The One Question Mormons Hope You Don't Ask

Talking with Mormon missionaries can feel daunting. They seem to know their scriptures and have all the answers. Do the LDS really worship the same God we do? Are they Christians? Here is a very special four part podcast series where I offer a key question that Mormons cannot answer. Listen to all four parts here:

• The One Question Mormons Hope You Don't Ask - Part 1
• The One Question Mormons Hope You Don't Ask - Part 2
• The One Question Mormons Hope You Don't Ask - Part 3
• The One Question Mormons Hope You Don't Ask - Part 4

Photo courtesy Saaby and licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic License.

How Heresies Tried to Change Scripture

Were books left out of the Bible? What are heresies against scripture? How did the early church determine which writings should be recognized as scripture and which shouldn't? In this one hour lecture, Lenny reviews the heretical movements that plagued the early church in regards to Scripture. The teaching is part of the Deepening Your Faith series put on at Harvest Christian Fellowship. For more information on that class, visit http://deepfaith.harvest.org/

Don't Avoid the JWs, or You May Lose a Christian!

Two Jehovah's Witnessed came to my door yesterday. We talked for some time and during our conversation I asked the more experienced gentleman, whose name was Albert, to tell me why he decided to follow the teachings of the Watchtower. This is his response:

"I was raised Baptist. However, one day when two men came up to my door, they told me a lot of things that I had never heard before. They told me the truth. For example, they told me the truth about holidays. Today is Halloween and many of the different churches will celebrate this holiday that has its roots in paganism. It was a pagan holiday, started by pagans but Christians don't seem to mind. Even Christmas.  People will say 'Oh, on Christmas we celebrate Jesus,' but Jesus wasn't born on December 25! We know that he wasn't because snow would have been on the ground in December, but the shepherds were out feeding their flocks."

During this point in the conversation, I began to wonder why holidays would be the thing to cause one to change belief systems. It sounded trivial to me. But then Albert got to the crux of the problem:

"They also talked about things like the Trinity and how the Trinity isn't right. They told me things that I'd never heard before in all my time at church. Afterwards, I was confused and called my pastor. I told him what they said and asked about the holidays and the points they brought up. He asked me, 'Are those Jehovah's Witnesses? You just need to stay away from those guys. They aren't good for you. And he hung up. It was after that that I began to learn from the Witnesses because they would tell me the truth."

This really saddened me. It wasn't the problems with the holidays that turned Albert away; it was his pastor's lack of response. Albert thought that his pastor either was trying to hide something from him or possibly that the pastor had no answer to his questions. But he didn't care about these issues that bothered Albert. He simply dismissed his meeting with the Witnesses and said, "Those guys are dangerous. Don't listen to them."

Albert's pastor should be ashamed of his counsel. Instead of protecting Albert from the wolves that cone in to devour the flock, the pastor's warning had the opposite effect and made Albert a Jehovah's Witness. That was in 1980, and Albert has spent the last forty years going door to door trying to pry others away from the faith.

I've heard several pastors tell their congregations not to engage with Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons.  They say don't confront atheists. They don't see any benefit of arguing with a person whose mind is made up. But, as Albert's story shows, this kind of response doesn't protect people from falling away. In fact, it may actually drive them towards a heretical belief since the Mormon or JW appear to want to engage in difficult questions about the Bible and faith.

Churches today need to become more serious in tackling the hard questions that both their congregants and their critics have. If Christianity is true, tough questions shouldn't scare us. Given the complexity of humanity and the transcendence of God, it also shouldn't surprise us that there will be some difficult issues we'll need to handle. But, we do a grave disservice to both the unbeliever and the Christian if we don't start working hard to find the best answers we can to the objections to the faith and incorporate them as part of a mature Christian life. In the Great Commission, Jesus commands his followers to "go and make disciples of all nations (Matt 28:19)." If we neglect the life of the mind, we are not fulfilling that call.

Is God just in punishing one person for the sins of another?

"How can it be fair to punish one person for the sins of another?" When I speak about the atonement, it's a question I've received more than once. "It doesn't seem for God to punish one person for the acts of another. Imagine a rapist whose brother volunteers to go to jail for him. A righteous judge would never accept such a thing! It wouldn't bring justice to the rapist, and it wouldn't bring justice to the victim, no matter how morally upright his brother is. How then can God punish Jesus for our sins and still be considered righteous?"

I think this is a good question and one that isn't addressed frequently enough in our understanding of salvation. There does seem to be something amiss here, but I think much of that is a misunderstanding based on the analogy used to explain the concept of atonement to begin with. In the past, I've even used courtroom analogies to try and show how God's love and His justice can be met simultaneously. But I've probably not done the best job in explaining this particular facet of the atonement. Let's take a look at what sin actually is and why Jesus' death can be accepted as full payment for our violation before God.

Over the next few posts, I will answer this objection. Today we'll see that people are only judged by God on how they violated of his laws. In the next couple of posts, I will talk about how God is justified in setting the appropriate punishment for violations against His laws and why the atonement is a more just and more fair solution to sin than even punishing the most heinous of sinners.

1. One can sin only against God

The problem here is one of equivocation. I agree that people can wrong, hurt, and abuse other people. But as I've explained before, sin is an absence of doing good, doing what is required of you. When we sin, we violate God's law because we don't do that which He as our Creator has set as our proper standard of conduct. Our sin may be due to an act against an individual, but it is not the laws of the individual I have violated. Another person does not inherently have a moral claim upon me. It is God to whom we are answerable because it is God who created us. God is also the source of moral law. Therefore, the condemnation resulting from sin is not primarily because one violated another's interests, but because he violated God's laws on how he should act.

In the book of Genesis, Joseph was tempted by Potiphar's wife to sleep with her. In resisting, he did not say he didn't want to violate Potiphar's trust. He said that he could not sin against God (Gen. 39:9). Similarly, after David, was confronted for taking Bathsheba in adultery and having her husband killed in battle, he said "Against You, You only, I have sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, So that You are justified when You speak And blameless when You judge" (Psalm 51:4). It is the fact that the sinner trespassed God's will that makes him accountable before God.

Our modern judicial system does make this distinction as well. We can agree that one person sleeping with the wife of another is immoral; however a person cannot be put in prison for doing so. You cannot bring criminal charges against an individual for adultery in a court of law in the United States since the person has not violated any laws. However, if a person takes a married woman and forces sex upon her, he or she can be put in jail for rape, which is against the law.

Because God is loving, His law includes prohibitions against hurting others, but we has His creation are answerable first and foremost to Him. It is His law to which we are obligated, and when we transgress we break that obligation. This is why Jesus created such a stir with the Jewish leaders when he told the paralytic that his sins were forgiven. If sin is a violation of God's laws, then only God has the authority to forgive such transgressions, just as the authority the state holds to press charges even when a victim declines.

This sets the stage for the atonement, but it doesn't answer the question fully.  Even if God is the one offended, how is crediting the offender with the punishment of another just? We'll look at that aspect tomorrow.

How did Reza Aslan Discover the Zealot Jesus?

Stop the presses.  Jesus is just a man.  That seems to be the reaction of the media to Reza Aslan's new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan has been making the media circuit, getting coverage on popular television news programs such as Fox News and Piers Morgan Live, along with featured articles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and many others . Aslan is currently on tour, and you can even check his web site to find out when he's coming to your city.

Who would have thought that a book on the life of Jesus would garner so much attention?  Actually, it could have been expected, though the clumsy interview Lauren Green gave on Fox News definitely lifted Aslan's profile to the other outlets. (What's that saying, again? The enemy of my enemy is my friend?) But we have seen this kind of attention given to authors who wrote similar books previously. The Jesus Seminar has had great coverage throughout the 1980s and 1990s when it was active.  Two of its prominent members, Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan, would be regularly seen in documentary specials and feature stories.  Debunking the Christian story is a draw, and the media knows it.

It seems that when any new theory about Jesus as someone other than whom the Gospels portray Him to be pops up, there is a new batch of faith-debunkers ready to jump on the bandwagon.  Of course, depending on your preference, each of these faith-debunkers have their own take on the matter. As Charlotte Allen wrote in her review:

"To be sure, all of the historical-Jesus people put their own idiosyncratic spins onto the basic narrative. Jesus is variously presented as a love-your-neighbor moralist (the Enlightenment view); a cynic philosopher (Crossan); a balding, overweight rabbi (Chilton); or a secular sage who hated organized religion (the Jesus Seminar's late founder, Robert Funk). Aslan's take is that Jesus was a fanatic Jewish ideologue and would-be messiah whose 'Kingdom of God' was a 'call to revolution' against the occupying Romans, and who envisioned 'blood-soaked streets' once the revolution got underway."

Isn't it interesting that those who claim to have the inside scoop of the real view of Jesus—the one that only dispassionate scholarship produces—all come out with different stories? It should give you pause when you hear claims that this new book or that one will disprove our Sunday school stories about Jesus. Why, if the scholarship is so convincing, do these scholars have such different conclusions on who Jesus really is?  They all use the same source material; the Gospel accounts, Paul's writings and some other historical texts are what both liberal and conservative scholars rely upon to build their understanding of Jesus' life and deeds. There are no new revelatory discoveries in the source material, so what's going on?

New Testament Scholar Craig A. Evans explains that "Aslan has canvassed much of the responsible scholarship in the field, but he does not always choose his options prudently. He often opts for extreme views and sometimes makes breathtaking assertions." Yes, it has been the practice by the historical Jesus crowd for a while not to take the whole of the source documents as reliable, but to cherry-pick only those facts that paint the picture one wants to portray. As Allen observed, "While Aslan describes the Gospels and other New Testament narratives as 'propagandistic legend' in which 'factual accuracy was irrelevant,' he quotes from them — when it serves his purposes — as often as any fundamentalist preacher." So Aslan dismisses miracles or the Resurrection as myth, but he somehow can discern just which passages are mythical and which are not. We are never told of the method he uses to do so, we are just to trust him to make these judgments for us.

In a court of law, when an attorney wishes to counter the testimony of a witness, they seek to discredit the witness entirely. In other words, the cross-examiner doesn't try to tell the jury "you have heard Mrs. Jones tell us that the robber was wearing a black shirt and blue jeans and he sped away in a red car. I think you should believe Mrs. Jones about the car, but she's making up the shirt and jeans part." That would never fly. Aslan needs to weigh in on the bits he dismisses as fable and answer just how he is able to so shrewdly discern the text. Otherwise we're left with Evan's summation that "at points Aslan's book is informative; it is often entertaining. But it is also rife with questionable assertions. Let the reader beware."