See, I’ve never heard it phrased like this. I don’t claim to be the King of Theology or anything, but are you sure “Christians” will all agree with this “culminating, perfect, and final” business? Seems like all sorts of liberal Christians will concede that the Bible was inspired by God, but written by men who may have goofed here and there.
Point taken.
My beef with this:
The Nicene creed is far from a detailed list of clear requirements. It’s a poem full of figurative language and flourishes of ambiguity. What does affirming a belief that Jesus is “seated at the right hand of the Father” actually mean? Do you have to believe that God is up there in a throne and Jesus is always on his right to be a Christian? When it says Jesus “ascended into heaven” do you have to believe that Jesus literally flew into the sky? Or can you treat it as a metaphor for his soul rising into heaven?
I’d say that certain Christians, such as colonial here, evidently don’t consider the Bible to be the final say. After all, they’re using something penned a few hundred years afterwards at the litmus test.
I do not see how there could be any dissent applying the terms to Christ, even
in the case of Unitarians who deny Christ’s personal divinity, but IIRC accept
the divinity of his message.
NB I specified the *New *Testament, which relieves liberals of having to swallow
OT stories such as, well, such as Jonah being swallowed by a whale. The words
“culminating” and “final” should not incite controversy. The NT does contain
obvious contradiction in the record of events, and so is not in that sense perfect.
However, it is considered perfect in its revelation of the mind of God, sectarian
disagreement as to the revelation’s precise meaning being beside the point.
But the New Testament contains revelations that are in irreconcilable contradiction. I’m not talking about conflicting narratives, but some things that are at the very foundation of christian belief. Jesus says that every letter of Mosaic Law is still in effect until the end of the world. Paul says there is a new covenant.
Paul says salvation comes from faith alone and “apart from” works, but the Epistle of James says faith alone is not enough and that “faith without works is dead.”
These are not small things. The New Testament does not provide a singular, unified, coherent revelation or template for belief. You still have to pick and choose.
colonial: I have a question for you about your posts in this thread. What’s with the odd column-style typing? I’m fairly sure you can trust me on this one; no matter what device you’re using to access the board, the lines will auto-wrap.
Well, first of all, the Trinity is fairly universal…whatever problems other denominations have with Catholicism, it’s not over that, I don’t think. Secondly, all of that is just about different interpretations of the New Testament, it’s not about another Testament altogether, as the LDS is. As I said, a new Revelation that re-defines God is a whole different ball game, IMO.
The New Testament does not define God as triune (or really give any lucid definition of God at all), and Trinitarian beliefs are not universal. They are rejected by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science, for instance. The Trinity is not in the New Testament.
As I said, it’s an interpretation of the New Testament.
So is the Book of Mormon.
Lots of traditional Christian churches still believe in revelation, by the way. That is plenty of them believe that it is still possible to receive new, revealed truths, from God, so it is not heretical, in itself, to believe that it happened to Joseph Smith.
I don’t get that statement at all. It’s a completely new story about events that happened in a completely different time and place from the New Testament.
Only Christ can say what’s Christian. But, whatever the Mormons are, they are something fundamentally different from what Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians are. Mormon doctrine, theology, cosmology and mythology are all very different from Trinitarian Christianity. What Jesus is doing in the story is different. The afterlife and how you get there are different. It’s like, the C/O/P Christians are all sitting at this table over here, and the Mormons are at that table over there . . . while the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and Christian Scientists are just kind of hovering around looking for a seat.
He always does it and he gets touchy if you call him on it, careful!
Mormonism requiring re-baptism if other Christians convert has nothing to do with differences in the “conceptual definition of the Trinity”. It’s all about the line of “priesthood” authority. They believe that around the time that the early Christian church slipped into general apostasy, the authority to baptize was lost. They regained this authority when John the Baptist visited Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery.
I’m sorry, I actually did know that. My bad.
The Articles of Faith and the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible (included as footnotes in the LDS edition of the KJV and as the section “Joseph Smith - Matthew” in the Pearl of Great Price) may be described as an interpretation of the New Testament. The Book of Mormon, the rest of the Pearl of Great Price, and most of Docrtine and Covenants are new books of scripture that, while Mormons consider them to be compatible with the NT, go way beyond being an “interpretation”.
(Or on preview, exactly what Sarafeena said in post #73.)
Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses are not Christian either. Religion is a set of beliefs about God. You can not have a seperate belief system about God and be the same religion. Christians belief that God the Father and Jesus are eternal parts of the triune God. Mormons believe that God the Father and Jesus were people who lived, died and went to heaven where God the Father became God and chose Jesus to go back to earth. These are obviously different beliefs. The same religion can not have different beliefs about the nature of God.
I don’t think anyone has claimed that Mormonism and Catholicism are “the same religion”. The argument is whether they fall under the general umbrella of “Christianity”.