As a member of Community of Christ, I’m supposed to be a Trinitarian, but if I’ve learned one thing in recent years, it’s that I have very little patience for insistence on Trinitarianism. It doesn’t make much more sense to me now than it did when I was a practicing Latter-day Saint, and if I can recognize value in the theological reflections that emerge from an assumption of Trinitarianism, I am just not sold that it’s the only (or even best) way of understanding God.

Rereading Faulconer here, I’ve realized that I’m just as impatient with Latter-day Saint insistence on non-Trinitarianism. This is especially the case when you have to make such seemingly tortured arguments to coax the contemporary Latter-day Saint view of the Godhead out of Abinadi’s comments in Mosiah. I get real skeptical out of any effort to put too much weight on verb tenses and specific pronouns in the Book of Mormon, given how much of a grammatical mess it can be sometimes. There are easier explanations of the details of the text than what Faulconer offers, and it sometimes feels like reasoning backward from a conclusion.

While this also feels true of his seeming insistence on bringing “intelligences” and other specific post-1830 Latter-day Saint theologies into King Benjamin’s sermon, I also have to say that I liked a lot of what Faulconer offered. This stands head and shoulders above Givens’s apologetic tone, in my opinion, and even when I wildly disagreed with Faulconer’s conclusions, I respect his reasoning. There are parts of this book I’d be happy to learn from—they’re just outweighed by the bits that feel frustrating.

• Mosiah: A Brief Theological Introduction
• James E. Faulconer
• Terryl Givens
• Trinitarianism
• The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions