Robert Bowman, Jr. is posting over at Parchment and Pen now (yippee!) and his first two posts were regarding a book review he sent to Christianity Today of Robert Millet and Gerald McDermott’s book Claiming Christ: A Mormon—Evangelical Debate. This review was rejected for publication because the editors believe that Bowman misrepresented the book (which I highly doubt).
But it was the comments that followed the post that struck me. Basically it was the lame name-calling game and heresy-hunting that I used to engage in but have since rejected since my enlightenment :-) that caught my attention. For example, Christianity Today (or the author of a specific article — I don’t know who they had in mind) was accused by one commentator of blasphemy for noting that there are some differences between Mormonism and Christianity. I guess this individual was looking for a proclamation that Mormonism is a wickedly devilish movement bent on deceiving the world and dragging everyone to hell along with Jesus’ spirit-brother Satan and Christianity is all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.
Let me just be very clear in stating that I do not believe that Mormons are Christians. In other words, I do not consider Mormons to be brothers with slightly different beliefs. But I have learned that simply shouting at the top of your lungs that Mormons are cultists doesn’t do much of anything except piss people off. It certainly doesn’t make anyone want to listen to any well-thought arguments that you might want to present at some point in the future.
When it’s all said and done, I just saw some of the comments as basically useless and a little too zealous for my taste so I responded briefly to a few of them. So check out Bowman’s post and then read the comments that follow. Enjoy!
B”H
