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