mormonism

A Concise Appraisal by Ecclesia Apostolica Jesu Christi

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The Mormon church was founded by Joseph Smith (1805 – 1844) in 1830. On 23 December 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, Joseph and Lucy Smith gave birth to their fourth child, Joseph Junior who proved to be a bright young boy, but he never received much of a formal education and was greatly confused by the plethora of religious sects then extant. He nevertheless possessed a good deal of natural talent, a vivid imagination, and a forceful personality that profoundly impressed itself on his companions. Three witnesses who had personally known Joseph Smith from ten years of age onwards told Dr Edward Fairfield, one-time President of Michigan College, that “he was simply a notorious liar.” New religions ~ strange cults with bizarre beliefs ~ sprang up like mushrooms during that period, and the excitable Joseph Junior was not unaffected by the prevailing atmosphere of superstition and credulity. He purportedly received a vision when he was fourteen amidst the conflicting claims of the growing number of such sects. Three years later, according to his own account, he had a visitation from an angel described as Nephi (the name of the celestial being was later altered by Smith to Moroni). Nephi and Moroni are two distinct characters in Mormon literature. However, in the first edition of The Pearl of Great Price, Smith mentioned having only seen “one personage.” The later edition(s) speak of “two personages,” constituting a rather serious discrepancy, especially because the truth of Mormon revelation rests on the prophetic authority of its books.

Immediately after Smith received his first vision, he reported this experience to a Methodist minister who is alleged to have reacted contemptuously, telling him that visions and voices were the work of the Devil. Smith nevertheless stood firmly by the vision and, on the evening of 21 September 1823, had a second vision of Moroni who apparently told him that there was a book written on golden plates. Inscribed on the plates was a history of the former inhabitants of America. Moroni went on to explain that the plates contained the fullness of the Gospel. Along with the plates, Smith was promised two “stones in silver bows” called Urim and Thummim. These devices were prepared by God to enable Smith to translate the plates into English. Smith was given a vision of the place where the plates were located. Moroni appeared two more times to give the same essential message with several additional instructions. The next day, on his way back to his house, Smith was again visited by Moroni who told him the same message a fourth time.

Smith then went to the place where the vision had directed him and knew right away the precise spot where to dig up the plates. Moroni appeared and told him that it would be four years before he would be allowed to take the plates from the ground. On 22 September 1827, the plates were given to Smith with the instructions to guard them carefully until such time as they would be required of him again. In January 1827 Smith had married Emma Hale from Harmony, Pennsylvania, having eloped owing to her father refusing to give his consent. Smith attributed this refusal to the intense persecution that had surrounded his life, but the real reason for it was because Smith’s one occupation in life was hunting for buried treasure with the aid of a “peepstone.” Smith was a “money diviner” who used a “peepstone” to find buried treasure. A 140-year-old court document was discovered in 1971 that revealed that Joseph Smith was a “glass looker” and that he was arrested, tried, and found guilty by a justice of the peace in Bainbridge, New York, in 1826.

Notwithstanding the intense persecution he was suffering, Smith moved to Harmony and into the home of his father-in-law where he began to translate the plates with the aid of the Urim and Thummim. This resulted in the Book of Mormon, and on 6 April 1830 Joseph Smith and a certain Oliver Cowdery laid hands on each other and thereby “ordained” one another as “Elders of the Church of Christ” (later “Jesus” and “Latter Day saints” was added). This was the moment when the Mormon church was born. They proceeded to lay hands on others and the growth of Mormonism proved to be rapid. Beginning with six members the number rose to approximately forty. The first Mormon temple was erected in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831. Smith decided that Kirtland was to be Zion, or the New Jerusalem, whence Christ would reign after His return to this world. But troubles over a Bank he had established and from which he issued worthless notes made a further revelation expedient indicating that Zion was to be established in Jackson County, Missouri, and not in Ohio. The Missourians wanted nothing to do with Smith’s polygamous church, so the Mormons moved to Illinois where they founded the city of Nauvoo on the banks of the Mississippi in 1838. Smith and his brother Hyrum were arrested and thrown into Carthage jail. Advocating plural marriages had led to the local people rising up against the Mormon church and its leader Joseph Smith. An infuriated mob broke into the jail on 27 June 1844 and shot the two brothers dead.

Sidney Rigdon, a revivalist preacher who had thrown in his lot with Smith, now claimed succession to the Presidency, but Brigham Young, who had joined the church in 1832, was elected. Brigham Young excommunicated Rigdon and then, to escape further clashes with the law of the land, commenced the migration to distant Utah in 1847 where he founded Salt Lake City on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. How successful he was is evident from the fact that he died some thirty years later, leaving over a million dollars to seventeen wives and fifty-six children.

The hierarchy of the Mormon church became well rooted and was based on the two priesthoods: the Aaronic priesthood and the Melchizedek priesthood. Every male member twelve years old and older may participate in the infrastructure of the church, but, prior to June 1978, blacks were not eligible to join the priesthood. Mormonism held that Africans were under a divine curse because of certain failures of this race in pre-mortal existence. This ordinance was revoked in 1978 due to growing concern that the church was being labelled a racist organisation. Polygamy was practiced until Brigham Young, the second President, in 1890 received a revelation that called for its discontinuance. To have carried on with polygamy would have prevented the Mormons from receiving a charter for statehood and, in any event, a change in civil law in that same year of 1890 would have compelled them to abandon the practice. In the nineteenth century, the Mormon church found murder, adultery and immorality, stealing, using God’s name in vain, resisting the Gospel, marrying a black person, covenant breaking, apostasy, and lying, to qualify as being worthy of the death penalty. Today Mormons deny that this doctrine was actually enforced, but there is every indication that it was put into practice quite early on, in the 1850s, but had to be abandoned because of the large influx of non-Mormons into Utah. Mormon leaders, however, have continued to insist that the most “humane” form of execution is through the “shedding of blood,” ie firing squad or beheading.

There is little doubt among scholars that Smith’s temple rites were borrowed from Freemasonry. The endowment ceremonies and the practices of the Masonic lodge are remarkably similar. Smith became a Mason in 1842 along with at least twelve hundred Mormons. They quickly adopted many of the Masonic rituals, incorporating them into their own temple rites. The Masonic “five points of fellowship” are adopted, word for word, by Mormons in the temple ritual.

Joseph Smith claimed that the necessity of polygamy was first revealed to him in 1831, almost a year after he had founded the Mormon church. Apparently it was revealed to him as a kind of after-thought, which had been overlooked in the first excitement of getting a new church under way. When, in 1843, his wife Emma objected to his bringing other women home to share him with her, Smith promptly had a revelation to calm her scruples. In Doctrine and Covenants (section 132) he makes God say: “And let Mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto My servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before Me.” Joseph Smith publicly declared the law of polygamy at Nauvoo in 1843; and the same law was again publicly proclaimed under Brigham Young by a church council in 1852. The United States Government absolutely prohibited polygamy on 24 September 1890, obliging the Mormon church to agree to abstain from it in practice, but they have never repudiated it in principle. They say that God dispenses from the necessity of it those who are unable to practice it for the time being. That it was ever taught and practiced makes Mormonism irreconcilable with Christianity. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and other authorative writers of Mormon doctrine, whilst using Christian terms, utterly pervert their meaning, and offer a teaching as far removed as possible from Christian truth.

Concerning the final state of humanity, Doctrine and Covenants distinguishes four different classes of people. The “sons of perdition.” These are the Devil, his fallen army of demons and human beings who have committed the unpardonable sin. Those who are saved will spend eternity in one of three kingdoms. The highest of these is the celestial kingdom, the second kingdom is the terrestrial kingdom, located on some specific planet in the universe, and the third and final kingdom, located on yet another planet, is the telestial kingdom. This is for the lawless and wicked who, after much punishment and suffering at the hands of Satan, will be offered salvation. This last kingdom will be the one most heavily populated. For a man and a woman to receive the fullest blessings in the preferred celestial kingdom, they must be married in a Mormon temple. Failure to do so results in a dissolution of the marriage at death, a single life in eternity, and consignment to the lower estate of an angel rather than a god. The most important thing a Mormon can do in this world is “to marry the right person by the right authority in the right place.” For a true Christian, marriage is an important sacrament, but it is not the primal focus or obligation of the Christian with respect to the order of salvation. Marriage, therefore, for Christians in truth is an honourable estate in this life, but has no consequence whatsoever for the life to come. The spiritual marriage on which the New Testament places emphasis is the spiritual union of Christ as the Bridegroom and His church as the bride (Ephesians 5: 21 – 33).

Mormonism, according to its official teachings, is not a Christian but a polytheistic sect, offering a doctrine of many gods of equal rank. Joseph Smith taught that “God Himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man.” According to Brigham Young, Smith’s successor, in order to create man, which could only be done by physical generation, God came into this world as Adam “with a celestial body, bringing one of his wives, Eve.” Adam, he therefore says, “is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do.” Adam is the “only” God with whom we have to do because above Adam there is Jehovah, and above Jehovah, Elohim the greatest of all Gods! Christ, as the Eternal Son of God (of which God it is difficult to say) is not of the same substance as the Father, whilst the Holy Spirit is described at times, not as a Person but as an “influence,” a ”divine fluid,” the purest and most refined of all electric and magnetic substances! Mormons today generally reject Brigham Young’s “Adam – God” theory, but they forget that, according to their own principles, Brigham Young, as duly elected President, was endowed with infallibility and could not fall into doctrinal error.

The Mormon doctrine of the church is equally astonishing. We are told that Christ founded His church in Palestine, choosing twelve apostles there, but that church failed. Apparently anticipating the failure, Christ went to America after His resurrection and chose another twelve apostles from amongst the Nephites, setting up His church on American soil. But that church failed. The only things to do was to wait for Joseph Smith’s arrival on the scene in the latter days and get him to set up another church for Him. So the last of the Nephite prophets, Mormon, left full instructions for the benefit of the said Joseph Smith. And the church he established, the Mormon church, is supposedly the only true church in the world today. All members were to inherit the miraculous gifts of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, etc.

The Mormons, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is extremely active and growing throughout the world. The popular image of the church is positively portrayed advertising. Commercials featuring celebrities and campaigns against drugs, smoking, and alcohol are commonly seen on television in America. The Mormon missionary campaigns dwarfs that of other American churches. It is estimated that over thirty thousand missionaries are sent out around the world. In 1962 it was reported that the total number of Mormons was 1,965,786. Most lived in the United States. In 1987 the church boasted six and a half million members with congregations in nearly one hundred countries. The current world membership is well in excess of eight million.

The Mormon church is an extremely wealthy organisation and is growing wealthier. In 1989 the annual income of the church was approximately two billion dollars. Seventy-five percent of this income is generated by tithes from church members. The remaining support comes from church-owned business enterprises. Mormons sometimes appear to have become another white middle-class denomination with obvious American origins. Yet they remain a people apart, bound by a very distinctive tradition that was brought into the world by a most unusual man. Their inner intellectual and spiritual problems cannot easily be shared with others. The problem of history ~ in the Book of Mormon itself and as it pertains to the people of that book since 1830 ~ has been especially acute; and the fact of contradictory interpretations is inescapably felt by every historian. The sect owes much of its ritual to Freemasonry and cannot be considered Christian. It nevertheless considers itself to be the true church of God on earth. All other churches are apostate, and seekers of the truth are commanded by Mormonism to come out from among them.

Christianity makes no such audacious claim. God’s true church is not embodied in any one specific organisation or group. God’s Holy Church consists of all those who hold fast to what is contained in the Bible, the Creeds and the teachings of the early fathers of the Church. Moreover, it consists of the “communion of saints” (Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds) who have been “born again” through baptism and who have faith in Jesus Christ. Nobody has an absolute monopoly on salvation. True doctrine is defined in the depositum fidei of the early Church. Our Lord did not commit rule and authority within the Church to all the faithful indiscriminately, however, but to the apostles and to their lawful successors who exist in the various jurisdictions of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, whether it be Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox, etc, or an autocephalous derivative that provides a valid channel to the same destination. It is for God alone to judge who is saved.

“He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ And Simon Peter answered and said, ‘Thou art the Christ, the

Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and

Blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and

upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the

kingdom of heaven; and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you shall loose on

earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ Then He warned the disciples that they should tell no one that He was the Christ.”

Matthew 16: 15 - 20