Dialogue between Christians and Mormons

Hi folks,
Below is an interesting article on attempts at dialogue between Christians and Mormons. The problem with the article is that it doesn't in any way show how Millet, a Mormon apologist, is misleading Christians in his attempts at dialogue, nor how Dr. Mouw, in meeting with Millet and having "intense debates" with him, is failing to defend Christianity. Millet has absolutely no intentions of ever becoming a Christian, but is rather doing everything he can to mislead people into thinking that he is seeking "common ground" between Christianity and Mormonism, which as far as I am concerned, can never exist, and for obvious reasons. Dr. Mouw is doing much to help Millet accomplish his goals by basically not letting the truth stand in the way of dialogue with his Mormon brothers.

Art


Evangelicals and Mormons in dialogue

By Rosalynde Welch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
November 6, 2009

Civil Religion is an attempt—a successful one, in my short experience—to foster mutual understanding among members of disparate religious (and nonreligious!) traditions. The advantages of the blog format are its convenience and its transparency: readers can easily access posts, participate in the comments, and readily search, recover and distribute the content. These are good things, mostly. But because blogs expose participants to a potentially hostile public gaze, there can be a reluctance on the part of bloggers to engage in the kind of mutually self-disclosing dialogue that leads to real understanding. If one fears that reflective self-criticism will be exploited by bad-faith opportunists, one is less likely to engage in open discussion. I know I’ve felt a bit of that in my short tenure as a participant here, though, happily, that fear has been largely unrealized.

That’s why I was interested to read about an interreligious initiative that has taken a very different form. Christianity Today reports on a series of private meetings between Mormon and Evangelical representatives working toward a shared understanding and relationship of good will:

Not many years ago, evangelicals would have deemed substantive contact with Mormonism … improbable. Yet since 2000, small scholarly teams of Mormons led by Millet and evangelical teams led by Fuller Theological Seminary president Richard Mouw have managed to hold 17 intense, closed-door dialogue sessions.

I would imagine that the intimacy and privacy enjoyed in these conferences allows the discussants to develop genuine trust, which in turn encourages the openness necessary for fruitful interchange on the most difficult topics. The article goes on to describe a variety of other initiatives jointly undertaken by Evangelical and Mormon groups, including an Evangelical revival meeting held in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, many of which seem to be fostering a more positive relationship between the two traditions. It makes an interesting read, and I recommend you take a look.

I don’t think that Civil Religion will ever be an entirely safe discursive space; there’s a genuine and inescapable tension between freedom and security, and blogs definitely skew toward freedom. But we’ll do our own good work here in this small corner of the universe, and we’ll learn from the work done in different ways and in different places.