Nancy and I recently
saw the movie Joseph Smith, Prophet of the Restoration
at the visitors’ center in Nauvoo. It was a wonderfully
appropriate setting for experiencing Joseph’s life,
service, troubles, and martyrdom! Mercifully the lights
did not come up quickly at the end of the production.
Those of us who know and love Joseph Smith were working
to staunch the flow of tears and to regain our composure.
I loved the movie.
Yet I wondered how those
who do not already know and love Joseph might react.
What claim does the movie make on a stranger’s interest
or faith? Would a non-believer wonder if Joseph’s
only claim was his amazing capacity to tolerate persecution
with apparent good cheer? Certainly many or most of
God’s prophets have suffered persecutions. But so
have quacks and fakers.
I suggest we test Joseph’s
claims by his fruits. One important fruit is the character
of the people who follow him. Any demographer can
tell you that the Latter-day Saints are a peculiar
people — high in education, morality, charitable giving,
and longevity. And the Church continues to grow at
a rate that is either disturbing or satisfying — depending
on your orientation.
In my view there is an
even better fruit to test: Doctrine. Did Joseph Smith
give us nonsense doctrine as many suggest? Are his
teachings a mass of confusion, a hodgepodge of speculations
and inventions? Do his teachings make a mockery of
God in heaven?
Or did Joseph Smith deliver
the most coherent, sensible, defensible, and breath-takingly
gracious doctrine taught on this earth in almost two
millennia? Let’s test him. If he is truly a prophet,
he can stand the test. If he is not, the evidence
will be clear.
The Doctrines that
Matter Most
Some doctrines matter
more than others. The nature of Paul’s thorn in the
flesh is interesting — but not essential for our spiritual
well-being. The body temperature of translated beings
might provide stimulating fodder in high priest groups,
but the knowledge is not vital for our salvation.
I think there are three
doctrines with eternal consequences for each of us:
- What is God like?
- How does He guide
us?
- What must we do
to be with Him?
If we are going to test
Joseph Smith — or any other professed messenger for
God — why not test him with key doctrines?
1. What is God Like?
The vast majority of
the Christian world sees God as the supreme creator.
As part of His creative efforts, He created us out
of nothing. What a miracle! According to the common
Christian account, if we accept Him as our God, He
will adopt us into His family and we will become
His children.
Joseph Smith gave us
a different vision of God. First, according to Joseph,
God did not create us out of nothing. We have always
lived! God did something analogous to what earthly
fathers do. Earthly fathers take our spirits and add
a body. Before we came to earth, God took our eternal
intelligences and gave them spirit bodies. And, like
the very best of earthly fathers, God loved, nurtured
and taught us in our development.
This different account
of His fathering makes a profound difference in at
least two ways. First, God is not merely our Father
if we choose to follow Him. He is already and literally
our Father — the Father of every single person on
the face of the earth! He is deeply and eternally
invested in us! Which leads us to a second profound
difference.
We are not created out
of nothing. We had an identity that He has nurtured
and advanced from the beginning of time. So we are
not mere craft projects for Him. He does not merely
spend an eon in the shop turning out pot holders and
masonry bowls and then cherish and display those that
turned out well and cast off those that disappoint.
He is our Father! We
have seeds of His nature woven into our souls! He
is committed to every one of us — not just the best
of us.
Of course the usual areas
of contention related to the nature of God are whether
He has a body, is separate from the Son, and is knowable.
While much mainline Christian theology attests that
He is an ineffable mystery, Latter-day Saints invite
the world to experience Him as a devoted, personal,
real, all-loving, and all-powerful Father.
Joseph upended the familiar
and accepted formulas and doctrines about the nature
of God. He returned us to the simple truths taught
by the Savior and the early church fathers.
We could show how Joseph
Smith’s understanding of God opens our minds to the
New Testament passages about the father of our spirits
(Hebrews 12:9) and the command to become perfect as
He is perfect (Matthew 5:48). We could layout dozens
of passages in the Bible that are more readily compatible
with Joseph’s teachings than with those of mainline
Christianity. But my objective here is not apologetics.
It is simple contrast.
In my opinion, an open-minded
student of the theology that Joseph delivered must
be stunned! Joseph made God more real and personally
invested than any modern theologian of Christianity.
His teachings, while different from the understandings
of his contemporaries are in perfect agreement with
the original commonsense teachings of the Bible.
2. How does God Guide
Us?
In the area of divine
guidance of our lives, there are two major competing
world views. The Catholic view is an epistemology
of authority. God guides His people through a central
spokesman, the Pope. Catholics are supposed to follow
the Pope’s counsel.
The second world view,
espoused by most Protestants, is more communal. God
guides us through the body of believers. Having cut
themselves off from a spokesman for God, Protestants
are left with a document, the Bible, and the faith
community to interpret it.
Neither Catholics nor
Protestants have a vibrant prophetic tradition. Official
scripture is limited to that delivered centuries ago.
The apostles were the last messengers of scriptural
truth. While there are skirmishes as to the merit
and authority of different books (e.g., the apocrypha)
and councils, the canon is closed. The heavens are
silent. The tradition of prophets is ended — fulfilled
by the coming of the ultimate prophet, Jesus Christ.
No one was more surprised
than Joseph Smith to learn otherwise. He did not go
into the grove of trees in 1820 expecting to see God
and be called as a prophet. He merely hoped for some
guidance in his spiritual journey. But God surprised
Joseph and all the world. The Father and the Son appeared
to the boy prophet! The heavens were opened once again!
With the opening of the
heavens came a string of heavenly messengers: John
the Baptist, Peter, James, and John, Elijah, etc.
Wow! God is serious about having humans taught from
on High!
Through a modern prophet
God brought us the amazing Book of Mormon! Disguised
as mere scriptural meanderings, the Book of Mormon
is a resonant, insightful, and powerful testimony
of the atonement of Christ. Anyone who has looked
earnestly for God and His plan in the Book of Mormon
has been flooded with soul-edifying truth! The insight
and invitation of just the great atonement chapters
in the Book of Mormon justify all the “sorrows, sacrifices
and toils of [any] life,” to paraphrase Parley P.
Pratt’s exuberant utterance.
But there is more. Much,
much more. We are taught that there are more peoples
and more records — far more than we know. Not only
do we have the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of
Great Price, but we are challenged to be ready for
the records of lost tribes.
And there is yet more.
The Book of Mormon reinforces the pattern of heavenly
involvement in human experience. We accept as doctrine
the full invitation of Heaven to be taught from on
High.
And there is still more.
Latter-day Saints have a remarkable personal epistemology.
We believe that the Lord will reveal vital truths
to every single seeker through God’s third in command,
the Holy Spirit. Father invites: “Yea, behold, I will
tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy
Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell
in your heart” (D&C 8:2). Notice the amazing and
safety-providing redundancy in God’s process of personal
revelation: He tells us in our minds and in our hearts.
Revelation must stand up to both reason and feeling.
And then God gave us
through Joseph Smith explicit teaching and case studies
on how to test revelation:
God is quite determined
to teach the lessons of eternity to those who seek
them! God is not only more real and invested in human
affairs, He and His helpers are more involved than
any human imagined. Joseph Smith is himself the evidence
that the heavens are open. With the coming of the
restoration, we do not have a peephole on God’s truth,
we have a picture window on His perfect purposes.
Anyone who reads Joseph Smith’s story (Joseph Smith-History)
with an open mind must conclude that this was an honest
boy who was as surprised as anyone at all that God
stood willing to do for His children.
And there is still more.
In general conference, President Faust renewed the
invitation to draw angelic help to our lives. “We
do not consciously realize the extent to which ministering
angels affect our lives. President Joseph F. Smith
said, ‘In like manner our fathers and mothers, brothers,
sisters and friends who have passed away from this
earth, having been faithful, and worthy to enjoy these
rights and privileges, may have a mission given them
to visit their relatives and friends upon the earth
again, bringing from the divine Presence messages
of love, of warning, or reproof and instruction, to
those whom they had learned to love in the flesh.’
Many of us feel that we have had this experience.
Their ministry has been and is an important part of
the gospel.”
So, how does God guide
His children? He does it abundantly through all the
classical epistemologies. He uses authority and revelation
(modern prophets and continuing revelation), intuition
(the wisps of the Spirit), empiricism (learning from
experience), and reason (“Study it out.”). The human
experience can be flooded with the knowledge of God.
Indeed, all things testify of Him!
God’s methods for guiding
us are awe-inspiring. They are also consistent with
the ancient precedent. All I can say is, “Wow.”
3. What must we do
to be with Him?
There are at least three
insurmountable difficulties in most Christian plans
of salvation. First, they offer only two vastly-different,
eternal destinations. Every person will go to Heaven
or to hell. As Catholic doctrine has moved away from
limbo and purgatory, they now suffer this problem
with the Protestants. It is simply indefensible to
argue that humans can fall tidily into two categories
of deservingness.
Many Christian theologians
now recognize the problem and write about different
levels of blessedness. Joseph Smith went a step further.
He taught us that there are various degrees of glory.
He takes Paul’s hint of diverse outcomes (I Corinthians
15) and gives us a panorama of purpose. He details
three degrees of glory and describes the paths that
lead to each. The restored plan of salvation shows
God’s amazing creativity and relentless goodness.
And every element of this plan is implicit in the
Bible. The prophet of the restoration made it explicit.
The second intractable
problem in mainline Christian plans of salvation is
the improbability of salvation. After most churches
lay out their requirements, it is clear that most
of God’s children must go to hell. Most of this earth’s
residents over its tortured history never heard of
Christ. Most have not accepted His message because
they have not heard it. Most eschatologies condemn
all of these people to endless hell.
That is outrageous. It
cannot be true that a perfectly loving and perfectly
wise Father would allow the bulk of His children to
be lost without even a chance at salvation. The idea
is grotesque! Yet mainline theologies offer no hope
to any but a select few. They may hint at hidden purposes.
But that is all.
Joseph Smith did exactly
what a prophet is supposed to do. He taught us about
a Perfect Father with a Perfect Plan. He invited all
hearers to come and feast on it. He showed us in detail
how God intended to rescue every one of His children
who was willing. Jesus’ visit to paradise and the
“spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:19) is no longer a
mystery but rather an inspiring, hopeful, and specific
assurance.
A third insurmountable
difficulty of mainline plans of salvation is their
theocentricity. They insist that the residents of
heaven will be so focused on praising God that they
will be unaware and uninterested in any association
with their fellow residents of heaven.
If we reason by analogy,
the problem with this doctrine becomes obvious. Does
a good earthly parent want his or her children to
do nothing but adore him or her? No. The opposite
is true. The best parents are focused on teaching,
helping, encouraging, and challenging their children.
This is exactly the truth
that God delivered through His latter-day prophet.
God’s work and glory is to help us advance (Moses
1:39). “He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit
of the world; for he loveth the world, even that he
layeth down his own life that he may draw all men
unto him” (2 Nephi 26:24). That is exactly what we
would expect of a Great Father.
Latter-day Saints look
forward to an eternity filled with loving associations
and productive activity. That is the hope written
in the souls of most people. It is the official doctrine
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Was Joseph Smith a wild
and creative dreamer of doctrine who spun a web of
clever ideas to ensnare the gullible? Each person
can judge for him or herself. Each can test the doctrines
with the Bible. Each can ask God if they are heaven-authorized
doctrines or mad impositions.
The fact is that the
teachings delivered by God’s latter-day prophet and
his successors are magnificent and awe-inspiring.
Joseph himself stood in awe of the truth that was
delivered through him. Note his statement about that
greatest-of-all revelations, the Vision recorded in
D&C 76:
