Here I quote a few paragraphs from my dissertation (36-38) in which I look at a couple of Stephen Webb’s books. Webb, though Catholic, borrowed from Mormon thinkers on asserting the claim of Platonic corruption of Christianity related to materiality and God’s body. I note that Webb, like Roberts, presented some contradictory claims.

Recently, Catholic philosopher Stephen Webb noted the similarities between Smith and the Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus in his Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn From the Latter-day Saints (2013): both Smith and Iamblichus promoted the importance of matter and both were accused of practicing magic.[1]  In an earlier book, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (2012), Webb said that “Joseph Smith dismissed the Platonism of the early Church Fathers” in his embrace of matter, particularly by going so far as to say that God had a body.  “Mormons put the Platonizing of Christianity at the heart of their critique of the ossification and corruption of Christianity,” argued Webb.  “Something went terribly wrong after the age of the Apostles, they argue, and that something has to do with the theological turn toward a metaphysics of immaterialism.”[2]  As I argue in Chapter Three, though Smith said that something did go wrong in early Christianity, that something was not Platonic corruption (Chapter Three).  Later Mormons theologians did embrace the Platonic-corruption model and these theologians made a similar argument to Webb: Christianity was corrupted by Platonic immaterialism.[3]  But as Webb noticed in Mormon Christianity, Neoplatonists like Iamblichus did embrace matter and as I argue in Chapters Three and Six, Smith’s embrace of matter and a material God fit within certain Christian-Platonic themes. 

As Webb’s comparison between Smith and Iamblichus in Mormon Christianity indicates, Webb seemed a little uncomfortable with the claim that Smith was anti-Platonic.  In Jesus Christ, Eternal God, Webb even asserted that Smith “would have liked the Platonic concept of pre-existent souls as well as Plato’s portrait of the Demiurge as being not absolutely different from the world (Timaeus 29a-53).”[4]  As I mention above and in Chapter Six, Smith did indeed like this portion of the Timaeus, going so far as using it in his translation of his Egyptian papyri.  Furthermore, in his introduction to Jesus Christ, Eternal God, Webb lamented, “Unfortunately, creedal Christians rarely take Mormonism seriously.  Perhaps the main reason for this neglect is the Mormon rejection of creation out of nothing, which puts it at odds with most of Western metaphysics and Christian theology.  None of its philosophical positions has made it more prone to scholarly condescension than this one.”[5]  Yet Webb neglected to note that the rejection of creation ex nihilo was a thoroughly Platonic concept, one that was debated in Smith’s day (Chapters One and Six).  

[1] Stephen W. Webb, Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn From the Latter-day Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 62-68.

[2] Stephen H. Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 249.  As I note in Chapter Six, Clement of Alexandria said that God had a body, while Origen said that God did not. 

[3] B. H. Roberts, Outlines of Ecclesiastical History, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1895); James E. Talmage, The Great Apostasy: Considered in the Light of Scriptural and Secular History (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1909), 100-1.  Webb probably got this notion that Mormons believed in the Platonic corruption model from contemporary Mormon theologians that he was in conversation with. 

[4] Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God, 249.

[5] Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God, 5.