Misconceptions about the Quorum of the 12

From the Church News:

“The Lord puts a lot of people together who are not that alike in many things — their professions, how they grew up, where they come from,” said Elder Andersen.

“They are alike in their testimony of the Savior and in their humility. They don’t seek position, they are not trying to be the smartest person in the room. The Lord can work with that. I have never seen anyone show anger and I have never seen anyone put anyone down.”

https://www.ldschurchnews.com/leaders-and-ministry/2018-08-09/twelve-apostles-respond-to-misconceptions-about-their-calling-47755

 

The Godhead, the Trinity, and the Apostasy

Concise summary by Robert Vukich, a long-time LDS scholar and apologist:

“The Trinity is a logical contradiction as opposed to a mystery. A mystery is how god could be self existent, or how there could be an infinite regression of gods, and matter be eternal. Those are mysteries which do not present a contradiction because they rely on something which is not revealed but doesn’t contradict itself.

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By contrast, the Trinity presents a contradiction at every point. The idea of being fully god yet fully a person within that god, and there being three persons, each fully god and having all the essence of god, yet still being one of three is illogical. It is untenably illogical when you realize Jesus is sitting or standing next to god (such as Acts 7:56), who has a physical location. It is logically impossible to say a thing is next to itself. It is not just silly word games which is most of the trinity description, but it is hard fact that any thing cannot logically be next to itself.

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Thus the trinity is not a mystery, it is an illogical word game. It is fully explained once the correct NT understanding is provided, which was there were many gods and many lords, but God the Father and Jesus the Lord are the only ones that matter to us. There is no statement in scripture which requires the oneness of god, as described in the Ancient Near East setting, to mean anything beyond a corporate oneness, which is in fact the way Jesus described his oneness with god. When Jesus quotes from the Shema, he doesn’t include himself in it, he simply cites it.

The trinity is a manmade mess of jumbled words to impress people with just how inscrutable god is, despite it being life eternal to know the only true god AND Jesus whom he sent.”

Yep.  Hardly a mystery.  Entire a contradiction.

Another view from the 3 Mormons!

These guys could be a little clearer in that creedal Christians believe the Trinity is composed of 3 persons whose substance is the same.  LDS Christians believe in absolutely 3 separate beings.

 

Dr. Paulsen is a distinguished scholar who spent a career at BYU.  He defends the LDS understanding of the Godhead:

Brant Gardner discusses the union of these ideas:  monotheism, Messiah, and the Book of Mormon.

Brant discusses the Father God, El; the mother God or spouse of El, Asherah; Jehovah, the preeminent among the Sons of El (the Father God); and other topics in the evolution of gods in Judaism.

The Sons of God were assigned to different nations.  Jehovah was assigned to Israel.  By the 8th and 7th centuries BC Jehovah grew in stature, supplanting El in certain respects, as the Jews developed a proto-monotheism.

 

 

The understanding of the Godhead’s nature was corrupted in the centuries after Jesus’ resurrection.

Jeff Lindsay shares many explanations here, on his blog LDS FAQ.

Fiona Givens provides a history of the Trinity development in her book,  The Christ who Heals: How God Restored the Truth that Saves Us.

She discusses those issues here, contrasting what occurred in the Eastern and Western Christian Churches:

Episode 62: The Christ Who Heals – Fiona Givens

Barry Brickmore shares how the early Saints believed in much that was restored through Joseph Smith: separate Father and Son, deification, creation ex materia (not ex nihilo), and more.

Greek philosophy corrupted the Christian understanding of the Godhead.

 

Read the 1987 Ensign article, “Is the LDS View of God Consistent with the Bible?

Key quotes below:

“When Christianity came into contact with the society in which that habit of mind existed, it modified, it reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives which stimulated it to action; but in its turn it was itself profoundly modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it.

It was impossible for Greeks, … with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive simplicity.” (The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, New York: Harper & Row, 1957, p. 49.)

As the church entered the third century, many ridiculed Christianity because they regarded it as polytheistic—that is, it had a theology of three Gods: the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

By this time the more sophisticated had rejected polytheistic pagan deities and had become monotheistic, accepting but one God. So the issue for the church was how to make Christian theology accord with respectable opinion.

Tertullian, a lawyer, offered this solution: The true God was composed of immaterial spiritual substance, and though the three personages that comprised the Godhead were distinct, this was only a material manifestation of an invisible God.

As for how three persons could be one, it was explained that the persons were legally conceived entities, “just as a corporation is composed of various people though it is not the people.” (T. Edgar Lyon, Apostasy to Restoration, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1960, p. 113.)”

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Augustine (354—430 C.E.), also known as St. Augustine, is a fourth century philosopher whose groundbreaking philosophy infused Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism.

Additional quotes from the Ensign about Augustine:

“The unsurpassed intellectual in Christian history was Augustine. He was the one who thoroughly fused the theology of the New Testament with Platonism.

In examining Christian doctrine, Augustine confessed to a strong preconception—a repugnance to the idea that God had a body. (The Confessions, V, x:19–20; VII, 1:1. In Great Books of the Western World, vol. 18, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, pp. 32, 43.)

He acknowledged that he had labored on the thesis of the Trinity for fifteen years without “ever reaching a satisfactory conclusion.” (Hugh Nibley, The World and the Prophets, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1954, p. 86.)

Finally he (Augustine) rationalized that if one accepts the Platonic idea that spirit essence is the purest manifestation of reality and that matter is the most corrupt, God must therefore be an immaterial being. He was then able to accept the doctrine of the Trinity. (Confessions, IV, xvi:29, 31; V, x:19–20; VI, iii:4–iv:5; The City of God, VIII, ch. 5–6. In Great Books, vol. 18, pp. 26, 32, 36, 267–69.)

As Plato had done before him, Augustine decided that since God is the ultimate good, he cannot be associated with anything material.

Augustine’s personal theology became that of the Roman Empire and remains an influence in historic Christianity to this day. Such is the basis for traditional Christianity’s teaching on the Trinity—a belief described by modern clerics as a mystery.”

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Listen to LDS scholar’s Blake Ostler‘s “The Attributes of God, Chapter ONE”, Part I and Part II.    A greater focus on the Apostasy:  “The Attributes of God, Chapter TWO.”

Ostler explains our view of the Godhead and our belief in eternal progression.  “As God now is, man may became.”

More from Ostler contrasting LDS and traditional cosmology:

 

Review Robert Vukich’s presentation here:  “Rejecting the False Doctrine of the Trinity.

Robert primarily uses widely respected, authoritative Christian and Jewish scholars to establish these points: 1) The Trinity isn’t biblical.  2) The Trinity was created by Greek philosophers centuries after Jesus.  3)  Multiple Gods are referenced in the scriptures.  4) Traditional monotheism isn’t supported.

 

LDS Truth Claims identifies the Greek influence on the early Church in the form of ex nihilo creation. These videos discuss concepts of impassibility (unemotional) and immutability (unchanging) of God and the Trinity: