Edit: Fuck some of these comments Y’all sick in the head. I’m out.

  • wjrii@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    I think it’s fairer to describe Mormons as nontrinitarian Christians, sort of a “neo-Arian heresy”. They specifically believe Christ to be part of a uniquely divine trinity with God the Father and the Holy Ghost, and that Christ died to redeem humanity and was resurrected (at which point he floated home for the weekend then stopped in on all the Jewish folks living in the Americas, of course).

    They also believe he was created as a “first among equals” son of God and, once you tug on a couple of uniquely Mormon threads, that God the Father probably had actual relations with Mary to conceive Jesus’s body, which after resurrection was “perfected” and divine, just like his dad’s.

    So anyway, Jesus holds a centrality to Mormon religion in a way he simply doesn’t for Islam, even with the large number of roles Muslims believe Jesus played and will play in the future. While his nature is different for Mormons, his role in their faith is much more analogous to “vanilla” Nicene Christianity. He is part of a tripartite Godhead and is their Savior, and faith in that is necessary for an individual’s salvation.

    Thomas Aquinas would roll his eyes at the unexplored repercussions of it all, but Mormons have thirteen “articles of faith” that we were supposed to learn as kids. A lot of the nonsense follows from a half-educated conman in WAY over his head trying to keep it all going and expand his own authority (including the authority to sleep with whomever he wanted) but specifically NOT to move beyond something his adherents would identify as Christian.

    Even if he failed at that, and you can argue he did, I would argue that the specifics of the theological niceties only tell part of the story, and the Mormon movement has to be viewed in its cultural context, and Mormons have always self-identified as Christians in a way that was not merely semantic.