ABSTRACT
Comparatively speaking, salvation takes a great variety of forms not only between different religions but also for different groups of adherents within a single tradition, as Max Weber persuasively demonstrated in his sociology of religion. Sometimes philosophical accounts of divine processes take precedence as they appeal to the human proclivity for meaning; sometimes the heartfelt cry for help in a pressing crisis or in the needed fertility of land or beasts lays claim to salvation. The very nature of Mormonism, as a Restoration movement, is grounded in the belief that the deity intervened in the life of Joseph Smith to create the Church itself. Any broad account of modern Mormonism needs to draw on Towler’s classes of exemplarism, theism, gnosticism and traditionalism, and each merits some comment. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
