Sounds heavily based on a very calculated and elevated emotionalism. What of those who wonder and pray and look into their hearts and all this and
don't receive some kind of miraculous feeling of being touched by God as to the truth of Mormonism/the BOM/Joseph Smith? If
feelings validate what is holy now, then why would they not also validate what is not?
Oddly enough, my former family member who was Mormon for a little while became interested in the LDS as a result of talking with the contractor who was working on my father's house at the time, who was Mormon and very nice and friendly and all the other adjectives that usually describe Mormons. She figured that if he was such a happy guy, maybe there's something to that religion that makes him that way. So that had nothing to do with Joseph Smith in particular, either (though I don't doubt that she came to believe the LDS narrative in the course of joining the LDS). I guess she left when the temporary feelings of happiness went away and she realized that there should probably be something more than transitory feelings to ones experience of a religion. Hmmm.
I also have to wonder how you can claim to have faith in Christ while also having faith in the notion of a restoration which by its very nature means that you must believe that the church which Christ founded fell into worldwide apostasy at some point, to the degree that such a 'restoration' was necessary. Mormons must have a very low view of Christ's words in verses like Matthew 16:18 or Matthew 28:20.
So you've got faith that Jesus Christ is your savior and the savior of the whole world, but not that the apostle's confession of faith is the rock upon which the Church over which the gates of hell will not triumph is built, or that Christ is truly with us always? Jesus just says this stuff, and then through the passage of time it somehow stops applying to His followers until
Joseph Smith 'restores' them and the church that Jesus was talking about via his visions and the new gospel which he produces? That doesn't seem like faith in
Christ at all.
All restorationist movements must have such faith in their messengers, since by virtue of their stance towards the religions that came before them they cannot trust whatever came before as reliable, which leaves them with only whatever their messenger(s) says as truth. Hence Mormons believe in the necessity of their restoration due to a supposed 'corruption' of every other church in the world, just like Muslims believe in the necessity of their religion's 'call to return to God' due to their belief that the previous religions that they do recognize as starting off correctly ended up in such a state of decay by the time of Muhammad that the world needed to be given Islam in order to get them back on the 'right path'. The reasons for these beliefs may differ slightly (or not...from what I can tell, both LDS and Muslims believe in some form of scriptural corruption, to at least some degree), the overall message is the same: God somehow did not preserve what had been given to the people before the coming of prophet X, but now He
totally will, because the new religion of prophet X is His favorite/actual one...He just waited ~600/1820 years to get around to establishing in on earth...because...reasons.
Meanwhile, the historical sources regarding how actual Christians of the early Church viewed themselves in relation to other religions reveal a different approach. Most famously St. Justin Martyr (d. 165 AD) gave us the idea of the 'seeds of the Word' (that is, Jesus Christ) in preexisting religious philosophies, whereby they can be seen as precursors which pointed to the full revelation of Christ the Lord which would come in time in Christianity. And this is how it actually worked out in the case of every apostolic church. In the case of my own, if you talk to some Copts about the beginning of our church, they will likely at some point tell you with much pride that one of the reasons why their forefathers took so readily to Christianity upon being preached to by St. Mark the Apostle was that they saw his message foreshadowed in their own preexisting native religion and its symbols, e.g., the famous ankh/crux ansata which was the Egyptian symbol of eternal life. So it would have made no sense of St. Mark to come to Egypt and simply start telling the people that they've got it all wrong, they've fallen away somehow from the true message of God, etc. as restorationists must say. Similarly, while the apostles and their disciples had great disagreements with the Jews who would not recognize Christ as the messiah, I don't recall anywhere where it is unambiguously claimed that the Christ-denying Jews actually corrupted their scriptures (though I have heard some modern commentators argue for such an understanding of particular verses). That would have made no sense to claim, either, since the apostles heavily quoted and alluded to those very same scriptures in arguing
for Christ to those very same Jews, since the apostles were also themselves Jews.
So no restorationist can credibly claim to be restoring the early Church or the faith to 'what God wanted'. Restorationism is an inherently anti-God concept, as it presupposes that God didn't know what He was doing when He founded the Church in the first place. Even those verses in the Bible which speak of coming heresies don't claim that they will require a complete tear-down of the Church and its restoration by _____ (Joseph Smith, Muhammad, Sun Myung Moon, Felix Manalo, etc.), as that's not the 'point' behind God's allowing division among believers in the first place. For example, 1 Corinthians 11:19 states: "For there must also be factions among you,
that those who are approved may be recognized among you." (And not, "for there must also be factions among you, so that in approximately 1800 years a farm boy in upstate NY involved in treasure hunting and serial wife-marrying can set you all straight regarding what we mean and don't mean.")
