Transcription
Mormons aren't Christian. I hear it all the time. Every Latter-day Saint has. It shows up in evangelical pamphlets, anti-Mormon websites, on doorsteps and comment sections, and at family dinners. It's probably the single most common attack aimed at members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But here's what's interesting. It's also one of the laziest. Most of the people saying it can't actually tell you why. Push back and they usually say something like, "You believe in a different Jesus." which when you press even further translates to because you don't accept the Nine Creed. But they usually can't say that out loud because they don't actually know that that's what they mean, which is a special kind of confidence, being absolutely certain about a theological conclusion that you can't theologically explain.
Now, we've already covered the Trinity argument and its non-biblical necessity. But today, we're going to take the Christian argument apart. And we're going to start with something that almost nobody in this conversation knows. Something that should stop the whole debate cold before theology even enters the room. The apostles didn't call themselves Christian either. Paul didn't and Peter didn't. The word appears exactly three times in the entire New Testament, and every single time it's either outsiders applying it or believers being persecuted under it. The early church had its own vocabulary. And when you find out what that was, the people using Christian as a gatekeeping credential have a serious problem on their hands. I'm Alex Arnold and this is Moroni Standard.
So, let's start with the question, what exactly is the argument against the LDS church? And what's wrong with it before we even get to the theology? The argument laid out clearly goes like this. Christianity requires belief in the Trinity as defined by the Nine Creed in 325 AD. And Latter-day Saints don't accept that formulation. Therefore, Latter-day Saints aren't Christian. That's the actual full chain, even when people can't articulate that out loud. The problem is is that there are three serious logical failures, and we haven't even touched a Bible yet.
First, it's what philosophers call the no true Scotsman fallacy. There's a named logical error formalized by British philosopher Anthony Flu in 1975 where a universal claim gets quietly redefined to exclude any counter example. It goes like this. A true Christian believes in Christ. Then someone points out that the Latter-day Saints follow Christ, get baptized in his name, take the sacrament in his remembrance, and preach his gospel worldwide. The response then shifts to, "Well, they're not real Christians because it's a different Jesus." ... See what happened? The definition shifted to exclude the counter example. The conclusion was already baked into the premise. That's circular reasoning. And it has a name, the no true Scotsman.
Second, it's all total straw man. Most people making this argument have never actually studied what Latter-day Saints believe. They absorbed a secondhand caricature of secret temples and magic underwear and not really Christian. And they're arguing against a version of LDS theology that doesn't exist. The actual center of LDS theology is the atonement of Jesus Christ. Every sacrament meeting begins with the sacrament in his name. Every prayer is offered in his name. Every ordinance is performed in his name. But that doesn't matter if you've never checked. It'd be like me arguing that you're not Christian because you sacrifice goats on Tuesdays. If I never verified that you actually sacrifice goats, then I'm not actually making a theological argument. I'm just making things up with confidence. Ergo, straw man.
Third, this is gatekeeping of a term that nobody owns. Christian simply means follower of Christ. That's it. That's not a trademark. No denomination holds the copyright, even though several of them have tried. The history of Christians arguing about who gets to be called Christian is as old as Christianity itself.
Now, here's why naming these fallacies matters before we ever open the Bible. It resets the terms of the debate. The person making the exclusionary claim now has to defend their definition using non-circular criteria, which means going to scripture. And when they go to scripture, they don't find what they've been using. When you tell someone, "That's the no true Scotsman fallacy. Here's why it doesn't hold." You've now moved the conversation from emotional to analytical. That's now our turf.
But before scripture still, there's a historical problem underneath this that almost no Protestant ever gets taught. And it cuts the legs out entirely. The apostles didn't call themselves Christians. So what did they call themselves? If you read through Paul's letters, the earliest documents in the entire New Testament written before the gospels and Paul doesn't call his audience Christians. He calls them saints. To the saints in Ephesus, to the saints in Corinth, to the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi. He uses the word saints dozens of times across his letters. They also called themselves believers, disciples, brethren, and followers of the way. The phrase shows up six times in the book of Acts as their own self-identifier. In Acts 24:14, Paul uses it to describe himself directly after the way which they call heresy. So worship I, the God of my fathers. These were the terms that the early church chose, not Christian.
The word Christian only appears three times in the entire New Testament. Acts 11:26 is the first and it says that the disciples were called Christians by outsiders in Antioch. The Greek construction there is passive, meaning the name was applied to them by others, not adopted by themselves. Antioch was a major cosmopolitan city in Roman Syria. The surrounding population started calling these Christ people, likely as mild mockery, possibly as a neutral descriptor. Either way, it's not what they called themselves. Acts 24:28 is King Agrippa, a Roman client king, not a believer, using the term to describe what Paul is trying to make him become. And first Peter 4:16, the only time a believer uses it self-referentially is specifically in the context of Roman persecution, suffering as a Christian, because the Roman state is using that label as grounds for prosecution. The early church absorbed a term under duress, but it was never their chosen self-identification.
And here's the irony that I want you to think about. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints calls its members Latter-day Saints. That's not a marketing decision. That's the actual New Testament vocabulary the apostles used for followers of Christ, Paul's word, used dozens of times. Saints is more biblically authentic as a self-identifier than Christians. So the people using Christian as the litmus test for authentic Christianity are defending a term that the apostles barely used to exclude people who used the term that the apostles actually preferred. You genuinely can't make this up. The term being used to exclude Latter-day Saints wasn't even the early church's own term.
But let's grant the argument its strongest possible form and deal with the theology because that's where the real case has to be made when you're dealing with soloscriptura. So what is the Nine Creed? Where did it actually come from? And why do so many people treat it as the definition of Christianity? To understand the Nine Creed, you need to understand the crisis that it was called to solve. In the early 4th century, a theologian named Arius, a popular church elder in Alexandria, Egypt, taught that the son of God, while a divine being of extraordinary majesty, was nonetheless a created being. The first and greatest of all God's creations, but not co-eternal with the father. Arius's famous line was, "There was a time when he was not." The son had a beginning. Only the father was truly eternal and uncreated. This position had an enormous following throughout the Eastern Church. It also created a crisis. Constantine had just unified the Roman Empire. Christianity was rapidly becoming the dominant religion. And there was a theology controversy threatening to fracture the whole thing. So, Constantine, who at this point had not yet even been baptized and was not technically a Christian by anyone's definition at the time, but sure, let's just have him share the most consequential theological council in history. convened the council of Nicaea in 325 AD to settle it. The council sided with a bishop named Athanasius who argued for the full co-equality and co-eternity of father and son. The key term was homoousios, Greek vocabulary meaning of the same substance as the father. The Arians preferred homoiousios, of similar substance. The difference was a single Greek letter, literally one iota of difference. The historian Edward Gibbon found this so absurd that he spent pages documenting it. The entirety of Trinitarian Christianity as we know it hinged on whether one Greek vowel survived the council. And here's something that doesn't show up in the sanitized version of this story. The bishop and church historian Eusebius of Caesarea was present at the council as an eyewitness. He records that Constantine personally intervened in the theological debate and may have suggested or endorsed the homoousios formulation himself. Meaning the decisive word at the most consequential theological council in Christian history may have been offered by an unbaptized Roman emperor with no theological training. When bishops who refused to sign the creed, including Arius and two others, Constantine didn't refer them back to the church for discipline. He exiled them using his imperial power. The formulation was further contested and eventually settled at Constantinople in 381 and Chalcedon in 451. And it's what we now call Trinitarian doctrine. One God and three co-equal co-eternal persons sharing one divine substance. For many Protestants and evangelical Christians, this framework is the definition of Orthodox Christianity. Accept it, you're in. Reject it, you're out. Because Latter-day Saints believe the father and the son are separate, distinct beings rather than co-equal persons of one substance. We're Nicaea rejects. That's the actual basis of the non-Christian claim, nothing else. It's based on this specific creed rejection. The problem is that it's being applied as a biblical standard when it was produced by a council using language not in the Bible under circumstances shaped by Roman imperial politics 300 years after Christ. That word homoousios is not in the New Testament. It's not in the Old Testament. It doesn't appear in any apostolic writing. It's Greek philosophical vocabulary imported into Christian theology, not by Jesus or his apostles, but by 4th century intellectuals settling a political crisis. Those are not the same credentials.
So, is the Trinity actually in the Bible? Because that's another big question. We've kind of covered this in another video that we did, but we'll touch on it here. The honest answer is that the trinity as formulated in the creeds is not in the Bible. The word trinity doesn't appear anywhere in scripture. The word homoousios doesn't appear. The philosophical framework of three co-equal persons sharing one divine substance is all just Greek metaphysics applied to Hebrew revelation. And when you look at what the Bible actually shows you, the picture is consistently one of distinct beings. Jesus prays to the father. He doesn't pray to himself. He says, "The Father is greater than I." And at his baptism, the father speaks from heaven while the son stands in the water and the spirit descends as a dove. Three simultaneous separate manifestations in different locations at the same moment. Stephen at the moment of his martyrdom looks up and sees the son of man standing at the right hand of God. Two beings in one location. And in John chapter 17, Jesus prays that his disciples may be one as he and the father are one. Same Greek word. If one means literally the same being, then Jesus was praying that his disciples would all merge into a single super disciple, which besides being totally logically incoherent, would have made the last supper incredibly awkward. The grammar doesn't allow selective application. One means the same thing throughout the same passage.
Now the Trinitarian response is that these verses are being read out of context and that John 1:1 and Matthew 28:119 establish the Nicaean reading. Let me deal with both of these. John 1:1 says the word was God. The Greek grammar in that clause is genuinely complex. The word translated God lacks the definite article which a number of non-LDS scholars, including Philip Harner in the Journal of Biblical Literature, have argued indicates qualitative divine nature rather than ontological identity with the father. It's saying that Christ is fully divine in nature, not that he and the father are the same being. Matthew 28:119 gives a single name for three, but that's equally consistent with three distinct beings acting in perfect unity, which is exactly what LDS theology teaches. Neither verse requires the Nicaean formulation, but both require interpretation to get there. And here's the historian's point that should settle the question of whether the Trinity is obviously in the Bible. If it were obvious, it wouldn't have taken three major councils and over 150 years of intense controversy to define it. That's not what it looks like when doctrine is clearly stated in scripture. That's what it looks like when philosophers are trying to reconcile scripture with their own Greek metaphysics. Even Tertullian, the man who coined the Latin term trinitas, from which we get Trinity, held subordinationist views about the son that the later Nicaean settlement would have rejected. The man who invented the word didn't hold what we now call Trinitarian doctrine.
Which brings us to what I think is the single most devastating argument in this episode. It's not even theological. It's just simple math. If the Nicaean creed defines Christianity, then Christianity didn't exist for its first 300 years. How do you answer that? This is the 300-year problem, and it's a real-time logical collapse at the center of this gatekeeping argument. The council of Nicaea was in 325 AD. Jesus's ministry was around 30 to 33 AD. That's roughly 295 years. If accepting the Nicaean creed is required to be a Christian, then the apostles weren't Christians. Peter wasn't and Paul wasn't. The believers being tortured and killed in the Roman arenas during the first three centuries weren't either. None of them had heard the word homoousios and none of them voted at Nicaea because it hadn't happened yet. Origen of Alexandria, one of the most influential theologians in the entire history of the church, writing around 225 AD, held subordinationist views, meaning that he believed the son was in some way subordinate to the father. By Nicaean standards, this is wrong. Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Christian apologists writing around 155 AD, described the son in terms closer to LDS Christology than to Nicaean Trinitarianism on key points. These were not fringe figures. They were among the most respected theological minds of the pre-Nicaean church and they wouldn't have passed the test being applied to us. If you died for your faith in 200 AD, you apparently died for something that technically wasn't Christianity yet. The people who actually knew Jesus, walked with him, witnessed his resurrection, and wrote the New Testament didn't meet the standard for the faith that they founded. That's not a gotcha. It's just what the argument requires you to actually believe. And it needs to be said out loud so everyone can hear how ridiculous that actually sounds.
Now, there is a serious theological response to this as well. It's called the development of doctrine argument. It's associated with Cardinal John Henry Newman, a 19th century Catholic scholar who argued that doctrines develop organically over time. What was implicit in the earliest sources becomes explicit as the church matures, guided by the Holy Spirit. I'm not Catholic, but that is actually a consistent position. The problem is it's a Catholic argument. It requires an ongoing authoritative spirit-guided institutional church with the authority to define what was always implicit in scripture. That's exactly what Protestant sola scriptura, scripture alone as the final authority, was invented to reject. If doctrines develop legitimately through the institutional church's spirit-guided process, then Luther was wrong to walk away from Catholic authority on indulgences and papal supremacy because these doctrines developed through the exact same process that produced the Trinity. You cannot accept the development of doctrine for Trinitarian theology while also rejecting it everywhere else the Catholic Church developed doctrine. That's not a principled position. That's picking up the Catholic rule book only when it agrees with you.
Here's my final Trinity point. Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon were all Catholic councils called by Roman emperors attended by Catholic bishops producing Catholic doctrine. Then the Protestants rejected Catholic council authority across the board on purgatory, the pope, Marian doctrine, and on the biblical canon that Luther revised. But when the Trinity is challenged, those same Protestants suddenly invoke Nicaea as binding. So, show me the principle that explains why Catholic councils are authoritative for the Trinity and not for everything else. There isn't one because that would be contradictory. The Nicaean creed cannot carry the weight of defining Christian identity for all of church history, which means that we need to go back to the actual standard, the one that Christ himself set.
So, what does the Bible actually require to follow Christ? And why don't the Protestants ever just ask that question directly? The list isn't complicated or hidden or anything like that. The Philippian jailer asks Paul directly, "What must I do to be saved?" The answer isn't affirm the Trinity. It's believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Peter on the day of Pentecost gives the fuller prescription. Repent, be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins. Receive of the Holy Ghost. Jesus to Nicodemus, "Except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." And Jesus to his disciples, "If you love me, keep my commandments." Mark 16:16, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." That's basically the list. Belief in Christ, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, keeping his commandments, and trusting his atonement. Now, search that list for a verse requiring acceptance of the Nine Creed. Search for homoousios as a salvation requirement. Search for any instruction to affirm a theological framework formulated 300 years after Christ. You won't find it because it isn't there. What Jesus and the apostles gave us is relational and covenantal. Believe, repent, be baptized, follow, and endure. Not intellectual assent to Greek metaphysical propositions developed by councils after the apostles were gone. The challenge to anyone who makes the non-Christian claim is this. Show me the verse, chapter and verse, where the Bible requires the Nine Creed for salvation. If that verse exists, then the conversation is over and they win. But if it doesn't, and we know it doesn't exist, then the argument collapses.
So, let's see. Do the Latter-day Saints actually meet the biblical definition of following Christ? Yes. Let's go through it directly rather than breezing past it. Is there a belief in Jesus Christ? Well, we believe he is the son of God, the savior and redeemer of the world, the only name under heaven by which mankind can be saved. His atonement is not a side doctrine in LDS theology. It's the foundation that everything else is built on. The Book of Mormon, for viewers unfamiliar with LDS faith, is a second volume of scripture that Latter-day Saints believe records Christ's dealings with ancient peoples in the Americas. And it states its own purpose in 2 Nephi chapter 25. It says, "We talk of Christ. We rejoice in Christ. We preach of Christ. We prophesy of Christ. And we write according to our prophecies that our children may know to what source they may look for remission of their sins." That's the stated mission of the entire record.
So, how about repentance? It's central to every missionary discussion, every sacrament meeting, and every covenant. Baptism. Full immersion. Baptism by proper authority in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, exactly as Acts chapter 2 describes. The sacrament in remembrance. We do that every single week in every congregation worldwide. The sacrament prayer in Doctrine and Covenants section 20 is drawn almost verbatim from the New Testament: that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy son and witness unto thee, O God the eternal Father, that they are willing to take upon them the name of thy son. So, we covenant weekly in his name in every ward on earth. What about following his commandments and preaching his gospel? The largest full-time missionary program in the history of Christianity. 50,000 or more missionaries at any given time at their own expense preaching to Jesus Christ. The content of every discussion that those missionaries teach centers on Christ and the atonement. We can go through biblical requirements one by one and by every standard that the Bible actually sets, Latter-day Saints qualify fully and completely. The only standard that we fail is the one that was invented by a council that met 300 years after Christ, using philosophical language that he never used to settle a political crisis that he never addressed.
Now, I want to give the critics the best version of their argument because there is a more sophisticated form of the non-Christian claim and some of the more well-read critics might go there. So, what about the different Jesus objection? The claim that the LDS Jesus isn't really God. Well, yes, Latter-day Saints do have a different conception of Christ's nature than the Nicaean formulation. We believe that the Father and the Son are separate, distinct beings. We do not accept the philosophical framework of one substance in three persons. We believe Christ has a physical, glorified, resurrected body. We believe he is fully divine, the son of God, the savior, and the redeemer. But that his divine nature doesn't mean that he and the father are the same being. And that's the honest answer. We simply disagree with the Nicaean metaphysics. But here's the question. Which Jesus looks more like the one that the New Testament actually describes? Jesus ate fish with his disciples after the resurrection. He invited Thomas to physically touch his wounds. He was recognizable, not a vision, not a spiritual impression, but a being standing in a location. Stephen sees him standing at the right hand of God. And Hebrews chapter 13 says he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If the resurrected Christ had a physical body, which virtually every Christian tradition affirms, and if he is the same eternally, then the eternal Christ is a physical being, that follows directly from combining the resurrection accounts with that verse. The Nicaean position requires qualifying what physical means in ways that the text itself doesn't invite.
Now, here's what I find particularly compelling. One of the strongest cases for LDS Christology doesn't come from LDS scholars. It comes from Steven Webb, a Catholic theologian who published through Oxford University Press. In his 2012 book, Mormon Christianity, Webb argued that the LDS conception of God as physical, personal, and glorified is actually more consistent with early Christian theology than the abstract immaterial God of classical theism. His argument is that classical theism represents the Hellenization of Christianity, the gradual replacement of the Hebrew Bible's personal, relational, sometimes physically described God with the philosophical God of Plato and Aristotle. A Catholic theologian at Oxford, arguing that the LDS view of God is more biblical than the Nicaean view. And he had nothing to gain from that argument. He made it because the evidence pointed there. Here's the thing. The different Jesus objection assumes that the Nicaean baseline is the correct one. But we've spent this entire episode showing that baseline isn't anywhere in the Bible. It's in a council. The objection is completely circular. It assumes the very thing it's supposed to prove. If you want to argue that LDS Christology misunderstands the nature of Christ, make the case from scripture. That's a legitimate debate and I welcome it. But your Jesus isn't Nicaean is a council argument dressed up as a biblical one.
Let me now bring everything together before we close. Why does this argument keep getting made if it fails this badly when you actually examine it? Because it works socially even when it fails theologically. Mormons aren't Christian functions as a tribal marker. It's a quick signal that shuts down any curiosity before it possibly becomes engagement. In evangelical communities, it operates as a prophylactic. If you can get someone to believe Mormonism isn't Christianity before they investigate it, then you've prevented the investigation without having the argument. Most people saying it haven't even examined the foundation themselves. They've heard it from someone that they trusted. It was repeated in the community and it became assumed. That doesn't make them necessarily dishonest. It makes them human. But it does mean that the argument is doing social and tribal work, not theological work.
For Latter-day Saints watching this, you don't have to accept that framing. The argument has a name, the no true Scotsman fallacy. And the best rock that you can put in someone's shoe is simple. Show me where the Bible requires the Nine Creed for salvation. Most people who have used "Mormons aren't Christian" as a conversation ender have never been asked that question. They won't have an answer. And a question that they can't answer stays with them a lot longer than an argument that they can dismiss.
So this pattern, human tradition dressed up as biblical mandate keeps showing up. What does it actually tell us? Every time we pulled on one of these threads, the biblical canon, sola scriptura, the Trinity, salvation by faith alone, creation ex nihilo, predestination, and now the definition of Christian itself. What we found underneath isn't the clear teaching of Jesus and the apostles. What we found is post-apostolic human authority, councils, Greek philosophical frameworks, and translators inserting words that aren't in the manuscripts. It's the same pattern with a different topic every time. And the people defending these positions keep presenting them as if they're directly from Christ. That pattern is the entire case for the restoration. Not that Joseph Smith invented something new, but that the original had been fragmented and that pieces of it survived in incomplete or altered form across the traditions that emerged and that God called prophets again to restore what had been lost. I've been building that case from the beginning of this channel. And that opens the next question. If they can't define Christianity from scripture without borrowing from councils that Jesus never authorized, can they define who the Messiah was supposed to be? Because there is a question buried underneath the Old Testament about what the ancient scriptures actually predicted about the coming of Christ. What happened to those prophecies and why the people who had been waiting for the Messiah the longest, who had those scriptures, didn't recognize him when he came? That's where we're headed next.
Every time we examine one of these doctrines that gets presented as obviously biblical, we find the same thing underneath. A human decision made after the apostles were gone that got layered on top of scripture and eventually presented as scripture itself. The people insisting Latter-day Saints aren't Christian are defending a definition of Christianity that didn't exist until 300 years after Christ, built on philosophical language that Christ never used, enforced by a council that he never authorized, called by an emperor who had never even been baptized. That's not a peripheral irony. That's the foundational problem with the entire argument.
For Latter-day Saints watching this, you meet every biblical standard for following Christ. Belief in him, repentance, baptism, keeping his commandments, and trusting his atonement, not as a technicality, but as a way of life. You are baptized in his name. You take his sacrament in his remembrance every single week. And you give years of your life proclaiming his gospel at your own expense. The next time someone tells you that you're not Christian, ask them to show you the verse. Ask them where the Bible requires the Nine Creed for salvation. They won't find it because it isn't there.
For those watching who are skeptical or who came here to argue, I've tried to give the Nicaean position its strongest form at every turn and deal with it honestly. The development of doctrine argument, the Holy Spirit guided the council, the different Jesus objection, all of it got a fair hearing. If you believe LDS theology is wrong about the nature of Christ, that's a legitimate theological debate and I totally welcome it, but make the case from scripture, not "you failed a council vote in 325 AD." That's not a biblical argument and it shouldn't be treated as one.
And if you're here just because you're curious or you don't know much about what Latter-day Saints actually believe and you're just trying to figure it out, here's the honest version. We believe that the Bible is inspired. We also believe the history of how it's been interpreted, translated, and systematized is complicated, and that the complications are documented, not invented. We believe God has never been comfortable leaving his people to navigate that kind of confusion alone. And we believe he didn't leave us alone this time either. That he restored what was lost, called prophets again, and provided additional witnesses of Jesus Christ to stand alongside the first rather than replace it. That's the claim. Whether you accept it or not, you now understand what it actually is. All of my sources are in the description. Go see for yourself. I'll see you next time. I'm Alex Arnold and this is Moroni Standard.