Loading...When I was a conservative evangelical teenager, I very much believed that God not only did miracles but gave us signs to show us the truth and save us from error. The most amazing (and funniest) sign I received was in the summer of 1975, while painting my house.
I was home from my second year at Moody Bible Institute and was doing odd jobs here and there to pay for school, and my parents needed the house painted. I hate(d) painting, but I like(d) being able to earn my keep, so I went for it.
To make sense of the sign, some background: one of my classes at Moody that year had been on the Christian “cults” – that is the Christian groups that evangelicals considered to be so far out there that they weren’t only non-Christian (like those Catholics and Greek Orthodox) but were dangerous to society and the well-being of the human race. These included such nefarious apostates as
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This reminds me of a preacher or evangelist (I can’t remember exact source) tell the following: if you sincerely and whole heartedly pray to God for an answer to what question or plea you have, God WILL answer. But, you may not like the answer …..
My mother put a positive possible predestination spin on your observation. She said, “every setback we faced was His crucible for us reaching our perfection.”
Thank you Dr Ehrman. I sent off for a (free) copy of the Book of Mormon when I was around 13 and it was hand delivered by 2 missionaries. They were charming young men but my mother eventually gave them their marching orders when she feared they might convert me. I got to keep the book but found it a difficult read and have long since mislaid it. Are you able to say what the main problems are with Mormon theology?
Not really. I don’t think one Christian theology as a rule is more problematic than another, just different.
As a daily reader of the blog, a committed Latter Day Saint, I can say a hearty “Amen” to this post. I was a missionary in the deep south in the 70’s, and had my share of these experiences from the other side of the table. At that time, I thought we (Latter Day Saints) were the only ones that had it right. But, as I continued to peel the proverbial onion over the years, I’ve learned that the way God deals with his children is, well, complicated. If you want an example of how Bart’s personal journey has come full circle, check out the debate he had with an evangelical Christian on whether the New Testament historically proved Christ’s resurrection on the British podcast “Unbelievable”. He reminded listeners that the New Testament only has one eyewitness (Paul) and then proceeded to ask his interlocuter why he wouldn’t accept LDS or Catholic truth claims which many more recent eyewitness claims of seeing the gold plates or Marian appearances. Frustrated for having been dismantled in five minutes, his interlocuter asked, “you certainly don’t believe there were gold plates” to which Bart replied, “of course not”! I laughed out loud.
Pardon my intrusion in your private dialogue with Bart. I have an observation. We read of Peter and Cornelius, the Centurion. Jews did not socialize with Gentiles. Old habits die hard, because we read in GALATIANS, Peter distanced himself socially from the Gentiles in Antioch. If Luke the Physician wrote the Gospel of Luke, and if Luke was a Gentile, then who were his sources? His sources were Jews, but from a different group than the group who were led by the Twelve Apostles. Luke’s group of Jewish followers of Jesus emerged from a group that originated in 180 BCE. The Seleucid ruler attempted to eliminate the Jewish religion in 180 BCE and provoked the Maccabean Revolt of 167 BCE. Dr. Norman Golb wrote that the Essenes did not write the Dead Sea Scrolls. Josephus wrote about the Essenes. I propose that the 180 BCE Group is the Essenes of Josephus. The Essenes interacted socially with the Gentiles. Luke’s group were Essenes whom I call the “Q” Community (because of scholarship of the hypothetical “Q” document). The “Q” Community interpreted the death of Jesus differently than the Twelve Apostles. Jesus was the Prophet of Zoroaster and the Buddha, also.
I also encountered a couple of Mormon missionary boys. For me, it happened right after Bible college when I thought I would be a church planter. I thought that converting a couple of Mormon missionaries would be quite the prize. We met weekly for about five or six weeks. And of course, they didn’t budge on their beliefs any more than I budged on my beliefs. But one of the things that struck me was their apologetics. I realized that they were using the same terrible apologetics logic that I had been taught for years as an evangelical.
Looking back, I see that as one of the early data points that would lead to my eventual exit from Christianity.
“some basic understanding of the history of Christianity with all its ins, outs, wranglings, disagreements, changes, transformations, innovations and so on can go a long way to instilling religious humility about how “right” you necessarily are…” Love it! As Richard Rohr says, God gave us a mind and you don’t have to check it at the door!
“They weren’t only non-Christian (like those Catholics and Greek Orthodox)” Professor while I am not challenging you but just where don’t they measure up as Christians? While to an agnostic or atheist its a purely academic issue if there are a couple bullet points that would be interesting. Thank you.
I’m not saying that I don’t think MOrmons are Christians — I’m saying the opposite. But I’m saying I USED to think Mormons, Catholics, and Orthodox were not really Christians because they never had a born again experience.
Duh! Now I understand. Thanks for clearing that up.
“….because they never had a born again experience.” Again, we can’t refute a person’s experience, because they alone experienced it. However, we can evaluate it. I have a friend who claims he had a born again experience;prayed a prayer, asked for forgiveness, tears and emotions, but years later he told me he no longer believes in God. I thought, “How could this be? He was baptized. He went through seminary.”
In trying to evaluate his claim I asked him, “what changed in your life when you thought you were born again?” I asked this because of what John-the-Baptist told the religious leaders, “where is the evidence of true repentance?(Matthew 3:7,8). Repent:Greek(Vines),Metanoia/meta=after, noia=to perceive, after thought, to change the mind,change direction.
My friend started going to church and reading the Bible, but that just proved he was religious not necessarily born again. The two are different. I later concluded, if there is no God(according to him)how could he have had a born again experience? seeing that the experience results from an interaction with God;Him calling us out of darkness into his light(1st Peter2:9).
If there’s no God then a born again experience is impossible(1st John2:19 They were never born again).
Bart?
People’s lives can certainly change radically and they can feel a sense of transcendance without God. Happens all the time, even among atheists.
I agree. I have many(many) atheist or non-Christian friends and know what you are saying, but I think you missed my point. Please consider the scripture(who ever you believe wrote it or when):
18 Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us (1st John 2:18,19).
I think it’s a common belief that this passage is pointing out that people who abandon their once confessed faith were never really born again. I feel there is another possibility though. They could have truly been born again, but have become the prodigal son, and it’s only a matter of time before they return home to their father(Luke 15:11-32). Only time will tell. Hope you are in good health. I wish I could spend a week with you and as they say pick your brain.
Wow, so I said to my colleague and very conservative baptist friend : If you believe Paul saw Jesus on the road to Damascus, why couldn’t Joseph Smith meet an angel almost 2000 years later? It got a rather forced laugh!
Not Mormon related, but when I was in undergrad classes in the early 70s, the instructor for my initial class on either Old Testament text criticism or New Testament text criticism (I forget which) was taught by a lapsed Roman Catholic who had a shaggy beard, a tooth missing, ragged jeans and dirty fingernails from working on his motorcycle all the time. This was an intro course so open to anybody. There was a girl in the class from the deep south, where Southern Baptists dominate. She was very uncomfortable with the class because it challenged her preconceived notions about the bible. One day she asked the instructor if he was religious, and he said not anymore but he once had been Catholic. She didn’t know what that was. Never heard of it. Asked him if Catholic was Christian or something else. At first he just stared at her, then a small laugh escaped him before he gently explained it to her. I don’t think she believed him. I took more classes from him but never saw her again. Not her cup of tea I suppose.
Whoa. That’s a good one!
Given what we know about Paul, why did the early Christians accept his claim to have seen a vision, and does his character give us good reason to trust his testimony, especially where it appears to diverge from Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels? Furthermore, what seems to have driven his ministry: a sincere desire to please God, or a quest for personal recognition?
It appears he was a very convincing speaker. And I’m afraid we can’t tell what his internal motivations were. (I suppose that’s true, technically, for everyone, though we often do take guesses and sometimes think we very much know…)
Professor Ehrman inspired me to think about my faith. Thank you!
“Theology goes awry when it fails to base faith on objective truth. When theology requires belief in unsupported claims—especially when it links Christianity to assertions that can be easily challenged or disproven—it weakens faith and makes it fragile.”
Excerpt From
What’s Wrong With Theology?
F.J. Morelli
This material may be protected by copyright.
Just this past week I watched “The God Makers,” an anti-Mormon film screened at evangelical churches in the 1980s, for the second time. The film was shown to us teenagers in Sunday School, and the indoctrination worked–I grew up thinking Mormons were a cult of crazies who believed they’d become deified after death and run their own planets as gods.
My point is that I now realize, rewatching as an atheist adult, that every gap or inconsistency the filmmakers levied about how Mormon beliefs had evolved over nearly 150 years to conveniently fit the present narrative could have been successfully applied to Christian theology in the mid- to late second century. Every hole the filmmakers poked into Joseph Smith’s story could have been used to shred the origins of their own evangelical beliefs.
https://archive.org/details/1982-the-god-makers
Bart, did it ever occur to you that maybe the paint was the wrong color for the house?
Could THAT have been the sign?
I bet that was covered in one of the Moody books!
Ah! It was definitely the wrong color for my hair…
I get Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons banging on my door all the time…and sometimes I let them out! (with thanks and credit to Jimmy Carr.)
Many years ago I was dragged along to Pentecostal church services. After one service outside on the lawn, the pastor came to chat to us and I mentioned just in passing that I have hurt my back lifting something heavy. To my surprise the pastor put his fingers on the sore spot and shot off a quick prayer for healing. To my utter astonishment the pain disappeared! (Even though I was then, and still is, an atheist. I can’t explain it, perhaps my brain must somehow have stopped the pain signal from reaching my conscious mind).
Whoa. Well, the brain is an amazing thing.
For me, the difficulty with classifying the LDS church as just another variety of Christianity, analogous to any other sect, is that the LDS conception of God is so radically different from all other Christian sects’ conception of God. According to the Mormons I’ve discussed this with and the information on the Church’s own website, their conception of God is that He is NOT transcendent, but is a being who exists within this universe; he did not create the universe but is part of it. Far from being incorporeal, He has a wife and they have begotten countless souls, many of whom are still waiting to be incarnated in human bodies.
If I’m understanding this theology accurately–and I may not be–it is completely different from other Christian sects’ conception of God. It reminds me most of the ancient Greek gods (well, that’s my field), who did not create the universe but arose from it, who married, begot children, and so on.
As an atheist, I’m making no call about which conception of God is more plausible; but they’re so different I have trouble classifying them as variations of the same religion. What would “same” even mean there?
My view is that Christianity has a lot of different (otherwise seen as weird) manifestations that do not accord with the traditoinal orthodox views — going back to Marcion, the Sethians, the Valentinians, and so on… I myself am loathe to say that any person/group that thinks / believes that Jesus is the way to salvation is not a Christian (especially if they themselves believe the are). If “Christian Gnostics” could believe in 365 gods … OK then!
As a practicing Latter Day Saint, I can say that your take on our view of God is generally correct. We are materialists, i.e. God organized rather than created “ex-nihilo”. God and Christ are physical beings (the Holy Ghost is not). The upshot of having heavenly parents (Father and Mother) leads to the idea that the nuclear family is an eternal template (my wife and I also believe we are married for eternity). We do believe that Jesus died for our sins, was resurrected the third day and will return, etc. so our soteriology is pretty close to the orthodox view. What usually gets us thrown out of the club is that we don’t believe in the common trinitarian view of the 3 in 1 God that exists outside of time, something that has never seemed coherent to me. One side benefit of a God that organizes rather than created ex-nihilo is that it implies God couldn’t create a world that didn’t include suffering, that somehow it is baked into the universe (my view). In short, God didn’t create suffering. Lastly, my club (who God inspires) includes anyone who is helping the less fortunate!
I’m glad as an atheist I’m in your club!! Or at least would like to be. (When it comes to the less fortunate)
You’re in there for sure brother, very inspired by what this blog does for others (and I’m sure this isn’t the only contribution you make).
That’s the project, shape ourselves in good ways as we learn that the point is that “it isn’t about me”.
I must confess however, that I talk much better than I walk but I can still aspire…
Thank you for this courteous and informative reply. I taught for a year at Utah State University in the 1990s and had long theological discussions with one student, working on his MA in history. I remember asking him, “Well, if God didn’t create the universe, then how DID the universe originate? ” He looked really startled and said “I’ve never thought about that.”
That really brought home to me that not only were our two conceptions of God (I was a Christian then) totally different, so was what we sought in/from religion. For me, the question of how the universe originated, how something came into being out of nothing, is THE primary question that fueled all my theological speculations from a very early age — when I was four years old, I asked my mother “If God made the world, then who made God?” Everything else, all other theological questions, were always secondary; the driving question is how did this all come into existence? So for me, a god who is a physical being, and who organizes rather than creates, sort of misses the point.
But I heartily agree about helping the less fortunate!
The best analogy I have read is that Mormonism is to Christianity, as is what Christianity is to Judaism. They both arose out of the earlier religion, but changed the beliefs fundamentally.
I think this is right. We have common ground with the resurrection of Jesus and the atonement theology is very similar, but it diverges pretty quickly, the nature of God, no original sin, frankly even God’s purposes with the world differ significantly. I’ve also felt we have much in common with the Jewish faith culturally. Both are very communitarian. I served as an LDS Bishop and members will bring their personal and financial problems to their Bishop as one would with their Rabbi. Our buildings have basketball courts to encourage the youth to come together. In short, the congregations behave as large families (plus both groups have endured significant persecution). Both have significant humanitarian efforts (we do a lot of work with Jewish Family Services which is a great organization that does refugee placement).
John Horgan is approximately your age and he has a blog, also. He spent a career as a staff journalist of Scientific American. He leveraged his ascent up the ranks to get the pre-approval of the eventual publication of his manuscript in 1996, The End of Science. In one of the latter chapters, he finally reveals the impetus of his book. Like your falling off of the ladder in 1975, he had an experience. He had an encounter with GOD – all inside of his Mind. He had two choices. Step “toward” the experience, or step “away” from the experience. Our minds are hard-wired with Mental Defense Mechanisms (MDM), so his decision to step “away” was received by his MDM and processed into something palatable to his worldview. In 1996, he reported the experience as a “psychotic episode”. Immediately, I remembered the story of JOB in the Old Testament.
Interesting.
In 7th grade San Jose, the Mormons showed me where the Lord’s Prayer was in the Bible [Matthew] no conversion talk.
Mormons presidential voting record for the past decade puts to shame the “USA church”
Very Interesting posts. A person’s experience isn’t something that can be refuted….like you said. It’s theirs….it’s personal, but we can evaluate it to see if it’s credible. Mormons describe a “burning in the bosom” to tell how they feel God is confirming the revelation of Joseph Smith. Smith always claimed to be a prophet. In Doctrines&Covenants-84 Smith prophesied that the “temple of the Lord” would be built by the generation of 1830 at a specific place in Independence Missouri. Didn’t happen. D&C-87 He prophesied(12-25-1832) that civil war would break out and spread upon ALL nations of the earth, and all nations would be destroyed…..the Day of the Lord. Didn’t happen.
The test of a true prophet? His claims come to pass. Evidence of a false prophet? His predictions fail(Deuteronomy18:21,22/Jeremiah28:9,15-17). Smith is therefore a false prophet; one of the ones Jesus warned would come and “deceive many”(Matthew24:11,24).
Brigham Young(Journal-of-Discourses:bk8,pg115)and Bruce McConkie(MormanDoctrine:1966ed,pg388) taught that Jesus was procreated by God the Father having sex with the Virgin Mary; “the same way all people are procreated.” They’re false teachers.
The Mormon’s experience may be real, but I would conclude that it’s not God confirming Joseph Smith’s revelations or Mormonism.
What’s Bart’s conclusion?
I too don’t think God confirmed Joseph Smith’s claims. But then again I don’t believe in God.
Respect to you for reading the Book of Mormon. I tend to agree with what Mark Twain purportedly said, that it is like “chloroform in print” – I’ve tried to read it, but found it interminably dull. Even the book of Numbers looked exciting by comparison!
Religious literature of all kinds almost always seems interesting mainly to people who are in the particular traditoin it embraces….
The Eastern Orthodox Church says that the Catholic and Protestant churches have part of the truth. However, according to the EOC, the Catholic church has more of the truth than the Protestant churches because it was founded closer in time to the proto-Orthodox church and has less divergent doctrines.