Mouw and Mormonism

The headline says it all, “My Take: This evangelical says Mormonism isn’t a cult.” Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Theological Seminary, continues his campaign to help Mormonism “mainstream” and, in the process, to throw every one of those who have worked so diligently to bring the gospel to the Mormon people under the bus. Mouw’s confusion on Mormonism, rooted not only in his personal theological liberalism, but in his friendships with leading LDS personalities (on the more liberal or left side of the spectrum of Mormonism, to be sure), was put on display years ago when he “apologized” to the Mormons for all those nasty Christians out there who had been seeking to evangelize them all these years.Let’s not worry about the fact that Mormonism teaches that there exists a plurality of gods; that the god of this planet was once a man himself who attained the status of godhood through the eternal law of progression; that Jesus is the first born spirit offspring of this exalted man (who lives on a planet that circles a star named Kolob) and one of his many wives (who, like him, have bodies of flesh and bone and with whom God, named Elohim, sires billions of spirit offspring); that men can become gods just as Elohim did. No, let’s leave all that aside as stuff we can “discuss” around the wonderful table of ecumenical dialogue! I am not sure what the basis of that discussion would be, since Mormonism has patently a-historical and simply false books of “revelation” that are held in higher esteem than the Bible (which is only the word of God so far as it is “translated correctly”), but given how far Mouw leans to the left anyway, that kind of “Bible thing” is not going to be a major hindrance anyway. In any case, Mouw continues to sow confusion and error regarding the status of Mormonism which, on any semi-fair examination, is fundamentally farther removed from Christianity in the spectrum of religious teaching than Islam is!

– Dr. James White