EVANGELICAL & MORMON DIALOGUE #2
A.M. Thursday – Richard Hughes of Pepperdine University, spoke on the parallels between Mormonism and the Churches of Christ movements in his presentation “Two Restoration Traditions: Mormons and Churches of Christ in the Nineteenth Century."

The Latter Day Saints and the Churches of Christ were both competing restoration movements that developed in early 19th century America. According to Hughes many of the first Mormons were actually disillusioned converts from the Churches of Christ. However there were some fundamental differences:

The Mormons had prophets and new scriptures, while the Churches of Christ emphasized a return to New Testament structure. (This seems to be something that Evangelicals ignore when talking with Mormons. We assume that they are people who have misread the Bible but they see the Bible as being fluid in authority. True authority – final authority – exists in the current prophets. The scriptures, even the book of Mormon, only point to this authority -- Brad).

The Churches of Christ emphasized apocalyptic revivalism and saw themselves as living in the shadow of the second coming of Christ. Until the WWI they tended to be extremely pessimistic in their apocalyptic orientation. They were also influenced, through Alexander Campbell, by Enlightenment thinking and Scottish Realism. That is, they approached things from a “scientific” perspective (especially after Campbell). According to their thinking, faithful attention to biblical direction regarding church structure would produce the same results as what was evidenced in the early New Testament church. Thus the New Testament was a blueprint or constitution on how to do church – a kind of map for a scientific reconstruction of the primitive church.

The Mormons, though, drew more on the ideas of Romanticism – the use of imagination. They desired to restore the church by enlarging the boundaries of the human spirit and thus transcending the structures of ancient church form. So they melded elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Masonry together in a way that created a more satisfying experience. For Latter Day Saints, the fall of the church (which is what they were reacting against) wasn’t a fall of the church structures (as supposed by the Churches of Christ) but a loss of immediate revelation in the church. And in the absence of prophets and revelation the church had to come up with systems to interpret the Bible. And that’s why there were so many sects and disunity in the church.

For Campbellites miracles function as the evidence that produces faith. But for the LDS movement faith produced miracles.

Other differences – the Campbellites tended to see only the New Testament as relevant but the Mormons saw the whole Bible as normative. The Latter Day Saints viewed the Bible not as data but as a story in which they participated. And thus their emphasis was more on the experience of God than on the biblical text itself. This is why Joseph Smith felt comfortable in revising the Bible. He used it less as a scholar and more as a poet/prophet.

Bob Millet, from BYU, responded to the talk and confirmed that the content of the Book of Mormon hasn’t played as important of a role in their Mormon thinking as it has as a symbol of the existence of ongoing revelation.