Bible Religion

What’s Wrong With Bible Religion? (Taken from the book, 50 truths, the devil doesn’t want you to know, by Joseph Fielding McConkie, pg. 37)

 

“All true religion is revealed religion. God stands revealed or remains forever unknown. Every doctrine we espouse must bear the label of revelation. Our testimony to all nations is that Joseph Smith instituted a new and final dispensation of the gospel. A dispensation is a period in which the doctrines of salvation are dispensed anew from the heavens.

 

This means we feast upon the fruits of our own garden, not the record of what others ate. It means that when we go to General Conference we raise our right hand to the square to sustain living prophets, seers and revelators, not Peter, James and John. The Church does not rest upon a record of what the Lord said to others but rather on what he is saying to us. As the Lord gave keys to the ancients, all who held keys or authority necessary to our dispensation conferred their presidency upon us.

 

If every Bible on the face of the earth and all the knowledge contained therein were to disappear tomorrow, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would not skip a heartbeat. Every doctrine, ordinance and authority necessary for the salvation of men has been restored to us anew in this the dispensation of the fullness of times.

 

All revelation must be immediate and personal. No man can be saved by another man’s revelation. To argue that you can be saved by a revelation given to someone else is to argue that your sins are remitted by their baptism and that you will be crowned with glory because of what they did. You might as well argue that their spouse is your spouse and their children your children.

 

Joseph Smith is the pattern we are to follow in learning the gospel. We are to learn as he learned and that was by the Spirit of Revelation. ‘The best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask it from books but to go to God in prayer and obtain divine teaching.’ (TPJS, 191)

 

The Bible when read without the Spirit of Revelation is nothing more than religious history. It is the power of the Holy Ghost as found in the reader that transforms it into scripture. As to those who are so quick to point out to us that their religion is Bible religion, we would note that Bible religion is unbiblical. No one who lived within the covers of the Bible had a Bible. What they had was living prophets and the Spirit of Revelation. All anti-Mormon arguments reduce themselves to the same thing: the critics’ refusal to accept the principle of revelation.

 

Scripture, which is the mind and will of God, cannot be scripture in the hands of an evil spirit. The Spirit must always light the torch of truth before it can give light. The word of God, which is light and truth, is a living thing. It cannot cease to be true and it cannot cease to give off light. All revelation by its very nature begets more revelation. Everything that lives produces in its own image and likeness. This is the eternal order of things.

 

The Lord never had a people that he acknowledged as his own, to whom he would not speak, or to whom he would not give the Spirit of Revelation.”