Evangelicals and Mormons by Robert L. Millet & Gerald R. McDermott

Author:Robert L. Millet & Gerald R. McDermott
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon), Christianity
ISBN: 9781573834490
Publisher: Regent College Publishing
Published: 2010-09-15T07:01:26+00:00

A Latter-day Saint Response

Robert Millet

There is no doubt in my mind but that Jesus of Nazareth was born at about the time of the death of Herod the Great, lived and ministered during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, and died by crucifixion at the hands of Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea. In other words, I know with an absolute assurance that Jesus was an actual, historical figure, a real person living in real time. Now that’s no huge announcement, nothing worthy of a press conference, for most people around the world, even those who do not accept the divine Sonship of Christ, accept the fact that he actually lived, even if they see him as no more than a kindly gentleman who loved people and turned some great phrases, a Samaritan Socrates, a Galilean guru.

Professor McDermott has provided an excellent summary of the teachings and work of Rudolf Bultmann and his fellow travelers, including Bultmann’s modern disciples that we know as the Jesus Seminar. For most of us who profess a belief in and commitment to the Savior, there is the tendency—and I encounter it regularly— to smile, shake our heads, and dismiss the Jesus Seminar and their Scholars Version of the four Gospels with a wave of the hand, for few seriously acknowledged New Testament scholars give them even a second look. The problem, of course, is that these men and women who make up the Seminar are teachers or church leaders, persons of influence who have students and parishioners and followers. While their work hasn’t given me (or I would say the vast majority of Latter-day Saints) even a slight pause, it is having an impact on a world that has already slid into snide cynicism. Furthermore, a liberal media loves controversy and especially the kind of controversy that in any way casts doubt upon what has been received and believed for millennia. Even scarier, one day the students and research assistants of the Seminar personnel will be professors, and some will choose to work in the ministry. And skepticism and even agnosticism cannot help but influence not only the content but also the spirit of what is taught or preached.

None of this should surprise the Christian world. Mormons certainly are not blown away by it. In 1966 Gordon B. Hinckley, at the time an LDS apostle and later a president of the Church, said: “Modern theologians strip [Jesus] of his divinity and then wonder why men do not worship him. These clever scholars have taken from Jesus the mantle of godhood and have left only a man. They have tried to accommodate him to their own narrow thinking. They have robbed him of his divine Sonship and taken from the world its rightful King.”31 Some five years later, Church leader Harold B. Lee explained to a group of students at Utah State University: “Fifty years ago or more,” he said, “there were the unmistakable evidences that there was coming into the religious world actually a question about the Bible and about the divine calling of the Master himself.

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