When you get into religious studies departments, the general consensus is that Mormons are, with a few caveats, a generally fundamentalist group because of our attitude towards scripture. The “as far as it is translated correctly” caveat is a red herring that we use to argue we aren’t fundamentalists but which doesn’t hold water with scholars, because it doesn’t change the default assumption that we have that the Bible is the word of God (versus being, for example, a book written by men in an attempt to approach the divine, or a collection of stories about the divine). Our use of that bit is something like a get out of jail free card, for we often claim things are mistranslated when they actually aren’t mistranslated, but just points that we disagree with. So we still maintain the notion that there is a fixed text that was altered that we are trying to get back to. All the talk about plain and precious parts being removed reinforces the notion that there was a pure text that become corrupted.

If you doubt that we are essentially fundamentalist, try suggesting in Sunday School that Job wasn’t a real person, that there were multiple authors of Isaiah and Genesis, that Adam and Eve may not have been specific individuals, that there may not have been a world-wide flood, or that Jesus may not have done or said everything stated in the Bible, and see what happens. These would be rather mild assertions in some Christian circles, but the response in Mormonism is the typical fundamentalist response of denial or attempts to somehow shoe-horn everything in (Cf. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ, which uses a typical fundamentalist strategy to harmonize the Gospels).

Note that I’m not advocating a particular answer to any of those issues, but, as a group, we tend to be pretty uncomfortable with those sorts of questions. Now many readers here will say “I’m not uncomfortable with those issues,” but are you really typical in that regard?

This all leaves the other issues Eagleton raises aside, but here at least, most scholars (including specialists in American religion) would tend to agree with him.

Douglas H., I would love to hear you expand on this. My familiarity with this issue is primarily related to the classical theistic arguments for divine atemporality, particularly in the context of the theological debates of the late medieval period – namely that the Thomists were suspicious of arguments for divine temporality (or ordinate power) because the very stability of world created of out nothing, the ability to reason about it, and divine character itself were subject to question if God changed the rules midstream.

You have writers as recent as Richard M. Weaver (quoted by LDS authorities no less) who trace the entire decline of Western Civilization to William of Ockham, who was actually quite a moderate on the issue, any reputation to the contrary.

“BHodges: I think there are basically two kinds of Mormonism – one that holds that God can be judged according to a standard external to himself and another that holds that he is the author of all moral standards.”

This should be the case in all versions of Christianity since this distinction is the distinction between the Greek and the Hebrew notions of the good and the true as they relate to the divine, both of which exist within Christianity. Kierkegaard understood this brilliantly.

from the OP

“It is an attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of words, seeing God as the final guarantor of meaning. It means adhering strictly to the script. It is a fear of the unscripted, improvised or indeterminate, as well as a horror of excess and ambiguity.”

Its too bad that you didn’t address this part of TE’s statement, I think exploring these areas would be more interesting. We Mormons do have a tendency to stick to the script. It seems pretty clear to me that the continuous use of stock answers to stock questions every sunday might have something to do with an attempt to fix meaning, or a fear of what is indeterminate, ambiguous. Of course there is a lot more to it than that, its hard to do such a discussion justice without going into the history of metaphysics. Further, I think that some (perhaps many?) Mormons do basically accept a pre-modern essentially fundamentalist notion of truth that nonetheless can be opened every now and again by a prophet mediator who speaks for God. Can Mormon thought can really be well described in the modern / anti-modern paradigm? After all JS clearly saw the Biblical text as something that needed to be brought into conformity with prophetic speech. So to a greater extent than in other forms of Christianity the role of speech in relation to the written word remains classical as long as its not just any text or any speaker. The link to ultimate logos has to be institutionally established and accepted.

I have not read Eagleton since the 1990′s but the Eagleton I was reading was a better thinker than described in the OP. Is the OP setting up Eagleton as a straw man, or is Eagleton lacking in critical rigor in his latter work?

I was speaking to Terryl Givens about writing an intellectual history of Mormonism and he said that he and Bushman actually did write an outline for the project. He said that he was considering it for a future project. As you can imagine, I heartily encouraged him to do it. Until we have a book that addresses the different schools of Mormon thought we will continue to have to defend our personal views in an ad hoc manner without referencing or attributing what came before. In other words, without intellectual history I have no where to ground my ideas without appearing to be an anomaly and non-representative of Mormonism.

Unless you insist on divine timelessness, aseity, etc. (which Mormonism generally doesn’t) the latter approach is not that different from post Modernism – i.e. there is no possibility of a truly objective judgment.

The prior approach (if less popular these days) is amenable to standard modernist / Enlightenment approach on a long list of social and moral questions precisely because it pre-supposes that an objective judgment pertaining to the virtue of various moral and religious precepts is in fact possible.

I think I understand where you’re coming from to an extent. I’m not arguing that salvation is found in postmodernism, but that there have been interesting postmodern-like ideas in early Mormon thought. Broadly speaking this is a generalization that could be applied to many traditions. I was saying it would be interesting to trace currents in LDS thought specifically.

As far as systematic theology for Mormonism is concerned, I am in the camp that isn’t fully convinced that it is needed or possible. It may very well be. We all tend to construct little systems anyway, why not try to take it all the way? Well, that’s a good question, and one that deserves further thought. Element has had some interesting articles in that regard recently.

In Eagleton’s latest work his target his Dawkins and Hitchens and what he sees as the other Atheistic fundamentalists. What he offers again as an alternative, without ever really saying it, is his own brand of Godless religion. What he hates about Dawkins and Hitchens is not that they might be wrong about the evidence for God, but that they do not share his politics. The point for him has never been whether you believe in God or not; it is whether you are involved in the cause or not. He can’t stand the idea of a Dawkins sitting back in Oxford sipping tea and laughing about the stupid believers when there are so many bigger problems in the world. In an age of religious fundamentalism, what the political left sees in religion is not right beliefs, but right action. What they see are the last group of people who are truly willing to fight the status quo.

In my view, this is why he has to mockingly dismiss Mormonism. He is just clarifying the point that this is not what he has in mind when he argues for the need for something more self-assured to stand up to the flimsiness of postmodernism. For Eagleton, Mormonism and other forms of what he sees as right-wing fundamentalism in the United States are just the reverse problem of the postmodernists that rule the academy—too much certainty (but with just as much investment in the status quo of America’s late-capitalist system). He doesn’t have to belabour the point because he knows most of his readers will already agree with him.

Eagleton’s charm for many religious readers is often that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Eagleton is more than happy to lay into the Dawkins of this world or others of the intellectual elite, but don’t think he is doing so in order to defend your right to believe. He would just as heavily lay into you if he thought it was worth his time. Rather what Eagleton peddles is a Godless religion which is committed to social change at all costs. What’s that I hear … I think it might be Ezra Taft Benson rolling in his grave.

I don’t think this effort got seriously underway until the Church was back-pedaling on some of Brigham Young’s more curious doctrines, plus polygamy of course. And then with the “neo-orthodox” resurgence of several attributes common to classical absolutism, there was a desire to maintain those classical precepts in more or less the traditional way without going the rest of the way down the road to where all those “apostate” theologians had gone before. The easiest solution is the effective denial of mortal capacity to do systematic theology.

The alternative, among other things, means emphasizing a bunch of things that could make Mormonism look even more heretical to conventional Christianity than it already does. Stuff that could make Open Theism look like a relatively conservative innovation. That doesn’t appear to be very popular for political reasons, practical reasons, and most of all the fact that centuries worth of Arminian theology is much easier (and less controversial) to rely on than attempting to do Mormon theology from scratch.

Many commentators (post modern especially) speak as if systematic Mormon theology is impossible. Maybe so, but it would seem a far more coherent place to hang our hat than the near wholesale re-adoption of classical Arminian theology, as convenient as that may be. And I say that recognizing that systematic theology is never going to have precedence over revealed doctrine, nor should it.

I think it is a bit ambiguous to be asking the question “Are Mormons fundamentalist?” when there is so little consensus on what the term means. To most people it is whatever collection of traditional beliefs or practices one thinks are outdated. We might as well just use the term “reactionary” instead.