“As man is, God once was. As God is, man can someday become.” Yes, LDS believe that Jesus is God, but they believe that you & I can become just as much God, though of course, Jesus and the Father will continue to progress, so they’ll still be ahead of us.
I do believe that many LDS are Christians, because they do trust in Jesus for their salvation, but the doctrines of Eternal Progression and the former humanity of Father God do fly in the face of historical Christianity.
Oh, I’m Assembly of God, and I am leaning to Romney.
Except that the LDS’s definition of “God” is so outside of the historic Christian consensus that I don’t fault those who do challenge the “true C’tianity” of the LDS faith. I just figure that many LDS are still “born-again” in spite of such “errant” theology, even as many LDS count other C’tians as true believers in spite of our “errant” theology.
I do know many who believe (or at least in 2005, strongly believed)
[ol]
[li]God will guide those who look to Him for guidance[/li][li]GWB is looking to God for guidance[/li][li]God guides GWB[/li][li]GWB does what God is leading him to do.[/li][/ol]
A number of people in that mindset who are also mostly non-politically active (don’t really follow politics in general, but showed up for Bush in 2000 & 2004) are not going to bother to go to the polls to vote for Romney. Should he become the candidate in the general election, they just won’t vote.
Well, kind of- Witnesses are much closer to historic C’tian teachings than the LDS on the very nature of God. JW’s & historic C’tians agree on the eternal unchangeable Deity of the Father, and the primacy of the Son as the Creating Agent of all other beings. However, they still differ on the degree that the Son shares in the Divinity of the Father and if there was ever a time the Son did not exist.
I would expect a reasoned, rational, informed response from you. And you did not disappoint.
The sheer and utter nonsense part of my post dealt with : “Indeed, the beliefs of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, or Christian Scientists are no closer to those of standard Protestants, Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox Christians than are the beliefs of Jewish or Moslem believers. The beliefs of Mormans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, or Christian Scientists are only slightly closer to the beliefs of Protestants, Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox believers than are the beliefs of Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jainist, or Bahai believers.”
As I suspect you know, the JWs, as one example, do not practice inter-faith and find little communion with other Christian faiths. Nonetheless, the average door knocking JW knows full well that a professed Christian shares a pretty fair amount of common ground with them. (even considering dividing issues like hell, or the trinity) But to state that the beliefs of JWs, LDSs, UUs etc are no closer than those of an orthodox Jew or Muslim is silly. And to suggest that those beliefs are “only slightly closer” than those held by “Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jainist, or Bahai believers” is rubbish.
I stand by my statement. The Mormon faith is an Abrahamic faith, in the sense that they are derived from Jewish beliefs and use the Jewish scriptures. So do Jews and Moslems. Christians (most Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox) are monotheists, as are Jews and Moslems. Mormons aren’t. They have some weird (and hard to understand) belief about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost being different beings, not just different persons. They believe that people can become gods after their deaths.
And Christians. Whatever point you imagine you are making here is stupefying.
Of course the Christians have an extra testamant from God, that they use as well. Mormons use that one too. Mormons also have other later documents they regard as later testaments of God’s will, just as the more traditional Christians have their New Testament.
Not true. They believe in one God (at least as much as any Christian does, more on that below), the same one all other Christians believe in.
Yes, because the Doctrine of the Trinity is a triumph of logical clarity. What you are declaring “hard to understand” is that the Mormons regard three separately identified beings in the New Testament as, what do you know, separate entities.
As opposed to the much more intuitive: Well, they are three aspects of a singular godhead, so they are one and the same God, but not really. Christians have been telling themselves this rationalization for centuries to convince themselves that they are monotheistic. Then some of them imbue other entities with god-like control over various aspects of life, and pray to them to intervene. Oh, but they’re not gods, they’re “patron saints”. Yeah, Christians are aaaaalllll monotheistic and shit.
Well, yeah, that they do. It’s only weird until you think about it for a minute.
If Jesus is the example of how life should be lived, then it would seem to follow that by living and believing like Jesus, we could attain immortality and divinity, just like he did. If, however, he’s the only one who could really do it that way, being the son of God and all (which the Mormons do think he is, by the way), then it’s not clear what the result is supposed to be if a normal human follows Jesus’ path. It could wind up being an exercise in futility. So the Mormon’s decided that Jesus’ example was what could happen to you if you lived life according to God’s plan. Which would mean that a really talented Mormon could achieve immortality and divinity, just like Jesus.
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Getting back to the subject of the thread, I don’t doubt that your reasoning is probably the same as that behind evangelicals who don’t like Romney. Doesn’t mean the viewpoint isn’t full of shit. I’d love it if Romney became a front runner for the nomination, and his main opponent was revealed as a Snake Handler. Would the evangelicals be lining up to vote for the latter? The thought amuses.
> And Christians. Whatever point you imagine you are making here is stupefying.
Yes, of course I included Christianity in the Abrahamic faiths. That was my point. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Mormorism are all Abrahamic faiths, since they all derive from Judaism and all partly use the Jewish scriptures. Other than that, they are quite different. They don’t have the same canon of scriptures. In that sense, Mormonism is no closer to Christianity than Judaism or Islam is. Mormonism’s canon of scriptures overlaps with those of Christianity, but it isn’t the same, just as the scriptures of Judaism or Islam overlaps with those of Christianity, but they aren’t the same.
> So the Mormon’s decided that Jesus’ example was what could happen to you if
> you lived life according to God’s plan. Which would mean that a really talented
> Mormon could achieve immortality and divinity, just like Jesus.
If you believe that it’s possible to achieve divinity, you’re either claiming that there are other gods or you’re stretching the term “divinity.”
My point in the first place was that some evangelicals believe that Mormons are not Christians. Whether Mormons believe they are Christians is irrelevant to the point of this thread. The official position of nearly all Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox is that Mormonism isn’t Christianity. For instance, they will accept each other’s baptism, but they won’t accept Mormon baptism:
What we have here basically is Mormons claiming that they generally agree with the basic tenets of Christianity, while nearly all Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox say that they don’t and hence aren’t Christians. This sort of position is actually fairly common in debates. Group X says “We’re mostly in agreement with group Y.” Group Y says, “No, you’re not in agreement with us about the basics.” The argument then turns into one not about the original issue but about whether the two sides are in agreement or not.
Also, for what it’s worth, I should again emphasize that I’m only reporting on the beliefs of some evangelicals about voting for Mormons. I’m not agreeing with them. My own position is as follows:
We never know for sure the religious beliefs of a political candidate. We only know what he claims to believe in his speeches. It’s too easy for a candidate to claim that he believes the same thing as some of the voters he’s trying to woo. It’s also hard to be sure what consequence the religious views of a candidate have on his actions in office.
We only partly know the personal habits of a candidate. We only know what he has publicly made known or has somehow been revealed. When we know the personal habits of one candidate and not his opponent, it often proves only that one political party is able to afford more private detectives to investigate the other candidate. If a candidate has committed a crime, it’s the job of law enforcement to investigate it, not the voters.
We know what the political positions of a candidate are. He announces them in his speeches. If he’s previously been in office, we know if he’ll stick to his positions.
Therefore, I only vote for a candidate because of his political statements and, in egregious cases, his personal actions. I would never vote for or against a candidate because of his religious views. The only relevant thing is what he will do in office.
Mormons believe this no less than Protestants or Catholics. They believe in the unity of the Godhead, they just believe that unity arises from intent and purpose, not from being. As a traditionalist Trinitarian, it’s not a distinction I personally can get all that worked up over. Just as Jews and Muslims can tell Trinitarians we are not monotheists because we believe in the Trinity, so we can turn around and say Mormons are not monotheists because they believe the aspects of the Godhead are separate. I’ve never seen much value in trying to exclude people from the family of Christianity on the same or similar grounds that others might try to exclude Christians from the family of People of the Book.
Mainstream Christianity affirmatively denies and rejects that any deistic status is available to any person. So immortality, yes; divinity, no.
Actually, it’s abundantly clear from the Bible what the result is supposed to be if a normal human follows Jesus’s path: “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
I’m not prosteltyzing or pushing this POV, but the idea that there is Biblical uncertainty as to the result of following Jesus is simply inaccurate. And Mormons don’t believe it, either.
My difficulty with LDS theology is not really focused on the Unity of the Three Persons in the Godhead, but the idea that the Father was at one time NOT
the Eternal Unchanging God, but was at one time a created man who was deified
through obedience to his Father God, and that we can go through the same process with the same result.
I just want to say that if it comes down to two candidates that I consider equally talented, and able to do the job, and their platforms are equally acceptable to me, and the only difference is one is supported by the evangelicals, and the other isn’t.