Christianity Today (January 2009) captures my two favorite. (more…)

As local media concentrate on their top stories for 2008, let me throw in just one of mine for fun. (more…)

After spending the afternoon in John 14, it would be sin for me to reject Jesus’ words and believe in a modalistic god as some “evangelicals” do.  They are not obedient in their faith.

I must obey by believing what Jesus told his disciples, for he speaks to me during these last hours of 2008. 

I believe, Lord.

I believe.

Marsh, an associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, authored A Child is Born (CFI, 2008).

He writes unapologetically for the LDS Christmas story.

The very first page of the book put me in a foul mood when he described Jesus:

He was half mortal and half eternal (1).

I would like to share more quotes from this book later.  But let me conclude with this Christmas truth:

For unto us a child is born, unto us as son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder:  and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Merry Christmas to you all. 

Glory to God.

So thankful for the birth of Jesus Christ.

Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known.

– The Atlantic, December 2008

Hmm . . . I think the sexually preoccupied, the secularists, and the atheists are really having fun with the nuances in this book.  I wonder why . . .

• Artwork by Al Rounds
• Text by S. Michael Wilcox
• Published by Covenant Communications, Inc. (2008)

My first question:  Would Joseph Smith embrace postmodernism or pluralism? (more…)

Here is the post:  “Christians’ Rejection of the Bible.” (more…)

Susan Easton Black authored this book (Millennial Press, 2007).  It is part of a series.  With all the misinformation accessible to journalists, this series is suppose to provide truth.

I read the book.  Here are some interesting questions in the book.

Did Joseph Smith prophecy that members in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would be in the millions? (p. 31) (more…)

Join together our nation’s president and our nation’s pastor and you have even some stirring toward a great emergence in the new age.

But what do we do with all the critics?

And what do we do with LDS in the Great Emergence? (more…)

In the book, The Temple Where Heaven Meets Earth (Deseret Book, 2008), Truman Madsen writes:

In the Gospel of John we read that in an upper room Jesus said to Peter that the acceptance of the ceremonial washing of feet was essential.  Peter’s refusal would mean that “thou hast no part [elsewhere translated inheritance] with me” (John 13:8).  That is strong language.  Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible notes that this washing “was the custom of the Jews under their law; wherefore, Jesus did this that the law might be fulfilled” (JST, John 13:10).  Some scholars see this as a custom that Jesus replaced.  In the Restoration, the washing of feet is both a preface to and an echo of sacred temple rites, a proper prologue to Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17 (which is a prayer for unity of Master and disciple as well as of disciple and disciple), and an example of subservience by a true and suffering servant.  But it is more.  It was given that they might “be clean every whit,” a condition which apparently neither their faith nor their baptism had thus far fully achieved (127).

If you are going to be clean, according to Joseph, you had better be in your regional temple for washing.  Didn’t you know that is what Jesus was trying to teach on his last night with the disciples?  Never mind his repudiation of the temple system in the earlier part of John’s Gospel.

Secondly, Truman states emphatically,

Jesus, in the book of John, as well as in the epistles of John, bears God’s name to the point that He can say, “the Father and I are one” (John 10:30.  Does this mean their names are one?  The specific divine name that is assumed in these passages is a matter of controversy.  Perhaps it is the divine name in Exodus 3:14: “I am.”  But the Masoretic text can be read to mean “I will become what I will become.”  This is compatible with the view that Yahweh became the messianic figure of the New Testament.  But it is incompatible with the philosophical thesis that God is exclusively “being” without the dimension of “becoming” (148, emphasis mine).

Plato’s god?  Yes.  The Christian God?  No.