Five beliefs in this book answer the question why a loving God doesn’t stop evil. Starting with the belief God cannot stop evil singlehandedly, the book adds that God empathizes with those who hurt, heals the injured to the greatest extent possible, squeezes good from evil God didn’t initially want, and needs cooperation from creatures to overcome evil.
Awesome podcast:
Oord helps shares his view on why bad things happen to us.
Key points:
“God’s uncontrolling love makes it so that God can’t prevent genuine evil.”
“God isn’t sitting on the sidelines doing nothing.”
“God doesn’t permit torture. God doesn’t have the power to prevent horrific things.”
Many falsely believe this: The pain and suffering in the world is allowed by God for some greater good, some hidden purpose, some divine plan. Oord disputes this idea.
“God squeezes good out of the evil that God in the first place.”
“God does have a plan, but it’s not a detailed plan.”
“God can’t prevent evil single handedly.”
Dr. Oord is an ordained elder within the Church of the Nazarene.
Another awesome podcast on a related issue. According to Mark Karris, God is all-loving, but not all powerful. We should reconsider how we pray when so much of what we pray for should involve us as solutions.
If you understand Aristotle’s views on God, metaphysics, philosophy, and the cosmos you’ll better understand Christianity. Specifically, you’ll better understand the doctrine of the Trinity, why Christians had the false interpretation of the cosmos (geocentric) for 1500 years, and other errors that were incorporated into a Christian world view.
After all, Greek thinking spread into the Roman world when the Romans conquered Greece. Roman leaders had Greek slaves teach them and their kids mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, and all other areas of knowledge.
After Jesus’ resurrection, Christianity spread into a Greek world. One that believed in things just the way Aristotle did centuries before. Eventually, Roman leaders persecuted Christians who believed in ideas contrary to the accepted Greek views.
Jews and Romans labeled Christians polytheists for belief in 2 Gods (Father & Son). This persecution continued on and off until Christians embraces Greek philosophy, defining God and Jesus being one (2 persons, but one being) and of the same substance.
Greek medicine has been largely rejected. So has Greek astronomy. A Greek view on God’s nature has persisted, however.
Aristotle had many brilliant ideas for his day. He debated non-believers and laid out proofs for God’s existence. Aristotle had a theory for nearly everything. He was correct on many things, but mistaken on many others (including theological, medical, and astronomical concepts).
Many of these errors were adopted without reservation by the educated and a very significant institution: the Roman Catholic Church. Nobody at the time conceived the Greeks were wrong. Indeed, these ideas were held up and propagated for centuries. These false ideas — geocentricism, Greek medicine, and others — were not rejected till the Scientific Revolution.
A short 12-minute summary:
From Christian Wheaton College. This is very dry. Joseph Smith makes it much simpler. He saw two resurrected beings.
More detail:
LDS scholar, Barry Bickmore, discusses the transformation of the Hebrew/Jewish organization into a more Hellenized version of Christianity:
Super talk by Noel B. Reynolds. You can read or listen to it here.
Subtopics:
– INFLUENCE OF THE SPIRIT
– SENTIMENTALISM VS. SPIRIT
– DISCERNMENT IMPORTANT
– LIGHT OF CHRIST
– USEFULNESS OF REASON
– THE ROLE OF SIN
– CONFIDENCE IN THE LORD
– GUIDELINES TO KEEP FAITH
– INTELLECT AND FAITH
A wonderful quote:
“Too much of the literature used, seen, and quoted in the Church today is just sentimental trash which is designed to pull our heartstrings or moisten our eyes, but it is not born of true spiritual experience. The tendency of our youth to use sentimental stories in Church talks creates a culture of spiritual misunderstanding in which thinking and learning are discouraged.”
I was a Teaching Assistant in BYU’s Zoology Department for Dr. Porter from 1999 – 2001. I helped him with his Pathology course. He is a very nice, bright, and spiritual man
“Spiritual” receptors. Awesome insight from an endocrinologist!
This takes time, humility, and effort:
A common charge against Mormons is that we ignore evidence and based testimony on feelings or emotions alone.
If this is true in any individual LDS person’s case it shouldn’t be!
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.
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.
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:
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.
“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.)”
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.”
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:
Just yesterday a friend of mine claimed that it’s arrogant to say you’re the only true church. After all, he said, other faiths say the same thing.
We debated for some time, reaching no agreement. I thought I’d YouTube the question. Among other things I found, I liked the video below. I shared it with my friend who hasn’t yet commented on it directly.
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, and the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College. He is a Protestant and considered by many to be America’s leading Christian philosopher.
Plantinga explains that, according to his view, only one faith can be correct. And it isn’t true one is arrogant to believe this. I agree with Dr. Plantinga’s arguments. I disagree, however, that Protestantism holds the Gospel’s fullness.
I believe Joseph Smith restored the fullness of Christ’s teachings through gradual development and miraculous visitations.
Finding a balance between loyalty or commitment to one’s faith and sympathetic openness to other faiths is one of the biggest challenges Mormons face in an age of inclusiveness.
Truth is found in all faiths. But priesthood and keys are only found in the restored church.
How can I know that spiritual experiences are not just a product of brain chemicals?
Only feelings?
Some critics state that all people have religious experiences that they report as true. They, in fact, state they’ve felt the Holy Ghost. Now what?
I say, do you feel it’s fair that only Mormons feel the Holy Ghost? No, we’ve never taught that. We know the light of Christ is felt by all. Gifts of the Spirit aren’t unique to Latter-day Saints.
When folks of other faiths feel the Spirit we should be glad for them. We hope they would consider investigating the LDS Church. As Plantinga points out above, many of our positions can’t all be true.
I believe Jesus when he said he was the way, the truth, and the light. One path gets us back to the Father, despite all the goodness and truth found in other faiths.
Blake Ostler emphasizes an inclusive faith in a pluralistic society:
