Chap wrote:But now I do feel a little uncomfortable when I think about the feature of Mormon belief that Kishkumen has highlighted on this thread. Is there, I have to ask, any group of self-styling Christians of any significant size and historical persistence apart from Mormons who claim that after death our ultimate fate will be decided by anybody other than Jesus?
I can't think of one. And it is a difference at a very crucial point in belief structure, perhaps none more crucial: how, to put it crudely, are we to get into heaven?
I still refuse to say "Mormons aren't Christians" on the grounds set out above. But if Mormonism is Christianity, Jim, it seems that it may not be Christianity as any other significant Christian group knows it.
Isn't this true of a host of other categories? (theological, liturgical, epistemological, doxological, ontological, soteriological, Christological, etc. etc. etc.)
So why more crucial? What's so special about the soteriological assumptions of the institutional Church highlighted in the thread? Why does it matter whether or not any self-identifying Christians have positions that are similar to those in Mormonism? What is definitionally crucial for being a Christian vs. being a heretic has always been fluid in the history of Christian theology. Starting in the third century, the Donatists placed such a high value on the priesthood lineage (as it were) of priests that your salvation really did depend, in their view, on your leadership. In the fourth century, the problem of how one got into heaven (grace vs. works) was important to a lot of people (e.g. Augustine vs. Pelagius), but in the fifth century that receded as Christology became (again) the definitional hinge. The problem of grace vs. works didn't reappear as a central issue until Luther in the 16th century, and even then it was very much cast in terms of obedience to the institutional hierarchy in a way that it isn't today. In the 19th century, many self-styled Christians thought that getting into heaven depended a lot on who baptized you when and how. This is where all of that baptism gibberish in the Book of Mormon comes from, but this is almost a non-issue today (Mormons being the exception that proves the rule: they accept the validity of no one's baptism but their own, and that contempt is reciprocated by other sects and denominations, but most Christian groups don't make you get rebaptized in the true method the way they used to). And until Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church was under the impression that, without the sacraments administered at the hands of their priests, you were not getting into any heaven that they would recognize, and as recently as the 1990s some Roman Catholic clergy thought they had the power to damn politicians who deviated in their policy views from the Vatican. So, maybe the soteriological status of the leadership is not just a Mormon thing, after all.
I do agree with Kishkumen that "the logic of this theology is still in force," but I'm not sure the original premise of that logic is all that present anymore. I mean, unless things have really changed in the last 10 years, this was really not a part of the Mormonism I encountered. There were stray quotes here and there and I do remember being told that by one bishop that I would be judged by my priesthood leaders (this just seemed logistically impossible, so I ignored it). He also thought, though, that the gulf of Mexico once contained Enochopolis, so I didn't feel compelled to take much of what he said that seriously. I wasn't required to take it at all seriously in any church setting and never encountered that again outside of books, books that I read of my own volition, not part of any catechistic process. My understanding of obedience was linked to their authority as revealers of god's will, not arbiters of salvation. To question their authority was to question either their access to revelation (and thus the access of the institution that called them) or to question god's will itself. So, despite the quotes from Brigham Young and even more recent sources, this does not seem like a central teaching of today's Brighamite Mormonism.
The danger of looking at this synchronically is to give too much weight to past theology and to attribute to members and the leadership beliefs that they may not hold. And then it creates unnecessary and insoluble chicken-and-egg knots (do leaders today emphasize obedience because of this deep strain in Mormon theology about the leadership's soteriological status, or is the leadership imputed to have this status because the institutional culture of the Church places, as any hierarchy necessarily must, a high value on obedience to authority?). Obedience to authority has been linked to Mormon soteriology probably from nearly the beginning, but looked at historically, the theological justifications for that link have changed, and they are not even consciously expressed today. I don't think that's because of any master plan to conceal theology; it's probably just because ritualized actions and ritualized thought far outlive their original contexts.
On the other hand, maybe there is a hidden theology that the leadership only allows us to glimpse when it is convenient for their purposes, but in that case we can only speculate what it is and why the conceal it. And if we're going to speculate, my inclination would be to speculate in quite the opposite direction: rather than guarding a closeted advanced theology, I think most of them have as simplistic an understanding of Mormonism as their conference talks suggest. They weren't promoted for their theological acumen but for their administrative expertise; and like most administrators in any context, they like to be obeyed and react harshly when questioned too intensely for their comfort.