Christian and Mormon Debate! Part 1 :: Different Worldview Perspectives

Opening Introductions and Debate Format

Let me bring these guys in so they can introduce themselves and this is gonna be a fun discussion.

What's up, fellas?

How y 'all doing?

Doing well, thanks.

All right, man. I'm pretty excited for this one, man.

This is gonna be an outstanding discussion.

It's gonna be fun. And I know you guys are just excited. Jeremiah, you were telling me you're a little nervous, man.

You're excited about this.

What's going on with you, man?

How you been?

Yes, sir, excited.

Excited, excited.

What's up, Joseph, man? You excited, man?

You good?

You ready to go for this?

I'm looking forward to it, yeah.

Excellent, excellent. So before we jump into the format of this discussion, I do wanna give you time to introduce yourself to the audience. So Joseph, if you don't mind, man, give a quick introduction yourself, man.

Sure. My name is Joseph Lawal. I'm a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I just recently started a YouTube channel called LDS Philosophy on which I kind of address philosophical issues in the church.

I'm also a student in philosophy and Latin and Greek. My research interests are mostly in kind of the intersection of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology, and then in the philosophy of religion.

All right, cool. Thank you once again for joining me. All right, Jeremiah, go ahead and give a quick... All right, Jeremiah, go ahead and give a quick introduction yourself, man.

Hello, everybody.

My name is Jeremiah Nortier. I've been married to my wonderful bride for almost five years now. I serve bi-vocationally as an elder and a youth director here in a Reformed Baptist church in Arkansas.

So you can probably hear my Southern accent there. And I'm looking forward to starting my Master's of Divinity coming up here in the fall. And I just want to simply say that I love my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and I have a passion for learning the word of God, which requires a lot of studying theology, apologetics, and all the wonderful insight from the saints throughout history.

So thank you, Marlon.

All right, all right.

Thank you both for joining me here on The Gospel Truth, man. Once again, this is gonna be a great discussion. This is probably the first type of discussion like this on The Gospel Truth, surprisingly.

So let's get into this. All right, so we're gonna start off the debate with a 15-minute opening statement from you guys. Then we will go to 30-minute each topic. So we're discussing five topics here, right?

So the first topic would be the gospel. Then we go transition to the trinity, Joseph Smith and Galatians 1. Sufficiency of scripture and completion of the canon. And then we're gonna go to a five-minute closing, and then we'll go to a Q &A from the audience.

That sounds good? All right, I don't think we actually agreed on who's gonna go first. This is not arguing a negative or affirmative premise. So Joseph, you mind going first, man?

15-minute opening, man?

Sure.

All right.

Okay.

You got, let me set you up. Also, before you go into it, once you get to that one-minute point, you'll hear this ding. You'll hear that chime. That'll let you know you have one minute left in your opening statement.

And let me set you up. Let me get the time up and everything, and I'll let you know when to go.

Thank you.

One second. All right, Joseph, you got it, man, for 15 minutes.

Thanks. So obviously, these five topics are pretty enormous topics. So I don't imagine that we'll get to any sort of sufficient exploration of any of them in the time that we have, particularly not in a 15-minute opening statement.

So my goal, actually, for the opening statement is just to give some preliminary remarks, really just on two of the issues. So what I'm gonna do is actually present a negative case. First, against the sort of exegetical methodology that I take issue with, that I think underlies Sola Scriptura or certain types of Sola Scriptura.

And the reason for that is it will actually set up the way that I'll approach the remainder of the questions anyway. And then I'm also gonna give my case for, well, some of the issues that I have with the Doctrine of the Trinity.

So because these are two of the topics, two of the big ones, I'll lay out my case here, and that'll help set up for the remaining of the questions. So I'll address the other three explicitly once we get to that point in the discussion.

So first, I'm gonna begin by kind of laying out a subset of the propositions which I think are necessary for an advocate of Sola Scriptura to hold. And this is not all the propositions you would need to hold.

So these are probably necessary, but not sufficient. I understand that the doctrine is not monolithic. And so if Jeremiah disagrees with my formulation of anything, I'm happy to revise it. I'm also gonna be dealing primarily with kind of this from a philosophical perspective.

My friend Robert Boylan has a book. I think it's the only book-length treatment of this topic by Al-Atare Saint. It's called Not by Scripture Alone. That gets a lot more into the scriptural side of it, if anyone's interested in that.

But I'll be dealing really with the philosophical stuff. So there are four things, I think, that would need to be the case for Sola Scriptura to be true. So first, we would need some sort of infallibility or inerrancy thesis.

Then we'd need a semantic thesis, a perspicuity thesis is what I'm gonna call it. And then we'd need some reason to think that it obtains. So in terms of infallibility or inerrancy, there's kind of a sliding scale of how strong a position you can take on this.

You could say that every single claim made in the Bible is literally true, including minor historical claims, total inerrancy. I think this is not a particularly popular position. I think it's very difficult to defend.

So then the kind of slightly weaker formation that's more defensible would be something like with regards to matters of theology and morals, that the Bible is infallible, right? So regardless of where you fall on this scale, I think there are three things that need to be affirmed for this infallibility or inerrancy thesis.

First, we'd have to say that the original words of the Bible are either exactly as God intended or within an acceptable range of formulations. Secondly, we would need to say that as the manuscripts of the particular books of the Bible are transmitted through time, they only vary within an acceptable range.

And then finally, we have to know that one and two are true. We have to know that it was, as it was originally written, it was within a certain acceptable range. And secondly, that it didn't vary too much through time.

I accept the first one. I accept that the original formulation was as God intended or within an acceptable range. I don't believe that we can prove that. I think that, not to other people, I think it can come to us as individuals.

The second one, I don't accept. And I think it would also be very difficult to prove empirically. So particularly in the case of the Old Testament, where the manuscripts we have are just simply not old enough, I think, to make any really very plausible claims about this.

So I think that's a problem for Sola Scriptura. Secondly, I think we need a semantic thesis. And this would be something like, there is one objective meaning to a passage of scripture or a set of meanings.

And I would accept this, I think, this thesis. It would be denied by a sort of relativist about meaning or about like a Quinean. Quine was a philosopher last century who said that meaning is indeterminate.

So you could challenge Sola Scriptura on these grounds, and I won't. Thirdly, we need a perspicuity thesis. So we have to say that we have reliable, knowledge-producing access to the semantic content of the Bible.

So we have to know what it says. And secondly, we have to have a reliable method for determining which propositions in the Bible are true and which are false if we don't accept the strong inerrancy thesis.

So the first one of these two is actually the one I'll be addressing in a moment. I'll be giving some philosophical reason to think that that's not the case on certain formulations. And then lastly, we need some justification.

We need some reason to think that Sola Scriptura is true. And I actually don't think we have this either. I don't think we have good reason to think Sola Scriptura is true. And we can discuss that more extensively kind of at the exegetical level once we get into the discussion.

So I want to focus on the first part of the perspicuity thesis that we need reliable, knowledge-producing access to the semantic content of the Bible. The problem I see with this is ambiguity. So there are different types of ambiguity.

There's lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Lexical is the level of words. Syntactic at the level of sentence structure. So like a good example, a funny example of syntactic ambiguity called amphiboly is the famous Groucho Marx line, I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

How he got in my pajamas, I don't know, right? So it's this sort of syntactic ambiguity kind of lends itself to that sort of humor because in my pajamas, you know, we expect it to be a modifying I, but then the joke is that it's modifying the elephant, right?

So because of the structure of the sentence, we have some ambiguity. Both of these sorts of lexical and syntactic ambiguity exist in the Bible, but I think they don't generally pose a problem for Sola Scriptura.

They're not generally related to really heavily theological passages. So I think the sort of ambiguity that is problematic for this idea that scripture alone is sufficient is, well, really two sorts, semantic and theological ambiguity.

So semantic is like the semantic content of a passage. Theological would be the theological propositions we can derive from the passage. I'll kind of conflate them for the sake of time, for the sake of this argument.

So I'll give a specific example and then set up a little bit of the philosophical framework for raising this objection. So Lorenzo Snow, who was the fifth president of the restored church, has this famous line.

He says, as man now is, God once was, and as God now is, man may be. So this is often taken as support for the idea that Latter-day Saints believe that God is an exalted man and that we can become just like God is.

Many Latter-day Saints do believe that. But the problem that I see with this sort of kind of linear view of interpretation is that this statement, as it stands there, is compatible with an Orthodox Christian framework interpreted in a different way.

So as man now is, God once was, that would just be the incarnation of Christ. And as God now is, man may be, that would be some sort of theosis. It can be more limited than the LDS view. So if you think about a passage like Hebrews 12, 9 and 10, talking about becoming partakers of God's holiness, I think that that could allow someone to assent to the statement, as God now is, man may be.

So it's a fairly straightforward statement, seemingly. We all understand it. But in terms of parsing what the semantic and theological content of the statement is, it's not so straightforward, I think.

I think the reason for this is the distinction between semantic reference and speaker reference. So this is a distinction due to Saul Kripke, who's probably the biggest philosopher of language of the last 200 years.

But it's also a very natural way to think about language. So semantic reference is just set by the linguistic conventions of a language. So the way words are used determines what a statement is actually saying.

Speaker reference is those conventions plus context plus intent. So it's not what the words mean, but what the speaker means by using those words. So one example that Kripke gives, he says, imagine two people are robbing a bank, and then one of them says, the cops are around the corner, right?

At the semantic level, or at semantic reference, he just means the cops are around the corner. But at the speaker reference level, he's really saying something like, we need to get out of here, right?

So what he meant by using those words was not literally what the words are saying. So I think we have more or less good access to semantic reference in passages of scripture, but that still leaves a wide range of options, even at the semantic level, but particularly at the level of speaker reference.

I think we can't definitively determine the semantic or theological content of a given passage. So I think this is particularly an acute problem in the case of the Trinity. So if you look at passages like Acts 5, which is kind of the proof text for saying that the Holy Ghost is God, and we can deal with this case specifically when we get to that point, I think it can be interpreted different ways, only one of which actually would lead us to think that the Holy Ghost is God in a way that Trinitarians need that passage to be saying.

I don't think we have any strong reason to prefer that reading. So I want to say I'm not a pessimist or a relativist about interpretation. I just don't think simply reading and studying is sufficient to give definitive answers.

I think to alleviate or solve this exegetical problem, we need one of three types of things. So the first type of thing would be a witness of the spirit to interpret and provide justification for the belief about what a particular passage is saying.

This can make for a consistent worldview internally, but it will not really do any good in a debate. The fact that I feel I've had a witness about a particular passage won't convince anyone else because they may feel that they have a conflicting witness.

So that leaves us really with two other sorts of alleviating institutions for this exegetical problem. One would be an interpretive authority. So something like the Catholic magisterium, which is meant to infallibly interpret passages, or in the case of the Latter-day Saints, I think modern day prophets can serve as an authority to interpret.

And then thirdly, we could imagine that the presence of further scripture would provide more data points and potentially a more clear layout doctrine so that there's less of a problem at the semantic and theological ambiguity level.

So I think the Book of Mormon is an instance of this. It allows us to more confidently interpret passages even in the absence of the other two. And it also means that we can argue for the interpretation of certain passages, provided that we can independently verify this interpretive authority or the further scripture.

The final problem that I kind of have with, or that I'll talk about for the Doctrine of Sola Scriptura would be the exclusion of certain books from the canon. So the apocryphal books, I think, pose a serious problem.

And I just wanna raise that now, touch on it, so that we can talk about that in the discussion portion, because I think it has some serious implications for the doctrine. Okay, so quickly, I just wanna cover now some of the problems I have with the Doctrine of Trinity.

So for one, I think it's very hard at the philosophical level to reconcile with the doctrine of divine simplicity. So most Orthodox Christians, and I wanna make sure before we discuss this that Jeremiah does, affirm that God has no parts, right?

That's in a creed. So that seems difficult when you look at passages like Christ saying, not my will, but thine be done to the father. So the presence of multiple wills would seem to constitute a distinction, but there can be no real distinctions within the triune God on the Orthodox view.

And so, people like Duns Scotus have tried to give answers by saying there are different types of distinctions. Some are real and some are only formal. But I think talking about distinctions of wills would constitute a real sort of distinction that poses a real problem for this.

So on the LDS view, I think in principle, it's possible for the father and the son to have diverging wills, but in practice, it will never be the case because they're united in will. But for the Orthodox view, I don't think that's true.

I think it can't even be in principle that they would diverge in will because that would constitute a real distinction in the Trinity and violate divine simplicity. And so passages like this, I think, pose a real problem.

I think there are other exegetical problems. So passages like in John 17, where Christ says that we can be one with him as he is with the father, on its face, that passage would seem to be saying that in the same way that the father and the son are one, we can be one with the son, but that's not possible in a Trinitarian view.

And so I think when you take passages like John 1 that says that the word was God that the Trinitarians used to support their position, what you have to say is that that is the interpretive text. It's the framework through which we interpret other texts.

And then we have to interpret John 17 in light of that. Of course, the non-Trinitarian would say that John 17 is the framework and that John 1 is the one that would be interpreted within that framework.

We would kind of accommodate it to the view that we can be one with the son in the same way that the son is one with the father. And so I think there's no good methodological principle because of the semantic and theological ambiguities that I raised about problems with semantic and theological ambiguities that I raised above to prefer one interpretive framework over the other except independently of scripture.

I think that scripture itself cannot in principle settle that question. So I think that's a problem, obviously for all sorts of doctrines and for the sufficiency of scripture itself, but specifically in the case of the Trinity, I think it's an acute problem.

Finally, so the Trinity, when we talk about the Trinity, there are different ways of talking about it. A common one is to say that there are three persons and one being, right? When we use the word person ordinarily, I think it entails the meaning of the term kind of loosely.

I'm not really fond of like strict analyticity in philosophy but it kind of includes the concept of only being one being. One person is equivalent to one being for ordinary, in ordinary settings. And so when we say that there are three persons in one being, we mean something different than what we ordinarily mean by person.

And this isn't, I don't think particularly controversial. It's famously associated with Thomas Aquinas, the solution is the doctrine of analogy. So we have univocal uses of terms and I'll explain this, I don't really have a lot of time now in the conversation, univocal uses, equivocal uses of terms and then analogical.

So different but related uses. Basically, I think my primary problem is that we can't really fill out the content of analogical uses of terms. So this is really, really acutely noticed in the case of divine simplicity.

So because there can be no distinctions between God and his attributes, God is identical to his being, is identical to his goodness, is identical to his knowledge, is identical to his benevolence, right?

That also means that the attributes, God's knowledge, for example, must be identical to each other. So to benevolence. So knowledge and benevolence are the same thing in God. And I think that's kind of a contentless statement.

I can't make sense of that. I can't fill in any concept there. And so the doctrine of analogy is an attempted way to say that we can talk about God, but it seems to me that it really leaves us with a totally non-literal way of talking about God that I think is a problem for ideas like salvific doctrines.

I think some theological statements serve as grounds for worship worthiness, but also we want to say that God loves us. And I'll explain this a little bit further, I think, when we get to the discussion portion.

But if it's just analogical love, I think we're really going against what scripture actually says about the nature of God. There's nowhere in scriptures that says God loves us in some analogical, totally alien way to the way that we love.

It seems very counterintuitive to me. So that's my opening statement.

The Gospel of Grace and the Triune God

All right, thank you, Joseph. Very, very well done. All right, Mr. Jeremiah Nurtir, you got it for 15 minutes. Let me set the time up and I'll let you know when to go.

All right.

All right, you got it, 15 minutes, brother.

All right, thank you, Marlon. Thank you, Joseph, for having this dialogue with me just to kind of also reemphasize what was already said. Me and Joseph, when we were talking about what in the world should we debate and dialogue about, we learned really quickly that he has an area mainly in philosophy and where I'm coming from is mainly theological.

So we wanted to pick a broad enough topic where both of those could overlap with one another. So that's why we went ahead and went with the topic, different worldview perspectives. So naturally, we'll talk about philosophy, the nature of scripture, and how we interpret the world around us.

So my three major points today, I wanna talk about what a worldview actually is. My second major point will be the transcendental necessity of the Christian worldview. And number three, finally, I wanna talk about the triune God's gospel of grace.

And so most philosophers and theologians agree that the three major pillars of a worldview are ontology, it's asking questions about what actually exists, and number two is epistemology, the study of knowledge, how we know what we know.

And number three, a worldview is made up of value. We talk about things that are ethical, how we should relate to one another and live in this life. And so all of these categories are profoundly dependent on one another.

When we ask the question, how should we live our lives? The question assumes that we exist, other people exist in a world that actually exists. And so we must have knowledge to some degree to even be able to ask that question.

And so that involves epistemology. Having an answer to that question involves a proper framework of these things, and the answer will be ethical. This assumes a standard of right and wrong of what we ought to do and what we ought not to do.

So my position is that there is one worldview that can consistently test for everything, account for everything, and justify everything including itself. The worldview of the triune God of Christianity is self-attesting, it's self-authenticating in the 66 books of the Bible.

So like Joseph already brought out, we're gonna talk about why 66 books of the Bible. My position is that there's no more and no less. So please do not hear me say that the Bible is true merely because it says it's true.

Rather, what I'm saying is that the triune God of Scripture produces a necessary view of reality. The universe that we truly live in and experience is the way that it is because the triune God of Scripture exists, and I believe that can be demonstrated.

And you may be thinking, well, wait a minute, preacher boy, you can't just assert something to be necessarily true and that be the case. And I agree with you. I believe that we can demonstrate something to be necessarily true if by trying to disprove that thing, we have to borrow from it in order to disprove it.

That would show that our position is self-refuting and the thing that we borrow from is true necessarily. This is also known as the transcendental necessity that can be proven by the impossibility to the contrary.

So I wanna give you a couple of examples of what I'm talking about and relate this to a broader worldview perspective. If someone's gonna say that I don't believe words are necessary for communication, whether that be verbal or by sign language, you see the problem that this person's gonna run into because in order to make their case that words aren't necessary, they're gonna have to borrow words in order to make their case.

And it's gonna prove that words are essentially necessary for communication. So that's a very rudimentary example. So I wanna bring it up a level. When we start talking about the laws of logic, the one that we're most familiar with is the law of non-contradiction.

The laws of logic are true by necessity, right? With how we live our lives and how we think and how we relate to one another. One good example of this, showing how we live within the laws of logic not changing.

If we go to the bank and we ask the teller, can I please have $100? And they say, sure. And they hand us a $1 bill. We're gonna look at them like they're crazy or they sadly mistaken because we asked for a specific thing which negates all of its opposites and things that do not ascribe to that.

And so the point is, is that we are logical human beings or at least we try to be rational and logical. But if we tried to argue that the laws of logic do not exist and we don't have to obey them, well, in order to make that case, you will have to borrow from the laws of logic.

It just is the way that we live and interact with people in our everyday lives. And so this is important. The principle I'm wanting you to hang on to is that in order for something to be necessarily true, try to disprove it.

And then by disproving it, if you have to borrow from that thing, well, then your position is self-refuting and the thing you're arguing against is true by necessity. So I believe that there is a worldview so thorough, so comprehensive in laying the foundation for why the universe is the way that it is.

And so to argue against this comprehensive worldview, you will have to borrow principles from it in order to make your case, therefore proving its necessity. So when I ask a question, what worldview justifies why reasonable moral humans exist in this profoundly unified and diverse universe?

We gotta be able to have a worldview to account for that. What worldview also accounts for and tells us where we get our knowledge from and where our knowledge comes from and if it's trustworthy? What worldview explains how we should interact with other people?

How do we know what is right and wrong and how we should interact and live our lives with other people? I believe that there is one worldview that can consistently provide a foundation for why everything is the way that it is.

When we start, when our ultimate starting point is with the triune God of scripture, then we can have justified true belief that we exist because God has eternally existed and created us within time and space.

And he has revealed this truth to us in his word. We can know that we are reasonable moral beings because we are made in the triune God's image. God is perfect. He possesses all knowledge and he's the standard of righteousness.

So temporally, we reflect the light of God in many ways as finite creatures. We live in a wonderfully crafted world that tells us many things about our creator, about how he is, this world is diverse and unified in a profound way.

This reflects the reality of the triunity of its creator. One being of God that is fully shared in three divine persons. We also, our epistemology is couched within a worldview that tells us the fear of God, the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge.

So when we start with God's infallible word who knows all things, reveals to us that his word is truth, that no lies of the truth and that he himself cannot lie, then we can have the greatest degree of certainty to answer the hard questions.

How should we live our lives? We can know for certain that it's to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Human beings have knowledge about many things in this creative world, but that is because our thinking and our knowledge reflects the triune God's image that we bear who has perfect knowledge and is the standard of logical thinking.

However, most people present an incoherent worldview that says we can't know anything for certain. And that would be self-refuting. Or you got a lot of people that say that you can know some things for certain, but it's just a brute fact.

It is the way that it is and I don't have to give you any justification. That would simply demonstrate that they are suppressing the truth in their sin and they are unwilling to give worship, honor and thanks to their creator.

And this is revealed to us in Romans chapter one. The triune God of Christianity's worldview is so thorough and comprehensive in providing the preconditions of our intelligible experiences and also tells us why reality is the way that it is.

So here's my big point. In order to argue against the Christian worldview, you would have to borrow the Christian worldview's principles in order to make your case. A person would have to act like an image bearer of the triune God to think in one and many categories, to relate to other people in a logical and reasonable way and to live with the assumption that the future will be like the past.

So to deny the triune God of the scripture, whether in what you say or what you do, would actually demonstrate your dependence on him. To deny the triune God of scripture in word or practice is like a little child sitting in their father's lap, slapping him in the face.

The child is being held up by his father even to be able to act like this manner. And so this is often the case with most human beings. We live and move and have our being because we live in God's created world, but we often slap him in the face, even though he's been so wonderful, so gracious and so loving to us.

And so I wanna shift to my last and third major point is since the God of Christianity is triune and distinct from all other systems of thought and all other worldly religions, I believe the method of salvation, the gospel is also uniquely different.

And so the message of Christianity is a gospel of grace. And me and Joseph will definitely talk about the emphasis of grace there. And number two, this gospel is a Trinitarian work. The Bible teaches us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

The wages of our sin earns us eternal punishment because sin is ultimately against the eternal God who is just, therefore the punishment will fit the crime. The Bible goes on to teach us that man has a sin nature that desires evil.

It's bent towards the bad and not towards the good. In fact, man is hostile to God for the unregenerate man does not submit to God's law. Indeed, he cannot. So God being rich in mercy, grace and love, humbled himself by taking on the form of a servant being born in the likeness of men.

This is God the Son who became flesh in Jesus Christ, both being truly God and truly man. He fulfilled Old Testament prophecies that foretold of the Messiah's coming. Jesus Christ accomplished something that no sinful man was capable of doing.

He fulfilled the law of God, which is holy and righteous and good. And this is key. Jesus was perfectly obedient to the commandments and was without sin. Jesus proceeded to fulfill Messianic scripture of Psalm 16, Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, Zechariah 12, which tells us that the Savior coming was to purchase redemption by bearing our sin guilt.

Jesus's hands and feet were pierced. He suffered and died on the cross of Calvary to fully satisfy the wrath of God for sin. And this is the reality. Jesus died the death that we all deserve. Jesus Christ did not remain dead like a lot of other major religious figures, but he defeated sin and death by resurrecting from the grave three days later, proving that he truly is Lord and God.

And so please don't miss this. This is the gospel truth, that you can have all of your sins forgiven if you repent and put your faith in the only Savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. By trusting in Jesus, all of your sin will be put on the cross of Calvary and will be paid for in full.

And in exchange, you will receive the righteousness of Jesus Christ credited to your account. God the Father will see you now as his child covered by the righteousness of Jesus Christ. The Bible makes no mistake about this.

In 2 Corinthians 5, 21, we read, for our sake, the Father made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God. This is known as the great exchange. When you look to Jesus and love him in repentant faith, then your sin gets put on the cross.

And in exchange, you get his perfect righteousness, his perfect obedience. And so the apostle Paul calls this message the gospel of the grace of God. And that is because salvation is 100 accomplished by God in him alone.

The Bible teaches us right before Jesus died on the cross, he said, to telestai, it is finished. This is a legal term, meaning that everything is paid for in full. And the reason why this is so important to understand is that Jesus fulfilled the righteous requirement of the law.

He did all the works necessary for salvation. Therefore, when we look to Jesus for salvation in repentance and faith, we cannot bring our own works to add to what Jesus accomplished. The Bible is explicit on this point.