Susan Easton Black - Expressions of Faith: Testimonies of Latter-Day Saint Scholars

1996 Deseret Book Company. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City, Utah 84130. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book Company. Deseret Book is a registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.

Preface

Noel B. Reynolds

Professor of Political Science, Brigham Young University

President, Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies

From the day Joseph Smith first shared the marvelous revelations that God was pouring out upon him, detractors began to gather. Today, as during his own lifetime, small groups of Christian antagonists and Mormon dissidents attack Joseph's revelations and the testimony of believers with endless repetitions and reformulations of arguments invented in the first years of the Restoration. In spite of the wide acclaim for the positive achievements of the Church and the way in which its critics have been overwhelmingly refuted, the negative spirit of anti-Mormonism lives on, surviving its retired or expired standard-bearers. Each generation recruits new champions, mostly from a relatively small number of dissidents on the fringes of Mormon society.

In our own generation many in the news media who are drawn mindlessly to controversy have given the detractors new status and power, christening them "Mormon intellectuals" and presenting them to the world as the thinking Mormons who know the inside story about the Church. In their rush to produce controversial news, many journalists have overlooked the obvious truththe LDS intellectual and academic communities are composed of strong believers in Joseph Smith's revelations and solid supporters of the Church leadership. Only at the fringes is there noticeable dissent. The overwhelming majority of LDS academics and intellectuals are active, faithful Latter-day Saints who find these detractors to be driven by a secret hate for a goodness they cannot understand or enjoy on their own terms.

In spite of occasional eruptions of anti-intellectualism in the LDS community, the long-term reality has been that Mormons, perhaps more than any other religious group, seek and respect learning. Joseph Smith set the example himself, establishing schools for adults and studying biblical languages. The LDS community has always produced far more than its share of highly educated people. And the Church has always taken advantage of the education of its members by calling well-educated Saints to positions of authority and responsibility at every level of Church organization. The media's errors might be excused to the extent that they are relying on a received common knowledge: in almost all religious communities the more educated groups are the most likely to exhibit reduced religious belief and commitment.

But why should this ignorance be excused among those who specialize in Mormon news when it has long been established by sociological research that educated Mormons show exactly the opposite tendency? The simple truth is that higher levels of religiosity among Latter-day Saintsas measured by devotion to private prayer, scripture study, tithe paying, church attendance, and other forms of religious observanceare directly correlated with higher levels of education. It may be an anomaly, but it is true of the LDS community that the more educated a person is, the more likely he or she is to be fully observant and faithful.

There may be good reasons for this surprising characteristic of the Latter-day Saints. Mormonism is a religion of both the spirit and the intellect. Mormon missionaries tell their investigators that they have answers to the great human questions. Conversion stories are always stories of learning and inspiration. Converts feel the spirit of the divine, and the gospel helps them receive answers to their questions about life and about themselves. Mormonism is not a religion that tells its members they have no right to know the divine mysteries. Rather, it tells them to seek knowledge of all things. There is nothing that God is not willing to reveal to his children, even to the point of showing himself to them on special occasions.

Nor are Mormons taught to be irrational or to despise logic in their understanding of the divine. From Joseph Smith to the present prophets, the Saints have always been urged to grasp a grand and coherent vision of themselves and their relationship to God. They are urged to acknowledge contradictions in their own lives and beliefs and to reconcile themselves to the full set of gospel truths. Latter-day Saints learn early that the Spirit can be their most valuable asset in this great quest, and that there is no true opposition between mind and spirit. The two must function harmoniously together to reach fully satisfying truth.

It would be fair to say that Latter-day Saints see themselves as both prophets and intellectuals. They depend daily on spiritual guidance, and they treasure deeply the understanding of God and his world that they have been given. They feel responsible to search the scriptures as a means of strengthening their spirits and their understandings simultaneously. They are suspicious of people who seem to emphasize one of these sources of knowledge to the neglect of the other. Both are God-given, and both are necessary for a fullness of life.

The testimony that individual Latter-day Saints bear of the truthfulness of the Church and the Book of Mormon, as well as the other revelations of Joseph Smith, is highly personal. The mind and spirit of a man or woman are finally quite private in their innermost workings. Each person must come to that mix of understanding and spiritual assurance that he or she finds adequate. There is nothing that others can hand you off a shelf that will do the job. It requires personal inquiry, reflection, prayer, and openness to God's revelations.

Though all believing Latter-day Saints find great commonality in the testimonies they hear from others, differences of personality and experience also stand out. Testimonies are multidimensional. They involve personal insights, spiritual witnesses, other people, miracles, personal experiences, and struggles with sin. Different individuals may emphasize different dimensions in their own understanding of their testimonies. I have always appreciated the fact that in Joseph Smith's first written account of his 1820 vision, it was the forgiveness of sins that most impressed him.

My experience is the same. For as we become aware of our sinfulness, we also begin to know of our distance from God and his high expectationswhich becomes the most important problem in our life. And once we have experienced God's gracethe baptism of fire by which sins are purged and the desire to do evil is cleansed awaywe've had an experience to which none other can compare. When one has been so directly touched and benefited by God's love, one will treasure and protect that gift at all costs. It is a form of knowledge that only a fool would deny or compromise.

The message of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that God offers this experience to every human being born into this world. The personal nature of such experiences renders them inaccessible to scientific investigation or to external examination and evaluation. The believer cannot fall back on science or the opinions of others to make decisions about spiritual experience. Each person must learn to recognize the voice of God in his or her own life and to honestly distinguish between experiences with that voice and other internal experiences of emotion or imagination. Our salvation depends on our personal integrity. And only we and God can know. The opinions of others do not count much, except as they are useful in helping us to learn to recognize the Spirit.