People regularly make the observation that Mormons are more concerned with orthopraxis than orthodoxy. In other words, Mormons are more concerned with right behavior than with right belief. The evidence in support of this claim seems fairly overwhelming in my mind. The fact of the matter is that we allow a huge diversity of beliefs on fairly fundamental questions (the nature of God and the nature of man for example), even though we frequently paper over the pluralism with equivicol and vague language. One the other hand, we worry a great deal about proper behavior: The Law of Chastity, the Word of Wisdom, participation in the Church, etc. In this context, I have frequently heard Mormonism compared to Judaism, which is taken as a paradigmatically orthopraxic faith. Which leads to me question:<\/p>\n
Why haven’t Mormons developed a jurisprudence.
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\nWhen one compares Judaism to Christianity one of the remarkable things is the extent to which Jewish thinking has focused mainly on the juridical exposition of scripture while Christian thinking has focused to a much greater extent on speculative theology. I don’t want to over play this distinction. There have been Jewish thinkers who have produced subtle works of speculative philosophy and theology \u2013 Spinoza and Maimonides come to mind. Likewise, the cannon law of the Roman Catholic Church is one of the great legal achievements of western civilization.<\/p>\n
If one looks at Mormonism, it seems that we have everything one would need to launch a religious jurisprudence. We have a strong emphasis on correct conduct. We have authoritative texts that specify that conduct. We even have ecclesiastical tribunals to decide cases, and for nearly a century they were quite active in resolving inter-member disputes and elaborating correct standards of conduct. Yet one will search Mormonism in vain for an LDS version of Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides, Abu Hanifa, al-Ghazali, or Ibn Rushd who are the great jurists of Judaism and Islam, which also has an incredibly rich jurisprudential tradition. Why isn’t there more Mormon jurisprudence? Let me suggest some possibilities:<\/p>\n
1. Mormons simply haven’t been around long enough. We won’t know whether we need to ask this question for another couple of centuries. After all, it took Islam nearly two hundred years before it produced its first great jurist Muhammad Ibn Idris ash-Shafi’i<\/p>\n
2. Mormons have not had a state of their own. At one time in their history both Islam and Judaism have been called upon to provide a full fledged legal regime for an entire society. It was this requirement that produced the body of law upon which the religious jurists went to work. Mormons had only a brief period of legal independence before outside authority in the form of the federal government intervened.<\/p>\n