Themelios Project

If you read the title of this post you’re more than likely wondering, what in the world is a Pseudo-Christian cult?  Glad you asked.  A Pseudo-Christian cult is, in brief, a religion that has taken a piece or pieces of Biblical Christian doctrine and distorted or perverted them.  This may be done through adding to or denying the particular piece of doctrine.  For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormonism are two common Pseudo-Christian cults.  Mormonism teaches that God spoke through a man named Joseph Smith during the 1830′s, informing him that the modern Christian church had corrupted the truth.  Smith then started a new religion and claimed that he had received a new revelation from God — one that required him to add to the Bible as a sort of “update”.   Jehovah’s Witnesses also distort Biblical Christian doctrine by denying the deity of Christ.  As a result, Jehovah’s Witnesses have made numerous revisions to the Scriptures, producing their own version — the New World Translation — which proposes contradictions to several fundamental tenets of Biblical Christian doctrine.

 Why should Christian be concerned about these cults in the first place?  Consider it this way: Christians need not be concerned about Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses because they are so different from Biblical Christianity.  Rather, Christians should be wary of these cults because they appear on the surface to be extremely similar to Christianity.  If you entered into a conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon about matters of religion, you may not quickly detect an obvious difference in your positions.  That is exactly what makes these cults so dangerous.  Christians who are not firmly grounded in the Bible — the true Bible, that is — may be easily swayed by a teaching on a few points of doctrine they are not familiar with.  As a result, they may be persuaded to accept the cult’s entire belief system, not realizing the conspicuous contradictions they hold toward Biblical Christianity.

 Because of the great extent of material a blog post would have to cover in order to take an in-depth look at particular Pseudo-Christian cults, I’ll have to wrap this one up by adding a few links to some resources.  As stated before, the great danger of these cults lies not in how different they are from Christianity, but how similar to it they appear on the surface.  Christians therefore need to understand these differences so they are not swayed by non-Biblical teachings.  Knowing what other religions and belief systems accept as truth is an invaluable step toward becoming an informed Christian.  More on that topic coming up in the next post.

List of articles concerning cults

Article about discerning cults

Fact sheet on Pseudo-Christian cults