Romney and the Divinity of the Christ
Posted 04-11-2012 at 07:28 AM by Grandma Bates
Once again, I started to respond to a post in a thread, and by the time I got done I realized that I had typed out a small novel. In this case it was a response to the question as to whether or not Gov. Romney is a Christian. The question was raised as to whether or not the LDS church is indeed a Christian tradition. That question immediately leads to the question of the Divinity of the Christ. The LDS Church does teach that the Christ is Divine, but he is not the only one.
The question raised in the thread is the nature of the Trinity. The Trinity is a central Christian tenant that describes the mystery of the "three-in-one" God. The idea of the Trinity was part of a response to gnosticism which was a recurring heresy in the early church. The Council of Nicea was an early attempt to formally address this heresy and has influenced Christian thought ever since.
The LDS view on the Trinity is a central issue as to whether or not the LDS faith really is a Christian tradition. I lived in Utah for a short period and trying to get at this idea with my LDS friends was surprisingly difficult. They know which parts of their faith sound odd and know how to avoid/dodge the issue which can be quite frustrating. Disclaimer: because of this the following is my understanding of LDS doctrine but is likely skewed and misses important subtleties
The LDS doctrine is basically that
Jesus, the eldest son of the Father, was chosen after a "Grand Council" to deliver the true message to humanity which has since been perverted and lost until it was later revealed to Joseph Smith and other prophets.
Gospel Principles
Gospel Principles
There is a Trinity in the LDS faith, but it represents three separate beings. The Christ was a messenger sent by the father. He was the son of the Father, but at the same time so is everyone else. The LDS doctrine includes the divinity of the Christ, but that is technically true since the Christ shares the same divinity as everyone else.
If you believe that the divinity of Christ is a central tenant of Christianity and that Christ's death on the cross was a sacrifice of the carnate God made for humanity then there is a serious question as to whether or not the LDS faith is a Christian faith. It is certainly not consistent with the Christian tradition that came from Council of Nicea. In fact Joseph Smith explicitly stated that the Church had twisted and lost the real teachings of Jesus.
When LDS church members say they believe in a Trinity it is not about a mystery of the nature of God. Rather, it is a simple fact about three important beings in the teachings of Joseph Smith. This is not something found in the bible, and Joseph Smith taught that this fundamental idea was purposely lost by those who wished to deceive others. The question is not whether or not the LDS Church includes a doctorine of the Trinity, but what is the Trinity and what is the nature of the Divinity of the Christ.
The Prophet, Joseph Smith, explicitly stated that the true message of Jesus had been twisted and lost. For other Christian traditions to embrace the LDS faith as a Christian faith is problematic and should raise questions about the central role of the Christ's carnate life.
The question raised in the thread is the nature of the Trinity. The Trinity is a central Christian tenant that describes the mystery of the "three-in-one" God. The idea of the Trinity was part of a response to gnosticism which was a recurring heresy in the early church. The Council of Nicea was an early attempt to formally address this heresy and has influenced Christian thought ever since.
The LDS view on the Trinity is a central issue as to whether or not the LDS faith really is a Christian tradition. I lived in Utah for a short period and trying to get at this idea with my LDS friends was surprisingly difficult. They know which parts of their faith sound odd and know how to avoid/dodge the issue which can be quite frustrating. Disclaimer: because of this the following is my understanding of LDS doctrine but is likely skewed and misses important subtleties
The LDS doctrine is basically that
Jesus is a child of the Supreme Being, but ain't we all!
Jesus, the eldest son of the Father, was chosen after a "Grand Council" to deliver the true message to humanity which has since been perverted and lost until it was later revealed to Joseph Smith and other prophets.
Gospel Principles
Gospel Principles
There is a Trinity in the LDS faith, but it represents three separate beings. The Christ was a messenger sent by the father. He was the son of the Father, but at the same time so is everyone else. The LDS doctrine includes the divinity of the Christ, but that is technically true since the Christ shares the same divinity as everyone else.
If you believe that the divinity of Christ is a central tenant of Christianity and that Christ's death on the cross was a sacrifice of the carnate God made for humanity then there is a serious question as to whether or not the LDS faith is a Christian faith. It is certainly not consistent with the Christian tradition that came from Council of Nicea. In fact Joseph Smith explicitly stated that the Church had twisted and lost the real teachings of Jesus.
When LDS church members say they believe in a Trinity it is not about a mystery of the nature of God. Rather, it is a simple fact about three important beings in the teachings of Joseph Smith. This is not something found in the bible, and Joseph Smith taught that this fundamental idea was purposely lost by those who wished to deceive others. The question is not whether or not the LDS Church includes a doctorine of the Trinity, but what is the Trinity and what is the nature of the Divinity of the Christ.
The Prophet, Joseph Smith, explicitly stated that the true message of Jesus had been twisted and lost. For other Christian traditions to embrace the LDS faith as a Christian faith is problematic and should raise questions about the central role of the Christ's carnate life.
Total Comments 5
Comments
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The LDS don't claim to adhere to the Nicene Creed, so if that is your baseline for being Christian you would have to say they are not Christian.
However, there is a large gap in time between what is supposed to be the timeframe of the Pauline letters and the Council of Nicaea. Gnosticism isn't really any less Biblical than Nicene Christianity and it can even be argued that it is more so. To my mind the decisions at Nicaea were political in nature and not proof that one flavor of ancient Christianity was correct and all the others were heresies.
Having said that, the LDS religion is basically a modern invention. They do consider Christ to be divine in a sense mortal humans are not, with a special role in what they call the "Godhead" rather than the Trinity. What the Mormons are not is monotheistic.
But the question of "who is a Christian?" defined by the Nicene Creed or any other sectarian definition sounds narrow to my modern ears. Possibly it is because I grew up in a place where not only Mormonism but also theistic Unitarianism and Universalism all passed muster as "normal." Fights in America over "who is a Christian" invariably carry overtones of what types of religion get to be treated as normal, enforceable and even tolerated.
In my experience, when people leave Mormonism, as I did, they rarely become Nicene Christians. There's no reason to flee authoritarian religion only to replace it with a different dogma. The more usual route is to become nontheistic, or take up with a personal beiief or something off the beaten path such as neopaganism.
At various times Mormons have been discriminated against for their religion, and it's something that occasionally still happened to me even after I had long since left it. There's a wariness even among ex-Mormons about what motivates so much anti-Mormon rhetoric. On the one hand, we don't want people joining a church we took the trouble to leave, sometimes at great personal cost. On the other hand, there are moderate and liberal Mormons, and an atmosphere that makes it okay to discriminate based on religion won't stop at picking on only one unpopular group.
Romney has sold out to the Republican right, but so has the original leadership of his church. Without a channel to give feedback to the leadership about questions of this sort, anyone who objects strongly enough will just leave.Posted 04-18-2012 at 03:50 AM by Brenda Archer
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Thank you for the very thoughtful response. It is very interesting to hear this from the point of view of a so-called "Jack Mormon." (I hope that does not come off as negative.)
I agree that this is a very narrow baseline for Christianity. I also agree that the Council of Nicaea was a political invention. Constantine decided that the religious issues were damaging for the empire and forced the issue on his bishops. The result is that the "heresy" of Gnosticism is a heresy by definition.
As a matter of doctrine, though, the council's decisions have shaped and defined Christian thought and created the foundation for the Christian church in the West. It has established the "accepted" notion of a Christ that is one with the Holy Spirit and the Father wrapped in the mystery of the Trinity.
If you accept this narrow definition then there is a legitimate basis for questioning whether or not the LDS church is a Christian enterprise. From what I can gather, this is the perspective that many hard line protestants view this issue, and my point is that from that point of view it is a legitimate question.
The nature of the Trinity and the nature of the Christ is a fundamental question in the Christian religion. If the Trinity is a construct to explain the mystery of the carnate presence of God and the sacrifice for our sins then a religion that believes in the divinity of all is problematic to say the least.
With respect to the comments about Universalism and Unitarianism that is another interesting aspect of this that gets swept under the rug. By the narrow definition described above then these points of view are also open to the same question. Even though you are correct to ask if this is a valid way to view the issue given the rather diverse experimentation that has defined the religious experience that have taken place in North America, it is something that should be asked.
It is unfortunate that these sorts of questions are basically ignored. Instead of exploring these questions there is instead a healthy dose of denial. The diverse experience of the so called "Founders" has been appropriated into some sort of bizarre view of uniform thought and practice. If more people were open to these sorts of questions a much more nuanced view would be possible.
Finally, with respect to the "selling out of the LDS Church." I am not sure I entirely agree with you on that point. There has always been a strong sense of the notion of prosperity as a virtue in the LDS Church including the practice of the Prophet, Joseph Smith. This has been a part of the reason for the early strife associated with the Church.
As an example, the jokes about how a woman can gain access to Paradise by surpassing the magic number of having more than six children exemplify that attitude. This is one area that I see hypocrisy in the attitude of some protestants. There are some hard line protestants who have adopted the "Prosperity Theology" which I feel is antithetical to the message of the Christ. I personally see this as a more important marker as to whether or not a tradition is following the message of Jesus.Posted 04-20-2012 at 05:14 AM by Grandma Bates - Thanks for your reply to my comment.
I wouldn't be defined as a "jack mormon," which implies someone still living in an LDS setting who has not bothered to completely leave. The ex-Mormon community by that name has achieved a degree of organization, both online and in-person with conferences, publications and support groups. That could be predicted
While it's true the LDS have leaned toward being economically conservative, I wouldn't equate their approach with the "prosperity gospel." Survival issues in the early period of settling the West made it necessary for Mormonism to have a strong component of the practical, but this led to a way of life not appreciably different from any other new communities in the West. While success was valued, the ability to survive well in hardship was also highly valued. By contrast, the proponents of the prosperity gospel tend to think that poverty is blameworthy.
Historically, this is just what we'd expect to see when we compare the Mormon culture, that descends from the Victorian frontier period, with the prosperity gospel, which descends from the socially stratified South.
It was necessary to be entrepreneurial to settle in a wilderness and make something of it. This perspective is Western, however, and not Southern. What we see now in the Republican hard right now is the result of the Southern strategy. Mormons valued their independence, so when their leaders sell out to the Dominionist hard right (which is not the same as the libertarian Western Republicans of the past) they are indeed still selling out, even if it is taking them from a conservative position to a fascist one.
Dominionist fascism and other problems of today's American culture are what make any attempt to define Christianity so frought with the risk of unintended consequences. Educated Mormons will not have any issue with saying they're not Nicene Christians. The problems arise with requiring Nicene Christianity as a test of citizenship or of participation in public life.
It would be better to remove Christianity altogether from the definition of "who is an American," but we only see this consistently applied on the centrist left. People leaving Mormonism often wind up in the center-left in their political opinions. Some of this is why they left, some of it is that they're all too aware that Mormonism, which is as American as it gets, can have no real future in an America which has normalized reactionary Dominionism.
New England Unitarianism and Universalism are also as American as it gets. We owe many of our original ideas about democracy - both its practice and about the kind of people that we need to be to achieve it - to that matrix.
If people feel that including non-Nicene religions in the definition of Christianity is damaging to Christianity though, that's a problem. Fighting over sectarian definitions and belonging was exactly one of the things the Founding Fathers were hoping to avoid. It's perfectly okay to say you don't consider someone to be part of a spiritual body which is real to you in a metaphysical sense, and defined by a dogma - if you're willing to be that precise in your objection.
In the shorthand of the street, you would say Mormons are not Catholics and Unitarian Christians are not Methodists and Universalist Christians are not Calvinist Protestants, and that's all true enough and people will "get it." But for better or worse, the man-in-the-street has a notion of an accepted and "normal" Judeo-Christian meta community that he equates with "being American." What does it mean if this kind of thinking is taken to be a problem? I've most often heard it seen as a problem by Catholics (but I'm from New England), but problematizing a non-Nicene umbrella definition for Christianity, leaves out a lot of VERY American religions.Posted 04-22-2012 at 05:52 PM by Brenda Archer - Thank you for the correction on the term "Jack Mormon." I was not aware of the organizational connotations. Both LDS and former-LDS friends tended to use the term in a light hearted manner. In the context of living in Utah the notion of being within any sort of structure is in the water. Being a gentile in a valley that was 80% LDS we were immediately plugged in to the gentile community which had its own connections and resources. Early on we made friends with a neighbor who was active in her parish and immediately were part of the local LDS connections. Support systems in that settings seemed like the natural way of life.
As for the idea of prosperity, most of the surviving western movements do have that tendencies. There were a number of other movements that did not have the same value on personal prosperity, but for the reasons you noted many of them did not last long. (See New Harmony Indiana as an example.)
Joseph Smith, though, took this to new levels. His immediate followers took up his teachings including his high valuation for prosperity with great fervor. Part of the reason for his constant struggles in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois were the relative levels of wealth between his followers and the other people in the area.
This was taken to new heights at Nauvoo. His settlement featured accommodations that were quite rare on the western frontier at that time. His flock had its own printing press, and the prophet even managed to keep his own bar in his well appointed house. (I am going from memory on this with my main source the book "No Man Knows My History" by Fawn Brodie.)
As for your comments on the narrow definition of Christianity and the definition of "who is an American," I am in agreement with your comments. From the point of view of many main line protestants or Catholics though, this is something that will require them to stretch their point of view.
The problem, as I see it, is that it requires some people to look outside a very narrow view and ask deeper questions about their beliefs and more importantly about their ability to see the world from another point of view. For a person coming from the tradition of such a faith is asking them to stretch their imagination. My primary point here is from that point of view it is a valid question to be raised about what is Christianity.
Unfortunately, as you rightly point out, it is a narrow point of view. It is more unfortunate that some people try to take that narrow definition and try to apply it to the broader idea of what is acceptable in a much broader sense.Posted 04-27-2012 at 09:13 AM by Grandma Bates - Thanks for your thoughts, and I agree. I think the record is turning out to show that in some ways Smith was pretty corrupt. Being forced to make some accomodations to the mainstream, to get statehood for Utah, may have been one of the best things ever to happen to Mormonism. The older form of the religion could be quite cultish, but it could also be progressive at times and even mystical.
All of that idiosyncracy has been whittled away over time and it seems like most of what is left is the cultlike tendency. So you can find people leaving the organized Church today who might have been contributors to it in the earlier environment.
And today, we have the option of nontheism. I didn't go that far but I'm quite comfortable around people who did and they serve as a reality check on my brain. Whenever you're in a group with cultlike tendencies, you cannot really avoid going to the opposite extreme at some point on the way out.
There's so many things still in American culture that can develop cultlike tendencies. Some of them are obvious, like Dominionism, and some of them less so, like certain groups in the recovery movement. The Republicans have been heading into the cultish mentality without any brakes. I never understood the appeal of high status in any de facto cult. You're always someone's pawn.
Still, I don't think our current political situation is organic. I think it's more that we have tendencies that allow us to be played like a fiddle.Posted 04-29-2012 at 10:31 PM by Brenda Archer
