The Restoration That Was Not Needed

A Christian Response to Denver Snuffer’s “Testimony of Jesus” and the Restoration Claim

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 27, 2026

Source: Denver Snuffer lecture transcript, “Testimony of Jesus,” posted on the front page of learnofchrist.org. The lecture spans roughly 100 minutes and provides a historical-theological narrative running from the Catholic apostasy through the Protestant Reformation through Joseph Smith to Snuffer’s own 2017 Boise covenant. A companion site, Covenant Christians, serves as the public-facing front of the same movement. A series of 24 videos and their transcripts are also referenced on learnofchrist.org. These address the History of Christianity and the same restorationist framework. The present essay anticipates its content but does not yet engage it directly.

Context: This essay was prompted by Leonard Hofheins’s transmission of the Snuffer transcript to the fellowship and by Thomas’s framing of the central question: was Joseph Smith’s revelation the actual restoration of the lost gospel, or was it (in Susan’s reading) a demonic visitation of an angel-of-light type whose mostly-true message contained the small, fatal poison that has held its adherents in bondage ever since? This is the third essay in the present sequence engaging the Mormonism question — building on the April 25 Mormonism essay, the April 26 Snuffer evaluation of his “Culture by Precept and Practice” lecture, and the April 19 fellowship meeting analysis. It is the engagement of the central restoration claim itself — the claim on which everything Snuffer says and everything Leonard believes structurally depends.

To the Fellowship —

The “Testimony of Jesus” lecture is, in many ways, the Snuffer lecture I have been waiting to read. Where “Culture by Precept and Practice” focused on movement-building and procedural concerns — the patriarchal blessing vote, the Restoration Edition, the eschatology of the modest fulfillment — “Testimony of Jesus” makes the load-bearing historical-theological argument that the entire Snuffer movement depends on. It is, in essence, the apologetic for why a restoration was needed at all. And because it states the restoration claim with unusual clarity, it gives us the opportunity to engage the claim with corresponding clarity.

The lecture’s argument, distilled: Apostolic Christianity perished within a few generations of the apostles. The Catholic Church became corrupt and then dominant. The Reformers — Luther, Calvin, Knox, Zwingli, the Campbells — were sincere and courageous, but reformation can only subtract; it cannot restore what was lost. Restoration requires God to send His messenger. Joseph Smith was that messenger. The Mormon institutions that followed Smith all failed to preserve what he restored — first by failing to build the Nauvoo temple, then by descending into adultery, then by Brigham Young’s polygamy and blood atonement and the Mountain Meadows massacre. After 185 years of condemnation, in 2017 a small body of believers in Boise accepted the covenant Joseph Smith began but could not finish. The restoration is now resuming, the new scriptures are in print, the temple will be built, and a single generation will see the second coming.

I want to engage this argument at four levels. First, what is true and admirable in it. Second, the historical claim that apostolic Christianity perished. Third, the load-bearing question: was Joseph Smith God’s messenger, or was the visitation of another kind? And fourth, what the Christian who wishes to honor every honest seeker — including Leonard, including Snuffer himself — owes by way of response.

This essay is longer than the previous ones because the claim being engaged is the foundation under everything else. If the foundation holds, the entire Mormon tradition — Salt Lake, Snuffer, every variant in between — has a structural ground. If the foundation does not hold, every restorationist movement falls with it, however refined or sincere. We owe the claim our most careful attention.

I. What Is True and Admirable in the Lecture

Before any critique, let me name what the lecture gets right.

1. The historical narrative of medieval Catholic corruption is largely accurate. Snuffer’s account of the period running from the 1302 papal claim of universal salvation-authority through the Black Death (1347 onward), the Western Schism (1378-1417, with three popes simultaneously claiming Petrine authority), the burning of Hus and Savonarola, and the corruption of indulgence-sales by Pope Leo X and John Tetzel, is the standard Reformation-era reading and is supported by careful Reformation scholarship. The Protestant Reformers’ courage in opposing this system was real, and they did face the genuine prospect of being burned at the stake. We should not flinch from acknowledging this.

2. His treatment of Luther and the Reformers is generous and accurate. He honors Luther’s personal devotion, his intellectual courage, the centrality of Romans 1:17 in his conversion (“the just shall live by faith”), and the providential coincidence of Gutenberg’s press making widespread Bible-reading possible for the first time. He gives Calvin a fair summary of TULIP doctrine — total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints — without caricature, and he honors Zwingli’s contribution to the rejection of the 1302 Catholic claim that there was no salvation outside the Roman Church.

3. He acknowledges the Reformers’ moral failures. He names Luther’s vicious response to the Peasants’ Revolt (in which Luther wrote that the rebellious peasants should be slain like mad dogs). He names Calvin’s role in the execution of Michael Servetus. He names John Knox’s involvement in the murder of Cardinal Beaton. This is honest history, and most Protestant accounts soften these episodes. Snuffer does not, and that honesty deserves credit.

4. He honors the Campbells’ restorationist instinct. Thomas and Alexander Campbell — the founders of what became the Disciples of Christ / Churches of Christ tradition — were genuine seekers whose impulse toward “where the Scriptures speak we speak, where they are silent we are silent” was a sincere attempt to recover apostolic simplicity. Snuffer’s summary of their motto and their motivation is accurate.

5. His critique of Salt Lake LDS is, again, internally substantive. The lecture is unsparing toward Brigham Young, whom Snuffer characterizes as an adulterer who instituted polygamy by personal authority, presided over the reign of terror in the intermountain West, bears moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, and admitted he was a “Yankee guesser” rather than a prophet of Joseph Smith’s caliber. Snuffer’s framing is harsher than my own April 25 essay — and on these specific historical claims, his framing is closer to what serious Mormon historiography (Fawn Brodie, D. Michael Quinn, Will Bagley on Mountain Meadows) supports. The convergence of internal Mormon dissent and external Christian critique on the moral catastrophe of Brigham Young’s leadership remains one of the most important things to name in any treatment of Mormonism.

6. He acknowledges the textual fragility of the Book of Mormon. Snuffer admits the original Book of Mormon contained an average of more than one copy error per page, that Joseph Smith never finished correcting these errors during his lifetime, and that the errors remain in the text used by mainstream Mormon institutions today. This is unusual candor from within the Mormon tradition — and it deserves to be acknowledged. He uses this acknowledgment to argue for the necessity of the Restoration Edition. We will come back to whether the acknowledgment actually accomplishes what he wants it to accomplish.

7. He is right that Reformation could not restore by subtraction alone. This observation, taken on its own terms and within his framework, is logically coherent. If the apostolic faith was substantively lost — if essential pieces were genuinely missing rather than merely obscured by ecclesial corruption — then the Reformers’ restoration-by-subtraction would necessarily be incomplete. Subtraction can only remove what should not be there; it cannot add what is missing. Snuffer’s framing of the Reformers as faithful within the limits of what reformation alone can accomplish is, structurally, fair to them.

These seven points should be acknowledged before any criticism is mounted. The lecture is not a screed. It is a serious, learned, and rhetorically capable presentation of a particular reading of Christian history.

II. The Decisive Historical Claim — Did Apostolic Christianity Perish?

Now to the substance. The entire lecture rests on one historical-theological claim: that apostolic Christianity, as a living tradition, perished between the close of the New Testament and the rise of medieval Catholicism, leaving Christianity as merely an institutionalized belief system without the Spirit’s gifts, without the apostles’ authority, and without the saving connection to the living Christ.

Snuffer cites John Wesley’s sermon “The More Excellent Way” to support this claim — Wesley’s observation that after Constantine, “the Christians had no more of the Spirit of Christ than the other heathens,” that the church was “turned heathens again and had only a dead form left.” Snuffer cites Roger Williams’s conclusion that “Christianity fell asleep in the bosom of Constantine.” On the strength of these citations, Snuffer concludes: “Christianity had not merely declined, it had perished.”

This is the load-bearing claim. If it is true, restoration is necessary. If it is false, the entire Mormon project is unnecessary at best and false at worst.

The biblical foreclosure

Christ’s own promise stands directly against the claim that His church perished:

“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — Matthew 16:18

“Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” — Matthew 28:20

These are not sentimental flourishes. They are explicit, on-the-record promises by Christ Himself that His church will not be overcome by the gates of hell and that He will personally accompany her until the end of the age. If apostolic Christianity perished — not merely declined, but perished, as Snuffer asserts with deliberate force — then Christ broke His promise. The gates of hell did prevail. The “I am with you alway” was conditional, despite the unconditional language. The eternal Word made flesh, who said “heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35), failed to keep His own commitment to His own bride.

This is not a small theological problem for the restorationist position. It is the central one. Either Christ kept His promise — in which case some faithful witness to apostolic Christianity has been preserved through every generation — or Christ did not keep His promise, in which case He is not who He said He was, and the entire restorationist project is being undertaken in the name of a Christ who has already proven Himself unreliable to His own word.

The historical reality the claim ignores

The claim that apostolic Christianity “perished” also runs into the obstinate fact of two millennia of Christian witness. To make the claim, Snuffer must dismiss as inadequate or apostate:

The Apostolic Fathers — Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, who personally knew the apostles and whose writings preserve the apostolic gospel within decades of the New Testament’s completion.
The Cappadocian Fathers — Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa — who articulated Trinitarian orthodoxy against Arianism in the 4th century.
Athanasius, whose Life of Antony shaped monastic Christianity and who held the line on Christ’s full deity at Nicaea.
Augustine, whose Confessions and City of God remain among the most penetrating works of Christian theology in any age.
The Celtic monasteries — Iona, Lindisfarne, Skellig Michael — which preserved Christian scholarship and the gospel through the Dark Ages and re-evangelized northern Europe.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition — never under Roman Catholic authority, which preserved a continuous liturgical and doctrinal tradition from the apostles forward.
The Waldensians, the Lollards under Wycliffe, Jan Hus and the Hussites — pre-Reformation movements that preserved scripture-centered faith and suffered persecution for it.
The Anabaptists, the Moravians, the Quakers — Reformation-era movements that recovered believer’s baptism, simple communal life, and missionary witness.
The Reformation Reformers themselves — whom Snuffer’s lecture honors as sincere and courageous, but whose substantive faith-by-grace gospel he must somehow categorize as inadequate to be “restoration.”
The post-Reformation evangelical witness — the Great Awakening under Edwards and Whitefield, the Methodist revival under Wesley (whom Snuffer cites against historic Christianity, though Wesley himself died a Trinitarian, sacramental Anglican who would have been horrified to see his words enlisted for Joseph Smith’s project), the missionary movement of William Carey and Hudson Taylor, the abolition movement led by Wilberforce, the modern Pentecostal renewal.

To sustain Snuffer’s claim, all of this must be reduced to “merely an institutionalized belief system” without the Spirit, without saving truth, without apostolic continuity. That reduction is not historically credible. It is the move a polemicist must make to clear the deck for the restorationist project, but it cannot survive serious engagement with the actual record.

The Wesley citation, examined

Snuffer cites John Wesley to support the apostolic-Christianity-perished claim. The citation is real, but the use Snuffer makes of it is not what Wesley meant.

Wesley’s sermon “The More Excellent Way” reflects on the decline of charismatic gifts (tongues, healing, prophecy) in the post-Constantinian church. Wesley was making a claim about the gifts of the Spirit in their extraordinary first-century manifestation, not a claim about the salvation of souls or the continuity of true faith. Wesley believed — emphatically, as a lifelong Anglican — that Christ’s church had continued in unbroken witness through every age. He spent his life within that church, reforming it from within, never claiming it had perished or that he was a prophet sent to restore what was lost. His Methodist movement was not a restoration; it was a renewal of an existing tradition Wesley took to be valid.

Snuffer’s citation of Wesley to support the perished-Christianity thesis is, in effect, conscripting Wesley to a position Wesley would have rejected. The same is true of Roger Williams. Williams’s despair at the corruption of state-church Christianity led him to a radical congregationalism — not to the conclusion that no true Christian existed, but to the conviction that no civil authority should compel religious conformity. He spent the rest of his life as a Christian, in fellowship with other Christians, awaiting eschatological renewal — not waiting for a 19th-century New York prophet to restore what had been lost.

The lecture’s appeal to Protestant authorities is rhetorically effective but historically misleading. Wesley and Williams cannot be enlisted as proto-Mormons. They were, and remained, Christians within the very tradition Snuffer claims had perished.

III. The Decisive Theological Question — Was Joseph Smith God’s Messenger?

Even if we set aside the historical impossibility of the perished-Christianity claim, there is a more focused question that has to be asked. Granting that the medieval Catholic Church had grave problems, granting that the Reformation was incomplete on its own terms, granting that there was room for genuine renewal — was Joseph Smith the messenger God sent to accomplish that renewal?

This is the question Thomas posed in his framing, and it deserves a careful answer.

Three possibilities

There are three logically possible accounts of what happened when Joseph Smith reported being visited by personages in the woods near Palmyra in 1820, by the angel Moroni in 1823, and on subsequent occasions over the years that followed:

The Mormon account: Joseph Smith was telling the truth. God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him; angels delivered to him the golden plates and the keys of priesthood authority; he translated the Book of Mormon by the gift and power of God; the resulting movement is the restoration of true apostolic Christianity, which had perished and required this divine intervention.
The fraud account: Joseph Smith fabricated his visions, fabricated the plates, dictated a long manuscript whose source-materials likely included Solomon Spalding’s manuscripts, Sidney Rigdon’s familiarity with the Campbellite restoration, Joseph’s own reading of the King James Bible and contemporary religious literature, and his own considerable creative imagination. The movement that resulted was a successful 19th-century American religious entrepreneurship, comparable to other 19th-century American sects (the Shakers, the Millerites, the Christian Science movement) but more durable and more theologically ambitious.
The deception account — the one Susan flagged in fellowship and the one Thomas’s framing asks us to consider seriously: Joseph Smith was sincerely and personally deceived. His visions were not fabrications, but they were also not from the God of the Bible. The personage he encountered in the grove and the angel Moroni were what Paul warned about in 2 Corinthians 11:14 — “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness.” The deception was sufficiently sophisticated to include vast swaths of biblically-resonant material — covenant language, Christ-centered piety, elevated moral standards, demands for chastity and family integrity — and was therefore sufficient to deceive sincere seekers across multiple generations.

I want to engage all three possibilities seriously, but particularly the third, because it is the one Thomas asked us to consider and the one most easily dismissed as paranoia.

Why the deception account deserves serious engagement

The fraud account is what hostile critics have always claimed and what serious Mormon historians like Fawn Brodie have argued in detail. It is not without evidence — the documentary record is clearer than Mormon apologetics has historically allowed — but it is the easy answer, and it requires Joseph Smith to be a more cynical figure than the historical record fully supports. He died for what he was preaching. He suffered enormously. His personal life shows signs of genuine religious devotion intermixed with the more troubling features (the polygamy, the King Follett discourse’s progression-of-God doctrine, the Council of Fifty’s political ambitions). The fraud account does not fully explain his persistence in the face of personal cost.

The deception account, by contrast, fits the data more comprehensively. It accounts for:

Joseph Smith’s sincerity. A genuinely deceived man will preach what he believes is true and die for it. This is consistent with Smith’s documented behavior.
The mixture of biblical truth with structural error. A demonic deception of the angel-of-light type is most effective when it is mostly true. A pure lie has no purchase. A mostly-true deception with one structurally fatal addition or distortion is the pattern Scripture warns about repeatedly. The Book of Mormon contains substantial biblical-sounding content alongside doctrinal moves (eternal progression to godhood, baptism for the dead, three-tiered afterlife) that contradict the apostolic deposit.
The escalation pattern. Joseph Smith’s doctrine expanded over time. Early Mormonism was relatively close to mainstream Protestantism. By the Nauvoo period, he had moved through plural marriage, eternal progression to godhood, the Council of Fifty’s quasi-theocratic ambitions, and the King Follett discourse’s claim that the Father was once a man. This trajectory is consistent with someone progressively listening to a deceptive source and accepting its expanding claims.
The post-mortem fragmentation. The proliferation of mutually-anathematizing Mormon factions — Snuffer’s lecture itself names approximately a hundred groups claiming Joseph Smith as their founder — is not what God’s preserved church looks like. It is what happens when the founding revelation lacked the divine authority to preserve unity beyond the founder’s lifetime.
The recurrence pattern. The same structural pattern appears in Muhammad’s account of the angel Gabriel in the cave at Hira, in Ellen White’s visions founding Seventh-day Adventism, in Sun Myung Moon’s claim of a vision of Christ on a Korean mountainside, and now in Denver Snuffer’s reported direct contact with Christ. Each claims to be the necessary corrective restoration. Each introduces material that contradicts the apostolic deposit. Each attracts sincere followers and produces communities of genuinely good behavior. Each requires submission to a continuing prophetic authority outside the closed canon.

The deception account is not paranoid. It is the account that takes seriously both Paul’s warning about angels of light and the empirical pattern of post-apostolic prophetic-claimant movements. And it provides the best explanation for why sincere people in good faith — Joseph Smith, his successors, Snuffer, Leonard — can devote their lives to a tradition that produces real virtue while resting on a foundation that contradicts the foundation Paul, Peter, John, and Jude declared they had received from Christ Himself.

The biblical test

Scripture provides the test. We do not have to guess.

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” — 1 John 4:1

“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” — Isaiah 8:20

“But 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.” — Galatians 1:8

The test is not the sincerity of the prophetic claimant. The test is not the moral fruit of the resulting community. The test is not the literary impressiveness of the produced text. The test is whether the content of the revelation accords with what was already given through Christ and the apostles.

By that test — the only test Scripture authorizes — Joseph Smith’s revelation fails, and fails on multiple structurally significant points.

Christology: The Jesus of Joseph Smith is the spirit-brother of Lucifer, conceived in a pre-mortal council, who progressed to divinity. The Jesus of John 1, Hebrews 1, and Colossians 2 is the eternal Word, “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), in whom “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9), with no spirit-brother.
Theology proper: The God of Joseph Smith is one of many Gods, who once was a man, with a body of flesh and bone. The God of Isaiah declares: “I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me” (Isaiah 45:5).
Anthropology: The destiny of the Mormon believer is to become a god of the same kind as the Father. The destiny of the New Testament believer is to be conformed to the image of the Son (Romans 8:29) — to participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) — without ever becoming the divine nature itself. “I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another” (Isaiah 42:8).
Soteriology: The atonement, in classical LDS theology, was accomplished primarily in Gethsemane through the bloody sweat. The atonement, in the New Testament, was accomplished on the Cross. “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). “It is finished” (John 19:30) was spoken from the Cross, not from the garden.

Each of these is a categorical departure from what was “once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). And each falls under Paul’s foreclosure: though an angel from heaven preach any other gospel, let him be accursed.

This is not, I want to underline, a question of whether Joseph Smith meant well. The deception account explicitly grants that he may have. The question is whether the gospel he preached — the Christ, the God, the destiny, the atonement — is the gospel the apostles preached. By the Bible’s own standard, it is not.

IV. The Gethsemane Substitution

Let me focus on one specific point that Thomas raised in his framing, because it crystallizes the larger issue. Thomas noted that Leonard had read aloud, in fellowship, a Book of Mormon passage in which the saving work of Christ is located in Gethsemane — in the bloody sweat — rather than on the Cross.

This is a doctrinal substitution of structural significance. Let me show why.

What Scripture teaches about the Cross

The New Testament locates the saving work of Christ — the atonement, the satisfaction of divine justice, the propitiation of wrath, the bearing of human sin — on the Cross, not in the garden.

“Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh.” — 1 Peter 3:18

“Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” — 1 Peter 2:24

“Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” — Hebrews 2:14

“For Christ also hath once suffered for sins… being put to death in the flesh.” — 1 Peter 3:18

“Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.” — Romans 8:33-34

“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” — Philippians 2:8

“And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself.” — Colossians 1:20

“And the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” — 1 John 1:7

The pattern is consistent across the New Testament canon. The atonement is the death of Christ on the Cross. The blood that cleanses is the blood shed on the Cross. The body offered is the body offered on the Cross. “It is finished” (John 19:30) is spoken from the Cross, with the work complete on the Cross.

What Gethsemane was

Gethsemane was the hour of Christ’s anticipatory anguish — His genuine human shrinking from what was about to happen. “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39). The bloody sweat (mentioned only by Luke, the physician, at Luke 22:44) was the physiological manifestation of extreme emotional distress — a real medical phenomenon called hematidrosis — produced by the Son’s full human comprehension of the wrath He was about to bear.

But Gethsemane is anticipation of the work. The work itself happens at Calvary. The Garden is the threshold; the Cross is the event. To relocate the atoning work to Gethsemane is to relocate it from the public, cosmic, scripturally-witnessed event to a private, garden-bound moment that the apostles themselves describe as prelude rather than fulfillment.

Why the substitution matters

The Gethsemane substitution is not a small theological reshuffling. It changes the entire structure of redemption.

If the atonement was accomplished in Gethsemane, the Cross becomes secondary — a public consequence of a private event, the visible aftermath of a hidden transaction. The blood that cleanses becomes ambiguous: was it the bloody sweat, or the blood from the wounds? The cup the Son drank becomes ambiguous: was it the Father’s wrath against sin (the historical Christian reading), or the agony of anticipating Roman crucifixion (which the LDS framing tends toward)?

More consequentially: if the atoning work is Gethsemane, the Resurrection becomes the resolution of Gethsemane rather than the resolution of the Cross. The empty tomb becomes evidence that the Father restored to the Son what the Son lost in the garden — rather than evidence that the Father vindicated the Son’s once-for-all defeat of sin and death at Calvary. The whole Easter narrative is reorganized around a different center.

And — this is what matters for the broader argument — the Gethsemane substitution is the kind of doctrinal move a deception of the angel-of-light type would most likely make. It preserves nearly all the surface features of the Christian gospel (Christ, atonement, blood, anguish, resurrection) while quietly moving the structural center of gravity to a location where the content of the atonement can be reshaped. This is what Susan flagged in fellowship: a mostly-true revelation with one small, structurally fatal addition that holds adherents in bondage.

The Cross is not negotiable. “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Not Christ in the garden. Christ on the Cross. That is the load-bearing event of the entire Christian gospel, and any “restoration” that softens or relocates it has not restored apostolic Christianity. It has produced something else and named it Christianity.

V. The Textual-Instability Problem

Thomas’s framing also raises a point worth its own brief treatment: the problem of ongoing textual revision in the Mormon tradition.

Snuffer himself acknowledged in his lecture, with some candor, that the original Book of Mormon contained more than one copy error per page on average, and that those errors persist in the text mainstream Mormon institutions use today. His Restoration Edition is in part an attempt to correct this. The LDS Salt Lake institution has, over the years, made thousands of textual changes to the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. Some of these have been editorial (punctuation, capitalization), some grammatical, but many have been substantive — including the famous changes to the Book of Mormon’s Trinitarian language (which Snuffer says he has restored by removing what he characterizes as Trinitarian misreadings introduced by John Gilbert’s 1830 punctuation), and the multiple revisions of the temple endowment ceremony over the LDS church’s history.

This presents what might be called the prophet-driven instability problem. In a system where the canon is open and the living prophet has authority to alter, expand, or correct the existing scripture, what is the standard of truth at any given moment?

The answer, structurally, is: whatever the current prophet says.

This is the freedom-bondage problem Thomas named in his framing. In Salt Lake LDS, the believer is bound to whatever the current prophet (currently Dallin Oaks, succeeding Russell Nelson, succeeding Thomas Monson, etc.) declares. In Snuffer’s Covenant Christian movement, the believer is bound to whatever Snuffer’s current Restoration Edition says, which may be revised in the next iteration. In every Restoration variant, the standard moves.

Compare this to historic Christianity:

“For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.” — Psalm 119:89

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” — Mark 13:31

“Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” — 2 Peter 1:20-21

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” — 2 Timothy 3:16-17

The biblical pattern is settled canon, fixed in heaven, sufficient for the man of God to be perfect and thoroughly furnished. The faith was once delivered (Jude 1:3). It is not still being delivered. The standard does not move because the apostles are dead and what they wrote is what they wrote.

This is what Paul means by “the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Galatians 5:1). The believer in Christ is free to read the apostolic deposit, to be illumined by the Spirit who indwells him, to be “taught of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:9) directly through the Word and the Spirit’s witness within. He does not need the latest prophet’s revision. He does not need to consult a hierarchy. He does not need to wait for tomorrow’s general conference or next year’s Restoration Edition update.

The Mormon tradition’s structural requirement of submission to a continuing prophet is, in effect, the abolition of Christian liberty — replaced with an ongoing dependence on the latest authoritative pronouncement. Even when (as in Snuffer’s case) the prophet himself disclaims hierarchical authority and insists on equality among believers, the structural pattern remains: someone is producing the new scripture, someone is identifying who should be set apart for what office, someone is interpreting which of the past prophets’ teachings still apply. That someone is not the local believer with the indwelling Spirit and the closed canon. That someone is a contemporary man whose teachings will be revised again.

This is the bondage Paul fought against in Galatians — the bondage of replacing the finished work of Christ and the indwelling Spirit’s direct illumination with submission to a teaching authority that stands between the believer and Christ. The Reformation re-discovered this liberty. The Mormon tradition, in all its variants, has never fully embraced it.

VI. The History-of-Christianity Anticipation

Thomas mentioned that there is a second video on learnofchrist.org, titled (presumably) “History of Christianity,” which we have not yet engaged. Thomas anticipates that it will argue that the historical conduct of Christians demonstrates that Christianity was never really the church Christ intended, and that this proves the necessity of a restoration. Without having watched it, I want to address the anticipated argument briefly.

The argument from Christian moral failure is real and should be taken seriously. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, slaveholding Christians defending slavery from the pulpit, the suppression of indigenous peoples by colonial Christian powers, the Holocaust occurring within nations of nominal Christian heritage, present-day clergy abuse scandals — all of this is real, and Christians who pretend otherwise dishonor the gospel they claim to preach.

But the argument from moral failure to Christianity-was-never-the-true-church depends on a specific assumption: that the true church should be visibly identifiable by the spotless moral conduct of its members. That assumption is not biblical. The New Testament repeatedly describes the church as a mixed reality — wheat and tares growing together until the harvest (Matthew 13:24-30), good fish and bad in the same net (Matthew 13:47-50), the visible community always larger than the truly converted, the truly converted themselves still struggling with sin (Romans 7), false teachers arising from within (Acts 20:29-30), apostolic warnings about backsliding being constant.

The biblical picture is not a pristine community of perfect saints whose visible holiness identifies them as the true church. The biblical picture is a covenant community in which God is patiently working out His salvation among genuinely-saved-but-still-sinful people, with the visible church always containing a mixture of wheat and tares, and the truly faithful witness preserved across centuries through individuals and communities the world rarely notices — the unnamed widow giving her two mites, the unmentioned disciple whose name God knows.

The argument from Christian moral failure to “Christianity was never the church” therefore proves too much. By that standard, Joseph Smith’s followers were not the church (because they fell into adultery, betrayed Joseph, fragmented after his death, produced Brigham Young’s atrocities). By that standard, Snuffer’s followers will not be the church (because they will inevitably fail in some respect, given that they are sinful humans). By that standard, every Christian movement that has ever existed fails to be the church, including the apostolic community itself (which produced Ananias and Sapphira, the divisions Paul confronted at Corinth, the false teachers John warned about, the lukewarm Laodiceans, and the ones who left because “they were not of us”, 1 John 2:19).

The right response to Christian moral failure is not “therefore the church was never the church and a restoration is needed.” The right response is “therefore the church needs perpetual repentance, perpetual return to its Lord, perpetual reformation.” Which is what serious Christianity has always understood and done. The church has always been semper reformanda — always being reformed — not because it has lost the gospel and needs a 19th-century prophet to bring it back, but because every generation needs to repent and return to the Christ who has never left.

When the History-of-Christianity video makes its case, this is what we should say back: yes, the moral failures are real and we lament them; no, they do not prove what you say they prove; and no, the answer is not restoration through new revelation, but reformation through repentance toward the Christ who has been with His church alway, even unto the end of the age.

VII. What I Say to Leonard, and What I Say to Mr. Snuffer

This essay has been long, and I want to close by speaking directly.

Leonard, my friend. The lecture you sent us is the clearest articulation I have read of the Mormon restorationist position, and engaging it carefully has been a privilege. I have not flinched from naming where I think Snuffer is right, and I have not flinched from naming where I think he and his entire tradition are wrong. I owe you — and the fellowship — that honesty.

The question I keep returning to is the one your own scriptures, in their honest moments, have to answer: did Christ keep His promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church, or did He not? If He did, no restoration was needed and the entire Mormon tradition rests on a false premise. If He did not, He is not the trustworthy Christ either of us is willing to follow. Both options are open to you, but only one is open to me, because I find Christ’s word in the Gospels so completely trustworthy that I cannot accept the other. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:27-28). They never perished. They are in His hand. They have been since Pentecost.

I commend to you again the Christ I have always commended — the Christ of the apostolic deposit, who paid the actual debt by bearing the actual recoil of God’s nature against actual sin in His actual body on an actual Cross on an actual day in history. Not the Christ of Palmyra, not the Christ of Boise 2017, not a Christ requiring restoration to be reached — the Christ who has been preached without interruption from Jerusalem to today, in every generation, by every faithful witness the Spirit has raised up.

Mr. Snuffer, if these words ever reach you. I have engaged your lecture seriously and found in it a learned, courageous, sincere attempt to do what cannot be done — to re-found a Christianity that does not need re-founding because Christ Himself promised it would not perish. The scholarship is real. The pastoral care is real. The moral seriousness is real. But the foundation is not the foundation Paul laid (“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ”, 1 Corinthians 3:11), because the gospel you have inherited from Joseph Smith is not the gospel Paul preached. It contains another Jesus, another God, another atonement, another destiny.

The way back is not forward into a deeper restoration. The way back is the road every honest seeker eventually has to walk: setting aside the Restoration claim, returning to the apostolic deposit, reading Paul without Joseph’s intermediation, reading John without Joseph’s intermediation, asking the eternal Christ to reveal Himself in the words He has already given. He will. He has never refused that to anyone who has asked Him on those terms. The gates of hell never prevailed against His church, and they never will. There is no need to wait for the next restoration, because the original is still here, still preserved, still preached — by every faithful believer in every faithful gathering on every Sunday morning across the entire world, exactly as Christ promised it would be.

To the fellowship. This is the deepest critique of Mormonism I have yet been able to articulate, and I want to record what enabled it. Susan’s reading of the Joseph Smith vision as a possibly-demonic deception, made mostly-true in order to be deceptive — that reading is the structural insight that organizes the rest. Without it, the Mormon question is endless because every individual claim can be defended on its own. With it, the structural pattern becomes clear: the angel-of-light strategy is the template, and Joseph Smith’s encounter fits the template exactly. The restorationist project, sincerely undertaken by sincere people, rests on a foundation that the apostle Paul anathematized in advance — and the moral fruit of the resulting community, however genuine, cannot vindicate a foundation Christ Himself foreclosed.

Pray for Leonard. Pray for the people in Snuffer’s movement, who are sincere and seeking. Pray for the people still inside Salt Lake LDS, who number in the millions and many of whom will never have the chance to read an essay like this one. The harvest is plenteous and the laborers are few. We commend the Christ who has never left His church, and we trust the Spirit to do, in His time, the work that no argument alone can do — the work of opening eyes that have been told their whole lives that the Christ they sing about is something less than He is.

Thomas

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” — Romans 8:38-39

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” — Hebrews 13:8

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

Denver Snuffer Theology Rebuttal