LDS: Apostasy

[zerinus]

Sorry…By Mormon version of the gospel, I meant the conglomeration of all Mormon doctrine. What makes Mormonism differ from Catholicism.

And the question is why is there no evidence from the early Church supporting this Mormon version? - the teachings that are unique to the LDS?

There is support for many—and equally, lack of support for many Catholic doctrines. The most frequently criticized Mormon doctrine for example: deification and plurality of gods, has absolute full support in early Christian literature. On the other hand, there is no support from scripture or earliest Christian writings for many Catholic doctrines and practices, such as infant baptisms, or the immaculate conception for example.

 

[zerinus]

Where do mormons get the idea that the “keys” were to pass from apostle to apostle as a sign of authority? No where in the Bible does it say that’s how Jesus designed it. He made Peter the head and that was it. Once St. Ignatius was made a bishop he was of equal authority of St. John or any other living apostle.

If that were true, it would undermine the Catholic position equally as much. Catholicism teaches that the Pope is the successor to Peter; and God gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter. If the Pope did not inherit the keys of he kingdom from Peter, then he cannot be the legitimate successor to Peter.

 

[ParkerD]

A friend of mine just joined the New Apostolic Church. They are based in Germany. They also claim to have the apostolic ministry. Quoting their website:

Why you and not them?

Once you wander off the reservation and found your own church like Joseph Smith did you can make any claim you want just like the New Apostolic Church does. God is a God of order. This entire claim of a complete apostasy and a restoration flies in the face of history and common sense. Either God preserved his priesthood authority in the Catholic Church or as the Protestants claim there is no need for priesthood authority. The idea of a restoration seems to be a uniquely 19th century idea which was not limited to Joseph Smith. But you need some proof. What’s the proof that God restored the church through Joseph Smith? Don’t tell me again that it was the Holy Ghost. The New Apostolic Church would make the same claim. What objective evidence is there for Joseph Smith’s claims?

Catholic20064,
I agree that God is a God of order. If you’re saying that had you lived in 70 AD and participated in a church service and been involved in personal repentance and being baptized and receiving communion, that you would have seen exactly the same kinds of outward circumstances (not the building you were meeting in, but the simple steps of how these things would be done) as if you did these things today, then I would say you have not been a very thorough student of history or of the New Testament.

Witnesses and participants have provided testimonial and experiential proof that Peter, James and John and John the Baptist for the Levitical, did restore the keys of priesthood authority to the earth, and established the same order and showed the same order that Christ showed in the original church, as you noted with the citation you brought from Ephesians 4. (The early church didn’t “come to the unity of the faith”, by the way. That was a long-term goal, not a short-term goal because new people were being brought into the church weekly, and attaining unity would take patient teaching and encouragement and allowing people to change as they participated in the new covenant gospel.)

The Holy Ghost provides a confirming witness about truth, after a person goes through the process of searching and praying and using mental energy and earnest desire and sincere faith in Christ and showing that by their actions. Covenant keeping is all about having the Holy Ghost involved in one’s life, because obstacles are going to come (the “storms” and the “thorns” and the “furnace of affliction”), so I hope you will understand that the Holy Ghost is absolutely a necessary part of the process of figuring out the truths of God and gaining greater knowledge like Abraham did. That is what Paul wrote about in 1 Corinthians 2. He gave a sure and certain witness of how one gains the wisdom of God as compared with the wisdom of men, and the Holy Spirit is absolutely the fundamental difference, as well as one’s personal humility so that when they make covenants, they will keep those covenants with faith, hope in Christ, charity and compassion for all, forgiveness in their heart, and patience in the continued process of repentance throughout their life.

As you provide leadership to your family and are a bulwark of support to your wife and to each child, I hope you indeed seek the Holy Ghost and find His guiding influence to bring peace and encouragement and compassionate understanding to all of your relationships. You can do that. God expects you to do it. He knows you can do it. It sounds like you have a wonderful family. God bless each of them. (I hope you can understand that He already is doing that, with His perfect love and particular blessings showered down upon them, and that they are a blessing in the lives of those around them. That should bring you great comfort and joy. ) Have a peaceful Christmas season.

 

[Catholic20064]

Catholic20064,
I agree that God is a God of order. If you’re saying that had you lived in 70 AD and participated in a church service and been involved in personal repentance and being baptized and receiving communion, that you would have seen exactly the same kinds of outward circumstances (not the building you were meeting in, but the simple steps of how these things would be done) as if you did these things today, then I would say you have not been a very thorough student of history or of the New Testament.

Witnesses and participants have provided testimonial and experiential proof that Peter, James and John and John the Baptist for the Levitical, did restore the keys of priesthood authority to the earth, and established the same order and showed the same order that Christ showed in the original church, as you noted with the citation you brought from Ephesians 4. (The early church didn’t “come to the unity of the faith”, by the way. That was a long-term goal, not a short-term goal because new people were being brought into the church weekly, and attaining unity would take patient teaching and encouragement and allowing people to change as they participated in the new covenant gospel.)

The Holy Ghost provides a confirming witness about truth, after a person goes through the process of searching and praying and using mental energy and earnest desire and sincere faith in Christ and showing that by their actions. Covenant keeping is all about having the Holy Ghost involved in one’s life, because obstacles are going to come (the “storms” and the “thorns” and the “furnace of affliction”), so I hope you will understand that the Holy Ghost is absolutely a necessary part of the process of figuring out the truths of God and gaining greater knowledge like Abraham did. That is what Paul wrote about in 1 Corinthians 2. He gave a sure and certain witness of how one gains the wisdom of God as compared with the wisdom of men, and the Holy Spirit is absolutely the fundamental difference, as well as one’s personal humility so that when they make covenants, they will keep those covenants with faith, hope in Christ, charity and compassion for all, forgiveness in their heart, and patience in the continued process of repentance throughout their life.

As you provide leadership to your family and are a bulwark of support to your wife and to each child, I hope you indeed seek the Holy Ghost and find His guiding influence to bring peace and encouragement and compassionate understanding to all of your relationships. You can do that. God expects you to do it. He knows you can do it. It sounds like you have a wonderful family. God bless each of them. (I hope you can understand that He already is doing that, with His perfect love and particular blessings showered down upon them, and that they are a blessing in the lives of those around them. That should bring you great comfort and joy. ) Have a peaceful Christmas season.

God also expects us to use our common sense when evaluating the claims of the various churches. Indeed it takes faith and the guidance of the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus is the Christ and that he rose from the dead. He left us with the Catholic Church which is guided by the Holy Spirit to bring us into the truth. I think we have to be very careful about going against the church that Jesus left us while he lived on earth to go after another. The Catholic Church is safe harbor. To go against it because our supposed “feelings” of what we assume to be the Holy Ghost leads us in another direction is the height of folly.

The proof is indeed in the pudding. You really have to have some objective reason to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet. There has to be some solid evidence so that we just aren’t being led about by our feelings. The Mormon Church doesn’t offer any such evidence. God’s Kingdom has rolled forth through the Catholic Church for 2000 years. I don’t see a good reason in Joseph Smith’s teachings to abandon the Catholic Church for another gospel.

 

[sterryfamily]

There is support for many—and equally, lack of support for many Catholic doctrines. The most frequently criticized Mormon doctrine for example: deification and plurality of gods, has absolute full support in early Christian literature. On the other hand, there is no support from scripture or earliest Christian writings for many Catholic doctrines and practices, such as infant baptisms, or the immaculate conception for example.

Thanks Zerinus.
Could you please point us to a source where we could view proofs from the early Christian centuries of documents which support theology which is unique to the LDS?

 

[zerinus]

Thanks Zerinus.
Could you please point us to a source where we could view proofs from the early Christian centuries of documents which support theology which is unique to the LDS?

Which particular theological point unique to Mormonism did you have in mind?

 

[sterryfamily]

Which particular theological point unique to Mormonism did you have in mind?

Any.

All you can.

Thanks

 

[zerinus]

Any.

All you can.

Thanks

The most “unique” one as I mentioned is no doubt the LDS doctrine of deification of man and plurality of gods; which has great support both in the Bible as well as in Patristic literature. I have already written a couple of articles about that in my Bolog which you can read here, and here.

 

[zaffiroborant]

Catholic20064,

(The early church didn’t “come to the unity of the faith”, by the way. That was a long-term goal, not a short-term goal because new people were being brought into the church weekly, and attaining unity would take patient teaching and encouragement and allowing people to change as they participated in the new covenant gospel.)

If there was no unity back then because people were “being brought into the church weekly” then there is no unity in your church now, because people are being brought in weekly. This is especially true with the milk before meat in combination with asking for a baptismal commitment in the first couple of discussions as advocated in the Preach my Gospel Manual.

 

[KathleenGee]

The earliest Christian liturgies followed a basic order in the breaking of bread…There is a book out by Michael Aquilina…I have to look for the actual title…it should clear up alot.

 

[Robert_in_SD]

From the OP:

…My questions to you are;

1. If Christ’s promise to protect the Church against the gates of hell 2,000 years ago, still allowed for men to screw it up, does the same apply today? Is it possible that men could abandon the true church as you see it, the LDS? Is it theoretically possible that this could have already happened?
2. What new promise has God made to the new iteration of His Church to protect it from error? How will this new promise be held up?

I read through this thread and I still don’t think I have seen a direct answer to the question beyond perhaps the book of Mormon and the confirmation of the HS will confirm the truth of LDS doctrine. But even this answer is not responsive. I too would like to know the LDS rationale, and I do not intend to critique it here. I just want to understand it. Let me restate the OP’s questions:

(1) What, if any, authority guarantees that the LDS Church (as we know it to be today) will not fail in teaching truth on matters of faith and morals; and
(2) Have there been any *new *promises that the LDS Church (the Prophet and the Apostles, etc…) will be protected by the HS from teaching error.

Peace,
Robert

 

[Bataar]

If that were true, it would undermine the Catholic position equally as much. Catholicism teaches that the Pope is the successor to Peter; and God gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter. If the Pope did not inherit the keys of he kingdom from Peter, then he cannot be the legitimate successor to Peter.

No, it does not. Jesus gave the keys to Peter. The keys then pass to Peter’s successor. No where does it say that it has to be an apostle. After Peter was martyred, the living apostles and bishops elected Linus (I believe) to succeed Peter and therefore, the keys passed to him.

 

[TheosisM]

Just an fyi for everybody: the deification of man is a concept that is found in traditional Christianity, and is particularly emphasized in Eastern Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This is also called “theosis”. It is not the same as the Mormon exaltation, however the concept of the deification of man was never lost in traditional Christianity. Western Christians may not place a lot of emphasis on it, or at least as much as Eastern Christians do.

 

[ParkerD]

If there was no unity back then because people were “being brought into the church weekly” then there is no unity in your church now, because people are being brought in weekly. This is especially true with the milk before meat in combination with asking for a baptismal commitment in the first couple of discussions as advocated in the Preach my Gospel Manual.

Zaffiroborant,

The passage in Ephesians is very specific, and I agree that the LDS church has not “arrived” “in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” I have no problem with the idea that unity is a long-term goal, and implies a fully Zion-like people, where there would be “no poor among them” (anywhere in the world), no feelings of status or position, and a synergy that would build an incredibly progressed society because of the sharing of both resources and talents and abilities with complete unselfishness. This is a long-term goal that is fully capable of being realized through the gospel of Jesus Christ and will be realized, but I assure you that apostles and prophets and good teachers will be necessary during the entire time preceding the “arrival” point of that kind of Zion, and even after that “arrival” point.

It is a wonderful thing to see people change as they grow in the gospel of Jesus Christ, as they repent of past behaviors that brought personal sorrow or family sorrow, and really do forgive themselves and others and have the atoning grace of Christ become an active part of their life. They also receive a calling or assignment that helps them feel like a participant in that on-going process of building a future Zion, such as being a teacher or a song director or a youth leader. “The body hath need of every member.”

All the while, the apostles are there as general leaders to give guidance and to oversee that as all the new members come into membership wherever they are in the world, their personal views and “traditions” they happen to bring with them do not “overpower” the group of members they join with so that an isolated group does not go off on a tangent because of the “persuasions of men” or the enticings of a wrong tradition. A new member grows at their own pace, but with the help of the Holy Spirit sometimes that growth is truly remarkable in its suddenness and the dramatic change in their life. This has happened over and over again with new members all over the world.

 

[Javl]

Might I ask the LDS if anyone knows the difference between apostacy, schism, and heresy? The “breaking of the church in to pieces”, according to the LDS, has nothing to do with apostacy. This has been proven to the LDS many times, but it does not register with any LDS member.

PAX DOMINI

Shalom Aleichem

 

[KathleenGee]

I posted on another thread the liturgy of St. James the Lesser who was probably the first bishop of Jerusalem. I gave the outline of the text of the liturgy which reflects much of the wording of today’s Mass. I gave direct quotes from the consecration of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

The Mass then as today had the same intent, message and Spirit. St. John the Evangelist gives the image of the worship in Mass in Revelations 22. He previously addressed the various churches that did not die out when he did. There were bishops, church fathers, deacons who assisted at the Mass.

The earliest church was Jewish and the people attended the synagogues of their own when the Jews began writing a malediction against Christ’s followers in their places of worship. It contained the priest’s greeting, the petition of God for absolution of sin, the prayer for protection and blessing, going into the Liturgy of the Word that encompassed the Old and New Testament, the dismissal of the unbaptized, the epiclesis and consecration of the bread and wine and the communion rite.

Public readings from the Law and the Prophets also may have been part of the worship enacted by the Gentile Christian community before 80 CE…Christian books or scrolls did not come overnight until the end of the first century, but as time and space went on from the actual events of Jesus’ life, the written forms took on more importance in the life and ritual of the community…The first century of Christianity was more of within Judaism, but then the Jewish community in time began to expell the followers of Christ who in turn let go of various Jewish customs until the actual split of Christians from the Jewish people.

There also came about conflicts between Christians and the Romans and we have the history of Christians worshiping in the catecombs…

The Holy Spirit at Pentecost not only worked through the Apostles, there were over 150 other people who also had tongues of the Holy Spirit appear over them…the Church expanded outward and to many people and local leadership put in place by the apostles…

And then to say everyone quit because the Apostles then were gone is not historical truth.

Here is a quote from the Apostolic Tradition --what the Lord’s apostles left us:

'Let everyone take care that no unbaptized person taste the Eucharist, nor a mouse or other animal, and that none of it fall and be lost. For it is the body of Christ to be consumed by those who believe and not to be treated lightly.

And the cup has been blessed in the name of God, you receive it as the antitype of the Blood of Christ. So spill nothing from it. May no strange spirit lap it up because you despise it and rendered yourself guilty of the blood of Christ – like a man who despises the price with which he has been ransomed.’

This source is from ‘The Mass of the Early Christians’, by Mike Aquilina.

St. John the Evangelist wrote the book of Revelation as a source of perseverence for us in the face of persecution, and the warning against laxity and abuse of the sacred.
In Chapter 22, the image of the work of the Mass is here…our first step into heaven.

The bishops and priests continue the work of the Apostles in bringing us the Word of God, the Sacraments and our liturgy of worship that fulfills ancient sacrifices.

Revelation ended with Jesus Christ. Our unity is found in Him. It is Jesus Christ Himself Who sustains the Church, not the Apostles. They laid out the framework and with many others. And the Church continued on, it vastly having spread and administered.

 

[KathleenGee]

Going back to Revelations…It already has been done, Christ’s work was already accomplished on this earth with His life, death and resurrection. What is continuing is the Daily Sacrifice and Catholics know what that is.

About the deification of man, the Western church reacts to that because of the stature of power and the threat of anti-christ.

It is also taught pastorally that when we receive the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ we extend the presence of Christ into the ordinary lives we live out, being as little christs to others.

We will share with the Lord in the new heaven and earth that will come…

 

[Javl]

Quoted by ParkerD
The Book of Mormon as a second witness of the Bible and a purifier of Biblical understanding, is the greatest safeguard against another full-blown drifting away from the pure doctrine of Christ’s wonderfully simple and wonderfully profound gospel. The two sources of pure doctrinal teachings complement one another and bring a level of doctrinal clarity and understanding that is greater than having the Bible alone. A person who reads the Book of Mormon and the Bible both, can be anchored to the Holy Spirit as their guide more faithfully than with the Bible alone. The Holy Spirit is, of course, a sure and certain guide to the fullness of all truth. But amidst all the many other clamoring voices within our world today, distinguishing the voice of the Holy Spirit must be done carefully, prayerfully, and with the examples provided in many, many scriptures.

Hello Parker:

I beg to disagree with your statement that the Book of Mormon is a purifier of Biblical understanding. Your statement reminds me of Mrs. Baker-Eddy of Christian Science “fame” who also claimed that her book “Key to The Scriptures” was a necessity in understanding the Bible and also of Charles T. Russell of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society ( Jehovahs Witnesses ) who claimed that unless anyone did not use his explanations as aguide would not understand the scriptures even if they studied them for more than two years.

The Bible stands alone and interprets itself. It needs no assistance or purification, especialy spurious books like those mentioned.

Peace to you.

PAX DOMINI

Shalom Aleichem

 

[KathleenGee]

I just read another post by Gabriel12 on why we have the rule of only a priest reading the gospel…

St. John in the Gospel also speaks of the disciples and their followers to be consecrated in the Truth…the Truth did not disappear afterwards…but continued on through the bishops as successors of the Apostles and the laying on of hands on men called to the consecrated life.

You cannot turn the Holy Spirit on and off like a light switch…because then you are implying a man-made church.

 

[KathleenGee]

Javl,

Thanks for your insights…I share the same as they all come out…from what a poster identified as the Campbell/Stone movement of the 1830’s…

Joseph Smith was into divinizing, a charlatan…After he had this great experience with an angel, the experience left him and he attempted to join a Methodist church. They refused him and so he started this movement. I read a piece on all the women he seduced. He was allegedly to have a few witnesses, but the practices then seemed like it was a men’s religion to serve their passions…

But a complete book outside the Sacred Tradition of faith…?..The Mormon church has been very effective in putting such a perception on us to their people, that I wonder what kind of education do Mormons have about early Christianity? Instead, they believe in these stories about the lost tribes of Jews in America…the Jewish people known for preserving their Jewish culture…and yet there are no signs among American Indians of having any Jewish artifacts or culture.

There is a group from the Far East claiming to be Jewish/Hebrew…and retain Jewish customs…I think they are from India or near there…but the point is, they have Jewish customs and practices…