The God Who Weeps

The God Who Weeps is Terryl Givens’s book of Mormon theology, and within Kyle’s reading it functions mainly as the foil that Adam Miller argues against throughout Future Mormon. Miller treats it as his “chief sparring partner”: he resists its claim that the “greatest act of self-revelation” is choosing what to believe, and presses what he sees as its under-examined Nietzschean problem. At the same time, Miller leans on Givens’s account of Mormon “radical materialism” — the claim that in Mormonism “dualism is rewritten as two-tiered monism” (spirit as more refined matter) and that “laws are themselves as eternal as God.”

Across these sources the book stands in for Givens’s broader framing of doubt, materiality, and a vulnerable God — a framing Kyle’s reading both adopts and contests. It is the contemporary theological position against which Miller’s grace-and-materiality essays define themselves.

Context: The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life (2012) is a work of Latter-day Saint theology co-authored by Terryl Givens and Fiona Givens, arguing that a God who weeps over human suffering is central to making sense of Mormon belief.

Where this appears

• Future Mormon — Adam Miller’s “chief sparring partner”: he resists its self-revelation-as-belief claim and presses its under-examined Nietzschean problem, while drawing on its account of Mormon radical materialism.
• Terryl Givens — named as the Givens book Miller argues against and the source of the “two-tiered monism” materialism thread.