My family is catholic, however, i was never brought up with strong ties to our church. I just recently started to get more involved and attending mass on sundays. Recently, a friend brought up the subject that LDS and JW baptisms are not valid and they are not considered christians and asked me why? could you please explain this to me.
Catholics believe that God came down from Heaven to be Incarnated in Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus is fully God and fully human. We believe he was tortured, died and was resurrected, and that he did all of this for us and for our salvation. We also believe that he taught certain things (call them “orthodox”) and that these orthodox teachings he desired to be taught to
all men: be they Jew or gentile (that is, non-Jew), male or female, slave or free. To ensure these teachings would remain orthodox for the rest of time, Catholics believe that Jesus began a divinely-inspired Church that is protected from error by the Holy Spirit, for all time. Today we call this the “Catholic Church”. We trace this Church back to the Apostles themselves, with Peter being the first Pope (the first bishop of Rome). There are thousands of historical documents that give testimony to the truth of the Catholic Church.
Protestants on the other hand, do not believe that Jesus started a divinely-protected Church on Earth. Rather, they believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible itself. The result of this is the multiplicity of denominations that you see: everyone teaches what they think the Bible is teaching, but everyone disagrees as to what the Bible teaches. Most Protestants have a Bible that contains seven fewer books than the Catholics (we call these the “deuterocanonicals”), but some Protestants believe that other books are also inspired. The Mormons are one group that believes this. They believe in the inspiration of the book of Mormon. JW’s on the other hand, have produced their own translation of the Bible that is full of errors (when compared to the original documents that are written in Hebrew and Greek), to suit their teachings.
As already mentioned, JW’s do not believe in the divinity of Christ. Rather, they think he is the archangel Michael, and they use their poorly-translated Bible to support this. Mormons are actually polytheists: they don’t believe in One God - as Catholics and almost all other Protestants do - rather they believe that if we are “saved” we ourselves actually
become gods, or something like that.
I have called JW’s and Mormons “Protestants”, but many more orthodox Protestants would object to me doing this. The reason is that the term “protestant” is not well-defined. Additionally, the term “Christian” is not well-defined. Thus, many Protestants refuse to acknowledge Mormons and JW’s as Christians, for the reason that they don’t believe in the orthodox teaching of the Trinity.
I on the other hand, am happy to call JW’s and Mormons “Christians”, because they think they’re following the teachings of Christ (in this definition, Muslims too could be called “Christians”). I just think that Mormons and JW’s get a bit more wrong than the others…
