Triangulating the Absolute

On Adjudicating Between Competing Claims of Revelation — and Why the Test Itself Is an Act of Faith

Christos Fellowship Essay; 16 August 2026

Purpose and posture

This essay addresses a live question inside our fellowship: when two witnesses each claim to speak for God, and each validates itself by its own testimony, how does anyone adjudicate between them?

Leonard holds that God still speaks; that the biblical text has suffered corruption in transmission, translation, and canon-formation; and that the revelations given through Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer restore what was lost and therefore govern where they differ from the received text. He puts the question to me this way, “If you believe God can do such a thing, why do you not believe He has?”

I want to answer that question, in its strongest form, before I test it. I will apply every test I propose to my own position as well, and I will name in advance what would change my mind. A test that only ever convicts the other side is not a test; it is a verdict wearing a test’s clothing.

Leonard spent five decades inside an institution, applied the test of fruits, and left when the fruits failed. That is precisely what Scripture asks a believer to do. The question this essay pursues, therefore, is not whether a man should test, but which tests, and whether the tests can return a negative.

I. The challenge, stated at full strength

Let me put Leonard’s case as forcefully as I can.

1. The corruption premise. The Bible we hold is not the autograph. It passed through copyists, translators, councils, and empires. Denver Snuffer’s lectures develop this at length. He claims the text is true but incomplete, and in gaps, mistranslations, and politically shaped decisions, it fails to preserve the whole counsel of God. This is not a fringe claim in its general form; textual scholars of every persuasion acknowledge variants, translation difficulties, and a canon assembled by human process.

2. The living-God premise. A God who spoke to Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and Paul is not a God who has gone silent. To insist that revelation ceased at a particular date is itself a doctrine — one not obviously taught by the text — and it has the odd effect of making God more accessible to the ancients than to us.

3. The self-reference problem. The Bible warns against other gospels and other spirits. But a document that certifies itself and disqualifies its rivals is doing exactly what any self-perpetuating system does. Citing the Bible’s warnings against competitors, to a person weighing whether the Bible is complete, is circular.

4. The conclusion. Given 1–3, when the received text and the latter revelation conflict, the latter — being direct, recent, and not subject to the intervening centuries of corruption — is the better witness.

5. The charge. Refusal to weigh the new revelation is not discernment but closed-mindedness — a limit placed on God rather than on the claimant.

That is a serious argument. Points 1, 2, and 3 each contain something true. My disagreement is not that these are foolish; it is that the conclusion does not follow, and that point 3, taken seriously, destroys the very position it was deployed to defend.

II. The reframe: Testing the Spirits

My resistance to accepting Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer’s teaching of ongoing revelation is not that I don’t believe God speaks to men now. My question is whether the Smith/Snuffer revelations contradict the Bible. I believe God has already spoken enough through revelation through various prophets to guide His people to a full life. If errors of omission or addition to the text, due to scribal inexactitude or political agenda, I do not believe those errors were substantial enough to obscure or distort the message of the Bible as recorded and delivered. I think God orchestrated the Bible’s assembly, and it was delivered intact from antiquity to modernity. I think the Bible adequately informs us how God directs man’s mind through temporal situations: the best path to conduct war and pursue peace, legislate, adjudicate, and execute government policies, and navigate the rough waters of business and relationships. Thus, the challenge of examining Denver’s revelation is not a question of the size of my faith or open-mindedness; it is the question of the content of his revelation.

A God who does not speak needs no counterfeits. Forgery presupposes currency. It is precisely the reality of divine speech that makes false claims to it profitable — and Scripture treats this as the normal condition of the world, not an exceptional one. Moses commands testing of prophets (Deut. 13, 18). Jesus warns of false christs performing signs (Matt. 24). Paul warns that Satan appears as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14) and pronounces anathema on any other gospel — including one preached by an angel (Gal. 1:8). John commands believers to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). The Bereans are commended for auditing an apostle against the text (Acts 17:11).

The one who challenges the veracity of prophecy and revelation is the one doing what God has explicitly told him to do. To decline to test is disobedience to the One who is revealing His will and desires us to follow the way. We are to be discriminating, wary of false prophets. I believe the major tool/trick of Satan is the slight twisting of God’s word and will and offering it as new revelation. It is the pattern of Eve in the Garden.

This is the theological heart of everything that follows: the same God who gives revelation gives tests for revelation. It is our duty and honor to test every spirit. Without an absolute standard, we cannot measure truth.

III. The real problem: two self-validating witnesses

Leonard’s third point is formally correct. No testimony is proved by the testifier’s own assertion. No one can declare truth by saying: “This is true because I think, say, or feel it is true.” The internal/subjective standard is not reliable. Likewise, the authority of the person who makes such a declaration does not validate its Truth, regardless of whether the speaker is a bishop, prophet, king, priest, soldier, judge, or book. This is a principle we must grant, embrace, and apply fully. Some process other than feelings/belief, declaration/proclamation, or force/indoctrination establishes truth. We must apply this to every scripture, speaker, and authority.

My point is that if self-validation disqualifies any witness, it disqualifies all witnesses. The Bible attests itself; the Book of Mormon attests itself (Moroni 10:4 offers an internal experiential test); Snuffer’s revelations attest themselves. The principle of disregarding the testimony of the Bible does not leave the BOM/Snuffer revelation standing on the field. It leaves the field empty. We cannot escape the system of two self-referential claims by choosing one or the other; we escape only by finding a referent outside both.

So the question becomes precise: what external referent exists?

We are asking to identify an absolute (which religion gives an absolutely true revelation of God, His will and way) inside a world system, a reality of experience, that presents us only with relatives. The problem with living in a world where we can see only relatives, which are formed from the substance of the absolute, is that the absolute is hidden and existent in both polarities. It is somewhat like the fish-in-water and man-in-air analogy, but it is even more extreme. But we can detect evidence of the absolute’s existence and its properties indirectly by looking for and examining asymmetries. If one conception of the absolute has properties that could only arise from what the revelation declares, and the other has revelations that would be false, that difference is evidence available to anyone, believer or not, without appeal to either side’s authority.

We are looking for tells.

In response to the question, regarding how to distinguish which divine messages are authentic, Michael answered in three words: “How about evidence?” He was not defending my position or Leonard’s; he was stating the requirement that any adjudication must satisfy. This is a solution that will convince unbelievers and believers in alternative revelations. The unbeliever in the room supplied the criterion the believers were circling. That is worth noticing twice — once because he is right, and once because it tells us what kind of argument is actually persuasive to someone outside the family quarrel.

IV. Four asymmetries that function as external referents

Asymmetry 1 — Structure: multivocal and public versus univocal and private

Consider what the two bodies of testimony are, structurally, apart from whether either is true.

The biblical witness is multivocal: roughly forty writers across something like a millennium and a half, in three languages, on three continents, in wildly different genres and social positions — shepherds, kings, priests, fishermen, a physician, a tax collector, a Pharisee. They are not a committee. They frequently constrain and embarrass one another and themselves: Moses is denied the land, David’s adultery is preserved, the apostles are recorded as slow and quarrelsome, Peter is rebuked to his face in a letter Peter’s own church would read.

The latter revelations are univocal: in each case one man receives privately, and the community receives from him. Muhammad in the cave. Smith with the plates and the stone. Snuffer in his study. In each case, the receiving is not witnessable, and the community’s access to God’s word runs through a single throat.

Now the asymmetry: a univocal private revelation is a claim that cannot in principle be checked; a multivocal public one is a claim that could have failed and didn’t. Independent witnesses constrain each other. That is why courts prefer them; that is why science replicates. The structural difference is not a matter of piety. It is a matter of what kind of evidence each is.

And notice the asymmetry cuts precisely where Leonard’s argument needs it not to: any person, in any century, can arrive and announce that the prior record is corrupted and that he has the uncorrupted version. The move is infinitely repeatable and costs nothing. Mani, Muhammad, Smith, and dozens of lesser figures have made it, and it will be made again. A criterion that cannot distinguish among these claimants is not a criterion at all. If Smith/Snuffer’s argument against the Bible and its replacement with uncorrupted tablets or conversation is based upon the Bible’s corruption, then another man may use the same personal revelation and declaration to say the same of Smith/Snuffer.

This is not hypothetical; students of the post-Smith era report that on the order of four hundred claimants have arisen since Joseph Smith, each announcing that he restores the correct restoration. The pattern is older than Mormonism: the Montanists of the second century made continuing prophecy their distinctive, through one man and two women, and passed away. The repeatability of the move is the point. A key that opens every door secures nothing.

Asymmetry 2 — The corruption premise is checkable, and it has been checked

Here is the crucial point, and it is the one place where the argument leaves the realm of dueling authorities entirely.

“The Bible is corrupted” is not a theological claim. It is a historical one. It asserts something about manuscripts — physical objects, publicly available, examined by scholars of every faith and of none, including many with a strong motive to prove the text unstable.

And it is testable without trusting either side. Stated carefully, with the caveats that honesty requires:

The Hebrew text. The Dead Sea Scrolls pushed our Hebrew manuscript evidence back roughly a thousand years. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ, c. 100 BC) is a complete Isaiah a millennium older than the standard Masoretic manuscripts. It carries real variation — catalogs count on the order of 2,600 variants — and the percentage of agreement depends entirely on how one counts: word-for-word identity is commonly cited near 95 percent, while stricter quantitative classifications yield figures in the low-to-mid 80s. What every counting method agrees on is the character of the variation: orthography, spelling, morphological updating, harmonization, scribal slips, occasional expansions. Assessments of the portion of Isaiah genuinely in doubt on the total evidence run near one percent. Note that this is not a partisan reading: a Latter-day Saint scholar at Brigham Young University produced the most detailed recent catalog of 1QIsaᵃ’s variants, and it documents the same categories.
The Greek text. The New Testament is attested by thousands of Greek manuscripts plus ancient translations and patristic quotations. The variants are overwhelmingly spelling, word order, and harmonization; the doctrinally significant disputed passages are a known, catalogued, and small set, marked in the margins of any decent modern edition.
The pattern the thesis requires is absent. The corruption thesis needs coordinated doctrinal excision — a text made to mislead on essentials. What the manuscript record shows is uncoordinated, mostly trivial variation preserved in the open, across regions that had no means of collusion.

Note carefully what I am not claiming: not that transmission was flawless, not that translation is trivial, not that canon-formation was untouched by human politics. I am claiming that the specific corruption the argument needs — deep enough to require replacement — is not what the physical evidence shows.

And note the irony at the center of the corruption argument, which I have documented in detail in the lecture assessments: the abundance that makes the Bible look “muddled” is exactly what makes verification possible. We can name the variants because thousands of independent witnesses preserve the competing readings. A text transmitted through a single line, with no surviving exemplars, is not thereby more reliable — it is simply unverifiable at the disputed stage. Silence is not accuracy.

Asymmetry 3 — Incentive: what does the new revelation add, and who benefits?

Every counterfeit must add something the original lacked, or it has no reason to exist. So ask of any new revelation: what does it add, and where does the addition point? ***

Three tells recur across the history of these movements:

(a) It adds a mechanism that makes the revelator indispensable. The canon closes; continuing private revelation reopens it. But the reopening is never general — it is channeled through the claimant. The doctrine that authorizes new revelation is always, in practice, the doctrine that authorizes this revelator.

(b) It moves authority, money, or access. Test doctrinal novelties by following what they redirect. A revelation that adds burdens payable to the new organization, that makes salvation contingent on ordinances only the new authority can perform, or that grants the revelator prerogatives the text never granted a prophet, is displaying its function.

(c) It relocates verification inward. Where the biblical prophets offered public, checkable signs — fulfilled predictions, an empty tomb with hostile witnesses in the same city — the newer claim characteristically relocates the test to private experience: pray, and you will feel it is true. This is not a straw man; it is the test as its own adherents state it. In our discussion, Leonard described his method in exactly these terms: test the word, and if it is delicious and it sprouts, it is good — the seed test of Alma 32. Notice two properties of that test. It cannot fail in a way anyone else could observe. And it returns opposite results for sincere seekers in rival movements: the Muslim, the Witness, and the Latter-day Saint each report the same inward confirmation in the same words. An experience that confirms every claimant confirms none. The seed test is a fine description of how a truth becomes dear to a person; it is not a method for determining whether it is true.

Asymmetry 4 — Content: is it another gospel, or the same one enlarged?

Paul’s criterion in Galatians 1 is not “new” versus “old.” It is another gospel versus the gospel. So the content test is: does the new material alter who Christ is, what He accomplished, and how a person is reconciled to God?

This is where I must be careful and fair, because the answer differs by case, and honesty requires the distinction:

Some claimants clearly preach another Christ — one who is not the incarnate Son who died and rose for sin.
The Smith/Snuffer stream, as Leonard receives and practices it, confesses the same Christ, the same cross, the same resurrection. Its additions are chiefly structural: continuing revelation, restored authority, expanded scripture, and a particular account of the church’s apostasy.

I should say plainly what follows from that: the danger here is of a different order than an outright counterfeit Christ. A man may hold much of this and love the Lord. I say so because it is true, and because an argument that inflates its charges forfeits its credibility.

But the structural additions are not harmless, and the reason is exactly Asymmetry 3(a): a doctrine of continuing revelation that can override the canon has, by construction, no ceiling. Whatever comes next through the authorized channel governs. The believer has traded a fixed reference point he can check for a moving one he cannot. That is not a small trade. It is the trade that makes every later drift unopposable — and drift is what the history of such movements characteristically shows.

V. Asymmetry 5 — Directional error: sorting the discrepancies

This section answers a question put to me directly, and it turns out to yield the most useful test in the essay.

Having now assessed all eight of Snuffer’s lectures claim by claim against Scripture and the documentary record, I am left with something on the order of a hundred and fifty discrepancies. The obvious objection is the honest one: so what? Every extemporaneous speaker misremembers dates. Are these substantial, or are they merely human drift, meaning nothing?

The answer is that they are not one kind of thing, and the sorting is itself the method. Four tiers:

Tier 1 — Drift. Immaterial, and charity requires saying so. Nicaea placed at 1,675 years rather than 1,692. Alexander’s campaign itinerary out of order. “Seven thousand” for the feeding of the four thousand. A pope’s regnal name confused. Ananias called Cornelius. Missouri’s 1838 given as 1837. These are the ordinary friction of a man speaking for an hour without notes. They prove nothing about anything, and an argument that leans on them is dishonest. Set them aside entirely.

Tier 2 — Load-bearing error. Here the error is not decoration; it holds up a conclusion, and if the error goes, the conclusion goes with it. Denver argues that sola scriptura is disproved because Luther translated the Bible out of Latin, a dead language, leaving the illiterate unable to be saved — but Luther translated from Erasmus’s Greek and from the Hebrew, precisely to bypass the Latin. He argues that the Reformation never even attempted to restore original Christianity, which is falsified by the Radical Reformation’s explicit restitution program from 1525 — and falsified inside his own lecture, which quotes Menno Simons as a Reformation father. He argues that the Gospel text was altered at Christ’s baptism, naming Matthew 3:17 as the altered verse — where no manuscript witness anywhere contains such a variant. Each of these is a beam, not a splinter.

Tier 3 — Directional error. This is the diagnostic tier, and it is the point of this section. Random error scatters. Motivated error points.

Across eight lectures and roughly a hundred and fifty assessed claims, I can identify essentially no error that runs against his own thesis. The corruption of the text is always overstated, never understated. The Reformation’s achievements are always minimized, never magnified. Manuscript evidence is always presented at its most skeptical extreme, never at its most conservative. The claim of a persisting faithful remnant is always denied, never conceded. Where a figure could be rounded either way, it is rounded toward the need for a restorer. Where a variant is contested among scholars, the contested minority reading is stated as settled fact — and in one case escalated across lectures, from a real (if minority) claim about Luke into a false claim about Matthew.

That is the tell, and it is available to anyone. It requires no theology and no trust in either party. A man honestly misremembering makes errors in both directions; the errors of a man assembling a case all point one way. This is the same reasoning any of us would apply to an expert witness whose every “mistake” happened to favor the party paying him. We would not call him a liar. We would say his errors have a direction, and that direction is information.

Tier 4 — Self-contradiction. Lecture 3 teaches that the cross “was not where He paid the price for our sins”; Lecture 4 teaches that Christ “had to die in order to complete the atonement, the propitiation for sin.” Lectures 1 and 2 ground Joseph Smith’s death in the Nauvoo Expositor affair — dissenters exposing his practice of plural marriage — while Lecture 8 teaches that the practice did not exist until Brigham Young invented it afterward. Lecture 7 declares the whole church corrupt and, in the same address, offers St. Francis inside that church as an authentic Christian ministered to by angels.

Contradictions of this kind are not moral failings; they are structural evidence. They show that the arguments were assembled to reach a conclusion rather than derived from a consistent framework. A body of teaching that arrived by derivation is constrained — you cannot get incompatible results from one set of premises. A body of teaching assembled per-occasion is not constrained, and it shows.

The summary answer, then: Tier 1 means nothing and should be conceded generously and immediately. Tiers 2 and 4 damage specific arguments. Tier 3 — the direction of the errors — is the finding that matters, because it is the only one that speaks to the character of the whole enterprise rather than to any single claim, and because an outsider can verify it without believing anything either side asserts.

VI. The definitional problem: what is a prophet?

Our discussion surfaced a difficulty that must be settled before any of the tests above can be applied, and it explains why these conversations so often run in circles.

Two definitions were in the room, and both were held sincerely.

The broad definition. A prophet is one who speaks forth the word of God — one who holds the testimony of Jesus, since “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev. 19:10). On this reading Moses’s wish is fulfilled: “would God that all the LORD’s people were prophets” (Num. 11:29). Anyone whose witness leads another to Christ is prophesying.

The narrow definition. A prophet is one who speaks God’s words with binding authority, whose predictions are publicly checkable and whose failure is fatal to his claim (Deut. 18:20–22) — an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, one who confronts kings and whose words enter the canon.

Each definition, taken alone, produces an absurdity. The broad one makes prophets of thousands and cannot exclude a single sincere teacher, however wrong. The narrow one, honestly applied, appears to admit no one in two thousand years — which was stated aloud in our own discussion by a man arguing for the narrow definition, who found the result disturbing and said so. That candor is worth more than any argument in this essay; it is what it looks like when a man submits his own position to a test that might fail.

The resolution is that these are two different offices sharing one English word, and the argument equivocates between them. The broad sense is real and precious: every believer who testifies of Christ speaks forth God’s word, and Numbers 11:29 means what it says. But nothing in the broad sense confers the right to add to or override Scripture. My testimony of Christ does not make my opinions canonical.

Denver’s claim requires the narrow office — a man sent as the apostles were sent, whose revelations govern where the received text differs. When that claim is challenged, the defense retreats to the broad sense: he only speaks of Christ, he claims nothing but what God asked of him, anything that leads to Christ is good. But those two things cannot both be the claim. If the narrow claim is made, the narrow tests apply — public, checkable, fatal-on-failure. If only the broad claim is made, then his revelations are one believer’s testimony, precious but not binding, and they cannot adjudicate against Genesis or Leviticus or Galatians.

Ask which office is being claimed, and hold the answer steady. Half of the fog dissipates.

A related resolution: was Paul commissioned?

The sharpest exchange of our discussion was Leonard’s challenge on Paul, and it deserves a better answer than I gave in the moment. His argument: Denver teaches that only one sent directly by God should be heeded; Paul was such a man (“an apostle, not of men, neither by man,” Gal. 1:1); therefore Denver’s principle is Pauline. And when it was noted that Ananias laid hands on Paul, Leonard seized it — there is the commission.

He is right about the fact and, I think, mistaken about what it proves. Look at the whole Pauline pattern, which has three parts, not one:

A direct call from the risen Christ on the road (Acts 9:3–6).
Confirmation through the existing community — Ananias, “a certain disciple at Damascus,” already a member of the church Paul was coming to arrest, sent to lay hands on him and baptize him (Acts 9:10–18). Leonard’s own observation establishes this: mediated commissioning is not the enemy of divine sending; it is part of it.
Submission of the content to those who were apostles before him: Paul went up to Jerusalem and communicated the gospel he preached, “lest by any means I should run, or had run, in vain,” and received the right hands of fellowship on a common gospel (Gal. 2:2, 9).

Denver’s claim reproduces the first element and not the second or third. There is no existing community that confirmed him — he was excommunicated by the body he came from and gathered a new one around his own claim. And there is no submission of content to a prior authority; the direction of judgment runs the other way, with the prior deposit corrected by the new revelation. Paul’s own precedent is the extraordinary claimant seeking confirmation against the existing deposit. That is the reverse of the pattern in view.

So Galatians 1:1 does not establish what it is being asked to establish. It records that Paul’s call was not from men — and Galatians 2:2 records that Paul submitted its content to men anyway, because he understood that a call which cannot be checked is a call no one else is obliged to accept.

VII. Why an absolute must exist, and what it would look like when it spoke

Everything above is comparative. But Leonard’s deeper question is right: comparisons among relatives never yield an absolute. So let me state the positive ground.

If reality is sustained moment by moment — if every point of it is held in being by a will that computes and upholds it — then there exists a reference frame that is not one opinion among others. This is what the physics I have spent decades developing points toward: a substrate whose every element is conscious and sustained, in which the persistence of the world is not inertia but continuous fidelity. I do not offer that as proof of Christian doctrine, and I will not overclaim it here. I offer it as this: the universe does not look like a closed mechanism that runs itself. It looks like something being held. If that is so, then an absolute exists, and it is personal, and the question of its self-disclosure is not naive.

Now ask the design question. If such a One intended a self-disclosure robust against the counterfeiting we have just catalogued, what would He build?

He would not entrust it to one man, because one man is a single point of failure and an unfalsifiable channel. He would spread it across many voices in many eras, so that agreement across them could not be arranged. He would anchor it in public events with hostile witnesses present. He would let the record embarrass its own heroes, so that no one could mistake it for propaganda. He would make it partly obscure — a pearl in a field — so that it would yield to the seeker rather than to the clever. And He would close it, so that His people would have a fixed place to stand when someone arrived claiming a newer word.

That is a description of the book we have. I take the correspondence to be evidence — not proof, but the kind of asymmetry we said we were looking for.

VIII. A worked example: the tell of the tithe

Abstractions convince no one. So here is the method applied to one concrete point of difference, offered as a template for the others.

The tithe in the biblical material is a defined thing, and it is defined at the source of increase: “all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the LORD’s” (Lev. 27:30); “thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field bringeth forth year by year” (Deut. 14:22); with the accompanying principle of firstfruits — “honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase” (Prov. 3:9). Whatever disputes exist about its application under the New Covenant, its shape is publicly specified: a tenth off the top, not a tenth of what remains.

The teaching given in Lecture 1 defines it otherwise: a tenth of one’s surplus, after all needs and responsibilities are met. That is not the Mosaic tithe, and it is not a New Testament ordinance; it derives from a particular reading of a Restoration text (D&C 119:4, “one-tenth of all their interest annually”).

Now apply the method rather than the outrage. The change is small, concrete, and checkable — which is exactly what makes it useful. And here I must be scrupulous, because in this instance the redefinition runs toward the hearer’s convenience and away from institutional collection: Snuffer’s fellowships collect in small groups, pay no clergy, and disburse to needs among themselves. Asymmetry 3(b) is not satisfied here, and I should say so plainly. What this example demonstrates is not enrichment but Tier 2 and Tier 3 of the previous section: a load-bearing definition presented as biblical which is not biblical, and — as with every other such substitution across the eight lectures — one that points in the direction of the newer revelation’s authority over the older text.

The template generalizes: prefer the small checkable difference to the grand doctrinal dispute. Whether Nicaea was right about homoousios is hard to adjudicate in a fellowship meeting. Whether Leviticus 27:30 says “increase” or “surplus” is not. And a pattern of many small differences, all pointing one way, is worth more evidentially than any single dramatic dispute.

(Note: where a claimant is charged with a teaching he did not hold — as Leonard testified regarding Joseph Smith and plural marriage — the correction must be made cheerfully and in writing. On that specific point the documentary record runs heavily against the exculpatory account, and I have set out the evidence in the Lecture 8 assessment; but the principle stands regardless of who is right in any instance. We do not need any single charge to be true, and an argument that clings to a disputed one has confessed its weakness.)

IX. Should this be adjudicated in front of an unbeliever?

Michael sits with us and does not believe. The reasonable worry: does an intramural dispute among Christians look, to him, like men arguing over the furniture of a house he does not think exists? Why not let each believe as he will?

I think the worry has it exactly backwards — if we conduct ourselves well. And after this morning I am no longer speculating about it.

What an unbeliever most often assumes about faith is that it is credulity: that believers accept what they are told and defend it afterward. What he is about to watch, if we do this properly, is a room full of believers applying tests — historical, structural, evidential — to a claim that flatters their own side’s openness, and being willing to follow the tests where they lead. He will see that faith here is not the suspension of judgment but the exercise of it.

The evidence that this works is that Michael did not watch from outside it. Asked how authentic divine messages are distinguished, he answered “evidence,” which is the whole thesis of this essay arrived at independently by a man with no stake in either revelation. And when a believer in the room stated his own criteria and then announced that those criteria appeared to disqualify everyone for two thousand years — including a figure he once revered — that is a demonstration of intellectual honesty no apologetic aimed at Michael could have produced.

Three conditions, though, or the demonstration inverts:

First, method over persons. We adjudicate claims and their properties, not a brother’s sincerity or a claimant’s character. Impeaching Joseph Smith by his personal life is the weakest available line — it is contested, it is ugly, and even if granted it proves less than the structural argument does. The tells above require no one’s biography.

Second, no other species. It was well said among us that the deepest sickness of a cult is that it divides the world into members and non-members — and that the same instinct operates in every human quarrel, sorting people into our kind and the other kind. The moment a brother becomes a category, the argument has already been lost, whatever its logic. Leonard is not a specimen of a movement. He is a man who left one at great cost, looking for Christ.

Third, real stakes, real charity. Leonard should hear his own position stated by me better than he could state it himself before he hears my objection. If he cannot recognize his view in my summary, I have not earned the right to disagree with it. And then let it be genuinely unsettled if it is unsettled. A room that performs a foregone conclusion teaches an unbeliever nothing except that we perform.

On the proposal to bracket the sources

It was proposed that we might simply agree to discuss the Bible alone, setting the Restoration sources aside, since all of us accept the Bible. The proposal is generous and it would produce peace. I think it should be declined, for one reason: the question of which sources are authoritative is not a distraction from the discussion — it is the discussion. To bracket it is to settle it silently, and to settle it silently in my favor is not fair to Leonard, who joined us openly with his sources named. The better course is the one we have taken: let every source be brought, and let every source be tested by criteria stated in advance and applied to all of them, mine included.

X. What would change my mind

The discipline requires this, and it is the section that makes the rest honest. I would have to revise substantially if:

The manuscript evidence turned. If the physical record showed the coordinated doctrinal corruption the argument requires — not variants and translation difficulty, but excision of essentials — Asymmetry 2 collapses, and with it the strongest external referent I have.
A public, checkable, non-repeatable sign attended the newer revelation. Predictions with specificity, publicly recorded before the event and fulfilled; something an outsider could verify and a rival could not manufacture.
The additions ran against interest. If the new revelations consistently reduced the revelator’s authority, income, and indispensability, Asymmetry 3 would be answered in the strongest possible way. (I note in fairness that on the narrow question of clergy compensation, this movement does better than most: no one is paid, and the collections stay in the fellowship. That is a real datum on the other side of the ledger and I record it.)
The errors lost their direction. If a careful audit of the lectures turned up errors distributed on both sides of the thesis — mistakes that inconvenience the argument as often as they serve it — Asymmetry 5 evaporates and what remains is ordinary human fallibility, which convicts no one.
The multivocal criterion failed on its own terms — if the biblical witnesses turned out to be a coordinated production after all, the structural asymmetry I lean on evaporates.

I do not expect these. But I hold the position in a form where they would count, and I would rather be corrected than be consistent.

XI. The method, in summary — toward “Triangulating Truth”

For the larger project, the transferable core is this:

Testing revelation is obedience, not doubt. The God who speaks commanded the tests. Begin here; it removes the sting from the charge of closed-mindedness without any defensiveness at all.
Self-validation disqualifies evenly or not at all. Grant the principle fully; note that it empties the field rather than choosing a winner; then go looking for an external referent.
Settle the definitions before the dispute. Most of these arguments equivocate between a broad sense of a term that no one denies and a narrow sense that is the actual claim. Ask which office is being claimed, and hold the answer steady.
The absolute is seen by inference, through asymmetries. Look for properties a true self-disclosure would have and a counterfeit could not easily fake: many independent voices, public anchoring, self-embarrassment, checkable factual premises, additions that run against the claimant’s interest.
Sort the errors before weighing them. Concede drift generously; identify which errors are load-bearing; and then look at the direction of the errors, which is the finding an outsider can verify without trusting anyone.
Prefer the checkable tell to the grand dispute. Small, concrete, directional differences are better evidence than large doctrinal arguments, because they can be verified in an afternoon.
Every cult and rival system is a subset of a center it partly reflects. They persist because they carry real light. Say so. Locating what they got right is not a concession; it is how you show where the center actually is, and it is the only posture in which a person inside one can hear you.
Hold your own position falsifiably. Name in advance what would change your mind, and mean it. This is what separates discernment from the tribalism it is so often mistaken for.

Draft status: working document. Version 0.2 incorporates the fellowship discussion of August 16, 2026. The manuscript claims of §IV.2 have been sourced and are stated with their counting caveats; the tithing example of §VIII has been documented from Leviticus 27:30, Deuteronomy 14:22, and D&C 119:4, with the incentive finding corrected in the movement’s favor. Prepared as groundwork for the “Triangulating Truth” study.

— Thomas

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Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

260816 – Competing Claims of Revelation