Author: joespencer

I’ve struggled with what to write in response to chapter 5 of The Problems of Theism and the Love of God. Why? Because, except when it comes to nit-picky details, I’m in full agreement with Ostler for once. Indeed, I applaud this chapter and am eager to see how he moves forward with it in the next chapters. What to write, then? For fun, I think I’ll just insert here, as a kind of confirmation of what Ostler has to say, my own recent written reflections on Romans 1—a passage he cites on page 162. Here is the passage in its entirety, with my own translation: It’s immediately within preaching, within the transfer of faith, that divine righteousness is revealed—as it’s written: “The one who’s righteous will live by faith”—while divine wrath is revealed from heaven against all lack of divinity, against all human unrighteousness, against all those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. What’s known of God is manifest among them, because God has made it manifest to them: his eternal power and divine nature—things indiscernible since the creation of the world—have been understood and discerned through the things he’s made. So they’re without excuse. Though they knew God, they didn’t glorify him as God or give thanks to him; rather, they grew vain in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened. In a word, professing wisdom, they became fools. And they have economized God’s glory by making…

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Ostler opens chapter 3 of The Problems of Theism and the Love of God by referring to several different individuals’ claim that the ontological commitments of Mormon theology foreclose the possibility of its embracing a defensible moral theory. Ostler then takes as his task in this chapter not only to identify what he takes to be Mormonism’s moral theory but also to argue for the possibility of such a moral theory to be fully robust despite its rootedness in a non-traditional theism. Much of the chapter is tied up in the details of an ongoing exchange between himself and Francis Beckwith on this question, but the conclusions to which Ostler comes in the end are relatively straightforwardly stated: (1) Every moral theory fails except for the Kantian one. (2) Even the Kantian moral theory fails in certain regards (i.e., it needs revision). (3) A revised Kantian moral theory, fully defensible, is the Mormon moral theory. What does that revised Kantian moral theory look like? Ostler rejects one formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative, according to which one should act only on maxims whose normativity can be universalized without paradox or contradiction. In its place, Ostler accepts the other major formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative, according to which one should treat whatever is of absolute value as an end and not as a means to an end. Ostler revises Kant’s own inflection of this formulation in an important way: it isn’t the…

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I’m more than happy to be turning from the divine attributes to the question of divine love. I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether God possesses the several “omni’s” before beginning this project, and, for all I’ve learned along the path laid out by Ostler’s first volume, I’m no more concerned now than I was before. Of course, I think in the end that Ostler himself would have to say that he shares my sentiments in this regard—at least to some degree. His project as he describes it in the prefaces to the several volumes of Exploring Mormon Thought is one of putting up with the sorts of ontotheological questions the tradition raises in order eventually to get to what he takes to be the beating heart of Mormon theology: the love of God. As with Ostler, the question of God’s love—and especially the question of grace—is one to which I’m not only willing but thrilled to give my attention. Ostler opens the first chapter of The Problems of Theism and the Love of God with exactly the right question: “It is commonplace in Christian theology to start from metaphysical concepts, such as the notion that God is a perfect being or that God is the metaphysical explanation of all existence. … What if, instead, we started from the most basic commitment of Jesus’s teachings—that God is the type of being who can enter into loving relationships of mutual reciprocity and…

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I haven’t any real idea who or what or how—or even when!—Jesus Christ was. And is. And will be. As odd as I’m sure it sounds, I’m not terribly interested in changing that situation. I suspect that, in large part, my ignorance and feeling of content concerning that ignorance are more a side effect than anything else, a side effect of the Pauline commitments that were created, nurtured, and cemented in me through my obsessive work on the Book of Mormon. The Christ to whom I have declared undying fidelity, of whom I consistently testify, concerning whom I couldn’t feel love more deeply—that Christ—is the one who died and rose again, who worked out a concrete, material immanent critique of death he then committed in theological form to Saint Paul, who came to Lehi’s children with pierced hands he used almost exclusively to turn the pages of Isaiah, Micah, Malachi, and who knows what other Hebrew texts. The Gospels? They’re interesting, as all scripture is. But do they teach me about Christ? To be a bit frank—a bit too frank: not really. I find in the Gospels somewhere between four and a dozen different views of who Jesus was, about the implications of his having walked among us, and I find all those views compelling. I let—I try to let—them shape the way I think and act. But I don’t know that they shape me much more than any other…

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It seems hard to deny that some kind of structure, however fragile or unstable, organizes human experience. And it seems hard to deny that a major aspect—if not the determining characteristic—of the structure of experience is time. Let’s grant all that for the purposes of this week’s discussion. If we take as paradigmatic the structure of a formal system, it turns out that there are two possibilities when it comes to a structure, as the early twentieth century’s greatest mathematical minds taught us: if a structure is consistent, it is incomplete; if a structure is complete, it is inconsistent. More strictly, every structure robust enough to be worthy of the name as it were produces an undecidable element—an element that cannot determinately be said either to belong or not to belong to the structure in question; if it is decided, in the name of achieving systemic completeness, that this element belongs to the structure, inconsistency results; but if it is decided, in the name of maintaining systemic consistency, that this element doesn’t belong to the structure, incompleteness results. Thus, completeness and consistency are mutually exclusive when it comes to structures. (Note that this result is easiest to demonstrate when it comes to formal systems, but it equally holds for non-formal systems, as so much work in the so-called soft sciences has shown in the past century.) Coming up against an undecidable, we have a decision to make. (Note that, paradoxical…

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We remain, in chapter 9 of The Attributes of God, within Ostler’s larger assessment of the (in)compatibility between exhaustive divine foreknowledge and human free will. I want to do two things in this post. First, I want to focus briefly on Ostler’s claim, on page 280, that the point on which “the debate ultimately turns” is “whether God’s having a belief is relevantly similar to humans having beliefs.” Second, I want to move from an investigation into what Ostler is doing with that gesture to yet another reframing of the question concerning knowledge—a reframing akin in spirit to what I did a couple weeks ago with chapter 7 and what Adam did last week with chapter 8. Divine Unicity I: What Says Joseph? Ostler claims that the pivotal point for the philosophical analysis of divine foreknowledge is the question of whether God is “utterly unique” or “a member of a kind” (p. 280). With this gesture, Ostler comes back to a distinction or at least point of clarification he drew in his very first chapter, between (1) “God” as the rigid designator of a concrete particular absolved in some sense from every class and (2) “God” as shorthand for a function that selects out of discreet beings a determinate set that contains more than one element. I’ve asked myself at least a dozen times in the last two hundred and fifty pages why Ostler hasn’t been drawing on that distinction…

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I will intentionally ignore the larger context in which chapter 7 of The Attributes of God appears—namely, an attempt to nail down the nature, according to the Mormon conception, of divine omniscience. I’ll focus more narrowly on just what Ostler has to say about agency. I think the larger concerns here are important, but we have some weeks yet in which to take up his conclusions. Late in chapter 7, Ostler begins to speak of emergence. I think this is the right term, but not, I think, in the way Ostler uses it. I want to talk about agency itself—in more classically philosophical terms: subjectivity—as emergent, but he, if I understand him right, wants to talk about choice-events as emergent. What’s the difference? Ostler, following the basic framework of analytic discussions of freedom of the will, provides us with two broad approaches to the will’s freedom—the compatibilist thesis, according to which the idea of the freedom of the will is argued to be compatible with causal determinism, and the incompatibilist thesis, according to which the idea of the freedom of the will is argued to be incompatable with causal determinism. The adherent of the former position has no need to question the conclusions of the determinist, but only to justify a minimalist conception of freedom (to be free is to follow one’s causally determined desires); the adherent of the latter position does have to combat determinism, but does so by…

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In the fourth chapter of The Attributes of God, Ostler does both a nice bit of analysis and a nice bit of synthesis. Ostler’s Analytic Gesture Through engagements with a handful of potential philosophical pitfalls, Ostler constructs a very nice analytic definition of omnipotence, stated thus on page 116: A is omnipotent at [time] t if A is able unilaterally to bring any logically possible state of affairs SA after t which (i) does not entail that “A does not bring about SA at t,” and (ii) is compossible with all events which preceded t in time in the actual world. Ostler has worked into a single definition here all the caveats that have to be noted in any conception of omnipotence that hopes to avoid certain contradictions or paradoxes. It works, I think, and does an excellent job of skirting a whole series of difficulties. Ostler’s Synthetic Gesture Drawing on the Pratts, a bit of Mormon folk theology, a handful of texts from the Doctrine and Covenants, and a bit of genius, Ostler produces a brilliant theological concept of divine “concurrence,” described in the following terms on page 126: Mormonism maintains that intelligences and natural substances have power too, although in order for them to exercise this power God must cooperate by lending his power to bring about the effect desired by these actualities. When God cooperates with the independent power exercised by intelligences or natural substances, he acts…

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What role do apostasy narratives play in Mormon theological discourse? Actually, let me ask that question more clearly, since I’m after something pre- rather than de-scriptive: What role should apostasy narratives play in Mormon theological discourse? A long and venerable tradition has given such narratives theological pride of place, but I want to ask whether that tradition has not generally seen Mormon thinkers wandering in theologically unproductive paths. Is there reason to be done, once and for all, with apostasy narratives in our theological work?

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