It's a little disturbing to have a Mormon more open to engaging the text
than you do evangelicals.
There are a lot of Mormons out there who really liked my work
because I acknowledged the supernatural nature of the elohim in Psalm 82,
and they camp out there.
Okay.
The problem is; is that in Mormon theology, all the elohim are basically the same.
They don't have attribute distinction.
Remember, I said a few minutes ago,
Yahweh is an elohim, but no other elohim is Yahweh.
There's none like him, okay. He's different. He's the only omnipotent The only creator,
all this stuff.
And the other ones are denied those attributes in certain passages,
specifically and explicitly, they're not this.
But in Mormonism, you don't have that.
And this in Mormon theology God and Satan are brothers,
because they're both elohim.
Yeah.
You know, there's just this leveling that goes on and so,
you know, you need to know things like that when you're having conversations
with people who have alternative worldviews
or you know, alternative belief systems like that.
Because I think that example; why they would consider them brothers,
as a follower of you know, Jesus, it'd be easy to rail against them,
but they're actually taking it probably from more scripturally,
even though it's the wrong application, the wrong understanding,
they're actually getting that from Scripture.
They are. I'll tell you a little story, you know, this was before Unseen Realm was published,
I got sent something from, you know, somebody (just an email),
that said, "Hey, you need to go over to this forum.
There's somebody there defending your view of Psalm 82 and getting beaten up for it."
So I went over to this forum. And sure enough, you know, this guy, he's right,
you know, and he's getting pounded, so I just put a little thing in there, "hey, like,
this is what the text says, just don't freak out about it. Here's how to parse it."
And the next day, I got an email from the guy getting beaten up on.
He was a professor at BYU.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, he's a professor. And so we got into a conversation.
And I found out, I mean, I'm not going to drop any names. I'll protect this guy.
But I found out that annually, he goes to the theological meetings
of the evangelical theological society.
Really?
And I said, "Why do you do that? You're a Mormon."
And this is what he said, Okay. It was both shocking and affirming at the same time,
he said, "Look, because there's very few of us over here, in Mormonism,
that really do Biblical Studies. We depend on you guys."
So he goes every year, and I told him, "Well, you're in luck this year,
because I'm going to read a paper on Psalm 82. I'm going to critique Mormonism."
He goes, "I'm gonna be there."
That's crazy.
And he was, he was. And that led to him, he enjoyed the paper so much.
He said it just gave him a lot to think about.
That is what led to me being published.
I'm probably the only evangelical scholar in the world that has been published
in a Mormon journal, critiquing Mormonism.
That's amazing.
You can actually find that on the internet, I mean, I have it archived on my own site,
but I have an article that was published in a Mormon source,
critiquing Mormonism's use of Psalm 82. Just because of this guy.
That's crazy.
Yeah, but I mean, and the differences are very clear. They didn't fiddle with it at all.
But they just wanted the discussion. They just wanted somebody to engage the text.
And I think that's amazing. The humility, and then the courage
to actually uncover what the Scriptures are saying and...
It led to; I got I had a chance to talk to him. You know about the gospel.
We sat down for lunch. I've preached one sermon in the last 15 years or so,
it's easy to remember.
But I use this as an illustration for that sermon where I took this guy to lunch.
And the first question he asked, we asked the Lord's blessing over the food,
he looks at me, he goes, "Well, I'm a Mormon. And you're an evangelical, am I going to hell?"
Oh, wow, that's a great start.
That's a great start.
And I said, Look, the answer is the same, no matter what label you have.
Yeah.
If you can look me in the eye and say that you are depending exclusively
on what Jesus did on the cross, separated from any merit of your own
for any reason.
If that is your faith, then you're a believer.
You're gonna have eternal life.
You know, and he thought for a little while. He said, "I don't know,
I think I could say that, but I'll have to think about a little bit more." You know.
Yeah.
Like, he thought he could, but, you know, and I mean, I know enough about Mormonism
to know that they have their own parsing of the terms and all that kind of stuff.
But my greater point is it led to a discussion with this guy about the gospel.
Yeah.
You know, so I mean, what better outcome could you want?
And they believe in a supernatural. You know, they have a supernatural worldview
when it comes to the Scripture. I think that's important too. Because if we...
we need to talk about that because we've stripped the supernatural many times.
We have, and again, some people might not like me to say this,
but I'm going to use this illustration as a segue into this.
It's a little disturbing to have a Mormon more open to engaging the text
than you do evangelicals.
I mean, that was something
That's disturbing.
After the fact it's like, I just had this this conversation with this guy.
And we had this relationship develop and he came to my paper
even though I was going to shoot at, you know.
Yeah.
All this stuff. It's like here this guy is more willing to engage the text
than a lot of the people I know at this meeting
who I would agree with, theologically, on basically everything.