Where Bible-believing Christians and LDS differ is over the concept of a "new direction", for whilst we accept that Yahweh continues to bring forth more light and truth from His Word, we do believe that involves a whole new priesthood system or concepts of authority which finds no warranty in the New Testament. Mormonism, as I perceive it, is a curious amalgam of Old and New Covenants with a heafty dollop of occultism stirred in. There has always been only a singular direction, from which men and institutions have undeniably deviated (and sometimes markedly), and which has always been present as Christ prophesied (when He said the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church, contradicted by the LDS claim of a universal apostacy), thus obviating the need of any formalistic/legalistic 'restoration'.

Apart from objections to a number of doctrines and the credibility of the angel/nephilim visits to Joseph Smith, it appears to me that what Mormonism has tried to to is initiate the millennial theocracy before its time under impossible conditions and without a visible all-powerful Regent, forcing the LDS Church to initially get around this problem by creating an independent Deseret State (a failure) and to crown Joseph Smith as a mortal King in Nauvoo (to be repeated by Young in SLC). The failure of this attempt was predictable, the many prophecies of LDS prophets/apostles of Smith and Young becoming US President, of the US Government being swept away by the Mormon theocracy, etc. being evidence enough that theb system was build on a false foundation. The cessation of the ordination of Kings and the Council of Fifty, the defeat of the LDS Church by the US Government forcing it to repeal polygamy, and its increasing secularisation and Americanisation are all moot witness. Indeed, it is the Mormon Church which has changed its own direction, and more than once, as it seeks to find its place as a failed theocracy within the wider world of competing religions. So whatever the "new direction" was that supposedly came through Mormonism's founding fathers, it has all but been discarded in favout of the more traditional Christian model of the New Testament which assumes that when Christ returns He will set everything in order. Recent "new new directions" (not to mention the "old" new ones cancelling a supposedly irreversible practice, polygamy, of allowing blacks into the priesthood before Young's time), reversing the previous "new direction" of allowing limited abortion (murder of the unborn), and a good number of other LDS U-turns, do not inspire confidence in the LDS theocratic system. Far better to accept what Christ taught that the Theocratic Kingdom was of the Miellnnium, and that the only Kingdom for THIS dispensation is the Kingdom within. For the New Covenant is, according to both the Testimony both of Jeremiah and the NT, a matter of supernatural activity beginning in the heart and working its way outwards, and not a matter of religious legalism and and outer 'authority' which belong to a future time when Christ reigns on earth as King. THEN Yahweh will restore his "judges and and all as at first", but not before. This is the dispensation of the house church, as it was in the New Testament period, not of the grand theocratic institution, and the apostolic witness of the current dispensation is not one of presiding over a giant organisation but of ministering to independent congregations.

I am, of course, sympathetic to the LDS vision of an ordered Kingdom but have learned through experience that the kind of Theocratic Order that is to come cannot be established here on earth without quenching the Spirit, inviting Priestcraft, and leading to spiritual tyrrany, notwithstanding all the best intentions in the world. The last 170 years of Mormonism have demonstrated the weakness and failure of such system-building through its ever evolving doctrine and practice to appease worldly politics (as with the removing of certain temple covenants between man and wife in order to be more politicall correct with feminism) and sensibilities (like admitting blacks to the priesthood and removing all the Masonic oathes of vengeance and blood-letting from the temple ceremony). Other legalistic 'authority-based' systems like Catholicism and the Jehovah's Witnesses have gone through the same meandering course. They simple don't work other than to maintain an air-tight system allowing for no further exploration that might upset the applecart for those who wish to challenge the restrictive paradigm imposed on them.

What happens when such matters are raised with the LDS is that everything ultimately reduces to 'authority' which, if there is disagreement with, requires the suspension of the thinking processes. You can explore, speculate and hypothesise WITHIN the artifically-contrived paradigm but not beyond. One is thus typically faced with the absurdity of fundamentalist Mormons arguing in support or the original doctrines of Mormonism for adherence to the original pre-U-turn LDS teachings and getting excommunicated for it. The paradigm is non-sensical, making truth a moving target and people accountable to only what is currently politically/doctrinally correct.

When you boil Mormonism down to its core ingredient, then, it becomes slavish obedience to the idea of the absolute authority of whoever is in command at any one point in time in terms of doctrine and practice. And this, according to Mormonism's own interpretation of Isaiah, is the way of Satan, who wished to compell everyone to follow a rigid way in order to be saved so that supposedly nobody would be lost.

I have debated with Mormons for many years (having been one myself once) and have discovered that discussing other theological issues is ultimately irrelevent because the Mormon platform is ALWAYS authority. So even if do prove yourself right from the scriptures, they will always come up with the fire-quencher that it is they, and they alone, who have authority. Any debates on theology are but temporary concessions in order to push people into the legalistic authority net.

I reject that net because I find no evidence of it anywhere in the New Testament. It belongs to an earlier system which has since passed away in Christ. It may not be a way of life that appeals to those who love and crave Order (I being one of those) but it is the "new direction" that Christ revealed, one requiring nothing less than a total reorientation thinking and behaving. As Paul revealed in Romans 6, we are baptised into Christ's death, which death represented the removal of the old system and the inauguration of a new one and into a "new way of living" (v.4, RBV) having very litte to do with the old rigid Mosaic system.

The "new direction" of the New Covenant in Christ was not simply taking the Old Covenant, with its priesthood, ordinances and systems, and adding Christ to it. Rebirth in Christ requires nothing less than a complete death to that sort of way of thinking and being. The whole thrust of the New Testament is that we learn to be free in Christ and to take personal responsibility for implementing the New Covenant Law which begins, not with an externally imposed authority by the laying on of hands, but by an authority working solely in sovereign grace from the inside out with outer ordinances such as baptism and the laying on of hands as symbols of the accomplished work of God and as visual testimony before witnesses that covenants have been made. THIS is the essential difference between Christianity and Mormonism. This is not to deny that the Body of Christ has no order, but that it is a voluntary association of those led and filled by the Spirit through a renewal of their inner man into associations or congregations which are then organised according to the apostolic tradition. But then Mormonim comes along, bringing with it many truths of Christianity, and one or two lost truths in addition (plus many false ones), and then resurrects a version of the old Mosaic system and calls it Theocracy by applying the conditions and practices yet to come. But in many ways it is worse than the old Mosaic one for it repudiates its own Standard Works of Scripture, saying that the sayings of the modern prophets superceed those that were said by their predecessors if their teachings are disjunctive or contradictory. This in turns FORCES people to deny what they previously believed in, even to the suppressing of conscience, and leads to a SLAVE MENTALITY. And it is THAT which, in my opinion, makes Mormonism satanic - not the individual pieces of truth about Christ, morality, family-centredness, etc. (all of which is praiseworthy in the highest degree) - it is the subjugation of the human spirit to the arm of flesh and to man-made systems - Babylon, in a word, but in a different, religious, Christian guise - a Babylon posing as an angel of restorative light. It creates an artificial illusion of security by placing people in a little box and saying that everything inside it is the truth and everything outside false ... though conceeding there may be smatterings of truth in the false. It creates an artifically contrived spiritual/emotional Comfort Zone reinforced by the constant repetition of parrotted testimony learned as a skill by small children and pawned off as the witness of the Holy Spirit, made to feel good by spontaneous emotionalism again pawning itself off as the Spirit. By constantly repeating the same things week after week people come to believe in it without questioning. By listening to human feelings / burnings in the bosom instead of applying the Word of God critically and faithfully, subjectivism takes over from reality and, by angelic/nephilim command, becomes THE way of determining .. not theology and practice, but LEGALISTIC AUTHORITY - it is the way the people fall into the net.

I am not, therefore, interested in the truth statements made by Mormonism (for there is much truth in it) but the system of spiritual oppression called legalistic authority, which has a nasty way of driving the nails of the false teachings into the heart of good conscience. The "new direction" you speak of is in reality an old one, having nothing to do with the New Covenant of Christ at all - worse, it subverts even that which was in the Law of Moses, which was good, by overturning the First Commandment and creating a polytheistic doctrine of deity - a doctrine which has been modified REPEATEDLY in Mormon history - the number of U-turns in Mormon Godhead Doctrine - from Trinitarianism/Unitarianism/Modalistic Monarchism, to Ditheism, to Tritheism, to Polytheism, to Tritheism again and now to goodness knows what (contemporary Mormon apologists give me different Godhead doctrines all the time) is enough to make a net all of its own.