Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Mormonism 101/Chapter 12

Chapter 11: Grace and Works

A FAIR Analysis of: Criticism of Mormonism/Books A work by author: Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson

Chapter 13: Communion and Baptism

Index to Claims made in Chapter 12: Heaven and Hell

Claim

• The authors state that the LDS believe that "a person is destined for one of six places after death," by which they mean Perdition, or Outer Darkness, the Telestial Kingdom, the Terrestrial Kingdom, and the three levels of the Celestial Kingdom.

Response

• By failing at the outset to make the critical distinction that these destinies are not determined until after the Judgment, not just after death, they sow the first seeds of confusion which permeate this chapter.

Claim

• The authors make the first error of "preaching to the choir" in the chapter, when they write that the key to understanding LDS soteriology is to "examine the biblical proof texts the Latter-day Saints use...to support their views."

Response

• Anyone who understands the Restored Gospel will know that we do not base our doctrine upon proof texts1 from the Bible (or anywhere else, for that matter), but upon latter-day revelation. Since we do not believe our teachings contradict the Bible, it is quite normal (even normative) that we would preach from the scriptures, but they are the reflection of our doctrine, not its source-a confusion all too easy for a Biblicist to make, for whom the relationship between doctrine and scripture goes exactly the other way around.

Claim

• The first alleged "proof text" examined by the authors is 1 Corinthians 15:40, "There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial...". They say that in light of verse 41, where Paul makes the comparison between the light of the sun, the moon and the stars as a simile for the difference in glories between the three kingdoms, that "many scholars believe that Paul was referring to heavenly bodies such as the moon, sun, and stars."

Response

• Well, yes—that is the whole point of a simile. If one were to say "my true love's eyes are like almonds," one is not writing an agronomy treatise, but, yes, one is referring to almonds. Paul's analogy works like this: "There are A, B, and C...so too is the resurrection of the dead (verse 42)"—a classic simile. To misunderstand such a fundamental literary feature as a simile does not bode well for the authors' understanding of the even more sophisticated literary forms that Paul often employs.
• The authors then say, "One thing for sure, there is no mention of 'bodies telestial.'" No, not in so many words, but Paul's simile is quite clearly tripartite, using the symbolism of the sun, the earth and the stars, so "telestial" (meaning "stellar," or "of stars") is hardly out of harmony with the verse. Because of their Biblicist background, they accuse Joseph Smith of a rather barefaced attempt to "bolster his erroneous doctrine" by inserting the word into the Joseph Smith Translation. However, it's well known that people in the nineteenth century often made what are technically called paraphrases (Thomas Jefferson made one of the New Testament which reflected his proto-Unitarian beliefs, for instance). A paraphrase is not a translation in the secular sense of looking at texts in other languages and then redacting (editing and recombing) the various texts and rendering the resultant consensus in the target language, and this latter, modern sense of translation has never been claimed by Latter-day Saints on behalf of the Joseph Smith Translation-it is, in fact, not canonical for precisely that reason (that is, his paraphrase as a study project was interrupted by his martyrdom so is incomplete at best). In any case, the term fits doctrinally and in the sense of the language Paul uses here, and its insertion would be problematic only for Biblicists (in other words, this is yet another error of "preaching to the choir").
• For a detailed response, see: 1 Corinthians 15:40 as a "proof text?" and History of the belief in a three-part heaven

Claim

• The next "proof text" the authors consider is 2 Corinthians 12:2-4: "I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such a one caught up to the third heaven..."

Response

• They start off in their usual way, with the circular assumption that we are basing our doctrines upon passages like this, rather than teaching doctrine from the scriptures, which is not quite the same thing. They then skim lightly over the scholarly tradition of Jews in a rather evasive way with the claim:

Using these passages to validate the idea of three kingdoms making up heaven ignores the Jewish tradition Paul would have known. According to that tradition, paradise was the abode of God, the place of eternal joy for God's people. However, Jewish custom never viewed a first or second heaven as alternative eternal destinations. Rather, these referred to the atmospheric heaven (the sky) and the galactic heaven (the universe).7

• If this sounds remarkably, even anachronistically modern, it's because it is. It turns out not to be Jewish at all: their reference is to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment-era Protestant commentator Matthew Henry, who writes:

It was certainly a very extraordinary honour done him: in some sense he was caught up into the third heaven, the heaven of the blessed, above the aerial heaven, in which the fowls fly, above the starry heaven, which is adorned with those glorious orbs: it was into the third heaven, where God most eminently manifests His glory.8

• Such a glaring error leads one to believe that perhaps they don't think people will check their footnotes-another sign of the "down-market" audience for which their book seems to be intended.
• For a detailed response, see: 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 as a "proof text?" and History of the belief in a three-part heaven  ^{[needs work]}

Hell: Afterworld Versus a Place of Punishment

Leaving behind the well-attested ancient belief in a tripartite heaven, let's see if McKeever and Johnson manage to mangle the Christian view of Hell as badly as they do with the correct, authentic and original Christian view of Heaven.

They don't start off well, confusing both the New Testament concepts of Hell in the sense of "hades" or "sheol" (spirit prison) and "gehenna" (everlasting burning)-terms with completely different meanings-and using the terms interchangeably, blissfully ignorant of the distinctions LDS (and the Bible, and most other Christians) make between the two. While it is probably true that, as they say, "...many [Latter-day Saints] find the [Biblicist] view of hell (eternal punishment with no second chances) to be both unfair and offensive," what offends us even more is that such an oversimplification is not Christian doctrine. Oddly enough, they are not even representing normative Protestant doctrine when they fail to make a difference between hades/sheol and gehenna.

As Innes explains,

"Hell" in the AV normally renders one of the three words, Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna.

Sheol...is the word [that] is used in the Old Testament for the place of the dead. In general, we may say that it is the state of death pictured in visible terms....In the later Jewish literature we meet with the idea of divisions within Sheol for the wicked and the righteous44 in which each experiences a foretaste of his final destiny (Enoch xxii. 1-14). This idea appears to underlie the imagery of the parable of Dives and Lazarus in the New Testament.45

"Hades" is the Greek term used to translate the Hebrew word "sheol" in the New Testament. Innes again:

In the LXX46 it almost always renders sheol, and in the New Testament the Pesh.47 renders it by shyul. It is used in connection with the death of Christ in Acts ii. 27, 31, which quotes Ps. xvi. 10. In Mt. xvi. 18 Christ says that the gates of Hades (cf. Is. xxxviii. 10; Pss. ix. 13, cvii. 18) shall not prevail against His Church. As the gates of a city are essential to its power, the meaning here is probably the power of death.48

With respect to Gehenna, Innes goes on to explain,

In later Jewish writings Gehenna came to have the sense of the place of punishment for sinners (Assumption of Moses x.10; 2 Esdras vii.36) The rabbinic literature contains various opinions as to who would suffer eternal punishment. The ideas were widespread that the sufferings of some would be terminated by annihilation, or that the fires of Gehenna were in some cases purgatorial. But those who held these doctrines also taught the reality of eternal punishment for certain classes of sinners...The teaching of the New Testament endorses this belief.49

In the New Testament, the Hebrew word is usually transliterated as ge'enna, but on occasion the general (i.e., non-Judaeo-Christian) Greek word Tartarus is also used. "Gehenna" comes from the imagery of a continuously smoldering garbage pit in the Valley of Hinnom in New Testament Jerusalem. Tartarus is a classical Greek word for the son of the god Chaos but came to mean that part of the afterworld where the wicked suffered for their sins. So we have two pairs of Greek/Hebrew words used in the New Testament: Sheol/Hades for the afterworld in general, and Gehenna/Tartarus for the place of eternal punishment. But as noted, Tartarus is a rarely used word in the New Testament (originally written, of course, in Greek).

Given such a fundamental and critical failure to distinguish between very clearly different concepts in the New Testament, precious little of McKeever and Johnson's commentary on the Gospel's beliefs regarding Outer Darkness, Perdition, Spirit Prison and the Telestial Kingdom makes any sense whatsoever and the critic of their work wonders where to even begin to approach it. A basic primer in Christianity (let alone its restored form) is needed by McKeever and Johnson.

Just as one example: they claim the following concerning our understanding of the Telestial Kingdom:

It is said that it "surpasses all understanding"; and that even its inhabitants, the last to be redeemed, and even then deprived of the personal presence of God and the Christ, shall nevertheless receive the ministration of angels and the Holy Ghost...is completely foreign to the Bible.50

Since McKeever and Johnson make absolutely no connection between how they interpret Biblical terms and modern LDS terminology, this claim doesn't even make sense. Their criticism could conceivably be true-if only we knew what they meant by the terms the Bible uses. Since the Bible itself so clearly teaches that Christ Himself went to minister to the souls in Hell (sheol), as referred to in 1 Peter 3:18-19 and 4:6, one can see that any serious attempt by a reviewer to take their criticisms at face value crashes upon the shoals of inconsistency and profound ignorance of the terminology used in the Bible. Hell: The Telestial Kingdom Versus Perdition

It should come as no surprise, then, that they confuse the LDS terms of "exaltation" and "salvation," when they criticize the Terrestrial Kingdom as being a place where only a "a measure of salvation, but not the fulness" of salvation will be given to those there. This is simply not what the Gospel teaches. We teach that all inhabitants of kingdoms of glory-let us remember that even the Telestial Kingdom is a mansion of Heaven-receive salvation by dint of the universal atonement of our Savior. The Telestial Kingdom is sometimes referred to by LDS as "hell" but only in the sense that neither Christ nor the Father will be there. Its inhabitants will have to be satisfied with the ministrations of angels sent from higher kingdoms. Needless to say, this is a point that goes right over McKeever and Johnson's head; it's not clear they even understand our position on it, let alone, of course, agree with it. The Telestial Kingdom is never confused with Perdition in LDS teachings-another point that goes over McKeever and Johnson's head, it seems.

But the Savior also gave us commandments and told us to build up his kingdom, and promised concomitant rewards to those who are more or less valiant than their peers. This is fundamental and clear New Testament doctrine that is ignored in embarrassment by Biblicists.

We draw a distinction between universal salvation and exaltation, and anyone who wishes to make a credible criticism needs to understand the distinction we draw. Whether or not they believe it themselves, their failure to understand it leads them into making silly claims such as the Terrestrial Kingdom representing only a measure of salvation. In any case, since Biblicists are Trinitarian, the difference between the ministering of Christ in that kingdom and the ministering of the Father being reserved for the Celestial Kingdom is an odd thing for them to overlook. If Christ and God the Father are two different persons within the same being-as classical Trinitarianism teaches-what difference does it make, and how does it logically follow that one divine ministration is less than another? The Terrestrial and the Celestial Kingdoms would be the same. Thus, even on their own terms this criticism fails.

It is also incorrect, as they claim, that we believe that exaltation only applies to the highest level of the Celestial Kingdom. The highest level has the distinctive characteristic that there is no barrier there to eternal progression-what ancient Christians such as Augustine called either theosis or deification. Augustine was, in fact, an eloquent expositor of this early Christian doctrine, forgotten long before the Reformation and only restored through Joseph Smith. See for instance, Benz, whose words stand as a non-LDS rebuke to McKeever and Johnson's comments about Restored Christianity's concept of exaltation being "egotistical." We'll come to this again, but Benz shows that the kind of opinion held by McKeever and Johnson is pure mischief:

Hence, the concept of Imago Dei [literally, the image of God, but in effect divinity] does not lead toward self-aggrandizement but toward charity as the true and actual form of God's love, for the simple reason that in one's neighbour the image of God, the Lord himself, confronts us, and that the love of God should be fulfilled in the love towards him in whom God himself is mirrored, that is, in one's neighbour. Thus, in the last analysis the concept of Imago Dei is the key to the fundamental law of the gospel, 'Thou shalt love God and thy neighbour as thyself,' since thou shouldst view thy neighbour with an eye to the image which God has engraven upon him and to the promise that he has given about him.'51

They even contradict themselves by making this claim, that there is no difference between salvation and exaltation first, and then quoting Joseph Fielding Smith as referring to the Celestial Kingdom as the place where those who gain exaltation shall dwell. Hell: The Role of Angels in the Telestial Kingdom

McKeever and Johnson likewise tread on the quicksand of ignorance when they venture into modern nangelology, claiming that angels are a special creation of God and that humans can never become angels. They make the critic's job too easy by quoting Psalm 148:2 and 5: "Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts...Let them praise the name of the Lord: for he commanded, and they were created." It's all too easy to be tempted to look this up and see what's in the intervening verses. And in fact when one actually opens up one's Bible, rather than just throwing it upon the rostrum and thumping it for emphasis,52 one learns that verses 3 and 4 include the exhortation to praise God to the sun and the moon and the stars of light, the heavens of heavens,53 and the waters that are above the heavens. God created everything, including us, and including angels and including the physical universe. There is no one-to-one relationship here that suggests that angels are not human species, merely humans at a different stage of development or playing a different role. That many today believe angels to be a different species of some kind is not an original Christian doctrine, nor is it an original Jewish doctrine.

Dahood explains that in the OT, "'his ministers' [is] another expression for the angels, described as ministerial servants ready to execute the sovereign will."54 Angels were messengers sent with a divine mission, and the parallelistic pair-structures of Psalms 148:2 indicate that in this case the angels in question were soldiers. McKeever and Johnson, as is typical of much of the modern North American Biblicist tradition that has arisen in the past century, anti-intellectual, anti-scholarly and deliberately cut off from exposure to centuries of European biblical scholarship, are confusing a general term with a specific, a title with the titleholder, so to speak.

Both the Greek angelos and its Hebrew counterpart, malak, simply mean "messenger." Ancient Jewish custom did borrow some rather bizarre imagery from Assyrian sources for some of its demi-divine beings such as cherubim, but cherubim-which are artistic conventions common to temple worship throughout the ages, and therefore symbolic and abstract-aren't angels, who are "real" beings. In any case, it is difficult to see how a scripture such as Psalms 148:2 would somehow limit God's capability to create angels at will, and however He will. But Biblicists have never let their belief in a naive omnipotence stop them from contradicting themselves when simple common sense would lead them to obviously inconsistent interpretations (because their interpretations are based on inconsistent assumptions).

Hickenbotham55 demonstrates how the LDS concept of angelology is more Biblical, ironically, than is the Biblicist view:

The scriptures often identify angels with ministering spirits. Psalms 104:4 rhetorically asks, "Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire...?" (see also Heb. 1:7) and Hebrews 1:13-14 reads, "But to which of the angels said he at any time, Sit on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool? Are they not all ministering spirits; sent forth to minister for them who shall be the heirs of salvation?" As has already been shown previously, we all existed as spirits before birth (see Matt. 18:10; note angels in this verse should be spirits). And men like angels often act as messengers of God (Hag. 1:13; Mal. 2:7; 3:1; Matt. 11:10; Mark 1:2; Luke 7:27). That angels are in appearance as men and were actually called men by inspired writers is also attested to in scripture (Gen. 18:1-2; 19:1, 15; Ezek. 40:1-4; Matt. 28:2-6; Mark 16:5; Luke 24:3-4; John 20:1-12; Acts 1:10; Heb. 13:2; Rev. 21:17). We are likewise instructed that we are not to worship angels (Col. 2:18; Rev. 19:10; 22:8-9; see also Jud. 13:15-16). It is only when we read the account of an angel's appearance to John the Revelator that this injunction is explained. John records, "And when... I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel... Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellow servant, and of thy brethren the prophets..." (Rev. 22:8-9). The angel thus identifies himself as a righteous man who had returned as an angelic messenger even as Moses, Elias, and others have done (Matt. 17:2; Mark 9:4; Lk. 9:30). He was not just man's equal but a spirit brother (Rev. 19:10) and a son of God as man is (Num. 16:22; 27:16; Acts 17:22-24; Eph. 4:6; Heb. 12:9). Some Christians mistakenly conclude that angels are "sexless" because Matthew 22:30 seems to support this belief. This scripture implies nothing about the ability of angels to procreate but only states that they are unmarried (single). Since marriage and procreation are only part of mortal life and exaltation, it seems clear that unexalted angels, whether pre-existent spirits or resurrected beings will necessarily be single (See D&C 132:15-17).56

McKeever and Johnson's characterization of theosis (deification, eternal progression), either in its early Christian or latter-day Christian form, as being self-centered ("more focused on personal power, gain, and sex" as they put it) is nothing more than a cheap shot. They unwittingly echo a common criticism by atheists of religion as a whole being self-centered. They contrast what they see in LDS doctrine with the image of worshipping God in Revelation, forgetting that Revelation is a canonical book for Latter-day Saints, too. They not only do not explain this contradiction, I seriously doubts it even occurred to them. In any case, for the record, all the speculations of nineteenth-century brethren aside (which, like the circular arguers that McKeever and Johnson are, they assume we lend all written material equal doctrinal weight-which we clearly do not) they assume all LDS writings are as indicative of LDS doctrine as are our canonical scriptures. This is circular because it argues a point of our doctrine based on one of their assumptions-that the written word is the Word of God, not a record of the Word of God. And in any case, uniquely LDS scripture happens both to echo the apocalyptic worshipping of God as in Revelation, along with the primacy of God in LDS soteriology (doctrines regarding salvation) and eschatology (doctrines concerning the latter days):

And he hath brought to pass the redemption of the world, whereby he that is found guiltless before him at the judgment day hath it given unto him to dwell in the presence of God in his kingdom, to sing ceaseless praises with the choirs above, unto the Father, and unto the Son, and unto the Holy Ghost, which are one God, in a state of happiness which hath no end.57

...for God said unto me: Worship God, for him only shalt thou serve.58 Conclusion

Not content to treat the LDS as Biblicists by giving every speculative personal LDS commentary the same weight as scripture, McKeever and Johnson go on to draw their own conclusions and present this as if it were LDS doctrine: "Every Mormon couple who obtains exaltation has no choice but to look forward to the day when one of their own children will serve as a tempter and cause one-third of the other family members to rebel and fall into sin." As if this non sequitur weren't vivid enough, they bring in the names of Auschwitz, Rwanda, Tiananmen Square and Kosovo in a melodramatic attempt to paint a horrible vision of "Mormon eternity."

I can end with no better condemnation of this kind of overheated prose than to quote McKeever and Johnson's own words against them: "Perhaps with our sin-tainted minds, such a wondrous concept would be difficult to grasp." Indeed. But the way to at least begin to grasp it is to ask the LDS what we believe, not presume to tell us what we believe.

Endnotes

1 In apologetic terms, a proof text is typically a scripture, often pulled out of context, used to prove a doctrinal point.

7 Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson, Mormonism 101 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2001), 172.

8 Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary of the Whole Bible (McLean, Virginia: MacDonald Publishing Co., 1706), 6:641.

44 Exactly as the Restored Gospel teaches.

45 D.K. Innes, "Hell," The New Bible Dictionary (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 1962), 518.

46 LXX is the commonly used abbreviation for the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament written in Alexandria, Egypt, several centuries before Christ. It's the tradition of the Old Testament Christ and the Apostles (as well as the Jews of the day) used; at the end of the first century A.D. Jewish scholars rejected the LXX tradition and developed a new one, one that took over half a millennium to compile-this new one is known as the MT, or Masoretic Text, and is the one most modern Christian Old Testaments, including that in the King James Version, are based on.

47 Pesh. is, like LXX, an abbreviation for a version of the ancient Bible. In this case it stands for "Peshitta," the Old Syriac version still used today by Lebanese Marionite Christians and Palestinian Christians.

48 Ibid., 518.

49 Ibid., 518.

50 McKeever and Johnson, Mormonism 101, 174-175.

51 Ernst W. Benz, "Imago Dei: Man in the Image of God," Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels, edited by Truman G. Madsen (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1978), 218-219.

52 Although this is couched in stronger language than the author would use himself, and it talks only about Southern Baptists, this tendency to use the Bible almost as a magic talisman brings to mind a quote by the modern Renaissance scholar, Harold Bloom, in his famous book The American Religion (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 222:

Even as Fundamentalists insist upon the inerrancy of the Bible, they give up all actual reading of the Bible, since in fact its language is too remote and difficult for them to begin to understand. What is left is the Bible as physical object, limp and leather, a final icon or magical talisman. To read Criswell [an anti-intellectual leader of the Fundamentalist faction of the Southern Baptist Convention] or any other Fundamentalist clergyman on the Bible is almost a literal impossibility, at least for me, because they are not writing about the text, in any sense whatsoever of text, or of that text. They write about their own dogmatic social, political, cultural, moral, and even economic convictions, and biblical texts simply are quoted, with frenetic abandon, whether or not they in any way illustrate or even approach the areas where the convictions center. They are quoted also as though they interpreted themselves and were perfectly transparent in their meanings.

53 I think I can understand why McKeever and Johnson decided to delicately ignore a Bible passage referencing multiple heavens.

54 Mitchell Dahood, S.J., Psalms III: 101-150. Anchor Bible, Vol. 1970 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970), 13.

55 Incidentally, an evangelical Christian who goes under the pseudonym J.P. Holding, gave Mormonism 101 a less than sterling rating, even though one would assume they're all on the same side. One of the reasons was McKeever and Johnson's failure to come to grips with the new generation of amateur (that is, non-BYU professors, nor General Authorities) LDS apologists that has cropped up: [1]

That said, I was very disappointed that there was not greater interaction with modern Mormon apologetic efforts. Names like [Richard] Hopkins and [BYU Professor of Arabic, and FARMS executive director Daniel] Peterson are barely discovered. I will grant that this was obviously intended as an introductory book….We recommend Mormonism 101 for all who are taking their initial steps into this field-but be aware of its limitations.

56 Michael W. Hickenbotham, Answering Challenging Mormon Questions: Replies to 130 Queries by Friends and Critics of the LDS Church (Bountiful, Utah: Horizon Publishers, 1995), #54.

57 Mormon 7:7.

58 Moses 1:15.