Thursday, June 17, 2010

Joel Osteen Thinks Mormons are Christians

What do you think? Are Mormons Christians?

5 comments:

Kwame E. said...

I’ll answer your question with a question pertaining to the captions in the video that you linked to.

In this country there are some who believe that Barack Obama is a Kenyan. There are also people who believe that Barack Obama is not a Kenyan but an American. Now I ask you: Does the average American have a “different President” than Birthers do? Do Birthers have a “different President” than the average American has? Are Birthers and other Americans talking about two different entities when they all talk about a DNC presidental candidate who ran against John McCain in November 2008?

There are also pockets of individuals in this country who reportedly believe that Barry Obama is a Muslim, this despite the whole Jeremiah Wright controversy. Is it possible that these individuals do not have “a different President” despite their erroneous beliefs but rather simply have erroneous beliefs about the President?

(And notice that I haven’t committed myself to any particular point of view here, but have simply asked questions.)

D.B. said...

Wouldn't we be able to say that RE: Obama or Mormon God- only one(if any, arguably) of those folks are right.

Either Obama is Kenyan or not. He is Muslim or he is not.

Jesus is either the spirit brother of Lucifer (as Mormons believe) or He is not. He either was a man who earned Himself Godhood or He did not.

My wife made the point concerning the video that he admits he doesn't know a whole lot about Mormonism...so maybe the comments in the video were overly agressive. Basically: for some, Osteen could not have said anything correct-there would always be something to pick on.

I think his mispeaking is something a promenant Christian pastor should know about, though I think she brought up an interesting point.

Kwame E. said...

DB wrote:

«Wouldn't we be able to say that RE: Obama or Mormon God- only one(if any, arguably) of those folks are right.

Either Obama is Kenyan or not. He is Muslim or he is not.

Jesus is either the spirit brother of Lucifer (as Mormons believe) or He is not. He either was a man who earned Himself Godhood or He did not.»

Of course only one side is right. But that is not the only important issue here. I asked whether, under the specific circumstances that I outlined, Birthers and non-Birthers are talking two different people. The answer seems clear: the answer is no, they are not talking about two different entities but a common entity or object. One side holds an erroneous view about the subject of their discussion, but both sides are talking about the same thing. It’s not like on the one hand there is this man out here who is Barack Obama while over here to the side there’s a second man called Barack Obama who somehow manages to occupy exactly the same space and time as the first Barry Obama.

Meanwhile, per the apostle Paul’s use of a phrase such as “another Jesus” (2 Cor 11.4), how many Jesus-s are there anyhow (besides, of course, individuals such as Justus or persons named Yehoshua)? There’s only one Jesus, right? And if you are smart enough to know that, then so is the apostle Paul. Now, keep that thought in the back of your head as you stop to consider the two following views: historically there have been people of the opinion that Aramaic was Christ’s primary language while others have thought it was instead Hebrew. The two camps of people have different beliefs about the Savior, and not both sides can be correct.

Now, do you want to say that one camp has “another Jesus,” according to the meaning of the Pauline phrase, such that one side is non-Christian? Presumably not, and this raises the question of where the line is drawn on the issue of errant beliefs concerning Christ. Who is disqualified, so to speak, from being properly classified as Christian? People who believe in eternal Sonship? People who believe that the Word only later became the Son? For reasons such as these, I for one am not quick to assert that Mormons are not Christians, especially since nowadays you seem to have Mormons who do not know the teachings of their own sect or church.

Likewise, I am not swayed by any argument for Mormons’ not being Christians which could be drawn up from Galatians, chapter one. One person may argue that the baptismal remission doctrine of Mormonism is anti-Gospel and that Galatians 1 shows that Mormons are not Christians since, presumably, Paul would never anathematize Christians. Well, for starters, what kind of people did Paul have in mind in that chapter? And who was Paul talking to in Galatians 1?

(Comments continue on the other side....)

Kwame E. said...

(Continuing...)

If you were to say that these questions are irrelevant, then I would turn your attention to the divide of Arminianism and Calvinism, as an example. Carefully consider 1 Corinthians 15.1-7, where Paul’s gospel includes the datum that Christ “died for our sins.” Calvinists would look at that phrase and see a limited and particular redemption mentioned there, whereas Arminians might see otherwise. Okay, so what happens when you have Arminians who go out and preach to unbelievers that Christ died for everyone’s sins? What happens is that they preach a message which is other than what Paul says in the Corinthian passage. It’s true that the Arminian preaches that Christ died for the elect--for this is logically entailed by the assertion that Christ died for all--and thus preach Paul’s gospel; however, the sum of the Arminian message here is something that Arminians will treat as being the gospel itself. Ergo, that sum is another report of good news--that is, another gospel.

But you don’t want to say that Arminians are not Christians despite their substitutionary gospel and Paul’s words in Galatians 1. Nevertheless, sauce for the goose is just as sweet to the gander; so if we hesitate to say that Arminians are not Christians, then we should not be very quick to say that Mormons are not Christians.

Finally, regardless of the full array of pertinent facts of the issue at hand that one can discover, there will always be Christians who won’t accept the idea of Mormons’ being Christians. For instance, they will never be able to accept the idea that God would allow some of his own children to be so wayward and off the mark as to believe that there will be other gods some day, or that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers, or that God has flesh and bones. And their reluctance may very well be justifiable.

However, one’s opposition to this idea should never be based on reasons of bigotry, arrogance, gut feelings, impressionistic reasoning, or romanticism. For example, if some Christian wants to think that God does not allow his people to lead a pitiful existence of very bad theology and moral failures because, like, it’s just soooo obvious that God would do no such thing, then this person must account for the possibility of Christian idolatry per Colossians 3.5, and 2 Corinthians 11.4 where Christians put up with those who present “another Jesus” and “another gospel.”

But this is what you get when people try to boil the issues down to something very short and simple, as was done with the captions in the Joel Osteen video. It is one thing to stop to calculate the odds of there being regenerated people among a congregation of people who don’t think themselves to be safe or saved until an authorized person baptizes them. And it is one thing to speculate about the mechanisms of Mormon prayer and connotations and denotations of “God” or “Jesus” as these names are used by Mormons--to try to determine whether characteristic Mormon doctrines assert themselves into the natural diachronic, traditional, and causal flow of direct and indirect knowledge of people by which, for example, 21st-century Americans and 18th-century Americans are talking about the same person when they say “George Washington” though the latter have never seen and heard George Washington and may have a couple of false beliefs about the man, such as beliefs of hair color. Yet these things don’t quite fit well into a one-minute video on the Web.

Kwame E. said...

DB wrote:

«My wife made the point concerning the video that he admits he doesn't know a whole lot about Mormonism...so maybe the comments in the video were overly agressive. Basically: for some, Osteen could not have said anything correct-there would always be something to pick on.»

She’s right. The curator of the Museum of Idolatry tries too hard to have new material to work with or criticize.

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DB wrote:

«I think his mispeaking is something a [prominent] Christian pastor should know about, though I think she brought up an interesting point.»

D’accord.