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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1630 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 8, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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I don’t take this account literally. I don’t believe that Adam was real, which means I don’t believe that he was the first prophet of the “true gospel”. Because I don’t believe this part of the claim, the rest of it can only be interpreted symbolically or esoterically. The way I approach the idea of a “restored gospel” is informed by conversations I have had with intelligent Catholics and Orthodox, in which their account of what they actually believe about God and creation and the nature of the cosmos is so wrapped up in mysticism and symbolic reinterpretation and thousands of years of commentary by church leaders that it becomes totally impenetrable and incomprehensible. I do not want to have to sift through 2,000+ years of biblical hermeneutics in order to even begin to grasp God’s plan for my salvation. By clearing away those millennia of cruft and theological rabbit-holes, the LDS church can return to a reading of the Bible which embraces plain language and concepts that normal people can work with, while also building a High Church structure similar to Catholicism without all the historical baggage. It’s a sort of “post-Protestantism” that takes what works about Catholicism and Orthodoxy, discards what clearly doesn’t work, and allows for a 21st-century reinterpretation of Christianity.

I mean the problem with this approach is that the church fathers have written down things from the beginning. We have a pretty good idea of what they believed about the gospel, Christ, sacraments, church structure and so on. It does not match with Smith’s restoration. Ignatius of Antioch refers to Christ as God before we have a codified New Testament. There are references to bishops in early Christian texts, there are references to sacraments. The earliest known Christian catechism is the Didache, it’s pretty short and you can read it online. It’s not Mormon. There’s no mention of preexisting souls, God once being a physical being, or Christ and Lucifer being related, etc. it’s not present in the early church.

This makes even a metaphorical restoration nonsense.

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