MORMON SMUGNESS?

Do the Mormons really think that their religion is better than any other? Hugh Nibley, in his work, The World and the Prophets, page 256, said, under the Chapter heading of, What Makes a True Church?

“Why this smug insistence, they would ask, that you are the only ones who have the truth? Why this narrow - minded claim that your religion is better than any other?

The first answer to this question today is an historical one. Every church that has an independent organization once claimed exclusive possession of the saving truth. If it did not, it should never have been organized, for the organization of every church creates division in Christendom and nothing will justify that, short of a peculiar and special claim to enlightenment on matters vital to salvation.

In the days of their pristine vitality and conviction, all the churches that now accuse others of thinking they have something better than anybody else thought the same way themselves. If Christianity is anything more than an ethical code or an agglomeration of sentimental attitudes and platitudes, it must be specific in its teachings and clear and uncompromising on matters which by its own profession are of transcendent importance.

It is a sorry day when churches apologize for ever having been definite and outspoken on the subject of salvation. Today the fashion is to be neither hot nor cold – and that is the worst state of all. The alternative to being firm and specific is a slippery relativism that leads to nothing but paralysis.

Because equally intelligent and gifted people disagree on what makes good music, it does not follow that all music is equally good or that all music is vanity. Because scientists in the same field often contradict each other, it does not follow that all science is a joke or even that the work of the wrangling scientists themselves is thereby discredited.


Because what seems wise and moral behavior in one society may be frowned upon in another, it does not follow that all morality is an illusion or that all actions are equally moral. Why then should we assume that since people of equal intelligence and devotion take different views on religion that one religion is as good as another and it really makes no difference what a man believes?

All prophetic religions, like all true disciples, are marked by a kind of narrowness, for strait is the gate and narrow the way that leads to eternal life. But the charge is a false one that the followers of the prophets would exclude all the rest of mankind from their little circle of the elect.

Of all the Christian religions in the world today, the only prophetic one, that of the Latter-day Saints, is that one which alone provides salvation for all the human race, living and dead. It alone has been taught by prophets that it is absolutely wrong to think of God as limiting his blessings and manifestations to but one small portion of his human family; all creatures, we are taught, were meant by God to have joy in the sphere in which they were created and in every age and in all parts of the world men have been given all the joy and all the glory that they have been willing to receive.

One of the most wonderful chapters in the history of the restored Church has been that which tells of the innumerable miracles and manifestations, visions and revelations by which the way has been opened up for the missionaries everywhere. The recipients of some of the most marvelous of these dispensations were what the Victorian world chose to call savages, living in the wilderness or the islands of the sea, yet God had filled their whole lives with blessings.
It was so in the ancient church. Cornelius, the Ethiopian, the righteous jailer and his family, the great company of priests…obedient to the faith (Acts 6:7) all these and many more were so near to the gospel that they recognized it instantly on sight – God had never deserted them but poured out his Spirit on them even in their pre-Christian days.

Yet when they heard the gospel, they joyfully accepted it. Because God had remembered them, they did not conclude that they needed no more. It was precisely because they were searchers for more light that God had blessed them as richly as he did: ‘To those that have shall be given,’ said the Lord, not, ‘to those that have there is no further need.’

There is nothing narrow, arbitrary, or ungenerous in revealed religion. In the end, all the human race will hear the fulness of the everlasting gospel. But meantime, all things must be taught in order and milk must come before meat. The Lord must work through his established Church, which must unfailingly be under the guidance of his servants, the prophets.”