Reformation, Restoration, and the Stone Cut Without Hands
A Christian Engagement with Denver Snuffer’s Protestant Reformation Series – (Part 1/4, lectures 1-7)
Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 28, 2026
Source: Denver Snuffer, Protestant Reformation lecture series (Parts 1-7), available as transcripts at learnofchrist.org/videos.html#reformation. The series is the first of four corpus-defining lecture series posted at learnofchrist.org, treating, in order: the Protestant Reformation; (presumably) post-Reformation history and restorationist precursors; Joseph Smith and the original Restoration; and Snuffer’s own contemporary covenantal continuation. The present essay engages only the first series (seven parts on the Reformation). Subsequent essays will engage the remaining three series as Thomas transmits the transcripts.
Context: This is the third Snuffer engagement in the corpus, building on the April 26 evaluation of Culture by Precept and Practice and the April 27 engagement of Testimony of Jesus. The April 27 essay engaged Snuffer’s restoration thesis directly — the claim that apostolic Christianity perished and required Joseph Smith’s prophetic restoration. The present essay engages Snuffer’s Reformation history on its own terms — what he says about Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Zwingli; how he characterizes their motives, their accomplishments, and their limits; and what his framing of the Reformation tells us about the larger argument the four-series corpus is constructing.
To the Fellowship —
Denver Snuffer’s seven-part series on the Protestant Reformation is, in many ways, the most generous treatment of the Reformers I have encountered from within the Mormon tradition. Snuffer has clearly read the history with care. He honors Luther’s personal courage, the providential timing of Gutenberg’s press, the moral seriousness of Calvin and Knox, and the theological clarity of Zwingli. He concedes that the Counter-Reformation produced genuine reform within Catholicism — including the founding of the Jesuits, whose original purposes he quotes at length and approvingly. And he closes the series with a striking call: that we should look back in gratitude on the Reformation and recover its energy by applying the virtue of God’s word in our own lives.
This is not anti-Protestant polemic. This is appreciative engagement, which makes the rhetorical purpose of the series harder to see at first glance and worth naming carefully.
Snuffer is doing two things simultaneously in these seven parts. First, he is delivering a substantively accurate, relatively even-handed history of the Protestant Reformation that any Christian could read with profit. Second, he is framing that history — through specific word choices, specific emphases, specific scriptural allusions — to position the Reformation as a necessary but incomplete movement whose unfinished work waits for completion in the project Snuffer’s own movement claims to be completing. The framing is not inserted clumsily. It is woven in. And it is exactly the kind of framing that requires careful Christian engagement, because the Reformation as a genuinely sufficient recovery of the apostolic gospel is precisely what Snuffer’s larger argument needs to deny.
I will engage the seven parts in three movements. First, what is honorable and accurate in Snuffer’s history. Second, the specific framing moves that slant toward the eventual restorationist conclusion. Third, the deeper theological question the series implicitly raises and explicitly mishandles: what did the Reformation actually accomplish, and what does its accomplishment tell us about whether the apostolic gospel was ever lost?
I. What Is Honorable and Accurate
Before any framing critique, let me name what the series gets right. Snuffer’s history of the Reformation is more careful than most popular Christian treatments and substantially more even-handed than most Mormon treatments. Several specific judgments deserve credit.
1. The proximate causes are correctly identified. Part 1 names the three converging factors that made the Reformation possible: the Catholic Church’s claim of exclusive salvation authority (the 1302 papal edict Unam Sanctam), the spiritual crisis precipitated by the Black Death (1347 onward, with roughly 25 million deaths in less than four years), and the credibility collapse of the papal office during the Western Schism (1378-1417, with two and at one point three competing popes each claiming exclusive Petrine authority). These are the right historical pillars. Most popular Reformation histories treat the schism cursorily, but Snuffer is correct that the spectacle of three competing popes did decisive damage to the unquestioned authority of the Roman see. People could not unsee what they had seen.
2. The Hus and Savonarola context is correctly placed. Part 1 names Jan Hus (burned at Constance in 1415) and Girolamo Savonarola (burned at Florence in 1498) as the immediate predecessors whose deaths established the lethal stakes of public dissent from Rome. This context is essential for understanding Luther’s courage. When Luther posted the Ninety-five Theses in 1517, he did so knowing that less than two decades earlier, an Italian Dominican friar of comparable spiritual seriousness had been hanged and burned in the public square of Florence for confronting papal corruption. Hus’s and Savonarola’s deaths were not ancient history to Luther. They were recent memory, and the threat they represented was real.
3. The role of Gutenberg’s press is correctly identified. Part 2 names what is sometimes underweighted in popular Reformation histories: that Luther’s translation of the Bible into common German would have remained a scholar’s curiosity without the printing press to multiply copies cheaply. The convergence of Luther’s translation work with Gutenberg’s roughly seventy-year-old printing technology is genuinely providential, and Snuffer is right to name it.
4. The Romans 1:17 conversion narrative is accurate. Part 3’s account of Luther’s resolution of his salvation dilemma through meditation on “the just shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17) follows Luther’s own well-documented account in his preface to the Latin works (1545). Snuffer’s reading — that Luther had to resolve his personal salvation question before he could safely confront the institutional church — is correct and important. The Reformation did not begin as ecclesial-political rebellion. It began as a sincere believer’s terrified search for salvation, who found it in Paul, and was emboldened by what he found.
5. The TULIP summary of Calvinism is fair. Part 5’s exposition of the five points of Calvinism — total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints — is presented without caricature. Snuffer correctly notes that limited atonement refers to limited application rather than limited sufficiency (a distinction many critics of Calvinism miss). He correctly notes that the perseverance principle restores some balance to the system by making final salvation testable in the believer’s actual life. He correctly identifies the soteriological logic: Calvin’s doctrine arose because Calvin took both his own sin and God’s holiness seriously enough that anything less than divine sovereign grace would have left him without hope. This is, as far as it goes, an accurate summary.
6. Zwingli’s contribution is correctly highlighted. Part 6 gives Zwingli his proper credit as a Reformer who advanced beyond Luther in scope. Where Luther’s Ninety-five Theses targeted the specific abuse of indulgences, Zwingli’s sixty-seven theses (1523) attacked the structural claims of papal authority root and branch — most consequentially Zwingli’s first article rejecting the 1302 edict’s exclusive salvation claim. Zwingli’s redefinition of the body of Christ as the community of believers rather than the institution headquartered in Rome is, Snuffer correctly notes, an originating Protestant move that today’s Protestants take for granted. The historical credit is properly placed.
7. The Counter-Reformation acknowledgment is honest. Part 7 concedes that the Catholic response to Protestantism — beginning with the Council of Trent in 1545 — produced genuine reforms: improved education and moral training of clergy, the end of political appointment of bishops, improved ecclesiastical discipline, and the founding of the Jesuit order. Snuffer quotes at length and approvingly from Ignatius of Loyola’s stated purposes for the Society of Jesus. This is unusually generous toward Catholicism for a Mormon-tradition treatment and deserves to be acknowledged.
8. The closing call is sound. Part 7’s final paragraph is the most clearly Christian sentence in the entire series — Snuffer’s call that we look back at the Reformation in gratitude and recover its energy by applying the virtue of God’s word in our own lives. This is exactly the right response to Reformation history. The energy of the Reformation was the recovery of the gospel of grace through faith in Christ alone, accessed through the Word of God read in the common tongue. That energy is available to every Christian today, and recovering it is the daily work of Christian life.
I name these eight things first because, on reading the series, one’s first impression is of a learned and careful Christian historian doing thorough work. That impression is partly true. The history is careful. The judgments are often sound. But the framing is doing work that the surface accuracy partially obscures — and that framing is what we have to engage carefully now.
II. The Framing Moves
Set the seven parts side by side and read them as a single argumentative whole, and a pattern emerges. The pattern is not falsification of fact. It is selection of fact and coloring of language such that the cumulative impression points toward a specific conclusion: the Reformation was a necessary but incomplete movement whose unfinished work requires completion through later restoration.
Six framing moves in particular deserve naming.
1. The Reformers’ motive is reduced to personal-salvation anxiety
Throughout the series, Snuffer emphasizes that the Reformers were driven by fear about their own salvation in the face of an abusive establishment. In Part 4 he summarizes the common pattern uniting Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Zwingli as men of extraordinary moral character whose desire was to understand God and obtain salvation, “each of whom feared they would not obtain salvation” through the existing religious establishment.
This is true as far as it goes. But it is a partial truth that subtly diminishes what the Reformers actually claimed. The Reformers were not merely seeking personal salvation against an abusive system. They were claiming to recover apostolic Christianity itself — the gospel that Paul preached, that the early church received, and that medieval Catholicism had progressively obscured. Luther’s sola fide was not a private therapeutic discovery for one anxious German monk. It was a claim about what the apostles taught and what every generation of Christians is meant to receive. Calvin’s Institutes was not a manual for managing personal religious anxiety. It was a systematic exposition of the Christian faith intended to recover the church’s apostolic theology in toto.
By framing the Reformers as primarily salvation-seekers rather than primarily gospel-recoverers, Snuffer subtly positions their work as preparatory rather than substantive. The Reformers found peace for their own souls; someone else (in Snuffer’s framework, eventually Joseph Smith and now Snuffer) would do the work of fully recovering the apostolic faith. This is not how the Reformers themselves understood their work, and the framing should be resisted.
2. The “stone cut out of a mountain without hands” allusion
Part 3 closes with a striking image: Snuffer compares Luther’s act to a stone cut out of the mountain without hands, rolling down the slope and gaining steam to produce the Protestant Reformation. Part 7 closes the entire series with the same image, applied this time to the global impact of the Reformation: like the stone cut without hands explained by Daniel interpreting King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the Reformation has grown to fill and change the whole world.
This is the prophecy from Daniel 2:34-35, 44-45 — the stone cut without hands that smashes the great metallic statue and grows to fill the whole earth, becoming a kingdom that “shall never be destroyed.” In mainstream Christian eschatology, the stone is universally interpreted as Christ Himself, and the kingdom that fills the earth is the kingdom of God inaugurated at Christ’s first coming and consummated at His return.
In Mormon eschatology, the stone has long been interpreted as the Restoration movement Joseph Smith founded. This interpretation appears in LDS scripture (D&C 65:2 explicitly invokes the rolling-stone-from-the-mountain image to describe the gospel rolling forth to the ends of the earth through the keys of the kingdom committed to Joseph Smith) and in two centuries of LDS conference rhetoric.
By applying the stone-cut-without-hands image first to the Reformation in Part 3 and then to the Reformation again in Part 7’s closing paragraph, Snuffer is performing a careful rhetorical operation. He is borrowing the Mormon-resonant prophetic image and applying it to the Reformation, framing the Reformation as one stage in the prophesied movement whose next stages — Joseph Smith, and now Snuffer’s continuation — are the completion of what the Reformation began. The Reformation is being enrolled into Mormon eschatology through scriptural allusion.
A Christian reading the series without Mormon-tradition background may not catch this, but Leonard would have caught it immediately, and so would any reader formed by LDS scripture. The allusion is not accidental. It is doing work.
3. The Reformation as a 500th anniversary event
Part 7’s penultimate paragraph contains a small phrase worth examining: Snuffer notes that the year of the lecture marks the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The lecture was apparently delivered in 2017 — the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses on October 31, 1517.
The framing of anniversary is significant. An anniversary marks a completed past event. We commemorate the Reformation the way we commemorate the American Revolution or the moon landing — as an event that happened, accomplished its work, and is now over. The framing implicitly closes the Reformation off as a finished historical chapter, available for retrospective gratitude and lessons learned, but no longer a living movement that continues to define the church’s life today.
This framing is precisely wrong. The Reformation is not an anniversary event. The Reformation is the recovery of apostolic Christianity that continues to define every faithful church today. Lutherans, Anglicans, Reformed, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, and most independent evangelical traditions worldwide — billions of Christians, alive and worshipping today — are continuing the work the Reformers began. The principles of sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria are not 500-year-old historical curiosities. They are the lived theological framework of the largest single body of Christians on earth.
By framing the Reformation as an anniversary, Snuffer subtly closes off the possibility that the Reformation is itself the ongoing reality of the apostolic gospel preserved in the church. If the Reformation is an event that happened and is now over, then the question what comes after the Reformation? becomes natural. And Snuffer has an answer ready: the Restoration. But if the Reformation is the ongoing life of the apostolic church, then no after-the-Reformation movement is needed, because the Reformation is not in the past — it is in every faithful Christian congregation gathering this Sunday morning.
4. The Counter-Reformation framed as Catholic competition rather than spiritual renewal
Part 7’s treatment of the Catholic Counter-Reformation is honest as far as it goes — Snuffer correctly notes the Council of Trent’s reforms, the founding of the Jesuits, and Ignatius of Loyola’s laudable purposes. But the framing is telling. He describes the Catholic response as competition forced upon Rome once Protestants gave people a religious choice.
The language of competition reduces the Counter-Reformation to a market-share response. It elides the genuine spiritual renewal that motivated figures like Ignatius, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Charles Borromeo, and Francis de Sales — Catholic reformers whose mystical and pastoral writings remain among the most spiritually serious works in the Christian tradition. The Counter-Reformation was not merely Catholicism’s response to Protestant competition. It was a parallel movement of the Spirit within the Catholic Church, recovering through different paths much of the same gospel-centered fervor the Protestants were recovering.
A Christian historian engaging the period sympathetically would name this. Snuffer’s framing nods toward it (the Ignatius quotation in Part 7) but his summary language frames it as competitive rather than spiritual. The framing serves the larger narrative arc: if Catholicism merely responded competitively rather than recovering the gospel itself, then post-Reformation Catholicism remains substantively unreformed. If Protestant Christianity is itself an incomplete reform, and Catholic Christianity remains substantively unreformed, then neither tradition has the fullness of the apostolic gospel, and a further restoration is required.
This is exactly the conclusion Snuffer’s larger corpus is constructing toward. The Reformation series is positioning the pieces.
5. The Reformers’ moral failures are named without their virtues
Snuffer’s broader corpus, in Testimony of Jesus, names Luther’s vicious response to the Peasants’ Revolt, Calvin’s role in Servetus’s execution, and Knox’s involvement in Cardinal Beaton’s murder. These were honest acknowledgments of real moral failures, and I credited them in the April 27 essay as honest history.
In the present Reformation series, those failures are not yet named — they appear in Testimony of Jesus, after the Reformation series has been delivered, where they do the work of demonstrating that the Reformers’ achievements were limited by their inherited corruption. The Reformation series itself treats the Reformers with substantial respect, but the broader corpus uses the moral failures as evidence that the Reformation could not, in the end, be the recovery of apostolic Christianity, because the Reformers themselves remained too compromised to embody what they preached.
This is a fair argument if the test of the apostolic gospel is the moral perfection of those who recover it. But that test is not a biblical test. The apostles themselves contained an Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5), a Peter who needed to be rebuked by Paul (Galatians 2), a John Mark who deserted Paul on missionary work (Acts 13:13, 15:38), a Demas who forsook Paul having loved this present world (2 Timothy 4:10), a body of Corinthian Christians whose moral failures Paul had to address explicitly. The presence of moral failure in those who preach the gospel does not invalidate the gospel they preach. If it did, no preacher in any age — including Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, whose moral failures Snuffer’s broader corpus catalogues without flinching — could be a faithful witness.
The framing critique here is not that Snuffer mentions Reformer moral failures in his broader corpus but that he uses them differently than he uses Joseph Smith’s. Smith’s moral struggles (per Snuffer) were the work of an imperfect prophet within an authentic restoration. The Reformers’ moral struggles are evidence that their work was not authentic restoration. The asymmetry is the framing move.
6. The Reformation as preparation for the Americas — and the Americas as preparation for restoration
Part 7 contains a passage that is historically accurate but theologically loaded. Snuffer observes that the Protestant Reformation came only two decades after the discovery of the Americas, that early colonists in North America were largely Protestants who knew the terrible history of Roman hegemony in Europe, and that those lessons inspired a political viewpoint that was incorporated into the Constitution of the United States — making the American government, in his framing, directly influenced by and indeed made possible by the Protestant Reformation.
This is true — and it is also, in the broader Mormon-tradition framework, the bridge to Joseph Smith. The Mormon argument is that God prepared the Americas, through Protestant colonization, religious liberty, and the Constitution, as the providential setting for the Restoration. Snuffer made this connection explicit in Testimony of Jesus, where he claimed that God spent half a millennium preparing the world before formally calling Joseph Smith to begin a restoration.
By concluding the Reformation series with the Reformation-prepared-the-Americas-prepared-the-Constitution paragraph, Snuffer is laying the rhetorical groundwork for what the broader corpus will then unfold: that the Reformation’s true purpose, in the providence of God, was not merely the recovery of the gospel for European Protestants, but the preparation of the geographic and political conditions under which Joseph Smith’s Restoration could unfold in upstate New York in 1820. The Reformation series is, in this respect, the prologue to the Joseph Smith story, even though Joseph Smith is not yet mentioned in the seven parts.
A Protestant Christian reading these seven parts in isolation would not catch this. A Mormon-tradition reader would. And a Christian who has already read Snuffer’s broader corpus can see clearly that the seven parts are operating as the first movement of a four-movement symphony whose final movement is Snuffer’s own claim to continue the work Joseph Smith began.
III. The Deeper Theological Question
Set aside the framing moves for a moment and engage Snuffer’s central theological claim about the Reformation directly. His position, stated most clearly in Testimony of Jesus and implicit throughout the Reformation series, is this: the Reformation was a necessary but insufficient movement that could correct abuses but could not recover what had been lost. Reformation can subtract; it cannot add. Restoration requires God to send His messenger.
This claim deserves direct theological engagement, because it is the load-bearing thesis the entire four-series corpus rests on. If the Reformation was substantively sufficient to recover the apostolic gospel, then no later restoration was needed. If it was not, then Snuffer has space to claim Joseph Smith and his own movement as the completion of unfinished work.
I want to make four points in response.
1. The Reformation did not need to “add”; the apostolic deposit was never lost
Snuffer’s argument that the Reformation could only subtract — could only remove medieval accretions — but could not add what had been lost depends on the prior claim that substantial portions of the apostolic deposit had been lost. If nothing had been lost, then subtraction would be the complete work, because the apostolic deposit, recovered cleanly, is itself sufficient.
The biblical witness is that the apostolic deposit was given once, was sufficient, and has been preserved.
“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” — 2 Timothy 3:16-17
Paul tells Timothy that the writings already in his hands are sufficient to make the man of God perfect and thoroughly furnished unto every good work. There is no further deposit yet to be added. There is no missing piece awaiting future restoration.
“Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” — Jude 1:3
Jude tells the early church that the faith was once delivered — hapax in the Greek, “once for all.” The participle is past-tense and complete. The faith is not still being delivered. It has been delivered. The believer’s task is to contend for what was given, not to await further giving.
If Paul and Jude are correct that the apostolic deposit was given once, was sufficient, and was to be contended for through subsequent generations, then the Reformation’s work — subtraction of medieval accretions to recover the deposit underneath — is exactly the work the gospel calls for in any age when accretions have obscured the original deposit. It is not a partial or insufficient work. It is the full work the situation required, because the original deposit was already sufficient and only needed the accretions cleared away.
2. The Reformers did “add” — they recovered what had been obscured but not lost
There is also a more nuanced answer to Snuffer’s subtraction-only critique. Snuffer claims the Reformers could only remove what was wrongly there; they could not restore what was missing. But this misdescribes what the Reformation actually did.
Luther did not merely remove indulgences. He recovered the doctrine of justification by faith alone — articulating what the apostle Paul had taught with a clarity the medieval church had progressively lost. Calvin did not merely remove papal authority. He produced the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a systematic recovery of the entire framework of Christian theology built directly from Scripture. Zwingli did not merely critique Roman ordinances. He recovered the priesthood of all believers and the centrality of Christ as sole mediator. Cranmer in England did not merely break with Rome. He produced the Book of Common Prayer, which has shaped English-speaking Christian worship for nearly five centuries.
These were not subtractions. They were recoveries — recoveries of the apostolic deposit that had always been there in Scripture, but that had been obscured by centuries of accretion. The Reformers did not need to add anything from outside the apostolic deposit, because the apostolic deposit was sufficient. They needed only to clear away what had been added, and to re-articulate clearly what was already there but had been buried.
This is what reformation looks like when it succeeds. The result is not less than apostolic Christianity. The result is apostolic Christianity recovered.
3. The “couldn’t recover what was lost” claim presupposes what it is trying to prove
Snuffer’s argument is structurally circular. The Reformation could not recover what was lost (he says) — therefore the church needed Joseph Smith’s restoration to recover it. But this argument depends on assuming, before the Reformation has even been examined, that something was lost that the Reformation could not have recovered. If nothing essential was lost, the entire claim collapses.
What does Snuffer say was lost? In Testimony of Jesus, he names:
- The fullness of the priesthood (which only Joseph Smith could restore)
- The fullness of the scriptures (which only Joseph Smith’s revelations could complete)
- The temple ordinances (which only Joseph Smith’s restoration could provide)
- The covenant relationship with the patriarchal fathers (which only Joseph Smith could re-establish)
- A “new dispensation” of prophetic authority (which only Joseph Smith could open)
But notice: every one of these “lost” elements is something the New Testament does not require, does not promise, and does not say was given to the apostolic church in the first place. The fullness of the Aaronic-and-Melchizedek priesthood as the LDS framework conceives it is not in the New Testament. The temple-endowment ordinances are not in the New Testament. The patriarchal blessing structure as practiced in Mormonism is not in the New Testament. The “new dispensation” of additional canonical scripture is not promised in the New Testament; what is promised is the closing of the canon (Jude 1:3 again, once delivered).
The “fullness” Snuffer claims was lost is the fullness of the Mormon framework, not the fullness of the apostolic gospel. The argument that the Reformation could not recover what was lost works only if you accept, in advance, that the Mormon framework is what was originally given. But that is the very point at issue. If the apostolic deposit, preserved in the New Testament, is the full deliverance of the Christian faith, then the Reformation recovered it sufficiently and nothing further was needed. If the Mormon framework is the full deliverance, then the Reformation was insufficient. The argument is circular: it assumes the conclusion (the Mormon framework is the apostolic original) in order to demonstrate the premise (the Reformation was insufficient).
4. The “stone cut without hands” image belongs to Christ, not to any post-apostolic movement
Snuffer’s borrowing of Daniel 2’s stone-cut-without-hands image, applying it first to the Reformation and ultimately to the Mormon Restoration, deserves direct response.
The historic Christian interpretation of Daniel 2 is that the stone is Christ Himself, cut from the mountain of God’s eternal purpose without human hands, who comes into history to break the kingdoms of the world (the metallic statue) and establishes the kingdom of God that fills the earth and stands forever. This interpretation is not a Protestant innovation. It is the consensus reading of the early church, the medieval church, and the Reformation churches. It is supported by the Book of Daniel itself, which describes the stone-kingdom as a kingdom that “shall never be destroyed” and “shall not be left to other people” (Daniel 2:44) — language that fits the eternal Kingdom of Christ but does not fit any post-apostolic human movement, all of which have either been destroyed, left to other peoples, or fragmented into rivalrous factions.
To apply the stone-cut-without-hands image to the Protestant Reformation is, on the historic Christian reading, a category error. The Reformation is part of the work the stone-kingdom does in history — the recovery of the gospel of Christ to fill the earth — but it is not itself the stone. The stone is Christ, and the kingdom that fills the earth is His kingdom, not any movement Luther or Snuffer or anyone else founded.
To apply the image to the Restoration is the same category error, intensified. The Mormon Restoration is not the kingdom that fills the earth and stands forever. It is, by Snuffer’s own honest admission in his broader corpus, a movement that has fragmented into approximately a hundred mutually-anathematizing factions, that has been under divine condemnation for 185 years according to its own scriptures, and that is now being re-restored through Snuffer’s 2017 Boise covenant. Whatever this is, it is not the stone-kingdom Daniel saw. The stone-kingdom cannot be destroyed and cannot be left to other people. The Mormon restoration has been both fragmented and quietly abandoned across multiple successor lineages.
Daniel’s stone-kingdom is Christ. The kingdom that fills the earth is Christ’s. No human movement can claim that prophetic image without taking to itself what belongs to Christ alone. The Reformation series’ invocation of Daniel 2 should be received with that correction in mind.
IV. What the Series Tells Us About the Larger Corpus
Stepping back, the Protestant Reformation series accomplishes three things in the larger architecture of Snuffer’s corpus.
First, it establishes Snuffer’s credibility as a careful Christian historian. A reader who comes to the series expecting Mormon polemic against Protestant Christianity finds instead a respectful, learned, and substantively accurate account. This builds trust. By the time the reader reaches the more contestable claims of the later series, the credibility built up here is doing rhetorical work — this man knows his history; I should take seriously what he says next.
Second, it positions Protestantism as a partial, preparatory movement. Through the framing moves I named in Section II — the personal-salvation-anxiety reduction, the stone-cut-without-hands allusion, the anniversary closure, the Counter-Reformation as competition, the asymmetric treatment of moral failure, the Reformation-prepared-the-Americas bridge — the series subtly closes off the possibility that the Reformation is itself the ongoing recovery of the apostolic gospel, and opens space for the further movement Snuffer’s broader corpus will then claim.
Third, it positions the Reformation as a model of how God works through individual prophetic figures at moments of historical convergence. The emphasis throughout on Luther’s courage, on the providential timing that brought Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Zwingli together, on the parallel with the American Founders, prepares the reader to expect that another such convergence might be at work in our own time, and that another such prophetic figure might be the agent through whom God works. The reader is being prepared to receive Joseph Smith — and now Denver Snuffer — within the same explanatory framework the Reformation has been fitted into.
This is the rhetorical work the series does. It is careful, it is substantively accurate, and it is positioning the reader for what comes next.
V. What I Say to the Fellowship
The Protestant Reformation series is a useful read for anyone in the fellowship who wants to understand the basic history of the Reformation, and I will not discourage anyone from working through the seven parts. The history is largely sound, and there is much in Snuffer’s treatment that even a Protestant Christian can read with profit and gratitude.
But the framing should be received with awareness. Snuffer is doing two things in these seven parts simultaneously: he is teaching Reformation history, and he is enrolling Reformation history into the larger Mormon-tradition narrative arc whose endpoint is his own movement’s claim to continue and complete what Luther began. The framing is not present in any single sentence one could point to. It is present in the cumulative shape of the seven parts read as a whole — in the choices about what to emphasize, what to set aside, which scriptural images to borrow, and which conclusions to leave hanging unanswered for the next series to take up.
The Christian response is not to flinch from the genuinely sound history. It is to receive what is true with gratitude — Snuffer has done careful work, and a Protestant Christian can honor a substantial portion of what he says — and to resist the framing that closes the Reformation off as a 500-year-old completed event awaiting further completion through Joseph Smith and Snuffer. The Reformation is not closed. The Reformation is continuing in every faithful evangelical congregation gathered this Sunday morning, in every Spirit-indwelt believer reading Paul in his own language, in every soul who has been justified by faith in Christ alone through grace alone according to Scripture alone for the glory of God alone. The energy Snuffer’s Part 7 calls us to recover is the same energy that has been animating the church without interruption since 1517, because the gospel the Reformers recovered is the gospel the apostles preached, and the gospel the apostles preached is the gospel of Jesus Christ — the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever (Hebrews 13:8).
We do not need a stone cut without hands beyond the Stone already cut. We do not need a kingdom that fills the earth beyond the Kingdom Christ is already building. We do not need a prophetic restoration beyond the apostolic restoration the Reformers recovered, which was itself only a recovery of what Christ delivered to His apostles two thousand years ago and has never lost.
The Reformation is enough — because what the Reformation recovered is enough.
Thomas
Postscript to the fellowship: As Thomas transmits the remaining three series in Snuffer’s corpus, I will engage each in turn. The next series presumably treats post-Reformation history and the restorationist precursors leading to Joseph Smith. After that, Joseph Smith’s restoration directly. After that, Snuffer’s own contemporary continuation. The argumentative work the present essay has done — naming the framing moves and the circular structure of the apostolic-deposit-was-lost claim — will carry forward into the engagement with each subsequent series, so that when the corpus’s final move is made, we will be ready to receive it on its own terms and to respond from the ground we have already established.
“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:11
“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” — Galatians 5:1
Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.