An article a couple of years ago in BYU Studies reviewed how many modern philosophers and theologians were increasingly concluding, after their thoughtful research and analysis, that God’s love and justice favors certain things: A social trinity founded on mutual love, an opportunity for all mankind to receive the saving Gospel after death, an understanding of salvation as the process of becoming like the Son of God.

Truman Madsen’s special insight lay, for me, in his explication of how Joseph Smith, in his intellectual innocence, offered us the answers at the end of these long pondering journeys, demonstrating that the revelations received by Joseph were also intellectually respectable and justifiable. They were not anti-intellectual, but rather anticipated intellectual searching.

Truman Madsen’s teachings have for me reaffirmed what Henry Eyring said defined God: He is the smartest person around. The best intellectation moves toward finding out the understandings that God offers us through revelation.

The other side of him was just as telling. I happened to be in the MTC and one day while standing in line for lunch we met a group of newly arrived missionaries. it was their first day in the MTC. One of those missionaries was a Sister Madsen, Truman’s daughter. Everyone was filled with awe and jealousy as the mail runner came back to line with a single letter in his hand. A letter written by Dr. Madsen and his wife to their daughter on her first day in the MTC.

He was caring, a loving father and husband, but most of all he was a good man. He will be missed, but his legacy will go on forever.

Nate mentions that his works were not academically rigorous productions. I think there are three reasons for this. First, Madsen’s interests spanned disciplines: philosophy, of course, but also world religion (ancient and modern), Judaism and Near Eastern studies, and intellectual, American, and Mormon history. His work on B. H. Roberts has very little to do with his writing on the symbol of olive or his work on JS. It seems doubtful that anyone, let alone someone as gifted as Madsen, would have either the time or the patience to keep up to date on the literature and major debates of all of these disciplines simultaneously.

Second, Madsen addressed primarily an Latter-day Saint audience. Despite his work in the Evans chair, his written work almost exclusively addresses the Saints, and so do his tapes. His most productive period came during a time when the Brethren were relying on intellectuals like him, and using them up in some sense, in everything from Know Your Religion to a steady round of symposia in the Mormon heartland. In this sense he his much like the later Nibley, who likewise layed his gifts on the altar of the church. (Madsen may have thought he was doing for philosophy and religious history what Nibley was doing with ancient and middle eastern history.) They both wrote at a time when it was assumed the Saints needed help finding their way through the bewildering maze of worldly sophistication. And in each case, the product was the same: the wisdom of the world confirms the Gospel rather than refutes it. They both wrote in the consensual spirit, playing up similarities and playing down differences, and very much in opposition to Mormonism’s overly bedazzked Lost Generation.

Third, Madsen’s style did not lend itself toward rigor. He was more artist than scientist, more wordsmith than logician, more impressionist than realist. He loved to make the truth witty and clever. Like many intellectual historians, he found it more to his liking to write an essay than to carry a thesis along to 250 pages. Much of his work hints or gestures at possibilities rather than actually proves or argues them. His great gift in writing, as well as speaking, was to evoke. But that is no small gift, and there was no one, ever, in our history did it better than he did. His life was far too short.