City Weekly done good, as usual.

http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/blog-2345-missing-the-oaks-for-the-trees.html

If this is the sort of theology you associate with religion, I can see why you’d find religion generally pretty alarming. As a religious man, I find Apostle Oaks’ approach embarrassing. But you should understand that this sort of thinking is downright peculiar when compared with that of the widespread religions. I suppose some strict fundamentalists might have similar problems in their handling of faith and reason. But most religious people, and certainly most conservatives, would have nothing to with a religious authority making claims like Apostle Oaks.

My own Catholic Church is famously hierarchical, but its authority extends only to the interpretation of an established set of Scriptures and a thoroughly documented theology. And that theology must satisfy the demands of reason, given the premises revealed to us by faith. The idea of God becoming man may seem crazy, and is certainly not demonstrable to reason. But the theological implications of that fact, once accepted, must be comprehensible to human reason. And the Church can’t plaster over inconsistencies by citing some new revelation. The moral authority of Jewish and Muslim clergy is likewise rooted in their interpretation of an established scripture.

I’m not saying these figures don’t have great power, or they can’t abuse it, or they don’t make mistakes. But their scope is fundamentally circumscribed by the fixture of their texts and the recognition of the role of reason. The amount of damage done by such authorities, even within those limits, is already sobering. The thought of an authority that can re-write its scripture, and so dismiss reasonable questions, is sort of alarming in its possibilities.

I don’t for a moment imagine that Apostle Oaks means anyone harm. I can easily imagine that he is a sincere and generous man. But the danger lies in what someone else may someday with this kind of authority, and in the implications of such ideas for how we should use our minds.

So please, don’t imagine that faith requires the sort of trust in human agents required by Apostle Oaks’ doctrine. There is no true conflict between faith and reason, and any dismissal of either on behalf of the other must be false.

The LDS church is careful in how it words things to the membership, but this one might have crossed the line, depending on local leadership and how things were handled/read/discussed in formal church meetings.

This “logic” is used deeply in Mormon dogma. The very notion of “moral agency” was from Joseph Smith’s notion of “free agency” which is, paraphrased, that “men are free to do as they choose, but if they don’t choose the way I said God told me, they are going to a place worse than hell.”

It’s very messed up and wrong-headed. Like I said, Mormons love to believe that Jesus was right there with a guiding hand on the pen of the authors of the Constitution. My continued writing about these kinds of things is that I feel it’s dangerous to think in those terms.

http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/religious-freedom

Does he really mean us to believe that God instituted the Constitution of the United States? And that He did so ““that every man may act . . . according to the moral agency which I have given unto him”?

This is self-contradictory nonsense. A divine institution of our Constituion wouldn’t assign much “moral agency” of the various delegates to the Constitutional Convention, would it? Nor does it square well with Oaks’ own assertion that “the people are the source of government power”.

And, it’s stupidly ignorant of the flaws of a Constitution that recognized human beings as property, and protected slaveholders’ rights to such property. God, in His wisdom, would legislate better than that.

Nor is God so dull a pedant. That people have “moral agency”, the freedom to choose for themselves, is obviously discoverable to human reason. We don’t need revelation for that, any more than we need the Lord God to explain that 2 + 2 = 4.

The Founders were quite clear that the Constitution was designed according to an understanding of human nature developed by careful study of three millenia of human history, and according to precepts of justice discoverable to any thinking person. Oaks’ “divine establishment” is an exact negation of their work.

God gave us minds to think. It’s no surprise that their proper operation comports with His justice, as our reasoning only discovers principles that He established. We need revelations to discover those realities that are beyond human sense and experience, but we don’t need them to clumsily duplicate the conclusions of the instruments God already gave us. The consistency of reason and faith, and reason and Christianity, has been thoroughly established and re-affirmed by the greatest thinkers. There is no need for revelatory gymnastics to avoid crediting reason for its accomplishments.

So I’m deeply suspicious of any theology that would seek to discredit our own reason in so great an example of its powers as the U.S. Constitution. It’s almost as if Oaks is anxious that the Constitution’s architecture might inspire people’s curiousity and questioning, and so prefers to diminish the powers of reason by attributing this work of genius to divine intervention.

And I have to wonder why Apostle Oaks, would be so reluctant to encourage people to think.

In his example then, his church is both the oppressive white man AND the black man who was unjustly discriminated against. How can he have it both ways?

It is yet one more glaring example of hypocrisy from this archaic-minded organization.

Thank you for posting. I always enjoy your blogs.

Jinxi