liz3564 wrote:
No offense to Dr. Peterson, but most people in my Ward would not be familiar with his work.
That has been my past experience, too. And although even the name Nibley is fairly well-known, few have bothered to wade through his apologia. It's not a case of "what's the answer", but "what's the question?" It seems you have to be in a certain frame of mind to even understand the questions.
General comments on apologetics:
In the early '80s a member bought
Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless, and after three or so chapters passed it on to me. I became engrossed in it and still consider this to be the best Nibley book in publication. It still remains on my (now one) bookshelf. In the chapter "Zeal Without Knowledge" he had some cutting criticisms of BYU. It's not so much his apologia that interests me now, but his eccentricity, and he could be as scathing of academia ("the robes of a false priesthood") as he was of "the BYU". Truman Madsen's Introduction to this book I still consider to be the best introduction I've read in
any book.
For those interested, here is his essay
Zeal Without Knowledge (PDF)
Yet Joseph Smith commends their intellectual efforts as a
corrective to the Latter-day Saints, who lean too far in the other direction, giving their young people and old awards for zeal alone, zeal without knowledge--for sitting in endless meetings, for
dedicated conformity, and unlimited capacity for suffering boredom. We think it more
commendable to get up at 5:00 a.m. to write a bad book than to get up at nine o'clock to write a
good one--that is pure zeal that tends to breed a race of insufferable, self-righteous prigs and
barren minds. One has only to consider the present outpouring of "inspirational" books in the
Church which bring little new in the way of knowledge: truisms, and platitudes, kitsch, and
cliches have become our everyday diet....
It actually
happens at the BYU, and that not rarely, that students come to a teacher, usually at the beginning
of a term, with the sincere request that he refrain from teaching them anything new. They have no
desire, they explain, to hear what they do not know already! I cannot imagine that happening at
any other school, but maybe it does. Unless we go on to other new things, we are stifling our
powers.
Nibley has earned a lot of criticism for some of his apologetic works (and I believe justifiably so in many cases), but only the most biased would fail to acknowledge that some of his general insights were quite sharp, and often contrary to "the Brethren".