Anyway, I like how you place revelation as ‘outside’ of discourse. Frankly, if revelation didn’t provide ‘meaning’ to life & to action…I don’t know if I could live. Trying to give/create ‘meaning’ for all of your daily actions is just plumb exhausting.

So I agree that both views can make use of similar arguments about the problems with idolizing reason, but they quickly part ways about what deserves reason’s vacated throne.

An LDS view is, “we have this piece of information by way of revelation, so we know it to be true. Does reason etc. help us understand this information better?” But the primacy of the revelation is, as you pointed out, very apparent. Since most other faiths reject modern revelation, perhaps this path is not as open to them as it is harder to pull off with just the Bible.

A postmodernist view (as best I can tell) begins similarly to the LDS one but is totally different in its ending. What is the “piece of information” that claims primacy in a way comparable to revelation? One rejects reason and embraces what, exactly?

One reason for Mormons to embrace postmodernism is that they find various claims others make in the name of reason, unacceptable. Yet as you point out, there is another way to critique, in particular, the conclusions of Greek philosophy: to identify their culturally-bound, religio/moral presuppositions or other pre-philosophical intimations, and critique those. The Greek philosophers thought changelessness better than change, and thought of their bodies as at least in part shameful. Yet these do not seem to be pronouncements of pure reason. We might simply say they must be false, because our revelations tell us that certain kinds of change, and certain kinds of embodiment, apparently including sexuality, are actually better than changelessness and incorporeality. We might also suggest, taking a more psychological approach, that Greek distaste for change and embodiment simply stemmed from their not knowing the blessings of the redemption, which is a perfecting and ennobling change (perhaps a perpetually ongoing change, even) of both spirit and body.

Is claiming that many philosophical claims are based in part on dubious, extra-rational assumptions tantamount to postmodernism? I don’t think so. At least, if it is, then I think Aristotle becomes a postmodernist.

Similarly, some of the pronouncements of science (a more recent claimant to the imprimatur of Reason) that fit badly with Mormon views (e.g. big bang theory, which suggests the universe has a beginning in time) are susceptible to scientific critique.

So, some resorts to postmodernism seem to me premature, not having exhausted the resources of (what I take to be) more or less conventional reason to counter falsehoods. While Mormons are very critical of the wisdom of the world (perhaps this refers in part to reason used in the context of fallen desires and spiritual ignorance), they are also traditionally very optimistic about the comprehensibility and rationality of the world, even the ways of God.

Philosophically, I have no quarrel with Mormons who see resources in post-modern thought. But there’s a history-of-ideas aspect to the appeal of post-modernism for Mormons: that’s what I’m pointing to. There are reasons that some Mormons find post-modernism appealing that have little to do with the coherence of the ideas and a lot to do with a religious-cultural predisposition to regard other Western intellectual and theological traditions with extreme suspicion.

Consider, for example, Mormons who become Unitarians. Do they become Unitarians because of the attraction and coherence of that tradition’s particular resolution of the theological problems created by the collapse of Puritanism at the Harvard Divinity School in the early decades of the 19th century? Do they find the Unitarian solutions to the problems of trinity, predestination, and other Calvinist quandaries unusually compelling on the merits, or does the political and theological liberalism of Unitarianism simply provide a nice landing place for former Mormons reacting against the political conservatism of Mormon culture and the authoritarian aspects of Mormon theology without jettisoning spirituality, ecclesiastical community, and some version of the social gospel?

I should add that, intellectually, there were themes in Unitarianism that resonated strongly with my Mormon background and provided a kind of bridge: the rejection of the doctrine of original sin, for example, and the emphasis on continuing revelation.

I’d also disagree with revelation not fitting into philosophy. First off I think that position is found within Aquinas. There is a sense of negative theology to his thought culminating in the vision he had after which he would no longer write. Further there is the sense that Mormon theology is within “common sense” and thus less apothetic than we find in the Catholic tradition. I think there is a sense in which revelation is transcendent, but we have to be careful what we mean by that.

I’d also second Ben in that I think Mormons distrust philosophy precisely because of Greek thought. I think this is unfortunately far too often overstated. (There were, after all, lots of Greek materialists) But I think that the oversimplified view of the apostasy as philosophy corrupting religion is widely held. I don’t know that this explains why Mormon philosophers become postmodernists. Perhaps we do worry about “logocentrism.” But it might also just be an accident of the fads of philosophy at the moment.

Massimo Introvigne, “The Book of Mormon Wars: A Non-Mormon Perspective,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, vol. 5, no. 2.

Let me suggest an alternative intellectual pedigree for Mormon post-Modernism. Perhaps it has less to do with the Mormon attack on philosophy and the Hellenization thesis about the apostacy. (After all, this view was well articulated by B.H. Roberts and Hugh Nibley long before post-modernism had intellectual currency outside of the continent.) It seems more likely to me that Mormon post-modernism is less about the desire to vault over and ignore two thousand years of philosophy, and more about rather parochial debates about how to properly write Mormon history.

As it happens most issues of Mormon theology and Mormon thought to the extent that they get sophisticated scholarlly treatement get thrashed out in the context of history and historiography. It seems to me that it was in this context — not in the context of discussing the notion of apostacy — that traditionalist Mormon post-modernism first emerged. I am thinking now of the Bohn-Alexander exchanges in the early and mid-1980s which probably did as much as anything to put the idea of tradtionalist Mormon post-modernism on the map. In this context, post-modernism was used to attack the assumed neutrality and invioability of the naturalistic assumptions used by some in the New Mormon History.