Mormon Folk and “Church of Christ” Folk . . .

SPAGHETTI WITH MORMONS

A friend was so kind’ as to give me tickets to a spaghetti dinner at the new Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints here in Denton. I was glad to get to go, whether at my, friend’s expense or my own, not only because I like spaghetti, but also because I like people, including Mormons. It also gave me a chance to get a close look at their fashionable new edifice. The Mormons are concentrating on university cities, and Denton is but one among many college towns in America where new buildings are being built.

The non-Mormon who wrote a book entitled These Amazing Mormons has the right description. It has always been a source of amazement to me that they could create a “restored gospel” from the fantastic story of Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni and win converts to it throughout the world. Presently they have 13,000 missionaries scattered throughout most of the countries of the world. The ministry of their church is about as free of professionalism as a denomination could be. Even the missionaries go out self-supported. Each Mormon is expected to tithe, which provides for a welfare system that almost defies description. No Mormon has to beg, and each one knows that if the worst comes the saints will take care of him; the church gives all their unemployed a job, even if it is nothing but sticking labels on canned goods to be distributed to the poor.

Every male Mormon is expected to give two years of his life as a missionary for the church, and now the women are getting into the act. This year 1,000 women are out telling the story of the “restored gospel.” The chances are that Mormon elders have come to your door, perhaps more than once. They convert something like 60,000 people each year. They started in 1831 and by 1906 they had over 200,000 members. Today they number about one and a half million, not counting the Reorganized Church in Missouri.

Their new church here in Denton is as elegant and utilitarian as any edifice one would expect to find anywhere, perhaps the finest in this city. It had such a professional touch about it that I suspected the plans came out of Salt Lake. Not only was this confirmed by my visit, but I also learned that headquarters also sent the engineer to build it. The man stays busy all time, going from city to city building Mormon churches. The building is but the first unit of a rather elaborate layout, which will eventually include a gymnasium and ballroom, fellowship hall, etc. It is their policy to provide entertainment for their youth on the church grounds. Their dances and sports open with a prayer. Say what you will about this, the fact is that juvenile delinquency is almost non-existent among them and divorce is something that they only hear about — and when their youth grow up they are still in the Mormon church!

Now, aren’t they amazing? But the most amazing feature is their history. You should follow them from western New York in the days of Joe Smith and Sidney Rigdon into Illinois and Missouri and finally into Utah with Brigham Young. The fabulous story, which includes rugged courage, unbelievable hardship and heartbreak and sordid tales of polygamy and murder, is a fantastic chapter. in American history. When we were at Harvard my wife spent days going through Tell It All, written by a highly intelligent woman who did indeed tell it all — how her husband was converted to Mormonism and was finally led to take other wives. She described the heartbreak she felt when her husband of many years left her side to sleep with his second wife, who was young and pretty — all of course in the name of the Lord! My wife wept all the way through it.

If their history is fantastic, their doctrines are even more so. They baptize each other in behalf of people who have long been dead, claiming that 1 Cor. 15:29 supports such a practice. They have at least three “inspired” books to look to besides the Bible, and they have a president (the church’s High Priest) who receives still further revelations. They have upward of a dozen temples, at least one of which cost six million dollars, in which there are secret rooms in which couples may enter into celestial wedlock. For a generation or two the Mormons lived polygamously for both time and eternity, until plurality of wives was forbidden by the government. Even now however the Mormons can look forward to a heavenly bliss of celestial polygamy.

Their doctrine of man is one of the most peculiar in the history of ideas, which in the final analysis makes man (Adam) himself God. Souls await in celestial spheres to be born, thus the reason for polygamy. Man is destined to rule as a god with his celestial wives enthroned as queens. The theories become quite involved, but it is apparent how important polygamy is to the system of Mormonism. Brigham Young is quoted in Wife No. 19 (a book the Mormons seek to destroy) as saying that Jesus was a polygamist, that Martha and Mary were his wives, and that the marriage at Cana was his own. Sex has been dominant in Mormon history, so much so that a Freudian psychologist might find it a fruitful area in which to test his theories.

Well, the spaghetti was tasty enough, and the friendly repast with my neighborly Mormons was even better. Later I was visited by two lovely, intelligent girls of college age who are in Texas from Salt Lake, serving their time as missionaries. I did my best to get these girls to assure me that the Christ and the Bible were sufficient for light and life, but they would not. To be within the fellowship of God I need more than the Christ and his Word, for I must accept the “restored gospel” brought by the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith. I went so far as to suggest that we enroll Joe Smith as a prophet, if they wanted it that way, but that it is still in the Christ and only in Him that there is salvation. Neither will this do. One must accept Moroni’s revelations that led to the organization of the Mormon church in order to be what God wants him to be. It all boils down to accepting the Mormon church as the right one. Unless one does this he might not even go to heaven at all, much less bask in the bliss of celestial marriage, whether with one woman or many. The loss of the latter prospect is indeed disconcerting!

Since this rendezvous with the Mormons I have been thinking about ourselves. I must not suggest, of course, that we are like the Mormons, who indeed have an angel from heaven preaching a different gospel. But there are some respects in which the “Church of Christ” is like the Mormons. We too preach a “we are the true church” gospel more than the Christian gospel. Like the Mormons, we talk of the right church, right name, right organization, and right worship — and, like the Mormons, we make this kind of thing the basis of Christian fellowship” And I don’t believe a word of it, whether preached by the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” in Denton or the “Church of Christ” in Denton, the “Latter-Day” or “Former-Day” Saints!

We are not content to receive one into “the fellowship” simply upon his confession that Jesus is the Christ and his baptism into the Christ. He must also be right about a long list of things that we make tests of fellowship, and our several different factions differ as to what these things are. We call ourselves “unsectarian” while we lay down stipulations for fellowship that go far beyond the profession of Jesus as Lord. One must wear the right name, and the church must be named like we name ours; he must be right about instrumental music, the Lord’s day, the millennium, organization, and a score of other things.

Like the Mormons, who will receive no one into Christian fellowship until he accepts all the trappings of Mormonism, just so we do not accept saints of God (yes, saints of God, people who are as much Christian as we are) unless they accept all the trappings of Church of Christ teaching. Like the Mormons, we preach our church as much or more than we preach the Christ — and there just big difference between the two!

A preacher from one of the big churches in Dallas was preaching by radio on what one must do to be a Christian. After outlining the five steps of the plan of salvation he proceeded to list other things the Christian must do, and anyone who knows the Church of Christ song and dance could follow each step. He said that for one to be a Christian he must lay by in store on the first day of the week as God has prospered him, quoting 1 Cor. 16:2.

That one point leaves out my wife and me, for as often as not we mail our check to the congregation’s secretary once each month, which may not be a Sunday at all, and we only occasionally drop our check in a basket on a Lord’s Day. We are not Christians according to both “Church of Christ” and Mormon doctrines, for according to “Church of Christ” doctrine we are not obeying 1 Cor. 16:2, and according to Mormon doctrine we are supporting a sectarian church, as any non-Mormon church would be. That last reason would do for the ‘Church of Christ” too, for any non-Church of Christ is a sectarian church — as are many “Churches of Christ”, depending on which faction you belong to!

If you ask me point blank if I believe that both the Mormon church and our own “Church of Christ” are sects, the answer is yes! I love the Mormons deeply, and most certainly I am especially devoted to our own “Church of Christ” people, believing many of them to be as fine Christians as can be found anywhere (and I do believe there are others elsewhere!), and yet I would urge both groups alike to lay aside their demands for conformity to their peculiar doctrines as basis for fellowship.

Both groups are factious because they make their interpretation of the church, with its work, organization and worship, necessary to fellowship, if not salvation itself.

Both groups are sects in that they have created a System, including a clearly-defined creed, that they insist upon as grounds for Christian brotherhood. Neither will accept a man or another congregation upon the simple profession of Christ as Lord and baptism. Both preach an “iffy” gospel: if you do as we do on this and if you believe as we do on that, then we’ll receive you. Both groups, of course, have an infallible interpretation of the scriptures, which gives them the right to draw such lines on fellow Christians. After all, there is no argument against being right. You are simply to accept it!

It is debatable as to which group is more enslaved and blinded by their audacities and prejudices. My Mormon girls, bless their hearts, said they knew Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and that the Mormon church is right. They furthermore assured me that I too would be made to see it someday. I always find it difficult to have dialogue with certitude, for dialogue implies a search for truth, and those who have already arrived are not in that search.

Early in the “dialogue” I asked the girls if they had carefully studied any of the reasonable and responsible treatments of Mormonism by a non-Mormon, such things as an examination of the anachronisms of the Book of Mormon or the Spaulding-Rigdon Manuscript. They said they had not, but they thought maybe they could. But those dear girls won’t and they can’t — not and stay in the System.

But are the Mormons any more certain than most of our own brethren. Have you tried a dialogue with a typical “Church of Christ” member? I say typical, for these days there are more and more nonconformists that the keepers-of-orthodoxy are having trouble corralling. Well, the typical brother is no less convinced and no less blinded than the Mormon. Both are in the only right church and they KNOW it. There is no need for such ones to search for truth.

Until they make some radical changes in attitude, neither of these groups will make any substantial contribution to a united congregation of believers. Though they may compass sea and land to gain proselytes for their own churches, they will contribute little toward the unity of all believers. Rather each one, from his own sectarian corner, will issue affirmations that the answer to the problem of a divided Christendom is after all a simple one: all the rest of the Christian world is to conform to our likeness.

But I love them both — spaghetti or no spaghetti — and I shall continue to be a brother to both to the extent that they’ll let me.

“First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” (2 Pet. 1:20-21) — The Editor