Crypto-Christians

If you know followers of Jesus Christ “by their fruits”, and if the usual interpretation of that verse is correct (that those who truly do good are therefore true followers of Jesus), does that mean that we’re claiming that, say, atheists or Muslims who do great good are actually Christians? ’Cause if so, there’s all sorts of weirdness afoot.

Easter!

Okay, so i’d originally written a post for today that started

In honor of Easter, no snark…

But having just come back from church, i’ve changed my mind.

I just want to say, based on my knowledge of attendance numbers for a handful of wards over the past few years, that any Mormons who decide to praise the piety of adherents of our religion by making fun of “Christmas and Easter [insert name of other denomination here]s” are hereby entitled to be summarily slapped—we’ve got a whole lot of those amongst us, too, after all.

In which David B pretends to be a deep thinker

I’ve read a good number of mainstream Xian critiques of the Mormon view of God from various sources, and they generally leave me with a simple question, based on the common claim that the mainstream Xian view of God entails a God who/that is absolutely perfect in every possible way and exceeds in all things, namely:

What's so great about absolute greatness?

This probably sounds like a joke, but it’s a serious question. If a critique of the Mormon conception of God is that the Mormon view entails a God who is not as wondrous as the mainstream Xian view entails,* then why is that supposed to be such a huge criticism? I see no inherent reason that that should be a valid critique; it seems to me that it’s a critique simply and only because it goes against some people’s underlying assumptions about the nature of deity, not because it somehow is a problem with a conception of deity.

And remember, an argument like “Isn’t it better to worship an absolutely great deity than a limited though still great deity?” won’t hold for this—i want concrete arguments here, not arguments in the abstract. It might be better if life here on earth didn’t involve the ebola virus, for example, but proposing an earth without ebola doesn’t make reality any different. I’m looking for arguments that speak to reality—and i haven’t found any yet.

* Something i’m not ceding, but which i offer as a basis for rational discussion on this issue.

Mormons and persecution

The next time somebody starts going off in a church meeting about how persecuted they are as a Mormon,* i’m going to direct them to the recent NPR story on Iraqi Christians being singled out for death threats and even actual killing simply because they’re Christian.

That’s persecution, folks. People look at you weird or won’t vote for you or laugh about your beliefs ’cause you’re a Mormon, that’s simply life. Get over yourself. Mormons in the 1830s and 1840s were persecuted. Mormons in the 1880s were persecuted. Nowadays? If Iraqi Christians had the time or energy to spare, they would scoff at your delusions—and they’d be justified in doing so.

* A surprisingly common meme, really. Occasionally it’s blatant (the “somebody laughed at me at school because i’m Mormon” sort of thing), but usually it’s more subtle, and couched in terms of “attacks” on religion or the family or somesuch, but set up with a clear attack-on-Mormonism sort of spin.

Sometimes you get heretical notions here

So let’s start with the foundational axiom that Jesus Christ led a sinless life.

Fine. But what does sinless mean?

The general idea among us Mormons, shared by most Xian theology, i think, is that it means that Jesus Christ never committed a sin—he was tempted, but never submitted to temptation.

However, there are other possible readings.

First of all, for Mormons, it could be that he committed acts that would be considered sinful, but that he did so before the age of accountability.*

Another possibility is that he committed acts that would be considered sinful, but he never sinned against any particular law that he knew of—after all, there’s that textually ambiguous status of sins committed by someone who doesn’t know what the rules are. (That’s at least part of why Mormons don’t consider the Fall to be the result of sins on the part of Adam and Eve—no knowledge means no sin.)

He may have sinned but consistently repented perfectly (better than the rest of us do, i’m thinking), meaning that those sins would not have been attributed to him.

And finally, he may actually have never sinned. At all.

I’m not sure which of these i hold with. I’m throwing this out there ’cause i’m curious what others think.

* For any non-Mormons reading, one doesn’t become accountable for one’s sins until arriving at the age of eight. (There’s more to it, but that’s enough detail for the moment.)

Learning from others

Back when we lived in Florida we learned about the Society of St. Andrew, a mainstream Xian group that does “gleaning”: going into already-picked fields to pick leftover fruits and vegetables and donating what's picked to food banks. We signed up to help a group pick sweet corn that was about to be plowed under at a farm about thirty miles away from our house.

By the end of the day our little group of twenty people, including a half-dozen children, had picked enough corn to fill half of the back of a delivery truck—about 4,000 pounds!

As we left, the man who was there from the food bank said to me “God bless you”—and he meant it. It struck me that lots of times we say things like that to each other, but it’s just a perfunctory thing—but he meant it sincerely, and I could feel the blessing of God wash over me. It was a powerful moment.

Anyway, just saying that it’s cool to be taught important spiritual lessons from someone of another faith—which is only to be expected, of course, since we Mormons may claim a monopoly on divine authority, but we oughtn’t ever claim to hold a monopoly on divine power.

The cross and the garden

I don’t know what to think—i give y’all better than a week to talk about lust, and all i get is one comment.

Apparently sex does not, in fact, sell.

Oh well. I’m back, so on with the three or four times a week schedule, starting with:

Where’s the doctrinal evidence behind the common Mormon meme that Gethsemane was of bigger importance to the Atonement than Golgotha? Is it just a way of distinguishing ourselves from mainstream Xian groups that focus on Christ’s miracle on the cross, or is there something deeper?

Happy Halloween!

Can i just say how happy i am that Mormon congregations pretty widely hold Halloween parties? (Generally limited to those parts of the world where Halloween is celebrated, of course.) There are too many mainstream-to-radically-conservative Xians out there who worry that Halloween is actually a tool of Satan, so as to normalize Satanic sorts of things. Well, Mormons may have their paranoias, but at least we don’t generally share that one!

Good translations

Time to give credit where it’s due.

The mainstream Xians who do the Veggie Tales videos got the content of Jonah’s prophecy to the Ninevites beautifully right (in my opinion) when they glossed it:

Stop it!

(Probably a reminder we all need now and again, now that i think about it.)

On evidences of apostasy

Today’s entry is semi-inspired by spending time in Kirtland, Ohio last Sunday with three different Latter Day Saint Movement churches, though i’ve thought it for a long, long time:

So what’s up with this widespread Mormon point of view that all the arguing amongst the existing Xian churches during the Second Great Awakening is proof that they were in apostasy? Given all the different Latter Day Saint Movement churches right now, and the doctrinal differences and occasional open disagreement between all of them, wouldn’t that mean we have proof that we are all in apostasy right now? I mean, if you’re gonna use the one, you have to be ready to be skewered with the other, right?

Are Mormons Protestant?

I’ve heard a number of people say that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints isn’t a Protestant church, but it’s also not a Catholic church. However, this leaves us undefined,* and it’d be nice to have a label of some sort—so here’s my take:

I’d argue that it’s true that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but rather that we’re part of a third (and much smaller) branch of Xianity, the Restoration branch (as opposed to Restorationist, which is clearly Protestant). This branch includes not just the LDS Movement religions, but also such religions as the New Apostolic Church and possibly the Quakers—basically, those churches that rejected previous approaches in favor of a restoration directly from the divine (or authority or spirit or whatever one cares to call it), without arguing that what’s involved is a “priesthood of all believers” or a similar idea.**

* And saying “We’re not Protestant, we’re not Catholic, we’re true” isn’t a valid way of dealing with it—it ignores the possibility that the Protestants or the Catholics or another of the neither-of-those groups is right.

** The Worldwide Church of God has gone through an interesting shift in which it started out as a Restoration church, but has moved toward fitting in better with Protestantism. There are a number of LDS Movement churches that have done the same.

Apologies, and the sacrament

First of all, administrivia by way of apology: Sorry about the lack of posts lately. Having to work ten or twelve hours a day to meet deadlines and getting nastily sick at the same time—well, let’s just say Real Life™ can be most unfun at times.

But enough of that—let’s get to today’s topic: The sacrament.

Why in the world do we call it the sacrament? Nearly other religion that uses the word sacrament, they mean what we mean when we say ordinance. In some other languages—i can vouch for German, at least, where Abendmahl is used for the eucharistic ordinance, in common with loads of other churches—we’ve avoided this confusing usage, so why do we feel the need to retain it in English? Seems bizarre for a missionary-oriented church.

Of course, the Community of Christ—the former Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—calls theirs the Lord’s supper, in common with a lot of other Xian churches. Maybe it’s an easy way to prove we’re not like them (whether them is the Community of Christ or mainstream Xianity in general)?

On the power of the Spirit

I (probably) don’t mean this as flippantly as this sounds, but since when did God become powerless enough not to be able to cut through the noise and bustle of everyday life, and be limited to communicating with us only when we’re in some sort of quiet meditative state? (After all, this pervasive-within-Mormonism idea just could’t have any useful side effects, like allowing us to dismiss charismatic/Pentecostal/evangelical-type spiritual experiences out of hand, so it’s not like we get any rhetorical mileage out of the idea, right? Right.)

Are Mormons Xian?

Why do Mormons want so intensely to be perceived as Xian? Given the state of modern American Xianity, I’d think we’d want people to perceive us as non-Xian.