Thank you for that very warm welcome and introduction. It's wonderful to be back home.
Several weeks ago I received an e-mail from
someone who identified himself as a BYU student
doing a research paper on the Prophet Joseph
Smith.
He asked, “Would you be kind enough to share
with me what you feel the impact of Joseph
Smith and the Book of Mormon on the world
has been?”
This was an important question, so I took
time framing my reply.
I wrote, “It was big.”
However, upon reflection, I decided against
sending that e-mail.
I didn’t want to do most of his work for
him.
I thought perhaps I would now revisit that
question in a little more depth.
A few months back I was visiting with a foreign
scholar of religion who had a related question
for me: “To what do you attribute the remarkable
growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints?”
Many people have been asking this question
for a few years now.
The bicentennial of the Prophet’s birth
has given many scholars an opportunity to
ask these and similar questions in formal
settings: at symposia hosted by the Library
of Congress in Washington, D.C.; by the New
South Wales Parliament in Sydney, Australia;
and by the National University of Taiwan in
Taipei.
When Joseph Smith was just a boy of 17, he
said an angel appeared to him and declared
“that [his] name should be had for good
and evil among all nations, kindreds, and
tongues, or that it should be both good and
evil spoken of among all people.”
This year in particular has seen that prediction
borne out.
Secular scholars and Christians, Hindus, Muslims,
and presumed atheists—in many nations and
in many tongues—speak good of Joseph’s
name.
In Sydney, Dr. Kazi Islam, a Muslim and chair
of the Department of World Religions, Dhaka
University, Bangladesh, explained that he
introduced Mormonism as a compulsory part
of the master’s degree in his department
“because of [his] profound love and respect
for the ideals” of that tradition Joseph
Smith founded.
Dr. Jason Lase, a director general in the
Indonesian Department of Religious Affairs,
affirmed his belief that Joseph Smith was
“a modern religious genius” who created
what he called “one of the most stable and
well-organized religious organizations”
he has ever known.
A few months later, Arun Joshi, a Hindu journalist
from India, gave a remarkable talk at the
Taipei conference in which he related the
experience of the First Vision to the conflicts
in Kashmir and the Middle East, concluding,
“The message of Joseph Smith is more relevant
. . . today than ever before.”
These are surely exciting developments, and
it can be heady stuff for members of a previously
marginalized religion of modest size to find
their faith and founder the subject of symposia,
celebration, and scholarly interest.
Some have even predicted a new world religion
will emerge out of these accelerating developments.
As that researcher had asked me at a conference,
“How do you account for this growth?”
I am, perhaps belatedly, coming to the recognition
that the sustained growth of the Church, while
impressive, is not itself the greatest legacy
of Joseph—or the most significant issue
we can investigate.
Amway had a phenomenal growth rate.
There is something else Joseph accomplished—something
that is obliquely suggested by the very difficulty
of knowing whether to define the people who
now revere him as a church, a religion, a
culture, an ethnicity, a global tribe, or
something else.
Joseph succeeded in creating a community with
no real parallel—and few precedents—in
the history of the world.
The Prophet’s brother Hyrum tried to capture
the unique quality of this society when, a
few months before Joseph’s death, he said:
“Men’s souls conform to the society in
which they live, with very few exceptions,
and when men come to live with the Mormons,
their souls swell as if they were going to
stride the planets.”
It is the quality of this community, not its
rate of increase, that is the more vital fact—and
the more enduring mystery—of The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
So I wish to explore some of the factors that
I believe have contributed to the effect that
Joseph’s message has wrought on the world
and on his followers in particular.
My remarks are in essence an extended commentary
on the truth pronounced by Thomas Carlyle
before Joseph’s own death.
“The Great Man,” Carlyle wrote, “was
always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest
of men waited for him like fuel, and then
they too would flame.”
What I want to understand, then, is what did
Joseph teach, and what did he embody, that
did not simply attract a faithful core of
followers but that galvanized and welded them
into a powerfully cohesive group and that
continues to endow a multimillion-member movement
with those same bonds and cohesion and vitality
today?
As Carlyle’s quote intimates, there is a
dimension to “the Great Man” and his influence
that is to be understood historically.
And there is a dimension that transcends history
in its evocation of that which is universal.
Both elements are present in Joseph Smith’s
case.
First, it is useful to see Joseph within a
particular historical context.
A scant dozen years before Joseph’s birth,
Louis XVI was guillotined by radicals.
That may seem an odd counterpoint to a talk
about the Mormon Prophet, but Albert Camus
called that execution “the crux of our contemporary
history.”
Why?
Because it represented a banishment of God
from the subsequent history of that people
and because it precipitated a steep decline
in the fortunes of religion in the West generally.
Louis was, after all, supposed to be God’s
representative by divine right.
His premeditated execution represented a deliberate,
willful repudiation of God and His role in
civic society.
The revolutions that would occupy America
and Europe from 1776 and throughout the next
century were occasioned by many factors.
But central elements were an irrepressible
optimism about human potential, a growing
embrace of human dignity and freedom as the
birthright of every man, and, in many cases,
doubts that such values and aspirations could
be compatible with the institutions of the
organized church.
Lafayette called his violent passion for liberty
a “holy madness.”
Jefferson swore on the altar of God eternal
enmity against every form of tyranny over
the mind of man.
William Wordsworth spoke for millions when
he wrote, “Bliss was it in that dawn [of
revolution] to be alive, / But to be young
was very heaven!”
But as the philosophes, French revolutionaries,
English radicals, and growing numbers of intellectuals
and reflective individuals concluded, dignity
and freedom alike were threatened by institutionalized
systems of religion that almost universally
emphasized human depravity, inherent guilt,
and arbitrary omnipotence.
The result, when it wasn’t outright atheism
or revolution, was often despair about the
irredeemably tragic nature of the human condition.
One cannot peruse the poetry of the Romantics
without being struck by the soul-agony of
an entire generation—drawn more than any
other to the possibilities of the sublime,
of transcendence, of the beautiful in nature
and in humankind, but thwarted and oppressed
at every turn by stultifying systems, rigid
hierarchies, and inflexible orthodoxies.
Thus the common lament of the poets of the
age: “Man is of dust,” mused the great
Wordsworth, but “ethereal hopes are his.”
“Too, too contracted are these walls of
flesh,” he mourned, “For any passion of
the soul that leads / To ecstasy.”
Lord Byron’s Lucifer taunted the man Cain
because Cain was a creature of “high thought
[but he was] / Linked to a servile mass of
matter.”
The poet Robert Browning described the quintessentially
tragic human plight more simply as the intersection
of “infinite passion, and the pain / Of
finite hearts that yearn.”
So they all concluded, with Wordsworth, that
“unless above himself he can / Erect himself,
how poor a thing is Man!”
Alexis de Tocqueville, in these same years,
recorded how he “had seen the spirit of
religion and the spirit of freedom almost
always move in contrary directions.”
In Joseph Smith, religion and freedom found
their first perfect, seamless synthesis.
For it was into this environment that Joseph
introduced a reinvented story of human origins,
nature, and potential.
And in the greatest intellectual fusion of
his age, Joseph argued that the majesty of
God does not exist at the expense of the dignity
of man.
He made religion the advocate, rather than
the enemy, of all that is best in human yearning.
But most important, Joseph promulgated a set
of teachings that centered the restored gospel
on a correct understanding of the divine nature,
of human nature, and of their relationships
to each other.
That is the knowledge that imbued his followers
with an uncommon degree of self-knowledge
and shared purpose.
He did this, first and foremost, by his radical
reconceptualization of the nature of God.
One of my favorite stories concerns a woman
named Sarah Edwards, wife of the famous Puritan
preacher Jonathan Edwards.
He was best known perhaps for his sermon that
every early American schoolchild had read:
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
He told his audience:
The wrath of God is like great waters that
are dammed for the present.
. . . The God that holds you over the pit of hell,
much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome
insect over the fire, abhors you.
And, for the unregenerate, he continued:
When God beholds the ineffable extremity of
your case, and sees your torment to be so
vastly disproportioned to your strength, and
sees how your poor soul is crushed, and sinks
down, as it were, into an infinite gloom;
he will have no compassion upon you . . . ;
I cannot help but wonder how such excesses
struck the hearts and minds of tender people
everywhere and of Edwards’ own devout and
loving wife in particular.
It so happened that on one occasion when Edwards
was out of town, another local preacher came
to visit Sarah and her children.
He offered to have a prayer with the family,
and she agreed.
Afterward, she recorded in her journal that
while the Reverend Peter Reynolds was offering
his prayer, she found herself feeling “an
earnest desire that, in calling on God, he
should say, Father.”
She asked herself, “Can I now at this time,
with the confidence of a child, and without
the least misgiving of heart, call God my
Father?”
In consequence of this reflection, she recorded,
“I felt a strong desire to be alone with
God,” and withdrew to her chamber.
In the moments that followed, she continued:
The presence of God was so near, and so real,
that I seemed scarcely conscious of any thing
else.
God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ,
seemed as distinct persons, both manifesting
their inconceivable loveliness, and mildness,
and gentleness, and their great and immutable
love to me.
. . .The peace and happiness, which I hereupon
felt, was altogether inexpressible.
Long before Joseph Smith offered his first
prayer, thousands and millions of people must
have yearned, as Sarah did, for the assurance
that God is not the severe, distant, impersonal
deity of Jonathan Edwards but the kind, loving,
and very personal God that Joseph found in
the Sacred Grove.
That Joseph experienced this God, that the
Book of Mormon testifies of and exemplifies
His tender mercies, and that all and sundry
are invited and given the means to experience
God’s presence in the world and in their
own lives made belief in a living, personal
God a potent and irresistible principle.
That God has a body of flesh and bones is
not the revolutionary teaching.
God’s physical form is not the point.
That God has a heart that beats in sympathy
with ours is the truth that catalyzes millions—that
He feels real sorrow, rejoices with real gladness,
and weeps real tears.
This, as Enoch learned, is an awful, terrible,
yet infinitely comforting truth.
Growing organically out of this conception
is a new human relationship to the divine
that requires a new vocabulary.
In 1844 Parley P. Pratt published a little
story in the New York Herald entitled “Joe
Smith and the Devil.”
In this story the devil happens upon Joseph,
and they have a pleasant conversation.
The devil is insisting to the Prophet that
he, the devil, is happy to support “all
creeds, systems, and forms of Christianity,
of whatever name or nature; so long as they
leave out that abominable doctrine, which
caused me so much trouble in former times,
and which, after slumbering for ages, you
have again revived; I mean the doctrine of
. . . ”
And guess what that doctrine was.
What do you think Parley P. Pratt and (I think
we can safely assume) Joseph Smith himself
believed was the single most important doctrine
he restored—one to make the devil himself
quake in the knowledge that his kingdom was
in jeopardy of total collapse?
That principle, Pratt wrote, was this: “You
have again revived [and this is the devil
speaking here] the doctrine of direct communion
with God, by new revelation.”
Latter-day Saints frequently refer to this
principle as personal revelation, but I think
that term fails to sufficiently delineate
the distinct contours—historically and theologically
speaking—of the model Joseph reinstituted.
A prominent historian recently wrote in a
history of the century before Joseph Smith
that the extremes of deists and dissenters
alike were happy to accept “religion without
its substance, faith without revelation.”
Another prominent historian of religion wrote
that by the modern age, “Revelation in the
fully personal sense characteristic of personal
agents has been abandoned.”
Two characteristics distinguish the revelation
Joseph modeled:
First, from his initial inquiry in those New
York woods to his last revelations, Joseph’s
prayers anticipated a personal response, a
discernible moment of dialogue or communicated
content.
This model, which I call dialogic revelation,
situates Joseph and the religion he founded
well outside Christian understandings of revelation.
Even the Christian model that seems closest
in spirit to this one, called by Avery Dulles
“revelation as inner experience,” differs
sharply.
Within this model, theologian George Tyrrell
wrote that there can be no revealed statements
or doctrines.
Auguste Sabatier insisted that “the object
of the revelation of God can only be God Himself,”
and John Baillie insisted that, “according
to the Bible, what is revealed to us is not
a body of information concerning various things
of which we might otherwise be ignorant.”
Against this backdrop Joseph insisted that
prayer frequently and dramatically evokes
an answer that is impossible to mistake as
anything other than an individualized, dialogic
response to a highly particularized question.
Second, the Book of Mormon expands the notion
of revelation far beyond the Old Testament
model, according to which, as the Oxford Dictionary
of the Christian Church puts it, “[Prophecy]
was pre-eminently the privilege of the prophets.”
This rupture with Judaeo-Christian precedent
occurs most forcefully in 1 Nephi, chapters
10 through 11.
Lehi is the patriarch and prophet of his people.
In the Old Testament we find that it is to
the prophets and patriarchs that revelation
comes.
So it is only to be expected that when a vision
of the tree of life is given, Lehi would be
the recipient.
But Nephi was “desirous also that [he] might
see, and hear, and know of these things”
for himself.
When Nephi made his wish known to the Spirit
of the Lord, he was asked if he believed the
words of his father.
I don’t know this, but I can imagine that
at this moment Nephi paused.
Perhaps if he said no, the Spirit would rebuke
him for disloyalty and faithlessness.
But if he said yes, the Spirit might well
ask, “Then why not be content to take the
word of your prophet and patriarch?”
When Nephi indicated that he did indeed believe
the words of his father, the Spirit broke
forth into a virtual psalm of rejoicing, shouting,
“Hosanna!”
Then Nephi was rewarded, not rebuked, for
seeking his own personal revelatory experience
(see 1 Nephi 11:5–6).
Here we find a dramatic and momentous break
with the Old Testament pattern.
Revelation, we here learn, is the province
of Everyman.
The subject of that dialogue between the human
and the divine finds substantial definition
as well.
The revelations that come from God to prophets,
the great Abraham Heschel wrote, “may be
described as exegesis of existence from a
divine perspective.”
Well, that may be.
But not many individuals are concerned, when
they kneel in prayer, with “exegesis of
existence from a divine perspective.”
In the Book of Mormon, worried parents, earnest
missionaries, befuddled Church leaders, hungry
hunters, and inquiring sons all learned the
great truth that their concerns—their immediate,
quotidian, personal concerns—were God’s
concerns.
And solutions to those proximate concerns
are the appropriate subject of divine communication
from the heavens.
That knowledge binds a people to their God
more powerfully than the “exegesis of existence.
Joseph’s conception of humankind was as
radical—and as well timed—as his views
on deity and revelation.
I am not sure which answered the greater hunger
of the seeking soul.
Here are the four truths about human nature
that Joseph taught that would reinvent man.
We are, he declared, eternally existent, inherently
innocent, boundlessly free, and infinitely
perfectible.
These notions simply had to have resonated
with special force in a time, as I mentioned
earlier, when—even more forcefully than
in the Renaissance—traditional strictures
on man’s self-understanding were bursting.
First: man is eternally existent.
Joseph quoted the Savior as saying: “I was
in the beginning with the Father.
. . . Ye were also in the beginning with the
Father.
Philosophers since Plato had sensed this,
poets like Wordsworth had believed this, but
Joseph Smith was the first prophet to clearly
teach this.
But have you considered some of the logical
implications of a premortal existence?
First, that man lived forever through ages
that recede back to an infinite past leads
to a second powerful principle, that man is inherently innocent.
If we lived as spirit children before the
Fall of Adam, then we do not descend from
corrupt or fallen parents.
As Joseph taught, “Every spirit of man was
innocent in the beginning; and God having
redeemed man from the fall, men became again,
in their infant state, innocent before God."
A second implication of premortality is equally
profound.
A British philosopher only pointed out the
obvious when he argued that if God created
our souls, He “could have prevented all
sin by creating us with better natures and
in more favourable surroundings.
. . . Hence we should not be responsible for
our sins to God.”
Thomas Aquinas was one of the first theologians
to recognize this problem when he admitted
the logical difficulty of finding freedom
in a universe where God is the first cause
of everything—because, as Aristotle had
reasoned, only that which is not created can
be free.
But if the soul is coeternal with God, as
Joseph proposed, then the Gordian knot is
severed.
Agency, or moral freedom, can logically inhere in every human being—
in other words, if man is coeternal with God.
And so we find Joseph affirming that “all
truth is independent in that sphere in which
God has placed it, to act for itself, as all
intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence."
And, finally, Joseph taught that this perfect
moral freedom that God grants to us opens
up possibilities that exceed anything the
Christians of his day could imagine,
because Joseph taught man is infinitely perfectible:
"You have got to learn how to make yourselves
Gods . . ." he said, "by going from a small capacity
to a great capacity, from a small degree to
another, from grace to grace, until the resurrection
of the dead, from exaltation to exaltation—till
you are able to sit in everlasting burnings
and everlasting power and glory."
In so literally embracing the divine potential
in man, Joseph ennobled human nature to such
a degree that even the most exuberant Renaissance
humanists would have blanched.
Parley P. Pratt suggested the profound implications
of all this for our relationships to deity
and to each other: “Gods, angels, and men
are all of one species, one race, one great
family, widely diffused among the planetary
systems.”
The audacity of such a view is the more striking
when it is juxtaposed with the teaching of
one of the most influential founders of the
Christian tradition.
Writing 1,500 years ago, Augustine asked,
“What could be worse pride than the incredible
folly in which I asserted that I was by nature
what [God is]?”
How significant that Joseph’s most potent
teaching—the one with the greatest power
to found true community by rooting it in a
knowledge of relations among men and women
and gods as they really are and really can
be—should be condemned in the early Christian
centuries as the greatest and most dangerous
of blasphemies.
Eternal existence, inherent innocence, perfect
freedom, and infinite potential—in the world
before Joseph Smith, man was seen as created
out of nothing, crippled from his birth with
a depraved nature, often enjoying little or
no freedom of the will, and limited in his
potential by a jealous god.
No wonder that by the 19th century some societies
were rebelling against kings and church alike,
believing that both were an enemy to man and
his eternal soul.
No wonder that when Joseph taught again these
doctrines of human nature, his ideas were
like fire on dry kindling.
Joseph emphasized the primacy and durability
of personal relationships.
On the eve of his martyrdom, the Prophet turned
to Dr. Willard Richards and said:
“If we go into the cell, will you go in
with us?”
The doctor answered, “Brother Joseph you
did not ask me to cross the river with you—you
did not ask me to come to Carthage—you did
not ask me to come to jail with you—and
do you think I would forsake you now?
But I will tell you what I will do; if you
are condemned to be hung for treason, I will
be hung in your stead, and you shall go free.”
Joseph said, “You cannot.”
The doctor replied, “I will.”
How does one explain the depths of this love
and loyalty?
Joseph’s friends loved him because they
knew the extent of his love for them.
Nothing in Joseph’s life was more important
than friendship.
When he revealed that the “same sociality
which exists among us here will exist among
us there [in the eternal world],” Joseph
was affirming the fact that heaven is constructed
out of a web of human relationships that extend
in every direction.
By the time his work was done, he had laid
the groundwork for men to be sealed to their
wives across the eternities; for parents to
be sealed to their children and their children’s
children and to their parents and their parents’
parents across infinite generations; and for
friends to be bound to friends in a great
assembly and Church of the Firstborn.
Parley Pratt singled out this dimension to
Joseph’s teachings as a supreme contribution:
It was Joseph Smith who taught me how to prize
the endearing relationships of father and
mother, husband and wife; of brother and sister,
son and daughter.
It was from him that I learned that the wife
of my bosom might be secured to me for time
and all eternity; and that the refined sympathies
and affections which endeared us to each other
emanated from the fountain of divine eternal
love.
. . . I had loved before, but I knew not why.
But now I loved—with a pureness—an intensity
of elevated, exalted feeling, which would
lift my soul from the transitory things of
this grovelling sphere and expand it as the
ocean.
The privileged status of personal relationships
was not just incidental to the Restoration;
it was a primary focus.
As Joseph wrote, “It was my endeavor to
so organize the Church, that the brethren
might eventually be independent of every incumbrance
beneath the celestial kingdom, by bonds and
covenants of mutual friendship, and mutual
love.”
When he later stated, with striking brevity,
“Friendship is one of the grand fundamental
principles of ‘Mormonism,’” he was saying
something about the deepest underpinnings
of Mormon theology.
Joseph rejoiced in his relationships to God,
family, and friends, and he articulated a
system that both revealed their eternal dimension
and—this is key—provided the principles,
ordinances, and knowledge to render them eternal.
He wrote in his journal:
How good and glorious it has seemed unto me,
to find pure and holy friends.
. . . In the name of the Lord, I feel in my heart
to bless them.
. . . These love the God that I serve; they
love the truths that I promulgate.
. . . I . . . prayed for them with anxious
and fervent desire.
. . . They shall not want a friend while I
live.
No wonder he could say truthfully, “Let
me be resurrected with the Saints, whether
I ascend to heaven or descend to hell.”
To others he insisted:
When you & I meet face to face, I anticipate,
without the least doubt, that all matters
between us will be fairly understood, and
perfect love prevail; and [the] sacred covenant
by which we are bound together, have the uppermost
seat in our hearts.
Again, how significant it is that he actually
made the affirmation of such bonds into a
sacred ritual.
Those who attended his School of the Prophets
were greeted in this manner:
Art thou a brother or brethren?
I salute you in the name of the Lord Jesus
Christ, in token or remembrance of the everlasting
covenant, in which covenant I receive you
to fellowship, in a determination that is
fixed, immovable, and unchangeable, to be
your friend and brother through the grace
of God in the bonds of love.
Seeing this project of a timeless and borderless
web of human relationships as his objective,
one can understand what sociologists and students
of religion cannot: how to explain the great
secret of how Mormonism became not just another
church, not just a thriving institution, but
a people for whom the words brother and sister
carry more than metaphoric significance.
The great appeal of first-generation Christianity,
Elaine Pagels has recently written, was the
feeling of entering into an extended family
community.
It was no small feat and not without the highest
significance that Joseph successfully replicated
the most essential, the most authentically
Christian aspect of the primitive Church.
That is the true greatness of his legacy:
he forged a genuine community.
There is, I think, another aspect of his legacy
that shapes the special character of the people
who call Joseph “Prophet” and that connects
them in a particularly powerful way.
That is the possibility of religious certainty
that Joseph held out.
A man inducted into his religious vocation
with a literal visit by an embodied God and
Christ is not likely to view his religious
convictions in the same terms as a typical
Christian believer.
Translating scripture out of tangible metal
plates weighing 40 or 50 pounds is not of
the same order of prophetic utterance as expressing
mere spiritual intimations.
Feeling the weight of angelic hands belonging
to resurrected Apostles on his head—conferring
upon him the priesthood of God—produced
a crystalline certainty about his authority
(the lack of which would drive other reformers
to abandon his own church).
Joseph Smith, in other words, did not simply
believe he was a prophet inspired to act in
God’s name; in his mind he was as certain
as any man could be on any subject sacred
or secular.
“I knew it, and I knew that God knew it,”
he said of his initial encounter with deity.
Joseph’s formative experiences—as a 14-year-old
seeker, as a prophet, and as a religion maker—were
saturated in the physical, the tangible, the
material, and the visible.
Certainty is a term that frequently appears
in the ministry of Joseph Smith—often in
a doctrinally prominent position.
In his Lectures on Faith, which he delivered
to the elders in Kirtland, he claimed that
from earliest times . . .
The inquiry and diligent search of the ancient
saints to seek after and obtain a knowledge
of the glory of God [was rooted in] the credence
they gave to the testimony of their fathers.
. . . The inquiry frequently terminated, indeed
always terminated when rightly pursued, in
the most glorious discoveries and eternal
certainty.
Of his own case he wrote to his wife, “For
as much as I know for a certainty of Eternal
things if the heavens linger it is nothing
to me.”
It is easy to see why his personal encounter
with a conversing deity would ground his own
sense of epistemological certainty.
But he clearly saw his own experience as a
prototype others could—and should—aspire
to.
An 1833 revelation had the Lord declaring,
“Every soul who forsaketh his sins and cometh
unto me, and calleth on my name, and obeyeth
my voice, and keepeth my commandments, shall
see my face and know that I am."
This possibility Joseph related to the doctrine
of the Second Comforter, spoken of by Christ
when He addressed His disciples before His
crucifixion.
"When any man obtains this last comforter," Joseph wrote,
". . . the Lord will teach him face
to face, and he may have a perfect knowledge
of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God."
Joseph apparently believed that the personal
epiphany he experienced in his visitation
by the Father and the Son—heralding full
immersion in the divine light, with all its
epistemological fullness and certainty—betokened
an order of knowledge that was the right and
destiny of all faithful Saints.
That very real possibility informs Mormon
life, worship, personal aspirations, and shared
purpose.
To attend any LDS testimony meeting, for example,
is to enter into a rhetorical universe in
which a language of calm assurance and confident
conviction and even professions of certain
knowledge overwhelm the more traditional Christian
expressions of common belief.
It may well be that this sense of shared knowledge—its
possession or pursuit—is an even more potent
community builder than shared faith.
At the same time, of course, such rhetoric
can have its drawbacks.
It can convey a sense of smugness or superiority;
it can create the tragic impression that with
certainty there is no room or need for searching;
and it can create discomfort and alienation
on the part of those who do not or cannot
share in expressions of serene, unconflicted
conviction.
So it is at this point that I want to conclude
with a few observations about what happens
in the absence of such certainty.
Whether faith is a way station on the way
to certainty, as it seems to be in Alma’s
sermon, or the place one’s spiritual journey
takes one to, it is important that one understand
the incalculable significance of faith—of
this deliberate gesture of belief—as a defining
moral gesture.
It is true that some people seem born with
faith.
And many people die with a full complement.
My own grandmother spent her last months pining
for death because she was the last of her
generation; she “missed her people” to
an excruciating degree; and she grew more
and more disconnected from a world she saw
as simply irrelevant, without the power to
interest or lay hold upon her.
It was striking to watch the world and persons
beyond the grave assume, in her mind and in
her conversation, a fully fleshed-out texture
and presence that utterly displaced the inhabitants
of the here and now.
Faith did not seem a choice for her.
It descended upon her as naturally, irresistibly,
and encompassingly as the heavy snowfalls
on her upstate New York farm.
But such a gift I have not found to be common.
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.
The option to believe must appear on our personal
horizon like the fruit of paradise, perched
precariously between sets of demands held
in dynamic tension.
One is, it would seem, always provided with
sufficient materials out of which to fashion
a life of credible conviction or dismissive
denial.
We are acted upon, in other words, by appeals
to our personal values, our yearnings, our
fears, our appetites, and our egos.
What we choose to embrace, to be responsive
to, is the purest reflection of who we are
and what we love.
It is the purest expression of who we are and what we love.
That is why faith, the choice to believe,
is, in the final analysis, an action that
is positively laden with moral significance.
I believe that we are—as reflective, thinking,
pondering seekers—much like the proverbial
ass of Buridan.
If you remember, the beast starved to death
because he was faced with two equally desirable
and equally accessible piles of hay.
Having no determinative reason to choose one
over the other, he perished in indecision.
In the case of us mortals, men and women are
confronted with a world in which there are
appealing arguments for God as a childish
projection, for modern prophets as scheming
or deluded imposters, and for modern scriptures
as so much fabulous fiction.
But there is also compelling evidence that
a glorious divinity presides over the cosmos,
that God calls and anoints prophets, and that
His word and will are made manifest through
a sacred canon that is never definitively
closed.
There is, as with the ass of Buridan, nothing
to compel an individual’s preference for
one over the other.
But in the case of us mortals, there is something
to tip the scale.
There is something to predispose us to a life
of faith or a life of unbelief.
There is a heart that in these conditions
of equilibrium and balance—and only in these
conditions of equilibrium and balance, equally
“enticed by the one or the other”—is
truly free to choose belief or cynicism, faith
or faithlessness.
Why, then, is there more merit—given this
perfect balance—in believing in the Christ
(and His gospel and prophets) than believing
in a false deity or in nothing at all?
Perhaps because there is nothing in the universe—or
in any possible universe—more perfectly
good, absolutely beautiful, and worthy of
adoration and emulation than this Christ.
A gesture of belief in that direction, a will
manifesting itself as a desire to acknowledge
His virtues as the paramount qualities of
a divided universe, is a response to the best
in us, the best and noblest of which the human
soul is capable.
For we do indeed create gods after our own
image—or potential image.
And that is an activity endowed with incalculable
moral significance.
As Carlyle said, “The Great Man was always
as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men
waited for him like fuel, and then they too
would flame.”
Joseph Smith ignited something in thousands
of men and women that connects them to God
and to each other in powerful ways.
In part, this was because he was, like Esther,
born to his hour in human history—an hour
when the passion for human liberty never burned
brighter.
His message resonated because it was a stirring,
compelling, and exciting synthesis that presented
a spiritually hungry humankind with a god,
like the god of Plato, who “was good, and
the good can never have any jealousy of anything.
And being free from jealousy, he desired that
all things should be as like himself as they
could be.”
The god of Joseph Smith was not a threat to
human potential but a being who gloried in
that potential and whose work was to bring
it to fruition.
That was why Joseph’s message resonated
and caught hold like a burning fire.
But his message also flamed forth because
millions of men and women have freely chosen
to believe.
They assayed the opinions of doubters, and
they gave a hearing to the critics.
Like Brigham Young, they knew Joseph was human
and subject to err, but they sampled his words
and agreed they tasted like honey.
They weighed the beauty of a god and of human
origins and a human future unlike anything
before imagined.
They found reason to doubt, and they found
reason to believe.
They chose to believe.
Thank you.
[applause]
