The Need for Theology

In this time of crisis of faith, many have come to judge the answers of Restoration apologists wanting. Arguments between critics and defenders of the faith take place almost entirely within the realm of history. The question that is most frequently asked is, "what actually happened?" Did Joseph Smith in his First Vision see Jesus, an angel, the Father and the Son, or nothing at all? Is the Book of Mormon a historically factual text about real peoples in the Ancient Americas or not? When members of the Restoration family find reason to doubt in such questions, they see the cost of participation as too high and take refuge in their doubt as a solid justification for leaving.

Bitter arguments over horses in America or inconsistencies between different versions of the so-called First Vision do nothing to resolve the core issues concerning faith in the Restoration. In many ways, such questions are understandable but unfortunate distractions. Progress in addressing this epidemic of loss of faith will only be made when we discover the importance of grappling with the larger questions behind these distractions of fact, when, in other words, we begin to find a place in Restorationism for the practice of theology. Only by engaging in theology will we begin to come to terms with the meaning and significance of the Restoration and more robust reasons for participating in it.

Facts are not only stubborn things; they are also, in a sense, dead ends. The fact that someone wrote a Gospel about Jesus in the late first century AD does not, in itself, enliven the faith of the Christian. A Gospel adds its witness to the Christ; it does not as a historical fact inspire faith. What inspires faith is the meaning of Christ's mission as articulated by literary witnesses of people like Paul. A negative way of viewing the same problem would be to say that a Gospel does not prove the fact of the resurrection, nor is it important that it should. Similarly, it is the meaning of the Restoration in its emergence in western New York and development in Kirtland and Nauvoo that inspires faith. It is not the individual facts of Joseph Smith's life and work that validate or invalidate the Restoration.

As long as we fail to enter into the larger project of making sense out of the Restoration in a methodical way, we will get lost in endless, granular arguments about this or that historical event, and our judgment regarding its acceptability or unacceptability, in the cultivation of a life of faith. Leaders of the Reorganized branch of the Restoration embraced the need for theology long ago, but they did with quite different needs and aims than those of Brighamite Restorationists and Restorationists of other branches. In recent times, LDS thinkers have embraced narrative theology and post-modern theology, and it remains to be seen how useful these experiments will be.

I would like to recommend a different option: Radical Orthodoxy. At first, that term may seem alien or off-putting. Orthodoxy is a word that people associate with inflexible conservatism or reactionary movements, on the one hand, and a large Christian sect, Orthodoxy, on the other. Radical often carries the connotation of being extreme or violent, as in the case of radical Islamist Jihadism. Radical Orthodoxy is actually none of those things. Instead, Radical Orthodoxy takes as its starting position that something went wrong in the thought of modernity that can be overcome through the use of post-modern intellectual tools engaging in the task of getting back to the best in earlier theology and philosophical thought. Its leading figure is the University of Nottingham theologian John Milbank.

Radical Orthodoxy offers a lot of promise to Restorationists who feel besieged by incessant, pointless arguments about tapirs and Joseph Smith's wives by allowing them to set aside all of this noise and focus on the big picture of what the Restoration means through a complementary kind of theology. Consider these central ideas of Radical Orthodoxy (which I am paraphrasing from the Wikipedia entry on Radical Orthodoxy) as summarized by Milbank:

1. Radical Orthodoxy denies a clean distinction between faith and reason, or reason and revelation, such that human knowledge is knowledge only insofar as it is illuminated with divine truth.

2. All of creation can be understood only as participating in God's ebing, and as such, gleans for us glimpses of the nature of God, without fully comprehending it. (God is in some sense knowable.)

3. Human constructs such as culture, community, language, history, and technology, also participate in the being of God. They are neither "incidental to the truth" nor "a barrier against it."

4. Theology functions through theurgy, "a co-operation between human work and divine work," which both ultimately belong to God. For Milbank, this work is called liturgy, where "a collective human action invites the divine descent." In Restorationism, this work might be called ordinances, chief among which is the temple endowment.

5. Radical Orthodoxy rejects postmodern nihilism. Human truth has no absolute grounding or finite certainty, but this lack of grounding orients the finite toward the infinite.

6. Only a belief in transcendence and participation in it secures the reality of matter and the body. God transcends the body, but is, as it were, even more body than body. Radical Orthodoxy thus insists on the valuation of the body, sexuality, the sensory and the aesthetic.

7. Human beings participate in the being of nature and of other humans. Because of this, salvation is as much cosmic as it is communal.

The Restoration finds its theological complement in these ideas, as it is similarly a restoration of ideas that hark back to a Christianity before the Modern era, in other words, before matter and spirit, thought and action, and faith and reason were seen as irreconcilable. Radical Orthodoxy diagnoses the problems of modern secularism and its ravages on communities of faith as the product of intellectual choices that cannot be defeated by tools that are based on premises emanating from those very choices. The Restoration can avail itself of these tools in its own quest to make itself intelligible to others and its own participants. Once one can see the point behind the Restoration and the deeper significance of what it offers, the granular issues that beset us on all sides will be reduced to their proper proportion in the larger view.