B. H. Roberts replies to Philip Wentworth’s Atlantic piece.
Roberts, senior president of the Seventy, will die in a few months. It’s 1933 and James Talmage will be dead four months after Roberts’s Improvement Era article appears. Roberts will die exactly two months after Talmage. It’s close to the end of an era. In answering Wentworth’s claims, Roberts will repeat a common Mormon trope. But that is for the final part of this meander. First, Roberts will go into a theme that guided his own life, and in an ideal world for him, would have guided his religion. But first, Roberts sees Wentworth’s predicament as a result of the failure of Christianity (Historic Christianity as evangelical apologists love to term it).
Read more: A Different Wentworth and a Different Letter. B. H. Roberts on Faith Crisis, Part III of IV: Roberts on the Engine of Religion and Freedom.Roberts sees the modern Christian world as “transgressing the laws, changing the ordinances and breaking the everlasting covenant of which the blood of Christ is spoken of a being the covenant to be broken (cf. Isa. xxiv:1-7; Heb. xii:20)” and “one of the most disastrous steps Christendom took in this direction was when it fixed limitations upon itself by denying continuous revelation to the Church.” Here, Roberts employs the long time argument of Latter-day Saint missionaries of the previous century: cessationism was the great departure from the true gospel. This denial of revelation means that the Church, as it stood for centuries and up to Wentworth’s own parish experience, fought against all forms of new knowledge. Including scientific progress. And this lays a trap for the young. For Roberts all truth, in one way or another, is a revelation from God. Roberts sees hermeneutics as the problem. Truth trumps hermeneutics for him. Here Roberts repeats Wentworth’s indictment of the Church in his claim the it deploys Government to enforce what it can’t get the folken to believe by sitting in the pews. Roberts even looks at Scopes as a straight-ahead dumb thing by a Tennessee system under the thumb of evangelical dictation. Here is where Roberts gets to the first of his arguments, and it’s pretty clear that he has more than one target in mind.
There are two ways human conduct may be controlled, Roberts says. 1 is “Moral Government,” 2 is “Effective Government.” He defines Moral Government as God’s true government, where an innate Truth is taught and the very force of such truth creates convictions in the populace “which leads to adherence to truth, and hence to right conduct as set forth by truth.” This government rests on “persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness and meekness, by love unfeigned, by kindness, and pure knowledge . . . (and so forth).” No influence ought to be used except by those principles. Those are the forces operating in “Moral Government.” Effective Government is man’s government and it ultimately rests on force, compulsion, fines, imprisonment, and even death. “This government is . . . wholly human, and represents power by which human decrees ostensibly work for the good of society;” but it proceeds by penalty and force. “it should never be invoked for enforcing beliefs or Church discipline.” Roberts sees Wentworth’s complaints as instances of the Christian Church co-opting Effective Government to serve where it should be able, were it truly in possession of real ongoing truth, to persuade, etc., etc. “The Churches . . . seeking state enforcement of prohibition, . . . stricter legislation regarding dissemination of birth-control information . . . and call[ing] upon laws against teaching evolution in [the] schools” have gone off the rails by using Effective Government to enforce religious dogma. [Oh boy.]
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