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Why Other Churches Do Not Accept the Baptism

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Why Other Churches Do Not Accept the Baptism

The Godhead is the point at which the question of whether the Latter-day Saint movement is a Christian denomination becomes concrete rather than rhetorical, because it determines whether other churches will recognise its baptisms.

In 2001 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ruled that Latter-day Saint baptism is not valid for the Catholic Church, on the ground that the words used, though verbally similar to the Trinitarian formula, carry a different meaning, since the Father, Son and Holy Ghost named in them are not the persons of the Trinity as Catholic doctrine understands them. Most mainline Protestant bodies have reached the same conclusion by the same route. A convert to Catholicism from another Protestant church is received without rebaptism; a convert from the Latter-day Saint movement is baptised. That is a reciprocal position, since the movement rebaptises everyone.

Latter-day Saints reply that they worship the Father in the name of Jesus Christ, that the name of Christ is in the name of the church, and that they read the New Testament without the fourth century Greek philosophical vocabulary in which the creeds were framed. Their objection is not to the Bible but to the councils. Critics answer that a term as central as the nature of God cannot be treated as vocabulary, and that a body which denies the creeds has left the definition of Christianity that the creeds established.

Both positions are held in good faith by people who have thought about them for a long time, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it. In practical terms it means the movement is a Christian tradition by its own account, a restoration by its own account, and outside Nicene Christianity by the account of nearly everyone else.

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