Evidence Sixty: Joseph Smith vs. St. Augustine as Theologian”©

101 Reasons Why I Believe Joseph Smith Was a Prophet of God:

Evidence Sixty:

“Joseph Smith vs. St. Augustine as Theologian”

I don’t know a great deal about this yet, but apparently it has been coming to light among scholars of Christian history for some time that the early Western church, and subsequently the Protestant Reformation, were led down the garden path by a theologically inadequate St. Augustine! The great saint, “the father of Western Christianity,” imposed upon the early church two ideas that have become “fundamentals” of Christianity. They were the doctrines of predestination and original sin--that man had no choice in his own salvation and from birth man was sinful, evil, and depraved. These two doctrines have, for 1,500 years and more, influenced the thinking of the Western Christian world. The trouble is, scholars now find that Augustine was wrong on both counts. Here is an excerpt from an article recently published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, by Terryl Givens on these points:

One of the great scholars of early Christianity [David Bentley Hart], has recently noted that the father of Western Christianity predicated his entire theological edifice on blatant, demonstrable errors of translation.  Not proficient in Greek, Augustine did not know that the proorizein of the New Testament should be rendered “to mark out in advance,” or as Mormons would say, “to foreordain,” not to predestine.7 As a consequence, Augustine vanquishes the efficacy of human agency and individual choice, in the face of a predestinating God of caprice, whim, and indefensible cruelty. This is the God fully embraced and taught by the great Reformers, a sovereign deity who damns and saves indiscriminately and independently of human efforts, choices, or desires. 

Augustine compounds the error by elaborating a pernicious dogma of original sin.  In David Bentley Hart’s analysis (which is, by the way, seconded in numerous sources), “only in the West did the idea arise that a newborn infant is somehow already guilty of transgression in God’s eyes,” because the Latin text Augustine relied upon “contained a mistranslation that suggested that “in’ Adam ‘all sinned.’”The actual Greek text,” he continues” says nothing of the sort.” So sin and depravity become the basis, the default, on which Western theology is constituted.(1)

How interesting, and the more so because Joseph Smith taught in the King Follett sermon that, “It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God....”(2) In the third Lecture on Faith he also taught that having “a correct idea”–and he emphasized the word “correct”– “the correct idea of his character, perfections and attributes,” was one of three things necessary for a disciple to possess in order to “exercise faith in God unto life and salvation.”(3) Alas, we are now learning from scholars of the world that St. Augustine had an erroneous intellectual conception of God based on faulty understanding and mistranslations. Nor did he possess personal knowledge of God’s character, perfections, and attributes based on revelation.

No wonder there was a need for a Restoration! And among the first things restored was a correct idea of the character, perfections and attributes of God, starting with the First Vision and continuing to the end of the Prophet’s life. That understanding was intertwined with a new understanding of theology that taught a doctrine of foreordination, but not predestination; a Fall, but not original sin and the depravity of man. Terryl Givens wrote: “Taken together, Joseph’s revelations restore a God wholly devoted to our fullest thriving who safeguards our agency at terrible cost, who sacrificed beyond imagining to bring us healing in his wings and guide us through this terrible but necessary mortal crucible.”(4)

Somehow, even against a man considered one of the greatest intellects of the Western world, Joseph Smith didn’t flinch.  He always seems to get religious things right. The contrast between Joseph and St. Augustine as theologians teaching about God is stark.  To me, this is not an insignificant evidence of his divine appointment as a Prophet of God.

Thank God for Joseph Smith!

Lets think together again, soon.

7 David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith (New York: Quercus, 2012), 77.

Notes:

1.  Terryl L. Givens, “Heretics in Truth: Love, Faith, and Hope as the Foundation for Theology, Community, and Destiny,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 51, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 13-14, my bold emphasis added.

2.  Joseph Fielding Smith, comp., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1967, 345.

3.  The original publication of the Lectures on Faith was in the first edition of the Doctrine and Covenants.  See, “Lecture Third,” in Doctrine and Covenants, Kirtland, Ohio: F. G. Williams, 1835), 36.

4.  Givens, “Heretics in Truth,” 14.

Evidence Fifty-Nine: The Difference Between Thieves and Robbers in the Book of Mormon and the Bible.©

101 Reasons Why I Believe Joseph Smith Was a Prophet of God:

Evidence Fifty-Nine: 

The Difference Between Thieves and Robbers in the Book of Mormon and the Bible.

Here is a simple little thing–the distinction between thieves and robbers as portrayed in the Book of Mormon. Research by John Welch and Kelly Ward, shows that anciently there was a difference between the two; robbers were generally in bands such as we find in the Book of Mormon, thieves were more like the one in your neighborhood or community. However, that same distinction didn’t exist in American jurisprudence at the time of Joseph Smith. Nor is it present in the King James Bible. So, how did he know to separate them? Ah, there’s the rub.  Here is an excerpt from Jack Welch’s 1992 book, Reexploring the Book of Mormon, which is a collection of updates on research on the Book of Mormon as published by the F.A.R.M.S. organization then at B.Y.U.

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Although there is only little difference between a thief and a robber in most modern minds, there were considerable differences between the two under ancient Near Eastern law. A thief (ganab) was usually a local person who stole from his neighbor. He was dealt with judicially. He was tried and punished civilly, most often by a court composed of his fellow townspeople. A robber, on the other hand, was treated as an outsider, as a brigand or highwayman. He was dealt with militarily, and he could be executed summarily.

The legal distinctions between theft and robbery, especially under the laws of ancient Israel, have been analyzed thoroughly by Bernard S. Jackson, Professor of Law at the University of Kent-Canterbury and editor of the Jewish Law Annual. He shows, for example, how robbers usually acted in organized groups rivaling local governments and attacking towns and how they swore oaths and extorted ransom, a menace worse than outright war. Thieves, however, were a much less serious threat to society.1

Recently studies have shown in detail how the ancient legal and linguistic distinctions are also observable in the Book of Mormon.

...

The importance of this ancient legal tradition in the Book of Mormon is further enhanced by the fact that Anglo-American common law would have provided Joseph Smith with quite a different understanding of the legal definitions of the terms theft and robbery, inconsistent in many ways with usages found in the Book of Mormon.

Moreover, if Joseph Smith had relied on the language of his King James Bible for legal definitions of these terms, he would have stumbled into error, for that translation renders "thief" and "robber" indiscriminately. For example, the same phrase is translated inconsistently as "den of robbers" and "den of thieves" in Jeremiah 7:11 and Matthew 21:13. The same word (lestai) is translated sometimes as "thieves" (Matthew 27:38), other times as "robber" (John 18:40). But there was an ancient distinction between thieves and robbers that no translator should neglect, and over which Joseph Smith did not blunder.(1)

1 Bernard S. Jackson, Theft in Early Jewish Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

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Interesting stuff!  One more bit of evidence that Joseph Smith was not the author of the Book of Mormon but its translator under the influence of the “gift and power of God.” A tidbit that adds to my belief that he was a prophet of God.

Let’s think together again, soon.

Notes:

1.  John W. Welch and Kelly Ward, “Thieves and Robbers,” in John W. Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992, 248-49.

"How Unpardonable Would it Have Been in You to Have Turned Out a Blockhead:" The Incomparable Wisdom, Courage, Vision, and Example of Abigail Adams©

Introduction: This morning I had the good fortune and pleasure of reading one of the most inspiring stories a former educator could read and I had to share it with you. It concerns the attempts of John and Abigail Adams to educate their young son John Quincy Adams. David McCullough one of America’s premier historians, as you will see below, thought John Quincy one of the best educated men to inhabit the White House, so his parents did pretty well. Below is the story of sending him off with his father, from the east coast of the United States, during the middle of the winter and the middle of the Revolutionary War, to France for an important part of his education. John Quincy Adams was a child at the time–equivalent to our elementary school children!  

Consider Abigail’s courage, her faith, her vision, and her commitment to not only allow, but to encourage this voyage. McCullough includes two truly amazing and inspiring quotations from letters she wrote to her son; one when he had to return to France a second time, and a second letter when she later learned the boy was a little uppity when he came home about his education and opinions. I think you will agree the wisdom of this woman is a wonder to behold. This episode should stand as a model for parents and children alike. I for one am grateful for her incomparable example and this story which is a significant part of our legacy as Americans. God has blessed America!  PS:  I didn't know they used the word "blockhead" in the Revolutionary period. I nearly fell out of bed laughing when I read it.

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I want to read to you, in conclusion, a letter that John Quincy Adams received from his mother. Little John Adams was taken to Europe by his father when his father sailed out of Massachusetts in the midst of winter, in the midst of war, to serve our country in France. Nobody went to sea in the wintertime, on the North Atlantic, if it could possibly be avoided. And nobody did it trying to cut through the British barricade outside of Boston Harbor because the British ships were sitting out there waiting to capture somebody like John Adams and take him to London and to the Tower, where he would have been hanged as a traitor. But they sent this little ten-year-old boy with his father, risking his life, his mother knowing that she wouldn’t see him for months, maybe years at best. Why? Because she and his father wanted John Quincy to be in association with Franklin and the great political philosophers of France, to learn to speak French, to travel in Europe, to be able to soak it all up. And they risked his life for that—for his education. We have no idea what people were willing to do for education in times past. It’s the one sustaining theme through our whole country—that the next generation will be better educated than we are. John Adams himself is a living example of the transforming miracle of education. His father was able to write his name, we know. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. And because he had a scholarship to Harvard, everything changed for him. He said, ”I discovered books and read forever,“ and he did. And they wanted this for their son.

Well, it was a horrendous voyage. Everything that could have happened to go wrong, went wrong. And when the little boy came back, he said he didn’t ever want to go across the Atlantic again as long as he lived. And then his father was called back, and his mother said you’re going back. And here is what she wrote to him. Now, keep in mind that this is being written to a little kid and listen to how different it is from how we talk to our children in our time. She’s talking as if to a grownup. She’s talking to someone whom they want to bring along quickly because there’s work to do and survival is essential:

These are the times in which genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Now, there are several interesting things going on in that letter. For all the times that she mentions the mind, in the last sentence she says, ”When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.“ In other words, the mind itself isn’t enough. You have to have the heart. Well, of course he went and the history of our country is different because of it. John Quincy Adams, in my view, was the most superbly educated and maybe the most brilliant human being who ever occupied the executive office. He was, in my view, the greatest Secretary of State we’ve ever had. He wrote the Monroe Doctrine, among other things. And he was a wonderful human being and a great writer. Told to keep a diary by his father when he was in Europe, he kept the diary for 65 years. And those diaries are unbelievable. They are essays on all kinds of important, heavy subjects. He never tells you who he had lunch with or what the weather’s like. But if you want to know that, there’s another sort of little Cliff diary that he kept about such things.

Well after the war was over, Abigail went to Europe to be with her husband, particularly when he became our first minister to the court of Saint James. And John Quincy came home from Europe to prepare for Harvard. And he had not been home in Massachusetts very long when Abigail received a letter from her sister saying that John Quincy was a very impressive young man —and of course everybody was quite astonished that he could speak French—but that, alas, he seemed a little overly enamored with himself and with his own opinions and that this was not going over very well in town. So Abigail sat down in a house that still stands on Grosvenor Square in London—it was our first embassy if you will, a little 18th century house—and wrote a letter to John Quincy. And here’s what she said:

If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world and obtaining knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book, but it has been supplied to you. That your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have turned out a blockhead.

How unpardonable it would be for us–with all that we have been given, all the advantages we have, all the continuing opportunities we have to enhance and increase our love of learning–to turn out blockheads or to raise blockheads. What we do in education, what these wonderful teachers and administrators and college presidents and college and university trustees do is the best, most important work there is.(1) 

Let’s think together again, soon.

Notes:

1.  David McCullough, “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are,” address to the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, 15 February 2005, in Imprimis, 34, no. 4 (April 2005), available online at: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/knowing-history-and-knowing-who-we-are/  See also, David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017, 115-19.