10 Reasons Why We Cannot Fellowship with the LDS Church Part 7

You hear a knock on the door and open it to find two friendly representatives from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormon Church.

So what will you say? Will you send them away without a Christian witness, or will you engage them in a meaningful and Christ-honoring conversation? If you desire the latter, may we suggest the book, Answering Mormon's Questions, by Mormonism Research Ministries Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson. Answering Mormon's Questions is available wherever you find quality Christian books. Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Aaron Shafawaloff, my colleague at MRM.

We're looking at a statement that was made by a Presbyterian group towards the end of the 1800s, 1897 to be exact. It was titled, Ten Reasons Why Christians Cannot Fellowship the Mormon Church. The point in going through these is a lot of the points that they made back then are still very relevant today, but this week we're looking more closely at the rebuttal to this statement that was made by an LDS general authority by the name of B.H. Roberts, Brigham Roberts. And one of the complaints that he seems to have, Aaron, is that he doesn't like in this statement where they're citing a lot of sources that are outside of the standard works or official statements made by Joseph Smith himself, even though some of the references are some of B.H.

Roberts' writings that we'll talk about later. I didn't have time to complete this thought thoroughly, but in order to defend his what we call a minimalist approach, he is going to give an account of several church conference minutes that he thinks supports his view that you only stick to the standard works or the official statements of Joseph Smith himself. I've heard that argument raised in modern times, that's for sure, but then he gets down towards the end of this section, and it's quite lengthy and we don't have time to go through all of them, where he says this then represents the position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints upon the authoritative sources of their doctrine. Then what does he say? It is not sufficient to quote sayings purported to come from Joseph Smith or Brigham Young upon matters of doctrine.

Our own people also need instruction and correction and respect to this. It is common to hear some of our older brethren say, But I heard Brother Joseph myself say so, or Brother Brigham preached it. I heard him.

But that is not the question. The question is, has God said it? Was the prophet speaking officially what the Catholics would call ex cathedra? That's interesting, and I would tend to agree with him here. I don't think it would be fair to quote hearsay, because we don't really know if Brigham Young or Joseph Smith said anything like that, but I think he engages in a bit of self-refutation here. Because in the very next section, B. H. Roberts says in his journal, under date of January 1843, the prophet writes, I've heard Latter-day Saints use that same argument today, but the problem, folks, is that statement doesn't meet the qualification that he just said in the previous paragraph where he says, Was the prophet speaking officially?

Well, Mr. Roberts, was he speaking officially when he's talking to this couple in his home back in 1843? Not hardly, but certainly that statement has gotten a lot of mileage out of a lot of Latter-day Saints who don't like some of the things that their past leaders have said. I'd like to say that Mormonism doesn't have an official doctrine on what constitutes official doctrine. It has a hard time giving us the kind of criteria for defining official doctrine using itself the criteria that it demands for. Whereas Christians have the Word of God, which we take to be inspired of God and self-evidencing and self-authenticating and as of the highest authority, Mormons don't treat Scripture in the same fashion.

And so they have to run this logical circular loop. Here's something that's interesting when he starts getting into the actual statement called the Ten Reasons. He takes umbrage, it appears, with the comment that was made that the Mormon Church unchurches all Christians.

It recognizes itself alone as the church. Roberts' response to that is kind of interesting because he says, well, we have to confess that so far the statement is substantially true. Well, it is true, and that's the position of the church to this very day. They have not changed their statement on that. They can't really change the statement because it's in section 1, verse 30 of the Doctrine and Covenants that this is the only true church in which God is well pleased. In general, when Mormon defenders fall back on this plausible deniability layer where they say, well, you know, that's not official or something like that, in general, they try not to be too specific about which claims. If you give 10 critical claims against the LDS Church, they'll kind of throw out as a blanket defense, hey, not everything our leaders say is official. But they try not to be very specific about which sayings of their leaders they take issue with.

What is it that they actually disagree with? And they try to keep that pretty vague. On this larger issue of officiality and official doctrine and speaking ex cathedra and what's binding, I had a discussion with Steven Smoot in front of the LDS Conference Center during General Conference. He was actually on YouTube in an interview, but I asked him about a hypothetical scenario. What if you had, say, 14 of the 15 top apostles of the LDS Church in agreement on a particular claim?

In fact, I gave an example. I said, what if 14 of the 15 apostles taught that Jesus on earth was a sinner? And what if they taught it in all their institutional channels, all their general conference talks, all the manuals, and what if every single other person in the LDS Church believed it? So it was taught by 14 of the 15, so it's one short of unanimity.

It's taught in all their institutional materials and all their people believe it. Would that yet count as official doctrine? And would that be the kind of blasphemy that would disqualify the LDS Church and its leadership? And he took the position of no. That because it was not yet unanimous among the 15, because it wasn't incorporated into something like scripture to that effect, it wasn't representative of the unanimity of the 15, the church could conceivably teach that kind of blasphemy to the entirety of the church and it wouldn't yet be something that an outsider could criticize as something fatally corrupt about the LDS Church.

It's not yet official. It's kind of like saying, hey, you're allowed to inspect the fruits of our religion, but only if the banana has the official dole sticker on the peel. You were to examine what we teach, but only when we tell you you can. But yet there are areas that we can zero in on that I think most Mormons, if they were honest with us, would say, well, yes, we should be able to defend or support what is written in, let's say, a church manual. Because church manuals are supposed to be given the approval by the first presidency of the church. You can't get any more official than that.

A conference statement should be fair game as well. If a leader says something in general conference, Latter-day Saints have been told that that is the mind and the will of God. And so if that's the case, then why couldn't we, as Christians trying to engage in a conversation with our LDS friends, bring up something like that and have them defend it? The whole point of Mormonism is that they can go beyond scripture and that they have living oracles and that they have modern day prophets that speak beyond scripture, that they have, say, general conference reports, which function as for six months, living scripture.

The whole point of Mormonism is to have living oracles. And so they otherwise lean into the, what they say is a selling point of the LDS church, that these prophets and apostles can speak with revelatory authority unless they're under critique. And then they say, you are only allowed to critique that little tiny portion of what we will publicly confess to the world and put in our scriptures. But even if we teach it to our children, even if we teach it to our teenagers, and even if we teach it to our church populace through institutional manuals, you are not allowed to critique what our prophets and apostles publicly disseminate from even our highest pulpits. You are not allowed to attack that as fair game. They say it's not fair game. We're allowed to teach it to our children, but you're not allowed to critique it. Well, if they're allowed to teach it to their children and to others within their congregations, I think we should have the freedom to teach it to our children and to our congregations so that our children, our congregations can have a better understanding of what Latter-day Saint children and congregations are learning. Why not?

Why shouldn't we be able to do this? I think it's the height of deception to say that we can't talk about these things when obviously they're talking about them. I think we should take note of just how low a view of they have their own prophets and apostles. This reminds me of the Pharisees and the scribes who were not used to someone speaking with authority. When Jesus gets up on the Sermon on the Mount and he preaches, as he descends the mountain, they say, wow, he's not like the scribes and the Pharisees. He speaks with authority. In the Old Testament, when God was raising Samuel up to be a prophet, it says that God let none of his words fall to the ground.

What an incredible display of the omnipotent wisdom of God that he was able to take someone like Samuel. And in raising him up as a prophet, let none of his words fall to the ground. Jesus says, watch out for false prophets.

You'll know them by their fruits. And then Jesus gives an analogy. He says, you don't go to where the thorn bushes are and the thistles are to get figs and grapes. And he talks about a diseased tree. If something's a diseased tree, essentially, Jesus says, you know, you have yourself a false prophet. Well, BH Roberts is essentially saying, well, yeah, about that. A lot of our prophets and apostles are diseased trees and not everything on the tree is worth eating.

And not everything is pickable. I would prefer that you not represent our orchard by picking trees over there. Oh, by the way, what Brigham said about Adam, God, he's just the crazy old Brigham in the attic.

Please pay no attention to the guy pounding on the ceiling. I mean, it's just like we have these guys in our church that we've called prophets and apostles. They're speaking for God. They're speaking for the Lord Jesus Christ.

They're influencing millions of people. We have people in our church who still believe what they said, but we would prefer that when someone critiques our religion, that they please not mention what our highest leaders have taught publicly about the very nature of God, because we don't hold ourselves as bound to the teachers of our religion who claim to speak for God. What kind of religion is this? Like, why even be a Latter-day Saint if this is what you have to resort to?

If you have to resort to minimalism to defend your religion, then don't belong to a religion which tries to enjoy otherwise maximalism and enjoying living oracles who can speak for God. They either speak for God or they don't. If they don't, then Jesus says, have nothing to do with them. They're false prophets. They're diseased trees.

Don't go for them for figs and grapes when they're just thistles and thorns. And I think that's something that's always puzzled me is this is a church that claims that all of the churches that claim to be Christian outside of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are in a state of apostasy because they don't believe in, quote, modern revelation. But yet when we quote their modern revelation, as you've just stated so eloquently, we get in trouble or we get rebuked for doing that. That shouldn't be the case. If this is what they're going to stand on, then by all means, that should be an area that we can focus on ourselves. In tomorrow's show, we're going to continue looking at some of the complaints that B.H. Roberts had regarding this statement that was put out in 1897, 10 Reasons Why Christians Cannot Fellowship the Mormon Church. Join us next week on Mormonism.