Terryl Givens publication on History of Mormon Theology Out
 

This November

http://www.amazon.com/Wrestling-Ange...=terryl+givens

Oxford Book, vol. 1

Whoa.

"most comprehensive account"

Not a modest claim.

OTOH, there is not a large universe of competing works.

Mormon Doctrine, the non-doctrinal work of BRM. What else?

A competition of two.

Mormon Doctrine by Givens

Modoc is of a slightly different genre than this one. Modoc concerns the content of doctrine, not its development. There have been treatments by others of how certain aspects of theology was developed (Sam Brown, Harrell), but this one is comprehensive.

I'm thinking of buying it. Has anyone here read it? It gets good reviews.

I'm 5/8 through.

It's what you expect from Terryl Givens: Engaging writing + Intellectual history.

He examines a lot of contemporary parallels. Chapters are topical.

still haven't ordered it. The cover is a little weird.

Another thing you'd expect from Givens: homoerotic covers.

I've just started reading and am enjoying it. It's excellent so far in setting the religious scene JS was born into, not just by describing the level of religious excitement, but by explaining how the revivalists thought differently than the mainline protestants and how that would have affected how JS thought about things like apostasy and restoration. It's also doing a great job showing how JS, Parley P. Pratt, Sidney Rigdon and other LDS of his time had a fairly significantly different way of looking at these topics than how modern LDS tend to think about them. It's extremely thoroughly researched both from LDS and non-LDS sources with a ridiculous number of footnotes.

I really enjoyed listening to Givens in person.

I find his writing to be ponderous and hard to read. I've started and failed to finish two of his books.

I haven't read anything else by him, so I don't know how this one compares to his other stuff. It does take a little more work to read it than most things. He seems to try to pack a lot into it and uses some unusual word choices. Not a light read but not boring.

He sounds the same speaking and writing to me. And he is among the most engaging writers I've read.

Reading this is reminding me that I just prefer the LDS concept of God (and Christ) over that of other Christian traditions. For example, I don't believe that a God who obeys laws diminishes his greatness in the least. It's interesting reading about how the theological debates on these issues developed over the centuries and how Joseph Smith usually went against the grain on many of them.

The takedown of original sin was epic.

I picked up "The God Who Weeps" again this past weekend.

I find it really hard to follow his (their) writing. He'll make a point, then he'll follow up with a quote from some historical figure, then an excerpt from literature, and then a couple more points. And then a quote from someone else. It's like a pastiche of notecards that he made on a topic, and he's trying to find a way to put them all into a chapter.

There's no flow. And there's no story.

So I find myself getting bored and wanting to skip ahead.

It's not that there isn't gold there, it's just that the gold per cubic yard of dirt isn't high enough.

That doesn't seem to describe how this book is organized.

Almost all his stances have a precedent, however (with the exception of polytheism).

Good point. One of my favorites is pre-earth life. Origen of Alexandria one of the most influential Christian theologians of the 2nd century and had a view of it that is not far off from the LDS idea. He was mainstream in his day but was then later labeled heretical a few centuries later.

But I think he got it from Plato.