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I think this is the key issue we've been going round on. Mormons don't see Christianity as synonymous with the true faith. The see Christianity as a big tent full of many denominations and their own Church as the true faith within that big tent. This is also why I don't think the trinity is a useful tenant for determining what is and isn't Christianity. Because from extremely early on the umbrella of Christianity. This is my personal view as well. I see Christianity as a big movement of many mutually exclusive Christianities even from the beginning. (see Paul's letters) And I don't think removing them from the category of Christianity is much use, we'd just have to come up with another term to categorize these Jesus worshipping movements. Also for someone without a Christian background the trinity may not even seem that that important. To someone not primed to see it, the father son and holy ghost being one in purpose but not in being versus different aspects of God together and separate in divine mystery, doesn't seem THAT different. Especially compared to things like worshipping graven images or praying to the saints and Mary.
Just as many Sunni Muslims try to exclude the Shia from Islam and insist they aren't Muslims. This just devolves into silly language games. The Ebionites, the Marcionites, the Arians obviously all fit under some category with the Orthodox. Virtually every university and textbook everywhere calls that thing Christianity and if we exclude them from it then we need to create an umbrella term for them. Which again seems redundant when we already have terms for these. But this debate actually only seems to come up in relation to modern American religions because Mormons seem weird to Americans and nobody uses they word Heretic anymore so they get excluded from Christianity.
But I think Christianity is too big a tent to do that. Fundamentally woke high church Episcopalians and Independent Fundamentalist Baptists believe extremely different things and live extremely different lives if they can be under the umbrella of Christianity so can the Mormons because the word Christianity does not describe one particular tradition but rather many disparate traditions which is the whole reason we have denominations in the first place!
The reason I see it as pretty central is that basically the Trinity goes back pretty far in the historical record, and was dogmatically declared around the same time the New Testament was canonized. It’s really hard to claim one without the other. If you’re calling the New Testament without reservations The Canon as opposed to other writings, it’s really hard to consistently also say “but they are wrong about these other things.”
Sure, but that also gets to the problem with Protestants. Treating a book as infallible that was created by a church you reject. You could make some apologism for this by pointing out the books of the Bible were really written separately until they were compiled but yeah I think it's a big problem for anyone not Catholic or Orthodox.
I think it depends on the flavor of Protestant. If you’re talking about low church Bible thumping evangelicals, I get it, but I think most high church Protestants respect the councils and the dogmas of the early church. The Anglo Catholic movement actually accepts the dogmas and canons of the first seven councils so they’d be pretty in line with the Roman Church and the various Orthodox Churches. Lutherans still informally accept quite a bit of that dogma through the Augustine Confessions and Book of Concord.
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Eh. This isn't really true. "The true faith" is faith in Christ, meaning love, obedience, loyalty, worship, and trust in the Son of God, qualities not confined to people in any particular religion. The LDS church doctrinally being "the true church" doesn't mean we have a monopoly on truth or even that in every respect we have more truth than any other denomination; it means we have the most truth and, perhaps even more important, God's authority to establish his kingdom on earth. This is quite comparable to the Catholic view of the nature of the Catholic church.
Critically, it is a claim that you are the only church with real priests whose ordinances (sacraments to Catholics, cleric spells to unchurched nerds) actually work.
American folk Christianity avoids the question, but the combination of scaraments that actually work, ordained ministry, and apostolic succession (as believed by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, LDS and some Lutherans) gives "real Church" vs "fake Church" a different and more significant meaning that it has in sola fide priesthood-of-all-believers Protestantism.
True, but our belief in a single authorized baptism is also accompanied by a belief that said baptism can be accepted even after death, so it’s not exclusionary as a complete package! And you really do need to include both, seems to me. It’s not as if this is the only very significant theological difference among Christian sects.
Well, qualified in one respect. It’s not as if we think that God ignores the prayers or genuine authentic intentions toward God of others. Functionally someone who confesses a sin to a Catholic priest, exercises faith in Christ, repents of their ways, is essentially forgiven (or will be) - just the priest didn’t actually serve an official role in it. So I guess I still don’t quite see it. Perhaps similar to how many Christian sects have walked back beliefs that the unbaptized can literally never enter heaven and won’t get a chance to, Mormons have also toned back the emphasis on how other sects are all extremely misled people. Early LDS history, (in)famously, was not quite the same - many especially older Mormons even thought of the Catholic Church as a somewhat devilish deception. So in that sense there’s an argument to be made that this distinction is no longer as true as it used to be.
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An even better comparison is Ahmadiyya, who claim to be Muslims, but every other denomination rejects them.
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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.
None of these other guys believe in the atonement, though, or that Jesus is God. Really LDS is just its own thing, not neatly slotted into a category of churches that see Jesus as a cool holy guy.
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Ackchyually, some Hindus consider Jesus to have been an avatar of Vishnu.
Would you call those Hindus Christian?
I'd put them in the 'Jesus-influenced' circle, or possibly add an intermediate circle between it and the outermost category.
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Ethnic cleansings have been done for precisely that distinction. The doers may have been 'bad' muslims doctrinally as well as ethically, and the determinations often coincide with political differences people feel worth killing over, but it has (and, occasionally, does) happen even if it's not the civilized norm.
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.
Them not being Real Muslims is the justification for why killing them is okay / moral / righteous, rather than theological fratricide. Sometimes its claimed on grounds of apostasy, sometimes that they are heathens, and sometimes qualified theological language is thrown out the door as well as any religious principles of how you should/should not treat other Muslims.
It's the same twisting of categories for why [insert denomination of Christianity] isn't Christian. Tailor a definition of the [Good Group] to some theological claim of [Subgroup], declare opponent outside the bounds of [Good Group], categorical ejection removes the target from the beneificary/protected claimed macro-group.
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