Post by Ginnie on Jan 7, 2010 21:06:12 GMT -4
which message we firmly believe is accurately reflected in the text of the New Testament.
Who's "we"? You don't speak for me. You're welcome to have that belief, but kindly don't imply that I must believe in the infallibility of the Bible in order to call myself a Christian. That, to me, is just silly superstition.
In any case you evaded my point. You said it comes down to the authority of scripture, but you acknowledge that there was authority before scripture and it was allegedly by that authority that we got scripture, so the real authority (if there is any) cannot be the scripture.
I don't respond well to Bible-thumping. If you'd like to have a friendly conversation on my approach to the Bible and my reasons for it, then I'll oblige. But be aware that I do not regard the Bible as a complete, infallible authority, nor do I agree that any such belief is required of one who professes to be a Christian.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here when you say "doctrinal vicissitudes and varying claims to "authority."
I'm talking about the establishment of practical doctrine through ecumenical councils and democractic conventions over the centuries. I don't understand how such committee process necessarily arrives at any "doctrinal purity" that God would be bound to respect, or for which he even cares for.
Once upon a time, for example, the leaders of Christian churches claimed that Christian doctrine allowed for chattel slavery, a belief most modern Christians would find abhorrent. Christian doctrine used to forbid divorce or marriage outside of one's race, beliefs that are not shared or agreed upon by modern Christians. The so-called "purity" of doctrine simply does not exist today among professing Christians nor has it been manifest throughout history.
For vicissitude of authority, try a pope or two. Millions of Christians today consider the Pope someone who speaks authoritatively for God, and consider that an important Christian belief. Millions of other Christians don't believe the Pope has any more authority to speak for God than the next guy. Millions of others quite a long time ago elected a different series of popes and revered them as the mouthpiece of God. Who is in authority to speak for God? You? Me? An national convention? Some German guy in Rome? Some guy in Salt Lake City?
The obvious problems associated with putting faith in some person as authority for belief has led to trying to find some rigid, objective standard against which one's belief can be measured for orthodoxy. Looking around, many American protestants settled on the Bible. Since it has an early provenance and it's an inanimate object, it seems to be a better choice for the gold standard.
But stepping back we see this as just a deferral of the problem. Regarding the Bible as an authority doesn't automatically make it one in any objective sense, and denying that you interpret it in your own way (or in any way) doesn't mean you don't. You're back to a subjective opinion of "what God wants," only this time you're trying to hide the fact that it's a subjective opinion.
Stepping back even further we see the need for such infallible authority in any form as simply the formulation of religion as a contest that needs rules to separate the winners from the losers, or as an exclusive club that needs membership criteria to keep out the riff-raff.
Carried to an extreme, the frantic worry about "being saved" becomes a significant distraction. That's how you get people who worry that they won't be "saved" unless they go picket some gay man's funeral or churches that ordain women. Very often what masquerades as religion is really social activism, and what is held up as "important" Christian doctrine is really just a thinly-disguised attempt to create a certain social order.
Some people adopt a religion for egalitarian purposes. For those people, the payoff is approval -- the feeling that one is "saved". And so they need hair-split rules that determine who is "saved" and who isn't. Why? Because "being saved" doesn't have any pleasant distinction unless there are some people who are not saved. Without the precise ability to exclude someone from the club, you can't argue he's not a member. And if you can't argue he's not a member, then you lose the emotional payoff of exclusivity. Religion can become simply a way to enforce a social "us versus them" distinction, and that's not useful to me.
I don't agree with the "country club" approach to religion.
It is important to understand precisely who He is, or you may find your faith misplaced.
Hogwash. The nature of the Trinity, held by some to be the most important doctrine of Christianity, is defined as a mystery and has been hotly debated literally for centuries. As I said, it was defined as a mystery precisely because there was no agreement among the many theologians and authorities who debated it. Defining it as a mystery means that anyone who says he precisely understands it is automatically wrong. What many people hold as the most important attribute of Jesus cannot be known precisely. Oddly enough, this same unknowable "truth" is precisely the yardstick some use to reject Mormons. I find that rather hypocritical.
Again, I don't see this is as a useful approach to Christianity. The obsession with hair-splitting debates over historical tradition or the microscopic nuances in some Bible passage distract, in my opinion, from a pleasant and beneficial practice of Christian veneration.
I once witnessed a heated debate lasting more than half an hour over the "proper" elements of the Eucharist. It's a fact that to represent Jesus' blood Mormons use water, Catholics use wine (cheap wine, to be specific), and Lutherans use grape juice. What a silly debate. The Catholics argue that it turns literally to the blood of Jesus while the Episcopalians say it doesn't. They all yell at the Mormons for using the least blood-like liquid. None of them bothered to pay attention to the most important part of the Eucharist: Jesus' instructions, "When you meet, do this to remember me." It doesn't matter whether it's pepperoni pizza and Diet Mountain Dew as long as it's done in the context of the Eucharist and with the recollection of Jesus as its central theme.
I've always found it interesting how certain insidious mindsets can wreak havoc on one's view of the world. The most insidious interpretation, for example, is the one you don't know you're making, or the one you deny making. You read a passage "naturally" as if to say that interpretation is irrelevant. If you aren't even aware of the possibility that other interpretations exist, then you won't recognize that your "natural" reading is simply your intuitive interpretation. So many people claim to read the Bible "literally" as if this means they aren't actually interpreting, and thus they think they free themselves from the need to justify that interpretation.
Similarly the most insidious approach is the one you don't recognize as an approach. If you take the "natural" approach to Christianity, you deny that there is even such a thing as a choice in the matter, therefore no need to justify one's choice of actions.
This inability to distinguish interpretation from fact leads, in religious circles, to mindless dogmatism. In secular circles it leads to conspiracism.
Everyone who reads the Lord's words has to make his own determination of how narrow that gate is.
Then kindly allow me to make my determination and, if necessary, the Mormons collectively to make their own. You seem focused on trying to tell everyone else just how narrow the gate is and in what dimension it's narrow.
I've worshiped with the Mormons in Utah, the Catholics in Rome, the Anglicans in London, the Baptists in Kansas, the Coptics in Cairo, and the Orthodox in Athens. Many charismatic American Protestants are utterly unaware of the vast richness of Christian belief and practice throughout the world. The little dogmatic slice of it that forms American Charismatic Protestantism is unbelievably miniscule in the grand scheme of things.
No matter what Christian source you refer to in order to compare these two faiths, you'll run into the same arguments.
That does not make those arguments well-reasoned or valid. The question of whether mainstream churches do accept Mormons as Christians is a simple question of fact. As you point out, we can simply consult the various governing bodies of those organizations and determine in a purely factual way the answer to that question. That makes it a fairly uninteresting question.
The better question is whether mainstream churches should accept Mormons as Christians. That opens up the question to examining the basis by which those pronouncements are made. You're simply trying to divert attention away from the interesting question toward an uninteresting one you can pound your fist on and declare the problem solved.
The "Christian source" I most often choose to consult is the rank-and-file Christian, who may or may not belong to any particular church and may or may not agree with every one of his church's official statements of doctrine. That is a much more practical measure of Christian belief than the edicts of various ruling bodies.
As I said, you refer me to the terse official statements of various ecumenical bodies and councils. Not only does that dodge the real question, it brings in a whole bunch of confounding issues. Churches and their ruling bodies act as much in social and political roles as they do doctrinal roles. I just thumbed through the report of the Episcopalians' convention recently, whose policy decisions seem almost entirely occupied with keeping the Anglican Communion together and not with trying to discern what Jesus really wants people to do.
So the Catholics don't accept Mormon baptism as equivalent to Catholic baptism. I'm not suprised; not everyone's baptisms are considered interchangeable. Churches that require baptism by immersion reject Catholic aspersion baptism. The interapplicability of baptism is not an identical question to one's recognition of another's beliefs otherwise.
I noticed that one church tried to exclude Mormons because they believed wrongly about the Trinity (axiomatic difference), but in doing so inadvertently excluded the entire Eastern Orthodox church, who professes an "economical" Trinity. You have to take those statements with a grain of salt, especially when they boil down to "We think Mormons believe differently than we on this point, therefore they're wrong."
Now such councils can't simply be set aside. They do establish policy, yes, but just as often for reasons of social and political expediency, and to support the retention of memberships. They do establish doctrine, yes, but only by a consensus of interpretation and belief. That is important where a Christian community is concerned. If Christians want to congregate, they can do so only where a certain commonality is sought, established, and enforced.
Do you maintain that every Christian who disagrees with Mormonism is a hate monger?
Of course not. First, not every Christian who disagrees with Mormonism denies that Mormons are Christians. Not everyone is dogmatic about their beliefs nor feels he needs to be.
Second, whether one disagrees is not so important as what one does with that disagreement.
If one expresses that disagreement in self-serving "I'm right and you're wrong" terms rather than as subjective differences or an unshared axiom, then one has often begged the question of one's own correctness. I think my personal beliefs are correct, otherwise I wouldn't hold to them. But that doesn't bind anyone else to think the same way about what I believe. Much of what I believe in a religious sense is purely subjective. I cannot argue that it's "right" in an objectively arguable sense. Failing to recognize the tenuous nature of one's own beliefs can be considered hate-mongering.
If I happen to disagree with someone else's profession of belief, that doesn't license me to attempt vigorously to dissuade that person from belief. I don't go picket the Mormon church because I might disagree with their policy, for example, on ordaining women. I don't go around alleging to every Mormon I see that their founder drank beer and is said to have believed in "moon men". I disagree respectfully. I don't need to reinforce my beliefs by pounding into other people's heads the supposed foolishness of theirs.
I have seen quite a number of people profess to tell others "what Mormons really believe." Ditto for Catholics, Hindus, Hare Krishnas, Muslims, and Jews and what they "really" believe. These expositions are almost never written except for polemical purposes, almost never written by people who know what they're talking about, and consequently almost never right, and therefore almost never worth the time to read them. Promoting disbelief through denegration might be considered hate-mongering.
Or just that site? I found no evidence of it.
Did you look for any? The sole mission of the Institute for Religious Research is to identify reasons why certain people aren't Christians. They're attempting to enforce some mythical "doctrinal purity" by ensuring that those who are on the outskirts stay on the outskirts. An organization whose sole purpose is to exclude people based on their own notion of acceptability a pretty good definition of a hate group.
Just because they smile politely and write dispassionately and give you footnotes doesn't change their basic mission. As I've said, I have very little use for such organizations.
I'm just bumping this post because I think everyone who is interested in this topic should read it! Probably the best post I've come across in this forum!
I'm stopping now - eight more pages to go.