It was just the CES folks in the religion department who seemed to want a very simple superficial and often wrong presentation of scripture. I think they believed pedagogically most students just weren’t prepared for the rest. Even people fully aware of a lot of the other issues in CES followed a very superficial presentation in their religion classes. Their hearts might have been in the right place but I think it was a counterproductive strategy ultimately.

Ben, I think that’s ultimately the problem. Having a tradition and then tying too much of ones identity to it. Give McConkie credit, while in many ways he helped develop that tradition, he was pretty quick to jettison parts of it he saw problematic. Too bad CES didn’t follow more his model.

On the other hand since the 90’s I think this CES traditional model has been in a rearguard defense. More and more gets cut out from them by the brethren. Especially as lds.org becomes more and more significant to members. I suspect before long we’ll actually have much better CES manuals for seminary and institute.

Why some Mormons, especially the CES department, have this weird inclination to feast at the fleshpots of fundamentalist Evangelicals whose theology is so opposed to ours has never made sense to me.

It could be because we have the Doctrine and Covenants, and we want to apply the same accuracy/reliability standard to the rest of the standard works that we get to apply to the D&C.

“Why some Mormons, especially the CES department, have this weird inclination to feast at the fleshpots of fundamentalist Evangelicals whose theology is so opposed to ours has never made sense to me.”
Because they don’t understand it?
OTOH, it can certainly be a challenge to tradition. If your view of tradition is narrow, and you ascribe heavy weight to it, then the challenge is all the stronger.

“Why some Mormons, especially the CES department, have this weird inclination to feast at the fleshpots of fundamentalist Evangelicals whose theology is so opposed to ours has never made sense to me.”

Couldn’t agree more.

Why some Mormons, especially the CES department, have this weird inclination to feast at the fleshpots of fundamentalist Evangelicals whose theology is so opposed to ours has never made sense to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I think people can go too far the other direction adopting too skeptical positions. But what’s odd to me is how at odds with Mormon scripture and Mormon doctrine so many of these evangelical infused fundamentalist ideas really are.

I am a lawyer by training, so I never had the graduate school/seminary experience that Cox described. Nevertheless, reading these books was revelation since I had never encountered any of these ideas (and probably never will) in the CES curricula.

My faith wasn’t challenged by reading these books, except to the extent that I now discount or disregard most of what I encounter in church manuals on these subjects. Rather, I found these discoveries exciting and eye opening. Simply stated, the scriptures made more sense to me after I had been exposed to these ideas than before.

Obviously, none of these hypotheses/theories provide all the answers, but they sure do raise a lot more questions. And I love questions.

All that said, I love the scriptures, whatever their origin. I’m partial to Peter Enns’ argument that the scriptures are both human and divine, and the challenge is to figure out what the scriptures say about the divine. For all the human that I see in the scriptures (and Biblical scholarship has really helped draw that out for me), I still see God in them. So despite that challenge, I’m not leaving the church. Church is a lot harder for me than it used to be, because I don’t read the scriptures the way it seems like most everyone else in Sunday School does. My faith is a very different, more uncertain thing than what it was before I was willing to take Biblical scholarship seriously. (FWIW, this has all been the result of personal study, not an academic program).