First I want to explain my admittedly (and deliberately) extreme formulation from yesterday, i.e., “not even close.” Though I think my boss could have done a much better job in making the case, I think he was right: Mormons simply believe too many things that are too radically discontinuous with the orthodox Christian tradition to be considered Christian. Compared to these differences, those separating Catholics and Baptists and Lutherans and Eastern Orthodoxy are quite tiny. As someone noted in the comments (sorry, I forgot the name), all of the above accept the validity of the Nicene Creed (except for the Orthodox, who object only over a single formulation about the Trinity). That’s a tremendous amount of overlap. Now, let’s remind ourselves of a few of the Mormons differences.

Mormons say Jesus came to earth a second time and preached the gospel to a group of people that no other Christian (or anyone else, for that matter) thinks even existed. This in itself is HUGE — and I’m afraid, Russell, that unless and until non-Mormon Christians become Mormons (meaning that they come to believe these things on the basis of the “burning in the bosom,” if that’s what it’s called), or some series of archeological discoveries are made to verify at least some key factual assertions of the BoM, then there will be no possible unification like the one you describe. Then there’s the BoM itself and the way it appeared, was translated, and then disappeared, which non-Mormons consider to be a hoax, through and through. Then there’s its distinct doctrine of atonement. Then there are the post-BoM revelations of JS, which frankly send Mormonism off in directions utterly removed from the Christian tradition — as foreign as, and in some ways much more foreign than, Islam’s views: the corporeality of God, the suggestion that God Himself was once a mortal human being and evolved into his divinity, the pre-existence of souls, rejection of creation ex nihilo, the centrality of America in the second coming, several levels of heaven — need I go on? Any one of these differences would make Mormonism a profoundly heretical Christian sect. Put them all together and it becomes, I think, something very much else entirely: a new religion that grows out of many of the same source materials, but takes them in profoundly different directions.

Now, I know that from a Mormon standpoint this all sounds kind of crazy, since you think that YOU and these beliefs represent the TRUE Christianity — more: the restoration of the true Christianity — and that the so-called Christianity that rejects all of them represents the apostasy. But this gulf or chasm in outlook is what led me to state the issue so starkly in yesterday’s post. And attempts to bridge this gap or deny it by suggesting that Mormons should be considered Christians because they believe in Jesus are, I’m afraid, unconvincing: what matters is what Mormons as opposed to non-Mormon Christians mean by “Jesus” and His Church — and as I hope the list above makes clear, the two groups mean very, very, very different things.

At the same time, though, I take Jim F’s point (to the extent that I understand it) about the difference between theological and political senses of the term “Christian.” I mean theologically Christian. I admit that politically speaking Mormons and non-Mormon Christians agree about quite a lot — including, for example, the moral grandeur of the Sermon on the Mount. That’s no small thing. But in the end, the theological differences are more fundamental. After all, lots of atheist humanists admire the teaching of the Sermon, too, while utterly rejecting the context of how and by Whom it was delivered.

Now, as usual, I’d like to leave you today by changing the subject just a bit. I’d like to explain why I — a Catholic — have so much more sympathy for Mormons and openness to the possible truth of its beliefs than (by far) most non-Mormons. Let me begin by saying that I hope you all understand how profoundly ridiculous most non-Mormons consider you to be. Occasionally I’ll say something like to this a Mormon friend and the response will be, “really? I had no idea.” Well, it’s true. It is extremely rare that a mention of Mormonism among non-Mormons — even intellectuals and even religious intellectuals — does not elicit a mocking joke about lots of wives and lots of gods and so on. In other words, it’s very rare to find someone who is willing to treat your faith with respect.

So, given that I’m no saint (latter-day or otherwise) and am guilty of harboring all kinds of ignoble prejudices, why am I different? Well, of course, some of it has to do with having lived and worked among Mormons for two years — and loving nearly every minute of it. But there’s something deeper at issue. Having been raised as a non-religious Jew, ALL religious belief seems incredible to me at some level. So Mormons think that God has a body and that He revealed himself in the 1820s to a rural farmer. That sounds weird. But certainly no less weird than the basic Christian belief that God became incarnate in a carpenter in Judea 20 centuries ago and then rose from the dead and ascended into heaven — let alone the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Trinity and lots of other things. In other words, having come from outside of all of these traditions, the playing field was already leveled for me. Of course lots of secularists feel this way and then conclude that all religion is equally absurd. But I was clearly more open to its truth for reasons I can’t quite explain.

And just as clearly, most “cradle” Christians are not open this way. For them, the doctrines of the orthodox tradition make intuitive sense in a way that Mormon views do not. But that’s always struck me as a very weak position, relying as it inevitably does either on the view that “what’s mine is true and what’s theirs is false” or the view that “what’s old is truer than what’s new.” Both are, of course, pretty pathetic. After all, if the first is valid, conversions would be impossible — and Christianity would never have arisen in the first place. As for the second, I can never get it out of my mind that in the year 150 AD, Christianity had been around for a shorter period of time than Mormonism has by today. Does that mean that the anti-Mormons of today would have rejected Christianity in 150? For their sakes, I hope not.

Anyway, that’s how it looks to me. I don’t do much with the Internet over the weekend so I can be fully available to my family, so I’ll be out of touch until Monday, for week 2 of guest blogging. Until then . . .

I’m pleased to have been able to inspire so many interesting comments in response to my provocation about the “fairy-tale” character of Mormonism, especially those that go beyond the too-easy “inside it makes perfect sense but outside it looks silly” response, which I’d think is hardly the right outlook for a missionary faith: the point is to bring those on the outside IN, is it not?

I would only add on the subject that . . .

I would only add that I think a good case can be made for Mormonism by appealing to something like natural human longings. That is, why not say: the “fairy-tale” character of the faith follows from the fact that it perfectly responds or answers to what human beings most want to be true. And isn’t that an indication of its truth rather than a sign that it’s all made up? Wouldn’t we expect the true religion to fit perfectly with our hopes and wants, like perfectly designed and produced shoes, as opposed to one that we have to work to make sense of? That is, given how opaque the human soul is — how much of a mystery we are to ourselves — isn’t the ability of Mormonism (in its ideal form, say) to identify and satisfy and answer what our souls long for evidence that it is true, as opposed to something made up out of whole cloth by some semi-literate rural teenager from nineteenth-century New York State?

OK, now that I’ve done my missionary work for the day (talk about preaching to the choir!), I’ll leave you with another provocation. Some of you might be aware that my boss (Richard John Neuhaus) angered a lot of Mormons about 4 years ago when he wrote a long essay for our magazine (I was teaching at BYU at the time) in which he answered the question “Are Mormons Christians?” in the negative. Now there’s no reason for any of you to go run and read the piece, though if you want to you can find it here (http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0003/public.html); it’s not nearly as informed about or respectful of the LDS as I think it should be. But that’s neither here nor there. I’d like to pose the question right here: Are Mormons Christians? And since I bet you’ve debated the question many times before, I’ll stir things up a bit more by offering you what I think is the definitive answer to the question: for Mormons, Mormons are the only true Christians — and for that very reason, for non-Mormons, Mormons are not, and can never be considered, Christians — not even close.

I’ll defend that view tomorrow. Until then, discuss.

Oh, and I have one last bit for Jim F. You say that it was a trick (though an unintentional one) to ask you to expound on the content of the “world” according to Heidegger while precluding you from making reference to formal structures. “Formal content,” you say, is all there is. But isn’t “formal content” a contradiction in terms? A purely formal theory or structure has no content — and that’s precisely my criticism of Heidegger’s thought: he’s defending the truth as it is disclosed within the “world,” but that world could be Nazi Germany or white Mississippi in 1952. Heidegger’s thought has no resources whatsoever to judge the practices (the content) of either world. I know that lots of scholars in the U.S. and Europe have begun to try to tease an ethics out of Heidegger. God bless them. I think he would have considered their efforts to be touching but superficial. On this I agree with Leo Strauss, Heidegger’s thought is permeated by the fact (and the implications of the fact) that ethics is impossible.

But before I say more on that, I’d like to settle things up with Jim F. . . .

Jim writes that “The world for Heidegger . . . [is] not empty. [It is] infinitely rich.” He then goes on to dismiss the “American reading” of Heidegger that “turns infinite richness into a kind of arbitrariness.” Leaving aside this latest example of him describing the position I’m taking in terms of its cultural pedigree (as if the fact that many American scholars hold something like my view means that this view is a prejudice I’ve unreflectively taken on as my own), I have a question: Could you list some of the content of the Heideggerian world? Not just the purely formal existential structures of Being and Time, Div 1, and not just the even more purely formal “thing” (the “jug” etc.) of his early 1950s essays, but actual, concrete content — like, for example, Aristotle’s virtues or regime types? I doubt you can. And why? Because Heidegger provides no such content; such content is and must remain (for the purposes of Heideggerian “thinking”) radically (even absolutely) indeterminate. The “world” is ANY world, Provo, 2004 precisely as much as Freiburg, 1933 — if you take my meaning. The point is that Heidegger has absolutely nothing to say in answer to the question that motivated philosophy from its Socratic starting-point: How should I live?

Now, perhaps you’ll reply that Heidegger’s texts are filled with pronouncements judging (negatively) how modern man lives (technologically): Don’t these statements imply some positive standard? Indeed they do. But there is, in Heidegger’s thought, no coherent basis or ground for those standards. Not nature, not reason, not even convention. And if Being is the standard — well, then that means that Heidegger simply “saw.” But how are we to share in this vision? To know that he’s not just the most brilliant of the anti-modern intellectuals running around Germany in the middle decades of the twentieth century? As far as I can tell Heidegger is a godless prophet — and that’s an odd kind of prophet indeed.

Two concluding (and quick) comments on Heidegger:

1. I’m surprised that you (Jim) say “the other beginning occurs over and over again in the history of philosophy.” But surely you know that Heidegger himself never speaks this way. Heidegger de-constructs (better: takes apart) the history of Western philosophy in order to think his (and our) way out of the (ever deepening) error in which that tradition has been mired for over two millennia. The 1936-38 Contributions and the lectures of the same period [GA 37/8, for example], when talk of the “beginning” is most pronounced, accord precisely with my “historicist” interpretation. Or so it seems to me.

2. To the extent that Levinas, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Marion, Taylor and other Heideggerians do appeal to concrete standards, they have left their teacher behind in this decisive respect. Good for them.

*

Now, to enchantment. Before reading Gary Cooper’s comment on my post, I was prepared to add to what I wrote yesterday by pointing out what all of you know very well: Mormons believe, for example, that every human being who has ever lived is the literal spirit child of an embodied God who actually resides on a planet in the visible universe — and that after we die we will literally be reunited with Him. If that’s not an enchanted world, I don’t know what is.

But Gary did such a marvelous job of “testifying” to what I had in mind that I’m tempted not to add to his remarks. But, alas, I won’t give in to that temptation.

I agree with Jim F that the term “enchantment” is precisely the right word to use for what Gary describes. And I’m glad that Jeremy mentioned Marcel Gauchet in this context. For those unfamiliar with his rich and profoundly intriguing (and vaguely Heideggerian) argument, Gauchet claims (in a book titled “The Disenchantment of the World”) that what modern, secular thinkers call “disenchantment” actually began with Christianity itself (for Mormons, the apostasy), which placed God in a different ontological dimension from the temporal, mundane world. Unlike the world of the pagan gods, for example, the Christian world is one in which the divine has been erased or expunged or purged or withdrawn — it is an absence, deriving its meaning and purpose only from its status as a negation of God’s eternal fullness and perfection. In such a scheme, God is very distant (most distant in the nominalist theories that proliferated in the late medieval and early Protestant eras) — so distant, in fact, that it is merely one short step to the view that there is no God at all, and the world is meaningless and purposeless — in other words, “disenchanted.” It is to this condition that modern (or, rather, anti-modern) thinkers rebel.

What’s interesting to me about this account in light of Mormonism is how the LDS avoid the problem altogether. I don’t mean “avoid” in a negative sense, by the way. When I taught a Nietzsche seminar at BYU I was fascinated by how the students responded to him; it was as if he were railing against something utterly foreign when he attacked “Christianity.” This was because, I think, Mormon Christianity is so far removed from the supposedly world-denying character of the Augustinian/Lutheran Christianity that Nietzsche associates with its essence. Likewise, in relation to Gauchet’s story of disenchantment, the LDS account of the apostasy, combined with its emphasis on a profound continuity between this life and the next, between the world that we know today and the one that awaits us, grants Mormons an entryway to a world that looks surprisingly like Gauchet’s “pagan” world — in which gods and humans interact almost on a daily basis. So, as it is with Nietzsche, the LDS manage to emerged unscathed in their confrontation with the profound and protracted modern problem of disenchantment. “But you’re not talking about us,” is a remarkably apt response for Mormons to quite a lot of challenges.

Now, I’ll leave you today with a provocation. Of course if you’re a believing Mormon you’re likely to respond to these last few paragraphs with a bit of self-congratulation at the accomplishment of JS and his successors in bypassing so many of the problems that have grown up around the Church of the “apostasy” and its progressive disintegration in modern times. Yet, I’d like you to consider another possibility — one linked, I suspect, to some defensiveness I detect on the part of some readers of my initial post on enchantment.

One of Mormonism’s considerable strengths, which grows out of its “nearness” to everyday life (which I’ve tried to highlight in my first few posts), is the extraordinary “good news” it has to share: unlike for Catholics or Protestants, a Mormon need not worry or be confused about how or in what way he will be reunited with those he loves in an afterlife. (Often this worry or confusion takes the following form: “How will I be ‘me’ and my loved ones be who they currently ‘are’ if they have no bodies, which must be the case in a purely spiritual heaven, which is what must await us, since to think otherwise would be to assume that I’ll have a penis in heaven, and that’s ridiculous and shameful because I know that sexual passion flows from original sin, which will be overcome by grace in heaven, if I’ve made myself worthy of receiving such grace, despite the fact that I know that to assume that one can earn grace is to prejudge God’s will which is utterly inexplicable to me, yet the Bible says our bodies will be resurrected at the Second Coming,” and so forth). For a Mormon, I am this body, this wife is my wife, her body is hers, and I’ll see and “live” with her for “eternity” (a really, really long time) after I “die.” In other words, for a Mormon death isn’t really death at all. Of course this is true to some extent for all believers in biblical religion, but Mormon emphasis on the profound continuity of this life and the next, and human beings and God(s), makes this even more so for them. No doubt this contributes to Mormonism’s extraordinary missionary successes: everyone wants to hear such “good news.” But this also leaves Mormons uniquely vulnerable to the charge that has always been leveled against biblical religion — namely that it’s just wishful thinking, fairytales, Santa Clause writ large, Disneyland Christianity, etc., through lots of things I’m sure all of you have thought about and heard said about you by non-Mormons.

The question is: How to respond to the charge? . . .

For now, let me leave you with a provocative suggestion . . .

Much of modern thought has been concerned about the problem of the “disenchantment of the world,” and it’s possible to say that the continued restless vitality of religion in America points to our collective longing for an enchantment that appears always on the verge of winking out of existence under modern conditions (in Europe they appear content to let it vanish).

Viewed in this context, Mormonism is remarkable for how radically it posits an enchanted world — doing, as it were, an end-run around other, less radical strategies for responding to modern disenchantment. After all, all orthodox Catholics and Protestants can say to modern men and women is: “Return to the old truths that still exist, preserved in the Church! Turn away from your false, secular assumptions and go back to the Tradition!” Even the many “new” Christian denominations in American history have usually been pretty tame and thin in their proposals to return some earlier form of worship.

But Mormonism posits something else entirely: that nearly the whole thing (indeed, if Siebach and Graham are right, all the way back to the first century; though I share Russell’s concerns in this regard) is a sham — and the age of prophesy has been restored in modern times. In other words, God is acting directly in the world right now, and He is speaking to living, breathing prophets at this very moment (roughly speaking). The world, in other words, is shot through with enchantment. Yet unlike evangelicals or Pentecostals, this enchantment is channeled (and thus moderated, tamed, and given concrete form) through an institutional structure claiming to have roots all the way back to a prior age of enchantment, as a direct link to divinity.

Leaving aside the question of whether JS’s revelations (and those of his successors) were and are true, this is a stunning accomplishment: an uncommonly potent effort at re-enchantment.

I’ll try to write two posts today, the first (this one) addressing the philosophical questions raised by Jim F and others; the second post will bring things back to Mormonism. I think the latter is important because this could easily develop into a debate about theory. I’d enjoy that, but I’m unsure if it would be a good use of the Times and & Seasons website.

So, on to philosophy, postmodernism, Heidegger, etc. . . .

It is true, as Jim writes, that “what is true of God is also true of ordinary objects: ultimately philosophical terms are inadequate to that which they desire to represent, whether divine or no[t].” Yet I nevertheless think a distinction needs to be made here. On the one hand, all discursive statements somehow fail to grasp the concrete particularity of the object they describe. For example, if I say, “that tree is tall,” and the tree is, in fact, tall, then I have accurately described it in one of its manifold aspects. But it is also brown, hard, has green leaves, those leaves are “oak” leaves, its lowest branch looks a little bit like my first girlfriend’s ankle, it’s the tree under which I was married and in which (on a branch that was struck by lightning in 1986) I read the first page of my first Shakespeare play, and so on and so forth, through my own personal experiences and thoughts about the tree and its physical attributes: it has cells of a certain (oak tree) kind, is composed of carbon and other elements, which are themselves composed of atoms in certain configurations, which are themselves composed of sub-atomic particles. Try as I might, it is never possible for me to make a long enough list of discursive statements to capture the essence of the tree. Even when the list is, say, 3,492 statements long — and I find it impossible to think of another one to add to the list — the content of that list does not produce the “tree” I see before me. The lived experience of the tree inevitably slips the bonds of discursive thought — mainly because “experience” (phenomenologically speaking) is a combination of (often implicit) propositions, sense input, and “mind” or “intelligence” (“nous” in Greek). And the propositions can’t “get at” the sense input or “minded” sides of the equation — and without them, there’s no “experience.” This is, I know, not Heidegger’s way of putting it in the “Origins” essay; but I think it ends up in roughly the same place.

So much for that “one hand.”

On the other hand, there are statements about God — which of the opinions, intimations, intuitions, suspicions, etc., floating around in our pre-reflective thoughts can be applied to the divine? And more importantly, how far should we allow our reason (through dialectical questioning and refutation) to move beyond those immediate, pre-reflective givens toward a more refined, rationally acceptable or coherent account? It strikes me that Mormonism (as I understand it) proposes to stop the dialectical ascent very early — very close to the ground of our most basic commonsense, pre-reflective opinions and intimations. “So JS says that God has a body? OK, if that’s what God told him!” The mainstream Christian tradition, by contrast, stops the ascent at a “higher” level — at least by the time of the founding Creeds. Hence God is understood in terms roughly consonant with Greek philosophic categories (like “eternity” and “substance”), which are themselves very far removed from commonsense intuitions (although still much closer to them than most modern scientific claims [bozons anyone?]).

On the narrower (but related) question of whether postmodernism leaves us with “no moorings whatsoever,” I admit that Heidegger and others do leave us with the standard(s) that emerge from within pre-reflective communities; they thus encourage a radical (the most radical) return to the “given” (as it is revealed or disclosed in a “world”) that one could imagine. This is why, I think, so many Mormons find postmodernism to be congenial: Heidegger opens the door to a thorough, profound affirmation of the truth of their own “given.” But of course the content of this “given” that postmodernism affirms is radically indeterminate (indeed, I wonder, with Stanley Rosen, whether Heidegger would have allowed himself to be satisfied with ANY determination of truth, as opposed to insisting on endless, open potentiality that never culminates in any actuality). The point is that postmodern thinkers really don’t provide “moorings,” beyond vague gestures toward there being such moorings out there, somewhere (Levinas is arguably an exception to this rule, but even his mooring is as vague as can be; the “Other” is pretty empty, is it not?). So, the Mormon embrace of postmodernism that I alluded to in my post is a purely negative embrace: Heidegger, et al, clear the ground for a richer awareness of and absorption into the pre-reflective revelatory experience of the LDS community.

One last point. I’m afraid, Jim, that we have very different understanding of Heidegger’s relation to the philosophical tradition. I realize that the European source of postmodernism are less inclined than Americans to dismiss the tradition; good for them. Yet it is, I think, quite misleading to describe Heidegger as an “Aristotelian.” Heidegger’s Aristotle is a radically Heideggerianized Aristotle. And yet he ultimately seeks to go behind even HIM, to find the primordial origins of the West that precede Socrates, the pre-Socratics, and even (one presumes) Homer. Yes, things went badly wrong with Descartes, but this error was prepared by Christian theological errors, which were prepared for by Aristotle’s and Plato’s, and Parmenides’ error before them. All of them flinched in the face of Being; only Heidegger himself (and maybe Hoelderlin) could withstand the violent emergence of truth, which set the West out on its “first beginning” and might, if he and we are up to it, prepare the way for “another beginning.” So, yes: the tradition is there and it’s useful as a means of helping us to think rigorously and to think our way out of our current debased world, rooted as it is in decayed philosophical desiderata. But we can’t learn anything from it in a positive sense.

Well, this has gone on long enough for now. Have fun.

Hence their postmodernism — or rather their attempt to fashion a genuine, stark alternative to the fundamentally Athenian character of Western thought, whether secular or religious.
That’s it for now. More tomorrow.

As Russell notes, I spent two years teaching at BYU, and have enjoyed dozens of email exchanges about LDS-related matters with the handful of good friends I made during my time on campus. Since I don’t have An Agenda for the following two weeks, I think I’ll start by sharing a few thoughts that have grown out of those exchanges.

One of the things that I found most interesting about the intellectual life of BYU is how many thoughtful Mormons (I assume it’s acceptable to employ the “Mormon” shorthand in this forum) understand their faith in terms derived, at some level, from postmodernist thought. This is in radical contrast to Roman Catholics, who usually appeal to some version of Thomism — that is, a tradition of philosophical reflection rooted in a holistic account of the natural world, including natural (and supernatural) ends or purposes. Mormons, by contrast, often reject such naturalism. There are, as I understand it, at least two reasons for this. First of all, there is the apostasy, which can be described, at least in part, as a debasement or distortion of authentic Christian teaching by concepts derived from the Greek philosophical tradition. This is actually just a radicalized version of an argument that many of the Protestant Reformers made about the decline of the Church in the Middle Ages. As I understand it, it means that the Church Fathers (Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, etc.) created a synthesis of reason and revelation many centuries before Thomas Aquinas made his own attempt to do so. The result was, supposedly, a dismal failure, with biblical religion coming to be interpreted in terms quite foreign to it.

Then there is the second, and related, issue of the character of Mormon revelation in particular — and this is the issue that I find most interesting. According to this interpretation, God’s revelation simply cannot be contained or explicated in philosophical terms at all, since revelation at once transcends the theoretical intellect and, if you will, flies under its radar. That is, revelation comes from above or outside of the world of rational human concepts; at the same time, it is embodied in the practical lives of concrete, historical communities with their distinctive traditions, norms, practices, and beliefs — the very communities, traditions, norms, practices, and beliefs that philosophers (in the West, at least) have traditionally striven to transcend (see Plato’s classic allegory of the cave on this).

Example: Mormons believe that God is embodied. But this was declared a heresy by the “apostate” Church only a short time after Christ’s death. Why? The LDS answer is that this was because Greek philosophical concepts told them the idea of a corporeal God made no coherent sense. But why did Greek philosophy posit that only a radically impersonal God was coherent? Because when you take pre-philosophical intimations of the divine and seek to refine them dialectically using rational reflection, you come to see that the idea of a radically personal, corporeal God is absurd — when judged by the standard of other (primarily moral) intimations. After all, if God has a body, He must have sex organs — but that seems shameful. And if he has a body, must He not feel pain? And be mortal? But how could that be, since we all “know” that God “must” be perfect and hence radically other than we imperfect humans.

Another example: The Mormon notion of a “finite” God who, like his (literal) children, is even now continuing to grow, develop, and improve; in other words, Mormons reject the bedrock Greek and Christian notion of a timeless, static God. There are several reasons for this — among them the Mormon resistance to thinking in terms of the traditional philosophical concept of “eternity.” And so forth.

The point is that in my experience lots of thoughtful Mormons explicitly reject this entire line of reasoning — which in other Christian faiths is considered to be part and parcel of Theology 101. As I noted above, this is (at least in part) because the LDS believe that God’s revelation — and how it has been handed down by prophets and institutionalized or concretized in a faith community — comes first. Full stop. Reason is then allowed and encouraged, but only after the revealed truth has been allowed to set the parameters of discussion and thought. So, an orthodox Mormon would never think to say: “gee, you know, maybe God doesn’t have a body, because when I think about the concept of God, it seems to entail that he must not, etc.” That simply makes no sense in an LDS context.

How is this connected with postmodernism? Well, in a nutshell, at its philosophical peak (in Martin Heidegger’s thought) postmodernism can be seen as an effort to show that revelation of the highest truth (in Heidegger’s terms, revelation of Being) always trumps what philosophical reflection can say about that truth. Indeed, much of Heidegger’s work can be seen as an attempt to undermine reason’s claim to self-sufficiency. Reason, for Heidegger, is always already rooted in and parasitic on a prior disclosure of truth within the “horizon” of a concrete historical community. Hopefully you see the link to Mormonism now.

So what do all of you think of this? Does it seem like a problem to you? After all, postmodernists tend to be atheists and relativists of one kind or another — yet Mormons strive to be “absolutist” postmodernists. Is this possible? Or does it seem like the most natural thing in the world?

Not to worry: I don’t plan for all of my posts to be this philosophical, and I won’t even continue the thread if my comments don’t inspire some kind of response.

Until tomorrow.