@albertmohler Not SBC but way to go in standing for the unchanging truth of Scripture! I pray that the Lord bless this mission and strengthen your people!
Mormon temple endowment ceremony in full, including the revisions. This is why they hide what they believe, it's not recognizable as Christianity to outsiders.
With Mormonism being the scuttlebutt of the hour, thanks to @SenMikeLee demanding the Pentagon undo 2k-year-old historic Christian doctrines to allow their inclusion, you might find my I2I piece on Mormonism and Freemasonry interesting, from a while back:
Joseph Smith became a Master Mason in Nauvoo in March of 1842, advancing through the degrees with astonishing speed, and soon surrounded himself with a leadership class heavily populated by fellow Masons, including his brother Hyrum Smith and future successor Brigham Young. The Nauvoo Lodge exploded into one of the largest Masonic bodies in Illinois almost overnight as hundreds of Mormon men entered its ranks, effectively intertwining the lodge and the church.
Smith himself occupied a unique concentration of power: prophet, revelator, mayor of Nauvoo, lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion, presidential candidate, and Masonic initiate, all at the same time. He presided over a movement that functioned as church, government, military force, and fraternal order simultaneously.
Then, within weeks of becoming a Master Mason, he unveiled the Mormon temple endowment, complete with ritual handshakes, sacred signs, ceremonial garments, secret passwords, veiled progression rites, and penalties for revealing the mysteries. He baptized those rituals, declared them divine revelation, and presented them to his followers as sacred ordinances revealed directly from heaven. Millions of people today regard these ceremonies as the pinnacle of God's restored truth, unaware that they originated in a nineteenth-century fraternal order.
The parallels are not vague similarities that only cult specialists can detect. They are so obvious that even Mormon historians are forced to acknowledge them. The secret handshakes. The ritual grips. The sacred clothing. The penalties for revealing temple secrets. The progression through degrees of hidden knowledge. The symbols carved into temples. The veils separating one realm from another. Strip away the pseudo-Christian terminology, and what remains is a structure that looks remarkably less like the New Testament church and remarkably more like a Masonic lodge. The Book of Mormon supplied the mythology. Freemasonry supplied the architecture. Joseph Smith fused the two together and called the result "restoration."
That reality creates an uncomfortable question for Mike Lee or anyone else insisting Mormonism is merely another Christian denomination. If the defining rituals of the faith were imported from a secret fraternity, if its temple ceremonies were constructed from borrowed Masonic forms, and if its doctrines of exaltation and progressive ascent mirror Masonic concepts of advancing toward greater light, then what exactly was restored?
The deeper one digs into Mormon origins, the less it resembles Christianity rediscovered and the more it resembles a frontier-era religious entrepreneur who wraps borrowed rituals in biblical language and persuades thousands that the costume itself is revelation. Once that possibility enters your mind, Mormonism stops looking like an ancient faith restored and starts looking like the most successful act of religious rebranding in American history.
Read at Insight to Incite. Link in the next comment.
I am a member of the Church of Mormon. I believe in the Trinity, reject Joseph Smith as a prophet, and oppose the notion that Jesus and Satan are brothers. But since my church has Mormon in the name, I am a Mormon, and I demand that the world recognize me as such.
I'm a member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. But I deny Joseph Smith as the prophet and actually think he's a false prophet. The temple is nonsense and I don't wear the garments. I love coffee and tea. Oh. And the Book of Mormon is true as long as it's translated correctly. I deny all your core doctrines.
But I'm still LDS.
It is definitional, not judgmental, to say that the LDS community is not Christian.
This is also LDS teaching, of course. They will intenerally refer to non-Mormons as "Gentiles," though publicly talk as if they are a denomination with an extra book.
Can't have it both ways.
A council of bishops who had apostolic succession to Christ convened at the Council of Nicaea to create the Nicene Creed to address the Arian controversy (whether Christ was fully divine and co-eternal with the Father) and to affirm Christ’s divinity with the term homoousios (“of the same substance”).
But that’s enough of my faith.
Let’s talk about Joseph Smith and the fact that Mormons have quotes from Jesus Christ in a book written by Joseph Smith in 1835. Mormons argue that Smith was right but ignore the fact that the guy was a total lunatic. He never produced the gold tablets he claimed told him everything and he was run out of every town he ever lived in until an angry mob finally killed him (we used to be a proper country). The LDS church has tried to do some damage control on Smith over the years but they can’t outrun that psycho.
Did a fourth-century church council invent Christianity as we know it? It's one of the most popular claims made by skeptics today — that the divinity of Jesus and the contents of the Bible weren't ancient convictions, but later inventions, decided by committee at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
In this the 3rd episode of Can I Trust the Bible?, Wes and Andy head to Turkey and Italy, going straight to the source to find out whether there's any truth to these claims. Did the Council of Nicaea really vote on the Bible, or invent Christ's divinity? The answers might surprise you.
Join us on this next adventure as we dig into one of church history's most misunderstood moments, separating myth from fact, and following the evidence where it leads.
https://t.co/skjRLm1Azc
I do NOT disagree with the claim that Mormonism is "the most American religion in the world." 😆
They claim the Garden of Eden was in America (Jackson County, MO), Adam and Eve then moved to Daviess Co., Noah's Ark was built in MO, and Jesus will return to Independence, MO.
I grew up with a Mormon dad and Catholic mom, the Jesus in the book of Mormon is not the same guy in the bible. Biblical Jesus was one with God before incarnating in human form as Christ, Mormon Jesus is the brother of Lucifer and existed as an entity seperate from God before coming to earth.
Whenever the "Mormons Aren't Christians" discourse gets going, Mormon Twitter generally responds in one or more of the following ways:
1. Insist that rejecting Jesus's divine nature and His work does not disqualify them from "believing" in Jesus
2. "We are literally the kindest and most righteous people on earth."
3. "Your churches are an abomination but we are just like you and it's so mean of you to say otherwise."
4. Accuse of us misrepresenting what they believe and then tell us what they actually DO believe, which is exactly what we just said they believe.
5. Outright lie about what they believe.