Presbyterianism is the archetypical Calvinist faith. Not all of them are hardcore predestinationists (what? The Canadian Presbyterians joined the Methodists? Really?), but classically most Calvinists were either Presbyterians or Congregationalists.
Lots of Catholic schismatics claim to be orthodox Catholics. It’s pretty much a hallmark of traditionalist schism.
But, yeah, even if you are in schism from Catholicism, that doesn’t make you a Protestant. Protestantism had definite historical and theological connotations which go well beyond just “not Catholic” or “not Catholic and not Orthodox”.
It’s true to say that , historically speaking, Mormonism emerged from Protestant Christianity, and still has certain inheritance from Protestantism. But it is sufficiently theologically distinct that it’s not helpful to think of it as still being one of the Protestant traditions of Christianity.
Yea, verily that was a deep assessment of the issue! You’ve really done your research. (I’ve forgotten most of mine.) I salute you sir.
I do remember teaching eternal progression as a missionary back in the mid to late 90s.
I also remember Gordon B. Hinckley downplaying the long-touted adage “as man is god once was” (I think in an interview with Larry King) and wondering at the time, “why are you trying to downplay what I’ve been taught all this time and have been instructed to teach to others?”
Welcome GottaBeMeh. Nice name and nice perspective.
And foolsguinea, I thought your post was a good, succinct response to the OP. Well put.
Mormons are Protestant in the same way that Muslims are Syrian Orthodox. In both cases they developed out of the tradition, but rejected some theological claims inherent to their parent faith while adding revelatory claims not seen in their parent faith. I think that calling them a related Abrahamic faith is probably the best classification.
I don’t entirely disagree. I’ve tried my best to argue that the Oneness concept really isn’t all that important. There’s nothing in the Bible that declares that the Trinity is the only possible way to interpret the three forms of God. And there’s definitely nothing that says that salvation is dependent on it.
They still believe that Jesus is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so, as far as I’m concerned, they’re still baptizing in the name of all of them. They just disagree about this concept that’s not even in the Bible at all.
It seems to me that the only things that should really matter are the bare essentials, and that those essentials should be concepts that are in the shared Scriptures Christians have in common.
The rest is just what Paul condemned in Romans 14:1 “Accept those who faith is weak, without passing judgement on disputable matters.” Exactly how the Mysteries of God work is disputable.
The argument I mention in that previous post was most recently with a Catholic on Facebook who very much was arguing against Kim Davis because of that situation. I argued that the Oneness thing didn’t matter, just the fact that her own belief system didn’t agree with what she was doing. I didn’t like the idea of her condemning any non-Trinitarian Christians and making them defensive.
To me, the working argument right now is simply that, even if you think homosexuality is sinful and think homosexual marriage is invalid, there’s nothing in the Bible saying that you should discriminate against people over it. You can do business with them. You can give them a cake. You can sign off on their marriage, since that’s a legal thing.
Though I am also working on the idea that the Bible doesn’t actually condemn homosexuality but actually pedophilia/pederasty.
As I understand it, the Old Testament was going through one of its periodic rewrites when a Canaanite sect took an opportunity to snub a rival sect famous for embracing homosexuals.
Mostly the OT does.
But in the NT, those who commit homosexual acts are condemned along with adulterers, fornicators and drunkards:** 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 King James Version (KJV)**
*9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.*
So, if you wont make a cake for a gay couple, better not make it for that drunk either. Or that fornicator. Or that adulterer.
Since it’s a hijack to the debate: [spoiler]I think former members know a lot more about LDS church history than most active members.
I left for theological reasons – after living in Japan for a while, I couldn’t see why Mormonism or even Christianity in general was so Western Centric in philosophy and culture. It wasn’t until after I had already left that I stumbled on the historical problems.
Once I had decided for myself that the actual history did not match was I was taught growing up, I was fascinated by the question if Joseph Smith was misguided, a fraud, or something else. Apparently scholars who have studied him extensively find him to be complex.
Anyway, that lead me to study early Mormonism and to see what was happening and when. Why did Smith decide on Gold Plates for the record? As a fifth or sixth generation Mormon, obviously I knew the official story very well. However, learning about the religious and cultural beliefs of the time make it so much more plausible that young Joseph started off with the Gold Plate story as one of his father’s and his many tales of buried treasure and then things morphed from there.[/spoiler]
My mission was in Japan in the early 80s and we had a special set of discussions which were written by Elder Kikuchi, the Japanese General Authority. I’m not absolutely certain that it wasn’t taught, but I don’t remember it.
Continuing the discussion of the evolution of Mormonism, there seems to be concerted efforts since the 90s to make it appear to be part of mainstream Christianity. I think it may have come from Hinckley, although because I was in Japan and this was pre-Internet, I didn’t see it in real time.
This is quite different from my childhood experiences in the 60s and 70s when we thought of ourselves as a “particular people” and were quite happy to be seen as vastly different than the poor souls who didn’t know the truth. To have a member suggest that the Church could be considered Protestant, like that Mormon blogger did, would have raised eyebrows back then.
I donno. If the Adam-God doctrine continued past Brigham Young and had been further developed by subsequent prophets then you could be right, but I don’t think that a majority of Christians now would consider Mormons to not be in the same group. Obviously some do, but probably not the majority.
Are you talking about Mormons? Because no, they definitely do not. Sorry if you weren’t.
Hinkley definitely tried to make the Church more mainstream. And the Church has been whitewashing its “quirks” for a long time. Many mormons born in the 90s probably don’t know half the stuff we used to call “deep doctrine.”
Benson was the last hard core President in my opinion.
Anyway, found it interesting that most of the Ex Mormon Dopers here are now atheists. I guess the “if Mormonism is ain’t true, none of them are!” attitude stuck, haha.
I haven’t even stepped into another church.
I also served in Japan, at the time Hinckley became president. (I met Elder Kikuchi a few times.)
The missionaries who preceded us had employed special strategies intended to make it easier for Japanese people to accept the church, including lots of friendly social activities and emphasizing various perceived links between Christianity/Mormonism and Japanese culture – the so-called Amon Project.
By the time I arrived in the field, that had been abandoned in favor of the standard 5-part lesson plan.
Shortly after I arrived, the Ohm-Sinri cult attacks occured; so missionaries were urged to emphasize the mainstream, not-at-all weird nature of the church.
But at the same time, teaching about the apostasy and restoration through Joseph Smith (ie, the idea that Mormonism is unique and the only path to salvation) was a key component of the standard lessons; as was teaching the principal of exaltation and eternal progression (ie, you too can become a god and create worlds without number). So, it was a bit of a balancing act trying to convince people we were both completely normal and very special.
My senior companion once chided me for mentioning in our first lesson with one investigator that Joseph Smith was only 14 when he met god and Jesus in his first vision, even though that was part of the standard lesson plan.
Well, I was Deist for a while. Now I’m agnostic.
Same. Except I lean now towards atheist.
What do you call an atheist that hopes he’s wrong?
I don’t know.
What do you call an atheist that hopes he’s wrong?
. . .
Oh, sorry.
I thought that was a set up for a joke.
It might be 
I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a term for that though.
I was there in the early 80s at the tail end of the Kikuchi Groburg fiasco where the entire missionary discussions were abbreviated down to 1.5 to 2 hours and teenagers were targeted because of their naivety. I’ve written about this before:
And I go on to explain how we were sent out to talk to people to see if they wanted off the roles. Although that wasn’t technically called an “unbaptism” that was essentially what we did.
If you google “kikuchi groberg” (the latter is the missionary president in Tokyo who was responsible for the chaos) you can get all of the dirt on the sordid tail. It was pretty ugly and many missionaries later left the church because of it.
I was agnostic for a while then became an atheist.
One small quibble. I see a few people say Protestants come from Calvin or Luther leaving Rome. It would be more accurate to say they come from Zwingli or Luther. Calvin converted about a decade after the big splits from Rome (he was after all born in 1509). Though he definitely was highly influential (he is arguably more influential than even Luther), I’d say he followed from Zwingli’s work.
Eh… if the theology depends on Jesus as God incarnate defeating sin and death through His death and resurrection, then it definitely DOES matter if Jesus and the Father are the same. It’s not just splitting hairs as it has profound consequences for how one looks at salvation and justification.
How so? I can maybe see it between Catholicism and Protestantism, but I can’t see it between Protestantism and Mormonism, which have a fundamentally different view of the trinity, yet still believe that you need to accept Jesus as your savior and be baptized. I don’t see the big difference there.
I think that there’s a big difference between sending your son to die and sending yourself to die. Non-trinitarianism has a number of philosophical differences with trinitarianism. The biggest is that it is a denial of monotheism. For the sake of ease, we’ll define non-Mormons as ‘Traditional Christians.’ Traditional Christians believe in a single God. The Trinity is three persons within a single being. We anthropomorphize the Trinity into differing shapes because it’s a difficult concept, but in Traditional Christianity, the being of God is singular - Father, Christ and Holy Spirit are aspects of a singular eternal entity. In Mormonism, the Godhead is much more like a committee where God is the oldest and Christ and the Holy Spirit came later. When we say ‘God sent his son to save the world.’ What Traditional Christians mean is that God sent an aspect of himself, not merely one member of the committee. It’s important in soteriology because Christ bridges the Man-God gap which he could not do if he were not God or somehow below God or even one of three Gods who happen to agree most of the time.
Joseph Smith’s conception of God was not even the anti-trinitarianism of the Arians or the Gnostics, but rather an uneducated person’s attempt at reconciling common language regarding the Trinity with the essential One-ness of God. What he arrived at was that God was not one and from that basic logical leap, he jumped into a place where God is not even eternal and simply created by another God and who then created Gods himself and in fact created us who will one day become God and I guess then free to run our own little universes. This idea may or may not have merit, but it’s pretty far from Traditional Christian conceptions of what God is and isn’t. Drawing lines is always hard, when does Temple Judaism become Rabbinical Judaism? When does Christianity cease being Temple Judaism? When does Islam stop being Syriac Christian and become its own thing? They aren’t as set in stone as we believe. At the same time though, they are all different things and I think that the Mormon conception of God is very, very different from the Traditional Christian conception of God and thus its own thing.
If God did not take on human form and die and then conquer that death (which are the ‘wages of sin’), then is one really absolved of one’s sin if you accept Jesus as your savior? I think most Protestants would have some form of issue with that.
I do also believe that Mormonism tends to be more (for lack of a better term) ‘works righteous’ than most Protestant denominations. ‘Grace alone’ isn’t a part of Mormon soteriology. In that, accepting Jesus as your savior isn’t enough - you also have to do good works / cooperate with God. It is more Catholic or Orthodox idea of salvation than a Protestant one.
Yeah, you’re right. Definitely is more to “getting to heaven” than just accepting Christ and baptism. But it is even more complicated than that in that there are 3 degrees of heaven, and the closest thing to hell is so awesome you’d kill yourself to get there (not counting Outer Darkness, which Mormon’s won’t commit that even Hitler would go to). Yeah there’s the traditional stuff, plus getting endowed, blah blah blah to get to the highest.
I have always thought that Mormons viewed Catholicism as their “closest opponent” as far as who is “right”. Protestants are basically disregarded altogether since they are simply an offshoot of Catholicism. And I always thought the “get baptized and accept Jesus” was a lazy way into heaven.
The funny thing is, from an outside perspective, I think Mormonism is closer to Islam than any other religion!