The Narrow Path Ministries

While listening to a Mormon debate recently, the Mormon apologist was asked "Has God the Father ever sinned?" His reply was "I don't know". I found this quote from a Mormon "Prophet".

According to page 132 of the 1976 LDS manual entitled "Achieving a Celestial Marriage, "... our Father in heaven was once a man as we are now, capable of physical death." It would appear that not only was the Mormon God capable of death, he in fact did die. As LDS Apostle Bruce McConkie wrote, "The Father is a glorified, perfected resurrected, exalted man who worked out his own salvation by obedience to the same laws he has given to us so that we may do the same" (A New Witness for the Articles of Faith, pg. 64)."

Now, if he is telling what he really believes, then it logicly follows that God the Father(to him)had to be a sinner. The truth is, if you have to be "perfected" you are not in a state of perfection. Thus the reason for achieveing perfection.

I pity Bruce and the boys in Utah who believe this.

What are your thoughts?

Brody,

This is what happens when you make "god" in man's image.

"The Father is a glorified, perfected resurrected, exalted man who worked out his own salvation by obedience to the same laws he has given to us so that we may do the same" (A New Witness for the Articles of Faith, pg. 64)."

This statement say's (among other heretical things) that "The Father" had to be obedient to laws...I would like to know who gave "The Father" any kind of law to obide by in the first place?

Yeah, I'm with ya brody. It's pretty scary to think that they say these things about the creator of all things.

Are you familiar with the Mormon doctrine of "Eternal Progression of the gods"?

They believe that God the Father had a god who had a god who had a god ad infinitum. LOL.
Its a strange show they are runnin out there in Utah.

Had a Mormon I worked with once trying to recruit me. Gave me a big picture, supposedly of Jesus in a red robe, whatever that means. I asked him who the "first great cause" was, who assigned each god their planet. He had no answer, although a very educated man. Never talked to me about it again. Oh well.

Homer wrote:Had a Mormon I worked with once trying to recruit me. Gave me a big picture, supposedly of Jesus in a red robe, whatever that means. I asked him who the "first great cause" was, who assigned each god their planet. He had no answer, although a very educated man. Never talked to me about it again. Oh well.

Mormonism is changing quite a bit these days. My friend Derek(the Derek who post here)had a group of Mormons tell him that they believed in the SAME Trinity he did.
Ofcourse they failed to mention that Joseph Smith said that our God(the Christian God)was a "monster".

I had a similar experience with some Elders from the local LDS church. They try and present Mormonism to be really close to Orthadox Christianity, when the truth is they are as different as apples and bananas.

This statement say's (among other heretical things) that "The Father" had to be obedient to laws...I would like to know who gave "The Father" any kind of law to obide by in the first place?

That is a valid observation, John. Yet, a prevailing view in Christendom, is that God must, by legalities which He Himself has established, punish sin, and that the only way in which He can forgive us is to have put to death an innocent victim (His Son) who took our punishment instead of us. This substitutionary action is considered to be a legal transaction.

Gustaf Aulen in Christus Victor put it this way:

You have broken the law because it is impossible to keep it, and so you must have broken it. And because you cannot keep this impossible to keep law you will be charged with death because "the penalty for sin is death" and those are just the rules. God must have blood because the law requires it; there must be a penalty paid. The only payment that would have been enough is sacrificing someone who was the "perfect law-keeper", someone who could live a perfect life without sin. So God decided to kill his own Son on the cross to appease his legal need for blood. Now that Jesus has been sacrificed God is no longer mad at us for not doing what we can't do anyway, so we can now come and live with him forever - as long as we are grateful to him for his "mercy" to us.

brody_in_ga wrote:Are you familiar with the Mormon doctrine of "Eternal Progression of the gods"?

They believe that God the Father had a god who had a god who had a god ad infinitum. LOL.
Its a strange show they are runnin out there in Utah.

I had LDS missionaries in my home every week for five months. They said that they liked coming to see me because I made them think. When I would point out the illogical nature of some of their positions, they would go away and scratch their heads. Sometimes, they would return with their ward leaders or a local LDS apologist. The above position is a perfect example of the kinds of things I would challenge them on. All Mormons are taught it, but they really have not thought it through. I became so well known for this argument that when the elder "elder" would bring in a newbie "elder", they would request that I relate the following example to them. I was more than willing to cause them doubts.

As you said, Mormons believe in this endless cycle. God created a world, populated it with people, and some of them grow to be gods themselves, create a world, populate it with people, and so on. They will tell you that this have been going on all past eternity. There has been an endless, uncountable, infinate number of these cycles. Pin them down and ask them to define "eternity" and "infinate" you you. Then lay this on them. Imagine the distance between two landmarks. If I start at one, and head towards the other, it doesn't matter how fast or slow I drive, I will eventually get there. Some miles may take longer then others. It doesn't really matter. Since I have a finite start point and a finite end point, the distance can be covered. Now if I move one of those landmarks an infinate distance out into space, and start travelling towards it, can I ever reach it? Of course not. If I ever did, it would be a finite distance and not an infinate distance. Now imagine that every mile of the distance was one itteration of these worlds. If I never reach the infinate world and it's place in time, then their logic holds. But if this cycle has been going on forever, how does the Mormon explain the current date and time. Think of each world cycle as an hour. Time has reached today. If time, and cycles of worlds within it, began an eternity ago, the infinate nature of eternity would force us to never reach the present. That means that the cycle had to have started somewhere.

Science is now telling us that time came into existance a measurable amount of time ago. 2 Tim 1:9 and Titus 1:2 refer to the "beginning of time". My cosmological worldview is backed up by logic, science, and the Bible. Their's is not.

If time, and cycles of worlds within it, began an eternity ago, the infinate nature of eternity would force us to never reach the present. That means that the cycle had to have started somewhere.

This seems rational to me. Yet, most of us have been conditioned to believe in an infite regression of time into the past. Indeed, the majority in Christendom speak of "eternity past" and "before the beginning of time" (an oxymoron as I see it). If time had a beginning, then there can be no "before". I hold to a simplistic view of time. Time is a measurement of the temporal "distance" between events. So time came into existence when the first (or perhaps the second) event occured. The first event was the begetting of the Son of God. As long as there are events, there will always be time. So time will never come to an end.

2 Tim 1:9 and Titus 1:2 refer to the "beginning of time".

I had never thought of the phrase "pro chronon aionion" as meaning "the beginning of time", but you may be right. The phrase literally means "before times age-long" or perhaps "before times going from age to age". Perhaps a better translation for our day would be "before the ages". This may well be the beginning of time. If "aionion" really means "eternal" as some translate it elsewhere, for example in the phrase "eternal punishment", then the phrase discussed above would be "before eternal times", a translation which doesn't seem to make any sense. But even worse, some translators render it "from eternity", which would pose the same problem with which you dealt, namely the problem of when the action would begin.

It has been my opinion for some time that the phrase "in the beginning" as found in Gen 1:1 and John 1:1 refers to the beginning of time.

Paidion wrote: This seems rational to me. Yet, most of us have been conditioned to believe in an infite regression of time into the past. Indeed, the majority in Christendom speak of "eternity past" and "before the beginning of time" (an oxymoron as I see it). If time had a beginning, then there can be no "before".

I have no problem with an eternity before time with a God that is outside of time. It is when you have the cycles that require time and yet believe that these cycles have been infinate that you have problems.

I once heard William Lane Craig speak on God and Time. It was very facinating and it took someone that smart to dumb it down to my level. You can read some of what he says on the topic at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcrai ... ltime.html. I don't have the mental ability to follow it any more, but you may get something out of it.
D.