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

The Iron Sharpens Iron Introduction and the Theme of Proverbs 27:17

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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

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. Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen.

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

I am so delighted to have not only a first-time guest, but a returning co-host to the program. 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 Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the RLDS, and now officially known as of a recent name change officially by the group, they are now known as the 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 Latter-day Saint who converted by God's grace to biblical Christianity and founded Refiners Fire Ministries, Paul Trask.

Thank you very much. Yes, great to have you on for the very first time, Paul. And now we have returning to the program, actually this may even be her first time as a co-host, 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 Dr. Latane C. Scott, who is a former Mormon, a former member of the 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, The Mormon Mirage, and it's great to have you back on the program, Dr. Latane C.

Scott. 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. Okay, all right. 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?

This is the first.

Time you've honored me with that, Chris, and I am very grateful, thank you. Oh, my pleasure.

Latayne Scott’s New Apologetics and Mormonism Books

Before we go into the main topic at hand, which is Paul Trask's own testimony and also his book, Partway to Utah, The Forgotten Mormons, and obviously we'll also be giving an update on the theology and practice of the 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 Ion Sharp and Zion 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 I give them out at the annual, or should I say bi-annual, Ion Sharp and Zion Radio Pastors Luncheon.

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

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

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

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. 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 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, I can do that. I can talk about my faith in that way to a non-believer. I'm excited about a partnership with me to play my partnership with them.

And also, Dr. Lynn K. Wilder, who has been a guest on here many times, author of Unveiling Grace, a former professor at Brigham Young University, now a Christian. She and I are just finishing up a book about how to mentor an ex-Mormon, because Mormons are leaving the Mormon Church in greater numbers than ever before, and many of them are flailing in their faith.

And this book tells a Christian how to mentor an ex-Mormon.

Wow, that's great. And for further information about Latayne's ministry, you can go to latayne .com, L-A-T-A-Y-N-E dot 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.

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 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 Mormons. Chris, thank you so much for asking. Before.

I jump into that, there's something to Latayne, and I want to express to her my personal appreciation of Mormon Mirage. I'm looking at a copy of that book, and Latayne, you published that in 1979, and less than ten years after that, we used that book ourselves.

You didn't know this until right now. 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, and so you were helpful to us as we were making our way out of the ROV.

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, and that it benefited us. So thank you very.

Much. You're very welcome. And by the way, 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, because a co-host on the phone, when I cannot see you, 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.

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, and that's the only way.

Because I may unintentionally ignore you for great periods of time if you don't do that. All right, I'm on it. Okay. Well, Paul, let's.

Go back to you now with your testimony. Well, I think that Latayne moved into my own personal interest in helping mentor Mormons into Christianity. I have written on that same thing myself, titled The Long Way Home.

It basically is a pulse into genuine Christianity. And I endeavor, to the best I know how, to take a former cult member in their faith all the way into becoming a mature Christian. And I walk them through eight different discrete stages of that leading process.

And I kind of try to move them into a stable course, because like you say, many of them are floundering in their faith. And I endeavor to put a plug in for my own book here. That's quite all right. That's what the program's for.

When I heard Latayne talking about her book, it resonated with me. I've written on that very topic, and it's been.

Very well received. Praise God. Well, I'm very happy about that. Fascinating. Yeah, praise God. Praise God. And by the way, for our listeners, 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 RLDS cult, you can go to Help4RLDS .com.

That's Help4RLDS .com. And remember, the 4 is a numeral, not a word. But now we can go to your testimony, Paul. Yeah, thank you, Chris. I was not raised.

I knew nothing about it when I met my wife, just as I was raised. After we dated for a while, I was never going to leave her church. She, on both sides of her family, went right back to the Joseph Smith era, and she actually has an ancestor who was killed in the 1838 Mormon War here in the middle of Kansas City.

And so she had a very long vintage in the RLDS church. Well, I'd never heard of it before, and so it occurred to me to inquire, 17, when we met. So, you know, I had probably capabilities, but I feel like he left time in my life.

And during our time together, he could not enunciate a single Saturday Sandism. In fact, he did not offer me a book. He did not offer to study with me. He did not put me in touch with something about the only thing of substance that he could say to me as we went home to look that word up in.

And it had a very innocuous meaning at that point in time. It merely said an expression of faith, nor does it count in the book, but I believe it was a definition of a cult. And the dictionary today, even then, it did 50 years of information, and I wrote a little bit about it.

It was an interesting thing for me to discover while I was doing my research. After we had dated, he asked me if I wanted to be baptized. Now, I didn't really know anything about the church. I'd never read the Book of Mormon.

I didn't think that was very... So I promoted the fact that he moves and guides them today, and I thought, well, there's nothing terribly wrong with that. So I went ahead and joined the High Muckety Muck in the Arrow Days, later became a patriarch here locally in the Kansas City area.

And so these guys that came to my house that day and after, I knew nothing. We got married. When we got married, I had taken a year off, and so I went back to the... what we did. I still didn't know anything about the Arrow Days Church.

I was wearing my peacoat out and walking around the communion trying to discover some more, and I repented of my sins and felt that I was released from that and helped the Arrow Days Church, which I became... the pastor was four years old in lay ministry, and so I'm a CPA, and I was working for a Big Eight, what was then a Big Eight CPA firm, and then later moved into corporate financial management, so a profession demanding a job, and I'm...

So while we were a stake bishop, one of the first things that happened was I went to a town in Happy Valley near Santa Cruz in northern California, and one of our... was speaking at this church camp, and he wagged his finger in the air, and he said, you know, the financial law has been changing... what he was talking... happened while I was... living right now.

So it... we... changes, we come... in 1983, and the church... in 1984... destabilizing event in our... Before we moved back in 1983, and I threw the cassette and thought, what is he talking about? And so the little church that we had a little RLJS about later, and it didn't exactly jump out at me, but I... in the RLJS Doctrine and Covenants, I said, I'm a God.

Apostle Tims was right. Between the 1833 Book of Commandments and the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants regarding... So when we got here to Independence, my family had followed us up from... and wanted me to go hear Doctrine and Covenants, which is what's going on up here, but he had a storyline of his book, something... something's pretty seriously going on here.

So in 1984, the church at that point... RLJS people, and... and the presentation of that... from the RLJS people who just began defecting from the formal auspices. A few years later, I... renegade... spring of one year, I had lent to... from Michigan to be a part of the Zionic Endowment... copy of David Whitmer, and lo and behold, a book to my friend, his whole family had left the church.

Why? And he... me... I said, Mike, this is good stuff. I mean, you've come across... get to this, but it's awfully hard to read this during the week and then get up and pastor this congregation on Sunday.

So, you know, give me some time here, I'll get to it. In the meantime, and this... this is the big thing to it... time in the RLJS... and it had become... and we weren't having fun. And I prayed to God, other than my wife at the time, that even while I was past... of the RLJS church... I did that in the summer of 1989... to be moved... the way the church was.

So we finally took... it's hard to do. But we didn't get too far into it... in the Book of Mormon, the other started... and we read for a... to the Book of Mormon, and there is no legitimate... that can make any sense I believed in you... look at you crosswise, and you crumble, right?

Once you lose your faith in the Book of Mormon, there's... once you've rejected the Book of Mormon. And one of those... we were attending church here in Kansas City... burden of guilt... getting emotional, so bear with me.

So... and I knew that that message was for me. My involvement in the RLJS... that day I got... so many years... the Spirit of God came in himself and let me go. Being clean, I felt that I had repented... my role as an elder in the RLJS church... understands what I'm saying... I hear you.

I hear you. And I actually had... I had trouble. I had trouble for a while, even praying to God. Because the RLJS was the... my feet. And many people... that's why I wrote my... years later, I wrote my... it is incredibly destabilizing, confusing, and people just don't know what to... I didn't know what to do.

I leave my accounting degree here in Kansas City, and I left my career to my seminary. And so I went to four seminary... had a wonderful, very intense... and... when 1990... a friend of ours in seminary ministry, and I kind of laughed at him.

I didn't want to do that. I'd never... I didn't want to, you know, undergo that work, you know, unless I knew that it was... God would be doing this just on a whim. And then... partway to Utah. And then in 2001, we left the area and moved back, starting a website.

And so I began... so I moved into corporate... and I had some downtime in my practice. And I took some time and put together the beginnings of a website. And then as soon as I had time to go, took time off again in 2000, and booked a long way home.

And then in 2007, we moved back here, and have been very active in the ministry ever since. Praise God!

The Testimony of Coming Out of the RLDS and Into Biblical Christianity

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. Then we will move into a segment of the show where we will differentiate and compare and contrast the RLDS, or otherwise known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and now officially known as the Community of Christ.

We will compare and contrast that with the larger cult, the 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.

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 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 chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Chrisarnsen 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 USA.

Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Perhaps you are still in the RLDS or the Community of Christ or some other 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.

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. Don't go away. God willing, we will be right back with our guest, Paul Trask, and our co-host, Dr. LaTainsey Scott, right after these messages from our sponsors.

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We thank you again for praying for Mike Adosh of Solid Ground Christian Books, and he thanks you as well. We are now back with our guest today, Paul Trask, who is a former reorganized Latter-day Saint who was converted by the grace of God to Biblical Christianity and founded Refiners Fire Ministries.

We are discussing his personal testimony of how our gracious Lord brought him out of that cult, and we're also talking about his book Partway to Utah, The Forgotten Mormons. And also on the program with us is my special co-host, Dr. Latane C. Scott.

She is a former Mormon, a member of the major cult of Mormons known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. She attended Brigham Young University before leaving that cult and is now a born-again believer in Christ Jesus.

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

The Burden of Guilt and the Difficulty of Leaving Mormonism

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 RLDS and the LDS, but...

And I have a question, too, if it's appropriate.

Sure, yeah. After I ask the first question, you can move right in. Okay. 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.

Have you ever thought, and of course this may involve some speculation, I am not, 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, 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.

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?

Possible, and a good one to ask. I would condemnation for having believed and taught these things for a number of years, and perhaps corrupting my mind by having me believe that this was an unforgivable sin, and then here I am holding this unforgivable sin and coming to the Holy God, and I guess I was expecting judgment.

I guess even though I could not have expressed it verbally at that point in time, I think I was fearful in coming to God because I had been carrying around this sense of, you know, what I had done here is unforgivable, and here I am now, all of a sudden, I'm coming to the Lord of life, and that's where the Lord, my own emotional state, my own mental and emotional state, carrying around this extreme guilt, and so I choose to really focus on how I supernaturally came in and broke those feelings.

Whether or not they were demonically accompanied or not, I really can't say. I think you could probably build a case for that. But the Lord, you know, it's not how I expressed it. There was more guilt and shame, and that He would bear that Himself, and that means He basically...

And I know that Dr. ...has to go... Go ahead. ...forgiven sin, you know, that that is inspired...

Well, you're not omniscient, so I don't expect you to have an exact answer on that, but Dr. Latane C. Scott, you had a question.

Paul, something you said, 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. You know, in Acts chapter 17, Paul walks out onto, you know, the hill there, and he chooses an altar to an unknown 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 RLDS way of thinking, is that God can't be obscured.

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

He couldn't be obscured completely by that, even though I thought I knew Him, the true and living God, shown through. And that was so encouraging. I don't exactly remember how you put it exactly, Paul, but that was so encouraging to hear that, and I hope it'll encourage anyone who's listening who's struggling with their own concept of God.

Can we have sinned so much, or can we have been so wrong that we can't, that God can't communicate with us? And of course He can't. Thank you, Letaine. I appreciate that. What I'm hoping is to give people hope, to think that you can move past anything that you could have ever known in latter days.

One question that I have also, Paul, in regard to your testimony is some of our listeners may be scratching their heads wondering why of all seminaries you chose Fuller, when in reality, in this day and age, Fuller would probably have more in common with the RLDS than evangelical Christianity or those that believe in biblical inerrancy and so on.

My friend, Dr. James R. White, who is a red-blooded conservative evangelical and Reformed Christian, he graduated from Fuller. He knew full well, entering Fuller, that it was a liberal school, but he actually said that he thanks 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 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.

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

Well, let me tell you, I ran the RLDS's for 19 years, not thinking about anything. I mean, I was a babe in the woods. And so, and I respected him. As it turned out, he got his doctorate of ministry at Fuller, even though he was able to recommend both Fuller as well as Gordon Conwell.

And so, to go and learn, you know, fill me up, let me learn. And I know, since going to Fuller, since graduating from Fuller, a lot of people have varied. He has done some, as far as I'm concerned, done some very outrageous things.

You'll have to, 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? I know it had something to do with ecumenism with Mormons.

Well, he started holding...

Amen, amen. ...a caricature of the gathering season, you know, joint Mormon-Christian discussions. And it's like, you really just don't get this.

I can get on a rant. Well, I think that how...

Go ahead. Richard Mao is an ethicist, he's not a theologian. Right.

I think how wide the divide was the catalyst to my friend Dr. James R. 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.

I'm certainly glad that he did. And so at Fuller, I got around the block more than planned to go there. He directed me to Pasadena and to go to Fuller. I endorse...

The RLDS, the LDS, and the Question of Polytheism, the Trinity, and Salvation

Amen. ...still a wonderful place. We have to go to our midway break right now. This is a longer than normal break. 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.

They air Iron Sherpins' Iron Radio twice a day in morning and evening drive time in a rerun format. And so they need to localize the program to Lake City, Florida, and thus they need the time to air their own commercials.

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 Paul Trask about the RLDS, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, today known as the Community of Christ since 2001.

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. 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.

Our email address for questions is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, God willing. We will be right back with Paul Trask and our co-host Dr. Latane C. Scott right after these messages from our sponsors.

Tired of box store Christianity, of doing church in a warehouse with all the trappings of a rock concert? Do you long for a more traditional and reverent style of worship? And how about the preaching?

Perhaps you've begun to think that in-depth biblical exposition has vanished from Long Island. Well, there's good news. Wedding River Baptist Church exists to provide believers with a meaningful and reverent worship experience featuring the systematic exposition of God's Word.

And this loving congregation looks forward to meeting you. Call them at 631 -929 -3512 for service times. 631 -929 -3512. Or check out their website at wrbc .us. That's wrbc .us.

I'm James White of Alpha Omega Ministries. The New American Standard Bible is perfect for daily reading or in-depth study. Used by pastors, scholars, and everyday readers, the NASV is widely embraced and trusted as a literal and readable Bible translation.

The NASV offers clarity and readability while maintaining high accuracy to the original languages which the NASV is known for. The NASV is available in many editions like a topical reference Bible. Researched and prepared by biblical scholars devoted to accuracy, the new topical reference Bible includes contemporary topics relevant to today's issues.