It's not always clear what is and isn't a cult, but thanks to the keen powers of discernment being exercised by the likes of Jordan Hall these days, those lines of demarcation are being illuminated more and more.
So now I know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints isn't a cult! Thanks Jordan!
Address: 50 N West Temple, Salt Lake City, UT 84150 (with a branch in my own community as well, at the corner of Elm and Lindsey!)
Year of origin: 1830
Head elder to whom to submit and under whose teaching to sit: Thomas S. Monson
Hooray for good discerning skills!
I can imagine how this conversation might have gone some time ago:
"Hey, early Christian in the year 84 AD! Tell me where your church meets and who your elders are!"
"Um, who are you?"
"CULT!!!!!!!!1111"
Speaking of which, Jordan's church has been around for ~30 years, and yet he likes to speak of individual visible local churches as though they were the institutions that Christ founded... ~2000 years ago. One can only guess at how Jordan thinks to resolve this -ahem- slight chronological discrepancy. It is doubtful that Jesus ever set foot in North America, still more doubtful that if He had, He spoke to a bunch of lily-white oilmen in the eastern Montana prairie, so as to found The Church Christ Founded® near Sidney, MT. So how does Jordan's church derive its authority to claim that it is The Church Christ Founded®?
One guesses it is because it was planted by someone else who had authority to plant churches (whatever that means; I'd like to see that notion derived from Scripture). But what about that planter? Was his church planted by someone who had authority to do so and how did he obtain the authority to plant churches? After all, Jordan is on record saying that Jesus gave the keys of binding and loosing to the church, by which Jordan means local churches and not the apostles or the invisible universal church.
So, presumably Jordan can trace the succession of church planters all the way back to Peter and the other apostles. I'd like to see that list. I guess it would be pretty long since his church was only founded ~30 years ago. That's around 1950 years, give or take, to account for! Yikes. And of course, one wonders what would set Jordan's own doctrine of apostolic succession apart from that of Rome or the Eastern Conciliarist churches. He'll say that they're antichrist and so they don't get to play, but who is he to make such an authoritative declaration?
This is what happens when you get addicted to authority rather than truth. Strangely, we've seen it in the Reformed camp, which should be the bulwark against Romanism, yet they have proven very susceptible to repeat one of Rome's main errors. Even more strangely, we've seen it from the likes of Jon Speed and of Jordan Hall, who pretty much hate each other. But all can unite and agree to hate abolitionists. We make all sorts of people uncomfortable. Like Jesus did.
But if one needed any further signal as to Jordan's instability, one need look little further than this post from April 2016, only five months ago, in which he said this:
"The podcast and Polemics Report, which takes hardly no time from me at all, for now will continue, at least until I tire of that, too. Everything else stops. Now. And I sleep well, having fought the fight. I fought it imperfectly. But I fought it. I’m pretty much done, now."
And yet here we find him enmeshed in a very extensive way in frequent social media accusations against abolitionists. Not that they actually share much real information; approximately 40% of the words he uses are "cult" or "cultist". He doesn't say much else. But the point is that he posts very frequently. It's like he never left. Or changed his mind radically in a few months' time. He was pretty much done. Now he isn't.
I pray his double-mindedness will cease, and soon.
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