What about Mormonism?

Question 60020.

Mormonism presents itself as restored Christianity, and it does so with real confidence. Two young men in white shirts arrive at the door with Bibles under their arms, speak warmly about Jesus, ask about your family, and offer to pray. Nothing in that encounter tells you that you are meeting a different religion, and that is exactly why the question keeps being asked.

The proper name of the body is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and its members prefer that to the older nickname. I will use their name where I can, while keeping the familiar term for the system of belief, because the system is what needs examining.

The claim at the centre

Mormonism is built on the claim of a great apostasy. On this account the true church died out shortly after the apostles, the priesthood authority was lost, the Bible was corrupted in transmission, and for centuries there was no true church anywhere on earth. Then in 1820 a young man in New York named Joseph Smith was told in a vision that all existing churches were wrong and their creeds an abomination.

Everything follows from that. If the church really did vanish, then a restoration was needed, and the man who brought it carries an authority no other teacher has. If it did not vanish, and Jesus kept His promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church, then the foundation of Mormonism is gone and the rest of the structure has nothing to stand on.

Joseph Smith and the books that followed

Smith reported being led to golden plates buried in a hillside, which he translated and published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon, an account of Israelite migrations to the Americas, a visit of the risen Jesus to those peoples, and their eventual destruction. Two further volumes followed, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, and both carry more doctrinal weight in practice than the Book of Mormon does.

The Bible remains on the shelf, but with a qualification written into the eighth Article of Faith, which accepts it as the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. In practice that clause allows any biblical text to be set aside when it conflicts with later revelation, which is why quoting a verse to a missionary rarely settles anything on its own.

A different God

This is the point most visitors never reach, and it is the one that matters most. Historic Christianity confesses one God who has always been God, eternal, unchanging, spirit, the Maker of everything that is not Himself. Mormonism teaches that God the Father has a body of flesh and bone, that He was once a man on another world, and that He progressed to His present state. Lorenzo Snow put it in a couplet still repeated among Latter-day Saints, that as man now is, God once was, and as God now is, man may become.

That is not a different emphasis within monotheism. It is a different kind of universe. It makes God a member of a class of beings rather than the Creator of all classes, and it opens the door to an unlimited number of gods. Isaiah leaves no room for it when he says that before Him no god was formed, nor shall there be any after Him, and the point of that sentence is precisely to close the door that Mormonism reopens.

The goal of the system follows the same logic. Exaltation means becoming a god oneself, with worlds and offspring of one’s own. Set that beside the promise of Scripture that we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is, and you can hear how different the two hopes are. One is glorified humanity. The other is promotion into deity.

A different Jesus

In Latter-day Saint teaching, Jesus is the firstborn spirit child of the Father, the elder brother of every human being, and, in the same order of being, of Lucifer as well. He is worshipped, He atoned, He rose, and He is Saviour. But He is not the eternal Word who was with God and was God before anything was made, and He is not of one being with the Father in the way the New Testament requires.

Paul warned the Corinthians about those who come preaching another Jesus, and this is what he meant. The words are identical and the Person is not. When John writes that all things were made through Him, and that the fulness of deity dwells in Him bodily, he closes off any account in which Jesus began as one of many spirit offspring. Mormonism keeps the name and changes the identity, which is the defining mark of what a cult is in the theological sense.

A different gospel

On salvation the language sounds close enough to be confusing. Grace is spoken of warmly. Yet the Book of Mormon says that it is by grace that we are saved after all we can do, and that small phrase changes everything. Grace becomes what makes up the shortfall once you have exhausted your own effort, rather than the ground you stand on from the first day.

In practice, the fulness of salvation in Mormonism runs through ordinances performed under Latter-day Saint authority, including temple rites which most of the world may not attend. Paul’s letter to the Galatians was written against exactly this instinct, and he does not soften it, saying that if anyone preaches a gospel contrary to the one we preached, let him be accursed. If you want the New Testament answer to whether effort completes grace, I have set it out in is faith alone enough, or do works matter.

Ephesians states the alternative in a single breath. We are saved by grace through faith, and this not of ourselves, it is the gift of God, so that nobody can boast. The Greek charis means favour that is not earned, and a grace which begins after all you can do is not that word at all.

What is genuinely admirable

I want to say this clearly, because contempt is a poor missionary. Latter-day Saints are among the most courteous, industrious and family centred people you will meet. They give two years of their youth to unpaid service. They care for their own with a thoroughness most churches would envy. They are usually better at hospitality than I am, and they are almost never rude to me at my door.

None of that is an argument for the truth of Mormonism, and none of it should be sneered at either. Sincerity and kindness are real, and they are not the same thing as being right. That is a hard sentence, and it is one I would want applied to me as readily as to anyone else.

Talking with the missionaries

Give them a drink and give them time. They spend their days being refused, and a household that treats them as people rather than as a nuisance is memorable. Ask about home, about how they are finding Britain, about what they miss. That is not a tactic, it is just how a Christian ought to behave.

Then ask about God rather than about Joseph Smith. Was God always God? Did He ever progress to become what He is now? How many gods are there? Those questions go straight to the heart of Mormonism and they do it without insult. Follow with the question of assurance, which is where many young missionaries feel the weight most: do you know today, with certainty, that you are accepted by God? Then read John’s Gospel with them if they will, and let Jesus present Himself in His own words.

Where Mormonism has quietly changed

One feature of Mormonism worth knowing is how much it has revised. The Book of Mormon has undergone thousands of textual changes since 1830, most of them minor but some of them doctrinal. The temple ceremony has been altered significantly within living memory. The ban on men of black African descent holding the priesthood, defended for well over a century on doctrinal grounds, was set aside in 1978 and the explanations previously given have since been disavowed.

In recent years the church has also published essays acknowledging matters that were formerly denied or left unmentioned, including Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage, the several differing accounts of the First Vision, and the method of translation involving a seer stone in a hat. Many Latter-day Saints have discovered this material for themselves and found it deeply unsettling.

I mention it without any pleasure. A restoration claim rests on the reliability of the man who made it, and Mormonism stands or falls with Joseph Smith in a way that Christianity does not stand or fall with any preacher. Our faith rests on a public execution and an empty tomb in a datable year, attested by witnesses who died rather than retract, and it has survived two thousand years of examination precisely because it never depended on the character of a founder in a private grove.

So, now what?

If Mormonism has been at your door, do not settle for deciding whether the visitors were nice. They almost certainly were. Ask instead who they say God is, who they say Jesus is, and what they say a person must do to be saved, because that is where the two faiths part company and nowhere else.

If you are a Latter-day Saint reading this, I have not written to score points off you. I would rather say that the God of the Bible has always been God, that you were never in a race to become one, and that the acceptance you are working toward is offered to you now as a gift. Read Galatians and then John, slowly, and ask God to show you whether that is true.

Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the LORD, and besides me there is no saviour.

Isaiah 43:10 to 11 (ESV)