Mormonism and the nature of God/Nicene creed

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Criticism

Critics claim that because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint does not accept the Nicene Creed's statement about the Trinity, they are not Christian.

Response

Since the Nicene Creed was first adopted in A.D. 325, it seems clear that there were many Christians in the first centuries following the resurrection of Christ who did not use it. Those who oppose calling the Latter-day Saints "Christians" need to explain whether Peter and Paul are "Christians," since they lived and practiced Christianity at a time when there was no Nicene Creed, and no Trinitarianism in the current sense.

Critics may try to argue that the Nicene Creed is merely a statement of Biblical principles, but Bible scholarship is very clear that the Nicene Creed was a novelty and an innovation.

Was Nicean Trinitarianism always a key part of Christian belief?

No. There is abundant evidence that “Trinitarianism”, as now understood by the majority of Protestants and Catholics was not present in the Early Christian Church.

When we turn to the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity, we are confronted by a peculiarly contradictory situation. On the one hand, the history of Christian theology and of dogma teaches us to regard the dogma of the Trinity as the distinctive element in the Christian idea of God, that which distinguishes it from the idea of God in Judaism and in Islam, and indeed, in all forms of rational Theism. Judaism, Islam, and rational Theism are Unitarian. On the other hand, we must honestly admit that the doctrine of the Trinity did not form part of the early Christian-New Testament-message. Certainly, it cannot be denied that not only the word "Trinity", but even the explicit idea of the Trinity is absent from the apostolic witness of the faith. The doctrine of the Trinity itself, however, is not a Biblical Doctrine..." ^[1]

Does the Bible contain also the necessary elements for Trinitarianism?

In order to argue successfully for the unconditionally and permanence of the ancient Trinitarian Creeds, it is necessary to make a distinction between doctrines, on the one hand, and on the terminology and conceptuality in which they were formulated on the other... Some of the crucial concepts employed by these creeds, such as "substance", "person", and "in two natures" are post-biblical novelties. If these particular notions are essential, the doctrines of these creeds are clearly conditional, dependent on the late Hellenistic milieu.^[2]

Note that this author says that many of “the crucial concepts” are “post-biblical novelties”: that is, they are new ideas that arrived on the scene after the Bible was written. If the crucial concepts weren’t around until later, then the doctrine wasn’t around until later either. As the author notes, these ideas arose out of the “Hellenistic milieu”, that is: Greek philosophy.

It is clearly impossible (if one accepts historical evidence as relevant at all) to escape the claim that the later formulations of dogma cannot be reached by a process of deductive logic from the original propositions and must contain an element of novelty.^[3]

Conclusion

Since the LDS believe in an apostasy from true doctrine, they see the creedal Trinitarianism—which is an admitted novelty in the centuries after Christ—as evidence of it.

Some modern Christians wish to apply a "doctrinal exclusion" to declare who is or isn't Christian. Such definitions are generally self-serving, and not very helpful. With the Nicene Creed, critics are ironically in the position of using a definition that would exclude all Christians for more than two centuries after Christ from the Christian fold.

Endnotes

1. [note] Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949), 205, 236.
2. [note] George A. Lindbeck (Professor of Historical Theology, Yale University) The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 92.
3. [note]  Maurice Wiles, The Making of Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 4.

Further reading

FAIR wiki articles

• Lectures on Faith teaches the Father is "a personage of spirit"

Printed material

• Blake T. Ostler, "The Mormon Concept of God: A Philosophical Analysis: Review of The Mormon Concept of God: A Philosophical Analysis by Francis J. Beckwith and Stephen E. Parrish," FARMS Review of Books 8:2 (1996): 99–146. - Philosophical implications of the LDS conception of God, versus that of Hellenized Christianity.
• Ari D. Bruening and David L. Paulsen, "The Development of the Mormon Understanding of God: Early Mormon Modalism and Other Myths" (review of Mormonism and the Nature of God: A Theological Evolution by Kurt Widmer), FARMS Review of Books 13/2 (2001), :109–69.