In this special episode, Sarah Allen, Jennifer Roach Lees, and Zachary Wright host a panel discussion on the topic “How Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals understand the Bible differently.”

Panel participants:

References in this episode:

The post Me, My Shelf, & I – How Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals understand the Bible differently appeared first on FAIR.

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about more about grace and works. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

Before I get started I just have to say….It was so fun to meet so many of you at the FAIR conference last week. So many of you have lived lives of long-term faithfulness to this gospel and yet you are kind enough to embrace a newcomer like me. I have never once felt unwelcome or unloved in this church – and to me that is a testament to the gospel. We have all these people who have just lived lives of patient faithfulness and it shows up in all parts of who they are. And, you know, I’ve got to do a lot of really cool things in our church over the last few years, and sometimes people are surprised that I’ve been in the church less than 5 years. But, I will tell you what, almost all of that has been through people I met at FAIR. I’m so grateful. My understanding is that the talks will be available online sometime this week. I gave a talk on my research into how the church handles sexual abuse on Friday afternoon and I encourage you to take a listen when it’s available. It’s totally outside of the scope of what we’re doing here – so I’m not going to recap any of it – but if that topic interests (or worries!) you at all, find my talk and take a listen. I’m sort of embarrassed to tell you this, but also so incredibly proud – every year FAIR gives out an award called the John Taylor Defender of the Faith Award to a person who has made a significant effort toward the work of apologetics and this year they gave it to me. I’ve read the list of recipients from years past – I consider many of them friends and all of them colleagues in the Gospel. It’s a huge honor to be listed with them. And I feel so grateful for being honored like that.

Okay, so today we’re going to talk about grace and works. This is the third of, I think, 6 times we will address it – each time from a slightly different angle. Today’s scripture jumping off point is Roamans 3:23-24:

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Now, I don’t know any Latter-day Saints who read that verse and say, “No, absolutely not. This is not how it works.” And in recent years there have been a number of General Conference talks and other teachings about the importance of grace. If we were just tracing Latter-day thought on this topic there isn’t very much interesting in the way of debate. We believe Paul when he says we are saved by grace. Which is part of why conversation about grace gets difficult with Evangelicals. The traditional line would be something like, “You guys don’t believe in grace.” And Latter-day Saints get confused and say, “No, I’m pretty sure we do…” Sometimes they can quote statements from the past that are not part of our teachings to “prove” we don’t believe in grace. And the conversation goes downhill from there.

Evangelicals here are very similar to other Protestants – and there is history here. We have to go all the way back to the 5th century and talk about Pelagius. He wrote about how to be a Christian while the Roman Empire is disintegrating. He came from Briton to Rome and is actually the first known British author. He was condemned as a heretic in 418 in a complicated series of trial that were trying to hold him responsible for things he said – as well as things that were said in his name. This might sound like ancient history but even in 2018 there was a major book, 400 pages, called The Myth of Pelagianism, so its still alive and well in theological circles. Anyway, the main charge against Pelagius is that he denies grace – while the opposite camp Augustinianism says that grace is all you need. What happened was Pelagius is a British Monk and he travels to Rome. While living there he observes the lax moral standards of the Christians living there. Sometimes this period is called “Late Antiquity” and during this century there are lots of wars between the Goths and Byzantines. It’s essentially the last vestiges of the Roman Empire as it once was and morals have mostly collapsed in all of society, including among the Christians. So, Pelagius shows up, sees the moral decay, and starts to preach and teach that people need to use their will to choose to do things as God would have them do. Neither the political leaders nor the religious leaders like what he is saying – and there was a lot of moral corruption in the Catholic church at that time – so they have him declared a heretic. They actually find him guilty at 3 different trials – one while he was alive, and then after he died they were still so mad at him that they had 2 more trials and found him guilty again, even though he was already dead.

Now, Pelagius was actually wrong about plenty of things, and I’m not here to defend him. Im telling you all of this because this is the history that is playing in the background. Many – maybe most – Evangelicals are not going to know this history in specifics. But they have been handed down a tradition for 1600 years that says they shouldn’t ever say anything except that grace is all one needs and putting out effort toward good works doesn’t really matter.

Evangelicals also went through a repeat of history in the 20th century on this. I covered this in one of my earlier episodes but Evangelicals used to be called Neo-Fundamentalists. The term fundamentalist was coined in the 1920’s around the time of the Scopes Monkey Trials which had to do with the increasing acceptance of evolution in science. But by the 1940’s the fundamentalist movement had really fallen apart. And after WW2 there were a number of younger leaders who had grown up in the fundamentalist heyday who wanted to revive the enthusiasm of those days. They initially call themselves neo-fundamentalists, then later neo-evangelicals, and then later they drop the neo and just call themselves evangelicals.

And what this early group of Evangelicals really wanted was to not be seen as they saw their grandparent’s generation -as a bunch of old fuddy-duddies who had all kinds of rules for church that had to be followed. Billy Graham rises in fame during this period in part because of this cultural mix – people who were interested in the saving grace of the gospel, but none of the rules for behavior. They wanted people to preach to them that Jesus would save them – without also telling them that their behavior needed to reflect the fact that they had been saved. It was kind of late-Rome all over again. And while those details are probably too many decades past for most current Evangelicals to know, the culture they have is steeped in this.

So, whether they know it or not, Evangelicals have been taught that grace is good and works are bad. Never mind that the New Testament teaches over and over about what kinds of behaviors Christians should have. “Works” is a trigger word for them – its not based in the Bible, it’s based on their own history. I’m not saying that as an insult, but rather as a way to maybe help you think through other ways to talk about this stuff. If they’re using the word “works” with you, you now know what they mean by it. You might be able to shift the conversation toward a different way of saying the same thing out of respect for the amount of baggage that word carries for them.

Latter-day Saints are sometimes told by Evangelicals that we must “pray to accept Jesus into our hearts” and not rely on grace at all. But if you tell an Evangelical that you absolutely have Jesus in your heart they will tell you that you have the wrong Jesus so it doesn’t count. In other words, you must have the absolutely correct understanding of Jesus and if you err even a tiny bit, the whole thing doesn’t count. How are you to gain this perfect understanding of Jesus? You must be taught by the right kind of teacher and accept their teaching before your prayer will be accepted. The whole thing is based on the actions – or works – of the individual. If the correct actions, the correct beliefs, the correct prayer do not take place then the person is denied salvation. If this weren’t true they would easily accept us as Christians too, but they generally don’t because we have not done their version of works. They can’t see it as works, but that’s what it is.

Here is my suggestion if you want to have this conversation with an Evangelical loved one….skip the works/grace language. It’s so culturally and historically loaded that it’s really hard to get to the actual meaning of what’s being said. The reality is that both Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals believe grace is important, and believe works are important. They don’t necessarily see their works as “bad” works – they see our works as “bad” and it’s all just a muddle. Maybe instead try to talk about all of this in their language. If you wanted the video from last week about testimonies this is a good place to start. When an Evangelical gives their “testimony” they’re telling you the story of what their life was like before they found Jesus, how they put their trust in him, and how their life is different now. If you can “borrow” that language it might put them more at ease to see that you too are a believer in Christ who might have something to offer them. I actually had a conversation last week with someone who didn’t know I’m a Latter-day Saint and he was going on about “those Mormons” when he stopped himself and said, “you know, I’m sure that at least some of them must know about Jesus and love him – how could you not love Jesus if you really knew him?” And I thought that was a beautiful bridge because as it turns out there are an awful lot of members of our Church who know and love Jesus.

Well, that is what I have for you this week. If you’re interested go check out the FAIR Conference videos this week. Would love to hear what you think – there’s a little bit of something for every level of geeky interest. Come back next week and we’ll do some more.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Romans 1–6 appeared first on FAIR.

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about apostles. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

I will remind you about the FAIR conference August 2-4 in Provo, Utah. You can buy tickets and come in person, or you can stream online for free. Go to FAIRLatterdaySaints.org to sign up for streaming. I am speaking on Friday, so you can come hang out with me. But I also want to tell you about a new podcast FAIR has going called, “By Study and Faith.” It’s hosted by an up-and-coming young scholar named Zachary Wright. I met Zach when he was still a missionary and have been impressed with how well he gets what the Disciple-Scholar model is all about. The basic idea of which is that your head and your heart don’t have to be in competition. The scholar makes the disciple better – and the disciple makes the scholar better. He has a few episodes out already and the one on how to evaluate evidences is very good. There are so many areas of evidences that can be explored – this is what apologetics is all about – but you have to have a good understanding of how to evaluate sources or you get off-track pretty easily. And Zach’s video is a great introduction to that topic. So go give him a listen.

Okay, so today we’re going to talk about Apostles. What actually is an Apostle? What makes someone an Apostle? Why do Evangelicals have such a different way of understanding this topic? The Come Follow Me readings are working our way through the New Testament and we’ve arrived at Acts – or Acts of the Apostles. Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals would easily agree that the Apostles mention in the New Testament are true messengers. The word “Apostle” literally means, “messenger” or “one who is sent.” The question becomes, “Who is a true messenger?” In our view, a true messenger is one who helps the people know what to do to follow God, to stay true to the instruction they’ve already been given. And a false messenger is one who leads the people astray, burdens them, exploits them.

Why wasn’t the apostleship passed down?

Often Latter-day Saints wonder with something like, “Maybe the Apostles forgot to pass it down?” Or, “Maybe they didn’t know they were supposed to?” As if the Apostles all died without ever trying. So this is not the common understanding for Latter-day Saints, but Peter actually does pass on his authority. He ordains Linus to follow in his place. Linus ordains Anacletus who ordains Clement 1. We use the word “Pope” to describe this role today, but what they’re doing is handing down authority to act in God’s name. My thinking is that they did try to pass it down. But there is a difference between passing it down and having that priesthood honored and respected. I know men in the church, and you probably do too, who appear to be “priesthood holders in name only.” They’ve been ordained to the priesthood – but they do not bear it in any recognizable way. If you follow the story of what happens to the generations that follow after Peter, you can see how this plays out – fast-forward to the year 950 and we get Pope John the 12th. He’s ordained as Pope at age 18 and things pretty much play out how you’d expect they would if a hormonal teenage boy was in charge of the church.

Evangelicals don’t disagree with this storyline. They would call Pope John the 12th a bad example of priesthood too.

Evangelical View

The Evangelicals certainly can talk about how they see the original apostles as being the only ones, and they have verses they use to explain that. But more likely their view can be summed up by saying that Apostles are no longer needed because we have the Bible and the Spirit to listen to.

If you’ve listened to very many of these episodes that won’t feel surprising or non-sequitur to you. Evangelicals are very focused on the importance of the Bible and are very confident in their ability to interpret it correctly. It’s a very anti-Catholic stand of, “I can interpret this on my own and don’t need an authority to help me do so.” There’s a theological level understanding (their biblical evidence that no new apostles are needed) but there is also a cultural level understanding that says each person is charged with being their own Apostle, as it were. They are the ones who must decide what is true, how to interpret it, and how to apply it. The idea of, “true messengers,” isn’t really a category for them. Evangelical leaders, pastors, and others are only “true’ to the degree that the individual agrees with them. It’s probably easy for Latter-day Saints to see all the ways in which this can go wrong, but if we’re looking for the best version of Evangelicals on this they’re doing it because they’re very worried that someone might corrupt what has been handed down. So they only can trust themselves, and not necessarily what they’re taught.

This is really well illustrated in the story of Rob Bell.

Bell was an Evangelical pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He started a church there in 1999 with the idea that other Evangelical churches had become focused on the wrong things and church should be stripped down to its basic elements: Worship and teaching. 5 years later they have 6,000 members and people around the world were downloading Rob’s sermons – at the height up to 50,000 downloads a week. Bell is very clearly a talented teacher (he was actually an adjunct at my Divinity School and I took homiletics from him, which was a wild class.) He writes a book, makes a video series with a huge following, goes on a speaking tour. He’s basically one of the hottest things in the Evangelical world at that moment in time. He’s 30 years old and struggling in all the ways that you might imagine a 30-year-old would struggle who has been shot to that kind of fame. But he’s created this huge empire that now employs hundreds of people and thousands of people are relying on him for spiritual guidance. And he’s wildly successful at it. People love him.

But in 2011 he writes a book that pushes against the traditional beliefs of Evangelicals that those who have not made an profession of faith in this life will be tortured in Hell for eternity. Honestly, the book doesn’t even push that hard. In our church we have a full-blown theology about how that isn’t true, and in Bell’s book he just gives some pushback to it. But people turn on him in an instant. The book was released in March of 2011 and by November that year he was forced out. He’s the leader (and founder) of this huge church, but the people he’s leading don’t agree with his new book (I would actually say he gets a lot of things right in that book) and he’s no longer considered a worthy teacher. This is the epitome of why Evangelicals don’t accept Apostles. Evangelicals generally love, and sometimes worship, their leaders – until that leader says something they don’t like or don’t agree with and then they’re canceled as soon as possible. The individual Evangelical is the one who decides what is true, and which new ideas are worthy of being considered. If you remember many episodes back we talked about their fierce independent streak. This is how that streak comes out when we’re talking about Apostles.

So, how do you talk with your Evangelical friends or family about this in any helpful kind of way? Their worry is that by following an Apostle we Latter-day Saints are giving up our autonomy. Unfortunately, there are some portrayals in the media that feed into this -the idea that Latter-day Saints are only allowed to think or read certain things and can never have questions, or never take our time to come to a testimony of certain things. In the realm of church culture, not theology, Evangelicals don’t have a very well-developed idea about, “developing a testimony” of something benign true – at least its not nearly as well-developed culturally as it is for Latter-day Saints. Evangelicals are never going to use the phrase, “I know my church is true.” That’s just not in their culture – it would require them to give up the independent spirit of, “I am the final authority.” A conversation about why you have a testimony of certain things would probably really resonate with them.

Okay, shorter episode today – but it makes up for all the other times when I’ve kept you long after class should have been over! Come back next week and we’re talking about the Holy Ghost. See you then.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Acts 1–5 appeared first on FAIR.

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Atonement Theories. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

And this video might be slightly different than some of our other ones where I’m doing a bit more compare and contrast, in this video what I really want to do is help you, Latter-day Saint, to understand what your Evangelical friends are taught about the Atonement.

I will remind you about the FAIR conference August 2-4 in Provo, Utah. You can buy tickets and come in person, or you can stream online for free. Go to FAIRlatterdaysaints.org to sign up for streaming. One of the presentations you will not want to miss is Jenny Reeder talking about the Eliza R. Snow project. I am a huge fan of Jenny’s. She is a PhD historian in the Church History Department. I was at a history conference last weekend where she spoke a few times and she was fantastic. She is a historian’s historian. I am very much looking forward to what she has to say about one of my favorite figures in church history, Eliza Roxy Snow.

We are still in the Gospels and have arrived at the portion dealing with the specifics of the crucifixion. It’s impossible to point to a single verse that summarizes the atonement – and as you will see, that is part of how we arrive at this episode. We’ll start with some history.

100 A.D. At this point it’s been about 60ish years since Jesus’ death and resurrection and he has not returned. Most of the early believers thought he would return in their lifetimes, and he didn’t. There had even been a bit of a sense of, “We don’t need to worry about all the details, or how to pass this stuff down the generations, Jesus is going to come back and it will all be fine.” But that was not Jesus’ plan, so they’re sort of scrambling to figure out how to form a coherent theology out of what is left. Jesus’ apostles are dead by now. Sometimes Latter-day Saints are curious about WHY the truths of Christ were not properly passed down – and this is one of the biggest reasons, in my opinion – they all thought Jesus was coming right back. So now they’re having to think about how to make sense of the story of Jesus in a different way than they were previously doing.

That, “how to make sense of the story of Jesus,” is where the idea of atonement theory comes in. Atonement is about the meaning of Jesus’ death/resurrection as well as the effect it has for humans. Evangelicals – or every more widely Protestants and Catholics – are not saying that they have a theory about Jesus’ atonement as in, “I don’t have proof, just a theory.” They’re using that phrase to describe the various ways of explaining what is happening in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The first guy who is writing very much about this is Justin Martyr, but a lot of what he wrote has been lost so we pick up most of what we know about his theory from the next guy in line, Irenaeus. He was born in Turkey but is later sent to France as a Bishop. His tomb existed in France until about the 1500’s when it was destroyed by the Huguenots (French Protestants.) Anyway, Irenaeus popularizes Justin Martyr’s eary attempt at understanding the Atonement in what is now called the recapitulation view of the atonement. In this view, Christ is seen as the new Adam who succeeds where Adam failed. Christ undoes the wrong that Adam did and, because of his union with humanity, leads humankind on to eternal life (including moral perfection).

Latter-day Saint friends you will notice two things here….1) This view hinges on the idea that what Adam did in the Garden threw humanity off course. William Barclay says about this theory, “Through man’s disobedience the process of the evolution of the human race went wrong, and the course of its wrongness could neither be halted nor reversed by any human means. But in Jesus Christ the whole course of human evolution was perfectly carried out and realised in obedience to the purpose of God.” So you can see here, there is no sense of a “fortunate fall.” There is a sense that God understood a Savior would need to be provided, but that’s as far as they can go. The other thing you will notice here is 2) the phrase, “moral perfection.” During this time there was still a belief that becoming like God actually meant becoming like God. For Irenaeus, the ultimate goal of Christ’s work of solidarity with humankind is to make humankind divine. He says that Jesus, ‘became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself’. [Irenaeus, Against Heresies Preface to Book 5] This idea is taken up by many other Church Fathers, such as Ss. Athanasius, Gregory, Augustine, and Maximus the Confessor. This Eastern Orthodox theological development out of the recapitulation view of the atonement is called theosis (“deification”), and they still hold that as a belief. But all other Christian groups (Protestants and Catholics and others) have lost that plain and precious truth. It’s us and the Eastern Orthodox here. So, that’s what the recapitulation theory is – “As man is God once was, as God is man may be.” But that theory mostly gets lost and the next one to take it’s place is called the Ransom theory.

Ransom theory replaces the recapitulation theory around the year 400. Robin Collins explains it this way, “Essentially, this theory claimed that Adam and Eve sold humanity over to the Devil at the time of the Fall; hence, it required that God pay the Devil a ransom to free us from the Devil’s clutches. God, however, tricked the Devil into accepting Christ’s death as a ransom, for the Devil did not realize that Christ could not be held in the bonds of death. Once the Devil accepted Christ’s death as a ransom, this theory concluded, justice was satisfied and God was able to free us from Satan’s grip.”

Latter-day Saint friends, you will recognize less and less of what you know to be true in these theories as we go along. But this theory does make a very charming children’s story. If you remember in the Narnia books…why does Aslan have to die? Because the Queen reminds him of the “deep magic” and that magic is, in fact, the atonement theory being worked out in Narnia – which is that Aslan’s death must be a ransom to satisfy that deep magic. This theory is the prevailing theory all the way up until the early middle ages – which is not surprising that CS Lewis chose to use it in his books, he was a scholar of the middle ages. Lewis later says that he prefers this theory because it allows us to think of ourselves as participating in Christ’s death and not something that happens without us being involved. But around 1100 another theory starts to gain popularity, the Satisfaction Theory.

This theory uses the metaphor of the relationship between a Feudal Lord and his people. The people live on land belonging to the Lord and are expected to produce some of their crops in exchange for living there. If the people do something wrong that harms the land, they must pay for the damages. In this theory Christ is punished instead of us. So in Ransom theory, Christ is suffering to overcome death itself. But in Satisfaction Theory he is suffering that honor or possession has been taken away, and must be paid back. The debt must be satisfied. The peasants must pay back the Feudal Lord for the damage they did to his property. But they are peasants and can’t afford to pay for the damage they caused, so Christ pays the debt for them and the Feudal Lord is satisfied.

There is also a rival theory during this time called the Moral Influence Theory of Atonement which says that God was trying to influence humanity by showing a great act of love in sending Jesus. That theory doesnt last long. It morphs into what is called the Moral Exemplar Theory which means that Jesus provided a good example for us in obeying his Father even to death and that we should do likewise.

Neither of those last very long and 500 years later they have morphed into what is now called Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

Penal Substitutionary Atonement removes the Feudal Lord metaphor and replaces it with a courtroom metaphor. “Penal” like “penal code” means that a law has been broken. They’re no longer thinking of “property damage” as much as they are “rule-keeping.” A law has been broken and the criminal must be punished. The judge in this scenario is Heavenly Father and he is angry at his rules being broken, so someone must be punished. Christ steps in and takes the punishment for us because we could not bear it on our own. Still today this is the Atonement theory most Christians hold. But there are others.

By the 18th Century there is a popular theory called the Government Theory of Atonement which basically says that God wants needs to maintain Divine Justice and he does through through a government system. We’re in the 1700’s and obviously there is a lot of thinking about what government is during this time and so this theory picks up that metaphor to say, “The atonement is really about God running a good government.”

We also get the Christus Victor theory which is a modernization of the Ransom Theory. In this theory, Jesus is battling powers and comes out the winner. There are also a whole variety of newer theories…There is a Feminist Atonement Theory, an Accident theory, many more.

One of the reasons I wanted to go through all of these and spell them out to you is so that you can see how the further away from the time of Christ we get, the more that has been lost, the more the theories change and sometimes even get weird. Saying that plain and precious truths were lost is no joke. Some of these theories see themselves as offering salvation to anyone – some see it as limited atonement that is only for some.

One thing you might notice in most of these theories is that God is mad or offended and has to be appeased. And I will compare that to what we believe. In our view, we existed with God before we were born. He sends us to Earth to learn and grow but knows that will come with making some terrible mistakes, including some deliberate decisions to disobey him. Those things would pile up and we would never be able to return to God. So he sets out a plan from the beginning that Jesus Christ will offer forgiveness and a lifetime of opportunity to repent and get back on track so that we can return to the presence of God. Our ability to repent and come back to God is only possible because of Jesus’ role as Savior. We live a life practicing repentance so that we may return to him. “As man is God once was, as God is man may be.”

Thank you for joining me for all of this. I hope it gives you insight not only into what other people are thinking about the atonement, but so that you can better understand our own beliefs about the atonement. Join me next time – we have one more week in the Gospels and then we move to Acts and that will be fun. See you then.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 27; Mark 15; Luke 23; John 19 appeared first on FAIR.

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Easter and Jesus. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand.

So, you are probably watching this video sometime in April or later. Dear people of the future, I hope the sun is shining and it’s warmed up because I’m recording this in February and the sky just dumped 1 foot of snow.

This week’s topic is a tiny bit different because of Easter. We jump forward in the readings from earlier in the Gospels to the events of Easter this week, we’ll go back and pick up the rest of the Gospels after this. So I don’t have a particular scripture that encompasses the question for this week, but it goes something like this…”Don’t Latter-day Saints worship a different Jesus?”

I’ve you’ve been following along you know that this is our 3rd episode on Christology and there are many aspects to this question. We’ve already talked about the question of, “Is Jesus God?”…and “If Jesus is ‘the son’ doesn’t that prove the Trinity?”…and the question of what worshiping or praying to Jesus looks like. So if you’re interested in those aspects see the earlier videos. And there will be more in Christology coming up, including the ever-popular, “How can you say Jesus and Satan are brothers?” But for today I want to focus on the basics of beliefs about Jesus as Evangelicals or Protestants express them in one of the most important Creeds in mainstream Christianity, the Nicen Creed.

First we need to talk a tiny bit about Creeds as a concept – meaning figuring out even what are they?

So one of my early questions when I was investigating the church was: Aren’t the Articles of Faith a creed? They certainly read like a creed. Afterall a creed is, “a brief authoritative formula of religious belief.” And the Articles of Faith are brief, they’re authoritative as evidenced by the fact that they are found in our standard works, and they spell out our religious beliefs. It’s confusing right?

But the way a creed functions is something else. A creed is not just A statement of belief for a faith group….It is THE statement of belief for that group. That is, it means, “here is what we believe and nothing can be taken away, modified or added.” For Latter-day Saints this doesn’t make any sense when you set it next to the idea of ongoing revelation. You can’t have both. Either you can nail your beliefs down at a single point in time and demand that no changes ever be made OR you can say you believe in ongoing revelation so here are our beliefs but when God reveals more, we will believe that too. So it’s not so much that we disagree with what is contained in a traditional creed – though there is some of that – it’s that we disagree with the entire concept of having a creed because that means saying official revelation is closed.

So what happened was there was a guy named Arius who argued that, “if the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is evident, that there was a time when the Son was not.” This is a heresy called Arianism.

As a side note….if you’ve been paying attention to these videos you remember in the very first week we started talking about this question of, “Was Jesus created?” Your Latter-day Saint ears probably heard that and thought, “Who in the world is even talking about this stuff?” Well, this is a very old heresy that has been talked about since the 300’s and Evangelicals have historically misunderstood Latter-day Saints as believing this. In theological conversations a really bad insult to throw around is that someone is an Arian, meaning they believe this heresy. And Evangelicals think we believe this – that Jesus has not always existed.

So back to the Nicene Creed. Constantine is Emperor at this time and he has made Christianity the state religion. And he’s a smart guy, he can read the tea leaves and see that Arius and his teaching are going to destabilize the entirety of Christianity, and thus the entirety of the Holy Roman Empire. So Constantine asks the leaders of the church to come together and hammer out what the church actually believes, and they do it in a city that was then called Nicea. It’s now called Iznik and it’s in Turkey. If you follow the news you know that some really bad earthquakes recently happened there. The earthquakes were in the southern part of the country, and Iznik is in the northern part, near Istanbul (which used to be Constantinople, named after Constantine.) So the leaders of the church meet in Nicea and want to lay down, once and for all, what the church beleives so that Arias gets knocked down. The creed was a collaborative effort, though there are three main authors called the Capadocian Fathers. They’re from Capadocia (which is also in Turkey, and on my bucket list of places I want to visit. Just google it, it’s gorgeous.) The Cap Fahters are two brothers and their good friend. In the background is also their sister. Her name was Macrana and they all called her The Teacher because she was said to understand theological concept more deeply than any of them and helped them make needed connections. There is a bakery in Seattle named after her. So the three Capadocian Fathers, with Macrena in the background, really are the ones who hammar out the creed.

So the question – the reason we’re going down this path at all – is to ask: What does the Nicean Creed say about Jesus? I’ll read you the section about Jesus…

“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”

The only place a Latter-day Saint would quibble here is in saying that Jesus is, “One being with the Father.” In English it sounds a little softer than it does in Greek. In English we can almost imagine stretching that phrase as far as it can go and landing on an understanding of the Godhead that is kind of close to what we believe. But in Greek, which is what the Creed was written in, it doesn’t stretch. The Greek word is Homoousious – meaning, “the same substance.” This is exact spot they take a left turn into Trinitarian thinking and end up having a hard time disambiguating God the Father and Jesus Christ.

I point all of this out because it’s a really interesting example of how Latter-day Saint has taken a creedal statement – that is a statement that is supposed to be set in stone – and applied ongoing revelation to it in a way that undoes the exact left turn that got taken in 325.

I think you’re able to see from here that there are a number of ways to approach the question from Evangelicals of, “Do you believe in the Jesus of the New Testament?” A plain answer would be something like: Yes, that’s exactly what we believe in, and we’ve corrected the error that was introduced 300 years later. But it gets difficult here because Evangelicals do a really normal and human thing at this point. You know, from standing in 2023 looking back over history the year 30 AD and 300 AD seem like pretty much the same thing. If I asked you to tell me 5 developments that had happened over those 300 years, most people couldn’t do it. 30 AD and 300 AD are pretty much the same thing to folks in 2023. So when your Evangelical friends have a hard time seeing the difference between what is taught about Jesus in the New Testament, and what is taught about Jesus in the Creeds, they’re not being difficult or obstinate. They’re just standing in 2023 and can’t squint hard enough to see the difference between the NT and Nicea.

I had a missionary ask me recently, “Do Evangelicals literally think that we believe in another boy named Jesus, who also had a mother named Mary, who grew up at the exact same time, and had the exact same things happen to him?” And no, that’s not what they’re saying when they ask if we believe in the same Jeus. What they mean is that their concept of Jesus has been shaped by the Creeds just as much as it has been shaped by scripture. We might say they have an extra-scriptural book called “the creeds” that they have been shaped by….while they would say that the Creeds are just a summary of what is already in the New Testament. They’re sort of color-blind to the difference between what is in the NT and what is in the Creeds.

So in the 1990’s when Gordon B Hinkley says that we don’t worship the traditional Christ, the Evangelicals lose their minds over it. Because they think the traditional Christ (that is the Christ portrayed in the Creeds) is identical to the Biblical Christ. They can’t tell the difference.

Our rejection of Creeds enables us to embrace a correction to an error that was made by really well-meaning people, long after Christ and the Apostles were gone. If that isn’t the best news ever I don’t know what is. We are not stuck with the burden of someone else’s mistake just because they thought we should be bound to it forever.

The reality is that we share a deep love of Jesus with our Evangelical friends. The vast majority of items we agree with them on, and where we don’t, it’s because we are open to God’s ongoing revelation.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation and have a bit more understanding of why and how this rift happens, and maybe how to talk about it instead. Join us next time and we’ll get to work again.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities.

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Easter appeared first on FAIR.

This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. Please join us for the 2019 FairMormon Conference coming up August 7-9! You can attend in person or purchase the video streaming.

Lynne Hilton Wilson, Peter and Paul’s Paradoxical Passages on Women

Transcript available here.

Dr. Lynne Hilton Wilson lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband Dow R. Wilson. She is mother to seven children—all with red hair. During her under-graduate years at BYU in 1982 she studied nursing and the cello. She received an MA in Religious Studies from Cardinal Stritch University. Her thesis explored Christ’s birth narratives in the New Testament. She received a PhD in Theology and American History at Marquette University where she focused her dissertation on Joseph Smith’s doctrine of the Spirit compared to his contemporaries. She has been an adjunct professor at BYU and iis now the Stake institute director and teacher in the Menlo Park, California Stake for the Stanford single wards. She has written three books and published several papers. She is a popular speaker at BYU Women’s Conference, Education week, the Society of Biblical Literature, the Mormon History Association, Sperry Symposiums, and many others.

Audio Copyright © 2018 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.

The post FairMormon Conference Podcast #32 – Lynne Hilton Wilson, “Peter and Paul’s Paradoxical Passages on Women” appeared first on FAIR.

This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This episode is a presentation from 2017. If you would like to watch the presentations from the conference we had earlier this month, you can still purchase video streaming.

Scott Petersen, Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever: A Restoration of Primitive Christianity

Transcript available here.

Scott is the Executive Director of the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at BYU. Under his leadership the program has been ranked in the top five of all collegiate entrepreneurship programs for each of the past seven years, ranking #2 in 2016. He is also the Founder and Chairman of Omadi, Inc., a venture backed SaaS mobile CRM platform for workforce management, serving the towing/transportation markets. Scott is a long time entrepreneur having co-founded or partnered in building seven companies (harvesting four), including several current ventures. Additionally, he serves on several business and private foundation boards. In 2005, Scott published a significant work, titled Where Have All The Prophets Gone?, a historical, theological book on early Christianity using the Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Apocrypha, the Dead Seas Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library, and all of the extant early Christian writings. In 2014 Scott published his second book, Do the Mormons Have a Leg to Stand On?: a Critical Look at LDS Doctrines in the Light of the Bible and the Teachings of the Early Christian Church. Scott and his wife Marilyn are the parents of 5 married children and they have 15 grandchildren. Scott serves as Stake President of the Provo Utah YSA 4th Stake.

Audio and Video Copyright © 2017 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.

The post FairMormon Conference Podcast #12 – Scott Petersen, “Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever: A Restoration of Primitive Christianity” appeared first on FAIR.

In the concluding podcast of this series Karen talks about the prophecies of Jesus. The scriptures consist of 66 books, with over 40 authors, [and] were recorded over a span of 1500 years; they contain heavy prophetic threads. If we just think about a few books—take Daniel, written 500 years before Christ, and the meticulous descriptions of the rise and fall of the empire of Alexander the Great. This just makes us marvel at the consistencies of those prophecies. How about Zachariah, who in advance truly describes the crucifixion of Christ; and Isaiah, of course, writes of how Christ would suffer. Through these miraculous and historical writings, we really come to see the perfect person of Jesus Christ. Dave, welcome. Let’s set the stage for reviewing and sorting through some of these prophecies.

You can find the complete transcript at ibelievepodcast.com.

This series of podcasts were produced by the “I Believe” podcast group. They are used by permission of Karen Trifiletti the author of this work.

As always the view and opinions expressed in this podcast may not represent those of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint or that of FairMormon

The post Mormon Fair-cast 330: #9 Is the Bible an authentic source of truth? appeared first on FAIR.

D.M. Johnson and I are back in this second-to-last podcast on the authenticity of the Bible. Today, we discuss undersigned coincidences. Undersigned coincidences are events or things in the Bible that could be coincidental, but there are just so many that they add up to real, compelling evidence.

As D.M. explains, “It becomes a little bit ridiculous to insist that all of these things are just purely happening by luck or some kind of random circumstance.”

We’ve got plenty of examples of such undersigned coincidences, from both inside and outside the Bible, including:

Jesus healing the sick;

The apostles keeping silent after the events on the Mount of Transfiguration;

And Jesus feeding the 500.

We invite you to join us on this podcast, and again, to read and study the Bible for yourself. It truly is God’s word.

You can find the complete transcript at ibelievepodcast.com.

Read more: http://ibelievepodcast.com/1825/8-points-authenticity-bible-undesigned-coincidences-8-9#ixzz3JdTQNCy4

This series of podcasts were produced by the “I Believe” podcast group. They are used by permission of Karen Trifiletti the author of this work.

As always the view and opinions expressed in this podcast may not represent those of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint or that of FairMormon

The post Mormon Fair-cast 319: #8, Is the Bible an authentic source of truth? appeared first on FAIR.

Critics and skeptics have long attacked Jesus’ Resurrection. Why so?? Well, in short, if the Resurrection can be disproved, all the other claims about Jesus Christ can also be dismissed. Christianity would crumble.

In this cast in the I Believe Podcast series on the Authenticity of the Bible (its reliability, not its perfection), guest D.M. Johnson and I will review much of the evidence which shows that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a validated, critical, wonderful historical event.

We’ll use the minimal facts approach, which means we’ll be looking at five key facts from the New Testament which can only be explained by the Resurrection.

Please join D.M. Johnson and I as we discuss this crucial area of Christianity. As always, we invite you to turn to the Bible yourself; it’s easy for some to hide behind the veneer of study and intellectual pursuit, to the exclusion of never coming to know whether or not something is true which comes by reading, study and sincere prayer which God alone can answer personally. This doesn’t exclude due diligence in any way, shape, or form, but means that once we have done that, we must come to a point of appealing to God for our ultimate witness and knowledge of truth. We are equipped to know it.  I witness that you can receive a witness that Jesus was indeed and is indeed Resurrected, if you will honestly ask from a desire to know. I assure you that God will speak to you in a language and way that you will understand.

You can read the complete transcript of this podcast here.

Read more: http://ibelievepodcast.com/1831/8-points-authenticity-bible-evidence-resurrection-7-9#ixzz3IunhhVcq

This series of podcasts were produced by the “I Believe” podcast group. They are used by permission of Karen Trifiletti the author of this work.

As always the view and opinions expressed in this podcast may not represent those of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint or that of FairMormon

The post Mormon Fair-cast 314: #7, Is the Bible an authentic source of truth? appeared first on FAIR.