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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.
Others want to use "Christian" as a group signifier, but your definition here is closer to something that would exclude Judas and include devout atheists who were baptized as children. It can also be a theological term without referring to one's standing before God--you could argue that being Christian means believing in certain key characteristics about Jesus.
Yeah, I couldn't find any others, but the linked study definitely isn't great.
Here we differ. If the thief on the cross practiced a form of Christianity (as I believe he did) then we can accept extreme diversions from and gaps in knowledge of Truth, and still ultimately call a belief system Christianity. Yes, the thief was perhaps justifiably ignorant where later groups are not, but belief systems are not ignorant or informed. They are ideas, they are the things about which we are ignorant or informed. A belief system is either true or false, valid or invalid, Christianity or not Christianity. You could say something like "nobody nowadays is as ignorant as the thief on the cross, and therefore no practicing Mormon is a valid Christian" but this is just not true--the thief was a whole lot more informed than, for example, your average 2-week-old.
In other words, let's say you have a 60 IQ and have only ever been exposed to Mormonism. You don't even know what the godhead or the trinity are; you just believe in God and his Son in very general terms. Is that belief system Christianity? Is it Mormonism? I don't think ideas exist outside of people's heads, so if someone can be both a practicing Christian and a practicing Mormon, then Mormonism is a form of Christianity.
Fair enough, I just hope you keep this in mind the next time this debate comes up.
I think you're muddling two things here. With the good thief, the question you asked was, "is he a Christian?" With the 60 IQ believer, the question you ask is, "Is that belief system Christianity?" Those are different types of question, and their answers don't necessarily always correlate. In almost all real cases they will, but I can imagine scenarios where they do not.
(One example might be someone in a coma or someone who has suffered significant age-related cognitive decline and is no longer capable of understanding or of holding propositional belief. Can such a person be a Christian? I'm inclined to say yes. On the other end of things, we can imagine a person who believes that all of a particular mass of Christian doctrine is true, but who, notwithstanding, renounces any kind of loyalty or obedience towards God, and in fact hates God. Satan is presumably such a figure - aware of all the facts of Christian doctrine, but nonetheless not a Christian himself.)
I'll also note that even granting that this 60 IQ individual is both a Christian (he is, to the best of his ability, seeking to know, love, and follow Christ) and a Mormon (he is likewise attempting to conform to Mormon doctrine and practice as best he can), it does not therefore follow that Mormonism is a form of Christianity. "If someone can be both a practicing Christian and a practicing Mormon, then Mormonism is a form of Christianity" seems like a mistake. For a counterexample, as I understand it, Mormons are religiously required to be teetotallers. It is obviously possible to be both a practicing teetotaller and a practicing Mormon. Would you say that Mormonism is a form of teetotalling? Or we can go past that - Mormons are not required to be vegetarians, but it is certainly possible to be both a practicing vegetarian and a practicing Mormon. It is possible to be both a practicing socialist and a practicing Mormon. That it is possible to be something else alongside a Mormon does not show that Mormonism is a form of that something else.
In this particular case, the argument would be that the Mormon understandings of who Christ is and who God is are sufficiently different to the Christian understandings of the same that it is misleading to describe them as instances of the same belief. It is possible to combine the two - that is, to believe in Christ in the Christian sense, and to believe in Christ in the Mormon sense - only through conceptual confusion. Our poor 60 IQ believer might be, through no failure of his own, one such case.
That 60 IQ person's belief system is both creedal Christian and Mormon. I contend that this "minimum viable Christianity" is in fact the definition you should be using. If a person can be fairly described as Christian, then their belief system can (outside of irrelevant edge cases, such as when identifying someone based on what they used to be before cognitive decline) be fairly described as Christian. Thus, it is not necessary to believe in the Nicene Creed to be Christian, nor do those who believe in a belief system that lacks such creeds believe in some other non-Christian belief system.
This is why I said "I don't think ideas exist outside of people's heads". If Christianity is a belief system, then nobody besides God himself believes in it. Every single human's individual beliefs will, to some extent, in some (possibly insignificant) particular, deviate from the true belief system to something adjacent and nigh-identical. Is someone Christian if they are Christian in every respect but think that putting a star on the Christmas tree is a commandment? Yes, of course. And if we want words to have useful meanings, then their belief system is still Christianity.
Do the ignorant majority of Christians who fail to understand the Nicene Creed believe in something other than Christianity? Do they follow a different belief system, besides Christianity? I contend that they still do follow Christianity, and therefore the Nicene Creed, and the Trinity, are not core, essential parts of Christianity as a belief system. Nor for that matter is the LDS concept of the Godhead--we will still accept you as LDS so long as you are exercising faith in Christ. You still meaningfully follow the "LDS belief system" if your attempts to follow Christ are within the bounds of our organized religion.
The creeds are, definitionally, an attempt to set a boundary of some kind. The function of the Nicene Creed is to define, as the 4th century councils understood it, the true faith over against heresy. One is free to disagree with the creeds, but surely to use the creeds as setting the boundaries of acceptable faith is simply to use the creeds as they are designed to be used.
I don't think the 60 IQ's person's belief system can be both creedal Christianity and Mormonism in the absence of some sort of deep confusion, at least insofar as we agree that creedal Christianity and Mormonism are mutually exclusive. I grant that deep confusion of this kind frequently occurs in real life, and in practice people of many religions often believe in idiosyncratic fusions unique to themselves, but the fact of human confusion and vagueness does not seem to me to be a reason to abandon the project of clarification entirely.
When it comes to belief, I think that people can implicitly assent to positions that they are not consciously aware of. A person who recites and assents to the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass does, in sense, believe the content of the creed, even if he or she cannot articulate the meaning of every line. If you read much catechetical material, even across different religions, I think this is understood. I have read, for instance, both Catholic and Islamic books that frame themselves as "explaining your faith". As (presumably, for I am neither) a good Catholic or Muslim you have assented to this large body of doctrine, some explicitly (e.g. by reciting creeds), some by extension (e.g. "I assent to everything that the church holds necessary for salvation"), and some only implicitly (e.g. as logical corollary of something explicitly assented to), and I see how there is value, catechetically, in exploring and spelling out what that means.
The Trinity is, in principle, something like this. I think the average Catholic or Protestant knows that the Father is God, that Jesus Christ is God, and that the Spirit is God, but is probably less than wholly clear on what that means or how it's possible. They know these things in the same way that the New Testament states them. The developed doctrine teases out and says explicitly that which is necessarily implied by the top-level beliefs, so when a theologian of the Trinity presents the doctrine, it is not being presented as something additional for belief, but rather as an explication of that which the church already believes.
I think something like this is the case when we consider ignorant Joe Catholic and ignorant Bob Mormon in the pews. Probably neither of them are capable of defining the fundamental differences in doctrine between them. But Joe believes that developed Catholic theology expresses, in a more refined way, that which he holds in his heart; and likewise Bob for the leaders of his own tradition. The difference is that if I ask Joe what all these doctrines he believes really mean, Joe will point at the bishop or the pope or someone and say, "Ask him, he knows", and if I ask Bob, he will point at a Mormon authority. And at that point it is certainly meaningful to compare the mature doctrines that those authorities will explain.
They are, in other words, members of communities of faith. They assent to what their community presents for belief - and levels of personal ignorance, however lamentable in practice, don't remove that sense of communal loyalty and identification. In some cases we say this holds even in cases of individual defiance or disagreement - I think it's meaningful to say "Catholics hold that contraception is morally wrong" even though most individual Catholics (in the US at least) observably don't. In the same way, it's meaningful to say "Christians believe X about God, Mormons believe Y about God, and these are not compatible", even if particular individuals in each tradition may be ignorant or even defiant of those particular beliefs.
I just don't think the creeds are a good basis for defining Christianity. Most Christians do not understand the creeds; many who think they do actually believe in one heresy or another. I say they're still Christian. "Ask him, he knows" is a pretty good start to justifying why these people may remain Christian, but I say extend that further to God himself. God's nature, his physical characteristics, the precise meaning of the term "omnipotence", are not all that important to me compared to other aspects of God. If you asked me what Jesus' resurrected body were made of I'd say "pray to him, he knows."
Someone with this attitude and an extremely primitive idea of who Christ is is still Christian. Thus the thief on the cross is Christian even if he hasn't yet found a church, even if he's been an atheist for 40 years and just stepped foot into an LDS church for the first time because it was the closest to his house. Thus LDS people are Christian even if our doctrine is wholly incompatible with the creeds, because the creeds are not actually the authority regarding the definition of "Christian."
"Christians believe X, Mormons believe Y, and these are not compatible" is itself not incompatible with Mormons being Christians. There are doctrinal disagreements that are not heresies, there are heresies that do not exclude one from Christianity. The question is how big of a disagreement is big enough. We believe all the core things about Christ--we believe he is divine, he is God, he performed the atonement for us, his teachings are correct, he is the only way we can be justified and saved. The only thing we don't believe is that he's consubstantial in essence with the Father. I just don't think this last thing is a core part of Christianity. If it were, if creedalists were to be trusted that this question is so important that getting it right is vital to salvation, I think he simply would have been clearer about that in his sermons. All of that hogwash about grace and charity and the sermon on the mount is of no importance at all compared to ensuring everyone knows the nature of the Trinity, since a proper understanding of grace is not necessary for salvation, but a proper understanding of the Trinity apparently is.
We can keep discussing very esoteric principles and fine-tuning our definitions of belief systems vs. believers vs. believing communities, but in the end what it boils down to is that you believe God will damn me and my family for eternity because, while we accept his divinity and worship him, and accept his Son as our Savior, we don't have the nature of the relationship between them quite right, and unlike others with those same misunderstandings we're not part of a creedal Christian community. Does this not strike you as obviously wrong?
What is the utility of the creeds if not to define who is Christian? Again, that is what they are for. They were created for that specific purpose - to clearly mark orthodox Christians apart from heretics. You could, I suppose, take one of two views. You could suggest that this purpose is laudable but the actually-existing creeds do it wrongly, and instead lock in heresy or error. (I understand this to be the historical Mormon position.) The creeds are in the wrong place or cement the wrong views. Alternatively, you could suggest that this whole endeavour is a mistake. That seems like it would have pretty big implications to me - should Christians not seek to delineate Christianity from heresy?
I interpret your position to be that a basic, perhaps creedal, definition of Christianity is reasonable, but that the actually-existing creeds are too narrow. Perhaps a more minimal creed, one that encompasses not only Nicene orthodoxy but even the likes of Arianism or perhaps even some Gnostic belief systems, would have been better, in your view?
As regards Mormon beliefs - well, I would say that the early church seems to have believed that Christ being one in substance with the Father was a core part of Christianity. They believed that enough to put it into the creeds, and to exclude people who denied it. Presumably you take the view that they were wrong, and you can do that, but I don't think it's absurd or uncharitable of me to suggest that, by doing so, you have removed yourself from community with the people who believed that.
As a final note:
I previously said, twice, that I don't think that Christianity is coextensive with the community of the saved. "You are not Christian" does not mean "you are damned to hell for eternity". I also said "I don't claim that no Mormons are saved or anything like that".
Personally I consider it usually inappropriate to speculate on who is saved or not saved. That is a matter for God. What I do in life is hope for the salvation of all peoples - as in the Nunc Dimittis: "for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all nations". That is the part given to me.
I therefore, at least, knowing that God desires to save everyone, hope for the salvation of all who earnestly seek God, and who show proof of that desire in their love of neighbour. This does, for what it's worth, put me in company with the Catholics, who teach (para. 15-16, and at more length here) that though all salvation comes from God through Christ, this is possible for those of other religions. If I have given you reason in this conversation to think that I don't sincerely hope for your salvation as well, then I apologise.
Sorry, I shouldn't have levelled that accusation. This whole discussion is intrinsically tied to the whole "different Jesus" debate--which is that, due to my more esoteric and less meaningful beliefs about the nature of Christ, I actually believe in a whole different (and nonexistent) person and my faith in "that Christ" is of no effect. I should not have associated you with that argument.
Honestly if you're just using "Christian" as a group identifier then define it how you will. What I care about is the underlying implication that frequently accompanies this identifier--that those unworthy of the label are consequently unworthy of salvation. You've been clear that this is not your belief so I don't think we meaningfully disagree on this.
I don't see what the word 'Christian' can be other than a group identifier, really. What else is the word for? I suppose my feeling is that the Christian community, in a historical process whose most visible products were the ecumenical creeds, established and defined its own boundaries. Some people around the edges disagree, but I would defend the community's right to do that.
It is correct to say that in itself this process does not establish anything about salvation, or about who's theologically correct, or what have you. At that point we would presumably need to have a discussion about the doctrine of the Trinity itself, or about Christology, or about the basis of Mormon theology, on their own merits, and that's something we can't really get into now.
Thank you for the productive conversation, though, and I wish you all the best for the future!
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