LDS: Ravi and the Godhead

This will be the conclusion of my report of B. and my meeting with the Mormons this past Wednesday. But first, following up from my recent post regarding the Most Improbable Dialogue article, here is the video of Ravi Zacharias' 2004 visit to the Tabernacle.

What struck me most was the following statement by Fuller Seminary president Richard Mouw, who played a significant role in organizing the event:

"I know that I have learned much in this continuing dialogue, and I am now convinced that we evangelicals have often seriously misrepresented the beliefs and practices of the Mormon community. Indeed, let me state it bluntly to the LDS folks here this evening: we have sinned against you. The God of the Scriptures makes it clear that it is a terrible thing to bear false witness against our neighbors, and we have been guilty of that sort of transgression in things we have said about you. We have told you what you believe without making a sincere effort first of all to ask you what you believe."

When we were speaking with the Mormons, the topic of Mormon-evangelical dialogue also came up. B. and my friend J. attends Bethany Bible College, and apparently a Mormon was invited there to explain his beliefs some time ago. The missionaries, after asking some questions about the fellow, thought that they knew him. Asked how he felt about speaking at the Bible College Elder C., who in my mind is often the most forthright of the two, thought for a second and replied, "He said he was pretty scared." I know I would be scared if I were heading to BYU to defend my beliefs.

And now, regarding the Godhead:

Of the differences I have identified to date between LDS and mainstream Christian belief, two stand out as especially important: (1) the legitimacy of the restored priesthood (including the authenticity of the Book of Mormon), and (2) the nature of the Godhead. B. and I had already discussed (1) to some extent, as detailed in my previous post. We thereafter turned to some discussion of (2).

I asked the missionaries if they could reiterate briefly for B., and for my remembrance, some of what they had told me previously about the Godhead. They were quite willing to do so, and put forth the following points:

1. God is identified as Elohim of the Old Testament. They often call him "Heavenly Father."
   
2. Jesus, who is the son of Heavenly Father, is Jehovah/Yahweh of the Old Testament (the JW's would have a heyday with this).
3. Jehovah (the tetragrammaton, YHWH, usually translated nowadays as "LORD" in all caps)  in the OT was the spirit of Jesus before being born into a body. The LDS believe that everybody existed as a spirit before having a body, including Jesus and God.
4. The person of the Holy Ghost is the third part of the Godhead. (I have read that the Holy Ghost, the person, is also considered by the LDS as different from the Holy Spirit, that is the spirit of God. I did not detect this distinction in our discussion, but I expect I will ask about it sooner or later.)
5. These three distinct parts are "United in Purpose".

I think it is evident from these points that the LDS belief on the Godhead departs significantly from traditional Christian doctrine. Interestingly, I think the above is compatible with the wording – though perhaps not the intent – of the Apostle's Creed.  In the time we had left, B. and I questioned the Elders on some of these points.

Our first question was about the unity of the Godhead. The LDS and Christian doctrines have in common that God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost are divided, and unified to some extent, but from point (5) above we see that theirs is a slightly different concept of unity. Elder C. expressed the LDS concept of unity clearly (I think he was quoting but I forget), saying it means that "Whatever circumstances in whatever time, they will all come to the same conclusion."

Both B. and I were surprised about the whole Jehovah = Jesus thing. The Mormons substantiated the belief with verses such as Psalm 3:8, that says, "Salvation belongs to the LORD; your blessings be on your people" (ESV). Since salvation belongs to YHWH, and we know it was Jesus who ultimately saves mankind, the only way this verse (and others like it) makes sense is if YHWH is the same person as Jesus. This requires, by the Mormon understanding that Jesus isn't God, that Jesus still be YHWH and YHWH not be God. (Convoluted, no?) After they brought up and explained this example, I quietly looked up and said, "But you can see why a passage like this would cause absolutely no problem for us and our Trinity thing, right?" They laughed and agreed.

As I suspected above, the JW's have complained about the YHWH = Jesus thing. The Elders told us a few stories about this, and took particular delight in the story of one JW woman who repeatedly criticised the LDS leaders about the YHWY = Jesus belief, and eventually went to Salt Lake City to harangue them about it. One of the Apostles wrote to her and said that if she continued he would speak out publicly and "break" her beliefs. (Elder M. said "crush" her beliefs originally, but Elder. C corrected him to what I think is a more poetic wording anyway.) From what they told us, he did just that. (I may have some details of the story wrong, but the gist of it should be right.) Apparently there is a document detailing the LDS arguments for the YHWH = Jesus belief, written specifically against the beliefs of JW's, called the "Jehovah's Witness Shuffle". I had to ask why it was called that, but the missionaries had no idea.

We went through a few passages regarding the separateness of God and Jesus. I think the most convincing of these to me was the vision of Stephen while he was being stoned (Acts 7:55-56), where he sees God and Jesus in heaven as two separate people. This parallels the experience reported by Joseph Smith, Jr. of seeing God and Jesus as separate beings in Doctrine and Covenants 76:19-24.

By contrast,  B. brought us to John 1:1, which is a very clear statement of the unity of God and Jesus given that Jesus is the Logos (translated "the Word"). B., the Mormons and I all believe that "the Word" refers to Jesus, and so the passage seemed clearly to indicate their identity despite the separateness:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (ESV)

B. impressed the Mormons by having me recite it in Greek, on which count I lucked out because this is the only verse I can recite in Greek. the Mormons attempted to reconcile the verse with their beliefs by suggesting that the Logos was only being called a god in the sense that they believe all humans will become gods, and not that He was being equated with Heavenly Father. At the time, I thought I remembered that the language reinforced the identity of God and the Logos, related to the Greek word for God, "theos", lacking a definite article in the phrase "the Word was God."

It turns out, I don't know what I'm talking about. After examining the Greek and some online searching, it seems that many scholars entirely unconnected with the LDS church support the translation "a God" rather than "God" because of the lacking definite article. The wikipedia article on John 1:1 is well referenced regarding the dispute. I need to look further into the issue, but a-priori I think there is a basis for a translation of John 1:1 that is compatible with the LDS belief, and so we will have to turn to other verses to support the identity in substance of God and Jesus.

That is where we ended our discussion for the evening, with an agreement to meet again at my apartment the following Wednesday.

I have asked the missionaries if we can, at our next meeting, go over the Apostles' Creed, and see where exactly they disagree with Christian orthodoxy. Also, the missionaries left me with a list of scriptures supporting their beliefs in the Godhead that I will read through before next week. It seems to me, right now, that we are engaged in two fruitful discussions about the very differences between our beliefs and theirs, and I look forward to more of the same.

I am kind of thinking that I would like to hang out with the missionaries a little more. We played baseball, did yardwork, and went out to lunch together one day in September, and I think Elder M. in particular enjoyed it greatly. They have plenty of fellowship within their own church, but I think there is great value not only in interfaith dialogue but also in interfaith fellowship, and I will be looking for such opportunities in the future.

Also, FYI, there is an article by the past LDS President Gordon B. Hinkley that details the Mormon conceptions of the Godhead quite well.

JW: What does the Bible Really Teach?, Chapter 1, Part 1

I am currently in meetings with ~2 Jehovah's witnesses, Kathy and Kathy (seriously), one middle aged and one slightly older. Sometimes, when one can't come, a non-Kathy missionary takes her place. They are not my favourite people in the world, for reasons I will soon outline, but my disdain has changed to pity as of our latest meeting, and perhaps I will be better at loving them hereafter. Our most recent meeting was yesterday, and was the first of a series going through the JW book What does the Bible Really Teach? (emphasis theirs).

About those reasons. My former roommate and I, around 2002, spoke with two JW missionaries over the course of a handful of meetings. It was a revealing experience at first, but after a short time the meetings degenerated into the missionaries reiterating pat answers as we tried to rephrase our questions in the hope that they had simply been misunderstood. I think eventually we moved and they stopped contacting us. My experience has been biased from the outset by that previous set of meetings.

During my current set of meetings, I have, until yesterday, left every one feeling deeply disturbed. This is in many senses just a personal impression. The missionaries (K&K, as well as the substitutes) have almost universally staunchly not met my eyes when we talk, not addressed the questions I was actually asking, and spoken in very superficial ways about things that to me are very profound. I am not sure why I find this troubling. They seem to me like empty shells, with nothing inside of them, and something about the combination of that and talking about things of God is horrific to me.

I have rationalized my fear (and thus reinforced it) in some ways. Reading their literature, I have discovered that they are "the ones who don't like blood transfusions". The bases for this belief, which I will explore at some later point, are shockingly trivial. That people could ignore their inbuilt moral compass and let people die on the basis of such poor arguments is pretty appalling. I suppose it ought to be even more appalling that they are dealing so lightly with the salvation of those they speak to. There is also their flagrant (by my understanding) abuse of the Biblical text, both in their literature and in discourse. That is always disturbing, in light of the plentiful evil instigated by disregard for the cultural and literary context of religious texts.

So much for my personal impressions of the JW's. Far be it from me to let fear prevent ecumenical discourse.

After a few meetings that jumped around wildly the JW's presented me with a copy of What does the Bible Really Teach?, and suggested that we go through it. They have a corresponding discussion guide, giving questions for each paragraph or two of the book, that they are meant to ask the subject of their witnessing. I agreed to this format, as it seems a good way to have an overview of their beliefs and the reasons for them, and in the spirit of forcing myself to "give them a chance" despite my personal qualms. My goal in these and all discussions is to remain to the best of my ability open but critical. And if I am honest, I must confess a secondary goal in this case, of trying to draw the JW's out of their shells a bit and see if they really are "real people" beneath the exterior they present. In the meeting I will describe here, we covered most of the first chapter, titled "What is the Truth About God?" At this meeting, the younger Kathy was replaced with a Serbian woman whose name escapes me.

The introduction to the talk took me by surprise. The JW's are masters of corny illustrations, and they began by directing me to two pages of them at the start of the book. The pictures show faded images of infirm humans juxtaposed with vibrantly coloured images of the same humans healed of their infirmities. Apparently a question went with these two. "Now Rob," asked Kathy (they like to call me Rob), "do you like what you see in those pictures? Wouldn't it be wonderful if the whole world were like that?"

Now, I knew exactly where that question was directed. In many of our previous talks, the JW's have tried to convince me that an Earth without infirmity is a "good enough" heaven. I answered honestly, but couldn't resist letting them know that I was on to them: "Of course I would like to see those things. But we see most of those things already, when people are healed by the medical profession. You are asking if I would like it if those good things always happened, and nothing bad did. Of course I would; that is the way the world was meant to be."

I saved comments along the lines of "...but those pictures are nothing compared to what I think God has in store for us", as not really relevant to the question and valuable at a later date. We began going through the chapter.

Most of the first chapter presents things I already believe: God loves us, God is just, God wants us to know Him, we can have a close personal relationship with Him. Standard tract. There are also plentiful encouragement to question assumptions and to seek truth, which is neither here nor there. I find the JW's tend to emphasize this more, probably because they disagree with some of the more fundamental aspects of orthodox Christianity (e.g. the Trinity, or Hell), and wish for people to question those. Of course, in tract form the exhortation to question often only extends to the reader's current beliefs and not to the ones meant to replace them. The same is true here. In my disdain for the JW's, I was very tempted to ask the missionaries if they questioned their own beliefs often, but I restrained my tongue.

We covered much of the chapter in the meeting yesterday. I will highlight two topics. First, on the problem of pain, and second, on the name of God.

I was dismayed by the weakness of argumentation in the first chapter about the problem of pain. In my mind, if they bring it up in the first chapter, they had better present some good answer for it. I can summarize the answer given by the book as follows:

1. God doesn't cause the suffering, He allows it.
2. God has good reasons for allowing it, and he doesn't have to explain them to us, but we will tell you about them in Chapter 11.
   

In my books, this does not constitute a good answer, and I said as much to the missionaries. But I will withhold further judgement until I read the answers given in Chapter 11. And of course, for any orthodox denomination, I would not expect tract answers to necessarily be good answers either.

The JW's consider Scriptural support for whatever they say as very important, but the support usually takes the form of a verse or two which supports their case only given their interpretation of the verses. Sometimes I wonder whether they really believe that the verses mean what they say they mean, but then it is easy with an older Bible translation to just take the meaning you are told a verse has, if you cannot clearly understand its specific meaning or context (and they do favour the KJV). By way of illustration, for what is admittedly an especially bad case, in the discussion on the problem of pain, the JW's book gives the following story to illustrate the difference between God allowing evil and causing it:

"For example, think about a wise and loving father with a grown son who is still living at home with his parents. When the son becomes rebellious and decides to leave home, his father does not stop him The son pursues a bad way of life and gets into trouble. Is the father the cause of the son's problems? No." (1)

The scriptural reference given for this is Luke 15:11-13. The biblically astute might recognize this as the first few verses of the Prodigal Son story, which I will reproduce here:

"And [Jesus] said, 'There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me." And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living.'" (2)

Try as I might, I see nothing there about whether the father is the cause of the son's problems, much less whether God is the cause of ours. It is just a similar story.

Mind you, as with the weak argumentation in tracts, this sort of abuse of Scripture is plentiful within orthodox Christianity as well. It is always disappointing.

The name of God is a big issue for the Jehovah's Witnesses. It is a cornerstone of their beliefs that God's proper name is Jehovah (their representation of the tetragrammaton), and that he should be referred to as such. The reasoning in the book is as follows:

1. In the Old Testament, the importance of God's name is often emphasized, and given as the tetragrammaton (which I will refer to by YHWH, its roman representation).
2. God's name is distinct from titles such as "Lord", "God", "Father", etc. It indicates a more personal relationship.

I asked why Jesus is never recorded as calling God Jehovah, and pointed out that something like "Abba" would indicate an even closer personal relationship. They said that by virtue of His close relationship with God (I wonder if they would ever capitalize Jesus' 'H'), Jesus by saying "Abba" or any other title knew very specifically who he meant. For us, they say, we should be careful to refer specifically to Jehovah since there are other spiritual beings who we might accidentally direct our prayers or worship to. I was very impressed with this answer, since it was reasonable and directly addressed my question. In fact, I think they may have a point. There is value to being able to specify that we are talking to God. Whether the name "Jehovah" helps with that, or rather to what extent it helps, I am not sure. But I told them they had a point, and they were happy.

I then asked whether the name Jehovah actually appears in the New Testament, reasoning that writing the Hebrew representation of God's name in Greek would be strange, and that it may even have seemed sacrilegious at the time to write YHWH in a bunch of letters and stories. I think I nailed them on that one. Their Bible uses "Jehovah" in place of "Lord" somewhere, but that is not the usual translation (sadly, I forget the verse, but the Greek is kyrios, usually translated "Lord", and certainly not "Jehovah"). According to this, albeit only a wikipedia article, YHWH does not appear in any extant NT manuscript. If it were sacrilegious, that would be a great argument against flagrant use of the name "Jehovah". But that is an uneducated guess, and I really know nothing about it.

I suppose to me YHWH, however is interpreted, is only God's name as represented to the Hebrews. I do not especially reverence this name (e.g. being careful not to say it or such, as I understand is part of some Jewish practice). I am sure in any event that God transcends a single name, and it has been my supposition that under the new covenant He can be known personally to anyone by many names and in a way that really defies assigning Him a single name.

So, the JW's haven't convinced me yet that using Jehovah as God's name matters much. But the discussion on that topic was redeeming for them and liberating for me. I discovered that they can, at least sometimes, hit a point that addresses my argument. And perhaps if I can make them a bit more comfortable around me, and get them to open up a little, they will do that more often. So I have a little less fear about the whole thing. At our next meeting, we will hopefully finish Chapter 1 of the book, but we will be beginning with a discussion of the name of God (there's an appendix on it that we will cover), and I am honestly looking forward to that.

As the JW's were leaving to go about their rounds, I commented that they must meet lots of interesting people. They said that they did, but most people weren't really interested in listening to them. Then, for about the first time since I started talking to them, Kathy actually made eye contact and thanked me for listening to them, since most people just shut the door on them. That made me feel that I was doing something of actual value by talking to them. I have to confess, in my heart of hearts, I think I sort of want to convert them. Not so much to my beliefs, but (presumptuous as it is of me to think such a thing) to people whose minds connect more closely with their hearts.

I realize now, typing about it, that walking around every day having doors shut on you might make it very difficult to be open and sincere with somebody you've only recently met behind one of those doors. The thought turns my disdain at their emptiness over pity over the hurt that I presume has caused their exteriors to detach so far from their selves. I think, if I am to know what they are really all about, then my goal should be to let them know that they are safe and comfortable when talking to me. Maybe then they will be able and willing to speak to me from their hearts, and have some real sincere discussions about God and the important things of life.

(1) Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 2005. What Does the Bible Really Teach?. Brooklyn, New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York Inc., 2006. Print.
(2) The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Bibles, 2001. Print.