Theology Trumps Salvation?

I spent Thursday evening speaking with some anti-Mormons at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. At one point a young fellow said to me that I just needed to accept Jesus and be assured of his Grace, through faith, and I could be saved. I told him I had already done so. He said I had not accepted the idea of only Jesus' grace to save me, and I said that was true, since the Bible and LDS scriptures make it clear that one must do certain things, such as be obedient (Hebres 5:8-9), endure to the end (Matt 10:22; Mark 13:13) and of course be baptized (John 3:5; Acts 2:38; Mark 16:16; Acts 22:16; Titus 3:5; 1 Pet 3:21).

Then he said "But you believe incorrectly about Jesus." I replied "What?" He said that because our theology of how God and Jesus relate to each other, then my understanding is not sufficient for salvation.

I replied that would mean all of the first and second century Christians were also not saved, since I believe what the Bible teaches about Jesus, and not the silly Trinity stuff. I said the early Christians had no idea what the Trinity was about, and if I am lost by his criteria, then so are they. I told him that theology is a luxury unneeded for salvation in the face of the scriptures.

What would you say?

Was there a First Vision?

Many times it is asserted that there is no contemporary evidence for the First Vision having occurred.  But it should not come as a surprise this is not true, as Richard Anderson published a beautiful, insightful and well documented article in BYU Studies in 1969 (9/3(1969):373-404), entitled Circumstantial Confirmation of the First Vision Through Reminiscences.

There are several things from this article and elsewhere which I will mention.
1.  In The Reflector, February 1831, they report a correspondent from 1830 talks about Oliver Cowdery's preaching in Ohio which affirms "Smith had seen God frequently and personally."
2.  Edward Stevenson reports he heard, around 1831, Joseph Smith preach about the First Vision.
3.  Lucy Mack Smith placed the timing of the First Vision after 1819 religious revivals, but prior to the 1823 death of Alvin.  She inserted Joseph Smith's narrative exactly as found in the History of the Church.  This means she has the correct timing, and perfectly endorses the timing of the First Vision found within the account itself.

These are obviously all post 1830.  Doesn't anyone remember something closer to 1820?

YES!
4.  Pomeroy Tucker, a vicious enemy of the LDS faith, was a childhood friend of Joseph Smith and the Smiths' from 1816 when they moved to Palmyra, until he left for work in 1820, returning in 1823.  In his 1867 history of Mormonism, he makes numerous statements which affirm something happens in 1820.  For example, he notes Joseph Smith, as a "youth", prayed "in the wilderness" and had his first vision.  He takes Orson Pratt's pamphlet on the First Vision as the guiding text, but adds several personal recollections to the text.  In other words, he accidentally, as an enemy, confirms it.
5. Orsamus Turner, who was another childhood friend of Joseph Smith, left Palmyra in either 1821 or 1822.  Among other things, he asserted in later writings there was no foundation to the idea that the Book of Mormon was copied from Spaulding.  But more importantly for our discussion, he recalls that Joseph attended a Methodist Camp Meeting down on Vienna Road (1819), and tended to them.  When combined with Tucker's statement that Joseph's "blasphemies" about God led him to withdraw from the Methodists around 1820, we have the main points of the First Vision confirmed.

Matt Brown noted that in the 1832 account of the First Vision, written by hand by Joseph Smith, Joseph notes that after God manifest his will do him, the Lord appeared.  This account was in Oliver Cowdery's possession when he wrote his 1834 account of the founding of the Church.  It seems obvious that the emphasis of Joseph Smith was on the restoration of the true church of God, not his personal vision.  We see something akin to this in Paul's writings.  Though we have three accounts of Jesus appearing to Paul, none of them are told to us by Paul.  They are reported by Luke in Acts, not in Paul's letters.  Paul focuses on doctrine and Church government.  He obviously told his story at least twice, based on Luke's account in Acts.  He surely told it more than that, as he is recognized by the Church as an Apostle.  But Paul's vision is never cited as authority or any purpose except to establish that Jesus overcame death.

So when people say things like there is no contemporary reports of the the First Vision, note the newspaper account, Lucy Smith's account, Pomeroy Tucker's account, and the fact that Joseph's entire family believed him, and stayed with the Church.  Let's compare:  The earliest accounts of the resurrection of Jesus were written 20 or 30 years after the Resurrection, and have many contradictions.  Thursday or Friday supper?  Etc.  Does that affect the reality of the Resurrection?  No.

So the First Vision evidence is excellent.  It did happen.  Even Joseph's critics acknowledged it.

Enjoy.

Mormonism in Mark 16:16, Faith and Ordinances= Salvation

I posed the question months ago to two folks, who never answered, so let's make it a headline:

Please answer directly, according to Mark 16:16 what does Jesus say it takes to be saved?

16he who hath believed, and hath been baptized, shall be saved; and he who hath not believed, shall be condemned. (Young's Literal Tranlsation, 1898)

This is Jesus talking. It predates all of Paul's writings. Many scholars believe Mark used the source material quoted in the Gospels much more literally than any other of the Evangelists.

The passage is remarkable for several reasons. First, grammatically it weighs faith and baptism equally for salvation.

Most non-LDS try to grab the second half of the verse for justification to ignore the parts they don't like in the first half. Jesus says, "he who hath not believed, shall be condemned."

I am not really interested in what it takes to be condemned. Anyone can be condemned. Just ignore Jesus. What I am concerned about is what does Jesus expect of me to be saved?

Believe and be baptized. In equal force. Belief is the intellectual part, so to speak, the motivational force. Baptism is the physical obedience. The requirement to not just think about salvation, but do something as well.

The letter to the Hebrews clearly recognized this:

"Although he [Jesus] was a son, he learned obedience through the things he suffered. 9 And by being perfected in this way, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him" (Heb. 5:8-9, NET Bible).

So it is a simple request I make: Tell me why I should ignore Jesus' direct statement about what it takes to be saved, instead trying to parse from what it takes to not be saved to ignore the command to be baptized?

If I truly believe LDS doctrine is Biblical doctrine, and I do, this passage stands like a lighthouse in the darkness of false doctrines about salvation. On the other hand, for those who profess "sola scriptura", it will be interesting to hear why such a direct, clear and unqualified statement by Jesus, the author of eternal salvation, should be ignored.

Leaders Fighting Amongst Themselves

I remember how I was told a story about the president of the Church snubbing a group of new members. Seems he was of a different social status than they were, and it just wasn't cool. I often wonder what those members thought. Here you have a brand new Church, a relatively new, 1st generation prophet, and constant new "convenient" revelations to sort out the differences from the Bible. And the president snubs you in public.

Then one of the members of the quorum of the twelve (or fifteen, if you count everyone who was called an apostle at the time), actually called the prophet out. This junior member of the quorum of the twelve had a reputation for being a hot head, in fact was known to be super opinionated, and even wrote things the Church had to remind everyone could be misconstrued. He routinely sounded authoritative, even as he would put in the caveat "this is my opinion". He also would routinely attack traditions people brought with them from their previously traditional accepted faiths.

The Church was accused of being filled with leaders lacking faith, lying about visitations by Jesus, and even denying the traditional beliefs about God. Oh, and the errors in the revelations, don't even get me started. They constantly received new "revelations", and then would actually edit the Bible to support their "convenient" revelations. They didn't write down their supposed eyewitness accounts for 20-50 years after the events transpired, and then they were accused of colluding on those accounts. They constantly argued over which translation had errors, and some of the leaders even speculated that Jesus was married, and they explained to be "born again" meant water baptism.

Still, when the president of the Church was confronted with his bad behavior, he admitted he was wrong privately, but never wrote or publicly admitted to correct his errors about treating people so inconsiderately. How is that for perfect leadership?

Some of you by now have probably figured out exactly who I am talking about. Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery? Maybe David Whitmer? Bruce R. McConkie? Or Brigham Young and Orson Pratt? No.

Peter and Paul.

Peter famously quotes Joel in his speech on the day of Pentecost. But he quotes a form not found in any Hebrew or Greek form. Paul free-style quotes the Old Testament constantly in his writings. The fight goes on until today whether the Majority Text tradition is correct or the Alexandrian texts, for the New Testament; and there are thousands of changes between the Masoretic text used for the King James Bible, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The supposed "Q" source for the New Testament Gospel accounts of Jesus' life assume that Matthew and John did not actually experience and write down their own original thoughts, and that Matthew, Mark and Luke copied from some unnamed source for up to 90% of their content.

Peter and Paul of course argued about Peter being afraid to openly associate with the Gentile converts around the Jewish converts. Paul got into such an argument with Barnabus, they actually split up and went different directions. Peter wrote to warn the saints that Paul's writings were sometimes difficult to understand. Peter never admitted he had been chastised by Paul, as Paul describes it in Galatians. Justin Martyr explicitly explains that to be "born again" meant to be baptized in water.

Anti-Christians accused the Christian disciples of being atheists for not believing in the official version of deity. Everyone accused the Christians of stealing Jesus' body, or even that he did not actually die.

Those who do not study history, stupidly repeat it. New Revelation is never accepted as authentic by the majority of the population where it is received. No one, or almost no one, argues with the baptists, Presbyterians or even the street preachers to any great degree, about doctrine. They may not like their methods, but the lies of Hellenization and the Etruscan culture adapted to create the traditional "Christian" Jesus hundreds of years after Jesus and the Apostles passed on, are what made today's Christianity what it is.

The truth is, our leaders are very, very flawed people, and always have been. That has nothing to do with whether God is using the weak things, the imperfect things, to bring about the salvation of humankind. He does today what he has always done: Tells us to listen with our hearts, and at times hold our noses, and believe he still speaks to us. Change is inherent in following a living, speaking Christ.

The Believable Book of Mormon

I believe the Book of Mormon to be true. I would even go further to say that by the power of the Holy Ghost, I have received the unmistakable testimony from God that it is true. I consider that a great blessing and a precious gift to have received such knowledge. When I was not committed to the Church, I did search for truth as an 18-19 year old, and I was exposed to the harshest criticisms of the Church and the Book of Mormon then available, including the Tanner's "Changing World of Mormonism" and Walter Martin's various works available back in 1979. I wasn't born a Mormon, and my family was completely inactive after having joined the LDS Church in 1976. So no one was forcing me or tricking me or coaching me. There was no guilt trip or sense of debt to anyone in the LDS Church. I had been a very good debater, I was a well educated student, and I seemed to do well on tests of ability to reason and think. So I came at the Book of Mormon with a simple desire to know if it was true, and a willingness to walk away if I found it not to be believable. I was raised Lutheran and attended many different Christian churches, so I wasn't "against" any faith or position. My best friend eventually went on to become a pastor of a Four Square Church in Idaho.

So I had an open mind. I still do, but that is getting ahead of things.

The first thing of huge import is the Book of Mormon has witnesses besides just Joseph Smith. And the closest of those witnesses all left the Church and in Joseph Smith's lifetime did not return. The two closest to Joseph Smith of the three, Oliver and Martin, later returned to the LDS Church. Oliver was actually present for angels visiting to confer the priesthood on two separate occasions.

I read how there was some talk that the witnesses, Oliver in particular, may have denied his witness. This was proposed by the Tanner's because a poem included a statement indicating Oliver may have done so, and the author said it did not matter. The Tanner's were being deceptive even publishing that, which I discovered, as the poem was reacting to a false report made about Oliver. This caused me then to become very careful in uncritically accepting as "facts" statements of critics. Sure a member of the Church published the poem and thought Oliver had denied his testimony. But it was false. Presenting responses to false statements without providing the context is to lie by omission.

I have learned the critics of the LDS faith do not feel any need to be balanced in presenting history of LDS doctrine. So I now always review their supporting information before I will accept something as factual. This is not based on just one incident. It is literally based on hundreds, maybe thousands of such interactions with both printed material and individuals.

So we have witnesses. What did they witness? Of the 11 people who are listed as witnesses in the front of the BOM, 10 actually held the plates and handled the individual pages (only David Whitmer did not). They saw the engravings, the color, the binding and lifted them to feel their weight. They did so in broad daylight. They did so in groups, usually. There is some controversy about whether two groups of four or all eight at once saw the plates. No real matter. Oliver and Martin were alone with Joseph when they handled the plates in the open.

Now the plates were actually quite heavy. Joseph let many people handle the plates and lift them while they were covered up. Maybe 16 or more people that I can count. The reports are the plates weighed between 30-60 pounds. That is not really much of a range if you lift a solid block of metal and then guess at the weight.

William Smith would later say the plates were a combination of copper and gold. All of the witnesses said they had the "appearance of gold". Moroni is quoted as saying they were "gold plates". All of these statements are consistent with a material used by Meso-American tribes called Tumbaga, which is a alloy of copper and gold, and depending upon that mixture, would have weighed about what the witnesses said the plates weighed. This is remarkable because Joseph Smith and the witnesses would have had no knowledge of Tumbaga, or its link to Central America.

Next, the text of the Book of Mormon is miraculous in its consistency. The work done by Royal Skousen on restoring the original text of the Book of Mormon is amazing on many levels. But what we find is a document which is not just the helter-skelter dictations of someone trying to crank out a book. It is consistent and complicated.

The text has had several in-depth studies done on "word printing". It is obvious from these studies (Hilton in 1997, Todd K. Moon, 2006, "Document Author
Classification using Generalized Discriminant Analysis")the Book of Mormon was not composed by Joseph Smith, only translated by him. This makes the case for the Book of Mormon being from Joseph Smith's mind extremely unlikely. Hilton's study also disqualified Solomon Spaulding and Oliver Cowdery. If not these folks, then who wrote it? The studies simply state there are unique author traits in the texts, so the authors are unknown. The most logical answer is they are those individuals whose names are on the books within the Book of Mormon, barring evidence of other composers.

But if there was other authors, where are there notes, books or for that matter their statements? Unlike the pictures we usually see in Sunday School of Joseph Smith behind a curtain with his finger on the plates translating, we know he actually was almost always in the open, initially wearing a breastplate and the Urim and Thummim attached to the breastplate in a sort of weird pair of glasses, then later putting his head in a hat with a seer stone. Those who commented, specifically Emma who was there, said he had no papers or books, and she would have seen them. I once challenged Dan Vogel, as an ex-LDS critic and perhaps the most scholarly critic of LDS history, to memorize 3 days work of the Isaiah passages, and then quote them back. That would be about 27 pages. Of course, you don't get to have a Bible around, since we know they did not have one present during the translation according to the witnesses present. And we will then make allowances for changes to the text at the same rate as Joseph Smith's dictation amends the Isaiah sections. Vogel declined, saying Joseph must have had a Bible. Really? You have witnesses present who say he did not, and your position is they are lying? Wouldn't Martin Harris and Oliver, both ex-communicated and humiliated at their leaving of the Church, mentioned this, even if false, to attack Joseph? I say even if false because they could have made the claim and why would they have cared, they were no longer in the Church? Because they knew there were lots of witnesses who saw how it was done. Vogel and the critics have no case that Joseph Smith actually wrote or copied the Book of Mormon from someone else' work. This evidence is very much on a par with the physical reality that there were gold plates. Because we can test the text and we have witnesses. And the witnesses obviously told other people, or else folks would not have constantly be trying to steal the non-existent plates he was translating.

The next item is the content of the text itself. As my friend Steve Smoot has pointed out on several occasions, Joseph Smith did not realize how "Hebrew" it was. He actually tried to edit out the "Hebrewisms" from later editions. However, we now know these unusual and non-English-style sentence structures are good Hebrew. And in his lifetime, Joseph Smith never claimed such a style to be present in the Book of Mormon. He doesn't say "See, there is Chiasmus and Hebrew sentence forms all over in it, proving it is Middle Eastern in its origin or influence." No. He goes the other way. Edit them out after the fact. Never comments on them. Hmm, its like he doesn't recognize they are there. Like he was just a translator or something...

Much has been made of the some "4,000 changes to the Book of Mormon". I always thought that was important. Until we looked closer. Editorially, if you count every comma, spelling and sentence structure change, Royal Skousen says there are closer to 100,000 such changes in a text of 400,000+ words. Is this a big deal? No. First, out of all of the changes, 99.5% were strictly to make the text more readable and are scatter across a dozen editions. Secondly, there are at most 50 some changes which could be considered significant in terms of doctrine for those not believing in prophetic direction. The addition of "son of..." to "God" in term describing Jesus, or the "pure" for "white" change describing the change to come to the Lamanites. How does this compare to the Bible? Well, there are at least 250,000, perhaps as many as 400,000 variations to the New Testament text in terms of spelling changes, word additions or deletions and word order changes. Since they did not include punctuation (that is added to translations, it is not in the Greek). Some of the changes are rather important. The last half of the last chapter of Mark, for example, is not considered by most textual scholars to be original to the text. 1John 5:7-8, the only text to fairly explicitly teach the doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible, is nearly universally rejected by scholars as a late (300 AD)addition to the text. Jesus being ministered to by an angel in the Garden of Gethsamane is not found in the earliest manuscripts, but is quoted by Justin Martyr, and found in later editions. The commentary on changes sold by United Bible Societies, which publishes the most widely accepted version of the Greek NT, lists over 3,800 changes they feel merit comment, out of which about 50 or 60 are such they admit they don't know what should be included in the text. The Book of Mormon suffers no such issue as to holes in the text.

The Old Testament does not fare much better. The main reason there are few variations in the Hebrew text of the Bible is because, (drum roll please), in the 10th Century AD the Rabbi's of the world met to decide what was the original text, and they destroyed all copies from earlier times. Fortunately we got the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, and they became widely available in the past 10-15 years. We now know there are thousands of variations in the text. Actually, tens of thousands. Some entire verses were left out. Some verses changed to hide the original belief that there were many real gods (Compare Duet 32:8-9 in the King James Bible and in the NRSV). The King James Bible followed the tradition, edited text from the 10th Century AD. We know now the Greek and Samarian versions contain variants which legitimately belonged to the original OT.

So do all these variations matter? I don't really think so if you recognize that people are involved in passing the text along, and God can restore it as he decides to make it available. You can still find God in the Bible. He just never tells us to pray to know the Bible is true. As we can now tell, for obvious reasons. He still, however, instructs us to study it.

Another example of things worth considering in the Book of Mormon are all the things which Joseph Smith "got wrong", which turned out he got correct. Examples such as Alma being a man's name. The existence of Nahom, and it being on the trade route in Arabia. Jerusalem being the location of Jesus' birth. Barley being in the New World. Cement in Central America. The kinds of "swords" used by Native Americans. A great list of these are found in a talk by Matt Roper, now on FAIR's website.

Brant Gardner's work on the historical accuracy of the Book of Mormon's Meso American setting is equally compelling. There is a lot of information, and links to videos, etc, at this web page.

I think those are probably the big ones. That is, except for the witness of the Spirit. I would lie if I said there have not been issues which troubled me to some degree as I made my way through the various criticisms of the LDS Church. So it was that my Spiritual experiences, after I had studied out the issues of the Book of Mormon to the degree I was able, helped me wait to see the big picture. If the Tanners or Walter Martin repeatedly distort history because they think the bigger cause is to get people out of the Church, rather than being accountable ministers to God, then I don't have to panic when I read their latest attack. I also need to have the intellectual maturity to realize that what passes as normal or abnormal today is completely irrelevant to early LDS history or Bible or Book of Mormon history. Faith is complicated in that way, even as it is simple. I need to realize God wants me to follow him in order to obtain a witness of his work (John 8:31-32). It is only by the Holy Spirit, not by reading and studying, one can come to know Jesus is real (1Cor 12:3). For those troubled by history or science or even doctrine, I can't prove anything. But I think the case FOR the Book of Mormon and the Gospel of Jesus Christ restored in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is good enough to be worthy of exercising faith, and then not forgetting to be true to that witness.

Dan Peterson said in a talk, after evaluating the fact that Joseph Smith apparently never needed to actually see the plates to translate them, that the purpose of the plates is the proverbial thumb in the eye of critics. You cannot reasonably prove the LDS faith is false unless you can provide a plausible case against the existence and content of the plates. The plates are a historical reality. That is what the evidence says. Therefore the Church was restored. Joseph Smith was a prophet, right down to Thomas Monson today. The plates are enough to cause us to exercise a particle of faith, and come and follow. That particle, when nurtured, will grow into a full blown, saving witness. (Alma 32:26-43; Luke 8:4-18)

It is my desire this brief exposition can provide a context for those seeking evidence for why they should believe in Jesus Christ and the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.