I was asked by a missionary I am facebook friends with if I would have a discussion with a Protestant in Utah, James Hazleton. A friend, Travis Anderson had some interactions with him on Sola Scriptura, and it did not go well for Hazleton, proving himself to be, to be blunt, a disingenuous hack.
I suggested Sola Scriptura and shared my personal email address with the missionary to pass on to Hazleton. Here is the exchange. Note that he tried to chicken out of discussing Sola Scriptura, and when I said I would allow the topic to be changed if he would provide just one person in the first 1,000 years of Christianity who held to his theology of justification, baptism, ecclesiology, and the formal sufficiency of the Bible, I would discuss his tract (click to enlarge):
Here is my final response to his nonsense:
Here is the thing many Evangelical Protestant critics do not seem to get: Even if "Mormonism" is false, Protestantism is not, ipso facto, true. And simply saying, as one Protestant did, "but the early Christians had the Bible!" as evidence of there being proto-Protestants in the first Chrisitan millennium is sheer nonsense: they all believed in baptismal regeneration, for e.g., a heresy according to many Protestants who are not Lutherans or many Anglicans, and none held to the formal sufficiency of the 66 books of the Protestant canon.
Latter-day Saints are intellectually honest in our belief in a Great Apostasy; Protestants like that hack Hazleton may claim they do not believe in a Great Apostasy, but functionally act as if there was one when (or in the case of Hazleton, if--I seriously doubt he has read 1 Clement, the Ignatian Epistles, the Didache, Epistle of Barnabas, or other early works such as those of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, for e.g.) they read the patristic literature. Speaking of patristic literature, for those wondering about deification in their writings, see:
Responding to Christina Darlington on Early Christians and Deification (see also the reference to the Jewish text Midrash Alpha beta diRabbi Akiba BhM 3:32):
Responding to Christina Darlington on Early Christians and Deification
Update:
Hazelton is misrepresenting our exchange. The guy is, as one bookstore owner in Utah would put it, a human mattress stain:
