Questions

Offensive Doctrines by Joseph Fielding McConkie, from his book, Answers, pg. 27.

Does the Gospel of Jesus Christ embrace doctrines and practices that are offensive to the world?

The world accepts only its own doctrines and its own churches.  The idea that their Messiah was to be a suffering servant who would die an ignominious death on a Roman cross was anything but a doctrine that could be expected to be popular among the Jews.

True doctrines do not appeal to those whose hearts are set upon the things of the world.  The idea that God can speak, that revelation continues and that Joseph Smith was a prophet in every sense that Moses and Isaiah were prophets, was and is, highly offensive to the world.

The doctrine of the plurality of wives was equally offensive, as has been the doctrine of who can and cannot hold the priesthood and the role of women in the Church.  We may not be able to predict what doctrines those of the world will take offense at in the future, but we have every assurance that they will have cause for offense.

Ours is not a new church; ours is a restored Church.  We have no doctrines that were not known to the Saints of dispensations past.  The prophetic descriptions of our day describe a restoration of all things, meaning all pure doctrines and righteous practices of the Saints in dispensations past.

Why do some critics of the Church say that Mormons aren’t Christians? (pg. 32)

Often those saying that Mormons are not Christians do so with the knowledge that the proper name of the Church is “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”  They are equally aware that our faith centers in Christ, as do our doctrines.  Most will concede that, in practice, we are a very Christlike people.  Why, then, do they persist in labeling us as a non-Christian cult?  The answer is in their history, not in our faith.

The historical Christian world has declared the Bible to be complete and the heavens to be sealed to revelation.

They have also declared the biblical descriptions of God to be simply metaphorical and accepted in their place a faith in the incorporeal (intangible) and incomprehensible God of the early ecumenical (universal) councils.

 
Because we do not accept as inspired the conclusions of those councils or embrace the notion that the heavens are sealed to modern revelation and that there are thus no apostles or prophets in our day, we are declared to be both unorthodox and unchristian.  The irony is that it is our loyalty to Christian doctrines that gets us the label of non-Christian.