{"id":2397,"date":"2005-07-07T13:16:59","date_gmt":"2005-07-07T17:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=2397"},"modified":"2005-07-07T17:42:25","modified_gmt":"2005-07-07T21:42:25","slug":"ed-firmages-apostasy-and-the-age-of-mormonism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2005\/07\/ed-firmages-apostasy-and-the-age-of-mormonism\/","title":{"rendered":"Ed Firmage’s Apostasy and the Age of Mormonism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed Firmage<\/a>, for many years the token Mormon at the U of U law school, is an interesting apostate. This weekend I read his deconversion story and was struck by an interesting twist on the familiar litinany of Mormon failures. Firmage seems to have been really upset by the doctrine of apostasy. What set him off was what he saw as its trivialization of the history of Christian thought. For Mormonism, he claimed, the whole sweep of Christian theology is only a prologue to the Restoration. As he insisted in a striking phrase, “Augustine isn’t just a prologue.”<\/p>\n

Firmage, of course, is right. He is right that the history of Christian theology is filled with great insight and power and that Mormons frequently do a disservice to it and themselves by reducing it to nothing more than a shadowy prologue to the visions of Joseph Smith. Yet I think that Firmage’s reaction to this insight — namely that Mormonism as a religion (as opposed to a tribe) is best jettisoned in favor of Catholicism or Episcopalianism — is mistaken. The reason, I think, has to do with understanding the age of Mormonism.<\/p>\n

There is a tendency for Utah Mormons, especially those of pioneer stock, to see Mormonism as something old, as something defined by a history and a tradition. Mormonism in this view becomes an exercise in memory and religion is transformed into a species of nostalgia. This creates the temptation to view Mormonism as something that has already happened, and to orient one’s view backwards toward history. This, in turn, tends to privilege particular intellectual tools — namely those of history and scholarly excavation — over other intellectual tools — such as philosophy and creative elaboration.<\/p>\n

In thinking about Mormon intellectual life, however, I think it is important to always remember that Mormonism is young. We are not in our intellectual adulthood or even our intellectual adolescence. We are in our infancy. I do not mean by this that Mormonism or Mormon intellectuals are puerile or childish. What I mean is that in the history of human thought, 175 years is not a very long time. When it neared the close of its second century, Augustine and Aquinas were still far, far in the future of Christianity. One hundred and seventy five years after Mohammed made his trek from Mecca to Medina, the usul al-fiqh (the basis of Muslim jurisprudence) and the elaboration of Muslim philosophy and theology had yet to happen.<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, the predicament of intellectual life in Mormonism revolves around issues of authority. On one side is the claim that living prophets and continuing revelation render distinctively Mormon intellectual projects outside of the realm of prophetic pronouncement superfluous at best and dangerous and faithless at worse. On the other side, are those — like Firmage — who lament the predicament of an intellectual caught in an authoritarian culture. Ultimately, however, I think that the issue of age is more decisive than the issue of authority.<\/p>\n

Most of the intellectual work of Mormonism has yet to be done. What that means it that Mormon thought, by necessity, should privilege daring and creativity over simple scholarship. This does not mean that I object to scholarly cannons of quality or deny the need for rigorous criticism and discussion. However, it does mean that Mormon thought is not primarily a matter of scholarly excavation. Mormon thought does not come in the form of a pious study of Augustine, bur rather from someone with the audacity — and intellectual heft — to pick a fight with Augustine. Firmage is surely right that hitherto the dominant Mormon ways of discussing Christian theology have been woefully simplistic and bereft of serious understanding or appreciation. This does not mean, however, that intellectual rigor means that one must allow Mormonism to subside into the stream of Christian thought. Rather, Mormon thought requires that one articulate the implications of the Mormon revelations for the discussions that have animated intellectual life for the last two or three thousand years.<\/p>\n

The absence that Firmage rightly perceived is not evidence of intellectual or spiritual aridity, but rather represents a challenge and an opportunity. We stand at the beginning of Mormon thought looking forward, rather than at the end of the trail looking back at a failed journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed Firmage, for many years the token Mormon at the U of U law school, is an interesting apostate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397","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\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}