What Mormonism Claims to Have Restored: An Examination of LDS and Snufferite Restorationism

By: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND Date: May 23, 2026

Coming out of the May 17 fellowship meeting with Leonard and the encounter with Sheikh Ra Sadiq, several brothers have asked me to write more carefully about what Mormonism actually is — both the conventional Latter-Day Saint form and the Snufferite branch that one of our brothers follows. The questions are reasonable. Mormonism is, on the one hand, claiming to be Christianity, and on the other hand, claiming to be Christianity restored after a catastrophic loss. To understand whether either claim is true, and to engage Mormon brothers and sisters faithfully, we have to know what is actually being claimed and on what authority it rests.

This essay attempts a clean synopsis. I will cover, in order: the LDS claim about historic Christianity (the Great Apostasy doctrine); the development of LDS doctrine from Joseph Smith’s First Vision in 1820 to his death at Carthage Jail in 1844; the Book of Mormon and the question of its source; the Nauvoo temple endowment and its undeniable Masonic origins; the doctrine of exaltation and the three degrees of glory; the diagnostic question of what specifically Mormonism claims to supply that the apostolic deposit lacked; the Snufferite branch and how it differs from the LDS Church proper; the structural critique I have come to think is load-bearing for Christians engaging Mormons; and a pastoral note on how the fellowship should hold itself in relation to Mormon and Snufferite brothers and sisters.

I write as a Christian who sees Mormonism as structurally distinct from historic Christianity, and who therefore cannot ratify its core authority claims. I am not writing as a neutral observer. But I have tried to represent the LDS and Snufferite positions accurately, including consulting research drawn from contemporary LDS-history scholarship and from sympathetic LDS sources. Where I disagree, I have tried to disagree on identifiable grounds rather than by caricature. I assume my Mormon brothers and sisters are sincere, devoted, and in many cases more disciplined in their religious practice than many Christians I know. The disagreement is not about sincerity. It is about the structure of the authority claim and what that structure does to the believer over time.

I. The Great Apostasy: What Mormonism Claims Christianity Lost

To understand Mormonism, one must understand its claim about what came before. The LDS Church does not present itself as a denomination within Christianity in the sense that Lutherans, Reformed, Methodists, Baptists, or Pentecostals are denominations — that is, communities within a continuing Christian tradition that disagree on secondary questions while sharing a common biblical canon and a common confession of Christ. The LDS Church presents itself as the only true church on earth, restored after a period during which no true church existed at all.

This is the doctrine of the Great Apostasy. In its standard LDS form, the doctrine holds that after the death of the apostles around the end of the first century, the Christian Church fell into total corruption. Priesthood authority was lost. Saving ordinances became invalid. True doctrine was distorted by Greek philosophical influence, political maneuvering, and human additions. Revelation ceased. For roughly eighteen hundred years, from the late first century until 1820, no Christian church on earth held God’s authority, and no ordinances performed in any Christian church were valid.

This is a strong claim, and it is the load-bearing claim of the entire LDS system. If the Great Apostasy is not true — if historic Christianity in its various forms has continued to hold the genuine apostolic deposit, valid ordinances, and the Spirit’s working — then there is no need for a restoration, and Joseph Smith’s mission collapses at the foundation. Every distinctive LDS doctrine downstream from the Great Apostasy depends on it being true.

The Christian engaging Mormonism faithfully has to recognize that this is where the disagreement begins, and it is not a small disagreement. The standard Christian view, held across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions, is that the Church Christ founded has continued through history — sometimes in great purity, sometimes in significant corruption, sometimes through reformation from within, but never extinguished, never absent from the earth. Christ himself promised: upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matt 16:18). He also promised: lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world (Matt 28:20). The Christian who hears the LDS Great Apostasy doctrine has to ask: at what specific moment did the Church Christ promised to preserve actually disappear? When did Christ’s promise fail?

The LDS answer is that the Church disappeared with the death of the last apostle, likely the Apostle John around the end of the first century. But this is asserted, not demonstrated. The early church fathers — Polycarp, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Rome, Tertullian — wrote within the first and second centuries and clearly held the gospel content the apostles delivered. They worshipped Christ as God incarnate. They confessed the Trinity (in substance if not always in fully-developed Nicene vocabulary). They held the resurrection as historical and central. They administered baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They were martyred for their faith in the same Christ the apostles had proclaimed. The trajectory of total corruption that the LDS narrative requires does not match the documentary record of the second-century church. The corruption-narrative is theologically required by the LDS system, not historically derived from the evidence.

This matters because the LDS apologetic argument depends on a particular reading of church history — one in which there is a complete break between the apostolic age and everything that followed. If the break is not complete, then continuity has been preserved through Christ’s promise, and the restoration thesis loses its foundation. The historical record, fairly read, does not support the complete-break reading. It shows continuity through suffering, reformation through controversy, and the Spirit’s preservation of the gospel core across twenty centuries despite significant institutional failures along the way.

Still, the Great Apostasy is the entry-point for LDS theology. Everything that follows is built on the premise that something was lost that needed to be restored.

II. Joseph Smith’s Story: From the Sacred Grove to Carthage

The next thing to understand is the story of Joseph Smith himself, because every LDS claim ultimately rests on the credibility of his account of his own experiences. The biographical arc runs from 1820 to 1844, a period of roughly twenty-four years, during which the entire structure of LDS theology was assembled. The development was not all at once. It came in stages, and the stages are theologically distinct enough that it is fair to speak of an early Joseph Smith and a late Joseph Smith, with the dividing line falling roughly at the move to Nauvoo, Illinois in 1839.

The early period (1820 to roughly 1838) is the period of the First Vision, Moroni, the golden plates, the translation of the Book of Mormon, the founding of the church, the restoration of priesthood through angelic visitation, the early revelations published in the Doctrine and Covenants, and the establishment of communities in New York, Ohio, Missouri, and eventually Illinois. The late period (1839-1844) is the period of the Nauvoo temple endowment, the introduction of plural marriage (polygamy) as a doctrine, the doctrine of eternal progression and plurality of gods (the King Follett Discourse, 1844), the priesthood keys for sealing, and the full ritual system that defines mainstream LDS temple worship today.

The First Vision is the foundational moment in LDS theology. Joseph Smith reported that in the spring of 1820, at age fourteen, he went into a grove of trees near his family’s farm in upstate New York to pray about which Christian church he should join. He had been moved by the religious revival in his region and wanted to know which denomination was true. According to his canonical 1838 account, two personages appeared to him — God the Father and Jesus Christ — and told him that none of the existing Christian churches were true, that they were all corrupt, and that he was to join none of them. This vision, in LDS theology, established Joseph Smith as a prophet called by God to begin a restoration.

There are important wrinkles in the First Vision account that any honest examiner has to acknowledge. Joseph Smith gave multiple accounts of the First Vision during his lifetime — the 1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842 accounts — and they differ on significant details. The 1832 account mentions only one personage (the Lord) and presents the vision primarily as a personal forgiveness experience. The 1838 account, which became canonical, mentions two personages and emphasizes the rejection of all existing churches. The 1842 account (the Wentworth Letter) gives yet another framing. These variations are well-documented in mainstream LDS-history scholarship; they are not a fringe critique. LDS apologists explain them as Joseph emphasizing different aspects for different audiences, or as memory development over time. Critics see them as evidence that the canonical 1838 account was a retrospective construction shaped by the theological needs of the developing church. The variations do not by themselves disprove the vision, but they complicate the simple narrative that the First Vision was a fixed, foundational event reported consistently from the beginning.

The biblical tension with the First Vision is also worth noting. John 1:18 says no man hath seen God at any time, and 1 John 4:12 repeats this categorically. The biblical position is that the Father has never been seen directly by any human being in his unmediated essence; what humans have seen are theophanies (visible manifestations of God in some form) and Christophanies (pre-incarnate appearances of the Son), with the Son himself being the visible image of the invisible God (Col 1:15, John 14:9). Joseph Smith’s First Vision in its 1838 form claims a direct visual experience of both the Father and the Son standing together. This is, on the standard biblical reading, an unprecedented kind of vision that has no parallel in the canonical record and that sits uneasily with the categorical statements in John 1:18 and 1 John 4:12.

After the First Vision, the next major reported event is the visitation of the angel Moroni in 1823. Moroni, according to Joseph’s account, was a resurrected being who had been a prophet-historian in an ancient American civilization. He told Joseph about a set of golden plates buried in a hillside near his family’s farm, containing the record of that civilization, and instructed him on how the plates would eventually be entrusted to him for translation. Joseph received the plates in 1827 and translated them between 1827 and 1829, producing the Book of Mormon, which was published in 1830. The translation, according to Joseph, was accomplished by means of two stones set in a frame, called the “interpreters” or the “Urim and Thummim” (a borrowed term from the Old Testament high priest’s breastplate). Joseph reportedly looked into the stones, saw English text, and dictated it to a scribe.

The Church of Christ (later renamed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) was formally organized on April 6, 1830, with six original members. Within months it had grown significantly. The early growth was driven by missionary work and by the appeal of the Book of Mormon’s claim to be a restored ancient scripture validating Christianity in the Americas.

The priesthood restoration is the next major piece. According to Joseph Smith’s accounts, in 1829 John the Baptist appeared and conferred the Aaronic priesthood on Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. Soon afterward, Peter, James, and John (the resurrected apostles) appeared and conferred the Melchizedek priesthood. These angelic priesthood-restoration events grounded the LDS claim that the Church now held genuine apostolic authority — the same authority that, in their telling, had been lost during the Great Apostasy.

The church moved from New York to Ohio (1831), then to Missouri, where the LDS settlers experienced significant persecution and were eventually expelled. They moved to Illinois and established Nauvoo in 1839. Nauvoo grew quickly to become one of the largest cities in Illinois.

The Nauvoo period is the second great phase of Joseph Smith’s theological development. Several major doctrines emerged in this period that were not part of the early movement:

In May 1842, Joseph Smith introduced the temple endowment ceremony. This was a structured ritual involving washing, anointing, clothing in temple garments, instruction in the creation/fall/redemption narrative, and the conveying of “tokens, signs, and penalties” — a ritual structure that closely parallels Masonic ritual (which I will examine in Section IV).

In 1843, Joseph Smith dictated D&C 132, which established the doctrine of eternal marriage and authorized plural marriage (polygamy) as part of the restoration. Joseph Smith himself practiced plural marriage from at least the late 1830s, though he denied it publicly during his lifetime. After his death, Brigham Young made plural marriage a public doctrine and the LDS Church practiced it openly until 1890, when the Manifesto officially ended the practice (though splinter groups continue it to this day).

In April 1844, three months before his death, Joseph Smith delivered the King Follett Discourse at the funeral of a deceased member. In this discourse, he articulated the doctrine of eternal progression — that God the Father was once a man who progressed to godhood, that men can do the same, and that there is a plurality of gods. As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become, in the later formulation by Lorenzo Snow. This is one of the most theologically distinctive LDS doctrines, and it is at substantial variance with historic Christian monotheism.

Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage Jail in Illinois on June 27, 1844, by a mob. He was thirty-eight years old. His death triggered a succession crisis in the church, eventually resolved (in the mainstream branch) by Brigham Young’s leadership of the migration to Utah and the establishment of Salt Lake City as the new LDS center. Other branches developed alongside the Utah-based church — the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now the Community of Christ), the various fundamentalist polygamist groups, and (much later) the Snufferite movement, which I will discuss in Section VII.

This is the historical framework. The question for the Christian engaging Mormonism is not primarily whether Joseph Smith was sincere — he likely was — but whether his claims about angelic visitations, priesthood restoration, the source of the Book of Mormon, and the late-Nauvoo doctrines are actually true. To that question we now turn.

III. The Book of Mormon and the Question of Its Source

The Book of Mormon is the central distinctive scripture of Mormonism. It is presented as the translated record of ancient American civilizations — primarily the Nephites (descended from the prophet Lehi, who left Jerusalem around 600 BC) and their adversaries the Lamanites — culminating in a visit by the resurrected Christ to these peoples around AD 34. The book is presented as containing the fullness of the gospel and the plain and precious truths that had been lost from the Bible during the Great Apostasy.

The structure of the Book of Mormon includes historical narratives, theological discourses, prophetic warnings, and a sustained Christological focus — the resurrected Christ’s visit to the Americas is the central event, parallel in importance to his crucifixion in the Old World. The Book of Mormon affirms the divinity of Christ, the atonement, the necessity of repentance and baptism, and many other doctrines familiar to Christianity. The Mormon claim is that this book restores the parts of the gospel that the Old World scribes corrupted or lost.

The Book of Mormon’s authority rests entirely on Joseph Smith’s account of its source. He claimed an angel showed him the plates, he translated them by divine gift, he showed them to a small group of witnesses, and then he returned them to the angel. The plates are no longer available for examination. The translation method (looking into seer stones placed in a hat, according to multiple firsthand accounts) is unverifiable. The witnesses’ statements, while attested in the early LDS movement, came from a small group of close associates of Joseph Smith, several of whom later left the church or had complicated relationships with their original testimony.

The empirical challenges to the Book of Mormon’s historical claims are substantial. The book describes pre-Columbian American civilizations using horses, cattle, sheep, wheat, barley, iron tools, swords, chariots, and various other items that the archaeological and biological record indicates were not present in the pre-Columbian Americas. The book describes large-scale wars and major cities that have not been identified archaeologically despite extensive investigation. The linguistic record shows that Native American languages do not derive from Hebrew or Egyptian, contrary to what the Book of Mormon’s Lehite-descent narrative would predict. The DNA evidence shows that Native American populations are primarily of Asian descent (via the Bering land bridge) rather than of Middle Eastern descent, contrary to what the Lehite-origin narrative predicts. None of these are fringe critiques; they are the considered conclusions of mainstream archaeology, linguistics, and genetics.

LDS apologists have offered various responses — that the Book of Mormon describes a small group within the larger pre-Columbian population (the “limited geography” model), that the terms for animals and items might be translation choices for unfamiliar things, that the DNA evidence cannot definitively rule out a small Lehite contribution, and so on. These responses are not unreasonable, but they require substantial recalibration of the straightforward historical reading the Book of Mormon itself seems to present. The defensive moves are sophisticated, but they are defensive moves.

There is also the question of the book’s nineteenth-century context. The theological concerns the Book of Mormon engages — anti-Catholicism, anti-infant-baptism, anti-Masonic conspiracy (in the Gadianton Robbers material), debates about the doctrine of grace, the gathering of Israel — are precisely the religious controversies that animated 1820s upstate New York, the region known as the “Burned-Over District” for its religious revivalism. The Book of Mormon’s theological emphases fit comfortably into the religious imagination of Joseph Smith’s specific time and place, in ways that would be more difficult to account for if the text were truly an ancient American document being faithfully translated.

What I want to emphasize is not that any one of these challenges is conclusive but that, taken together, they shift the burden of proof. The Book of Mormon is a substantial claim — an ancient American civilization, a divinely-mediated translation, a restored fullness of the gospel — and the standard of evidence required to substantiate such a claim is correspondingly high. The available evidence does not meet that standard. The book stands or falls on Joseph Smith’s personal testimony, with no independent verification possible.

For the Christian, this matters because the LDS view treats the Book of Mormon as scripture on par with — and in some respects superior to — the Bible. If the Bible’s authority rests on its multi-vocal testimony across four thousand years, with extensive external corroboration (fulfilled prophecy across centuries, the historical record of the early church, the manuscript tradition with thousands of manuscripts allowing textual reconstruction, the archaeological record largely consistent with the biblical narrative in its central claims), then the Book of Mormon’s authority rests on a structurally different foundation. The Bible is, in the vocabulary I have been developing in recent essays, a multi-vocal canon — dozens of authors writing across many centuries, in many genres, with many independent witnesses to a single redemptive story. The Book of Mormon is a mono-vocal deposit — one revelator, one translation event, one set of plates, with no independent verification of either the source or the process. The structural difference matters.

IV. The Nauvoo Endowment and the Masonic Question

Of all the puzzles in LDS history, the Nauvoo temple endowment is the one that requires the most careful examination, because the historical evidence is unambiguous and the theological implications are significant.

In March 1842, Joseph Smith was inducted as a Master Mason in the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge, advancing through the three Blue Lodge degrees in unusually rapid succession. Approximately six weeks later, in May 1842, Joseph Smith introduced the Nauvoo temple endowment ceremony. The structural parallels between the Masonic ritual and the Nauvoo endowment are not minor or coincidental. They include:

• A staged ritual progression through degrees or stations
• The use of specific hand grips and signs as identifying tokens
• The conveying of “penalties” associated with violating sacred secrecy (the LDS Church removed the explicit penalty-language in 1990)
• A ritual narrative tracing humanity’s progress from a primordial state through a fall to redemption
• Specific ritual clothing including aprons and other vestments
• The wearing of an inner garment as a symbol of covenant commitment
• The use of stylized “lectures” or instruction-passages explaining the symbolic meaning of the elements
• An emphasis on secrecy regarding the specific content of the ritual

LDS historians, including faithful believing scholars such as Richard Bushman (in his biography Rough Stone Rolling) and others, acknowledge these parallels openly. The question is not whether the parallels exist — they unambiguously do — but how they are to be theologically explained.

Joseph Smith’s own explanation, repeated by later LDS leaders, is that Freemasonry preserved corrupted fragments of ancient temple rites going back to Solomon, and that God, through Joseph Smith, was restoring the pure original form that Masonry had only partially retained. On this account, the similarities are not evidence of borrowing but of common ancient origin: Masonry preserved what it could of the ancient ritual; Joseph Smith restored what it lost. This is the standard apologetic move.

The problem with this explanation is that there is no historical evidence that Freemasonry preserves ancient Solomonic temple rites. Freemasonry, as a fraternal order, traces its organized history to the early eighteenth century in Britain, with various older legendary genealogies that historians do not credit. The Masonic ritual elements that parallel the Nauvoo endowment are themselves of eighteenth-century origin within the Masonic tradition, not of ancient origin. So the LDS claim that Masonry “preserved” ancient rites that Joseph Smith then “restored” requires positing an unbroken transmission of ancient ritual material through eighteenth-century European Masonry — a claim for which no historical evidence exists. The simpler explanation, the one that fits the documentary record, is that Joseph Smith encountered Masonic ritual through his initiation in March 1842 and incorporated its structure into the endowment he introduced six weeks later.

If this is correct, then the temple endowment is not an ancient restoration but a nineteenth-century synthesis of Masonic ritual structure with Joseph Smith’s developing theological vocabulary. This is not a damning conclusion in itself — many religious traditions adopt ritual structures from their cultural context. But it does undermine the specific LDS claim that the endowment is an ancient ordinance restored after a long absence. The endowment is, on the historical evidence, a new ritual introduced in 1842 with very recognizable nineteenth-century-Masonic-American sources.

The temple garment is part of this same ritual complex. It is not mentioned in the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants (prior to the Nauvoo period), or the Pearl of Great Price. It is not connected to anything in Moroni’s reported revelations, the golden plates, or the Urim and Thummim. It originates in the Nauvoo endowment ceremony of May 1842, where participants are given a “garment of the holy priesthood” to wear under their clothing as a reminder of temple covenants. The garment’s design has changed several times in LDS history, most notably in the 1979 two-piece revision. It is, in its origin, a ritual artifact of the late-Joseph-Smith Nauvoo period, not an ancient practice.

For a Christian examining Mormonism, the Masonic question is significant because it touches the credibility of the broader restoration claim. If the most distinctive ritual element of LDS temple worship is, on its face, a nineteenth-century adaptation of Masonic forms rather than an ancient restored practice, then the broader claim of restored ancient practice has to be evaluated against the possibility that other “restored” elements are similarly nineteenth-century innovations dressed in ancient vocabulary. This is the structural concern: not that ritual borrowing is bad in itself, but that the specific LDS claim about the ritual’s origin does not match the evidence.

V. The Three Degrees of Glory and the Doctrine of Exaltation

What does Mormonism claim to offer that historic Christianity does not? This is the question every serious convert eventually asks, and the answer reveals the substantive theological core of LDS doctrine.

In May 1832, Joseph Smith dictated D&C 76, which describes three “degrees of glory” or kingdoms into which the righteous and the unrighteous are sorted in eternity. The three kingdoms are:

• The Celestial Kingdom, the highest, where God the Father dwells. This kingdom is itself divided into three sub-levels, the highest of which is exaltation. Only those who have received the LDS temple ordinances and have been sealed in eternal marriage can enter the highest level of the Celestial Kingdom.
• The Terrestrial Kingdom, the middle, where Jesus Christ is present but the Father is not. This is reserved for honorable people who did not fully accept the gospel in mortality — well-disposed unbelievers, partly-faithful believers, and similar categories. According to LDS theology, this is where most morally-decent non-Mormon Christians will go.
• The Telestial Kingdom, the lowest of the three glories, where neither the Father nor the Son is directly present, but the Holy Ghost is. This is for the wicked who eventually repent during a post-mortal probationary period (the LDS spirit world / spirit prison).

There is also a category of Outer Darkness for the very small number of “sons of perdition” — those who, having known the truth, willfully reject it and remain in rebellion.

This three-tiered cosmology is one of the most distinctive features of LDS theology, and it does not appear in historic Christianity. The biblical evidence LDS theology cites for it is primarily 1 Corinthians 15:40-42, where Paul speaks of “celestial bodies” and “bodies terrestrial” and of differences in “glory” between the sun, the moon, and the stars in connection with the resurrection. This is not, on the historic Christian reading, a description of three separate kingdoms after judgment. It is a description of the different glory of the resurrection body compared to the earthly body. The LDS use of these terms in D&C 76 is an interpretive overlay, not a straightforward biblical exposition.

The doctrine of exaltation is the load-bearing element of the LDS soteriology, and it is the doctrine that most clearly distinguishes Mormonism from historic Christianity. Exaltation, in LDS theology, is not merely salvation in the historic Christian sense — it is godhood. Those who attain exaltation become gods themselves, capable of eternal increase (producing spirit offspring), ruling their own worlds, progressing eternally in glory. The Lorenzo Snow couplet captures it: As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become. This is theosis in a literal and ontological sense, not in the analogical or participatory sense in which Eastern Orthodox theology has historically spoken of theosis as union with God’s energies while remaining a creature.

The metaphysical implications are substantial. LDS theology, particularly in its Joseph-Smith-late and Brigham-Young-era expressions, holds that God the Father himself was once a man who progressed to godhood through a similar process of faithfulness and ordinances. There are, in this view, many gods — perhaps infinitely many — with our God the Father being the God of this particular world or system. This is henotheism (worship of one god while acknowledging the existence of others), not the monotheism of biblical revelation. The biblical pattern is unequivocal: I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me (Isa 45:5); Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD (Deut 6:4). The LDS doctrine of plurality of gods, however carefully it is presented, is in substantial tension with the foundational monotheism of both Testaments.

Eternal marriage and family sealing are part of the same exaltation framework. Marriages performed in LDS temples by sealing-priesthood authority continue beyond death; marriages not so sealed dissolve at death (“till death do us part” being, on the LDS view, a confession of insufficient marriage). Children sealed to parents in temple ordinances become part of the eternal family unit. The deceased can have ordinances performed for them by proxy (baptism for the dead, temple sealing for the dead) so that they may, if they accept the gospel in the spirit world, still attain the exaltation that requires these ordinances.

This is, in many ways, the substantive doctrinal heart of conventional LDS Mormonism. It is what Mormonism offers that Christianity does not: not just salvation, but exaltation; not just heaven, but godhood; not just resurrection, but eternal increase; not just family reunion, but eternal family-sealing. For someone who finds historic Christian eschatology insufficiently rich, the LDS offer is genuinely more elaborate. For someone who reads the biblical material as setting boundaries on what God promises (a resurrection to eternal life with God, but not deification in the ontological sense; a new heavens and new earth, but not a multiplicity of worlds; reconciliation with the Father, but not equality with him), the LDS offer is an overreach.

VI. The Diagnostic Question: What Was Actually Missing?

This brings me to what I think is the load-bearing question for any Christian examining Mormonism. It is the question Charlie’s pressure at the May 17 fellowship meeting was implicitly pointing toward, and it is the question I tried to develop in Section III of the fellowship summary. The question is simple to state:

What specifically was missing from the apostolic gospel that the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, the Nauvoo endowment, and the LDS prophetic tradition supply?

This question matters because it forces the LDS claim to be evaluated on the level of substantive content rather than on the level of institutional authority. If something genuinely necessary for salvation was lost during the Great Apostasy and restored by Joseph Smith, then the restoration is justified. If nothing genuinely necessary was lost — if the apostolic deposit, as preserved in the New Testament and applied through the indwelling Spirit, is sufficient — then the restoration is offering a competing institutional authority rather than supplying a missing soteriological content.

When I ask this question of the LDS claim, I do not find a satisfying answer.

Was the gospel of grace through faith in Christ missing? No — the New Testament preserves it with overwhelming clarity (Eph 2:8-9, Rom 3:21-26, Rom 5:1, Gal 2:16, Phil 3:9, and many more). Was the doctrine of Christ’s atoning death and resurrection missing? No — it is the central claim of the apostolic preaching (1 Cor 15:3-8 names it as the gospel of first importance). Was the indwelling of the Holy Spirit missing? No — John 14-16 develops it explicitly, Acts 2 records its fulfillment, and Romans 8 articulates its operation in the believer’s life. Was the ordinance of baptism missing? No — Christ commanded it and the apostles practiced it (Matt 28:19, Acts 2:38-41). Was the Lord’s Supper missing? No — Christ instituted it and Paul carefully preserves it (1 Cor 11:23-26). Was prayer access to the Father through the Son missing? No — Christ taught it (John 14:13-14, John 16:23-24), and the apostolic writings repeatedly affirm it. Was the moral law summarized in the Great Commandment missing? No — Christ articulated it and the New Testament works it out in detail.

What, then, did the Book of Mormon supply that was missing? The LDS answer would name the doctrine of exaltation, eternal marriage, the three degrees of glory, the priesthood-keys system, the temple endowment, plural marriage (in its historical period), and the doctrine of plurality of gods. But the appropriate question is whether any of these were missing in the sense of being soteriologically necessary, or whether they were added in a way that goes beyond what the apostolic gospel actually requires.

I do not think they were missing. I think they were added. The apostolic gospel, as preserved in the New Testament canon, is sufficient for salvation. The believer who confesses Christ as Lord, repents of sin, is baptized into the name of the Triune God, receives the indwelling Spirit, and walks in the apostolic teaching has everything that the New Testament names as necessary. The LDS additions go beyond the apostolic deposit; they are not restorations of what was lost but accretions onto what was already complete.

This is where the sola fide commitment becomes important to name openly. My argument that nothing was missing depends on the conviction that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ’s atoning work, received by the indwelling Spirit, with the canonical Scripture sufficient as the rule for sanctification afterward. A serious Mormon interlocutor would not deny that grace is necessary; he would deny that grace alone is sufficient. He would say that ordinances, temple sealings, priesthood authority, and continuing prophetic revelation are also necessary, layered on top of grace. The disagreement is not whether grace is necessary but whether anything else is also necessary. I hold to sola fide — salvation by grace through faith alone, with the indwelling Spirit and the apostolic Scripture sufficient — and that conviction is the foundation of my argument that nothing was missing. A reader who does not share that conviction will have to engage the sola fide question first, before the canon-closure argument can land.

The biblical case for sola fide is, in my view, overwhelming. Ephesians 2:8-9 (For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast) is the clearest single statement. Romans 3:28 (Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law) is direct. Galatians 2:16 (Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ) is emphatic. The works that James 2 calls for are the evidence of saving faith, not a co-condition of salvation; the Reformed reading of Romans-Galatians-James as a coherent whole, with faith justifying and works confirming, is exegetically defensible and theologically clean. The LDS framework that requires temple ordinances, eternal marriage, and priesthood-mediated authority as conditions of the highest salvation adds something the apostolic gospel does not require.

The biblical tests for true vs. false prophets reinforce the diagnostic. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 says that a prophet whose teaching draws people after other gods is to be rejected even if his signs and wonders come to pass; the primary test is doctrinal consistency with prior revelation about God’s character. Deuteronomy 18:21-22 says that a prophet whose predictions do not come to pass is not from God. Joseph Smith’s mature theology of God — eternal progression, plurality of gods, God as an exalted man (King Follett Discourse) — diverges substantially from the eternal, immutable, monotheistic God revealed in both Testaments, which puts pressure on the Deut 13 test. Some of his specific predictions, including the prophecy that a temple would be built in Independence, Missouri within his contemporaries’ lifetimes (D&C 84, 1832) and various imminent-Second-Coming predictions, did not come to pass as stated, which puts pressure on the Deut 18 test. The biblical tests for true prophethood do not unambiguously vindicate his claim.

Paul’s warning in Galatians 1:8-9 is the verse I find most directly applicable to the structural form of the Mormon claim. Paul writes: though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed. Paul is anticipating exactly the scenario of a later angel-mediated revelation supplementing or replacing the apostolic gospel, and he instructs the church to reject it. The Mormon claim of an angel-Moroni-mediated restoration is structurally exactly the scenario Paul has in view. Paul’s instruction is to reject it, even if it comes from an angel from heaven.

Hebrews 1:1-2 makes the related point from the positive direction: God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. The Son is the final word — the eschatological revelation that completes what the prophets had been pointing toward. Jude 3 confirms the canonical settlement: the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. Once delivered (Greek hapax paradotheisē) means once-for-all, definitively, not iteratively or progressively. The apostolic deposit is the once-for-all settlement of revelation in the Son.

These passages, taken together, do not just fail to support the addition of post-apostolic single-revelator deposits to the canon — they explicitly anticipate and warn against the pattern. The Christian who rejects Joseph Smith on the basis of these texts is not closing his ears to genuine revelation; he is exercising the discernment the apostolic deposit itself instructs him to exercise.

VII. The Snufferite Branch: What It Keeps and Rejects

The Snufferite movement is a relatively recent breakaway from mainstream LDS Mormonism, and it deserves separate treatment because it has a different structure from the conventional LDS Church and because one of our fellowship brothers is a sincere participant in it. Understanding the Snufferite position helps us understand what is actually load-bearing in his commitments.

Denver Snuffer, born 1952, is a Utah attorney who was a faithful LDS member for many decades. He began publishing books in the early 2000s describing what he reported as a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. His teaching emphasized that the LDS Church had become institutionally corrupt, particularly under and after Brigham Young’s succession, and that the true continuation of Joseph Smith’s mission required a return to Joseph Smith’s earlier emphasis on direct personal encounter with Christ rather than on institutional priesthood structures and temple ritual systems. Snuffer was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 2013 over the content of his teaching, particularly his claim to have received revelation that the LDS Church no longer possessed valid priesthood authority.

After his excommunication, Snuffer continued to write, teach, and gather a community of followers — sometimes called the Remnant movement — who accept his prophetic role while rejecting the LDS Church’s institutional structure.

What does the Snufferite movement keep from Joseph Smith and from Mormonism more broadly?

It keeps Joseph Smith as a legitimate prophet, particularly in his early period through approximately 1830-1836. It keeps the Book of Mormon as inspired scripture. It keeps the broader Doctrine and Covenants from Joseph Smith’s era (with some interpretive flexibility about which sections are authoritative). It keeps the doctrine of the Great Apostasy as the framing for why a restoration was needed. It keeps the idea of an open canon — that God can and does continue to give revelation to chosen servants in the present.

What does the Snufferite movement reject from mainstream Mormonism?

It rejects the Brigham Young succession as illegitimate or at least seriously compromised. It rejects the LDS institutional hierarchy as corrupt — including the office of the LDS Church President, the Quorum of the Twelve, the General Authorities, and the institutional structure built up since the 1840s. It rejects the LDS temple endowment in its current form, viewing it as a Masonic-influenced innovation that has been further distorted by institutional control. It rejects the LDS temple garment as institutionally and ritually problematic. It largely rejects the elaborated doctrine of exaltation, plurality of gods, eternal progression, and the celestial-terrestrial-telestial cosmology in its developed LDS form (though there is variation among Snufferites on these points). It rejects the LDS priesthood-authority claim — that the LDS Church holds the keys conveyed by Peter, James, and John to Joseph Smith — as having been forfeited by institutional unfaithfulness.

What it offers instead is a Joseph-Smith-without-Brigham-Young Christianity: the prophetic claim, the Book of Mormon, and the continuing-revelation framework, but without the temple ritual system, the priesthood hierarchy, the plural-marriage history, or the polytheistic-exaltation cosmology. Snuffer himself claims direct contact with Christ, in the form of personal visitations, and teaches that other faithful seekers can have similar contact through repentance, scripture study, and prayer. The Snufferite movement is structured loosely, without a formal institutional hierarchy; gatherings are small, leadership is charismatic rather than institutional, and the practical religious life of the participants looks in many ways like that of a sincere evangelical Christian who happens to read the Book of Mormon alongside the Bible.

For Christians engaging Snufferite believers, this is important. The Snufferite is not, in most cases, defending exaltation, polygamy, or temple ritual. He is defending Joseph Smith’s role as a prophet, the Book of Mormon’s status as scripture, and the open-canon framework that allows Snuffer to be a continuing prophet today. His soteriology is in most cases recognizably Christian — Christ’s atoning death and resurrection as the ground of reconciliation, faith in Christ as the means, baptism as the response, the indwelling Spirit as the seal. The disagreement with historic Christianity is narrower than it is with conventional LDS Mormonism; it is concentrated on the question of post-apostolic prophetic authority and on the status of the Book of Mormon.

This makes the Snufferite case in some ways more theologically subtle than the LDS case. With the LDS Church, the disagreement is wide — exaltation, plural marriage (historically), Masonic-influenced temple ritual, polytheism, institutional authoritarianism. With the Snufferite, the disagreement is concentrated almost entirely on the epistemological question: can the canon be added to by a post-apostolic single revelator? The doctrinal content of the additions is, in the Snufferite case, less divergent from Christianity than it is in the LDS case. The question of authority remains as sharp as ever.

VIII. Why a Sincere Christian Might Follow Snuffer

Why would a person who reads the Bible carefully, confesses Christ sincerely, and lives a moral life nonetheless follow Denver Snuffer rather than remain in or move to historic Christianity? The question is worth asking, and the answer is structural rather than doctrinal.

The Snufferite who has left the LDS Church but kept Joseph Smith is not, typically, persuaded by the LDS Church’s authority claims any longer. He has seen the institution up close and found it wanting. He has, in many cases, been hurt by the institution or has witnessed its hurt of others. He has read the LDS history honestly enough to recognize the Masonic origin of the endowment, the variations in the First Vision accounts, the problematic elements of plural marriage history, and the corruption of the post-Joseph-Smith institutional structure. He is no longer credulous about the LDS Church.

But he has not given up on Joseph Smith. Why?

I think the answer is that Joseph Smith, in his early period, offered something powerful that the Snufferite cannot easily give up: the claim that God speaks directly today, through a living prophet, with new revelations that supplement the closed canon of the past. This is the open-canon claim, and once a person has embraced it, returning to a closed-canon historic Christianity feels like a contraction of the spiritual life. It feels like saying God spoke through the apostles, then stopped, and now we are stuck with a closed book and an indwelling Spirit that whispers but no longer announces. The closed-canon position is, for the Snufferite, insufficient. He wants the living Word in his own day.

The Snufferite finds in Denver Snuffer’s claimed encounters with Christ a continuation of the open-canon promise that Joseph Smith began. Snuffer claims direct revelation. Snuffer teaches that direct revelation is available to anyone who seeks it earnestly. This is a powerful spiritual promise. Compared to it, the conventional Christian assertion that the Spirit guides through the canonical Scripture, through prayer, through providence, and through the believer’s conscience — which is in fact the historic Christian position — sounds less immediate, less particular, less alive.

The Snufferite is also, very often, drawn to the remnant identity. He believes himself part of a small faithful group who have been called out from a corrupt institution to participate in the continuing restoration. This is an identity-forming claim that gives existential meaning to the believer’s life. He is not just one of many Christians; he is part of the called-out remnant in the latter days. The identity is psychologically powerful.

So the Snufferite’s commitment is not held primarily for doctrinal reasons. It is held for epistemic reasons (the open canon, the living prophet, the direct revelation) and identity reasons (the remnant, the called-out, the continuing restoration). The doctrinal content of his Christianity may be largely conventional; what makes him a Snufferite is the framework of authority within which he holds that conventional content.

This is what makes the conversation difficult and the disagreement durable. The Christian arguing doctrinal points with a Snufferite will often find substantial agreement — on the deity of Christ, on the atonement, on the resurrection, on the indwelling Spirit, on the necessity of repentance and baptism, on the priority of love. The conversation only becomes difficult at the structural-epistemological level: can the canon be added to, by a single post-apostolic revelator, through angelic visitation and personal encounter, with the additions becoming binding on those who receive them? The historic Christian answer is no; the Snufferite answer is yes. The disagreement is at the level of how truth is known and authorized, not at the level of what truth is.

IX. The Structural Critique: Mono-Vocal versus Multi-Vocal Authority

Let me close the analytical section with the structural critique that I have come to think is the load-bearing one for Christians engaging Mormons of either the conventional or Snufferite stripe.

The biblical canon is multi-vocal. Sixty-six books written over roughly four thousand years by dozens of authors in many genres — law, history, prophecy, wisdom, psalmody, gospel, epistle, apocalyptic. The voices range from Moses to John, from kings to shepherds, from Levitical priests to fishermen and tax collectors. The central figure of Christ, the Word incarnate, is himself one voice within this multi-vocal canon; his recorded teaching is comparatively brief, scattered across four gospels written from four different angles. The biblical revelation is the cumulative testimony of many witnesses across many centuries, with the Holy Spirit doing the internal application work for each believer who comes to it. The canon’s authority is reinforced by the convergence of its many independent voices on a single redemptive story — the parallax argument, I have been calling it.

Mormonism, whether in its LDS or Snufferite form, layers on top of this multi-vocal biblical foundation a mono-vocal deposit: Joseph Smith’s single set of received revelations, in the LDS case extended by the institutional prophetic succession and in the Snufferite case extended by Denver Snuffer’s continuing claims. The mono-vocal layer carries the unavoidable signature of its single human medium. Whatever Joseph Smith’s particular spiritual sensibilities, theological emphases, cultural assumptions, and personal limitations were, they are imprinted on the revelation he reported. The same applies to Denver Snuffer. The single voice cannot be separated from the message it transmits.

This is the structural concern. When a believer makes the mono-vocal deposit operatively authoritative in his life — when he allows it to interpret, supplement, or override the multi-vocal biblical witness — he is binding himself to the spirit that operates through that particular medium. The spirit’s signature, whatever it is, becomes the shape his spiritual life takes over time. The mono-vocal source has structurally narrower validation than the multi-vocal canon. It cannot be cross-checked against parallel witnesses. It cannot be verified against converging testimony. Its claim to authority rests entirely on the credibility of one person, with no independent triangulation possible.

This concern applies regardless of whether the content of the mono-vocal deposit appears to contradict the Bible. Even if the content is largely non-contradictory but additive — as is largely the case in the Snufferite version — the structural concern remains. The believer is binding himself to a particular spirit through a particular medium. The medium leaves an imprint. The imprint shapes the believer over time. The shaping moves the believer along a spectrum from the parallax-rich multi-vocal canon toward the narrower mono-vocal source. This is not a damnable error in any direct sense; it is a structural narrowing of the spiritual life.

This is, I think, the most honest critique of Mormonism in either of its forms. It does not depend on identifying specific content-level errors (though those exist). It does not depend on disproving Joseph Smith’s character (which I will not attempt — he may have been sincere). It depends on the structural observation that any post-apostolic single-revelator deposit, however well-intentioned and however well-aligned with the apostolic gospel in content, narrows the validation surface of the believer’s epistemology and binds him to a particular medium’s spiritual signature.

The apostolic gospel, by contrast, is multi-vocally attested. The eyewitness apostolic generation, writing in different cities, with different theological emphases, in different genres, converged on a single Christ and a single gospel. The cross-checking is built in. The believer who rests on the apostolic deposit rests on a parallax-rich foundation. The believer who rests on a post-apostolic single revelator, however earnest, has a narrower foundation. The difference is structural, not just historical.

X. Pastoral Closing

How, then, do we hold ourselves in relation to Mormon and Snufferite brothers and sisters?

First, with love. The Lord’s commandment to love one another is not conditional on doctrinal agreement. The Mormon brother whose primary allegiance is to Christ — and Leonard as a Snufferite is a brother in Christ regardless of the secondary commitments to a tradition we cannot ratify. He is to be loved as the Lord loves him.

Second, with clarity. Love does not require pretending that the structural concerns I have outlined here do not exist. The Mormon claim to be the restored true church, with priesthood authority that historic Christianity lost, is a substantive claim with substantive implications, and pretending we agree with it when we do not is neither honest nor loving. Honest disagreement, expressed with care, is the appropriate posture. The fellowship has been working on the texture of such disagreement in recent months and will continue to do so.

Third, with patience. The Snufferite who has invested decades in his framework, and the LDS member who was raised in his tradition and finds his identity in it, are not going to be persuaded by a single conversation, however careful. Persuasion, where it happens, will happen through long fellowship, through the Spirit’s work in the brother’s heart, and through the slow accumulation of pastoral evidence that the Christian framework is alive, life-giving, and worth attention. Our role is to hold the witness faithfully, not to demand immediate conversion.

Fourth, with the recognition that the Spirit may do more work in our Mormon brothers’ hearts than we know. The Lord knows his sheep. The Lord saves his own. We do not have to do the Spirit’s job for him. Our task is to bear witness, to love, to invite, and to leave the harvest to the harvest-master.

Fifth, with the recognition that the Christian tradition has its own institutional failures — corrupt clergy, abusive structures, doctrinal drift in various denominations, complicity with worldly power, failure to love the poor and the marginalized. The Mormon critique of historic Christianity’s failures is not always wrong about the facts; the Reformation itself was, in part, a response to such failures within the Catholic tradition of its day. Our witness is not the witness of a perfect tradition to a flawed one. It is the witness of imperfect believers to an unrepealed gospel. The gospel itself is what matters. The institutions that carry it are servants of the gospel, not the gospel itself. A Christian witness to a Mormon must hold this in mind: we are not asking him to switch tribes; we are asking him to attend to the apostolic gospel that is sufficient on its own terms.

The May 17 fellowship meeting, with Charlie pressing the Pharisee question and the Sheikh bringing his Moorish-Islamic challenge in the same afternoon, was a useful occasion for the fellowship to develop the framework that this essay attempts to systematize. The framework is not complete; the application is ongoing. But the basic structure is, I think, sound: historic Christianity rests on the multi-vocal apostolic deposit, post-apostolic single-revelator additions narrow the believer’s epistemic foundation, the content of those additions is rarely soteriologically necessary, and the gospel of grace through faith in Christ’s atoning work — once delivered to the saints — is sufficient.

The Christian Underground, as Charlie named it on May 10, is the patient soul-by-soul work of converting the world to Christ through witness, love, good works, and the reasoned defense of the gospel. Engaging Mormon and Snufferite brothers and sisters is part of that work. It is not the work of a single conversation; it is the work of long fellowship. The Lord of the harvest is the one who brings the harvest. We are servants of the field.

— Thomas