Mormonism and Christianity - Differences and Similarities

There is a rumor going around that people think Mormons and Christians are the same. This could not be further from reality. I have heard this many times and it usually comes from Mormons and people who overvalue tolerance at the expense of truly understanding. President Hinckley of the Mormon church personally taught this to all of the Mormon church and is it found on their official site.

Let's get a few things straight at the start. I love my Mormon friends. I consider some closer than family. I think they are mistaken about some things, but love certainly triumphs over differences here.

Second, this post is completely unpolitical. I could care less if a Mormon is president. I could really care less about politics at all in this point in my life.

Ok... that being said, there are some huge differences between Orthodox Christianity and Mormonism. Differences that cause each group to be outside of the others tent - if that makes sense. 

The biggest and most consequential difference has to be centered around the theology of God. Mormonism, their scripture, and doctrines teach that God was once man and has now been exalted to be God. This man and his wife have become Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. The official Mormon website, which does not go into all these things, says this about God the Father, "He has a body that looks like ours..." This certainly deviates from Christianity

More so, any idea of the Trinity is completely out the window in the Mormon religion. The heavenly Father is completely different from Jesus Christ who are both completely different from the Holy Spirit. The Mormon church has this to officially say about the Holy Spirit, "The Holy Ghost is one in purpose with the Father and the Son, but is a separate being." Any oneness that exist is in purpose but not in being.

This is all very, very different from Christianity. God is the Trinity. God is both Trinity and Unity. God is one in three and three in one. Most Christian traditions affirm the major church creeds. The Nicene, Athanasian, and Chalcedonian Creeds all affirm the Trinity. With respect to my brothers and sisters in traditions that are non-creedal, they still completely affirm the Trinity. My use of the creeds is to show that the Trinity is an essential belief for the last 1700 years.

Nicene:

• "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father..."
• God is one, and yet The Father and Jesus exist. Jesus is God in every way, not in being a deity but in being one in substance with the Father.
• Jesus is affirmed to be fully God before he is affirmed to be man (Chalcedonian creed).

Athanasian:

• "Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated..."
• Catholic, here, means universal...
• This goes on and on describing the Trinity and unity of God.

Though the Trinity is mysterious and hard to explain (if not impossible), it is one of the central tenets of Christianity. The Father, Jesus and Holy Spirit are one and yet 3 at the same time. They are not only one in purpose, the creeds make it absolutely clear that they are one in substance, essence, personhood.

An interesting set of questions usually arises from this: (1) The doctrine of Trinity is absent from most of the first 300 years of Christianity, what about those Christians who lived then? (2) Is the doctrine of Trinity required for salvation?

Yes, it is true that the official doctrine of the Trinity is not formed until about 325, but ideas of the Trinity existed from the beginning. The church quickly came to agreement on this doctrine and spent the next few hundred years defining and defending it.

As to the salvation question, (1) I don't think it is beneficial that we boil everything down to salvation, (2) I am not God, only God judges in these matters, and (3) the point is not about salvation requirements, the point is about the centrality of the Trinity in Christian doctrine. The Trinity encompasses the central tenets of Christianity and as one of my professors has said, it is the most interesting thing about Christianity. No other religion or philosophy has anything like it. 

So, on this point alone, Mormons are not Christians and Christians aren't Mormons. Mormons aren't even monotheists (like Christianity, Judaism, Islam) in that they affirm the Resistance of many gods and that they themselves become gods someday. 

Jeffrey Goldberg, a Jew, totally has this to say about this issue:

Mormons themselves contend that “Christ is at the center of our worship, study, service and faith,” as a statement released by the church after Jeffress’s comment put it.

But theological honesty demands that we recognize that Romney would be the first president to be so far outside the Christian denominational mainstream.

There is much in Mormonism that stands in opposition to Christian doctrine, including the belief that the Book of Mormon completes the Christian Bible. Christianity had an established creed about 1,500 years before Joseph Smith appeared in upstate New York with a new truth, codified in the Book of Mormon, which he said was revealed to him by an angel named Moroni.

“The Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed settled the basic ideas of Christianity,” said Michael Cromartie, an evangelical who is vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. “The canon was closed, and then Joseph Smith comes along and says that there’s a new book, an extra-biblical addition to the agreed-upon canon.”

Nothing in Mormonism is quite as alien to Christian thought as the core assertion that God and man are of the same species.

“This is a canonical belief of Mormons, and it stands in radical opposition to the beliefs of the monotheistic religions,” Richard J. Mouw, the president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in California, told me. “Your people” -- that is, Jews -- “and my people would say that the fundamental sin here from the biblical point of view is that God is God and we’re not. There’s an ontological gap between creator and creation.”

Mouw, who is a leader in the deepening dialogue between evangelical Christian and Mormon theologians, said he believes that many Mormons are moving toward more Christ-centered modes of worship. The Mormons who, in the Salt Lake City vernacular, tend to “go planetary” -- who embrace some of Mormonism’s more idiosyncratic folk beliefs -- are dwindling in number. But Mouw said he isn’t ready to accept Mormonism as branch of Christianity."

The greater context of this article above is about the political realm, which is not my aim. I show this article to show that even someone of a different faith outside of Christianity or Mormonism can plainly see this fact. The theology of God is completely important and a distinguishing characteristic of each.

So, let us be clear, Christians and Mormons vary wildly about the doctrine of the God we each claim to follow, serve and worship. To me, that seems to be enough to differentiate us. If our Gods our different, then logically the institutions are as well. We can say a lot of things, but let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that these two are one and the same.


Blessings!