I Think I Might Be a Calvinist

I don’t think that a Christian is necessarily required to come down one way or another on Calvinism vs. Arminianism (or Lutheranism or whatever the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox think about it), but the fact is, I’ve been wrestling with issues of predestination, free will and the nature of God pretty fiercely for months now, and I keep coming to the same conclusions.

It doesn’t help that I have been reading Augustine’s Confessions this year, either. Next up: the Institutes!

No offense to my Arminian friends, but I just don’t think that the Arminian position is tenable at all. It eats itself.

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An Open Question for Mormon Women Seeking Priesthood Ordination

If you, as a Mormon woman, want to be ordained to the priesthood, why don’t you leave the LDS Church and join the Reorganized LDS Church/Community of Christ, where they ordain women?

Partially as a response to the late Mormon prophet Gordon B. Hinckley’s statement in an interview that there has been no “agitation” in the Church for women to be ordained to the priesthood, a number of Mormon women have begun to step up and publicly advocate for ordination. Groups have been formed like Ordain Women. Protests have been planned. Women have told their stories and explained why having the priesthood is important.

But it all seems entirely unnecessary to me. The Community of Christ (formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) already ordains women. If you think women should be ordained, why not vote with your feet? I don’t think that there is a good, coherent reason to stay LDS, and I’ll tell you why I think that (and I invite you to tell me if and why you think I am wrong).

Normally, the biggest reason to stay Mormon despite any difficulty you have with the Church is that, at the end of the day, you believe that the Church is the sole holder of the priesthood keys necessary for saving ordinances. But it seems to me that if you believe that the nature of the priesthood is such that the Church is this far in error and can be corrected by “agitation,” you are effectively undermining the notion of exclusive priesthood authority anyway. The point of the priesthood in Mormonism is the authority to act in God’s name. It’s a principal-agent relationship with God. And it’s not just the authority to do saving ordinances, but also the authority to organize and preside over God’s church. But by rejecting the priesthood’s exercise of this authority (e.g., the policy of not ordaining women), you are rejecting the authority itself, aren’t you? If the priesthood held by the LDS Church is God’s exclusive authority, then when God’s agents act within the constraints of their calling, it is as if God has acted, isn’t it? That’s what authority is. If you don’t believe that, then you don’t really believe that the LDS Church’s priesthood is the exclusive authority to act in God’s name after all. And if that is the case, couldn’t you theoretically get the priesthood somewhere else? My understanding is that the Community of Christ will happily give it to you.

You might reply that, even though you may reject the Church’s claims to exclusive priesthood authority, your culture is Mormon and you identify as a Mormon and your Mormon heritage means everything to you and you do not feel like you should have to give it up to get equality. But you don’t! The Community of Christ is just as “Mormon” as the LDS Church is! It’s a close branch of the same family! Joining the Community of Christ is not a rejection of your Mormon identity at all. It’s just a different organization.

You could also say that unity is important, and you don’t believe that leaving the Church for the priesthood is the right decision, but as a Mormon–a member of a schismatic Restoration sect drawn out of schismatic Protestantism from schismatic Roman catholicism–you are hardly in a place to say that. If unity of faith is the most important thing, even to the extent that you are willing to stay in a patriarchal church and work for change that may never happen, the Eastern Orthodox church is happy to welcome you back with open arms. And their patriarchs have better hats.

I know that many Mormons who reject the Church’s truth claims choose to remain members of the Church for fear of family backlash, but I honestly suspect that you would not get nearly the same negative reaction to leaving for the Community of Christ. It’s still appreciably Mormon after all. I strongly suspect that your friends and family would not feel anywhere near the rejection that they would feel if you just became an atheist or an Evangelical. You would retain a cultural common ground without having to be a part of the Patriarchy. You might even get less flak for switching to the CoC than you would for staying LDS as a dissenter.

I’ve also heard the arguments about inequality anywhere hurting all of us, and whether or not I agree with that (it’s a zinger of a statement that can stand to have come unpacking and close examination done to it, but that is outside the scope of this post), I’m not sure it applies. There’s no guarantee that “agitating” inside the Church will change anything anyway, and voting with your feet will have an immediate individual and potentially powerfully aggregate impact (you make a statement, the patriarchal Church doesn’t get your tithing money anymore, membership in the patriarchal Church shrinks, etc.).

So why not convert to the Community of Christ?

(I want to be clear–this is an honest question and I’m interested in hearing the answers. I’m not a member of the Community of Christ, so I have no vested interest there; it just seems like it would be a better option.)

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An Interesting Turning Point?

I had an interesting conversation on the subway ride home the other day (actually it wasn’t on the way home; it was on the way to have dinner and see Rent with my beautiful wife for our seventh wedding anniversary, which is another story). A colleague of mine was on the same train–he’s an interesting guy and we’ve had a few brief but stimulating conversations about politics, society, culture, etc. Anyway, this guy is Greek Orthodox, and for some reason or another the fact that I’m an ex-Mormon came up in the conversation.

The interesting thing is, we didn’t really talk about Mormonism or ex-Mormonism for very long before we transitioned, and we started talking instead about Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, and some of the issues that the two churches face. The big deal about this conversation was that my point of view in the exchange was Anglican. I was speaking not as a Mormon, or an ex-Mormon, but as an Anglican.

It was kind of awesome. We talked about the Reformation, about creeds and schisms, about theology, and about church and culture and the challenges that come from the interplay between the two. But instead of talking from the perspective of an ex-Mormon floundering about on a spiritual quest, I was talking from the perspective of a committed Anglican.

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The Old Limbo Crossoads: Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism

Sorry this post has been so long in coming.  I haven’t had much time to put together a long post that meaningfully addresses complex and abstract issues, and on top of that, I sunk into a period of total spiritual apathy that I might just now be coming out of.

As I indicated in the introductory post to this series, I feel like I am standing at a spiritual crossroads of sorts.  Two of the paths that I have been honestly considering in my journey towards Christ are Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

One of my concerns with Protestantism in general, and with Evangelical Protestantism in specific, is that I see a lack of authoritative-ness, both institutional and personal.  Particularly in the emergent conversation, clergymen don’t come across as trustworthy guides or wise counselors because they come across as regular people just trying to figure things out.  I’m not saying that I think clergy should have all the answers and not be on spiritual journeys of their own, but there’s a sense in which I want clergy to be something more than just another person at church, who happens to be able to give a good sermon.

So I think I am looking for a church with an ordained clergy, and a church with institutional weight.  At the very least, “having been around a long time” means having, as an institution, weathered all kinds of turmoil and change without being destroyed by it.  To me, an older church feels generally more trustworthy and reliable simply by virtue of its age, and the collected wisdom of generations that goes along with it.

What churches have that more than Catholicism and Orthodoxy?

Furthermore, I’m looking for a church that is genuinely sacramental, one that includes outward expressions of faith and repentance to accompany the inward changes that seem so elusive and ephemeral.  I also want sacraments that are something more than a clever symbol that can be changed at will.  Although I believe that sacraments are largely symbolic, I think that too much emphasis on their symbolic nature renders them weightless and inconsequential.

So far, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy seem to fit the bill most perfectly.

I’m also looking for a church where there’s a real sense of community, more than “hanging around for donuts and lemonade after church and chatting with the peopel you’re friends with.”  What impressed me so much the one time I went to an Eastern Orthodox (OCA) was that they actually all sat down together for a meal when liturgy was finished.  In both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I think there is a sense of identity that is fundamental to community that I haven’t seen in most Protestantism.

Finally, perhaps because of tradition and institutional age and wisdom, it seems to me that Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been able to escape the twin evils of fundamentalism and theological liberalism that plague Protestantism so doggedly.

So why don’t I just become Catholic or Orthodox?  I have a couple of reasons.   First, my understanding of and belief in Jesus Christ is actually fairly Protestant.  Becoming Catholic or Orthodox would essentially involve rethinking and re-imagining everything I already believe, and I’m not sure I want to do that.  It’s not that I’m complacent or scared to re-think, but that my Protestant understanding of Jesus is intimately tied up in my decision to believe in Jesus in the first place.  adopting a totally new view of atonement and salvation would mean a complete rethinking of Christianity, and I’m not sure I want to do that.

Second, both churches have doctrines that are often troubling and in my opinion wrong: Catholicism has  it worst here, with things like the ban on contraception, the celibate priesthood, and transubstantiation.  But Orthodoxy doesn’t necessarily escape doctrinal scrutiny either.  Their beliefs and doctrines may be verifiably the oldest traditional Christian beliefs, but that doesn’t mean I agree with them.

At the same time, I have been wondering lately if submission isn’t actually an important component of Christian faith.  While there are unreasonable extremes, I wonder if it might actually be spiritually healthy to submit to authority and be teachable, and allow your opinions to conform to something greater.

If I’m just looking for the church that teaches exatctly what I believe, I might never be challenged and forced to grow.  I’m not sure.

My other problem, more one with Orthodoxy than Catholicism, is that they are in many ways very alien.  AI grew up Mormon, which claims all kinds of unique distinctiveness but in reality it has deep (and to me, obvious) roots in the frontier Protestantism of the early 19th century, so Protestantism is more culturally consonant for me.  Becoming Catholic or Orthodox would be almost as jarring as becoming Hindu.

Again, maybe that’s actually good- maybe encountering Christ shouldn’t be about being comfortable but instead should be about following him, even if it means following him into strange places.

I have a lot to think about.

Oh, and on a practical note- Orthodox liturgy is long, and you have to stand up the whole time.  I guess you get to sit down in Greek Orthodoxy, but it seems so much more of an ethnically rooted church, and, well, I’m not Greek.

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Emergent Issues: Reinventing the Wheel?

When I read Emergent writers like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, I find myself nodding and agreeing with so much of what they say.  I find the emergent conversation compelling enough that I actually sought out the church that McLaren founded, and that’s where my wife and I go every Sunday these days.

There’s a lot about the emergent conversation that I really like.  But I also have some problems with it that I would like to discuss.   These problems are interrelated and difficult to make really distinct, so they don’t really lend themselves to a bullet-point list in order of importance or something like that.  Instead, I’ll just pretty much tackle the whole thing at once, starting wherever and typing until I feel like I’ve said all I have to say.

One problem I have is that I see, for the most part, the emergent conversation/emerging church is really a child of evangelical Christianity as opposed to Christianity as a whole.  In a way, it seems like a kind of mini-Protestantism, emerging from fundamentalism and evangelicalism the way Protestant Christianity emerged from Catholicism.  The thing was, in the fifteenth century, Catholicism is all there was, so the Reformation was a big thing- its adherents were birthed from the entirety of western Christianity.

By contrast, the emerging church is mostly just the product of evangelicalism, which is only a small slice of current Christianity.  Thus, I feel like it rests on many evangelical assumptions, despite trying its best to be ecumenical and “generous” in its theology and outlook.

In short, I feel like emergent Christianity (and I knowingly use the terms “emerging” and “emergent” interchangeably, Mark Driscoll’s opinions notwithstanding) begins by making evangelical assumptions, finds problems there, and simply assumes that the answers can’t be found anywhere else in Christianity.  Even in McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy, which is a great book, and you should read it, the hat-tip he gives to the rest of Christianity is largely superficial, and betrays his deel evangelical/fundamentalist roots.

Why do I care about this?  Well, for one thing, I have some concerns about evangelical Christianity that the emerging church doesn’t really resolve.  Second, recent things I’ve read make me wonder if the emerging church isn’t really just trying to reinvent the wheel, while rejecting the possibility that the wheel has actually already been invented and refined if not perfected.

I just finished reading Rowan Williams’s book Where God Happens.  Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion.  I plan on posting something lengthy about Anglicanism in the near future, but suffice to say for the moment that Anglicanism is one of the paths I am seriously considering in my journey towards Jesus Christ, but I also have very serious doubts and reservations.

Where God Happens is a short book about the Desert Fathers and the relevance for people today of their teachings, sayings, and way of life.  Interestingly enough, the concepts that Dr. Williams pulls out of the sayings and practices of the Desert Fathers are in many ways extremely similar to the theological ideas and concepts of the emergent church.

This was an extraordinary discovery for me.  Until that point, the emergent conversation had been my oasis, the shining example of what it seemed like Christianity should really be about.  But here is the Archbishop of Canterbury invoking the fourth-century Desert Fathers (and Mothers; let’s not leave out Amma Syncletica) and the result is basically the same message!  In particular, the ideas about community and relationship and Christian discipleship are startlingly similar to the theological ideas of McLaren et al.  But more importantly, this same message is in a context that lends it so much more authority- or at least that makes it so much more authoritative– than the hemming and hawing we’re-just-regular-guys McLaren and Bell even come close to.  This is completely steeped in the fullness of Christian history and tradition.

The result is that I start to wonder about putting too many of my eggs in the emergent basket.  If they’re just reinventing the wheel, they’re doing it in a humble but arrogant way, assuming that the wheel hasn’t already been invented and highly refined just because they don’t find the wheel in their narrow evangelical and fundamentalist backgrounds.

If all of the things that I like about emergent theology are there for the discovering in historic orthodox Christianity, then maybe emergent Christianity isn’t as great asI thought it was, especially considering my other concerns with evangelicalism that are carried over into the emergent conversation.

Another concern I have with the emergent conversation is in terms of the practice of worship.  While one stream of the emergent conversation is concerned with reworking and refining theology, there’s another, maybe more major stream that is concerned with new and relevant ways of worship.  I am not as excited about this stream, although it is generally seen by the rest of the evangelical world as the more acceptable facet of emergent Christianity.

These new ways of worship often involve pairing religious innovation with recovered ancient Christian traditions.  Once again, my problem is that this is completely from an evangelical standpoint.  The ancient traditions of worship and spirituality are not lost; they have merely been abandoned by evangelical Protestantism.  They are still easy to find and access in many Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and even traditional Protestant churches and communities.  And when the emergent church “recaptures” these traditions, they always seem so much more… superficial than they do when seen in practice in their traditional context, in something like an Eastern Orthodox Liturgy.

Furthermore, I’m not necessarily always excited about innovative worship.  To me, it assumes that the traditional ways have been fully mined for meaning and there’s none left, so we need to make up something new.  And I challenge that assertion.  I think part of the problem is a media-soaked culture that has forgotten how to be still and reflective, how to take time, to be thoughtful, and to let spiritual things penetrate deeply.  I think if we could recover contemplation, then the traditional ways of worship, the ones that have proven themselves relevant to human beings for up to twenty centuries, will still be just as relevant as they have always been.

I think there is room for thoughtful innovation in worship, but I think it is a thing that should be done carefully and deliberately, not recklessly.

My final criticism of the emerging church is its concern with being relevant to the postmodern person, and its general marriage to postmodernism.  As a postmodern person, it seems great, but at the same time, I long for a faith that stands outside of and independent of philosophical trends and momentary (compared to the continuity of human history) ways of thinking.  Christianity existed before modernism, and I think embracing modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to Christianity (I’ll post more about this later, but in my opinion, embracing modernism means either taking the path of theological liberalism or the path of theological fundamentalism, both of which make Christianity look foolish).  At the same time, I have no real confidence that people won’t say the same thing about postmodernism in a few hundred years.  Postmodernism may be a new way of thinking and a refreshing alternative to modernism, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve “finally gotten it right.”  Down the road, postmodernism will be outdated and will be junked with all of the other antiquated philosophical frameworks that humanity has consigned to the collective cognitive dusty attic.

I think Christianity should be able to stand outside of passing waves of philosophy- it should be something that endures apart from and independent of “the way people think.”  It should be an alternative to the current philosophical trend, not just one more manifestation of it.  It might make Christianity difficult to the individual who is hesitant to set aside his conventional philosophical framework, but I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.  I believe that there are ways in which Christianity should be difficult.  When Jesus Christ said his yoke was easy and his burden was light, I really don’t think he meant that his way meant not having to change the way we live and think.  In fact, I’m fairly convinced that he meant the opposite.

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The Old Limbo Crossoads

In many ways, I’m standing at a crossroads, spiritually. I have some ideas about what I think real Christianity is all about, what God wants from me, what I think is important, and what I want from God. I also see several clear paths I could go down, each of which has definite strengths and weaknesses in relation to what I want and what I think God wants, meaning that they all lead somewhere probably pretty good, but I don’t think any of them really leads where I want to go, where I will find Jesus Christ.

I have said in previous posts that I have a hard time really articulating some of these issues because they are in many ways abstract and sometimes ill-defined. It’s not that I have a clear picture in my head that I can’t put words to so much as it is that I have a vague, fuzzy half-picture in my head that if I tried to define it in words, I’d probably get it wrong. Sometimes when I’m talking about religion, faith, and spirituality, I feel more than a little like J. Alfred Prufrock.

Anyway, in the next four posts, I’m going to try to describe the four paths I see, as I see them, and to explain why I simultaneously want to go down each but also fear that none of them leads where I think I will truly encounter Jesus Christ. The four paths are Evangelical Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism.

Also a little warning- like I said in past posts, I’m feeling a bit vulnerable right now and I want to be able to express myself without having to defend myself. I’m interested in comments and feedback, but I imagine I’m going to be a little quicker than usual to delete comments if I feel they are hostile or overly critical. Just a fair warning.

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Why Wasn’t Joseph Smith Catholic?

One particularly (in my opinion) credulous meme in the Mormon Church is that the time, place, and manner in which the Church was restored was the only way God could have done it. Now granted, Mormon God is not fully omnipotent in the definitional sense (even though the missionaries teach that he is), but seriously, it seems pretty clear to me that if God needed to do the Restoration, he could have done it anywhere he wanted. Europe handled the Reformation, and Protestantism is going strong today. Europe could have also handled the Restoration, assuming such a thing needed to happen at all.

In my last post, I talked about the problems with the doctrine of the Great Apostasy. I want to now deal with a couple more. Primarily, if some regeneration did need to happen, why didn’t God do it within his Church, like he appears to have done at very other time throughout Mormon scriptural history? Why wasn’t Joseph Smith a Roman Catholic (or Eastern Orthodox!) priest who God raised up to be His Pope and restore all that was lost? Unless the Catholic Church wasn’t God’s church, but that could only be the case if True Christians were actually wiped out and replaced by impostors at some point. Gradual corruption never made God totally abandon his Church and start over again in the scriptures, so why would this be the one weird exception?

Because God couldn’t have done so? Poppycock. At best, God didn’t want to. Mysterious ways and all that, but to me that’s really a cop-out. The whole business is one more counterintuitive thing that has to be accepted on faith, or based on an extremely subtle “whispering of the spirit” that is absolutely indistinguishable from the rublmings in my stomach due to not having eaten breakfast yet.

And don’t even get me started on why God waited like 1800 years to restore the truth. That’s nonsense. The bit about how that’s when the time was right is also nonsense. Even if God had to do the whole Restoration thing the way he supposedly has done it according to Mormonism, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have persevered despite the persecution just like all kinds of other heretical movements throughout Christianity have done.

And seriously, this is God. He can preserve his people from their enemies, right! Didn’t he have an angel kill like 180,000 people in the Bible once to preserve the Israelites? Sigh.

Note- I have also added this post to my Sailing Away From Mormonism page.

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How Great Was The Apostasy?

In order for the Mormon church to make any sense, there has to have been a Restoration. In order for there to need to be a Restoration, there has to have been a Great Apostasy. This is fundamental enough that the new Preach My Gospel manual that the missionaries use starts out with the Great Apostasy from the beginning. The main problem, in my opinion, is that there’s no good evidence that such a Great Apostasy occurred, at least to the extent that it would have needed to occur for Mormon theology to make sense.

From the standpoint of Mormonism, the Apostasy meant that 1) there were no more living prophets and/or apostles to continuously reveal the truth, 2) true doctrine became subverted by human ideas and was thus lost (and without living prophets, it was not re-discoverable), and 3) the priesthood authority was gone from the earth.

Each one of those points is incredibly problematic. The first point seems hard to argue with, because nobody was claiming to receive revelation, prophet-style, on behalf of all Christendom. To many Mormons, thats eals the deal. However, the sad truth is that the Latter-Day church doesn’t seem to get ay revelation, either. After Joseph Smith, there’s basically been a long line of prophets who don’t prohesy. Now, most Mormons will dispute this, and their evidence will be geenrally statements that they personally ascribe prophetic-revelation-status to (though the maker of the statement did not), or they appeal to the “probability” that the prophet gets these big revelations all the time, but doesn’t share them with the Church and the world for whatever reason. Or, barring those, they will shift their definition of revelation to include a moregeneral type of inspiration.

In any case, there’s not much evidence that the rate of contemporary revelation right now was any different than during the Great Apostasy. Nevertheless, there’s a differnence- the next two points (true doctrine and priesthood authority) make clear the difference between the Church during the Great Apostasy and the Latter-Day Church.

James E. Talmage, in pretty much any book he wrote, was quick to trot out shady, questionable doctrines and practices of the medieval Catholic church as evidence of its apostasy. What it basically comes down to is that doctrines were changed away from the “plain and precious truths” that were taught by Jesus Christ and his apostles. This is also problematic, for a couple of reasons.

First, despite what Mormons may learn in Primary and Sunday School, many doctrines and practices have also changed during the not-quite-two-hundred years of the latter-day church. I need only mention the big, contentious ones like polygamy, Blood Atonement, and the Adam-God theory. Sure, some of those doctrines have come and gone, but so did some of the questionable Catholic doctrines that Talmage loves to pick on. It’s not limited to the anti-Mormon fodder, either. Plenty of other doctrines and practices have changed or evolved over time and members don;t even bat an eye.

As an aside- a common Mormon metaphor for the Apostasy and Restoration is a broken glass. You can’t just put the pieces of a broken glass back together to make the cup good again; you have to actually make a new cup. The broken glass is the Christian church during the Apostasy and the new-blown glass is the Restored church. If the Apostasy was just a matter of inspired leadership and correct doctrine, then the metaphor is complete junk. Rediscovering old, correct doctrine, if such a thing exists, is merely a matter of going back to old texts and seeing what was taught before the change away from the truth. It is well within human capability, and it’s exactly what the Reformers were trying to do. If it was just a matter of inspiration/revelation and true doctrine, then the Reformation (and accompanying counter-reformation) should have done the trick. The Mormon Church even teaches that those men were inspired.

This is the point in the discussion where the Mormon falls back to the bunker of Priesthod authority, but I am afraid there is no cover to be found there either.

According to Mormon theology, the big evidence for the Apostasy and Restoration, the real clincher, was authority. God’s priesthood, the power and authority to act (and lead) in His name, was gone from the earth. It had to be fully restored in order for God to run things the right way, for the ordinances like baptism to have any effect, and for the Kingdom of God to be built on earth.

However, there’s no real indication that the Priesthood, assuming that it did indeed exist the way that Mormonism teaches that it once did, ever left the earth. In fact, I think it’s completely and utterly unreasonable to think that it did.

Mormonism believes in a lay priesthood- all worthy men can (and these days should and are) be ordained deacons, teachers, priests, and elders. This Priesthood existed in the time of the apostles, but it was lost, so only the apostles themselves could give the Priesthood back to us. Thus, first John the Baptist and then Peter James and John appeared to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery to give them this priesthood, so there would be an unbroken line of authority back to Jesus Christ (for the Melchizidek Priesthood) and to Aaron (for the Aaronic Priesthood).

But that means that this lay Priesthood existed in New Testament times, but it had disappeared by Joseph Smith’s time. The problem is that the Christian church didn’t disappear during that time. In order to have the Priesthood die out and fade away but the Church continue, you’d have to have an entire generation of Priesthood-holders simply not give the Priesthood to anyone else. Simultaneously, you’d have to have an entire generation of Church leadership come in and claim leadership positions without even holding the Priesthood (if you think about that in the framework of the modern Mormon Chruch, it doesn’t even make sense).

The Mormons claim that John, not Linus, was the second leader of the Church (since he got Revelation on Patmos after Peter’s death, and only the leader of the Church would get scriptural revelation like that), which means that the Catholic line of authority was broken from the beginning. The problem with that apologetic is that it confuses leadership with the Priesthood. Linus may not have been “the prophet,” but as a member of the Church, there’s no reason at allt ot hink he didn’t have the Priesthood. Past that, the Catholic church (and the Orthodox Church and even the Anglican Communion) can show an unbroken line of apostolic succession all the way down to the current set of bishops. What reason then is there to believe that all those bishops don’t have the Priesthood?

Sure, they may not use it right, and they may have their heads full of false doctrine, but Mormon theology is pretty clear that priesthood authority doesn’t go away despite personal apostasy. A wicked missionary’s baptism is still valid, because he had the authority, and it was the Priesthood (i.e., God) doing the job, not him. Look at Alma the Elder in the Book of Mormon- he was one of a whole crop of evil clergymen who were ordained by the equally wicked King Noah and were doing al kinds of wring things and teaching all kinds of wrong doctrines. Nevertheless, the line of authority that gave Alma his Priesthood was still a valid one, so he could baptize all of those people at the Waters of Mormon. If he had the Priesthood, then why don’t the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox clergy have the Priesthood?

In short, although there may have been a falling away from the truth over time, there’s no real reason to believe that The Great Apostasy ever happened in such a way as to necessitate the Restoration as it is taught in Mormonism.

Note- I have added this post to my Sailing Away From Mormonism page.

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Liturgy & Etcetera

I’ve been thinking about what kind of Christian I want to be if I decide to be Christian after all.  I’m kind of torn.  I currently got o Cedar Ridge Community Church (the one founded by Brian McLaren) with my wife.  She likes it a lot, and she’s looking to settle down in a congregation and make it her home.  I can’t say I blame her.  She’s pretty solid in her Christianity, and just wants to get on with living a Christian life, being part of authentic community, and worshipping God, and I can’t say I blame her.  In many ways, my religious search is probably frustrating as I nervously flit back and forth between all kinds of different ideas and theologies.

There’s much about emergent Christianity that appeals to me.  The sermons at Cedar Ridge are dynamite- I agree with the theology being presented 100%.  However, I’m not incredibly excited aboutt he mode of worship.  Actually, I think it’s innovative, relevant, and a fantastic idea, but I don’t know that it’s the mode of worship that really appeals to me and connects for me.

I’d be much more comfortable in a more traditional liturgical service- Episcopal, Lutheran, or even Eastern Orthodox (I’m looking forward to trying out a Greek Orthodox service in the near future).  I like the liturgy.  I prefer the music- I’m not all that enthusiastic about contemporary praise music.  Some of it can be great, but not all the time; it just doesn’t mesh with my preconceived notions about what “church” and “worship” are supposed to be like.

In some ways, because of it’s broad tolerance for vastly differing theological approaches, the Episcopal Church would be almost ideal.  I really enjoy a good Episcopal service.  However, I prefer the sermons at Cedar Ridge by a factor of maybe a million.  And Cedar Ridge seems like one of the most friendly, welcoming places we’ve come to (other than maybe the Quakers).

The other factor is that I’m not excited about going to church separately from my wife.  I feel pretty strongly about that.  We should be together at church.  Even if I decide to be a committed atheist, I still plan on going to church with my wife every Sunday for the rest of my life.  It just feels right to me.

I don’t dislike anything about Cedar Ridge.  It’s just not my ideal fantasy church.  I don’t mind going to Cedar Ridge (and I certainly get something- quite a bit actually- out of it when I go), but I’m not so sure that in terms of worship it’s a perfect match for me.

The whole issue is pretty much unripe though, given that I still haven’t decided that God exists anyway.  But if I do decide to be a theist, it’ll be an issue.

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