“Easter and Doctrine and Covenants 138”

I wish you a happy and blessed Good Friday.

I wrote an article for Easter weekend that appeared late last night in Meridian Magazine and I hope that you’ll give it a look: “The Resurrection Was So Real, It Transformed Ordinary Men into Fearless Witnesses.”

Our 2026 Easter message, written by Janet Ewell, has just been published on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Easter and Doctrine and Covenants 138: Our Harrowing of Hell, Our Descensus Christi ad Inferos, Our Anastasis”:

Abstract: Easter should be a feast for all our senses. Early Christians recounted the events between Christ’s death and Resurrection with joy, and much in their accounts is familiar to us. Doctrine and Covenants 138 describes and celebrates Christ’s visit to the world of the spirits between his death and Resurrection. As this revelation becomes part of our Easter celebration, we, like the early Christians before us, will find our Easter to be the feast of feasts.

I hope that you’ll enjoy it, and that you’ll read it either today (Friday) or tomorrow (Saturday), for which it’s especially apropos.

1 Onward, Christian soldiers,
marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
going on before!
Christ, the royal Master,
leads against the foe;
Forward into battle,
see his banner go!

Refrain:
Onward, Christian soldiers,
marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
going on before!

One of the first steps in a serious, intellectually honest disagreement is to attempt to understand (and perhaps even to restate) the differing position of a discussion partner in such a way that she would recognize it as expressing her own actual opinion.

As regards the teapot-tempest that a few zealous critics have whipped up in one or two corners of the internet about the recent placement of Michael Hall’s bronze sculpture of Jesus Christ Carrying the Cross at Temple Square, this is a summary of my viewpoint that was posted just this morning at the Peterson Obsession Board:

I am now suggesting, the proffered summary says, that the Church’s use of “cross symbology” on Temple Square “is just akin to an illustration of New Testament happenings” and that it indicates no significant shift from the past stance of Church leaders, at least one of whom expressly described “cross symbology” as “repugnant.”

[Acknowledged as indisputably true:  Whether other leaders of the Church used that precise word or not, there is certainly no shortage of statements from them expressing disapproval of “cross symbology” or, at least, no support for it.  As I said just the other day in my first response to this little controversy, a historical “Latter-day Saint disinclination to use the cross as a symbol” is “traditional (and undeniable).”  Curiously, though, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” — see above — has been in the Latter-day Saint hymnal since the 1920s — or, in other words, for roughly a century.]

Please permit me to correct that purported summary:  I don’t think that the Michael Hall statue of Jesus Christ Carrying the Cross is an instance of “cross symbology” any more than I regard Harry Anderson’s illustration of The Crucifixion, above, as an example of “cross symbology” — or of “cloud symbology” or “thief symbology” or “ancient Jew symbology” or “Roman soldier symbology” or “kneeling woman symbology”).  Nor do I consider it “just akin to an illustration of New Testament happenings.”  It’s not merely “akin.”  It absolutely is an illustration of New Testament happenings.  A cross is an important part of the story of Jesus in the New Testament, just as a manger is (and just as the “Sea of Galilee” and the Jordan River and fishing boats are).  The story of Christ cannot be fully told without reference to the cross.  His crucifixion is, umm, a rather important part of that story:

I offer an analogy:  Latter-day Saint artists have created many illustrations of the martyrdom of Joseph Smith in Carthage Jail.  These illustrations have, in every case that I can recall, depicted the mob’s use of guns.  But such illustrations aren’t instances of “gun symbology” among the Saints, nor of any “adoration” of those guns nor of a liturgical veneration of them.  The guns are depicted because they’re an essential part of Joseph Smith’s story.  Simply that.  So with the cross for part of the story of Jesus.

Although it’s true that Latter-day Saints and the Church leaders who emerge from their ranks have historically rejected the veneration or “adoration” of the cross that is common in several Christian traditions (most of all on Good Friday, which happens to be today), it simply isn’t true, despite one poster’s declaration, that Latter-day Saints “have rejected all portrayals of the cross of Jesus as ‘repugnant’ and as not in keeping with the Mormon [sic] faith.”  In my prior comments on this subject (here and here and here), I’ve already provided specific visual counterexamples demonstrating that claim to be flatly false.  (See, too, this clip from an official Church video of The Life of Jesus Christ.)

Placing Michael Hall’s statue on Temple Square indicates no reversal on the use of “cross symbology.”  We haven’t adopted “cross symbology.”

I think that this will be my last comment on the subject.  I’m confident that most who read what I’ve said on this topic have had no difficulty understanding what I’ve said.  And I have no confidence at all that those who refuse to try to understand what I’ve written, or who pretend to misunderstand it, will experience a change of heart.

That said, I will observe that, in recent years, I’ve seen a few Latter-day Saint women wearing crosses as jewelry (which, by the way, doesn’t bother me even slightly).  I think that Latter-day Saint objections to the cross have faded a bit over the past couple of generations, and I’ll speculate that this may be related to a general fading of anti-Catholicism in (and beyond) our ranks.  Almost all of our early converts, in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, came out of Protestantism, and they brought their hostility to Catholicism with them back when intra-Christian sectarian rivalries were much more intense than they are now.  But Protestant and ambient anti-Catholicism has also waned, I think — it was a big issue with John F. Kennedy, but  Joe Biden’s Catholicism was scarcely mentioned — and, as our missionaries have had more and more success in Latin America and elsewhere abroad (but also in the United States), a large number of our converts are now themselves former Catholics.  They don’t necessarily bring an aversion to the cross with them.

Please enjoy Conference!