The Reopened Court

If God is all-powerful and all-good, why do the innocent suffer? For seventeen centuries, classical Christianity has answered with a plea of mystery.

This book treats the question as what it has always been: a courtroom argument, with God in the dock. And it argues that the charge cannot be answered from inside the traditional premises, because the premises themselves are the problem. A God who conjured everything from nothing owns everything that followed. The doctrines recovered through the Restoration begin from different premises entirely: a divine council rather than a solitary omnipotence, element and intelligence as eternal as God, a premortal self that chose this mortal schooling, degrees of glory in place of a binary heaven and hell, and a God who weeps over His children. Taken together, they do not soften the problem of evil. They dissolve the prosecution's case.

The Reopened Court is not a defense. It is a case in chief, built the way a careful advocate builds one. An opening chapter lays down the rules of evidence: a strict hierarchy of witnesses, from canonized scripture downward, with every doctrine cited to the canon and every scholar quoted in words verified against the original. Hostile witnesses are called and heard. Twelve chapters then present the doctrines one by one, each in two parts: first the doctrine and its support, then the lived implication, followed by objections and replies and a scripture appendix. Four appendices supply a concordance to the Articles of Faith, references by chapter, a lexicon, and an index.

Written for the Latter-day Saint who has sensed that these doctrines answer questions the creeds cannot, for the Christian who has carried the problem of evil honestly and found the standard answers wanting, and for the reader of any persuasion who is willing to follow evidence to an unfashionable conclusion.

The court, the author argues, has been reopened. What follows is the case.

From the author of Bridging Biblical Divides and The Comprehensive Bible of Book of Mormon Evidence.