Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Latter-day Saint
One curious aspect of some critics’ response to the leaked videos

One curious aspect of some critics’ response to the leaked videos

Last updated on: October 5, 2016 at 4:15 pm by Dan Peterson

One curious aspect of some critics’ response to the leaked videos 2016-10-05T16:15:27-06:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

From the earliest days of the Church (as illustrated by the temple-like school room that Joseph Smith added to Newel Whitney’s store in Kirtland, Ohio, in the early 1830s) Church leaders have relied upon both secular learning and divine revelation to carry out their assignments.
(Image from Wikimedia Commons

Critics and disaffected members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to the extent that they’ve responded to the recently leaked videos, have found various reasons for outrage and lament.

One negative reaction that I’ve encountered from several of them goes along these general lines:

These videos demonstrate that the Church isn’t run by revelation. The Church lied to us, telling us that the prophets take regular dictation from Jesus. Instead, though, these videos show them making decisions just the way any other group of corporate bureaucrats would.

Apart from this or that perceived “gaffe” or any particular indication of supposed insensitivity or of dissent from fashionable contemporary views or of failure to genuflect before certain currently orthodox liberal pieties, the meetings represented in these videos seem to be thought incompatible in principle with belief in a Church directed by prophets. They are said to demonstrate that Church leaders aren’t really prophets at all.

I would like to respond to this particular criticism.

Bottom line, first: These videos demonstrate nothing of the sort.

These meetings (of which I have some limited experience; I even recognize the room) aren’t meetings in which decisions are made. They’re informational meetings. There are other meetings (including those in the upper rooms of the Salt Lake Temple, but also meetings of the Council of the Disposition of the Tithes and of the Church’s Board of Education and of its Missionary Committee and so forth) in which decisions are made, but that’s not the purpose of these meetings.

Ah, reply some critics, but if Jesus were really running the Church by revelation, they wouldn’t need such meetings as those shown in the videos. Jesus would (I guess) simply tell them everything they should know.

Nonsense.

Nobody in Church leadership, and no even slightly knowledgeable Latter-day Saint, has ever claimed that the Church is run entirely, on a minute to minute basis, by divine dictation through personal appearances by Jesus and without any admixture of human reasoning and judgment.

That wasn’t so in Joseph Smith’s day, and it’s never been true since.

The Brethren have always met in council. They have always discussed and deliberated. They have always sought information as well as inspiration. Even in local matters, they meet with people. They ask for information. When an apostle or a member of the Seventy is sent to call a new stake president, for example, he prayerfully interviews an often fairly large number of men. He doesn’t simply arrive at the airport with the announcement that the new stake president will be Brigham Kimball Benson III.

And any serious reading in the history of the Church will demonstrate that Church leaders have always, whenever they had opportunity, sought the best secular information they could get before making a decision.

In June 1847, for example, the non-Mormon trapper Jim Bridger and President Brigham Young met at the mouth of the Little Sandy River to discuss the idea of settling in the Salt Lake Valley. (Bridger expressed to Brigham his doubts about the agricultural productivity of the Salt Lake area; Brigham listened, but, plainly, chose to go forward with settling there anyway.)

Even earlier, though, Brigham Young and other Church leaders had been researching sites in, and routes to, the West. On 30 October 1844, the Mormon newspaper The Nauvoo Neighbor had printed a selection from Washington Irving’s Astoria entitled ”The Climate of the Rocky Mountains.” Throughout 1845, the same paper published many other articles on Oregon and the Indians, as well as extracts from John Fremont’s reports about the Oregon Trail, the Bear River area, and the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. The Nauvoo Neighbor also published portions of Lansford W. Hastings’s Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, which had just been published in 1845. And another Mormon newspaper, the New York Messenger, printed almost all of Hastings’s book in a nine-part series that ran between July and September 1845.

So it should be pretty clear that the Brethren have never been averse to doing a bit of secular study as part of their callings.

I’m not sure that I understand how any informed Latter-day Saint can imagine that our apostles and prophets have simply sat back, indifferent to secular sources of knowledge, waiting for detailed instructions from the Savior on absolutely everything. Waiting, in other words, like marionettes for the puppet master’s tug on their strings. Even in the early days of the translation of the Book of Mormon it was not so, as this famous April 1829 passage in the Doctrine and Covenants should demonstrate beyond reasonable dispute:

Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me.

But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right. (Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-8)

In late December 1832, the Lord advised his infant church to

“seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom, seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:118).

In March 1833, he counseled them to

“Study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people” (Doctrine and Covenants 90:15).

In May 1833, he said in a revelation to them that

“it is my will that you should . . . obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, of laws of God and man, and all this for the salvation of Zion” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:53).

It shouldn’t be any surprise, in this light, that the School of the Prophets at Kirtland, Ohio, and slightly later in Missouri taught not only scripture and “theology” but English grammar, penmanship, history, Hebrew, arithmetic, literature, government, philosophy, and geography.

Does that, in and of itself, cast doubt upon the prophetic claims of Joseph Smith?

For the life of me, I can’t see how it should.

Moreover, it seems obvious to me that the meetings partially revealed in these illicitly-distributed new videos show something that is very much in the tradition of the early-nineteenth-century School of the Prophets. In fact, I think that these meetings would be worthy of that name.

And they in no way cast doubt on the prophetic/apostolic status of some of those involved.

I call your attention to the chapter on the 1978 priesthood revelation in Gregory A. Prince’s new biography Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History. I’m inclined to have reservations about Dr. Prince’s general approach to Church leadership and some other Church-related issues, and I haven’t yet read all of this new book. But I’ve read the chapter I mention, and I commend it to you.

Prince chronicles the back-and-forth on the black priesthood ban. He reports on studies and reports and discussions and disagreements. Thus far, it all looks pretty human. But, in the end, he doesn’t (as I feared he might) suppress or try to explain away the undeniably clear testimonials that he finds, in his sources, of a spectacular and very real revelation. And I might add to those testimonials Leonard Arrington’s own remarkable experience with two of the apostles at the time, recounted in the relevant chapter of his own memoir, Adventures of a Church Historian — an experience that is unaccountably omitted from Dr. Prince’s Arrington biography.

There is no incompatibility or inconsistency whatever between trying to learn and think in a purely human, natural way and attempting to obtain, or even claiming, divine inspiration.

The scriptural motto has been on record since very nearly the founding of the Church:

“By study, and also by faith.”

Uncategorized

Previous Post

October 5, 2016

On being offended

Next Post

October 5, 2016 "Astronomy's 'Dark Horse' Lit Up by Hubble"

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 March 2014 August 2013 February 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What did God create on the first day according to Genesis?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Man Light Animals Plants