Mormonism & Christianity

My Take: This evangelical says Mormonism isn’t a cult

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/09/my-take-this-evangelical-says-mormonism-isnt-a-cult/?hpt=hp_t2

October 9, 2011

Editor’s note: Richard J. Mouw is President of Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical school in Pasadena, California.

By Richard J. Mouw, Special to CNN

Some prominent evangelical pastors have been telling their constituents not to support Mitt Romney’s bid for the 2012 presidential nomination. Because Romney is Mormon, they say, to cast a vote for him is to promote the cause of a cult.

I beg to differ.

For the past dozen years, I’ve been co-chairing, with Professor Robert Millet of Brigham Young University - the respected Mormon school - a behind-closed-doors dialogue between about a dozen evangelicals and an equal number of our Mormon counterparts.

We have talked for many hours about key theological issues: the authority of the Bible, the person and work of Christ, the Trinity, “continuing revelations” and the career of Joseph Smith, the 19th century founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), better known as the Mormon Church.

We evangelicals and our Mormon counterparts disagree about some important theological questions. But we have also found that on some matters we are not as far apart as we thought we were.

I know cults. I have studied them and taught about them for a long time. It’s worth noting that people have wondered whether I belong to a cult, with a reporter once asking me: “Evangelicalism, is that like Scientology and Hare Krishna?”

Religious cults are very much us-versus-them. Their adherents are taught to think that they are the only ones who benefit from divine approval. They don’t like to engage in serious, respectful give-and-take dialogue with people with whom they disagree.

Nor do they promote the kind of scholarship that works alongside others in pursuing the truth. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, haven’t established a university. They don’t sponsor a law school or offer graduate-level courses in world religions. The same goes for Christian Science. If you want to call those groups cults I will not argue with you.

But Brigham Young University is a world-class educational institution, with professors who’ve earned doctorates from some of the best universities in the world. Several of the top leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have PhDs from Ivy League schools.

These folks talk admiringly of the evangelical Billy Graham and the Catholic Mother Teresa, and they enjoy reading the evangelical C.S. Lewis and Father Henri Nouwen, a Catholic. That is not the kind of thing you run into in anti-Christian cults.

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.

No one has shown any impulse to walk away from the table of dialogue. We do all of this with the blessing of many leaders from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, some of whom have become good friends.

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.

I find Mormons to be more Christ-centered than they have been in the past. I recently showed a video to my evangelical Fuller Seminary students of Mormon Elder Jeffrey Holland, one of the Twelve Apostles who help lead the LDS church. The video captures Holland speaking to thousands of Mormons about Christ’s death on the cross.

Several of my students remarked that if they had not known that he was a Mormon leader they would have guessed that he was an evangelical preacher.

The current criticisms of Mitt Romney’s religious affiliation recall for many of us the challenges John Kennedy faced when he was campaigning for the presidency in 1960.

Some well-known Protestant preachers (including Norman Vincent Peale) warned against putting a Catholic in the White House. Kennedy’s famous speech to Houston pastors clarifying his religious beliefs as they related to his political leadership helped his cause quite a bit.

But the real changes in popular attitudes toward Catholicism happened more slowly, as Catholic Church leaders and scholars engaged in a new kind of dialogue with each other and representatives of other faith groups, most dramatically at the Second Vatican Council during the early years of the 1960s.

Cults do not engage in those kinds of self-examining conversations. If they do, they do not remain cults.

Those of us who have made the effort to engage Mormons in friendly and sustained give-and-take conversations have come to see them as good citizens whose life of faith often exhibits qualities that are worthy of the Christian label, even as we continue to engage in friendly arguments with them about crucial theological issues.

Mitt Romney deserves what every politician running for office deserves: a careful examination of his views on policy and his philosophy of government. But he does not deserve to be labeled a cultist.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Richard J. Mouw.

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Mitt Romney Responds To Anti-Mormonism:
‘Poisonous Language Doesn’t Advance Our Cause’
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/mitt-romney-responds-to-anti-mormonism-poisonous-language-doesnt-advance-our-cause/

by Frances Martel | 1:02 pm, October 8th, 2011

After half a weekend where the top news story was a debate whether his own religion was a “cult,” Mitt Romney took the stage at the Values Voter Summit today and shot back at those who would undermine his political prowess based on his religion, decrying “poisonous language” and, particularly, “one of the speakers who will follow me,” referring to anti-Mormon American Family Association representative Bryan Fischer.

RELATED Anti-Mormon Pastor To Anderson Cooper: Romney May Belong To A ‘Cult,’ But He Is Better Than Obama

Romney, preceded by a speech in which Bill Bennett explicitly shamed pastor Robert Jeffress for calling the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints a “cult” and hurting the Rick Perry campaign by proxy, thanked Bennett for his speech– “talk about hitting it out of the park,” he joked, a comment Perry had made about Jeffress. During his speech, Romney took a respite from political issues to remind the crowd that “decency and civility are values, too” and to note in particular that “one of the speakers who will follow me today has crossed that line, I think.” Attacking his “poisonous language,” he argued that it “does not advance our cause; it’s never softened a single heart or changed a single mind.” While he did not mention Jeffress, Fischer has made similar comments about the LDS church.

A report on Romney’s comments Fox News below:

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Bill Bennett: Jeffress comments on Mormonism 'bigotry'

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65475.html

By ALEXANDER BURNS | 10/8/11 9:40 AM EDT Updated: 10/8/11 6:58 PM EDT

Conservative commentator Bill Bennett, speaking at the Values Voter Summit, rebuked the Texas pastor who described Mormonism as a “cult” here Friday afternoon.

Bennett, the former education secretary and conservative author, said that Baptist church leader Robert Jeffress had given “voice to bigotry” in his remarks.

Jeffress gave a fiery speech endorsing Rick Perry for president and later told reporters he did not believe Mitt Romney is a Christian.

“Do not give voice to bigotry. Do not give voice to bigotry,” Bennett said in his speech Saturday morning. “I would say to Pastor Jeffress: You stepped on and obscured the words of Perry and Santorum and Cain and Bachmann and everyone else who has spoken here. You did Rick Perry no good, Sir, in what you had to say.”

Bennett’s remarks came less than half an hour before Romney was scheduled to take the stage at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65475.html#ixzz1aT2zFOYJ

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For More Information on Mormonism

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism

Theopedia - http://www.theopedia.com/Mormonism

MormonInfo.org - http://mormoninfo.org/

Scot McKnight's Website: Comments - http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/10/10/romney-a-mormon-is-he-a-christian/#comments

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Jeff Goldberg, a Jew: “Mormonism isn’t Christianity”
http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/11/02/jeff-goldberg-a-jew-mormonism-isnt-christianity/#more-21854

by Scot McKnight
November 2, 2011

Jeff Goldberg thinks he needs to step into this “is Mormonism Christianity?” issue:

One reason why is that Mormonism isn’t, in fact, Christian. Today’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn’t resemble a cult in any meaningful way. But its relationship to Christianity is similar to Christianity’s relationship to Judaism….

Just so we’re clear, I couldn’t care less whether Mormons are Christian, for two reasons: 1) I’m Jewish, so both Christianity and Mormonism (not to mention Islam) are a bit too arriviste for my taste; and 2) religious tests for public office are profoundly un-American. It says so in Article VIof the Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”…

Neither does Mormonism offend me aesthetically. I don’t particularly care about what secular culture — on Broadway and off — sees as evidence of its essential ridiculousness: the early dalliance with polygamy; the belief that every righteous Mormon gets his own planet; the sacred underwear; the off-putting absence of both acne and irony among Mormon youths. Christians believe in a virgin birth, after all, and members of my faith remove the foreskins from 8-day-old boys, just as our Bronze Age ancestors did (which bothers me not at all)….

Mormons themselves contend that “Christ is at the center of our worship, study, service and faith,” as a statement released by the church after Jeffress’s comment put it.
But theological honesty demands that we recognize that Romney would be the first president to be so far outside the Christian denominational mainstream.

There is much in Mormonism that stands in opposition to Christian doctrine, including the belief that the Book of Mormon completes the Christian Bible. Christianity had an established creed about 1,500 years before Joseph Smith appeared in upstate New York with a new truth, codified in the Book of Mormon, which he said was revealed to him by an angel named Moroni.

“The Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed settled the basic ideas of Christianity,” said Michael Cromartie, an evangelical who is vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Centerin Washington. “The canon was closed, and then Joseph Smith comes along and says that there’s a new book, an extra-biblical addition to the agreed-upon canon.”…

Nothing in Mormonism is quite as alien to Christian thought as the core assertion that God and man are of the same species.

“This is a canonical belief of Mormons, and it stands in radical opposition to the beliefs of the monotheistic religions,” Richard J. Mouw, the president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in California, told me. “Your people” — that is, Jews — “and my people would say that the fundamental sin here from the biblical point of view is that God is God and we’re not. There’s an ontological gap between creator and creation.”

When confronted by such questions about his religion, Romney shouldn’t defend its doctrines. He should defend the right of a Mormon to be president. And those Mormons drafted to defend their faith on the political battlefield shouldn’t argue that they are merely misconstrued Christians, a claim that won’t fly with pivotal Christian constituencies. Instead, they should assert that theirs is a legitimate and moral system of belief, and that a country that elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama as president is certainly ready to elect an adherent of what [Mr.] Land calls the "Fourth Abrahamic faith." (sic, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Mormonism, as used in this sense - skinhead)