Man of Holiness: The Mormon Search for a Personal God

Preface

It has been over twenty years since the publication of the Master’s thesis on which this book is based. While much of the original text remains substantially the same, it has been necessary to add new material, update some of the statistics and facts in relation to the LDS Church and incorporate references to some of the new publications which have appeared in recent years.

Ezra Taft Benson was still President of the Church in 1988 when I wrote my thesis and LDS Church membership was about seven million. Since then Presidents Hunter, Hinckley and Monson have followed and membership has increased by a further six million. In 1988 there were 41 temples, the 41st being the Frankfurt, Germany Temple. Today there are 130 the latest being the Oquirrh Mountain Utah Temple. Twenty two more have been announced or are under construction around the world. Twenty years ago there were about 33,000 LDS proselytizing missionaries carrying the Mormon gospel to the world. Today that number has almost doubled. In 1988 there was still a Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Today, two presidents later, it has been transformed into the Community of Christ and built its first (and only) temple in Independence Missouri. In my own country Australia, there was only one Temple in 1988, the Sydney Australia Temple. Today there are temples in every state capital except Hobart and the National Capital, Canberra. Take a twenty-year period in any major Protestant denomination today and see if it has a profile of growth and development that comes anywhere near matching that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In 1988 the Internet had not yet been available for private use and though personal computers were around I certainly did not have one and typed my whole thesis on an IBM golf-ball typewriter. Since then of course, the Web has given rise to countless sites providing information on a seemingly endless list of topics, including Mormonism. At last count there were 139,000 websites on LDS subjects! The LDS Church has its own very fine official website, as do numerous anti-Mormon organizations, but what the net has also done is provide an instant forum for disaffected and ex-Mormons. They can explore a number of sites on The Mormon Ring, including information and support on www.exmormon.org. And today as well, periodicals like Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Sunstone Magazine, BYU Studies and the Neal A. Maxwell’s Institute’s links to BYU Studies and FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies), are just a few of the resources available to current students of Mormonism.

My thesis was about theology and this revision of that thesis written at a time of continuing growth and change in the LDS Church is still chiefly concerned with that, with what Mark P. Leone called Mormonism’s most spectacular, even unique feature. There have been changes in the way Mormonism presents itself, revisions in the Missionary lessons for potential converts as well as in the way it markets its teachings and practices. It has gone through several revisions of its ‘sacred’ Temple Endowment rites and has had to face tougher questioning and critical analyses from its own scholars and intellectuals about numerous issues, but it has not abandoned its basic teachings about God. It may seem more guarded and defensive in the way it sometimes presents those teachings, but is no less confident that they are fundamental and non-negotiable in asserting their claim to be the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth (Doctrine & Covenants 1:30).

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still does not hesitate to denounce the historic Church councils which produced the creeds of orthodoxy. They are adamant that such orthodoxy is unsupported by either the history of earliest Christianity or by the teachings of the New Testament. Their critiques of trinitarianism are more sophisticated now than they have ever been previously, while their affirmations of the deity of Christ certainly leave many liberal Protestant theologians in the pale. Despite all the big counter-cult guns that have been blazing away at the Mormon flagship for decades, the Man Mormons call God still exerts considerable attraction to growing numbers of potential converts. Ridiculing, demonizing and sensationalizing the God of Mormonism does nothing to inhibit the progress of the LDS Church. Happily a new school of Christian theology, missiology, and apologetics, offering a far more sensitive, serious and accurate evaluation of Mormon theology is on the rise. It can act as a supplement to the more traditional Evangelical approaches in assisting the Christian community in maintaining a meaningful dialogue with our LDS neighbours. I would like to think that when I wrote my thesis on Mormonism: The Search for a Personal God, I was already anticipating that dialogue.

JLB

Canberra

Australia

2010

INTRODUCTION

It is far easier to caricature and ridicule the Mormon doctrine of deity than it is to analyse it seriously and accurately. The general public derives its understanding of Mormon teaching almost exclusively from anti-Mormon literature. Anti-Mormon writers more often than not, simply draw attention to Mormon theology in the most simplistic and sensationalist terms, sometimes without comment or qualification. The theology is rarely examined fairly and few of its amateur critics are competent to assess its theological or philosophical implications.

The primary approach of such writers is polemical. This is largely the result of seeing Mormonism as an irreconcilable Christian heresy¹ and a pernicious cult, instead of recognizing it as a new religious movement (NRM) or even as a new world religion. Decker and Hunt’s book, The God Makers, is subtitled A Shocking Expose of What the Mormon Church REALLY Believes. It is brimming over with sensationalistic innuendo, emotive language and outright misrepresentation. The book represents a new low in anti-Mormon literature. Rather than attempting to analyze the Mormon Church with integrity in a serious and enlightening manner, it compares the Zion Curtain in Utah with the now long-gone Iron Curtain. It labels Mormonism as a totalitarian power² and suggests that the Utah-based church may well succeed in turning the U.S.A. into a theocracy, in the first stage of a takeover of the world.³ Such an extremely disturbing possibility is admitted by the authors to be highly speculative and improbable, yet they present it regardless.

Surprisingly, the book was endorsed as an accurate account of the theology, goals and secrets of Mormonism, by the late Walter Martin, Director of Christian Research Institute and author of the well-researched Kingdom of the Cults. Decker and Hunt published their work in 1984. Eleven years after that it is an ex-Mormon, Janis Hutchinson writing in her The Mormon Missionaries: An Inside look at their Real Message and Methods, who seeks to inform us about the shocking motive behind Mormon missionary work. Her shock revelation is along the same lines as Decker and Hunt, i.e. the Mormon Church wants to establish a political stronghold in the US Government and eventually establish a theocracy in America. Hutchinson is convinced that this is the real motive for the money the Church spends on its missionary program. I am not saying that her book is without value, it has an engaging, conversational style and is informative in many ways. It is just that one would expect that a woman who spent thirty-four years of her life as a devoted Mormon, would take a more insightful and sympathetic approach into what motivates Mormons to support missionary work. Instead she spends the whole of Chapter Three talking about the establishment of the Political Kingdom of God.

If Christians are to achieve any breakthroughs in attempts at dialogue with Mormons, they will have to try harder to understand Mormons in their own terms and resist the temptation to simply win theological arguments. I have regularly browsed through lists of books on Mormonism and despite the increasing number of quality publications, continue to be dismayed by so many titles and descriptions which continue to take an offensive, polemical approach. Mormonism: A Latter-day Deception; Mormonism Unmasked; Lifting the veil from one of the greatest deceptions in the history of religion; Exposing secrets Mormon authorities don’t want you to Know; Does Mormonism include occult practices?; How to rescue your loved one from Mormonism; You will know what to say when these young men come to your door. Such language is effective for marketing books to a particular kind of Christian readership, but when it deliberately chooses words such as ‘expose’, ‘unmask’, ‘deception’, it will only further alienate Mormons and make it impossible for us to engage them in any meaningful or truly Christian way.

Since they are writing largely for Christians, writers of anti-Mormon works assume that their readers will immediately be able to contrast Mormon teaching with their own and dismiss the former as unworthy of their attention. They forget that many Christians rarely stop to reflect on their own convictions about the nature of God or the Trinity, much less articulate why they subscribe to such orthodoxy. Like most things in life we tend to think about our theology more seriously and defensively when it is being opposed or challenged. Some Christians far from being repulsed by accounts of Mormon deity, may actually feel an uncomfortable attraction to certain Mormon concepts and be forced to admit that they may have conceived of God in Mormon terms all along! This could simply be the result of their own lack of understanding of Christian theology, their pursuit and espousal of a ‘simple’ faith. It is also true to say that the average Mormon is more adept at asserting his views than is the average Christian. Add to this the fact that currently, the vast majority of Mormon convert baptisms come from Protestant as well as Catholic backgrounds and we may begin to realize that people are more attracted than they are repulsed by LDS teaching about God. Between one quarter and one third of a million people annually embrace with enthusiasm, the Mormon concept of God.

Despite continued attacks on Mormon theology and documentary exposes like the anti-Mormon film The God Makers, reportedly shown to 200,000 Americans a month in the 1980’s, Mormon missionary efforts have not been appreciably affected. Worldwide membership is currently doubling every fifteen years. In the United States and Canada where the Mormon presence is most recognizable, the Church is the largest religious organization in the states of Utah and Idaho, the second-largest in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, the third-largest in Alaska and Montana, the fourth-largest in New Mexico, the fifth-largest in Colorado and the fourth-largest separate religious organization in the United States as a whole.⁴

Assuming that for orthodox Christians, the Mormon Church’s view of God is its most distinctive, sensational and controversial teaching, why is that teaching being so willingly accepted by so many people in a nominally Judeo-Christian culture?⁵ More puzzling still, why are Mormons who are more and more being forced by Christians to see the contrast between their opposing theologies, still asserting that they are Christians and Biblically-oriented? One of Mormonism’s more astute analysts, Thomas O’Dea, writing nearly forty years ago (1968), said that while some critics of Mormonism saw it as obsolete he believed they underestimated its contribution to character formation and the moral life and the importance of its strictly religious tenets in the eyes of its adherents. O’Dea concluded that Mormonism has always ultimately rested upon its religious appeal which still offers meaningful content to many⁶ Since he wrote those words an additional ten million people have discovered that meaningful content." Never has the Christian offensive against Mormonism been more sophisticated and aggressive than it is today and never has Mormonism enjoyed such success. Historically this is a faith forged in the midst of opposition and persecution, one which has survived remarkably against considerable odds.

David T. Hesselgrave in his analyses of what causes religious movements to grow, noted that it must remain as the primary indictment of a great portion of the church of Christ that its truth remains closeted and cloistered while lesser causes advance, borne on by the zeal of ordinary believers.⁸ Aggressive programs of propagation involving large segments of the laity⁹ of the Mormon Church appear to outperform any comparable Christian attempts to disseminate and promote the Christian faith.

A plethora of anti-Mormon books has served in some ways to provoke a new wave of Mormon apologetics. For some decades now, Christian and ex-Mormon authors such as Walter Martin, Gordon H. Fraser, Floyd McElveen, Ed Decker, Dave Hunt, Harry Popp, A. A. Hoekema, Reed and Farkas, John Ankerberg, Selwyn Stevens, Philip R. Roberts, Janis Hutchinson, and more recently, Richard Abanes, Kurt Van Gorden, and Bill McKeever, have produced a varied range of Christian polemic against Mormonism aimed at the popular market. More recent titles by ex-Mormons which give evidence of greater sophistication and command of the subject include the Third Edition of Latayne C. Scott and The Mormon Mirage (2009), Simon G. Southerton and Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (2004), Ross Anderson and Understanding the Book of Mormon (2009) and Grant H. Palmer’s An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins (2002). The continuing work of Sandra Tanner and her Utah Lighthouse Ministry in Salt Lake City is also deserving of acknowledgment.

Mormons long since adjusted to rejection have traditionally meet their critics with silence and have usually appeared uninterested in making their theology acceptable to non-Mormon theologians and critics. When pressed they have accused their critics of being ill-informed and negative in their approach. Today however they are responding vigorously with an apologetic approach that is marked by its sophistication and academic rigor and a greater willingness to confront Christian polemicists.

Apart from reprints of earlier Mormon works such as Hyrum Andrus’ God, Man and the Universe, first published in 1968, works directly aimed at critics of Mormonism have been coming from the presses of Bookcraft, Deseret and Horizon for more than twenty years. Examples are, A Challenge to the Critics - Scholarly Evidences of the Book of Mormon by Diane E. Wirth which set out to systematically expose the fraudulent assertions of anti-Mormon claims with irrefutable evidence.¹⁰ There followed a series of audio-tapes by Duane S. Crowther aimed at equipping Mormons to more effectively deal with their critics. His titles include, Recognizing Techniques of Deception in anti-Mormon literature and Doctrinal Evidences that Mormons are Christians. Joseph F. McConkie and Robert L. Millett pooled their resources in 1985 to produce Sustaining and Defending the Faith, a slim, defensive little volume that is scant on content but strong on encouraging strength in opposition. Some of its more substantial segments deal with the doctrine of God. In a chapter with the sub-heading, The Greater the truth, the greater the Opposition, the authors nominate the doctrine of God as the greatest truth, contrasting it with Christian theology of God which they suggest is the greatest heresy ever devised . . . a web of darkness out of which every apostate Christian creed has been spun . . . a doctrine of hopelessness and despair . . . made of the darkness from which it comes."¹¹ Elsewhere the book reiterates the charge of the Church’s founder Joseph Smith, that Christian ministers of religion are all corrupt. Such expressions are more akin to those published by 19th Century Mormon apologists who, like Orson Pratt, sought to defend the faith at a time in its history when Mormonism was far less respectable than it is today. They also indicate the severity of the differences theologically, which exist between Mormons and Christians. In his 1986 publication, The Truth about the Godmakers, Mormon Institute instructor, Gilbert W. Scharffs rebutted the book and film’s charge that Mormonism is a dangerous and immoral fraud. His rebuttal is a detailed point-by-point analysis of the accusations and runs to 432 pages. Mormon publicity releases described it at the time as Informative, convincing and inspiring. Such a publication indicated that Mormons were not only hearing about the film from non-Mormon friends and associates, but were seeing it themselves.¹²

For several years now the Mormon Church’s monthly magazine for adults, The Ensign ¹³ has included a number of apologetic articles designed to offset criticism of such subjects as the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and the reliability of the Prophet Joseph Smith’s original accounts of his 1820 vision of the Father and the Son.¹⁴ Some Mormons seeking to be more open and objective in their analyses of problems have written articles that have not been well received in official church circles.¹⁵ This openness has been met by disdain on the part of the hierarchy of General Authorities as evidenced in a statement made by the Apostle Boyd K. Packer in the Church’s 155th Annual General Conference, May 1986. In an address entitled, From such turn away he cautioned the general membership against those who, motivated by one influence or another, seek through writing and publishing criticisms and interpretations of doctrine to make the gospel more acceptable to the so-called thinking people of the world¹⁶ The subjects of such criticism and ecclesiastical intimidation are genuinely concerned for the intellectual and scholarly integrity of their faith. They express themselves in independent scholarly journals whose aim is to bring their faith into dialogue with human experience and to foster artistic and scholarly achievement."¹⁷

One of these journals, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought devoted a segment of one issue to an article on the works of Jerald and Sandra Tanner, then the most prolific publishers of anti-Mormon literature in the world who have devoted their lives to exposing and trying to destroy Mormonism.¹⁸ The article immediately following was entitled, The Mormon Concept of Cod by Blake T. Ostler who has a degree in philosophy and psychology from the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Significantly, while the latter article seeks to explain and defend Mormonism’s unrefined finitist theology of God, it also warns of a Mormon temptation to return to the Catholic/Protestant understanding of an absolute God against which it rebelled in its origins.¹⁹ The two articles evidence a dual movement within contemporary Mormonism that persists to this day. On the one hand, renewed efforts to explain and defend the Mormon faith to the world via the hearts and minds of its own people, and on the other hand a ferment of dialogue amongst Mormon intellectuals which seeks to express far greater liberty in dealing with Mormon primary sources and in expressing basic Mormon concepts. Those in the latter category are more concerned with the survival of Mormonism in the future as a viable and defendable faith, than they are with expressing strength and unity in the face of gentile²⁰ opposition.

This is not the place for me to enter into a discussion about the different schools of Mormon thought, Traditionalists, Progressives or the Neo-orthodox, Liberals, including ‘revisionist’ LDS historians, but it is appropriate to state that anti-Mormons today are being met by an aggressively-confident, well-resourced and highly-qualified school of LDS intellectuals who see themselves as the front line of defense in the war on anti-Mormon detractors. Revisionist Mormons like Edward Ashment, Brent Lee Metcalfe, D. Michael Quinn and Dan Vogel want to abandon Mormon orthodoxy altogether because they see it as an untenable position. They are opposed to apologetics and are seldom a target for counter-cult groups. On the other hand the dominant school which is firmly committed to apologetics is composed of scholars like Robert L. Millet, Stephen E. Robinson and Gerald Lund. The late great LDS scholar Hugh W. Nibley might be considered a ‘Founding Father’ of the new movement, whose chief institutional expression today is ‘FARMS" – the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, incorporated in 1979 and now officially, associated with Brigham Young University. Each year it produces a prolific amount of apologetic material, deliberately designed to confront and confound anti-Mormon literature and figures. Some of Millet’s titles, twenty years on from his Sustaining and Defending the Faith with Joseph Fielding McConkie, include Getting at the Truth: Responding to Difficult Questions about LDS Belief (2004), A Different Jesus?: The Christ of the Latter-day Saints (2005), Latter-Day Christianity: 10 Basic issues; The Mormon Faith, A New look at Christianity and The Vision of Mormonism (2007) Amazon.com alone, lists twenty-five of his titles.

Two things strike me as being significant here. Millet’s book on A Different Jesus is published by Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company rather than one of several LDS publishing houses. The title of Latter-Day Christianity which he edits, suggests the kind of labeling that the new Mormon apologists are keen to market. Books like Stephen E. Robinson’s Are Mormons Christians? published in 1991, address the Mormon sense of exclusion by name-calling and while repudiating the label ‘cult’ assert that Mormons have every right to be regarded as Christians. The Mormons themselves have been urged to treat their ‘Gentile’ or non-Mormon neighbors in a similarly sensitive manner. Apostle M. Russell Ballard addressing the October General Conference of the Church in 2001, spoke of a ‘Doctrine of Inclusion’ and suggested "it would be good if we eliminated a couple of phrases from our vocabulary: ‘nonmember’ and ‘non-Mormon.’ Such phrases can be demeaning and even belittling. Personally I don’t consider myself to be a ‘non-Catholic’ or a ‘non-Jew’. I am a Christian. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That is how I prefer to be identified – for who and what I am, as opposed to being identified for what I am not."¹

Under Customer Reviews on the Amazon.com website, one reviewer responded to the Latter-Day Christianity book with this comment: I’m not a Mormon (Evangelical Christian, actually) and I think this is a great intro to LDS doctrine for Christians curious about Mormonism. If you want to know the true LDS beliefs you should get them from a person who believes in Mormonism, not from a person who thinks Mormonism is a terrible cult (emphasis mine). This book quickly cuts to the chase on some of the more controversial issues. This way you can make your own opinion, not get railroaded into a sensational one. Such a comment testifies to the effectiveness of current LDS apologetics and ought to be food for thought for the traditional counter-cultists who seem unwilling to change tack.

No other New Religious Movement is as well represented in the halls of academia as these Mormon apologists. They have done their own studies at prestigious universities like Oxford, Yale, Harvard, Notre Dame and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The breadth of their scholarship can be seen in the fact that four LDS scholars are on the International Dead Sea Scrolls Editing Team ²² It was FARMS in cooperation with BYU which produced and distributed the Dead Sea Scrolls on CD to Scrolls scholars. This was their initiative to increase access to these invaluable ancient documents. The database they have produced consists of a comprehensive, fully indexed and cross-linked computerized collection of Dead Sea Scrolls transcriptions published by Oxford University Press.²³ Ironically, FARMS, whose principal aim is scholarly research on the Book of Mormon, would love to discover the kind of threshold evidence for the Book of Mormon that the Dead Sea Scrolls offer for the Bible. But as Craig Hazen has stated, they have inherited a devastating drought of ‘threshold’ evidence that does not allow the broader scholarly community to take seriously the claims made in and about LDS sacred texts.²⁴

No doubt Zion will increasingly experience a broadening of its theological spectrum from those traditionalists who do not believe it is necessary to prove what is to be accepted by faith, to those who believe that defending the faith is absolutely essential for promoting its credibility and on through to those who see traditional LDS claims as indefensible and irrelevant and simply want to re-invent the faith. Anti-Mormon writers rarely comprehend the complexity and sophistication of Mormonism as a world faith. The Mormon doctrine of God which is our chief concern here is not the inane ramblings of some new and exotic sect whose teaching may prove to be superficial, trite, even unintelligible. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is well into its second century, and by the year 2,030 A.D. its adherents will number in the tens of millions. If Christians are ever going to engage in meaningful dialogue with Mormons and respect Mormonism as no mere dissenting sect but as a real religious creation, one intended to be to Christianity as Christianity was to Judaism: that is, a reform and a consumumation²⁵ then they will have to make a far more earnest attempt to assess Mormonism in the light of its appeal to the common man. So far that attempt has been very largely second-hand, courtesy of anti-Mormon polemicists, though there are encouraging signs that things are changing. The publication of The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement (Zondervan, 2002), and the work of groups in Utah such as Greg Johnson’s Standing Together ministry, and the Western Institute for Intercultural Studies (WIIS), as well as the Lausanne issue group on post-Christendom spiritualities, the Sacred Tribes Journal (STJ), and the Sacred Tribes Academic Press as a collaborative venture between WIIS and STJ, provide us with a new and refreshing model of how we might more profitably engage with Latter-day Saints.

In examining Mormonism’s beliefs about God and the appeal of those beliefs to ordinary people, I will attempt to show that there is room in the popular imagination and understanding of the Mormon doctrine of God for something more than caricature and expose; something revealing the complexity, sophistication, even wonder, of the Mormon view. For Mormons, gods and men and angels are of the same species, not eternally separated by the transcendent and the infinite. Their whole understanding of themselves, their sense of identity, their raison d’etre, are entirely related to who and what God is and to God’s stated purpose of seeking to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.²⁶ When Christianity challenges the Mormon view of deity and seeks to ‘expose’ it, it challenges the Mormon psyche and threatens to undermine the Mormon’s sense of identity and security So much of what they are, is bound up in what He is, that it is not possible to criticize or ridicule the one, without deeply offending and wounding the other.

Christians must recognize that it is possible to go on disagreeing with Mormonism theologically, while at the same time exercising real empathy towards Mormons as a people. Empathy rather than polemics will not only encourage more meaningful dialogue, it will also aid Christians in sharpening their own perceptions of the faith which they espouse. The Christian who regards Mormonism as heresy ought to be encouraged by Harold O.J. Brown’s reminder of what orthodoxy owes to heresy: in a sense, it owes its very existence.²⁷ Brown talks about orthodoxy and heresy as the original and the reflection. He defines orthodoxy as a traditional understanding or interpretation of a faith transmitted through the centuries. He asks whether heresy is a reaction to orthodoxy, or orthodoxy a reaction to heresy. If the former, then the history of orthodoxy is the history of the truth, if the latter, then it is the history of usurpation.²⁸ He believes that there was a faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) and that it still exists today in the modern Christian Church. Nevertheless, he knows that what we now call orthodoxy was sometimes apparently the faith of only a tiny minority and that despite Vincent of Lerins call to Christians to believe all that has been believed ubique, semper et ab omnibus, there was a time in the fourth century when it was Athanasius against the World.²⁹

The Christian thinks of the Mormon doctrine of God with its characteristic finitism, materialism and polytheism as radical and heretical, an aberration of monstrous proportions. The Mormon on the other hand is simply bewildered that all men do not see God as he sees him. It is a bewilderment that can be read on the young, zealous faces of its proselytizing missionaries when their message is rejected. Why would anyone not want to receive it? they seem to ask. For them, their own position is eminently rational, irrefutable, biblically-based and most natural. They wonder whether Christians really appreciate what they are defining in their historic creeds, and echo the sentiment of their Prophet-founder, that that which is without body, parts or passions is nothing.³⁰ They see no alternative to the God revealed by the Prophet Joseph Smith.

One of the central emphases of Christian theology is mystery, a mystery which is the vital element of dogmatics and which assumes that the idea that the believer would be able to understand and comprehend intellectually the revealed mysteries is equally unscriptural.³¹ Against that resignation to mystery, Mormonism, like a renewed gnosticism, announces a knowledge . . . that has not been revealed since the world was until now. It is a knowledge reserved for this final dispensation of human history, a knowledge for the present, but also for the future, in the which nothing shall be withheld, whether there be one God or many gods.³² Gnosis has always proven to be an irresistible attraction for some people, especially those unsatisfied with mystery alone.

Most 19th Century sects which had their origins in the United States, dissented from the orthodox understanding of the Trinity. The modern layman for example, may never have known what Arianism was until the Jehovah’s Witnesses revived it. Mormonism as a movement within Christianity may already have proven itself to be the bearer of the most comprehensive and effective challenge to trinitarian orthodoxy in the history of the church. It has gone far beyond the Christological controversies of the first four centuries. Only in this instance the challenge has been mounted not in a strongly