Veritate - Christianity "Amish, Mennonites, Puritans" and the Questions

Veritate - Christianity "Seventh Day Adventist" and the Questions

On October 22, 1844, tens of thousands of people waited for the end of the world. The sun went down and nothing happened. They called it the Great Disappointment, and out of it came the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This episode follows the evidence from that failed date to the doctrine built to bury it. William Miller did the math, got it wrong, and did the honest thing and admitted it. The men who came after him took his failed date, invented a vision in a cornfield, and called it the investigative judgment, a doctrine that Hebrews dismantles in a single line and that the Adventists' own leading scholar could not defend. We trace the Saturday Sabbath argument they aim at the Catholic Church, the one that quietly proves the very authority it tries to destroy, and we examine what they teach about the dead and what Christ actually said. Then we reach the question that holds the whole church up. Every Adventist doctrine runs back to one person, Ellen White, a prophetess claiming the authority to bind a church. Scripture gives women the gift of prophecy. It gives no woman the office of an apostle, the office Christ made male and the Church has guarded for two thousand years. That leaves two doors, and both lead out. Under all of it sits one promise. Christ said the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church. If that is true, the Church never failed, and the prophetess who came to rescue it was rescuing something that was never lost. Christ did not die for your opinion. He died for His Church.

Veritate - Christianity "Church of Christ" and the Questions

In the hills of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina there are communities where two separate traditions both claim to have restored the original church. One has a cappella singing and meets in a plain building on Sunday morning. The other built the world's largest Ten Commandments on the side of a mountain in Murphy, North Carolina. A woman named Mamaw Margie attended one and loved the other without knowing they were different traditions making the same claim. She was not confused. She was looking for God. The Restoration Movement said: strip away every denomination, every creed, every tradition added by men, and follow the New Testament alone. No creed but Christ. No book but the Bible. No name but Christian. The question worth asking is not whether that impulse was sincere. It was. The question is whether a blueprint without an architect holds the building together.

Veritate - Christianity "Amish, Mennonites, Puritans" and the Questions

The most disciplined Christians in America do not have the sacraments. They do not have apostolic succession. Several of them deny things the Church has taught since the first century. And they will outlast most of the parishes you drive past on a Sunday morning. Three traditions, three separate centuries, three different countries of origin. Most people cannot tell them apart. A horse and buggy in Etowah, Tennessee. A tour group at the Lost Sea that was not what they appeared to be. A tourist in an airport calling someone in plain dress a Puritan. Three moments that took years to understand. This episode runs the same test on all three.

Veritate - Christianity "LDS" and the Questions

They are the most likeable people who will ever knock on your door. Young, clean-cut, two by two, name tags straight, genuinely warm. Before I became Catholic I had real conversations with Mormon missionaries and they were some of the most pleasant exchanges I had with anyone representing a religious tradition. Then I told one of their members I was a 32nd degree Freemason and needed the whole story, not just the Book of Mormon but everything. He handed me the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. I opened them. I recognized what I was looking at. Because I had taken the same obligations, learned the same grips, and worked through the same degrees that Joseph Smith received in March 1842, five weeks before he introduced the temple endowment ceremony. Joseph Smith taught that God was once a man, that men can become gods, and that the entire Christian church apostatized after the apostles, leaving no valid Christianity on earth for 1,800 years. He translated the Book of Mormon by placing a stone in a hat. His Doctrine and Covenants contains Section 132, which commands plural marriage as an everlasting covenant and is still in the canon. It contains Section 84, which promises a temple in Independence, Missouri in that generation. The temple has never been built. Moses said one false prophecy disqualifies a prophet. Paul said the angel who delivered the whole enterprise is accursed. And on June 27, 1844, Joseph Smith died at Carthage Jail raising his hands and beginning the Masonic Grand Hailing Sign of Distress. He never finished it. Nobody came. This episode follows the evidence.

Veritate - Christianity "Jehovah's Witnesses" and the Questions

Before I became Catholic, I could not tell the difference. Two Jehovah's Witnesses would leave my door and I had heard something about Jesus, something about the Bible, something about a better world coming. It sounded like everything I had already heard from the Baptists down the street. That was not an accident. They are fluent in a language most Americans already half-speak, and they have replaced what every word means underneath. They are organized, they are committed, and they are knocking on your door in a country where half the population has already decided they do not need organized religion. The question is not whether they are sincere. They are. The question is whether what they believe is true. Jehovah's Witnesses are not Protestant. They share no historical connection to the Reformation. Their Christology was condemned as heresy at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, twelve hundred years before Luther existed. They use a Bible produced by anonymous translators to support conclusions already reached. They answer to a Governing Body that claims to be God's sole channel of truth on earth, predicted the end of the world in 1925 and again in 1975, and told the members who sold their homes and skipped having children that they had believed too completely. This episode follows the evidence on who they are, where they came from, and what they actually believe when they knock on your door.