Thursday, May 21, 2020

Matthew Paulson Providing a Textbook Example of a Quote-Mine


Matthew Paulson, an anti-Mormon who, in his Breaking the Mormon Code has argued LDS scholars and apologists engage in quote-mining has provided us with a dictionary-definition example of quote-mining. In one of his many attempts to impute deception to Daniel Peterson and Stephen Ricks in their Offenders for a Word wrote the following:

Peterson and Ricks assert theosis, or theopoiesis (the idea that man may become a god), is a notion of the Church Fathers. They state, “Athanasius and the Byzantine Father…understood theosis in precisely the same way as Latter-day Saints.” (Peterson and Ricks, Offenders for a Word, p. 76) (Matthew A. Paulson, Breaking the Mormon Code: A Critique of Mormon Scholarship Regarding Classic Christian Theology and the Book of Mormon [Livermore, Calif.: WingSpan Press, 2006, 2009], 57)

This is a lie. Peterson and Ricks explicitly deny that they believe Athanasius et al understood theosis in the same way as Latter-day Saints do. Here is what Peterson and Ricks actually say on the page Paulson references:

We are, of course, under no illusions that such figures as Athanasius and the Byzantine fathers—given their very different metaphysical and theological presuppositions—understood theosis in precisely the same way as do the Latter-day Saints.

This is only representative of the fact that Paulson’s critique on LDS scholarship and apologetics, notwithstanding his priding himself on trying to appear scholarly, is, in reality, a joke. For more, see:



Matthew Paulson hard at work in the quote mines