🌍 World Religions — Unit 8: New Religious Movements

Orientation

This unit turns to a different kind of religious movement than any this course has studied so far. Where Units 2 through 7 examined traditions that arose independently of Christianity, in different centuries, cultures, and continents, this unit examines three movements that arose within the last two hundred years, in direct relationship to Christianity or the broader Abrahamic tradition, each claiming in some way to restore, correct, complete, or supersede the Christian message rather than to offer an entirely separate religious system. Scholars often group movements like these under the label New Religious Movements, and while the label covers many groups this course cannot examine individually, three deserve particular attention because of their size, their historical significance, and the frequency with which a pastor in Cuba or Mexico is likely to encounter their adherents, often at his own front door.

This unit will examine the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called Mormonism; the Jehovah's Witnesses, organized under the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society; and the Baha'i Faith, a movement with different origins but a structurally similar claim to complete what earlier revelation began. All three movements share a pattern worth naming at the outset: each claims some form of continuing or completed revelation beyond, or in addition to, the Bible as historic Christianity has received it, and each, in different ways, denies core convictions the Christian church has held since its earliest centuries regarding the nature of God, the person of Christ, or both. Because these movements use so much of the same vocabulary Christians use — God, Jesus, salvation, the Bible itself — a pastor must listen with particular care to what these familiar words actually mean within each system, since the vocabulary often stays the same while the meaning changes entirely.

It is worth naming directly why this course treats these three movements in a unit of their own rather than folding them into the broader category of Christian denominations. Historic Christianity, across its Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant expressions studied implicitly throughout this seminary's other courses, has disagreed sharply on many matters of church government, sacramental practice, and the finer points of soteriology, yet has held in common, since the great ecumenical councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, a settled consensus on the full deity of Christ, the Trinity, and the sufficiency and closed nature of the biblical canon. Each movement examined in this unit rejects at least one of these three settled convictions outright, which is precisely why classical Christian theology has historically classified them not as denominations within the Christian family but as movements standing, on these specific points, outside it — a classification this unit maintains not out of contempt for the sincere people who hold these beliefs, but out of the same commitment to doctrinal honesty this course has maintained throughout.

I. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Mormonism traces its origin to Joseph Smith, who reported in western New York state, beginning in 1820, a series of visions, including a visitation from God the Father and Jesus Christ as separate, physically embodied beings, and later visits from an angel named Moroni who directed him to golden plates buried nearby, containing what Smith translated and published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon, an account of ancient peoples in the Americas who Mormon teaching holds were visited by the resurrected Christ after His ascension. Smith taught that the true Christian church had fallen into complete apostasy after the apostolic age, and that his own ministry represented a restoration of true priesthood authority and correct doctrine, lost from the earth for centuries until recovered through his own prophetic call — a claim that positions Mormonism not as a new religion alongside Christianity but as the sole legitimate continuation of it, with every other Christian church, Catholic and Protestant alike, considered to have taught corrupted doctrine.

This claim of total apostasy deserves careful attention because it functions as Mormonism's foundational premise, the reason a sincere Mormon believer can hold that his church alone possesses valid priesthood authority and correct doctrine while every other Christian tradition, however ancient or however carefully it has preserved the biblical text, does not. Scripture itself, by contrast, promises the ongoing preservation of Christ's church rather than its total collapse: Jesus told Peter that "the gates of Hades shall not prevail against" the church He was building (Matthew 16:18), and Paul describes the church as already possessing, in the first century, "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15) — language difficult to reconcile with a total, centuries-long apostasy requiring complete restoration through a nineteenth-century prophet.

Mormon theology diverges from historic Christian doctrine at several decisive points a pastor should understand clearly. Regarding God, Mormon teaching holds that God the Father is Himself an exalted, glorified man who progressed to His current divine status, that He possesses a physical body of flesh and bone, and that faithful Mormons may themselves progress toward a similar exaltation and godhood in the eternities to come — a doctrine captured in the well-known Mormon couplet, "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become." This differs fundamentally from the biblical doctrine that God has always existed as God, eternally and without beginning (Psalm 90:2), and that no creature will ever become God in the sense Mormon theology envisions. Regarding Jesus, Mormon teaching historically taught that Jesus and Lucifer were spirit brothers, both offspring of Heavenly Father in a premortal spirit existence, with Jesus chosen to be the Savior and Lucifer, having his plan rejected, becoming Satan — a teaching that, whatever refinements later Mormon apologists have offered, places Jesus in a fundamentally different category than the eternal, uncreated Son of historic Christian doctrine (John 1:1-3; Colossians 1:15-17). Regarding salvation, Mormon theology teaches a system of graded eternal destinies called the three degrees of glory, with the highest, exaltation in the celestial kingdom, requiring not merely faith in Christ but temple ordinances, priesthood authority, and enduring faithfulness to LDS teaching and practice — a salvation substantially dependent on the believer's own works and ongoing performance rather than the finished, sufficient work of Christ received by faith alone (Ephesians 2:8-9).

II. Jehovah's Witnesses

The Jehovah's Witnesses trace their origin to Charles Taze Russell, who began a Bible study movement in Pennsylvania in the 1870s that grew into the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, the organizational structure that today governs Jehovah's Witness doctrine and practice worldwide with a degree of centralized control few other groups this course has studied can match — virtually all doctrine, including specific interpretations of individual Bible verses, flows from the Governing Body in Warwick, New York, and members are expected to accept these interpretations as the authoritative, divinely guided understanding of Scripture.

Jehovah's Witness theology denies the Trinity outright, teaching instead that Jehovah alone is the one true God and that Jesus is a created being, identified specifically as Michael the Archangel, the first and greatest of God's created spirit beings, who became human, died, and was raised not bodily but as a spirit being, later "created anew." This denial of Christ's full, eternal deity places Jehovah's Witnesses in direct contradiction with texts like John 1:1, which the Witnesses' own New World Translation renders "the Word was a god" rather than "the Word was God," a translation choice virtually no recognized Greek scholar outside the Watch Tower organization accepts as grammatically justified, and with texts like Colossians 2:9, which states plainly that "in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." Jehovah's Witnesses also deny the conscious existence of the human soul after death, teaching instead a doctrine of soul sleep followed, for most of humanity, by a future resurrection to a restored paradise earth rather than heaven, while reserving heavenly existence and rule with Christ for a limited class of 144,000 taken literally from Revelation 7 and 14 — a doctrine that has required repeated organizational explanation as membership numbers claiming this heavenly calling have shifted over the group's history. Jehovah's Witnesses reject the doctrine of hell as eternal conscious punishment, teaching instead the complete annihilation of the wicked, and are widely known, including among people who know little else about the group, for practices flowing from these doctrines: refusal of blood transfusions, refusal of military service, refusal to salute flags or celebrate birthdays and most holidays, and vigorous door-to-door evangelism using Watch Tower publications like The Watchtower and Awake! magazines.

III. The Baha'i Faith

The Baha'i Faith traces its origin to nineteenth-century Persia, arising from the teaching of a man known as the Bab, "the Gate," who in 1844 announced himself as the forerunner of a greater prophet soon to come, and was executed by Persian authorities in 1850 for this claim. One of the Bab's followers, Mirza Husayn Ali, later known as Baha'u'llah, "the Glory of God," announced in 1863 that he was the promised messenger the Bab had foretold, and it is Baha'u'llah's teaching that forms the foundation of the Baha'i Faith as it exists today, now claiming several million adherents worldwide with a particular concentration of new growth historically in parts of Latin America.

The Baha'i Faith's central theological claim, and the point at which it diverges most fundamentally from historic Christianity despite speaking warmly of Jesus, is the doctrine of progressive revelation: Baha'i teaching holds that God has sent a series of Divine Messengers throughout human history, including Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, each bringing a portion of religious truth suited to the needs and capacity of the age and culture in which he appeared, and that Baha'u'llah is the most recent and, for the present age, most complete of these Messengers, whose teaching supersedes without contradicting what earlier Messengers, including Jesus, taught. This framework allows Baha'i teaching to affirm Jesus as a genuine and important Messenger of God while denying precisely what the New Testament insists on: that Jesus is not one true prophet among a series of equally authorized successors, but the unique, final, and unsurpassed revelation of God Himself — "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son... who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person" (Hebrews 1:1-3). Where progressive revelation implies Muhammad supersedes Jesus and Baha'u'llah supersedes Muhammad, Scripture presents Christ not as one voice in an ongoing sequence but as God's final word.

IV. Engaging Neighbors from These Movements with the Gospel

A pastor should approach conversation with a Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, or Baha'i neighbor with the same posture this course has commended since Paul at the Areopagus in Unit 1 — but with one important adjustment specific to this unit, since these movements, unlike the traditions studied in Units 4 through 7, use biblical vocabulary and often display genuine moral seriousness, family devotion, and evangelistic zeal that a pastor can honestly acknowledge and even, in some respects, hold up as a model of committed discipleship his own congregation might learn from. The Bereans in Acts 17:11, commended by Luke for receiving the word "with all readiness" while still "searching the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so," provide the model for this unit's central pastoral method: the most effective engagement with these movements returns again and again to what Scripture itself actually says, tested carefully against whatever additional authority — the Book of Mormon, Watch Tower publications, the writings of Baha'u'llah — a given movement has placed alongside or above it.

Because both Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses train members specifically for door-to-door evangelism, a pastor is statistically more likely to encounter these movements directly than most others studied in this course, and should prepare specific, well-tested approaches rather than general goodwill alone: for Mormon visitors, gently pressing the question of God's eternal, unchanging nature (Malachi 3:6; Psalm 90:2) against the doctrine of an exalted, once-human Father; for Jehovah's Witnesses, patiently working through the full deity of Christ using texts their own theology struggles to explain away, such as Thomas's confession "My Lord and my God" received without correction by the risen Jesus (John 20:28), or Titus 2:13's description of "our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" as a single Person, not two; for Baha'i friends, affirming genuine respect for their sincere desire for religious unity and world peace while pressing the specific, exclusive claims Jesus made about Himself that a "one Messenger among many" framework cannot accommodate — "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). In every case, the goal is not merely winning an argument but helping a sincere, often genuinely devoted person see that the Jesus of the New Testament, read on its own terms, makes exactly the exclusive and unsurpassed claims their own movement's framework was built to soften or reinterpret.

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

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