What Are Common Concerns Mormonism Has About Traditional Christianity?
During the First Vision, Joseph Smith prayed to know which church he should join. The answer was startling: “Join none of them” for “they were all wrong.” Hidden deep in this short reply are two concerns Mormonism has long harbored against traditional Christianity. The first is how churches are described as “them” and “they,” emphasizing the plurality of Christianity rather than its unity. If Christians are meant to be a people of “one Lord [and] one faith” (Eph 4:5), why are they separated into denominations? The second concern is related. Smith learned from the vision that all churches “were all wrong,” especially their creeds. If Christianity ought to reflect “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3), why are there so many theological disagreements and deviations?
This short essay explores these concerns, as well as the possibility that Mormonism reflects similar concerns.
Traditional Christianity Was Hellenized
Mormonism contends that early Christianity was altered by Greek thought (sometimes call Hellenism), which produced a religion based on the philosophies of men mingled with scripture. The idea of God as the ineffable, transcendent First Cause of all things feels more at home among disciples of Plato, not Christ. Trinitarianism is a philosophical compromise, a way to reconcile Athens to Jerusalem. Greek philosophy initially gave early Christians the necessary framework to explain and defend the faith to unbelievers, but it ceased to describe Christian doctrine and started informing it over time. “What began as a Jewish religion founded on revelation and faith became an appendage of classical civilization,” opined LDS scholars. Orthodoxy, then, is an unintended hybrid between divine and worldly ideas, and its ecumenical creeds represent the “conceptual merger of Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy.” In short, Christianity “became hellenized and was transformed in the process.”
There should be no doubt about the intricate and extensive interaction between Christian and Greek thought in the early church. The question is not whether but how the two influenced one another. Adolf von Harnack, a nineteenth-century historian, popularized the Hellenization interpretation of Christian history in his History of Dogma. According to Harnack, the development of early Christian thought is best explained primarily as a process of assimilation with Greco-Roman thought. Bearing in mind the Great Apostasy, Mormonism instinctively adopted this interpretation because it helps to explain how the post-apostolic church “apostatized from the truth and lost the priesthood,” a point Smith argued but hesitated to elaborate in detail. Syncretism could be a reason for apostasy—or even the outcome of apostasy—as the church gradually forfeited its doctrinal birthright for the pottage of Greek philosophy.
However, Harnack’s interpretation of early Christianity is not unchallenged among scholars. Historian Robert Louis Wilken has charted a more convincing interpretation that inverts Harnack’s narrative. Christianity was not Hellenized; instead, Hellenism was ‘Christianized.’ Wilken argued that the writers of the patristic era displayed far greater interest in scripture and worship than in embracing Greco-Roman intellectual frameworks. In fact, “Christian thinking, while working within patterns of thought and conceptions rooted in Greco-Roman culture, transformed them so profoundly that in the end something quite new came into being.” Is it the case, as Harnack argued, that Christianity was Hellenized, or is Wilkin’s assessment correct, that Hellenism underwent Christian baptism? The debate is unsettled, of course, but Harnack’s story ought not to be received uncritically.
Moreover, Platonic concepts, like the premortal existence and unconditional immortality of the soul, resonate deeply with Mormon thought. Indeed, sometimes patristic writers seem to affirm Mormon doctrine. Apotheosis, for example, captured the imagination of church fathers who argued the telos of humanity was to become like God. Latter-day Saints have been quick to see classical thought as evidence that “early Christians still retained many Gospel truths and the same verities were revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith.” But when the ancients disagree with Mormon doctrine—e.g., Trinitarianism or original sin—their writings are dismissed as “pagan philosophies being mingled with the doctrines of the gospel to form the apostate Christianity.”
In the end, humility and charity are always warranted when interpreting another religion’s historical development. We should consider that whatever we find distasteful in the other story may lurk in our own. This point is especially true of the Mormon objection to traditional Christianity that stems from its many denominations.
Traditional Christianity is Fractured
In Christ’s high priestly prayer, he asked the Father that his disciples would “be one, as we are” (John 17:11). His request was profound, that Christians would share the same kind of oneness as the Father and Son. The fledgling church sustained this ideal state in the opening chapters of Acts as it grew “with one accord” (Acts 1:14), even when adding converts at an astounding rate (see Acts 2:41–47). But already during the later apostolic era, disunity threatened the church.
A handful of reasons undermined its unity. The first threat was cultural disagreements, especially about the integration of Gentiles into the predominantly Jewish church (see Gal 2:12–14). Another issue was doctrinal. If Gentiles were allowed to become members of God’s covenant community, should they become circumcised? Members of the so-called “circumcision party” (Gal 2:12, ESV) thought so and opposed those who disagreed (see Acts 11:1–3; Gal 5:2–3; 1 Cor 7:19). Relatedly, issues over authority and allegiance divided a single congregation into at least four factions (see 1 Cor 1:12), like a mirror dropped to the floor and shattered. This fracturing led the apostle Paul to conclude it was “necessary that there be factions among you” to determine who was “approved” by God (1 Cor 11:19, CSB).
The Greek word for “factions” (airesis) is the source of the English “heresy.” Such heresies continued to develop over generations, e.g., Docetism, Gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism, Nestorianism. At significant inflection points, the church assembled councils to discern truth amid differences, striving to maintain the unity for which Jesus Christ prayed. Still, Christianity has suffered denominationalizing throughout its history, from the East-West schism to the many Protestant movements of the Reformation.
Mormonism has long pointed to denominations as a sign of Christianity’s distress and need for restoration. After Smith made an “intimate acquaintance with those of differant denominations,” he concluded their nonalignment with scripture was so severe that “there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.” From Rome to Cane Ridge, every church “had apostatised from the true and liveing faith” and needed complete restoration. In Smith’s lifetime, major divisions included Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Baptists, Methodism, and Restorationism. Since then, even more churches have formed, like those of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.
Smith’s concern about the apparent disunity of Christianity was warranted. Christians must be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (see Eph 4:3, ESV). The church is the bride of Christ (Eph 5:23), and he has only one bride, not many. Unity and love are the foundation on which our common faith rests (see John 13:35; 17:11). Despite spanning time and space, all Christians ought to affirm “one faith,” which is less a codified body of doctrines housed in an institution than it is the simple trust that sinners place in Christ alone for their salvation. Every true believer must affirm the simplicity of the faith that was “once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3), which is this: the Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins, was buried for three days, and rose again before the apostles, all according to scripture (see 1 Cor 15:3–5). Believing this is “most important” (1 Cor 15:3, CSB) because rejecting Christ’s resurrection places one outside the community of faith. In other words, despite all appearances to the contrary, Christianity has always been (and will always be) the “one faith” of the crucified and resurrected Lord Jesus. To confess Christ as Lord and to believe in his resurrection is to be part of that “one faith” (see Rom 10:9), to be “sealed with that holy Spirit of promise” (Eph 1:13). “Whoever has the Holy Spirit is in the church,” said Augustine.
The invisible church is not bound together by polity or creeds but by the lordship of the resurrected Son of God, whose authority does not recognize our confessional borderlines or institutional walls. As German theologian Jürgen Moltmann explained, “Where so far as Christ rules, there, consequently, the church is to be found.” Christ is the unifying authority of mere Christianity, the landlord of C. S. Lewis’ great hall of faith “out of which doors open into several rooms,” or different Christianities. All rooms are connected by the great hall, a corridor of common confessions to core beliefs, but “it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.” So Christians are encouraged to settle in the room of a church while also recognizing that they share a roof with the neighboring churches around them, all of whom live in—and, better, all of whom are—the house of the Lord (see Matt 16:18; 1 Cor 3:16; 6:19; 2 Cor 6:16). “Just as there are many rays of the sun but one light,” so there are many churches but one faith, taught Cyprian, a third-century theologian. In other words, institutional disunity does not reflect disunity of the faith, as Smith apparently feared.
Besides, Mormonism also suffers from division. A handful of branches sprouted during Smith’s life, and his movement suffered severe fragmentation after his death. Today, the original Church he founded in 1830 has split into hundreds of groups with thousands of members. Mormonism is no monolith. It is better understood as a collection of Mormonisms, with each group calling the other to return to the “true” church. Perhaps it is wisest for those who worship in glass churches not to cast stones. Instead, we ought to recognize that strife and division is often rooted in pride, which is common to all people, whether they are traditional Christians or Latter-day Saints. May we all humbly retreat into Christ’s high priestly prayer for unity through what is most important to his faith.
The print edition will, naturally, include citations.
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