Customer Reviews

Part Way to Utah : the Forgotten Mormons

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Paul Trask beautifully fills the void of Christian apologetics materials available on the Reorganized Latter Day Saints. He covers RLDS history, helps you understand their thinking, and helps you focus on beliefs relevant to RLDS, rather than on LDS beliefs. (Many Christians may not even realize the Reorganized church, also called "Community of Christ," exists.)

Trask has excellent analyses of RLDS scriptures, RLDS Zionism, and the RLDS priesthoods from the Christian perspective. He gives helpful, realistic guidance in winning RLDS members to Christ. This is an indispensable aid to Christian witnessing in this specialized area!

Paul Trask, the author of Part Way to Utah, is a former member of what is currently known as the Community of Christ. Trask depicts himself as one of the many casualties among conservative members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints generated by a gradual takeover, beginning in the late 1960s, by those indoctrinated in liberal Protestant seminaries.

An escalating and ever increasingly radical series of changes were forced upon those previously situated in the Reorganization. Many conservative RLDS ended up joining one of the splinter groups that have broken away from the Reorganized Church. Unlike these, Trash gravitated into a form of fundamentalist Baptist religiosity.

This explains the glowing endorsement of Trask's essay by Phil Roberts, currently the president of the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Roberts was the person primarily responsible for the anti-Mormon propaganda circulated before and during the 9-11 June 1998 annual convention in Salt Lake City of the Southern Baptist Convention. Trask has become a rather typical countercult anti-Mormon.

The primary difference between this book and the usual countercult literature on Mormon things is that Part Way to Utah attempts to direct the attack against the Community of Christ.

One useful feature of this volume is the collection of statements by those now disaffected from the Reorganization whose transition into Protestantism was clearly facilitated by their already having imbibed much of the style and some of the content found in nineteenth-century Protestant fundamentalism.

They have now shifted fully in that direction.

It is tragic that there are so few scholarly books about the Community of Christ (CoCh). This is the second book I have found that is wholly devoted to CoCh, (the other one being Carol Hansen). The authors of both books know each other and have helped each other in writing these books, Carol's came after this one.

The book reflects the typical converted people's strategies in denouncing the former faith from a new acquired "truth" based on another equally ineffable system of faith. However, even these books have some objective facts - such as the background of CoCh or their teachings. At the same thing, these parts take always some ten percent of total volume, cause the book is written to counter-argue.

So, based on the research on Latter-day Saints (Utah) during the period of 1940s-1970s the typical anti-LDS strategy is used. For those of you who are not acquainted with this tradition I'll clarify it shortly: Joseph Smith Jr (1805-1844) came to establish a new Christian tradition based on his revelations. When killed, different denominations (100 or so) flourished in his wake, one being the very large and known LDS in Salt Lake (10 millions or so adherents) and the other one, CoCh (200 000 or so adherents). Besides theological differences, the shared history of both, grounded in the revelations of Joseph, makes it easier for Trask to use anti-LDS rhetoric. The tragedy is cemented when the anti-LDS rhetoric still clings 1940s-1970s and hasn't evolved since then. Another tragedy is that CoCh is more liberal in its attitude, which make Trask's task difficult, but he has chosen to argue against the "traditional" CoCh. CoCh official standpoint towards Joseph's revelations is liberal and it accepts a diversity in belief and not a dogmatic one - it has moved from a leader-centred church to a open truth-seeking church, a community based on hope, faith and not only dogmas.

Therefore the book can never be better - no apologetic literature can be better than this. The book focuses on disproving the revelations thru a biblical-evangelical perspective. The Evangelicals believe in a bible without faults and they use it in denouncing all other "faulty" documents of other faith traditions. So the basic concepts of the hierarchy of CoCh, with a patriarch giving blessings, an order of priesthood (a lower and a higher) with a leader called prophet are denounced. The character of Joseph the founder is questioned and so on - so the CoCh can just close down its "business" and join the Evangelical one. The same for the Catholics, "traditional" Protestants ... 1 star only for the little historical part.

Where are the scholarly work on CoCh???

PS. Carol Hansen's book is much more detailed, it includes testimonies from former CoCh-adherents, a closer look at Joseph, bible, his revelations and a bit more about history. She also counter-argue the "traditional" CoCh, not the liberal one.