If you object to the teaching of Mormon leaders that God the Father had physical sex with Mary, then BYU professors Daniel C. Peterson and Stephen D. Ricks say you have “a Neoplatonic and gnosticizing disdain for the material cosmos, a discomfort with the body and with sexuality.”
Get ready for a roller coaster ride.
Daniel C. Peterson and Stephen D. Ricks object to accusations that Mormonism is not Christian for denying the virgin birth. They dismiss it as “scattered nineteenth-century speculations,” forgetting Mormonism’s twentieth-century “speculations.” They say it’s unfair to “[hold] Mormons to statements that they and their own leaders have never deemed authoritative or binding,” yet overlook the fact that Mormons look up to their leaders as prophets and apostles, not as mere pastors and teachers. But in case you thought they were repudiating their own leaders’ “speculations” that God had sex with Mary, they go on to claim that “the New Testament is not specific about the mechanism of Jesus’ conception.” So our problem with these “speculations” is unfounded. And apparently the Protestant denunciation of the idea that God had physical sex with Mary is just “a Neoplatonic and gnosticizing disdain for the material cosmos, a discomfort with the body and with sexuality.” And besides, they argue, “While certain early Mormon leaders may occasionally have reinterpreted the concept of ‘virgin birth,’ they never for a moment suggested that Jesus was begotten by a mortal man, nor that his father was any other personage than God.” Oh! That makes me feel better. It’s not another mortal man who may or may not have had sex with Mary. It was the immortal man who had already graduated from his past mortality. In any case, they tell us that “history is replete with such groups as the ancient Ebionites and the modern Unitarians, to whom both scholarly and common usage refer as Christian, who nonetheless reject the Virgin Birth and deny the divinity of Christ. How can those groups be described as Christian, and the Mormons not?”
After reading this, can you at least see a little why people feel inclined to call Mormonism a theological cult?
