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<\/a>I expect that I am not the only person today who was impressed by the powerful and remarkable testimony of President Jeffrey R. Holland. \u00a0I\u2019m so very grateful that he is still with us.<\/p>\n
There was also a passage in President Henry B. Eyring\u2019s remarks in the morning session that really hit me. \u00a0I\u2019ll have something more to say about it later.<\/p>\n Some like to complain about what they see (or claim to see) as the shallowness of the speeches given at General Conference and, indeed, of the Church itself and its teachings. \u00a0The complaint has never made much sense to me; I find more than enough in every session of Conference to challenge me<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0Nevertheless, with that complaint in mind I want to revisit something that I posted here about six years ago:<\/p>\n Quite a while back now, I was surprised and saddened by a gratuitous insult to my faith in Thomas Cahill\u2019s otherwise interesting book How the Irish Saved Civilization<\/em>. \u00a0While discussing the ancient Iranian-born religion of Manichaeism, now long gone but once (for a few centuries) a serious rival to Christianity, Cahill suddenly, out of the blue, compared it to \u201cMormonism\u201d and to the doctrine of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses. \u00a0All are, he said, shallow and superficial faiths, \u201cfull of assertions . . . but yield[ing] no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.\u201d<\/p>\n I thought this remarkably unfair. \u00a0While Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses have been noted over many decades for their disdain for higher education, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> has, to put it mildly, not<\/em> been so known. \u00a0Indeed, as far back, at least, as Kenneth R. Hardy\u2019s \u201cSocial Origins of American Scientists and Scholars,\u201d Science<\/em> 185 (9 August 1974): 497-506, it\u2019s been recognized that Latter-day Saints are disproportionately represented in scholarship and the sciences. \u00a0(See also this article<\/a>, by sociologists Stan Albrecht and Tim Heaton.) \u00a0There exists, so far as I\u2019m aware, no Jehovah\u2019s Witness analogue to, say, the Association for Mormon Letters<\/a>, the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists<\/a>, the Mormon History Association<\/a>, the Academy for Temple Studies<\/a>,\u00a0Mormon Scholars in the Humanities<\/a>, the Mormon Social Science Association<\/a>, the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology<\/a>, The Interpreter Foundation<\/a>, nor even, for that matter, to Brigham Young University (in its three campuses at Provo, Rexburg, and Laie) or Ensign College or Southern Virginia University or the multitude of schools, seminaries, and Institutes of Religion that are sponsored by the Church.<\/p>\n Inspired by Elder M. Russell Ballard\u2019s 2007 call<\/a> to use the Internet more effectively to spread the Gospel, I had already been intending to someday seriously think about perhaps getting around to eventually maybe launching something like\u00a0Latter-day Saint Scholars Testify<\/a>. \u00a0It was, though, Thomas Cahill\u2019s unexpected slur that finally impelled me to act. \u00a0(And perhaps that reflects poorly on me: \u00a0Irritation motivated me where apostolic admonition had not.)<\/p>\n I would, of course, agree with Mr. Cahill that the Restoration hasn\u2019t yet produced its equivalent of St. Thomas Aquinas\u2019s Summa Theologica<\/em>. \u00a0However, mainstream Christianity took twelve centuries to produce St. Thomas \u2014 he died in March 1274; it\u2019s not coincidental, by the way, that one of my sons, born on the anniversary of his death, bears his name \u2014 and the Restored Church, not yet two centuries old, doesn\u2019t seem to me to be doing dramatically worse on the intellectual front than the early Christians were at roughly AD 218.<\/p>\n I\u2019m fond of several aphorisms from the eighteenth-century German physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. \u00a0Two of them remind me of the reactions of certain critics to the Book of Mormon: \u00a0\u201cA book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0(Ein Buch ist Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt<\/em>.) \u00a0\u201cWhen a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?\u201d \u00a0(Wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammensto\u00dfen und es klingt hohl, ist das allemal im Buch?)<\/em> \u00a0But it seems to me that precisely the same things can validly be said about the reaction of certain critics to the Restoration as a whole.<\/p>\n Moreover, for various reasons, I\u2019m not convinced that the Church should<\/em> generate its own Summa Theologica<\/em>. \u00a0And St. Thomas himself might agree with me on that. \u00a0The famous story is told of some sort of revelation given to him on 6 December 1273, roughly four months prior to his death, during his celebration of a mass in the Dominican monastery at Naples. \u00a0Although his works are voluminous, St. Thomas never wrote another line thereafter. \u00a0He dictated nothing more to his socius<\/em>, Reginald of Piperno. \u00a0When Reginald begged him to continue with his work, Thomas replied \u00a0\u201cReginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me [mihi videtur ut\u00a0<\/em>palea<\/em>].\u201d<\/p>\n Failure to produce a Summa<\/em> is not, in my judgment, tantamount to shallow superficiality. \u00a0There is, I\u2019m convinced, great depth in the Gospel \u2014 whether or not we Latter-day Saints have done enough thus far to explore that depth.<\/p>\n But the Church and the Gospel aren\u2019t intended solely or even primarily for Thomist philosophers or Hegelians. \u00a0Our services and Sunday school classes aren\u2019t academic seminars in historiography or systematic theology. \u00a0Like every other broad demographic group, the Saints are mostly people who don\u2019t spend hours each day worrying about ontology, epistemology, counterfactual conditionals, or Angst<\/em> in the works of Sartre. \u00a0And the saving message of the Gospel is for them, every bit as much as it is for intellectuals and artistes<\/em>.<\/p>\n I\u2019m convinced that people will find depth in the Restored Gospel commensurate with their own, if they put the requisite thought and effort into studying and reflecting on it. \u00a0But, just as the exclamation \u201cFire!\u201d doesn\u2019t have to be philosophically deep in order to bear life-saving meaning, so too the theological depths of the Gospel don\u2019t have to be fully charted before it can lead us to life-saving repentance. \u00a0It would be a fool, and very likely soon a dead one, who refused to budge while the flames drew nearer simply because the person who had warned him to flee had shown insufficient intellectual or literary sophistication while doing it.<\/p>\n A well-known story is told about the prominent Swiss thinker Karl Barth (d. 1968; author of, among other important things, the massive and famous thirteen-volume Church Dogmatics<\/em>), who is generally considered the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century: \u00a0After a lecture at the University of Chicago\u2019s Rockefeller Chapel \u2014 or, perhaps, at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, or perhaps in both places (see here<\/a>) \u2014 a student supposedly rose during the question-and-answer period to ask Barth whether his entire life\u2019s work could be summarized in a single sentence. \u00a0Yes indeed, Barth is said to have responded. \u00a0\u201cIn the words of a song I learned at my mother\u2019s knee: \u2018Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'\u201d<\/p>\n Simple, yes. \u00a0But, if true, profound. \u00a0Profoundly important. \u00a0And very richly meaningful.<\/p>\n<\/a>