The New Mormon Challenge

Current facts about Mormonism
•Over 11 million members.
•Over 60,000 full-time missionaries—more than any other single missionary-sending organization in the world.
•More than 310,000 converts annually.
•As many as eighty percent of converts come from Protestant backgrounds. (In Mormon circles, the saying is, “We baptize a Baptist church every week.”)
•Within fifteen years, the numbers of missionaries and converts will roughly double.
•Within eighty years, with adherents exceeding 267 million, Mormonism could become the first world-religion to arise since Islam.

You may know the statistics. What you probably don’t know are the advances the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is making in apologetics and academic respectability.

With superb training, Mormon scholars outclass many of their opponents. Arguments against Mormon claims are increasingly refuted as outdated, misinformed, or poorly argued.

The New Mormon Challenge is a response to the burgeoning challenge of scholarly Mormon apologetics. Written by a team of respected Christian scholars, it is free of caricature, sensationalism, and diatribe. The respectful tone and responsible, rigorous, yet readable scholarship set this book in a class of its own.

The New Mormon Challenge recycles no previous material and duplicates no one’s efforts. Instead, responding to the best LDS scholarship, it offers freshly researched and well-documented rebuttals of Mormon truth claims. Most of the chapter topics have never been addressed, and the criticisms and arguments are almost entirely new. But The New Mormon Challenge does not merely challenge Mormon beliefs; it offers the LDS Church and her members ways to move forward.

The New Mormon Challenge will help you understand the intellectual appeal of Mormonism, and it will reveal many of the fundamental weaknesses of the Mormon worldview. Whether you are sharing the gospel with Mormons or are investigating Mormonism for yourself, this book will help you accurately understand Mormonism and see the superiority of the historic Christian faith. Outstanding scholarship and sound methodology make this an ideal textbook. The biblical, historical, scientific, philosophical, and theological discussions are fascinating and will appeal to Christians and Mormons alike. Exemplifying Christian scholarship at its best, The New Mormon Challenge pioneers a new genre of literature on Mormonism.

The Editors
Francis J. Beckwith (Ph.D., Fordham University), Carl Mosser (Ph.D. candidate, University of St. Andrews), and Paul Owen (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) are respected authorities on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the authors of various books and significant articles on Mormonism. Their individual biographies as well as information on the book’s contributors appear inside.

With contributors including such respected scholars as Craig L. Blomberg, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and others, The New Mormon Challenge is, as Richard Mouw states in his foreword, “an important event for both Protestant evangelicals and Mormons” that models “to the evangelical community what it is like to engage in respectful and meaningful exploration of a viewpoint with which we disagree on key points.”

“In recent years, Mormon scholars have produced a body of literature that has been largely ignored by evangelicals. This current volume takes a giant step forward in correcting this oversight in a way that is both intellectually vigorous, yet respectful.”
—Ken Mulholland, President, Salt Lake Theological Seminary

“Intellectually serious evangelical responses to the faith of the Latter-day Saints have been depressingly rare. This book represents a significant contribution to a conversation that, really, has just begun.”
—Daniel Peterson, Brigham Young University; Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS)

“Finally we have a book from evangelicals in which the authors have made