My Mormon Dad Rejects the Trinity...

[00:00:00]I grew up Mormon, but I've recently left. I'm going to be with my parents coming up, and when me and my dad have kind of discussed differences and stuff like that. Joe, as you're aware, under the guise of the Great Apostasy, Mormons will inadvertently reject any kind of, you know, philosophy or extra-biblical concepts that, you know, don't either explicitly appear in the Bible or aren't talked to Joseph Smith. So, how do you talk to How can I talk to him about, you know, this concept of like the distinction in the persons, but, you know, one in union, different persons?

[00:00:34]>> It makes total sense. That's a very common obstacle, and you've described it perfectly. That they reject the Trinity, but they also reject the Church Fathers.

[00:00:43]And all of the evidence that you point out to show, "Look, the earliest followers of Jesus clearly believed something like the Trinity." They're going to be like, "Well, I guess that proves that the apostasy happened even earlier than we thought it did." And it it's a very difficult challenge to surmount. Now, I think it is worth doing a couple things. First, I like to point out that heresy is diffuse, while truth is united. And so, think about it like this. If you were to take all of the students who aced a test and compare the tests that they have, those tests are going to look identical.

[00:01:20]They're going to look very similar.

[00:01:22]You know, they're all going to have the same answers. But it Then on the other hand, if you take all of the students who flunked the test, chances are they're going to flunk it in different ways. And this is the story of truth versus heresy. That the truth is united, and heresy is all over the board. And so, frequently, we'll at the same time have to deal with heresies in two opposite directions. You've got people who say, right now, "Oh, yeah, you're just a soul trapped in a body." And you've got people who say, "You're just a body, and the soul doesn't exist."

[00:01:51]Both of those are wrong, but they're wrong in opposite ways. That's the kind of course that we chart through life. So, I I make that point to say, when you look at what the early Christians believed about the Trinity, they're pretty remarkably unified. You can find, uh, some apparent dissimilarities, but a lot of them are relatively minor.

[00:02:13]Nobody seems to be arguing for the Mormon view. Nobody seems to believe that's what Jesus taught. And that's pretty remarkable if that is in fact what Jesus taught. And at a certain point it's like, okay, I get that you don't trust philosophy and don't believe that reason is going to help us here.

[00:02:29]But let's acknowledge that all of us have to use our brains in some way to try to make sense of the Bible. Even if you say you're taking it on faith, your brain is still involved. And when you use reason, that's going to open you up to a charge of man-made philosophy. But that's just an unavoidable part of having a brain. And so, recognize that is like just the like I I really dislike when people use the mere use of philosophy as some kind of argument against Christianity or, you know, against the Trinity. Because scripture itself uses philosophy. Like when John refers to Jesus as the Logos, that term is coming out of the world of Greek philosophy. He's uniting that with Genesis 1 in this masterful way. But he's showing the the harmony between the best elements of Greek philosophy and the Hebrew scriptures. And and like purifying the imperfections in Greek philosophy in the light of the gospel.

[00:03:27]And so, all of that is to say, faith and reason are the two wings upon which the human spirit rises. So, to have this disdain for philosophy is very hard. But just showing, like, okay, even if you think the early Christians weren't perfect and that they're going to go into error, can't we agree that if they're going to go into error, we'd expect them to be all over the place and they're actually much more harmonious than one might assume? And if Jesus really taught the Mormon theology of the Godhead, who is out there teaching it?

[00:03:53]Like who did no one understand Jesus' teaching? Cuz one thing to say some people got it wrong or even a lot of people got it wrong, but if you say nobody got what Jesus taught, that seems like a pretty damning indictment of Jesus himself, right? Like if if I teach something and nobody understands it, then at a certain point that's just on me. So, I would press those kind of issues in the main, just you know, to address the sort of disdain and philosophy of the disdain of the early Christians. But the particular example I like to use in showing the Trinity because people do their eyes glaze over if you mention nature and persons, is I like to just explain. Nature is what you are and a person is who you are. A rock, if I say what is that rock or what is that thing, you'd say, "Oh, that's a rock." If I said, "Who is that?" You there's no answer to that. A rock isn't a who. It's a what, it's not a who. It has a nature, but it's not a person. So, one nature, zero persons. If I talk about, you know, the guy hosting I say, "What is that?" You'd say, "Oh, that's a man." If I say, "Who is that?" You'd say, "Psychedelic." The the psychedelic.

[00:04:55]A one nature, one person. But then when you talk about God, when you say, "What is that?" Who's God? Who is that? It's Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There's one nature and three persons. Person and nature are a more technical way of saying who and what in this context, but that's all we're expressing is is the same thing you can express in saying why a person is a who and a a rock is not.

[00:05:16]Um does that make sense?

[00:05:17]>> Yeah, that makes sense. I guess in the conversations I've had, it comes a more down to like, you know, my dad will say things like, "Oh, well, who is Jesus praying to, you know, in these verses?"

[00:05:28]You know, or it's like with Mormons, you know, I've noticed that any verse I point to where it's like, "Look, the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not names." Or, you know, any of these verses that talk about one in unity, right? They reinterpret that as one in purpose. And so, that's how it, you know, deals away with some of those verses that are slam dunks for the Trinity. They're like, "Oh, no, they mean united in purpose or one in purpose, not one in essence."

[00:05:54]>> So, I I would say the place to go there actually would be looking at the Old Testament. So, one of the things God makes very clear to the Israelites is that there is just one God. The Shema Israel, Deuteronomy 6, uh hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. That is this very strong expression of monotheism, and Mormonism is a rejection of monotheism. And they're just It is not saying all the gods in the pantheon are united. It's saying there is one God. And saying that God, like the different gods are one, is just playing games with language at a certain point.

[00:06:33]That This is not how language works in English, in Hebrew, in Greek. We don't just say, "Oh, yeah, you know, there's there's one animal," by which you mean all the animals are moving in the same direction.

[00:06:45]>> That's not how that works. That just Being united in in one purpose, you can talk about oneness, but you don't use the singular to describe one individual and and pretend that that is a group now. No, it just doesn't work like that.

[00:06:59]And so, that's not what the word God means. And so, when you say the Lord God, the Lord our God is one Lord, this means the Lord our God is one Lord. That there is one divine unity. That there's one divine substance. That there's one divine being.

[00:07:16]And so, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are consubstantial, but there's only one substance. And so, that like the Old Testament is filled with passages like that in which God clarifies that these other gods are not really gods. And this actually continues in the New Testament as well, because, you know, St. Paul makes that same point. Does that help?

[00:07:36]Does it Does that make sense?

[00:07:37]>> It does help. And and I realize, too, like I was saying before, that there is a part on me to understand it better before I try and go and start, you know, talking to my dad about it. Um, but I I appreciate it. It's It's one of those, you know, forever kind of like eternal problems with Mormonism is it's like, "Oh, we reject that because it's philosophy, but here's this 1800s philosophy that we You know what I mean?

[00:07:59]Like, I'm sure that you encounter this all the time and it's >> It's remarkable how much it looks like 19th century Protestantism in some of the most controversial things. You know, like the teaching on uh the curse of uh Ham or Cain, any of these things where they It just looks like 19th century racism. And you're like, man, or even the use of bread and wine instead of bread and water instead of bread and wine. Like, you have all these the the restorationist movement itself, the number of different movements in this area of New York that claim to be re-founding uh the new Pentecost or, you know, restoring the church because it had been lost. That's all over the place. Like, Mormonism looks so much like the world in which it was created that it's hard to look at it from the outside and not be like, well, okay, this is clearly a guy in the 19th century just applying these ideas. And in particularly when you look at some of the works that Joseph Smith like plagiarized for the Book of Mormon where there's like huge textual similarities to books that we know he had. And you're like, okay, look, he just took this part. Like, portions of this just seem to be lifted.

[00:09:04]Those are big kind of red flags to just say like, okay, you can't criticize people using the best philosophy from their day and then give a total pass to using not only philosophy, but even like cowboy and Indian stories about the New World and all of that and applying that to your scriptures and theology. It seems like a much more egregious kind of mixing of faith and culture. All the lines full, we're talking Mormonism with Joe Haschmeyer today on Catholic Answers Live.