Why the RLDS Restoration branches reject the King Follet sermon

[soren1]

Wouldn’t that make you a “polytheist” according to that webster-dude who keeps trying to turn this into a discussion on polytheism?

No. When I say the false gods were real, I mean there were actual demons behind the Canaanite cults. That is not a univocal use of the word “god,” since a demon is called a called only in an improper sense, insofar as he is an object of worship. That is an accidental likeness to God that does not make the demon into an actual god by nature.

To be a polytheist, one must not simply use the term “god” of more than one being, but must do so univocally, that is, with no variation in meaning. False gods are called gods metaphorically; glorified saints and angels are called gods analogically, by virtue of their internal reception of the divine person; but only God is called God strictly, by virtue of his own self-existent nature. That diversity in the meaning of “God,” which is thoroughly supported by biblical usage (e.g. Exod 7:1; Ps. 96:5, 1 Cor 8:5; 1 John 3:2), prevents us from being polytheists even when we say things like “we will be gods.” In such contexts, only an insistence on treating “god” as a univocal term at all points, as happens in Mormonism, results in polytheism.

I agree that polytheism doesn’t matter. The issue in Deut 13 isn’t whether you beleive theoretically that other gods might exist, but whether you actually WORSHIP any God other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Polytheism does matter. It just doesn’t bear on the particular argument I am making. My assertion that Smith teaches us to follow other gods is not directed to the polytheistic teachings in his exegesis of Gen 1:1. It has instead to do with his claim that God is a man like ourselves who progressed to godhood. Even if there were only one God in Smith’s cosmology, this claim, if false, would still show him as a false prophet. For if the God who revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is not in fact a changing being limited in his creative power as Smith would have it, then Smith has falsified God’s nature, and so has falsified God’s identity. That amounts to following a different god. I could provide philosophical grounds for drawing that conclusion, but I think it is more to the point that, as we have already seen, Smith himself claims that the true identity of God, as it pertains to his worship, is at stake in this teaching.

Notice my use of “if” in the preceding paragraph. I use that qualifier for the purpose of limiting my comments. I am not trying to show that Smith was wrong in the KFD. There would be no point in doing that since you deny the relevance of the sermon. I am therefore arguing only for its relevance, prior to any particular judgment about its correctness. Even my discussion of polytheism above is intended principally to establish what I mean by “polytheism,” rather than to determine whether polytheism is true.

I’m quite sure that you’re wrong on that. The accurate statement is that first time heretics weren’t traditionally put to death. A second offense was considered “Stubborn” or “willful” heresy, and that’s when the Inquisition invoked the death penalty for heresy.

Why do you think that makes me wrong? That proves I am right. Stubborn or willful heresy is the same thing as formal heresy. A first-time heretic is presumed to be a heretic only materially, that is, he is in error about some matter; only persistence in the same error manifests that he is a heretic formally.

What you say may be the standard today, but that’s clearly not it was historically.

What I have explained here is the classical Catholic position summed up by Robert Grosseteste in thirteenth century: “a heresy is an opinion chosen by human perception contrary to holy Scripture, publically avowed and obstinately defended.” Views essentially identical to this can be found in early centuries right up through the medieval period to the present day. It is absolutely standard and non-controversial. Consider the view of St. Augustine, who writing in the late fourth century, became the most influential Catholic theologian throughout the Early Medieval period:
Those are by no means to be accounted heretics who do not defend their false and perverse opinions with pertinacious zeal (animositas), especially when their error is not the fruit of audacious presumption but has been communicated to them by seduced and lapsed parents, and when they are seeking the truth with cautious solicitude and ready to be corrected.
Thus, when speaking of what Aquinas later called a “material heretic” Augustine did not even use the word “heretic,” but notes that those who reject some part of the faith because they are ill-informed or innocently mislead are not culpable. Only obstinacy puts one in opposition to the faith.

In the High Medieval period the most important theologian to press this point was Gratian, whose Decretum became the first volume in the earliest version of the Code of Canon Law, and remained in effect from the twelfth century until 1918. There, backing it up with extensive patristic evidence, Gratian asserts, “By no means should we accuse of heresy those who, however false and perverse their opinion may be, defend it without obstinate fervor, and seek the truth with careful anxiety, ready to mend their opinion, when they have found the truth.”

That is a little bitty taste of the evidence that supports my explanation of heresy, which you say is “clearly not what it was historically.” As it happens, my account is supported in 100% of all orthodox Catholic theology you can find, from any given century. If you could find even one Catholic theologian who taught that mere intellectual error made a person guilty of heresy, I would consider it a major find.

 

[soren1]

Do you have any evidence that the Catholic church ever confronted Joseph Smith about his opinions? Then by your standards, how can you call him an heretic?

In the legal sense of having been condemned explicitly by the Church he was not a heretic, but any baptized person who knowingly opposes any article of the Catholic Faith is a heretic de facto even if not de jure.

I am exquisitely uncomfortable with the 2nd half of D&C 132, but you’d never hear me refer to it as I did the KFD. The difference is that Section 132 is claimed as official prophesy. JS never made such a claim for the KFD, and if he spoke as a man, then it’s perfectly appropriate for me to mock when someone tries to cast the KFD as canonized scripture.

Have I ever claimed it is canonized scripture? Where have I said that? Have I not rather been arguing that the KFD is an adequate text to test whether Smith was a prophet regardless of whether it is scriptural or even official LDS teaching? Here is what I wrote at the start, and you may take this as my thesis statement:
*The canonical status of the King Follett discourse is irrelevant. The whole modern Mormon distinction between official and unofficial doctrine is extraneous to most questions of prophetic authority. To show why this is, two questions, that are often confused, need to be always distinguished:

1. Is doctrine X official LDS teaching?
2. Does doctrine X test Smith’s authority as a prophet?

Mormons generally assume that the answer to #2 can only be “yes” if the answer to #1 is also “yes.” This makes a lot of intuitive sense to Catholics, because we ourselves think that papal infallibility operates only when the pope speaks officially, in his capacity as pontiff. Naturally, we think it is reasonable and fair to extend the same considerations to Mormon prophets.

But it is not. A prophet is different from a pope. Popes do not speak directly from God. When someone claims to be a prophet, he claims to speak for God directly, and should be tested by criteria appropriate to that claim. This means Mormon prophets really have to meet a significantly higher standard than popes. The Biblical standard for judging the doctrine and worship of a prophet is plenary infallibility. *
How much more clearly could I have made the point? My contention all along has been that the KFD can be used to evaluate whether Smith was a false prophet irrespective of its canonical status for Mormons. How can you hear implied in that thesis an implication that the KFD is canonized scripture? The point of departure for my whole discussion, the only reason I turned to Deuteronomy 13 in the first place, is because I grant that the KFD is not part of the Mormon canon. That is why I make an effort to supply different grounds for using it to test Smith!

To tell the truth, if I thought that the KFD were Mormon scripture, and if I intended to convince that it was, I would not make Smith’s claim that God progressed the centerpiece of my argument. Oh no. If the text is scripture, then any error would disprove it, so I would head straight for Smith’s translation of Gen 1:1, by far the weakest point in the text. Yet I am not bothering with that. I am sticking to the portion that most unambiguously pertains to Deut 13, Smith’s teaching that the god we ought to worship was once a man. My admission that the KFD is not canonized scripture is my whole reason for limiting myself as I have done.

 

[soren1]

But you make one counterfactual claim. You say that Smith made no claim to inspiration in the KFD. He actually did, and asserted that his authority as a prophet could be tested by it. At the very beginning, he says:

I have been requested to speak by his friends and relatives, but inasmuch as there are a great many in this congregation who live in this city as well as elsewhere, who have lost friends, I feel disposed to speak on the subject in general, and offer you my ideas, so far as I have ability, and so far as I shall be inspired by the Holy Spirit to dwell on this subject.
I want your prayers and faith that I may have the instruction of Almighty God and the gift of the Holy Ghost, so that I may set forth things that are true and which can be easily comprehended by you, and that the testimony may carry conviction to your hearts and minds of the truth of what I shall say. Pray that the Lord may strengthen my lungs, stay the winds, and let the prayers of the Saints to heaven appear, that they may enter into the ears of the Lord of Sabbaoth, for the effectual prayers of the righteous avail much. There is strength here, and I verily believe that your prayers will be heard.

You will notice that he does not claim that his exact words are going to be dictated by God, but he is confident that the Holy Spirit will move him, and prays for this in confidence. Note in particular the repetition of “so far as” in the first quoted sentence; in the second instance, he states as his intention that the extent to which he speaks is the same as the extent to which the Holy Spirit moves him. At the very least, Smith is vouching for the sermon on his personal testimony, and later in the sermon he will assert his testimony directly in favor of several of his teachings. But that is just the beginning; only a few sentences later, Smith makes the single most biblical statement in the entire sermon:

My first object is to find out the character of the only wise and true God, and what kind of a being he is; and if I am so fortunate as to be the man to comprehend God, and explain or convey the principles to your hearts, so that the Spirit seals them upon you, then let every man and woman henceforth sit in silence, put their hands on their mouths, and never lift their hands or voices, or say anything against the man of God or the servants of God again. But if I fail to do it, it becomes my duty to renounce all further pretensions to revelations and inspirations, or to be a prophet; and I should be like the rest of the world – a false teacher, be hailed as a friend, and no man would seek my life. But if all religious teachers were honest enough to renounce their pretensions to godliness when their ignorance of the knowledge of God is made manifest, they will all be as badly off as I am, at any rate; and you might as well take the lives of other false teachers as that of mine, if I am false. If any man is authorized to take away my life because he thinks and says I am a false teacher, then, upon the same principle, we should be justified in taking away the life of every false teacher, and where would be the end of blood? And who would not be the sufferer?

If Smith is not claiming to speak as a prophet, but only as a private person, why would he tell us that his credibility as a prophet stands or falls on what he is going to say about the divine nature? Why does he come out agreeing with me rather than with you?

 

[soren1]

I’m sorry that you have such a low opinion of your church to make the leap from torches to Catholicism. That saddens me, Soren. The fact is that even your Spanish Inquisition saved more people from being burned to death by secular authorities, than it ever condemned. Brother Alonzo Salazar y Frias (cruelly libeled as “the witches’ advocate”) is a great hero of mine, and brought then-unprecedented standards of rationality into the trial process.

A low opinion of my church? Again you have not followed my argument. I was not expressing my own opinion of Catholic history, but was rather making a point about the understanding and evaluation of Catholic history within Mormonism. I said that from the Mormon point of view, stake-burning of heretics was objectively evil. Thus from a Mormon point of view, a moral comparison between stake-burning and the precepts in Deuteronomy would implicate Deuteronomy in evil.

Now, I think I missed the mark because you don’t seem to have the same view of the Inquisitions as every other Mormon I have ever talked to about it. I am used to Mormons having a view roughly equivalent to that expressed by Talmage in The Great Apostasy:

Of this infamous institution as operative in Spain, Mayers says, “The Holy Office, as the tribunal was styles, thus became the instrument of the most incredible cruelty. Thousands were burned at the stake, and tens of thousands more condemned to endure penalties scarcely less terrible.” … What shall be said of a Church that seeks to propagate its faith by such methods?

Given that this expresses, at least in my experience, the usual LDS view of the Inquisitions, you will understand perhaps why I easily saw in your repeated allusions to stake burning a furtive implication of similarity between by treatment of Deuteronomy and the horrors imputed to Catholic theocracy. This especially since burning was not an Old Testament practice but is a Medieval innovation. Even if that was not your intention, it seemed a fairly evident suggestion from the way you wrote. I can admit an error here on my part, but it comes from my experience of Mormon apologetics, not my own dismissal of Catholic history.

I’d rather you not take us seriously, than make false accusations against us that seem likely to get someone murdered.
It’s not a “joke” at all. I have parents on a mission in the Congo; they’ve seen people murdered by stoning, and I fear for their lives when people post vicious distortions of scripture which seem likely to incite murder.

and

My laughter wasn’t mocking, it was nervous. I have seen Orthodox Jews and even one Conservative Jew use that Deut 13 scripture to justify threatening murder against a Jewish woman that was converting to Catholicism.

and

Their interpretation was as wrong as yours, even though I believe you when you say that you did not mean to incite murder

I sympathize with your concern for your parents, but they have nothing to fear from my reading of Deuteronomy. They are endangered by a misappropriation of it. In and of itself the text is spirit and life, and we can gain wisdom from it even if others, rebelling against God, use it to condemn themselves to darkness.

I do not need to answer for anyone else’s use of this text. If I were to confine myself only to texts that had never been used as justification for evil, then I would never be able to quote anything beyond the beatitudes. Should I stop quoting passages from John’s gospel that have been used to justify anti-Semitism? Should I edit out passages that have been used to justify violence against homosexuals? I doubt that any of the people who use texts in that way are participating on this forum, and I have said nothing that would advance their cause.

I am not at all, by the way, unaware of how this text is used in other countries. I didn’t know about the Congo, but I do know that Islamic militants, who view the Koran as an extension of the Mosaic Law, do refer to places in the Torah where they find justifications for religious violence. The thing is, however, I don’t think any of those people are reading at this forum. I anticipate that most people reading my posts are Catholics, and the distinction I drew between the operation of the judicial precepts in the Old Law, which are no longer enforced, and the underlying theological insights, which are eternal, is Catholic Covenant Theology 101. In a better world, it would not have required explanation. Since justifying the murder of religious dissenters requires reading the text in a way totally antithetical to the Catholic worldview; you have no grounds to attribute those conclusions to me even as an unintentional implication. Your response at this point has been totally improper.

 

[soren1]

It wasn’t back then, when those that led Israel astray took them into cults which practiced human sacrifice. It seems obvious from context that it wasn’t intended to apply to Jews that converted to Catholicism or to Catholics who converted to the LDS church.
Nope. Back when Moses said it, that was simple self-defense against the atrocities of the local human-sacrificing pagans.

I find no warrant in the text for these claims. While human sacrifice is condemned a few verses before, there is no reason to assume that it is therefore the defining rationale for laws of this kind. The purpose of the whole Deuteronomic code is to safeguard divine worship. The most important context for understanding the whole Deuteronomic Code is the incident of the Golden Calf. Because Israel has proved a wayward son, God enforced especially harsh precepts against idolatry in the laws he gave them afterwards. [Note that the calf incident involved no human sacrifice, since Egyptian cults did not sacrifice humans, but still resulted in 3,000 executions before God took mercy on the remnant.] That is the reason for the hard form of holiness code; there is no “self-defense” ethic implied in any of the penal statutes.

I could go on an defend that at length, but since I already wax long, I will limit myself to pointing out why, even if true, your argument about human sacrifice is still irrelevant. The text we are looking at is a legal text, which is composed of two logically distinct parts:

1. A teaching about how to identify a false prophet.
2. A teaching about how to punish a false prophet.

Teaching #1 is about conviction; teaching #2 is about sentencing. My argument is based only on teaching #1, and your rebuttals have been based only on teaching #2. Thus nothing you have said is germane to the matter.

There is a big difference between these two aspects of the text. While sentencing is a matter of practical prudence, determining guilt is a matter of absolute truth. Teachings about practical prudence can change relative to time, situation, dispensation, and covenant. But a question of absolute truth cannot. Teaching falsehood about who is God defines a false prophet, and is a valid way to test a prophet, absolutely speaking. No distinction between official and unofficial teaching, canonical or non-canonical texts, figures in. This is not an historically relative matter and therefore Mormon prophets can be tested by their non-canonical statements if they ever violate the Deuteronomic standards. Joseph Smith and the Bible agree at this one place.

But if your only argument for the capital punishment part to not apply today is that Jesus did away with all that, aren’t you tacitly saying that Jews, not believing in Christ, should apply Deut 13 to put to death Jews who convert to Catholicism? Are you sure that you want to go that way?

I think Jews should become Christians. For that reason, I would urge a Jew to not put anyone to death. Yet I would not justify my view by creating a false context to explain the text away. I would expect any Jew serious enough to enforce Deut 13:1-4 to know enough about the actual rationale for the Law to see right through that. But I wouldn’t say anything as false as “Jesus did away with all that.” Instead, I would say that Jesus fulfilled that. This acknowledges the holiness of the Law, and its eternal character, while uplifting Christ as the redeemer. What better response could there be? It might not win the day if my goal is to save my hide, but it has the distinct virtue of being true; as such it is the one the response that a Christian ought to give. What more could you want?

 

[Cowboy_Pete]

Now, I think I missed the mark because you don’t seem to have the same view of the Inquisitions as every other Mormon I have ever talked to about it. I am used to Mormons having a view roughly equivalent to that expressed by Talmage in The Great Apostasy:

Ah. Then I completely understand your response. I hope that dialogue will improve now that we’ve gained a better appreciation for each others’ specific backgrounds.

Talmage is a great religious scholar, and I hope that you’ve read his Jesus the Christ, but the history in The Great Apostasy is not at the same standard. Even when I served my mission in the 1980s, “Jesus the Christ” was recommended reading for missionaries, and “The Great Apostasy” was forbidden reading within the mission. (So was “mormon doctrine”, btw.)

I sympathize with your concern for your parents, but they have nothing to fear from my reading of Deuteronomy. They are endangered by a misappropriation of it. In and of itself the text is spirit and life, and we can gain wisdom from it even if others, rebelling against God, use it to condemn themselves to darkness.

I do not need to answer for anyone else’s use of this text.

You may not need to answer for it, morally, but I need to be concerned about it, every time that someone tries to apply to mormons a scripture that extends the death penalty, even if their intent is not to apply the death part. I think that your stretch of the categories was unwarranted personal interpretation.

If I were to confine myself only to texts that had never been used as justification for evil, then I would never be able to quote anything beyond the beatitudes.

Your private interpretation creates an over-broad category of offenders, far greater than that intended by the scripture itself. That’s an evil in itself, and one which could lead to murders, including murder of Catholics by Jews and Muslims, if they believe that your Trinity doctrine diverges from the God of Abraham.

Should I stop quoting passages from John’s gospel that have been used to justify anti-Semitism?

No. But you certainly should avoid the erroneous and implicitly murderous interpretations, e.g. that “the Jews” were culpable as a race for Jesus’ death. Any person educated in the scriptures should realize that John’s whole point was that the Sadducees (Caiphas’ people) were the ones who called the curse on their children and grandchildren, and that this curse was literally fulfilled in 70 AD, i.e. before the Gospel of John was written. John’s whole point in writing down those statements (which the earlier gospels did not mention) was to show that the curses had been fulfilled, as had the prophesied destruction of the Temple.

Should I edit out passages that have been used to justify violence against homosexuals?

Certainly not! But you certainly should avoid the foolish and murderous misinterpretation of Genesis that the sin of Sodom was “homosexuality,” when the story describes gang-rape of strangers. Surely any true disciple of Christ would recognize that the sin of rape outweighs the sin of homosexuality. Adultery is worse than fornication, but when a woman is raped, do we ask if she was married in order to determine how grave a sin the rape was? Of course not; it would be absurd. Surely you agree that rape is rape is rape.

But I wouldn’t say anything as false as “Jesus did away with all that.” Instead, I would say that Jesus fulfilled that.

I’m sure that nitpick is absolutely doctrinally correct, but in this context, your quibble is kind of like arguing over whether a Rhino has one horn or two horns while it runs you down and tramples you. After all, we’re dealing here with your private misinderpretation of scripture which could easily lead to murder of Catholic, LDS, and other Christian missionaries.

In short, Soren, I am not asking you to edit the scriptures, but simply to avoid illiterate misinterpretations of the scriptures which seem likely to lead to mass murder. When I talk about torches and pitchforks, I’m not talking about Catholicism, but the medieval mob mentality which certain logical manglings tend to promote. (If she weighs as much as a duck, she’s made of wood, and is therefore a witch!). My own people were victims of mobs, and AFAIK none of them were Catholic mobs.