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If you didn't believe that you wouldn't profess it, but how do you know that Jesus agreed with it? I'm no New Testament scholar, but from what I've read from it, I don't see how it would be possible to be sure that Jesus actually agreed with it.
The entire Christian religion is predicated on the assumption that Jesus would have agreed with it.
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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.
But then why are Mormons not Christians in your view? Granted I don't know much about their views, but from the little I know, it doesn't seem more different from the Nicene Creed than Matthew 24's Jesus quote: "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
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.
Did they police the boundaries of Christianity that way? Or the boundaries of heresy and orthodoxy that way?
Surely the whole point of heresy, as a category, is to declare something non-Christian.
No that's why there is a distinction between heretic and heathen. A heretic is someone who goes about worshiping Jesus in the wrong way a heathen doesn't worship him.
But most people are using not Christian to include both.
Well I think they are wrong. Mormons obviously fit a patter of American restorationist movements and just because they fall outside echumenical Orthodoxy doesn't mean they shouldn't be considered Christians.
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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?
I dunno about destructive. I would say falls outside the bounds of Orthodoxy, but maybe that's inherently destructive idk.
I'm also not coming at this from a religious perspective so maybe my definition is useless to you. I'm just treating Mormons the same way I would treat Essenes, or Ismaliis or other hetrodox sects.
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It's actually fairly common in many religious based homeschool groups to write out mandatory statements of faith that exclude members of the LDS faith, so yes, several protestant groups do gatekeep them out. Of course, my family left one such group when we figured out their history curriculum was littered with references on how the evil Romanists ruined things in history...
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Fair enough. I've probably underestimated the degree to which Mormon theology differs from mainstream Christian theology, cause of how much Mormons and mainstream Christians in the US at least largely seem to me to behave the same and live very similar lifestyles. Maybe I'm not aware of differences in lifestyles, either.
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.
This is my tension with the LDS as well -- the "we're just like you" thing backfires for me, not because I think Mormons are bad people, but because I think it waters down -- quite literally, "milk before meat" -- the elements of Mormonism as a theological tradition in ways that make it genuinely less interesting. A lot of the wild cosmological speculations of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are really really interesting, really unique, really cool. It just is slightly frustrating when the things that are so distinctive about Mormonism are downplayed.
It very much is like Catholics watering down the cultus of the saints or transubstantiation -- this is your thing, guys, this is what makes you unique, this is what distinguishes you from your competitors in the marketplace of ideas and makes me want to learn more. I think attempts at Protestantizing both faiths weakens them: the only way the Papacy or the Presidency can survive as an institution is by offering unique religious experiences, values, and beliefs that support and validate the intense level of religious authority you're presenting. If what you're offering is equivalent to what they're offering down the street, but joining you comes with a measure of social ostracization from the religious mainstream and asks a lot from me in terms of religious obedience, why shouldn't I just go to the chill southern baptist church down the street, where they'll have a similar service and sing similar hymns?
But obviously the Mormon strategy is working for them in important ways, and I think they're very explicitly going for normie, straight-laced kind of people and not people like me, who are spiritual seekers with high openness to experience. They want to be a church for normal, well-to-do, kinds of people. But when I read the writings, speeches, and accounts of Smith, Young, and the early Mormon movement, they really do strike me as intense spiritual seekers with high openness to experience, and a lot of the elements of Mormonism that seem most fascinating have slowly been pushed to the sidelines or rejected altogether and the idea space of American religion is worse off for it. If you have a mystery cult, don't dress it in khakis and pretend it's just another sermon. Own the mystery.
I think the problem here is that the list of things about distinctive about Mormonism that are interesting, unique, and cool are very tightly connected to the list of things that are distinctive about Mormonism that are obviously false. Joseph Smith taught that the Book of Mormon came from a pre-Colombian civilisation of ethnically Middle Eastern Christians in America which had access to Eurasian crops, livestock, and metallurgical knowledge. No archaeological evidence for such a civilisation exists, and someone who has received a secular education would know that. And Mormonism doesn't have the political power to put docents in the Egyptian gallery at the Met to point out the drawings of enslaved Jews and similar historical fudges.
It is still just about possible for an intelligent person to believe the historical claims made by mainstream Judaism or Christianity without rejecting their secular education wholesale - particularly if you treat 1 Genesis as allegorical, as e.g. the Catholic hierarchy does. The hardest part is the Passover Narrative. (Hyksos=Jews is consistent with the Genesis story from Abraham to Joseph and the migration from Canaan to Egypt, and with the wandering in the desert under Moses and eventual return to Canaan, but the Hyksos were not enslaved and were violently expelled rather than fleeing in the night). Historical Nephites and Lamanites and the Book of Mormon as an inspired translation of ancient Nephite scripture is harder to reconcile with secular scholarship than a historical Exodus, and far harder to reconcile than historical Jesus and the New Testament as inspired accounts of his teachings by his contemporaries.
If the Book of Mormon is what it appears to be to secular scholars (a mediocre King James Bible fanfic by a man steeped in but apostate from 19th century American Protestantism, with a side order of Freemasonry) then Mormonism is nothing.
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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.
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I see you, Arius of Cyrenaica, trying to spread your homoiousian nonsense. Of course we know Jesus agreed to it, because Christ was of the same substance as God the Father, as decided by a council of bishops brought together by God's chosen representative on Earth, Constantine the Great. Being of the same substance logically follows that Christ knew of the true formulation of God's church, even after his death.
The Motte is no place for you or the Arians who hold to your corrupted image of the triune nature of God.
Almost good satire, but just a tad too obviously ridiculous here.
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