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Mormon Stories Podcast

850: Mormon Millennial (Neo-) Apologist Jaxon Washburn Pt. 3

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.55.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2017

⏱️ 63 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this Mormon Stories Podcast episode, we interview millennial apologist Jaxon Washburn. Jaxon is 19 year old, pre-mission Mormon apologist attending Arizona State University.

Jaxon was introduced to issues of Mormon faith as his mother lost belief in and left the LDS church, while his father remained faithful to the church. Jaxon’s involvement in an interfaith family led to strong personal interest in matters of faith, which has led to extensive interfaith efforts.

In this interview Jaxon discusses his own history of doubts, including his experiencing watching the church evolve as an active Mormon youth in how it speaks about and teaches certain issues. He explains how he reconciles difficult Mormon issues and also discusses his view of classic and modern Mormon apologetics, including the newly coined term/wave of “neo-apologetics.”

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:09.0

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0:21.0

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0:30.0

Thanks for your support.

0:40.0

Let me ask you about Joseph Smith's first vision. A lot of people are troubled by the different.

0:45.0

You don't have to give long answers. You can give us the short answer first and then if I want to dig deeper you can.

0:53.0

There's a lot of classic apologetic answers to these delimits.

0:59.0

What Joseph Smith's first vision and the varying accounts, what's the category of your reconciliation of that problem?

1:07.0

I'm personally fine with an amount of ambiguity as to what actually happened.

1:14.0

We do have the 1838 canonized account, right?

1:19.0

I'm not opposed just because I accept scriptures like the Bible and other texts within Mormonism.

1:28.0

I'm not opposed at looking at stories or events for inspiration, but also understanding that there can be differences in those accounts.

1:41.0

This isn't exactly analogous to the first vision, but within Mormonism, within the standard works or within our LDS experience, we have four different accounts of the creation narrative.

1:59.0

We have one in Genesis, arguably there's two in Genesis, but there's one in Genesis, there's one in the Book of Abraham, there's one in Moses, and then there's one in the temple as well.

2:08.0

All of them have different details and have different takes. Some of them have elements that contradict other ones.

2:15.0

And yet we are okay having all of those within the same faith and approaching all of them and kind of drawing from all of them.

2:26.0

I would say in a way that's how I go about with Joseph's experience as well.

2:31.0

I do believe that he had an experience with divinity, with deity and the grove.

2:36.0

I feel like the emphasis or kind of the takeaways from that experience changed for him throughout his life, where early on it was more a matter of personal repentance.

2:50.0

And then later, there was more of an emphasis or focus on authority once kind of the church had been established.

2:57.0

And there's ways we could talk about how memory works and things like that.

3:03.0

But I'm not uncomfortable with the different accounts, but I don't seek to make them fit or align, if that makes sense.

...

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