"Theories of atonement" is the name for arguments and explanations as to how the actual mechanism by which jesus resurected and absolved peoples' sins worked. Some of the are very old, most of them are interesting, none of them are airtight.
Theodicy is the name for the theological and philosophical attempt to reconcile and omnipotent, omniscient an omnibenevolent god with the presence of evil. It literally means "the justice of god "
Created by augostus of hippo
Ebionites were a sect of judeo-christians, we know very little about them except that they romped around Israel from at least the late first to fourth century AC and that they held the belief that Jesus was at no point god incarnate. They were very unpopular with christians for obvious reasons.
Tertullian wrote an anonymous work called “against all heresies” In which Ebion (the leader of the ebionites) is mentioned, placed at around the 2nd century. About a century later Epiphanius (the church father) listed more details of Ebion’s life in his own text regarding heresies “The Panarion”. Ebion’s birthplace was detailed, He was said to have lived in a hamlet called Cochabe in the district of Bashan. Epiphanius even provided his travel itinerary, claiming he travelled through Asia and went to Rome.
The thing is though, Ebion never existed. The name of the Ebionites wasn’t eponymous. It was based on the Hebrew word for “the poor”. Tertullian (or someone before him whose work has been lost) just didn’t understand the etymology and incorrectly assumed the dirty heretics were following a man they had been named after, and over time more and more details got made up over time.
Ebion is a good tracer to see how lax most of the church fathers were with the truth.
I was once brushing up on some chemistry via a youtube video one day. An advert for the Church of Latter- day Saints came up, it featured a young woman guaranteeing a free book of Mormon for anyone willing to fill in a form and get visited by some missionaries. I was already desperate to have an out from learning some very boring chemistry so this didn’t seem such a bad idea. I filled in the form and had some missionaries come by my house the next day, both of them were kids, in their early twenties. They wore ties and badges emblazoned with “elder” and their last name. I’ll call them elder pot and elder kettle. In preparation for their arrival I dusted off my knowledge of Mormonism (what makes them different from other christian denominations, when did they split off and the like). Obviously I had a lot of questions. Most being variations of “who would believe this”.
The fundamentals of Mormonism are that they believe a teenager named Joseph smith had an angel named Moronai reveal the location of magic gold tablets. Then Joseph Smith had bestowed upon him the ability to translate these tabletes, from reformed Egyptian (which, by the way, is a language Joseph Smith made up) into English, using seer stones and other mystical techniques. Then Moronai came back and took the gold tablets back up to heaven.
I asked the missionaries how they believed this, why the fact that the only evidence that Joseph Smith was truly ordained by God was conveniently taken back to heaven, even though that would completely go against what they believe their god to want. To my surprise on this front they didn't even put up a fight. They just agreed, “yeah that is weird isn’t it, but god works in mysterious ways”
I moved on to their theodicy, how they justified evil in the presence of an all good god, they went with the free will route, I used my go to response to this and pointed out that it is all well and good to use that response for evil committed by believers, but everything else is still a problem.
There's no free will being tampered with if god stops children getting leukemia. Nor would there any free will being interfered with if god were to reveal himself to a heretic just before attacking another heretic, or someone of the “correct” religion
They fizzled off again here and I never really got an answer
Then I addressed the actual text itself, specifically the fact that the book of Mormon contains loads of anachronisms. It is meant to be a documentation of a group of israelites that had immigrated to america. But all sorts of details Are off, crops are mentioned that simply did not exist in the Americas until about 3000 years after the events detailed in the book, the same for domesticated horses, cattle and so on and so forth. To this they answered that we just probably hadn’t unearthed these yet, because America has only been discovered quite recently.
I had them come back every Tuesday and 20:30. Elder kettle and elder pot quickly invited me to their church, and told me a professor at Oxford university would attend and he could answer my questions. I went to church the next Sunday and sat next to him. He was a very serious, weary looking man. Several speakers came up to a lectern, saying the kinds of things you'd expect in most churches, feel good stuff. The one that stood out to me was an extremely tired and dishevelled looking woman. Her speech was short, she talked about how no matter how hard life is, God is there, and everything will be ok. She spoke of the story of job and how his life was torn apart only to be rewarded with twice as much. She seemed to be saying it to herself more than anyone else in the church. The whole time she wearily looked out into the distance and took long pauses, looking as if on the brink of tears.
She finished and stepped away, as the next person came up to take the lectern they stopped to give her a comforting touch on the back, whispering some words of encouragement presumably. I assumed something had happened to her, or maybe her situation had been on the downhill for a while. Whatever it was, it was tragic to me that this was her coping mechanism. How much worse could it get for her if she truly believed the more she suffered the more she was going to be suffered? How much less would she struggle to help herself if she believed her god would do it for her?
Eventually the speechmaking ended and the mood turned to a seminar for missionary work, a form was handed out. The professor turned to me and told me that this part wasn’t really for me, so we could doddle off and have a conversation in another room. We found some chairs and I asked him why he chose Mormonism. He told me that he had grown up Mormon and had received a revelation. He also found that the writing of the book of Mormon was so complex and so elegant that an uneducated Utah farmboy could not possibly have just made it up.
When I asked him some of the questions I had already tried on Pot and Kettle, he revealed that he actually had a theology that was far and away from almost everyone else’s in that church. He revealed that he took very little of the bible literally, calling back to earlier when the distraught woman had spoken to the congregation about job. He explained that he did not believe the story of job ever happened. Nor did any other part of genesis. He knew that there was no archaeological evidence for the flood, or the fleeing of the Israelites. He believed that it was absolutely possible and probable that the words of Jesus had been tampered with in the new testament. After everything was stripped off he believed very little of traditional christian doctrine, fundamentally only that Jesus was a god. Every other sentence of his would start off “Well, look, this is what the church itself would tell you, but I believe…" I realised that he was as different from his fellow latter day saints as I was from him. It seemed he had cause to believe in the reliability of Joseph Smith but was incredibly disillusioned with the Church authority itself. A few weeks later I would find something out about him that would solidify this as a possibility. After a while time went by (it tends to do that) and I had another thing to frolic off to, so we said our goodbyes.
After Christmas I examined the moral attitudes of Pot and Kettle. I asked them about the role of women. They seemed tolerant enough about them but were very insistent that raising a family would be their one true calling, not that unusual for any christian denomination. I asked them what they thought of homosexuality. They explained that their position was that while the act of homosexual sex itself was a sex, the church recognised that some people were born hoosexual of no “fault” of their own. So one could be openly homosexual but either elect for abstinence and celibacy, or marry a woman regardless. If you were a practising homosexual, so to speak, your position in the church would be extremely limited. After a while they offered to have the professor join us by call. I asked more questions in the same vein, and got significantly higher quality answers from him. When I asked further questions on the attitudes towards homosexuality his demeanor changed and he revealed that his own brother was openly homosexual, with a husband, and so was effectively Ostracized both officially and socially by the church. Once again, in a very tired voice, he said “Well, look, this is what the church itself would tell you, but I believe…”. Over the next few weeks Elders Pot and Kettle revisited. It became clear that I was talking to the monkeys and not the organ grinder and the weekly ritual had gotten a little stale, their infuriating habit of eventually admitting that they had no evidence for their claims, but still telling me that they were right, because they felt it in their hearts. They shrugged at me and smiled and brushed off every inconsistency of their belief system like water off a duck’s back.
They asked me to pray to god to reveal to me if he was true, If the book or mormon was true which I did.
I went back to the church and listened to more speeches. After, someone told me that every two weeks, after the service, the men and women would separate into 2 groups and talk. I joined the men and sat in their makeshift circle. Two groups were new to the church. A convert from another christian denomination and his friends who had come to see his baptism, And the family of a long time converted mormon. We all introduced ourselves to the group and started. The subject matter was innocuous, the average age around that circle must have been in the 30s or 40s but they spoke to each other like children. They talked about mentors and who ours were, as well as who we were mentors to. They used as a case study the child of a mutual friend of the regulars, They asked who were his mentors. They listed his parents, his older siblings, his teachers and his church ministry. Eventually the metaphorical talking stick was handed to who I assume was the father of one of the converts. He started off by stating that he was not Mormon but so long as they were christian he thought they had enough in common, he was clearly uncomfortable though. He was from Nigeria. He explained that his experience of white people had always been with missionaries, so he assumed that all white countries contained only christians. A man a few seats away from me smiled, shook his head and chortled “I wish”. The Nigerian detailed his shock and disappointment upon coming here for the first time seeing how secular Britain really is. He then vented his frustration that British schools did not even forcibly teach bible stories, proudly boasting that the bible was mandatory reading in Nigeria. Everyone laughed and applauded his country, A young man sitting next to me spoke to the Nigerian directly, “if it makes you feel better there are some schools where they still learn the bible, private schools I think, I went to one”
This whole interaction made my hairs stand up on my neck. The casualness with which they described misleading vulnerable children into adopting beliefs they had no true justification for. Both in the instance they briefly mention the role of the ministry in the life of the child of their mutual friend, and in the wider remark about all schools.
Eventually Elder Pot and Elder Kettle told me they would be leaving soon, Elder Pot’s 2 year mission was nearly over and elder Kettle was going to continue his somewhere else. An event was being held at the church, an FHE, Family Home Evening. Normally, as the name suggests done amongst families, but also sometimes arranged for the metaphorical family of churchgoers. And this would be my last opportunity to see the pair.
Later in the evening, Elder Kettle asked me if I like anime, I told him I’d seen some of them and had not not un-disliked them. He pulled me to the side and pulled out of his pocket a pack of collection cards, similar to the pokemon ones. But the writing on this one was entirely in japanese and was absolutely covered with half undressed, physically impractically cup sized anime style women. He told me his friend in Taiwan loved to collect these cards and that they were very popular in the east. His friend had given him this pack and Kettle wondered if I would like it.