Teaching Pure Doctrine

Ogden Temple

From the book, Here We Stand, Chapter Seven, Teaching Pure Doctrine, pages 114-117, by Joseph Fielding McConkie: (emphasis added)

"AS HE WAITED FOR HIS flight to be announced, my father buried himself in a book by a renowned New Testament scholar. He was delighted to discover material by a sectarian scholar that constituted a marvelous defense of Mormonism.

As he boarded the flight he met Marion G. Romney, then a member of the First Presidency. He said, 'President Romney, I have got to read this to you. This is good,' and proceeded to share his newfound treasure. When he was finished, President Romney said, 'Bruce, I have to tell you a story. A few years ago I found something that I thought was remarkable written by one of the world's great scholars. I read it to J. Reuben Clark, and he said, 'Look, when you read things like that, and you find that the world doesn't agree with us, so what? And when you read something like that and you find they are right on the mark and they agree with us, so what?'"

My father thought that a good lesson. The world is not the source of the doctrines we teach nor is it the source from which we seek confirmation for our doctrines. We simply do not bear testimony on the basis of the wisdom of the world. Doctrine and testimony must come from a pure source. To get that idea across to his children, Dad used a little cowboy wisdom. 'Don't drink below the horses,' he said. 'All true religion is revealed religion.' Which is simply to say, we must drink at the fountainhead.

In so saying I am not picking a fight with good scholarship. My father read widely. He had a fine library of well-read books. He read the best of Latter-day Saint writers and the best of secular scholars. His standard of measure, however, was always the revealed gospel.

A doctrine is something learned, because, as the word doctrine implies, it is something taught. The source of all good doctrine must be God himself. If a doctrine cannot clearly demonstrate its divine origin, it cannot claim place in the family of saving principles. Members of the Church share a loyalty to and a faith in certain principles we accept as doctrines of salvation. By revelation the Lord said, "For thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" (D&C 115:4). 'The' in the name of the Church carries a meaning quite different from 'a' Church of Jesus Christ.

To say it is 'The' Church is to say, as the Lord did in the first section of the Doctrine and Covenants, that it is the "only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth" (D&C 1:30). We hold that declaration to be a doctrine of salvation. Salvation cannot be found in any other organization, ordinances, priesthood, or doctrines. Needless to say, that announcement has given offense to many. Doctrines created in heaven never seem to find a comfortable resting place in theologies crafted by the wisdom of men. No saving doctrine can stand independent of faith in Christ and the necessary discipline associated with membership in his church.

Saving doctrines do not grow wild. Salvation is not found in everyone doing his own thing. Those who falsely suppose that they can negotiate their own salvation often choose to be offended by such declarations. If, as Latter-day Saints hold, there is only one true church, then all others are false and thus the doctrines of salvation are not found in them. Such a position, we are frequently assured, is both judgmental and unchristian.

The irony of such an accusation should not go unnoticed. To be Christian, in any meaningful sense of the word, is to believe that the hope of salvation is in Christ. It is to embrace the dogma that mankind is in a fallen state from which Christ alone can redeem them. Thus, all who make a serious profession to being Christians must draw the same narrow and judgmental line relative to Christ that Latter-day Saints draw relative to his Church and its doctrines. The real issue is not the necessity of drawing such a line but rather where it should be drawn and who has the authority to draw it.

The essence of our faith centers on preserving the purity of our doctrine. No principle of salvation can ever be a matter of private interpretation or of speculation. Faith cannot be exercised in principles that are not true. As we must not be seduced by false doctrines, so we must not be distracted by doctrinal decoys. Let me suggest a few of the common forms such decoys take.

When I was a young seminary student, our teacher gave a lesson for which he placed pictures of a dozen world-renowned scientists in the front of the room. Then he read a quotation from each of the men represented, in which they indicated a belief in God. The idea was that we shared a faith in common with these great scientists and thus our faith was justified. In truth that is not the case. What they were calling God, we call nature. The statements he read merely illustrated that these men acknowledge that there is order in the laws of nature and that those laws govern our universe.

The faith, however, that God is a personal being, that he is the father of our spirits, that he was literally the father of Jesus of Nazareth, that Jesus worked out an atoning sacrifice that assures that we will all be resurrected and if we choose to live worthy may return to the presence of God, is quite another matter. If any of those men embraced that faith, which is peculiar to Latter-day Saints, then why hadn't they numbered themselves among us? And if they had, then their testimony of God, of necessity, would have rested on spiritual, not scientific, principles. I assume they were all wise and good men, but their affirmation of God's existence rested on their wisdom, not on the revelations of heaven.

A Bible scholar of considerable reputation recently told a group of divinity students at an Ivy League school that Joseph Smith was a prophet just as Moses was a prophet. The statement loses much of its luster, however, with the discovery of what this man really thinks of Moses. Academic acknowledgments and spiritual commitment are not the same thing. Had he lived in the days of Moses, this man would not have followed him any more than he would now seek admission into the Church by confession of his sins and baptism at the hands of our young missionaries."