The Fo-Mo Chronicles

Are we jealous of mormonism?

2012-01-27T13:29:00.001-05:00

That is the contention of New York Times writer David Reynolds as he examines what he perceives as the core issue behind Why Evangelicals Don’t Like Mormons. At the outset, the title itself is prejudicial. It isn't a matter of "not liking" mormons. It is a matter of recognizing mormonism as a dangerous false cult. Mr. Reynolds spends a few paragraphs getting around to his point, namely that evangelicals are just jealous of mormon "success", as if making converts to a false religion is somehow a sign of success.

The real issue for many evangelicals is Mormonism’s remarkable success and rapid expansion. It is estimated to have missionaries in 162 countries and a global membership of some 14 million; it is also, from its base in the American West, making inroads into Hispanic communities. Put simply, the Baptists and Methodists, while still ahead of the Mormons numerically, are feeling the heat of competition from Joseph Smith’s tireless progeny.

Mr. Reynolds repeats this oft quoted notion that we are just jealous of mormonism. The sheer size of mormonism is a factor but not as a matter of jealousy but concern. With millions of adherents and millions more who have turned away from mormonism and are disenchanted with faith in general, coupled with an aggressive effort to lure away church going people, makes mormonism a religious movement that cannot be ignored. There are plenty of lone wolf crackpots like Victor Hafichuk and his sad band of cult followers but other than random emails and blog posts, they are somewhat self-contained. Hopefully Christians who live near them are making an effort to witness to him or at least his deluded followers but he has little impact outside of his internet rantings. Mormonism on the other hand has spread like a cancer around the world. Every town in America has a mormon presence and the combination of their all-American virtues and carefully disguised language allows them to worm their way into the homes of many unsuspecting families. Far from jealousy or competition, evangelical Christians see mormonism as the home of one of the most dangerous pseudo-Christian cults around. If I witness to someone and they end up going to a different local church than the one I am associated with after professing Christ, that is not a win for that church and a loss for mine. It is a win-win! On the other hand someone converting to mormonism has taken a path that leads to an eternal hell and as followers of Christ that trumps any of our denomination differences or personal preferences. Souls are quite literally at stake. I can't speak for every evangelical but for myself and everyone I personally know, jealousy of mormonism is the last thing on our minds.

I think this is largely overblown. Many evangelicals, far too many, seem to care more about political victory than Gospel fidelity. Pauls admonition to not be unequally yoked with unbelievers (2 Cor 6:14) is not speaking specifically of marriage at all but that is how it is interpreted. It certainly should include political issues as well as business dealings and marriage but that doesn't seem to concern many evangelical voters and leaders. Regardless, if Mitt Romney is not the GOP nominee it will be because of his shaky conservative credentials, his past flip-flopping, his nonchalance about the race and the ugly pseudo-populist attacks on his wealth and success, not because he is a mormon.

An ad for mormonism in the Wall Street Journal

2011-12-29T20:47:00.000-05:00

The WSJ features what basically amounts to an advertisement for mormonism on its opinion pages tomorrow. The article, From American Idol to Mormon Missionary, is written by Allison Pond, a returned missionary who is listed as "an associate editor for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City". I would encourage you to check out the article and engage in the points it raises.

Where was Joseph Smith's veil?

2011-12-12T08:20:00.000-05:00

It is an article of faith in the mormon church that Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Chris:

It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him! (Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith-History, 17)

Of course it is important to point out that this "first vision" went through a number of iterations until Smith settled on the version we know today (for a listing of these visions and the myriad problems with the whole event, see First Vision from the Mormonism Research Ministry). Regardless for mormons today this is simply fact, Joseph Smith was visited by two distinct "personages" manifested before Him, one being God the Father and the other Jesus Christ.

This account begs a number of questions but I think an important issue is how the Bible treats this notion of chatting with God the Father in person. The most pertinent passage is found in Exodus 33: 18023

Moses said, "Please show me your glory." And he said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name 'The LORD.' And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live." And the LORD said, "Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen." (Exodus 33:18-23)

So here is Moses, one of the major prophets and figures in all of Scripture, and God won't even let Him see Him face to face. God instead hides him in the cleft of a rock and lets Moses just glimpse a tiny fraction of His glory because to see Him face to face in all of the fullness of His glory would destroy Moses.

When Moses came down, something had changed because he had been in the presence of the Lord...

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with them. Afterward all the people of Israel came near, and he commanded them all that the LORD had spoken with him in Mount Sinai. And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face. Whenever Moses went in before the LORD to speak with him, he would remove the veil, until he came out. And when he came out and told the people of Israel what he was commanded, the people of Israel would see the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses' face was shining. And Moses would put the veil over his face again, until he went in to speak with him. (Exo 34:29-35)

Moses was dramatically impacted by this event such that his face shone and the people were afraid to come near him, thus the veil. Apparently Smith, who allegedly had an even more direct encounter with the living God, had no such manifestation of having been in the presence of God.

That kind of leaves us with a couple of alternatives. One is that Smith was more special or less impacted than even Moses. The other is that the event never happened. Given the varying accounts, the Biblical impossibility of what Smith taught and the well documented fact that Joseph Smith was a teller of tall tales and a scoundrel, it certainly seems more plausible that this event sprang from the fertile soil of Smith's imagination, an event that fits into the fanciful tale that he spun and modified as he went along.

A very informative resource

2011-10-13T15:31:00.000-04:00

Aaron Shafovaloff has been working on an important project, God Never Sinned. This gets to a crucial question: if God is a glorified person, did that mean that at some point in His existence He might have sinned. How you understand and approach this question is crucial to understanding the difference between mormonism and Biblical Christianity. Watch this video for a sampling:

This is the tragic fruit of mormonism, faith in a "god" who was perhaps a sinner. Check out God Never Sinned

James White on 'Is Mormonism A Cult?'

2011-10-13T11:17:00.000-04:00

James White is going to be on the Paul Edwards show today at 5:00 PM EST discussing this topic. This is a crucial issue given the closeness of American evangelicalism and politics and the recent statements by Richard Mouw. You can tune in from Paul's webpage, God and Culture.

Check it out!

Richard Mouw, evangelical seminary president and defender of mormonism

2011-10-10T11:01:00.001-04:00

Mr. Mouw is a frequent commenter on mormonism, often tapped for quotes because he, unlike the vast majority of Christians, understands that mormonism is a false faith with unmistakably cultic practices. As such he was predictably asked by CNN for his opinion on the recent controveray over a statement by a supporter of Rick Perry who described Mitt Romney as a member of a cult: My Take: This evangelical says Mormonism isn’t a cult. Perhaps the comment regarding Mitt Romney was politically indvisable but it certainly is theologically correct. Not according to Richard Mouw however.

According Richard Mouw, who incredibly is the President of Fuller Theological Seminary, mormonism is not a cult. He bases this on what he describes as “a behind-closed-doors dialogue between about a dozen evangelicals and an equal number of our Mormon counterparts.”

Apparently he finds that mormonism is not as different as some of us, like those of us who actually were mormons, seem to think. From the CNN piece (emphasis added)…

So are Mormons Christians? For me, that’s a complicated question.

My Mormon friends and I disagree on enough subjects that I am not prepared to say that their theology falls within the scope of historic Christian teaching. But the important thing is that we continue to talk about these things, and with increasing candor and mutual openness to correction….While I am not prepared to reclassify Mormonism as possessing undeniably Christian theology, I do accept many of my Mormon friends as genuine followers of the Jesus whom I worship as the divine Savior.

Huh? How exactly can someone be a genuine follower of Jesus Christ if they misrepresent and frankly slander the very Person of Jesus Christ? A genuine follower of an idolatrous, blasphemous version of Jesus? Either the mormons Richard Mouw is speaking with don’t hold to the basic tenets of mormonism (which would mean they aren’t mormons) or Richard Mouw has a flawed understanding of Jesus Christ or, worst of all, he is so undiscerning and eager for compromise that he can’t tell adherents of pagan religion from genuine followers of Jesus Christ. Given that he is speaking with Robert Millett and others like him I can't believe the first explanation is possible.

What gives Richard Mouw the right to accept as followers of Jesus Christ those who subscribe to a theological system that turns Christ into a created being that is part of a polytheistic faith? Being a seminary President doesn’t give you carte blanche to utter this sort of foolishness. His frequent public utterances undermine the Gospel witness of many Christians who try to evangelize mormons. People like Bill McKeever, Sandra Tanner and Aaron Shafovaloff are working daily to reach mormons with the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. Richard Mouw has provided yet again ammunition for mormon apologists to undermine these efforts. They will say “look, this guy is a seminary President and he doesn’t think mormonism is a cult!”. That can only serve to hamper the Gospel witness of those who labor in this difficult field among the millions of lost individuals entrapped by the mormon cult.

It is embarrassing that a man who heads up a seminary is this ignorant of such a crucial issue, especially since he apparently spends a lot of time speaking with leading mormons. Perhaps he should have these conversations somewhere not behind closed doors where the issues being discussed can be exposed to the entire church rather than a secretive cabal of academics. I am awfully suspicious of conclusions reached outside of the view of the “little people” in the church. I would love to see the reaction of the president of a different seminary, namely Al Mohler, regarding the state of faithful mormons as genuine followers of Christ.

Not that he cares but I am publically calling Richard Mouw to repent of his support and approval of a pagan religion and a cult that entraps millions of people. As someone who has experienced first hand the cultic culture of mormonism and been exposed to the pagan practices of the mormon “temple” I can assure Mr. Mouw that for all of his study he has missed the mark by a mile. Paul had something to say about those who gave approval to those who were sinning…

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:28-32 ESV)

I would categorize the leadership of the mormon church as slanderers and haters of God and men like Joseph Smith as inventors of evil. Mr. Mouw gives approval to men who practice these things by declaring that many of them are “genuine” followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. In doing so he treads a very dangerous line. I sincerely hope and pray that faithful Christians around Richard Mouw likewise call him to repent and if he refuses take the appropriate disciplinary steps to restore him.

Musing about Mitt

2011-10-08T18:22:00.000-04:00

How Christians should think about a Mitt Romney candidacy and perhaps even a Presidency is going to become a more serious issue in the next twelve months. This video is a good place to start.

Glenn Beck, John Hagee and Zionism

2011-08-29T08:30:00.000-04:00

Check out this brief but valuable interview with Kim Riddlebarger discussing Glenn Beck's recent trip to Israel. I might have mentioned that Beck is a dangerous wolf in sheep's clothing and by joining arms with him people like John Hagee and David Barton are making common cause with an unbeliever and wolf for the sake of misguided notions of Zionism and a return to a "Christian America".

Click here to listen.

What about this?

2011-08-08T20:04:00.000-04:00

Rachel Held Evans, a fairly well known Christian blogress and author invited a mormon lady, Jana Riess, to field some questions on her blog: Ask a Mormon...(Jana responds). Questions were typically pretty much fluff questions with Jana Riess getting to answer them without a hint of anyone suggesting that she was not telling the whole truth. For example:

From Ellen: Can you list several core beliefs that you hold in common with other Christians? Can you list several core beliefs of Mormonism that are different (either subtly or hugely) than those held by other Christians?

One shared core belief is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for our sins, and that his atonement makes it possible for humanity to be reconciled to God. This is why Mormons so stubbornly insist that we are Christians, even though we’re not Trinitarians. But for many Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians, belief in the Trinity is the dividing line that determines whether a person can be considered a Christian.

That is pretty disingenuous. The aberration that is mormon theology is more than "just" denial of the Trinity, although that alone is sufficient to warrant the charge of heresy. It goes much deeper than that into the very nature of God as a created being and Christ as the same as Satan in terms of the nature of His being. To suggest that Christians and mormons alike hold that Jesus is "the Son of God" when I assume she knows full well how disparate the definitions of that title are between Christians and mormons is tantamount to an outright lie.

Here is my question. Is this a proper way of addressing mormonism? Giving a mormon apologist free reign to answer a series of soft ball questions with no clarification on terminology? I should hope that people reading Rachel's blog don't come away with the impression that mormonism is just a slight variation of Christianity. I am afraid that Rachel is letting her shared sense of egalitarianism with Ms. Riess color her judgment.

A wonderful testimony

2011-07-13T20:19:00.001-04:00

Really enjoying this testimony from the members of the band Adam's Road. They are all former mormons who have been saved out of mormonism and into the loving embrace of Christ who saves His people by grace and not by their works.

You can download their music for free at their webpage, watch the video, check out their testimony and music and be blessed!

Close but no cigar (against the Word of Wisdom ya know!)

2011-06-27T12:57:00.000-04:00

With not one but two mormons running to be the GOP nominee for President, there is increasing interest in mormonism, a topic many people have an opinion on but few know much about. CNN posted an article purporting to be "10 facts about mormonism" in an article titled: Explain it to me: Mormonism . Several of them are pretty straightforward (what is the official name?) but some are quite a bit off the mark. Here are the items in question with comments...

2. Mormons consider themselves Christian but their beliefs and practices differ from traditional Christianity in key ways, including belief in sacred texts outside the Bible and practices like posthumous proxy baptism and wearing special undergarments.

Those things are true but that is not the big issue. The big issues have to do with heretical views of God, of man, of salvation, of the church, of...well pretty much everything of any importance. Mormons are not Christians with magic underwear and some weird practices, it is a completely pagan religion from top to bottom. The PR machinery of the mormon church is desperate to blur the distinctions today. I am a bit nostalgic for the days of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith where at least they were open and honest about their heresy.

3. There are about 14 million Mormons today, which more than half living outside the United States.

To clarify, there are perhaps 14 million names on the membership rolls of the mormon church but in terms of actual adherents the number is much smaller, perhaps half of that figure. No one outside of Salt Lake knows thanks to the cultic secrecy that pervades the hierarchy of mormonism. Got keep the sheep ignorant so they don't start asking questions. Hopefully as the light shines on mormonism more brightly, we will get more in-depth examinations of mormonism that go beyond ten snippets about a very complex cult.

5. The Church of Latter-day Saints has outlawed polygamy since 1890.

Sort of. The mormon church has outlawed the practice of polygamy but the doctrine of the "new and everlasting covenant" is very much still in force. It has to be, otherwise it might raise questions of just how prophetic the early prophets really were.

While in some ways I think a mormon President would help normalize mormonism and be a huge boost to the mormon church itself, I also think that in increase in scrutiny might expose more people to the quirks, oddities and outright heresies of mormonism. I am not a huge Romney fan, nor a fan of Huntsman, so I am hoping neither of them wins!

Is Glenn Beck my brother?

2011-06-07T17:00:00.000-04:00

(Reposted from my main blog)

I got into a “discussion” with someone regarding Glenn Beck and the individual in question threw down the “don’t judge” and referenced the “remove the beam/plank in your own eye first” passages in Matthew and Luke. So that raised an interesting question for me. Is Glenn Beck my brother? If he is not, what is he?

I have made no secret of my concerns about Glenn Beck. Not because of his politics because frankly I don’t know that he believes anything he says. My concern as I have stated often is that Beck attempts to integrate himself into the church by downplaying the very dramatic issues with mormonism and playing up patriotism, nationalism, moralism and economic conservatism. To listen to Beck you would think mormonism was just a slightly variation on orthodox Christianity when it in fact is a completely pagan religion more akin to Norse mythology than Christianity. I don’t know if Beck is covering up his differences because he is trying to infiltrate the church or if it is purely driven by money. Some combination of the two is likely. Regardless, many otherwise well-meaning church going American conservatives find more kinship with a politically conservative unbelieving wolf than they do with a politically liberal fellow born-again follower of Jesus Christ. That is a serious issue.

Back to my question. First, what did Jesus actually say in the “remove the plank from your own eye” account. Here it is:

“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye. (Matthew 7:1-5)

Something that I believe gets missed all the time here is that Christ is speaking here of seeing a speck in your brothers eye. Three times in these verses He references “brother”. Now I may be missing the nuance but it seems that Jesus is speaking somewhat narrowly here. Likewise the point here is not “never judge” because Jesus also talks about removing the log from your own eye so that you can see your brother’s eye clearly. So when we apply this to how we are to live our lives, these events are applicable to the relationship between fellow believers.

That brings us to the second question. Is someone like Glenn Beck my brother? What did Jesus say…

Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see you.” But he answered them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”(Luke 8:19-21)

So who does Jesus say are our brothers and sisters? Those who hear and do the word of God. Likewise we read that those who are regenerate are adopted into the family of God. My brothers and sisters are not those who I agree with politically, they are those God has elected, regenerated and adopted into His family.

One more Scripture. Paul doesn’t seem really interested in judging those outside of the church:

For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.” (1 Corinthians 5:12-13)

Since people like Beck are unbelievers, shouldn’t we ignore them and concentrate on getting our own house in order? We certainly have plenty of need to get our house in order but that doesn’t preclude any of us from warning fellow believers about false prophets and ravening wolves who seek to weasel their way into our midst. When someone tries to pass himself of as “one of us” but is proven to be a false professor we don’t have an option here. I have no access to Glenn Beck otherwise I would call on him to repent. I do have a platform to address a small part of the church and in that capacity I think it is perfectly appropriate and necessary to warn the church about an evil person in our midst. That might strike you as an especially harsh statement. Is Glenn Beck really an “evil person”? Well if we define an evil person as someone who does evil and if we would qualify trying to lead God’s people astray with false and blasphemous teaching as being inherently evil, then yes I can’t see how we can view him any other way. There is a difference between someone who is lost and being led astray and someone who is leading people astray.

Jesus, Peter, Paul and John warned the church repeatedly about those who outwardly seek to appear as a follower of Christ but who are really false prophets, false brothers, ravenous wolves. They come in all shapes and sizes from Harold Camping to Jim Jones, Thomas Monson to David Koresh, Glenn Beck to Charles Taze Russell. Regardless they all have something in common: they pervert the Gospel for their own benefit.

The Bible, I believe, makes a distinction between the lost and false prophets and wolves. I try hard not to judge an unbeliever for acting in ignorance like an unbeliever. How exactly should we expect those who are outside of Christ to act? Now someone who is a false prophet, a wolf trying to integrate himself among the sheep to deceive and scatter them? That is a whole different proposition.

I am fully aware of my own failings and they are many and varied. My awareness of my own failings and those areas where I have a log in my eye have nothing to do with warning the Body about those who seek to sneak in and spread lies and dissension among the people of God. My sincere hope is that God saves Glenn Beck out of mormonism just as He saved me. Until that happens and as long as Beck seeks to lead people astray, I will warn anyone who wants to listen to see him for what he is, a false brother and someone that we should have no fellowship with, no matter how much he calls for a strong national defense and lower taxes.

The irony is rich here

2011-06-06T12:00:00.000-04:00

Author Eric Metaxes is being interviewed by Glenn Beck on his book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Watch at about the 7:30 mark....

Here is the money quote:

He is fundamentally opposed to actual Christianity but he hides it because he knows that if he reveals it he loses everything.

Eric is talking about Hitler but that quote applies to Beck just as neatly. Certainly Beck in not a Nazi but he is no more a Christian than Adolf was. Both are part of a pagan religion that considered certain people to be sub-human, Jews for Nazism and blacks for mormonism.

A great post on the dangers of supporting Romney

2011-05-25T10:42:00.001-04:00

Many Evangelicals are suspicious of Mitt Romney and for good reason. His meandering positions are troubling. His awkward and confused defense of Romney-care while condemning Obama-care is laughable and would provide ammo to Obama in debates and advertisements if Romney becomes the nominee. Of course there is also his mormonism. As a member of what most evangelicals consider to be a cult, Romney’s judgment is highly suspect. I read a great article today by Warren Cole Smith detailing the dangers of supporting Romney, A Vote for Romney Is a Vote for the LDS Church. That is a blunt and bold statement but I think it is true in many ways. I think this paragraph is a great insight into why Romney shouldn’t be supported….

What Weyrich understood was that you can't have it "both ways" when it comes to Romney's faith. You can't say that his religious beliefs don't matter, but his "values" do. The Christian worldview teaches that there is a short tether binding beliefs to the values and behaviors that flow from them. If the beliefs are false, then the behavior will eventually—but inevitably—be warped. Mormonism is particularly troubling on this point because Mormons believe in the idea of "continuing revelation." They may believe one thing today, and something else tomorrow. This is why Mormons have changed their views, for example, on marriage and race. Polygamy was once a key distinctive of the religion. Now, of course, it is not. Mormons once forbade blacks from leadership roles. Now they do not. What else will change?

That is simply excellent and gets to the heart of mormonism. There is no settled and unchanging ground that mormonism rests upon other than anything is up for grabs based on what the latest prophet has to say. Little wonder that when mormons talk about their beliefs, they don’t stand on propositional truths about God, they focus on their church and their prophets in spite of the ever changing stances of mormonism. Polygamy is an eternal commandment! Whoops, that changed! Blacks cannot hold the priesthood! Oh, that is socially unacceptable and God changed His mind! This is the revealed design of the garment! Well fashions have changed and God has changed along with it! Romney shows some of those same signs in his public policy, as if he is also receiving “continuing revelation” that explains some of his major policy flip flops.

As Mr. Smith points out, mormon “values” do seem similar to Christian values but the underlying theology is a perversion. When your view of God is as skewed as what mormonism teaches, all of the resulting beliefs are likewise going to be flawed.

Having said all of that, Romney is, politically speaking, a huge improvement over Obama but there is a real danger that Romney will do the same thing that Glenn Beck is seeking to do writ large, i.e. normalize relations and cozying up with Christians by joining forces against political liberalism. Having abandoned the frontal assault against Christianity, mormonism seeks to normalize relationships, minimizing the differences and finding political common ground to entice people in. Christians need to recognize this for what it is and call it out where it occurs. When compared to the loss of an eternal soul, lower taxes suddenly don’t seem all that important.

2 Corinthians 6:14 anyone?

2011-05-23T19:53:00.000-04:00

While I am not in favor of evangelicals getting too involved in politics, I really question when they make common cause with an unbeliever for the sake of political gains (emphasis mine)....

Another person has jumped aboard Mitt Romney's burgeoning presidential campaign — Mark DeMoss, deemed by the Christian Post as a "Southern Baptist media guru."

"(DeMoss) believes Christian voters mistakenly place theology over qualifications when they select a candidate for the presidency," Christian Post reporter Stephanie Samuel explained last week. "Shared theology, he noted, is a benchmark that many Christians only use inside the church or church ministry. … Based on what he has heard during his travels, DeMoss commented, 'I think more people, more evangelicals will get past [Romney's faith] in this election cycle than in the last election cycle.' Romney's popularity will likely grow since the top contender, Mike Huckabee, announced that he will not join the race for the presidency."

Winning the White House back is politically important and believe me I want to see President Obama replaced but the idea that we only need to worry about "shared theology" on Sunday morning flies in the face of 2 Corinthians 6:14...

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, "I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty." (2Co 6:14-18)

When winning political victories trumps winning souls to Christ, we have a problem.

Who is crazier, Glenn Beck or Harold Camping?

2011-05-20T19:53:00.000-04:00

It is kind of surreal to watch one cult member chastising and mocking the leader of a different cult.

So Beck mocks Camping for his ludicrous prophesies but doesn't seem to be too worried about all of the crazy things the "prophets" of his church have taught. He mocks the preparations for the end by Camping's followers but his church teaches its members to store food and water in their basements in preparation for some sort of future tribulation. It is no coincidence that lots of the survivalist outfitters are located in Utah!

Harold Camping. Thomas Monson. Glenn Beck. All deceived and all in need of prayer. Camping will be shown to be a false prophet once again tomorrow. Beck's various prophets have been shown to be false prophets for more than 100 years. When you get down to it, there isn't much difference after all...

More from the wolf himself

2011-03-29T19:11:00.001-04:00

Glenn Beck expounding on Ephesians 6

I love that he exhorts people to read Ephesians. I wonder if he has read it, you know the parts where Paul reminds us that it is not works that save us...

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Eph 2:8-9)

I wonder if he has read that and realized that the mormon notion of works righteousness and self-righteousness runs in complete contradiction with Paul's words?

I wonder how many Christians, or at least church attenders, are sitting in the audience listening to him speak of praying in "the temple" and realizing that an earthly temple doesn't jive with the Bible they carry with them to church on Sunday? That he is talking about the Gospel of peace but the "gospel" his church proclaims is another gospel that cannot save and cannot bring peace between man and God? That he is teaching them about the armor of God but that his church teaches that God was once a man and that men can become gods?

Little wonder that the church is in such dire straits when pagan unbelievers teach Scripture to audiences that are unequipped and unaware that they are applauding a man who blasphemes God every time he goes in his precious temple.

Studying Mormonism= Studying Christianity?

2011-02-28T20:00:00.000-05:00

There is a new (unofficial) webpage put out by mormon’s that purports to be dedicated to “studying Christianity” (hence the name Study Christianity) without regard to “theological differences” (it is not a new page, it looks like it has been around a few years but this is the first time someone has pointed it out to me). Their intro page says:

The Foundation for Christian Studies (FCS) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the study, teaching, and practice of Christianity in a way that inspires all people, regardless of theological differences, to come together in support of essential Christian values and compassionate service to God’s children across the globe. The FCS accomplishes this by providing rich scriptural course study and spiritual commentary, interactive web forums for thoughtful discussion, an online store offering inspirational Christian media, and a charitable giving program that emphasizes individual and community self-reliance.

This is the latest attempt by the mormons to change their tactics from a frontal assault on Christianity into a back-door approach. This approach attempts to draw people in with an ostensibly Christian message that waters down the inherent and irreconcilable differences between mormonism and Christianity in order to gain a foothold with those who are not sufficiently versed in Scripture and mormon marketing methods to recognize the deception. This group, founded by one Eric Shuster, attempts to marginalize the very real differences between Christianity and mormonism by describing any such attempt as “political correctness” and being contentious. That is not how Jesus described it.

In Matthew 16, Jesus asked a pivotal question of Peter….

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. (Matthew 16:13-20)

The answer to that question is the key. Affirming who Christ claims to be is pivotal. It is not enough to say you "believe in Him". you must recognize His divinity because only God Himself is able to make sufficient atonement for the sins of His entire people. Notice in this passage that lots of people talked about Jesus and believed in some aspects of Him, whether it was His teaching or His miracles. It is not enough to say “we believe in Jesus” without also answering the question: “Who is Jesus?”. Mormons can answer the first question in the affirmative but when asked the second question, if they give an honest answer, you will see why Christianity and Mormonism are completely incompatible. This group tries to brush away differences but when you look more closely at what they say, you see we are not talking about the difference between a Baptist and Methodist, we are talking about completely different religions:

The contentious individuals and institutions who deny the Christianity of others often utilize their own personal interpretation of scripture and sect-driven dogma to support their assertions. They contend the privilege of earning the Christian label is dependent on such things as believing in the Triune God, accepting certain creeds, experiencing certain feelings, and/or belonging to a particular faith community (or not belonging to another). These disputations are reminiscent of the Pharisees of old who fought relentlessly to preserve the letter of the law of the Moses, while being urged by Jesus Christ to embrace the spirit of the law by putting love and faith at the center of their energies.

When you lump denying the Trinity in with belonging to a particular church, it is clear that this group is being intentionally deceptive. There are many, many Christians that I disagree with quite vehemently on any number of issues. I am not a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Lutheran. What divides us doctrinally are secondary issues but every Christian is united on the fundamentals of the faith and the divinity of Christ is a non-negotiable. Whether or not Jesus Christ is God is not a divider among Christian groups but rather a divider between believers and unbelievers, between the faith in Christ that saves and the paganism that denies Him. Just saying “I believe in Jesus” is not enough. James 2:19 tells us even demons believe that God is one and that knowledge makes them shudder!

The Bible is quite clear that not everyone who says to Christ “Lord, Lord” is a Christian…

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7:21-23)

Part of what this foundation is designed to do is encourage Christians and mormons to work together for charitable works. That sounds awfully noble and Biblical on the surface but the unfortunate reality is that it is Scripturally untenable. Christians are not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers:

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? (2 Corinthians 6:14-15)

These verses have as much to do with partnering with unbelievers to do charitable works as they do with the more common interpretation of marriage. Making common cause with mormonism makes about as much theological sense as Israelites making common cause with Baal-worshippers. Overly harsh? Not when you consider the very real danger that mormonism presents to the millions of people who adhere to it.

I am all for studying Christianity but I find it disingenuous and intentionally deceptive to play the victim card and plead for common ground in a faith born from a young man lying about a message he received from “God the Father” that paints all of orthodox Christianity as an abomination. At least be honest enough to stand up for your faith and not sugar coat the irreconcilable differences. Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were megalomaniacs and lecherous scoundrels but at least they didn’t play word games to try to hide what mormonism was all about. This webpage is just another in a long line of marketing efforts deigned to deceive those who are Scripturally ignorant and get mormon missionaries in their living room.

What makes a cult?

2011-02-25T07:59:00.000-05:00

That is the question raised this morning in the Wall Street Journal by Mitch Horowitz, When Does a Religion Become a Cult? It is an interesting question and one that in Western culture is somewhat uniquely American because of our free and open society when it comes to religious expression. That freedom has made possible all sorts of different denominations, movements, sects and cults. Horowitz describes what makes a religion into a cult in this paragraph:

Many academics and observers of cult phenomena, such as psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford, agree on four criteria to define a cult. The first is behavior control, i.e., monitoring of where you go and what you do. The second is information control, such as discouraging members from reading criticism of the group. The third is thought control, placing sharp limits on doctrinal questioning. The fourth is emotional control—using humiliation or guilt. Yet at times these traits can also be detected within mainstream faiths. So I would add two more categories: financial control and extreme leadership.

A few paragraphs later, Horowitz adds: Yet every coercive religious group harbors one telltale trait: untoward secrecy. There some aspects of this in many religious groups but I can think of one that embodies all of these perfectly. No shocker, that religious group is mormonism. Let's look at the list one by one:

1) behavior control, i.e., monitoring of where you go and what you do.

Check. Mormonism is well known for keeping its members busy with activities. It is not so much that Mormonism controls where members go but it does keep them away from certain people (i.e. apostates) so they won't be infected. Add to that the various legalistic requirements of the "Word of Wisdom" and you get a perfect example of behavior control.

2) information control, such as discouraging members from reading criticism of the group.

Check. This is an obvious one. Mormons are strongly discouraged from reading anything written by critics and those who critique or question mormonism are demonized by mormon leaders (i.e. Sandra Tanner)

3) thought control, placing sharp limits on doctrinal questioning

Check. Another easy one. I remember vividly when we lived in Michigan the first time, I mentioned some doubts I had about the Book of Mormon. My wife called some friends because she was concerned and it didn't take long for some "brothers" to stop over to get me back in line. Questioning mormon doctrine or mormon leaders is a sure way to get yourself in trouble and eventually end up in someone's office.

4) emotional control—using humiliation or guilt

Check. Mormonism uses an ornate system of control to keep members in the fold. The standards imposed are high enough to cause a great deal of guilt among mormons for failing to be faithful enough in their calling, home teaching, Family Home Evening, tithing, temple attendance, food storage, etc. Women are especially impacted by this.

5) financial control

Check. If you want to be a god, you need to go to the temple. To go to the temple you need a recommend. To get a recommend you must prove your "worthiness" by submitting to a grilling by a couple of men and you can be sure you are going to be asked about your "tithing". Now no one knows where those tithes go or how they are used because of the veil of secrecy over the finances of the mormon church but you better give 10% regardless!

6) extreme leadership

Is Thomas Monson an extreme leader? Not really but church leaders like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young certainly were. They both were tyrants, lecherous and megalomaniacs. Modern leaders are more like really old corporate CEO's but the extreme hierarchy of mormonism is clear to anyone who bothers to look. Everybody reports to someone.

All six of these factors are bound together by extreme secrecy. Mormonism keeps lots of stuff, including embarrassing documents and their financial records, under tight control. When the pivotal religious experience, i.e. the temple ceremony, is forbidden to be spoken of outside of the building, you have the epitome of control and secrecy.

So based on what Mitch Horowitz listed, is mormonism a cult? Most certainly and the people who are still trapped in it are not only controlled by it but placed in spiritual peril. That is why those of us who have been saved out of mormonism have such an urgency and burden toward those still caught up in it. We are often asked "Why can't you just leave them alone?" My response is that I can no more leave mormons alone than I could walk by a person about to be crushed by a falling piano. Love compels us to speak, even when what we say is received with hostility or makes people upset.

Coming soon to the Hoosier state!

2011-01-26T21:00:00.000-05:00

Exciting news! The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is building a new temple in Carmel, Indiana: Plans to build temple in Carmel reflect Mormon growth. No more driving to Chicago or Louisville! Carmel is a pretty ritzy town with a median family income in 2007 of $110,549, so you know the 50 acre site is going to cost a pretty penny. I am hoping to get down to Carmel when the "temple" opens and take the tour. We haven't been inside a mormon temple since we experienced our own temple ordinances in Washington, D.C. It should be a great opportunity to witness to mormons and curious visitors alike.

Shelter from the storm? For mormons only!

2010-11-08T19:27:00.000-05:00

I have been watching the Hurricane situation in Haiti closely and it must have been terrifying. Bad enough to face a horrible storm in a comfortable, secure building but to face it with no shelter other than a tent? People in Haiti went wherever they could for shelter but one place was pretty restrictive according to this report from AOL: No Sanctuary at This Church in Haitian Storm...

LEOGANE, Haiti (Nov. 8) -- The water in Haiti's seaside town of Leogane rose to the doorsteps of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But if you're local, and homeless, you needn't have bothered coming here for help. Help is for Mormons only.

Hurricane Tomas swiped the western coast of Haiti late last week, and three days of rain brought massive flooding to many towns, including Leogane. The U.N. estimates 1,500 people in the city were displaced by the flood, most of whom have been living in temporary tents since the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The LDS church is one of the biggest and most modern buildings in Leogane, with the capacity to safely hold and protect 200. The church's hurricane policy? Only church members can seek shelter there. On Friday, 36 congregants and family members slept at the church.

They didn't receive food or water, sleeping mats or mattresses. On Friday afternoon, a dozen women sat on the ground and in chairs outside, underneath the shadow of the church's enormous satellite dish, while church staff more or less ignored them.

Wow, way to be witnesses to the community! Especially in a predominantly black nation where you have to cover up the vile racism of your organization's founders. Even though common sense and pure human decency would have called for opening your doors, that doesn't help in the authoritarian cult of mormonism:

"It's not simple," said Matthieu Chrisner, adviser to the bishop, the leader of the local congregation. Letting people take shelter here "is a very complex decision, and a lot of people would have to agree. It's a chain of authority that reaches the headquarters in the Central Caribbean."

If I had a group of children right now who needed a shelter?

"For now, we can have members of this church and their parents," he replied.

If they were disabled?

"I would have to ask at another level," Chrisner said. "There is a committee. Really, it's a committee inside of some other committees. It goes through the bishop, then a committee process ... then, there's no way to know if it's longer or shorter. I can't tell you how long it would take for an answer."

A local Mormon mother, 25-year-old Tanya Favery, sought shelter here before the storm. She thinks the Mormon-only policy is wrong, but she is resigned to her role, as a grateful beneficiary, and doesn't question the authority of the bishop.

"It's not normal, as a Christian," Favery said. "It should've been done otherwise. People could've come here and found Christ. But I'm not the decider."

They might have found something in this "church" but it wouldn't have been Christ. So even though what they were doing is clearly wrong, Ms. Favery doesn't question the authority of her "bishop". How tragic but this sort of blind obedience is one of the hallmarks of mormonism and all authoritarian cults. Perhaps I will run into Ms. Favery during my trip to Haiti. I would love to tell her who Jesus is and why He is not who mormons worship, no matter what the sign on the building says.

Of course we are Christians, we have a picture on our wall!

2010-10-21T19:57:00.000-04:00

By this all people will know you are my disciples, if you buy a picture of me and hang it in your living room.

An interesting news story came out today. A Christian church in North Carolina that sponsors (as a ministry of their church) a Cub Scout troop rejected the application of a couple who desired to be leaders and have their sons involved. The reason? The couple in question are mormons...

In shopping around for a Cub Scout program for their two sons, ages 6 and 8, Jeremy and Jodi Stokes decided on the one at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews.

The Stokes, also of Matthews, weren't members of the evangelical megachurch, but they had many friends who were. And unlike the Cub Scout pack at their own church, which doesn't have a program for 6-year-old Tiger Scouts, Christ Covenant's was big enough to accommodate both of their boys.

The couple even signed up to be Scout leaders - he would lead the Bears, she'd help with the Tigers - when they discovered the church needed more adult help. And when the Scouting officials at Christ Covenant found out Jeremy Stokes was an Eagle Scout, they were thrilled.

So why, in the end, did Christ Covenant reject the Stokes' application to be Scout leaders?

Because they're Mormons. And, therefore, not real Christians, church officials told the couple last month.

Au contraire! Of course the Stokes are Christians!

What upset the Stokes family most was the church questioning their Christianity.

"It was so offensive," said Jodi Stokes, who was raised Catholic, then became a Mormon. "I have a picture of Jesus in my living room."

And, she added, look at the formal name of their church: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Jeremy Stokes, a Bank of America financial consultant whose family has been in the LDS (Latter-day Saints) church for generations, wrote this when asked on Christ Covenant's Scouting application to describe his relationship with Christ: "One of the most important things in my life is my faith and trust in Christ and in His Atonement. Without Christ's help and guidance, I know I wouldn't be the loving father or devoted husband or humble man I am today. His example is the one help I need and rely on every day and I am truly grateful for that."

Well shoot. If you have a picture of Jesus (or at least a picture of fairly Caucasian looking guy with long hair wearing robes that you think represents what Jesus looks like) in your living room and have the words "Jesus Christ" in the name of your organization, you must be Christians! Just ask their "Bishop"...

Bishop Steven Rowlan of the LDS ward, or parish, which the Stokes attend in Weddington, acknowledged that Mormon theology diverges from some beliefs shared by most Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians. But he insisted members of the LDS church are as Christian as the members of Christ Covenant.

"Yes, there are distinct differences," he said. "But not with respect to being a Christian. We definitely and truly are Christians in every sense of the word."

Sure there are differences, just minor quibbles. Like denying the deity and eternalness of Christ. Like teaching that Jesus and Satan are brothers. Like teaching that God was once a man and that good mormons can become gods too. Like completely redefining the Christian and Biblical doctrines of the atonement. Just minor stuff that we should gloss over and ignore when they send young men out to knock on doors to tell Christians that God declared their churches to be abominations and that they need to be baptized by 19 year old mormons to have a legitimate baptism.

Gosh this is so unfair. After all, I am sure that mormon Scout troops would welcome a Christian leader. Right?

Nationally, the Mormon church has a close relationship with the Boy Scouts of America. What is the Mormon church's rules about appointing Scout leaders?

Mormon Bishop Rowlan, who heads the Stokes' Weddington church, would not say whether he would be open to naming a non-Mormon as a Scouting leader.

"I'd have to take each one on an individual basis," he said, adding that that is the policy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Huh. I seem to recall that be Scout leaders for mormon troops were "callings", something that only a mormon could be called to. I can't imagine that a mormon church would "call" a Christian to be a Scout leader for one of their troops anymore than they would call a Baptist to be their "Bishop".

Good for Christ Covenant Church. In a day when too many Christians are completely undiscerning about theology, it is good to see someone taking an unpopular and politically incorrect stand for the truth instead of putting unbelievers in a leadership position in one of their ministries.

(I wonder. If the parents who wanted to be leaders were atheists or muslims and were denied a leadership position at a Christian church sponsored Scout troop, would anyone notice or care?)

Very interesting statement and retraction at WORLD Mag

2010-09-17T12:39:00.001-04:00

There is a bit of a firestorm at WORLD Mag where columnist Andrée Seu wrote a glowing essay on Glenn Beck where she made this comment:

But it was obvious to me that Beck wasn’t into the extra money or fame. It was obvious to me that he was a new creation in Christ. I know he’s Mormon and all that. I also remember reading a book by Professor Harvey Conn decades ago that said that you have to be very careful when judging a person’s salvation—some people with lousy theology have their hearts right with God, and some people with impeccable theology are cold toward God.

Glenn Beck isn’t cold toward God. He is red hot. He is “a brand plucked from the fire” (Zechariah 3:2). He knows what pit he was in—and he knows exactly who took him out of it. If I were his station manager I would be biting my fingernails every day, because the man just doesn’t hold back about Jesus, and I can say without hesitation that I have not heard the essentials of the gospel more clearly and boldly in any church than on his program.

I have heard all the criticisms, and I can find sympathy for them—about the Mormonism, about the dangers of religious syncretism, etc. But regarding the Mormon thing, I think we should regard Beck as an Apollos and pray for a Priscilla and Aquila in his life, to steer him better (Acts 18). I just don’t see how anyone can listen to the man for a solid week and not be as blessed as I am by his courage, his utter lack of fear of man, and his sharp and personal testimony of Christ’s transforming power.

Either she doesn't understand mormonism or she doesn't understand the Gospel. Needless to say that didn't sit well with WORLD's mostly evangelical readers and it has prompted a ton of backlash around the web. Today Mickey McLean posted that this had slipped through the editorial process and then posted in full Justin Taylor's thoughtful response to Seu. Here is what McLean said:

On Wednesday, our beloved columnist Andrée Seu wrote a column on her observations on Glenn Beck and his faith, which has drawn a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Our friend Justin Taylor wrote a thoughtful response at his Between Two Worlds blog, which we reprint below with Justin’s permission.

WORLD’s position: All of us need editing. Our website editing system failed in regard to Andrée’s post about Glenn Beck. The breadth of response points out confusion concerning Beck and where he stands. Rather than speculating further, we will push to interview him and ask hard questions. One of the hardest aspects of reporting is assessing hearts, so we try not to do it: We look at what individuals do and say rather than attempting to analyze their relationship with God. For a sense of WORLD’s current understanding of the Beck phenomenon, see “Beckoning Christians.”

I am glad that the folks at WORLD realized how tragically wrong Seu's comment was although I wonder if they would have said anything if there wasn't such a public outcry. We all need to understand that overcoming an addiction and becoming a more moral person, even a conservative political hero of sorts, is praiseworthy but it is NOT the same thing as being born-again and to suggest that it is amounts to borderline blasphemy at worst and a gross misunderstanding of the Gospel at best. I don't read WORLD magazine at all but this whole episode is proof positive that Beck is impacting the church for the negative.

Russell Moore on Glenn Beck

2010-08-29T18:07:00.000-04:00

The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia: Russ Moore nails it!:

Originally posted on my main blog but I am trying to get this link out to as many people as possible....

Glenn Beck and 'Divine Destiny'

2010-08-28T08:18:00.000-04:00

Today is the day that Glenn Beck and a cadre of enabling "pastors" and other religious leaders are gathering in Washington D.C. for Beck's "Divine Destiny" rally. There are going to be many ostensibly Christian leaders who are linking arms with Glenn Beck to promote the gospel of Americana.

Exhibit A comes from David Barton in an article from CNN:

"For Christians concerned about Glenn's faith, I would ask the following questions: What fruit do you see produced by Glenn," David Barton, an influential evangelical activist who is joining Beck's rally, wrote on his Facebook page recently. "Good or bad? If you judged Glenn only by the fruits he has produced, would you still hold concerns over his faith?"

"Christians concerned about Glenn's faith should judge the tree by its fruits, not its labels," Barton, a former Republican National Committee consultant, continued. "After all, Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton openly call themselves Christians... Although these individuals have the right labels, they have the wrong fruits."

That is so ignorant that one would have to question the heart of David Barton. Glenn Beck's fruit? The fruit of mormonism is spiritual death. That is the fruit that matters. Would David Barton say the same thing about a Muslim who is a political conservative? An atheist? I don't care how Glenn Beck votes or what he writes in books or how emotional he gets when shedding crocodile tears over America, what matters is where he stands with Christ and where he stands is in opposition. He embraces a faith that portrays Christ as a created being and the brother of Satan, he embraces a faith that thinks that God Almighty is an exalted man, he worships in a blasphemous temple where rituals that have nothing to do with the Gospel are performed in secrecy to hide their shame.

Let me be blunt:

Any Christian who would make common cause with an unbeliever and blasphemer in the name of some sort of misguided patriotism doesn't deserve to bear the name of Christ. Period. It is embracing in the name of "God" a man who is a blasphemer.

Is "reclaiming America" so precious that we are willing to abandon the Gospel to advance this vaguely religious political movement?

Yoked With Unbelievers

2010-08-23T10:23:00.000-04:00

Glenn Beck is inviting all sorts of folks to join him for an event in a few weeks: “Glenn Beck's Divine Destiny”. One has to wonder if he is speaking of his own divine destiny (i.e. to become a god and have a world of his own to rule, where presumably there won’t be any liberals).

Join Glenn Beck for an inspiring look at the role faith played in the founding of America and the role it will play again in its destiny. The audience for the event will be overwhelmingly made up of pastors, ministers and clergy: a modern day Black Robe Regimen. Tickets will be made available to the general public at no cost.

A question for the “pastors, ministers and clergy” who make up the audience for this event. What does this mean to you?:

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? (1 Cor 6: 14-15)

These verses from Paul are far more than admonitions about marrying within the faith. Is the cause of the Kingdom advanced when you stand shoulder to shoulder in common cause with an unbeliever? Do you really see as an integral part of your calling to “the ministry” joining with a mormon to advance Constitutional restoration?

I wonder if these men have given any thought to the consequences here. Do people see these men embracing Beck in a religious setting and think that perhaps mormonism is something to look into? Beck is one of the top five most visible mormons on the American scene along with Mitt Romney and even if he is not an official representative of the mormon church, he certainly is widely recognized as a member. Joining forces with Beck tells me that these men see “reclaiming America” as more important than preaching the Gospel of Christ.

Glenn Beck’s latest

2010-08-20T09:22:00.000-04:00

Praying with Glenn!

Now good God-fearin’ red-blooded Americans can pray each morning with Glenn Beck and get a nugget of spiritual wisdom from Glenn to start their day!

So how many Christians are gathering in the morning to pray for America, prayer initiated by an unbeliever and blasphemer and done so with a "guest pastor", without the faintest notion of the implications of doing so? The fawning comments from people who are Beck fans are troubling and frankly border on being cultic. As I have said time and again, I expect many of them are in a church building on Sunday but are so lacking in basics doctrines of the faith that they don’t recognize that a) Glenn Beck is an unbeliever and b) when he speaks about God, it is not the same God spoken of in the pew Bible in front of them on Sunday. Too many people have received a lifetime of sermons and can’t recognize the difference between the Kingdom of God and America, between an unbeliever and a believer.

One can only imagine the outrage if this were spiritual thoughts and prayer led by a Muslim. Or even worse, if it was prayer and spiritual thoughts from some commie pinko lib’ral like Jim Wallis. Conservative Christians would be outraged. But Glenn Beck? That is apparently OK with way too many people. Beck is a far greater danger to the Gospel witness than Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. A wolf that makes no pretense of being anything other than a wolf is easy to spot. It is the wolf who tries to clothe himself like a sheep that is the danger we are warned about in the Bible.

Making lost kids more moral

2010-08-13T09:30:00.000-04:00

I read a blog post at Beliefnet this morning touting how moral mormon kids are compared to kids in evangelical churches.

One of the researchers in the National Study of Youth and Religion, Princeton Theological Seminary professor Kenda Creasy Dean, now draws upon the data to issue a gentle jeremiad to Protestant congregations. In Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, she argues that if teenagers don't have a firm grasp of core Christian doctrines and instead worship at what she calls "the Church of Benign Whatever-ism" -- or don't worship at all -- it's because youth pastors and other leaders have watered down the message, she claims. Teenagers in Protestant churches get the idea that they're supposed to feel good about themselves, but that little is expected of them; Christianity is designed to make them "nice," but it's not supposed to form them as disciples. The first part of the book draws upon copious research data to diagnose the problem that Protestant teens are being taught a brand of Christianity that is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Then the book takes a surprising turn. In a chapter called "Mormon Envy," Dean further indicts Protestant churches by holding up Mormonism as an example of a religious group that is doing right by its teenagers. She makes it clear that she has serious theological disagreements with Mormonism, but from a sociological perspective, Mormonism is succeeding in creating young adults who firmly understand what they believe and why their faith needs to have a claim on their behavior.

I can safely say that few mormons know much about what their church believes beyond the talking points. Once you press them, they are completely unprepared to address the glaring discrepancies between what their church teaches and what the Bible teaches, or even more tellingly what their church teaches now and what the “prophet of the restoration” and his cronies taught. Nowhere is this more true than among the missionaries, young people who supposedly are firmly grounded in their faith. What they are grounded in is having it pounded in their head that their feelings rule and that those feelings influenced by years of indoctrination by their parents tell them that mormonism is true. If that is the sign of success, i.e. borderline brainwashing, I want no part of it.

In many ways mormonism is more of a culture than a faith, a culture that requires certain pious activities and a certain mindset. Mormonism overcomes a problem that evangelical churches have yet to “solve”: how do you integrate and retain young people who are not transformed by the Gospel? Mormonism accomplishes this by replacing the Gospel with a religious culture. The end result are kids who are very, very nice and respectable, who go to church in their Sunday best, get married young and have big families. Those same kids are as lost as a Muslim in Saudi Arabia or an atheist in France, but they sure are nice people!

Molding kids who obey a series of rules and are taught from a young age to parrot back their “testimony” that Joseph Smith is a prophet and that they know this church is true is not a behavior that Christians should seek to emulate. The answer is not to try to retain kids or make them more moral by making them go to church but rather by presenting the Gospel to our kids and leaving the results up to God. That might mean that some children are not going to keep going to church but that is not really up to us nor is that our goal. Our goal is to see lost sinners come to faith in Christ and our role in that is to proclaim the Gospel, not to make our kids obey religious rules. Sure we should bring our kids to the gathering of the church and sure we should teach them about Jesus and of course we want to make our kids obey certain rules, but that is not the end result we are after.

Touting mormon kids exhibiting morality is just another way for the mormon church to try to infiltrate the Christian church.

The book of Hebrews: A testimony against Mormonism

2010-08-11T20:12:00.000-04:00

Well of course it is not just a testimony against mormonism but it certainly seems at times to have been written with Joseph Smith in mind. I was struck by this again tonight as we read in Hebrews 7 at the gathering of the church, especially here:

The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. (Heb 7:23-24)

Notice the contrast between a priesthood of Aaron that served in the temple that required many members and the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek that only Christ holds. Of particular note here and throughout the book of Hebrews is the difference between the priesthood of Aaron with many priests and the priesthood of Melchizedek which is always spoken of exclusively referencing Christ in the singular. There is only One who holds this priesthood and His name is Jesus Christ. The smiling young men in dark suits and white dress shirts going door to door and the men who claim to be bishops in a restored church and the old guys in Salt Lake City who declare themselves "apostles" all have blasphemously and presumptuously declared that they share in a priesthood that is reserved for our Great High Priest Jesus Christ and Him alone. By claiming the priesthood that only Jesus Christ can hold these men place themselves on equal footing with Jesus Christ. Providentially the Bible recorded the refutation of the false notion of a "Melchizedek priesthood" with millions of holders long before Joseph Smith concocted his heretical story of ghosts giving him a priesthood that no mere man can hold. I have placed and will continue to place my hope and assurance in Jesus Christ and His priesthood and not in the pale shadow and mockery instituted by Joseph Smith.

Glenn Beck: Refuting bad theology with even worse theology!

2010-07-10T13:10:00.000-04:00

So Glenn Beck took recently took President Obama to task over his view of "collective salvation". I honestly haven't ever heard Obama use that phrase or even anything vaguely like it. Leave to it Beck to weasel in some mormon doctrine to "refute" Obama....

GLENN: Collective salvation, unless we all are saved, none will be saved, okay? Jesus came to save you, okay? Let me just give you the — real quick, you've got to take it back, you've got to take it back to the war in heaven. War in heaven with the angels and everything else, and they have this war and Lucifer says, "I'm going to save all of them. Just give me the glory." And God says, no, I don't think so. And he selects, he selects the plan of Christ which, I'm going to send a savior down and he will save each individual, okay? That's why he's — that's why God came — that's why, you know, God came down and saved the — saved us all because of individual salvation. You accept the atonement of Jesus Christ and you are saved. Collective salvation is, I can't be saved on my own, I can't be. I have to make sure and ensure everyone else's salvation and then we're all saved together.

Beck blithely reiterates the mormon doctrine of the "council in heaven" where our older brothers Jesus and Satan had a family spat over how mankind would be saved. Apparently God the Father gave an equal hearing to the competing views and chose Christ's plan. If you think that this whole notion of Jesus and Satan being brothers and God letting them present competing plans for how to save humanity like He was taking bids from contractors to build a porch doesn't sound quite right, you are correct! Satan was never in the planning process, God wasn't interested in his opinion on how to save mankind and Jesus is NOT the brother of Satan. Meanwhile, lots of Christians still want to link arms with Beck because he is supposed to be the latest, greatest conservative leader.

I can't help but wonder how many people who attend church every Sunday would even catch what Beck was saying and realize it was completely wrong?

More on Glenn Beck and Liberty University

2010-06-26T10:28:00.000-04:00

"the voice of one crying out in suburbia...": Politics trumps the Gospel at Liberty

Mormonism desperately wants to be legitimized among Christians because it makes evangelizing nominal Christians that much easier. Setting aside the Gospel to win political fights is shameful and has no place among the Body of Christ. I would rather lose every political fight and see mormons won for Christ.

A testimony you should check out

2010-06-04T09:01:00.000-04:00

In New Horizons ,the magazine of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is an article titled Mormonism and the Gospel. The article is the testimony of Jody Morris who grew up as a devout mormon but was saved by Christ after moving out of his mormon home. He is now a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It is a great testimony to the sovereign saving power of God and it places the focus where it should be, not on Jody but on Christ and what He has done. It is a testimony of God’s grace, grace that is greater than all our sins.

I liked this a lot:

Sure, Mormons have their version of an atonement and forgiveness. They believe that Jesus died for sin, but in my experience their version of the atonement was unable to make me right with God. It only made it possible for me to make myself right with God.

That really captures one half of the glaring problem with the mormon notion of salvation. Mormon theology tells you all about being a sin and a failure but doesn’t give you a way to deal with it. The atonement as mormons understand is all about helping me to reconcile myself to God rather than the Biblical model which tells us how God has reconciled us to Himself. In mormonism it God saving us after all we can do, in other words we save ourselves as much as we can and then Jesus fills in the gap. The other half of the problem with atonement in mormonism is of course a faulty doctrine of God, specifically Jesus Christ. The Jesus of mormonism can only help you save yourself because He is insufficient and inadequate to do any more than that. A Jesus that is like you in nature, even if He is older and wiser, is hardly going to be able to save to the uttermost. He is more of a big brother helping us out because He has been there and done that. He is different from us in age and in experience but little else.

I would encourage you, especially if you are a mormon, to consider what Jody has written. I always love to hear stories of God’s grace rescuing people out of any false belief system but especially mormonism. Our God is great and He is able to save any of us, even those of us who are certain that we don’t need saving!

Now if we can just get Pastor Jody to stop baptizing babies…

By this all men will know you are my disciples, if incorporate "Jesus Christ" in the name of your organization

2010-05-07T12:29:00.001-04:00

Of all the various and sundry tactics employed by mormons to argue that they are Christians, there is none more silly than the "We have the name of Jesus Christ right there in the name of our church, we must be Christians!". There were no organized churches in the time of Christ and the ministry of the apostles. The idea that putting the name of Jesus Christ into your organizational name makes you a legitimate is foreign to Scripture. Refusing to worship Jesus Christ as Lord and God is not negated by putting His name on your organization, in fact misusing His name might just bring even greater condemnation.

"You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. (Exo 20:7)

Joseph Ratzinger, Joseph Smith and where the buck stops

2010-04-06T09:05:00.000-04:00

This whole blow-up in the Roman Catholic church gets uglier and stranger every day. Not a lot of people are blogging about this because it is such a horrifying situation. What do you say about a decades long string of abuses involving children? Words really fail to capture the grotesque horror of the situation and we over use words like “tragedy” and “atrocity” to the point that they don’t do justice to what has and is happening.

So what does the scandal over pedophilia cover-up in the Roman Catholic church have to do with mormonism? Not much in the scandal itself but plenty in the reactions by the faithful. We are seeing a full court press to deflect blame away from Joseph Ratzinger all over Catholicism. From angry sermons to editorials, Roman apologists are out in full force to blame anyone or everyone except Joseph Ratzinger. To hear some of the defenders, Ratzinger is the victim here and the accusations are part of some sort of plot to fell Rome. Already several underlings have fallen on their swords but the media is on this like a pit bull. For Roman Catholics, the “pope” is the successor of Peter and the false notion of an “unbroken line of succession” from Peter to whoever is riding in the Popemobile today is vital for maintaining the illusion of absolute authority. They have little choice but to defend him.

The same thing occurs in mormonism on a smaller scale. As a mormon you simply must defend at all costs the character of Joseph Smith and the other “prophets”. Smith claimed a pretty exalted position for himself and his place in the “church” he founded is of paramount importance. If you can’t believe Smith, mormonism falls apart. If you recognize that Joseph Smith is a man who made mistakes, it makes it hard to trust everything he said on face value. When you start to look into his myriad character flaws and outright sinful behavior, his whole story becomes suspect. Smith’s wanton abuse of his position as “prophet” provided him with the means to gather a harem of “wives” who were willing to suffer the ignominy of being a polygamous consort because Smith was the prophet. People accepted and still accept what was clear infidelity on his part because they believed him to be a prophet and like the men who declare themselves the pope with the keys to the only true priesthood, they have the power to forgive or condemn. To oppose the Roman pope or the mormon prophet is to put your soul in jeopardy, so you just swallow hard and look the other way.

So I see a lot of similarities between the two organizations (strict hierarchy, emphasis on sole authority to interpret Scripture, a claim to a unique priesthood, powerful leadership centralized in one man) and I also see a lot of similarities between the manner that the leader of each organization is treated. Granted, Smith’s sinful behavior was more direct but Ratzinger oversees a far bigger and older institution.

Whether you declare yourself to be the “Pope”, take on titles like “Holy Father” and “Vicar of Christ”, claim infallibility over all matters of faith and practice and allow men to kiss your ring or whether you declare that you have seen God face to face, name yourself the “Prophet of the Restoration” and in one fell swoop declare that you are rewriting the Bible and remaking God in your image, you are setting yourself up as the place the buck stops. You don’t get to hide behind surrogates.

The Bible paints a very different picture from the hierarchical, man-centered and authoritarian churches we see in Salt Lake City and Rome. Roman Catholicism and mormonism are means by which men can control other men. The Church as described in the Bible is a means for Christians to submit to and serve one another. When a Christian leader stumbles into error and sin, the church can enact restorative discipline because the Christian church is not based on one fallible man for leadership. There can be no discipline for a pope or a prophet because he is the church.

The differences couldn’t be more stark.

Um, Glenn....hate to break this to you...

2010-03-12T19:01:00.000-05:00

Glenn Beck has caused something of a controversy over something he said. Nothing new there. This time the controversy is coming from Mr. Beck's call for Christians to "flee" churches that advocate "social justice". Here is Glenn 'splaining himself (emphasis added):

GLENN: For the love of Pete. Marx started in 19 1848. All of this stuff started percolating, all of Nietzsche comes along, everything, it's redistribution of wealth. I've told you this, the progressive movement started with people like Woodrow Wilson whose father was a preacher! They perverted Christianity! "The concept is that Christians should not merely give to the poor but also work to correct unjust conditions that keep people poor." Yes! You're exactly right. We should as Christians do that. But then there's that added little step of having the government do it, not you. "Many Christians consider it a reoccurring theme in scripture. Mr. Beck himself is a convert to Mormonism, a faith that identifies itself as part of the Christian family but nevertheless rejected by many Christians. Philip Barlow, Arrington professor of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University said one way to read the book of Mormon is a fast track on social justice." Yes, that is one way to read it.

A couple of problems here. First, Glenn can’t speak in this way “We should as Christians do…” Just like I can’t say “We should as Norwegians” or “ we should as NBA players”, Glenn has no place in speaking of our common solidarity in Christ when we don’t believe in the same Christ.

Second, while I would certainly discourage someone from being associated with a local church that was committed to “social justice” (defined as government programs that use confiscatory taxation and coercion to enact wealth redistribution ), I am far more concerned with people fleeing a church that teach that God was once a man, that men can become gods, that polygamy is an everlasting commandment and that Jesus Christ and Satan are brothers. Glenn Beck has the level of standing to give advice to Christians as a Muslim, Hindu or atheist. Christians need to be discerning and recognize that whatever merit Mr. Beck's political rantings might have, he is lost in a pseudo-Christian cult and none of his religious advice is worth a hill of beans.

Glenn, if anyone should be fleeing their church it is you!

Breaking out the really big guns!

2010-03-12T11:14:00.000-05:00

I mentioned on Facebook that we had a fresh set of missionaries over last Friday. They called kind of out of the blue and since they were both new they noticed our name on the “board” and wanted to touch base. We of course asked them to come over! After a few delays, we scheduled a Friday evening meeting and they arrived on schedule. What was a little different was the (much) older man who was accompanying them, the local mission President.

Dealing with a mission President is a far different matter. Unlike the younger missionaries, he has many years of experience in dealing with questions and was quite slippery. In fact, during much of the conversation you would have thought he was an orthodox Christian believer because he has mastered the ability to affirm truths of the Bible. What is difficult about it is that I know that the mormon church means something completely different but it was hard to pin him down. I recognize that his answers were a mix of dishonesty and evasion but in a limited time it was hard to really dig in. An interesting challenge, it was mostly interaction with him and one of the missionaries. The other guy didn’t say a word and mostly just played with one of our cats for an hour and a half.

So that was interesting but now those same two missionaries are coming over tonight. They seemed a little lost last week. Maybe it was having the mission president accompanying them. Anyway, these two are something of a blank slate. We have typically had at least one missionary each night who had been there before, so now we have two fresh guys who we haven’t worked with. I am looking forward to really digging into some stuff tonight but keeping it narrowly focused. Since the mission president was quick to affirm everything I was saying, perhaps tonight I will ask why they have a separate church. If you already agree with everything I say, just come be part of a Christian church. That will give us the opportunity to talk about the priesthood and prophets. You can be sure I will be busting out Hebrews 1: 1-2 if we go that way!

Coming to the end of the line?

2010-01-13T09:44:00.001-05:00

Last night was an interesting meeting with the missionaries. It was pretty tough sledding. There was a new guy and he was borderline belligerent. It was a lot harder than normal to try to get him “off script” because he kept going back to the Book of Mormon. Short of completely shooting him down and shooing them off, I found it hard to keep on track. The new guy is a lot more prepared and bold than the typical mormon missionary, which may be why he was assigned to his companion instead of the guy who kind of suddenly was relocated.

I did get him to admit that the only people who go to “outer darkness” are mormons. I could see his companion trying to stop him and then get frustrated and sit back. The other missionary, the one who has been coming for a while, hardly spoke at all. He is the more senior of the two but the other guy had kind of a “bull in a china shop” kind of style.

We also spoke a bit about the idea of faith and where faith comes from. I was trying to get across the point that faith is not inherent in any person, that no one intrinsically has faith and that until God works first, no one ever will have faith. They have a hard time understanding that because mormonism teaches that men are more analogous to “gods in training” and that God is an exalted man. Because of that, the idea of a hopelessly sinful human and an infinite and infinitely holy God are hard to understand.

Near the end of the second hour, we started getting an ultimatum from the new guy that amounted to: if we are going to keep teaching you, you need to basically acquiesce to the truth of mormonism by reading and “praying about” the Book of Mormon. It is interesting because the mormon method of “milk before meat” where it comes to teaching and the mormon doctrine of “outer darkness” work hand in hand here as a control tool. Mormonism has horrible retention rates among converts because “conversion” is based on an emotional response to a prayer about a book. Once someone gets in and the “meat” doctrines are rolled out, it becomes a whole lot less attractive. The rollercoaster of sin, repent, sin, repent is wearing on you. No one can live up to the impossibly high standards of mormon culture. Emphasizing your own personal “worthiness” leaves you constantly feeling “unworthy” or worse with the delusional feeling that you are worthy. All of this added together with doctrines like exaltation and the temple lead to lots of converts leaving the church or at least becoming functionally “inactive”. The mormon church may baptize lots of people each year but they are losing those same people out the back door. Of course, once you are in and receive “the gift of the Holy Ghost”, you are stuck because now if you leave, you find yourself bound for “Outer Darkness”. It is an ingenious control mechanism. Get people in based on an emotional response that is fostered by these nice young men, get them baptized and have the elders “lay hands” on them and then spring on them that if they leave they are damned. Very clever and quite literally diabolical.

I have been a bit lazy prior to the missionaries coming over. We haven’t been praying like we should before they show up and I think that was on display last night because it didn’t go well. I got them to agree to come over next week but we need as a couple to pray before they show up. This may be the last time they come over so I am going to try to put together a rock solid, fifteen minute presentation of the Gospel starting with who God is, man’s sinfulness, what was achieved at the cross and how they can be saved. Depending on how it goes, we may declare a cooling off period for six months to let them work their way out of the area and get a couple of new guys in. As always prayer is appreciated for these young men.

Missionaries coming tonight

2009-12-29T10:26:00.000-05:00

The missionaries are coming over tonight for their Tuesday night visit. Not sure who we are going to get because we just passed a missionary swap so I expect to get a new guy tonight. With their schedule of changes we should be able to speak with a ton of different mormon young men throughout the year. The more, the merrier! We are planning on talking about the role of our works in salvation tonight (which was actually suggested by the long serving missionary last week).

Along with the passages in Romans and Galatians that deal with justification by faith alone, I am going to try to work into passages like Micah 6: 6-8 because that also ties in with the idea of the priesthood and the temples, so if we can get to why the mormon priesthood and temple system is nothing like the Old Covenant system. I have tried to get them to look at the covenants but I get blank stares, so that is not terribly fruitful. Here is the passage:

6 “With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6: 6-8)

The key to what Micah is saying is that it is not the outward works that God desires but the inward change. You cannot do good works to change your heart, God must change your heart and save you to do good works. That is a common misperception among evangelicals as well, so mormons are not alone in this. It should be a good conversation, please pray for these young men, pray as we do that God would change their hearts and free them from the bondage of self-righteousness that mormonism holds people with.

Titus 3: 4-8 and mormonism

2009-12-17T12:08:00.000-05:00

I haven’t posted in a while because I have been focused on other issues. We do have the missionaries coming over tonight, but we only get them for an hour so I am going to focus on a particular passage and see what they come up with. The passage is from Titus 3:

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people. (Titus 3: 4-8)

I like this passage because it touches on so many topics that are contrary to mormonism simultaneously. It talks about salvation being apart from works, speaks of good works being a result not a cause of salvation, it speaks of “God our Savior” and “Jesus Christ our Savior”, showing that the Bible teaches that Christ is God. I will try to post what the outcome is from tonight’s meeting at some point tomorrow.

A mormon president?

2009-11-30T16:18:00.001-05:00

There are two online editorials today about Mitt Romney and his “mormon problem”. A number of polls show some distressing signs for Mitt Romney as we slowly start down the road to 2012. A sizeable segment of the population polled (about 1/3) declared that they be less likely for a mormon as President. That is a problem.

The first article was by David Frum, posted on CNN.com. Writing from a conservative standpoint, Frum argues that we shouldn’t let Romney’s mormonism preclude him from office.

Simultaneously, USA Today ran an editorial today chastising the perceived religious intolerance of those who would not vote for a mormon for President. I say perceived because one’s faith is not a value neutral issue. When you believe that God is a created being and that Jesus and Satan are brothers, the offspring of “heavenly parents” and that faithful mormons become gods and rule over their own worlds, your judgment is suspect. His faith is one of the factors about him that people use to judge whether or not to vote for a candidate. There are plenty of people that are legally eligible for office that I wouldn’t support for a variety of reasons.

Regardless, I certainly agree that Mitt Romney’s mormonism is not a disqualifier for elected office. In fact I would prefer Romney as a candidate to any number of other moderate “Republicans” and certainly I would prefer him to Barack Obama. Romney was gracious in defeat and a good soldier after he withdrew. He did everything right in defeat and supported the GOP nominee. I think that by and large Romney would be an o.k. President, reliably conservative and predictable. We could certainly use someone who is stable and not afraid to extol America’s virtues, someone who doesn’t see America as the biggest problem in the world. On top of that, Romney, compared to the Boy Wonder in office now, has actually had some experience in the real world. So if it comes down to Romney versus Obama, I will heartily cast my vote for him and I would also support Romney over people like Rudy Giuliani or other socially liberal Republicans.

Having said that, I do recognize the danger here and it is a danger that goes way beyond fiscal policy or foreign relations. A Mitt Romney Presidency would expose and mainstream mormonism like never before. That could be quite interesting. Would a President Romney, with the press always on his heels, go to the temple in Washington, D.C. and risk having the major media outlets start publishing details of what goes on in the temple? Would the scrutiny of a mormon President bring to light the quirky and heretical views of mormonism? Or would a mormon President make it that much easier for mormon proselytizing? Mormon missionaries already find themselves in a world that is by and large ignorant of God. The more Biblically literate people are, the less effective mormon evangelism becomes. Unfortunately with each passing year, Americans become less Biblically literate and more relativistic. When you combine a mormon President to make the religion seem less scary and an ignorant populace, you have fertile soil for the lies of mormonism to take root.

It should be an interesting story to watch as the race for 2012 unfolds. I think that if Romney were a Methodist, he would be a popular choice as a safe selection, an adult alternative to the childish Obama administration. But as a mormon, coupled with his “Johnny come lately” conservative principles, Romney may find it hard to pull out a primary win in the GOP.

Report from the latest missionary visit

2009-11-11T22:22:00.000-05:00

We spent a lot of time on the idea of praying about the Book of Mormon. I tried to really impress upon them the reality that people can talk themselves into all sorts of stuff. The people in Jonestown who drank the Kool-Aid, the followers of David Koresh, the 9/11 hijackers all sincerely believed and had convinced themselves that what they were doing was the right thing. It is little different from mormonism. Mormonism at its heart is based on a “testimony” of the book of mormon that stems from praying to be given a revelation that it is true. It then becomes a linear A-B-C, if the BoM is true, then Joseph Smith was a prophet and the church he founded is what he said it was, the “priesthood” is restored and therefore Thomas Monson is a prophet. All of this stands over and above what the Bible teaches. All of it transcends evidence to the contrary that shows the Book of Mormon to be a fabrication, the product of Joseph Smith’s imagination. There is faith and there is blind faith and mormonism falls into that. The young men who were in our home last night are captive to the same manipulation that has been used for over 150 years by mormonism to draw people into a false belief system. By clever marketing, selective misrepresentation of the Scriptures, religious language and genuinely polite, likeable and nice young men as their representatives, mormonism creates a product people want to buy and like a good salesman mormonism manipulates people into modifying their desire to belong to what seems at first blush like a great thing into feelings of “faith” bolstered by their testimony and that of others. Little wonder that so many talks in mormonism focus on the mormon church being the “true church” and the monthly testimony meetings where you are to inundated with others telling you and encouraging you to publically intone the words “I want to bear my testimony that I know this church is true, that Joseph Smith is a prophet and Thomas Monson is a prophet”. When you have a preconceived outcome and a sincere desire for whatever reason to reach that outcome bolstered by the support of people you like, it is pretty easy to manipulate yourself into an experience. A couple of other things I brought up were people who fall in love and feel all warm and fuzzy, only to break up a few months later and also that they were raised as mormons with the tacit understanding that the BoM was true and that they would be missionaries. That sort of familial pressure can create all sorts of feelings (which is true of many “Christian” kids as well). I have often wondered if they reason the mormon church sends these men out so young is that they are still heavily influenced by their family upbringing and easier to control and manipulate than a more mature adult might be.

We also spent some time on the nature of God. As I mentioned, one of the members who came with the missionaries gave us a copy of Gospel Principles, so we were able to ask about our “heavenly parents” and that this implies a “Heavenly Mother”. We were able to talk a bit about who Christ is, His nature and who He is, and why the Bible teaches that what mormonism believes about Christ is heretical (without using those words). I tried to emphasize that Jesus cannot be who He said He was in the Bible and also be a created being who is the brother of Lucifer and our elder brother, different in age but not in nature.

One new tactic they tried was to get us to preemptively commit to being baptized as mormons and working our way toward that goal even though we clearly had no interest in doing so. Kind of determines the outcome and t hen working toward it. It is kind of clever, it puts pressure on you to get a “burning in the bosom” as you get closer to your date. I think it would be a great sales pitch for a lot of products, decide at the beginning on the closing date of the sale and then work on your pitch. What we did instead was tell them that we would do so if they would similarly agree to be baptized on the same date as Christians. We would search the Scriptures for a month together, pray together and at the end of that time either we would be baptized as mormons or they would be baptized as Christians. That really threw them off. They were kind of stunned for a second. That is when we got into the conversation that either we are wrong or they are wrong but that we cannot both be right. I get the sense that the “commit to be baptized” thing was their big gun and when that didn’t work I was afraid they weren’t coming back. They did commit with no qualms to come again next week, we might have a new missionary after the change date on Monday. Please pray for these lost young men and all of the missionaries around the world who have been manipulated and deceived into earnestly and sincerely preaching a false gospel to the lost of the world.

Building a mall for the glory of God!

2009-11-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

Watch this video on the new $1.5 billion temple of affluence that the mormon church is building in Salt Lake City! Gotta love a church that has "investments" sufficient to bankroll a $1.5 billion development.

Visitors tonight!

2009-11-10T17:10:00.000-05:00

The missionaries are coming over tonight. Hope to have a very deep conversation who Jesus Christ is. I want to use the Gospel Principles book they left me as a springboard, and ask about our "heavenly parents". So many of the errors of mormonism come back to an aberrant view of who Jesus Christ is, who His Father is and who we are as humans. They are coming at seven o'clock, prayers would be welcome!

Abandoning the Gospel to win political fights

2009-10-30T23:51:00.000-04:00

I read an article about the effort by some in the evangelical movement to "dialogue" with mormons. The article in Christianity Today presented a very disturbing and sobering statistics in response to the question "Are Mormons Christian?" :

Evangelical Protestants

No 45%
Don't know 15%
Yes 40%

Mainline Protestants

No 23%
Don't know 15%
Yes 62%

Black Protestants

No 30%
Don't know 27%
Yes 43%

I found the 43% yes from black Protestants troubling given mormonism teaching that their black skin is a curse and that until the late seventies when political pressure became too great, blacks were unable to become full members of the mormon church (in that they were unable to hold "the priesthood" and not permitted to do temple work). What these stats tells us is two fold. First, many Christians are completely unequipped and undiscerning to the point that they don't realize that a religion that teaches that God the Father is an "exalted man" that has a body of flesh and bones and that Jesus Christ is a created being and the brother of Satan cannot by nature be a "Christian" religion. Second, it shows us that in the effort to win the culture war, we are allowing ourselves to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For example, check this very honest quote:

One undoubted factor in the search for better relations is that evangelicals and Mormons today unite on various moral issues and feel on the defensive, especially in shared opposition to same-sex marriage. Whatever differences they may have about the nature of God, "when you've been in the trenches together, it often generates new respect," said evangelical attorney David French, who leads the Alliance Defense Fund's (ADF) campus religious freedom project. "The LDS commitment to core values is one that betters our country, without question."

Better to lose the culture war than to put the cross of Christ to shame and deny the Gospel.

Thoughts on hearing from a "General Authority"

2009-10-28T12:23:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned, I spent last night listening to Paul Pieper, a mormon "General Authority", a member of the "Seventy". For the mormons present, this was a thrill. For me it was heartbreaking. These people were so earnest, so excited, listening so raptly to a man proclaiming a false gospel and a false god. I took a lot of notes to talk to the missionaries about when they come tomorrow night, most especially on the various ways that Paul Pieper portrayed a gospel of works salvation and human righteousness. Some of the things Pieper said were (speaking of mormons): "You don't know how much power you have in your goodness" and "All mankind can be saved by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel" So they use words like grace when what they mean is a grace that fills in the gap between our own righteousness and God's perfection. Lots of talk last night about making sure that we are "qualified" by our own works to be baptized which equates to being born again. Not a hint of the Biblical doctrine of being born again through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is relegated to a baptismal gift, given after baptism to be a helper so we know which works we need to perform and which sins we need to repent of so we can clean ourselves.

When I left and went to my car, I wept for a moment. I was overcome by the lostness exhibited and the blasphemy celebrated. I was heartbroken but I was also thankful. I saw starkly how lost I was and how great my Savior is that in spite of my own arrogant self-righteousness He saw fit to save me. The true God, the God of the Bible is a God who saves in spite of works, who saves in spite of our own righteousness. That is the God I worship and that is the God I proclaim. I pray for those who were in attendance last night, for all mormons, for the missionaries, for the false prophets who lead them. If God can save Paul, if God can save me then He certainly can save Paul Pieper and Thomas Monson. It is my prayer that this happens. All praise and honor and glory to Jesus Christ, for He alone is worthy!

And they sang a new song, saying, "Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth." Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!" And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!" And the four living creatures said, "Amen!" and the elders fell down and worshiped. (Rev 5:9-14)

This might get interesting

2009-10-27T18:00:00.000-04:00

The missionaries were supposed to come over tonight but they stopped over last night to tell us they couldn't make it because there is a "Fireside" Tuesday in the area. One of the "General Authorities", Paul Pieper, is speaking. They invited me to come and you can bet that I will be there. I am really hoping there is a chance to ask questions.

Let me be clear. I have a heart for the missionaries, these young men are lost and deluded. They are preaching a false gospel but many of them have never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It breaks my heart to see them so eager and so zealous for such a pernicious lie.

Adult mormons are somewhat different. Many of them have little excuse outside of their own sinful, unregenerate nature for rejecting Christ. They may have family or social reasons for staying in the church. As a former mormon, I know that those ties are strong and it takes a mighty work of God to break them.

Mormon leaders are a different story. These men are mature and have been mormons for a long time. They are not only lost, they are deceivers, false prophets and wolves. These men have certainly heard the Gospel at some point and have rejected it for the false gospel of mormonism. They know the lie and they still propagate for their own motivation. This man coming to speak tonight is one of the top 100 mormons in the world. I pray that he will be saved by Christ but until that happens I plan to boldly declare the Gospel of Jesus Christ to him and rest in the comfort of knowing that God is sovereign in all things. We are meeting at seven this evening, please pray.

I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears. (Acts 20:29-31)

Dissension in the ranks!

2009-10-20T21:19:00.000-04:00

Had the boys over tonight. The one missionary has been the same one who comes every week but they were on splits tonight and he brought the zone leader with him. I think the zone leader was getting mad at him, especially when I got the other missionary to say that the index and topical guide in the book of mormon were "inspired". We spent a lot of time on justification tonight and even wandered into predestination and election. I gave the zone leader a bunch of Scriptures to look up. I was sure to schedule next Tuesday night with the primary missionary because I was a little concerned that the zone leader would forbid them from coming back to talk to us. Good talk, got to share the Gospel with these young men and pray for them.

Report from the missionaries

2009-10-13T21:03:00.000-04:00

Had another good visit with the missionaries. They brought help along in the form of a couple from church. The guy was a teacher of the Gospel Principles class (and gave me his copy!)

I felt kind of bad for one of the missionaries, the newer guy. He was the senior missionary and was leading the lesson and by the end he was in a lather because I was riding him like Seabiscuit. I was trying to let him get through his lesson, the first one "The Plan of Salvation" but I kept having to interrupt him to ask questions or call him on something he said. It was the firts official lesson we went through, normally we were just going over particular issues like the "priesthood". I was afraid I came on too strong but they are coming again next week, with a different companion on splits with them so we will get a chance to talk with another of these lost young men. I would ask for your prayers for them and for all of these earnest but lost young men around the world.

News from the latest missionary visit

2009-10-03T08:23:00.000-04:00

We had a very good meeting last night with the missionaries. We spent most of our time talking about the priesthood. I think I managed to demonstrate that a human "priesthood authority" was completely absent from the New Testament and I also tried to plant the seeds of the idea that not only is that "priesthood authority" absent, it actually flies in the face of the entire idea of the New Covenant and Christ as our High Priest

We also asked lots of questions about how they live and how odd and isolating it seems. The one missionary especially was clearly not happy about the living arrangements that are designed to keep missionaries isolated. When you have no one to develop personal relationships too, you tend to rely on your companion and when you have doubts you talk to the other guy who has invested two years of his life in a mission.

I am going to the "priesthood session" tonight. I am hoping it provides me the chance to ask lots of questions again. One of the missionaries is moving on to a new area and the newer guy is staying, so he will be back with his new companion on Tuesday to go through their "Plan of Salvation" lesson. I am going to try to keep my mouth shut while they go through it and leave them with lots of follow-up questions. Please pray for these two young men and for all of the young men who are trapped in mormonism, working so hard to please God but instead proclaiming a false gospel. These zealous, sincere, nice young men are as lost as a Hindu in India or a Muslim in Saudi Arabia and they need to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ just like any other lost person. Pray that God will raise up bold and faithful people to witness to them.

New visitors last night

2009-09-23T09:40:00.000-04:00

I haven’t written much here lately, I have had lots of other stuff on my mind regarding the church. Lately though you can’t go to a webpage without seeing an ad for the mormon church, so I clicked on one and requested a book of mormon. The missionaries came over last night and we spent about two hours talking.

I was trying to hold off any heavy questions, just letting them talk. That is hard for me to do, but I wanted to let them speak and give us their spiel. I had a hard time holding back on the “two personages” appearing to Joseph Smith, time for that later.

I threw a few questions out like “Why would a Jew write in ‘Reformed Egyptian’ instead of Hebrew when they were several centyries removed from living in Egypt when Lehi left Palestine and then almost a millennia removed from that?” It seems unlikely that Mormon or Moroni would even be familiar with Egyptian as a language, much less ‘Reformed Egyptian’ and even less likely that they would have written a record in a language that no one on the continent had ever spoken. I also brought up Hebrews 1. We spent some time on the Bible and why it was trustworthy. When they started giving the lines about it being translated over and over and things being missing, I asked them to give a quick summary of their understanding of the translation methodology and formation of the canon. That seemed to stump them, so I threw out 2 Timothy 3:16, gave some reasons both academic and theological as to why the Bible was trustworthy.

At one point they asked if they could refer to us as “brother” and “sister”. I gently demurred and asked them to call us by our first names. In all seriousness, they are not our brothers in the sense of being brothers in Christ. I also prayed both to open and close the meeting, I have a hard time letting people pray to a false god in my home.

They are coming back next week, I plan on spending a lot of time on the idea of the priesthood and the prophet, the temple and the differences between the Old and New Testament and the New Covenant. In the interim I am going to spend some time in study in the book of Hebrews which totally confounds the notion of a human priesthood. I expect to ask more pointed questions instead of letting them run through their standard presentation without spooking them. Time permitting I am thinking about going with them next weekend for the “priesthood” session of General Conference. Please pray for these two young men that God will work in their hearts. The stories have been pounded hard into these two young men but I know from personal experience that God can change even the hearts of people utterly convinced of a lie and if it is His will, He can and He will change the hearts of these young men.

Irony Alert

2009-07-21T13:25:00.000-04:00

Thomas Monson presented Barack Obama with a detailed family tree yesterday. As Aaron Shafovaloff points out, according to mormon doctrines from their past "prophets", right up at the top would be the name: "Cain".

I wonder if Thomas Monson explained Brigham Young's proclamation to our president who happens to have a white mom and a black father?

In the preisthood I will tell you what it will do. Where the children of God to mingle there seed with the seed of Cain it would not only bring the curse of being deprived of the power of the preisthood upon themselves but they entail it upon their children after them, and they cannot get rid of it. If a man in an ungaurded moment should commit such a transgression, if he would walk up and say cut off my head, and kill man woman and child it would do a great deal towards atoneing for the sin. Would this be to curse them? no it would be a blessing to them.— it would do them good that they might be saved with their Bren. A man would shuder should they here us take about killing folk, but it is one of the greatest blessings to some to kill them, allthough the true principles of it are not understood.

Brigham Young, February 5th, 1852

Just think if he had finished it?

2009-07-11T07:24:00.000-04:00

As part of his "prophetic" calling, Joseph Smith took it upon himself to retranslate the Bible, which is odd since he had as far as I know no original text to translate from and no ability in Greek or Hebrew. Smith died in a shoot out before he could finish his "translation" of the Bible, leaving us only fragments of his handiwork to give us a glimpse into what would have happened if he had the time to completely rewrite the Word of God. Aaron Shafovaloff on Facebook pointed out one example of what sort of shenanigans Smith tried pulling in "re-translating" Hebrews 7:3. Here it is in the original KJV:

Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.

Here is the "Joseph Smith" translation of the same text (emphasis in original):

For this Melchizedek was ordained a priest after the order of the Son of God, which order was without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life. And all those who are ordained unto this priesthood are made like unto the Son of God, abiding a priest continually.

Notice how he inserts language to change Melchizidek from a unique type of Christ, a sign of what was to come and makes a whole priesthood order out of him thus propping up the heretical notion of a contemporary human "Melchizidek priesthood". Thankfully, Smith didn't complete his work of butchering the Bible and mormons today at least have a glimmer of the original truth in their otherwise completely false "Scriptures".

Brigham Young University lifts ban on YouTube?

2009-06-28T17:11:00.001-04:00

Brigham Young University Lifts YouTube Ban After 3 Years

PROVO, Utah — Brigham Young University, the Mormon church school where students agree to live a chaste and virtuous life, has lifted its almost three-year policy of blocking access to YouTube.

Administrators lifted the ban on Friday, citing an increasing amount of educational material on the popular video-sharing site, university spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said.

YouTube has its own filters for porn, but BYU added it to the list of Web sites blocked by campus online filters in 2006 because administrators felt there was too much content that could violate the school's strict, conservative standards.

The university's software also blocks pornography, adult content and violence from other sites.

BYU cited limited bandwidth as another factor when explaining the decision. But some professors have since complained that they couldn't access relevant YouTube content in the classroom.

"I think there's no other way but to provide all of it," Jenkins said.

I didn't even realize that they banned YouTube. Seriously, how many students have laptops and phones and blackberries with access to WiFi? If the students want to watch YouTube videos, I am sure they will have no problems doing so. You really aren't stopping much by blocking YouTube. on campus servers. Given their teachings on God that deny His eternal divinity and lump Jesus into a familial relationship with Satan, they have much bigger problems at BYU than students watching YouTube.

Great video from Sandra Tanner

2009-06-21T10:39:00.000-04:00

I haven't had time to watch the whole thing (it is over an hour) but what I have watched so far has been just great!

(Mormon viewers please note: you will notice that Sandra Tanner doesn't have horns...)

The Reliability of the New Testament

2009-06-04T20:17:00.000-04:00

By James White...

Good stuff, kind of long

(HT: Reformation Theology)

Cultural mormonism

2009-05-28T22:24:00.000-04:00

A couple of posts have got me thinking about the hold mormonism has on people long after they stop believing. There are a lot of people who are nominal mormons at best and many more who are lapsed completely. Why do they retain their connection to mormonism when they stopped believing a long time ago?

The first was from Gloria at Musings on Mormonism in her post Religion vs. Relationship with Jesus. The second was from Andrew, a former mormon who retains his cultural ties to mormonism with a post linked to Gloria's called Religion vs. relationship.

What it stems from is the veneer of religiosity. Mormonism does a great job at creating a sense of community that is founded in a belief that they, unlike anyone else, have the "true church" and that they share a common sense of persecution. Ironically, mormon "persecution" looks a lot like the proselytizing that they do to other religions. Persecution can look pretty different depending on what side of the fence you are standing on. Even more than basic doctrines, mormonism is concerned with imprinting on the lifelong member and new convert alike a shared sense of history, being a part of the story of mormonism. It is easier to tell people a story and then surround them with other people who affirm that same story, even if the average mormon is woefully ignorant of the actual history of their church and what their basics beliefs are. Doctrine takes a back seat to feelings, history is preeminent over theology. When your basic evangelism tool is to ask people to pray for a warm feeling about a book penned by a shyster in the 19th century, you certainly want to rely on feelings and not pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Mormon teaching, whether fast and testimony Sundays or General Conference talks or teaching in Elders Quorum is all about reaffirming the belief in the mormon story. If you are a former mormon, think about the talks you get at General Conference from "apostles". What is the general theme over and over, year after year? It is that mormonism is the "true church". You don't get deep teaching, you get stories. You don't get Scriptural exposition, you get anecdotes. So even when people completely abandon the teachings of mormonism, they still cling to the church because they still buy into the story even if they don't buy into what that story means.

The same is true of Roman Catholicism and other religious organizations that have deep cultural ties and family linkages. Many Catholics are simply Catholics because that is what they were born. They might never go to Mass, might not believe in the doctrines, but Catholic is how they were born and Catholic is how they will die. Similarly, many mormons flat out will not leave mormonism because they have so much invested into it that they cannot bear to walk away even after they stop believing.

A new blog you should check out!

2009-05-23T13:06:00.000-04:00

Musings on Mormonism: Response to a comment from an LDS reader

Gloria, who like me was saved out of mormonism and like me has a big family (even bigger than ours!), has been writing some excellent thoughts on mormonism at her new blog, Musings on Mormonism. You should check it out!

So.....

2009-05-05T20:33:00.000-04:00

Haven't posted much recently. My thoughts have been heavily on church matters, on politics, on conferences and reformation societies. But we are finally getting more or less settled in to our new house, and a new house in a new area means it is time to request a free copy of the Book of Mormon! I hope to get one delivered by a couple of sincere, nice young men in the next few weeks and have the opportunity to explore the Word of God with them...

As far as it is translated correctly

2009-04-06T20:30:00.000-04:00

Those seven words make a world of difference. Ask a mormon and they will say that they believe in the Bible. In fact, it is right in their 13 Articles of Faith that they believe in the Bible. But those seven words after that assertion change the whole meaning of the 8th Article: As far as it is translated correctly. That really makes all the difference because it gives them an "out". When faced with something problematic, you just shrug it off as being translated incorrectly.

Mormons only believe the Bible as as far it is translated correctly. As far as what that means? Well that is a little vague. I am all for accurate translation from the manuscript evience we have into English. But that is not really what mormons mean when they say: As far as it is translated correctly. What that really means is that the Bible is accurate where verses can be taken out of context but when it clearly denies mormon doctrines, you are free to ignore it.

Notice what the AoF say about the "Book of Mormon": we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.

No qualifier there. Which is really odd because we have no way of knowing if the Book of Mormon, assuming for a second that there were ever plates or a person named Mormon to begin with, is translated correctly. Why not? Because all we have are Joseph Smith's multiple accounts of how he translated the plates but no plates to examine. With the Bible we have thousands of records to examine in real languages that can be verified. With the Book of Mormon we have no originals to examine, and even if we did they are supposedly written in a language that never existed, making verification impossible.

The Bible is viewed with suspicion by mormons, but the Book of Mormon is accepted as true and accuate based on a "burning in the bosom". The Bible contains accounts of people and places that are historically verifiable, the Book of Mormon records people and events that not only have no evidence of existing, but the evidence would seem to refute that they ever lived. All we have to go on with the Book of Mormon is the word of a known scoundrel and the affadavits of a handful of his family members and cronies. With the Bible we have the most studied work in history with thousands of manuscripts to examine in real languages that are translatable. I would be willing to bet that not a single one of the top mormon leaders could translate even one line of the Bible from Greek or Hebrew, and yet these men deign to sit in judgment of the Word of God.

Why is it that mormons put such faith in the Book of Mormon but are so distrustful of the Bible? The only real explanation is that the Bible refutes so much of what mormon leaders have taught that it must have doubt cast on it, it must be questioned and claimed to be less authoritative. Otherwise mormons reading the Bible and seeing the jarring disconnect between what it says about sin, God, Christ, man, etc. and what mormonism teaches will come to question their leaders.

Missionary zeal versus Conservative political values

2009-04-04T08:39:00.000-04:00

I saw a very interesting article in USA Today, LDS members conflicted on church's illegal-migrant growth. There is a growing conflict among mormons apparently over the issue of illegal immigrants. Even as mormon growth has flattened in America, it has still flourished among the heavily Roman Catholic Latin American countries, and that apparently includes immigrants to this country. The problem is that many of these converts are illegal aliens and if mormons are anything, they are law-abiding and conservative politically...

The Mormon Church is one of the fastest-growing denominations in the country, and much of that growth is coming from an unlikely source: Latino immigrants.

Latinos overwhelmingly are raised Catholic, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is aggressively reaching out to them by touting the religion's heavy focus on family and community, pillars of the Mormon faith that are also at the center of Hispanic culture.

As a result, Latinos are joining the Mormon Church at a greater rate than members of any ethnic group, even Anglos, church leaders say.

But the outreach has created some unusual conflicts because the majority of the Latino converts are undocumented immigrants, which goes against a major tenet of the Mormon Church: obeying the law.

At the same time, some Mormons who say the church teaches compassion are upset that fellow members, including Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, have spearheaded a crackdown on illegal immigrants.

"What has happened among a good number of LDS members is that they have been shaped by the Republican Party of the last 40 years. They gravitate to the Republican Party, and the party has become very anti-immigrant, culture-wars-oriented," said Brigham Young University history Professor Ignacio Garcia

So illegal immigrants are fertile ground but darn it, it really rubs them the wrong way that they are breaking the law. That is a tough one, preaching the Gospel (which these missionaries are not) should be more important than concerns over immigration status. So perhaps they can convert them to mormonism, baptize them and then report them to the INS. The article estimates that 70% of Hispanic converts are illegal aliens. That makes sense, they are probably less likely to come from a church background that is steeped in the Bible, and because they are isolated they are vulnerable to the claims of mormonism.

One of things that really stuck out to me was this section:

"My father died a few years ago in a job accident in Colima," (Mesa Community College student Miguel)Chavez said. "They told me that families can be together forever, and we can see each other after this life. I really want to see my dad again."

Mormon missionaries and marketers use the desire of people to see loved ones again to sell their religion. I have a mormon video that starts off with a family dealing with the loss of a young child, and the point is that if you become mormons you can see family members again. It is a very effective marketing ploy, although it flies in the face of Biblical truth to claim that people who die get a second chance to be in heaven (as long as they agree to convert after death to mormonism). Far easier to sell people a story about seeing loved ones again than to tell people the truth that those who die outside of saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ are condemned for eternity. But that false hope has lured countless people to join mormonism, people who will later find that it is all a lie, a ploy that tugs at the heartstrings of vulnerable people.

Secret versus sacred

2009-03-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

The kerfuffle brought about with the recent airing of a depiction of a small part of the mormon temple ceremony on HBO’s “Big Love” is sweeping the blogosphere, at least the portion of it dealing with mormonism from both the mormon view and the Christian view. Many mormons refuse to discuss the temple in any sort of detail at all, and they find such discussions distasteful and offensive. Few topics get mormons wound up like talking about the temple. In mormon life, the temple is built up as the ultimate experience on this earth. Many mormon homes have a three pictures on the wall, one of the current prophet or the current First Presidency, one of a stylized image that is supposed to be Jesus and a picture of a temple. We even got a very nice, suitable for framing, picture of the Washington, D.C. temple when we went through and still have it. It is front and center all of the time, it is spoken of in general terms constantly (but never in detail). Even when we were going through our prep classes before we went to the temple, none of the details were given. It was all very vague and designed to build up your expectations that this would be just a wonderful, uplifting experience. Even in private homes among mormons or in church buildings, the details of the mormon temple ceremony are not spoken of.

That brings us back to the sacred, not secret claim and the episode of HBO’s “Big Love”. Mormons claim that the temple ceremony is sacred, not secret. The fact that it is hidden from view and that not only are mormons forbidden to speak of it to outsider, but really are not supposed to discuss the details with one another, strikes many people as very odd and secretive, especially given the lack of precedence for that sort of activity in the Bible. I suppose one could make the argument that the ceremony was SO secret in the early church that it was not even mentioned in the writings of Paul and the other apostles. But there is just no reference to mormon style temple ceremonies at all. There is not a hint of it anywhere, not the unique theological underpinnings of the mormon temple, or the ceremony itself or anything like that. If the temple is supposedly such a vital ordinance, it strikes me as odd that during the earthly ministry of Christ and the teachings of His apostles, it gets no mention at all and in fact the teaching we do get runs contrary to mormon temple teaching. It would be like the Bible making no mention of baptism or the Lord’s Supper but expecting us to observe them.

Well, some may say, what about the temple in ancient Israel, that was very sacred and reserved to certain men? True, but not really analogous. The ceremonies that went on in the old temple are not only available to review, they are laid out in excruciating detail as anyone who has read through the Old Testament knows. What they wore, what color their temple garb was, the animals they sacrificed, how they were sacrificed. It was incredibly sacred, but it was also very open. When the High Priest went into the inner sanctum, everyone knew what he was doing. The mormon temple relies on a general ignorance of the Old Testament, which is all too common among mormons and Christians alike. If I recall correctly, the Visitors Center of the Los Angeles temple has lots of information about the ancient Israelite temples to further increase the illusion that they are somehow related. Because of that, it is possible to build up the temple experience in the mind of mormons to offset the general weirdness that goes inside. Compare the specific details of the Old Testament temple practices with the vague warm and fuzzy depictions of the temple experience disseminated for public consumption. Compare also what actually went on in the tabernacle/temple of the Jews and the quirky ceremonies in a mormon temple.

Frankly, the shroud of secrecy that hides the mormon temple ceremony from public consumption has nothing to do with it being sacred in nature. Having been through the temple and reflecting back on it, I can assure you that if the particulars of the mormon ceremony were made public it would cripple mormon proselytizing. The temple ceremony is an embarrassing relic of a bygone age, when Joseph Smith could indulge his every whim and turn every notion that crossed his mind into an official doctrine.

By contrast, I am more than happy to discuss openly every aspect of Christian teaching and church practice. Some of it is hard to explain and might even make people uncomfortable, but it is not secret. Secrecy is not a hallmark of the Gospel. When you read what the disciples preached you don’t see any references to the mormon temple worship, nor is there a hint that something more is needed. It is the Good News, accompanied by the regeneration of the Holy Spirit that makes disciples, not mystic secret rituals in a temple. Christ died publicly, on a cross reserved for criminals, and when He rose again He appeared in public to many people. His teachings were spread far and wide, and none of those teachings had anything to do with secret temple rituals. The Gospel is the plain news that sinners, justly condemned by their sins, can receive forgiveness through the shed blood of Christ by faith in Him alone. That’s it. Nothing more complicated or secretive than that.

There is plenty that is secret going on within the white walls of the mormon temples around the world, and it may be sacred to mormons, but it has nothing to do with Jesus Christ and His Gospel.

What goes on in the temple?

2009-03-16T16:44:00.000-04:00

This is the controversial video from the HBO show "Big Love" and while it is a bit off, it captures the utter creepiness of what went on in the temple. What this and you will see why the mormon church is so adamant about keeping the temple ceremony under wraps.

Embarrassing Mormon Temple Ceremony as Shown by HBO

In the spirit of equal time, watch the response from the mormon church, explaining why they build temples

(HT: Mormon Coffee)

Hopping down the bunny trail…

2009-03-03T10:28:00.000-05:00

Whenever the topic rolls around to evangelizing mormons or discussions of mormon theology, it seems almost inevitable that the conversation veers off into all manner of ancillary and minor stuff. Read a couple of days into a thread on Mormon Coffee and almost invariably the conversation veers into a number of different, more or less unrelated, topics. The moderators try their best to keep the conversation on topic, and have been pretty strict about it, but in spite of their best efforts the topics often wander. But all of the issues that people get distracted by: polygamy, horses in the Book of Mormon, blood atonement, etc. pale when compared to “the big issue” with mormonism.

The big issue with mormonism is idolatry.

And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before me. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20: 1-6)

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. Exodus 32: 1-6

What is interesting is that Aaron and the Israelites didn’t completely make up a god out of thin air. They even say that this golden calf is the god who brought them out of Egypt, thus tying their false idolatrous god into the God of the Bible who redeemed His people out of bondage. The best lies are the ones tinged with truth.

Mormonism, started by Joseph Smith and sustained by his successors throughout the last century and a half, created and worships a god of his own understanding. He clearly was a man who, despite his rudimentary education, had a keen intellect and an incredible imagination. Despite that and a typical religious upbringing in frontier America, he lived in a time of religious upheaval and because of that upheaval confusion ran rampant in religious circles. Because of that uncertainty, Smith decided that rather than study deeper into the Bible to figure out who God was, it was far easier to create a new god of his own imagination.

The god that Smith created and that is worshipped even today in thousands of mormon churches and hundreds of mormon temples is a god that bears very little resemblance to the God of the Bible. Where the God of the Bible is infinite, eternal and unique, the god of Smith’s imagination is finite, created, subservient and but one of an untold multitude of gods. It certainly is not the first time that an idol has been created by man in place of God (i.e. the golden calf) but mormonism has taken the extra step of claiming fidelity to the Bible while at the same time completing reinventing who God is. That makes it difficult to speak with mormons, as many have pointed out before, because we are using the same words but meaning something completely different.

If you want to witness to mormons, you first need to study up on who God is. We have a hard time, in my humble opinion, witnessing to people of other faiths, cults and aberrant religions because we don’t have any idea what we believe. We don’t know what the Bible teaches, who God has revealed Himself to be in the Scriptures and so when we are faced by someone with a radically false view of God, we know something is wrong, we just don’t know what it is. God’s people need to get back into God’s Word so we can talk to people who are lost, whether muslims, mormons or atheists, and declare to them the God who has revealed Himself. Otherwise we will just be arguing about minor issues that don’t matter in the long term, because if you don’t know God through His Word that has revealed His Son, you are lost and no amount of clever argumentation will change that. A good resource, and a free one, is an online book by Paul Washer The One True God. That is a great study resource to complement your reading of the Word.

God is hard to comprehend, and frankly I don’t want a God that I can comprehend too completely. But that does not excuse us from creating a god in our own image, whether we are doing so intentionally or out of ignorance of who He has revealed Himself to be.

Buggy Whip Restoration

2009-01-20T10:05:00.001-05:00

Imagine this scene if you can. Everyone knows that General Motors is in big trouble. They are desperate for cash and to revitalize their business. So the CEO Rick Wagoner announces they are bringing in a management guru who is going to teach them how to transform their business model. The man walks in and introduces himself as John Yoder, and he kind of sticks out in the room full of tailored business suits because he is wearing Amish homespun overalls, a straw hat and a plain shirt. Mr. Yoder addresses the board of directors and declares that their problems are over. The solution to the domestic automotive industry is simple: go back to manufacturing buggy whips! The problems in the auto industry prove that cars were just a bad idea from the get go, so out with the internal combustion engine and in with horse and buggy. What’s old is new again!

This is kind of a crude analogy of the premise behind mormonism but I think it makes the point. Joseph Smith and his followers promised to restore the church, the New Testament church reflecting the New Covenant in the blood of Christ, by returning to Old Testament, Old Covenant types and shadows. You know what’ll fix the church? Temples. Yeah, and prophets! Throw in some priests! That’s the ticket! That is an undoing of the Gospel and a return to the untenable system of works and obedience righteousness that mankind failed to keep. Mormon leaders say this stuff with a straight face and never get challenged from within except by a few dissidents who are in peril of excommunication because of their questioning of the “prophet”. There are plenty of Biblical references sprinkled throughout mormon doctrine but there is no semblance of the New Testament church, the ascension of Christ as prophet, priest & king, of justification by faith, of propitiation for sins at the cross. Mormonism cannot appeal to the New Testament for its source of theology. It cannot appeal to the New Testament ecclesiology to affirm its hierarchical, authoritarian human “priesthood” driven organization. It cannot even appeal to the New Testament to speak to the nature of God the Father, of His only Begotten Son Jesus Christ or the lostness of sinful man.

All that is left is a polytheistic paganism couched in Biblical terminology. Buggy whips will not save General Motors and a return to the Old Covenant will not reform the very real problems in the church.

Political free speech is un-American?

2009-01-18T19:12:00.001-05:00

Tom Hanks is one of America's most beloved actors and directors. He has always struck me as someone apolitical, you just never heard him making inane political comments as so many other Hollywood types feel inclined and empowered to do because they have become rich and famous pretending to be someone else.

But apparently he thinks that only certain free speech is acceptable and by his statements shows himself to be just another one of Hollywood's self-declared cultural prophets. Mr. Hanks recently expressed his opinion of the mormon church and California's Proposition 8 at the premier of Big Love, his show about a polygamous family in Utah.

Tom Hanks, an Executive Producer for HBO’s controversial polygamist series “Big Love,” made his feelings toward the Mormon Church’s involvement in California's Prop 8 (which prohibits gay marriage) very clear at the show’s premiere party on Wednesday night.

“The truth is this takes place in Utah, the truth is these people are some bizarre offshoot of the Mormon Church, and the truth is a lot of Mormons gave a lot of money to the church to make Prop-8 happen,” he told Tarts. “There are a lot of people who feel that is un-American, and I am one of them. I do not like to see any discrimination codified on any piece of paper, any of the 50 states in America, but here's what happens now. A little bit of light can be shed, and people can see who's responsible, and that can motivate the next go around of our self correcting Constitution, and hopefully we can move forward instead of backwards. So let's have faith in not only the American, but Californian, constitutional process.”

Apparently the "constitutional process" doesn't mean that the people should be able to make their will law, but instead means that the courts can feel free and be encouraged to overturn the will of the people, declaring constitutional amendments to be unconstitutional. As I have mentioned before and what should be clear from my writings is that theologically I have no allegiance with mormonism, nor do I consider them suitable allies in any sort of cultural crusades. Mormons, members of the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" are a lost people group nor different than Muslims or Hindus. "Enemy of my enemy is my friend" doesn't work with the Gospel. We can have no fellowship nor friendship with enemies of the Gospel.

Having said that, the idea that mormons using their own resources to stand up for a cause that they believe strongly in qualifies as "un-American" demonstrates the opinion of someone who is obscenely ignorant. The right to free speech and free religious expression is foundational to our republic. I think the Founding Fathers might have had a comment or two about that...

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

So where do we see that mormons do not have the right, individually or collectively, to express their political will? Where is it un-American? Mr. Hanks has a disturbing and quite dangerous idea of what American Constitutional government is founded upon. His sort of freedom is the same sort of freedom we saw in every totalitarian government that has ever existed. Certain ideas are approved by the elites, and other ideas are considered dangerous and deserving of being suppressed. What he is counting on, the California Supreme Court overturning the will of the people, is an intrusion in the democratic process that is unprecedented.

Bill McKeever from the Mormonism Research Ministry is quoted in the Fox News article and I affirm what he says:

Bill McKeever, a rep for the Mormonism Research Ministry, added, “Personally, I find it un-American to tell people that they shouldn’t vote their conscience. Hanks said he doesn’t ‘like to see any discrimination codified on any piece of paper.’ Considering that just about every law discriminates in some form or another, makes this comment ridiculous. Hanks’ comment shows that he very much believes in discriminating against people with whom he disagrees. I may not agree with Mormon theology, but I certainly defend their right to express their opinion.”

Our differences with mormons does not mean that they do not have the same rights as any other Americans, and as a religious group they have even greater protections under our system of government. We should witness to mormons with the Gospel of Jesus Christ but we should also defend their right to free speech as vociferously as we would any other Americans.

Word of "Wisdom" my foot!

2009-01-15T12:09:00.000-05:00

Drinking coffee reduces risk of Alzheimer's: study

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Middle-aged people who drink moderate amounts of coffee significantly reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, a study by Finnish and Swedish researchers showed Thursday.

"Middle-aged people who drank between three and five cups of coffee a day lowered their risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease by between 60 and 65 percent later in life," said lead researcher on the project, Miia Kivipelto, a professor at the University of Kuopio in Finland and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The study, which was also conducted in cooperation with the National Public Health Institute in Helsinki and which was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease this month, was based on repeated interviews with 1,409 people in Finland over more than two decades.

The Trinity

2009-01-14T11:45:00.000-05:00

I kind of fell away from doing this series of responses because I didn’t have time, we haven’t been as focused on mormonism since the missionaries haven’t been over and the individual who posted the initial comment has disappeared (seriously, I wish I had a buck for every bold mormon apologist who posts something to set me straight and then disappears when I call them on it). But I said I was going to do a full response, so by golly I am! The next point had to do with the Trinity, this is a lengthy quote but I need to post the whole thing to be fair. You will not that we find very minimal citation for some pretty strongly declared statements (I love the appeal to agnostic Bart Ehrman!).

The Trinity:

A literal reading of the New Testament points to God and Jesus Christ , His Son , being separate , divine beings , united in purpose. . To whom was Jesus praying in Gethsemane, and Who was speaking to Him and his apostles on the Mount of Transfiguration? The Nicene Creed’s definition of the Trinity was influenced by scribes translating the Greek manuscripts into Latin. The scribes embellished on a passage explaining the Trinity , which is the Catholic and Protestant belief that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The oldest versions of the epistle of 1 John, read: "There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water and the blood and these three are one." Scribes later added "the Father, the Word and the Spirit," and it remained in the epistle when it was translated into English for the King James Version, according to Dr. Bart Ehrman, Chairman of the Religion Department at UNC- Chapel Hill. He no longer believes in the Nicene Trinity. . Scholars agree that Early Christians believed in an embodied God; it was neo-Platonist influences that later turned Him into a disembodied Spirit. Harper’s Bible Dictionary entry on the Trinity says “the formal doctrine of the Trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries is not to be found in the New Testament.” The Church of Jesus Christ (LDS) views the Trinity as three separate divine beings , in accord with the earliest Greek New Testament manuscripts.

Mormonism is very appealing to cultural Christians, people who think they are Christians because of church attendance and because they try to behave in a moral way. They have a rudimentary knowledge of some churchy terms and some of the stories, but their knowledge is shallow and because they are not regenerate believers they never seek to dig into the Word and they surely are not being taught the whole counsel of God in most churches. The trinity is an area where many nominal Christians and culturally conditioned church going unbelievers are vulnerable precisely because it is a heady concept and one that receives so little attention in the church. I suspect that is because a lot of preachers don’t really understand it (which is somewhat understandable) and have never taken the time to really work through it (which is not acceptable).

Mormonism is seductive because it takes some of the great mysteries of God and redefines them into more easily accessible doctrines. Sure they are contrary to Scripture, but they are easy to understand, so go for it! Kind of like the Golden Calf, it is easier for a sinful mind to worship something tangible than to worship the great I AM that you can’t see. The Trinity is a prime example of that because it is a doctrine that gets right to the heart of who God is, His very nature. Obviously anytime a mortal, fallible, sinful human tries to wrap his mind around the infinite, holy, self-existent God of the Bible, he is going to fall woefully short but that doesn’t give us a free pass to create gods in our own image. Unfortunately, the fact that the nature of the Triune God is so hard to grasp in many ways makes it a prime target for heresy, from Arianism to Mormonism to modern day modalism.

The Trinity is not something that is specifically spelled out in the Bible, that much is true. In other words, there is not a verse that gives a dictionary definition or says: There is one God, eternally existing in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, it is also in no way a result of Greek philosophy, something made up in a church council or the other drivel people cut and paste as a “refutation” of the doctrine of the Triune God. It is a doctrine that is clear when you look at the totality of the Biblical witness, something intertwined in the story line of redemption recorded in the Bible, but like many of the other great truths of the Bible it requires you to read and study and pray. In other words, put in a little effort!

Christ exemplifies the attributes that are unique to God and since the Bible is equally clear that there is but one God, we have a quandary. Either Jesus is not God, or there is more than one God or something else. That "something else" is where we find the Trinity. Jesus is clearly divine, uncreated, self-existing, immortal, in other words He is God in a way that only the God of the Bible can be. So it cannot be that He is not God. The Bible is also unequivocal that there is only one God. Not one God of this world or one God that we know about. In all creation, in all things that ever have or ever will exist, there is only one God. The most heinous of sins is idolatry and worship of other, false gods. So it cannot be that there is more than one God. What then? We are left with Christ, who has all of the attributes of God, who declares Himself to be God and is worshipped by the apostles as God. We also have the Father and the Spirit, who are personal, have all of the attributes of God and are distinct from Christ and from each other. So what does this tell us? It tells us that there is one God, eternally existing in three persons: the Father, the Son and the Spirit. That is the only explanation that makes any sense at all. Lots of things are declared in the Bible that are hard to figure out. How can a sinner be made right with a infinitely holy and just God by the death of one Man? It just is and the fact that it is a tough concept is no reason to feel free to rewrite Scripture and reject what the Word says to make a tough concept easier for us to understand.

That Jesus Christ is God even as He is also man (the hypostatic union) is evident in the pages of Holy Writ. I am not going to try to replicate the volumes of work done by scholars who are better read than I and have done a much better job explaining the Trinity (see additional resources at the bottom of this post), but there are a few basic, fundamental points that show unequivocally that the doctrine of the Trinity is found clearly in the Bible. It is complicated and can be hard to wrap your mind around, but all of the great truths of God are taxing on the limited, selfish and sinful minds of mere mortal humans.

Jesus declares Himself to be divine

Jesus disciples and the NT writers recognized His unique and divine nature

Jesus was worshipped as God and accepted that worship

Jesus is uncreated and eternal, and shares the attributes of God

Pointing out that Jesus interacted in a personal way with the other members of the Trinity does not refute the Trinity, it supports it!

As I said, I don’t want to reinvent the apologetic wheel on the Trinity, so check these resources out for more clarification and deeper explanations.

Additional Resources:

The Forgotten Trinity, James White

The Trinity, CARM

THE NATURE OF GOD - THE TRI-UNITY OF GOD, Alpha and Omega

A Brief Definition of the Trinity, Alpha and Omega

33,000 Protestant Denominations?

2009-01-10T09:27:00.000-05:00

Interesting video from James White. A lot of groups who claim that their organization is the "one, true church" organization throw out the "Protestantism has splintered in 33,000 denominations" claim and then suggest that "That is not what Jesus wanted". The implication of course is that unity in Christ must equal conformity to a church organization. Dr. White is specifically dealing with Roman Catholicism here, but it also applies to mormonism and other, smaller groups claiming the mantle of "one, true Church".

It is hardly preferable to have one, authoritarian unBiblical organization with heretical practice and doctrines in place of a bunch of smaller groups that at least get the Gospel right (in some cases) and need work on their ecclesiology. Replacing some minor errors with a bunch of huge ones is not an improvement! Whenever someone starts off with a defense of their organization as being the only true organization, that should be a warning to you that some is awry!

I would say that those Dr. White refutes in this video are correct in one respect. I don't think that the various and sundry competing Protestant denominational organizations are what Christ instituted or the New Testament shows us by example. But until we shed our "my organization is better than you organization" mantra, we will have a hard time seeing the Church as it should be: a simple gathering of Christians, whatever the location, who fellowship, pray, break bread and teach one another.

Great Video!

2009-01-04T08:14:00.000-05:00

This is a great little video by James White. Intro music is a little hokey, but otherwise good stuff on the core question: Is mormonism Christian?

Piper, the Pope and the Prophet

2009-01-01T09:34:00.000-05:00

Very interesting post on Mormon Coffee comparing the authoritative differences between Protestant Christianity, Catholicism and mormonism. The post, What if Thomas Monson, Pope Benedict XVI, and John Piper began teaching that the practice of homosexuality was morally praiseworthy? , is interesting and really shows the flaws in placing a human authority over the Bible. In the post, Aaron uses the example of homosexuality. If John Piper suddenly started teaching that homosexuality was OK, Christians including Aaron and I who love Piper's ministry, would call him out for teaching something that was not in accord with God's Word. But if Thomas Monson started teaching that, what would mormons be able to do about it? There isn't a recall vote for prophet that I am aware of. They would either have to grit their teeth and go along with it or recognize Monson as the false teacher he is. The third option would be to devolve into what much of Catholicism has, where people claim to be adherents and yet feel free to ignore what the Pope says.

Stray from the authority of the Word, place a human between you and Christ and all manner of mischief follows! The comment string alone should be worth the price of admission!

Does Psalm 82 support the mormon doctrines of a plurality of gods?

2008-12-30T15:42:00.000-05:00

That question has been raised on Heart Issues for LDS by a couple of vocal mormon apologists and has been raised by countless other mormons as a defense for the mormon doctrine that the God of the Bible is an exalted human being, who was once a man and progressed to be a god and is one of a multitude of other gods who are at least His equals (since God was once a man who progressed to Godhood, there must of necessity be a greater god than He who created Him.) To try to defend this belief and throw Christians off track, mormons often throw Psalm 82 out and declare that even the Bible itself supports this doctrine. So does it?

Well the obvious answer is no because the Bible is clear that there is only one God, unique and without peer, equal or equivalent. But that answer, while obvious, likely will be unsatisfactory to a mormon, especially one who is better versed in So first let’s look at Psalm 82, not just the parts that a mormon might quote but the entire chapter.

Rescue the Weak and Needy
A Psalm of Asaph.
82:1 God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
2 “How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
3 Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
4 Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
5 They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
6 I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;
7 nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.”
8 Arise, O God, judge the earth;
for you shall inherit all the nations!

(Psalm 82: 1-8 ESV)

So before digging too deeply, we need to ask the question: what is Psalm 82 all about? Who is speaking, who is the audience, what is the point? The Psalm refers to God as the supreme judge, who in this case is standing in judgment over those who rule over others, and in their rule they are being partial to the wicked and unjust to the weak. They are implored to rescue the weak and needy and are warned that they are destined to die like any other man.

It makes no sense whatsoever that the “gods” spoken of here are other gods like the God of the Bible because they are both unjustly ruling and they are mortal, falling or dying like any other man. That depiction is hardly one that lends itself to the belief that these are other gods.

So that is what I think, but what have the leading minds and scholars through the ages said?

First, from Augustine….

1. This Psalm, like others similarly named, was so entitled either from the name of the man who wrote it, or from the explanation of that same name, so as to refer in meaning to the Synagogue, which Asaph signifies; especially as this is intimated in the first verse. For it begins, “God stood in the synagogue of gods” (ver. 1). Far however be it from us to understand by these Gods the gods of the Gentiles, or idols, or any creature in heaven or earth except men; for a little after this verse the same Psalm relates and explains what Gods it means in whose synagogue God stood, where it says, “I have said, Ye are gods, and ye are all the children of the Most High: but ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.” In the synagogue of these children of the Most High, of whom the same Most High said by the mouth of Isaiah, “I have begotten sons and brought them up, but they despised Me,” stood God. By the synagogue we understand the people of Israel, because synagogue is the word properly used of them, although they were also called the Church. Our congregation, on the contrary, the Apostles never called synagogue, but always Ecclesia; whether for the sake of the distinction, or because there is some difference between a congregation whence the synagogue has its name, and a convocation whence the Church is called Ecclesia: for the word congregation (or flocking together) is used of cattle, and particularly of that kind properly called “flocks,” whereas convocation (or calling together) is more of reasonable creatures, such as men are.…I think then that it is clear in what synagogue of gods God stood.

Augustine, as an early writer around 400 A.D. is one of the most highly regarded writers in the early church days.

Let us look next at Calvin’s introduction. John Calvin is generally esteemed as one of the, if not the, finest theologian to have ever lived. Certainly his thoughts would carry some weight….

As kings, and such as are invested with authority, through the blindness which is produced by pride, generally take to themselves a boundless liberty of action, the Psalmist warns them that they must render an account at the bar of the Supreme Judge, who is exalted above the highest of this world. After he has reminded them of their duty and condition, perceiving that he speaks to such as refuse to receive admonition, he calls upon God to vindicate his character as a righteous judge.

So Calvin also recognizes this as a depiction of unjust and wicked human judges who will be called to account. A couple of possible references to the judges in question are alternately suggested in Chronicles 19:5-7 or 2 Chronicles 29:30, both of which refer to wicked judges. There are a number of places, especially in the psalms, that refer to unrighteous judges, inaccurate weights, etc. as being under condemnation.

How about Matthew Henry, Bible commentator extraordinaire?

This psalm is calculated for the meridian of princes’ courts and courts of justice, not in Israel only, but in other nations; yet it was probably penned primarily for the use of the magistrates of Israel, the great Sanhedrim, and their other elders who were in places of power, and perhaps by David’s direction. This psalm is designed to make kings wise, and "to instruct the judges of the earth’’ (as 2 and 10), to tell them their duty as (2 Sa. 23:3), and to tell them of their faults as 58:1. We have here, I. The dignity of magistracy and its dependence upon God (v. 1). II. The duty of magistrates (v. 3, 4). III. The degeneracy of bad magistrates and the mischief they do (v. 2, 5). IV. Their doom read (v. 6, 7). V. The desire and prayer of all good people that the kingdom of God may be set up more and more (v. 8). Though magistrates may most closely apply this psalm to themselves, yet we may any of us sing it with understanding when we give glory to God, in singing it, as presiding in all public affairs, providing for the protection of injured innocency, and ready to punish the most powerful injustice, and when we comfort ourselves with a belief of his present government and with the hopes of his future judgment.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that without exception throughout the centuries the most respected writers are in unanimity that this Psalm is written as an indictment of the judges who are oppressing the weak and needy. The point is that those humans who sit in judgment and rule over others are themselves subject to death and judgment from the ultimate judge, i.e. God.

If for some reason you reject the idea that these individuals in the assembly written about were the human judges, which I think the context clearly suggests, another possible rendering is that this is the angelic host. We know for certain that there are other beings that surround God, angelic beings that appear in Isaiah’s vision for example. But it is also clear that these angels are created beings and are beneath and subject to God, not other gods. There is not, without the most egregious eisegesis, any way to make this Psalm a support for a plurality of gods. That abominable doctrine is the product of Joseph Smith’s imagination and bears no more resemblance to the God of the Bible than the pagan pantheons of Greek or Norse gods.

Glenn Beck booted

2008-12-29T18:24:00.000-05:00

There was a bit of a stir recently when Focus on the Family produced an interview with pundit Glenn Beck regarding his new Christmas book, The Christmas Sweater. A number of Christians protested the perceived endorsement of this book and by proxy Beck's mormonism. In response to the outcry, Focus on the Family printed a retraction and removed the interview. From an article on MormonTimes...

James Dobson's Focus on the Family ministry has pulled from its CitizenLink Web site an article about talk show host Glenn Beck's book "The Christmas Sweater" after some complained that Beck's LDS faith is a "cult" and "false religion" and shouldn't be promoted by a Christian ministry.

When contacted Friday, a Focus on the Family worker at the ministry in Colorado Springs, Colo. confirmed that the article had been pulled at this link and read a prepared statement for callers who had called about the Beck article:

"You are correct to note that Mr. Beck is a member of the Mormon church, and that we did not make mention of this fact in our interview with him. We do recognize the deep theological difference between evangelical theology and Mormon theology, and it would have been prudent for us at least to have pointed out these differences. Because of the confusion, we have removed the interview from CitizenLink."

Beck is predictably outraged....

A Special Message from Glenn:
The Christmas Sweater is a story about the idea of Christmas as a time for redemption and atonement. Whatever your beliefs about my religion, the concept of religious tolerance is too important to be sacrificed in response to pressure from special interest groups, especially when it means bowing to censorship. I'm humbled and grateful that hundreds of thousands of people from different faiths have read the book and have appreciated its uplifting message for themselves. At a time when the world is so full of fear, despair, and divisions, it is my hope that all of those who believe in a loving and peaceful God would stand together on the universal message of hope and forgiveness.
-glenn

Funny to quote religious tolerance when you are a member of a heretical church that sends tends of thousands of young men around the world to tell Christians that they are members of a "abomination":

19 I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.” (Joseph Smith "History" 1:19)

What is the problem with a mormon Christmas book? The Christ child in mormonism is not the same Christ child of the Bible. He is at best a created being and the brother of Satan and at worst is the product of a blasphemous doctrine that God the Father bodily engaged in intercourse with Mary, impregnating her with Jesus. By giving a venue to Glenn Beck, Focus on the Family tacitly legitimized Beck's mormon views of Christ. This stunt is no different than Focus inviting a muslim to talk about their Christmas book, or any other unbeliever.

What is especially troubling is that Focus on the Family, an ostensibly Christian para-church ministry, gave a platform to someone who comes from a faith tradition that is in direct opposition to the Gospel and that is engaged in proselytizing and luring people away from Christianity. Someone at Focus needs to be more discerning and worry less about elections and more about the Gospel.

(HT: Voice of the Sheep)

Baptism

2008-12-29T16:07:00.000-05:00

This is the next post replying to my anonymous commenter…the rest of my responses should be more brief than the prior one.

Baptism:

Early Christian churches, practiced baptism of youth (not infants) by immersion by the father of the family. The local congregation had a lay ministry. An early Christian Church has been re-constructed at the Israel Museum, and the above can be verified. The Church of Jesus Christ (LDS) continues baptism and a lay ministry as taught by Jesus’ Apostles. Early Christians were persecuted for keeping their practices sacred, and prohibiting non-Christians from witnessing them.

Some of that is true, but that doesn’t mean that mormonism is also true. As I pointed out previously, correcting an error with a greater error is not a restoration! I will agree wholeheartedly that the New Testament model of the church was a lay ministry, but also that the earliest church was not a hierarchical organization but instead small gatherings of believers often in homes, not in meeting houses with basketball courts and satellite links to Salt Lake City. I have posted with some regularity recently on my main blog affirming the lay ministry model (see here) but that affirmation does not necessitate or support mormonism. I also will affirm that paedobaptism, the baptism of infants of believing parents is not a correct practice. Many, many Christians deny infant baptism. On the other hand, baptizing someone because they turn eight is not a correct practice either!

That early Christians hid their “sacred” ceremonies I am not so certain about. They were certainly often in hiding because of persecution. Again, we get no citation so I cannot be sure where that claim comes from. Early Christians were persecuted for many things, but it is an enormous leap to think that the reason they were persecuted, as implied here, is that they were conducting secret mormon temple ceremonies. It is a chicken and egg situation, were they persecuted because they were in hiding or were they in hiding because of persecution? The latter seems far more plausible.

What we have here is an argument that points out some truths, but then makes the assumption that mormonism is the correct prescription for meeting these truths. Getting some aspects of ecclesiology correct doesn’t outweigh gross errors in theology proper.

Is mormonism the true New Testament Christianity?

2008-12-27T17:33:00.000-05:00

That is the assertion made in a comment on a previous post. See here. That statement is the beginning of a series of statements made by this anonymous individual, and the audacity and inaccuracy of the claims demands a response. I am going to dissect all of the arguments made in this comment and demonstrate from plain facts and Scripture that they are false. The individual who posted this and also has a couple of blogs is anonymous, so it cannot be ascertained what their background is or where they got their information. The comment starts with this statement:

Mormons Are New Testament Christians, not Creedal Christians

A bold statement, but one with no basis in fact. Obviously I would, as would all Christians, deny that mormonism is the restoration of New Testament Christianity (or that mormonism is any sort of Christianity at all). I want to reiterate and expand on my comments in response to that statement. My original comments are in green.

Nowhere in the NT do we see Christians holding or needing a priesthood, in fact the need for a human priesthood is specifically rejected in the NT especially in Hebrews.

Throughout the book of Hebrews we see Christ as our High Priest. The role of the human priesthood after the order of Aaron has been negated (see my prior post A restoration or a fabrication? for more details on the elimination of the need for a human priesthood) We need no human priests when we have a great High Priest who intercedes for us directly with the Father. The whole notion stems from a misunderstanding of the priesthood under the Old Covenant and the great priesthood of Christ as mediator of the New Covenant.

The idea of mormon temple worship does not appear anywhere in the NT.

The temple is a key to mormon theology and practice, but mormon temple worship doesn't appear anywhere in the New Testament. We do see the early apostles going to the Jewish temple, but there purpose in going there was to preach and teach the Gospel, not to perform the mormon temple ceremonies. The temple ceremonies of mormonism bear no resemblance to New Testament Christian worship or Old Testament temple ordinances. None at all.

The idea of a plurality of gods is specifically and vociferously rejected through the old and new testament.

This sort of goes without saying. The Bible is clear and speaks frequently to the uniqueness of God. The Bible rejects categorically the existence of any other gods, on par with or even vaguely similar to God. The whole of creation includes the Triune God, created angels/demons and humanity. There is not category for other gods, certainly not a god who created the God of the Bible as the doctrine of God being an exalted man would require.

Exaltation is absent.

Exaltation, or the becoming of a god by faithful mormon men, is so foreign to the Bible that it becomes indefensible and frankly unthinkable. See my posts on exaltation Talking 'bout my deification as well as my post on the Biblical doctrine of adoption.

Dietary codes like the word of wisdom are rejected.

This pertains to the mormon "word of wisdom" that prohibit certain foods. See Matthew 15:11-19 and the vision of Peter before going to the house of Cornelius in Acts 10: 9-15. Both of which point to the elimination of dietary laws. The word of wisdom boils down to an external pietistic control mechanism. Humans are not sanctified by observance of dietary laws, and the idea that drinking a cup of tea makes you unworthy to become a god is silly.

An ongoing need for a human prophet is rejected.

See my post here on Hebrews 1: 1-2 and how pointless a prophet is today. The fullness of the revelation of God to man for salvation is contained in the Bible describing the person and work of His Son. What more do we need? What more do we want? When we had the missionaries coming over, this was a stumbling block for them. It seemed they had never gotten beyond "God used to speak through prophets, so shouldn't He today?" without working through the implications of that thought. They never were really able to give a cogent answer as to why we would need a prophet today.

New "revelation" that contradicts the apostles is declared anathema.

Would new revelation completely contradict the original, complete revelation given by Christ? That hardly makes sense and Paul has pretty strong words for those who preach "another gospel" in Galatians 1: 6-9. Completely changing the Gospel is not a restoration, it is a heresy.

The mormon offices of elder and deacon run contrary to the qualification laid out in the NT. The hierarchical, authoritarian nature of the mormon church is contrary to the structure of the NT church.

The structure of the church is not really a structure at all. Mormonism seeks to establish the proper organization on earth, but the church is not an organization at all. It is the people of God in all places and at every time. We gather together but that gathering is not the church. The church is not this program or that leader. It is the elect of God throughout the ages, the Bride of Christ. Mormonism also takes the titles that appear in the New Testament and applies them improperly and with no regard to the qualifications laid out. Think of the missionaries. They all carry the title of "elder" and they are young men of 19-21 years of age. Their age is not in and of itself the issue, but in 1 Timothy 3: 1-13 we see the qualifications laid out for elders and deacons, and it is hard to think that a teenage young man is qualified as being mature in the faith, the husband of one wife and managing his household well. The structure and offices of mormonism are yet another glaring example of the mormon church using Biblical terms, but doing so improperly.

To summarize: the mormon church bears no resemblance to the New Testament church in either doctrine or in practice. Outside of a few superficial similarities in names the form, function and foundations of the mormon church are built on the teachings of the imagination of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, not the teaching of Christ and His apostles. As such, mormons are not New Testament Christians and indeed because of their beliefs are not Christians at all. You cannot say that this person believes A and is a Christian, and that person believes B, which is mutually exclusive from A, and is also a Christian. Christianity is many things, but one thing it certainly can be said to be is a series of propositional truths. Deny those truths and you deny Christ, and as such cannot be a Christian. How can you be "New Testament Christians" when you cannot appeal to the New Testament to support your theology and practice and instead seek to undermine that very document in your later arguments?

There are plenty of issues that modern Christianity is wrestling with and has wrestled with for two thousand years. The writings of Paul speak of false teaching early in the church and we are warned in the Word of a coming falling away (which may or may not be a future or even present event). The Reformation was driven by the false teachings of Rome. We saw false teachings in every century since the cross. We certainly see plenty of false teaching today.

But here is where mormons miss the mark:

Correcting errors with greater errors is not a restoration!

That is the big problem with the "restoration" argument. Change in and of itself is not a correction. In the church, only change that conforms more closely to the Word is a restoration, anything else is just compounding one error with another.

At peace with God

2008-12-24T12:18:00.000-05:00

Hark! the herald angels sing,
"Glory to the new born King,
peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!"

How often have you sung this Christmas hymn? In church it is a Christmas staple, and when I was younger we used to sing it in Christmas programs at school (when we were still allowed to sing Christmas songs and still call it Christmas instead of "the holidays"). But one line in that hymn really stands out to me, God and sinners reconciled. Christmas has become, culturally, all about the giving and receiving. We think about the babe in the manger as God's gift to the world. But I am afraid that we have lost sight of the cross because of the manger. Jesus coming in a miraculous birth to a virgin, in and of itself, accomplished very little other than fulfilling one part of the prophecy. It was at the cross where the Christ child was destined to ascend that the full reality of the gift of God to His people was realized. It was there, on the cross, where He brought peace between God and sinners.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:1)

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col 1:19-20)

(Emphasis added)

What all of this tells me is the depths to which we once were His enemies. Our separation was so severe, the gulf so unbridgeable that peace between God and His people could only come at a terrible cost, the cost of the life of His Son. We have no peace in this life because we have no peace with God. It was an enmity that our sin has caused and it was a separation that outside of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit we are unaware of. Sure we know something is wrong in the world, but we don't realize that what is wrong with the world is not global warming, or capitalism, or war, or those people over there. What is wrong with the world is us. We were unable and unwilling to make peace with God, so God had to send His beloved Son to make peace with us. Don't buy that Total Depravity stuff? Think we are just generally good people who needed a little nudge in the right direction? Think again...

Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Romans 5:9-11)

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience-- among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Ephesians 2:1-3)

So we are all depraved, wicked sinners. But didn't Jesus come to bring peace? Certainly, but not the peace we usually think of.

The peace that Christ brings is not an earthly peace, a time of peace and goodwill. 2000 years of human history have proven that. There are wars, famine, hatred. The world is certainly not a peaceful place by any stretch of the imagination. So what is all of this peace talk about anyway? We read in Isaiah 9:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)

We see on the glorious night that Christ was born:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!" (Luke 2:13-14)

But yet we don't see peace in the world nor should we expect to. The peace that Christ brought is peace with His Father, a peace treaty signed in His blood.

We are cynically called to remember "The reason for the season", but the reason for the season is not the manger, it is the cross. It is not the three wise men, it is the centurion who said: "Truly this was the Son of God!". It is not the adoring shepherds, it is the crowd screaming "Crucify Him!". The reason for the season is that:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (Joh 1:14)

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and by His stripes we are healed. That is reason to celebrate. Not for iPods or gift cards, but the eternal Word condescended to dwell among sinners who hated and rejected Him. But we also read that while we were yet sinners, He came and died for us. Celebrate that on Christmas day, celebrate that God and sinners are reconciled by the cross and because of that we have peace with God for all eternity.

Now that is deserving of a...

Merry Christmas!

Give Thanks

2008-11-27T17:05:00.003-05:00

His Steadfast Love Endures Forever

A Psalm for giving thanks.

100:1 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
2 Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into his presence with singing!

3 Know that the Lord, he is God!
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise!
Give thanks to him; bless his name!

5 For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations.

Psalm 100 ESV

"I have a testimony"

2008-11-11T20:08:00.000-05:00

As I figured we would eventually, we got to an impasse with the missionaries tonight. They were very nervous from the get go, and I figure one of their higher ups recommended that they not visit any longer. I was able to pray with them and encourage them to read the Word, instead of relying on their feelings and what the "prophet" tells them. So I don't expect to see them again, and one of the missionaries is getting moved next week. They are off to some easier audiences, but I pray we managed to plant a seed of doubt that God will nurture when they get home from their missions.

On the bright side, I got a new job in a different area so we will be moving in the not too distant future and as soon as we get settled in, we will hop on www.lds.org and request the missionaries bring by a Book of Mormon!

Oops!

2008-11-11T08:04:00.000-05:00

Caught again!

The mormon practice of baptism for the dead often is a controversial one, and in the past it has caused a ruckus among the Jewish community because mormons have seen fit to baptize Holocaust victims, who were murdered for being Jewish. Several times in the past, the mormon church has promised to stop baptizing Holocaust survivors only to be caught with Holocaust survivors on their rolls for temple work. Now the Jewish community has broken off talks, figuring that they were wasting their time...

Jewish group wants Mormons to stop proxy baptisms

By DEEPTI HAJELA and JENNIFER DOBNER
Associated Press Writers

NEW YORK (AP) -- Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say they are making changes to their massive genealogical database that will make it more difficult for names of Holocaust victims to be entered for posthumous baptism by proxy, a rite that has been a common Mormon practice for more than a century.

But Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, said that is not enough. At a news conference in New York City on Monday, he said the church also must "implement a mechanism to undo what you have done."

"Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable," said Michel, whose parents died at Auschwitz. He spoke on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-incited riots against Jews.

"We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion," Michel said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. "We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough."

Michel said talks with Mormon leaders, held as recently as last week, have ended. He said his group will not sue, and that "the only thing left, therefore, is to turn to the court of public opinion."

In 1995, Mormons and Jews inked an agreement to limit the circumstances that allow for the proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims. Ending the practice outright was not part of the agreement and would essentially be asking Mormons to alter their beliefs, church Elder Lance B. Wickman said Monday in an interview with reporters in Salt Lake City.

"We don't think any faith group has the right to ask another to change its doctrines," Wickman said. "If our work for the dead is properly understood ... it should not be a source of friction to anyone. It's merely a freewill offering."

Christians recognize the need to evangelize Jews, no different than any other group. But we also realize that given the history of Jews especially with regards to the Holocaust and the Inquisition (neither of which we perpetrated by Christians). The mormon church could halt the baptism of Holocaust victims by insisting it's members stop adding the names, but given their focus on the un-Biblical practice of proxy baptism for people who had no interest in being mormons in life, it is unlikely that it will ever truly stop. The only consolation I can offer to Jews who had family members die in Auschwitz and Treblinka is that proxy baptism has no basis in Scripture and is nothing more than a show. I doubt that will be much consolation though.

Adventures in eisegesis

2008-11-01T14:32:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned several posts ago, I went with the missionaries to the Priesthood session of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints broadcast. The evening was capped by a presentation by Thomas Monson, the president of the mormon church and the self-proclaimed modern prophet of God. In the second of Paul’s epistles to Timothy, he urges Timothy as a young elder to be sure he is rightly handling the Word of Truth (2 Tim 2:15). Based on what I heard from Thomas Monson, he is hardly on par with Timothy, much less a prophet of the restoration. Take this passage from his priesthood talk as an example, where Monson quotes one of my favorite passages in the Bible, Ezekiel 36:

In this vast throng are priesthood power and the capacity to reach out and share the glorious gospel with others. As has been mentioned, we have the hands to lift others from complacency and inactivity. We have the hearts to serve faithfully in our priesthood callings and thereby inspire others to walk on higher ground and to avoid the swamps of sin which threaten to engulf so many. The worth of souls is indeed great in the sight of God. Ours is the precious privilege, armed with this knowledge, to make a difference in the lives of others. The words found in Ezekiel could well pertain to all of us who follow the Savior in this sacred work:

“A new heart . . . will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you. . . .

“And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

“And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.”1

How might we merit this promise? What will qualify us to receive this blessing? Is there a guide to follow?

May I suggest three imperatives for our consideration. They apply to the deacon as well as to the high priest. They are within our reach. A kind Heavenly Father will help us in our quest.

First, learn what we should learn.

Second, do what we should do.

And third, be what we should be.

Oh the erroneous assumptions assumed by that statement. Keep in mind that this man is speaking from the “pulpit” or lectern at the mormon General Conference, speaking on priesthood authority to those who also hold a similar, although lower, priesthood authority.

The great error involved in this statement is the very premise of the question: How might we merit this promise? The whole point here, and indeed one of the key, overarching themes of Scripture, is that we cannot merit this change of heart, or seek to impact that change. It is a work of God. Notice the initiator and the recipient throughout the passage in Ezekiel: The repeated use of "I will" indicating God is the initiator of the action and we are seen as the recipient. Nowhere is it stated or even assumed that we have something to do with this sovereign change of heart. Like most of the talks in the "priesthood" session, the emphasis is on human ability with God's help, human worthiness. The focus of Ezekiel 36 is not on man however, but on God. Statements like this demonstrate that Thomas Monson has a minimal grasp of the Scriptures and feels free to misrepresent and reinterpret Scripture as he sees fit.

I wonder if any of the "priesthood" holders looked up Ezekiel 36 and wondered about Monson's interpretation.

That pesky fellow!

2008-10-26T20:01:00.000-04:00

One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, "Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!" But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong." And he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And he said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:39-43)

There is probably no figure that causes more trouble to those who buy into doctrines like works salvation or baptismal regeneration quite like the repentant thief on the cross next to Christ. He really confounds those who believe in some version of works based righteousness. We see a man who does nothing to merit paradise, just condemnation, one who is justifiable being punished hanging next to one you merited no such punishment. There are many ways he confounds those who insist on works for all or part of their salvation.

His simple declaration of faith

His faith is simple, it is a faith of one who places his hope on the One who can save him. His hope is in spite of the life he lived up to that point, not because of it. When a Christian is saved, he or she is saved despite the utter sinfulness of their prior life. We are saved not by our litany of good works, we are saved by Christ.

His recognition of his own sin

He sees and realizes his own sins, and Christ's sinlessness. A recognition of sin that must precede salvation. We cannot be saved until we see why we need to be saved. That flies in the face of a faith+works salvation. The image of the thief is little different than the image of the saved Christian. We are that sinner, a lowly criminal hanging next to His King. We bring nothing to our salvation, we add nothing to our justification but the sin that Christ atoned for.

His salvation

His salvation requires no action on his part, only His blessing. Nothing else needs to be done. Indeed I think the reason we see this account is to show us that this thief, like us, is utterly helpless. He cannot get down and go do righteous works to show himself worthy of salvation. All he brings is all God demands: a penitent heart, changed by God, that declares Jesus Christ as Lord. That is all we need, and when we seek to add our works to His work we put the cross to shame and deny the Lord.

Something else I love about this guy: He is anonymous. We have no idea who this guy is or what his name is or what kind of life he lived. He was a thief, we know that and that is about all we know. The conversation is not about him, it is about Christ, about Christ being merciful on an undeserving sinner. In a day when “me, me and me” is the new Trinity, when we wonder what God can do for us, when we seek as much as we ever have to stand insolently before God and claim our reward based on our works and our righteousness , this anonymous thief reminds us all that each of us has a cross we should have faced, but that in the case of redeemed Christian He faced it for us so that we wouldn’t have to.

Whenever you hear someone say that it is our works that save us, remember this lowly thief who brought nothing to the cross but his sin, but today dwells with the Lord in paradise and remember that we can do nothing to save ourselves. That's O.K. though, because Jesus has paid for it all with His blood and that was good enough for this thief and it is good enough for us. Praise God for His mercy and praise God for recording the story of this thief in His Word to set to rest the question of who and what saves us!

New podcast on mormonism

2008-10-19T20:27:00.000-04:00

The Mormonism Research Ministry is re-releasing their podcast, so if you subscribe to podcasts via iTunes or another service you can check them out. It is all quality, Christ honoring and well researched material.

Talking ‘bout my deification

2008-10-16T21:23:00.000-04:00

A lot of discussions revolving around mormonism end up wandering off into ancillary issues: Adam-God, the Mountain Meadows massacre, various eccentric oddities in the Book of Mormon (and there are lots of those!) I think that is partly intentional, because it serves to distract from the question at hand. But discussions of those issues, while interesting and some of them are topics I will raise here because they reflect the fundamental errors of mormonism, don’t get at the real core of the problem. Lots of Christian churches teach things that I don’t particularly like. Lots of Christian churches teach things in error (i.e. infant baptism). Some denominations get the Gospel wrong, even though they recognize the proper nature of God, especially as it relates to Christ (i.e. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy).

But where the proverbial rubber meets the road, where mormonism diverges most radically from Christianity, is in the nature of God and as a corollary the nature of man.

Mormonism teaches that God of the Bible is actually an exalted man (Gospel Principles pg. 9). That means that God is not unique in the universe, not just in “this” universe but in terms of being existence as a whole. Not only is God not unique, but He is created which means that there are other gods like Him and that it would also mean that there was a god who created Him who stands above Him. This stands in opposition to the traditionally held beliefs of Christians of all stripes. One or the other must be false. God cannot be both eternal and uncreated and at the same time an exalted, created being. It is my contention that the Bible reveals to us a God who is like no other being, and that there are no other gods because God is unique and has revealed Himself as such. This is a brief Scriptural case for that position looking at the nature of God, the nature of man and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The nature of God

Who and what is God? I am not asking here about philosophical speculation or what this or that early Christian postulated. What I am talking about is who God has revealed Himself to be in His Word. The Bible is, speaking most broadly, a record of God’s revelation of Himself to man. The God revealed in Scripture is unlike anyone or anything. God has eternally existed in three persons, Father, Son and Spirit and for His own pleasure and glory created the universe. No one made God, He is without cause or creation. A sample of Scripture indicates this truth...

To you it was shown, that you might know that the LORD is God; there is no other besides him. Out of heaven he let you hear his voice, that he might discipline you. And on earth he let you see his great fire, and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire. And because he loved your fathers and chose their offspring after them and brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves, to bring you in, to give you their land for an inheritance, as it is this day, know therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. (Deuteronomy 4:35-39)

Let these words of mine, with which I have pleaded before the LORD, be near to the LORD our God day and night, and may he maintain the cause of his servant and the cause of his people Israel, as each day requires, that all the peoples of the earth may know that the LORD is God; there is no other. (1 Kings 8:59-60)

Therefore you are great, O LORD God. For there is none like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears. (2 Samuel 7:22)

I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other. (Isaiah 45:5-6)

The prevailing theme here? That there is no other god but God. Not that there is none like Him in these here parts. There is but one God anywhere and He is unique, without being created. Man is as different from God as the east is from the west. We are created in His image, but we are not like Him in nature because no one, no being, nothing is like Him.

The nature of man

Just as the Bible is clear that God is unique, uncreated, eternal, without beginning or end, perfectly just and loving, sublimely holy, it is also clear that man is anything but. Man is revealed as utterly sinful, lost in sin, an enemy to God by nature.

The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.(Genesis 6:5)

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. (Psalms 51:5)

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (Romans 3:23)

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned-- (Romans 5:12)

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience-- among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.(Ephesians 2:1-3)

Man is many things. Sinful, Imperfect. Prone to wander. But gods in embryo? Capable of progressing into godhood? Certainly not. We are adopted into the family of God. We receive the imputed righteousness of Christ that replaces our iniquity. We never become righteous in and of ourselves. Our only righteousness is that imputed to us through the grace of God by faith in Christ.

The Gospel

The Gospel is marvelously simple and infinitely complex, but what it boils down to is this (and this of course is a very imperfect summary). God who is infinite and eternal created man in His image and for His pleasure. The first man, Adam, willfully rebelled against God by disobeying the clear command to not eat of the fruit. Man was thereby cast out of the Garden, out of the fellowship with God that Adam had enjoyed. That rebellion had the consequence of both physical death and spiritual death, i.e. hell. Despite the rebellion and enmity of man to God, God revealed Himself to His creatures and set about redeeming a people to Himself. That redemptive plan saw it's culmination in the miracle of the virgin birth of Christ. The Son of God lived a perfect life and ministered among man for some time, and was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate with the blessing and encouragement of many of the Jewish leadership. He bore the wrath of God for the sins of His elect on the cross, and died on that same cross. He was buried and then rose again on the third day, appearing to many of His followers and charging them to spread the Gospel. He then ascended into heaven, where He awaits the day of judgment when He will bring His bride, the church, home.

What is missing from the Gospel is any hint that Christ came to enable sinners to become gods, or that it is His intent to see that happen. Jesus Christ came to save sinners, not to make new gods.

The doctrines of mormonism are at odds with Christianity, the revelation of Christ in the Bible in many ways, but nowhere more clearly or tragically than in the misrepresentation of God and man, and in the way that another Gospel is being proclaimed around the world by deceived young men. This is where our focus ought to be first and foremost: declaring Jesus Christ as the only means to save a people who are lost.

Nice Visit

2008-10-14T21:51:00.000-04:00

We had the misssionaries over again tonight. My wife made me be quiet and listen, which is really hard for me! Ever heard someone ask "Are you listening or just waiting to talk", I am the "just waiting to talk" kind of person. We did get halfway through a booklet on the plan of salvation, and I let them give their spiel. They are coming back next week and I asked them to think about the person of Christ, who He is. Should be an interesting conversation.

2008-10-14T21:00:00.000-04:00

In a comment on my post about the heretical hymn "Praise to the man" , Mormon Heretic claims that a recent article in Christianity Today supports or at least suggests support for the mormon doctrine of exaltation. Here is part of the comment:

The article goes on to quote Athanasius and Irenaeus, as I did in my blog. Some key scriptures it points to regarding deification (or mingling with gods, as the mormon hymn points out) are:

John 10:34
Romans 8:291
John 3:2
Gen 1:26
Gen 3:5
1 John 1:5

Now I freely admit that mormons view of exaltation isn't 100% the same as deification. However, the similarites are striking, enough for me not to worry about this hymn you find so troubling.

Do these verses support mormon exaltation?

How about John 10:34. OK, that one is just silly. This is what John 10:34 says: Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I said, you are gods'? The quote is from Psalm 82:6 but look at the context of the verse by adding in verse 7...

I said, "You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince." (Psalms 82:6-7) Like other men you will die. The "gods" spoken on here are the human judges over Israel, who die like any other man. Then look at the full context of John 10:34:

Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came--and Scripture cannot be broken-- do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father." (John 10:34-38)

So what we see is quite contrary to deification. The "gods" spoken of are mere men, magistrates over Israel compared to Christ who IS God. Not only does it not support deification, it also shows that Christ is God.

What about Romans 8:29?

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. (Romans 8:29)

We here we see a different Biblical doctrine being brought forth, the doctrine of adoption ( in conjunction with the doctrines of election and predestination, which are unexplainable in mormon theology). Adoption tells us that by faith we are adopted into the family of God. A child that is adopted into the family is not genetically a family member, but is brought legally into a family. In the same way, we are adopted by God into His family. That doesn't make us gods, but rather brings us into familial fellowship. Look a few verses earlier in Romans 8...

And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:23)

We do not have to be gods to be adopted by God!

Surely 1 John 3:2 must support exaltation? Or does it?

Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)

Why are we like God? Because we will have our own worlds? Because we share his attributes? No, because we will see Him for who He is. That is all it promises, we will see Him as He is whereas now we see through a glass darkly. Again, this speaks of adoption not exaltation.

Genesis 1:26 doesn't even make sense.

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." Genesis 1:26)

We are made in His image, not in His nature. He created us and He is uncreated. We are sinners and He is perfect. He is eternal and we are not. Being made in the image of an eternal, perfect being doesn't make us gods. It makes us creations.

On to Genesis 3:5. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5)

OK, first you are using something Satan says to support your argument. Second, why are we like God? Because Adam and Eve, who did not know good and evil, now DO know good and evil (they knew they were naked and were ashamed) They are clearly not godlike, they lived and died like anyone else. What they did have however was a knowledge of good and evil, as God does, which doesn't make them like God in nature and in fact led to their death.

Finally 1 John 1:5. I am not sure what you mean by this, I think you referenced the wrong verse because 1 John 1:5 reads: This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5). Not sure how that supports your argument.

Just listing a bunch of verses is not an argument. This is why you need to read the Word completely and in context. Prooftexting is always a dangerous thing. When examined in context and read clearly, none of those verse support exaltation, and in several cases show just the opposite.

Angels of light

2008-10-09T17:44:00.000-04:00

Ever had an "Ah-ha!" moment when reading your Bible? We had one last night when doing our daily devotional. We read these and looked at each other and said "Wow!"...

I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me! For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. Indeed, I consider that I am not in the least inferior to these super-apostles. Even if I am unskilled in speaking, I am not so in knowledge; indeed, in every way we have made this plain to you in all things. Or did I commit a sin in humbling myself so that you might be exalted, because I preached God's gospel to you free of charge? I robbed other churches by accepting support from them in order to serve you. And when I was with you and was in need, I did not burden anyone, for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied my need. So I refrained and will refrain from burdening you in any way. As the truth of Christ is in me, this boasting of mine will not be silenced in the regions of Achaia. And why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do! And what I do I will continue to do, in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. (2 Corinthians 11:1-15)

It is amazing how replete the Scripture is in warnings of false prophets, false teachers, false gospels. They may seem sincere and nice, they will almost certainly not be obvious. It is the subtle lie, the lie that appeals to the sinner's heart that has the greatest chance of deceit. To the great shame of Christianity, we have done such a poor job in training up our people show that they know a lie when they hear it that cults and false religions flourish.

On leaving mormonism

2008-10-08T10:46:00.000-04:00

This should be an interesting conversation on Mormon Coffee. The topic is Leaving the Mormon Church and I expect some really pointed conversation to follow. Should be fun to follow.

Thoughts from the "priesthood" session

2008-10-06T14:34:00.000-04:00

I was at the priesthood session of the general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. If you are not "in the know" with mormonism, twice a year the mormon leadership from Salt Lake City broadcasts two days of talks aimed at the members. The talks are pretty bland stuff, but sometimes they announce new temples and such during conference. On Saturday night there is a special session just for the men and boys who hold the mormon "priesthood". The missionaries we have been evangelizing invited me to come, and I picked that session. As I mentioned in the last post, I hadn't been in a mormon church since we left almost eight years ago.

A few observations from someone who had been to many priesthood sessions before, but now was seeing it through fresh eyes. These are the things that jumped out at me.

1) How little Scripture was used. I guess I never noticed it when I was a member but there was VERY minimal reference even to mormon Scriptures. When Scripture was used, it was thrown out to support a claim the speaker was already making and in some cases, like Monson butchering Ezekiel 36, what they were saying had nothing to do with the Scripture they were quoting.

2) How man centered it was. All of the talks were about ways to be better mormons, to be more worthy, more personally righteous, more effective. It was little more than a two hour self-help seminar. Sin was barely mentioned and it was mentioned only as a barrier to you being the best mormon you could be. No wonder Joel Osteen likes mormonism so much!

3) Thomas Monson is nowhere near the orator that Hinckley was in his prime. Hinckley, even when he was older, was a much better speaker. In the last few years he was slipping, but heck he was 90 something. In his prime though, he was a marvelous speaker. Monson looks lost up there.

4) How sincere and nice the young men sound when they are singing a song that is rank heresy. To the uninitiated, you might think the singing was just wonderful and there is something great about hundreds of young men, with virtually identical suits and haircut, all wearing their missionary tags singing along with the magnificent organ. But when you stop to listen to the words they were singing, you realize that sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, heresy comes in a pleasant looking and sounding package.

If you go to the lds.org webpage you can listen to and soon read the content of the talks, but for some reason the priesthood session material is not listed. I wonder if that is something they are doing now, because there was not a broadcast online of it either for mormons in remote areas. I am currently reading through a talk by the first counselor of the relief society on the temple. Pretty much the same rote stuff you hear every year.

Praise to who?

2008-10-04T22:31:00.000-04:00

The song always kind of bugged me, even when we were mormons, but wow let me just say what a visceral impact I had tonight to Praise to the Man. About halfway through the "Priesthood" session of the general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, they sung that song. Just read the lyrics and then try to reconcille that with it being sung in a church that claims to follow and worship Christ...

Praise to the Man

1. Praise to the man who communed with Jehovah!
Jesus anointed that Prophet and Seer.
Blessed to open the last dispensation,
Kings shall extol him, and nations revere.

[Chorus]
Hail to the Prophet, ascended to heaven!
Traitors and tyrants now fight him in vain.
Mingling with Gods, he can plan for his brethren;
Death cannot conquer the hero again.

2. Praise to his mem’ry, he died as a martyr;
Honored and blest be his ever great name!
Long shall his blood, which was shed by assassins,
Plead unto heav’n while the earth lauds his fame.

3. Great is his glory and endless his priesthood.
Ever and ever the keys he will hold.
Faithful and true, he will enter his kingdom,
Crowned in the midst of the prophets of old.

4. Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven;
Earth must atone for the blood of that man.
Wake up the world for the conflict of justice.
Millions shall know “Brother Joseph” again.

Who are they praising? Where is the focus? Who is being exalted and glorified? He will enter "his kingdom"? "Great is his glory"? Don't even get me started on "mingling with Gods"!

More thoughts on the mormon general conference tomorrow. Suffice it to say that the mindset revealed in this song were on full display in Salt Lake City on Saturday night.

This should be interesting...

2008-10-04T18:52:00.000-04:00

The missionaries invited me to General Conference. I am planning on going this evening to the Priesthood session. Honestly, as someone who has suffered through the conference in the past, it is not the best proselytizing tool. I hope I get the chance to take some notes and ask some questions, beating on the drum of "why a restored priesthood" again. I noticed that the priesthood session is not broadcast over the internet, which is interesting but after the infamous "wet dreams" talk I sat through a decade ago, I can understand why!

I haven't been in a mormon church since we left all those years ago.

Calling in the cavalry

2008-09-30T20:50:00.000-04:00

Had the missionaries over tonight and they brought a regular member with them. He was someone who was a little more well versed in the Bible. The conversation got a little more pointed than normal, especially when speaking to the local member. I am guessing he was a former bishop, because he was fairly well versed in some of the arguments, but as we dug deeper into the priesthood it became pretty clear that he wasn't that familiar with Hebrews and the covenants. He was a little irate with me at times, so I may have overdone it but he was a bit smarmy. I saw him talking for some time with the missionaries outside after our visit, so I am worried that he was warning them to not come back.

I am afraid I was a little heavy handed tonight, a little too quick to come back on every comment. My impulse when I get challenged it to jump on the person with both feet, which isn't the right way to witness of course. I ended up speaking way more to the member than to the missionaries, and I hardly expected to sway the lifelong adult. My hope is to plant the seed of the Gospel in the hearts of these young men so that when they leave their missions they are encouraged to dig deeper into God's Word and see who Christ truly is. We did get a commitment to come back in two weeks, and I really want to give them the chance to talk more so we don't completely spook them. If they don't come back we lose the chance to keep up the dialogue, so I am praying that they will be back. We are due for a switch so I am expecting that the one missionary won't be back but the other one will with a new companion, so we have a chance to talk to a new person.

Very fruitful conversation

2008-09-25T15:39:00.000-04:00

We had a great conversation on Tuesday with the mormon missionaries. I used the pamphlet they left the last time to ask a couple of general questions, "The Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ" and then it was on. I asked them right away about the Aaronic priesthood and focused the questions on what the function of the Levitical priesthood was. I got them to agree that the Aaronic priesthood was the restoration of the same priesthood as that held by the Levites, which is important and is pretty clear given that the restoration allegedly came from John the Baptist whose dad was a Levite etc. Once I had gotten their agreement on that (and it is vital to make sure you have agreement on definitions), I asked them if they knew what the function of the Levitical priesthood was in the Old Testament. They didn't really have a good answer, so I explained from the OT what the Levites did. I then took the to the NT and showed them how Christ fulfills the sacrifice for the sins of His sheep and because of that there was no need for the Aaronic priesthood to be restored. Then I took them to Melchizidek and we talked about who he was and how Christ holds that office alone as a High Priest after the order of Melchizidek. Again the central point being that with a High Priest like Christ and a sacrifice as perfect as the one of Christ, what need do we have for a human priesthood and a restored temple? They honestly had no answers for me.

I did get a commitment from them to come back next Tuesday. I hope to make this a more or less weekly thing, we figure that with them moving in and out of this area and splitting with other missionaries we should have the chance to impact 12-15 missionaries a year at least. I don't expect any of them to come to Christ and leave mormonism on their mission, but I do hope to plant a seed that will flourish later on and get some contact info from them so I can stay in touch with these young men. I am hoping that they call for reinforcements so I can meet some members in the area and talk to them. I am sort of considering going on a fast and testimony Sunday so I could get up with an open mike and declare the Gospel of Jesus Christ...

Pray for these young men, who I will not name specifically, that God will use our visits to show them the lie of mormonism and that through our interaction I can show them the better way that is found by simple faith in the grace of Christ.

Another visit upcoming

2008-09-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

The missionaries called us again and are coming over Tuesday night. I am going to get some pizzas for them because I have been to a number of missionary apartments and they generally live like animals (put a couple of 20 year old guys with no money in and apartment, and it is a wonder they don't turn to cannibalism when the noodles run out!)

My goal for Tuesday night is to dig deeper into the idea of the priesthood, and focus the conversation on the same vein as in the post below. What is the priesthood in the OT, what is the role of Christ, why do we need a new priesthood given the office of Christ? It is a delicate balance because I want them to keep coming back, so I need prayer that I will be firm and bold in declaring Christ but not hostile or confrontational. It is easier with missionaries because we have a soft spot for these young men. I loved going out with them when we were mormons, and having them over for dinner weekly. They for the most part have been spoon fed mormonism since they were small children, and it takes time to unravel the lie while showing them a better way through the Christ of the Bible.

Examining the Book of Abraham

2008-09-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

Bill McKeever of the Mormonism Research Ministry put together a very lengthy video debunking the "translation" of the Book of Abraham, a pivotal text in mormon theology. The full video is pretty long and you can watch it here, but there is a shortened version that I like a lot because it very succinctly demonstrates that what mormons carry around in their "scriptures" is not what Smith claimed it to be at all. Watch and enjoy!

Examining Facsimile One from the Book of Abraham from Mormonism Research Ministry on Vimeo.

Sober Discourse: Subject/Purpose Statements for Hebrews#links

2008-09-20T13:32:00.000-04:00

Sober Discourse: Subject/Purpose Statements for Hebrews#links

For more on the superior priesthood and office of Christ, see this brief outline from my pastor Michael Jones.

A restoration or a fabrication?

2008-09-17T18:08:00.001-04:00

A restored priesthood?

Even a cursory glance at mormon teachings will show what a vital part of their mythos the idea of a restored priesthood is. It is one of the, if not the key, declaration of uniqueness and superiority of mormonism over and above orthodox Christianity. If mormons are correct, then every Christian baptism performed is null and void and if they are not correct, then every mormon baptism is illegitimate and they are all individually lost in their sins because they have placed their faith in false teachers and a false gospel.

The story takes us back to the 1800's in Harmony, Pennsylvania on the banks of the Susquehanna River. On May 15, 1829 as Joseph Smith tells it, an angelic visitor appeared to him and his companion Oliver Cowdery and identified himself as John the Baptist. John places his hands upon Joseph and Oliver and gives the the "Aaronic Priesthood". The story is canonized in mormon scripture in the Doctrine & Covenants, Section 13: 1 Upon you my fellow servants, in the name of Messiah I confer the Priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys of the ministering of angels, and of the gospel of repentance, and of baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; and this shall never be taken again from the earth, until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in righteousness. Set aside for a moment the idea of the sons of Levi making an offering again after the perfect sacrificial offering of Christ. What Smith is claiming here is startling: a man who was beheaded in the first century appears to these two men in the 1800's, with a body of flesh and bone apparently, and confers on them a priesthood that has been lost for 18 centuries. Later Peter, James and John appeared to Smith and granted them the higher priesthood, known as the Melchizidek priesthood.

The first issue is the nature and the function of the Levitical priesthood, the priesthood of Aaron that Mormonism claims has been restored. The Levites were a particular ethnic group that was set aside for the administration of the temple ordinances, in return for their service they were not given a land holding but were given a portion of the offerings to support themselves. The primary function of the Levitical priests was to administer the temple ordinances, which were primarily to deal with sacrifices. That is important because according to mormonism, young men hold the “Aaronic” priesthood which was restored, but there is no comparison between the Aaronic priesthood of Mormonism and the Levitical priesthood. The Levites were an ethnic tribe and spent most of their time in sacrifice.

The key here is the idea of covenant administration. Under the Old Covenant, the members were national Israel, it was an ethnic membership. The mediator was the High Priest, an office which only one person at a time held. What we know from the book of Hebrews and from Old Testament evidence, primarily the promise of a new and better covenant in the book of Jeremiah chapter 31, is that the new Covenant is different than the old Covenant. Under the old Covenant, human priests offered sacrifice for the sins of the people and also for themselves. Under the New Covenant, there is the perfect and complete sacrifice by and through Christ. That sacrifice for sin is complete and eternal and sufficient, so there is no reason for a system of ongoing sacrifice which was the main function of the Levitical priesthood. In the same respect there is no need for an ongoing prophetic ministry in the sense of receiving new revelation or in a restoration of the temple system. Why have a temple and priests when there are no more sacrifices to be made? Why have a prophet when revelation has been received once and for all in the person and work of Christ (Hebrews 1:1-2)? The prophets of the Old Testament all were pointing in one way or the other to the coming of Christ and His reign, and that has taken place so now the ministry of the believers is to call people to recognize that event and repent. Any new revelation that is allegedly being brought forth is done to the detriment of the Gospel, trying to add to the perfect work of Christ on the cross.

There is no mandate in the Bible for a person who receives revelation to hold any priesthood, or to administer the sacraments or any of the other minor functions associated with the “Aaronic” priesthood in mormonism. There is no sign of the receipt of the Holy Spirit in regeneration being tied to the priesthood. In fact the concept of a continuation of a human priesthood that resembles in any way the OT priesthood is completely absent in the NT.

So in a nutshell the issue is that the “restored” priesthood is a relic of the Old Testament/Old Covenant and has been made obsolete by the cross because the function and role of the human priest as administrator of the sacrifice and mediator between man and God has been replaced by our great High Priest, Jesus Christ. The book of Hebrews is just devastating to the whole foundation of the mormon restored priesthood and modern day prophets. From front to back, it contrast the Old Covenant human priesthood of Aaron with the eternal priesthood of Christ, the perfect mediator of the New Covenant.

Furthermore, the Levitical priesthood that was supposedly restored is restricted to members of that tribe and is further restricted in that only those of a certain age could serve in it: “from thirty years old up to fifty years old, all who can come on duty, to do the work in the tent of meeting.” (Numbers 4:3) Mormons by contrast “ordain” young men in their teens to the Aaronic priesthood.

The priesthood of Melchizidek is held by only one individual, that being Christ Jesus, and there is no mention of this priesthood held by anyone else (other than the man that it is named after in the OT)There is not a hint that Peter, or Paul, or John or any of the Apostles held or claimed to hold or needed to hold some special priesthood.

Ultimately, there are two major issues that confound the mormon priesthood restoration tale: First, the mormon priesthood doesn't resemble in any way the Levitical priesthood and it certainly is not reflective of the priesthood of Melchizidek which is held only by Christ as our mediator and High Priest and second there is no evidence that the apostles held to or saw a need for a specific priesthood that was passed on by the laying on of hands after the mormon model. We don't need to restore something that Christ has made obsolete, and we should not desire to go back to the old system and try to please God outside of Christ.

Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, "See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain." But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second. For he finds fault with them when he says: "Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. For they did not continue in my covenant, and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more." In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. (Hebrews 8:1-13)

Interesting conversation

2008-09-13T21:48:00.000-04:00

The missionaries came over tonight, we had a very nice conversation. The spiel has changed some since we left, the one missionary was very open up front about the nature of God, etc. The little handouts they give out now even speaks highly of Martin Luther and John Calvin! But the old missionary lesson plan seems to be out of style. A lot of their talking points are still pretty much rote memorization, so when they started in on the party line I tried to switch to personal conversation to break the train and then get back to digging deeper into what they were saying, without spooking them too much. They didn't even try to give us a Book of Mormon.

They did seem to be caught off-guard when I brought up Hebrews 1 telling us that God no longer speaks through prophets. I was trying to not hammer them on stuff, but I was able to give them a good overview of the nature of man, sin, of justification.

I am hoping they will come back so I can engage them in a conversation about the priesthood, why it is not a requirement to be an apostle or elder, why there is no record of any of the early Christians holding it and why the need for a human priesthood has been done away with. That should lead to a conversation on the office of prophet. Pray for these young men and all the young men and women that are out there unknowingly spreading a false gospel.

Prayer needed

2008-09-13T16:00:00.000-04:00

We are having the local missionaries over on Saturday night at around 7:00. Please pray for us and for these lost young men. I hope to have a good conversation with them about the fundamentals of their church from a Christian standpoint, not an apostate standpoint.

What do you mean we aren't Christians?

2008-09-04T22:03:00.000-04:00

I was looking for something else on the webpage of talk show host Glenn Beck (who is a mormon) and came across this article:

Glenn not a Christian?

GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

GLENN: ABC wanted me to do something on Good Morning America. It was my understanding, but I've been so busy, I haven't been involved in all the details, but it was my understanding that Diane was going to have a conversation with me on Mitt Romney and what was happening with Mitt Romney and what I thought he should say in the speech, but that would be too reasonable. That would be a reasonable conversation to have. Instead when I arrive, Richard Land is there and he is a Southern Baptist and I said, hello, Richard, how are you? And we talked for a few minutes and he was a very pleasant man. We get on the air and Diane Sawyer, I think the first question out of her mouth is, are Mormons Christian? And, of course, his answer is no, they're not which, you know, under two hours sleep I've got to tell you I had a hard time, you know, just smiling and letting it pass, especially since I only had two hours sleep because I had done a Christmas show the night before where I was talking about the real meaning of Christmas being with redemption and about not the birth of the baby, about the empty tomb and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So I had a little hard -- it was very difficult for me to let that one pass, but I did.

The next question, with about 40 seconds to go, was about the deep doctrinal issues of Mormonism, and I've got to tell you something. I want you to put yourself in my shoes. Mormons, the doctrine is different. However, that's what attracted me to it. For me some of the things in traditional doctrine just doesn't work, but it works for millions of other people and that's great. Happens to work for millions of Mormons the other way. That's great. You know, I'm not going to preach to you, you don't have to preach to me. We'll pray for each other and we'll see each other on the other side hopefully.

Now, imagine, put yourself in this position. Let's say you are in Saudi Arabia where nobody's ever heard of the trinity. You're a Catholic. Nobody's ever heard of the trinity. What, the trinity? What, it's three in one, they're everywhere and nowhere. Jesus is on the cross but he's really God. So God has died but yet he didn't die and how does this -- imagine you've never heard this before. So you've never heard any kind of explanation. So it works. You know what I mean? You've never heard anybody say, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, you've got to slow down. She asked me two questions about deep doctrine issues and I had in my ear, 40 seconds. Oh, well, hang on. I've got 40 seconds. Let me explain this to you. You can't explain it in 40 seconds. You can't explain anything of deep philosophical viewpoint or deep theological viewpoint. It took me a year of real studying to be able to understand some of the stuff in all of different doctrines, which leads me to this. Nobody really cares. Nobody really cares.

I wonder if the issue is that Mr. Beck can't answer the question or just doesn't want to. Mormon president and "prophet" Gordon Hinckley did a similar thing on Larry King Live when asked about men becoming gods, and he ducked and dodged all around one of the most firmly held mormon beliefs. Well I don't know if we teach that...What do you mean, you are the prophet of the restored church with a direct conduit to Christ. How do you not know this stuff? The answer is that mormons know that discussing this sort of stuff on TV makes it harder for missionaries to get in the door of unsuspecting people. "Hi, we are missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and we would like to tell you how to become gods". That isn't going to get you many invites into the living room.

Mr. Beck raises the same sort of objection we often hear from mormons. How can they say that I am not a Christian, look at all of the Christian appearing stuff that I do. I go to a church with the name of Jesus Christ on the building. I read the Bible. I pray in the name of Jesus. Most mormon, especially the missionaries, trip over themselves to use the name of Christ as often as possible. Isn't that enough? Well no, it is not.

A key passage in the Bible is Matthew 16:13-17.

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 16:13-17)

Simon Peter declares Christ the Son of the living God, in contrast to what other people say about Jesus. It wasn’t like He was unknown or that people did talk about Him, but just talking about Him does not make you a Christian.

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.' (Matthew 7:21-23)

If you don't recognize Christ as God incarnate, God in the flesh who lived a perfect life and atoned for the sins of His sheep on the cross, died, was buried and rose again, and place your trust in Him and depend on faith alone, through grace alone, in Christ alone then you aren't a Christ. Muslim praise the name Jesus Christ, but they aren't Christians and having the name Christ on your church sign and talking about Christmas doesn't make you a Christian.

Adoption

2008-09-04T07:22:00.001-04:00

One of the biggest problems with witnessing to mormons is that we are using many of the same words and often even referencing the same Scriptures, but meaning entirely different things. This exposes the lack of Biblical depth that most Christians, including me, have because we have a hard time exposing the context and rebutting what is being said with the entire Biblical record. When we are witnessing to mormons and others who are lost, we need to understand what the Bible says so that when faced with verses out of context we can draw the conversation back to the Bible instead of arguing about what a verse means.

That is nowhere more true that the Biblical doctrine of adoption.

Mormons read in the Scripture that we will become joint heirs with Christ, that we will be called sons of God and immediately connect that to the mormon doctrine of exaltation (i.e. that the most faithful mormon men will become gods and reign over their own planets, just as the God of the Bible is supposed to be an exalted man. It is all a divine pyramid scheme in a way). This is an all too common reaction from mormons who typically view all of Scripture with suspicion, and whenever possible view any doctrine through the lens of mormonism. But it is clear that the Bible tells us that there is but one God, negating the idea of man's exaltation in the mormon sense.

So if the mormon idea of exaltation, of deification of man is not what the Bible is speaking of, what do these verses mean? In a nutshell, they refer to adoption. There are a number of passages that directly deal with adoption in the New Testament...

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!" The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs--heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. (Romans 8:14-17 ESV)

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. (Galatians 4:4-7)

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3-6)

So what we see in these verses that deal directly with the becoming sons of God, joint heirs with Christ, is that we are not granted this because we are by nature like Christ but because we have been granted that status graciously through adoption.

There is a great sermon by C.J. Mahaney on the topic of adoption that you can listen to here that really gets at the humbling heart of adoption. We are not made God's equals or even like Him in nature. Jesus is not our literal brother. What we receive though is the blessing of renewed familial fellowship with our God through the purchasing power of Christ's blood. Salvation is not merely being saved from hell, it is also being adopted by God, given the glorious benefits of being sons and daughters of God. If we were merely saved from hell, that alone would be worthy of an eternity of gratitude and praise to God, but God is not content merely to save us but also to adopt us, calling us out of the world of sin.

We were once slaves to this world, slaves to sin but when we come to faith in God through His grace, we are no longer slaves, but sons. If you adopt a child, that child is not genetically made like you. They are still different from you in a number of ways, but they are given the same rights as your natural children. God only has one Son, His only begotten who is like Him but we are ushered into His glorious presence through adoption, and that is why the Christian can call God "Father".

What is the point of a prophet who doesn't speak prophetically?

2008-09-03T21:17:00.001-04:00

One of the central hallmarks of mormonism is that they have a restored priesthood that includes a restored office of prophet. For mormons, the man who occupies the office of President of the mormon church is a true and only prophet of God on par with men like Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The man who occupies that office today is Thomas Monson, a guy who has spent almost his entire life as a mormon leader. He was "called" as a local bishop when he was 22, which is pretty unusual. He has not had a job that wasn't connected to the mormon church for what looks like half a century, so this is a guy who knows mormonism inside and out. If you want to know something about mormonism, you could hardly find anyone who is better prepared to speak on the topic.

If you are looking for someone to prophesy though, you need to look elsewhere.

The mormon President is many things. Normally a good speaker, an outspoken believer, a spokesperson and a leader. But a prophet? Not hardly. You will look in vain for a prophetic utterance from Thomas Monson. Or his predecessor Gordon Hinckley. Or his predecessor. And on and on. In fact, other than the politically expedient "revelation" overturning the racist prohibition on blacks holding the mormon priesthood., the mormon prophet has not done anything prophetic for generations back. The Bible is allegedly not translated properly. Is the mormon prophet using his prophetic office and his "priesthood authority" to translate the Bible properly so mormons could trust what it says? Nope. They are apparently too busy appearing on Larry King Live.

When I hear a mormon talk about the "prophet", I always refer them back to Hebrews 1:1-2. We don't need prophets today to point forward to the Christ when Christ has already come and fulfilled all righteousness. We don't need a temple when Christ has made the perfect and complete sacrifice. We don't need a human priest to be a mediator for us when we have the great High Priest interceding for us directly to the Father.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. (Hebrews 1:1-2)