Per Atrios, I can’t shed many tears for Mitt Romney when people start highlighting some of the more unusual aspects of Mormon theology. I don’t think you get to say: “It’s vital, and crucially relevant to my qualifications for office, that I have a powerful set of guiding convictions… but never mind the actual contents of those beliefs.”
That said, now that I’ve read the account of the doctrine that Jesus is Satan’s older brother, I kind of like it. If Jesus is just sort of constitutionally perfect and sinless, it seems less impressive, in a way. If he could have been another Satan but opted to go the messiah route, that’s another story again. Though even in the latter case, I suppose watching dad throw your little brother into a lake of fire will tend to strengthen your disposition toward filial deference.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Chuchundra // Dec 13, 2007 at 11:06 am
It is a neat idea, but it’s not Christianity.
2 Julian Sanchez // Dec 13, 2007 at 11:39 am
Well, what exactly IS “Christianity”? Mormonism seems to share the definitive core elements–monotheism, the divinity of Jesus–and beyond those, there’s a fair amount of variety among Christian sects. What gets one voted off the island?
3 Anon // Dec 13, 2007 at 11:45 am
Ones that don’t conform to the Nicene creed.
4 Julian Sanchez // Dec 13, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Hmm… so was Saint Lucian of Antioch not a Christian?
5 Anon // Dec 13, 2007 at 1:02 pm
I don’t know anything about him, but the Nicene creed is generally viewed as determining what was inside and outside of Christianity at the time of its writing (Inside — Orthodox, Copts, etc. , outside — Arians). All the big groups that have become distinct since then up until recently have conformed to it (Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants).
Unitarians aren’t on the inside and neither are Mormons, Jehovah’s witnesses, etc.
Also, as to the “definitive core elements,” that is what the Nicene Creed and its subsequent revisions are.
It might appear to be an arbitrary distinction, but it is hard to use the terms “Christian” and “Christianity” to mean any sort of identifiable group of beliefs and believers otherwise.
6 Anonymo // Dec 13, 2007 at 2:10 pm
If Jesus is just sort of constitutionally perfect and sinless, it seems less impressive, in a way. If he could have been another Satan but opted to go the Satan route, that’s another story again.
Which is why The Last Temptation of Christ is the only Jesus movie that ever made any sense to me.
(and I think that should read “… but opted to go the Jesus route…”)
7 Eric D. Dixon // Jan 6, 2008 at 3:21 am
It’s much more prosaic than this. Because Mormons believe that everybody God created are brothers and sisters to each other on a spiritual level, their posited filial relationship to deity includes Jesus and Satan as much as it includes, say, Jack the Ripper, Joseph Smith, Adolph Hitler, Milton Friedman, Mother Theresa, Paris Hilton, or any random reader of this blog. Although Jesus and Satan get most of the press, nothing about the doctrine actually singles out any particular subgroup as a tiny dysfunctional nuclear family…