Home > Work > Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity
1 " Catholics espouse papal infallibility, but no Catholic believes in it. Joseph Smith espoused prophetic fallibility, but no Mormon believes in it. "
― Terryl L. Givens , Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity
2 " Of Sir Isaac Newton’s momentous decipherment of the laws of the universe, the French scientist Pierre-Simon de Laplace famously told Napoleon, in his philosophical euphoria, that he no longer had need of God to make sense of creation. Secular science could henceforth exile God from his universe. In Joseph Smith’s conception, by contrast, naturalism and God co-exist. "
3 " Matter and spirit are of equal duration; both are self-existent,—they never began to exist. "
4 " God is part of the universe, master architect but not master magician. In this conception, miracles do not represent, as they traditionally have, “the intervention of God in the natural order” or “the suspension of the natural order.”10 "
5 " the first and fundamental principle of our holy religion” to be free “to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another. "
6 " I stated that the most prominent difference in sentiment between the Latter-day Saints and sectarians was, that the latter were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived its members the privilege of believing anything not contained therein, whereas the Latter-day Saints have no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.”83 "
7 " Dante thought a state of eternal, rapturous contemplation, and few have proffered more specifics than that. Post-redemption theology seems an oxymoron. "
8 " LDS conception of matter is “essentially dynamic rather than static, if indeed it is not a kind of living energy, and that it is subject at least to the rule of intelligence.”24 This position is very much like the Process Theologians’ view that “actual entities at every level embody an element of self-determination. "
9 " Joseph Smith, and this is not always fully appreciated within the tradition he initiated, did not feel that direct communication from God, gifts of seership, and an open, continuously expanding canon in any way obviated the need for theology. "
