Follow-up to Spencer Kraus’s response to Jonathan Neville

In my last post, I shared an excellent response by Spencer Kraus to Jonathan Neville’s recent video interview.

Kraus has written a follow-up review in which he tackles this curious statement Neville made in the interview around the 21-minute mark:

For Christians in general they’ve kind of tended to see the Book of Mormon as separate from the Bible… I see it as sort of a fulfillment of the Bible, and something that was anticipated actually by people such as Jonathan Edwards, who talked about the future, glorious state of the Church, and he talked about how the word of the Lord would be prevailed [sic] throughout the world… The problem is, I think… it’s devolved to the point today where we use the Book of Mormon as a missionary tool, and that turns Christians off. Because if you go to a Christian and say “If you read this book and believe it’s true, you have to join our church,” they’re not going to read the book, or they’re going to look for ways to attack it.

I had an experience with a Christian, really great guy, we’ve become really good friends, and he said, “Yeah, I know the missionaries always told me to pray about this, and I’d get a good feeling about it, but of course I would because it contains so much of the Bible!” [chuckles]. He says, “That tells me that the Bible parts of the Book of Mormon are true, I have a spiritual witness of that, but it doesn’t say anything about the rest of the Book of Mormon.”

And then, so that’s an example of poor apologetics, I think, this whole idea that if you pray about the Book of Mormon, and you get a strong feeling that it’s true, you have to join the Church. I don’t think that was ever the intent. In fact, even in the Title Page it doesn’t say that. It says nothing about joining any church, it says to bring people to Christ.

Read Spencer Kraus’s dissection of Neville’s statement here:

“That They May Know the Covenants of the Lord”: A Response to Jonathan Neville Regarding the Book of Mormon and Missionary Work

—Peter Pan