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.