Presuppositionalism Apologetics vs. Mormonism

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala. And today

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I have two guests. I don't think I've ever had two guests on before. It's usually just one other person and we have super interesting conversations covering a wide variety of topics from theology and apologetics.

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But today I have two Christian brothers who are deacons at Apologia Church.

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And they just recently did a debate with two Mormons on a very interesting topic.

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And so I think you guys are going to be in for a treat as we're gonna be doing something that you don't normally see.

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And Apologia Church, if you're familiar with the church and their apologetics ministry, you've seen it done there.

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But generically speaking, we don't often get to see a presuppositional approach applied to Mormonism.

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So when we think of a presuppositional apologetics or the more technical term that when we use transcendental arguments and these sorts of things, we typically think in terms of like the

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Christian and the atheist. But really the presuppositional approach, because it's biblical and it's grounded in scripture and it can be used against any form of unbelief.

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And so I really enjoyed watching the debate between the two gentlemen that I'm gonna have on with me in just a moment with the

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Mormon gentlemen. And they did an excellent job and we're gonna talk a little bit about what that debate was about.

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What was their game plan and how they applied this, what we would call a biblical apologetic to that context.

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And so they did have a very intimidating task as they'll go into detail, but it was their first public debate.

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And of course, James White is the moderator. So that can be a little intimidating, but they did a good job and I'm looking forward to jumping into this topic with them.

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Just as a heads up, I think May 17th, I might make a correction, but this presuppositionalist right here is going to have an evidentialist apologist on my show.

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Now, as you guys know, I am a hardcore presuppositionalist. I believe that that is the biblical approach to apologetics.

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However, you have often heard me say that there is great benefit in learning from people who don't share our same apologetic methodology.

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And so when we learn, for example, information from evidentialists and classicalists, the information is still useful as long as we being faithful to scripture and to our biblical presuppositions, we learn to contextualize that information in a way that does not compromise our biblical and presuppositional commitment.

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So I'll be actually having a doctor, I don't know if he's a doctor, Jay Warner Wallace, who wrote the book,

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Cold Case Christianity. He's gonna be coming on the show, I believe May 17th. Don't quote me on that, I'll double check.

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And so it should be a really fun and interesting conversation. And so just wanted to give you guys a heads up.

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We wanna look at our classical brothers, our evidentialist brothers, and even unbelievers that we're engaging with through presuppositional eyes, through the lens of the authority of scripture.

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So when we do that, we can still find great value in speaking with those that we don't necessarily agree with on various issues.

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So with that out of the way, I would like to introduce my guests, Oscar Dunlap and Daniel Constantino.

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How are you guys doing? Good. Good to be here. All right, well, welcome.

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I'm happy that you guys are here. Congratulations. I think you guys, it's the first time I ever had two guests on.

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So for what it's worth, congratulations. This is the second time that happened with us. With Pastor James, when he brought us on the dividing line, he said the same exact thing.

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He's like, I've never had two people in studio with me. So I don't know, maybe we're just gonna get used to this.

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It's good to be at first, right? I love how you guys did this kind of two -on -two debate. I wonder if you'll ever get on someone's show individually.

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I can't see one without the other. I reached out to Oscar and he was like, hey, is your buddy joining us?

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Like, it feels weird if it's just you. So you guys, I'm happy that you guys are here.

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Praise God, we are too. Thanks for having us. All right, well, why don't you take a few moments to let people know who you are, a little bit about your church and what you guys do.

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And then we'll kind of jump right into the discussion of your debate and just the main content of the show tonight where we're talking about pre -suppositionalism and Mormonism.

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Why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself? Sure, so we are both, as you said, deacons at Apologia.

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We do a lot of evangelism. We run some Bible study groups at our church and we're just very active in ministry throughout the week.

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Our church does a great deal of ministry out in the abortion mills, downtown.

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We're all about reaching out in the culture by pressing the crown rights of Christ and trying to make his name known.

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So that's our primary thing as far as ministry goes. And then kind of when that happens, we kind of run into some individuals and sometimes it turns into longer, deeper discussions and we're always happy to kind of go further into those discussions if time permits.

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And so, yeah, I'll add to that there. Yeah, so we'll usually go out

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Friday, Saturdays together. We have a first Friday, we'll go out to downtown Phoenix. We have thousands of people there.

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We run into Hindus, witches, Muslims, Roman Catholics, everything you can think of under the sun.

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We have a Mormon outreach. So I lead that every other Sunday. What we do is we go to their, they're called wards.

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It's basically their churches where they meet for their Sunday gathering. And we'll go out there, we'll stand outside and we'll engage and try to call people and say, hey, let's have a conversation.

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We love you guys. We're concerned about some things your church teaches. Like, can we talk about it?

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So that's actually how this debate came about through our Mormon outreach. One Sunday we're out at a ward, probably five minutes from my house and Hayden, one of the

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Mormons we debated comes down. He's like, hey, and we start exchanging information and him having great conversations.

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And that eventually leads to us having the conversation with Matt Oscar on their podcast,

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Two Witnesses podcast. And that led up to the debate. The whole point was the way the debate originated was just through outreach.

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I said, we love our Mormon neighbors. We're gonna take time out of our Sunday morning to go out and talk to them about the gospel, about why they're under a false teaching, a cult, a

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Christ that can't ultimately save them. And so we do that every other Sunday at Apologia. So for people who might not know, and I know people who are in apologetics and learn about the cults and the theology of Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness and things like that, why is it the case?

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And I guess I have two questions here. So why is it the case that Mormons require evangelism? There are some

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Mormons who might be watching who are like, what are you talking about? We're genuine Christians. What is the key difference between what we would call

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Orthodox Christianity and Mormonism? And perhaps you can make a distinction between the different kinds of Mormonism that's out there.

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I was sharing, I posted something, I think you guys might've seen it on Facebook about Mormonism and how the

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Mormon God is unable to ground logical absolutes and stuff like this. And there was an old friend of mine who was a

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Mormon reached out to me and she was under the impression that what I thought about Mormonism was perhaps from a source other than the main branch of Mormonism.

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There's a branch that broke off. And so she thought that I was having misinformation that, no, it's not what you think, it's this over here.

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What is it about Mormonism that regardless of whether the branch, the main branch, the one that broke off, what is it about Mormonism that requires us as Christians to still proclaim the gospel to them?

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Yeah, there's two main big, big problems. The person of Christ and the gospel itself, right?

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So if you ever hear Christians talk about the Bible, we say this is ultimately about Jesus. Both Testament prophesied about him in the gospels, he arrives in Acts, he's proclaimed in the epistles, he's explained and in Revelation, he's expected, right?

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It's all about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And so we would agree it's important then that we get the person of Jesus right.

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If he's the central aspect of the Bible, we can't say there's room to get him wrong. And so part of Mormon theology includes things about Jesus that we would say is fundamentally in opposition with what the

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Bible teaches. For example, one quick one is Jesus being the creator of all things, right?

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You have John 1, 3, it says if anything was made, it was made by him. And I always tell people, okay,

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John's telling us that if it falls in a made category, if you can look at this over here and say it's made, that means

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Jesus made it, okay? In Colossians 1, you have Paul's explanation about all things were created through Christ and for him, and then he exhausts every category there is, right?

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He says visible, invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, all things were created through Christ and in him, all things hold together.

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So you have this consistent, it's not just those two verses, there's more, but you have this consistent teaching from scripture that Jesus created all things and the

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Mormons don't teach that. And so the problem is not, I had a Mormon tell me this, do you think when

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I die, God's gonna ask me, well, did Jesus create all things? And the problem is not that God's gonna ask you that when you meet him in judgment.

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The problem is who died for you on that cross? If the creator of all things didn't die for you on the cross, if he's just an offspring, if he's a part of creation himself, that sacrifice is not sufficient.

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It can't pay for your sins. And so the person of Christ is one area that is distorted in Mormonism.

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They teach that he's offspring of Elohim. They would not affirm, you can ask Mormons this, they would not affirm that Jesus created

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Lucifer. They would actually say that he's spirit brothers with him. He's even our spirit brother. And so that's one area.

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And the second one is the gospel itself. How are you saved? How are you reconciled with God?

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And every cult will affirm, you need grace, right? You need some of God's mercy. But in Moroni 10, it tells us that God's grace is only sufficient for us after we've done all we can do.

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That's when it becomes sufficient. So the question you ask a Mormon is, have you done all you can do?

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And if they're honest, they're gonna say no. And so it's this teaching of the gospel where it's like, yes,

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God's grace is necessary, but you also need to do your part as well. There's actually something that you can show before God.

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And if you talk to any Mormon, they might wanna deny that language. Like, no, no, no, there's nothing I can do. And it's like, okay, that's fine, but you need to be consistent with that.

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And the problem is, is you're not. Your prophets have taught, the Book of Mormon teaches otherwise, and you live in such a way that you're trying to show

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God things you've done to merit salvation. And we would say, of course, good works for Christian are a good thing, but they don't merit any good favor in front of God.

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So that's the reason why they need to be evangelized. Okay, so that's interesting.

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So you said something about the grace of God being sufficient after all they can do. So his grace is not sufficient unless you're meeting some prior condition of righteousness.

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So now as a Protestant, I understand grace as being undeserved or unmerited favor.

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Do Mormons understand grace in that way? Because if they do, then there seems to be a conflict with what the definition of grace is and the condition that has to be met.

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If it's unmerited, then why does it only come after a condition of righteousness is fulfilled?

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Do they have a different, kind of a nuanced understanding of what grace is? Maybe Oscar, if you wanna jump in on that.

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Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's where we see a fundamental contradiction, right?

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Doing an eternal critique of Mormonism, you'll see that those two concepts are in conflict, right?

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They will affirm when talking that they believe grace is unmerited favor, but then when you actually critique, right, the fundamental beliefs of Mormonism, you'll find that that which they make more meritorious is in contradiction, in fact, with biblical definition of grace.

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So when you make grace conditional, you've put a merit there and it destroys, fundamentally it destroys it being unmerited, right?

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So you can't have both of those concepts. So I think what's interesting is when we view that, we had a conversation with our opponents and it took us 30 minutes to really flesh out that concept, right?

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They would say, no, no, we believe by salvation through, salvation by grace alone as well. And then eventually

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Daniel got to, wait, don't you guys believe they need to be baptized in order to be saved? And like, absolutely.

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And like, well, that's a contrary concept. Now you've just introduced something different than what we've been saying the whole time.

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Once you add a condition, it's no longer grace. Now it's due. Now you're owed something.

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And that's par argumentation in Romans and also in Galatians when they're in circumcision, right? You destroy the gospel when you add anything to it.

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All right, very good. Now here's my other question. And then I wanna get into, this is my last question before we get into kind of the issue of the debate that you had.

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Now folks have heard you say at the beginning here that you guys do street evangelism. Now there are

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Christians who may want to get into that, but it's kind of an intimidating thing, like to go out into the street.

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What do you do when you go out in the, okay, we're outside. There's a bunch of Mormons, there are Christians, there are

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Hindus, there's some random cult that you never heard of before. How do you start or begin to engage in conversation without being like the weird

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Christian who's holding up this huge dime? How do you engage? How do you kick off the conversation and really just start interacting with people right away?

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Right, I think what's fundamental for us as Christians is approaching it from a biblical worldview.

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So actually the last sermon from our church from Pastor Jeff was the ending of Matthew, right? We just finished

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Matthew. I think it took the church eight years to get through Matthew, right? Eight years. And Matthew ends with Christ proclaiming that all authority in heaven and earth is his.

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And he says, therefore go, right? Therefore go, we make disciples of the nations. And that's what rounds us when we're going in, we're going into apologetics or evangelism.

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We're going out into the culture to press the rights of Christ. We're going out as ambassadors of a

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King, right? So our common ground with all people is that we're all made in the image of God, right?

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We recognize that that's fundamental to us all. That's our starting place. And then going from there, understanding that that's true and understand that the

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Bible is infallibly true. We can go and speak with authority into the lives of individuals because we know their creator and he's told us to go and preach to them.

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So if we truly believe what we're saying, truly believe what we believe, then how could we not?

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It's not so much a question of how do you or how could you, how could you get into evangelism?

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How could you not, right? If this is true, then it necessitates Christians to go out into the culture and to preach.

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As far as like methodology and things like that, I think that's something that you grow in over time, right? It's just a practice of doing it and you get better at it.

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My brother, Matthew Jesus, our podcast is kind of all entirely what we focus on.

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Two minutes of the podcast, it's all about going out. Well, what's the methodology? What's the mindset going into the culture and preaching?

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But I think as far as why is it necessary, it's because all authority is

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Christ. So when you're out on the streets, you like walk up to a person and be like, hey man, do you know

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Jesus? Like how does that look? So we understand the necessity of it because of course the scriptures teach us.

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It's kind of like when someone says, how do I become a strong Christian? And then the generic answer, and it's a correct answer, is you pray and you read the

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Bible. But not, there you go. Are you Pentecostal? You have the gifts of the spirit, you read my mind.

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It's the force. It's the force. It's the force, that's right, that's right. So when someone says pray and read the

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Bible, well, not everyone knows what that looks like. Well, how do I read the Bible? I mean, do

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I just open up anywhere? It's like, how do I study the Bible? How do I pray? Am I just talking? Is there a way to do it? When someone says go out and proclaim the gospel, like what does that look like?

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Do we stand on the top of a rock and scream repent? What does that look like? If you can show me in like a thumbnail, how do you actually talk to someone?

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So suppose I'm a Mormon. I'm the local Puerto Rican Mormon, right? Just walking the street, you know what

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I'm saying? I need Jesus. And so I see you two gentlemen on the street. And so what is this gonna look like?

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Yeah, so practically speaking, one, it's just good not, you can't go alone.

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It's probably better not to. And I always tell people, when you first start this type of ministry and outreach, go for a couple of weeks and just listen to people who've done it for years.

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That's the way you're gonna benefit greatly. But practically, what does it look like? If we see a

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Mormon walking and it's me and Oscar, we say, hey, do you have a minute to talk about, we know there are already Mormons.

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So hey, do you have a minute to talk about Jesus? Right, because it's already that kind of common ground, they believe in him.

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And they say, yeah. And really it turns into, Bonson says, if you give somebody enough time to talk, they'll hang themselves, right?

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So now it's a matter of asking them questions. Hey, like, be genuine. I tell people all the time, be genuine.

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What's your name? How long have you been in the Mormon church? Where did you serve a mission? Like ask those questions generally, not to like just kill time.

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Ask them, get to know the person. And okay, is it true that you believe this about Christ? Is it true that you believe

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Christ didn't create Lucifer? How would you reconcile as a Mormon when Joseph Smith says this, and then it's good to show them the actual quotation in the

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King Father discourse of Joseph saying, you can become a God. How do you reconcile that with Isaiah 43?

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And then read it to them and let them get an answer. So practically speaking, when you're talking about evangelism in the street, it's good to ask people questions and to let them actually hear their folly.

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Sometimes they haven't thought about it, but when they actually say it out loud, when you press them enough and they say something, whether it's an atheist or Mormon, and they say something, they're like, oh my

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God, did I just say that? And they may not tell you then, but they'll go home and they'll think about what they said. So a good practical tool is asking them questions.

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Obviously you wanna be grounded in the scriptures. You wanna know how to respond. You wanna know how to stay on task.

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Don't argue about things that are on the outside. At the end of the day, you're looking at an image bearer of God who's gonna die one day, who's gonna see

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God. And so you want them to have peace. And that needs to be in your message too is, hey, I'm concerned for you.

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I want you to have peace with God. I understand as a Mormon, you may be self -deceived. You may think you actually have peace with God and you don't know him.

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And that's why I'm here. That's why I wanna talk to you. If it's an atheist, it's hey, I understand you may hate your creator right now, but I know

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I don't deserve his mercy and his grace either. And I want you to have peace and be reconciled to your

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God. And so asking questions is gonna be key. Excellent. Well, folks, if folks are interested in learning how to ask questions, you could watch videos, of course, watching people engage

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Mormons in Jehovah's Witness. And I know, apology on their YouTube channel, there's a lot of content there, but there's an excellent book out there that I highly recommend.

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And it is called Tactics by Greg Kokel. Excellent resource, teaches you how to ask questions and navigate conversation.

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I think that's an excellent resource for people doing small groups and things like that. Kokel is not a presuppositionalist, but if you read the book, it's very presuppositional.

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And there's a lot of useful information there to navigate conversation. But all right, well, thank you for that.

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Well, let's jump right into the debate then. The debate topic was super interesting.

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The proposition was on what authority should we believe? Okay, and of course, you guys took the reformed

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Protestant position and the Mormons took their own position. Now, can you explain for us then, what is the nature of the answer to that question from a

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Mormon perspective? Okay, that's the first part. And was the position they held, was that normative for Mormons or did they have kind of this idiosyncratic view of the authority that differs from say the broader

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Mormon church? Yeah, sure. And anybody can jump in and answer that.

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Yeah, yeah, we can kind of tag on that. So to answer the first part, the traditional

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Mormon position, it would be predicated upon the veracity of Joseph Smith's claims, right?

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Prophethood and priesthood, the restoration of the gospel, it's all predicated on whether or not

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Joseph Smith's first vision is true, if he's truly a prophet sent from God. And they would, all of their authority, the authority of the church would rest upon that.

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And so typically of argumentation, dealing with Mormons and their ultimate authority is going to be dealing with the authority of the prophets.

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And then I think along with that, it would be the validity of personal revelation that they can receive from the spirit of God, right?

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And so I think those two aspects is everything stands on those, right? You have these prophets of Mormonism, right?

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Joseph Smith and the following prophets. And then you have a direct line to God to basically witness to you whether or not these prophets are true prophets.

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So I would think that's probably normative as far as all of the people that we've come in contact with in the

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Mormon literature that we've read. What they presented though, no, not at all.

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We had Mormons tell us directly that that is not what we believe. That's not what the church teaches.

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They would say what they presented was consistent, but it's not normative from what we experienced with Mormons whatsoever.

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You wanna add anything? Yeah, so actually, so this is what they were supposed to say, right? So we said, okay, what we're gonna argue for is the scriptures alone, and they're gonna argue for something called the collective witness model.

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So one of the Mormons we debated, Jacob, he actually coined that term. It's an idea. He has a

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YouTube video. You can go find it. The idea is you take a collective amounts of evidences and resources, and when you combine them together, that's how you know things, right?

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And you can have greater certainty or less certainty depending on all the evidences you have to your disposal.

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So he actually coined that term. Now, when you look at Mormons historically, they are fine and okay with saying, because Joseph Smith and because the

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Spirit told me, and that's it, and they're fine with that. They actually, they're getting advice from a

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Mormon apologist named Robert Boylan, and they did an interview with him after the debate, kind of similar to this, and they asked him, hey, how would you have responded to this question?

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What would your answer would have been? And he would have been personal revelation. That would have been my ultimate authority, personal revelation, and that would have been sinking sand too, but the point is

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I think they were trying to disguise, that was essentially the answer as well, personal revelation, but they were trying to disguise their actual ultimate authority and say, hey, we appeal to all these evidences.

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God gives us our eyes. God gives us reason. God gives us the prophets. God gives us history, and so when we look at all these evidences, we can triangulate and see and come to a conclusion, and the most important witness of their collective witness model is the

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Spirit, so when we press them on that in the debate, you'll hear them say when I ask them, how do you know anything infallibly?

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Well, because the Spirit told me, okay? And then I asked them, is it possible that it's actually

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Satan telling you those things and not the Spirit? And he says, yes, so it's a bunch of mumbo jumbo.

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It's really, it's sinking sand because Jesus tells us that the wise man builds his life on the words of Christ, and the moment you don't do that, you're building your house on sand, so they've tried to disguise all these appeals to evidence and all these things that sound nice, but it really has no ground.

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So, okay, so if someone says, well, personal revelation or the use of my reason, there was a lot of appeal to reason and observation and things like that, which

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I think is very interesting. If people understand what

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God is like in Mormonism, that he has a body of flesh and bone, he is stuck, the

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God of Mormonism is stuck in the same way human beings are in what philosophers call the egocentric predicament.

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There is no way to get outside your finite self to get an objective vision of reality and to know how facts relate to each other exhaustively so that God ultimately has to be agnostic with respect to certain claims to knowledge, right?

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So when your God tells, when the God of Mormonism tells a Mormon, reveals something, the certainty of that fact is as dubious and doubtful as it is for the

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God who reveals it because he's not absolute all encompassing like the God of Christianity.

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That was very interesting. But at any rate, let me turn it around on you guys. So if someone were to say personal revelation, okay, or the evidence, whatever, and then you kind of offer your critique and you say, well, wait a minute, well, what do you have,

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Mr. Christian? What is your authority? And on what basis can you be certain of that? How would you answer that?

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And please give me permission to interrupt and give pushback while you give your answer just so people can see what it looks like in conflict.

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Go ahead. What's your authority? So we would stand on scripture as our ultimate authority.

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No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't stand on scripture. You stand on your interpretation of the scripture.

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Okay. Am I doing good? Yeah, you're doing very good. No, I'm good. I'm good all the way.

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That's the first critique, right? We stand on our interpretation. And I would push back and say that God has been clear in his word pertaining to his will for man, pertaining to his nature, pertaining to the nature of scripture itself.

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And so we can be sure about the things that we're holding to as absolute regarding particular things.

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Everything in scripture is not exhaustive pertaining to the knowledge that God reveals within, but there are things that God has spoken with perspicuity and that we can be sure about.

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Okay, okay. But the Roman Catholic or the

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Jehovah's Witness or whatever, they say, well, the word of God is clear. And you guys completely disagree.

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So saying that it's clear that God has revealed these things doesn't make it so you're just evincing your bias towards your interpretation.

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Yeah. So what we'd say is, for example, if you look at the Jehovah's Witness or the Roman Catholic is they themselves have to be inconsistent with the scriptures.

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So with one hand, they'll affirm the scriptures are clear. God cannot lie.

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And then when you hear them deal with a text that is in complete opposition to their beliefs, Jehovah's Witnesses deny the deity of Jesus.

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We can take you through hours and hours of scriptures, multiple Old and New Testament proving the deity of Jesus.

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So when you wanna know, how is someone's interpretation true? The question is, what's consistent with what's been revealed in the scriptures?

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If there's two different interpretations, the problem is not the scriptures. The problem is one of the people.

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One of us is wrong, but what you don't do is dismiss all of scripture and say, it must be the scriptures.

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So the question is, okay, now we know that the scriptures are the word of God. Jesus held men accountable to the scriptures in Matthew 22 and all throughout his ministry with ease.

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You see the Lord Jesus quoted from the scriptures as authoritative, right? Have you not read what

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God spoke to you saying? And even the Sadducees in his day, they didn't say, Jesus, we don't understand that interpretation or Jesus, how are we supposed to know what that meant?

29:31

Jesus holds them accountable for what was spoken. And he says, God spoke this to you. So there is a clarity in the scriptures.

29:39

It's an objective testimony of God's revelation of how God reveals himself. Of course, we would acknowledge the scriptures themselves.

29:46

They, there are hard passages in other. And as Christians, we should be diligent to say, okay, what's the context?

29:53

Who's writing this? Why? What does all of scripture teach on this? But as Christians, we hold ourselves to high standards.

30:00

We shouldn't be able to do that. It's not the hardest work, but it requires some type of focus and diligence to say, okay,

30:06

I'm gonna understand this passage. But what it's not saying is that it's completely ambiguous and nobody can know what the interpretation is.

30:14

When it says Jesus wept, I don't know how else you're gonna interpret that, then he wept, that's clear, right? And there's other passages that talk about other things, not just physical things

30:23

Jesus did that are clear today that you have to be dishonest to say, I don't know that interpretation.

30:30

Right. Just to add to that really quick, just to add to that. If you deny that, you actually give up the reality, you give up the reality of apprehension of absolute truth.

30:42

If you deny that scripture is clear on certain issues, pertaining to salvation and the will of God, there is no way to ground truth whatsoever.

30:51

So the argument on the other side is the destruction of knowledge, essentially. Yeah, when

30:58

I was listening to that portion about interpretation, I was thinking about this, and I think this is important to bring out, is that the existence of multiple interpretations does not negate the reality and possibility of one having the correct interpretation.

31:15

Now, some say, well, that's just your interpretation. Cool, but my interpretation is correct, even if you disagree with it.

31:22

The fact that you disagree with it doesn't falsify my interpretation. So what we believe as Christians, and I know that you guys would agree with this, is that while it is up to interpretation, number one, multiple interpretations does not negate the possibility of a true one, and number two, because God has revealed

31:40

Himself through His word, God has seen fit to use language as an adequate mechanism to conveying truth.

31:48

So it's an adequate mechanism. According to God, language is sufficient to understand. If you deny that, and you kind of adopt some kind of linguistic agnosticism that we really can't interpret language, then

32:00

I can say, someone says the Book of Mormon is true, and I'd be like, thank you for saying you like my sweater.

32:06

I could just interpret anything you say in any possible way, you know?

32:12

You can't object to that, because you've now relativized all of language, and you've denied the central idea that language is a sufficient tool for interpretation, because it's not just books we interpret, it's conversations.

32:26

I'm exegete, as we're having this conversation, I have to exegete your words in my mind and interpret, and we're in agreement that certain words mean certain things in context.

32:36

And so, as you said, Jesus wept. I mean, that's a sufficient statement. I could know what that statement means.

32:42

And if I could know what that statement means, then why can't we apply this to these other areas, even if someone wants to close their eyes and say,

32:48

Jesus wept doesn't mean Jesus wept. And you're wrong, you're wrong, you know? So I think it's gonna work.

32:55

That's one of the things we were talking about as we were prepping for the debate, was you're really seeing an assault on the sovereignty of God from how they're presenting their

33:06

God is, right? Which is why I think Oscar brought up greatly in the psalmist says, our

33:11

God is in the heaven. He sits and he does as he pleases. If God wants to reveal himself through the scriptures, through the writings of the prophets and the apostles, we as men are nobody to tell

33:23

God, hey God, you should have done it better. God, you should have done it this way. The clear teaching is, is that it is how

33:29

God has revealed himself. That's taught clearly through the apostles. And again, the

33:34

Lord Jesus held men accountable for what was written in the scripture. I think it was interesting that didn't engage at all with second

33:41

Timothy 3, 16, first Peter one, second Peter one and Matthew 22. And there's a verse we could have went to, but those were verses where you see the scriptures being placed as such a high pedestal that this is the ultimate authority.

33:54

This is how we know things. And if the Lord Jesus held this view, you have to ask yourself, do

34:01

I want to hold a position that Jesus didn't hold? As someone who's professing to believe in Jesus, if Jesus believed the scriptures were clear and sufficient that he was quoting from Exodus, which was written 1400 years earlier, he can quote that and say,

34:16

God spoke this to you. Then Christians now, 2000 years after the apostles, God spoke this to you and you're accountable.

34:24

Yeah, that's an excellent point. Now thinking in terms of, well, real quick, I'm still at people who are listening.

34:30

There's a question here. We'll take it towards the back end of this discussion, but if anyone has any questions, these two gentlemen have agreed to take questions.

34:37

So please preface your question with question so that I could differentiate them from the comments. So please,

34:43

I encourage you guys to do that. All right, so in the discussion, there was a debate about interpretation.

34:50

I think you guys navigated that well, but something interesting happened in the debate in that the debate is, what was it called again?

35:01

Which authority should we follow or something like that? Yeah, what authority should we believe? There we go.

35:07

The conversation weirdly kind of veered off into a critique of Calvinism.

35:14

So how did you guys navigate that shift in the topic? I mean, do you think this was a strategy on their part to attack a theology that is really easy to attack because it's easily misunderstood by a lot of people?

35:29

Or do you think that they were genuinely kind of like, hey, this isn't a legitimate topic to bring up in the nature of this discussion?

35:36

What are your thoughts there? Well, it's even hard to call it veer because from the very beginning, their opening statement was -

35:46

Trying to be nice, Oscar. I was trying to be nice. Their opening statement, their rebuttal against Calvinism.

35:53

And I mentioned that in my rebuttal. Like that wasn't an opening statement. That wasn't a positive presentation.

35:59

We both were supposed to present our positive presentation, our worldview, our epistemology, and we were supposed to also critique each other's.

36:08

Well, they came out and entirely critiqued, right? Towards the very end, did they actually address the question?

36:13

And very, very briefly, not in a way that anybody could walk away from the debate and actually tell you, hey, what did they say? What did the Mormons believe?

36:20

How do they know what's true? They would say, oh, we know what's true because God told us. And really, it's like, wait, don't you also have to interpret what

36:28

God is telling you? Are you sure that that's God telling you that? Or are you presupposing that? And they would say, oh, we don't presuppose anything.

36:34

So we could go all the way with that. But as far as them attacking

36:40

Calvinism, I think it was a strategy of theirs. And I think what it shows is weakness in their position.

36:46

When you cannot adequately defend your position, you make it a point to continue to attack.

36:53

I think they put up this, they approached the debate in this way because there's a lot of things, as you said, about Calvinism, when they are misinterpreted or when they're explained poorly, they will get an emotional reaction from it.

37:10

So bringing up things like Anne Frank or bringing up God's sovereignty in all of the acts throughout history, those things are gonna draw an emotional response.

37:19

And if you actually look at the comment section from the debate, most Christians, or a lot of Christians who aren't reformed and who are presuppositional, they critique our methodology in the debate because they don't understand our position.

37:33

So what was more difficult about that is trying to stay true to the topic of the debate, as well as trying to answer some of their misrepresentations of Calvinism.

37:43

Because they presented, what they were talking about wasn't Calvinism either. So they didn't actually present

37:49

Mormonism or Calvinism. Right, they skewed a bunch of stuff up. If I didn't know anything about Calvinism and I watched that debate,

37:56

I would come away from the debate and say, apparently Calvinists just hate Anne Frank. Right, right, right, right.

38:02

Very surface, very surface level, you know, God. Yeah, go ahead. I think part of it,

38:09

I think was, if we think, hey, was it dishonest, was it honest? Part of it was dishonest in terms of, we had hours of conversation with them.

38:19

Okay, we wanna make this as meaningful as possible. We have to argue at the bottom. It doesn't make sense for us to debate the person of Christ because we're just gonna disagree on what we're appealing to.

38:29

So let's debate what we're appealing to. We spent hours saying, okay, we want this debate to be that.

38:36

And then they show up and then they start talking about Calvinism. So that part was dishonest, but I think part of it was honest because if you look at their ultimate standard, it's emotional for them.

38:47

It's what God told me. So they were trying to get the crowd to be emotional with them.

38:53

If you look at the closing statement, Jacob was like, I want you guys to know every single one of you are a child of God and he loves you.

39:01

They were trying to create this emotional appeal, which is why they were arguing against Calvinism because they're misrepresenting it.

39:08

But they're trying to create this emotional moment because their ultimate authority is emotional.

39:15

It's what God told me. So that part could have been honest in terms of, they're like, hey, how could you wanna worship and do you hear what they're saying?

39:23

Not everybody's a child of God. God doesn't wanna save everybody. Oh my gosh, what kind of a God is that? Anne Frank, Anne Frank, and then their

39:30

God can't even account for the Anne Frank problem either because ours can, theirs can't because theirs knew

39:36

Anne Frank would go through that and created her anyway. Ours actually puts a purpose and a sovereign plan behind it where Anne Frank's suffering has purpose and meaning and God is glorified in that.

39:47

They didn't bring that up, but I think that part was them just putting into the emotional argument, trying to be honest.

39:54

Yeah, and I think that's important to identify too because as powerful as emotional arguments can be, they don't really get us to the truth.

40:01

It's kind of like when people bring up the problem of evil emotionally, like, yeah,

40:07

I'll grant you as a Christian, emotionally, that's a problem, but intellectually, it's not. We have answers to it, right?

40:12

So then it's the intellectual aspect that gets us at the truth. The emotional aspect kind of just clouds the discussion.

40:18

So that came across really strongly in how they presented their case. What I did appreciate about the debate was the respectfulness between, but I mean, you guys have strong opposition.

40:31

You disagree, obviously, but there seemed to be kind of that relationship built through the hours and hours of interaction, right?

40:37

By the time we were able to share the stage together, you guys were able to have kind of a very, not as focused as we would have hoped, but it was a respectful interaction, right?

40:47

And that says a lot too. That says a lot too, even in the midst of, perhaps you had a goal in the debate and it didn't get reached in terms of staying on topic, but the way you guys carried yourself and the

40:57

Mormon gentlemen as well, I think it was a good example of how we should be interacting with one another.

41:03

So I appreciate that. All right. Well, my next question is more methodological now in terms of presuppositional apologetics.

41:11

How do you understand presuppositional apologetics in general? And what was your frame of thinking in terms of applying this to these

41:18

Mormon gentlemen? What did that look like in terms of thinking along presuppositional and biblical lines when preparing for this discussion?

41:26

Because I know you guys have spoken to atheists before, right? I mean, you've spoken to Catholics. How do you go about thinking about how to apply a presuppositional approach to specifically the

41:36

Mormon? Right. So what I would say is, our approach obviously is fundamentally, how do we know what we know is because God revealed it in his word.

41:47

And I think when you are referencing scripture, you don't only have the claim from Christians to say, we know because scripture says it, but you actually have the testimony of scripture affirming the same thing.

41:59

So you have Peter saying, you know, we witnessed what happened here. We witnessed what happened in transfiguration, but you have a more sure word of prophecy.

42:07

You have Christ saying, he rebuking the disciples saying, slow are you to believe all that the prophet said.

42:14

You seen it, you see me now, but the rebuke is actually regarding them knowing what the scripture says and not believing that.

42:21

So I think we have a fundamental appeal to scripture as far as our conviction as Christians, but we also see that in scripture.

42:28

So when we are approaching the Mormons, when they're appealing to scripture and also denying the infallibility of scripture, we say, well, you're contradicting yourself because how do you know what's true in scripture and what's not?

42:40

I brought up the issue of scripture being God breathed and they totally passed over. Like, well, what does that mean?

42:46

Because according to scripture, scripture is breathed out by God, right? That this is the origin and the nature of scripture.

42:54

And then if God cannot lie, that means his word cannot not be true, right?

42:59

So when we are appealing to scripture and we have others who say that they believe in Christ, who say that they believe in the

43:05

God of the Bible, but at the same time are attacking the veracity of scripture we say that fundamental contradiction that destroys your worldview.

43:14

It can't be true and not true. Scripture must be taken wholesale, right? And the other thing I would say is our belief in scripture and the impossibility of the contrary.

43:24

If you cannot objectively ground truth in the word of the creator, you cannot ground truth at all, right?

43:31

Truth becomes a relative principle and now it becomes all subjective as to how you take information in and you come to whatever conclusion you want.

43:39

And that's the issue that they have with the witness of the spirit. They say, God has spoken to us. God has told us.

43:44

That's when Daniel presses them on this issue and he says, okay, God told you that it was wrong to pour hot water on a baby.

43:51

And another person says, it's right. God told me it's right. What can he say? All he says was, well,

43:56

I'll just tell them God told me and they'll say, yeah, God told me. And that's where the argument ends because there is no way to apply your subjective experience and what you assume to be

44:06

God speaking to you, apply that to another individual when you don't have an objective standard. Absolute truth must always be the reference point for the pursuer of more truth.

44:16

Otherwise you're using tools to arrive at a place that you don't actually know what it is. Now, would you say across the board from a

44:24

Mormon theological perspective that their epistemology basically just relegates to like a subjectivism?

44:31

Is there a variance and degrees within Mormonism where some people might have a more stronger epistemology that avoids those problems?

44:39

Or do you think at the core, all Mormons because of their view of God and their view of revelation, are they all relegated to that critique you just offered?

44:48

I mean, yeah, like it's either gonna land on one of two grounds, either your own subjective feeling and reasoning or on Joseph Smith, because even when you read the

44:59

Book of Mormon, it ends off and it says, pray, pray and ask God if this book is true, right?

45:05

That's the way the Book of Mormon ends. It's telling you and if you're gonna write a lie, that's how this way out ended too, right?

45:12

Like pray and ask God if this is true and people will go and pray for a feeling. And it's gonna end off in either

45:18

Joseph or in their heart. It's what God told me in my heart or it's what God told Joseph. And there's problems with both of those, right?

45:25

The Bible tells us the heart is wicked, right? Who can know it is deceitful. You look back at Joseph, really your whole worldview is based off of, did

45:36

Joseph actually have a vision in the garden? Did he actually see God? It doesn't matter what happened after that.

45:42

If he didn't have that, if that vision never happened, everything else is false, which is why it's built on sinking sand.

45:50

And so a majority of Mormons are gonna be subjective because the book tells them to be.

45:55

Pray and ask God if this is true. And that's the difference between, I think, the triune God of scripture and the false

46:01

God of Mormonism is the triune God of scripture says, this is my word and take it in my account.

46:07

But believe me because I'm God and I'm saying this, right? And as Christians, we have to be comfortable with that answer.

46:13

God said so. Now we can account for that. Of course, there's a worldview that grounds the scriptures that when we say

46:20

God says this, it's the triune God who's speaking. The God who, it's only the triune

46:25

God that can make sense of things. It's not the God of Islam or the God of Mormonism because all those gods fail and they fall at a certain aspect.

46:34

And so it can be different. So now, as a presuppositionalist, we've heard this so much that when

46:41

I hear it, my eyes just roll back and I like start drooling from my mouth. Is that, bro, what's your problem, man?

46:48

Clearly what you're saying is just simple fallacious circular reasoning.

46:54

You're just assuming the authority that you're standing on. So, and I know that came up in the conversation, maybe folks who haven't listened to the debate.

47:02

How do you respond as a presuppositionalist to the claim of fallacious circularity?

47:08

So Daniel responds to this, I think in one of his rebuttals. And he said, this is a debate about ultimate authorities.

47:15

And so what else can we do but to appeal to our ultimate authority, to validate our ultimate authority? The moment you appeal to something else, that's no longer your ultimate authority.

47:23

And so when they come to this debate, they're like, yeah, we have five ultimate authorities. And it's like, that doesn't work.

47:29

That's an impossibility, right? One has to be all ultimate amongst your, the five things that you're saying.

47:34

And what I think that they're doing is trying to put up a bunch of targets so that one of them couldn't be attacked. And we recognize what it is.

47:41

It's personal revelation at the end of the day. But they put up, they present all of these tools and they say, no, use all of these to triangulate truth.

47:48

The reality is knowledge, knowledge and our epistemology must be grounded in an ultimate standard.

47:58

And the only way to validate that ultimate standard is by that ultimate standard. There's no way to do it outside of that.

48:04

So when we're appealing the scripture as the word of God, God is not relying upon some other source in order to validate his word, right?

48:13

God doesn't say, believe me because of this or because of that, right? God has spoken and he says, this is true.

48:19

God cannot lie. He's given us his word and it's true because it comes from God. So I think,

48:25

I'm not exactly sure where that argumentation comes from. I think what's being applied is circular reasoning in a sense of not dealing with ultimate authorities where you could use that argumentation.

48:37

If we're talking about something and we're not talking about ultimate authorities, then I think circular reasoning can be invalidated, right?

48:43

Because there is something that you can appeal to higher. But in the discussion of ultimate authorities, that's the only way to have this discussion is to ground your ultimate authority in its own testimony.

48:54

So when it comes to scripture, we would point to scripture bearing marks of divinity. We would point to, and it's not to say that we can't point to evidences from there, but again, those evidences are gonna be understood within the context of what scripture has revealed to us.

49:08

So we could expect to see the truthfulness of the claims of scripture manifested in church history.

49:15

We could expect to see the church reacting to the word of God. We could expect to see these things because scripture is true, but we don't base entirely our belief in scripture being true on whether or not we can see the evidences play out.

49:28

Yeah, sure. Okay, so everyone, and here's a critique that I often hear of a presuppositional approach that saying that we have no choice to engage in circularity at an ultimate level doesn't make it, doesn't mean that it's a valid thing.

49:43

I mean, it's like, okay, yeah, at the basis, we all have to appeal to some circularity, but then what do you have there?

49:49

You have two circles, two ultimate circles, right? Fighting against each other. How do you break the tie between them and argue for the truth of your perspective?

49:57

How would you do that? So the Mormon would say, I have my, whatever authority that they would appeal to, the gentleman that you were engaging, it was this personal revelation, right?

50:07

That's his circle. I believe in on the authority. God has revealed it to me that Joseph Smith is a prophet. And then you're saying, nope,

50:14

God has spoken to us in his word. And that is the ultimate authority because God says that, you know, the Bible says that God could not swear by anyone higher than himself, right?

50:23

So we swear to Abraham and swears by himself. So you have these two circles. How do you break the tie and avoid this kind of, this ultimate kind of skepticism?

50:33

There's no way to escape ourselves. How do you avoid this kind of postmodern situation where there are no meta narratives?

50:40

Sure. So one distinction that Bonson makes that I really like is he says you have vicious circular argumentation and then you have spiral argumentation, right?

50:52

So in a spiral, you're still going in a circle, but as you go in that circle, you go deeper and deeper and deeper.

50:59

And that would be the difference between the Christian perspective and any other one. So what's gonna happen when you use circular reasoning in terms of what does the

51:08

Bible say? It's gonna be vindicated by reality because God is a God of truth because this is his world and we live in it.

51:16

When God says something, it's gonna be coherent with his scriptures have already said. When you look at the

51:21

Mormon now epistemology of circular reasoning, there's gonna be somewhere in their life where they're inconsistent.

51:29

And that's what we were pushing them is we're like, hey, you're saying these things, but you don't live that way. You don't live like you actually believe it's up to the spirit.

51:37

Because if you saw somebody hurting somebody in a way that is wrong, you would step in and you would assert yourself as if you actually have a reason to.

51:45

And so when you have these two circles that you're talking about, right? And how do we know which one's actually right?

51:53

Well, one vindicates itself because it's truth. And the other one, you're gonna say it, it may sound nice, or maybe it doesn't sound nice, but there's gonna be an inconsistency.

52:02

There's gonna be a flaw. And so that's where you would point out the flaw in terms of, all right, you took your argumentation, your

52:08

God can't even account for the things you're saying. You're saying one thing about God here and you're saying another thing here.

52:14

You see how the triune God of scripture doesn't do that. Even one thing they said, it completely blew our minds.

52:22

They believe that their God is subjected to what they call eternal law. So God is under a law that he has to follow.

52:31

And that's a problem. If that's the God you're gonna appeal to, that's your circle of argumentation.

52:36

And yet you're telling us that he's under a law. They even told us that God could hypothetically sin and cease to become

52:43

God. You don't have that with the triune God because he's not subjected to anything. And so I think spiral argumentation and spiritual argumentation can be two different things.

52:54

Yeah, very good. Yeah, I think there's an important distinction to be made between the idea of just making a bare authority claim.

53:01

We are making an authority claim as Christians and everyone else is making an authority claim whether they acknowledge it or not.

53:07

I think the difference is that our authority claim, our circle, as Bonson said, actually saves knowledge.

53:13

It saves intelligible experience. It saves science. It saves induction. And the other circles are destructive to those things in which

53:21

I think you guys beautifully pointed that out when you internally critique their position. All right, excellent.

53:27

Very good. Now, apart from the authority. So, and of course it's good to start there cause that's the foundation. So everything else is built on that.

53:33

But what are some other routes a believer can take in engaging a Mormon in terms of some of their specific doctrines?

53:40

So for example, their false view of Jesus. Would you engage their false views of Jesus right away or would you always go and appeal to the source of authority issue?

53:54

Is there a time to start one place over the other? How do you guys approach that? Yeah, I think we often would engage with their conception of Christ because that's common ground that they're gonna recognize.

54:09

They would say they believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, right? If we start with scripture being the ultimate authority, they won't believe that.

54:16

And so we're gonna be dealing with apologetics from the very beginning. But if we start with Christ and we start with common ground, they say they recognize

54:24

Christ as Lord and Savior. And so do we. Then we can go to the text regarding the nature of Christ right away.

54:31

And when we do this immediately, we point out to them the difference in the nature of Christ from a biblical worldview as far as in comparison with the

54:43

Mormon worldview. And Daniel spoke about this a little bit earlier. Christ ontologically is different, right?

54:49

He's different in creation. And fundamentally, when you have a creator in creation, in that sense, ontologically, there's only two categories, right?

54:59

And Christ is in the category of creator while everything else is in the category of creation.

55:06

And scripture draws a hard distinction there. There is no way to miss that unless you're purposely rejecting it.

55:12

So again, you would take John 1, you would take the Colossians, you would take them to Christ saying in John 8 and 24, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.

55:21

So Christ is not only making the distinction about his nature as God, but he's saying unless you believe that I'm the

55:28

God of the Old Testament, that I am creator God, you actually can't be saved. So when we say, no, it's not just about believing

55:35

Jesus, but the right Jesus, we're making that claim from scripture. These are Christ's words that says, unless you get me right, unless you know who

55:43

I am, you're gonna die in your sins, right? So I think we can address from that perspective right away.

55:50

And I think it's a good method to go because they would generally say, they would say that they believe in Christ as well.

55:57

And I think, just to add to that, I probably use four different arguments to go to, either

56:06

Joseph Smith, I'll show them the problems with Joseph Smith. There's great books you can buy, one called, Where Does It Say That?

56:12

And it gives you all his false prophecies, all his sermons, all that stuff, the person of Christ, the gospel and monotheism, right?

56:21

But the point is, is when I'm taking a Mormon through those things, I'm trying to show them their need for actual salvation because they believe they're saved.

56:31

I'm a Christian, I'm with you, we're on the same team. And so they've actually, they've deceived themselves into thinking that Christ, this gospel, this church can save me.

56:42

And so I'm not always showing up with like, hey, these are ultimate authorities and mine is right, yours is wrong.

56:48

It's, hey, what do you believe about Christ? We were just having, they had like an Easter pageant here for almost two weeks.

56:55

And it was a big Easter play, thousands and thousands of Mormons. And I would constantly say, hey, like this play, in terms of what it represents is beautiful.

57:03

The idea of Jesus coming and dying for his people, it's a beautiful message. But our concern is that this message has been distorted in your church, that you guys don't actually have

57:13

Jesus dying on the cross for you because of what your church says about X, Y, and Z. And so there's a number of routes you can take them.

57:19

If you just show a Mormon the false prophecies of Joseph Smith, that'll, and they've never read it maybe, that'll like, it'll cause them to be like, whoa, like I've never thought about that.

57:29

Or you just take them through the flaws in their worldview that'll cause a Mormon to say, oh, maybe

57:35

I am lost. Maybe I am in need of salvation. That's where we would come in and say, hey, look, this is the point of the gospel.

57:42

This is the point of the, this is why you have to leave this church because this church would say things like there's only one true church and if you're not part of the one true church, then you're part of the church of the devil.

57:53

It's in First Nephi 14, okay? So I would ask them, do you believe

57:58

I'm a part of the church? I'm a part of the church of the devil. And if they're gonna be consistent, they would have to say yeah, but there's such nice people, they don't wanna say yeah.

58:07

So they're like, no, you're not a part of the church of the devil. And then I'm like, okay, so then I'm a part of the one true church.

58:13

And they're like, ah, no, no, no. And so it causes them to say, I don't have ground to stand on.

58:19

And so you don't always have to do that by arguing ultimate authority. You can point them to Christ, to monotheism, to the gospel, to Joseph Smith.

58:26

There's different areas you can go to say, hey, look at where you're standing. Look at your sinking stand. You actually need salvation.

58:33

I care about you. And so you can go that route too. Very good. Now you did mention a book real quick and I didn't catch, you said it really fast.

58:41

You said it was a book. Where does it say that? It's probably like $10,

58:46

I think, maybe. You can look it up on Google. Where does it say that? It is photocopies of Mormon documents.

58:56

So it is sermons, sections of scripture by the Mormon prophets, what they're saying.

59:03

You'll see Brigham Young teaching Adam God theory. That Adam is

59:08

God. Okay, I see here. So where does it say that? Photo reprints that expose

59:14

Mormon deceptions and Christian witnessing resource. I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna put that in the, let me see here.

59:22

I'm gonna put that in the chat so people can take a look at that.

59:28

I mean, if you're a Mormon, if you're a Mormon, take a look at it. I mean, yes, it's material that a

59:35

Christian would use to witness to a Mormon, but look at the documentation. I'm gonna post the link there in the comments there.

59:42

And so hopefully folks will find that useful. Now, what are some other resources?

59:48

How would you encourage Christians to equip themselves to engage Mormons? I mean, is it, what role does studying theology play in all this?

59:59

What type of scriptures should a Christian be looking to memorize and all these sorts of things?

01:00:04

How would you encourage folks to get equipped to engage Mormons in a meaningful way? Right, I would think ultimately it's scripture and our study of scripture and us being grounded in our own theology and understanding the nature of scripture, understanding salvation by grace of faith, having a good comprehensive understanding of what you believe is going to be preeminent in your defense of the faith and also for you to be able to actually throw down the strongholds of a false belief system.

01:00:40

Right, and then further study, I think Apologia and Alpha and Omega Ministries have been really gold mines when it comes to evangelism and apologetics regarding Mormon church.

01:00:52

And then there's various books out there. I know Pastor James has a book, Who is to a Mormon Elder. He actually has a, on Alpha and Omega Ministries, it's a hundred verses to memorize regarding outreach to Mormons.

01:01:05

So that's an actual webpage and he goes through all of these verses. Let's take a look. Yeah, well, the ones, and you can, like, as a

01:01:13

Christian, you can use your own Christian liberty and say, hey, like, what do I want to focus on more? I think monotheism is a great one.

01:01:18

So any of the Isaiah 43 through really 47, I like to focus on, because it's easy to memorize,

01:01:27

John 1, Hebrews 1, and Colossians 1. Oh, really? Those are all texts appealing to the deity of Jesus that he's the eternal creator and they're clear.

01:01:36

And what I like to point out to Mormons is, okay, in John 1, you have Jesus creating all things.

01:01:42

If anything was made, it was made by him. And then in John 10, you have the good shepherd, one who lays his life down for the sheep, the one who calls his sheep.

01:01:51

And if you give up Jesus in John 1, you don't get Jesus in John 10, right? In Colossians 1, you have the beautiful exposition of Paul.

01:01:59

And then in Colossians 2, it's one of my favorite verses of all the Bible. It says that he takes our record of death and he nails it to the cross, right?

01:02:07

Well, you don't get that benefit in Colossians 2 if you've given him up in chapter one. And the same thing with Hebrews.

01:02:13

In the book of Hebrews, it says that he's made a purification for sins, that he is the great and high priest.

01:02:19

But if you've given up in Hebrews chapter one, then you don't get those benefits. So I tell people whenever they ask me,

01:02:27

John 1, Hebrews 1, and Colossians 1, get familiar with them, get familiar with the book, and take people to those passages and let them wrestle with them.

01:02:36

And one other thing to add to that, just regarding Scripture, obviously, and this is kind of our view, and what we present is, again, the nature of Scripture.

01:02:45

2 Timothy 3 .16, we see that Scripture, God breathed in. So this is the ultimate source, and this is the reliable truth that's given to us from God.

01:02:56

And if we can't trust that, then we can't trust anything. So the Mormon would say, oh, they do believe that Scripture is influenced by God.

01:03:02

They do believe Scripture, in some sense, is from God, but they believe that their prophets could err. They believe that a man, the moment that man becomes involved in any enterprise, it's therefore corrupted and therefore not infallible.

01:03:16

Well, the rebuttal to that, the rebuke of that would be, well, the same goes for your prophets, but that whole concept which you just introduced is a logical conclusion that you've come to by dealing with the nature of man and saying, well, yeah, man is fallible, and therefore everything that man deals with is fallible.

01:03:36

Well, Scripture denies that entirely, right? And so now we have your word versus Scripture, right?

01:03:41

And how do we know it's true about that, right? So we would take God's word, the Scripture is God breathed, and we hold to that.

01:03:48

But I would say, get very familiar with that verse, understand the nature of Scripture and the purpose of Scripture so that you're able to defend the

01:03:55

Scripture. Very good. Now, I think it was Daniel, you mentioned something about focusing on specific areas of theology that one might find useful in engaging

01:04:04

Mormons. And you mentioned monotheism. Now, when I posted my post on Facebook and I made that comment about Mormonism, let me pull it up here real quick.

01:04:18

And a friend of mine who is a Mormon, she had taken issue with what

01:04:25

I had said. I won't mention her name. She's a sweet, I mean, I guess she's a woman now.

01:04:30

I've known her since a long time ago. And she made some comments here and I want you guys maybe to address it.

01:04:38

So I said that Mormonism with its doctrine of a limited and finite God and gods lacks the capacity to account for the universal conceptual laws of logic as the deities that exist within Mormonism exist within a broader and more fundamental metaphysical context of impersonality.

01:04:56

The God of Mormonism is not the God of Scripture who is described as the one whose authority is so great.

01:05:02

There is nothing or no one greater than him to swear by, that's Hebrews 6 .13. The God of Mormonism on the other hand stands under the greater authority of the impersonal eternal natural law which governs intelligences.

01:05:16

And this individual had messaged me and I had asked because she expressed that perhaps

01:05:21

I was misunderstanding Mormonism. And so I asked her a few questions to help me get a gauge to whether my criticism and my quote still applies to her flavor of Mormonism.

01:05:32

And so I asked her if there was more than one God. All right, do you believe or you deny the existence of many gods?

01:05:40

And she responded and I won't mention her name just because obviously I don't share private messages with people, but she was so kind to share and answer some questions here.

01:05:50

Her answer to my first question was, there is only one God, our heavenly father.

01:05:56

And then she quotes the first commandment, thou shall have no other gods before me. This does not claim existence of there being any other gods.

01:06:03

It does refer to people putting other things, focus, higher powers as being in existence and of more important than God, our heavenly father.

01:06:11

As in mixed priorities and thoughts of separate beings to rule such as the Greek gods, mythical gods.

01:06:17

In other words, she's denying that there exist other gods. Now, I'm not a scholar in Mormonism, but I've studied

01:06:25

Mormonism and I have never heard a Mormon proclaim monotheism.

01:06:33

Now I have heard them say, we worship one God, we worship the God of this world, but they do acknowledge, according to their authoritative sources, the existence of other gods.

01:06:44

So I'm confused. I wanna make sure, am I right to be confused or is there some form of Mormonism that is monotheistic?

01:06:54

No, so here's the problem. One, usually you'll hear them say things like, there's one God of this earth.

01:07:00

The problem is the Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says there's one God, period. That God doesn't even know of any other gods.

01:07:06

There's none before him, none after him. So the Bible is clear. When they try to make that distinction, we just point them to scripture and say, that's not what the scriptures say.

01:07:13

But I've actually had a couple of Mormons tell me that. And I think the reason they're doing it is because they understand the clarity of monotheism in the scriptures.

01:07:24

But here's where the problem comes in for them. We believe in monotheism with the triune

01:07:31

God. They believe if they're gonna claim that form of monotheism, it's just Heavenly Father, then you ask them, is

01:07:37

Jesus God? Is the Holy Spirit God? They will usually have to say yes, and if they say no, then you tell them, okay, so someone other than God died on that cross and paid for your sins?

01:07:50

That's not sufficient. So I've actually had, at the Mormon temple this past week, they're like, yeah, one

01:07:55

God. And I was like, okay, so the Father's God. They're like, yeah, but what about Jesus? Well, no, he's kind of like God, but he's the offspring.

01:08:04

Okay, so then the person who died on the cross with you wasn't God. He can't pay for your sins. And so the big hole when they try to adopt this form of monotheism because they don't adopt it how the

01:08:16

Bible teaches it, where it's the triune God. They try to take pieces of it because the Bible is clear on monotheism, but they don't go all the way and they should go all the way.

01:08:26

And so that's it, I think. Just real quick so I can clarify. So all Mormons, which

01:08:32

I was corrected, the person said, you know, they shouldn't be called Mormons. They should be called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

01:08:39

Saints. So she made a distinction there, which I wasn't aware. I know Mormonism and I know how to have conversations and the questions to ask.

01:08:46

And, you know, I do apologetics, that's what I do. But I wanted to be respectful to my possible ignorance of some broader branch of Mormonism or Latter -day

01:08:55

Saints that I was unaware of. And so I wanted to hear what this person had to say. Is there some branch of Mormonism that is more in line with what this young woman was?

01:09:06

No, I've never heard of a branch. And I always ask them, okay, so do you disagree with Joseph? Because Joseph didn't believe us.

01:09:12

That's what's important. Joseph, and you can take him to all of Joseph, his words, to the King Paul discourse, where he says that God had a

01:09:20

God before him, that we've imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. He says, I'm gonna refute that idea.

01:09:26

You have to learn to become God yourselves one day. So if a Mormon, there's no branch of Mormonism that teaches it, at least not yet.

01:09:33

Mormonism is very, very slippery. So they may get there one day, not there yet, but there's no branch.

01:09:39

But then you can ask them, your own prophet doesn't teach that. Why are you claiming that? And I think it's them trying to dodge bullets.

01:09:46

And so what you're dealing with is synchronization. Something that we often talk about here is that you have to convert them to Mormonism before you actually start to preach to them.

01:09:59

Before you try to save them from Mormonism, you have to remind them what Mormonism is. So this might be what you're talking about.

01:10:06

There's a new age of Mormonism. There's like a post -modern Mormonism, which is totally different from a lot of the claims, the absolute truth claims that the older Mormonism would make.

01:10:19

They're not making those claims anymore. And there's also a synchronization. So many of the people out at the temple when we went, they didn't know the difference.

01:10:28

So I would go and ask them, I would say, hey, we're Christians from a local church. Do you know why we're here? And they wouldn't know why.

01:10:34

They don't understand the separation between our theology and their theology. And so when we say we believe in one

01:10:39

God, they're like, yeah, yeah, we believe in one God too. They're not aware of what Mormonism teaches as far as what is taught by the prophets from the beginning.

01:10:46

And they're also not aware of what we believe. Most of them, the first time they were introduced to Christ was from the

01:10:54

Book of Mormon, not from scripture. And so, so much of the process of evangelization with Mormons is teaching them what you believe accurately, what we believe, and also reminding them of what

01:11:05

Mormonism taught from the beginning. Because what you're saying about that lady, she's contradicting her prophets.

01:11:10

None of the prophets teach that. They all teach a plurality of gods. So I would say, if you believe in one God, you should, Daniel says this all the time, you should be on our side because we teach one

01:11:19

God. We teach the triune God of scripture. You guys don't believe that. Okay, so what, where, when you quoted that passage from Joseph Smith, what reference is that?

01:11:28

Do you remember the reference? Maybe if a person actually watches this video that she can check it out for herself and maybe kind of, you know.

01:11:35

Yeah, so it's the King. And I actually have it, this would be for any Christians who want to get involved in this type of ministry.

01:11:41

You can actually go on the Latter -day Saint Church website. So this is their publication so that they won't try to say, hey, that's not what we believe.

01:11:51

And you can look up, it's called Jesus, churchofjesuschrist .org, and on that website, you can go to the

01:11:58

King Father Discourse. And that's where Joseph is giving a sermon at a funeral.

01:12:03

And he, that's where the reference comes. He says, I'm gonna tell you how

01:12:09

God came to become God. And then he gives the, we have imagined and supposed. So if you just go to churchofjesuschrist .org,

01:12:16

you type in King Follett, and it'll come up. All right, excellent. There's also for folks,

01:12:23

I'm sure folks would know about this but karm .org, Christian Apologetics Research Ministry with Matt Slick.

01:12:28

Matt's a good friend of mine. He's got a huge apologetics website and there's a giant section on Mormonism and the references in their own publications as well.

01:12:37

So folks might find that useful if they don't know about it already. Well, with that said, let's move to some listener questions.

01:12:45

And I just wanna thank you guys. You guys have been doing an excellent job and I've been really enjoying this conversation.

01:12:50

And Daniel, bro, that sweater is nice, bro. I've been looking at it. You've been talking about Mormonism, I'm like, bro, dude, where'd you get that, my guy?

01:12:58

I appreciate it. So I have a bum wife who actually got me this sweater. I love

01:13:03

Star Wars, so. We were talking off camera about some disagreements I had with you guys. Oscar, your shirt is nice too, bro.

01:13:09

Your shirt is nice too. It's all good, this is better. I don't got muscles to flex though, so I need the sweater,

01:13:15

I need to cover up. You know what I'm saying? All right, so let's - I appreciate it, brother. All right, no worries, no worries.

01:13:20

All right, so let's see here. Let's go through. Okay, so Haley, I apologize if I can't pronounce your last name.

01:13:29

Is it Lou -ha? I guess Lou -ja, Lou -ha? Haley says, have you ever done apologetics with Catholics?

01:13:35

And perhaps you can kind of tell us in answering that, is there a similarity with how you approach a Catholic and a

01:13:41

Mormon? I think the similarity would come - Yes, not as much.

01:13:46

They're not on the street as much, but yeah, we welcome conversation with any and everybody. I think that's a good thing about evangelism and apologetics on the street, is that it's gonna force you to touch up in all of these areas, because you never know who you're gonna run into.

01:14:01

And if you're not equipped or not prepared in a certain area, you're gonna be challenged, and that can maybe not be the best experience.

01:14:08

But I think the similarities would be the Catholics wouldn't hold to scripture as the ultimate authority.

01:14:16

They would say it is a tradition along with the oral tradition, and that these things, we would say, fundamentally, their tradition or the tradition of the church destroys scripture as a ultimate authority, and therefore their church becomes the ultimate authority.

01:14:31

When you get to talking about infallibility of the Pope and basically an exegetical tradition that you must hold to regarding how you understand scripture, much of their argumentation of the

01:14:43

Mormons that we debated, much of their argumentation sounded Catholic as far as how they challenged our belief in social authority.

01:14:50

The answer, yes, we have done some, but not as much as we would like, though. And some of my family is

01:14:55

Catholic, so I'm Mexican, just in case you guys can't tell. And a lot of Hispanics tend to be Catholic.

01:15:01

So I have family who's Catholic, and it'll come up sometimes, especially when someone in the family dies, and now there's all these weird rituals happening and talk about purgatory.

01:15:16

And so I use that as an entrance to say, the two main disagreements, I think, that I would have with Roman Catholicism is the authority of scripture, which he already talked on, and then even being saved by grace alone.

01:15:30

They have all these sacraments and things you need to do that'll actually help justify you in front of God, that you can fall in and out of salvation.

01:15:40

And so those are two routes where I'm like, hey, if you even believe in the scriptures a little bit, the scriptures don't teach what the

01:15:46

Roman Catholic Church is saying. And why do you believe that so -and -so is in purgatory right now?

01:15:51

Like, that's not a biblical concept. So there's some similarities, just because anytime you're dealing with somebody who you disagree with, usually it's gonna start at the root with the scriptures and the

01:16:02

Bible, and so they disagree with it. The Catholics have to do it. They'll say the magisterium, the Pope, look at that as to define what scripture is.

01:16:11

And so how do you know what you know is always the ultimate question. Yeah. Absolutely. And by the way, the us

01:16:17

Protestants who hold the Sola Scriptura need to answer that question too, since that is a common attack upon Protestantism is

01:16:24

Sola Scriptura, how do you know that that's true? That's not, you don't get the golden index of the books of the

01:16:31

Bible. Maybe you can have me back on to talk about Sola Scriptura. I'd love to talk about that as well.

01:16:36

We'd love that. Yeah, that'd be great. Well, I'm really enjoying this conversation, and I would love to,

01:16:42

I mean, we're not done just yet, but I would love to have you guys back on if you would be okay with that.

01:16:48

All right, we got you on camera saying it. Huh, what was that? Sola Scriptura sounds great.

01:16:54

That's one thing that recently just has been more of like, it's been more,

01:17:00

I don't know if a passion is the right way to say it, but I've just loved it more. And you're right, we do need to have answers. What books, why are they in there?

01:17:09

Obviously the term Sola Scriptura is not used in scripture, but where does that idea come from? That's a scripture of the highest authority, so it's essential.

01:17:16

Yeah, awesome. And I'm also, I'll throw this out there, I'm actually gonna, we haven't set a date, but I'm actually gonna be having

01:17:23

Luke, is he one of the pastors there? Yeah, yeah. So I'll be having

01:17:29

Luke on in the future to talk about the importance of, Luke the Bear, if people are familiar with that, it would be a name there.

01:17:37

We'll be talking about the importance of doing apologetics within the context of the local church. So that's gonna be super interesting.

01:17:44

So we don't have a date yet, but he's confirmed with me, we'll set that up in the future. And hopefully one day I'll get

01:17:49

Jeff on. I know he's a super busy guy, but we'll see what happens. All right, so we have a comment here that I want you guys to speak to.

01:17:57

This is from Arthur Bear. The right interpretation is using scripture to interpret scripture. I agree with that.

01:18:02

And why don't you guys unpack what that means and why that's important? What does it mean to interpret scripture in light of scripture?

01:18:08

Sure. So scripture, what we understand is that scripture has an author -intended meaning, an author -intended interpretation.

01:18:18

And so there's ways to derive at this, right, hermeneutical practices to derive at what is true, dealing with context, dealing with who's speaking, dealing with audience, right?

01:18:29

But ultimately, if scripture is not interpreted within the confines and context of scripture, you get to, you can begin to allegorize scripture and meanings can kind of be floating in the air.

01:18:44

So there must be something that grounds meaning. If all of scripture is God -breathed, if it's not just sola scriptura, but tota scriptura, all of it's

01:18:52

God -breathed, that means that gives us the ability to cross -reference and come to understandings of things maybe that are less clear from things that are more clear.

01:19:00

But all of it is the word of God, and therefore it is all reliable and all infallibly true. And so our conclusions must rest there.

01:19:07

There are many issues within Protestantism and evangelicalism where there are difference of opinions and different interpretations, right?

01:19:14

That doesn't mean that someone isn't right. It just means there isn't a consensus on it, and that's not what we're claiming.

01:19:20

But on the essential truths, and this is what we kept pressing during the debate, the essential truths can be known from scripture.

01:19:26

The essential truths are held throughout the church, right? We recognize these things. We're a

01:19:31

Reformed Baptist, there's Presbyterians, we have issues of covenant theology and administration of ordinances, things like that.

01:19:37

But as far as the essential truths, nature of scripture, destroying God, salvation by grace alone, those things we can know infallibly because they're spoken clearly in scripture.

01:19:46

Yeah. And I mean, it comes to the idea of hermeneutics, recognizing that it is all of scripture, that when whoever wrote

01:19:56

Hebrews wrote Hebrews, they had a theology behind them, right? They were opinions of Old Testament.

01:20:01

If you've never read Old Testament and you try to go to Hebrews, good luck, right? You come up with some wack theology.

01:20:08

So the idea is there's a collective, there is a collective message in all of scripture that it's cohesive, that it's one message.

01:20:17

Of course, different authors have different intents and different purposes and writing at different times, different audiences, all that is important to help recognize what the scriptures are saying, but you use all of God's word.

01:20:31

To help enlighten or to help interpret other passages. Yeah, excellent. Very good.

01:20:37

The sire asks, who do you think is the best Mormon apologist? So in terms of Mormons defending

01:20:43

Mormonism, who do you think is the best representative, best defender of Mormonism in as much as they, there are people who try to defend their position and they do it more systematically and they try to be more conscious and consistent in the way they do it.

01:20:59

So for example, a scholar or a theologically informed

01:21:04

Mormon is probably gonna have more refined answers than say generic

01:21:10

Mormon you see on the street. So is there anyone that sticks out in your mind as to like, yeah, we disagree with them, but he kind of knows his stuff and he can give a

01:21:20

Christian pretty good challenge unless you really know your stuff very well. Yeah, Alma Allred, Pastor James's debate, or they've had discussions that are recorded on YouTube.

01:21:33

They haven't had official debates. I think - What's his name? Alma Allred. Alma Allred. You can,

01:21:39

I know it's hard to spell. You can type up James White debate

01:21:45

Mormonism. It'll be one of the ones that come up. Kwaku L, he's not a good representative of Mormonism, but his name's

01:21:53

Alma Allred. He's in Utah. He's an older gentleman. He's theologically sharp, what he believes in.

01:22:01

Like he can at least say, hey, this is what I believe, this is what I don't believe. He knows the history of the church. Him and James have been talking for years actually.

01:22:09

So he's one of them for sure. 35, 30 years or something like that. I think

01:22:14

Alma, as far as like best, that's a hard thing to say because obviously we do disagree with it.

01:22:19

I think as far as his comprehensive knowledge of what Mormonism is and trying to be consistent within that framework, then

01:22:27

I would say he's probably the best guy that we've seen. And Kwaku L is pretty popular, although he's not the best representative.

01:22:37

What's the deal with him? Why do you think he's not a good representative?

01:22:43

Because a lot of people seem to think of him in terms of like someone who's out there engaging

01:22:49

Protestants and things like that. Well, he has that personality for sure. He's out there and I give him credit for that.

01:22:56

The fact that he's willing to step in to those places and have those debates, it's just admirable that you're willing to do that.

01:23:02

But the problem is he'll say things that your prophets don't say or you know that's just not historically true.

01:23:10

He'll say things. When I've seen him debate, I've seen him not really concerned with truth, more of I'm here to kind of make a stand and to show myself and to say things that sound nice, but you just do a little bit of research and you're like, that's not even credible.

01:23:28

Why are you believing those things? Why are you saying those things and teaching them as if they're Mormon doctrine? So he's just,

01:23:35

Mormons themselves would have problems with him. Okay, all right. Arthur Bear has another question.

01:23:41

Could you guys discuss the Mormon view of repentance? From what I understand, they also have a different view of repentance among other things.

01:23:47

Thanks. So one thing here is essentially they're universalists.

01:23:54

Essentially they believe that Christ, his death will start in Gethsemane, that the atonement covers everyone, right?

01:24:01

There's three levels of heaven, right? Three levels of exaltation. This is funny, didn't mention this earlier, but when you said the lady that you know, she says, we believe in one

01:24:11

God. Well, one central theme in Mormonism is reality of exaltation.

01:24:17

The whole process is to become a God. So that's another area to kind of question her in, is like, that's a central theme.

01:24:24

When Joseph Smith is saying that, he's saying you must learn to become gods, like all God before you.

01:24:29

That's interesting. But essentially they're universalists. They do have a concept of hell, which is like outer darkness, which

01:24:36

I think not a lot of people go there. I think like apostate Mormons go there, and I'm not sure if anyone else does. But essentially they're universalists.

01:24:43

And even for us, they would say we would go to the lesser kingdom. So the concept of repentance cannot be in any way, shape or form represent that which is in scripture, because essentially all sins are covered.

01:24:56

It's just what level of exaltation, what kingdom you enter in after, and that has to do with your works, right?

01:25:02

Your acts in the temple, things like that. Okay, excellent. Thank you for that. D Otero says, can a valid argument be made against Mormonism to point out the lack of archeological and historical evidence with regards to the story told in the

01:25:17

Book of Mormon? Yeah, I mean, yeah, the claims made about that Joseph makes about Jesus and America and all this stuff, it's just not historically true.

01:25:31

And you can tell Joseph was just making things up on the fly. We can go back and look at these things.

01:25:38

So the way that argument would be valid is if you're talking to a Mormon and you're saying, hey, is this the prophet that you really wanna follow?

01:25:47

The prophet that you wanna ground all your beliefs in, like we said earlier, that the idea is if his vision in the garden is true, then everything else is true, but if it's false, then it's not.

01:25:58

And so you can look at things like the character of Joseph Smith, how he was arrested, how he was known by people in his community as not a good person.

01:26:06

People, they would say he was a deceiver. He would tell good stories, but they were fake. And you see that played out in his theology when he makes things up that there's no evidence for these things.

01:26:16

And it's cool that as Christians, we can actually look at evidence and say, oh, we found all these biblical cities, right?

01:26:24

We found all these evidences that the Bible said this was the case. And we go and we do studies and we dig archeology and we're like, oh, it was true.

01:26:32

But not that we needed it, but it points to something to say, hey, the fact that Joseph was making these claims and none of them can be justified should concern you.

01:26:41

Right, so we would hold to scripture as true based upon God's word, but because it's true, it's manifested in reality.

01:26:48

It's manifested in history. It's manifested in the history of the church, archeological history, all of those things.

01:26:55

But when you're dealing with Mormonism, just one example is the main scripture edition of scripture.

01:27:02

You don't have anything even remotely like that with Mormonism. The evidence of the first vision would be where are the gold tablets at?

01:27:09

Moroni took them, right? So there is no evidence. You have to rest all of your belief on Joseph and his character.

01:27:17

And it asks not whether or not he's telling the truth. You have these gold plates that are massive. It's like could someone even carry those things?

01:27:23

Like there's so many problems there that I don't see Mormons often going, they don't often go that route when they're trying to validate the belief in scripture.

01:27:32

That's why I think it's much more of a personal revelation and less that has anything to do with archeology because I think that's very hard to defend that for them.

01:27:39

And real quick, real quick, I know we're going long on this question, but just throwing that, we're presuppositionists, so you can use this argument, but you have to know that they also have presuppositions even if they don't acknowledge them.

01:27:51

So if you're talking to a Mormon and you bring this up, they're gonna interpret all the evidence or lack of evidence in light of their presupposition.

01:27:59

So this could be something good to point out, but you have to just be aware that this may not be a problem for everybody because somebody's gonna say, that's fine.

01:28:07

Even if it's not there, I'm presupposing that what Joseph said was true, that he's actually a prophet from God. He restored the gospel.

01:28:13

And so I don't care about the lack of evidence. Non -believer doesn't have a problem with inconsistencies. Well, you just said,

01:28:19

Daniel, in passing, you said, well, can someone even carry those tablets? Well, I mean, if a

01:28:25

Mormon wants to say, he's like, well, God could empower him to carry them. So, you know, I mean, if that's his presupposition, they could take that and interpret in light of the presupposition.

01:28:36

So I think that's why it's important to really attack at that foundational level. And when we say attacking,

01:28:42

I mean, if a Mormon's watching, and we don't mean it in kind of a pejorative sense. I mean, we love Mormons. We want them to hear the true gospel.

01:28:50

They think we're wrong. We think they're wrong. Let's come together and have a conversation about it, right?

01:28:55

It's not that we hate Mormons, but we disagree with the theology and we think there are important issues to address.

01:29:00

So that's really the spirit with which we're approaching these issues. Marlon Wilson has a question here.

01:29:08

What are you guys, what are your thoughts? Well, I don't know if I should take this question because Marlon is misbehaving.

01:29:19

Let's put up Marlon's other comments, okay? I hope he's watching right now. He posted this a little while ago.

01:29:26

This is in reference to Daniel's legit, awesome sweater. Look what he says here.

01:29:32

No, that sweater is ugly. Bro, come on, man. That is not an ugly sweater.

01:29:38

That's not right. That is not right. He's missing out. He doesn't understand. That's heresy, bro.

01:29:44

That's heresy. He's falling on dangerous territory. That's right.

01:29:51

Okay, now we gotta preach the gospel to Marlon now because, oh, yeah, okay. All right, here's his question.

01:29:57

We can do it by watching Star Wars because Star Wars is full of gospel parallels, yeah.

01:30:03

The Chosen One, being redeemed. Got the charismatic gifts. Got the charismatic gifts to yield to Marlon.

01:30:10

We can make room for it. That's what's up right there. Okay, Marlon says, what are you guys' thoughts on Mormonism and justice?

01:30:16

Is the God of Mormonism a God of justice? I think the God of Mormonism is arbitrary, right?

01:30:25

Is entirely arbitrary. And the reason why I would say that is because our God is the very standard of justice, right?

01:30:32

So he doesn't appeal to something outside of himself to derive at what is just and what is unjust.

01:30:39

But their God exists within a order where eternal law is above him.

01:30:45

So when I say the God is arbitrary, the question is what it comes down to if your

01:30:52

God must abide by a standard and you're saying he has the ability to sin, right?

01:30:58

That's what they would say. He has the ability of sin. By nature, your God is not infallible, right? He can make mistakes.

01:31:04

He can sin, right? And therefore, I think that that's a God that's untrustworthy. I don't think that we can trust his sense of justice because he is not the standard of justice.

01:31:13

They say, well, if he sinned, if he sinned, he would cease to be God. If your God would cease to be

01:31:19

God because of his capability of sinning, I say that's not a God to trust. Do not think you can trust what he determines to be just or unjust.

01:31:26

Because he could be lying and you've already admitted that, right? We believe in the justice of our God because he is the very standard of justice.

01:31:33

All right. Yeah, how do you know that God is good? Because he says so? Right. If he's able to sin, then how do you know he's not lying and being deceptive?

01:31:42

That's a great point. That's one of the big problems that I hope people are catching is one of the big differences between us and Mormons is we make a creator creation distinction that they would not make.

01:31:55

The Mormons that we debated told us this when we did a podcast. They believe they're ontologically the same as God right now.

01:32:03

Yeah, right. There's not a creator creation distinction. So when we say God is holy, we mean something completely different than they mean when they say

01:32:12

God is holy. When they say God is holy, they mean God is like me. He's just better. Bigger and better.

01:32:18

Yeah, he's just exalted. When we say God is holy, we mean he's completely other. He's different.

01:32:23

And this is why justice derives itself from the triune God. This is why God as creator defines what is justice.

01:32:31

And you have the psalmist who says, all your statutes are right and just. It's because he's

01:32:36

God. He's the eternal God. And so they don't make that same distinction so their

01:32:42

God wouldn't be able to be just the way the triune God is. At most you can hope that he's just, but you wouldn't invalidly know that he's just.

01:32:50

Sure. Excellent. Here's the last question from Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob says, hey,

01:32:56

Eli, question for the guys. I have a Mormon father -in -law who is fairly postmodern, but very culturally

01:33:02

Mormon. He thinks we're all the same. What is some good food for thought for him?

01:33:10

Go ahead. Yeah. You could point him to the words of Joseph Smith himself.

01:33:16

So look up the first vision. And in the first vision, Joseph, I'm gonna summarize it.

01:33:22

He's praying. He's asking God, which church should I join? And apparently according to Joseph, God told him to join none of them, that their creed are abomination, that all their professors are corrupt.

01:33:36

And you have to tell your father -in -law that would include Christians. Like if I was alive in Joseph's time, that would be me.

01:33:43

Because I believe the same things they believe. So in terms of us all being the same, point your father -in -law to say,

01:33:50

Joseph didn't even believe that. This is why in 1st Nephi 14, it says there are only two churches.

01:33:56

There's only two. There's the true church. And if you don't belong to the true church, you're a part of the church of the devil.

01:34:02

So you can point him to that and say, your prophets have taught historically that because I don't belong to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

01:34:11

Saints, I'm not part of the true church. So the question is not, is there a difference between us?

01:34:16

The question is, what is the difference? And take your father -in -law to passages about Jesus being the creator of all things.

01:34:26

That's gonna be a key one. And tell your father -in -law, say, hey, go ask your bishop, did

01:34:33

Jesus create Lucifer? And then tell your father -in -law to read John 1, Hebrews 1, and Colossians 1.

01:34:40

And how does he reconcile that? And let him wrestle with the scriptures. That's my advice would be.

01:34:45

Just to add to that really quick. I think what Daniel was saying here is, so when we were putting this debate together, that there was something interesting happened.

01:34:58

When we created the flyer, we put Christians, and did we put Christians and Mormons on the flyer?

01:35:04

And we get so much flack for that. We get so much flack for that from the Mormon community.

01:35:09

And what's funny about that is, that distinction was first made by Joseph Smith. He made that distinction.

01:35:17

He separated his branch of what you, we wouldn't call it

01:35:23

Christianity, but the restoration of the gospel. He purposely separated that from the rest of Christianity.

01:35:29

So why are we being more faithful to your prophet in that sense than you are? He said that, and we're just saying, yeah, you're right.

01:35:36

There is a distinction. We recognize that you guys are different from us, but now in this post -modern culture, it's all about synchronism.

01:35:44

It's all, we're all the same, we're all Christians. Why are we fighting? Why don't we unite? There is no uniting, because fundamentally, we believe two different things.

01:35:51

We believe in two different Jesus. We believe in two different canons. We believe the nature of God is different. So there is nowhere to unite, right?

01:35:59

So as far as these things being the same, or us all being the same, that couldn't be further from the truth on our side as well as on their side.

01:36:07

Yeah, right. And Dr. Bob, you can also ask your father -in -law, ask him, is your baptism and is your marriage valid even though it wasn't sealed in the temple?

01:36:18

And the Mormons will say, without the proper priesthood, your marriage isn't valid.

01:36:24

You're not married. Your baptism, you're not married, and your baptism isn't valid either because you need the proper priesthood, which is what

01:36:31

Joseph was teaching, the restoration, we have the priesthood again. So that could be another helpful question to ask your father -in -law, or have your father -in -law ask a leader in the church.

01:36:42

Would my son's baptism, or my son's marriage with my own daughter, would it be valid if it wasn't sealed in the temple?

01:36:49

And so that way he can see that you're not making this up, that they are actually the ones saying there is a distinction here.

01:36:57

Right. And we are too. Yes, yes. But they are also. Right, right, right.

01:37:02

Well, and here's what we're not saying too is, while it's true that there's no agreement, there's no possibility of unity on that level.

01:37:10

Again, that doesn't mean that we don't love the Mormons, right? Oh, absolutely. That's not what we're saying.

01:37:17

I want any Mormon who's listening to this to hear that. It's because we love you that these disagreements need to come out, and we need to talk about those things.

01:37:27

So gentlemen, I would like to thank you profoundly. This was really enjoyable.

01:37:32

And not only is the topic of great interest, but you guys are fun to hang out with and talk with.

01:37:38

And so I appreciate and I hope that this is the beginning of doing other things together.

01:37:44

I would really love to connect with you guys again, if you wouldn't mind, so. Yeah, Eli, we appreciate you and your work in the ministry.

01:37:52

We do. So we've known about you before you knew about us. For sure. For sure. That's awesome. Well, we'll get you back on in the future to talk about Sola Scriptura, but I'm sure we'll connect before that.

01:38:04

Maybe we can exchange contact info and we can stay connected even behind the scenes.

01:38:10

I'd love to get to know you guys a little more. So would you like to say anything in parting as we conclude this episode to our audience?

01:38:18

If you wanna say anything to encourage Christians and to challenge any Mormons who might be watching?

01:38:25

For the Christians, constantly check your heart. Love the

01:38:31

Mormons. And out of concern that they've been deceived, that they've bought into a false gospel, let that be your motivation in going.

01:38:40

Paul says that we're ambassadors of Christ, pleading with them to be reconciled to their

01:38:45

God. This is their creator who created them and they're deceived. So as much as there's a bunch of good information to get familiar with, there's a bunch of good scriptures to get familiar with,

01:38:57

I have to constantly, as we go out every other Sunday and we stand in front of the Lord and we see them walking, is

01:39:03

I have to love these people and I have to pray, God, let my heart break for them. Don't let me come out with just an attitude of being contentious, right?

01:39:13

Sometimes it's good to be contentious in love, but if I'm here just to argue, just to win a debate, just to say, hey, look at everything

01:39:20

I memorized, look at how Joseph's wrong, it doesn't do anything if you're not reminded of where you were before the grace of God.

01:39:29

Yeah, and just to add to that, I mean, Paul even tells us about this. Some piece of gospel, it's from a place of vanity.

01:39:37

It's a place to show off, to show intellect, to show a greater understanding in this area or that area.

01:39:43

Like my brother said, this is about love. So while we are coming to throw down strongholds and to destroy worldviews, we're also coming to embrace these individuals with love.

01:39:53

Without love, this wouldn't be possible, right? I mean, we give up our Saturday nights, right? We have families, we give up Sunday mornings, we give up time with people that we love to go reach out to people that we love.

01:40:04

And it's very important for us and it's very important for Christians, I think in general, to understand that we are going out to rescue people who are suffering at the hands of false gospels or suffering in false religions, right?

01:40:18

This is not a war against individuals. The war is against falsehood, right? We are ambassadors of truth.

01:40:25

There is falsehood out there and we wanna go rescue people from the grasp of those false religions and so.

01:40:32

Snatch them from the fire. Exactly, yeah. Well, thank you so much, gentlemen. If you wanna, real quick, tell people,

01:40:37

I know you guys have a YouTube channel yourself, if you wanna share that with folks real quick. Yeah, yeah, so we have a podcast and a

01:40:46

YouTube channel, Two Witnesses Podcast, where we talk about a lot of these issues. The heart of it is really evangelism, apologetics, and reaching out in the public square, like I said, pressing the crown rights of Jesus Christ, going out and loving your neighbors with the gospel.

01:41:01

If we as Christians believe the gospel is true, then there is nothing more loving than we could do than go preach it, right?

01:41:07

And that's where it comes down to. If you're a Christian, you need to be preaching the gospel. Not everybody needs to stand on a crate, right?

01:41:13

Not everybody needs to yell out the microphone, but you need to be giving the gospel to individuals that don't have it.

01:41:20

Well, thank you so much, guys. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for sending in your questions and sticking with us for an hour and 41 minutes.

01:41:28

I'm so sorry if that was longer than you expected. No, you're good. Hey, thank you, Eli, for having us. We appreciate it.

01:41:34

We learned a few things. Bye, man, it was a great time. We appreciate it. It's been an honor and a pleasure, guys. Well, that's it for this episode, guys.

01:41:40

This will, I haven't updated the podcast in a while, but it will be updated. So just over the weekend,

01:41:46

I'll upload this conversation as well as the previous one that I had on the other night, and it'll be available there.

01:41:52

So things have been a little busy on my end, so I'll make sure. I know there are folks who don't really have the opportunity to watch the

01:41:57

YouTube videos. They like to watch it on the, listen to the podcast. So I'll definitely update and upload those things for you guys.