lizs1988,
In regards to your parent’s admonish not to read any books outside of your church, I have to wonder on the consistency of visiting a catholic forum. It will be piecemeal, but you’ll find yourself reading selections from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and various other Catholic documents.
That said, I will try to explain why I choose Catholicism over LDS. I’ve read a number of the debates out there, so I know already that zerinus and why me have already offered their rebuttals aplenty to what I’m going to say, so I know what I’m going to pose is certainly not going to convince anyone to change their positions.
I’m going to start with the Nicene Creed.
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen or unseen.
This already is a big statement. The Catholic Church believes in one God, one prime mover, one creator of all that is. He is eternal, unchanging, perfect, all-powerful. Without Him, nothing came to be; He created all there is apart from Himself. All matter and all spirit are contingent on Him.
I believe in this firmly for a number of reasons. I believe very strongly in the uncaused cause argument. I cannot accept an infinite past. The logical implications lead to absurdities (simply, if you have an infinite past, you have no beginning; if you have no beginning, you cannot reach the present.) And I cannot accept an infinite regression of deities. Or rather, I veiw an infinite regression of contingent beings a contingent construct itself, still in need of a necessary being to explain itself existence. And I believe that a necessary being must have the properties of eternal, unchanging, acting, and infinitely powerful. He has to be eternal, because otherwise he is not necessary. He has to be unchanging, because otherwise He could become something not identical with necessity. As a corollary, He is also perfect, because perfect implies no need to change. As a second corollary, He must be spirit, because matter is by nature divisible, changeable. He is acting, otherwise He could not cause other things to be. And He must be infinitely powerful so that He can create.
The gods of the Mormon creed are none of these things, thus I cannot accept them. That doesn’t make me right, but as I said before, this is just an explanation of why I believe the Catholic Church, and not the LDS.
I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God. One in being with the Father, through Him all things were made.
As Catholics, we believe that Jesus Christ is God. As we believe in only one God, this means that Jesus Christ is one with the Father. How is this? A mystery of unity. In the Trinity we believe in three Persons with one nature.
The generation of the Son from the Father is not a matter of creation, for the Son is not separate from the Father. He is subordinate to the Father in procession, since the Son is eternally begotten by the Father. They each have their own will, but they act in accord. They are distinct persons, but the same in nature. Again, how can this be? The eternal generation of the Son is as the Word of God, the perfect thought of God, God beholding God. This is by no means an easy concept to work with. The Mormon belief is by far easier to understand and doesn’t have the apparent contradictions that a surface look at the Trinity has, but nevertheless I accept the Trinity.
I believe Jesus must be both God and man. He must be man so that his sacrifice on Calvary is efficacious. He must be God to bridge the infinite gap between man and god.
I believe in one God. The singularity of God is, to me, the only logically tenable choice. This goes back to the nature of the necessary being I mentioned before.
I believe Jesus is different from the Father. This comes mainly from His words in the Bible.
In order for Jesus to be God, for Jesus to be different from the Father, and for there to be one God, I have to accept the Trinity.
- For us men and for our salvation, He came down from Heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered, died and was buried. On the third day He rose again from the dead, in fulfillment of the scriptures. He ascended into Heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.*
I don’t know that there is necessarily anything horribly opposing between Catholic and Mormon thought here. We both believe that Jesus came to save us. We both believe that he was born of the Virgin Mary (though we differ on how Jesus was conceived–Father versus Holy Spirit–and how virginity is defined), and we both believe he was crucified and raised from the dead. I think we both believe in the second coming of Christ at the time of judgment.
But I will speak some more on Christ’s sacrifice. I’m not sure how Mormons view original sin or how salvation actually works. In the Catholic Church, while every man is a special creation of God, his soul made from nothing at the moment of conception, nevertheless it was Adam and Eve that were tested, with the results to apply to all generations on. They were created full of grace, as perfect humans. Their sin against God emptied their souls of grace, and this choosing the material over God made them incapable of receiving grace. They passed this fallen nature on to all their descendants, so that they are born in a state lacking of grace. We call this original sin. Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, bridging the infinite gap between man and God, he restored to us the ability to be filled with grace. Through baptism, our souls become capable of receiving grace, and through the other sacraments we cultivate that grace, or recover the grace we lost when we stumble. We have the ability to become righteous (as opposed to Protestant thought, in which we don’t actually become righteous, but are judged righteous because Jesus suffers in our place) in the eyes of God.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son He is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets.
Just as the Son of God is God’s perfect word, God beholding God, eternally generated from God the Father, so the Holy Spirit is the perfect love of God, proceeding from Father and Son. And because the Holy Spirit is the perfect love of God, He is also a person, and also God. He is subordinate to the Father and Son in order of procession, but equal in nature, fully God in and of Himself.
At times I still struggle with: why a Trinity? Why only three? Why as many as three? I think the answer is simply that, when we are talking about perfect and all-powerful, then self, the image of self, and the love of self are all there are and all there can be.
(continued in next post…)
