Audio only:
Joe breaks down Mormon teaching on never worshiping or praying to Jesus. Yes, you read that correctly…
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So should Christians worship Jesus and should we pray to him, those questions might seem obvious. Anybody calling themselves Christian or they might not. They might be things you’ve wondered yourself as you considered how to approach God. But today I want to respond to the fascinating answers provided to those questions by the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the LDS or the Mormons. Now they’ve got a newsroom which basically serves as PR for their religion, putting out little clips to make Mormonism more palatable to mainstream Christians. And in one of those videos, the question is posed, do you worship Jesus Christ in your services? Very simple question. Now listen to how it’s answered.
CLIP:
Anyone that visits the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is welcome and they would be impressed totally with the devotion and the center of our faith being Jesus Christ, the son of God. You would hear the name of Jesus Christ mentioned time after time after time. We pray in His name. We teach in His name. We have the communion or the sacrament, we call it all in his name. In remembrance of his atoning sacrifice, we partake of the bread and the water in renewing our covenants we’ve made with him. When the meeting is concluded, we close it in the name of Jesus Christ.
Joe:
So he’s clear that Jesus’ name comes up a lot in Mormon services. But stop and ask yourself, did he actually answer the question? I mean, he gave an answer that sounded like he was saying, yes, we worship Jesus. But did he actually say that? Wait, what’s that? Oh, I’m sorry. I thought it sounded like you said yes. I will go to shameless joe.com and sign up for as little as $5 a month to access exclusive q and a live streams in a community of beautiful Christians who want to learn more about the faith. Well, if you did say something like that, I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting the channel, but go back to the answer we just heard on this question of whether Mormons worship Jesus, whether they pray to him. The answers seem to be different depending on the audience.
So for instance, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has a come unto Christ campaign right now on their website, which is clearly targeting non-Mormons by trying to show Mormonism as being centered on Jesus Christ. This is part of a larger rebranding effort that the current LDS President Russell Nelson is undertaking to try to get people to refer to the Mormons as the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints instead and really emphasize the connection to Jesus. Now as part of this campaign, they offer four ways you can come closer to Jesus Christ. Number two on the list is worship him with the suggestion that church is the perfect place to draw closer to Jesus Christ. So okay, it sounds like I can worship Christ in a Mormon service, but in contrast, the church materials presented for insiders for Mormon seminary students, they say that in our prayers, we pray to God the Father in the name of his son Jesus Christ.
There is no place in scripture where we are taught to pray to Jesus. Wait a minute. So there’s no place in scripture where we’re taught to pray to Jesus. That can’t be true, right? Well, we’re going to get back to that, but right now, just notice this passage sounds like we’re not meant to worship Jesus or even to pray to him. And in fact, that is precisely what Mormon leaders like Elder Bruce McConkey have taught when speaking to Mormon audiences. Now, if you’re not familiar, McConkey was one of the 12 apostles of the church of Jesus Christ, Latter-Day Saints. He was also a massively influential Mormon theologian in his own right. His book Mormon Doctrine sold hundreds of thousands of copies and is regularly quoted by LDS leaders. And the book is regarded with an almost scriptural reverence. And in 1982, McConkey gave a talk to students at BYU to warn them against trying to have a personal relationship with Jesus, telling them not to pray to him and not to worship him. And he laid out a very clear rule.
CLIP:
We worship the Father and Him only and no one else. We do not worship the son and we do not worship the Holy Ghost.
Joe:
Now, that’s actually a strange position for Mormons to take since after all in the Book of Mormon itself, there’s a scene where the knee fights fall down at the feet of Jesus and worship him later they pray unto Jesus calling him their Lord and their God, and Jesus blesses everybody who prays to him. There are in fact even explicit instructions and second nephi to worship Christ with all your might mind, strength and soul. Now, in his doctrinal New Testament commentary, McConkey responds to this by saying that it might’ve been okay for people to pray to Jesus while he was personally with them, but it isn’t now that he’s ascended. And as for worshiping Christ, McConkey explained that these passages really just mean that we’re to remember Jesus we’re to honor him and we’re to be grateful to him.
CLIP:
I know perfectly well what the scriptures say about worshiping Christ and Jehovah that they are speaking in an entirely different sense. The sense of standing in awe and being reverentially grateful to him who has redeemed us. Worship in the true and saving sense is reserved for God. The first, the Creator
Joe:
Mackey’s argument is straightforward and one that many Christians might have trouble disagreeing with
CLIP:
True worshipers shall note that this is mandatory shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth for the Father Seeketh such to worship him. For unto such hath God promised his spirit and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth, there is no other way, no other approved system of worship.
Joe:
So as I understand it, McConkey is really making two biblical arguments. First, when we’re told in the Bible how to pray, we’re consistently told to pray to the Father. For instance, when the apostles ask Jesus how to pray, he gives him the our Father. And second, all of the passages, whether biblical or in his case from the Book of Mormon that seem to show the worship of Christ being a good thing, they don’t really mean worship in the false sense. Now, both of his arguments actually contain an element of truth that I want to affirm, but neither of those arguments should persuade you not to worship Christ your Lord. Okay? So first there certainly is a sense that as Alan Parr has said, the biblical picture of prayer is that we should pray to the Father through the Son and by the Holy Spirit. So this is actually a model of Trinitarian prayer and it’s sort of taken for granted throughout the New Testament. The Father sends the Son, the Son sends the Spirit, the Spirit then shows us the Son, and the Son shows us the Father. If you’re a Catholic, you can actually see this structure in the prayers at mass. The Spirit transforms the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, which is then presented to the Father while the priest prays
CLIP:
Through him and with Him and in him, oh God Almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
Joe:
So there absolutely is a way in which Trinitarian prayer and worship are typically directed to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. But the second thing I want to affirm is that it is true that the biblical terms for worship like pro sceo don’t always mean worship. Sometimes they just mean paying homage or prostrating yourself, and we have to be careful with language. My colleague Trent Horn recently pointed out even our English word worship originally referred to giving someone the highest respect, honor, or fame that they’re worth. I’m going to link that video in the description below. So ProScan does not automatically prove worship every time it’s used. For instance, in Revelation chapter three, verse nine, Christ promises to prostrate the synagogue of Satan before the feet of the church. And the word used there is pro sceo, which could mean that they’re worshiping the church, but clearly they’re not.
Okay. So if these two things are correct, if there really is a kind of prayer and worship directed to God the father specifically, and we can’t jump from the usage of a verb like pro sceo to automatically conclude that everybody bowing down to Christ is actually worshiping him, then are the Mormons rights? Should we stop worshiping Christ? Should we stop praying to him? No. So let’s put a few biblical pieces of the puzzle together. First, many times pro sceo does mean worship in the sense of offering divine honor. For instance, St. John goes to worship the angel in Revelation 22, and he’s told not to do this, but to worship God alone. Similarly, Cornelius tries to worship St. Peter, but Peter stops him. In both instances, the word for worship used there is ProScan. Now, similarly, this is the kind of worship that the devil demands from Jesus when he is trying to tempt him in the desert, okay?
Even though ProScan doesn’t always mean worship, it often seemingly typically does in the Bible, and people prostrate themselves ProScan before Jesus quite a lot. In the Bible, for instance, the Mangi tell Herod that they’ve come to Judea to worship the newborn king, which they do upon finding him in the manger and throughout his ministry, various people come up and offer worship in this way to Jesus from Jairus to the mother of the sons of Zebedee, to the garrison democ to the man blind from birth. In fact, this is the same word used in Hebrews one to describe how even the angels in heaven worship Christ, and it’s the same word used to describe the women worshiping Christ on Easter morning, or the apostles worshiping him after he ascends into heaven. But okay, here’s the striking thing. Unlike the angel in Revelation, and unlike St. Peter, Jesus never refuses these acts of worship.
So there’s really only three ways I see of explaining this evidence. Number one saying that nobody in the Bible really meant to worship Jesus. That seems clearly implausible. Even if we grant that not every instance of pro sceo towards Christ is automatically an act of divine worship, it’s a total stretch to say that none of those are acts of divine worship. It doesn’t really make sense that people would try to worship Peter and not try to worship the glorified Jesus Second option, people worship Jesus in the Bible, but they shouldn’t have. Well, if that view is right, then Jesus should have been rebuking his worshipers the way that Peter and the angel did, but he doesn’t. That leaves us with a third option. People worship Jesus rightly. That seems to me to be the obvious biblical conclusion from the evidence, and it explains why the early Christians very clearly worship Jesus Christ.
So people have worshiped Christ from the time of the New Testament forwards because this is the appropriate response to Jesus we’re to give him the divine honor that he is worth. But what about praying to Jesus? Now, the clearest biblical evidence for this comes from Acts seven in which Saint Stephen is being stoned to death. Now, just as Jesus had prayed to the Father from the cross saying, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, and Father, into thy hands, I commit my spirit. Stephen’s last words are prayers to Jesus saying, Lord Jesus receive my spirit, and Lord do not hold this sin against them. So he’s praying to Jesus in very much the same way that Jesus prayed to the Father. Now, this practice of praying to Jesus is clear enough that St. Paul can refer to followers of Jesus, who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, the second to last verse in the Bible is a prayer to Jesus come Lord Jesus. But McConkey argues that we shouldn’t pray to Jesus and we shouldn’t try to have a special relationship with him.
CLIP:
Another peril is that those so involved often begin to pray directly to Christ because of some special friendship they feel has been developed in this connection. A current and unwise book, which advocates gaining a special relationship with Jesus, contains this sentence, because the Savior is our mediator, our prayers go through Christ to the Father, and the Father answers our prayers through His son. This is plain sectarian nonsense. Our prayers are addressed to the Father and to him only. They do not go through Christ or the Blessed Virgin or St. Genevieve or along the beads of a rosary. We are entitled to come boldly unto the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Joe:
But that’s just an argument from silence. The fact that we can go boldly before the throne of grace doesn’t mean that there are no intercessors. In fact, the biblical description of the throne of grace, the throne of God in Revelation eight, shows us angels before him interceding by offering up the prayers of the saints as incense before him. And so whether you’re using this to argue against the mediation of Christ or against the intercession of the Blessed Virgin or St. Genevieve, hopefully is clear. This kind of argument is just biblically unsound. The fact that we can pray to God the Father, does not mean that we can’t also pray to Jesus or through Him. On the contrary, we’re called to have a friendship with Christ who calls us to abide in Him and He and us, and who refers to those who love him as his friends.
So it’s not just okay to pray to Jesus. It’s crucial that we do so. After all, what sort of friends refuse to talk to one another? Now, of course, this is hardly the only place that Mormon theology breaks from historic Christianity. The LDS actually teach that we can’t trust historic Christianity because the church went into what they call a great apostasy almost immediately after the death of the Apostles. So how could they possibly make such a claim and how should Christians respond to it? Well, you’re going to have to click this video to find out more for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.