Day of the Covenant Books

Let the buyer beware! I ordered this book for a friend's birthday.

I Checked the ISBN, and it is for a black genuine leather bound Doctrine and Covenants published by Herald House for the Reorganized Church, now known as the Community of Christ.

What I received was the large print paperback D&C. Not the black leather bound, and not a $45 book. Needless to say my friend did not get his birthday present!

On a positive note, Amazon graciously accepted the return and gave me a full refund.

So, sometimes even checking the ISBN is no guarantee that you're getting the right thing.

Please pay no attention to this book full of false prophets and thier prophecies. It is more likened to a guidebook for a dungeons and dragonesque game where you can find out what prophecies may gain you power or destroy you, but as a book of facts???...forget it. Fantasy and FALSE!

This books touches on relegious aspects of the modern days. It touches on important points of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that the New and Old Testament leave out. For anyone who has the desire to better themselves this book is the one for you.

The fuzzy-headed Christian, specifically. A person with a firm grip on logical rigor will not be impressed with the argument presented in Abraham's Seed and Covenant; nor, I suspect, would a strong Bible scholar of non-Mormon denomination. Or a high school English teacher, for that matter. In this book, Mr. Bentley takes the reader on a rickety tour of the story of the biblical patriarch Abraham, whose descendants are supposed to have been given special privilege and responsibility by God. Along the way he lays out the creaky planks of his argument for conversion to the LDS faith, centering them around the concept that the most sacred portion of the lineage of Abraham corresponds directly to the current membership of the Church of Latter-day Saints.

Though this premise is broadly hinted at in the book's jacket description and elsewhere, it nonetheless seems a bit jolting when Mr. Bentley steps out of the Bible's timeline (wherein the story of the sacred lineage seems to break off rather uncertainly) and smoothly picks things up again in the Book of Mormon. Bentley seems unaware of any impact this shift will have on the reader--at first, he goes on blithely quoting scriptures without even mentioning that his source material has changed. But this is more a matter of clumsiness than of subterfuge; the author's desire to convert his reader soon becomes explicit enough, and the book gradually shifts focus toward that end over the remainder of its length.

Clumsiness, it turns out, is a highly effective missionary tool, at least if the blurbs on and inside the book's cover are to be believed. Mission presidents and PhDs alike register their admiration for Mr. Bentley's hucksterish approach to religious persuasion. Indeed, despite the man's frequent grammatical errors, consistently weak storytelling, and occasional tasteless jokes, the strengths of his church shine through clearly in his writing--particularly, its cynical use of argumentative logic as a warm-up act for gently insistent evangelism. In one chapter, Bentley presents a variation on Pascal's Wager to the would-be convert, and then encourages the skeptical reader to test any objections by personally asking God whether the Book of Mormon really is true. Like a busy CEO hiding behind his secretary, he uses the deity to muffle any return arguments, neatly sidestepping the need to defend his own claims. Earlier in the book, he supports a point with the reasonable argument that the writings of the apostle Paul shouldn't always be taken at face value, separated from us as they are by thousands of years and multiple translations; yet in an anecdote from his own life, the author shows only helpless puzzlement at the words of a psychology professor who once tried to tell him that truth was in the eye of the beholder. "I believe he was actually serious about his definition of truth," says the hapless Mr. Bentley, who caps off three decades of thought about the incident with a four-line paragraph that dismisses the professor's way of thinking as "ludicrous." Somehow this man can navigate his empathy through the vast shrouds of time and culture that separate him from Paul, but cannot even begin to understand what any precocious twelve-year-old can tell you after having watched "The Matrix" a couple of times: that people base their personal truths at least partly on their personal, subjective perceptions.

Abraham's Seed and Covenant is an interesting book, even a fascinating one, insofar as it reveals the seductively half-logical method by which Mormon missionaries attempt to win converts. To a person for whom half-logic is enough, and who already believes in the early, Bible-based parts of Mr. Bentley's tale, this book may indeed motivate conversion. But those in search of effective argument, serious scholarship, or decent writing in support of the LDS church will have to look somewhere else.

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[Endnote from the future: Now, quite some time after I originally posted this review, I feel badly about having written it in such a scornful way. That wasn't my intention. I think there's some good substance in my review, but it's sort of obscured by all that bile that somehow snuck in there. As many of you LDS folks out there surely already know, it's awfully easy to present an aspect of your worldview in a way that makes it seem like you think you're better than everybody else. Lesson learned, I guess.]