George Cobabe? I haven’t heard of this guy. I will check him out.

You won’t have to go far: his post is here on the FAIR blog.

Greg

But then I read these little comments in books and hear all the little comments in neighborhoods.

And then I think of the next lady that had this very book on reserve to read it after I returned it to the Idaho Falls library.

George Cobabe? I haven’t heard of this guy. I will check him out.

Good question in #18. My take? All of the things this sister mentions are good, but none are essential to salvation.

Life is full of choices, and we all need to actively choose what to fill our time with. Sometimes the choice is not just between good and bad/evil but between good and good. This sister just needs to choose what she wants to do with her time–and it should be good–and do it. Leave the rest to the Lord.

I know that Evangelical Christians have a different take on this, but the commandment is to be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, or as Jesus is perfect. Did Jesus do genealogy or temple work (as we do it now) or Enrichment Meeting or missionary meals? Nope.

I don’t have the full context of what the sister stated in the surrounding text, but when she counts these things as items she has to “do,” in some quantity in order to get into the Celestial Kingdom, she doesn’t understand the good news of the gospel.

Pity, really. We try to teach people correct principles and then let them govern themselves. Some do, some don’t. I’ll wager that there are, among the Evangelical Christian rank and file, those who don’t “get it all right” either.

-Allen

Heaven Bound: Speed Bumps on the Way to Perfection (Covenant Communications, Inc., 2007).

“I’ve been trying to figure out whether I should put a little more effort into genealogy, whether I should make more trips to the temple, how to get the family fed before I zip off to Enrichment Meeting or to Sister So-and-So’s for visiting teaching, how many more times I must put my name on the sign-up list for missionary meals to get into the celestial kingdom, and how I can fit that all somewhere in my load” (11).

What do you guys think about this comment in light of Allen’s post?

[I can't relate to Lynn about the great harvest for the celestial kingdom, but on a note all of us Idahoans can relate to, she made me feel right at home concerning Idaho potato harvests.

"When I was growing up my family raised potatoes on our farm. I had a love/hate relationship with the potato harvest. I loved the homemade French fries; I loved the smell of the dirt as the potatoes were dug out of the ground. I loved autumn and the long, slightly cool days with cobwebs drifting through the fields. I loved the crackle of dead weeds on the ditch bank. It takes a little long to detail the things I hated." (37)

Definitely, "Potato harvesting is tricky business" (38).]

I suppose that makes me just as devious as Huckabee when he “innocently” asked whether Mormons believe that Satan and Jesus are brothers.

I haven’t taken a position on whether or not imputation is a legal fiction or not, but you can imagine that Ostler’s arguments have gotten me leaning towards his view. In my mind I try to construct the best version Christianity outside of Mormonism to compare with. Using the cafeteria metaphor, the NPP’s TULIP is more appealing to me than Calvin’s TULIP.

But we should be fair to Huckabee as well. We should not take one simple sound bite by a politition, and assume a complete theology from it. Better to let him express his views in a more complete way, or find out the complete story.

If we expect others to not pick and choose short sound bites about our beliefs, we should not do the smae to theirs.

I do, however, still believe that most of us Christians (including Mormons of course) are often not as far apart as we think. Other times we are.

And thanks for making some distinctions, Allen, in #13. That is fair.

We plan on building a new educational/fellowship wing in Ammon, Idaho.

An 80% LDS community will not hold up signs about what they despise privately in me about doctrinal matters when the dedication of a building arrives. But the continually private grumblings are real.

One thing about Aaron, he smiles and he is upfront about his heart conviction on scripture.

Many are not so honest and transparent in any given ward boundaries.

In my blog post I mentioned hanging out with the street preachers every six months. There have been many conferences when I have also seen Aaron there, proudly waving a placard for his web site and calling the Saints to repentance. (Yes, Aaron does this sort of thing.)

Amazing thing is, the street preachers–almost without exception–are King-James-Only believers. They don’t like Calvinists. In fact, they chased James White away from General Conference a few years back. They (the street preachers) think that Aaron is going to hell in company with the Mormons.

Aaron hasn’t indicated whether he thinks the Mormons are going to hell, but he is happy to “protest” with the street preachers against those non-Christian Mormons every six months.

It’s almost comical.

-Allen