Continuing from ‘Modern Liahonas,’ quoting form “All Things New” by Fiona and Terryl Givens:
We do have at least one revealed litmus test for truth; it comes from the greatest of Joseph Smith’s revelations, Moses 7. There we encounter the Weeping God of Enoch, the “Man of Holiness,”and the Father of the “Son of Man” (Moses 7:35; 6:57). This magnificent epiphany provides us a template that corrects the greatest evil in the history of Christian theology—the God the Father who is divested of emotion, passion, vulnerability, and capacity to weep real tears in shared suffering with His children. C.S. Lewis did not know this scripture, but he did infer the great truth taught. Writing to a friend, he acknowledged the danger of assuming that our own moral sensibility is the appropriate standards for judging God’s actions. We run the risk of presentism, personal subjectivity, and finite perspective when we dismiss out of hand biblical depictions we find uncomfortable. “I see grave danger we run by doing so,” Lewis wrote. “But the dangers in believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still a greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that or inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. We thing the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two” (emphasis added).10
Lewis was but repeating a maxim of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, whom Brigham Young called “as good [a man] who ever walked the earth.”11 Wesley stated, “But you say you will prove it by the Scripture. Hold! What will you prove by Scripture? that God is worse than the devil? It cannot be. Whatever that scripture proves, it can never prove this: Does what I am reading expand my heart and mind, or does it harrow the mind and constrict the heart? (Alma 32:34).
Many early church fathers and mothers remained true and faithful to their understanding of the parental nature of God. Macrina (324-379 AD), the sister and teacher of the church father Gregory of Nyssa, taught that the godlike qualities of the soul draw it to those same qualities in the divine, by the means of movement and the activity of love.”13 Later, the anchoress Julian of Norwich would declare that God is not capable of wrath because “wrath and friendship are two contraries.”14 What J. Reuben Clark said of spoken scripture must pertain equally well to that which is written: “I have given some thought to this question, and the answer thereto so far as I can determine, is: We can tell when the speakers [and writers] are ‘moved upon by the Holy Ghost’ only when we, ourselves, are moved upon by the Holy Ghost.’ In a way this shifts the responsibility from them to us to determine when they so speak.15 ~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New (Faith Matters Publishing, 2020), 67-69 (continued. . . )
