Discerning Truth in the Gospel

Jurisprudence and the Biblical Witness

Fellowship Essay by Charlie Gutierrez | 6 September 2026

Question 1: American jurisprudence has accepted rules of evidence. What are they, and how can they be applied to spiritual knowledge?

American evidence law is a good lens for this question because it’s one of the most developed systems humans have built for deciding what counts as adequately supported belief under uncertainty. Here’s the core framework, then where the analogy to spiritual knowledge holds up and where it strains.

Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE):

The Federal Rules of Evidence — the codified rules that govern what evidence is admissible in U.S. federal courts.

What FRE refers to in law

The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) are a comprehensive set of rules adopted by Congress to ensure fairness, reliability, and efficiency in federal trials. They define:

What counts as relevant evidence (FRE 401)
When relevant evidence may still be excluded (FRE 403)
How witnesses may testify
How documents, physical evidence, and scientific evidence must be authenticated
Privileges, hearsay exceptions, expert testimony standards, and more

FRE 401–403: establish the foundational threshold for admissibility:

FRE 401 — Relevance: Evidence is relevant if it makes a fact “more or less probable than it would be without the evidence.”
FRE 402 — General admissibility: Relevant evidence is admissible unless another rule excludes it.
FRE 403 — Balancing test: Even relevant evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by unfair prejudice, confusion, misleading the jury, undue delay, or waste of time.

Why FRE matters

These rules are the backbone of evidentiary practice. Every objection, every admissibility argument, and every evidentiary ruling in federal court ultimately traces back to the FRE framework.

FRE: The main categories

Relevance (FRE 401–403). Evidence must make a fact “more or less probable than it would be without the evidence,” and even relevant evidence can be excluded if its probative value is outweighed by prejudice, confusion, or waste of time.

Hearsay (FRE 801–807). An out-of-court statement offered to prove the truth of what it asserts is presumptively inadmissible, because the original speaker can’t be cross-examined. There are many exceptions (excited utterances, business records, dying declarations, statements against interest) — all justified by circumstances that make fabrication unlikely.

Authentication (FRE 901–902). Before evidence (a document, recording, object) can be considered, its proponent must show it is what it purports to be.

Witness competency and personal knowledge (FRE 601–602). Witnesses generally must testify from firsthand perception, not speculation or secondhand belief.

Opinion and expert testimony (FRE 701–702, Daubert). Lay witnesses may offer opinions only when rationally based on their own perception. Experts can go further, but their methodology must be reliable — tested, peer-reviewed, subject to known error rates, and generally accepted in the relevant field.

Judicial notice (FRE 201). Facts that are indisputable and either generally known or verifiable from unimpeachable sources can be accepted without formal proof.

Burdens and standards of proof. Civil cases typically use “preponderance of the evidence” (more likely than not); criminal cases require “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The standard shifts depending on the stakes of being wrong.

Corroboration and impeachment. Testimony gains weight when independently corroborated, and loses weight when a witness’s credibility, bias, or consistency can be attacked.

Applying this to spiritual knowledge

The exercise mostly translates into asking: what role does personal testimony play, and what would corroboration or impeachment even look like here? A few honest mappings:

Personal knowledge/eyewitness testimony maps onto religious experience or revelation. Just as courts allow eyewitness testimony despite its fallibility, many religious epistemologies (e.g., the “Reformed epistemology” of Alvin Plantinga, or William Alston’s work on perceiving God) argue that direct experience can be a properly basic source of belief, not requiring external proof, in the same way sense perception is.
Hearsay problems show up acutely in scripture and tradition — claims transmitted through unverifiable chains of testimony, sometimes centuries removed from the event, without cross-examination of the original source. Historians of religion apply something like hearsay-exception reasoning: does the transmission chain have features (early dating, multiple independent sources, embarrassment criterion, hostile-witness corroboration) that make fabrication less likely?
Corroboration is where comparative religion and testimony-based arguments (like some versions of the argument from religious experience) try to do work: if many people across unconnected traditions report structurally similar experiences, does convergence function like independent witnesses?
Authentication parallels debates over textual provenance — manuscript dating, authorship attribution, archaeological corroboration of scriptural claims.
Expert/Daubert-style reliability is the hardest fit. Daubert asks for testable methodology and known error rates. Spiritual claims are largely not falsifiable in that sense, which is precisely the objection empiricist philosophers (from Hume through logical positivists like Ayer) raised: if a claim can’t in principle be checked against a defeating instance, it doesn’t function as ordinary “evidence” does.
Burden and standard of proof is really a values question in disguise — how the analogy works depends on how much you think is at stake in being wrong, and there’s real philosophical disagreement (evidentialism, à la W.K. Clifford’s “it is wrong always… to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” versus fideism/pragmatism, à la William James’s “The Will to Believe,” which argues some existentially forced questions warrant belief past the evidence).

Where the analogy breaks down

Courtroom evidence rules exist to adjudicate a specific, falsifiable, third-party-checkable dispute within a system with subpoena power, cross-examination, and an adversarial process that forces claims into the open. Spiritual knowledge claims are frequently first-person, non-repeatable, and resistant to the kind of external check the rules assume is available. So the honest answer is that evidentiary rules can structure the inquiry — they’re a useful checklist for testing rigor, provenance, and internal consistency — but they can’t fully settle the question, because the deepest disagreement is prior to the rules: whether personal religious experience counts as a category of evidence at all, or is a different kind of claim (meaning-making, faith commitment) that evidentiary frameworks weren’t built to arbitrate.

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Question 2: From within the frameworks of recorded spiritual inquiry, what are the rules of spiritual evidence by which men struggle to know the truths of the kingdom of God that is within us?

That phrase — “the kingdom of God is within you” — comes from Luke 17:21, and Tolstoy later used it as the title of his book on inward Christianity and nonviolence. It points to something the courtroom analogy can’t quite reach: an inquiry where the witness, the evidence, and the judge are, in some sense, the same person. Different traditions have nonetheless developed real disciplines — “rules of evidence,” if you like — for testing whether an inward conviction is trustworthy or self-deception. A few of the major ones:

The test of fruit. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16-20) is probably the most widely shared criterion across traditions: a spiritual perception is validated not by its intensity but by what it produces over time — humility, charity, steadiness, self-mastery — versus pride, division, or appetite dressed up as revelation. This consequentialist test applies to an internal event, and it requires patience; fruit takes a season to show.

The test of peace versus agitation (Ignatian discernment). Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises lay out detailed “rules for discernment of spirits” — the idea that authentic movements toward God tend to bring a settled, deep peace (“consolation”), even amid difficulty, while counterfeit or disordered impulses tend to produce restlessness, anxious urgency, or a peace that only exists at the surface. Quakers developed something structurally similar with the discipline of “waiting worship” and testing a leading against the settled sense of the gathered meeting before acting on it.

The test of consistency and coherence. Does the new perception harmonize with what has already been soundly established — scripture, prior teaching, the moral law as best understood — or does it require you to discard everything previously trustworthy? Most traditions treat radical discontinuity as a warning sign, not proof of depth. 1 John 4:1 puts this directly: “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.”

The test of communal weighing. Paul’s instruction that when someone speaks under inspiration, “let the others judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29) reflects a recurring pattern: private conviction is submitted to a community capable of discernment, not because the community is infallible, but because self-deception is easier alone. This is the closest spiritual analog to cross-examination — a check external to the witness.

The test of humility and self-forgetfulness. Many mystics (John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, the desert fathers) warn that the ego is the most persistent counterfeiter of spiritual experience — that visions and certainties which center or exalt the self are the ones most to be doubted, while those that decrease the self and increase charity toward others carry more weight. This is why the tradition is suspicious of spiritual experience that arrives with grandiosity attached.

The test of reproducibility across witnesses. Not experimental repeatability, but something more like convergent testimony: when contemplatives across unconnected traditions and centuries — Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Vedantic — describe structurally similar interior states (dissolution of self-boundary, unitive love, ineffability, noetic certainty), some take that convergence as a weak but real form of corroboration, in the way independent witnesses strengthen a case.

The test of ineffability held honestly. The apophatic strand (Pseudo-Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing, negative theology generally) insists that whatever rules you apply, the deepest truths exceed propositional capture — so the last rule of evidence is almost anti-evidentiary: a genuine perception of the kingdom tends to leave the knower more aware of what they don’t know, not less. Certainty that closes off further inquiry is treated with suspicion.

The Eastern parallel, for comparison. The Buddha’s Kalama Sutta gives a strikingly similar structure from outside the Abrahamic traditions: don’t believe on the basis of report, tradition, rumor, scripture, logic, or the authority of a teacher — but when you know for yourselves that certain things lead to harm or to welfare, accept or reject them accordingly. Fruit, again, as the final court.

What’s notable is that these criteria converge on something evidentiary structures in law also value — corroboration, consistency, and consequence over time — while explicitly refusing the thing courtroom evidence relies on most: an external, third-party-checkable fact. The “rules” here are less about proving a proposition to someone else and more about a discipline for not fooling yourself, tested against fruit, peace, community, and time rather than against a jury.

If it’s useful, I could go deeper into any one strand — Ignatian discernment in more detail, the desert fathers on diakrisis (discernment as the “mother of virtues”), or how Quaker testing of leadings actually works in practice.

Quaker “leadings”

Trying the Case

A Response to “Evidence of Truth”

Fellowship Essay by Thomas | 13 September 2026

Last week’s discussion kept arriving at the same question from different directions. Michael asked how one knows which of two sincere believers, a Mormon and a Lutheran, holds the truth, and how one knows which of a man’s several transformations of personality and belief was the real one. Susan noticed that the test scripture gives for a messenger is hard to apply to the authors of scripture themselves. Leonard asked how large Christ’s tent is, and I replied that the Bible goes on the altar and everything else goes on the bookshelf, because I take the Bible as closest to the apostolic witness, drawn from the converging multi-vocal testimony of Christ’s life, teaching, and promise. Charlie’s essay this week takes the question head-on: what rules do we use to decide that a claim about God is adequately supported?

His essay lays out two sets of rules. The first is the FRE (Federal Rules of Evidence), one of the most carefully built systems people have made for deciding what to believe when certainty is not available. The second is the set of disciplines the spiritual traditions themselves developed to test whether an inward conviction comes from God or from oneself. I want to walk through both sets using last week’s testimonies as examples, because I think the four conversions we studied are exactly the kind of evidence these rules were designed to weigh.

The courtroom rules and the Gospel

Personal knowledge. A witness may testify only to what he perceived himself. The Bible meets the criteria of testimony from qualified witnesses. The apostles were there. John opens his first letter by insisting on it: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). Whatever else can be said about the New Testament, it presents itself as eyewitness testimony, and the earliest readers, some of whom were also there, and their testimony is accepted it as such. A revelation received centuries later, however sincere, is testimony about an event the witness did not see. That is not a reason to call it false. It is a reason to give it a different weight.

Hearsay and its exceptions. Charlie notes that scripture is, on its face, hearsay: statements transmitted through chains of people who cannot be cross-examined. He also notes the exceptions, which deserve attention because they apply to statements made under conditions that make fabrication unlikely. A statement against interest is one such condition. The apostles’ testimony cost them their livelihoods, their standing, and in most cases their lives. Dying declarations are another; Stephen, Peter, and Paul all died affirming what they had said. The criterion of embarrassment is a third: the Gospels record the disciples as cowards, doubters, and slow learners, and report that the first witnesses to the resurrection were women, whose testimony carried little weight in that culture. No one inventing a story to persuade a first-century audience would have written it that way. Greg Viehman, in his testimony, reached this same conclusion as a physician evaluating the record, and found that no alternative explanation of the empty tomb survived.

Impeachment and the hostile witness. The strongest witness in any case is the one who had every reason to testify the other way. Paul was a Pharisee, a persecutor of the church, a man with nothing to gain and everything to lose by joining it. Greg named him as the evidence that finished the case. Rosaria is the same kind of witness in our own day: a tenured activist who opened the Bible to discredit it and was overturned by it. Susan, who rejected the faith of her upbringing for fifteen years before returning, is a milder instance of the same pattern. When the case for a claim rests on witnesses who began as its opponents, the usual impeachment for bias runs backward.

Corroboration. Four witnesses, unknown to one another, three of them on video and one in this Fellowship, reported the same sequence: intellectual acceptance of the claims, then a change of heart they had not expected, then the discovery of Galatians 5:22 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,” as the description of what had happened. Independent witnesses converging on the same detail is what a court means by corroboration. Greg, Susan, and Rosaria did not compare notes.

Authentication. Before a document is admitted, you must show it is what it claims to be. Manuscript dating, textual criticism, and archaeology do this work, and they have done it more thoroughly for the New Testament than for any other ancient document. Charlie’s essay rightly puts this in the category of provenance. It is also the category where a second scripture that appeared in the nineteenth century with no manuscript history faces its hardest test, and I think it is fair to say that Charlie’s own reservations about the Book of Mormon are authentication reservations.

The standard of proof. The standard of proof is the level of certainty the law requires before a fact-finder may decide an issue. Different standards reflect the court’s assessment of the relative stakes of being wrong — the higher the potential harm from an erroneous decision, the higher the required standard of proof. What is at stake in the Gospel claim is the whole shape of a life and whatever follows it. William James argued that some questions are forced, meaning that refusing to decide is itself a decision, and that for such questions one may reasonably believe past what the evidence compels. I would put it more simply. The question “did Jesus rise” cannot be left open the way “is there life on Mars” can. Greg saw this at once: if it happened, it is the most important event in history, and if it did not, it is a fairy tale, and a man cannot live as though it were both.

Where the analogy strains. Charlie is right that the Daubert standard, which asks for a testable method and a known error rate, fits poorly. The resurrection cannot be repeated in a laboratory, but neither can the history of any given event. This is the challenge of veracity every past event must face; it is the heart of every court case and the significance of evidence. The changed heart is one type of evidence. Susan’s challenge to the unbeliever was to run the experiment: pray earnestly and read the Bible daily for a season, and see. Greg’s challenge was the same: call on Christ and test him. Uncounted people have run the experiment across two thousand years. Some change dramatically; others notice only a new voice of conscience. There are those of other religions who claim change, and perhaps it is the light of Christ that is in all that is being awakened by their newly declared devotion to God. Claims of a changed heart are subjective, but changed behavior can be validated objectively and statistically. Such tests may have been done. A statistics-based proof is not a courtroom proof; it is more of a science-type proof that supports a hypothesis, but does not prove causality or uniqueness.

The rules of the traditions

Charlie’s second set of rules addresses the harder case: not whether Christ rose, but whether a particular inward conviction is from God. Here the witness, the evidence, and the judge are the same person, and self-deception is the constant hazard. I want to take his seven tests and examine their utility.

Fruit. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16). This is the test the four testimonies pass most plainly. Ruth Viehman’s statement that she is married to a different man (Greg’s transformation) is fruit observed from outside, by the person best placed to see it. Susan’s joy and peace have lasted years. Rosaria’s life was rebuilt. Fruit takes a season, which is why testimony given decades after conversion weighs more than testimony given the week after.

Peace. The Ignatian rule is that movements from God bring a settled, deep peace even in difficulty, while counterfeits bring restlessness and surface calm. Greg woke up peaceful and content for no reason, and checked his medicine cabinet before he believed it. Rosaria found that the words of Hebrews 4 undid her, and the peace came only after she went all the way across to Christ. Both fit the rule, and the rule fits the fruit of the Spirit.

Consistency. Does the new perception harmonize with what is already soundly established, or does it require discarding everything previously deemed trustworthy? A later revelation that agrees with the apostolic record may be true or may be an elaboration. To discern trustworthiness in this case, whatever contradicts it fails the test. “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). Susan’s observation that we know little about the authors of some biblical books is fair, but the test is still available: the books that were received into the canon were received because the churches that had known the apostles judged them consistent with what the apostles had taught.

Communal weighing. “Let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29). Charlie’s essay calls this the nearest spiritual analog to cross-examination and the communal test in operation. When Susan proposes a reading of Ephraim and Manasseh that none of us has heard before, and I ask her to write it up so the group can weigh it, that is the same test. A private conviction should be compared with the group’s judgment.

Humility. The mystics warn that the ego can counterfeit spiritual experience. Certainties can exalt the self and blind the heart with confidence. I look at myself; I had an experience that was not noble or credible in its origin, a revelation that I believe was from God, but it came in an altered state. The fruit was a completely changed life, and a forty-year development of a theory of everything. It appears consistent with conventional physics, but adds a layer of understanding of structure and mechanism that makes it plausible that we live, move, and exist within Him. I hope conventional physicists will find my vision, logic, and proofs compelling, see it as evidence of God’s existence and omniscient presence in the material world, and acknowledge Him in their lives and science. An impact of such magnitude tempts the ego to exalt itself. And of course, we should challenge such revelations, logic, and evidence lest we follow a false path. It is easy to follow a charismatic man, be enticed by new doctrines, and relinquish the liberty we were given in Christ.

Convergence. Contemplatives across unconnected traditions describe similar interior states, and some take that as weak corroboration. I said last week that the mystical literature of other traditions gives me a glimpse of a world beyond this one and strengthens my faith that such a world exists, without my following those traditions. Charlie’s essay gives a category for that: convergent testimony is evidence that something is there, even when it is not evidence for a particular account of what it is.

Ineffability. The last rule is nearly the opposite of a rule: a true perception of the kingdom tends to leave the knower more aware of what he does not know. Susan’s vision-therapy picture belongs here. The reader who has suppressed the verses that do not fit has a single flat image and feels certain. The one who is given depth perception sees both and knows the reconciliation is still in progress. Certainty that closes inquiry is a warning sign; a process that may last a lifetime is more likely the real thing, as Paul struggled throughout life to the end: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7)

What the rules settle and what they do not

Charlie’s essay ends by saying that evidentiary rules can structure the inquiry but cannot settle it, because the deepest disagreement lies before the rules: whether personal religious experience counts as evidence at all. I think that is exactly right, and I think last week’s testimonies show where the settlement actually happens. Greg had the courtroom case complete and was unchanged. What settled the matter was not a further argument but a walk-in patient’s question and a night on his knees, followed by a morning of peace that he could not explain away. The rules of evidence brought him to the door. Something else opened it.

So the rules do two things for us. They tell us which claims deserve to be taken seriously enough to test, and here the Gospel passes a court’s tests of evidence. And they give us a discipline for not fooling ourselves once we have begun to believe. What they cannot do is substitute for the test itself. The kingdom of God is within you, and the only way to gather evidence for what is within you is to go in.

Questions for our discussion

Which of the courtroom rules do you find most persuasive when applied to the Gospel, and which do you think a skeptic would rightly say does not apply?
Charlie’s essay distinguishes evidence for a proposition from a discipline for not fooling yourself. Where in your own walk have you needed the second more than the first?
If communal weighing is the spiritual form of cross-examination, how well does this Fellowship perform it? What would make our testing of one another’s convictions more honest and more charitable at the same time?
The standard of proof shifts with the stakes. What standard did you actually apply when you came to believe, and would you apply the same one now?

— Thomas

What Is Truth?

Fellowship Discussion Essay – September 13, 2026

The meeting centered on Charlie’s essay “Evidence of Truth,” which set American rules of evidence beside the disciplines spiritual traditions have developed for testing an inward conviction. Before the essay, Michael presented notes carried over from the previous week, which turned the first hour toward the nature of hell, judgment, and repentance. The second hour returned to the essay’s question: How do we know something is true? This essay records the points made in both halves and the responses given.

1. Michael’s notes from the previous week

Christians killing Christians. Michael proposed a way through the problem he has raised before: that Christians have made war on one another for centuries. All factions agree on the behavioral teaching: the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, love of neighbor. If the emphasis were placed there and taken off what he called the vehicle code, the doctrinal fine print by which one faction declares another to be of the devil, the armies would have less to fight about. Thomas objected that scripture nowhere instructs one believer to call another of the devil for holding a different version. Michael agreed that it does not, but observed that people do it anyway, and that the problem is getting them to stop.

Living forever. Michael reported that the previous meeting had corrected an assumption of his. He had supposed that only Christians live forever; he now understood that in this paradigm everyone does, and that the difference is where and in what state. He is neither buying nor denying the assumption. He asked for more on purgatory, which the group had not discussed, and whether life after death might resemble the state before birth, in which case he has many further questions.

The samurai and the monk. He told the story of a samurai who asked a famous monk whether heaven and hell exist. The monk insulted him until the samurai drew his sword to kill him, at which point the monk said, “This is hell.” The samurai understood, sheathed the sword, and the monk said, “This is heaven.”

Hell as pain. Michael offered two reference points from his own life. As a boy of seven, left alone for the first time, he melted all the household candles in a pot to play with the wax, heard his parents at the door, poured the wax down the sink, burned his hand trying to clear it, and then met his parents with the words, “You aren’t going in the kitchen, are you?” The point was the layered experience of pain, fear, and consequence. The second was a stroke in 1982, during which he lay for five days in undifferentiated agony, too far gone even to think that he needed a pain reliever until the fourth day. From this he posed a question about the design of hell: maximal pain without awareness becomes a kind of white noise, while a lesser pain with enough consciousness to know one is in it may be worse. A competent designer of hell, he said, would have to decide which, and God is up to it.

Love, kindness, and trust. He has often lived without these, traveling in a van, and it has not bothered him; rocks, rivers, and panoramas are a joy and do not need to love him back. He does not trust anyone; he assigns likelihoods instead, and personal friends rate very high. He asked whether heaven as immersion in love, kindness, and trust leaves room for the loner, such as the frontier trappers who wanted nothing from society, and whether the afterlife differs from this one only by being non-physical.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge. He noted that the original sin was eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In his reading, not questioning what is good and evil is Eden; questioning gets one expelled; ignorance is bliss. Yet this forum, and this vision, is precisely the questioning of good and evil.

Peter Pan. He closed with a passage from Barrie in which Captain Hook bites the hand Peter extends to help him, and every child who meets that first betrayal remembers it forever, except Peter, who met it often and always forgot. Michael identified with Peter: he accepts others’ mistrust and loves them anyway, since they came by it for good reasons.

2. The nature of hell

A short history of the word. While Michael spoke, Charlie looked up how the idea developed. The earliest scripture uses Sheol, a dim and silent holding place for all the dead, righteous and wicked alike. Judgment enters in the Second Temple period, and Daniel 12:2 is the closest the Old Testament comes to differentiated fates: some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt. In the New Testament the word is Gehenna, a transliteration of the name of a valley near Jerusalem associated with child sacrifice to Moloch, which became a symbol of judgment and defilement. Hades, Tartarus, and the lake of fire also appear. Charlie observed that Christianity today has no unified view of what hell actually is, and gave his own: as a parent who loves his children, he wants them to suffer the natural consequences of their behavior and no more, and he trusts that God, who is better than he is, will do exactly as much as is needed to make souls his and no more. He does not believe that there is an eternal lake of fire.

Michael responded to each term in turn. A dim, silent holding place sounds like a place he would enjoy. Shame is universal, since whoever one is, someone will shame him, and he regards the shame of those whose opinion he does not respect as entertainment. A lake one is thrown into is only hell if one is prevented from drowning. He asked how God would maximize pain beyond what the Inquisition devised, given that the Inquisition eventually ran out of the victim’s capacity to survive. Charlie said that if he were God, he would never send Michael to hell because Michael would enjoy it too much, and proposed a giant library with no books; Michael recognized the Twilight Zone episode in which a man who wants only to read survives a nuclear war, finds the library intact, and breaks his glasses.

Hell as self-banishment. Leonard offered his own view. We make our own hells. God does not assign people to them; he tries to describe them in scripture, in language of fire and brimstone because the reality is foreign to us, but the place is one we choose, as we chose to come here. Hell is the inability to endure the presence of God because of the guilt of what one has done. Christ paid the price of sin so that we need not suffer as he did; those who reject that payment must suffer as he did, in the eternities, and that is hell: the diametric opposite of the glory, peace, and love of God’s presence. In his theology, there was a war in heaven; Lucifer rebelled to gain the Father’s glory, and a third of the host went with him; they were not so much cast out as they left, thinking they could do it on their own. The deception is so complete that their hell is their heaven. A person who learns of Christ in this life and rebels against him will, when brought back into God’s presence, see the difference, feel an unbearable guilt, and banish himself to where misery loves company. That is the justice of the universe.

Michael accepted the premise that we make our own hells and quoted Thomas Paine: our tragedy is heightened because we furnish the means by which we suffer. On guilt, he said the cure is atonement, which Christianity, Islam, and much psychology agree on. He described his own method: examine what you can do to fix what you broke, and do it, including calling someone to clarify a remark that could have been taken as cruel. He contrasted this with the Christian method of trusting Christ to take care of one’s sins, and said both have merit depending on the paradigm. He then raised the case that does not fit: the person who does wrong and glories in it. Hitler did not experience his crimes as self-inflicted pain. Leonard answered that the self-inflicted pain comes at the judgment, not in this life, when one faces God and sees what one has done; he added that he had recently read a claim that Hitler said a demon possessed him.

Demons, insanity, and accountability. Michael said he has never met an angel or a demon and is unfamiliar with the distinctions between them. Leonard said he does not need to meet one; one can see living demons by looking at the world, and he cited a recent case in which a mother killed her children and a single holdout juror refused to accept an insanity defense. He called that juror righteous: one cannot say “I lost my mind” and be innocent, and she was not brought into court in a straitjacket. Michael distinguished insanity from disease. A person with rabies has nothing left of himself; what does that say about the soul? A person who is simply unhinged is a different case, and he set no lower limit on how far a person’s intelligence can fall. Leonard held that there is no excuse for killing one’s children, that the act requires a response, and that most broken laws, physical and spiritual, can be repaired through the atonement, but not without repentance.

Leonard read from Doctrine and Covenants 19, in which the Lord commands repentance on pain of a suffering whose severity is unknown to us, and says that he, God, suffered these things for all so that they might not suffer if they repent, a suffering that caused him to tremble, bleed at every pore, and wish not to drink the bitter cup. Leonard’s summary: repentance is coming to understand what one has done, not doing it again, and repairing what can be repaired; God has provided an off-ramp in his Son; the only place one can change is in this life; and God does not trifle with men’s souls. Michael said he agreed with that definition of repentance. He compared his stroke with the crucifixion, reasoning that the nails would have produced cycles of agony rather than his own four days of undifferentiated pain. Leonard replied that in the Mormon reading, the Atonement has two parts: the spiritual suffering in Gethsemane, which he has recently come to understand the disciples did not sleep through but fainted from witnessing, and the physical suffering on the cross.

A hypothetical and a scripture. Michael posed a case: a slave owner enters a cabin to rape a woman, her husband stands up, the owner kills the husband, and the woman kills the owner. Has she sinned against the Bible and the law and earned hell? Leonard said self-defense and retribution are different matters; Charlie called the case contrived; Michael insisted such things happened in slavery. Michael said at first that Jesus would tell her to let him rape her rather than kill him, then withdrew that and said Jesus would say, “Don’t kill him,” which does not mean submitting, and see what happens. Leonard concluded that her killing the owner was self-defense and justified, while the owner’s killing of the husband was murder. He then told the opening story of the Book of Mormon, in which Nephi, commanded to obtain the brass plates from Laban, finds Laban drunk in the street, is told by the Lord to kill him, does so with Laban’s own sword despite never having killed a man, impersonates him to obtain the record, and takes the servant Zoram by oath. Leonard’s point was that obedience can sometimes trump virtue. Michael said he had a thousand questions about that story but had to leave.

A parting question. Isak, leaving as well, asked whether hell might be a metaphor for the burning off of a human life, the decomposition of the body into whatever material it becomes, and whether that material is collected and gathered back into the fold. Leonard replied that the body decomposes but the spirit does not, so the spirit must go somewhere, and hides itself from the pain of God’s presence in a place of no glory. Very few go there. In his theology, there are degrees of glory: celestial, where the Father is; terrestrial, where Christ is; and telestial, which is similar to this world, with good and evil mixed, and where most people end up, apart from God as we are here, with God in the heart but not in his presence. Hell may likewise have levels, where those who rejected the atonement pay for their own sins. Charlie remarked that he never thinks about hell, and Leonard said there is no need to.

3. The process of knowing what is true

What the essay did for its author. Thomas asked Charlie what he had taken from preparing the essay, and Charlie said he assembled it by putting questions to an AI, one leading to another. His answer was that Mormonism had given him a simplified and controlled process for discovering truth: if the prophet says so, it is; and if reading the Book of Mormon produces a burning in the bosom, that is the sign of truth. Neither, he said, is a viable truth detector. The actual process is slower, more thoughtful, and more complex, and the Quaker practice in particular, with its clearness committees and the example of John Woolman, is rational, patient, and communal. This is the opposite of the top-down authority he was raised under, which is not merely what the prophet says but what the latest prophet says, and which he finds oppressive. He gave an example of the process at work: a video by a Bible scholar on the apparent conflict between Jesus’s words about the law standing until heaven and earth pass and Paul’s teaching on the law had led him, for the first time, to consider that Christians might still be under the Torah. Susan had cautioned him not to be hasty but slow, prayerful, and deliberate, since such a conclusion would change a life. Susan noted that Jesus said he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17), and that Charlie was reporting a scholar’s synthesis rather than Jesus’s words; Charlie agreed the question deserved its own meeting.

The Quaker approach. Armond said he was drawn to the Quaker method because we are human, have egos, and are acted on by many powers. Beginning by looking within, testing whether an impulse is of the ego, looking for the absence of self-will, and testing against scripture all seemed to him ways of getting one’s reliance on self out of the way. The clearness committee, in which a private leading is submitted to a small group for patient questioning, struck him as a sound concept.

A case of testing a leading. Susan told a story that fits the tests, though not the communal form. After COVID, she and Charlie were far behind on rent, and the property manager called to ask when payments would resume. Susan prayed, and the answer she received was, “Tell her that I will provide.” She did not act on it. She sat with it for three or four days, asking God to confirm it, aware that Satan or her own wishful thinking could produce such words, and waited to see whether it would fade or be replaced. It did not. She then wrote to the manager and felt the Spirit help with the words. The manager called at once, said she had known many people of faith whose faith did not pay the rent, and pressed her to be realistic. Susan found a boldness she could not account for and pushed back, and at the end the manager said the one thing she could not argue with was God, and asked for a payment plan. Neither Susan nor Charlie knew how they would meet it. Shortly afterward, Charlie and Thomas made a financial arrangement, and the first payment was met on time; the contract was completed. Susan’s indicators were the felt presence of the Spirit while writing and speaking, and the fruit. She stressed that the waiting mattered: had she acted on the first impression as if it were certainly God’s, she believes the outcome would have been different and not good. Charlie summarized the method as testing by waiting, by feeling, by study, by conversation, and by fruit, and contrasted it again with the tradition in which the thinking has been done and one need only obey.

The host’s framing. Thomas said the Federal Rules of Evidence were new to him but read as common sense set down in writing. The real question for him was the one the group has circled for a year and a half: how do we know the Bible is true, how do we know that an impression such as Susan’s is from God, and, in the standing conversation between Mormonism and Christianity, how do we know which record to trust. He mentioned that he transcribed and wrote up an interview with a Jordanian Muslim who became a Christian, which he intends to send out, and noted that the Quran presents a comparison different in kind from the Book of Mormon, which reads more like backstory.

He then set out the comparison as he sees it. The restorationist argument, as he understands it and as Denver Snuffer’s lectures presented it, is that the Bible has been corrupted and cannot be primary, so that new revelation is required. Against this, the Bible was copied many times, but the surviving manuscripts, dispersed across regions and centuries, have been compared and agree closely; the variants are minor and change no doctrine. The four Gospels are four witnesses whose accounts triangulate on the same events, and that triangulation is the standard method by which Christendom has validated the record. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, rests on one man’s testimony, dictated by a method that included a hat and a seer stone, with no plates available for examination. Those are the two bodies of evidence, and the question is which is more authentic and more trustworthy: the apostolic record copied with minor errors, or the record Joseph Smith produced by the means he described.

The reply from the restorationist side. Leonard said the restoration had nothing to do with the Bible being bad. The Bible was fine; men corrupted the teaching and added their own philosophies, and what was restored was belief in the Bible, after which God, as he always does, added more. Joseph Smith preached from the Bible. The additional record came from the same roots: an Israelite people of the house of Joseph, the other sheep Christ said he must also visit (John 10:16). Asked in effect whether the Book of Mormon is more correct than the Bible, Leonard said he does not care; he loves all of it, and the more one can receive from God the better. Ranking one against the other is a mousetrap Satan sets. On the hat and seer stone, he said that is hearsay, and cited the rules of evidence against it; Joseph used an instrument that came with the record, which he called the Urim and Thummim, and eventually needed no instrument. He noted that each author in the Book of Mormon has a distinct word pattern, and that the Bible’s originals are no more available than the plates. None of this, he said, is what really matters. What matters is whether it is true, and the only way to know is to test it. God’s method is to understand a principle, believe it provisionally, obey it, and receive the blessing that follows; the blessing confirms the principle, faith becomes knowledge, and the cycle repeats until, in the end, the Lord manifests himself, though few reach that point. Spiritual things require spiritual tools; God does not honor “show me a sign.” If one refuses to test, that is a choice not to know.

Testing what, exactly? Susan said she agrees entirely with testing by obedience, which Charlie identified as the fruit test. She then asked for an example: is there a commandment in the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants, not found in the Bible, that a person could test by obeying it this month? Leonard first named doctrines such as the three degrees of glory, which he said are tested by prayer, since the Book of Mormon’s own instruction is simply to ask God. Susan pressed for something to do. Leonard offered baptism, which most Christians do not consider necessary; Susan replied that many do, and that baptism is in the Bible. Leonard could not name a commandment unique to the additional scripture, and said that everything can be tested one way or another, by obeying it or by asking God through the Holy Ghost. Charlie observed that this is where the difficulty lies: when an idea comes, it is very hard to know whether it is God’s Spirit, one’s own ambition, or one’s own creativity. Leonard’s reply was that Charlie thinks too much, which Charlie took as a fair objection. Charlie added that his first wife believed every thought she had was true, and that if everything that enters one’s head is taken for God’s Spirit, one is headed for hell.

Spiritual experience is not evidence of doctrine. Susan made the comment she regarded as most important. When she was LDS, her spiritual experiences carried great weight as evidence that what she believed was true, including that her church was the true church. Leonard said he hates that use of them. Susan’s lesson is that one can have spiritual experiences and still not be believing the truth, because anyone who sincerely believes in Jesus, across many denominations, will have such experiences; they are common, and it is common to take them as confirmation of whatever doctrine one holds, but they are not an accurate test. She agreed with Leonard that one should pray and ask God, and read James 1:5-7 in the New Living Translation, which she prefers here to the King James: when you ask, be sure your faith is in God alone; a person of divided loyalty is like a wave tossed by the wind and should not expect to receive anything. J. B. Phillips renders it as asking without secret doubts about whether one really wants God’s help. She used to read the passage as a demand for enough belief that the request would be granted. She now reads it as a question about the heart: Is your faith in God? Do you really want to hear whatever he says, and are you willing to obey it even when it is not what you wanted? Discernment, wisdom, and understanding are gifts from God; attempted by one’s own power, they end in deception. The tools in Charlie’s essay are good tools, but they work only on that foundation. She added that this was not aimed at Leonard, whom she regards as a sincere believer who wants to obey, but at the premise that all of them should check before using any of the tools.

Leonard said he believed everyone present had experienced the hand of God and knew it, which is why they gather, and that it is a kind of miracle the group can discuss these things without anger. God will reveal truth to the heart; ask, seek, knock; and do not limit him, who is as vast as the ocean while we are a droplet. He recommended that anyone who chooses to read the Book of Mormon use the modern-language Covenant of Christ edition, and said he loves the various Bible translations because their makers strove to give us a record we can understand.

4. Closing

Susan closed in prayer, asking that the group be taught how to discern what is true and have experiences this week in which they learn it. Afterward, Leonard observed that “What is truth?” was Pilate’s question to Christ, asked while Truth stood in front of him, and that we likewise speak to the Lord and fail to recognize him when he answers. Susan added that Jesus identified himself as the truth: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260906 – Evidence of Truth