I'm taking a break from the Egalitarian series (even though it's not yet finished) and coming back to my series on The Book of Mormon. It's been a while since I wrote about it, but since last writing I've run into a sort of Mormon seeker coming to my church and he asked to study The Book of Mormon with me, hoping to get back into the swing of evangelizing and sharing the good news of Mormonism.
He's had some rather eye-opening surprises.
Meanwhile, reading with him has put me well into the "book" of 2 Nephi and given me lots to write about. The book opens where 1 Nephi left off. For those of you who've slept since my last post (I know I have), the story so far is that Lehi, a Jew living in Jerusalem around 600 BC, is told by God to pack up his family and get out before the city is destroyed (by the Babylonians, though I don't think they're ever really mentioned). Lehi has a number of sons, three of which are important to the plot. Leman and Lemuel are the eldest sons who are constantly doubting God, antagonizing their brother, and falling into egregious sins, such as rudeness. Nephi, the younger son, is faithful. He is also the first-person narrator who wrote these books. He will let you know that he is Nephi, the author! He will say it again, and again (one of the most common phrases in the book is I, Nephi, just in case we might have forgotten who he was in between sentences). He will waste whole chapters telling you that he wrote these books, named them after himself, and wrote them in the language of his own Jewish subgroup (reformed Egyptian, naturally)...and then he will complain about how much he has to leave out because of all the space he wasted telling you the above (not to mention how much space he wastes telling you he's having to leave stuff out...or all the other unnecessary stuff he does). He goes on to have many adventures with many teachable moments, such as how to murder someone in cold blood when the spirit of god commands you to in a highly uncharacteristic manner, nearly starve your entire family to death because you broke your (historically impossible) steel bow and everyone else's bows "lost their springs" (exact quote, I kid you not), and be given divine instructions on how to build a very special ship to cross the ocean to the Americas and somehow forget to write them down. And to be honest, that's just the highlights reel. I could go on all day. But anyway, after faithfully following god's directions via a magical compass powered by one's own belief (because one of the major lessons of this book is that all truth comes from direct revelation of God and that it's completely dependent on us believing the truth as hard as we can before we get any proof) to the Promised Land (by which we mean America...somewhere), Nephi, his brothers, and his aged parents (who were left ambiguously hanging on the edge of death when the narrator forgot about them in chapter 18) finally arrive at book two.
Here, having just completed an important journey by God's grace and power alone, anyone familiar with the Old Testament Jews and their habits might expect Nephi and his family to offer a sacrifice in thanks or build an altar of some sort as a memorial (as did Noah in Genesis 8:20 and Joshua in Joshua 4:5-9), but despite professing multiple times to be a faithful follower of the Law of Moses (which is full of sacrifice requirements), Nephi has yet to mention offering a sacrifice of his own even once. Apparently, he's just that kind of Jew.
But I don't want to get too bogged down here in the many, many details I could nit-pick—like how The Book of Mormon is consistent with saying that everyone in Jerusalem was killed and the city was completely destroyed, whereas history and the book of Jeremiah in the Bible tell us that there were a significant number of survivors still living in Jerusalem at the time (including Jeremiah himself), or how it explicitly claims that God hid the Americas from every other nation except Nephi and company because otherwise it'd be overrun with other peoples, even though history and even The Book of Mormon itself tell us there were other people in the Americas long before the children of Lehi. Yeah, I could go on for a while, but I want to get to the titular issue for this post: Dualism.
Dualism, strictly speaking is a theology wherein both an evil and a good deity exist, equal in power. Almost always, these two have each been around as long as the other and will always be around because neither can conquer the other. In fact, in some way, they need each other. It's this last part of Duelism that's most popular today, and that finds its way into the most places. It's a popular idea that good and evil coexist in some way, even with their obvious conflicts, and that one really can't exist without the other. It's a sort of justification for evil in all of its forms, an answer to the Problem of Evil. Why are there bad things in the world? Well, because without them, we wouldn't have good things either! So the story goes, anyway.
In 2 Nephi, Lehi opens the book by going into a multi-chapter sermon, in which he's supposedly blessing his sons on his deathbed, but gets very distracted along the way. One of the points he winds up talking about is definitely an endorsement of Dualism. "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things," he says in 2 Nephi 2:11. Right there, you have the definition of Dualism embraced in a nutshell. But just in case you missed it, Lehi will reiterate it and spell it out several times in the rest of the verse, and the verses that follow (even Mormons call this the Gospel of Repetition). Specifically he claims that the following cannot occur outside of opposition "[neither] righteousness...[nor] wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad." This need for "opposition" (that is, Dualism) is expounded upon until it becomes clear that it encompasses all of existence, and even the existence of God, for "if these things are not there is no God," as 2 Nephi 2:13 asserts. Even life cannot exist without death, sense without insensibility, purity without corruption (2 Nephi 2:11). Though it is not stated outright that there is a second Dualistic god out there, it's an almost inescapable conclusion from the text. If God is good, if God is love, if God is life, and wisdom, purity, joy, and peace, and if none of these can exist outside of opposition (and even god is not immune to this principle, as per 2 Nephi 2:13), then surely there must exist a deity who has been around as long as god and who is his opposite in every way: evil and hateful, a god of death, folly, corruption, misery, and war. Some outside The Book of Mormon have proposed Satan to be that very god, an eternal, undefeatable, and necessary opposite to the God of the Bible.
However, when we examine the Bible, we find that the Dualistic good-god is, in fact, not the God of the Bible. First and most obviously, the God of the Bible stands alone. He does not even know of any other gods that do or ever have (or ever will) exist (Isaiah 44:8). Satan, certainly, is not a Dualistic equal and opposite god to our God. Satan cannot even inflict the most basic of miseries without God's express permission (Job 1:8-12), and He is a created being who has not always existed, nor will he always be free to cause trouble. That alone should make it clear that the Bible does not share Lehi's Dualism. But for further proof, we need look no further than the creation account in Genesis. At the end of chapter 1, God declares His creation finished and "very good." He has made a wonderful paradise full of life, love, purity, joy, and peace...and there is not a trace of evil, hate, folly, misery, war, or death anywhere in creation. Clearly all things do not have to exist in opposition.
In fact, claiming the need for Dualistic opposition leads to some very strange interpretations on the creation story, particularly the Fall. Lehi spells it out for us. Was man made to serve and glorify God (as per Isaiah 43:7, and numerous other Bible passages)? Not at all! According to 2 Nephi 2:16, man was created to "act for himself." Here, the Humanistic all-importance of man's agency in Mormonism appears (it's so pervasive that they explicitly teach that Satan's evil plan is essentially just predestination—and must be rejected because it takes away our agency!). Humankind needed to have a choice to do good or evil from the beginning. Going further, Lehi claims that they needed to do evil, in order to balance out all of that good and secure their own existence in the cosmic Dualism. "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy," says 2 Nephi 2:25.
That verse might be a little surprising to anyone familiar with the Bible. In fact, it should be. That's because there is no passage anywhere in the Bible giving a positive spin to the Fall. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Adam's Fall was necessary. Nowhere does it say that it was ultimately a good thing. In fact, in Genesis 3, God pronounces a terrible curse on all of Creation because of Adam's Fall. Paul in Romans goes on to elaborate that it was this one act of Adam that brought sin and death down upon all mankind, and that Christ came as a type of second Adam specifically to free us from these. In the Bible, the Fall was such a terrible thing that it wrecked all of creation and fundamentally broke all of Adam's descendants in such a way that, in order to make healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness possible the very Divine Son of God had to suffer and die on a cross thousands of years later. That's what the Bible says the Fall was like. It's not exactly the portrait of a positive and liberating necessary event.
Nor should it be. There's a very simple reason why the fundamentally Dualistic theology and philosophy of The Book of Mormon clashes so badly with the Bible: Dualism isn't a Biblical idea, nor does it come from any culture that existed in Lehi's time. It comes from the ancient Greek philosophers. From them, the idea passed on to us and has gained a certain credence, despite its logical problems (like how it would, logically, require that logical principles such as squares not being able to be triangles could only exist in opposition with some nonsense place where squares could be triangles if they wanted to be). It became popular with humanism, which saw it as a way to excuse our flaws and turn a blind eye to the evils of the world. After all, there's no use sweating over your own shortcoming when you believe that, without them, you couldn't be great! Evidently Smith found this train of thought appealing. He certainly would have been exposed to it, the Burned-Over District where he came from being a melting pot of Christian-like philosophies. This of course, explains exactly how Dualism found its way into The Book of Mormon and exactly why it doesn't agree with the Bible...because Smith was it's human, uninspired author.
He's had some rather eye-opening surprises.
Meanwhile, reading with him has put me well into the "book" of 2 Nephi and given me lots to write about. The book opens where 1 Nephi left off. For those of you who've slept since my last post (I know I have), the story so far is that Lehi, a Jew living in Jerusalem around 600 BC, is told by God to pack up his family and get out before the city is destroyed (by the Babylonians, though I don't think they're ever really mentioned). Lehi has a number of sons, three of which are important to the plot. Leman and Lemuel are the eldest sons who are constantly doubting God, antagonizing their brother, and falling into egregious sins, such as rudeness. Nephi, the younger son, is faithful. He is also the first-person narrator who wrote these books. He will let you know that he is Nephi, the author! He will say it again, and again (one of the most common phrases in the book is I, Nephi, just in case we might have forgotten who he was in between sentences). He will waste whole chapters telling you that he wrote these books, named them after himself, and wrote them in the language of his own Jewish subgroup (reformed Egyptian, naturally)...and then he will complain about how much he has to leave out because of all the space he wasted telling you the above (not to mention how much space he wastes telling you he's having to leave stuff out...or all the other unnecessary stuff he does). He goes on to have many adventures with many teachable moments, such as how to murder someone in cold blood when the spirit of god commands you to in a highly uncharacteristic manner, nearly starve your entire family to death because you broke your (historically impossible) steel bow and everyone else's bows "lost their springs" (exact quote, I kid you not), and be given divine instructions on how to build a very special ship to cross the ocean to the Americas and somehow forget to write them down. And to be honest, that's just the highlights reel. I could go on all day. But anyway, after faithfully following god's directions via a magical compass powered by one's own belief (because one of the major lessons of this book is that all truth comes from direct revelation of God and that it's completely dependent on us believing the truth as hard as we can before we get any proof) to the Promised Land (by which we mean America...somewhere), Nephi, his brothers, and his aged parents (who were left ambiguously hanging on the edge of death when the narrator forgot about them in chapter 18) finally arrive at book two.
Here, having just completed an important journey by God's grace and power alone, anyone familiar with the Old Testament Jews and their habits might expect Nephi and his family to offer a sacrifice in thanks or build an altar of some sort as a memorial (as did Noah in Genesis 8:20 and Joshua in Joshua 4:5-9), but despite professing multiple times to be a faithful follower of the Law of Moses (which is full of sacrifice requirements), Nephi has yet to mention offering a sacrifice of his own even once. Apparently, he's just that kind of Jew.
But I don't want to get too bogged down here in the many, many details I could nit-pick—like how The Book of Mormon is consistent with saying that everyone in Jerusalem was killed and the city was completely destroyed, whereas history and the book of Jeremiah in the Bible tell us that there were a significant number of survivors still living in Jerusalem at the time (including Jeremiah himself), or how it explicitly claims that God hid the Americas from every other nation except Nephi and company because otherwise it'd be overrun with other peoples, even though history and even The Book of Mormon itself tell us there were other people in the Americas long before the children of Lehi. Yeah, I could go on for a while, but I want to get to the titular issue for this post: Dualism.
Dualism, strictly speaking is a theology wherein both an evil and a good deity exist, equal in power. Almost always, these two have each been around as long as the other and will always be around because neither can conquer the other. In fact, in some way, they need each other. It's this last part of Duelism that's most popular today, and that finds its way into the most places. It's a popular idea that good and evil coexist in some way, even with their obvious conflicts, and that one really can't exist without the other. It's a sort of justification for evil in all of its forms, an answer to the Problem of Evil. Why are there bad things in the world? Well, because without them, we wouldn't have good things either! So the story goes, anyway.
In 2 Nephi, Lehi opens the book by going into a multi-chapter sermon, in which he's supposedly blessing his sons on his deathbed, but gets very distracted along the way. One of the points he winds up talking about is definitely an endorsement of Dualism. "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things," he says in 2 Nephi 2:11. Right there, you have the definition of Dualism embraced in a nutshell. But just in case you missed it, Lehi will reiterate it and spell it out several times in the rest of the verse, and the verses that follow (even Mormons call this the Gospel of Repetition). Specifically he claims that the following cannot occur outside of opposition "[neither] righteousness...[nor] wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad." This need for "opposition" (that is, Dualism) is expounded upon until it becomes clear that it encompasses all of existence, and even the existence of God, for "if these things are not there is no God," as 2 Nephi 2:13 asserts. Even life cannot exist without death, sense without insensibility, purity without corruption (2 Nephi 2:11). Though it is not stated outright that there is a second Dualistic god out there, it's an almost inescapable conclusion from the text. If God is good, if God is love, if God is life, and wisdom, purity, joy, and peace, and if none of these can exist outside of opposition (and even god is not immune to this principle, as per 2 Nephi 2:13), then surely there must exist a deity who has been around as long as god and who is his opposite in every way: evil and hateful, a god of death, folly, corruption, misery, and war. Some outside The Book of Mormon have proposed Satan to be that very god, an eternal, undefeatable, and necessary opposite to the God of the Bible.
However, when we examine the Bible, we find that the Dualistic good-god is, in fact, not the God of the Bible. First and most obviously, the God of the Bible stands alone. He does not even know of any other gods that do or ever have (or ever will) exist (Isaiah 44:8). Satan, certainly, is not a Dualistic equal and opposite god to our God. Satan cannot even inflict the most basic of miseries without God's express permission (Job 1:8-12), and He is a created being who has not always existed, nor will he always be free to cause trouble. That alone should make it clear that the Bible does not share Lehi's Dualism. But for further proof, we need look no further than the creation account in Genesis. At the end of chapter 1, God declares His creation finished and "very good." He has made a wonderful paradise full of life, love, purity, joy, and peace...and there is not a trace of evil, hate, folly, misery, war, or death anywhere in creation. Clearly all things do not have to exist in opposition.
In fact, claiming the need for Dualistic opposition leads to some very strange interpretations on the creation story, particularly the Fall. Lehi spells it out for us. Was man made to serve and glorify God (as per Isaiah 43:7, and numerous other Bible passages)? Not at all! According to 2 Nephi 2:16, man was created to "act for himself." Here, the Humanistic all-importance of man's agency in Mormonism appears (it's so pervasive that they explicitly teach that Satan's evil plan is essentially just predestination—and must be rejected because it takes away our agency!). Humankind needed to have a choice to do good or evil from the beginning. Going further, Lehi claims that they needed to do evil, in order to balance out all of that good and secure their own existence in the cosmic Dualism. "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy," says 2 Nephi 2:25.
That verse might be a little surprising to anyone familiar with the Bible. In fact, it should be. That's because there is no passage anywhere in the Bible giving a positive spin to the Fall. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Adam's Fall was necessary. Nowhere does it say that it was ultimately a good thing. In fact, in Genesis 3, God pronounces a terrible curse on all of Creation because of Adam's Fall. Paul in Romans goes on to elaborate that it was this one act of Adam that brought sin and death down upon all mankind, and that Christ came as a type of second Adam specifically to free us from these. In the Bible, the Fall was such a terrible thing that it wrecked all of creation and fundamentally broke all of Adam's descendants in such a way that, in order to make healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness possible the very Divine Son of God had to suffer and die on a cross thousands of years later. That's what the Bible says the Fall was like. It's not exactly the portrait of a positive and liberating necessary event.
Nor should it be. There's a very simple reason why the fundamentally Dualistic theology and philosophy of The Book of Mormon clashes so badly with the Bible: Dualism isn't a Biblical idea, nor does it come from any culture that existed in Lehi's time. It comes from the ancient Greek philosophers. From them, the idea passed on to us and has gained a certain credence, despite its logical problems (like how it would, logically, require that logical principles such as squares not being able to be triangles could only exist in opposition with some nonsense place where squares could be triangles if they wanted to be). It became popular with humanism, which saw it as a way to excuse our flaws and turn a blind eye to the evils of the world. After all, there's no use sweating over your own shortcoming when you believe that, without them, you couldn't be great! Evidently Smith found this train of thought appealing. He certainly would have been exposed to it, the Burned-Over District where he came from being a melting pot of Christian-like philosophies. This of course, explains exactly how Dualism found its way into The Book of Mormon and exactly why it doesn't agree with the Bible...because Smith was it's human, uninspired author.