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The Doors of Faith
What is it that the restored Church of Jesus Christ offers to the world that no other church can―and how might recognizing those contributions help us stay strong in our faith? The poet Thomas Traherne “No man . . . that clearly seeth the beauty of God’s face, . . . can, when he sees it clearly, willingly and wittingly forsake it.” In The Doors of Faith , Terryl Givens teaches that the surest route to a meaningful and enduring faith is a “witting” understanding of Jesus Christ and His gospel. Givens bears a strong personal witness of many unique aspects of the restored gospel, demonstrating that the Restoration provides us with the most morally compelling, intellectually satisfying, and aesthetically appealing account of the universe and each person’s place within it. He shows that such knowledge is a powerful catalyst to a more profound appreciation of Jesus Christ’s love, grace, and Atonement.
176 pages, Paperback
Published November 29, 2021
37 people are currently reading
237 people want to read
About the author
Terryl L. Givens
39 books211 followersTerryl L. Givens was born in upstate New York, raised in the American southwest, and did his graduate work in Intellectual History (Cornell) and Comparative Literature (Ph.D. UNC Chapel Hill, 1988), working with Greek, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and English languages and literatures. As Professor of Literature and Religion, and the James A. Bostwick Professor of English at the University of Richmond, he teaches courses in Romanticism, nineteenth-century cultural studies, and the Bible and Literature. He has published in literary theory, British and European Romanticism, Mormon studies, and intellectual history.
Dr. Givens has authored several books, including The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (Oxford 1997); By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford 2003); People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (Oxford 2007); The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2009); and When Souls had Wings: Pre-Mortal Life in Western Thought (2010). Current projects include a biography of Parley P. Pratt (with Matt Grow, to be published by Oxford in 2011), a sourcebook of Mormonism in America (with Reid Neilson, to be published by Columbia in 2011), an Oxford Handbook to Mormonism (with Phil Barlow), and a two volume history of Mormon theology. He lives in Montpelier, Virginia.
Dr. Givens has authored several books, including The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (Oxford 1997); By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford 2003); People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (Oxford 2007); The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2009); and When Souls had Wings: Pre-Mortal Life in Western Thought (2010). Current projects include a biography of Parley P. Pratt (with Matt Grow, to be published by Oxford in 2011), a sourcebook of Mormonism in America (with Reid Neilson, to be published by Columbia in 2011), an Oxford Handbook to Mormonism (with Phil Barlow), and a two volume history of Mormon theology. He lives in Montpelier, Virginia.
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December 27, 2021
“No man . . . that clearly seeth the beauty of God’s face, . . . can, when he sees it clearly, willingly and wittingly forsake it.” –Thomas Traherne
I am so grateful for the Givens, their scholarship, intellect, perspective, and heart. This book by Terryl on faith and restoration theology is no exception, and is a beautiful addition to his previous work. I don’t even know how to share my favorite quotes and notes because of the excessive amounts of underlining and marking I did…so much goodness, truth, beauty, reason, simplicity, and hope. I finished feeling enlightened, inspired, and have much to ponder. I think anyone who reads this with an open heart will be changed for the better. Givens has the elevated thoughts that I aspire to. Until then, I will latch onto all the insights and inspiration he will share with me.
Notes and Quotes:
Coming soon
I am so grateful for the Givens, their scholarship, intellect, perspective, and heart. This book by Terryl on faith and restoration theology is no exception, and is a beautiful addition to his previous work. I don’t even know how to share my favorite quotes and notes because of the excessive amounts of underlining and marking I did…so much goodness, truth, beauty, reason, simplicity, and hope. I finished feeling enlightened, inspired, and have much to ponder. I think anyone who reads this with an open heart will be changed for the better. Givens has the elevated thoughts that I aspire to. Until then, I will latch onto all the insights and inspiration he will share with me.
Notes and Quotes:
Coming soon
February 17, 2022
I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of Terryl Givens' Doors of Faith in the mail the other week. I had been getting a book here and there from the A Brief Theological Introduction series on the Book of Mormon, but I assumed I had been removed from the list. Good to know I haven't been kicked off yet!
I met Terryl Givens once. I didn't get to talk to him, but he was a keynote speaker at the one Northstar conference I attended (not really my thing now, but it was a help during a chapter of my life). I found it an interesting choice of guest speaker given the context-- all of us sad gays-- but Givens' address was masterful. His talk centered around adjust our focus in the Church and Christianity in general around sinfulness to woundedness. It wasn't an entirely new idea for me-- my mission had centered Alma 7:11-13 that says Christ came to take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people. But for me it still seemed like a "yes, and" kind of statement, while Givens was radically recentering Christ's mission around our wounds rather than our sins. I remember him saying something along the lines of, this generation doesn't respond to messages of hellfire and damnation and instead are yearning for a message of healing.
I went through an extended Givens obsession where I tried to read everything Givens had released in print. I read The Good Who Weeps, The Christ Who Heals, The Crucible of Doubt, Wrestling with the Angel, and Feeding the Flock. While the books cover a lot of ground, I would distill Givens' work down to five main ideas:
God feels for us and this is how his Atonement works.
We are learning to become like God, and mortality is a part of that process e.g. the doctrine of theosis
The three kingdoms of glory is not only approaching a doctrine of universal salvation, it is a doctrine of universal salvation; God will never give up on our ability to progress
Joseph Smith was an eclectic borrower and theological experimenter. His method of revelation wasn't downloaded directly from heaven.
The Church doesn't have a monopoly on truth. You can find Restoration truths in early church fathers, medieval mystics, poets and philosophers. These don't compete with the Restoration, but instead bear witness to it.
That last point in particular is threaded through every page of Givens' work. He quotes widely from Julian of Norwich to David Hume, from Emanuel Swedenborg to Dorothy Sayers. I read Terryl Givens not only for his own ideas but for his bibliography. I ended up going down a Nikolai Berdyaev rabbit hole a few years ago, just as one example. Givens kind of popped on the lid open on a world of beautiful Christian and religious ideas that I had never encountered before. It helped spark my own search for the good and the true that I now knew wasn't only contained in my own tradition.
Terryl's vision of the Church is not what the Church looks like now:
I worship a Christ who wants peers, not subjects. Friends, not servants. He comes as our healer, not our judge.
At its worst, our culture can be anti-intellectual, judgmental, authoritarian and shallow. But I love it for what is best in it: the total commitment it invites, its optimistic assessment of human potential, and the most generous God in the religious universe, one who is willing to shepherd every human soul without exception to his own exalted status as a holy being living in holy relationships.
His is a very progressive and open-minded church that engages with the world, not one that holds itself above the world grasping its capital-T Truth. He emphasizes doctrines that are truly a part of our heritage, but are no longer emphasized and oftentimes forgotten our outright countered e.g. the idea that we can progress through kingdoms. How can we aspire to this if most do not share this vision?
On the other hand, I think Givens judges those who leave the Church too harshly. He allows himself to see the flaws of the Church, but he also doesn't seem to be able to fully sympathize with those who leave. But then, this is fundamentally a work of apologetics. In the early chapters of his book, he describes members who leave as not being "witting" enough to stay in the Church:
In the Christian world and among our fellow Latter-Day Saints, many are choosing, in John's words, to "[walk] no more with [us]." The numbers are heartbreaking. Many and varied are the causes, and all are to be lamented. I am going to propose, as one explanation for what is happening among our own community, the words of the poet Thomas Traherne: "No man... that clearly seeth the beauty of God's face... can when he sees it clearly, willingly, and wittingly forsake it."
If that is true-- yet everywhere we turn, men and women are "willingly forsaking the beauty of God's face"-- then perhaps the choices are not being made "wittingly." Perhaps too many of us never came to fully know and see what Traherne and Gregory-- knew and saw and therefore loved.
I don't think this is the case. I think many choose to leave because they too like Givens do find that God is a loving God, and yet don't see it in the institutional church they are a part of. They can't reconcile the two. People aren't leaving because they don't love God or haven't come to know him; they are leaving because they have, and it is not the God they were taught to know.
In sum, I don't feel like Doors of Faith doesn't cover a lot of new ground, but I don't think the book is meant to do that. It does have a good overview of the ideas that Terryl has developed throughout his works, a body of ideas that paints a picture of what it could mean to be a Latter-Day Saint.
December 16, 2021
Brilliant and beautiful and deeply thought provoking. I will be coming back to this again.
April 28, 2022
This very accessible book is based on a series of four lectures at BYU given by Brother Givens. I am adding this to my modern canon of "must reads" for latter-day saints in the 21st century. A lot of what Professor Givens has been lecturing and writing about over the last dozen years or so has moved LDS culture and faith forward in very positive ways, a little bit at a time. In our time, almost all churches are shrinking, hemorrhaging members as more and more people decide that institutional religion doesn't do much for them, or it doesn't accord with what they see to be true, or as dogmatic followers of religion insist on orthodoxy and dogma at any cost.
Among latter-day saints, this last part should not be much of a problem, but it has unfortunately become so. Our tradition is one of great exploration of ideas and possibilities, which rejected the dogmatic and stuffy creeds of the past in favor of an expansive view of God and of salvation and of a future for the whole of humanity. Even after the great restoration teachings on the "upward fall" of humankind in Eden, and on an extremely expansionist view of salvation, sadly, many people have gotten bogged down in false beliefs and false traditions.
Particularly, simplified, one-dimensional "Mormon" culture has too often dominated the conversation, and has overtaken the rich theological possibilities to be explored by faithful individuals. But as Givens quotes in this book, "The great religious scholar Krister Stendahl once said we should judge any religion by its best, not its worst. At its worst, our culture can be anti-intellectual, judgmental, authoritarian, and shallow. But I love it for what is best in it: the total commitment it invites, its optimistic assessment of human potential, and the most generous God in the religious universe, one who is willing to shepherd every human soul without exception to his own exalted status as a holy being living in holy relationships. I am grateful for the Restoration's shattering of the snow globe of self-concern and of a world narrowly demarcated by birth and death. I know there are 'more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy.'"
Some of the themes in here will be familiar to anyone who's followed Givens' works the last few years, but I find they are presented here in a handy and compact format that ties them together in a sort of "Advanced Discipleship" primer. Givens' explores a worldview in which faithful latter-day saints return to the "high adventurism" of fervent religious belief enhanced by intellectual curiosity, which characterized the restoration prior to the emergence of a reactionary segment within our culture in the middle of the last century (coincident with reactionary sentiments in the greater American culture). Givens urges us past the basic "box-ticking" observance of our religion into willing and witting discipleship, choosing to become "little Christs" who bless and heal the world around us rather than "little robots" good at only preprogrammed checklists.
He also goes into much discussion of how through Christ we overcome our awful woundedness, and how we can help others to overcome this separation from God as well. He talks about understanding sin as being more a separation from God than anything else, and how rather than damning us, God allows our sins to educate us: we don't go to hell because of our sins, per se, but the natural consequences of our sins create a hell in which we trap ourselves. Conversely, through the natural consequences of love and following Christ, we create our own heaven, and our own heavenly relationships that carry with us through eternity.
Through the four lectures, as well as the introduction and epilogue, Givens provides inspiring thoughts to equip latter-day saints to become more committed disciples, eager to bless the world and to share the gospel message, which is the superabundant love of God.
5 of 5 stars, easily. Read this. (I read each lecture twice through over this period.)
Among latter-day saints, this last part should not be much of a problem, but it has unfortunately become so. Our tradition is one of great exploration of ideas and possibilities, which rejected the dogmatic and stuffy creeds of the past in favor of an expansive view of God and of salvation and of a future for the whole of humanity. Even after the great restoration teachings on the "upward fall" of humankind in Eden, and on an extremely expansionist view of salvation, sadly, many people have gotten bogged down in false beliefs and false traditions.
Particularly, simplified, one-dimensional "Mormon" culture has too often dominated the conversation, and has overtaken the rich theological possibilities to be explored by faithful individuals. But as Givens quotes in this book, "The great religious scholar Krister Stendahl once said we should judge any religion by its best, not its worst. At its worst, our culture can be anti-intellectual, judgmental, authoritarian, and shallow. But I love it for what is best in it: the total commitment it invites, its optimistic assessment of human potential, and the most generous God in the religious universe, one who is willing to shepherd every human soul without exception to his own exalted status as a holy being living in holy relationships. I am grateful for the Restoration's shattering of the snow globe of self-concern and of a world narrowly demarcated by birth and death. I know there are 'more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy.'"
Some of the themes in here will be familiar to anyone who's followed Givens' works the last few years, but I find they are presented here in a handy and compact format that ties them together in a sort of "Advanced Discipleship" primer. Givens' explores a worldview in which faithful latter-day saints return to the "high adventurism" of fervent religious belief enhanced by intellectual curiosity, which characterized the restoration prior to the emergence of a reactionary segment within our culture in the middle of the last century (coincident with reactionary sentiments in the greater American culture). Givens urges us past the basic "box-ticking" observance of our religion into willing and witting discipleship, choosing to become "little Christs" who bless and heal the world around us rather than "little robots" good at only preprogrammed checklists.
He also goes into much discussion of how through Christ we overcome our awful woundedness, and how we can help others to overcome this separation from God as well. He talks about understanding sin as being more a separation from God than anything else, and how rather than damning us, God allows our sins to educate us: we don't go to hell because of our sins, per se, but the natural consequences of our sins create a hell in which we trap ourselves. Conversely, through the natural consequences of love and following Christ, we create our own heaven, and our own heavenly relationships that carry with us through eternity.
Through the four lectures, as well as the introduction and epilogue, Givens provides inspiring thoughts to equip latter-day saints to become more committed disciples, eager to bless the world and to share the gospel message, which is the superabundant love of God.
5 of 5 stars, easily. Read this. (I read each lecture twice through over this period.)
January 13, 2022
Another home run. A lot of ideas from this complication of talks are in their other books.
January 25, 2023
Nine years ago I discovered Terryl and Fiona Givens with their book The God Who Weeps. I read it during the darkest part of my life, and I was changed. It showed me a God who is intimately involved in our lives and weeps for our sorrows and sins, and shares our joys and triumphs. The three books that have followed it: the Crucible of Doubt, the Healing Christ, and All Things New have continued in this vein.
This book, Doors of Faith is based on a series of lectures Terryl gave at Brigham Young University. Again, it opens the eyes, and hopefully the hearts, to the generousness of God and the abundant life he wants to share with us.
Don't be fooled by its short length, the pages are rich in doctrine, that often takes a while to digest. Its short 117 pages hold more depth than books three times its length.
Terryl--and Fiona, as well--is the consummate scholar, simultaneously erudite and elegant. But writing with a profound passion, presenting hope and joy. In this book, just like all the others, there are few pages that don't have something underlined, and in many cases, I underlined entire pages.
This book is a wondrous, beautiful treasure. I can't wait to re-read it.
This book, Doors of Faith is based on a series of lectures Terryl gave at Brigham Young University. Again, it opens the eyes, and hopefully the hearts, to the generousness of God and the abundant life he wants to share with us.
Don't be fooled by its short length, the pages are rich in doctrine, that often takes a while to digest. Its short 117 pages hold more depth than books three times its length.
Terryl--and Fiona, as well--is the consummate scholar, simultaneously erudite and elegant. But writing with a profound passion, presenting hope and joy. In this book, just like all the others, there are few pages that don't have something underlined, and in many cases, I underlined entire pages.
This book is a wondrous, beautiful treasure. I can't wait to re-read it.
October 10, 2022
This was a wounderful, thought provoking read. Diffently will buy a personally copy of this one. Beautiful ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
January 25, 2022
Excellent book. Every book by Terryl and/or Fiona Givens is like a college AP class. I feel like I need to sit down with paper and pen and be ready to take notes - notes that I want painted and framed and hung throughout my house so that I can read and re-read them. They are profound and cause my mind to dig deep into what I believe, into that meanings of original words mean, into the context of settings, culture, people, language, etc., and so much more.
This book is no different.
The very beginning of the books states, in the Forward:
"This most recent offering [this book] is an invitation to find reasons to hope, to make the willing and witting choice to believe, and to contribute to the fellowship of the fragile finding their way home." - and I found that message throughout the book.
Givens is most definitely a scholar, on all levels. It is hard to argue against anything he writes, for his knowledge database is profound, he is articulate and precise in what he shares. If anything, one might (and that's a good size 'might') argue that he is "too" open-minded. But I have found in his writings that while yes, he tries to see and expose things from all angles, that he is anchored in the gospel of Jesus Christ and sticks to that no matter what comes.
In this book Givens shares what it is that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers the world that no other church does and how understanding and seeing these can help one stay strong in their faith as well as The Church. He exposes original Christianity and how it more closely aligns with the teaching of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - as well as how modern churches have begun "coming around" to these ideas more and more during the 21st century. The most sure and secure route to a profound, lasting, and meaningful faith in Christ is a "witting" understanding of Christ and His gospel. This books exposes the how and why and what of all that.
Givens provides a definitive argument in favor of restoration doctrine and, as The Neal A Maxwell Institute states: "provides us with the most morally compelling, intellectually satisfying, and aesthetically appealing account of the universe and each person’s place within it. He shows that such knowledge is a powerful catalyst to a more profound appreciation of Jesus Christ’s love, grace, and Atonement."
I particularly enjoyed Givens' detailed description of the facts that took place in the Garden of Eden, their meaning, their purpose, their blessing and necessity! An original Christianity view of the Garden, Adam and Eve. Simply marvelous and utterly crucial to our understanding of God, Jesus Christ, who They are and what Their and our purpose is!
Some favorite quotes:
"A growing chorus of philosophers and cosmologists, including a substantial number of atheists, are finding the universe at both the macro and micro scale too transcendently magnificent and mysterious for reductive and materialistic approaches. To take one example of the latter, Thomas Nagel comments that, 'The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it was something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness, and the physical science, whatever it may have to say about the original of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness. That shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for the world.'"
"“Second proposition - We are moral agents, and hence belief is a choice, but belief, like life, is difficult by design. There has been no more valuable aid to a diagnosis of the human condition than the story of Eden as clarified in Restoration scripture. In this, the most momentous narrative reconstruction in Christian thought, we encounter two remarkable texts that reveal the poignant truth about our predicament; the most valuable of insights into the pained and wounded nature of our lives here. Eve and Adam discover that the primeval conflict at the heart of our existence as moral agents, is we find ourselves in a universe where we are not primarily embroiled in a titanic struggle between good and evil. We find ourselves in a perpetual, more immersive, more quotidian confrontation with competing, often irreconcilable ‘goods’. Centuries of preachers and theologians trace the story of our race to a simplistic dichotomy- obey or disobey, God or the devil, submission or rebellion. Eve and Adam, having chosen wrongly were now vessels of sin looking for redemption. Only in recent generations has the doctrine of original sin lost its primacy as the cornerstone of Christian self-understanding. Joseph [Smith] revealed an alternative paradigm in 2 Nephi and the Book of Moses alike, an utterly new version of the story in which Eve’s choice launches this educative ascent toward godliness that we call mortality. Here in the narrative of Eden we find two terribly compelling options: Yes, obedience and safety and security in God’s presence are presented as one of the choices. But the restoration narratives are more sympathetic to Eve’s perception of the alternative, the beauty of the fruit, its goodness as food, its desirability to make one wise. Have we perhaps missed this convergence in her mind of the sacred triad of the good, the beautiful, and the true, as acting upon her with a legitimate appeal fully equal to the alternative? In this, the foundational story of human life in a new plane of existence the fundamental position in which we find ourselves, is that effacing, front and center, not a blatant choice between good and evil, but a wrenching decision to be made between competing sets of good. “The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel believed that this scenario replicated in myriad artistic narratives, expressed the inescapably tragic nature of the Universe. There are very few simple choices. No blueprint gives us easy answers. Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong, but between competing demands on our time, on our resources, our love and our loyalty. We inhabit a perpetual ground of tension, that is central to God’s purposes for us. We must absorb the lesson of Eden, or our lives will be lived in perpetual dismay."
And those quotes are just the first half of Chapter 1!!!
This book is no different.
The very beginning of the books states, in the Forward:
"This most recent offering [this book] is an invitation to find reasons to hope, to make the willing and witting choice to believe, and to contribute to the fellowship of the fragile finding their way home." - and I found that message throughout the book.
Givens is most definitely a scholar, on all levels. It is hard to argue against anything he writes, for his knowledge database is profound, he is articulate and precise in what he shares. If anything, one might (and that's a good size 'might') argue that he is "too" open-minded. But I have found in his writings that while yes, he tries to see and expose things from all angles, that he is anchored in the gospel of Jesus Christ and sticks to that no matter what comes.
In this book Givens shares what it is that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers the world that no other church does and how understanding and seeing these can help one stay strong in their faith as well as The Church. He exposes original Christianity and how it more closely aligns with the teaching of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - as well as how modern churches have begun "coming around" to these ideas more and more during the 21st century. The most sure and secure route to a profound, lasting, and meaningful faith in Christ is a "witting" understanding of Christ and His gospel. This books exposes the how and why and what of all that.
Givens provides a definitive argument in favor of restoration doctrine and, as The Neal A Maxwell Institute states: "provides us with the most morally compelling, intellectually satisfying, and aesthetically appealing account of the universe and each person’s place within it. He shows that such knowledge is a powerful catalyst to a more profound appreciation of Jesus Christ’s love, grace, and Atonement."
I particularly enjoyed Givens' detailed description of the facts that took place in the Garden of Eden, their meaning, their purpose, their blessing and necessity! An original Christianity view of the Garden, Adam and Eve. Simply marvelous and utterly crucial to our understanding of God, Jesus Christ, who They are and what Their and our purpose is!
Some favorite quotes:
"A growing chorus of philosophers and cosmologists, including a substantial number of atheists, are finding the universe at both the macro and micro scale too transcendently magnificent and mysterious for reductive and materialistic approaches. To take one example of the latter, Thomas Nagel comments that, 'The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it was something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness, and the physical science, whatever it may have to say about the original of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness. That shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for the world.'"
"“Second proposition - We are moral agents, and hence belief is a choice, but belief, like life, is difficult by design. There has been no more valuable aid to a diagnosis of the human condition than the story of Eden as clarified in Restoration scripture. In this, the most momentous narrative reconstruction in Christian thought, we encounter two remarkable texts that reveal the poignant truth about our predicament; the most valuable of insights into the pained and wounded nature of our lives here. Eve and Adam discover that the primeval conflict at the heart of our existence as moral agents, is we find ourselves in a universe where we are not primarily embroiled in a titanic struggle between good and evil. We find ourselves in a perpetual, more immersive, more quotidian confrontation with competing, often irreconcilable ‘goods’. Centuries of preachers and theologians trace the story of our race to a simplistic dichotomy- obey or disobey, God or the devil, submission or rebellion. Eve and Adam, having chosen wrongly were now vessels of sin looking for redemption. Only in recent generations has the doctrine of original sin lost its primacy as the cornerstone of Christian self-understanding. Joseph [Smith] revealed an alternative paradigm in 2 Nephi and the Book of Moses alike, an utterly new version of the story in which Eve’s choice launches this educative ascent toward godliness that we call mortality. Here in the narrative of Eden we find two terribly compelling options: Yes, obedience and safety and security in God’s presence are presented as one of the choices. But the restoration narratives are more sympathetic to Eve’s perception of the alternative, the beauty of the fruit, its goodness as food, its desirability to make one wise. Have we perhaps missed this convergence in her mind of the sacred triad of the good, the beautiful, and the true, as acting upon her with a legitimate appeal fully equal to the alternative? In this, the foundational story of human life in a new plane of existence the fundamental position in which we find ourselves, is that effacing, front and center, not a blatant choice between good and evil, but a wrenching decision to be made between competing sets of good. “The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel believed that this scenario replicated in myriad artistic narratives, expressed the inescapably tragic nature of the Universe. There are very few simple choices. No blueprint gives us easy answers. Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong, but between competing demands on our time, on our resources, our love and our loyalty. We inhabit a perpetual ground of tension, that is central to God’s purposes for us. We must absorb the lesson of Eden, or our lives will be lived in perpetual dismay."
And those quotes are just the first half of Chapter 1!!!
October 7, 2022
Another magnificent theological expedition with Terryl Givens! Not sure if I am more impressed by how widely read he is or by his resulting thoughts, but he definitely gets me thinking, and softening my heart.
"If we embrace the gospel willingly as well as wittingly, we can perceive the full beauty of God's face and will never forsake him."
"Our heavenly Father is more liberal in His views, and boundless in His mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive." -- Joseph Smith
"We must trust that our divine Parents really can and really will bring each one of us home. And we need the confidence that this institution, this Church of Jesus Christ, is the optimal mechanism fo assisting us in that process."
"Living lives of commitment and exertion and teachability."
"Develop a voracious appetite for the feast already laid before you."
"If we embrace the gospel willingly as well as wittingly, we can perceive the full beauty of God's face and will never forsake him."
"Our heavenly Father is more liberal in His views, and boundless in His mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive." -- Joseph Smith
"We must trust that our divine Parents really can and really will bring each one of us home. And we need the confidence that this institution, this Church of Jesus Christ, is the optimal mechanism fo assisting us in that process."
"Living lives of commitment and exertion and teachability."
"Develop a voracious appetite for the feast already laid before you."
January 16, 2022
The author has a way of writing that touched me. Although a little more intellectual than I would normally read, I loved how he approached the subject of faith.
June 4, 2022
Such a thought-provoking and eloquently written book about faith and reason as a part of “willing and witting discipleship”. Terryl Givens (and his wife, Fiona, who often cowrites with him) are easily my favorite LDS scholars and I wish more members of my church would read their work.
May 11, 2022
There are some good thoughts here about the importance and power of faith in Jesus Christ. It’s full of quotes and thoughts from other philosophers and writers as well, but also reminds us that we need to experience the power of faith by living in accordance with our faith to understand more. I really like the reminder that we need to clearly see (and experience) the beauty of God. When we truly see Him and recognize His hand in our lives we won’t forsake Him or our faith.
Here are some good quotes:
“It is the knowledge of the Master and his Father that opens the doors of eternal life (John 17:3, p. XV).”
“Life is an upper-division course in gradual sanctification (p. XV).”
“Rare is the individual who awakes in the morning, finds his or her reservoirs of emotional, physical, and spiritual waters brimming (p. 2).”
“Faith liberates us from the angst of our own preoccupations and frees us to listen, to fully attend, to clearly see the other (p. 2).”
“None of us has yet reached that perfect day when we see as we are seen. That is why the nurturing of faith is an incremental task that beckons to us all (p. 2).”
“The fragility of our predicament is necessary to foster flourishing. Only when incomplete souls encounter a world of unpredictable novelty are we force to engage that world with creativity and risk (p. 8).”
“The account the Restoration gives, the stories it tells, the world before and after this one that it describes, and the agencies it reveals all pertain to a larger, more complete plane of existence (p. 9).”
“Perhaps you find yourself a disciple by inheritance or by inertia. Or maybe spiritual promptings have brought you to this place (p. 11).”
“‘No man that clearly seeth the beauty of God’s face can when he sees it clearly, willingly, and wittingly forsake it (Thomas Traherne, p. 12).’”
“We may hold the truth but hold it with insufficient understanding, appreciation, or intimacy; we may give it our assent without giving it our hearts; or we may know the correct facts about Christ and his Restoration without having experienced the Christ and his gospel (p. 13).”
“When the angel asked Nephi if he ‘knew’ the condescension of God, he was clearly referring to more than an intellectual apprehension. He wanted to know if Nephi had been remade by the experience of Christ’s absolute compassion, the stunning realization of Christ’s shared suffering in our pain (p. 14).”
“Ultimately… Christ’s purpose was to effect an atonement—that is, a reconciliation, a union—of humans and God (p. 14).”
“The rationality of faith is nowhere more evident than its lived efficacy (p. 14).”
“Anything short of a fervent love for Jesus Christ, any belief structure that is not predicated on a profound and personal response to him—a living, trusting response—is sure to fail us in the end (p. 15).”
“We come to a greater love of the Lord as we become more aware, more understanding, more reflective, and more informed about just what the Restoration of his gospel entails (p. 17).”
“The power and potency of our faith is that it collapses sacred distances, fills the empty tomb with concrete artifacts, materializes angels, and furnishes heaven with familiar furniture (p. 18).”
“This willful, deliberate act of faith becomes the portal into an ampler reality, not a profession of tenuous conjectures… In the lived experience of this new truth, oneself is realigned (p. 19).”
“There is enormous distance between assent to propositional claims and a truth fully lived when we open the doors of faith (p. 20).”
“Mere skepticism in the face of those claims that give definition and meaning to our existence is not a decision—it is a flight from the most urgent questions we can face (p. 20).”
“It is helpful in the life of discipleship to being with a healthy dose of epistemological humility… the rainbow we perceive on a sunny, rainy day is only ‘.0035 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum (p. 21).’”
“‘We navigate the world by our common-sense perception, but that perception has blinded us to reality again and again. We have mistaken our sensoria intuitions for facts about the universe (p. 21).’”
“‘To see the world clearly… we must first become aware of the veil; we must recognize our blind spots (Ziya Tong, p. 22).’”
“The gospel opens our faculties—intellectual, moral, and sensory—to the richness of a boundless universe. There are multiple ways of knowing, and we need to honor them all (p. 22).”
“An attitude of preoccupation with ourselves, with our own desires and interests, precludes our access to the true meaning of the other (p. 24).’”
“Love is the only position or emotional disposition from which we become fully aware of the already present reality of the other person as more than a mere object among other objects in a crowded universe (p. 24).”
“A growing chorus of philosophers and cosmologists… are finding the universe at both the macro and micro scale too transcendently magnificent and mysterious for reductive and materialistic approaches (p. 26).”
“Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong but between competing demands on our time, our resources, our love, and our loyalty. We inhabit a perpetual ground of tension, and that is central to God’s purposes for us (p. 30).”
“One of the most glorious promises of the gospel is ‘that every soul who forsake the his sins and cometh unto me, and calleth on my name, and obeyeth my voice, and keep the my commandments, shall see my face and know that I am.’ Every soul (p. 32).”
“To his disciples in both hemispheres, Jesus explicitly stated that they are ‘more blessed’ who believe as an act of faith than those driven to certainty by the evidence (p. 32).”
“Faith, the choice to believe, is in the final analysis a stance that is positively fraught with moral significance and confronted with what seem equally compelling alternatives (p. 33).”
“A gesture of faith is always freighted with risk and is therefore a witness to the value we place on the object of that faith. Such risk is an act of vulnerability. It is therefore an offering of self that we place on the altar in quest of a possibility that is beautiful enough to deserve the sacrifice (p. 33).”
“Awaken to the beauty of a faith freely ventured, freely given. And… with time, you will come to see the beauty of God’s face… and never willingly nor wittingly forsake him (p. 35).”
“She ‘felt a strong desire to be alone with God’ and withdrew to her chamber. In the moments that followed, ‘the presence of God was so near, and so real, that I seemed scarcely conscious of any thing else (p. 42).’”
“We are never so defenseless… as when we love. God chooses to love us (p. 43).”
“It is not their wickedness but their ‘misery,’ not their disobedience but their ‘suffering’ that elicits the God of heaven’s tears (p. 45).”
“One beauty of the Restoration is that it… canonized so many of those plain and precious truths that… have been intuited by multitudes of seekers open to the divine light (p. 47).”
“One must ‘look beyond the region of the temporal in order to find the original source of our freedom (Julius Muller, p. 53).’”
“We are not helpless victims of fate, cast ignominiously upon he shores of a hostile world. We participated in those decisions that led to this very earth’s creation (p. 56).”
“How do we come to know Christ? How do we recognize him—his presence in the world (p. 59)?”
“We only know Christ—really know him—to the extent that we know what his love for us cost him (p. 60).”
“The Fall was no fall but ascent (p. 62).”
“Life is an upper division course in gradual sanctification, not a purgatory of inherited sin (p. 62).”
“The difference between ordinary people and saints is not that saints fulfill the plain duties which ordinary men neglect. The things saints do have not usually occurred to ordinary people at all… This process is like the work of the artist. It needs imagination and spontaneity. It is not a choice between presented alternatives but the creation of something new (p. 66).”
“‘Every man commences to acquire the germ of the independence that is enjoyed in the heavens (p. 67).’”
“A testimony… must be continually rebuilt with every new morning (p. 67).”
“‘Since God has shown to me a ray of his goodness, I cannot doubt him on the ground that someone has made up some new logical puzzles about him (p. 68).’”
“‘Why put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear (p. 69)?’”
“We should welcome challenges to our faith as an opportunity to reshape our understanding of God, his nature, and his activity in the universe (p. 70).”
“For those open to the divine voice, God speaks through manifold means, which often surprise and confound us. Maybe he speaks in the voice of another or in the still small voice only you may hear (p. 70).”
“We as Saints have perhaps diminished God’s majesty by our glib familiarity and thought to tame and domesticate the blinding light into a pleasant, nonthreatening nightlight (p. 71).”
“We want our religious narratives to be simple and straightforward. But God’s workings invariably disappoint such expectations (p. 72).”
“‘You need to wonder more and assume less. You need to break through all the familiar ways of seeing and hearing him and being again (p. 76).’”
“‘Divine truth is better understood as it unfolds itself in the purity of men’s hearts and lives (p. 76).’”
“‘Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, takes off the relish of spiritual things… that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself (p. 77).’”
“‘We must become holy, not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us (Mother Teresa, p. 77).’”
“Heaven is no less and no more than sanctified individuals thriving in sanctified relationality. Someone’s refusal to forgive me impedes our relationship and—in that way—constrains my heaven as well as hers (p. 78).”
“What does it mean to see Jesus Christ as our Healer? How do we find access to His healing power (p. 79)?”
“Perhaps the first sin… is only in our refusal to fully acknowledge, to own, to concede our inevitable error, and embrace the task of change (p. 81).”
“‘We glory in God by our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have received now reconciling (p. 82).’”
“Atonement does not describe something Christ did but something he hopes to achieve (p. 82).”
“We have to do our part to bring the process to fruition by accepting, embracing, and redirecting our desires and affections and by performing the work of healing among all with whom we have influence (p. 83).”
“Divine forgiveness is a gesture of holy healing conducive of at-one-ment (p. 84).”
“When we find ourselves perplexed, troubled, or wounded—and most of all doubtful—it is perhaps hope that we most fervently desire (p. 88).”
“If faith is the trusting leap into the darkness, then hope is the assurance you will be caught (p. 88).”
“If we embrace the gospel willingly as well as wittingly, we can perceive the full beauty of God’s face and will never forsake him (p. 89).”
“‘Everyone has many loves; but they are all related to his ruling love (Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 90).’”
“How do you know what your ruling love is? It may lie so deep within that even we ourselves are—for the most part—oblivious (p. 90).”
“Faith must be a choice. God wants our assent freely given (p. 91).”
“How do we find assurance, hope, confidence, and the peace that passeth understanding as we contemplate the eternal worlds (p. 93)?”
“Our God—the weeping God of Enoch, or rather, the Heavenly Parents in whose courts our spirits resided in eons past—have the desire and the capacity to bring all of their children home to an exalted place in the eternal worlds. That was the plan from the beginning. No other prospect could have made the daughters and sons of God shout for joy (p. 94).”
“‘Father, I want those you have given me to be with me (p. 95).’”
“‘The Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speakers unto his friend’ (Exodus 33:11, p. 96).”
“‘Follow my counsels. Trust in me. Keep faith with these covenants and principles. And you will become whole and complete (p. 99).’”
“If life is a school, then we must trust the schoolmaster. I think that is the motif that pervades scripture. I think the Lord is telling us to trust that he loves us beyond imagining, that he can shape our hearts and desires in such a way that our ruling love will guide us to where he is. The key is repentance… the continual reeducation of the heart (p. 99).”
“We are all apprentices, and we have good reason to trust the Master (p. 100).”
“We must trust that our divine Parents really can and really will bring each one of us home. And we need the confidence that this institution, the Church of Jesus Christ, is the optimal mechanism for assisting us in that process (p. 101).”
“I need the Church and you, its members. I need the inspiration that comes of our shared aspirations and disappointments and struggles. I need the discipline of instruction and reminding; I need the discipline of stewardship and sacrifice and service. There are no solitary saints (p. 101).”
“The vicissitudes of mortality and the frailties of human commitment tend toward chaos and disintegration (p. 101).”
“‘We can set no limits to the agency of the Redeemer; to redeem, to rescue, to discipline, is his work, and so will he continue to operate after this life (p. 108).’”
“‘Jesus had not finished his work when his body was slain, neither did he finish it after his resurrection from the dead… Not until he has redeemed and saved every son and daughter of our father Adam that have been or ever will be born upon this earth to the end of time, except the sons of perdition. That is his mission (Joseph F. Smith, p. 108).’”
“Jesus Christ is committed to shaping our hearts and shaping our love to align with his. I trust in his patience and his power to do so. That is the source of my confidence and my hope (p. 108).”
“‘For God did not send His Son to the world in order to judge the world, but in order to heal the world (p. 108).’”
“Hope is not complacency. We have to bring Christ’s work of at-one-ment to fruition by living lives of commitment and exertion and teachability (p. 110).”
“I pray you will develop a voracious appetite for the feast already laid before you. Be open to an abundance life which beckons through the doors of faith (p. 110).”
“Be open and teachable and receptive to the bounties, spiritual and material, of the here and now (p. 110).”
“Our God is a God of superabundance (p. 111).”
“The scope of God’s plan was too ambitious, too generous, too magnanimous for a people raised in a Christian tradition that had long inculcated concepts of a universal Fall, limited atonement, and a severely restricted heaven (p. 113).”
“‘What a glorious field of intelligence now lies before us, yet but partially explored. What a boundless expanse for contemplation and reflection now opens to our astonished vision. What an intellectual banquet spreads itself invitingly to our appetite, calling into lively exercise every power and faculty of the mind, and giving full scope to all the greater and ennobling passions of the soul (Parley P. Pratt, p. 114).’”
“Stepping through the doors of faith has opened my eyes and my heart to profoundly satisfying answers to the most urgent questions of my existence and to an ambitious project of Zion-building here and hereafter that I judge worthy of a life of devotion (p. 115).”
Here are some good quotes:
“It is the knowledge of the Master and his Father that opens the doors of eternal life (John 17:3, p. XV).”
“Life is an upper-division course in gradual sanctification (p. XV).”
“Rare is the individual who awakes in the morning, finds his or her reservoirs of emotional, physical, and spiritual waters brimming (p. 2).”
“Faith liberates us from the angst of our own preoccupations and frees us to listen, to fully attend, to clearly see the other (p. 2).”
“None of us has yet reached that perfect day when we see as we are seen. That is why the nurturing of faith is an incremental task that beckons to us all (p. 2).”
“The fragility of our predicament is necessary to foster flourishing. Only when incomplete souls encounter a world of unpredictable novelty are we force to engage that world with creativity and risk (p. 8).”
“The account the Restoration gives, the stories it tells, the world before and after this one that it describes, and the agencies it reveals all pertain to a larger, more complete plane of existence (p. 9).”
“Perhaps you find yourself a disciple by inheritance or by inertia. Or maybe spiritual promptings have brought you to this place (p. 11).”
“‘No man that clearly seeth the beauty of God’s face can when he sees it clearly, willingly, and wittingly forsake it (Thomas Traherne, p. 12).’”
“We may hold the truth but hold it with insufficient understanding, appreciation, or intimacy; we may give it our assent without giving it our hearts; or we may know the correct facts about Christ and his Restoration without having experienced the Christ and his gospel (p. 13).”
“When the angel asked Nephi if he ‘knew’ the condescension of God, he was clearly referring to more than an intellectual apprehension. He wanted to know if Nephi had been remade by the experience of Christ’s absolute compassion, the stunning realization of Christ’s shared suffering in our pain (p. 14).”
“Ultimately… Christ’s purpose was to effect an atonement—that is, a reconciliation, a union—of humans and God (p. 14).”
“The rationality of faith is nowhere more evident than its lived efficacy (p. 14).”
“Anything short of a fervent love for Jesus Christ, any belief structure that is not predicated on a profound and personal response to him—a living, trusting response—is sure to fail us in the end (p. 15).”
“We come to a greater love of the Lord as we become more aware, more understanding, more reflective, and more informed about just what the Restoration of his gospel entails (p. 17).”
“The power and potency of our faith is that it collapses sacred distances, fills the empty tomb with concrete artifacts, materializes angels, and furnishes heaven with familiar furniture (p. 18).”
“This willful, deliberate act of faith becomes the portal into an ampler reality, not a profession of tenuous conjectures… In the lived experience of this new truth, oneself is realigned (p. 19).”
“There is enormous distance between assent to propositional claims and a truth fully lived when we open the doors of faith (p. 20).”
“Mere skepticism in the face of those claims that give definition and meaning to our existence is not a decision—it is a flight from the most urgent questions we can face (p. 20).”
“It is helpful in the life of discipleship to being with a healthy dose of epistemological humility… the rainbow we perceive on a sunny, rainy day is only ‘.0035 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum (p. 21).’”
“‘We navigate the world by our common-sense perception, but that perception has blinded us to reality again and again. We have mistaken our sensoria intuitions for facts about the universe (p. 21).’”
“‘To see the world clearly… we must first become aware of the veil; we must recognize our blind spots (Ziya Tong, p. 22).’”
“The gospel opens our faculties—intellectual, moral, and sensory—to the richness of a boundless universe. There are multiple ways of knowing, and we need to honor them all (p. 22).”
“An attitude of preoccupation with ourselves, with our own desires and interests, precludes our access to the true meaning of the other (p. 24).’”
“Love is the only position or emotional disposition from which we become fully aware of the already present reality of the other person as more than a mere object among other objects in a crowded universe (p. 24).”
“A growing chorus of philosophers and cosmologists… are finding the universe at both the macro and micro scale too transcendently magnificent and mysterious for reductive and materialistic approaches (p. 26).”
“Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong but between competing demands on our time, our resources, our love, and our loyalty. We inhabit a perpetual ground of tension, and that is central to God’s purposes for us (p. 30).”
“One of the most glorious promises of the gospel is ‘that every soul who forsake the his sins and cometh unto me, and calleth on my name, and obeyeth my voice, and keep the my commandments, shall see my face and know that I am.’ Every soul (p. 32).”
“To his disciples in both hemispheres, Jesus explicitly stated that they are ‘more blessed’ who believe as an act of faith than those driven to certainty by the evidence (p. 32).”
“Faith, the choice to believe, is in the final analysis a stance that is positively fraught with moral significance and confronted with what seem equally compelling alternatives (p. 33).”
“A gesture of faith is always freighted with risk and is therefore a witness to the value we place on the object of that faith. Such risk is an act of vulnerability. It is therefore an offering of self that we place on the altar in quest of a possibility that is beautiful enough to deserve the sacrifice (p. 33).”
“Awaken to the beauty of a faith freely ventured, freely given. And… with time, you will come to see the beauty of God’s face… and never willingly nor wittingly forsake him (p. 35).”
“She ‘felt a strong desire to be alone with God’ and withdrew to her chamber. In the moments that followed, ‘the presence of God was so near, and so real, that I seemed scarcely conscious of any thing else (p. 42).’”
“We are never so defenseless… as when we love. God chooses to love us (p. 43).”
“It is not their wickedness but their ‘misery,’ not their disobedience but their ‘suffering’ that elicits the God of heaven’s tears (p. 45).”
“One beauty of the Restoration is that it… canonized so many of those plain and precious truths that… have been intuited by multitudes of seekers open to the divine light (p. 47).”
“One must ‘look beyond the region of the temporal in order to find the original source of our freedom (Julius Muller, p. 53).’”
“We are not helpless victims of fate, cast ignominiously upon he shores of a hostile world. We participated in those decisions that led to this very earth’s creation (p. 56).”
“How do we come to know Christ? How do we recognize him—his presence in the world (p. 59)?”
“We only know Christ—really know him—to the extent that we know what his love for us cost him (p. 60).”
“The Fall was no fall but ascent (p. 62).”
“Life is an upper division course in gradual sanctification, not a purgatory of inherited sin (p. 62).”
“The difference between ordinary people and saints is not that saints fulfill the plain duties which ordinary men neglect. The things saints do have not usually occurred to ordinary people at all… This process is like the work of the artist. It needs imagination and spontaneity. It is not a choice between presented alternatives but the creation of something new (p. 66).”
“‘Every man commences to acquire the germ of the independence that is enjoyed in the heavens (p. 67).’”
“A testimony… must be continually rebuilt with every new morning (p. 67).”
“‘Since God has shown to me a ray of his goodness, I cannot doubt him on the ground that someone has made up some new logical puzzles about him (p. 68).’”
“‘Why put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear (p. 69)?’”
“We should welcome challenges to our faith as an opportunity to reshape our understanding of God, his nature, and his activity in the universe (p. 70).”
“For those open to the divine voice, God speaks through manifold means, which often surprise and confound us. Maybe he speaks in the voice of another or in the still small voice only you may hear (p. 70).”
“We as Saints have perhaps diminished God’s majesty by our glib familiarity and thought to tame and domesticate the blinding light into a pleasant, nonthreatening nightlight (p. 71).”
“We want our religious narratives to be simple and straightforward. But God’s workings invariably disappoint such expectations (p. 72).”
“‘You need to wonder more and assume less. You need to break through all the familiar ways of seeing and hearing him and being again (p. 76).’”
“‘Divine truth is better understood as it unfolds itself in the purity of men’s hearts and lives (p. 76).’”
“‘Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, takes off the relish of spiritual things… that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself (p. 77).’”
“‘We must become holy, not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us (Mother Teresa, p. 77).’”
“Heaven is no less and no more than sanctified individuals thriving in sanctified relationality. Someone’s refusal to forgive me impedes our relationship and—in that way—constrains my heaven as well as hers (p. 78).”
“What does it mean to see Jesus Christ as our Healer? How do we find access to His healing power (p. 79)?”
“Perhaps the first sin… is only in our refusal to fully acknowledge, to own, to concede our inevitable error, and embrace the task of change (p. 81).”
“‘We glory in God by our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have received now reconciling (p. 82).’”
“Atonement does not describe something Christ did but something he hopes to achieve (p. 82).”
“We have to do our part to bring the process to fruition by accepting, embracing, and redirecting our desires and affections and by performing the work of healing among all with whom we have influence (p. 83).”
“Divine forgiveness is a gesture of holy healing conducive of at-one-ment (p. 84).”
“When we find ourselves perplexed, troubled, or wounded—and most of all doubtful—it is perhaps hope that we most fervently desire (p. 88).”
“If faith is the trusting leap into the darkness, then hope is the assurance you will be caught (p. 88).”
“If we embrace the gospel willingly as well as wittingly, we can perceive the full beauty of God’s face and will never forsake him (p. 89).”
“‘Everyone has many loves; but they are all related to his ruling love (Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 90).’”
“How do you know what your ruling love is? It may lie so deep within that even we ourselves are—for the most part—oblivious (p. 90).”
“Faith must be a choice. God wants our assent freely given (p. 91).”
“How do we find assurance, hope, confidence, and the peace that passeth understanding as we contemplate the eternal worlds (p. 93)?”
“Our God—the weeping God of Enoch, or rather, the Heavenly Parents in whose courts our spirits resided in eons past—have the desire and the capacity to bring all of their children home to an exalted place in the eternal worlds. That was the plan from the beginning. No other prospect could have made the daughters and sons of God shout for joy (p. 94).”
“‘Father, I want those you have given me to be with me (p. 95).’”
“‘The Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speakers unto his friend’ (Exodus 33:11, p. 96).”
“‘Follow my counsels. Trust in me. Keep faith with these covenants and principles. And you will become whole and complete (p. 99).’”
“If life is a school, then we must trust the schoolmaster. I think that is the motif that pervades scripture. I think the Lord is telling us to trust that he loves us beyond imagining, that he can shape our hearts and desires in such a way that our ruling love will guide us to where he is. The key is repentance… the continual reeducation of the heart (p. 99).”
“We are all apprentices, and we have good reason to trust the Master (p. 100).”
“We must trust that our divine Parents really can and really will bring each one of us home. And we need the confidence that this institution, the Church of Jesus Christ, is the optimal mechanism for assisting us in that process (p. 101).”
“I need the Church and you, its members. I need the inspiration that comes of our shared aspirations and disappointments and struggles. I need the discipline of instruction and reminding; I need the discipline of stewardship and sacrifice and service. There are no solitary saints (p. 101).”
“The vicissitudes of mortality and the frailties of human commitment tend toward chaos and disintegration (p. 101).”
“‘We can set no limits to the agency of the Redeemer; to redeem, to rescue, to discipline, is his work, and so will he continue to operate after this life (p. 108).’”
“‘Jesus had not finished his work when his body was slain, neither did he finish it after his resurrection from the dead… Not until he has redeemed and saved every son and daughter of our father Adam that have been or ever will be born upon this earth to the end of time, except the sons of perdition. That is his mission (Joseph F. Smith, p. 108).’”
“Jesus Christ is committed to shaping our hearts and shaping our love to align with his. I trust in his patience and his power to do so. That is the source of my confidence and my hope (p. 108).”
“‘For God did not send His Son to the world in order to judge the world, but in order to heal the world (p. 108).’”
“Hope is not complacency. We have to bring Christ’s work of at-one-ment to fruition by living lives of commitment and exertion and teachability (p. 110).”
“I pray you will develop a voracious appetite for the feast already laid before you. Be open to an abundance life which beckons through the doors of faith (p. 110).”
“Be open and teachable and receptive to the bounties, spiritual and material, of the here and now (p. 110).”
“Our God is a God of superabundance (p. 111).”
“The scope of God’s plan was too ambitious, too generous, too magnanimous for a people raised in a Christian tradition that had long inculcated concepts of a universal Fall, limited atonement, and a severely restricted heaven (p. 113).”
“‘What a glorious field of intelligence now lies before us, yet but partially explored. What a boundless expanse for contemplation and reflection now opens to our astonished vision. What an intellectual banquet spreads itself invitingly to our appetite, calling into lively exercise every power and faculty of the mind, and giving full scope to all the greater and ennobling passions of the soul (Parley P. Pratt, p. 114).’”
“Stepping through the doors of faith has opened my eyes and my heart to profoundly satisfying answers to the most urgent questions of my existence and to an ambitious project of Zion-building here and hereafter that I judge worthy of a life of devotion (p. 115).”
April 19, 2022
From the description I was expecting a short primer for college-age students, responding to our current faith challenges, based on a set of lectures to undergraduates. While not a bait and switch, the book is not that - at least not in a straightforward way. The writing would be difficult for most undergrads, deeply informed by (Catholic and Protestant) church history and Romantic literary references. At first I struggled to see what was new in the book as compared with Givens' earlier works, but I stuck with it and was rewarded.
The book is at once personal and theologically dense at various points - but always honest and rigorous. Don't look for a blog-style confessional, but Givens comes as close to a personal confession of faith as I have seen in his writing.
I don't want to take Terryl Givens for granted but I do sometimes- he is the premiere interpreter of Joseph Smith based restoration faith. The Doors of Faith is NOT a compilation or summary or earlier work - it stands rightly on its own as a provocative appeal and witness to restoration theology's contribution to Christian faith.
The book is at once personal and theologically dense at various points - but always honest and rigorous. Don't look for a blog-style confessional, but Givens comes as close to a personal confession of faith as I have seen in his writing.
I don't want to take Terryl Givens for granted but I do sometimes- he is the premiere interpreter of Joseph Smith based restoration faith. The Doors of Faith is NOT a compilation or summary or earlier work - it stands rightly on its own as a provocative appeal and witness to restoration theology's contribution to Christian faith.
April 12, 2022
I've quite enjoyed Dr Givens take on various aspects of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints. It's obvious that he (and his betimes co-author wife) have thought and considered deeply about church doctrine and teachings as well as the challenges of living those doctrines and teachings.
I feel most of the other books he has (they have) done were meant for a somewhat wider audience than this one. While prepared for a college (mostly undergraduate) audience, this one is quite erudite and I really had to stop and consider (and a few times look up word meanings.) The topic is, as noted in the title, Faith and some of the doors to faith - not just through this churchs eyes, but through the eyes (and writings and thoughts) of various believers from all sorts of different times and places. He freely acknowledges that what he is presenting are his thoughts/philosophy - not official church doctrine, and while some of it rubs me a bit wrong, quite the majority is (for me) wonderfully uplifting.
I feel most of the other books he has (they have) done were meant for a somewhat wider audience than this one. While prepared for a college (mostly undergraduate) audience, this one is quite erudite and I really had to stop and consider (and a few times look up word meanings.) The topic is, as noted in the title, Faith and some of the doors to faith - not just through this churchs eyes, but through the eyes (and writings and thoughts) of various believers from all sorts of different times and places. He freely acknowledges that what he is presenting are his thoughts/philosophy - not official church doctrine, and while some of it rubs me a bit wrong, quite the majority is (for me) wonderfully uplifting.
April 7, 2022
I’ve read each of the Givens’ gospel books. Some I find some educative, some make me excited, others make me frustrated by the course I see the church pursuing. The Doors of Faith I believe is the best book Terryl has written. While only 115 pages, I would say it is his magnum opus. It is a salve to a questioning, burdened soul. For those who wonder and question and feel guilt because of it, this book invites that approach and helps you feel that your faith is stronger because you question. It provides much-needed anecdotes to the idea that God will save ALL his children and that his mercy has no bounds. Beautifully written. It is must-read material.
January 7, 2022
I just didn't get into this book. The book is called The doors of Faith, but I don't really feel like it was about faith. The parts that stood out to me more were about God and other people's religions theology about God's personality. I don't know... I know that's not the whole book. I felt the book really jumped around and didn't have a solid theme. I'm sure some people read this book and are going to love it. But I, I didn't get much out of this book and felt it lacked structure. I've read a lot of spiritual books and this one just fell flat for me
February 16, 2022
Describing the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has always been a bit like trying to chase your own shadow. Lacking any kind of magisterium, like the Catholic Church, or a guiding statement of theology like the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterian churches, the LDS faith has left its theology up to a loose combination of professional educators, academics, and independent scholars, with occasional statements by general authorities. Joseph Smith himself decried creeds in general, saying that many churches
“…were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived its members the privilege of believing anything not contained therein; whereas the Latter Day Saints had no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.” [1]
This is an unusual stance for a church, like the LDS church, which maintains a strong hierarchical and authoritarian organization. While strict policies guide the administration of ordinances and rites in the church, there still exists a surprising amount of leeway for individual beliefs and interpretations, within some basic boundaries. I suspect that Terryl Givens would resist being categorized as a theologian as opposed to a religious scholar. Nor is his latest book, The Doors of Faith, a primarily theological text. Yet, looking over his body of work, including several books with his wife Fiona, an argument can be made that Givens is following in the footsteps of other “accidental” Mormon theologians such as Sterling McMurrin and Eugene England. In The Doors of Faith he writes about how to live a faithful life, based on a foundation of theological insights.
The Doors of Faith is fairly brief at 136 pages, organized into four chapters, with the first a framework around the book’s title. Titled “A Willing and Witting Discipleship,” it describes the concept of discipleship as balancing the willingness of the heart to follow the example of Christ, and the knowledgeable acceptance of the challenge based on reason. It is that combination of faith and reason that allows us to open those doors. “Only when something has been disturbed in our own mind are we open to new possibilities…” Givens writes. “Perhaps the most important doors that had to be opened were not the gates of church membership; perhaps they were the closed doors of our own perception.” [p18] It’s an intriguing idea, that a paradigm shift is required to open us to new possibilities for spiritual growth. And what doors do we avoid opening?
If we use both faith and reason in our pursuit of discipleship, then it follows that a correct knowledge of the nature of God and our relationship with him is vital. The remaining chapters describe aspects of faith and how our theology informs them. Chapter two tells us that we are eternal beings, co-eternal with our Heavenly Parents, making it easier to understand such scriptures as Moses 1:39, where we are told that it is God’s purpose to bring about our immortality and eternal life, not just for His glory. It is a concept, Givens writes, “…that may well bring us closer than any other in religious history to a literalizing of God’s role and status as a divine parent, not a sovereign.” [p47]…”We are collaborators, long time pupils working under conditions and covenants in which we actively and knowingly…participated.” [p56] This understanding of our relationship with Deity counters the capriciousness of creation ex nihilo and an immaterial and passionless God present in many other religions.
Chapter three deals with the atonement as the practice of God healing us through the sacrifice of His Son. Christ is “…our healer from woundedness, not our rescuer from depravity…We believe in a God who wants peers, not subjects, and we have confidence that they---God jointly---will bring us to where they are.” [p62]
The final chapter is about hope, but with an interesting twist. True faith is more than just hope. It is “…the commitment to be responsive and true and loyal out of love in the here and now, the present moment, with no conceptualization of a tomorrow…faith is manifest in the act, it is the gesture requiring willful effort, what Paul calls the actual work.” [p88-89] In this sense, we become partners in our sanctification and the sanctification of others through Christ-like love and service. Perhaps this vision of faith for our eternal prospects is best summed up in the words of Joseph F. Smith:
Jesus had not finished his work when his body was slain, neither did he finish it after his resurrection from the dead; although he had accomplished the purpose for which he then came to the earth, he had not fulfilled all his work. And when will he? Not until he has redeemed and saved every son and daughter of our father Adam that have been or ever will be born upon this earth to the end of time…that is his mission. [p108]
Faith, the first principle of the gospel according to the Articles of Faith, then is not a solitary act or passive hope, but the willing engagement of our hearts and minds in understanding and helping to open the doors of faith for ourselves and others. Faith without works is dead, because true faith includes the work of becoming true disciples of Christ. In The Doors of Faith Terryl Givens us the key to opening many doors, all of which lead us back to our Heavenly Parents.
[1] Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, Vintage Books, New York, 2005, p 285
“…were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived its members the privilege of believing anything not contained therein; whereas the Latter Day Saints had no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.” [1]
This is an unusual stance for a church, like the LDS church, which maintains a strong hierarchical and authoritarian organization. While strict policies guide the administration of ordinances and rites in the church, there still exists a surprising amount of leeway for individual beliefs and interpretations, within some basic boundaries. I suspect that Terryl Givens would resist being categorized as a theologian as opposed to a religious scholar. Nor is his latest book, The Doors of Faith, a primarily theological text. Yet, looking over his body of work, including several books with his wife Fiona, an argument can be made that Givens is following in the footsteps of other “accidental” Mormon theologians such as Sterling McMurrin and Eugene England. In The Doors of Faith he writes about how to live a faithful life, based on a foundation of theological insights.
The Doors of Faith is fairly brief at 136 pages, organized into four chapters, with the first a framework around the book’s title. Titled “A Willing and Witting Discipleship,” it describes the concept of discipleship as balancing the willingness of the heart to follow the example of Christ, and the knowledgeable acceptance of the challenge based on reason. It is that combination of faith and reason that allows us to open those doors. “Only when something has been disturbed in our own mind are we open to new possibilities…” Givens writes. “Perhaps the most important doors that had to be opened were not the gates of church membership; perhaps they were the closed doors of our own perception.” [p18] It’s an intriguing idea, that a paradigm shift is required to open us to new possibilities for spiritual growth. And what doors do we avoid opening?
If we use both faith and reason in our pursuit of discipleship, then it follows that a correct knowledge of the nature of God and our relationship with him is vital. The remaining chapters describe aspects of faith and how our theology informs them. Chapter two tells us that we are eternal beings, co-eternal with our Heavenly Parents, making it easier to understand such scriptures as Moses 1:39, where we are told that it is God’s purpose to bring about our immortality and eternal life, not just for His glory. It is a concept, Givens writes, “…that may well bring us closer than any other in religious history to a literalizing of God’s role and status as a divine parent, not a sovereign.” [p47]…”We are collaborators, long time pupils working under conditions and covenants in which we actively and knowingly…participated.” [p56] This understanding of our relationship with Deity counters the capriciousness of creation ex nihilo and an immaterial and passionless God present in many other religions.
Chapter three deals with the atonement as the practice of God healing us through the sacrifice of His Son. Christ is “…our healer from woundedness, not our rescuer from depravity…We believe in a God who wants peers, not subjects, and we have confidence that they---God jointly---will bring us to where they are.” [p62]
The final chapter is about hope, but with an interesting twist. True faith is more than just hope. It is “…the commitment to be responsive and true and loyal out of love in the here and now, the present moment, with no conceptualization of a tomorrow…faith is manifest in the act, it is the gesture requiring willful effort, what Paul calls the actual work.” [p88-89] In this sense, we become partners in our sanctification and the sanctification of others through Christ-like love and service. Perhaps this vision of faith for our eternal prospects is best summed up in the words of Joseph F. Smith:
Jesus had not finished his work when his body was slain, neither did he finish it after his resurrection from the dead; although he had accomplished the purpose for which he then came to the earth, he had not fulfilled all his work. And when will he? Not until he has redeemed and saved every son and daughter of our father Adam that have been or ever will be born upon this earth to the end of time…that is his mission. [p108]
Faith, the first principle of the gospel according to the Articles of Faith, then is not a solitary act or passive hope, but the willing engagement of our hearts and minds in understanding and helping to open the doors of faith for ourselves and others. Faith without works is dead, because true faith includes the work of becoming true disciples of Christ. In The Doors of Faith Terryl Givens us the key to opening many doors, all of which lead us back to our Heavenly Parents.
[1] Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, Vintage Books, New York, 2005, p 285
February 24, 2022
Exceptionally brilliant book! I listened to it on the Deseret Bookshelf app and then bought it in print so I could read it again and mark my copy. It’s thought-provoking and incredibly well written. I was uplifted, edified, motivated, and solidified in my testimony (“committed beliefs”). So good. Add this to your TBR list!
February 6, 2022
Solid book that is fairly short. I've read several of Givens' other books and this seemed to be mostly a repeat of past material. If you haven't read much of Givens books I highly recommend.
December 23, 2024
I wish I could hold on to every thought from this little book. It is packed so tightly with wisdom that I need in my life. Terryl Givens is my faith hero; he gets the struggles I have and helps open my eyes to a bigger grander conception.
Here's just a glimpse:
And this long passage I am quoting here for myself, to go back to later.
Beautiful, inspirational, words that lift my soul!
Here's just a glimpse:
We only know Christ--really know him--to the extent that we know what his love for us cost him. And so, perhaps, that is the primary mode by which Christ knows and engages us--by our wounds. By feeling our wounds. That would seem to be the meaning of his words, "I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands." We know him by his wounds as he knows us by ours.
And this long passage I am quoting here for myself, to go back to later.
It is not fashionable in today's secular age to speak of trust in an institution. My institutional trust in the Church of Jesus Christ is rooted in my self-knowledge and in my work as a historian. Simply put, I need the Church and you, its members. I need the inspiration that comes of our shared discipline of instruction and reminding; I need the discipline of stewardship and sacrifice and service. There are no solitary saints, and I harbor no delusions about my capacity for unassisted self-transcendence. I am not the measure of all things. I want to be taught, instructed, guided--and I believe benevolent Heavenly Parents have made provision for revealing their plan and their principles to inspired figures who have managed, however imperfectly, to pierce the veils of ignorance that blight our world. And they have revealed covenants and ordinances that tap into unseen reservoirs of spiritual light and power. Joseph knew, as I have felt, that the vicissitudes of mortality and the frailties of human commitment tend toward chaos and disintegration. Entropy appears to be a universal principle not only of thermodynamics but of civilization and human relationships. In spite of the best efforts of the most earnest individuals, marriages fail, friendships fade, and family ties falter. In priesthood and temple practices, I have experienced a power as real as the laws of physics, one that assists in the formation of more durable bonds that connect individuals to each other and to God.
Beautiful, inspirational, words that lift my soul!
August 8, 2022
Faith is not a wall. This scholarly book introduces many doors of faith to see through and move through the walls of skepticism and doubt. A great many of these doors are from writers who are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and even opposed to Christianity) but who agree with the deeply inspired thinking of the Prophet Joseph Smith. I personally truly appreciate this positive approach to truth using all manner of relevant and supportive sources rather than grinding against the opposition. And I certainly agree with Givens' last line in his Epilogue (quoted from George MacDonald) "I would rather die forevermore believing as Jesus believed, than live forevermore as those that deny Him." There is always more to learn, and the Law of Eternal Progression is obvious -- that is, we either go forward or backward in our faith. After reading the book in six days, I immediately read it again in another six days to try to grasp more of the scholarly material introduced.
September 28, 2023
As always, Terryl knocks it out of the park. Its much of the same ideas shared in All Things New, or Wrestling the Angel, or any of the other books, but more direct and succinct.
He shares a beautiful perspective on how transitional our Faith is, how it is a good thing and how we must wrestle with our faith, our questions to truly learn and get to freedom and power of a deeper, truer understanding.
This was my favorite quote: No man...that clearly seeth the beauty of God's face..can when he sees it clearly, willingly, and wittingly forsake it. - Thomas Traherne
I love the insight into historical Christian thought (its not dry, I promise!) I listened to this book, but as with all of their books, I'll need to own it and reread it. If you're going through a faith transition, or have questions and want to find answers, these books (in addition to just being in scripture), are a solid place to start.
He shares a beautiful perspective on how transitional our Faith is, how it is a good thing and how we must wrestle with our faith, our questions to truly learn and get to freedom and power of a deeper, truer understanding.
This was my favorite quote: No man...that clearly seeth the beauty of God's face..can when he sees it clearly, willingly, and wittingly forsake it. - Thomas Traherne
I love the insight into historical Christian thought (its not dry, I promise!) I listened to this book, but as with all of their books, I'll need to own it and reread it. If you're going through a faith transition, or have questions and want to find answers, these books (in addition to just being in scripture), are a solid place to start.
April 13, 2023
There were some great things in this book!
Here is one of my favorite quotes that is referencing Mark 6:51 and says “they (the apostles) were sore amazed in themselves beyond measure, and wondered.”
“If those who walked with him, broke bread with him, and were personally tutored by Jesus were stupefied, amazed, dumbfounded, and perplexed, then I must expect to be filled with even more wonderment. If I am not, it is not because I comprehend more than they; it is because the story has been dulled in its retelling. Christ’s effigy is worn by millions, his face omnipresent in art, and his very title a label assumed by over a billion. He has become, in a word, deceptively familiar. Mark is trying to humble me. He says, in effect, ‘You need to wonder more and assume less. You need to break through all the familiar ways of seeing and hearing him and begin again.”
Here is one of my favorite quotes that is referencing Mark 6:51 and says “they (the apostles) were sore amazed in themselves beyond measure, and wondered.”
“If those who walked with him, broke bread with him, and were personally tutored by Jesus were stupefied, amazed, dumbfounded, and perplexed, then I must expect to be filled with even more wonderment. If I am not, it is not because I comprehend more than they; it is because the story has been dulled in its retelling. Christ’s effigy is worn by millions, his face omnipresent in art, and his very title a label assumed by over a billion. He has become, in a word, deceptively familiar. Mark is trying to humble me. He says, in effect, ‘You need to wonder more and assume less. You need to break through all the familiar ways of seeing and hearing him and begin again.”
March 2, 2022
This is a collection of essays TG has given over the years. He and his wife are scholarly masters about the early Christian church and its evolution through the early years (The Great Apostasy). This book is no exception. It has meat. This is a book that a person can appreciate more with each reading.
I use ratings to decide which books I am going to buy, and I recently decided I am partially responsible for inflating the ratings on books. Either they were 5 star or 1 star. I decided to use the star rating more objectively as follows:
★★★★★ Great book! Can’t wait to read it again (and I will).
★★★★☆ Good book. I am glad I read this.
★★★☆☆ OK book. Nothing special but not bad.
★★☆☆☆ Not good. Why did I waste my time?
★☆☆☆☆ Lousy. I didn’t finish.
I use ratings to decide which books I am going to buy, and I recently decided I am partially responsible for inflating the ratings on books. Either they were 5 star or 1 star. I decided to use the star rating more objectively as follows:
★★★★★ Great book! Can’t wait to read it again (and I will).
★★★★☆ Good book. I am glad I read this.
★★★☆☆ OK book. Nothing special but not bad.
★★☆☆☆ Not good. Why did I waste my time?
★☆☆☆☆ Lousy. I didn’t finish.
August 8, 2022
Beautifully articulated discussion about faith and restoration theology (“RT”)
He unpacks two elements of RT in the context of Christian Theological History with many contradicting beliefs.
1) Heavenly Parents (including Heavenly Mother) and divine heritage and potential
2) Premortal existence
He beautifully described mortality as an educative assent rather than depraved state
I loved his description of faith as a deliberate choice about love not one born of fear or aspiration of heavenly reward.
He beautifully described mortality in the context of how it confronts our beliefs and our faith is forged in the process.
He unpacks two elements of RT in the context of Christian Theological History with many contradicting beliefs.
1) Heavenly Parents (including Heavenly Mother) and divine heritage and potential
2) Premortal existence
He beautifully described mortality as an educative assent rather than depraved state
I loved his description of faith as a deliberate choice about love not one born of fear or aspiration of heavenly reward.
He beautifully described mortality in the context of how it confronts our beliefs and our faith is forged in the process.
February 3, 2024
I felt like this book gave me more motivation to choose faith than I have had for a while.
What I liked: I loved the academic approach to the subject and that the author included quotes from people from diverse backgrounds. I liked the perception of God and the purpose of life that the author conveyed.
What I didn't like: There were a few pieces of logic that didn't seem sound to me. For example, I don't agree with the idea of judging a religion on its best, not its worst. I think you must judge a religion as a whole.
What I liked: I loved the academic approach to the subject and that the author included quotes from people from diverse backgrounds. I liked the perception of God and the purpose of life that the author conveyed.
What I didn't like: There were a few pieces of logic that didn't seem sound to me. For example, I don't agree with the idea of judging a religion on its best, not its worst. I think you must judge a religion as a whole.
June 20, 2022
If you're familiar with Givens' previous work, there isn't anything here that will be new. But it is a really wonderful summation of the view of the Restoration that he has been building over the past decade, so it makes for an excellent review for the experienced or an excellent introduction for the unfamiliar.
September 23, 2022
Mind Enhancing and Expanding
Few books and authors are able to change the way I believe and think than that of Doors of Faith and Teryl Givens. What a refreshing and expansive view on Christianity, heavenly parents, their love, and the resulting potential we possess as their children. Extraordinary!!!
Few books and authors are able to change the way I believe and think than that of Doors of Faith and Teryl Givens. What a refreshing and expansive view on Christianity, heavenly parents, their love, and the resulting potential we possess as their children. Extraordinary!!!
July 2, 2024
I love everything the Givens write. Such a breath of fresh air and always intellectually-stimulating, Terryl Givens educates readers on the nature of God (our heavenly parents) and the truths of the gospel based off of writings of prophets. He also addresses the dilution of truth that culture and corruption have created in regard to the gospel of Christ.
November 3, 2025
This book reminded me why Terryl and Fiona Givens are some of my favorite religious scholars. They incorporate so much depth and clarity into their insights. I also love how they incorporate literature and poetry into their books to bring more context to principles. I’m determined to read the rest of their books I haven’t read yet.
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