OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
He mentioned it here. Professional obligations of some sort. He'll be back in a few months.
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
I... don't see how one can comment on the meaning of the word 'Christian' without being primarily theological. 'Christian' is a theological term.
I am actually, like C. S. Lewis, willing to bite the bullet on many, or even most, self-proclaimed Christians not really being Christians. I'm not hugely strict about this in practice where I tend to think that any good-faith attempt to genuinely know and follow God, to the best of one's limited ability, is acceptable worship, and in that light, sure, there are no doubt individual Mormons who render that worship. I don't claim that no Mormons are saved or anything like that. But if you ask me to accept that most Americans who call themselves Christians are not meaningfully Christian, then I will do that. That is probably and unfortunately the case.
(I am not quite as pessimistic as your linked study - I think survey design can be unreliable, most people struggle with theological language, and there is often a sensus fidei that exceeds the ability of people to explicate their faith. If a Catholic says the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass, sincerely intending to believe it, but when asked to define the Trinity during the week descends into waffle, I would extend some charity. The linked paper doesn't include the questions themselves and has some red flags for me - who the heck are 'Integrated Disciples'? they possess a 'biblical worldview'? huh? - so I'm skeptical. Nonetheless, no one could deny that ignorance or confusion around the Trinity is very common.)
So perhaps it would be helpful to refine a little. I claim that Mormonism, which is to say that which the Mormon church presents for belief, is not a form of Christianity.
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
Sunni and Shia have absolutely killed each other over the distinction, yes. There are rivers of blood between those parties. I'm just not aware of cases of Sunni or Shia declaring the other party not Muslims.
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
I don't think one needs a detailed knowledge of theology to be a Christian. The good thief addressed Jesus directly and appears to have perceived him to be the messiah and believed that he would be the ruler of the kingdom. The reference to the kingdom of God as well as the good thief's confidence that Jesus had done nothing wrong suggests that the thief was aware of at least the basic outline of Jesus' preaching. At any rate, he put his faith in Christ to the best of his ability. That would appear to meet most minimal definitions of Christian faith. (Some definitions might add something like "faith in Christ as God", but I think we can safely presume that the thief had that.)
I don't think that scenario is directly comparable to Mormons, though. The thief would naturally have been unaware of doctrines formally laid out after him - doctrines intended to clarify and explain the nature of what the good thief was privileged to witness directly - but ignorance does not constitute denial. Likewise for, even today, the Catholic or Protestant in the pews who happens to be theologically ignorant. The issue with Mormons is not ignorance, but rather denial of core doctrines.
For what it's worth, I specifically do not use the word 'Christian' to mean people that I believe are saved. I do not think that the categories 'Christian' and 'saved' are coextensive. There are Christians who are not saved (cf. Matthew 7:22-23), and there are non-Christians who are saved (cf. Luke 16:22).
You could draw a distinction whereby people who call themselves Christians, are recognised as Christians by the world, and appear in good standing in the church are not real Christians if they are rejected by Christ, and likewise that people who in their lives were never aware of Christ or put any explicit faith in him (like Abraham) are in some way implicitly Christian, but I think that does too much damage to the everyday uses of the words. My understanding is that all salvation is from Christ (cf. John 14:6), but that not all who are called by the name Christian partake of this, and that some who do not call themselves Christians do. The power of God is not constrained by human labels or categorisations.
My main use of the word 'Christian' is to identify members of the church. I believe Peter van Inwagen once argued that the word 'Christianity' is itself a mistake - there is no such thing as Christianity. There is only the church, and its various members. I'm not as rigid about the word as he is, and I'm happy to use the word 'Christianity' to mean 'that which the church professes', but I think there's something to be said for the basic point. Christians are the fellowship or the community of those who follow Christ - or perhaps more properly, those who follow the triune God, because I would probably exclude Christian atheists. I exclude Mormons because I do not understand them to follow Christ in the sense that Christians do. As the Catholic document you cited says, the Mormon understanding of who 'the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit' are is so divergent 'from the Christian meaning' as to not even be heresy. The utility of the ecumenical creeds is as guardrails - they lay out a basic minimum understanding of who God is and of the economy of salvation.
OliveTapenade
9hr ago
Nitpick: in my experience Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims do not try to exclude each other from Islam. In Islam there is a very strong consensus that anybody who says and sincerely believes the shahada is a Muslim. Sunni-Shia differences are obviously very important and a major driver of violence even today, and heaven help you if try to change from one to the other, but I have never heard a Muslim trying to suggest that a member of the other party is not a Muslim.
That said, I don't like the analogy to early Christianity that much because I think what we're looking at in early Christianity is a young tradition forming itself, and as part of that formation, it went through a process of debating and coming to understand its own doctrine. 'Christianity' as we know it today is largely a product of that process.
I'd suggest that most people have an intuitive sense that there is a point at which a Christian-derived or Christian-influenced religious movement ceases to be Christianity. The most famous example is probably Islam itself. We know that the first Christians to come into contact with Islam understood it to be a heresy - Muhammad was a deluded man who misunderstood the scriptures and preached his own revelation. I think we have a spectrum of dissent where, say, Protestantism is clearly Christianity, Islam is clearly not Christianity, and in the middle there's a grey area. Pentecostals? Christian. Adventists? Christian. Jehovah's Witnesses? Ehh, getting pretty heretical. Mormons? A bit further out. Candomblé? Influenced by Christianity but definitely not. And so on. I understand that different people will, in good faith, draw the Christian/non-Christian line in different places.
My personal model would be concentric circles, if that makes sense? At the centre we have 'Christianity', which I define in terms of the ecumenical creeds. It contains Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and maybe Oriental Orthodoxy. The next circle out is what I term 'Jesusism', which includes any religious tradition in which Jesus Christ is the central or decisive figure: this includes Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Iglesia ni Cristo, Hong Xiuquan, and so on. The next circle after that is 'Jesus-influenced': this includes any religious tradition in which Jesus is a major figure, but not the central one. This would include Islam, the Baha'i Faith, CaoDai, and so on. Finally, beyond that, we have religions that have nothing to do with Jesus whatsoever: Hinduism, Daoism, Scientology, and so forth.
But I grant that there are plenty of people for whom 'Christianity' means everything within my 'Jesusist' circle.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
As a Protestant, this matches a complaint I have with many of my Protestant friends - there is such a temptation to water down the faith, to boil it down to the thinnest possible gruel, on the logic that anything beyond that constitutes a kind of obstacle. But praxis does not merely repel; it can also attract! And the Protestant tradition if you actually look at it is not an anti-intellectual one, nor one hostile to unique practice. There is thickness and depth here, if you dare to offer it! I find it extremely frustrating.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
I suppose what this boils down to is the question of what you think is important in defining Christianity. I take faith and belief to be central. If Christianity is about, as I would argue it is, who God is, then a group's position on the Trinity or on Christology is extremely important.
I certainly grant that Mormonism is what you call 'sociologically Christian'. They are Christian-ish - they gather in buildings that look like church buildings (mostly; they reject crosses), they read from the Bible, they talk a lot about Jesus. I just don't think that any of that is enough to make a person or a group Christian. They themselves presumably agree on this principle, because as you note, they believe that all traditional churches have fallen from the faith.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
I do agree with the comparison to other 19th century restorationists. It seems to me that Mormons are part of a family of 19th century American Protestant offshoots or spin-offs - Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christadelphianism, and so on. They generally share a common method (charismatic leader/writer and reinterpreter, extremely strong emphasis on scripture and dismissal of tradition, etc.), and frequently some doctrinal conclusions (nontrinitarianism, narrative of general apostasy, etc.). Go back a bit further and there are Europeans following the same model as well - the Swedenborgian New Church, for instance. Likewise there are more recent examples - Iglesia ni Cristo in the Philippines is another instance of the same model, and perhaps even the Unification Church.
At any rate, I don't think all the groups in that category are non-Christian - Adventists, for instance, seem pretty clearly inside the tent. However, I think some of them have placed themselves outside the bounds of orthodoxy.
I think you're probably correct that there's a scissor statement here. I am particularly interested in doctrine, but most American Christians are extremely ignorant of theology and embrace a number of heresies. (Though I should say that Ligonier, the people doing the State of Theology survey, themselves have a rather narrow and tendentious view of orthodoxy.) As long as Mormonism looks like church on the outside, only weird nerds like me will get stressed about what they actually believe.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
A heresy, I would say, is something that emerges out of Christianity but is destructive to Christianity. Does that seem a fair definition to you?
You don't think that the claim that Hajnalis aren't whites and Tropicals aren't blacks is undermined a bit by the post itself? In the top-level post you describe very specific elements of Tropical culture and phenotype - you suggest that there are 'eastern' Tropicals with slightly lighter skins who are clearly Asians, but it's clear that your central example of a Tropical is a sub-Saharan African.
Likewise you describe Hajnalis with a very specific cultural and religious history - you cite, more-or-less unchanged, Henrich's argument that the medieval Catholic ban on cousin marriage shaped the Hajnalis. It is transparent that Hajnalis are Europeans - even if some Europeans have moderately darker skin, the identification is clear enough. You describe both World Wars and the American Civil War, attribute both to Hajnalis, and say that the latter concerned "the imported Tropicals". You then go on to describe 20th and 21st century troubles in American education in a way that clearly maps to African-Americans - yes, you've said that Asians are a type of Tropical, but these violent schoolchildren reaching puberty earlier and making schools less safe certainly do not sound like Chinese-Americans.
Look, I'm not blind, and this is the Motte, where you are allowed to just speak plainly. It just feels like needless pussyfooting.
On your goals more generally:
If I were you I'd worry that this isn't a practical way to make your point. It's not clear that you need all these digressions in order to explain your tiger. A skeptical reader like myself is not nodding along to all these points you're making in earlier posts and will then happily be led to your conclusion. The less credible the earlier posts seem, the less credible the eventual conclusion will seem.
I understand and connect with the general theme of order emerging out of chaos - I'm not disposed to be skeptical of that, or of the idea that the large, invisible forces under the surface might be drawing civilisation back towards chaos, or that we are in a time of collapse. But when you bundle that up with a lot of extremely tenuous theories about prehistory which, when examined more closely, seem to reduce to just 19th and early 20th century racialism, maybe that makes people less willing to take that journey with you.
Put it this way: if you want to convince people that Western commitment to the idea that everyone is equal will lead to disaster, I think you can make that case more strongly, persuasively, and succinctly without the grand historical narrative. You don't need a millennia-long just-so story to make this point. I applaud your patience and your very high level of courtesy and kindness to commenters through this project, but I'd gently suggest that the project is misconceived.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
Well, I don't think that being American has anything to do with anything, and imitating the form of a Protestant worship service doesn't seem relevant to me either? Unitarian Universalists are non-Christian. Sunday Assembly are non-Christian. At some point Christianity has to be about what a person believes.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
Surely the whole point of heresy, as a category, is to declare something non-Christian.
OliveTapenade
12hr ago
I mean, I'm happy to use the word 'heretic' as well. I think there is a meaningful difference in that in Arius' time, the boundary was not yet well-defined, whereas today that line has been clearly drawn for well over a millennium and a half, but I'm not going to fight too hard over words as long as it is clearly understood that, whatever words you use, Mormonism does not belong to the same category as, broadly speaking, 'Christianity'. Mormonism is not the same kind of thing as Protestantism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism. That's the hill I'll defend.
Personally I don't like to use 'saved' as a synonym here because I think that means something different. There are Christians who are not saved, and there are non-Christians who are saved. The saved and Christianity are overlapping but distinct categories.
OliveTapenade
12hr ago
Over the last fifty years or so, Mormons have also made a concerted effort to rehabilitate their image. Mormons used to be widely hated in America, and in turn they explicitly held that all non-Mormon society and especially religion is corrupted and of darkness. Since then Mormons themselves have softened a lot on the supposedly apostate Christian churches, and made a big effort to present themselves as friendly, respectable, and trustworthy - to the extent that nowadays they have a reputation for being clean-cut and nice to an almost Stepford-esque degree.
I'm in Australia, not America, but anecdotally all of my in-person interactions with Mormons have been incredibly polite, and the Mormons have almost been falling over themselves to emphasise, "We're just like you, we believe in Jesus too, Jesus is at the absolute centre of our faith, we have so much in common", and they never bring up any disagreements. That's probably why I overcompensate a little in return, as I want to make clear that I do not consider them to hold the same faith that I do.
I'm probably also biased because, while all my in-person interactions with Mormons have been friendly and kind (and I don't argue "you're not Christians" to their faces, out of politeness), I have also been close friends with a number of ex-Mormons, typically people raised Mormon who got away as an adult, and that has acquainted me with a lot of horror stories from the inside. I'm sure that former Mormons aren't exactly the most impartial people either, but I am at least aware that the sunny, white-picket-fence version of Mormonism is not the most fair representation either.
I'm also conscious that most of those ex-Mormons have had the very idea of Christianity poisoned for them, or loaded with so much negative affect by the way the idea of Jesus is linked with their (frequently abusive or borderline-abusive) Mormon upbringing, that there is no longer any chance of them approaching Christianity on other terms. I don't hold this against them - the Catholics have a concept of 'psychological impossibility' that I find useful, and I applaud the way these friends have been able to find and explore spirituality on other terms - but I can't help being angry at the tradition that did that to them. Matthew 18:6-7. I try not to let that bias me too much - every tradition will have some practitioners who are so fanatical as to be abusive, or to poison the entire tradition, we all know about Protestants or Catholics who are this extreme - but I can't in good conscience deny that the anger is there.
OliveTapenade
12hr ago
Well, I think I was implicitly tabooing 'Christianity' here. What I assert is that there is a broad category of belief into which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants generally fit, but which Mormons do not fit into. I assert that Mormon belief and doctrine is significantly qualitatively dissimilar to that of these other groups.
It seems to me that two things are going on when people say "Mormons aren't Christian". The first thing is just "you don't believe what I believe" or "you don't worship what I worship". There are implicit claims about differences in doctrine and practice. The second is "you are not my people". They are attempting to differentiate themselves from Mormons in a tribal sense.
Thus when I, for instance, say "Mormons aren't Christianity", what I'm actually saying is "you're not affiliated with me!"
OliveTapenade
12hr ago
Because I think that historically the Christian community has defined and policed its boundaries in ways that place Mormons outside of it - I apologise if that was not clear.
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
Would it help to go through the Creed line by line?
It seems pretty clear that Jesus believed in one God, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Did Jesus believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father? Jesus does not offer a programmatic Christology in the gospels, unless you want to go fairly deep into John, but even in the synoptics it seems fair to say that Jesus identifies himself with the Father in a profoundly intimate way, even if he does not spell it out in these terms.
Did Jesus believe that he came down from heaven for us and for our salvation? That seems pretty clear in the gospels - he talks about the Son of Man coming to save sinners. Did he believe he was born of the virgin Mary? Well, certainly he knew who his mother was, though depending on which gospel you read some might argue about the virgin birth. If we accept the Resurrection at all, presumably Jesus believed that he was crucified and rose again and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the father, and in the gospels Jesus mentions the future coming of the Son of Man and judgement of the nations plenty of times.
Did Jesus believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life? Jesus doesn't talk about the Spirit that explicitly outside of the gospel of John, though he does mention the Spirit a few times. I'm happy to give this one a check though I'll admit that a lot of things are a bit hazier if you don't accept John.
Did Jesus believe that the Spirit spoke through the prophets? That one's easy. In one holy catholic and apostolic church? He does talk about the church or the community of his disciples a bit in the synoptics - I think that counts. Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, absolutely, if we accept the Great Commission as historical. That was his idea to begin with. And the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come - yes, Jesus is recorded arguing in favour of those beliefs.
It seems like most of it is pretty safe. If you're interested in the quest for the historical Jesus and you're skeptical of the gospels, especially John but also to an extent Luke (for the virgin birth), you might question whether Jesus believed most of this, but if you do accept the gospels (and surely Christians do), the Nicene Creed seems quite consistent with how Jesus described himself and his Father. It is sometimes more specific or explicit than Jesus himself was, but that doesn't seem fatal to me.
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
Is Christ himself a follower of Christ? It seems like a bad case to build your definition on.
The point of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, at any rate, is to clarify and define the apostolic faith, particularly in order to draw clear lines that include the orthodox and exclude heretics. Obviously Jesus himself didn't know the Nicene Creed in its exact terms, but considering that the Creed is defined in particular reference to Jesus' life, words, and death, I think it's reasonable to say there's some relationship between him and the Creed?
In any case, as regards Mormonism specifically, the point is that when we talk about 'historical' or 'orthodox' Christianity, we talk about a large community or set of communities which has defined its belief in particular ways. Creeds are among the various tools that the church has used to do this. It is, I think, objectively the case that Mormonism exists outside of these historical definitions. Mormons themselves would accept this - Mormons believe that there was a great apostasy that led to pretty much the entire Christian world falling into error and unbelief.
When I say "Mormons aren't Christians", what I mean is that Mormon beliefs are outside of and contradictory to historical definitions of orthodoxy. We can dispute the exact words appropriate to describe that situation - non-Christian, heretic, unorthodox, heck if you ask a Mormon they might prefer 'restoration' or something - but I think the words point to a real fact about the world.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...).
This is... tricky, I think, in terms of sensitivity.
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians. Or at least, they do not fall within any historical confession of Christian orthodoxy. They're probably best understood as a type of heretic; personally I put them in a category that I think of as 'Jesusists', that is, religions that take Jesus as their central figure, but which are too different from historical Christianity to be understood as the same thing. The point is that "Mormons aren't Christians", as a statement, is substantially true.
On the other, it is obviously breathtakingly insensitive to bring that up at this time. Mormons believe that they are Christians, even if they are, in my judgement, in error. (I realise that technically definitions can't be wrong; even so I can and do believe that they draw the line between Christianity and non-Christianity in an indefensible place.) More importantly, whether Mormonism is a form of Christianity or not is irrelevant to this particular issue. Murdering a group of Mormons at worship is obviously very, very bad. Christians ought to respond to that by condemning the crime while offering empathy, support, and compassion to those grieving. It is not the appropriate time to engage in a confessional dispute.
But to return to the first hand - a major public figure, the president of the United States, just responded to this by asserting that Mormons are Christians, and that this shooting is an attack on Christianity qua Christianity. Now I judge both of those statements to be untrue, and though many might argue the former, the latter seems pretty hard to dispute. It is not factually true that this shooting was "a targeted attack on Christians". If nothing else, ranting about the anti-Christ suggests that the shooter himself is a Christian, albeit a very delusional one. So it seems like there is value in clarifying in this moment that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong.
I suppose this is just another situation where Trump really needed to keep his mouth shut, because all his comments have done is make a tragic situation worse for everyone.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
Pardon me if you've answered this question before somewhere else, but just for my own satisfaction:
What is the point of the euphemisms and fictionalised names? You're not writing a detailed fantasy story with its own history or anything. It is pretty clear what you're talking about - why not skip the fig leaves of Tidus, Hajnalis, and Tropicals, and just say Earth, whites, and blacks? I understand that there's dramatic utility sometimes in using different language and context to sneak past the prejudices of an audience, and invite us to consider an issue without all the baggage we currently attach to those terms, but you aren't being subtle enough for that to work. It is too blatant. All you have done is replace a handful of nouns. Why bother?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It's a crime that no one has made Sick, Sad World yet.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think it's because the United States already uses imperial, switching over carries a cost, the United States is large enough that there is no pressure to switch for the sake of standardisation with neighbours, and the United States is historically quite bad at top-down standardisation and national reform. There are fifty states, some might embrace metric and some would resist it, and the federal government would struggle to make it compulsory - it would incur both state resistance and widespread popular resistance. Whichever government tries to make the switch is going to face a lot of complaints, and the other party is inevitably going to seize the issue and portray themselves as soming to save your measurements. Lastly, Americans hate being made to conform with the rest of the world - there is a very strong sense of national exceptionalism and defiance. The ingrained sense of "but we're different" wins out - from everything from climate agreements to conventions on landmines, the US has a tradition of being the exception. Telling the rest of the world to piss off usually goes down well domestically. It's a bit like the British attitude to EU regulations, or the Japanese attitude to whaling. Maybe on its own it wasn't a big issue, but the moment it becomes an issue of pushy, arrogant foreigners telling us what we ought to do, the US goes, "You know what? I'm gonna start doing it even harder."
Disclaimer: I'm Australian, Imperial units are garbage, metric is superior.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
That's my experience, anecdotally. People sometimes measure things in feet and inches, but I take that as just because feet are a practically useful, everyday measure that there isn't a good metric equivalent for. Every now and then I hear people say 'miles', but at least in my generation, every time I hear 'mile', I need to mentally multiply by 1.6 in order to visualise what it means.
I am trying to be nice here, and I genuinely do appreciate this guy's level of politeness when dealing with hostile comments. He always thanks and compliments commenters, and that's worth something. That said, I did accuse him of writing "a variant on the Gobineau/Grant Nordicist theory", and from what I've seen since then, I think that holds up. This reads to me like a 21st century update of The Passing of the Great Race. Is there a brilliantly clever twist lurking in the background somewhere? All I'll say right now is that it doesn't look like it to me.
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