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Does Mormonism have a theology? My gut response, as someone who reads 17th-century theological debate for fun, is to say “no.” We do not, as a people, engage in the sort of definitional arguments that characterize formal theology. Ask someone after sacrament meeting what kind of Christology Mormonism has and you’ll probably still make it to Sunday School on time (unless that someone is Blake Ostler). This isn’t to say that your typical Mormon is stupid for not knowing what Christology is, or for not being able to place Mormon belief within the historical arguments about it. The typical Catholic probably couldn’t do that either. The difference is that Catholicism has a long history of philosophical engagement with these questions, and Mormonism doesn’t. Our engagement tends to be more ad hoc, with an Orson Pratt here and a Sterling McMurrin there. At present, in addition to Ostler (and approaching theology in a quite different way), we have the triumvirate of Jim Faulconer, Adam Miller, and Joseph Spencer.

What’s interesting about Faulconer, Miller, and Spencer is that their work tends to actively resist the systematizing impulse that drove, say, Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin. Faulconer has argued that theology is dangerous, because, for instance, it was the theologizing impulse that led us to rationalize the exclusion of blacks from the priesthood in harmful, racist, and ultimately untrue ways. For him, theology is more useful for exposing fault lines in our thinking than it is for attempting to articulate the sum of all truth. “Perhaps God,” he writes, “could give us a list of the elements of pure doctrine, though whether he would is another question.” Theology is useful only insofar as it leads us to see what we do not know and seek continuing revelation.

This attitude places Faulconer in a long line of apophatic, or negative, theologians. The simple version of this approach is that we cannot say what God is with any certainty, but we can be more confident about at least some things that God is not. Hence, Adam Miller constructs theological Rube Goldberg machines instead of finely engineered systematic theologies.

A major influence on the current approach to apophatic theology is the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who died ten years ago today. An important trio of books published in 1967—Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference—put some of Derrida’s key arguments into play, among them the antifoundationalist idea that there is no transcendental (or theological) perspective that can comprehend the totality of linguistic meaning or firmly ground the meanings of individual words. This idea then led to the related concepts of différance, or the perpetual deferral of meaning, and the supplement, or the idea that every word depends for its meaning on something outside itself that supplements and then supplants the original. Language only ever refers to other language (there is nothing outside the text), and meaning, instead of being fixed and stable, becomes subject to a constant play.

That Derrida’s insights about language apply to Mormonism appears in the surprising statement by one of its most ardent systematizers, Bruce R. McConkie, in the wake of the 1978 revelation on priesthood:

Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whosoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that has now come into the world. [1]

Admittedly, McConkie probably did not understand this statement as pointing logically toward antifoundationalist conclusions, but it does strongly imply that human pretensions to certain knowledge of anything are just that: pretensions. As Isaiah wrote, God’s ways are higher than our ways, signifying that we live in a mysterious world where, like when the Pharisees confronted Jesus, the question of by what authority things happen remains painfully unresolved.

In keeping with the history of apophatic theologies, perhaps the most likely path for a post-Derridean religion is mysticism. The mystic seeks transcendental experience instead of transcendental logic, aiming for that which tongue hath not spoken nor ear heard and knowing little more than that God loves her. With the Psalmist, she acknowledges that the face of God is often hidden, and that her prayers are words of hope launched into the abyss. Amidst experienced absence, we nevertheless cry, “O God, where art thou?” [2]

Derrida “rightly passed for an atheist,” although, unsurprisingly, he troubled the distinction between atheism and belief. Indeed, he suggested that people have to pass as closely to atheism as possible in order to believe in God. May we who desire to believe learn from his relentless investigation into the architecture of uncertainty as we look for God with mortal eyes that can only see through a glass, darkly—eyes that may, in fact, have to see the darkness before they can see God.

Mormon Lectionary Project

Jacques Derrida, 2004

The Collect: O God the Great Unknown, by the grace of Jesus Christ open our eyes that we might see our blindness; grant also that we, as perpetual searchers in the mysteries of thy Holy Spirit, might follow Jacques Derrida in pursuing thy hiddenness and that divine Oneness that so persistently eludes our mortal perceptions. Amen.

Isaiah 55; Psalm 143; Luke 20:1-8; 1 Cor. 2; 1 Ne. 11:16-17; D&C 121:1-6

For the music, I couldn’t resist returning to an old favorite: the original acoustic version of “The Sound of Silence” from Simon and Garfunkel’s first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4]

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Notes

[1] Quoted in Edward L. Kimball, Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball (Salt Lake: Deseret, 2005), 238. Kimball notes that McConkie’s retraction of his prior views may have been limited to his notion of when the curse would be lifted, not necessarily extending to the entire curse-of-Cain structure that backed his belief in the restriction.

[2] Kevin Hart explores the mystical possibilities of Derridean religion in The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).