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Dec 22, 2022·edited Dec 22, 2022

Quite an enjoyable meandering thru histories, both personal and theological. The anecdote on your recent conversations with Mormons made me wish I were in your study with a glass of lemonade myself. It also matches my own experience with their missionaries, years ago in my single days. I welcomed them in, and I'd wager we talked more on orthodoxy than mormonism that day.

It will be a lifelong interest to me I think, how my own growing up orthodox rather than evangelical or "Murica'cian"(improv. Might keep using) has affected my own worldviews and perspectives.

I grew up absorbing a superior attitude(which no one necessarily told me directly, but it was in the air), which once I became aware of as an adult I grew to abhor.

"I'm orthodox. Its the oldest church, so its the right one. We celebrate Christmas on a different day". These are things I definitely thought and said as a child. While I do not think you, or many other members of the church, actively feel this way, those who do are an unfortunate deterrent to converts on the fence in my opinion. Its also just a narrow minded way to view religions.

My current views are agnostic, and I need some time to develop and examine them as well as other aspects of my self before my next iteration arrives. Orthodoxy, while almost infinitely deep in history, beauty, and interesting theology, can also fit into rigid, non questioning, rule following mentality. Perhaps any religion can. I am well aware and respectful of the amount of knowledge you and others I know have regarding the Church. Unfortunately, in my teenage and adult time in it, I more often than not was simply going through the motions. And there are plenty of "motions". Each with meaning and purpose I paid no mind to. There a number of reasons I drifted away, but this is probably the most profound and that which took the longest to acknowledge.

No one lied to me.

No one abused my trust.

No one traumatized me.

These are so often the case I find in people leaving religions.

No. I simply lost interest, and kept going anyway. Holding on to structure. Rules. "Truth".

I know now that I need to put in work to find my way. Hard work, using mental muscles I let atrophy most of my life. Its no one in the churches fault I left, and none of them could coax me back. I have my path to follow, and I'm working on finding a map.

All that aside, Im very glad I still am in touch with you, and will always enjoy and value your writing and perspective. Hopefully 2023 will feature a meet up for coffee or a beer. Happy holidays!

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I was enjoying your ramble very much even before you gave me a shout-out. "Favorite aggregator" for you will carry me through the day with a warm glow.

Those Baptists you're thinking of are Landmark Baptists.

You've apparently read somewhat more widely on this than I have, but I had also come to the conclusion that the difference between Protestant Restorationists and Mormons is much less than the Restorationists care to admit. Indeed, I inveigh against Evangelicalism more than against Protestantism these days because the latter is older, and saner, than the Evangelicalism I partook of in my mis-spent youth, none of which seemed to go further back than the burnt-over district.

Its roots in the same soil as (much? most?) American Evangelicalism is one of the reasons I cannot just write off Mormonism as a "cult" as in the Walter Martin Kingdom of the Cults. The other is that, despite Joseph Smith's yarn about angelic revelations that all the early 19th-Century denominations were full of hooey, Mormons increasingly (and bafflingly) want to be considered simply Christians along with all those full-of-hooey folks. Some of them will take offense if you deny them that.

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Thanks for this perspective on the Restoration movement - I came out of the “Instrumentalist” church of Christ congregations (although some of my family were non-Instrumentalists). So much of this feels so similar to my experience growing up. I recall one otherwise quite learned New Testament prof at a Bible college of this tradition consistently asserting “scripture interprets scripture” as a hermeneutic with much passion but not with a lot more nuance about what that meant or how it was to be applied … something begs many questions. I recently watched a program about the Reformation and Old Order Amish and was struck (again) at the common narrative of Anabaptist and Amish history of the early church that is almost the same as the Restoration movement although they do not share a fully common origin.

I am eternally happy to have a love of history and to have encountered Hilary of Poitiers’ writings and to have encountered living eastern Christians from the Middle East who opened up new vistas of understanding and communion.

Be well and have a blessed Nativity my friend!

Eric John

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