Title: The Doors of FaithAuthor: Terryl GivensPublisher: BYU Maxwell Institute and Deseret BookGenre: Religious NonfictionYear Published: 2021Number of Pages:136Binding: PaperbackISBN: 9780842500555Price: $14.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
The Doors of Faith is an interesting book. The first words from Terryl Givens that we read are a series of questions in italics: “Why is it so hard to believe? And why, believing, is it so hard to remain constant in that faith? Why a veil, obscuring from us our origins, our true home, the reality of a living God?” (1). Givens repeats the first two of these questions a couple pages later. As he ends the Introduction, Givens offers something of an answer, but at a slant, to these questions, talking about the Restoration and God and Christ as described, in Givens’ view, in that Restoration. Givens says that they “cause the world of my own experience to fall into focus and make rational, aesthetic, and moral sense” (9). For Givens, the Restoration is worth believing in because it simply explains his life and mortal experience better than anything else. Indeed, by the end of the Introduction, I wasn’t quite sure the questions that opened it had the personal force for Givens that they seemed to when it started (or that is on display in other works by Givens, particularly The Crucible of Doubt, written with his wife, Fiona).
This sense of certainty and assuredness carries through the book, occasionally in ways that rubbed me the wrong way (most egregiously in the second chapter, “The Nature of God and Human Origins”, where Givens spends considerable time detailing why other Christian traditions are lacking, largely in an effort to provide context to Christ’s words to Joseph Smith in the First Vision that “Their creeds were an abomination”). The book’s quoting and sourcing is quite ecumenical, so this approach was somewhat out of place with much of the tone of the rest of the book.
That said, there were a couple of insights that I found particularly moving and worth drawing your attention to. Givens discusses heaven, saying that:
One of the most astonishing things Joseph said about the celestial kingdom was that ‘if you do not accuse each other God will not accuse you. If you have no accuser you will enter heaven.’ If you take him at his word, that is a terrifying specter…but it is based on a peculiarly Latter-day Saint version of heaven. Heaven is no less and no more than sanctified individuals thriving in sanctified relationality. (78)
I LOVE this quote from Brother Joseph, and can’t believe that I have never heard it before! It offers a fascinating insight into one way of imagining heaven and the sort of sociality that will exist there (and also casting a new light on the commandment to forgive). I will be thinking about this moment for a long time.
Another moment that struck me is towards the end of the volume, as Givens is thinking through some of the implications of the Restorationist doctrine of the pre-mortal existence. Givens says that “We can have confidence in the end of the story because we know how it began. We did not begin in a lost and fallen world but in a family circle, in the company of gods” (94). I love this framing of what the pre-mortal life was like, it draws on some of the teachings from the Pearl of Great Price that I am personally drawn to, and the section it is in gestures to the necessity of family and a universalist sounding approach to heaven.
There are many enlightening and provocative insights throughout The Doors of Faith, along with some comparisons to other religious traditions that are more disparaging than I would like. I am not an expert in other Christian traditions or beliefs, so cannot speak to the accuracy of Givens’ claims in those areas, but find them off-putting regardless of accuracy. That said, if you are a fan of Givens’ work generally, particularly his later work, there is likely to be much of interest for you here. I know I’ll be thinking about some of these insights for a long time.