When Christianity focuses on theology, then trouble is in the offing, unless there is already great faith, humility, inner discipline and love of God within which theological exploration may occur.

But even then, the corruptions of the world, the limits of knowledge and the feebleness of reason will tend to lead us astray.
”

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-significance-or-non-significance-of.html

The Way that can be said is not the true Way.

I think its unlikely he’s going to explode on Mormons as long as we keep marrying and having kids and being disliked by the PC crowd. He has, unfortunately, elaborated some pretty sterling defenses that allow him to be as sympathetic as he is.

It’s curious, though, that I am in a way relearning the glories of Mormon doctrine from two righteous gentiles, Bruce Charlton and Stephen Webb.

This particularly jumped out at me:

And the thing which induces people to know yet to reject the offer is pride; an insistence upon imposing one’s own, personal, system of evaluation upon reality.

It is not that such people actively want Hell as such, but that they deliberately reject Heaven – because Heaven entails chosen subordination of oneself to God, to Reality, to objective Truth.

It is in this sense that Hell is chosen.

This is part of an essay which argues for what is essentially the Mormon understanding of the sin against the Holy Ghost, stripped of some of its legalisms.*

And what this excerpt seems to say is that refusal to subordinate oneself to God is equivalent to refusal to subordinate oneself to reality. It’s a strikingly different picture from the God-as-Oriental-tyrant picture touted by the more militant atheists I know.

My fear is that Charton, having come to appreciate the appeal of Mormonism, is going to start working on a really devastating rebuttal of the “Yes, but…” variety. Of course, he may fail, and draw the obvious conclusion; but I am not an optimist. After all, if he were to abandon his creedal Christian orthodoxy, what would become of him?

*Not that the legalisms are untrue or unimportant. Just that they can be the trees that obscure the forest.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-scientists-idea-of-truth.html