Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Galatians

Evangelical Questions: Another Gospel by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about the phrase, “another gospel”. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. A couple of reminders for you. This last weekend FAIR hosted an online only conference called Defending the Book of Mormon. Those talks will be released on the FAIR Youtube channel in the upcoming weeks. Brent Schmidt’s talk about grace is still exploding in my head. And Stephen Smoot’s talk – not on the Book of Abraham where he is an expert – but on the difference between translation and revelation was also fantastic. And yes, you see me a bit in there too – I didn’t present anything, but got to introduce speakers and ask questions. Which, really meant I got to have all the fun of a conference without the pain of writing a paper to present. You also get to see Zach Wright and Sarah Allen doing the same thing. And…oh goodness….at one point we end up with more time than we’d planned for. A couple speakers were efficient with their time and we needed to fill some space. So you get to hear me interview Sarah – she’s the author of that 70-part response to the CES letter – and we had a great chat. Though I think it was something like, “Hey, you girls are interesting, and we’ve got some time to fill – can you just go talk and we’ll film you?” In other words, you can probably fast-forward through that section. But it was fun. Last bit of news….at FAIR we do have some fun projects cooking up for next year. Not ready to let details out yet, but lets just say that I will be busy. More to come later. Okay, we’re going to talk about that phrase, “another gospel” and our jumping off point is Gal 1:8: But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! And this verse comes up a lot for Evangelicals when thinking about what our church teaches. So I want to dive in here and try to understand why they say that – and then take a look at how Evangelicals actually define, “the gospel” and see how much agreement there actually is between the two groups.<br /> What IS the gospel, according to Evangelicals? So, “the gospel” literally means, “the good news” and no one is disputing that. Both Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints are on the same page here. But we do differ in some areas. I think I could come up with a pretty good answer on my own, but I wanted to see what is currently being taught in their own words so I surveyed some of the most popular sites for Evangelicals and here is the criteria they’re talking about… The gospel is…”Imputed righteousness. What do we receive because we are counted righteous in Christ? The answer is fellowship with Jesus. (This will) remove obstacles to the only lasting, all-satisfying source of joy: Jesus Christ.” Latter-day Saint friends I suppose some of you are thinking, “Umm, what’s wrong with that?” We’ll unpack. Let’s start with the first one which talks about “imputed righteousness.” And here is your can of worms. What is “imputed righteousness.” It is, “Imputed righteousness is the righ