{"id":22711,"date":"2012-10-04T08:17:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T13:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=22711"},"modified":"2012-10-04T08:17:32","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T13:17:32","slug":"exploring-mormon-thought-biblical-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2012\/10\/exploring-mormon-thought-biblical-criticism\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Mormon Thought: Biblical Criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"William<\/a>Life has intervened and time is short. <\/p>\n

But I still want to write a few more posts on Blake Ostler’s\u00a0Exploring Mormon Thought\u00a0<\/em>books before putting the project to bed.<\/p>\n

The third volume of the series,\u00a0Of God and Gods<\/em>, begins with some 200 pages dedicated to summarizing some of the most persuasive and respected contemporary work in biblical criticism.<\/p>\n

In particular, Ostler focuses on what this scholarship reveals about what the biblical text’s\u00a0themselves\u00a0<\/em>say about the nature of God. It turns out – surprise! – that the ancient Hebrews didn’t have anything like the creedal Trinity in mind. (It also turns out that NT authors didn’t either.) Moreover, it even turns out that many of the Hebrew authors didn’t have anything like a strict (metaphysical) monotheism in mind. This is true even of the\u00a0Shema<\/em>. Rather,\u00a0monolatry<\/a>\u00a0is more apt as a general descriptive category for the milieu than monotheism.<\/p>\n

I won’t rehash Ostler’s own summaries and arguments on these points here (though you should read them yourself – they’re persuasive, instructive, accessible and don’t require any philosophical training), but I do want to make a kind of meta–observation about what Blake’s approach, here, models for Mormon thinking in general.<\/p>\n

He’s what Ostler does in this book: he marshall’s, to devastating effect, the best of contemporary biblical criticism in order to cut creedal monotheism off at its knees and make room for a Mormon conception of God that is more complex, plural, and passible.<\/p>\n

Read that previous sentence again: Ostler\u00a0sides<\/em>\u00a0with contemporary biblical criticism\u00a0in defense\u00a0<\/em>of Mormon theology.<\/p>\n

The interesting by-product of this strategy is that, having cut creedal monotheism off at the knees, he has also cut generations of CES-style, neo-evangelical\u00a0Mormon<\/em>\u00a0readings of the biblical texts off at the knees.<\/p>\n

Further, the most remarkable aspect of Ostler’s work here is that he sides with biblical criticism\u00a0without\u00a0<\/em>divesting the biblical texts of their revelatory force and authority.\u00a0In fact, he engages biblical criticism as a way of\u00a0affirming and defending<\/em>\u00a0the Bible’s revelatory authority.<\/p>\n

On this score, take the first 200 pages of Volume Three as a primer on how to think biblically as a Mormon theologian.<\/p>\n

Don’t hide in the skirts of neo-evangelical literalism and inerrantism. Take all of the best historical and critical scholarship on the Bible that we have, look it square in the eye without gullibility or bias, \u00a0and then\u00a0work with it\u00a0<\/em>on behalf of Mormonism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life has intervened and time is short.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":22712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/The-Ancient-of-Days.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22711"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22721,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22711\/revisions\/22721"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}