McDermott Responds to Critics

Posted on October 31, 2008
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Gerald McDermott wrote a fairly controversial article in First Things a few months back that generated a lot of discussion. He’s responding to some of the criticism in a post up at Summa Theologica. While I frankly find the whole “are Mormons Christian” discussion to be fairly silly and pointless there were some interesting things raised. Let me address some of them.Jesus is a different God – I think here we have to distinguish the semantic issues from the physical or ontological issues. Put simply even for a Trinitarian one can use the word “god” to refer to either the ousia or unity of God or to one of the persons. That Mormons separate out the persons is unsurprising since so too do Trinitarians. Whether Mormons deny any substantial unity of the persons is the real question. Yet McDermott skips this question and merely points to texts promoting a difference. The problem is that whether there is a difference should not be the question at all. Rather the question should be whether there is a robust unity.

Of course later McDermott talks about “there is not ontological oneness in the Trinity.” But I think one has to distinguish between whether there is an ontological unity in the Godhead in LDS thought (as I believer there is) from whether than ontological unity takes the form that some theologians (such as Augustine) take it to have that goes beyond the formal doctrine of the Trinity. That is one can accept a thoroughgoing unity without accepting all philosophical beliefs regarding that unity.

I don’t understand why McDermott skips this issue entirely. Now there certainly are some Mormons who adopt a nominalistic view of the unity of God. However I don’t think this is true of even a majority of prominent Mormon thinkers through history. It certainly isn’t necessarily true of Mormon theology and I think the “official” answer, if there is one, is that we don’t know much about the nature of the unity merely that there is a strong unity of some sort. (i.e. the position is that there is no ontological position that is official)

The closest McDermott gets to the issue is pointing out that “LDS believe Jesus and the Father are two different beings (even tho they share will and purpose ALL the time), just as you and I are two different beings. This is precisely where we disagree.” This suggests he sees the nominalistic view as the LDS view. Yet unless one unpacks what is meant by being here this tells us nothing. Likewise merely sharing will and purpose tells us nothing about whether this is all that is shared.

The issue of whether there are three gods (as in the Trinity) in one God or whether there are more (as in most Mormon thinkers) is well made. Obviously, as McDermott himself notes, not all Mormon thinkers think about this the same way. However saying that the mere possibility that Mormons can think there are more than three Gods is a problem strikes me as odd. But I think this is a stronger place for McDermott to attack (even if I don’t think it ultimately has much basis for his main thesis)

Jesus grew into God – this one is just weird to me. McDermott criticizes Mormons for believing that Jesus both grew into becoming God and is somehow also the eternal God. Given the formal doctrine of the two natures of Christ I just don’t understand why this is a problem unless McDermott believes that Jesus was always omnipotent and omniscient while a human baby. Put an other way it seems to me that the Mormon position is very much wrapped up in the same issues that theologians have long struggled with in their Christology. Maybe, given our conception of pre-existence, the form of the problems appears different. But I don’t see huge logical differences.

Jesus is the same species as we are – once again a pretty odd place to go given standard theological Christology over the past centuries. Of course Jesus is the same speicies as us. That’s demanded by condescension. Now really what McDermott is after is he wants there to be a fundamental ontological difference between Jesus and man. But he has to be careful in making this distinction lest he deny the doctrine of the two natures. (i.e. that Jesus was fully man)

What I think he really wants to go after is the typical Mormon rejection of the ontological gap created by creation ex nihilo. And there I think he’d be correct. But to say that Mormons believe Jesus was “merely a man at one time” (i.e. without the dual natures at some time) is just factually false. Some Mormons might believe that and perhaps McDermott could then raise the problem that Mormonism allows people to believe this. But that whole line of argument just strikes me as odd.

God is not larger than the cosmos – this just strikes me as a bad view of transcendence. To say that God and the universe co-exist temporally says nothing about logical order nor does it really invalidate transcendence. I think though that what McDermott is really after isn’t transcendence but creation ex nihilo again. That is that God has logical omnipotence which logically entails that nothing can exist independent from him. There are problems with that view, but since I am convinced that creation ex nihilo is the real source of difference between Evangelicals and Mormons I’ll not belabor the point here.

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