Mormons are Christians - Apologetic Setup [01]

Joseph Smith said that Christians are "all wrong ... all their creeds were an admonition in his sight, and that those professors (Christians) were all corrupt" (Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith, 2:18-19). Argument One: The founder of the religion did not want to be regarded as a Christian---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The name Christian was first used, as Acts 11:26 records, to identify the disciples of Jesus Christ. The word "Christian" is the Greek word "christianos," and it means an adherent of Jesus Christ. It literally means "Christ ones" (Acts 11:26, 26:28, 1 Peter 4:16). The correct definition of the word is one who is a follower of the Jesus Christ of the Bible. For almost two thousand years it has never had a reference to anyone other that the historical Jesus Christ of the New Testament.""The god of the Mormons is not the God of the Bible. To the Mormons, Jesus is the firstborn son of an exalted "man" who became the god of this world. The man-god of Mormonism was made the god of this world because of his good works on another planet somewhere out in the universe. He "earned" godhood, and was thus appointed by a counsel of gods in the heavens to his high position as the god of planet Earth. The Mormon god of this world was a man, like all men, who became a god. This is what the celestial marriage and the temple vows are all about. LDS men, by doing their temple work, are striving for exaltation by which they, too, shall one day become gods. Their wives will be the mother goddesses of "their" world and with their husband will produce the population of their world. This is the Mormon doctrine of "eternal progression." Note the following quote from the Mormon Journal of Discourses, vol. 1, page 123, made by the LDS Apostle Orson Hyde: "Remember that God, our heavenly Father, was perhaps once a child, a mortal like we ourselves, and rose step by step in the scale of progress, in the school of advancement; has moved forward and overcome, until He has arrived at the point were He is."Lorenzo Snow, late President of the Mormon church, made this statement in the second verse of his famous poem entitled, "Man's Destiny":"As Abra'm, Isaac, Jacob, too, babes, then men--to gods they grew. As man now is, our God once was; As now God is, so man may be,-- Which doth unfold man's destiny. . ."The God of the Bible is not an exalted man. The God of the Bible is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. The Bible says He is the only God and there are no other Gods. He had no beginning or end and he is a spirit being and never was a man.http://www.seafox.com...Argument Two: The Mormon God is not the God of the Bible. Simply because the Mormon Church recognizes "A Jesus", does not make them Christians. Muslims also recognize "A Jesus". They are also not Christians. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Mormon beliefs are considered to be so far outside the beliefs of most Christians that the Roman Catholic Church, Presbyterians and the United Methodist Church all declared that Mormon converts must be re-baptized, a setback to the Mormon Church's effort to characterize itself as a Christian denomination. The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith declared that baptisms in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are "not the baptism that Christ instituted." The ruling was a departure from the Catholic Church's usual practice of recognizing the baptisms of converts from most other churches. The Vatican held that the Mormon view of the nature of God was too different from Catholicism's. Southern Baptists have called Utah "a stronghold of Satan".Point Three: The Church of Christ is one body. The body of Christ has wholly rejected Mormonism. While this is not a definiton of a Christian (that the Church accepts you), it certainly adds credence to the argument. Christians generally recognize each other. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------