The founder of the Baptist Church in America, Roger Williams, just prior to leaving the church he established, said this: “There is no regularly constituted church of Christ on earth, nor any person qualified to administer any church ordinances; nor can there be until new apostles are sent by the Great Head of the Church for whose coming I am seeking.” (Picturesque America, p. 502.) Martin Luther had similar thoughts: “Nor can a Christian believer be forced beyond sacred Scriptures,...unless some new and proved revelation should be added; for we are forbidden by divine law to believe except what is proved either through the divine Scriptures or through Manifest revelation.” He also wrote: “I have sought nothing beyond reforming the Church in conformity with the Holy Scriptures. The spiritual powers have been not only corrupted by sin, but absolutely destroyed; so that there is now nothing in them but a depraved reason and a will that is the enemy and opponent of God. I simply say that Christianity has ceased to exist among those who should have preserved it.” The Lutheran, Baptist and Church of Jesus Christ (LDS) churches recognize an apostasy from early Christianity. The Lutheran and Baptist churches have attempted reform, but Mormonism (and Roger Williams, and perhaps Martin Luther) require inspired restoration, so as to re-establish an unbroken line of authority and apostolic succession.
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If Joseph Smith taught a number of esoteric doctrines that were unknown to have existed in the early church during his time, but which research and uncovered documents (during the 1950 to 1970 period) now show were part of early Christianity, one has to conclude that he was inspired of God. Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom, wrote a book called The American Religion, in which he writes of Joseph Smith: “I can only attribute to his genius or heavenly intervention his uncanny recovery of many elements in ancient Jewish theurgy [xxvi] that had ceased to be available either to Judaism or to Christianity, and that had survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly.” The Church which Joseph Smith restored is the original Church of Christ, as revealed in the many documents of the first three centuries after Christ .
‘The Church’ is not an institution such Mormonism proclaims their being ‘the only true church’. The Church is a spiritual entity composed of those who have the earnest of an inheritance, a ‘speck’ as it were of the Holy Spirit of God in their human spirit, making their spirit alive forever more. Mormonism is all about the institution established by the sexual predator of married women, liar and conman, Joseph Smith. Yes, that institution has had some refinements since Smith ‘passed on’, but it is still absolutely not The Church. Playing games with wrods and phrases, focusing attention upon the vagaries of institutions will not redeem the smithian blasphemies at the heart of Mormonism.