Every serious religious tradition must eventually answer a fundamental question: Is the truth it proclaims stable, or is it subject to revision? The answer a tradition gives to this question determines whether its adherents can trust its teachings across generations, whether converts are embracing the same faith as those who came before, and whether the institution possesses a coherent theological identity at all.
The Catholic Church answers this question with remarkable clarity. The deposit of faith — the body of revealed truth entrusted to the Apostles and handed down through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition — is complete, immutable in substance, and protected by the Holy Spirit from corruption. The Church may deepen her understanding of these truths over time, articulating them with greater precision as heresies arise and human knowledge grows, but she can never contradict what she has previously defined. An acorn becomes an oak, but never a maple.
This principle, classically expressed by St. Vincent of Lérins in his fifth-century Commonitorium, holds that authentic development proceeds "in the same doctrine, the same sense, the same import."
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints presents a fundamentally different model. Built on the claim of continuing revelation through living prophets, Mormonism holds that each new president of the Church can receive revelations that supersede, modify, or outright contradict those of his predecessors. As Elder Ezra Taft Benson taught in his influential 1980 address at Brigham Young University: "The living prophet is more important to us than a dead prophet" and "the living prophets always take precedence."
The practical consequence of this system is a tradition in which core doctrines, scriptural texts, temple ordinances, and fundamental theological commitments have shifted dramatically and repeatedly — often without formal acknowledgment that any change has occurred. This essay examines both traditions side by side, demonstrating the remarkable continuity of Catholic teaching across two millennia against the backdrop of persistent and often radical doctrinal instability within the LDS tradition.
Perhaps no doctrine better illustrates Catholic continuity than the Church's teaching on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. From the earliest post-apostolic writings to the present Catechism, the Church has consistently maintained that the bread and wine, once consecrated, become in substance the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. This teaching has never been reversed, softened into mere symbolism, or relegated to "past prophetic opinion."
The chain of testimony begins in the New Testament itself. St. Paul warns the Corinthians that whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup "in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord" (1 Cor. 11:27). The Lord Himself, in the Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, insists that His flesh is "true food" and His blood "true drink" — a teaching so scandalous that many disciples abandoned Him over it (John 6:53–66).
The testimony of the Protestant historian J.N.D. Kelly — whose objectivity cannot be questioned — is telling. In his landmark study Early Christian Doctrines, Kelly conceded that early Eucharistic teaching "was in general unquestioningly realist, i.e., the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Savior's body and blood." This is a Protestant scholar acknowledging what Catholic apologists have always maintained: the Real Presence was the universal teaching of the early Church.
The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century did not invent transubstantiation but formally defined what had been believed from the beginning, using precise philosophical language to safeguard an ancient truth against Protestant innovations. No pope, no council, no theologian in the history of the Catholic Church has ever taught that the Eucharist is merely symbolic. The Catholic who receives Communion today participates in the same sacramental reality that Ignatius of Antioch described fewer than eighty years after the Resurrection.
Catholic teaching on marriage provides another powerful example of doctrinal stability. From the words of Christ Himself — "What God has joined together, let no man separate" (Matt. 19:6) — through the Fathers, the medieval canonists, the Council of Trent, and the present Catechism, the Church has consistently taught that marriage is an indissoluble union between one man and one woman, ordered toward the procreation and education of children and the mutual sanctification of the spouses.
When Henry VIII demanded an annulment that the Church could not grant, the papacy chose to lose the entire nation of England rather than compromise this teaching. When modern secular culture pressured the Church to accept divorce and contraception, Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae (1968), reaffirming what every previous generation of Catholics had believed. These decisions came at enormous social and political cost — but the Church accepted those costs rather than alter what it understood to be divinely revealed truth.
The Catholic doctrine of God — one God in three Persons, the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, co-equal and co-eternal, sharing one divine substance — was formally defined at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381. But these councils did not create new doctrine. They articulated with precision what the Church had always believed, in response to the Arian heresy that threatened to reduce the Son to a creature.
From that day to this, the Catholic understanding of God has not shifted. God is infinite, eternal, unchangeable, and utterly transcendent. He created all things from nothing (ex nihilo). He did not "progress" from a lesser state to a greater one. He was not once a man who "earned" divinity. No human being will ever become a god ontologically equal to the Creator. These truths are as firmly held in the twenty-first century as they were in the fourth.
The Catholic position is often caricatured as claiming that nothing ever changes. This is false. What the Church claims is that doctrine develops organically — like a seed growing into a tree — without ever becoming something fundamentally different from what was planted.
St. John Henry Newman elaborated this principle in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), showing that the highest truths, though "communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients." Development is the natural consequence of the human mind gradually apprehending the fullness of divine revelation — not the replacement of old truths with new ones, but the deepening of understanding of truths always present in seed form in the apostolic deposit.
No area of LDS theology illustrates the problem of doctrinal instability more starkly than the doctrine of God. The Book of Mormon, published in 1830, presents an essentially monotheistic or modalistic view of God. Passages such as Mosiah 15:1–5, 2 Nephi 31:21, and Mormon 7:7 clearly present one God. The once-scriptural Lectures on Faith taught a binitarian concept: "How many personages are there in the Godhead? Two: the Father and the Son." The Holy Ghost was described merely as the "mind" of the Father and Son.
Yet by the end of Joseph Smith's life, the theology had shifted radically. In the King Follett Discourse of 1844, Smith declared that God the Father was once a man who progressed to godhood, that humans can likewise become gods, and that there exists an infinite plurality of gods:
This is not a development of the Book of Mormon's theology — it is its direct contradiction. Brigham Young pushed the theology further still with the Adam-God doctrine, publicly teaching in the 1850s that Adam was "the very Eternal Father" who came to the Garden of Eden with a celestial body and "brought Eve, one of his wives, with him." This teaching was incorporated into the temple endowment ceremony. Yet in 1976, President Spencer W. Kimball explicitly denounced the Adam-God doctrine as false. Even Elder Bruce R. McConkie acknowledged that "Brigham Young contradicted Brigham Young."
If Brigham Young was a true prophet receiving revelation from God, how could he teach a doctrine about the very identity of God that a later prophet declared to be false? And if such fundamental error is possible on the most central of all theological questions — who God is — what confidence can any Latter-day Saint have that the current prophet's teachings about God are correct?
Perhaps no doctrinal reversal in LDS history is more dramatic than the trajectory of plural marriage. Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which remains LDS scripture to this day, presents polygamy not merely as a permitted practice but as a "new and everlasting covenant." The revelation warns that those who receive this law and fail to abide it "shall be damned."
Yet in 1890, under intense federal pressure that threatened the Church's property and the territory's statehood, President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto officially ending the practice. Today, practicing polygamy is grounds for excommunication from the LDS Church.
The problem is not merely that the practice was discontinued — practices can legitimately change in response to circumstances. The problem is that polygamy was taught as an eternal principle essential to the highest degree of exaltation — and then reversed. Moreover, the Book of Mormon itself, in Jacob 2:24, calls the polygamy of David and Solomon "abominable before the Lord." This creates an internal contradiction within LDS scripture that has never been satisfactorily resolved.
During the 1850s, Brigham Young and other LDS leaders taught that certain sins were so grievous that the atonement of Jesus Christ was insufficient to cover them. For these sins, the sinner's own blood had to be shed as a sacrificial offering. Joseph Fielding Smith taught as late as 1954 that some sins could "place [a person] beyond the reach of the atoning blood of Christ." Yet by 1978, the LDS First Presidency officially repudiated the doctrine.
From a Catholic perspective, the blood atonement doctrine represents a direct assault on the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross. The Catholic Church has never taught, in any era, that any sin requires an additional blood sacrifice beyond Calvary. To do so would be to deny the infinite merits of Christ's Passion — something no Catholic pope, council, or theologian has ever done.
The Book of Abraham, canonized as part of the Pearl of Great Price in 1880, was presented by Joseph Smith as a direct translation of Egyptian papyri he purchased in 1835. Smith stated explicitly that the work was "a translation of some ancient records … purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."
When fragments of these very papyri were rediscovered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1966 and returned to the LDS Church in 1967, professional Egyptologists — both Mormon and non-Mormon — identified them as common Egyptian funerary documents: the Breathing Permit of Hôr and portions of the Book of the Dead. The papyri contain no reference to Abraham whatsoever.
The LDS Church's own Gospel Topics essay now concedes: "Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of Abraham." Faced with this evidence, the Church has gradually redefined what "translation" means — suggesting the papyri may have served merely as a "catalyst" for revelation. But this contradicts over 150 years of explicit Church teaching that Smith translated the papyri directly.
The Book of Mormon is claimed to be "the most correct of any book on earth," translated "by the gift and power of God." Yet it has undergone thousands of changes across its many editions. While many are minor grammatical corrections, several are theologically significant.
In the 1830 first edition, 1 Nephi 11:18 referred to Mary as "the mother of God." This was changed in 1837 to "the mother of the Son of God." Similar insertions of "the Son of" were made in 1 Nephi 11:21 and 1 Nephi 13:40. These changes reflect Smith's evolving theology of the Godhead — moving from a more modalistic view toward the tri-theism of his later years. But if the original translation was given by divine power, why did the identity of God need to be corrected?
The change from "white and delightsome" to "pure and delightsome" in 2 Nephi 30:6 raises further concerns, as do quietly revised chapter headings that once described the Lamanites as "a dark, filthy, and loathsome people." Compare this with the Catholic approach: the Church has never changed the substance of a biblical teaching in response to cultural pressure. Scripture's meaning is interpreted by the Magisterium in continuity with the Fathers — it is not subject to editorial revision to accommodate modern sensibilities.
The LDS temple endowment ceremony — regarded as among the most sacred of all religious ordinances — has been revised repeatedly throughout the Church's history. Before 1990, the ceremony included explicit penalties involving graphic gestures for revealing temple secrets. The Oath of Vengeance, in which participants swore to pray that God would "avenge the blood of the prophets on this nation," was removed in the 1920s. Further significant revisions occurred in 1990, 2005, 2019, and during the presidency of Russell M. Nelson.
From a Catholic standpoint, this pattern is deeply problematic. The Catholic Church teaches that the sacraments were instituted by Christ and that their essential form and matter cannot be changed by any human authority, including the Pope. The words of consecration at Mass are the same today as they were in the apostolic era. Rites may be adapted in their accidental features, but the substance of the sacraments is beyond human authority to alter. The contrast with the LDS temple, where the most sacred ordinances are revised by administrative decision, could not be sharper.
The LDS Church officially teaches that its prophets are "not infallible." President Dallin H. Oaks stated categorically: "We don't believe in the infallibility of our leaders." President Nelson asked members to "give your leaders a little leeway to make mistakes." At the same time, members are taught that they must follow the living prophet with complete obedience. Ezra Taft Benson's "Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet" assert that "the prophet will never lead the Church astray" and that "if there is ever a conflict between earthly knowledge and the words of the prophet, you stand with the prophet." This address was reaffirmed by two General Authorities in the October 2010 General Conference.
The member is left in an impossible position: obligated to follow a leader who admits he can be wrong, while being warned that doubting or questioning that leader is spiritually dangerous. The prophets are fallible human beings who can and do make mistakes — even on matters of doctrine, as the Adam-God, blood atonement, and polygamy episodes demonstrate. Yet obedience is demanded with the force of infallibility.
The Catholic understanding of papal infallibility avoids this problem by carefully delimiting its scope. The Pope speaks infallibly only when he teaches ex cathedra — defining a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the universal Church. This charism has been formally invoked only twice in history: the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption of Mary (1950).
Outside this narrow range, the Pope's opinions are not guaranteed to be free from error. Popes have held erroneous personal opinions. But the Church teaches that the Holy Spirit prevents the Pope from formally binding the universal Church to a false doctrine of faith or morals. The Catholic can trust that defined doctrine will never be reversed while acknowledging that popes are sinful, fallible human beings. The Latter-day Saint, by contrast, is asked to trust a prophet who claims no infallibility but demands obedience as though he possessed it — and whose predecessors have demonstrably taught doctrines that later prophets declared false.
The Catholic insistence on doctrinal immutability is not an arbitrary institutional preference. It flows directly from the witness of Sacred Scripture, which consistently testifies that God's revealed truth is permanent and unchangeable.
The biblical model is one of transmission and preservation, not innovation and revision. The Apostles received a complete revelation from Christ. They handed it on to their successors. Those successors guard it, teach it, and defend it. No one — not even an angel from heaven — has the authority to alter it.
The LDS model explicitly rejects this understanding. By teaching that living prophets supersede dead ones, that new revelation can overwrite old revelation, and that doctrines are subject to revision by prophetic fiat, Mormonism has created a system in which nothing is truly settled. The Book of Mormon can be edited. The Doctrine and Covenants can be reinterpreted. Temple ordinances can be rewritten. Even the identity of God can be reconceived from one generation to the next.
| Doctrine | Catholic Teaching | LDS Teaching — Then & Now |
|---|---|---|
| Nature of God | One God in three co-equal, co-eternal Persons — unchanged since Nicaea (A.D. 325) | 1830: near-monotheism → 1844: God was once a man → 1850s: Adam is God → 1976: Adam-God condemned → Present: ambiguous |
| The Eucharist | Real Presence — unbroken from A.D. 110 to present | No comparable doctrine; LDS sacrament is symbolic only — itself a departure from the universal early Church |
| Plural Marriage | One man, one woman, indissoluble — unchanged since Christ | 1843: eternal covenant required for exaltation → 1890: Manifesto ends practice → Present: grounds for excommunication |
| Christ's Atonement | Infinite and sufficient for all sin — defined at Trent, never revised | 1850s: insufficient for certain sins (blood atonement) → 1978: repudiated as "theoretical" |
| Scripture | Biblical canon fixed; substance of meaning protected by Magisterium | Book of Mormon revised thousands of times; Book of Abraham redefined from "literal translation" to "inspired catalyst" |
| Sacred Ordinances | Sacramental form and matter immutable by any human authority | Temple endowment revised in 1920s, 1990, 2005, 2019, and ongoing |
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offered a parable that speaks directly to the question of doctrinal authority. The wise man builds his house upon the rock, and when the storms come, the house stands firm. The foolish man builds upon the sand, and the same storms bring ruin (Matthew 7:24–27).
The Catholic Church claims to be the house built on rock: the rock of Peter (Matthew 16:18), the rock of apostolic succession, and the rock of a deposit of faith that the gates of hell cannot prevail against. Her doctrines are not popular. Her moral teachings are countercultural. Her insistence on permanence is unfashionable in an age that prizes novelty and flexibility. But precisely because she will not bend, she provides what every soul ultimately needs: a truth that can be trusted across generations, across cultures, and across the full span of human history.
The LDS tradition, for all the sincerity and devotion of its members, has built on a different foundation. A system in which each new prophet can revise the teachings of his predecessors, in which sacred scriptures are edited to reflect changing sensibilities, in which the very nature of God has shifted from monotheism to polytheism and back toward ambiguity — this is a system built on sand. It may weather calm seasons, but it cannot endure the storms that inevitably test every religious claim.