Evangelical Questions: “Paid Ministry?”

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 paid ministry. 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’s verse comes from Mark 6:7-9:

And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts— but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics.

And there is so much in that verse alone to talk about, but I want to focus on a question that comes up a lot between Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals: Is it right to pay clergy or isn’t it?

And I will give you a full disclaimer here. I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I’ve earned full-time income working in churches and had no problem with it – and now I’m a Latter-day Saint and I can see why paying clergy is problematic. And, I will also point out that it’s true that our church does in fact have paid clergy – our senior leaders work full-time and are paid for their work. So the answer here has to be nuanced.  We can’t just say, “paying clergy is bad,” because we do in fact pay a small number of clergy. The right question is something closer to: Under what conditions should clergy be paid?

As always, let’s start with how Evangelicals think about this issue. And we’ll start with the practical reasons. How does an Evangelical even become a paid clergyperson?  There are exceptions to this, but for the most part a person who wants to become ordained as an Evangelical minister must first do a 4-year undergraduate degree followed by a 4-year Master in Divinity (MDiv). There are some types of positions where a person can get away with a 2-year Masters in theology but the standard route is a MDiv. I know this route well – you will notice in my credentials that I earned one.  It was a fantastic program, I loved every moment of it. But most MDiv’s come with a pretty hefty price tag, mine did too, so the people who take one are either very serious students of theology who are learning just for the love of learning, or they are hoping to work in a church setting for their employment – in part because they will need to pay off their student loan. So, right out of the gate, on a very practical level, you can see why Evangelicals are set up for a paid ministry situation. And while there are some outliers in either direction, the average salary for an American pastor is about $80,000 a year. Now, the tax situation makes this a little bit more livable for them because a pretty large chunk of that can be claimed as a housing allowance, which is not taxable income. So, there’s our second practical reason why they usually pay clergy – even the American tax system is set up with the expectation that ministers are paid. The third practical reason is that most of the time being a paid minister is a full-time job, meaning they don’t have the opportunity to earn income elsewhere, so they need to be paid. 

Moving from the practical to the values of Evangelicals that cause paid clergy to make sense to them. First, Evangelicals, as their name suggests, puts a high value on sharing the message of Christ as they understand it. And while the 75-year history of Evangelicals has always included paid clergy, the idea really found substance in the example of a church in the Chicago area called Willow Creek. Willow Creek was the first of its kind because they made Sunday mornings, not a time for believers to gather and worship, but a time to showcase what a church had to offer for “seekers.” Willow Creek goes on to become the largest church in America for quite a long time and their influence was felt in every Evangelical church across the country.  While a typical little church on the corner of some small town would normally have 1 paid minister working alongside several volunteers to present a Sunday morning worship service, Willow Creek employed hundreds of people full-time to produce television-quality services on Sunday mornings. No longer was it good enough for a volunteer to play the piano or guitar, they began employing professional musicians. And the rationale for all of this was that someone who was interested in their church but not yet a believing Christian needed a very specific kind of experience in order to feel comfortable. They coin the term, “seeker sensitive,” meaning that everything is looked at through the lens of the “unchurched” (another term they coined) person. Willow Creek believed that those seekers should be given the most professional presentation possible in order to get them more interested in Jesus. And soon, every other church in the country was trying to imitate them. So the average church on the corner went from one pastor and some volunteers to multiple pastors or other workers who would produce services for them.  This fed an explosion in attendance at Evangelical churches during the 1980’s and 1990’s.  The downside is that not every church could manage this kind of financial burden and many of them would combine their congregations to make employing these people more affordable. 

The unintended result of this was that churches kept getting bigger simply because they were bigger. And any smaller church that was trying to buck the trend and keep Sunday mornings for worship by believers was just financially edged out. The whole experiment doesn’t go all that well for Willow Creek either, to be honest. There were some sexual scandals happening with their top leadership that were not dealt with very well, and they lost well over half their congregation over it. But, the reason I tell you all of this is to illustrate that the Evangelical value of producing services for “seekers” is part of what drove their need to pay people to do the work. 

And to be fair to them, the value behind this – wanting to help seekers understand more about Christ – was not bad. It’s even admirable. But there were not enough checks and balances in the system to keep it on the rails as the decades go by. 

Another value held by Evangelicals that influences them here is that the members of a congregation are seen as people who need to be fed and taken care of, and I mean that in the very best way possible. It’s not that they don’t think those people can do some of the work of the church, it’s that they want them to feel that the church cares about them, and therefore God cares about them. The church doesn’t want to put too much of a burden on even a willing volunteer because when that volunteer goes out of town for a week, the job won’t get done, and someone else in the church may end up feeling not cared for. Because of this the “most important” jobs are paid – paid work comes with different expectations than volunteer work. A volunteer and a paid worker both sometimes go out of town, but there is a different set of expectations for the paid worker than the volunteer in terms of how things will be taken care of in their absence. So when an Evangelical church hires someone to be the Pastor of Middle Schoolers (yes, that’s a thing) part of why they’re doing that is so the people in attendance have a reliable go-to source for that area of ministry. To put it bluntly, volunteers can flake out, it’s harder for employees to do so. Or at least there are more consequences when they do. These churches place a very high value on what could be called, “customer service” and they don’t want volunteers making that difficult. 

Now, Latter-day Saints, the thing you will notice in that discussion is that they use the word, “volunteer” to describe these non-paid positions – and that volunteers are held at slightly lower standards, are seen as less reliable, and are not trusted with the really important jobs in the church. I think you get a sense now of why they’re doing that. But let’s contrast it with what we’re doing. 

In our church you are not a volunteer – you are called, sustained, and set apart. Non-paid workers are not given then unimportant jobs, they’re given all the jobs. And we see these positions not as just being good for the church presenting a professional or slick image, but they are good for the person who holds them. Whether you work in the Nursery or are the Bishop that calling is a responsibility where you will help shoulder the weight of what the congregation needs. And we all do it together. And that is part of what shapes our spirituality. Church is not something we pay other people to produce for us, it is something we co-create. 

The trade-off here is that Sister Jones might not be very good at giving Sacrament Meeting talks but we all have to listen to her once a year. And Brother Miller hasn’t been able to figure out how to get on Family Search, but he still does his best to learn when he gets the calling to be a Family History consultant. But it’s really, really good for Sister Jones to give a talk, even if she’s not very good at it, because it helps shape her ability to study and articulate her own faith. In an Evangelical church if you are not good at something, you will not be doing it for long, even if you volunteer. The value is on impressing seekers or outsiders. While our value is on shaping the spiritual life of Saints. 

But we’re still left with a question I pointed out at the beginning of this video: If our system of calling people to positions of service and not paying them is so good and healthy, why do we pay our top leaders?  And it’s a fair question. I don’t have a definitive answer, but let me tell you what I think.

Do you remember earlier in this video where I mentioned that “seeker sensitive” church Willow Creek sort of falls apart in the end? The obvious reason for that is that the man who created that church and led it for decades showed himself to have very poor moral character as evidenced by the sexual abuse he committed. But the less obvious reason is that he had no one above him. He had no accountability. He didn’t answer to anyone. There was no one to have the equivalent conversation that we have about renewing a temple recommend, for example. He had no accountability. And because Evangelicals don’t conceptualize “ministers” as “priesthood holders” he didn’t even have to see himself as accountable to God all that much. In our language he was a bishop without a Stake President to be accountable to. So in our church, you can see how everyone has someone above them they answer to, even the Prophet who answers to God. And when you’re a worldwide church it eventually requires a small number of people who are given a different calling than the rest of us – they are called to work full-time to keep this thing on the rails SO THAT the rest of us can enjoy the blessings that come with ordinary ward-life…callings and releasings and working together and all the goodness and soul-formation that comes with that comes with that. We actually need a structure that goes all the way up so that the vast majority of us can be sheltered in the orderliness of everyone being accountable to someone. 

I hope you have enjoyed these thoughts on paid clergy. If you’ve got questions put them down in the comments and I try to get to them as I can, or you can hit me up at jroach@fairlatterdaysaints.org and I will see you in the next video. 

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

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

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 14; Mark 6; John 5–6 appeared first on FAIR.

Attending the temple for the first time can be a bit overwhelming. It can seem like a very unfamiliar experience for many, especially because we rarely hear details about what happens there. Understanding the doctrine and purpose underlying the temple will help you be ready and excited to enter the House of the Lord.

The purpose of this podcast is to do just that. We will cover topics such as the Endowment, temple sealings, covenants, ordinances, sacred temple clothing ,and common misconceptions about the temple.

Whether you are preparing for a mission, your own temple sealing, or just desire to receive your own endowment we hope that this podcast will deepen your understanding of the doctrine surrounding the temple.

In this episode, Jacob Crapo talks with Scott Woodward about how the temple and “Plan of Salvation” relate to each other. They discuss what the temple teaches about God’s plan for humanity and how the temple ordinances and covenants play a key role in that plan. Scott teaches religion classes at BYU-Idaho, is a managing director at Scripture Central, and host of the Church History Matters podcast.

Jacob Crapo was born and now resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. He served his mission in Upstate New York and was an ordinance worker in the Las Vegas Temple. One of Jacob’s dreams is to help build a temple. He is an electrician by trade but his real passion is helping others access the powers of heaven.

The post Cornerstone: A FAIR Temple Preparation Podcast – Episode 1: The Plan of Salvation with Scott Woodward appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: “Certain Women”

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 Women and their role in the church. 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’s verse comes from Luke 8:1-3:

Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, 3 and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.

So here we have Jesus and his disciples going around doing what they do – and we also have a group of women who are supporting them financially, and though the text doesn’t say it they were probably offering lots of other practical means of support as well. And so the question presents itself about the role of women in various churches. This is not an easy question answer on a number of fronts, but one of the most complicating factors is that “Evangelical Churches” are not 1 single entity.  “Evangelical” is not a denomination or formal group. Evangelicals are a subset of Protestants whose tradition and way of thinking developed about 75 years ago – around the time when the Billy Graham crusades began. But they can be of any denomination – like Baptists or Methodists – or they can be of no denomination at all. So when we say, “What is the Evangelical stance on women?” there is no one single answer to that.  There are some general trends and I’ll talk about those, but there are also lots of exceptions. Explaining our LDS understanding is complicated for other reasons. Unlike Evangelicals who have a decentralized structure, we have a very centralized structure so the official list of what women can and can’t do isn’t hard to identify – the difficult thing for us is that there are a lot of feelings around this. And I’ll talk about that a little today too.

The Evangelical View on Women

First, let’s gain some understanding on how Evangelicals view women and why they see it like they do. And the first thing I’ll say is that I’m not talking about the characteristics of Evangelical women. The reality is that they’re not all that much different than Latter-day Saint women in many ways. They love Jesus, they serve their families and community tirelessly, and they want good things for their children. But I’m going to talk about how they’re viewed in their churches, what they’re allowed to do, and why. 

I want so badly to be able to explain this to you in a simple way by saying, “there are two groups, and here is what they think,” but the on-the-ground reality is very different than that. I’m going to tell you how I understand it, even though it’s a bit messier.  And I know that even though this series is aimed at Latter-day Saints that we have some Evangelical friends who are listening along and I’d love to hear your experience on this issue in the comments – there really is a wide variety of how this plays out here. 

So, according to the Pew Research Center roughly 10% of American churches (in all their varieties) will ordain women and allow them to take the top leadership position in a church. And about half of those are Evangelical churches. So a pretty small minority of churches will say that women can be the lead pastor in a congregation. Of the largest 100 Churches in America – churches that have between 10,000 and 40,000 members (a few outliers have up to 100,000 members) 3 have a woman in the senior role, and 4 others have had one in the past, but not now. So the number of churches that have women in top leadership positions is very small, and we’re going to set that group aside for moment.  The only reason I really point them out is that sometimes I think Latter-day Saint women look at other churches with a sort of misunderstanding that they all have women who are allowed to do as much as they want, and that’s just not true. 

Public Role of Women

Of all the remaining churches, which is the vast majority, there are limits on what women are allowed to do, but those limits vary from church to church. Latter-day Saint women might find it amusing to hear that is that many, many of those churches women are not allowed to speak (meaning teaching or preaching) in a public service. I say that’s amusing because we let 12 year-old-girls teach us on Sunday morning on a regular basis. So sometimes when I hear Latter-day Saint friends complain about women not having enough of a role I just chuckle to myself because right out of the gate girls and women in our church already have a greater role than in many places. Churches that have this practice – women not being allowed to teach a mixed group in public – are doing so because they are trying to obey their understanding of Paul in the New Testament when he says, “a woman should remain silent in the church.” They take that very literally – this doesn’t mean that all of them like it, but they get respect for trying to take scripture seriously. 

In other churches women are allowed to speak or teach, but they are restricted from doing other things like bless and serve communion, or perhaps are restricted from being on a governing board or something similar. And here is where women in our church have a lot in common with Evangelical women as girls and women in our church do not do these things either. And it is probably fair to say that Evangelical women have mixed feelings about this just as Latter-day Saint women do. And they manage those feelings much like women in our church do. 

In terms of public worship outside of speaking/teaching Evangelical and Latter-day Saint women are pretty similar. In both traditions women are frequently found leading worship – for us that looks like a song leader helping the congregation with hymns, and for them it might look like a praise-band on a stage.  In both traditions women are often found doing things like teaching Sunday School, leading youth, planning events, coordinating various service efforts, and more. We sometimes joke that our church would not run without the Relief Society, well their churches wouldn’t run without the women who do the equivalent work. 

Ordination

When it comes to ordination it’s an interesting view. Many Evangelical churches don’t even practice ordination, so it’s not an easy comparison to make. Of those who do, they think about it differently. Ordination is usually not about being able to lead priesthood ordinances. There are a few minor exceptions to this and those have to do with who is authorized to do something like perform a wedding. But for the most part ordination is a process through which the community recognizes that a certain person has a call to some kind of ministry and they become ordained as a way for the congregation to say that they will sustain this person in their call. In function this is what we do too. I know that there are women – some whom I like and respect a lot – that would feel really frustrated with that explanation because they feel using the word “ordained” is important. And I sympathize with that pain. But in function, the callings that women experience in our churches work the same way that ordination works in most other churches. It’s recognition that someone is going to be filling a role and the community pledges their support. 

Interestingly enough, Evangelical women do not usually receive this formal kind of calling and declaration of support or sustaining. If the 3rd grade class needs a Sunday School teacher, a woman might volunteer, get a bit of training and some materials to use, and that is that. There is no calling and setting apart, no sustaining. While we don’t use “ordination” language for women in our church, the apples-to-apples comparison puts us in a situation that is often better than is recognized.

Heavenly Mother

Another difference to point out is that only the most liberal of Evangelical or Protestant churches would talk about having a Heavenly Mother. And to be fair, it’s not like we know a lot about how to do with her or even have a very developed theology around her – but we do have the concept of her. The only comparison that comes close for Evangelical women is that they can sometimes talk about God having feminine qualities – maybe a reference to the verse about Jesus being like a “mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings.” But it stops there.  Before I joined our church I did not know that Latter-day Saints had a belief in a Heavenly Mother. The way I found out went like this…I wasn’t even studying with the missionaries yet, but I wanted to visit a LDS service and just see what it was like.  It happened to be Father’s Day. We sang the hymn “Oh my Father,” and I was shocked to see the line about, “I have a Mother there.”  But I think I told myself that it was only a song and didn’t think too much about it. But one of the speakers that day was a middle aged man whose children were teenagers. He talked about the work of being a father with all its rewards and challenges, and admitted that he could not have begun that journey in any way without his wife. And then he said something like: It’s just like our Heavenly Father…a Mother is required for someone to become a Father and aren’t we grateful to have a Heavenly Mother.”  To say that I was shocked was an understatement. Only the most liberal of liberal churches would talk about God in that way. I was very confused.  Later I messaged a friend to ask about it – the only sense I could make of it was that this idea must have belonged to that individual man and he was saying something provocative but it was based in his own belief and logic – it couldn’t possibly be a teaching of the Church. 

The Two Trees

Before we are done here I want to make one recommendation. I know this is a tough topic for some women in our church. If nothing else I hope this comparison has helped you see that when you compare like-to-like, we actually have quite a bit to be very pleased with. And still, I think any of us can struggle from time to time. And I have a thought for something that might help. 

On the FAIR website (and YouTube channel) there is a talk called The Two Trees by Dr. Valerie Hudson. Dr. Hudson is a member of our church and also a professor at Texas A&M in the Department of International Affairs, previously she taught at BYU. Her list of impressive credentials is longer than my arm. I say all of that to say that this woman is no dummy. She is incredibly impressive. And she gave a talk called The Two Trees that addresses this topic so well. It’s a long and dense talk. I won’t do justice to it with this summary but her main point is that both men and women are required in this work. Without a woman (Eve) the whole human project would have never got off the ground. And without another woman (Mary), Jesus Christ could not have come to save us. But men have their role too. Without the man Jesus Christ we would be stuck in our sin forever. And without a priesthood bearing man we have no ability to accomplish ordinances. It took women to usher us into this world, and it takes men to usher us into the next. If this is at all interesting to you please go listen to Sister Hudson’s talk. It was the single most helpful thing for me to get all of this settled in my head. 

So there you have it.  There are many similarities – and some important differences between Latter-day Saint women and Evangelical women. I hope this conversation encouraged your faith and sparks something in you to learn more. 

Join us next week and we’ll tackle another topic from the New Testament.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

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

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 13; Luke 8; 13 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Why Don’t You Pray to Jesus?

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 Prayer. 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’s verse comes from Luke 11:1-2:

“And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name….”

If you’ve ever visited an Evangelical church for a worship service you’ve probably noticed a lot of differences from how we conduct worship in our church. A couple videos back I talked about this at length and if you want a more thorough discussion on that take a look at the episode about honoring the Sabbath. And one of the things you may have noticed is that they address prayers directly to Jesus, while we do not. 

…And here’s a bit of an aside…All of the issues I’m discussing are addressed in depth on the FAIR Latter-day Saints website. And many other issues this series won’t touch. Almost every video in the comment section (“Hi people who leave comments!! Love you!”) someone will ask about addressing some other aspect of the same topic, but sometimes it’s just far beyond the scale of what I’m trying to do here. But FAIR has a massive collection of articles and research that explores every nook and cranny of just about every issue you can think of. One of my hopes for this series is actually that something you hear makes you curious about the topic and you set out to learn more. And the FAIR website is just a treasure trove of information for you to dive into. Okay, back on topic…

So before we talk about why Latter-day Saints pray differently, we need to work to understand why Evangelicals are praying directly to Jesus and what it means to them to do so. 

First we should say that Evangelicals also pray to the Father. And some also pray directly to the Holy Spirit. That’s not off limits to them and you will hear plenty of this in their services or private prayer. But they have special affinity for praying to Jesus that’s a bit hard for us Latter-day Saints to understand. 

Evangelicals would start with the Bible and say that we have examples from the New Testament of people praying to Jesus and it seems to work out for them.  There are 3 main examples of this plus one other, and we’ll quickly look at all of them. 

The three examples are Stephen, Saul, and Ananias – their stories are found in Acts chapters 7-9. The other instance is in Revelation 22:20, the second to last verse of the Bible. There are some other examples that people quibble about, but these are the ones where there is agreement that these are prayers directed toward Jesus. 

Stephen

So first let’s look at Stephen’s example and try to see  how Evangelicals see it.  In Acts 6 we see that Stephen is a man full of the Spirit and working to spread the Gospel.  The ruling council called the Sanhedrian – they’re a ruling council for Jews during this era – if you remember Jews are under Roman occupation so the rule of Rome is still enforced, the Sanhedrian is a ruling body or court for religious matters the Roman government didn’t concern itself with. The members of the Sannhedrian are upset with Stephen, they conspire to make false charges against him and haul him into court. The charge is that he has spoken blasphemous words against Moses and against God. Stephen is asked if the charges are true and he gives a passionate speech explaining how Moses points directly to Jesus. The Sanhedrian is furious – they “gnashed their teeth at him” – and then they drag him outside the city limits and start stoning him.  Stephen looks up to Heaven, sees Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ in a vision, and prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my Spirit.” 

Stephen’s prayer is very short and directed at Jesus, despite the fact that Heavenly Father is there too. Evangelicals take this to reinforce the idea that Jesus is the mediator between God and man. They’re not taking this passage to say, “You shouldn’t pray to Heavenly Father,” but they do take it to reinforce the idea that no longer did people need to consult a priest or make an animal sacrifice to approach God. Praying in Jesus’ name is now the key to communication with God. For them, “praying in Jesus’ name includes praying directly to him.” They see Stephen taking this option – even though God the Father was right there too. 

Bruce R. McConkie addresses this in his Doctrinal New Testament Commentary by basically saying the prayer was consistent with what Stephen had just preached, and was being stoned for – calling Jesus God. Jesus, showing his approval for Stephen’s actions, reveals himself to Stephen as he is dying, and Stephen addresses him directly because that’s how he got in this spot in the first place. 

Saul

We’ll look at the example of Saul, but Evangelicals basically make the same argument here. In Acts 9 Saul (who becomes Paul) is traveling around persecuting Christians for many of the same reasons the Sanhedrian was persecuting Stephen. He and his companions are walking on the road to Damascus. Saul sees a great light and hears a voice asking, “Saul, Saul why do you persecute me?” Saul answers back directly to the voice, “Who are you?” and the voice tells him that it is Jesus speaking and then gives him some further directions. Paul’s “who are you” is a kind of prayer directed at Jesus. Evangelicals would say that this is an example of praying to Jesus when things worked out. 

Is it?  Technically, yes. Paul speaks to Jesus, speaking to the divine is prayer, so Paul prayed to Jesus. And it worked out for him. 

But the experience does seem like an outlier. It’s not a normal occurrence to be traveling down the road, blinded by a light, and have Jesus speak directly. And I suppose if you have this experience, answering directly is the right thing to do. But these are not the normal circumstances of how most of us are going to pray our entire lives. 

Ananias

The final example Evangelicals would cite is Ananias.  He’s a disciple living in Damascus, where Saul is headed. Now, Saul had been blinded by his encounter with Jesus on the road and Ananias is who gets called on to restore Saul’s sight. Ananias has a vision of Jesus asking him to go to a certain house where Saul will be to restore his sight. Ananias’ first response is, “Yes, Lord.”  And I think we Latter-day Saints would agree that if Jesus appears to you and aks you to do something, the correct response is, “Yes, Lord.” 

But none of these examples – Stephen, Saul, or Ananias – are typical. They happen very soon after the resurrection of Jesus, they all happen within a short time of each other (Acts 7-9), they all involve Jesus appearing to someone, speaking to them, and the person speaks back. Evangelicals see this as a prototype of prayer, while we would probably see it as an understandable exception. 

Revelation 22:20

And there is one other example that helps explain why Evangelicals see praying directly to Jesus as a good thing.  Revelation 22 is the last chapter of the Bible. It’s not the last chapter that was written – that’s probably 2 Peter, though there’s plenty of debate – but it is the last chapter of how the New Testament is arranged, and this verse is one of the final verses we read, so it has some weight. 

The verse goes like this, “He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”  And, ‘he who testifies to these things,’ is Jesus himself, and the phrase “Amen, Come, Lord Jesus,” is seen as a prayer in agreement that he does so. 

And that phrase, “Come, Lord Jesus,” has a history. It is considered the second oldest formulation of prayer, second only to the Lord’s prayer. Part of how we know this is that Paul quotes it in 1 Cor. 16:22 – but he quotes the Aramaic version, Maranatha. The people living in Corinth are Greek speakers. So for Paul to assume they would know an Aramaic phrase suggests that it was a well known prayer. The phrase also appears in another book from that era called the Didache, which is kind of like an early “church handbook” and teaches about how the church should be run in practical terms. The phrase, “Come Lord Jesus” or Maranatha is suggested as a way to end a prayer, much like we would say, “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” Early Christians could say, “Come, Lord Jesus. Amen,” and they meant the same thing. And the phrase, “Come, Lord Jesus,” goes on to have an important place in Christian worship for many centuries. 

Evangelicals aren’t usually super interested in ancient church history though. And they don’t understand the history and development of how that phrase has been used. Remember the entire Evangelical movement is about 70 years old, so they don’t care much about history before that except to jump way back into time to the days of the New Testament. And when they see “Come, Lord Jesus” in the New Testament they take it to be a prayer toward Jesus. But they miss the fact that the phrase was being used as something much closer to, “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” Their desire and motivation here is not bad. They want to get as closely connected to Jesus as they can, and that is admirable. But in doing so they miss the fact that Jesus himself asked us to pray in the name of the Father. 

One of the weaknesses of the Evangelical movement is that because they hold a view of the Bible as inerrant, they take things in it more literally than context and history would allow. They take “Come, Lord Jesus” as a literal prayer, not a formation of praying in Jesus’ name. Their hearts are in the right place, but they get a bit lost in the weeds of obeying the Bible vs. obeying Jesus. I say that kindly, and I think they have very good motives for doing so, but the resulting practice has some issues. 

Repetition in Prayer

The other issue I want to briefly introduce here is repetition in prayer. For the most part we would be on the same page as Evangelicals about scripted prayers. Like us they would say scripted prayers are to be avoided because it’s too easy to pray them without your heart in it. However, there is a sizable minority in the Evangelical world who experiment with scripted prayers, and they have an interesting motivation for doing so that I want to point out. 

Now, usually scripted prayers are not new prayers. They are very old prayers that have been written down and repeated throughout the centuries. You’ve probably heard of The Book of Common Prayer which contains the Anglican prayers assigned to any given Sunday. Evangelicals who are interested in this kind of thing have a soft spot for Anglicans so that’s usually their go-to source.  These prayers have been prayed by Christians for many centuries. And there is a decent sized minority in the Evangelical culture that longs for learning about ancient ways. They have an innate understanding that their so-called “happy clappy” churches are actually missing something. And they know the thing they’re missing is ancient. Using very old scripted prayers is one attempt they make to learn ancient practices. They know that something has been lost, and they long to have it restored. I’ll push my luck here and say: they long for a restoration. And what they long for in theory and vagueness, we have in specificity. Just something to think about as you talk with your Evangelical friends about these kinds of things. 

I hope you will join us next time. I love getting your questions in email – you can find me at Jroach@fairlatterdaysaints.org And I will 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 – Matthew 11–12; Luke 11 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: No Authority Needed?

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 Authority. 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’s verse comes from Luke 9:1-2:

Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick.

Why Authority?

A common Evangelical question that would come up here is something like: Why are Latter-day Saints obsessed with authority? In our church authority comes straight from Jesus.” And it’s interesting because there are several spots in this week’s readings, and in the readings coming up, where Jesus’ authority is questioned. People want to know under what authority he is doing this or that. And in our church we talk a lot about authority…proper authority…priesthood authority…general authorities. Who has authority to do what is an important question to us. We would say its part of how Jesus Christ has ordered his church. Evangelicals see questions of authority differently.  I want to explain how they see authority and what they mean by it, so that we might see a way our church’s point of view might be thoughtful or a blessing to them. 

First, I need you to set aside, just for a minute, the worry about the Bible being corrupted and translated incorrectly. Yes, those are true, but if that is your whole focus in conversation about the Bible you’re going to be butting heads with Evangelicals and not seeing a way to understand them, or to let them see the beauty in our beliefs. So, yes, there are issues in the Bible’s translation and transmission process. We will just let that sit to the side for a moment. In this video I want you to think of the parts of the Bible that are inspired, that truly show God, that are translated correctly – all the best parts of the Bible. 

And this topic gets a little heady – and we need to geek out a bit to get to the point – stay with me there is a pay off, I promise. 

If you’ve been following along with these videos you are starting to see that because Evangelicals hold a certain set of values, they prioritize different concepts differently. 

When Evangelicals use the word “authority” it’s usually in the context of, “the authority of scripture.” And they put a lot of effort and priority into demonstrating how and why the Bible is the source of authority. They have a sincere desire to live in a way that is resisting the pull of culture (to some degree) and place themselves under the authority of scripture. This value goes all the way back to the earliest Protestant roots.  At least part of what the Reformation was about was the question: Who or what gets the final say? Is it the Pope? Who?  

The Reformation

Prior to the Reformation (which was not a singular event, but a process over many years) authority was contained in the Catholic Church. Few people had access to a physical Bible, few could read, and frankly few had time to devote to study as their lives were primarily about doing what needed to be done to sustain life. Leisurely sitting and studying the scriptures is not easily compatible with agrarian life. So before the Reformation the Catholic Church holds all the authority. The scriptures mean what they say it means – very few people could open up their Bible and check their work. And it wasn’t just Martin Luther who saw some of the contradictions between what the text said, and what the Catholic Church taught that the text said. Plenty of priests saw this, some were even writing about it. But it took a Martin Luther to have the courage to take the argument public. And he does it in spectacular fashion – and with excellent timing. If he had been born even 100 years earlier his argument wouldn’t have mattered much because there was no way to get scripture into the hands of average folks since the printing press had not been invented. But Luther comes along and makes a good point at a time in history when there is technology to actually apply it. And all of this is a very good thing. However, what happened when the Bible itself was given ultimate authority, and the church took a back seat. Anyone with enough education to read could access the Bible – their level of understanding the context of what they were reading didn’t matter much because the Bible itself was the ultimate authority. As long as they read with as “plain” a reading as they could, the Bible could replace the authority of the priest.  This is referred to as Sola Scriptura – meaning “Scripture alone” has the final say. Today’s Evangelicals very much follow in this tradition. The idea for them is that God is the ultimate authority, and he has given us a book, therefore that book has to have authority too. 

Did God come to us as a Book? Or did he send a Son?

But here’s the problem. We don’t say, “God so loved the world that he sent us a book.”  That feels pretty cold, a bit lonely, kind of disconnected. We say, “God so loved the world that he sent us his son.” Sending his son came with all kinds of messiness and pain and difficulty, but the experience Jesus had while on Earth was very human so that is to be expected. It just seems odd that God would go to this great, messy length to send us a Son, and then expect those who come after that Son to be given a book to represent him and whose authority to follow, and not an actual real-live human being who can act in his authority. 

We believe, as the first 1500 years of Christianity believed, that the authority to act in Christ’s name is best located in a human being who can understand the messiness of life – not in a book. Further – without even talking about the problems with translation and transmission of the Bible – all written words have to be interpreted. You have to take the written word and understand what it means. This requires a human mind. There is no bypassing this where God just dumps words straight from his mouth into your head. (Michael Ash’s book, “Rethinking Revelation: The Human Element in Scripture” is 700 pages explaining why this is true if you’re interested.) God’s project of communicating to us has to involve humans. Evangelicals want to place it in an object, a book.

What is the Authority of the Bible?

And it’s easy to see how some problems develop right away when a book is the container for God’s authority on the Earth, instead of a human being who represents him. The biggest question seems to be, How can an ancient narrative text hold authority over modern people who do not understand the culture and context from which it came?

Here is what Evangelicals do, and it’s interesting, they simply open the scripture, read what it says, and apply it to themselves. The end. Or so they think. They understand themselves to be doing a “plain reading” of scripture, and that they have within themselves all that is needed for understanding – anyone who understands differently is at best dull-minded, and at worst outright evil. But most of the Bible is not a list of things to do and things to avoid, or even a list of things to be believed. It’s a story, a narrative. And even when it lists things to be believed or things to do, those are in the context of some story. But if you can’t understand the story, you have no way to understand the do’s and don’ts. It can kind of be a grab-bag approach – just reach into the text and pull out some meaning, doesn’t really matter if it was ever intended to apply or not. 

A low view of Scripture

Evangelicals then think about the Bible as something that represents God – He has placed his authority into the Bible. When they say, “authority of the Bible” it’s a kind of short-hand for, “God has authority and he has vested it into the book we call the Bible. We can turn to the Bible to learn what we need to learn.”  But we think of it sort of the other-way around. And it’s the same point that NT Wright makes in some of his writing. We would say that according to the Bible itself authority is vested in God – and God gets to decide what to do with it – and the narrative of the Bible shows us, over and over, that God vests it in his representatives. To say that God now vests the authority in a book takes a complete left-turn away from where the story of the Bible is leading you. It’s actually a very low view of scripture because what it’s saying is that: God’s plan within the pages of the Bible is to cooperate with humans to do his work, but we feel ambivalent about that, so we’re going to change the plan and let God place it all in a nice neat book, not a messy human race. By taking the authority away from where God was pointing it, we disrespect him and the very book he gave us. 

So what about your Evangelical friends? They want – desperately want – to get things right about God. And having everything all neat and tidy inside a book seems like a good way to do that. So they remove authority from human leaders and place it in a book. They’re trying to keep things “pure” and not let the humans mess them up. That’s an understandable desire and goal. But it’s not God’s desire. God partners with us to create, to organize, and to lead. And to remove authority from the humans God partners with, and placing that authority in a book might feel safe, but it’s not because it’s not God’s plan. 

In other words, Jesus gives authority to his apostles in this story. That’s what we read in Luke 9. Evangelicals are saying, “That’s scary because humans mess things up – remember the Reformation.”  And they’re not wrong. But the answer isn’t to change God’s way of operating in the world, the answer is to try and get better at following the very pattern the Bible has laid out for us – listening to God’s representatives on the Earth. The Evangelicals desperately want to have a high view of scripture. But they undermine themselves because they’re pivoting away from scripture when they place the Bible as God’s partner instead of the humans God has decided to partner with. Think of it this way, the Bible is kind of like a 5-act play…Creation, the Fall, the story of Israel, Jesus, and then the book we call, “The Acts of the Apostles,” where the gospel is taken to the ends of the Earth. And that is the stage we’re still in. We don’t call it, “The Acts of the Book.”  Books don’t commit acts. They’re objects. Everything in the Bible is intended to teach us how to carry on the story of the Bible, and that includes placing authority in humans, not books. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Come back next week and we’ll look at some more. 

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

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

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 9–10; Mark 5; Luke 9 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: But I thought Jesus said we don’t have to follow the Sabbath anymore?

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 Sabbath. 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’s verse comes from Mark 2:23-27:

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28 So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

A common Evangelical question that would come up here is: WHY does your church teach that we should obey the Sabbath when clearly Jesus says we don’t have to. First we’ll address what that looks like during Sunday worship and then what it looks like for the rest of the day on Sundays.

So, how do Evangelicals understand what “keeping the Sabbath” means?  As we’ve talked about in another video the history of Evangelicalism really goes back about 70 or so years and it’s growth happens right along side the Baby Boom. And those initial churches that called themselves Evangelical were pretty much following the pattern churches had followed forever – Sundays were for worship, no working, no shopping, no extravagant entertainment, spend time with family, try to keep a reverent spirit about the day. But by the late 60’s that starts to change and it’s a Southern California church called Calvary Chapel they’re at the forefront of that change. They were hugely successful. They become the hub of the “Jesus Movement” of the 1970’s where churches and a tension starts to develop between the rules and expectations that churches, even Evangelical Churches had, and what the Jesus Movement/Hippies were looking for. But for most of the 1970’s this tension is located Southern California and isn’t an issue.  Most Evangelical churches across the country would still have been thinking about something like the Sabbath Day in traditional ways. The members probably would have still been dressing up for church, men in ties and women in dresses. But by 1979 the younger leaders at Calvary Chapel wanted to take the church culture they had created there, and start churches with the same mind set around the country. And so during the 1980’s the Evangelical movement takes a radical turn toward a more casual worship style. It doesn’t happen all at once, but by the end of the 1980’s most Evangelical churches are encouraging people to come “dressed as you are” to church, and have also de-emphasized most rules on Sunday behavior. This is the history of how they got there, but why did they do it?

Ultimately Evangelicals place high priority on the pragmatic – does something work – and far less priority on the long term consequences. Beginning in the 1980’s and certainly into the 1990’s the kinds of Evangelical churches that were embracing a casual style of worship were growing. They were exciting places to be. Families with youth flocked to these churches because they had fun programs that kept the teenagers engaged. But by the 1990’s and into the 2000’s a pragmatic practice that had begun for a good reason (to accommodate the Jesus Movement culture) had turned into the normalized practice. By 2000 you would be hard pressed to find any Evangelical church where members and clergy alike were not dressing in casual clothes on Sunday morning. And when that shift happened along with it was the shift away from “rule keeping” around other Sunday practices like not working or shopping. Nobody really saw a point in emphasizing what was relevant because embracing what was casual was working for them from a pragmatic point of view. The casual style did draw in young families and lots of excitement. By the time this had spread to most Evangelical Churches there really wasn’t a way to put the Genie back in the bottle. The change happened and that was that. 

Interestingly enough, about 15 or so years ago, a movement started within some corners of Evangelicalism to embrace more traditional practices, to have services that were quiet and not full of rock music. Many of the people who embraced that ultimately move out of the Evangelical world and become Anglicans, Lutherns, Catholics or Eastern Orthodox.   

One thing I’ve noticed in our church is that it can sometimes be hard for Latter-day Saints to look at Evangelical services and not be a little jealous. They’ve got exciting music, lots of energy, worship bands, and more. And so sometimes I think that a conversation with an Evangelical friend would end with a Latter-day Saint saying something like, “Yeah, I kind of wish we were doing what you’re doing.”  And I sympathize. Our hymns are old, organ music is not the most exciting, even when the hymn says it should be “sung vigorously” it’s usually not. But I’d like to make the case about why a more reverent style of worship sets the tone for a day where the Sabbath can be kept, and that keeping the Sabbath is a blessing, not a rule we chaff against. 

When Evangelicals started to dismantle a more formal style of worship for the sake of the Jesus Movement they had the best of motives. But as it grew into a standard practice without the underlying motivation it also came with an unspoken message that said something like: We can follow Jesus without traditional constraints, and in fact, it is our obligation to do so. “We need to show people that church is not about following your grandmother’s rules for church, it’s for us fun, modern people too.”  Do you hear the change there? It went from, “We want to change our worship style for the sake of the Jesus Movement people who seem to need an honest accommodation,” into “We make the change for ourselves because we’re not old and boring.”  The goal moved from accommodating others to expressing one’s own coolness. And if the point of worship is about me and what makes me feel comfortable, it’s really hard to accept that anyone else, even God, should place any expectations on me. So the idea that God gets a say in how worship goes gets tossed aside. But none of them really looked far enough into the future to say, “If we start to throw out God’s expectations in one area, it becomes pretty easy to throw them out in other areas.”  And a deep cynicism starts to develop of God’s right to have any say in our behaviors. If his opinion doesn’t matter on Sundays, soon it won’t matter on Friday night either. 

Instead, what we are trying to do in our church is to say that God asks us to have an attitude of reverence when we worship him, especially on the Sabbath day. And that attitude should be carried throughout the day. And it’s true that the expression of reverence might look different in different cultures, but there is no culture where failing to express reverence in at least some way is obedience to that command. God is the object of our worship, His day is Sunday, we modify our behavior to worship him as he would like – not as we would like. And so while I see what the Evangelicals are trying to do, at least historically, I think that project ultimately failed. It became about what makes the members of that church feel good – and when they stop feeling good at that church, they can move to another one across town where they might feel good again. 

But what about after church?  How do Evangelicals think about keeping the afternoon/evening holy?

In our church there has been some change over time here as well. Some of the more strict practices of the past seem to have softened. If you were to peek in on a Latter-day Saint family during a Sunday afternoon and an Evangelical family during the same time, you might not see much difference. It’s subtle, but let me try to tease it out for you. 

In the last 10 years or so there has been a flurry of books published in the Evangelical world on the topic of the Sabbath. I’ve read many of them, one of the classes I had in Divinity School was simply titled, “The Sabbath.” Those books have titles like, “Finding Renewal on the Sabbath”…”The Sabbath for Soul Rest”…and one simply titled, “Breathe.”  The thesis of most of these books is that God wants you to feel good and mentally healthy, and taking time for yourself on the Sabbath is God’s plan for how to do that. Now, you know this, I’m a mental health therapist so I’m all about good self-care and doing things in your life that will bring about more mental health. This is not a bad pursuit and I’m certainly not making fun of them for it. You should be taking care of yourself and you do need breaks from your obligations and that is certainly part of what is going on in observing the Sabbath. But is that it?  Is it just for me to feel better?  You can hear in this the same logic that is used for an Evangelical Sunday worship service playing out here too. This is “you time” which is quite different then,“This is a day where we focus on worshiping God all day long, and in various ways, even when that requires quite a bit of effort from us.” The traditional understanding of keeping the sabbath day holy was that this is God’s day, and we use it for him. But for Evangelicals that has turned into “this is a day for you to rest and feel better.”   

So, how do we explain our beliefs to an Evangelical friend without their eyes glossing over and them thinking, “that doesn’t sound like Sabbath day rest to me at all.”  Well, let me tell you what it was like for me when I was investigating our church.  

I noticed the external differences in worship right away, anyone would. But eventually I noticed the spirit of reverence behind the differences and found that very attractive. It’s impossible to be both reverent and cynical. Those two things repel each other. And, while this isn’t true for every Evangelical, my experience of it was that all that striving to be cool also came with a deep river of cynicism.  When you form a church to suit your own preferences, you have to edge out at least some of God’s preferences, and things get confusing. It’s hard to tell which of God’s commandments even matter any more. Or what things about God are even true. Not everyone’s experience, but it was mine. So when I encountered a very typical, boring service at my local ward it didn’t take me long to see the lack of cynicism as very comforting. I came to enjoy being able to worship reverently with friends, but also to have a hilarious time with those same friends in other contexts. But when we’re together doing the things of God we act like God wants us to act. That’s the feeling of community and purpose. There are very few feelings that are better than that. 

I hope you enjoyed this discussion on the Sabbath day. Join us again next week when we look at more Evangelical questions as they come up in our Come Follow Me text. 

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

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

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 8; Mark 2–4; Luke 7 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Why Do You Need Prophets Anyway?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Matthew 7:15-20 Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16 By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

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 prophets. 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 common question from Evangelicals is why do we think we need prophets?  Aren’t they easily identified as false prophets? And to be honest, when I was investigating the church this was the hardest issue for me to grapple with. The idea of having prophets made literally no sense to me.  These days I can see it how other Latter-day Saints see it – it’s a blessing and a gift – but back then I felt suspicious. So why is it so hard for Evangelicals to understand the need for modern prophets?  I think there’s two reasons and we’ll talk about both of them.

First, Evangelicals are suspicious of the idea because they have a belief that Jesus is the last prophet – and to call anyone who comes after him a prophet is to be disrespectful to Christ. Where does this belief come from?  Let’s look at Hebrews 1:1-2 “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” I know, to your Latter-day Saint ears there is no problem with that verse. You don’t hear it how they hear it.  For them that verse sounds more like, “but in these last days we will only hear from Jesus.” As with most scripture quagmires, a careful reading of the text helps us out a bit. All they hear is, “Jesus was the final prophet, no more prophets will come.” But that’s not what the text says, and it’s not what the New Testament shows. 

“In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets, at many times and in various ways” – We have no disagreement with Evangelicals there. The problem comes here, “but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things.” In that they hear that Jesus is the last and greatest prophet, that him being the “heir of all things” means that no other “heirs” are needed. The problem here, of course, is that we’re talking about prophecy in a few different ways. When we say that we have a living prophet on the earth today we are not saying that the prophet is greater than Jesus. The Old Testament prophets pointed to a future day when God would save his people. Then Jesus came. Now modern prophets still point to Jesus. Evangelicals are confusing the role of Jesus as prophet with the role of all the Old Testament and modern day prophets. It’s a bit nonsensical since they don’t literally think Daniel or Habakkuk are in competition with Jesus. But they feel very sensitive to the idea of upstaging Jesus. One way to talk about this with them is to talk about what a modern prophet does – points us to Christ over and over. 

And then the second issue comes up. Evangelicals wonder why they would need someone to, “point to Jesus” when they already have a few reliable sources of doing that. They see the New Testament as pointing to Jesus (and we certainly wouldn’t disagree with them there); they see the Holy Spirit testifying to them of Jesus (again, no disagreement, we believe the Holy Ghost does that too); and they rely heavily on the concept of the, “priesthood of all believers” meaning that they themselves contain all the needed gifts to hear from God, no “mediator” needed. We’ll talk much more about the priesthood of all believers and what that means when we get to that section of scripture but for now we’ll just say that Evangelicals basically believe that no leader can hear from God any better than they can. Their own pastors teach them, but if the individual doesn’t like what is being taught then they move to another church where they like the teaching better. 

Latter-day Saints may find it odd to say it this way, but there is a sense in which Evangelicals believe that by doing this they are emulating, as closely as possible, the New Testament church. They would say they’re just trying to boil down to the essence of the gospel and follow that as much as they can.  And it might sound odd to you, but underneath that is a desire for Restoration. 

They can easily look around and see that the Evangelical world is in trouble in some very real ways. And they long for God to reach down and set things straight. Sound familiar? What a fascinating opening to talk about what it means that we have a restored church. It might surprise you, Latter-day Saint to learn that many, maybe even most, Evangelical churches sometimes talk about how they’re really just trying to live in a way that contextualizes the New Testament for today’s world. They think they’re living a kind of restoration. I want to talk a little more about that in way you might be somewhat familiar with. 

This comes from the work of Dr. RoseAnn Benson. She previously had been in the Ancient Scripture department at BYU and now teaches at Southern Illinois University. Her book is Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith: 19th-Century Restorationists and it’s worth reading. Let me explain what she says and then you’ll see how it relates to Evangelicals. My apologies to Dr. Benson for this simplistic summary. Her work is layered and deep and beautiful and I cringe at the way I’m about to summarize it for you, but summarize it I will. 

The year is 1830 and Parley P. Prat (PPP) has been corresponding with his friend Sydney Rigdon. You know from church history that Rigdon is a Campbellite preacher at this time. PPP and other missionaries convert him and about 100 others including 5th President of our church Lorenzo Snow and his sister Eliza R. Snow. This is the basic church history information that you probably already know. What you might not know is that the Campbellite movement considered themselves a Restorationist movement. They thought they were doing the work of bringing the restoration, but they were going about it with an entirely different strategy. The Campbellites believed at that time that in order to restore the Lord’s true church they needed to pare down the essence of the gospel and remove everything that wasn’t essential.They wanted to strip away everything that was not the very basics. They wanted to clear things to the side that didn’t support the goal of restoring the the very essence of the gospel.  They were trying to take the very heart of what the Bible teaches and bring it into their day in a way that would get rid of all the errors that had crept into the church over the decades. You can kind of see the logic in what they’re doing. 

What happens when PPP and Sydney Rigdon meet in person is that PPP is able to agree with him about the need for a restoration – but that Joseph Smith was teaching the restoration doesn’t come from paring everything down. Joseph doesn’t want to take everything away that isn’t the rock-bottom essentials. Joseph wants to restore everything. Every, everything. He didn’t want to push anything to the side – he wanted to open everything up. To restore it all. Once Rigdon, and 100 others including the Snow family, hear this they understand. They already believed a restoration was necessary – but now they understood it wasn’t going to come through removing parts of what God had established, it was going to come through restoring everything. 

Back to our Evangelical friends. 

They already know things need to be restored. This is where the mental health therapist comes out in me.  If they don’t trust you, or you don’t have enough relationship with you, they are not going to feel safe admitting that any kind of restoration is needed. They will feel defensive and not open up. That’s okay, it just means you need to earn more relationship collateral with them. But if they trust you enough to admit that there can be some issues with their church from time to time, you can probably have a pretty cool conversation about what restoration would look like – is it a paring down of everything so that an individual person sitting alone with their Bible is enough?  Or is it a restoration of everything – so that the individual can certainly sit alone with their Bible, but they are also guided by a Prophet from time to time to keep them headed in the right direction? 

Now, I told you I would tell you how I gained a testimony of having a Prophet and here it is. 

Three and a half years ago I was in the middle of taking lessons from the missionaries. (If you haven’t heard my conversion story it’s a fun one and I’ll put a link to it in the description below where you can listen to it on the FAIR website. But, warning, it has some difficult themes in it and probably isn’t great to listen to around small kids – teens and up would be fine.) From Anglican Minister to Relief Society Sister – Interview with Jennifer Roach – FAIR (fairlatterdaysaints.org) And honestly I was struggling with the idea of having a Prophet. I’ve seen the worst of what can happen in churches when people in power take advantage of that power (listen to my story if you want to know more about that) and I was skeptical that a man with that much power could be trusted. 

One day the missionaries say, “The Prophet is coming to Seattle and we have tickets for you.” At the time I didn’t know that this was an unusual thing. Maybe the Prophet just drops by from time to time. But it was a very special event and it was held at Safeco Field, the baseball stadium. It was a beautiful summer evening and 50,000 people showed up to see Russel M. Nelson. And he was great, just like you’d imagine. But it wasn’t his talk or anything in the evening’s program that made me change my mind.  What helped me was that when I arrived about half an hour before the event was to begin and sat with friends from my ward. While we were waiting everyone around us was talking about “their prophet” – usually the one who had been leading the church when they were young, and what it meant to them to have a leader like that. To be totally honest I think my own skeptical nature on this topic would have kept me from trusting a man I didn’t know and will never meet. But I saw what having a Prophet did in the lives of my friends and how much goodness it brought to them. And I was converted to the idea that very night – not by President Nelson’s words, though they were great, but by the testimonies of my friends. 

I hope these words have given you some thoughts about how to talk with your Evangelical friends about the idea of Prophets. If you have a question an Evangelical friend has asked you that you’d like to get some insight on please email me at jroach@fairlatterdaysaints.com. I got an email this week from some Sister Missionaries in the Houston, Texas mission so shout-out to Sister Cox and her companions. I’ll be answering their question in an upcoming episode. And I look forward to seeing you all 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 – Matthew 6–7 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Why You So Judgy?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Luke 6:37 Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 

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 worthiness. 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 common question from Evangelicals is why our church spends so much time and energy, “being judgy” – meaning, why do we care about worthiness?  Why do we say our Bishops are, “Judges in Israel.” Can’t we just follow Jesus’ words and refrain from all the judgment?

This is a huge issue, and there is not enough time in a video like this to parse through all of it, so I’m just going to cover the parts the average Evangelical would be worried about. And they are worried about it. If you remember a couple videos back we talked about the history of the Evangelical movement and how they can be considered “Double Protestants” because they come from a tradition that protested against the Catholic Church, and then they did it again and protested against their own Protestant churches. And that same dynamic is going to come into play here, especially as it comes to them being Protestants who have moved away from the Catholic Church. 

So, an Evangelical’s understanding of what is happening in a Catholic Church is that the priest sets himself up as God and directly forgives sins, or refuses to forgive them, and that people have no direct access to God. Now, that is not what is happening in a Catholic Church – all of you who have a Catholic background can take a deep breath, I know that is not what is happening in a Catholic Church, but that’s what Evangelicals (largely) think is happening. And in reaction to that they have a very high value on the idea that only God can judge and no other human ever has to be involved in the process at all. It’s actually a really unfortunate over-reaction to their misunderstanding because what happens is that the individual is left utterly alone to learn how to repent and change and grow. There is no communal support for how to repent. They’ve created that culture for what they think is a good reason – a really important reason – which is that they see themselves as the ones who take down barriers between people and Christ. 

How Does This Work

So you, Latter-day Saint, you know how this works in our church. Let me try to explain how this works in Evangelical churches. You remember from our previous videos that Evangelical churches place a really high value on the conversion experience or, “saying the sinner’s prayer.”  Not all Protestant churches function this way, but at least historically in Evangelical churches the entire point of everything is to get people to say the sinner’s prayer….and what happens next varies greatly, depending on the particular church. Some churches are content to pretty much stop there – oh they certainly want people to keep attending, and keep learning about God, but not much more is going to be expected of them. They’ve already done the thing – they said the prayer. One hugely popular Evangelical author says it’s like going around the bases in baseball, once you’ve gotten to home plate you’re done and now your main job is to cheer on the other members of your team so that they can get to home plate too. Sure, you probably need to learn and grow a bit, and that includes confession of sin, but that’s a private thing that you do alone on purpose. No one else is to be involved because that would be putting a barrier between you and God. They don’t even really have a conceptualization of getting help in the repentance process because if a person asked for such help they would be told to go pray in private, confess their sins, and move on. The best case scenario is that this is a system which fosters self-reliance and forces a person to build up their own relationship with God – and the worst case scenario is that it leaves people without much help or hope on difficult issues when they know what they should be doing but can’t quite bring themselves to do it. 

So, when your Evangelical friends or family members learn that we require adults and teenagers to sit for worthiness interviews, or that we sometimes say bishops are to function as a, “judge in Israel,” their defenses go up pretty high. They’re worried that we’re doing unnecessary gate-keeping and leaving people separated from God unnecessarily. Interestingly enough we both have the same worry about each other – we worry a bit about them abandoning people to have to handle every act of repentance entirely alone; and they worry that we are causing people to feel abandoned by God because we’re putting up barriers for them to repent. 

Common Ground

But at the end of the day, we both want the same thing – for people to repent from their sins and grow in holiness. And still it seems kind of hard for many Latter-day Saints to explain why we do what we do. I don’t have the definitive answer on that, but I do have some thoughts about why what we’re doing is worthwhile and how you might be able to talk about it with your Evangelical friends in a way they can understand, and might even learn from. 

Maybe you’ve had this experience, I certainly have….if the topic of worthiness interviews comes up, your Evangelical friend is going to look at you like you are a crazy person for voluntarily submitting to that. They’re going to think you are handing over your autonomy and will probably quote Jesus’ words to you about, “judge not lest ye be judged.”  But what is Jesus actually saying there?

In my day-job I’m a mental health therapist and this question comes up all the time. A client will be participating in a certain activity, or spending time with a certain person and the activity or person turns out to not be very good for them. They leave that person’s presence feeling more anxious, or they have some other bad consequence from spending their time that way. If I, as their therapist, suggest that they might need to reconsider who they spend their time with I am often met with the objection, “Well, I can’t judge them.”  But, I don’t even know what that means, to be honest.  When I go to the grocery store and want to buy a nice piece of salmon I have some choices to make.  I can buy the piece that looks like it came off the boat that morning, or I can buy the piece that looks like it’s been sitting in the case for 5 weeks. Buying the fresh fish has one set of consequences, and buying the weeks old piece of fish has a different set of consequences. I get to choose which consequences I’d like. These days I know exactly how to go to the store and notice the signs of freshness in a fish, but I didn’t always. Someone had to point them out to me so that today I can properly judge which piece of fish is going to give me the consequences I want. Am I judging the fish?  Yes. But what I’m really judging is the consequences of my own actions. The topics that come up in a worthiness interview are kind of the same thing. Let me use an old example to explain.

As you know, the worthiness interview questions have changed over time. A previous version of the questions asked members if they had, “stolen irrigation water from their neighbor.” I grew up in an agricultural area where irrigation water was, and still is, fiercely debated. Stealing water that does not belong to you is going to have bad consequences for you (you will be used to a certain amount of water for your crops, and when it becomes restricted after you get caught the crops you planted with that extra water will die); it’s bad for your neighbor (their crops will die), and it’s bad for the entire ecosystem (I don’t have time to explain that piece, just trust me). So if we’re looking at a behavior called, “stealing irrigation water” we can demonstrate how it will have negative effects on the individual and community. It will be negative in the same way that eating a bad piece of fish from the store will be bad. In our modern worthiness interview when you are asked, “Do you live the law of chastity?” is that an improper use of judgment, the kind Jesus was talking about? Or is that designed to help people consider the consequences of their actions and decide if those actions are going to have good or bad consequences for them and their neighbors? I think most members would say that this is intended as – and functions as – a question about considering consequences. Infidelity is an act that is not between two people in private, that’s an act that impacts everyone they love and have influence over. And those consequences – the natural consequences of infidelity – are far more devastating than eating a piece of bad fish. 

Despite the fact that your Evangelical friends or family members largely are left to confess sin in private they could probably see the benefit of worthiness conversations when we think about them this way. The word, “judgment” has a bad reputation these days, and probably for some good reasons, but we’re left without a better word to explain what we’re after in those interviews. In this topic my mind often goes to the youth.  Youth in Evangelical churches are going to be expected to sustain some form of chastity (for the most part) but without a vehicle to talk about that and potentially get help repenting over that, it’s an incredible burden to place on them and ask them to manage it alone. In this sense the very concept of a worthiness interview is similar to teaching someone how to choose good fish at the market.  It’s not the kind of judgment that tells the person, “you’re a bad person,” it’s the kind of judgment that helps them discern which outcomes they would like to have the best chance at getting. 

I hope this episode helps you think through how to talk about these things with your Evangelical friends and family members. The unique gift that our church has in this realm is that we provide a private place for every member to have a private chat with their local leader to think through these things, and that’s not just limited to a worthiness interview, but includes going to your bishop when an issue comes up where you can’t figure out how to repent on your own. If you’ve grown up in the church you might not realize how rare it is to have that option. There may be a few exceptions but for the most part Evangelicals don’t have that option – and at the larger churches their local pastor won’t even know their name, nevermind how they or their family are doing managing the challenges of life. 

Join us next week as we take up another Evangelical question. If you have a specific question you’d like to see answered shoot me an email at jroach@fairlatterdaysaints.org 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 – Matthew 5; Luke 6 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: What Must I Do To Be Saved?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

John 3:16-18 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

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 what it means to be saved. 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. 

Well, if there ever was a topic where Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals get confused over language it’s this one…What is salvation? Our agenda for today is this: First we’ll talk about how Evangelicals understand salvation and why they think the way they do, next we’ll answer their questions hopefully in a way they can hear, and then we’ll talk about the unique contributions our faith makes to this part of the conversation. 

What Does it Mean to be Saved?

In our church when we talk about life after death we have a conceptualization that pretty much everybody is “saved.” We get anxious about what exactly that will look like, and especially anxious over what the relationships will be there, but the actual question of salvation isn’t really all that interesting to us. But it is huge to Evangelicals and I want to help you understand why. First I’m going to talk about Evangelicals broadly, and then about the two subsets of Evangeliclas who view these issues slightly differently. 

First, in general Evangelicals believe that after this life is over each person will face judgment where there really is only one question God asks, “What did you believe about my son, Jesus Christ?” Those who can answer that question by saying they believe Jesus is Lord receive a reward of eternal happiness in Heaven, and those who either can’t say that Jesus is Lord, or who have never heard of Jesus are condemned to eternal suffering in Hell. While historically Catholics have believed that there is some wiggle room with their conceptualization of Purgatory, Evangelicals believe it is a one-time judgment that can never be changed, even if the reason for the person’s lack of belief is that they lived in a time and place where no one had heard of Jesus. 

And if you remember from an earlier video you know that Evangelicals as we know them today are really a post-WW2 invention.  One of the original goals of the Evangelical movement was to take down all barriers that churches had put up for people coming to Christ. And as their name – Evangelical – implies they are very interested in sharing the message of salvation with everyone. But they had a problem which was churches who put up, in their opinion, too many barriers to faith. And by this they meant requiring people to be baptized. Now, many Evangelical churches still practice baptism, it has not gone away. Instead what has happened is that they’ve changed the process from, as the New Testament puts it, “Believe and be baptized” to “Believe, say the sinner’s prayer, and later show evidence that you have done these things already through your act of baptism.”  Baptism itself is not efficacious, it’s the sinner’s prayer that actually does the heavy lifting, and the baptism is for show. So for them, to be saved means that you pray a prayer of repentance, inviting Jesus “into  your heart,” and then you are saved. When judgment day arrives for you the issue will be already settled since you have made some declaration that Jesus is Lord and will be placed in Heaven. That’s what salvation is for them in a general sense. 

Two subsets

I don’t want to get too far off track here but there are two important distinctions to talk about here. “Evangelical” is a broad term.  It’s not a denomination. It’s a descriptor that applies to many different types of churches. You can be a Baptist, and be an Evangelical. You can be a non-denominational church and be an Evangelical. And there is another descriptor that it’s important to talk about here: Calvinist. Evangelicals come in 3 varieties: Calvinists, Non-Calvinists, and Blind-To-Theology. The Bling-to-Theology category simply means this: members at a specific church are not taught using theological terms or categories. This is your, “We just love talking about Jesus” kind of church. Now, the leadership of that church, and the denomination they belong to (if they belong to one) absolutely has a stance as Calvinist or Non-Calvinist, but the pew-sitting people in those churches couldn’t tell you who Calvin was or how he is influencing their lives if you paid them. Their leaders simply side-step the issue by using other language to talk about the same things. So, really, we only have 2 categories.

100 years ago it would be easy to spot a Cavlinist church because they were mostly called either “Presbyterian” or “Reformed.” That hasn’t been the case for a long time. The hipster church on the corner that is called something like, “Engage! Church” could be Calvinist, or they could be Non-Calvinist, you’d have to dig to find out. So what is a Calvinist anyway and why is it important?

John Calvin was born during the Renaissance in France. He’s educated at the University of Paris but right after his University studies he breaks away from the Catholic Church and becomes a Protestant (French Protestants are called Huguenots) but eventually he has to flee to Switzerland because there is a great deal of violence against Protestants in France during that era. Calvin was trained as a lawyer, but he becomes a theologian and you can see the lawyer in him when you read his theology. And Calvin’s biggest theological contribution is the idea that because God is so Supreme, so sufficient, so all-knowing, he already knows who will and won’t be saved (at this time in history that’s the “believe and be baptized” version of being saved, not the “pray the sinner’s prayer version.) And in fact, this knowledge in God is so certain it must only be because he chose who would be saved and who wouldn’t. And, even further, it is entirely possible for a person to want to be saved, but if God has decided they will not be saved, there is no hope for them. The opposite is true too – if God has decided you are to be saved, that will be “irresistible” to you in a way that requires no agency from you. Today, there are various versions of Calvinism, some softer than others, but the basic idea is the same: God chooses who will be saved and who won’t. A person can’t really know for sure that they’re saved until the judgment. 

Calvinism still has a huge influence on Christianity today, especially in America. Roughly 60% of Evangelical churches believe some form of Calvinism, and this is part of what fuels the grace-vs-works debate. But it’s not a clear-cut distinction for which Evangelical church follows it and which ones don’t. The opposite position, Armeniniasm believes every person has the possibility of being saved and that the church should work hard to reach as many people as possible. But most churches have some mix in them.  I grew up in an Evangelical church where we were jokingly told, “You should spend your waking hours as an Armeniest (meaning you should work hard to spread the gospel) but you sleep like a Calvinist (meaning you should leave it all in God’s hands and be content with whatever he decides.)” 

You can see, in these two subsets there are two very different views on what it means to be saved. In one version God pre-decides it for a person, and no agency of theirs is required. In the other version the person has to use their will to decide to follow God, and that creates salvation for them. (I know this doesn’t make any sense, I didn’t make the rules, I’m just telling you.)

So, you can see, even within Evangelicalism there is disagreement about what it means regarding how to get saved. But they all agree on the fact that not being saved means eternity in Hell.  How will that time be spent? Opinions vary from, “eternal conscious torment” to “obliteration,” and obliteration is about the best you can hope for. About 15 years ago there was a movement in the Evangelical world to reconsider what Hell is, who goes there, and how that time will be spent, and the “obliteration” option largely became more popular because of that movement. Which means that in their view, if we’re considering a person who has never heard of Jesus Christ, the very best thing we can hope happens after they die is that they simply no longer exist. The alternative is that they are consciously tormented forever. 

Talking About Salvation

Normally in these videos I’ve tried to explain the Evangelical position in a way that hopefully makes you say, “yeah, I can see where they’re coming from even if I disagree.” But I gotta be honest, it’s really hard to do that here. The best I can do is to point out to you that their belief system (whether they’re Calvinists or not) is highly self-reinforcing. When I was an Evangelical I completely bought into this system because of the ways it’s self-reinforcing. There is the threat of eternal damnation hanging in the balance after all. But I’ll tell you how it started to crack for me. 

I grew up in a family where my mom took us to church and my dad only attended if us kids were having some kind of special event (a special choir performance, etc.) I was taught as a girl that someone like my dad would go immediately to Hell if he died in his unbelief. They softened that for people like me by saying, “life is long and you have no idea when someone’s heart might turn to God.” But it turned out that my dad’s life was not long. He died in a car crash at 44 years old. I was 12, which doesn’t sound very old, but I was a weird kid and interested in theology straight out of the womb. So I had to figure out how to understand that my church said my father was going to be consciously tormented forever without letting it break my faith. And in my little 12-year-old mind I kept a secret thought, “I think my church is wrong about that.” It would take me decades to gain enough theological sophistication to think all the way through that, of course, but that’s where it started. And I can tell you exactly where I was standing when I had it (12th and M street, Modesto CA), because it shook my world. The fruition of that thought wouldn’t come for decades, but I don’t know that I would be here today without it. 

I tell you all of that to say this: There are Evangelicals out there who question this system they’re in, even if it is very quietly. And frankly, our church’s conceptualization of the afterlife is far kinder, far more in line with the character of God. In this series we’re talking about the gifts our church has to offer to the larger Christian world, and this is certainly one of those areas. When you talk with Evangelicals about, “what it means to be saved” you will have to fight past a lot of anxiety about the threat of Hell, and worries about getting things wrong, and an entire self-reinforcing system. But you have something to offer here that your friends or family members might end up wanting.

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 – John 2–4 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Why is there so much of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon anyway?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Luke 4:15-17 “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read… the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.”

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 something from the New Testament that is actually something from the Old Testament, and what it has to do with the Book of Mormon.  We’re talking about Isaiah, and why so much of it is in the Book of Mormon. The reason this topic comes up in this week’s readings is because we see Jesus going to the synagogue and reading from the scroll of Isaiah. Luke 4:15-17 “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read… the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.”

If you’ve had conversations with Evangelical friends and family before this topic has almost certainly come up: Why is there so much Isaiah in the Book of Mormon?  So we’re going to talk about that in a couple ways. First, we’re going to try and understand what Evangelicals mean when they ask that question – it’s a bit different than what we mean when we ask it.  Then we’ll look at some answers to their questions and finally look at the unique gift our faith brings to this part of the conversation. 

What Are They Asking

You have certainly heard church members ask (complain? bemoan?) about why is there so much Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, but they mean it more in a way that says, “We already get this during Old Testament year, why do we have to spend weeks on it again?” It’s a complaint about repetition, or sometimes a complaint about not understanding the meaning, but that is not what an Evangelical is doing when they ask this question. 

I’ll tell you my experience….The first time I read the Book of Mormon I did not know what it was about.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I actually thought it was about the Utah period. So I  went in not knowing the plot, and certainly not knowing that Isaish would be quoted so much. I was surprised and curious about what it was doing there and how it was functioning inside the larger text. That’s a conversation for another day because what a lot of people reading the Book of Mormon initially think is that this is plagiarism. “Oh look, he just straight copied that out of the Bible!”  Now, that’s not what’s happening or how the Isaiah quotes are functioning inside the text, but it is what Evangelicals worry about. Why?

Because what they’re really asking with this question is something like, “Aren’t you just stealing scripture from the Bible to legitimize the Book of Mormon?”  And that’s a fair question for them to be asking because it puts them in a dilemma that goes something like this…If I believe the book of Isaiah is scripture, and it’s here in the Book of Mormon then I have to concede that I believe at least parts of the Book of Mormon and I feel uncomfortable saying that because of my loyalty to the Bible.” 

In order to understand a bit deeper we need to look at that word, “scripture.”  For Latter-day Saints the word “scripture” is a pretty broad word. We refer not only to our 4 standard works as scripture, but we refer to our Patriarchal Blessings as “personal scripture,” we treat some documents that are not officially part of our 4 standards works as if they are scripture such as the Proclamation on the Family, and even further we sometimes treat the words we receive from our leaders during General Conference as scripture. For us, the word, “scripture” has a lot of wiggle room in it. But it is not that way for Evangelicals.  In the Evangelical world only the Old and New Testaments are scripture. Some of them have a bit of fuzzy knowledge about the fact that there has been debate over certain books of the Bible which are sometimes included in the canon, and sometimes are not. But all of that is seen as just part of the historical process – today the lines of what is scripture and what isn’t are very clear for them. You can see why they get a little nervous when material from their very carefully defined canon is mixed into our open canon in service of a story that they don’t know, and don’t understand. We’ll leave out of the conversation the fact that the entire Old Testament (not just Isaiah) is included in their Christian Bible and sometimes the Jewish people (whose Bible it was first) have had some things to say about that. But that aside, you can see how this is a really a conversation about open vs. closed canon. 

Why does an open canon bother them so much?

Many latter-day Saints have a hard time understanding why an open canon is so troublesome to Evangelicals. “If God has more to say, wouldn’t you want to hear it?” But when you get into conversation with Evangelicals something confusing starts to happen. Evangelicals DO want to hear more from God, they do believe God speaks today, they do believe he has both personal messages for them as well as larger messages for all who call themselves Christians. We very much have that in common with them. During my first read-through of the Book of Mormon I really had to grapple with this. I believed that God can and does speak today, but I felt a bit queasy about it being written down in a book. But when I started to formulate that into a sentence that went something like, “God can speak today, you just can’t write it down in a book,” I knew that wasn’t a solid place to stand. It was surprising for me, but what this question illuminates is the struggle Evangelicals have around authority. 

A bit of history is in order here. Evangelicals are a subset of Protestants. Which means, as you will see, that they already have two strikes against the concept of authority. In 1517 Martin Luther nails his 95-Thesis to the church door and Protestant Reformation begins (that’s not a historically accurate version of how it began or why, but it is the popular version and good enough for our purposes here.) The Reformation results in churches that used to be under the authority of Rome, now becoming their own authority. And it was mostly based on country or region. The Dutch Reformation happened very differently than the English Reformation, for example and by the end the Dutch wanted to do things the way they wanted to do them, and the English wanted to do things the way they wanted to do them. Fast-forward about 500 more years and we have many churches doing as they see fit. Around the same time as the Baby Boom is happening there starts to be a feeling in American Christianity that the old ways should be moved on from, and that included religion. Starting in Southern California, and moving across the country churches began with the expressed purpose of not being fuddy-duddys about church but bringing in rock music, allowing for casual dress and a more relaxed service. This group, initially called Neo-Fundamentalists, become the Evangelicals. So, Evangelicals are not just Protestants (protest-tant) and the children of all that entails, they “protest” against their own tradition and advocate for a more relaxed and informal worship setting where no one is going to tell them how to dress or to cut their hair. In this sense they’re double-Protestants, and have a double-dose of suspicion of authority. 

Their attitude of being suspicious of authority shows up in their theology too. You’ve certainly heard an Evangelical friend say something like, “We don’t need the priesthood, we have the priesthood of all believers” (this is an issue we will also get to in another video) and that is the ultimate anti-authority statement because they get to have it both ways by saying that authority is not needed, and even if it were we have it in ourselves. 

But then a funny thing – a very human thing – happens and it’s a psychological principle that happens to everyone. Let’s take the topic of budgeting and responsible spending. Most people will look at those who spend their money more freely than they do and consider them foolish, maybe even reckless. But they will look at those who are stricter with their money than they themselves are and see them as too tight or too rigid. Somehow the human mind always sets itself as the exact, perfect midpoint. And this phenomenon happens here to Evangelicals – the very ones who we can call “double-Protestants” look at the open canon of Latter-day Saints and say, “No, that’s too far.  Our fuddy-duddy grandparents didn’t go far enough, but you go too far. We are the correct midpoint.” 

I don’t tell you that so that you can go and argue this reality with them, I tell it to you so that you can understand what is going on with them and why they think the way they do. It’s actually a very human and understandable process. Instead of arguing against it and trying to convince them of why we actually do have the proper authority to introduce new scriptures, or that having an open canon is a good thing, maybe go back to the very thing that prompted this entire discussion. What is Isaiah doing in the Book of Mormon?  Or for that matter, consider the verse that inspired this conversation: Why is Jesus quoting from Isaiah? 

Here is what Jesus read from Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

    because he has anointed me

    to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

    and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

When Jesus takes Isaiah out of its original context and applies it to his day, he does so in a very unique and unexpected way.  The poor get good news, the prisoners get free, the blind get sight. To be totally fair, this is what the Evangelical movement was about when it began, or at least what it tried to be about – making room for all kinds of people in the church. The sections of Isaiah that are in the Book of Mormon are there to teach us about covenant keeping and that God keeps his side of the deal, and that even when we keep messing up there is always a path back to God. When your Evangelical friend asks you why there is so much of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon at least part of what they’re asking is: Do you really have the authority to add Isaiah to your book? But it’s the same pattern and purpose that they are longing for in their churches too – that there is room for everyone, that it doesn’t matter what has happened in your life, there is always a path back to God. They put a huge emphasis on the Gospel being for everyone, no matter what. And by including the sections of Isaiah that we do into the Book of Mormon, we are also saying that God has a path for us back to him, and that when we make covenants with God he will always help us keep them. In that sense, we want the same things….and if anything our unique contribution here is that the path back to God is not some ethereal path you have to figure out for yourself. It’s defined well and there is an entire church to support you on that path. 

I hope you enjoyed this episode, join us again next week when we look at more questions about the New Testament.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

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

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 4; Luke 4–5 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Wait. You Don’t Believe in the Trinity?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Mark 1:10-11 “And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. I’m Jennifer Roach and today we’re looking at a popular question you might get from your Evangelical friends or family members: Why don’t you believe in the Trinity?  As you know we’re following the Come Follow Me readings in the New Testament this year and this week’s reading brings up the question in Mark 1:11 because we have Jesus being baptized, the voice of God calling down from Heaven, and the Spirit appearing in the form of a dove.  So it’s understandable that our friends get confused on this issue. Here we are reading Mark 1, but denying the Trinity. What gives?

Understanding the Question

As always we are first going to try to understand where an Evangelical is coming from with this question.  It comes up a lot, and it certainly is a big deal to them and I want to help you understand why so you can see where we have commonality, and where we can offer a unique gift to the rest of Christianity with our perspective. 

So, why is the Trinity such a big deal? But the word “trinity” is not found in the Bible, nor are the Greek or Hebrew equivalents. Most Latter-day Saints have some knowledge that this idea came from the church councils that formed the creeds, and that’s a good start. But instead of looking at this history of how the Trinity developed, I want to look at the modern understanding of it by today’s Evangelicals. (We will talk about Creeds in a later episode, but that needs a full episode all to itself.) At the heart of it, their concerns are about getting the nature of God correct. That’s a commendable thing. On that note, we want the same thing that they do.

It’s a really important question and Evangelicals will often think of this in terms of the nature of God being a foundational piece that will throw everything else off if it is gotten wrong. I attended an Evangelical Divinity School for my Masters in Divinity and one our professors was found of saying, “Every conversation is about the nature of God – it just looks like it’s about finance or fashion or pizza from the outside.” And if you’re not a person who lives in your head, maybe that’s taking it too far, but there is some truth to it. So we give them respect for caring about who God is and what He’s like. And if you have Evangelical friends who are willing to talk with you about the nature of God, well you are very lucky – what better conversation is there to have?

Today’s Evangelical Belief in the Trinity

Ironically, Evangelicals often don’t understand this issue any better than Latter-day Saints do. In 2018 two Christian ministries – Ligonier Ministries which focuses on doctrinal competence and LifeWay Publishers which is the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention – did a survey of Evangelicals to assess their understanding of the Trinity.  What they did was ask participants to affirm certain statements about the Trinity, but the trick was that each statement was an official heresy, not a true belief about the Trinity. On average they affirmed 3 out of 8 heretical statements, earning them a failing 62.5%. 

Although to be completely fair, in the past many Evangelicals would have used a handful of popular analogies to describe the nature of the Trinity such as, “It’s like water, steam, ice – all three are made of the same stuff.”  Or, “It’s like an actor who wears three different masks.”  Evangelicals themselves have mostly debunked these and gotten away from their usage, which is a good thing. Each of those analogies really better represents a rejected heresy about the Trinity than the actual concept itself. You’ll certainly still hear these analogies, but far less than in decades past. However the thinking behind them persists, as evidenced by the previously mentioned survey.

And in more thoughtful corners of the Evangelical world they’ve made a move to talking about the mystery of the Trinity, and shying away from the specifics of it. Instead of hearing, “The Trinity is like a three-leaf clover,” you are far more likely to hear, “The Trinity is a great mystery where the members of the Trinity are in perfect communion with each other because they are made from the same substance as each other, and yet they have full independence to act as themselves without that ever disrupting the unity of the group.” And I’ll be honest, when I was an Evangelical the appeal to mystery worked for me because it appeals to the Trinity as a community of whose love overflows outward to humanity. And here’s where it gets really interesting for Latter-day Saints.

Jürgen Moltmann

You may have never heard of Jürgen Moltmann, and your Evangelical friends or family members probably have never heard of him either – but their pastors absolutely have, the academics who write thoughtful books for them have, and the professors who teach in Divinity Schools absolutely have. Why is Moltmann important?

Moltmann was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany. As of this writing he is still alive at 96 years old. You can guess by his birth year and home country that he has saw the horrors of World War 2 and the rise of authoritarianism.  And it led him to think about the problems that happen in Christianity when we have a “hyper sovereign” view of God in the Trinity. That sentence alone has way too much to unpack for a video like this so let’s just leave it at saying he started to see the holes in the 3-in1-1-in-3 model of the Trinity. Moltmann develops an idea about the Trinity that he calls, “The Social Trinity,” which basically means he sees the Trinity as a cooperation or society of Divine persons, each separate from each other, but united to their core in purpose and will. Starting to sound familiar? 

Before you get too excited, don’t go out and sit by your mailbox waiting for an invitation for Moltmann’s baptism into our church. Ultimately what Moltmann does with that idea of the Trinity is to demonstrate the dangers of forcing unity without free will under a supreme dictator. He was born in Germany in 1926 afterall. However, what Moltmann has done is introduce the idea of a Social Trinity that sounds very similar to our concept of the Godhead. They are not identical, and if we had more time I could show you the layers of difference, but for now it is interesting to note that the conversation around the Trinity is changing. No longer will you only hear, “The Trinity is like an egg made of a yoke, the white and the shell.” The influence of Moltmann has filtered into many corners of the Evangelical world and they are having better conversations about the Trinity because of him. And it’s not just him, the theologians who come after him (and are teaching today’s pastors) like Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian who writes about the intersection of theology and public policy. Volf is extremely influential on pastors who have been trained in the last 20 years. Will the average pew-sitting person know his name? Probably not. But their pastor does and has likely been influenced by his ideas about the Social Trinity.

So What?

I tell you all of this about Moltmann and Volf to say that things are changing in the Evangelical conversation about the Trinity. And while they themselves are still trying to reign in heresies about the Trinity, the conversation is also opening up. Your Evangelical friend or family member is very likely to at least be introduced to the idea of the Trinity as a community of Divine beings of love whose goodness flows outward to humanity. And that’s a conversation that would be very interesting to have.

Matter Matters

The most unique contribution that our faith makes to the conversation about the nature of God is that God the Father has a body. You may have heard that statement so many times in your life that it has no meaning to you and it’s hard for you to understand the implications of God being only a Spirit. Let me draw out some meaning for you.

In the traditional conception of God the Father he is seen as a spirit who has no body. Jesus gets a human body for a time while he lives on Earth, but that is God’s only experience of what it’s like to inhabit matter. And when God is only Spirit it is easy to only relate to him in our hearts and minds, not our bodies. This is the heresy of Gnosticism where it becomes really important to think the right things with your mind, but not very important to do the right things with your body. As long as you have correct beliefs, well you can do whatever you want with your body. The Spiritual matters, the physical doesn’t. Latter-day Saint beliefs turn that on its head in a profound way when we say that God the Father has a physical body. Other corners of Christianity hint at this in various ways by saying that God inhabits the Eucharist (either symbolically as Protestants say, or literally as Catholics say) or other symbols of faith. But Latter-day Saints are not saying God symbolically inhabits matter, we are saying that He is made of matter. So if God the Father is made of matter, then simply giving intellectual assent to concepts about faith can never be enough. Our beliefs matter, but our physical acts matter too. We’ll revisit this idea in a future video when we talk about the tension between works (things you do in the physical world) and grace (which exists in the spiritual or intellectual world alone).

In Conclusion

My sense is that historically conversations between Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals has been rough when it comes to talking about the nature of God. But never before has such a good foundation been laid in Evangelicalism itself to talk about the concept of the Godhead and how we see that working. You might be very surprised to find yourself on a similar page as an Evangelical friend on this topic, and even more surprised that our unique contribution of God the Father inhabiting physical matter is intriguing and helpful.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

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

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 3; Mark 1; Luke 3 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Why did Joseph Smith change the meaning to some verses in the Bible?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

This week we come to a very important verse in scripture.  John 1:1 traditionally translated, “In the beginning was the word.”  You’ll find it that way in almost every translation. It’s often the first verse beginning Greek students learn, “Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος” and straight away they are introduced to the complexities of translating. The text literally says, “In the beginning was the logos.” We look at that verse now, with the benefit of centuries of translation on our side and know “logos” means Jesus in some sense. Translators, theologians and scholars have been settled on this for a very long time. So it’s a fair question to ask, “Why did Joseph Smith step out of the established translation on this verse?”  Now, your Evangelical friends or family members may not be able to point to this specific verse and see the differences, but if you’re in conversation with them about the New Testament the issue of Joseph’s variations in translation are going to come up eventually. Let’s look at how Joseph translated the same verse:

John 1:1 In the beginning was the gospel preached through the Son. And the gospel was the word, and the word was with the Son, and the Son was with God, and the Son was of God.  (JST)

There’s a lot going on here and we’re going to break it down into pieces.  First we’ll talk about what your Evangelical friends think when they hear that different translation and why they hear it that way. And then we’ll talk about what Joseph is doing in this translation and how it opens up meaning even your Evangelical friends might appreciate. 

First, what do Evangelicals hear when they hear that kind of translation?

There are many verses in the Bible that have translation variations and most Evangelicals are completely comfortable with this. They understand that the many different translations of the Bible are trying to do different things. For example, they understand that a translation like The Message (which isn’t actually a translation, it’s a paraphrase) is trying to do something radically different than a translation like the English Standard Version (ESV). The Message is attempting to put the Bible’s message into fresh contemporary language so that the modern reader can hear it and understand it in their own context. The language is meant to sound good on your ears.  Meanwhile the ESV is trying to give as close to a word-for-word translation as possible even if it has to mean sacrificing the lyrical sound of a passage. So when they hear a different translation they’re not reacting to the fact that differences have been brought in. They’re used to that. 

The thing that is bothersome for them is that they doubt Joseph’s abilities as a translator and they use his “wrong” translation of John 1:1 as proof that if he couldn’t even translate the Bible correctly, what chance did he have of translating the Golden Plates correctly? 

The Golden Plates and the Bible

One of the things your Evangelical friend might be wondering about is how you can trust the Book of Mormon to be true when we have no access to the Golden Plates to check Joseph’s translation work? The interesting assumption behind that question is that we have originals of the Bible to check against.  Many people (Evangelicals and others) have either seen pictures of old manuscripts, or perhaps they’ve seen one in person such as the Codex Sinaiticus which is on public display at the British Library in London. Because these manuscripts are very old many people assume they are the actual documents that the original writers literally wrote. Sinaiticus is considered the oldest complete manuscript – but even it is only dated back to the 4th-century. It’s not like we can do a direct comparison to the Biblical text either. The originals simply do not exist. Now, there is a science called “textual criticism” which identifies and tracks the variations in the text. This process is very good at identifying exactly where changes happened, which manuscripts got copied with which changes and more. But, it’s not 100% accurate, and has been wrong in the past. So we’re still in a situation where the translation of the Bible and the translation of the Book of Mormon are in pretty similar boats. 

Still, Evangelicals feel nervous about a novel translation of John 1:1 (or any of Josephs’s other novel translations) because no other translations are in agreement with what he’s doing. They hear it as a subtle way to smuggle “incorrect meaning” into the scriptures.  But is that what’s happening here?

What Does Joseph See in John 1:1?

So, if you remember, here is what Joseph is doing in the very first part of the verse, instead of, “In the beginning was the word,” or ““Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος,” we get, “In the beginning was the gospel preached through the Son.”  Joseph is swapping out, “the word” for, “the gospel preached through the Son.” And the question becomes, what is he doing here and why? 

What is “Logos”?

Most Latter-day Saints are not particularly interested in philosophy, and for understandable reasons. But in order to get at some important content here I want to glance in the direction of philosophy for just a moment because it is the best way to understand what this “logos” actually means. 

Logos is a huge concept in Greek philosophy. It doesn’t have an exact translation in English. You have probably been taught, “it means Jesus” and that’s true insofar as the concept points to Jesus, but the word itself doesn’t mean, “Jesus.” The word means something close to, “the metaphysics that are universal law.” One Greek philosopher, Heraclitus said, “the world is animated and kept in order by fire, and this fire is the Logos.”  In his example it is the thing that makes everything else work. Plato and Aristotle understood logos as something like, “the very principles of logic.” The Stoic philosophers said logos was the vitalizing force guiding the universe.  Jumping forward many centuries we see the philosopher Hegel saying that logos is the “absolute concept” of the universe. 

So we have the literal Greek text saying, “in the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God.”  Our English translations almost universally translate “logos” as “word” and what they’re trying to do there is say something like, “In the beginning the ‘logic that makes all logic make sense” was with God…” Or, “In the beginning the, ‘story that ties together all the stories’ was with God.”  Or even, “In the beginning the “thing that makes everything work” was with God.”  But what we humans do is simplify things. We no longer hear, “in the beginning was the word” and understand it to mean all of these things, we just hear, “the word” and plug in, “Jesus.” Which isn’t untrue necessarily, but it certainly misses a lot of meaning. 

So when Joseph translates, “In the beginning was the gospel preached through the Son,” he is not mistranslating, he is bringing in a layer of meaning that is largely lost to the modern reader.  I read this as Joseph saying, “In the beginning God’s plan to animate this whole world was the Gospel, and it was Jesus who was going to carry that Gospel out.” Instead of Greek philosophy’s, “The universe is animated through fire.”  We get, “The world is animated through the Gospel plan.” And now all of a sudden it has a whole new depth of meaning and the question of, “Why did Joseph change the Bible when no one else translates it that way?” has a far easier answer. 

Insofar as it is Translated Correctly

You might be tempted to say that John 1:1 clearly is a spot of the Bible that has not been translated correctly, that Joseph got it right and everyone else got it wrong. This is tricky ground and I want to explain why.

Technically, “in the beginning was the word” is a correct translation in that it is a literal translation of the Greek sentence that is on the page. The translation is fine. What we see happening in Joseph’s translation is that he is opening up a new layer of meaning in an artistic way that is not identical to the literal translation. Your Evangelical friends might object to this by saying that it is taking too many liberties and that translation should be as close to a word-for-word translation as possible. However, at the same time, Evangelicals love The Message version of the Bible which renders John 1:1 like this, “The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word. The Word was God.” Now, that is not what is on the page in Greek. It is a translation which is bringing out some nuance that is not there in the traditional translation. An interesting thing for Evangelicals to grapple with is, “Why is it okay for The Message to bring out a layer of meaning, but it’s not okay for Joseph Smith to do so?”

Translations

This also brings up the issue of various Bible translations. Our leaders have said that we are to use the King James version in public worship, and for some very good reasons. But your Evangelical friends might think you crazy for going along with it because the language is sometimes hard to understand. On the other side, sometimes Latter-day Saints are skeptical of the variety of translations. Although today we’ve seen that John 1:1 gets translated the same way almost across the board, that isn’t true for many verses and there can be wildly different translations.  Latter-day Saints can have the same worry about non-KJV translations that Evangelicals have about the Joseph Smith translation – that they’re bringing in corrupted meaning or have been mistranslated. Let me give you a brief run-down on other translations that might be helpful to you to add alongside your KJV translations. 

As we’ve already alluded to in today there are a few different philosophies behind Bible translations, as well as a few different categories of source material. We’ll talk about source material first. Remember, we don’t have any originals of the Bible. We have manuscripts and fragments. Between the time of Christ and the invention of the printing press we have almost 6,000 manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament. Most of them are fragments, some fragments are as small as a business card, others are almost complete books, and no two are identical. So Bible translators have to make some choices about which manuscripts and fragments they are going to use as source material to translate from. You can read in the preface of each Bible about which manuscripts are their source material; different versions use different source material for different reasons. That’s an interesting thing to know, but unless you are an academic it’s not going to be super helpful to you. What is helpful is that translator’s philosophy, something they will also tell you about in the preface. There are 3 basic philosophies. 1)Word-for-word 2) Thought-for-thought 3) Paraphrase into modern language. 

First, you should know that the word-for-word translations are not actually translating word-for-word. No such thing is possible. The Hebrew of the Old Testament lacks a grammatical structure that English speakers rely on. In English (and any other modern language) we can break down a sentence into its parts of speech and understand how each one functions. Hebrew doesn’t let you do that, the structure is just not there so the translators have to introduce it into the English version – if they didn’t the whole thing would be unintelligible to you. It’s true to a lesser degree for Greek as well. So what the word-for-word translators are doing is trying to get as close to that as possible – even when they have to sacrifice readability to do so. Translations that fall into this category include the English Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible and the Revised Standard Version.

In contrast the thought-for-thought translators are trying to take a thought from the source material and stay true to that thought as they bring it into English. They’re less concerned about staying as close to the words as possible and more concerned with actually getting the meaning across. These translations sound better to our ears and are generally more understandable, but they sacrifice staying close to the source material. Translations that fall in this category are the New International Version or the New American Bible, among others. 

The final category of translation are Bibles that are not actually considered real translations because the source material was not the Greek and Hebrew from an ancient manuscript. Their source material is a Bible previously translated into English. They take the English sentence and make it sound modern or fresh. These are called paraphrases and while they’re not a great choice for serious study, they can be a good choice for devotional reading. The Message and The Living Bible, as well as others, fall in this category. 

Conclusion

When the issue of translations comes up with your Evangelical friends or family it can feel overwhelming and you might feel hesitant to talk about it for fear of lack of knowledge. But as you can see in John 1:1, Joseph Smith was brining out meaning in the text the same way other Bible translators do today. And your friends outside of our church might even enjoy hearing about what Joseph was doing in that text.

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 – John 1 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Why are temples still needed?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Luke 2:22, 27

And when the days of her (Mary’s) purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him (baby Jesus) to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord…And he (Simeon) came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law.

Again we will be looking at a section of scripture in the Come Follow Me readings that corresponds to a common question Evangelicals have about our faith. Last time we talked about how an Evangelical’s value of showing loyalty to Christ makes them suspicious of some of our claims. This week we’re going to talk about the temple – why Evangelicals are skeptical of the need of a temple, why they think that way, and some of the ways you can have better conversations with them that lead to a natural but confident sharing of your testimony.

What Do Evangelicals Understand About Temples?

Many Evangelicals actually have a keen interest in learning about the temple as it is portrayed in the Old Testament. They understand much of the symbolism and value what God was trying to teach through those symbols. They also have a knowledge of how the temple functioned in the New Testament and what role it plays in the story of Jesus. You might find your Evangelical friends or family an interesting source of conversation about the temple as it is talked about in the Bible. Another area of commonality with them is that they believe the temple will be restored in Jerusalem at some future point which is related to the End Times. All of these are great jumping off places for a conversation about temples.

Where Temples Get Uncomfortable for Evangelicals

Despite our commonalities in talking about temples in the Bible, Evangelicals would start to get nervous when we talk about modern-day temples. Here is an example: when I was a girl I lived in California not far from the Oakland Temple.  If you’ve ever seen the Oakland Temple you know it sits high up on a hill overlooking the entire Bay Area of San Francisco. It’s illuminated at night and very hard to miss. We were taught by our leaders that we should avert our eyes away from the temple and not even look at it – despite it being the brightest thing on the hill – because, “strange and evil things happen inside of those temples.” Clearly this was a misguided statement, but it represents the kind of fear Evangelicals have when it comes to our temples. But when you sit down to have a conversation with them about the temple it often boils down to one real question: Didn’t Jesus do away with the temple?

Did Jesus do away with temples?

I’m going to try to explain what most Evangelicals would say about why temples are no longer needed – and why they say it.  If you remember back to our first video in this series, one of the dynamics at play here is that they are trying very hard to show proper loyalty and respect to Jesus Christ. Assuming they have some other motive is going to make a conversation like this harder, not easier. So, assuming their good motives we look at why talk about temples makes them so nervous.

First, you have to understand that Evangelicals prioritize the work and words of Jesus. Despite the numerous times in the Old Testament that the temple is talked about in ways that they can learn from, the ultimate temple story is when the temple veil rips in half during the crucifixion. Matthew 27:51, “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split.” The temple veil referred to here is of course the veil that separates the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple. In Old Testament days the Holy of Holies was only entered 1 time per year and only by a very special priest and there were very strict rules around this. Normal people certainly didn’t have access to the Holy of Holies at any point during their lives. Evangelicals interpret this verse as if it’s saying that the entire temple is unneeded. They would say something like, “If the veil is ripped, then there is no need to protect the Holy of Holies, anyone can have the special direct access to God that was allowed in that place.” While we would disagree with that interpretation there is something to admire in it. Evangelicals are trying to make it so that every person has as much access to God as they want, and all it takes is a turn of the heart to be in full communion with God. They would say that because of Jesus’ sacrifice we humans no longer need anyone to help us connect with God. And in theory, we wouldn’t disagree with that, right?  We too believe that every human can choose to pray inside the quietness of their own mind and that God will listen.

The differences come when Evangelicals start to make practical applications of this theology. Because the temple veil was ripped in two, there is now no barrier between us and God. and therefore it is not necessary to go to a temple to feel God’s presence, we can access it anytime from anywhere through the Spirit. In their view temples are unneeded simply because no physical space can cause a person to have, or not have, the Spirit. Again, in theory we wouldn’t disagree, but they use this to say that therefore temples are not needed. They see us as putting up a barrier to people who want to be closer to God – when Jesus’ work on the cross took that barrier down. Their hearts are certainly in the right place.

Temple Worship in the New Testament

Even though there is a certain logic to this claim, and a good motive behind it, it doesn’t really pan out .  If the New Testament ended immediately after Jesus’ resurrection, they might have a more convincing claim. However, we have a lot of information about what a life of faith looked like in the post-resurrection world. And that information includes temple worship. Let me show you what I mean.

In Acts 22 we get a fascinating story from the Apostle Paul. First he retells the details of his conversion (we converts love to do this!) and after he’s done he goes on to tell a less well-known story. He tells of visiting the temple in Jerusalem and says that while he was praying in the temple he was, as the King James version says, in a trance. What exactly does that mean? We don’t totally know but Paul tells us that God told him to leave Jerusalem because the people there were not going to receive what he had to say, and that he should go preach to the Gentiles.

For most Latter-day Saints there is nothing at all odd about a story where someone goes to the temple and God communicates to them. If you don’t have a story like that of your own, you certainly know someone who does. Saying, “It’s easier to hear God speak in the temple sometimes,” would not be a controversial statement for a Latter-day Saint to make. But that statement is hard for Evangelicals because they hear us talk about temples and think we’re trying to make it harder to hear God, not easier. At this point in the conversation your Evangelical friend or family member might ask, “Well, then why are there so many rules about who can go in the temple and who can’t?  Don’t you want everyone to hear from God?”  Yes, we do want everyone to hear from God, and we believe that living the kind of life that makes you temple worthy gives you the very best chance at hearing from him. And that having a physical place to go where it’s quiet and everyone is focused on God also gives you a better chance.  It’s not that we want to keep people out per se, it’s that we want to help people construct lives where they regularly hear from God. The requirements for temple entry are an aid toward being able to hear from God, not a deterrent from it. Can God speak to a person anywhere? Of course.  He spoke to Saul, before he became Paul, out on the side of the road. But that same Paul also recognized the value of going to the temple where he could pray and hear from God. It’s taken us to this point to make the connection, but the reality here is Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints all desperately want the same thing – a connection with the Divine. We have some disagreements on how to best facilitate such a connection, but the desire is the same. They’re worried that we’re trying to keep people away from God, but it’s an unfounded fear.

Selective Reading

One of the things you might be starting to notice, even here in Video #2, is that many of the questions that come up for Evangelicals about our faith are born out of focusing on a different set of  Bible verses than we would focus on. Set aside the fact that we have additional scriptures that they don’t have, even if we’re just looking at the Biblical text you can see that we Latter-day Saints focus on different texts, and different details in the text. And for many of the issues we’ll cover in this series one doesn’t even have to look beyond the Biblical text to have a good conversation about our difference. How can this be?  If Evangelicals are sincere seekers of God, how is it that we see things so differently, even when we’re just looking at the Bible? Yes, modern revelation is part of it. We have information they don’t have. But perhaps there is something else going on too. The Bible is a really big book, with a lot of details that are odd to our ears. And most people condense the stories down into memorable parts, they attach a spiritual lesson to it, and sort of put it in the “done” column. They stop thinking about what a passage could possibly mean because they think they have it figured out.  It’s not just Evangelicals that do this – all humans do this when trying to understand large amounts of information, we have to develop a system of shorthand in order to manage it all. We all do some degree of selective reading.  And it really can take an act of humility to take a text and look at it again with fresh eyes.

When I was an Evangelical I never would have picked up the detail about Paul having a vision/trance in the temple. It’s not that I disbelieved it, I just wouldn’t have noticed it because it didn’t fit into the other bits of knowledge I was already trying to build on. I had no real place to put that information because my preconceived idea was already that temples weren’t important. As members of the church sometimes I think we shy away from a very careful reading of the Bible, not out of laziness or disinterest, but because we already have a feast of scripture that is far more explicit about these things in our modern-day scriptures. Understandable enough. But after listening to all of this you can see how having a conversation with a friend who is not of our faith about the Bible actually can lead you to some parts of scripture that perhaps they overlooked – not in a fighting or contentious kind of way, but in a way that reads closely and might see how the pieces are put together differently. I hope that as you are going through the New Testament this year you are doing a close and careful reading of the text – not just assuming that you already know what it says, but with a mind open to the Spirit to see the important details. You might be surprised at how much they bolster your faith and your confidence in talking about your testimony.

Join us next week as we look at another question that comes up in the readings. If you have a specific question that you are hoping will get addressed please contact FAIR directly or email me at jroach@fairlatterdaysaints.org

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

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

The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Matthew 2; Luke 2 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Is Jesus God?

by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC

Matthew 1:21

21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

Introduction

So, right off the bat we have an interesting point of conversation that could come up with your Evangelical friends: Who do you believe Jesus is?

This is a really important question in the Evangelical world and a lot hinges on this for them. They’re generally taught, “Get this answer wrong, and you get everything wrong.” And there is a lot to respect in their thinking here. If Jesus were just another good teacher, or just trying to help people understand the mortality of being kind to each other, then we miss a lot of what’s happening in this part of God’s plan.

And one of the things you’re going to see come up in this series over and over is that sometimes we use the same words to describe different things. Evangelicals are aware of this too and they’re nervous that they’re going to almost get tricked into believing something about Jesus that turns out not to be true. One of their greatest desires and values is to show loyalty and respect to Jesus Christ. So they might approach a conversation with you about Jesus nervously. And to be honest, that’s an admirable character trait – this is one of the ways they show their faithfulness to Christ.  So in a conversation with an Evangelical friend about Christ they’re going to feel really protective of him. Also admirable.

Is Jesus a Child of God?

The thing that makes talking about Jesus with an Evangelical difficult is that they think they know what members of the church REALLY think about Jesus, and their defense mechanisms naturally kick in – they feel a lot of loyalty to Christ. Here’s some examples of things I was taught as  an Evangelical, and things I used to actually think…

1. That Jesus is a literal Spirit Child of a Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.

If you’re a member of the church, that probably doesn’t sound very odd in your ears. “Of course Jesus is a Spirit Child of God – we all are!” Let me tell you how Evangelicals hear that:

“To say Jesus is a literal spirit child of God is to say that he is less than God, he was created at a point in time and therefore is not eternal. He can never be really considered God.”

Now, as members of the church that probably sounds odd to you and you might be asking, “Don’t Evangelicals say that Jesus is the Son of God?” Yes, they do. But they mean something different by it and when we say that he is a spirit child born of Heavenly Father they get uncomfortable because somehow that diminishes him.  Remember, they’re not necessarily trying to fight against Truth, when they say that, they’re trying to be loyal to Jesus and they feel protective of his place. Its the “literal” child of God that makes them nervous. This is probably very confusing to you because in our church we belive EVERYONE is a literal spirit child of God, including Jesus. Let’s explore that…

Evangelicals do believe in being a child of God, but let me tell you what they mean by it….

To the evangelical God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit exist as a special species of beings called God (singular) and no one else will ever join that species. Angels and demons (to the degree that they believe in them) are a separate species. They have no information on how that species began or if any more beings can be added to it. They just know it is a different species from God, and from humans. Humans are a third species. New humans are created at the moment of their conception and at that moment God creates a new spirit to put into them. Even though humans must collaborate with God in the creation of babies, all humans are a species all unto themselves with a substance entirely different from what either God or angels are made from. A human has about as much chance to become an angel as a dog does to become a cat. And in their thinking, the idea that a human could transcend their species to become like God is impossible.

What Species is Jesus? What Species are you?

So when an Evangelical says, “I am a child of God” – and they do say that – what do they mean?  HOW are they children of God if they are an entirely different species? Isn’t that like saying a kitten is a puppy? Here is what they mean:

I’ll quote the NIV for clarity…

Gal 4:4-5

4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.

Now, what they’re saying that verse says – that we are some other species and God adopts us into his family as there would be no other way for us to be considered his family – is not true. If you read the entire context of that paragraph of scripture you see it is talking about an underage heir who must live under some restrictions – and then when the time comes that heir becomes the master and functions as such. This is not a paragraph about cross-species adoption. But they hear that word “adoption” and combine it with their preconceived idea that God is a different species than us, so that when they say, “I am a child of God” they mean, “I was not God’s child, but He has graciously adopted me into His family, even though I don’t deserve the title.”

So, back to our original question, “I thought you didn’t believe Jesus is God?”  you can now see what they mean by that.  They mean: Because you say Jesus was born as a spirit child of God He can’t be equal to God but is somehow adopted in like we humans are.”

The question has been overwhelmingly answered right on the Church’s website. We believe in the Jesus of the Bible, just like our EV friends and neighbors do. We believe Jesus is the only begotten son of God, born in the flesh and lived among us, He suffered, died, was burried, and rose again. This article from the Church details it much more specifically. What Latter-day Saints Believe About Jesus Christ (churchofjesuschrist.org)

Differences

However, let’s not collapse all our differences. There are things we believe about Jesus that are different from Evangelicals. Because their view of Jesus is shaped through the Creeds, and ours is not, we see some things differently.

You can confidently say, “Yes, we believe these same things about Jesus, but here are the areas where we slightly differ…” And from my perspective, as a former Evangelical, this is one of the best spots for inspired conversation. So what are the actual differences?

God Revealed

In our church we believe that God continues to reveal himself, even now in our day. This can make Evangeliclas a little nervous because they are used to being taught that matters about God have been settled, and they can find those settled answers in the Bible and in the Creeds. They believe they’ve captured the right answers and now have them corralled into a fenced yard and if they keep those answers in, and all other answers out, they will be safe. It’s an understandable desire. This is where I was when I was first learning about the church. The idea that God could reveal more information about himself felt like a trick and my loyalty reflex kicked in. But as I came to understand that the new information God had revealed about himself was good and helpful, I began to trust it more.

When Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ visit Joseph Smith for the First Vision we see Joseph learning some things. It takes him a bit to put the pieces together, but once he does he comes to understand that Heavenly Father is material and all that implies – and what it implies is very good, more on that in another video.

The Evangelicals aren’t rejecting new information because they have particularly hard hearts or are not open to God.  They reject this because they’re skeptical – they’ve been taught to be skeptical – out of loyalty. But when you can show a Evangelical friend that God revealed really means something good, they might get curious.

Jesus in the Book of Mormon

Before I read the Book of Mormon for the first time I really didn’t know what it was about. I knew the cultural references to it, and understood the basics of the story of Joseph and the gold plates. But I actually thought, as embarrassing as this is to admit, that it was about the early Utah period. So it will come as no surprise to you that I didn’t have any idea how much of Jesus was in the Book of Mormon. One of my earliest reactions was being surprised by how much knowledge they have. Part of me was skeptical that this was a heavily constructed history but I decided to judge the content of the book on its truths, leaving aside the questions about where it came from at first. When Jesus is mentioned in the Book of Mormon I decided that I would ask myself if what was being taught was true or not. And it didn’t take me very long to feel comfortable with the truths I found.

I say all of that to say this: When you’re talking with an Evangelical friend about our beliefs about Jesus don’t be too alarmed when they’re skeptical of how the Book of Mormon came to be. They don’t have to have a firm testimony of that before they can gain truth from it. And my experience with Evangelicals is that they welcome truth when they find it – as long as they can get over their skepticism. If you’re talking with your EV friend and they’re skeptical of how the Book of Mormon came to be, that’s okay. Talking about Jesus as revealed in the Book of Mormon might be a more faith-producing place to start anyway.

Conclusion

So, if the question is, “I thought you didn’t believe Jesus is God,”  you can confidently assure your friend that yes, we believe Jesus is God and affirm what the New Testament teaches us about Him.  You and your friend are on the same page there.  And, as the Spirit leads, you might be able to tell them something good about the additional revelation we have received.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

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

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

Jennifer Roach introduces this new video series that will follow our Come, Follow Me study of the New Testament in 2023.

Each week we’ll talk a look at the CFM readings in the New Testament with a specific eye looking for places where there is either a resonance or a dissonance with what the average Evangelical Christian in the US believes. And each week we’ll look at a specific question an Evangelical might ask if they were in conversation with you about this text.

The idea isn’t to give you ammunition to shoot down your Evangelical friends in debate, but to try to better understand their questions and provide an informed and faithful answer.

We have so much in common with our EV friends and neighbors, but sometimes members of the church get a little shy of talking about scripture because the whole thing can end up in a muddle. This series will give some framework for understanding how they hear the same passage and how to answer questions that might come up.

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 – Week 0 – Introduction appeared first on FAIR.

A Gourd, a Worm, and an East Wind: Discovering God’s Extensions of Love in the Book of Jonah

by Matt Crawford

Jonah called Gath-hepher home—a town which was west of the present-day Sea of Galilee (see 2 Kings 14:25). When the Lord called Jonah on a mission from his comfortable home to the Assyrian city of Nineveh,[1] he did not hesitate to act. Jonah immediately “rose up to flee unto Tarshish” (Jonah 1:3).[2]

Jonah may have run away from the mission call to Nineveh because one of Israel’s enemies, the Assyrians, lived there. The Assyrians were known to regularly torture and kill their captives, and then gruesomely desecrate their bodies.[3] While we do not know if Jonah was afraid of physical pain, we do know that he hated Assyrians and was afraid that they would repent and receive God’s mercy if he fulfilled his mission (see Jonah 4:2).

Rejecting God’s call, Jonah “paid the fare” (Jonah 1:3) for passage on a ship to Tarshish. One commentator notes that Jonah probably paid a considerable sum of money because the journey to Tarshish could take up to one year—“evidently because of the need to restock provisions frequently at ports along the way, wait for favorable winds, and trade the cargo.”[4] At one point Jonah slept soundly below deck while the ship’s crew thrashed through a storm (see Jonah 1:5). The storm was so brutal that the sailors expected the ship to sink, unless they prayed to their gods and tossed trade goods overboard to lighten the load (see Jonah 1:5). When the shipmaster found Jonah asleep, the captain woke him up and asked him to pray to God (see Jonah 1:6). When prayer did not lessen the intensity of the storm, the crew cast lots.

Proverbs 16:33 declares that “the lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof [the outcome] is of the Lord” (see also Proverbs 18:18). Casting lots was a trusted source of divine intervention during Old Testament times because it allowed the Lord to guide who was chosen—He could order the pieces so that a certain person was picked. Pieces of rock or wood were placed in a container, and, either by rolling all the pieces out of the container or inviting each participant to take a piece out of the container, led to the Lord’s decision (see Joshua 21:4–8; Nehemiah 10:34; 1 Nephi 3:11). In more recent times we might liken lot casting to drawing straws—whoever draws the shortest is the chosen one.[5]

When the sailors aboard the ship cast lots, “the lot fell upon Jonah” (Jonah 1:7). Despite his efforts to run from God’s call, the Lord is not giving up on the reluctant prophet. God continues to reach out toward Jonah through a storm and the lot. Jolted, Jonah confessed to the sailors that the storm was because he ran from God. Surprised, the crew questioned: “Why hast thou done this?” (Jonah 1:9). The sailors asked what could be done to still the storm. Fully realizing that his poor decision to run from the Lord was now affecting others, Jonah came to the following conclusion: “Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you” (Jonah 1:12). The sailors initially refused to comply with his wish. Instead, they “rowed hard to bring [the ship] to the land,” but in the end, “they could not” (Jonah 1:13). Thus, the men “took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging” (Jonah 1:15).

When Jonah hit the water, he recalled, “billows and . . . waves passed over me. The weeds were wrapped about mine head [and] I went down to the bottoms” of the sea (Jonah 2:5–6). Fearing that this was the end, Jonah’s “soul fainted” but then he “remembered the Lord” through prayer (Jonah 2:7). It appears that the prayer brought the great fish—potentially some type of whale—and it swallowed the prophet. The scriptures reveal that this was no ordinary experience: “The Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah” (Jonah 1:17; emphasis added). To prepare this great fish for Jonah, the Lord knew when the great fish needed to be born, He knew the great fish’s habits, He knew that the great fish had to be in the vicinity when the men threw Jonah overboard, and He needed a creature big enough to complete the job. Such preparation for one frightened missionary begs the question, If the Lord will prepare a great fish, a game of lots, a storm, or a mission call for a rebellious disciple, what will He do for each of us?

After Jonah is swallowed by the great fish he continued to pray: “Out of the belly of hell cried I” (Jonah 2:2). Like Jonah, we may at times be headed in the wrong direction, but change is possible. The book of Jonah is an extremely detailed case of the Lord’s multiple maneuverings to save a single soul. Jonah acknowledged his own “lying vanities,” his selfishness, and “vowed” to be more faithful to the Lord’s will (Jonah 2:8–9). After three days and nights “the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land” (Jonah 2:10).[6] Once free from the fish “the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh. . . . So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh” (Jonah 3:1–3).

The prophet promptly enters the city and prophecies that in forty days “Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4). The inhabitants of the city, including the king, listened to Jonah’s teachings and began to repent. The people fasted, wore sackcloth as a demonstration to God that they were humbly pleading for forgiveness, and the king issued a decree which encouraged the entire populace to repent (see Jonah 3:5–9). The measures proved successful because “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way and repented; and God turned away the evil that he had said he would bring upon them” (JST Jonah 3:10).[7]

We expect Jonah to be doing back flips of joy, but the final chapter begins: “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry” (Jonah 4:1). What displeased him? How can he be angry? Jonah prayed while upset and explained his reason: “When I was yet in my country . . . I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness” (Jonah 4:2).  In other words: “Lord, when I was at home I knew of Thy goodness and patience toward even the most despicable of people. That is why I headed toward Tarshish and not Nineveh. I did not want Thee to forgive and bless the inhabitants of Nineveh.” Jonah vehemently hated the Ninevites—they were not part of covenant Israel and what is more they were Israel’s sworn enemies. Jonah did not want them to change and be blessed, he wanted them to sin and suffer. Jonah then concluded his prayer by asking the Lord to “take   . . . my life from me; . . . for it is better for me to die than to live” (Jonah 4:3).

After Jonah’s audacious reply, the Lord, once again, shows Jonah mercy and patience—mercy and patience the Lord just demonstrated toward those of Nineveh, but which Jonah spurned. The Lord utters the simple question, “Doest thou well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4). There is no harsh rebuke, no flash of lightning which sizzles Jonah’s flesh, no thunder from heaven to scare Jonah into a feeling of gratitude, but a simple question which may, if the prophet allows, work on his heart.

After the Lord asks Jonah if his anger is justifiable, the prophet refuses to respond. Was Jonah stung by the question or pierced by the Lord’s keen insight? The question seemed to infuriate Jonah so much that he gives the Lord the silent treatment. Like a teenager mad at his parents, or a husband after a tiff with his wife, Jonah turns and walks away from the situation, refusing to respond.

Jonah exited the city proper and headed east (see Jonah 4:5). Then he probably scaled part of the hills located in that direction and waited and watched Nineveh.[8]  Jonah seems unconvinced that the repentant state of the people of Nineveh is permanent. He is waiting, hoping, for the city to “be overthrown” after “forty days” as he originally prophesied (Jonah 3:4). While he waited, he built himself a booth or hut to provide shade—perhaps fashioned of overlaid sticks and branches, as was done for a feast required by the Law of Moses (see Leviticus 23:42; Nehemiah 8:14–15). The booth or hut evidently provided some shade, but it was probably hastily constructed from errant sticks from the vicinity. If so, Jonah’s comfort level and shade was minimal—sunshine would have streamed through the sticks. Whatever its construction, the booth was probably intended to be a physical, non-verbal sign that the Lord was wrong, and Jonah was right. Jonah’s thoughts may have ventured into this line of reasoning: If I wait here long enough the Lord will see Nineveh destroyed. Despite the almost worthless hut and Jonah’s constant moodiness the Lord provided a miracle.

While the booth provided a minimal amount of shade from the blazing sun, the “Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd” (Jonah 4:6). We do not know the specific type of plant[9] which grew overnight to such a mass that it shaded Jonah (see Jonah 4:10). Yet, as was the case with the call, the storm, the game of lots, and the great fish, this “gourd” was “prepared” for Jonah (Jonah 4:6). The Lord knew that Jonah would go up on the hill and pout, and so the seed of this plant was in the right place at the right time to provide physical comfort for the prophet. God really does know our moods and routines. Despite Jonah’s gladness for the shade—the only positive emotion Jonah shows in this book—the shadow would not last.

As was the case with the storm, the lot, the great fish, and the gourd, the Lord had “prepared” other things for Jonah (Jonah 4:7). A worm “smote the gourd that it withered” a day after its astonishing growth, and a “vehement east wind” probably knocked over the booth[10] and the “the sun [once again] beat upon [Jonah’s] head” (Jonah 4:7–8). While the “vehement east wind” seems to indicate the Lord’s displeasure with Jonah’s behavior,[11] God still does not give up on this angry, uncomfortable child.  Ultimately, the quick growing leafy plant served as tangible evidence of the Lord’s mercy—His constant readiness to forgive Nineveh and Jonah—while the equally fast demise of the gourd and the blasts of hot air presented proofs that without God’s goodness ruin follows.

To underscore these eternal truths, the Lord pointed out the folly of Jonah’s anger toward the inhabitants of Nineveh by asking, “Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?” The prophet retorted, “I do well to be angry” (Jonah 4:9). Patiently, the Lord connected the dots for Jonah: “Thou has had pity on the gourd…should not I spare Nineveh, that great city…?” (Jonah 4:10–11). In other words, “Your appreciation and love for the gourd is but a shadow of the care and love I have for you and the Assyrians of Nineveh.”

In short, every person is valuable to God. He simply will not give up or stop trying to save His children. From a city of Assyrians to a frustrated, bitter servant sitting next to a withered gourd, God cares for, watches over, and strives to bring everyone back home to heaven.

More Come, Follow Me resources here.

[1] Nineveh was probably located in modern-day Iraq Pictoral Bible Dictionary, ed., Merrill C. Tenney (Nashville, Tennessee: The Soutwestern Company, 1976), s.v. “Nineveh.”

[2] It is likely that Tarshish was located in modern Spain and known for its successful trade industry (see Ezekiel 27:12); Pictoral Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Tarshish.”

[3] Erika Belibtreu, “Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death,” Biblical Archaeology Review, 17 no. 1 (1991): 51–61, 75.

[4] Uriel Simon, The JPS Bible Commentary: Jonah (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999), 6.

[5] For more information regarding casting lots see Joh. Lindblom Lund “Lot-Casting in the Old Testament,” Vestus Testamentum 12, facs. 2 (April 1962): 164–178.

[6] Where the great fish “vomited out” Jonah is a matter of debate. One tradition holds that the great fish deposited Jonah to a spot south of Jaffa—the port city where Jonah boarded the ship days earlier (see Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Atlas of the Crusades [New York: Facts on File, 1990], 43; see also John MacArthur, The MacArthur Bible Commenatry [Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2005], 1011). Others suggest that the fish put Jonah in ancient Alexandretta—now İskenderun in modern-day Turkey (see The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, ed. George Arthur Buttrick, 5 vols. [Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1962–1976] s.v. “Jonah, Book of,” 2:965). The ancient historian Josephus reported that Jonah was disgorged on the shore of the Euxine or Black Sea (see Josephus: Complete Works [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 1960], 208).

[7] One commentator notes that the Hebrew text implies that the Assyrians only ritually repented. That is, they repented the only way that they knew how: through sackcloth and fasting. “Ritual response and ethical tidying up are precisely what one would expect from pagan Assyrians—and from every indication, they are still just that, despite the fact that they have taken a step in the right direction.” John H. Walton, “The Object Lesson of Jonah 4:5–7 and the Purpose of the Book of Jonah,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 2 (1992): 53–54.

[8] See The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed., Ididore Singer, 12 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1901–1906), s.v. “Nineveh,” 12:311.

[9] The most likely was a type of giant castor bean or oil plant. Jules Janick and Harry S. Paris, “Jonah and the ‘Gourd,’ at Nineveh: Consequences of a Classic Mistranslation,” 349–357; paper presented at North Carolina State University’s Cucurbitaceae Conference September 17–21, 2006. See also Encyclopaedia Judaica, eds. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., 22 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), s.v. “Castor-Oil Plant,” 4:516.

[10] See Jack M. Sasson, Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretation, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 304.

[11] Alonzo L. Gaskill, The Lost Language of Symbolism: An Essential Guide for Recognizing and Interpreting Symbols of the Gospel (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2003), 153–154.

Matt Crawford is a husband, father, teacher, and writer. He resides with his family in Layton, Utah.

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Audio and Video Copyright © 2022 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.

This podcast series features past FAIR Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2022 conference. You can still register to watch the entire conference free of charge.

Craig Foster, What Under the Banner of Heaven Gets Wrong

We have more resources responding to Under the Banner of Heaven here, including interviews Craig Foster did with some of the law enforcement officers that were involved.

Craig L. Foster earned a MA and MLIS at Brigham Young University. He is also an accredited genealogist and worked as a research consultant at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City for over thirty years before retiring in December 2021. He has published multiple books and articles about different aspects of Mormon history, including co-editing the Persistence of Polygamy series with Newell G. Bringhurst and co-authored American Polygamy: A History of Fundamentalist Mormon Faith with Marianne T. Watson. Craig is also on the editorial board of the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal.

The post FAIR Conference Podcast #81 – Craig Foster, “What Under the Banner of Heaven Gets Wrong” appeared first on FAIR.

Scriptural Mormonism Podcast Episode 14, cross-posted with permission.

Robert Boylan interviews Brian Hales and Craig Foster about Mormon Fundamentalism and the Netflix show “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” and specifically comparing FLDS to LDS, and Warren Jeffs to Joseph Smith.

Also join us at the 2022 FAIR Conference where Craig Foster will speak on “Under the Banner of Heaven,” and Brian Hales will participate in a lunch-time panel (for in-person attendees only) on common criticisms from Reddit. More information at https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2022-fair-conference

The post Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey – Mormon Fundamentalism with Brian Hales and Craig Foster appeared first on FAIR.

The post Under the Banner of Heaven: American Fork Police Chief Randy Johnson interviewed by Craig Foster appeared first on FAIR.

Les Langford served as a Utah state trooper from 1972 – 2002. He was the trooper that arrested Dan Lafferty in 1983 while he (Dan) was a candidate for sheriff. He appeared in a total of 4 trials and stood toe-to-toe with Ron Lafferty as Dan’s followers tried to disrupt the court proceedings. In 1984 when Dan and Ron set out to do the murders, they created a “hit list” that included the stake president that had excommunicated them, the stake relief society president, and others. Brenda Lafferty was about 4th on the list, and Les Langford was 6th on the list. He is interviewed here by Craig Foster.

A rough transcript is available here. More information about the disinformation in Under the Banner of Heaven can be found here.

Audio and Video Copyright © 2022 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.

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