[Another in the series of “Responding to Bumper Stickers,” or “Long Answers to Short Questions,” in which I try to give a Latter-day Saint response to a question or accusation commonly lobbed against us on X.]
“Begging the question” is an almost entirely misused phrase. Despite appearances, it does not mean that a statement raises an obvious and necessary question. (Thus, an incorrect use would be, “Jesus says that loving your neighbor is one of the two great commandments, which begs the question, ‘Who is my neighbor?'”)
One of the earlier forms of the phrase is “begetting the question,” which helps indicate its true meaning: That an argument assumes the truth of what it’s trying to prove, i.e., it’s a form of circular reasoning. Thus: “You should believe me because I’m telling the truth.”
Here’s a form of begging the question that Latter-day Saints get very familiar with on social media, when creedal Christians try to demonstrate the falsity of Latter-day Saints claims and cite Galatians 1:8 as some kind of “drop the mike” prooftext.
For those who don’t have it memorized, Galatians 1:8 reads:
But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. (KJV)
The assumption here is that Latter-day Saint doctrine is specifically NOT the gospel Paul taught, and that what creedal Christianity accepts IS that gospel. But that’s the premise in debate.
The big problem here is that we don’t have record of all of what Paul taught, in Galatia or elsewhere. His missionary journeys usually involved staying and preaching in one area for weeks or months, and none of his follow-up epistles read like bald rehearsals of what he taught in person — he merely references his more foundational teachings in places like Galatians 1:9 as “what you received” — so that means there’s a HUGE volume of teaching of which we have no record.
That wouldn’t be a problem if a large contingent of Christians didn’t assume that the Bible is “complete,” and that all doctrinal truth can be found in or extrapolated solely from what’s contained therein. That yields a very different picture of “true” Christianity than assuming that what we have in the Bible is a good but incomplete record of all the truths that Paul, or any of the other apostles, taught. (See my previous post on What is the New Testament?)
That’s why the Restoration was necessary — because so many truths were lost, subsumed, or misunderstood from the original gospel taught by Jesus and the apostles in person, it became like a jigsaw puzzle missing a considerable number of pieces. We believe that the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have filled in lacunae with incorrect extrapolations and/or reinterpretations, while Protestants claim that the puzzle pieces we have are the only puzzle pieces that ever were (sola scriptura), while implicitly accepting many of the extrapolations largely from the Catholic tradition.
Fortunately, while we may not have a full picture of Paul’s doctrine, we do know what he was referencing in Galatians 1:8, as its the main idea he’s arguing against for the whole epistle: Christian “Judaizers” who still insisted on observing the Law of Moses, including circumcision, among Christian converts. And so we know the main point he’s arguing as the core of the gospel of Jesus Christ:
Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. (Gal. 2:16)
You won’t get any arguments against that from Latter-day Saints: That faith in (pistis, trust in and loyalty to) Jesus Christ is the source of our justification.
And anyone who DOES preach that, apostle or angel, is preaching the good news.