August 27, 2018 Show with Paul Trask on “Part Way to Utah: The Forgotten Mormons”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 27th day of August 2018.

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I am so delighted to have not only a first -time guest but a returning co -host to the program.

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Today we are going to be addressing an issue that I have never focused on before for an entire two -hour interview anyway, and that is the subject of the

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Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, also known as the

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RLDS, and now officially known as of a recent name change officially by the group, they are now known as the

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Community of Christ. And it is my honor and privilege to first of all welcome for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, a former reorganized

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Latter -day Saint who converted by God's grace to biblical Christianity and founded Refiners Fire Ministries, Paul Trask.

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Thank you very much Chris, it's good to be with you today. Yes, great to have you on for the very first time

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Paul, and now we have returning to the program, actually this may even be her first time as a co -host,

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I can't remember, she has definitely been a guest many times on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, but I'm so delighted to have back on the program

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Dr. Latane C. Scott, who is a former Mormon, a former member of the

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Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, the larger group in Salt Lake City, Utah, and she's also a graduate of Brigham Young University, she is the author of a number of books including the classic work

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The Mormon Mirage, and it's great to have you back on the program Dr. Latane C. Scott.

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It's good to be here. One small correction, I attended BYU up until my senior year but didn't graduate from there, so that's almost right.

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Okay, and I couldn't remember exactly if this is the first time you've co -hosted, even though I know you've been a guest many times obviously, but is this the first time you've co -hosted a show?

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This is the first time you've honored me with that Chris, and I am very grateful, thank you. Oh my pleasure.

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Before we go into the main topic at hand, which is Paul Trask's own testimony and also his book

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Partway to Utah, The Forgotten Mormons, and obviously we'll also be giving an update on the theology and practice of the

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RLDS, aka the Community of Christ. But before we do that Latane, tell us something about a new book that is being published by you, it's being published by our friends at Cruciform Media who have actually blessed

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Iron Sharpens Iron very much over the last several years by shipping us at least a hundred copies of a book that I choose that they publish when

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I give them out at the annual, or should I say bi -annual, Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon.

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They've been very generous to us over there at Cruciform Publishing, but tell us about the book that they are publishing for you.

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Well I have that book and then one that is about Mormonism, but I'll start with the Cruciform book.

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When I was a schoolteacher, I became very concerned that many students, junior high and high school students, and also homeschool students didn't have good literature to help them with apologetics, in other words how to talk about their faith, how to articulate it.

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And you can't give a kid an apologetics book and expect them to digest it and learn how to use it.

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And so I did it in a novel. And I have a novel series that just started with Cruciform where a young girl kind of time travels through paintings, great art, back into the time of an artist.

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The first one is the Mona Lisa mirror mystery. And in the course of that she figures out who and why about the smile of Mona Lisa.

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But also back in the present when she is back with her friends, she discusses with some of her non -believer friends the authority of the

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Bible and why you can believe it and trust it. And of course this is done in conversation and it's done in such a way that kids can read it and think, well you know

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I could do that. I could talk about my faith in that way to a non -believer. So I'm very excited about Cruciform's partnership with me to publish these books or I should say my partnership with them.

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And also Dr. Lynn Kay Wilder who has been a guest on here many times, author of Unveiling Grace, former professor at Brigham Young University, now a

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Christian. She and I are just finishing up a book about how to mentor an ex -Mormon.

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Because Mormons are leaving the Mormon Church in greater numbers than ever before.

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And many of them are flailing in their faith. And this book tells a

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Christian how to mentor an ex -Mormon. Yeah, a couple of things going on.

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Great. And for further information about Latayne's ministry, you can go to latayne .com,

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L -A -T -A -Y -N -E .com. Well, Paul, what I'd like you to do, not only because it makes perfect sense to do this during a discussion on a topic like this, but I'd like you to give your personal testimony of salvation.

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Every time I have a first -time guest on, I have them give a summary of what religion they were raised in, what kind of journey they went through, through the providence of God, until they finally arrived at a place where they embraced the true

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Jesus Christ and true gospel of the inerrant Word of Scripture. So if you could give us a summary of that account before we move on to our major topic today, partway to Utah, the forgotten

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Mormons. Well, very good, Chris. Thank you so much for asking. Before I jump into that,

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I would like to just say something to Latayne. And I want to express to her my personal appreciation for her wonderful book,

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The Mormon Mirage. I'm looking at a copy of that book now. And if I remember correctly,

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Latayne, you published that in 1979. And less than 10 years after that, we used that book ourselves.

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You didn't know this until right now. And so I just want to tell you that I'm looking,

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I'm coming through it even as I'm talking to you, Latayne, and I can see all kinds of highlighting and markings that we put in this book.

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And so you were helpful to us as we were making our way out of the RLDS church.

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You made my day, Paul. Well, I just want to express my personal appreciation for your time and effort, your honesty and the scholarship that you put into that book.

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And that it benefited us. So thank you very much. You're very welcome. And by the way, I forgot,

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I forgot to say something very important to Latayne. Since this is the first time you're co hosting with me, you've got to try to be counterintuitive about rudeness.

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Because a co host on the phone when I cannot see you,

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I cannot see facial expressions or hand gestures, just butt in with a question that you may have as long as it's not a midstream sentence or something.

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But whenever you feel an opening, or you have a question that you would like to ask, just immediately ask it without worrying about rudeness, because that's just better radio, especially when you have a co host on the phone.

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And that's the only way because I may unintentionally ignore you for great periods of time if you don't do that.

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All right, I'm on it. Okay, well, Paul, let's go back to you now with your testimony.

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Well, and I'll get to that in a minute as well. I wanted to say just one more thing. Sure. Before I move into my own personal story,

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I was very intrigued with your most recent writing interest in helping mentor

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Mormons into Christianity. I have written on that same thing myself. My second book is entitled

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The Long Way Home, which I published in 2006. And it basically is designed to take former, in fact, it's called moving from a pseudo

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Christian cult into genuine Christianity. And I endeavor to the best I know how to take a former cult member right through the time when they're beginning to question their faith all the way into becoming a mature

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Christian. And I walked them through eight different discrete stages of that leading process anywhere, becoming aware of the issues that are at hand, to leaving to some of the mistakes that you make when you first leave and kind of taking them by the hand.

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I talk about Bible translations and, and I kind of try to move them into a stable course, because like you say, many of them are floundering in their faith.

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And I endeavor to prop up the Bible, demonstrate that it's legitimate. I have a chapter on salvation.

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So you'll have to pardon me, Chris, I'm putting a plug in for my own book here. That's quite all right. That's what the program's for.

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When I heard Latayne talking about her book, it resonated with me. And I just couldn't let that go without explaining to her that I, I too have written on that very topic, and it's been very well received.

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Praise God. Well, I'm very happy about that. Fascinating. Yeah, praise God, praise God. And by the way, for our listeners,

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I will be, God willing, repeating this later. But if our listeners want to look up more information about Paul Trask's books and other books that he has published by other authors, primarily those who have left the

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RLDS cult, you can go to help4rlds .com.

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That's help4rlds .com. And remember, the four is a numeral, not a word.

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But now we can go to your testimony, Paul. Yeah, thank you,

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Chris. I was not raised in the RLDS church. In fact, I knew nothing about it when

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I met my wife, just as I was graduating from high school. And after we dated for a while, she made it very clear to me that if we ever got serious, that she was never going to leave her church.

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She had been born and raised in the RLDS church, and she went back six generations.

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She went right back, her family heritage, on both sides of her family, went right back to the

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Joseph Smith era. And she actually has an ancestor who was killed in the 1838

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Mormon War here in Missouri, up at Ponds Mill, just north of Kansas City. And so she had a very long, deep, and prestigious heritage in the

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RLDS church. Well, I'd never heard of it before, and so her bold, firm stance on it caused me to inquire.

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And so I would read about it briefly. I was only 17 when we met, so I had probably limited study capabilities at that time of my life.

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My parents became very concerned when they saw that I was getting serious with a Latter -day

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Saint, and so they wanted me to talk to our Baptist pastor. And I loved our Baptist pastor, and still do, even though he's gone to be with the

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Lord. But I feel like he let me down at a very important time in my life. I went and had a private conversation with him for an extended time.

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And during our time together, he could not enunciate a single substantive thing about Latter -day

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Saintism. In fact, he did not offer me a book. He did not offer to study with me.

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He did not put me in touch with somebody who did know or understand something about the Latter -day

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Saint movement. The only thing of substance that he could say to me as we were closing our time together was, you don't want to join that church.

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It's a cult. Well, I grew up in a little town of 300 people, and the word cult was not in my vocabulary.

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I had to go home and look it up in dictionaries. And I still have the dictionary that I went home to look that word up in, and it had a very innocuous meaning at that point in time.

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It merely said, an extreme devotion to a person or idea. And I thought to myself, well, that sure doesn't sound very threatening.

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Yeah, it doesn't sound very dangerous to me. And I thought, well, if that's the worst thing that he can say about it, I might as well just go ahead.

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So after we had dated for a couple of years, and by the way, in writing my second book, I didn't put this in the book, but I basically chronicled over a half a century the migration of the dictionary definition of a cult.

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And if you look that up, if you look the word cult up in a dictionary today, you'll find that it's got a far more sinister definition today than it did 50 years ago, which

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I thought was fascinating. And I wrote a little bit about it, but I decided to not put that in my book. So that was an interesting thing for me to discover while I was doing my research to write.

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So after we had dated for a couple of years, we decided to get married. And then just a matter of weeks after we got married, a couple of our

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LDS elders came over to our house and asked me if I wanted to be baptized. Now, I didn't really know anything about the church.

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I'd never read the Book of Mormon. All I had read was some tracts, and they believed in the laying on of hands for the healing of the sick, and I didn't think that was very bizarre.

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And they also promoted the fact that God still speaks to people and moves and guides them today, and I thought, well, there's nothing terribly wrong with that.

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So I went ahead and joined her church. Leslie's father was a high priest in the church and was kind of a high muckety -muck in the area.

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He later became a patriarch here locally in the Kansas City area. So these guys that came to my house that day and asked me to join the church assumed that I probably knew everything there was to know about it, since Leslie's father was a high priest.

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Well, they were wrong. I knew nothing. So we got married. I joined the church, and then a short time later,

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I returned to college. We were halfway through my college experience when we got married. I had taken a year off, and so I went back to the

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University of Michigan, and I got my degree in business, and we lived kind of a college partying lifestyle and fell away from church altogether.

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And when I graduated from the University of Michigan, we decided we were going to move to San Francisco, which is what we did, and there

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I felt a need to repent of all that stuff we'd been doing in college and come back to the

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Lord. I still didn't know anything about the Herald -Deyes Church, but it just happened to be the church

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I belonged to at the time. So I remember getting my P -code out and walking around in San Francisco fog for a couple hours one

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Sunday morning before communion, trying to repent of all the sin that I could remember, which was a lot.

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And every time I thought I was done, I'd remember some more, and I'd walk around the block again. So I went to communion service that morning and felt that I had repented of as much of my sin as I could remember, at least, and felt that I was released from that and felt clean.

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So at that point forward, I became very active in the Herald -Deyes Church, which I'd never been before.

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So not long after that, the pastor forced me to teach the adult class immediately, and I felt unequipped for that.

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A few months later, I was ordained to the office of priest, and about a year after that, they ordained me an elder and made me the pastor of the

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San Francisco congregation, and I'm 24 years old! I don't really think

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I should be pastoring a congregation, but everybody wanted me to do this, and so I went ahead and did it.

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And then as soon as I was done being pastor of the San Francisco congregation, I was asked to be the counselor to the

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San Francisco Bay State Bishop, which I did, reluctantly. When I'm working the whole time, the

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Herald -Deyes Church has lay ministry, and so I'm a CPA, and I was working for a Big 8

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CPA firm, and then later moved into corporate financial management. So I'm in a fairly demanding profession, demanding job, and I'm having to do all this church stuff on the side.

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So while I was a counselor to the San Francisco Bay State Bishop, two things happened, and I'll come back to one of them.

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One of the things that happened was I went to a reunion, which is a church camp down in Abbey Valley near Santa Cruz in Northern California, and one of our apostles by the name of Will Thames, who was a rather short

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Englishman with a very thick English brogue, was speaking at this church camp, and he wagged his finger in the air, and he said,

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You know, the financial law has been changed, and I had no framework for understanding what he was talking about, but I did snag some cassette tapes of the week's proceedings, and I took them home with me.

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The second thing that happened while I was counselor to the state bishop was I come across this section of the

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Doctrine and Covenants that said, Those who are not commanded to tarry ought to go to independence.

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And I thought, Well, that's us, you know, that we ought to go to the center place of Zion, which is not far from where we're living right now.

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And so we, a couple years later, we actually packed up and moved here to independence.

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That didn't work out. Series of job changes. We come back a short time later, and we got back here just in time for the

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RODS church to fall off a cliff. We arrived back in Zion here in 1983, and the church officially fractured itself the following spring in 1984, which was a very destabilizing event in our lives.

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Before we moved back to Zion here the second time in 1983, we had been living in Houston for a short time, and I threw the cassette tape for Will Tims back in my truck that I was driving to work, and I heard him say that again,

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You know, the financial law has been changed. And I thought, What is he talking about? And so the little church that we had, the little

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RODS church that we were going to in Houston had a library, and so I rummaged around in that library until I found the original

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Book of Commandments, which I can talk about later, and it didn't exactly jump out at me, but I pawed through that book, and I finally found section, at least it's section 42 in the

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RODS Doctrine and Covenants that talks about the financial law, and son of a gun, Apostle Tims was right.

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There were substantial changes in this document between the 1833 Book of Commandments and the 1835

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Doctrine and Covenants. I would go on, I've got a whole chapter in my book partway to Utah regarding those changes.

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So when we got here to Independence in 1983, another family had followed us up from Houston and wanted me to go hear somebody talk about the changes in the

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Doctrine and Covenants, the changes in the Revelations, and I didn't really want to go do this.

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We had been in Independence long enough to know that there was a lot of really squirrely and strange stuff going on up here, but we were good friends with this family, and so we decided to go.

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Well, I went and heard a very fascinating discussion about the changes in the Revelations.

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Not only did this man document all the changes thoroughly, meticulously, but he had a storyline, and he undergird his storyline with all the documentation regarding why these changes had taken place and probably who did it.

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Well, I was fascinated by that, and so we became fast friends, and I still have several copies of his book on my bookshelf.

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And so that was one of our first awakenings that something's pretty seriously going on here.

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So in 1984, the church here in Independence kind of fell off a cliff.

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The prophet of the church at that point in time produced a so -called revelation introducing women into the priesthood, which at that point in time was the kiss of death to fundamentalist

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RLDS people, and the presentation of that document led to a mass exodus from the

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RLDS church. I don't know what the exact numbers are, but there were substantial, massive numbers of people who just began defecting from the formal auspices of the

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RLDS church, and we were part of that. We were part of those rabid fundamentalists who left the church.

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A few years later, I find myself pastor again, this time of what at that point in time was the largest of these renegade congregations here in Independence, and it was called

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Restoration Branch. And during the spring of 1989,

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I had lent to a friend of mine who had followed us down here from Michigan to be a part of the zionic endeavor here in Missouri.

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I had lent this friend a copy of David Whitmer's Address to All the Lamers. And lo and behold, maybe two or three months after I had lent this book to my friend, his whole family had left the church, which about knocked me off my chair.

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And then he started handing me stuff to read, and I was pastor, and I said, Mike, this is good stuff.

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I mean, you've come across some really good stuff here, and I'd like to get to this, but it's awfully hard to read this during the week and then get up and pastor this congregation on Sunday.

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So give me some time here, I'll get to it. In the meantime, and this is kind of an interesting, even as I look back on my own life, this is kind of an interesting thing to admit or to confess, but we were not having a fun time in the

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Herald -Diaz Church at this point in time. The church had come unraveled, there were lots of restoration groups, fundamentalist groups meeting independently, and it had become pretty much an endurance contest, and we weren't having fun.

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And I prayed to God, I didn't tell anybody this other than my wife at the time, that even while I was pastoring this restoration branch,

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I prayed to God that he would release me from the bondage of the Herald -Diaz Church.

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I did that in the summer of 1989, and then Leslie and I began to be moved to thoroughly examine the

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Book of Mormon, which we had never done before. We were all over the Doctrine and Covenants. We had already decided that that was a book that was in very serious trouble, and consequently the church was, because that book was.

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So we finally took the blinders off, and for the very first time in our lives, began to look at the

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Book of Mormon objectively, which was a little bit hard to do. But we didn't get too far into it, and we discovered major problems.

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My wife and I sat in our living room one day, and we began reading part of the Book of Mormon.

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One of us was reading the Book of Mormon, the other started reading from the second chapter of Isaiah. And we read for a very long time, and didn't miss a beat.

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Which meant that there were massive, massive, very substantial portions of Isaiah, and the

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King James Version in general, which were directly plagiarized, and put into the

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Book of Mormon. And there is no legitimate translational storyline that can make any sense of that. And I remember actually getting mad at the

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Book of Mormon, as though it was a living person. I remember yelling at it, and saying, you know,

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I trusted in you, I believed in you, and I taught you for all of these years, and all

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I've got to do is look at you crosswise, and you crumble right before me. And so we lost our faith in the

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Book of Mormon. Well, once you lose your faith in the Book of Mormon, it's pretty much over. There's no salvaging your

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Latter -day Saintism once you've rejected the Book of Mormon. And so I finally announced to our congregation that I was resigning as pastor.

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I kind of played out my remaining time, and then I took my inspired version of the

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Bible, and went to a Baptist church. About a year later, this friend who had left the church invited me to visit his church.

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We started attending. And one of those, during one of those sermons, you know sometimes you're in church, and you know the message is designed for you.

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And that happened to me while we were attending church here in Kansas City. The pastor said, some of you here today have been shouldering a very heavy burden of guilt.

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I feel myself getting emotional, so bear with me. So, you know, shouldering a burden of guilt that you need to be relieved from.

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And I knew that that message was for me. And I had been avoiding coming to terms with God over my involvement in the

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RLDS church. And I had avoided it. But I knew he was talking to me, so when

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I got home that day, I got by myself and got on my knees. And I began to pray.

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And I was almost afraid to, I was afraid to bring this issue up with God. Because even though in my head

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I knew different, it had the feeling, it had the feeling of unforgivable sin. That I had, that I had so thoroughly misrepresented

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God that I loved, and that I thought that I was service. And it was very, and as you can tell, it's hard for me to even talk about it now.

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I remember, so I began to pray. And as I began to pray, I felt that I was falling into a bottomless abyss of blackness.

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As I began to confess to God how sorry I was for misrepresenting him to so many people for so many years.

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And after I got into that prayer for a while, and it was very painful and very scary to me.

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The spirit of God came on me, and he let me know that there was more pain to be experienced here.

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That he was going to absorb the pain in himself, and let me go.

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Wow, wow, wow. And so I got up off my knees, and thanked

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God for his forgiveness. And came clean, I felt that I had repented for all of those years that I had spent teaching and preaching and believing the wrong stuff.

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And I was so arrogant, you know, in what I had once believed. And now I had come to realize that I had been so wrong.

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And it just, it just, it crushed me. It just, it crushed me. My entire identity was wrapped up in my role as an elder in the

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Arrodeas Church. And so I was left with a real, very serious identity crisis.

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And I know that Latane understands what I'm saying when I say this. I hear you.

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I hear you. And I actually had, I had trouble. I had trouble for a while even praying to God.

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Because the Arrodeas Church, all that it stood for was the lens through which

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I came to see and understand God. And I had taken that lens, and I had crushed it under my feet.

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It's like, well how do I relate to God now? You know, what is our relationship now?

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How do I move forward? It was, it was very hard. And many people, that's why I wrote my second book, you know.

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Years, years later, I wrote my second book to help people through that period of time. It is incredibly destabilizing and incredibly painful and confusing.

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And people just don't know what to, I didn't know what to do. And so I know that others are going through that too. So, I asked the pastor of this church,

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I had had a love for God, obviously, and a love for ministry. And so I asked him what seminary to go to.

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And he said, well there's two that he could recommend. Gordon Conwell in Boston and Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.

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I checked them both out and I decided to, that I was going to leave my career. I had been a director of accounting at Sprint, the telephone company here in Kansas City.

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And I left my career at that point in time to pursue my seminary.

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So I went to Fuller Seminary, had a wonderful, very intense three years and just a priceless experience.

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And when I got out, a friend of mine, I never thought I'd come back to Independence, Missouri.

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I really didn't. And when we left Independence in 1990, I thought that's it, we're never going back to Independence, Missouri.

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So a friend of ours in seminary suggested that I come back here and actually do RLDS ministry.

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And I kind of laughed at him initially. And then through a sequence of events which were inspired by God, I actually did come back here in 1995 and I wrote my first book,

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Partway to Utah. Based on a spiritual experience,

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I knew that it would be a major undertaking and I didn't want to do that. I'd never read a book before, so I didn't want to undergo that work unless I knew that it was

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God ordained. I didn't want to be doing this just on a whim. So once I became convinced that God was moving me to write this book,

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I sat down and it took a year and wrote Partway to Utah. And then in 2001, we had left the area and moved back to L .A.

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for financial reasons, for work. And in 2001,

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I was woken up in the middle of the night to revive my interest in starting a website. So I took some time off my consulting practice.

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I was no longer in corporate financial management. I moved into corporate financial consulting and I had some downtime in my practice.

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And I took some time and put together the beginnings of a website. And then as soon as I hit the go button to publish it, more work came in and I went right back to work.

33:31

So my website now has been up. The website, Chris, that you mentioned ago, healthforRLDS .com,

33:38

has been up now for 17 and a half years. And then I took time off again in 2006 to write that second book,

33:45

The Long Way Home. And then in 2007, we moved back here and have been very active in the ministry ever since.

33:52

Praise God. We have to go to our first break right now. And then when we return, we'll wrap up some of Paul's testimony with a couple of questions on that.

34:02

Then we will move into a segment of the show where we will differentiate and compare and contrast the

34:09

RLDS, or otherwise known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

34:14

Saints, and now officially known as the Community of Christ. We will compare and contrast that with the larger cult, the

34:22

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, the Mormons, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Because I'm sure that many, if not the vast majority of our listeners, don't know the difference.

34:34

And then we will, during the last portion of the program, compare and contrast, most importantly, the difference between RLDS teaching, both past and present, with the

34:48

Holy Scriptures and the true Church that Jesus Christ established. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

35:00

chrisarnson at gmail .com. That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

35:09

USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

35:15

Perhaps you are still in the RLDS, or the Community of Christ, or some other

35:21

Mormon offshoot. Or perhaps you have friends, family, and loved ones in that group, or any of those groups, and you do not want to draw attention to your true identity.

35:33

We can understand that. But other than that, if it's just a general question, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

35:40

Don't go away. God willing, we will be right back with our guest, Paul Trask, and our co -host,

35:46

Dr. LaTainsey Scott, right after these messages from our sponsors. Hi, I'm Chris Arnsen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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So I'm delighted that my friend Chris Arnzen and I will be heading down to Atlanta for the

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They rarely have seen people after this particular type of surgery get up and walk around and sit upright in a chair for long hours as Mike has done already.

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We are now back with our guest today, Paul Trask, who is a former reorganized

44:08

Latter -day Saint who was converted by the grace of God to Biblical Christianity and founded

44:14

Refiner's Fire Ministries. We are discussing his personal testimony of how our gracious Lord brought him out of that cult, and we are also talking about his book,

44:25

Partway to Utah, The Forgotten Mormons. And also on the program with us is my special co -host,

44:30

Dr. Latane C. Scott. She is a former Mormon, a member of the major cult of Mormons known as the

44:38

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. She attended

44:44

Brigham Young University before leaving that cult and is now a born -again believer in Christ Jesus.

44:51

She is an author of multiple books, including the classic The Mormon Mirage, and she is, as I said, co -hosting with us today.

45:00

If you'd like to join us on the air with questions of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

45:08

Please give us your first name, city and state and country of residence if you live outside the USA, unless there's a compelling reason that leads you to remain anonymous.

45:17

And Paul, you were giving your testimony, a very moving testimony. There's a couple of questions that I have before we go on to some of the meat and potatoes area of the differences between the

45:29

RLDS and the LDS. And I have a question too, if it's appropriate.

45:35

Sure, yeah. After I ask the first question, you can move right in. Paul, you said that when you were praying, this is like a pivotal point in your transformation, your conversion, your becoming a new creature in Christ, but you were spiraling into darkness during this prayer.

45:59

Have you ever thought, and of course this may involve some speculation, not that I am bashing or trying to be mean -spirited to my charismatic or Pentecostal friends in any way, but I am not a charismatic and I do not sensationalize those kinds of experiences.

46:19

And I'm not saying all of my friends who are charismatic or Pentecostal do do that, but it is most common amongst them, and I'm sure many of them will admit that.

46:27

But do you think that this could have been a last -ditch effort, if you will, not that the devil would not continue to try to harass you, but could this have been a demonic experience where the devil or Satan himself was trying to dissuade you from this conversion experience?

46:51

It's possible. Yeah, I understand your question, Chris, and thank you for asking. I think that's a very astute question and a good one to ask.

46:59

And I would not be inclined to suggest that it was demonic. I was pretty wrapped up in my own self -condemnation for having believed and taught these things for a number of years.

47:13

And perhaps it was Satan corrupting my mind by having me believe that this was an unforgivable sin.

47:22

And then here I am, you know, holding this unforgivable sin and coming to the Holy God, and I guess

47:30

I was expecting judgment. I guess, even though I could not have expressed it verbally at that point in time,

47:36

I think I was fearful in coming to God because I had been carrying around this sense of, you know, what

47:42

I had done here is unforgivable. And here I am now, all of a sudden, I'm coming to the

47:48

Lord of life, and I'm confessing, you know, what I've done. And that's where the

47:55

Lord came in. So even though I started that prayer and had that dark feeling,

48:01

I think that was more my own emotional state, my own mental and emotional state, carrying around this extreme guilt.

48:10

And so I choose to really focus on what the Lord did, because the Lord supernaturally came in and broke those feelings.

48:16

Whether or not they were demonically accompanied or not, I really can't say.

48:22

I think you could probably build a case for that. But I choose to focus on what the

48:28

Lord, you know, it's not how I started that prayer, how I ended the prayer. How I ended the prayer was, the

48:35

Lord let me, and this was a profound experience that I've never had before or since, the Lord let me know, indeed, in fact, there was more guilt and shame and pain to bear that He would bear that Himself and set me free.

48:51

And it was like, hallelujah, praise God, you know. And I was released. He basically took all of that load of guilt and sin that I'd been carrying around, and He lifted it from me, and I walked away a free man.

49:06

And that's the gospel. Amen. And I know that... Go ahead.

49:14

...of forgiven sin. So, yeah, you know, I never thought about that perhaps being demonically oriented, but perhaps it was.

49:22

And I guess anything that corrupts or infiltrates our mind to think inaccurate and unholy things,

49:29

I mean, that's all you could build a case, you know, that that is inspired by the devil. So it's a good question.

49:35

I wish I had a better answer. Well, you're not omniscient, so I don't expect you to have an exact answer on that.

49:43

But Dr. Latane C. Scott, you had a question. Paul, something you said

49:49

I think can be of great hope to anyone who's trapped in a wrong manner of thinking in which the character and the history and the nature of God is obscured.

50:05

You know, in Acts chapter 17, Paul walks out onto the hill there and he chooses an altar to an unknown

50:12

God and builds a sermon on the unknown God. And what I heard you say that is so encouraging and I think should be encouraging to anyone who's listening who's maybe struggling with being part of Mormonism or the

50:25

RLDS way of thinking is that God can't be obscured.

50:31

And it's like he was the true and living God was peeking out behind all of that darkness of your wrong way of thinking and my wrong way of thinking.

50:44

And even though I had believed that he was once a man and that he had a body and, you know, all these other things, he kind of peeked out behind that.

50:53

He couldn't be obscured completely by that. Even though I thought I knew him, the true and living

50:58

God shone through. And that was so encouraging. I don't exactly remember how you put it exactly,

51:05

Paul, but that was so encouraging to hear that. And I hope it will encourage anyone who's listening who's struggling with their own concept of God.

51:13

Can we have sinned so much or can we have been so wrong that God can't communicate with us?

51:18

And, of course, he can. Thank you, Latayne. I appreciate that. And like you,

51:25

Latayne, I'm hoping, you know, I mean, the work that we both do is to give people hope, to think that you can move past this.

51:33

You can have a rich, fulfilling spiritual life. In fact, it's better than anything that you could have ever known in Latter -day

51:40

Saintism. It's better, way better. That's right. It's better. One question that I have also,

51:47

Paul, in regard to your testimony is some of our listeners may be scratching their heads wondering why of all seminaries you chose

51:54

Fuller when, in reality, in this day and age, Fuller would probably have more in common with the

51:59

RLDS than evangelical Christianity or those that believe in biblical inerrancy and so on.

52:05

My friend, Dr. James R. White, who is a red -blooded conservative evangelical and Reformed Christian, he graduated from Fuller.

52:16

He knew full well, entering Fuller, that it was a liberal school, but he actually said that he thanks

52:21

God for the education that he got there, not only because some of it was truly superb in regard to the original languages of the

52:28

Bible and so on, but he also was trained unconsciously on their part, meaning the professors, but he was trained into how to argue, and I mean argue in the best sense of the word, with liberals as a result of the experience that he had there.

52:46

But why Fuller, other than the recommendation of the pastor? And I'm curious as to why the pastor recommended

52:52

Fuller. Well, let me go back a little bit. First off, in the

52:59

RLDS ranks, they don't believe in seminaries. The brand of RLDSism that I had moved along with for 19 years, they just buried any seminary experience.

53:11

And so I had a low view of seminaries. I knew nothing about anything. I mean,

53:16

I was a babe in the woods. And so this pastor was pastor of a large church, and I respected him.

53:23

As it turned out, he got his doctorate of ministry at Fuller, even though he was able to recommend both

53:29

Fuller as well as Gordon Conwell. And so I basically said, look,

53:36

I'm going to be a blank slate. I'm going to say I know nothing. I'm going to admit that I'm a babe in the woods.

53:43

I want to go and learn. You know, fill me up. Let me learn. And in the process of going to Fuller, it was a very rich educational experience for me that I wouldn't trade for anything in the world.

53:57

And I know since going to Fuller, since graduating from Fuller, I know that a lot of people have very ugly things to say about Fuller.

54:06

In fact, I think, Chris, you and I mentioned Richard Mao, the former president of Fuller Seminary.

54:11

In fact, he became president the year I graduated in 1993. He has done some, as far as I'm concerned, done some very outrageous things regarding my testimony.

54:23

We had a computer glitch here where there was a noise made by the computer. Can you repeat the outrageous thing that Richard Mao was involved in?

54:32

I know it had something to do with ecumenism with Mormons. Well, he started holding joint sessions with Mormons as though he was trying to wrap them into the fold of evangelical

54:43

Christianity. He wrote the foreword to a book written by a Mormon, How Wise the Divide.

54:48

It's trying to suggest that we really worship the same Jesus, which I adamantly refute.

54:55

I prove that's wrong. Amen, amen. It's not the same

55:00

Jesus. The Jesus of the Latter -day Saint movement is a caricature of Jesus as portrayed and dreamed up by Joseph Smith.

55:09

It's not the Jesus of the Bible, but you are incompatible. It's another Jesus. And I don't get that concept out of my own imagination.

55:18

I get that from the Apostle Paul, who talks about another Jesus, which is not the real

55:24

Jesus of the Bible. So I have an axe to grind with Richard Mao, who was the president of BAR, for the gatherings.

55:34

He used to have symposiums at Fuller for joint Mormon -Christian discussions.

55:39

And it's like, you really just don't get this. It's hard for me to make... Anyway, I don't want to continue.

55:46

I can get out of rant. I don't want to get out of rant.

55:55

Richard Mao is an ethicist. He's not a theologian. I think

56:00

How Wide the Divide was the catalyst to my friend Dr. James R.

56:06

White's book, Is the Mormon My Brother? I'm almost convinced from my memory that that is the reason he wrote that book, as a response and rebuttal to that.

56:15

I'm certainly glad that he did. And so at Fuller, I got, as far as I'm concerned, having been there, and having been around the block more than once since graduating,

56:28

I'm convinced that I got a far better, broader education at Fuller than I would have gotten at any sectarian seminary.

56:36

There's a large Southern Baptist seminary just north of Kansas City by the name of Midwestern.

56:42

And I was accepted there. I had actually planned to go there, but the Lord very specifically directed me, and I could go into that.

56:51

I'm not going to right now, but the Lord really specifically directed me to Pasadena and to go to Fuller.

56:58

I wouldn't trade my Fuller education for anything. Now, trust me, I do not endorse all the stuff that I encountered at Fuller.

57:08

But at least I encountered it, and I encountered it and was able to express coherently, intelligently, why

57:16

I don't accept some of the stuff that I encountered at Fuller Seminary. It's still a wonderful place.

57:22

We have to go to our midway break right now. This is a longer -than -normal break.

57:28

It's long because Grace Life Radio 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires a long break between our two major segments because they air their own commercials and public service announcements during that break.

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They air Iron Sherpins Iron Radio twice a day in morning and evening drive time in a rerun format.

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And so they need to localize the program to Lake City, Florida, and thus they need the time to air their own commercials.

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But if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, take advantage of this long break to write your questions for our guest

58:03

Paul Trask about the RLDS, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

58:08

Saints, today known as the Community of Christ since 2001.

58:14

They made that official name change. And also use this time, please, to write down the information provided by our advertisers because we need our advertisers to survive as a program.

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And the more you write down the information provided, the more likely you are to patronize my advertisers and the more likely they are then subsequently to remain as advertisers and keep this program on the air.

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Our email address for questions is chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com Don't go away,

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God willing, we will be right back with Paul Trask and our co -host Dr. Latane C.

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That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. James White here, co -founder of Alpha Omega Ministries and occasional guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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I'm so delighted that my friend Chris Arnson will be heading down to Atlanta for the next G3 Conference from January 17th to the 19th, 2019, where I'll be joining a very impressive lineup of speakers on the theme

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Their website is cvbbs .com. Browse the pages at ease, shop at your leisure, and purchase with confidence as Todd and Patty work in service to you, the

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01:09:19

Before we return to our interview with Paul Trask, author of Partway to Utah, and our discussion on the cult known as the

01:09:30

Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, today known, actually since 2001, known as the

01:09:37

Community of Christ. Before we return to that discussion, we just have some announcements about some upcoming events.

01:09:43

Next week, I am heading down to Jacksonville, Florida, for two events that I have organized there.

01:09:50

The first is being held, God willing, on Friday, September 7th at 6 .30 p .m. at the

01:09:55

Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Jacksonville, Florida. They have more than one campus, and that is the

01:10:01

Jacksonville campus. The theme of that event is A House -Mended Christian Unity in a

01:10:08

Culture of Outrage, and the speakers are my dear friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and also

01:10:14

Dr. Michael L. Brown of the Line of Fire radio program and the

01:10:20

Fire School for Ministry. For more details on this event at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Jacksonville, Florida, go to the website of the

01:10:29

Switzerland Community Church, who are co -sponsoring this event with me, at SwitzerlandCommunityChurch .org,

01:10:37

SwitzerlandCommunityChurch .org. Then the following night, God willing, on Saturday, September 8th, also at 6 .30

01:10:43

p .m., there is a formal debate taking place at Switzerland Community Church this time.

01:10:50

Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries and Dr. Michael L. Brown of the Line of Fire radio program are on the same team, and they will be debating two professing

01:11:01

Christians who are also ordained ministers and also open advocates of homosexual activity.

01:11:11

These are two individuals who are also both married to someone of their own gender, and that would be

01:11:20

Rev. Dwayne J. Robinson and Rev. Ruth Jensen Forbel.

01:11:26

They are both going to be debating James White and Michael Brown on the theme, Is Homosexuality Consistent with New Testament Obedience?

01:11:34

On Saturday, September 8th, 6 .30 p .m., at Switzerland Community Church in Jacksonville, Florida, go to SwitzerlandCommunityChurch .org,

01:11:43

SwitzerlandCommunityChurch .org for more details, and this is free of charge. Then coming up in November, on the 9th and the 10th,

01:11:52

I will be heading out to Quakertown, Pennsylvania for the Quakertown Conference on Reformed Theology. The theme is

01:11:58

The Glory of the Cross, and the location is Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

01:12:05

The speakers include David Garner, Ray Ortland, Richard Phillips, Timothy Gibson, and Carlton Nguyen. That's November 9th and the 10th at the

01:12:13

Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quakertown, Pennsylvania. For more details, go to the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals website, which is

01:12:20

AllianceNet .org, AllianceNet .org. Then scroll down to, well, click on Events first, and scroll down to The Glory of the

01:12:29

Cross, the Quakertown Conference on Reformed Theology. Then coming up in January, from January 17th through the 19th, which is a

01:12:39

Thursday through Saturday, the G3 Conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia. Technically, it's

01:12:45

College Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, and the event will be held once again at the Georgia International Convention Center.

01:12:52

G3 stands for Gospel, Grace, and Glory. The theme this January is The Mission of God, A Biblical Understanding of Missions.

01:12:59

There is a Spanish and bilingual event in the Spanish language being held on Wednesday, January 16th, so tell your

01:13:08

Spanish -speaking and bilingual friends that there is a Spanish -speaking event on Wednesday, January 16th.

01:13:14

But the English -speaking event will include such speakers as Dr. James R. White, Paul Washer, John Piper, Stephen Lawson, Vody Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad M.

01:13:25

Bayway, Tim Challies, and I know that my co -host today, Dr. Latane C. Scott, knows

01:13:31

Tim Challies and actually, I believe, supports his writing ministry. Phil Johnson, Josh Bice, Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, Stephen J.

01:13:43

Nichols, who is the president of Reformation Bible College, the college founded by the late R .C. Sproul and Ligonier Ministries, and many more are on this very long and impressive lineup.

01:13:53

Go to g3conference .com, g3conference .com to register, and I strongly urge you, if you have a business or parachurch ministry that you want to promote to the crowd there,

01:14:04

I would strongly urge you to register for an exhibitor's booth, too, just as I am going to be manning there,

01:14:09

God willing, because they are expecting between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 people to attend the G3 Conference.

01:14:15

g3conference .com, g3conference .com. And last but not least, if you love my show and you don't want it to go away, go to ironsharpensironradio .com,

01:14:24

click support, then click to donate now. You can donate instantly with a debit or credit card.

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You can also mail in a check via snail mail to the address that appears on your screen. That's ironsharpensironradio .com,

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click support, then click, click to donate now. Please never siphon money away from your regular giving to your local church where you are a member in order to give to Ironsharpensironradio, and never put your family in financial jeopardy because you're giving to Ironsharpensironradio.

01:14:50

Those two things are commands of God, providing for family and church. Providing for my show is not a command of God, but if you're financially blessed above and beyond your ability to obey those two commands, please donate as much as you can and as often as you can to Ironsharpensironradio.

01:15:04

We rely on your donations to survive, and if you want to advertise with us, send us an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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01:15:20

Keep in mind, if you are not a member of a Bible -believing church, you need to be a member of one or else you are living in rebellion against God if you're not prayerfully seeking for one at least.

01:15:30

So send me an email to chrisarnson and put I need a church in the subject line. I have long lists of biblically faithful churches all over the world, and I can help you find a church near you, and I have already done so for many listeners in our audience.

01:15:44

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com, and put I need a church or something similar in the subject line. That is also the email address where you can send in a question for Paul Trask, author of Partway to Utah, and our discussion on the

01:15:56

Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, known since 2001 as the Community of Christ.

01:16:02

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. And let's get into the part of the program,

01:16:11

Paul, where we discuss the differences between these two cults, one known as the

01:16:17

RLDS that you were a part of, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, now known as the

01:16:23

Community of Christ, and also the other, the larger group by far, the

01:16:29

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, known as the Mormons, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Can you tell us about some of the primary differences that they have between them?

01:16:38

Let me start off with one. I know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

01:16:43

Saints is and has historically been a polytheistic religion, although they adamantly and vociferously deny that.

01:16:53

They deny that because they say the fact that they worship one god negates them being polytheists.

01:17:01

But the fact of the matter is they believe that an endless and infinite number of gods exist, so therefore they cannot get around from the charge of polytheism or henotheism.

01:17:14

Henotheism is a form of polytheism where there are multiple gods, but there is a hierarchical order or order of greatness or power.

01:17:22

But, if you could, Paul, let us know about that in regard to the

01:17:27

RLDS. Well, Chris, before I launch into that,

01:17:33

I should just say, for the benefit of our listening audience, today we're focusing on two flavors of Latter -day

01:17:40

Saintism. I'm looking at a book written by Stephen Shields called The Virgin Pants of the

01:17:46

Restoration, and our listening audience ought to understand that there is well over 100 different freestanding denominations, which all claim

01:17:56

Joseph Smith as their founder, they all claim the Book of Mormon, and they all claim Joseph Smith as their prophet.

01:18:01

We're focusing on the largest of two today, but there are well over 100, and they're scattered all over the country.

01:18:09

So, I just wanted to make people aware of that, that there are many different flavors of Latter -day

01:18:16

Saintism. The Utah Mormon Church, understandably, gets the most airtime because they are obviously far and away the largest.

01:18:25

So, I just wanted to say that. In fact, it might be a good idea for you to, before you get into my question that I just asked, give us a bit of the history on how they became two different religions.

01:18:38

Well, I'd be happy to do that. Joseph Smith was killed by mob action in 1844 in Illinois.

01:18:50

And the church was dumbfounded. He had not left clear instructions about who his successor would be.

01:18:59

And I'm going to put a plug in for an article that I have on my website called, I Will Be a Second Muhammad.

01:19:06

This was a statement by Joseph Smith made during the 1838 Mormon War here in Missouri.

01:19:12

And this article that I put together some time ago has been a perennial favorite. Interestingly, one of the similarities between Mormonism, Latter -day

01:19:21

Saintism, and Islam is the fact that both Islam as well as Mormonism have the same troubled dynamics.

01:19:30

The majority of Muhammad's followers, which are Sunni Muslims, believe that they were to elect their new leader, whereas the majority, the

01:19:37

Shiite Muslims, believe that Muhammad's son was to be their next leader. It's identical in Latter -day

01:19:43

Saintism. The majority of Latter -day Saint believers believe that Brigham Young was to be elected as their next president, where the reorganized

01:19:55

Latter -day Saints believe that Joseph had appointed his young son to be his successor.

01:20:00

That's just a parallel, one of many parallels, between Mormonism and Islam.

01:20:06

A lot of people become, a lot of Latter -day Saints become offended when I draw comparisons, but there's been a number of people that have written on this topic, including myself.

01:20:15

So, going back to when Joseph was killed, he had been the charismatic leader and founder of the

01:20:22

Church for 14 years, and actually had been leading people for a couple of years even before that.

01:20:29

And so, there was an obvious leadership vacuum. What were people supposed to do without Joseph Smith at the helm?

01:20:34

He was the only one that received revelations from God. He produced the Book of Mormon. The whole

01:20:39

Church revolved around Joseph Smith. Well, he's dead. What do we do now? So the Church floundered for a couple of years, before Brigham Young did the

01:20:50

Westward whole thing, and took a large percentage of the

01:20:55

Church out to Salt Lake City. And that track has been well documented, and people are well aware of what happened.

01:21:01

But what people don't understand is that there was a large percentage of the Church which didn't follow

01:21:07

Brigham Young out to Utah. A number of things had been happening in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the years running up to his murder, which unsettled a lot of people, not the least of which was polygamy.

01:21:22

So Joseph Smith also married his Church into Freemasonry, and all of the temple nonsense that went along with marrying

01:21:29

Freemasonry into his Church. A lot of people were disturbed by what had happened in Nauvoo, and the last thing they wanted to do was to follow this

01:21:39

Church out to Salt Lake City. So let me be clear. The Church that Joseph Smith was presiding over when he was killed, the spiritual trajectory of that Church went directly to Salt Lake City.

01:21:52

The people that stayed behind were going to just kind of bide their time and wait for Joseph Smith's young son to rise to the leadership of the

01:22:01

Church. Significantly, part of the people who stayed home and didn't go out west was

01:22:07

Joseph Smith's own widow, Emma Smith, and their son, Joseph Smith III. Joseph Smith's own wife, widow now, and son did not go out west to Utah.

01:22:18

They stayed back in Missouri. And so, Joseph Smith's young son, though, was only 12 years old when his father was killed.

01:22:27

Well, he was hardly fit to lead a Church, and so what were they to do? So people back in the

01:22:32

Midwest, and there were a large number of people that scattered throughout the Midwest, not just in Illinois.

01:22:40

They were forbidden to live in Missouri at that point in time. And so they just kind of tread water.

01:22:47

People started leaving different factions. J .J. Strang led a faction up to Beaver Island in northern

01:22:53

Michigan, and he had himself crowned King James, interestingly enough.

01:23:00

In the early days, right after Joseph Smith was killed, the J .J. Strang movement was competing in numbers with what

01:23:07

Brigham Young was doing in Utah. So this was a very significant movement. Sidney Rigdon, which had been

01:23:13

Joseph Smith's right -hand man in developing the so -called inspired version of the

01:23:19

Bible, he led a group off to Monongahela, Pennsylvania, which is kind of a fun town to pronunciate.

01:23:27

David White led another group down to Texas. And so people began scattering to the four winds following different leaders.

01:23:33

There was a group in the Midwest that didn't follow any particular leader or came back to just kind of bide their time until young Joseph became old enough to be their prophet.

01:23:44

In 1852, a number of these independent congregations came together and semi -formally reorganized the church.

01:23:54

And they sent appeals to young Joseph who was getting older at that point in time, but he spurned all of their requests to be prophets.

01:24:03

Interestingly enough, there were more than one delegation from Salt Lake City, from the

01:24:09

Utah Mormon church, that came to young Joseph begging him to come out to Salt Lake City and be their prophet.

01:24:16

But he turned down their suggestions. And so, in 1860, about eight years after this semi -formal organization had formed,

01:24:27

Joseph Smith III, who is now 28 years old, studying law, and he began having his own spiritual experiences indicating that he should come and become the prophet of this emerging group of churches which are called the

01:24:43

Reorganized Church. In fact, in the early days of the Reorganized Church, they didn't have the word reorganized in it.

01:24:50

They called themselves, they saw themselves as the continuation of Joseph Smith's early church, and so they just called themselves the

01:24:57

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. Well, obviously, a lot of confusion ensued because you got two churches going by the same name.

01:25:05

So, in the process of time, they appended the word reorganized on the front of their name.

01:25:12

And so, young Joseph Smith, now 28, and his mother, Emma, who was in possession of Joseph Smith's inspired version of the

01:25:20

Bible, all of a sudden Emma and Joseph Smith III are joined with this reorganized group of congregations, and that's where the reorganization really got ahead of steam and began picking up momentum.

01:25:34

They relocated themselves first from up around Chicago down to southern

01:25:40

Illinois, southern Iowa, just above the Missouri border to a little town called Lamoni, which still houses the

01:25:47

RODS College. It used to be called Graceland College, now Graceland University. And then, after the

01:25:55

Mormon War in Missouri and all those hostilities had ended, more than a generation, nearly two generations later, people began filing back down here to Independence, Missouri.

01:26:09

And so, in 1918, the RODS Church moved their formal headquarters from Lamoni back down to Independence, Missouri, and that's where they reside today.

01:26:19

That's a thumbnail sketch. Now, in the early days, there were two distinguishing characteristics between the

01:26:26

RODS Church and Mormon Church. Number one distinction was, we have

01:26:31

Joseph Smith's own son who turned to be our prophet, and they were quite proud of that, of course. And the number two plank in their initial platform is, we don't believe in polygamy.

01:26:40

Those were the two primary distinguishing characteristics of the RODS Church. Now, there's more, but those were the big ones.

01:26:50

Now, at that point, though, I know that there are RODS folk that insist that Joseph Smith was never a polygamist, and therefore that is why they were never a polygamist people.

01:27:05

But do they have history backing them on that? And perhaps, Latane, you could even pipe in after Paul gives his answer?

01:27:16

I'd be happy to talk about that question. Yeah, Joseph Smith III, once he became the prophet of the reorganized church, set out to clear his father's name.

01:27:27

Of course, he was very closely aligned with his mother, and they both had been subjected to incredible ridicule and shame, because word was spread rampant throughout the countryside that their husband and father had been unfaithful to Emma with a number of other women.

01:27:46

And so this was very hurtful to both Joseph Smith III and his mother, Emma. So Joseph Smith III made it one of his primary missions in life to clear his father's name.

01:27:57

So he mounted more than one trip out to Salt Lake City to talk with as many people as he could from that era of the church history.

01:28:07

And based on his own personal investigation, he came back and concluded that his father, number one, never authored the revelation on polygamy, which is section 132 in the

01:28:19

Mormon Doctrine and Covenants, and number two, that he never practiced polygamy. And so that became the official position of the

01:28:27

RLDS church. Now, I often times call RLDS people Mormons in denial.

01:28:36

Yeah, the Mormons at least own their own history for the most part, and they own up to what

01:28:44

Joseph Smith did, and Joseph Smith indeed authored polygamy, and Joseph Smith indeed had a number of wives, which are very, very well documented with affidavits.

01:28:58

And so Joseph Smith had satisfied himself and maybe he was doing this for the benefit of his mother.

01:29:06

It's hard to believe that he did a very thorough or honest job when there's so much evidence to the contrary, but that became the official storyline of the

01:29:15

RLDS church, and that's the storyline of the RLDS church to this day, that they deny that Joseph Smith authored the practice of polygamy, they deny the fact that he ever had more than one wife.

01:29:26

And Latane, do you have anything to say before we move on as far as you being a former member of the larger group, the

01:29:34

LDS church, which at least the

01:29:46

LDS ordained plan and design at that time before another change in that circumstance was allegedly brought into the church by a convenient revelation of a president in the 19th century.

01:30:05

But if you could, tell us about that revelation before we move on.

01:30:11

When I was LDS, we were taught that Joseph only had one wife,

01:30:17

Emma. He was always faithful to her. And of course, as the evidence kept mounting up, the church denied it for such a long time in official documents.

01:30:28

But if you go to LDS .org, they list now his wives. And a little bit of research will show that these unions broke biblical commandments that a man couldn't marry a mother and a daughter or someone who was already married.

01:30:45

And a substantial number of Joseph Smith's wives that he married were married to living men at the time.

01:30:52

When I found that out, that was pressing to me because she was like my heroine in the church.

01:31:02

I'm so fascinated with what Paul's saying, I just want to hear more. So go on, Paul. In fact, Paul, pick up where you left off because we have to go to our final break.

01:31:10

I'm sorry that we have to take these breaks. I'm very caught up in the conversation as well, but this is a necessary break.

01:31:22

If anybody wants to send in a question, do so now or forever hold your peace. We're rapidly running out of time.

01:31:30

That's chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Don't go away. God bless

01:31:40

God bless bless you. God bless you.

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01:34:46

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01:39:46

Welcome back. This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full program is

01:39:52

Paul Trask, a former reorganized Latter -day Saint who converted, by God's grace, to biblical

01:39:58

Christianity and founded Refiner's Fire Ministry. We're discussing his book

01:40:03

Partway to Utah, The Forgotten Mormons, and we're giving an update on the theology and practice of the RLDS, a .k

01:40:10

.a. the Community of Christ. We also have on the program a special co -host today,

01:40:15

Dr. Latane C. Scott, who is a former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, the larger cult based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

01:40:24

She is a born -again believer in Christ, a prolific writer, and is author of the classic work,

01:40:30

The Mormon Mirage, amongst many other things. Our email address, if you have a question, is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com.

01:40:37

chrisarnsen at gmail dot com. We do have a number of people who are waiting, and I hope they're waiting patiently to have their questions asked and answered.

01:40:43

But before we go to them, Paul, the president of the major cult, the

01:40:52

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, said quite a long time ago, as man now is,

01:40:59

God once was. As God now is, man may be. And basically, this was a teaching of progression, how faithful Mormons would become, eventually, gods of their own planet.

01:41:14

And therefore, such a teaching necessitates or requires an infinite number of gods, and multiple universes, etc.

01:41:24

Was this a part of the teaching of the RLDS ever? Because I believe that today, they don't accept that.

01:41:33

And I was wondering if they ever accepted that. Yeah, the short answer,

01:41:38

Chris, is that they never accepted that. That would be part of the Nauvoo, you know, be classified as one of the strange

01:41:45

Nauvoo doctrines that crept in during the Nauvoo era. Most RLDS people identify with the

01:41:51

Church before Nauvoo. The Nauvoo Church went to Salt Lake City.

01:41:58

And so, the RLDS people relate to the Church pre -Nauvoo, and so no, they completely reject the

01:42:06

Adam -God theory, the eternal progression, you know, moving into Godhood.

01:42:12

That whole package of nonsense has always been, and it has never been, accepted by any

01:42:18

RLDS group. Now, having said that, however, I know that it was interesting to see three young Mormon people on YouTube defending their faith, and they insisted that they weren't polytheists, even though they enthusiastically admitted that if they are faithful, they will be gods of their own planet.

01:42:44

But they said that they weren't polytheists because they believe that they worship only one

01:42:50

God, even though there are countless, innumerable numbers of gods.

01:42:55

And so therefore, the question that Dr. James R. White very appropriately asked while he was examining that video, what about the fact that the

01:43:07

Mormons believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three different deities? What is the perception of the

01:43:15

RLDS in that regard? Do they believe in the Trinity? Do they believe in the deity of Christ? Do they believe in them as separate deities, or what is their explanation for the

01:43:25

Trinity? I would say that the RLDS want to be

01:43:31

Trinitarian, and I think functionally they are Trinitarian. They get hung up on Joseph's founding experience, where Joseph Smith claims to have seen the

01:43:43

Father and Son standing in bodily form side by side, and the Father pointing to the

01:43:49

Son and saying, here is my Son, here Him. And so while they want to be

01:43:54

Trinitarian, and I believe functionally they are, they get a little hung up. Something that stops them from going all the way is that clinging to Joseph Smith's claimed founding experience, which

01:44:09

I don't believe ever happened at all. And so that founding experience really kind of is a fly in the ointment.

01:44:16

And so you don't know for certain whether or not they are officially modalists, that they believe that the

01:44:23

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit merely traded modes, if you will, back and forth, or if they were, as the

01:44:31

Trinity historically has been described as, one God in three eternally equal, but eternally separate persons.

01:44:42

Chris, I need to tell you that what you just expressed was a very technical explanation, a very systematic explanation of the

01:44:50

Trinity. Something our listening audience really ought to know is that the

01:44:55

RLDS Church has never, ever had anything close to a systematic theology.

01:45:01

So you're talking at a level of theological sophistication that the RLDS Church has never formally addressed.

01:45:09

This is not something that has ever been on the table and has ever been dealt with systematically.

01:45:15

Even in the heyday, even before the RLDS Church became irretrievably liberal and fell off a cliff in 1984, even in their heyday, back in the mid -20th century, they never had anything even approximating a clearly defined systematic theology.

01:45:34

And so this is something, what you're describing is something that would be held in little pockets of people.

01:45:40

People would have an idea in their own minds, they would follow a leader, they would do something in their congregation or in conjunction with other members, but it was never an officially decided issue at the top church level.

01:45:55

Now before we move on to the current community of Christ, which is basically barely distinguishable from what

01:46:04

I understand from a liberal mainline apostate Protestant denomination, what about salvation?

01:46:13

What is their concept of salvation historically anyway? Does one merit or earn their salvation?

01:46:21

And what exactly is salvation to them? And what did the death of Christ accomplish on Calvary?

01:46:29

Let me say a couple of things before we jump into the technical matters of this. One is that we hold a ministry picnic frequently, and we're going to, by the way,

01:46:42

I'll put a plug in for this while we're on the air. We're going to have another picnic on the 8th day of September for former

01:46:49

RLDS members. It's a reunion thing. We get together and share testimonies, and we're doing that again this coming 8th of September on a

01:46:57

Saturday. We did that same thing a few years ago, and a large church in the region hosted the event, and there was well over 100 people in attendance.

01:47:07

And for the benefit of the church staff who was hosting the event, I asked this crowd, how many of you are former

01:47:15

RLDS? Nearly all the hands shot right up. I waited a minute, and then

01:47:21

I said, how many of you never understood the gospel until you left the RLDS church?

01:47:26

And as far as I could tell, the entire, you know, all of those same hands went right back up again. And so, by their own admission, the gospel is neither understood nor promoted within the

01:47:38

RLDS church. That's number one. Number two, it's impossible to treat the

01:47:45

RLDS church monolithically at this point in time. You have the main trunk of the church,

01:47:50

Community of Christ, but there is a wide diversity of belief and practice even within the

01:47:55

Community of Christ church, and then you've got all of the subordinate, not subordinate, but all of the resultant splinter groups, the restoration and remnant branches, which are predominantly headquartered in this region but are scattered throughout the country as well, and there's a wide difference going on there.

01:48:12

So, it's impossible in today's culture to paint with a broad brush and to say, this is the way it works in the reorganized

01:48:20

Latter -day Saint church, because you've got such a broad diversity of understanding and practice.

01:48:25

But in the olden days, and in the restoration branches today, the remnant and restoration branches today, salvation comes by being baptized at eight years old and by believing in Joseph Smith and in the

01:48:38

Book of Mormon and in the founding tenets of the Latter -day Saint movement. That constitutes salvation.

01:48:45

If you believe those and go through a pre -baptismal class, you know, most of the people, most of the kids who are raised

01:48:51

RLDS are baptized at the age of eight or shortly thereafter, and that constitutes salvation.

01:48:59

And then a short time later, you have a laying out of hands, theoretically, for the reception of the Spirit. And that constitutes salvation in the

01:49:08

RLDS rank, and that's also very much still true in the remnant and the restoration branches today.

01:49:16

There's a little bit of a looser understanding of that, I would suggest, in the main trunk of the community of Christ today, although there are some still there who still understand and practice what

01:49:27

I just expressed. Now, what about the role of the death of Christ? The Christians obviously believe that Christ's death redeemed

01:49:36

His people from their sins. It was not just an example for people to follow.

01:49:42

It was not just something that made possible salvation. He actually redeemed

01:49:48

His people on the cross. What is the understanding of the RLDS? And I know you just said that it's not monolithic.

01:49:54

What are the varieties, at least in summary form, of understandings of that? Well, let me talk about the fundamentalist breakaways first.

01:50:06

The restorationists and the remnant branch people still believe in the blood of Christ, very much like orthodox

01:50:13

Christians do, but they believe also that that Christ who died for us inspired

01:50:20

Joseph Smith to restore the church to earth again. So it's kind of a package deal. If you believe in Jesus, then you believe in Joseph Smith, because Joseph Smith was

01:50:28

Jesus' ordained prophet to restore all of Christianity to earth again. When you get inside today's community of Christchurch, you can essentially believe anything that you want or nothing at all, and you're welcomed in the community of Christchurch today.

01:50:45

They are the most thoroughly confused, disorganized group of religious people on the planet.

01:50:51

And I realize that the sound of my voice today is going over Independence, Missouri, and people are jumping up out of their chairs, even as I say that.

01:51:01

But they are absolutely rudderless. They have completely lost any anchor.

01:51:06

The leadership of the community of Christchurch had an opportunity of leading the corpus of that church into legitimate

01:51:13

Christianity, and they have gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction, and they are actively teaching and promoting pluralism, which teaches that there's no wrong answers, all roads lead to God, that there's no difference between Muhammad and Buddha and Jesus Christ, that God authored and is at work in all of the world's religions, and that God is actively using all of these religions to lead people to himself.

01:51:40

I've had people write me on the website who are drinking that Kool -Aid, who seek to argue with me in saying that there's no difference between Muhammad and Buddha and Jesus Christ.

01:51:50

So they're basically nearly identical to the Universalist Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist group.

01:51:58

They very closely approximate that, yep. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised from what you said if they merged one day.

01:52:06

And so, from what I understand, is that they fully endorse homosexuality as a valid desire and practice.

01:52:15

In fact, you are hoping to arrange a debate with my friend Dr. James R.

01:52:21

White and a leading official in the RLDS on that subject. So they have really become nearly indistinguishable from very liberal, if not more accurately, left -wing, apostate, mainline

01:52:38

Protestantism. That is an absolutely accurate statement.

01:52:44

The top leadership of the Community of Christ Church... You see, in 1984, all of us fundamentalists looked for the door and we left.

01:52:54

Well, without that balance or without that weight, that counterbalance of the fundamentalists, the remaining

01:53:01

RLDS Church became so increasingly liberal that there was no limit to what they could accomplish in terms of moving in a liberal direction.

01:53:09

And so that's what led to the name change in 2001. They wanted to shed their identity with the

01:53:14

Latter -day Saint movement. They started disparaging the Book of Mormon as being true, and they stopped using the...

01:53:23

Well, they moved away from using Joseph Smith's inspired version of the Bible, which was one of their bragging rights.

01:53:30

They own and publish the inspired version of the Bible. In fact, they sell

01:53:38

RLDS -produced inspired versions of the Bible in bookstores in Salt Lake City, because the

01:53:44

RLDS Church has the copyright to Joseph Smith's inspired version of the Bible. And so they started using other versions of the

01:53:51

Bible now in Community of Christ churches. And I'll go even further before we run out of time.

01:53:59

In order to prove just how open -minded and how liberal and how much they embrace diversity,

01:54:05

I have heard and read reports that there have been some Community of Christ congregations who have actually invited

01:54:12

Wiccan covenants in to conduct their worship services just to demonstrate their open -mindedness.

01:54:20

Wow. Well, obviously open -mindedness except for conservative evangelicals who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and who believe in only one way to salvation, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

01:54:38

Well, Latane, we are nearly out of time. Do you have any final question that you'd like to ask of Paul before we go off the air?

01:54:45

Oh, no, I've learned so much, and I'm just so grateful to Paul for his ministry, and I'm going to put him on my daily prayer list to pray for his ministry.

01:54:53

Praise God. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much, Latane. Well, Paul, I would like you to have three minutes uninterrupted to just summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

01:55:08

The person of Jesus Christ is real. He offers forgiveness and salvation to all who believe in him in truth and in spirit and in reality.

01:55:18

And while the Latter -day Saints claim to believe in Jesus, they're not believing in the real

01:55:24

Jesus of the real Bible. They are believing in a counterfeit Jesus who is producing a counterfeit gospel and a counterfeit salvation.

01:55:33

The Jesus of Joseph Smith cannot save because he does not promote his actual gospel.

01:55:41

And so while Latter -day Saints can spell the name Jesus, it's not the same Jesus as the

01:55:46

Jesus of the Bible. The grace of Christ is strikingly missing from Joseph Smith's writing.

01:55:54

I did a study. In fact, I have an article on my website, Where's the Grace? Grace is at the heart of the

01:56:00

Christian gospel. Grace or gift, it can be variously translated either way in the Greek, is at the heart that salvation is a gift of God.

01:56:09

Joseph Smith sought to take his church back into the Old Covenant era by instituting Old Testament priesthood,

01:56:15

Old Testament law, calling God the lawgiver, and thoroughly confusing and combining the

01:56:24

Old and New Covenants in his writings. And Freemasonry. And Freemasonry.

01:56:30

That's the one thing that we didn't spend a lot of time on. Joseph Smith married Freemasonry into his church, and that church went to Utah.

01:56:37

Well, we'll have you back on again to get involved in more of that. Let me go to a couple of our listener questions before we run out of time here.

01:56:45

We have Linda in Hilltop Lake, Texas. After the

01:56:50

Mormons moved away from something as major as polygamy, why did they get hung up on something so minor as coffee and soft drinks?

01:56:57

Because it has caffeine. That may be a difference, another difference, that the

01:57:03

RLDS has with the LDS. Latane, you want to comment about the

01:57:08

LDS and its view of coffee and caffeine? Well, actually, the

01:57:13

Word of Wisdom, which prohibited hot drinks and other substances that have later been interpreted as coffee and tea, that was actually an early part of Mormonism, kind of co -existent or concurrent with polygamy.

01:57:31

So it's not that they replaced one with the other. They just elevated one to more importance.

01:57:36

But they both were there pretty much from the times of Joseph Smith and Abu Dhabi. And, Paul, how about the

01:57:43

RLDS? Is there any connection with that? Yeah, there sure is.

01:57:49

As Latane said, the Word of Wisdom actually was produced, that so -called revelation, was produced before Nauvoo.

01:57:58

And so in the olden days, before the community of Christ Church became so liberal, avoiding coffee and tea, the

01:58:05

Word of Wisdom, hot drinks, not for the body or belly, which Joseph Smith later identified as coffee and tea, that was adhered to in the

01:58:13

RLDS Church as well throughout the 20th century and is still adhered to today with Restorationists and remnant ranch people, not so much anymore in the main trunk of the community of Christ Church.

01:58:27

Well, we are out of time. And what we're going to do is we're going to save the questions that we did not have time to ask on the air for the next time

01:58:36

Paul comes back, because we do need to cover some of these areas that we didn't have time to address.

01:58:41

I want to make sure that our listeners have all of the important contact information. Once again, the website for Refiners Fire Ministries, the ministry that Paul Trask, our guest today, founded, is help4rlds .com,

01:58:58

help4rlds .com, help4rlds .com.

01:59:05

Latane C. Scott's website is latane .com, latane .com.

01:59:10

I want to thank both of you so much for being on the program. I want you all to mark your calendars for Wednesday, because we're having

01:59:16

Peter Elliott on the program, who is another convert out from the

01:59:21

RLDS, who has written a book published by Refiners Fire Ministries. And my friend

01:59:27

Jason Wallace, pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, will be the co -host on Wednesday.

01:59:34

I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.