LDS Divine Father vs Catholic Divine Father

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

LDS Divine Father vs Catholic Divine Father In Gethsemane, facing agony and death, Jesus cries “Abba, Father.” He does not reach for a title. He reaches for the word a son uses for his own father at home. That has to mean something. Fatherhood cannot be central to how Jesus reveals God, only to become an inadequate human analogy whenever we take its implications seriously. When a frightened child cries for his father, he is not asking whether someone possesses perfect knowledge of his distress. He is asking whether someone loves him enough for his distress to matter personally. You do not cry out a metaphor when you are sweating blood. You cry out to someone. I know the Catholic answer: God loves perfectly without suffering, and impassibility does not mean indifference. But becoming a father has made that distinction implausible. When my child hurts, something in me hurts, and I would take that pain into my own body if I could. A father weeps beside the bed because his child is in pain. Love cannot watch suffering unmoved. Why should God’s knowledge and power to make all things right exclude his capacity to grieve over what is wrong? Here is the deeper problem catholics have. John does not say God is loving. He says God is love. And love is not a serene regard from a safe distance. It is a bond, and a bond can be wounded. Sorrow is not a flaw in love. It is what love feels when the beloved is in pain. You cannot keep the love and remove the sorrow. Strip the sorrow out and what remains is not a purer love. It is something else wearing love’s name. This is why Catholic theology, for all its reverence, cannot truly believe that God is a father. It has defined love in a way that excludes grief, and a love that excludes grief is not the love any father has ever known. A doctrine that forbids God to weep has not protected his love from weakness. It has quietly denied the nature of love itself. A god who cannot weep may be many things, but he is not a father. That is why the weeping God of the Mormons reaches something in me that argument alone cannot reach. Perhaps the great recovery Joseph Smith restored is not a new idea about God at all, but the oldest one. When Jesus said Father, he meant exactly what he said.

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2108353623809720503?s=20

Fr. Chris Vorderbruggen

@FatherChrisVor1

When I read this Mormon reflection, I hear a father describing something real. When your child is hurting, you hurt. Of course you do. But then he makes a leap: God cannot truly be Father unless He suffers the way a human father suffers. That is where he leaves Christian teaching behind. Jesus calling God “Abba, Father” is no empty title (Mark 14:36). God is truly Father. Yet He is not a bigger version of us, with a body and emotions pushed around by events. Human fatherhood comes from Him, not the other way around. St. Paul speaks of “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14–15). When a child is in pain, my heart can break. I can be frightened, exhausted, and changed by it. God is not less loving because nothing can break Him. “I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). His love does not grow weak when the world is dark, nor does it need to be rescued from grief. That is what Christians mean by impassibility. God is never indifferent. He is never standing at a safe distance, merely observing. He freely acts. He saves. In the Son, God came to us. This is what Gethsemane and the Cross show. The eternal Son took our humanity. He really did sorrow, pray, sweat blood, and die. None of it was staged. Yet His suffering in the flesh does not make the Father an emotional creature like ourselves. God did not have to become wounded for our pain to matter. He gave His only-begotten Son to enter our suffering, overcome death, and bring us home. That is the love from which every good father learns to love.

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

12h

You are called Father by people who are not your children, and you are defending a God who is called Father by children whose pain cannot reach him; I do not think the resemblance is an accident. Your Church asked you to give up a child of your own so that nothing could divide your heart, and I honor that, but it means the only fatherhood you have ever lived is the kind that cannot be wounded, and you have now described a God who matches it exactly. Every father in your parish knows something about the Father that you have chosen not to know, and it is the one thing this argument turns on. I’m not trying to be a dick, but it’s like describing a sunset to someone who’s never seen a sunset.

Historical Jesus

Not an LDS apologist, but useful to the general topic of this blog.

Question on Quora:

Was Jesus ever mentioned in any other writing of that time period?

Dr. Bart Ehrman, a prominent secular New Testament scholar and agnostic (not a Christian), wrote the book "Did Jesus Exist?" (2012). In it, he states:

“Virtually every modern scholar of antiquity—across the theological spectrum—agrees that Jesus existed and was crucified.”

He calls Jesus mythicism—the theory that Jesus never existed—

“A fringe theory held by a tiny, tiny minority of non-experts.”

This isn’t just Christian scholars defending their faith. A 2011 survey of experts across theological and ideological lines—biblical, Jewish, Islamic, secular, and even skeptical historians—showed over 99% agreement that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person

Actually, the claim “there are no sources for Jesus outside of the Bible” is a common claim that circulates every couple of years given the increasingly secular makeup of society: but regardless of increasing secularism changing our religious makeup- this claim Jesus isn’t mentioned outside of biblical text collapses under intellectual and historical scrutiny. The real “debate” is: was he who he claimed to be? Not if he existed.

First: Jesus is absolutely mentioned by multiple first-century or near-first-century sources, both Christian and non-Christian.

So, who outside the Bible mentions Jesus during the first and second century? Several.

1. Tacitus (c. 56–120 AD):

In Annals (15.44), Tacitus — a Roman historian and no friend of Christians — records that "Christus, from whom the name [Christian] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus."

This is a hostile Roman source confirming Jesus’s execution, time frame, and the existence of early Christians.

2. Josephus (c. 37–100 AD):

In Antiquities of the Jews (Book 18, 3.3), Josephus — a Jewish historian writing for a Roman audience — mentions Jesus explicitly:

“At this time there was a wise man called Jesus... He was the Christ. Pilate condemned him to be crucified... those who had loved him did not cease to do so. To this day the tribe of Christians named after him has not disappeared.”
Even though later Christian interpolations may have expanded this, scholars broadly agree that Josephus did mention Jesus—and also his brother James in Antiquities 20.9.1.

3. Pliny the Younger (c. 61–113 AD):

Writing to Emperor Trajan (Letter 10.96), Pliny describes early Christians as gathering to “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.” This reflects established worship of Jesus within decades of the crucifixion.

• This shows worship of Jesus as divine within decades of his death.

4. Suetonius (c. 69–122 AD):

In Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius refers to disturbances in Rome under Claudius due to “Chrestus,” a variant spelling of Christus. This is strong evidence of early Christian activity and conflict.

• In context, Suetonius is not describing a living agitator in Rome at the time (c. 49 AD), but rather disturbances caused by debates among Jews over Christ, whose movement had already spread.

Online critics outside of academic circles love to point out that Philo of Alexandria (prominent Jewish philosopher) never mentioned Jesus, as if that proves something—but it doesn’t. This is a classic argument from silence. Philo was a wealthy Jewish aristocrat, steeped in Greek philosophy and living in cosmopolitan Alexandria, far removed from the political and religious strife of rural Judea- not to mention the poor area of Nazareth Jesus was from was routinely ridiculed for. His focus was elite intellectual synthesis—not documenting fringe movements from the peasant class.

Jesus, by contrast, was a provocative figure from Galilee, specifically Nazareth—a backwater region viewed with disdain by the Jerusalem and Roman establishment. He surrounded himself with local fishermen, tax collectors, and social misfits, the sick, prostitutes, drunkards- preaching a kingdom that eventually overturned conventional Jewish power. From Philo’s vantage point, this wasn’t just distant—it was beneath notice- that is until the movement picked up steam in later decades after his death. This is the viewpoint of scholars today.

The real issue isn’t lack of evidence — it’s historical double standards. If we judged other ancient figures by the same criteria people on Quora online use to try and dismiss the life of Jesus- despite scholarly consensus- we’d have to discard half of classical history. Yet Jesus is one of the most attested figures of antiquity- and there isn’t a debate about this among scholars- it’s settled, both in manuscript volume and external corroboration. The Gospels themselves, written within living memory of the events, reflect the fiery spread of a movement- despite Roman and Jewish opposition- too explosive to fabricate. The claim that “there’s no evidence” is not just lazy — it’s false.

Again, serious criticism of Jesus begins with his claims of divinity — not with denying he walked the earth, which virtually no credible historian disputes.

The Christianity of the Word of Wisdom

 

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

Word of Wisdom: So That My Brother May Live I recently spoke with a young co-worker about why he had left the LDS Church. He came from generations of pioneer ancestry and had received a mission call to the other side of the world, but he chose not to go. As we talked, I was reminded that people leave organized religion for very different reasons. Some cannot honestly accept its truth claims. Some have been wounded by people who claimed to represent God. Others find themselves spiritually hungry, or alienated by a church’s culture and politics. But this young man acknowledged another reason: he wanted to drink. He wanted a freedom his religion would not permit. So we talked about alcohol, and I gave him the argument I have come to believe is the heart of the Word of Wisdom. Set the health claims aside. Forget the liver and the lungs. Put ten men in a room. Give all ten permission to drink. Eight of them will be fine. They will have a beer on Friday and a glass of wine at a wedding and die old in their beds. Two of them will not be fine. Two of them will become drunks. They will lose their wives and their children and their work. They will die early, and they will take other people down with them on the way out. Everyone who has lived long enough knows the two. Most of us have buried one. Here is the question. Should the other eight give up alcohol so that the two may live? My answer is yes. Absolutely yes. The eight should set the thing down, not because it would hurt them, but because it will kill their brother, and no one can tell in advance which of the ten is the brother. That is the whole argument. The commandment is not written for the eight. It is written for the two, and the eight keep it so that the two are never alone in keeping it. The revelation says this about itself. It is given, in its own words, for the weak and the weakest of all saints. It does not claim to be a diet. It is a fence built around the one man who cannot climb back over it, and everyone else walks the long way around for his sake. That is what Christianity is. Sometimes you give up a thing you enjoy so that your brother may have life. Not because the thing is evil. Because he is your brother. He disagreed. He said it simply. Why should I have to give up alcohol so the other two can live? That question stayed with me. Beneath a disagreement about alcohol was a deeper disagreement about what we owe one another. Is my brother’s vulnerability merely his problem, or does loving him place a claim upon my freedom? Must I personally suffer the consequences of something before I have a reason to give it up? To me, Christianity begins to become real precisely where the answer costs us something, where another person’s good matters enough to interrupt our enjoyment. This young man’s own people knew this in their bones. The pioneers he descends from gave up houses, farms, orchards, the graves of their parents, the country they were born in, and in more than one family their children, so that a people might exist that did not yet exist. They did not ask why should I. When the handcart companies were dying in the snow, men rode out of the valley into the storm for strangers whose names they had never heard. That is his blood. He is being asked to give up a beer. I do not say that to shame him. I say it because the distance between what his fathers gave and what he would not give is the measure of what has happened to the Mormons, and it did not happen to him alone. I think the mission call and the drink were the same question wearing two coats. A mission is two years of your life handed to strangers in a country you will never see again, so that someone there may have life. The Word of Wisdom is one small pleasure handed to a man you will never meet, so that he may have life. He answered both the same way. Why should I. Once you have said it to one, you have already left the faith.

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2105879040640843807?s=20

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

·

1h

Lost my best friend in law school to alcohol. He was a true genius. I've seen so much death and destruction as a result of the substance. It needs to be banned. Utah should grow a pair and do it.

Lee Torian

@Leetorian

·

45m

Just imagine the countless ruined marriages, shattered homes, and innocent lives lost due to drunk driving. I would abhor the thought of being even remotely involved in any influence to any of that.

Bob Jenkins

@BobJenkinsfr

·

1h

Great take. I’ll add that I don’t think it’s the only reason; it’s also wise to refrain from things that are addicting and intoxicating. They take your money, time, attention, devotion, and everything else that you could instead be giving to God and those you love. Just my thoughts.