OK, we don’t have a Radio Free Salt Lake City theme, or even a graphic…but if we did, this would have been the program to use them for! I had the misfortune of listening to the “dialogue” between Dr. Richard Mouw, long time president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and Dr. Robert Millet, BYU professor and author of the Eerdman’s published book, A Different Jesus?, which took place recently at the Eerdman’s bookstore. I was again amazed at the “massaging” of the message of Mormonism, and the either rank dishonesty, or possibly outlandish naïveté, of Richard Mouw in his defense of Mormonism and his redefinition of historical beliefs propounded by the General Authorities of the LDS Church. We have here the quintessential example of “ivory tower” academics completely missing the forest for the trees. I had to often comment that clearly Dr. Mouw has not spent time with LDS missionaries or plain old Mormons on the streets. He has, instead, spent way too much time with a narrow spectrum of BYU professors, to be sure. In any case, we spent about 100 minutes today on the topic, and we are only halfway through the material, so we will have to pick it up again on Tuesday. This Thursday we will be joined by David Ould and I intend to carve out enough time to respond to this particular commentary from an MSNBC anchor.
For those interested in the Dividing Line reviews from the original speeches given at the evangelical visit to the Mormon Tabernacle back in 2004 you can find them here and here.
I also noted that I put a few items on the Ministry Resource List this morning as I look toward the upcoming book projects and debates during Spring, 2013. Here’s the MRL.
