260428 Denver Snuffer – Series 2/4 – The Restoration

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

The Altar Call at bornofwater.org

A Christian Engagement with Denver Snuffer’s Christian Restoration Series (Series 2/4, Lectures 1-7)

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 28, 2026

Source: Denver Snuffer, Christian Restoration lecture series (Parts 1-7), available as transcripts at learnofchrist.org/videos.html#restoration. The series is the second of four corpus-defining lecture series posted at learnofchrist.org. Where the Protestant Reformation series traced the Reformation history without yet naming the restorer, the Christian Restoration series names Joseph Smith, narrates the Mormon-Campbellite collision, catalogs the post-Smith fragmentation, and concludes with an explicit baptismal invitation directing readers to bornofwater.org to be baptized by men who claim authority from Jesus Christ to administer the ordinance.

Context: This is the fourth Snuffer engagement in the corpus and the second in the systematic four-series treatment. The companion essays so far are: Culture by Precept and Practice (April 26), Testimony of Jesus and the Restoration Claim (April 27), Upon This Rock (April 28), and the Protestant Reformation Series (April 28). The April 27 essay engaged Snuffer’s restoration thesis; the present essay engages Snuffer’s restoration narrative — the seven-part account of how he believes the restoration unfolded from Roger Williams to the Campbells to Joseph Smith to the 2017 Boise covenant — and the altar call with which the series concludes.

To the Fellowship —

The seven-part Christian Restoration series is the central evangelistic document of Denver Snuffer’s public ministry. Where the Reformation series I engaged earlier today positions Protestantism as a preparatory movement, this series names what was being prepared: Joseph Smith’s restoration in 1820, its tragic unraveling after his death in 1844, and Snuffer’s own claim that the restoration was resumed in September 2017 by a body of believers in Boise, Idaho who became the first since Joseph Smith’s day to accept the Book of Mormon as a covenant. The series concludes — and this is the analytical key to the whole — with a direct invitation to the reader to be baptized at bornofwater.org, where men who claim apostolic authority from Jesus Christ Himself will perform the ordinance.

This is not a lecture series about history. This is an altar call. The historical material in Parts 1-6 is doing the work of preparing the reader for the decision Part 7 invites them to make. Leonard has made that decision. The essay I am writing now is, in significant part, written to him — to lay alongside his decision the careful examination that any decision of that magnitude deserves.

I will engage the series in five movements. First, what is honorable in Snuffer’s narrative arc. Second, the Reformation-was-insufficient argument as it appears here (Parts 1-3), and where it both repeats and goes beyond what the April 27 essay already addressed. Third, the Joseph Smith account in Part 4 and what Snuffer chooses to defend versus what he chooses to assert without defense. Fourth, the catalog of post-Smith Mormon failure in Parts 5-6, which I want to name as a remarkable gift to the Christian case rather than damage to it. Fifth, the altar call in Part 7, which is where the essay must, in the end, speak directly to Leonard and to anyone reading over his shoulder who is being invited to take the same step.

I. What Is Honorable in the Narrative Arc

Snuffer is doing serious historical work, and the series deserves credit for its substantive accuracy on several fronts.

1. The Roger Williams treatment in Part 2 is genuinely careful. Roger Williams (1603-1683) was a remarkable figure — Baptist founder, abolitionist, advocate for indigenous peoples, a man whose conscience drove him out of Massachusetts and into the founding of Rhode Island. Snuffer correctly highlights the wall-of-separation language Williams used (which Jefferson later borrowed for the First Amendment), correctly notes Williams’s conviction that no recovery of original Christianity was possible without God’s direct involvement, and correctly quotes Williams’s striking declaration that he was waiting for new apostles to be sent by the Great Head of the Church. This is honest history. Williams really did say what Snuffer says he said, and the citation is accurate.

2. The Campbell treatment in Part 3 is similarly careful. Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington (1809), Alexander Campbell’s intellectual development, the famous motto “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent,” and the formation of what became the Disciples of Christ / Churches of Christ tradition — Snuffer presents this material accurately. The Campbells were genuine seekers, and their restorationist instinct was a serious attempt to recover apostolic simplicity by stripping away creedal accretions.

3. The Sidney Rigdon connection in Part 5 is historically real and consequential. Snuffer correctly notes that Rigdon was a prominent Campbellite preacher before joining the Mormon movement, that his conversion brought a substantial portion of the Campbellite Ohio congregations with him, that Mormon success in Ohio came at the expense of the Campbellites, and that this provoked Alexander Campbell’s blistering 1831 review of the Book of Mormon. The Mormon-Campbellite collision is one of the most consequential intersections of nineteenth-century American religion, and Snuffer handles it accurately.

4. The acknowledgment of post-Smith Mormon catastrophe in Part 6 is unsparing and accurate. Brigham Young’s institution of polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 1857 (in which over 120 men, women, and children of the Baker-Fancher emigrant party were murdered by Mormon militia and confederate Paiutes), the post-1860 Reorganized LDS sect’s abandonment of the Book of Mormon, the polygamist splinter groups’ systematic violation of marriage and child-protection laws — Snuffer names every one of these. The unsparing honesty about Salt Lake LDS and its successor sects is something Christian apologetics typically must establish against Mormon defenses; Snuffer establishes it for us. He has read the history, and he is willing to say what the history shows.

5. The diagnosis of authority-displacing-revelation is theologically sharp. The closing of Part 5 contains one of the most theologically substantive paragraphs in the entire series — Snuffer’s observation that Mormonism, like Roman Catholicism before it, succumbed to the central pathology of religious institutional life: the displacement of revelation and God’s voice by hierarchy, position, title, and governing prerogative. This is exactly the diagnosis a Bible-based Christian critique of both Catholicism and Mormonism would make. Snuffer makes it from the inside.

6. The post-Smith chronology in Part 6 is devastating to the very tradition Snuffer claims to defend. From Joseph and Hyrum’s murder on June 27, 1844 to Brigham Young’s elected leadership on August 8, 1844 — six weeks. Three years later, August 1847, Young became sole president. In neither year was there a voice from heaven guiding the succession. Snuffer states this plainly. For a movement whose entire structural claim depends on continuing prophetic authority, the absence of any such authority at the founding moment of post-Smith Mormonism is a fact of enormous evidential weight, and Snuffer reports it without flinching.

These six points should be acknowledged. They show that Snuffer is not engaged in cheerleading. He has read the history honestly and reports it accurately. The question is whether the conclusion he draws from the history is the one the history actually supports.

II. The Reformation-Was-Insufficient Argument, Revisited

Parts 1-3 of this series reprise material the April 27 essay already engaged. Snuffer claims that Christianity had not merely declined, it had perished between the close of the New Testament and the sixteenth century; that the Reformers could subtract corruption but could not restore what was lost; that Roger Williams correctly perceived that no true church existed and that new apostles would have to be sent before any recovery could occur; and that Thomas Campbell’s effort to recover the original by subtraction alone could not work because adding could only come from God.

I have already engaged this argument at length in The Restoration That Was Not Needed (April 27). The biblical foreclosure stands: Christ promised in Matthew 16:18 that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church, and in Matthew 28:20 that He would be with His people alway, even unto the end of the world. If Christianity perished, Christ broke His promise. The Wesley citation Snuffer uses is, on careful reading, about the decline of charismatic gifts in the post-Constantinian church rather than about the perishing of true faith; Wesley himself died a Trinitarian Anglican who would have been horrified to be conscripted for the Joseph Smith project. The Roger Williams citation is similar: Williams remained a Christian within a tradition he believed to be substantially valid, awaiting eschatological renewal rather than a 19th-century New York prophet.

Two observations specific to Parts 1-3 deserve to be added to what I said before.

1. Part 1’s catalog of Reformer moral failures is being deployed asymmetrically. Snuffer names Luther’s Peasants’ War rhetoric (the famous letter calling for the slaying of obstinate peasants), Calvin’s role in the execution of Michael Servetus, and Knox’s involvement in the murder of Cardinal Beaton. He uses these failures to support the conclusion that Reform was unable to escape the low and un-Christian condition the Reformers inherited from their Catholic predecessor. But the same standard, applied to the Mormon tradition Snuffer himself defends, would demand that we conclude Restoration was unable to escape the low and un-Christian condition of its own founder and immediate successors — Joseph Smith’s documented marriages to women already married to other living men, Brigham Young’s institution of polygamy and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the polygamist splinter groups’ ongoing crimes against children. The asymmetric treatment is the framing move. Reformer moral failures are evidence that their movement was insufficient. Mormon moral failures are evidence that the followers failed the prophet, while the prophet himself remains beyond serious examination.

2. Part 3’s framing of the Campbells as preparatory is the rhetorical bridge to Joseph Smith. Snuffer presents Thomas and Alexander Campbell as restorationists who understood the right goal but lacked the necessary means — they could subtract but could not add. And adding could only come from God. This is the line that prepares the reader to receive Part 4: God did add, and the means was Joseph Smith. Notice the implicit move. The Campbells’ inability to recover lost truths by subtraction alone is taken as evidence that something needs to be added to the apostolic deposit. But the Christian position is that nothing needs to be added because nothing essential was ever lost. The Campbells failed in their goal not because they could not add, but because their goal was misconceived from the start. The apostolic deposit, faithfully read, is sufficient. Subtraction of medieval accretions is not a partial work. It is the whole work, because what is underneath the accretions is the apostolic deposit itself.

The Campbells, on this view, were partly right and partly wrong. They were right that historic Christian creedal traditions had accumulated authority beyond what scripture warranted. They were wrong to think the Bible alone, read without the historic creedal tradition’s insights into Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy, would naturally produce apostolic Christianity. The history of the Disciples of Christ tradition has, in fact, demonstrated both — they recovered congregational autonomy and biblical primacy genuinely, and they produced over time a tradition that has wrestled (with mixed results) with the Christological depth the historic creeds were articulating. The lesson is not that subtraction needed supplementing by 19th-century revelation. The lesson is that subtraction needs to be guided by the apostolic deposit’s own internal coherence, which the historic creeds at their best articulated.

III. The Joseph Smith Account in Part 4 — What Is Asserted and What Is Defended

Part 4 of the series is the load-bearing apologetic for Joseph Smith. It is here that Snuffer must persuade the reader that an actual divine restoration occurred through this man. The remarkable feature of the account is what it asserts and what it does not defend.

What is asserted: That Joseph Smith, at age fourteen, went into the woods in upstate New York to ask which church to join; that he encountered a pillar of fire and was told God had a work for him to do; that in the years following, angels appeared to him and gave him an ancient book which he translated by the gift and power of God into the Book of Mormon; that Christ Himself appeared to him on multiple occasions; that he produced more scripture than any prophet or apostle of the Bible; that he restored the authority to minister ordinances; that he prophesied events both fulfilled and yet-to-be-fulfilled.

What is not defended: The historical claims of the First Vision narrative (which exists in multiple incompatible later versions, with substantial variation in who appeared, what was said, and even whether Christ was present); the historical claims about the golden plates (no neutral witnesses, the eleven witnesses’ later religious careers and complicated testimonies, the absence of any extant material evidence); the translation method (face in a hat with a seer stone for substantial portions of the work, attested by participants like Emma Smith and David Whitmer, which raises questions about the “by the gift and power of God” claim Snuffer simply repeats); the Book of Abraham translation (where Joseph’s claimed translation of recovered Egyptian papyri can now be checked against the actual Egyptian text since the papyri were rediscovered in 1966, and the translation does not match what the text actually says); the Kinderhook plates incident (where Joseph translated a portion of fabricated metal plates as containing a record of an ancient leader); the doctrinal evolution from early Mormonism’s nearly-Trinitarian position to the Nauvoo King Follett discourse claiming the Father was once a man.

This is an apologetic strategy worth naming directly: appeal to authority by pre-supposing the authority. Joseph Smith is presented to the reader as a prophet whose claims are taken as data. The reader is invited to accept the Mormon narrative not on the strength of evidence presented but on the strength of the narrative’s own internal coherence and the moral seriousness of those who tell it. This is, of course, the same strategy any religious tradition uses for its founder — but it is worth naming because Snuffer’s broader corpus is so unsparing toward the historical record of every other religious tradition. Catholic claims he examines critically. Protestant claims he examines critically. Salt Lake LDS claims he examines critically. Joseph Smith’s foundational claims he simply asserts.

The Christian who has carefully examined the documentary record on these questions must, in honesty, name that the historical case for Joseph Smith as God’s prophet is substantially weaker than the historical case for the apostolic origin of the New Testament documents — by a wide margin. The New Testament’s historical credentials are documented in eyewitness testimony, contemporaneous letters, archaeological corroboration, and the converging consensus of secular historical scholarship that the events described did happen in roughly the form described. The Joseph Smith claims rest on the testimony of a single man, contradicted at multiple points by the documentary record, defended by a tradition that has had to revise its own historical narrative repeatedly as new documents have emerged.

I do not say this to mock Joseph Smith. I say it because Snuffer’s case requires the reader to accept Joseph Smith’s claims as comparable in evidential weight to the apostolic deposit, and they are not. Not by any honest standard of historical examination.

IV. The Catalog of Mormon Failure in Parts 5-6 — A Gift to the Christian Case

Now we come to what is, in my view, the most consequential portion of the series for the Christian engagement. Parts 5-6 are Snuffer’s catalog of post-Joseph-Smith Mormon failure, and the catalog is so honest, so unsparing, and so detailed that it constitutes — paradoxically — one of the strongest available cases for the Christian position that Joseph Smith’s revelation was not from God.

Let me lay out what Snuffer admits.

Sidney Rigdon’s reorientation of the movement. When Mormonism began, it was modeled after the Book of Mormon. Rigdon, a former Campbellite, redirected it toward recovering the New Testament Church. The movement became preoccupied with organizational structure and administrative control even during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. Joseph’s teachings and revelations became secondary and the church structure became primary. This is Snuffer’s own diagnosis. Within Joseph Smith’s lifetime, the movement he founded was already drifting from its founding revelation toward the very institutional pathology the broader Snuffer corpus is at pains to critique in Catholicism.

The 1841 temple commandment and the Mormon failure to obey. Christ commanded a temple be built; Mormons had sufficient time to build it; if they disobeyed they would be rejected. Snuffer states plainly: Mormons disobeyed. They built a Masonic Hall, brick homes, and personal property improvements instead. The temple was less than half-built when Joseph was killed three and a half years later. By Snuffer’s own framework, the Mormons were under threat of divine rejection before Joseph’s murder.

The post-1844 succession with no voice from heaven. Six weeks after Joseph and Hyrum’s murder, Brigham Young was elected by an organizational body. Three years later, he became sole president. Both in 1844 and 1847 no voice from heaven guided Mormonism as they elected replacement leaders. Snuffer says this plainly. For a tradition founded on the claim that God speaks directly to His prophets, the founding of post-Smith Mormonism was conducted by ordinary parliamentary procedure with no divine guidance. Hierarchy displaced revelation and heavenly guidance — Snuffer’s own words.

Brigham Young as the Yankee Guesser. Young himself characterized himself as a guesser rather than a prophet of Joseph Smith’s caliber. He instituted polygamy. He claimed apostates should be slain. He led the reign of terror in the Intermountain West. He bears moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The man who became the architect of post-Smith Mormonism was, by Snuffer’s own honest characterization, a guesser who governed by force, instituted doctrines Joseph Smith had opposed, and presided over mass murder.

The fragmentation pattern. Of the 15,000 Mormons Joseph gathered, only about half followed Young to Salt Lake. Other factions went to Wisconsin, Texas, Missouri. The RLDS sect (now Community of Christ) eventually abandoned the Book of Mormon and entertains doubts about Joseph Smith. Polygamist splinter groups have systematically violated marriage and child-protection laws to the present day. There are nearly 100 groups claiming Joseph Smith as their founder, most of which have excommunicated all the others.

The structural diagnosis. Snuffer’s most striking observation is at the end of Part 6: Mormonism fell into the central-hierarchy pathology much more quickly than Catholicism. Catholicism took three centuries from the apostolic age to the consolidation of central hierarchy. Mormonism took six weeks from Joseph Smith’s death to Brigham Young’s election by parliamentary body, and three years from Joseph Smith’s death to Young’s sole presidency. So much has been lost that it requires another restoration.

Now let us put this catalog alongside Christ’s promise in Matthew 16:18:

“Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

If Joseph Smith’s restoration was the genuine recovery of the church Christ promised to build, then Christ’s promise should hold. The gates of hell should not have prevailed. Whatever institutional weaknesses Joseph’s followers exhibited, the church Christ promised to build cannot fail. It is the kingdom that shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). It is the body Christ promised to be with alway, even unto the end of the world (Matthew 28:20).

But by Snuffer’s own honest catalog, the gates of hell did prevail against Joseph Smith’s restoration. Within Joseph’s own lifetime, the movement drifted into institutional preoccupation. Within six weeks of his death, hierarchy displaced revelation. Within three years, a self-described guesser became sole president. Within a generation, polygamy was normalized, the Mountain Meadows Massacre had occurred, and the Mormon people were under federal military occupation. Within two centuries, the movement had fragmented into approximately a hundred mutually-anathematizing factions, the largest of which has now revised its temple ceremonies repeatedly, abandoned its public association with the Book of Mormon, and faces growing internal questioning of its founder.

This is not a record consistent with the gates of hell shall not prevail. This is a record consistent with the gates of hell did prevail, repeatedly, comprehensively, and quickly. By the standard Christ Himself promised, Joseph Smith’s restoration was not the church Christ was building, because the church Christ was building cannot be defeated, and Joseph Smith’s restoration was defeated.

Snuffer’s response is to assert that the failure was the followers’ fault, not the prophet’s, and that the failure simply demonstrates the need for another restoration — his own, the 2017 Boise covenant. But this response is structurally non-falsifiable. Any failure of any restoration becomes, on this view, an opportunity for the next restoration. The pattern can repeat indefinitely without ever providing evidence against the framework. This is the structural problem: a theological system whose failures can never count against it is not a falsifiable system, and what is not falsifiable cannot be confirmed either.

Christ’s promise, by contrast, is falsifiable. If Christ’s church had been demonstrably defeated by the gates of hell — if the apostolic gospel had truly perished, if no faithful witness existed in any generation, if the eternal Word had no bride preserved on earth — then Christianity would be falsified. But it has not been falsified. The faithful witness has persisted in every generation, in every nation, regardless of which institutions were faithful and which were corrupt, because the foundation is Christ Himself and Christ Himself cannot be moved.

Snuffer’s catalog of Mormon failure does not strengthen the case for restoration. It strengthens the case against it. By his own honest reporting of what happened, Joseph Smith’s movement failed by the standard the church Christ promised must meet. The failure is not partial. It is comprehensive. And it is exactly what we would expect to see if the original revelation was not what Joseph Smith claimed it was.

V. The Altar Call — Part 7 and bornofwater.org

Part 7 is where the analytical engagement must stop and the pastoral engagement must begin, because Part 7 is not a lecture. It is an invitation.

The structure of Part 7 is a sustained doctrinal frame followed by a specific call to action. The doctrinal frame: restoration and apostasy are constants, never stasis; apostasy subtracts truth and silences God’s voice; restoration adds, recovers, returns connection to heaven; the 2017 Boise covenant began the resumption of Joseph Smith’s interrupted work; faithful followers are now publishing new scripture, accepting more of Christ’s gospel, expecting greater understanding; the movement is non-institutional, has no paid ministers, and offers baptism freely to all.

Then the call to action: if you believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who taught truth and died to save mankind from sin and death, you should act on that by being baptized in His name. Go to bornofwater.org to request baptism. Someone will come to you who has authority from Jesus Christ to administer the ordinance.

This is the moment the entire seven-part series has been building toward. The reader is being asked to take an action — to request baptism by men claiming apostolic authority outside any historic Christian tradition — and to trust that the men who arrive have the authority they claim.

I want to address this directly and seriously.

To Leonard, who has already responded. The decision you have made deserves to be honored as a sincere act of conscience. You went seeking God’s voice and you believed you found it. That seeking is the right impulse, and the fact that I do not believe you found what you sought does not diminish the seriousness of the search. I want you to know that.

But I also want to say plainly what I believe: that the men who baptized you, however sincere, do not have the apostolic authority they claim. No man does, in the sense Snuffer’s tradition means it, because that authority was never lost in the first place — there has been an unbroken witness to apostolic Christianity through every generation since Pentecost — and so the entire framework of needing to receive ordinances from authorized restored ministers rests on the prior claim that the church was lost, which Christ promised it would not be. The men at bornofwater.org are offering you an authority they do not possess, not because they are dishonest, but because the authority they claim does not exist apart from the apostolic succession that has continued, in the faithful witness of every generation of Christians, without interruption.

What does this mean for your baptism? It does not mean you are unsaved. The thief on the cross was saved without being baptized at all. The Roman centurion Cornelius was filled with the Spirit before Peter even finished his sermon and called for water. Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ, not by the precision of the baptismal lineage. If you have made Peter’s confession in truth — “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” — and have trusted in the Christ that confession identifies, you stand on the foundation that Christ Himself laid, regardless of who held the bowl when the water touched your head. The foundation is Christ. The means of access to the foundation is faith. The mark of entrance to the visible church is baptism, but baptism’s validity is not principally a function of the administrant’s credentials. It is a function of the Christ in whose name it is performed, and the faith of the one being baptized.

So I do not say to you, “your baptism was invalid; you must be baptized again by a different lineage.” I say to you, “the authority claim under which you were baptized is not what its administrants believe it is, but the Christ in whose name you sought baptism is exactly who you sought, and your faith in Him is the substance of your standing.” The framework around your baptism is, I believe, mistaken. The faith inside the framework is not.

To anyone reading this who is being invited toward bornofwater.org. The invitation deserves a careful response. You do not need new apostles to be sent. You do not need a 2017 Boise covenant. You do not need to wait for the next restoration. The apostles have already been sent — by the eternal Christ, two thousand years ago — and what they delivered is in your hands when you open the New Testament. The Spirit Christ promised has been indwelling believers in every generation since Pentecost, and He indwells you the moment you trust in Christ. The church Christ promised to build has been building for two millennia, and you are invited to join it not by being baptized into a 2017 covenant in upstate Idaho but by confessing the same Christ Peter confessed, repenting of your sins, trusting in His finished work on the Cross, and being baptized into the historic body of believers in any of countless faithful congregations that confess the apostolic gospel today.

You do not need a restoration. The original is still here. The gates of hell did not prevail. Christ kept His promise. That is the gospel — not that the church was lost and is being recovered, but that the church was promised to endure and has endured.

VI. What This Series Adds to the Engagement

Stepping back, the Christian Restoration series adds three things to the larger Snuffer engagement that the previous essays did not address as directly.

First, it makes the altar call explicit. Where the Reformation series and Testimony of Jesus and Culture by Precept and Practice operated as historical-theological lectures, this series has an evangelistic endpoint at bornofwater.org. The Christian engagement therefore must include not only argument about the framework but counter-invitation to the actual Christ. I have tried to provide both.

Second, it shows what Snuffer is willing to defend and what he simply asserts. The catalog of post-Smith Mormon failure is unsparing. The defense of Joseph Smith’s prophetic authenticity is essentially absent — the claims are stated but not argued. This asymmetry is itself an argument. A thinker who critically examines every other tradition but exempts one tradition’s founder from the same critical examination is not, however learned, doing balanced work. He is doing apologetics. That is a legitimate genre, but it should be named as what it is.

Third, it confirms the structural non-falsifiability of the restoration framework. Snuffer’s response to the catalog of Mormon failure is another restoration is needed. The same response will, presumably, apply when his own 2017 movement eventually fragments or fails — yet another restoration will be needed. The framework cannot be tested against any possible historical record because every failure becomes evidence for the next restoration. Christianity, by contrast, makes a falsifiable claim: the church Christ promised will not be defeated. That claim has been tested against twenty centuries of history and has held. The historical record is the test. The test has been passed.

VII. Closing

The Christian Restoration series is the heart of Denver Snuffer’s public ministry, and engaging it carefully has been worth the effort. The historical scholarship is real. The pastoral seriousness is real. The willingness to speak unsparingly about the institutional Mormonism that excommunicated him is real. None of these should be dismissed.

But the framework rests on a foundational error that the entire seven-part series presupposes rather than defends: that the church Christ promised to build was substantially lost and required nineteenth-century prophetic restoration. The biblical foreclosure of that claim has stood since the April 27 essay, and the present series, despite its honest reporting of post-Smith Mormon failure, does nothing to overturn it. Indeed, by Snuffer’s own honest catalog, the gates of hell did prevail against Joseph Smith’s restoration — comprehensively, quickly, and at every level of institutional life — which is the evidence we would expect to see if the founding revelation was not what its founder claimed it was.

The altar call at bornofwater.org deserves a counter-invitation to the actual Christ — the eternal Word, identified by Peter’s confession, present in every generation through His indwelling Spirit, accessible without intermediation by any modern prophetic claimant, sufficient to save and sanctify any soul who comes to Him in faith. That invitation has been open since Pentecost. It is open today. It will remain open until He returns. There is no need to wait for the next restoration, because the original has never been lost.

Leonard, the seriousness with which you are seeking God is a thing I respect. The seeking is the right impulse. The conclusion you have reached is one I cannot follow you into, because the foundation it rests on is the foundation Christ Himself promised would not be moved, and Christ Himself has not moved it. Wherever you go from here, the Christ I commend to you is the same Christ Peter confessed at Caesarea Philippi. He is enough. He has always been enough. He will always be enough.

Thomas

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

“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” — John 3:5

“Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” — Romans 8:9

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.