Christ is the Reason

Carl Mosser's chapter in The New Mormon Challenge remarks, not unfairly, that "no Latter-day Saints have yet distinguished themselves as world-class biblical scholars, philosophers, or theologians."² One is tempted to reply that, for a relatively small movement that did no t reach the million-member mark until 1953—preoccupied for its first century with fleeing persecution, establishing settlements throughout the West, and digging irrigation canals—we are not doing too badly. Or that, compared to the original Christian movement at AD 171, we have an acceptable number of tenured professors.

But there is a more fundamental reason, and it needs to be stated here.

I love philosophy. But philosophy is not a primary mode of religious reflection for Latter-day Saints. Nor is systematic theology. Not even a secondary mode. Nor a tertiary one.

We tell stories. "Of man's 1^st disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world."³ Of Moses and the children of Israel and the migration of a small group of Hebrews to the New World. Of the incarnation and atoning sacrifice of the Son of God. Of the visit of Jesus Christ to a shattered but expectant people in the Americas. Of the appearance of the Father and the Son to Joseph Smith. Of the pioneers, the modern Camp of Israel under a Latter-day Moses, fleeing persecution and colonizing the Great Basin.

And at the 1^st of each month, fasting—as well as many times in between—we tell one another of our own experiences with the grace of God and our faith in Jesus Christ.

Our chief intellectual accomplishments, as a religious culture, have come in the writing of history—journals, family and local histories, academic historiography.

The Bible, for us, is not a poorly organized systematic theology. It is a book of stories, a collection of testimonies.

There is a tangible quality to the witness of the Bible that is utterly different from the ontological speculations of the Hellenes and their imitators among the Christians. The authors of the New Testament did not offer syllogisms and metaphysics. They testified of "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life" (1 John 1:1).

The first few pages of the Clementine Recognitions, an early third-century Christian text, offer us a glimpse of a clash between Hellenized philosophical culture and a Christian witness that had not yet succumbed to its attractions. The first-person narrator, who identifies himself as Clement of Rome, tells of his youthful anxiety about the immortality of the human soul and his desperate search for proof of it. Clement joined the philosophical schools of his native city, but he was very disappointed and depressed to find no truly convincing arguments and to see that his teachers and fellow students were more interested in demonstrating their cleverness than in attaining to the truth. So desperate did he become that he even, for a time, considered taking up spiritualism.

But then rumors began to reach Rome of a great and powerful worker of miracles in the distant land of Palestine. And one day, while he was walking in the city, Clement encountered a Jewish Christian named Barnabas, who was proclaiming the coming of Christ to the passersby. "When I heard these things," recalls Clement, "I began, with the rest of the multitude, to follow him, and to hear what he had to say. Truly I perceived that there was nothing of dialectic artifice in the man, but that he expounded with simplicity, and without any craft of speech, such things as he had heard from the Son of God, or had seen. For he did not confirm his assertions by the force of arguments, but produced, from the people who stood round about him, many witnesses of the sayings and marvels which he related."

Impressed, a number of those in the crowd began to give credence to what Barnabas and his fellow witnesses related. But then a group of philosophically minded onlookers challenged Barnabas. They "began to laugh at the man, and to flout him, and to throw out for him the grappling-hooks of syllogisms, like strong arms." They asked him, Why do tiny gnats have six legs and a pair of wings, while the much larger elephant has only four legs and no wings at all? But Barnabas declined to enter into their frivolous objections. "We have it in charge," he said, "to declare to you the words and the wondrous works of Him who hath sent us, and to confirm the truth of what we speak, not by artfully devised arguments, but by witnesses produced from amongst yourselves."⁴

I find that same spirit or sensibility in the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Here is Hyrum Smith, one of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, writing in December 1839 of his recent sufferings in Missouri, where he had come face to face with the prospect of martyrdom: "I had been abused and thrust into a dungeon . . . on account of my faith. . . . However, I thank God that I felt a determination to die, rather than deny the things which my eyes had seen, which my hands had handled, and which I had borne testimony to, wherever my lot had been cast; and I can assure my beloved brethren that I was enabled to bear as strong a testimony, when nothing but death presented itself, as ever I did in my life."⁵ Four and a half years later, Hyrum Smith, with his brother Joseph, did go willingly to his death as a martyr, a witness. (The Greek word martyros, of course, means "witness.")

# posted by Adam and Myisha Partridge @ 8:02 AM