  I wasn't inspired to, so I don't feel that bad about it.

I find this story ironic.  I'm glad that I was able to find the family I always think that we were there to help the wife and that maybe on the other side us showing up when we did will help her accept the gospel on the other side.  All I know is that when I absolutely had to have an answer one came.

I've always thought to myself could I walk away from the Church?  The thought literally terrifies me.  I couldn't in good conscious say in prayer to the Lord you have to tell me this book is true or I'm leaving, the Lord would have to know that that's not true and never will be.

The Internal Destruction of Christianity — A Sad Story Pt 2

After the Reformation Europe entered into a series of religious wars.  There were other reason for the wars, political reasons and what not, but one of the driving forces of those wars was religion.  People back then took their religion seriously.  After the end of the 30 years war in Central Europe and the English Civil War, both with heavy religious components, Europe was exhausted and pulled away from religious extremism and started to accept pluralism, even if it was forced on them.

While the Reformation was moving a pace a revolution in scientific knowledge was going on at the same time.  This commonly referred to as the Scientific Revolution as many people say that it started with Copernicus's's "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies" and Vesalius' "On the Fabric of the Human Body" both published in 1543.

Both of these "Revolutions" (I certainly think the Reformation was a revolution in religious thinking) changed the way that the world was viewed.  All kinds of new discoveries were being made and it was found that the ancients were not always right.  Everything was to be subjected to reason and logic, nothing was going to be accepted on authority as it had in the past.  This included the Bible.

Around 1800 the Bible started to be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that any other piece of literature was given.  In 1835 George Strauss wrote the "Life of Jesus" in which he explained the miracles of Jesus as natural occurrences that were misunderstood.  Strauss was not the first to start questioning the Bible, or the miracles of Jesus, but he was the first to publish a book about it.  I've actually read Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" has some great insights into the writing of the Bible.

At about this same time Joseph Smith was receiving the Book of Mormon and other divine revelations, and he taught that "The Bible was correct so far as it was translated correctly."  Also, in the Book of Mormon the writers admitted that there might be mistakes in there writings, after all they were humans and humans make mistakes.

Throughout the 19th Century Christianity was subjected to an Enlightened understanding, which resulted in liberal theologies.  People were too smart to accept miracles, and that God did not come down and interact with humans.  In America one reaction to this was a set of tracts that were written called "The Fundamentals."  These were a set of writings that set out the "fundamentals" that any Christian should believe.  These tracts were funded by some wealthy men who gave the tracts away to ministers and others and they were very influential.  These led to some Christians being called Fundamentalist's.  One of the things that these tracts put forth was that the Bible was inerrant.  Inerrant means that there are no mistakes in the Bible.

I've done quite a bit of reading Christian sites on the internet, and I can tell you that there are a lot of people out there who believe that the Bible is inerrant.  I know that's not scientific but there it is, and I believe that that belief is unsustainable.  A few years ago I read a book that was put out by Deseret Books, and I believe it was called the "Faith of Scholars."  In that book one scholar told of going to a theology school and at the end of it a fellow student told him that she was jealous of him because when they first started she thought that he was an ignorant Mormon, but at the end of their studies he still had his faith and she had lost hers.  He said that it was because of the difference of their beliefs when they started.  He wasn't bothered when mistakes were found, while his fellow student was and her frame work of belief could not hold up to the assault.  So at the end of the course of study the evangelical had lost her faith, but the LDS scholar had.

The Internal Destruction of Christianity – A Sad Story Pt 1

I'm starting to think that the LDS Church is going to save Christianity.  OK that's meant as an ironic statement because it's pretty much what the LDS Church has stated since it's beginning and something that I've always taken on faith.

Here's what happened in my opinion.

At the time that Jesus lived the Romans ruled the Mediterranean and it was a stable world where the Gospel could be spread.  A unique time in history.

However it happened Christianity became the dominant culture in Europe, and in 1054 the Christian World split into an Eastern and Western part.  Actually this split just set in stone a process which had been going on much earlier and that was that Western Christianity spoke Latin and was influenced by Augustine, and the Eastern Christianity spoke and read Greek and followed other Greek Fathers.  In other words there were two Christianities, East and West, and two cultures East and West.

In the West Christianity was influenced by Scholasticism, which was heavily influenced by reason and logic.  This was a gift given to Christianity by the Islamic Culture.  Some people think that scholastism was started by Averroes.  It seems to me that these three cultures reached the same point; "Do we continue to use our reasoning powers to understand God, or do we just accept the word of God as final?"  In the Islam world they turned away from reason with the "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" written by Al-Ghazali.  Averroes was highly influential in the West, and you could find Latin versions of his commentaries on Aristotle in western universities.  In the Islamic world his works were never printed until the 20th Century.

So the West decided that reason was to be used and that new ideas were good.  This led eventually to the idea of Natural Theology.  Western Christianity decided that since God was all powerful and could have created the world any way he wanted to, the fact that He created this world the way He did should tell us something about him.  Therefore by studying nature, or Natural Theology, we would learn about God, and people in the RCC took to doing Natural Theology with a passion.  Almost every scientific discovery during the Medieval Age was performed by a Churchman, or someone who's profession was the RCC, or nobility.  People who had the leisure to perform scientific experiments, and while they were doing this they were coming to a greater understanding of God.  However, as they started doing this they started to notice something Aristotle wasn't always right.

Scholasticism was more of a method than a theory.  Part of that method was that if you had a question you would go to the sources that talked about the question and arrange all of the information about the question and then you would use that to make your decision.  The greatest scholastic scholar was Thomas Aquinas and his great accomplishment was to reconcile Aristotle with the RCC.  During the scientific revolution people started realizing that Aristotle was not always right.  Once people started realizing that not everything ancient was always right people started questioning the RCC.

There was a lot of questioning going on at the time of Luther and the Reformation.  However, everyone still pretty much accepted the Bible, or some deity.  Protestantism allowed different readings of the Bible, and the scientific revolution led to the Enlightenment.  During the Enlightenment people started reading the Bible critically for the first time.  Why not, everything else was up to scrutiny.

So people started reading the Bible critically for the first time in history.  Everything was set.  Printing made the Bible available and the years of learning made it possible to start scrutinizing the Bible.  Around the same time that this had started the restoration of the Gospel started with Joseph Smith and he informed the LDS Church that everything dealing with man was subject to mistakes, or that the Bible is "Bible is true only insofar as it is translated correctly."

Martin Luther Lecture by Prof Cary

I listened to a lecture series on Martin Luther from the Teaching Company by Prof. Cary.  This turned out to be a nice experience.  I got the series because of something that I read or heard about Martin Luther that interested me in learning more about him.  Here's what I'd learned that I didn't know before.  First Luther was not just some unknown monk that suddenly became famous when he posted his 95 Theses.  He was a monk but he was also a Priest and was very well known and educated.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out that Luther showed great faith when he entered the monastery, he was giving up the life of being a lawyer and going against the wishes of his father, and then when he was convinced that the Catholic Church was wrong he left the monastery, the life he'd known and been living into the unknown on faith.  Anyway this made me want to learn a little more about Luther, and since we were going to be driving a lot over the holidays I got the Luther tapes.

First I was pleasantly surprised to find that this series was given by Prof. Cary.  I listened to a series by Prof. Cary "The History of Christian Theology" and liked it so much I got a second set called "Philosophy and Religion in the West" so I was excited that he'd done this set as well.  It's funny because I only realized who the lecturer was after starting to listening to it.

I really liked this set of tapes primarily for the reason that Prof. Cary seems to me to be a Christian believer.  He says that he's a Lutheran and he says that he realizes that there are some problems with what he believes and that he just accepts those problems as opposed to accepting the problems that come from believing in Calvinism.  I don't remember off the top of my head what the problems were but I like the way that he stated it.

He also talks about "traditions" and explains it very well.  He says that he can listen to a car engine and not hear anything wrong but a mechanic that has been taught the "traditions" of car mechanics can listen and tell that a spark plug, or something, is not working right.  No text has an inherent meaning to it in only has meaning with the traditions we bring to it.  That seems right to me.

Prof. Cary I feel is very insightful as to Luther.  He's hard on him when he should be hard on him, such as his treatment of the Jews, and his seemingly intransigence.  For example Prof. Cary thinks that the Reformation wouldn't have taken place if Luther had not decided the the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) was the anti-Christ.  Luther didn't say that a certain Pope was bad (Many people had said that including Erasmus.) but that the entire RCC was anti-Christ.  Prof. Cary admits that's a hard statement especially when it's obvious, as I feel, that the RCC is not the anti-Christ.

I liked these lectures and highly recommend them.

Prof Ehrman – Caveat Emptor

I've listened to a series of lectures by Prof. Bart Ehrman from the teaching company.  Before I started listening to his tapes I read some of his books.  I'd heard about his writings in the notes of some FARMS papers.  His name popped up enough that I got (as is I actually bought them) a couple of his books and read them.  The books that I've read have been "Lost Christianities", "Misquoting Jesus" and "The Text of the New Testament."  On the last book he was the co-author of with Bruce Metzger and it was the 4th version of the text.  The book is considered the introductory text of New Testament textual criticism and I was surprised to see that Prof. Ehrman was the co-author because it basically means that Prof. Metzger was passing the torch to Prof. Ehrman.  Prof. Metzger wrote the first three versions himself.

The three lectures sets that I've recently listened to by Prof. Ehrman are "The New Testament", "The Apostolic Fathers" and "Lost Christianities," but the first lecture series that I listened to was "The Historical Jesus."

I actually think that Prof. Ehrman is pretty interesting as a lecturer and writer.  He must be because he's written a ton of books and does a bunch of lecture series and he's got some of my money.

The first lecture set that I listened to by Prof. Ehrman was called "The Historical Jesus."  I've read a lot about this topic and nothing that Prof. Ehrman said in the series really shocked or surprised me.  He started out with the standard description of Apollonius of Tayana.  For anyone who doesn't know about this guy his story sounds exactly like Jesus, except he's not the Son of God so no one hears of him except trivia experts and people trying to destroy Christianity.

One thing that I found interesting was his description of how a historian handles miracles.  He was apologetic and said that he couldn't say that miracles didn't happen but that as a historian he could only deal with probabilities and since most people don't walk on water the way to bet is that a story of someone walking on water probably didn't happen.  He then asks how the listener deals with miraculous stories of other religious leaders.  I have to admit that made me think.

All of Prof. Ehrman's books and lectures are very interesting but you have to listen to them with the understanding that he's talking to you as a lapsed Evangelical Christian.  I obviously don't know his complete history but he does give a little background in the introduction to "Misquoting Jesus" and it sounds like he went into higher learning as a believing Evangelical Christian and came out as an agnostic New Testament Scholar.  When talking about the teachings of Paul he flat out states that Paul teaches that we're saved by grace alone.  Now I understand this being said by a Born Again Fundamentalist Christian, but it surprised me coming from a scholar.  I can think of a number of other interpretations of the teachings of Paul that I've heard from other scholars that Prof. Erhman doesn't even hint that may be there.

He takes the scholarly idea that Christianity was made up – at least that's what it always sounds like to me when I hear it.  Here's what he describes.  Jesus had a few followers who spread out after he died and they started talking about the wonderful things that Jesus did.  Over time the stories that were told about Jesus were slowly changed and modified and then finally written down.  Prof. Ehrman actually gives as an example the party game of "Telephone" where one person at the end of a line of people tells a person a sentence and then each person whispers the same sentence to the next person and then at the end of the line the last person repeats the sentence and everyone laughs at how funny the differences are.  That basically is how the Gospels came about.  Cool huh?

Another thing that Prof. Ehrman talks a lot about is apocalypsism.  I had actually never heard of acpcalypsim before I listened to Prof. Ehrman which kind of surprised me.  I've heard of apocalyptic literature before and I know that there are people who consider the apocalypse the end of the world because of Revelation.  Here's how it works.  The last book in the Bible is called Revelation and the reason it's called Revelation is because that is the English translation of the Greek word Apocalypse.  Francis Ford Coppola make a famous Vietnam War movie called "Apocalypse Now"  based upon a Joseph Conrad novel called "The Heart of Darkness" and suddenly everyone now knows that apocalypse means the end of the world.  Well apparently it does mean that now.  I'd always thought that it just meant a piece of literature which describes a persons tour of heaven (and sometimes hell) with an angelic being accompanying the tourist giving explanations of what is being seen.  However, after listening to Prof. Ehrman, and some other series, I guess that apocalypsim is a term which means you believe the end of time is next week.  So according to Prof. Ehrman Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist who was an apocalypsist (Are you surprised that Jesus was a disciple of John?  I was, but apparently the superior baptizes the inferior according to Prof. Ehrman's understanding of early Christian customs.) which means Jesus was and Paul who was a follower of Jesus is an apocalypsist.  Prof. Ehrman seems to find joy in doing things like saying "An early 1st century apocalyptic prophet said..." then he pretty much quotes Matt 24 then he gleefully tells us that it is a prophecy of Jesus with the obvious implication that he's a false prophet.

Despite all these things I have learned some insights from Prof. Ehrman.  For example he points out in Romans that Paul talks about the "Law" on two levels.  One level was the "Law" that seemed to apply to Jewishness, and another level was the "law" of an ethical level.  I thought that was a pretty good way to describe it because I've always been amazed at the commandment lists that Paul lays out that he expects Christians to live by.  However, after pointing all this out he never addresses the implications again.

I found one other amazing description given by Prof. Erhman.  There was a movement in early Christianity called gnosticism of which one of the primary claims was that there was a secret gnosis, or knowledge, which is what the Greek word gnosis means.  Prof. Erhman goes through a convoluted explanation that gnosticism arose from Jewish apcalyptism that arose in the 3rd or 2nd Century BC.  I found it laughable, but it was an excellent demonstration of how scholars ignore Acts 1:3-4 which is where it says that Jesus spent 40 teaching all things about the Kingdom of God.  What and where is that teaching?  Nibley says this is the reason that gnosticism rose because there was the tradition about that teaching.  Nibley's not the only person that I've read mention this, Margart Barker does as well, and others.  Not Prof. Ehrman.

I found the tapes OK especially if you know what your going to be getting before starting with them.

Still Reading the BKC and an Addition

I really enjoying reading through the Old Testament with the Bible Knowledge Commentary.  I actually enjoyed reading the giving of the law in the Exodus and the explanation of the Tabernacle.  When they explained the size of a cubit being around 18 inches supposedly.  No one really knows what the size is but that's the accepted estimate.  I also understood just what they were talking about with the clothing or the high priest.  The reason that I understood this this time is that it's explicitly explained in the book.  As I was reading about the clothing for I realized that I bought an illustrated book about the Old Testament that probably had pictures that would show the cloths and the tabernacle.

I went and got it it's called "Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament: An Illustrated Reference for Latter-Day Saints."  I decided that I'd read the book as well and it's been pretty interesting as well.

Since the surgery I haven't been able to start doing the body weights exercises so I've been riding the exercise cycle every morning and I've really been enjoying the reading that I do.