Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Important info about Harriet Miers' religion

She's a restorationist, which is focused on trying to return Christianity to its original primitive roots.

In a sense, I'm a restorationist too, except that I believe that Christ did this by restoring the same organization, authority and doctrines as were taught in the primitive church by calling a new prophet, Joseph Smith, whom he called, like Samuel, as a boy and trained him up, and giving additional and clarifying revelations, through which the Church was restored. New apostles were called, and the church is lead by Christ himself through prophecy and inspiration, just as the early church was lead by Peter, James and John. The apostles were not succeeded by bishops who did not have the kind of general jurisdiction over the whole church that they, the apostles, did. When they were taken away, the power of revelation was taken from the church because it was drifting into apostasy and not following their teachings. Without that, the true church was no longer there and it was taken over by scholastics and powermongers who rode it to the splits that we see in it today.

Going to the website of the Valley View Christian Church, and checking its articles of faith, I find them to be standard protestant doctrine descended from the Nicean Creed and the doctrines of salvation by grace alone. I don't believe in the three-in-one-person idea of God, because it doesn't make sense with the Bible and other revelation, and it smacks of Greek philosophy and mystic ideas about immaterial, omnipresent objects of worship. I find such things to be difficult to imagine, understand or pray to. If God exists at all, he is a person who created human beings in his own image, and Jesus, being resurrected, looks like him and is one with him in the sense that he prayed for his apostles to be one, even as he and the Father are one (John 17). All this proves, though, is that you can't restore something which has been lost without going to back to the original source. It seems clear from the multiplicity of Christian sects that the Bible is not sufficient to explain itself to us. Surely a God who was willing to speak to mankind in the past would not leave us without better guidance today if we ask him to give it.

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