The problem in the US is we are largely unexposed to alternative Christian thought. The early Roman creeds were not the only ones running about. And in non-European churches there are versions of Christianity that have views on the Trinity that are no less variant than the Mormons. Take the Assyrian, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian and other Eastern churches. They all disagree with the Nicean creed in one or more ways (admittedly sometimes very minor ways). Some are in communion with the Roman Catholic church. Some aren’t. All are at least as old as western Christianity. All should be considered Christian.
Then you have all the early divisions that died out; the Ebionties (Christ was not divine at all, similar to the modern Jehovah’s Witnesses in that regard), the Arians (Christ was divine, but not co-eternal with the Father), Marcionites (where the Father isn’t Jehovah), the adoptionists, and so on. Of the 1800 odd bishops known in 325 only some 300 odd participated. And for the better part of a Century the Arians and their completing creed dominated in Rome and for a couple centuries they dominated among the Germans. It seems a bit odd to toss out what was likely a majority of early Christians.
What percentage of Christian sects follow that tenet? If most, then that would be a good rule of thumb. If not, then what you have is a way to tell if Mormons are Presbyterian.
Am I, then, a Christian? Because I’m sure as hell an atheist, too. I could argue that much of the Western system of ethics is traceable to Jesus, especially the Christian notion of the virtue of poverty and Slave Morality in Western culture, but in my case, it’s unnecessary. I’ve always found the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ radical pacifism therein very attractive. But I don’t believe in God, Jesus as anything other than a historical figure, or a higher power of any kind. Am I still a Christian?
The traditional definition of a Christian that I learned was of someone who believed that Jesus Christ was their Lord and Savior. I don’t know how that applies to LDS beliefs.
Actually, the JWs are closer to the Arians than the Ebionites. JWs & Arians agree that The Son was The Father’s first Creation, that The Son was Godlike but not God, that The Father & The Son created everything else, and that when the time came, The Son was conceived miraculously through the Virgin Mary. The Ebionites believed that God created Jesus to be the natural son of Joseph and Mary and made Jesus to be His Son through Jesus’s obedience, the Spirit’s anointing at Jesus’s baptism, and exaltation after the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Going through JW literature, they even claim Arius as a forerunner.
Wow. You really do need to get a tad more familiar with the definitions of objective and subjective. You chose the wrong word in that [del]glurge[/del] statement.
While you have that dictionary open, cruise over to the definition of opinion, too.
Oh? And do you care to tell us “what Mormons are, what Mormons are not”? But be sure to do it without all the opinion and subjective views, if you don’t mind.
I know more than a few people who recite the Nicene Creed and even the Apostles’ Creed without knowing the names of the things. Hey, I know even more people who say they believe those creeds along with the Athanasian Creed but those people cannot explain any of them.
There may be soem fussiness about details, but the historic Christian consensus has been that God the Father is supreme & eternal, not the latest in a potential lineage of Gods.
The latter part, becoming like God, just depends on what is meant by that. The LDS version seems to mean that our difference from The Father is one of degree, not essence- just like the difference between us and out mortal fathers. They will always be older than us, but providing we remain in good health, we can become as old as they are now & as strong as they were in their prime. Many versions of Christian faith have us participating in the Immortality of God & some of His powers, but not growing to be God as He is now.
Actually, I cannot do this. My definition of a christian faith is one that claims to be christian. Thus there cannot be a faith that claims to be christian that isn’t.
What I mean by that is I think the fairest way to describe religion, just like race, is to permit complete freedom of individual self designation.
If someone believes there is no god but allah and muhammed is his prophet, and describes himself as a christian, then as far as I am concerned he is a christian.
And for this reason I consider mormons christian. Heck, I’ll consider them to be catholics if they want to be. I believe the church of england considers itself catholic.
Personally I don’t think the question can be resolved that simply.
Suppose someone claimed to be a Freudian, i. e. a believer in the theories of Sigmund Freud. Suppose that this person then told you that he believed Sigmund Freud was a hoola dancer who lived in Australia in the 8th century. If so, you’d probably agree that this person did not actually follow the same Sigmund Freud that most Freudians follow.
The Mormons have a similar problem with Jesus. The person named “Jesus Christ” that they follow showed up at additional places that the historical person named Jesus Christ never visited, and said and did things which radically contradict what the historical person named Jesus Christ said and did. Hence the person in Mormon teaching named “Jesus Christ” is not the same person as the historical figure named Jesus Christ worshiped by Christians.
If everyone gets to be Christian then the word has no meaning. Whenever a group is formed, it excludes people. A religion is a set of beliefs about God and how he wants us to act. If a group does not believe the same things about the nature of God they become their own religion. Christians and Jews both believe in the God of Abraham and the ten commandments. Christians are not Jews because Christians believe in the trinity, the divine nature of Jesus, and the New Testament. Muslims and Jews both believe in the God of Abraham but Muslims are not Jews because they believe in the Laws of Mohammend and the Koran. Muslims believe that Jesus was sent from God to be a great prophet but they are not Christians because the do not believe in the divinity of Jesus.
Mormons do not believe in the trinity, believe God has a different nature, believe Jesus has a different nature, and believe in the Book of Mormon.
According to Mormon beliefs when Joseph Smith asked the angel what denomination was the one he should follow, the angel told him that all of them were an abomination and none had the truth. That is how the founder of Mormonism thought about Christianity.
Mormons are therefore not Christian.
Nitpick: sermons occur in the local chapels, or are broadcast from the Tabernacle or the Conference Center. LDS temples are for ceremonies (called ordinances), not sermons.
This definition excludes people who believe in the divinity of Jesus yet discard the bits about welfare and turning the other cheek. And it includes people who view Jesus as a non-divine moral philosopher.
But people were calling themselves Christian before the creed. The word appears in the New Testament. Mormons ignore the Creeds because they are too confusing and mysterious and internally inconsistent. They believe in the divinity of Jesus, view him as the only path to salvation and eternal life, and they defend their beliefs using cherry-picked passages from the New Testament. Just like all other Christians.
Up until a few years ago, I was a Mormon. I professed belief in the New Testament. I read the NT (KJV) several times. I believed in the divinity of Jesus, accepted the miracles and sermons as historical facts, believed that Paul and the other apsotles had a telepathic connection to the ressurected Jesus, and believed that I would be resurrected and forgiven of all sins thanks to the resurection and atonement of Jesus. The Creeds were incomprehensible, and they contradicted the Bible as it had been explained to me.
A person who self-identifies as a believer in a divine Jesus Christ is a Christian. Why does it have to be more complicated than that?
How do you know what the Historical Jesus said and did? The historical Jesus obviously never could have really resurrected or spoken to Paul on the road to Damascus, so the New Testament contains things that the real Jesus never did, and also contains irreconcilably contradictory claims about him.
Even if you are a believer, and you think Jesus appeared to Paul after his ascension, then he just as easily could have appeared to Native Americans. People even now think Jesus appears to them, so how do you know who’s telling the truth and who isn’t?
The Mormons believe things that are not attested in the New Testament, but they don’t believe anything that contradicts the New Testament, and both the New Testament and the Book of Mormon contains claims that can’t be historically, literally true. That’s hardly a barometer for being a Christian. If Christians are defined as excluding any beliefs about Jesus that are not historically true, then the only true Christians are atheists.
People love to trot this out every time this topic comes up but it simply isn’t true. The Jesus Christ in the Book of Mormon is no different than the Biblical Jesus because that part is almost word for word a copy of the Bible. It is impossible for Book of Mormon Jesus to “radically contradict what the historical person named Jesus Christ said and did” when the whole visit is a clear copy/plagiarism.
Clearly all the other weird revelations to Joseph Smith have nothing to do with the Biblical Jesus, but the Book of Mormon contains no such thing.
Mormons are clearly outside the Christian mainstream, but it’s silly to deny that once you move past the baroque absurdities and sci-fi cosmology, at Mormonism’s heart lies a simple Christian idea.
Their person named “Jesus Christ” was the Creator of the Earth, was born in Bethlehem to a virgin named Mary in approximately 0 C.E., was the only begotten son of God the Father, performed miracles in the Jerusalem area, founded a church upon the “rock” of Simon Peter, suffered to atone for the sins of mankind, was crucufied on a Friday before sundown, was resurrected early Sunday morning, had the ability to appear in rooms without the use of a door and yet could be handled by his followers, had the ability to ascend into heaven, claimed that he was going to visit “other sheep who are not of this fold,” and has since been seen by several people such as Paul and Stephen.
I don’t think your analogy of the 8th century Australian hoola dancer is relevant.
Two things wrong: (1) In the official version of the Joseph Smith story, Joseph wasn’t talking to “the angel”. He was talking to the resurrected Jesus. And (2), this story tells us how the founder of Mormonism thought about the Christian denominantions that were around in 1820, not about Christianity in general. Mormons believe that the 1st-century Christian church in the Holy Land, the fictional 1st-century Christian church in the Americas, and the “restored” Latter-day church are all the same church, and that all other Christian variants are (pick your favorite word: abominations / whore / heresy). They describe you as a heretical Christian, and they expect you to describe them the same way.
I’m sorry if I was misunderstood. But as others have pointed out in this thread, the Nicene Creed is much broader than one denomination. Virtually all traditional Western European denominations follow it in one form or another. Presbyterians are in such a subset.
What I believe is that people who treat all other people, including their enemies, lovingly are Christians. I find every Mormon, both practicing and who have moved away from their faith, do this. I think that Mormons are generally Christians.
I’m glad we both agree that Mormons are generally Christians.
But I take offense at the idea that Christian = Moral. Lots of non-Christians treat people lovingly. And lots of Christians are total douchenozzles.
I lived in Tahiti for a while. There, “catholic” is a slang term for “moral”. If someone is rude, “that’s not very catholic”. If someone is generous, “how very catholic!” Non-Catholics ought to take offense, just as non-Christians ought to dispute the suggestion that loving = Christian. Jesus promoted love, but he didn’t invent it and his believers certainly don’t have a monopoly on it.
I believe mine is just so, and you fail to make any case against it.
There is no reason to even mention the Nicene Creed if its profession is
not necessary for a Christian.
My parsimonious definition objectively encompasses Catholic, Protestant,
Orthodox, Monophysite, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, and numerous
others such as Mennonites and Arians (JWs I am not sure about). It is also
effective at removing imposters.
So does Islam. So did David Koresh.
So did Koresh.
And NB LDS include as scripture includes work as alien to Christianity as the Koran.
If profession of the Nicene Creed is not necessary for being Christian then
there is no reason to bring it up, and to keep repeating it.