Concerning Mormon Authority

Authority: The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.

Galatians 1:6-8

After spending a few weeks in Utah around a multitude of Mormons, the question of where Evangelicals get their authority becomes an essential issue. Mormons, as we know , believe that they are the restored Church and that they alone possess the authority of Jesus Christ to baptize, administer the Lord's supper and function as a true Church.

The LDS Church makes the audacious claim that Joseph Smith was God's annointed prophet of this dispensation and the power and authority of Christ rests in Joseph Smith and his apostles. The Mormons believe in the doctrine of Apostolic Authority that has similarites with that of offical Roman Catholicism in that they believe that the authority of Christ given to the Apostle Peter in Matthew 16:18-19, after falling way from the earth upon the death of the Apostle John around 100 A.D. was fully restored by Christ and bestowed upon Joseph Smith and his apostolic sucessors; namely the Presidents of the Mormon Church that followed him after his death in 1844. Joseph Smith wrote,


"My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)—and which I should join. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”

History of the Church, Vol. 1, Chapters 1-5


"By searching the Scriptures I found that mankind did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatized from the true and living faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament"
(Personal Writings, p. 5).


Mormons believe the church fell away and was restored by Joseph Smith in 1830. Mormons believe in the reality of ongoing and continous revelation and that God has decreed that there be apostles of the Church today. The LDS believe that the supreme authority of Jesus Christ rests in the chief apostle, president and revelator Gorden B. Hinckley.

However, just the mere assertion that the Mormon Church is the true church of Jesus Christ and that God's annointed prophet and president of the Church is Gorden B. Hinckley does not make it the truth.

There is absolutely no evidence that the true Church of Christ fell away as the Mormons claim.