As I look around my office I see literally hundreds of volumes produced by the venerable old Christian publishing house, Eerdmans. Many of my best resources bear that name on the spine. And I truly wonder what the founders of that company would think about its newest book.
Robert Millet is the Richard L. Evans Professor of Religious Understanding and professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. A believing Mormon, he has been key in the dialogues taking place between certain non-LDS scholars and pastors and LDS scholars from BYU. His book, Another Jesus?, though advertised by Eerdmans as a work “intended to inform rather than to convince or persuade,” is pure apologetic from start to finish. You could find this kind of work at your local LDS bookstore, but thanks to Richard Mouw of Fuller Seminary, now you will be able to find it in your Christian bookstore, too! Yes, friends and neighbors, not only has Richard Mouw apologized for all of us mean-spirited folks who have labored to witness the true God and the true Christ and the true Gospel to Mormons for decades, but now he has made sure to provide a “Trojan Horse Apologetic,” a work that attacks the Trinity, deity of Christ, sola scriptura, justification by grace through faith alone, the sovereignty of God in salvation, the finished work of Christ on the cross—OK, like I said, it is an LDS work of apologetics, so it is pretty well opposed to sound theology at just about every point—and he has made sure that book will be right there in your local Christian bookstore (how many bookstore owners will recognize it for what it is? Then again, what section will they put it in anyway?). Cards, roses, and copies of the Book of Mormon can be sent to Fuller Seminary in thanks.
I do not know how much time I will have to dig into this work over the next few days. I am starting to work on my presentations for Italy, and then I need to be gearing up for the Long Island debate (well, I hope so, anyway). But you can really sum up the impact of this work by looking at Richard Mouw’s final comments, his afterword. He brings his thoughts to a close by saying, “I think that an open-minded Christian reader of this book will sense that Bob Millet is in fact trusting in the Jesus of the Bible for his salvation. That is certainly my sense” (p. 183). Ah, well, the apologetic worked, at least for the President of Fuller Seminary, anyway. This is still the Jesus who is the first-begotten offspring of an exalted man from another planet, (an exalted man who now lives, enfleshed in a body of flesh and bones, on a planet that circles a star named Kolob along with his multiple wives), who is the only begotten of the Father in the flesh, but these are not differences sufficient enough to lead us to think that is a different Jesus. Or so says Richard Mouw, and Eerdmans.
Warning, folks: your local Christian bookstore is just as dangerous as any place else anymore. Don’t let those Bibles on the wall fool you: what’s on the shelves doesn’t take the Bible section very seriously anymore anyway.
