260524 – Fellowship on Governmental Obedience and the Covenant Christian Restoration

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

Two Conversations: Render Unto Caesar, and the Covenant Christian Restoration

Fellowship Discussion Summary | May 24, 2026

Occasion. This was the Sunday following a long week of theological-production work — the engagement with Reid’s Romans 13 essay published May 15, the distilled summary completed Friday, the pronoun essay engaging the convention of generic he/him in formal writing, and three Facebook-post fellowship essays produced in a single day (the Mark Smith Obama list, the Manookian/Williams Ninth Circuit post, and the Rawan Osman piece on early-Zionist quote-mining). The Sunday meeting itself unfolded across roughly three and a half hours, with four distinct conversations that the transcript treats as a single document but that the fellowship’s actual structure marks as four. They deserve to be drawn out separately, both because each does its own work and because the day, taken whole, exhibits a cross-domain pattern that is itself worth naming. I will treat the four in order and close with the pattern.

The two main conversations were these:

1. The main fellowship on the May 13 Reid-engagement essay, during which Charlie offered an interpretive reading of render unto Caesar that I had not previously heard articulated in this form — a reading not of image but of title and ownership. The conversation then ranged across the spectrum from Reid-style maximum-submission to active conscientious refusal, with substantive contributions from Michael Sherman, Susan, and Leonard.
2. The LDS-Covenant Christian conversation that opened when Leonard mentioned, in passing, that Abraham was almost sacrificed by his father — an extracanonical claim that pulled the meeting into a careful working-through of the relationship between the Covenant Christian branch of LDS Restorationism (which Leonard now affiliates with) and mainstream Salt Lake LDS theology (which he has departed from), with Susan and Charlie speaking from their own former-LDS history.

Part I — Render Unto Caesar: Charlie’s Reading and the Spectrum of Resistance

The Reid foil

The main fellowship opened with Charlie’s report on having tried to read the Reid essay I had sent earlier in the week (the original CGG Forerunner article from 1996 that the May 13 fellowship essay engages). His first response was this guy is such a coward and sissy. I don’t like him. My response, this is exactly what an essay needs in order to be written, an interlocutor whose position is sharply wrong enough to be answered. I responded that Reid is a foil in the literary sense — the figure whose definite position provides the resistance against which the essay can develop its own definite position. Reid is not a strawman. The May 13 essay tries hard to give him his due (he is right about the default disposition, right about rebellion-as-spiritual-disposition being sin, right about the sovereign-citizen movement, right about Daniel and the three Hebrew children as the right model). But the essay disagrees with him on the structural reading of Romans 13, on the scope of Acts 5:29, on the two halves of Matthew 22:21, on the witness of Paul’s actual life, on the Reformation lesser-magistrate doctrine, and on the moral-cooperation analysis required by the contemporary tax question. Charlie had skimmed past the sovereign-citizen sections — Susan and I are definitely not that — and had landed in the body of the argument, which he then began to engage substantively.

Charlie’s title-and-ownership reading of render unto Caesar

Charlie highlighted the render unto Caesar passage:

Christ in that exchange about render unto Caesar — another way to look at it, is that what he was asking us to do was to make a decision on ownership and a decision on title. Just because Caesar puts his image and superscription on every coin doesn’t make him the owner of every coin. What Christ asks us to do, in my opinion, is in all ways judge who is the owner of any given thing. God owns everything, including Caesar, and so just because Caesar makes a claim doesn’t mean he gets what he claims. It means that we have an obligation every single moment of our lives to render to the owner what is theirs.

Leonard, who had not yet read the May 13 essay, immediately recognized this as the heart of the render unto Caesar saying as he had received it. Hardly anybody gets that, Charlie. That’s the first thing that jumps to my mind, that gulf between render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s. It’s like, okay, who owns what here?

Charlie’s reading is, I think, a third interpretive layer beyond the two layers the May 13 essay had developed. The popular reading is to pay the tax; the matter is closed. The middle reading of the May 13 essay developed at some length is the image reading — the coin bears Caesar’s image and is therefore owed to Caesar; the human being bears God’s image and is therefore owed to God; the parallelism is the integrating frame. Charlie’s reading does not displace these but adds, beneath them, the title question: under what authority does the image function as a claim of ownership? The answer, in Charlie’s reading, is only insofar as the image-impresser actually owns what he has stamped. Caesar’s stamp does not constitute ownership; it presupposes a prior question about whether Caesar has standing to claim the coin in the first place. And the deeper biblical answer is that God owns Caesar, and therefore God owns the coin too; thus, the believer’s act of rendering the coin to Caesar is itself conditioned by God’s prior and superior ownership of everything, including Caesar.

This makes the render unto Caesar saying not a flat division of two ownership-domains (mine to Caesar, mine to God) but a single judgment exercised under God’s universal lordship: render to the rightful owner what is the rightful owner’s, recognizing that the rightful owner of everything is God, and that Caesar’s claim is real only to the extent that God authorizes Caesar’s stewardship of the coin. The believer is being asked to make a constant ownership judgment — whose is this? to whom does this rightly belong? — and to render accordingly, with the understanding that even what is correctly rendered to Caesar is rendered through and under God’s prior title.

This is, I think, the highest reading of the saying. It absorbs the popular reading (the coin is materially Caesar’s, and is materially returned to him), absorbs the middle image-bearing reading (the person bears God’s image and is owed to God), and adds a layer of judgment-under-divine-ownership that orients every act of rendering toward God as the ultimate owner.

Summary: This perspective sheds new light on the meaning of Jesus’ “Render unto Caesar, Render unto God”  response to the Pharisees and Herodians. The bottom line is that we are required to make a judgment about who owns what. This means that we must judge the morality of the situation the way that God would. The judgment is thrown back on us. We must study God’s law, listen to the Holy Spirit, carefully examine the reality of each situation, and judge rightly who is the proper owner in each circumstance. This is exactly what this discussion was about. It was about establishing the distinctions.

Charlie on civil order and the Constitution

Charlie, by his own description, falls on the rebellious side of the temperamental spectrum — he has spent significant portions of his life as a guest of the state, in the Contra Costa County Jail and elsewhere, mostly over disputes with the state about child-support arrangements that he believes were inverted in the application against him. I’m all for civil order, he said, but I’m also all for our civil servants to read the Constitution once in a while, which apparently they never do. The principle behind his statement is one that the May 13 essay touched on only briefly: the United States Constitution itself, when read closely, is far closer to a charter for restraining the federal government than to one for empowering it. Charlie had to learn the Constitution from the law library shelf in the county jail in order to make arguments to the state that the state’s own agents either do not know or do not honor.

This is the lesser-magistrate doctrine running in a different direction than the May 13 essay developed — not the doctrine that lesser civil magistrates must restrain higher civil magistrates, but the related doctrine that the constitutional charter itself is a lesser magistrate over the federal executive and its agencies, and that citizens have standing under that charter to demand performance of its terms. Charlie’s working theory of his own legal exchanges with the government is that when I point out what the Constitution actually says, I have had many successful exchanges. The Constitution is a document that the agents of the state have largely forgotten how to read. Citizens who have read it possess an authority the agents lack.

Michael Sherman on venue and the wrong-direction-on-the-freeway protest

Michael Sherman raised the point about venue — that tax-protest of the symbolic kind is, in his framing, the wrong venue for the kind of resistance that civil-conscience refusal actually requires. It’s sort of like, okay, therefore I’m not going to obey this country’s laws because of their evils, and I will drive going in the wrong direction on the freeway. Ha ha on them. Well, I get the protest idea, but not the right venue to do it. It will only cause you a lot of grief if you run into another car or one into you, and it doesn’t address the issue.

Michael’s structural point lines up exactly with the moral-cooperation analysis the May 13 essay developed in §IX: symbolic refusal of remote material cooperation (the calculated immoral portion of the general tax) does not actually move the spending, does not constitute conscientious objection in the historic sense, and exposes the resister to consequences disproportionate to any effect achieved.

Michael’s wrong venue is the same insight stated as practical wisdom rather than as moral theology. The real thing is, you really want the unjust or ungodly law to change. I picture living like Winston in 1984, or picture a Nazi citizen watching his neighbors being hauled away to concentration camps and saying, well, what can you do? Well, I don’t know what, but hide them — something that’s important. Your voice matters if you really think it needs to change. The right venue is an organized political-cultural witness that moves the law itself, or a specific conscientious refusal at the point of direct participation, where one’s own hand is implicated. Symbolic tax refusal is neither.

The Rockefeller / Trump income disclosure thread

Leonard raised the well-known story of Nelson Rockefeller’s confirmation-hearing testimony in 1974, when asked why he had paid no income tax in a particular year — because I have no taxable income — and the parallel of Trump’s release showing very low income-tax payments due to legal carry-forward losses. The story was offered in the spirit of the tax laws being a mess, which is true, but Michael Sherman corrected the framing in the direction of accuracy: it is not the case that anyone can avoid taxes by knowing the loopholes; it is the case that ownership of businesses generating Schedule-A losses creates write-off opportunities that wage earners do not have. The structural inequity is real and is a recurring topic of congressional reform proposals. The thread did not extend beyond this, but it is worth noting in the summary because the fellowship sometimes drifts into the territory of imagining that ordinary citizens have hidden legal tools available to them that they merely have not discovered. Mostly, we do not. The wealthy have access to structures that wage earners do not. This is not a conspiracy; it is a feature of the tax code that operates differently across income types and that ordinary citizens cannot easily access without the kinds of asset structures that wage employment alone does not generate.

Susan’s choreography point — the relinquishment of grandiosity

Susan said, of the larger question of what one person can do:

It’s important to recognize in our own minds and hearts that it’s Christ that’s choreographing his work. We are just doing one part of Christ’s work, and so instead of looking at this thing that we do as the thing that’s going to change everything, it’s more like, okay, Christ is choreographing, and he has untold amounts of people on this earth, who knows how many, who really love him, and who are doing their part, or trying to do their part, or will do their part. And we don’t have to think that we are going to facilitate everything. It’s all Christ wants us to do — our part.

This is the relinquishment-of-grandiosity move that the fellowship needs to hear regularly, because the work the fellowship is doing — across CFE, CCC, CPP, CRF, IDM, CHR, CHS, CVN, and now the Walk Center — is sufficient to produce in any single contributor an over-identification with outcomes that are not the contributor’s to produce. Susan’s instinct is correct. The job is not to win the world; the job is to do one’s part faithfully and to trust the choreographer for the rest. Michael Sherman picked up on this, holding the Catholic-Protestant religious-war counterexample as a needed complication (Christians killing Christians, both armies blessed by their respective clergy, is a difficult case for the Christ is choreographing this framing if taken simplistically). Susan answered the complication well: He gave us a beautiful gift by saying, “This is how you will know my disciples—they will have love for one another.” So, in helping us to know who his disciples are, we can also know who his disciples are not, and we can recognize when people are at odds with each other and killing each other, that isn’t Christ. People can abuse Christ’s gospel, his name, and we don’t have to lump them in together with the people who are truly obeying.

The believer does not have to endorse every event that happens in the Christian-cultural sphere as Christ’s choreography. The believer is permitted — required — to identify what is Christ’s and what is not, to do his part in the work that is Christ’s, and to leave the choreography to the Choreographer.

The pointillism image

The Christos Underground project contains many pieces. In describing the larger project that the CFE essays and the broader Christos work are aiming at, I use the image of pointillism. The Christos work, taken as a whole, is not a single argument, a single book, a single cultural intervention — it is a tapestry of ideas, relationships, organization, and work. Each essay, conversation, demonstration, engagement, business decision, and act of faithfulness is a single point of color on the canvas of culture. None of them is, on its own, the picture. But assembled — placed beside each other, accumulated over years, viewed from the right distance — they resolve into a portrait. The portrait is the face of Christ as he would be lived in our particular cultural moment, applied across the full domain of contemporary life. The Christos Underground is a positive intervention program rather than a defensive reaction. It is the slow, patient pointillism of a Christ-portrait being built up by many hands.

The image is useful because it organizes the otherwise overwhelming sprawl of the work. We do not have to know what the whole picture will look like in its grand/full comprehension. We have to put down the dot in front of us by taking the right/good/Godly action in each moment. We are each placed in a specific circumstance that intersects with the past and future of our lives and with the lives and circumstances of others in the present. The color we place on the canvas of life is the action and spirit we bring to each moment. As we listen to the Holy Spirit, we are being directed in the grand Choreographer’s composition of the Kingdom of Heaven manifesting on Earth.

Part II — Restoration, Restoration, Restoration: The Covenant Christian Question

How the topic opened

The LDS-Covenant Christian conversation opened sideways. Leonard, late in the meeting, was citing biblical examples of saints who would not cross the line, and mentioned Abraham was almost sacrificed by his father. I challenged him on that. I had not heard the claim, and did not recognize it as biblical. He clarified that it’s in our scriptures. It was an additional revelation given to Joseph Smith, recorded in the Pearl of Great Price (the Book of Abraham). The story Leonard then told is not, properly speaking, identical to the midrashic Abraham-smashes-his-father’s-idols tradition that appears in Genesis Rabbah and in various Jewish and Islamic sources, though it draws on the same well. In Joseph Smith’s version, Abraham is sentenced to be sacrificed on an altar to his father’s idols and is miraculously delivered. The delivery sets him on the path to seeking greater knowledge, leading to his eventual reception of the Abrahamic covenant.

I noted that in the canonical Bible, the sacrifice narrative concerning Abraham is the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son and then provides a ram. The Joseph Smith addition reverses the spiritual polarity. Abraham is the Godly would-be victim, with his idolatrous father as the would-be sacrificer. Leonard noted that this is not contradictory but an additional perspective. He presented the Joseph Smith story as background history that predates the binding of Isaac, and that the test prepared Abraham to be the kind of man who would later be willing to bind Isaac.

The canonical Bible creates a typological structure through the story of Abraham sacrificing his only Son, establishing a type/shadow/future recapitulation. The binding of Isaac is the pre-figuration of God the Father’s offering of the Son. The lifting up of the brazen serpent is the pre-figuration of Christ lifted up on the cross. The Passover lamb is the prefiguration of the blood of the Lamb of God, which protects against the spirit of judgment. These typological pre-figurations are the literary evidence, internal to the canon, that the canon was authored by a single divine Mind over many human pens across many centuries. They are how we know the Bible is what it claims to be. The Joseph Smith addition does not disrupt the canonical typology; it merely adds a chapter before Genesis 22. The canonical Genesis 22 is spare. The Pearl-of-Great-Price account is detailed and narrative-driven.

Leonard’s actual position

Leonard’s position deserves to be stated carefully, because Leonard is a member of this fellowship and because his theological location is more complex than either mainstream LDS or former LDS who has come to evangelical orthodoxy. He is part of the Covenant Christian branch of LDS Restorationism as revealed by Denver Snuffer, which has formally departed from the Salt Lake institutional LDS Church to return to what its adherents understand as the original Joseph Smith teaching prior to the institutional corruptions of the Brigham Young era and after. He rejects the contemporary LDS Church’s temple-building program. He rejects the proxy-work-for-the-dead temple endowment structure. He renounces, in strong terms, the LDS framing of sanctification as independence. He holds that as one becomes more righteous, one becomes less dependent on God. He believes that doctrine is heresy and categorizes it as an attempt to manipulate people with the seduction of power and importance. He believes that separation from God is the last thing you would want to do.

Susan grew up in the LDS Church; she had absorbed precisely the sanctification-as-independence framing as a young woman, and was really glad to hear Leondard reject that framing. Leonard and Susan, were both speaking from inside the LDS tradition as they had each known it, agreed in real time that the as you become more righteous, you become less dependent on God trajectory is a heretical reading of sanctification, and that the orthodox-biblical pattern is the precise opposite: sanctification draws the believer into deeper dependence on God, not into independence from him.

The exaltation question

Where Leonard left the question of exaltation open. Exaltation is the LDS doctrine, articulated most explicitly in Joseph Smith’s King Follett discourse, that the faithful believer, after a long process of becoming-like-Christ-through-Christ’s-power, will eventually share in something like the divine nature in a way that the canonical Christian tradition does not affirm. Leonard’s working formulation is biblically careful: he cited 2 Peter 1:4 (partakers of the divine nature) and Christ’s be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48), and offered the King Follett move as a long-process extrapolation of those texts. I can’t do it myself; it’s impossible; there’s no way I can be like him except if he gives me his power, if he saves me, and he will if I give him my trust, my faith. So yes, I do believe God can save me and help me become like him. That’s what he wants. He wants his children to be like him in his family.

The canonical Christian tradition, particularly in its Reformed and broadly evangelical forms, has historically read partakers of the divine nature as a deification (theosis) language that does not entail ontological identity with God but rather participation in God’s character through the indwelling of the Spirit. The Eastern Orthodox tradition reads theosis more strongly than the Western Protestant tradition but still maintains the creator-creature distinction. The LDS reading — that the faithful become ontologically gods, with their own creations, in the King-Follett sense — crosses a line that the canonical tradition has held since Athanasius against Arius and through the Cappadocians. Leonard, in his Denver Snuffer expression of the doctrine, does not appear to me to be claiming the full King-Follett ontological reading. He is claiming something closer to the Eastern Orthodox theosis with a long-process eschatological extension. That is closer to the canonical position than mainstream LDS.

Susan, again, drew the line precisely where the canonical position draws it: as far as becoming gods and all of that, because it is so clearly spoken against in the Bible — about there being other gods, there’s only one God — that kind of thing, I tend to accept that. Susan’s posture is the right one for a member of the fellowship who has come out of the LDS tradition. She affirms what she finds in the canonical text, declines to add to the canonical text, and trusts God for whatever the eschatological end will reveal that the canonical text did not specify. Whatever happens in eternity, it’s going to be good, and I don’t know what it is. I trust God.

The Mother-in-Heaven / Proverbs 8 question

Leondard cited Proverbs 8, with its personified female figure of Wisdom, as evidence for the LDS doctrine of a Heavenly Mother. The Proverbs 8 chapter does indeed personify Wisdom in unambiguously feminine grammatical and rhetorical terms (Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? She standeth in the top of high places…). The question is whether the personification is ontological — pointing to an actual feminine divine being — or literary — using Hebrew poetry’s standard personification device to give Wisdom-as-divine-attribute a vivid voice. The biblical-scholarly consensus, including across the Christian theological spectrum, has overwhelmingly been the literary reading. Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is the same Wisdom that the New Testament identifies with Christ himself (1 Corinthians 1:24, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God), and the feminine grammatical gender of the Hebrew word for wisdom (chokmah) does not constitute evidence for an actual feminine divine being any more than the feminine gender of ekklesia (church) constitutes evidence that the Church is ontologically female.

Leonard’s reading is the LDS reading, and it sits structurally beside the mainstream LDS doctrine of Heavenly Mother (which, intriguingly, the LDS Church has historically discouraged from public devotional practice — Eliza R. Snow’s hymn O My Father is the canonical reference, but the LDS Church has long counseled members not to pray to Heavenly Mother). Leonard’s Covenant Christian version of the doctrine appears to honor Heavenly Mother but, like the mainstream LDS, declines to direct worship to her. She doesn’t want to be worshipped, Leonard said when Susan pressed the point.

Susan declined to assert that the Bible teaches a Heavenly Mother or that it forbids one. She located herself in the same epistemic posture she had taken on exaltation: I feel like it’s best to just not talk about Mother in heaven. It may be that there’s a Mother in heaven, but the Bible is silent on the personage of the Mother in heaven. This is the Protestant-evangelical posture, and it is consistent with the Sola Scriptura discipline that has structured the Reformed tradition for five hundred years. The Bible authorizes what it authorizes. It does not authorize devotional practice toward a divine person it does not name. The believer can speculate about what may or may not exist in the divine economy beyond what is named, but the believer’s devotional practice must remain within what is named.

I suggested that there might be a spirit in charge of wisdom — an angelic or ministerial figure to whom the wisdom-function is delegated, without that figure constituting a fourth member of the Trinity or a feminine divine consort. The idea has some footing in the broader biblical-angelology literature (the Wisdom literature of the intertestamental period, including Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon, develops the Wisdom-personification in directions that some early Christian writers later identified with the pre-incarnate Christ, others with the Holy Spirit, others with the angelic order). The canonical text personifies Wisdom poetically and identifies the same Wisdom in the New Testament with Christ; it does not authorize devotional practice toward a Heavenly Mother; we hold to what the canonical text authorizes and decline to extend beyond it.

References to the female aspect of God in scripture include: The Isaiah 49:15 (Can a woman forget her sucking child… yet will I not forget thee), Isaiah 66:13 (as one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you), Hosea 11:3-4 (the maternal-tender-parent imagery), and Matthew 23:37 (how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings) maternal-metaphorical references to God. These are, of course, metaphorical illustrations of God’s character, not ontological assertions about a feminine divine person. The canonical text uses them and does not extend them.

Charlie on the temple as Mormon center

Charlie, who came out of mainstream LDS in his own life trajectory, was familiar with the LDS-Nauvoo-Masonic relationship. In LDS doctrine, the temple, the endowment, and all the ceremonies are huge. He mentioned a former church leader whom he had known as a child, who had told him about a temple room in his home — a room where pictures of the LDS temple are displayed and where the family is reminded that the temple and its rituals are a primary value. Charlie did not know this was a feature of Mormon culture, even though he had been raised in a mainstream LDS household. Susan confirmed it. The Nauvoo-period temple endowment is not a peripheral feature of LDS practice that the fellowship can dismiss as a Masonic accretion; for the mainstream LDS believer, it is the central spiritual experience of his life, and the temple itself is functionally the center of LDS devotional reality. Susan and Charlie both went through the endowment ceremony before leaving the LDS Church. Both took the temple oaths that were in force at the time — oaths that, until 1990, included blood-penalty consequences for revealing the ceremony’s specifics. Both regard the experience now as a serious spiritual entanglement that the LDS Church has, in their judgment, taken pains to play down in its public-facing materials. Susan said that in her opinion, it opens the door to a lot of demonic.

I have not had the experience Susan and Charlie are describing. Susan’s and Charlie’s first-hand witness on the temple-endowment question is, for any responsible engagement with the LDS tradition, primary source material that an outside observer cannot supply.

Closing the section

The LDS-Covenant Christian conversation closed with a prayer led by Susan — a benediction that modeled the very posture the conversation had been working toward. We thank you and praise you for our fellowship, and we ask you to please go with us this week. Help us, help us to grow, help us to understand, help us to gain understanding. Open our eyes — not for our sakes, but for your sake, God, that you might be glorified. The session had confronted substantive disagreement on substantive matters, but shared opinions within the context and expression of mutual love.

Joining today: Thomas, Charlie, Armond, Leonard, Susan, and Michael.

Departed midway: Michael (~01:23), Leonard (~02:30), Susan (~02:32). Charlie and Armond remained for the post-meeting.

Closing prayer offered by Susan.

Word count: ~5,300.

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute One heart to make Christ King.

260523 – LDS and Snufferite Restoration

by Thomas Abshier | May 23, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

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

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

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

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

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

I. The Great Apostasy: What Mormonism Claims Christianity Lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. The Nauvoo Endowment and the Masonic Question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. The Diagnostic Question: What Was Actually Missing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII. The Snufferite Branch: What It Keeps and Rejects

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

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

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

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

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

What does the Snufferite movement reject from mainstream Mormonism?

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

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

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

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

VIII. Why a Sincere Christian Might Follow Snuffer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X. Pastoral Closing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Thomas

260522 – Forwarding Posts Discipline

by Thomas Abshier | May 22, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Thirty-Eight ‘Firsts’: On Forwarded Outrage, the Ninth Commandment, and the Christian Discipline of the Share Button

By: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

Date: May 22, 2026

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 22, 2026

Occasion. A friend named Mark Smith forwarded to his Facebook circle a list of thirty-eight items styled as “President Obama’s impressive accomplishments.” The list itself is attributed to Tom Ririe and has been in circulation, in some form, for more than a decade — copy-pasted, lightly edited, refreshed for a new audience every election cycle. Mark added item thirty-eight himself. The list opens with a sarcastic frame (“Quit trashing Obama’s accomplishments”) and closes with a sarcastic frame (“such an accomplished individual … in the eyes of the ignorant”). The thirty-eight items in between describe Obama variously as a stoner, a foreign-aid fraud, a Social-Security-number imposter, a violator of multiple laws, a tyrant who terminated American space-flight, a man who cancelled the National Day of Prayer, and an ex-president who tried to impeach his successor. The whole document is offered as a single piece of mockery: here is what your opponents call accomplishment.

This essay is not a fact-check of the list. It is a fellowship-discussion essay about what happens to Christian witness when forwarded outrage is treated as legitimate political speech, and about what the Ninth Commandment actually requires of those of us — and I include myself, plainly — who pass things along because they confirm what we already believe.

I. What is right about the underlying frustration

The list does not arise from nowhere. It arises from a real and not-illegitimate well of conservative Christian grievance about the Obama presidency, and any fellowship essay that wants to be heard by people who share that grievance has to begin by saying so. I share substantial parts of it myself.

There is a real argument that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate was a constitutional and prudential overreach. There is a real argument that the executive-action route on immigration policy (the DACA pathway in particular) circumvented Congress and weakened the separation of powers. There is a real argument that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was premature in a way that embarrassed both the Nobel Committee and its recipient — a fact Obama himself acknowledged in his acceptance address. There is a real argument that the administration’s posture toward American manufacturing, coal communities, and religious-liberty plaintiffs was hostile in ways those communities are entitled to name. There is a real argument that the broader cultural moment of those eight years included a significant erosion of the public role of Christianity in American life, and that the administration accelerated rather than slowed that erosion. None of those arguments depends on the list. All of them can be made carefully, in the daylight, with primary sources, and they have been made carefully by serious conservative thinkers — Yuval Levin, Ross Douthat, Robert George, Rod Dreher, R. R. Reno. The fellowship can read those writers and engage them. We can disagree with our brothers and sisters on the political left and do so honestly.

What the list does is something else. The list is not a careful argument. It is the form of an argument used to deliver an emotion — contempt — wrapped in a parody of accomplishment. The opening sarcasm names what is actually being transmitted: quit trashing Obama’s accomplishments. That is not how someone who has accomplishments to defend would speak. It is how someone speaks when they want the reader to feel that the opposition is contemptible. The list is the vehicle; the contempt is the cargo.

This distinction matters because the legitimate critique is poisoned by the vehicle. Mark’s actual conservative neighbors — the ones who hold genuine, defensible objections to the Obama policy record — find that the moment they speak, they are mistaken for the people who forwarded the list. And the moment they are mistaken for the people who forwarded the list, the careful argument is over. The list trains the political opposition to dismiss everyone who criticizes Obama as a person who believes the items on the list. It then trains the political ally to repeat the items on the list as though they were equivalent to the careful argument. Both effects are losses for the conservative Christian witness, and both effects are produced by the act of forwarding.

II. A taxonomy of the thirty-eight items

I am not going to walk the list item by item. The point of this essay is not to be a fact-checker. But I do want to sort the thirty-eight items into kinds, because the kinds tell us what is happening underneath.

Kind 1: Outright falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Items 1 through 3 fall here. Obama is described as the first president photographed smoking marijuana (no such photograph from his presidency exists; he wrote in Dreams from My Father about teenage drug use, which is a different matter); the first president to apply for college aid as a foreign student and then deny he was a foreigner (no documentary evidence has ever surfaced of any such application, and the claim originated as a satirical hoax published by a website that retracted it); the first president to hold a Social Security number from a state where he had never lived (the Social Security Administration has publicly explained that mid-1970s number assignment was based on the regional processing center receiving the application, not the applicant’s state of residence, and Obama’s number was issued in 1977 while he was living in Hawaii). These are not policy critiques. They are claims of fact, and the claims are false. They are repeated because they fit a story, not because they are true. Item 15 — that Obama “cancelled the National Day of Prayer” and declared America “no longer a Christian nation” — belongs to the same kind. Obama issued a National Day of Prayer proclamation every year of his presidency; he declined to host the public White House service that the Bush administration had hosted, which is a different and much smaller thing. The “no longer a Christian nation” quote, from a 2006 speech, said in full: Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. That is a descriptive statement about American religious pluralism, not a renunciation of the country’s Christian heritage. To excise the word just and report the rest as Obama denying America is Christian is to bear false witness in the literal sense — to report what was not said as though it had been said.

Kind 2: Partisan framing of ordinary or contested presidential actions. Items 4 through 13 and many of the later items fall here. The credit-rating downgrade of 2011 happened under Obama; Standard & Poor’s explicitly cited Republican-led debt-ceiling brinksmanship as a factor in the downgrade, which complicates the “first president to preside over” framing considerably. War Powers Act violations are alleged against every president since Nixon, including Reagan in Grenada and Clinton in the Balkans. Required purchase of a product (item 7) is a real complaint about the ACA’s individual mandate but is not without precedent — Social Security contributions, military draft registration, and mandatory automobile insurance in most states are all legally compelled transactions, and the constitutionality of the ACA mandate was tested and resolved at the Supreme Court. The “first to tell a CEO to resign” framing of the Chrysler bailout (item 13) ignores that the Chrysler CEO was negotiating in real time over federal bailout terms — a transaction, not an ambush. None of these is unanswerable. Each could be a real argument. But each is presented as a unique moral first, and that framing is false even where the underlying complaint has substance.

Kind 3: Personal-conduct grievances. Items 26, 30, 31, 32, 33 — golf rounds, vacations, personal trainers, dog trainers. Eisenhower played roughly eight hundred rounds of golf in eight years. Wilson and Trump golfed prodigiously. Every modern presidential family has had personnel, transportation, security, and recreation costs that ran to taxpayer expense, because the office and the family are inseparable for security reasons. To list these as moral firsts is not analysis; it is class-grievance theater. The reader is supposed to feel that the Obama family lived above the people, and the items are dressed up as accountability when their function is resentment. Whatever one thinks of the Obama family’s personal style, calling these items “firsts” is straightforwardly false.

Kind 4: Distorted-quote items. Item 34 — that Obama said the Islamic call to prayer is “the most beautiful sound on earth” — comes from a 2007 New York Times interview in which Obama, reminiscing about growing up partly in Indonesia, said the Arabic call to prayer was “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” A childhood memory of an evocative sound becomes, in the forwarded list, evidence of crypto-Islamic loyalty. The quote is real; the framing inverts its meaning. Item 36 and 37 — that Obama told the military to pay for their own war insurance and then called them unpatriotic for objecting — describe a Congressional Budget Office proposal that Obama did not endorse, and a White House response that did not occur. These are not exaggerations of true things. They are reports of events that did not happen.

Kind 5: Genuine policy critiques mislabeled as moral monstrosities. The pieces of legitimate conservative argument — that the administration overstepped on coal regulation, on immigration enforcement, on executive action, on inspector-general independence — are scattered through the list, but each is dressed as a unique evil rather than a contested policy choice. The reader who agrees with the conservative position on coal regulation is invited to feel that the disagreement is not a policy difference but a moral abomination. This is the rhetorical move at the heart of the list, and it is the one most corrosive to honest political life.

Kind 6: The added item, number 38. Mark added this himself: First ex President who was involved in trying to impeach His successor President Donald Trump! The factual claim is empty — ex-presidents have no role in impeachment, which is a House process — and the historical claim that no ex-president has ever criticized a successor is preposterous. Theodore Roosevelt ran against his own successor in 1912. John Quincy Adams returned to the House as a constant adversary of every president who followed him. Jimmy Carter has been a persistent critic of every Republican administration since his defeat. Obama, in fact, refrained from public criticism of Trump for longer than most modern ex-presidents have refrained from criticism of their successors. The item is invented. It was invented by Mark, in good faith presumably, and added to a list of inventions, because the inventional logic of the list invites continued invention. Each forwarder is given permission, by the form, to add their own.

III. Why the list works: the Schiff Syndrome in operation

The Christos Theological Grammar (v1.4, Part I, §2) names a mechanism that the fellowship has been studying since the What Is Truth essay last year. Susan called it the Schiff Syndrome — the question of how intelligent and basically decent people come to believe and repeat things that are false. The Grammar’s diagnosis is fourfold:

1. Uncertainty creates discomfort — the mind cannot tolerate ambiguity.
2. Pattern completion is automatic — we fill gaps unconsciously.
3. Coherence trumps accuracy — we prefer stories that fit over facts that don’t.
4. Identity precedes evidence — we reason from who we are, not from what we see.

The thirty-eight firsts are a perfect specimen. The reader already holds a story about Obama: that he was a foreign-influenced, anti-American, anti-Christian president who damaged the country. That story may be partly defensible on policy grounds; that is not the issue. The issue is what happens when the story is already in place and a list arrives that fits it. Pattern completion takes over. Each item is processed not against external sources but against the internal story. The items that fit are nodded at. The items that are obviously absurd (the dog trainer at $102,000, the personal trainer flown in weekly) are not absurd to the reader, because they fit the vibe of the story. The dog trainer line, by the way, originates in a misreading of a salary line item for a military aide whose responsibilities included the family pet; the actual figure was much smaller and the role was much larger. But the figure does not need to be true to function. It needs only to fit.

The Grammar’s social-economy diagnosis applies equally:

• Status from being distinctive, not correct. The reader who forwards the list signals tribal membership. The reward is fellow-conservatives nodding; the cost of being wrong is borne by no one, because no one in the reader’s circle is going to fact-check the items.
• “Secret knowledge” as social currency. The list claims to expose what the mainstream has hidden. The reader is flattered as one of the few who can see.
• Rejection becomes evidence of suppression. When a fact-checker rates the list false, the rating itself becomes proof that the fact-checker is part of the problem. The list is therefore unfalsifiable in form, exactly as the redemption-movement essay last week described an unfalsifiable conspiracy doctrine.
• The cost of being wrong is replaced by the reward of being contrarian. The forwarder is admired by his circle for forwarding. Whether the items are true does not enter the social transaction.

These are not partisan observations. They apply to the equivalent lists about Trump that circulate in left-leaning Christian circles, to the equivalent lists about Biden that circulate elsewhere, to the equivalent lists about every president of the last fifty years. The mechanism is the same. The fellowship has to learn to see it independent of which side it currently flatters.

IV. The Ninth Commandment is not a partisan amendment

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour (Exodus 20:16).

The commandment does not contain an exception for political opponents. It does not contain an exception for a president whose policies one opposes. It does not contain an exception for items that one believes to be probably true but has not verified. The Hebrew construction reaches further than perjury in a formal court; it reaches every report we make of another person to a third party. Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment (Exodus 23:1-2). The very phrase the King James translators use — raise a false report — addresses the act of repeating and amplifying. The forwarder is not the originator of the report, but the forwarder raises the report; he gives it new life, new readers, new credibility. The commandment is not silent about that.

The proverbs make the standard tighter, not looser:

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him (Proverbs 18:13). The forwarder who has not checked the items has answered before hearing.

He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him (Proverbs 18:17). The list, read alone, seems just. The Christian’s obligation is to be the neighbor who searches.

A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall not escape (Proverbs 19:5).

A man that beareth false witness against his neighbour is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow (Proverbs 25:18).

The neighbor in view is whoever is being spoken of. Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) settled the question of who counts as a neighbor: anyone, including the one we are inclined to despise, including the one from the wrong nation, including the political opponent. Obama is our neighbor in the precise theological sense that Christ established. The Christian who would not stand in a courtroom and swear to the truth of items 1, 2, 3, 15, 26, 28, 34, 36, 37 has no warrant to forward those items on Facebook. The medium does not absolve the witness. The casual tone does not absolve the witness. The fact that everyone is doing it does not absolve the witness — thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.

V. Truth is not a partisan resource — it is ontology

Here the Christos framework descends to its load-bearing level. Truth is not a debating tool. Truth is not a strategic asset deployed when convenient and set aside when inconvenient. Truth is the structure of reality itself.

The Conscious Point Physics work the Hyperphysics Institute has been doing for the last several years argues, with mathematical rigor we have begun to publish in peer-reviewed venues, that reality is constituted by conscious points sustained in being by God’s mind. In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) is not a metaphor; it is an ontological description. The physical world is real because God holds it in being as a consistent, definite structure. Truth, then, is the alignment of what we say with that structure. A true claim corresponds to what is. A false claim describes what is not. The false claim does not merely fail; it creates, in the mind of the speaker and the mind of the hearer, a mental model that diverges from reality. That divergence is not neutral. The model occupies attention. The model shapes subsequent inference. The model travels — in the case of a Facebook share, to several hundred more minds — and the divergence is multiplied.

This is what the Bible has always called bearing false witness. The framework of conscious-point physics names the same offense in ontological terms: the construction and propagation of a reality-map that is misaligned with the actual structure of being. That is what every false item on the list is. That is what the list as a whole is.

For a community whose whole project is the manifestation of Kingdom culture — which is to say, the cultivation of patterns of life in which the structure of being is honored and worked with rather than contradicted and resisted — the discipline of truth is not a side virtue. It is constitutive. The Kingdom of God is at hand (Mark 1:15) is not just an announcement of arrival; it is an announcement of a regime in which the Word is the foundation. In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). To traffic in falsehood for political reward is to repudiate the foundation while claiming to build on it.

There is no Kingdom shortcut around an accurate description. The Christian who lies for Christ’s sake does not lie for Christ’s sake. The Christian who repeats what he has not verified, against a neighbor he has been instructed to love, has chosen a tribe over a Lord.

VI. The spirit of the content

I want to be specific about what is being transmitted under cover of the items. The list is not primarily about Obama. It is about marking a boundary between us and the ignorant. Read the closing line again: I feel much better now. I had been under the impression he hadn’t been doing ANYTHING … Such an accomplished individual … in the eyes of the ignorant! The mockery is the point. The items are the pretext. The function of the document, socially, is to invite the reader to laugh at people who voted for Obama, who admire him, who think he was a competent president. The laughter is the reward for the share.

Christ was specific about this posture. Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire (Matthew 5:22). Raca — empty-headed. Thou fool — morally vacant. The list calls Obama supporters the ignorant. That is precisely the register Christ forbade. The forbidding is not weaker because the target is a political opponent rather than a member of one’s church; if anything, the political-opponent case is harder, which is why Christ extends the command across that boundary as well: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you (Matthew 5:44).

I am not saying the forwarder hates anyone. I am saying that the vehicle he passed along carries hatred whether or not he personally bears any, and that the act of passing along amplifies what the vehicle carries. A Christian cannot remain neutral to the content he transmits. The signal he amplifies is, in part, his signal.

This is also a Christian-witness problem of a specific kind. The political and cultural fight the church is in right now is, in part, a fight about whether Christianity is a thinking faith — whether Christian conviction can be held by people who reason carefully, source claims, distinguish levels of evidence, and refuse to traffic in nonsense. Every viral forwarded list of the present kind is, in that fight, a defeat. The skeptical neighbor who reads Mark’s post is given evidence — false evidence, but evidence — that conservative Christianity is a tribe held together by shared willingness to repeat things that are not true. The witness the church is trying to make against secular materialism, against the new pagan cosmology, against the ascendant ideologies of self, is undermined every time a Christian shares a list he has not bothered to verify. The shared list says, to the unbelieving reader, you do not need to take us seriously. And the unbelieving reader, having been told, doesn’t.

VII. The discipline of the share button

The practical implication is concrete and discipline-shaped. Before a Christian forwards a political claim — about anyone, of any party — the standards that apply are not in dispute. They are scriptural and they are old:

Verify. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The triangulation method the Grammar lays out (multiple independent sources, predictive power, cross-examination, character of witnesses, coherence with established knowledge, testimony of the Spirit) is the practical form of that command. Use it.

Consider the source. A list with no author named, no source citations, no date of composition, and no specific events tied to specific places fails on the most basic triangulation step. Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God (1 John 4:1). The principle extends to the testing of every secondary witness — every list, every meme, every chain text.

Apply the standard symmetrically. The standard that applies to political claims about an opponent is the same standard that applies to political claims about an ally. The Christian who would dismiss as nonsense an analogous list about Trump must dismiss as nonsense an analogous list about Obama. A just weight and balance are the LORD’S (Proverbs 16:11). Asymmetric standards are forbidden weights. The Lord notices the scales.

When in doubt, do not share. In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin (Proverbs 10:19). The default disposition of the share button should be off. The burden of justification is on the forwarder, not on the reader. Let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil (Matthew 5:37).

When you have shared what was not true, retract. I have done this myself, more than once, on this very kind of material. The retraction is brief, public, and unequivocal: I shared this; I have since learned it is not accurate; I am taking it down and I am sorry. The retraction recovers the integrity of the Christian witness. The silence, after one has been corrected, hardens the posture. Hardening is a worse sin than the original error.

VIII. Closing pastoral note — to Mark, and to Tom Ririe, and to me

This essay is not written to mock Mark Smith. Mark forwarded what reached him, and what reached him has been circulating for over a decade and has reached, by now, probably hundreds of thousands of Christians who have done exactly what he did with it. He is in a very large company, and many in that company are sincere disciples whose political frustration is legitimate and whose share-button discipline simply has not been taught.

It has not been taught because the church has been slow to recognize, until very recently, that the social-media share is a form of speech under the Ninth Commandment. The forwarded text is testimony. The retweet is testimony. The screenshot passed in a group chat is testimony. The standard that applies to a pulpit applies, in attenuated form, to each of these. The fellowship is one of the places where that standard can be learned, by the slow work of essays like this one and by the slower work of friends correcting friends gently, in private, without contempt of their own.

To Tom Ririe, whose original list this is — I do not know you. I assume you wrote what you wrote because something real in the Obama presidency angered you, and that not every angered conservative reaction to that presidency was wrong. I would say to you what I have to say to myself: anger is not a substitute for accuracy, and the Christian writer is held to a higher witness-standard than the cable-news commentator, the meme-maker, or the partisan operator. If God will hold us accountable for every idle word (Matthew 12:36), the words we write down and circulate are not idle; they are testimony. The list as it stands cannot survive that test. Some of its items are simply false. Almost all of its items conflate policy disagreement with moral monstrosity. Its closing line names the people it differs from as the ignorant, which is the precise epithet Christ forbade. Whatever it accomplishes in conservative comment threads, in the books that will be opened it accomplishes nothing for the Kingdom. It hurts the witness it purports to defend.

To Mark — keep posting. Keep arguing for what you believe is true and good for the country. Argue against Obama’s record; argue against any record you wish; conservative Christian voices are needed in the public square and you have the courage to be one of them. But verify before you forward. Apply to claims that flatter your politics the same skepticism you apply to claims that challenge them. When you make the conservative case, make it on what is true. The conservative case can be made on what is true. It does not need the thirty-eight firsts. The thirty-eight firsts are a millstone tied around the neck of the case you actually want to make.

To me, and to the fellowship — we are not exempt from any of this. The same essay can be written about lists we have nodded at, shared, or composed ourselves. The point is not that one side is honest and the other is not. The point is that the Kingdom is built on truth or it is not the Kingdom, and that we, who claim to be building Kingdom culture, are accountable for every report we raise.

These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the LORD.

— Zechariah 8:16-17

Word count: ~4,000.

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute One heart to make Christ King.

260519 – The Idolatry of Gender

by Thomas Abshier | May 19, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Pronoun and the Real: On Language, Sex, and the Idolatry of Gender

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 19, 2026

Occasion: Last week, in the final editing of the May 13 civil-obedience essay before publication, I caught a paragraph generated by Claude that used the alternating-she convention throughout — a Christian Underground member files her taxes, obeys traffic laws, pays for her business permits, sends her children to school, votes in elections, serves on juries. I rewrote it back into generic-he. The objection was not stylistic. The convention of randomly using she as a generic for human beings strikes me as inauthentic, as a kind of cultural genuflection, and ultimately as something that bows to an idolatry of gender. The deeper charge — that the language convention is theologically idolatrous — is deliberate and asks for development rather than dismissal. This essay is the working-out of why generic-he is the right convention, where the alternating-she practice came from, what it actually commits a speaker to, and where the cultural fight over pronouns sits in relation to the deeper biblical claim about created sex.

The underlying claim of what follows is that language conventions are never neutral. They encode and transmit substantive commitments about the nature of reality, the nature of human beings, and the relations of human beings to one another. The Christian who uses the conventions of the surrounding culture without examining them adopts the culture’s convictions along with its words, however orthodox his explicit theology may be. The pronoun is not just a word. The pronoun is a piece of the world, and which pronoun the Christian chooses to use is a small but real confession.

I. The Question — Is Language Neutral?

The question that runs underneath every dispute about generic pronouns, sex-neutral language, preferred-pronoun conventions, and the rest is whether language is neutral. If language is a value-free tool that conveys propositions without freight, then the choice between generic-he and alternating-she is purely a matter of taste — choose whichever you prefer; the underlying claims are unaffected; the dispute is merely aesthetic. If language is not neutral — if conventions of speech carry implicit theological and metaphysical commitments — then the choice is consequential, and adopting one convention rather than another is a substantive act, whether or not the speaker is aware of it.

The Christian tradition has not generally treated language as neutral. The opening verses of the Gospel of John identify the logos — the Word — as the eternal divine reality through whom all things were made. The act of speaking is the first creative act in the Genesis narrative — and God said, Let there be light: and there was light (Gen 1:3). The giving of names is one of the first acts assigned to Adam, and the act is treated as substantive — and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof (Gen 2:19). Language in the biblical canon is closer to the ontological floor than to the surface. Speech participates in being. Names participate in nature. The rightness or wrongness of a name carries weight: Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter (Isa 5:20). The prophet’s curse falls on the mis-naming — on those who call by one name what is properly called by another. Misnaming is not a stylistic infelicity. It is a participation in the lie.

The principle is not unique to the biblical tradition. Confucius, in the Analects, gave it its sharpest classical formulation outside Scripture: if names are not rectified, language is not in accordance with the truth of things; if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success; if affairs cannot be carried on to success, the proprieties and music will not flourish; if proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded; if punishments are not properly awarded, the people will not know how to move hand or foot (Analects XIII.3). The chain of reasoning is striking. From the right ordering of names through the right ordering of speech through the right ordering of practice through the right ordering of civil and aesthetic life to the very physical capacity of ordinary people to act in the world. The rectification of names is the precondition of everything that comes after.

Twentieth-century linguistics, working from a very different starting point, reached compatible conclusions. The strong-form Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — that the structure of a language determines the thought-world of its speakers — has been moderated by subsequent empirical research, but the weaker form remains broadly accepted: language shapes thought; conventions of speech tilt patterns of perception; the categories built into a language carry consequences for what its speakers find easy or hard to think. Cognitive science has found evidence that speakers of languages with rigid gendered noun systems perceive objects differently than speakers of languages without them; speakers of languages with elaborate color vocabularies discriminate hues more finely than speakers of languages with poor color vocabularies; even fluent bilinguals describe the same events differently depending on which language they are currently using. Language is not neutral. The question is not whether the convention one uses carries freight; the question is what freight it carries.

So the question of whether language is neutral has, on multiple lines of evidence from multiple traditions, a clear answer: it is not. The next question is what the specific conventions of English generic pronouns — generic-he vs. alternating-she vs. singular-they vs. the contemporary preferred-pronoun framework — actually commit the speaker to. To answer that question we have to look at where the alternating-she convention came from, what its early proponents argued for, and what claims it carries.

II. The Convention We Are Examining — Where Alternating-She Came From

Generic-he was the unchallenged English convention for several centuries. The Authorized Version (1611) uses generic-he. The Westminster Confession (1646) uses generic-he. The Declaration of Independence (1776) speaks of the rights of man and all men are created equal. The Constitution uses he and him generically throughout. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural (1865) employs generic-he. Twain, Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson, Faulkner, Tolkien, Lewis — generic-he throughout. Until the 1960s no one was confused; no one wrote think-pieces about whether man in the rights of man included women; no one argued that the convention silenced the female half of humanity. The convention was understood as exactly what it was: a grammatical universal that comprehended both sexes when used generically, and a specifically male reference when used particularly.

The change came in the late 1960s and 1970s, riding two waves of intellectual development that converged.

The first wave was second-wave feminism. The major theoretical works of the movement — Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), Daly’s Beyond God the Father (1973) — held in common a particular thesis about language: that the structures of patriarchal society were encoded in the structures of language itself, and that liberation from patriarchy required liberation from the linguistic forms that carried it. Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place (1975) gave the thesis its most influential academic treatment. Casey Miller and Kate Swift’s Words and Women (1976) and their Handbook of Nonsexist Writing (1980) brought it to a popular audience. Their argument was straightforward: generic-he was not an innocent universal but the linguistic manifestation of a worldview in which the male was the human-default and the female was the exception, the deviation, the supplement to the universal. To use generic-he was to participate, however unwittingly, in the patriarchal structure. To liberate language was to displace generic-he — first by alternating it with she, then by neutralizing toward singular-they, eventually by abandoning binary pronouns altogether.

The second wave was post-structuralist linguistic philosophy, particularly the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, refined by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The post-structuralist claim, stated baldly, was that the meaning of words is socially constituted rather than referentially fixed, and that the categories of language create rather than describe the categories of experience. Combined with feminist linguistics, this produced a powerful proposition: if language constitutes reality (not merely describing it), then changing the language is changing the reality. Generic-he did not merely reflect a patriarchal world; it constituted one. Replace the pronoun and the patriarchal world begins to unmake itself.

The institutional adoption of the new conventions followed quickly. The American Psychological Association adopted alternating-she and singular-they in its style guide in 1977. The Modern Language Association followed in 1983. The University of Chicago Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and the major American university and trade publishers moved through the 1980s. Government style guides, corporate communications departments, and journalistic stylebooks followed in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, generic-he in formal academic writing was treated as either intellectual sloppiness or — worse — ideological hostility to women, and the convention had inverted. What had been universal in 1965 was disreputable by 2000.

The further developments — (s)he, generic-they as singular, neopronouns like ze/zir and xe/xem, the demand for pronoun-disclosure in professional and educational settings, the cultural normalization of declared-pronoun signatures in emails — all grew from the same root system. If language constitutes reality, and if binary male/female categories in language participate in oppressive social structures, then the work of linguistic liberation is incomplete as long as binary pronouns persist. The current proliferation of pronoun conventions in 2026 is the late-stage development of a trajectory whose early phase was alternating-she. To use alternating-she now without examining its origins is to inhabit a halfway house on a road that goes considerably further — a road that ends in the abolition of any pronoun convention grounded in created sex.

III. The Theological Claims Embedded in the Convention

The feminist-linguistic project of the 1970s carried four claims that are, in their substance, theological. They were not always presented as theological — most of the project’s early advocates were secular — but the claims occupy the territory theology occupies, and they cannot be evaluated without reference to assertions about the nature of reality, the nature of human beings, and the nature of the created order. Let me name them.

(1) Male and female are constructs of culture rather than realities of creation. This is the foundational claim. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) gave it its famous early formulation: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) extended the claim radically: gender is performative, constituted by repeated acts of social signaling rather than grounded in any prior biological reality. On this view, the categories male and female are not given by biology or by creation; they are imposed by culture, and they can be uncreated by cultural intervention. Language, as one of the primary instruments of cultural imposition, is also one of the primary instruments of cultural uncreation. Change the language, and the categories begin to dissolve.

(2) Hierarchical patterns of relation between male and female are unjust. The Pauline patterns of headship (Eph 5:22-33, 1 Cor 11:2-16), the Genesis patterns of distinct creation and complementary calling (Gen 2:18-25), the ordering of household and church in the New Testament (1 Tim 2:8-15, Titus 2:1-5, 1 Pet 3:1-7) — these are read, on the feminist-linguistic framework, as instruments of oppression that must be dismantled. Generic-he, on this reading, is a small but persistent reinforcement of the male-headship pattern, and displacing it is part of dismantling the pattern.

(3) Language constitutes reality rather than reflecting it. This is the post-structuralist contribution. If language merely reflects reality, then changing language without changing the underlying reality is a confusion of cause and effect. But if language constitutes reality — if the categories of speech are also the categories of being — then changing language is changing reality. The pronoun is not just a word; it is a piece of the world. This claim is not always stated explicitly by users of the convention, but it is presupposed by the practice; otherwise the practice would have no point.

(4) Justice requires linguistic intervention. Given (1), (2), and (3), the conclusion follows: justice requires deliberate linguistic intervention to displace conventions that carry oppressive structures. The individual writer who uses generic-he, even when he intends no oppression, contributes to the maintenance of the oppressive structure and must therefore be persuaded or coerced into displacing the convention. Linguistic intervention is not optional or preference-based; it is morally required.

These four claims are theological because they make load-bearing assertions about the nature of created reality (claim 1), the moral structure of human relations (claim 2), the metaphysics of language (claim 3), and the obligations of speakers (claim 4). The Christian tradition has, on its own grounds, made very different claims at each of the four points.

Genesis 1:27 asserts that male and female are created realities, made in the image of God in their distinction: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. The biblical pattern of male and female is grounded in creation, not in cultural construction. The two sexes carry different vocations in marriage, household, church, and civic life (Eph 5, 1 Tim 2, 1 Cor 11), but they share equally in the image of God and in the dignity proper to image-bearers. The biblical pattern of headship in marriage and elder-rule in the church is presented as a created ordering for human flourishing under God’s design, not as an instrument of oppression invented by men. The biblical doctrine of language locates speech as participating in created order rather than as the constitutive ground of it — Adam named the animals that God had already created (Gen 2:19-20), and the naming was a recognition of given reality, not a constitution of new reality. The obligations of Christian speakers are governed by the law of charity (1 Cor 13) and the law of truth-telling (Eph 4:25, Col 3:9-10), not by an obligation to intervene linguistically in service of ideological projects.

The alternating-she convention, then, carries claims that are at every point in tension with biblical claims. Adopting the convention without examining what it carries is adopting the implicit claims along with the explicit pronouns. The Christian writer who alternates she with he throughout his prose without thinking about it is, at the level of language convention, performing the feminist-linguistic confession even if his explicit theology is orthodox.

IV. The Biblical-Canonical Grounding for the Generic Masculine

If language is not neutral, and if the alternating-she convention carries claims in tension with biblical claims, what does the biblical canon itself do? The answer is that the biblical languages — Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek — all use the masculine as the generic, and the biblical writers use the convention without apology or qualification.

In Hebrew, adam is the standard noun for humanity, mankind, human being. The word is grammatically masculine, and it serves as the unmarked-universal for humans of either sex. Genesis 1:26-27 uses it precisely this way: and God said, Let us make adam in our image, after our likeness… so God created adam in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. The adam in this verse is plainly inclusive of both male and female — the verse says so explicitly — but the noun is masculine, and the verbs and pronouns agree with the masculine gender of the noun. The masculine serves as the universal. The Hebrew also has ish, which is the specifically male noun for man, and ishah, which is the specifically female noun for woman. The system is exactly what the Christian tradition’s English convention preserves: the masculine functions as both the generic-universal (when comprehending both sexes) and the specifically male (when contrasted with the female). There is no third register; the universal does not require neutralization.

Greek does the same. Anthropos is the standard generic noun for human being, person; the word is grammatically masculine; it comprehends both sexes when used generically. Aner is the specifically male noun for man; gune is the specifically female noun for woman. Anthropos serves as the universal in countless New Testament passages — the Sabbath was made for anthropos, not anthropos for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27); what is anthropos that thou art mindful of him? (Heb 2:6, quoting Ps 8); there is one God, and one mediator between God and anthropos, the anthropos Christ Jesus (1 Tim 2:5). The Greek pattern is the Hebrew pattern: the masculine is the universal, and the specifically-male is a narrower subset of the universal-masculine.

Latin does the same: homo is the generic-universal (and masculine), and vir is the specifically male. The Latin theological tradition — Augustine, Aquinas, the medieval scholastics, Calvin in his Latin works, the post-Reformation continental dogmaticians — uses homo generically and vir particularly throughout. The Apostle’s Creed in Latin confesses Et homo factus est — and he was made man (generic, in the sense of incarnate as a human being) — using the universal-masculine where contemporary English translations sometimes neutralize to and became truly human.

The Indo-European pattern is consistent: the masculine functions as the unmarked-universal across the languages from which English descends. English inherits this pattern from its Germanic, Latin, and Greek influences, and the inheritance is preserved in generic-he, generic-man, mankind, brethren (now archaic but historically the generic for people-of-the-church), and the related conventions. To displace generic-he in English is to break with the linguistic pattern of every language in the European Christian tradition for the entirety of recorded Christian history. This is not a small breakage. It is the deliberate severing of English from its Indo-European inheritance in pursuit of a project that the Indo-European tradition does not support.

The biblical writers themselves did not seek to neutralize the masculine. Paul, writing in Greek to communities that included substantial numbers of women — Romans 16 alone names at least ten women who labored in the gospel alongside him — uses adelphoi (brothers, grammatically masculine plural) as the generic address to the church. Some recent English translations have moved to brothers and sisters in certain passages to communicate to a contemporary readership that women are included; the underlying Greek is uniformly adelphoi. Paul did not feel obligated to neutralize his masculine generics, because the masculine generic was the unmarked-universal of his language and required no neutralization. He named the women by name when he wanted to honor them particularly (Phoebe, Priscilla, Junia, Tryphena, Tryphosa, Persis, Rufus’s mother, Julia, Nereus’s sister, Mary); the generic comprehended them automatically when he addressed the whole church.

The biblical pattern, then, is the generic-masculine pattern. The Christian who uses generic-he in English is using the convention that biblical Hebrew and biblical Greek use natively, and that the Latin Christian tradition used for fifteen centuries. The Christian who replaces generic-he with alternating-she is innovating against the convention of the entire Christian-canonical and post-canonical tradition in favor of a recent secular cultural movement. The presumption of authority lies with the historic convention, not with the innovation.

V. What the Feminist Critique Got Right — and Where It Went Wrong

It would be unfair, and ultimately ineffective, to engage the feminist-linguistic project as if it had no legitimate concerns. There are real concerns in the historical record, and a serious Christian engagement must name them before proceeding to disagreement.

What the critique got right. Women had, in certain historical periods and certain particular institutions, been treated as less than full image-bearers — denied education, denied property rights, denied access to professions and trades, denied participation in civic and political life, treated by their husbands as instrumental rather than as persons. The historical record contains real injustices, and Christian institutions have sometimes participated in them. The medieval and early-modern legal codes treating wives as property of husbands, the long denial of women’s access to higher education, the practical exclusion of women from many professional and trade positions, the assumption in many corners of the church that women’s spiritual gifts were less serious than men’s — these are facts, and a Christian engagement that minimizes them is dishonest.

Moreover, generic language in some historical periods was sometimes used as a vehicle of practical exclusion. When 18th-century American legal documents wrote about all men being created equal and then practically excluded women from voting, holding property in their own names, sitting on juries, and accessing higher education, the generic men in the documents was being read by many of its users as practically referring only to men. The disjunction between the theoretical universality of the language and the practical exclusion of women was real. The feminist critique, in pointing this out, identified a genuine pattern.

Where the critique went wrong. It diagnosed the problem at the wrong level. The historical injustices to women were caused by injustice — by particular human acts of exclusion, by particular legal codes, by particular cultural patterns of disregard. They were not caused by the convention of generic-masculine grammar. The biblical writers used generic-masculine grammar and treated women with notable seriousness, dignity, and honor. The medieval scholastics used generic-masculine Latin and produced rich theological reflection on the dignity of Mary, on the spiritual gifts of women, on marriage as the image of Christ-and-Church. The Reformation theologians used generic-masculine grammar and produced the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers that elevated the spiritual standing of every Christian, male and female. The historic Christian tradition married generic-masculine grammar to a high doctrine of women’s dignity without contradiction.

The injustices to women came from failures of the Christian tradition to live by its own doctrine, not from the language convention. When 18th-century American men wrote about the rights of man and practically excluded women, the failure was in their practice, not in their grammar. Other societies with the same Indo-European generic-masculine grammar — and the same biblical canon — produced different practical outcomes. The variable was not the grammar; the variable was the practice of the people speaking the grammar.

The feminist-linguistic project, then, proposed a remedy that addressed the symptom rather than the disease. Changing the grammar does not change the heart. The man who has contempt for women will have contempt for them whether he writes he or she or they or any other pronoun; the man who honors women will honor them in any grammar. The language convention is downstream of the underlying disposition, and changing the language convention without changing the disposition produces a kind of theater — the appearance of justice without its substance.

Worse, the linguistic project carried with it the deeper claims (1)-(4) of Section III, which the historic Christian tradition cannot accept. By bundling a real diagnostic concern (that women had sometimes been mistreated) with a false metaphysical claim (that male/female categories are social constructs, that language constitutes reality, that justice requires linguistic intervention), the project made it difficult to accept the legitimate concern without also adopting the false metaphysics. The Christian engagement has to disentangle these. We can affirm without qualification that women bear the imago Dei fully, that they are co-heirs of the grace of life (1 Pet 3:7), that their spiritual gifts are real and to be exercised in their proper context, that they have legitimate vocations in marriage and household and church and civic life, that historical exclusions were sometimes unjust — and we can refuse to adopt the linguistic conventions of a project whose deeper claims undermine the very categories of male and female that biblical anthropology rests on.

VI. The Broader Cultural Project — Where the Convention Stands in 2026

The alternating-she convention was the early phase of a longer trajectory. The trajectory has continued, and the convention now sits in a particular cultural location that did not exist in 1975.

In 1975, the alternating-she practice could plausibly be presented as a marginal innovation pursued by a small number of feminist writers with limited cultural consequence. The substantive metaphysical claims behind it were held by relatively few people; most users of the convention adopted it as a polite social gesture without examining the theoretical framework.

In 2026 the cultural location is different. The substantive metaphysical claims have moved from the academic margins to the cultural center. The categories of male and female as cultural constructs rather than created realities are now the working assumption of most major American institutions: the universities, the major media, the federal civil service, large corporations, the public school system, the medical and psychiatric professions in their official organs, the Democratic Party as a political institution, and the soft-progressive wings of every mainline Protestant denomination. Children as young as five are taught in public schools that biological sex and gender identity are separable categories and that one can be assigned one sex at birth and discover oneself to be a different gender. Surgical and pharmacological interventions are performed on minors to alter their developing bodies in pursuit of an inner-felt gender identity that the child claims and the medical profession affirms. Pronoun disclosure has become normative in professional and educational settings; failure to use a person’s preferred pronouns is treated as a form of harassment in many corporate human-resources frameworks; in some jurisdictions, deliberate misgendering is treated as a civil-rights violation. The recategorization of biological males as women for purposes of women’s sports, women’s prisons, women’s locker rooms, and women’s professional and educational scholarships is now common; the consequences for women in those spaces are visible in the news cycle weekly. The rise of adolescent gender dysphoria, particularly in young women, has produced a clinical and pastoral crisis whose dimensions are still being measured.

This is the cultural location in which alternating-she sits in 2026. It is the early phase of a much larger project; the metaphysical claims its early proponents made are now mainstream; the practical consequences of those claims are visible in the bodies of children, in the legal frameworks of major institutions, and in the daily life of every workplace where pronoun-disclosure is a norm. A Christian who in 2026 uses alternating-she without examining the trajectory is not making a small stylistic choice. He is occupying a position on the trajectory whose endpoint is the dissolution of created sex as a meaningful category.

This is what the phrase the idolatry of gender names. Idolatry, biblically, is the worship of the created in place of the Creator — the elevation of something that is itself made and contingent into the place that belongs only to what is uncreated and necessary. The contemporary cultural project elevates gender, understood as an inner-felt subjective identity, into the place that biological sex (as a created reality reflecting God’s design) properly occupies. The created reality (sex, given by God) is denied or relativized; the constructed category (gender, claimed by the self) is exalted. This is, in its precise structure, idolatry — the worship of the made-thing in place of the Maker. The phrase is exact.

The language convention of alternating-she is a small but real participation in the larger idolatry. It accepts, at the level of grammar, the framework in which sex must be neutralized or balanced rather than recognized as a created given. It signals deference to the project even when the speaker is not aware of signaling anything at all. It is, in plain terms, a bow — small, polite, and theologically corrosive.

VII. The Christian Response — Consistent Practice without Performative Polemic

The Christian response to this is twofold: consistent practice, and the avoidance of performative polemic.

Consistent practice. The Christian writer uses generic-he as the unmarked-universal; uses man, mankind, humanity, human beings as the generic forms; refers to specific women by she and specific men by he; honors women genuinely and substantively in the pattern of the biblical witness; and does not engage in the linguistic theater of the surrounding culture. The convention is held quietly, without commentary, because the convention is the historic English convention and requires no defense. The innovation requires defense, and where the innovation lacks defense, the historic convention stands on its own ground.

The fellowship’s writing — essays, sermons, newsletters, books, correspondence — should reflect the consistent practice. The same applies to spoken language in fellowship meetings. The same applies to the formation given to children. The same applies to the convention used in family conversation, professional life, and civic engagement. The convention is not a battle to be fought publicly. It is a discipline to be practiced quietly. The fight, if there is one, is in the practice. The world will notice if our convention is consistent, just as the world noticed when the early Christians refused the small sacrifice to the emperor’s genius. The refusal was the witness; the witness did not require a tract explaining the refusal.

Avoidance of performative polemic. It is tempting, having seen what the alternating-she convention carries, to denounce its users and to treat the convention’s use as itself a sign of theological compromise. This temptation should be resisted, for three reasons.

First, many users of the convention adopt it as a polite social gesture without examining its theoretical origins, and they are not deliberately performing the feminist-linguistic confession. Treating them as if they were collapses charity into ideology. The convention’s meaning at the systemic level is one thing; an individual user’s intention is another. Both matter, and a thoughtful engagement holds them separately.

Second, polemic about pronouns tends to be heard, by the broader culture, as small-minded, reactive, and obsessed with trivia. The Christian witness is more effectively borne by the consistent quiet practice of the convention than by tracts denouncing the alternative. The witness is in the practice; the practice carries the doctrine; the doctrine is what eventually transforms hearts. Tracts denouncing the convention tend to harden the users of the convention rather than move them. Quiet consistent practice over time tends to move them, because it presents the alternative as livable and ordinary rather than as a position one has to be argued into.

Third, the larger work of the Christian Underground — articulated in the May 13 civil-obedience essay’s Section X — is the patient soul-by-soul conversion of the world through witness, love, good works, and the reasoned defense of Christ. Linguistic-convention polemic is poorly fitted to that work. The convention should be used; the underlying theological claim should be available when asked about; but the convention should not become a flag the speaker waves. The work is to win souls, not to win the pronoun fight.

VIII. The Pastoral Question — Brothers and Sisters Who Disagree

A real pastoral question follows. Many sincere Christians, including many in the fellowship’s broader circle, use the alternating-she convention without thinking about it. They have absorbed the convention from their academic, professional, or denominational formation, and they do not see themselves as making a theological statement. The fellowship’s engagement with such Christians should not assume the worst about them.

The right approach is twofold. First, in the fellowship’s own writing and speech, use generic-he consistently without ostentation. When asked, articulate the reasoning briefly and without polemic. Second, do not require other Christians to adopt the convention as a condition of fellowship. The convention matters, but it is not the foundation of fellowship. The foundation is shared confession of Christ as Lord, the Lordship of Scripture, and the basic patterns of Christian life. Brothers and sisters who use alternating-she while holding orthodox views of creation, marriage, sex, and personhood are brothers and sisters. Their pronouns are downstream of formation they did not choose, and they can be brought to a different practice over time by example rather than by argument.

The cases that do matter for fellowship boundary are different. When a Christian’s pronoun usage signals adoption of the deeper metaphysical claims — when they is used for someone who is biologically male in a context where biological reality is at stake (a women’s locker room, a women’s sport, a hospital ward), when neopronouns are used as a sign of allegiance to the project, when pronoun-disclosure is treated as obligatory ethical practice — the issue is no longer the surface convention but the underlying claim. There the fellowship needs to be clearer and firmer, because the underlying claim is in direct conflict with the biblical doctrine of creation.

The discernment is not always easy. Some Christians use they as singular in informal writing because it has long-standing precedent in English (Shakespeare uses singular-they, as does Jane Austen) and they have no particular metaphysical claim behind it. Others use they with full adoption of the contemporary framework. The difference is in the underlying confession, not in the surface word. Pastoral discernment asks about the confession, not just the word.

The cardinal rule: charity to those who use the convention without adopting the framework; clarity with those who adopt the framework; gentleness in either case, because the goal is not to win the argument but to win the soul.

IX. Crescendo

The Christian project of speech is not a project of neutralizing language. It is the project of naming the real — of using words that correspond to the reality God has made, in a manner that honors both the reality and its Maker. Adam named the animals; the names were not arbitrary; they were recognitions of given creatures. The Christian writer’s task is the continuation of Adam’s task, on a more limited scale: to name what is, in the words his language gives him, with the fidelity that the truth requires.

Male and female are real. They are created realities, given by God, reflected in body and soul, complementary in their distinction, equal in their dignity, irreducible to constructs of culture or to performances of social signaling. The languages of the biblical canon — Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek — name this reality through their grammar: the masculine as the universal-when-comprehending-both-sexes, the masculine-as-particular when distinguishing-from-female. The Christian tradition inherited this pattern through Latin and into the European vernaculars. English carried it for centuries, in the King James Bible, in the founding documents of the republic, in the literature of the language’s greatest writers.

The recent innovation of alternating-she and its successor conventions is the linguistic phase of a larger cultural project that denies the created reality of sex, claims that gender is socially constructed, and demands that the body conform to the inner-felt identity rather than the identity to the body. To adopt the linguistic phase is to participate, however unwittingly, in the larger project. To refuse the linguistic phase is to refuse participation. The refusal is small, almost invisible — a pronoun in an essay, a he where a contemporary expectation would put a she — but the refusals add up over time into a witness that the convention of historic Christianity is livable, ordinary, and faithful.

Generic-he is not a battle the Christian Underground fights publicly. It is a discipline the Christian Underground keeps quietly. The witness is in the consistent practice. The practice carries the doctrine. The doctrine is what eventually changes the surrounding culture. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). The Word made flesh names things rightly. The disciples of the Word do likewise. The pronoun is small. The pronoun is real. The pronoun, used rightly, confesses creation as God made it — male and female, in his image, both bearing his likeness, both honored, both irreducible to constructs of culture. The convention is the confession. We will keep it.

X. What Remains Open

Several threads in this essay deserve fuller treatment than I have given them.

First, the rich biblical-theological literature on the imago Dei — what it means for man and woman to be created in God’s image, the equality of dignity within the distinction of vocation, the ways the biblical pattern of marriage images the relationship of Christ and the Church (Eph 5:22-33) — deserves a fellowship essay of its own. Filed for CRF derivation work and for the Christos Logos module.

Second, the contemporary transgender movement, the rise of adolescent gender dysphoria, the medical and surgical interventions performed on developing bodies in pursuit of gender identity, and the pastoral questions these raise for Christian families and communities deserve a separate engagement. The questions are urgent and the fellowship has not yet addressed them in writing at the depth they require. Filed for distinct essay development.

Third, the question of male headship in marriage and church — what it actually means, what it does not mean, how it is exercised faithfully, what the relevant New Testament texts actually require, and how it has been distorted in both the patriarchal-abuse direction and the egalitarian-collapse direction — has been minimized in much of the contemporary American church and deserves recovery. The CGG tradition (which produced the Reid civil-obedience essay engaged in the May 13 piece) holds male-headship with greater seriousness than most American evangelicalism; their work on the question is worth engaging. Filed for fellowship discussion and CRF work.

Fourth, the recovery of biblical womanhood — what it means for a Christian woman to flourish in her distinct calling, the rich pattern of Mary, Esther, Deborah, Ruth, Hannah, Lydia, Priscilla, Phoebe, Anna, Dorcas, and the Marys — would balance and complete the work of this essay. This essay has dealt with what we refuse; an accompanying essay should deal with what we affirm. The biblical witness on women’s dignity and calling is rich, specific, and underdeveloped in much contemporary Christian writing, and the fellowship would benefit from a positive articulation. Filed for fellowship study and essay development.

Fifth, the broader question of language as Christian discipline — beyond pronouns, into the territory of how Christians should speak about politics, sex, money, race, nation, and the various other contested vocabularies of contemporary public discourse — is real and deserves systematic treatment. The pronoun is a particular case; the principle generalizes. Filed for substantive future essay.

Sixth, the pastoral question of how fellowship members should handle pronoun-disclosure norms in their professional and educational settings — when they are required to list pronouns in email signatures, when they are asked to address persons of one biological sex by pronouns of another, when they are pressured into linguistic compliance in professional contexts — is concrete and important. The principle of consistent practice articulated above does not, by itself, resolve every concrete case. Filed for direct pastoral conversation and for case-by-case fellowship discussion.

Seventh, the philosophical and theological work on language as participation in the logos — Augustine’s De Magistro, Aquinas on signification, the broader Christian metaphysics of language as creaturely participation in divine Word — is a deep well that this essay has only gestured at. The CPP framework, which holds consciousness and intelligible structure as primary, provides a metaphysical ground for the doctrine of language-as-participation-in-reality that the secular post-structuralist tradition cannot provide. Filed for CPP-CRF integration work and for Christos Logos module development.

Closing Reflection

The pronoun is a small thing. The Christian Underground operates by small things — small witnesses, small refusals, small consistencies, small acts of love and good works and reasoned defense of Christ done daily over decades. Most of the work that converts the world is done at this scale. The grand cultural battles draw attention; the small daily disciplines do the actual work.

My flag on the she pronouns in the civil-obedience essay rewrite last week was, in itself, a small thing. It became this essay because the small thing turned out to have substantial roots — roots that went down through cultural history, through linguistic theory, through metaphysical claims about the nature of male and female, through the biblical doctrine of creation, all the way to the question of whether language is neutral or whether it carries freight. The roots are the reason the small thing matters.

The fellowship’s practice on this will be consistent generic-he as the unmarked-universal, man and mankind as generic for humanity, specific she and her for specific women, charity toward Christians elsewhere on the question, clarity against the deeper metaphysical project, and the quiet faithful discipline that holds the line in writing and speech without polemic. The convention is the confession. The confession is biblical anthropology, biblical creation, biblical theology of language, biblical patterns of male-female complementarity. We will keep the convention because we hold the confession. We will hold the confession because the confession names the real, and naming the real is what speech is for.

In the beginning was the Word. The Word names. The Word makes. The Word redeems. The disciples of the Word do likewise, in their small ways, with the words their language gives them, in the convention their tradition has carried for two thousand years. We keep the convention not because we are reactionary but because we are receiving. The tradition gave us the convention; the convention names the real; the real is what God made; what God made we honor by naming it rightly. Render unto the Real what is the Real’s, in this small as in all things.

— Thomas

260517 – Fellowship Meeting – The Pharisee and the Sheikh

by Thomas Abshier | May 18, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Pharisee Question and the Visit of the Sheikh: When the Spirit-Behind-Religion Test Came to the Living Room

By: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

Date: May 17, 2026

Fellowship Discussion Summary | May 17, 2026

Occasion: This was the Sunday following the May 10 fellowship that produced the Christian Underground synthesis and the subsequent week of theological-production work (the eschatology essay on enduring the trial, the civil-obedience essay engaging Reid’s Romans 13, the Islam reading list compiled for the planned Sherman Zoom dialogue, and the postscript on interfaith witness and the liberty in Christ). Charlie had skimmed the week’s output and arrived with a piercing question about the Mormonism discussion. Leonard joined for substantial portions of the first hour before having to depart to help his wife. Armond arrived early and stayed through the post-meeting debrief. Approximately one hour and twenty-three minutes into the meeting, Michael Sherman appeared on the call with a guest — Sheikh Ra Sadiq of the Moorish Science Temple of America. What followed was a real-world stress test of the spirit-behind-religion framework that the fellowship had been developing — twice in one meeting, once with Leonard, and once with the Sheikh, each presenting in his own way the structural shape of a serious adult-formed adherent of a mono-vocal religious tradition.

This summary attempts a complete account of what was discussed, in roughly the order it was discussed, with my own reflections marked as such. The meeting was rich enough that this summary runs longer than usual. Length is in service of completeness; this Sunday merits the full record.

I. Charlie Reopens the Mormonism Thread

The meeting opened with the usual small talk and check-ins, and then Charlie immediately drew the conversation back to the previous week’s Mormonism discussion. He had skimmed the essay I had circulated but, by his own admission, had not read it carefully. Saturday is a workday for me, he said, and the rest of the week is workdays too, except Sunday — which is the day he needed to read it by. So he came in with a paraphrased understanding of what I had written, and his paraphrase was honest and pointed: Is the gist that you agree with Leonard on most things, except for the need for a restoration and the restoration itself? And that you actually consider Leonard’s position a dangerous one that threatens his relationship with God?

I tried to answer the question more carefully than Charlie’s request invited. In short, I can detect no substantive difference between Leonard’s beliefs about what the Bible says, the way to salvation, the contents of a Godly life, the meaning and significance of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection. I believe he holds the proper posture, attitude, belief, practice, and thought to please God and enjoy the forgiveness of sin and reconciliation with God.

If there is a distinction between Leonard and me, it is on another axis. That difference is how he holds the Book of Mormon. As far as I can tell, he holds the BOM at a level equal to, or more likely, superior to the Bible. He believes that there was a need to restore what was lost in the Bible — material lost through the erosion of the sands of time, intentional or inadvertent deletion, or the addition of inauthentic text.

I believe that God can do sufficient work with the small portion of the record of the law, prophets, psalms, gospels, epistles, and revelation that has been delivered to modernity, regardless of the imperfection of the transmission.

As a point of clarification and classification, I believe the Book of Mormon should be called a new revelation, rather than a restoration. Neither I nor anyone knows what the original was, so we cannot determine whether the Book of Mormon — which was revealed by Moroni to Joseph Smith and from Jesus to Denver Snuffer — was a restoration of an original revelation or a new revelation. We can say for certain that they are new revelations to us. We rely on the testimony of Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer that these are, in fact, the originals that were lost and were hence restored by a divine messenger, as they reported. I think this framing is more practical and honest.

As a trivial observation, the BOM is not identical to the Bible. It has more or less detail in stories that both report. There are other stories that are completely new. I would call the BOM a book of historical metaphors, a book of life lessons illustrated by stories. I don’t believe Leonard’s salvation is in jeopardy, but I don’t have the knowledge of God’s inner thoughts and standards to make that judgment. My concern is that Leonard is following the revelations of two men, Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer. We do not know for certain who the spirit was that delivered these revelations — it might have been Moroni for Joseph Smith and Jesus for Denver Snuffer. The fact is that we don’t know that for certain. We cannot independently verify their story. But that is their story, and the spirit may or may not be who they thought it was. The bottom line is that it was their personal contact, and it is their testimony as a man.

The average Mormon believes the BOM’s revelations of Joseph Smith, and Leonard believes the testimony of Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer to be of equal or greater authority than the Bible, in the sense that they are more complete and truer / less distorted. Leonard gives greater credence and authenticity to the BOM when there is a conflict between the two. This is the key point of my counsel and confrontation. Leonard has placed the BOM as the point of spiritual perfection, leadership, and authority. In effect, the BOM is the pattern that he is using to pattern himself. It is my thesis that the leader and the scripture one chooses as one’s authority — one’s ideal — will shape one in its image.

A note on terminology — the mono-vocal / multi-vocal spectrum

I want to introduce the framework I have been working with for distinguishing religions by the structure of their authoritative sources, because it has clarified for me what the actual disagreement with Leonard’s position is. In earlier framings, I had been using a binary — guru-religions on one side, biblical Christianity on the other. I have come to think that binary is too sharp. A spectrum is more accurate, and the spectrum runs from mono-vocal on one end to multi-vocal on the other.

At the mono-vocal end sit religions whose authoritative content originates from a single living human teacher or prophet — what is classically called the guru-disciple relationship in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the living-prophet movements in their first generation, the personal-revelation traditions where one person reports one set of received teachings and the community organizes around that report. The religion’s credibility depends entirely on the credibility of its single human medium. The content of the religion is based on whatever the medium reports. The spiritual life of the disciple is, in a real sense, vassalage to the spirit that speaks through the medium.

At the multi-vocal end sits biblical Christianity. Sixty-six books. Dozens of human authors writing across roughly four thousand years. Many genres — law, history, prophecy, wisdom, psalmody, gospel, epistle, apocalyptic — each contributing a different angle on the one God and his one redemptive work culminating in Christ. The central figure of Christ, the logos incarnate, is himself one voice within this multi-vocal canon. His recorded teaching is comparatively brief — a few thousand words at most, scattered across four gospels each written from a different angle. The biblical revelation is the cumulative testimony of many witnesses over many centuries, with the Holy Spirit doing the internal application work for each believer who comes to it.

So in this taxonomy, Christianity is not a non-guru religion. Jesus is the guru, the teacher, the rabbi, the master whose claims we are following. Christianity is, in this structural sense, a guru-religion. But Christianity is the most multi-vocally diluted guru-religion. The single voice of Jesus has been refracted through prophetic anticipation across two millennia before his coming, through the eyewitness apostolic testimony of his immediate disciples, through Pauline theological elaboration, through Johannine mystical penetration, through Petrine pastoral exhortation, through James’s practical wisdom, through the historical and apocalyptic literature of both Testaments. The guru-imprint is diffused — by the four-thousand-year breadth of the canon, by the diversity of authors, by the multiplicity of genres, by the centuries of fulfillment between prophecy and accomplishment, by the dozens of independently composed manuscripts that converge on a single redemptive story — to the point where the recipient is not bound to any single human medium. He is in conversation with a multi-vocal witness, and the Holy Spirit applies it personally to the student, seeker, follower, and disciple.

In between these two ends of the spectrum sit the various intermediate religions, including Mormonism. Mormonism uses the biblical canon as its reconciliation framework — it accepts the Bible’s account of God, creation, fall, Christ, atonement — and adds to it a layer of post-apostolic single-revelator deposit (Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, and, within particular sub-traditions, the further revelations of Denver Snuffer). The Mormon is therefore in a hybrid position: he holds the multi-vocal biblical witness as foundation, but he attaches to it a mono-vocal personal-revelation deposit that becomes operatively authoritative in his life. He is, structurally, partway along the spectrum from biblical Christianity toward the mono-vocal end. The further he moves toward giving the mono-vocal deposit operative supremacy over the multi-vocal canon, the further along the spectrum he travels.

The institutional layer — a separate axis

The mono-vocal / multi-vocal axis is one dimension of the religious taxonomy. A separate dimension concerns the institutional layer that develops after the founding prophet or teacher. When the founder is dead, and his immediate disciples have passed, an institution typically arises to enforce the purity of the original teaching and to mediate the relationship between the founder’s deposit and successive generations of adherents. The institution can be more brutal than the founder ever was.

Catholicism’s medieval Inquisition and contemporary expectations of doctrinal conformity operate at a level of institutional control that no first-century apostolic figure ever exercised over the early Church. The Sunni-jurist tradition codified Quranic teaching into the elaborate Sharia of Reliance of the Traveller and the equivalent classical legal manuals that go far beyond what Muhammad himself ever specified. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of the Jehovah’s Witnesses exercises governance over individual lives that Charles Taze Russell did not specify. The LDS Church’s institutional structure — which Leonard himself recognizes is, in important respects, not specified in Joseph Smith’s original vision — operates with disciplinary authority Joseph Smith himself never wielded. The pattern recurs: the founder dies, the message stabilizes, the institution rises around the stabilized message, and the institution begins to discipline its adherents in ways the founder did not.

The institutional layer is a separate concern from the mono-vocal vs. multi-vocal source question. A religion can be mono-vocal in source and tyrannical in institution (post-Muhammad Sunni Islam, post-Joseph-Smith institutional Mormonism). A religion can be mono-vocal in its source and non-tyrannical in its institutions. Leonard’s Denver Snuffer movement is an instance of this latter case: the living prophet is hands-off, the institutional structure is very loose, the disciples are not subject to the kind of life-management control that, say, an LDS bishopric or a Salafi imam exercises. A religion can also be multi-vocal in its sources and tyrannical in its institutions — Catholicism is the clearest example, where the multi-vocal canon is overlaid by an institutional magisterium that has historically been highly controlling. The two dimensions are independent. The Christian assessment of a particular religion has to take both into account separately.

For Leonard specifically, this dual analysis is useful. His living prophet, Denver Snuffer, is not inclined toward theological tyranny; the institution around him is loose; Leonard is not subject to the kind of disciplinary structure that constrains rank-and-file LDS members. Leonard is in a relatively benign institutional position. But the mono-vocal source question remains: Leonard is still attaching his spiritual discipline and beliefs to the testimony of a single human medium (Denver Snuffer and, behind Denver Snuffer, Joseph Smith) who reports a single set of received teachings. The mono-vocal validation problem — that the medium’s testimony can only be validated from within — remains operative even where the institutional layer is benign.

Validation at the mono-vocal end is structurally weak

When a person follows a single living guru or a single post-apostolic revelator, the criterion of validation is some version of he said it, I believe it, I am following him because it sounds right to my mind and resonates in my heart. The internal witness — what the biblical writers call the still small voice (1 Kings 19:12), what Christians call the Holy Spirit’s confirmation, what mystics across many traditions call inner knowing — is doing the load-bearing work. That internal witness must be present; without it, the disciple has no anchor at all, and the religious life is mere social convention. But the internal witness alone is not sufficient. It must correspond to reality external to the disciple’s own consciousness.

A common early phenomenon in new religious movements is what I call the first one is free. The new adherent experiences a striking miracle, an answered prayer, an unmistakable spiritual touch in the early days of his commitment to the new tradition. The miracle confirms to him that the tradition is true. But miracles do not by themselves validate a tradition’s claims. Demons can produce miraculous-seeming events (Matt 7:22, 2 Thess 2:9-10, Rev 13:13-14). Charismatic frauds can stage the appearance of miracles. The first miracle is not enough. The corpus of the tradition’s fruit over time — across many adherents, across many years, across many testable predictions about what holy living produces — is what bears the weight of validation. And one of the more objective criteria available within that corpus is the test of freedom in Christ (Gal 5:1, John 8:36, 2 Cor 3:17). Does the tradition leave its adherents in genuine liberty under God, or does it bind them into restrictions that the canonical witness of the Bible itself does not require? The freedom-test is one of the cleaner external referents for evaluating any mono-vocal source’s claim to authoritative status. Other external referents include converging biblical-textual consistency, fulfilled prophecy across long time-horizons, the moral and intellectual character of the tradition’s saints, the historical record of how the tradition’s institutional embodiments have treated dissenters and outsiders, and the question of whether the tradition’s claims can be cross-checked against general revelation — the testimony of nature, the structure of human nature, the moral law written on the heart, and the increasingly clear results of physical science.

These external referents are what make the multi-vocal canon’s claim to authority structurally stronger than the mono-vocal guru’s claim. The biblical witness, taken as a whole, has been cross-checked against fulfilled prophecy across centuries, against the historical events its eyewitness writers reported, against the moral law universal to human conscience, against the testimony of the saints across twenty centuries of the Church’s history, and against the structural features of creation that bear God’s signature. The mono-vocal guru, by contrast, has only his own testimony plus whatever institutional pressure his successors apply. The validation surface area is dramatically smaller.

The optimal-liberty criterion

The framework above has a practical decision-rule attached for the Christian who is evaluating which tradition to follow. The criterion is twofold: (1) does the tradition bring the adherent into a reconciled relationship with God, and (2) does it optimize freedom — that is, does it limit the believer’s liberty no more than necessary to bring him into and sustain that reconciled relationship?

In the case of Christian traditions broadly — Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Baptist, Pentecostal, Anabaptist, and so on — all of them embrace the Bible as authoritative and accept the gospel’s account of reconciliation through Christ’s atoning death and resurrection. On the first criterion, all of these traditions are equal: each brings the believer into a reconciled relationship with God through the same gospel. The distinction between denominations therefore turns on the second criterion: how much liberty does each tradition leave to the believer? Which denomination’s doctrines and practices respect the freedom we have in Christ with the minimum unnecessary restriction?

Of course, if a tradition’s foundational claims about Christ’s atoning work are eliminated or rendered insufficient — if grace is overlaid or displaced by works-righteousness, if the cross is treated as inadequate to reconcile, if the believer is told that his standing before God depends on his performance of religious labor — then the tradition has reverted to a works-based form. Such a system is both ineffective (it cannot produce the reconciliation it promises through human effort) and freedom-limiting (it loads the believer with the unending burden of trying to be good enough). Various religions across the world operate on this works-based structure, including some that adopt biblical or biblically-adjacent vocabulary; each of these deserves its own careful and respectful engagement on its own terms.

In Mormonism’s case, the religion falls within the broad category of biblical traditions, since it uses the Bible’s framework for reconciliation with God. The distinction between Mormonism and other denominations is therefore initially about which dos and don’ts should be followed in the Bible — this is the standard kind of denominational distinction. But because Mormonism follows additional non-Biblical scripture, the further question is to what extent these extra-Biblical texts regulate the believer’s behavior, and whether those additional regulations exceed what the Bible itself requires.

In Mormon practice, the Bible is generally placed on a spectrum from equal stature with the BOM to a subservient appendage of, or outdated precursor to, the newer “restored” revelations in the BOM, which are considered to be more complete or reliable. Mormonism is thus a biblical religion with a guru intermediary (Joseph Smith) who reported a vision with Moroni that corrected errors and filled in missing stories, background, and instructions that, on his account, had been lost from the Bible. In the case of the Denver Snuffer sub-tradition, there is a secondary revelator who met Jesus personally and received what he understands as the same message Joseph Smith received, thereby further correcting, elaborating on, and clarifying Joseph Smith’s restoration.

The question is then: what is the harm or consequence of following a later-day restoration or new revelation? Two answers.

First, there is the risk of collision with the Bible’s own warnings against false prophets and new Christs. Matthew 24:23-24 and 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 are direct: false prophets and false Christs will arise, with sufficient signs and wonders to deceive even the elect if it were possible. The biblical witness anticipates the very phenomenon Mormonism instantiates.

Second, and more structurally, the fact that the new revelation came from a single man rather than from four thousand years of multivocal revelation means that the message has been collapsed from broad parallax into the single voice of a guru. Any pattern of follow me, do this, don’t do that, here is the certainty, here is the program is narrower, more crystalline, and more specific than the broad spectrum of perspectives presented by the multi-vocal canon. The revelation of a single voice can work against the creation’s purpose of producing free souls capable of loving God from genuine freedom rather than from external dictation.

In some mono-vocal religious systems, the living guru’s voice becomes specific, life-directing, and the basis of theological tyranny — not necessarily oppressive in a political sense, but oppressive in the sense of having one’s life delegated to another person’s spiritual leading rather than walking it out one’s self under the Spirit. The believer becomes, in some sense, a clone of the revelator, subject to the revelator’s spiritual leading. The multi-vocal Bible offers a parallax view of the possibilities of life; from those various guide-stars the believer makes his own decisions. The biblical multivocality and the Spirit’s individualized application make it possible to retain genuine personal responsibility for one’s character development, because the canon offers options rather than directions. Even when it gives instructions, the voice of the canon (refracted through the Spirit’s internal application) functions as an advisor rather than as a command.

This is the spirit-behind-religion principle restated in the language of the spectrum. Mormonism, as a religion partway down the spectrum toward the mono-vocal end, attaches a layer of restrictions and prescriptions that is narrower than the biblically-guided life. The question is whether the Mormon lives a better life because he has additional revelation, or a more restricted life because the additional revelation narrows his options. The biblical foundation is the same; what is added is constraint. The honest question is whether the constraint serves him or limits him beyond what is necessary for his reconciliation with God.

My counsel to Leonard, in summary: if you find value in the Book of Mormon, hold it as literature, as interesting ideas, as the testimony of two men — Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer — who reported what they reported. Take it as one possible perspective among many. Make sure not to make it the perspective. If you are following the BOM as literature and as one source of insight while the Bible remains your pinnacle, you are not denying central Christian doctrine in any obvious way. But if the BOM becomes operatively authoritative over the Bible — if, when the two conflict, you side with the BOM — then you have moved further toward the mono-vocal end of the spectrum than the Christian framework can sustain, and the spirit imprinting itself on your soul through the medium of Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer is no longer the same as the Spirit testifying through the multi-vocal canon’s witness to Christ. The danger I refer to is not damnation, in any direct sense. It is more subtle than that. It is about the character one develops over time when one’s spiritual life is shaped by a single human medium rather than by the broader, more parallax-rich witness God has provided.

II. The Pharisee Question

Charlie heard me out and then asked the question that turned out to be the load-bearing question of the entire first hour of the meeting:

What is the difference in your mind between the attitude you advocate and the attitude of the Jews and Pharisees and why they would reject Christ?

He pressed the question with a precise formulation:

A very simplistic view of what you said is that what God has revealed and what was recorded in the Bible is adequate. No more gurus allowed at this point. But how is that different than what the Pharisees said — that we are of Moses, and we have the law, and here we are, and this upstart, just another one of many, calls himself the Messiah? They rejected Jesus. How is their rejecting Jesus different than your rejecting Joseph Smith?

Charlie is correct — there is, structurally, something parallel between the Pharisees’ canonical reverence for the Mosaic deposit and a closed-canon Protestant rejection of post-apostolic revelation. Both positions hold that the deposit they have is sufficient and that no new revelator is needed. Both can be used to dismiss a genuine messenger from God.

My answer comes down to one thing: the Spirit’s internal witness, combined with the external referents available to a multi-vocal canon. The only way a person can distinguish a true messenger from a false one, at the moment of confrontation with the messenger’s claim, is by the Spirit speaking within and confirming or refusing to confirm — Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt 16:16) was Peter’s confession, and Jesus’s response was that flesh and blood had not revealed it to him, but the Father in heaven. The internal witness is what makes Peter’s confession authoritative. Without that internal witness, no external argument can settle the question of who is sent from God and who is not.

The Pharisees had the Mosaic law, but did not have the incarnate Christ present in their hearing by the Spirit’s witness. Their hearts were closed; the Spirit’s confirmation was unavailable to them; therefore, when the Son of God stood before them, they could not recognize him. The text of Matthew 23 makes the diagnosis specific — they were sons of those who killed the prophets, and their fathers’ rejection-pattern continued in them. Critically, the Pharisees also failed the external-referent test that was actually available to them: Jesus himself argued from their own multi-vocal canon (Luke 24:27, John 5:39) that the Hebrew Scriptures testified to him. The texts they revered already pointed to the Messiah they were rejecting. Their rejection was therefore not a faithful application of a closed canon; it was a closed-hearted refusal of what their canon was actually saying.

The Christian who today says no more new authoritative revelators is making a structurally different claim from the Pharisees’, if and only if the Christian’s saying is rooted in the Spirit’s internal witness, combined with attention to the external referents the multi-vocal canon actually contains. If I were rejecting Joseph Smith merely because I happen to have been raised on the Bible and not on the Book of Mormon, I would have no real ground for the rejection beyond cultural attachment, and Charlie’s parallel would hold. But if I am rejecting Joseph Smith because (1) the Spirit who has confirmed Jesus Christ to me has not confirmed Joseph Smith to me, and has, instead, when I try to listen for it, given me an unease about Joseph Smith’s claims, and (2) the multi-vocal canon’s own external-referent witness — fulfilled prophecy, converging eyewitness testimony, the moral coherence of the gospel, the historical pattern of how single-revelator innovations have unfolded over time — does not validate Joseph Smith’s report in the way the canon’s own internal evidence validates Christ, then the rejection is of a categorically different kind from the Pharisees’ rejection of Jesus.

This is, of course includes the subjectivity of one’s spirit, but It is an honest answer about the limits of what can be argued from outside the Spirit’s witness. Charlie heard it. We moved on, but that is the question every new believer must answer. Why believe the Bible instead of every new shiny religion? To me, the best answer is the very fact that both Mormonism and Christianity are biblically based. If a person does not get a clear internal witness for one or the other, go with the Bible because of the multi-vocal-vs-mono-vocal argument: the multi-vocal canon has structurally more external-referent validation available to it than the mono-vocal innovation does. That is simply a structural feature of the two kinds of authority.

Does it matter if someone delivers a revelation that they are convinced came from God, and does not contradict the Bible, but adds additional revelation that makes the Bible more understandable or clear in its direction? The answer is yes. I think it matters because I believe God wants us to grow into full spiritual maturity in the liberty of Christ. When other revelators offer clarity, they also reduce liberty. If we are told what the right answer is, not from a parent or teacher, but from what we are told is divine authority, and never wrestle with the problem in life because we have the answer, we do not grow. The predigested religion, where the guru tells us all the specifics of what to do/not do in life, subtly removes freedom. I don’t know all the specifics of Mormonism, but from Charlie’s experience, he found it very controlling. I don’t know how much of this is institutional invention, and how much was channeled through the revelators, but it is exactly the kind of restrictions that are the marks of a predigested, mono-vocal religion.

The fact that Mormonism was introduced as it was — through a single young man in upstate New York in the 1820s, reporting a single set of visions, with the claim that the Christian Church for eighteen hundred years had been operating under corrupted scripture and false authority — could plausibly be a trick of the adversary to pull people off the broad parallax-rich path of the biblical canon, where a person’s character is tested in many different ways through engagement with the diverse witnesses, onto a narrower path where the answers are clearer because they come from a single voice. As Charlie put it, Mormons have an answer for everything. That is precisely the symptom of a mono-vocal source. Single voices produce clear answers; multi-vocal canons produce wisdom forged in the wrestling with apparent tensions.

III. Leonard’s Return — Why No More Gurus? Why No More Scripture?

Leonard then pressed the question from a different angle.

I’m trying to understand what you’re trying to say in that — no more gurus. Let’s say no more scripture. Let’s say that the scripture, the book that we have, is also an idol — an idol that people follow.

I stopped him there, because his point was the same point Charlie had just made. The Pharisees had made the book an idol, a non-living record. The Christian who treats the Bible as a sealed deposit that excludes any further speaking and hearing of the Holy Spirit is treating the Bible as an idol. The idol is a human-crafted creation that neither hears nor speaks. It is lifeless. But this is not the Bible we were given. Within it is the spirit of life. Jesus specifically promised that He would send the Holy Spirit when He left. (John 15:26) “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.” (John 14:16-17, John 14:26, John 16:7) If it were just a book, a prescription of what to believe and not believe, it would be an idol. But with the addition of the Holy Spirit, guiding us in the holy conduct of our daily lives, this is a living Word. If it had only the rigid-canon position, which excluded the Holy Spirit, and was only the words of a prophet, it would be dead. We don’t need another prophet. What we have recorded in the Bible is sufficient. We have a record of the words spoken under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit over 4,000 years by prophets who heard God’s voice. We have the record of what Jesus, the incarnate form of God, said. We have the witness of Paul, who was taken into Heaven and testified to what He saw and knew from that perspective. The triangulate, they are non-contradictory with each other. The Words of the Bible are sufficient. They give us a broad spectrum of the Holy Spirit’s character as spoken in many different situations. It is multi-vocal; it gives us a broad spectrum of words the Holy Spirit may speak to our hearts in many different situations. The written word is a pattern-matching codex. It is not the full transcription of all things the Holy Spirit has ever said or can say; it is a pattern that is a sufficiently broad spectrum representation of his voice to be able to recognize His voice. If the voice of the conscience, the still small voice, contradicts this voice, it is another spirit.

Then Leonard said, I think Christians need to look in the mirror too. It looks like Christians have made an idol out of the canonized Bible. What is the difference between the Pharisees making an idol out of the Old Testament and modern-day Christians making an idol out of the canonized Old and New Testaments?

In response, I replied: the Old Testament was incomplete, and they were worshipping it as though it were complete. The OT by itself says that it is not. It was awaiting the Messiah’s coming. When the Messiah came, their hearts were hard, and they could not hear the voice of the holy spirit.

Then Leonard said, “And another thing, does God change? Has He ever changed His way of working with His children, with His creation? Why wouldn’t He continue in the same process that He’s had for the last four thousand years — to reveal Himself through servants that He chooses?”

My reply was that His nature is unchanging, and His plan for salvation never changed. I know you asked the question to show that the Bible shows how God changes over time. You were attempting to justify the argument that if God gave progressive revelations (changed the amount of knowledge He had revealed over time), why wouldn’t He continue to give additional revelations through prophets such as Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer?

Obviously, there were many changes in circumstances over time. In response to the various changes, He changed the way He communicated with His people. He walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden; then He spoke with Moses on the mount, from the cloud, and at the burning bush. He changed His mind about destroying the Israelites and repented when Moses rebuked Him. Prophets revealed new information about the Messiah, about God’s wrath, or the need to repent. God told Adam he would have to work by the sweat of his brow, but God fed the Israelites with Manna. He allowed His people to be ruled by judges, and then by kings when the people petitioned. God gave the Law to Moses, but Jesus came and fulfilled it. John received a final revelation on the Isle of Patmos. There was progressive revelation from Adam to Christ, which we see referenced in Hebrews 1:1–2 “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets… but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son.” And in Jude 3 we see a description of “The faith once for all delivered to the saints. In these verses, we do not see a Biblical opening for additional revelation regarding salvation. And given that Christ was the author and the executor of His plan for salvation, His words testify of His finished work on the cross.

So, in answer to your question about whether God changed in any way over time, the answer is emphatically yes: God has changed His response to His people in light of the circumstances of their lives. He gave new revelations to prophets over the years about the need for repentance and the coming Messiah. But the real question with regard to the Smith/Snuffer revelation, is whether a change was needed to complete His plan for the salvation of men’s souls? Was the Biblical revelation incomplete, erroneous, or otherwise unsatisfactory in enabling the seeker to transit the journey from sinner/unbeliever to redeemed/man of faith?

Was what was missing a new revelation about the right church to go to that had the full message? If so, what message it that Smith/Snuffer supplied? Was there a missing piece in the organization of the Church that was necessary to provide assistance to the soul seeking salvation? Was the configuration of the temple important to provide the spiritual atmosphere or resonance with the prototypical temples that Moses and Solomon built to facilitate worship, hearing God, or providing the atmosphere where God would come. Did we need a revelation about what clothing to wear, what rituals to do in the temple, what ceremonies were needed with regard to marriage, how to relate to our ancestors, or knowledge of the heavenly  domains?  Is there anything in the apostolic revelation that is missing that is supplied by Smith/Snuffer that brings us more perfectly into salvation? Does that knowledge actually make a difference? Is there anything that could not be found in the Biblical testimony that the Smith/Snuffer revelation fills in, completes, and make effective for salvation and sanctification what was previously ineffective?

Are the Smith/Snuffer revelations necessary/required for the advancement of our souls in righteousness and relationship with the Father? From the outside, it seems that we are looking at revelations about spiritual structure, history, procedure, and organization. I don’t see the need for such revelation for salvation or living a Godly life. We have the Great Commandment, to love God, neighbors, and self. If we need a church for our salvation, then salvation by grace, belief, and living with Jesus as Lord is not enough. If the BOM is a new revelation regarding what is necessary for salvation, then that is a different Gospel, and the Bible is superseded. If so, the Bible was simply incomplete and should be subservient/minor/dependent upon the new revelation that includes these necessary elements.

Can I prove that the Bible is sufficient for salvation and living the best and most Godly life? I cannot. Can I prove that the BOM is unnecessary and that there are no gaps missing in the Bible? No, I cannot. I can only look at the logical structure of the Bible, and what the BOM fills in. I don’t know the BOM in detail, so I can’t tell you whether the BOM fills a missing gap or not, so I will leave that for your search and discrimination to inform me of the necessary revelation by Smith/Snuffer that fills in those missing/distorted/incorrect parts of the Biblical canon.

I don’t know where all the rituals and organizational details of the Temple are recorded in the Mormon canon, but regardless, it appears that the revelators or the subsequent institution believed something was missing regarding the church. But if my impression that the church was included in the revelation of Smith/Snuffer, then I don’t think this revelation was a vital/necessary/essential/salvation-level-omission from the Biblical canon. I don’t think the organized church is a necessary element of salvation. The church is the body of believers who assemble to edify and fellowship. The church, as the body of believers, is the totality of the souls of men in whom the Lord lives in a meaningful way. The church is not in a temple made with hands, an organization, rituals, priests, or hierarchy. We have one mediator between God and man. There is no need for more revelation about the church rituals, meetings, organization, or buildings. These are external foci; the real work is internal — the heart, the soul, the daily walk with Christ under the Spirit’s leading.

Meeting with believers is important, whether to learn or teach. Gathering together in twos or a group to fellowship, witness, edify, or counsel, is integral to the process of spreading the gospel and discipleling. The Great Commission is the heart of church spreading, Matthew 28:19–20, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost…” And Romans 10:14–15 “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?”  All that is needed is a preacher and a listener; no organization is required.

Regarding salvation, is there something missing in the Biblical canon? My opinion is that there is not. I see the fruit in the lives of people who have been touched by the Biblical revelation and followed its prescription for living. Smith asked, “Which is the right/true/best church?” The question should be, Who is the true God, and what should I do to access the fullness of joy in a relationship with Him? I believe the Bible answers that question. I think what the apostles received was sufficient for salvation and the instruction in living a life pleasing to God. The needed instruction in life is available through the Holy Spirit, and salvation is accomplished on the cross by His substitutionary death and suffering, in His receiving the wrath of God at our sin, as the payment of the debt rendered when He became sin for us. I don’t think anything was missing or lost that needed to be revealed to a young man in 1820 to reveal what was missing. To use the Mormon term, I don’t think there was anything lost that needed to be restored. I think God’s plan for salvation was recorded and reported adequately by the apostles. I think God’s plan for salvation remained unchanged from the beginning. That is, God’s plan has not changed from the time when the Father and Son planned the creation of the universe. From that time on, He was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8). If the Biblical plan was inadequate for salvation, and the Mormon revelation filled it, then what specifically are those missing elements that were supplied?

All the changes that were recorded in the OT and NT were fundamentally procedural. If Joseph Smith received more information about what was necessary for salvation, then his revelation fundamentally changes His message, His purpose, and His character.

The argument that “nothing was missing” from the apostolic gospel rests on the sufficiency of grace through faith, and as we see in James, that faith is reflected/shown/known by works. The Biblical record declares that the whole of Christ’s atoning work on the Cross, received by faith, is itself the whole of what is necessary for salvation. The promised indwelling Spirit that guides each man to sanctification is likewise revealed in the Biblical record.

I am sure a serious Mormon interlocutor would not deny that grace is necessary. But he would deny that grace alone (with the accompaniment of the indwelling Spirit as revealed by the apostolic Scripture) is sufficient. He would say that ordinances, temple sealings, priesthood authority, and continuing prophetic revelation are also necessary, layered atop grace. The disagreement, in other words, is not whether grace is necessary but whether anything else is also necessary. I hold to sola fide — salvation by grace through faith alone (Eph 2:8-9). And that faith implies obedience to the leading of the Holy Spirit, John 16:13 “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth…”. The fruit of the Spirit seen in the lives of men is the evidence of the argument that nothing was missing in the apostolic revelation. A reader who does not share that conviction will have to engage the sola fide question first, before the canon-closure argument can land. I flag it here so the structure of my argument is visible.

An argument central to the Mormon justification of being open to other prophets is that the Bible itself records God working through servant after servant, many of them rejected, and ultimately his Son is rejected and killed, as seen in the parable and in His life and crucifixion. It is Leonard’s contention that there is no clear scriptural warrant for the claim that this pattern of continuuing revelation has now permanently stopped. But this is not true. The Bible very clearly states (Revelation 22:18–19): “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life…” It could be argued that this warning applies only to John’s Revelation and not to Paul’s epistles or the gospels. The phrase “this book” in context refers specifically to Revelation, not the entire Bible. However, because Revelation is the final book in the canonical order and contains a warning against adding to or subtracting from it, the early church treated it as a functional “closing seal” on Scripture. While no other NT verse explicitly says “the canon is closed,” several passages reinforce the idea that:

• The apostolic witness is once-for-all delivered (Jude 3),
• The foundation is the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:20),
• No later teachings may contradict the apostolic gospel (Galatians 1:8–9).

Of these three, Galatians 1:8-9 carries the strongest weight, because it is universal in address (not book-scoped, as Rev 22 can be read as being) and comes from undisputed apostolic authority. Paul writes to the Galations: “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. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.” Paul is anticipating exactly the scenario of a later angel-mediated revelation supplementing or replacing the apostolic gospel, and he instructs the church to reject it. The Mormon claim of an angel-Moroni-mediated restoration is structurally exactly the scenario Paul has in view. Paul’s instruction is to reject it, even if it comes from an angel from heaven.

The Bible also supplies its own criteria for testing a prophet’s claim. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 says that a prophet whose teaching draws people after other gods is to be rejected even if his signs and wonders come to pass, because the primary test is doctrinal consistency with prior revelation about God’s character. Deuteronomy 18:21-22 says that a prophet whose predictions do not come to pass is not from God. Both tests apply to any modern claimant, and Joseph Smith’s case is contested on both. His mature theology of God — eternal progression, plurality of gods, God as an exalted man (King Follett Discourse, 1844) — diverges substantially from the eternal, immutable, monotheistic God revealed in both Testaments. And some of his specific predictions did not come to pass as stated. The biblical tests for true prophethood do not unambiguously vindicate his claim.

Leonard took Christ’s warning about false prophets (Matt 7:15) to be a warning not to reject true prophets. He used the example of not counterfeiting a seven-dollar bill. You only counterfeit hundred-dollar bills because hundred-dollar bills exist. The problem with this argument is that the person who finds a latter-day prophet is not only obligated to be certain that he is not a false prophet but also that he is, in fact, a true prophet. I don’t consider a young man who prayed earnestly about which church was the true church in 1820, and had an angel answer his prayer (and later translated tablets that became the BOM) to be sufficient evidence that he was a true prophet.  But the deeper question is, why would this be necessary? Moroni told Joseph Smith that no church was the right church, in answer to his request for knowledge. But what evidence is there that Moroni was an angel from God? Even the prophet himself cannot know for certain the validity of his revelation. A man can testify that he actually had a vision, and we may judge whether he was speaking truthfully, but we have no measure to judge whether the source of that revelation is valid/trustworthy. A prophet can only testify to the truthfulness and actuality of his revelation; he cannot verify the divinity of the message he received. This is why the test of a prophet was that his prophecies were never wrong.

Leonard’s position is that the continuation of revelation goes through Joseph Smith, that there have been subsequent prophets and seers (the modern LDS line, or the breakaway Snufferite line, depending on which Mormon you are talking to), and that an open canon is the more biblically consistent posture than a closed one.

I am not a cessationist in the sense that I believe God has ceased all revelation to man. I am a cessationist in the sense that I believe God completed what was necessary for man to know to come to Him and accept the sacrifice of Christ for our sins. What Moroni told Joseph Smith may have been completely true, but it was not necessary for salvation or sanctification. I believe the Holy Spirit continues to speak to individual believers, counseling us in our sanctification. I believe He has spoken to me, and I have heard members of the fellowship make similar claims. We see clearly that Christ Himself promised that the Holy Spirit would come in John 16:7: “Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” We also see in John 14:16-17 (the promise of “another Comforter”), John 14:26 (the Spirit as teacher), and Acts 2 (the fulfillment at Pentecost). The Bible is clearly not without reference to God revealing His will to us in the moment, in our development, and in our communication.

The existence and claims of new revelations beg the question: what is missing? Did we really need to know about the Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial? The Bible already informs us of the general realms in biblical passages (1 Cor. 15:40-42). This verse is used to justify that their revelation is correct and Biblical. But is knowledge of the afterworld necessary? It’s interesting, but where we need to live, and live properly, is here on earth.

So, it is not that God has ceased speaking. What I am questioning is the elevation of any post-apostolic single-revelator deposit to the status of canonical scripture alongside or above the multi-vocal canon. The Christian who hears the Spirit’s leading internally and acts on it is not adopting a mono-vocal guru; he is hearing his Father’s voice as it applies the multi-vocal canon to his individual situation. The Christian who accepts another human being’s claimed received revelation as canonically binding has — whatever the content of the claim — bound himself to a particular spirit through a particular medium. That medium carries with it the signature of the revelator, which will skew and limit it, which will then imprint the follower. It is this distortion that binds him to that spirit; the binding moves him along the spectrum toward the mono-vocal end. The binding requires diagnostic care.

I had made the comment that if Mormonism were actually true and better, then I should consider being a Mormon. He had said that he believed in his prophet, but he was clear in his statement to me that converting me was not his intention. He said: I love you, and I don’t want you to change your allegiance — keep it with the Bible, keep it with Christ. That’s fine, really. I’m happy with that. I want you to be — to have an allegiance to the only one that can save you, and that’s not Joseph, it’s not Moroni, it’s not Nephi, it’s not Jeremiah, it’s not Isaiah, it’s not Paul — it’s Christ. That’s where we need to focus, and that’s our common ground. And he said it: We are all one in Christ, really, if you consider that He’s the only one that can save us.

I appreciated his expression of care, his allegiance, and his recognition of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. From what I have heard so far, I don’t see Mormonism as significantly different from Christianity in the sense of worshipping another God or denying the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the necessity of accepting His gift of salvation, and living in His spirit. I am concerned about adding words to the testimony of the prophets and apostles from the vision of a man, given by an angel whose credentials we cannot verify, and giving it equal or greater weight than the Bible. My major concern is that it creates a spiritual connection through the human vessel, the angelic messenger, and ultimately to God. My reading of the Bible is that we have one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ. I’m sure Leonard would object to that framing, because I don’t think he thinks that he is worshipping Moroni, Joseph Smith, or Denver Snuffer. And just to be clear, I am not saying that. I am saying that the teacher imprints the message with his personality and perspective. It’s unavoidable. I see Moroni/Joseph Smith/Denver Snuffer as spirits/channels/vessels of transfer that put their own signature on the transmission. This is unavoidable. The medium leaves an imprint on the message. The revelator/teacher/prophet leaves his signature on the message, and the message imprints the follower. It’s unavoidable.

But we need to keep theological discussions/debates in perspective on a human level. The real issue is human relationships. The content of our discussion is spiritual fine points. I think God realizes we are all going to get some things wrong in our conception of who He is and how to live life. The one thing that is really important is acceptance of Jesus’ gift of forgiveness for sin and adopting Him as Lord. I don’t think we need to have absolute doctrinal agreement to obtain salvation. But I do think we need to love each other as brothers in the faith, and I think love for each other includes attempting to convince/teach/challenge our brother in the Lord to see it in the way that each of us sees as the best understanding of life, love, and Godliness. To do otherwise is to hold back the greatest gift that we could give each other, a perfect pattern and understanding of life.

Based on my discussion with Leonard, I think these spiritual questions have earthly consequences. I think what we believe shapes our souls. If we have incorporated error into our fundamental belief system, it will have an effect on our character, our souls, our spirit, and what we take out of this world. I think this is an important fact of life, and we should accept it. But the more important point is to love one another. We can be right and be really unpleasant people. How we relate to each other is more important than being perfectly factual in everything we say/believe. A Mormon whose primary allegiance is to Christ, alongside a Protestant brother whose primary allegiance is to Christ, attempting to understand and convey their understanding to the other, is a wonderful opportunity for fellowship and for exercising speaking the truth in love. Disagreeing without being disagreeable is the foundation of the texture of the Christian Underground’s character. Sunday was a good demonstration of it.

IV. The Self-Validation Problem — And How I Came to Believe the Bible

In the middle of this exchange, a structural epistemic problem came to the surface that Leonard named and that I have to credit him for naming: every scripture validates itself. The Bible says it is true; the Book of Mormon says it is true; the Bhagavad Gita says it is true; the Quran says it is true. Each text comes with internal self-attestation. Each devotional community treats its text’s self-attestation as confirming.

If self-attestation is the only criterion, then it is no criterion. As Leonard put it after I made the point that the LDS internal-witness mechanism (the burning in the bosom of Moroni 10:4-5) is self-validating: Well, just like the Bible does. The Bible validates itself. And he is right that, if we are honest, the same epistemic move that I would dismiss in the Mormon case (the internal burning that confirms the Book of Mormon to a sincere reader) is the move I am making when I treat my own internal witness of the Bible as authoritative.

What I have come to think, and I said this at the time, is that no scripture can validate itself purely from within itself. Some external referent is required. Without an external referent, every text is hermetically sealed and self-confirming, and the choice between texts becomes a matter of which community one was raised in or which charismatic teacher one happened to encounter first. The multi-vocal canon has structurally more external-referent validation available to it than any mono-vocal source — but the external referents have to be actually engaged, not merely asserted. So let me say what the external referents were in my own case, because the testimony is part of why I hold the position I hold, and Sunday’s exchange with Leonard pressed me to say it more directly than I had before.

The March 1987 vision

In March 1987 I had a vision. It was actually a drug induced hallucination. It wasn’t to the point of seeing the walls move, just vivid inner imagery. I had my full faculties, but and the chemicals induced the looseness that allows for stronger, clearer imagination than normal. It was not a vague impression or a strong feeling; it was a picture and a flow of conscious awareness of what this picture meant. The same experience happened two nights in a row, two successive trips, which was unusual to have the same exact trip. It had never happened before. The first one was just a curiosity. The picture stayed the entire trip, which was unusual – it had never happened before. When the same picture came into consciousness on the second trip, I immediately suspected this was not just an altered state, I was open neurologically to the spirit realm, and God was using that to give me a message. It was then that the download happened. I was convinced that this message was being given to me from outside my own consciousness. I was being shown the symbol visually, but the message of what it meant was coming as words, inner thoughts, not audible, just the inner voice of thinking words, and it was telling me about the nature of reality on the subatomic/foundational scale of nature. I had been praying, in desperation, to know the meaning of life, who was the true God, after my 40 different religions I had inspected over the last few years. I had been asked to give a lecture, which I chose, called “Health and the Soul” which I code named, “Find God by Tuesday.” And sure enough, the prayer was answered well enough to know the direction to go in my exploration.

The implications were these. First, that the physics of the natural world would bear God’s signature — that the structure of matter, energy, space, and time would not merely be compatible with a Christian metaphysics but would actively testify to it when examined with sufficient care. Second, that the signature of God in the physics would match the testimony of God in the Bible — that the same divine reality which created the cosmos through the Son had also revealed himself in scripture, and that the two testimonies (creation and canon) would, when properly understood, converge rather than conflict. Third, that the human task was to engage in the work of pattern-matching between these two great witnesses, allowing what is shown in nature to confirm what is reported in scripture, and what is reported in scripture to illuminate what is shown in nature. I knew at the moment of the vision that this was the closest possible kind of proof a human being can be granted concerning God — not a proof imposed from outside that overrides the will, but a structured pattern of correspondence between independent witnesses that the rational mind can recognize as evidence and that the heart can recognize as testimony.

I want to be honest about what kind of vision this was and what kind it was not. It was not Joseph Smith’s First Vision. It did not include God the Father appearing visibly to me in a grove. It did not give me a new scripture to translate. It did not commission me as a prophet. What it did was orient me toward a particular line of investigation — that the physics of consciousness, properly worked out, would lead to a metaphysics that the Bible already contained in its own register — and I have spent the subsequent time, thirty-nine years as of this writing, working out that orientation.

What the work has shown

The physics work has, over those decades, produced what I now call the Conscious Point Physics. The framework of CPP holds that consciousness is fundamental rather than emergent — that the universe is made of conscious points, organized into dipole-point pairs, executing polarize-capture-depolarize cycles in a substrate that itself is conscious. The framework derives Standard Model results from a 600-cell polytope geometry at zero fitted parameters. The 600-cell polytope is one of the regular four-dimensional figures, with 120 vertices and 600 tetrahedral cells, exhibiting a particular geometric perfection that finite Euclidean space allows only at very few scales. The framework’s predictions — proton mass ratios, neutron lifetime, electroweak coupling, magic-strength nuclear binding energies, mixing angles in the neutrino sector — match observed values to within the precision of the measurements. The framework is presently in active development across roughly thirty papers, with multiple AI reviewers (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok) cross-checking the derivations.

What the framework does, when I step back from the technical detail, is to show that the imprint of God in nature goes all the way down to the Conscious Point — that the universe is not impersonally mechanical with a deity attached at the top, but is consciousness organized through geometry, with consciousness itself being the ground rather than the consequence. The Conscious Point arises from God’s mind. The Son was likewise generated as a duplication of the mind of the Father, and this is why Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.” (Heb 1:1-3, John 1:1-3, Col 1:15-17) The Son was the agent through whom all things were made (John 1:3, Col 1:16). The CPP framework, which I did not invent so much as discover through almost four decades of study. It was my passion and interest to attempt to fit these seed observations into a pattern that gives mechanical explanation to what and why Matter Energy, Space, and Time act as they do. It ultimately resulted in a set of 4 types of Conscious Points, which attract and repel each other according to rules that produce all physical phenomena, (i.e., all the relativistic, quantum, particulate, and field effects that physics has identified).

This segues with the Bible. John 1:1-4, God’s mind/spirit declared the Son into existence (I AM that I AM). In the same manner, the Son gave existence to the Conscious Points as mind points-of-view (That Is). The Conscious Points are the underlying mind-substance that gives apparent solid existence to the physical universe. The source of every point of consciousness is the mind of God; therefore, He experiences the entire universe. He enjoys the experience when love of self and neighbor are freely given and experienced. He feels love when we choose to follow His way/His moral code. When we live His way, in His universe, He experiences love. What the Bible reports about God corresponds with what nature speaks. The same consciousness underlying the Conscious Points that form the substrate of the physical universe animates our hearts, minds, soul, spirit, and God Himself.

The convergence runs deep. The underlying substance composing matter, energy, space, and time is generated and sustained by the Son. He is the chief cornerstone, the foundation of creation. The physics is not separated from value, purpose, and meaning, because the substrate allows the formation of the created order, which in turn supports moral agents capable of loving God by choice. The connection between physics, ethics, and the meaning of life is direct. God created a world with morally significant choices at the level of human consciousness; the physics support the vessels where those choices have the consequence of pain and pleasure, association and dissociation. The physics supports the substance, which supports the play of moral agents who express their love of God by choosing to live according to God’s character. The free-will argument that Armond would later defend when talking with the Sheikh on Sunday is not merely an abstract metaphysical consideration or debating point; it is the foundational process that gives relationship meaning.

The historical witness

The CPP framework is one external referent, and a particular kind that most believers do not have access to. But they have other kinds, and the other kinds are also genuine.

The historical witness is one. God showed his hand to the Jewish people over thousands of years, in particular events and through particular prophets, building up a record of revelation that culminates in the incarnation. The prophetic anticipation of the Messiah is itself a kind of miracle — the predictions across many centuries (Genesis 3:15, Genesis 12:3, Genesis 49:10, Numbers 24:17, 2 Samuel 7:12-13, Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah 9:6, Isaiah 11:1-2, Isaiah 53, Daniel 7:13-14, Daniel 9:24-27, Micah 5:2, Zechariah 9:9, Zechariah 12:10, Malachi 3:1-3, and many more) converging on a single figure who appeared in first-century Israel. The prophecies are external referents; their fulfillment in Christ is verifiable in principle (the Old Testament texts were complete and in wide circulation before the events of the gospels); the converging witness of multiple independent prophets across multiple centuries is the kind of evidence no mono-vocal innovation can produce.

John the Baptist testified to the coming of the King. The four gospel writers gave four independent accounts of his life and ministry from four different angles. The apostles spread the message across the Roman Empire, were persecuted and killed for it, and left behind a documented historical record of a community that arose from nothing and transformed civilization. The resurrection is the load-bearing claim, attested by hundreds of eyewitnesses (1 Cor 15:3-8), proclaimed in Jerusalem within weeks of the event, with the empty tomb available for inspection and the living disciples available for cross-examination. The historical case for the resurrection has been worked over by scholars for two thousand years and still stands as a serious, defensible claim about what actually happened in first-century Jerusalem.

The death and resurrection were not just historical events; they are the spiritual-physical hinge where the battle against evil swung, and good established its beachhead against the ruler of this world. Good and evil are a polarity, and the capitulation of Adam and Eve to the temptation of Satan gave him legal claim to dominion. Good has the attractive power of long-term gain but evil holds the greater immediate flesh-attraction. As such, Satan is a worthy competitor for the hearts of men. God’s deepest satisfaction comes when men, in the face of evil’s strong immediate pull, set aside the pleasures of sin and choose to love, obey, and live for him. The Cross is the demonstration of God’s love and desire to reconcile the world to himself; it is also the moral pattern the believer is invited to follow (Phil 2:5-11, 1 Pet 2:21). The whole architecture of moral reality is exhibited at Golgotha.

God provided a way to reconcile His total/unequivocal/never-changing rejection of evil with a relationship with sinful man. The cross is the only way into His presence; blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matt 5:28). The purification available through the cross cannot be replaced by good works. The multi-vocal canon records the pathway that to make known that Jesus is the true Messiah, the creator of the world, the Lord of the universe, the good shepherd. The points of reference are numerous; the parallax is wide; the converging witness of the canon, the historical record, the moral evidence of transformed lives across twenty centuries, and (for those who have the eyes to see it) the structural signature of God in the physics of creation, all bear on the question of whether the biblical claim is true. By contrast, the mono-vocal guru offers a single point of view from a single human medium. His report is necessarily limited to what he can transmit in words — the serial, low-bandwidth medium of language. He can describe what he saw or experienced, but he cannot transmit the multi-channel, parallax-rich witness that the entire universe gives concerning the glory of God (Ps 19:1, Rom 1:20).

This is what the parallax argument comes down to. The multi-vocal canon, the testimony of creation, and the testimony of the heart gives the believer many independent lines of evidence that converge on the same conclusion. The mono-vocal guru gives one line. The believer who trusts the mono-vocal guru is trusting his internal-witness response to a single channel; the believer who trusts the multi-vocal canon is trusting his internal-witness response that has been informed by, and is anchored in, many channels at once. Both involve the internal witness; the difference is the surface area of the external referents the internal witness has been calibrated against.

I do not claim this is a knockdown public argument. I claim it is the honest account of why I hold the position I hold. The Spirit’s internal witness in me has been calibrated for decades against the converging external evidence — the historical, the moral, the physical, the prophetic, the experiential — and the calibration has produced settled conviction. When Leonard or the Sheikh or any other adherent of a mono-vocal tradition presents the authority of the prophet/revelation, I am not denying the sincerity or reality of the revelator’s experience; I am observing that his calibration has had access to fewer channels than the witness of the Biblical canon. I realize that the structural advantage of the multi-vocal canon is inductive, not deductive, and hence not a conclusive argument for truth. But from my perspective, it appears that complex/multi-factorial questions resolve only as probabilities rather than as deductive certainty. In other words, God spoke to man through many channels because it is not possible to transmit all truth decisively without collapsing the degrees of freedom that make faith, free will, and love possible in a universe that is governed by deterministic law. Thus, I offer the following framework to all seekers and people of faith; consider that all messengers/revelators have only one perspective from which they can speak. The Biblical canon offers many perspectives, all of which converge on a constellation of moral principles, and the parallax confirmed signature of truth about God’s purpose, and His nature (what He has defined as good and evil), His creation of a free-will universe where we, as god-like beings can choose to be in a peer-peer/parent-child, freely offered mutually sacrificial love relationship. The vast history of orchestrated coincidence is its own witness of truth, which leaves open the reasonable choice of doubt, rebellion, and choosing the world system, the self, the flesh as one’s lover. As such, I recommend consideration by all practitioners of all religions to embrace, use as a guide, elevate to the top of your hierarchy of evidence in the validation of Truth, the standard of moral perfection, and the vehicle by which God reveled His relationship with His creation and how to restore it.

The biblical canon, the historical record, the moral evidence, and the physical signature are the four converging witnesses that brought me to and have kept me in the Christian position. I would not have arrived here from any single one of them. I am here because all four converged.

V. Leonard’s Reframing — Gethsemane AND Cross, and the Psalm 22 Insight

In the first hour, where we discussed Mormonism and the relative merit of Biblical authority versus the revelation of Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer, Leonard reframed Denver Snuffer’s Gethsemane account. This removed one of the objections which I held about Mormonism, as an incompatible/mutually exclusive to Christianity religion.

In last week’s discussion and in the essay I had written and circulated, I treated the Mormon (Joseph Smith-through-Denver Snuffer) account of the atonement as moving the redemptive event from the Cross to Gethsemane. I had identified the Gethsemane-versus-Cross distinction as the single clearest doctrinal divergence between mainstream Christianity and Mormonism, and I had used that divergence to conclude that the two revelations come from two different spirits.

Leonard corrected me. He was unambiguous: That’s not what he says. You’re misunderstanding that. It’s the whole — it had to be part of it. Spiritual in the garden, part of it physical on the cross. It was the whole. That was the sacrifice that had to happen. Both had to happen. He explained Denver Snuffer’s account further: in Gethsemane, Christ took upon himself the sins of the world and bled from every pore — that is the suffering of bearing sin spiritually. But that was not the end of the atonement. He continued on to the Cross, where he died physically. The death on the Cross was, in some sense, Denver claims to have been shown, made possible only by the prior emptying-out of Gethsemane: without the spiritual depletion in the garden, Christ would have been physically strong enough to remain on the Cross indefinitely. The Gethsemane suffering enabled the Cross dying.

This is a both-and account, not an either-or account. Leonard cited the two emblems of the sacrament (Mormon and broader Christian) — the bread for the body broken on the Cross, the wine for the blood shed — which the LDS reading specifically associates with the bleeding from every pore at Gethsemane. Both emblems are present in remembrance precisely because both moments are present in the redemption.

I had to acknowledge that this reframing changed what I had thought I was disagreeing with. If the Mormon account is Gethsemane AND Cross — adding texture and emotional depth and historical detail to the biblical account, without subtracting the Cross’s centrality — then it is not the categorical divergence I had taken it to be. I said so at the time, and I will repeat it here for the record: what you’ve done with that explanation, which was very good and very transformative, you have reformed Mormonism in my mind. The phrase came out at the time, and I want to keep it, because it captures what happened. Leonard, by carefully restating Denver’s actual position rather than letting me caricature it, changed my reading.

I want to be careful, though, about what this acknowledgment means. It does not mean I now accept Joseph Smith or Denver Snuffer as canonical revelators. It means that the specific Gethsemane-versus-Cross divergence I had used as a diagnostic does not hold up to careful re-reading of the Mormon position. The deeper concern — that any post-apostolic single-revelator system moves the adherent along the spectrum toward the mono-vocal end, regardless of whether the revealed content overtly contradicts the Bible — remains. The structural-spectrum argument does not depend on finding a content-level contradiction. It applies even when the revealed content is non-contradictory but additive.

Still, I owe Leonard the acknowledgment that the content-level argument I had been making was less sharp than I had thought. The structural argument, the multi-vocal versus the univocal revelation of God over four millennia is the load-bearing one. I should rely on it rather than on a content-divergence claim that turned out to be less sharp than I had treated it.

After that exchange, Leonard offered another small but significant insight that added depth to the drama and prophetic fulfillment of the crucifixion. When I quoted Christ on the Cross — My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me — and gave it my own interpretation (that Christ was experiencing the wrath of God against sin as the substitute), Leonard said: Do you know what he was doing there? He was reciting scripture. He was reciting scripture from the Psalms. He was quoting Psalm 22:1. Christ on the Cross was, in his last words, identifying himself as the fulfillment of the prophetic Psalm that opens with that exact cry and continues with what reads, when you go back to it, like a detailed prophetic description of the crucifixion (they pierced my hands and my feet… they part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture — Psalm 22:16-18). Christ was, in some sense, testifying of who he was by quoting the prophecy he was fulfilling, even from the depths of the suffering.

This was another perspective that grounds the New Testament in Old Testament prophecy. It also illustrates what genuine Christian fellowship across denominational lines makes possible — Leonard’s Mormon background led him to read the Old Testament with particular attention to messianic typology, and from that attention came an insight that enriched the rest of us. The fellowship is bigger when Leonard is in it.

VI. The Canon Question

The discussion drifted naturally into the question of when the apostolic witness closes and how the canon was settled, as this is the primary disagreement I now see with Mormonism. I had the impression that the canon was formalized around the time of the Council of Nicaea (around the time of Constantine, fourth century). Leonard was skeptical. Research outside of the fellowship discussion revealed that the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) was primarily about Christological controversies (Arianism) and did not actually settle the New Testament canon. The canon was developed gradually through several regional councils and through Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367 CE that lists the twenty-seven New Testament books, with broader agreement crystallizing through the Council of Hippo (393 CE) and Council of Carthage (397 CE). My point stands, it was the period roughly around Constantine, when the early Christian community formalized which writings it considered authoritative, which is a reasonable rough approximation. It was not Nicaea specifically that canonized the scripture included in the Bible.

The substantive point I was making, was that the criterion the early Christian community used for canon-recognition was apostolic provenance. Writings that came from the apostles themselves (Paul, Peter, John, Matthew, James, Jude) or from close associates of the apostles writing under apostolic authority (Mark with Peter, Luke with Paul) were recognized as canonical. The Old Testament was already a received corpus inherited from the Jewish community (with disagreements at the margins about the deuterocanonical books). The criterion is closeness to the historical witness of Jesus Christ and the apostolic generation.

By this criterion, the apostolic witness closes around the end of the first century, with the last writings of the Apostle John. Anything after that — however edifying, however prophetic, however inspired — is not canonical scripture in the sense the early Church meant by the term. It is, at most, the working out of the implications of canonical scripture in subsequent generations, with whatever measure of the Spirit’s wisdom the working-out has been given. This is the framing of Biblical canon that I presented to Leonard.

Leonard’s response to my justification of a closed canon was that he holds an open canon. He believes that the Lord has continued to speak through chosen servants and that the writings of those servants — Joseph Smith’s revelations, the Book of Mormon translation, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, and Denver Snuffer’s contemporary contributions — are part of an ongoing extension of canon. He does not see this as displacing the Bible but as adding to it. He doesn’t stop. He’s not going to stop talking. We may stop listening, but He’s never going to stop talking. That is Leonard’s position, said simply and with conviction. I agree that God has not stopped speaking to people since the apostolic era. Rather, the question is whether the voice of God to individuals is to be taken with the same level of universal authority as the Biblical canon.

What I held on to in the conversation, and what I want to hold on to in this summary, is that I have chosen the biblical canon as the first rock in the edifice. Everything subsequent I evaluate against that rock. If a subsequent revelation contradicts the biblical canon, I reject it. If it is non-contradictory and additive, I am willing to read it with interest but not to give my heart, my allegiance, or my spiritual vow to its medium. The structural concern about moving along the spectrum toward the mono-vocal end remains operative even for non-contradictory additions. This is the operating framework I came out of last week’s discussion with, and Sunday’s conversation refined it without overturning it.

One additional point that has been operative throughout this discussion, but underemphasized, and perhaps my major consideration in the choice of following/embracing/giving my heart/mind/soul to the multi-vocal over the mono-vocal revelation, is (what I consider to be fact) that spiritual patterns are associated with both revelations. I believe that we pattern our minds/hearts/souls/character strongly by what we elevate to the level of primal theological revelation. I believe every configuration of life has an associated soul-spirit pattern association. The spirit of a mountain, crystal, school team, business plan, etc. We live in a sea of spirits, and we alter who we are to interact with each spirit. We adapt to the spirits around us, and we take on the corresponding hand-in-glove relationship by that relationship. As a result, when we take on a mono-vocal revelator, we are strongly imprinted by that pattern. In this way, our character is shaped in a particular way, which a broader revelator, i.e., the Biblical canon, our character has greater freedom to explore possibilities.

VII. The Sheikh Arrives

Approximately one hour into the meeting, Michael Sherman appeared on the call. I had written to him several days earlier, recommending that the most productive forum for an interfaith conversation with one of his Muslim contacts would be a separately scheduled one-on-one Zoom. The Sunday fellowship meeting has been dedicated to working on questions within Christianity. Inserting an external interfaith dialogue into it changes that. Michael’s guest was Sheikh Ra Sadiq, an Imam (or, more precisely, a representative teacher) of the Moorish Science Temple of America.

Michael’s having brought the Sheikh meant the fellowship had an unscheduled real-world test of the spirit-behind-religion framework we had been developing all week. Michael had to leave in fifty-five minutes for another commitment.

The most striking thing about the encounter, in retrospect, is that the Sheikh did not fit the profile of the Muslim interlocutor I had prepared for in the reading list. I had compiled the reading list expecting we would meet a Sunni Muslim, possibly Sufi-inflected, who would represent some recognizable strand of the global Muslim tradition. The Moorish Science Temple of America is not that. It is an American religious movement founded by Noble Drew Ali (born Timothy Drew, 1886–1929) and formally chartered in 1925. Noble Drew Ali published the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America (the Circle 7 Koran) in 1927. The MSTA teaches that black Americans are descendants of the ancient Moors and should reclaim their Moorish national identity (rather than being called Negro or Black). It incorporates elements of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Theosophy, and Freemasonry. It is historically related to but distinct from the Nation of Islam (Wallace Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad later drew on Moorish Science influences in founding the NOI in 1930). The MSTA is genuinely interesting as an American religious phenomenon, but it is not Sunni or Shia Islam in any conventional sense, and the careful diagnostic questions about naskh and Quran 9:5 and Reliance of the Traveller that I had prepared for were not really the right questions for this interlocutor.

I should have asked at the introduction, What tradition of Islam do you represent? — but Michael had introduced him simply as someone knowledgeable about Islam, and the Sheikh’s own opening was direct: he distinguished himself immediately from the Arab representation of Islam and made clear he follows Prophet Noble Drew Ali, an American-born prophet. He has been practicing since age 21; he is now 77. He emphasized that the MSTA’s Islam is different from what the Arabs have produced as Islam. They pray three times a day, not five. They have their own prophet. The MSTA does not, in his telling, practice the militant or expansionist forms of Islam that figure in international Salafi-jihadist movements, and he was emphatic that contemporary slavery in parts of Arabia and Africa — castration of black men, racial subjugation — is incompatible with anything he would call Islam.

In other words, the Sheikh is a particular kind of American Moorish reformist, with a strong anti-Arab-Islam current running through his religious self-understanding. His Islam is, in many respects, more reformist than the reformist Muslim scholarship I had compiled in the reading list, because it begins from a different premise altogether — that the Arab representation of Islam is itself a distortion of a more original, more authentic, more universal Islam to which Noble Drew Ali was bearing witness.

In the spectrum-vocabulary I developed in Section I, the Sheikh’s MSTA tradition sits at the mono-vocal end of the spectrum — its authoritative deposit is Noble Drew Ali’s Circle 7 Koran and the teachings of a single prophet — but its institutional embodiment is non-tyrannical in practice. The Sheikh is, in this respect, structurally similar to Leonard. Both follow a mono-vocal post-apostolic era revelator whose institutional setting is relatively benign. The Sheikh’s Noble Drew Ali plays in the MSTA the structural role Leonard’s Denver Snuffer plays in his Snufferite Mormonism: a single-medium, single-revelation source with a loose institutional surround.

VIII. The Four Questions

Michael walked the Sheikh through three of the four questions I had prepared in my letter to Michael Sherman. The fourth question — about the demographic-majority scenario, what mainstream Muslims would do if they became the majority in an American jurisdiction — did not get asked. After determining that the Sheikh did not fit into the conventional Islamic paradigm, I chose to move the conversation in a different direction. Here is how the Sheikh handled the three questions that did get asked.

Question 1 — Quran 9:5 and 9:29, the sword verse and the jizya verse. The Sheikh read Q 9:5 aloud from his own copy of the Quran: when the sacred months are over, slay your unbelievers wherever you find them. He immediately framed it defensively. If you try to slay me, I’m gonna kill you. If you cut my hand off, rape my woman, molest my child, I’m gonna kill you, and I’m looking for you ahead of time. The reading he offered is that the verse refers to situations in which a peace agreement has been broken — suddenly you break the agreement; you’re trying to enslave me; I turn around and defend myself. The phrase but if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them go on their way he interpreted as a permission to release attackers who repent rather than as a coercive conversion-or-die command. The verse, in his reading, applies to agreement-breakers acting badly rather than to all unbelievers everywhere.

This is a substantially reformist reading. It is closer to the only defensive jihad is permitted position that figures like Khaled Abou El Fadl and Akbar Ahmed defend in contemporary reformist Muslim scholarship than to the classical Sunni jurisprudential position represented in Reliance of the Traveller Book O. I do not know enough about the Moorish Science Temple’s actual hermeneutic tradition to say whether the Sheikh’s reading is representative of his tradition more broadly or particular to him; my impression is that the MSTA generally operates inside this kind of broadly pacific-defensive reading rather than inside classical militant-expansionist jurisprudence.

I named him, in the moment, as a reformist, and I said I had no problem at all with reformist Islam — it is coexistent, peaceful, searching for God, honoring man, creating a good life. The Sheikh resisted the label slightly. He said Islam doesn’t need to be reformed; Islam needs to be learned. His point was that what he is teaching is the true Islam, not a reformed version of a corrupted Islam — the corrupted version (in his telling) is what the Arabs have produced. The original or authentic Islam is what Noble Drew Ali recovered. So he is, in his own framing, a restorationist (in a structural sense) rather than a reformist — claiming to recover an original that has been corrupted, rather than to reform an existing tradition. The distinction matters for understanding him on his own terms, though from the outside the two postures look quite similar.

He also offered an extended critique of Christian European history at this point — Q 9:29 he framed similarly to 9:5 (the people of the book who break agreements and try to impose their will are to be fought; those who live peaceably are not), and he turned the camera around on Christianity. I learned Arabic to learn the Quran. The Christian had to learn Latin to learn the Bible — until Martin Luther. The implicit point was that Christianity has its own history of restricted access, hierarchical control, and corruption, and that the same kind of internal reform process he sees in Moorish Science (recovering an authentic teaching from a corrupted lineage) has happened in Christianity.

Question 2 — Muslim minorities in non-Muslim civil order. The Sheikh’s answer here was rooted in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence rather than in the classical Islamic jurisprudence of fiqh al-aqalliyyat I had prepared for. If we’re living in peace, we’re living at each other’s character… I don’t be fussing… I’m doing unto others I want others to do unto me. His emphasis was on the universal principle (the Golden Rule) and on the American constitutional framework as the appropriate civic order. The classical dar al-Islam / dar al-harb binary was nowhere in his framework. Rather, what surfaced was his historical critique of Christianity’s own civilizational record:

What about the article that the Pope issued, the canon of discovery, that was killing anybody that wasn’t a Christian? I don’t understand this conversation, because your history in the world of conquest has a thing with the Pope where he drew a line down — we call it the demarcation line. He said, well, y’all can have this part, y’all can have that part — and you got Spanish-speaking people that weren’t speaking Spanish, you got Portuguese people speaking, you got English people speaking — all this because the religion that the Pope started — they made everybody else a slave. The thing of discovery, where the Pope drew down the line — if they’re not Christian, rape them, kill them, do whatever you want to do. Now that’s the record of humanity, but suddenly it’s like Islam has become a threat, and I’m trying to figure out why is Islam a threat to a people that did all that anyway?

Of course, the Sheikh’s point was correct that there have been abuses by people who claim the name of Christ. The Pope was not right in what the Doctrine of Discovery authorized. The Catholic Church was wrong in that authorization. The historical record of European Christian colonization includes genuine and substantial atrocities. None of that is in dispute, and the Christian doctrine itself condemns it (regardless of what the Pope of 1493 said). The concern about Islam in the present, I said, is whether some current strands of Islam — not the Sheikh’s, but specifically the militant and expansionist strands — operate on a structural logic similar to the Pope’s Doctrine of Discovery, where the framework authorizes conquest and subjugation of non-believers. The question is not whether all of Islam is bad; the question is whether some strands of Islam carry an expansionist logic that we need to be aware of. The Sheikh’s strand clearly does not. Other strands clearly do.

He accepted the framing well. He returned to his own ethics — feeding stray animals, talking to children, helping a European woman who was struggling with her three children by giving her thirty dollars, giving his prayer beads to a friend who admired them — and his point was: that’s what humanity tells me. The doing-unto-others. He is, on this point, on solid biblical ground, and Christianity should recognize the convergence, and support the stand for good works regardless of the religion.

Question 3 — The reformist Muslim scholars (Abou El Fadl, Akbar Ahmed, Kamali). The Sheikh did not know these scholars. He affirmed instead his own framework: Islam is for love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice. Basically those are the basic principles we as Moors live off. He continued: There is no form in Islam that tells us the world conquered. You can see that in the Quran itself, when it says the people of the book — some of the people of the book will be right, some will be wrong. So it cannot be that type of religion unless there’s a group of people trying to make it that way.

His position, again, is that the world-conquest reading is a misreading or a distortion produced by people with conquest-agendas, not a faithful reading of the Quran. Whether that is historically and exegetically defensible in the broader Islamic tradition is a serious question (the classical jurisprudential tradition does, in fact, codify the dar al-Islam / dar al-harb binary and the doctrine of fard kifaya offensive jihad). But it is clear that the Sheikh, in his own practice and teaching, holds this peaceful-coexistence position with sincerity. He is, as Susan would later observe in the debrief, an instance of light operating within a tradition that also contains other elements — the light of Christ in every man who comes into the world (John 1:9), as Susan would put it later in her Gospel exposition.

Michael had to leave, so we didn’t get his input, and after his departure, the conversation pivoted into a different mode entirely.

IX. The Counter-Attack — Luke 19:27, Genesis, Isaiah 45:7, and the Snake-and-Baby

After Michael left, the Sheikh took up the questioner’s seat himself, and his line of inquiry turned sharply. He had prepared his own questions for us, and they were not soft. He launched into a series of biblical critiques that constituted, in effect, a counter-mission from Moorish Science back to the fellowship.

The Luke 19:27 challenge. Read your Bible. Go to Luke 19, verse 27. It says, if Jesus told this: ‘If you don’t believe in me, bring him in and kill him.’ That’s in the Bible. Nobody talks about that.

Susan looked up the verse and read it aloud. The King James reads: But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me. The verse was unfamiliar to most of us in the moment, and the Sheikh’s point seemed to be — here is the supposed Prince of Peace authorizing the slaughter of those who refuse him. Susan’s instinct was that we needed to look at the context, but in the moment the context was not immediately available, and we acknowledged that we did not have a ready answer.

Later, in the debrief after the Sheikh had left, Armond came back to this question and made the crucial correction: Luke 19:27 is the closing line of a parable, not Jesus’s direct teaching. The parable is the Parable of the Pounds (Luke 19:11-27, sometimes confused with the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25). In the parable, Jesus tells of a nobleman who travels to a far country to receive a kingdom, leaving servants with money to invest. Some of the nobleman’s citizens refuse to have him reign over them. When the nobleman returns, he settles accounts with his servants (rewarding the faithful, punishing the unfaithful), and then — in verse 27 — the nobleman commands that his enemies, those who refused his rule, be brought and slain before him. The line is the nobleman’s command, inside the parable, not Jesus’s direct teaching about how Christians should treat unbelievers.

This is a significant exegetical correction, and it deserves to be on the record. The Sheikh used Luke 19:27 as if it were a teaching of Jesus himself, when it is in fact a piece of dialogue Jesus places in the mouth of a parabolic character. The parabolic character is, in the standard Christian reading, a figure of Christ in his second-coming role who in His role as the returning King will have no mercy on those who rejected Him. This is actually the real point we must consider. Is this a merciful God or a just God. I believe this parable refers to the fate of those who reject His way and offer of clemency. I believe Jesus was describing the wrath of God against evil. God is perfect, pure, and hates evil, and He will not allow it in His presence. It is this principle, that God directed His absolute/unmitigated wrath at the Son, who “became sin” for us. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) God is merciful to those who have been cleansed, who have accepted His terms of alliance. This verse uses the literary mechanism of the parable of how God rejects those who reject Him. It is not a teaching of how we should treat an unbeliever. This brings up a strong point, whether God should be merciful to all people, regardless of their acceptance of Him and His way. The verse is clear, God’s anger at sin and rebellion is hot and counting on God to overlook a life of unrepentant violation of His way unwashed by the blood is a most serious offense, not a point to be used as a proof of theological error in the canon or God’s character. Armond made the point in the debrief, that this was a textbook case of how easy it is for someone outside a tradition to take a passage out of context and use it as a weapon. Likewise, it is easy for people within the tradition to ignore the actual weight of words spoken by our Lord Himself. As another note of caution, this misunderstanding is illustrative of how we should be careful of doing the same thing to other traditions. This also illustrates how we must be prepared to defend our own faith and be ready to correct misinterpretations directed against us.

The Genesis 1:12 / problem of evil challenge. The Sheikh moved next to Genesis. He quoted Genesis 1:12 — the earth brought forth grass and herbs yielding seed after their kind, and trees yielding fruit, and God saw that it was good — and asked: Now, if all these trees are healing themselves, doing this, who made the tree of good and evil? If everything God made was good (Genesis 1:31), how can we account for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil being in the garden? Did God make evil?

He moved on to Isaiah 45:7 — I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. He read this as a straightforward divine admission that God creates evil. So, he asked, what is your context on that?

Susan offered the response that settled the question. He has defined what is good, and by defining what is good, that defines what is evil. Satan was clearly created, but I believe that he was created as a being of light, and then he chose darkness. He wasn’t created as an evil being. He disobeyed. He departed from what was good. This is the classical Christian answer: evil is privation of good, not a positive substance God creates; Satan was created good (as Lucifer, the light-bearer) and fell by his own choice. The creation of evil in Isaiah 45:7 is often reframed as disasters and calamities sent in judgment rather than to moral evil as a substance. I personally think that Susan’s framing, that evil is created by God’s defining what is good, is adequate. Clearly God allowed evil to exist in His world, and I believe evil existing was necessary, and intimately connected with God’s purpose. Another interpretation is that the Son created that entirety of the world. All things, in heaven and earth were created by Him, and thus, there was a separation of the Father from evil by the Son, who created everything, and from which evil arose. Clearly, if God created everything, and evil exists, even if by rebellion, if it continues to exist, God has de facto allowed evil’s existence. It is not possible to separate God from the creation of evil, because God, through the Son, has created everything. But the creation of evil is impossible to avoid if He create a creation where He defines good and evil, names some actions as pleasing to him, and others as not.

The Sheikh pressed: If God knows everything, how come He didn’t know that He created something that’s going to mess up everything He created? This is the classical theistic problem of evil. This is the question that philosophers and theologians have wrestled with for centuries. Susan answered this question from the standard Christian framework: God did know, and Satan’s fall ends up serving God’s purposes by providing the moral opposition that draws people back to God through the trials Satan creates. It is the felix culpa (happy fall – greater good from a bad situation) tradition in its pastoral form.

The Sheikh was not persuaded. He then presented the next conundrum of the exchange: If a woman has a brand new baby, and somebody comes in and puts a brand new baby snake in there, and the snake bites the baby, who you gonna punish?

The implication is clear. God created Satan; Satan bit Adam and Eve; on the Sheikh’s reading, God himself is the one to blame, because God put the snake in the crib.

Armond’s response — the free-will reframe. Armond stepped in here and made the response that ended up being the load-bearing point of the entire exchange. How proud would you be if you put that snake in there and gave it the choice not to bite, and you trained that snake not to bite — how proud would you be if the snake didn’t do what was within his nature, which is to bite?

The Sheikh pivoted: So why didn’t God do that with the devil? And Armond came back: Well, what He did was He did it with us, because we got sin in our nature. In effect, Armond was saying, God concern was with the development of character of man, not the character of the devil. The devil will follow his nature, but God wanted man to grow up and become mature in His ways, but Adam failed, as God knew he would – hence the reason why Christ was slain before the foundation of the earth. It was a preplanned strategy for redeeming man. God warned man not to eat the apple, but he did it anyway. Adam and Eve were both aware enough to know that what they were doing was wrong. They were ignorant of how high, and the exact cost of sin, but they had enough knowledge, awareness and intelligence to be able to realize there was a cost and chose to do it anyway. God gave man a choice of whether to react to the temptation or not. He knew that man’s sin-nature was too strong and that he would fail. Thus, the stage was set for millennia of growth, maturation, and the experience of relationship between God and man. The goal of the trials, and the building of character, is the development of souls capable of living in God’s universe that love Him. The ultimate purpose of the universe is to satisfy God’s loneliness, or put in terms of the positive, to give God the experience of requited love.

This opened into a sustained exchange about free will. The Sheikh’s position was, in effect, deterministic: man in the garden was created without intelligence, without genuine knowledge of good and evil; God told him not to eat from the tree precisely because if he did, he would gain knowledge, but until he ate he was dumb; therefore he had no real choice; therefore his fall is God’s fault, not His; therefore no human being can be held morally responsible in the way Christian theology claims.

Armond held the line: The choice was always there when options were provided. Leonard added the point that God provided a consequence for choosing. That’s a choice. If a real consequence attaches to a real option, the choice is real, regardless of whether the chooser fully understands the deep cosmic implications of the choice.

The Sheikh was not persuaded. He insisted that a being without intelligence cannot choose, and that man before the fall lacked intelligence, and that therefore man’s choice was not a real choice. My opinion is that this is an inaccurate assessment of man’s actual mental/emotional/moral capability. Adam was not without intelligence. He did not have a deep/articulated/specific knowledge of the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, but he knew there were consequences. The totally innocent/ignorant child truly cannot make a meaningful choice about a snake, or an apple, he knows nothing about consequences, and cannot make a meaningful choice. But this scenario does not reflect the state of man. Armond and Leonard’s response was, man before the fall had sufficient knowledge for the choice that was set before him — eat or do not eat, with stated consequences for each option. The fact that he did not yet have full knowledge of good and evil in some deeper sense did not eliminate the moral content of the simpler choice that was actually in front of him. If we have enough knowledge about the consequences of the choices, if we know there is a difference, and if we know the general direction of those consequences, then we have a real choice, and we are culpable. To say that we only deserve the consequences when we know the consequences in infinite detail is to assume that culpability only comes with omniscience. To say, “The severity of the consequences is much worse than I expected, I’m not responsible” is merely to say that I thought I would be able to enjoy the sin and the cost wouldn’t be too high, so the equation of pleasure and pain weighed on the side of pleasure. This is testing the Lord’s mercy, patience, and tolerance, and betting we won’t have to pay too high a price for the sin. The fact was that the man thought he could eat and enjoy and not be punished too badly, illuminates the fact that we desire the fruit of sin. But with regards to responsibility, we are responsible (i.e., culpable/deserve the consequences we got for the choices within our actual present cognitive reach). Omniscience is not required before culpability.

The conversation never fully resolved on the Sheikh’s side, but at least he and his students heard a substantive Christian response rather than capitulation.

After this exchange, Armond later observed in the debrief that the snake-and-baby analogy, properly understood, actually cuts the opposite way from how the Sheikh used it. He thought we were the baby in the box, but that was not true. God did not put us in the garden as helpless innocents without defense against the temptations of Satan; He put us in the garden as moral agents capable of choosing to obey or disobey God’s command and warning. The dignity and the burden of that choice is what makes us responsible. The Sheikh’s analogy assumed we were victims. We are not. The problem is that we have a proclivity toward sin, even without a knowledge of what sin and evil is. The Christian framework holds that we have free moral agency, and we are each responsible for developing that into habitual character.

X. Susan’s Exposition of the Gospel

At a certain point in the exchange, when the back-and-forth on free will was no longer making changes in either side, Susan asked if she could lay out the Christian framework as she understood it, and the Sheikh let her. What followed was a coherent summary exposition of the Gospel. It deserves recording in its substantive shape.

Susan walked through the framework:

Man was created good — that is, without sin, in right relationship with God, though not yet wise in the sense of having matured into full discernment.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a real choice with real options and real consequences. God said eat and you shall surely die. Adam disobeyed. The death that followed was spiritual death — man was cut off from God spiritually, which meant that he was exiled from the relationship.

The light of Christ in every man — Susan invoked John 1:9, that Christ is the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Not every Christian. Every person. This is why, she said, you find love and truth and goodness in people across many traditions, not just among Christians. The light of Christ is the substrate that makes any genuine human goodness possible, regardless of the tradition that the person consciously identifies with.

Many non-Christians are remarkably loving — Susan said this directly. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of people who don’t believe in Christ who are just the most loving people. They’ll give you the shirt off their back. They’re kind. She also noted that many self-identified Christians do not exhibit love and end up giving God a bad name or Christ a bad name. The light of Christ is everywhere; the darkness of false Christian profession is also visible, and the apostle’s words about taking the Lord’s name in vain apply directly to Christians who do not love.

Christ’s atonement opens the door to be reconciled with the Father, to have peace with God, to pass from death to life. The believer who confesses Christ is filled with the love of the Father in his heart. The void from the lack of love-from-God is like death, and that void is filled when we confess Christ. I know this is real, Susan said, “I’ve experienced this.”

Sanctification is ongoing — even after the confession, we live in a world where everyone is still tempted to go their own way and not follow God’s way. We still aren’t perfect, because we’re like Adam, we know what is wrong to some extent, but we choose to do it anyway. The Christian life is daily confession, repentance, daily renewal, and daily growth. Our prayer is, “Lord, make me new again today.”

The Great Commandment as the test — Jesus said this is how my disciples will be known, that they have love one to another (John 13:35). Therefore, Christians who do not love are failing the test Christ himself laid down. This was Susan’s pastoral admission to the Sheikh, “Yes, much of what you have criticized about Christianity is rightly criticized. This is because much of what calls itself Christianity is not, because it does not have that love.”

The Sheikh may not have been persuaded by Susan’s exposition, as he was steeped in his own framework after fifty-six years of practice. But the Gospel was placed in front of him clearly, and as Susan would later say in the debrief, we don’t know how much will influence him — probably not at all in the moment. But it’s important for us to do that. And, as Armond observed, there were other people listening, too. The Sheikh had his students with him on the call. The Gospel went into more ears than the one.

XI. The Sheikh’s Personal Quest

Perhaps the most human moment of the story was the Sheikh’s account of his own spiritual quest. He shared it at length, after Susan’s Gospel exposition. It is worth recording in his own terms.

He was eighteen years old. He said he had been pimping, running with a fast crowd on the streets of Chicago. He found himself one evening in a wealthy European-owned apartment, the kind he had never seen from the inside before. They were talking about politics, God, they were talking about Iraq, and they talked about so much stuff. I’m like, wow, these people even look intelligent. He left that apartment thinking those people up there know things I don’t. Walking down the street afterward, he looked up at the sky and said, “I never seen the color of the sky like this.” I just looked at it and I said, “Man, that must be what God is up there. God must be right up there.”

And then, in his telling, he had a vision. He was lifted up. He saw a great hall full of beings on either side of an aisle. At the front, a figure of light. He walked down the aisle. He thought: that must be God — that shiny-head one down there must be God. He approached. A hand came out from the figure, the universal gesture for stop. He stopped. The figure said: “Who am I?”

He answered: “You — Jesus?” The figure said “No.” He found himself back in his body, messed up, because he had been baptized as a Christian, and he had said the only answer his Christian formation had given him, and the answer had been rejected.

A few years later he went back up — by which he meant another such experience. By now several of his friends had become Black Muslims in the Nation of Islam tradition, and he had absorbed Muslim ideas. He walked down the aisle again. The hand stopped him. “Who am I?” He answered: “You — Allah?” No, the figure said. He wasn’t Allah. He wasn’t Jesus. He was back in his body, messed up again. Two to three weeks messed up. Here I am, eighteen years old. Don’t know who God is. Have no conception of who God really is. And I’m using what other people told me — the Christians, my family, they were Christians. The Muslim brothers, they told me.

He spent the next ten to fifteen years searching for the answer to the question Who am I? — that is, who God is to him. He read voraciously across traditions. He has, he said, a religious dictionary on his desk; he reads Buddhist material, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hindu scriptures. He keeps a holy book always nearby. Right now I got my house full of books and scriptures to formulate an idea, a concept of my relationship to God. What is my relationship to God? Not what people told me. What do I know? My personal relationship with God.

This is the testimony of a serious seeker. Whatever else he is, the Sheikh is not a casual or unreflective practitioner of his tradition. He has spent five-and-a-half decades looking, and the looking has been substantively engaged with the major options the world has on offer. His settled place — the Moorish Science Temple of America — is where his looking has landed, not where his upbringing left him.

In the debrief after he left, Armond would observe, that’s the Islamic Leonard. The structural similarity is striking. Two men, each in his seventies, each having spent five decades or more inside a particular mono-vocal tradition that he came to as a young adult, each having internalized the tradition deeply, each operating from sincere love of God as he understands God, each unmovable from the tradition. The two are similar in their spiritual posture, and their differences are in the specific content of the mono-vocal tradition each has chosen. Leonard inherited Mormonism through ancestry and culture; the Sheikh chose Moorish Science by deliberate adult conversion. Both have shaped their souls by commitment to a particular post-apostolic mono-vocal tradition. People choose a spiritual practice, teacher, tradition, based on what resonates with their souls, which in turn shapes their souls.

XII. After They Left — Armond’s “Islamic Leonard” Observation

The Sheikh had a class at 2:30 and had to depart. The fellowship — by now reduced to Susan, Charlie, Armond, and me — debriefed for nearly another hour.

Susan led with what we were all thinking: That was like riding a Bronco or something. The conversation had moved in directions none of us had anticipated. The four prepared questions, the reformist-vs-classical framework I had developed in the reading list, the diagnostic moves I had thought we might use, mostly ended up being directly relevant. The Sheikh had set the agenda once we had challenged him about the character, traditions, and abuses of Islam. He then proceeded to challenge us on the abuses and scriptures of Christianity rather than on Islam’s.

Armond made an important observation that I have already mentioned regarding interfaith encounters the fellowship may have.

That’s the Islamic Leonard in his search, in his seeking, and then even in his heritage, in his family’s lineage. He’s very much steeped into Islam and you know, the Moorish sect, the American Moorish sect, so I think the challenge with having a conversation is when we have a conversation amongst us, just within our own Christian following and Christian faith, I think we come into it with a certain lack of egotism, and with a certain commitment to learning, and commitment to knowledge. So you know, I saw it even with Dr. Tom today. He was so open to receiving what Leonard was delivering that within five or ten minutes of hearing something that resonated, he was like — yeah, no, before we had this conversation I didn’t think this; I think it now — which I thought was huge. And I think that the challenge is, when we’re discussing something outside of Christianity, outside of self-proclaimed Christians, and even self-proclaimed followers of Christ, and different religious sects of even Christianity — I think the challenge is, to not make it a fight. It’s natural to come on with the premise of defending what we’re discussing and defending our life’s goals and our life’s missions and our entire fifty-year path of life. So, we’re coming on defending our entire paths of life, instead of being able to be open enough to receive anything.

This observation is doing several things at once, and each deserves to be drawn out.

First, it places Leonard and the Sheikh in the same structural category: serious adult-formed believers in a particular mono-vocal tradition, with deep internalized lifelong commitments. They are not the same in content (Mormonism and Moorish Science differ in many respects), but they are the same in shape of the soul. Treating Leonard and treating the Sheikh require the same kind of pastoral care and the same kind of careful witness. The lessons from one transfer to the other.

Second, Armond identified a difference between internal-fellowship dialogue (where we come in with low egotism and high openness to learning) and external-tradition dialogue (where we come in defending fifty years of commitment). The difference is real and explains why so many interfaith dialogues go badly — both sides arrive with their guards up, ready to fight, and the defending fifty years of commitment posture makes genuine listening structurally difficult on both sides.

Third — and this is what Armond pursued in his closing exchange with me after Susan had signed off — the question is how do we set up rules of engagement for inter-tradition dialogue that do not begin with both sides in combat posture? How do we engage in a conversation without saying this is what you guys are doing wrong. That posture of attack on the entire system of belief held by the masses following that religion? The framing matters enormously. The Sheikh came in already braced, partly because his fifty-four years had taught him to brace, partly because Michael’s introduction had set up an expectation of defense rather than mutual inquiry. We were in response-to-attack mode within minutes, and the conversation became more about parrying than about genuine exchange.

In response to Armond’s observation, I told him that I think in every interaction there is some kind fight. In the teacher-student interaction, there is fight is between ignorance and knowledge. In the sharing of personal stories, there are always questions such as: its literal truth, the method of delivery, the words chosen… The most obvious example of a fight though, and usually the only one we call a fight, is when there is a difference of opinion about facts or future action. This is always and unavoidably a fight. If there’s a difference, that means there are two people who have different points of view. If there is merely a difference in perspective, agreement can be reached by frame shifting. But, if the perspectives are mutually exclusive, they aren’t both right. But Armond’s point stands: even if the underlying disagreement is real and cannot be dissolved by frame-setting, the manner of the fight matters. The question changes from “how do we convince the other person” to “How do we speak the truth in love?” As the old saying goes: Make your words sweet, because someday you might have to eat them. This is a fellowship posture that we need to always adopt as a default habit. We need to practice speaking the truth in love in every interaction in our lives. This means belittling, ridiculing, sarcasm (cutting the flesh), etc. are inappropriate in most life circumstances.

XIII. Categories of Religion — Locating Traditions on the Spectrum

A different question arose in the debrief that I want to elevate, because it has been latent in the fellowship’s discussions for some weeks now and Sunday brought it to the surface clearly.

Susan, processing the meeting, said something like: if we say Mormonism is another gospel, we’d have to say that nearly everything is another gospel — Presbyterian, Baptist, all of them, everyone is embracing some kind of departure from pure Christianity. Her point was pastoral. She did not want to weaponize another gospel language (Galatians 1:8) against Leonard because, to be consistent, we would have to apply it to many other communities besides his, and we do not.

I think Susan was raising a real question and that she gave me an opportunity to articulate what I had been working toward in Section I — the spectrum framing along a new axis rather than the binary (right/wrong, Godly/demonic, good/evil). The axis we are examining today is the various traditions on the mono-vocal / multi-vocal spectrum. The institutional layer is on a tradition deserves its own examination. The mono-vocal vs. multi-vocal placement clarifies one type of disagreement we have with each tradition.

At the multi-vocal end of the spectrum sit the biblical-canon Christian traditions. The Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Pentecostals, the Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, the Reformed, the Anabaptists, the Anglicans, the various Sabbatarian traditions (CGG, Worldwide Church of God descendants, Seventh-Day Adventists), and so on — these are all centered on the multi-vocal biblical canon. They differ from one another, sometimes substantially, on matters like sacramental theology, ecclesiology, the work of the Spirit, eschatology, the relationship of law and grace, and so on. But they all hold the sixty-six-book Protestant Bible (or sixty-six-plus-deuterocanonical for the Catholic and Orthodox traditions) as the rule of faith, and they all read the Christian tradition as the continuing interpretation of that biblical deposit. Their disputes are internal disputes within the multi-vocal canon. Their institutional layers vary widely: Catholicism has a highly developed institutional magisterium with historical patterns of disciplinary control; most Protestant traditions have looser institutional structures with congregational or presbyterian governance; some traditions (Seventh-Day Adventism, certain Pentecostal movements) have institutions whose authority extends beyond what the multi-vocal canon by itself would warrant, but the institution still operates as commentary on, rather than addition to, the canon.

In the middle of the spectrum sit the traditions that combine the multi-vocal biblical canon with a layer of post-apostolic single-revelator deposit. Mormonism is the central case. The Latter-Day Saints hold the Bible plus the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price; the various breakaway and reformist Mormon movements (RLDS / Community of Christ, the Snufferite tradition Leonard belongs to, the fundamentalist polygamist groups, and various smaller movements) hold variations on this hybrid structure. The believer in these traditions has the multi-vocal biblical foundation but attaches to it a mono-vocal personal-revelation supplement that becomes operatively authoritative in his life. The institutional layer varies sharply across the Mormon movements: the mainstream LDS Church has a highly developed institutional structure with significant disciplinary authority (which Leonard recognizes is, in important respects, far off base of Joseph Smith’s original vision), while the Snufferite tradition has a deliberately minimal institutional presence around a deliberately hands-off living prophet.

Jehovah’s Witnesses similarly combine the biblical canon with a layer of authoritative post-apostolic interpretation through the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society publications. The Watchtower’s interpretations function as operatively authoritative in ways that distinguish JW from mainstream Protestantism, and the institutional structure of the Watchtower Society exercises significant control over individual lives.

Christian Science combines biblical citations with Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as the authoritative interpretive deposit. The institutional structure is moderate.

Seventh-Day Adventism, as I noted earlier, properly sits closer to the multi-vocal end than to the middle of the spectrum, but Ellen G. White’s writings function with significant authority in shaping SDA doctrine and practice, which puts SDA partway along the spectrum from purely-multi-vocal toward the middle. (Note that Mary Baker Eddy, and Ellen G. White are distinct figures who founded distinct movements, and their respective postures toward the Bible differ in important ways. SDA holds the Bible as primary in ways that Christian Science does not.)

At the mono-vocal end of the spectrum sit the traditions whose authoritative deposit is primarily or entirely a single revelator’s report or a single closed scripture without the multi-vocal biblical foundation. Islam is the largest case: Muhammad as the single Prophet, the Quran as the closed single-volume revelation, the hadith as a subordinate layer of commentary on the Prophet’s life and sayings. The classical Sunni jurisprudential institutions (the four madhhabs, the modern Salafi reform movements, the various jurisprudential authorities such as Al-Azhar) operate with significant institutional control in their respective contexts.

The Moorish Science Temple of America (Noble Drew Ali plus the Circle 7 Koran) is a smaller-scale instance of the same structural form: a single founding prophet, a single revealed text, organized around a particular community. The institutional layer is much looser than Sunni Islam’s.

The Nation of Islam (Wallace Fard Muhammad as the originating figure, Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman as the operative authoritative text, Louis Farrakhan as the long-standing public leader) is structurally similar in source-form to MSTA but with a stronger institutional layer.

Hindu and Buddhist guru-disciple traditions in their various forms — from the classical Vedantic lineages to the modern ashram movements (Yogi Bhajan’s 3HO movement, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation movement, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s neo-Sannyasin movement, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda and ISKON, Swami Saraswati and his Divine Love Society, Sri Ramakrishna and the Vedanta Society and many others) — are mono-vocal in source-structure, with widely varying degrees of institutional control over disciples’ lives.

The Unification Church (Sun Myung Moon as the single revelator and Divine Principle as the operative text) is structurally mono-vocal with a moderately developed institutional layer.

The Bahá’í tradition combines mono-vocal elements (Bahá’u’lláh as the founding figure, with Báb as predecessor and Abdu’l-Bahá as authorized interpreter) with a deliberate ecumenical openness that distinguishes it from more closed mono-vocal traditions; structurally Bahá’í sits somewhat closer to the mono-vocal end than to the middle, but with less institutional control than most.

These traditions are not all the same in content. They are alike in structural form: each centers its adherents’ spiritual lives on a relationship to a single post-apostolic founding figure’s revelation, with whatever institutional layer that founding figure’s successors have developed.

The category-distinctions matter because the spirit-behind-religion concern applies along the spectrum in a graded way. Pure multi-vocal traditions are well-protected against the spirit-behind-a-single-medium problem; pure mono-vocal traditions are highly exposed to it; the hybrid traditions in the middle are exposed to whatever degree their adherents allow the mono-vocal supplement to take operative supremacy over the multi-vocal foundation. The Pauline warning about another gospel (Gal 1:9) does not require a content-level contradiction to apply; it can apply to a source-level change. If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed — the received gospel is the multi-vocal apostolic deposit; a different gospel could be one that subtracts from the multi-vocal deposit (denying parts of it) or one that adds to it a mono-vocal supplement that effectively displaces the multi-vocal foundation in the adherent’s operative life.

This is the framework I have been developing through the recent essays, and Sunday’s encounter. Leonard the Mormon and the Sheikh the Moor in the same meeting made the framework more visible. Both Leonard and the Sheikh are on the spectrum, partway down from the multi-vocal end toward the mono-vocal end. Both are loved as image-bearers. The fellowship’s witness to each of them takes a similar shape: honor the person, recognize what is true in their tradition, hold firm to the multi-vocal biblical canon as the primary source, point them toward the Christ who is the only one who can save (Leonard is firmly committed to Jesus as Lord, the Shiekh still follows another prophet), pray for the Spirit’s witness to confirm in them what no argument of ours can.

XIV. Armond’s Black-American-History Reflections

A substantial portion of the post-departure debrief was Armond’s extended reflection on black American history, identity, and the question of what the Sheikh represented from inside the African-American religious tradition. I want to record what Armond shared without endorsing or refuting it in detail; these are claims he made, drawing on heterodox historiography that exists in certain black American intellectual traditions, and they deserve to be on the record as part of what happened in the meeting.

Armond named the Doctrine of Discovery — the papal bulls Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter Caetera (1493) that authorized European Christian states to claim non-Christian lands and subjugate or enslave their inhabitants — as a significant historical injury that mainstream American Christian consciousness has largely failed to reckon with. He paired it with the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas — estimates ranging from three to five million in pre-Columbian North America alone, with the population destroyed not only physically but also historically through the erasure of written and material records. We speak about the Holocaust, Holocaust, he said, but no one speaks about the three to five million indigenous Americans that were killed during colonization. And we’re not talking about just the Trail of Tears; we’re talking about millions of people that were across the entire North America with civilizations that were thriving, that were obliterated, not just physically, but even historically, with all signs of history.

He moved from there to what he called the $5 Indian phenomenon. The claim, as he described it, is that during the period of westward expansion and the establishment of Indian reservations, individuals could purchase Native American identity claims for nominal sums (the $5 Indian designation), which had implications for the demographic accounting of who counted as Native American and who counted as Negro. The further claim — and here I am reporting Armond’s framing, not endorsing it — is that a substantial portion of the contemporary black American population descends not primarily from West African slaves brought across the Atlantic, but from indigenous American populations that were reclassified through census manipulation as Negro (a category created and elaborated specifically for this reclassification, on Armond’s reading) rather than as Native American. This argument is sometimes referred to in heterodox black American historiography as the we are the indigenous Americans thesis, and the Moorish Science Temple of America is partly anchored in this framework (along with the parallel claim about Moroccan/Moorish ancestry of certain North American black populations).

Armond also made a logistical-feasibility argument about the transatlantic slave trade: that there weren’t enough ships that could have been built during the time of slavery to support the numerical accounts of the slave trade that are mainstream in standard American history. Right now we don’t import nearly as many goods from the African coast as we do from South America. If shipping and shipping technology has increased so much, why don’t we get more from Western Africa, which is arguably some of the richest natural resources in the world? It doesn’t add up. He drew the inference: I don’t refute that [the transatlantic slave trade] didn’t happen. My argument is that it wasn’t at the scale, and it didn’t — it wasn’t to the scale that we’re led to believe.

And he gave a personal angle. Armond traces his own family history through documented Native American tribal lineages (with an ancestor who was one of the first black senators of South Carolina during Reconstruction). Nobody’s from Africa, you know. One of my great, great, great cousins was a senator, the first black senator of South Carolina, and all of our family all trace back to Native American tribes. Nobody — no one has ever said… a lot of times they’ll say this grandparent was a slave, but I also have family that was around during slave time that were free men. The point is that his own family record does not include African origin; it includes Native American origin and various American-born ancestors (some free, some enslaved, all American in deeper-than-displacement ways).

I want to be honest about how I receive these claims. I am not a historian of the transatlantic slave trade, of Reconstruction-era census reclassification, of the relationship between black American and Native American populations in the late nineteenth century, or of the Moorish Science Temple’s historiographical claims. The standard scholarly consensus is that the transatlantic slave trade did transport roughly twelve-and-a-half million Africans across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (with perhaps ten and a half million surviving the Middle Passage to arrive in the Americas), and that the contemporary black American population descends primarily — though by no means exclusively — from these forced migrants. The heterodox alternative Armond described exists; it is associated with various Afrocentric and Moorish intellectual movements; it has serious adherents and substantial publication; I do not pretend to evaluate its substantive merits here. What I can say is that something real is being pointed at by these traditions — namely, the substantial historical injuries done to indigenous American populations, the loss of records and identities under colonization, the lived experience of black American communities for whom official histories have often functioned as further injury — even if the specific historical claims about ship numbers, $5 Indians, and reclassification are contested among historians.

What this meant for the meeting: Armond was helping us understand the Sheikh from inside the tradition he comes from. The Moorish Science Temple of America operates inside a particular black American intellectual ecosystem that takes the claim of indigenous-American (rather than African-displaced) identity seriously, and that names this identity Moor rather than Negro or Black. The Sheikh’s identification with Moorish identity, his rejection of Arab Islam as the corruption rather than the original, his strong sense of the Doctrine of Discovery as a foundational Christian injury to non-Christian peoples — all of these positions hang together inside a coherent worldview, even if the worldview is not the mainstream one.

For the fellowship’s purposes, the relevant point is that when we engage someone from inside this tradition, we need to know enough about the tradition to honor what is true in it (the real historical injuries; the genuine spiritual seeking; the legitimate desire for an identity that is not defined by the slave-deportation narrative) while still witnessing to the Christ who stands above all these particular historical traditions and offers to all of them the salvation no tradition can produce from within itself. Armond’s contribution to the meeting was substantial precisely because he is positioned, by his own heritage and his own intellectual journey, to do this kind of bridge-work better than the rest of us can. The fellowship is bigger when Armond is in it, the same way it is bigger when Leonard is in it.

XV. The Joseph Smith First Vision Question

Late in the debrief, Susan returned to the Mormonism question with one more piece. The vision that Joseph Smith had — he said different versions where he explains it differently — but he said that God the Father and the Son appeared to him. I feel like that contradicts the Bible.

The contradiction Susan was pointing at is John 1:18 (no man hath seen God at any time) and 1 John 4:12 (no man hath seen God at any time). The biblical position is that the Father has never been seen directly by any human being in his unmediated essence; what humans have seen are theophanies (manifestations of God in some visible form) and Christophanies (pre-incarnate appearances of the Son), with the Son himself being the visible image of the invisible God (Col 1:15, John 14:9). Joseph Smith’s First Vision account (in its 1838 canonical form) includes a direct visual experience of both the Father and the Son standing together in a grove in upstate New York. On the standard biblical reading, this would be an unprecedented kind of vision, one that has no parallel in the canonical record and that conflicts with the categorical statements in John 1:18 and 1 John 4:12.

She also noted what is established in Mormon historical scholarship and what some LDS apologists acknowledge: that Joseph Smith gave different accounts of the First Vision at different times. Multiple versions exist (the 1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842 accounts), and they differ on details including who appeared, what was said, and the circumstances. This is not a fringe critique; it is documented in mainstream LDS-history scholarship. The variations have been explained variously (Joseph emphasizing different aspects to different audiences; memory development over time; theological refinement), but the variations are real.

I want to record what Susan said and my response after thinking over this question throughout the week, because it bears on the spirit-behind-religion framework: It is impossible to know the reality of the spirit behind the vision. As Christians, being warned by scripture of impostors, our first thought is that it may be Satan, disguised as an angel of light, but we don’t know that for certain. Maybe it really was Moroni and authorized by God as a true answer to sincere prayer. Joseph Smith may have been given a whole lot of really good/true revelation. Every word of it might have been true and from the throne of God, or it may have been a deception by Satan. The problem is that we cannot know. The person receiving the revelation does not and cannot know, and all the people who hear the testimony of the revelator cannot know. The bottom line is that I am not going to replace the canon of the apostolic witness with the new revelation. I will listen to anyone. I will try to extract value from their revelation. I note and applaud what is consistent with the Biblical canon. I will disagree with anything that is clearly opposing scripture. I will consider anything that does not contradict the Biblical canon and see if it enriches my larger picture of life.

One thing to realize about a new revelation is that it changes our worldview and instills a new spirit within us. If it is a good/Godly spirit, that is good, and bad if not. I don’t think we can be absolute in our judgment of facts and spirits. We should judge and try them all, but we may be wrong. This is the reason why we should hold our top-level standard of truth sacred. If we hold the Bible as true, as the canon of life, and all other testimony as provisional, we will order our lives around that spirit, which I believe is the Holy Spirit, and in time, all will be revealed, and we will suffer only a little and not deeply as a result of our error. Such tentative holding should include the news, facts about events, political commentary, gossip, and group beliefs. All this information is unavoidable, but it should be held at a distance from the center of one’s being/soul.

On visions by other people, hold them lightly. Assume they are told in good faith, recognize that they are deeply personal and meaningful to the visionary. They may be true/Godly, and maybe not. They are not canon. If they contradict scripture, disbelieve it. If it’s non-contradictory, hold it loosely and test it with logic and test of consistency with reality, the Bible, and personal experience.

I can’t see into the spirit world, and I don’t know how Satan thinks for certain, but it makes sense to me that if Satan wants people to worship him, a really effective method would be to send them false prophets who didn’t realize they were spreading the Gospel of Satan. All that is necessary to advance the Kingdom of Satan is to pass on messages that add to the canon without contradiction. If a new sect/group/denomination/cult can form that follows the revelation of the new prophet, and that new prophet is placed at a higher or equal esteem/veracity/worship/respect/embrace as the Biblical canon, then it is possible to turn the multi-vocal Biblical spirit into a mono-multi-vocal spirit. The spirit of the revelator is not separable from the message (the medium is not all of the message, but it is part of the message and changes the character of the message to match the spirit of the revelator. This dilutes the believer’s power/influence/force for promoting the spirit of the Bible. He has been diluted in his witness for the Biblical canon and its multi-vocal liberty. The person who follows a restoration/new revelation/latter-day prophet/revelator will necessarily be divided in his loyalty to the Biblical canon as truth and the new/more restored/more correct revelation of the revelator. If I were Satan, and I wanted to weaken the effect of the Biblical canon, the multi-vocal world of God, I would give the new prophet a vision that was exactly the same as the Biblical canon, and then include all sorts of revelation that may or may not be true, and make the new revelation very attractive/exciting because of its current/fresh/new/modern content. There may not be a single thing that is wrong/false in the revelation, but it will take focus away from the Biblical canon and will necessarily draw at least some focus onto the revelator. This is a benefit to the kingdom of Satan, and the people of God are split into the latter-day restoration schism and those who follow/give attention to the new Revelator.

If the Biblical canon is true and the new scripture/revelation is actually different, then the student/follower/disciple will be inviting demons into his heart, since the source of the error was not from God. If the new revelation is exactly the same thing as scripture, but differently stated, not contradictory, but additive, then people will not resist the teaching and will willingly invite the spirit of the new revelator into their hearts. If the source of that new revelation is demonic, then the result of worshiping, following, or putting their allegiance in that man and his scripture and his words, and giving their heart to that spirit that was behind it, a spiritual portal has been created that allows Satan to have influence. He would never allow such an influence in knowingly, but if deeply disguised, using the patterns of authenticity, looking like the Biblical Canon, they think they’re following Jesus, but they have opened the door to influence by another spirit.

This is sharp language, and I want it on the record because it represents where my view has landed after this week’s work and Sunday’s meeting. I do not believe Leonard is consciously following Satan; I believe Leonard is a brother in Christ whose primary allegiance is to Jesus and whose secondary commitments are to a tradition whose foundational visions and revelations may come from a source that is not what it claims to be. The structural concern is genuine. The pastoral posture toward Leonard remains unchanged: love him, honor him, walk with him, point him to Christ, pray for him, and accept that the Spirit will do whatever further work the Spirit chooses in his own time.

XVI. Closing Exchange — Speak Truth in Love, Make Your Words Sweet

After Susan led us in prayer and signed off, Armond and I lingered on the call for another exchange, an important footnote to an already rich meeting.

Armond came back to the question of how to engage in dialogue without a combat posture. He was reflecting on the Sheikh’s encounter and on what we might do differently next time. Throughout the interaction, he was thinking about how we get aligned as a one-world nation. How do we get in alignment with Muslims, with Buddhists, with Thomas, with everybody? How do we establish that? I think it happens through interactions like that. I did get an idea of how we can get closer to it as we figure out the rules of engagement. We’ve got to frame the rules of engagement properly, so that no one’s coming into it with the gauntlet up, ready to fight. Instead, we’re going into it with “let’s figure this out together.” We’ve got something we want you to weigh in on. If I listen and learn from you, and you from me, we can both become experts at what we each do. If we weigh in on subjects together, trying to learn. I think that may be the winning form of engagement. If we make our words sweet, it won’t be hard to eat them.

If there is opposition in every interaction, we can frame it as a fight to win or an opportunity to teach and learn. If we learn how to speak the truth in love, as a habit, being with people becomes an easy back-and-forth volley. Armond’s summary captured the seriousness of the conversation: the power of life or death lies in the tongue, which is biblical. (Proverbs 18:21.) So it’s like — how do we speak life into our brothers that are on the path that’s going to lead them to death?

Another principle in this family is the verse from James 1:19: Be quick to listen and slow to speak. That is the rule of engagement we need to develop further. The fellowship has been doing reasonably well on it within our own circle. We need to learn to extend the same grace, peace, and ease in listening and speaking in our interfaith and inter-tradition encounters. For the Christian Underground project to succeed, we will need to be heard, and the door to being heard is hearing, not necessarily agreeing, but actually caring.

XVII. Synthesis and Open Threads

The meeting did not resolve the issues. Probably no fellowship meeting on this scale of substantive challenge ever does. What I think we came away with:

On the Mormonism thread. Leonard’s reframing of Denver Snuffer’s Gethsemane account (as both-and rather than either-or with the Cross) was significant and I owe him the acknowledgment that my prior diagnostic claim was sharper than the text supports. The deeper structural concern — the spectrum-placement of Mormonism partway from the multi-vocal end toward the mono-vocal end, regardless of content compatibility — remains operative. Leonard remains a brother whose primary allegiance is to Christ and with whom fellowship across denominational lines is real and edifying.

On the canon question. The criterion of apostolic provenance for canon-recognition is what I am operating under, with the canon effectively closing around the end of the first century with the last apostolic writings. Post-apostolic deposits (the Mormon, the Moorish, the Islamic, the Christian Science, etc.) are not categorically the same as the apostolic deposit and should not be treated as such, even where their content does not overtly contradict the biblical canon.

On the Sheikh encounter. Sheikh Ra Sadiq presented an American-Moorish-Islamic position that is substantially more peaceful and accommodating than the classical Islamic doctrines the reading list had prepared us to engage. His tradition (Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by Noble Drew Ali in the early twentieth century) operates within its own historical and theological frame that requires dedicated study to engage well. The Islam reading list I had compiled was useful but insufficient for engaging with this particular interlocutor; an MSTA-specific reading list would be needed for serious follow-up.

On Charlie’s Pharisee question. The question remains alive and merits further work. The Spirit’s internal witness combined with the external referents available to a multi-vocal canon is the best answer I have, and Section IV develops it in some detail through my own testimony. But the limit of what can be argued from outside the Spirit’s witness remains something I need to keep in front of me.

On Armond’s Islamic Leonard observation. This is one of the most useful sociological-pastoral observations to emerge from any of the recent fellowship meetings. The category of serious adult-formed mono-vocal-tradition adherent is real, and the pastoral posture toward such adherents is the same across traditions. We will encounter more of them. Knowing the shape will help.

On the rules of engagement question. The fellowship needs to develop a more articulated method for interfaith and inter-tradition dialogue that avoids the default of both sides in a combat posture. Some elements: ask first, listen long; honor what is true in the other tradition before naming what is false; do not assume the other person has internalized the worst of their tradition (the Sheikh’s Islam is genuinely peaceful); know enough about the other tradition to engage it from inside its own categories where possible; speak the truth in love and make your words sweet.

Open threads for future work:

1. Luke 19:27 in its parabolic context — worth its own short fellowship piece, because the misuse of this verse by interlocutors hostile to Christianity is likely to recur, and the parable structure of Luke 19:11-27 should be in the fellowship’s working knowledge.
2. Isaiah 45:7 and the problem of evil — Susan’s answer (definitional rather than substantive creation of evil) is sound but compressed; the question deserves a fuller fellowship treatment, especially since the problem of evil is one of the most common challenges any Christian witness faces.
3. The Joseph Smith First Vision variations — well-documented in mainstream LDS-historical scholarship, and the John 1:18 / 1 John 4:12 tension deserves a careful working-out. A future engagement with Leonard could productively focus on this question.
4. A Moorish Science Temple of America reading list — to complement the Islam reading list, in case future fellowship engagement with the MSTA continues. Noble Drew Ali’s Circle 7 Koran, the academic literature on the MSTA (Susan Nance’s How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, Edward Curtis’s various works on African-American Islam, Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah on Muslim slaves in the Americas), and the relationship between MSTA, the Nation of Islam, and broader American Muslim traditions.
5. The black-American-historical-identity question — Armond’s contributions opened a substantive area that the fellowship has not yet engaged seriously. The Doctrine of Discovery, the historical injuries to indigenous Americans, the heterodox traditions about indigenous vs. imported origins of black Americans, and the role these histories play in shaping black American religious identity (including the MSTA and the Nation of Islam) deserve fellowship-level study, especially if the Christian Underground project is going to do substantive witness in black American communities.
6. The rules-of-engagement project for interfaith dialogue — possibly a fellowship working-paper on method, building on Armond’s question. How does the Christian Underground develop the capacity to engage Muslim, Mormon, Moorish, Buddhist, Hindu, secular-humanist, and other interlocutors substantively without defaulting to combat posture? This is method-work, not doctrine-work, and it is what the next phase of the fellowship’s witness will require.
7. Charlie’s hang-gliding-pilot illustration of the Spirit — worth recording on its own and developing into something the fellowship can carry. You can’t see the wind. If you could, it would terrify you, because it is wild. There are currents going up and down and sideways and forward and back, and you’ve got to feel it every moment and adapt to it. And that’s a lot like God’s Spirit. Charlie’s illustration of John 3:8 from the contemporary English version is genuinely useful pastoral teaching and should be elevated.
8. Michael Sherman conversation — I need to respond to his email regarding Islam, which questioned my assertions about Islam, which were picked from statements in my essay on the Islam reading list.
9. The Psalm 22 / cross / fulfilled-prophecy thread — Leonard’s observation that Christ on the cross was quoting Psalm 22:1 (and, by implication, identifying himself with the entire prophetic Psalm that describes the crucifixion in advance) is a profound insight that the fellowship had not previously articulated. A short essay tracing the Psalm 22 / Isaiah 53 / Daniel 9:24-27 / Zechariah 12:10 prophetic-cluster as the multivocal scriptural confirmation of the cross-event would be worth producing for the fellowship’s discipleship work.
10. The mono-vocal / multi-vocal spectrum and the institutional-tyranny axis as CRF candidates — the framework I developed in Sections I, IV, and XIII is the kind of formal apparatus that the CRF derivation workflow is for. The axiom-candidates (e.g., language conventions are not neutral; revelation comes through human media; the credibility of a revelation correlates with the breadth of its external-referent validation; freedom in Christ is an objective criterion of religious authenticity), the theorem-candidates (e.g., mono-vocal sources are structurally weaker in validation than multi-vocal sources of the same authority claim), and the conjecture-candidates (e.g., the institutional layer post-prophet is structurally prone to greater tyranny than the founding prophet exhibited) are all here in the essay’s argument. Filed for CRF derivation work.

Closing Reflection

It was a long meeting. It went in directions none of us had planned. The pre-meeting plan — continue the Mormonism conversation, perhaps land at a clearer mutual understanding with Leonard — got displaced by Michael’s surprise arrival with the Sheikh, and the encounter that followed was rougher than expected. But the rougher encounter was, in retrospect, exactly what the fellowship needed. The spirit-behind-religion framework we had been developing in the abstract met two living instances of the pattern in one meeting, and the framework held up well enough to be useful while also being stretched in ways that revealed its limits. The mono-vocal / multi-vocal spectrum and the separate institutional-tyranny axis are real and important. The Spirit’s internal witness, as the final court for distinguishing true from false revelators, combined with the external-referent validation that the multi-vocal canon makes available, is the right epistemic structure. The pastoral love that the fellowship must extend to brothers and sisters inside mono-vocal-tradition systems is real and important. None of these is in tension with the others; all three need to be held together.

Armond’s observation was important; the Shiekh was an Islamic Leonard. Sheikh Ra Sadiq is, structurally, the same kind of seeker as Leonard. Leonard is like Charlie was when he was deep in Mormon practice before his and Susan’s long emergence. And Charlie is the as a Mormon was the same kind of seeker I was as an American Sikh, as a young yogi practicing under Yogi Bhajan before the Bible found me and the physics confirmed it. The pattern of the human being committed to a particular mono-vocal tradition, seeking to experience the love, knowledge, and experienceof God is not foreign to me. There is no shame in seeking. Only the seeker who finds. As people more grounded and satisfied in the faith, seeking only to please God, I have been that person. It is important for all of us to extend a pastoral posture (loving neighbor as self) to the Sheikh, Leonard, and anyone in that category. It is the posture I wanted extended to me forty years ago. My parents did it, lived it, and continued to love and support me for the 10 years I was searching in non-Biblical fields for that pearl of great price. I know I had many people praying for me, and it may have been their prayers, and my intense desire to know the truth, which was a type of visceral, unspoken prayer, that God gave me the vision that changed my life. We cannot see the spiritual forces acting in our lives, but we can apply the Biblical prescription (Matthew 7:7): “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” We cannot know for certain what will be effective, but I do believe that asking, seeking, and knocking for ourselves and those we love has an effect, eventually. This was the care extended to me by the patient witnesses, who continued to point me toward Christ and remain faithful witnesses to the fruit.

The fellowship is doing what fellowships are supposed to do. The Christian Underground is the practice of doing it sustainably over years. The Spirit is at work. The work is harder than the framework makes it sound. Sunday was a good Sunday.

— Thomas