Growing Up LDS--Things We *Didn't* Care About Then
Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 8:18 am
I grew up LDS in the 70s and 80s (that's *19*-70s and 80s, kiddies, not *18*-).
Three things that so exercise Latter-day Saints today didn't seem to bother us then:
1) Accusations that we weren't Christian;
2) The idea that we were saved by works; and,
3) Whether or not a belief constituted "official doctrine."
I'll elaborate:
1) It wasn't that we agreed we were not Christian--quite the contrary. The idea that we weren't Christian was just too silly to take seriously. What, were the accusers hard of reading? Couldn't they see "Jesus Christ" in the name of our church? Rather than try to convince them that our church was Christian, we tried to convince them that, in a sense, theirs weren't: Ours was the church that emulated Christ's New Testament teaching, example, and church organization most perfectly, while theirs had fallen away from his example, his authority, and his present-day guidance.
2) We had been trained to respond to the notion of salvation by grace by appealing to the Epistle of James: "faith without works is dead." While Jesus' work was necessary to salvation, we had to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. We didn't spend our time trying to convince non-members that we believed in salvation by grace; rather, we confidently tried to bring them around to the vital role of works and ordinances.
3) No one talked about "official doctrine." Okay, maybe some handful of people--Mormon liberals and bleeding-edge revisionist scholars like John Sorenson. The question for the average saint was not "Is this official?" but "Do we believe this?" or "Is this true?" If something had the imprimatur of prophetic teaching, we believed it.
This all began to change around the mid-to-late 1980s, apparently under the influence of the evangelical propaganda film "The Godmakers."
The first I ever encountered the "that's not official doctrine" defense was in the book The Truth about the Godmakers by LDS Institute director Gilbert W. Schaarfs, around 1987. Schaarfs responded to the idea that God and his wife sexually procreated their spirit children with the assertion that this was not official doctrine. This was a puzzling response, since the idea of "children" who can only be created by a mother and a father suggests nothing but sexual procreation. Virtually all Latter-day Saints, except perhaps ill-informed recent converts, believed this idea--Gilbert W. Schaarfs almost centainly not excepted.
This brings out the most puzzling feature of this type of apologetic argument: the "official doctrine" distinction is a defense used by Latter-day Saints against their own beliefs. It is not a denial that this is what Latter-day Saints generally believe, or that they would traditionally have identified the "unofficial" doctrine as part and parcel of their faith. Rather, it is a refusal to be pinned down to what Latter-day Saints do believe or have believed to be integral to their faith. It is a way of asserting the right to change one's mind without acknowledging the significance or implications of such a change.
"The Godmakers," cleverly crafted as it was by one Ed D. Goebbels (or something like that), also put Latter-day Saints very much on the defensive about their Christianity. No longer was the rejection of Latter-day Saints as Christian rooted in mere ignorance; now it was rooted in ill-intended disinformation. In the face of claims that it was a devil-worshipping cult with "a different Jesus," the church initiated more strident efforts to be defined as Christian by traditional Christians. But this was a terrible misstep. Latter-day Saints had always known they were Christian on their own terms. But now they also had to meet someone else's definition of "Christian" as well. The natural result was a temptation to dumb-down or evade traditional LDS beliefs; and a particularly sturdy tool was available for this purpose: the official doctrine distinction. This game has been played at the highest levels, as when Gordon B. Hinckley repeatedly informed the Christian world, through the media, that the doctrine of God having once been a man was "just a couplet" and not something we necessarily "teach" or "know much about."
Even as the church and its associated subculture were Protestatizing their rhetoric in response to "The Godmakers," Mormondom, and particularly BYU, were being infiltrated by traditional Christian (especially Protestant) ideas through the influence of religion professors and philosophers trained in non-Mormon academia and steeped in traditional Christian thought. These professors, sensing too wide a divide between their Protestantized minds and their backwardly Mormon community, set out to narrow the gap by importing Protestant ideas and emphases into that community and restating--and even reformulating--LDS ideas in a way more palatable to Protestant Christians. Some of these new doctrinal thinkers have rejected the traditional LDS notion of God as immediate Father in a never-ending patriarchal chain of gods in favor of the traditional Christian idea of God as the Supreme, Unsurpassed Being. Others have revived the Protestant notions of grace embedded in the Book of Mormon. And some few have gone so far as to identify the LDS as scriptural inerrantists on the model of Evangelical Christians!
Gone are the days when a Latter-day Saint could respond to criticism with the confidence that how Christian a church was should be measured by the LDSstandard, rather than the Protestant standard; when a Latter-day Saint would match prooftexts for salvation by grace with prooftexts for salvation by works; and when a Latter-day Saint could be counted on to defend the beliefs handed down from Joseph Smith to the end of the 20th Century.
In shifting the locus of judgment from within the LDS community and tradition to without, the contemporary church has set itself on a course of increasing Protestantization that may successively sacrifice all the beliefs and practices that have made Mormons Mormon.
Don
Three things that so exercise Latter-day Saints today didn't seem to bother us then:
1) Accusations that we weren't Christian;
2) The idea that we were saved by works; and,
3) Whether or not a belief constituted "official doctrine."
I'll elaborate:
1) It wasn't that we agreed we were not Christian--quite the contrary. The idea that we weren't Christian was just too silly to take seriously. What, were the accusers hard of reading? Couldn't they see "Jesus Christ" in the name of our church? Rather than try to convince them that our church was Christian, we tried to convince them that, in a sense, theirs weren't: Ours was the church that emulated Christ's New Testament teaching, example, and church organization most perfectly, while theirs had fallen away from his example, his authority, and his present-day guidance.
2) We had been trained to respond to the notion of salvation by grace by appealing to the Epistle of James: "faith without works is dead." While Jesus' work was necessary to salvation, we had to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. We didn't spend our time trying to convince non-members that we believed in salvation by grace; rather, we confidently tried to bring them around to the vital role of works and ordinances.
3) No one talked about "official doctrine." Okay, maybe some handful of people--Mormon liberals and bleeding-edge revisionist scholars like John Sorenson. The question for the average saint was not "Is this official?" but "Do we believe this?" or "Is this true?" If something had the imprimatur of prophetic teaching, we believed it.
This all began to change around the mid-to-late 1980s, apparently under the influence of the evangelical propaganda film "The Godmakers."
The first I ever encountered the "that's not official doctrine" defense was in the book The Truth about the Godmakers by LDS Institute director Gilbert W. Schaarfs, around 1987. Schaarfs responded to the idea that God and his wife sexually procreated their spirit children with the assertion that this was not official doctrine. This was a puzzling response, since the idea of "children" who can only be created by a mother and a father suggests nothing but sexual procreation. Virtually all Latter-day Saints, except perhaps ill-informed recent converts, believed this idea--Gilbert W. Schaarfs almost centainly not excepted.
This brings out the most puzzling feature of this type of apologetic argument: the "official doctrine" distinction is a defense used by Latter-day Saints against their own beliefs. It is not a denial that this is what Latter-day Saints generally believe, or that they would traditionally have identified the "unofficial" doctrine as part and parcel of their faith. Rather, it is a refusal to be pinned down to what Latter-day Saints do believe or have believed to be integral to their faith. It is a way of asserting the right to change one's mind without acknowledging the significance or implications of such a change.
"The Godmakers," cleverly crafted as it was by one Ed D. Goebbels (or something like that), also put Latter-day Saints very much on the defensive about their Christianity. No longer was the rejection of Latter-day Saints as Christian rooted in mere ignorance; now it was rooted in ill-intended disinformation. In the face of claims that it was a devil-worshipping cult with "a different Jesus," the church initiated more strident efforts to be defined as Christian by traditional Christians. But this was a terrible misstep. Latter-day Saints had always known they were Christian on their own terms. But now they also had to meet someone else's definition of "Christian" as well. The natural result was a temptation to dumb-down or evade traditional LDS beliefs; and a particularly sturdy tool was available for this purpose: the official doctrine distinction. This game has been played at the highest levels, as when Gordon B. Hinckley repeatedly informed the Christian world, through the media, that the doctrine of God having once been a man was "just a couplet" and not something we necessarily "teach" or "know much about."
Even as the church and its associated subculture were Protestatizing their rhetoric in response to "The Godmakers," Mormondom, and particularly BYU, were being infiltrated by traditional Christian (especially Protestant) ideas through the influence of religion professors and philosophers trained in non-Mormon academia and steeped in traditional Christian thought. These professors, sensing too wide a divide between their Protestantized minds and their backwardly Mormon community, set out to narrow the gap by importing Protestant ideas and emphases into that community and restating--and even reformulating--LDS ideas in a way more palatable to Protestant Christians. Some of these new doctrinal thinkers have rejected the traditional LDS notion of God as immediate Father in a never-ending patriarchal chain of gods in favor of the traditional Christian idea of God as the Supreme, Unsurpassed Being. Others have revived the Protestant notions of grace embedded in the Book of Mormon. And some few have gone so far as to identify the LDS as scriptural inerrantists on the model of Evangelical Christians!
Gone are the days when a Latter-day Saint could respond to criticism with the confidence that how Christian a church was should be measured by the LDSstandard, rather than the Protestant standard; when a Latter-day Saint would match prooftexts for salvation by grace with prooftexts for salvation by works; and when a Latter-day Saint could be counted on to defend the beliefs handed down from Joseph Smith to the end of the 20th Century.
In shifting the locus of judgment from within the LDS community and tradition to without, the contemporary church has set itself on a course of increasing Protestantization that may successively sacrifice all the beliefs and practices that have made Mormons Mormon.
Don