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I recently discovered Eugene England’s Quote:Dialogues with myself
.
You can find it at:
http://www.signaturebookslibrary.org/?p=516 Specifically Chapter 15 is: “What it means to be a Mormon Christian.”
He talks about going to the holy land with a group of students & their experiences while they mingled with people of other christian religions. Part of it is quoted below.
Quote:I felt part of a great community of faith, one of the millions over the centuries moved by our hope in Christ to make a pilgrimage there—to places made sacred not only by Jesus but by all those of us who go there to worship him as our Divine Savior. We returned to our study center in England where I continued with new vigor and understanding to teach my Mormon students two things: that they were part of an ancient religious tradition which they should know and appreciate, from the Old Testament prophets and forerunners to the New Testament apostles and evangelists and the early Church fathers, then the great scholastics and cathedral builders of the Medieval age of faith, to the great reformers and martyrs and translators, Luther and Calvin, Tyndale and Wycliffe, Thomas More and Charles Wesley, and, in America, Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards. But that they also had their own special witness to bear, their own tradition, with its own special emphases and precious revelations, which at its best taught them both to identify with that great Christian tradition and to challenge it and other religious traditions, in love, with their own unique Christian witness.
This is for me a different perspective then I normally hear.
Very interesting.
Mike from Milton.
I do feel that the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, gets obscured within the LDS Church. We have so much dogma, that we lose sight of what a wonderful and lasting message that is. I often think of the Sacrament, Communion, Lord’s Supper, as an interesting connection to the ancient. Every Sunday, since the first reunion of Jesus’ close associates to commemorate him, followers throughout the ages have taken food and drink in symbolism of his death, and its life-giving power.
Every once in a while, I get refreshed in the Jesus story by reading the Gospel According to Mark straight through. It’s the least well-known. LDS usually know John, Matthew and Luke much better; John because of its deeper doctrine, Matthew because of the Sermon on the Mount and well-developed parables, Luke because of other parables as well as the nativity. But, for me, I find the fast-paced Mark to be the most intriguing, wonderful, compelling, tragic and triumphant of the four.
Pres. Uchtdorf gave a talk in the April 2008 General Conference called “Faith of Our Father”. In it he said: Quote:When my own family contemplates the phrase “faith of our fathers,” often it is the Lutheran faith that comes to mind. For generations our ancestors belonged to that denomination. In fact, my son recently discovered that one of our family lines connects back to Martin Luther himself.
We honor and respect sincere souls from all religions, no matter where or when they lived, who have loved God, even without having the fulness of the gospel. We lift our voices in gratitude for their selflessness and courage. We embrace them as brothers and sisters, children of our Heavenly Father.
We believe that it is a fundamental human right to worship “Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”
and
Quote:As the restored Church of Jesus Christ blossoms throughout the globe—now with more than 13 million members—“the faith of our fathers” has an expanded meaning. For some, it could refer to their family’s heritage in one of the hundreds of Christian faiths; for others, it could refer to Middle-Eastern, Asian, or African faiths and traditions.
I know the rest of that talk was a pretty standard interpretation of the Restored Gospel, but I really love the quotes above. Notice how Pres. Uchtdorf said “faiths and traditions” – not just “religions”. We really should honor “sincere souls from all religions” – and I would add, “and sincere souls who profess no religion”.
One more thing, just because I knew about the multiple references but didn’t remember who spoke and how often they occurred: I checked at lds.org, and William Tyndale (a Protestant reformer) has been mentioned in 8 General Conference talks since 1997 – 5 of which were given since 2005. In one, he was called, explicitly, a “Christian martyr” (by Boyd K. Packer, interestingly) – and he was praised in every one.
The general membership might be ignorant of the point of the quote in the OP, but the leadership certainly isn’t.
On My Own wrote: Quote:I do feel that the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, gets obscured within the LDS Church. We have so much dogma, that we lose sight of what a wonderful and lasting message that is.
Is this why Evangelicals will call Mormon’s non-Christian?
But, I think evangelicals go beyond this and they condemn the Church to the point of vehement hate.
“I can’t understand what makes a man hate another man, help me understand.” Martin L. Gore-Depeche Mode “People Are People.”
jamison wrote:On My Own wrote:I do feel that the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, gets obscured within the LDS Church. We have so much dogma, that we lose sight of what a wonderful and lasting message that is.
Is this why Evangelicals will call Mormon’s non-Christian?But, I think evangelicals go beyond this and they condemn the Church to the point of vehement hate.
1. Joseph Smith started off by saying that all current Christian churches were/are false.2. LDS reject the creeds
3. LDS reject the trinitarian doctrine – Father is incorporeal, Son is begotten, HG emmanent, one god, consubstantial, in three persons
4. LDS reject Sola Scriptura – that the bible is the only Word of God and cannot be extended
5. LDS preach the necessity of works as part of the process of exaltation.
Above this, they find plenty of evidence from the wide variety of speculative doctrine that has been preached in General Conference and in noted funerals (King Follett) for 180 years containing things that are all over the map. Pretty much, evangelicals think that Mormonism is the very Anti-Christ. They would prefer electing an adulterous advocate of open marriage than a Mormon any day.
jamison wrote:On My Own wrote:
Quote:I do feel that the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, gets obscured within the LDS Church. We have so much dogma, that we lose sight of what a wonderful and lasting message that is.
Is this why Evangelicals will call Mormon’s non-Christian? “
It’s because that in LDS theology the Father and Son have tangible bodies and aren’t one in trinity with the Holy Spirit and from that the belief that the Father was once as we are now. Along with that the belief that Jesus is literally the first born in the flesh of a union between the Father and Mary and that Jesus and Lucifer are brothers. Then comes the idea of exaltation and eternal progression and creating and populating worlds. What LDS people take for granted as a perfectly logical way of looking at Jesus and the Godhead can make a traditional believing Christian apoplectic because the Jesus each other believes in are so totally different.
Honestly, if we’re playing the “rejection” game, we rejected them before they rejected us. Our church’s very existence is founded on a rejection of them. I’m not saying that to excuse them in any way, seriously, but we too often overlook the fact that we started by telling them their creeds were abominable. It’s hard to blame them for reacting to that.
Old-Timer wrote:Honestly, if we’re playing the “rejection” game, we rejected them before they rejected us. Our church’s very existence is founded on a rejection of them.
I’m not saying that to excuse them in any way, seriously, but we too often overlook the fact that we started by telling them their creeds were abominable. It’s hard to blame them for reacting to that.
181-year-old tit-for-tat…Yeah, little brother mouths off to big brother in a pretty condemning way; big brother punches little brother;
little brother runs crying to dad about being punched and claims to be the favorite son;
big brother tells dad little brother is an annoying child and claims he is the birthright son;
dad tries to get both of them to love each other;
neither one will stop doing what annoys the other one;
the mouthing off and punching continues day after day after day . . .
Today in our Gospel Doctrine class, part of the lesson talked about 1NE 13:5.
Quote:…Behold the foundation of a church which is most abominable above all other churches, which slayeth the saints of God, yea, and tortureth them and bindeth them down, and yoketh them with a yoke of iron, and bringeth them down into captivity.
The discussion was, are they talking about specific church(es) or kingdoms of the world?
It was quickly decided that the scripture was addressing kingdoms (government or principalities) not specific churches.
Has this view changed recently within the Church?
I remember (years ago) that when this topic was presented in the “olden” days, it meant Churches & they were specifically named.
I’m curious if this teaching was recently changed.
Does anyone know?
Mike from Milton.
I think the general view in the Church now, if you don’t count those who grew up worshiping Elder McConkie, is that it doesn’t refer to specific churches but rather talks about attitudes of people in all churches. Now, those who grew up worshiping Elder McConkie still are fairly numerous, so it’s nowhere near unanimous (and I’m certain many classes had people mention “that one church”), but I believe the general view has been changing for a while. mike wrote:I remember (years ago) that when this topic was presented in the “olden” days, it meant Churches & they were specifically named.
I’m curious if this teaching was recently changed.
Does anyone know?
Your recollection almost certainly stems from Bruce R. McConkie’s declaration in the first edition of Mormon Doctrine, in 1958, that the statement referred to one certain church, which he named. McConkie was a member of the First Council of the Seventy at the time. However, it should be noted that Church leadership, especially David O. McKay, wasn’t happy about the idea an individual making statements of doctrine un-endorsed by the First Presidency. The book was published by Bookcraft, not the Church-owned Deseret Book, and at that time, Bookcraft was not owned by the Church. A minor rift grew up around the book that the FP and Q12 viewed as rife with errors. Eventually, McKay gave approval to McConkie to publish a second edition (1966) as long as certain changes were made, and the reference to the that one named church was one of those changes.
So, I’m not sure if official Church doctrine has ever been any different than it is now, but that there was definitely an unofficial doctrine running around, that has taken a while to die out, thanks to McConkie.
Old-Timer wrote:it doesn’t refer to specific churches but rather talks about attitudes of people in all churches.
Same conversation in my SS. The positive was that we quoted the second edition of MD (about the church of the devil being both a mindset and any organization than takes people away from God). We also quoted GBH about Mormonism not having a monopoly on answered prayers. We talked about the Pilgrims that were specifically foretold in Nephi’s narrative and how God blessed them for their faith.
I then asked – “If the church of the Devil is a metaphor for both a mindset and a multitude of different bad organizations, is it possible that the church of Christ (as spoken of by Nephi) is also metaphorical and refers to both attitudes and also may include (in addition to the LDS church) many organizations that can serve as stepping stones to the fullness of the gospel?”
Alas, I was stonewalled. Even when talking to the teacher afterwards about if the pilgrims specifically could be considered part of this metaphorical “church of Christ” – she said that they where definitely part of God’s plan but then stopped short. She couldn’t quite bring herself to look at God’s church as anything other than a specific organization. Interesting….
P.S. in PH a brother compared members suffering from leadership burnout and the culture that discourages them from talking about their struggles to PTSD and how it used to be hush-hush to talk about these things in the military. He followed it up by saying that if the military can change its culture, then so can we.
:shifty: :clap: Roy wrote:I then asked – “If the church of the Devil is a metaphor for both a mindset and a multitude of different bad organizations, is it possible that the church of Christ (as spoken of by Nephi) is also metaphorical and refers to both attitudes and also may include (in addition to the LDS church) many organizations that can serve as stepping stones to the fullness of the gospel?”
Roy, I really liked your comment, as I suspect most on this site would. I believe the BoM is generally quite open to the idea of believers not necessarily belonging to a specific organization (Alma, the Elder, for example), so I would agree about the metaphor going both ways.
Neal A. Maxwell wrote:One important thing we can do, as Church members, is to gladly and spontaneously rejoice over how much good so many other people do and in so many good causes! Jesus so responded to offset the wonderment of His meridian disciples who were concerned over good deeds being done by some who apparently were not of Jesus’ flock: ‘And John answered him, saying, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our part. For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward.’ (Mark 9:38-41.)
Our zeal must never lead to intolerance. Nor should we restrain our rejoicing in all good deeds.
In fact, Mormon revealed that ‘all things which are good cometh of God’ (Moroni 7:12). Therefore, we should sincerely rejoice in all goodness. (Neal A. Maxwell, That Ye May Believe)
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