Joseph Fielding Smith - Answers to Gospel Questions: Volumes 1-5

Answers to Gospel Questions: Volume 1

FOREWORD

Since May 1953, President Joseph Fielding Smith has been answering the questions of readers, in a monthly page in The Improvement Era, under the continuing title"Your Question."

In his mail comes a multiplicity of questions of all kinds, pertaining to scripture, to doctrine, to history, and to the interpretation of many points and problems.

He cannot, of course, answer all the questions that come. The mail is too voluminous, the questions too repetitious, and time and strength too limited, with all the other official obligations.

But with all these limitations, President Smith has given an earnest and eminently able service in selecting from among the many, those questions which to him seem most timely, or most significant, or most frequently repeated.

In using the pages of The Improvement Era for this purpose, President Smith has carried forward a tradition passed on from his father, President Joseph F. Smith, who, in 1897, was one of the Era's first editors, and whose doctrinal and other writings appeared on the "Editor's Table" and elsewhere in the Era, beginning some sixty years ago. Some of those Era writings of President Joseph F. Smith found their way into the much read and much quoted book, Gospel Doctrine, which has proved so significantly useful to the Church.

And now, in this generation, we are grateful for President Joseph Fielding Smith's willingness to bring his broad background of scripture, and doctrine, and history to the Church, through the pages of The Improvement Era, and through the pages of this book, which carries the title Answers to Gospel Questions.

The Deseret Book Company has requested the privilege of collecting and publishing these writings, and The Improvement Era, with President Smith's concurrence, has granted that privilege, to perpetuate a work that will be widely read and widely referred to, in answering "Your Question."

RICHARD L. EVANS

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Deseret Book Company wishes to express appreciation and gratitude to President Joseph Fielding Smith of the Council of the Twelve and The Improvement Era for permission to publish the material which has appeared in the magazine as a monthly series under the title "Your Question." During the past several years this feature has been so popular, that Deseret Book Company sought permission from President Smith and The Improvement Era to collect the material in book form. Answers to Gospel Questions is presented to Church readers with the sincere hope that it will provide answers to perplexing questions and increase knowledge of Church doctrine.

Deseret Book Company also desires to acknowledge its indebtedness to Joseph Fielding Smith, Jr. for his painstaking care and expert assistance in the planning and publication of this book.

INTRODUCTION

From the days when Adam was driven from the Garden of Eden, the Lord has commanded that his children should seek knowledge concerning their salvation. The heavens have always been open when necessary for knowledge to be revealed and when the people sought for light in relation to their temporal and eternal salvation. It is not the will of the Lord that the heavens have been closed since the departure of the apostles nearly nineteen hundred years ago. He has always been willing to converse with man and instruct him in doctrine, and guide him in spiritual things, when man has shown a willingness to be so instructed. It is a sad reflection upon the Christian world that there has been a prevailing belief that revelation ceased and man is dependent solely upon what has been written in the scriptures as it has come down to us, unfortunately too often in imperfect form. The trouble with the Christian world since the time when Peter and his associates of the Twelve were on the earth, is that it has arrogated to itself the right to know the mind of the Lord and the plan of salvation without any further manifestation of divine power or spiritual guidance. We have been told that the "canon of scripture" is closed; that there is to be no more vision, no more coming of messengers from the divine presence, for all such things are no longer needed. Hence we find the professed followers of our Master divided, and stumbling in the dark with diverse interpretations on the "written word." The simple logic of this condition should teach us one and all that it is impossible for unity to exist in the minds of men in relation to the plan of salvation.

One prominent writer, many years ago, summed up the matter in these words:

The sum of the whole matter is this: Reason is the last arbiter; our own reason, our individual reason, my reason, nobody's else. There are various sources of authority, Bible, or Church, or God, but each one must be tested by our personal reason before it is believed. We are all of us at bottom rationalists, cannot help being. What God is, whether there be a God, we must decide by the best reason we have. If we are made in the image of God, that image is in reason, not in body; and our little reason can and must get some true view of God, just as our little blinking myopic eyes can truly, if imperfectly, decry the infinite spangled universe. Reason may see faintly, even erringly, but it is all we have to guide us. It may rest on custom, tradition, social inheritance, the teachings from childhood of those whom we think possessed of more knowledge and judgment than we, but all our beliefs rest on such reason as we have.... It is by reason that we too must test the Bible as well as the Vedas, Moses as well as Hesiod or Zarathustra. If we find in our Bible anything of cosmogony, or history or morals that does not approve itself to our reason, we must reject it, we cannot help it. That did not, could not come direct from God, but came through fallible man, the framework and the chord of whose harp was constructed after the fashion of their day, and could not sound perfect music. Reason prefers our school text-book to our Bible on matters of geology and astronomy, sifts Bible history by comparison with contemporary records recovered from the sands and clay of ancient empires and reason it is that judges the teachings of Jesus to be superior to the sacrificial cult of Leviticus, or the cursings of Ezekiel and Amos. Our light is better than theirs, for our reason has more knowledge, more experience, on which to rest. The best human reasonI think I do not errwhether it looks outward or inward, finds God.(William Hays Ward, The Independent, March 14, 1915. )

This may be an accurate summation of the prevailing view which has dominated the thinking of men during the past few centuries and more particularly that of the present century; but it does violence to the doctrine of revelation and guidance by the Holy Ghost, which was promised to those who truly served the Lord in righteousness. This view is the natural result of the doctrines of the closed heavens. If men are left to grope in spiritual darkness guided only by their individual reasons, then confusion, disorder, contention and a million different views are the inevitable result. Far better is the counsel of our Savior to his disciples just before he left them: