As a child, I was baffled with the world as described by some stories in ancient scripture. How could Noah have lived 950 years? How did he manage to put two of every creature on the planet into that boat? How could the Red Sea have parted? How could Jesus have raised the dead? I’d never witnessed events even remotely similar to these and their presence in books that were supposedly sacred and factual befuddled me. I concluded that the basic nature of existence must have changed. Physical laws in place then must have differed from those of the modern world. I could see no other explanation.
The elementary, innocent questions of childhood rarely present serious challenges to one’s faith. However, with the eventual arrival of adolescence may come inquiry of a more sophisticated nature, calling for more substantive answers. With some, a bridge may need to be crossed leading from doubt to testimony, from agnosticism to a settled belief.
To be clear, I’m of the opinion that questioning and pondering play an important role in the development of spiritual maturity. Without pondering, the roots of testimony can never reach deeply into the fertile soil of faith. However, I believe that we’re not born equally gifted in things spiritual. Many appear to have come into mortality with a significant endowment of innate faith, “trailing clouds of glory” to quote Mr. Wordsworth. Others like myself, have had to fight for faith, wrestling with questions and doubts as we attempt to negotiate the straight and narrow way “home.” All of which brings me to the point of my ramblings- In the Book of Mormon a bold missionary by the name of Alma (himself with a storied journey to faith) teaches a marvelously comforting concept. In the 32nd chapter of Alma, verse 27 we learn that “even if ye can no more than desire to believe” the grace of a loving Father can work with that desire and step by step build it into a flourishing, life sustaining, joyful faith. Why are some born with keen spiritual eyes while others seem to possess dimmer, less than perfect vision? I don’t know. Whatever the reason, the missionary-prophet Alma appears to be telling us that either way, the gate to Eternal Life is open to us all.
Part of the solution for the skeptical may lie in recognizing that what society views as religion is very different from the reality described by the restored gospel. Though the two vocabularies are similar, the underlying meanings are often dissimilar. Recognizing this dissimilarity proved to be a milestone in the development of my personal testimony. This principle is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in an ancient account of an interaction between the Adversary and Adam. Satan, recognizing that Adam and each of us, possess a desire to reconnect with our divine origins, offers up “religion” as the means through which that desire may be fulfilled. Adam replies, almost quizzically, that he was simply calling on his Father in prayer. In that brief exchange, we catch a glimpse of how “religion” with its piety and man-made creeds can be at variance with the pure, instinctual, act of reaching upward into the cosmos in search of our origins, our literal and loving spiritual Parents.
To illustrate: As a young man, I read an article published in National Geographic, which equated the Christian account of creation with the creation myths of other cultures. One story of our beginnings was as good as another since the whole lot was merely the product of primitive, unenlightened, un-evolved societies, traditions, and values. “Faith”, in the incomplete science of neo-Darwinism was permissible, encouraged, even required, but faith in a living Christ was looked upon with condescending disapproval.
It appeared to me that the author had intentionally added one more brick in the wall that supposedly separates religion from reason, science from faith. I’m embarrassed that I was so slow to understand, but it wasn’t until that moment, I realized science, as well as academia, were battling a Christianity I had never believed, one, which veered off course after the death of the Apostles and the birth of the Creeds. The intransigent secularist then as now could trumpet the illogical, superstitious, incomprehensible, metaphysical, naive, nature of Christianity all he liked; his arrogant outlook had nothing to do with my faith. (Again, though the vocabularies of Mormonism and religion are similar, their meanings are frequently different). Frankly, I would have probably conceded many of his arguments… but they had nothing to do with me. Faith and reason together have led me to the belief that humanity’s beginnings were not an accident of nature but an act of God. While I am very much interested in the questions of how we came to be, my faith is not predicated upon where those answers will ultimately lead. If Father utilized evolution to bring His spirit offspring into mortality…fine. If Pre-Adamites, as Hugh Nibley has described them, whose skeletal remains lay scattered about the earth, have no relation to us…fine. In the end, I’m not worried that science will dethrone God. God is the very personification of perfect science.
As in the earlier mentioned story of Adam and Satan, I’ve never been a disciple of mainstream “religion.” When my heart and mind are compelled to commune with the divine it is not to the God of Nicea that I turn, rather it is to the physical, literal, Eternal Father whose spirit child I am. This type of dissent from traditional Christianity is hardly unusual. Similar frustrations can frequently be seen in the work of one prominent LDS scholar.
“The stories of the garden of Eden and the Flood have always furnished unbelievers with their best ammunition against believers, because they are the easiest to visualize, popularize, and satirize of any Bible accounts. Everyone has seen a garden and been caught in a pouring rain. It requires no effort of imagination for a six-year-old to convert concise and straightforward Sunday-school recitals into the vivid images that will stay with him for the rest of his life. These stories retain the form of the nursery tales they assume in the imaginations of small children, to be defended by grownups who refuse to distinguish between childlike faith and thinking as a child when it is time to ‘put away childish things’. (1 Corinthians 13:11.) It is equally easy and deceptive to fall into adolescent disillusionment and with one’s emancipated teachers to smile tolerantly at the simple gullibility of bygone days, while passing stern moral judgment on the savage old God who damns Adam for eating the fruit he put in his way and, overreacting with impetuous violence, wipes out Noah’s neighbors simply for making fun of his boat-building on a fine summer’s day.
This is another case of what I have called the gentile dilemma or, if you will, the devil’s dilemma.” (Old Testament and Related Studies Hugh Nibley [Doc #3740] p.63)
On another occasion this same author observed:
“What we have failed to see is that the religion which disgusted the intellectuals was a dishonest religion — vitiated by human weakness and priestcraft.” [Hugh Nibley Doc 7185]
Here Doctor Nibley puts forth, in brusque fashion, an insight forged from his decades of not only rigorous scholarship, but discipleship as well. Philosophers and intellectuals have for ages looked upon religion as did Karl Marx when he famously remarked that religion “…is the opium of the people.” Perhaps, on occasion, Marx’s hackneyed phrase might even prove valid. However, Nibley’s statement concludes with stinging words, reminding us of the distortions and destruction wrought by man on the word of God. It is precisely this falsification that erodes the ground from underneath the intellectual’s contemptuous view of faith.
With some casual exploration of history, one may discover others whose views on Christianity placed them outside the orthodoxy of their day. One such example can be found in a pair of the 17th century’s most influential thinkers, John Locke and Isaac Newton.
“…two principal players in opening the doors of liberty and science to the modern world were coincidently close friends. Locke and Newton became close after Locke’s return from Holland in 1688. John Locke strongly urged Sir Isaac Newton to publish his carefully studied objections to the doctrine of the Trinity as defined by the creeds. For his heresy, Newton was quietly dismissed from the Anglican priesthood. Newton was a devoted believer of the Bible, but he was labeled as a heretic because of his public rejection of the god of the creeds. Newton and Locke were towering intellects who simply couldn’t fathom the creeds.” (R.A. Stone, personal notes).
Several of the America’s Founding Fathers could not make peace with the religion of their peers. For instance, Thomas Jefferson’s objections to the Christianity of his time are well known. While some of these objections, specifically those involving the miracles of Jesus, and His divinity, are contrary to LDS theology, others are not.
In a letter from Jefferson to one Colonel Pickering he writes of “the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one and one is three.” (R.A. Stone, personal notes).
In another letter to James Smith, Jefferson writes:
“The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs” (Works, Vol. iv., p. 360).
In the same communication, he continues in words that retain their brilliance and insight, applying as much in our time as they did in his.
“The Athanasian paradox that one is three and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.” (R.A. Stone, personal notes).
Jefferson, expounding even further on his views of religion and mysticism, wrote in a letter to John Adams, August 22, 1813,
“It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism that three are one and one is three, and yet, that the one is not three, and the three are not one…. But this constitutes the craft, the power, and profits of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies” (R.A. Stone, personal notes).
Later in American history a great mind and moralist, Abraham Lincoln, failed to reconcile his religious faith with contemporary Christianity.
Abraham Lincoln also seems to be one at odds with the creeds. The religious wrangling of his day, “…attracted his attention, though…he was reluctant to accept any creed.”
“So damaging was the allegation that he was ‘an open scoffer at Christianity’ that in his race for Congress in 1846 he was obliged to issue a formal denial: ‘That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.’” (Lincoln, David Herbert Donald, p 48-49) (R.A. Stone, personal notes).
Despite their nonconformity with the accepted Christian philosophies of their day, these men were, nevertheless “believers,” not atheists, not agnostics, and not merely deists. Faith in God as a designer and maintainer of the universe was a guiding force in their lives, even if in Jefferson’s case, it caused him to remark, “I am a sect by myself, as far as I know.”
The thinking of Locke, Newton, Jefferson, and Lincoln finds significant mutuality with a member of the LDS Quorum of the Twelve, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland:
“…unfortunately, nearly two millennia of Christian history have sown terrible confusion and near-fatal error in this regard. Many evolutions and iterations of religious creeds have greatly distorted the simple clarity of true doctrine, declaring the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to be abstract, absolute, transcendent, immanent, consubstantial, coeternal, and unknowable; without body, parts, or passions; and dwelling outside space and time.
In such creeds, all three members are separate persons, but they are a single being, the oft-noted “mystery of the trinity.” They are three distinct persons, yet not three Gods but one. All three persons are incomprehensible, yet it is one God who is incomprehensible.
We agree with our critics on at least that point—that such a formulation for divinity is incomprehensible. With such a confusing definition of God being imposed upon the Church, little wonder that a fourth-century monk cried out, “Woe is me! They have taken my God away from me, … and I know not whom to adore or to address.”7 How are we to trust, love, and worship, to say nothing of striving to be like, One who is incomprehensible and unknowable? What of Jesus’s prayer that it “is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent”? (John 17:3; emphasis added).
It is not our purpose ever to demean any person’s belief or the doctrine of any religion. We extend to all the same respect for their doctrine that we ask for ours. (That too is an article of our faith.) But no less a source than the stalwart Harper’s Bible Dictionary, the gold standard in that field, records that “the formal doctrine of the Trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries is not to be found [anywhere] in the [New Testament].”8
So we are very comfortable, frankly, in letting it be known that we do not hold a fourth- or fifth-century, pagan-influenced view of the Godhead, and neither did those first Christian Saints who were eyewitnesses of the living Christ.9 We are New Testament—not Nicene—Christians.
The Unity of the Godhead
However, I now quickly stress that when we have made the point about the distinctiveness of Their persons, it is equally important to stress how unified They are and how truly One the Godhead is. I think I am safe in saying that part of the reason we are so misunderstood by others in the Christian tradition is because in stressing the individual personages of the Godhead, we have not followed that up often enough by both conceding and insisting upon Their unity in virtually every other imaginable way. For this we have reaped needless criticism, and we have made our LDS position harder to be understood than it needs to be.”
To further complicate matters, are perplexing perceptions of God a reaction to the layering of societal biases over those perceptions? Elder Bruce R. McConkie said that God stands revealed or remains forever unknown. Absent that personal revelation our image of God will not be hewn from our experience but rather the experience of others. Such a view will not be personal, authentic, and intimate, but will instead reflect the distortions and discolorations of a lens ground by flawed, sometimes even nefarious, human hands. God, as perceived by an ancient Amazon tribesman, a medieval Jewish scholar, or a televangelist of dubious motivation, will assume characteristics of those respective societies. Even the superlative language of the much revered King James Bible bears the unmistakable marks of the early 17th-century English culture by which it was produced. It goes without saying that this would be the case. How else is God’s word to be recorded, except through the written vocabularies of the many prophets, scribes, and translators involved in its transmission? He frequently uses the human and temporal to teach us the divine and eternal. The unfathomable agony and transcendent love of the Atonement are, after all, brought to our remembrance by the awkward thirteen-year-old boy passing us a tray of broken bread each week. For some, it can, at times, be difficult see the true nature of reality, obscured as it by the familiar and rutty circumstance of everyday existence. Without genuine divine disclosure is it any wonder that the god of The Other seems more like myth than verity? Is it any wonder that such disparity leads some to ask, “is man the creation of God, or is God the creation of man?”
As an early President of the Church wrote:
I do not wonder, when the people generally reject the principle of present revelation, that skepticism and infidelity prevail to such an alarming extent. I do not wonder that so many men treat religion with contempt, and regard it as something not worth the attention of intelligent beings, for without revelation religion is a mockery and a farce. (Teachings of Presidents of the Church/ John Taylor p. 158-159)
Moroni 7:48 seems to hint at a related phenomenon when it speaks of the Second Coming of the Savior. If we simply behave ourselves, “we shall see him as he is.” Even in the face of that coming apocalyptic yet glorious day there appear to be those who initially will not recognize events for what they are. Perhaps many of us, perhaps most of the time, don’t see Him or His gospel in their true light. It’s as if the Veil is drawn not only across our memory but across our understanding. Language itself is ill-equipped to communicate the profound realities of the cosmos, its Organizer, and the relationship we have to both. The only thing capable of piercing this veil, of providing the enlightenment and personal peace we each so desperately need, is the third member of the Godhead, the Holy Ghost. Without His guiding influence, we become hopelessly entangled in a net of inadequate words. As the brilliantly gifted writer, Elder Neal A. Maxwell once observed:
“Tongue cannot always transmit the truths of the gospel. Its truths are too powerful for us to manage on occasion.… That is why we are so in need of the Spirit-so that knowledge can arc like electricity from point to point, aided and impelled by the Spirit-aid without which we are simply not articulate enough to speak of all the things which we know. (“But for a Small Moment,” Neal A. Maxwell p.451) [doc.#4452]
While the gospel of Jesus Christ, as understood by the Latter-day Saints, purports to be the One Way of returning to Father, Mormonism does not ask us to believe it is the sole repository of morality and truth. Speaking of other churches president Boyd K. Packer once wrote:
They have some truth-some of them have very much of it. They have a form of godliness. Often the clergy and adherents are not without dedication, many of them practice remarkably well the virtues of Christianity. They are, nonetheless, incomplete. (Boyd K. Packer, Things As They Really Are p.47).
Further, President Gordon B Hinckley expressed it this way:
“I do not wish to argue with anyone. I respect the religion of every man and woman, and honor them in their desire to live it.” Gordon B. Hinckley [doc#3899].
On another occasion President Hinckley stated:
“We can respect other religions, and must do so. We must recognize the great good they accomplish. We must teach our children to be tolerant and friendly toward those not of our faith. We can and do work with those of other religions in the defense of those values which have made our civilization great and our society distinctive.” Ensign, Conference Report May 1998. Gordon B. Hinckley [doc #3626]
Such statements of tolerance and support for other faiths as well as the good works they perform are common among the LDS people and its leadership. Who among us has not been uplifted and inspired by the acts of charity, devotion, and sacrifice, as manifest in the lives of believers of all stripes. To reject, out of hand all beliefs and practices of every faith tradition but our own would not only be provincial in the extreme but would, in effect, be rejecting much of what we ourselves hold to be true. There are reflections, and fragments of Mormon theology and ritual, including those found only in our temples, spread through many religions, times, and cultures. Given we hold that many faiths ultimately have a common root in the religious practices of our First Parents, one would be surprised if it were otherwise.
From Elder Neal A. Maxwell we read:
“Dispensationalism thus confirms that Christianity began not in the Holy Land in the meridian of time but with Adam in the very beginning. Hence, instead of wondering why similar fragments and shards of truth appear in various and disparate cultures, some of these parallels actually result from original wholeness and subsequent shatterings and scatterings.
Undoubtedly the knowledge of this law and of other rites and ceremonies was carried by the posterity of Adam into all lands, and continued with them, more or less pure, to the flood, and through Noah, who was a ‘preacher of righteousness,’ to those who succeeded him, spreading out in all nations and countries, Adam and Noah being the first of their dispensations to receive them from God. What wonder, then, that we should find relics of Christianity so to speak among the heathens, and nations who know not Christ, and whose histories date back beyond the days of Moses, and even beyond the flood, independent of and apart from the records of the Bible.”9 (Neal A. Maxwell The Promise of Discipleship p. 26) [Doc #7003]
To repeat, Mormonism unapologetically proclaims itself to be The Restoration of the ancient Church, the only modern organization possessing the authority, power, ordinances, and knowledge necessary for exaltation in the highest realm of the Celestial Kingdom. Additionally, that the very definition of exaltation is the eternal perpetuation and expansion of the family unit in the presence of God. In a remarkably clear statement, President Boyd K. Packer said, “The power of procreation is not an incidental part of the plan of happiness; it is the key to happiness.” The Church also holds to the unique view that God the Father, his Only-Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are separate, distinct, corporeal (though the body of the Holy Ghost is spiritual in nature) beings.
It has been said that Lucifer understands the significance of such doctrine, even if we don’t. The late Elder Bruce R. McConkie stated:
“There is no salvation in believing … false doctrine, particularly a false or unwise view about the Godhead or any of its members. … “It follows that the devil would rather spread false doctrine about God and the Godhead, and induce false feelings with reference to any one of them, than almost any other thing he could do.”5
From one perspective Mormon dogma regarding the nature of God and the Godhead is so profoundly different from conventional Christianity it is difficult to overstate. From another perspective, one views vast areas of common ground. As Elder Holland explains:
“That kind of true experience [with God] can come only when there is the realization that He is a real being, an actual person, a literal Father of flesh and bone who speaks and sees and feels, who knows all His children’s names and all their needs, who hears all their prayers, and who wants all His children in His Church. These investigators [of the LDS faith] need to know He has a plan for their salvation and that He has given commandments as to how we find our way back to Him.
A God who cares about them as tenderly as a parent cares for a child cannot be an ethereal mist or a vague philosophical First Cause or a deistic absentee landlord. He must be recognized for what He truly is—a merciful, compassionate Father, in whose image every one of His children has been made and before Whom all of us will one day again stand—and then kneel! Few of our investigators will know that kind of God now, in or out of contemporary Christianity”.
The sectarian world teaches of an amorphous Creator, beyond description, existing outside physical space, and time, (all views contrary to LDS belief). The supernatural and non-material are key attributes of such a Deity. To hold views outside this norm is considered heretical by conventional standards. However, it appears that this was not always the case. One of America’s foremost theologians writes in his book The Secular City:
“The extraction of the biblical doctrine of God from the metaphysical solvent in which it has been suspended provides one of the most important theological challenges of our day…the church may very soon have to go back and start from scratch. However, in the meantime, it limps along with a theology still not extricated from the metaphysical baggage of the [Constantinian] era…” p.77
Despite the profound truths found in many world religions; the kindness, morality, selfless works, bone-deep dedication, righteousness, scholarship, and intelligence of their adherents, a growing secular swath in the western world seems unconvinced of religion’s validity and relevance. Two people read of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. One is filled with awe and wonder at the power and love of the Savior; the other is left unmoved, quite certain that tales of Centaurs and Mermaids are every bit as literal. Why does one see a miracle while the other sees a myth? Could it be that some of the spiritually gifted can see, albeit unwittingly, underneath the metaphysical veneer, to the miraculous verity below the factitious surface? Some believe as easily and naturally as they draw breath, while others search, struggle, and in the end cynically declare the universe to be arbitrary and godless.
The “metaphysical baggage” for many has been too great a burden, making Christian discipleship seem like so much fiction and fancy, an emotional tool of survival needed only by the unintelligent and unsophisticated who are unwilling to face the harsh existential facts. From an LDS perspective, a “born again” straw man has been fashioned and the elites delight in setting it ablaze. But again, what does it have to do with us…?
Any hope we have for seeing God as He is, must surely include seeing ourselves as we are. That paternal and maternal link between ourselves and Deity informs Their every action, and everything we were meant to become as Their offspring. Poets, philosophers, and Christian disciples, for ages have sensed, if only vaguely, not the “metaphysical solvent” bemoaned earlier but the sort of hyper-reality revealed through Joseph Smith. Our Father is not the creation of a “frenzied mind” but the ultimate, unchanging, physical, reality in a universe otherwise, ruled by entropy. He is an Exalted Man, perfect and eternal, with a body of flesh and bone and in whose image we are made. We are not the result of the wildly unlikely, random, unguided, infusion of life into the lifeless but the very means through which the Ruler of all expands his work and his glory. He loves us as His children, His family, with unimaginable potential made possible only through His grace. That knowledge should change, at the most basic level, how we perceive ourselves and interact with those around us. C.S. Lewis wrote:
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which… you would be strongly tempted to worship…”
He continues, then writes,
“There are no ordinary people.”
Somewhere, deep within our primeval cores the suspicion rests that we are each remarkable. (The problem seems to arise when we substitute the natural yearning to fulfill the measure of our creation with a destructive pride. I.e., when those feelings of potential and possibility become instead comparative, and we measure ourselves against one another). Who among us, in a moment of clarity and stillness has not gazed into the night sky made brilliant with the burning of distant suns, and sensed in a small way that we are all so much more than mortal?
As Terryl and Fionna Givens have expressed elegantly:
Let me but be taught the mystery of my being,” pleads one of Lord Byron’s characters, in tones the apostle Paul would have readily understood. Paul wrote a beautiful hymn to charity, which the King James translators rendered in part, “For now we see through a glass darkly.” By “glass” they meant a looking glass, a mirror. The original actually reads, “We see in a mirror, dimly” (NRSV). In other words, we are the mystery yet to be revealed. It is our own identity that we must struggle to discern, before we can rightly perceive our place in the cosmos and our relation to the Divine. With the poet John Keats we feel to say, “Do you not think I strive—to know myself?” And like him, we find ourselves, “straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness.” Straining because we never feel completely at home in this world and because we sense we carry within us clues to our origins. We experience those sparks in the night as though we were archaeologists glimpsing familiar fragments of our lost culture, not relics of an alien world. It is more than the recurrent intimations of a different sphere, a different domain of existence only dimly perceived, that haunt us. It is the familiarity we cannot shake, which tells us as much about ourselves as about those realms beyond the veil that shrouds our life in mystery. [doc. #7979 Terryl and Fiona Givens]
Yes, there are those of us who at times reluctantly, awkwardly, wrestle with belief, as we struggle against our doubting dispositions. However, in other, more sacred and lucid moments, we may be given astounding, life-altering glimpses of “things as they really are” and understand that after all, His yoke is easy, His burden is light. We may find ourselves straining to believe an unbelievable “religion,” a philosophy that men have wrapped in superstition and falsehood, then remember that the authentic language of God and the language of the Creeds are often two different tongues.
A Reason For Faith 
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