“If I covet any place on earth but the dust at the foot of the Cross, then I know nothing of Calvary love.” — Amy Carmichael
January 8 — The first Sunday I attended a Mormon Church I wore my cross necklace. I didn’t think anything of it because, I believed this was a Christian church. There should be no problem with a Christian wearing a cross necklace in a Christian church, right?
It didn’t take long to find out how wrong I was. After the service. I noticed people staring at me and talking about me. I heard one lady whisper to her friend, “maybe she doesn’t know?”. I asked my husband and his mom about why I was getting those reactions and they said it was probably because of my necklace.
In his talk during the October 2022 General Conference Elder Jeffery R. Holland talked about why his church has refused to embrace the cross as a symbol of Jesus’ sacrifice.
He begins by explaining “why we generally do not use the iconography of the cross,”.
He talked about how the Romans used the cross as a “brutal instrument” for torture. He went on to say-
“By the fourth and fifth centuries, a cross was being introduced as a symbol of generalized Christianity, but ours is not a “generalized Christianity.
Being neither Catholic nor Protestant, we are, rather, a restored church, the restored New Testament Church. Thus, our origins and our authority go back before the time of councils, creeds, and iconography. In this sense, the absence of a symbol that was late coming into common use is yet another evidence that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a restoration of true Christian beginnings.”
I wonder how Holland would have responded to 1 Corinthians 1:18–
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
Holland said that the Mormon Church is “a restoration of true Christian beginnings.” In truth the Mormon Church bears no resemblance to the early Christian church.
The only way Joseph Smith was able to deceive people as he did was to get them to doubt the Bible, and to doubt God. He said things that tickled their ears and piqued their curiosity by telling them outlandish tales as he preached another gospel to them. All these things God has warned us about in his Word.
As I was writing this article, I recalled hearing a Mormon leader say when asked why their church doesn’t have a cross, (paraphrasing) we don’t worship the Jesus on the Cross, we worship the resurrected Jesus.
I did a quick search and found a talk by Gordan B. Hinckley, where he said –
“I do not wish to give offense to any of my Christian brethren who use the cross on the steeples of their cathedrals and at the altars of their chapels, who wear it on their vestments, and imprint it on their books and other literature. But for us, the cross is the symbol of the dying Christ, while our message is a declaration of the Living Christ.” (April 1975 General Conference, Gordon B. Hinckley)
He completely missed the point of the cross. It was there that Jesus paid the price of our sins, which is where the atonement happened, and not in the Garden of Gethsemane as Mormons believe.
They don’t want to think about what brought him there, and what that means for them. To say the cross is a “symbol of generalized Christianity” is a slap in the face to what Jesus endured. To belittle it in such a way is unthinkable to me.
There are so many wonderful old hymns about the cross, that you’ll never see in a Mormon Hymnal. The early Church knew how important the message of the cross was for their life and those around them. If the Mormon Church wants to “restore” things they might want to start there.
In Christ,
Melissa Grimes
References –
Gordan B. Hinckley, April 1975 General Conference
Jeffery R. Holland, October 2022 General Conference
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