Our Message

DO WE SEEK COMMON GROUND? 

(By Joseph Fielding McConkie, pages 182 to 203 from his book, Here We Stand) Only a small part is included)

A woman called our home one evening to tell me that she was having a discussion with a nonmember neighbor—not an argument—and what she needed, she said, was a scriptural reference to prove that God has a body. I directed her to Doctrine and Covenants 130:22, which reads: "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us." Surely that is as plain and to the point as language permits.

My caller immediately objected. "What I need," she said, "is a Bible passage."

Now, I happen to know that there are more than five hundred passages of scriptures in the Bible that can be used to argue that God has a body, but I also know that such an argument is fruitless. We read our Bible text and say, "See, there's the proof." But no one ever responds by saying, "Wow, I didn't know that! May I be baptized?" What they say is, "The scriptures you are reading were not intended to be understood literally. They are simply figurative representations of God. If you are going to accept everything in the Bible as being literal, then when it says God is 'the rock of our salvation' you must believe he is a rock; or when it says he will keep us under the shadow of his wings, you must believe God is a bird and has wings." The discussion gets silly very quickly, and the silliest thing about it is that we allow ourselves to be a part of it.

So I told my caller that the way we knew that God had a body was that he told us and that we had no better authority than that. We hadn't learned it from the Bible. With a tone of disappointment in her voice she said, "Well, thanks, anyway. I'll see if I can find someone else who can help me," and hung up.

I have been through that kind of experience again and again. A young man came to my office one morning before class and told me that he just about had his nonmember roommate converted. "All I need," he said, "is a passage of scripture that proves that marriages are supposed to be eternal. Can you help me?" he asked.

"That's easy enough," I said. "We have God's word on the matter in Doctrine and Covenants 132."

"No, no," he interjected, "what I need is a Bible passage."

"We are not practicing eternal marriage because of any Bible text," I responded. "We do it because God commanded us to do so through a living prophet."

"You mean you don't know of any Bible text that proves it?" he asked, tension and anxiety ringing in his voice.

"I don't even know a Bible text that I can torture into saying such a thing," I replied.

He responded, "I'd better see if there isn't someone else who can help me," and left abruptly.

The perspective represented by these exchanges, which is not an uncommon one, is a matter of considerable concern. It ignores the fact that there has been a restoration of the gospel. It represents a retreat to the Protestant position that the Bible is the final word on all things. It makes us a part of the argument over the meaning of the Bible instead of the solution to that argument.

 It is a way of saying that dead prophets outrank living ones and that modern revelation can be accepted only if Bible texts prove it to be true. This perspective short-circuits the conversion process and effectually denies the reality of the First Vision. It turns a deaf ear to every revelation we have received since the spring of 1820.

The Book of Mormon testifies that many of the plain and precious parts of the Bible were taken from it before it went forth to the nations of the earth (see 1 Nephi 13:23-29). We can hardly be true to the book if we argue that all its doctrines can be found in the Bible.

To properly present our message requires that we testify that Joseph Smith is the great prophet of the Restoration.

There is power in such a testimony, and every effort is made by the adversary to keep us from bearing it. Perhaps his most effective ploy is the notion that we should not testify about Joseph Smith for fear that people will think we worship him instead of Christ. The idea is to emphasize our faith in Christ while avoiding reference to Joseph Smith.

We hope that such an approach will place us in a position to say to those of other Christian faiths, "We share your love and reverence for Christ."

But if we succeed in convincing our friends of other faiths that we share their reverence for and testimony of Christ, we have left them no reason to join with us. Similarly, in missionary work, as long as we attempt to show people the path of salvation as stemming from the Bible, we become nothing more than another of the squabbling sects of Christendom. Our responsibility is to teach investigators to pray and to show them how answers come.

As Latter-day Saints we must know clearly where we stand. If our message is simply a reworking of key Bible texts for which we have gained some insights that others overlooked, then why not abandon the offensive notion that there was a universal apostasy, or that there is but one true church, and get on with the matter of mending fences with historical Christianity?

If, on the other hand, we are serious in testifying that there was indeed an apostasy, that it was universal, that it included the loss of the priesthood and the saving truths of salvation and the knowledge of the very nature of God himself, then we must be prepared to stand alone. We are not attempting to rebuild out of the theological rubble of the past. We have no borrowed doctrines. We have no priesthood, no keys, no power, no authority that we have received from the world. Such being the case, we have no right to proclaim our message to the nations of the earth by seeking common ground. We must stand independent. Indeed, it is not common ground that we seek. We seek sacred ground, and upon that ground we must stand.