Water Dog wrote:Kishkumen wrote:Well, I wish him all the best. Now that he has been published in the peer-reviewed Interpreter, he has one more notch on the old CV belt.
I haven't read the article, so no comment about its content, might come back later for that. But just thought I'd point out this man has AB degree from Princeton, MA & John Dehlin from Columbia, MPhil from Cambridge, and MA, MPhil, PhD from Yale. Man has 7 degrees from ivy league institutions. He's taught at Yale and is current research fellow there in addition to his role at GWU. Where'd you go to school, BYU? I'm sure he has been published in plenty of places besides the Interpreter. He seems to have had an impressive legal career. Why do you have to start out with a character attack, and one which isn't even truthful. These comments seem beneath you. It's apparent he was hired to clean up a mess at a relatively new institution. Do you really want to compare his level of responsibility with yours? I suspect you'd lose that battle. I've been involved in a university receiving accreditation before, and that was with the backing of an already-accredited and highly ranked parent institution. Not easy. Show a little respect.
If he was hired to clean up a mess, he is not helping. He doesn't understand the Early Church Fathers. For example, he says,
Still, sometime after the 3rd century AD, in Western Christendom, there occurred a great theological eclipse. God in the thinking of the learned –after Irenaeus and Clement– had become so platonically high in the heavens that His loving response to our loving obedience disappeared in a puff of misguided transcendence.
This is absolute fantasy. Irenaeus was teaching the very same theology (see my quote above) as Athanasius was two centuries later. C. S. Lewis wrote of him,
When I first opened his De Incarnatione I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece. I knew very little Christian Greek except that of the New Testament and I had expected difficulties. To my astonishment I found it almost as easy as Xenophon; and only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity. Every page I read confirmed this impression. His approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as "arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature." They are here shown to be rather the re-telling in capital letters of the same message which Nature writes in her crabbed cursive hand; the very operations one would expect of Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to "borrow death from others." The whole book, indeed, is a picture of the Tree of Life—a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence. We cannot, I admit, appropriate all its confidence today. We cannot point to the high virtue of Christian living and the gay, almost mocking courage of Christian martyrdom, as a proof of our doctrines with quite that assurance which Athanasius takes as a matter of course. But whoever may be to blame for that it is not Athanasius.
As Athanasius himself wrote so eloquently,
Much more, then, the Word of the All-good Father was not unmindful of the human race that He had called to be; but rather, by the offering of His own body He abolished the death which they had incurred, and corrected their neglect by His own teaching. Thus by His own power He restored the whole nature of man. The Savior's own inspired disciples assure us of this. We read in one place: " For the love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge that, if One died on behalf of all, then all died, and He died for all that we should no longer live unto ourselves, but unto Him who died and rose again from the dead, even our Lord Jesus Christ."[1] And again another says: "But we behold Him Who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God He should taste of death on behalf of every man." The same writer goes on to point out why it was necessary for God the Word and none other to become Man: "For it became Him, for Whom are all things and through Whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Author of their salvation perfect through suffering.[2] He means that the rescue of mankind from corruption was the proper part only of Him Who made them in the beginning. He points out also that the Word assumed a human body, expressly in order that He might offer it in sacrifice for other like bodies: "Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, He also Himself assumed the same, in order that through death He might bring to nought Him that hath the power of death, that is to say, the Devil, and might rescue those who all their lives were enslaved by the fear of death."[3] For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection. By man death has gained its power over men; by the Word made Man death has been destroyed and life raised up anew. That is what Paul says, that true servant of Christ: For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Just as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,"[4] and so forth. Now, therefore, when we die we no longer do so as men condemned to death, but as those who are even now in process of rising we await the general resurrection of all, "which in its own times He shall show," even God Who wrought it and bestowed it on us. (http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/ath-inc.htm#ch_2)
This makes Boyle's words ring hollow:
God was conceived as so utterly transcendent that many at the time and since lost track of the fact that God is completely responsive to the worship, struggles, tragedies and prayers of His children.
Again, Athanasius,
(8) For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us. He saw the reasonable race, the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father's Mind, wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption. He saw that corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression; He saw, too, how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled. He saw how unseemly it was that the very things of which He Himself was the Artificer should be disappearing. He saw how the surpassing wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own. Nor did He will merely to become embodied or merely to appear; had that been so, He could have revealed His divine majesty in some other and better way. No, He took our body, and not only so, but He took it directly from a spotless, stainless virgin, without the agency of human father—a pure body, untainted by intercourse with man. He, the Mighty One, the Artificer of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known and in which He dwelt. Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.
It didn't take Jo Smith to show us who God is. The Early Church Fathers did so millennia before, clearly and concisely, declaring that all who taught what Jo later took up, (that God is not a Trinity), were heretics who did not understand the God that was revealed to them in Jesus and affirmed by His Apostles.
This is why, As Boyle so astutely observes,
Mormon doctrine receives so little theological credit among academic theologians.
