The Front Porch That Becomes the Closed Door

A Christian Engagement with Denver Snuffer’s Addresses to All Christians (2017–2025, Nine Addresses)

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 28, 2026

Source: Denver Snuffer, Addresses to All Christians (Cerritos California 2017, Dallas Texas 2017, Atlanta Georgia 2017, Sandy Utah 2018 fourth, Sandy Utah 2018 fifth, Sandy Utah 2018 sixth, Boise Idaho 2018 seventh, Montgomery Alabama 2019 eighth, and Philippines 2025 ninth — recorded August 2025 for the Philippines Covenant Christians Conference). Available as transcripts at learnofchrist.org/videos.html. The series is the fourth and final corpus-defining lecture series I am engaging in the systematic Snuffer treatment.

Context: This is the sixth Snuffer engagement in the corpus and the fourth 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), Reformation Series (April 28), Christian Restoration Series (April 28), and Christian Restoration Continues Series (April 28). With the present essay the systematic engagement is complete.

To the Fellowship —

The fourth and final Snuffer corpus is different in genre from the first three. Where Reformation, Christian Restoration, and Christian Restoration Continues were each a tightly-organized seven-part lecture cycle delivered to internal audiences, the Addresses to All Christians are nine standalone evangelistic talks given to (or recorded for) general Christian audiences across an eight-year span — Cerritos September 2017, Dallas October 2017, Atlanta November 2017, Sandy Utah September 2018 (multiple addresses), Boise November 2018, Montgomery Alabama May 2019, and the Philippines (recorded) August 2025. Each address is freestanding. Each opens with a thank-you to volunteers, an explicit no-collection-plate disclaimer, an invitation to learnofchrist.org, a recitation of the doctrine of Christ as preserved in 3 Nephi 11, and a closing invitation to be baptized at bornofwater.org by men who claim restored apostolic authority.

Reading the corpus as a whole, what emerges most clearly is an arc. The Cerritos and Dallas and Atlanta addresses of 2017 are warm, ecumenical, wide-armed. Snuffer praises C.S. Lewis at length, cites Mother Teresa and St. Francis appreciatively, says he believes authentic Christians can be found in every denomination, names Father Ordway and his friend Rick’s mother Mary as Catholic witnesses with real holiness, and explicitly invites Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and others to fellowship together with him on the basis of shared belief in the simple doctrine of Christ. The 2018 and 2019 addresses extend this generosity through long expositions on the diversity of early Christianity, the compromises of post-Constantinian creedal orthodoxy, and the wisdom of various Christian witnesses across the centuries. By the 2025 Philippines address, however, the wide-armed ecumenism has been replaced by a different posture: historic Christian baptism is declared invalid, re-baptism by men holding restored authority is required of every Christian listener including those previously baptized in the LDS Church, and the historic creedal traditions are dismissed (in Snuffer’s characterization echoing the 1820 First Vision narrative) as the philosophies of men mingled with scripture, with their practitioners likened to those who crucified the Lord.

This is the arc the essay needs to engage. The front porch of 2017 leads, by 2025, to the closed door of all your previous baptisms are invalid; submit to ours. The warmth at the front of the corpus and the closure at the back are not in tension — they are the same evangelistic strategy unfolding over time. The wide-armed welcome was the first move; the call to submission to a specific authority is the destination. This is worth naming carefully, with respect for what is genuine in the welcome and clarity about where the welcome was leading.

I will engage the corpus in six movements. First, what is honorable in the addresses, particularly in their pastoral tone and their substantive Christian witness on certain subjects. Second, the arc of progressive narrowing across the eight years. Third, three doctrinal engagements that need direct response: the early-Christianity-was-diverse argument, the Gethsemane-substitution theology elaborated in the Atlanta address, and the Book-of-Mormon-as-hermeneutical-key claim. Fourth, the Daniel 2 stone-cut-without-hands eschatology that organizes the Sandy 2018 addresses. Fifth, the 2025 Philippines address as the corpus’s culmination and the place where the framework’s exclusivity becomes most explicit. Sixth, pastoral closing — to Leonard, to anyone reading toward bornofwater.org, and to the fellowship.

I. What Is Honorable in the Addresses

The Addresses to All Christians contain genuine Christian substance that deserves to be acknowledged before the structural critique begins.

1. The witness to Christ’s resurrection. Every address in the corpus testifies clearly and centrally to the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the foundation of Christian hope. The Cerritos address contains a particularly moving treatment of the disciples’ transformation from cowardice to courage on the first day of the week, observing that the men who had cowered at the trial were transformed by the resurrection into men willing to die for the testimony that Christ was risen. The Philippines address closes with a personal testimony from Snuffer about his childhood friend Waldo who died at age eleven in a bicycle accident, and the comfort that flows from knowing he will see Waldo again. These are not the words of a man who does not love Christ. The witness to the resurrection is real, sincere, and Christian in its substance. This deserves recognition.

2. The honest treatment of Christianity’s institutional failures. Snuffer’s diagnosis of what happens to Christian movements when they acquire money, buildings, professional clergy, and political influence is, on the merits, accurate and worth hearing. He observes that as soon as a church owns a building, the cares of this world necessarily invade — title questions, incorporation questions, tax questions, board governance, succession, the hire-and-fire of clergy. This is the truth. Religious institutions develop their own institutional self-interest that competes with the spiritual interest of the believers they exist to serve. Snuffer’s challenge to take the money out of religion, to gather tithes and use them for the poor among the fellowship rather than for clerical compensation and capital projects, is closer to the practice of the New Testament church described in Acts 2 and Acts 4 than what most contemporary Christian institutions actually do. This is a genuine prophetic challenge to Christianity, and it should be received as such.

3. The pastoral generosity in the early addresses. The Cerritos, Dallas, and Atlanta addresses are wide-armed in a way that is genuinely admirable. Snuffer says explicitly that he thinks you can find authentic Christians in every denomination. He praises C.S. Lewis. He names Mother Teresa and St. Francis. Of his Catholic friend Rick’s mother Mary, he describes seeing in her that fire of belief, that devotion — naming the recognition of authentic faith across a tradition very different from his own. He describes the Christian goal as a coming-together in unity of faith, accomplished not by coercion but by the persuasion that comes when truth resonates as truth. This is generous. It is also the front porch of the larger evangelistic strategy, but the generosity at the porch is real and not merely a manipulation.

4. The treatment of the Sermon on the Mount as the law of Christian community. Across the corpus, Snuffer returns repeatedly to Matthew 5–7 as the law that should govern Christian life. The Boise 2018 address contains a particularly substantive meditation on St. Francis’s literal practice of the Sermon on the Mount — giving away the only coat in winter, founding the Franciscans on poverty and service. The Montgomery 2019 address develops the Sermon on the Mount as Christ’s intensification of the Law of Moses — the point being that mere outward refraining from killing and adultery is not enough; what Christ commands is the transformation of the heart from which those acts arise. This is sound exegesis. The Sermon on the Mount as the constitution of Christian community is closer to the apostolic deposit’s vision of what Christianity is about than the doctrinal warfare and credalism that has too often dominated Christian history.

5. The diagnosis of LDS institutional drift. Snuffer’s unsparing critique of the contemporary LDS Church — its tens of billions of dollars of liquid assets, its hundred-thousand-acre Florida real estate development, its corporate transformation, its abandonment of much of what Joseph Smith originally taught, its claim to be God’s vehicle for salvation while behaving structurally like every other wealthy religious institution — is honest in a way that very few public observers, inside or outside Mormonism, are willing to be. The fact that Snuffer tells this truth carries weight, and the truth is worth hearing regardless of the framework within which he tells it.

These five things are honorable. They deserve to be honored. The structural critique that follows does not undo any of them.

II. The Arc of Progressive Narrowing

The most striking structural feature of the corpus is its arc.

In Cerritos September 2017, Snuffer’s posture is invitational. He explicitly invites the audience to participate with his movement in worshipping Christ and practicing His doctrine, and he characterizes his movement’s authority as something that is not jealously guarded but freely shared with any man willing to accept and follow the doctrine of Christ. The implicit claim is that authentic Christians from any tradition can fellowship together on the basis of shared faith in Christ.

In Dallas October 2017, the same posture continues. Re-baptism is offered as an opportunity for those who would like to receive it from authorized administrants, without charge — but as opportunity, not requirement.

In Atlanta November 2017, the wide-armed welcome continues but the doctrinal content becomes more aggressive. The extended Gethsemane-substitution vision is delivered as Snuffer’s own first-person witness. The Origen-and-Johannine-pre-existence argument is made. The seven streams of early Christianity (Pauline, Matthean, Johannine, Petrine, Gnostic, Syriac, Thomas) are named to support the claim that Mormon doctrine recovers what was lost when the Petrine stream consolidated power.

In the Sandy Utah 2018 addresses (the fourth, fifth, and sixth in the corpus chronology), the focus shifts decisively to the Book of Mormon as the interpretive key for Christianity itself. The fifth address argues that any Christian who wishes to escape the eschatological destruction of the Babylonian-influenced great image must take the Book of Mormon seriously as the ensign of truth planted by God for the last days. The argument is no longer that Baptists and Methodists and Catholics can fellowship together with Snuffer’s people. The argument is that all Christians need to receive the Book of Mormon as their hermeneutical key.

The sixth address (Sandy 2018) hardens this further. Snuffer there places every Christian who declines to receive the Book of Mormon in the moral position of those who crucified Christ — likening them to those who gave lip-service to a false and inadequate religion and rejected the Messiah Himself. This is the sharpest single rhetorical move in the entire corpus. The wide-armed welcome of 2017 has, by this point in 2018, narrowed into a specific demand that comes with a specific anathema attached.

In Boise November 2018, the gathering-all-things-in-one-in-Christ theme is developed in a way that reaches outward to Hindus and Buddhists — Snuffer claiming that the highest aspirations and ideals of both traditions are present in the gospel of Christ. This sounds expansive but functions as a different kind of narrowing: the only frame within which all these traditions can be gathered is in Christ, and the only access to that gathering point Snuffer is presenting is through his own movement’s recovery of the doctrine of Christ as preserved in 3 Nephi.

In Montgomery May 2019, the corpus turns autobiographical. Snuffer recounts his own conversion, his decades in the LDS Church, his excommunication, his work as a Mormon historian, his conviction that Joseph Smith was an authentic Christian, and his current movement’s practice. The address ends with an extended argument that Joseph Smith’s life and writings — particularly the Liberty Jail letter — bear witness to authentic Christian sanctity equivalent to St. Francis’s. The reader is being invited to accept Joseph Smith specifically as the prophet through whom Primitive Christianity has been restored.

By the Philippines address of August 2025, the corpus reaches its destination. The Trinity is named directly as a stumbling block. The historic creeds are dismissed as the philosophies of men mingled with scripture, with their practitioners doing what Joseph Smith was told in his 1820 First Vision narrative was an abomination. All previous baptisms — including LDS Church baptisms — are declared invalid and in need of being redone by people holding restored authority. The wide-armed welcome of 2017 has, by 2025, become a call to be re-baptized by Snuffer’s movement on the grounds that no one else has the authority required.

This arc is not accidental. It is the structure of the evangelistic appeal. The wide-armed welcome was the entry point. The closed door of 2025 was the destination. The reader who entered the conversation through the front porch of Cerritos 2017, expecting fellowship across denominational lines, finds by 2025 that the only fellowship offered is the fellowship of submission to a specific restored authority claim that historic Christianity has had no grounds for accepting. The generosity at the front of the corpus is genuine. The narrowing at the back is also genuine. They are not contradictory; they are the same strategy, deployed across time.

Naming this arc is, I think, the single most useful service the present essay can perform. Anyone reading the Addresses to All Christians needs to read all nine addresses to see the arc. The reader who reads only Cerritos 2017 and stops there will form a picture of Snuffer’s project that the 2025 Philippines address contradicts. The reader who reads only the 2025 Philippines address will miss the genuine pastoral generosity of 2017. Both are real. Both belong to the same project. The arc is what tells you what the project is.

III. Three Doctrinal Engagements

Three substantive doctrinal claims in the corpus deserve direct engagement on their own merits.

1. The Early-Christianity-Was-Diverse Argument

Across the Atlanta and Boise addresses, Snuffer elaborates an argument that early Christianity was originally diverse — Pauline, Matthean, Johannine, Petrine, Gnostic, Syriac, Thomas — and that this diversity was natural, healthy, and intended by Christ until the Constantinian unification at Nicaea imposed a false orthodoxy that crushed legitimate alternative streams. Snuffer leans heavily on Bart Ehrman’s scholarship to argue that the New Testament text itself was corrupted during the proto-orthodox consolidation.

There is a real historical observation underneath this argument that should be acknowledged. The first century church was, in fact, more theologically diverse in its expression than later patristic orthodoxy. Different communities did emphasize different teachings and traditions. The patristic age did involve serious theological debate and consolidation. Bart Ehrman’s text-critical scholarship documents real variations in the New Testament manuscript tradition.

But the historical observation does not support the theological conclusion Snuffer draws. The diversity of early Christian expression existed within a substantial unity of confession. Paul and Peter sometimes disagreed sharply (Galatians 2 records Paul’s confrontation with Peter at Antioch), but they agreed on the centralities — Christ crucified and risen for sins, the gospel proclaimed to the nations, the church as Christ’s body. Snuffer treats these disagreements as evidence that early Christianity had no rule of faith. The historic Christian position is that there was a rule of faith from the beginning — what Jude 3 calls the faith which was once delivered unto the saints — and that the patristic creedal articulation was the church’s defense of that rule of faith against teachings (Arianism, Gnosticism, Docetism, Marcionism) that actually contradicted it.

The Gnostic streams that Snuffer mentions appreciatively — the ones that taught hidden knowledge accessible only to initiates, that rejected the goodness of material creation, that denied the full incarnation of Christ — were not legitimate alternative Christianities that the Petrine consolidation unjustly crushed. They were teachings the apostles themselves explicitly rejected. The First Letter of John was written substantially against early proto-Gnostic teaching: every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God (1 John 4:3). Paul’s letter to the Colossians addressed similar teachings: Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men (Colossians 2:8). The patristic consolidation against Gnosticism was not an unjust narrowing of legitimate diversity; it was the church doing what the apostles told it to do.

Bart Ehrman’s text-critical work, similarly, does not support the theological conclusion Snuffer draws. Ehrman documents real variants in the manuscript tradition, but the variants are mostly minor (spelling, word order, scribal harmonizations) and the substantive doctrines of the New Testament are not at risk from textual variation. No major Christian doctrine depends on a contested text. The text we have is, by any honest standard of ancient document transmission, exceptionally well attested. Ehrman himself acknowledges this in his more careful scholarly works (as opposed to his popular polemical books). Snuffer uses Ehrman’s documented variants to argue that the Christian faith is so textually compromised that we need a new and more reliable revelation — a conclusion Ehrman himself does not draw and which the textual evidence does not support.

The diversity-of-early-Christianity argument is, in the end, a rhetorical move that uses a real historical observation to license a theological conclusion the observation does not support. The observation: early Christianity had genuine theological variety. The conclusion: therefore historic Christian orthodoxy is illegitimate consolidation, and Mormon scripture restores what was lost. The logical gap between observation and conclusion is wide enough to drive a truck through.

2. The Gethsemane-Substitution Theology

The Atlanta November 2017 address contains the most theologically distinctive single passage in the entire Snuffer corpus. Snuffer presents an extended first-person account of an alleged vision experienced in February 2005 and December 2007, in which he saw Christ suffering in Gethsemane in waves of vicarious atonement — first absorbing the experiential horror of those who commit sin, then absorbing the experiential horror of the victims of those sins, with each pair of waves greater than the last, culminating in physical wounds opening at every pore from the cumulative weight.

The passage is extraordinary as a piece of religious writing. Whatever else may be said about it, it is sincere, vivid, and pastorally serious. It clearly reflects genuine spiritual experience of some kind on Snuffer’s part. I am not in a position to adjudicate the visionary claim; that is between Snuffer and God. What I can engage is the theological content of what the passage teaches about atonement.

The theological content locates the price of atonement specifically and primarily in Gethsemane rather than at the Cross. Snuffer concludes the passage by stating directly that Christ’s death on the cross was not where the price for sin was paid. He observes that many men have died similarly in Roman crucifixions, and that what made Christ’s atonement unique was that He alone could absorb the burden of mankind’s sin — a burden, on Snuffer’s account, that was carried in Gethsemane rather than at Calvary. The Cross becomes a necessary subsequent step (because Christ had to die to break the bonds of death by resurrection), but the atoning work itself was completed in Gethsemane.

This is a Mormon-distinctive theology of atonement. It is not the theology of the New Testament. The apostolic deposit consistently and emphatically locates the atoning work at the Cross. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3). We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins (Ephesians 1:7). Made peace through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20). Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood (Romans 3:24–25). Without shedding of blood is no remission (Hebrews 9:22). The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin (1 John 1:7). Worthy is the Lamb that was slain (Revelation 5:12). The blood, the cross, the death — these are where the apostolic deposit locates atonement. Gethsemane is the place where Christ accepted the cup; the Cross is the place where He drank it.

The Gethsemane-substitution theology has another problem: it is in tension with the phenomenology of the Cross insight that has emerged in this very fellowship’s recent work (the April 25 essay developed Thomas’s articulation of the Cross as the place where God’s own experiential recoil against sin was absorbed by the only Being who could survive absorbing it). The Cross is morally and theologically central to the Christian gospel because it is there — at the place where the sinless Son hangs in the agony of the world’s sin — that the atoning work is done. To relocate the atoning work to Gethsemane is to lose the iconic centrality of the Cross to the gospel. It is to displace what Paul calls the word of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18) from the center of Christian preaching.

I do not say this to question the sincerity of Snuffer’s reported visionary experience. I say it because the doctrinal content of what is reported as a vision contradicts the doctrinal content of the apostolic deposit, and on a question of this importance, the apostolic deposit must govern. Galatians 1:8 stands: 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. The gospel preached by the apostles locates atonement at the Cross. A vision that relocates atonement to Gethsemane, however vivid, is not the gospel the apostles preached.

3. The Book-of-Mormon-as-Hermeneutical-Key Claim

The Sandy 2018 fifth address contains the most aggressive single argument in the entire Snuffer corpus, and it deserves direct engagement.

Snuffer adopts Walter Martin’s hermeneutical principle that you interpret the old in light of the new — meaning, in Martin’s original use, that the New Testament’s interpretation of Old Testament prophecy governs Christian reading of those passages. Snuffer turns this principle on Christianity itself: the Book of Mormon, as the latest-in-time text of public availability (1830), becomes the interpretive key for both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Sandy 2018 sixth address sharpens this into the anathema characterized in the Section II discussion above — placing every Christian who declines the Book of Mormon in the moral position of those who crucified Christ.

Walter Martin would not have agreed with this extension of his principle, and the extension is theologically illegitimate. Martin’s principle assumed a closed canon. The New Testament can govern interpretation of the Old Testament because the New Testament is part of the same revelation — given by the same Spirit, through the same prophetic-apostolic line, to the same covenant people. The Book of Mormon is not part of that revelation. Its claim to be is precisely what is at issue. To use Martin’s principle to elevate the Book of Mormon over the New Testament is to assume what needs to be proven: that the Book of Mormon belongs in the same revelatory category as the apostolic deposit.

The apostolic deposit is closed. I beseech you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints (Jude 3) — the once (Greek hapax, meaning once for all) is decisive. The pattern of new revelation through new scripture, on the apostolic deposit’s own internal logic, ended with the closing of the apostolic age. New revelations are not impossible (the Spirit speaks personally to believers in every generation, leading them into the truth already deposited), but new scripture is. The scriptural deposit is what the Spirit is leading believers into, not adding to.

Snuffer’s likening of Christians who reject the Book of Mormon to those who crucified the Lord is the sharpest expression of the framework’s exclusivity in any of the four series. It is also, on examination, exactly backwards. Those who crucified the Lord rejected the Lord. Christians who reject the Book of Mormon are not rejecting the Lord; they are protecting the Lord’s gospel from supplementation by claimed revelations the apostolic deposit gave no warrant to expect. The proper Christian posture toward any post-apostolic claim of new scripture is to test the spirits, as the apostle John commanded. When the test is applied — does the new claim agree with the apostolic deposit, or does it contradict the apostolic deposit at structural points? — the Book of Mormon, on the deposit’s own standard, fails the test. Its anthropology (premortal spirit existence), its theology proper (multiple gods), its Christology (the Father and Son as separate exalted beings), its soteriology (salvation requiring valid restored ordinances administered by men holding restored authority) — each of these contradicts the apostolic deposit at structural points. The Christian who rejects the Book of Mormon is not crucifying the Lord; the Christian is doing what the apostolic deposit commanded the Christian to do.

The sharpness of the Sandy 2018 sixth address’s anathema actually inverts the relationship Snuffer needs. Far from showing that Christians who reject the Book of Mormon are like those who rejected Christ, it shows that the framework cannot tolerate disagreement at its load-bearing point. A framework that anathematizes those who decline its core claim is a framework that needs the core claim accepted in order to function. The apostolic deposit needs no such anathema, because the deposit is its own evidence — its historical credentials, its doctrinal coherence, its twenty centuries of attested fruit — and disagreement with it does not threaten its standing. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, must be accepted on faith and cannot tolerate the test.

IV. The Daniel 2 Stone-Cut-Without-Hands Eschatology

The Sandy 2018 fourth and fifth addresses are organized around an extended reading of Daniel 2 — Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the great image with the head of gold, shoulders of silver, belly of brass, legs of iron, feet of iron mingled with clay, and the stone cut out of the mountain without hands that grinds the image to dust.

Snuffer’s reading is that the head of gold (Babylon) influenced the religion of Israel during the Babylonian captivity, that the subsequent kingdoms (Medo-Persian, Greek, Roman) progressively corrupted the religion, and that Christianity itself emerged within this corrupted milieu and inherited the corruption. The Book of Mormon, on this reading, represents an uninfluenced preservation of authentic religion from a community (the Lehi-Nephi colony of approximately 600 BC) that left Jerusalem before the Babylonian captivity and was therefore never subject to the post-exilic corruption. The Book of Mormon is therefore the stone cut without hands — the recovery of pre-Babylonian religion that will, in the last days, grind the post-Babylonian-corrupted religious-cultural-economic-governmental system to dust.

This reading is structurally similar to the Reformation-series Daniel 2 reading I engaged in the April 28 Reformation essay, but it is more elaborated and load-bearing here. Three observations.

First, the historic Christian reading of Daniel 2 has consistently identified the stone cut without hands as Christ Himself and His kingdom — established at His first coming, growing throughout history through the proclamation of the gospel, and finally consummated at His return in glory. This is the reading of the patristic commentators (Hippolytus, Jerome, Theodoret, Augustine), the medieval commentators, the Reformers, and the bulk of contemporary Christian scholarship. Christ as the stone cut without human hands fits the text precisely: He was conceived without a human father (cut without hands), born of David’s line (out of the mountain), small at His coming (the stone), and His kingdom is the one that shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). The Christian reading does not require a future restored religion to fulfill the prophecy because the prophecy was fulfilled at Christ’s first coming.

Second, the historical claim that the Book of Mormon represents an uninfluenced preservation of pre-Babylonian religion is not testable in the way Snuffer needs it to be. The Book of Mormon as a published text dates from 1830 and bears the marks of the early-19th-century Protestant religious world from which it emerged — including, on careful reading, substantial echoes of the King James Bible’s English (which is a 1611 translation), of contemporary debates about infant baptism and the doctrine of the Trinity, of Methodist and Campbellite revival theology, and of other features of its actual provenance. The claim that its content reflects pre-Babylonian Hebrew religion is not a historical claim that can be checked against the evidence; it is a faith claim that requires acceptance of Joseph Smith’s prophetic authenticity as its prior. We are, again, at the theology that begins after the step not taken.

Third, even granting Snuffer’s reading of the historical chronology, the conclusion that the Book of Mormon is the stone cut without hands does not follow. The text of Daniel 2 specifies that the stone fills the whole earth and replaces all the kingdoms — the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). The Book of Mormon as a published text has not done this. It has produced, by Snuffer’s own honest catalog in the Christian Restoration and Christian Restoration Continues series, a movement that splintered into approximately a hundred mutually-anathematizing factions within two centuries of its publication. The largest of those factions (LDS) has, by Snuffer’s account, fallen into the same Babylonian corruption Snuffer charges historic Christianity with. The smallest of those factions (Snuffer’s own movement) is, by his own admission, very small — Snuffer himself describes the worldwide movement as a small body of believers scattered across Japan, Europe, Australia, and Canada. The Book of Mormon has not filled the earth. It has not destroyed the kingdoms. It has not done what Daniel 2:44 says the stone will do. By the very text Snuffer cites, the Book of Mormon is not the stone cut without hands.

The Christian reading of Daniel 2 — the stone is Christ Himself, His first coming inaugurated the kingdom, the kingdom has been growing for twenty centuries through the gospel’s proclamation, and the consummation will come at His return — fits the text. The Snuffer reading does not.

V. The 2025 Philippines Address

The Philippines address (recorded August 2025 for the September 2025 Philippines Covenant Christians Conference) is the corpus’s destination, and it deserves direct engagement as such.

The address contains four moves that, taken together, constitute the sharpest expression of the Snuffer framework’s exclusivity in the entire corpus.

First move: the Trinity is named directly as a stumbling block. The Philippines address presents the historic Christian Trinitarian doctrine as something the original disciples of Jesus could not have understood — alleging that the three-in-one and one-in-three formulation is foreign to the apostolic witness. The doctrine is presented as a philosophical imposition that obscures the plain biblical witness to the Father and Son as two separate beings. The Christian observation: the doctrine of the Trinity was not the imposition of post-apostolic philosophy on a simpler apostolic teaching; it was the church’s necessary articulation of what the apostolic witness actually said when the witness was tested against unitarian and modalist alternatives. Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord (Deuteronomy 6:4). In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). I and my Father are one (John 10:30). Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Matthew 28:19). The Trinitarian articulation arose because the apostolic deposit said all of these things and the church had to confess what they all together meant. Snuffer’s preferred unitarian-with-Son reading flattens the witness rather than confessing it.

Second move: all historic Christian baptism is invalidated, including LDS baptism. Asked directly in the question-and-answer session whether someone previously baptized in a Christian church needs to be re-baptized, Snuffer answers unambiguously that all such baptisms need to be redone by men holding restored authority from his own movement. The Christian observation: this is the framework reaching its destination. Every previous baptism — every Catholic baptism, every Lutheran baptism, every Baptist baptism, every Methodist baptism, every Presbyterian baptism, every Eastern Orthodox baptism, every LDS baptism — is declared invalid. The only valid baptism is one administered by men holding the authority Snuffer’s movement claims to have received. This is the closed door at the end of the front porch.

Third move: the historic creeds are framed as abomination. The address quotes Joseph Smith’s 1820 First Vision narrative in which Christ allegedly told the young Joseph that all the historic Christian creeds were an abomination. This characterization is then applied to the present-day Christian world: anyone holding to the historic creeds is holding to what Christ Himself declared abominable. The Christian observation: the historic creeds — the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Chalcedonian Definition — are the church’s confession of what the apostolic deposit teaches about God, Christ, the Spirit, and salvation. They were not produced by speculative philosophy; they were produced by the church’s defense of the apostolic deposit against teachings that contradicted it. To call them an abomination is to call the apostolic deposit’s faithful articulation an abomination. This is not a position the apostolic deposit can support.

Fourth move: the simplicity-versus-philosophy framing. Snuffer presents Primitive Christianity as simple, plain, accessible to uneducated people, and the historic Christian creeds as the corruption of that simplicity by educated philosophers. This is a familiar restorationist trope and it has surface appeal — but it is unfair to the historical reality. The patristic articulation of orthodoxy was not the work of philosophers imposing speculation on simple faith; it was the work of pastors and bishops defending simple faith against philosophical heresies. The Arian controversy was provoked by Arius, who had imported Hellenistic subordinationist categories into the doctrine of God. Athanasius’s defense of Nicene orthodoxy was the simpler position, and the more biblical position — the Word was God (John 1:1), without subordination, without graded divinity. Snuffer’s framing reverses the historical reality.

The Philippines address closes with a direct invitation to be re-baptized at the conference, by men holding Snuffer’s restored authority, with the assurance that the old self is washed away in the water like Christ in the tomb and that the believer rises from the water as a new person. The reader who has followed Snuffer through eight years of addresses, from the wide-armed welcome of Cerritos 2017 to the closed door of the Philippines 2025, has now reached the place where the only step remaining is to accept the closed door and walk through it.

This is where the corpus has been heading all along.

VI. Pastoral Closing

To Leonard. With this essay the four-series systematic Snuffer engagement is complete. Across six engagement essays now, totaling somewhere around thirty-five thousand words, I have tried to engage Snuffer’s framework with the seriousness it deserves — to credit what is honorable in it, to name what is genuine in the pastoral substance of the men around it, to acknowledge what is true in the historical observations it makes, and at every load-bearing point to ask whether the framework’s foundation can hold the weight it is being asked to bear. My honest conclusion, after sustained engagement, is that the foundation cannot hold the weight. The biblical foreclosure of the restoration claim stands. 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. The doctrinal content of Mormon scripture contradicts the apostolic deposit at structural points. The post-Smith catalog of Mormon institutional failure is, by Christ’s own promise in Matthew 16:18, evidence against the framework rather than for it. The arc of progressive narrowing across the Addresses to All Christians — from front porch to closed door — is an arc that the apostolic-Christian gospel does not require.

The position I stated in the Christian Restoration series essay and the Christian Restoration Continues series essay stands. Your baptism does not need to be redone. The framework around your baptism is, I believe, mistaken. The faith inside the framework is not. The Christ in whose name you sought baptism is the Christ Peter confessed at Caesarea Philippi, and your faith in Him places you on the foundation Christ Himself laid. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his (Romans 8:9) — and the converse: if you have the Spirit of Christ, you are His, regardless of which administrant held the bowl when the water touched your head. The 2025 Philippines address says you need to be re-baptized. The apostolic deposit says you do not. I follow the apostolic deposit on this question.

What I want most for you, as we close this engagement, is that the friendship and the fellowship survive the disagreement. We can disagree about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the 2017 Boise covenant, and the men at bornofwater.org. We cannot disagree about the Christ we both confess, because that Christ is one. The unity that matters is the unity Paul speaks of in Ephesians 4: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. That unity is real between you and me, however firmly I hold to my position about the framework you are inside.

To anyone reading this who is being drawn toward bornofwater.org. The arc of the corpus you have been reading is not what the front porch suggests. The front porch is genuine; the closed door is also genuine; and the closed door is where the front porch has been leading. By the time you are invited to be re-baptized into Snuffer’s restored authority, you will be told that every other baptism you may have received is invalid, that the historic Christian creeds your faith was formed in are an abomination, that the doctrine of the Trinity that has confessed Christ as God for two thousand years is a stumbling block, and that you are no more Christian than those who crucified the Lord if you decline to receive the Book of Mormon as the interpretive key to all scripture.

You do not need to walk through that closed door. The Christ you are seeking is the Christ Peter confessed, the Christ the apostles preached, the Christ the historic creeds confess. He has been here all along. He has not been hiding behind a closed door waiting for you to be re-baptized into a 2017 Boise covenant. He has been offering Himself freely to every honest seeker since Pentecost, and He is offering Himself to you now, on the same terms He has always offered Himself: faith, repentance, baptism into His name in any of countless faithful Christian congregations that confess Him truly. The historic Christian church is your home if you want it to be. You do not need to be told that everything you have been is an abomination before you can come.

To the fellowship. With the licensing infrastructure now in place (commit 64fe027) and the four-series Snuffer engagement complete, the corpus has reached a meaningful inflection point. We have, between the April 25 Mormonism essay, the phenomenology-of-the-Cross standalone, the April 19 fellowship-meeting analysis, the three-conversations-at-one-table essay, the Snuffer-evaluation essay, the Restoration-That-Was-Not-Needed essay, the Upon-This-Rock standalone, and the four series-engagement essays of April 28, a substantial Christian-engagement-with-Mormonism corpus that did not exist a week ago. The doctrinal positions are settled. The pastoral posture toward Leonard is consistent. The biblical foundations are clearly named. The arc of the work is now visible.

What remains is the harder work — the work that goes beyond writing essays — of continuing to walk in the same room with Leonard, of holding the friendship through the disagreement, of trusting the Spirit to do the work that argument alone cannot do, and of staying open to the possibility that we may have been wrong about something and that further conversation may yet teach us more than further essays will. The systematic engagement is complete. The friendship is not. The friendship continues.

Thomas

“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:11

“There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” — Ephesians 4:4–6

“I beseech you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” — Jude 3

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.