260428 Denver Snuffer – Series 1/4 – Reformation

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 28, 2026 | World Religions/Theology/Philosophy

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.

Christ the Son of the Living God

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Upon This Rock

What Christ Was Building, and Why It Has Not Fallen

Standalone Theological Essay | April 28, 2026

Context: This essay is the natural companion to The Restoration That Was Not Needed (April 27, 2026). That essay argued, against the Snuffer/Mormon restoration claim, that Christ promised His church would not perish. The present essay does the exegetical work to defend that promise carefully — walking through Matthew 16:18 in its context, examining the three serious readings of upon this rock, and showing why the reading that integrates the rest of the New Testament’s foundation language also forecloses every restoration claim. The point is not merely defensive. Matthew 16:18 is, equally, the productive promise that Christ is building something — and what He is building is what the Christos Civitas project is consciously trying to participate in.

To the Fellowship —

There is a verse that has carried more theological weight than perhaps any other in Christian history, and it is one Christians ought to be able to handle carefully:

“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — Matthew 16:18

The Roman Catholic Church has built nineteen centuries of papal authority on this verse, reading it to identify Peter himself as the rock, and the bishops of Rome as Peter’s apostolic successors holding the keys he received. Protestant traditions have, with varying degrees of confidence, rejected that reading and offered alternatives. The Mormon restoration tradition has, in its own way, conscripted the verse — claiming that the church Christ promised here was lost in apostasy and required a 19th-century prophetic restoration to be re-established.

Each of these uses of the verse cannot be right. Some of them must be wrong. And the question is significant enough that it deserves to be settled carefully — because the answer determines whether the Christ who spoke these words is trustworthy, whether the church He promised exists, where it is, and how anyone today can be sure they are standing on the foundation Christ Himself laid.

This essay walks the question carefully. I will look at the immediate context of Matthew 16, examine the Greek wordplay that has produced the exegetical disputes, lay out the three serious readings of upon this rock, and show why the reading that integrates the rest of the New Testament’s foundation language is also the reading that forecloses every restoration claim — Catholic, Protestant, or Mormon. I will close by showing why this same verse is, equally, a productive promise about what Christ is building, and why the Christos Civitas vision is simply the conscious participation in that ongoing work.

I. The Setting at Caesarea Philippi

The Matthew 16 conversation does not happen in a neutral place. Caesarea Philippi was a region thick with religious meaning, sitting at the foot of Mount Hermon in the far north of Israel. It was filled with pagan shrines — temples to Pan, an Augusteum honoring the Roman emperor’s divinity, and most strikingly, a great cliff face containing what locals called the Gates of Hades: a deep cavern from which a spring flowed, said to be the entrance to the underworld.

Christ chose this location. He took His disciples to a place visibly associated with both pagan religious authority and the very gates of hell He was about to mention. And there He asked His question:

“Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” — Matthew 16:13

The disciples reported the public opinions: John the Baptist returned, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. All of these were high opinions. None of them was the right one. Then Christ pressed:

“But whom say ye that I am?” — Matthew 16:15

Peter answered with the confession that became the hinge of Christian history:

“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” — Matthew 16:16

Christ blessed Peter immediately, naming the source of the confession:

“Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” — Matthew 16:17

Only after the confession is given, and only after Christ has identified its divine origin, does He speak the verse that has carried so much weight:

“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — Matthew 16:18

The gates of hell are not metaphorical scenery here. They are visible behind Him as He speaks. He is making, in front of the actual gates of Hades, a promise that the church He is building will not be overcome by them. The setting is doing theological work.

II. The Greek and the Wordplay

The verse hangs on a wordplay in the Greek that English partly preserves and partly obscures. “Thou art Petros, and upon this petra I will build my church.”

Petros — the masculine form — names Peter and connotes a stone, a piece of rock you could pick up and throw. Petra — the feminine form — names the bedrock, the rock-mass on which something can be built. The two words share a root and are obviously related, but they are not identical, and the shift from masculine to feminine in the second clause is what has given the verse its exegetical tension.

Three readings are grammatically possible:

Reading 1 — Peter himself is the rock. The masculine/feminine shift is explained by the underlying Aramaic Kepha, which has no gender variation. Kepha would naturally render into Greek as masculine Petros when used as a personal name, but as feminine petra when used as a common noun for rock. On this reading, Christ is making a deliberate name-and-meaning identification: You are Rock, and on this rock I will build my church. This is the Catholic reading and has serious historical and scholarly support.

Reading 2 — Peter’s confession is the rock. The masculine/feminine shift is intentional precisely because Christ is naming a different referent in the second clause. The rock is not Peter himself but the truth Peter has just confessed: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The church is built on the truth that Christ is Christ, the Son of the living God. This is a venerable Protestant reading, going back to the Reformers, and it has serious exegetical support.

Reading 3 — Christ Himself is the rock, identified by Peter’s confession. The masculine/feminine shift is intentional because the rock is neither Peter nor the verbal confession as such, but the Person Peter’s confession identifies — Christ Himself. The confession is the means by which Peter (and every subsequent believer) recognizes the rock that has always been there. This is Augustine’s mature reading, Calvin’s reading, and the reading that aligns most directly with the rest of the New Testament’s foundation-language. It is the reading I will defend below.

Honest scholarship recognizes that all three readings are grammatically possible from the Greek alone. The deciding factor cannot be the Greek wordplay in isolation. It has to be the broader testimony of the New Testament about what the foundation of the church actually is. And that testimony is decisive.

III. What the Apostles Said the Foundation Was

The apostolic deposit answers the foundation question repeatedly and consistently. We do not have to guess what the apostles believed Christ meant when He said upon this rock, because the apostles told us what the foundation of the church is — sometimes within a few decades of the conversation at Caesarea Philippi.

“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:11

Paul is unambiguous. There is no other foundation. There can be no other foundation. The foundation is Jesus Christ — not Peter, not the confession as a verbal formula, but the Person.

“And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.” — Ephesians 2:20

Paul again. The believers are built on the foundation laid by the apostles and prophets — but the cornerstone, the load-bearing piece without which nothing stands, is Jesus Christ Himself. The apostles are the masons; Christ is the stone.

“Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded.” — 1 Peter 2:6

Now look at who is writing these words. This is Peter himself, in his own epistle, citing Isaiah and identifying the cornerstone — and he does not identify himself. He identifies Christ. Peter himself, in inspired apostolic writing, locates the foundation of the church in Christ rather than in himself. If anyone in church history would have been entitled to claim the Petrine foundation reading, it was Peter. He did not.

“Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders rejected, the same is made the head of the corner.” — 1 Peter 2:6-7

Peter unfolds the metaphor. Christ is the elect, precious cornerstone. Believers are precious to Him as they believe in Him. The disobedient reject Him, but He is made the head of the corner regardless of their rejection. The whole picture is built around Christ as the foundation, with believers being added as living stones (verse 5) into the edifice.

The apostolic deposit’s own answer to “what is the foundation” is therefore unambiguous: Christ Himself. Reading 3 is the reading that integrates Matthew 16:18 with the rest of the apostolic deposit.

This means the wordplay in Matthew 16 is doing exactly what the wordplay in 1 Corinthians 3 and Ephesians 2 and 1 Peter 2 is doing: identifying Christ as the rock, with Peter (named Petros after the rock that is Christ) serving as a stone in the edifice but not the foundation of it. The confession Peter made — “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” — is the means by which Peter recognized the foundation that was already there. Every subsequent believer who has made the same confession in truth has joined the same church on the same foundation.

IV. The Reformers’ Refinement

The Reformers, while rejecting the Catholic Petrine reading, were not always agreed on whether to land on Reading 2 (Peter’s confession) or Reading 3 (Christ Himself). The two readings are closer than they may appear, because the confession identifies Christ — and so what the confession is about is what the rock actually is.

Calvin, in his commentary on Matthew, settled clearly on Reading 3. He argued that Christ has built His church upon Himself, not upon Peter — and that Peter could only be a foundation of the church in any derivative sense if he himself rested first upon Christ as the only true foundation.

Augustine, who had earlier in his career leaned toward Reading 1, later corrected himself in his Retractations. He acknowledged that he had at one point said the church was founded upon Peter as the rock, but he wrote that he came to explain the verse differently — that the church is built upon the One whom Peter confessed when he said “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” On this corrected reading, Peter (named after the rock that is Christ) represents the person of the Church which is built upon that rock, and the careful grammar of the verse itself supports the distinction: “Thou art Peter” was said to him, but not “Thou art the rock.”

This is, I believe, exactly the right refinement. The confession and the Christ identified are inseparable. The confession is the means by which Christ-as-foundation is recognized; the confession is not, as a verbal formula, the foundation itself. The Christ Peter confessed is the rock.

This refinement also explains why Christ blessed Peter’s confession in the immediately preceding verse. “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). The blessing is for correctly identifying who Christ is. Peter saw what the disciples needed to see — what every future believer would need to see — and what the Father had revealed to him about Christ became the standing testimony of who the foundation is.

This is also why every subsequent believer who makes the same confession enters the same church on the same foundation. Peter’s confession was not a unique, unrepeatable foundational act. It was the first instance of what would become the universal mark of every Christian: the Spirit-given recognition that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

V. The Implications for the Restoration Question

Now we can return to the question the previous essay engaged. The Snuffer claim — and the Mormon claim more broadly — is that the church Christ promised in Matthew 16:18 was lost. That apostolic Christianity perished within a few generations. That the visible church that has existed for nineteen centuries is not the church Christ was building. That a 19th-century prophet was needed to restore what was lost.

With the foundation question settled, the restoration claim collapses cleanly.

The church Christ promised to build is built on Christ Himself. Not on Peter. Not on the apostolic verbal formula. Not on the institutional structures that grew up to serve and sometimes corrupt the church’s life. The foundation is the eternal Word made flesh, the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever (Hebrews 13:8). That foundation cannot be lost, because the foundation is the very Christ who said the gates of hell would not prevail.

The church is identifiable by its preservation of the apostolic confession. Wherever, in any generation, anywhere on earth, believers have confessed in truth that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the church Christ promised has been standing on the foundation Christ laid. That confession has been preserved continuously, in writing, since the close of the New Testament. The apostolic deposit (the canonical scripture) preserves it textually. The Spirit who indwells believers reveals it inwardly. Every faithful witness in every generation has carried it forward. The chain has not broken.

Corrupt institutions have grown up around the church without becoming the church. The Catholic medieval hierarchy was, in many ways, corrupt. The state-church arrangements of post-Constantinian Christendom were often more political than spiritual. The Protestant denominations have produced their share of moral failure. Modern evangelicalism has its compromised celebrity pastors and its theological soft spots. None of this has any bearing on whether the church Christ promised has perished. The church Christ promised is the body of those who confess Christ in truth and are indwelt by His Spirit — and that body has existed, in every generation, regardless of which institutional structures around it were faithful and which were not.

The “we confess Christ too” Mormon counter has a precise answer. Mormons (Salt Lake LDS, Snuffer, every variant) will insist that they confess Christ as the Son of God. The answer is: the words are similar, the Christ identified is not. Peter’s confession identifies the eternal Word, who was God and was with God, in whom dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. That Christ has no spirit-brother named Lucifer. That Christ did not progress to godhood. That Christ accomplished the atoning work on the Cross, not in Gethsemane. The Mormon “Christ” of Joseph Smith’s revelation is, in critical respects, a different Person identified by similar words. The foundation is not the words as words but the Christ those words identify. Get the Christ wrong, and you have built somewhere else, regardless of which words you use.

This is, I believe, the complete and final answer to every restoration claim. Christ’s promise stands. The church He promised has been standing on its foundation since Pentecost. The foundation cannot be moved, because the foundation is Christ Himself, and Christ Himself has not been moved.

VI. The Productive Promise

But Matthew 16:18 is not only a defensive promise. The verse contains two clauses, and we have spent most of our attention on the second one — the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. The first clause is at least as important and is, I believe, where the Christos Civitas vision is most directly anchored:

“Upon this rock I will build my church.”

Christ is building. Active, present, ongoing. The verb oikodomeo in the Greek is not passive or static. It is the language of a master craftsman engaged in continuous construction. From the moment Peter made the confession at Caesarea Philippi, Christ has been building something on the foundation that He Himself is. The construction has not stopped. It is happening now. It will continue until what He is building is finished — until the Bride is presented to the Bridegroom not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing (Ephesians 5:27).

What is He building? The New Testament’s answer is consistent. He is building:

A body with Him as the head (Ephesians 1:22-23, 1 Corinthians 12)
A temple indwelt by His Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, Ephesians 2:21-22)
A people taken out of every nation, tribe, and tongue to be a kingdom of priests (Revelation 5:9-10)
A family of brothers and sisters of the firstborn Son (Romans 8:29, Hebrews 2:11-12)
A city whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:10), which will descend at the end as the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21)

Each of these images is a description of the same reality: a community of people, redeemed by the Cross, indwelt by the Spirit, growing in conformity to Christ, related to one another and to Him as members of one body — and bearing visible witness in the world through the life together that the Spirit produces.

This is what Christ has been building since Pentecost. Imperfectly visible, yes. Always under attack from the gates of hell, yes. Sometimes obscured by corrupt institutions claiming to be the church, yes. But genuinely present in every generation, growing toward the completion Christ promised, and never overcome.

VII. The Christos Civitas Connection

The Christos Civitas project is not the founding of something new. It is the conscious participation in what Christ has been building since Pentecost.

When the fellowship gathers on Sunday and Peter’s confession is implicitly the ground we are standing on — Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God — we are not constituting a new church. We are joining the one Christ promised at Caesarea Philippi to build, the one He has been building for two millennia, the one that has had faithful witnesses in every generation and that will never be overcome.

When we speak of building a Christian civic order — citizens whose first allegiance is to the King whose Kingdom is not of this world but is being made manifest in this world — we are speaking of the visible expression of the church’s life as it grows. The Christos Civitas is what happens when the citizens of the Kingdom take their citizenship seriously enough to let it shape their politics, their commerce, their education, their family life, their culture. It is not a separate project from what Christ is building. It is the natural overflow of what He is building when His citizens begin to act consistently with their citizenship.

This is also why the Christos Civitas project does not need a restored prophet, a new revelation, a re-opened canon, or any of the apparatus the Mormon tradition has felt it needed. The foundation is already laid. The apostolic deposit is already given. The Spirit is already indwelling every believer. What remains is for the citizens of the Kingdom to live consistently with their citizenship — and the shape of that consistent living, applied to civic and cultural life, is the Christos Civitas.

The work is ours to do, but the foundation is not ours to lay. “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

VIII. What the Reading Forecloses, and What It Opens

Let me close by naming what this reading of Matthew 16:18 forecloses and what it opens.

What it forecloses:

The Catholic Petrine reading — that the bishop of Rome holds unique apostolic authority by succession from Peter as the personal foundation of the church. The personal foundation is Christ, not Peter; succession from Peter does not transmit a personal-foundational authority Peter himself never claimed.
Every restorationist claim — that the church Christ built was lost and required some 19th-century prophetic restoration. The church cannot be lost because the foundation cannot be moved.
The view that institutional purity is the mark of the true church — whether Catholic, Protestant, or Restorationist. Visible institutions can be more or less faithful, but the church is identifiable by Peter’s confession preserved in truth, not by institutional perfection.
Sola ecclesia in any form — the view that any visible institution is, as such, the church. The church is the body of those who make the apostolic confession in truth and are indwelt by the Spirit. Visible institutions serve that body but do not constitute it.

What it opens:

Confidence in Christ’s promise. The church has not perished. It cannot perish. It has been standing on its foundation since Pentecost and will stand until the Bridegroom returns.
Liberty for the believer. You do not need a prophet, a hierarchy, a magisterium, or a Restoration Edition to be standing on the foundation. You need the apostolic confession (which the closed canon preserves) and the indwelling Spirit (whom Christ has sent to every believer). That is what the foundation requires. That is what makes you a citizen.
Catholicity in the deepest sense. The church Christ has been building includes every believer, in every generation, in every nation, who has made the apostolic confession in truth — Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Pentecostal, the unnamed faithful in places church history barely records. We are joined, across all these lines, by the foundation we share, even where institutional walls obscure the joining.
The vocation of building. What Christ is building, He invites us to participate in. The Christos Civitas vision is one form of that participation — a deliberate effort to let citizenship in the Kingdom shape civic and cultural life. Other believers will participate in other ways. The body has many members, and the Spirit gives gifts severally as He wills.

The verse that has carried more weight than perhaps any other in Christian history is, when read carefully, the most reassuring promise in the gospel for those who wonder whether they are standing on the right ground. The right ground is Christ, identified by the apostolic confession, preserved in every generation, indwelling every true believer by the Spirit He sent. The gates of hell have never prevailed and will never prevail.

We are on the foundation. We have always been on the foundation. The work now is to live consistently with the citizenship we have, and to invite every soul we meet into the same citizenship — including the ones currently inside Restoration movements, who have been told the foundation was lost and need to be told the truth: the foundation is Christ, the foundation has not been lost, and the door to the foundation is the same confession Peter made on a Galilean hillside two thousand years ago — that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

That is enough. That has always been enough. That will always be enough.

Thomas

“For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building. According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:9-11

Renaissance Ministries | Standalone Theological Essay One heart to make Christ King.

Denver Snuffer Theology Rebuttal

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Restoration That Was Not Needed

A Christian Response to Denver Snuffer’s “Testimony of Jesus” and the Restoration Claim

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 27, 2026

Source: Denver Snuffer lecture transcript, “Testimony of Jesus,” posted on the front page of learnofchrist.org. The lecture spans roughly 100 minutes and provides a historical-theological narrative running from the Catholic apostasy through the Protestant Reformation through Joseph Smith to Snuffer’s own 2017 Boise covenant. A companion site, Covenant Christians, serves as the public-facing front of the same movement. A series of 24 videos and their transcripts are also referenced on learnofchrist.org. These address the History of Christianity and the same restorationist framework. The present essay anticipates its content but does not yet engage it directly.

Context: This essay was prompted by Leonard Hofheins’s transmission of the Snuffer transcript to the fellowship and by Thomas’s framing of the central question: was Joseph Smith’s revelation the actual restoration of the lost gospel, or was it (in Susan’s reading) a demonic visitation of an angel-of-light type whose mostly-true message contained the small, fatal poison that has held its adherents in bondage ever since? This is the third essay in the present sequence engaging the Mormonism question — building on the April 25 Mormonism essay, the April 26 Snuffer evaluation of his “Culture by Precept and Practice” lecture, and the April 19 fellowship meeting analysis. It is the engagement of the central restoration claim itself — the claim on which everything Snuffer says and everything Leonard believes structurally depends.

To the Fellowship —

The “Testimony of Jesus” lecture is, in many ways, the Snuffer lecture I have been waiting to read. Where “Culture by Precept and Practice” focused on movement-building and procedural concerns — the patriarchal blessing vote, the Restoration Edition, the eschatology of the modest fulfillment — “Testimony of Jesus” makes the load-bearing historical-theological argument that the entire Snuffer movement depends on. It is, in essence, the apologetic for why a restoration was needed at all. And because it states the restoration claim with unusual clarity, it gives us the opportunity to engage the claim with corresponding clarity.

The lecture’s argument, distilled: Apostolic Christianity perished within a few generations of the apostles. The Catholic Church became corrupt and then dominant. The Reformers — Luther, Calvin, Knox, Zwingli, the Campbells — were sincere and courageous, but reformation can only subtract; it cannot restore what was lost. Restoration requires God to send His messenger. Joseph Smith was that messenger. The Mormon institutions that followed Smith all failed to preserve what he restored — first by failing to build the Nauvoo temple, then by descending into adultery, then by Brigham Young’s polygamy and blood atonement and the Mountain Meadows massacre. After 185 years of condemnation, in 2017 a small body of believers in Boise accepted the covenant Joseph Smith began but could not finish. The restoration is now resuming, the new scriptures are in print, the temple will be built, and a single generation will see the second coming.

I want to engage this argument at four levels. First, what is true and admirable in it. Second, the historical claim that apostolic Christianity perished. Third, the load-bearing question: was Joseph Smith God’s messenger, or was the visitation of another kind? And fourth, what the Christian who wishes to honor every honest seeker — including Leonard, including Snuffer himself — owes by way of response.

This essay is longer than the previous ones because the claim being engaged is the foundation under everything else. If the foundation holds, the entire Mormon tradition — Salt Lake, Snuffer, every variant in between — has a structural ground. If the foundation does not hold, every restorationist movement falls with it, however refined or sincere. We owe the claim our most careful attention.

I. What Is True and Admirable in the Lecture

Before any critique, let me name what the lecture gets right.

1. The historical narrative of medieval Catholic corruption is largely accurate. Snuffer’s account of the period running from the 1302 papal claim of universal salvation-authority through the Black Death (1347 onward), the Western Schism (1378-1417, with three popes simultaneously claiming Petrine authority), the burning of Hus and Savonarola, and the corruption of indulgence-sales by Pope Leo X and John Tetzel, is the standard Reformation-era reading and is supported by careful Reformation scholarship. The Protestant Reformers’ courage in opposing this system was real, and they did face the genuine prospect of being burned at the stake. We should not flinch from acknowledging this.

2. His treatment of Luther and the Reformers is generous and accurate. He honors Luther’s personal devotion, his intellectual courage, the centrality of Romans 1:17 in his conversion (“the just shall live by faith”), and the providential coincidence of Gutenberg’s press making widespread Bible-reading possible for the first time. He gives Calvin a fair summary of TULIP doctrine — total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints — without caricature, and he honors Zwingli’s contribution to the rejection of the 1302 Catholic claim that there was no salvation outside the Roman Church.

3. He acknowledges the Reformers’ moral failures. He names Luther’s vicious response to the Peasants’ Revolt (in which Luther wrote that the rebellious peasants should be slain like mad dogs). He names Calvin’s role in the execution of Michael Servetus. He names John Knox’s involvement in the murder of Cardinal Beaton. This is honest history, and most Protestant accounts soften these episodes. Snuffer does not, and that honesty deserves credit.

4. He honors the Campbells’ restorationist instinct. Thomas and Alexander Campbell — the founders of what became the Disciples of Christ / Churches of Christ tradition — were genuine seekers whose impulse toward “where the Scriptures speak we speak, where they are silent we are silent” was a sincere attempt to recover apostolic simplicity. Snuffer’s summary of their motto and their motivation is accurate.

5. His critique of Salt Lake LDS is, again, internally substantive. The lecture is unsparing toward Brigham Young, whom Snuffer characterizes as an adulterer who instituted polygamy by personal authority, presided over the reign of terror in the intermountain West, bears moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, and admitted he was a “Yankee guesser” rather than a prophet of Joseph Smith’s caliber. Snuffer’s framing is harsher than my own April 25 essay — and on these specific historical claims, his framing is closer to what serious Mormon historiography (Fawn Brodie, D. Michael Quinn, Will Bagley on Mountain Meadows) supports. The convergence of internal Mormon dissent and external Christian critique on the moral catastrophe of Brigham Young’s leadership remains one of the most important things to name in any treatment of Mormonism.

6. He acknowledges the textual fragility of the Book of Mormon. Snuffer admits the original Book of Mormon contained an average of more than one copy error per page, that Joseph Smith never finished correcting these errors during his lifetime, and that the errors remain in the text used by mainstream Mormon institutions today. This is unusual candor from within the Mormon tradition — and it deserves to be acknowledged. He uses this acknowledgment to argue for the necessity of the Restoration Edition. We will come back to whether the acknowledgment actually accomplishes what he wants it to accomplish.

7. He is right that Reformation could not restore by subtraction alone. This observation, taken on its own terms and within his framework, is logically coherent. If the apostolic faith was substantively lost — if essential pieces were genuinely missing rather than merely obscured by ecclesial corruption — then the Reformers’ restoration-by-subtraction would necessarily be incomplete. Subtraction can only remove what should not be there; it cannot add what is missing. Snuffer’s framing of the Reformers as faithful within the limits of what reformation alone can accomplish is, structurally, fair to them.

These seven points should be acknowledged before any criticism is mounted. The lecture is not a screed. It is a serious, learned, and rhetorically capable presentation of a particular reading of Christian history.

II. The Decisive Historical Claim — Did Apostolic Christianity Perish?

Now to the substance. The entire lecture rests on one historical-theological claim: that apostolic Christianity, as a living tradition, perished between the close of the New Testament and the rise of medieval Catholicism, leaving Christianity as merely an institutionalized belief system without the Spirit’s gifts, without the apostles’ authority, and without the saving connection to the living Christ.

Snuffer cites John Wesley’s sermon “The More Excellent Way” to support this claim — Wesley’s observation that after Constantine, “the Christians had no more of the Spirit of Christ than the other heathens,” that the church was “turned heathens again and had only a dead form left.” Snuffer cites Roger Williams’s conclusion that “Christianity fell asleep in the bosom of Constantine.” On the strength of these citations, Snuffer concludes: “Christianity had not merely declined, it had perished.”

This is the load-bearing claim. If it is true, restoration is necessary. If it is false, the entire Mormon project is unnecessary at best and false at worst.

The biblical foreclosure

Christ’s own promise stands directly against the claim that His church perished:

“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — Matthew 16:18

“Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” — Matthew 28:20

These are not sentimental flourishes. They are explicit, on-the-record promises by Christ Himself that His church will not be overcome by the gates of hell and that He will personally accompany her until the end of the age. If apostolic Christianity perished — not merely declined, but perished, as Snuffer asserts with deliberate force — then Christ broke His promise. The gates of hell did prevail. The “I am with you alway” was conditional, despite the unconditional language. The eternal Word made flesh, who said “heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35), failed to keep His own commitment to His own bride.

This is not a small theological problem for the restorationist position. It is the central one. Either Christ kept His promise — in which case some faithful witness to apostolic Christianity has been preserved through every generation — or Christ did not keep His promise, in which case He is not who He said He was, and the entire restorationist project is being undertaken in the name of a Christ who has already proven Himself unreliable to His own word.

The historical reality the claim ignores

The claim that apostolic Christianity “perished” also runs into the obstinate fact of two millennia of Christian witness. To make the claim, Snuffer must dismiss as inadequate or apostate:

The Apostolic Fathers — Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, who personally knew the apostles and whose writings preserve the apostolic gospel within decades of the New Testament’s completion.
The Cappadocian Fathers — Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa — who articulated Trinitarian orthodoxy against Arianism in the 4th century.
Athanasius, whose Life of Antony shaped monastic Christianity and who held the line on Christ’s full deity at Nicaea.
Augustine, whose Confessions and City of God remain among the most penetrating works of Christian theology in any age.
The Celtic monasteries — Iona, Lindisfarne, Skellig Michael — which preserved Christian scholarship and the gospel through the Dark Ages and re-evangelized northern Europe.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition — never under Roman Catholic authority, which preserved a continuous liturgical and doctrinal tradition from the apostles forward.
The Waldensians, the Lollards under Wycliffe, Jan Hus and the Hussites — pre-Reformation movements that preserved scripture-centered faith and suffered persecution for it.
The Anabaptists, the Moravians, the Quakers — Reformation-era movements that recovered believer’s baptism, simple communal life, and missionary witness.
The Reformation Reformers themselves — whom Snuffer’s lecture honors as sincere and courageous, but whose substantive faith-by-grace gospel he must somehow categorize as inadequate to be “restoration.”
The post-Reformation evangelical witness — the Great Awakening under Edwards and Whitefield, the Methodist revival under Wesley (whom Snuffer cites against historic Christianity, though Wesley himself died a Trinitarian, sacramental Anglican who would have been horrified to see his words enlisted for Joseph Smith’s project), the missionary movement of William Carey and Hudson Taylor, the abolition movement led by Wilberforce, the modern Pentecostal renewal.

To sustain Snuffer’s claim, all of this must be reduced to “merely an institutionalized belief system” without the Spirit, without saving truth, without apostolic continuity. That reduction is not historically credible. It is the move a polemicist must make to clear the deck for the restorationist project, but it cannot survive serious engagement with the actual record.

The Wesley citation, examined

Snuffer cites John Wesley to support the apostolic-Christianity-perished claim. The citation is real, but the use Snuffer makes of it is not what Wesley meant.

Wesley’s sermon “The More Excellent Way” reflects on the decline of charismatic gifts (tongues, healing, prophecy) in the post-Constantinian church. Wesley was making a claim about the gifts of the Spirit in their extraordinary first-century manifestation, not a claim about the salvation of souls or the continuity of true faith. Wesley believed — emphatically, as a lifelong Anglican — that Christ’s church had continued in unbroken witness through every age. He spent his life within that church, reforming it from within, never claiming it had perished or that he was a prophet sent to restore what was lost. His Methodist movement was not a restoration; it was a renewal of an existing tradition Wesley took to be valid.

Snuffer’s citation of Wesley to support the perished-Christianity thesis is, in effect, conscripting Wesley to a position Wesley would have rejected. The same is true of Roger Williams. Williams’s despair at the corruption of state-church Christianity led him to a radical congregationalism — not to the conclusion that no true Christian existed, but to the conviction that no civil authority should compel religious conformity. He spent the rest of his life as a Christian, in fellowship with other Christians, awaiting eschatological renewal — not waiting for a 19th-century New York prophet to restore what had been lost.

The lecture’s appeal to Protestant authorities is rhetorically effective but historically misleading. Wesley and Williams cannot be enlisted as proto-Mormons. They were, and remained, Christians within the very tradition Snuffer claims had perished.

III. The Decisive Theological Question — Was Joseph Smith God’s Messenger?

Even if we set aside the historical impossibility of the perished-Christianity claim, there is a more focused question that has to be asked. Granting that the medieval Catholic Church had grave problems, granting that the Reformation was incomplete on its own terms, granting that there was room for genuine renewal — was Joseph Smith the messenger God sent to accomplish that renewal?

This is the question Thomas posed in his framing, and it deserves a careful answer.

Three possibilities

There are three logically possible accounts of what happened when Joseph Smith reported being visited by personages in the woods near Palmyra in 1820, by the angel Moroni in 1823, and on subsequent occasions over the years that followed:

The Mormon account: Joseph Smith was telling the truth. God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him; angels delivered to him the golden plates and the keys of priesthood authority; he translated the Book of Mormon by the gift and power of God; the resulting movement is the restoration of true apostolic Christianity, which had perished and required this divine intervention.
The fraud account: Joseph Smith fabricated his visions, fabricated the plates, dictated a long manuscript whose source-materials likely included Solomon Spalding’s manuscripts, Sidney Rigdon’s familiarity with the Campbellite restoration, Joseph’s own reading of the King James Bible and contemporary religious literature, and his own considerable creative imagination. The movement that resulted was a successful 19th-century American religious entrepreneurship, comparable to other 19th-century American sects (the Shakers, the Millerites, the Christian Science movement) but more durable and more theologically ambitious.
The deception account — the one Susan flagged in fellowship and the one Thomas’s framing asks us to consider seriously: Joseph Smith was sincerely and personally deceived. His visions were not fabrications, but they were also not from the God of the Bible. The personage he encountered in the grove and the angel Moroni were what Paul warned about in 2 Corinthians 11:14 — “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness.” The deception was sufficiently sophisticated to include vast swaths of biblically-resonant material — covenant language, Christ-centered piety, elevated moral standards, demands for chastity and family integrity — and was therefore sufficient to deceive sincere seekers across multiple generations.

I want to engage all three possibilities seriously, but particularly the third, because it is the one Thomas asked us to consider and the one most easily dismissed as paranoia.

Why the deception account deserves serious engagement

The fraud account is what hostile critics have always claimed and what serious Mormon historians like Fawn Brodie have argued in detail. It is not without evidence — the documentary record is clearer than Mormon apologetics has historically allowed — but it is the easy answer, and it requires Joseph Smith to be a more cynical figure than the historical record fully supports. He died for what he was preaching. He suffered enormously. His personal life shows signs of genuine religious devotion intermixed with the more troubling features (the polygamy, the King Follett discourse’s progression-of-God doctrine, the Council of Fifty’s political ambitions). The fraud account does not fully explain his persistence in the face of personal cost.

The deception account, by contrast, fits the data more comprehensively. It accounts for:

Joseph Smith’s sincerity. A genuinely deceived man will preach what he believes is true and die for it. This is consistent with Smith’s documented behavior.
The mixture of biblical truth with structural error. A demonic deception of the angel-of-light type is most effective when it is mostly true. A pure lie has no purchase. A mostly-true deception with one structurally fatal addition or distortion is the pattern Scripture warns about repeatedly. The Book of Mormon contains substantial biblical-sounding content alongside doctrinal moves (eternal progression to godhood, baptism for the dead, three-tiered afterlife) that contradict the apostolic deposit.
The escalation pattern. Joseph Smith’s doctrine expanded over time. Early Mormonism was relatively close to mainstream Protestantism. By the Nauvoo period, he had moved through plural marriage, eternal progression to godhood, the Council of Fifty’s quasi-theocratic ambitions, and the King Follett discourse’s claim that the Father was once a man. This trajectory is consistent with someone progressively listening to a deceptive source and accepting its expanding claims.
The post-mortem fragmentation. The proliferation of mutually-anathematizing Mormon factions — Snuffer’s lecture itself names approximately a hundred groups claiming Joseph Smith as their founder — is not what God’s preserved church looks like. It is what happens when the founding revelation lacked the divine authority to preserve unity beyond the founder’s lifetime.
The recurrence pattern. The same structural pattern appears in Muhammad’s account of the angel Gabriel in the cave at Hira, in Ellen White’s visions founding Seventh-day Adventism, in Sun Myung Moon’s claim of a vision of Christ on a Korean mountainside, and now in Denver Snuffer’s reported direct contact with Christ. Each claims to be the necessary corrective restoration. Each introduces material that contradicts the apostolic deposit. Each attracts sincere followers and produces communities of genuinely good behavior. Each requires submission to a continuing prophetic authority outside the closed canon.

The deception account is not paranoid. It is the account that takes seriously both Paul’s warning about angels of light and the empirical pattern of post-apostolic prophetic-claimant movements. And it provides the best explanation for why sincere people in good faith — Joseph Smith, his successors, Snuffer, Leonard — can devote their lives to a tradition that produces real virtue while resting on a foundation that contradicts the foundation Paul, Peter, John, and Jude declared they had received from Christ Himself.

The biblical test

Scripture provides the test. We do not have to guess.

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” — 1 John 4:1

“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” — Isaiah 8:20

“But 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.” — Galatians 1:8

The test is not the sincerity of the prophetic claimant. The test is not the moral fruit of the resulting community. The test is not the literary impressiveness of the produced text. The test is whether the content of the revelation accords with what was already given through Christ and the apostles.

By that test — the only test Scripture authorizes — Joseph Smith’s revelation fails, and fails on multiple structurally significant points.

Christology: The Jesus of Joseph Smith is the spirit-brother of Lucifer, conceived in a pre-mortal council, who progressed to divinity. The Jesus of John 1, Hebrews 1, and Colossians 2 is the eternal Word, “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), in whom “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9), with no spirit-brother.
Theology proper: The God of Joseph Smith is one of many Gods, who once was a man, with a body of flesh and bone. The God of Isaiah declares: “I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me” (Isaiah 45:5).
Anthropology: The destiny of the Mormon believer is to become a god of the same kind as the Father. The destiny of the New Testament believer is to be conformed to the image of the Son (Romans 8:29) — to participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) — without ever becoming the divine nature itself. “I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another” (Isaiah 42:8).
Soteriology: The atonement, in classical LDS theology, was accomplished primarily in Gethsemane through the bloody sweat. The atonement, in the New Testament, was accomplished on the Cross. “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). “It is finished” (John 19:30) was spoken from the Cross, not from the garden.

Each of these is a categorical departure from what was “once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). And each falls under Paul’s foreclosure: though an angel from heaven preach any other gospel, let him be accursed.

This is not, I want to underline, a question of whether Joseph Smith meant well. The deception account explicitly grants that he may have. The question is whether the gospel he preached — the Christ, the God, the destiny, the atonement — is the gospel the apostles preached. By the Bible’s own standard, it is not.

IV. The Gethsemane Substitution

Let me focus on one specific point that Thomas raised in his framing, because it crystallizes the larger issue. Thomas noted that Leonard had read aloud, in fellowship, a Book of Mormon passage in which the saving work of Christ is located in Gethsemane — in the bloody sweat — rather than on the Cross.

This is a doctrinal substitution of structural significance. Let me show why.

What Scripture teaches about the Cross

The New Testament locates the saving work of Christ — the atonement, the satisfaction of divine justice, the propitiation of wrath, the bearing of human sin — on the Cross, not in the garden.

“Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh.” — 1 Peter 3:18

“Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” — 1 Peter 2:24

“Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” — Hebrews 2:14

“For Christ also hath once suffered for sins… being put to death in the flesh.” — 1 Peter 3:18

“Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.” — Romans 8:33-34

“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” — Philippians 2:8

“And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself.” — Colossians 1:20

“And the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” — 1 John 1:7

The pattern is consistent across the New Testament canon. The atonement is the death of Christ on the Cross. The blood that cleanses is the blood shed on the Cross. The body offered is the body offered on the Cross. “It is finished” (John 19:30) is spoken from the Cross, with the work complete on the Cross.

What Gethsemane was

Gethsemane was the hour of Christ’s anticipatory anguish — His genuine human shrinking from what was about to happen. “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39). The bloody sweat (mentioned only by Luke, the physician, at Luke 22:44) was the physiological manifestation of extreme emotional distress — a real medical phenomenon called hematidrosis — produced by the Son’s full human comprehension of the wrath He was about to bear.

But Gethsemane is anticipation of the work. The work itself happens at Calvary. The Garden is the threshold; the Cross is the event. To relocate the atoning work to Gethsemane is to relocate it from the public, cosmic, scripturally-witnessed event to a private, garden-bound moment that the apostles themselves describe as prelude rather than fulfillment.

Why the substitution matters

The Gethsemane substitution is not a small theological reshuffling. It changes the entire structure of redemption.

If the atonement was accomplished in Gethsemane, the Cross becomes secondary — a public consequence of a private event, the visible aftermath of a hidden transaction. The blood that cleanses becomes ambiguous: was it the bloody sweat, or the blood from the wounds? The cup the Son drank becomes ambiguous: was it the Father’s wrath against sin (the historical Christian reading), or the agony of anticipating Roman crucifixion (which the LDS framing tends toward)?

More consequentially: if the atoning work is Gethsemane, the Resurrection becomes the resolution of Gethsemane rather than the resolution of the Cross. The empty tomb becomes evidence that the Father restored to the Son what the Son lost in the garden — rather than evidence that the Father vindicated the Son’s once-for-all defeat of sin and death at Calvary. The whole Easter narrative is reorganized around a different center.

And — this is what matters for the broader argument — the Gethsemane substitution is the kind of doctrinal move a deception of the angel-of-light type would most likely make. It preserves nearly all the surface features of the Christian gospel (Christ, atonement, blood, anguish, resurrection) while quietly moving the structural center of gravity to a location where the content of the atonement can be reshaped. This is what Susan flagged in fellowship: a mostly-true revelation with one small, structurally fatal addition that holds adherents in bondage.

The Cross is not negotiable. “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Not Christ in the garden. Christ on the Cross. That is the load-bearing event of the entire Christian gospel, and any “restoration” that softens or relocates it has not restored apostolic Christianity. It has produced something else and named it Christianity.

V. The Textual-Instability Problem

Thomas’s framing also raises a point worth its own brief treatment: the problem of ongoing textual revision in the Mormon tradition.

Snuffer himself acknowledged in his lecture, with some candor, that the original Book of Mormon contained more than one copy error per page on average, and that those errors persist in the text mainstream Mormon institutions use today. His Restoration Edition is in part an attempt to correct this. The LDS Salt Lake institution has, over the years, made thousands of textual changes to the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. Some of these have been editorial (punctuation, capitalization), some grammatical, but many have been substantive — including the famous changes to the Book of Mormon’s Trinitarian language (which Snuffer says he has restored by removing what he characterizes as Trinitarian misreadings introduced by John Gilbert’s 1830 punctuation), and the multiple revisions of the temple endowment ceremony over the LDS church’s history.

This presents what might be called the prophet-driven instability problem. In a system where the canon is open and the living prophet has authority to alter, expand, or correct the existing scripture, what is the standard of truth at any given moment?

The answer, structurally, is: whatever the current prophet says.

This is the freedom-bondage problem Thomas named in his framing. In Salt Lake LDS, the believer is bound to whatever the current prophet (currently Dallin Oaks, succeeding Russell Nelson, succeeding Thomas Monson, etc.) declares. In Snuffer’s Covenant Christian movement, the believer is bound to whatever Snuffer’s current Restoration Edition says, which may be revised in the next iteration. In every Restoration variant, the standard moves.

Compare this to historic Christianity:

“For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.” — Psalm 119:89

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” — Mark 13:31

“Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” — 2 Peter 1:20-21

“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

The biblical pattern is settled canon, fixed in heaven, sufficient for the man of God to be perfect and thoroughly furnished. The faith was once delivered (Jude 1:3). It is not still being delivered. The standard does not move because the apostles are dead and what they wrote is what they wrote.

This is what Paul means by “the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Galatians 5:1). The believer in Christ is free to read the apostolic deposit, to be illumined by the Spirit who indwells him, to be “taught of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:9) directly through the Word and the Spirit’s witness within. He does not need the latest prophet’s revision. He does not need to consult a hierarchy. He does not need to wait for tomorrow’s general conference or next year’s Restoration Edition update.

The Mormon tradition’s structural requirement of submission to a continuing prophet is, in effect, the abolition of Christian liberty — replaced with an ongoing dependence on the latest authoritative pronouncement. Even when (as in Snuffer’s case) the prophet himself disclaims hierarchical authority and insists on equality among believers, the structural pattern remains: someone is producing the new scripture, someone is identifying who should be set apart for what office, someone is interpreting which of the past prophets’ teachings still apply. That someone is not the local believer with the indwelling Spirit and the closed canon. That someone is a contemporary man whose teachings will be revised again.

This is the bondage Paul fought against in Galatians — the bondage of replacing the finished work of Christ and the indwelling Spirit’s direct illumination with submission to a teaching authority that stands between the believer and Christ. The Reformation re-discovered this liberty. The Mormon tradition, in all its variants, has never fully embraced it.

VI. The History-of-Christianity Anticipation

Thomas mentioned that there is a second video on learnofchrist.org, titled (presumably) “History of Christianity,” which we have not yet engaged. Thomas anticipates that it will argue that the historical conduct of Christians demonstrates that Christianity was never really the church Christ intended, and that this proves the necessity of a restoration. Without having watched it, I want to address the anticipated argument briefly.

The argument from Christian moral failure is real and should be taken seriously. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, slaveholding Christians defending slavery from the pulpit, the suppression of indigenous peoples by colonial Christian powers, the Holocaust occurring within nations of nominal Christian heritage, present-day clergy abuse scandals — all of this is real, and Christians who pretend otherwise dishonor the gospel they claim to preach.

But the argument from moral failure to Christianity-was-never-the-true-church depends on a specific assumption: that the true church should be visibly identifiable by the spotless moral conduct of its members. That assumption is not biblical. The New Testament repeatedly describes the church as a mixed reality — wheat and tares growing together until the harvest (Matthew 13:24-30), good fish and bad in the same net (Matthew 13:47-50), the visible community always larger than the truly converted, the truly converted themselves still struggling with sin (Romans 7), false teachers arising from within (Acts 20:29-30), apostolic warnings about backsliding being constant.

The biblical picture is not a pristine community of perfect saints whose visible holiness identifies them as the true church. The biblical picture is a covenant community in which God is patiently working out His salvation among genuinely-saved-but-still-sinful people, with the visible church always containing a mixture of wheat and tares, and the truly faithful witness preserved across centuries through individuals and communities the world rarely notices — the unnamed widow giving her two mites, the unmentioned disciple whose name God knows.

The argument from Christian moral failure to “Christianity was never the church” therefore proves too much. By that standard, Joseph Smith’s followers were not the church (because they fell into adultery, betrayed Joseph, fragmented after his death, produced Brigham Young’s atrocities). By that standard, Snuffer’s followers will not be the church (because they will inevitably fail in some respect, given that they are sinful humans). By that standard, every Christian movement that has ever existed fails to be the church, including the apostolic community itself (which produced Ananias and Sapphira, the divisions Paul confronted at Corinth, the false teachers John warned about, the lukewarm Laodiceans, and the ones who left because “they were not of us”, 1 John 2:19).

The right response to Christian moral failure is not “therefore the church was never the church and a restoration is needed.” The right response is “therefore the church needs perpetual repentance, perpetual return to its Lord, perpetual reformation.” Which is what serious Christianity has always understood and done. The church has always been semper reformanda — always being reformed — not because it has lost the gospel and needs a 19th-century prophet to bring it back, but because every generation needs to repent and return to the Christ who has never left.

When the History-of-Christianity video makes its case, this is what we should say back: yes, the moral failures are real and we lament them; no, they do not prove what you say they prove; and no, the answer is not restoration through new revelation, but reformation through repentance toward the Christ who has been with His church alway, even unto the end of the age.

VII. What I Say to Leonard, and What I Say to Mr. Snuffer

This essay has been long, and I want to close by speaking directly.

Leonard, my friend. The lecture you sent us is the clearest articulation I have read of the Mormon restorationist position, and engaging it carefully has been a privilege. I have not flinched from naming where I think Snuffer is right, and I have not flinched from naming where I think he and his entire tradition are wrong. I owe you — and the fellowship — that honesty.

The question I keep returning to is the one your own scriptures, in their honest moments, have to answer: did Christ keep His promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church, or did He not? If He did, no restoration was needed and the entire Mormon tradition rests on a false premise. If He did not, He is not the trustworthy Christ either of us is willing to follow. Both options are open to you, but only one is open to me, because I find Christ’s word in the Gospels so completely trustworthy that I cannot accept the other. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:27-28). They never perished. They are in His hand. They have been since Pentecost.

I commend to you again the Christ I have always commended — the Christ of the apostolic deposit, who paid the actual debt by bearing the actual recoil of God’s nature against actual sin in His actual body on an actual Cross on an actual day in history. Not the Christ of Palmyra, not the Christ of Boise 2017, not a Christ requiring restoration to be reached — the Christ who has been preached without interruption from Jerusalem to today, in every generation, by every faithful witness the Spirit has raised up.

Mr. Snuffer, if these words ever reach you. I have engaged your lecture seriously and found in it a learned, courageous, sincere attempt to do what cannot be done — to re-found a Christianity that does not need re-founding because Christ Himself promised it would not perish. The scholarship is real. The pastoral care is real. The moral seriousness is real. But the foundation is not the foundation Paul laid (“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ”, 1 Corinthians 3:11), because the gospel you have inherited from Joseph Smith is not the gospel Paul preached. It contains another Jesus, another God, another atonement, another destiny.

The way back is not forward into a deeper restoration. The way back is the road every honest seeker eventually has to walk: setting aside the Restoration claim, returning to the apostolic deposit, reading Paul without Joseph’s intermediation, reading John without Joseph’s intermediation, asking the eternal Christ to reveal Himself in the words He has already given. He will. He has never refused that to anyone who has asked Him on those terms. The gates of hell never prevailed against His church, and they never will. There is no need to wait for the next restoration, because the original is still here, still preserved, still preached — by every faithful believer in every faithful gathering on every Sunday morning across the entire world, exactly as Christ promised it would be.

To the fellowship. This is the deepest critique of Mormonism I have yet been able to articulate, and I want to record what enabled it. Susan’s reading of the Joseph Smith vision as a possibly-demonic deception, made mostly-true in order to be deceptive — that reading is the structural insight that organizes the rest. Without it, the Mormon question is endless because every individual claim can be defended on its own. With it, the structural pattern becomes clear: the angel-of-light strategy is the template, and Joseph Smith’s encounter fits the template exactly. The restorationist project, sincerely undertaken by sincere people, rests on a foundation that the apostle Paul anathematized in advance — and the moral fruit of the resulting community, however genuine, cannot vindicate a foundation Christ Himself foreclosed.

Pray for Leonard. Pray for the people in Snuffer’s movement, who are sincere and seeking. Pray for the people still inside Salt Lake LDS, who number in the millions and many of whom will never have the chance to read an essay like this one. The harvest is plenteous and the laborers are few. We commend the Christ who has never left His church, and we trust the Spirit to do, in His time, the work that no argument alone can do — the work of opening eyes that have been told their whole lives that the Christ they sing about is something less than He is.

Thomas

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” — Romans 8:38-39

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” — Hebrews 13:8

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.

260419 Fellowship – God’s Place in the Christos Civitas Vision – God’s Work

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Where Is God in This?

A Fellowship Meeting Analysis: The Question of God’s Voice in the Christos Civitas Vision

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 19, 2026

Source: Sunday Zoom fellowship, April 19, 2026. Participants: Thomas Abshier, Charlie Gutierrez, Susan Gutierrez, Leonard Hofheins, Isak Gutierrez, Armond Boulware. Discussion arose from Leonard’s written comment posted to the Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men essay (April 18, 2026), which asked: Where is God in all this? Does he have a voice? What would be his part, if any? Does he speak today, and if so, to whom? Or do we need him to speak — a Bible, a Bible — we have a Bible. There can’t be another Bible.

To the Fellowship —

The meeting on April 19 took shape around a single question, and the question was Leonard’s. He had read the Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men essay the night before and had left a comment on the website asking, with characteristic directness, where is God in all this? It was a fair question, and it set the agenda for the entire two and a half hours that followed.

I want to capture what the conversation surfaced, because the question is one we will keep encountering — with Mike, with Leonard, with every new conversation partner — and the way the fellowship handled it on April 19 deserves to be preserved. There were three substantive movements in the meeting, and a brief opening exchange about what to name the broader project, and a closing testimony from Charlie that I want to honor. Let me walk through each in turn.

I. Naming the Project — Christos Civitas

Before the substance began, I shared with the group a list of name options I had been working through for the broader civic-and-theological project I have been calling, for years, “the Christian nation.” Michael had pressed the question at the time of his last visit: what should this thing be called, given that “Christian nation” carries baggage and “kingdom” risks confusion? I had asked the AI for candidates. The list was: Kingdom Nation, Righteous Society, Christos Nation, Kingdom Culture, Kingdom Way, Covenant Nation, One Nation Under God, Christos Vision, Kingdom Commonwealth, Renewed Republic, Christos Civitas, Sanctified Society.

The candidate that landed for me was Christos Civitas — the city or citizenship of Christ. Latin rather than English on purpose: it carries the gravity of the long Christian tradition without conscripting any modern American political frame, and it names what the project actually is — a city in the Augustinian sense, a citizenship in the Pauline sense (Philippians 3:20: “For our conversation is in heaven” — politeuma, citizenship). It is not a nation-state. It is not a denomination. It is a body of citizens whose first allegiance is to a King whose Kingdom is not from this world, but whose Kingdom is being made manifest within this world through people who have submitted to His way.

Charlie, true to form, suggested “Jesus is an American” and “Jesus is a redneck” as alternatives. We will not be using those. But the Christos Civitas name will appear in the corpus going forward, and members of the fellowship are welcome to push back if a different name fits better.

II. Leonard’s Question — Where Is God in This?

Then Leonard surfaced his question, and the rest of the meeting was the working-through of it.

His written comment, read aloud at the start of the meeting, was substantively this: Where is God in all this? Does he have a voice? What would be his part? Does he speak today, and if so, to whom? Is there anyone who speaks for God today? Or do we need him to speak — a Bible, a Bible, we have a Bible, there can’t be another Bible.

The phrase “a Bible, a Bible” is from the Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 29:3-6) — a passage Mormons commonly invoke to argue that revelation is ongoing rather than closed. Leonard was placing that passage alongside the Kingdom of God essay and asking whether the essay had implicitly closed off divine speech.

His worry, as it unfolded, was not that the essay denied God’s existence. His worry was that the essay’s vision of a Christos Civitas was being constructed as if God had nothing to say about it — that we were “steadying the ark” (a phrase from 2 Samuel 6, where Uzzah died for steadying the ark of God with his hand when the oxen stumbled, presuming to do God’s work in his own strength). Leonard was asking whether the project was vain — whether we were laying out a vision in human terms when we should be on our knees asking what God’s vision is.

This was a serious question, and it deserved serious engagement. Three things came out in the working-through.

A. The Mormon-shaped expectation of a prophet

Leonard’s question carried with it, as he later acknowledged, a particular cultural expectation. The Mormon tradition assumes that God speaks to His people through a designated prophet — Joseph Smith originally, then his successors in unbroken succession. If God is speaking today, the LDS framework expects that He is speaking through someone in particular whose words are then to be heeded. Leonard has explicitly distanced himself from the Salt Lake institutional version of this, but the underlying expectation — that God works through chosen messengers — is so deeply embedded in his theological formation that it shaped the way he framed the question.

I tried to name this gently in the meeting. I observed that I had grown up Bible-based rather than Mormon-based, and that the expectation of a single chosen prophet was simply not part of my theological formation. I had heard, growing up, of the still small voice (1 Kings 19:12) — God speaking quietly and individually to those who would listen. I had not heard people around me saying “the Lord told me, therefore everyone should follow me.” The cultural-theological air I breathed was different.

I offered a counter-example as well: the Netflix documentary The False Prophet, about Sam Bateman, the FLDS leader who claimed to hear God and used that claim to take dozens of wives, including underage girls. The pattern is recognizable. Whenever a community is primed to expect a prophet — primed to expect that God will speak through one designated man — the door is open for any sufficiently audacious figure to walk through it. Bateman walked through it. Joseph Smith’s spiritual heirs walked through variant doors. Sun Myung Moon walked through one. Jim Jones walked through one. Sam Bateman walked through one. The pattern repeats because the expectation is itself the vulnerability.

This is the practical-theological reason Bible-based Christianity has historically resisted the sole-prophet model. It is not that God cannot speak through individuals — He can and does. It is that making the prophetic office central to the community’s life creates a permanent vulnerability to the next charismatic claimant. The Reformation closed the canon, partly to close that vulnerability.

B. Charlie’s recurring question — How do you know what’s true?

Through the meeting, Charlie kept returning to the question that has been his persistent contribution to the fellowship: how do you know what’s true? He named it in conversation with Leonard’s question, drew a line back to Acts 17:11 where the Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so,” and observed that this is what we are condemned to do — think and pray and weigh and compare — at every point.

Charlie’s hang-gliding analogy was the most memorable image of the meeting. His first hang-gliding teacher told him: If you could see what a wild, crazy ocean of currents the air actually is, you would never fly. But if you are going to fly, you have no choice. You go up with it, go down with it, and deal with it. Charlie applied the image to the spiritual life. The currents of conflicting voices in our world — religious traditions, charismatic teachers, political prophets, internet gurus, our own internal chatter — are a wild ocean. We cannot pretend the ocean is not there. We have to fly through it anyway, alert and discerning, comparing every voice to the standard of “my sheep know my voice” (John 10:27).

This is, I think, exactly right. The Christian life is not the avoidance of the ocean. It is the disciplined flight through it.

C. Isak’s insight — the veil was always our idea

Isak made the most theologically generative move of the meeting, and I want to capture it carefully because it integrates the apparently competing positions.

Isak observed that the desire for a human mediator between the people and God is not God’s idea. It is Israel’s idea, repeatedly. At Sinai, when the people heard God’s voice as thunder and lightning, they begged Moses: “Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:19). Centuries later, when the prophet Samuel was old and Israel was in transition, the people demanded a king “like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5) — a human mediator they could see and follow. The pattern repeats: given the option of an unmediated relationship with the living God, the human heart consistently chooses a human substitute.

The work of Christ, Isak argued, is the removal of the need for that substitute. The veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom at the moment of His death (Matthew 27:51) — a deliberate sign that the separation requiring a priestly mediator was over. “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil” (Hebrews 10:19-20). The new covenant is not “find a better mediator.” The new covenant is “the mediator has done His work, and you are now invited into direct fellowship with the Father through the indwelling Spirit.”

This means that any movement that re-installs a human mediator at the center of its religious life is, in some structural sense, going backward — back to the pre-Christ pattern of priestly mediation, even when the language of “Christ” is preserved. The Mormon prophet, the Catholic priest’s role in confession, the Pentecostal apostle, the cult guru — these all share the same structural feature: a human stands between the believer and God. The biblical pattern, post-resurrection, is the opposite. Every believer is a priest (1 Peter 2:9, “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood”). Every believer is indwelled by the Spirit (Romans 8:9). Every believer has direct access to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16).

Isak’s framing did the work of turning the conversation. The question “Where is God in this?” has two possible answers. The Mormon-shaped answer is “find the man God is speaking through and follow him.” The Christ-shaped answer is “every member of the body has direct access to God through the Spirit, and the body together discerns His voice through the Word, in fellowship, and in the conviction of conscience the Spirit applies.”

The Christos Civitas vision is the second answer. It is not a vision in which God is absent. It is a vision in which God is distributed — speaking to every faithful citizen through the Spirit He sent, and the body of citizens together discerning what He is saying, comparing it to the apostolic deposit, and acting on the consensus of Spirit-led discernment.

D. Susan’s procedural counsel — James 1:5

Susan, characteristically, brought the conversation to ground with scripture. She read James 1:5: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” And then verses 6-8: “But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”

Her gloss was important. “Asking in faith” does not mean “asking, with confidence that you will get an answer.” It means asking, having already decided that you will obey whatever answer comes. The wavering James warns against is not intellectual uncertainty about whether God exists or speaks. It is moral wavering — the posture of the seeker who reserves the right to evaluate God’s answer before deciding whether to obey it.

This is the precondition for hearing God’s voice. The believer who comes to God with conditions — I will obey if the answer suits me — has already foreclosed the conversation. The believer who comes saying whatever you say, that is what I will do has opened the door God has been waiting to walk through.

That is, I think, the correct response to Leonard’s original question. Where is God in this? God is everywhere His people are seeking Him with that posture — and silent everywhere His people are seeking Him with reservations.

III. The Resolution — “Everybody Is a Prophet”

Late in the meeting, after some heat had built up between Leonard’s framing and mine, Susan brokered a clarification. She suspected — correctly — that Leonard and I were not actually disagreeing about substance. We were talking past each other on framing.

Leonard, when pressed, was not actually arguing that the Christos Civitas project requires one designated prophet through whom God speaks. He acknowledged this directly: God does not choose just one, he said — God chooses many, those who are willing to do the work and to be called. What he was arguing, in his original comment, was that the Christos Civitas vision document needed to explicitly verbalize that the project is being undertaken in submission to God’s will rather than as a human construction. He wanted the language to make plain: we are doing this because we are seeking what the Lord wants, and we believe He is leading. Without that language being overt, the document risked appearing to be vain in the biblical sense — a human project undertaken in human strength.

Once Susan named this clearly, the apparent disagreement dissolved. I responded that this is exactly what I believe and intend. The Christos Civitas vision is not a vision in which we are filling a hole left by a silent God. It is a vision in which every faithful citizen is hearing the Spirit and contributing what they hear to the discernment of the body. Everyone is a prophet, in the small sense — everyone who is in Christ has the Spirit, and everyone with the Spirit has access to God’s voice in the matters before them.

I will adopt Leonard’s recommendation. The vision documents will more explicitly verbalize that the project is being undertaken under the leading of the Spirit, not in our own strength, and that we expect God to direct it through the Spirit-led discernment of every faithful participant. This was a genuine contribution from Leonard, and I am grateful for it.

The agreement we reached was, in summary:

No one human prophet is required for God’s voice to be present in the project.
Every faithful citizen is a prophet in the sense of being in continuous communion with the Holy Spirit and able to discern God’s leading on the matters before them.
The body of citizens together — through prayer, scripture, fellowship, and the discernment of the Spirit applied to each — discerns God’s will for the larger project.
The vision documents should make this explicit, so that no one reading them assumes God has been left out.
Charismatic claims to special prophetic authority require, at minimum, the same kind of testing the Bereans applied — comparison to the apostolic deposit and the witness of the Spirit in the body.

This resolution will hold for the foreseeable future. It is consistent with the Theological Grammar’s posture on revelation, and it is consistent with what I have argued in the substitutionary atonement and phenomenology essays about union with Christ. The Christ who paid the debt at Calvary now indwells His people by His Spirit, and the Spirit speaks within every believer who will listen. That is where God is in this.

IV. Charlie’s Question — What Kind of Life Do You Want?

About halfway through the meeting, Charlie pivoted with a question that pulled the conversation out of theological abstraction into personal testimony. What kind of life do you want?

The answers were revealing.

Leonard: peace and quiet. He wanted to be left alone, to get on with his life, to not encounter constant struggle with everybody and everything. The answer of a man who has fought a long battle to leave the institutional Mormon church and is now seeking refuge in a quieter form of faithfulness.

Isak: the same — peace.

Armond: a life of service, with impact. He told the story of his older brother talking him off the ledge of his Y2K-era anxiety about death — the realization that took root in him then was I am going to die at some point. I am going to take advantage of being here while I am here. He spoke about being blessed with influence and physical presence, and choosing not to use those gifts to bully but to be a positive presence to his peers. He spoke about wanting, when he meets God, for God to recognize that he had been responsible with the duties and the gifts he was given.

Susan: the testimony she gave was the most pastorally important moment of the meeting. She spoke about what it actually feels like to be in continuous relationship with the Lord — the way prayer turns from petition into companionship, the way obedience starts to feel less like burden and more like coming home, the way the unconditional love of the Father, once felt, produces in the believer the desire to love Him back. She quoted Psalm 37:5 — “Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.” And she said, plainly, that connection with God is joyful even when it passes through hard things — that there is a difference between obedience-as-drudgery (which is how it can look from outside) and obedience-as-gratitude (which is how it feels from inside).

This is the testimony that should anchor the Christos Civitas vision. It is not a project of theoretical theology. It is a project of people who are actually in this relationship, and who are bearing witness to what the relationship is like, and who are inviting others into the same relationship. Without testimony like Susan’s, the project becomes intellectual machinery. With it, the project is the natural overflow of a community that has met the living Christ and cannot help but speak about Him.

Charlie’s own answer — given partly through testimony rather than direct statement — was that he has lived this question expensively. He has spent time in jails for following the Spirit’s leading in ways the government did not approve. He does not drink alcohol because he does not want a single moment of his life to be blurry — “too dangerous.” The kind of life he wants is the kind of life in which he is awake, sober, alert, and free to obey when the Spirit speaks, regardless of the cost. This is a serious answer from a serious man, and the fellowship should honor it.

V. The Doctrine of Christ — A Brief Exchange

Near the end of the meeting, Leonard and Susan circled around the question of what the doctrine of Christ actually consists of. Leonard gave a fivefold list drawn from his Restoration framework: faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, and the doctrine of Christ as believing Him. Susan added what she felt the list left out — love. The mark by which the world is meant to recognize Christ’s disciples is that they have love one to another (John 13:35). A list of doctrinal-procedural items without love named explicitly leaves out the central commandment, the central demonstration, and the central recognizable feature of authentic Christian life.

The exchange was a small one but worth noting. Leonard accepted the addition. The fivefold-plus-love framing is not the worst summary of the gospel I have heard, and it is consistent with what historic Christianity has always taught: faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). Faith is the mode of receiving Christ; repentance is the turn from sin; baptism is the public declaration of union with His death and resurrection; the Holy Ghost is the indwelling presence applying Christ’s finished work to the believer’s life; and love is the fruit by which the Spirit’s indwelling becomes visible in the world.

That is, I think, what we will land on as the core summary in the Christos Civitas vision documents. Faith. Repentance. Baptism. The indwelling Spirit. Love made manifest. These are the family resemblance markers of the citizens of the Christos Civitas. Anything that fails to include all five is not a complete description of Christian life. Anything that adds requirements beyond these — temple ordinances, priesthood ratifications, prophetic submission — is adding to what Christ established.

VI. What the Meeting Taught

Three things I leave the meeting holding more firmly than I held them before:

1. Leonard’s question deserved better than I initially gave it. My first response treated it as a Mormon-shaped expectation of a single prophet. It was that, partly. But it was also a legitimate concern that the Christos Civitas vision was not adequately verbalizing its dependence on God’s leading. Susan saw what I missed. The vision documents will be revised to make the dependence explicit.

2. Isak’s “the veil was always our idea” insight is doctrinally generative and deserves its own treatment. The recurring human pattern — Sinai, Samuel, the Mormon prophet, the Pentecostal apostle, the cult guru — is the demand for a human mediator. The work of Christ is the dissolution of the need for that mediation. Every member of the body has direct access through the Spirit. This is the structural feature that distinguishes apostolic Christianity from every restorationist movement that has installed a new mediator in the gap Christ closed. Worth a founders_vision seed entry, and possibly a standalone essay.

3. Susan’s testimony is what the Christos Civitas project actually rests on. The intellectual scaffolding — the Theological Grammar, the substitutionary atonement essays, the political vision — all of it is downstream of the experience of actually being in relationship with the living Christ. Without that experience present in the fellowship, the project is dead letter. With it, the project is the natural overflow of a community that has met Him and cannot stop speaking. The fellowship should make space, regularly, for the kind of testimony Susan gave on April 19. That is the soil from which everything else grows.

VII. Closing

Leonard, the question you raised on April 19 was the right question, and I am glad you raised it. The vision documents will be revised to make explicit what was implicit — that the Christos Civitas is not a human project in human strength, but a project undertaken by people who believe they are being led by the Spirit of the living Christ, and who are seeking, every day, to discern His voice in fellowship, in scripture, and in the conviction of conscience.

To the fellowship: this is what we do for each other. Iron sharpens iron. The conversations that look like disagreements are often, on closer examination, the body discerning together what no member could discern alone. April 19 was a working-out. April 26 was the next working-out. Every Sunday is a working-out. “Forsaking not the assembling of ourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25) is not optional, because the assembling is itself part of how the Spirit speaks.

We close, as Susan closed the meeting, in the hope that next week’s gathering will be edifying, that we will challenge each other in love, that we will continue arriving at truth together, and that the Lord will bless each of us with His Holy Spirit.

Thomas

“Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.” — John 16:13

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.

Mormonism and Christianity – Doctrine Comparison

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 25, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

What Do Mormons Believe?

A Fellowship Response to the PragerU Interview with LDS Stake President Michael Stanley

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 25, 2026

Source: PragerU interview — “What Do Mormons Believe?”

To the Fellowship —

PragerU has just released a long, friendly conversation between Marc Halawa and Michael Stanley, the LDS stake president of Santa Clarita. This is relevant for us because of the history of some of us in the fellowship — peripheral Mormons, ex-Mormons, family members of both still close to our hearts.

The interview is unusually clarifying. Two articulate men — one Jewish, one Latter-day Saint — sat down without rancor and let each other speak. Stanley represented his church well. Halawa was generous, curious, and pressed where pressing was warranted. I want to honor that kind of conversation, and to take it seriously enough to respond at the same depth.

Let me try to do three things. First, name what is genuinely admirable in the Mormon witness — what I will call the Christlike remainder. Second, name the five places where the LDS system departs from historic Christianity in ways that are not denominational disagreements but categorical differences. Third, descend to the ontological floor and ask which Christ is actually being preached — because that is the question the whole conversation finally rests on. Then I will come back up with implications for those of you who love Mormons and want to know how to engage with them.

A note before I begin. The arguments below could be picked up as weapons to swing at the people in your life. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is clear thinking — about what we stand for, whether our position is defensible, what is finally true, and how to bear faithful witness to the friends and family God has placed in our paths. The argument is for us first; the witness flows out from understanding, not from ammunition.

I. The Christlike Remainder

Before I say anything critical, let me say what is true.

The Mormon church sends out 80,000 missionaries. That is more missionaries than most Protestant denominations have members in active service. These are 18- and 19-year-olds who pause their education, learn a language they did not grow up with, fund themselves or are funded by family, and spend two years knocking on doors for a gospel they believe to be true. Halawa got the framing exactly right when he relayed his missionaries’ answer: if you had the cure to cancer, you would not be able to sleep at night until everyone knew.

That is the right urgency. That is the missionary spirit Christ commanded:

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” — Matthew 28:19-20

When was the last time a Baptist 19-year-old gave the prime two years of his life to learn Mandarin and live in a strange city for a faith he believed was the cure to cancer? When was the last time the average Methodist sent a tenth of his church’s youth into the field?

The Mormon church puts most of evangelical Christianity to shame on this point, and we should say so plainly.

It does not stop with missions. The Mormon church gave $1.5 billion in humanitarian aid last year and partnered openly with Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim charities to do it. Mormon families intact, Mormon homes orderly, Mormon teenagers chaste at rates the surrounding culture cannot approach. Mormon men show up — to church, to community, to fatherhood. Stanley’s stated aspiration that his community be the kind of neighbor every other family wishes they had is not a marketing slogan; it is an empirically observable feature of Mormon life in any town that has a stake.

There is more. The Mormon insistence that this life is preceded by something — that we existed before we were born — is not biblically defensible in the elaborated, specified form Mormon doctrine has given it. The God of Scripture knew Jeremiah before He formed him in the womb (Jeremiah 1:5), but I will not press that hint into a pre-mortal council of spirit-children, because Scripture does not. What I will say is that the underlying instinct — the human is more than chemistry, the soul is something more than matter that happens to think — is correct. On this point, Mormons see what most secular Americans no longer see, even if the elaboration goes further than the text supports.

The Mormon insistence that God still speaks is also a Christian instinct. Hebrews tells us that 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” (Hebrews 1:1-2). The instinct that revelation is not a dead letter but a living word is right — for matters of individual guidance, conviction, and the application of fixed truth to changing circumstances. But the fundamental doctrines of the faith do not change. The vehicle distinguishes Christianity from Mormonism most consequentially: a living Prophet whom every Mormon must obey without question is not the same thing as the Holy Spirit, who speaks to every heart that will listen. The first is slavery to a man. The second is the liberty in Christ that the New Testament promises. The instinct that revelation continues is correct; the specific vehicle by which revelation comes is the point of strong disagreement, and probably the single most consequential doctrine in terms of the lived experience of the Mormon.

Despite what I deem to be errors in Mormon doctrine, there is a Christlike remainder of demonstrably good fruit produced by discipline and dedication to Godly/biblical morality. Wherever a system has flourished for two centuries and produced followers committed to godly character, the Spirit is doing something through it — and the good fruit testifies to whatever in the system is in alignment with God’s actual nature. We should be honest about that. We should commend the good works and the evident benefits of walking in the ways of Christ to which Mormons aspire.

But we also do not commend Christ by softening what He is.

II. The Five Departures

Here is where the conversation must turn. I want to walk through five places where the LDS system departs from historic Christianity — not in surface practice, not in worship style, not in cultural feel, but at the level of what is actually being claimed about reality.

1. Christology — Which Jesus?

In historic Christianity, Jesus is the eternal Word, God Himself, who has always existed and through whom all things were made. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). He is not a creature. He has no beginning. He shares the divine essence with the Father. Colossians puts it as starkly as possible: “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9).

In LDS theology, Jesus is a literal spirit-son of Heavenly Father, conceived in a pre-mortal council, the elder spirit-brother of every other human soul — and, notably, the elder spirit-brother of Lucifer. He is a separate being from the Father. He progressed through obedience to attain divinity. He is exalted, but He was not always God in the sense that the Nicene Creed means by it.

This is not a denominational disagreement. This is a different Jesus.

I am not the one drawing this line. Paul drew it: “For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached… ye might well bear with him” (2 Corinthians 11:4). There is such a thing as another Jesus. Paul presupposed it. The question — the only question that finally matters — is whether the Jesus the Mormons preach is the Jesus Paul preached.

The answer, I believe, is no. The Jesus of John 1 has no spirit-brother named Lucifer. The Jesus of Hebrews 13:8 — “the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” — did not progress to divinity. The Jesus of Colossians 2 already contains the fullness of the Godhead bodily, before any council, before any earth, before any gospel preached on the American continent.

2. Theology Proper — How Many Gods?

LDS theology has historically taught what Lorenzo Snow famously summarized: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become.” The Father has a body of flesh and bone. The Father was once a man on another world. There may be many gods over many worlds. The Father is the god of this earth.

When Halawa pressed Stanley on Kolob — the planet near where God dwells — Stanley deflected by saying it had not really been taught in LDS doctrine for centuries. This is rhetorically true and doctrinally evasive. Kolob is in the Pearl of Great Price, which remains canonical Mormon scripture. The de-emphasis is a public-relations posture, not a theological retraction.

Compare this to Isaiah, the prophet Halawa shares with us:

“I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me.” — Isaiah 45:5

“I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.” — Isaiah 44:6

There is one God. Not “the god of this earth among many.” Not “an exalted Man who attained divinity through obedience.” The God. The One who declares Himself to have no peer, no equal, no rival, no predecessor, and no successor.

This is the foundational claim of biblical monotheism. If it is given up, everything downstream changes — what salvation is, what worship is, what the Cross accomplishes, what humans become. Mormonism gives it up. It does so kindly, in modern wording, in the company of warm and good-hearted people. But it gives it up.

3. Anthropology — What Are Humans Becoming?

This is where the LDS system most directly contradicts what I have argued elsewhere about the structure of reality. The Mormon vision is that the faithful, through obedience, temple ordinances, and endurance, may become gods themselves — exalted, generative, able eventually to populate worlds with their own spirit-offspring.

This is a misunderstanding of category — confusing participation with identity, the part claiming to be the whole. We are of God, in God, from God. We are not, and never will be, the totality of God. A wave is of the ocean but is not the ocean. A cell is of the body but is not the body. We exist because God holds us in being; we do not become independent gods, equal in essence, ever.

The practical test: can the most exalted Latter-day Saint, after eternities of progression, create a universe ex nihilo, sustain every conscious point in it, know all things, and exist necessarily without dependence on another? If not, he is not God — he is, and will always be, a creature participating in God’s being.

The LDS doctrine of exaltation is not a different destination. It is a different ontology. It claims that the categorical line between Creator and creature is, ultimately, dissolvable. Historic Christianity says it is not. “I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another” (Isaiah 42:8).

4. Soteriology — What Did the Cross Accomplish?

In the interview, Halawa asked Stanley what happens to people who don’t accept the Mormon faith. Stanley’s answer was extraordinary, and it deserves close attention. He compared this life to first grade in an eternal school. People on the path back to God, he said, will eventually graduate — “weren’t the best student in first grade doesn’t mean you can’t get a diploma.” The afterlife is structured into kingdoms — celestial, terrestrial, telestial — and almost everyone ends up somewhere good. Hell is not flames and pitchforks; it is, at most, the inability to live up to one’s potential.

I want you to feel the gravity of what just happened in that exchange. The Cross was not mentioned. The penalty for sin was not named. The wrath of God against unrighteousness — the wrath that required the death of the Son to be satisfied — was not part of the answer.

In its place: progressive learning. The student who fails first grade tries again in second. Eventually, with enough lifetimes and ordinances and effort, the diploma is earned.

Compare to what I argued in the April 18 essay on Substitutionary Atonement: the Cross is not a teaching among teachings. It is the unique solution to a cosmic dilemma — a holy God who legislated separation from sin against Himself, a creation that has all sinned, and a justice that requires death. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). The infinite debt requires an infinite payer. “It is finished” (John 19:30) means the debt is paid in full at Calvary, by the only One who could pay it — God Himself, in the flesh, on the tree.

The LDS system has progressive sanctification through endurance and ordinance, with the atonement (located primarily in Gethsemane in classical LDS theology) granting universal resurrection but not full exaltation. Exaltation must be earned through temple endowments, sealings, and continuing obedience.

This is, structurally, what the Reformation called works-righteousness with a Mormon vocabulary. The thief on the cross does not enter the celestial kingdom in this system without further work; in the historic Christian system, he does, by grace, through faith, today, in paradise (Luke 23:43), with no temple endowment performed.

The structural test: when Mormons proclaim Jesus, what does His death actually do in their account? It opens a door. It sets a stage. It models obedience. It pays a partial debt that the believer must complete with personal righteousness. In the New Testament account, His death does everything — it satisfies justice, propitiates wrath, reconciles the sinner, opens the holy of holies, defeats death, and seats the believer with Christ in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6).

These are not the same gospel. They are not even the same logic.

What the Cross experientially is — what the wrath actually is, and what it cost God Himself to bear it — deserves more weight than this section can carry without losing the spine of the comparison. I take it up in Addendum III, which is the deepest theological response this essay has to offer.

5. Canon and the Restoration Claim

Now we come to the load-bearing structural claim of the entire LDS system, and the place where I think the system fails its own internal test.

The LDS claim is not merely that the Book of Mormon supplements Scripture. The claim is that historic Christianity went into total apostasy — that the church Christ founded was so corrupted within a few generations of the apostles that a new dispensation, a new prophet, and new scriptures were required. Joseph Smith did not present himself as a reformer. He presented himself as the prophet of a restoration, because what existed before him was, in his account, beyond reform.

This is a load-bearing claim. If the historic church was not in total apostasy — if Christ kept His promise that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18) — then no restoration was needed, and the entire LDS edifice rests on a false premise.

So the question is: did Christ’s promise fail?

For 1,800 years between Pentecost and Palmyra, was there no church that taught, baptized, suffered, served, witnessed, copied Scripture, fed the poor, evangelized the heathen, and held fast to the gospel? Were Athanasius and Augustine, the Cappadocians and the Council of Chalcedon, Aquinas and Wycliffe and Luther and Tyndale, the Celtic monasteries and the Moravian missions, the underground churches of Diocletian’s persecution and the martyrs of the coliseum — were all of these laboring inside an apostate system that had completely lost the gospel? Did the Holy Spirit fail to preserve a single faithful witness for eighteen centuries, until a young man in upstate New York began translating golden plates that no one else has ever seen?

That is what the system has to claim. And the moment it is stated plainly, it falls of its own weight.

Paul anticipated this exact situation in Galatians, in language so direct it cannot be softened:

“But 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.” — Galatians 1:8

The Mormon account requires an angel from heaven — Moroni — bringing a new gospel that contradicts what Paul preached. Paul left no room for that. He pre-emptively foreclosed it. The claim is structurally impossible to reconcile with apostolic Christianity, because apostolic Christianity has, in writing, anathematized in advance exactly the kind of revelation Mormonism claims.

III. The Practical Test — Which Christ Saves?

Let me apply the practical-test pivot to all of this, because abstract theological distinctions can feel like quarrels among scholars. They are not.

Practical test: A man is dying. He has lived an ordinary life. He has done some good and some harm. He is afraid. He calls on Jesus.

Which Jesus is actually there?

In the historic Christian gospel, the Jesus he calls on is the eternal God who paid the full debt at Calvary, who promises to lose none of those the Father gives Him, and who has the authority to forgive sins because He bore them. That dying man — like the thief on the cross — receives full salvation by grace through faith. He does not need a temple endowment. He does not need to be baptized for the dead. He does not need to graduate from kindergarten through twelfth grade across multiple eternities. Today he is with Christ in paradise.

In the LDS gospel, the Jesus he calls on grants him universal resurrection — which is not nothing — but exaltation requires more. The dying man, if he was not endowed in the temple, sealed to a wife, baptized into the LDS church, and persevering in priesthood-mediated obedience, will not enter the celestial kingdom. He may end up in the terrestrial or telestial kingdom, which Stanley described in warmly affirming terms. But he does not stand before the Father as a son of the most high God in the way the New Testament promises every believer in Christ does.

The two systems do not just describe different Jesuses. They produce different deathbeds.

Another practical test: A grandmother is grieving an unbaptized grandchild. What do you say?

In the LDS system, you tell her not to worry — the child can be baptized by proxy in the temple, and the deceased can accept or reject the ordinance from the spirit world. Halawa, with characteristic generosity, said he found this practice touching.

In the historic Christian system, you tell her something different. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). The state of the soul is decided in this life. There is no second chance from the spirit world, no proxy ordinance that can be accepted or rejected after death. The grandmother’s hope, if any, must rest in the mercy of God toward her grandchild’s brief life and the operation of grace toward those who could not believe — not in a temple ritual performed by descendants.

I do not say this to distress the grandmother. I say it because the actual question is whether the spirit-world second chance is real. If it is not real, telling her it is real is not kindness; it is theater performed over a real grave.

A note: there is a minority Christian tradition of ultimate reconciliation — the view that God’s purposes finally bring all souls to Himself — that some take to be plausibly biblical despite its rejection by mainstream Christianity. I have explored it in a separate essay: Renaissance Ministries — Ultimate Reconciliation. I commend that essay to those interested in the question. But it does not change what to say to the grandmother today: whatever the eschaton holds, the LDS spirit-world second chance through temple proxy is not the biblical mechanism. The hope to commend, in the moment, is the mercy of the Father — not the ordinance of the temple.

A third practical test: What changes when a Mormon prophet contradicts a previous Mormon prophet?

Polygamy was commanded; then it was abandoned. Black men were excluded from the priesthood; then they were included. Blood atonement was taught; then it was repudiated. The current prophet, Dallin Oaks, may speak in conference and modify positions held by his predecessors. Brigham Young taught things that no Mormon today would defend.

In a system where the living prophet has authority equal to or greater than canonical scripture, what is the standard of truth? Whichever prophet is currently speaking. That is not stable ground. The Book of Mormon itself can be — and has been — quietly emended over the generations. The “most correct of any book on earth,” in Joseph Smith’s words, has had thousands of textual changes since its first printing.

Compare to historic Christianity, which has, for two thousand years, held its standard up against the closed canon and asked at every generation: does this teaching square with the apostles? The standard does not move because the apostles are dead. “The faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3) is, by definition, not in flux.

Mormon authority is, by design, in flux. The very thing the system advertises as its strength — a living prophet who can correct course in the present moment — is the thing that makes it impossible to nail to a fixed truth claim.

IV. The Ontological Floor

Now let me descend to the level the recent essay reached, because the deepest answer to Mormonism is not exegetical. It is ontological.

The Conscious Point Physics — the physics I have been working on for nearly forty years — holds that reality itself is constituted by Conscious Points, each generated by and of the essence of God’s mind. Every particle, every field, every relationship is the expression of one consciousness, the consciousness of the Creator who declared “Let there be light” and there was.

If this is true, the LDS doctrine of eternal progression to godhood is not merely biblically unsupported. It is ontologically impossible.

You cannot become the ground of being by climbing inside the system the ground of being is sustaining. The wave does not become the ocean. The cell does not become the body. A creature within God’s consciousness can be progressively transformed, conformed to Christ, glorified, exalted in the New Testament sense — caught up to participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) — without ever being the One whose nature is being participated in.

This is the difference between theosis in the Eastern Orthodox sense (participation in God’s energies while remaining ontologically distinct from God’s essence) and exaltation in the LDS sense (becoming a god of the same kind as the Father). The first is biblical and ontologically possible. The second is biblical-sounding and ontologically incoherent.

There is no council of gods, because there cannot be. Being is not a club. Either you are the necessary, self-existent, all-sustaining ground — or you are a creature held in being by that ground. There is no third thing. There is no ladder from creature to Creator. There is only the gracious gift of the Creator, who came down into His own creation to bear the weight of the creature’s sin and to restore the creature to right relationship with Himself.

This is why the central insight of Acts 17:28 is not poetry but ontology:

“For in him we live, and move, and have our being.”

In Him. Not alongside Him. Not progressing toward His level. In Him. We exist within the consciousness that is God. Outside of Him there is, literally, nothing — no place to stand, no platform from which to ascend, no eternal first matter from which one might forge oneself into a deity.

The Mormon vision of eternal progression is, at root, the oldest temptation: “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). The serpent’s promise. Repackaged with American optimism, family values, and excellent humanitarian work — but the same promise. We do not become gods. We are restored to the children of God we were always meant to be. And that is more than enough, because the God we are children of is the only God there is.

V. What I Am Actually Saying

To be concrete, so no one mistakes my position:

Mormons are, in many cases, better neighbors than I am. I take this seriously, and I refuse to compete on virtue.
Mormons evangelize at a level evangelicals should be ashamed not to match. This is the urgency of the Great Commission, and it is real.
Mormons honor family in ways the surrounding culture cannot. This is good, and it should be commended.
The LDS doctrine of God, of Christ, of salvation, of canon, and of human destiny departs from historic Christianity in ways that are not denominational but categorical. The Jesus preached is, in critical respects, a different Jesus.
The Restoration claim is the load-bearing structural assertion of the entire system, and it cannot survive its own internal test — Christ promised the gates of hell would not prevail against His church, and we have eighteen centuries of faithful witness that demonstrate He kept His promise.
The dying man, the grieving grandmother, and the searching young person need a true Christ — not a kind Christ, not a culturally compatible Christ, but the actual eternal Christ who actually paid the actual debt at the actual Cross.
The Mormon you love is not your enemy. They are a captive to be rescued, not an adversary to be defeated.

What I am not saying:

I am not saying Mormons cannot be saved. God is more merciful than my theology, and if a Mormon clings to the actual Christ who actually died — even through the haze of bad anthropology and a wrong theology proper — He may save them in spite of the system, the way He saves any of us in spite of our own confusions. I leave that to His judgment, not mine.
I am not saying Mormonism is the same kind of threat as Islam. It is not. Mormonism does not seek conformity through coercion; it seeks transformation through persuasion. Mormonism is a Christian heresy — a deviation from within the Christian universe — not a parasitic external ideology. The category matters.
I am not saying we should refuse Mormon friendship. I am saying we should not refuse Christ in the friendship.

VI. The Bottom Line

Stanley closed his interview with King Benjamin’s question from the Book of Mosiah: Are we not all beggars? It is a beautiful question, and I take no issue with it. We are. Every one of us is a beggar at the gates of mercy.

But the question of which gates and whose mercy is the question that finally matters.

The mercy of a god who progressed to godhood and may yet be supplanted by his offspring is not the mercy of the eternal I AM who declares Himself the first and the last and beside whom there is no other.

The mercy purchased by a spirit-brother of Lucifer who modeled obedience and sweat blood in Gethsemane is not the mercy purchased by the eternal Word made flesh, who bore the wrath of God against sin in His own body on the tree and rose on the third day with all authority in heaven and earth.

The salvation accessed through temple endowment, sealing, and progressive endurance is not the salvation given freely to the thief on the cross by a Savior who said today thou shalt be with me in paradise before the thief had performed a single ordinance.

These are different gospels. They produce different gods, different Christs, different Crosses, different deathbeds, and different eternities.

We commend the actual Christ — the eternal Word, who was God, who was with God, who became flesh, who tabernacled among us, who paid the debt no spirit-brother could pay, who rose, who reigns, and who is coming again to judge the living and the dead.

Not a god in progression. Not the elder brother of Lucifer. Not the founder of an additional dispensation requiring a nineteenth-century restoration. Not the Christ of Palmyra.

The Christ of the apostles. The Christ of the Gospels. The Christ of the closed canon and the open tomb. The Christ who said it is finished — and meant it.

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines.” — Hebrews 13:8-9

That is the bet I am making. That is the Christ I will live and die in. And that is the Christ I commend — to the missionary at my door, to the ex-Mormon at my table, to the grandmother at the graveside, and to every member of this fellowship who has someone in their life still inside that beautiful, hospitable, missionally serious, but deeply mistaken house.

Love them. Honor what is honorable. And do not soften the One who alone can save them.

Thomas

P.S. — Three matters deserve their own treatment. Halawa’s pluralism is the first; the engagement with Mormons in our lives is the second; and the deepest theological question this essay raises — what the Cross actually is, experientially, and why only God could bear it — is the third. I take them up in the addenda below.

Addendum I: A Word on Halawa’s Position

Marc Halawa was the most generous interlocutor a Mormon stake president could have asked for, and I respect his manner. But his theological framing is not Christian, and it cannot be allowed to stand as the unspoken default in our discussion.

Halawa’s position, repeated multiple times in the interview, is the rabbinic teaching that righteous Gentiles — those who keep the seven Noahide laws — have a place in the world to come without conversion to Judaism. Don’t murder. Don’t commit sexual immorality. Set up courts. Honor God. Do these things, and salvation is guaranteed.

This is a dignified, ancient, and theologically serious position. It is also, from a Christian standpoint, wrong, and we should not be silent about it because Halawa was charming.

The Christian claim is not “be Jewish” or “be Mormon” or “be Christian-as-tribal-affiliation.” The Christian claim is that every human being has fallen short of God’s nature, every human being owes a death he cannot pay, and only one Mediator between God and men can pay that death. “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

The seven Noahide laws are not a path to heaven. They are a description of basic human decency, and they cannot resolve the cosmic debt. A man who keeps all seven still dies a sinner under God’s righteous judgment, because all have sinned (Romans 3:23) — even the Noahide-observant. The question is not whether you have been a decent neighbor. The question is what is to be done with the wrath of God against your sin.

The Cross answers that question. The seven Noahide laws do not.

When we engage Jewish friends, this is what is at stake. We owe them the same gospel we owe Mormons — the gospel of the eternal Christ who alone bore the sin of the world, who calls every man to repentance and faith, and who saves no one apart from His own blood.

I do not say this with hostility to the Jewish people. I say it because the Christian Scriptures are clear: “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16). The gospel is for the Jew. Especially for the Jew. To affirm a parallel path that bypasses Christ for Jewish friends is, in the end, not love. It is concession.

Stanley, to his credit, did not concede to Halawa. He politely affirmed that he would still want Halawa to be baptized — that the Mormon claim of necessity is not relaxed for cherished Jewish friends. On this much, the LDS instinct is more biblical than the modern evangelical instinct that has, in too many cases, accepted a “two-covenant” theology in which Jewish people don’t need Jesus.

We need to be clearer than that. The Christ I commend is the Christ for everyone — the Christian, the Mormon, the Jew, the Muslim, the secular humanist, the post-everything cynic. There is one Mediator. There is one Cross. There is one Name.

Addendum II: How to Engage the Mormons in Your Life

For those of you with peripheral or ex-Mormon connections — and for those of you with active Mormons in your families and at your workplaces — let me end with practical counsel.

1. Honor what is honorable, without flinching.

If your Mormon brother-in-law is a better father than you are, say so. If your Mormon coworker is a more honest businessman than you are, say so. If your Mormon neighbor is the first to bring a meal when your family is sick, say so. The credibility you earn by honest acknowledgment is the credibility you will spend later on the harder conversations. Christians who can only see the errors in Mormonism, and never the virtues, will never be taken seriously by anyone in that community. And rightly so.

2. Do not soften Christ.

You are not doing your Mormon friend a favor by pretending the differences are denominational. You are confirming them in a system that, at its core, has the wrong Christ. Love means telling the truth at whatever cost to the social ease of the relationship. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6). You will be tempted, in the warmth of a Mormon family’s hospitality, to let the categorical differences drift. Don’t. The hospitality is real, but the hospitality is not the gospel.

3. Ask better questions than you make accusations.

The most powerful evangelistic tool with a Mormon is rarely an attack on Joseph Smith. It is a sincere, sustained question about Christ. “Tell me what Jesus’ death actually accomplished. Walk me through it.” Listen carefully. The answer will, almost always, locate the atonement in Gethsemane, frame eternal life as progressive earning, and rest the believer’s standing on a combination of faith and ordinance and endurance. That is the conversation. Not the golden plates. Not Kolob. Not the historical questions. The Christ-and-the-Cross conversation. That is the place where the Spirit can do work the historical-debate conversation cannot.

4. Pray for them by name.

This is not optional. The struggle is not against flesh and blood. There are powers and principalities entrenched in the Mormon system — as there are in every religious system, including evangelicalism — and they do not yield to argument alone. Pray for your Mormon friends by name. Pray for the prophet by name. Pray that the God who opened Saul’s eyes on the Damascus road will open eyes still under Joseph Smith’s spell. Pray that the Spirit of the actual Christ will speak to hearts that have been told their entire lives that He is something less than He is.

5. For the ex-Mormons among us:

A particular word. You have already paid the price most Mormons in our orbit have not yet paid. You know the cost of leaving the kingdom that wasn’t. Some of you lost family. Some of you lost the only community you had ever known. Some of you spent years in exile from any faith at all before the actual Christ found you.

Your testimony is precious to this fellowship and precious to the gospel. Use it carefully. The ex-Mormon who attacks his old church from bitterness will reach no one. The ex-Mormon who weeps over his old church from love — and tells the story of the actual Christ who finally met him — has a witness almost no one else can match. “Comfort yourselves together, and edify one another” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). And when your turn comes, speak.

Addendum III: What the Wrath Actually Was — The Phenomenology of the Cross

The April 18 essay on substitutionary atonement argued that the Cross was the unique solution to a cosmic dilemma — a holy God, a creation that had sinned, and a justice that required death. Christianity alone, I argued, satisfies all four divine attributes simultaneously: holiness (sin is not ignored), justice (the penalty is paid), love (the sinner is freed), and omnipotence (God accomplishes what no creature could).

But that argument left a deeper question on the table — the question every careful catechumen eventually asks, and every shallow apologetic deflects:

Why is substitution morally coherent? How is it justice for an innocent man to die for guilty men? Why does punishing the One satisfy the wrath of God against the many? Is this not, on its face, the moving of guilt from one person to another — which is precisely the kind of cosmic accounting trick that sounds like a legal fiction rather than a moral resolution?

The answer requires us to look closely at what the wrath actually is — and once we see what it is, we will see that the Cross is not a fiction at all. It is the most literal event in the history of the cosmos.

What the Wrath Actually Is

God’s nature is not merely opposed to sin in the abstract, the way a judge is opposed to crime. God’s nature is constituted such that sin produces, in Him, an absolute recoil — a response Scripture describes as wrath, holiness, fire, and consuming jealousy. “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity” (Habakkuk 1:13).

This is not a choice God makes about how to feel about sin. It is what God is — the moral integrity of being itself, against which sin registers as wound, contradiction, abomination. The classical theologians sometimes spoke as if God were too transcendent to suffer at the appearance of sin. But Scripture does not speak this way. Scripture speaks of a God who is grieved (Genesis 6:6), who abhors (Leviticus 26:30), whose anger burns (Numbers 11:1), whose face is set against the evildoer (Psalm 34:16). These are not anthropomorphic decorations on a passionless deity. They are the actual structure of the divine response — what classical theology, more carefully, calls God’s holy disposition against sin, real and active and unsoftenable.

And here is the point that has not been adequately said:

This recoil has to be experienced somewhere.

Sin is not an accounting entry that can be deleted. The fact of its having occurred is fixed in the actual structure of reality. The divine response to its occurrence is also fixed — by the very nature of the God whose existence sin contradicts. Either the sinner experiences this response himself, in eternal separation from the One whose nature he has violated — that is the substance of hell, the subjective experience of being held at infinite distance by a holiness that cannot do otherwise — or the response is experienced for him, by Another.

There is no third option. The recoil is not a mood God can talk Himself out of. It is what God is in the presence of sin. To soften it would be for God to cease being God.

The Cross as Discharge

The Cross is the second option made cosmic event.

God Himself, in the Person of the Son, takes the human flesh that sin has touched, and absorbs into His own divine consciousness the full recoil of His own nature against the sin being borne. The Conscious Points constituting the body of Christ on the cross experienced not merely Roman nails but the white-hot response of divine holiness against sin — concentrated, in those hours, into one tortured human form that was also the eternal God.

This is what “made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21) means at the experiential level. It is not a polite legal designation. It is the Son of God, in the flesh, made the locus on which the divine recoil of His own nature against the totality of human sin is concentrated and fully discharged.

This is the cup the Son asked to have taken from Him in the garden, sweating blood:

“O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” — Matthew 26:39

What was in the cup? Not Roman cruelty alone. Many men have suffered Roman cruelty without sweating blood the night before. What was in the cup was the response of God’s nature to sin, in undiluted concentration, falling on the One who was bearing it for the world. The cup was the wrath of God Himself — and the Son shrank from it because He knew, in a way no creature could know, exactly what it would be.

This is what Isaiah saw seven hundred years before Calvary:

“Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin… he shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.” — Isaiah 53:10-11

Read those words slowly. The LORD’s own action. On the LORD’s own Son. Bearing the LORD’s own response to sin. “It pleased the LORD to bruise him” — not because the Father is sadistic, but because this was the only mechanism by which the divine recoil against sin could be discharged without destroying the sinner.

And then the cry from the cross:

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — Matthew 27:46

This is not despair. This is the report from inside the event. The Son experienced — within the indissoluble unity of the Trinity, in a way that defies our reasoning but is testified to by His own words — what it is to bear the divine response to sin. He was forsaken. The fellowship eternal between Father and Son was, for those hours, eclipsed by the concentrated recoil of the divine nature against the sin the Son had taken into Himself. “He hath made him to be sin for us.” And so the wrath of God against sin landed on the One who was holding it.

This is why only God could pay this debt. No created being could survive bearing the response of the divine nature against sin. The recoil is of God, by God, from God’s own integrity with Himself. Only One whose own being is the standard could absorb the response of that standard against the violation of that standard. The Cross is not a transaction conducted by a God who watches from outside. The Cross is the divine being, in flesh, experiencing His own nature’s response to all the sin of the world, and surviving it because He is God.

Why the Substitution Is Not a Fiction

Now return to the question that began this addendum. Why is substitution morally coherent?

It is morally coherent because nothing was moved. Guilt was not transferred like a parcel from one ledger to another. The experiential consequence of sin — the recoil of the divine nature against it — was absorbed by the One Being who could absorb it, in the very flesh that had been touched by the sin in the first place. The Son took our nature, made it His own, drew the totality of human sin into Himself, and bore in His own divine consciousness the response that the sinful nature had earned.

When Paul says “He hath made him to be sin for us,” he is not using metaphor. He is reporting ontology. The Son became the locus where the actual divine response to actual sin was actually borne. Not represented. Borne.

And because it was borne — fully, infinitely, by the only Being whose absorption could be infinite — it does not need to be borne again by us. The recoil has been discharged. The white-hot heat has already passed through. There is no remaining wrath against sin for those who are in Christ, because the wrath against their sin already had its event, and the event is over. “It is finished” (John 19:30) is not a sentimental closing line. It is a statement about thermodynamics. The reaction has run to completion.

What Union with Christ Accomplishes

This is why union with Christ is the central category of New Testament salvation, and why “going to heaven when I die” is too thin a way to talk about it.

To be in Christ is not a legal fiction. It is the actual application of the actual discharged event to the actual person who trusts Him. The believer who dies to self and is raised in Him is credited not merely with a status but with the experience that has already been undergone in His Person. The recoil has been borne. The white-hot heat has already passed through. We are not merely declared clean — we are clean, because the response has been discharged. Not in us. In our Representative. Who is also our God.

“Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” — Galatians 3:13

He was made a curse — not designated, not labeled. Made. The curse of the law against sin landed on Him. And because we are in Him, the curse no longer falls on us, because there is no curse left to fall. It already fell. On the Cross. On Him.

Why Only God Could Pay

This is also why no other religion could conceivably offer this resolution, and why the Christology of the Five Departures is not optional.

If Jesus were merely a created being — a spirit-brother who progressed to divinity, a great teacher, a perfect man — He could not bear the divine recoil against the sin of the world, because the divine recoil is infinite, and only the infinite can absorb the infinite. A progressed god, a created christ, an exalted-Man, could perhaps bear his own sin, or the sin of one other person at most, before the response would destroy him.

The Christ who paid this debt had to be God Himself in the flesh — the eternal Word, who was the standard and was therefore the only one capable of bearing the response of the standard. “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9) is not a doctrinal flourish. It is the structural requirement for the Cross to actually work. Without the full deity of the Son, the absorption fails. The debt is not paid. The wrath is not satisfied. The discharge does not occur.

This is why the LDS Christology I described in Section II.1 is not a denominational disagreement but a soteriological catastrophe. A spirit-brother who progressed to divinity through obedience cannot bear the wrath of the standard against the violation of the standard, because he is not the standard. Whatever such a Christ accomplished in Gethsemane, it was not the discharge of the divine recoil against the sin of the world. It could not have been. He was not God in the way the discharge required.

The Christ of the apostles is the only Christ who could pay this debt — because He was, and is, the only Christ who is the actual standard against which the recoil is calibrated.

The Conscious Point Physics Connection

Briefly — because the full integration belongs in another essay — note how this aligns with what the Conscious Point Physics has been pointing toward.

If reality is constituted by Conscious Points generated by and of the essence of God’s mind, then sin is not the violation of an external law but the introduction of misalignment into the very substance of being. Every act of sin produces, in the Conscious Points that constitute the act, a deviation from the alignment of the divine mind. And because reality is the divine mind expressing itself, every sin is felt at the level of being.

The wrath of God is, in this framework, the response of being itself to misalignment within itself. It is not arbitrary. It is structural. It is what happens when a system whose ground is consciousness encounters an act that contradicts the nature of that consciousness.

The Cross, then, is the divine consciousness concentrating the totality of the misalignment into one Person — Conscious Points constituting human flesh that was also the eternal Logos — and absorbing within that Person the response of the whole field of being against the misalignment. This is not metaphor in CPP. This is mechanism. The Conscious Points constituting the body of the Son on the cross were the actual locus of the actual response of the actual ground of being against the actual sin of the actual world.

We will live and move and have our being in Him forever — but we will do so cleanly, because the response that our misalignment had earned has been borne in Him and discharged from the field of being. “Therefore there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). There cannot be. The condemnation has already had its event.

The Pastoral Implication

Here is what this means for the believer at the deepest level — and what it means for the Mormon, the Jew, the Muslim, the secular humanist, the searching young person at the door:

You do not need to bear the response of God’s nature against your sin. Someone already bore it.

You do not need to perform ordinances to earn admission. The admission has been purchased, at infinite cost, by the only One whose payment could be sufficient.

You do not need to graduate from kindergarten through twelfth grade across multiple eternities. You need to come, by faith, to the Christ who has already done the thing that could not be done by anyone else, and rest in Him — because what He bore on the Cross was the very response of God’s own nature, in undiluted form, against the totality of the sin you have committed and ever will commit.

This is why the gospel is good news. It is good news of a particular and irreducible shape: the wrath of God against my sin already had its event, and I was not the one who bore it.

When the hymn writer wrote “It is well with my soul” in the immediate aftermath of losing his daughters at sea, he was not whistling past the graveyard. He was reporting from inside the Christian assurance: whatever storm is here, the storm against my sin has already broken on Christ. That is why it is well. That is the only reason it is well. There is no other ground.

What This Costs God

I want to close this addendum where I think Christian theology too often refuses to linger.

What we have been describing is not, ultimately, a transaction. It is something more like a wound in the divine being itself, voluntarily accepted in order to heal the breach between the divine and the human.

God did not need to do this. There was no external compulsion. The Father was not coerced; the Son was not unwilling; the Spirit was not absent. The Triune God, in eternal counsel, chose this — chose to enter His own creation, chose to take on flesh, chose to bear the response of His own nature against the sin of those He loved, chose to be made a curse, chose to cry out “Why hast thou forsaken me?” in the very moment of bearing the discharge.

This is what God’s love actually is, and what the Cross actually cost. Not a generic benevolence. Not a feeling. The voluntary absorption of the divine recoil against sin into the divine being itself, undertaken by the Son for the joy that was set before Him.

“Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” — Hebrews 12:2

The joy was us. The joy was the discharged wrath. The joy was the breach healed, the alignment restored, the children gathered home. The joy was the moment when the recoil completed and reconciliation became possible.

This is the gravity at the center of the Christian gospel. It is what the LDS system, with its progressive learning and its first-grade-to-graduation framework, has fundamentally not seen. The Cross is not a teaching aid in an eternal school. The Cross is the divine being absorbing its own response to the totality of human sin, into the flesh of the only One who could survive it, so that those who are joined to Him by faith inherit the consequence of that discharge — clean, restored, unaccused, beloved.

This is the Christ we commend. This is the Cross we preach. This is the gospel.

There is no other.

“Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief… he shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.” — Isaiah 53:10-11

VII. Closing

The Mormon question is not an exotic curiosity. It is the question of which Christ we are commending — and therefore which Christ we believe in. Every false Christ is, finally, no Christ at all, however lovely the lives constructed around Him.

The actual Christ does not need a 1,800-year apostasy to be restored, because He never lost His church. He does not need golden plates buried in Palmyra, because He has the apostles’ writings preserved by His Spirit through every generation. He does not need a temple endowment to admit the dying thief, because He has a Cross. And He does not need our progression toward divinity, because He is the divinity into which we are graciously and eternally invited as sons and daughters of the only God there is.

We commend Him. We name His Name. We invite our Mormon friends to come and meet the Christ they have heard about but not yet known — the Christ who paid the actual debt, by bearing the actual response of God’s own nature against actual sin, in actual flesh, on an actual Cross, on an actual day in history.

That is the Christ. That is the gospel. That is enough.

“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” — John 17:3

The only true God. The Jesus Christ He sent. Not a god among gods. Not a christ in progression. The only true God. The Jesus Christ He sent.

That is who saves. That is who is preached. That is who is enough.

“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” — 1 Timothy 2:5

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.

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