However, as a student at Dartmouth College, I came in contact with Latter-day Saints. They were bright, happy, energetic, involved, kind, caring, and sincerely spiritual. I was very drawn to them. When I was with them, I felt things that I had not felt much—if at all—before. I began to learn that there is much more to life than meets the eye. There is much that is non-physical, but spiritual. There is a grand dimension to us that is beyond biology, chemistry, or physics.

The feelings that grew within me were discernibly distinct, too, from physical and emotional feelings that I knew. They were not of my mind—I did not seek them; I did not want them, and I resisted them. I had every reason to not give in to these promptings from the Holy Ghost.

Yet I had to be intellectually honest. I had had questions about the nature of God, and the authority to represent Him, for years. In my prior religious exposures, I did not get answers that made sense. I had been told that God was everywhere, but nowhere, and I was taught repeatedly that God had no resemblance to us. Yet clearly those precepts had no relation to the God of the Old and New Testaments.

I also had been told that men could represent God due to their scholarship, or they could represent God because councils authorized them to do so, or they had authority from God through the Bible. But again, these things had no validity in the Bible itself.

On the other hand, the experiences of Joseph Smith receiving divine revelation, authority, and ongoing direction surely were aligned with Biblical patterns and prophecies. The universal apostasy, the restoration of the Priesthood, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, the doctrine of the Godhead and Mankind, the doctrines of life, salvation, and exaltation, the commandments, the ordinances, temples and redemption for the dead, missionary work, ongoing revelation, and more—all were perfectly Biblical and sensible.

My mind reasoned, and the Bible confirmed: If there is indeed more to us than mere chemistry and physics, this spiritual dimension must have come from something other than the physical. It is reasonable then that there is a living God, Father of our Spirits. If He is our Father, then He loves us. If He loves us, then He wants us to be happy, and to have all that He enjoys.

Surely, a loving Father would teach us how to become like him; He would give us commandments, ordinances, and divine helps that likely run counter to our limited reason—surely His ways are much higher than, and different from ours. Because we are far from godly, we must need help beyond that which is human. We must need a divine Redeemer. Jesus of Nazareth fits that role of Messiah (Christ) perfectly. He taught the perfect way. He offered the perfect sacrifice.

Surely He would have mankind record His perfect way. The Bible is a much better guide to God’s ways than man’s feeble intellect. Scripture is always preferred to human intellect.

However, human interference corrupted Christ’s perfect truths. Doctrines and ordinances were changed and perverted. God’s authority was lost. Religions retained parts of the truth, and semblances of ordinances and authority, but they were not fully as God knows we need in order to inherit all that He wants for us.

With the fullness of Christ’s pure Gospel corrupted, perverted, and lost, mankind could not construct a living Heavenly tree of life from a dead branch. God would have to restore it directly. I saw that a reformation would have been insufficient; a restoration was clearly called for.

The coming of God and His Son to a boy made sense too. How could the great ones receive a fullness that they had a vested interest in holding back?

And of course it made perfect sense to me that because Jesus is the Savior of the (entire) world, then He must have offered salvation to more than just the people of Palestine. Would not God have sent the Gospel to all His children able and willing to receive it? Would they not record it too? Would not the stories of ancient Americans make sense vis-à-vis the Book of Mormon?

Now came the important part. My mind was satisfied, but that alone was not sufficient. My spirit, my heart, my will, my very nature had to be converted. As my reason became satisfied, I grew willing to humble my will, and then to be touched by God’s Holy Spirit. I felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing me deeply. I was being reborn through faith in Jesus Christ.

In all my pursuits of various other faiths, I have never been saved, converted, and brought to Father in Heaven as I have been through my Mormon faith. It is singular in its origin, its truth, and its saving, redeeming power. It is true—wholly and completely. I know that better than I know anything else.

To know that I am a son of a real Heavenly Father who has a plan of happiness and salvation for me is the rock-solid foundation of my life. To know that we have a Savior from death and the bondage of sin brings such great relief. To understand Jesus’ example and to strive to follow it brings me closer to my family, friends, neighbors, and all mankind. To love the scriptures and to feast upon them feeds me with delicious nourishment unavailable anywhere else. And they are an iron rod through all mists of darkness, doubt, and despair. To serve within, and to be led and served by, the authentic priesthood of God warms me and keeps me in balance. To know of the restoration of the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the Prophet Joseph Smith is exciting to me; I thrill at his example. To be able to walk in the House of the Lord, his holy temple, and to be sealed to past and future generations, allows me to touch a bit of Heaven. To have full faith in prayer, to see prayers answered miraculously, and to have access to personal revelation, is true happiness. And to share this knowledge, these gifts and these blessings with others is not only my duty, but my joy.

————————————–

Gordon F. Holbein is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Leadership at the University of Kentucky. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Geography from Dartmouth College (1978), his Master of Business Administration in Organization and Management from Syracuse University (1983), and his Ph.D. in Business Administration from The Pennsylvania State University (1996).

Posted May 2012

Witness

“Men seem to be constitutionally believers and unbelievers. There is no bridge that can cross from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions, affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief,—incline to that side. All that is generous, elegant, rich, wise, looks that way. But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 17 September 1833

“Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind
& in the mind’s mirror, the world.”
–David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Since first being asked to write this testimony, I have given considerable thought as to what it means to testify, to bear witness, to say those most sobering of words, “I know.” I have come to the conclusion that bearing witness is one of the most meaningful and perhaps ponderous of human acts, one that carries with it enormous responsibility. People tend to listen more attentively and seriously and to trust more completely words spoken as testimony or witness. Think of the words of the messenger in Job— “I alone am escaped to tell you . . . ”; of Holocaust survivors— “I was there and saw it with my own eyes”; or of John, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life. . . . That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you” (1 John 1:1-3).

When we say with conviction and passion that we “know” something is true, our words have a moral weight. When we bear witness it focuses others’ attention in a way that mere report or opinion do not. On the other hand, as recent research on the reliability of eye witnesses demonstrates, what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears is not only not infallible, it can be seriously distorted by subjectivity. Although Mormons tend to rely more on inspiration, spectral evidence, and the witness of the Spirit as confirmation of truth, I would guess that most of us hear testimonies on fast Sundays (and possibly every day) the veracity of which we have cause to doubt. We are all witnesses to those who bear witness casually and irresponsibly, even insincerely. I admit to having been guilty of this myself: As a young missionary I bore witness to things I later learned were unfounded. Serving an extended senior mission with my wife during my sixties, I was more cautious but still clear in my testimony. As a Mormon scholar, I begin this invitation soberly, thoughtfully and with some trepidation. I hope that whatever I can say as a witness here is honest and responsible—and open to examination and challenge.

One of the problems with bearing witness is that it can be a learned expression. It isn’t that I am against modeling, since that is a constant human activity; from one another we learn, to borrow J. V. Cunningham’s lines, “not only what to say/but how the saying must be said.”¹ Nevertheless, ultimately not only the words but the conviction behind them must be ours and ours alone. I must confess that I am not always comfortable with little children bearing their testimonies in sacrament meeting. While I sometimes find it charming and occasionally touching (and sometimes humorous), usually when four and five year olds say they “know the gospel is true” or that “Thomas S. Monson is a prophet,” what they likely are doing is either parroting what others have said or repeating verbatim what their parents are whispering in their ears at that moment. It may be that this is a good thing, but I often feel uneasy about it. It reminds me of a panel I was once on that included a convert from a Communist country. He said he didn’t see much difference between such recitations and those he and others made as “young pioneers” in the Soviet Union, dutifully and happily voicing formulaic propaganda. Hopefully, children in our testimony meetings grow up to bear their own sincere and hard-won testimonies.

What do I “know”? Clearly not nearly as much as I once did or thought I did—not as much as I at times have claimed or in my youth hoped I knew. Nevertheless, after considerable thought, after examining my heart and mind, the following are a few of the truths to which I can testify at this seventy-fifth year of my life:

I know that God lives. I say this as someone who wrestles every day with issues of theodicy—questions relating to God’s justice and therefore his existence. I cannot say with Emerson (as I did say twenty-five years ago²) that “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.”³ I can say that some of what I see leads me to that conclusion, but some does not. I do not understand the design of a world in which every year millions suffer and die from malnutrition, starvation, and disease; in which thousands of young girls are sold into sexual slavery; in which girls and women in some cultures are raped with impunity; in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people are tortured and brutalized; in which innocent people are imprisoned sometimes for life or cruelly executed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In addition , I am unable to harmonize the idea of a just and caring deity with the blind indifference of natural disasters, so called “acts of God” in which tens of thousands are drowned in the depths of sea, buried in mud or volcanic ash, sucked into whirlwinds, or their famine-stricken bones left to dry on desert sands. Equally perplexing is the seeming randomness and capriciousness of birth disorders, crippling disabilities, and disease. I have no way to reconcile such things—or others like them—with a just and loving God, and yet I believe in a just and loving God.

What makes such acts and phenomena more challenging are the testimonies that people bear that these are indeed conscious acts of God (set in motion, we are often told, to humble us and make us stronger or, more troubling, to punish or destroy the wicked—even though the righteous are often destroyed in greater numbers). Equally disturbing are the assertions (even testimonies) that God acts in individual lives in minor, even trivial, matters but not in dramatic, ultimate ways in the lives of millions of others. I cannot make the equation work in which God apparently saves one child from abduction (as some Latter-day Saints feel he did with Elizabeth Smart⁴) and yet allows another child—equally innocent and precious to God–to be abducted, held in captivity for over twenty-four years and repeatedly raped by her captor father (as happened with Elizabeth Fritzi⁵).

It makes even less sense to me to argue, as some did, that God acted in the case of Elizabeth Smart because she was a Latter-day Saint. Equally inexplicable are those who assert that God allowed/approved of (perhaps even inspired) the United States to go to war in the Middle East because it opened the way for Mormon soldiers to preach the gospel in “the Land of Abraham.”⁶ If indeed such capricious or seemingly capricious events can be attributed to God then we must conclude, as did Mark Twain, that he is the “Jekyll and Hyde of sacred romance.”⁷ But he is not. Rather, he is the loving, suffering God who, though God, or perhaps because of that fact, has his heart broken continuously by the wickedness and suffering of his children. Further, and this too is a sobering realization, if we are worthy of exaltation and inherit all that the Father has promised (D&C 84:35, 37–38), then one of the things we inherit is some inescapable degree of suffering; that is, we too will continue to suffer as long as we love and as a consequence of that love ensure our children’s agency, the exercise of which leads to their suffering. Thus, our suffering, like God’s, can never end, although, presumably, it will be tempered by a greater measure of joy and glory. This is one of the profound paradoxes of Mormon Christianity.

In my twenties I came to the conclusion that agnosticism is a defensible, even in some ways a persuasive position. Though less defensible and persuasive, even atheism has its convincing arguments. And yet I am neither an atheist nor an agnostic but a believer, perhaps even a true believer, if by that term we mean “one who is strongly attached to a particular belief.”⁸

I know that love is the most powerful, essential and inexhaustible force in the universe. I bear witness that in all of its divine and human manifestations love makes mortal life worth living—and enduring—and eternal life worth hoping for. Love is the clearest definition of and evidence for God. Without love God would cease to be and without love, humans wither and die. I bear witness that in ways we only dimly understand, love and light are somehow, physically, metaphysically and spiritually related. When God said, “Let there be light,” he could just as easily have said, “Let there be love,” for that love which shines in the darkness lights our lives because its ultimate source is God’s heart and mind, and when we allow it in, such love lights the dark chambers of our own hearts and minds.

I can say with utmost confidence that our Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother and their son, Jesus Christ, love us with a love beyond our capacity to fully understand—or imagine, or reciprocate, except as we attempt to do so from our own limited wholeness. And yet we can feel the reality of it in our bones and in our cells and, especially, in the deepest recesses of our hearts. I don’t believe that the multiple manifestations of love, especially in a world in which so many forces seem bent on denying and countering it, can be explained by naturalistic causes, forces, or processes. We are capable of loving beyond the edges of evolution, beyond our own need for love, astonishing even ourselves at times with spontaneous, unbidden, and abundant love in acts that Fay Weldon calls “the unexpected lurch of the heart toward others which can take the heart by surprise.”⁹

I can truly bear witness to the truth of the Restoration. That is, I know that something powerful and transcendent happened in that grove of trees in 1820. Part of that conviction is related to the conviction that the spiritual fruit from that grove has taken root, both in my own heart and in the hearts of others all over the world, and flowered like the white, luminous fruit on Lehi’s tree, which is, after all, as the angel tells Nephi, the love of God. When I consider how much love has resulted from young Joseph’s courageous voyage into that foreboding wood, including the enormous blessing of love in my own life, I cannot pronounce it as anything but good, even though I acknowledge that, as with all human acts, sorrow and tragedy have also flowed from that astonishing vision of light and love. That is, such light is always filtered through the imperfect prisms of our mortal, that is our fallen, natures. Nevertheless, it is light, however diminished by human limitations.

Over the course of a lifetime, including six years of fulltime missionary service for the Church, I have borne witness to the truth of the restored gospel to thousands of people, including some of my own colleagues, students, and professional associates. When my students have asked how I could possibly believe the things I do, my response typically has been, “As honestly as I am able to evaluate the totality of my experience, I have to say that if what I have experienced as deep spiritual experience is not real then perhaps nothing is.” I remember a conversation with Kurt Vonnegut and Allen Ginsberg during meetings I was responsible for organizing between distinguished writers from China and the United States. When I told them of my belief about Joseph Smith’s experience in the Sacred Grove and the Book of Mormon, they were incredulous that a UCLA professor could seriously hold such beliefs. Ginsberg, who later became a friend, asked skeptically, “This is believed?” I assured him that it was, by me and many others.

An extension of that witness is a witness of the fact that the Book of Mormon derives from the history of actual ancient peoples. After a lifetime of serious study of the Book of Mormon, including an earnest and honest consideration of the critical literature challenging the book’s claim as an authentic ancient sacred text, I can come to no other conclusion than that it is what it purports to be: a history of several groups of real people who migrated to and flourished in the New World BCE. I have seriously considered the arguments of those who contend that it is a fictive invention by Joseph Smith or others living in nineteenth-century United States, but conclude that the construction of such a book in such a time and place was impossible given the book’s intricate and complex structure; its nuanced, even convoluted composition; and the depth and consistency of its spiritual messages.

I am not qualified to discuss archeological, anthropological, geographical or linguistic issues related to the Book of Mormon, nor am I a specialist in genetics and mitochondrial DNA analysis. What I can claim is expertise in rhetorical and textual analysis—the study of the actual language and narrative structure of the book. In “Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon and the American Renaissance,” I examined the Book of Mormon in relation to the foundational literary texts of the American Renaissance, a literary period roughly parallel to the Mormon restoration. My conclusion was that in comparison with his more illustrious contemporary authors (Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and Hawthorne), Joseph Smith lacked the education, literary imagination, talent, maturity as a writer, time necessary for composition, knowledge base, and sophistication necessary for writing the Book of Mormon. I further stated, “I don’t believe that Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman, colossal writers that they were, together could have written the Book of Mormon. Further, I don’t believe that if all the scholars in the world in the mid-1820s had gathered in a large room and had had access to every extant book and manuscript and had a decade of work on it, that they could have written such a book. That is my seriously considered, scholarly opinion. There is simply too much that the book points to that no one in the nineteenth century knew or could have known.”¹⁰

I don’t by any means wish to suggest that questions about ancient inter-continental migrations, archeological artifacts, anthropological patterns, linguistic connections, biblical borrowings, nineteenth-century parallels, or DNA traces are irrelevant; indeed, I believe that any serious exploration of and about the Book of Mormon is legitimate. What I am suggesting is that what should have primacy in approaching this good book is the book itself, its narrative styles, rhetorical patterns, vocabulary, images, symbols, and allusions—and what all of these reveal about its essential, stated purpose—to be a witness of Jesus Christ in our time, to our world.

I bear witness that God’s truth and love are found in many places beyond Mormonism. One of the things I find most assuring and affirming in teaching at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley is how much my students enlighten me, expand my knowledge of our shared and sometimes unique sacred texts, and, at the same time, deepen my spiritual understanding, including my understanding of God and Christ. These are gifts from other believers that I cherish. As Rumi says,

We can’t help being thirsty.

Moving toward the voice of water
Milk drinkers draw close to the mother.
Muslims, Christians, Jews,
Buddhists, Hindus, Shamans—
Everyone hears the intelligent sound
And moves with thirst to meet it.¹¹

As Coleman Barks, Rumi’s American translator, summarizes, “If you think there is an important difference between a Muslim and a Jew and a Christian and a Buddhist and a Hindu and a Shamanist then you are making a division between your heart and your ability to act in the world.”¹² While I believe there are important differences between what I believe and what others believe, I do not want there to be a division between what my heart knows and how I act in the world. So I believe that in spite of important differences, what is at the heart of every religion is not different—that the highest form of worship is to love God with all of our hearts, minds, and souls and to love others as we would want to be loved. Wherever we find these practices, we find fellowship.

There are many other things to which I could testify, but perhaps these will suffice for this purpose.

——
Notes:

¹“To a Friend, on Her Examination for the Doctorate in English,” The poems of J.V. Cunningham, ed. and with an introduction and commentary by Timothy Steele (Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press, 1997), 27.
²Robert A. Rees, “Monologues and Dialogues,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 20:2 (Summer 1987)
³“Immortality,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Edition. Vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1904).
⁴Pat Reavy, “Elizabeth’s life a ‘miracle’,” Deseret News, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/600116661/Elizabeths-life-a-miracle.html; accessed 20 April 2012. See also, Alex Tresniowski, “The Miracle Girl,” People Magazine, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20139640,00.html; accessed 20 April 2012.
⁵“’House of horror’ children never saw daylight,” http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/28/austria.cellar/index.html, accessed 20 April 2012.
⁶Robert A. Rees, “The Cost of Credulity: Mormon Urban Legends and the War on Terror,” Sunstone 144 (Dec. 2006),
⁷Notebook, 1904, http://www.twainquotes.com/God.html; accessed 23 April 2012.
⁸http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_believer; accessed 20 April 2012.
⁹Introduction to “Corinthians,” Pocket Canon Bible (New York: Grove Press, 1999), xii.
¹⁰Robert A. Rees, “Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon and the American Renaissance,” Dialogue 35:3 (Fall 2002), 83-112.
¹¹In Bill Moyers, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 57.
¹²As quoted in Bill Moyers, The Language of Life, Season 1, Episode 2, “Love’s Confusing Joy,” PBS television program directed by David Grubin; original broadcast 23 June 1995. Available in DVD.

——————————————

Robert A. Rees (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is an educator, scholar, and poet.

Dr. Rees has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Wisconsin; the University of California at Los Angeles, or UCLA (for twenty-five years); the University of California at Santa Cruz; (as a Fulbright professor) at Vytautaus Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania; and the California State Universities at Northridge and Los Angeles. He has lectured at universities in China, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Kaliningrad, and has been a visiting scholar at the Centers for Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. Currently, he teaches religion at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Professor Rees has extensive experience in international education. He established and was the Director of Studies for three UCLA Extension programs in England—with Cambridge University and with the Royal Colleges of Art and Music. He was also involved in education initiatives in London, Paris, and the former Soviet Union, and led two delegations of distinguished American writers to China.

In 1998 he was named Director of Education and Humanities at the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California.

Dr. Rees has served as bishop of the Los Angeles 1st Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he and his wife Ruth served as education, humanitarian, and service missionaries in the Saint Petersburg Russia and Baltic States missions of the LDS Church. In October 1992, Dr. Rees and his wife became the first LDS Church missionaries to work in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union.

For the past twenty years, he has been active in humanitarian and interfaith work. He was Director of Humanitarian Services for Deseret International Charities in the Baltics (1994-96), President of the University Religious Council at UC Santa Cruz (1998-2000), and a member of the Santa Cruz Interfaith Council (1998-2001). Currently he serves on the Advisory Board of S.A.F.E. (Save African Families Enterprise), a non-profit organization providing antiviral drugs to HIV-positive pregnant women in Zimbabwe. He is also a founding member and vice president of the Liahona Children’s Foundation, an organization that provides nutrition and education to children in the developing world, and serves as a director of the New Spectrum Foundation.

From 1971 to 1976, he was the second editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

Posted April 2012

My ultimate interest in research was stronger than ever, and was now focused in the medical specialty of endocrinology. At the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, I took on faculty duties as an assistant professor of medicine. Although I continued seeing patients and teaching during my entire career, my research focus occupied the vast majority of my time, throughout my career. I spent a few more years in laboratory research early on, but I subsequently developed (perhaps partly attributable to the exposure of my medical training) a strong interest in clinical research, and spent most of my mature career in this discipline. The most important and significant pursuit of my career was a fifteen-plus-year project, completed at Lilly Research Labs in Indiana, during which I developed a chemical entity known as raloxifene hydrochloride into a human preventative medicine targeted at the prevention of osteoporosis and the prevention of breast cancer in postmenopausal women. Eli Lilly and Co. has marketed this entity under the trade name Evista for the past fifteen years, and to date, more than 70,000,000 women worldwide have been treated with Evista. My development studies on the safety and efficacy of raloxifene hydrochloride involved more than 10,000 study subjects, many treated for five years or more, and resulted in numerous scientific publications.

Throughout this time I also developed a great love for and a deep interest in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I have served in my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in numerous positions, including missionary, teacher, elder and bishop, and some of the most glorious times of my life have been with my family as we have been involved in all aspects of this religious service.

I remember hearing quite frequently about the “great debate” or the “conflict” between science and religion, but I never understood it. For me, the more I learned in my scientific studies, the more I appreciated my religious beliefs. The deeper I became immersed in my religion, the more I appreciated the wonders of science and their true perspective in life. I became convinced that the “conflict” arose either because the person involved in the conflict did not properly understand science or because he/she did not truly understand the glorious truths of religion as I understood them—or, most frequently, had both problems. Throughout my subsequent career, I have never found conflict between my scientific knowledge and my religious beliefs. My experience has fortified my conviction that the principles of my religious beliefs, and the proper understanding of our current scientific knowledge, are all a part of the great body of truth with which we live here on earth, and which continually governs our lives.

There were two specific episodes during my education that significantly affected my feelings on these issues. While I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, I joined and eventually became president of the campus Chemistry Club. On a couple of occasions, we traveled as a group to Salt Lake City and met with Henry Eyring, Sr., then professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Utah. Professor Eyring, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and one of the most distinguished Americans in science, was most gracious to host us and to sit and chat about science and other topics. I came away from my interactions with him convinced that the strongest knowledge of Truth I would ever gain would be my knowledge of my Savior and His gifts to me. As a scientist, it would additionally be an honor to catch small glimpses into other parts of that great Truth, via my scientific pursuits.

While I was a graduate student at Rockefeller University, I attended an unforgettable symposium held on the University campus. The University had invited distinguished Professor Gerald Holton, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, to preview a soon-to-be-published manuscript on the history of early-twentieth-century physics. This was, of course, the age of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, and other notables in the world of theoretical physics. Professor Holton stood at a podium on one side of the stage to read his manuscript. On the other side of the stage, seated informally in comfortable armchairs, were three senior Rockefeller faculty in physics and mathematics, all of whom had known one or more of the “greats” during their lifetimes and had had significant interactions with them on the major discourses in modern physics. For over three hours, Professor Holton read his manuscript and the others would break in spontaneously with comments like “Ah yes, I remember sitting with Einstein on a train headed to Copenhagen, and we discussed that very point . . .,” or “Niels Bohr and I had several conversations about that topic between lectures at the ———- meeting in Paris.” This was one of the most interesting scientific evenings I have ever spent. I came away with a deep and humbling understanding of the tenuous nature of scientific theory and “truth.” Theoretical physics underwent a convulsive upheaval about every ten years in the early twentieth century, and what was “truth” at one point was rejected or modified a few years later. Only appropriate humility permits the true scientist to appreciate the wonders of scientific progress while at the same time realizing how fragile our theories always remain.

—————————————–

Michael W. Draper (Ph.D., Rockefeller University; M.D., Cornell University), now retired from the Indiana University School of Medicine, has also been associated with Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, the Veterans Administration Hospital of San Francisco, the University of California at San Francisco, and, for many years, as a researcher, advisor, and director in endocrinology and internal medicine, with the Lilly Research Laboratories of Eli Lilly and Company.

He is the author or co-author of scores of scientific papers and abstracts, and the holder of a dozen patents, and he and his wife Margie are the parents of five children.

Posted April 2012

Regrettably, there are some in the Church who seem to be afraid of the intellect. They would eschew the “philosophies of men” completely, as if they were inextricably antithetical to the revelations of God. I find this anti-intellectual strain in the Church and anywhere else both lamentable and dangerous. Isn’t this the great lesson that was learned by Oliver Cowdery, when he tried his hand at translation? “Behold, ye have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it to 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, emphasis added).

But I am even more concerned by so-called “Intellectuals” in the Church (anyone who thinks of himself as such is probably not!), who seem to perceive the whisperings of the Spirit, the counsel of inspired leaders, and the scriptures themselves as somehow inferior to “objective, scientific reality.” As we learn in sacred places, truth is to be circumscribed into one great whole and truth is truth and should be eagerly sought, regardless of its apparent origin. To do that takes more than a modicum of humility, which is all too often sadly lacking among those of us blessed with a great deal of formal education.

Throughout my life, I have found great comfort in combining secular and religious study–in joining rational meditation with fervent prayer. Whenever I have neglected secular study I have become intellectually flabby; when I have neglected my study of the scriptures and meaningful prayer I have suffered spiritually. When I have combined the two, letting one approach to knowledge both challenge and support the other, I have been at my best.

To be sure, some of those challenges have been rather daunting. I’ll admit that my “faith shelf” has, at times, sagged a bit under the stress of many unresolved issues. And there are certainly questions for which I still do not possess completely satisfactory answers. But as time marches on, I have found that many of my issues have found resolution and I have faith that, sometime in the eternities before me, all will come together in a most satisfactory way. In the meantime, I try not to sweat the small stuff.

So, what is it, exactly, that I have come to believe through my own study and faith? Following are a few of my personal “articles of faith.”

• I believe that Joseph Smith was, indeed, a Prophet of God and that the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price are all inspired texts. I do not worry about how these texts came about or even if every word within them is literally accurate. It’s the great teachings and principles therein that speak to and guide my soul. Nor do I concern myself with whether everything Joseph taught was true. (I am grateful that I am not faced with the great challenge of polygamy, for instance). But I am convinced he saw God the Father and God the Son and that the Holy Priesthood was restored through him. Based on that conviction, I am comfortable proclaiming that I know this is the true church of God on the earth today. At the same time, I am quick to acknowledge that we hardly have a monopoly on truth. With John Stuart Mill, I fervently believe that it is through the clash of competing ideologies that ultimate truth is discovered and appreciated.
• I believe in modern-day Prophets, who are charged with the responsibility to lead us in paths of righteousness. I do not believe for a moment that any of them are perfect, nor do I believe they always speak with authority. But I do know that, on the whole, following their counsel will bring all of us great happiness. One could do much worse than pay attention to them.
• I believe that I have the ultimate responsibility to make right choices and that any kind of “blind faith”–whether to an institution or to a particular individual–can (and has been in our history) very dangerous. At the same time, I know that leaning too much on my own understanding is unwise. Relying on the “arm of flesh”–especially one’s own–is fraught with jeapardy.
• I believe that my Heavenly Father will never let me down and that, to the extent I earnestly seek direction from Him, I shall receive it. At times I may see through the glass very darkly, but I know He helps me to see much better than I ever could on my own. Although one can all too easily “hear what one wants to hear” if one isn’t careful, I believe in personal revelation.
• I believe that through temple ordinances I can be sealed to my family through all eternity and that through those same ordinances all who have ever lived on the Earth will have an equal opportunity to return to God’s presence. (I choose not to obsess over the vestiges of Masonry that have found their way into the endowment ceremony.) As suggested in the preface to the Book of Mormon, “if there are faults, they are the mistakes of men, condemn not the things of God. . . .”
• I believe that I and all others are co-eternal with God and that while He was instrumental in helping us progress from one type of existence to the next (a sort of “spiritual evolution,” if you will), none of us can either be created or destroyed.
• I believe that agency is a fundamental necessity for all existence (which to me explains the real reason Satan and his third were cast out of heaven) and that it is absolute. While many exigencies may, and do, impinge on agency, we are–in the ultimate analysis–free to choose how we react to the vicissitudes of existence. And with Jean Paul Sartre, I believe that choice is unavoidable: even to choose not to choose is to choose.
• I believe that there has been only one Perfect Man to walk this earth and that it is only through the grace of God and the atonement of Jesus Christ that any of us can be “saved.”
• Finally, I believe in the very real possibility of being highly and delightfully surprised by many assumptions I and others have held dear once we get to “the other side.”

——————————————

Roger Robin Ekins is a professor emeritus from Butte College in Oroville, California, where he served as dean of instruction, director of the honors program, and charter advisor of the Phi Theta Kappa honor society, and taught courses in composition, creative writing, existentialism, and the history of ideas. Prior to the twenty-five years he spent at Butte College, he both taught and served in various administrative capacities at the Augusta campus of the University of Maine (seven years), Johnston College of the University of Redlands (two years), and Staten Island College, within the City University of New York (five years). Church callings include service as Bishop, several stints on the High Council, and what most people on this site would agree is the best calling in the Church: Gospel Doctrine teacher.

Ekins’s academic degrees include the Honors Bachelor of Arts in English (University of Utah), an M.A. in Creative Writing (U. of Utah), and a Ph.D. in Education through the Union Institute. His publications include Defending Zion: George Q. Cannon and the California Newspaper Wars of 1856-1857, which received the Best Documentary History Award from the Mormon History Association. Together with his wife, Helen Leonard Ekins, he is currently working on a trail guide titled The Flumes and Trails of Paradise, referring not to the more desirable section of the Spirit World, but to their home, in Paradise, California.

Posted March 2012

Although my belief is certain now, it was not always so, and answers to my inquiries about God and religion did not come immediately when I asked.

I gained my knowledge of the reality of God and the truth of the Book of Mormon at a time of personal struggle. At the age of eighteen, having just finished my freshman year in college, I came to feel that I needed to know for myself whether there was a God and whether the things I had been taught in Mormonism as a child were true. To that point, I had prayed intermittently and had read—though somewhat irregularly—from the Book of Mormon, with an occasional inquiry to God asking to know if it was true. No answer that I could recognize came, and I wondered why my asking did not produce the answer that the Book of Mormon promises and whether I was asking in the right way. However, despite the lack of an answer, I continued to believe in Mormonism since so many of its teachings made sense to me. The most compelling claims to me included the belief that God continues to send prophets to the earth in modern times, that God can and does speak by personal revelation to ordinary, lay members of the Church and not just to its leaders, and that spiritual gifts are available now, just as in ancient times. On this basis I formed a belief, yet I wondered when and whether my prayers to know definitively concerning God and religion would be answered; I was sure that if Mormonism was true, I too had claim on personal revelation. In my early teenage years, I made the determination to stay true to Mormonism for at least a period of time since I could not then decide if it was true or not. If, by the time I reached twenty-one, I had not experienced divine revelation, I planned to reevaluate these questions.

It is now clear to me that the primary reason I did not recognize any answers to my prayers or perceive a witness about the Book of Mormon as a young teenager was because I put forth little effort and had only a small desire for an answer. Though I did want to know, I did not put my heart and soul into prayer the way I did years later.

My freshman year in college was an exciting one, as I had the opportunity to deepen my understanding of subjects I felt passionate about and also had the chance to interact with a wider range of individuals than I had grown up with. I attended the University of Utah, and although this campus is located in Salt Lake City, there were a large number of students who were not Mormons, and this was especially true in the sciences and in engineering.

I became good friends with a small group of atheists and agnostics and felt eager to share my beliefs with them, thinking that they would see the uniqueness of the tenets of Mormonism and would want to learn more about the Church. I am grateful for these friends and the discussions we had, because I have had dozens more since then with other sincere disbelievers among my classmates, colleagues, and friends in academia. My freshman classmates challenged my beliefs in ways that were often constructive, but also introduced me to the experience of being mocked and belittled for belief in God. Such is the persuasive device that some revert to in an attempt, if not to refute faith, then at least to intimidate faith’s adherents. (Paradoxically, atheism involves a unique style of faith that is not practiced by believers since, if God does exist, His presence has the possibility of being verified through divine communication, while a claim that there is no God cannot ever be substantiated by any kind of evidence.)

I came away from these discussions with a greater desire to know for myself—sooner rather than later—whether there was a God. If there was no God, I had no interest in aligning myself with a religious institution.

The questions that arose at this time served as a backdrop to a great challenge that came a short while later when I had a falling out with a close friend that left me feeling sad and somewhat lonely.

In these circumstances, my attitude regarding the question of religion and God was quite different than it had been in prior years. I turned to my Maker and to the scriptures—most especially to the Book of Mormon and other modern revelations—with an eager yearning to know whether God really lived. I asked in prayer more sincerely than I ever had before whether there was a God and whether the Book of Mormon was true. I read God’s word with more intensity and desire than ever before. I needed to know. And I felt certain that if there were a God and if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were true, I would receive an answer as I had heard so many other members of the Church describe having received.

Through the act of reading the Book of Mormon and praying concerning it, I was following the invitation contained in its pages to “experiment upon the word’” (Alma 32:27-37, 41-42). The book’s predicted outcome of this experiment is divine communication confirming that the book is of God and is true (Moroni 10:3-5).

I did not have to wait long before discovering a sweet peace flowing into my heart both as I prayed and as I read scripture. This peace contrasted sharply with the feelings of sadness and loneliness that were otherwise in my heart. Soon my desire to commune with God became frequent and deep. In the ensuing year, I often poured out my soul in private, seeking to know more of the Being who filled me with such peace and hope, feelings that otherwise seemed so elusive. The results of my experiment proved to be consistent with the outcome predicted in the Book of Mormon.

Through all of this I came to know that God does live and that He is the Father of my spirit; that He is a loving, tender, and devoted parent; and that He is keenly aware of me and my life. I came to know that God lives as certainly as I know that I exist. The spiritual manifestations that came were poignant, and so sharp and profound at times that I knew my own mind could not conjure them. When I felt a heaviness of heart, I would turn to my Father in Heaven and, shortly thereafter, I would come away feeling buoyed up, lightened, and hopeful about the future. Sometimes the state of mind I was in before seeking God’s support was heavy indeed and the lightness and strength that came into my heart and soul through earnest seeking were the polar opposite of what I had felt beforehand.

I am a witness to the reality of the promise given throughout scripture, “seek and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7-11). That phrase and other semantic equivalents are among the most common to occur in scripture. God is eager to reveal Himself to us. Despite His eagerness, however, God wants us to be clear—both to Him and to ourselves—that we really desire the manifestations we ask for. Receiving a knowledge that God lives has the power to fundamentally change the course of one’s life and carries with it some responsibility (Alma 32:17-19). Because God does not wish to burden an individual with the responsibility of knowing concerning Him without that person having a deliberate and earnest desire to know, His answers to some inquiries may be subtle and difficult to recognize.

In the varied conversations I have had with my disbelieving friends—and friends they are!—I have sometimes been accused of being brainwashed or deluded. I have considered these ideas very seriously because I know that our minds are complex and that self-deception is a possibility. Reflection has convinced me that my experience is simply too profound and too distinct from what I might envision by my own mental devices to be accounted for as springing from within me.

To some, this statement affirming a divine source of my spiritual experiences may not carry much weight. I offer three points in answer. First, one who dismisses my accounting of spirituality—or that of countless others—as delusional are deeming themselves better judges of my experience and psyche than I am, even though they were not present during these experiences. Second, if such persons have not sought or had spiritual manifestations for themselves, and if they have not experimented with prayer as I and others have, their pessimistic explanation about the fruitful results of others’ efforts is at best hollow. Third, there is simply no evidence that I or other believers are delusional. Those claiming delusion rely on blind faith—blind disbelief—to support their claims that another’s mental state is flawed.

The evidence I have in support of the truth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grows with time as I continue to seek to know God and to live by His teachings. The experiences I had when I was eighteen were only the beginning of what has become a rich and vibrant part of my life, and I now turn to God daily to deepen a relationship that provides me with support and answers to life’s challenges. The depth and persistence of my connection to God expands, though in a nonlinear way, as I strive to devote myself more and more to Him. Because of my faith, I see others on this earth as my spiritual brothers and sisters, with infinite divine potential. I vaguely glimpse the immensity of God’s love for His children and I am in awe of the Creator of the universe, our Heavenly Father.

I testify that God lives and loves us. I testify He knows your name just as He knows mine. He will answer any and all who earnestly seek a witness of His reality. You can know for yourself, independent of anyone else, that God lives and loves you. You can know that the Book of Mormon is true and that prophets are again on the earth, speaking boldly concerning proper morals and providing a code of conduct for life. As I have, you can feel a peace permeating through your heart that carries and sustains you and leads you to learn of God’s plan for your life.

Most fundamentally, what draws me to Mormonism is the claim that all can know for themselves—through “experimenting upon the word,” as the Book of Mormon invites—that God lives and that Mormonism is true. I invite all to experiment upon the word as I have.

—————————————–

Amy Williams is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School, studying population and medical genetics. She graduated with dual B.S. degrees in 2003 from the University of Utah in Computer Science and Mathematics, and received an S.M in 2005 and a Ph.D. in 2010 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Computer Science. Her research focuses on leveraging computational techniques to empower genetic studies and to learn about patterns of genetic variation and evolution, with the aim of inferring human history and demography.

Posted February 2012

A postmodernist might view my interest in “Mormon” ideas in German texts as a social construct, a form of Rorschaching, or a kind of subjective projection of my private a priori views onto the elaborate tapestry of German Studies.¹

But such constructs are two-way streets, for it is also true that my involvement with things German has emphatically influenced what I have come to see as the most important doctrines of my own “virtual Mormonism” as it were, those tenets I have assembled from the elaborate tapestry of “Latter-day Saint” ideas into my own private credo.

Thus my current views on war, pacifism, and civic responsibility for example, have clearly grown out of my exposure to Germany’s historical experiences, including that of young Helmuth Hübener and his two fellow-LDS friends Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudi Wobbe, whose story I first encountered in the oeuvre of Nobel-Laureate novelist Günter Grass. (Further research into the subject, including extensive interviews with Schnibbe and Wobbe as well as with other survivors who had emigrated to the US, particularly to Utah, enabled me and my collaborators, BYU historians Douglas Tobler and Blair Holmes, to publish several articles and books on the subject and to participate in the making of a documentary film.)²

So just as the general German experience with dictatorship, war, and the incurring of national guilt on a gigantic, genocidal scale influenced my later reaction to truth claims I heard voiced by supporters of various US wars from Vietnam to the invasion of Iraq, the Hübener story forced me to confront LDS ideas about the degree to which citizens should subject themselves to governments, and under what conditions.

In the end, I came to see that the matter of civic responsibility and ethical behavior is much more complex and sophisticated than the simple LDS 12th Article of Faith³ might suggest on its surface. Indeed, I have come to include in my personal German-history-inspired credo what I consider a much more nuanced LDS position, derived in part from the 98th Section of the book of Doctrine and Covenants.⁴

Quite a different “LDS idea” which has had a particular fascination for me is the concept that the souls of human beings existed eternally prior to our physical births on this planet. This is an ancient notion with a long history of advocates and detractors.⁵ The German texts to which this idea drew me include a pair of remarkable films by Wim Wenders⁶ (with some collaboration by Austrian poet and novelist Peter Handke), which posit the existence of a kind of preexistence, where angel-like beings, portrayed in the film wearing distinctive overcoats and ponytails, are seen (by film viewers though not by other characters in the film, save some children) hovering about Berlin, having been there since time immemorial, witnessing and observing life generally.

In due course, one of the “angels,” Damiel, (all such names have that -el suffix connoting divinity), decides to become human, to “earn a (hi-)story for myself by struggling for it” (“mir selber eine Geschichte erstreiten.”) In the second film, Damiel’s angelic companion Cassiel also becomes human, having weighed the implications of the change rather less than Damiel had, since Cassiel has to make a split-second decision to become human so that he can rescue a young girl for whom he serves as a guardian angel. (Cassiel is a compulsive lifesaver: In the end, after having taken many missteps in his brief sojourn on earth, Cassiel selflessly gives his own life to save all his friends.)

Thanks to the artistic gifts of Wenders and Handke, a notion that exists as a kind of black-and-white, two-dimensional concept in Mormon lore now takes on rounded contours and becomes a colorful, living idea, able to resonate in our minds and souls. Watching Damiel and Cassiel do the same, we are invited to contemplate, for example, just how we ourselves must have struggled with the concept of evil (Berlin, with its recent Nazi and Cold-War history is certainly an appropriate location for the contemplation of the existence of evil) before agreeing to become mortal.

We consider with Wenders and Handke the role of love and fellowship among former angels, for there are many (including a cameo role by Peter Falk) who have retained a memory of their prior life, trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth would have said it, who treat their fellow humans with the respect and dignity such courageous eternal beings deserve.

In the end, the films point forward to the creation of a new global family of like-minded former angels, who understand the profound eternal reason for their lives and have the potential to create a fairer, more peace-loving and humane society.

(In the course of discussing these films with colleagues, Professor Walter Whipple pointed out to me a related poem, “One Version of Events” by Polish Nobel-Laureate Wisława Szymborska,⁷ which I also highly recommend.)

Other German texts bear brief mention in the context of preexistence: The most remarkable Viennese author Hugo von Hofmannsthal collaborated with the deservedly famous composer Richard Strauss to create an opera entitled Die Frau ohne Schatten⁸ (The Woman Without a Shadow), which is a veritable compendium of LDS ideas, including this one. The plot is complex, but includes the idea that a disembodied spirit from a preexistent state, the Empress, has taken upon herself a human form but, in a kind of intermediate Garden of Eden milieu, has not yet taken the final step to become truly human.

This she does, finally, by renouncing a human shadow – here a symbol of mortality – which her evil nurse has illicitly acquired for her from another woman, the Dyer’s Wife, who at one juncture wants to renounce her mortality to avoid having to bear children. (The Dyer’s Wife changes her mind when she has a vision of her seven unborn children, whose voices seem to sing out to her – from seven fishes cooking in a pan.)

When the Empress renounces the ill-gotten shadow (though she believes that by so doing she has doomed her own husband, the Emperor, to eternal death), by virtue of her own selfless behavior it is seen that she miraculously has earned her own shadow, and her husband returns to life from his death-like state.

The risen Emperor sings that he, too, has had a vision of unborn children, and then soon the Empress, also, is able to see and hear the songs of the unborn. She asks: “Sind das die Cherubim, die ihre Stimmen heben?”(“Are they the Cherubim, who raise their voices so?”) The Emperor enlightens her: “Das sind die Nichtgeborenen, nun stürzen sie ins Leben mit morgenroten Flügeln zu uns, den fast Verlorenen; uns eilen diese Starken wie Sternenglanz herbei. Du hast dich überwunden. Nun geben Himmelsboten den Vater und die Kinder: die Ungebornen frei! Sie haben uns gefunden, nun eilen sie herbei!” (“They are the unborn, now they rush into life with dawn-red wings to us, who were nearly lost; these strong ones hasten to our side like starshine. Thou hast overcome thyself. Now heavenly messengers free the father and the children: the unborn! They have found us, now they hasten hither.”)

The unborn continue to address their parents and encourage them not to fear the trials of parenthood: “Hört, wir gebieten euch: ringet und traget, dass unser Lebenstag herrlich uns taget! Was ihr an Prüfungen standhaft durchleidet, uns ist’s zu strahlenden Kronen geschmeidet!” (“Listen, we command you: struggle and bear your burdens, so that our day of life may dawn gloriously! That which you unwaveringly suffer through in the way of tests is wrought for us into glittering crowns!”)

The opera ends with a mysterious song by all the unborn children, revealing that they are really the hosts, not merely the guests, at any (wedding) feast:

Vater, dir drohet nichts,
siehe, es schwindet schon,
Mutter, das Ängstliche,
das euch beirrte.

Wäre denn je ein Fest,
wären nicht insgeheim
wir die Geladenen,
wir auch die Wirte!

(Father, nothing threatens thee,
behold, Mother, that which made
both of you anxious,
is already disappearing.

Could there ever have been a feast
at which we, the invited ones,
were not also
secretly the hosts?)

Another important German opera attracts me strongly, in part for its portrayal of yet another “LDS” idea dear to my heart. This is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte,⁹ (The Magic Flute) and the idea is one which certain other Christian denominations love to hate, namely the notion of apotheosis, of man becoming like god. In The Magic Flute, the idea comes up relatively early, when Papageno, the opera’s comic bird-man figure, first meets Pamina, the opera’s heroine. Together they sing a duet about the universal nature of love and the personified goddess of love:

Ihr hoher Zweck zeigt deutlich an,
Nichts Edlers sei als Weib und Mann.
Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann
Reichen an die Gottheit an.

(Her – love personified’s – noble purpose demonstrates clearly
That there is nothing more noble than a wife and a husband.
Husband and wife and wife and husband
Reach up to – and attain – godhood/divinity.)

(Another of my favorite ideas will be mentioned here only in passing, namely that it is in this eternal bond between two spouses that the potential for attaining godhood is greatest. This paean to eternal, temple marriage – another important LDS idea – is found in The Magic Flute as well as in The Woman Without a Shadow. And in The Magic Flute, the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris appear as role models: a married god-couple!)

At the end of Act I, the chorus sings an important text, the (bold) portions of which are repeated in Act II:

“Wenn Tugend und Gerechtigkeit
Der Großen Pfad mit Ruhm bestreut,
Dann ist die Erd’ ein Himmelreich
Und Sterbliche den Göttern gleich.”
(When virtue and justice
Strew the path of the great ones with fame,
Then earth will be a heavenly kingdom
And mortals will be equal to the gods.)

In Act II, the three young boys who serve as spiritual guides to the characters also promise a proximate apotheosis:

“Bald prangt, den Morgen zu verkünden,
Die Sonn’ auf goldner Bahn.
Bald soll der Aberglaube schwinden,
Bald siegt der weise Mann.
O holde Ruhe, steig hernieder,
Kehr in der Menschen Herzen wieder;
Dann ist die Erd’ ein Himmelreich
Und Sterbliche den Göttern gleich.”
(Soon, to herald the morning,
The sun will be resplendent on its golden path.
Soon superstition will disappear,
Soon the wise man will be victorious.
O graceful, lovely peace, descend to us,
Return into the hearts of humans;
Then earth will be a heavenly kingdom
And mortals will be equal to the gods.)

At the end of the opera, when the appearance of the sun has driven away the night, Pamina and Tamino, as well as Papageno and his wife, Papagena, are blessed with many children (in the one case) and truly exalted (in the other). The High Priest Sarastro sings:

Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht,
Zernichten der Heuchler erschlichene Macht.
(The rays of the sun drive away the night,
Destroying the ill-gotten power of hypocrites.)

The choir of priests then sings to Pamina/Tamino:

Heil sei euch Geweihten!
Ihr dranget durch Nacht.
Dank sei dir, Osiris,
Dank dir, Isis, gebracht!
Es siegte die Stärke
Und krönet zum Lohn
Die Schönheit und Weisheit
Mit ewiger Kron’!
(Hail to both of you consecrated ones!
You have penetrated through night.
Thanks be to thee, Osiris,
Thanks to thee, also, Isis!
Strength was victorious
And, as a reward, crowns
Beauty and wisdom
With an eternal crown!)

As a last example I will mention a related, and supporting, notion to that of apotheosis, namely imago dei, man in the image of god. I had the good fortune to have been given by Professor Douglas Tobler a copy of a paper once presented at a conference in Switzerland by Ernst Benz, a Professor of Church History at the University of Marburg, entitled: “Der Mensch als imago dei” (“Man in the Image of God”). Later I was asked by Professor Truman Madsen to translate the piece when Professor Benz visited BYU but gave a talk deemed less appropriate for inclusion in Madsen’s volume of collected Reflections on Mormonism.¹⁰

A difficult, dense piece, Benz’s magisterial work is nonetheless a very important synchronic contextualization of this lofty idea, carefully traced by Professor Benz from the distant Biblical and Hellenic past via Neoplatonists (many of whom believed it) to the Church Fathers, many of whom – such as Augustine – were less inclined. Eventually the idea was marginalized and made anathema – expressing it was even punishable by death! – and sent underground). It surfaces in the German mystics of the Middle Ages, and then in Jacob Böhme in the seventeenth century and the German romantics of the nineteenth, finally to appear … mirabile dictu! … in its fullest form in the teachings of the uneducated boy Joseph Smith in far-off America, and on the wild frontier at that!

Here, among the followers of Joseph Smith, says Benz, is the place where the idea of humans in the image of god finally really took root and unfolded itself in all its important implications: for education, for universal medical care, for adequate nutrition for all, for suitable dwellings and clothing worthy of beings created in the image of god, for non-stultifying employment that reinforces respect and allows the mind and body to develop … in short, implications for how we really see and treat all our fellow beings across the globe, namely as eternal, divine beings created in the image of god, with the potential to become like gods.

This brief recitation of a few of my favorite theological/anthropological ideas taken from German texts and from LDS doctrines will have to suffice for now to convince any reader of these lines that I see the gospel of Jesus Christ restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith as a great compilation of some of the best ideas ever thought and believed by humankind. It is inconceivable to me that an untutored youth, Joseph Smith, in a nineteenth-century American frontier milieu, could, on his own, have tapped into so many sources of universal truth as these.

I am fully aware that there are all manner of notions entertained by people calling themselves Latter-day Saints. Theirs is the burden of demonstrating that their favorite “LDS ideas” are consonant with truly Christian values and, if consistently applied, will result in a better society.

For my part, I have chosen to populate my own virtual credo with those ideas I resonate with and those ideas I also find expressed by great thinkers and artists, but most especially, those which have, in my humble opinion, the potential to remake a vicious, polarised, warlike, obscurantist, social-Darwinite world of fear and hate into a truly enlightened, irenic, equitable, humane, compassionate Christian civilization of love and hope.

—-
Notes:

¹ As evidence I submit my book, In Search of the Supernal: Preexistence, Eternal Marriage, and Apotheosis in German Literary, Operatic, and Cinematic Texts (Münster: Agenda-Verlag, 2003) A German-language version is also available, at http://aufdersuchenachdemsupernalen.blogspot.com/
² The film is Truth and Conviction (see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0420975/). The books are: The Price, the True Story of a Mormon who Defied Hitler (see: http://www.amazon.com/price-story-Mormon-defied-Hitler/dp/0884945340); When Truth Was Treason: German Youth against Hitler: The Story of the Helmuth Hübener Group Based on the Narrative of Karl-Heinz Schnibbe (see: http://www.amazon.com/When-Truth-Was-Treason-Karl-Heinz/dp/0252022017); and (in German) Jugendliche gegen Hitler: Die Helmuth Hubener Gruppe in Hamburg, 1941-42 (see: http://www.amazon.com/Jugendliche-gegen-Hitler-Helmuth-Hubener/dp/3921655757). The articles include: “The Führer’s New Clothes: Helmuth Hübener and the Mormons in the Third Reich.” (See: http://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/024-20-29.pdf)
³ “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”
⁴ “5 And that law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind, and is justifiable before me. 6 Therefore, I, the Lord, justify you, and your brethren of my church, in befriending that law which is the constitutional law of the land; 7 And as pertaining to law of man, whatsoever is more or less than this, cometh of evil. 8 I, the Lord God, make you free, therefore ye are free indeed; and the law also maketh you free. 9 Nevertheless, when the wicked rule the people mourn. 10 Wherefore, honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold; otherwise whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil. 11 And I give unto you a commandment, that ye shall forsake all evil and cleave unto all good, that ye shall live by every word which proceedeth forth out of the mouth of God. 12 For he will give unto the faithful line upon line, precept upon precept; and I will try you and prove you herewith. 13 And whoso layeth down his life in my cause, for my name’s sake, shall find it again, even life eternal. 14 Therefore, be not afraid of your enemies, for I have decreed in my heart, saith the Lord, that I will prove you in all things, whether you will abide in my covenant, even unto death, that you may be found worthy. 15 For if ye will not abide in my covenant ye are not worthy of me. 16 Therefore, renounce war and proclaim peace, and seek diligently to turn the hearts of the children to their fathers, and the hearts of the fathers to the children;” (I have added emphasis here to some of the phrases I deem particularly relevant to the Hübener story).
⁵ Cf. for example, the recent book by Terryl Givens, When Souls Had Wings (see: http://www.amazon.com/When-Souls-Had-Wings-Pre-Mortal/dp/0195313909).
⁶ Der Himmel über Berlin (translated as Wings of Desire) (see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093191/) and In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Far Away, So Close! see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107209/)
⁷ See: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2001/spring/szymborska-one-version-events/
⁸ See: http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?id=43
⁹ See: https://byustudies.byu.edu/PDFLibrary/EntireJournals/2004_v43_n03%200348e2d4-ce07-4ad6-b307-95f5ac54a541.pdf
¹⁰ Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels (see: https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/BYUStudies/article/viewArticle/5165). Professor Madsen shortened the essay to fit the requirements of his volume, but eventually the full essay appeared in the FARMS Review. See: http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=17&num=1&id=573

————————————-

Alan Frank Keele is Professor Emeritus of German Studies at Brigham Young University.

Professor Keele was born in 1942 in Provo, Utah. He attended schools in Springville, Utah; Laramie, Wyoming; Spanish Fork, Utah; and Bicknell, Utah, and graduated from Wayne High (Utah) in 1960. He then attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, on a Rotary International scholarship, majoring in chemistry. After serving a thirty-month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany from 1962 to 1964, he received his B.A. from Brigham Young University in German and History in 1967. In 1971, he received a Ph.D. in German Language and Literature from Princeton University in 1971, whereupon he began his career teaching at Brigham Young University. He has studied German, French, Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Russian (in ascending order of incompetence).

He is married to Linda Kay Sellers. They have six children and ten grandchildren. Professor Keele has served on the board of Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms Race, Utah County Chapter, on the Area Advisory Council for the Alpine School District, as chair of the Utah Democratic Forum, as co-chair (with Professor Donald K. Jarvis) of Russian Relief, twice as an LDS campus high councilman, as an LDS branch president of a BYU single student branch (1974-1977), and as LDS bishop of a BYU married student ward (1993-1997). He has been an ordinance worker in the Mt. Timpanogos LDS temple, a choir director, a Primary teacher, and Ward Mission Leader. Since 2010 he has been retired from Brigham Young University.

Posted February 2012

Now faith is . . . evidence.
~Paul, Hebrews 11:1

The moral of all this is an old one; that
religion is revelation. In other words,
it is a vision, and a vision received by
faith; but it is a vision of reality. The
faith consists in a conviction of its reality.
~G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Hearing the “Joseph Smith story” for the first time may raise a few eyebrows, and a few questions. Mitt Romney recently reported that he responded honestly and frankly to a reporter’s request for an explanation of his, Romney’s, belief in Joseph Smith’s “first vision.” After complying with this request Romney said he was astounded, perhaps “blindsided” was the word he used, at the reporter’s follow-up question. “How can you believe in that kind of stuff?” That is not an easy question to answer in a few words, and the length of the answer depends somewhat on the theological knowledge and maturity of the one asking. Is it a sincere question? And does his or her knowledge of religion go beyond a sophomore course in “The Bible as Literature”?

Nevertheless, the “first vision” has been rather easy for critics to dismiss. Joseph was an uneducated farm boy, only fourteen years old. The religious fervor around him cried out for spiritual experiences. He admits he was unconscious for at least part of the time. “When I came to myself again, I found myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven” (JSH, 20). And little changed in his life for the next three years. Joseph tells us, “I continued to pursue my common vocation in life until the twenty-first of September, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-three . . .” (JSH, 9)

But on the night of September 21, 1827, everything changed. Joseph Smith reports the visit of a “messenger sent from the presence of God,” whose name was Moroni. This messenger (soon to be known commonly as the Angel Moroni) instructed Joseph in lengthy detail, quoting scriptures, telling of “gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent,” and most surprisingly (I assume Joseph was surprised) instructing Joseph that he was to get these plates, translate the ancient characters into English, and publish the translation. And this time Joseph was conscious throughout the whole of this amazing scene.

. . . when almost immediately after the heavenly messenger had ascended from me for the third time, the cock crowed, and I found that day was approaching, so that our interviews must have occupied the whole of that night (JSH, 47).

If the “first vision” raised questions which critics have, in their minds, easily answered, the events of the night of September 21, 1823, and the following day, and subsequent events which continued through the next seven years until the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830, raise many more questions which are not so easily answered. I discovered this when I tried to approach these events through the eyes of the unbelieving critic, and said to myself: Suppose there were no Moroni and no gold plates? What then?

Joseph told his father the next morning about the visit from the angel and then left his father standing in the field and went, supposedly, to the hill, supposedly to meet the angel again and discover the plates. That evening he told his entire family that he had gone to the hill, had pried off a big rock which was covering a cement repository, had seen the plates, and had seen the “angel,” a fifth time within two days. And here comes the first question. Was Joseph Smith a liar?

The much-admired scholar Harold Bloom says that in his opinion Joseph Smith was “a religious genius,” even “an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history” (The American Religion, 80, 82). Since we are assuming here, as Professor Bloom assumes, that there was no Moroni and no gold plates, we must then also assume that Joseph Smith was, in addition to being a genius, devious, crafty, and very clever. We might even say shrewd. In kindness we may also believe him to have been sincere in his intentions. But having said that we must still raise the question again, Was he also a liar? Harold Bloom says no, he was not a liar.

In explaining the Book of Mormon and the plates Professor Bloom has the following rather strange explanation: “I assume that magical trance-states were involved, so that we can dismiss the literalism both of the golden plates and of conscious charlatanry” (emphasis mine). There were no golden plates ergo no Angel Moroni. But in saying multiple times to many people over the course of several years that these plates existed and that he had communicated directly on several occasions with the Angel Moroni, Joseph Smith is not telling lies. Did he exist in a perpetual “magical trance-state and therefore there was no “conscious charlantanry”?

I am reminded of a favorite passage from G.K. Chesterton.

Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. . . . It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. (Orthodoxy, Image Books, 124)

Following Chesterton’s theory, the sentence: “I assume that magical trance-states were involved, so that we can dismiss the literalism both of the golden plates and of conscious charlatanry” actually says: “Forget about the gold plates. Joseph Smith was not an outright liar because he was a crackpot.” Can we have it both ways? When one reads the description of Joseph Smith’s first visit to the hill and his first experience with the plates and his fifth visit by the angel, it is hard to read the detailed, matter-of-fact descriptions of this event and think of Joseph as being in a continuous “magical trance-state.” But maybe it is too harsh to call his description of these events “lies”. The British have a kinder word. They call such little harmless things “taradiddles.” He embellished these taradiddles further by telling the family he had tried to take the plates but “was forbidden by the messenger.” Furthermore, he was to go to the hill each year on that day for a total of four years. Question: Where had he been all day when he should have been working in the field? Why did his family believe him? His brother William later answered the last question by saying that of course they believed him, that Joseph was a good and an honest boy. Why shouldn’t they believe him? William also mentioned that they were a religious family and frequently read the scriptures together in the evenings, which would make Joseph’s taradiddles all the more astounding.

And here I have to pause before asking a big question. I must make it clear that I consider Joseph Smith to have been a very intelligent man. He was not a fool, and certainly not a crackpot. Nor did he have schizophrenia. I have lived with a schizophrenic. My older brother completed a degree in mathematics and then suffered what we called back in those days, a “mental breakdown.” He remained a pleasant fellow, walked the streets of Provo talking to himself or to anyone else who wanted to listen to his theories about squaring the circle, but schizophrenics or delusionary people (people in a magical trance-state), in my experience, do not write books. They may see small birds as angels, but that does not inspire the confidence and admiration that Joseph Smith enjoyed from those closest to him. No, if Joseph Smith was not a prophet, he was a liar.

So what was the motive behind the lies? Did Joseph Smith want to become the creator of a new “biblical religion,” with himself at the head? Did he want to restore early biblical Christianity? Did he want to model a new church after the apostolic church that arose after the death of Christ? If so, he was not the only one. Many contemporary ministers claimed to be doing just that. So, another following question would be, why didn’t he do just that? It would have been so easy. Why did he invent this fantastic story about gold plates with ancient engravings telling about the origin of ancient inhabitants of this continent? And plates that he would have to get his hands on, keep, translate, and publish? Why did he lay on himself at the outset of his ecclesiastical career such an impossible burden? Of course, it turned out not to be an impossible burden. He actually did, in a relatively short time, dictate, complete, and publish the Book of Mormon. And, according to the assumptions I am suggesting here, he did it without the assistance of an angel and without gold plates!

How did he do it? Did he memorize twenty-one chapters of Isaiah? All the scribes insist he had no papers with him while he dictated. And speaking of Isaiah, we must ask other questions. Joseph Smith reported that the messenger, Moroni, quoted specific passages from Old and New Testament prophets. There was no Moroni giving him instructions, and yet these quotations all point in the direction of a “restored” Church of Christ, a rebuilding of “the house of Israel.” He even has the messenger telling him that the prophecies found in Isaiah concerning this restoration were “about to be fulfilled.” What did Joseph Smith have in mind at this early date? Thousands of readers of the Book of Mormon have seen the genius of the organization of these restoration prophecies. And in every case, as far as Isaiah is concerned, the passages include detailed commentaries. How did he do it? Had Joseph Smith, with his meager formal education, become a master scholar of the writings of Isaiah?

We find, for example, twenty-one chapters of Isaiah arranged with complete commentaries by Nephi, Jacob, Abinadi, and Jesus Christ. We also find the term “house of Israel” occurring 106 times in the book, frequently occurring in conjunction with the term “gentiles,” with the commentaries instructing us that “in the last days” the “house of Israel” is going to be “restored” by a “gentile” nation. It is also interesting that these terms (“house of Israel” and “gentile”) only occur when the prophet Isaiah is being quoted—that is, only in First and Second Nephi, in Jacob, and in Third Nephi. Did Joseph Smith arrange all of this in his mind before and during the time he was dictating?

Perhaps there are answers to these questions about Joseph Smith’s dictating the Book of Mormon. But even more questions arise when we continue with the problem of there being no gold plates. Huge questions. There is probably no event in Joseph Smith’s early life for which there are so many reliable and insistent witnesses. When Joseph reported to his family that he had received a severe reprimand from the Angel for not being diligent enough in his work, what was he talking about? More lies? When Joseph and Emma took Joseph Knight’s horse and wagon away from the Smith home at midnight where did they go? When Joseph returned home with a dislocated thumb and said he had been waylaid in the woods by persons trying to steal the plates, where had he really been and what had he been up to? First he told his family that he had hidden the plates in a log, but shortly thereafter he brought the plates home, covered with a cloth or with a coat, and each member of the family was allowed to handle them but not remove the covering. Joseph’s brother William (16) says “I was permitted to lift them as they laid in a pillowcase but not to see them, as it was contrary to the commands he [Joseph] had received. They weighed about 60 lbs. according to the best of my judgment.” Another time William handled whatever it was that Joseph had covered and said: “I could tell they were plates of some kind and that they were fastened together by rings running through the back.” Joseph’s sister Catherine (15) “hefted” them and declared they were “heavy.” What did Joseph have hidden in the coat or under the cloth that could deceive the members of his family?

Joseph asked his brother Hyrum for a box to store the plates in. Hyrum had also “hefted” the plates and was quick to provide the box. Why? Several days later Martin Harris’ wife and daughter visited the Smith home with the intention of seeing the plates. They went home disappointed and told Martin Harris that they were not permitted to see the plates but they were permitted to hold the box. Martin reported: “My daughter said they were about as much as she could lift . . . and my wife said they were very heavy.” So Martin himself went to the Smith home to see the plates with the same result. He was allowed to lift the box which contained the plates and reported: “I knew from the heft that they were lead or gold, and I knew that Joseph had not credit enough to buy so much lead” (Anderson, 26). A farmer like Martin Harris worked with and knew all kinds of metals. What was in that box?

These experiences could be repeated many times and each time would raise many questions. What did Joseph’s wife Emma have sitting on the table in her house “wrapped in a small linen table cloth?” She says:

I once felt of the plates as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb. . . . I moved them from place to place on the table, as it was necessary in doing my work. (Anderson, 29)

What was under the cloth?

Mrs. Whitmer says that she was shown the plates. In David Whitmer’s words:

My mother was going to milk the cows, when she was met out near the yard [by a stranger] who said to her: “You have been very faithful and diligent in your labors, but you are tired because of the increase of your toil; it is proper therefore that you should receive a witness that your faith may be strengthened.” Thereupon he showed her the plates. (Anderson, 31-32)

She repeated this story to her children and grandchildren all her life. Was she also a liar? If not, what did she see? Who was the stranger?

Another question: Why would a man like Joseph Smith, who was in his right mind, who had a plan in his head, and who had finished dictating the Book of Mormon and was about to take the manuscript to the printer, why in the world would he invite eight shrewd and probably still somewhat skeptical farmers, including his father and his two brothers Hyrum and Samuel, to meet him in a secluded spot in the woods near their house where he would show them the plates, if he had no plates to show them? His father and brothers, as well as the Whitmer family, had been waiting for several years for this opportunity. They were all religious men. They trusted in Joseph Smith. There were no plates to see, but when they returned to the house they each signed a document stating they had seen “the plates of which hath been spoken which have the appearance of gold . . . we also saw the engravings thereon. . . we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates. . . . And we lie not, God bearing witness of it.” If there were no plates, what happened that day in the woods? What conversation took place between Joseph and these men? What did Joseph tell his father and his brothers when he showed up with no plates? Sorry, Dad, I have been lying to you all these years, but if you will only say you actually saw the plates, that would help me out a whole lot. What would Joseph’s father answer to such an absurd statement?

I am now getting to the point of weariness suggesting these questions, and this reminds me of an interesting anecdote in the life of Samuel Johnson which is somewhere in Boswell’s Life. James Macpherson, the compiler and editor of the Ossian papers, was disturbed that Samuel Johnson did not believe the poetry came from an early-medieval Celtic bard, but believed, rather, that Macpherson himself had collected old highland poetry and fused it together with a few poems of his own. Incensed, Macpherson asked Mr. Johnson: “Sir, Do you believe any man living in this age could have produced such poetry?” to which Johnson answered, “Yes, sir. Many men, many women, and many children. A man could write such stuff all day if he would abandon his mind to it.” But there were not any men, let alone women and children who could have written the Book of Mormon. But I could continue asking such questions all day if I would abandon my mind to it. But I will not abandon my mind to it; I will close this session of questions.

And Joseph Smith did not abandon his mind. His mind became sharper and clearer as his work as prophet continued through city planning, through temple building, right on through his imprisonment when he dictated this pearl of the Doctrine and Covenants:

. . . let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from heaven. The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto the forever and ever. (D&C 121:45-46)

——————————————

Garold N. Davis (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Brigham Young University, where he also chaired the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and served as associate dean of the College of Humanities. Prior to joining the faculty at BYU, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Southern Oregon College, and the University of Colorado.

Among his Mormon-oriented publications are “Pattern and Purpose of the Isaiah Commentaries in the Book of Mormon,” in Davis Bitton, ed., Mormons, Scripture, and the Ancient World: Studies in Honor of John L. Sorenson (Provo: FARMS, 1998); and, with Norma S. Davis, “Behind the Wall: The Church in Eastern Germany (Part 1: Saints in Isolation, 1945-1989),” Ensign (April 1991); “The Wall Comes Down: The Church in Eastern Germany (Part 2: 1989-1990),” Ensign (June 1991); Behind the Iron Curtain: Recollections of Latter-day Saints in East Germany, 1945-1989 (Provo: BYU Studies, 1996) [German edition: Jenseits des eisernen Vorhangs: Erinnerungen von Heiligen der letzten Tage in Ostdeutschland, 1945-1989 (Bad Reichenhall, Germany: LDS Books Schubert & Roth OHG, 2005).

Dr. Davis is married to Norma S. Davis, and they are the parents of five children. Together, they have served two missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany and Austria. He is currently an assistant executive secretary in his home ward, and a sealer in the Provo Utah Temple. His hobbies “in a previous life” were backpacking, cross-country skiing, and marathon running; now, they’re somewhat more sedate: golf and woodcarving.

Posted February 2012

These are the questions that I asked myself as a teenager. I was fairly diligent and non-rebellious as far as teenagers go. I worked hard to please my parents, Church leaders, high school teachers. I practiced the piano, I memorized scriptures, I studied for tests in history and chemistry and calculus. I wasn’t just going through the motions to please others, either. I loved learning about the world; I wanted to learn to know God.

And yet at that time, I felt that there was tension between the two major tracks of learning in my life (learning how to interpret the world as an educated person, and learning how to become a mature member of the Church). For instance, my biology textbook talked about the theory of evolution as the widely accepted view of how human life came to be. But when I questioned my Sunday School teacher on evolution, he gave me a dismissive look and said, “Melissa, do you really think that we came from monkeys?”

Now, this Sunday School teacher was—like all Mormons at the local level—doing his job as a volunteer. Actually, he was a conscript. A local bishop appointed him to the job. This Sunday School teacher wasn’t a scientist, either. So I didn’t see him as the final authority on whether the claims of Mormonism could harmonize with the claims of science.

However, it troubled me that contradictions seemed to exist among “the things that I knew” as an educated member of the Church. It also troubled me that others also sought to draw attention to contradictions within my faith. I was aware that some of my Christian friends had anti-Mormon lessons at their church youth groups. Clearly, what they had learned led them to feel contempt and derision for my deeply held beliefs. One of them told my brother that, as a Mormon, he was “living a lie.”

Therefore, to my high school self, the questions “Is the Church true? Are its teachings correct?” were not only very important, but also rather terrifying because it seemed that the validity of so many other things also hinged on these questions. I knew that I would have to figure this out, but at the same time I didn’t want to. I was afraid of what I perceived to be a zero-sum contest between my religious truth and “everybody else’s truth.” What if the Church lost? And then what could I believe, and who would I be?

“There are a lot of stories in the world, but Mormonism is the story that I want to be true. To the extent that it is not, I will make it true.”

For help I turned to my “crazy Uncle Charles,” as he called himself: my dad’s little brother, a Stanford-and-Harvard-educated professor of Japanese literature at Tufts University. [Uncle Charles is also featured on the Mormon Scholars Testify website, and I commend to you his essay, which is much more eloquent and articulate than mine.] I told him about my intellectual doubts about Mormonism’s claims. In the sort of long, belabored emails that high school students with Big Questions are wont to write, I laid out all of my doubts: What about evolution? What about blacks and the priesthood? What about polygamy? What about Joseph Smith saying that there were five-foot-high Quakers living on the moon [or something like that]?

Uncle Charles replied that when he was an undergraduate, he, too, had had doubts. He had gone to another Latter-day Saint professor for help. This professor had told him that there were a lot of stories in the world, but the Mormon story was the one that he wanted to be true. Uncle Charles concluded his message with the statement, “There are a lot of stories in the world, but the Mormon story is the one I want to be true. To the extent that it is not, I will make it true.”

At the time, I read this as a sort of well-meaning self-deception, kind of like what happens with the Santa Claus story. Santa Claus doesn’t really exist, but for kids who believe in Santa Claus, he does. Wow! He flies around the sky in a sleigh drawn by reindeer! He fits down the chimney and magically leaves presents with tags signed in parents’ handwriting! That’s great and magical for, say, five year-olds, but for everyone else (and for those five year-olds whose parents have let them in on one of life’s harsh realities) it’s just another tender falsehood. To say something like, “to the extent that it is not, I will make it true” sounded foolish and also a little arrogant. You can’t make a religion “true” in the same way that you can pull off the Santa Claus act. There had to be “a right answer” that was definitely and completely right.

At the same time, I didn’t really know that there was a right or a wrong answer. As a sophomore at Harvard College, I took a moral reasoning class that pitted the world’s great moral philosophers against each other on the question of whether a belief in God was necessary for the formation of moral laws. Everything I read sounded about right to me, even when the syllabus set philosophers up to directly contradict each other. I read A and agreed with A. Then I read B and agreed with B.

In the midst of my ambivalence, I was ultimately comforted by Uncle Charles’s endorsement, incomplete as it seemed to me at the time. Maybe there were some things about religion that weren’t clear to me at the moment, but Uncle Charles was a pretty smart person. I still knew for a fact that the key to what I loved most about my wonderful extended family was the common faith that we all shared in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as interpreted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I knew for a fact that I had felt the Spirit’s powerful witness—not all the time, but enough times to make a difference. Maybe I would figure things out someday.

I testify that this message is true. Will you follow Jesus Christ and be baptized into His church?

I turned in my mission papers and was called to Taiwan. I had just finished my junior year as an East Asian Studies major with a specialization in Chinese literature and I hit the ground running in terms of language. At the Missionary Training Center (MTC), where new missionaries go to acquire languages, doctrine, and psychological resilience, my teachers dispatched me to study Chinese with Elder McMullin, a missionary with thick, owlish glasses and a generally nerdy demeanor, who had previously been an exchange student in China. For the sake of propriety, our teachers kept the classroom doors ajar and had us move our desks into the well-trafficked hallway. We memorized discussions and waited impatiently for the opportunity to leave the MTC for Taiwan. I must admit that my eagerness to leave arose partially from narcissistic self-assurance: I already speak and read Chinese! I already know the Confucian classics as well as the Bible and the Book of Mormon! Taiwan needs me! The Lord needs me! Here I am, send Me!

I got to Taiwan, was assigned a trainer, and found that I had a good deal to learn. In the first place, my knowledge of Chinese religious and philosophical traditions was not the secret conversionary weapon that I’d imagined it would be, but actually a hindrance. I would try to talk to people about the Dao (the Way), or about the bodhisattva’s ultimate sacrifice, and draw connections to the conclusion that whoever it was to whom I was speaking should join my church. However, I soon found that while comparative philosophy was interesting, it didn’t demand that anyone change anything about their lives—myself included. My companion and I invited many people to accept Jesus Christ and be baptized, and some accepted, but I didn’t feel a sense of certainty about the presence of the Holy Spirit in my work as a missionary. I worked hard, studied hard, prayed hard. But in many ways, despite my “successes” as a missionary in terms of logging hours and baptizing converts, during the first part of my mission I was actually missing the point.

Create in me a clean heart, O Lord; and renew a right spirit within me. (Psalms 51:10)

After a while, my many failures and shortcomings as a missionary and as a person became more apparent to me. I’m not quite sure how this happened or how long it took, but I do recall one event from this period of self-reflection. It was the day I picked up a new companion from the train station in Tainan. She was a new missionary who had only been out for six weeks. On the bike ride home from the train station—suitcases strapped to our back racks with bike tire inner tubes, motorcycles and giant trucks rumbling past in clouds of black exhaust—I found out that she hated riding a bike in a skirt, disliked Chinese food, was struggling with Chinese, and didn’t like doing missionary work. My response was something like, “Tough. We’re missionaries, we work hard, and we love it. So just get over it.” Shortly thereafter, as we left the apartment and paused at the door to pray, I looked up and saw my companion with tears streaming down her face, weeping. I thought to myself: How can someone who is supposed to be representing Jesus Christ be the kind of person who fails to take care of someone who needs extra love and support?

I decided that of all things, being a better disciple of Christ, and not the statistics showing “how hard I worked,” should be the measure of my success as a missionary. As I rode my bike from appointment to appointment, I repeated in my head a scripture from Psalms: Create in me a clean heart, O Lord; and renew a right spirit within me.

I had the good fortune to spend the last nine months of my mission in the western district of the city of Tainan. The members of the Church there were so dedicated and generous. I came to know the families and individuals in the ward well enough to understand how to serve them better. I loved them for their diverse gifts and personalities and for their desire to follow Christ.

I also became well acquainted with Tainan’s neighborhoods and cultural institutions, including its religious institutions. My companion and I went every week to a nursing home run by a Catholic nunnery and helped the nuns do the laundry. We hung damp sheets and adult-sized cloth diapers to dry. Sometimes we helped to iron the priests’ collared shirts. The nun with whom we worked most often told me how she had been called to serve God when she was a young woman about my age who was engaged to be married. She was an American woman, cheerful and hardworking as she labored in this part of God’s vineyard. I felt certain that God appreciated and accepted her sacrifices. I was also beginning to feel certain that God appreciated and accepted the sacrifices that I was making as a missionary. I experienced the good fruits of the Spirit in the happiness I felt, in the joy and love that welled up spontaneously in me like a miracle, like a superpower, like a fountain of living water.

When I returned from my mission and resumed my undergraduate studies, I found that I had become a better student. I was less easily swayed by first this and then that forceful argument. I was able to think critically and exercise judgment. I was more invested in the work of studying and less easily distracted. I decided to apply for a Ph.D. in Chinese history and was accepted to the program at Harvard.

Church history has some sticky spots, and the Church sure is a patriarchal, conservative institution, but I really love my husband.

I deferred Ph.D. studies for one year because I ended up engaged to Elder McMullin, the nerdy, skinny elder who had been my Chinese study partner in the MTC. During our engagement, I participated in a summer research seminar at the Smith Institute for Church History at BYU. It was the first time I had ever studied Mormon history in-depth.

Over the course of the summer, as I delved through history books and primary sources, I was alternatively inspired, impressed, intrigued, and shocked. I began to see that the early Saints had been flawed human beings like all of us. I learned that early leaders such as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had made missteps in the course of their leadership. I learned that Church culture, organization, policies, and even doctrines have been subject to shifts over time. I learned more about the Church’s nineteenth century practice of plural marriage, which is a very difficult subject for nearly all Mormon women, no matter how orthodox. Finally, I confronted the reality that in terms of its formal doctrinal and administrative structure, the Church—past and present—is a patriarchal and very conservative organization. This reality is not a challenge for many members of the Church, and it is not a significant challenge for me now. However, it was a challenge for me at the time, as I prepared for marriage in the temple and anticipated having to submit to the various aspects of the temple liturgy that reinforced this patriarchal order.

At the same time, I was in love with my fiancé Joseph, the former Elder McMullin. He was intelligent, whimsical, even-tempered, and generous. We had many shared interests, including our shared experience as missionaries in the Taiwan Kaohsiung Mission and our interest in China and the Chinese language. He was supportive of my plans for pursuing a doctorate and later a professional career while also raising a family. He was deeply committed to following Christ, serving in the Church, and fulfilling the responsibilities of a husband and a father. He was in love with me. Intellectual concerns about patriarchal liturgies notwithstanding, I couldn’t think of anything more wonderful than being married to Joseph for time and all eternity. I was sure that our marriage would be a partnership of equals. Furthermore, I knew that so much of what I valued about who he was, including why he valued who I was, was directly linked to his upbringing as a Latter-day Saint.

So, on my wedding day, I thought: Patriarchy, smatriarchy. We’ve been married for eight years now—we’ve had three kids along the way—and it’s been wonderful. I don’t mean for this to devolve into a hubbi-mony: “I know my husband is true.” What I’m trying to say is that the formal structures of a religion can be very different from the everyday practice of that religion. Focusing on the formal structures alone yields an incomplete picture.

There are a lot of stories in the world, and they all have sticky spots.

When I went back to Harvard for the Ph.D., I studied the history of Christianity in China and was based in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. During seven years of taking classes, preparing general examinations, conducting field research, and writing my dissertation, I studied the history of religious movements from the great world religious traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam. I examined numerous historical accounts showing how these religious traditions have also had leaders who made missteps in the course of their leadership, that these religious traditions have also been subject to shifts and swings over time, and that—generally speaking—these religious traditions in their various global and historical manifestations have tended to be quite patriarchal and very conservative.

In the context of the world’s religious traditions, I didn’t see anything particularly problematic about Mormonism. If there is any reason why Mormonism seems more vulnerable to intellectual criticism than other major world religions, it is because Mormon history begins relatively recently. The miracle of a virgin getting pregnant is no more believable than the miracle of a fourteen-year-old boy seeing God and Jesus Christ in a vision. The “problem” with the Mormon miracles is simply that they haven’t been shored up by thousands of years of religious tradition. But that problem lies in the eyes of beholders who are willing to withhold scrutiny from “old” but not “new” religious claims, not in the miracles themselves.

Learning about how religious texts are created, translated, and disseminated from place to place and from culture to culture also helped me to appreciate the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. I’ve read many accounts of people who have left the Church for lack of archaeological evidence of the Book of Mormon in the Americas, “therefore the Book of Mormon is not an accurate historical record, therefore Joseph Smith wasn’t a prophet, therefore the religion that he founded is all bogus.” Or I’ve heard of people who say they left the Church because they researched this or that prophecy made by Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants and found that it never came to pass, “therefore Joseph Smith wasn’t a prophet, therefore the religion that he founded is all bogus.”

There was a time in my life when I would have thought about religion in this same uncompromisingly syllogistic way, as if a religious system is a string of cheap Christmas tree lights. If one light gets broken, the whole string is out. This was what was in my mind when, as a high school student, I asked my Uncle Charles: Is the Church true? Are its claims correct? In my mind, one incorrect claim, such as Joseph Smith’s alleged statement that the moon was inhabited by people dressed like Quakers, could set off the whole chain reaction that ended with my faith being bogus. To me at the time, Uncle Charles’s response, “To the extent that [the Church is] not [true], I will make it true,” was small comfort. If something is bogus, how can you do anything to make it true?

But I now have a different perspective on this issue of religious claims. From a scholarly perspective, most religious claims are by nature miraculous and indefensible from an empirical point of view. When good primary sources exist, religious founders all turn out to be real people, not perfect beings. Religious texts and systems of doctrine are all problematic in their own way, from the Bible to the Mahayana Buddhist sutras to the Koran. Maybe this is what Uncle Charles meant when he alluded to ways in which the Church might not be “true” according to my line of thinking at the time. Maybe when he said, “I will make it true,” he was simply speaking of the initiative required to nurture and exercise faith. “It’s not a spectator sport,” he said on a subsequent occasion, referring to religious life as a Mormon. I, too, have learned about the work of faith: that it is neverending, sometimes arduous, and that it has great value. It is work worth doing.

Instead of a string of Christmas tree lights, perhaps a better metaphor for how I see The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a building. To last, a building must have a good foundation. If it has a solid foundation, it can be built taller and larger, retrofitted and remodeled as use dictates. But if it has a shoddy foundation, it will be impossible for the building to endure, no matter how determined the builders. It will simply fall apart or sink into the soil. To me, the foundation of the Church was laid by the prophet Joseph Smith, his interpretation of the Bible and the Christian tradition, his revelation of humankind’s closeness to God, and the new scriptures that he brought forth, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. No matter how ungainly or flawed it may appear to some, the foundation of Mormonism continues to withstand the stresses of expansion and change.

There are a lot of stories in the world, and some of them are very similar to the Mormon story.

I wrote my dissertation on the history of the True Jesus Church, a Chinese Christian church with a founding story that Mormons find familiar: A man considered himself a Christian and read the Bible, but looked at the numerous Christian denominations and wasn’t sure that any of them represented the church that Jesus had founded. One day he had a vision in which Jesus spoke to him and commanded him to restore Christ’s true church. So in Beijing in 1917, Wei Enbo founded the one true church: the True Jesus Church. Same story, different punchline.

During my research, I became personally acquainted with many members of the True Jesus Church who were moral, intelligent, and in many cases impossibly kind to me, the “Gentile” researcher. I was certain that they were truly striving to follow Christ. I heard their testimonies of God’s love and care. Just as one hears in LDS General Conference or church publications, in the course of my research on religious experience in the True Jesus Church I heard and read many stories of miraculous healings, divine intervention, guidance given in answer to prayer. I was certain that church members were not lying when they recounted miraculous or life-changing manifestations of God’s power in their interviews. Why should they be? These were people of faith, and they saw the Holy Spirit at work in their lives.

The resemblance of the True Jesus Church to the church to which I belonged, along with the respect that I felt for the True Jesus Church members’ faith, provoked much reflection. If the Mormon story is not entirely novel, I thought, what is it that makes it different? What makes it matter? What makes it true?

Religions are more than just stories. So is truth.

One thing that I have learned as a scholar of religion is that religions are more than just “stories”. That is, a religion is much more than simply the scriptures, recorded teachings of religious leaders, institutional policies, and popular narratives that explain the state of the world and humankind’s place in it. Religion includes what people do, what people eat, when they pray and what material objects they use to pray, how they decorate their houses and how they build sacred places. Religion is how people feel, what they see in visions that no one else can see, how they make friends and what they do to make amends to those whom they have offended. Religion is people’s lived experiences, which are impossible to represent with a single list of doctrines or a single narrative. To understand religion, a scholar must encounter it on its own terms and according to the understanding of its believers, although understanding of course is not limited to this alone. This view is the state of the field in religious studies.

Telling stories is important, but I don’t think that any story that we try to tell about God can be complete as a “truth” in itself. To me, the way truths can be manifest in lived experience is a more valid measure of what is true, real, or from God. Who cares whether something is “true” by any abstract measure, including intellectual or theological argument, if it cannot be realized in our daily work, our bodies, or, most importantly, our relationships with our fellow beings? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that what people did was more important than what people said, and that people could be known by their fruits. I think that the ultimate responsibility for whether someone grows into the measure of a true disciple of Christ lies with that individual herself, not her religion. However, religions teach us what is possible, what is expected, what we can become. They set parameters and create the conditions for our growth.

This is why I think that Mormonism is the most amazing religious system that I have ever encountered, professionally or personally. As I have matured as a scholar and have gained a deeper knowledge of religions and religious believers, especially global Christian movements, I’ve gained a much deeper appreciation for Mormonism as a religious system based on powerful and compelling ideas and organized in a unique and compelling way that helps people in real life, that evolves over time, and that will endure. More importantly, however, my years of experience as a member of the Church have developed my testimony that the Church is an inspired organization where people can learn about Christ not only through prayer and study of the scriptures, but through continuous opportunities to yield, to serve, and to express gratitude. I know for a fact that the Church and its members are not perfect. As a people and as an institution, we’ve come a long way and we still have a long way to go. As a group, Mormons are probably no better than other people, be they Jews or Buddhists or atheists, who are committed to doing what is right even though it is hard, including loving one’s fellow beings as one’s self. I have good friends who belong to other faiths or who have left the faith traditions within which they were raised; they are moral, kind, wonderful people, and, because of them, the world is a better place. I can’t speak for them. What I can do is speak from my own experience. I testify that the Church is a divinely inspired organization, that Joseph Smith was a prophet who received divine revelation, and that the ordinances we receive and the covenants that we make within the Church have divine authority. I value the Church and I am so grateful to be a Latter-day Saint.

O then, is this not real? (Alma 32:35)

As I’ve continued to learn and grow as a person, as a member of the Church, and as a parent, I’ve been blessed with many wonderful opportunities to feel the active presence of the Spirit: the powerful, transforming awareness that God exists and is mindful of us. I have been inspired by the patterns and the commandments set forth in our scriptures, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. On countless occasions I have witnessed the Spirit working in people’s lives: giving them words of power and blessing, expanding their capability to be humble and generous, transforming enemies into friends. I am grateful that my life as a Latter-day Saint has helped me to develop a relationship with God and has defined the scope of this relationship in such marvelously limitless ways. I am grateful for the discipline that we learn as Latter-day Saints: for the laws of the fast, of the Sabbath, of the Word of Wisdom, and of tithing. I know that today, as in days of old, prophets still exhort in the name of God for people to repent and to become better.

There are still many things that I don’t completely understand about how the world works or doesn’t work and what God wants us to do about it. There are still many things that I don’t completely understand about how the Church works, or about the way that Mormons did or thought about things decades or centuries ago.

And yet my life experiences and education as a scholar have led me to treasure the blessings in my life: the fruits of the restored gospel in a world where such fruit has great value. As the prophet Alma says in his sermon about a seed that is planted, that grows, and that bears good fruit, “O then, is this not real?”

————————————–

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye earned her Ph.D. in Chinese history from Harvard University in 2011. While researching and writing her dissertation, “Miraculous Mundane: The True Jesus Church and Chinese Christianity in the Twentieth Century,” she lived in Xiamen, China, and was an affiliate of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences from 2009-2010. Her dissertation research project was funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Languages and Area Studies Dissertation Fellowship and by the Religious Research Association’s Constant R. Jacquet Research Award. Melissa taught in the history departments of Loyola Marymount University and California State University, Los Angeles, from 2006-2008. In 2003 she graduated magna cum laude in East Asian Studies from Harvard College, delivering the Harvard Oration at the Class Day graduation exercises.

Melissa currently serves as co-director of the Mormon Chapter of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy. Her journalistic work and creative writing have been published in The Far Eastern Economic Review, the NPR show Here and Now, and various literary journals and blogs. She is the mother of three children. She and her family live in Hong Kong, where she is engaged in additional research in the archives of Hong Kong Baptist University to prepare her dissertation manuscript for publication in book form. jingshangmu@gmail.com.

Posted January 2012

I grew up mainly in Maryland. My mother was a Christian Scientist and my dad an inactive Presbyterian, so my brother and I were brought up in the Christian Science faith. No two faiths in Christianity could be more different than Christian Science and that of the LDS Church. As an undergraduate student at Utah State University, I had serious questions about the faith of my youth, even though I had seen healing and other positive results of that faith. Unable to resolve the conflicts and questions about the basic principles of that religion, I had my name removed from the rolls of that church. That loss of faith left me very unsettled religiously.

As a college senior, I met Ann, a thoughtful, attractive, young woman student. Two years later we were married and moved to the state of Wisconsin for my graduate studies. Ann was a life-long and active member of the LDS Church. Ann’s parents were disappointed that she married a nonmember. She had faith that I would join the Church. Ann, knowing that I was deeply involved in scientific research, began to gently introduce me to evidences for the Book of Mormon. These were mainly articles in FARMS and books such as Lehi in the Desert. I read them willingly, and would say, “Hmmmmm. That’s interesting.” But nothing changed outwardly. That process went on for many years.

After graduating with my doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, I still had uneasiness about faith, having once lost my own. We lived in Thailand, where 95 percent of the population is Buddhist. My friends and colleagues there were Buddhists, and they had faith that if they followed the teachings of their religion, they would reach Nirvana, and, while on earth, Buddhism did give them a sense of peace and contentment and a good moral code to live by. After Thailand, we moved to Colombia, the most Roman Catholic country in Latin America. Most of my friends and colleagues there were Catholic, and had faith that if they followed the teachings of their church, they would be released from Purgatory and would go to Heaven. And their Catholic faith did result in healings and other blessings. And so, I was exposed to very different faiths, but all with apparent positive results and blessings.

I developed an early appreciation for the LDS Church and had no resistance to Ann’s activity nor to raising our two daughters in the Church, which helped them navigate through childhood and adolescence. Ann continued to pass along evidences of the Book of Mormon to me. But I remained doubtful about faith as a basis for belief and commitment, having lost mine and seen some very different faiths in operation among my friends. I had not experienced that spontaneous, overwhelming feeling that the Book and the Church were true. Several years earlier, a friend of mine, who had not been particularly religious, knew the Church was true when he saw two missionaries approaching his house, and when they came in the door, he was ready to receive the lesions and be baptized before they even taught him. Our foster son, a Catholic from Colombia, just knew that the Church was true when it was first explained to him. I expected to experience similar feelings, but they never came.

Ann continued to pass along articles on evidence for the Book of Mormon and discuss them with me. Little by little, I began to see that the Book of Mormon might be true. Finally, she passed along an article on word print analysis of the Book of Mormon that provided strong evidence of multiple authorship of the Book. That meant that Joseph Smith, Jr. wasn’t a genius who just made it up. With that, I decided that I needed to discuss this with a friend of mine. He was a distinguished biological scientist who had been an active Church member all his life. He agreed to meet with me, and brought along two missionaries. I had had missionary lessons before, but they did not connect with me. The missionaries were unable to make one of the appointments with me, but my friend came. I mentioned that I had not experienced those feelings that my friend and foster son had received that convinced them that the Church was true. He said something important—there are many ways to achieve a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel and the Church. I should not expect to have the same experiences that others, like my friend and foster son, have had. An intellectual path can also lead to faith and a testimony. The key point is that all paths end up at the same point, with a conviction that the Book of Mormon and the Church are true. One could be both a good biological scientist and an active LDS member.

I think that there is a useful lesson for missionaries coming out of my experience. I had received missionary lessons before. Forty years before, a couple of sister missionaries met with me. I asked them to set aside their flannel boards and routine approach and just tell me about the Church, what they believed in and why they believed it. They handled the challenge well and we had begun to make progress when they were transferred to another area. The two elders who replaced them just couldn’t handle discussions done that way and we didn’t make any progress. Forty-three years later, my scientist friend was able to provide an explanation that cleared away my doubts about faith and the many ways to achieve it, and I was baptized nine years ago. The lesson for missionaries is this: My impression is that, forty years ago, the missionaries were not as well trained as those coming out of the MTC today. Although better trained today, it is still necessary to adapt the message to the investigator’s background, interests, and values. A single approach does not fit all, so missionaries must become perceptive enough to know what will connect with investigators and what will not.

There are two other messages for all of us coming from my conversion story. First, Ann’s steadfast commitment to the Church and dedication to her callings were a constant, good example for me, and showed me that she truly believed in the Church and its teachings and acted on that. People within our families and outside them will judge the validity of the Church by our own actions and examples. Like it or not, we are all daily missionaries, and our actions will speak louder than any words we say. Second, from the beginning of our marriage, Ann prayed constantly that I would come to the conclusion that the Church was true and join. And I finally did, but it took a long time. The message is that prayers are answered, but not necessarily as quickly as we would like. True, she would have preferred that my conversion would have come in forty-three months rather than forty-three years, but it came in the Lord’s time, not hers. We are grateful that her prayers were answered when they were.

I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

———————————

Tom Yuill is an emeritus professor of Pathobiological Sciences and of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, now living with his wife, Ann, in Mapleton, Utah, since his retirement eight years ago. He was on the UW faculty for thirty-three years as a teacher and researcher, and during that time also served as Associate Dean for Research in the School of Veterinary Medicine for ten years and, for another ten years, as Professor and Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

Posted January 2012

I came to realize that I share Bro. Madsen’s view. My witness of the truth of the prophet’s role in the restoration came first. It is the foundation of my faith. Joseph Smith’s life and thought, and, more importantly, the Lord’s revelations through him, have been my window to the Savior.

Therefore, as Peter taught, I have a reason for the hope that is in me when he said, “. . . sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”³ As a youthful missionary, I remember violating part of Peter’s declaration by always wanting to intellectually defend the church and the doctrines of the restoration from its detractors by proof texting, using the Bible. During those efforts to defend the church and my faith, I did not always do it in a spirit of meekness and fear. In addition, many times I did not first sanctify the Lord God in my heart before entering into gospel discussions with those who were antagonistic toward the restoration. At the time, I felt the Bible would at least be a good starting point and common ground among other Christian faiths. However, after life’s experiences and a long teaching career I have “learned for myself” that the Bible is at times the battleground, not the common ground among denominations. During those early missionary days, I was not inviting my investigators into their own sacred grove. Joseph Smith spoke of his religious quest for truth in this profound way: “the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”⁴ Religious truth ultimately comes by personal revelation augmented by rational argument. Austin Farrer said, “Though argument does not create conviction, lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.”⁵

For me, developing a firm testimony and faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ is primarily a spiritual endeavor. As I read the scriptures, study languages, or study modern scholars, I constantly see rational evidences or reasons to believe in the restoration through the instrumentality of Joseph Smith. In my mind, for example, Joseph did not simply write the Book of Mormon in approximately sixty-five working days. He did not know or understand Hebrew chiastic structure as we find throughout the work. He did not manufacture the names of Mahijah and Mahujah in the Pearl of Great Price associated with the Book of Enoch as found much later with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.⁶ However, my ultimate witness of the gospel and the restoration comes from the spiritual confirmation of the Holy Ghost. Jacob teaches, “the spirit speaketh of things as they really are, and of things as they really will be.”⁷

Similarly, experiences with the spiritual realm were the source of Jacob’s faith during his encounter with Sherem the anti-Christ. Jacob said he could not be shaken from the faith because of “the many revelations and the many things which I had seen concerning these things for I truly had seen angels, and they had ministered unto me. And also, I had heard the voice of the Lord speaking unto me in very word, from time to time; wherefore, I could not be shaken.”⁸ Recently, as I was reading the Book of Mormon, it appeared to me that the book treats the word “mysteries” very consistently, albeit with a little different meaning than the New Testament word musterion.⁹ The Book of Mormon references to “mystery” or “mysteries of God” are always associated with the notion that certain gospel principles can only be learned by revelation. For instance, the sacred record teaches, “for he that diligently seeketh shall find; and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them, by the power of the Holy Ghost.”¹⁰

While discussing these matters recently, a brilliant professor friend of mine reminded me that, when emphasizing this spiritual approach to gaining gospel knowledge, I should not in anyway disparage the life of the mind. Man himself is “an intelligence,” or, in other words, light and truth. Hugh Nibley suggests that the LDS temple experience is a model for learning the gospel. “Why do we call the temple a school? The initiatory ordinances make that clear . . . bring your brain with you and prepare to stay awake, to be alert and pay attention; also come often for frequent reviews repeating the lessons to refresh our memory, for you cannot leave without an examination—you have to show you have earned some things.”¹¹

The Lord expects us to “bring our brain and intellect” to the temple and to life’s journey. The theme of pursuing knowledge through study and faith is clear in the Doctrine and Covenants and the teachings of Joseph Smith:

D&C 4:6 “Remember faith, virtue, knowledge”
D&C 42:61 “If thou shalt ask, thou shalt receive revelation upon revelation, knowledge upon knowledge”
D&C 93:24 “And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come”
D&C 93:36 “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and Truth”
D&C 130:18,19 “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life . . . he will have so much the advantage in the world to come.”
D&C 131:6 “It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance”
Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 217 “A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge”
Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 287-88 “In knowledge there is power. God has more power than all other beings, because he has greater knowledge; and hence he knows how to subject all other beings to Him. He has power over all.”

Therefore, there is no doubt the Lord wants us to advance in knowledge and truth. We should, as Peter says, be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us, spiritually as well as rationally. We need to seek learning by study as well as by faith.¹² Elder Hugh B. Brown taught, “I’m impressed with the testimony of the man, who can stand and say he knows the gospel is true, but what I would like to ask is, ‘But, sir, do you know the gospel?’ I say it is one thing to know the gospel is true and another to know what the gospel is. Mere testimony may be gained with but perfunctory knowledge of the Church and its teachings, as evidenced by the hundreds now coming into the Church with but bare acquaintanceship. But to retain testimony and to be of service in building up the Lord’s kingdom requires serious study of the gospel and a knowing of what it is.”¹³

So in order to retain testimony and to be of greater service to the kingdom we should seriously study the gospel and truth wherever we can find it. I honestly believe that Mormonism has the answers, at least as well as we can have them in this life, to mortality’s basic questions regarding God and the life beyond. However, the problem at times is that we as Latter-day Saints do not fully understand the questions. One cannot appreciate the answers until you know the history behind the question being asked. This is what higher learning has done for me. When I attended the University of Missouri, I studied with students of different faiths, including Judaism and all forms of Christianity. This helped me to truly appreciate other approaches to biblical hermeneutics. As stated above, this was a totally different experience than I had in my youthful missionary days. I came away with a much better tolerance for differing interpretations of the scriptures according to one’s theological biases. In the process, I deepened my own faith and the LDS approach to religious quandaries and interpretation of the Bible. Education will always dissipate arrogance and misunderstanding, and create mutual tolerance. As Joseph Smith once said, “truth is Mormonism.”¹⁴ Truth is what we always seek for from wherever the source may be.

In our personal quests for truth through faith and study, we should remember that doubt at times serves its purpose. As Terryl Givens explains, “It would seem that among those who vigorously pursue the life of the mind in particular, who are committed to the scholarly pursuit of knowledge and rational inquiry, faith is as often a casualty as it is a product. The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true, and to have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing them to be true. I am convinced that there must be grounds for doubt as well as belief in order to render the choice more truly a choice—and, therefore, the more deliberate and laden with personal vulnerability and investment.”¹⁵

I testify that faith and religion is a matter of the heart. Faith is a choice. It is not always to have a perfect knowledge of things. I, along with many others, hope for things which are not always physically seen but are true because of the revelations of the Holy Ghost to our souls. I trust that anyone who becomes a student of the scriptures of the restoration will begin to “see God’s own handwriting in the sacred volume, and he who reads it oftenest will like it best. . . and once discovered will bring an obedience to its heavenly precepts.”¹⁶

—–

Notes:
¹ C.S. Lewis 1947.
² Truman G. Madsen (Jan. 29, 2005) at BYU-Idaho’s Religious Lecture Series commemorating the life of Joseph Smith.
³ 1 Peter 3:15.
⁴ Joseph Smith History 1:12.
⁵ Austin Farrer, “The Christian Apologist,” in Light on C.S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 26.
⁶ See Moses 6:40 and Moses 7:2.
⁷ Jacob 4:13.
⁸ Jacob 7:5.
⁹ “Secret, secret rite, secret teaching, mystery associated with strange customs and ceremonies.” A Greek- English Lexicon of the New Testament, by Arndt and Gingrich, page 530. In the 1828 Webster’s dictionary the definition of the word mystery is “A profound secret; something wholly unknown or something kept cautiously concealed, . . . In religion, any thing in the character or attributes of god, or in the economy of divine providence, which is not revealed to man . . . beyond human comprehension until explained.”
¹⁰ 1 Nephi 10:19; see also Alma 12:1- 11.
¹¹ Hugh Nibley, “Abraham’s Creation Drama,” in The Temple in Time and Eternity, edited by Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks, page 16.
¹² D&C 88:118; 109:7, 14.
¹³ Personal correspondence, dated 28 January 1969, as quoted by Robert J. Matthews, “Using the Scriptures” (Brigham Young University 14 July 1981).
¹⁴ Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, page 139.
¹⁵ Terryl L. Givens, “‘Lightning Out of Heaven’: Joseph Smith and the Forging of Community,” BYU Speeches of the Year (29 November 2005).
¹⁶ Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, page 58

————————————-

John L. Fowles received his BS and MA degrees from Brigham Young University and a PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia in Social Foundations of Education, with an emphasis in Religious Studies. He has taught in the LDS Church Educational System for thirty-five years—previously in Scottsdale, Arizona; Provo, Utah; and Columbia, Missouri where he directed the LDS Institute)—and is currently an instructor at the Logan LDS Institute of Religion adjacent to Utah State University.

He is the author of “Zenos’ Prophetic Allegory of Israel,” in A Symposium on the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, CES, 1986); “The Decline of the Nephites: Rejection of the Covenant and Word of God,” in The Book of Mormon: Helaman through 3 Nephi 8, According to Thy Word, edited by Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1992), 81-92; “The Jewish Lectionary and Book of Mormon Prophecy,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3 (Fall 1994): 118–122; “Missouri and the Redemption of Zion: A Setting for Conflict,” in Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History: Missouri, edited by Arnold K. Garr and Clark V. Johnson (Provo: Department of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University, 1994), 155-171; “John’s Prophetic Vision of God and the Lamb,” SBSS 1998, 74– 82; and, with Newell K. Kitchen, “Finding the Haun’s Mill Face Wheel,” Mormon Historical Studies (Fall 2003).

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dr. Fowles has served in elder’s quorum and high priest group leadership, on a high council, as a bishop, and as a counselor in two stake presidencies. He currently serves as a Gospel Doctrine teacher in his ward.

Posted December 2011