The Altar Call at bornofwater.org
A Christian Engagement with Denver Snuffer’s Christian Restoration Series (Series 2/4, Lectures 1-7)
Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 28, 2026
Source: Denver Snuffer, Christian Restoration lecture series (Parts 1-7), available as transcripts at learnofchrist.org/videos.html#restoration. The series is the second of four corpus-defining lecture series posted at learnofchrist.org. Where the Protestant Reformation series traced the Reformation history without yet naming the restorer, the Christian Restoration series names Joseph Smith, narrates the Mormon-Campbellite collision, catalogs the post-Smith fragmentation, and concludes with an explicit baptismal invitation directing readers to bornofwater.org to be baptized by men who claim authority from Jesus Christ to administer the ordinance.
Context: This is the fourth Snuffer engagement in the corpus and the second in the systematic four-series treatment. The companion essays so far are: Culture by Precept and Practice (April 26), Testimony of Jesus and the Restoration Claim (April 27), Upon This Rock (April 28), and the Protestant Reformation Series (April 28). The April 27 essay engaged Snuffer’s restoration thesis; the present essay engages Snuffer’s restoration narrative — the seven-part account of how he believes the restoration unfolded from Roger Williams to the Campbells to Joseph Smith to the 2017 Boise covenant — and the altar call with which the series concludes.
To the Fellowship —
The seven-part Christian Restoration series is the central evangelistic document of Denver Snuffer’s public ministry. Where the Reformation series I engaged earlier today positions Protestantism as a preparatory movement, this series names what was being prepared: Joseph Smith’s restoration in 1820, its tragic unraveling after his death in 1844, and Snuffer’s own claim that the restoration was resumed in September 2017 by a body of believers in Boise, Idaho who became the first since Joseph Smith’s day to accept the Book of Mormon as a covenant. The series concludes — and this is the analytical key to the whole — with a direct invitation to the reader to be baptized at bornofwater.org, where men who claim apostolic authority from Jesus Christ Himself will perform the ordinance.
This is not a lecture series about history. This is an altar call. The historical material in Parts 1-6 is doing the work of preparing the reader for the decision Part 7 invites them to make. Leonard has made that decision. The essay I am writing now is, in significant part, written to him — to lay alongside his decision the careful examination that any decision of that magnitude deserves.
I will engage the series in five movements. First, what is honorable in Snuffer’s narrative arc. Second, the Reformation-was-insufficient argument as it appears here (Parts 1-3), and where it both repeats and goes beyond what the April 27 essay already addressed. Third, the Joseph Smith account in Part 4 and what Snuffer chooses to defend versus what he chooses to assert without defense. Fourth, the catalog of post-Smith Mormon failure in Parts 5-6, which I want to name as a remarkable gift to the Christian case rather than damage to it. Fifth, the altar call in Part 7, which is where the essay must, in the end, speak directly to Leonard and to anyone reading over his shoulder who is being invited to take the same step.
I. What Is Honorable in the Narrative Arc
Snuffer is doing serious historical work, and the series deserves credit for its substantive accuracy on several fronts.
1. The Roger Williams treatment in Part 2 is genuinely careful. Roger Williams (1603-1683) was a remarkable figure — Baptist founder, abolitionist, advocate for indigenous peoples, a man whose conscience drove him out of Massachusetts and into the founding of Rhode Island. Snuffer correctly highlights the wall-of-separation language Williams used (which Jefferson later borrowed for the First Amendment), correctly notes Williams’s conviction that no recovery of original Christianity was possible without God’s direct involvement, and correctly quotes Williams’s striking declaration that he was waiting for new apostles to be sent by the Great Head of the Church. This is honest history. Williams really did say what Snuffer says he said, and the citation is accurate.
2. The Campbell treatment in Part 3 is similarly careful. Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington (1809), Alexander Campbell’s intellectual development, the famous motto “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent,” and the formation of what became the Disciples of Christ / Churches of Christ tradition — Snuffer presents this material accurately. The Campbells were genuine seekers, and their restorationist instinct was a serious attempt to recover apostolic simplicity by stripping away creedal accretions.
3. The Sidney Rigdon connection in Part 5 is historically real and consequential. Snuffer correctly notes that Rigdon was a prominent Campbellite preacher before joining the Mormon movement, that his conversion brought a substantial portion of the Campbellite Ohio congregations with him, that Mormon success in Ohio came at the expense of the Campbellites, and that this provoked Alexander Campbell’s blistering 1831 review of the Book of Mormon. The Mormon-Campbellite collision is one of the most consequential intersections of nineteenth-century American religion, and Snuffer handles it accurately.
4. The acknowledgment of post-Smith Mormon catastrophe in Part 6 is unsparing and accurate. Brigham Young’s institution of polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 1857 (in which over 120 men, women, and children of the Baker-Fancher emigrant party were murdered by Mormon militia and confederate Paiutes), the post-1860 Reorganized LDS sect’s abandonment of the Book of Mormon, the polygamist splinter groups’ systematic violation of marriage and child-protection laws — Snuffer names every one of these. The unsparing honesty about Salt Lake LDS and its successor sects is something Christian apologetics typically must establish against Mormon defenses; Snuffer establishes it for us. He has read the history, and he is willing to say what the history shows.
5. The diagnosis of authority-displacing-revelation is theologically sharp. The closing of Part 5 contains one of the most theologically substantive paragraphs in the entire series — Snuffer’s observation that Mormonism, like Roman Catholicism before it, succumbed to the central pathology of religious institutional life: the displacement of revelation and God’s voice by hierarchy, position, title, and governing prerogative. This is exactly the diagnosis a Bible-based Christian critique of both Catholicism and Mormonism would make. Snuffer makes it from the inside.
6. The post-Smith chronology in Part 6 is devastating to the very tradition Snuffer claims to defend. From Joseph and Hyrum’s murder on June 27, 1844 to Brigham Young’s elected leadership on August 8, 1844 — six weeks. Three years later, August 1847, Young became sole president. In neither year was there a voice from heaven guiding the succession. Snuffer states this plainly. For a movement whose entire structural claim depends on continuing prophetic authority, the absence of any such authority at the founding moment of post-Smith Mormonism is a fact of enormous evidential weight, and Snuffer reports it without flinching.
These six points should be acknowledged. They show that Snuffer is not engaged in cheerleading. He has read the history honestly and reports it accurately. The question is whether the conclusion he draws from the history is the one the history actually supports.
II. The Reformation-Was-Insufficient Argument, Revisited
Parts 1-3 of this series reprise material the April 27 essay already engaged. Snuffer claims that Christianity had not merely declined, it had perished between the close of the New Testament and the sixteenth century; that the Reformers could subtract corruption but could not restore what was lost; that Roger Williams correctly perceived that no true church existed and that new apostles would have to be sent before any recovery could occur; and that Thomas Campbell’s effort to recover the original by subtraction alone could not work because adding could only come from God.
I have already engaged this argument at length in The Restoration That Was Not Needed (April 27). The biblical foreclosure stands: Christ promised in Matthew 16:18 that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church, and in Matthew 28:20 that He would be with His people alway, even unto the end of the world. If Christianity perished, Christ broke His promise. The Wesley citation Snuffer uses is, on careful reading, about the decline of charismatic gifts in the post-Constantinian church rather than about the perishing of true faith; Wesley himself died a Trinitarian Anglican who would have been horrified to be conscripted for the Joseph Smith project. The Roger Williams citation is similar: Williams remained a Christian within a tradition he believed to be substantially valid, awaiting eschatological renewal rather than a 19th-century New York prophet.
Two observations specific to Parts 1-3 deserve to be added to what I said before.
1. Part 1’s catalog of Reformer moral failures is being deployed asymmetrically. Snuffer names Luther’s Peasants’ War rhetoric (the famous letter calling for the slaying of obstinate peasants), Calvin’s role in the execution of Michael Servetus, and Knox’s involvement in the murder of Cardinal Beaton. He uses these failures to support the conclusion that Reform was unable to escape the low and un-Christian condition the Reformers inherited from their Catholic predecessor. But the same standard, applied to the Mormon tradition Snuffer himself defends, would demand that we conclude Restoration was unable to escape the low and un-Christian condition of its own founder and immediate successors — Joseph Smith’s documented marriages to women already married to other living men, Brigham Young’s institution of polygamy and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the polygamist splinter groups’ ongoing crimes against children. The asymmetric treatment is the framing move. Reformer moral failures are evidence that their movement was insufficient. Mormon moral failures are evidence that the followers failed the prophet, while the prophet himself remains beyond serious examination.
2. Part 3’s framing of the Campbells as preparatory is the rhetorical bridge to Joseph Smith. Snuffer presents Thomas and Alexander Campbell as restorationists who understood the right goal but lacked the necessary means — they could subtract but could not add. And adding could only come from God. This is the line that prepares the reader to receive Part 4: God did add, and the means was Joseph Smith. Notice the implicit move. The Campbells’ inability to recover lost truths by subtraction alone is taken as evidence that something needs to be added to the apostolic deposit. But the Christian position is that nothing needs to be added because nothing essential was ever lost. The Campbells failed in their goal not because they could not add, but because their goal was misconceived from the start. The apostolic deposit, faithfully read, is sufficient. Subtraction of medieval accretions is not a partial work. It is the whole work, because what is underneath the accretions is the apostolic deposit itself.
The Campbells, on this view, were partly right and partly wrong. They were right that historic Christian creedal traditions had accumulated authority beyond what scripture warranted. They were wrong to think the Bible alone, read without the historic creedal tradition’s insights into Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy, would naturally produce apostolic Christianity. The history of the Disciples of Christ tradition has, in fact, demonstrated both — they recovered congregational autonomy and biblical primacy genuinely, and they produced over time a tradition that has wrestled (with mixed results) with the Christological depth the historic creeds were articulating. The lesson is not that subtraction needed supplementing by 19th-century revelation. The lesson is that subtraction needs to be guided by the apostolic deposit’s own internal coherence, which the historic creeds at their best articulated.
III. The Joseph Smith Account in Part 4 — What Is Asserted and What Is Defended
Part 4 of the series is the load-bearing apologetic for Joseph Smith. It is here that Snuffer must persuade the reader that an actual divine restoration occurred through this man. The remarkable feature of the account is what it asserts and what it does not defend.
What is asserted: That Joseph Smith, at age fourteen, went into the woods in upstate New York to ask which church to join; that he encountered a pillar of fire and was told God had a work for him to do; that in the years following, angels appeared to him and gave him an ancient book which he translated by the gift and power of God into the Book of Mormon; that Christ Himself appeared to him on multiple occasions; that he produced more scripture than any prophet or apostle of the Bible; that he restored the authority to minister ordinances; that he prophesied events both fulfilled and yet-to-be-fulfilled.
What is not defended: The historical claims of the First Vision narrative (which exists in multiple incompatible later versions, with substantial variation in who appeared, what was said, and even whether Christ was present); the historical claims about the golden plates (no neutral witnesses, the eleven witnesses’ later religious careers and complicated testimonies, the absence of any extant material evidence); the translation method (face in a hat with a seer stone for substantial portions of the work, attested by participants like Emma Smith and David Whitmer, which raises questions about the “by the gift and power of God” claim Snuffer simply repeats); the Book of Abraham translation (where Joseph’s claimed translation of recovered Egyptian papyri can now be checked against the actual Egyptian text since the papyri were rediscovered in 1966, and the translation does not match what the text actually says); the Kinderhook plates incident (where Joseph translated a portion of fabricated metal plates as containing a record of an ancient leader); the doctrinal evolution from early Mormonism’s nearly-Trinitarian position to the Nauvoo King Follett discourse claiming the Father was once a man.
This is an apologetic strategy worth naming directly: appeal to authority by pre-supposing the authority. Joseph Smith is presented to the reader as a prophet whose claims are taken as data. The reader is invited to accept the Mormon narrative not on the strength of evidence presented but on the strength of the narrative’s own internal coherence and the moral seriousness of those who tell it. This is, of course, the same strategy any religious tradition uses for its founder — but it is worth naming because Snuffer’s broader corpus is so unsparing toward the historical record of every other religious tradition. Catholic claims he examines critically. Protestant claims he examines critically. Salt Lake LDS claims he examines critically. Joseph Smith’s foundational claims he simply asserts.
The Christian who has carefully examined the documentary record on these questions must, in honesty, name that the historical case for Joseph Smith as God’s prophet is substantially weaker than the historical case for the apostolic origin of the New Testament documents — by a wide margin. The New Testament’s historical credentials are documented in eyewitness testimony, contemporaneous letters, archaeological corroboration, and the converging consensus of secular historical scholarship that the events described did happen in roughly the form described. The Joseph Smith claims rest on the testimony of a single man, contradicted at multiple points by the documentary record, defended by a tradition that has had to revise its own historical narrative repeatedly as new documents have emerged.
I do not say this to mock Joseph Smith. I say it because Snuffer’s case requires the reader to accept Joseph Smith’s claims as comparable in evidential weight to the apostolic deposit, and they are not. Not by any honest standard of historical examination.
IV. The Catalog of Mormon Failure in Parts 5-6 — A Gift to the Christian Case
Now we come to what is, in my view, the most consequential portion of the series for the Christian engagement. Parts 5-6 are Snuffer’s catalog of post-Joseph-Smith Mormon failure, and the catalog is so honest, so unsparing, and so detailed that it constitutes — paradoxically — one of the strongest available cases for the Christian position that Joseph Smith’s revelation was not from God.
Let me lay out what Snuffer admits.
Sidney Rigdon’s reorientation of the movement. When Mormonism began, it was modeled after the Book of Mormon. Rigdon, a former Campbellite, redirected it toward recovering the New Testament Church. The movement became preoccupied with organizational structure and administrative control even during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. Joseph’s teachings and revelations became secondary and the church structure became primary. This is Snuffer’s own diagnosis. Within Joseph Smith’s lifetime, the movement he founded was already drifting from its founding revelation toward the very institutional pathology the broader Snuffer corpus is at pains to critique in Catholicism.
The 1841 temple commandment and the Mormon failure to obey. Christ commanded a temple be built; Mormons had sufficient time to build it; if they disobeyed they would be rejected. Snuffer states plainly: Mormons disobeyed. They built a Masonic Hall, brick homes, and personal property improvements instead. The temple was less than half-built when Joseph was killed three and a half years later. By Snuffer’s own framework, the Mormons were under threat of divine rejection before Joseph’s murder.
The post-1844 succession with no voice from heaven. Six weeks after Joseph and Hyrum’s murder, Brigham Young was elected by an organizational body. Three years later, he became sole president. Both in 1844 and 1847 no voice from heaven guided Mormonism as they elected replacement leaders. Snuffer says this plainly. For a tradition founded on the claim that God speaks directly to His prophets, the founding of post-Smith Mormonism was conducted by ordinary parliamentary procedure with no divine guidance. Hierarchy displaced revelation and heavenly guidance — Snuffer’s own words.
Brigham Young as the Yankee Guesser. Young himself characterized himself as a guesser rather than a prophet of Joseph Smith’s caliber. He instituted polygamy. He claimed apostates should be slain. He led the reign of terror in the Intermountain West. He bears moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The man who became the architect of post-Smith Mormonism was, by Snuffer’s own honest characterization, a guesser who governed by force, instituted doctrines Joseph Smith had opposed, and presided over mass murder.
The fragmentation pattern. Of the 15,000 Mormons Joseph gathered, only about half followed Young to Salt Lake. Other factions went to Wisconsin, Texas, Missouri. The RLDS sect (now Community of Christ) eventually abandoned the Book of Mormon and entertains doubts about Joseph Smith. Polygamist splinter groups have systematically violated marriage and child-protection laws to the present day. There are nearly 100 groups claiming Joseph Smith as their founder, most of which have excommunicated all the others.
The structural diagnosis. Snuffer’s most striking observation is at the end of Part 6: Mormonism fell into the central-hierarchy pathology much more quickly than Catholicism. Catholicism took three centuries from the apostolic age to the consolidation of central hierarchy. Mormonism took six weeks from Joseph Smith’s death to Brigham Young’s election by parliamentary body, and three years from Joseph Smith’s death to Young’s sole presidency. So much has been lost that it requires another restoration.
Now let us put this catalog alongside Christ’s promise in Matthew 16:18:
“Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
If Joseph Smith’s restoration was the genuine recovery of the church Christ promised to build, then Christ’s promise should hold. The gates of hell should not have prevailed. Whatever institutional weaknesses Joseph’s followers exhibited, the church Christ promised to build cannot fail. It is the kingdom that shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). It is the body Christ promised to be with alway, even unto the end of the world (Matthew 28:20).
But by Snuffer’s own honest catalog, the gates of hell did prevail against Joseph Smith’s restoration. Within Joseph’s own lifetime, the movement drifted into institutional preoccupation. Within six weeks of his death, hierarchy displaced revelation. Within three years, a self-described guesser became sole president. Within a generation, polygamy was normalized, the Mountain Meadows Massacre had occurred, and the Mormon people were under federal military occupation. Within two centuries, the movement had fragmented into approximately a hundred mutually-anathematizing factions, the largest of which has now revised its temple ceremonies repeatedly, abandoned its public association with the Book of Mormon, and faces growing internal questioning of its founder.
This is not a record consistent with the gates of hell shall not prevail. This is a record consistent with the gates of hell did prevail, repeatedly, comprehensively, and quickly. By the standard Christ Himself promised, Joseph Smith’s restoration was not the church Christ was building, because the church Christ was building cannot be defeated, and Joseph Smith’s restoration was defeated.
Snuffer’s response is to assert that the failure was the followers’ fault, not the prophet’s, and that the failure simply demonstrates the need for another restoration — his own, the 2017 Boise covenant. But this response is structurally non-falsifiable. Any failure of any restoration becomes, on this view, an opportunity for the next restoration. The pattern can repeat indefinitely without ever providing evidence against the framework. This is the structural problem: a theological system whose failures can never count against it is not a falsifiable system, and what is not falsifiable cannot be confirmed either.
Christ’s promise, by contrast, is falsifiable. If Christ’s church had been demonstrably defeated by the gates of hell — if the apostolic gospel had truly perished, if no faithful witness existed in any generation, if the eternal Word had no bride preserved on earth — then Christianity would be falsified. But it has not been falsified. The faithful witness has persisted in every generation, in every nation, regardless of which institutions were faithful and which were corrupt, because the foundation is Christ Himself and Christ Himself cannot be moved.
Snuffer’s catalog of Mormon failure does not strengthen the case for restoration. It strengthens the case against it. By his own honest reporting of what happened, Joseph Smith’s movement failed by the standard the church Christ promised must meet. The failure is not partial. It is comprehensive. And it is exactly what we would expect to see if the original revelation was not what Joseph Smith claimed it was.
V. The Altar Call — Part 7 and bornofwater.org
Part 7 is where the analytical engagement must stop and the pastoral engagement must begin, because Part 7 is not a lecture. It is an invitation.
The structure of Part 7 is a sustained doctrinal frame followed by a specific call to action. The doctrinal frame: restoration and apostasy are constants, never stasis; apostasy subtracts truth and silences God’s voice; restoration adds, recovers, returns connection to heaven; the 2017 Boise covenant began the resumption of Joseph Smith’s interrupted work; faithful followers are now publishing new scripture, accepting more of Christ’s gospel, expecting greater understanding; the movement is non-institutional, has no paid ministers, and offers baptism freely to all.
Then the call to action: if you believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who taught truth and died to save mankind from sin and death, you should act on that by being baptized in His name. Go to bornofwater.org to request baptism. Someone will come to you who has authority from Jesus Christ to administer the ordinance.
This is the moment the entire seven-part series has been building toward. The reader is being asked to take an action — to request baptism by men claiming apostolic authority outside any historic Christian tradition — and to trust that the men who arrive have the authority they claim.
I want to address this directly and seriously.
To Leonard, who has already responded. The decision you have made deserves to be honored as a sincere act of conscience. You went seeking God’s voice and you believed you found it. That seeking is the right impulse, and the fact that I do not believe you found what you sought does not diminish the seriousness of the search. I want you to know that.
But I also want to say plainly what I believe: that the men who baptized you, however sincere, do not have the apostolic authority they claim. No man does, in the sense Snuffer’s tradition means it, because that authority was never lost in the first place — there has been an unbroken witness to apostolic Christianity through every generation since Pentecost — and so the entire framework of needing to receive ordinances from authorized restored ministers rests on the prior claim that the church was lost, which Christ promised it would not be. The men at bornofwater.org are offering you an authority they do not possess, not because they are dishonest, but because the authority they claim does not exist apart from the apostolic succession that has continued, in the faithful witness of every generation of Christians, without interruption.
What does this mean for your baptism? It does not mean you are unsaved. The thief on the cross was saved without being baptized at all. The Roman centurion Cornelius was filled with the Spirit before Peter even finished his sermon and called for water. Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ, not by the precision of the baptismal lineage. If you have made Peter’s confession in truth — “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” — and have trusted in the Christ that confession identifies, you stand on the foundation that Christ Himself laid, regardless of who held the bowl when the water touched your head. The foundation is Christ. The means of access to the foundation is faith. The mark of entrance to the visible church is baptism, but baptism’s validity is not principally a function of the administrant’s credentials. It is a function of the Christ in whose name it is performed, and the faith of the one being baptized.
So I do not say to you, “your baptism was invalid; you must be baptized again by a different lineage.” I say to you, “the authority claim under which you were baptized is not what its administrants believe it is, but the Christ in whose name you sought baptism is exactly who you sought, and your faith in Him is the substance of your standing.” The framework around your baptism is, I believe, mistaken. The faith inside the framework is not.
To anyone reading this who is being invited toward bornofwater.org. The invitation deserves a careful response. You do not need new apostles to be sent. You do not need a 2017 Boise covenant. You do not need to wait for the next restoration. The apostles have already been sent — by the eternal Christ, two thousand years ago — and what they delivered is in your hands when you open the New Testament. The Spirit Christ promised has been indwelling believers in every generation since Pentecost, and He indwells you the moment you trust in Christ. The church Christ promised to build has been building for two millennia, and you are invited to join it not by being baptized into a 2017 covenant in upstate Idaho but by confessing the same Christ Peter confessed, repenting of your sins, trusting in His finished work on the Cross, and being baptized into the historic body of believers in any of countless faithful congregations that confess the apostolic gospel today.
You do not need a restoration. The original is still here. The gates of hell did not prevail. Christ kept His promise. That is the gospel — not that the church was lost and is being recovered, but that the church was promised to endure and has endured.
VI. What This Series Adds to the Engagement
Stepping back, the Christian Restoration series adds three things to the larger Snuffer engagement that the previous essays did not address as directly.
First, it makes the altar call explicit. Where the Reformation series and Testimony of Jesus and Culture by Precept and Practice operated as historical-theological lectures, this series has an evangelistic endpoint at bornofwater.org. The Christian engagement therefore must include not only argument about the framework but counter-invitation to the actual Christ. I have tried to provide both.
Second, it shows what Snuffer is willing to defend and what he simply asserts. The catalog of post-Smith Mormon failure is unsparing. The defense of Joseph Smith’s prophetic authenticity is essentially absent — the claims are stated but not argued. This asymmetry is itself an argument. A thinker who critically examines every other tradition but exempts one tradition’s founder from the same critical examination is not, however learned, doing balanced work. He is doing apologetics. That is a legitimate genre, but it should be named as what it is.
Third, it confirms the structural non-falsifiability of the restoration framework. Snuffer’s response to the catalog of Mormon failure is another restoration is needed. The same response will, presumably, apply when his own 2017 movement eventually fragments or fails — yet another restoration will be needed. The framework cannot be tested against any possible historical record because every failure becomes evidence for the next restoration. Christianity, by contrast, makes a falsifiable claim: the church Christ promised will not be defeated. That claim has been tested against twenty centuries of history and has held. The historical record is the test. The test has been passed.
VII. Closing
The Christian Restoration series is the heart of Denver Snuffer’s public ministry, and engaging it carefully has been worth the effort. The historical scholarship is real. The pastoral seriousness is real. The willingness to speak unsparingly about the institutional Mormonism that excommunicated him is real. None of these should be dismissed.
But the framework rests on a foundational error that the entire seven-part series presupposes rather than defends: that the church Christ promised to build was substantially lost and required nineteenth-century prophetic restoration. The biblical foreclosure of that claim has stood since the April 27 essay, and the present series, despite its honest reporting of post-Smith Mormon failure, does nothing to overturn it. Indeed, by Snuffer’s own honest catalog, the gates of hell did prevail against Joseph Smith’s restoration — comprehensively, quickly, and at every level of institutional life — which is the evidence we would expect to see if the founding revelation was not what its founder claimed it was.
The altar call at bornofwater.org deserves a counter-invitation to the actual Christ — the eternal Word, identified by Peter’s confession, present in every generation through His indwelling Spirit, accessible without intermediation by any modern prophetic claimant, sufficient to save and sanctify any soul who comes to Him in faith. That invitation has been open since Pentecost. It is open today. It will remain open until He returns. There is no need to wait for the next restoration, because the original has never been lost.
Leonard, the seriousness with which you are seeking God is a thing I respect. The seeking is the right impulse. The conclusion you have reached is one I cannot follow you into, because the foundation it rests on is the foundation Christ Himself promised would not be moved, and Christ Himself has not moved it. Wherever you go from here, the Christ I commend to you is the same Christ Peter confessed at Caesarea Philippi. He is enough. He has always been enough. He will always be enough.
Thomas
“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:11
“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” — John 3:5
“Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” — Romans 8:9
Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.