In the past few months, I have many good discussions with the Mormon missionaries. I have found opportunities to ask them questions about their beliefs and reply with my own objections. By speaking with them I have been able to gain more understanding about the theology and teachings of the Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They claim that the Book of Mormon and the Bible present the same theology, furthermore, that the Book of Mormon illustrates this identical theology more clearly and accurately than the Bible. I don’t agree. I would like to show two areas in which the Book of Mormon is in conflict in its philosophy and theology with the teachings of the Bible. The areas I would like to touch upon are the nature of God and the nature of Jesus Christ.
Mormons claim to be monotheists. Indeed, Christianity also claims that there is but one, true God. However, the God in whom the Mormons believe (usually referred to as Heavenly Father) is a totally separate being from Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, Heavenly Father is like a human in that he has a spiritual body as well as a physical body. The Book of Mormon’s teaching is clear that God the Father has a physical body. Why is it so important that God have a physical body? A secret teaching, not usually told to immature believers, explains why. It was revealed to Joseph Smith that “as man is, God once was.” In other words, Mormons believe that Heavenly Father was at one time a man created by a previous Heavenly Father who was in turn once a man created by a previous Heavenly Father, and on and on to infinity. This doctrine is of course necessary so that good Mormons can have the hope that they themselves can become a future Heavenly Father on their own world or universe. This secret doctrine destroys their monotheistic guise and reveals Mormonism as a polytheistic religion. Furthermore, it is this belief that God was once man and that man can subsequently become God that is squarely in opposition to the teaching of the Bible.
The Bible does not teach that God has a physical body, in fact, John 4:24 is very clear that “God is a spirit.” It is true that the Bible often refers to God’s face, his feet, his hands, etc. but that is always in a figurative sense. If we took those passages literally we would have say that God also has wings (Ps 91:4) is made of wood (John 15:1), and is hot, combusting gas (Heb. 12:29). The Bible is equally clear that there has been only one God: “Before me there was no God formed, and there will be none after me.” (Is. 43:10). Mormons like to argue that God made us in his image and if he didn’t have a body he couldn’t have given us bodies. However, this interpretation of Genesis 1:27 does not stand up well to critical examination. Indeed God created man, but even this admission informs us that the phrase “in the likeness of” does not mean “exactly like.” Let me explain. Something that is created or made is intrinsically different from its maker. Birds make nests, but birds are not nests. Cats make hairballs, but (despite some debate) cats are not hairballs. Men create pictures, but men are not pictures. A man can even create a picture that is very much like him, but that picture can never be the same thing as the maker. In the same way God has made man, but God is not himself a man, and neither is man God. God is God, the one and only. Man cannot become God, no matter how god-like we become just as no picture of a man can become a man, no matter how lifelike it is.
Now following this train of thought it would seem impossible that God could become a man. A man can be the subject of a picture, but he can’t physically become a picture. So it would seem that God could not become a man. However, the Bible tells us that what is impossible with man is possible with God (Luke 18:27). Mormons believe that Jesus is not God, but is only one in spirit and purpose with Heavenly Father. There is no Trinity and Jesus was just a very spiritually elevated man. However, this is not what the Bible has to say about the matter. In John 1:1 the book’s author tells us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What does the Word do? Well, “the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Whether we understand it or not the fact is that the Word, the Logos or God’s mind, became human. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that John calls Jesus the “only begotten from the Father.” Not only does this further set Jesus apart from the rest of mankind but it introduces an important concept. Unlike things which are created, things which are begotten are the same as the begetter. Birds beget birds and cats beget cats. In an analogous way God begets God. It would be difficult to argue that God could beget a man, no more than if a man could beget a picture of his son. It is true that God did miraculously impregnate Mary; however, I do not think that John’s reference to begetting is an allusion to the Virginal Conception.
In addition to the first chapter of John, the rest of the New Testament tells us that Jesus firmly believed that he was God. He claimed to forgive sins (an act only possible by God Himself) and was nearly killed on more than one occasion because of his claims. Both Jesus and the people around him know who he was claiming to be: God in the flesh. Jesus claims to be God can either be true or false. If they are false then he is either a madman or a liar. Neither option would suggest that he was just a Good Prophet like many claim. The only other option is that Jesus was telling the truth about his divinity.
The missionaries I have met with always object when I tell them that Jesus is God. If Jesus is God, and Heavenly Father is God, and if the Spirit is God doesn’t that mean that you believe in three Gods and not one? The simple answer is no. The Trinity is a very complex subject, but one should expect the truth to be complex. C.S Lewis once wrote, “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anybody can be simple if he has no facts to bother about” (Mere Christianity). The fact is that Jesus claimed to be God and all throughout the Bible allusions are made to the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity. When we look at the Bible we see that there are three distinct personalities claiming to be God. And while they are each making claims to Divinity none make claims to subtract from the others. If we want to make it simpler for ourselves and say that God the Father is the only God and Jesus and the Spirit are very godlike, but didn’t quite make the cut we must call Jesus and the Spirit liars. That is what the facts force us to do.
In conclusion, the Bible is often unclear about certain points of doctrine. But it is clear that Jesus, the Father, and the Spirit are all separate while all being one God. It is clear that God the Father is a spiritual being and that Jesus was fully man and fully God. To believe otherwise is to ignore the facts presented in the Bible. If, as I have shown, the teachings of the Mormons stand in such stark contrast to the teachings of the Bible there can be only two logical courses of action. One is to accept the Bible and reject the Book of Mormon (along with the Mormon’s other Scriptures). The other is to accept the Book of Mormon as truth and reject the Bible as misinformation. The option to accept both as Holy Scripture is simply dead in the water.
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Monday, January 8, 2007
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Third Nephi: My First Look at Mormon Beliefs
It may seem that this installment is somewhat superfluous. By the end of my last article I have fully rejected that the Book of Mormon is inspired Scripture. You may be asking “Why continue to talk about the Book of Mormon?” and I would answer, “Maybe we can glean some truth from the Book of Mormon.” It might not be credible Scripture, but neither is The Republic and we can still learn truth from Plato. The Elders told me that everything taught in the Bible is analogous to what is taught in the Book of Mormon. They claim that the two records make it more difficult for false schisms to form by stabilizing one another. So let us examine the two books and see if they are really as closely aligned as we would be told.
The first section I read in the Book of Mormon was the account of Jesus’ appearance in the Americas (3 Nephi 11). To summarize: a great number of people are gathered together discussing the meaning of the past few days’ signs (these signs were prophesized to signal the arrival of Christ). A loud voice from Heaven calls three times (it was unintelligible the first two times) saying “Behold my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name—hear ye him” (3 Nephi 11:7). Do you remember hearing something like this before (Matt. 3:17)? After they hear the voice, the glorified Jesus descends from the clouds and stands among the people. Everyone gets a chance to pass by and feel his wounds. He preaches to the crowd and baptizes them. He picks out twelve specific men and gives them the authority to baptize and spread the gospel. Chapters 12 through 14 pretty well mirror chapters 5 through 7 of the book of Matthew, which (for those of you like me who aren’t Bible scholars) is the Sermon on the Mount.
Let’s take a moment to look at these chapters with a discerning eye. The first thing that I noticed was Jesus’ entrance into the New World. His choice of entrance is just about as opposite as you can get from the way he came onto the scene in Judea. In the Old World, He entered in with no fanfare in a shed in a little town called Nazareth. He lived a fairly uneventful thirty years before beginning his ministry. During his ministry he often told the disciples not to proclaim him the Messiah (Matt. 8:4; 16:20; Mark 8:29-30; Luke 9:20-21). But all those previous ways of doing things go out the window as Jesus crossed the Prime Meridian. Instead of a quiet ministry beginning in rural South America, Jesus comes in like it’s the Second Coming. It seems that from the beginning this might not be the same Jesus of the Bible.
The fact that the chapters which retell the Sermon on the Mount are nearly identical to the account in Matthew is a source of little interest. Maybe if Joseph Smith had never read Matthew, then this would be of great importance. The only interesting point in those three chapters is the addition of a Beatitude. In 3 Nephi, the first beatitude is not “Blessed are the poor in spirit” but rather blessed are those that are baptized (12:2). This beatitude is conspicuously absent from the Biblical account. Of course, this addition doesn’t prove that the Book of Mormon is totally different theologically from the Bible, Jesus did preach about baptism; but it does begin to show the disproportionate amount of importance that Mormonism places on good works, in this case baptism.
In addition to reading those chapters, I also skimmed through the histories that recorded the events before Christ’s appearance. It seems that even before he was born the people in the New World knew that the Messiah’s name would be Jesus. Even more surprising is the fact that they actually understood the purpose of the Messiah! Almost two thousand years after his appearance there are still a great numbers of Jewish scholars who don’t understand the purpose of the Messiah. So how did the people here understand and believe everything about Jesus’ necessary sacrifice? Remember that during Jesus’ time most Jews thought that the Messiah was going to be a political savior not a man who would die on a cross. To fully appreciate this problem, please allow me a short tangent so that I can propose an adequate analogy to illustrate my point.
The progression of revealed religion and mathematics has a great deal in common. Both started off with a very basic understanding. The idea that a God even existed is as enormous a leap as the discovery that there exists a number called zero. In our modern day we take zero for granted, but it was quite a feat to come up with the concept of zero. As time progressed so did math and religion. Math added new functions like addition and division. Religion discovered the new ideas of good and evil. Even more time passed and both branches of knowledge continued to advance. Mathematicians found algebra, geometry, and calculus. Theologians (or their ancient counterparts) were shown Jehovah, the sacred act of the sacrifice, and finally the Great Act of the Sacrifice of God Himself for the sins of mankind. When we look back at these discoveries through time, we lose the appreciation of the monumental changes in thought that it took to move on to the next level of development. In addition to this loss of awe, we have taken for granted that we need each step in the progression to get to where we are now. Without basic algebra we wouldn’t have discovered calculus. In a like manner, without exposure to the early Judaic beliefs and practices we would not be able to understand Christ’s sacrifice. That is part of the reason I believe that we have the Old Testament. It tells us where we came from spiritually so that we can understand critical points of doctrine, such as, why Jesus died.
It seems to me that the people in the New World were at the level of basic math in their spiritual lives when the Jews arrived around 600 BC. They quickly advanced to algebra with guidance from the displaced Israelites. And when Christ arrived they made another enormous jump-- from algebra to calculus III. Now it is possible that they were capable of making these huge leaps in understanding, but I doubt it. If you throw the average Algebra student into an advanced calculus college course he will be able to follow some of the lecture. But at the end of the day you will have a very confused kid. In the same way, I think that the people of the New World would not have been able to understand Jesus as quickly as they purportedly did.
This short entry is no doubt far from the entire story, but I think that even from this small sample we can see that the Book of Mormon does not accurately portray the Jesus in the Bible or the required progression of thought needed to understand Christ’s mission. There may be something yet for us to learn from the Book of Mormon, but the odds are that it won’t be much.
The first section I read in the Book of Mormon was the account of Jesus’ appearance in the Americas (3 Nephi 11). To summarize: a great number of people are gathered together discussing the meaning of the past few days’ signs (these signs were prophesized to signal the arrival of Christ). A loud voice from Heaven calls three times (it was unintelligible the first two times) saying “Behold my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name—hear ye him” (3 Nephi 11:7). Do you remember hearing something like this before (Matt. 3:17)? After they hear the voice, the glorified Jesus descends from the clouds and stands among the people. Everyone gets a chance to pass by and feel his wounds. He preaches to the crowd and baptizes them. He picks out twelve specific men and gives them the authority to baptize and spread the gospel. Chapters 12 through 14 pretty well mirror chapters 5 through 7 of the book of Matthew, which (for those of you like me who aren’t Bible scholars) is the Sermon on the Mount.
Let’s take a moment to look at these chapters with a discerning eye. The first thing that I noticed was Jesus’ entrance into the New World. His choice of entrance is just about as opposite as you can get from the way he came onto the scene in Judea. In the Old World, He entered in with no fanfare in a shed in a little town called Nazareth. He lived a fairly uneventful thirty years before beginning his ministry. During his ministry he often told the disciples not to proclaim him the Messiah (Matt. 8:4; 16:20; Mark 8:29-30; Luke 9:20-21). But all those previous ways of doing things go out the window as Jesus crossed the Prime Meridian. Instead of a quiet ministry beginning in rural South America, Jesus comes in like it’s the Second Coming. It seems that from the beginning this might not be the same Jesus of the Bible.
The fact that the chapters which retell the Sermon on the Mount are nearly identical to the account in Matthew is a source of little interest. Maybe if Joseph Smith had never read Matthew, then this would be of great importance. The only interesting point in those three chapters is the addition of a Beatitude. In 3 Nephi, the first beatitude is not “Blessed are the poor in spirit” but rather blessed are those that are baptized (12:2). This beatitude is conspicuously absent from the Biblical account. Of course, this addition doesn’t prove that the Book of Mormon is totally different theologically from the Bible, Jesus did preach about baptism; but it does begin to show the disproportionate amount of importance that Mormonism places on good works, in this case baptism.
In addition to reading those chapters, I also skimmed through the histories that recorded the events before Christ’s appearance. It seems that even before he was born the people in the New World knew that the Messiah’s name would be Jesus. Even more surprising is the fact that they actually understood the purpose of the Messiah! Almost two thousand years after his appearance there are still a great numbers of Jewish scholars who don’t understand the purpose of the Messiah. So how did the people here understand and believe everything about Jesus’ necessary sacrifice? Remember that during Jesus’ time most Jews thought that the Messiah was going to be a political savior not a man who would die on a cross. To fully appreciate this problem, please allow me a short tangent so that I can propose an adequate analogy to illustrate my point.
The progression of revealed religion and mathematics has a great deal in common. Both started off with a very basic understanding. The idea that a God even existed is as enormous a leap as the discovery that there exists a number called zero. In our modern day we take zero for granted, but it was quite a feat to come up with the concept of zero. As time progressed so did math and religion. Math added new functions like addition and division. Religion discovered the new ideas of good and evil. Even more time passed and both branches of knowledge continued to advance. Mathematicians found algebra, geometry, and calculus. Theologians (or their ancient counterparts) were shown Jehovah, the sacred act of the sacrifice, and finally the Great Act of the Sacrifice of God Himself for the sins of mankind. When we look back at these discoveries through time, we lose the appreciation of the monumental changes in thought that it took to move on to the next level of development. In addition to this loss of awe, we have taken for granted that we need each step in the progression to get to where we are now. Without basic algebra we wouldn’t have discovered calculus. In a like manner, without exposure to the early Judaic beliefs and practices we would not be able to understand Christ’s sacrifice. That is part of the reason I believe that we have the Old Testament. It tells us where we came from spiritually so that we can understand critical points of doctrine, such as, why Jesus died.
It seems to me that the people in the New World were at the level of basic math in their spiritual lives when the Jews arrived around 600 BC. They quickly advanced to algebra with guidance from the displaced Israelites. And when Christ arrived they made another enormous jump-- from algebra to calculus III. Now it is possible that they were capable of making these huge leaps in understanding, but I doubt it. If you throw the average Algebra student into an advanced calculus college course he will be able to follow some of the lecture. But at the end of the day you will have a very confused kid. In the same way, I think that the people of the New World would not have been able to understand Jesus as quickly as they purportedly did.
This short entry is no doubt far from the entire story, but I think that even from this small sample we can see that the Book of Mormon does not accurately portray the Jesus in the Bible or the required progression of thought needed to understand Christ’s mission. There may be something yet for us to learn from the Book of Mormon, but the odds are that it won’t be much.
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