I’d like to begin my presentation (there should have been an outline that was handed out that you have in front of you). But I want to begin a bit off outline. I was amused- I was reading this morning that we have (and Chris Buttars is a good friend of mine) and he’s wondering whether he should introduce intelligent design into Utah schools. And I was thinking intelligent design? Chris is a Mormon and he probably doesn’t even realize what he would be teaching isn’t Mormon cosmology.

And I was reading another article—as a matter of fact just last night—about how the Big Bang proved this story of Genesis and I was thinking, apparently the people who read- who know all about the Big Bang have never read Genesis. (Laughter)

CONTINUED HERE

The post Classic FAIR – The Fallacy of Fundamentalist Assumptions – Blake Ostler, 2005 appeared first on FAIR.

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Hi friends, and welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. If you wondered if you missed last week’s episode, it wasn’t you, it was me. And sometimes life is like that. Several of you reached out with kind notes asking if I was okay and I’m grateful for your caring. And here we are, back on track now.

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 also wanted to tell you….I got to run up to Salt Lake this last week and participate in a preview of Come Follow Me for next year. There are some structural changes in the manual that will likely make it easier for families as well as new material that was not in the manual last time we went through it 4 years ago. I got to take home a physical copy and honestly, if you have kids I recommend getting a physical copy. The digital copies have access to all of the children’s activities, but you will have to print things out and the physical copy has everything in one place.

So, I’m behind a week and here is how I’m going to solve that problem. Today you’re going to get the content from last week, and I’m going to combine the text for this week and next into my episode for next week – they’re both in Revelation and it’s easy enough to cover in the same talk.

Okay, today we’re going to talk about the Holy Ghost from last week’s readings. One of the questions I’ve received at least a couple of times in the last year goes something like: How can Evangelicals claim to have the Holy Ghost, I thought our church was the only church with authority to give the gift of the Holy Ghost. And it’s a good question, you can see why it would be confusing because Evangelicals absolutely do claim to have the Holy Ghost, though they’re much more likely to refer to him as the Holy Spirit. So, what is that like for them?

We’ve talked about this a bit before on this show regarding the “charismatic” or “pentecostal” side of the Evangelical world, but what about the rest of them? Because here is their dilemma: There is no possibility for new authoritative revelation. So anything they feel from the Spirit does not have the same idea underpinning it that God can reveal new things. In fact, they are warned against believing that God might reveal something new to a person through subjective means. Whatever they hear from the Spirit will be echoed in the Scriptures, and that is now they know it’s true. The problem, of course, is that there are millions of choices a person has to make over the course of their lifetime that the Bible does not address, and can not address specifically. They have to take broad principles from the scriptures, apply them to what they feel the Spirit is saying, and only move forward if they see a match. Some of this is a very good safeguard – they have a good understanding that the Spirit is not going to tell them to do something wicked. If you boil the whole endeavor down to it’s most basic parts the idea you’re left with is that the Spirit can remind them of things that the Bible has already said, He can contextualize things the Bible has already said, but not much more.

And in some ways, dear Latter-day Saint friends, they have it easier. They view the scriptures as a check-and-balance against the subjective experience of hearing the Spirit. It’s a cleaner process, far less messy. There is another way they have it easier, but it doesn’t always work out fo them very well – that is they have no one above themselves telling them what the scriptures or Spirit are actually saying. The vast majority of them are going to make an honest attempt to listen to both scripture and spirit in an open way that allows God to guide them. But we little humans are excellent at self-deception, even when it comes to spiritual things. It’s very easy to mistake one’s own desires for the Spirit. We have this problem too – all humans do – but our risk is mitigated a tiny bit because we have a Prophet who can give a final word on big things. We don’t need – or want – to have a Prophet giving us exact directions on every single thing. But there is some rest available in the fact that we’re not left alone to figure it all out by ourselves. The difference here for Evangelicals is that they do accept pastors and others to teach them, but those teachers are employed by the will of the listener. If the Evangelical person does not want to listen to a particular teacher or pastor, they don’t. And they feel no compulsion to see that person in authority. While Latter-day Saints are much more likely to see the goodness of having someone with authority being able to teach us.

So, do Evangelicals have the Holy Spirit? I will speak for me, not the church, not FAIR, just myself. Long before I knew very much about our church at all, I know that I had the influence of the Holy Ghost in my life -guiding me, teaching me, leading me. At the most basic definition, that is the gift of the Holy Ghost. So, what’s different now that I’ve joined this church, been baptized and confirmed? Well, honestly, it’s not a lot different in terms of feeling the Spirit and allowing him to lead me. The difference is the presence of covenants.

In the Evangelical church someone can hear the Spirit, and as long as it confirms basically what is in scripture, then it’s considered a good thing. For me, now as a Latter-day Saint, the Spirit’s role is to provide a broader kind of guidance that allows me to do the things I’ve already been asked to do, or promised to do. It’s not about confirming the scriptures – it’s about how do I live out the covenants I’ve made. Now, there are Evangelicals who believe in covenant theology, but the role o the Spirit is still kind of stuck just being able to confirm what scripture says. And I’m sure other people’s experience is different than mine, I can only tell you my experience.

Okay, that’s about all I’ve got to say on that. Next week we’ll do Revelation – which is always weird, but 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 – 1–3 John; Jude 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 priesthood of all believers. 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.

It is Thanksgiving week here in the US, so happy Thanksgiving if you celebrate. We got snow on the mountains here in Utah County, so there is plenty to be thankful for in these parts. I hope it’s a week of gratitude for you too, no matter where you live.

Okay, today we’re going to talk about one of the most misunderstood verses in the New Testament when it comes to conversation between Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints: The priesthood of all believers. We’ll start with 1 Peter 2:5:

You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

Now, no Latter-day Saint that I know of would disagree with that verse or verses like it. There is no quibble as to if this is a good verse translated properly or not. The question becomes what does it mean by “priesthood”? And as with most things, digging down a little into history and language helps us clear up the confusion.

Let’s start with history. So, rewind all the way back to before the Protestant Reformation. In 1517 Martin Luther has had it with the corrupt practices of the Catholic church and nails his 95 thesis to the door of the Wittenburg Chapel. Luther had 95 complaints and social media hadn’t been invented yet, so nailing something to the door of the church was what he had available to him. A lot of that document has to do with the concept of purgatory and the paying of indulgences. Indulgences were purchased for money by living people in essence to shave off some of the time a dead person would have to serve in purgatory. Sometimes they’ve been wrongly thought of as purchasing a free pass to commit some sin, and there may have been some of that happening, but what Luther was really upset about was the idea that a living person could impact the experience of a dead person- without that person having to accept the work. Luther wasn’t even primarily mad at the idea that a living person could do some proxy work for dead people – he was mad that indulgences discouraged the purchaser from doing works of mercy in a way that would cause growth in their own soul. His logic was: How could people who were not pious give any assistance toward the piety of dead people? It would be as if we were baptizing people for the dead but there were no requirements on the righteous living of the person doing the work. Luther saw this issue really clearly. By the end of the 95 Thesis Luther makes it clear that he’s not trying to do away with proxy work altogether, he just wants to have it be done in such a way that requires righteousness from living people.

And what Luther was trying to do, he states this very clearly, is to begin a conversation among the religious scholars of the day. But by 1520 (just 3 years later) the whole thing spins a bit out of control for him as the conversation morphs into, “what is the role of the priest in forgiveness – are they actually the ones deciding if you get forgiven? Or are they the ones who pronounce forgiveness upon you but that forgiveness is granted from Christ, not the priest.” And that’s where we’ll pick up the thread.

So things are not going well for our boy Martin, at least in terms of debate among his academic peers. He wanted to be having this as an academic conversation, and he got some of that, but the people are starting to understand at least a bit of what he’s talking about when they see the implications for them. And Luther himself sees this to. In 1520 he puts out a document that has a very unfortunate name if you’re standing on this side of history. “The Christian Nobility of the German Nation.” But this is the document where he really lays out his growing ideas on the priesthood of all believers. And what he’s trying to do is react against the pre-Reformation idea that humans are divided into 2 categories – the secular and the sacred. So before this, if you lived in some little German town, there would be the regular people living their lives, mostly just trying to feed themselves and their families. These were the secular people. Even if they were followers of Christ, they were considered secular. The sacred people were the priests and those who had taken holy orders to live in monastic communities. And how it played out was that the secular people who believed in Christ didn’t have much access to materials that would help them learn the scripture or grow on their own – so they kind of gave up and let the sacred people take on that burden. It was sort of the attitude of, “I’m just a regular person, I don’t need to spend my day praying because those monks up in the monastery on the hill are spending their days doing that on my behalf.” And you can see where Luther gets upset at this – he’s not mad about the “proxy-ness” of it, he’s mad that the secular people side-step their own responsibility to grow and outsource most spiritual tasks to the priests, monks, and nuns. In the monasteries, the system was set up so that they prayed at fixed points throughout the day, including the middle of the night. And this system of prayer became more and more elaborate, requiring more and more time. The regular folks just trying to live their lives and feed their families couldn’t live under a schedule like that, so instead of modifying it for their own use in ways that were workable, they mostly just let the monks and nuns take care of the prayers for them. And Luther is upset at this because it leaves the regular people spiritually immature. And he wants to correct this situation, so he writes about it in “Nobility of the German Nation.”

And so one of Luther’s goals becomes the emptying of the monasteries. He wants everyone – secular people and sacred people – to know how to do the work of prayer and Christian living. The term “liturgy” has its origins here – liturgy means, “the work of the people.” And you can see how Luther is using this term in particular – he wants the regular people to do spiritual work too. But in order to do that, he has to help them break out of the system they have going that separates secular and sacred. So he spends a lot of time and energy teaching that the regular people also have a priesthood to which they belong, the priesthood of all believers, and there are responsibilities in that priesthood.

So far, Latter-day Saint friends, I don’t think there is much for you to disagree with. What Luther was doing is very reasonable in lots of ways. But let’s flip contexts out of Luther’s German world, and into our English-speaking world. And you’ll easily see how the problems develop.

Very often when translating from Biblical Greek to English we have more English words to choose from. But in some instances it works the other way around – Greek has more words for something while English only has 1. Probably the best example you’re familiar with is the various words for “love” in Greek describe important nuances between different forms of love. But in English, we use the same word for, “I love pizza” and “I love my child.” It’s the same situation with “priesthood.” We have 1 word, priesthood, while the New Testament has 2 words: One that means “sacred person” and the other that means “one with elderhood.”

So when Luther says, “you are the priesthood of all believers” he means, “You are not just secular people who have nothing to do with the spirituality of those monks and nuns….you too are sacred people, even just living your normal lives of taking care of your families.” He never intended to say that there aren’t 2 different kinds of priesthoods. The one we are talking about right now, the priesthood of all believers, is a universal priesthood that everyone who claims the name of Christ has – the priesthood that asks us to do the spiritual work for ourselves and those over whom we have responsibility such as children. The other form of the word meaning, “the one who has eldership,” is not canceled because of this universal priesthood responsibility that the average believer also has.

So, what about our Evangelical friends? What do they make of all of this? Well, as we’ve talked about here a number of times Evangelicals value 2 things above all else – independence and devotion to Christ. When I say “independence” what I mean is they do not want to be told what to believe by anyone who claims authority. To them, the very claim of authority is problematic. They want an absolute level playing field where no person has authority over any other. They want to do what is right in their own eyes – you get the appeal, I’m sure. But they also value devotion to Christ and the concern here is that they do not want anyone “standing between” them and Christ. Not monks and nuns up on a hill, not priests that help with confession and repentance, not even the body to which they are a church member. If they don’t like what is being taught they see no obligation to stay – they move on to another church. In practice what this means is that they each have to be their own Prophet. They don’t get – or want – guidance that comes with authority. They are the authorities.

They also see Christ as being not just the “great High Priest” but also the only current priest of any type. And to be honest, we’re not too far apart from each other on this one – we would also say that the priesthood belongs to God. It is his power on the Earth. But Evangelicals worry that any claim to priesthood is an attempt to take the power away from God and give it to man.

And this is part of the arc of development for them as people embedded into a particular time and place. The Evangelical movement grew up right alongside of the modern, hyper-modern, and post-modern era. The natural conclusion of this arc is that the concept of authority itself is invalid. Think of how people conceptualize books. It used to be that the author had a meaning in mind, she would write her thoughts, and people who wanted to understand what she’s on about would read the book. The author got the final say, as it were. But in the postmodern turn it is the reader who brings meaning to the book. The reader decides what it means, even if that meaning is wildly different from what the author intended. The reader gets the final word. There is an important philosophical concept that started back in the 1960’s that says, “the author is dead”….and by natural progression, the very concept of authority dies with him. Author-authority. We see this play out in our national debates – what is an authority anyway? Is a guy at home with an internet connection just as much of an authority as a guy with a PhD? Large parts of our current culture answer that question as: Yes. Authority has died. And this is the culture the Evangelical movement has grown up alongside. Any authority that comes with priesthood is bad, it’s nonexistent to them. Only the common authority anyone has over their own lives matters, the idea of, “you can say what you want as long as its true for you.” But, “history predicts the future” and these things are cyclical – at some point things change. If you look at last week’s Deseret News you will find an article titled: Want to fix education? Bring back authority.” (You also will find a piece in DN last week with my name on it – its a summary of the presentation I gave at the FAIR conference back in August if you’re curious.) But “Bring back authority” is essentially getting at this same thing – we’ve swung too far away from the idea that anyone, teacher/priest/researcher/anyone can have authority at all. And maybe these things correct themselves over time.

This got to be a long episode, but I hope it helps you think though why your Evangelical friends get so worked up about the “priesthood of all believers” concept.

Okay, we’ve got 5 episodes left. Next week we’re talking about the Holy Ghost and asking what does it mean when an Evangelical also experiences the Holy Ghost. I think you’ll be plenty fascinated with that one. 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 – 1 and 2 Peter 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 perfection. 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.

We are on Week 46. This year of Come Follow Me is rapidly coming to a close which means that talking about how Evangelicals view things in the Bible doesn’t really make sense next year because we’ll be doing Book of Mormon year. And I know several of you have wondered what will happen next year. Fear not. Things will change for next year, this particular podcast needs to pivot a bit, but I will still be around. FAIR is working on a show in addition to this one where there will be fewer episodes, but higher quality. I have been working with 2 of the best researchers FAIR has and we’re putting something together I think you’re going to like. So you will still get to see me – Congratulations and I’m sorry. I don’t know exactly what to say about that. But it will be good and I will have much more to share with you after Thanksgiving.

We have arrived at week 46 and we’re in James. 2 of the biggest verses in James that we could have talked about are James 1:5, “If any of you lacks wisdom let him ask God…” and James 2:14 and following talking about works. We’ve actually covered both of these topics pretty well in this series, so we’re going to back up a little and talk about James 1:2-4. This is in the ESV:

2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

There is some history here that will help put Evangelicals in the right context. And, as we’ve seen before many times here, even when an Evangelical church presents itself as a “community church” with no denominational tie, there is usually a tie somewhere in the background – and that might be a formal denomination that just isn’t put front and center (Lifeway Research says that over 60% of the cosmetically named churches, things like Vision Church, are Southern Baptist churches that simply do not name the SBC anywhere on their website or materials and they present themselves as if they are no ties with a larger group at all.) Or it can just show up in the education of the pastoral staff – if they all went to Dallas Theological, then you know something about where they’re coming from.

So, the particular part of the Evangelical world a church comes from matters here. Churches that are informed by the Lutheran, Reformed or Calvinistic traditions are very unlikely to ever talk about the idea of becoming, “perfect as your father in Heaven is perfect.” It’s not a category for them, and their theology reveals why. Their position is sometimes called, “hyper-sovereignty” which is trying to get at the idea that God is so perfect, so complete, so good that it’s insulting to him for any human to have the audacity to say that they could be perfect as he is perfect. So, for them verses about perfection are part aspirational – they believe God is perfect and we should try for perfection even though we will never achieve it. But they’re also part of their system that says all humans are depraved and hated by God – only the power of Jesus Christ can heal the rift between us and God. So verses like this function as a sign to point out not only how good God is, but how bad we are. You know how Paul sometimes says that the law exists to point out our sin – these folks would likely say that these verses about perfection exist to point out how imperfect we actually are. In their way of thinking perfection is impossible, even thinking we could ever do it is hubris. Their interpretation is that God is so good he is perfect, and we are so bad that we could never obtain perfection. It doesn’t feel as grim in real time for them as it sounds to you. It sounds awful, I know, but they think of it more like: The stronger of a believer you are, the more willing you are to affirm God’s goodness and your own depravity. It’s a way for them to say that they are so committed to God that they’re willing to accept their own terribleness, and its a point of pride when they’re able to do so. All of this that I’ve just described is true for Evangelical churches that are influenced by Reformed theology, probably about 60% of current Evangelical churches. But there is another side.

It started in the 1700’s with John and Charles Wesley, the brothers who begin the Methodist Church. Just for timeline, John dies about 15 years before Joseph Smith is born. The Wesleys are part of the 1st Great Awakening, and Joseph Smith is part of the 2nd Great Awakening. And what the Wesleys do is pull from the group in early Christianity known as the Church Fathers who lived in the couple hundred years after Christ. And there is plenty in their writings about the idea of perfection. But, things get weird around the 4th Century and that thinking about perfection turns into a very deep asceticism and monasticism – so life either in a cloistered monastery or life lived in public society but living with deliberate poverty and frankly, near starvation. Now, Christian history had to go that way – the fall of Rome happens right around this time and the governmental structure that had been holding Europe together disappears. And we get the dark ages. By this time Christian monastic communities were already well established in such a way that they could continue to exist. So, its not an entirely bad thing, but the Wesleys look at that and think its awful – that Christian life is intended to be lived out publicly in a way that nonbelievers can see and understand. Not cloistered away or taking vows of extreme poverty. So the Wesleys want to rewind time and go back to what the early Chruch Fathers were talking about with perfectionism. Over time, Methodists have moved away from the idea quite a bit, but it gets picked up by a group of churches known as the Holiness Movement. The Free Methodist Church (different from their much larger sibling the United Methodists), The Church of the Nazarene, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), The Salvation Army, and the Wesleyan Methodist Church (the smallest of the Methodist groups.) And an awful lot of current Evangelical churches are influenced by this arc in all kinds of ways. But it gets weird.

You can trace the influence of the Wesley brothers into modern Evangelicalism in about 100 different ways. But the idea that we might become like God is not one of them. Mostly what they do is take advantage of the wiggle room that exists in the Greek word used here for perfection. There is a legitimate nuance in that word that is something closer to “mature.” So you get translations like the NIV that say, “Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” The ESV still gives us, “that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” The ESV is considered a little bit more scholarly than the NIV, but the NIV has been around for decades longer and has had more influence on Evangelicals. So when they read a verse like this they hear, “be mature” and it doesn’t trigger the same response that, “be perfect” does. So some of them don’t even know, “perfect” is a possible translation here.

So what do we do with all of this?

Well, first, I can’t help myself…the mental health therapist in me needs to tell you that this conversation has nothing to do with perfectionism or the idea that today you must do all things perfectly in order to be loved or accepted by God or others. Part of the joy of having family and friends is that those are the people who can see your imperfections and love you anyway. So we’re not talking about some kind of scrupulosity or perfectionism. And to be fair, you do see a slightly lower incidence of these issues in an Evangelical population than you do in a Latter-day Saint population.

But as far as how to talk with Evangelicals about this, let me offer you my experience when I was an Evangelical. I didn’t know a lot about Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I had picked up some things along the way, not as any kind of serious study, just part of being alive in the 20th century in America. And I can say from that perspective that there is some overlap for people outside our church on the concepts of “perfection” and “worthiness.” Before I knew better, I would have heard the phrase, “a worthy Latter-day Saint” as “a perfect Latter-day Saint.” I knew that didn’t make sense, but I also knew the reputation of people in the church as being good people, excellent mothers, and excellent people to have around in a crisis. So, my first thought is that if a conversation about the concept of perfection came up, you might want to make sure your friend is able to differentiate between the two concepts.

Here is my second thought. There is a quote from President Nelson long before he was the president of the church. Back in 1995 he said, “We all need to remember: men are that they might have joy—not guilt trips!” And I love that because guilt is…kind of contagious. If you feel guilty about what you have and have not done, and you’re talking about the ideas of perfection, or even worthiness with an Evangelical friend, they will intuitively feel that guilt in you. The role of guilt in spiritual or personal development must be to point out something that has gone wrong – thus prompting us to make a change to address the issue. That’s the only reason you get the emotion of guilt. It doesn’t add to your holiness, it doesn’t add to the love you receive from God. It’s a big arrow pointing to a situation or event – not to make you feel worse about yourself, but for you to do some problem-solving around how to change. We humans don’t like to change, and sometimes barely know how to change, but that is the role of guilt – to point to where change needs to happen. In that sense its an empowering and problem-solving emotion. But what we do a lot of times is turn guilt to shame – instead of, “I did a bad thing” it becomes, “I am a bad thing.” That’s not growth or development, that’s self-pity. As much as you can, for your sake and the sake of those with whom you talk about gospel issues, let the feelings you have about your own lack of perfection be the things that makes you progress forward – not stay stuck on how awful you are for getting something wrong. So much overlap between this and mental health, forgive me for my soapbox.

Okay, next week is Priesthood of all Belivers. Come back and we’ll have some fun.

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 – James 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 part 2 of 3 on priesthood. There is so much to say on this and we’re going to get right to it. But I want to point out one thing…

Sometimes, at least in people I know, Latter-day Saints seem a little unsure of their overall Bible knowledge. And it’s true, there are some ins and outs of the Bible, especially the New Testament, that Evangelicals will tend to know better than our people. But the Book of Hebrews is not one of those places. The Book of Hebrews is the least read in the New Testament among Evangelicals. It’s not that they don’t think it’s scripture. They do. But it’s a dense book, and you have to know some things about the Old Testament, and even then it’s still considered kind of esoteric. But because of the mention of Melchizedek in Hebrews, more Latter-day Saints have spent significant time there. The parts of Hebrews they really do like are chapters 11 and 12. You probably see this too, but it feels more familiar in tone, pace, and voice. It feels like Paul writing. The first 10 chapters of Hebrews just feel different to them. And, to be fair, they are different. If this is Paul writing, these chapters are the only ones where he talks like that.

Okay, so let’s get to our jumping-off point. Hebrews 7:17:

You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.

So what do Evangelicals do with this verse?

If we’re talking about percentages – how many Evangelicals engage with this concept – the answer is: its not a very high percentage. It’s just not on their radar. We say, “The Bible doesn’t lay flat,” meaning that some passages form a canon within a canon. Those are the go-to passages that all Evangelicals would know. And the verses in Hebrews about Melchizedek are not on that list. Latter-day Saints certainly have our own “canon within a canon” – the passages we pay more attention to, and those outside of it don’t get much air time.

So the most likely question an Evangelical would have here is simply, “Who is Melchizedek anyway?” Because we don’t have tons of details about the historic priest Melchizedek, the answer to that question is pretty short, so they think there isn’t much here and move on to the other parts of Hebrews that have more content they can do something with. They don’t really have a conceptualization of “priest” so it doesn’t really go anywhere with them. They do like the part in Hebrews that talks about Jesus’ ability to be our Great High Priest because he suffered in the same ways we suffer. And who wouldn’t? There is a lot of comfort in that idea and we are on very firm mutual ground here. Both Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals would feel good about that concept.

Among Evangelicals who are theologically educated, you might get conversation about how Melchizedek is actually “Jesus in disguise,” as one of the few places in the Old Testament where Jesus shows up. That was a really popular theory all throughout the 20th century, less so now.

I think the question that might most come up for them here is, “Why are you making all of this priesthood stuff more complicated than it needs to be?” And if you’ve been listening to this series at all you know that is pretty on-brand for them. The entire Evangelical project has been all about simplifying the Gospel, taking away the parts that make it hard for people to understand or participate – church services are very casual, “priests” are now “pastors,” Difficult to sing hymns are replaced by pop worship choruses. There is a way to take this question without disrespect intended, I think it could be a very sincere question: Why are you making this so complicated? Because in many ways Evangelicals are doing what the early Campebelite churches were doing – trying to get rid of everything that is not the absolute most essential part of the Gospel. The Campbelites considered that the “restoration of all things,” to them it meant just getting to the most important part and let everything else go. And you can hear echoes of that in the Evangelical question: Why are you making this so complicated? And to be honest, it’s a fair question. On the outside looking in, it can seem like a lot when you’re used to the “paring down” philosophy. However, Joseph Smith was not interested in a restoration that gets rid of everything. He wanted to add in everything, always be expanding, worlds without end. So Latter-day Saints look at this and think: Why wouldn’t you want EVERYTHING restored?

And what it comes down to on this one is the question of authority. What is needed in order to do God’s work? The go-to verse for Evangelicals is in 1 Peter, “the priesthood of all believers,” and they interpret this to mean that no special authority is needed to baptize or perform ordinances. They see the Bible as giving anyone who believes in Christ the proper authority. To them, the concept of authority means that someone else is going to stand between you and God and regulate what you must do. While we would see authority slightly differently – the power of the priesthood is God’s power and we all are invited to participate in it in various ways.

We see the priesthood as belonging to God, it is his power, and we humans are invited to participate. While they see the priesthood as belonging to humans who just want to get in the way and make it more difficult to understand God. And sometimes they’re not wrong. There really are, “evil priests who seek to destroy and oppress,” even if those people don’t always carry the title, “priest.”

And I gotta tell you….I sympathize with their opinion in some ways. No one wants evil priests, and it is very easy for someone who thinks they’re acting in the power of God to confuse that with their own desires for power. That goes bad in 100 different ways. But the saying, “misuse should not mean no use,” applies here. Just because evil priests exist, does not mean there is no good priesthood at all. And this is part of what Hebrews is getting at – Jesus is the only priest who never messes it up and misuses his power.

But you can see that what Evangelicals are really worried about here is something like: Who gives you the authority to make all these rules? And the accusation is: You’re just making stuff up to make it seem more complicated than it is. And in a weird way, they see THAT as being an “evil priest.” A person who is blocking access to God – in this case through “complications” – instead of doing what Jesus did which is to make access to God even possible.

They see things like baptism being required as an extra rule. They see all of the ordinances that way. The idea of a priesthood is just another example of this. But this is actually where we find some common ground. In the Evangelical way of thinking authority or leadership is bestowed on someone because they themselves feel a direct call from God to do whatever it is that God is calling them to do. No one chooses you or calls you, you have to do it yourself. And, depending on the corner of the Evangelical world you’re standing in, anyone can claim to be called to anything simply because they feel God wants them to do the thing. In the simplest terms possible, this is the main difference that they would be able to identify – they call themselves and qualify themselves, and we have a process for it that involves requirements and accountability. A young deacon in our church might not have given much thought as to whether he should become ordained or not – I hope he has, but these are young boys and that process probably happens a bit more automatically for some than for others. They get ordained as a deacon simply because they’re the right age to do so – but the further up he goes the more it will require the man himself to desire to take on the requirements and responsibilities of the priesthood. He has to want to do it too. That piece – the man’s desire to serve in this way, and his own understanding of his calling – that is something Evangelicals can relate to. They might never love the structure (though to be honest, for someone like me the structure in our church is a breath of fresh air) but they might also be surprised that a man taking on priesthood responsibilities is also doing it out of his own sense of desire to do so. I mean, have you met the men in our church? My impression is that yes, they can certainly submit to their spiritual leaders when necessary – but it’s not divorced from the man’s own desire to serve. And Evangelicals would recognize and respect that if it were pointed out to them.

Okay, next week we’re in the book of James, so a break from talking about priesthood – and then we do the “priesthood of all believers” which is the continuation of this. 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 – Hebrews 7–13 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 why in the world ALL men in the church can be ordained as a priest, not just a few. 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.

You will also notice I am not in my regular spot. I’m in the airport waiting on a delayed flight. I planned on recording when I got home, and that is not going to happen. But I got to have a fantastic girl’s weekend with friends that I know from growing up in Modesto, CA. So, this video is going to be shorter, and well, it’s an airport. So, yeah. Here we go.

The word, “priesthood” is a very loaded word. At least when we’re trying to talk about how different groups use that word, and the situation between Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals is one area where it gets hard in about 8 different directions. But, luckily, we’re spending 2 weeks in Hebrews, and then some time in 1 Peter, so I’ve got 3 episodes worth of material to try and unpack this. Today we are only going to focus on the aspect that we come across in Hebrews 5 which is this:

For every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. 2 He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness. 3 Because of this he is obligated to offer sacrifice for his own sins just as he does for those of the people. 4 And no one takes this honor for himself, but only when called by God, just as Aaron was. 5 So also Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him,“You are my Son, today I have begotten you”; 6 as he says also in another place, “You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.”

So the question that comes up here might not even be obvious to you as a Latter-day Saint if you haven’t spent much time in other Christian churches. For this episode, we’re going to talk about “priest” as a category, not necessarily a job title. Most Evangelical churches are not going to use the word, “priest” except in the context of, “priesthood of all believers” and we will get to that specific issue once we hit 1 Peter. However, today we’re just going to stay tightly focused on the issue of why most men are ordained to the priesthood in our church. It’s a rather unique thing. I actually can’t think of another denomination where that happens – where every eligible man is ordained. If you know of one, hit me up in the comments.

In Evangelical churches the word priest morphs into “pastor” and all the variations on that word. But we’re in the same category, sort of. But we need a little history lesson first.

For most of the history of Christianity churches were led by pastors, and those pastors were overseen by a bishop – maybe they didn’t call him bishop, but that’s the category of the role. So it goes, congregation, pastor, bishop, and then someone over him, and up some more. And initially, Evangelical churches were organized this way too, at least in th e1950’s and well into the 1960’s. By the late 70’s, and certainly by the 1980’s this structure had significantly disappeared. The nature of Evangelical churches lends itself very much toward independent churches that are not overseen by a bishop. This is not scientific evidence, but I messaged a handful of my Evangelical friends who all attend church regularly and asked if any of their churches had this set up, and not one did. It’s mostly gone away. So what they have now is congregation, pastor, and maybe he has some kind of advisory board, but there is no one above him. And so the language started to change in the 80’s and into the 90’s. They started to say things like, “Every member a minister” and the idea was that the senior pastor was now the overseer of all the members of the chuch, who are actually the ministers. It’s no longer a bishop overseeing a number of churches in the same city, but a pastor overseeing non-ordained people who mostly do the work of the church.

This set up should sound somewhat familiar to you. An Evangelical would look at how our local wards are set up and wonder why someone is being called the Bishop (I mean, if they know the word at all) because he’s only over 1 congregation and traditionally bishops were over multiple churches. But if you go up one level in structure we have Stake Presidents who essentially are in the same category that would traditionally be called Bishop – he oversees multiple congregations. And it’s not immediately intuitive to Evangelicals that we have formalized a structure that they arrived at because of the changing landscape of how churches work. So, back to our question, why is every eligible man and boy ordained? But the only structural difference there is that we have formalized what they keep informal. They actually do see each member (men and women, for the most part) as ministers – they just grab the title “priesthood of all believers” to sort of cover them in that role.

This is one of those fascinating situations where, at first glance, we are in very different structures…..but as it turns out, no, not really. Now, questions about priesthood certainly don’t stop at understanding who is ordained and why. We’ll get to the rest in parts 2 and 3.

But I do hope this clears up a bit of the language difference between us. We use a formal ordination process for “ordinary” men – and they use an informal process that accomplishes the same thing.

This is a short episode, but I’m in the airport. So. Come back next week and we’ll take up the next bit on priesthood.

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 – Hebrews 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 polygamy. 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.

We are on Week 43 of this 52-week project. I’ve teased you a little about what will happen next year. I’m still not ready to spill the beans, but we had a planning meeting for it yesterday and I’m really encouraged.

Our jumping-off point is 1 Timothy 3:2:

Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach…

Before we start, let me set some expectations. This is not an apologetic for polygamy. This is not to pretend there are not hard issues with polygamy. If you yourself, Latter-day Saint friend, are struggling over the history of polygamy there are so many resources to help you. Let me just briefly touch on 3 of them. 1) The work of Brian Hales on this topic is the the very best source for learning the history here. His site JosephSmithsPolygamy.org should be your first stop if you’re wanting to see the most in-depth display of original documents as it relates to Joseph’s polygamy specifically. Brian and his then-wife Laura Harris Hales (now passed) created the site. Laura was amazing and kind. I gave my first formal talk for FAIR in 2020 and Laura was the speaker right before me. We had never met but she just sort of told me, “You and I are going to be friends because you need to know the things I can tell you.” Maybe not that blunt, but in essence, that’s what it was. Laura’s talk that year was on Helen Mar Kimball’s later-in-life reflections on polygamy. Helen was sealed to Joseph when she was 14, which gets really complicated for us today. But Helen’s own words, written after a lifetime of living polygamy, are the essence of what it means to embrace faith in the midst of something really messy. And if I had not already been completely swept off my feet over this church, I would have become so right then and there. My very favorite genre of speaking or writing is from the standpoint of, “You can maintain faith even if things are messy, even if you have doubts, even if you have questions. Those things in no way disqualify you from having a strong faith.” So, resource 1 is: check out Brian’s site (Brian is very much alive and well – just this last week he released a paper on Joseph Smith’s education called, “Joseph Smith’s Education and Intellect as Described in Documentary Sources.” Our friends at the Interpreter Foundation have it up on their website. It’s 8,000 words and over 120 footnotes. Brian’s site and Laura’s talk on HMK at the 2020 FAIR conference. 2) Second resource you should know about is the 2023 talk at FAIR by Don Bradley. Don is a proper historian and did the deep research for Brian and Laura’s work. And he has continued on in that work. Don’s talk at FAIR a couple months ago brings new information into play that changes the timeline of Joseph’s polygamy – which snaps several previously problematic ideas into place. It is well worth your time. 3) Finally Brittany Chapman Nash’s book, “Let’s Talk About Polygamy.” Brittany worked in the church history department for a long time, she was on the YW General Advisotry Board. She makes the topic very accessible and this is a very easy read. I think it’s less than 150 pages, in plain language, and it’s a great resource if you are struggling here. Ok, those are 3 great resources if you’re struggling in general with the topic as a Latter-day Saint. But what we are going to do today is different. We, as always, are going to talk about this topic as it comes up for Evangelicals.

So, before I was interested in the church, I knew some rough details about polygamy – mostly from movies or tv shows. I couldn’t have sketched out an overview of why it started or when. I just knew it was a thing, and supposedly wasn’t a thing anymore. But even that small amount of knowledge is more than a good percentage of Evangelicals have. As evidenced by this reality….Since joining the church I’ve received a handful of messages from friends about various tv shows that go something like this: “Hey, I’m watching such-and-such tv show about your church. There’s a lot going on there – you okay?” And they mean that with the kindest of intentions, they really do. They just don’t realize they’re watching a show about the members of a different group who practice polygamy, not our church. And I would say most Evangelicals have an understanding that is somewhere between what I knew and the knowledge that my friends displayed in their messages. So when they think about polygamy you need to know that their imaginations are populated by what they see on television and not by actual historical realities.

But even if you can explain all of that to them, and I think many (most?) Latter-day Saints could, you still have a problem…They interpret this verse in 1 Timothy to mean that all expressions of polygamy are bad for all places and all times. They get real squeamish explaining the polygamy of almost every prophet in the Old Testament and will usually say something like, “Yeah, they might have done that, but God didn’t like it or allow it – they just did it.” You can point out that 30% of the countries in the world still allow it today. They just…it’s usually been a hard no for them. But even that is changing.

In 2003 Gallop does a survey and finds 7% of adult Americans thought polygamy was morally acceptable – by 2020, 20% of adult Americans said it’s morally acceptable. And 35% of adults who consider themselves politically liberal say it is morally acceptable. This is sort of the spot where I walked in. I wouldn’t describe myself as particularly liberal, but I lived in a very liberal West Coast city for 25 years and that exposes you to a wide variety of people and lifestyles where the automatic response of most people is, “love is love.” So when I was investigating the church, that’s the cultural soup I was living in, so when the issue of polygamy came up my response was something like: Love who you want to love, why should I care? When the conversation came up with 2 women friends that are members of the church I was surprised. So surprised. I asked how they thought about the history of polygamy or the issue in general and they kind of fell all over themselves trying to tell me how bad they thought it was. They wanted to put lots and lots of distance between today and the 1800’s. I was confused. My liberal culture had taught me: You don’t get to have an opinion on how other people structure their marriages. Now, I get what they were doing – I was an investigator and they were trying not to freak me out – and I see the goodness in that. But I was far less worried about the issue than they were. As time went on, and I learned more, there were parts of the topic that I struggled with harder than others – I struggled with Joseph’s polyandry and if you struggle with that one too you must watch Don’s talk that I referenced earlier. But my initial reaction to the topic of polygamy was kind of, “So?” And I really haven’t moved too far from that. I understand the problems, I understand that the theological framework that supported polygamy is still found in places in our church. I listened to 100 episodes of a popular podcast talking about polygamy. And perhaps I’m not the typical example here, but what I’ve observed is that people inside the church are more touchy about this topic than people outside of it. So, all of that to say, you might be surprised that this conversation could go an entirely different way than you imagine. You, Latter-day Saint, might have far more complicated feelings about this than someone outside of our faith. You’re allowed to have complicated feelings here, and there is plenty of help for that, but Evangelicals don’t necessarily walk in with the same baggage.

And here is the other direction I want to go. I think sometimes we Latter-day Saints look at Protestants widely, and Evangelicals specifically as being a people who don’t have to grapple with history as hard as we do in our church. Since we’re talking about polygamy we’ll use that as the example. There are 2 reasons for this.

1) Evangelicals are perfectly aware of polygamy in the Old Testament. But, that was a very, very long time ago. Meanwhile, in our church, there are people alive today whose grandparents practiced polygamy. So stories about polygamy (and all of its challenges) are not just random stories about stuff that happened 3,000 years ago. Evangelicals have the luxury of not thinking about this topic very much because 3,000 years is a long time. And, to be honest, in general, they’re fairly unaware of the events that have happened in the interim. For example, Martin Luther, the great reformer and father of Protestantism, said, “I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture. If a man wishes to marry more than one wife he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God. In such a case the civil authority has nothing to do in the matter.” But even that was 500 years ago, so it just doesn’t feel as relevant for them.

2) Evangelicalism is very young as a faith community. Younger than ours. They really didn’t start gaining steam until post-WW2. And what was the cultural zeitgeist in post-WW2 America? Everything is modern and new. Everything is about the future. New is better than old. So they’ve culturally been able to tell their origin story that way. Think of the biggest Evangelical church in your town, I can almost guarantee you that their origin story is something like, “Well, Pastor So-and-So just wanted to study the Bible with some friends so they started a Bible study group in his living room. And pretty soon it grew into a church, and now here we are.” Well, that’s a pretty tidy history. But you understand that it’s an edited history. “Jesus did some stuff, died and rose again, then fast-forward 2000 years and we started this church.” And that’s the end of the history lesson. Because its culturally allowed (even expected) for the story to be told that way, they mostly just accept it, and no one asks harder questions based on history. They actually really do have it easier here than we do. But this is sort of the pay off on this topic and what I want you to hear….

Faith in messy. History is messy. People are messy. There was a time in our church’s history when a more sanitized version of history was being told – that happened for a lot of reasons, and it seems we’ve mostly moved past that mentality. And now we grapple with this stuff. And yes, some people leave over these issues. But have you met the people who know the depths of these issues and don’t leave? Don’t abandon their faith? People who can struggle through these issues, faith intact? If you’re watching this, I suspect there is at least some of that in you too. And you have no idea what a gift that is. A person who goes to a church whose origin story is Pastor Bill and his living-room Bible study, well they don’t develop the same skill in the same way. They don’t have to because the messier details are obscured from sight. My very favorite people in the world are people who model this for me – they want to know all the details of everything, and they still choose faith.

My point here is not even to prep you on how to talk about polygamy with outsiders. I don’t think that’s even a very interesting conversation, and a pretty large number of them won’t even care. But there’s a pretty easy pivot from that conversation to how one keeps faith alive while also acknowledging the messy. This is one of the gifts of our faith that you might not see, but in my opinion, helping other people build their faith by modeling how to wade through complex issues is one of the holiest things you can do in this world. I hope and aspire to be able to do that for other people, and I know you do too.

Okay, well, there you go. And seriously, if you are hurting or struggling over this issue please check out the resources I listed at the top of the show. Sometimes I’ve seen this cynical attitude from critics of the church that says, “Well, if you knew everything I knew, you’d leave too.” Which is just ridiculously untrue. And the folks in the sources I mentioned can really show you what its like to know all the details and still maintain faith.

Next week, “the priesthood of all believers” is up. That will be a great conversation. 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 – 1 and 2 Timothy; Titus; Philemon 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 Gnosticism. 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.

We are just going to jump right in with this week’s verse Col 2:8-9:

See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, which are based on human tradition and the spiritual forces of the world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.

Okay, normally I don’t exegete passages for you, that’s not what we’re doing here, but I do feel like a little guidance is helpful here in order for you to understand where we’re going. Paul’s statement here in Col 2 is kind of weird if you don’t understand what’s happening in the background. He makes this statement that you shouldn’t be deceived by human philosophy and traditions. Okay. And then if you don’t know what he’s doing it seems as if he makes a strange left turn by adding in the reminder that Christ had a body. No one would blame you if you read that passage and wondered if the pages got stuck together or something. It’s odd on the face of it.

But what Paul is doing here is addressing Gnosticism. What is Gnosticism, why should you care, and what does it have to do with Evangelicals?

Gnosticism is a philosophy that covers many things, and we only have time to talk about 1 part of it. The Gnostics believed that it really only matters that you get the correct knowledge in your head. Thinking correctly and having knowledge is not just the most important thing, it’s everything – to the degree that the world which exists outside of the invisible things going on in your head just don’t matter. The only things that really matter are things you can think about – things you do with your actual physical body have nothing to do with it, they certainly don’t need to be regulated, and something that’s just pointless to worry about. If thinking in your head is everything….then the things that happen outside of your head are nothing. There was a very specific version of this in Paul’s day that he’s fighting against – and that idea was that Jesus either didn’t have a body, or maybe he only appeared to have a body. In this view, Jesus had obtained enough knowledge that he was able to be body-less because of his advanced knowledge. And someone with that much knowledge shouldn’t even be bothered with a body – it distracts from the really important thing, knowledge in your mind. So when Paul says, “Hey, don’t get distracted by this philosophy, Jesus actually had a body,” he is responding to this issue.

So, what does this have to do with our conversation about Evangelicals? As you know, Evangelicals reject the idea that anyone can choose to accept ordinances done on their behalf after the person has died because of their view that the afterlife is a binary between Heaven and Hell. But that’s only the first part of why they get confused about proxy ordinances. Gnosticism is the other reason why.

To Evangelicals having a body is not considered a gift, it’s not something they even think about all that much. They tend toward a kind of dualism that says belief is more important than behavior. What you think in your head is more important than what you actually do with your body. Now, to be fair, most people don’t study philosophy, and probably couldn’t tell you much about Gnosticism, but you can see the impact it has on their faith in the way they don’t value doing good works in the same way that we would in our church, or they don’t think baptism is important – it’s a nice thing, but accepting baptism is not really required for entrance into Heaven. They’re happily less restrictive on clothing, language, substances, and more because as long as you’re believing the correct things, it doesn’t really matter all that much if your physical body is allowed to do other things. So even though most of them won’t know the word “gnostic” they live in a system greatly influenced by it. The theologically trained folks know what it is – and they understand that Gnosticism is a bad thing. In that world, it is a legitimate and devastating blow to call someone out for being “too gnostic.” So it’s not like the leaders and theologically educated folks are embracing the idea that your body dosn’t even matter, but to preach about that doesn’t really go very far in that world. What you wear doesn’t matter, what you say or where you go doesn’t matter, what you do doesn’t matter – as long as you say the right things.

Okay, why should you care about any of this….It is a fair question for those outside our faith to ask why proxy work is how it has to be. If they can set aside the idea that there are no chances after death to believe (which is hard for them to set aside) they still get stuck on exactly why it requires a person who still has a physical body to get baptized, for example, on their behalf. Couldn’t God just accept their confession of faith after death? Why involve the people who are alive today and have bodies? This truly makes no sense to them. They might bring up the thief on the cross to whom Jesus spoke and said, “today you will be with me in paradise.” No baptism, no proxy work for that guy was required in what Jesus said. Though to be fair, Jesus was a bit busy at the moment when this conversation was taking place.

So, if you’re having a conversation about proxy work with an Evangelical this concept of Gnosticism is in the background, even if either one of you know it. So, what do you do?

Well, one interesting way to address this is to wonder with them: Why was it important that Jesus had a body through which he suffered greatly? Couldn’t God have just decided to forgive the sins of anyone who would come to the correct cognitive beliefs about their sin? They will probably tell you that God could have done that – but he didn’t. Why was it important to Paul that Jesus had a real body when he did his proxy work for us?

The other piece that comes up here is something I want to be really careful and kind with. There is a piece of Gnosticism – and especially the kind that is at the heart of modern-day evangelicalism – that says not only is knowledge important, but MY version of knowledge is the most important. For example, the key to salvation in the Evangelical world is that each person makes a “personal profession of faith in Christ.” And that is good. We believe that too – no one can decide about Christ for you, you have to decide for yourself. But from there, the Evangelical faces some different challenges. If MY personal salvation is based on MY own thinking – then everything can be. And there’s no one to tell me otherwise. If I don’t like what my pastor teaches, I go find a pastor who teaches what I like. When I get mad at him – or when he’s too old or not cool enough – I can go find another one. No one gets the final word but me. They’re not being self-centered or egotistical about this – its a theological expression for them and they feel the great responsibility of having to decide every single thing in their own head. There is no authority. No prophet. The first time I heard the phrase, “the authority of God was taken from the Earth,” I remember being confused because I had been so indoctrinated in the idea that God really wanted us to figure everything out on our own. In the Evangelical way of thinking that’s not seen God’s authority being taken – but that the very concept of authority doesn’t matter anymore. It’s postmodernism – the author is dead, and with him the concept of authority. You yourself have to be your own authority. Shoot, today in our Western culture we don’t even like the idea of saying that someone who has spent decades studying is an “authority” when I person can spend 5 min on Google and piece together a loud opinion. Evangelicals aren’t just up against this in our culture, they’re up against it as part of their faith system.

If you’re thinking ahead, you can already see how this same dilemma causes them to reject having a Prophet. They DO value prophets – they just value the ones who they can read and not see. The ones who lived so long ago they couldn’t possibly understand life today. Having a living prophet – another way to say that is to say we have a human Prophet who lives in a human body – feels much more dangerous to them than reading dead Prophets who are now disembodied.

That’s a lot of philosophy for today. So I’m not going to go on too much longer. But I hope this has helped you see how these differences play out. And really, if anything, I want you to recognize the goodness of the water you’re swimming in but probably don’t even realize.

Next week, I don’t remember what we’re doing, but in 2 weeks we’re talking about polygamy. So that’ll be fun. See you next time.

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 – Philippians; Colossians 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 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.

Today, is Sunday evening, October 1. I hope you had a great conference weekend. I certainly did. And I’ve got a list of talks I need to go back and listen to again. You probably do too! I will not tell you how many Cinnamon Rolls I ate, but you can probably guess.

We are just going to jump right in with this week’s verse Eph 2:8-9:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

So, I remember grappling with this verse when I was an Evangelical, probably age 16 or 17. I grew up in a non-LDS church that tried to walk a fine line between Calvinism (God chooses whom he will save, and your choices don’t matter. Even if you want to be saved, you might not be) and Arminianism (People have free will to choose God or not therefore we should Evangelize around the world. And, for what they were trying to do, they did an okay job at it. “Spend your days like an Arminianist, but spend your nights like a Calvinist” – meaning, work hard to share the gospel but also go to sleep knowing God is going to do what God is going to do. But when we would come to verses like this I was rather confused because my church taught that in order to receive this grace what you were supposed to do was pray, “the sinner’s prayer” which means asking Jesus into your heart. And that was it. Pray the prayer, that’s all you have to do, and God’s grace does the rest. But, in my 16-year-old brain, I couldn’t quite work out why that sinner’s prayer was not considered a “work.” It’s something that the person does. If it was actually true that God’s grace is all that’s needed, then why do we even need to pray the prayer? Evangelicals do have answers for this, but none of them felt very satisfying for me. Eventually, I just moved on from the question.

And, this will not come as a surprise to listeners of this show, I was also taught that Latter-day Saints are trying to work their way to Heaven and if they made one small mess-up, their chances were ruined. Which is part of why I was so intrigued when I read the Book of Moses. If you haven’t heard me say it before, Moses was actually the first Latter-day Scripture I ever read. And there’s a lot contained in that little book – something I understand now way more than before – so when I talk about it I usually say something like, “I really didn’t even know what I was looking at yet.” And that’s true. I didn’t. But there is also this. Literally, by verse 4 I’m confronted with ideas about works. In vs. 4 God tells Moses that his work is vast – and that he is still not done working. He’s got more to say and more to create. Well, hmmm, this is not something that Evangelicals ever taught me. But by Moses 1:6 we see God telling Moses that he has a work to do as well, just as Jesus Christ had a work to do. Huh. If you had asked me even a few weeks earlier to guess what a verse like this would say I probably would have guessed something like God telling Moses: I have a bunch of work for you to do, and if you do it well enough you can earn your way back into my presence. But that’s not what happens in Moses 1. Even by Verse 4 we know that God is calling Moses, “son” – and presumably Moses hasn’t even done anything yet. He is assured of his sonship and then given work to do. I’m not even sure if I articulated any good questions about that at the time. So, right from the beginning, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this concept. And I think that most Evangelicals who are baptized into our church have to go through a version of the same puzzle. People who have been members of our faith for their whole lives often get really confused here as well. The questions Evangelicals ask here don’t really make any sense and we all talk right past each other. So, what I want to do today is try to fairly explain why Evangelicals are in the place they are on this, and hopefully some ideas on how to have a better conversation.

About 6 weeks ago the magazine Christianity Today (which has long been considered the Evangelical’s magazine) published an article called, “Mormons Expect More of the Next Generation. Why Don’t We?” And the whole point of that article is basically that Evangelical kids don’t fair as well because they’re given far lower expectations – counterintuitively to some, high expectations (coupled with high levels of support) are good for kids. CT actually publishes articles like this roughly every decade. The most recent one I could find before the article in August was back in 2013. What is fascinating though is that all these articles, every decade or so, praise the works of Latter-day Saint youth – they talk about the goodness of their service and how the missionary program helps in young adult development. They talk about the humanitarian work, and all other good things our church does. But they divorce it from our beliefs. The logic goes something like this…We Evangelicals believe the Latter-day Saints are doing really good works – those works end up being meaningless because they think they’re earning salvation with them – but at least some people are getting some benefit out of them. In these articles, you get statements along the lines of, “Mormon culture is founded on a worldview requiring works in order to gain eternal life.” And, “Trying to earn God’s favor through human effort is not going to help any teenager, whether Mormon or Protestant.” One more, “Christians have a unique core that motivates our service, a core that separates our religion from others, including Mormonism. That core is grace.”

Now, Latter-day Saints, I know you’re minds are full right now of verses from the Book of Mormon, or from modern Prophets, explaining that we do not believe our works save us. But no matter how much you talk about those verses, Evangelicals have not budged on this, as evidenced by the simple example of the decade-after-decade articles from Christianity Today that we are a works-based religion.

Remember when we did the “Different Jesus” episode? Evangelicals have a deep worry that getting Jesus wrong, even a little bit, means that no matter how strong your faith it won’t really matter because you don’t believe in the “correct” Jesus. And that comes into play here. It’s not so much that they don’t believe in doing good. They do, and they can cite the Bible verses which support this. The problem is that because, in their view, we don’t believe in the “correct” Jesus whatever good works we do have to stand on their own as just nice things people are doing. They can’t see our works as an expression of our faith in Christ because they can’t see that we have faith in Christ.

Now, it’s conference weekend, so heavily in my mind was the number of times that speakers mentioned Jesus Christ. I thought I’d keep a tally, but quickly lost my ability to keep up. The text of those talks is not available yet, so I went to last Conference, April 2023, to see how many times Jesus Christ was mentioned. There are over 500 times, and if you take out all the mentions of the name of the church (“Welcome to the annual conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) you still have well over 400 times. Elder Gary Stevenson, in that conference, talks about him the most, 25 mentions in a 14-min talk. He mentions Jesus Christ on average every 30 seconds. And in fact it’s rare to have a speaker not mention Jesus Christ multiple times. You and I all know this. But our Evangelical friends won’t accept those 400 times because to them it doesn’t matter how hard you believe or how big your faith is if it is invested in the wrong thing. And here, “the wrong thing” essentially means that we don’t accept the things written about Jesus by a committee 400 years after he was gone – the basic Trinitarian conceptualization. You don’t believe in the Trinity, the object of your belief is false, therefore your works are not a product of faith – they’re you trying to earn your way to Heaven.

The only way that I really see out of this corner is to speak more specifically about what you believe regarding Jesus Christ with your Evangelical friends. “I believe in Jesus Christ,” is met with, “But you believe in the wrong Jesus.” That’s an expected reflex. But something like, “I believe Jesus Christ is the eternal Savior of the world and no one can return to God except through him,” would certainly get you some agreement and understanding with them.

I’ll say one other thing about getting out of this corner. If you want to have credibility, you have to live up to what you’re saying. You actually have to be the kind of person who embodies the teachings of Jesus Christ. This is why I don’t personally participate in conversations about Christ with people I don’t know online. There is a spot for that – and if you are gifted in the area, God bless you – I think many of our missionaries are gifted this way as they knock on doors of strangers or start discussions with people they don’t know well at all. But I am not one of those people, at least in part because the biggest piece of credibility I have is the fact of who Christ has led me to be. You can’t really communicate that to someone you don’t know well. But occasionally an Evangelical friend will say something like: “I don’t believe a thing your church teaches you, but I can see that it’s working for you because you’re happier than I’ve ever seen you.” Said by a friend who has known me for more than 30 years. How you live your life and what makes you happy really actually matters. And my life is certainly not perfect, and neither am I, but my friend was right, I am happier than I’ve ever been, despite some real challenges. And if you’re like most Latter-day Saints I’ve met, you’re that way too. You conduct your life in a way that is what Jesus described as letting them, “see your good works and glorify your father who is in Heaven.” Who you are, and how you live your life – the good works that you do – actually gives you more traction with people who know you in getting them to want to listen to you about Jesus.

Okay, that’s about it for today. Next week we’re going to talk about something called Gnosticism which Paul fought hard against – and why proxy work is a perfect antidote to Gnosticism. 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 – Ephesians 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 the phrase, “another gospel”. 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.

A couple of reminders for you. This last weekend FAIR hosted an online only conference called Defending the Book of Mormon. Those talks will be released on the FAIR Youtube channel in the upcoming weeks. Brent Schmidt’s talk about grace is still exploding in my head. And Stephen Smoot’s talk – not on the Book of Abraham where he is an expert – but on the difference between translation and revelation was also fantastic. And yes, you see me a bit in there too – I didn’t present anything, but got to introduce speakers and ask questions. Which, really meant I got to have all the fun of a conference without the pain of writing a paper to present. You also get to see Zach Wright and Sarah Allen doing the same thing. And…oh goodness….at one point we end up with more time than we’d planned for. A couple speakers were efficient with their time and we needed to fill some space. So you get to hear me interview Sarah – she’s the author of that 70-part response to the CES letter – and we had a great chat. Though I think it was something like, “Hey, you girls are interesting, and we’ve got some time to fill – can you just go talk and we’ll film you?” In other words, you can probably fast-forward through that section. But it was fun. Last bit of news….at FAIR we do have some fun projects cooking up for next year. Not ready to let details out yet, but lets just say that I will be busy. More to come later.

Okay, we’re going to talk about that phrase, “another gospel” and our jumping off point is Gal 1:8:

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!

And this verse comes up a lot for Evangelicals when thinking about what our church teaches. So I want to dive in here and try to understand why they say that – and then take a look at how Evangelicals actually define, “the gospel” and see how much agreement there actually is between the two groups.

So, “the gospel” literally means, “the good news” and no one is disputing that. Both Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints are on the same page here. But we do differ in some areas.

I think I could come up with a pretty good answer on my own, but I wanted to see what is currently being taught in their own words so I surveyed some of the most popular sites for Evangelicals and here is the criteria they’re talking about…

The gospel is…”Imputed righteousness. What do we receive because we are counted righteous in Christ? The answer is fellowship with Jesus. (This will) remove obstacles to the only lasting, all-satisfying source of joy: Jesus Christ.”

Latter-day Saint friends I suppose some of you are thinking, “Umm, what’s wrong with that?” We’ll unpack.

Let’s start with the first one which talks about “imputed righteousness.” And here is your can of worms. What is “imputed righteousness.” It is, “Imputed righteousness is the righteousness of Jesus credited to the Christian, enabling the Christian to be justified.” This is a term that comes from Martin Luther and was a corrective to some of the Catholic practices at the time including buying indulgences with money. An “indulgence” kind of sounds like it is a free-pass to do some elicit activity without getting in trouble, but what it really means is that the person’s “sentence” in purgatory will be reduced by a certain number of years. Luther was right to fight against this practice. He’s trying to say that people don’t need to spend money to get a softer sentence in purgatory – Jesus pays the price. And I know, in theory, when you put it that way, we don’t disagree. But the idea is part of a bigger package of ideas that include believing that God is angry at all of his children and will absolutely torture them for eternity unless during their lifetime they profess faith in Christ. Luther’s phrase here, imputed righteousness, solves one problem (indulgences) but opened up another – and 500 years later, Protestants are still grappling with what it means to accept salvation that they can’t earn. This doctrine is called Sola Fide, “By faith alone” Lately – meaning the last 120 years – its turned more into “Jesus did it all – so you don’t have to do anything.” But it hasn’t always been this way.

If we go back even further to Augustine – who isn’t always trying very hard to keep the apostasy at bay – but he gets it right here. He uses the term, “Infused righteousness” which for him means, “God bestows justifying righteousness upon the sinner in such a way that it becomes part of his or her person.” The implication here is that after one receives this righteousness it becomes part of them and they go on to strive to live a life of holiness. But you can see how Luther’s change – which made sense at the time when you compare it to the practices of the Catholic church – has been used to claim that Jesus’ righteousness does everything for us and we don’t have to do anything. Here it is expressed by one Evangelical pastor, “Your salvation is a free gift. You can not do anything to earn it. You can’t even ask for it because asking would be you doing part of the work. If God is going to save you, he’s going to save you. It has nothing to do with you. It is God’s work. You are the object of that work. But that’s all you are.” Augustine was closer to the truth on this one than Luther – and I’m not really a fan of Augustine. But he’s right here.

John Wesley, founder of the Methodists, tries to offer a correction here to the change Luther made by coining the term, “imparted righteousness” as a way to say that salvation is through Christ alone, but it must, “empower the process of sanctification,” which Wesley also called Christian perfection. By “perfection” here he means something similar to what we mean when we say that we will become “like God.” And it’s no wonder that Joseph Smith said that the Methodists are closer to truth than some other groups.

So, what is the gospel to Evangelicals? They would all affirm that its good news. That it comes through Christ alone. But they radically disagree on what comes next. Do we have to do anything after receiving salvation or not? The room is deeply divided on this. Why did I tell you all this?

Why do Evangelicals think we have “another gospel”?

I think you can see at this point that the versions of the gospel offered by Luther and Wesley (2 men who still influence Evangelicals to a great degree) are radically different, or at least have been taken in radically different directions. And yet, these 2 versions of the gospel do not trip the Evangelical worry about “a different gospel.” But they couldn’t be more different. They in fact opposite. The only thing they have in common is that Jesus Christ paid for salvation. In one version of the gospel you, the individual, are not required to do anything at all – and if you try you are insulting God by saying that Jesus is not enough. And in the other, Christ paves the way for salvation, but you, the individual, must change and grow in holiness as time goes on in order to reach perfection. It’s weird right. Totally different views. But Evangelicals will sometimes easily say that we Latter-day Saints have a “different gospel.” If you ask for specifics you’re more likely to get quotes from past leaders that are not part of the standard works and that are taken out of context. Or perhaps were not even recorded correctly in the first place – see the last FAIR conference and the talk by LaJean Carruth for an incredibly detailed account of how and why this is true.

Why else do they think this? Because, frankly, anti-mormon propaganda has been effective. That was true in Joseph Smith’s day. There is a book – if you don’t know about this book you should – written by 3 BYU professors and came out this year called, “Marrianne Meets the Mormons.” And it’s about the church in France in the first part of the 20th century. During this time there are less than 500 members of the church in all of France. Statistically, they’re not a significant group in that culture by any means. But, the amount of literature, art, and music that uses “Mormons” as the bad guys is huge. There’s 42 Million people in France at this time – 500 of them are members of the church – but anytime a movie or book needs a bad guy, he’s very likely to be a Mormon. It’s very similar to the same stereotyping that we see today – turn on any number of television shows from the last year and you already know this.

What now?

So, what do we do with this? Within the Evangelical community, you can have 2 radically different versions of what the gospel is and no one cares. But when you want to talk about the gospel how Latter-day Saints do, which includes a belief in the saving power of Jesus Christ, and agree with both Augustine and Wesley that sanctification matters after salvation – all of a sudden that’s just too different.

You have a number of options here. You can fight with them, though I dont recommend it. You can simply bear your testimony knowing that they can’t really refute what you believe, and that’s a good move. But on this chanel we’re really focused on how you talk about these things with the people you love – friends and family – and sometimes bearing your testimony can feel like you’re shutting down the conversation, not opening it up. At least when it’s with people you’re close to. Our leaders – Prophets, Apostles, your local leaders – have given us plenty of spiritual advice on how to manage these situations. I won’t repeat all of that you – you know it already and should listen to them. But I will offer you a piece of psychological advice.

People love to feel understood. I love it. You love it. One quote says, “Being heard feels so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” So try to hear them before you try to get them to hear you. What does the gospel mean to them? Does admitting that there are different versions of the gospel even among Protestants make them feel anxious? Why? What’s that about for them? And similar questions will help them teach you about what they need in order to have this conversation. Maybe that’s just therapist psychobable. But if you want them to understand why you see the gospel the way you do – you’re probably going to have to put in the work and understand why they’re resistant to it. If they’re throwing a bunch of complaints that sound like they got them off some website, they probably did. Try to help them identify what their actual concerns are. And listen to them to understand them. That is the most effective way to get them to listen to you, at least from a psychological perspective.

All right, next week we’re to do what is essentially part 2 of this week’s episode and talk about how Paul sees “works” in the book of Ephesians. 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 – Galatians appeared first on FAIR.