God bless America.

To Hinkley and others downplaying such things, part of that is I think just a PR move by the media savvy Hinkley who knows such things can’t be explained in a soundbite. But I also think it gets into the sense that more ontological claims are very vague and perhaps aren’t as well grounded in repeated clear revelation as other doctrines are.

Take the most characteristic ontological feature of Mormonism: our materialism. That tends to arise primarily out of D&C 131 which is in term a very fragmentary note from a longer discourse. It’s almost impossible to tell what’s meant or its boundaries. Further it doesn’t even really give a physicalist ontology. It just says spirit is matter (without explaining what that matter means in that sense). It doesn’t say (as Orson Pratt took it) that there’s only matter. And not at all unexpectedly in the 20th century many people separated intelligence from spirit and saw the former in a manner closer to Cartesian minds or Aquinas’s substantial forms.

You could repeat that process for most of the “deep doctrines.” Most of what we have are really folk doctrines that arose out of speculations regarding vague and fragmentary statements many not even codified in canon. (Say the Sermon in the Grove, the King Follet Discourse, or the many sermons recorded in the Journal of Discourses) So epistemologically they are weak and really shouldn’t be treated as Mormon doctrine even if widely believed. (Say what one will about McConkie codifying speculation as doctrine, but in a certain sense Mormon Doctrine was more helpful for removing as doctrine many folk beliefs)

Even when we talk about repentance and sanctification it’s still conceived of in instrumentalist ways. The legal theory of grace (which I find problematic) is taken up by Jesus choosing to take our place. So it’s less mystical than it is a literal legal substitution. Again that’s instrumental. And with the other aspects of repentance it’s seen as God repairing consequences with his power — often by helping people overcome psychologically in the long term. So that’s instrumental. And full sanctification is first seen as the bestowal of the Holy Ghost giving us gifts that aid our ability to choose and our abilities to act. Then finally we get a resurrected body which is seen as a kind of biological repair.

The point is that grace is almost always seen as God doing practical things with his power to bring about desired ends or enabling conditions. There’s very rarely a more mystical or platonic sense of Grace that you see in say Augustine’s platonism.

Grace is the gifts to us of God acting for us. Likewise we participate in grace to the degree we act in that same spirit. (Abinadi’s exegesis of Isaiah 52 in Mosiah 15 is interesting there) So grace literally is giving of our actions to promote some end. Which is pretty much instrumentalism.

Getting back to Adam or more Buddhist like conceptions, I’m not necessarily opposed to that. I just don’t really think it’s grace. I think it’s Adam taking up a more ontological conception of grace that arises out of Augustine, giving it a somewhat more Mormon twist, and then really just saying Becoming in its ontological sense is this grace. Which is fine as a metaphor but more problematic (IMO) in a Mormon context that’s far more alienated from Augustine. I think Mormonism tends to embrace the earlier Jewish view (see say Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil) where God’s creative activity (and thus grace) isn’t ontological but is organizing and holding back chaos.

That said, I think we can appreciate the givenness of reality itself. So I think Adam’s thinking is important and I hope it gets embraced more. What Mormonism fundamentally does is remove the God of Hellenism which treated anything anthropomorphic as a myth used for pedagogy. (See Plato’s Phaedrus for example) The Christian Fathers largely unified this “ontological origin” God with a more anthropomorphic deity (although the anthropomorphic angles became associated only with Jesus). We push the anthropomorphic parts but reject the Hellenistic God. Yet that Hellenistic “god” still makes ontological demands. Thus it becomes secularized grace as in Adam’s work.

There’s lots of these little things like that I find while reading or listening to Taylor. I find my mind drifting down tangents opened up by Taylor but not really addressed by him with his more Catholic orientation. Even with his discussion of Protestantism there’s often that frustration things are being left out.

I like your point about instrumentalizing the atonement in LDS thought. I think that’s right although I’m not sure I agree with you seeing this as problematic. Nor do I see it as being at odds with works. I do think Mormons often interpret it in incorrect economic ways. And I fully agree that perhaps our instrumentalist tendencies lead us in that direction. But one can avoid the economic interpretations of the atonement without abandoning the instrumentalist tendencies.

With regards to Adam, I confess that my biggest problem with his writings on grace is precisely over rejecting this instrumentalism. That is grace seems to be seen primarily in terms of a secular grace more akin to Buddhist immanence or even something closer to neoplatonic immanence of the One. The idea of grace as grace of God in terms of a gift from God is missing or treated as secondary or even metaphoric. That is the notion of gift is completely transformed into something problematic.

That’s not to say I have a problem with this secular grace. I think that’s a great way to talk about it. I just think the term grace is misleading precisely because it moves towards analysis in terms of this more deist angle. However as I’ve long said Mormons, precisely because we reject the unifying of the God of Athens with the God of Jerusalem, end up bifurcating these issues. The theology of God gets divorced from the theology of the universe or being. The former becomes (ala Brigham Young) an anthropology. The latter effectively becomes a deism stripped of God. That is ontologically we have more in common with the atheists than the Catholics.

To the degree this informs the discussion of Taylor, I suspect this explains the problem of locating Mormons on either side of Taylor’s divide. Ontologically we’re secularists. God’s creation becomes an ordering of the cosmos ala the early Hebrew creation accounts. The implication being that God’s creative power functions in a basically instrumentalist way of transforming chaos.

Rachel (8) I confess I don’t see Mormon discourse of ominipotence and omniscience as playing down the ontological gap issue. Mormons tend to instrumentalize both. That is knowledge and power are seen in terms of God being able to do what he needs to do rather than the more Hellenistic take on those attributes purely in terms of the attributes themselves. Even in the debate over foreknowledge the conflict between those Mormons inspired by Open Theism and those more open to foreknowledge ends up hinging upon whether God could act the way he is portrayed as acting if he doesn’t have more robust foreknowledge. That instrumentalist bent however seems to me to presuppose there is no ontological gap. That is God acts as a being on other beings unlike in traditional Trinitarianism or even Greek absolutism or deism.

Thanks for the link to that fascinating article; it seems that at the heart of the debate is the differing views of human nature (and relevant to Taylor’s overall analysis): “Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility….a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism, among which (Catholics hold) are the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation…” Mormonism’s checkered history with social and political radicalism and post-20th century conservativism, and its simultaneous embrace of the sovereign, uncreated self, but also a profoundly relational one (twinned into godhood through marriage, or bound into celestial sociality through mortal relationships and sealing links) are one of the reasons I find Mormonism such a fascinating case study to put against Taylor’s analysis. Though I know I’m being sloppy with the different historical forces and timelines now… But I think there’s more room for that kind of debate you reference above, when we flesh out some of these different facets (some might say tensions or contradictions) in our theology, history, and cultural practice.And, of course, when we incorporate non-Western Mormon experiences.

The issue of grace is interesting. Pre-protestant Christianity often interpreted it in near mystic terms. While portraying Mormons as Arminians is wrong, there is a sense in which we see grace in more practical terms of God giving to us. That is grace is seen akin to human grace. I think there’s always a sense of transcendence in that – but it’s the transcendence of human autonomy.

I suspect this is why existentialism in various forms has been so often attractive for Mormon thinkers. Because in many ways we are closer to the secularist side ontologically than the medieval Christian side the existentialist approach to transcendence offers a great deal.

I think your point though highlights the two different ways to conceive the supernatural/natural distinction. To me it’s best to just discount the conception and opposition as inherently problematic. If Taylor is really still thinking in terms of that distinction (even if qualified and historicized carefully) then that’s problematic to me.

The problem I have with Mormon naturalism is that we assume some final laws. But those final laws are ambiguous. (I’d note that this parallels the problem that physicalism often has as well where it wants to acknowledge that contemporary science is incomplete and possible incorrect in details) So it might be the laws of this universe as set could be changed temporarily by God. Yet a Mormon wouldn’t say that was supernatural even in Hume would. Simply because we want to call it some meta-rules by which this universe has to abide. All of this gets complicated by various multiverse theories and the common assumption that the laws of the universe are actually open to a lot more types of systems that this universe – each with very different rules due to different symmetries.

While Mormonism has a supernaturalism of sorts, as I said I’m not sure I’d call it that. Rather it’s more a kind of “enchantment” of the real world around us. That is that there are these extra players with their own intents that are in play which aren’t captured by traditional secular analysis.