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| ====Agency and Decision-Making==== | ====Agency and Decision-Making==== |
| Could I take you for a bit of a walk? | Before making a choice, consider all the reasons you can. But the reason that should outweigh all others is what the //consequence// of the choice will be. |
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| It irritates me endlessly that people make their choices for reasons. Almost all reasons are worthless. Most of them aren't even real. They're made up to justify an action that was taken without conscious thought. Humans produce receipts and scientists have collected them; the actions we take from moment to moment are driven by our midbrains, and after the "choice" has been made, our forebrains invent a justification for it. | > Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can. |
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| (If you want to go argue with an MRI machine, don't let me stop you. Just remove anything metal first; I don't want to see you get hurt because of your beliefs.) | > Rupertus Meldenius (But almost always misattributed to John Wesley) |
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| I still believe in agency. That's just not how agency works. The primate brain lies about its rationale, but it also has tremendous power, in the times between making choices, to imagine situations and prepare specific responses that are shaped by our chosen values. This is why it's so important to have times of solitude and reflection: those are the times when agency can actually move the needle on choices. That is when you can say, "when X happens, I will respond with Y, in service of this value Z." | |
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| But choices in service of values aren't enough. There's still room for bad reasoning to sneak in. To complete the thought, one has to consider the //consequences// of an action, and whether that consequence magnifies their values. Otherwise you get things like the Temperance movement, which worsened alcoholism and the social ills around it. | |
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| The clarity that allows for agency requires more than solitude: it requires removing any barriers that exist, and acknowledging any reasons that might be relevant to the choice. I don't choose //because// of consideration; I choose //after// consideration. It's not enough for me to have good reason; I must also be confident that the results will be good. | |
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| Joining a church is a big deal, so I'm investing a lot of consideration. I'm considering the reasons, the barriers, and what I expect the outcomes to be. Thank you to anyone who joins me on this walk. | |
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| ====Re: Sacramental Faithfulness==== | ====Re: Sacramental Faithfulness==== |
| The first thing to clear up is a document by E. Brian and Jennifer L. Hare-Diggs (with a study guide by Gayle C. Felton). The title is //Sacramental Faithfulness: Guidelines for Receiving People From The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints//, and it was adopted in 2000 by the General Assembly of the United Methodist Church (UMC). It is therefore authoritative, and as a former Mormon, I must address it. | This document deserves its own treatment, but I'm not spending that many words in an essay that's about so much else. The short answer is this: Sacramental Faithfulness is not a serious document and while I did learn some things, it's basically "garbage in, garbage out." |
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| First off, I call them Mormons. I was actively LDS from birth until about 24 years old. I don't refer to myself as "a former member of the LDS church." I am a former Mormon. If anyone "chooses to be offended by that", it's on them. (If you know, you know.) | |
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| That said, my break with the church is not simple. I left for the same reason as Tertullian: There has been an apostasy, and we can do more good in the world by going somewhere else. | |
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| Second, I'm going to use the term "Universal tradition" when speaking of the set of mainline Christian churches who recognize each others' baptism. This is based on my own confusion about the terminology. Correction is welcome, as long as you can make it make sense **and** not complicate the text too much. | |
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| This should not be confused with the modern Unitarian Universalist church, nor with universalist theology. I will revisit these points later. | |
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| Third, an important difference between LDS and Protestant culture is how differently certain terms are used. Mormons only use the term "sacrament" in the singular, in reference to the ritual performed with bread and water (almost) every Sunday. It closely resembles the Holy Communion, with major and minor differences. I will touch on some of these later. | |
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| Mormons use the term "ordinances" where other churches say "sacraments". As far as I can tell, they are synonymous, except that Mormons enumerate a lot more of them. ("The Sacrament" also counts as an ordinance but that's not really important.) | |
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| ===Seriously?=== | |
| To be blunt, //Sacramental Faithfulness// is not a serious document. It was delegated to a low level by both the UMC and LDS churches, and the conversation between them was obviously unproductive. Neither party came away with a correct or complete understanding of the others' position. I suspect that nobody involved learned anything at all. | |
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| We use so many of the same terms to mean different things, and vice-versa, a good chunk of this essay is just going to be an explanation of what's meant where. Mormons and mainline Christians talk right past each other, then walk away thinking the other is an idiot. | |
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| No, no, no. We're //all// the idiots. | |
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| ===LDS Representation=== | |
| Elder Jay Jensen of the Quorum of the Seventy represented the LDS church. It's worth noting that Elder Jensen was honorably released from the Quorum in 2012, and subsequently granted emeritus status. (Per Wikipedia.) By 2000, he did not have authority to speak on issues of Mormon doctrine beyond his own testimony, personal experience, and individual beliefs. | |
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| His career, both professional and ecclesiastical, was spent almost entirely in the LDS Church Educational System (CES). LDS church members frequently and pejoratively refer to the CES as "the other church." Its theology is so divorced from anything scriptural... I'm just going to stop there. The point of this essay is not to insult the CES, though it certainly deserves to be insulted. | |
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| The point is, if this had been a serious attempt to either gain an understanding of the Methodist position, or to answer questions authoritatively, the LDS church should have sent someone with //current// authority to speak, and whose viewpoint was broad enough to reach across the linguistic and cultural gaps. | |
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| ===UMC Response=== | |
| From the first paragraph, I see basic errors of grammar (LDS is an adjective, not a noun) and a presupposition that a baptism into the LDS church is not a "Christian baptism." The question is never even asked. The answer is first assumed, and later stated explicitly: the LDS church is not a Christian church, and Mormons are not Christians. **This is absurd.** | |
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| The LDS //Articles of Faith// are a concise, simplified overview of LDS theology, written by Joseph Smith himself. Modern times might call it "The LDS FAQ." They are not a creed; they are a simplification. They're not meant to be parsed. Their use should ensure that, as one studies the doctrines of the church, they are unlikely to be led away from the "plain and precious truths" at the core of Mormon theology. If you are honestly trying to understand Mormonism, **READ THEM FIRST**. | |
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| //Sacramental Faithfulness// makes no reference to any of them, instead digging into obscure and dubious sources to find the most objectionable material it can. It puts gnats under a microscope while ignoring the camels in the room. | |
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| The first three Articles of Faith are: | |
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| - We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost. | |
| - We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression. | |
| - We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel. | |
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| The mental gymnastics required to say that such a church is not Christian are almost impressive. Mormons usually phrase it differently, but Mormons must accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior and be born again. Jesus is the way and the light. (?) The plain and precious truths of mainline Christianity are just as true of Mormonism. They just like to say it differently; doing so "others" the rest of Christendom, as the rest of Christendom has "othered" the LDS church. | |
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| Am I being too harsh? No... the section on authority is too harsh. | |
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| ===The Nature of God=== | |
| Mormonism is at its core a Unitarian theology. (Again, this has nothing to do with the modern Unitarian Universalist church, which has almost totally secularized itself.) "Unitarian" in this context simply means that Mormons reject the Trinity in favor of a view that, um... makes sense. The early Christian church was also Unitarian, and there is a long tradition of theologians both pointing that out, and making the point in their own way. | |
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| Just... once more for the people in the back: **Unitarianism is an explicitly Christian theology. Mormon theology is explicitly Unitarian. Mormons are, in fact, Christians.** | |
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| Oddly, Mormons do not describe themselves as Unitarian. I believe this is simply because they've never heard the term. Such is their bubble. | |
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| ====On Being a Heretic==== | |
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| | ====My Personal Heresies==== |
| > Condemn no man for not thinking as you think. Let every one enjoy the full and free liberty of thinking for himself. Let every man use his own judgment, since every man must give an account of himself to God. Abhor every approach, in any kind or degree, to the spirit of persecution, if you cannot reason nor persuade a man into the truth, never attempt to force a man into it. If love will not compel him to come, leave him to God, the judge of all. | > Condemn no man for not thinking as you think. Let every one enjoy the full and free liberty of thinking for himself. Let every man use his own judgment, since every man must give an account of himself to God. Abhor every approach, in any kind or degree, to the spirit of persecution, if you cannot reason nor persuade a man into the truth, never attempt to force a man into it. If love will not compel him to come, leave him to God, the judge of all. |
| > | > |
| > John Wesley | > John Wesley |
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| ===My Theology Is Unitarian=== | ==Unitarianism== |
| Here is my take. | The most important departure I take from Methodist tradition is that I reject the Trinity. I believe that Jesus Christ, His dad, and the Holy Spirit, are separate beings. I don't recognize the Nicene Creed as authoritative; I see it as a failed attempt to create a theology that includes deification. I see it as blasphemy. |
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| In Old Testament times, substantial confusion arose because Jesus and His dad had to speak out of the same mouth. Even if you read the Old Testament with this in mind, I don't think you can parse out who is saying what, because the authors themselves didn't always parse it out correctly. As soon as Christ is born, however, the ambiguity is removed. Jesus speaks of His father, and the Holy Spirit, in the third person. | There's a long tradition of Christian scholars pointing out that the early Christian church was unitarian, complete with supporting scriptures and other documentation. They've been a small minority since Nicea, and I'm comfortable being part of that small minority. |
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| If you live in the 18th Century, and the universe you inhabit is built from the essences of things and the relationships between those essences, then yes, you can build a Trinity and it works just fine. But it is the 21st Century, and we live in a universe made of objects, which are made of particles, which are made of wobbles in quantum fields. If this is the substrate on which our universe is built, a Trinity is not possible. There is no set of definitions you can choose for the verb "to be" and the adjective "the same" that allow a Trinity to "exist" without rendering existence meaningless. You can't add dimensions and make it possible. You can't plug it into Einstein's field equations and get a valid result. In our universe, The Trinity is inherently self-contradictory. (I could just say "the Aristotelian argument holds" but I'm indulging myself... thanks for hanging in with me.) | John Wesley held that the Trinity was an essential part of Christianity and denounced Unitarian belief. I think that if he saw the same things I've seen, he would come around to my point of view. I could be wrong, and that's fine too. Regardless, we agree that Jesus is the Christ, our Savior, and that his Father is the God we worship above any other. We will all find out the whole truth eventually, hug it out, and then we will go back to singing. |
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| Jesus Christ has run the entire race: He began as a non-corporeal being, got a body basically the same way we did, lived as a mortal human just like us, died as we all will, got himself resurrected, and is now an exalted being. Jesus' dad, on the other hand, is immutable. He started out exalted and will be in the same state of exaltation through the end of time. The Holy Spirit is non-corporeal and will remain so until the end of this eternity. My explanation does raise questions but they are outside the scope of this essay. (In particular, anyone who asks me about the carnal implications of a physical God fathering a physical Son gets the same answer: I don't want to think about it.) | |
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| John Wesley held that the Trinity was an essential part of Christianity and denounced Unitarian belief. That's fine. I think that if he saw the same things I've seen, he would come around to my point of view. I could be wrong, and that's fine too. Regardless, we agree that Jesus is the Christ, our Savior, and that his Father is the God we worship above any other. We will all find out the whole truth eventually, hug it out, and then we will go back to singing. | |
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| **There had better be hugs and singing.** | **There had better be hugs and singing.** |
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| ===Salvation=== | This is my take. It's a lot of words so feel free to skip to the next section. |
| There is substantial confusion //within// the LDS church about whether they're a "saved by grace" or "saved by works" church. The most common explanation I heard growing up was that we are "saved by grace after all we can do." In my opinion, far too much emphasis is placed on the "all you can do" part. So much so that it's really hard to find grace among church members. (For example, if a man shows up to church wearing anything but a white shirt and necktie, he is //definitely// going to hear mean comments about it. God forbid that men should wear earrings. Such is the their puritanical culture. But I digress.) | |
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| Attending Methodist services and studies have shown me that divine grace is always within reach. Whatever happens next, I am grateful for that education. | In Old Testament times, substantial confusion arose because Jesus and His dad had to speak out of the same mouth. Even if you read the Old Testament with this in mind, I don't think you can parse out who is saying what, because the authors themselves didn't always parse it out correctly. As soon as Christ is born, however, the ambiguity is removed. Jesus speaks of His father, and the Holy Spirit, in the third person. |
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| (Now back to being snarky.) | If you live in the 18th Century, and the universe you inhabit is built from the essences of things and the relationships between those essences, then yes, you can build a Trinity and it works just fine. But it is the 21st Century, and we live in a universe made of objects, which are made of particles, which are made of wobbles in quantum fields. If this is the substrate on which our universe is built, a Trinity is not possible. There is no set of definitions you can choose for the verb "to be" and the adjective "the same" that allow a Trinity to "exist" without rendering existence meaningless. You can't add dimensions and make it possible. You can't plug it into Einstein's field equations and get a valid result. In our universe, The Trinity is inherently self-contradictory. (I could just say "the Aristotelian argument holds" but I'm indulging myself... thanks for hanging in with me.) |
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| //Sacramental Faithfulness// confuses the LDS conception of salvation with exaltation. Salvation means the same thing for all of us: Jesus Christ was the son of God; begotten, not made. He atoned for our sins, was crucified and died, came back to life on the third day, and is now seated at the right hand of God. (Again, Mormons use different language, but they mean the same thing.) | Jesus Christ has run the entire race: He began as a non-corporeal being, got a body basically the same way we did, lived as a mortal human just like us, died as we all will, got himself resurrected, and is now an exalted being. Jesus' dad, on the other hand, is immutable. He started out exalted and will be in the same state of exaltation through the end of time. The Holy Spirit is non-corporeal and will remain so until the end of this eternity. My explanation does raise questions but they are outside the scope of this essay. (In particular, anyone who asks me about the carnal implications of a physical God fathering a physical Son gets the same answer: I don't want to think about it.) |
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| Exaltation picks up when Salvation has finished its work: once we have been saved from death and Hell, and have returned to God's presence, it tells us what we will be doing for the rest of Eternity. They are not incompatible; they are orthogonal. (Look it up.) | |
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| ====Authority to Baptize==== | |
| The LDS church has always maintained the position that it alone has the authority to administer sacred ordinances. //Sacramental Faithfulness// fully addresses this point. Unfortunately, everyone quickly developed an attitude of superiority. | |
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| > We don't recognize your authority. | |
| >> Yeah, well, we didn't recognize your authority first. | |
| > We don't recognize your authority more. | |
| >> But we have apostles. Where are your apostles? | |
| > Apostles! We can trace our authority straight from Jesus' hand-picked apostles. | |
| >> But you're apostate. God told us so. | |
| > YOU'RE apostate! We'll excommunicate you! | |
| >> You can't excommunicate us! We're not even members of your church. And we'll excommunicate anyone from our church who joins your church. | |
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| **I'm bored.** | |
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| For decades we've joked that the Utah State Motto should be "Our Jesus is better than your Jesus." But **it's the same Jesus**. We forget that. | |
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| We also forget that **prophets only ever appear sporadically**. It has only passed from father to son a handful of times; David and Solomon are the only examples I can think of. There is no "line of succession" as Mormons and Catholics maintain. Prophets pop up, carry out some little part of God's plan, and then get too popular. //The Church and The World change each other.// They apostatize. | |
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| Authority is a way of being right about things without having to work at it. Churches worldwide maintain claims to authority despite being in a state of apostasy. I believe that both the LDS and Universal traditions are in their own states of apostasy. Neither the Pope nor the LDS Prophet really have authority to speak for God. Prophets are not hard to spot, if you know what to look for, and I see no evidence of prophesy in any church I've found. There is goodness, there are failures, there is grace, but there is no global divine mandate to any of it. | |
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| So what authority do churches have? The same authority as any other institution: **they derive their authority from the consent of the governed**. That's it. Our divine mandate comes from scripture. We all have authority to interpret scripture for ourselves. If God is speaking to us, He is doing so at an individual level. With your permission, He guides your stewardship, whatever its scope may be. But none of us has authority to speak for God to another. Parents may be guided in raising their children, for example, but once the children have been baptized and confirmed, they are responsible for their own relationship with God and Jesus. | |
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| Judging by the state of the world, this much agency is a disaster, but it's the disaster we all signed up for. | ==Universalism== |
| | (**Start reading again here**) |
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| This is what I believed as a Mormon. It is not universally held within the LDS church; in fact, there is an ongoing struggle between those who believe that you should have a personal relationship with Jesus, and those who believe you should have a relationship with your Priesthood leader, who has the relationship with Jesus on your behalf. (I feel a need to wash my hands just from typing such a ridiculous idea.) | The Atonement, in my belief, is infinite. Grace extends to literally everyone, eventually. This is controversial enough, but also core enough to my beliefs, that I'm not getting into it here. I also won't bring it up in church settings. I only share details with individuals, when moved upon by the spirit. You may ask me about it, **but only if you have an open mind**. |
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| (need a better segue here) | If you just want to tell me I'm wrong, or hear enough of my position to invalidate it, kindly fuck off. |
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| ===The Nicene Creed=== | That doesn't mean I believe in salvation by grace or any such nonsense. Jesus said that calling "Lord, lord" is not enough. He gave commandments for a reason; works clearly matter. Our actions have consequences and those matter. You have to do what you can. |
| This is where //Sacramental Faithfulness// really loses the plot. While I don't consider myself a "Red Letter Christian," I admire the sentiment, and I definitely value the actual Word of God above any other words. Jesus Himself was explicit on this matter: Anyone teaching more or less than [this] is not teaching My Gospel. | |
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| The Nicene Creed is a compromise document. All the Creeds are. They the Church and the World changing each other. They are evidence of apostasy. | A thoughtful reading of Matthew 20 will do more to prepare your heart for understanding this than anything I could write. |
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| As you are making a list of Creeds, please include the LDS Family Proclamation. It doesn't even claim to be divine; it starts out "We, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim..." and so on. //They// declare, //they// warn, //they// call upon... and who the hell are they that I should pay attention to their prattling? Apostles? Hah! | ==Authority== |
| | Tertullian eventually left the early Christians and joined the Montanists, not because he lost his faith, but because he recognized that there had been an apostasy. This is my understanding, anyway, and is the same reason I left the church of my youth: it claims divine authority, and yet its prophets consistently make wrong predictions and even wrong observations. (What do you call a prophet that's consistently wrong? Hmm...) |
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| I personally reject all these creeds, and focus first on the words of Christ himself. This brings us to the Canon. | Forgive me if I've extrapolated past the end of my data set, but the pattern I see in the scriptures is that God calls a prophet to accomplish some specific task; an authority structure forms; and it apostatizes basically as soon as the prophet is gone. (Paul's lamentation about how people twist his words--"what will they say I said after I'm gone"--is endlessly amusing to me. **Citation needed.**) |
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| ===The Canon=== | As far as I can see, there are no institutions with any authentic divine mandate currently on the earth. I see no true prophets. What authority churches have, therefore, is the same authority all institutions have: that to which their members consent. |
| //Sacramental Faithfulness//, in my opinion, steps far out of line with regards to the Canon. The idea that it should be closed is spurious. The Bible was assembled, and a lid put on it, for the simple reason that books can only get so large, and compromises had to be made. | |
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| Catholicism (and other churches?) include the apocrypha in their canon, but we don't object. In fact, the book from which Methodists derive their lectionary includes references to the books of the apocrypha. They're treated as first-class, as if they were from anywhere else in the Bible. | ===Authority to Baptize=== |
| | The whole concept of "having authority to baptize" breaks down if all the churches are apostate. Where did John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus, get his authority? |
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| There's so much else that's worth reading and considering, I simply refuse to close the Canon. | I guess this is still an open question for me. |
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| I've read all the Mormon fan-fiction. I'm fully aware of the problems. Despite the obviousness of the 19th-Century thinking that created them, they leave me with enough questions answered //that should not be answered//, I'm willing to put them on the same shelf as most of the Bible, sorted by weight, not by volume. Saying even this much will lower some peoples' opinion of me--pearls before swine, you know--so I'll stop marching up this particular hill. | (As I'm writing this, I feel my blood sugar dropping... I'll call it a draft and be back later.) |
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| * Neither tradition actually has authority to baptize | * Baptism is a fundamentally different thing in Methodism vs. Mormonism. Rejecting the baptism of the other tradition is pointless. We are better served by appreciating them both for what they are. Mormons should do their own baptism as should Methodists. One does not invalidate the other, nor are they in conflict. The merely accomplish different things. (And a few same things.) |
| * Baptism is a fundamentally different thing in each tradition. Rejecting the baptism of the other tradition is pointless. We are better served by appreciating them both. Mormons should do their own baptism as should Methodists. One does not invalidate the other, nor are they in conflict. The merely accomplish different things. (And a few same things.) | |
| * Does being Unitarian exclude me? | * Does being Unitarian exclude me? |
| * Does being Universalist exclude me? | * Does being Universalist exclude me? |
| * Does my acceptance of other scriptures exclude me? | * Does my acceptance of other scriptures exclude me? |
