Two Conversations: Render Unto Caesar, and the Snufferite Restoration
Fellowship Discussion Summary | May 24, 2026
Occasion. This was the Sunday following a long week of theological-production work — the engagement with Reid’s Romans 13 essay published May 15, the distilled summary completed Friday, the pronoun essay engaging the convention of generic he/him in formal writing, and three Facebook-post fellowship essays produced in a single day (the Mark Smith Obama list, the Manookian/Williams Ninth Circuit post, and the Rawan Osman piece on early-Zionist quote-mining). The Sunday meeting itself unfolded across roughly three and a half hours, with four distinct conversations that the transcript treats as a single document but that the fellowship’s actual structure marks as four. They deserve to be drawn out separately, both because each does its own work and because the day, taken whole, exhibits a cross-domain pattern that is itself worth naming. I will treat the four in order and close with the pattern.
The two main conversations were these:
- The main fellowship on the May 13 Reid-engagement essay, during which Charlie offered an interpretive reading of render unto Caesar that I had not previously heard articulated in this form — a reading not of image but of title and ownership. The conversation then ranged across the spectrum from Reid-style maximum-submission to active conscientious refusal, with substantive contributions from Michael Sherman, Susan, and Leonard.
- The LDS-Snufferite conversation that opened when Leonard mentioned, in passing, that Abraham was almost sacrificed by his father — an extracanonical claim that pulled the meeting into a careful working-through of the relationship between the Snufferite branch of LDS Restorationism (which Leonard now affiliates with) and mainstream Salt Lake LDS theology (which he has departed from), with Susan and Charlie speaking from their own former-LDS history.
Part I — Render Unto Caesar: Charlie’s Reading and the Spectrum of Resistance
The Reid foil
The main fellowship opened with Charlie’s report on having tried to read the Reid essay I had sent earlier in the week (the original CGG Forerunner article from 1996 that the May 13 fellowship essay engages). His first response was this guy is such a coward and sissy. I don’t like him. My response, this is exactly what an essay needs in order to be written, an interlocutor whose position is sharply wrong enough to be answered. I responded that Reid is a foil in the literary sense — the figure whose definite position provides the resistance against which the essay can develop its own definite position. Reid is not a strawman. The May 13 essay tries hard to give him his due (he is right about the default disposition, right about rebellion-as-spiritual-disposition being sin, right about the sovereign-citizen movement, right about Daniel and the three Hebrew children as the right model). But the essay disagrees with him on the structural reading of Romans 13, on the scope of Acts 5:29, on the two halves of Matthew 22:21, on the witness of Paul’s actual life, on the Reformation lesser-magistrate doctrine, and on the moral-cooperation analysis required by the contemporary tax question. Charlie had skimmed past the sovereign-citizen sections — Susan and I are definitely not that — and had landed in the body of the argument, which he then began to engage substantively.
Charlie’s title-and-ownership reading of render unto Caesar
Charlie highlighted the render unto Caesar passage:
Christ in that exchange about render unto Caesar — another way to look at it, is that what he was asking us to do was to make a decision on ownership and a decision on title. Just because Caesar puts his image and superscription on every coin doesn’t make him the owner of every coin. What Christ asks us to do, in my opinion, is in all ways judge who is the owner of any given thing. God owns everything, including Caesar, and so just because Caesar makes a claim doesn’t mean he gets what he claims. It means that we have an obligation every single moment of our lives to render to the owner what is theirs.
Leonard, who had not yet read the May 13 essay, immediately recognized this as the heart of the render unto Caesar saying as he had received it. Hardly anybody gets that, Charlie. That’s the first thing that jumps to my mind, that gulf between render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s. It’s like, okay, who owns what here?
Charlie’s reading is, I think, a third interpretive layer beyond the two layers the May 13 essay had developed. The popular reading is to pay the tax; the matter is closed. The middle reading of the May 13 essay developed at some length is the image reading — the coin bears Caesar’s image and is therefore owed to Caesar; the human being bears God’s image and is therefore owed to God; the parallelism is the integrating frame. Charlie’s reading does not displace these but adds, beneath them, the title question: under what authority does the image function as a claim of ownership? The answer, in Charlie’s reading, is only insofar as the image-impresser actually owns what he has stamped. Caesar’s stamp does not constitute ownership; it presupposes a prior question about whether Caesar has standing to claim the coin in the first place. And the deeper biblical answer is that God owns Caesar, and therefore God owns the coin too; thus, the believer’s act of rendering the coin to Caesar is itself conditioned by God’s prior and superior ownership of everything, including Caesar.
This makes the render unto Caesar saying not a flat division of two ownership-domains (mine to Caesar, mine to God) but a single judgment exercised under God’s universal lordship: render to the rightful owner what is the rightful owner’s, recognizing that the rightful owner of everything is God, and that Caesar’s claim is real only to the extent that God authorizes Caesar’s stewardship of the coin. The believer is being asked to make a constant ownership judgment — whose is this? to whom does this rightly belong? — and to render accordingly, with the understanding that even what is correctly rendered to Caesar is rendered through and under God’s prior title.
This is, I think, the highest reading of the saying. It absorbs the popular reading (the coin is materially Caesar’s, and is materially returned to him), absorbs the middle image-bearing reading (the person bears God’s image and is owed to God), and adds a layer of judgment-under-divine-ownership that orients every act of rendering toward God as the ultimate owner.
Summary: This perspective sheds new light on the meaning of Jesus’ “Render unto Caesar, Render unto God” response to the Pharisees and Herodians. The bottom line is that we are required to make a judgment about who owns what. This means that we must judge the morality of the situation the way that God would. The judgment is thrown back on us. We must study God’s law, listen to the Holy Spirit, carefully examine the reality of each situation, and judge rightly who is the proper owner in each circumstance. This is exactly what this discussion was about. It was about establishing the distinctions.
Charlie on civil order and the Constitution
Charlie, by his own description, falls on the rebellious side of the temperamental spectrum — he has spent significant portions of his life as a guest of the state, in the Contra Costa County Jail and elsewhere, mostly over disputes with the state about child-support arrangements that he believes were inverted in the application against him. I’m all for civil order, he said, but I’m also all for our civil servants to read the Constitution once in a while, which apparently they never do. The principle behind his statement is one that the May 13 essay touched on only briefly: the United States Constitution itself, when read closely, is far closer to a charter for restraining the federal government than to one for empowering it. Charlie had to learn the Constitution from the law library shelf in the county jail in order to make arguments to the state that the state’s own agents either do not know or do not honor.
This is the lesser-magistrate doctrine running in a different direction than the May 13 essay developed — not the doctrine that lesser civil magistrates must restrain higher civil magistrates, but the related doctrine that the constitutional charter itself is a lesser magistrate over the federal executive and its agencies, and that citizens have standing under that charter to demand performance of its terms. Charlie’s working theory of his own legal exchanges with the government is that when I point out what the Constitution actually says, I have had many successful exchanges. The Constitution is a document that the agents of the state have largely forgotten how to read. Citizens who have read it possess an authority the agents lack.
Michael Sherman on venue and the wrong-direction-on-the-freeway protest
Michael Sherman raised the point about venue — that tax-protest of the symbolic kind is, in his framing, the wrong venue for the kind of resistance that civil-conscience refusal actually requires. It’s sort of like, okay, therefore I’m not going to obey this country’s laws because of their evils, and I will drive going in the wrong direction on the freeway. Ha ha on them. Well, I get the protest idea, but not the right venue to do it. It will only cause you a lot of grief if you run into another car or one into you, and it doesn’t address the issue.
Michael’s structural point lines up exactly with the moral-cooperation analysis the May 13 essay developed in §IX: symbolic refusal of remote material cooperation (the calculated immoral portion of the general tax) does not actually move the spending, does not constitute conscientious objection in the historic sense, and exposes the resister to consequences disproportionate to any effect achieved.
Michael’s wrong venue is the same insight stated as practical wisdom rather than as moral theology. The real thing is, you really want the unjust or ungodly law to change. I picture living like Winston in 1984, or picture a Nazi citizen watching his neighbors being hauled away to concentration camps and saying, well, what can you do? Well, I don’t know what, but hide them — something that’s important. Your voice matters if you really think it needs to change. The right venue is an organized political-cultural witness that moves the law itself, or a specific conscientious refusal at the point of direct participation, where one’s own hand is implicated. Symbolic tax refusal is neither.
The Rockefeller / Trump income disclosure thread
Leonard raised the well-known story of Nelson Rockefeller’s confirmation-hearing testimony in 1974, when asked why he had paid no income tax in a particular year — because I have no taxable income — and the parallel of Trump’s release showing very low income-tax payments due to legal carry-forward losses. The story was offered in the spirit of the tax laws being a mess, which is true, but Michael Sherman corrected the framing in the direction of accuracy: it is not the case that anyone can avoid taxes by knowing the loopholes; it is the case that ownership of businesses generating Schedule-A losses creates write-off opportunities that wage earners do not have. The structural inequity is real and is a recurring topic of congressional reform proposals. The thread did not extend beyond this, but it is worth noting in the summary because the fellowship sometimes drifts into the territory of imagining that ordinary citizens have hidden legal tools available to them that they merely have not discovered. Mostly, we do not. The wealthy have access to structures that wage earners do not. This is not a conspiracy; it is a feature of the tax code that operates differently across income types and that ordinary citizens cannot easily access without the kinds of asset structures that wage employment alone does not generate.
Susan’s choreography point — the relinquishment of grandiosity
Susan said, of the larger question of what one person can do:
It’s important to recognize in our own minds and hearts that it’s Christ that’s choreographing his work. We are just doing one part of Christ’s work, and so instead of looking at this thing that we do as the thing that’s going to change everything, it’s more like, okay, Christ is choreographing, and he has untold amounts of people on this earth, who knows how many, who really love him, and who are doing their part, or trying to do their part, or will do their part. And we don’t have to think that we are going to facilitate everything. It’s all Christ wants us to do — our part.
This is the relinquishment-of-grandiosity move that the fellowship needs to hear regularly, because the work the fellowship is doing — across CFE, CCC, CPP, CRF, IDM, CHR, CHS, CVN, and now the Walk Center — is sufficient to produce in any single contributor an over-identification with outcomes that are not the contributor’s to produce. Susan’s instinct is correct. The job is not to win the world; the job is to do one’s part faithfully and to trust the choreographer for the rest. Michael Sherman picked up on this, holding the Catholic-Protestant religious-war counterexample as a needed complication (Christians killing Christians, both armies blessed by their respective clergy, is a difficult case for the Christ is choreographing this framing if taken simplistically). Susan answered the complication well: He gave us a beautiful gift by saying, “This is how you will know my disciples—they will have love for one another.” So, in helping us to know who his disciples are, we can also know who his disciples are not, and we can recognize when people are at odds with each other and killing each other, that isn’t Christ. People can abuse Christ’s gospel, his name, and we don’t have to lump them in together with the people who are truly obeying.
The believer does not have to endorse every event that happens in the Christian-cultural sphere as Christ’s choreography. The believer is permitted — required — to identify what is Christ’s and what is not, to do his part in the work that is Christ’s, and to leave the choreography to the Choreographer.
The pointillism image
The Christos Underground project contains many pieces. In describing the larger project that the CFE essays and the broader Christos work are aiming at, I use the image of pointillism. The Christos work, taken as a whole, is not a single argument, a single book, a single cultural intervention — it is a tapestry of ideas, relationships, organization, and work. Each essay, conversation, demonstration, engagement, business decision, and act of faithfulness is a single point of color on the canvas of culture. None of them is, on its own, the picture. But assembled — placed beside each other, accumulated over years, viewed from the right distance — they resolve into a portrait. The portrait is the face of Christ as he would be lived in our particular cultural moment, applied across the full domain of contemporary life. The Christos Underground is a positive intervention program rather than a defensive reaction. It is the slow, patient pointillism of a Christ-portrait being built up by many hands.
The image is useful because it organizes the otherwise overwhelming sprawl of the work. We do not have to know what the whole picture will look like in its grand/full comprehension. We have to put down the dot in front of us by taking the right/good/Godly action in each moment. We are each placed in a specific circumstance that intersects with the past and future of our lives and with the lives and circumstances of others in the present. The color we place on the canvas of life is the action and spirit we bring to each moment. As we listen to the Holy Spirit, we are being directed in the grand Choreographer’s composition of the Kingdom of Heaven manifesting on Earth.
Part II — Restoration, Restoration, Restoration: The Snufferite Question
How the topic opened
The LDS-Snufferite conversation opened sideways. Leonard, late in the meeting, was citing biblical examples of saints who would not cross the line, and mentioned Abraham was almost sacrificed by his father. I challenged him on that. I had not heard the claim, and did not recognize it as biblical. He clarified that it’s in our scriptures. It was an additional revelation given to Joseph Smith, recorded in the Pearl of Great Price (the Book of Abraham). The story Leonard then told is not, properly speaking, identical to the midrashic Abraham-smashes-his-father’s-idols tradition that appears in Genesis Rabbah and in various Jewish and Islamic sources, though it draws on the same well. In Joseph Smith’s version, Abraham is sentenced to be sacrificed on an altar to his father’s idols and is miraculously delivered. The delivery sets him on the path to seeking greater knowledge, leading to his eventual reception of the Abrahamic covenant.
I noted that in the canonical Bible, the sacrifice narrative concerning Abraham is the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son and then provides a ram. The Joseph Smith addition reverses the spiritual polarity. Abraham is the Godly would-be victim, with his idolatrous father as the would-be sacrificer. Leonard noted that this is not contradictory but an additional perspective. He presented the Joseph Smith story as background history that predates the binding of Isaac, and that the test prepared Abraham to be the kind of man who would later be willing to bind Isaac.
The canonical Bible creates a typological structure through the story of Abraham sacrificing his only Son, establishing a type/shadow/future recapitulation. The binding of Isaac is the pre-figuration of God the Father’s offering of the Son. The lifting up of the brazen serpent is the pre-figuration of Christ lifted up on the cross. The Passover lamb is the prefiguration of the blood of the Lamb of God, which protects against the spirit of judgment. These typological pre-figurations are the literary evidence, internal to the canon, that the canon was authored by a single divine Mind over many human pens across many centuries. They are how we know the Bible is what it claims to be. The Joseph Smith addition does not disrupt the canonical typology; it merely adds a chapter before Genesis 22. The canonical Genesis 22 is spare. The Pearl-of-Great-Price account is detailed and narrative-driven.
Leonard’s actual position
Leonard’s position deserves to be stated carefully, because Leonard is a member of this fellowship and because his theological location is more complex than either mainstream LDS or former LDS who has come to evangelical orthodoxy. He is part of the Snufferite branch of LDS Restorationism, which has formally departed from the Salt Lake institutional LDS Church to return to what its adherents understand as the original Joseph Smith teaching prior to the institutional corruptions of the Brigham Young era and after. He rejects the contemporary LDS Church’s temple-building program. He rejects the proxy-work-for-the-dead temple endowment structure. He renounces, in strong terms, the LDS framing of sanctification as independence. He holds that as one becomes more righteous, one becomes less dependent on God. He believes that doctrine is heresy and categorizes it as an attempt to manipulate people with the seduction of power and importance. He believes that separation from God is the last thing you would want to do.
Susan grew up in the LDS Church; she had absorbed precisely the sanctification-as-independence framing as a young woman, and was really glad to hear Leondard reject that framing. Leonard and Susan, were both speaking from inside the LDS tradition as they had each known it, agreed in real time that the as you become more righteous, you become less dependent on God trajectory is a heretical reading of sanctification, and that the orthodox-biblical pattern is the precise opposite: sanctification draws the believer into deeper dependence on God, not into independence from him.
The exaltation question
Where Leonard left the question of exaltation open. Exaltation is the LDS doctrine, articulated most explicitly in Joseph Smith’s King Follett discourse, that the faithful believer, after a long process of becoming-like-Christ-through-Christ’s-power, will eventually share in something like the divine nature in a way that the canonical Christian tradition does not affirm. Leonard’s working formulation is biblically careful: he cited 2 Peter 1:4 (partakers of the divine nature) and Christ’s be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48), and offered the King Follett move as a long-process extrapolation of those texts. I can’t do it myself; it’s impossible; there’s no way I can be like him except if he gives me his power, if he saves me, and he will if I give him my trust, my faith. So yes, I do believe God can save me and help me become like him. That’s what he wants. He wants his children to be like him in his family.
The canonical Christian tradition, particularly in its Reformed and broadly evangelical forms, has historically read partakers of the divine nature as a deification (theosis) language that does not entail ontological identity with God but rather participation in God’s character through the indwelling of the Spirit. The Eastern Orthodox tradition reads theosis more strongly than the Western Protestant tradition but still maintains the creator-creature distinction. The LDS reading — that the faithful become ontologically gods, with their own creations, in the King-Follett sense — crosses a line that the canonical tradition has held since Athanasius against Arius and through the Cappadocians. Leonard, in his Snufferite expression of the doctrine, does not appear to me to be claiming the full King-Follett ontological reading. He is claiming something closer to the Eastern Orthodox theosis with a long-process eschatological extension. That is closer to the canonical position than mainstream LDS.
Susan, again, drew the line precisely where the canonical position draws it: as far as becoming gods and all of that, because it is so clearly spoken against in the Bible — about there being other gods, there’s only one God — that kind of thing, I tend to accept that. Susan’s posture is the right one for a member of the fellowship who has come out of the LDS tradition. She affirms what she finds in the canonical text, declines to add to the canonical text, and trusts God for whatever the eschatological end will reveal that the canonical text did not specify. Whatever happens in eternity, it’s going to be good, and I don’t know what it is. I trust God.
The Mother-in-Heaven / Proverbs 8 question
Leondard cited Proverbs 8, with its personified female figure of Wisdom, as evidence for the LDS doctrine of a Heavenly Mother. The Proverbs 8 chapter does indeed personify Wisdom in unambiguously feminine grammatical and rhetorical terms (Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? She standeth in the top of high places…). The question is whether the personification is ontological — pointing to an actual feminine divine being — or literary — using Hebrew poetry’s standard personification device to give Wisdom-as-divine-attribute a vivid voice. The biblical-scholarly consensus, including across the Christian theological spectrum, has overwhelmingly been the literary reading. Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is the same Wisdom that the New Testament identifies with Christ himself (1 Corinthians 1:24, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God), and the feminine grammatical gender of the Hebrew word for wisdom (chokmah) does not constitute evidence for an actual feminine divine being any more than the feminine gender of ekklesia (church) constitutes evidence that the Church is ontologically female.
Leonard’s reading is the LDS reading, and it sits structurally beside the mainstream LDS doctrine of Heavenly Mother (which, intriguingly, the LDS Church has historically discouraged from public devotional practice — Eliza R. Snow’s hymn O My Father is the canonical reference, but the LDS Church has long counseled members not to pray to Heavenly Mother). Leonard’s Snufferite version of the doctrine appears to honor Heavenly Mother but, like the mainstream LDS, declines to direct worship to her. She doesn’t want to be worshipped, Leonard said when Susan pressed the point.
Susan declined to assert that the Bible teaches a Heavenly Mother or that it forbids one. She located herself in the same epistemic posture she had taken on exaltation: I feel like it’s best to just not talk about Mother in heaven. It may be that there’s a Mother in heaven, but the Bible is silent on the personage of the Mother in heaven. This is the Protestant-evangelical posture, and it is consistent with the Sola Scriptura discipline that has structured the Reformed tradition for five hundred years. The Bible authorizes what it authorizes. It does not authorize devotional practice toward a divine person it does not name. The believer can speculate about what may or may not exist in the divine economy beyond what is named, but the believer’s devotional practice must remain within what is named.
I suggested that there might be a spirit in charge of wisdom — an angelic or ministerial figure to whom the wisdom-function is delegated, without that figure constituting a fourth member of the Trinity or a feminine divine consort. The idea has some footing in the broader biblical-angelology literature (the Wisdom literature of the intertestamental period, including Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon, develops the Wisdom-personification in directions that some early Christian writers later identified with the pre-incarnate Christ, others with the Holy Spirit, others with the angelic order). The canonical text personifies Wisdom poetically and identifies the same Wisdom in the New Testament with Christ; it does not authorize devotional practice toward a Heavenly Mother; we hold to what the canonical text authorizes and decline to extend beyond it.
References to the female aspect of God in scripture include: The Isaiah 49:15 (Can a woman forget her sucking child… yet will I not forget thee), Isaiah 66:13 (as one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you), Hosea 11:3-4 (the maternal-tender-parent imagery), and Matthew 23:37 (how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings) maternal-metaphorical references to God. These are, of course, metaphorical illustrations of God’s character, not ontological assertions about a feminine divine person. The canonical text uses them and does not extend them.
Charlie on the temple as Mormon center
Charlie, who came out of mainstream LDS in his own life trajectory, was familiar with the LDS-Nauvoo-Masonic relationship. In LDS doctrine, the temple, the endowment, and all the ceremonies are huge. He mentioned a former church leader whom he had known as a child, who had told him about a temple room in his home — a room where pictures of the LDS temple are displayed and where the family is reminded that the temple and its rituals are a primary value. Charlie did not know this was a feature of Mormon culture, even though he had been raised in a mainstream LDS household. Susan confirmed it. The Nauvoo-period temple endowment is not a peripheral feature of LDS practice that the fellowship can dismiss as a Masonic accretion; for the mainstream LDS believer, it is the central spiritual experience of his life, and the temple itself is functionally the center of LDS devotional reality. Susan and Charlie both went through the endowment ceremony before leaving the LDS Church. Both took the temple oaths that were in force at the time — oaths that, until 1990, included blood-penalty consequences for revealing the ceremony’s specifics. Both regard the experience now as a serious spiritual entanglement that the LDS Church has, in their judgment, taken pains to play down in its public-facing materials. Susan said that in her opinion, it opens the door to a lot of demonic.
I have not had the experience Susan and Charlie are describing. Susan’s and Charlie’s first-hand witness on the temple-endowment question is, for any responsible engagement with the LDS tradition, primary source material that an outside observer cannot supply.
Closing the section
The LDS-Snufferite conversation closed with a prayer led by Susan — a benediction that modeled the very posture the conversation had been working toward. We thank you and praise you for our fellowship, and we ask you to please go with us this week. Help us, help us to grow, help us to understand, help us to gain understanding. Open our eyes — not for our sakes, but for your sake, God, that you might be glorified. The session had confronted substantive disagreement on substantive matters, but shared opinions within the context and expression of mutual love.
Joining today: Thomas, Charlie, Armond, Leonard, Susan, and Michael.
Departed midway: Michael (~01:23), Leonard (~02:30), Susan (~02:32). Charlie and Armond remained for the post-meeting.
Closing prayer offered by Susan.
Word count: ~5,300.
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