March 5, 2005

The Maze of Mormonism

Walter Martin. Vision House: 1978.

Although I find the Mormon religion quite fascinating as a curiosity, I am by no means a Latter-day Saint apologist. However, Dr. Martin's attack on Mormonism and the LDS church is illogical in many places, overly biased throughout (a little bias is okay, if not healthy, but Martin goes overboard), and just plain dull in several chapters. With the wealth of weird, contradictory, secret, can-be-made-to-seem-Satanic beliefs, theology and history of the LDS church, one would hope that a much better book could be written.

An ex-Mormon himself, Martin is too close to the issue to write a very powerful book: he gets lost in little details about history, rather than exploring either the significance of the history or the big theological issues and their implications. His insistence to rely upon the Bible as a foundation from which to attack is the wrong stand to take, since Mormons accept it only as far as it has been "translated correctly." The LDS church makes no claim to believe the Bible is 100% accurate, so why bother? Martin should step out of his new Christian shoes and jump into the Mormon framework to expose its weaknesses.

One of the appendices is quite interesting, though.