The bias in Mormon thought (and this flows through both the Brigham Young styled line of theology and the more Orson Pratt styled line) is of God as an engineer. That is God and even ethics really is conceived much more in modern terms. That’s true even if one could strongly argue much that Joseph restored, such as the endowment, goes back to a different conception of ordering. When we think morals, we think in terms of what it does.

Chapter 4 in particular was fascinating for me. Especially because when I was younger I found the evolution of how society interpreted time so interesting. The place where Judaism, Greek philosophy and then Christianity mixed and merged to produce what allows for secular time is both important as an epoche in human history but also for understanding contemporary approaches to time. I found Taylor’s explanations pretty well done, being somewhat familiar with the topic already.

The whole flattening evolution seems as much tied to time as everything else. As Taylor notes it’s not just time that becomes purely horizontal. We no longer think of time primarily in terms of major events as they relate logically typically. Just in terms of their points on a time scale. However this is also true of space. From a contemporary Mormon perspective the relationship between the New Jerusalem, classic Jerusalem, eschatological Jerusalem, and Zion as the gathering place of the Saints is a great example of the shift Taylor speaks of. Our contemporary mind want’s to treat these as separate with only a distant secondary metaphoric or similarity function between them all. The pre-modern mind sees them as inherently closer.

Taylor’s constant emphasis on naive thinking gets at this. (For those who haven’t read it – he means naive in terms of how we instinctively think about topics and the categories we use without thinking) Our modern mind thinks of time and space as containers with the ordered place of the containers that of a number line. Think how we do time management, to borrow an example of Taylor’s. For a great “in between” shift I always think back to William Blake who ties London and the New Jerusalem together poetically. I think Blake is kind of a throwback to that pre-modern way of thinking.

And of course our modern way of thinking makes reading the Book of Mormon and New Testament more difficult because of how we order events. N. T. Wright makes this point about Paul. For Paul and most early Christians and Jews the events of the Old Testament aren’t merely history in the modern sense nor even metaphors but archetypes that are being repeated (especially against Roman occupation) I think when we read how Nephi uses Isaiah both to describe his narrative but also future narratives the same thing is going on. The Exodus pattern isn’t just a type setting or metaphor for Nephi but something much deeper in terms of how reality itself is ordered for him.

From a Mormon perspective what makes this all more difficult is noting how a lot of the rise of modernism (and this change in ordering) was necessary for the restoration. It’s not hard to find statements by early and contemporary GAs along those lines. As I read Taylor’s moves, I can’t help wonder if the Mormon stance is perhaps a tad more complex than what his more Catholic stance ends up being. I’m probably also saying that from a scientific perspective where the changes in ordering allowed science to be science. Which I think is an unambiguous good.

I am curious as to what you mean by discontinuities with Protestant thought. It seemed to me that Joseph saw Protestantism as preparing the way for Mormonism, but it always seemed complex to me. Although there is that interesting June 16, 1844 record where he makes very interesting comments on Catholicism that might shock some who associate Catholicism with the great and abominable ala McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine.