Richard Sherlock, a professor of philosophy and religion at Utah State University, refused to allow his maturity in life stand between him and the particular faith he was looking for when he converted from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Catholicism.
By leaving the Church, Sherlock made a life decision that, for him, has only fostered peace, not the chaos many envision when they consider transitioning religions or leaving religion altogether.
A previous feature, titled “A USU Hidden Secret: Professor Richard Sherlock, from Mormon to Catholic,” introduced Sherlock and debunked many cultural expectations around blind observance of religion. For Sherlock, ignorance never was happiness.
This article will investigate the doctrines or implicit customs/beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that Sherlock said was a “head in the sand” approach to religion. That is, one that did not allow room for questioning, scrutiny or reason.
“When it comes to theology, Mormons simply avoid the use of the tools of philosophical reason to explore, develop, expand, or articulate their theological beliefs,” he said. “More than once I was told not to raise serious questions in Mormon classes or was ignored when I raised my hand.”
One of the paramount features of the Church of Jesus Christ’s restoration is the belief that Christ’s church was detracted from, added to or corrupted between the end of his ministry and the time Joseph Smith organized the restored church. Many church members attribute this to a loss of the holy priesthood on the earth during this period of “darkness”, thus ushering in an era known as the Great Apostasy.
Sherlock does not believe that the Church’s belief in a Great Apostasy is justified.
“For me, the whole concept of an ‘apostasy’ broke down my first year at Harvard,” Sherlock said. “Whatever one’s field of study, all master’s students had to take one course in every field: bible, theology, church history, ethics, and world religions.”
In these fields of study, Sherlock began to scrutinize the idea of the Great Apostasy, which his Sunday school teachers had taught throughout his childhood.
What he found was that many religious, scholarly sources agreed that regardless of differences between various sects of Christianity — whether Baptist, Evangelical, Episcopalian, Protestant, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Catholic — none considered the Great Apostasy a genuine concern.
Sherlock said it seemed that Christianity, regardless of its changes and shifts over hundreds of years, never strayed so far from Christ’s original teachings that it could warrant the title “apostate.”
“Since the idea of a fundamental breakdown of the Christian church does not fit the fact of the growth of the early Christian church and the development of its theology, a restoration of something lost is simply not needed,” Sherlock said.
Dr. Richard Sherlock is an ex-Mormon, a Catholic convert, and a professor of philosophy and religion at USU. Photo by: Megan Nielsen
Another divergence between Mormonism and Catholicism, Sherlock points out, is the Church of Jesus Christ’s symbolic observance of the sacrament — Christ’s administering of the bread and wine. This is not limited to Mormonism, as many other Christian sects prefer a nonliteral interpretation of scripture surrounding the sacrament.
“There are a number of truths that are rooted in scripture that Mormons reject,” Sherlock said. “Consider ‘the real presence’… when consecrated by the priest, the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ… Nowhere are the bread and wine said to be anything other than the actual body and blood.”
Latter-day Saints reject this idea, he said, because they believe the original Bible taught that the bread and wine were only symbols representing Christ’s body and blood.
“This supposedly ‘corrected’ text was, of course, only known to Joseph Smith, since no extant Greek text can be plausibly read as teaching anything other than ‘the real presence’,” he said.
Sherlock also argues there are cracks in the Church of Jesus Christ’s theology on the nature of God. The belief “as Man is, God once was,” preached in Joseph Smith’s sermon on King Follett’s in 1844, is one that resonates well for millions of Latter-Day Saints.
They see the doctrine as proof of a God who intimately understands what life is like in one’s state as a natural man. To Latter-Day Saints, it as a comforting thought — that mankind is capable of eternal progression and can inherit all that God has, in wisdom, love and mercy.
However, Sherlock demonstrates that the attitude around this doctrine is a often a matter of culture or even personal preference. The reason being, outside of the Church of Jesus Christ, it is no secret that many other Christian faiths see this particular doctrine as especially heretical.
Many, like Sherlock, believe it holds no theological weight.
“The belief of Mormonism that I really never accepted and have come to regard as fundamentally non-Christian and deeply destructive of true faith, is the Mormon denial of an existential gap between God and man,” he said. “God is not eternal or infinite in power, knowledge or goodness. He is simply a more developed version of human beings.”
Sherlock is not alone in questioning the Christianity of Mormonism.
“The Mormon doctrine of God includes many gods, not one,” said Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr, a writer for Christianity.com. “Furthermore, Mormonism teaches that we are what God once was and are becoming what he now is. That is in direct conflict with Christian orthodoxy.”
In a blog post on Patheos.com, a religious discussion website, writer Ben Witherington agrees.
“Mormons are polytheists, not monotheists,” he said. “Indeed they believe that God the father is an exalted man.”
Yet, for Latter-day Saints, this doctrine is not only necessary for God’s comprehension of the human experience, it reaffirms the emphasis on eternal progression. While modern Latter-day Saints do not dwell on these doctrines in their weekly Sunday school lessons, the teachings from the King Follett discourse nonetheless bear their weight in gospel thought.
“It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another,” Smith preached, “and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself the father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did.”
Such a doctrine can be vital for some people, yet others see it as a denigration of God’s supreme nature.
Sherlock summed up his thoughts on this doctrine with one question: “Why pray to a being that is still developing? How can you have complete faith in God if he is not the creator of all, existing outside time and space, the same yesterday, today, and forever?”
Such a god, Sherlock and many others argue, could not possibly be that being described in King Follett’s sermon.
Another primary aspect of Mormonism that did not settle with Sherlock is the cultural aversion to asking sensitive questions. The ability to distinguish doubt from weakness is one that all faiths should try to cultivate.
Sherlock used an example from his years at Harvard to illustrate this. A Latter-day Saint student at the university was teaching a Sunday school lesson at church one day. During his lesson, which was on the “Old Testament,” he brought in various religious and scholarly sources. Such sources forced his class to swallow some unsavory facts regarding the chronology and authorship of sacred texts. The class was outraged. They believed he was teaching “heresy, or worse,” Sherlock said. The Harvard student left the Church after teaching the lesson, largely due to its reception amongst his peers. He never returned. Sherlock considers this a staple in the Latter-day Saint culture: the divorcement of faith and reason.
The lesson Sherlock described took place in the 1970s. Today, things are changing, yet as in all religious traditions, there remains a stigma that often brands those asking questions as deviant, disobedient or weak.
And that is simply not true.
Sherlock’s wife died in May 2008. “I thought my life was worthless,” he said. Prayer up to that point could not ease the heartache he felt on a daily basis due to the loss of such an irreplaceable, beloved person.
“When I started the process of conversion I felt an immense joy that I could now pray to the true God who had my life in his loving arms,” he said.
Today, Sherlock joyfully follows the teachings of the very church he believes Christ left on the earth after his ministry. He believes that his salvation “(was) purchased with his blood on the cross.”
“Grace is my salvation. The true happiness I feel is overwhelming,” he said.
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