A Response Part IV: The Rabbit Hole Gets Deeper
We continue the critique of an anti-LDS blog using an anti-LDS website as its source.
One of the running themes I'm seeing as I go through this blog and my critique of it is that there isn't a lot of support for the claims and accusations being made. There's a lot of "Mormons believe this absurd thing" or "Mormons teach that heresy," but this is definitely a blog meant for an audience that already agrees with its premise. I'm finding very little support for its claims and interpretations. Every argument comes across as "Protestants believe X. Since you have to believe X to be a Christian, Protestants are Christians, and since Mormons don't believe X, then they can't be!"
...without ever demonstrating why X is true, or why believing it is the defining characteristic of what a true Christian is. The best example is the doctrine of the Trinity. The reader is meant to simply accept that doctrine without question, or is assumed to already believe it, so that it's a simple matter of showing that Latter-Day Saints disagree and, presto!
But it's important to examine these premises. Every time in history that someone has stepped out and started a new Christian tradition, they've questioned assumptions made by the denomination they're coming out of. If you're afraid to examine those assumptions closely, then I'd gently suggest you spend some time in prayer, scripture study, and deep thought.
So, back to the blog. (The original blog I'm examining is linked to in Section I of this series.) We go now to section 1E.
Our friend starts off by quoting from the website a little about what Latter-Day Saints believe regarding Jesus, which he agrees with at first. Then it goes on to talk about the idea that Jesus is the Son of God in the same way that we are all sons and daughters of God.
GethN7's comments:
"Again, Mormons recycle the canards of Arianism. Arianism just could not accept how a sinless spirit could coexist in a temporary mortal shell, so they claimed his mortal form was also divine because such a concept they could not resolve in their own minds, hence denial of his being born in a mortal form. The fact this makes his death in said mortal form an inherent absurdity is obvious and makes for a logical error they cannot resolve."
I'm not sure I see what the comparison is meant to be here between Arianism and Latter-Day Saints. Is he saying that we don't believe that Jesus was born in a mortal body? Arianism may teach such a thing, but we don't. Of course, Jesus was born of Mary in a little stable in Bethlehem. The comparison here is just false. Indeed, how could Jesus Christ have been crucified without a body? Maybe I don't understand what he's getting at here.
He goes on to say "Jesus made quite clear he had to die in his mortal form to redeem us, made it clear multiple times in the Gospels and it played out exactly as he said God intended. By Mormon theology, this was just an elaborate live-action roleplay exercise devoid of any actual meaning, making Jesus a liar and God one by proxy by their own logic."
Again, I don't know what logic he's talking about here. If he's getting this from that anti-LDS website, he's being deceived in a big way.
Moving on to Section 1F, where he discusses the Atonement.
He quotes the website again in a passage where it says that Latter-Day Saints don't have a precise doctrine of the Atonement. That's quite a whopper, and it's so easy to find the truth.
There. That's our precise doctrine of the Atonement. I'll quote from that in a second. Our friend goes on to write this:
"I am already flabbergasted. If they accept everything up until the original apostles passed away, they should KNOW this is absurd. Christ died in his mortal shell on the cross to be the perfect sacrifice for all sin that no mortal could otherwise offer because their spirit was tainted by original sin. According to Mormon concepts already established, Jesus just suffers pain, and that somehow cleanses humanity of the burden of sin without elaboration. Even in the Books of the Law, God made clear no mortal sacrifice could ever truly wash away sin without his sanction of the sacrifice being worthy of doing so and even then it would not be permanent if one sinned again. Jesus' death on the cross, as Christ was also God, would have thus been the only logical sacrifice that would be eternally acceptable."
He's flabbergasted. Well, he wouldn't be if he'd gone to the source instead of somebody's agenda-based website. From the Atonement page I linked above:
"The only way for us to be saved is for someone else to rescue us. We need someone who can satisfy the demands of justice—standing in our place to assume the burden of the Fall and to pay the price for our sins. Jesus Christ has always been the only one capable of making such a sacrifice.
From before the Creation of the earth, the Savior has been our only hope for “peace in this world, and eternal life in the world to come” (Doctrine and Covenants 59:23).
Only He had the power to lay down His life and take it up again. From His mortal mother, Mary, He inherited the ability to die. From His immortal Father, He inherited the power to overcome death. He declared, “As the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26).
Only He could redeem us from our sins. God the Father gave Him this power (see Helaman 5:11). The Savior was able to receive this power and carry out the Atonement because He kept Himself free from sin: “He suffered temptations but gave no heed unto them” (Doctrine and Covenants 20:22). Having lived a perfect, sinless life, He was free from the demands of justice. Because He had the power of redemption and because He had no debt to justice, he could pay the debt for those who repent."
That doesn't strike me as being particularly imprecise. For that matter, it isn't all that different from what you'd hear in any other church. If you're a Protestant or a Catholic, imagine that quoted text as a sermon at the pulpit on a Sunday morning. Would it be that odd?
Next comes some quoted text about how in LDS theology, salvation comes only through "...faith, repentance, baptism, and enduring to the end by keeping the commandments of God."
Yeah. Why is that weird? Of course, one has to have faith and believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior. That's a given, is it not? Repentance is part of the process of becoming a follower of Christ. Again, that should be a given. Baptism... I know some other traditions do not hold Baptism as essential. Some do. I've never heard that used as a disqualifier. Yes, we hold Baptism to be absolutely essential. And one assumes that continuing to be obedient to God's commandments goes with the territory. Why would that be wrong? Well, let's ask GethN7.
"In this, they do not agree with Catholics or Protestants AT ALL. In Catholic and Protestant traditions, only God's grace through faith is the only sure guarantee of salvation. No good work will ever save someone on the basis of the work alone, no ritual will ever make one ceremonially clean before God entirely on its own, and if one dies hoping these will help without faith in the promises of God, then one is LOST. Protestants and Catholics have a lot of disputes over the proper sacraments and their meaning, but if either were denied any and all sacraments, such as the thief on the cross who was still saved through faith ALONE, they could still be saved by divine grace,"
So... He acknowledges that God's grace comes through faith. Ok, no problem there. Next, he seems to go off into the weeds a bit on the point of rituals. Now, the website he's drawing from suggests that a set of rituals is what saves us, is LDS doctrine. That's false. Even a passing understanding of what LDS Ordinances are and what they're for would expose the falsehood in his statements. Yes, Baptism is essential. If that's a ritual to you, then okay, fine. We do have to have it. Again, that's hardly unique in Christendom.
He doesn't mention repentance. I can understand why. Imagine making the argument that one doesn't need repentance for salvation. He doesn't make that case, which is good. He doesn't address it either, which leaves us with enduring to the end, which also he doesn't comment on, so we'll leave it at that. He mentions the thief on the cross as the example of someone who was saved through faith alone, but was he really? Do we know for a fact that he wasn't baptized? After all, of the two who were crucified with Jesus, he was the one who acknowledged Jesus' divinity, so he must have already known. I'm not saying he definitely was, but you can't say for sure that he wasn't either. And in confessing that Jesus is the Savior, I'd say repentance goes right along with that, to the extent that one can repent and endure to the end while hanging on a cross.
He continues:
"Mormons are just recycling "you must do certain procedures and rituals" in just another form for another generation to be deceived. Worse, by making the exact nature of atonement not dependent on the eternal sacrifice of Christ for our sin, yet not establishing clearly what IS the proper sacrifice to make up for it while saying certain rituals are absolutely required, they do not walk the same road any Protestant or Catholic does on their way to salvation. Again, I emphasize in this regard Mormon doctrine is irrationally vague whereas Protestants and Catholics have a far more specific concept based on prior logic for how it works."
Remember back in the beginning when he said he was going to write this blog respectfully?
So here he's suggesting that we don't believe in Atonement being based on Jesus' sacrifice on the cross. That's an erroneous statement that I already exposed above in the quoted section from The Atonement page on the LDS website. It also belies the statement that our view on the subject is "irrationally vague."
Now, to clarify, I'm not calling GethN7 a liar. He's making statements that I think he honestly believes to be true because he's put way too much trust in a poorly researched, agenda-driven website with the goal of discrediting the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Are the writers of the website liars? I don't know. Maybe they're just breathtakingly poor researchers. I don't know them, so I can't say. All I can say is that I'm exposing the false statements they're making, and I'm bringing the receipts. Most of the false claims about LDS theology can be corrected with a simple web search, taking less than ten total seconds. You may disagree with what we believe, but it is not at all hard to find out what it is you're disagreeing with. Not once in GethN7's blog does he directly quote from any LDS Church resource that I've seen so far, only trusting a website that is demonstrably unreliable in its assertions.
Next comes another passage from that site saying that we overemphasize Jesus' suffering in Gethsemane. We do make a point of studying that, but even a cursory look over LDS writings on the subject of the Atonement ought to properly show how we see it. Again, from the Atonement page:
"Jesus’s atoning sacrifice took place in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross at Calvary. In Gethsemane He submitted to the will of the Father and began to take upon Himself the sins of all people... The Savior continued to suffer for our sins when He allowed Himself to be crucified—'lifted up upon the cross and slain for the sins of the world'"
Not seeing a huge problem here.
"This seriously confuses me. How does Jesus being scared and nervous like anyone would be of death and pain do anything? Jesus still died on the Cross for us, which even they will concede, even if they reject the end result as following the same logic of standard Christian doctrine. Since they reject the core point of Christ's sacrifice despite claiming as canon all that was in existence until the passing of the original apostles, who themselves backed up the Protestant and Catholic view Christ's sacrifice was essential, this is illogical on every level."
GethN7's confusion is certainly understandable considering the nonsense being asserted by his source. He goes on to repeat the false assertion that Latter-Day Saints don't regard Christ's sacrifice as essential. Again, that's not just untrue, it's comically, hilariously, laughably untrue. What isn't funny is that people out there actually believe it.
Believe it or not, we're actually getting close to the end of his blog post. I'll finish it in the next part. He has another post after that which I'll probably critique next, but I haven't looked at it yet, so it may just be more of the same, in which case there wouldn't be much point in repeating the same things.
Comments
Post a Comment