Fundamental Mormon Claims

[_Daniel Peterson]

You're right. I don't agree.

LoL, Okay, I will play...

And what, exactly, will you "play"?

How about playing at writing more clearly . . .

Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, Joseph Fielding Smith,Joseph F. Smith Jr., Milton Hunter, and Bruce McKonkie [McConkie]. They wrote books like ...Doctrines of Salvation, Religious Truths Defined, Gospel Through The Ages, and Mormon Doctrine...all of which deal with core LDS doctrine and thought.

Actually, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, and Joseph F. Smith wrote no such books.

Joseph Fielding Smith and his son-in-law Bruce R. McConkie wrote such books, and Joseph Fielding Smith compiled such a book for his deceased father, Joseph F. Smith. It was, in a sense, something of a family industry.

Today, and correct me if I'm wrong, LDS leadership do not define these core doctrines anymore.

By which you mean to say that, like most of the prophets and apostles of the LDS Church (e.g., Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, Joseph F. Smith, Heber J. Grant, George Albert Smith, David O. McKay, Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, Howard W. Hunter, Gordon B. Hinckley, and Thomas Monson, to say nothing of such relatively early apostles as Albert Bowen, George Teasdale, Orson F. Whitney, Erastus Snow, George Q. Cannon, Delbert L. Stapley, N. Eldon Tanner, and scores of others) they tend not to write book-length doctrinal treatises.

Plainly, you need to lose the word today.

So when I wrote that core LDS stops with these past LDS apostles and prophets ( and one seventy who wrote with help and encouragement of apostles prophets) that is what I meant. If I am incorrect here Dan, give me the tile of books written by current prophets and apostles that deal with the core doctrine like these books and men dealt with.

Give me the titles of the significant doctrinal books written by, say, Marriner W. Merrill, Franklin D. Richards, Charles C. Rich, Reed Smoot, Charles A. Callis, Matthew Cowley, Charles W. Penrose, Anthon H. Lund, Melvin J. Ballard, Adam S. Bennion, George Q. Morris, and Richard L. Evans, in order to establish your presumption that, while the current leaders of the Church don't write substantial books on doctrine, earlier Church leaders commonly did.

[_Wisdom Seeker]

Is there anything wrong with members asking for clearly defined doctrine?

[_Daniel Peterson]

Is there anything wrong with members asking for clearly defined doctrine?

No.

But, overwhelmingly in my experience, members are quite satisfied with the clarity of our doctrine and, as I've said here, have little or no problem with it.

Those who complain that our doctrine isn't clear are, again in my experience, typically if not solely critics, alienated members, and the like.

Our fundamental doctrines are entirely clear.

Do we have definitive answers on questions like the details of the mortal life of the Father, or precisely when the spirit enters the body, or the precise GPS coördinates of the Jaredite city of Lib, or other matters of that sort? No. But they're not fundamental, either.

[_Fence Sitter]

Dan,

Wouldn't something like the nature of eternity be a fundamental question? We seem to talk about it a lot but we don't really seem to have a good grasp of what it means.

[_Daniel Peterson]

Wouldn't something like the nature of eternity be a fundamental question? We seem to talk about it a lot but we don't really seem to have a good grasp of what it means.

I'm not at all sure that, in our current state, we can have a good grasp of what it means.

[_Fence Sitter]

Wouldn't something like the nature of eternity be a fundamental question? We seem to talk about it a lot but we don't really seem to have a good grasp of what it means.

I'm not at all sure that, in our current state, we can have a good grasp of what it means.

I agree.

But that always leaves me wondering how we can make commitments for eternity or talk about eternal blessings or punishment or even eternal life when we don't even understand the concept. If we don't understand what it means and it is a fundamental concept, which I think it clearly is, wouldn't that be something we could expect to have explained by the Church?

[_moksha]

Is there anything wrong with members asking for clearly defined doctrine?

If clearly defined doctrine amounted to adding further speculation to what we already have, then it really behooves us not to do further clarification. There are points to President Hinckley's response that "we do not know much about that" which serve us best through its simple honesty and directness. Who wants to add layer upon layer till we have a systematic theology akin to a house of cards?

[_Joseph]

Fence sitter wrote: "Dan told me what we do is history and there is really no place for a paid clergy in the Church. We have never had a paid clergy"
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lds-inc has had PAID clergy for quite some time. Even Mormon.com says they have it. Why keep trying to pass off the lie that there is no paid clergy?

[_Wisdom Seeker]

Wouldn't something like the nature of eternity be a fundamental question? We seem to talk about it a lot but we don't really seem to have a good grasp of what it means.

I'm not at all sure that, in our current state, we can have a good grasp of what it means.

Our current state? I thought we had Prophets, Seers and Revelators?

[_Daniel Peterson]

But that always leaves me wondering how we can make commitments for eternity or talk about eternal blessings or punishment or even eternal life when we don't even understand the concept. If we don't understand what it means and it is a fundamental concept, which I think it clearly is, wouldn't that be something we could expect to have explained by the Church?

As I say, I don't think that eternity is explainable to us.

Prophets and apostles are human, and, like the rest of us (said the apostle Paul), "see through a glass, darkly." I don't believe that we have the capacity to comprehend eternity, any more than my desert tortoise can play chess or appreciate Beethoven.

I'm also unpersuaded that a typical couple entering marriage outside of the Church has any real understanding of making commitments for life, etc.

If clearly defined doctrine amounted to adding further speculation to what we already have, then it really behooves us not to do further clarification. There are points to President Hinckley's response that "we do not know much about that" which serve us best through its simple honesty and directness. Who wants to add layer upon layer till we have a systematic theology akin to a house of cards?

I agree with this. I enjoy speculation as much as anybody else does, but I don't believe that we should pretend to have any real authority to go beyond what has been revealed to us.

Fence sitter wrote: "Dan told me what we do is history and there is really no place for a paid clergy in the Church. We have never had a paid clergy"
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lds-inc [sic] has had PAID clergy for quite some time. Even Mormon.com says they have it. Why keep trying to pass off the lie that there is no paid clergy?

You may want to consider, Joseph, whether this forum is well suited to you. If you decide that you want to try participating here, you might make an effort to be very careful about lightly accusing others in the forum of lying.

I don't think that granting, say, about a hundred people a living allowance when they've been called out of their ordinary salaried work in order to serve full-time until they're seventy years old or even until they die really justifies a blanket statement that the Church has a paid clergy, in view of the fact that nearly three thousand stake presidents and nearly thirty thousand bishops, to say nothing of their roughly sixty-six thousand counselors and not to mention all of the other teachers and leaders and missionaries in the Church, serve without pay.

More to the point, though, I suspect that I probably said that one of the reasons we don't have academic theologians in the Church is that we don't have a professional clergy (which is a slightly but significantly different thing, and is certainly not a lie). There would be few if any theology-related jobs for them in the Church.