Too Much LDS: My Journey into Biblical Theology - Episode 018

Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks, the spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and I'm recording this episode In between the two celebrations of Resurrection in the Christian Church, the Western tradition just celebrated and the Eastern tradition is about to.

So I figure this would be a good time to give you a little bit about my connection to Jesus Christ. I'm going to give you my story, my faith journey that brought me into focusing on biblical theology as not all of you know, I was raised Mormon in the L d s church in previous episodes. I have done some expounding on l d s faith as a comparison for what we find in the Bible because the differences are both interesting and I think they form a comparison, which helps enlighten the whole.

And I can talk about all of that because I've authentically been in both places. Anyway, this episode is [00:01:00] going to have two parts to it. I think I'm going to tell about my experiences in faith, my journey from there to here, so to speak, from having a strong LDS faith to where I am now. And then I'm going to expound on that, telling you a little bit about what I believe it means.

And yeah, that'll probably turn into a bit of preaching, but you know, it is what it is. I have a lot of LDS family and friends, and I'll be honest that I'm a little bit concerned at how this is going to be taken though. I hope you can appreciate that. this is just me being as forthright as I can be, but just know I'm probably going to offend both sides of the issue here, so you don't need to feel alone if that's you.

And look, I just wanna be as fair and straightforward as I can be in how I think about this, and my experiences have been my experiences. There's nothing I can really do about that. I'm also concerned that I'm just going to [00:02:00] end up confusing people or formulating a whole lot of misunderstandings as I'm trying to communicate things clearly that aren't necessarily going to be clear, because I might be coming at this in a way that is different from how you might expect or how you might want me to approach this.

So all of that to say, I hope that this can be a fruitful topic to bring to light what my positions are and how I think, spoiler alert, I actually think both the Christian community and the LDS community ought to stop fanning out their feathers to show off and should instead come together more in dialogue.

This is not going to be, or at least I don't intend it to be a SmackDown against Latter Day Saints in the way that I know some of you kind of maybe want it to be. Nor am I going to sugarcoat the ways that I think Mormon doctrine fails massively. I think there are nuances and misunderstandings galore, and we need to realize that inside institutions are real life [00:03:00] people, imagers of God, and we all deserve respect.

Now, yes, make no mistake that my position is that the LDS church is incorrect, but the conversation needs to be so much more nuanced than that. I think there's more common ground than people want to accept or admit and you know, it's on common ground that we can meet together and talk and love one another.

I do hope that I can get another friend on who has also had experiences with the LDS church to come talk with me here because his experiences were vastly different than mine. But I believe that there are common touchpoints in both of our stories that will further highlight the conclusions I'm going to draw out of my experiences, particularly in regards to the concept of believing loyalty, which I'll get into here in some depth as it applies to myself and my experiences.

A disclaimer, these are my personal experiences and I can't vouch [00:04:00] that they are like another person's, or that they show anything that's more enlightening or correct than what another person has experienced. I'm just living my life, doing my best, trying to formulate the best theology and love of God and people that I can in my life.

Oh, and one last thing. I'm going to go between using the terms LDS and Mormon, and there's no real reason for that beyond I grew up with the term Mormon. There was a time where there was a push of stop letting people call you Mormon because that's not the right term and we want to focus on the fact of the return of the gospel message, but it didn't really take at the time, there is a new push right now to get people to stop using the term Mormon, but it's just really awkward to keep saying LDS or Latter Day Saint.

So please don't take any offense as I use both terms. For all of those who are not familiar with the LDS church, the official name of it is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I appreciate that they wanna start highlighting the Church [00:05:00] of Jesus Christ part for a reason, but they can't avoid adding on the last part since there are other churches by that name.

And yes, there are actually different l d s denominations as well. I will be talking about the main branch that is headquartered in Salt Lake City. At any rate, I was born into an L D S family in an area that is heavily populated by Mormons. Most of my extended family were l D s with a few notable exceptions, but those exceptions were not really oppositional to the faith.

So I was very steeped in LDS belief and LDS culture, but there is an unspoken hierarchy that exists in the LDS church. So there are L Ds families and then there are L d s families. Some families in the LDS church are almost like a, like part of a royal court. Many of these families can trace their family tree back to Joseph Smith or Brigham Young or some other [00:06:00] notable figure in early LDS or Utah history.

And it makes sense that there are so many of them. Considering the history of polygamy, a lot of people can trace their family line back. Uh, I know that my grandpa was the product of polygamy. In fact, his family had to hide out in Mexico for a little while because of it. So for me, there was a disconnect in that.

Um, my connections to LDS hegemony go too far back for those whose families were steeped in Utah or Idaho. LDS politics for generations, that can be a different story. There are a lot of expectations and pressure on a child who is born into a family like that, and not just an l d s family like that, but any family with a cohesive and public history where you're expected to follow in the footsteps of your parents and grandparents and the like.

But that wasn't my family. My family were very strong believers, but they weren't part of the politics in our area. In some [00:07:00] ways, that meant our, that our family was, well, to be honest, we were kind of looked down upon. My parents just worked completely normal jobs and they just lived their daily lives as best they could, and they were not interested in getting wrapped up in drama.

They were interested in the growth of the church and in seeing God work in lives. When I was a child, I saw a big difference between my parents and many of the other adults in our community. My dad had such a great faith in the work of God, and he loved people. He loved them so much to that point that for us kids, it was sometimes embarrassing, which is uncomfortable for me to admit now because it should not have been embarrassing.

But he was just so loving and so charitable, and so interested in other people and loved them so much. If you were blessed to know my dad, you couldn't help but love him and see his love of God. And my mom also, I, I have seen her go through some really, really tough [00:08:00] situations and in all of it, she gives up herself to trust God.

Now, I'm not trying to say that my parents are better than anyone else's, but this is what I saw growing up. Here's a demonstration of the difference that I see in my parents and some others in the LDS faith. And I don't mean to put this out to disparage anyone, but listen, if you get nothing else from what I'm saying here, you are either centered on God or you're centered on something else.

So this here, here's something that really struck me a couple of years ago. The LDS church put out a push around Thanksgiving to have their members put out on social media what they are most grateful for. I guess maybe they do this yearly to some extent, but this particular year, the push was really strong.

It was probably 2020 that I'm thinking about. So I have a lot of LDS friends whom I loved dearly, but I'll be honest, I cringed every time. Every last time I saw that [00:09:00] the first thing someone was grateful for was the Book of Mormon or the LDS prophet. That was the first thing many of them thought of as being the thing they were most grateful for.

But my mom, the number one, the number one thing she was grateful for was her savior, Jesus Christ. And this is my mom, the core of her. Yes. I grew up in a home where the LDS church was our daily lives, and where I heard my parents exclaim over how much they loved the prophet and where a big focus was on how families can be together forever and all of that.

But my mom has never failed to put a focus on Christ, and I have really been so grateful to have grown up in that. So there's my parents, as you can guess. I, I believe that their influence on me played a big part in where I am today. But I'll also say I have a big brother and he's a strong LDS believer and I have younger brothers who have [00:10:00] drifted off into, I don't know what they really think.

So this influence can't be the only thing, but it definitely impacted me when I was first formulating my faith. If you're raised in the LDS church when you're eight, you have the chance to choose to be baptized. Not all of my aunts and uncles were lds, and I remember one of them boldly putting forward the idea that, you know, I really don't have to, it's, it's a real choice.

I can't really say how much my eight year old self appreciated that or really took it in. But I prayed about the choice and I really thought about it. Now having a seven year old children myself, I have a hard time realizing that this was the age I was, but I really did think about it and pray about it, and I tried to get an answer from God.

The LDS faith is really big on that kind of experience. Of course, you're supposed to read the Book of Mormon and then pray about it, and then you're supposed to have what they call a burning in the [00:11:00] bosom to show you the truth of that. So there are a couple of different things that I can talk about here.

Praying about the Book of Mormon and praying about baptism are related, but not necessarily the same thing. I did pray about the truth of the Book of Mormon. I did that a few times in my life and I never did get that burning in the bosom. I never even duped myself into thinking I had it. I, I truly never did.

But I don't remember my prayers at the time of my baptism being so much about the truth of the Book of Mormon. I do remember a lot of prayers about God himself, asking him to reveal himself to hi to me, asking him to be present, asking if I should be baptized, all of those kinds of things. And overwhelmingly when I prayed in a way that was God-centered, I do believe that was a two-way street in communication.

Call it Revelation. Maybe it was a burning in the bosom. But uh, really I just describe it like an assurance, [00:12:00] like have you ever vented to a friend and your friend was just present with you? Like you could feel the empathy present even if they didn't say anything, even if they didn't have a solution or anything, they were just there.

That was my experience with God, and I remember it distinctly at this time. And I've never had that go away in my life, though. I've had plenty of times when I've been angry or frustrated with God, when I have cried out wanting answers or reassurance and didn't get it then. But in those times, it was always the sense of God telling me to be patient, that things would come in due time.

When I tell people that I came from the LDS church but have rejected their doctrine, I'll get some different responses. Often people will assume that I changed my faith like a radical transformation, that I went from believing in one God to believing in the true God. And this is where I know that I [00:13:00] annoy a lot of my Christian friends, to be honest, because I don't think that, I do not believe that the God I allied myself to when I was eight years old is different from the God I serve today.

How can that be? Well, we'll get to that a little bit more in depth, I think, I hope in this episode. But how I'd categorize my path is not a deconversion and reconversion, but just a deepening of my relationship with God as he has drawn me into his truth. I have shed falsehoods and I have clarified my thinking.

I have, as some people like to call it, deconstructed down and reconstructed back up. But it's all been on the basis of the faithfulness of the God who has revealed himself to us in the Bible, and who I believe revealed himself to me as a child. That's what it has always been. That's where my loyalty lay my allegiance to my king and Lord and Savior.

So, [00:14:00] because God himself formed the bedrock of my faith, rather than say, faith in the Book of Mormon, is that what the difference is? Is that maybe why I never got that famed burning in the bosom that others had about the Book of Mormon? Because my foundation already was not the book, but the sovereign creator.

I think so. Or at least I think that's a large part of it. I mean, I, I didn't reject the Book of Mormon till I was an adult coming out of all of this. And as a teenager I did my best to work in apologetics to figure out how to defend the Book of Mormon. And I was pretty dang good at it. Really In high school, l d s teenagers take seminary classes in an l d s populated area.

You can often do this during school hours, though technically you are off campus for that class. But each year of high school focuses on a different section of the LDS cannon, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, [00:15:00] and the Doctrine and Covenants, which we're writings by Joseph Smith that are considered scripture.

And the Pearl of Great Price is another section of scripture that's thrown in there, which is a book that includes writings that Joseph Smith supposedly translated from some Egyptian papyrus. I'll probably talk a little more about that later. So anyway, I took these classes and I loved them because they were so much deeper than any Sunday school class you might have most places, especially back in the nineties.

Even though I had Christian friends, I frankly knew much more about the Bible than they did, and I really mean a lot of correct information because the secret is that LDS scholars tend to riff off of evangelical scholars like a lot. So a lot of the information I got in these classes, at least in the Old Testament, and New Testament was pretty solid material.

Now, me being me, I like to poke at things and see how they work and see how they fall apart [00:16:00] or don't fall apart and ask why. So I got into l d s Apologetics, learning to defend my faith, and seeing all of the arguments as to why the detractors were wrong. And I asked questions because any good apologist ought to be able to know their opponent's positions well, right?

So I tried to find out things like why Christians believed in the Trinity and all of that, and all of the arguments I came across as far as the Trinity were rubbish. I, I still believe that to this day. I'd still call them rubbish, and I even believe in the Trinity. Now, if you want more on that, I did touch on this part, uh, in my episodes discussing the Trinity.

But anyway, I had some friends who tried to poke holes in my LDS faith, but I had some really strong answers for them. But I also had a growing cognitive dissonance because you don't get into that kind of stuff with an honest outlook and don't encounter the ways that, for that matter, your faith really isn't as strong as you thought it was. After all. I'd say that even for [00:17:00] Christianity and apologetics in Christian circles, because you're not usually brought into the faith with the most solid of reasons for everything you believe, right? Of course not. So it's useful to poke at these things and say, where does my faith fall apart? Where could I find a more solid answer for this or that is what I'm thinking, even really the right way to think about it.

I was genuinely looking at responses for my faith, and I was genuinely looking for reasons that Christians believed what they believed. But for several years, I'll admit, I wasn't really taking that honest of a look as to why I believed what I believe. I was continuing to ride on the coattails of others and the culture and society I was in.

There are arguments against the LDS faith that made me uncomfortable that I had to file away in the back of my mind, and they kind of festered there. And why did I allow them to sit there? Well, there I was. Remember having genuine interaction with God. So how [00:18:00] could I experience that while being enmeshed in this belief system if it was wrong?

That's a really good question, and I'm not gonna pretend I have a complete answer for that, but I do think it involves discipleship anyway. I don't mean to get ahead of myself as to examining my story yet. So the cognitive dissonance, I couldn't explain why it was there, but I knew that God was there and I truly trusted in him and the path in my life.

Now here is where I could bring up the possibility of those who might say, well, look, maybe I wasn't ever really lds. It's the no true Scotsman fallacy, right? Because of some of the things I've said that I didn't really have a burning in, in the bosom feeling about the Book of Mormon and that I think that I've always had a faith in the God of the Bible. Some people are going to come back and say, that must mean I wasn't really a believing in the God of Mormonism. And I can see where that perspective is coming from. [00:19:00] But I really was a faithful member of the LDS church. I enjoyed listening to general conference where the prophets and general authorities of the LDS church talked, and I framed everything I did in the construct of the LDS church.

I was as convinced as I could have been that God couldn't be three people in one, because that didn't make any sense. Uh, I held a temple, recommend and attended Temple services. When the opportunity came up, I took the sacrament every week. That's what they call the Lord's table in the LDS church. I wanted to bring others who weren't LDS into the LDS church.

I'd never experienced that feeling about the Book of Mormon, but that was the case for other Mormons too. I chalked that up to the fact that, well, I just already knew it was true, so I just didn't happen to need that extra assurance that others needed. All of my theology and my life was wrapped up in the LDS church.

Yes, I had doubts and dissonance, but guess what? I have doubts today. Doubts don't mean that you don't [00:20:00] have faith in something that you don't believe Something. Anyone who knew me in high school and college would've thought, yep, that's a Mormon girl right there. I was really true. Bled L D s I bought into it all.

So I go to college still a completely faithful l d s girl intending to live an l d s life with being married in the temple and all of the usual things in high school. L d s religion classes are called seminary, and in college they're called institute. So I went to institute classes in college and these were more specific than the ones in high school.

And really quite interesting when you're an inquisitive young girl who wants to know all of the details about everything. And I thought, well, my seminary classes in high school seemed really solid, so these ought to be even more so since it's college level. And I took a class. I wish I could remember what it was exactly. I, I remember I was in that class when I learned about the Twin Towers falling on September 11th, and I remember it was at least in [00:21:00] part a class on the early church, like the early centuries after Christ. So in the L d S Church, as I've explained in previous podcast episodes, there is an idea of a great apostacy.

The idea is that after the apostles died, a lot of truth was lost and many bad ideas crept in. But when I was a teenager, no one could offer me any examples of this, how we could see it in history. None of that. No one really knew. But now I was in college, and surely college instructors would know more.

And surely the instructor teaching this particular class could really lay things out to show unequivocally that there was an apostacy. And indeed that was part of this class. The proof presented was that obviously the apostles would have known everything correctly. And the truth of everything should have been super clear at the time.

Yet, what do we see in history? We see division, we see people saying all kinds of things that are not in agreement with one another. What explanation could [00:22:00] there be other than people, apostatized rather than heretics? The l d s church sees the faithful minority who are trying to keep the truth intact, and if you start with the perspective of knowing about a restored gospel well, that seems to make a lot of sense unless you look a lot closer at exactly what the early church fathers were saying and how the l d s church chooses to cherry pick data.

An example that I've brought up before, they love the statement that God became man, so that man might become God, but they ignore what became means. You don't become something that you already are. So God can't become a man if he's already a man and we can't become gods if we are already gods. We also ignore all the other writing that those church fathers did that shows how much, how much they were defending the Trinity.

So that's a very bad way to read those early church fathers. But back to my class I was taking, my instructor [00:23:00] was finally bringing forward information that seemed to support this idea of an apostacy, but he wasn't presenting anything in his wholeness, and I began to see that even without access to the original writings themselves at the time, the answers were a little too convenient sounding.

So whatever deep doubts I had, which I'd buried away and ignored, those started bubbling to the surface more and more in a way that I couldn't ignore them. And I was supposed to be living within the realm of the true church, but away from home, what was I experiencing in that I couldn't find much fellowship in my local congregations?

It was all starting to seem a little bit fake. And no, that's not evidence against truth because you can find that anywhere to some extent. No matter what faith tradition you're in, your experience is going to largely be what you make of it. And I knew that though it was frustrating that I couldn't find any deep connections and no one who was deeply interested in discussion or anything [00:24:00] like that.

But the fact was I had no real net of fellowship to deal with these cracks I was seeing in my foundation. And questions were only ever welcome if you accepted the pat answers that were found for those questions. I wasn't fitting in anywhere that I expected to be fitting in, and that's not a good state to be in in such a formative years as early college, and it's not a good state to be in when you're beginning to question your reality and what you've always been taught.

So what happens then? Then I found connections outside of the l d s church, and though I had non l d s friends in high school, I never really participated in a broader Christian construct. And I started to do that more in college and I started having deep relationships outside the L d s church. Those were the places I was finding fellowship and places to explore deep questions.

And I was starting to see a big difference in attitudes between the members of the LDS church and members of [00:25:00] general Christian congregations. And I thought, wow, Christians seemed to be a lot nicer in general, and not nearly as close-minded as I was taught they were. And no one, by the way, was actively trying to convert me away from the LDS church.

Don't get me wrong, I know that there were some external pushes to that direction from others who weren't in direct contact with me, but no one I was engaging with actively was trying to show me how wrong the LDS church was. Instead, they warmly welcomed me into what they were doing. This is a point I cannot stress more, rather than telling me how wrong I was, they just loved me. They just accepted me. They just welcomed me. That was not what I expected. Now, do I think if the tables had been turned, my family would be welcoming to others? Yes, they would, but not quite in the same way. [00:26:00] When I brought non LDS friends to LDS functions, it was in a word awkward. I didn't experience that awkwardness in Christian circles, and I realized this is just my personal experience. Your mileage will vary. Plenty of Christian places aren't welcoming and plenty of LDS places are. Some of that is personality and happenstance and whatever, but it affected me deeply. This is when my cognitive dissonance reared its ugly head, and I started having some major issues internally. I felt often, like I was at war with myself in a lot of ways. I felt like I was on the wrong path, surely, but I didn't feel like that in any real way, external to myself, but it was against everything I had been raised in. Everything I had been, I had believed in. It was in a lot of ways excruciating, and I didn't have many people to process this with. Aside from a few friends, [00:27:00] almost no LDS friends were understanding of where I was. They just said that my internal conflict was proof that I was on the wrong path, obviously. My Christian friends, however, understood that very differently, and thankfully my parents, especially my mom, just wanted to love me. And even though they couldn't understand what was happening, they were in no way ostracizing me.

But I wasn't comfortable really talking about any of this with my parents because I didn't want to hurt them, and I didn't think they'd really get it. But I deeply appreciated that they wanted to love me no matter what. So I got into a relationship with my future husband, who was Christian, not lds, and that was rough and yet liberating.

As a Mormon, I wasn't supposed to do something like that, and I was shocked that I allowed myself to even approach the possibility. It was very, very disorienting and very crushing. Excruciating really in a lot of ways. And this isn't something I really have a handle on to be able to [00:28:00] explain cohesively, because on the one hand, it went against everything that I had settled in my mind as to what I had believed.

So that was hard. My conscious brain was telling me what an awful person I was. And yet, deep down it never actually felt wrong at stepping out of my usual circles into a wider view of who and what was acceptable. I continued to talk to God a lot at this time, and I felt like I'd built up a good relationship with him that I wasn't afraid of being led into deception because I relied on him and obviously from the perspective I'm in now, I don't think I was wrong about that.

What was at war in my heart was the story that I was holding onto and the path that I think God was calling me on. Those two things were coming into conflict. That's hard, and when you combine that with the potentiality of leaving a culture and society that I was born and raised in, that's a tough thing.

It was a lot of wrestling and I had a lot of questions that needed answers. [00:29:00] And yes, it was tied up in not wanting to break things off from my boyfriend who became my fiance during all of this. But I thought even if I broke up with him, I'm still on this path. It's, it's not just about that. I wasn't going to just be satisfied with going back to what I'd always believed until I at least had some good answers.

And remember, I had been into l d s Apologetics, so I knew the storylines, I knew the answers, and they weren't okay. They didn't make sense. None of it was frankly logical. I saw the cognitive dissonance, it was brought out in the open, and I couldn't just shove it away again. There was no going back. So I had to wrestle it forward, and I would have been okay with finding answers that led me back into my old faith. I would've been okay with some religious, emotional experience showing me the true path, that direction, but nothing was opening [00:30:00] up to me like that. Even though I was okay with being open to it, I welcomed it. I prayed for it. I knew it was possible that I was conflicted because maybe I was doing something wrong.

Overall, it was just a really confusing trying time. So I really empathize with people who are in that kind of spot. You know, when something you're learning is pushing you outside of that comfort zone that you've been in for so long, and especially if it goes against what your trusted mentors and family and friends have told you, it feels like you're being pulled in two opposite directions.

It's, it can be absolutely torturous at times. Believe me, I know I lived in this discomfort for years really. I ended up getting married and told God all along that, you know, I'm still open to whatever you lead me and to, and that's where it seemed to go because those were the truth breadcrumbs I was following.

But how did I decide what I could hold onto that strongly? [00:31:00] Well, like I said, I trusted God and I saw no reason not to continue to do so. Even in spite of all of my wrestling. It's hard to boil down a simple argument why I believe in God so strongly. It's, it's just the entire narrative of what the Bible speaks to. Really, that just screams truth to me, and I see it play out in life daily because clearly this world has problems and clearly we cannot fix those problems ourselves. But clearly there are answers and good things. Good things do happen. Things do improve sometimes, and what's the greatest answer and the greatest good thing that we can see?

It's Christ. So yes, I like historical arguments and arguments for the resurrection, but those aren't what sway my heart deep down. Nor is it simply my experiences that I've personally had with God. Though of course those play their part. It's how all [00:32:00] of that, all of it together fits in with the arc of history and the situations that the world is in and that we are in individually and collectively.

This is why the topic of the image of God and the incarnation of God into the world matters so deeply to me because those are the things that I see calling out in creation, in our lives, in the truth of the gospel, the patterns of this as to as to how they play out everywhere. It's just a massively cumulative case, in my opinion.

Nothing else from a logical standpoint explains it all, and when you put Christ at the center of it all, it's something that is more than fate, more than happenstance. It's personal. It's a person. This is the story we are called to continuously, and what it boils down to for me is. What has the most explanatory power of everything, because if your faith is based on one pillar, then that pillar could potentially be knocked over.[00:33:00]

It might be a really, really strong pillar, but even if, but even if something can't be crashed, there's always something that can introduce a weak spot that then weakens your foundation. I did a lot of thinking to come to that bedrock of my faith in Christ. I think it was really there in a lot of ways already in the way I thought and believed previously, but it wasn't there as clearly as it ought to have been until this time.

I needed to really examine it all closely to tear it all down till I got to the point where I couldn't tear it down any further. So that took some time and I, I married my husband. We went on with Life Together and I was still trying to fit myself into a Mormon shaped box in some sense. And that just wasn't working.

It wasn't working at all. But I tried to make it work. I really did. When I was still newly married, we lived in upstate New York and upstate New York happens to be one of the founding places of the LDS church, maybe the [00:34:00] founding place really, because that's where Joseph Smith was, where when he had his great vision that told him he wasn't to join any other church, but that he would be restoring the truth.

This was the time of the second great awakening where there were preachers everywhere trying to win converts to their congregations. And Joseph Smith was perplexed and wasn't certain which church to join. So he went into the woods and prayed and received his first vision there in what is now called the Sacred Grove.

That was about three or four hours away from me where I lived. But when my husband was deployed and I had a lot of time on my hands, I decided to travel there and spend some time because the idea is not just, if you pray, you'll get revelation about the trueness of the LDS church, but if you pray in the right spot, a sacred spot, then you'll really get a good personal revelation.

So that's what I did. I went there and I checked it out, and there's a neat little log cabin with some stuff from that era. I went at a time when there were weren't any, any crowds at all. I [00:35:00] was pretty much entirely alone. And I went into those woods and I prayed, and I really wanted some assurance that, hey, yes, the LDS church is true and I can get back to my roots of belief, but I got nothing.

Absolute dead silence. I didn't feel anything positive. I didn't feel anything negative. No answer, no response. It was a beautiful place. But that was that. I drove home perplexed, like surely I'd have gotten a response one way or another, right? God could have easily given me a negative response as well as he could have given me a positive one, but nope, none of that.

It was weird. It was really weird. I started to think, well, maybe I was trying to ask God to be some kind of genie in these requests, and maybe that's not really fair. But I was raised to think this way, to approach God like this, but it wasn't working no matter what I did. Next time we [00:36:00] visited back home, I decided to visit the grounds of an LDS temple.

I wasn't in a personal state where I felt like I could get a temple recommend, so I couldn't go inside, but surely God could reveal himself outside his holy house. So I went several times and prayed. And again, the grounds were beautiful. It was spring, it was gorgeous. The weather was perfect, and I felt alive in that sense, but I felt nothing in response to God, aside from maybe a quiet, really, Carey?

And I thought, yeah, really? I, I think I get it. I think I've had my answer for a while now, and it wasn't dramatic and it wasn't anything really emotional. So finally I came to a place where I asked myself, what if I just trusted in Christ? And what if I just did that? What if I wasn't able to come to any other agreement within myself as to much beyond that?

Is that enough? Could that be enough? That. That was the point where I started to feel some real peace [00:37:00] rather than feeling like I was constantly at war in my own mind. And then I thought, well, if I believe in Christ, then I believe in the Bible, because that's where we get our knowledge of Christ from.

Okay, good enough. That was my new foundation and I decided this was my new framework. I didn't tear down my LDS oriented mental structures. I didn't get angry and decide that the church was a host of demons or anything in, in large part, because that wasn't my experience. I never felt anything truly negative there.

It just wasn't right. I thought, I don't know what the truth is there in that church or the doctrine, but anything the LDS theology holds is true. That is consistent with the Bible. I can accept that at least. I thought there was going to be a lot more there than what I ended up with in the end. To be honest, the more I considered this and compared LDS theology to the Bible, it just kept crashing and crashing and crashing [00:38:00] down.

And I did this with other theologies as well. We'd attended a number of Lutheran churches and a lot of that was okay, but not everything. There was a lot there that I didn't think necessarily aligned with the Bible too. And that brings us into the idea of denominations, which I was sorely struggling with along the way as well.

I had a strong presupposition from the way that I was raised, that there had to be one true church, one accurate system, and so there had to be one denomination that was right. That thinking was drilled very deeply into my mind. I was fairly sheltered in terms of denominational exposure, and since the Roman Catholic Church didn't seem like a good option, that one especially was supposed to be part of the downfall of the truth after all.

Then I thought, well, the Lutheran Church was okay, but it just bothered me that I couldn't find something that looked and sounded like it was the thing I should be part of. As I settled down into the belief that the Bible could be my source of truth, I [00:39:00] slowly came to the realization that I had just assumed there would be one institutional church that was true, but the Bible didn't show me a picture of Jesus setting that up.

Could it be possible for man to build these structures, which still served and pleased God? That made a lot more sense because it fits into the reality of what we see. No human run organization is perfect and God isn't coming down to smite people into obedience in these institutions, but clearly they are bringing people to Christ.

So maybe this whole way that God works is a little more organic than I thought. And you know, it seems that's more incredible than if he had to set up some organization, really. So that's the place I was in for a few years, finally settled in on some sort of structure going to a Lutheran church, which wasn't fully satisfying to me at that point.

Not because of theology necessarily, but because I wasn't going to become a confirmed Lutheran. And so that [00:40:00] meant that I was hampered in my ability to serve in the church I was attending, but I wasn't a member of. And that's where I was when I found the work of Dr. Heiser. My husband was working a job late at night and listening to Coast to Coast AM when he came across Dr.

Weiser's appearance. Actually several appearances on the program. He came home and he told me to listen, and I just kind of brushed it off, like I'm not listening to that. I mean, I like paranormal stuff, so it's not like I was against it necessarily. I was just like, why would someone be presenting theological ideas on a program like that?

Then my husband found Dr. Heisler's YouTube lectures uploaded by someone somewhere. I'm not sure you can find all the ones I watched now, which is a shame because they were all amazing though I really wondered if he could be legit, but he sounded so level-headed. The last thing in general Christianity that I really struggled with was the concept of the Trinity, because remember, I am there [00:41:00] fully insisting that my faith be based on what the Bible claimed.

And as I said, all the proofs of the Trinity that anyone gave me were not satisfying, not in the least. And then I listened to an eight hour lecture on the Jewish Trinity, and that blew apart my world. I had to listen to it several times. Over the course of a few months, I listened to other lectures by Dr. Heiser about the context of the ancient near Eastern world, and I thought, why didn't I know about this field when I went into college? All the pieces started falling into place for me in a way that I couldn't hardly believe considering my crazy mental fights I was having with myself previously. I became so hungry for this type of information, and so here I am today, deeply invested and still so excited about what Biblical theology brings to the table. For me. I am still devoted to the truth of the revelation of the Bible, and I love that every time I look at it, I can see something in a different light that makes [00:42:00] that explanatory power of it all even more full than it was before. And am I doing that in a self-serving way, trying to piece together something because I like how it looks?.

I hope that's not what I'm doing. That's why I find it essential to read and interpret and think within the wider body of Christ, which by the way, exists beyond this time and place. So I'm not discounting things like systematic or historical interpretation. Traditional doctrines and creeds and writings all become necessary, not because they themselves are inspired in the same way scripture is, but because we need to test our interpretations against other ideas against those who have followed Christ through all of these centuries.

You do that by also looking at the context of those writers and seeing the conflicts they were engaged in and the biases they had in place. But there's a reason there are a few firm points of Christianity that have lasted thousands of years now. They have lasted because they [00:43:00] have stood the test of time and scrutiny.

And yes, there's always a need to reform and correct our views when we learn new things or gain insight we didn't have before. We can talk together now to see what makes the most sense and to pit argument against argument. And all of that can be fruitful and it's so necessary. We need to be open to correction and open to adjustment.

And the journey of that is it's, it's so much more exhilarating than being right about everything from the start. So now what, what do I think of the LDS church now? You know, a lot of people want to call it out for being certain things and you know, they might be right. I think some perspectives are, but to some extent, I don't think we have enough information really to get a complete picture.

There are things we want to say one way or another, but in general, I think we should be more cautious. Was Joseph Smith a complete liar or was he himself deceived? did demons or evil spirits actually show up to him? I have no [00:44:00] idea. I am certain that some seriously twisted things were going on in particular regarding polygamy and the treatment of particular people, and I'm certain that in such things there are always connections to evil Powers on the other side, but what those relationships are, I cannot say, and how they end up trickling out and affecting the rest of the church. Again, I don't think we really have the right to say, and I think that in light of my own experience, I never, ever experienced anything I'd call demonic. In my experience with the LDS church, I know others have, and I know some will say that my struggle in letting go of LDS church may have been influenced by some evil spirit, but I don't feel that's the case.

I think that was just pure me fighting with myself and my own presuppositions as many people do. Really, I think it's dangerous and just unfruitful for us to go speculating on it, saying that we know exactly what's going on. It's just like when someone claims that Baal is behind this or that, really we [00:45:00] can't say that for sure because we don't actually have inspired revelation that lays things out that simply, and it doesn't matter that much in the end either.

Test things always test things, and if it's from God, that will end up showing. And if it's not from God, that will also end up showing And things that come from God can come in unexpected ways, in unexpected places. I just think that in this, as in many other things, we want our nice little ribbon tied around the box.

We've put it all into, and that's just too much to ask really. Alright, so that's basically my story as neatly and succinctly as I can tell it. Now to go beyond that, why did I land where I did? I think it's fair to say that in most cases when people move away from Mormonism, it's quite different from my experience.

A lot of people lose their faith in God entirely. A lot of people end up angry at the church, which is fair when they've seen and been part of abuses within it. There's often a schism [00:46:00] with family and friends. It's, well, a lot of times it's not a pretty picture. It's like a train wreck. So why did that not happen with me?

In large part, it helped me a great deal to have a new place to land that was secure and also based on God. It helped me that I have a tendency to think critically and to be a able and willing to tear things apart, to entertain notions that might make others uncomfortable. It helped that my family was not going to disown me for making different choices.

I think all of those things are pretty critical in general for people who are deconstructing. So if you are in that critical state or you know someone who is, then find a community that will allow you to be your authentic questioning self who can support you in ways that are centered on God. Allow yourself to think critically and to examine and tear apart your beliefs, but do it in a place with other people who can help support you.

I, I'd suggest [00:47:00] remaining within the community of the body of Christ, wherever you can be, but there's more to my particular situation, just in the way that I told my story. I think you can see some hints of what was really different for me. First of all, I never had the experience that many claim that emotional feeling in the center of my chest to tell me what was true.

I won't say that I've not had emotional experiences in prayer, in communication with God, because I absolutely have. I even believe I've almost heard voices, maybe not audibly, but mental words in my mind, but I'm quite aware that those are, well, they're simply not trustworthy as a basis for your entire belief system, because those things can be manipulated.

No, really they can. They can be manipulated and influenced by chemicals, by drugs, by being in situations or with certain people, and you can really, really want to believe something, so your brain will manufacture experiences to help you along. It's a sad fact of the matter. That's not the kind of thing I liked hearing when I was Mormon, though. I'll be [00:48:00] honest. I'd roll my eyes and say, yes, I know. Of course those can be deceitful, but somehow we are the greatest exception to those types of things, aren't we? So, but anyway, I wouldn't say that I never had emotional experiences that indicated that the l d s church was true, but I, I really always felt somewhat ambivalent about Joseph Smith.

I was never really wowed by his story. There was a lot about his life that just, well, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd say that I believed in the Book of Mormon, but I never really had the emotional connections to it that a lot of others seem to. However, I did have those experiences regularly just in feeling like God was with me, that he was present, that he was a real and active force in my life.

So I think that, I really think that is key. I think it was genuinely God who was and is and has always been there, and my belief is that this means I genuinely did have the [00:49:00] Holy Spirit indwelling in me just as we'd expect of a Christian believer. Maybe the Holy Spirit's presence is what, in a sense protected me from going down some paths of trust that I might have otherwise.

I also think my parents were so, so key because I saw their manifestation of God's love and I saw that their focus was on God. Yes, also the L d s Church, but that was the context that they had for God's manifestation in their lives. What does it all mean? It means in a word or, well, two words, believing, loyalty.

Before I get straight into that though, I want to talk about something. I wanna talk about how belief systems are structured. Don't worry, I'm not gonna get too technical and psychological in this, but do you remember how I talked about how our ideas should not be the same as our identities, but they often are anyway.

And even if they are not, our ideas and our beliefs are almost always connected to the communities and societies we live in. [00:50:00] That means that we can have a lot to lose. If we change our beliefs, we might lose our family, our friends, our entire foundation. As far as the society of people we hang out with and who accept us.

I'm lucky that was less of a problem for me, but it remained a strain nonetheless. But when we form our beliefs, we are really, what we're really doing is deciding what sources we trust. When I started this podcast, I talked about being able to rethink and reevaluate, but that doesn't mean we necessarily need to start completely from scratch.

It's almost impossible to do that anyway, and it's unnecessary most of the time. But I'd qualify that with a little nuance. We ought to examine ourselves in order to know what sources we use as a basis for truth. Now, many of us, a big part of that is going to be traditions and beliefs we grew up with. Or if we step away from those, we might possibly go to somewhere opposite from those.

Like there's one reason many Mormons who leave the faith end up as atheists. [00:51:00] They don't have anywhere else to land, so they land in as opposite a shore as possible from where they started. If the way I was raised is not correct, and that must mean there's no basis for belief whatsoever. And they have no idea that there are other options in front of them.

And that's kind of where I was for a long time too, in a sense. Like when I thought, I have to believe that one particular denomination has got it right. I, I didn't understand that there was the option that maybe none of them have it all buttoned down and that doesn't have to disconnect the truth of God in the Bible at all.

That's not a bucket that most people have. They have no idea that option exists. It took me inching out of a lot of these ideas to come to that conclusion. I know another bucket is similar to that, which would be, none of them have it all buttoned down, but maybe there's one that I think is closest and that's fair, particularly given certain prerequisites that you might believe are necessary to the faith.

So anyway, going back to what I said my foundation was, [00:52:00] it's Christ and it's the, it's the Bible and it sounds really nice to just leave it at that, right? Like I can just read the Bible and know what it says on the most basic, fundamental level. I think that's true as long as you're in the realm of taking it in good faith.

But even then, I can think of a lot of ways that the Bible can be read and completely twisted to mean as complete opposite, like take the view that God is evil because of the conquest of Canaan. Now, I don't think that's actually reading the Bible in good faith, but laying that aside, that seems obvious to many people who read the Old Testament.

Why does it seem obvious? You want to counter back with some proof that they're reading it wrong. But the real problem is that their basis for reading the Bible, Is nowhere near your basis for reading the Bible. Their trusted sources are quite different from yours, and it's very difficult to get people on the same page when you're trusting different things.

So we start out with certain ideas in life about what we can trust and what we can't trust, and those change to [00:53:00] some degree as we grow. But those formative years are generally impactful on us one way or another, and they can be difficult to change. That's why I struggled so much because that's what was going on for me. I had to figure out new ways of processing things when a source I held as being trustworthy ended up not being so.

So I say that I put my trust in the Bible, but what does that mean? Because I could have said that when I was Mormon too. I need something aside from just the Bible. I know that's not what we want to hear, but listen, it's, it's not a dire situation because we're not alone in holding the Bible as our source of truth.

We also have all of Christian history and yes, it's a messy, messy thing. All those different ideas who can be right. Well first you might maybe possibly want to consider that earlier. Sources are probably a little more essential than later sources. If your systematic theology is coming only from the reformation, you might wanna think about that a bit.

I grew up with the idea that there [00:54:00] was a great apostacy in the early church, which left me unable to trust early sources, and I now find that a disturbing place to be because then there is functionally no other foundation you can use alongside your reading of the Bible, other than to trust the people who told you to begin with that there was a great apostacy, and I'll be frank, what do we see in the LDS church? Change? Lots and lots of change. Way more change than you see in the early church, I think, which is ironic. So the LDS person can't even truly put their trust on the history of the last 200 years or so because things have changed that radically.

This is why the living prophet is so essential to the L d s faith. If you're going to be L D s, you're going to believe in your set of scriptures, which includes the Bible for the most part. Not discussing the fact that Joseph Smith tried to do his own translation of that, and the fact that the Book of Mormon itself had changes, but even beyond that before all of that, [00:55:00] really, you need to trust in the current prophet of the day.

Who might be saying something radically different from his predecessors, but it's okay because those other prophets were trustworthy in their time, but not necessarily right now. The one we can trust is the one who's right there in Salt Lake City right now. You see they've created a nice moving target so that things can be adjusted whenever it seems right to the prophet to do so.

This is why the living prophet is so essential, because he, not scripture, not church tradition, needs to be the ultimate authority, the ultimate trusted source. whereas in the Christian tradition, yes, there is plenty of disagreement over the centuries, but there are certain things that you can dig out from all of that that are entirely agreed upon that have never changed, that have never been adjusted.

But these are also not our only sources of trust. We also need to ask ourselves, where does science and philosophy fit into our spectrum of sources? Because I assure you that they do they fit somewhere. and what philosophy? As [00:56:00] far as I've been able to figure out for my own self, I think both modern philosophy and science can play useful roles.

And these include formulations of systematic theology. But I have chosen to land on biblical theology and studying the Bible in context so as to bring out the application from there rather than bringing modern philosophy back in with me. Now, here's why I say we need to carefully examine ourselves because I know I don't entirely manage to do that.

I know that I actually do bring modern systems back to the text with me. To some extent. I try to ferret out where that does happen and decide if I'm okay with that, because we need to be able to understand the Bible from the structures we have currently, and I think it's okay to do so. I mean, that's part of what the New Testament writers did with the Old Testament, isn't it?

They began to understand the Hebrew Bible in ways that the original Hebrew audience would never have dreamed. So there's precedence for this, but we ought to be aware of it. That's what I'm saying.[00:57:00] Be aware of what you're doing, where you are, what systems and structures form the basis for your belief system and make peace with that decision.

If you're not comfortable with that, if you see a need for change, then do so painful as it might be. I'd suggest though, at minimum base your foundation on something, unchangeable, something that has the best explanatory power of a wide variety of things in life, rather than a pillar that you cannot predict something solid.

And this is where we get into the topic of believing loyalty and how that ties things together in what I see in my own experience. This episode is apparently going to be long because I don't want to stop right here, so I'm just gonna keep talking about what I wanna talk about. And this episode is going to be as long as it needs to be.

Believing loyalty is a term I got from Dr. Heiser. There are other ways you can express the same idea. Matthew Bates has done some amazing work on the topic of faith and allegiance. I'll give a brief rundown for those not [00:58:00] familiar. Believing loyalty is connected to faith. But what is faith? Many people define faith as something that you mentally believe is true.

Like, yes, I believe in Bigfoot. I do not believe in Bigfoot. Those are types of belief. But do you have faith in Bigfoot? Having faith in Bigfoot would mean more than just the fact that you believe he exists. Having faith in Bigfoot means that you trust something in regards to him. So having faith in God is not simply that, yes, God is there in some sense, but God intercedes in my life in some way that I will trust him with something.

I will trust him for something. And so trusting in Christ, believing in Christ, having faith in Christ, having believing loyalty in Christ, all of these things are yes. You believe he exists. It's presumed that you believe he exists. It's presumed that you believe he did what he did. there's a [00:59:00] reciprocal faithfulness that comes between you and Christ himself. I talked about trusted sources before, but now I'm, I'm talking about trusting in the person of Christ or the person of God. And it may come as a surprise to you, but when Christ was here on earth, he asked people to do things.

He asked for repentance. He asked for certain types of behavior in response to knowing that the kingdom of God had been ushered in, and now people were to follow him. Sometimes people followed him for their own reasons.

They were curious. Maybe they wondered what he was doing. Maybe they just wanted to be healed. Maybe they liked the miracles, but those who truly had faith in Jesus followed him because he was their king, he was their leader. it was a declaration of loyalty.

This connects to the topic of grace, which We think of grace as a free gift, right? Well, [01:00:00] actually, back in the day, the understanding of grace was that there was a reciprocal action going on between the one extending grace and the one receiving grace. If you are receiving grace from someone, that meant that you. Owed them your loyalty. You were meant to be loyal in response to their free gift to you. So it was actually much more reciprocal than we often are taught that it was.

So what does believing loyalty mean? How does that play out in your life? well, we can see how it played out in the lives of the disciples and the lives of the people. In the early church

lives were changed. People were baptized into the church,

Gentiles were brought in.

If you don't realize how much change happened during Christ's life and just after, you're not looking very closely at history.

So having believing loyalty means that you are putting your trust in God and no one else. It means that you are trusting in God for your salvation, for your very existence [01:01:00] and your very walk with Him.

He is the source of light and truth and justice and everything else in your life,

I am tempted to go on a little bit of a tangent as to why it's necessary for the Spirit to be God and for Christ to be God, and for God to be God. All of those things altogether because we are having faith in . God the Father who sent Jesus. We're having faith in Jesus and we're having faith in the spirit, and all of those members of the Trinity are wrapped up in what we need to believe in as far as believing loyalty.

Maybe some of you are sitting there thinking, wait, God expects something of us. Well have you read the New Testament? There's actually quite a lot of expectation that's circulating around in the New Testament. It's not like Christ came and said, there you go. Now you can just do whatever you want. No, people were expected to have their lives changed. People were expected to behave in certain ways. People were expected to be baptized. People were [01:02:00] expected to be part of a local church, a local congregation.

You can't have discipleship without the idea of faithfulness in this way without the idea of believing loyalty. So believing loyalty means allegiance to God, allegiance to Christ, allegiance to the one who can truly save our allegiance is not in the Bible. Our allegiance is not in a created being of any kind. Our allegiance is to the sovereign creator of the universe who came down into creation. And died. For us, it means we take seriously the fact that we are God's imagers here on earth. We are to represent him. We are to live that way. And the reason we can do that is because of the spirit in us. Because Christ is dwelling within us and has made that possible so that we are the image of God and we are being conformed to the image of his son. Both of those things together belong as part of our believing loyalty walk. [01:03:00] So believing loyalty includes the element of discipleship. You are actively following Christ as your teacher, as your pattern for life. What we're not saying about believing loyalty is that it is a works-based. Salvation. You are not actively doing things for Christ in order to be saved. You are doing it as a response to what he has done. You are doing it because the Holy Spirit is genuinely inside of you, changing you in ways to enable this to happen. So this is not the kind of thing where you're picking yourself up by the bootstraps and I'm gonna go follow Christ because I can.

No, you're doing it because you are enabled to change your life in order to fully be the image of God that you are. So am I saying that I had believing loyalty to God back when I was Mormon? Yes, I think I did. And I don't think that's necessarily [01:04:00] uncommon. So wait, you're asking me now, does that mean Mormons can get to heaven?

Well, look, the question of who's saved and who's not is not up to us. That that's God's providence, right? But here's something to consider. Institutions are not people. So there's a difference between an institution and what it says, and a person's actual lived out believing loyalty if you're part of an institution or society or anything like that. Are you the perfect example of that? Is there anyone that you can really point to that you know, epitomizes that institution? Well, usually not because we're all individuals and we all vary in subtle and specific and important ways we talk about society, like it's some cohesive thing that that exists on its own.

And it does in a sense. [01:05:00] Institutions are the same way. An institution truly exists in a real way. And it's made up of individuals, but that doesn't mean that those individuals can be equated to the institution in a one-to-one correspondence. In addition, I question how much knowledge that we actually need to affirm in order for salvation to be effective in our lives.

Is salvation bound up in knowledge and correct knowledge? If it is, we're all kind of in trouble. What about Christian creeds? Aren't those important Notice they aren't in the Bible?

Yes, I affirm them, but surely you can have a Bible believeing Christian who doesn't understand the creeds, right? Now, I said before that it's really quite important that we have Christian tradition and that we allow that to play. Its part in our interpretation of the text, and I stand by that firmly.

But again, is that knowledge what's important to our salvation?[01:06:00]

Why does it bother us so much that we have particular points of belief that we need to have people affirm or else they're not Christian? Is it that knowledge that's really essential to our salvation, or is it the person of Christ?

Is it having his life speak into ours for salvation to be effective. Now, I think it is fair to talk about these passages that Paul brings up of did you believe in a different gospel, even if an angel came and proclaimed to you a different gospel you should not believe it. And yes, so there's a sense that I think that we need to hold accountable the originators of the l d s faith, as far as this is concerned, either they were deceived or they lied. Either way, there's a responsibility there. False teachers surely have great responsibility in what they are teaching. So please don't mistake me there. Peter has a lot to say about that in his writing.

But notice he's talking about believers who are [01:07:00] being deceived by false teachers. It's the false teachers who are in the wrong. The believers need to be brought back into proper discipleship in order to follow the truth. And Peter doesn't go and lay out the arguments as to why they're false teachers.

He just brings forth the truth of the gospel to show the difference of what the people are being taught by them and what the apostles were truly teaching. We get all up in arms about this is false and this is false, and I'm gonna show you how it's wrong.

Well, that can have its use, but why not just teach the truth? Why not just show people? Look, here's the real reality of things, and if they see it, they'll get on board. If they can't see that, they're not gonna be convinced by you knocking down their things that they already trust. It was just the same when I was in my L d s apologetics phase.

Now, here's what I think is actually a tough question. Do they believe in Jesus Christ? They [01:08:00] believe that they do, and this is a major disconnect between the way Christians talk to LDS people and the way LDS people talk to Christian people. It's like, you don't believe in Jesus. We believe in the same Jesus. No, we don't. It's, it's a big argument all the time, and there's no good way to settle the debate to anyone's real satisfaction, each side is just going to assume that they're right.

But here's something for your consideration. They read the Bible and then you might say, but, but they don't understand Christ's nature. And my answer to that is, oh, really? You think you understand it? You think it's really that clear, but you say, They have to affirm the divinity of Christ. Guess what they do as far as salvation goes the divinity of Christ is essential and core to their faith. Christ is the Yahweh of the Old Testament, just as Christians affirm. Now, do I think that that's a way that makes salvation [01:09:00] makes sense? No, it, it does not I, I don't think that their formulation of the nature of God makes sense in light of Christian salvation, but that's just a strike against the reality of what they say.

I believe that the Christian formulation of the nature of God is essential to the fact of salvation. Knowing that is not essential to the fact of salvation. Just the fact of it is necessary for salvation to make sense. And I get it. It's a fair point to say that when an LDS person says that Jesus and Satan were brothers, then you're suggesting that Satan is in some way a positive figure.

But notice we're talking about Satan's nature there, less about God's nature . And you might be annoyed at me when I say this too, but having a theology of Satan is also not essential to being saved. In their defense, why does an LDS person claim that they are in fact, [01:10:00] Christian?

Well, they read the Bible. They believe that Christ did everything that he did in the Bible, they affirm that Christ is the Messiah who suffered bled and died for sin, and who was raised again and is exalted at the right hand of God. They believe also that Christ will come again to rule. So far, that doesn't sound like a different gospel to me.

Now, if somebody wants to add into that, the idea that we will rule planets ourselves after that, that that's part of the gospel message and that's part of why Christ died, then yeah, that might be a problem. The gospel is centered on Christ's glorification and any glorification that humans get beyond that is still to point to the glory of Christ.

It's never ever a truly human centered message. So what do we do with the fact that they have so much that's wrong compared to what Christianity has? Well, I was wrong for half of my life now, or [01:11:00] whatever what happened to me? I think that that was a path of discipleship. What if you took a Mormon friend seriously when they told you they believed in Christ?

What if you approached it as a discipleship thing where you tried to bring them closer to Christ? They might not like that, and that might indicate where their true loyalty lies. They might not trust you, and so that's where you need to center your efforts. Look, I'm not saying that the stuff the LDS church teaches is not wrong, but I was wrong for a long time. And it was much more fruitful to have people treat me like a disciple rather than trying to evangelize me and tell me how wrong I was when I felt like I was an outsider. It was a battle when I felt welcomed, it was a conversation. I wanted to be treated like family and do family disagree?

Of course they do all the time.

You probably have family members who are on all kinds of wrong [01:12:00] paths. Do you alienate them or do you bring them in?

The basic problem is on an institutional level, really,

and when you're both primed and ready to go to bat,

then you're missing the relational element that could be at play.

Am I saying that we should invite L d s people into our churches to teach things? No, of course not.

But you wouldn't even do that with a Christian without knowing exactly where their theology is.

I took a class last year from a guy who does Christian apologetics from an LDS perspective where you're trying to, to reach LDS people, right.

He kept equating the l d s church to the Roman Catholic Church because he was coming from a very reformed Protestant understanding of things that felt like nails on a chalkboard to me. A lot of times he thought, well, l d LDS people and Roman Catholic people, they're, they're both the same because they both preach a different gospel because they both preach a gospel of works

well. There's plenty of Protestants who actually approach [01:13:00] faith just the same way, and I think having an understanding of believing loyalty can help correct that to understand that works need to be a part of our faith, but they're not part of our salvation anyway. It just showed that many branches of Christianity are very exclusionary with one another, not let alone bringing in something like the l d S Church.

I don't personally like that. I, I think that Christianity should be united around those who have believing loyalty in Christ. I'm happy crashing anybody's party and joining in on worship with anyone who claims that because I don't get to be the dictator of who has believing loyalty with Christ and who doesn't.

I think all of this shows that no matter who you are. There is such a need for discipleship. There is such a need for instruction. There is such a need for the body of Christ to come together as one. Now as I finish up, maybe I should touch on why I think it's so obvious that the LDS sources of trust are not actually [01:14:00] trustworthy.

Joseph Smith obviously claimed to be a prophet, and he himself said that if what I say doesn't come to pass, then I'm not really a prophet. And that happened again and again and again. But that kind of information is just kind of ignored, slid under the car seat and said, well, we just won't look at that or explain it away. In some sense. It's also not right to throw away the Bible as a bedrock of truth, which Joseph Smith effectively did by saying the Bible is true when it's translated correctly. And he supposedly was writing a new translation, but he never finished it. So if you can't believe in the Bible, then how do you really believe in Christ?

I don't think that's where most l d s people are, though I, I think most of them absolutely accept the Bible. I've already mentioned how I don't think it's a great idea to have a living prophet be your. Source of truth because the living prophet can change his mind. And prophets have again and again proven time and time over that they have changed the [01:15:00] ideas of previous prophets, not in small ways, in very big important ways.

They also firmly believe in the ordinances of the temple. But those ordinances have also been changed time and time again. However, I think one of the most obvious mistakes of the LDS church is that book I mentioned earlier, the Pearl of Great Price

back in the time of Joseph Smith,

Egypt was a big deal, and mummies actually toured the country.

Mummies were a big deal. And it was a little bit strange, like people would grind them up and drink them for health reasons. So it was really sad because we lost a lot of great history, no doubt, through all of that. So, because all of these Egyptian artifacts were circulating around, Joseph Smith got a hold of a copy of, uh, part of the Book of the Dead, I think it was. Which has an image of a priest performing a mummification. Well, from the perspective of Joseph Smith at the time, because nobody knew a whole lot about Egypt, yet the Rosetta Stone hadn't been discovered, had not been [01:16:00] translated. So nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphics.

So the priest who was doing the embalming looked like he was sacrificing someone. And Joseph Smith thought that that was Abraham sacrificing Isaac. So he wrote these books that were supposedly translated from these papyri, papyrus, piracy, whatever.

And he said, this is, this is actually Abraham and these Abraham's words, and this is the book of Moses. But we can read Egyptian. Now we know what those images are. It's not Abraham sacrificing Isaac. That's an in, that's that's a priest embalming someone. And yet this is literal scripture in the l d s church.

I am not gonna lie, it boggles my mind that that doesn't dismantle more people's faith. But anyway, I truly think that there's deception and wrong teaching going on, but there's like a compounding effect that goes on there. And who is responsible for what, because [01:17:00] remember, we all have our trusted sources and it's really rare that we actually examine those as closely as we should.

So for your average l d s person,

they might be wrong, but does that necessarily indicate that, that they can't have believing loyalty to the God of the Bible? Obviously, in my experience, I would say it's, it's certainly possible. And for those listening, that's what I'd ask of you. I'd ask, do you have believing loyalty in God? is he your center? Is Christ's work what you're laying claim to? Is that what matters to you? Here's the secret. We all come to scripture with some sort of twisted idea that we are importing into it. That's just a natural given, and that view can and will and does twist every interpretation we have, so that depending on what kind of idea we're importing into scripture, it can seem really, really wrong to somebody who doesn't have [01:18:00] that view, who isn't importing just those ideas into the text.

I know a lot of people want me to come really hard down onto this and say, the LDS church is twisting scripture, and every LDS person who affirms that is twisting scripture, but is that what they're doing? I'm just suggesting that we shouldn't accuse people of twisting things when really they're just coming at it from a very different perspective.

Might be wrong, doesn't mean it's twisted. All right? So I could really just keep rambling on, and maybe I'll get to some more points on this later, but I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up. Maybe now you understand a little bit more of why I love biblical theology so much. I am very grateful for my faith and I'm grateful for all of the people in my life who have helped me along this path in various ways.

I do hope that I haven't unduly offended my LDS friends and family in all of this. I hope that we [01:19:00] can all learn more about Christ Together and follow a path of discipleship together. That's my wish. For everyone who listens, for everyone who interacts with me, I appreciate you listening to this extra long episode.

If you enjoyed listening, please consider rating my podcast where you listen to it. Uh, maybe liking my Facebook page that is associated with the podcast, and also I believe you can rate it there as well. I also have a Facebook group that you can join to discuss whatever I'm talking about here and an email address that you can email me with questions or comments or whatever at genesis marks the spot@gmail.com.

Thanks to Wintergatan for the music, and I wish you all a blessed week.