(Image from Wikimedia Commons
Critics and disaffected members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to the extent that they’ve responded to the recently leaked videos, have found various reasons for outrage and lament.
One negative reaction that I’ve encountered from several of them goes along these general lines:
These videos demonstrate that the Church isn’t run by revelation. The Church lied to us, telling us that the prophets take regular dictation from Jesus. Instead, though, these videos show them making decisions just the way any other group of corporate bureaucrats would.
Apart from this or that perceived “gaffe” or any particular indication of supposed insensitivity or of dissent from fashionable contemporary views or of failure to genuflect before certain currently orthodox liberal pieties, the meetings represented in these videos seem to be thought incompatible in principle with belief in a Church directed by prophets. They are said to demonstrate that Church leaders aren’t really prophets at all.
I would like to respond to this particular criticism.
Bottom line, first: These videos demonstrate nothing of the sort.
These meetings (of which I have some limited experience; I even recognize the room) aren’t meetings in which decisions are made. They’re informational meetings. There are other meetings (including those in the upper rooms of the Salt Lake Temple, but also meetings of the Council of the Disposition of the Tithes and of the Church’s Board of Education and of its Missionary Committee and so forth) in which decisions are made, but that’s not the purpose of these meetings.
Ah, reply some critics, but if Jesus were really running the Church by revelation, they wouldn’t need such meetings as those shown in the videos. Jesus would (I guess) simply tell them everything they should know.
Nonsense.
Nobody in Church leadership, and no even slightly knowledgeable Latter-day Saint, has ever claimed that the Church is run entirely, on a minute to minute basis, by divine dictation through personal appearances by Jesus and without any admixture of human reasoning and judgment.
That wasn’t so in Joseph Smith’s day, and it’s never been true since.
The Brethren have always met in council. They have always discussed and deliberated. They have always sought information as well as inspiration. Even in local matters, they meet with people. They ask for information. When an apostle or a member of the Seventy is sent to call a new stake president, for example, he prayerfully interviews an often fairly large number of men. He doesn’t simply arrive at the airport with the announcement that the new stake president will be Brigham Kimball Benson III.
And any serious reading in the history of the Church will demonstrate that Church leaders have always, whenever they had opportunity, sought the best secular information they could get before making a decision.
In June 1847, for example, the non-Mormon trapper Jim Bridger and President Brigham Young met at the mouth of the Little Sandy River to discuss the idea of settling in the Salt Lake Valley. (Bridger expressed to Brigham his doubts about the agricultural productivity of the Salt Lake area; Brigham listened, but, plainly, chose to go forward with settling there anyway.)
Even earlier, though, Brigham Young and other Church leaders had been researching sites in, and routes to, the West. On 30 October 1844, the Mormon newspaper The Nauvoo Neighbor had printed a selection from Washington Irving’s Astoria entitled ”The Climate of the Rocky Mountains.” Throughout 1845, the same paper published many other articles on Oregon and the Indians, as well as extracts from John Fremont’s reports about the Oregon Trail, the Bear River area, and the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. The Nauvoo Neighbor also published portions of Lansford W. Hastings’s Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, which had just been published in 1845. And another Mormon newspaper, the New York Messenger, printed almost all of Hastings’s book in a nine-part series that ran between July and September 1845.
So it should be pretty clear that the Brethren have never been averse to doing a bit of secular study as part of their callings.
I’m not sure that I understand how any informed Latter-day Saint can imagine that our apostles and prophets have simply sat back, indifferent to secular sources of knowledge, waiting for detailed instructions from the Savior on absolutely everything. Waiting, in other words, like marionettes for the puppet master’s tug on their strings. Even in the early days of the translation of the Book of Mormon it was not so, as this famous April 1829 passage in the Doctrine and Covenants should demonstrate beyond reasonable dispute:
Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me.
But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right. (Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-8)
In late December 1832, the Lord advised his infant church to
“seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom, seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:118).
In March 1833, he counseled them to
“Study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people” (Doctrine and Covenants 90:15).
In May 1833, he said in a revelation to them that
“it is my will that you should . . . obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, of laws of God and man, and all this for the salvation of Zion” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:53).
It shouldn’t be any surprise, in this light, that the School of the Prophets at Kirtland, Ohio, and slightly later in Missouri taught not only scripture and “theology” but English grammar, penmanship, history, Hebrew, arithmetic, literature, government, philosophy, and geography.
Does that, in and of itself, cast doubt upon the prophetic claims of Joseph Smith?
For the life of me, I can’t see how it should.
Moreover, it seems obvious to me that the meetings partially revealed in these illicitly-distributed new videos show something that is very much in the tradition of the early-nineteenth-century School of the Prophets. In fact, I think that these meetings would be worthy of that name.
And they in no way cast doubt on the prophetic/apostolic status of some of those involved.
I call your attention to the chapter on the 1978 priesthood revelation in Gregory A. Prince’s new biography Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History. I’m inclined to have reservations about Dr. Prince’s general approach to Church leadership and some other Church-related issues, and I haven’t yet read all of this new book. But I’ve read the chapter I mention, and I commend it to you.
Prince chronicles the back-and-forth on the black priesthood ban. He reports on studies and reports and discussions and disagreements. Thus far, it all looks pretty human. But, in the end, he doesn’t (as I feared he might) suppress or try to explain away the undeniably clear testimonials that he finds, in his sources, of a spectacular and very real revelation. And I might add to those testimonials Leonard Arrington’s own remarkable experience with two of the apostles at the time, recounted in the relevant chapter of his own memoir, Adventures of a Church Historian — an experience that is unaccountably omitted from Dr. Prince’s Arrington biography.
There is no incompatibility or inconsistency whatever between trying to learn and think in a purely human, natural way and attempting to obtain, or even claiming, divine inspiration.
The scriptural motto has been on record since very nearly the founding of the Church:
“By study, and also by faith.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In